THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT: Gen Z voters surge right in 2024, helping propel Trump to victory.
Archive for 2024
November 7, 2024
BUT NOT TOO DUMB TO BE PLAUSIBLE: Too Dumb to Check: Democrats Urging Sotomayor to Retire Before Trump Takes Office.
A HUGE SWING AND A MISS: Pollster J. Ann Selzer: ‘I’ll be reviewing data’ after Iowa Poll misses big Trump win.
Renowned Pollster J. Ann Selzer said Tuesday she would be reviewing her data to determine why a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll released just days before the election produced results so far out of line with former President Donald Trump’s resounding victory.
Trump handily won Iowa for a third time, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris by 14 percentage points with more than 90% of the vote counted ― a sharp contrast to Saturday’s Iowa Poll that had Harris leading by 3 points.
“Tonight, I’m of course thinking about how we got where we are,” Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., which conducts the Iowa Poll, said in a statement.
On the flip side, Nate Silver ran his renowned simulation 80,000 times on Monday night and it never produced anything more conclusive than a million-dollar shrug emoji.
Polling is broken. The betting sites performed much better — again.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Dems’ Blame Game Is Weaker Than Kamala’s Public Speaking Skill. “They’re going to keep pointing fingers in all of the wrong directions. In fact, so far they’ve been content to double-down on all of the hysterical hyperbole that got them a good old-fashioned butt-whuppin’ on Tuesday.”
ROGER SIMON: After Trump’s Victory: ‘Justice Without Revenge.’
BUT I ALREADY VOTED FOR HIM:
Trump will begin operations to deport millions of undocumented immigrants when he starts his term, campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday morning.
He'll launch the "largest mass deportation operation" of undocumented immigrants on Day 1.https://t.co/O5hbjaIY0e
— Axios (@axios) November 6, 2024
Mitt Romney got mocked for his comment about “self-deportation” in 2012, but disincentivizing illegal settlement/employment would go a long way towards making that happen — and save us a lot of money on repatriation expenses.
POST-ELECTION OPEN THREAD: Okay, this is probably the last of these morning election threads, but there’s a lot to talk about.
IT’S SATIRE, BUT IS IT?
Democrats Call For Abolishing Popular Vote https://t.co/OSsMUSMevG pic.twitter.com/piX5Eumlwu
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) November 6, 2024
PAUL BEDARD: Trump trounced elites and won ‘war of cultures.’
DON SURBER IS drinking liberal tears. “The presidential race in a nutshell: Trump’s secret weapon was a good presidency. We really were better off four years ago even in the midst of an overblown pandemic. Elections aren’t complicated. People vote for who is best for them. People who think they are smarter than everyone else overlook this simple fact. Which is why the day after Americans gave this mandate to President Trump, liberal tears gushed like an overflowing washer. Their Fountain of Uselessness was enjoyable. Their explanations of why the dumbest candidate for president imaginable lost were delicious.”
That picture of a distraught Nancy Pelosi at Kamala’s concession speech belongs in the Louvre.
Plus: “Bad personnel decisions have consequences. Policies do too, but don’t expect Democrats to change theirs. No, they change their messengers but never their message. They just replace their white male communists with DEI communists.”
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
Clearly, AOC is suffering from a strange case of amnesia, given her barnstorming “New Socialist ‘It Girl'” debut to the world in 2019, when she wanted to ban and regulate the entire US economy, her original chief of staff was photographed on multiple occasions wearing a T-shirt celebrating a Nazi collaborator, and she gave passionate shoutouts to Evita Peron and the Black Panthers. Such was the stuff of legend before everything went pear-shaped starting in March of the next year, thanks to Dr. Fauci’s form of authoritarianism.
ROGER KIMBALL: The Three Reasons Donald Trump Won.
The first two are interwoven. Kamala Harris was a horrible candidate. Trump, on the contrary, was superb.
As to Kamala, her inarticulacy was a major stumbling block. So was her choice of running mate: Tim Walz may be the left-most governor in the country. Certainly, he is the weirdest. Harris’s 60 Minutes interview was a disaster, as was her interview with Bret Baier. . . .
