We begin today with a report by UnidosUS, the oldest Hispanic civil rights organization, that disputes the national exit polls with regard to Latino voters in the 2024 presidential election.
In a historic night for Republicans, who increased support across most demographics including Latinos, a majority of Hispanic voters — including men — voted for Vice President Kamala Harris. In many instances, policies associated with Democrats far outperformed candidates from that party. Pocketbook concerns dominated 4 of the top 5 priorities, with reproductive rights rounding up the top 5, nationally. [...]
UnidosUS Vice President of the Latino Vote Initiative Clarissa Martínez de Castro said,
“The most potent driver in the election was economic discontent, expressed in President-elect Donald Trump’s gains with most demographics. If there is a mandate, it’s on that: raise wages and bring down food, housing and health care costs. A majority of Hispanic voters supported Harris — including men — and a supermajority reject mass deportations and abortion restrictions. The mainstream exit polls got Hispanic candidate support wrong, and that is a recurring sampling issue. But there is dissonance between candidate choice and policy positions, with much greater support for policies supported by Democrats than for Democratic candidates. This is an area of strategic reflection for Democrats. For Republicans, the message is that many of the policies in their platform are opposed by a majority of American voters, including Latino supermajorities. Elected officials on both sides of the aisle would be wise to govern with those elements in mind, to keep or grow Hispanic support in future elections.”
“This election sent three strong messages regarding Latino voters. First, the influence of Latino voters continues to grow as we reach a new record in terms of the number of Latinos who voted, despite the underinvestment in year-round outreach efforts. Second, Latino communities can mobilize effectively in key moments when properly resourced, both to push back or push forward on issues that matter. And third, but certainly not least, Latinos still hold onto certain core values when it comes to policies, such as the desire for action on climate change, support for a fair economy and a commitment to humane immigration policy, all of which should be taken into consideration when discussing legislative priorities in 2025,” said Frankie Miranda, president and CEO of Hispanic Federation. “Latinos must be invested in if we hope to turn out the Latino vote. We can no longer be ignored or take it for granted. With sufficient and substantial resources, Latinos can be mobilized in unprecedented numbers.”
These are the state breakouts. I suppose that I could check and see if these numbers line up with the votes in heavily Latino areas.
Here’s a curious stat in the report.
“Highest Trump support was from Cuban Americans (54%).”
Curious because Barack Obama received 48-51% of the Cuban American vote in 2012. Trump’s 54% seems...low. (There is nothing in the report about overall Cuban-American support for Harris, my guess is that Harris was in the upper 30’s to low 40’s.)
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo looks at the latest personnel selections by the shoe salesman.
But Tulsi Gabbard is pretty new to MAGA world. I’m frankly a little surprised he trusts her. I don’t mean trusts her not to become normal or actually do the job. I think she’s as crazy as he is. But all these other people have shown over many years that they’re 100% in Trump’s camp. Gabbard’s pretty new to MAGA. And you might be saying, well I could tell she was Trumpy back in 2019. And yeah, me too. But that’s not the same as being a ride-or-die loyalist to Donald Trump. It may not matter. I’m simply noting that that is the first and really only nomination that surprises me. Not because she’s nuts and a pretty severe threat to U.S. national security but because her time as a Trumper is quite limited. As we remember from the old Sesame Street segments, one of these things is not like the other. And that thing is Tulsi Gabbard.
As for Matt Gaetz — comically inappropriate, totally unqualified, but completely unsurprising. There may be no apparatus Trump wants to control more than the Department of Justice. Gaetz throws in the additional benefit of being a total chaos agent. And it might even free up opportunities in his dating life. In many ways, this is provocation as much as anything. A big F You to everyone who believes in the rule of law. [...]
There’s a method to this madness. Note that Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, the two biggest immigration hawks, are housed within the White House. Miller is deputy chief of staff for policy, a very critical position. Homan is “border czar.” But that’s not a thing. That’s just an advisor with a title at the White House. Concentration of power in the White House is a feature of most recent administrations. But here we see a particularly acute version of it: People who are generally non-entities in many key positions and the decision-making housed in the White House, free of whatever minimal oversight the Senate might have over the departments.
Renée Graham of The Boston Globe points out that noone is playing “identity politics” more than MAGA.
For nearly a decade, the president-elect has cultivated the ample supply of white fear and grievance about immigrants. He cranked up his rhetoric to fascistic levels with claims that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” and racist lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and Venezuelan immigrants in Aurora, Colo.
