The Morning: The Democrats’ mirage - frederick.lapides@gmail.com

November 7, 2024

Good morning. We’re covering the day after the election — as well as Benjamin Netanyahu, smog in Pakistan and cheese storage.

A line of voters stretching from inside to outside a building.

Voting in Las Vegas. Bridget Bennett for The New York Times

Trump’s majority

For much of the past year, Democrats comforted themselves with recent election results. Yes, the 2024 polls looked tight, but when it really mattered — when people went to the polls to vote — Democrats won again and again. In 2022, they kept Senate control and nearly won the House, defying the usual midterm curse for the president’s party.

This pattern led many Democrats to hope that Donald Trump and his MAGA allies were so extreme that they had created an electoral majority in opposition to them. That hope helped explain why President Biden based his initial campaign message around Trump’s threat to democracy and why Kamala Harris called Trump a fascist late in her campaign. It also explained why she and her advisers ran such a cautious campaign, one that didn’t break with Biden in major ways or offer a clear rationale for a Harris presidency.

But the Democratic belief in an anti-Trump majority always had a flaw.

In midterm and special elections — the elections that gave Democrats confidence — voter turnout is much lower than in a presidential election. People who vote in off-year elections are more politically engaged. They tend to be older, more educated and more affluent, and feel more trust in the country’s institutions.

The presidential electorate, like the overall population, includes more people who feel alienated and cynical. They were less persuaded by Harris’s message that Trump was a radical who would upend the country’s establishment. They may appreciate Trump’s radicalism.

A chart showing red arrows for each state. The length of the arrow corresponds with the number of points each state shifted Republican in the 2024 presidential election compared with the 2020 presidential election.

As of 4 a.m. Eastern. | By The New York Times

Polls repeatedly showed that the Democrats’ emphasis on democracy wasn’t persuading swing voters. (In post-election interviews, voters said they worried about paying the rent, not about an endangered country.) Many voters also weren’t deterred by the Republicans’ unpopular stance on abortion, another subject that often fails to move votes in a general election.

Most Americans still don’t have a favorable view of Trump, which helps explain why this election was “no landslide,” as my colleague Nate Cohn put it. But there was never an enduring anti-Trump majority among the presidential electorate. After all, he nearly won re-election four years ago, despite the chaos of the Covid pandemic.

The Democrats’ electoral success since then — all of it in lower-turnout elections — distracted the party from developing a coherent message aimed at the swing voters of 2024. This year’s election was never going to be easy for Democrats, given the anti-incumbent energy in much of the world. But the party made it harder by putting too optimistic a spin on the election results of the past few years.

As Trump prepares to govern again, Democrats are left to figure out how they can appeal, as they once did, to frustrated voters who don’t want to hear promises of stability and paeans to the political establishment. Those frustrated Americans helped make up the electoral majority this week.

How Trump won

Trump bet that he could make his grievances — a conviction, an assassination attempt — America’s grievances. It paid off.
Trump secured support from core Democratic constituencies: He made inroads with Latinos and Black voters, and claimed modest gains in suburbs and cities.
“He gets us”: Trump got voters laughing. That goes a long way, Shawn McCreesh writes.

Where Trump won

Florida: Trump won Miami-Dade County, which has many Latino voters. It is the first time a Republican presidential candidate has done so since 1988.
Texas: Support for Trump in the border counties of South Texas helped him win the state by 14 percentage points, based on the latest count. He won by only six points in 2020. Starr County went to a Republican for the first time since 1896.
New York: The city has moved right each time Trump has run — by 26 percentage points overall since 2016. The shift was pronounced in parts of the Bronx, Queens and southern Brooklyn.
Michigan: In Dearborn, Mich., a majority-Arab American city, frustration with the war in Gaza helped Trump win with 42 percent of the vote. Harris received 36 percent, while Jill Stein of the Green Party received 18 percent.

The day after

Kamala Harris waves to the crowd while standing near a lectern.

Kamala Harris Erin Schaff/The New York Times

“While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign,” Harris said in a speech at Howard University, her alma mater. “Sometimes the fight takes a while.” See her speech.

Harris called Trump to concede the race and congratulate him. Biden spoke with both candidates and invited Trump to meet him at the White House.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Emmanuel Macron and other world leaders congratulated Trump, as did Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and other U.S. business executives.
Stocks rose, and both the dollar and Bitcoin strengthened. Expectations of an increase in inflation also rose.

