Election

Bishop Butler once observed that probability is “the very guide of life.” This is true. It follows that possibility is cheap, an errant muse. Yes, we must stash away in the back of our mind the admonition that “in this life... we must always distinguish between the Unlikely and the Impossible” (that’s the philosopher R. Psmith, courtesy of P.G. Wodehouse). Nevertheless, we should not run our lives or write our columns on that basis.   “Why Trump won.” That is my assignment. I shall treat it as a declaration, not a question. And even though I write before the returns are in, I can give you the reasons. After all, I have been predicting that Donald Trump would win “in a landslide” at least since July.

I have a confession to make. This year, I practiced electoral abstinence. By that, I mean I mostly tuned out from the election campaign. No posting a spicy GIF every time one of the candidates dodged a question. No clicking refresh on the RealClearPolitics polling average until I could feel the slow onset of carpal tunnel syndrome. It was a serious change of pace. For more than a decade, I was a conservative journalist, and before 2024, I’d covered every election cycle since 2012 (if sitting on my couch in sweatpants watching CNN and writing about it counts as “covering,” which in our current media landscape means yes!). I wrote reaction pieces after each of the Obama-Romney presidential debates. I watched on my TV as the events of January 6, 2021 unfolded five miles up the road.

In the minds of many progressive Democrats, Representative Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Dem, just committed an unpardonable sin. He told the New York Times that his two girls should not have to compete in sports against men who have become women: Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that. Moulton’s statement is really about two issues, not one. It is important to distinguish them. The first, obviously, is about women and athletics.

Cities never sleep, but neither does Donald J. Trump. That might explain why he managed to make inroads in the most unlikely of places.  Trump’s gains in the Big Apple were able to do some damage to the Democrats’ star candidate and helped contribute to his popular vote win. “Kamala Harris won New York City by a thirty-seven-point margin, far shy of the nearly fifty-four-point margin of victory that President Biden held over Donald J. Trump in 2020,” Dana Rubinstein and Stefanos Chen wrote in the Times.  So how did he do it? It depends on who you ask.

Donald Trump has won the presidency for a second time — but the real surprise is the coalition of voters that put him there. Women showed up less for Kamala Harris than they did for Joe Biden, Trump’s white working-class base didn’t falter, and Arab Americans made their mark in Dearborn, Michigan. But the most notable gains for the GOP, however, were with Hispanic men and young men. With Hispanic men, according to CNN exit polls, the shift is remarkable: from +31 for Hillary Clinton, to +23 for Joe Biden, to +10 to Trump. Lots of credit is due to the burgeoning Spanish-speaking conservative media. With young men, the trend is even more eye-opening.

Republicans have, very foolishly, engaged in “autopsies” after recent election losses. This election, it’s the Democrats’ turn! The Democrats will engage in a circular firing squad for the next couple of years, with all factions doing their best to gain the upper hand by giving their rivals the shiv in the jailhouse shower. Allow me, a Republican political consultant without a dog in this fight, to answer the pressing question: who will Democrats blame for the campaign that inconceivably allowed the bad Orange Man to win and the obviously superior Kamala and Clooney and Oprah to fail? First, let’s start with the obvious — black voters. The people at DNC HQ will be furious that black voters did not obey instructions and vote 95 percent for Democrats.

The candidate who said Americans should be “unburdened by what has been” is now a has-been. The irony will be lost on her.  Also lost was the traditional graciousness — and normative necessity — of conceding defeat clearly and publicly as soon as the loss is certain. When Donald Trump failed to take that step in 2020, after exhausting his court challenges, he violated that norm and deepened our national divisions. He deepened that chasm on January 6 and later by continuing to challenge the rightful winner. Those challenges threaten the peaceful transfer of power and undermine the public consensus that the winner holds office legitimately.  Kamala Harris learned from Trump’s mistake and repeated it.

Welcome to The Spectator’s live 2024 election coverage. Stay tuned throughout the night as our writers bring you news, analysis and commentary on the presidential race and others from across the country.

Donald Trump’s podcast bonanza just paid off with the biggest win possible: a formal endorsement from Joe Rogan, whose massive audience has been coveted by both Trump and Kamala Harris in the final days of the election. In Rogan’s latest episode, with top Trump surrogate and X CEO Elon Musk, the two talked for almost three hours in Rogan’s Austin studio — standard fare for his show, which was apparently too much for the sitting vice president, whose team would only agree to an hour-long interview on the road, which never occurred. But the most important takeaway came when Rogan posted the episode, along with his commentary. “If it wasn't for [Musk] we'd be fucked,” Rogan wrote.