Trump won because he offered a vision of a healed America — and he did so with a team that brought both unstoppable brio and an articulate discussion of policy issues to the table. Harris brought snarling animus and an unwillingness to engage in any serious discussion of policy. Asked about how she voted on California’s tough-on-crime Prop 36, she declined to answer. Amazing.
Trump won because people are worse off now than they were four years ago when he was president. Prices are higher, the border is broken and the world teeters on the edge of World War Three. That all happened on Harris’s watch. She couldn’t escape it.
But the third reason Trump won was a shift in the zeitgeist. The country is increasingly cognizant of and fed up with the administrative apparat that rules over us and that fabricated the manikin Kamala Harris as frontman for their agenda. Trump has exposed cracks in “The Narrative” that supports that agenda. Voters saw what Biden-Harris and, before them, Obama had done in their effort to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” They saw — and they rebelled. The result was that, come January 20, Donald J. Trump will be the 47th president of the United States.
I’m beginning to think that God really does look after fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.
Relatedly, a friend from Belgium texted yesterday: “On the Flemish news they interviewed Americans. Trump voters pointed out real problems, Dems were crying about how trump will take away their rights. Even the Flemish news noticed.”
ALL OF THEM: ‘Resistance’ Lawfare Abusers Must Be Held Accountable.
Also feel better at seeing Professor Jacobson is looks as unslept as I am….
JOSEPH CAMPBELL IN JULY: Is Kamala setting herself up for a Dewey-versus-Truman defeat?
While noting the distance Harris has kept from the news media — she has neither granted an interview nor convened a news conference since emerging as the Democrats’ nominee — the New York Times nonetheless reported recently: “Some political strategists say Ms. Harris is doing exactly what she should be doing.”
Perhaps it’s not “exactly what she should be doing,” though — not when recalling campaign history and the case of Dewey, who served three terms as Republican governor of New York but twice lost the presidency as his party’s nominee.
Dewey in 1948 embraced a distant, glide-path strategy against President Harry Truman (D), sidestepping controversy and offering tame platitudes such as the importance of national “unity.”
“When you’re leading, don’t talk,” Dewey told a supporter, according to his biographer.
He specifically rejected suggestions by Republican leaders to undertake a vigorous, hard-hitting effort against Truman, who had become president in 1945 upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“I will not get down into the gutter with that fellow,” Dewey said of Truman.
The last days of Kamala’s campaign seemed somewhat reminiscent of Harry Truman’s 1948 campaign, when Truman, struggling in the polls, went all out smearing Thomas Dewey with the F-word, which ultimately helped earn Harry his legendary “Dewey Defeats Truman” photo. But that would have seemed shocking just three years after the end of WWII, especially coming from the man who had ended it. 76 years later, after every Republican presidential nominee since has been declared a Nazi, the attack has lost its punch, especially after Kamala and Biden played footsie with those with a similarly vicious antisemitic bent.
THE SAVIORS OF DEMOCRACY™ PRESENT THEIR NEXT PROJECT, KNEECAPPING THE PEOPLE’S NEW CHOICE: Biden team debates how to ‘Trump-proof’ foreign policy.
Despondent Biden administration officials are mulling how to protect their national security priorities before president-elect Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office in January. Whether it’s sending funds to Ukraine or imposing new sanctions on extremist Israeli settlers, an array of options are on the table.
But there’s no formal plan yet for how to lock in President Joe Biden’s big-ticket policies against a Trump effort to dismantle them, a senior Biden administration official said.
Some administration officials also believe having such a plan won’t make a difference.
Trump is sure to quickly halt or reverse much of what Biden’s team manages to push through in these final months, multiple current and former U.S. officials said. He will have broad executive authority to do so, as well as enough support in Congress and in the judiciary that almost nothing will stop him.
“You really can’t ‘Trump-proof,’” one U.S. official said. “You can ‘Trump delay,’ you can throw sand in the gears, but there is no way short of legislation to ‘Trump-proof.’”
It’s almost as though elections are supposed to mean something.
AT AMAZON, Shop the holiday deals. #CommissionEarned
ICYMI:
The view just basically said the quiet part out loud.
