About Last Night

Somebody said: "Americans will always do the right thing - once they've tried everything else."

That was a wipeout yesterday. That was not a simple rejection, or even a big-ass repudiation of this Trumpian GOP Fuckery thing. That was a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, inside a total ass-kickin', all wrapped up tight with a Fuck You And The horse You Rode In On.

First, all politics is local.

And when it works locally, you can apply it generally, tailoring it to suit the needs of a given area, or city, or constituency. But the message for 'small d' democrats is that we are not all that divided. We've allowed some very bad-faith assholes to convince us we need to split ourselves off from everybody else, and fear each other - to the point where we're in real danger of believing we have nothing in common with anyone but the few people who think and believe and behave exactly the way we do.

"For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures."

-- JFK

Like the lady said: "When we fight, we win."

The only way we can't win is if we don't show up to fight.

Across the country Tuesday, state and local elections served as the first major test of how the public feels about President Donald Trump’s second term ahead of major national elections next year for control of Congress.

It didn’t go well for him.

Here are winners and losers from these elections.

Winners

Democrats: They took back a governor’s mansion in a critical swing state, Virginia, and kept control of another in New Jersey, while winning a mayoral race in New York City and holding onto three critical state Supreme Court seats in Pennsylvania. Voters in California agreed to allow Democrats to redraw their congressional districts to match Republicans doing the same in other states. Democrats also won in state and local elections in Georgia and Mississippi and expanded their majorities in the Virginia state legislature.

These were exactly the results Democrats wanted a year before the next big referendum on Trump, which will be nationwide elections where control of Congress is up for grabs. On Democrats’ big night, turnout in Virginia, New Jersey and New York City was up.

“Tonight we sent a message, ” Abigail Spanberger, the next governor of Virginia — and the state’s first woman to win the office — said in her victory speech. She won almost every coveted voter group: women, independents, younger voters and voters who said the economy was their main concern, according to network exit polls reported by CNN.

Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill (D) speaks alongside her family at her election night watch party in East Brunswick, New Jersey, on Tuesday. (Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images)
In New Jersey, Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill’s win suggests real momentum for Democrats. She won in a state where Black and Hispanic voters have become more open to Trumpism — and overcame history as well: For the first time in 50 years, New Jersey Democrats have won the governor’s mansion for three straight terms.

There are caveats to Democratic wins. Virginia, with its large federal employee workforce, has been uniquely hurt by the government shutdown and Trump’s mass firings of federal workers.

“I tend to think we overrate the impact of these off-year elections,” said Doug Heye, a veteran Republican strategist. “New Jersey and Virginia are more blue than purple.” Democrats I talked to agreed with him.

The poles of the Democratic Party: Virginia and New Jersey elected moderate Democrats with national security backgrounds — Spanberger served in the CIA and Sherrill was a Navy pilot.

After losing to Trump twice, many Democrats approve of this direction as the 2028 presidential election comes into view. “At the end of the day, Democratic voters get really pragmatic about who can win,” one veteran Democratic strategist told me.

But the liberal wing of the party had a great night, too. America’s largest city elected a democratic socialist, Zohran Mamdani, who supports redistributing wealth to provide free bus fare and child care in the city, among many other services.

Republican attack ads for the next year: In Mamdani, Trump and Republicans feel they’ve found the perfect foil for next year’s midterm elections. He’s so far to the left that the top two Democrats in Congress, also from New York, hesitated to endorse him or just didn’t.

“Many people are petrified by the Radical Left,” Trump said on social media, “but I’m not, they keep getting me, and other Republicans, elected!”

Some Democrats say they’re worried about the socialist label sticking, especially in the wake of successful “woke” attacks the past few elections that framed their party as too concerned about special classes of Americans over others.

Stop being afraid of their words, Democrats. You won by (finally) smackin' the other guy right in his fat smug face.

"Oh - you say I'm a socialist? So what? You don't like it? Fuck you - make me stop."

You lose because you're timid. You've developed a bad habit of buckling under the slightest pressure. Knock that shit off. Be bold. Be assertive.

 

And point out the truth:

"We've put together several 'socialist' things in this country that we all know and love."

• The US military's a good socialist thing
• Every local cop shop is a good socialist thing
• Streets and highways and dams and sewer systems are good socialist things
• Public schools are good socialist things
• and and and

Free and fair elections: In the days before the election, Trump floated an allegation without evidence that Democrats were somehow “shipping” votes, and his Justice Department sent monitors to polling locations, in a move that some Democrats viewed as menacing. Despite that tension, millions of voters from New York to California had their say in elections run by states and municipalities. Tuesday night underscored what election experts have been saying for years amid Trump’s fraud claims: It’s very hard to rig an election, especially because they are so decentralized.

Losers

Trump: This election was about Trump. He endorsed major Republican candidates and tied all of these elections to his efforts to lower the cost of living: “If affordability is your issue, VOTE REPUBLICAN!” he posted on social media. But prices are up, Trump is broadly unpopular, and Democratic candidates welcomed making their elections about Trump. Network exit polls showed that most voters in Virginia and New Jersey voters disapproved of Trump.

