Opinion: Voters sent a clear message with Trump win. Will left listen?

Donald Trump has been elected president again, this time by a wide margin. Americans have strongly rebuked Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden and their progressive ideas.
Voters have spoken loud and clear. Will the Democratic Party listen to what a majority of voters said?
Four years after Republicans lost the presidency, President-elect Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance and more than 72 million Americans harnessed a “red wave” that knocked down the “blue wall” and swept the GOP back into the White House and back to control of the Senate − with perhaps control of the House yet to come.
Trump is even leading the popular vote by about 4.8 million ballots as of Wednesday.
Trump didn’t just win, he won decisively, dispelling any concerns about contentious legal fights over the vote. The race was called less than 12 hours after polls began to close in the Eastern time zone.
In Texas, where I live, Trump flipped Starr County, which has voted for Democrats since way before I was born, 1982. He also managed to flip Miami-Dade County in Florida, a county that’s been blue since 1988.
I’m stunned. I spent the past six months buried in slogans and predictions that Biden would be a second-term president, until he wasn’t.
Then it was Harris, whose joy and hope would save the nation from the billionaire-turned-convict Trump, whose presence on the ballot was a supposed threat to democracy.
What a difference a day makes.
Trump has not just won, but won, well, bigly, as the kids say.
But this isn’t a joking matter: Trump’s lopsided victory − and the long list of wins by other Republicans across the country − should send a chilling message to the Democratic Party.
Democrats propped up candidates who spout extreme progressive ideas while expressing contempt for the electorate they were trying to win over. You don’t win by dismissing voters’ concerns about the high cost of necessities, out-of-control illegal immigration or the visible decline of the current president who had to be replaced as the party’s nominee because he wasn’t up to the job.
You also don’t win by calling tens of millions of Americans who support your opponent “garbage.”
Over the past few months, I tried to convey this repeatedly: The majority of Americans can see reality with their eyes. The Democrats tried to win by gaslighting the voters. They failed.
George Orwell wrote in “1984”: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Americans heard that command and said, “Goodbye, Joe. No thank you, Kamala.”
On the campaign trail, Biden, Harris and vice presidential nominee Tim Walz kept telling the American people they were wrong about the life they were living. That their own eyes, ears and bank accounts were wrong, not the Democratic Party’s failed policies.
Harris maintained that Americans were mistaken about inflation and the economy, even though anyone with a brain and a wallet could see groceries cost more than ever.
Harris kept telling Americans nothing was wrong with immigration and border security (until near the end of the campaign) even though Americans could see statistics showing record-high migrant encounters at the border during the Biden administration.
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Little of what Harris and Walz said reflected Americans’ experiences on the economy, immigration, the border and abortion.
Why would Americans elect someone who says the problems they are experiencing firsthand are fabricated? How can Harris-Walz fix problems they say don’t exist?
We’ll learn more as the days go on about who voted and why. But it’s clear that Americans could see and hear that Harris couldn’t explain what she would do as president or how she would accomplish what the Biden administration had failed to do for four years.
The messenger failed. And the message failed, too.
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Harris tried to say she no longer supported progressive ideas that were foundational to her first bid for the presidency only five years earlier. It wasn’t clear that she truly believed or wanted to do.
But Walz’s record as governor of Minnesota seemed like the most obvious road map. Walz turned Minnesota into a haven of progressive policies that rivals California. From abortion on demand to spending a huge surplus on more costly programs, resulting in even higher taxes, Minnesota doesn’t just boast nice people and cold winters anymore: It’s where progressives go to prove their ideas are awful.
Turns out, the rest of America didn’t like that plan. Voters rejected the Democratic Party’s progressive agenda − and rejected it by a wide margin.
That’s not all Americans rejected. They’ve rejected a party that views them as less-than, with disdain and full-throated contempt.
On PBS late on election night, Jonathan Capehart said that due to the election results, “I can’t help but wonder if the American people have given up on democracy.”
Americans who voted for Trump have given up on the democratic process that returned him to the White House? What?
Leftists who hold contempt for Americans’ free and fair choice to vote for Trump and other Republican lawmakers demonstrate a big reason why Americans made that choice in the first place. Americans grew tired of progressives lecturing, shaming and insulting them, then seething in a self-righteous pout because their own arguments failed.
On CNN, Republican analyst Scott Jennings said it this way: “I’m interpreting the results tonight as the revenge of just the regular, ole working-class American, the anonymous American who has been crushed, insulted, condescended to. They’re not garbage. They’re not Nazis. They’re just regular people who get up and go to work every day, and are trying to make a better life for their kids. And they feel like they have been told to just shut up when they have complained about the things that are hurting them in their own lives.”
If Democrats are serious about someday earning the privilege to again represent the majority of Americans, they’ll right their own ship. At the moment, the Democratic Party is the Titanic, and Trump is just the tip of the iceberg.
Nicole Russell is an opinion columnist with USA TODAY. She lives in Texas with her four kids. Sign up for her newsletter, The Right Track, and get it delivered to your inbox.