PUNDIT SUDDENLY REALIZES THAT THE WHOLE COUNTRY DIDN'T CHANGE WHEN TRUMP WON BY 1½ POINTS

David Wallace-Wells of The New York Times just noticed something:

... between the July 2024 assassination attempt on [Donald] Trump in Butler, Pa., and the ignominious end of Elon Musk’s run at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency in May 2025, it certainly looked as if ... Mr. Trump had managed a generational political realignment, pulling the country’s plutocratic elite in Silicon Valley into a new ideological alliance with his legacy base of the left behind in postindustrial states and drawing an eye-opening number of Black and brown and young male voters into the fold, as well....

Eighteen months later, we can say that if that first vibe shift was real, it’s been followed by another, in the opposite direction, with the bottom falling out of Mr. Trump’s second term and his administration looking again like the same old destructive kakistocracy. But another way of looking at the disarray of the second MAGA era is to consider the possibility that it was always at least partly an illusion, jointly conjured up by self-aggrandizing Republicans and self-lacerating liberals.

Really, David? Ya think? You think maybe a Trump popular-vote victory by one and a half points might not have been a genuine sign that the entire country was now MAGA?

Some of us understood this in real time. Three days after the polls closed, I wrote:

And always remember: Kamala Harris got 48% of the vote. This was not a blowout. It was not a landslide. Harris's voters were close to half the country. If Trump had lost with 48% of the vote, pundits would be urging Democrats to be conciliatory to Trump voters.

Franklin Roosevelt won 57% of the vote in 1932 and more than 60% in 1936, after Republican Calvin Coolidge won a landslide of his own in 1928. That was a vibe shift. Ronald Reagan's two blowouts in 1980 and 1984 were vibe shifts, a few years after the downfall of Republican Richard Nixon and the 1976 victory of Jimmy Carter.

Trump eked out a win in 2024. Pundits thought it was zeitgeisty because they grade Republicans on a curve.

The "self-lacerating liberals" Wallace-Wells refers to include much of the punditocracy, who have learned to self-lacerate after decades of ref-working by Republicans. Republicans have persuaded most liberal pundits that Democrats are elitist outlier weirdos and Republicans are the only "real" Americans. There's one problem with that: Democrats somehow managed to win the popular vote in seven of the eight presidential elections that preceded 2024. The bar is so low for Republicans that when a Republican wins by an eyelash, it's seen as resounding confirmation of the GOP's status as America's normative party.

So even though Trump's popular-vote victory margin in 2024 was one-third the size of Biden's victory margin in 2020, and even though Trump's victory margin in 2024 was smaller than Hillary Clinton's victory margin in her 2016 loss, Trump's win was seen as a sign of a massive cultural shift.

Pundits thought this was a cultural shift because they wanted to believe it was a cultural shift. When "an eye-opening number of Black and brown and young male voters" moved right for one election, pundits were thrilled at the prospect that these groups might now be joining "the left behind in postindustrial states" -- noble blue-collar white Republicans -- in abandoning the icky weirdo elitist Democrats.

It's been obvious for quite a while that the vibe shift wasn't real -- Trump's job disapproval rating began exceeding his job approval rating in March 2025, and the gap has just grown wider ever since. If it took pundits this long to realize that the vibe shift was illusory, it's because they wanted it to be real.