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1. If Trump wins, this is a victory for POPULISM - a diverse coalition of Trump, Vance, RFK jr., Tulsi, Vivek, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan et al — not conservatism.
See ICYMI, The presidential race is about populism vs. the establishment, not D vs. R. [ [link removed] ]
Trump is a former Democrat, not a conservative. Just ask Romney or Cheney.
RFKJ, Tulsi, Elon are former Democrats; DNC corruption drove them to Trump.
J.D. Vance was a never Trumper — and probably still is. He likes Trump’s policies.
Joe Rogan was a Bernie bro — and probably still is. He likes Trump’s independence.
Democrats ran an empty establishment suit in an obviously populist moment — not just here in America, but around the world.
Of course she’s losing.
We did not listen to the customers.
We scolded, dismissed, and condescended to them.
The NY suburbs might yet save the House. [ [link removed] ]
If we lose the rest, it should surprise no one.
2a. It’s (still) “the economy, stupid.”
See ICYMI, The Occam’s Razor Election [ [link removed] ] and 13 days [ [link removed] ].
2b. Republicans now have a better claim to being the party of the working class; Democrats have become the party of the college-educated, white collar urbans/suburbans.
This is not news to anyone paying attention…which means it’s news to CNN.
It should concern every single Democrat, but especially labor leaders, that so many rank-and-file union members of every race voted for Trump.
Two helpful books on this:
Patrick Ruffini — Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP [ [link removed] ]
Ruy Teixeira — Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes [ [link removed] ]
And a related interview to understand what happened today:
3. Kamala Harris was never a competent candidate and didn’t do the obvious things she had to do to win.
See ICYMI, MEMO: 3 strategic adjustments would help VP Harris beat Trump [ [link removed] ] — it suggests a set of totally Captain Obvious things that Harris never did:
(1) Stop talking about fascism and start talking about feminism.
(2) ORANGE MAN BAD is not a winning strategy. Tell us why YOU want to be president.
(3) Focus on the economy — and distinguish the Harris vision from the Biden record.
4. Race and gender hurt Harris in the general. Race and gender also made her vice president. Both are wrong.
See ICYMI, The case for reality [ [link removed] ] and why American deserves better. [ [link removed] ]
5. Woke race ideology is a electoral loser.
My first post here was In Defense of Caitlin Clark [ [link removed] ] for a reason: her objective excellence in a sport I love, juxtaposed against the subjective treatment she gets simply for being white, alerted me to the insanity of the academic/Very Online left.
Now, I see: universities, Hollywood, big corporates, and legacy media are infected by an obsession with race and racial identity.
It’s lovely to be woke in the OG sense of that word: alert to injustice. That’s why I went to law school and spent my time there studying poverty and doing civil legal aid.
But if woke means the color of your skin is the most important thing about you and must be noticed and talked about at all times, well, I’m getting the fuck off that crazy train — and so are most Americans.
Kamala ran from wokeness, but there were enough clips from 2019 to tie her to its absolutely decadent idiocy.
6. Woke gender ideology is an electoral loser.
a. Feminism is perfectly compatible with traditional masculinity. Wokeism is not.
Yes, most women care a lot about reproductive rights. Most Americans are supportive of trans rights. And sure, per HBO’s Euphoria, gender may indeed be somewhat fluid.
But SEX and GENDER are not the same thing.
And is quite impossible to own the mantle of feminism when you can’t define what a woman is. [ [link removed] ]
Or what a man is, for that matter.
b. There’s more to sex equality than abortion rights.
Surely, I’m not the best spokesperson for this truth. But it’s worth saying anyway: what happened to eliminating the gender pay gap? Fixing child care? [ [link removed] ] Protecting female-only spaces like sports and women’s liberal arts schools such as Scripps and Wellesley, which launched a confident 21-year-old Hillary Rodham into the world?
Reproductive freedom is paramount: if women cannot control their pregnancies, they cannot control their lives.
But that is only one part of a broader vision of female empowerment Democrats have failed to articulate.
c. The boys are not alright, in part because they’re not being allowed to become men.
