Swing State Sweep
A referendum on years of ignoring the majority of America
Election Day 2024 has come and gone. FINALLY! America saw an unprecedented amount of madness in the months leading up to Election Day. We saw a coup of a sitting president, two assassins attempt to kill a presidential candidate/former president, the installation of a candidate of a major political party with no electoral process, and more. And none of that madness even touches on the weaponization of the justice department to jail a presidential candidate.
The campaign lies and the dirty tactics are behind us. Much energy will be spent trying to understand what went wrong for the Harris campaign. In the end, she just didn’t have much to run on. She was stuck vacillating between standing by the work she did with Biden and pretending to be different from Biden. She could not separate herself from what Americans really wanted to escape, which was the Biden-Harris administration. Her campaign lacked substance and it was all too evident in her rehearsed responses that consistently failed to respond to the questions to which Americans needed answers. How many times did we hear “I was raised in a middle-class home” in response to questions like “Do you believe Americans are better off today than they were four years ago?” Dozens if not hundreds of times!
So, it is no surprise that Trump won in dominant fashion. It is no surprise that, even though he only needed to pick up a few swing states, he ended up sweeping them all (at the time of publication, Arizona and Nevada results were not official but leaned strongly to Trump). It is no surprise that Trump won the popular vote by a fairly significant margin (over 4.5 million votes) and the electoral vote by an even larger margin.
Today, we join the multitude of pundits in an assessment of this election.
Red Wave
Widespread pundit sensationalism on both sides of the political spectrum suggested that democracy was at stake in this election. Some suggest democracy died well before Election Day, otherwise we would have better candidates available to us and both major party candidates would have been duly nominated. We here at Meet Me in the Middle are not among the sensationalists that believe democracy is dead or will die as a result of this election. From a far less sensational perspective, party control of the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, and the White House is what was really at stake.
The balance in the Senate leaned slightly to the Democratic Party side coming into the election. Of the 2024 races, only a few were expected to be in play for the Republicans to claim Senate seats from the Democrats. And enough flipped to give Republicans control of the Senate. The Republicans had the advantage in the House before the election, but all of the House elections have yet to be settled. At the time of this publication, 39 House seats were still undecided, 17 of which were leaning Republican — Republicans needed 13 to retain the House while Democrats needed 27 to take control, but it is still too close to call.
And, of course, a pseudo-Republican/moderate populist won the White House.
Many conservative pundits expected the 2022 midterm elections to result in a “Red Wave,” or a massive purging of Democratic Party representation in the House and Senate in favor of Republicans. That Red Wave came on November 5, 2024, consolidating a significant portion of legislative and executive power in the hands of a mostly-aligned mostly-conservative group.
The Democratic Party needs to spend some time thinking about what they did wrong. This election should have them sitting in the corner wearing a “dunce” cap. We have some suggestions for improvement for next time. For starters, don’t call half of Americans racists, neo-Nazis, garbage, or deplorables. It just is not that endearing.
Voting trends - Understanding the election results
As the Leftist liberal agenda has stretched the political and cultural spectrum so much farther to the left over the past couple of decades, more and more people have found themselves favoring conservatives over liberals. If one does not buy into our claim that the leftmost extreme of the political spectrum has shifted to unprecedented far left positions, then that sets us up to acknowledge that the liberal agenda has pushed the entire country to the right. It is one or the other. Like most centrists, we here at Meet Me in the Middle believe that it is the spectrum that has shifted as our own values, beliefs, and positions have not fundamentally changed.
We find it interesting that Trump won the popular vote with what looks, at this stage, like will be a slightly smaller number of votes than he earned in 2020. Meanwhile, around 13 million more people turned out to vote for Biden in 2020 than for Harris. Could that be true?? Could it be evidence that more secure measures prevented invalid votes from being counted? We are not trying to promote conspiracy theories, but consider this discrepancy worth understanding.
In 2020, Trump won Florida by 3 percentage points — that margin grew to about 13 points in 2024. Many other red states demonstrated a similar trend, though not all margins saw double-digit percentage shifts. However, it wasn’t just red states that saw those margins shift. Harris won New York, but by 13 less points than Biden did in 2020.
But WHY???
WHY?? Why did so many people vote for Trump?? This is the question that many people who voted for the “I’m not Trump” candidate are asking. Consumed by outrage, sadness, and shock, they just want to know why anyone would vote for Trump. Well, do you really want to understand why?
The question that most people on the Trump side ask is, “How can you not understand?”
