We are now more than a week from election day, Nov. 5, 2024.

The final results are (almost all) in – Republican Donald Trump won the presidency, the GOP picked up the U.S. Senate, and barely held the U.S. House (still not done counting; thanks, California).

As I have read on both MSM and conservative websites, the political observers of all persuasions are debating, endlessly, about the causes of this election result. These people have a lot of ideas, some very silly – racism, sexism, Hitler! – and some more logical and reasonable. 

Let me add in my two cents. To paraphrase this guy, the 2024 election results showed that the problem was “the economy, and the chaos, stupid!” and that the swing voters wanted a return to prior good (economic and other) times.

Every election has a main theme, and this is the main theme of 2024. And the reason that Donald Trump won this race, and that the GOP won the Congress, is because they recognized that theme, and addressed it convincingly. The Democrats, including both Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris, never did.

It really shouldn’t be that hard to understand. In 2021, Joe Biden and his vice president, Harris, came into the presidency, supposedly to mark a return to “normalcy” after the “big meanie,” chaos-bringer, Donald Trump. Although election irregularities in 2020 may have cost Donald Trump, he also lost because some swing voters were tired of the “mean tweets” and bothered by the COVID situation. So, those voters turned against Trump, and gave Joe Biden, a more “normal” politician, the White House. 

But there always was a catch with this narrow Democrat victory. The Trump economy, minus the COVID year, had been excellent. And the U.S. was respected/feared throughout the world – ask General Soleimani of the IRGC if you don’t believe me. So, the swing voters in the U.S. expected “normal” politician Joe Biden to accede to Trump’s success on the economy and managing the world, but also to “behave” on Twitter.  

Joe Biden totally misunderstood what was expected of him and, thereby, blew up his presidency. His administration pumped huge amounts of federal dollars into the economy, which ignited inflation. He limited oil exploration and tried to restrict technology for the sake of environmental crazies. He opened wide the border, letting everyone in, regardless of background, in the hope that these people would vote Democrat. This created violence, crime, and chaos. And Biden brought back the Obama foreign policy appeasers, inspired by former-fiction-writer-turned-foreign-policy-guru Ben Rhodes, who believed the U.S. was a bad country – colonialist, violent, perhaps genocidal – and that the way to make nice with hostile nations was to understand that they were misunderstood and to appease their demands. So, the U.S. caved to every rogue nation, whether it be China, Russia, Iran, etc. And as I have said endlessly, when you pay the “Danegeld” to the “Danes,” you get more violence and aggression. And this chaos spread back home to the U.S., as crazed antisemites were inspired by U.S. weakness to attack American Jews and other Israel supporters on college campuses, at restaurants, at synagogues, in their neighborhoods, etc.  

It also didn’t help that Joe Biden was clearly getting more and more senile as he aged.

Thus, Biden’s own actions as president really devastated his attempt to win another term in the White House. The American people, especially the swing voters, wanted a real return to normalcy in 2024 – that the U.S. go back to how it was between 2017 and 2019, when things were good with the economy and the world. This meant that when Donald Trump ran again, the swing voters immediately judged him a credible candidate, since he had produced that economy and that world situation.  

Biden, and then Harris, needed to win these swing voters back by undermining Trump’s record on the economy and his management of the world. Which Biden, and then Harris, never did. (It may have been impossible.) Instead, they ignored the problems of the economy and the border, and claimed everything was great under Bidenomics. Also, they ran a bogus partisan lawfare campaign against Trump that turned our nation into a banana republic, without the bananas. And they attacked Trump for being the devil. Also, they ran to save abortion, and claimed Trump was a religious prude who wanted to force women pregnant, and back into the kitchen. And finally, Harris pretended to be independent from the Biden administration, and blamed all problems of the past four years on evil billionaires, such as Donald Trump.  

But, none of this worked, because none of it really addressed the main theme of the election – it was the economy, and the chaos, and voters wanted a return to the good times (of 2017-2019).

By the way, it also didn’t matter that Biden/Harris had a lot more money than Trump. As they say in advertising, smart dimes beat dumb dollars.  

There really isn’t much more to say.