The Briefing, Vol. XII, Issue 46
Nov. 11, 2024
This week:
- Donald Trump wins decisively
- Republicans likely to clinch both houses of Congress
- Why he won and why she lost
- Historic aspects of the 2024 victory
Outlook
Former President Donald Trump (R) will serve a second non-consecutive term as the 47th president of the United States.
His win last Tuesday over Vice President Kamala Harris (D) was not a landslide, but it was a decisive victory, the likes of which no Republican has won since 2004. Indeed, Trump carried some key counties (for example, Bucks County, Pa.) that no Republican has carried since 1988, and other regions that no Republican has carried in more than a century.
When all the votes are counted, Trump will have won the popular vote — probably with a majority, not just a plurality — and with the highest vote total of any Republican candidate in history.
Why he won: Before we get into the reasons, let us note also that this is the most thorough repudiation of biased and stupid left-wing media narratives in our nation’s modern history. But that’s for another day.
The reasons for Trump’s win are many.
- First, the conditions for a Republican victory were there, regardless of candidate. The Biden-Harris administration’s massive unpopularity on most important issues made its defeat very likely, both when Biden was the candidate and after Harris replaced him.
- Democrats based much of their message on issues that voters considered unrealistic, stupid or low-priority — “clean energy,” for example, and Trump’s supposed fascism or authoritarianism. The one effective issue they had was abortion, but that has been mostly played out as a spur for pushing voters to the polls. Election 2024 demonstrates that even if you can get a majority to turn out and support abortion (as campaigners did in states like Florida, Montana, and Arizona), they won’t necessarily vote for Democrats when they show up.
- January 6 was a non-starter as a political issue. The idea that that regrettable disturbance was a sign of impending fascism was always an extremely weak one politically. Moreover, Harris’s decision to campaign with war-hawk and former Rep. Liz Cheney, one of the few Republicans who had participated in the Democrats’ Jan. 6 show-trials on Capitol Hill, was probably more offensive to Arabs and Muslims (given the Iraq War) than the choice of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) as her running mate would have been.
- Trump’s issues — economy, crime, immigration, and also the attempted normalization of transgenderism — were extremely effective. That last one was so effective that the Trump campaign bombarded the airwaves — especially during football games — with three different “Kamala is for they-them” ads throughout campaign season. This proved devastatingly effective, particularly with men, and particularly with Hispanic men.
- Trump managed to drive his own popularity upward at just the right time, to one of its highest levels in his career. He always has unusually low favorability numbers, but by the end of the campaign, his numbers were at their all-time high and Harris’s were lower. A large part of this can be attributed to two iconic campaign stunts that will go down in history — Trump’s stint working at a McDonalds for an afternoon, and his press conference from the passenger seat of a Trump-Vance garbage truck, wearing a yellow sanitation worker’s vest. The campaign was so successful that the social stigma formerly associated with being a Trump supporter fell away.
Trump ran a truly innovative campaign in which he and running-mate JD Vance largely circumvented the conventional media. After all, Trump received 95 percent negative coverage, versus Harris’s 78 percent positive coverage. More on that in a moment, but given that it’s true, why appeal to people through the prism of an extremely biased anti-Republican and anti-Trump media when you can instead do hilarious stunts that humanize your candidate and podcast interviews with mega-popular “bro” podcasters — Theo Von, Tim Dillon, and of course Joe Rogan, among others — who collectively have significantly broader reach than cable and even network news.
Note that this only worked because both Trump and Vance are so authentic and capable of thinking and speaking on their feet. In the end, this is what separated them from the Harris-Walz ticket.
The repercussions of this outcome could be quite dramatic for the culture of political candidates and campaigns. This may be the election that kills off the always-on-message, talking-points-heavy style of politicking that dominated U.S. elections from the early 1990s through 2016.
In short, Trump and Vance made strides through long-form interviews that humanized them and showcased their intelligence and experiences, and every candidate in the future will be expected to do the same.
Why she lost: Harris, meanwhile, was doomed by all of the above, plus an impossible dilemma. Her campaign faced two mutually incompatible tasks.
- On the one hand she had to be hidden from the public and the media except at scripted events. From the beginning, their best hope was to hide her from any genuine interactions and run out the clock.
There are two reasons for this. One was that Harris couldn’t afford to be asked about the very recent, ultra-woke policy positions that she had eagerly embraced in 2020 and then just abruptly abandoned without any plausible explanation. (See the note above about “Kamala is for they-them” as just one example among many.)
Second, Harris is absolutely terrible on her feet, to the point that she seems both deeply inauthentic and unintelligent — whether or not that is fair to say about her as a person. This was evident when she ran away, during her interview with Brett Baier, from her own previous vocal backing for taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for California inmates. It was also evident when she refused to take a public position on California’s Proposition 36, whose passage on Election Day with almost 70 percent of the vote represents a stunning public repudiation of everything California liberals have been trying to do with criminal justice reform.
Her evasions evinced a startling degree of shallowness and inauthenticity that could not be attributed to any previous presidential candidate.
