THE MEASURE OF THE CALAMITY: WHO VOTED FOR WHOM (AND WHO DIDN'T)

Below, in a single collage infograph, I assembled the most important hard numbers from the exit polls, from where we can clearly glean THREE incontrovertible facts which explain Trump's convincing victory and Harris's appalling defeat:

1. At the bottom of the infograph, I've included the total votes for Harris in 2024 vs Biden's in 2020. It shows that Harris UNDER-PERFORMED Biden by a whopping 11 MILLION votes! Trump, on the other hand, held on firmly to his 2020 total count of 74 million, repeating this same amount of the votes he got in 2024.

This only means that the EXTRA folks that SAT OUT these elections, compared to 2020, came MOSTLY FROM THE DEMS SIDE.

2. The MAJORITY of WHITE WOMEN BETRAYED, again, their sister Kamala Harris's attempt to finally break the presidential glass ceiling -- something they also did to Hillary Clinton in 2020. (It's true that college educated white women sided with Harris, but the much larger cohort of non-college educated white women voted overwhelmingly for Trump).

Those white women nevertheless who voted for Trump in larger numbers again, did so DESPITE his avowed, direct responsibility for having stacked the Supreme Court with theocratic zealots that overturned Roe and reversed the half-century of women having the constitutional rights to a legal, safe abortion and other reproductive/health rights!

3. The MAJORITY of LATINO MEN betrayed, for the first time since the 1950s, their Latino immigrant communities who have no papers and could not vote on this or any other elections.

They voted for Trump DESPITE his ubiquitous, slanderous, racist/Nazi rhetoric regarding immigrants and his incessant campaign pledges that he will launch the largest deportation campaign against ALL undocumented or temporarily legal immigrants (Dreamers, TPSers), abolish asylum rights, close the border and dump asylum-seekers onto Mexico, and strip U.S. citizenship to U.S.-born children of undocumented parents!

Much analysis awaits to correctly explain these dismal facts. I take a longer view than the present bout of the Duopoly Games - which didn't turn chaotic and violent because the fascist side won -, namely: the growing crisis of legitimacy and functionality of the duopoly mode of rule in the plutocratic-controlled U.S. - especially in the era of sharp decline of U.S. global hegemony and structural crisis of the modern capitalist world-system. But that is for another occasion.

But for now, the inescapable conclusion is that, on the one hand, the Biden/Harris administration and their presidential campaigns TURNED OFF big chunks of their working class base (if not its professional class liberal strata), who sat out the 2024 elections in huge numbers; while on the other hand, Trump FIRED UP and turned out his base pretty much intact -- while surprisingly securing the support of two groups that he and his rabid misogynist/xenophobic party had particularly targeted for vicious attacks: non-college working class white women and Latino men.

Together, these now-incontrovertible facts describe - if not explain - the measure of the calamity that befell this republic: the willful election by a clear majority of the American people, of an avowed fascist to power, promising to implement a ruthless, faux populist program on behalf of the most socially reactionary sectors of the American plutocracy - the economic nationalists, the white supremacists, the religious zealot billionaires, etc..

Explaining why and acting on it becomes our greatest, most urgent, political and intellectual challenge.

Deal with it, people!

Postscript: For those of you interested, I invite you to go to my FB site here, where I've posted a number of insightful articles, with my own commentaries, regarding the elections and its catastrophic results.

La lucha sigue y sigue. Nos vemos en las trincheras. ¡Aquí nadie de raja, ni se vende, ni se va!

Profe. Gonzalo Santos