Democrats won back three House seats in New York that they lost in 2022. Republicans still have the edge for House control, with prognosticators like Decision Desk HQ giving them an over 90 percent chance of keeping the majority. Still, every race will matter; the narrower the Republican House majority, if they do keep it, the greater the likelihood of daily dysfunction.
Some key Senate seats are yet to be called. The Associated Press called Pennsylvania for Republican Dave McCormick, but Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) has not conceded, pointing to provisional ballots that still have to be counted. The commonwealth’s secretary of state urged patience on Thursday, pointing to a large pot of still-uncounted votes.
The Democrats are leading in Nevada and Arizona, the two other Senate races yet to be called by the AP and a network.
Follow along with our live coverage of these races and the ongoing Trump transition below:
I wanted to note that quite a few of you have subscribed to TPM over the last 48 hours – currently more than 200 readers and continuing to rise. We get that people are exhausted, despondent, angry, and probably just tired of feeling so many things, none of them pleasant, all at once. Folks here feel many of the same things. I’ve spoken to you about our membership system at many points and in many ways over the years, about its importance and centrality. Today isn’t the time for us to be getting into that. What I wanted to say is that we greatly appreciate the show of support, the vote of confidence in our importance in the larger politico-media ecosystem, or simply in your world. Thank you.
Running for president is a “no excuses” endeavor. If you win you become the most powerful person in the world and if you lose you become a dumping ground for disappointment, ridicule, blame, recrimination. And that’s just from your friends. It’s an enterprise both binary and brutal.
Democrats have much bigger challenges ahead than worrying about Kamala Harris’ feelings or future reputation. That’s not my concern here. But it’s important for every aspect of what Democrats have to do going forward to understand as well as they can what happened, why it happened and more. You know my opinion. I wrote the day before the election that I thought she ran a near-flawless campaign. I wanted to commit that to virtual paper in advance of the result because we inevitably judge campaigns by reading back from the result.
Thanks for these reaction dispatches. This morning after reading the great discussions about the lack of a liberal or Democratic social media/current media landscape, I had a discussion with my 22-year-old son and wanted to add some commentary from a Gen Z (male) voice.
When asked why he (a Democratic Socialist who has reacted very emotionally to the election outcome) thought the younger male vote turned to Trump, he said this:
While the Justice Department reportedly seeks to end its prosecutions of Donald Trump before his inauguration and Trump promises to pardon the convicted Jan. 6 rioters, another group from that fateful day may end up paying no price: the Jan. 6 rioters who have yet to be apprehended.
The Justice Department has spent nearly four years seeking to identify and prosecute virtually everyone who participated in the attack that threatened to derail the transfer of power that day. But the nationwide manhunt, which prosecutors have dubbed the largest and most complex in American history, is expected to come to an abrupt conclusion once Trump takes over.
In its latest update this week on the Jan. 6 cases, the Justice Department reported that 1,561 people have been criminally charged in the Capitol attack. That represents as little as half of the estimated number of participants who committed crimes.
It’s unlikely that the Justice Department will be able to find and charge a substantial number of rioters still at large before Trump returns to office. Either way, a Trump DOJ will almost certainly not pursue any new cases and may seek to unwind pending cases, separate and apart from any Trump pardons.
Who Bears The Brunt Of Trump’s Victory?
The impacts of Trump’s win do not fall evenly. Among those carrying the greatest weight:
“Donald Trump’s allies and some in the private sector have been quietly preparing to detain and deport migrants residing in the United States on a large scale, according to four sources familiar with the discussions.”–CNN
Sums It Up
“In a burst of hate and misogyny, MAGA militants cheered the return of a president they consider an ally.”–WaPo
FBI Investigating Blitz Of Racist Texts
“A wave of racist text messages summoning Black people to report for slavery showed up on phones across the United States, prompting the scrutiny of the F.B.I.”–NYT
Taking a strong stand for the independence of the the Federal Reserve, Chairman Jerome Powell told reporters that Trump does not have the power as president to fire or demote him and that he would refuse to resign if Trump asked him to.
First Woman As White House Of Chief
Trump named his campaign adviser Susie Wiles as his new White House chief of staff. (TIL: Wiles is the daughter of the late NFL placekicker and longtime sports broadcaster Pat Summerall.)
Trump On Track to Win All 7 Swing States
Trump wound up carrying all three Blue Wall states, and is on track to carry all four Sun Belt swing states. The AP has not yet called Nevada or Arizona, but he leads in both states.
The AP called the Pennsylvania Senate race for Republican David McCormick, denying Sen. Bob Casey a fourth term. With the Democratic candidates leading in the yet-to-be-called Arizona and Nevada Senate races, the GOP looks likely to wind up with a 53-47 majority.
