Our editorial board does not believe the results of the presidential campaign that ended a week ago should surprise anyone — least of all the frequent readers of this page.

We have noted with alarm that the Biden Administration’s failures to address inflation or even communicate that they recognized the undue stress it placed on American families.

“Americans are struggling and worried,” we editorialized in July of 2022. “And we need our leaders in Washington, D.C. to recognizes those struggles and fears and address them head-on.”

“For too long, hope has simply played too great a role in how the inflationary pressures on middle-class and working-class families are being addressed,” we wrote in March of 2023.

“It pains us that after years of imploring the White House and other leaders to elevate the level of importance of this critical issue, we continue to see such a lackadaisical attitude,” we noted less than a month ago.

Often as we emphasized the urgency of curtailing inflation, we acknowledged the important role affordable domestic energy could play in bringing relief to Americans. We’ve advocated, to no avail, that the White House wholeheartedly embrace energy production.

“Republicans are correct to say that the ‘American people have suffered enough’ due to the administration’s reluctance to allow more domestic drilling,” we wrote in October of 2022. “They are correct when they identify this approach as ‘destructive.'”

As we noted again when Vice President-elect JD Vance visited Williamsport, we agreed with Vance’s “criticisms of Democratic efforts — efforts which thankfully have had limited success — to swear off conventional energy sources and mandate a reliance on renewable energy before that level of reliance is remotely practical.”

We’ve expressed the concerns we hear shared by our neighbors, family and friends that the reach and cost of our federal government is simply unsustainable — with perhaps no initiative better illustrating that unsustainability than the Biden administration’s efforts to forgive student loans — an initiative that, as we said in April of 2024, sets “expensive precedents in an age of a $34 trillion national debt.”

This is by no means a comprehensive list of the opportunities we’ve taken to share our concerns about the White House’s neglect of these important issues.

Yet on all of these concerns — and others — we’ve found the White House, the Harris campaign and many of their most public supporters to be, at best, unresponsive and, at worst, condescending and dismissive.

We do not believe anyone should be surprised that comfortable margins in the states key to the electoral college — and in the nation as a whole — proverbially spoke up in a way the administration could not dismiss, and to which it must respond — by turning the White House over to the 45th and soon-to-be 47th president, Donald Trump.