Americana

1. Where it all came down to turnout
2. The new GOP trifecta
3. Democrats debate trans rights
4. How undecided voters broke
5. Q&A with Marjorie Dannenfelser

Also: A too-early read on the California governor’s race

“I’m offended by any person who professes shock,” retired Judge Michael Luttig said at a panel organized by the Society for the Rule of Law, which I attended on Wednesday. Luttig had endorsed Kamala Harris for president this year, and her loss, he said, was a voter mandate against “democracy and the rule of law” as many understood it.

That’s one way to view the cabinet nominees announced by Donald Trump so far this week. None should have been surprising. All of them campaigned for him, and the most prominent ones, like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said outright that they would be part of a norm-smashing coalition in Washington if Trump won. Presidents don’t typically put their defense attorneys in top DOJ jobs — they don’t usually need to have defense attorneys — but Trump is, and they’re among the names least worrying to the Republicans who say they want to defer to him.

All of this has affected the Democratic rebuild, too. As they figure out what went wrong, they are already looking for promises Trump made that he isn’t fulfilling to certain interest groups (picking Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel didn’t thrill Arab-Americans) or mixed messages he sent in the election’s final week (his transition chair had told CNN that Kennedy wouldn’t get the nomination he just got.) They can’t change the results, but they are beginning to learn what went wrong, and what Trump will have them running against in two years.

Democratic turnout plummeted in 2024 — but only in safe states

The vast majority of votes from this election have been counted, with just a few million ballots outstanding in western states. Total turnout is on track to fall just short of 2020, well ahead of some observers’ expectations on Election Night, when conspiracy theories about more than 10 million “missing Biden voters” flourished among Democrats.

Harris will win fewer votes than President Joe Biden did four years ago — but the decline was significantly steeper in safely red or blue states than in swing states. Where there was no national campaign spending on turnout, and where voters knew that they were unlikely to change the outcome, Harris ran further behind Biden.

In the 43 states (and D.C.) where neither campaign invested resources, there was an average 8-point shift toward the Republican ticket. In battleground states, the shift was 3 points.

The Harris campaign’s desperate strategy, of reconstituting a Biden coalition with fewer non-white voters and more college-educated white voters, came close to working — she lost by less than 2 points in the decisive Rust Belt states and only a little more in Georgia.

In four swing states, Harris was even able to win more raw votes than Joe Biden did four years ago: Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Adjusted for population growth, that didn’t mean much in the first three states, and Black turnout was disappointing enough to Georgia Democrats that Sen. Jon Ossoff is calling for a change in party leadership. But there was no overall decline in Democratic votes.

There was one in uncompetitive states. Trump ran stronger with non-white voters in big cities than any Republican nominee in decades. That performance looks even stronger because so many Biden voters, in places where they knew she would win, didn’t come back for Harris.

Republicans’ narrow MAGA majorities

Republicans secured control of the House on Wednesday, after swing state victories, new maps, and close results in western states that took more than a week to count.

As of Friday morning, Republicans had secured 218 seats in the House, and were leading in three un-called races; Democrats were growing confident that they would take back one of them, the Orange county contest between GOP Rep. Michelle Steel and challenger Derek Tran. In Pennsylvania, GOP challenger Dave McCormick had declared victory over Sen. Bob Casey, which would leave Republicans with 53 seats in the upper chamber; Casey had not conceded the race, and was ignoring pressure from Republicans who said he was delusional about whether the outstanding ballots could reverse a 29,000-vote gap.

Those results would leave Republicans with more Senate control than they had at the start of Donald Trump’s first term, but a far smaller margin in the House. But both majorities were far more ideologically coherent than they’d been eight years ago — and as Trump revealed cabinet picks who might have struggled to be confirmed by yesterday’s Republicans, none had come out to say that they would oppose Attorney General-designate Matt Gaetz or HHS Secretary-designate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Democrats open up a new debate on transgender rights

Two House Democrats urged their party to rethink how it talks about trans rights after their 2024 election loss. Both met immediate and intense resistance from allies, who said they were advancing right-wing talking points, and even putting vulnerable people in danger.

Late last week, New York Rep. Tom Suozzi and Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton both told the New York Times that the party needed a new answer on what Suozzi called “biological boys … playing in girls’ sports.” No other congressional Democrat agreed with them on the record, and multiple Democrats criticized them.

“It’s very, very painful to see Democrats throw certain vulnerable communities under the bus or buy into Republican logic,” Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal told Semafor, after introducing Delaware Rep.-elect Sarah McBride, the first transgender member of Congress, alongside new members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. (She got back-up from NBC late night host Seth Meyers, making the same point with a four-letter word.)

