Some thoughts on last night
First, I think what happened (so far) is the most optimistic election result that anybody could have hoped for. Electoral college? Popular vote? Senate majority and growing? Probably keep the House with expanded majority? Yes, please. Trump’s margins may shrink and the growth in seats in the Senate and House may stall to something less than spectacular but this was an amazing result.
Second, I bet the Democrats will develop a strange new respect for the filibuster and federalism. Always remember in our system where ambition is to be checked with ambition, the reason you keep the filibuster around is not out of some sentimentality but rather because you will find yourself needing it one day.
Third, on the Powerline podcast last night Steve Heyward speculated if this was the election that finally marked the shift from the traditional media model to podcasts. Maybe though we’ve been waiting for that death for a while. There was a lot of chatter in the past about how social media was going to be the one to torpedo the “SS Traditional Media” (keep in mind the Russian influence hysteria of 2016 centered on their purchase of ads on Facebook).
Fourth, I would imagine this is finally going to mark the fall of the House of Obama and maybe even get him to move out of Kalorama. That’s okay, I’ve heard he was renting anyway.
Fifth, you can see Biden’s historical legacy taking shape among the Left. They had spent the past four years spinning him as worthy of Mt. Rushmore, one of the greatest presidents ever, and now they are going to pin the disaster of last night on him because he decided to run again. It won’t be Kamala, the symbol of the heroic woman of color who can do no wrong, because today’s Left doesn’t work that way. So it will be Old Man Biden who will get the chop.
Sixth, the saga of Biden over the last 18 months is the flip side of the Democrats clearing the path to the nomination in March, 2020 for him. Everyone assumed that he was going to be a transitional figure and only be a one-term president, but then he changed the deal and decided to run again and gummed up the works. There’s a lot there that we don’t know about the intra-party struggles among the Democrats regarding Biden’s deciding to run again, but in retrospect it was a worst-case scenario in the way he twisted the party around. If he was more than just a weasel with dementia I could see him doing an imitation of Darth Vader in Spring 2023, telling the Dems he was running again — “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”
Seventh, even better than Trump’s victory speech is all the wailing and gnashing of teeth among the lefty commentariat. Their spin? Evil, wicked America didn’t deserve Kamala. The country has failed her. The Left no longer recognizes the country they live in, and yes, they really do think Trump will be a fascist. Almost as good is when some of the other lefties try to point out some things out like, you know, if maybe the Democrats should have had a more inclusive message… they then get beaten into submission by the shrieking harpies. Good times.
Good times all, but it won’t last. This is merely the end of the beginning.
What happens next?
What happened last night was not only the most optimistic scenario in terms of election returns, but also in going forward for the next few months. The Democrats and the Left in general are in a state of shock and demoralization. If the election results were more ambiguous, with decisive races still being counted or capable of being lawfared, the line of resistance for the Democrats would be more clear. The Democrats could have been energized by the possibility of hope. Now there is no hope from the ballot box, rigged or otherwise.
However, the fundamentals remain. The Democrats have run a campaign casting Trump as not just a threat to democracy but as the second coming of Hitler. They see another Trump administration as the coming of the dark fascist night over America from which there is no return.
Steve Hayward allowed me to say a few words on the podcast last night, and as he caught me by surprise, my thoughts weren’t in proper sound-bite form. However, my point was that the Left has adopted a Manichean, apocalyptic worldview regarding Trump. Given that, it would be naïve to expect that they would simply throw in the towel on the election, and allow him to re-take the White House, on the presumption that they can fight him on the same subversive terms as in 2016; by their logic, we no longer live in normal times, and by extension to treat Trump’s return to the White House as a normal (though regrettable in their view) event is a historic act of moral cowardice.
There are other ways of stopping Trump from returning to office than just Constitutional means, and given the implied intent by the Left, all options probably have to be viewed from the standpoint of utility rather than legal or social norms. Assassination? Color revolution? To assume that these are off the table is to assume that the Left will simply unilaterally back away from all of their rhetoric, all of their extraordinary actions of lawfare and subversion, and say “my bad.”
To top it all off, the fact that Trump grew his coalition over the past few months with the addition of Musk and RFK frightens the daylights out of the Left, because Trump has promised to let them loose on the Beltway
The next few weeks will be critical. I expect between now and January 20th, at a minimum, some violence and Jan. 6 nastiness at least at the level of voting against certification. More than that? That’s going to depend on how broken the Left is by what happened last night, and on whether they can regroup over the next few weeks to accomplish anything more than spasmodic hissy-fits.
Keep an eye out for catalytic actions and other good ole Marxist revolutionary tactics. Large protests — say, along the lines of the big Palestinian protest in DC last November; actions that bring people together and give them a spark of hope. A crisis, contrived or otherwise. A scandal that can be used to revive people’s fears of a Trump presidency. It doesn’t need to have the support of the majority of the country, just enough support to get large crowds going, just enough to provide a hook for people to hang their emotional insanity on.