Calling someone racist is an extreme position. How can you not understand that people do not like being called bigots for political positions such as opposing ideas like open borders and defunding the police? How can you not understand that people do not like being accused of racism for opposing equity-based doctrines?
Calling someone a conspiracy theorist is taking things to an extreme. How can you not understand that people do not like being referred to as a whacko conspiracy theorist for questioning an experimental vaccine or for challenging COVID-19 mandates when the U.S. saw the worst death rate among developed countries? How can you not understand that denouncing the mere suggestion as a conspiracy when someone acknowledges the monetary motivations of an industry built on what has been questionably termed “transgender healthcare” for children, despite mounting evidence that the “care” has been detrimental to children’s health? How can you not understand that people do not like being called conspiracy theorists when questioning the role of government agencies in the censorship of massive numbers of Americans?
Calling someone a white supremacist is extreme. Calling someone a Nazi is extreme. Calling someone a fascist is extreme. How can you not understand that this either poisons people against others or drives people away from your position?
How can you not understand that all of these labels are driving our worsening division?
How can you not understand that people simply rejected the morphing of the Democratic Party into an authoritarian regime that embraced an ideology that is simply too extreme?
How can you not understand that the desire, the demand, and the quest for truth does not make someone a bad person?
How can you not understand that people are too smart to not view the prosecution of a presidential candidate as anything but a thinly veiled weaponization of the Department of Justice?
How can you not understand that this was a rejection, not an election? How can you not understand that this was less about electing Trump and more about delivering a resounding defeat of extreme Leftism? How can you not understand that the majority wants to be able to freely express their rejection of Leftist ideology? How can you not understand that people want common sense to prevail?
How can you not understand that the people who voted for Trump no longer want to be treated as heretical? How can you not understand that those people desperately want to change the direction of the country? How can you not understand that they viewed a vote for the “I’m not Trump” candidate as not just more of the same, but a worsening of the current divisive conditions?
How can you not see that people view the Trump team as a potential disruption of the forces that have spiraled America downward for nearly two decades?
The “Comeback”
A popular term emerged immediately following the realization that Trump was running away with this election: “the comeback.” Some said it was the greatest comeback in political history. Others noted that it was miraculous that Trump was able to come back from what they perceive as a self-inflicted black eye stemming from his role in J6. Some suggest that it seemed impossible for him to come back from being a “convicted felon.” However, we feel like there are some more fitting terms, such has “resuscitation” and “revival.”
Trump’s “street cred” was resuscitated by the tenacious pursuit of the Biden-Harris administration’s Department of Justice. If they had backed off some and let the more robust legal cases take shape, they might have accomplished their goal. Instead, those court cases that were meant to crush his political aspirations did the opposite. Americans are smarter than the Democratic Party gives them credit for. And they saw right through the hogwash. Those cases ignited an indignation among many, turning Trump into a symbol of the Democratic Party’s attack on the foundation of America.
Starting no later than the release of the Twitter Files, Americans could see the intertwined efforts of the Democratic Party and government agencies at work to distort citizens’ reality and manipulate what they have a right to: the truth. When it was evident that government agencies took action just days before the 2020 election to ensure social media platforms suppressed stories that illuminated the Biden family’s corrupt international activities, Americans felt betrayed and appalled. And this revived the notion that Trump lost due to cheating — thus, the completely valid claim that the election was stolen from him. The Democratic Party and their pet agencies within the government absolutely deserved the resulting distrust.
Renewed and revitalized by the Democratic Party’s actions, Trump stormed back to a resounding victory. But it was no comeback. Trump’s success was energized by the Democratic Party’s actions. His political ambitions could have died and faded away if they had not reinvigorated him. The Democratic Party worked hard to earn this Trump win and they deserve all the credit for how badly they were defeated.
Reproductive Rights on the Ballots
In an effort to capitalize on the perception of rising support for abortion in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade a couple of years ago, abortion activists succeeded in getting abortion amendments on the ballot in ten states. The outrage from abortion activists has been deafening ever since the world was convinced that the Supreme Court ruling was some kind of violation of American’s constitutional rights (it was not). Abortion was never a right explicitly protected by the constitution, which means that it belongs on the state level — thus, the ballot amendments in these ten states during this voting cycle. Here, we will update you on all of the outcomes.
Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Missouri became the first state to ban abortion. The state also become the first to overturn such a ban via a ballot measure initiated by the state’s citizens. The Missouri measure establishes “a fundamental right to reproductive freedom,” and defines that right to cover making and carrying out “decisions about all matters relating to reproductive health care.”
