Postmortems of the Democratic Party's loss, running well beyond the defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), are starting to come in from some of the party's most perceptive thinkers.
As we gather this Thanksgiving, it's easy to take abundance for granted.
One thing Hollywood is very good at is scaring the bejesus out of Americans -- even when they're merely spreading false fears.
As they carve their turkeys this year, Republicans can be grateful for Donald Trump, mapmaker.
Did anyone expect, when they heard the candidate's announcement at the base of the Trump Tower escalator in June 2015, that nine years later, he would be elected to a second term with sharp increases in Republican percentages from nonwhite people -- Latinos especially, but also Black and Asian people?
— Kamala Harris carried Virginia by close to 6 points this month. This was worse than Joe Biden’s 10-point showing in the state, although it was slightly better than Hillary Clinton’s performance, even as the latter had a Virginian (Sen. Tim Kaine) on her ticket.
— Much of the state’s movement to Donald Trump can be attributed to a pronounced rightward shift in heavily Democratic Northern Virginia.
— Though she lost ground overall, Harris held on to some of Joe Biden’s 2020 gains in many of the state’s more marginal localities.
— Though it was not a Toss-up state, in some ways, such as its internal swing and voting rhythms, Virginia was in sync with the nation as a whole.
— After the election, many took note of some seemingly unusual patterns in the presidential and Senate voting. Some winning Democrats in states that voted for Donald Trump, for instance, received fewer total votes than Kamala Harris, but still won while Harris lost.
— Some voters likely cast votes just in the presidential race, meaning that there were fewer votes cast in a state’s Senate contest compared to its presidential contest.
— However, there is nothing unusual about this compared to recent history. Senate races almost always have fewer votes cast than presidential races in presidential years.
— In fact, the average size of the Senate “undervote” this year was smaller than many other recent cycles.
— The third party vote was generally larger in key Senate races than in the presidential race, which likely also contributed to the outcomes in certain states. But a higher third-party vote for Senate is also not unusual—it was a feature of some of 2020’s closest Senate races, too.
People eagerly give money to rich environmental groups. The Natural Resources Defense Council has $463 million in assets.
Earlier this year, in one of the most absurd court rulings in modern times, federal judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google violated U.S. antitrust law by gaining a monopoly in the search engine markets.
America is outgrowing the Democratic Party.
Here's another way to look at why Republicans swept the 2024 elections: It's the fault, only partly, of course, of the gerontocracy of the Democratic Party. Going back through history, it's hard to find a time when a party's leadership was so far along in years. The founder presidents retired in their mid-sixties. Andrew Jackson retired at 69, Abraham Lincoln was murdered at 56, and Ulysses S. Grant retired at 54. Theodore Roosevelt died at age 60, Franklin Roosevelt at 63.
— Split outcomes between presidential and Senate results saw a resurgence in 2024, as at least four Donald Trump-won states sent Democrats to the Senate.
— Republicans still took the majority in the Senate because while Sens. Jon Tester (D-MT) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) performed notably better than Kamala Harris, they did not do so by enough to hold their seats.
— Across most key Senate races, Senate Democrats ran better than Harris in rural parts of their states but were comparatively weak in some suburban counties.
— In one of Harris’s best states, Maryland, former Gov. Larry Hogan (R-MD) stood out as Republicans’ top overperformer, although Harris’s 26-point margin in the state was too much for him to overcome.
Election 2024 is in the rearview mirror. Pollsters won’t be bombarding voters with phone or email polls. Today’s entertainment is liberal heads exploding on social media or the latest Democrat threatening but not actually following through on everything from drinking cyanide to setting themselves on fire or leaving the country if Donald Trump won the election.
I often report on fake "crises" pushed by media.
A few days before last week's election, Bernie Sanders issued a dire warning to voters: "If Donald Trump is elected, the struggle against climate change is over."
Shocked by Donald Trump's sweeping victory, Democrats are playing the blame game, and Joe Biden is the scapegoat.
Here are some observations on what you didn't hear on election night. Most networks' focus was, quite properly, on whether former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris would carry enough of the 93 electoral votes of the seven target states -- Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- to win the needed 270 electoral votes. Public polling, as reported and analyzed by websites such as RealClearPolitics and Silver Bulletin, had Trump ahead in most of the target states, but by microscopic percentages, and polling in both the 2016 and 2020 cycles had understated the percentages Trump ended up winning.
It seems that as more and more time goes by, my appreciation for the ingeniousness of our Founding Fathers elevates.
The most extreme accusations Democrats and Republicans hurl at one another today would be familiar to the Founding Fathers.
