How Sherrod Brown Lost Ohio

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Manu Raju and Clare Foran at CNN:

Sherrod Brown can boil down the loss of his Senate seat to this: Donald Trump and withering GOP attacks.

And the top of his ticket didn’t help him much, either.

As the veteran Ohio Democrat takes stock of the loss in his marquee race, he also has a blunt message for his party: Win back working-class voters or lose more elections.

“I think that we don’t appear to be fighting for them,” Brown said when asked why Trump won the same blue-collar workers whom the Democratic senator has prided himself in courting through the course of his three-plus decades in Congress. “Workers have drifted away from the Democratic Party.”

In a wide-ranging interview with CNN, Brown bluntly criticized his party for not addressing voter concerns over rising consumer costs and declining economic conditions. And he accused Republicans — including his foe in the Senate race, Trump-aligned businessman Bernie Moreno — of distorting his record as he battled the headwinds at the top of the ticket.

...

 “I lost, but we ran ahead of the national ticket,” said Brown, who fell to Moreno by 4 points. “When the leader of your ticket runs 12 points behind, almost, you can’t overcome that, even though it was a close race in the end.”

How Dems Lost Ground in Atlanta and Wayne County

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Our next book will look at the 2024 election. 

 Robert Gebeloff, Eli Murray, Elena Shao, Charlie Smart and Christine Zhang  at NYT:

In Atlanta and its suburbs, both candidates found new voters, but Ms. Harris’s gains in precincts where white voters were the largest racial or ethnic group were canceled out by losses elsewhere. Mr. Trump’s uptick in support from voters of color across Atlanta, along with improved performance in the state’s rural areas, was enough for him to win Georgia — a swing state he narrowly lost to Mr. Biden in 2020.

In Wayne County, which includes Detroit, Ms. Harris struggled to capture the support of Arab-American voters, many of whom had been turned off by the Biden administration’s Middle East policies. In a swath of voting precincts spanning Dearborn and Hamtramck, which have the nation’s highest concentration of people of Arab ancestry, Mr. Trump picked up thousands of votes compared with 2020, while the Democratic Party lost an even bigger number. Countywide, precincts with high shares of Arab residents made up just 6 percent of the electorate but accounted for more than 40 percent of the decline in Democratic votes.

The wins keep mounting for Deaborn in Trump's personnel choices: "In one video last year, he provided advice to Israeli leaders on how to prosecute their conflict with the militant group...“Kill every single one of them,” Gorka said. https://t.co/enGxSUTxSA

— Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) November 23, 2024

The House in 2024

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Laura J. Nelson at LAT:

In a major victory for Democrats, first-time candidate Derek Tran defeated Republican Rep. Michelle Steel in a hotly contested Orange County congressional race that became one of the most expensive in the country.

Tran will be the first Vietnamese American to represent a district that is home to Little Saigon and the largest population of people of Vietnamese descent outside of Vietnam.

The race was the third-to-last to be called in the country. As Orange County and Los Angeles County counted mail ballots, Steel’s margin of victory shrank to 58 votes before Tran took the lead 11 days after the election.

Tran was leading by 613 votes when Steel conceded Wednesday, and the Associated Press called the race for Tran not long after.

“Only in America can you go from refugees fleeing with nothing but the clothes on your back to becoming a member of Congress in just one generation,” Tran said in a post on X.

Tran was born in the U.S. to Vietnamese refugee parents. His father fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975, but his boat capsized, killing his wife and children. Tran’s father returned to Vietnam, where he met and married Tran’s mother, and the couple later immigrated to the United States.

“This victory is a testament to the spirit and resilience of our community,” Tran said in a statement. “My parents came to this country to escape oppression and pursue the American Dream, and their story reflects the journey of so many here in Southern California.”

In a statement Wednesday, Steel thanked her volunteers, staff and family for their work on her campaign, saying: “Everything is God’s will and, like all journeys, this one is ending for a new one to begin.”

