Republicans win everything

140 thoughts on “Republicans win everything”

1. I wanted the dems to win because I deeply dislike Trump, but I knew the election was theirs to lose.
   Here are two opinion pieces explaining (some) of what went wrong and predicting our current, quite depressing situation:
   https://www.thefp.com/p/progressives-blew-it-crime-open-border-identity-politics-kamala-trump

   And:
   https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-ideological-litmus-tests-are-turning-states-red-opinion-1978920

   Also, I was (and still am) upset with Kamala for skipping over Josh Shapiro, and I definitely think the reason was him being Jewish. That poor decision probably cost her Pennsylvania. All of this is to say – the democrats just kept sabotaging themselves in a cascade of very shitty (excuse my French) decisions. Trump is absolutely insane, but the democrats came across as incredibly stupid.

2. “Beyond that, I can make no predictions save that Trump will not be elected again.”

   Of course not. The last free and fair election in the US was yesterday. It’s all over.

   1. I do not agree with that. I think that we will have one in two years–the midterm.

   2. Ridiculous.

3. Yes that was a great conversation between Harris and Shapiro. Both were eloquent.
   For fun I asked ChatGPT to redo it:
   https://www.integralworld.net/visser373.html

   “If Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro were to discuss what could happen to U.S. stability and division if Trump wins or loses the next election, their views would likely reflect deep concerns about polarization, though they’d approach the issue from different angles.”

4. *Sigh* I woke up the same way, having kept the tv off last night.
   I could say something. Make a pointy point, maybe, but right now I am going to just carry on with my day.

5. All along I felt that she was a far better candidate than was Trump. She lost, I think, because she was not sufficiently centrist, and because she didn’t show, as Presidents must, that she had the ability to think on her feet.

   You are probably correct about the centrist thing, but being able to think on your feet isn’t necessary. Tr*mp can’t think on his feet either. In fact, I don’t think it’s long before he won’t be able to think at all.

   Sitting here on the wrong side of the Atlantic, my take is that the difference is that the Democrats wanted a good president, but the Republicans wanted to win. Tr*mp’s faults are many many times worse than Harris’s and yet we heard criticism of her from both sides. She never stood a chance.

   Now you have a government that is totally controlled by Republicans. The Democrats will never have effective power again because, by the time they get the GOP out, all the federal judges will be Tr*mp shills and they’ll strike down everything a future Democrat government will try to do..

   I’m sorry and I hope I am wrong, but the USA is screwed. And, by extension, the rest of us in the free World are screwed too.

   1. Trump, I’d say, CAN think on his feet: he just gives answers that often seem demented. And he does espouse policies, even though many of them also seem bizarre.

      1. Ask “What will u do for gay people?”

         Harris would go on a combobulated winding road of policy wonkery and a complete history of gay discrimination in America.

         Trump “Gay people? We’ll have more jobs for gay people than they’ll know what to do with. And we’ll secure the borders and make them safe! Them and everybody else!”

         And it works. If you can’t answer a question in 10 seconds don’t answer it.

         1. +1
            Good for any question.

6. All I have to express is gratitude to PCC(E) for the principled approach to discussion on this website. For modeling the free speech principles in e.g. Kalven, but also Hitchens, and so on, which guarantees contradictory thought in competition. I am continually struck by how frank / based PCC(E) can get and that is admirable – not getting caught up in a political breeze, even though I can tell some things are hard to admit as they can conflict with our Ideals. For letting users express themselves with the important proviso to be ready to back it up. The challenge has driven me to try doing better each comment, and I look forward to more.

   Let Friends Be Wrong
   (Attr. T. Jefferson)

   E Pluribus Unum
   -United States motto ca. 1776

   Live Long and Prosper
   -Vulcan salutation

   1. +1

7. Sadly, I called this election for Trump a few days ago in an email to my sister, who lives just outside Portland, OR. Biden should never have been the candidate and the attempts to defend him after his disastrous debate performance just made those around him look like fools when he eventually bowed to the inevitable. Harris was not a good candidate – a primary of some sort should have been held.

   If the Dems hadn’t drunk the Kool-Aid and supported allowing men to self-identify into women’s sports, prisons, and other single-sex spaces and services, and they hadn’t endorsed “gender-affirming healthcare” for gender-confused children and young people despite the absence of any sound evidence, they wouldn’t have given Trump such an easy victory.

   I sincerely hope that they learn a lesson from this, but I’m not holding my breath. Meanwhile, they just got the divisive Proposition 1 passed in New York – so there’s a long way to go…!

   1. and the Dems will lose again in four years as they won’t give up their woke policies in only four years.

      1. There are the mid-term elections in 2 years, which often gives the out-of-power party more leverage. As for the next presidential election, well that will be a toss-up now since who knows who will run in either party?

   2. That’s a pretty good summary. Several people have said publicly that they wouldn’t vote for Harris, or would even vote for Trump, even though they had always voted Democratic, because of wokeness. Considering the cancellation faced by those who speak out against wokeness, probably only a tiny minority speak out and there is a significant number of such people.

      The Democrats lost big time, against arguably the worst Republican candidate ever. Will they try to figure out why or just try to find someone to blame? I’ve already heard claims that Harris lost because she is non-White and/or a woman. I seriously doubt that. (And the same people would be overjoyed had she won even if she had won because she is a non-White woman.) Also, the Democrats lost both houses of congress. Congress doesn’t always go the way of the President, so trying to say that it is racism and sexism which cost them the election is probably not the correct answer.

      1. As someone posted on Mumsnet earlier:

         What a surprise that “Trump is completely crazy!” doesn’t work as a strategy when voters can see you the next day saying “yes some men are women now”.

         If you’re going to run on a platform of sanity, probably try and look sane would have been a good starting point. I don’t believe that gender ideology sways a large amount of votes in and of itself but I think it should be obvious that it allows many millions of normal people to see that the Democrats/left can also be completely loopy, rendering your main attack strategy of “we’re the sensible ones” null and void.

