We begin today with Michael Schaffer of POLITICO noting that the shoe salesman won the 2024 presidential election with a mere plurality of votes as opposed to a resounding mandate.
It’s hard to blame them: Even as the counting progressed, Trump’s victory was described as “resounding” by news organizations ranging from the Associated Press to the The Washington Post to the The New York Times to POLITICO. Others offered “commanding win,” “runaway win” and “dominant victory.”
Say what?
To coin a phrase, we’ve defined dominance down. After years as a 50-50 country, it seems, even a small win gets talked about like a shellacking. Wriggling into office with a puny plurality and less than half the vote in an essentially two-way race used to be considered pretty weak sauce. A squeaker. Why do we now treat a JV-caliber success like some sort of Olympian feat? Following the traumas of 2020, maybe “dominant victory” has come to simply mean a win that doesn’t lead to endless recounts or domestic insurrection.
Washington, please stop this consensus!
The only thing is, what Trump did this month is a lot like what Joe Biden did four years ago — but with less of the general public on his side. Biden won the vote by about four-and-a-half points, making inroads with GOP demographics and capturing the swing states while his party held the House and retook the Senate by the narrowest possible margin. There was no talk back then of a Biden blowout.
And appropriately so: Biden may have had a popular majority, but it too was a squeaker.
Schaffer makes a good point that Trump’s (and the Republicans) ultimate victory margin was very slim and we need to keep that on mind as opposed to what legacy media is saying but, ultimately, Donald Trump was the worst choice to to ever win the presidency. There is no equivalency of competence with President Joe Biden. And America may pay for that slim victory. Dearly.
Renée Graham of The Boston Globe looks at the real “DEI” hires of Trump’s proposed Administration.
In a recent CNN segment, Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks were described as “unconventional,” as if the anchors were talking about quirky vacation destinations instead of an anti-vaxxer as health and human services secretary or a woman who has been called a “sympathizer” of America’s enemies leading national intelligence.
Instead, call the president-elect’s choices for his next administration exactly what they are: disqualifying, extreme, and incompetent.
Or DEI hires.
DEI usually stands for “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” But in the white backlash after worldwide protests spurred by the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, it’s been sharpened into a pejorative thrown around by Republicans whenever someone other than a white man — especially if it’s a Black woman — ascends to a coveted position or makes inroads in institutions that once would have barred them at the door. [...]
But most Republicans have gone suspiciously and predictably silent about the manifestly unqualified people that Trump wants to fill his Cabinet.
Gabriel R. Sanchez of the Brookings Institution takes another dive into the data involving Trump’s increased share of the vote among Latino men.
How much did Trump improve on his performance with Latino men relative to 2020? This is an important place to begin this discussion, as there is a rather wide range of estimates of just how well Trump did with this sub-group of the electorate. I put a lot of caution on the National Exit Poll’s estimate of 55% for Trump among Latino men, given that similar to the national preelection polls, it is not designed to capture nuances among sub-groups of the electorate and has been critiqued in the pastfor its inability to fully capture the Latino vote. Although the majority of Latino men did not vote for Trump, it is clear that Trump significantly improved his performance among Latino men.
According to the 2024 American Electorate Voter Poll, a survey I reference throughout the rest of this article, 43% of Latino men supported former President Trump—significantly lower than the estimate from the National Exit Poll but much higher than what Harris and Democrats were hoping for. When we note that 38% of Latino men supported a Republican congressional candidate in the 2022 election, this represents a modest yet significant 5% increase in GOP support over the past two years. [...]
The economy’s importance to Latino men, combined with the perception that Trump and Republicans are better at reducing costs and creating higher-paying jobs, was clearly a key factor in shaping their voting behavior this cycle. However, it is important to put this into context. Nearly a third of construction workers in the country are Latino, a labor force hit hard during COVID-19 closures. Furthermore, we found in our academic research that a third of Latino families lost their business/were in jeopardy of losing their business, with Latino men being more likely to experience economic stress during the pandemic.
Jonathan Cohn of HuffPost looks into factors that may decide the Trump’s Administration’s ultimate move on a federal tax credit for electric vehicles.
