Jeremy's Den: December 2024

We trust that time is linear. That it proceeds eternally and uniformly into infinity. But the distinction between past, present and future is nothing but an illusion, albeit a stubbornly persistent one. Yesterday, today and tomorrow are not consecutive, they are connected in a never-ending circle. Everything is connected.
(Albert Einstein)

The moving finger writes and, having writ, moves on.
Not all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.
(Omar Khayyám, Rubáiyát, in Edward FitzGerald's translation, 1859)

Now it didn't get according to plan, did it? When I first started drafting this post-mortem, my chosen soundtrack was Rush's A Farewell To Kings, so the article could be cleverly titled 'A Farewell To Trump'. Doesn't sound so clever now, does it? When the bombshell news started falling, the obvious fallback option was to switch to Alice Cooper's Welcome To My Nightmare. Just slightly tweaked by the inclusion of the alternative version of "The Awakening", with a second monologue by Vincent Price, that was released only on the album's reissue in 2002. And also the addition of "Ballad Of Dwight Fry" from the earlier Love It To Death album, that had been added by Alice Cooper himself to the soundtrack of The Nightmare TV special back in the day.

Images. Click. Bigger. You know that already, don't you?

Let me get something off my chest first. I'm still shell-shocked by what we have read on Twitter, during that fateful first week of November, from people I thought were sort of my kindred spirits in our shared opposition to absolutist transgenderism and wokeism. First clapping for Kemi Badenoch like lobotomised seals. Then cheerleading for Donald Trump like drunken rednecks going, "Oi! Oi! We've beaten the woke". Naw, you have done nothing of the sort, bros, you didn't have a vote in either. All you have done is proving that the fanatical obsessive anti-woke monomaniacs can be as viciously stupid as the fundamentalist woketariat. Having said that, the most amazing thing about that election is that it took them a month, probably just because of a constitutional deadline or else it would have taken even longer, to get the final certified counts in all states. Finally we have it, and it shows how disastrously off the polls were. And they will hear about it for the next seven generations, from Elon Musk at least. Exhibit A is the trendlines of presidential polls since the 2020 election, with the 2024 result marked big at the tail end, to show how far off they were.

So now Donald Trump is the 45th and 47th President of the United States. More accurately he will be on the 20th of January at noon, only the second man, after Grover Cleveland, to get elected for two non-consecutive terms and thusly get two Presidential Numbers. Just like the Kings Jameses of England and Scotland. Anyway, contrary to what some of his most feverish supporters claim, the Orange Baboon did not bag a majority of the popular vote. He got only 49.84%, not a majority but nevertheless the largest number of votes for any Republican presidential candidate since the party was founded. He did not overtake Joe Biden, though, who still remains the candidate from any party with the highest number of votes ever, with 81.3 million in 2020. Funnily even the Last Day Polls, exclusively those released on the 4th of November, still had Kamala Harris leading, though by just a teeny weeny 0.6%. My own last prediction was based on a wider selection over the last week, that had Harris leading by 1.7%, which made it plausible that she might win the Electoral College by a hair. Obviously a 0.6% lead would have meant a defeat, as it is far two low to overturn the significant Republican bonus embedded in the make-up of the Electoral College.

But, at the end of the day, not even that tiny lead happened, and Donald Trump won by 1.48%. By far the stupidest question about the American elections was asked by the BBC, wondering aloud if the polls failed. Of course, they fucking failed, they got absolutely everything fucking wrong, and mostly by bigger margins than in 2016 and 2020. Starting with the popular vote for the presidency. This is a complete fiasco that, unfortunately, gives some credibility to Elon Musk's whiny self-serving narrative about the 'legacy media'. The British public have witnessed summat very similar, very aptly described by the great Suzanne Moore in one of her recent Letters From Suzanne. We too have seen how the notionally left-wing media, including the once-revered Guardian, have become echo chambers of feral bourgeois conformism. We too have seen how different opinions are dismissed, not on their merits or lack thereof, but because of where they were published. The same kind of 'guilt by association' that 'progressives' vociferously denounce when it is applied to them. That's how the punditariat totally missed the very real impact of Trump's populist demagoguery on huge swathes of the American electorate, and how it could very easily be duplicated by Nigel Farage here.