Republican hopes of keeping control of Congress next year: House Republicans have one of the smallest House majorities ever, and history suggests that whatever party controls the White House tends to lose the midterms. Tuesday did little to dispel that trend: Since the 1970s, when one party has swept these off-year elections — as Democrats did Tuesday — that party has done well in the next year’s congressional elections.

The Senate, which Republicans also control, is a higher reach for Democrats, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility. Senate Democrats are holding the line against reopening the government without assurances that programs such as food assistance will be restored. As the shutdown becomes the longest ever on Wednesday, Trump is expressing concerns his party will get blamed for it if they don’t make drastic moves to end it. “The Democrats are far more likely to win the Midterms, and the next Presidential Election,” he warned his party Tuesday.

Nothing’s a done deal. A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that while voters broadly disapprove of Trump, they’re more open to voting for Republicans in Congress. But to the extent you can read into these elections, analysts say you’d rather be a Democrat than a Republican going into next year.

“There’s a lot of anger on the left,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) warned his party recently. “And elections can be dangerous when one side is mobilized, is angry.”

Holy Crap

Democrats sweep all 30 House of Delegates seats in Northern Virginia, flip 13 seats statewide

Democratic candidates won all 30 of Northern Virginia's seats in the Virginia House of Delegates on Tuesday as the party was set to significantly expand its 51-49 majority in the state's lower chamber.

As of 11 p.m., Democrats had picked up 13 seats statewide, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. With only one race undecided, the Democrats will hold at least 64 of the 100 seats, the most they have held in nearly 40 years.

Two of the pickups were in Northern Virginia, including in western Prince William's 21st District, where former Del. Elizabeth Guzman ousted first-term incumbent Ian Lovejoy.

And in the 30th District -- western Loudoun County and northern Fauquier County -- Democrat John McAuliff defeated Republican incumbent Geary Higgins by about 600 votes, or 1.5 percentage points.

After years of Republican control, Democrats took the majority in the House of Delegates in 2019 only to lose it in 2021, when Republican Glenn Youngkin was elected governor. However, the party won control back in 2023, following redistricting in late 2021.

“Tonight, Virginians sent a clear message across the nation: Donald Trump and Virginia Republicans’ politics of chaos and cruelty have no home in the Commonwealth,” House Speaker Don Scott of Portsmouth said in a statement. “House Democrats expanded our majority because we stood up for Virginians and built a vision that puts people first — lowering costs, growing our economy and protecting our rights."

In districts that include parts of Prince William County, results Tuesday were as follows.

19th District (northeastern Prince William and southeastern Fairfax County)

Democrat Rozia Henson, a Woodbridge native, was reelected to a second term without opposition. Henson is the first openly gay Black man to serve in the House.

20th District (Manassas area)

Democrat Michelle Maldonado was elected to a third term in the House with 67.8% of the vote. The name of Republican Christopher Stone appeared on the ballot, but Stone withdrew last month.

21st District (western Prince William, including Haymarket)

In a race that was considered to be tight, Democrat Josh Thomas easily won a second term over Republican challenger Gregory Lee Gorham by more than 5,000 votes, or nearly 17 percentage points.

22nd District (western Prince William, including Bristow and Brentsville)

In one of the most closely watched and most expensive races in the state, Lovejoy didn't survive a challenge from Guzman. The Democrat, returning to the House of Delegates after previously serving two terms, won 54.6% of the vote to Lovejoy's 45.3%, a margin of 3,400 votes.

23rd District (southeastern Prince William and northern Stafford County)

Democrat Candi King was elected to her third full term in the House. She was first elected in a special election in January 2021 to fill the seat vacated by Jennifer Carroll Foy, who resigned to run for governor that year, and then was elected to her first full term that fall.

King defeated Republican James Tully with 76.5% of the vote.

24th District (southern Prince William, including Montclair and portions of Dale City)

Powerful Democratic Del. Luke Torian, who has served in the House since 2010, did not have a challenger. Torian chairs the House Appropriations Committee, which determines how the state spends its tax dollars.

25th District (north central Prince William, including Lake Ridge and the County Center area)

Democrat Briana Sewell was unopposed for a third term.

Closer Than It Looks

394 days until the mid-terms.

Well That Sucks

But no - we ain't done yet. With each one of these shitty moves, Republicans show us they've got no good cards to play.

And that takes me back to that fucked up meeting with Zelensky when they ambushed the guy and tried to push him around, saying, "You don't have the cards. You don't have the cards."

Daddy State Awareness Guide, Rule 1:

Every accusation is a confession.

Researcher who has distorted voter data appointed to Homeland Security election integrity role

NEW YORK (AP) — A conservative election researcher whose faulty findings on voter data were cited by President Donald Trump as he tried to overturn his 2020 election loss has been appointed to an election integrity role at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Pennsylvania activist Heather Honey is now serving as the deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in the department’s Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans, an organizational chart on its website shows.