         In the meantime, the Canadian government should be looking south and taking notes.

   3. +1 JezGroves / Proposition 1 – doesn’t it mean Equal Rights and Abortion for all? Meaning women have rights, but some woMEN have even more?

      1. I believe so. Although, for example, males having the right to compete in female high school sports is already enabled in New York, by incorporating this into the state’s constitution the protection of this right is strengthened.

8. Hopefully a Trump administration will reverse the Biden/Harris policy of having NSF spend fully 25% (!) of the money that is supposed to fund scientific research grants on DEI instead, such as a “study” to determine whether the use of whiteboards instead of blackboards is racist.
   https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2024/10/new-cruz-investigation-reveals-how-biden-harris-diverted-billions-from-scientific-research-to-dei-activists

   1. The more likely outcome is just a massive cut to all science agencies across the board. It is what Trump tried unsuccessfully to do in 2016, and with him promising huge cuts to federal agencies this is more likely. That’s actually much worse in my mind than the DEI nonsense. The same is true about universities. Pretty sure the new administration will go hard Title 6 on private universities, meaning that STEM faculty might not be able to get federal grant $$ (whatever is left of it) even though we are the ones who were against the protest nonsense the most.

      The medicine will be worse than the disease unfortunately.

      1. Elon Musk will stop Trump from destroying science.

         1. Hardly. Elon Musk is not a friend of science.

            1. Why do you think that?

            2. I cannot understand this comment at all.

         2. Musk isn’t interested in science beyond how he can profit from it. He’s an entrepreneur, not a researcher. As such, he has no use for academic research. If he’s put in charge of cutting government spending, he will assuredly cut that.

   2. Worst case is a big cut to science and the DEI stays because Trump can’t be bothered to actually do anything about it.

9. This will affect us Canadians too, but obviously we get no say in it. I had come to a point where I would have been happy to see Harris win (and Trump would get what he deserves), and also consoled myself that if Trump won, there would be less woke nonsense. It seems clear that the average American doesn’t like what the Democrats have been offering. Now we will have to renegotiate NAFTA all over again, no doubt at dreadfully disadvantageous terms. At least Israel will get support now, but the poor Ukranians….

   1. Chris you ticked off every one of my thoughts in this.
      We must be some kinda weird WEIT twins!
      best,
      D.A.
      NYC

   2. The Democrats have been horrible to Ukraine as well. When Trump finally relented and the Congress voted the $60 billion aid package, Biden’s administration delivered only about one tenth of it. To cap it all, Ukrainians are not allowed to strike deep into Russia with the little they have, because it would be “escalation” (while Russia bombing children’s hospitals, slaughtering civilians and razing whole cities is apparently OK and no escalation). Biden insisted to give more protection to Russian bombers than to Ukrainian civilians.
      These days, a Ukrainian general in an interview stated what had been a public secret for a year: in 2023, Americans leaked to Russia the plans for the Ukrainian offensive so that it would be thwarted. It is no coincidence that the only successful Ukrainian military campaign since the end of 2022 was the incursion into Kursk, which had been kept secret from the USA.

10. Hopefully this election loss will serve as a dope-slap (as applied by the Three Stooges) to Democrats, so they start listening to people like James Carville, and rethink their policies. Race-based favoritism, and forcing people to accept into bathrooms, and sports men who think they are women are stupid ideas, and losing policies. The anti-western bent of the far left, and avoiding calling out the excesses of Islam also needs to change. Of course, my party may resist change and become even more irrelevant.

    1. Another Biden policy that cost the Dems dearly was over three years of an open border. This came up over and over on comment boards I’ve seen.

       Let’s hope the Dems recalibrate and head back from these extreme positions.

       1. I’ve gotten really tired of the argument that Trump is a threat to democracy. Well, so are the Dems. Even though they have never tried to sabotage the peaceful transfer of power, the Dems adopted an illiberal creed – wokism – that is out of sync with what the American electorate wants. The Dems concerns with the preservation of democracy is very selective. When it comes to abortion, for instance, the Dems shout that SCOTUS and the Republican party is out of sync with what Americans want. But there are at least half a dozen of political issues where Dems also have taken positions that are very much out of sync with what American voters want. Can there be something more anti-democractic than what the Biden administration did with its Title IX rewrite? (And this is just one example. I could give more.) For those who are surprised by the outcome of this election, I recommend reading this book (it explains it all):
          Ruy Teixeira and John Judis: Where have all the Democrats gone? New York, 2023

          Now I will have to put up with all the whining that Kamala Harris didn’t get elected because she was a woman and she wasn’t white. The truth is that she was a bad candidate (as Jerry and Andrew Sullivan have argued persuasively) that Biden settled the Dems with in the highly delusional belief that at his advanced age we owe him a second term (thus depriving the Dems of a competitive primary).

          1. Agree. She reminds of our PM, Justin Trudeau, who has governed far to the left. He’s pretty unpopular now, down in the polls and he’s a white man.

          2. Of the major issues from abortion to gun control, the public overwhelmingly supports the Democrat positions. But the MAGAs were able to steer the conversation to trans rights and to immigration, and to the economy, even though the Democrats handled supply chain disruptions, caused by the pandemic and wars, and inflation as well as anyone could, and better than all the other industrialized nations. But that was too complex an issue for average voters to understand. All they knew was that eggs cost more now.

             Immigration is certainly where the Dems failed, even though their policies were virtually the same as Trump’s except for child separation. They should have made a show of cracking down on it. But the reality is that any administration that deports millions of immigrants will crash the economy and cause inflation to soar. They are an essential part of the workforce. Again, an issue average voters fail to understand.

             1. Having an orderly immigration system will not crash the economy. Very few Americans want to stop immigration altogether.
                Oh, and the issue on which the Dems are representing the voters (you mention abortion and gun control), those issues become ipso facto the major issues on which the election should be decided. And the issues where the Dems are out of touch with what voters want are ipso facto issues that should not matter. I did not know that.