If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best coloured man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.
(Lyndon B. Johnson)

Devil's Food © Alice Cooper, Bob Ezrin, Kelley Jay, 1975

The Black Widow © Alice Cooper, Dick Wagner, Bob Ezrin, 1975

It’s a political victory that our country has never seen before.

(Donald Trump, 5 November 2024)

American pollsters love dissecting the electorate into all sorts of demographics in their post-mortems of a presidential election. It's based on exit polls, so can be expected to be less unreasonably inaccurate than their pre-election polling. But possible mistakes are irrelevant, as what I intend to do is compare the demographic breakdowns of 2020 with those of 2024, which used the same methodology. Only the differences between the two matter. not the numbers per se. And we even might get some explanations of why Kamala Harris lost so convincingly, other than the punditariat's usual talk about the economy, the cost of living, immigration and wokeism. Unless some of these demographics lead us to exactly these topics, and of course they will. No spoiler here, you have already read the other post-mortems, and so have I, so we both have a pretty good idea why it went so badly for Democrats. Which is neither 100% the economy nor 100% the backlash against wokeism. Of course, we now know what the real explanation is. It's Trump's dance moves, stupid. I will not bore you with all 137-or-so available items, as pollsters tried everything short of the favourite colour of socks, so let's try the most obvious first, sex and race.

The punditariat's common wisdom is that everything in America is about race, though you can just as demonstrably say that everything is about sex. Just ask Donald Trump. Anyway, one of the Democrats' most damaging mistakes, exemplified by Barack Obama's summat patronising campaigning and widely shared by Labour here, is that they have the 'minority vote' locked in. Clearly they haven't, and it was one of the factors in their across-the-board defeat. White and Black voters have barely moved from where they were in 2020, but Latinos and Asians have. Another of Kamala's mistakes was thinking that she had the female vote locked in too, because of the atrocious anti-abortion laws passed in Republican states since the Trump-packed Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. Clearly she hadn't, and she has lost more votes among women than among men. Could the same reasons be behind all these failures? Let's try and find out, and for this let's intersectionalise it, as the woketariat always urges us to do. What we see is quite stunning, and contradicts a lot of the Democrats' post-mortem narrative.

White women, who were obviously one of Harris' prime targets with her strong pro-abortion stance, have barely moved from one election to the next. The very small changes within the Black electorate are not enough to have had a significant impact on the final outcome. But the race-sex intersections of the Latino electorate tell a very interesting story. Harris lost Latino men to Trump on quite a brutal swing, and also lost considerable ground among Latina women. First factor must have been Trump and Vance's brutal anti-immigration stance, which worked beyond their wildest expectations with a community who were probably migrants themselves two or three generations back. The simplistic stereotypes of migrants 'stealing our jobs' and 'living off welfare', very common among the British far-right too, found an audience in a community who pride themselves on their success. Basically living the mythical American Dream thanks to hard work and strong values. Wokeism surely had a part in it too. Harris' supporters are quick to retort she did not campaign on it, but Trump did and it definitely had an impact on communities who are more likely to embrace traditional values, especially people who are also more likely to be Catholics. Another crosstab tells us that Catholics went 52-47 for Biden in 2020, then 58-40 for Trump in 2024, another quite brutal change of direction. And there goes a massive chunk of the Latino vote, and it lost Harris Nevada and Arizona. But the Generation Game was also a massive surprise for Democrats.

The biggest change is quite clearly among the TikTok Gen Z. They were 14 to 20 four years ago, so probably more than half of them were new voters, and they massively defected to the Red Side Of The Force. I'm quite sure the Biden administration's stance on Israel and Gaza had very little impact, as it would have influenced mostly the 25-29 University-dwelling age bracket, and it barely moved away from the Democrats. Then it's quite an impressive achievement that the supposedly most woke generation drifted away from the Democrats much more significantly than the older generations, 30 to 64, who are the building blocks of the United States' active workforce. The implication is quite devastating for the Democrats, that the economy and the cost of living, major concerns for the working-age electorate, might have played a lesser role than The Young Ones feeling fed up with the massive woke indoctrination they are subjected to as early as kindergarten. After all, YouGov had already found that wokeism, or rather its rejection, was the key motive for 26% of swing voters, those who switched from Biden '20 to Trump '24 and brought him back from the dead. Finally another crosstab defeats the Democrats' usual narrative than only uneducated people, plausibly Hillary Clinton's 'deplorables' and Joe Biden's 'garbage', vote for Trump. The only category that switched sides are those with a college degree, accounting for a quarter of the electorate, who went 51-47 for Biden in 2020, and then 51-47 for Trump this year. As much as I agree with Mister Ed, that Trump's return is nothing to celebrate, Democrats definitely need to address the real roots of their defeat rather than relish in stubborn denial, if they want to restore their credibility before the 2026 midterms.

