What the F**k Just Happened? And What Happens Now?

AP VoteCast asked in its exit poll, but the result probably isn’t worth writing any essays about:

As of Monday afternoon, the University of Florida’s Election Lab calculates that 63.51 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in the 2024 election (more than 155 million people, out of an eligible voter population of nearly 245 million). That is down from 2020 general election turnout, which Election Lab calculates was 66.34 percent. In 2016, it was 60.12 percent, and in 2012, 58.57 percent.

According to the Wall Street Journal’s initial analysis, Democratic turnout dropped off significantly this year:

Nationwide turnout notched down slightly compared with 2020. But among counties that President Biden won in 2020, the declines on Election Day this year were especially sharp—and voters moved away from the Democrats. While Harris’s organizational and advertising efforts successfully moved voters to the polls in the battleground states, the overall voter pool shifted toward Trump, compared to 2020. Across the rest of the country, Democratic turnout plummeted. The Journal’s analysis includes counties where nearly 100% of the votes had been counted as of Thursday evening.

Party switching alone doesn’t explain Harris’s defeat. “Democrats sat out the election,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. The lack of enthusiasm among Democratic voters translated into a fractured coalition, with a swath of key groups sharply reducing their support.

Per the New York Times similar analysis:

Counties with the biggest Democratic victories in 2020 delivered 1.9 million fewer votes for Ms. Harris than they had for Mr. Biden. The nation’s most Republican-heavy counties turned out an additional 1.2 million votes for Mr. Trump this year, according to the analysis of the 47 states where the vote count is largely complete.

The drop-off spanned demographics and economics. It was clear in counties with the highest job growth rates, counties with the most job losses and counties with the highest percentage of college-educated voters. Turnout was down, too, across groups that are traditionally strong for Democrats — including areas with large numbers of Black Christians and Jewish voters. The decline in key cities, including Detroit and Philadelphia, made it exceptionally difficult for Ms. Harris to win the battlegrounds of Michigan and Pennsylvania.

However, there is evidence that the Harris campaign’s turnout operation also made gains on Biden’s totals in some places:

To some degree, the data suggest that program worked; Ms. Harris won more voters than Mr. Biden in four of the six battleground states where the count is nearly complete. But that increase was swamped by Mr. Trump’s gains.

At Foreign Policy, Anusha Rathi notes how U.S. turnout compares with other recent national elections around the world:

This year, Indonesia (82 percent) and Sri Lanka (79 percent) had some of the highest voter turnout globally. In Indonesia, which holds the largest single-day election in the world, restaurants handed out free food and coffee to voters amid heavy rain. In Sri Lanka, more than 13 million voters headed to the polls for the first time since the country spiraled into an economic crisis in 2022.

By contrast, the countries with some of the lowest voter turnout rates this year were Pakistan (48 percent) and Bangladesh (42 percent), where opposition leaders were either barred from running or boycotted the election. The United Kingdom registered its lowest voter turnout in a general election since 2001, despite the Labour Party’s landslide victory. Similarly, South Africa’s voter turnout (59 percent) was the lowest in the country’s 30-year democratic history.

In my new post, I compare and contrast Trump’s 2024 victory with Reagan’s 1980 landslide:

Different as it was in how it developed and unfolded, the scary thing about the 1980 precedent for Democrats is that Reagan’s singular win over a damaged incumbent turned out to represent a genuine policy revolution. The new administration unearthed an obscure device called “budget reconciliation” that enabled it in early 1981 to package a vast array of legislation into one huge bill that passed on up-or-down votes (it immediately repeated the trick with tax-cut proposals). Assuming Republicans, as expected, hang onto control of the House, this same device will be available to Team Trump in 2025 to enact whatever policy changes he can’t impose via his expanded willingness to rule by executive order. …

But assuming 2024 will be another 1980 seems misguided. After the end of a global pandemic and the first real national experience with significant price inflation since the days of Jimmy Carter, Donald Trump won the national popular vote by around 2 percent (it’s 3 percent now, but is being steadily eroded by the millions of ballots still being counted in California and other western states). He will win 312 electoral votes, pretty much the same as the 306 he won in 2016 and Joe Biden won in 2020. The GOP Senate conquest was mostly the product of an insanely tilted landscape that all but guaranteed a flip; Democrats won several close Senate races (they won no close Senate races in 1980). And Republican House control, if that’s the final outcome, is mostly a continuation of the status quo. The stars have aligned for a Republican trifecta, but it’s not the sort of top-to-bottom landslide that 1980 turned out to be.

Nor is it clear any sort of long-term pro-GOP political alignment is in the works. Trump’s famous 2024 gains among Black and Latino voters are surprising, if only because of his long history of racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric. But Black and Latino defections from the Democratic Party are not anything like the wholesale abandonments the party suffered in the 1980s (continuing into the 1990s and even into the new century) among white southerners and midwestern Catholic “ethnics.”

Read the rest here.

Gabriel Debenedetti reports that “the biggest difference between now and 2016 is the lack of clarity, or even initial ideas, about whom the party can or should turn to for leadership and a vision”:

So who, exactly, rises to shape the debate this time? Much of the answer will likely be determined organically, in local and state-level races and in battles on the Hill and in statehouses, rather than in donor-organized conference rooms like the ones that filled up in the wake of Clinton’s loss. New faces will emerge in Washington, and Democrats will look to the states for examples of governance and campaigns that appeal to diverse majorities. (Colorado, a rare bright spot for Democrats this week under the leadership of Governor Jared Polis, is already getting a fresh look from some who think his economic messaging may hold lessons for the rest of the party, as his COVID policies did.)

And though it’s tempting to read the vacuum as an opening for the next presidential race, 2028 is far too distant, and the future under Trump is far too uncertain, to treat as the same matter the party’s identity crisis and the campaign to be its next standard-bearer. The politicians already being mentioned as possible next presidential candidates — Gretchen Whitmer, Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cory Booker, J.B. Pritzker, and so on — may choose to offer their own diagnoses and ways for Democrats to win young men, say, or Latinos. In the hours after Trump’s win, each spoke out to reassure their followers they would keep up the good fight. But the question of who views the coming months as a grim opportunity to cut a distinct path ahead is a separate one from a campaign that’s still four years off, against an uncertain opponent, in an environment that’s impossible to predict.

Read the rest here.

In a Guardian column the day after the election that echoed many op-eds published the day after the 2016 election, Robert Reich called for the Resistance to rise again:

Countless people are now endangered on a scale and intensity almost unheard of in modern America. Our first responsibility is to protect all those who are in harm’s way. …

How will we conduct this resistance?

By organizing our communities. By fighting through the courts. By arguing our cause through the media. We will ask other Americans to join us – left and right, progressive and conservative, white people and people of color. It will be the largest and most powerful resistance since the American revolution.

Meanwhile, Trump allies like Senator Marco Rubio, pointing to Trump’s popular vote victory, are arguing that resisting or obstructing Trump would be thwarting the democratic will of a majority of Americans.

Speaking with Politico, longtime Democratic strategist Donna Brazile noted a key difference between now and 2016: ‘With Hillary’s defeat, we said, the majority of us voted against that, and we felt like we could resist. [This election,] the American people rejected normalcy, decency, morality and they chose Trump. Let’s sit with that.”

Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr. addressed the mandate argument in his own call for a second resistance against Trump and his agenda, and emphasized how the Democratic leaders might not be as reliable an ally this time around, if they ultimately conclude that they need to be more amenable to Trump voters’ concerns:

I expect Trump and his team to try to implement their policy agenda, even the most controversial parts. The president has surrounded himself with conservative true believers. And the president-elect has a decent case that Americans want a full-throated Trumpism. Voters knew who and what they were voting for and still chose to give Trump four more years in the Oval Office.

I worry that Trump and his team won’t be alone in interpreting his second victory as a mandate from the public. Mainstream news outlets, business leaders and other parts of civil society who were very critical of Trump during his first term may now feel that he is a mainstream figure whose leadership they should generally accept. So the “resistance” to Trump may not be as broad as it was during his first term. …

Trump won the election. But that doesn’t mean his ideas are fair, moral, just or right. Americans who disagree with him should work as hard as possible to make sure his policies and views don’t become law. So we should resist — again. Journalists, activists, nonprofits, left-leaning officials and everyday Americans need to go back to their posture of 2017 to 2020, carefully tracking every action of the president and his administration and being ready to aggressively contest it.

Blue state leaders, including governors and attorneys general in California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Massachusetts are reportedly working to to Trump-proof their states ahead of Inauguration Day.

As for the various organizations that tried to fight Trump the last time, the Washington Post reports that Resistance 1.0 leaders are already trying to get the band back together, and they acknowledge that Trump fatigue and feelings of hopelessness may pose a problem:

The unofficial coalition of left-wing groups, which came to be known as “the resistance,” is made up of hundreds of activist organizations large and small. Their leaders say they’ve been planning for this possibility, and they are already reactivating the infrastructure they built up during the Republican’s first term. But when so many knew a Trump win was possible this time, the result lacked the element of surprise that jolted so many into opposition after his defeat of Hillary Clinton. Instead, resistance leaders must contend with a swirl of other feelings: Exhaustion, dejection, burnout.

Some Harris supporters, fresh off a whirlwind campaign, are tired of mobilizing; others are aghast that so many fellow citizens would support a candidate they felt so deeply threatened democracy; and many simply suffer a modern malady: Trump fatigue. Responding to that sentiment, the leaders are encouraging people to take a break, check in on one another and commiserate locally. Their early message to those like [Women’s March organizer Teresa] Shook is, “When you’re ready, we’ll be here.”

“Take some time to mourn and get with your community and we’ll have a strategic plan for what to do next,” said Ezra Levin, one of the co-founders of Indivisible, a group that began in late 2016 with a crowdsourced guide to countering Trump’s agenda. “We lost this year — that sucks, that’s terrible. It does not mean democracy is lost. It doesn’t mean it’s over. I’m not ready to throw in the towel yet.”

NBC News also checked in on how the original Resistance coalition was reacting to Trump’s reelection:

[I]n the days following this election, the anti-Trump movement seemed notably quieter online than it did in 2016, with some describing the resistance as “tired” or “dormant.”

On a Thursday-evening video call led by left-leaning groups MoveOn, Indivisible, the Working Families Party and others, leaders told their communities that it was OK to take a beat before fighting onward. “The one feeling we cannot allow ourselves to sit in is hopelessness,” MoveOn Executive Director Rahna Epting told the 130,000 viewers gathered on the call.

“I know for some folks on the call, maybe that’s a tall order right now, to ask you to keep hope alive,” she added. “But hope is the fuel we need, hope that there’s still more people that believe in love and peace over hate and divisiveness.”

Epting told NBC News that she’s hopeful about the future of the movement, pointing to the thousands of people who joined the call and other metrics, like the fact that over 8,000 attendees on Thursday expressed interest in hosting their own community gatherings in the following weeks.

In a New York Times op-ed, history professor Timothy Shenk argues that the Resistance has “run into a dead end” and that opposition organizers and Democrats may need to try something new:

Reflecting on Hitler’s rise in her native Germany, Hannah Arendt pointed out that by the final days of the Weimar Republic, politics had split into two irreconcilable factions: “those who wanted the status quo at any price” versus “those who wanted change at any price.” One thing both groups had in common, she added, was “the tacit assumption that the electorate would go to the polls because it was frightened.”

Awkward coalitions across left and right have their place during emergencies, and there’s no politics without some fearmongering. But the methods Democrats counted on to keep Mr. Trump out of the White House came up short, and the excuses have lost touch with electoral reality. He was impeached, indicted and convicted, and then he won more votes in a fair fight with what could well be the most racially diverse Republican coalition in decades. Trumpism doesn’t have a generational lock on American politics, but it has broad and deep support, with the potential to grow in the years to come.

