The election has come and gone, and Kamala Harris has lost, in a particularly damning fashion. She is on track to lose the popular vote and every single battleground state, while winning Democratic safe states like Illinois and New Jersey by less than 10 points. The full autopsy of the Democratic Party’s 2024 electoral campaign is certainly underway in Washington D.C. hotel rooms and Democratic operative meetings, where men and women are no doubt hunching over tables and desks, asking themselves how voters did not reject Donald Trump a second time. How did voters allow the man who was convicted of 34 felonies just last May, consistently and constantly made inflammatory comments about almost every minority you could think of, and ran on a campaign that was made up of mostly lies?
Many of my peers have claimed that the Democrats did not go far left enough, and should not have pandered to moderate Republicans in the suburbs. Alternatively, a number of my other peers see her campaign as too far left, and that the electorate simply was not ready for a candidate from the Democrats after four years of “Bidenomics,” an economic plan that was not exactly popular in the average voter’s mind. There is no clear path forward for the Democrats in 2028, unlike in 2016 when there was at least an avenue through either Biden or Sanders. The progressive movement is all but dead, and moderate politics failed at the ballot box, by a lot.
To understand this election, however, is to understand one simple fact. Voters, Americans as a whole, do not care. They do not care if Kamala Harris was leftward enough, rightward enough. Nothing she could have said or done would have mattered. She was going to lose this election. Donald Trump is an electoral force in America because he represents to many male voters who they aspire to be. Sexually, economically, and socially, Donald Trump is who we as Americans want to be, and particularly young American men, a demographic that the Democrats slipped hard with in the 2024 federal elections. They want to speak their mind without fear of being ostracized, they want to exert disturbing control over their partners, and they want to have the money and economic freedom that he has. They vote for him because he represents what kind of person that they can become. They represent their version of the American Dream. Becoming the “strong man” who rose from the ashes to power and stardom, and in the case of Trump, public immunity.
This leads me to the title of this article. The ball is in our court, and it’s time for Democrats to play by the new rules of politics. The standard ethics of politics lasted for a long day, but the sun has crept under the ocean. If America continues to elect the candidate that they view to be the most desirable, then why not nominate LeBron James? Elections are no longer about the questions of qualifications and experiences of the candidates. It’s simply about who elicits the sick jealousy deep in the minds of Americans of a candidate who they can aspire to be. When Democrats run the most experienced candidate, does it speak to America? I believe the answer is no. What really matters is simple star power.