The political appointment, first reported by Democracy Docket, shows how self-styled election investigators who have thrown themselves into election conspiracy theories since 2020 are now being celebrated by a presidential administration that indulges their false claims.

Her new role, which didn’t exist under President Joe Biden, also comes as Trump has used election integrity concerns as a pretext to try to give his administration power over how elections are run in the U.S.

The president has ordered sweeping changes to election processes and vowed to do away with mail ballots and voting machines to promote “honesty” in the 2026 midterms, despite a lack of constitutional authority to do so. Trump’s Department of Justice also has demanded complete state voter lists, raising concerns about voter privacy and questions about how the federal government plans to use the sensitive data.

Neither Honey nor DHS immediately responded to requests for comment on Tuesday.

Honey runs an investigations and auditing consulting firm called Haystack Investigations, according to contact information provided on her LinkedIn profile. Since 2020, she also has led a variety of election research groups whose flawed analyses of election data have fueled right-wing attacks on voting procedures, including in battleground states Pennsylvania and Arizona.

In 2020, her election research misrepresented incomplete state voter data to falsely claim that Pennsylvania had more votes reported than voters. Trump echoed the falsehood during his speech to supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, saying Pennsylvania “had 205,000 more votes than you had voters.” Shortly after, his supporters violently attacked the U.S. Capitol in an effort to prevent Biden from becoming president.

In 2021, Honey was involved in the Arizona Senate’s partisan audit of election results in Maricopa County, she confirmed in a podcast interview with a GOP lawyer. That review in the state’s most populous county, which spent six months searching for evidence of fraud, was described by experts as riddled with errors, bias and flawed methodology. Still, it came up with a vote tally that would not have altered the outcome, finding that Biden actually won by more votes than the official results certified in 2020.

In 2022, Honey’s organization Verity Vote issued a report claiming that Pennsylvania had sent some 250,000 “unverified” mail ballots to voters who provided invalid identification or no identification at all.

Officials in Pennsylvania said the claim flagrantly misrepresented the way the state classified applications for mail-in and absentee ballots. The “not verified” designation did not mean the voter didn’t provide accurate identification information, nor did it mean their ID wasn’t later verified.

Former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer said he received dozens of public records requests related to elections from Honey during his time in office, which took up “scores of hours of staff time.” He said he was surprised to hear she had been elevated to a position of such “authority and responsibility.”

From what he saw, Richer said, she’s “not a serious auditor.”

Honey’s hiring at the Department of Homeland Security comes amid reports that Trump’s administration has met with several other election conspiracy theorists in recent months. Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow and one of the most prominent election conspiracy theorists, said in an email to supporters in June that he had met with the president twice in the previous eight weeks. In June, a federal jury in Colorado found that Lindell had defamed a former worker for a company that makes election equipment by making false claims related to the 2020 election.

Seth Keshel, an election modeler whose work on the 2020 election prompted challenges that were later dismissed, presented his research to White House personnel in May, he said on his Substack account.

David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research, said DHS used to have real credibility in its advisory role on elections. Its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had collaborated with states to shore up their elections from foreign attacks and disinformation, he said.

Now, the agency has fired its “real experts” on elections, he said. Trump’s administration also has done away with much of its work tracking foreign influence campaigns targeting voters, both at CISA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

“What I’m concerned about is that it seems like DHS is being poised to use the vast power and megaphone of the federal government to spread disinformation rather than combat it,” Becker said. “It’s going to really harm DHS’s credibility overall.”

Today's Skepchick

Russiagate is a real thing. It's just not what some would have us believe.

10 Things

1. Know stuff
2. Tell people about the stuff you know
3. Run for something
4. Volunteer to help somebody who's running for something
5. Join or actively support pro-democracy groups
6. Become a poll Watcher or a Poll Worker
7. Call / write / visit elected officials
8. Show up and vote every chance you get
9. Stay at it
10. Support independent media

Today's Pete

First - stop putting these dog-ass Republicans in office.

Warrior Spirit

Mallory McMorrow brought the fire 2 years ago, and she continues the good fight.

This is the warrior spirit that we have to internalize in order to wield it against the dark forces.

Current Sen Gary Peters is not running for re-election in 2026.

Donate

Bringing The Fire

If Only

I think it's more than just possible Kamala Harris would be in the White House now if the campaign had just turned this guy loose.

As of now, if he runs, I'm on him (assuming, of course, we still have legit elections in 2028).

Oy

And the hits keep right on a-rollin'.

This - plus The SAVE Act, plus some well-placed vigilante action - will practically guarantee MAGA wins almost across the board.

The only thing they'd have left to do would be to figure out a way to make it seem not-too-rigged so we don't end up with "victory" margins in the Putin/ Saddam range of 70 or 80 or 90%.