Democrats brought this battle on themselves, and they lost it. The Resistance has run into a dead end. That doesn’t mean ignoring the ideological overreach, bureaucratic incompetence and flagrant corruption that is guaranteed to pile up in Mr. Trump’s Washington. But it does mean giving up on the hope that laws, norms or one last impeachment will deliver us from Trumpism. It’s going to take a sprawling, messy and sometimes brutal debate inside the Democratic coalition — a debate that ends with a party that can plausibly present itself as a champion of ordinary people trying to make a better life in a broken system. That’s not Resistance. It’s democracy.

Washington Post columnist Heather Long notes that Trump’s “gains reversed an urban shift toward Democrats that had seemed locked in since the Obama years”:

[S]aid John Lettieri, president of the Economic Innovation Group, “The places that shifted the hardest to Trump were the largest, most expensive places.” Lettieri’s team was early to identify how, during the pandemic, people with young children left cities in a “family flight” for larger homes with yards in the suburbs, where their money went further. In this election, the city-dwellers who stayed behind voiced their frustration at the ballot box.

The pandemic hurt high-cost urban areas in other ways, too. Long lockdown periods made it especially difficult to bounce back. Some cities experienced crime spikes. And although violent crime has fallen back to pre-pandemic levels in most places, unease persists. This has influenced mayoral elections, too. San Francisco just elected a new mayor, and North Miami’s mayoral race is going to a runoff.

Urban areas with large non-White populations seem to have felt the most frustration. Much has been written about how Hispanic men were drawn to Trump in this election. But in cities, there’s more to it than that. The data suggests that urban, non-White, working-class people have been turning away from Democrats and increasingly voting Republican for the past few election cycles.

Politico spoke with a number of Democratic lawmakers and strategists for their thoughts on what went wrong and what to do next. Here are two responses that stood out about how the party can better appeal to working class voters:

“If we talk to people like we’re trying to win a Harvard Law Moot Court competition, we could have the best ideas in the world and it doesn’t resonate,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.).

Swalwell specifically pointed to the down-to-earth approach Rep. Ruben Gallego took to campaigning for the Senate in Arizona, by attending boxing fights, stock car matches and rodeos. “Not just, like, as a campaign stunt,” he added. “He stayed and integrated himself into the rodeo culture.”

Democrats are so distraught that they are looking for answers in unusual places. In Nebraska, independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn lost, but performed better than Harris by 14 percentage points. The mechanic’s TV ads blasted “millionaires run by billionaires” and talked positively about Trump’s border wall. Tommy McDonald, a strategist for Osborn and Democratic Sen. John Fetterman’s 2022 campaign, said one lesson is Democrats should field more candidates who are themselves workers. “A party based on championing and identifying with the working class can run and win everywhere,” he said. “A party based on championing and identifying with subgroups cannot win everywhere, and even does worse with the subgroups they rightfully champion.”

In a New York Times op-ed, What’s the Matter With Kansas? author Thomas Frank argues that by making itself a party of elites, Democrats had it all coming:

Liberals had nine years to decipher Mr. Trump’s appeal — and they failed. The Democrats are a party of college graduates, as the whole world understands by now, of Ph.D.s and genius-grant winners and the best consultants money can buy. Mr. Trump is a con man straight out of Mark Twain; he will say anything, promise anything, do nothing. But his movement baffled the party of education and innovation. Their most brilliant minds couldn’t figure him out.

I have been writing about these things for 20 years, and I have begun to doubt that any combination of financial disaster or electoral chastisement will ever turn on the lightbulb for the liberals. I fear that ’90s-style centrism will march on, by a sociological force of its own, until the parties have entirely switched their social positions and the world is given over to Trumpism.

Can anything reverse it? Only a resolute determination by the Democratic Party to rededicate itself to the majoritarian vision of old: a Great Society of broad, inclusive prosperity. This means universal health care and a higher minimum wage. It means robust financial regulation and antitrust enforcement. It means unions and a welfare state and higher taxes on billionaires, even the cool ones. It means, above all, liberalism as a social movement, as a coming-together of ordinary people — not a series of top-down reforms by well-meaning professionals.

The latest estimated vote totals and percentages from Nate Silver:

• Harris 76.2m votes (48.4%)

• Trump 78.5m votes (49.9%)

• other 2.6m votes (1.5%)

CNN’s Zachary B. Wolf puts the results in context:

The final 2024 popular vote tally likely won’t be known until December. When he lost convincingly in 2020, Trump got a little more than 74 million votes. So while it’s true that much of the country moved to the right in this election, it’s also true that there was some voter apathy if, at the end of the day, turnout is down from 2020. …

In terms of the Electoral College, Trump won 312 electoral votes. It’s a solid win, but in the lower half of US presidential elections. It was a better showing than either his or Joe Biden’s 306 electoral votes in 2016 and 2020, respectively. It also outperformed both of George W. Bush’s electoral victories in 2000 and 2004. But it was far short of Barack Obama’s 365 electoral votes in 2008 and 332 in 2012. Bill Clinton never reached 50% in the popular vote because both of his presidential elections featured a strong third-party candidate in Ross Perot. But Clinton did run away with the Electoral College vote, winning 370 electoral votes in 1992 and 379 in 1996.

There is a rising tide of criticism directed at Democrats, including from within the party, suggesting they were done in by their bad attitudes toward Trump and the voters who just reelected him. But as I note in my new post, while it’s important for Democrats to fully examine everything that went wrong, their policies remain the most likely culprit:

During the two years (2021-2022) when Democrats held a governing trifecta and could pretty much do as they pleased they pursued policies that contributed to excessive inflation and to an explosion in cross-border migrations, and on November 5 they paid the price for that. On the inflation front, yes, I understand, supply-chain disruptions had a lot to do with suddenly rising prices, and yes, I get it, Democratic policymakers were trying to head off a possible recession. But by enacting two big packages of new federal spending (the first being focused on boosting consumer spending rapidly) on strict party-line votes, Democrats inevitably owned the high inflation rates that ensued which to this day are regarded bitterly by low-to-middle income people, including young people starting off careers and families. I’m not enough of an insider to know the extent to which people in the Biden administration or the Congress knowingly courted this economic and political danger. But I do know it happened after a period of liberal elite fascination with “modern monetary theory,” which holds inflation fears associated with reckless fiscal policy as mostly misguided. And it also happened at a time when most of the people running the government never knew or no longer remembered the political consequences of high inflation in the 1970s (or more recently in other countries). They should have known better or been more careful, and Kamala Harris and countless other Democratic candidates in 2024 paid the price for that mistake.

There’s also no question that Democrats courted disaster with relaxed border policies (not to mention massively underfunded law enforcement policies) at the precise moment when conditions in Central and South America produced an unprecedented surge of asylum-seekers. In doing so, did they harbor malice towards U.S. citizens, native or naturalized, or seek to deploy them as illegal voters, as the Trump campaigned alleged with zero evidence? No, of course not. But they waited to reverse border policies until as Trump had warned migrants became a visible presence and a political controversy all over the country. And so very burned was Kamala Harris that she tried to ignore immigration policy entirely and lost the opportunity to score points over the economic and humanitarian disaster of mass deportation that Trump was promising.

Read the rest here.

I spoke with the Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter to get her thoughts on what just happened. She cited, as others have, widespread economic malaise and the fact that every recent presidential election except 2012 has been a change election. I noted that Americans can be fickle, and she responded:

We want what we want. But because we’re so polarized, you come in as the winning party knowing that a good 47, 48 percent of the electorate is never going to give you credit for anything. You could solve cancer, you could do the most amazing things, and that other party will find a way to say, “Yeah, but they’re still terrible.” That makes it really hard, too.

I think the other thing to appreciate is, for those of us who live our lives thinking about politics, the people who decide elections are the people who live their lives not thinking about politics. And they are basing their decision on what their day-to-day lives look like. That was always the challenge for Harris and why you saw her and her campaign and the outside groups spend so much time talking about the economy: “I’m going to lower prices, I’m going to take on the pharmaceuticals, I’m going to take on the price gougers.” I think a lot of voters said, “Okay, that’s cool and everything, but aren’t you the party in power right now? Shouldn’t you have already done that?”

Read the rest of her thoughts here.

At Slate, Jim Newell writes that Democrats learned the wrong lessons from the 2022 midterms and it cost them dearly, but cautions against broad proclamations that the party has suffered some fatal blow:

Democrats will spend the next years figuring out what went wrong and how to rebuild. We all eagerly await this tedious process. Want to know a little secret, though? They probably won’t change much, and they may get away with it. Trump will make a mess of himself once he’s back in office, and the (probably) unified Republican Congress will spend capital on slashing Medicaid and cutting taxes for rich people, setting Democrats up for improvement in the midterms. Democrats will have an open primary with star governors in 2028, and Republicans will nominate someone who won’t have that special something Trump has in activating new voters. Since I started covering politics in 2007, I’ve seen the Republican Party declared dead (2008), the Republican Party declared dead (2016, after nominating Trump), the Democratic Party declared dead (2016, after Trump won), the Republican Party declared dead (2020), and now the Democratic Party declared dead (2024). Maybe this one will last. Probably not.

At Semafor, Benjy Sarlin notes that the election results also indicated that in many places, Trump got more support than his party-mates did:

Contrary to popular assumptions, Trump proved uniquely popular with some voters, thanks in part to his perceived economic success in the White House, and tended to outrun others in his party. In the last nine years, no Republican has quite replicated Trump’s power in battleground races — and those who try the most typically do worse than less MAGA alternatives. Predicting how a post-Trump nominee would fare (which right now looks like JD Vance) is very hard; they might not be able to draw out his voters, they might have greater upside with voters he’s repelled, and a ton of their appeal will depend on his record in office.

At Vox, our former Intelligencer colleague Eric Levitz argues (in a members-only post) that the Democratic Party has to make itself more appealing to more Americans, and particularly the right-shifting working class voters who will most likely continue to determine the winners of both presidential and Senate races:

[T]here is a theoretical basis for believing that the trends derive from deep-seated, structural changes in American life and will therefore be difficult to fully reverse.

Working-class voters have not only been drifting right in the United States for decades — they’ve also been doing so in virtually every Western nation. The reasons for this are complex, but they relate to the weakening of trade unions amid deindustrialization, and the tendency of highly educated people to hold unusually cosmopolitan values — an inclination that spurs social conflict when college graduates become numerous enough to dominate cultural production and center-left politics. And trade unions are not going to become drastically more powerful — nor educated professionals, less multitudinous — anytime soon.

Meanwhile, there’s long been reason to suspect that Hispanic and Black voters would grow less Democratic over time. For decades, Democrats have been relying on the votes of conservative nonwhites, whose support for the party derived less from ideological affinity than inherited allegiances.

He also points out that for all Trump’s political strengths, he was simultaneously a uniquely and broadly flawed candidate, and Democrats shouldn’t assume his GOP successor(s) will share the same liabilities:

If the GOP nominates a more ordinary Republican in 2028 — a near certainty, given Trump’s ineligibility for a third term — then Democrats could see their share of the college-educated vote fall, even as structural forces prevent a rebound in their Black and Hispanic support.

Vox members can read the rest of Eric’s (always insightful) thoughts here.

Like her Democratic predecessors, Kamala Harris was backed by a large number of celebrities, from Taylor Swift to Eminem to Beyoncé to Julia Roberts to Bad Bunny to Harrison Ford, and many served as high-profile surrogates for the Harris campaign.

