The final tally, it looks like, is going to be 312 electoral college votes for President Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris' 226. Just for context, in 2016, Trump won with 304 electoral votes and Biden won in 2020 with 306. So it's a pretty sweeping victory. He won all the supposed swing states this year fairly resoundingly.
There's no real super close calls. There's some close calls, but a pretty resounding victory. Chamath, what happened? Wow. It's a really good question. I think that there's many layers of the answer, but I think in its most basic calculation, I think that the bottom fell out of the Democratic Party.
And if you look at why, there's a simple explanation and then there's the more nuanced explanation. I think the simple explanation is like they just lost the script. I think that there was so many people that just got really tired of being spoken at and labeled misogynist, racist, fascist, transphobe, whatever it was.
And there was just these litany of these judgmental labels that would come out instead of engaging on the topics at hand. So I think the Democratic Party played this game of trying to use identities, genders, races as a bid to basically get people that they thought should always vote in their direction to continue to support them.
And instead what happened was people just started to think for themselves and say, "Hold on a second. I'm just a normal person that wants to be left alone. What matters to me?" And I think what Donald Trump spoke to was a desire for folks to have economic prosperity, a safe neighborhood, a predictable educational curriculum where these kids could go to school, not be indoctrinated and come out the other side and just know some useful skills so that they could get a good job and do better than they did.
And all these basic truths ended up on the ballot. And so it was a bunch of perception versus just a bunch of hard realities. And I think Trump stayed focused and ultimately made sure that people understood that that's what he was focused on. And I think the Democrats just went to this place of demagoguery and labels.
And I think it was just a resounding defeat. And David, I just want you to just to put a pin on how resounding it is. In California and New York, which I would say are the two most prolific bastions of elitist liberal thinking, Democrats won those states in some of the narrowest margins they've ever seen.
I think in 2020, they won California by 29 points. It was barely half is what they won by this year. In New York, it shrunk to a 12 point margin. So what is this telling you? It's telling you that the Democrats really need to retool and get back to first principles.
It was a cataclysmic dismissal of wokeism, of cancel culture, of judgmentalism. It was an ringing endorsement of a meritocracy, of just plain, simple common sense, of talking with people and to people, being able to tolerate disagreements, remaining friends. All of those things were on the ballot. And it was just an absolute resounding victory for just normalcy.
That's what I think we saw. We saw a return to normalcy. Is this the nature of democracy, that over time, when you have a two-party system and one party veers too far to the left or one party veers too far to the right, people jump ship to the other party?
And ultimately, they pull the policies of the party that they left back to the middle. And that's the way democracy is supposed to work and has worked historically. So is this the way it's supposed to go? And do we project that four years from now, the Democrats will need to be and need to adjust to the center, and we'll see less of this extremism because of the way the voting turned out this election cycle?
Well, I think that's a very interesting question, is whether the Democrats have the necessary introspection to learn from this loss. I would say that one of them does. If you look at Matt Iglesias, who's someone I've sparred with on TwitterX, who is a Democrat partisan, he basically tweeted a list of principles that he thought the Democrat party needed to adopt.
I read it and retweeted it. I said, laughing my ass off, this is a list of Republican principles. It was all about, you know, opposing woke and being in favor of merit and innovation. Tolerance. Tolerance. I'm like, great. Look, you know what? If the Democratic Party wants to adopt these principles, that's a wonderful thing for the country.
I hope that they do it. Okay. But will they do it? I have my doubts. You look at this tweet by Ari Fleischer, where he talks about who the Democratic Party now is. Yeah, I think that this is a really important tweet because it sort of tells you, Sax, who's going to be left in the room?
If these are the only people left in the room, the last thing they're going to do is admit defeat. Right. Exactly. So what you see is that the Democratic Party base is these very affluent, very overeducated, very non-religious types. And frankly, I wonder whether they're too out of touch to know they're out of touch.
They're certainly very whiny and entitled. And I just don't think they're going to cede control of the party without a fight. And frankly, they've disappeared so far up their own woke asses that I don't think they can find an electoral majority if they try. So if these people stay in control of the party, and these are the people who you're seeing having a mental breakdown on TikTok, they're posting all the videos, they're insulting the electorate.
And let's face it, it's not just on TikTok, it's on the legacy media, it's on MSDNC. It's basically the legacy media who are trying to diagnose a psychosis in the American electorate to explain why they were so wrong. If those people stay in control, I think that the Republicans could have an electoral majority as far as the eye can see.