The next few weeks are going to be about getting the Democrats to accept defeat and to go gently into the good night.
If they do that? Good. Because the next step is shock and awe come January 20th.
One likely move — Trump will be sentenced, and the courts will have to step in to stay that action. Much howling over that will ensue.
Yes the sentencing may be one of those initial events.
I was amused to see this Tweet from Jeff Besos
“Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing
@realDonaldTrump”
all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.”
https://x.com/JeffBezos/status/1854184441511571765
Power Is more about perception and direction than a specific assessment Of an external reality. Besos is signalling to the non-Trumpers, essentially giving them permission, that it is okay to not go along with Left, that their power is broken (for now)
Besos has made his peace with a Trump presidency and much like Soon supporting Trump explicitly, he is daring the Left to stop him from exposing them as a paper tiger.
At the very moment when the left needs to unite for a desperate push they have Bezos Trying to start a preference cascade
Now, if only all the parasites that have promised to leave the country would do so, forthwith.
A small reminder of what I hope are positive ramifications outside the U.S.
https://nypost.com/2024/11/06/us-news/irans-currency-falls-to-an-all-time-low-as-trump-clinches-the-us-presidency/
An interesting question…..
https://x.com/zerohedge/status/1854144250562429081
So right now she sits at 67 million and Trump just shy of 72 or 139 million total votes. Note while the counts haven’t been completed yet there’s not going to be a sharp change in the total number of votes cast.
In 2020 Trump received just over 74 million so Biden movies 81 million provides 155 million. Note Trump’s votal is roughly equal for both years
Note 3rd party totals for both 20/20 and 2024 or about the same 3 million
So what happened to those 13 14 million voters from 2020 to 2024? They didn’t change their vote Trump in the third parties have roughly the same as 2020.
They just disappeared
THANK YOU, GOD!
So what happened to those 13 14 million voters from 2020 to 2024?
Notable figures such as Elon Musk, RFK jr., and Tulsi Gabbard have lept out of the leftist loony bin. It seems logical to me that others less renowned would also jump ship. Perhaps they “forgot” to stuff ballot boxes, or just didn’t find the time to swap out flash drives and replace them with others preloaded with extra demonrat votes. There were also plenty of posts on X about demonrats attempting some scheme and being blocked by team Trump lawyers, so perhaps we can thank Lara Trump for the win.
That said, I still don’t trust the results. Dominion voting machines are still out there, switching votes, and there were still the usual truck loads of ballots “found” at 2am. I bet this cost the GOP many seats, including 2-3 US senate races.
It’s an obvious tautology to note that things work until they don’t. The present regime was started by FDR almost a century ago, based upon certain assumptions that are now obviously false, yet the regime still operates as if nothing has changed since circa 1950. I still recall the celebrations when they passed Obamacare and acted as if they’d guaranteed themselves perpetual power- and now the public discourse continues essentially as if Obamacare doesn’t exist and never even happened. That’s not success.
People have lived through their tricks before. There was apparently a full court press to make the Trump-loves-Hitler story a major scandal- an October surprise, as it’s known- yet it immediately became a joke.
At the very moment when the left needs to unite for a desperate push they have Bezos Trying to start a preference cascade
I recall Scott Adams noting Trump was doing A/B testing at his rallies during the 2016 campaign. That is, Trump would try out which statements got applause and which didn’t and use that to craft his campaign message. It seems to me that the 2016-2020 and 2020-2024 presidential terms have essentially been A/B tests as to which post-FDR sociopolitical regime has the best plan for the future.
Bezos and other billionaires seem to have noticed recent events and they don’t appear to like the communist future the left has planned out for them.
Who could have thought billionaires would notice political trends and react accordingly?
Not the flailing remnants of the FDR coalition, who remain too busy frothing at the mouth to notice reality.
Ugly times are still ahead but perhaps less ugly now.
For us – my daughter and I – we’re just happy to have it over, and done so conclusively that there never seemed to be any chance of thousands of fraudulent ballots appearing out of boxes and suitcases, fed through the scanners in the wee hours, after sending the poll observers home. At least, that was prevented from happening this time.
Now … I guess we buckle down and endure the screams of dismay from the proggies.
I do think that the establishment mainstream media has been defanged; they had no power over the electorate, as hard as they tried with the “Trump as Nazi” and accusations of welshing on paying for the burial of that poor murdered Army soldier. That all got shut down even before it took off, through various alternate media. The establishment media tried their best to haul Kamala-walla-bang-bang across the finish line, and failed utterly. Something has got to come of that.