But are celebrities doing more harm than good? Many on the right have been arguing that for decades, and particularly during the Trump era. And it’s certainly possible that was the case this time around. The New York Times reports:

Janice Min, the chief executive of Ankler Media and former president of The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard, said there wasn’t much question what effect Ms. Harris’s celebrity surrogates had on the race.

“They did not work,” she said Wednesday afternoon, adding an expletive[.] … On one hand, Ms. Min said, Ms. Harris spent the better part of the summer and the fall sending out the message that a second Trump presidency would involve him bending at the knee of his fellow billionaire businessmen. On the other, she’d been anointed as the Democratic nominee by party leaders without a proper primary process, after which she aligned herself with the types of surrogates who can ignite resentment because of how much more money they have than most of their fellow citizens — and during an election in which most voters cited the economy as a top concern.

The Hollywood Reporter’s James Hibbert adds:

[F]or all the Gen Z courtship and endorsements from celebrities with legions of young fans, vote tallies showed that Harris significantly lost ground among 18- to 29-year-olds compared to Biden.

All this seems to support a 2010 North Carolina State University study that showed young voters are not swayed by celebrity endorsements of political candidates, and sometimes even like the candidate less as a result of receiving a celebrity endorsement (they also often liked the celebrity less, as well). …

Of course, it’s impossible to know how well Harris might have performed if she hadn’t gotten — and embraced — all these endorsements. It’s always possible they were still a net positive for her campaign despite losing the race by a fair margin.

But in retrospect — and it’s always easy to say such things in retrospect — Trump’s viral stunt “working” at a McDonald’s (which showed him warmly interacting with customers) and sitting for a three-hour chat with podcast king Joe Rogan on Oct. 25 (where the former president came across as relatively normal — at least, by his standards), might have been far more effective than having Hollywood stars onstage and in ads — particularly when trying to court voters in the critical Rust Belt “blue wall” states who might not necessarily associate Hollywood values with their own.

The showman’s show goes on, Megan Garber laments at the Atlantic:

Trump has used his remarkable fame—its insulating power—to argue that he is not a politician, even as he has become an über-politician. Each of his might-have-been endings, as a result, has served for him as a new beginning. Each has been an opportunity for him to reset and begin the narrative anew, to double down on his threats and hatreds. The effect of attempting to hold Trump accountable, whether in the courts or in the arena of public opinion, has been only to expand the reach of the spectacle—to make him ever more unavoidable, ever more inevitable.

“It’s probably not a good idea for just about all of our news to be focused on a single subject for that long,” Manjoo wrote in 2017. He was absolutely correct. But he could not foresee what Trump had in store. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the old Breitbart saying goes. But Trump’s reelection is one more piece of evidence that politics and culture mingle, now, in the same murky water. Both seethe in the same dark sea. Trump once again has carte blanche to impose his vision on the world. And his audience has little choice but to watch.

On his Substack, Josh Barro says he thinks Trump didn’t deserve to win, but Democrats deserved to lose:

The Democratic argument is, more or less, “look at all my programs” — all the things I’m going to have the government do to make life easier for you. In some cases, there is a clear track record to run on: the Affordable Care Act has gotten more popular over time, and the expanded subsidies that reduce the premiums most Americans pay to buy individual plans on the exchanges have increased enrollment. But mostly, I think Americans look around at how it goes when the government actually tries to help, and they have a healthy skepticism about how helpful the government is really going to be, and about whether the benefits are really going to flow to them. Democrats are making too many promises; they instead need to pick a few things for the government to do really well, with a focus on benefits to the broad public rather than to the people being paid to provide the services, instead of trying to do a zillion different things and doing them badly at great expense, as was the approach with the moribund Build Back Better Act.

As you know, I think Kamala Harris should have picked Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate. Having seen Tuesday’s results, I don’t think choosing him would have changed the outcome — he wouldn’t have gotten her two percentage points more in Michigan. But Shapiro is a popular swing-state governor — 57% approve / 23% disapprove, in a September New York Times/Siena poll — who will be a frontrunner for the 2028 nomination. And Shapiro’s signature policy achievement is rebuilding a highway underpass. There is a lesson here — when government focuses on its core responsibilities and delivers on them quickly, efficiently, and with a laser focus on making sure people can go about their lives as normal, the voters reward that. You don’t need a grand vision; you need to execute.

As the Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein notes in his election post-mortem, after pointing out how nine in ten U.S. counties shifted right:

A striking sign of that change was [Trump’s] dramatic improvement in big urban centers with large populations of Black and/or Latino voters, including the counties encompassing Philadelphia, Detroit, and Las Vegas. But Trump also improved (compared with 2020) in communities dominated by working-class white voters, such as Macomb in Michigan, Luzerne in Pennsylvania, and Kenosha and the small cities around Green Bay in Wisconsin. Harris maintained the Democratic hold on the prosperous, well-educated inner suburbs around major cities. But in most of them, her party’s margins declined relative to its 2020 results. She slipped just slightly in predominantly white-collar areas such as Montgomery and Delaware Counties outside Philadelphia, and Oakland outside Detroit, and failed to improve on Biden’s deficit in Waukesha, around Milwaukee. The result was that in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Harris’s margins in these big suburbs were closer to Hillary Clinton’s in 2016 than Biden’s in 2020. That wasn’t enough to withstand what I’ve called the “pincer” move of Trump’s concurrent gains in the smaller, mostly white, blue-collar places and the much more diverse urban cores.

The geographic pattern of actual vote tallies for Trump captured the magnitude of the red shift more vividly than the two major surveys that try to measure voters’ behavior for media organizations: the exit polls conducted by Edison Research and the VoteCast survey done by NORC.

Politico has zoomed in on 14 places that explain how Trump won — including Bristol County in Massachusetts:

In presidential races, Massachusetts and Rhode Island provide some of the most reliably blue turf in the nation. But Bristol County, right on the border between the two states, is virtually dead even at the moment — Harris leads Trump by less than a percentage point. Four years ago, Biden easily won there, 55-42.

What’s unusual here is that it’s been decades since any of Massachusetts’ 14 counties have voted for a Republican presidential candidate. Key to Trump’s enhanced performance in the cluster of towns and cities that make up Bristol County are New Bedford and Fall River. New Bedford, where Trump’s support spiked this year, offers a glimpse into Trump’s non-traditional coalition — the city is roughly a quarter Latino, with a relatively sizable Puerto Rican population and a higher-than-average percentage of foreign born persons. In addition, Trump flipped the city of Fall River, which like New Bedford has a relatively low percentage of residents with college degrees and a relatively high percentage of foreign-born people.

Elie Honig writes that all of the criminal cases against Trump are now “effectively over” — including the ones in New York and Georgia:

[W]e face a vexing constitutional question: Can a state prosecution proceed against a sitting president? Once again, watch for intellectually stimulating legal arguments by brilliant scholarly minds. But I’ll end the suspense: There’s no way. If state-level authorities in New York try to imprison the sitting president, or if Georgia courts attempt to put him on trial, the federal courts will block it under the Supremacy Clause, or the lesser-known You-Must-Be-Kidding-Me Clause. Our executive branch simply cannot function and cannot enforce the law of the land effectively with the commander-in-chief tied up in court or behind bars — on state charges, no less.

Theoretically, both state cases could be put on hold until Trump’s term ends in January 2029 and resumed then. But Trump would have an argument that such a delay would impair his right to a speedy trial (even if the delay is due to Trump’s own status as president). And again, we need to consider the practicalities. Will we really see state-level DAs (whoever they may be four years from now) attempt to imprison an 82-year-old, two-term former president for conduct that happened 13 years prior (as in the hush-money case)?

Read the rest here.

John Herrman responds to the not-at-all surprising wave of tech leaders congratulating Trump, and emphasizes how important showing loyalty to the president will now be for them:

Letting the incoming administration know that you’re looking forward to working with it is pragmatic and standard behavior for a major tech executive. However, the circumstances under which they’re doing so in 2024 are unusual. The broad outline of Trump’s economic agenda suggests a hard swerve into privatization; in recent years, tech companies with roots in social media, retail, and search have been pushing hard into government contracting — including military contracting — in order to sustain growth. Tech companies and their leaders were uneasy administration antagonists during Trump’s first presidency, never quite figuring out how to balance employee and public backlash with pressure from the president and his allies. They really did think, after 2020, that they were done with him and he was done with them. Now, having signaled their interest in working with the government and the military, particularly with big potential AI contracts on the line as well as a corresponding intolerance of staff and members of the public who may think they shouldn’t, they’re clearly hoping for a different role this time.

A tech industry in which fate is more determined by expressions of political loyalty and patronage is an industry in which the range of possible outcomes for major firms is fundamentally altered: At one end, tentatively represented by Musk, you have oligarchal opportunity; at the other, you have arbitrary retribution and punishment. The latter is a fate that Bezos — who in 2019 saw Trump allegedly sabotage a major federal contract with Amazon over his “personal dislike” of the then-CEO and whose Blue Origin now competes directly with Musk’s SpaceX for massive new contracts — surely wants to avoid. (Every tech giant is gunning for AI contracts, and many could need help building or accessing power infrastructure to support their efforts; Musk, with a possible role inside government, is also competing in this space.) This isn’t a dynamic that major tech leaders can easily opt out of. We can expect them to become thoroughly politicized in ways that are both within and uncomfortably beyond their control. This time around, we shouldn’t be shocked to see groveling, over-the-top praise, swift apologies, and other rituals of highly personal appeasement and debasement.

Read the rest here.

Now that Trump has won, it’s no longer a matter of if his ally Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his alternative and often extreme views about food, health, and medicines will hold sway in next presidential administration. At the Cut, E.J. Dickson has put together a comprehensive look at RFK Jr.’s various views and self-purported plans, what role he could have in the Trump administration, and what impact he could have. Here’s part of the section on vaccines:

Perhaps the most salient concern among public-health experts stems from Kennedy’s long-held views on childhood vaccines and whether they may influence parents to delay or opt out of vaccinations for their children. Although Kennedy has balked at being labeled an “anti-vaxxer,” he has spent the past few decades rallying against vaccine requirements and promoting the repeatedly debunked theory that the childhood MMR vaccine can cause autism. …

Pediatricians and public-health experts are terrified that vaccination rates could plummet even further with the Trump administration, which could lead to potentially fatal outbreaks of preventable diseases like measles. Such fears were stoked further when Trump indicated on Sunday that he seemed open to a full-stop “ban” on certain vaccines, telling NBC News he will “make a decision” about a prospective ban after consulting with Kennedy.

In an interview with NBC News on Wednesday, Kennedy clarified that he does not plan to “take away anybody’s vaccines,” saying he hopes to use whatever role he assumes in the Trump administration to spearhead more research on vaccine safety and efficacy. “If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away. People ought to have [a] choice, and that choice ought to be informed by the best information,” he said. It’s also worth noting that Trump does not have the authority to issue a vaccine “ban,” though he could theoretically pressure the FDA, which authorizes vaccines, to revoke approval or appoint federal judges who attempt to limit the power of agencies like the FDA, according to the New York Times. 

Read the rest here.

Institute for Islamic, Christian, & Jewish Studies scholar Matthew D. Taylor warns in an X thread that Trump’s reelection is also a major victory for Christian nationalists:

I expect — and I’d be thrilled to be wrong — we’ll see a surge in Christian nationalist and Christian supremacist rhetoric and identities around Trump in the coming weeks and months. Trump’s seemingly “miraculous” re-election on the heels of his “miraculous” survival of the assassination attempts will pour jet fuel on the already popular idea that Trump is ordained and anointed by God for office. Trump gestured toward this in his victory speech. Christians who choose to resist that theology will be castigated and alienated by many churches.

