You know, I get it: Will Bunch, the far-left opinion columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is thoroughly eaten up with #TrumpDerangementSyndrome, far too eaten up to see some basic facts. Mr Bunch fairly heavily documents his work with hyperlinks, so it’s not as though he doesn’t know how. But, in his Tuesday morning newsletter, “Revealed: The real reason that Trump won,” he managed to completely miss the most obvious thing:

(Michael) Podhorzer (former political director at the AFL-CIO organized-labor federation) titled his analysis of the 155 million votes tallied in November “Why Trump ‘Won’” — the quotation marks around “Won” coming because it’s clear that the election was less a public endorsement of Trump and more an apathetic rejection of what Team Harris and the Democrats offered, cast by millions who voted with their feet to stay home.

Podhorzer argued convincingly in an essay on Medium that “the results are best understood as a vote of no confidence in Democrats, not an embrace of Trump or MAGA.” This political analyst then brings the receipts, showing that the “red shift” of precincts towards Trump wasn’t because the tainted GOP nominee gained support, but rather the result of the drop in Democratic, or anti-Trump, turnout from the surge that Biden saw in 2020.

In arguing that the 2024 electorate turned “couchward,” Podhorzer crunched the final numbers to show that as many as 19 million Americans who voted for Biden four years ago didn’t cast ballots this fall, especially in deep-blue precincts in cities like Philadelphia. Framed differently, he finds that 15 million fewer Americans cast ballots against Trump than they did in the COVID-19-soaked 2020 contest.

There’s more at the original.

Mr Bunch almost hit on it, noting that the 2020 election was held during the COVID panicdemic — not a typo, but an accurate reflection of how I see the country’s reaction to it — but failing to note the extreme measures taken during the election. States, including Pennsylvania, sent out millions of ballots in the mail, complete with postage-paid return envelopes. Normally, every election has far fewer votes cast than there are registered voters, because some people simply don’t find the time or energy to get off the couch and go vote.

But, with the ballots mailed to people’s houses, and no cost to fill them out and send them back to the state, millions of people who are normally too lazy to vote, did vote in 2020. That was where Joe Biden got his surge in votes, from the mostly lazy and shiftless, from the people who normally don’t vote. Come 2024, with a failed and floundering Biden presidency, helmed by a man obviously sinking into dementia, who was then cast aside and his Vice President, a woman whose own presidential campaign in 2019 had foundered because she just wasn’t an exciting candidate, tabbed to carry the Democrats’ banner, what urgency was there for the normally lazy to get up and go vote?

And a point Mr Bunch would never, ever mention: the lazy registered voters are primarily Democrats.

The columnist continued to tell us where he believed Kamala Harris Emhoff’s campaign fouled up, primarily with a concentration on the wrong potential voters. Her campaign was pretty much of an uninspiring cluster, but, in something else the left won’t admit, it was an uninspiring cluster because the candidate herself is uninspiring. Love him or hate him, Donald Trump has truckloads of charisma, while Mrs Emhoff, like Hillary Clinton eight years earlier, are just plain dull.

Someone described Mrs Clinton as every man’s first wife. Ouch! I didn’t see that about Mrs Emhoff, but yeah, it applies to her as well.

The Democrats, and Mr Bunch, should have seen all of this. The vote totals in 2020 were so far out of the ordinary that surely someone should have suggested that they were an aberration rather than some new normal. Of course, for anyone who supported the Democrats to suggest that might give some credence to Mr Trump’s complaint that there was massive vote fraud in 2020, and we couldn’t have that, could we?

What we had in November was a normal election, with normal turnout figures.