Ever since Donald J. Trump arrived on the political scene in 2015, elites have claimed his rise signals the last gasp of a dying white-majority America alarmed by cultural and demographic shifts. This was always a kind of security blanket—an excuse to ignore uncomfortable truths.
If Tuesday’s election results do not demolish that cope once and for all, we’re not sure what will. Because look at the results: Trump made big gains among almost every demographic group: Latinos (45 percent went for Trump—a history-making number for a Republican presidential candidate), African Americans (13 percent voted Trump compared to 8 percent in 2020), Asians (39 percent), women (46 percent), the young (46 percent).
The only group Kamala Harris made gains with was white college-educated women and those over 65.
Just look at this graph from the Financial Times:
But if the media meltdown that followed Trump’s extraordinary comeback is anything to go by, there is no end to that fever dream. Just take a look at what has transpired over the last 36 hours:
On MSNBC, Joy Ann Reid said, “anyone who has experienced this country’s history. . . and knows it, cannot have believed that it would be easy to elect a woman president, let alone a woman of color.” Of Harris’s election effort, she added: “I mean, this really was a historic, flawlessly run campaign.”
On The View, Sunny Hostin said: “I was so hopeful that a mixed-race woman married to a Jewish guy could be elected president of this country. And I think that it had nothing to do with policy. I think this was a referendum of cultural resentment in this country.”
On Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough said to a nodding Al Sharpton that “It’s not just misogyny from white men; it’s misogyny from Hispanic men, it’s misogyny from black men—things we’ve all been talking about—who do not want a woman leading them.” He added that it “might be race issues with Hispanics. They don’t want a black woman as president.” (He left out the fact that Trump performed nine points better with Hispanic women this year compared to 2020.)
Laura Helmuth, the editor in chief of Scientific American, chimed in with a now-deleted tweet: “I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists.” (Fifty-four percent of Gen X voted Trump.)
The pastor and activist John Pavlovitz, who has 400,000 followers on X, declared: “Kamala Harris was the perfect candidate and she ran a beautiful campaign of joy, empathy, and unity. She just happened to run in a nation that is addicted to nihilism, cruelty, and division.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The 1619 Project at The New York Times, warned that: “We must not delude ourselves in this moment.” Among “shifting demographics where white Americans will lose their numeric majority,” she added, there is “a growing embrace of autocracy to keep the ‘legitimate’ rulers of this country in power.”
We could go on, but you get the point. And their point is: Don’t blame Harris, blame the voters.
On one level, that’s true. In a democracy, the electorate is responsible for the results—for better or for worse. H.L. Mencken nailed it when he called democracy “the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
But you don’t succeed in an election by calling the common people racist or sexist or stupid. You win by listening to them.
And our media elite have put their heads in the sand. Again. They seem to think that if they keep calling Americans knuckle-dragging bigots, one day they’ll get the message.
That’s why you’ll get more insight from our nine-year-old election-night livestream star Josie Savodnik than from some of the best-paid cable hosts on TV. Josie’s take on why Kamala lost? “Maybe because of the border. Maybe it’s because of Kamala’s personality. And she also did kind of a terrible job at being vice president.”
She’s not wrong.
Unlike what’s happening in the old media, here at The Free Press, we’ve been working hard to understand last night’s results—and explain what happened to our readers.
Today’s Front Page is stuffed with brilliant analysis on Trump’s win—from Matthew Continetti on the future of the right, and Freddie deBoer on the failure of the left. Former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson’s evisceration of her own party, Olivia Reingold’s dispatch from the swing voters of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and Kat Rosenfield’s take on the liberals crying misogyny.
We have tons in store for you this morning—and more later today. If we’re doing our job right, you’ll have 20 tabs open by the end of the day.
Okay, let’s get to it:
Matthew Continetti—who wrote the book on the American right—looks at how Donald Trump remade the Republican Party in his image. But, he warns, Trump should not interpret his decisive win as an unqualified endorsement of his personality and program. Read Matthew Continetti on how Donald Trump Broke the Republican Party—And Put It Back Together Again.
Freddie deBoer’s politics could not be more different than Continetti’s, which is why we wanted him to make sense of Tuesday’s results from the left. “There are many reasons that Kamala Harris and the Democrats lost so thoroughly last night. But they’re for another day,” deBoer writes. “Right now, let’s acknowledge the biggest problem, the overarching problem, which is that the Democrats are not a political party. The Republicans are a party—a repugnant party, to me, but a party. The Democrats are a nonparty, an anti-party. And until that changes, durable progressive political victory is impossible.” Read Freddie deBoer on the Democrats’ Identity Crisis—and How the Left Can Win Again.
Marianne Williamson, meanwhile, is coming for blood. She says the elites of her own party “have not sauntered out of their gated communities long enough to have made sense of what is going on out there.” Read her brutal diagnosis of what went wrong in the Democratic Party.
Many Democrats have blamed Kamala Harris’s loss on one factor: the fact she’s a woman. But, says Kat Rosenfield, it’s easier for the party to demonize sexist voters than to critique their own failed campaign. And “to suggest that Americans balk at the notion of putting women in power is absurd.” Read Kat’s op-ed: It’s Not Because She’s a Woman.
Olivia Reingold headed to the swingiest county in the swingiest state in the nation—Bucks County, Pennsylvania—to find out why a region that hasn’t voted for a Republican president since 1988 finally tipped into the red zone. Justine Zaremba, a 37-year-old Bucks County native, held back tears as she told Olivia, “I’m elated, like a huge weight just lifted off of my shoulders,” as news of Trump’s win spread throughout a watch party in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. Read Olivia’s report: Voters in America’s Swingiest County: ‘I’m Crying, I’m So Happy.’
Finally, Frannie Block reveals how our institutions of higher education have gone into election trauma mode after Trump’s historic reelection. From Northwestern offering a “postelection wellness space” with “puzzles, crafts, games, snacks, and a variety of brain break activities” to professors canceling classes at Columbia and Michigan State, she shows how colleges have turned into “infantilizing safe spaces.” Read her report on how universities rushed to console their “grieving” students here.
For more election analysis, listen to the latest episode of Honestly. Bari sits down with Peter Savodnik, Batya Ungar-Sargon, and Brianna Wu. They discuss what Trump got right, what the Dems got wrong, what a second Trump term will look like, and more. Click play below to listen, or catch their conversation wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to read an edited transcript of the episode, you can find that here.
We’re rounding things out with a palate cleanser. If you happened to catch our election-night livestream, you’ll have seen a series of videos featuring pairs of voters—one Republican and one Democrat—heading to the polls together on Election Day. In the clip below, made in conjunction with Braver Angels, Lissa and Brad of Lancaster County, PA—who attend the same church but vote for different parties—discuss their vote and the importance of finding “common solutions to our big problems.”
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