Trump’s message was plain — Black and brown immigrants threaten a nation where only white lives matter. At a rally a week before the election, Stephen Miller, who is expected to be Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, said “America is for Americans and Americans only.” Miller left the white part silent, but it was impossible to miss. So a majority of white voters did last week what they did in 2016 and 2020 — they voted for Trump.
But it’s the Democrats with the identity politics problem, right?
[...]
But we’re also seeing this — flexes of intimidation from those most protective of white identity and patriarchy. Since the election, women have been inundated on social media with misogynistic phrases like, “Your body, my choice,” “Get back to the kitchen,” and “Repeal the 19th,” a reference to the constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote.
John Cassidy of The New Yorker looks at some of the economic factors that led to Harris’ defeat at the polls.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that economic factors were solely responsible for the U.S. result. Immigration, the culture war, Trump’s reprobate appeal, and other factors all fed into the mix. But anger at high prices clearly played an important role, which raises the question of what, if anything, the Biden Administration could have done to counteract the global anti-incumbency wave. This is a complex issue that can’t be fully addressed in a single column. But one place to start is at the White House itself, where staffers at the Council of Economic Advisers (C.E.A.) and the National Economic Council spent a lot of time analyzing the inflation spike and examining options to deal with it. [...]
After Harris replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, she vowed that reducing the cost of living would be her first priority. She also outlined a number of proposals designed to help low- and middle-income families, which included expanded child tax credits, a new subsidy for first-time home buyers, and allowing Medicare to help cover the cost of home care. “One of the biggest problems with the wave of recent price shocks was that even after grocery and gas prices stabilized, the prices for housing and child care were out of reach and had been the source of enormous stress for middle- and working-class families for decades,” Felicia Wong, the president and C.E.O. of the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank, told me. Harris’s proposals were designed to address these issues.
Ultimately, however, none of these things dislodged the public perception that over-all prices were still too high and that Biden and Harris, if not entirely responsible, were convenient vehicles for voters to take out their frustration on. “If people have brilliant ideas about how we could have communicated on inflation more effectively, I’m all ears,” [Ernie] Tedeschi said. “But we tried a number of different things. I just don’t think there is a way to talk around it, precisely because it is so real.”
Helen Braswell and Anil Oza of STATnews point to the dangers of public health (particularly for children) during the incoming administration.
Two senior Biden administration officials on Wednesday warned there could be serious consequences for the nation’s children if it had to relearn lessons about the public health benefits of vaccines.
The comments, which came as the country waits to see who will fill key health positions in the new Trump administration and how much sway anti-vaccine figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might exert, were made by Mandy Cohen, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at an event in Washington, and Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulator, at a scientific conference in Boston.
Both cautioned the country may pay an unnecessary toll if it adopts policies that undermine the uptake of childhood vaccines in particular.
“I think we have a very short memory of what it is like to hold a child who has been paralyzed with polio or to comfort a mom who’s lost her kid from measles. It’s not that many generations ago, but it is far enough away that folks have forgotten,” Cohen told an audience at the Milken Institute’s Future of Health Summit.
“No one wants to see a child paralyzed, a child die from something that we can prevent.”
Nicholas Grossman of ARC Digital has some suggestions on how to survive in the near future.
...The near-future will be tough — I expect a period darker than anything most living Americans have experienced — and it makes sense to protect your mental health. If you do, you’ll be better at supporting your loved ones, countering Trump administration abuses, and organizing to get power back.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I realized after the election that I’ve spent over eight years trying to save the world. I don’t mean in any grandiose sense, just that I thought of the Trumpist threat to U.S. Constitutional democracy — and with it, the world order — like they were my problems, and my responsibility to help solve. I’m guessing a lot of you felt similarly.
It didn’t work. I do not think we were wrong to try, but I do think this moment calls for adjustments. I plan on somewhat shrinking my focus, devoting more energy to family and community. At that level, there are a lot of ways we can succeed.
As for nationally: Do not accept that it’s over. It isn’t. Politics is a competition for power, and while it may have changed, it never ends. More authoritarian governments than Trump Term II have fallen.
For myself, I have not watched cable news since the day after the presidential election, I’ve deactivated my Twitter account and while I am keeping up with the news, I’m not keeping up with some of the political back and forth on Bluesky or anywhere else. I’ll address how I will handle “legacy media” in this coming Sunday’s APR.
