When in 1974, having persuaded Ohio’s state legislature to impose an income tax, Gov. John Gilligan, a Democrat, was narrowly defeated for re-election by his Republican predecessor, he was remarkably honest about it. He took full responsibility. The vote, Gilligan said, was simply a rejection of him.

Gilligan fairly could have made excuses. He had lost by only 11,000 votes out of more than 3 million cast, even as a leftist independent candidate got 95,000 votes that probably would have gone to Gilligan, and there was a sharp decline in voter turnout in Ohio’s most Democratic cities. (While Ohioans were sore about the income tax, among other things, they have yet to repeal it.)

Are Democrats still capable of such candor and clear thinking in their reflection on Donald Trump’s surprisingly easy defeat of Kamala Harris in this month’s presidential election? They don't seem like it.

Some Democrats are blaming voters for not being persuaded that President Biden and Vice President Harris had given them the best economy ever, as if people shouldn't believe the contrary evidence of their own lives.

Some Democrats are blaming Trump’s supposed demagoguery against minority groups, though his support among those groups increased strongly.

Some, like Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, say the Democrats have lost touch with their traditional constituencies and need to "rebuild the left," though the leftism of the Biden-Harris administration — from open borders to mandatory transgenderism and electric cars to defunding police — provided the material for the most effective Trump campaign commercials.

Far more probable is that, as with Gilligan in Ohio in 1974, most voters this month just determined that the incumbent administration had been awful. What else could explain why most people were ready to get rid of that administration even at the cost of returning the ever-troublesome Trump to the White House?

What else could explain the big decline in voter participation in Connecticut’s cities, Democratic strongholds, just like the big decline in Ohio’s cities in 1974? It seems that even many Democrats this month were profoundly discouraged by their party’s performance in power.

Especially obliged to reconsider are those Democrats and their apologists in the news media who think the economy under the Biden-Harris administration has been strong. Anyone paying attention should have noticed long ago that government's economic and inflation data is manipulated and falsified.

A low unemployment rate is a lie when the labor participation rate is low as well. Inflation in necessities long has been far higher than the government has been reporting under its deceitful calculation criteria. Maybe the Democratic big thinkers can’t discern that rising homelessness and demand at food banks are signs of impoverishment, not prosperity. But people who live in the real world can.

What the big thinkers have missed is that the things they praise the Biden-Harris administration for were more than nullified by inflation.

So what if, by government decree, the price of insulin has been cut and a few more people have medical insurance when all other necessities, from food to housing, have soared in price and absorbed the savings and then some?

Whatever good things the outgoing administration did, they only seemed to be free. They weren’t financed by taxes but by money creation, which, in excess, creates the inflation that has just caused so many people to decide that, awful as Trump may be, the Democrats are worse.

Who among the Democrats — especially those in the Democratic sinecure of Connecticut, where even the most obtuse and moronic Democrats enjoy long political careers — can acknowledge the obvious and act on it? Who among them can agree openly with voters that their national administration failed terribly?

At least in his reluctance to "rebuild the left" in Connecticut with the spending spree it desires, Gov. Ned Lamont may think that state government’s seemingly strong financial position is vulnerable to imminent recession and renewed inflation even if Joe Biden doesn’t start another world war, his final insult to the country.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. He can be reached at CPowell@cox.net.