I’ve turned off Morning Joe. And Nicolle Wallace. I used to get something resembling a kick out of watching some people I respect and others I put up with say things I agree with, but that’s wearing thin these days.
What’s more, for the first time in my life, I’m not enthusiastic about reading the newspaper.
(If you read my rant below, or know me at all, you know how serious that is).
I’ve been content to read several days of the Times online instead of going out of my way to find one of the last remaining outlets that carry print newspapers (O Newsroom, O Kramerbooks! O Lost!1) I know I’ll go back to luxuriating in my print newspaper habit, but lately it feels like a chore.
But I haven’t turned on MSNBC since election night and don’t feel like going back anytime soon. I know what everyone is going to say there and I don’t need to hear it, thank you very much. I said my piece here:
and I don’t need to spent much more time wallowing in that one.
In my mea culpa I quoted Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez who said,
“People are putting their groceries on their credit card. No one is listening to anything else you say if you try to talk them out of their lived experiences with data points from some economists.”
I also quoted my favourite newspaper, the Guardian, which reported this:
One 2021 study found that a leading predictor of support for Trump – over party affiliation, gender, race and education level – was belief in “hegemonic masculinity”, defined as believing that men should be in positions of power, be “mentally, physically, and emotionally tough”, and reject anything considered feminine or gay. Some heterodox influencers gained a following by embodying or promoting precisely this brand of masculinity, and giving their followers a script for blaming dissatisfaction on women.
If pundits pontificating over news like that isn’t enough to make me (and you?) turn off the TV I don’t know what is.
It turns out I’m not alone. According to yes, the New York Times,
Viewers Flee MSNBC, and Flock to Fox News, in Wake of Election
Prime-time viewership at MSNBC has fallen 53 percent from October, and jumped 21 percent on Fox News.
The article quotes Martin Kaplan,who runs the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California.
“In the wake of the result, people are probably turning to self-care, It’s like post-traumatic stress disorder of some kind. You don’t want to go back to the scene of the explosion right away.”
I know they’re talking about Matt Gaetz on MSNBC, but that particular explosion is already occupying too many of my brain cells. In fact, when I saw the news flash that Trump was nominating Gaetz to be Attorney General, I remarked that I didn’t know the writers at Saturday Night Live were now running things at Mar-a-Lago.
makes a similar point in the you-know-where:“These are so appalling they’re a form of performance art,” Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice, said in an interview, reflecting on Mr. Trump’s choices and their fitness for their jobs.
Giving Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and anyone else who catches Trump’s fancy on TV jobs that can mean life-and-death to millions is part of Trump’s appeal. He won the “sticking-it-to-the-liberals” vote, which turned out to be bigger than anyone expected.
It turns out a lot of people agree with the Republican voter I once heard on NPR explain her support for a presidential candidate who was said to be of dim wattage, “you know, smart people don’t have all the answers!”2
Not having smart, competent or qualified people in government isn’t a problem for the folks I’ve been writing about here—huge numbers who agree with what this Black voter said in a Times article headlined,
Some Black Voters Ask, What Have Democrats Done for Us?
Jamaal Stokes’s quality of life in Milwaukee has declined over the past decade, just as it has for many other Black residents.
He lost his well-paying factory job in the mid-2010s, when his company left town. He spent the next several years toiling in temporary jobs as he searched for stable employment. Mr. Stokes, 44, now works as a security guard at a local supermarket, even as he struggles to afford groceries himself.
This presidential election, he paid little attention to Donald J. Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris, because national politics are “not the answer.”
“So what’s the point?” he asked. “I’m just kind of over it all.”
What’s the point? Shirley Chisholm knew.
Another Times story that I clipped (yes, I tear pages out of newspapers) was a profile of Rep. Barbara Lee, “a liberal icon and the highest ranking Black woman in the House leadership, whose first political job was working on Shirley Chisholm’s pathbreaking presidential campaign in 1972.”
Ms. Lee led Mills College’s Black Student Union. In 1972 she extended a speaking invitation to Representative Shirley Chisholm, Democrat of New York, who in 1968 had become the first African American woman elected to Congress.
Ms. Chisholm took her up on it, and gave her some advice that changed her life.
“I had a big Afro, two kids, I was a returning student,” Ms. Lee recalled. “And she asked me, ‘Little girl, are you registered to vote?’”
No, Ms. Lee told her. “I don’t believe in politics. It’s not doing anything for my life.”
Ms. Chisholm chided her: “If you’re not involved, others are going to make decisions for you,” Ms. Lee recalled.
I’ve written a lot about Shirley Chisholm in my work for a National Organization representing the rights of Women, and one quote I find useful is
"Our representative democracy is not working. Congress, that is supposed to represent the voters, does not respond to their needs. I believe the chief reason for this is that it is ruled by a small group of old men."
This isn’t going to change until it’s not just old men—and mainly white men—who are not only getting elected, but monopolizing the electorate.
We needed to break turnout records among young voters, progressive women and liberal Democrats but this year, the turnout records broke us.
Voters in liberal strongholds across the country, from city centers to suburban stretches, failed to show up to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris at the levels they had for Joseph R. Biden Jr. four years earlier, contributing significantly to her defeat by Donald J. Trump, according to a New York Times analysis of preliminary election data.
Want to know what happened in Pennsylvania? The Times tells all:
In Pennsylvania, the biggest electoral prize on the battleground map, Mr. Trump’s victory received an outsize boost from an unlikely place — the five counties with the highest percentage of registered Democrats: Allegheny, Delaware, Lackawanna, Montgomery and Philadelphia.
