He's Back!

Good morning. Donald Trump is the president-elect. The race was officially called around 5:30 a.m. when Wisconsin’s results finally came in. Trump had already won North Carolina, Georgia, and Pennsylvania several hours prior, and expected to win Alaska’s three electoral votes (though they’re still not technically in yet, since polls in Adak, on the tundra, close at 1 a.m. Eastern Time), so in characteristic fashion, he went ahead and gave a victory speech a bit prematurely a little after midnight.

Overnight, though, everything solidified with the delivery of the Wisconsin count. We’re waiting on the swing states Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan to get a full accounting of how Trump performed, but by 1 a.m. last night Kamala Harris was done waiting, and slinked off to bed. She’s expected to concede, and give a speech at Howard University, sometime today.

Republicans picked up a Senate seat in West Virginia, with Gov. Jim Justice winning his race to replace an outgoing Sen. Joe Manchin (an independent who frequently caucused with Democrats). They also picked up a Senate seat in Ohio, with Republican Bernie Moreno defeating Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. It’s unclear how the House will shake out, but it’s looking like Republicans may clinch a majority there too.

For those keeping track: That’s what a red wave looks like.

There were quite a few surprises, based on exit polls (which, to be clear, are not exactly definitive): Trump performed really well with Latino and black men. The widening education, gender, and income polarization appears to be further bolstered by last night’s results: Trump performed really well with non-college-educated voters while Harris performed well with college-educated voters. Less well-off voters went Trump, richer went Harris. The gender gap between married people and parents is minimal; the gender gap between single, unmarried men and women is vast, with single women going aggressively for Harris.

Interestingly, Trump overperformed in urban areas: Vote totals for all five boroughs of New York indicate major growth in support for Trump. But not just New York: Voters in Chicago, Houston, Miami, and elsewhere warmed to the man. In typically staunchly blue states, Harris did poorly while still clinching victory: In 2020, Joe Biden won New Jersey by +16, which Harris appears to have won by only +5. Same story in Illinois, which Biden won by +18, while Harris only won by+5. Harris was, in other words, a poor candidate (something you probably didn’t need me to tell you).

As for poor Chase Oliver, we don’t have the full popular vote count yet, but it’s looking like the Libertarian Party’s redheaded stepchild/presidential candidate underperformed Jo Jorgensen, the candidate they ran in 2020. Given that the party at times seemed to support Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump instead of their own candidate, it’s no shocker that Oliver struggled. (Currying favor with those others was a highly successful bid for relevance, they’d surely counter; we’ll see.)

In ultrablue areas, progressive Democrats faced defeat again and again. Los Angeles voters did away with their District Attorney George Gascón, a Democrat, replacing him with Republican-turned-independent Nathan Hochman. Up north in San Francisco, voters gave more tech-friendly moderate Democrats the go-ahead to replace more radical Democrats on the city’s board of supervisors.

Meanwhile, I’ve been watching MSNBC’s meltdown coverage since about 4 a.m. and I am not convinced that they’re on the way toward atoning for their identity-politics sins of the last eight years. Though some commentators have been able to concede that Harris was simply a very poor candidate hindered by her late and unconventional entry into the race, others have decided to go with the explanation that her being a mixed-race woman in an interracial marriage was simply “too much” for most of the country to handle, implying racism or intolerance from white voters—an odd explanation given what we’re seeing from exit polls about Trump support among black men and Latinos (who appear to have helped him sail to the top). You would think there’d be more analysis as to how much her legions of consultants botched this one, failing to find and stick to a persuasive message, failing to figure out how much or how little to trot out the candidate to the press, failing to pick an appealing running mate, failing to figure out which anti-Vance, anti-Trump lines would be salient.

What now? A second Trump term will bring all kinds of fresh hell, especially for those who are not in this country legally. Trump has promised a massive deportation sweep; his vice president, J.D. Vance, has estimated some 1 million migrants could be deported annually. Trump has vowed to bring back the Remain in Mexico program, which forces asylum seekers to stay on the far side of the southern border while they await court dates to adjudicate their immigration cases. He wants to drastically increase the number of Border Patrol agents, which will come at substantial cost to taxpayers.