Election Aftermath
Politico: The 14 Places That Explain Trump’s Victory
The Latino Vote
Benjy Sarlin: The 2024 election should end the ‘demographics are destiny’ era of politics
WSJ: Trump’s Huge Latino Gains Put a Big Crack in Democratic Coalition
NYT: ‘An Earthquake’ Along the Border: Trump Flipped Hispanic South Texas
Federal Judge Slams Deadbeat Rudy
“A federal judge on Thursday threatened to hold Rudy Giuliani in contempt after the former New York City mayor missed a court-imposed deadline to surrender his assets to two Georgia election workers he defamed.”–Politico
Chinese Hackers Access Trump Attorney’s Phone
“In the run-up to Tuesday’s presidential election, the Chinese cyber-spies who targeted cellphones associated with the Trump and Harris campaigns hacked into the main cellphone used by Donald Trump’s lead criminal defense attorney, Todd Blanche, multiple sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.”–ABC News
Neera Tanden Formally Accused Of Hatch Act Violations
“A government ethics watchdog agency has formally accused White House domestic policy chief Neera Tanden of repeatedly violating the Hatch Act by soliciting political contributions on social media in the months before the election.”–Politico
Leaker Of RBG’s Health Info Gets 2-Year Sentence
“A former medical worker who was convicted of illegally accessing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s hospital records as she underwent cancer treatment in 2019 was sentenced Thursday to two years in prison after a judge excoriated his “truly despicable conduct” and “stunning lack of empathy.”–WaPo
Old-School Political Corruption Seems Almost Quaint Now
“The mayor of Jackson, Miss., a City Council member and the local district attorney have been indicted on federal corruption charges, with court documents unsealed on Thursday detailing a scheme in which F.B.I. agents posing as real estate developers paid tens of thousands of dollars in bribes to city officials.”–NYT
Have A Restful Long Weekend
I’ll be trying to get the TPM staff out a little early today and urging them to unplug as much as they can over the holiday weekend. I hope you can, too. See you back here Tuesday.
As we all go through our collective grief processing, I just wanted to throw down three markers:
– It looks like the popular vote margin shifted by like 8 points from 2020 to 2024. The margin in the key battlegrounds looks more like a 2-3 point shift. Harris smoked Trump’s ground game. In a slightly less hostile national environment it would be her winning the EC while losing the PV. Unless the goal was to get votes in Chicago and the Bronx, neither Musk nor LaCivita’s grand schemes did anything. Cold comfort indeed, but good to bear in mind when we see the inevitable crowing. And also, personally, that is a much more dramatic ground game benefit than I imagined.
Been reading these and thought I would throw in mine, even though in an ideal world we would mandate a cooldown period where everyone had to hold off a week for any takes. So many of them seem to be either people lashing out because they’re upset and terrified or score settling for their particular hobbyhorse that they would be advocating for regardless of what the outcome had been. It’s going to take another beat before we can find any constructive path forward.
As someone who has worked on abortion for a long time, I don’t think it’s fair to say that it doesn’t have electoral salience for Democrats. While abortion was on the ballot in a lot of states, it wasn’t actually a large part of many federal campaign’s messaging. There seems to have been an assumption that it would be self-evident, but that’s just not true, particularly because of the confusing way it happened through the courts and technically under Biden. And a lot of Republican candidates flat out lied or fundamentally misrepresented their position on abortion in ways the media didn’t pick up. I’m sure a lot of the people who voted for both abortion referenda and Trump genuinely thought they were picking a pro-choice candidate.
I just had to chime here because I am deeply worried that we will learn the wrong lessons from 2024.
I understand Reader DS’s (#7) frustration with the outcome, but Reader AJ (#4) is much closer to the mark in my book. Look, 2024 was not a landslide for Trump. What makes 2024 so disappointing is that the map looks a lot like the House vote in 2022. Biden’s approval rating has basically been steady since late 2022. The economic conditions do not feel much different than 2022. Prices might not be rising, but they are pretty high relative to 3-4 years ago. Interest rates are high and housing is in short supply. A whopping 67% of people think the country is on the wrong track. Like many others, I thought the democracy argument would win the day. It did not.
As always happens after a bad election loss — and is compounded when that loss is sweeping, and to the man who launched a coup against the country — the losing side is in full panic mode. I’ve seen people musing about tossing out Democratic party leadership, overhauling the language, the policies, the messaging. I’ve seen recriminations laid at the feet of VP Kamala Harris and of President Joe Biden. I’ve seen mockery about Harris’ embrace of never Trumpers and told-you-sos from progressives irate about Gaza and Democratic indifference to the working man’s plight. I’ve seen despair about erosion with Latino men, angst that Democrats have become solely the party of the college educated, who only comprise about 37 percent of the electorate.
There’s a delicate balance in moments like this for anyone who has any level of megaphone. You don’t want to sound pollyannaish or appear that you’re in some kind of denial about the gravity of the situation. Just as much, though, you don’t want to affirm perceptions or feelings that are natural and even healthy but are still not altogether accurate.
America is not in or destined for autocracy. We took a step closer to it on Tuesday. And it was a pretty decent sized one. We elected a man all of whose instincts and desires are to govern as an autocrat. And that was after the country got a chance to see who he was up close once already. So we not only got that but we got that with a majority, though the tiniest of ones, voting for it with every reason to know who Trump is. I said in an earlier post that I don’t believe a majority of the country wants the future Trump is promising. In response, one reader wrote, with a lot of intensity, that I was letting voters off the hook. They knew exactly what they were getting, etc.