Steel filed paperwork Monday to seek reelection in 2026. Tran did the same Wednesday.

The 45th District was among the country’s most competitive races, critical to both parties as they battled to control the House of Representatives.

With Steel’s loss, Republicans will hold 220 seats in the House, barely above the 218-seat threshold needed to control the chamber.

Just one House seat has yet to be called: In California’s agricultural San Joaquin Valley, Democrat Adam Gray holds a slender lead over GOP Rep. John Duarte in the 13th Congressional District, but the race remains too close to call.

FWIW, current counts of House districts drawn by...

Republicans: 180
Bipartisan/ind. commissions: 116
Democrats: 75
Courts: 58
None (At Large states): 6

Bottom line: it's impressive Dems nearly flipped the House majority given 1) GOP redistricting advantage 2) Trump's win.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 28, 2024

Biden and Inflation

 Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Our next book will look at the 2024 election.

Inflation was probably the most important reason for the Democrats' defeat.

William Galston at WSJ:

The administration’s economic strategy included industrial policy, worker power, antitrust policy, a shift away from free trade, and a reorienting of fiscal and monetary policy away from capital toward labor.

Several of these measures yielded tangible results, but the new macroeconomic policy proved fatal for the administration. The Hewlett report insisted that neoliberalism had hurt workers by focusing on inflation rather than unemployment. Why was it, the report asked, that after a long period of rock-bottom interest rates, inflation was “too low”? The report asserted: “If economic developments over the past decade show anything, it is that there is greater headroom for spending without causing undue inflation.” Governments, Hewlett argued, can spend more on efforts to boost demand “without worrying about inflation quite so frantically.”

A few months later, Mr. Biden signed into law the American Rescue Plan, a nearly $2 trillion stimulus package on top of the trillions the Trump administration had spent during the pandemic. Three years later, the consumer-price index showed a 20% overall price increase. The inflation over which the Biden administration presided dramatically undermined Kamala Harris’s electoral prospects.

Some Democratic-leaning economists have argued that inflation was a global, pandemic-induced supply shock on which fiscal stimulus had little or no effect. To his credit, Jared Bernstein, Mr. Biden’s chief economic adviser, doesn’t take this easy way out. In a recent interview with the New York Times, he said the inflation of recent years “was exacerbated by strong demand, no question. So I’m not giving fiscal policy a pass.”

GOP and Labor

In Defying the Odds, we suggest an under-examined reason why Democrats were unexpectedly weak in key industrial states;  union membership was way down.  Our next book examines the 2024 election.

Trump nominated pro-union Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon to labor secretary. Conservatives are unhappy.  Nick Catoggio at The Dispatch:

But a lot of conservative ideological mooring has come unmoored under Trump. Why hasn’t right-wing opinion about unions done so as well?

One reason, I assume, is the role teachers unions played in lobbying to keep schools closed during the pandemic after it became clear that children had little to fear from COVID. Despite politicians bending over backward to prioritize teachers’ safety, from ushering them toward the front of the line for vaccines to appropriating nearly $200 billion for public education to address COVID-related problems, unions encouraged friendly Democratic politicians to extend closures well into 2021. Parents’ outrage at the learning loss their children suffered may have helped reelect Trump; his nominees to fill the public health positions in his Cabinet are all “COVID contrarians,” coincidentally enough.

The human face of union opposition to reopening schools was Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers. She’s become a top-tier political villain in Republican politics because of it—yet there she was on Friday night cheering Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Labor Department. “It is significant that the Pres-elect nominated Rep. Chavez-DeRemer for Labor,” she tweeted. “Her record suggests real support of workers & their right to unionize. I hope it means the Trump admin will actually respect collective bargaining and workers’ voices from Teamsters to teachers.”

The implied warranty in Trump’s Us-and-Them brand of politics is that he’ll use public power to ruthlessly punish the right’s cultural enemies. That Weingarten, the dictionary definition of a tribal enemy, should be gratified by his choice on labor policy feels like a grievous breach of that warranty.