Yes, the Demonrats still have total control of government media, Big Law, Big Bureaucrazy, and their AntiFa rent-a-mobs … along with an apparent supply of willing assassins. It is safe to predict future disruptions.
Let’s not forget the weakest link in the chain — the execrable performance of Institutional Republicrats in Congress. Too many seem to be closet Demonrats, and they will certainly work to thwart any good things which President Trump tries to achieve.
And there are always those assassins. Remember when smart people argued that the reason Kamala was picked as Biden’s VP was to make sure that no Demonrat would want to remove Biden from office? Maybe the best way of protecting President Trump from further assassination attempts would be for JD Vance to become more like Russia’s Medvedev. Make the Demonrats want to keep Trump in place, because his replacement would be much more hard-line.
One of the things to keep an eye as a side project is what the Democrats do here in the next few years, An electoral loss, in reality a shellacking, should spark a rethink about not just strategy but also a reorganization of the various factions in the party.
Back in the 1980-90s, there was the Democratic Leadership Council which sought to respond to the Reagan challenge by pulling the party to the right, that’s how we got Clinton. Obama, especially by 2012, was a rejection. Will there be such a move now?
The problem for us on the relative outside is that the information is signal is badly corrupted, the media just doesn’t fall into its old habit of telling stories instead of providing the raw info but it is an active participant in palace politics. To get a better idea we have to cross-reference what we are told by what we see, revealed preference, in terms of what they key players actually do.
The Democrats had a problem in the 1980s that they thought they were basically sound, they just needed to try harder and find the right candidate, the DLC thought otherwise and they provided the organizational muscle to take advantage of the opportunity provided in 1992.
It’s not clear that if and how the Democrats will have a “come to Jesus moment.” The immediate post-election analysis is that Trump won because he snookered the population – MAGA, Hispanics, black males – by either explicitly strongman appeals or that people who should no better (non-whites) were voting on economic grounds instead of their true self-interest (i.e. chickens voting for Colonel Sanders) The other problem is that while the Republican victory was comprehensive and decisive it was not an overwhelming landslide. There is still room for self-delusion among Democrats that one more push would have done it, also they would be in a great position to pick up the pieces after Trump fails. The old “Nach Hitler, uns” argument from the German communists in 1932.
Publicly the initial reaction is to pin this on Biden and not Kamala. They cannot with Kamala, because as a woman of color she cannot be seen to fail of her own flaws but rather because race traitors like Hispanics and black males are misogynistic. They also cannot blame Biden’s policies because they were the Left’s policies, so they blame him for not getting out of the way in 2023 not so that there could be a proper vetting through a competitive primary process but to allow more time for people to get to know Kamala.
Yes it’s a delusion but right now they are coping. I’m guessing we won’t see signs of a re-think until the first months, year of Trump takes place. We’ve relly have never been in a “second term” like this before. Traditionally second term administrations are a disappointment; the elite team of the first administration is gone and the second team doesn’t match up, also people are just exhausted. This won’t happen here – Trump might be a lame duck by year 3 like other 2nd term presidents but he’s coming on a full head of steam.
How the Democrats respond in the next 6 months to Trump (assuming no extensive per-inaugural chaos) will go a long way to determine which way the party goes in the next 4 years. The biggest known unknown is the Progressive and also more radical wings of the party expended themselves and therefore can be isolated. There’s such a coherent metaphysical world view that is so diametrically opposed to traditional American politics it’s not clear they can ever be reconciled to a Shapiro or more moderate Democrats in anything more than a tactical sense. At least with Clinton in 1992 and then in 1996 he was dealing with severe policy difference, not with people who wanted to overthrow the entire American way of life.
I expect we’ll see from the outside whether and how the Democrats respond to the Trump challenge and whether there is a 2025-26 version of Clinton in terms of a leader. The Democrats have a growing weakness for the past three election cycles in that there is nobody who can keep the party together by stiff-arming the radicals while appealing to the country at large. Hillary was merely a product of the larger Clinton machine and was a terrible candidate and from there is was downhill for the Dems. The entire 2020 primary cycle was trying to find someone besides Bernie Sanders – Buttigieg, Warren, Klobuchar, even Kamala had their turn – the party finally settled on Biden because they could market him as the seemingly moderate front man and hide him in the basement during COVID. Kamala in 2024? Please.
We will see how this plays out in two phases – how they fight the next year or two will set the stage for the Democrat’s nomination battle in 2025-2026. That battle, say between a Shapiro and Newsom and the prior battle will give use signals whether the Democrats are willing to take seriously the problems they have.
To that I don’t know. Monday I expected that battle in part to take place between election and inauguration of Trump won. It looks like now between disarray and shock that battle will come in response to what will more than likely Trump’s shock and awe campaign upon taking office.
My best prediction is that the Democrats are going to have go through a lot more pain and delusion before reforming themselves. Let’s hope they don’t try something really stupid and have the color revolution I was expecting to happen, happen during the Trump presidency.
