make us feel better in the immediate aftermath. It will take a long time to sort out, and I doubt very much that there was one single cause but a confluence of many things, including an inaccurate perception of the state of the economy; racism, misogyny; a whole lot of propaganda from both internal and external sources; uninformed voters; and people who could have voted but didn't. There will also be a whole lot of internal finger-pointing, which has already started. Trying to blame the whole mess on hacked voting systems without evidence makes us look as foolish as Trump's people in the aftermath of 2020, where those claims got shot down in 60+ lawsuits because there wasn't any supporting evidence. That's not to say there should be no examination of unusual patterns in unexpected places, but it's a pretty big chasm to leap in order to claim the debacle was the result of nationwide vote tampering. Rather than chasing our tails to find a unified theory that doesn't involve taking a hard look at what went wrong politically and which might make us Democrats feel bad for having misjudged the national Zeitgeist, let's let the dust settle and analyze patterns and strategies before pouncing on a conclusion which might be false and lead to more mistakes in the future.
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