I went to bed on Tuesday night with assurances from several sources that the election was still very close and that it might take many more hours to determine the winner — if any — of the 2024 US federal election. Roughly an hour later, it was apparently all over but the crying:
We’re sitting down to write this at 2 a.m., and by now it’s clear: Donald Trump is set to be the 47th president of the United States, and on track to win the electoral college and the popular vote. It is a stunning comeback.
The red wave that wasn’t in 2022 came crashing down tonight. Republicans have retaken control of the Senate. Control of Congress is still in the balance.
Going into tonight, Nate Silver ran 80,000 simulations of what could happen. In 40,012 of them, Kamala Harris won. Every pollster and pundit said the same: It was gonna be a squeaker. Too close to call. We wouldn’t know for days, maybe even weeks!
That’s not how it went down. Not at all.
Trump had won Pennsylvania before the night was out. And by 2:30 in the morning, he was onstage, surrounded by his family and Dana White, delivering his victory speech in West Palm Beach.
Tonight at our election party, the British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore said he hadn’t seen a comeback like this since Charles de Gaulle. But perhaps the only American echo of tonight is Richard Nixon. As Commentary editor John Podhoretz wrote on Twitter: “This is the most staggering political comeback in American history. Period. Nixon has held the comeback trophy for nearly 60 years. No longer.”
Why Trump won so convincingly — and why Kamala lost so fully — are themes we’ll cover over the coming weeks. But for now, enough from us.
In the same Front Page summary:
This race was the Democrats’ to lose. And they blew it. Badly. As of 2 a.m., there wasn’t a single county in the country in which Harris outperformed Joe Biden. What went wrong? Peter Savodnik has some ideas.
“They didn’t lose because they didn’t spend enough money,” writes Peter. “They didn’t lose because they failed to trot out enough celebrity influencers. They lost because they were consumed by their own self-flattery, their own sense of self-importance.”
And above all else, they lost because they lied. “They seemed to think that Americans wouldn’t mind that they had pretended Joe Biden was ‘sharp as a tack’, that they actually orchestrated a behind-the-scenes switcheroo, that the party that portrayed itself as the nation’s answer to fascism nominated its standard-bearer without consulting a single voter.”
Last night, the truth caught up with them.
Kamala Harris failed to retain Joe Biden’s record 81 million Democratic voters, falling back to about the same level of support (67 million) as Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Barack Obama in 2012. Weird.
Freddie deBoer wonders what the Democrats will end up blaming this loss on:
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Jill Stein.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Putin and the Russians.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Bernie Sanders and his supporters.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Rogan.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Glenn Greenwald and The Young Turks.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the decision to run with Tim Walz.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the New York Times and its occasional Democrat-skeptical opinion pieces.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Biden for getting out of the race too late.
You can’t pull all the usual Democrat tricks. You have to actually figure out what’s wrong with your party, root and branch. Because you called the guy a fascist, again, and he walked right through that insult to the Oval Office, again. And the eternal question presents itself: what are you going to do about it?
Of course, some Trump supporters can’t help but get a little triumphal:
Donald J Trump has been elevated to the purple by the prince-electors at Aachen, and coronated in Rome by the Pope, so that he is now Imperator of the Holy Roman Empire, and of the Empire of Man, Rex Quondam et Rexque Futurum.
All Glory to God and to his anointed!
The Tribune Assembly of the Commoners in America, who retain a quaint custom of confirming the Electoral determination by local ballot, have also granted His Imperial Majesty the Mandate of the Commons.
[…]
JD Vance will be Executive-for-Life, and Elon the first Transhuman Immortal of the Noosphere. So far, so good.
Purple haired girls will no longer be allowed to twirk and grind in public, as show in the first scene, and modest dress codes will be decreed by the National Census Office. No more tattoos nor face piercings.
Also, involuntary concubinage will ensure a reverse of the demographic decline, the return to the fertility levels needed to colonize Mars.