Either way, as in the presidential race she was forced to abandon in 2019, voters liked Harris less and less the more they saw her.
- The Harris campaign’s other task was the more common one that every presidential campaign faces — to gain public attention and build up (ideally positive) name recognition around your candidate. Cable news hits, interviews (conventional and podcast), political stunts and public events — things every candidate does — are all intended to get people to notice and talk about you so that eventually they also vote for you.
But because Harris’s staff was trying to hide her and run out the clock after she received the nomination, they were limited in how much they could spread her image far and wide.
To be fair, later in the campaign, Harris’s team did some of the same strategic narrow-casting that worked for Trump. The idea of her doing the Call Her Daddy sex podcast, for example, although many people found it weird and criticized it, was definitely aimed at precisely the “future-cat-lady” demographic that Harris wanted to get to come out and vote against Trump in droves.
The problem, however, went back to the first task listed above. After the unprecedented media hype campaign to boost her and Tim Walz in mid-July, Harris’s people had really good reasons to hide her and try to run out the clock instead of letting her go out in public.
Even in the friendliest of forums — “The View,” Stephen Colbert’s show, and her own campaign’s staged interview with Oprah Winfrey — Harris handled herself well. In fact, these friendly interviews were clearly more damaging to her than even the testy Fox News interview she ultimately agreed to (under duress, since her campaign knew she was losing at that point).
The most damaging question of all, as we have previously noted, was delivered on Oct. 8 by leftist activist Sonny Hostin, about what Harris would do differently from Joe Biden. Harris, stunningly, had no answer. That bizarre moment will go down in history along with President Gerald Ford’s (R) infamous 1976 statement, during a debate with Jimmy Carter (D), that “There is no Soviet Domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.” And to make matters worse, she had no better answer hours later when Colbert asked the same question.
To sum up, Harris’s overall lack of substance was evident every time she opened her mouth. Every appearance she made and even every campaign video she made was cringe after cringe. And her inauthenticity went hand-in-hand with her ideological malleability, for which her only explanation was the question-begging, “My values haven’t changed,” an assertion never explained or supported in any meaningful way.
Another point: Harris definitely did win her only debate against Trump. We said so at the time. But the victory proved to be of little benefit to her. One reason was that she only won by baiting him repeatedly into typically undisciplined Trump rants. Harris herself never had a moment where she shined or drove the stake into his heart. There is no clip from that debate that her campaign was able to use subsequently to her benefit, and that really says it all.
Why he lost: It is also worth addressing briefly Harris’s unexpected and (especially now) controversial choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) as her running mate.
This pick was justified at the time in at least three different ways, based on our observations.
The first was the positive explanation: That Walz came up with the brilliant idea of calling Trump and JD Vance “weird.” In hindsight, that isn’t a very impressive credential for Walz, and it hardly seems credible that Harris would make such a consequential choice based on something so stupid.
The second explanation was that Pennsylvania Gov. Shapiro (D), who is not only Jewish but also a former Israeli Defense Forces volunteer, would be an extremely offensive choice for Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan. So the choice was not simply playing to vile antisemitism, but more to anti-Zionism, or more likely to some combination of the two.
Even so, that doesn’t seem like a good rationalization, given the outcome. Trump ultimately co-opted much of the Muslim vote in Michigan based on other issues — in particular Democrats’ wokeness problem, which led Muslim voters to rebel against the flying of gay pride flags in the cities and towns where they dominate local politics.
A third explanation was offered, that Walz would not upstage Harris the way Shapiro might. This proved to be true — indeed, Walz kept an incredibly low profile in comparison to JD Vance, who soundly defeated him in the one debate where they faced off. It wasn’t a good reason for picking him, though, just given his drunk driving arrest and his history of false statements about his own biography. Liberals tried to hype him up as some kind of game-changer, but his nomination was more of a momentary and forgettable distraction than anything else.
The big switch: We saw in early April that Biden could not win, because the Electoral College math wasn’t adding up.
When he was unexpectedly cast aside in favor of Harris months later, we were equally convinced that she could not win, but there was some doubt. It took some time to sort out and identify the signs that her candidacy was in fact no better than his.
The polls certainly did narrow for several weeks after her accession, especially in key states. Certain states (North Carolina especially) seemed to be back in play. However, the fundamentals of the race never changed, and fundamentals usually win, absent an amazing turnout operation — which Harris’s campaign did not have.
The Biden administration’s approval rating this fall has ranged between 40 and 42 percent in the RealClear average. That made Harris’s campaign an uphill climb irrespective of her personal shortcomings.
Harris had also been a tremendously unpopular figure within the Biden administration before she stole the nomination from him. Probably (we will learn a lot more about this in the coming months) she was even involved in a threat to use the 25th Amendment to remove him from office unless he stepped aside.
The idea that she was suddenly “brat” or cool or “joyful” or authentic or “fun” (as some of her YouTube campaign ads put it) seemed absurd and manufactured.