Ms. Harris won these counties, but not by the margins needed to overcome Republican-heavy areas of the state. Total turnout was down from 2020 in all five Democratic strongholds, which could partly explain how Ms. Harris received 78,000 fewer votes than Mr. Biden. Mr. Trump added 24,000 votes to his total in these same counties.
This gap left Ms. Harris with little chance of winning Pennsylvania. Mr. Trump’s victory margin in the state, as of Sunday, was about 145,000 votes.
And what about Gen Z? We won’t have complete voter file data until early 2025, but based on exit polls, CIRCLE estimates Overall Youth Turnout Down From 2020 But Strong in Battleground States
Young voters cast 14% of all ballots in the 2024 election, according to the National Election Pool exit poll conducted by Edison Research. While this number may be adjusted in the coming days, and other data sources may show different numbers, this 2024 youth share of the vote was also lower than in 2020 (17%) and 2016 (19%) based on the same data source.
And while Harris won more youth votes in 22 states for which CIRCLE currently has data, Trump won young voters in 17 states. In 2020, Trump won the youth vote in just seven states.
The Guardian talked to political scientist @MelissaDeckman who writes about the politics of Gen Z:
We’re still waiting for more detailed data on how young men and women prioritized issues in this campaign, but what do we know so far about the issues that were most important to gen Z?
By and large, it was the economy. For gen Z voters who care about the economy, they really broke for Donald Trump.
Abortion really dropped as being the most salient issue for younger people. I think that was the most surprising to me.
If you look at the youth vote in 2022 – and this is all young voters, not just men or women – 44% said abortion was the issue they put at their top priority. Whereas this fall, the issue was only 13% [exit polling shows]. That’s a pretty big cratering.
Hellooooo down there! This is your politics calling!! Who’s going to take an interest in electing candidates from now on?
Voters ages 50 and older were key in the 2024 election. Data shows that across the country, older voters made up 55% of the electorate, and that winning the 50+ vote was key to winning races up and down the ballot around the country. AARP’s survey found House Republicans won voters 50+ by a 50% - 47% margin while these districts were a dead heat among voters overall, allowing Republicans to maintain a narrow advantage in the House of Representatives.
Let’s review: 14 percent for young voters and 55 percent for older ones adds up to an imbalance in our government between leaders and those they purportedly represent. No wonder voters echoed Jamaal Stokes, wondering what politics has done for them, and why they’re so “over” politics they could vote for Donald Trump.
I still think our response to this election must be to make the connection to young voters between what they care about and this clunky old political system we’re stuck with. I’ll have more to say about this later, but for now, I’m once again agreeing with
, who shared “my suggestions of other things for each of us to do, in our own personal time, to recharge, reboot, and revitalize our spirit before we head back into the fray.”Last but by no means least on his list was
Laughter. Comedy. Wit. Satire.
It’s the best medicine, the biggest high, the most effective vehicle for you to use to communicate your ideas and to create change. People like to laugh and they’ll listen to you better if you let them enjoy being with you. Sometimes when the moment we’re in or the facts that we’re facing are just too god-awful to handle, that’s exactly when a spoonful of sugar helps this bitter pill go down.
As someone who once maintained a blog subtitled “Keeping Democracy Safe Through Satire,” and along with my colleague and fellow Substack author
was behind the campaign of Murray Hill, Inc., the first corporation to run for Congress, I’m all in on that recommendation.I promised “politics and culture, with interesting links” for this Substack and next post will contain more culture—particularly the spoonful of sugar advised by Dr. Michael Moore.
I turned after the election to my usual tonic for election disasters and power blackouts in the winter—comic fiction. I’ve been known to barrel through four P.G. Wodehouse novels in 48 hours, and I just discovered another prolific British comic author, Anthony Berkeley. My recuperation from the election began here:
which the jacket describes as having
“all the trappings of the Golden Age: a rambling country house, locked room, a seance, a murder—and an ingenious puzzle…published as a 30-part newspaper serial with a valuable prize for anyone who worked out the solution correctly. Nobody did—even Agatha Christie entered and couldn’t solve it. Could you?”
How could I resist that? A friend describes Berkeley’s most popular character, Roger Shearingham as
“the anti-Marple. He's young, male, annoyingly confident, rich, famous, and often wrong.”
I’ve ordered one from Alibris already. Berkeley wrote more than 40 books, and Wodehouse authored 90. I’ve got plenty to keep me busy when I’m not watching cable news.
I’m not sure I’ll go back. What about you?
Your thoughts, and book recommendations please, in the comments.
As I wrote in that rant I quoted, I drive a ridiculous distance each day here in upstate New York to buy a print copy of the Times, but spent Election Week back in DC. Dupont Circle isn’t what it used to be when I had my little propaganda factory above Suzanne’s Restaurant.
Can you believe it? She was talking about Gov. George W. Bush!
I like the evening anchors on MSNBC. I’ve watched them for years. Since the election it’s been hard. I am so bitter and angry and fearful that being confronted by the story line is too painful. Like Terry, I need MSNBC to survive to (maybe) Valentine’s
Day when I hope I can bear the news again.
I still watch Lawrence and Rachel, but I’ve ditched the rest. And thanks for the Berkeley rec, I just borrowed or put holds on several thru our library and Libby.