Arizona passed a measure to enshrine a “fundamental right” to abortion before fetal viability (the point at which a fetus can survive outside the uterus), which is generally estimated to be around 24 weeks (an expansion from Arizona’s previous 15-week limit). The citizens of Montana voted in favor of a similar measure that prohibits the government from “denying or burdening the right to abortion before fetal viability.” The citizens of New York (via an “equal rights” amendment), Colorado, and Maryland voted in new abortion protections. Nevada completed a first step towards new abortion protections, but the measure will not become law until it appears on a general election ballot in 2026.
The citizens of South Dakota voted down their ballot amendment that would have restored the protections established by the Roe v. Wade decision and legalize abortion in the first trimester. The South Dakota amendment did not have strong support even from abortion rights groups because the language was so weak that lawmakers could have worked around it.
Abortion was already legal within the first six weeks of pregnancy in Florida, but voters had a chance to expand that period with their 2024 ballot choice. The pro-abortion measure would have expanded the Florida abortion protection to “before viability” It required 60 percent voting for the amendment, but fell just short with only 57 percent. Perhaps a more moderate proposal would have passed?
Nebraska faced an interesting choice because both abortion and anti-abortion activists sponsored their own measures to expand or restrict rights, respectively — and if both measures won a majority, the amendment receiving the most votes would be adopted. The pro-abortion measure protected abortion until fetal viability. The “anti-abortion” measure banned abortion in the second and third trimester with the exceptions of rape, incest, or cases of medical emergency. The latter measure won, making abortion in the first 12 weeks legal in the state of Nebraska. Even though a measure protecting abortion for up to 12 weeks passed, the pro-abortion crowd is dishonestly propagandizing the story that the Nebraskans voted against support for abortion rights since they did not choose the more extreme measure.
There are now only 12 states in which abortion is banned in most circumstances. So, about 265 million Americans or ~78 percent of the U.S. population have access to abortion (it is worth noting that only around 140 million people voted in the 2024 presidential election). That means 38 states have laws in place to protect abortion. 100 percent of Americans have access to abortion to save the life of the mother. 99.7 percent of Americans have access to abortion or emergency contraception for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest.
Reproductive Rights Red Wave
In a sign that reproductive rights have bipartisan support more so than the Democratic Party would have you believe, numerous Republican candidates promoted their opposition to a national abortion ban in their campaign advertisements. That’s right, many Republicans want the people to decide! Despite redefining the Republican position on abortion and their efforts to firmly plant themselves in the corner of their voters, many of those Republican candidates still lost their bids for election or re-election.
Our Prediction
On July 29, 2024, we made a prediction. We predicted that Kamala Harris would both lose this election and become the first female president in U.S. history. We stand by that prediction. We predict that the Democratic Party, in their obsession with race and gender, cannot pass up the opportunity to have a woman of color become president. Joe Biden clearly lacks the capacity to run the country. He truly is in rough shape. Plus, his administration is now a lame duck. So, why not?
The 25th amendment offers the path for Harris to oust Biden (again). The Vice President and a majority of Congress must support the action. Harris clearly has the ambition to be president and her party still controls the Senate, for now. Is this outcome within reason?
Bringing It On Home
The majority of America has used their votes as their voice. Their voice was heard loud and clear: we reject the Leftist agenda.
This was not about embracing Trump or his agenda. This was about rejecting censorship and elitism. This was about denying those who would talk down to Americans and apply horrible labels to good people. This was about the growing recognition that the Democratic Party is a greater threat to America than a second Trump term.
This should be a wake up call to the Democratic Party. There is room in the center of the political and cultural spectrum for them to ease their way back. But it is essential that they leave behind the extremist ideology, the extreme rhetoric, and the extreme tactics.
Whether you are a Trump supporter, a Trump hater, or somewhere in the middle, you probably see and feel the vicious division in America. We offer this hope: more than Trump himself, the team that he has assembled are disrupters that are intent on correcting the issues within our government that plague Americans in the form of fiscal irresponsibility, health and wellness, military might, the squandering of resources, terrible foreign policy, the propagation of wars in distant lands, and the inhumane conditions associated with undeterred border crossings. That is where our hope lies — not in Trump himself, but in the team he is assembling. He has the opportunity to make mistakes as he continues to build that team, but he is wiser and has better advisors now than he did eight years ago.
There is reason for hope. There truly is. We are not foolish enough to promise that the things we hope for will be realized. But the American majority demands a change for the better. We will be watching closely and holding this next administration responsible for delivering.