          3. I put that book on my “for later” list at our library. It sounds like an interesting read Thanks. That “for later” list is growing mighty long…

    2. I would like to think so too but it didn’t in 2016 so probably won’t now either

11. I think the outcome isn’t a very big surprise. For all the handwringing about polls, this was the best performance for polls since 2012 at least in a presidential election. The polls basically had the race nearly tied in the popular vote, and Harris narrowly losing all of the sun belt swings, and *maybe* a sub 1 point lead in the blue wall states. In the end all of these aggregated poll numbers were off in Trump’s favor by about 1 or 2 points (polling error is almost always correlated in one direction as swings are often approximately uniform). That’s pretty decent. More similar to good polling years like 2004. The result should be no shock.

    I think postmortems will zig and zag in all directions. The overall one I believe is most true is simple: Biden is remarkably unpopular. Inflation and immigration were the stories of the election. Biden talked in 2020 as if he would be a transitional president, but decided not to be-holding on way too long. By the time he was forced to step down, it was quite difficult to fight the tide. Not having a real process to pick a new candidate, and picking the VP of the failing one, made it impossible for Harris, regardless of her abilities or true positions, to be the change candidate vs Trump. Voters simply thought he will handle these 2 big things in a better way, and it may well have been the case that they would think that regardless of who ran for the Democrats. I obviously think Shapiro was the right VP pick (and a better P pick!!)-it wouldn’t have mattered I think even in PA, at least if we are talking about VP picks.

    Some other take aways: Hispanic voters have really fled from the blue side, more so than black voters (who have also been consistently shifting right for a while). A lot of this leaves the Democrats in an interesting and difficult position. Young black male voters, for example, poll consistently more as independent that reliably Democratic because they don’t like the social agenda of the party nor the economic one. They are to the right of the party socially, to the left of it economically. In some sense more like New Deal Ds than New Left ones. Will this move the party to the right/left on social/economic issues? Doubt it…

    Other take away-the influence of podcasters and people like Elon Musk with younger male voters is not to be ignored. This scares me a lot. As bad as our legacy media are as gatekeepers I think I prefer them to Joe Rogan…and there is not much you can do with this now. So, in the end, people seems to be ok with not just a guy who literally tried to subvert an election with scant evidence of fraud as president, but also perhaps RFKjr as the head of the CDC, etc. Dark times indeed.

    1. “Young black male voters, for example, poll consistently more as independent that reliably Democratic because they don’t like the social agenda of the party nor the economic one.”

       I think that many young black men are starting to see the Democrats as the party of women + soft/wimpy guys + LGBTQ/trans. Not the masculine image they are looking for.

       1. Sure-and I think that has always been true about black voters-they have always been more socially conservative (not just young ones or male ones in fact-although young/male the most). The difference is that young voters are not tied to the memory of the civil rights movement, and far fewer are tied to local churches. The latter 2 things were a force to get black people to vote en bloc, but the pull of that force has been diminishing for a while.

12. Of all the “why did Harris lose?” analyses, this one by moderate centrist Tracingwoodgrains is the best I’ve seen so far:

    https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/kamala-did-not-represent-the-center

    1. Yes I thought that one was good too. Fake centrism from Kamala was not convincing to enough voters.

13. Doesn’t surprise me. I live north of NYC, fairly close to the Bronx, and I could see a lot of enthusiasm for Trump, who was seen as an embattled underdog, and little energy for Kamala. Nobody seemed to like this woman.

    From the maps that show the voting results by county, you can see clearly that the Democrats have now become the party of the urban centers, with some rich suburban areas sprinkled in, and the Republicans have virtually everything else.

    Even so, this was the Democrats’ race to lose. It was obvious to anyone with eyes even two years ago that Biden was in no shape for a second term, and plans should have been in place, such as:

    Plan A: Biden announces early in his final year that he will not be running again, and anoints Harris as his successor, giving her plenty of time to prepare and build a following.

    Plan B: Biden leaves it late (as he did), but then the Democrats run an open primary. If Kamala wins that primary, it legitimizes her more and better prepares her. If she loses, the Dems get a stronger candidate.

    But they did neither.

    Instead we got Plan C: Democrats pretend that nothing is wrong with Biden for 3.5 years, except perhaps for a stutter. Then, they do an abrupt 180 and put him to pasture. They makes noises about an open primary for a replacement, then scrap that and abruptly decide to shove Kamala into the hot seat, giving her little time to craft her own image and no legitimacy.

    The Dems went with Plan C and wonder why they got shellacked….

14. The greatest country in the world. Could someone please explain this to me.

    1. See my reply to comment # 10 above. If you don’t want to buy the book by Teixeira and Judis or you can’t get it in another way (say, through the library), head over to the free substack site The Liberal Patriot and read what Teixeira posted there during the last 3 years or so.
       Teixeira is actually a senior political strategist affiliated with the Democratic Party (read his Wikipedia entry for more information about him). About 12 years ago he wrote a book predicting that the Dems would dominate US politics in the future – he did not foresee that the Dems would go woke … If you go woke, then you go broke, electorally. (Of course, I realize that the high inflation during Biden’s term did not help the Dems. But let’s face it: without the pandemic Donald Trump would have gotten reelected in 2020.)

15. I recently heard a pro-Trump Republican finally give an answer to “is there anything Donald Trump could do or say that would make you turn on him?”

    “Yeah — he could come into my daughter’s grade school and teach her that she might really be a boy.”

    I think the Democrats and much of the media seriously underestimated the impact of what was frequently dismissed as “culture wars”distractions — all the things that fall under the label “woke” or critical social justice. DEI, BLM, gender ideology, critical race theory, queer theory, and what seemed to be a general assumption that masculinity itself was toxic and standard virtues are “whiteness” were intruding into mainstream practice and, as both conservatives and moderate liberals agreed, into their lives without consent.

    What I see are a lot of people who believed Trump was a horrible human being and would make a bad president but believed the Democrats deserved to lose on this issue alone. They voted Trump. I couldn’t. I’m also filled with an uneasy sense of dread. But I predicted Trump would win because I couldn’t easily refute their arguments.

    1. I’ve pondered the Republican and Democratic election methods. I’ll suggest (using a very broad brush) that Democrats are much more concerned about reputation than Republicans. This has a positive side in that the Dems are more likely to be concerned about equality, racism, and ‘fairness’ and their virtue – but the downside is that all the attacks on the personality of Donald Trump and the ‘deplorables’ do not manage a palpable hit (which puzzles the Dems).

       The Republicans, and especially Donald Trump, are far more motivated by policies and actions and were given no reason to expect any from Kamala Harris.

       1. The Democrats have been yelling “racist”, “fascist”,”literally Hitler”, “transphobe”, “white supremacist” at everyone so incessantly for so many years that the words have ceased to have any meaning, people now just discount these epithets. And that has utterly blunted the Democrats only campaigning tool.

       2. “Democrats are much more concerned about reputation…and their virtue.” Freddie deBoer calls this “working the refs” or “big Mommy”.

          https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/big-mommy-is-not-coming-to-save-us

16. Sad to say, but Americans will get exactly the government that they deserve.

17. A long time ago, magicians learned how to manipulate human attention in order to make us see what they wanted us to see.

    I fear that modern magicians have learned how to use social media and the internet for the same purpose.

    1. During Trump’s first campaign, Scott Adams (the Dilbert cartoonist) argued that Trump would win because he was, quote, “a wizard” – someone who used well-ingrained techniques of persuasion and hypnotism to get the masses to dance to his tune. Adams thought that was great and did not give a damn to what ends Trump would use this power, but apart from that, he was apparently onto something.

18. 40% of Americans believe in creationism, and well over 50% of Americans believe in tariffs. According to the Harris Poll, 70% of Americans believe in astrology, and among millenials 32% completely believe in astrology.

    When you consider this, the election results are far less surprising.

    1. Have the statistics you cited changed (in the direction of more irrationalism) since Obama won the presidency twice? If not, then your argument falls flat.

       I have seen this so many times in the liberal media, like The New York Times – fans of the Democratic Party just don’t want to admit that the Dems have embraced a whole suite of unpopular issue positions like:

       1. be soft on crime (this one was renounced pretty quickly, but the fact that the party embraced it, even if only for a short while, is revealing about how the Dems have changed since, say, Obama),
       2. hiring quotas by sex and ethnicity (affirmative action and DEI, which is and was conceived as nothing else than an endrun around bans on affirmative action through popular referenda or legislative action),
       3. downgrading of educational excellence (to reduce measured ethnic disparities in academic achievement),
       4. abolishing women-only spaces (women’s sport, women’s prisons, women’s hospital wards, changing rooms, toilets, etc),
       5. defence of the affirmative approach in transgender youth medicine leading to the sterilization and mutilation of children (How is that different from female genital mutilation? Remember that the sequential adminstration of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones leads to sterility and severely degraded sexual functioning, if nothing else.),
       6. identity politics that divides us against each other,
       7. open borders,
       8. unrealistic climate change goals,
       9. suppression of free speech,
       10. the complete unwillingness of Dems to exercise political oversight of public universities when they stray from their mission of teaching and research and turn to political advocacy,
       11. discrimination against … well, if you are an old straight cis white male, you are ipso facto one of the worst people imaginable (unless you are Joe Biden, in which case the American voters owe you a second term as president, never mind your age.)

       I’m not surprised that the Dems lost. It’s richly deserved. Of course, Trump is an asshole, unfit to be president. (Harris though did not inspire confidence as to her own fitness for president. She was a bad candidate, though with a better fashion sense than Trump.)

       The sorry state of the Dems was, of course, covered up the fawning and biased news media coverage by the mainstream media. So I can see why the Dems’ loss yesterday comes as a rude surprise to some people.

       1. Peter, you nailed it.
          Regarding the fawning news media, I’m sure it gave tribal reassurance to many D’s (note the anger that the WaPo didn’t endorse Harris), but it also backfired when clear-thinking people noticed the obvious bias and lies that they perpetuated. Things like M. Raddatz’s fact check to JD Vance that it was “only a handful” of apartment complexes taken over by gangs (which in fact validated Vance’s claim), extreme one-sided fact checking, obvious selective editing of Trump quotes to cause outrage (Liz Cheney “firing squat”, dictator, fine people, etc.) and ignoring / playing down of any negative points about Harris.
          According to the Media Research Center, a conservative research group with probably some bias of their own, Harris received 78% positive media reporting since July, while Trump’s was 85% negative. While this works great for brainwashing some (one commenter’s noted Scott Adams, who has better things to say about this), others step back and say “wait, I just heard this, and they’re reporting it differently”. This leads to mistrust of the media – see Gell-Mann amnesia.
          Not to mention calling Republicans Nazis when they were the party with unanimous support of Israel while the Harris courted (or at least tried not to offend) supporters of Jew killing. Trump is a Nazi because he did a rally at MSG? Then I guess the Knicks must be Nazis too! Biden’s Philly speech with the red lights and him shaking his fists in anger looked much more like Nazi symbolism than any Trump did.
          Keeping Harris in hiding during the initial stages of the campaign, and then severely limiting her exposure to tough media questioning also hurt. I’d argue that had she been out there facing real questions from the media from the beginning, she would have probably failed terribly in the first couple of interviews but then would have become better at it in a short amount of time. It takes practice and she was not offered the chance to practice. The fact that this didn’t happen when she had a crack team of comms people around her tells me that maybe she was just innately horribly bad at it.

          We’ll move forward, and the error correction that we’re afforded by our democratic process will allow us to see how this goes over the next years and make changes.

    2. Harris talked about price control, which is worse than tariffs.

19. Biden should pardon Trump now.

    1. Nah. Why? A criminal is a criminal. Let Trump pardon himself, so that everyone can see what’s up.

    2. Yes, he should. The whole point of all the federal prosecutions was to prevent the voters from having the opportunity to re-elect Donald Trump, because they couldn’t be trusted to defeat him. Those efforts failed. So stop them. Second-guessing or pre-empting the judicial process in the name of the public interest in what pardons are for. For President Biden to do it in his last days would be a fitting non-partisan cap to his career that would show he understands the public interest beyond partisan politics. In this case there is a public interest in preventing a tradition becoming established that a departing president has to spend the last of whatever assets he still has in defending against ritual investigations and prosecutions by vengeful victors. Without an exemplary pardon, there is nothing to stop President Trump from sending Joe Biden into penury himself.

       The states can still have their way with him.

       1. “Yes, he should. The whole point of all the federal prosecutions was to prevent the voters from having the opportunity to re-elect Donald Trump”

          Being a convict or even jailed does not prevent anyone from running or being voted for.

          Trump committed NUMEROUS very serious crimes, and the DOJ was making him accountable.

          If anything, Garland had all the evidence to do everything he did right away, but waited two plus years to do anything about this. Its his fault alone that the cases got delayed all past election time, and now all federal cases will go away Jan 20/25.

          But its a lie to say ‘prevent voters’ as it prevents nothing.

          Pardoning Trump for all that he did greenlights it from the dem side.

       2. That assumes that the prosecution of Trump was a vengeful one instead of the prosecution of a criminal. Which he is (in my opinion).
          “The king can do no wrong” seems to be the resurrected mantra of Trump’s supporters. Well, it wasn’t right in the middle ages and it shouldn’t be right now.
          In general, I wouldn’t care much what you do with your country. The problems is America’s weaknesses affect the rest of the world. And the free world is now (I fear) really screwed.

    3. Harris should invoke the 25th amendment and become the first female president.

20. The Supreme Court removed the guardrails that helped to control presidential power. The Orange Felon now has carte blanche to do as he pleases and his second term will be more chaotic and criminal than his first term. This country is screwed.

    1. “This country is screwed.”

       Be more specific. Will the market crater? Will inflation increase? Will the rate of unemployment increase? Will violent crime increase? Will the US $ lose its status as the world’s reserve currency? Will the US military cease to be dominant? Will women stop making historic gains in education and employment?
       Will gay marriage be rolled back? Will there be a federal law passed to ban abortion outright? Will there be famine, pestilence, and a plague of locusts?

       What exactly is going to happen that will reduce in four years’ time the US from sole superpower to “screwed”?

       1. I obviously can’t speak for Greg Z, and I don’t think the U.S. is “screwed,” but my concerns include:

          Trump replacing knowledgeable people in the government with ideological acolytes;
          If he actually follows through on his tariff ideas, yes, the economy will suffer and inflation will rise;
          Any attempts at mass deportation will result in morally objectionable actions;
          And Alito and Thomas will resign and get replaced with 40-year old versions of themselves, cementing a right-wing, Heritage-based Supreme Court for at least a quarter-century.

          I’m sure I could think of more things, but that’s some of my main worries.

          Here’s what I thought was a good article about what Trump’s reelection means about us, the citizens of the U.S.:

          https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/11/06/trump-wins-2024-presidential-election/75942805007/

          Many thanks to the host for providing a good analysis of the situation, as well as a good forum for providing opinions.

       2. One need only look at his first term as a preview to his second term. A chaotic and revolving door Cabinet. Political lackeys and loyalists installed in administrative offices that affect the country. Appointing of far-right federal judges–the GOP already selectively files lawsuits with those types of judges. Alienation of our allies and Trump can be manipulated with flattery by the likes of Putin. Say goodbye to anti-pollution regulations and hello to more climate change. Any national crisis (can you say COVID?) will be met with incompetence. Trump essentially ran a crime family while in office and he will do the same thing again.

       3. Yes, as a non American I see that “the US military will cease to be dominant”. Trump will be an even sillier clown in the international arena, sucking up to Putin and all the autocrats he admires. And democracy will recede worldwide the moment he allows Putin to take Ukraine, bolstering other nefarious actors who are also your enemies, even though you can keep your Netflix subscription for a few years before you feel the hammer. I bet they are drinking champagne now in the Kremlin.

          1. Well, time for Western Europe to bolster their militaries. The US can’t always be the bodyguard from across the Atlantic.

             1. Good point.

             2. Cease to export security and you cease to reap the benefit for providing security.

                That 2nd part seems so often ignored by US conservatives.

             3. Then the US should not disarm its allies and pledge to defend them. The Budapest Memorandum, with which the USA forced Ukraine to surrender its nuclear arsenal and falsely promised to defend it in return, is the reason why Ukraine is being destroyed now.

                Not to mention that many European countries supported the US war in Iraq, contributed soldiers and gave victims; now when it is Europe that is under attack, this is happily forgotten, and all we are hearing from across the Atlantic is: “Defend yourselves, we want to stay in brilliant isolation.”

21. To explain why Trump won despite his racist, misogynistic, and hate filled campaign,
    I like David Brooks take: The liberal elite’s reaction of disgust at Trump’s behavior caused the angry, disenfranchised half of Americans to rally around him. They feel abandoned by the rest. And see anarchy as the best way of getting their share of the pie. The disgruntled are the less educated who find the American system looks down on them for not being part of the technical revolution we are living through. They feel disrespected and at the bottom of the ladder of success.

    1. I think Trump may have won because of his racist, misogynistic, and hate-filled campaign…

       1. I agree.

22. PCC(E) excellent essay above combined with the comments section is the best analysis I’ve read on this – and that is the case very often for many issues.
    Leaves even the big newspapers, and certainly anything on TV, far behind.

    D.A.
    NYC

23. …I can disagree with a political leader’s actions. I can legislate. I can do civil disobedience if I think what they support is wrong. I can disagree with actions that are not compassionate. But I want to keep my heart open. If I don’t, I am part of the problem, not part of the solution. And that’s just not interesting enough. That’s what the inner work is—to become part of the solution.

