Just to clarify: this isn’t just the first time since WW2 that all incumbent parties in developed countries lost vote share.
— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) November 7, 2024
It’s the first time since this data was first recorded in 1905. Essentially the first time in the history of democracy (universal suffrage began in 1894). pic.twitter.com/04hdpN8aq0
Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties.
“I don’t want loyalty. I want loyalty! I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses. I want his pecker in my pocket.” -- Lyndon B. Johnson
With the Gaetz and Hegseth nominations, Trump is rejecting the idea that anything other than loyalty is important in someone leading a massive government department and he is challenging the Senate to dare to disagree.
Gift link: https://t.co/icOsDNtyvA
New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for US ambassador to the United Nations, is now refusing to stand by her previous push for Ukraine’s NATO membership — a stance she once framed as critical to regional stability.
Her office also declined to say whether she still believes Russia committed genocide in Ukraine, as she said in 2022.
In 2022, Stefanik urged NATO to admit the nation, especially as Russia’s invasion escalated. At the time, she argued for extensive military aid support, highlighting the Trump administration’s previous providing of Javelin missiles.
“I’ve seen how important Ukraine is for the region,” she said. “They need to be admitted into NATO and we need to do everything we can by providing them munitions and javelins, and remember, the javelins were supplied under the Trump administration.”
Her comments at the time reflected the strong pro-Ukraine stance that aligned with broad bipartisan support for Kyiv in the early days of the conflict.
Now, when asked if she still supports NATO membership for Ukraine, Stefanik’s spokesperson declined to specifically address her current position. Instead, her office signaled that she is aligning with Trump’s approach.
GOP Rep. Troy Nehls to us just now after Trump meeting:
— Melanie Zanona (@MZanona) November 13, 2024
“If Donald Trump says, ‘jump three feet high and scratch your head,’ we all jump three feet high and scratch our head.”
He was wearing a Donald Trump tie while he said it.
Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Our next book is about the 2024 election. The consequences of that election are coming into view.
Vivian Salama, Nancy A. Youssef and Lara Seligman at WSJ:
The Trump transition team is considering a draft executive order that establishes a “warrior board” of retired senior military personnel with the power to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership.
If Donald Trump approves the order, it could fast-track the removal of generals and admirals found to be “lacking in requisite leadership qualities,” according to a draft of the order reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. But it could also create a chilling effect on top military officers, given the president-elect’s past vow to fire “woke generals,” referring to officers seen as promoting diversity in the ranks at the expense of military readiness.
As commander in chief, Trump can fire any officer at will, but an outside board whose members he appoints would bypass the Pentagon’s regular promotion system, signaling across the military that he intends to purge a number of generals and admirals.
Donald Trump's appointment of Pete Hegseth, a Fox News commentator, and former National Guard officer, as his secretary of defense has sparked controversy within military circles, with one commentator describing him as "the least qualified nominee for SecDef in American history."
Hegseth's selection was announced by Trump in a social media post on Tuesday evening. The president-elect said: "Pete has spent his entire life as a Warrior for the Troops, and for the Country. Pete is tough, smart and a true believer in America First."
During his first term, Trump had an often tempestuous relationship with the two defense secretaries he appointed, Jim Mattis and Mark Esper, both of whom became highly critical of their former boss after leaving office. Speaking to podcaster Joe Rogan in October, Trump said his biggest mistake in the White House had been appointing "bad people," including "neocons," to serve under him.
...
Reacting to Hegseth's appointment on X, formerly Twitter, Paul Rieckhoff, founder of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America Association, commented: "I first met Hegseth when he started running Vets for Freedom around 2007. He is a highly effective and ferocious media, culture and political warrior for MAGA. And beyond loyal to and trusted by Trump.
"I figured Trump would pick probably pick him for Chief of Staff or Press Secretary. But this... "Hegseth is undoubtedly the least qualified nominee for SecDef in American history. And the most overtly political. Brace yourself, America."
In a statement Paul Eaton, chairman of VoteVets, a group which aims to support veterans and fight "for progressive values," said: "Pete Hegseth is wholly unqualified to head the Department of Defense and hold the lives of our troops in his hands. Period. Nothing more needs to be said."
According to Politico, when asked for their reaction to Hegseth's appointment, one defense industry lobbyist commented: "who the f*** is this guy?" adding they'd been hoping for "someone who actually has an extensive background in defense."
A Senate class elected in a midterm will face reelection in a presidential year, and vice versa. The political conditions of the second will be different from the first. A wave election brings in a set of senators who are vulnerable to defeat six years later. The GOP took control of the Senate in the Reagan sweep of 1980, and lost it in 1986. The GOP tied in 2000, suffered a big setback in 2006.