US Homeland Security says election security personnel placed on leave

Feb 11 (Reuters) - The Department of Homeland Security, as part of an evaluation of its election security mission, said on Tuesday that personnel focused on misinformation, disinformation and foreign influence operations aimed at U.S. elections have been placed on administrative leave.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem is "undertaking an evaluation of how it has executed its election security mission with a particular focus on any work related to mis, dis and malinformation," agency spokesperson Rhonda Lawson said in a statement in response to a Reuters query.

Lawson did not immediately respond to questions about how many employees were placed on leave, if they would be reassigned or if they were permanently leaving the department.

Noem criticized the Biden administration's approach to homeland security, including efforts by DHS's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, during her confirmation hearing on January 17. The agency had "gotten far off mission," she said.

Say What?

So - no States' Rights on this one?

Big government in Washington gets to dictate what your local elections will look like?

Donald Trump Announces Plan to Change Elections

President-elect Donald Trump has announced a sweeping plan to change the way U.S. elections are carried out.

"We need to get things straightened out in this country, including elections," he said, after accepting the "Patriot of the Year" award at a Long Island event organized by Fox Nation on Thursday. Trump, 78, accepted the award, designed to resemble the American flag, after a live performance of Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" – the president-elect's go-to entrance song.

"We're gonna do things that have been really needed for a long time," he said. "And we are gonna look at elections. We want to have paper ballots, one day voting, voter ID, and proof of citizenship."

He went on to denounce a recent law passed in California that prohibits local governments from requiring voters to present identification when casting their ballots at the polls. "In California they just passed a law that you're not even allowed to ask a voter for voter ID. Think of that. If you ask a voter for their voter ID, you've committed a crime. We're gonna get the whole country straightened out," he said.

It isn't the first time Trump has proposed changing elections. During a speech in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in August, he proposed getting rid of mail-in ballots in favor of same day voting and voter ID laws.

"We have to get back in and we want to change it all. We want to go to paper ballots. We want to go to same-day voting. We want to go to citizenship papers, and we want to go to voter ID. It's very simple. We want to get rid of mail-in voting," he said.

State senator fails sobriety test in video after alleged hit-and-runRead moreState senator fails sobriety test in video after alleged hit-and-run
According to the Brennan Center, 98 percent of counties in the United States use paper ballots. But since the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. has seen major shifts in how elections work, with more people than ever voting early or voting by mail. In 2024, 88,233,886 mail-in and early in-person votes were cast nationally, with 47 states now allowing some form of early voting. Meanwhile, laws requiring voter ID are on the rise, with eight states enacting voter ID laws since 2020.

Trump has previously made an effort to prevent mail-in voting, with his campaign filing several lawsuits in 2020 to stop many of the changes made by states to make it easier to vote by mail. He also called mail-in ballots "dangerous" and "corrupt," claiming that they'd lead to "massive electoral fraud" and a "rigged" 2020 election. He later blamed mail-in ballots for his 2020 election loss.

While there have been some isolated cases of election fraud as a result of postal voting, such as in the 2018 North Carolina primary, which was re-run after a consultant for the Republican candidate tampered with absentee voting papers, the rate of voting fraud overall in the U.S. is less than 0.0009 percent, according to a 2017 study by the Brennan Center for Justice, external. "There's simply no basis for the conspiracy theory that voting by mail causes fraud," Federal Election Commission head Ellen Weintraub said.

Despite railing against mail-in voting, this year Trump changed his tune, actively encouraging his supporters to vote for him early. "I am telling everyone to vote early," Trump said on a podcast hosted by Dan Bongino.

Meanwhile, in a series of virtual town halls and robocalls, Trump and daughter-in-law Lara Trump, the co-chair of the Republican National Committee, actively encouraged voters to take advantage of early voting options, including mail-in ballots.

"Hi, this is Lara Trump calling on behalf of President Trump's campaign, and we're urging you to get out and vote before election day," one robocall said, according to CNN. Earlier this year, Lara Trump voiced a robocall falsely alleging massive fraud in the 2020 election due to mail-in ballots.

The shift came as Trump sought to appeal to voters in the seven battleground states, all of which he won.

But a move back to one-day voting would likely hurt rural voters, particularly in swing states that have high rates of early voters, a large number of whom have thrown their support behind Trump in the past. It would also disproportionately affect disabled voters, whose voter participation was boosted in 2020 thanks to mail-in voting.

Meanwhile, Trump's plan to require "citizenship papers" and voters' ID could disproportionately disenfranchise nonwhite people to whom such paperwork is not easily accessible. This group of voters is disproportionately nonwhite and identifies as independent or Democrat, according to NPR.

A total of 35 states required a government-issued identification to vote in person in the 2024 presidential election. Of these, 24 required a photo identification such as a driver's license or a U.S. passport. That is four more states than required the same in the 2020 election.

Separation

Trumpers who are shocked and hurt that people are cutting them off have some real issues they're being forced to confront now.

"If your politics make you fearful that your loved ones will need to separate from you, now would be a good time to examine your politics."

