Nov. 6: The Trump Landslide

The bro vote; Iranian rial plummets; Bibi congratulates Trump

---

---

The Big Story

On Tuesday night, Donald John Trump recaptured the presidency in what may be the greatest second act in American political history. While some states are still counting votes, it seems likely, as of our writing, that he will sweep all seven battleground states and become the first Republican since George W. Bush in 2004 to win the popular vote. The Republicans have already recaptured the Senate and are favored (92.4% chance, according to Decision Desk HQ) to retain their majority in the House of Representatives, though many of the competitive races won’t be called until later this week. But we know enough now to say that last night’s election delivered a decisive popular mandate for Trump and a decisive repudiation of the Democratic Party machine built by Barack Obama. 

The election played out essentially how we suggested it might in our Oct. 30 Big Story. Our only regret is telling you not to bet the house on it, because if you’d done that, you would have made a fortune. We cannot, unfortunately, claim any special insight into the numbers; we merely had the luck or good sense to follow the right people, among them anonymous early-vote analysts such as @DataRepublican, @TonerousHyus, and @earlyvotedata on X, as well as allegedly “low-quality” or “right-wing” pollsters such as Rich Baris, Mark Mitchell, and the team at Atlas Intel. For months now, they have been saying that mainstream pollsters and pundits predicting a Harris victory were full of it. They were right. The late Harris surge in the polls was a mirage. The stories that recently appeared in outlets such as Politico about massive last-minute swings to Harris among independents, Hispanics offended by a comic’s Puerto Rico joke, and educated women—all of it was bullshit, invented out of whole cloth by Harris campaign operatives and repeated by journalists such as Jonathan Martin as if it were fact. In the end, none of it was real. The election wasn’t even close. 

How did Trump do it? We’ve seen some suggestive exit polls showing, for instance, Trump winning more than 40% of the Jewish vote in New York City; that sounds right, but we’d caution that exit polls are notoriously unreliable. County data, on the other hand, is rock-solid. So consider the following map from The New York Times, which shows virtually the entire country shifting massively toward Trump and the Republican Party since 2020:

And consider this chart, also from the Times, which breaks down vote shifts by county type:

To put that in simple terms: Pretty much the entire country shifted toward Trump. That includes deep-blue strongholds. The New York Post reported Wednesday morning that Harris was leading New York by a little more than 11% with 95% of votes counted—the worst performance by a Democrat in the Empire State since Michael Dukakis in 1988. Trump cracked 30% in New York City—also the best performance by a Republican since 1988, driven by a 35% improvement in the Bronx relative to 2020 and improvements of 20% and 16.5% in Manhattan and Queens, respectively. Finally, Trump blew the doors off of several heavily minority counties across the country, flipping Florida’s Osceola County (home to a large Puerto Rican population) and Texas’s 97% Hispanic Starr County. He won the latter by nearly 16% after losing it by 5% to Biden—a 21-point swing in four years. It was, as Ryan Girdusky observed on X, the first time Starr County had voted for a Republican since 1892. 

We’ve seen some talk of a “realignment election,” with the Republicans broadening their appeal among the multiracial working class while the Democrats become more entrenched in affluent white suburbs. We’ll have to wait for more detailed demographic breakdowns to say for sure, but what the above table suggests to us is something different: a “whole of society” (to borrow a term) rejection of Kamala Harris and her party. Punchbowl’s congressional reporter, Max Cohen, cited a Democratic House source this morning who summed up the result nicely: “This was a total and complete repudiation of the Democratic Party. People are not buying what we’re selling. Period.”

Indeed. In the wake of this election, there will no doubt be calls for unity and restraint from the people who spent the past half-decade attempting to undo the results of the 2016 election, censoring speech, weaponizing the federal government and intelligence agencies against their political opponents, prosecuting Trump and his allies and supporters, and more recently running a full-spectrum propaganda campaign to demonize him and his supporters as fascists and Nazis. They gambled their credibility and any right to a presumption of good faith, pushing America’s institutions to their breaking point in their effort to win. And they lost—“bigly,” as the president-elect might say. 

We, too, would like to see national unity, and a healing of the scars of the past decade. But first, there needs to be justice. 

---

The Rest

→We heard a lot about this being a “gender gap” election, and it was, but not because Trump was doing worse among women … at least, not young women. Here’s a graphic from The Wall Street Journal, based on a survey of more than 120,000 voters conducted by the Associated Press, showing that Trump improved among young men and young women relative to 2020—the widening gap coming from his genuinely massive improvement among young men:

→As for the Kamala Harris postmortem, here’s CNN’s Jake Tapper with our Clip of the Day:

Literally nothing.

→As we mentioned in the Big Story, you would have had a much more realistic assessment of Trump’s chances in this election if you’d been reading us (or following anonymous anime-avatar election modelers) than if you’d been reading The New York Times, Politico, or Nate Silver’s Substack. Will the press learn anything? Early indications say no, judging from this line in the Times’ morning write-up of Trump’s victory, which is a real thing that someone wrote and then submitted to another person, who edited and published it:

The relative stability on domestic and international affairs during the last four years is about to be gone, replaced by a volatile president who often operates without regard to national precedent.

On the more optimistic side, Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, was quick to send his congratulations. “Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” the world’s second-richest man wrote on X. “No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.”

→The Iranian rial plunged to an all-time low early Wednesday morning as it became clear that Trump would retake the White House. The rial-to-dollar exchange rate dropped to 703,000-to-1 as networks began to call Pennsylvania for the former president, down from the already weak figure of 584,000-to-1 on July 30, when Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was inaugurated. When the Iran nuclear deal was signed in 2015, the exchange rate was a mere 34,000-to-1. 

→Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “among the first leaders” to congratulate President-elect Trump, speaking to him early Wednesday morning. The prime minister congratulated Trump on his election victory, and the two agreed to work together for Israel’s security, according to a statement from the prime minister’s office reported in The Times of Israel. “The two also discussed the Iranian threat.”

→U.S. Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith announced Wednesday that he would be dropping both of his ongoing cases against Trump. Smith had charged Trump in two separate federal cases: one concerning his conduct after the 2020 election and on Jan. 6 (using an “obstruction of an official proceeding” statute designed to prevent corporations such as Enron from destroying documents) and the other concerning Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. DOJ guidelines do not permit department lawyers to pursue cases against a sitting president. 

→For those who might be struggling to accept the results of the election, here’s some advice in our Post of the Day: