Did anyone expect, when they heard the candidate's announcement at the base of the Trump Tower escalator in June 2015, that nine years later, he would be elected to a second term with sharp increases in Republican percentages from nonwhite people -- Latinos especially, but also Black and Asian people?
Here's another way to look at why Republicans swept the 2024 elections: It's the fault, only partly, of course, of the gerontocracy of the Democratic Party. Going back through history, it's hard to find a time when a party's leadership was so far along in years. The founder presidents retired in their mid-sixties. Andrew Jackson retired at 69, Abraham Lincoln was murdered at 56, and Ulysses S. Grant retired at 54. Theodore Roosevelt died at age 60, Franklin Roosevelt at 63.
Here are some observations on what you didn't hear on election night. Most networks' focus was, quite properly, on whether former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris would carry enough of the 93 electoral votes of the seven target states -- Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- to win the needed 270 electoral votes. Public polling, as reported and analyzed by websites such as RealClearPolitics and Silver Bulletin, had Trump ahead in most of the target states, but by microscopic percentages, and polling in both the 2016 and 2020 cycles had understated the percentages Trump ended up winning.
"The only garbage I see out there is his supporters," said President Joe Biden on Tuesday evening, referencing a comedian's comment at former President Donald Trump's Madison Square Garden rally, as Vice President Kamala Harris delivered on the Ellipse, visible from the White House windows, what her campaign has described as her "closing argument" speech of her campaign.
Was it just a coincidence that Vice President Kamala Harris showed up, 15 minutes late, to be interviewed by Fox News' Bret Baier a day before Nate Silver's poll aggregation website showed her chances of winning the election slipping below 50%? Probably not.
Not everything significant politically is happening just in the target states.
Jonathan Draeger, reporter for RealClearPolitics, wrote Tuesday that "the 2024 presidential contest couldn't be tighter." Unless, of course, it turns out not to be nearly as close as this season's run of polls suggests it is.
Vice presidential debates don't matter, we have been assured over and over. No one votes for vice president or a presidential nominee for her or his choice of running mate. You can go back and look at snap polls taken after past vice presidential debates and find basically zero correlation with the final election results.
In my time as a political consultant, I observed that carrying out a campaign strategy was surprisingly simple. You settled on a basic strategy, emphasizing the candidate's strong points on issues and character, framing the election in terms favorable to most voters. Then you just carried it out.
Neither Vice President Kamala Harris nor former President Donald Trump, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday's front page, has any proposals to cut the rapidly increasing national debt. Instead, both are proposing to hand out goodies to strategically positioned voters.
When I was in the polling business many years ago, our reports always started with the mood of the electorate, whether things were moving in the right direction or seriously off on the wrong track, then moved to two sections on character and issues.
As I try to understand public opinion in yet another presidential election year with former President Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, I see an anomaly.
What if they held a tumultuous election, with an early one-sided debate, a candidate substitution and third-party withdrawal, and no voters changed their minds? Well, that's not exactly what has happened in America's 60th presidential election year, but it's not so far off, either.
Learning isn't necessarily cumulative. Human experience over the centuries provides lessons, some clearer than others. But each generation has to learn lessons anew, and some do not.
"There's a lot of opposition to just hearing what President Trump has to say," Elon Musk said at the beginning of his two-hour interview on X with the 45th and would-be 47th president.
There is an uncanny symmetry in the two presidential candidates' choice of vice presidential running mates. There are a few superficial differences -- Republican J.D. Vance is 40, Democrat Tim Walz 60. Vance is bearded, Walz balding.
Monday night's "White Dudes for Harris" Zoom call, with some 90,000 registered to participate, was surely a landmark in political history. Nearly 200 years ago, when the Democratic Party was being formed to elect and reelect Andrew Jackson, the entire American electorate, with exceptions, such as Black New Englanders, property-owning Black New Yorkers, and New Jersey widows, was made up of "white dudes."
The astonishing political events of the last four weeks make plain, once again, how much of America's history depends on what voters have come to accept as the choice of one person: each presidential nominee's choice of a vice presidential candidate. Even as the nomination process was expanded, half a century ago, to include millions of primary voters, the choice of the vice presidential nominee has devolved from smoke-filled rooms of bosses who represented large constituencies to the choice of a single person.
For those of a certain age, or with more than a woke education, the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump brings back echoes of history.
Fourteen days after his disastrous debate, President Joe Biden is still in the race for reelection. Multiple elected Democrats, New York Times editorial writers and columnists, and Democratic Party megadonors -- "elites," sneers the perceptive David Dayen -- have called on him to step aside. A secret ballot of congressional Democrats, the procedure under which they choose their own party leaders, would surely go against Biden, probably by a wide margin.