Kamala lost because Americans can now think for themselves and we have free speech on X. We no longer need to listen to the fake news media for the narrative and we can call out their lies in real timepic.twitter.com/49tYmBowDI
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) November 6, 2024
JOEL KOTKIN ON THE COUNTRY’S CHANGING BALANCE OF POWER: Who are the winners and losers from the US election?
NIALL FERGUSON: The Resurrection of Donald J. Trump.
This is a bigger comeback than Grover Cleveland’s in 1892, when he became the first—and, until last night, only—American president to win a second nonconsecutive term. This is a bigger comeback than Richard Nixon’s, when he was elected president in 1968, eight years after he lost by a dubious whisker to John F. Kennedy. It’s bigger than Winston Churchill’s multiple comebacks, the biggest of which were in 1940 and 1951. It’s bigger than Charles de Gaulle’s in 1958. It’s bigger than Napoleon’s Hundred Days in 1815. In fact, I am tempted to say that the only comeback it’s not bigger than is the Resurrection.
Why? Because all of Trump’s political opponents made a vain effort to destroy him. In the words of Elon Musk—who has been a key variable in Trump’s epic comeback—Trump is the man “who they tried to kill twice, bankrupt, and imprison for eternity.” Trump faced two assassination attempts, one of which came within an inch of killing him. He was indicted in four criminal cases and convicted in one of them. He was impeached twice as president, in December 2019 (over his infamous call to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky) and again in January 2021 (over the mob’s invasion of the Capitol on January 6).
In a civil case in May 2023, a Manhattan jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming the journalist E. Jean Carroll, awarding her $5 million in damages. Last May, he was convicted in a Manhattan court on 34 felony counts relating to hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels. My colleague Eli Lake puts the grand total at 116 indictments. This wasn’t just lawfare; it was total lawfare.
And still he won. He totally won.
What all this goes to show is that Trump is authentically antifragile. That term originated with my brilliant friend Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Let me quote his definition from the book Antifragile: “Antifragility. . . is beyond robustness: It is about loving randomness and disorder and benefiting from shocks. And love of randomness is love of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to do things without understanding them—and do them well, mostly much better than by understanding them.”
Friedrich Nietzsche put it more elegantly: Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker. “What doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.” That famous aphorism, from Twilight of the Idols (1889), will provide the perfect epigraph for the first serious biography of Trump, when a younger version of me gets around to writing it.
Speaking of analogies that involve the Other World, Seth Mandel on “The Sixth Sense Election:”
“I see dead people.” One of the most famous lines from any Bruce Willis film—and certainly the single best-known line in M. Night Shyamalan’s catalogue—was also a stroke of true genius. The Sixth Sense tells you the big twist up front but bets, correctly, that you won’t be paying close enough attention to realize it. Willis’s character is a specter, a figment the whole time, no matter how real he seems.
Last night was the Sixth Sense Election. We were told, up front and in no uncertain terms, that this was the “vibes election.” We were not misled—we misled ourselves. By every metric, Kamala Harris vs. Donald Trump was going to be the closest presidential election since 2000. On Election Eve, Nate Silver’s team put their data through 80,000 simulations; Harris won 40,012 times.
There were momentum swings, but the polling averages showed razor-thin margins. The momentum swings were vibe swings. They seemed real—it became conventional wisdom that a joke about Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally would cost him Pennsylvania. We all watched the movie together.
Then came the twist: The campaign we watched wasn’t real. It was a specter, a figment all along.
It certainly felt like that each step of the way, but as with Biden in 2020 and almost with Hillary in 2016 and Gore in 2000, the power of the DNC-MSM to help get a stiff of a candidate over the finish line and eke out a win should not be dismissed. Hence all of our “don’t get cocky” reminders (which were increasingly puréed through the thesaurus as November got closer, just to spice things up).
SPAIN REMOVES DAMS, GETS ENGULFED IN FLOODS. THANK HEAVEN FOR THE ROMANS? Europe is demolishing its dams to restore ecosystems.
Ancient Roman dam saves Spanish town from devastating floods.