They might be wrong that no one was saying that, but there definitely wasn’t a significant voting block who thought a third party candidate had a shot at winning.

Blaming third party voters is a loser mentality. 77 million voted trump, 75 million Harris, and 101 million didn’t vote at all. How about blaming those people?

Yeah, I mean, I agree. I don’t think third-party voters made the difference. I don’t even think protest voters and protest nonvoters made the difference. I think the civic education of the US electorate is worse than previously thought, and it was previously thought to be pretty damn bad.

Or blaming the party and candidate? If someone didn’t win the majority of the blame lies with the person running.

This is an election. The people - the electorate - make the choice. If faced with the most incompetent democratic candidate imaginable, and a literal Nazi, the electorate - the voters - should still be held responsible if they chose the literal Nazi, or decided it wasn’t worth bothering with which one won. Or, conversely, if the democratic candidate is the best damn campaigner anyone has ever seen, but loses to the literal Nazi, that does not mean that the blame lies with the democratic candidate.

Elections are not a race between two aristocrats trying to prove they’re better than the other - or at least, they should not be. Elections are a decision about what direction the country should take going forward, and the campaigning of candidates only important insofar they emphasize one aspect or another. And the country decided that it liked, or didn’t care about, the fascist platform put forward by Trump.

That’s on us. That’s on the country. No matter what incompetence, vanity, or venality Harris or the Dems have shown, no matter what condemnation they rightly deserve, the final choice, the ultimate sin, is on the nation’s soul. We were given the choice between fascism and avoiding fascism, and we chose fascism.