The Christian advisers and leaders who surround Trump (formally, his National Faith Advisory Board and a circle of informal evangelical advisers) have at least as extreme a vision as Project 2025, if not more. I’ve spent years studying them. They are effusive and resolute today. Over the past 10 years, charismatic (i.e. supernaturalist) Christian prophets have issued hundreds of positive prophecies about Trump, his divinely appointed destiny, endurance of persecution, etc. This means that Trump has taken on a quasi-messianic aura for many American Christians.

What makes this so dangerous is that, to his followers — the only segment of the American populace he cares about — Trump can make the case that he has not only a democratic mandate, but that he also has a divine mandate to enact his agenda.

There has been a lot of commentary and analysis in the aftermath of the election on what the Harris campaign could have done — or would have even been able to do — to change the outcome. That has included questions about the effectiveness of the campaign’s well-resourced and reportedly well-organized ground game in swing states; whether the Harris spent enough time campaigning in the right places; and of course, whether the campaign’s policy bets were the right ones, or communicated effectively. But there is already one convincing piece of evidence that, at least in the swing states, the Harris campaign made a significant difference:

At Bloomberg Opinion, Patricia Lopez writes that “Latinos were motivated by the same concerns that drove other voters in the new Trump coalition: an economy that has eroded working-class buying power and a flood of immigrants who were feared as competitors for jobs”:

Trump shrewdly played on those fears with his “Black jobs” riff, which he later expanded to include “Hispanic jobs.” His anti-immigrant rhetoric drew a bright line between Hispanics on the one hand and migrants on the other. “They’re going to be attacking — and they already are — Black population jobs, Hispanic population jobs, and they’re attacking union jobs too,” Trump said. “So, when you see the border, it’s not just the crime. Your jobs are being taken away, too.” Never mind data that shows the claim is untrue.

The pitch drew Latinos into a universe where many longed to be, included in the mainstream, and allowed them to participate in otherizing the new enemy — recent immigrants. Trump’s attacks also exploited tensions within the Latino population itself. Mexicans by far represent the largest and most well-established group of Latino Americans and occupy all rungs of society, from entrepreneurial billionaires on down. Puerto Ricans are American citizens by birth and some — though by no means all — resent being associated with those here illegally.

Trump gave permission for each group to look down on newer waves of immigrants that now arrive mostly from Central and South America and have proved as much a headache to Mexico as to the US.

In a prescient X thread on Tuesday night, Jack Herrera made a number of other important points, summing up his (excellent) election year reporting. He noted that Republican organizers paid more attention to low-turnout Latino communities:

Republicans [were] organized, funded, and ambitious in Latino neighborhoods this year, especially in South Texas, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Democrats, meanwhile, keep prioritizing the most likely voters, in whiter, college educated suburbs. In low-turnout communities, door knocking and in-person outreach makes a huge difference.

And he explained that Latinos’ perceptions of Trump didn’t outweigh their basic economic concerns as a group that is 80 percent working class:

I’ve spoken with pro-Trump Latinos who aren’t shy about calling out his racist comments. They don’t have rose-colored goggles for the man. Still, many tend to assume his xenophobia is directed at undocumented immigrants, not them personally. Polling still find that most Latinos consider Democrats the more welcoming party. Republicans get read as racist. But Latinos vote strategically — the economy ranks as their #1 issue; racism trails far behind. And some think Democrats are also racist.

There’s another dynamic this year. In the past, the taboo for voting for Trump was intense. After Trump’s surprising success in 2020, however, the social consequences for openly supporting him are less severe. Do not underestimate how powerful this interpersonal element is.

He says that Democrats are losing Latinos in part because they are choosing not to court them:

Latino dealignment is a symptom of broader class dealignment. My argument, however, is that this transformation comes from electoral strategy as much as ideological shift. Democrats *could* win; but they’re not trying as hard as the GOP to win working class voters.

Bloomberg Opinion’s Patricia Lopez also concluded that Democrats are going to have to take long hard look at how to appeal to this enormous and diverse group of voters:

Ronald Reagan used to joke that Latinos were Republicans, “they just don’t know it yet.” Democrats have long sought to make Latinos part of their coalition — fighting for Dreamers, a path to citizenship, and better wages and working conditions.

But they may have lost a step in recognizing that Latinos are no more a monolith than Black voters or any other identity group. The Latino red shift could be a fluke or a permanent realignment. But expect the priorities of this multi-faceted community to come into a much higher profile as the two parties battle over them.

Equis Research’s Stephanie Valencia and Carlos Odio, meanwhile, are pushing back on the idea that Latinos voters can be blamed for Trump’s victory, as his swing-state wins and the shift of the Latino vote are in fact two distinct stories:

The magnitude of the gains Trump made in places like New York, New Jersey, and Texas — states that don’t decide the presidential race - were surprising and point to deeper discontent and broader trends.

But the support Trump received among Latinos in the battleground states should not have been a surprise to anyone who was paying attention. Those shifts were present in polling throughout the cycle and since the early days of the Biden presidency. Harris ultimately had the support she needed with Latinos to win, if all else held according to plan. Yes, Trump did make big gains with Latinos, but those gains are not what decided his victory. What happened in this election is larger than Latinos - Trump’s win came from a broader erosion of support in key battleground states. Latinos in the battleground states are a critical part of winning but they do not alone determine the outcome.

They also argue that Trump “Trump should not misread any gains in Latino votes as support for his full agenda — in fact quite the opposite”:

The Latinos who did move to Trump were clear: they want him to bring down prices. They rejected Project 2025, and told us repeatedly in focus groups and polling that they didn’t believe he would do any of the things his opponents said he would, from banning abortion to repealing Obamacare to deporting long-term immigrants like Dreamers. They voted for Trump because they believed he would prioritize the economy over all else, just as they did in voting for him.

UCLA political psychologist Efrén Pérez adds that based on his research, Latinos and other people of color are simply becoming more polarized, just like everybody else already is:

What I think we’re seeing is polarization catching up to people of colr. We get two parties and two choices and all of the internal heterogeneity of various people of color must be channeled and expressed through these two (!) parties. Both parties currently “own” different identities. Eg, Democrats are the party of people of color while Republicans are the party of “real” Americans. Many people of color have clear identity priorities. Among Asian and Latino individuals, about 27 percent of them value their American identity over their racial identity.

Part of what is happening with party identity among these groups is that they are sorting into the “correct” party that they see reflecting how they view themselves.

At the Columbia Journalism Review, Kyle Paoletta sums up the coming storm for countless members of the media:

Since he entered politics, a decade ago, Donald Trump has castigated journalists for their skepticism and independence, calling the media “the enemy of the people,” a “threat to democracy,” “fake,” and “crooked bastards” whom he vows to prosecute. Now that he has secured a second term, he will be free to make good on his promises. Already, during his first term, the Department of Justice conducted surveillance of reporters and charged Julian Assange with espionage; regulators seemingly sought to block a merger of AT&T and TimeWarner as retribution for critical coverage by CNN; the White House arbitrarily denied access to veteran journalists. All of that fostered an environment of media suppression, leading to more than six hundred physical attacks on journalists nationwide in 2020 alone. Trump has welcomed the violence. “To get to me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news,” he told a crowd in Pennsylvania this week. “I don’t mind that so much.”

Next year, Trump’s assault on the press will become a fusillade of discrete attempts to quash whatever reporting he views as antagonistic. Access to the West Wing will be limited, perhaps by aides only credentialing journalists from conservative outlets—or even closing the White House briefing room outright. More consequential are the plans of Trump and his allies to turn the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission against the media, which will entail a raft of leak investigations, the politicization of broadcast licenses and antitrust litigation, and the potential indictment of journalists for espionage. Reporters covering protests and immigration enforcement will face detention from not just local police, but the Department of Homeland Security. It’s possible that Trump may even seek congressional action to reform libel laws or otherwise criminalize dissent. 

At the Atlantic, Derek Thompson writes that another way to conceive of the election is as the second COVID election:

Trump’s victory is a reverberation of trends set in motion in 2020. In politics, as in nature, the largest tsunami generated by an earthquake is often not the first wave but the next one.

The pandemic was a health emergency, followed by an economic emergency. Both trends were global. But only the former was widely seen as international and directly caused by the pandemic. Although Americans understood that millions of people were dying in Europe and Asia and South America, they did not have an equally clear sense that supply-chain disruptions, combined with an increase in spending, sent prices surging around the world. As I reported earlier this year, inflation at its peak exceeded 6 percent in France, 7 percent in Canada, 8 percent in Germany, 9 percent in the United Kingdom, 10 percent in Italy, and 20 percent in Argentina, Turkey, and Ethiopia.

Inflation proved as contagious as a coronavirus. Many voters didn’t directly blame their leaders for a biological nemesis that seemed like an act of god, but they did blame their leaders for an economic nemesis that seemed all too human in its origin. And the global rise in prices has created a nightmare for incumbent parties around the world.

The Guardian’s Rebecca Solnit argues that “a democracy requires an informed citizenry, and the US media over the past eight years in particular created an increasingly misinformed citizenry”:

When people are more concerned that a trans girl might play on a softball team than that the climate crisis might profoundly devastate the biosphere and much of life on it, human and otherwise, for the next 10,000 years, the media has failed. When people worry about crime when it is low, an economy when it is thriving and immigrants when they do much of the hard work that sustains that economy and commit fewer crimes than the native-born, the media has failed.

When it came to Donald Trump, they went easy on him, and they again and again let him and the far right set the agenda. They constantly treated asymmetrical issues as symmetrical ones – if the Democrats resisted Republican outrages, both sides were “polarized”. In the media everything had two sides, even if one side was the truth and the other was the lie, one side was the human rights or the law and the other side was their violation.

They went soft on Trump’s criminality and incompetence, and his sheer volume of scandals meant that the past ones were forgotten as the next one erupted.

At the Free Press (subscriber-only), Matt Continetti writes that Trump has now remade the GOP into a populist powerhouse and delivered a “decisive shift toward the Trump Republicans across the country”:

For all the discussion of Trump as an authoritarian, the Make America Great Again movement is not imposed from above but driven from below. The Republican Party has changed in a more populist and nationalist direction because the typical Republican voter has changed. The college-educated, prosperous suburban voters who were once the foundation of the GOP have drifted over to the Democrats. In 2016, Trump compensated for these losses by attracting supermajorities of white voters without college degrees as well as disaffected independents who hadn’t participated in elections for some time. This year, Trump expanded his coalition by drawing in young, Hispanic, and black male voters as well. The former Republican establishment melted away. A friend observes that just one of the seven living GOP presidents, vice presidents, and presidential and vice-presidential nominees supported Trump in 2024. That person was Sarah Palin, Trump’s populist harbinger. The former outcast now belongs to a new Republican leadership class that is closer to the grassroots.

He argues that “Trump’s disregard for conventional wisdom and established practice allowed him to modify unpopular Republican policy positions in ways that appeal to the new GOP electorate,” and that includes new Trump-imposed positions on tariffs, immigration, and foreign policy. But Continetti also wonders how long it can last:

Presidents often misread their electoral mandates. If there is a danger for Trump in the months ahead, it would be that he interprets his decisive victory as an unqualified endorsement of his personality and program. He and his party have an opportunity to ease widespread dissatisfaction by delivering a tight labor market with low inflation, a secure border, and international peace. Going beyond these imposing tasks would put Trump’s political position at risk—and threaten the future of the growing, diverse, proud, and ambitious party he’s built.