This is a dark, dark day for people around the globe. The world’s largest economy and most powerful military will be led by a dangerous, destructive demagogue.

(Ed Davey)

Do you know what it is? I want to be a whale psychiatrist.

(Donald Trump)

There is widespread common wisdom among the American punditariat, also relayed by the British media, that no Democrat has ever won the Presidency without winning Pennsylvania. And it's actually not true. Grover Cleveland did in 1884 and again in 1892. Then Woodrow Wilson did in 1912 and 1916. Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in 1932. Finally Harry Truman won the election and lost Pennsylvania in 1948. Then you might think that no Republican ever won the Presidency without winning Pennsylvania, but that's equally untrue. Richard Nixon lost it in 1968 and George W. Bush twice in 2000 and 2004. Pennsylvania is not even the best bellwether state as they chose the winning candidate in only 34 of 43 presidential elections since 1856, the first where the 'modern' Republican and Democratic parties faced each other. But this time, they did, ad did the other two competitive Rust Belt states.

It is quite revealing of the scale of Harris' defeat that all three were seen as marginal Democratic holds by the last batch of polls, and also by the punditariat's Last Day ratings, and ended up being marginal Republican gains. There is massive irony here, on three different levels. First, the difference between the last prediction and the actual result is tiny, around 2%, so it is within the margin of error of standard polls. I can't wait to hear pollsters arguing along this line, that they were less than a margin of error away from getting that election right. Second, even the newly-hatched herd of Trump-leaning pollsters eventually underestimated the Trump vote and put Harris in the lead. Third, the Harris campaign were totally played by the Trump campaign, who baited them into spending all their time in these three states late in the campaign, and never missed an opportunity to expose Harris's weaknesses and multiple faux pas, with the very efficient help of Elon Musk and the FSB's swarm of Twitter bots. Then the other three most watched swing states, that all went to Joe Biden in 2020, were also very bad news for Kamala Harris.

Nobody expected Harris to hold Arizona and Georgia, but Nevada was a different matter. It had often looked in the danger zone at past elections, either presidential or for its Senate seats, and finally come back to the Democratic column thanks to a last minute surge in the Latino vote. It worked totally differently this time. It came into play quite late in the campaign, which may have made the Harris campaign complacent, and then it kept swinging back and forth in polls in a way that probably made the Harris campaign over-confident over a repeat of the usual last day surge. The Democrats' hubristic belief that they had the minorities' votes locked in no matter what played against them too, as it definitely didn't work that way this time. Harris won only two of the state's seventeen counties, so pretty much Las Vegas and Reno, and with reduced margins. Local media definitely identified a swing of the Latino and Filipino vote towards Trump as the key factor. Trump's anti-immigration rhetoric probably worked unexpectedly well among communities who are themselves third or fourth-generation descendants of immigrants. But it would be wrong to set aside the impact of negative messaging about wokeism among massively Catholic voters who embrace socially conservative values, as many Democrats appear willing to do. This is definitely a part of the electorate where the horror stories about men in women's sports, no matter how overhyped and amplified by Twitter bots, were bound to influence the vote, as more and more made headlines all along the campaign.

We’re the garbage can for the world. We are. We’re a garbage can. We’re like a garbage can.

(Donald Trump)

I want to protect the women of our country. I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not.

(Donald Trump)

Then we have three states that could have made a difference in a wholly different context, and qualified as swing states. North Carolina and Florida went for Trump in 2016 and 2020, but both had also gone to Barack Obama in his historic victory in 2008. Obama then lost North Carolina but held Florida in 2012. This year, North Carolina kept swinging back and forth, and often appeared as the tipping point state that would deliver the Presidency to Kamala Harris if Pennsylvania failed her. Democrats were less bullish in Florida, but it looked like it could again be put in play for quite a long time after Harris became the candidate. Texas has not gone to a Democrat since Jimmy Carter in 1976, but Democrats nevertheless had great hopes for it in the long term, mostly based on its demographics and a less strong Republican dominance than in many other Southern states. At the end of the day, all three went to Trump more conclusively than the last batch of polls predicted.

I could ramble on on why Democrats failed miserably in Florida and Texas, where their main hopes lay with the young Latino electorate, and just rehash what I said earlier bout Nevada or the Latino electorate in general. Also don't forget that the rift between Democrats and Latinos started some years back, when an over-zealous woke activist found it smart to rebrand them as 'Latinx', and they deeply hated it. Trump's rhetoric about undocumented migrants damaging the prospects of hard-working people who had fully integrated into American society was also heard favourably, as it did have the ring of credibility when the messaging was done smartly enough to erase the obvious racist undertones of the original raw version. Democrats forgot the obvious, that Republicans too can be smart, and they really found out it was a big mistake. Finally, I kept an eye on three Blue States that were never actually in play, even if Redfield & Wilton added two of the them to the list of swing states they polled regularly. It was in fact a good idea to watch them, as they also show another side of the Democrats' unmitigated debacle.

Minnesota was a state to watch for only one reason, that it was Tim Walz's state, so Republicans would have loved nothing more than to toggle it to their side. But it has also been reliably Democratic at every presidential election since 1976. Election Eve polls still predicted the result there would be quite similar to 2020, and it ended up being significantly closer, effectively making it a marginal hold for Harris. The results were just as damning in New Mexico and Virginia, which had qualified as swing states in the distant past, until 2008 actually, but delivered double-digit leads for Joe Biden in 2020. Election Eve polls said Harris would hold both with reduced margins and the actual result was worse, with her lead almost cut in half in both. That's an average 2.3% swing towards Trump in both states, slightly lower than the nationwide swing but in the same ballpark. Such results, in two states Democrats thought well out of the danger zone, show how badly pollsters misread the electorate. And also that Trump's victory was unavoidable, which even the pundits who predicted a Harris victory until the very last day are saying now, on the strength of 20/20 hindsight.

Let’s put Liz Cheney with a rifle, standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.

(Donald Trump)

So we have won. This is decisive. The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat. The future is finally open. I am really happy.

(Aleksandr Dugin, 6 November 2024)

Of course, the fun part is to compare how I predicted the Electoral College would look like on Election Eve, and what actually happened. Not on Election Day, but four days later, as some counts were unbelievably slow. Of course the result was already obvious on the day after, as Trump had cleared the 270 votes hurdle some time during the night. And was instantly celebrated by most deranged Russian fascists, Nigel Farage and Elon Musk. Trump surely has the friends and sycophants he deserves, some of which even deserve being called psychophants. Sorry, couldn't resist. Before you throw rotten tomatoes at me, I just have to remind you that Nate Silver also predicted the Electoral College would go to Harris 270-268. Being just as wrong as the most celebrated and most self-promoted Beltway Pundit, the John Curtice of America, is quite something, innit? Notice that it's not just the overall result that went off piste, but also the allocation of the states to one of the 'party strength' categories. Which was also very commonly missed by all the learned pundits from East Coast to West Coast.

I got only the solidly Democratic states right, though Harris's lead shrunk in all of them, compared to Biden's lead in 2020. Even in California, Trump got closer and flipped 8 counties out of 58, leaving Harris in the lead in only 26. Harris also lost ground, of all places, in the District of Columbia, a clear hint that even the most Democrat-leaning Black electorate were not fully satisfied with her. Otherwise, there was a domino effect of tectonic shifts across the board from Leaning Harris to Solid Trump, moving the huge majority of states to less favourable ratings for the Democrats. Quite significantly, only the swing states still qualify as Weak Trump, as he gained votes in all states without exception. It is quite fun to look at all my earlier predictions, that actually highlight how badly Harris did. Her foundation of unmissable Electoral College votes was always 226, and that's what she got in the end. There was a widespread consensus that seven states, with 93 votes, genuinely qualified as 'swing states' and would decide the election. Against all polls, Trump won all seven of them, a marked contrast to 2020, when seven out of eleven then identified as swing states went to Joe Biden and four to Donald Trump.

