There are lots of ways of defining the liberal elite, but there can be no question that Tuesday night saw a wholesale rejection of their dominant value system. America didn’t just elect a craven candidate whom the highly educated had deemed unacceptably dictatorial, fascistic even, but the nation did so in such a way that President-elect Donald J. Trump’s agenda now will largely be unfettered, thanks to Republican majorities in the Senate and, quite possibly as we write, the House.

And, adding insult to injury for Democrats, it’s likely that the result of the election also will deliver Trump from his myriad legal challenges.

The party that had been saying democracy was on the ballot found that democracy had risen like an orange tiger to bite it in the neck.

Democratic Party nominee Vice President Kamala Harris failed to outperform President Joe Biden in a single state. On CNN very late Tuesday night, they even were struggling to find a single county where that was true.

“Donald Trump is going to be our president,” Hillary Clinton thus found herself saying Wednesday, no doubt though gritted teeth. “We owe him an open mind and a chance to lead.”

For some on the left, that kind of largesse toward a convicted felon will be impossible. That we can understand. But the results are the results.

As a bleary America awoke Wednesday to a new political reality, armchair quarterbacking as to why Harris and Tim Walz lost was already underway. We have our theories, too.

Harris, as we noted here many times, failed to answer, in a clear and direct way, questions about what she would do as president, an essential thing to do if you want voters to be able see you in the job.

Trump, palpable flaws and all, was known; Harris remained unknown. The gauzy biographical movies from the Democratic National Convention were not enough.

A majority of voters clearly were uncomfortable with the Democrats’ switcheroo after the party belatedly discovered that Biden was unfit for another term as president. In essence, the party bosses then told voters to fall in line, quiet down, ask no questions and demand no further choices. Americans, it has now been confirmed, did not care for that. (We never did.)

The Republican Party has become a party not of business and nonprofit leaders, now mostly Democratic Party members, but of the working class and the lower middle class. Elites throughout history have found to their cost that there are very many of those folks, even if we don’t hear from them all that much. By effectively abandoning the working class, especially men, by deeming so much of what they felt unacceptable, Democrats got themselves on the wrong side of the numbers game.

A plethora of Americans saw Trump, who survived two assassination attempts during the campaign, as their protector and not as the disruptor the elites saw. And regular folks tend to vote what they perceive to be in their economic or cultural interest, regardless of race.

This is a tough lesson for Democrats to learn because they tend to have been taught otherwise, but it explains, especially, the pivotal defection of some Black men to Trump just as it makes the point that many U.S. citizens of Latino origin or descent don’t necessarily approve of a border it is easy to cross without authorization. And they voted accordingly.

Now, thanks to the toughest of nights, Democrats better understand.

The Chicago Tribune