In a new post, our own Jonathan Chait warns against buying into the idea that Trump, with his slim popular-vote victory, has won some mandate to do whatever he wants, and everyone should just get out of the way:

In his victory speech, Trump did call for putting the divisions of the past behind us. He is capable of magnanimity when his power is unchallenged. Those fleeting gestures should not be mistaken for a temperament that is compatible with democratic politics. He craves dominance and regards all opposition as illegitimate and, in most cases, criminal. His supporters are already salivating at the prospect of pursuing charges against a litany of Trump critics. Here, to take one example, is John David Danielson in The Federalist calling for Trump to sic the Justice Department on Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, Christopher Wray, and “everyone else at Biden’s DOJ who was involved in these lawfare cases against Trump”:

“Democrats cannot only fall back on opposition to Trump. They must seriously reexamine the failures of the Biden presidency and the pathologically self-defeating habits of the progressive movement infrastructure.”

But Democrats should not psych themselves out in advance by accepting the notion that Trump somehow represents the Real America, or that the public will only reward them for cooperating with his litany of crackpot schemes and payoffs. It is both the nature of human life in general and democracy in particular that sometimes bad guys win. Winning does not make them cease to be bad.

Read the rest here.

At Politico Magazine, Ankush Khardori points fingers at Mitch McConnell, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority — and Merrick Garland:

It is now clearer than ever that Garland was a highly questionable choice to serve as attorney general from the start. From the outset of the Biden presidency, it was readily apparent that Garland had little desire to investigate and potentially prosecute Trump. …

[T]he warning signs for where this could all end up — where the country finds itself now — were clear by late 2021, less than a year into Biden’s term. The public reporting at the time indicated (correctly, we now know) that there was no real Justice Department investigation into Trump and his inner circle at that point, even though the outlines of a criminal case against Trump — including some of the charges themselves that were eventually brought nearly two years later — were already apparent.

As a result, the Biden administration and the Garland Justice Department were running an extremely obvious risk — namely, that Trump would run for reelection and win, and that any meaningful criminal accountability for his misconduct after 2020 would literally become impossible. That, of course, has now happened. It was all eminently predictable.

At FT, John Burns Murdoch highlights, as others have, that all year across the developed world, governing parties have been punished by voters amid a historic, unprecedented global wave of anti-incumbency. And there’s a limit to how much those governments could have expected voters to understand what was and was not their fault: “Ultimately voters don’t distinguish between unpleasant things that their leaders and governments have direct control over, and those that are international phenomena resulting from supply-side disruptions caused by a global pandemic or the warmongering of an ageing autocrat halfway across the world.” And he notes that inflation may not be the only culprit, at that global macro level:

That different politicians, different parties, different policies and different rhetoric deployed in different countries have all met similar fortunes suggests that a large part of Tuesday’s American result was locked in regardless of the messenger or the message. The wide variety of places and people who swung towards Trump also suggests an outcome that was more inevitable than contingent.

But it’s not just about inflation. An update of economist Arthur Okun’s “misery index” — the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates — for this era might swap out joblessness and replace it with immigration. On this basis, the past couple of years in the US, UK and dozens of other countries have been characterised by more economic and societal upheaval than they have seen in generations.

Writes Bill Scher at Washington Monthly:

Despite the bravado, Trump is no economic mastermind. If he follows through on his across-the-board tariff plan, he may jack up prices high enough to cause a major political backlash, which happened to his beloved William McKinley. An immigration crackdown or mass deportation can also disrupt the labor market, causing negative economic consequences. Considering that Trump can never run for president again, doesn’t care about anyone but himself, doesn’t have to worry about the future of the Republican Party, and rarely listens to sane advice, I see the chances of Trump implementing self-indulgent, economically foolish policies to be high, especially with a cowed GOP-controlled Senate and, possible, a GOP House, to boot.

For Democrats, the time is now to correct the narrative and not wait for when Trump screws up. Democrats can and should tell the true story of the Biden-Harris economic record, how they cleaned up Trump’s mess and handed him back a humming economy—just as Barack Obama cleaned up George W. Bush’s mess and handed it to Trump in the first place. They should start now and repeat it often to help regain lost credibility. …

Let the campaign begin by making it clear that Trump 2.0 is being handed a powerful economy courtesy of the Biden-Harris administration and that when it goes south, it’s the Republicans’ fault.

At the New York Times, Ezra Klein writes that Democrats should see Trump’s victory as an opportunity to remake themselves, and should keep an open mind as to what that might entail:

Emotionally, there are two ways Democrats can respond: contempt or curiosity. I’ve seen plenty of contempt already. If Americans are still willing to vote for Trump, given all he’s said and done, then there’s nothing Democrats or Harris could have done to dissuade them. There’ll be a desire to retreat, to hunker down, to draw the boundaries of who is decent and who is deplorable ever more clearly. But Trump sharply improved his margin in New York City. These are voters angry about prices, about immigration, about a sense of disorder and failure. Trump seems to have made huge gains among voters making less than $50,000 a year. The Democratic Party is losing voters who lie at the core of its conception of itself.

Democrats have to go places they have not been going and take seriously opinions they have not been taking seriously. And I’m talking about not just a woke-unwoke divide, though I do think a lot of Democrats have alienated themselves from the culture that many people, and particularly many men, now consume. I think they lost people like Rogan by rejecting them, and it was a terrible mistake. But I’m also talking about day-to-day Democratic governance. When voters are this unhappy with the way you’ve wielded power, you have to want to know why. That work has begun in the Democratic Party — you saw it in the Biden administration’s eventual pivot to border enforcement — but it was clearly too little and too late. …

Trump is surrounded now by people who are more relentlessly focused on carrying out his will and their own. Republicans have the Senate and the Supreme Court and may well win the House. That is a huge amount of power for a man not known for wielding power carefully or responsibly. Maybe JD Vance and Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. bring judiciousness. I think it is as or more likely that they egg Trump into ideological overreach. And my God, the corruption we are about to see. So is this the beginning of the Trump realignment, or will this end with Trump’s name and reputation as tattered as that of the Bush dynasty he destroyed?

I don’t pretend to know. But Democrats need to admit that they are at the end of their own cycle of politics. The Obama coalition is over. It is defeated and exhausted. What comes next needs to be new. That means going to new places and being open to new voices. A politics right for the next era will not be a politics designed to win the last election. It’s not going to be predictable, from where we stand right now, just as Obama’s 2008 victory would have sounded laughable in 2004 and Donald Trump’s 2016 win violated everything Republicans believed after their 2012 defeat. Finding what is next, amid the pain of what is about to come, is going to require a lot of conflict and a lot of curiosity.

Read the rest here.

At the New Yorker, Susan Glasser writes that the country is now faced with a another Trump presidency which is far more less constrained and far more dangerous than the last:

[W]hat a leap of unthinking partisanship and collective amnesia it has taken for [the GOP] to embrace this twice-impeached, four-times-indicted, once-convicted con man from New York. Trump in 2024 was no regular G.O.P. candidate. He was an outlier in every possible way. In 2016, perhaps it was conceivable for voters upset with the status quo to see Trump, a celebrity businessman, as the outsider who would finally shake things up in Washington. But this is the post-2020 Trump—an older, angrier, more profane Trump, who demanded that his followers embrace his big lie about the last election and whose campaign will go down as one of the most racist, sexist, and xenophobic in modern history. His slogan is now openly the stuff of strongmen—Trump alone can fix it—and he will return to office unconstrained by the establishment Republicans who challenged him on Capitol Hill and from inside his own Cabinet. Many of those figures refused to endorse Trump, including his own Vice-President, Mike Pence. Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, the retired four-star marine general John Kelly, told the Times during the campaign that Trump met the literal definition of a “fascist,” and yet even that was not enough to deter the enablers and facilitators in the Republican Party who voted for Trump.

The new gang surrounding Trump will have few of Kelly’s qualms. He will make sure of that. One of the main lessons that Trump took from his Presidency was about the power of the staff surrounding him; his son-in-law Jared Kushner left the White House concluding that poor personnel decisions represented the biggest problem for their Administration. Soon after Trump left office, I interviewed a senior national-security official who spent extensive time with him in the Oval Office. The official warned me that a second Trump term would be far more dangerous than his first term, specifically because he had learned how better to get his way—he was, the official said, like the velociraptors in the first “Jurassic Park” movie, who proved capable of learning while hunting their prey. Already, one of Trump’s transition chairs, the billionaire Howard Lutnick, has said publicly that jobs in a new Administration will go only to those who pledge loyalty to Trump himself. Having beaten off impeachment twice, this second-term Trump will have little to fear from Congress reining him in, either, especially now that Republicans have managed to retake control of the Senate. And the Supreme Court, with its far-right majority solidified thanks to three Trump-appointed Justices, has recently granted the Presidency near-total immunity in a case brought by Trump seeking to quash the post-January 6th cases against him.

Good Authority’s John Sides, highlighting how Trump improved on his 2020 numbers in almost every county in the country, recommends looking for a broad explanation instead of falling for a narrow one:

Narrow explanations tell stories about individual states, counties, even cities. They tell stories about individual groups within the electorate – women, men, Latinos, young people, young men, single people, young single men, etc. The constant tweeting of county results on election night invites us to imagine a specific story about that place. What happened in Miami-Dade? Ooh, look at Queens! And even though people should know better, the constant tweeting of preliminary exit poll numbers invites us to imagine a specific story about each group.

But Donald Trump did better in all kinds of places – red states and blue states, rural places, cities, and so on. So the initial explanations we should seek have to be broader than just one place or one group.

The simplest story is one that Michael Tesler and I wrote about back in March. A spike in inflation dragged down Joe Biden’s approval rating, which never improved very much even as inflation receded. Public views of the economy remained less positive than other indicators – economic growth, employment – would predict.

In an X thread, FWD’s Andrea Flores argues that Biden and Democrats’ failed the border crisis in a number of ways, and it cost them:

Biden never developed a coherent policy framework on immigration and failed to maintain operational control of the border or develop a federal response to the arrival of migrants in U.S. cities for three years. Biden actually shifted to the right on immigration in year one, and maintained an asylum restriction that drove up border crossings until it finally ended in 2023. This delayed the admin from building out some of the improvements we’ve seen more recently.

But even when border numbers went down, the admin failed to address the consequences cities faced when they were forced to welcome and house tens of thousands of new arrivals who could not access work permits. There were so many opportunities for the admin to explain what was happening in countries like Venezuela and Ecuador, to help voters understand exactly why so many displaced people were arriving. Without context, the public could only conclude the increase was Biden’s fault.

She adds:

Immigrants will face some of the greatest human consequences of this election. While Democrats have a moral responsibility to protect them, they also have a responsibility to sell a better policy vision to American communities on the future of immigration reform.

On Wednesday’s The Daily, Astead W. Herndon argued that the Democrats ceded the mantle of change to Trump and the GOP well before Biden’s reelection campaign even began:

The Democratic refusal to see the unpopularity of Joe Biden. The dismissal of anyone who talked about a primary. The demanding of party loyalty. All of that looks ridiculous. And the national picture that shows a consistent desire for change, I think has to be read as, first and foremost, a rejection of the current administration. And there [were] a lot of signs that pointed to that for a long time.

