John Scalzi (@scalzi.com) is a successful science fiction writer (Old Man’s War, for example, helped kick off decades of writing success) who has a large digital footprint, including on Bluesky, which is where the following quotes about the presidential election come from:

My question is: where did 18 million Democratic voters go from 2020? Not to Trump, he’s pulling even fewer voters than he did four years ago. But Harris has currently pulled 18M fewer than Biden in 2020. That margin will shrink but it’s still huge. There are possible answers here, none great.

But let’s get to an obvious one: lots of US men – and a lot of US women – simply won’t vote for a woman for president.

He’s been supporting Harris ever since she became the Democratic nominee, and before that Biden. He has written repeatedly on his blog Whatever about the dangers of a second Trump presidency. He gets it. He voted early, exhorted his readership to do the same. He left on a European book tour hoping that Harris would win, confident in his own way she would. His reaction to the aftermath of the presidential election and the Trump win is understandable, and above all else, rational if pity.

And like him, I too want to know what the hell happened to 18M Democratic voters? I know what bucket a percentage of those voters fall into, and that’s the group who somehow hold Biden (and Harris) responsible for the horrors in Gaza. I get all that, but not voting for Harris in protest just made a very bad situation horribly worse. My attitude towards those childish voters who threw a temper tantrum on 5 November thinking they’d show Harris have instead shown just how fucking stupid they really are, and how fucking ignorant and naive they are about how global politics works. If you thought it was bad under Biden, it will only get worse under Trump.

I know we’re going to have to rebuild the Democratic party after this, but while we do that work, I want us to flush those bastards that stabbed us politically in the back out of the party. Go off somewhere else, in fact go protest in Trump’s new America and then come back and tell me how that worked out.