“Democrats will hold some of North Carolina’s highest offices, including the governorship, come January. But these incoming lawmakers will be less powerful than their predecessors, after the Republican-dominated legislature stripped away several of their duties this week.
It isn’t the first time Republicans in North Carolina’s state legislature have shifted the balance of power away from Democrats and toward members of their own party. As a result, the North Carolina governorship is a weaker office than it is in many other states — and Republicans will have a remarkable degree of influence over state politics, despite Democratic victories at the ballot box in November.
North Carolina is a deeply polarized state, and was considered a battleground in the 2024 elections. Now, when Gov.-elect Josh Stein and other Democrats take office in 2025, the battle will be between them and a legislature still dominated by Republicans.”
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“The state legislature, known as the General Assembly, didn’t just target Stein, although he’s the most high-profile official that the new law applies to. The incoming lieutenant governor, attorney general, and superintendent of public instruction (who oversees the state’s public school system) all had authority stripped from them in the new legislation.
There are two major changes to Stein’s authority. First, he loses the ability to make appointments to North Carolina’s five-person elections board. Previously, the governor appointed two Republicans and two Democrats, and a fifth member who could belong to either political party. (Typically, the governor appointed a member of their own party for that final slot.) The State Board of Elections chooses four of the five members of each county board, with the governor appointing the fifth member — again, usually a member of the governor’s party. Those powers will now be in the hands of the new state auditor, Republican Dave Boliek.
“It shifts from Democratic control to Republican control, because the auditor is now a Republican, and if they keep the same basic principle, he’ll appoint three Republicans and Democrats will appoint two,” Michael Bitzer, a political science professor at North Carolina’s Catawba College, told Vox. “Whether that will be significant in terms of what the election board does in the future, I think we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Perhaps of greater significance, Stein will also have limits around who he can appoint to vacant state supreme court and Court of Appeals seats; now, rather than appointing any qualified person, the law states he must choose from a list “recommended by the political party executive committee of the political party with which the vacating judge was affiliated when elected,” preventing him from significantly changing the balance of power in those courts.
The other significant change relates to incoming Attorney General Jeff Jackson. Under the new law, he will be required to defend the state legislature’s bills when they are challenged at any level.”
“There are roughly 1,500 arrested, charged, or imprisoned January 6 insurrectionists, and among their number are all sorts of people.
The January 6 defendants aren’t just hard-boiled leaders of militant groups; the insurrectionists included an actor, small-business owners, and even a self-proclaimed shaman, many of whom voiced a belief in conspiracy theories. However, some of the January 6 insurrectionists were affiliated with a variety of radical anti-government movements, most notably the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, right-wing paramilitary groups recognized as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Those convicted have been found guilty of a range of crimes, from low-level offenses like trespassing or property damage to grave offenses like seditious conspiracy.”
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“The push for freeing insurrectionists has its roots in the false assertion, popularized by Trump, that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. That false claim, based on a variety of conspiracy theories, asserts that the 2020 election was improper; thus the insurrectionists were justified in taking action. Furthermore, the insurrectionists’ supporters claim, Justice Department investigations into Trump show that it is weaponized against those on the right, and that makes the prosecution against insurrectionists improper and invalid.
Trump has encouraged this line of thinking, repeatedly claiming that the DOJ is being weaponized against him and his supporters, often saying, as he did following an indictment, “They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way.”
As the trials of insurrectionists unfolded, several groups began to work to draw attention to the trials and recast them as persecution. One leader of these efforts is Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, a woman shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer during the insurrection. (The officer was investigated by the DOJ; he was cleared of any wrongdoing.) Witthoeft moved to Washington, DC, from San Diego to support January 6 defendants and hold vigils in support of the cause.
Trump has supported the narrative that January 6 defendants are the victims, with Babbitt cast as a martyr and the convicted as “political prisoners.” To be clear, they’re in prison not for expressing political beliefs but for interfering with the political process, committing serious violence, and other crimes.
Now, there is a constellation of pro-insurrectionist groups, like Justice for January 6 (J4J6), American Patriot Relief, J6 Pardon Project, and stophate.com, all of which have called for pardons. Proud Boys leadership has requested clemency, and a slew of other groups and individuals associated with the January 6 insurrectionists have asked for pardons, too.”
“Trump’s share of the Black and Latino vote increased by 8 points each between 2020 and 2024.
Analysts have proposed several different explanations for those shifts, including sexism within communities of color, pessimistic views of the economy and inflation, disinformation, social class and the ongoing ideological sorting of nonwhite conservatives into the Republican Party. While there’s probably merit in some of these, my analyses suggest that one of the biggest factors behind Trump’s growing support from nonwhite voters may be opposition to immigration.
There are two main reasons for this. First, nonwhite Americans’ attitudes about immigration moved sharply to the right during President Joe Biden’s term. That resulted in a much larger pool of Black and Latino voters who were receptive to Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. Second, voters of color with conservative immigration attitudes were especially likely to defect from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024 — even after accounting for other plausible reasons for these changes.”
“because of its winner-take-all nature, the Electoral College isn’t a good measure of closeness. Imagine an election where one candidate wins every state and district 50.1 percent to 49.9 percent. That candidate would romp to a 538-0 victory in the Electoral College, but that election was obviously still very close. The same principle was at play in the 2024 election: Trump won six of the seven major swing states (Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) by 3.2 points or less. And he won Wisconsin by just 0.9 points, Michigan by just 1.4 points and Pennsylvania by just 1.7 points.
That’s important because if Harris had won those three states (plus all the states and districts she actually did win), she would have gotten exactly 270 Electoral College votes.”
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“if Harris had done just 1.8 points better across the board — or even just in those three states (although that’s not usually how elections work) — she would be the president-elect right now.”
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“There have been 20 presidential elections since the end of World War II, and in only six of them was the tipping-point state decided by a smaller margin than Pennsylvania was decided by this year.”
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“the same is true if you look at the Electoral College margin, Trump’s main claim to landslide status. His likely 86-electoral-vote margin over Harris is larger than the 77 electoral votes he won by in 2016 or the 74 electoral votes that President Joe Biden won by in 2020. But it’s smaller than the 126 electoral votes that Obama won by in 2012 and the 192 electoral votes that Obama won by in 2008. And once again, it is only the 14th-biggest Electoral College victory since the end of World War II.”
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“Another way to assess the closeness of an election is, of course, the national popular vote. While the popular vote doesn’t affect who actually wins the election, it can be relevant in discussions of how big of a mandate the winner has to govern. By this measure as well, 2024 was a historically close election. Since the end of World War II, only three elections had popular-vote margins smaller than Trump’s current 1.6-point lead: 1960, 1968 and 2000.”
A lot of the public were Googling if Biden dropped out right before the election. Maybe a primary would have helped informed the public about Democratic candidates’ positions.
“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.”