And so in the same way I think there is an active embrace of Donald Trump you can’t ignore, I think you also have to point out that the strategy Democrats took, the self-belief they had, that they were certain of, has put them in this situation. …

Joe Biden’s refusal to do what he implied he would do in 2020 and transition to a different type of generation. Allow Democrats to have a broader conversation about change, allow Democrats to be freed from the status quo, is not what happened. I think it would be easier for me to say that Donald Trump completed this mass realignment among the working class if we had a universe where the Democrats had a primary, where the Democrats nominated a candidate that was based around some set of ideas, and it was not tied to this administration so clearly and the status quo. But since that is not what happened, I think it has made the Republican ability to be the agents of change so much easier, that I find it the biggest thing that has happened in this race.

At Politico Magazine, John F. Harris writes that Trump’s victory proves he “is not simply a celebrity candidate but the leader of a political movement”:

The distinction is important. Conventional politicians can see their careers wilt in a moment before controversies and setbacks. Movement leaders — rare figures in American history — draw their energy from deep wellsprings of cultural identity, grievance and aspiration. Like a hurricane over tropical waters, they actually grow stronger from controversies and setbacks.

He also wonders what happens to Trump and Trumpism now that his comeback is complete:

People are drawn to Trump and the contempt he expresses toward his opponents, especially liberal politicians and the news media, precisely because of the contempt he draws in return. This is the through line of his politics. The implications are stark. For a significant portion of his supporters, he didn’t win in 2016 in spite of his notorious remark to Access Hollywood about grabbing women by their private parts, or in 2024 in spite of his election denialism. He won in some measure because of these things — and the indignation they inspired.

Now, however, there is a new challenge for Trump. Much of his political energy comes from victimhood — the perception that he is valiantly fighting back against entrenched forces. How does that work now, in light of the reality that he has unambiguously bested those forces?

In her response to Harris’s loss, New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom explores the multifaceted ways that identity politics played a role in the election, overall, and in Harris’s failed candidacy, specifically — including how Harris strategically downplayed her race and gender in order appeal to the voters who ultimately rejected her anyway. McMillan Cottom also makes a point of linking Harris’s fate to the phenomenon of women, and particularly Black women, only getting opportunities for leadership roles under high risk circumstances in which they are unlikely to succeed:

When [Harris] became the Democratic nominee, it did not feel like a conquest. It felt like a Hail Mary.

The stink of our national desperation has haunted me since Harris accepted the nomination. It called to mind how Black women become firsts in other arenas. Research shows that women often inherit leadership roles when organizations are in crisis. That kind of risk exposure is especially acute for women of color. Desperate companies and nonprofits blow through their wunderkind leaders and turn to women, who often have fewer organizations competing for their talents. They can get them at a good deal — female C.E.O.s often make less than male C.E.O.s. And when the organizational fractures are too deep to be fixed or the female leaders are given too little authority or resources to fix them, they are blamed for the failures they inherited. …

Black women have saved democracy enough times to deserve more than cosmetic diversity. We deserve more than hope and change. We deserve recognition and power. Above all, we deserve better than a post at the head of a sinking ship that reveres the iceberg.

McMillan Cottom also remains hopeful that Harris’s candidacy paved a way for other Black women to succeed where she could not:

She proved the continuing importance of Black institutional life. The schools and churches and social groups that Black Americans cobbled together from the ashes of white violence and dispossession made her candidacy possible. Wealthy donors make you competitive. But a base makes you viable. Her competitiveness proved that Black culture can still make a powerful base.

Kamala Harris would not be the first Black female vice president were it not for Howard University, a historically Black college, and her affiliation with Alpha Kappa Alpha, a Black Greek-letter sorority. Even her political base in California’s Bay Area tapped into that area’s racial history — the Black migration that built racial enclaves that became microsites of political power.

Whether or not Harris’s campaign alters the political imagination for Black female electoral power, the institutions she has brought along with her just might.

Read the rest here.

At Bloomberg Opinion, Andreas Kluth writes about the uncertainty Trump’s re-election brings to global affairs, emphasizing how his foreign policy ideas are incoherent:

The person who has best captured the man’s worldview is John Bolton, a notorious hawk who did a stint as Trump’s national security adviser. The critical point is that Trump has “neither philosophy nor policies,” Bolton says. Trump’s decisions on national security are entirely transactional, he writes, spread on the map like “an archipelago of dots, unconnected by chords of logic, salience or results.”

The optimistic spin on Trump’s approach is that it’s a new and amped version of the “madman theory” that was once attributed to Richard Nixon (although Machiavelli long ago suggested that it can indeed be a “wise thing to simulate madness”). By that logic, America’s foes and friends alike will be docile out of sheer fear: What might this man do, with or without a nuclear button?

But the madman theory — never properly elaborated or tested — assumes a leader who has a compass and a mental map, and feigns occasional derangement tactically to navigate to his strategic destination. Trump has neither compass nor map. If his foreign policy seems incoherent bordering on mad, he may not be feigning. America could actually find itself adrift in his archipelago of dots, also called the world.

Daniel McCarthy, who edits the conservative journal Modern Age, has written two far-reaching responses to the election outcome. At the American Conservative he argues that Trump’s popular vote majority gives him and his movement a mandate that goes beyond politics:

That majority adds psychological force that makes the Trump revolution cultural as well as political. Before, it was easy for Trump’s critics to believe his 2016 victory was a fluke. They might have to deal with its consequences, including the impetus his election gave to a populist turn within the institutions of the conservative movement. But once Trump was out of office, those institutions would sooner or later revert to their former character. After all, populism didn’t have money behind it. If it didn’t have people, either, it wouldn’t be around for long. 

But now there’s a Trump majority. The Trump movement isn’t some rogue ideological faction or a personality cult only interested in its celebrity leader. Trump and Trumpism speak to, and for, America’s democratic majority. Every institution of American life, conservative or otherwise, has to adjust to that. 

McCarthy also writes in a New York Times op-ed that Trump’s victory is a act of “creative destruction” for the American political system:

Those who see in Mr. Trump a profound rejection of Washington’s present conventions are correct. He is like an atheist defying the teachings of a church: The challenge he presents lies not so much in what he does but in the fact that he calls into question the beliefs on which authority rests. Mr. Trump has shown that the nation’s political orthodoxies are bankrupt, and the leaders in all our institutions — private as well as public — who stake their claim to authority on their fealty to such orthodoxies are now vulnerable.

This may be exactly what voters want, and by allying herself with so many troubled and unpopular elites and institutions, Ms. Harris doomed herself. Do Americans think it’s healthy that generals who have overseen prolonged and ultimately disastrous wars are treated with such respect by Mr. Trump’s critics? A similar question could be asked about the officials in charge of the intelligence community.

Mr. Trump is no one’s idea of a policy wonk, but the role his voters want him to serve is arguably the opposite: that of an anti-wonk who demolishes Washington’s present notions of expertise. Mr. Trump’s victory is a punitive verdict on the authorities of all kinds who sought to stop him.

Stat’s Sarah Owermohle has assembled a comprehensive overview of the ways Trump’s re-election may have affect health care in the country. It’s worth reading in full, but here are few takeaways.

The impact on vaccines and public health could be profound — and what power Trump awards to RFK Jr. looms large:

Trump has pledged to form a presidential commission to probe the “stunning” rise in chronic illnesses, examining food policy, environmental factors, federal health care agencies, and possibly the pharmaceutical industry itself. 

While the president-elect has leaned heavily into the “Make America Healthy Again” call for public health reforms, he has previously avoided the idea — pushed by MAHA leaders such as RFK Jr. — that vaccines play a role in chronic disease. However campaign surrogates have signaled in recent weeks that a second administration is increasingly open to unproven theories about vaccine risks.

Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick told CNN days before the election that while RFK Jr. would not be tapped to lead the Health and Human Services Department, he could oversee efforts to whittle down the number of vaccines on the recommended schedule. Lutnick and others have also talked about reassessing liability protections for the pharmaceutical companies that develop the shots.

And here’s what the Trump team has said about changes to Obamacare:

GOP lawmakers and policy experts have floated a number of potential ways to reform the ACA and signaled an appetite for major overhauls. Many Republicans are opposed to the enhanced tax credits that keep ACA premiums low, which are expiring after next year.

Vice President-elect JD Vance has suggested that the administration would let insurers divide enrollees into different risk pools and offer different plans based on those health risks. While that could lead to lower-cost plans for healthier, younger Americans, policy experts warn that older people and those with chronic health issues could see their premiums balloon. 

A second Trump administration could also revive his earlier efforts to offer more short-term health plans. Those insurance options — extended during the first Trump term then narrowed by Biden — don’t have to cover everything required under ACA plans. A 2018 KFF survey found that 71 percent did not cover prescription drugs, for instance. 

Rachel Cohen notes at Vox that there are number of ways the Trump administration can further restrict abortion access, and that’s exactly what his allies have said they plan to try to do. These efforts could include everything from appointing additional anti-abortion judges to federal courts, to appointing anti-abortion officials to head federal agencies, to using the Comstock Act to prohibit sending abortion medication and medical equipment used for abortions through the mail:

For months Trump dodged journalists’ questions regarding the Comstock Act, but by August, he finally said he would not use the old statute to ban abortion drugs in the mail. However, many people in his close orbit, including the vice president-elect, are on record urging the opposite, and it was a core item in Project 2025, the notorious policy blueprint drafted by the Heritage Foundation and many people close to Trump’s campaign.

Trump could also ban abortion by appointing anti-abortion leaders to control key federal agencies that could use executive power to restrict reproductive rights, including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). …

Appointing anti-abortion leaders to agencies like the FDA and DOJ could affect anti-abortion litigation. In October, three Republican attorneys general (Raúl Labrador in Idaho, Kris Kobach in Kansas, and Andrew Bailey in Missouri) filed a lawsuit to force the FDA to heavily restrict access to mifepristone, one of two drugs used to induce abortions. 

As I explain in my new review of the poll industry’s performance, the election forecasts didn’t do so great, the battleground polls were mostly within the margin of error, and at the national level, Trump’s vote was once again underestimated. So Trump vs. Harris was a mixed bag for pollsters and polling analysts, but nobody should feel misled. It was truly too close to call.

Read my full analysis here.

Chalkbeat’s Erica Meltzer spoke with some experts about what impact Trump’s second administration may have on children’s education:

Chalkbeat spoke to advocates, experts, and former education department officials about what to expect from the next administration. They widely agreed that President Joe Biden’s Title IX rewrite, which extended new protections for transgender students and is currently tied up in the courts, will be repealed, that civil rights enforcement will look very different, and that future education budgets will be more austere.

But they disagreed on how likely it is that Trump would actually do away with the U.S. Department of Education and how much progress he might make toward federal support for school choice. Many said they do not expect to see federal policy focused on improving education, even as students are still struggling to recover from the wide-ranging effects of pandemic school closures, chronic absenteeism remains high, and many students graduate poorly prepared for college or skilled jobs.

And then there is Trump’s mass deportation threat:

An estimated 4.4 million American children have at least one undocumented parent, and some former Trump immigration officials have suggested that families be deported together.

Mike Petrilli, president of the conservative education advocacy organization The Fordham Institute, believes Trump’s education policies won’t make much difference in American classrooms, but his immigration policy may be felt in dramatic ways. … “The chances that it’s a humanitarian disaster are quite high,” Petrilli said. “Is he going to put people in camps? Will that include families? Are there going to be schools in these camps? I don’t see any reason we should believe they won’t give that a try.”

Even if enforcement is spotty, changes to federal policy have the potential to sow confusion and chaos in local communities, said Janelle Scott, a professor at University of California Berkeley. Some families may keep children home from school out of fear, she said.