In presidential election years, when voter turnout swells, presidential candidates often receive more votes than Senate candidates, even Senate incumbents. Yet this year, 11 of the 14 Senate Democratic incumbents up for reelection won more votes in their states than Harris.
By contrast, Donald Trump vastly outperformed Republican candidates for Senate, especially in swing states like Nevada and Michigan. Of the eight GOP incumbents up for reelection (not counting Nebraska Sen. Pete Ricketts, a former governor who was appointed in 2023), Trump had a higher vote total than six of them. The only senators he didn’t outpace were Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso and Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, two veterans who are well known in their relatively small-population states.
Trump’s performance last week was a far cry from his first presidential bid in 2016. Back then, Republican candidates for Senate won in spite of him — of the 22 Republican Senate incumbents up for reelection that year, Trump ran ahead of only six of them. His great fortune was that Hillary Clinton was an even larger drag on her party’s ticket — all seven Democratic incumbents up for reelection that year won more votes than her in their home states.
This time around, he provided significant tailwinds, especially for the two Republican senators who had the closest reelection victories — Deb Fischer in Nebraska and Ted Cruz in Texas.
Trump’s transformation from drag on the Republican ticket to boon has Democrats unnerved about the future of their party. Where 2016 may have felt like a terrible nightmare powered by the strangeness of the Electoral College, 2024 felt like a total rebuke. Trump, who went from losing the popular vote by almost 3 million votes to winning it (by how many is yet unclear), can no longer be easily dismissed as an aberration governing without a popular mandate.
Ironically, though, in terms of the Senate, the outcome might be better for the Democratic Party moving forward. In 2016, zero states voted for a president of one party and a senator who came from another. This year, if Democrat Ruben Gallego’s lead holds, there are four — Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin.
All of that ticket splitting is due in large part to Trump’s strength relative to Harris; his popularity was in some cases not transferable to other Republicans on the ballot with him. He outran the Republican Senate candidates in those four states by huge margins, while Harris had trouble even matching the vote totals from Democratic Senate candidates.
As the dust settles on the 2024 election, Trump resembled a uniquely strong Republican candidate, while Harris ran more like a weak incumbent who voters wanted to punish. That might be a good sign for the future of the Democratic Party.
Reality check: The surge in inflation that started in 2021 and peaked in 2022 was linked to snarling of global supply chains due to COVID shutdowns and labor shortages as many would-be workers stayed close to home.It occurred globally, even in countries with more modest fiscal action.
Yes, but: That doesn't mean the super-sized U.S. stimulus didn't have an inflationary impact. An analysis from the San Francisco Fed, for example, found that fiscal policy could account for about 3 percentage points of 2021 inflation, which totaled about 7%.If more restrained fiscal policy had resulted in inflation peaking even a couple of percentage points lower, the Fed would not have seen the need to raise rates by as much as it did, lessening another vector of recent economic pain.
The very existence of the super-sized fiscal action may have created a clearer linkage in voters' minds between Biden's policies and the pain of high prices.
The benefits of the ARP — those $1,300 checks in particularly — were quickly forgotten, and the rapid recovery it helped fuel taken for granted.
Between the lines: The Biden administration has pointed to falling inflation over the last two years — amid a generally favorable job market — as a great triumph.The speed of the U.S. expansion the last few years has been the envy of the world, much faster than other large rich countries, and the 2021 fiscal action helped jump-started it.
But voters appeared more concerned about the cumulative impact of inflation — prices are 21% higher now than 4 years ago — than the fact that the annual inflation rate has slowed to 2.4%.
The bottom line: At the beginning of the Biden years, liberal economists were full of enthusiastic talk about creating a "high-pressure" labor market and "running the economy hot." As it turned out, Democrats got burned.
Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.
Frustrated by open-air drug use, “smash-and-grab” robberies and shampoo locked away in stores, California voters overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure, Proposition 36, that will impose harsher penalties for shoplifting and drug possession.
Voters in Oakland and Los Angeles were on their way to ousting liberal district attorneys who had campaigned on social justice promises to reduce imprisonment and hold the police accountable. And statewide measures to raise the minimum wage, ban the forced labor of inmates and expand rent control, all backed by progressive groups and labor unions, were heading toward defeat.
Cayla Mihalovich at CalMatters:
In a setback to California’s historic reparations effort, voters rejected a ballot measure that would have ended forced labor in prisons and jails. Proposition 6 garnered support from Democratic party leaders, labor unions and dozens of advocacy groups who viewed their efforts as part of a national movement to end a racist legacy and abolish slavery.