    So going around being angry at everything and everybody is a cheap pie. It really is. You don’t have to act out of anger in order to oppose something. You can act to oppose something because it creates suffering. You can become an instrument of that which relieves suffering, but you don’t have to get angry about it.

    Social action does not have to be pumped up by righteous indignation or anger. That’s working with the dark forces. That’s working with fear. You can work with love. You can oppose somebody out of love. You can do social action out of love. And that’s the way you win the whole war, not just the battle…

    Ram Dass

    1. +1

24. https://x.com/CNN/status/1854109735076676021 🇺🇸🗳😢

    I’ve been following the news of the US presidential election. 📲
    The result was really sad and disappointing. 😢

    The next four years will be a tough one for America. 🇺🇸
    And countries outside of America will be caught up in Donald Trump’s self-righteousness. 🌍

    But I think Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Mark Hamill, and Robert De Niro will keep fighting. 🎶🎬✊
    I believe in the future and hope of America. 🇺🇸✨🐱

25. In the Harris vs. Shapiro debate, I found Shapiro’s pro-Trump argument illuminating. Basically, he argues that it is okay to vote for Trump because someone else (in the form of “institutions” and “norms”) will stop him from doing all the authoritarian things he has openly said he wants to do. His pro-Trump argument rests on an abject abdication of moral responsibility. Essentially, Shapiro thinks it is reasonable to give a man sweating bourbon and asking for a fresh glass of the same the keys because the cops, what with their speed traps and breathalyzers and fancy flashing lights, will head off any real trouble.

    The way Shapiro pressed Harris on the notion that Trump represents a threat to democracy was also revealing. In Shapiro’s view, the belief that Trump is a threat to democracy should motivate the anti-Trump crowd to abandon all principle and pull out all the stops to ensure he’s not elected. And that, I think, tells us something fundamental about Shapiro’s own worldview: the way he sees it, the right ends justify just about any means. Here is a man who will destroy a thing to “save” it.

    These are the views of one of Trump’s most well-spoken, thoughtful, and reluctant supporters. That disturbs me greatly.

    1. Yes, and I never liked Shapiro even before Trump was ever a presidential candidate.
       Trump supporters who are thoughtful and reluctant (I assume there are quite a few among the voters) will not be among the high ranking supporters who will now influence the policies.

26. I’m lucky, as a UK/US citizen I have somewhere to go. I also have permanent residency in a third country. But I’m no way as optimistic as you are. It’s also not really good news that trump may not make it through fours years (death or 25th Ammd), as we have a two faced catholic misogynist bigot waiting in the wings.

    I think America is fucked for the foreseeable future and I’m out of here.

    1. Do let us know when you actually move.

       In a variation of the joke Mike told the other day, there will be Canadians paid to wait at our immigration desks to be ready to greet the first American refugee who abandons America for Canadian socialism (and winters.) It won’t pay much, but the job security can’t be beat!

       1. I already did. Currently in Mexico and deciding whether the UK or Australasia will be the best place for my research work, as RFK Jr is going to screw up NIH funding.

          1. After Mexico I expect you would find UK winters much too cold (unless you personally prefer a “4 seasons” environment).

          2. Good for you, hope you will be happy and safe. My plane leaves tomorrow, not sure if I will ever return. Best wishes for everyone that cannot leave. Maybe things will not be as bad as many fear, still hoping for miracles!

27. Did anyone notice that Niall Ferguson recently more or less endorsed Trump? At least that was my impression. I may have misinterpreted him. He was part right in some of what he said, but then crashed my expectation of intelligent analysis by blaming all of the current woes and problems, many of them decades in the making, on the Democrats. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUJMyTJ9gyI

    1. I don’t know if this is relevant, but Ferguson is married to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has already said she would vote for Trump.

       1. Based on this tweet from Ferguson today: https://twitter.com/nfergus/status/1854288357662056556 he definitely likes Trump. And I need to work on my autistic-virile qualities.

28. Maybe the Leafs will win the Cup this year.

29. Trumps voting base stayed roughly the same if a little less.

    MILLIONS less dems showed up to vote for Harris.

    Every dem who stayed home helped make this happen. Keep that in mind.

    1. I saw that, but i think those numbers are only the votes from states that have been called, so in the end it may not be quite so bad in that aspect.

    2. This is something I’ve been thinking about this morning. As I write this, Trump has 71 million votes, 4 million fewer than last election.

       Harris has 66 million votes, 15 million fewer than Biden got.

       Yes, I know there are still votes to count, but these numbers still seem to reflect a lack of enthusiasm for either candidate, but most especially a lack of enthusiasm by Democrat voters for Harris.

       1. Major election victories are usually about a collapse in the losing side’s vote rather than a surge in the winner’s.

          1. Obama’s?

30. There’s a saying about Marxism-Progressivism … which has supplanted the original American Idea.. Until last night.

    “It seems good, until you run out of other people’s money.”

    National debt this morning: $35,884,401,015,854.36.

    1. Strangely, it’s the republicans who always run up the debt when they are in control. The Democrats fix it (as best they can) when in control.

       1. The juggernaut is much deeper than “republicans and democrats.” However, the team that will take control Jan20 is not on the Marxist Spectrum.

          1. Fascist spectrum – I agree.

             1. no, the Original American Freedom Spectrum.
                It is not attractive for Left to throw the “fascist” card when they are upset, because it never fits.

    2. This argument would kind of make sense if Republican presidents didn’t also run up the national debt. For example, Trump ran up more debt in his four years than Biden (~$6.7 trillion vs. $4.7 trillion). Meanwhile, the non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projects that Harris’ policies would have added $3.95 trillion in debt while Trump’s will add $7.75 trillion.

       The idea that Trump (or the GOP writ large) will reduce the national debt has no basis in observable reality. They will, however, make a lot of noise about it whenever they find it politically expedient to do so.

       1. $35,884,401,015,854.36 has nothing to do with particular presidents, R or D. It is the legacy of Left.

          The debt was run up over 135 years by the Progressive Project. In 1890, the function of government was to protect the nation from invasion and run federal courts, plus a list of other executive operational functions.