There’s another reason why Chavez-DeRemer might be hard for partisan conservatives to swallow, though. Compared with issues like government spending and foreign interventions, there’s been little ideological work done by populists to “uninstall” the Reaganite conventional wisdom on unions...

A lot of political energy has been spent over the last few years smuggling those ideas into mainstream right-wing thought. But comparatively little has been devoted to presenting organized labor as beneficial to the economy or useful to the working joes who voted for Trump on November 5.

That means unions are still “Democrat-coded.” The old Reaganite software on that topic is still running.

Janice Fine and Benjamin Schlesinger  at Boston Review:

In the blame game that followed Harris’s loss, union leadership has been clear: you can’t put this on us. They are only partly right. According to both public exit polling and internal union surveys, the labor movement came through and a large majority of union members voted for Harris. While some polls had Biden tied with Trump among union members before he dropped out, early returns in some battleground states showed a commanding twenty-point margin for Harris. In every swing state, UNITE HERE and the AFL-CIO’s field program made personal contact with millions of their members. Organizers persuaded tens of thousands of voters to side with their economic interests and reward the administration that had done so much for them with another term. That spadework is what labor has traditionally been good at. It’s entirely possible that unions’ internal organizing efforts saved Senate seats in Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan along with overperforming in down-ballot legislative races in Pennsylvania.

The Biden-Harris administration saw in unions what unions would like to see in themselves: a broad and powerful organization of the working class that could reshape American society and partner with them to end the neoliberal era. The problem with that vision is that it isn’t true. When only 6 percent of private-sector workers belong to unions, unions are no longer a legitimate stand-in for the working class.Most working-class Americans have no experience with unions in their daily lives.

The Lavatory Lady

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.  

Andrew Kaczynski, CNN:

Republican Rep. Nancy Mace as recently as last year called herself “pro-transgender rights” and said she supported children exploring gender identities with different hairstyles, clothing and preferred pronouns, a stark contrast to more recent comments that have put her in the national spotlight.

Last week, the South Carolina Republican introduced a resolution to amend the rules of the US House of Representatives to ban transgender women from using women’s restrooms at the Capitol and filed broader legislation that would apply to every federal building and federally funded school.

The resolution came in direct response to the election of Democratic Rep.-elect Sarah McBride of Delaware, the first out transgender person elected to Congress.

In hundreds of tweets over the last week, Mace has used a flood of anti-transgender rhetoric, including repeatedly calling transgender people “mentally ill,” which is a stark — and unexplained — departure from her past positioning as a self-proclaimed pro-LGBTQ Republican.

In July 2023, Mace described herself as “pro-transgender rights” and voiced support for children exploring their identities, such as by changing pronouns, hairstyles or clothing.

“If they wanna take on a different pronoun or a different gender identity or grow their hair out, or wear a dress or wear pants, or do those things as a minor –— those are all things that I think most people would support. Be who you want to be, but don’t make permanent changes as a child,” Mace said in an interview last year.

Mace made the comments in the context of saying she opposed gender-affirming care for minors.

Incumbency Wins

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Ballotpedia:

This year, 90% or more of incumbents won re-election in 43 states. In 2022, it was more than 90% in 41 states, and in 2020, it was at or above 90% in 47 states.

• Ninety-eight percent of congressional incumbents were re-elected in 2024, the same percentage as in 2022 and slightly higher than the 96% re-elected in 2020. In 41 states, all congressional incumbents who sought another term were re-elected. In 41 states, all congressional incumbents were re-elected, the same as in 2022. In 2020, voters in 38 states re-elected their incumbents who sought another term.
• At the state executive level, 96% of incumbents were re-elected, while 93% of state-judicial incumbents and 97% of state legislative incumbents who ran were re-elected.
• Local-executive incumbents had a 93% win rate, local judicial incumbents had a 98% win rate, and local legislative incumbents, such as city council members or other officeholders who write laws at the local level, had an average win rate of 90%.

