The Biggest Thing We Learned From the Election

A quick look at what we can actually learn from an eminently avoidable result.

(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

Hello everyone! To start off the new year, I’m releasing an article going over one of my favorite questions from the chat for the Q&A series. I originally planned on including this as part of the list, but I liked the question enough that I decided that it deserved its own standalone piece. The rest of the answers to the selected questions will be coming soon, but feel free to ask some in the comments below for it or a future Q&A article. Happy New Year!

Tim asks: What's the single biggest thing that we've learned from this election?

This is a question that I’ve been thinking about quite a lot in recent months because it’s hard to come up with an obvious answer. Of the big headline messages from the results—i.e., the endurance of Trump’s appeal, the sheer degree of anger towards the status quo, the Biden administration’s unique unpopularity—hardly any of them are new. The polls had repeatedly shown such things to have been the case for years on end, so the fact that they finally came to pass without being addressed was more frustrating than surprising. It’s for this reason that I’m not at all surprised that liberals have largely tuned out of politics since the result. When the only conclusions to come to are that either the voters are irredeemably stupid or that Democratic elites failed to adjust to political realities that everyone has known about for nearly a decade, it’s hard to feel all that inspired to follow minute-by-minute coverage of a movie we’ve all already seen before.

With that said, 2024 still taught us a number of valuable things about the basic facts of politics, even if those basic facts themselves failed to change and have been obvious for quite some time.