The measure would have amended the state’s constitution to repeal language that allows involuntary servitude as a form of criminal punishment, making work assignments voluntary and allowing incarcerated people to prioritize their rehabilitation.
...
California mandates tens of thousands of incarcerated people to work at jobs – many of which they do not choose — ranging from packaging nuts to doing dishes, to making license plates, sanitizer and furniture for less than 74 cents an hour, according to legislative summaries of prison work.
...
It faced no funded opposition, and as election results showed the measure trailing, Prop. 6 supporters and independent political experts said the language might have confused voters.
The California Attorney General’s Office writes ballot language and summaries, and the word “slavery” did not appear on the California ballot. Instead, the language read, “Eliminates Constitutional Provision Allowing Involuntary Servitude for Incarcerated Persons. Legislative Constitutional Amendment.”
“When I saw the words ‘involuntary servitude,’ I thought, ‘This might take some explaining for the voters,’” said Mark Baldassare, survey director at the Public Policy Institute of California. “We know that when people are unsure or uncertain, the default is to vote ‘no.’”
In Nevada this election, a measure similar to Prop. 6 passed with 60% voter approval. Voters there saw ballot language that referenced slavery.
Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. Abortion was a big issue in the 2022 midterm. In 2024, it was complicated.
Abortion has been a topic for statewide ballot measures since the 1970s. However, in 2022, following Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a then-record number of abortion-related measures were on the ballot, including three from campaigns that described themselves as pro-choice or pro-reproductive rights. In 2023, voters in Ohio approved Issue 1.
On November 5, voters decided on 11 abortion-related ballot measures—the most on record for a single year. Ten addressed state constitutional rights to abortion. Voters approved seven of them in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, New York, and Nevada. Voters rejected three in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota. One, in Nebraska, limited the timeframe for when an abortion can be performed.
The big picture: The president-elect, who has repeatedly taken credit for overturning federal abortion protections, has flip-flopped on the issue but insisted he would not sign a national ban into law.But with a likely trifecta at the federal level, Congress could have the means to curb access — whether it be by passing a total national ban, pushing through a ban at various weeks of pregnancy or instating legislation to limit access to medication abortion.
Voters, showing they recognize abortion as a top priority, approved measures to expand or enshrine abortion access in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and New York.
Trump also won in deep-red Missouri and Montana and the swing states of Arizona and Nevada."Clearly, voters continue to be comfortable splitting tickets, both in terms of candidates but also when it comes to abortion rights ballot measures," Kelly Baden, vice president of public policy at the Guttmacher Institute, said.
What she's saying: This seeming contradiction between supporting abortion expansions and pro-life Republicans is not a new phenomenon.Baden pointed to Mississippi's 2011 "personhood" initiative, which was soundly defeated at the same time Republicans against abortion rights won in nearly all statewide races.
State of play: Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, voters in 16 states have weighed in on abortion-related constitutional amendments.Prior to this week's elections, in every state with ballot measures to expand abortion access, voters passed that expansion and it was a winning issue for Democrats in the midterms.
"One lesson is that we must better connect the dots for people that abortion is an economic issue," Baden said.
Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.
New @CookPolitical: as in 2022, House Dems are reaping a slight "battleground bonus" - they're on track to win ~48.5% of all major party votes cast for House but ~49.4% of seats. https://t.co/0PJ3t5gHGQ pic.twitter.com/XsK3CYf7Kn
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 9, 2024
Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Our next book will look at the 2024 election. Objective indicators were doing great. Perceptions, not so much.
On paper, the economy seems OK. Inflation is down recently. Wages are up. But anger persists. That’s because higher prices cause a special kind of pain — one that lingers and, historically, leads voters to punish the people in charge. Tuesday was no exception....
Why does inflation anger voters so much? Some economic problems, like high unemployment, affect only a minority of the population. But higher prices affect everyone.
Inflation also taps into what psychologists call “loss aversion”: People feel negatively about losses much more than they feel positively about gains. So although wages have kept up with inflation or surpassed it, people still feel more pained by sticker shock at the grocery store than elated by their gains.
To make matters worse, consumers can’t do much about inflation. They simply have to cut back their spending on certain things or work more hours to afford them. The sense of loss combined with a feeling of powerlessness leaves people furious. They expect their leaders to fix the problem.
Inflation fell to normal levels over the past year, but high prices remain. Eggs still cost nearly triple what they did four years ago. When people imagine an ideal end to inflation, they think of prices returning to normal. That hasn’t happened, and economists don’t expect it will. When the polling firm Morning Consult surveyed U.S. voters about inflation, they were comparing prices with those from 2020. They blamed President Biden and Harris for the increases since then, fairly or not.