Trump has promised across-the-board tariffs, to the tune of either 10 or 20 percent (depending on when you ask him), with possibly higher taxes imposed on Chinese goods. Though we’ve perhaps avoided the inflationary results that would come from massive government spending under a Harris presidency, prices may well go up drastically if and when Trump implements these tariffs. (Trump’s “proposed tariff increases would hike taxes by another $524 billion annually and shrink GDP by at least 0.8 percent,” estimates the Tax Foundation.) Trump’s government spending has not been very restrained historically, so I would be pleasantly surprised if this time were different.

Trump will also need to resist his authoritarian impulses in terms of prosecuting opponents, and survive his November 26 sentencing following his conviction for falsifying business records (as well as his other unresolved legal cases for which he might be able to pardon himself).

The main “outreach to the middle” Trump needs to do is swear off lawfare. Explain that he won’t prosecute his opponents—and then not actually prosecute his opponents.

— Tim Carney (@TPCarney) November 6, 2024

For libertarians who care about abortion access, last night’s results are a decidedly mixed bag. Florida’s Amendment 4, which would’ve created a constitutional right to an abortion, was defeated. Nebraskans voted to enshrine abortion protections up until 12 weeks but defeated a measure that would have legalized it up until week 24. South Dakotans also defeated an amendment that would have expanded abortion access. Arizona and Missouri voted to expand abortion rights.

Weed legalization lost in Florida, and California voters increased penalties for certain drug offenses. One California measure that passed makes shoplifting back into a felony, rolling back a 2014 change that downgraded theft of goods under $950 in value to a misdemeanor.

Some optimism: For years, Americans have been deeply divided, with a portion donning Handmaid’s Tale cloaks and hats to vote and march in the streets against theocracy/fascism and a portion declaring that an election was stolen due to mass voter fraud that was never really proven to be true. None of that is going away, per se, but the fact that the electoral and popular votes match up so well, and that there don’t appear to have been disturbing voter-machine irregularities, is also a good sign that people will collectively accept these results. The polarization shifts—black and Latino men in particular coming out for Trump, and the Republican Party becoming much more representative of the working class—also bode well for the identity-politics fever breaking, and the Democratic Party no longer attempting to interpret all things through that pointless prism.

Elon Musk may well be appointed secretary of cost-cutting and, at minimum, we know terrible policies like student-loan forgiveness and setting price controls and taxing unrealized capital gains are now totally off the table. It’s possible a second Trump term will bring some wins for libertarians, but it’s totally contingent on who he appoints to serve and whether his attempts to grow his own power get sufficiently reined in.

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Scenes from New York: Harris still won in New York City, but not by the margins Democrats typically win by. In literally all five boroughs, Trump did better than expected.

Kamala Harris, with >95% of precincts reporting, is polling at 67.8% of the vote in New York City.

If that holds, that would be the WORST performance for a Democratic Presidential candidate in the five boroughs since 1988 (!!!!)

A disastrous evening for Democrats in Gotham.

— Michael Lange (@MichaelLangeNYC) November 6, 2024

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QUICK HITS

• If you want the short form of today’s Roundup, I wrote a summary of the results here:

GOOD MORNING to those just waking up who want a rundown of the results:
-Trump declared winner around 5:30 a.m. He won Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Wisconsin. Michigan, Arizona, Nevada results TBD but not needed. He will win Alaska (but it’s not in yet). He’s also doing very well…

— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) November 6, 2024

• The real upshot:

Elon just did a hostile takeover of the entire administrative state pic.twitter.com/NrZKQXxQqQ

— Chrisman (@chrismanfrank) November 6, 2024

• “Republican control of the Senate…likely dashes progressives’ hopes of dramatically shifting the burden of US taxation toward corporations and wealthy individuals as trillions of dollars worth of provisions in the 2017 tax law expire at the end of next year,” reports Bloomberg. 
• Yes, also as an appreciator of rich guys and building stuff I very much relate:

Significant trend this year – Dems running the “these rich guys just want to cut their own taxes” 2012 message, and voters saying: Hm, I like these rich guys, they build stuff and hate DC, just like me. https://t.co/jmxR8dxHxP https://t.co/MU1vI3rii9

— David Weigel (@daveweigel) November 6, 2024

• Dreams do come true:

Two weeks ago he was just a humble fry cook and now he’s about to be the President Elect of the United States.

God bless America. pic.twitter.com/lXC2bEXN6I

— Whale Psychiatrist (@k_ovfefe2) November 6, 2024

The post He’s Back! appeared first on Reason.com.

Source: https://reason.com/2024/11/06/hes-back-2/