The policy in question is a federal tax credit for buyers of new electric vehicles. It exists thanks to the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s signature legislative accomplishment, and is part of that law’s effort to reduce reliance on fossil fuels by promoting EV use.
Last week Reuters reported that Trump’s transition team was recommending he ask Congress to kill the tax credit. And while Trump has not said anything publicly, auto industry leaders and investors saw the report as a trial balloon and indicator of what the president-elect is likely to do. [...]
One of the co-leaders of the transition team on EV policy, according to Reuters, is Harold Hamm, a billionaire oil tycoon who was a prodigious Trump fundraiser during the campaign (and donated plenty of his own money, too). Hamm opposes support for EVs, whose growth over the long term would reduce demand for gasoline ― i.e., the financial lifeblood of his enterprises.
Elon Musk, another Trump megadonor, also has the president-elect’s ear. And although Musk is the CEO of Tesla, the nation’s top electric carmaker, Musk has said his company doesn’t need the subsidies because it’s not trying to retool from making gas-powered cars and isn’t at the same disadvantage internationally as the legacy Detroit automakers.
Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review notes that for all the bluster and panic about podcasts, the “manosphere” and “news influencers,” legacy media is more than holding its own.
...On Monday, a much-discussed study from the Pew Research Center reported that roughly one in five Americans—a figure that rises to nearly two in five among young people—say they regularly get information from news influencers, a term that Pew defines as individuals who regularly post about “current events and civic issues” and have at least a hundred thousand followers on a major social platform; Pew found that these influencers skew male and right-wing (though not by much, in the latter case) and tend not to have any background in traditional newsrooms. Also on Monday, Puck’s Peter Hamby wrote about a poll that his outlet conducted in partnership with Echelon Insights, noting that public reaction to Trump’s, erm, controversial cabinet picks has generally been more positive than the frenzied news cycle around them might suggest, and observing that “legacy media is losing its place in the attention economy.” The same day, Abby Phillip, an anchor on CNN, spoke at an event at Harvard. “I feel like I have to talk about my own demise here, but that’s what it is,” she said. “People are not watching TV anymore.” On Wednesday, we learned that several other cable networks, including MSNBC and CNBC, would be spun off by their owner, Comcast—a move that the Times interpreted as a bid to unshackle the company’s movie and theme park assets from “the waning fortunes of traditional television.”
And yet, if Merid was right to say that media fragmentation is not an easy phenomenon to understand or measure, we should be careful not to overstate the extent of legacy media’s demise, at least to this point. The consequences of the Comcast spinoff are not yet totally clear; at Harvard, Phillip also stressed that CNN “remains extremely relevant” in a shifting media landscape. Puck’s polling with Echelon found that for all “the hype about podcasts and TikTok,” TV and streaming remained dominant information sources during the election: majorities of voters “said that TV ads and news coverage of events and rallies were the main vehicles for learning about the candidates,” while nearly 60 percent reported watching the results live on TV. And, as Semafor’s Ben Smith has noted, major mainstream outlets (not Von or Rogan) have broken “nearly all the news” about Trump’s appointments...
Finally today, the reporting team of Fiona Harvey, Adam Morton, Dharna Noor, and Damain Carrington of Guardian reports that the COP 29 summit came to some agreements regarding climate assistance to developing companies but no one is happy with that agreement.
Rich and poor countries concluded a trillion-dollar deal on the climate crisis in the early hours of Sunday morning, after marathon talks and days of bitter recriminations ended in what campaigners said was a “betrayal”.
Under the target the developing world will receive at least $1.3tn (£1tn) a year in funds to help them shift to a low-carbon economy and cope with the impacts of extreme weather, by 2035.
But only $300bn of that will come primarily in the form they are most in need of – grants and low-interest loans from the developed world. The rest will have to come from private investors and a range of potential new sources of money, such as possible levies on fossil fuels and frequent flyers, which have yet to be agreed.
Mohamed Adow, director of the Power Shift Africa thinktank, said: “This [summit] has been a disaster for the developing world. It’s a betrayal of both people and planet, by wealthy countries who claim to take climate change seriously. Rich countries have promised to ‘mobilise’ some funds in the future, rather than provide them now. The cheque is in the mail. But lives and livelihoods in vulnerable countries are being lost now.”
Try to have the best possible day everyone!
