Exit polls for the 2024 presidential election showed that a plurality of Americans (34%) believed that the single most important issue facing the nation now is democracy. If that is true, then why did roughly 5 million more voters support Donald Trump than Kamala Harris?

Rather than parsing all the reasons, which cable news broadcasts endlessly, this essay attempts to offer alternative ways of looking at the complex 2024 election from a single, unrepresentative voting district, Hancock County, where Harris triumphed, and one local town in the same county, Gouldsboro, where she did not prevail. Take a look at local yard signs as symbols of support of a particular candidate, remembering that only an idiot would believe that by destroying a yard sign you eliminate public consideration of the candidate.

Locally, reports of yard signs being stolen, defaced or destroyed were invariably those in support of Harris/Walz, and Jared Golden, a two-term “blue dog” House Democrat. He made the apparent error of calling for rethinking gun control policies, most especially the federal response to serial killers, who usually are white males born in the USA. Of course, USA-born serial killers will not be deported as undesirable in the Trump plan for massive deportations of Latinos.

An omnipresent yard sign placed locally and unblemished by factual accuracy and not taken or destroyed is the “Trump = Safety” on lines 1 and 2, and the other two lines reading “Kamala = Crime.” No matter that violent crime under Biden/Harris has dramatically decreased, and that Harris, as a district attorney and then as attorney general of California, actually prosecuted violent gun users.

Another revealing yard sign urges eligible residents to support a local lobsterman whose past troubles with the law seem offset today by his dedication to serve the House of Representatives in Augusta as minority leader. The signs supporting his candidacy include one that implies that another term for him is a positive byproduct of tribalism. He is “one of us,” reads the sign, as if residents who do not fish for lobster are somehow not “one of us.” Such exclusionary politics is most potent at the local level. Just ask most any black Southerner, most any Latino, or any woman who needs to end her pregnancy.

“Not” this, “not” that. What is being described has been amply summarized by The Economist as “negative partisanship” defined as “the inclination of people to vote not for a party in which they believe, but against another one that they fear or despise.” Hence, Trump supporters can willfully overlook that their own candidate is a convicted felon, that he cheated not only the IRS but also donors to the now defunct Trump Foundation as well as “graduates” of Trump University, also defunct. He was found liable for sexually abusing a woman, the courts found, in a Manhattan department story changing room, then demeaned her in an ineffective ruse to convince jurors that she was not credible. Nearly two dozen more Trump accusers, all women, are waiting for their turn in court.

The Democrats likewise engage in negative partisanship. Trump is variously described by Dems as a bully, an autocrat, a wannabe dictator, unfit, unhinged, Putin’s pawn, not very smart, certainly about how our constitutional system of government works, and indifferent to human suffering (except his own, of course).

Negative partisanship pollutes the lifeblood of a democracy – truthfulness, openness and transparency. However much Dems might despise the liar Trump, the 78-year old president-elect has been clear that he intends to be a “dictator for one day” in addressing illegal migrants, the Russian war against Ukraine and the imposition of tariffs on foreign-made goods. He will not tell his base that a promised tax cut will in fact require every American to spend an extra $2,600 per person penalty as the cost of Trump’s tariffs.

Trump’s next four years hold the real possibility of making America miserable again (MAMA), sparking the sort of consumer outrage that Trump so carefully cultivated by repeatedly lying to the public that Biden somehow set off inflation. The next four years also may take our nation into the authoritarian mold all too familiar to the people of Hungary, Russia, China and North Korea. “It” can happen here, as Sinclair Lewis reminded us in his prescient 1936 novel about the rise of fascism in America.

In the meantime, Mainers and Americans more generally need to build focus groups to discuss what must be done to win the 2028 presidential race. Those focus groups might then transition into a 2024 version of the Underground Railroad – building capacity to help immigrants stay safe and free until such time as our nation pledges to cease separating small children from their parents. This would strike a blow for freedom and would create facts on the ground that cannot easily be dismissed by the Trump propaganda machine.

Republicans in 2024 have shown that kowtowing to Trump is a positive for their political careers (at least in the short term) and the Democratic Party revealed that it has outgrown its popular appeal. Local politics in this recent national election indicates that what happens at the bottom, i.e., local politics, can be reproduced at the state and federal levels. “All politics is local,” intoned former House Speaker Tip O’Neill, perhaps now to be recycled in Trumpian form, and, predictably, bring MAMA into play.