To drive your enemies before you and hear the lamentations of the talk show hosts.
https://nypost.com/2024/11/07/entertainment/jimmy-kimmel-stephen-colbert-fallon-melt-down-over-trumps-election-victory/
It used to take car loads of paper and barrels of ink, then hundreds of transmitters and thousands of engineers and technicians. Now, all it takes is an audience and a phone. And if I knew a sure fire way of getting the audience, I’d be posting this from my super yacht.
I think one thing that would help the news media immensely would be to end the “Crossfire” format. Few people realize how damaging and corrosive that show was. It’s one of the few things Jon Stewart has ever been right about.
Most cable news shows appear to be Crossfire clones. Jake Tapper (or someone) introduces a story, then introduces a panel, and they proceed to argue about it. There seems to be an assumption that whoever is watching already has a passing familiarity with the story itself, and the debate suggests there are only two ways to feel about it. So we get little actual information and only messaging based on emotion, not analysis.
It wasn’t always like this. Most readers will probably remember the old format, largely maintained by the networks’ evening news shows. An anchor comes on, introduces the story, then throws to a reporter who recapitulates the story and fleshes it out with pictures and interviews. The editorializing comes from the anchor himself, rather than the panel.
In my opinion, if cable news returned to the “anchor/reporter” format, just presenting domestic and international events, they would gain a lot of credibility and the absence of arguments by panels would bring the temperature down and make viewers have to make up their own minds about the information. CNN’s Headline News was excellent at this. You would know a lot of what you needed to know in half an hour, including international news from all corners of the globe. If you wanted more depth, you could always flip over to CNN.
The point is that the news should not be something that is debated about. That makes reality appear to be fungible, and leads to the bubbles we all live in.
So: things should go back to the way they used to be. You may now kindly get off my lawn.
A note on supposed ‘millions of missing votes’ from Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt today …
“ADDENDUM: If you see that “there are 20 million missing voters” meme or argument going around, keep in mind that a bunch of the western states take an unforgivably long time to count the vote, and if they weren’t safe Democratic states, this would be a much bigger issue. As of this writing, Thursday morning, California has just 60 percent of the vote counted. There will probably be around 6 or 7 million more votes to be counted, and I’d expect a roughly 60–40 split in favor of Harris. Oregon has only 78 percent of the vote counted, and Washington State has just 71 percent of the vote counted. Arizona has just 70 percent of the vote counted, Colorado has 81 percent, Mississippi has 81 percent, New Jersey has 91 percent, Maryland has 82 percent, and Maine has 93 percent. So the total votes will increase, and either come closer to the 2020 vote total or perhaps even surpass it.”
The Election Lab at U of FL has projected about 159 million ballots were voted, roughly 1 million less than in 2020. Turnout was down to 64% from 66% but the number of eligible voters increased by 5 million from 2020.
Christopher,
Thanks for posting that. I had seen something earlier but didn’t get to it. California as of this morning was at 59% counted. Unbelievable. As bad as Maricopa County is, California is even worse
I think one thing that would help the news media immensely would be to end the “Crossfire” format. Few people realize how damaging and corrosive that show was.
I feel duty bound to defend Crossfire at least a little because I used to watch the original. It reminded me of the America that would watch political debates as entertainment- e.g., the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
I’m not sure sure how debating the issues could be corrosive, unless your position will melt away under scrutiny. I bet that’s why Jon Stewart didn’t like that format- he’d have to defend an actual position against an adversary instead of doing the clown-nose on/clown nose off shtick he did on his show.
An anchor comes on, introduces the story, then throws to a reporter who recapitulates the story and fleshes it out with pictures and interviews.
No one today will believe that this scenario is anything other than a construct created to enable a lie.
The point is that the news should not be something that is debated about.
Why not? Why shouldn’t we be able to debate anything at all? Why should anyone trust a talking head on a TV set or phone or monitor if the only thing they’re willing to do is make unchallenged assertions?
I say no one should- and today no one does.
The Crossfire I remember wasn’t a debate or even an argument in that neither side ever seemed to pay any attention to anything the other side said but rather just kept delivering the same talking points past and over their opponent, over and over, at high volume. Maybe that was just the few I happened to watch.
A Deep State faction that runs figurehead candidates eventually won’t care about elections at all.
The Crossfire I remember wasn’t a debate or even an argument in that neither side ever seemed to pay any attention to anything the other side said but rather just kept delivering the same talking points past and over their opponent, over and over, at high volume.
By the time it degenerated into that shinola I’d quit watching the original and all its clones. I’m not going to condemn anyone for not liking the format, considering how it ended.
A Deep State faction that runs figurehead candidates eventually won’t care about elections at all.
True- and I think they’ve reached that point now.