Provisional Initial Election Thoughts

A new political order for America has arrived

1. Trump won this election soundly. It’s not the kind of electoral college blowout you could have in the late 20th century, but he’s almost certainly going to end up winning the popular vote and topping 50%. That’s going to be an earthquake in American politics; liberals have long clung to the idea that Trump was a minority president, an accident of the electoral college. He’s not personally popular and probably never will be, but make no mistake: this was America choosing Trump and the GOP over Harris and the Dems. Period. I mean, look a this map of the vote shift by county between 2020 and 2024.

   

   Just an absolute awful performance for the Dems relative to 2020

2. Nobody yet knows why, and the answer right now is overdetermined. It could be the fundamentals; incumbent parties around the globe of all ideologies are getting crushed right now by voter anger over post-COVID inflation. It could be the Biden policies; the administration was deeply unpopular on domestic and foreign policy. It could be the Democratic brand, reeling from some combination of woke lefty politics and unpopular cosmopolitanism. It could be the candidate or the campaign. It could be the general sense of disorder in society. It could be a combination of all of this. It could be a dozen other things. Once all the data is in and surveys are done and the political scientists stare at it for a couple years, you’ll have some answers. Maybe.

3. Nevertheless, the parties and the political actors are going to build an explanation for what happened, and those understandings—right or wrong—are going to drive future politics. Right now, everyone is in the process of credit-claiming and blame-assigning and trying to shape how the public sphere comes to understand the election. Different groups will settle on different answers. But those answers will lead political actors to push certain agendas, adjust their ambitions specific ways, commit resources to certain fights, and create new political coalitions and cleavages.

4. My hunch is that Trump has now locked in a major transformation of American politics. Had he just served his one term, he might have been a blip. But this election and then four more years of Trump politics is going to completely shatter the previous political order and rearrange the coalitions for several decades. The Democrats will be back; American politics is thermostatic and contingent and their party brand will recover, quite possibly even in time to make major gains in the House in 2026 and capture the presidency in 2028. But they will be fighting on the turf of the new order Trump has ushered in: a conservative populist party as the driving force, and a cosmopolitan liberal party as the opposition. Welcome to the post-Reagan political order.

   

   American Politics, then and now

5. The order will be anchored by a conservative Court that is likely to get at least one, and probably two, new young Trump-appointed Justices, to replace Thomas and Alito. If Sotomayor leaves the bench, that would be three. The biggest liberal fallacy is that the Court has somehow traditionally been a friend to progressive causes—with the exception of the Warren Court in the 60s, it has basically been the opposite—and that is going to be hammered home again and again for the next few decades as the Court hems in liberal policymaking, weakens liberal rights, and expands executive authority. (I say this in a neutral way; I do not disagree with the Roberts’ Court about everything).

6. The GOP looks poised to end with something like 54 or 55 Senate seats. But the House is going to be a very narrow margin—like 220 seats or less to the majority—and it’s still not clear which party is going to control it. This is a pretty big deal for thinking through the next four years. The last five presidencies have started with unified control of the government, and many have featured a regular pattern: some attempts at party-line legislating via reconciliation (ACA, Obama stimulus, Trump Tax Cuts, Biden ARPA, Biden IRA) before giving way bipartisan negotiation over appropriations and other items, followed by the loss of the House in a midterm. If the GOP hangs on to the House, next year may legislatively look like the beginning of a new presidency.

7. If the Dems retake the House, Trump’s second term is going to look more like, well, a second term—or at least a second Congress after a midterm. Opposition party oversight will be in full swing; party-line legislating will be dead. The legislative politics will be characterized by gridlock and high-profile compromise on must pass items. No one will be sniffing around filibuster abolition.

8. I judge Speaker Johnson to be safe in his job if the GOP maintains the House, assuming Trump backs him. I don’t see the House Freedom Caucus playing any games in the face of a unified government that wants to get off the ground and down to business. You never know with the margins this small—just a few rebels could gum things up—but I think people will fall in line.

