A Dozen Thoughts on a Historic Election
As an observer of, and writer about, politics, I both love and hate election night.
I love it because election night is the grand spectacle of American democracy playing out across TV screens and elsewhere. It’s history, math, science, and literature all rolled together in a pageant of real-time societal evolution, and there is nothing better for a free country to put on display.
But I hate election night as a blogger, columnist, and commentator for the same reason most people would find drinking out of a fire hose unpleasant.
How do you decide what subjects to cover? Which fastballs flying toward your head, of the many hurtling your way, do you swing at?
You can’t start writing an analysis of an election until it’s decided, and it isn’t decided until the middle of the night, by which time your brain is scrambled and you’re sleep-deprived.
It’s the worst possible time to come up with anything cogent to say, which is why the talking heads on TV so often come off as morons.
For example, here was Joe Scarborough this morning:
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough says that Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump because blacks and Latinos are sexist and Latinos are racist.
Via @RealSaavedra pic.twitter.com/EQSgeir2UI
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) November 6, 2024
That leads me to the first of a dozen quick observations I was able to jot down before passing out from exhaustion. Each of these I could write a whole column on, but, in the interest of brevity, I’ll just do a drive-by.
1. The Media Is Dead
Who is going to watch Joe Scarborough now? Who’s going to watch Joy Reid? Why would anyone pay attention to Norah O’Donnell or David Muir?
At one point Tuesday night, Steven Crowder was pulling a larger audience than any of the networks covering the election returns.
It’s over for the legacy corporate media. Congress and the new Trump administration ought to take some steps to break up the big media conglomerates that control the major news networks and democratize media in this country. But, even if they don’t, it’s only a matter of time before independent podcasters like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson become the 21st-century versions of the Walter Cronkite the media mavens so pine for.
Cronkite was never really Cronkite, by the way. Most of that was a myth. But even the myths are fading away as major media collapses under the weight of its incompetence, radicalism, and corruption.
2. Kamala Is Trash for Not Conceding
By midnight Central Time, the election was over. She should have conceded the race. She didn’t, and by failing to do, so she’s now the second uncharismatic female Democrat nominee who showed her derriere rather than observing the norms better Americans than her had long ago established.
Considering all the stupid questions asked of Donald Trump about conceding the election if he lost, we now know who should get those questions. The American people shouldn’t forgive this. And Cedric Richmond, who got drafted to play the part of John Podesta at the Javits Center this time, shouldn’t forgive it either.
3. The Never Trumpers Can Go Away Now
I’ll do something nasty and single out Quin Hillyer as an example of this — Hillyer was predicting on Monday that Kamala would win in a post that came off as a fatal dose of hopium for the Never Trumper movement.
There, Quin. I’ve given you some traffic, if not credit for the utter drivel you inflicted on the public.
These people have never accepted that they were the ones who destroyed Ronald Reagan’s legacy while they were claiming it as their own (and that was an egregious lie all along). Now their irrelevance is complete.
Where does the Lincoln Project go now? That grift is played out. It’s over.
4. Mitch McConnell Is Gone
Another of the old loser holdouts can now be dispatched to well-deserved irrelevance. McConnell finally gave up the ghost as the GOP’s Senate leader, and, though the likely replacements aren’t particularly inspiring either, there is definitely light at the end of the tunnel.
Republicans are going to hold more Senate seats than they’ve held in a long while, and that’s a direct function of the public not seeing McConnell’s hand on the Senate’s tiller. He’s been a massive drag on the party for reasons both intentional and unintentional, but that drag is lessening and it’ll be gone completely by 2026.
McConnell spending nothing on Ted Cruz’s race while the Democrats threw the better part of $150 million against Cruz was utterly shameful. As was the money wasted on Larry Hogan, another Never Trumper undeserving of support. What if the Hogan money had been invested in Mike Rogers, Eric Hovde, or Hung Cao?
With Morphine Mitch gone, you’re very likely to see the GOP grow its Senate roster even in what looks like a tough 2026 cycle.
5. Holding the House Gives America a Chance
It was a damn near-run thing, in the words of Winston Churchill, but the House has apparently held and is still under GOP control.
I’ve said that Mike Johnson was dealt an impossible hand as an “interim” speaker, and I caught some criticism for that from people who think my personal friendship with him colors my judgment.
Fine, but Johnson now has resources he didn’t have before. He has a president who can dish out favors to those members of the House GOP delegation who need some extra convincing to get in line — or threats to those who won’t. And he’ll now have a Senate that won’t dismiss things like the SAVE Act when Johnson works to pass it.
Of course, the flip side of that is that Johnson is now out of excuses. He has to make things work, at least at a rate equal to what Nancy Pelosi was able to do with a narrow House majority plus the Senate and White House behind her from 2021–2022.