Today's PG

Harris came up short by less than 2 percentage points.

The 2024 election was not in the running for "the big win" Trump needs us to think he got. He managed the 16th biggest winning margin since WW2 - finishing one behind Jimmy Carter.

There was no landslide, so there's nothing even vaguely approximating a mandate. And people are actually starting to get their heads outa their asses enough to see something other than their own shit for a change.

Donald Trump Has Not Won a Majority of the Votes Cast for President

Donald Trump’s popular vote total has fallen below 50 percent, and his margin over Kamala Harris has narrowed considerably as all the votes are counted.

“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Donald Trump declared in the early morning hours of November 6, 2024, after all the polls had closed. Indeed, he claimed that he had won “a political victory that our country has never seen before, nothing like this.” Trump was excited by the numbers showing him with well over 50 percent of the popular vote and establishing a wide lead over his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Unfortunately, for the president-elect, the United States takes time to count 155 million votes—give or take a million—and the actual result will rob Trump of his bragging points.

Trump can no longer claim that powerful mandate. By most reasonable measures, the beginning point for such a claim in a system with two major parties is an overwhelming majority vote in favor of your candidacy. Trump no longer has that.

Over the weekend, as California, Oregon, Washington, and other Western states moved closer to completing their counts, Trump’s percentage of the popular vote fell below 50 percent. And his margin of victory looks to be much smaller than initially anticipated. In fact, of all the 59 presidential elections since the nation’s founding, it appears that—after all of the 2024 votes are counted—only five popular vote winners in history will have prevailed by smaller percentage margins than Trump.

Trump’s popular-vote advantage has declined steadily since election night. As of Monday afternoon, Trump was at 49.94 percent, while Harris was at 48.26, according to the authoritative Cook Political Report’s tracking of results from official sources in states across the country. And we can expect that the Republican’s total will only continue to tick downward as heavily Democratic states on the West Coast finalize their vote tallies.

Trump’s still ahead of Harris in the popular vote. He also maintains a lead in the decisive, though absurdly antidemocratic, Electoral College— slightly less than Barack Obama’s in 2012, slightly more Joe Biden’s in 2020—based on a pattern of wins in battleground states. So, the failure to win a majority won’t cost Trump the presidency. But he’s lost his ability to suggest that he trounced the Democrat. In fact, she’s now trailing him by just 1.68 percent of the vote.

Let’s put this in perspective: Trump is winning a lower percent of the popular vote this year than Biden did in 2020 (51.3), Obama in 2012 (51.1), Obama in 2008 (52.9), George W. Bush in 2004 (50.7), George H.W. Bush in 1988 (53.2), Ronald Reagan in 1984 (58.8), Reagan in 1980 (50.7), or Jimmy Carter in 1976 (50.1). And, of course, Trump numbers are way below those of the presidents who won what could reasonably be described as “unprecedented and powerful” mandates, such as Richard Nixon’s 60.7 percent in 1972, Lyndon Johnson’s 61.1 percent in 1964, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 60.8 percent. As Trump’s percentage continues to slide, he’ll fall below the thresholds achieved by most presidents in the past century.

Harris, on the other hand, is looking like a much stronger finisher than she did on election night. In fact, the Democrat now has a higher percentage of the popular vote than Presidents Trump in 2016 (46.1), Bush in 2000 (47.9), Clinton in 1992 (43), or Nixon in 1968 (43.4). She has also performed significantly better than recent major-party nominees such as Trump in 2020 (46.8), Trump in 2016 (48.2), Mitt Romney in 2012 (47.2), John McCain in 2008 (45.7), George W. Bush in 2000 (47.9), Bob Dole in 1996 (40.7), George H.W. Bush in 1992 (37.4), Michael Dukakis in 1988 (45.6), Walter Mondale (40.6), Carter in 1980 (41), or Gerald Ford in 1976 (48).

Yes, some of those historic results were influenced by the presence of strong third-party contenders. But most were not. And the bottom line is that the gap between Trump and Harris is narrower than the difference between major-party contenders in the vast majority of American presidential races.

Why make note of all the presidents who ran better than Trump? Why discuss the narrowness of his advantage over Harris? Why consider, in addition, that the Republican majorities in the House and Senate will be among the narrowest in modern American history? Because it puts the 2024 election results in perspective—and, in doing so, gives members of both parties an understanding of how to respond when Trump claims that an unappealing nominee or policy should be accepted out of deference to his “powerful” mandate.

Trump’s victory was not of “epic” or “historic” proportions. There was no “landslide” for the once and future president, as Fox News suggested repeatedly in postelection headlines. The election did not produce the “decisive victory” for Trump that the Associated Press referred to in the immediate aftermath of the voting. Nor did it yield the “resounding defeat” for Harris that AP reported at the same time.

That won’t matter to Trump, who claimed a mandate even when he lost the 2016 popular vote by almost 3 million ballots. Four years later, Trump refused to accept his defeat by more than 7 million votes, and denied that majority support for Biden in the 2020 election amounted to anything akin to a mandate.