Donald Trump must be eternally grateful to Elon Musk and the swarms of Russian bots that were allowed to roam free on Twitter to boost the Republican campaign. It worked better than expected, as Trump not only overturned the 2020 result, but also did better than against Hilary Clinton in 2016. He won the same thirty states he had won back then, and added Nevada to the list. Quite a feat. And now, to lighten the mood, I have a good question for 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?'. How many persons have been President of the United States? Not 47, even if Trump is the 47th, but 45. Because two blokes now were elected to two non-consecutive terms. Grover Cleveland was the 22nd President from 1885 to 1889, and then the 24th from 1893 to 1897. Trump was the 45th from 2017 to 2021, and will now be the 47th. Even Barack Obama got that one wrong when he stated he was the 44th person to sit in the Oval Office. He was only the 43rd even if he was the 44th, because Cleveland. But Trump nevertheless scored a first that is unlikely to be repeated any time soon, as he is the first convicted felon ever elected to the Presidency.

It's hard to bring things down once they're up. You know, it's very hard.

(Donald Trump)

If Trump comes to the UK, I will be out protesting on the streets. He is a racist KKK and Nazi sympathiser.

(David Lammy, 2017)

There were many remarkable things about the House of Representatives elections. Of course the pollsters got them wrong, but not in such a dramatic way as the presidential election. The most striking part is that both dominant parties gained votes on their 2022 results, with third-party and independent candidates squeezed into near-extinction, and that the final headcount of seats was pretty similar to 2022. The trendlines show that polls predicted a Republican surge late in the campaign, though the very last batch turned away from that and cruelly fuelled the Democrats' hopes that they would take back control of the House after all, even on a very wee margin. It did not happen, but it doesn't mean that Trump will have full powers, and the very small number of seats changing hands means that about half of the Republican Representatives are still not fully aligning with the extremist MAGA mob.

The most troubling part is that it took them a full month to get all seats declared, the worst performer being California, the home of the most brilliant techbrains in the known Universe. Of course Elon Musk and the other Trump courtiers were quick to make fun of that, conveniently forgetting to mention that several Republican states were almost as slow, and also performed worse on the presidential vote count. From where I'm sat, the second most flabbergasting part was Democrats bragging about getting the first 'openly transgender' member of Congress elected, in Joe Biden's home state of Delaware. The backstory of this election shows how far back the Democrats' involvement in 'gender identity' politics goes, and how it has switched the 'progressive' establishment into positions that are now unacceptable for massive parts of the American public, only a small minority of which fit the 'far-right bigots' narrative conveniently spread by the woke-compliant activists and influencers. There was a interesting sequel though, with the Battle Of House Loo, culminating in a proposed bill to validate and affirm women-only private spaces. Republicans clearly won that first skirmish when their iconic target conceded defeat and complied with the policy, as enforced by the Speaker of the House.

Obviously Republicans and Elon Musk were quite silent about the House, as it was a whole galaxy away from the Trumpian tsunami they were expecting, and would have bragged about until the next elections. They surely expected better that a quasi-repeat of the 2022 midterms, that were a setback for them. There was no Trumpian landslide two years ago, and even less so this year, as they actually ended up with fewer seats. As I expected, Democrats gained back one seat each in Louisiana and Alabama, three each in California and New York, and lost three in North Carolina, as the Congressional vote aligned with the Presidential vote in districts that qualified as marginals in 2020. This has not worked everywhere though, as American media have identified sixteen remaining 'crossover districts', those with split loyalties. Thirteen districts went to Trump and a Democrat for Congress, who will undoubtedly be at the top of the Republican target list at the 2026 midterms, and just three went to Harris and a Republican. Now that the Republican majority has shrunk to just five seats, it will be interesting to watch how the Trump administration handles the House, and how House Republicans handle the very predictable attempts by the Trump administration to make them endorse the full MAGA agenda, up to its most deranged parts. How much they value checks and balances over party loyalty will be a key factor in the next two years.

Congratulations to Donald Trump on your victory. We look forward to working with you and JD Vance.

