- Via the Des Moines Register: Pollster J. Ann Selzer: ‘I’ll be reviewing data’ after Iowa Poll misses big Trump win. I expect she will given that Trump won the state by 13 points (as of this morning).
- Carlos Lozada has a depressingly accurate list in the NYT: Stop Pretending Trump Is Not Who We Are.
- Via Axios: NC Democrats break GOP legislative supermajority.
- Via NPR: Sarah McBride becomes the first openly transgender person elected to Congress.
- Via The Hill: Florida’s abortion amendment fails, leaving 6-week ban in place.
- Via the AP: AP VoteCast: Harris voters motivated by democracy, Trump supporters by inflation and immigration. I think a lot of people are still mad about inflation and also think that it is possible to reverse it. Not only are prices not coming to come down (it doesn’t work that way). If Trump does what he says he wants to do, they are going to be going up.
- Jonathan Bernstein: Ugh. BTW, I think this is on target, all while agreeing we don’t really know for sure at this point.
I will speculate a bit. Incumbent parties have been doing badly around the world in the last couple of years in the wake of the pandemic and the fallout from the pandemic, economic and otherwise. Democrats did better than the Conservatives in the UK, or Macron’s party in France earlier this year. Everyone will want to attribute the election results to choices made by the candidates. But it’s quite possible – in fact, I strongly suspect it’s the case – that the Democrats ran a solid candidate who ran a good campaign, and the Republicans ran a terrible candidate who ran a mediocre campaign, but all of that only made it into a competitive race and couldn’t put the incumbent party over the top.1
One more time, however: We just don’t know yet.
- Julia Azari: Be wary of anyone claiming an election mandate. And I agree with this:
Others have been quick to observe that “Trump is who we are” – and that, too, is a truth that needs to be wrestled with. But “who we are” is not and never has been a single thing. The country has always had people pushing for change and justice, people putting all their efforts into maintaining unjust hierarchies, and all sorts of people in between. And this is where the attempt to construct a “mandate” for a single person chosen to lead a complex nation shows its impossibility. Whoever wins in a given election, the reasons are complicated, and there are lots of people who voted the other way.
And also,
As I wrote in 2018, elections are both complicated and simple. We are already seeing confident takes about what happened – the campaign, the Biden presidency, the misogyny and racism. And these can all be true. The fundamentals also explain what happened pretty well in the end – the post-pandemic status quo has been painful, and the public memory of the Trump presidency contains a lot of positive elements (mostly about the economy). As we wait to learn more, we can understand what happened yesterday as both very complicated and also very simple.
