Opinion: A Victory for a Day or a Realignment for a Generation?

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

Those on the Right are understandably overjoyed, in the aftermath of the 2024 General Election. Those on the Left are understandably discouraged.

Neither group is entirely right to be.

Certainly the Republican Party – and especially the Trump campaign – are right to be proud of their accomplishments. Such a political comeback (or “resurrection” as Trey Gowdy calls it) is unprecedented in American politics. Everything from messaging (in the swing states) to turnout to strategy was masterful. The Trump campaign, and the victorious legislative flips like the Ohio and Montana Senate seats, deserve credit.

But on election night and since, there has been talk of a realignment, talk that the politics of old are over, and the Republicans are dominant again, and that the Democrat command of certain demographic groups is done, perhaps for a very long time.

Such talk is premature.

In analyzing this election, we must remember that the four-year term from 2021 through 2024 has been an objectively horrific time in American politics, in which every negative reflects on the Democratic Party currently in power.

· Automobiles have almost doubled in price due to government mandates. The cost of fuel for those vehicles has also doubled in price, also due to federal meddling; that fuel cost alone has cost the average driver a thousand dollars per year.

· Other aspects of the above war on energy caused a massive increase in the cost of manufactured goods, groceries, and the transportation of such things. While it’s much more difficult to estimate the per-capita cost of this group because of regional difference and family consumption, every estimate begins at the cost being several thousand dollars per year per family, and approaches ten thousand per year for some demographics.

The combined hit of these types of both immediate and long-term inflation has devastated the standard of living of the average American worker, entrepreneur, and retiree.

Of course when they got to the polls, the American people were going to hold this against the party in power.

On top of these economic issues, we have seen other big picture nightmares that can also be laid directly at the feet of the incumbent regime:

· The abandonment of the Abraham Accords and in fact their virtual reversal, by going from isolating Iran before to coddling Iran today, directly led to Iran’s escalation of hostilities across the middle east, including the devastating Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023 and the Houthi terrorists’ year-long blockade of the Suez Canal to global shipping.

· The shameful and horrific abandonment of Afghanistan, purposefully turning over the country to the Taliban, undoing 20 years of diligent and heroic investment.

· The intentional importation of countless millions of illegal aliens, and pouring countless billions of tax dollars into the care and feeding of these gatecrashers, while native-born Americans and legal immigrants were suffering the economic travails listed above.

There’s more. So much more.

And yes, it’s tempting to say “We know all this; that’s why America overthrew the Democrats and gave President Trump and the GOP Senators a majority again!”

But this is both the beauty and the danger of the American system. A relatively small change on election day – two or three Senate seats, two or three points in a few battleground states for the electoral college – can appear to be a huge wave. It can indeed make a huge difference.

But it doesn’t necessarily mean that twenty or thirty percent of the population has learned their lesson and reformed their way of thinking about politics, government, and voting.

It’s difficult to say this because one does not want to minimize the very real accomplishments of November 5. But we must remember that the change revealed this election night only represents a few percent of the voting public.

Some of the Democrats were dispirited and stayed home. Some were angry and punished the current regime. Some have certainly been convinced of their past errors, and now count themselves as conservatives.

But the vast majority of Americans – 80%? 85%? 90%? of the public – are still on the same page they were on before. Most conservatives are still conservative, most liberals are still liberal, most independents still see themselves as independent.

We don’t yet know – even with the best polling, such determinations take years to be certain – how many of these people’s changes are permanent, and how many will fade away and return to type after a year or two of peace and plenty again.

Kamala Harris was an appalling candidate. She picked an appalling runningmate. Both are incompetent, inarticulate Marxists, running to serve as a continuation of the four-year dumpster fire already described.

How many of the voters who rejected them this week will reject all Democrats in the future, vs. how many will be open-minded when they face a different, more presentable candidate next time? It’s too early to say for sure, but there is no reason to assume that you had to give up your DNC card and join the ACU in order to vote for Trump, Vance, Moreno and Sheehy.

Plenty of this week’s Republican voters will be open to the pitch of the next friendly, likable, common-sense Democrat who runs. If the next DNC picks one of their party’s slicker governors, it will be anybody’s ball game yet again.

This isn’t to say that the Right needs to give up, or even that the Trump campaign failed to do its job in converting people back to the vision of the Founders. They had to win, and that means concentrating on battlegrounds, and disregarding the rest. In a campaign, you just don’t have time or resources for the states that won’t make a difference to the outcome.

There are battleground states where five percent more of the people truly understand that the Biden-Harris regime policies are part and parcel of the modern Democratic Party, and it doesn’t matter who wears the label, all modern Democrats stand for such disaster – because the right ads were run in those media markets and the message got through.

But outside those markets, where the campaign couldn’t afford such a media barrage, the public received no such education.

North Carolina and Georgia have been told; Illinois and Massachusetts have no idea.

So even though the White House has flipped occupants, the nation is still nursing a nest of vipers in its bosom. The states that missed out on 2024 messaging have had no such realignment, no such renewed awareness at all.

And every election, new voters arrive on the scene and old voters depart; it’s a moving target.

In light of this reality, it should be clear what the job of the GOP must be in the term – and terms – to come.

Some of us are old enough to remember the days of President Ronald Reagan, a man dubbed The Great Communicator, who wove economic lessons and libertarian philosophy into every speech and press conference.

It took time, but that technique gradually educated voters who had been ill-served by their schools, and produced an understanding in the electorate that the fundamental philosophy of candidates and their parties was more important than even the apparent intelligence or qualifications of the name on the ballot.

The Democrats have run three truly terrible presidential tickets in a row. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris were all – objectively speaking – abysmal, repellant personalities.

But between skilled organizers, unbelievably massive campaign budgets (funded both legally and illegally), and the Democrats’ built-in structural foundation of media, academia, pop culture and bureaucracy, even these three dreadful candidates came within a few points, three times in a row.

Imagine if they had run skilled politicians with the talent of Bill Clinton or Jack Kennedy. Imagine if they nominate such politicians in the future.

The new Republican leadership of our federal and state governments must spend these next few years explaining what they’re doing, explaining why every step matters, to inoculate the public against the crooked campaigns they will face in the future.

For example, it’s not enough for the White House or the Congress to say “We are cutting off the revenue source of the islamofascist government of Iran.”

Not everyone knows what Iran does within Iran. And hardly anyone knows what evil Iran does outside Iran.

So we must go into more detail, every time. We must say “We are cutting off the revenue source of the islamofascist government of Iran, because when these mullahs have money, they give rockets to Hamas to shoot into residential neighborhoods of Israel. And when they have money, they give weapons to the Yemeni Houthis so they can keep independent commercial vessels out of the Suez Canal. This practice alone has cost the world economy billions of dollars per day just in increased transportation costs alone. America can stop this awful waste – this attack on both the world’s security and economy – and thereby build a safer and more prosperous world, by stopping Iran from having the money to facilitate this blockade.”

It takes a bit longer. But the public deserves to know why we are adopting every policy, and we can’t assume it’s obvious to them.

Also, voters benefit from seeing the logical approach of a rational administration, so that they have something to compare against when an irrational administration like the Biden-Harris regime comes along.

The Right has been given a chance to correct the course of both the United States of America and, to a certain extent, the world.

But we have another election in two years. And communication is key to extending this mandate and turning it into the realignment that America so desperately needs.

Copyright 2024 John F Di Leo