“Americans were comparing this economy to one without inflation, whether or not that was a realistic option according to economists,” said my colleague Ben Casselman, who covers the U.S. economy. “They weren’t saying, ‘Inflation is tough, but at least I have a job thanks to Biden.’ They were saying, ‘Of course I have a job, but now I have to deal with all this inflation thanks to Biden.’”
The same dynamic is haunting leaders all over the world. Over the past few years, voters have thrown out incumbents, on the left and the right, in Britain, France, the Netherlands, Argentina, Italy and Australia. The top political parties in South Africa, Japan and India also faced disappointing elections. Canada’s and Germany’s incumbents are in danger of losing their jobs next year.
And while tens of millions of voters still cast ballots against Mr. Trump, he once again tapped into a sense among many others that the country they knew was slipping away, under siege economically, culturally and demographically.
To counter that, those voters ratified the return of a brash 78-year-old champion willing to upend convention and take radical action even if it offends sensibilities or violates old standards. Any misgivings about their chosen leader were shoved to the side.
As a result, for the first time in history, Americans have elected a convicted criminal as president. They handed power back to a leader who tried to overturn a previous election, called for the “termination” of the Constitution to reclaim his office, aspired to be a dictator on Day 1 and vowed to exact “retribution” against his adversaries.
Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.
One thing is certain about the current campaign: Trump isn't getting any younger. He is sundowning.
Tim Alberta at The Atlantic:Entering the final weekend of October, I noticed something in conversations with numerous Trump staffers: resignation. They had long since become accustomed to working in the high-intensity, zero-margin-for-error environment created by Wiles and LaCivita. But this home stretch of the campaign hadn’t just been hard and stressful; it had been disillusioning. Several campaign officials had told me, throughout the spring and summer, how excited they were about working in the next Trump White House. Now those same people were telling me—as paperwork was being distributed internally to begin the process of placing personnel on the transition team and in the prospective administration—that they’d had a change of heart. The past three months had been the most unpleasant of their careers. Win or lose, they said, they were done with the chaos of Donald Trump—even if the nation was not.
National politics getting you down? Are you tired of reading about the same old presidential and Senate races?Why does this matter? Because states are where much of today’s political action happens. Consider some of the top hot-button political issues of the past few years. Congress rarely passes bills on any of these topics, but state legislatures have enacted a flood of laws on them:
Good news: Legislatures in 44 states are also up for election this year, and they feature a bushel of nail-biters. Even more important: What happens in these races will reverberate in American politics for years to come.
Though Republicans enjoy a considerable state-level advantage — they control 28 state legislatures, to Democrats’ 20 — a healthy number of chambers are toss-ups. If Republicans have a good night, they’ll fortify their grip on state governments. But if Democrats outperform expectations, they could cut into the GOP’s 770-seat lead in state legislative seats nationally — and might even break some supermajorities in Republican strongholds.
Many pollsters now worry whether survey respondents are too Democratic-leaning relative to the electorate. In this survey, 40% of the respondents identify as Democrats and 31% identify as Republicans, even after weighting the data to match the demographics of the 2020 electorate.
But it’s not clear whether this Democratic-leaning sample is a problem. It does not match some other polls, which suggest a narrower party divide. But if Democrats end up being more mobilized to vote in 2024, this partisan imbalance could be a feature of this year’s electorate.
Or maybe not. It could be that Democratic voters are just more likely to take this poll – as was the case in 2020.
If it’s the latter, then the sample is “too Democratic” and needs to be adjusted further. Two common approaches are to weight the sample by partisanship or by self-reported vote in the last presidential election. But again, the right benchmark isn’t obvious.
For partisanship, pollsters often rely on benchmarks such as the Pew Research Center’s National Public Opinion Research Sample, which suggests that the country is evenly split – 33% Democrat, 32% Republican, and 35% independent – or Gallup’s tracking survey, which suggests that 28% are Democrats, 31% are Republicans and 41% are independents. If I adjust the raw data by both the demographics of the 2020 electorate and these party identification benchmarks, Harris’ margin is greatly reduced relative to the raw data and demographics alone:
Raw data: +6.0 Harris
2020 demographics: +9.0
2020 demographics + Pew party identification: +3.9
2020 demographics + Gallup party identification:+0.9
Hugh Dougherty at The Daily Beast:
Jeffrey Epstein described himself as Donald Trump’s “closest friend” and claimed intimate knowledge of his proclivity for sex, including cuckolding his best friends, according to recordings obtained exclusively by the Daily Beast.