There’s a lot of work to do. Holding the House means there’s a two-year window to get it done.
6. The Importance of a Functional RNC
How bad does Ronna McDaniel look now?
Lara Trump and Michael Whatley did such a great job with election integrity and get-out-the-vote that we can now look at the Republican Party as a functioning entity capable of providing infrastructure to win elections, rather than just a corrupt political action committee whose job was to dole out patronage to consultants.
I don’t think they’re finished building that machine, either. They can’t be. Much more has to be done. But at least we’ve begun to see that these are people who can do the work. When McDaniel was running the RNC, the party was utterly useless, and it harmed, rather than helped, the efforts of GOP candidates.
That’s a major change.
7. An Experienced Trump Means a Much Different Term the Second time around
I don’t think anybody is giving the selection of JD Vance enough credit for how important it was in this election and the administration to come. Vance’s nomination as vice president on the GOP ticket was an indication that Trump was not interested in making common cause with the swamp monsters inside the Republican Party, but rather he was going to shape the party in an “America First” direction.
That’s huge for more reasons than just a symbol, but it’s a symbol nonetheless and a major one.
Donald Trump’s second administration is not going to be full of John Kellys and Jeff Sessionses. It won’t be a collection of Washington, D.C., insiders trying to “tame” or redirect him. Trump now has a mandate and a challenge from the American public — slay the swamp monster or it will slay him. And the people he’s surrounding himself with — Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy, Tulsi Gabbard — are committed reformers who can’t afford to fail in the effort to drain the swamp.
The next six months will be fascinating.
8. Kill the Deep State, or It’ll Kill You
And terrifying, because the Deep State now knows that it’s on the wrong side of the American people. That’s been true for a while, but the leviathan has been able to delude itself that Trump was the outlier.
How does it react to the fact that the censorship, the endless wars, the psyops, and everything else have been repudiated by a majority of the people?
Trump had better seize the initiative. And we’d better pray we don’t get a repeat of November 1963 in the coming weeks and months.
9. Trump Has Two Years to Save America
Regardless of what’s in No. 8 above, this window of holding the White House, the Senate, and the House has got to be a whirlwind of activity.
The budget has to be balanced — soon — or the federal debt will kill our economy.
The wars must be brought to a close.
Our military needs a DEI/woke enema because China is waiting in the Pacific.
We need massive election integrity reform. The census must count citizens, not “residents,” for the purposes of apportionment. We need a federal voter ID law, we need clean voter rolls, we need the SAVE Act, and we need reforms made to the Voting Rights Act, which is being abused by Obama judges to provide affirmative action for black Democrat politicians at a time when it’s unremarkable for a Tim Scott, Byron Donalds, or John James to win a federal election.
And lots more needs to be done.
That midterm election in 2026 could go just as badly as the one in 2018 did. We don’t know what kind of Democrat Party awaits in that cycle. Better to get all of the important things done now.
10. This Might Be the End of Obama
The best thing about Tuesday night is that the Obama era of American politics looks like it’s finally over. Kamala Harris was a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of Barack Obama, and the Obama “punch harder” Chicago style of politics the Democrats have embraced for the last 16 years is now officially played out. I’ll have more to say about this perhaps in my next column but, clearly, it doesn’t work anymore.
The Democrats had to pivot to the Bill Clinton “New Democrat” centrist approach after the beating they took in 1988. Something like that is needed now. The screamy, woke politics of Obama, and its incumbent disdain for the American people, has now gone septic, and that might be the happiest consequence of all.
11. We Owe a Tremendous Debt to Elon
If for nothing else, his investment of $44 billion of his own money to turn Twitter into X and thus save online free speech in America was one of the most demonstrative acts of civic philanthropy in American history, and for that alone we should be building statues to Elon Musk.
He’s become an extraordinary figure in our history. And his efforts to elect Trump may well have saved America.
Thank you, Elon.
12. The American People Remain Good, All Said and Done
Kevin O’Leary, on Fox News Tuesday night, noted that the American system is self-correcting and will reject things harmful to it. O’Leary was talking about the insane idea of taxing unrealized capital gains and jacking up corporate tax rates to 28 percent, but what he said was true pretty much across the board.
But the system is made up of Americans. And Americans know that our leaders and elites are no good. We’ve self-corrected.
Americans saw through the unhinged and dishonest rhetoric and voted for common sense. We voted for the old norms, the pre-Obama ones. We voted for the golden age Trump promised, and against the filth and decline of our cities.
We are good people who have grown tired of hearing that we are bad. And as a result, we stand ready, for the first time in 20 years or so, to grow and thrive again.
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The Bullet We Dodged, the Miracles We Experienced, the Idiot We Faced
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