Jonathan Yerushalmy of the Guardian reminds us that the gender gap among Gen Z is not limited to the United States,
While votes are still being tabulated, last week’s election saw a chasm open up between the political preferences of 18- to 29-year-olds in America. Trump’s seismic win among young men was mirrored almost inversely by Kamala Harris’s huge, 18-point win among young women. Notably, that margin is more than double the gender gap in the overall electorate; Harris won female voters of all ages by just seven points.
In this regard the US is not unique; political polarisation between the genders has been growing among young people across the globe. In South Korea’s 2022 presidential election there was a difference of just a few points in voting preference between men and women in every age range, except those aged 18-29.
In Gen Z there was an almost 25-point difference when it came to voting for the conservative-leaning People’s Power party.
The same patterns play out elsewhere: in the 2024 UK general election, almost twice as many young women voted Green than young men (23% to 12%). Conversely, young men were more likely to vote for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK (12% to 6%). Meanwhile in Germany, a sample of recent surveys showed men aged 18-29 were twice as likely to vote for the hard-right AfD than women in the same age range.
Daniel Drezner of Foreign Affairs takes a generalized view at what a Trump 2.0 foreign policy may look like while pronouncing the coming Administration as “the end of American exceptionalism.”
Trump will navigate world politics with greater confidence this time around. Whether he will have any better luck bending the world to his “America first” brand is another question entirely. What is certain, however, is that the era of American exceptionalism has ended. Under Trump, U.S. foreign policy will cease promoting long-standing American ideals. That, combined with an expected surge of corrupt foreign policy practices, will leave the United States looking like a garden-variety great power. [...]
Trump’s foreign policy worldview has been clear ever since he entered political life. He believes that the U.S.-created liberal international order has, over time, stacked the deck against the United States. To change that imbalance, Trump wants to restrict inward economic flows such as imports and immigrants (although he likes inward foreign direct investment). He wants allies to shoulder more of the burden for their own defense. And he believes that he can cut deals with autocrats, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putinor North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, that will reduce tensions in global trouble spots and allow the United States to focus inward. [...]
The most important difference between Trump 2.0 and Trump 1.0, however, is also the simplest: Donald Trump is now a known commodity on the global stage. As the Columbia professor Elizabeth Saunders recently observed, “In the 2016 election, Trump’s foreign policy was somewhat mysterious. . . . In 2024, however, Trump’s actions are far easier to predict. The candidate who wanted to be the ‘madman’ and loved the idea of keeping other countries guessing has become a politician with a pretty predictable agenda.” Leaders such as Xi, Putin, Kim, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and even French President Emmanuel Macron have seen Trump’s schtick before. Both great powers and smaller states know by now that the best way to deal with Trump is to shower him with pomp and circumstance, abstain from fact-checking him in public, make flashy but token concessions, and remain secure that by and large their core interests will be preserved. Trump’s negotiating style yielded minimal concrete gains in his first term; it will yield less than that in his second term.
Finally today, Andrea Rizzi of El País in English looks at work a future Trump Administration could upend the world’s geopolitical order. In this excerpt, Rizzi looks specifically at Taiwan and North Korea.
It should be remembered that Xi Jinping has repeatedly pointed out that the “rejuvenation” of China that he seeks necessarily entails the assertion of Beijing’s control over the island. Biden has been the most explicit of American presidents in his promises to defend Taiwan if it were unjustifiably attacked.
While the desire to maintain U.S. primacy over China is a central part of Trump’s discourse — and is, incidentally, the only bipartisan consensus in Washington — the isolationist instinct and the reluctance to get involved in military operations are an essential part of his policy. If Beijing were to interpret that Trump is not willing to act to defend Taiwan, this could change calculations about the opportunity of military action to subjugate the island.
The strengthening of ties between Pyongyang and Moscow raises many concerns. The first reason is obvious: through military support to Russia, North Korea seeks in return aid from the Kremlin — military technology, food, energy — and in general the possibility of not depending only on China, to expand its options, to have a triangular capacity instead of merely bilateral. But some wonder if the activation of this clause of mutual military support is a step to strengthen Pyongyang’s options for attacking South Korea. This is unlikely, but it is inadvisable to rule anything out, especially if the isolationist branch ends up prevailing in the new Trump administration.
Try to have the best possible day everyone!