Moulton, who ran briefly for president in 2019 but didn’t face an opponent this year, defended his position all week, as Democrats in his district mobilized against him.

Poll: Why undecided voters broke for Trump

The Democratic polling shop Blueprint found last week that late-deciding swing voters saw Kamala Harris as too left-wing on cultural issues, and that her move to the center during the campaign wasn’t convincing.

In a study of thousands of swing voters, who had not made their minds up at the start of the race or changed their minds during it, Trump decisively won those deciding in the final week. That contradicted what Democrats thought they saw at the end of the election – Harris closing on a strong message, with no gaffes, and Trump lurching off script.

“These misalignments persisted despite the Harris campaign’s messaging, showing how sweepingly the Republican narrative on Harris’s positions took hold and shaped the lens of these voters,” Blueprint lead pollster Evan Roth Smith said in an analysis of their data. “This, in turn, created the impression for too many swing voters that Democrats hold the most extreme possible version of left-of-center positions and would enforce them through policy.”

Democrats are beginning to reckon with an information gap that they couldn’t close this year, between highly-engaged voters who they reached and less-frequent votes who they didn’t. In polling conducted by Data for Progress, Harris won voters who consume “a lot” of news by 6 points. She lost voters who consume no political news by 19 points. And that included many of the voters whose impression of the candidate came from social media, where her attempts to re-define her image didn’t land.

Q&A: SBA Pro-Life America’s Marjorie Dannenfelser

When Roe v. Wade was overturned, Republican joy was tempered by one big worry: Would they lose the next election? They got their answer last week, regaining control of the White House and Senate despite an intense Democratic focus on abortion rights.

“The post-Dobbs backlash has ceased or abated, and there’s actual discernment going on,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. “The scare tactics were not successful. That clears the path for actual conversation about where a nation wants to land, and where states want to land on this.”

Dannenfelser’s group didn’t get everything it wanted from Trump. During the 2024 Republican primary, it proclaimed that any candidate who wanted its support would need to support a federal ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The candidates who obliged were out of the race before Iowa. Donald Trump, who refused to support a federal limit, successfully carried an ambiguous pro-life message into November.

Now, as Trump prepares to take office as the first post-Roe Republican president, Dannenfelser and anti-abortion activists are counting their wins and preparing for new ones.

Polls

For the first time since 2010, California will hold a race for governor with no incumbent or clear front-runner. (Gov. Gavin Newsom was the clear favorite in the last open-seat race, six years ago.) Democrats don’t know much about the declared candidates — Lt. Gov. Elani Kounalakis, who jumped in 18 months ago, has no obvious constituency yet. She trails, by an insignificant margin, a member of Congress who ran for Senate and built name recognition (Porter); a county sheriff being sued by a man who says he arrested him to pretend that he stopped a Trump assassination attempt; and the 2022 Republican candidate for governor. There is no movement to draft Vice President Harris into the race, but she’d start out as the instant favorite, not having to spend anything on the advertising that costs tens of millions of dollars to introduce Californians to their candidates.

Scooped

There isn’t time or adderall enough to write every wrap on what happened last week. A great one: Radley Balko’s study of what happened to progressive prosecutors, a decade after donors began funding their campaigns. “The future of criminal justice reform seems grim,” he writes, looking at multiple factors (public sentiment lagging crime data, a surge of money from conservative donors who hadn’t been interested before) to explain why reformers saw some of their biggest gains reversed.

Next

• 66 days until Inauguration Day
• 354 days until off-year elections
• 718 days until the 2022 midterm elections

David Recommends

The great Democratic re-think will be a major story for Americana over the next few years. The most interesting contributions are coming from the people on their second or third diagnosis of what went wrong. In his Off Message newsletter, Brian Beutler calls for an end to litmus testing by issue groups, a development that accelerated in Democratic politics after Barack Obama’s presidency. In the New York Times, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira see a more complicated story than the one they wrote in “The Emerging Democratic Majority” two decades ago, or in “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” this year — and that Republicans may be overrating their new coalition.

Billions of dollars of investment in US clean tech factories could be stranded if the incoming Trump administration pares back the country’s climate policies, outgoing President Joe Biden’s national climate adviser told Semafor’s Tim McDonnell.

Ali Zaidi warned that domestic manufacturing, in particular, is at “a fragile inflection point” and that the changes to climate policy could cut new investments short.