(David Lammy, 2024)

Trump controls both houses. The one where Melania lives, and his.

(Ian Hislop, Have I Got News For You?, 29 November 2024)

Before the elections, I had selected twelve key Senate races, different from the twelve states to watch at presidential level, and none of them went quite the way I expected. Back then, Democrats were bound to lose Montana and West Virginia, and there was still a very remote possibility that Republicans would lose one of the Nebraska seats to an Independent. At the end of the day, Democrats lost Ohio and Pennsylvania too, and Republicans held Nebraska, admittedly in a rather lacklustre way. That was when you could still imagine Democrats keeping control of the Senate, with a 50-50 tie being resolved by Vice President Walz's tie-breaking vote. Then voters decided their best option was to absolutely shatter this angelic vision to bits. Let's start now with the four seats that switched from the Democrats to the Republicans, including two that not even Nate Silver saw coming.

The loss of Montana and West Virginia was fully expected. Democratic Senators had clearly outstayed their welcome in states that voted for the Republican presidential candidates continuously since 1996 and 2000 respectively. Pollsters got the Montana race almost right, with Jon Tester overperforming Kamala Harris by 7%. But West Virginia ended up far worse than the two Senate polls fielded there predicted, matching the presidential result. But the real shockers came from Ohio and Pennsylvania, where veteran Democrats Sherrod Brown and Bob Casey were expected to fight off the riding red tide, even by just a few votes, and failed eventually. It was actually a much more brutal awakening for Casey than for Brown, as only three polls out of several dozen predicted a Republican gain in Pennsylvania, while those fielded in Ohio were evenly split and had sent flashing red light alarms for two weeks before the election. This is kind of a dinosaur extinction event for the Democratic Party, as Brown and Casey were among the last of the old style blue collar Democrats, who had the kind of working class appeal that the new woke-compliant generation will never have. Their loss. Then we have the four Democrats who now qualify as an endangered species, as they have managed to hold their seats in states that switched their presidential vote from Biden to Trump.

The most interesting here is Arizona, where the result was pretty much a duplicate of 2018, while the presidential vote swung to Trump by 3% and gave him the state's eleven electoral votes. That's quite different from Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, where the Democrats significantly lost votes from their 2018 results. Those three have a common pattern, weak Democratic holds for the Senate combined with weak Republican gains for the Presidency. So maybe the Blue-Senators-In-Red-States curse won't hit them as it hit Brown and Casey. After all, this quartet have six years to consolidate their position, until the 2030 midterms, and the whole American political landscape will probably be dramatically different then, possibly including all four states switching back to a Democratic presidential candidate in 2028. My last select quartet are seats that were never really expected to change the balance of power in the Senate, and haven't. Though one of them came surprisingly close.

Of course we're talking Nebraska here, the one that could have been the major upset in this electoral cycle. Libertarian-turned-Independent Dan Osborn outpolled Republican incumbent Deb Fischer for most of the campaign, then the prevailing winds shifted and Fischer held her seat with her majority cut by two-thirds. Hers was a clearly lacklustre performance in a state that went to Trump by 20%, and also when compared with the other Senate race in Nebraska. A special election, which you know now is American for by-election, was held off-cycle to fill a vacancy and the Republican candidate won it by 25%. The other three seats are quite representative of this year's voting patterns. The Florida seat was an ultra-marginal gain for Republican Rick Scott in 2018, and Ted Cruz in Texas faced a tougher challenge back then than he ever expected. Both cruised to re-election this year, with much larger margins than polls predicted. It worked the other way round for Democrat Tim Kaine in Virginia, who saw his winning margin cut almost by half. Interestingly, he nevertheless outperformed Kamala Harris by 82k votes and 2.7%, which is indeed quite a verdict on her piss-poor campaigning skills in the last weeks before the elections.

Let’s be fair about this to Elon Musk, and we all find him to be a little bit kooky. But if it’s him or Trump and one of them’s got to make the decisions, Elon Musk taking control of everything sounds a lot better to me.

(Bomani Jones, Have I Got News For You? US, 19 November 2024)

I’d like to see the Democrats’ version of storming the Capitol, though. They would… everyone would have little wicker baskets. They’d all be listening to podcasts on the way.

