“According to the exit poll, 35 percent of voters nationally rated the “state of democracy” as the most important factor to their vote. Eighty-one percent of these people voted for Harris and just 17 percent for Trump. But the economy was the next-most-influential issue. Among these voters, Trump led 79 percent to 20 percent. In the end, abortion did not rate as highly as Democrats might have hoped; only 14 percent rated it as their biggest concern.
It’s possible that inflation contributed to the growing divide between high-income voters and low-income voters. According to the exit poll, Democrats increased their vote share by 9 points among voters living in households that make more than $100,000 dollars a year. Among households making less, which account for about 60 percent of voters, Republicans gained 12 points on margin.”
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“In addition to economic headwinds and deteriorating margins with their base, it looks like Democrats also simply had bad turnout. So far, around 137 million ballots have been counted for the 2024 presidential race. Predictions of final turnout are hovering somewhere in the neighborhood 152 million votes. That would be a decrease from the 158 million who voted in 2020 and would be equivalent to about 61 percent of eligible voters. That would be a decline from 66 percent in 2020.”
“Black voters — men and women — have been the bedrock of the Democratic Party, and in recent years, Latinos and young voters have joined them.
All three groups still preferred Democrat Kamala Harris. But preliminary data from AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide, suggested that Trump made significant gains.
Voters under age 30 represent a fraction of the total electorate, but about half of them supported Harris. That’s compared to the roughly 6 in 10 who backed Biden in 2020. Slightly more than 4 in 10 young voters went for Trump, up from about one-third in 2020.
At the same time, Black and Latino voters appeared slightly less likely to support Harris than they were to back Biden four years ago, according to AP VoteCast.
About 8 in 10 Black voters backed Harris, down from the roughly 9 in 10 who backed Biden. More than half of Hispanic voters supported Harris, but that was down slightly from the roughly 6 in 10 who backed Biden in 2020. Trump’s support among those groups appeared to rise slightly compared to 2020. Collectively, those small gains yielded an outsize outcome.”
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“about half of Trump voters said inflation was the biggest issue factoring into their election decisions. About as many said that of the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to AP VoteCast.
He papered over the fact that the economy by many conventional metrics is robust — inflation is largely in check and wages are up — while border crossings have dropped dramatically. He talked right past the facts and through relentless repetition convinced voters.
He also sold them on the promise of the largest mass deportation effort in U.S. history, although he has not explained how such an operation would work. And he is threatening to impose massive tariffs on key products from China and other American adversaries, which economists warn could dramatically boost prices for average Americans.”
“The bill’s reforms aside, its restrictions would have made the border a much more dangerous and inaccessible place for people seeking protection. A similar border-buttoning authority during the pandemic didn’t prevent crossings, but it did lead to thousands of reported instances of kidnapping, torture, and rape suffered by asylum seekers who were returned to or stopped in Mexico. Fortifying the border against asylum seekers, as the bipartisan bill would’ve done and as President Joe Biden is now doing, keeps vulnerable migrants in danger.
Harris and Walz’s eagerness to defend the failed border bill is a sign of the Democratic Party’s rightward shift on immigration and border security this year. The legislation had no grand reform—no pathway to citizenship for undocumented longtime residents, no solution for Dreamers, no farm work visa improvements—to balance the significant asylum restrictions. But the border and immigration have increasingly become liabilities for Democrats (and top priorities for voters), so their messaging has gotten tougher and their appetite for restrictionism has grown.
Congress should work on immigration reform instead of relying on the president to patch up the broken system. As Walz said in yesterday’s debate, “You can’t just do this through the executive branch.” Questions of process aside, this year’s bipartisan bill wasn’t the silver bullet or the humane solution Democrats keep suggesting.”
“Check the U.S. Constitution, and you’ll see that Article 1, Section 8 clearly gives Congress sole authority over “Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises.” Unfortunately, Congress traded away much of that power during the 20th century, beginning in the aftermath of the Great Depression—which was considerably worsened by a series of tariffs passed by Congress—and continuing with various laws passed in the 1960s and 1970s, as the Cato report details.
In theory, handing over those powers made sense. Lawmakers were more likely to be influenced by parochial interests and would favor protectionism that benefited some local industry, even if it came at the expense of the nation’s economy as a whole. Presidents, it was assumed, would take a more expansive view of the benefits of trade and would use those powers to reduce barriers like tariffs.
For a long time, that was true. It no longer is. Both Trump and President Joe Biden have favored protectionism, and have faced scant opposition from Congress or the courts.
If Trump returns to the White House in 2025, he would assume huge power over the flow of goods into the United States “without substantial procedural or institutional safeguards” due to the “broad and ambiguous language” included in many of those trade laws passed decades ago, Packard and Lincicome write.
The tariffs that Trump imposed during his term in office took advantage of many of those same powers.”
“I think you actually see this in the bit of daylight that emerged between her and the White House early in Biden’s term. I warned in March 2021 that Biden wasn’t thinking clearly about the asylum situation. His administration didn’t want a ton of asylum-seekers to show up at the border, but was also unwilling to actually say that or align their policies clearly with the goal of preventing it. The person who was willing to say it was Kamala Harris, who got saddled with the quasi-impossible task of ending the root causes of migration via diplomatic engagement with Central America, but who managed to fly to Guatemala and actually say the thing — “do not come” — that should have been the administration’s top to bottom message.
