“Germany’s three-party ruling coalition — consisting of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Greens on the left side of the political spectrum, and the fiscally conservative Free Democratic Party (FDP) on the center right — was never a match made in heaven. Both the SPD and the Greens favor a strong social safety net and big investment to speed economic growth and the green energy transition. The FDP, on the other hand, believes in less government and less spending.
You may ask yourself why this triad came together in the first place. Good question! Simply put, there weren’t a lot of options given Germany’s increasingly splintered political landscape, as the rise of upstart parties has made it more difficult for the big-tent parties — the SPD and the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) — to form two-party coalition governments.
The fragmentation has worsened with the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, now polling in second place nationally, and will continue with the arrival of populist-left newcomer Alliance Sarah Wagenknecht (BSW). Post-war Germany hasn’t had much experience of larger coalitions (Scholz’s fallen triad was the first three-way alliance in over six decades), but the ongoing division may make such coalitions — which tend to be more volatile — the new norm.
The key moment in the early demise of Scholz’s coalition came a year ago, when Germany’s top court handed down a bombshell ruling that ended a workaround the government had been using to spend money without violating the country’s constitutional “debt brake.” In order to circumvent those self-imposed fiscal strictures, Scholz’s coalition had relied on a network of “special funds” outside the main budget. The court deemed the practice unlawful, blowing a €60 billion hole in the federal budget in the process.
After that, Scholz’s coalition, which had relied on the free flow of money to paper over its major ideological differences, was not long for this world. A string of embarrassing election defeats and record-low approval ratings prompted the coalition parties to play to their bases to revive their political fortunes, worsening their incessant squabbling.”
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“Germany will hold its federal snap election on Sunday Feb. 23, 2025, lawmakers and officials in three of the major parties told POLITICO”
“It is now clearer than ever that Garland was a highly questionable choice to serve as attorney general from the start. From the outset of the Biden presidency, it was readily apparent that Garland had little desire to investigate and potentially prosecute Trump.
The most comprehensive accounts on the matter, from investigative reporting at The Washington Post and The New York Times, strongly indicate that the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation and public hearings in 2022 effectively forced Garland to investigate Trump and eventually to appoint Smith in November of that year — nearly two years after Trump incited the riot at the Capitol.
There are many people — including many Democratic legal pundits — who have continued to defend this delay and may continue to do so, so let me be very clear: Those people are wrong.
It was clear after Trump’s loss in 2020 — even before Jan. 6 — that his conduct warranted serious legal scrutiny by the Justice Department, particularly in the area of potential financial crimes. But that probe, which could and should have been pursued by Biden’s U.S. Attorney and aspiring attorney general in Manhattan, somehow never materialized.
It was also clear — on Jan. 6 itself — that Trump may have committed criminal misconduct after his loss in 2020 that required immediate and serious attention from the Justice Department.
The formation of the Jan. 6 committee in early 2021 did nothing to change the calculus. There too, it was clear from the start that there would still need to be a criminal investigation to deliver any meaningful legal accountability for Trump.
In fact, the warning signs for where this could all end up — where the country finds itself now — were clear by late 2021, less than a year into Biden’s term. The public reporting at the time indicated (correctly, we now know) that there was no real Justice Department investigation into Trump and his inner circle at that point, even though the outlines of a criminal case against Trump — including some of the charges themselves that were eventually brought nearly two years later — were already apparent.
As a result, the Biden administration and the Garland Justice Department were running an extremely obvious risk — namely, that Trump would run for reelection and win, and that any meaningful criminal accountability for his misconduct after 2020 would literally become impossible. That, of course, has now happened. It was all eminently predictable.
Garland’s defenders over the years — including many Democratic lawyers who regularly appear on cable news — claimed that Garland and the department were simply following a standard, “bottom-up” investigative effort. Prosecutors would start with the rioters, on this theory, and then eventually get to Trump.
This never made any sense.
It did not reflect some unwritten playbook for criminal investigations. In fact, in criminal cases involving large and potentially overlapping groups of participants — as well as serious time sensitivity — good prosecutors try to get to the top as quickly as possible.
