“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.”
“Unauthorized immigrants aren’t broadly eligible for naturalization — and have few paths to citizenship. To qualify for naturalization, someone generally has to have been a lawful permanent resident for five years, married to a US citizen and a lawful permanent resident for three years, or a member of the military.
Additionally, the US is approving citizenship applications at its swiftest pace in years, but it’s not because regulators are trying to skew the election in Democrats’ favor. The government is doing so because there was already a backlog that got worse during the pandemic, the Los Angeles Times reports. Now, the Department of Homeland Security is effectively doing catch-up.
The US naturalized 878,500 people in 2023 and is now processing applications in roughly 4.9 months – a pace that’s comparable to how quickly the government was approving applications in 2013. According to the New York Times, processing time for naturalization applications spiked during the Trump administration as the White House sought to reduce legal and unauthorized immigration.
These new citizens also aren’t guaranteed Democratic voters. Polling has indicated that naturalized citizens lean Democrat, but both parties are likely to pick up some new voters as people undergo this process. According to a survey from the National Partnership for New Americans, 54 percent of naturalized citizens said they’d vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in November, while 38 percent said they’d back former President Donald Trump.
It’s worth reiterating that naturalized citizens aren’t unauthorized immigrants, and that the bulk of them — roughly 83 percent, according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services — have been lawful permanent residents for five years. Unauthorized immigrants have limited pathways to citizenship, and many aren’t eligible for naturalization.”
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“This Republican talking point appears to refer to a “parole” program the Biden administration has approved for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans amid instability in their home countries. Under the program, people can temporarily enter the US for two years, pay for their own travel, and fly into the country. There is no evidence that people are being flown specifically to swing states, and as a US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) spokesperson told Vox, DHS does not choose the airports that parolees fly into, and it also doesn’t control or choose where parolees settle down.
Additionally, parolees do not have a path to citizenship and as a result would be unable to vote in future elections.
As legal immigrants, asylum seekers do have a path to citizenship; according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), 3.3 percent of those naturalized in 2023 came to the US as asylum seekers — roughly 29,000 people. While that might be enough to swing a state as close as Georgia was in 2020, it’s not enough to affect the outcomes in all the states Musk listed, even if Democrats were flying people there. Which, again, they aren’t.
In addition, most naturalized citizens have settled in states that are not swing states, with California, Texas, Florida, New York, and New Jersey topping the list, per USCIS.”
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“It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and noncitizens have very rarely been found to be illegally voting. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning nonprofit that focuses on voting rights, election officials responsible for the counting of nearly 23.5 million votes in 2016 identified just 30 possible cases of noncitizen voting for investigation.
Noncitizens are able to vote in some local elections for positions like City Council and school board in some jurisdictions in Vermont and California, but they aren’t able to vote anywhere in federal elections.”
“That 53-seat majority will be a boon to the GOP agenda next year. But three of Republicans’ wins were in solidly red seats in West Virginia, Ohio and Montana. They flipped a true swing state in Pennsylvania but suffered losses in Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona. That means they’ll fall well short of the 57 seats they might have had, thanks to undervoting, smaller Trump coattails and well-funded and disciplined Democratic opponents.
This was the fourth straight cycle in the Trump era that Senate Republicans struggled to win purple states. In theory, Trump could have pulled some of their top recruits over the finish line — he outperformed Senate GOP candidates in every single battleground state.”
“Wage growth has caught up with inflation on average. But wage gains haven’t been uniform: The lowest-paid workers saw some of the biggest gains, particularly in the leisure and hospitality sectors, but other industries, from advertising to chemical manufacturing, saw their wages decline relative to inflation.”
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“Even if workers received raises that outpaced inflation, that doesn’t help with sticker shock. Research has shown that consumers have an internalized “reference price” — a conception of what constitutes a fair price for a good they routinely purchase. If that imagined price doesn’t match up with reality, consumers feel short-changed.”
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“Consumers also often misunderstand how inflation works. The important thing to know is that it only goes one way: When inflation decreases, that just means that prices are increasing less quickly, not that they are going down. (That can happen, though rarely.)
Prices going down, a phenomenon known as deflation, would be a potentially worrying signal about the health of the economy. If consumers pay less for a good, that can translate to less money to pay the workers who produce and distribute it, leading to less consumer spending overall and slower economic growth.”
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“people are staying unemployed for longer: 1.6 million Americans were unemployed for a period of at least 27 weeks in October, compared to just 1.3 million the same month last year.”
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“After a brief spike in savings rates during the pandemic due to a series of stimulus checks, Americans are now saving less than they were pre-pandemic. This creates a cycle where Americans have less money, so they borrow more. Because interest rates have been high, borrowing has become more expensive, leaving them with even less money.”
“President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election was powered by a remarkably consistent nationwide trend of voters turning against the Democratic ticket. Vice President Kamala Harris performed worse than President Joe Biden did in 2020 nearly everywhere: in big cities and rural areas, in blue states and red ones.”
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“What happened on Tuesday is part of a worldwide wave of anti-incumbent sentiment.
2024 was the largest year of elections in global history; more people voted this year than ever before. And across the world, voters told the party in power — regardless of their ideology or history — that it was time for a change.”
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“One credible answer is inflation. Countries around the world experienced rising prices after the Covid-19 pandemic and attendant global supply chain disruptions, and voters hate inflation. Even though the inflation rate has gone down in quite a few places, including the United States, prices remain much higher than they were prior to the pandemic. People remember the low prices they’ve lost, and they are hurting — hurting enough that they see an otherwise-booming economy as a failure.
As much sense as the inflation story makes, it remains an unproven one. We’ll need a lot more evidence, including detailed data on the US election that isn’t available yet, to be sure whether it’s right.”
“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.”