These numbers are better for the Democrats than what was recorded on election night, and that many pundits continue to suggest. That does not mean, however, that a clearer picture of the results should dissuade the Democrats from looking for ways to reform their party. Even if the margins are narrower than initially imagined, it is still the case that the party failed to beat Trump and a Republican Party that embraces the destructive politics not just of its presidential candidate but of the billionaire class. This is a time for serious reflection on mistakes that were made, and on challenges going forward, as part of a needed examination of how to build a multiracial, multiethnic working-class coalition that can win decisively, and not just at the presidential level but also in the struggle to regain control of the House and Senate in 2026.

What the numbers do provide Democrats and progressives, however, is an argument against despair and surrender, especially as the debate opens over Trump’s cabinet picks, judicial nominees, and legislative priorities.

“Research suggests that mandate claims, despite their tenuous connection to reality, can be effective in affecting legislative behavior,” notes Julia Azari, the associate professor of political science at Marquette University who authored Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate. “Political science studies show that legislators will change their behavior in response to the perception of a mandate election—but only for so long.”

The first months of Trump’s presidency will go a long way toward defining the character of his second term. Democrats and a handful of thoughtful Republicans have the potential to temper Trump’s worst excesses, and to assure that the constitutionally mandated system of checks and balances is maintained. When Trump pushes back against congressional oversight by claiming that his appointments and policies reflect the will of the electorate, members of the House and Senate can counter that specious claim by explaining that the majority of the American people did not vote for him.

Today's Belle

What's to stop him?

If he does what he says he intends to do (admittedly, always a big if), and it stands to trigger the kinda of global shit storm they say it will, who's there to stop him this time?

And if it gets to be as bad as they say it's bound to get, how fast can the Republicans move to finish totally fucking up the elections process so 'we the people' can't do anything about it either?

The explainers from Impartial Points:

Today's Jen

The politics of disgust.

"They just won - why are they still mad?"

Because we haven't been wiped out. And that may be the key.

MAGA hired this guy to annihilate us. So as long as we're still here, he's failing.

Unfortunately, since their side owns the power right now, they'll likely expect some pretty nasty things be visited upon us to get us to knuckle under.

Jen Rubin and Robert P Jones

What White Christians Have Wrought

Like other social scientists and scholars, I’ll spend the next weeks and months scouring pre-election data, the exit polls, and the first wave of post-election surveys trying to understand how a majority of American voters chose to return Donald Trump—a twice-impeached convicted felon and adjudicated sexual abuser who incited a violent insurrection when he lost the last election—to power.

Because elections are won and lost at the margins in a deeply divided nation such as ours, most of that analysis will rightly focus on which subgroups (like Latinos and young men) shifted most significantly away from the Democratic Party’s winning 2020 coalition. But that focus, while strategically important, will obscure the deeper peril facing our nation. Authoritarianism, when it blossoms, emerges from the deeper soil at the center.

With the Republican presidential candidate regularly spewing racist, misogynistic, and even Nazi ideology (such as claims that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country), the most remarkable thing about this election is not which groups shifted marginally in his direction, but which groups continued to provide him with supermajority support. Namely, we must talk about how thoroughly Christian nationalism has infected mainstream white Christianity.

Trump’s Electoral College victory in 2016 was made possible because, as noted by the Pew Research Center’s validated voter study, 77% of white evangelical Protestant Christians, along with 57% of white non-evangelical Protestants and 64% of white Catholics, lent him moral legitimacy and gave him their votes. Even after watching Trump implement cruel policies such as separating migrant children from their parents and putting them in cages, even after witnessing his impeachment for abusing the power of the presidency to try to get a foreign leader to interfere in the 2020 election, white Christians continued to support him. White evangelical Protestant support for Trump in the 2020 election ticked up to 84%, while non-evangelical Protestants and white Catholics generally held steady (57% each).

As Trump staged his political comeback in 2023 and 2024, white Christians had the benefit of witnessing a second Trump impeachment for inciting a violent insurrection in an attempt to remain in office after losing that election, four criminal indictments and a felony conviction, and the most overtly racist presidential campaign since George Wallace (who also held a fascist-style rally in Madison Square Garden in 1968).

Despite all of this, in stark contrast to 2016, there were virtually no major dissenting voices among the leaders of Trump’s most stalwart supporters. Just two weeks before the 2024 election, American evangelical Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, explicitly petitioned God for Trump’s election at a Trump rally in Concord, NC. “There’s a spiritual element that’s at work here. There are dark forces that are arrayed against this man. They’ve tried to put him in prison; they’ve tried to assassinate him twice; he’s attacked every day in the media,” he lamented. “We pray for our nation and, Father, if it be thy will, that President Trump will win this election. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.”