(Richard Osman, Have I Got News For You?, 8 November 2024)

The comparison between my last prediction for these Senate elections and the actual results shows pretty much the same patterns as the presidential election. Republican candidates did better than predicted and expected in swing seats, and there was a general shift towards weaker ratings for Democrats and stronger ones for Republicans. Even Minnesota, Tim Walz's home state, and iconic Deep Blue states like California, New York and Delaware, Joe Biden's home state, saw Democrats underperform and the states lose their usual 'Solid Dem' status. It wasn't always bound to be that way, and these results illustrate the very negative downballot effect of Kamala Harris's failure. She literally dragged even confident Democrats with strong starting positions down with her. This is probably as good a reason as any for the Democratic Party choosing not to give here a second chance in 2028, and opting for a full reset and the erasure of the Biden years instead.

This year's results are especially disappointing for the Democrats as they had progressed at all three elections of the previous six-year Senate cycle. The Senate is now back to 2018, Trump's first and so far only midterms, and I can only predict uncertainty for the 2026 midterms, when 33 Class 2 seats will be up, plus a special election in Ohio for JD Vance's former seat. Republicans will have 20 seats up, including one in a state that went to Kamala Harris (Maine). Democrats will have 13 up, including two in states that went to Donald Trump (Georgia and Michigan). The Democrats' best hope for a gain will be North Carolina, as the seat was only narrowly held by the Republicans in 2020. But they already had high hopes to switch North Carolina at this year's presidential election, and it failed quite conclusively. Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take back control of the Senate next time, and current patterns make that highly unlikely, as well as the profile of the seats that will be up. Unless Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk fuck up considerably in their new jobs, which can of course not be ruled out.

But, as you might expect, the story doesn't end here and now, and it looks like we can expect some further plot twists. Senate Republicans sent a first message of defiance to Trump when Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine voted to confirm Joe Biden's lame-duck judicial appointments, which predictably sent the whole MAGA mob into a hissy mantrum of rage. Then they sent a much more powerful message when they elected John Thune of South Dakota, a known Trump-sceptic, as the next Senate Majority Leader against John Cornyn of Texas and Rick Scott of Florida, both staunch Trumpistas. I think there is a subliminal warning to Trump here, that he will be a lame-duck President from day one as he can't ever stand again, and that he'd better not try to bully them into complete submission to his personal whims. Or Elon Musk's. This show of force led to rumours that Trump planned to shut down the Senate to fast-track his government nominations without scrutiny as 'recess appointments'. Which would have been totally unconstitutional and pretty much a coup, and thusly very unlikely to actually happen, though I wouldn't put it past Elon Musk to have advised the Orange Baboon to do just that. This unprecedented power grab has almost certainly been blown to smithereens now, but it hints that the next four years may well be quite a bumpy ride of skirmishes between Congress and the White House.

Happy Thanksgiving to all, including to the radical left lunatics who have worked so hard to destroy our country.

(Donald Trump, 28 November 2024)

It is estimated that Trump’s mass deportation plans could cost around $88 billion. Which is still less than what the Democrats spent on booking Beyoncé.

(Roy Wood Jr, Have I Got News For You?, 8 November 2024)

The gubernatorial elections, for Governors in eleven states and Lieutenant-Governors in five states, were quite demonstrably the least suspenseful in this cycle. Nobody expected anything to change, and nothing did. Not completely actually, as two Lieutenant-Governorships changed hands, but in opposite directions so they cancelled each other out, resulting in a global Net Zero. And nobody really cares about the Lieutenant-Governors anyway, so what the fuck? These races were also surveyed far less often by the pollstertariat, but the most significant were, with generally satisfying results. The only one that could have been somewhat competitive was New Hampshire, where a Republican Governor was seeking re-election in a Democratic state at presidential level. Some polls hinted that the seat would flip, but it did not happen, with Kelly Ayotte winning with an outright majority of the popular vote.