School Choice Loses

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Eli Hager and Jeremy Schwartz at Pro Publica:

Coming into this week’s election, Donald Trump and Republicans had hoped to reverse that sort of popular opposition to “school choice” with new voucher ballot measures in several states.

But despite Trump’s big win in the presidential race, vouchers were again soundly rejected by significant majorities of Americans. In Kentucky, a ballot initiative that would have allowed public money to go toward private schooling was defeated roughly 65% to 35% — the same margin as in Arizona in 2018 and the inverse of the margin by which Trump won Kentucky. In Nebraska, nearly all 93 counties voted to repeal an existing voucher program; even its reddest county, where 95% of voters supported Trump, said no to vouchers. And in Colorado, voters defeated an effort to add a “right to school choice” to the state constitution, language that might have allowed parents to send their kids to private schools on the public dime.

Expansions of school vouchers, despite backing from wealthy conservatives, have never won when put to voters. Instead, they lose by margins not often seen in such a polarized country.

Not a Landslide

 Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Our next book will look at the 2024 election. 

Peter Baker at NYT:

With some votes still being counted, the tally used by The New York Times showed Mr. Trump winning the popular vote with 49.988 percent as of Friday night, and he appears likely to fall below that once the final results are in, meaning he would not capture a majority. Another count used by CNN and other outlets shows him winning 49.9 percent. By either reckoning, his margin over Vice President Kamala Harris was about 1.6 percentage points, the third smallest since 1888, and could ultimately end up around 1.5 points.

...

Mr. Trump would not be the first newly elected or re-elected president to assume his victory gave him more political latitude than it really did. Bill Clinton tried to turn his 5.6-point win in 1992 into a mandate to completely overhaul the nation’s health care system, a project that blew up in his face and cost his party both houses of Congress in the next midterm elections.

George W. Bush likewise thought his 2.4-point win in 2004 would empower him to revise the Social Security system, only to fail and lose Congress two years later. And President Biden interpreted his 4.5-point win over Mr. Trump in 2020 as a mission to push through some of the most expansive social programs since the Great Society, then saw Republicans take control of the House in 2022 and the White House and Senate two years after that.
...
Real landslides have been unmistakable, including Lyndon B. Johnson’s in 1964 by 22.6 points, Richard M. Nixon’s in 1972 by 23.2 points and Ronald Reagan’s in 1984 by 18.2 points. In the 40 years since that Reagan victory, no president has won the popular vote by double digits.
...

Mr. Trump’s 1.6-point victory is smaller than that of every winning president since 1888 other than two: John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Richard M. Nixon in 1968. In addition, two presidents won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote: the second Mr. Bush in 2000 and Mr. Trump in 2016.

Moreover, Mr. Trump had limited coattails this month. With some races yet to be called, Republicans were on track to keep almost exactly the same narrow majority in the House that they already had. The party picked up four seats in the Senate, enough to take control, a major shift that will benefit Mr. Trump. But even then, in the places where Mr. Trump campaigned the most, he failed to bring Republicans along with him in four of five battleground states with Senate races.

Not Believing in the Rule of Law or the Separation of Powers

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. As for devotion to the Constitution, the state of the GOP is not good. 

GOP Rep: If Trump says tariffs work, tariffs work. Donald Trump is really never wrong. Think about it. He is never wrong. pic.twitter.com/talzMZQoWQ

— House Judiciary Dems (@HouseJudiciary) November 15, 2024

Rep. Troy Nehls is all in:

"He's got a mission statement. His goals and objective, whatever that is, we need to embrace it... If Donald Trump says 'Jump three feet high and scratch your heads,' we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads."pic.twitter.com/PGVrSmr3CQ

— The American Conservative (@amconmag) November 13, 2024

Hannity: Would Trump have the ability to remove Jerome Powell?

Sen. Hagerty: President Trump certainly has a mandate that we've never seen before.