The convicted pedophile even boasted of his closeness to Trump and his now-wife Melania by claiming, “the first time he slept with her was on my plane,” which was dubbed the Lolita Express.
Epstein spoke at length about Trump with the author Michael Wolff in August 2017, two years before being found dead in his jail cell. Wolff was researching his bombshell bestseller Fire and Fury at the time.
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On the tape Epstein can be heard saying, “He’s a horrible human being. He does nasty things to his best friends, best friends’ wives, anyone who he first tries to gain their trust and uses it to do bad things to them.”
On one occasion, Epstein alleged, Trump took a woman to what he called “the Egyptian Room” in an Atlantic City casino. Epstein alleged, “He came out afterward and said, ‘It was great, it was great. The only thing I really like to do is f--- the wives of my best friends. That is just the best.
He alleged that he and Trump would pick up women by combining to split them from their male companions. “We always used to go to Atlantic City to try to find girls in the casino,” he said. “And if there was a guy, I would say, ‘I’m here to invite the guy to go out to dinner.’ And he’d say, [to the woman], ‘Let me show you the casino.’ And as he walked out, he put his arm around the girl’s shoulder, and the bodyguard would walk up and Donald, whoosh, take the girl away.”
Epstein also alleged that Trump had an elaborate scheme to procure sex with his friends’ wives. He would call the men into his Trump Tower office to ask them about their sex lives and offer them sex with beauty pageant contestants, the pedophile said. He would do this while the wives were—unknown to their husbands—listening on speakerphone, so that he could then seduce the wives on the basis their husbands had betrayed them, Epstein claimed.
Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.
One thing is certain about the current campaign: Trump isn't getting any younger. He is sundowning.
Former President Donald Trump used apparent technical issues during a Friday rally to toy with the idea of attacking people working the event in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
“You’ve got to be kidding. Do you want to see me knock the hell out of people backstage?” asked the GOP presidential nominee, who called it a “pretty stupid situation” after rallygoers chanted “fix the mic” during his speech.
In 1948, Tom Dewey lost support from railroad workers and other blue-collar voters with a similar comment. Time, 10/25/1948
A slight misadventure at Beaucoup, Ill. almost spoiled that stop. Engineer Lee Tindle, who improved the time at these railway siding stops by taking on water, had overshot the water tank. Without realizing what he was doing, he backed the Victory Special into a gathering of admirers at the rear end.
The crowd fell back in panic. Dewey, startled, yelled “Whoops!” But the train moved only a few feet and Dewey, smiling wryly, addressed himself to the microphone. “That’s the first lunatic I’ve had for an engineer,” he declared. “He probably ought to be shot at sunrise but I guess we can let him off because no one was hurt.”
Disinhibition is a sign of dementia., Trump also simulated sex acts on a microphone:
Wow wtf is he doing pic.twitter.com/TNHFsQF2OH
— Acyn (@Acyn) November 2, 2024
Republicans won a staggering 680 seats across the country and took control of 22 state legislative chambers in a single night.
When President Obama acknowledged that Democrats took “a shellacking” in the midterms, he may have been primarily speaking about congressional races, but it was an even more apt description of the electoral carnage they suffered in state capitals across the country.
The ramifications of that GOP wave are still being felt today in state capitals across the map. In states like Wisconsin, North Carolina and Ohio, Republicans seized on their newfound power — and fresh Census data — to craft new legislative maps tilted decisively in their favor and dominate state House and Senate races for a decade. That’s enabled them to push through major conservative policy priorities like toughening voter restrictions, scrapping environmental protections and stoking culture wars over issues like LGBTQ rights and school curriculums.
Democrats have made steady inroads in recent cycles, pushing the balance of power in statehouses back in their favor. A huge shift occurred in 2022 when they secured ruling trifectas in Michigan and Minnesota, while flipping the Pennsylvania House. They are counting on taking another important step forward on Tuesday.
But Republicans begin with an edge. They currently hold 55 percent of state legislative seats,according to Ballotpedia , and maintain majorities in 56 legislative chambers, compared to 41 for Democrats. While Democratic gains in 2022 were centered mostly on the Midwest, Republicans strengthened their power in the South, widening margins in states like West Virginia, Kentucky, Florida and the Carolinas.
Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good.
Some Republican leaders -- and a measurable number of rank-and-file voters -- are open to violent rebellion, coups, and secession.
Trump on Liz Cheney: "Let's put her with a rifle standing there with 9 barrels shooting at her. Let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face." pic.twitter.com/Mtx1fbLtwE
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 1, 2024
Kamala Harris depicted as chained up behind golf cart during Pennsylvania Halloween parade https://t.co/dtdSXtngbI
— CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) November 1, 2024