Young men today are struggling [ [link removed] ] in part because of our confused discourse and poor leadership on gender.
In particular, it’s now clear that the daily scrutiny of what’s wrong with masculinity, without a celebration of all that is right with it, has taken a serious toll.
Some men love being masculine. We are willing to confront its ‘toxic’ downsides: sexual violence, crime, misogyny, etc. But only if we are also rewarded for its major upsides: fighting America’s wars, building our roads and bridges, and in most families, for better or for worse, providing for spouses and children.
The left must respect masculinity and femininity as sexes — not just as genders.
Until we do, we’re out of touch with most Americans.
America will elect a woman president, even a feminist woman. But not a woke one.
7. Prosecuting Trump elected him.
I’ve tried to warn my lefty lawyer friends, in particular, that going after Trump for things Bill Clinton clearly got away with would be a conviction Democrats will probably come to regret [ [link removed] ] and reflected a wider abuse of prosecutorial discretion [ [link removed] ] of which Trump is only the most prominent — and now profitable — victim.
DeSantis was beating Trump by 23 points at the start of the GOP primary……...
Then, Trump got indicted.
And the rest, it seems, will be history.
Democratic leaders made a martyr of Trump by prosecuting and persecuting him with tortured interpretations of the law, at best, and Banana Republic witch hunts, at worst.
What we should have been doing is cleaning house, putting Biden out to pasture, and holding a presidential primary.
8. Rigging primaries in 2016 for Hillary and 2024 for Biden/Kamala is an electoral loser.
Party primaries exist for a reason: to figure out what voters want and battle-test a nominee who can win the general.
Say what you want about Trump, but he won two competitive RNC primaries.
The DNC, by contrast, cancelled [ [link removed] ] primaries [ [link removed] ] to protect a president who probably has dementia — aka “Operation Bubble Wrap” [ [link removed] ] — and then anointed as his successor a vice president who got 0 votes and finished almost dead last in the 2019 primary, behind Andrew Yang.
Iron sharpens iron.
Competition is good for everyone.
And if ‘democracy is on the ballot,’ then you have to let me vote.
9a. Democrats are a threat to democracy, too. Voters see this. The DNC, apparently, does not.
See ICYMI, The dual threat to democracy. [ [link removed] ]
9b. The legacy media is a threat to democracy — and the best friend Trump has ever had.
There are some early signs that the legacy media’s comically biased ABC debate [ [link removed] ], brutal scrutiny of Vance, and frequent misrepresentation [ [link removed] ] of Trump vs. a ‘kid gloves’ treatment of Harris and her allies actually drove some voters to Trump.
In particular, national media’s failure to cover credible allegations of assault made against Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff [ [link removed] ] or to press Gov. Walz on his many lies [ [link removed] ] lost them a ton of credibility.
So when they turned around and called Trump a fascist [ [link removed] ], no one believed them.
10. The best check on Trump is a constitutional renaissance, not an online #resistance.
Is it time to torch the constitution? [ [link removed] ] No, it’s not. It is actually the worst possible time to do that.
The best guardrails on Trump are the timeless ideas of the American founding: federalism, separation of powers, bicameralism, judicial review, civil rights and civil liberties, and a little section Tim Walz never bothered to read [ [link removed] ] called the 1st Amendment.
Yes, Trump, Elon, and Vivek might dismantle the administrative state and much of the permanent bureaucracy. That’s not in the constitution. So it’s a legal and policy debate we have to have.
Beyond that, if you don’t like Project 2025 [ [link removed] ], read up on a much deeper and more formidable book called The Federalist Papers.
—
America is a truly great country if we allow it to be.
Democracy is a process — not an outcome — and the process seems to have worked.
So I want President-elect Trump to succeed and I pray for his success.
I agree with his focus on securing the border, growing the economy, and bringing peach through strength without endless wars.
And where I disagree with him, I know my best hope lies the practice of law and the pulpit of politics — exactly as our founders intended:
“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” -The Federalist, No. 51. [ [link removed] ]

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