The Justice Department can — and should — have quickly pursued the rioters and Trump in parallel. The fact that many legal pundits actually defended this gross dereliction of duty — and actually argued that this was the appropriate course — continues to amaze me.”
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“None of this, however, excuses the Republican political and legal class for their role in all this as well. In fact, Trump could not have pulled it off without a great deal of help from them too.
Start with Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans in 2021. They could — and should — have voted to convict Trump after his second impeachment, which would have prevented him from running again for the presidency. Instead, McConnell and almost every other GOP senator let him off the hook.
Trump then proceeded to execute perhaps the most remarkable political rehabilitation in American history, but which should not have been nearly such a surprise. He never seemed to lose his grip on the party and in fact strengthened it over the course of 2021, as the likes of Kevin McCarthy and others quickly rallied around him.
The Republican presidential primaries also proved, in the end, to be a boon for Trump in his legal fight. By the time they concluded, Trump had been indicted by the Justice Department and local prosecutors in Manhattan and Fulton County. Under the traditional rules of politics, this should have provided incredible fodder for his adversaries and essentially killed his campaign.
Instead, his most prominent primary opponents — his opponents — came to his defense. As the prosecution in Manhattan came into focus, for instance, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis belittled the effort as “some manufactured circus by some Soros-DA.” Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy both said that they would pardon Trump if elected.
It was no surprise, then, that Republican primary voters rallied around Trump. Perhaps it was inevitable, but it was certainly made easier by the fact that Trump’s supposed adversaries were all endorsing his legal defense as well as his false claims about the prosecutions themselves.
Last but most certainly not least: The Republican appointees on the Supreme Court bailed Trump out this year — in the heart of the general election campaign and when it mattered most.”
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“The six Republican appointees — three of whom, of course, were appointed by Trump himself — sided with Trump on both counts.
They first slow-walked Trump’s appeal on immunity grounds this year and then created a new doctrine of criminal immunity for Trump that had no real basis in the law — effectively foreclosing the possibility of a trial before Election Day. It was a gross distortion of the law in apparent service of the Republican appointees’ partisan political objectives.”
“And yet, Democrats might not be in as much danger as it appears. There’s evidence that this year’s vote does not represent a pure, wholesale ideological transformation of Latinos. On the ground in Starr County, and in similar places across the country, I met voters who thought of the election simply as a referendum on the economy. The school teachers and gardeners and ranchers didn’t talk like Steve Bannon or J.D. Vance. They talked about the price of milk and gas. More than that, they saw national Democrats as apathetic — the party didn’t see their path to victory going through many Latino neighborhoods, so they focused elsewhere. And the results reflected that.”
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“These two Latinos had gone through an actual ideological shift. Lira voted for Obama twice, but had transformed into a passionate Republican. Other Trump voters I met in town, however, were much less ideological. Their message, instead, was something like this: Under Biden, there were days I couldn’t afford to fill up my truck with gas; the price of eggs doubled; my rent went up. Entonces, Biden is fired. It’s time for change. While the White House could point at record-high unemployment, and historically high blue-collar wages, high prices under Biden were much more keenly felt than any boost in paychecks. Accordingly, Trump’s ability to run as the change candidate gave him a huge, structural advantage with Latinos upset with the economy.”
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“Lira was disgusted with Democrats’ flip-flopping: She had voted for Obama in large part for his promise to create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers. But after 12 years of Democrats promising that pathway with no evidence of anything changing, Lira came to believe she’d been lied to.”
It’s sad because it was mostly Republicans that blocked a pathway to citizenship.
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“Here’s how profoundly damaged Democrats were by losing both immigration and the economy as winning issues: They lost support even among undocumented Latinos. Lira told me she had undocumented friends in Denison who (though they couldn’t vote) nonetheless supported Trump. Some had lived in the states for decades, working long hours, paying Social Security taxes they’d never get back. They felt bitter and aggrieved that the newest arrivals, especially those from Venezuela, had been given humanitarian parole under Biden, while they themselves still lacked legal status. They felt cut in line. And the feeling of being cut in line is the glue that unites conservatives in this country. Democrats flip-flopping lost them both pro-immigration voters and anti-immigration voters. It wasn’t just that their proposals weren’t popular — they had simply lost all credibility on the issue.”