          Now, the job of the Federal Gov is to take money from citizens and distribute it as Social Services. Oh By The Way, it still protects the nation, but that is only 12.6 % of spending. Here’s the chart:

          https://jrdonohue.com/spend.png

          Interest on debt, which was caused by the Progressives, is nearing the amount spent on defense of the nation.

31. Surprised that his comments about fluoride and vaccinations has escaped attention.

    I guess we’ll just take hydroxychloriquine and ivermectin daily and we’ll all be fine.

    1. I use ivermectin daily.

       A lot was made during COVID about it being a horse wormer and a malaria treatment, both of which it does very successfully, but I’ve been using it for years as prescribed by my dermatologist for controlling my rosacea. Repurposing of drugs is a thing.

       In terms of the hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, I acknowledge that neither seemed to positively helped with COVID. ACX did a nice rundown of the ivermectin studies https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted . Some of those studies did show positive results, but even talking about that was shut down with the media labeling ivermectin of horse wormer and people who suggested using it as a possible treatment for COVID as lunatics. No one is suggesting to take both of those drugs daily, but we are told to take vitamins daily which have questionable benefit except in the case of certain dietary deficiencies.

       1. Big pharma couldn’t make any money off those meds, so the info was black holed.

32. Predictions…

    1. Clarence Thomas will retire within 12 months
    2. The Senate Republicans will abolish the filibuster
    3. Trump will resign in year 3, making Vance President, setting him up for 2028
    4. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau will be abolished
    5. Environmental laws will be gutted
    6. The White House will not be lit up like a pride flag during pride month

    Obamacare… is it untouchable at this point?

33. It’s the Endangered Species Act that I’m worried about.

    1. Yes, me too. That was a miracle of an act even in its own time, and it seems very out of place in today’s society, especially after this election. Many species’ survival depends on it, and I think if it is abolished we will never get it back.

34. Take it from a German: The Republic will not stand, nor will the country.

    This movement wants to dismantle the state and sell it for parts, as happened in its role model, Putin’s Russia.

    On the upside: we now know that unbridled capitalism is incompatible with democracy.

    Given the US’s systemic importance for human survival as the powerhouse of science, this is a huge blow for all mankind.

    1. Well, Florian, I hope you’re wrong. We shall revisit your predictions in four years!

    2. I strongly disagree, and would be willing to place money down. I cannot understand what your logic is.
       How will the republic fall exactly? We have a Constitution and Bill of Rights. Are you suggesting that the Democratic Party will foster dissent and destruction to damage the republic to the point of ruin?

       I also don’t get your comment about unbridled capitalism being incompatible with democracy. We don’t have unbridled capitalism here; in fact some argue that it’s too bridled by regulation, and the potential for future higher tariffs. Free markets are completely compatible with democracy – both involve personal choice, and both have error correction mechanisms inherent in their operation. Free markets, freedom of speech, and freedom to vote are all compatible and support each other. I could add the right to bear arms in that mix too.

    3. Florian, you’ve got it dead wrong about U.S. science. As we have documented, beginning literally on Day 1 of his presidency, Biden undermined the scientific enterprise in the U.S. By means of a series of executive orders, he mandated that every federal science funding agency introduce DEI criteria into their funding decisions. Currently, every scientific proposal is judged not only the soundness of the proposed research but on how the research will further the administration’s (supposed) social justice agenda. This subjugation of merit in science to the ideology of DEI would only get worse under Harris. Trump will, I presume, promptly abolish this pernicious practice.

    4. As a fellow German I strongly disagree with the notion of Trump aspiring to be the Führer. It takes some zealotry for that. Subsumation of the individual also isn’t compatible with Trump. He aspires to be Louis IV, not some Austrian painter.

       I don’t see the US becoming a monarchy. Inequality will rise, funds will be siphoned and the nation will be plundered to some extent. Until…. until either there is revolution or reform.

35. Misogyny and racial prejudice won. The only course for the Democratic party for the next decades is to field white, heterosexual, non-woke male candidates.

    1. A big part of why the Democrats lost is that they always attribute everything to race, sex and sexuality “identities”.

       They could have easily won with a black woman candidate, so long as it was one picked on merit, not on being a black woman.

    2. Yes, I think misogyny is an important point. It certainly was in Hillary Clinton’s defeat, even though she was a far more impressive candidate than either Harris or Biden.

    3. Not USian nevertheless I think this outcome is awful.

       But I don’t understand this “misogyny & racism” explanation for what happened. Trump’s share of votes from women and hispanic voters increased from 2020 to 2024, his share of all black voters stayed the same, and his share of votes from black men increased.

       https://www.nbcwashington.com/decision-2024/2024-voter-turnout-election-demographics-trump-harris/3762138/

       How can that pattern be caused by misogyny and racism on the part of the people who voted?

       The difference seems to be that more than 10 million Biden voters stayed home rather than come out and vote for Harris.

       1. I’ve just read that Trump’s support among white voters dropped from 57% in 2020 to 49% in ‘24, while there was a 4% increase for black and Latino in the same time period. The numbers still show a majority of white voters, but this statistical difference throws out the hypothesis that this victory was fueled by new surges of White Supremacy.

          As far as hating women, the party that eliminated women’s right to abortion is the same party supporting women’s sex-based rights in Title IX. It’s complicated.

    4. Disagree. Harris was a terrible candidate. She had become a joke among right-leaning voters from early in the Biden presidency.

       Her inability to speak without a script was disabling.

       And she had a record of far left ideas.

       Here in Canada, Trudeau is very like Harris and he’s way down in the polls. People are retreating from the “progressive” left everywhere.

    5. Folks should stop trying to cram Trump and all of his supporters into a prejudice-shaped bin. Yes, white supremecists and Nazis do seem to love the guy, but I have yet to see any convincing evidence that they–or other flavors of hate-motivated voter–make up the majority of the people who vote(d) for him. Heck, Trump himself may even be a racist and mysogynist*. However, the notion that his political fortunes are largely explained by racism and mysogyny seems like a lazy narrative concocted by journalists and commentators who ran out of serious ideas and insights but still had room for a lot more words.

