Thread by @RadioFreeTom

Uncharacteristically, I'll say that Dems should stop beating up on themselves and firing volleys back and forth. (They can get back to that later.) American voters - as I've been warning for years - are changing, and becoming more like Trump. That's hard to counteract. /1

Maybe the mistake we all made was thinking America would elect a Black woman. I had a gut feeling they would not. But in any case, when elections are about feelings, fantasies, boredom, and resentment, the candidate who services those delusions has a natural advantage. /2

Democrats are understandably focused on voters who flipped because they're suffering economically. But a far larger number of voters werfe un-flippable and not poor! They're the comfortable Trumpers who think, like, Canada conspired with Michelle O to hijack voting machines. /3

When millions of people think that way, you can't agonize *too* much over losing another 3 pts during a global backlash against inflation (that no govt could have stopped and that the US handled well).
Especially when you've won impt House/Senate races in all those states./4

The Democrats should definitely have a reckoning about their inability to recognize that becoming the party of the college-educated (which is what the GOP used to be) has affected their ability to message. And you're seeing some rumbles already. /5

But no Dem can change the fact that millions of ungettable GOP votes are set in stone not because of economic conditions - which were the best any candidate could have hoped for - but because even relatively affluent voters have spent years marinating in complete craziness. /6

And I'll add, again, that this is not some post-hoc rationalization based on this week. I've written about this for years, and warned about it at length in a book I wrote more than four years ago. That's really why I just couldn't be optimistic about this election. /7x