9. Who knows what policies Trump is going to prioritize and what policies he’s going to shelve. Liberals on Twitter are convinced he’s going to do everything he has said during the campaign, but I basically think that’s nonsense. There’s not going to be a push to repeal the entire income tax. But no tax on tips? No tax on social security? No tax on overtime? With the TCJA expiration coming up, I don’t think you can rule out any of it. I’m really hoping Trump wasn’t serious about the universal tariffs—that’s a disastrous policy and custom-built for political corruption—but I’m not optimistic. I do think he was all bluster about trying to repeal the CHIPS Act—that’s been a really good industrial policy that has gotten us on the right track against China—and even if the GOP wanted to, it’d be subject to a filibuster.

10. I do think Trump is serious about the deportations, but it remains to be seen what that actually means. The Obama administration had record numbers of deportations and it didn’t involve federal LEO acting out some sci-fi dystopia. But I suspect Trump wants the spectacle of the sci-fi dystopia and believes (perhaps correctly) that it’s good politics, so we may get a more overtly-cruel policy by design.

11. My biggest concern, far and away is foreign policy. Trump quit clearly is willing to pull the U.S. back from its position as leader of the western liberal economic and military alliance, and when you combine that with his gross admiration for the dictators, we are almost certainly going to end of ceding global influence—and possibly allied territory—to China and Russia and the other rising authoritarians. This is a disaster for Ukraine, bad for Taiwan, and not good for our trade relations in Asia, but my guess is that it hurts us most with our core allies. The EU, Japan, South Korea. Absent U.S. leadership, they will build their own paths forward, and those paths will be less friendly to our interests. We may very well be approaching a new global political order, and it’s not clear we are going to be leader of the coalition opposed to the authoritarian states.

12. I’m also more than a little concerned about Trump’s age and cognitive fitness. I’m on the record fully against having presidents as old as Biden or Trump. I won’t rehash the arguments, but it’s not good for the 3am phone call to be taken by a man who’s going to be 82 at the end of his term. And I don’t want to hear any of this bullshit about ageism. This is an incredibly demanding job that involves life and death decisions, regularly for small numbers of people and possibly for millions, on very short notice. He’s too damn old.

13. I expect the Trump norm-breaking and ethics violations to resume on January 20th. Of immediate concern to me is that he’ll almost certainly end the federal criminal proceedings against him, and that he’ll likely pardon the violent January 6th insurrectionists. The latter is his prerogative and morally noxious, but that’s politics. Quashing the DOJ investigations into his own criminal behavior is outrageous and unethical and impeachable behavior, but he’s going to do it and nothing is going to come of it and we’ll get to read tortured bad-faith legal arguments about why its all ok.

14. One wonkish question that bubbled up last night is what happens in the lame duck session of the 118th Congress now? Of most pressing note is the FY25 CR for government funding, which expires in December and can either be replaced by actual full-year FY25 appropriations, or be pushed into the new Congress / admin with another CR. The argument for pushing them is that the GOP might get more priorities in the bills once they have the WH and the Senate. The argument for tying them off is that it clears the decks of the FY26 budget to get going ASAP after inauguration, and appropriations always have to be a compromise anyway because of the filibuster, so there’s no huge gain by waiting, even if they have a unified government. Also on the decks are the farm bill extension, NDAA, and all the disaster relief funding that is piling up.

15. Personnel is going to be a circus in the next administration and White House, as well as a hot topic of executive management. I’m skeptical Trump is going to be able to fundamentally reshape the civil service, but he may have more success politicizing the agencies (which is something all presidents try to do). Trump was disastrous from a management point of view in his first term, and I doubt he’ll do any better. His White House is likely to again be a snake-pit of leaky staffers angling for influence, and the agencies will be full of politicos freelancing bad policy as they ignore Trump’s whimsical directives. If he’s really intent on doing things like putting RFK Jr. at HHS, there’s just no bottom on how poorly the executive branch might be run next year.

16. The racial realignment of the Trump 2024 coalition looks incredible based on the provisional data that emerged last night. If the data holds up, Trump has built, by far, the most diverse GOP coalition since the civil rights movement. Huge gains among Latino voters, and more modest gains among African-Americans. If the GOP can find a way to solidify a multi-racial working class base, that will be a powerful electoral force going forward. And, in my view, it’s probably on balance a good thing overall for race relations if both parties are competing for minority votes.