Zak Cheney-Rice takes a hard look at Trump’s new multiracial coalition and concludes that “when people feel like the systems around them are broken, they might just vote for the person who promises to take them apart”:

Some of the details from Trump’s victory are at least clarifying. The first is that there continue to be profound political and ideological variances among the Latino electorate, shaped by factors like race, ethnicity, and ancestral country of origin, to the point that blanket outreach efforts have limited applicability. The term “Latino vote” itself is overly broad and obscures how localized and narrowly targeted most of the party’s strategy will have to be.

The second is that the stubbornness of classic election-year fundamentals seems to have been underrated. For all his ostentatious bigotry, crudeness, and corruption, Trump had plausibly recast himself as a normal Republican who could benefit from an unpopular Democratic incumbent and widespread disenchantment with the economy. Latino and Black male voters were not immune to his appeals on that basis.

The third is that Trump’s victory, distressing as it is, could be merely the beginning of something much worse for Democrats. While it appears that Black male voters overall defied some of the preelection shaming and hand-wringing over their softening support for the party, their long term loyalty is not guaranteed. The post-civil-rights political order that once transformed the Black electorate into a reliable blue bloc is crumbling everywhere you look. Voting rights have been eroded, affirmative action is dead, and a credibly accused Fair Housing Act scofflaw is headed back to the White House.

Read the rest here.

At the New Yorker, Isaac Chotiner writes that Biden’s arrogant re-election run doomed Democrats, Harris, and his own legacy:

The single biggest reason this defeat should fall on Biden’s shoulders is that his stubbornness in refusing to step aside as the Democratic nominee until July short-circuited the possibility of staging a primary, and left Harris as the only real choice to replace him. Enough has been written about Biden wheezing through campaign appearances before eventually dragging out his farewell for weeks after the calamitous summer debate. But Biden’s arrogance remains astonishing to behold: well before 2024, he was quite simply too old to ask people, in good faith, to keep him in office through 2028. He did so anyway, insuring that his age became the biggest political story of the first half of the year. The result depressed Democrats across the country and allowed the Trump campaign to attack its opponent in a manner it hadn’t been able to since 2016. …

Perhaps it’s best to judge Biden by the standard he set for himself. Five years ago, he announced that the impetus for his 2020 campaign was to defeat Donald Trump, and all that he represented, which in Biden’s mind was (understandably) captured by Trump’s handling of the 2017 white-supremacist march in Charlottesville. “In that moment,” Biden said, in the video that kicked off his campaign, referencing Trump’s infamous “both sides” remark, “I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I’d ever seen in my lifetime.” He continued by insisting that we were “in a battle for the soul of this nation,” and that, if Trump could be kept to only four years in office, history would look back on those years as “aberrant.” But, Biden continued, “if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation.” It’s in no small measure thanks to Joe Biden that all we can do now is hope he was wrong.

At Curbed, Nolan Hicks notes that time is now running out for Governor Hochul to reverse her reversal:

When Kathy Hochul put congestion pricing on ice last June, she insisted that it was a pause — that the $15 Manhattan toll on drivers could be reactivated at will. The program was supposed to bring in about $15 billion, which would draw upon $3 billion in federal matching funds to build the East Harlem leg of the Second Avenue Subway, delivering major quality-of-life improvements — from much faster commutes to reduced air pollution — to a neighborhood that has long needed it. The agency also had contracts to modernize and computerize service on some of the most delay-prone stretches of the system. It has an order already drafted to continue the MTA’s push to replace its oldest and most breakdown-prone subway trains with new and reliable models.

All of that is now at risk, because Donald Trump, if his first term is any guide, will likely try to cancel Washington’s portion of that funding. Trump has displayed a reliable hostility toward rail projects, and especially our rail projects, and there’s little reason to believe he’ll treat this one differently. Hochul therefore has one last chance to reverse her decision: The whole congestion-pricing plan, and by extension the recovery of the New York subway, lives or dies based on what she does between now and and Trump’s return to office on January 20. If she doesn’t restart it now, it’s probably finished for good.

Read the rest here.

Sarah Jones argues that populism, not centrism, was what could have made a difference, and that’s a lesson Democrats finally need to learn:

As the race wore on, it became clear that Harris was no populist at all. Instead, she was beholden to the very establishment that had elevated her. The Never Trumpers who backed her might be fixtures on cable news, but they were never going to deliver enough voters to Harris. Their audience consists of liberals who want to believe that our norms still work and the center still holds. It doesn’t. It hasn’t for years. To some extent that falls on Biden, who pledged a return to normal politics and failed to deliver, but Harris also did not recognize the danger he’d put her in. She tacked consistently to the center right, hoping that a handful of technocratic economic policies and a pro-Roe message would be sufficient. Meanwhile, a majority of voters knew that our norms had failed, and felt keenly that the economy didn’t work for them. That includes many women, who don’t vote solely on abortion. They are often in charge of the household pocketbook, and although inflation is going down and inequality has narrowed, they’re still affected by the high cost of living. Rents are up and mortgages are expensive, as are child care and health care. Despite this, the New York Times reportedthat Harris spent more time with billionaire Mark Cuban in October than she did with Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers. …

Trump will now return to power, perhaps with a Republican Congress. Women will inevitably suffer, even those who voted for him. When they begin to hurt, they will need help, and someone will have to offer it to them. Maybe that person will be a Democrat. Maybe they’ll be an independent. Maybe we know their name already and maybe we don’t. Whoever they are, they have to do what Harris didn’t, and break with recent history in order to try something new. “Sometimes, the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win,” Harris said during her concession speech on Wednesday, and that could be true but only if her party restructures itself. I’m not entirely sure what that ought to look like, but I do believe it’s possible to glean some insight from the wreckage of Tuesday evening. Some will say that Trump’s opponents must sacrifice the rights of transgender people and immigrants and women to win, which fundamentally misunderstands the problem. Voters believe, wrongly, that Trump works for them. Democrats — or whoever else — must convince them otherwise, preferably with a populist economic message that addresses their concerns without throwing our most vulnerable workers to the wolves. It’s possible. More than that, it’s necessary. Women deserved more from Harris and her party, and so did everyone else.

Read the rest here.

From their Wednesday op-ed on Trump’s “second chance”:

If Mr. Trump makes a priority of seeking revenge against his opponents, he will squander political capital and quickly lose whatever goodwill his victory earns him. Ditto if he focuses on responding to every critic who insults him. We realize that asking Mr. Trump to act with self-restraint and political grace is the triumph of hope over hard experience. But he could set the right tone by promising to pardon Hunter Biden after he takes office and vowing not to prosecute Joe Biden.

The overriding policy message from the exit polls is that Mr. Trump needs to keep his eye focused clearly on economic growth. He has a mandate to repeal electric-vehicle mandates and the climate commands of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Above all he needs growth with low inflation that raises incomes, especially for American households who don’t have stocks or own a home. Extending the pro-growth planks of his 2017 tax reform and deregulation to unleash business investment will be crucial. He won’t get that result by adopting the income redistribution or union feather-bedding favored by the big-government right.

Podcaster Max Fisher wonders:

It’s a distinction without a difference but we may spend years sorting out the degree to which voters affirmatively wanted a far-right strongman vs. just wanted to kick out the incumbent party and didn’t understand or care what they were replacing it with.

Political scientist Lee Drutman adds:

The danger of a two-party system is something when you just want to vote for “change” you get fascism by accident if that’s the only other option.

Writes Alex Shephard at the New Republic:

Donald Trump, his allies, and likely much of the mainstream media will likely cast his victory as evidence of his extraordinary strength and his singular place in American political history. Republicans will tout it as a mandate for the litany of horrors that they will unleash in three months time. But Biden’s weakness played a significant and perhaps decisive role. By refusing to drop out of the race until mid-July, he put his party in a difficult, and perhaps impossible position. It may very well have simply been too late to convince voters that the party could change direction. This is the thinnest of silver linings but if one sees this as a rejection of Biden as much as—or perhaps more than—an embrace of Trump, one can hope that he will quickly remind voters of why they voted him out of office four years ago.

But that may not matter. This election is a reminder of the Democratic Party’s weakness and the failure of its decade-long effort to convince voters that Donald Trump is a singular, existential threat to the country has failed and that it has failed catastrophically. Despite a failed presidency, a pandemic, an insurrection, and dozens of criminal charges, he is still seen as a credible and legitimate leader by tens of millions of voters. Defeating Trump and his political project will require more than centering Trump’s obvious unfitness for office; Democrats have had four years to convince voters that they can offer a better alternative. They have failed in the effort. What’s more, they may be further away from success now than they were eight years ago.

Semafor’s Dave Weigel argues that immigration policy made a key difference:

I’m still thinking about a moment from Trump’s successful effort to get the International Association of Fire Fighters to stay neutral this year, after endorsing Biden in 2020. Key union leaders ruled out supporting Harris, not because of anything she’d done against labor, but because they blamed Biden’s border policies for letting fentanyl into the country and putting their members at risk. But the Democratic coalition that won in 2020 was committed to those border policies, campaigning for gentler treatment of asylum-seekers that year and crediting Trump’s strong performance with Latinos to other issues, like COVID stimulus spending. It was committed to transgender rights – the “civil rights issue of our time,” according to Biden – and believed that Republicans sounded mean and semi-deranged when they campaigned against trans people.

What they hoped was a backlash to how Trump talked and behaved, that his calls for “mass deportation” would be so horrifying that voters would reject it, and for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election would alienate moderate voters. It did alienate some of them, and another Democratic conversation over the next two years might be about the remnants of the mainstream media that has held less clout every four years. On Harris-friendly cable news, ex-Republicans broadcast their horror at who Trump was and what he’d done; in the new social media and podcasts favored by Republicans, all of that was whining disconnected from what voters really cared about.

Twelve years ago, the last time they didn’t run Trump for president, Republicans watched Mitt Romney fail to break a 20-year Democratic grip on the Midwest. His weakness with Latino voters convinced many Republicans, briefly, that they needed to pass immigration reform. Trump ditched Romney’s austerity policies, soft-pedaled his own very similar tax policies, and ran on closing the border to new arrivals to protect the country for the people already living here. And it broke the Democrats’ coalition

At National Review, Noah Rothman wonders if Democrats can escape their echo chamber:

Democrats would surely like to convince themselves that their misfortunes are overdetermined. Was it the economy that did them in? Joe Biden’s senescence and unpopularity? The border crisis? “Wokeness”? The answer is “yes,” but it’s hardly prescriptive. It’s merely a good place to start. Putting every assumption on the table for debate would impose some humility on a party that struggles to speak to voters like fellow human beings.

Democrats should dispense with their belief that they can carve up the electorate into balkanized, mutually antagonistic cantons. They will be inclined to reevaluate only how they appeal to white working-class voters, female voters, black male voters, and Hispanic voters when they should just be talking to voters. The party finds itself in a position akin to where the GOP ended up in November 2012, after which Republicans committed to a grueling examination of how they reach out to Latino voters — a painful process that produced a lot of wrong answers. Trump threaded the needle by dispensing with the notion that there was such a thing as “Hispanic issues.” The GOP has never been in a stronger position with minority voters, not because it focused its attention on the subjects that mattered to them but because it talked about the issues that mattered to everyone.

John Podhoretz had it right when he observed last night that, whatever Trump’s many personal shortcomings may be, “he was the only person who leveled with the American people about the mess we are in.” It was too easy for Democrats to escape into the media’s hall of mirrors, in which dissatisfaction with the status quo was a byproduct of rampant “disinformation” and the party’s critics could be dismissed as cranks and bigots. But even that last citadel has fallen. There are no more Obamas left to feign self-assuredness and persuade Democrats that they’re secretly popular.

At Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop writes that while covering another Trump presidency will be an unprecedented challenge, it’s also an critical opportunity to improve what the press can and should do:

Already, there is chatter among some observers that the heightened mass outrage and interest of Trump’s first term—which drove eyeballs and subscriptions to organizations producing hard-hitting journalism, and energized the journalism itself—won’t be repeated this time; that exhaustion and apathy might reign instead. If that is indeed to be the case, then it will pose some very sharp questions for the business of news—or rather, intensify questions we’re already grappling with. I won’t pretend to have easy answers now. But there is still, and I believe always will be, a demand for new and important information—an itch that the Musks and Rogans of the world, for all their cultural ascendancy, will never be able to scratch—and enough journalists with the gumption and tenacity and desire to seek it out, relay it, and put it in context. Again, we are going to have to think harder than ever before about how to fight for the right to do that, and how to make sure that enough people see it and fund it. But we knew that already. Trump’s win intensifies the urgency, but it did not create the problem.

Nor does Trump’s win somehow invalidate, as if by majoritarian acclamation, all the great, truthful, hard-hitting accountability journalism about him to date; indeed, the problem with Trump journalism up to now has been (as I’ve argued many times) that the good stuff was too often drowned out by a political-media elite more interested in doing journalism by poll, and by political consultant, and by optics (and possibly, of late, by betting odds). We need vastly less of that type of journalism, but we already knew that, too. We need more of the good stuff—and more focus on it in the newsletters and cable shows that still, in a world of Musks and Rogans, have at least some power to set the political agenda. This would be the case even if an entire country were primed to reject its presentation of facts or its logical conclusions. And the will of a majority does not speak for an entire country. America remains divided. In many ways, that’s been a huge problem for journalism, which imagined that it could speak across the divide. This morning may feel like the final nail in that hope. But if this election has proved anything, it’s that the country is more complicated than elite media clichés can capture. This goes for the divide, too. And, even in the world of caricature, there are still millions of Americans out there who not only need good journalism, but want it, too. They deserve for us to keep offering it.

At Slate, Jill Filipovic writes that “this race was about a particular kind of masculine identity that increasingly crosses racial lines, and imperils women and men alike”:

Trump surrounded himself with tech bros and podcast bros and fighting bros. The men of the Christian right and the architects of Project 2025 were there too, but they receded a bit as Trump courted the kind of men who may not go to church much anymore but who still want the respect traditionally afforded to men simply by virtue of being men. Vance spoke to this directly in earlier podcast clips and fundraising appeals that may have been damaging to his ticket’s female support but might also have piqued the interest of resentful male listeners: He derided single cat ladies and by extension the entire category of women who believe that their lives are just as good (if not better) without men than with them. The men Trump and Vance courted likely don’t believe they hate women at all, despite voting against women’s most fundamental rights. Many of them seem to desperately want female affection, approval, and, perhaps most of all, respect—but, having not exactly earned it, long for a time when female deference was essentially mandatory.

That is the America that Trump and Vance promised these men they would bring back. Yes, it’s an America where a (white) working-class man could make a living wage—but the fantasy is less about the number on a paycheck and more about the ability to have a financially dependent and adoring wife, or to be able to be as violent, crass, and unrestrained as one wishes without social consequence. As much as pundits and voters may point to the economy or immigration or crime as the reason voters backed Trump, the truth is that Trump offered virtually nothing in the way of actual policy on any of those issues. He offered instead the promise of masculine strength and male dominance, of men returned to their rightful positions of authority in the White House and in houses across America. He talked to men who are frustrated and men who are adrift, many who feel—despite all evidence—mistreated and even discriminated against. And he promised them a return to power.

As Reid Epstein notes at the New York Times:

During his first term, [Trump] demanded personal loyalty from officials across the executive branch and fired those who resisted his demands. Now he returns to the White House with the knowledge of how the system restricted his impulses and with a roster of officials more willing to help him circumvent longstanding norms. The last time he took office, a culture of resistance emerged from corners that included Democrats, the federal government’s civil servants and even some of his own appointees. This time, he is unlikely to elevate people willing to speak against him. 

She did the best she could in an impossible situation, Andrew Egger writes at the Bulwark:

This wasn’t the race she asked for — to be the last person standing to mount a furious defense against the rising tide of Trump’s lawless populism. The campaign she waged, given the circumstances, was likely the strongest anyone in her position could have mustered. In the end, how well or poorly she piloted her campaign just didn’t matter. Trump was blessed in 2016 to run against one of the weakest Democratic candidates ever put forward; this year, he was blessed to run against the woman left holding the bag, however stoically, for a president who had proven incapable of holding it himself.

At the Atlantic, Tom Nichols doesn’t quote fictional president Thomas J. Whitmore, but he does invoke Winston Churchill in his call for Americans to hold the line against Trump’s authoritarianism:

[T]his is not the end or the beginning of the end; it is the end of the beginning. …

Trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people. All of them can be beaten: in court, in Congress, in statehouses around the nation, and in the public arena. America is a federal republic, and the states—at least those in the union that will still care about democracy—have ways to protect their citizens from a rogue president. Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not counseling complacency: Trump’s reelection is a national emergency. If we have learned anything from the past several years, it’s that feel-good, performative politics can’t win elections, but if there was ever a time to exercise the American right of free assembly, it is now—not least because Trump is determined to end such rights and silence his opponents. Americans must stay engaged and make their voices heard at every turn. They should find and support organizations and institutions committed to American democracy, and especially those determined to fight Trump in the courts. They must encourage candidates in the coming 2026 elections who will oppose Trump’s plans and challenge his legislative enablers.

At Vox, Andrew Prokop notes two critical factors that fueled Harris’s demise at the polls:

The first was a global trend: In the years since the pandemic, incumbent parties have been struggling in wealthy democracies across the world. The reasons for this are debated, though post-reopening inflation is likely a big one. But to win, Harris would have had to defy this trend.

The second was Biden’s unpopularity. The president was historically unpopular long before his disastrous debate with Trump, and poll after poll showed voters irate with his handling of the economy and immigration. Foreign policy, particularly the Israel-Gaza war that divided Democrats’ coalition, was a problem too. And since Harris had served in his administration as vice president, she had to figure out what to do about that.

Read the rest here.

The Associated Press offers a first draft of why voters made the choice they did, including how, yes, it was the economy, stupid:

The share of voters who said their family’s financial situation was “falling behind” rose to about 3 in 10, up from roughly 2 in 10 in the last presidential election. Many voters were still reeling from inflation that spiked to a four-decade high in June 2022. About 9 in 10 voters were very or somewhat concerned about the cost of groceries, and about 8 in 10 were concerned about their health care costs, their housing costs or the cost of gas.

Trump picked up a small but significant share of younger voters, Black voters and Hispanic voters, many of whom were feeling down about the economy. Majorities of younger Black voters and Latino voters said the economy is not working well.

The economy carried more prominence than in the 2020 election, including for these groups. Four years ago, COVID-19 and racism were important issues for Black and Latino voters. But this time, they were more focused on the economy, and Trump managed to make inroads with both groups even as the majority stayed with Harris.

Trump’s nativist and isolationist rhetoric made an impact, too:

Voters were more likely to embrace hardline immigration policies than they were four years ago, which aligned with Trump’s tough approach. About 4 in 10 voters said that immigrants living in the U.S. illegally should be deported to the country they came from, up from about 3 in 10 in 2020. And while most voters said that immigrants living in the U.S. illegally should be offered a chance to apply for legal status, that was down from 2020 …

Voters were more likely than in 2020 to adopt many of Trump’s isolationist stances. About 4 in 10 voters wanted the U.S. to take a “less active role” in solving the world’s problems, up from about 3 in 10 in 2020.

And while Trump’s character and extremism were important issues for many voters, they weren’t decisive:

Nearly half of voters said they were “very concerned” that another Trump presidency would bring the U.S. closer to authoritarianism. Roughly 1 in 10 in this group voted for him anyway. About 6 in 10 voters said he is not honest and trustworthy, but about 2 in 10 in this group backed him. A majority of voters said he does not have the moral character to be president, and about 1 in 10 of those voters supported him.

Andrew Rice writes that Trump now has a mandate to flip the “lawfare” script on his enemies:

Trump described all [the legal cases against him] as a campaign of “lawfare,” part of a “deep state” conspiracy that began during his first term, with the FBI’s and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian election interference and the Ukraine impeachment inquiry, and intensified after his 2020 defeat. During their four years out of power, veterans of the Trump administration have drawn up plans to assert sweeping power over the federal bureaucracy, and particularly over the Justice Department. Members of the incoming administration now know how to work the levers of the federal government, and they have signaled that they will try to bring the Justice Department and its law-enforcement authority under more direct White House control. It now seems likely that those powers will be turned against those who have attempted to impose legal accountability on Trump and his allies.

Trump has hinted that, as president, he will pardon the many hundreds of his supporters who have been charged and convicted with criminal offenses related to the assault on the Capitol on January 6. Early in this campaign, Trump promised to “totally obliterate” the government institutions that he describes as the “deep state.” “I am your warrior, I am your justice,” he said at his 2023 kickoff rally in Waco, Texas, a location heavy with incendiary symbolism for the far right. “For those who have been wronged and betrayed,” he said, “I am your retribution.” He has repeatedly suggested his version of “retribution” may involve ordering investigations of his perceived legal adversaries — including Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Biden and his family. In September, Trump suggested that he would also like to see his opponent tried for unspecified offenses, saying Harris “should be impeached and prosecuted for her actions.” He and his supporters have suggested that “they” — without explicitly naming names — were somehow behind the actions of a pair of would-be assassins, one of which only narrowly missed his target when he shot at Trump from a rooftop at a Pennsylvania rally in July.

In the end, a majority of voters just didn’t care enough about making Trump pay:

In 2016, it was possible to wonder whether the electorate chose Trump because of his novelty, celebrity, or the influence of foreign propaganda. After eight exhausting years and a campaign that made plain the stakes as the Democrats saw them, no one can say that Americans are under any illusions. The voters saw the jury’s verdict. They knew who Trump was and the kind of president he would be again. And yesterday, they voted for him anyway.

Read the rest of Andrew’s response here.

The conclusion of my post-mortem on the Harris campaign and Biden presidency:

The Democrats’ only chance of winning, in retrospect, was to pick a nominee who could credibly run as a complete outsider untainted by either the 2020 primary left-a-thon or the Biden administration’s record on inflation and immigration.

Why is it important to understand all this? Because their defeat is fundamentally rooted in concrete events and decisions, many of which lay in their control. There is no mystical bond between the public and Trump they cannot sever. The Democrats allowed themselves to be prodded, and sometimes bullied, into either fooling themselves about the true nature of public opinion or fooling themselves into thinking public opinion didn’t matter. And their impulse to rally around Biden led the party to minimize his unpopularity and deny his physical decline until it was desperately late. Echo chambers can trap their own inhabitants.

When Trump won the first time, Democrats abandoned strategic thinking in response, setting the stage for their defeat later. Their future will be determined by whether they can respond more shrewdly this time.

Read the rest here.

As I wrote in my first response to Trump’s victory, the simplest explanation, may be the most compelling:

This was a classic “change” election in which the “out” party had an advantage that the governing party could not overcome. Yes, the outcome was in doubt because Democrats managed to replace a very unpopular incumbent with an interesting if untested successor, and also because the GOP chose a rival whose constant demonstration of his own unpopular traits threatened to take over the whole contest. In the end Trump normalized his crude and erratic character by endless repetition; reduced scrutiny of his lawless misconduct by denouncing critics and prosecutors alike as politically motivated; and convinced an awful lot of unhappy voters that he hated the same people and institutions they did.

Read the rest here.