House results

Control of the House remained too close to call.
It may come down to a handful of races in Arizona and California, where officials are still counting votes. Republicans appear to be in a stronger position.
A moderate Maine Democrat won a fourth term in a district where Trump has won three elections in a row.
See the House results here.

Senate results

While Republicans will control the Senate, Democrats are still winning competitive Senate races. They won races in Michigan and Wisconsin, and they appear to be ahead in Arizona.
The Senate race in Nevada remains uncertain. In Pennsylvania, Dave McCormick, a Republican, leads Senator Bob Casey, the Democrat. See the full results here.

More election results

Republicans’ election dominance stretched to statehouses: They made gains in Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Vermont.
A ballot measure to ban prison labor as a form of punishment appears likely to fail in California. Similar measures recently passed in more conservative states, including Alabama and Tennessee.
Ten states voted on abortion policy. Here’s how access will change.

A chart showing abortion laws in different states and how they have changed or stayed the same.

*Note: In Nevada, a winning measure to protect abortion until viability must pass again in the next general election before it can be added to the state’s Constitution. | By The New York Times

Democrats’ response

After Trump’s victory in swing states, Democrats have a fractured base and questions about how to move forward.
Democratic, Republican and independent voters all blamed Biden and Harris for failing to control the chaotic border.
Other Democrats accuse Biden of setting the party on a path to failure. Harris’s loss could haunt his legacy.
Trump’s first term turned some Democrats into activists. Now, many of them are struggling to muster the energy to do it again.
Some women wondered if the glass ceiling would ever break.
The election result affirmed what many Black women believed about America: That it would rather send a felon than a woman of color to the White House.

Trump’s next administration

Trump has an expansive agenda, including widespread tariffs, a restructuring of the U.S. government and shifting international alliances. Read how he could make his plans happen.
Elon Musk spent more than $100 million to help elect Trump. In return, he is hoping to place SpaceX associates in some top government positions. (Tesla stock jumped after Trump’s victory.)
The Senate, which had been full of critics in Trump’s first term, is now full of allies ready to advance his agenda.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic, is poised to wield power in Trump’s administration.
Trump is scheduled to be sentenced later this month in his New York criminal case. He has many ways to avoid punishment.

THE LATEST NEWS

Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, wearing a suit and standing between two pillars.

Olaf Scholz Eric Lee/The New York Times

Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, fired his finance minister. The move effectively ended his three-party ruling coalition and destabilized his government.
By firing his defense minister, Netanyahu has removed his main internal critic.
Hurricane Rafael cut power across Cuba, which has struggled with its faltering energy grid.
Smog has choked Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province. Hundreds have been hospitalized and the authorities have told many workers to stay at home.
A fire in South California swept across 10,000 acres in a few hours. The blaze burned homes and prompted evacuations.

Opinions

Democrats lost because they dismissed inflation and immigration and because they have become a party of pontification and pomposity, Bret Stephens argues.

Trump’s and Harris’s campaigns pitted men against women. Men won, Maureen Dowd writes.

Here’s a column by David Brooks on the Democrats’ failure.

MORNING READS

Edward Hopper’s “Manhattan Bridge Loop,” which features an urban scene with brown and orange buildings.

Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Test your attention: Look at this painting — Edward Hopper’s “Manhattan Bridge Loop” — for 10 minutes, uninterrupted.

‘It’ pants: For fashion enthusiasts, wearing these pants is akin to carrying a flashy designer handbag.

Wildlife: To understand how vampire bats get their energy, scientists put them on a treadmill.

Lives Lived: Geoff Capes, who won the World’s Strongest Man competition twice, could pull 12-ton trucks uphill, flip cars and tear phone books in half. He died at 75.

SPORTS

N.F.L.: The Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce defended his brother, Jason, who slammed a heckler’s phone onto the ground last weekend.

M.L.B.: The Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Mookie Betts will move back to the infield for next season, the team’s general manager said.

ARTS AND IDEAS

Three wedges of cheese are photographed in moody lighting.

Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times

You may be storing cheese wrong. Times Cooking has compiled a guide on how to keep and serve your cheese, and when to toss it. Here’s an excerpt:

Experts across the field agree that cheese paper is ideal for wrapping everything except fresh cheeses like ricotta, feta and mozzarella (which should stay in their original packaging with their brine). And yes, for cheeses cut in pieces that you buy wrapped in plastic, it’s a good idea to rewrap if you’d like them to last longer.