Reflections on the 2024 Vote.

I hate to react to the results of this year’s election by throwing out the old saw about how history repeats itself, but sometimes it’s the only way to understand how and why something happened which otherwise might never be understood.

It’s not that Trump won a national political contest which everyone said was too close to call. It’s that he not only won the election but also won the vote in every so-called ‘battleground’ state — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and North Carolina.

I happen to think Trump won for the same reason that Richard Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey in 1968, namely, that in both instances, the winners were able to tie the losers to the policies of the sitting Presidents, and the losers — Herbert Humphrey and Kamala Harris — were unable to convince the voters that if elected, they would take the direction of the country on a different path.

What killed Biden was the single most visible symbol representing a President’s performance, which is the price of gasoline. That’s because just about everyone in this country who leaves home in the morning to go to work gets there by driving a vehicle and passing at least one gasoline station which displays that day’s gallon cost in big numbers which everyone sees.