According to the 2024 National Election Pool exit polls, 8 in 10 (81%) white evangelicals once again declared their allegiance to Trump, as did 60% of white Catholics and similar numbers of white non-evangelical Protestants. (Note: While there are no publicly available exit poll numbers for white non-evangelical Protestants, pre-election polling from PRRI suggests 6 in 10 once again supported Trump).

If we put white Christians’ strong support for Trump into context, we can clearly see their singular contribution to his power. Overall, more than two thirds (68%) of white Christians favored Trump over Harris—a mirror image of the rest of the country, including Christians of color (33%), followers of non-Christian religions (30%), and the religiously unaffiliated (28%). While the proportion of white Christians in the country has been declining over the last three decades, they remain 41% of the population and an even higher percentage of voters. Even a modest decline in the overwhelming level of support for Trump among white Christians would have denied him the Republican nomination or the presidency.

Most disturbingly, this time, white Christians, who once proudly called themselves “values voters,” knew exactly who and what they were voting for. With Trump abandoning the Republican Party’s longstanding support of a national ban on abortion and no Supreme Court justices left to appoint, the fig leaf of abortion fell away, exposing the uglier elements that have always tied white Christians to Trump.

PRRI’s surveys have consistently found strong support among white Christians for the racial grievance and xenophobia that is the deeper DNA of the MAGA movement. Majorities of white Christians agree that “today discrimination against white Americans has become as big a problem as discrimination against Black Americans and other minorities.” And three quarters of white evangelical Protestants, along with 6 in 10 white non-evangelical Protestants and white Catholics, say they favor even the most extreme parts of Trump’s mass deportation scheme, described in the survey as “rounding up and deporting immigrants who are in the country illegally, even if it takes setting up encampments guarded by the U.S. military.”

But numerical support for Trump is only one facet of what white Christians have wrought in our nation. Historically, we know that all authoritarian leaders need a mechanism for projecting moral legitimacy, particularly as they accelerate efforts to consolidate power and undermine democratic norms and individual freedoms.

Nearly a century ago, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement coopted the German Evangelical Church. Today we are seeing similar uses of the Orthodox Christian churches in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Catholic Church in Viktor Orbán’s so-called “illiberal democracy” in Hungary—contemporary models both Trump and white evangelical leaders have praised.

Over the last decade, many white Christians have not just selfishly supported a dangerous, narcissistic man who promised to restore their waning influence; they have now willingly blessed the advent of a new American fascism that threatens our democratic future. They are principally responsible for Trump’s rise and return to power—and for everything that is coming for all of us in its wake.

A Rant

I don't know this guy - he's new to me. Good rant tho.

Off_JaWaggon

Understandable

You get tired of the fight. And sometimes, you have to stop and rest. Sometimes, you have to stop and walk away altogether.

I'm tired of the fight. But I don't know what else to do.

I will not lay me down - I have to stay and fight until there's nothing left of me.

Goodbye I love you all pic.twitter.com/39ADbx0JGf

— Bob south florida water man 🇺🇸 (@WaterDean) November 6, 2024

I make this promise - paraphrasing Gandhi:

They can harass me.

They can steal from me.

They can arrest me.

They can imprison me.

They can torture me.

They can beat me to death.

They can have my dead broken body.

But they will never have my obedience.

Ever.

Well That Sucks 2 - The Sequel

All things Russian = Trump. And Elon Musk. 

76 days from today, the American dictator takes power.

Because that's how we do things here:

The worst possible outcome flowing from the best possible system of government.

It's premature to say it's all over, but I'm holding out scant hope for anything better.

I can see a slow (at first), but then accelerating slide into autocracy and the implementation of Trump's vengeance-driven personal agenda, followed by "a time of adjustment" that will look like - and will be sold to us as - "a sensible solution to the terrible problems wrought by that poor unfortunate sick man, who BTW just suddenly went a little nutty - nobody could've seen it coming".

And then we'll be onto whatever the plan is for the removal of the dastardly Trump and the installation of kindly President Vance, who will continue to dismantle the federal government, and sell off the pieces to the friends of his billionaire benefactors, and eventually rewrite the US Constitution according to Project 2025.

And what're we betting that they'll enlist the willing help of Democrats in the House and Senate to impeach and remove? That should give them all the leverage they need against Trump, but more importantly, it gives them some nice political cover because they can say that whatever horrible thing they've turned the US into, they had help from the Dems.

Welcome to the plutocracy

Yeehaw And Away We Go

This is where we are because of one small stupid insecure little man, and a host of barely-invisible moneyed interests supporting him thru dis-information and straight up gaslighting - all of whom hate our tradition of democratic self governance, and are working to tear it all down in order to replace it with a good old-fashioned top-down corporate-style plutocracy.

I think we continue to come out of this MAGA nonsense today, by electing Kamala Harris.

But don't start thinking we're anywhere near the beginning of the end. We may not even be at the end of the beginning.

This democracy thing is pretty hard. Because it's a constant struggle for balance between honor and belligerence. Between humans' natural impulse for violence and a more enlightened sense of the greater good.