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“Still, the situation for Democrats in swing states looks a lot better than it does in South Texas and Florida. Odio said that, in his own analysis of the vote, Democrats only performed a few points worse among Latinos in battleground states than they did in 2020 — “erosion, not realignment,” as Odio put it. When you grade on the curve on inflation and a super-unpopular incumbent, Democrats get even better grades — back when Biden was the nominee, Odio expected them to lose in a blowout. “I actually think the Republicans underperformed,” Odio said.”
“Kamala Harris lost the presidential election and Democrats lost control of the Senate.
But when you zoom in on the details of that result, there’s a striking pattern: Democratic Senate candidates are outperforming Harris. Or, put another way, Republican Senate candidates are doing worse than Trump.
In recent years, the outcome of a state’s US Senate race has increasingly matched the outcome of its simultaneous presidential race. Ticket-splitting has decreased in our era of polarization and partisanship. The vast majority of people voting for a presidential candidate also vote for their party’s Senate candidate.
But not everyone does that. And there’s still some variation in how much better or worse Senate candidates do compared to the top of the ticket. Looking at that variation can provide clues about what sorts of candidates overperform (even if they don’t actually win).”
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“Some might argue for racism or sexism explaining Harris’s struggles, but I’d note that several of the Democratic candidates who overperformed Harris were nonwhite or female. Others might argue that she was a uniquely flawed candidate or campaigner, but President Joe Biden was on track to do much worse if he’d stayed in the race.
My suspicion is that Harris’s electoral struggles were more about Biden’s unpopularity and her association with his administration than any newfound love of the American public for the Republican Party generally.”
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“Call them the “I don’t like Republicans much, but the economy was better under Trump” voters. Biden lost them, and Harris failed to get them back.”
“According to exit polls, 55 percent of men voted for Trump in 2024, compared to 45 percent of women, for a 10-point gender gap — 1 point less than the 11-point gap in support for Trump in both 2020 and 2016.*
Compared to other exit polling results that point to how Trump’s victory may have boiled down to a referendum on President Joe Biden and the economy, this relatively static gender gap may not point to gender as a major factor in the election. But differences in the gender gap across groups of voters — such as growing gaps among Black and Latino voters — can tell us more about the country’s changing partisan landscape. And there’s a reason gender has also been widely discussed in the aftermath of Election Day: The role that gender played in each party’s 2024 presidential campaigns highlights a potential shift in the parties’ approaches to male and female voters, and how voters think about gender and politics.”
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“Trump’s 11-point gap in support between men and women in 2016 and 2020 was a record, but men have been consistently more likely than women to back Republicans since 1980. From then until 2016, the gender gap in support for Republicans ranged from 0 points (in 1992) to 10 points (in 2000), according to exit polls. (The phenomenon of men consistently showing stronger support for the more ideologically conservative party than women is not limited to the U.S., either.)”
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“the gender gap isn’t uniform across all groups. For example, white men and women voted more similarly to each other in 2024 than Black or Latino men and women.”
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“Nonwhite and younger voters had the largest gender gaps”
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“in 2020 Trump won 61 percent of white men and 55 percent of white women, for a 6-point gender gap among white voters. That gap was just 1 point bigger this year according to exit polls — 60 percent to 53 percent, for a 7-point gender gap among white voters. But the gender gap among nonwhite voters increased by significantly more.
Among Black voters, even as the vast majority of both men and women voted Democratic in both elections, Trump gained 2 points of support among men and lost 2 among women, moving the gender gap from 10 points in 2020 to 14 points in 2024. The gap is even more striking among Latino voters, one of the groups among whom Trump gained the most support overall compared to 2020. Four years ago, 36 percent of Latino men and 30 percent of Latino women supported Trump, a gender gap of just 6 points. That gap nearly tripled in 2024, as Trump’s support among Latino men went up by almost 20 percentage points: He won 55 percent of Latino men and 38 percent of Latino women, for a gender gap of 17 points.”
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“49 percent of men and 37 percent of women aged 18 to 29 supported Trump, for a 12-point gender gap, 3 points larger than in 2020. The gap among men and women aged 30 to 39 was also 12 points, while it actually shrank among voters over 50.”