       *Personally, I suspect he is, but mostly in the mundane sense of holding a variety of unexamined and potentially corrosive views about various demographic groups. Lots of people are like that and I don’t think we gain much by lumping them in with hate-filled people motivated by hate-fueled ideologies.

    6. Honestly I don’t believe that misogyny played a part in the elections at all.

       Maybe people would have voted for a woman if she was smart but could not vote in an idiot who has been unburdened by what has been.

       The trans stuff is now being seen as an actual threat to women and children. Many people voted with their families and fairness in mind.

       Shoving racial politics constantly down people’s throats does not foster a positive community spirit just resentment and intolerance.

       Many democrat voters feel that the party has left them and not vice versa. Will they listen to their concerns now or keep the progressive policies that people can’t stand? If they can’t reform their nutcases they have no hope.

       Using celebrities to bolster any political arguments is a guaranteed success to failure. Have all those ‘stars’ who promised to leave the USA if Trump won actually started packing their bags yet? Nobody cares how the super rich feel. Ricky Gervais did it best.

       https://x.com/MichaelSCollura/status/1852392690488619218

    7. Then explain to me how Barack Obama won. Why did racial prejudice not rule him out?

    8. Well, if that is the only type of candidate that Democrats have shown, by their turnout, that they’ll vote for, then I guess the Party will have to do just that if it wants to win. Until they can shame their faithful base into being more broad-minded and feminist and inclusive of diversity. There might be lots of Republicans cut from that cloth but you can’t expect them to cross the aisle and help their rivals for power elect a rainbow candidate.

36. One of the weaknesses of the US political system is that the losing party in a presidential election thereafter has no formal leader, perhaps not even an informal figurehead figure (as Trump has been for the Republicans over the last four years), who can orchestrate shifts in party policy while in opposition (like the Leader of the Opposition in the UK). The chair of the party, or the minority leaders in Congress, don’t have the authority to be that person, and mid-term elections are more about the personalities of the people involved than coordinated party platforms. So basically there’s no way to really signal a shift in party policy until the winning candidate emerges from the primaries of the next presidential election cycle. That creates an awfully long time for an opposition party to essentially be in limbo, awaiting their next leader to give concrete form to their political agenda. The problem for the Democrats is that they really can’t afford to wait until then. Fundamental policy shifts need to start now.

37. As a Canadian, watching and shaking my head, I have to wonder about the Democratic leadership/candidates. They don’t seem to realize you need to give people a reason to vote for you, rather than just voting against the Republican candidate.

    1. +1

    2. To paraphrase Billy Crystal, Republicans don’t need a reason to vote. They just need a place.

38. America will be great… again! Like it wasn’t? That amuses me, along with, the Dems are crocked and already rigging the election… hmm, how rigged is it now?
    Now we can look forward to the war in Ukraine being over in 24 hours. Nth Korea being US bestie “cause Jung un is a smart man”. Perhaps he is looking at how he just sidelined China for Putin. All this to look forward to and more, glad this parts over though. Take a course of optimism (me) and
    “smoke a banana”… 😜
    “He don’t care” Dan Hicks and his Hotlicks.

39. US right-wingers always say that they are against taxes, but if you relabel taxes as “tariffs” then suddenly they love them.

    Very strange.

    1. As a conservative, I don’t like the idea of replacing income taxes with tariffs. What I do like is the idea of abolishing a half-dozen Departments (DHS, Education, HHS, HUD, Transportation, and Labor), paying down the debt, and then lowering taxes. useful agencies, like the NTSB can find homes in other departments, like Commerce.

40. I must have been one of the few here who stayed up past sunrise watching returns!

    It was very late in the night before CNN turned attention from the battleground states to realize what was happening in some predictably deep-blue domains. Below is a comparison between 2024 and 2020 for some select states:

    Illinois. Harris +8.2 (Biden +16.9)
    New Jersey. Harris +4.3 (Biden +15.8)
    New York. Harris +11.6 (Biden +23.2)

    Let the recriminations and excuses begin.

41. The minorities the Democrats are losing are the minority cultures who believe in a work ethic and strong nuclear families. Minorities who want governments to provide infrastructure – which includes healthcare and education as well as water and roads and electricity – and then get out of their way, they can do the rest. Democrats, get back to the basics. Right now there is no end to the amount of government programs the Democrats will bankrupt us with. Provide the basics, leave the rest to families.

42. There has been much talk about Donald Trump being an existential threat to democracy but I found myself wondering this morning if he is an existential threat to civilization. We have just elected the most unsuitable person possible to be president at time where we face potentially severe threats from, for example, climate change and AI. Perhaps this is how intelligent civilizations wipe themselves out.

    1. You know he was President before, right? The Earth didn’t go spinning out of its orbit.

43. I’m not surprised. Two wet blankets after a guy who despite it all gave an image of power and force.

    Then a minority that had been in the past been alienated and finally given before the law equality only to come about and do in kind to a majority?

    Add that he is probably intimidating as heck.

    My fear is that unlike him who has his militant followers under his thumb, Harris doesn’t and while he certainly ordered them on Jan 6th, she wouldn’t but my fear is rogue elements would.

    1. PCC(E): I echo what several other readers have said to you today — I am ever so grateful for your coverage of this election and for providing us with such a fantastically open forum in which we could freely and considerately hash out our thoughts and fears. This has been incredibly edifying for me. Thank you for sharing the debate, as well. Really good stuff. How fortunate we are to have access to this space. I spent the bulk of my afternoon on WEIT and gained a tremendous amount of perspective for doing so. Thank you!!

       1. Now to watch the dark comedy unfold.

          1. I actually meant my comment to stand alone but it somehow attached itself to your comment as a reply. I probably hit an incorrect link again. No biggie

             1. No worries.

                I’m just a cynical bystander.

44. Why didn’t you see it coming?

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