It’s the economy, silly, not Lily

Donald Trump had a lot of baggage, cupboards full of skeletons, started as a convicted felon, someone who had lost an election, a dirty old man who even the Republicans had thrown to the wolves. He won.
Kamala Harris had everything going for her – the money, the media giants, the dedicated left, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the Ivy League, Oprah, JLo and Cardi B. She lost.
The left wasn’t the problem. It’s the radical left imposing its loud, unreal utopia on the saner side of the Democrats. A cacophonous minority nurtured in campuses made it seem like the Democratic Party stood by their postmodernist propaganda. The revolutionaries, now called wokes, can lead anyone to the garden of lilies. So Kamala carried on. Abortion crept up to the top of her agenda because Lily said her body, her choice. And it sounds right and nice.
Lily’s mom cares deeply about that slogan but doesn’t want Lily to disfigure her body in a choice she cannot unmake. Lily’s mom calls it a temporary dysphoria. America is a deeply conservative country in the middle that holds its Judeo-Christian values dear. But that’s not what crushed Kamala.
The swing voter on the fence swung right because the blue side was talking about blue sky ideas, not rust belt rustic action. And if and when the blue side talked action, people said if you could act, you would have acted. Joe Biden sleepwalked out of the race. Kamala guffawed into it. Trump had won a hard primary. Kamala had won nothing to be on the ticket.
It’s the rent, the food on the table, the dollar per hour, or what they call the economy. The Democratic economic agenda got muffled in the noise about gender, abortion, and how horrible Trump is.
Trump, on the other hand, was mostly wrong in whatever he was blabbering about, but he was blabbering about the economy, flexing his deal-making skills, the border, tariffs, and immigrants taking jobs. Yes, jobs.
Trump got his point across. His victory isn’t going to change the average American’s fortunes overnight. But Trump’s fortunes have changed. His multiple legal troubles, even if not over, are pushed forward by four years. Four years is a long time in politics.
(Kamlesh Singh is a former editor, columnist and satirist, who is the Tau in the popular podcast Teen Taal)