The Groups and media leftists yelled at her, the Biden administration didn’t back her up, and now, three years later, her biggest political vulnerability is still her association with Biden’s efforts to appease the Groups. The good news on the substance of immigration policy is that Biden eventually changed course, and now crossings are lower than they were at the end of Trump’s term.
Harris has also clearly said that she wants to sign the border security bill that Trump quashed for his own personal political game. Immigration groups originally revolted, not so much at the substance of the bill (which is good!) but at the idea of doing anything on border security detached from a path to citizenship for the long-resident undocumented. Biden belatedly shifted Democrats off this bit of Groups-think by linking the border security measures to aid for Ukraine. But Harris is now advocating for border security in a freestanding way.
I personally would love to see comprehensive immigration reform, but it’s clear that the construct ran aground some time ago. And Harris has been steering, from the get-go, toward a more sensible approach that involves considering individual immigration policy changes on the merits. Back in 2019, she co-sponsored a skilled migration bill with Mike Lee at a time when the idea of doing this detached from comprehensive reform was anathema to The Groups.”
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“I sincerely understand why people with very right-wing policy views might decide they want to overlook Trump’s well-known flaws and roll the dice on the possibility that he does something catastrophic. But if you’re a normal person with some mixed feelings about the parties, I think you will be dramatically happier with the results that come from President Harris negotiating with congressional Republicans over exactly which tax breaks should be extended rather than a re-empowered Trump backed by a 6-3 Supreme Court and supportive majorities in Congress.”
“Understanding the full scope of Vance’s answer requires a quick recap of how Trump’s lawyers wanted January 6, 2021, to play out. The so-called Eastman memo outlined the necessary steps to prevent a transfer of power. It proposed that officials in a handful of states won narrowly by Joe Biden should submit alternative slates of electors and that then-Vice President Mike Pence should invoke his unilateral authority “without asking for permission—either from a vote of the joint session [of Congress] or from the [Supreme Court]”—to count only the Trump-supporting slates from those states.
If state legislators in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and other disputed states failed to take the bait, there was a backup plan in which Pence would cite “all the evidence and the letters from state legislators calling into question the executive certifications” as grounds for refusing to count the votes from seven disputed states.
“At the end of the count, the tally would therefore be 232 for Trump, 222 for Biden,” Eastman wrote. “Because the 12th Amendment says ‘majority of electors appointed,’ having determined that no electors from the 7 states were appointed…TRUMP WINS.”
It’s unknown whether this would have worked. Certainly, it would have drawn an immediate lawsuit from the Biden campaign, but it’s unclear how the Supreme Court would have viewed its role in such a dispute.
Crucially, Pence refused to play his part in the scheme. For doing so, he’s become a pariah in Republican politics—though he deserves to be remembered for maintaining his courage in the face of both a literal and metaphorical partisan mob.
Vance indicated in the All-In interview that he would be willing to do the opposite. Asked twice whether he would refuse to certify the election, Vance fell back both times to his claim that he would have simply asked states to submit alternative slates of electors and allowed Congress to have a debate about what to do.
That’s a cowardly response that fails to give a clear answer, but there can be no doubt about the signal Vance is sending. He is effectively saying that he’d have followed the path outlined in the Eastman memo—a path that would allow the vice president to claim he was merely letting Congress debate the outcome, and then use the chaos and uncertainty created by that same debate to throw out the results from certain states in pursuit of a different outcome.”
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“It’s also worth engaging with the underlying notion here: that the country or Congress needs to debate the results of the election. That is also nonsense.
The country did debate the 2020 election. For months. Votes were cast, results were tallied, and the Electoral College determined the winner. The final certification of the results is not the time or place for that debate to take place. Indeed, the Trump campaign took advantage of many other opportunities that are built into the system to challenge results in specific places, and none of those efforts found systemic fraud or other reasons to doubt the outcome.”
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“What Eastman proposed (and what Vance is nodding along with) is a reversal of all that: a substitution of the vice president’s and Congress’ opinion for the will of the voters. That’s not constitutional, democratic, or even populist. It’s just authoritarian.”
“The U.S. government has limited influence over those global prices, which are shaped by market and geopolitical factors. Gas prices dropped during the early months of the pandemic, for example, because millions of people stayed home and dramatically reduced their gas consumption. But as the Bureau of Labor Statistics documented, prices surged as society reopened and the economy started to rebound.
While energy prices have consistently been higher under Biden than they were during Trump’s first term, they have dropped from their heights in 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent global prices soaring. As the Agriculture Department noted in February, fuel and oil costs saw significant declines in 2023 and are expected to decline again in 2024, thanks to drops in global energy prices. U.S. oil prices in the past few days have dropped to their lowest level in two years as OPEC+ says it will increase its own oil production later this year and fuel demand in China looks weaker.
And it’s not clear green-lighting more domestic drilling would have much impact on energy costs. For one thing, the U.S. is already producing record amounts of oil and gas, not to mention renewable energy like solar, wind and hydropower. The Biden administration has also approved more permits to drill for oil on federal land than many of its predecessors, even as it moves to restrict how much federal land is available for drilling.
Several economists also told POLITICO that while energy costs are a factor in every part of the food supply chain, they’re just one of many inputs companies consider when setting prices.”