For many, the morning after election day in 2016 was shocking. For weeks, Hillary Clinton was leading in the polls, and most political pundits had all but declared her Madame President. But this shocking loss was not a failure of polling, but of the ego of the Democrats, which must be eliminated before November 5th, 2024, if they hope for Kamala Harris to win.

According to the Washington Post, journalists just could not “believe that the America they knew could embrace someone” like Donald Trump. So they used some “magical thinking” to convince themselves that he could not win. They viewed and portrayed him as entertainment, and gave him increasingly more media exposure, without seeing him as a legitimate candidate. With the increased exposure to the media, Trump attracted larger and larger attention nationally ahead of the election. 

This represents the avoidance stage of ego. As Carlos Maza explains in “How to be Hopeless,” humans when faced with tragedy and misfortune in life go through a process of egotism, which very closely follows the stages of grief. It begins with the first stage of avoidance, similar to denial. Since we believe that we are “special,” we say “this cannot be happening to me.” It is similar to how we react to fascism and authoritarianism in the rest of the world: “that would never happen in America, because America is special.” In 2016, for as long as they could, the American media and Democrats avoided the idea that Donald Trump could win.

After avoiding fate for as long as possible, we move into the phase of scapegoating, or as it is more commonly known, blaming. Back during the pandemic, many blamed the pandemic on the government, billionaires, and immigrants instead of taking the pandemic seriously. The same has been seen in modern American elections, where voters of the losing party blamed candidates or even the parties for their failure.

After Trump won, instead of finding ways to better mobilize voters, Democrats began to scapegoat. They blamed Hillary Clinton for not being a good enough candidate, despite her winning the popular vote by millions of votes. They blamed the party as a whole for choosing Hillary Clinton as the nominee because she was not likable enough. 

But the true failure of Democrats in 2016 was believing the polls and not believing that Trump could win. According to the Pew Research Center, poll forecasters put Clinton’s chance of winning anywhere from 70-99%. These inaccurate numbers created widespread overconfidence in low-propensity Democrats who chose not to vote, believing that the outcome was already decided. 

The same thing may happen again in 2024. Politico has reported that there is a “dangerous assumption” that Donald Trump will lose this election. Currently, Kamala Harris holds a narrow margin over Donald Trump nationally and in the swing states she needs to win the presidency. But these polls should hardly be trusted. In 2020, polls had Joe Biden winning nationally by as much as 10%, according to the Economic Times, which then narrowed to just 4.5%. 

It is dangerous to assume that Donald Trump is destined to lose in 2024, just like it was dangerous to assume he would lose in 2016. The only remedy to such uncertainty for Democrats is to take Donald Trump and his movement very seriously in the final weeks before election day.