There's a kind of weird Twilight Zone quality to it - it's somewhere between the lofty summit of our knowledge and the dark pit of our fears.

Fake lord help us find that balance.

Drones and snipers on standby to protect Arizona vote-counters

Razor wire. Thick black iron fencing. Metal detectors. Armed security guards. Bomb sweeps.

The security at this centre where workers count ballots mirrors what you might see at an airport - or even a prison. And, if needed, plans are in place to further bolster security to include drones, officers on horseback and police snipers on rooftops.

Maricopa County became the centre of election conspiracy theories during the 2020 presidential contest, after Donald Trump spread unfounded claims of voter fraud when he lost the state to Joe Biden by fewer than 11,000 votes.

Falsehoods went viral, armed protesters flooded the building where ballots were being tallied and a flurry of lawsuits and audits aimed to challenge the results.

The election’s aftermath transformed how officials here handle the typically mundane procedure of counting ballots and ushered in a new era of high security.

“We do treat this like a major event, like the Super Bowl,” Maricopa County Sheriff Russ Skinner told the BBC.

Razor wire sits atop one of the fences guarding the county's election tabulation centre
The county, the fourth most populous in the US and home to about 60% of Arizona's voters, has been planning for the election for more than a year, according to Skinner.

The sheriff's department handles security at polling stations and the centre where ballots are counted. The deputies have now been trained in election laws, something most law enforcement wouldn’t be well-versed in.

“Our hope is that it doesn't arise to a level of need for that,” he said when asked about beefed-up security measures like drones and snipers. “But we will be prepared to ensure that we meet the level of need, to ensure the safety and security of that building” and its employees.

The election process here in many ways echoes that in counties across the country. Ballots are cast in voting locations across the county and then taken to a central area in Phoenix where they're tabulated. If they’re mailed in, the ballots are inspected and signatures are verified. They’re counted in a meticulous process that includes two workers - from differing political parties - sorting them and examining for any errors.

The process is livestreamed 24 hours a day.

While much of this process remains the same, a lot else has shifted. Since the 2020 election, a new law passed making it easier to call a recount in the state. Previously, if a race was decided by the slim margin of 0.1% of votes cast, a recount would take place. That’s now been raised to 0.5%.

The tabulation centre is now bristling with security cameras, armed security and a double layer of fencing.

Thick canvas blankets cover parts of a parking lot fencing to keep prying eyes out. Officials say the canvas was an added measure to protect employees from being harassed and threatened outside the building.

“I think it is sad that we’re having to do these things,” said Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates.

Gates, a Republican who says he was diagnosed with PTSD after the election threats he received in the 2020 election, doesn't plan to run for office again once this election is over because of the tensions.

“I do want people to understand that when they go to vote centres, these are not militarised zones,” he told the BBC. “You can feel safe to go there with your family, with your kids and participate in democracy.”

Yellow and black rope forms a line where visitors to the tabulation centre must queue to go through a metal detector. Three armed security guards stand near the detector. A black folding table sits nearby with a metal detector wand.

The county has invested millions since 2020. It’s not just security, either. They now have a 30-member communications team.

A big focus has been transparency - livestreaming hours of tests for tabulation machines, offering dozens of public tours of their buildings and enlisting staff to dispute online rumours and election conspiracies.

“We kind of flipped a switch,” assistant county manager Zach Schira told the BBC, explaining that after 2020 they decided, “OK, we’re going to communicate about every single part of this process, we’re going to debunk every single theory that is out there.”

It’s all led up to Tuesday's election.

“We may be over prepared,” Sheriff Skinner said, “but I'd rather prepare for the worst and hope for the best.”

Some Maricopa Republicans told the BBC they’ve tracked recent changes and felt there would be fewer problems this election cycle.

“They’ve made steps that I think will help,” said Garrett Ludwick, a 25-year-old attending a recent Scottsdale rally for Trump’s vice-presidential running mate JD Vance.

“More people are also aware of things now and I think there are going to be a lot of people watching everything like a hawk," he said, wearing a Trump cap that read, “Make liberals cry”.

One Republican voter, Edward, told the BBC the 2020 cycle caused him to get more involved. He’s now signed up for two shifts at polling locations in Maricopa County on Tuesday.

“Going to a rally or being upset isn’t going to fix things,” he said. “I wanted to be part of the solution.”

Not all are convinced.

“I still think it was rigged,” said Maleesa Meyers, 55, who like some Republican voters said her distrust in the process is too deep-rooted to believe the election could be fair. “It’s very hard to trust anyone today.”

Results in Arizona often hinge on Maricopa County, giving the county an outsized role in the outcome. Officials here estimate it could take as long as 13 days to count all ballots - meaning the expected tight race in this swing state might not be called on election night.

“There’s a chance that in 2024, the whole world will be watching for what the result is in Maricopa County," said Schira, the assistant county manager.

"Truly the world’s confidence in democracy could come down to this.”