“Trump doesn’t have to do something dramatic like cancel the election in order to erode democracy. The relationship between democracy and autocracy is a spectrum, not a binary; for example, countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua, Turkey and Hungary still hold elections, but their leaders aren’t held meaningfully accountable by them (or by other mechanisms like the courts). A more realistic concern is that the U.S. will slide into what political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism,” in which democratic institutions still exist but they are regularly abused. Maybe the chief executive can’t just abolish the other branches of government, the free press and other tools of accountability for fear of being seen as illegitimate, but he can find ways to weaken or circumvent them. And while the incumbent party still must face elections — and can even lose them — it makes every effort to tilt the electoral playing field in its favor.”
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“some of these things wouldn’t be new for Trump. During his first term, he fired FBI Director James Comey, who was leading an investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia. He purged the Republican Party of his critics by endorsing their opponents in primaries. And of course, he sowed distrust in the results of the 2020 election and attempted to overturn former President Joe Biden’s win. But that’s just the point: According to some political scientists, Trump’s actions during his first term already meet the definition of democratic erosion.”
“while Americans are generally supportive of abortion rights, there was little evidence to show that abortion was going to end up mattering more than other issues, like the economy and immigration, and even less evidence that it would be a more motivating issue than it was in the 2022 midterms, which took place just months after the Supreme Court overturned federal abortion rights in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Generally speaking, Americans are supportive of abortion rights. When asked a standard polling question about whether abortion should be legal in all cases, legal in most cases, illegal in all cases or illegal in most cases, majorities of Americans typically say that it should be legal in all or most cases. And we saw that support show up in the 2024 election results: Six states* passed ballot measures that enshrined abortion rights in their state constitutions, and these measures significantly outperformed Vice President Kamala Harris in every state they were on the ballot.”
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“Polling before the 2024 election did seem to show an increasing share of voters saying abortion was their top issue — on average, even more than in the months preceding the 2022 midterms. According to YouGov/The Economist’s weekly tracking survey, there was a slow but steady increase in the number of registered voters choosing abortion as their top priority over the course of the campaign, from around 5 percent in the summer of 2023 to around 10 percent before the election.
But 10 percent is still relatively low compared with other major issues in the election. The percentage of respondents choosing an issue related to the economy*** in the same surveys averaged 39 percent in polls conducted in October 2024, much higher than the percentage saying abortion was their top issue, which averaged 9 percent in October.
And the increase in Americans prioritizing abortion may be an artifact of a well-known quirk of political polling: partisans forming their political opinions based on what trusted elites are saying. In other words, the Harris campaign’s focus on abortion may have made Democratic voters more likely to say abortion was an important issue to them. Indeed, if we break down the YouGov/The Economist polling numbers by party, we see that abortion’s increasing prioritization as an issue in 2024 was driven almost entirely by self-identified Democrats.”
“A Republican judge has spent more than two months trying to overturn his narrow defeat for a North Carolina Supreme Court seat by arguing that around 60,000 ballots should be tossed out. But many residents have only recently learned that their votes are in danger of not being counted and say they have done nothing wrong.”
“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”