Fact check: false. Trump got less than 50% of the popular vote. His margin ranks 44 of 51 since 1824.pic.twitter.com/B9cLCTLLKz

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) November 22, 2024

MTG: “Whoever he nominates and appoints, you better pass them through the Senate. That is your job. You say ‘yes sir,’ and you get it done."

That’s not how it works @mtgreenee. The senators work for the American people, not for Trumppic.twitter.com/Cy3eAaUUuH

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) November 21, 2024

Gaetz as Caligula's Horse

Kyle Cheney at Politico:

Donald Trump is not a monarch.

That’s the unmistakable lesson of the ill-fated nomination of Matt Gaetz for attorney general. Rather than showcasing Trump’s absolute power over his GOP allies, it revealed his limits. The doomed nomination lasted just eight days — and its failure is an unwelcome lesson for the president-elect, who has been projecting invincibility and claiming a historic mandate despite his reed-thin popular vote victory.

“The short version is ‘checks and balances work,’” said Eugene Volokh, a UCLA professor of law.

Though Republicans will control both chambers of Congress, the resistance from Senate Republicans to Gaetz’s nomination proved that there are still some checks on Trump — no matter how limited — that can hold, despite fear on the left that he will squeeze Congress into submission, get carte blanche from the conservative-dominated Supreme Court and enact his agenda at will.

“I think it shows that Donald Trump cannot get anything he wants,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California-Berkeley School of Law.

Chemerinsky and others cautioned against extrapolating too much from the Gaetz debacle; he was so uniquely despised and compromised by legal and political scandal, and vying for a position that wields unique and extraordinary power, that his failed nomination may not be a harbinger of the pushback Trump may face for other nominees.

In fact, if Trump is able to muscle through his other controversial nominees, the lesson may be that Trump is more unchecked by Congress than ever, said Edward Foley, an Ohio State University constitutional law expert.

Fundamentals: Incumbent Parties Lost Ground All Over the World

 Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Our next book will look at the 2024 election. Inflation was a major cause of the Democratic defeat.

 

Just to clarify: this isn’t just the first time since WW2 that all incumbent parties in developed countries lost vote share.

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

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) November 7, 2024

Loyalty to Trump

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

— Philip Bump (@pbump) November 14, 2024

Andrew Kaczynski at CNN:

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:

“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.

— Melanie Zanona (@MZanona) November 13, 2024

Trump to Pentagon: Drop Dead

 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.

James Bickerton at Newsweek:

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."

 

 

Senate Elections and Coattails

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

The six-year cycle of Senate elections is crucial to understanding the chamber's partisan makeup.

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.

Calder McHugh at Politico:

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.

The Inflation Election, Continued

 Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Our next book will look at the 2024 election. Inflation was a major cause of the Democratic defeat.

Neil Irwin at Axios:

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.

Crime and California

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Tim Arrango at NYT:

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.

Abortion Ballot Measures

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.

 Ballotpedia:

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.

Sareen Habeshian at Axios:

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.

Aggregate Vote for the House

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

Inflation Election

 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.

German Lopez at NYT:

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.

 

Post-Election 2024: What's a President-Elect to Do?

The General Services Administration Runs the Transition:

• GSA continues to provide office space and support services to the President-elect and Vice President-elect, with support continuing up to 60 days after inauguration
• A classified summary regarding national security is given to the president-elect as soon as possible after the election
• Training and orientation activities commence for prospective presidential appointees (typically funded by Congress for the fiscal year in which the transition falls)
• 30 days before the expiration of the term, GSA begins support to outgoing president and vice president, with support continuing for seven months total.

Personnel:

• The Plum Book
• RFK
• Project 2025 database
• "You won't work in this town again."
• Schedule F

Policy: Unilateral Power

• Tariffs
• Deportation
• Pardons
• Prosecutions
• Ukraine
• NATO

Policy: Congressional Action

Mounting Discontent

 Bruce Mehlman:

Summing Up 2024

 Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.

Peter Baker at NYT:

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.

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