Harris’s inability to articulate any sort of ideas about policy, her unwillingness to engage in substantive conversations with podcasters like Joe Rogan, and her unwillingness to take positions on key issues such as California’s successful Proposition 36 (restoring the rule of law to her own lawless state and repudiating the legacy of Gov. Gavin Newsom), evinced a candidate too cowardly to take any position on anything important or meaningful to voters.
Harris took the nomination, counting on running out the clock and winning the election based on “vibes” and “joy” and calling her opponents “weird.” It was a dumb strategy. When it failed, she abruptly changed strategy, took multiple interviews, and did badly in them.
There is no evidence that Democrats could have done better by sticking with Biden. But given that they cast him aside so disrespectfully, Biden at least represent that something better could have been.
Notes about 2024
This election is historic for a number of reasons. Here are a few additional notes about it:
- Trump apparently held every county his party won in the prior election (2020), something that no candidate has done since FDR pulled it off in 1932.
- There was something fundamentally different about this win. Unlike in 2016, when Trump ran behind Republican Senate candidates in Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Arizona, and Florida, Trump ran ahead of Republican Senate candidates almost everwhere this time. The lesson: This is his completely his party, and he is now one of its most beloved figures.
- Trump flipped all of the heavily Hispanic counties along the Mexican border in South Texas, some of which had not gone Republican in more than a century. He turned what had been a five-county 120,000 vote deficit in those counties for Mitt Romney in 2012 into an 18,000-vote lead. This result is a stunning repudiation of the Biden administration’s border policies.
- Speaking of Hispanic voters, Trump also flipped Miami-Dade and Osceola (26 percent Puerto Rican) Counties in Florida, becoming the first Republican presidential candidate to do so in decades.
- Trump’s improvement with Hispanic voters is historic and could be a game changer for Republicans going forward as they strive to keep states like Texas and Florida Red and become more competitive in states like Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Illinois (yes, really), and New Jersey. Trump’s 46 percent score among Hispanic voters, and 55 percent score among Hispanic men nationwide, is part of a trend that has been in the works for more than a decade. If Trump doesn’t visit Chicago’s West Side during his second term — and Puerto Rico, for that matter — he will be making a big mistake.
- You may remember a late Iowa poll that suggested Harris would make serious inroads in the Hawkeye State, even winning it by three points. We pointed out that it was nonsense. We were right.
Trump came much closer to flipping Illinois (8.6 point margin of victory), New Jersey (5.5 point margin), and New York (11.6 point margin) to Red then Harris came to flipping Iowa (13.3 point margin) to Blue.
- The rightward shift in Democratic counties such as Cook County, Illinois (Chicago), and the five boroughs of New York City — among many other major urban areas — was quite pronounced. People are evidently tired of the doom-loop of one-party Democratic governance. There is probably some way for Republicans to take advantage of this in the next two years as they attempt to build a better urban base.
- Republicans had great success downballot in state supreme court races in Ohio and North Carolina. In both of these states, Republicans will now hold 6-1 majorities on the high courts, pending a few outcomes.
- Republicans lost control of no legislative bodies in this year’s election. They gained control of the Michigan House of Representatives and forced a tie in the Minnesota House of Representatives, ending total Democratic dominance of the state of vice presidential running mate Tim Walz.
- Republicans had incredible success with younger voters in swing states such as Wisconsin and Michigan, in part thanks to the work of organizations like Turning Point USA.
- Scott Presler’s Early Vote Action organization has done an amazing job over the last four years. This year, it turned out low-propensity voters early in Pennsylvania at incredible rates, especially targeting hunters, truckers, and the Amish. His work, and that of similar organizations in other states, also helped reduce or erase some states’ historic Democratic voter registration advantages.
What we got wrong: The Briefing did not expect Trump to carry Michigan. We got all of the other states right in our predictions about the Electoral College, however.
We also believed, mistakenly, that the marginal Senate seat would be the one in Wisconsin — not the one in Pennsylvania. The loss by Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) after he repudiated his former pro-life beliefs is gratifying for every conservative in an election where pro-life ideals took a beating through ballot measures in some states. Although there are 100,000 votes left to count, Casey would have to win more than 70 percent of them to catch up to Senator-elect Dave McCormick (R-Pa.).
We were also incorrect about several House races, although we believe that we were correct that Republicans will retain the House. As of this writing, they are two seats shy with six seats outstanding where the Republican candidate leads and a couple of additional close races.
California: Finally, a message of hope from one of the least likely places in America.
The passage of Proposition 36, the defeat of pro-criminal Los Angeles County D.A. George Gascon (D), and the recalls of Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao (D) and pro-criminal Alameda County D.A. Pamela Price (D) represent another repudiation of left-wing criminal justice anti-incarceration abolish-the-police mumbo-jumbo.
Despite what many conservatives reading this might think, this is not the only recent positive sign from California voters.
Recall that in 2020, even as they were electing Joe Biden, California voters rejected Proposition 16 — an extremely well-funded campaign to restore Affirmative Action, backed by Harris herself and many others — with 57 percent opposed.
The lesson here California still has the chance to become America’s Lazarus. No political alignment is ever permanent. Perhaps Hispanic and Asian Republican voters will be the backbone of a much-needed revolution.
