[Craving even more FPM content? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more. Click here to sign up.]

You can still get sports coverage on ESPN, but the ostensible sports network has been famously woke for years, with its NBA analyst and “First Take” host Stephen A. Smith leading the way. Smith has demonstrated more than once, however, that he is not a doctrinaire leftist who never dares to question the elites’ line. He has just shown this independent streak yet again, even going so far as to express regret that he voted for Kamala Harris, and offering a solid, common-sense reason why Trump won. Will Smith’s leftist fans follow his lead and start thinking for themselves as well?

Fox News reported Saturday that Smith has already raced through the classic five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) regarding the 2024 presidential election, and has moved to a sixth stage: buyer’s remorse. “Kamala Harris,” Smith said, “who didn’t resonate during the primaries in 2020, couldn’t even get to Iowa, suddenly is the Democratic nominee, then you roll up to the convention in Chicago and everybody is like ‘She’s a rockstar!’ So it’s like ‘How’d that happen?’” How indeed? Well, she was processed and packaged like detergent or Doritos, and millions bought the product. Luckily for America and the world, the selling of Kamala Harris wasn’t quite as successful as Democrat party top dogs had hoped.

Smith continued: “Yes I voted for her, a lot of people voted for her, but in the end, we end up feeling like d— fools, because we supported it, we fell for the okiedoke as they say. If you had a primary, the likelihood is she would not have been the Democratic nominee.” Indeed. But as everyone knows, the self-anointed guardians of “our democracy” (yeah, it’s a republic) don’t really care about “democracy” at all. That was just another packaged product they were selling.

Smith also had an accurate view of why Trump won, which he articulated amid a lamentation over how the left’s lawfare failed in its objective: “Here’s the deal: the man was impeached twice, he was convicted on 34 felony counts, and the American people still said, ‘He’s closer to normal than what we see on the left.’” Yeah, and that’s because Trump was indeed closer to normal than what we saw on the left.

Smith showed that he had more than an inkling of the specifics of that phenomenon as well, saying: “It’s such a strong tilt to the progressive left where we are talking about transgender issues and culture wars and identity politics and all of this stuff. We are sick of all of that. That makes total, total sense to me, and I’m good with it, even though I didn’t vote for [Trump]. I’m not as taken aback and feeling like nothing but gloom and doom and the world is coming to an end because the person I voted for didn’t win.” Well, that’s an unusual and refreshing perspective on the left.

Expanding on this point on another show, Smith repeated that Trump was “closer to normal. Why? Because something that pertains – when you talk about the transgender community, for example, and you talk about the issues that pertain to less than one percent of the population – the Democratic Party came across as if that was a priority more so than the other issues.” Indeed it did. The elites condescended to the American people throughout the campaign, and after they lost, doubled down, suggesting that the electorate was too stupid or racist or sexist to make the obvious choice and pull the lever for Kamala Harris.

In contrast to all that, Smith called for a return to sanity: “I think that in light of those results we have to look at this election as a referendum on the Democratic Party. And America’s saying we’re not feeling where you are, we’re not feeling where you tried to go, we want no part of it, we’re not having it – and they made their choice and we all have to accept it.”

Will the leftist political and media elites heed Smith’s words and reconsider their intransigence? That’s not likely, but they can’t do anything to stop the fact that the tide is turning. Just a few years ago, public figures on the right as well as the left hurried to comply whenever the left offered some crazy idea (such as transgenderism) or declared that some individual had uttered something unacceptable and had to be shunned accordingly. But now that wave has crested, as Smith’s own comments demonstrate. If present trends continue, more common sense is likely to dawn among leftists in the coming months and years.