Vermont, Bernie Sanders's home state and also the one where Kamala Harris got her biggest margin of victory outwith Washington D.C., was definitely one to watch and it did not disappoint. Not only did Republican Phil Scott hold the Governor's seat more easily than polls predicted, and also with a bigger margin than at the previous election. But the Lieutenant-Governor's position, that had never been polled, also quite sensationally switched to the Republican Party against the Democrat-backed Vermont Progressive Party. But the most watched races happened in North Carolina, ending on a double slap in the face for the Republicans. Incumbent Democratic Governor Josh Stein held his seat on a 5% swing towards him, on the same day the state's presidential vote swung towards Trump by 1%. Of course he was helped by his Republican challenger Mark Robinson being a completely deranged maverick, who was too much of a lunatic even for the most extremist in the MAGA mob. There was an instant trickle-down effect on the race for Lieutenant-Governor, with Democrat Rachel Hunt gaining the seat on a 2.5% swing from the Republicans. Obviously the next term won't be a walk in the park for Stein and Hunt, as Republicans retained control of both houses of the State Legislature, but that was just the kind of success local Democrats needed on an otherwise dark day.

When Donald Trump is given a choice between hiring someone comically unqualified or horrifically immoral, only he has the courage to say , "Why not both?"

(Roy Wood Jr, Have I Got News For You? US, 26 November 2024)

The American people don’t know what’s best for them. I do. I know exactly what they need. They’re like little children. We have to hold their sticky fingers and wipe their filthy mouths.

(Frank Underwood, House Of Cards: Chapter 56, 2017)

Finally, they had elections for the State Legislatures, with 85 chambers in 44 states up, putting 65% of the State Senates' seats and 85% of the State Houses' seats in play, 5,693 seats overall. The State Legislatures are a major pillar of American democracy, in a way Europeans can't even start to imagine. Federalism grants them far more power than our devolution, and even the powers of German Länder are less extensive. States' Rights have always been a core issue in the American political debate. In the early days after the American Revolution, the Federalist Party, contrary to what the name implies, favoured a strong central government while the Democratic-Republican Party, the big-tent liberal coalition that later spawned both the modern Democratic and Republican parties, favoured decentralisation of power. In later eras, Sates' Rights became a major manifesto commitment for Democrats, as a way to salvage pro-slavery laws before the Civil War, and then for Republicans, as a way to 'protect' civil liberties against an 'intrusive' federal government, which has also become one of Elon Musk's favourite talking points after his conversion to Trumpism. Back to the present day, these elections ended up as another setback for the Democrats.

The very last predictions, based on the punditariat's consensus, hinted that Democrats would gain control of both Houses of the State Legislature in Arizona and New Hampshire, while Republicans would gain the Houses of Representatives in Michigan and Pennsylvania. It did not work that way at all, as only the Michigan House of Representatives changed hands from Democrats to Republicans. On top of that, Kamala Harris's running mate Tim Walz suffered an unexpected personal blow in his home state of Minnesota, where the House of Representatives swung from a Democratic majority to a tie. Ironically, Democrats even managed to lose seats in some iconic Blue States like California, Hawaii, New Mexico and Vermont. The overall picture after all these elections is thusly that of significant blows for Democrats, although it would be quite an exaggeration to call it an unmitigated disaster.

At face value, the Republican Party and Donald Trump have won the trifecta of Presidency, House and Senate. But Trump's victory in the Electoral College is not the result of a landslide in the popular vote, Republicans are weaker in the House of Representatives than before the elections, and the seeds of rebellion have already been sown in the Senate. Donald Trump would be well-advised to not listen exclusively to JD Vance and Elon Musk, and overplay his hand, as some prominent Republicans would love nothing more than reminding them that the MAGA faction are a minority in Congress, and that The Donald himself will be a de facto lame-duck President on Inauguration Day, and has pretty much just one year to act before everyone goes on the campaign trail again for the 2026 midterms, and all support for Trump's Musk-influenced extreme 'reforms' vanishes to avoid spooking voters. Can Trump now be denied the absolute power to make an absolute shitshow of his second Presidency? Possibly, though it would require all non-MAGA Republicans in Congress to show some baws, which is not everybody's forte. Or will the Beltway Establishment take its cues from Alaska, where Republicans dominate the popular vote, but a Coalition of Democrats and not-totally-batshit-crazy Republicans are in charge? Obviously won't happen, but wouldn't it be nice?

Ah, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears

Bury the rag deep in your face for now's the time for your tears

(Bob Dylan, The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll, 1964)

Jeremy's Den

09/12/2024

Welcome To Their Nightmares

Welcome To Their Nightmares