Lessons From Last Night
To describe last night’s election results as anything less than a mandate does not do justice to the numbers that we saw across the country. Black and Hispanic men broke in disproportionate numbers for Trump from The Bronx to Miami. The suburban women who ditched Trump in 2020 fled back to him while Kamla Harris performed worse in Minnesota with the sitting governor as her Vice President than Biden did in 2020.
If you got The Show Notes this morning, you saw the CNN clip where my friend Jake Tapper was stunned to learn on CNN that Harris did not outperform Biden in a single county by 3% or more. Simply put, there were no bright spots for the Democrats.
But now comes the hard part for Republicans: governing. Democrats lost racial and ethnic minorities because they treated them as demographic blocks who were more interested in the power dynamics of historical grievances than how to afford groceries and keep boys out of their daughters’ bathrooms. Republicans, you need to deliver for these people if you want to convert them to permanent members of your party. Watch:
It cannot be stressed enough that republicans MUST deliver what has been promised. In my opinion, they are remarkably fortunate that they have been given such an amazing opportunity again, so they had best not blow it up with fractious bickering and stonewalling if they don't happen to agree 100% with a popular idea. We want to see a big cut of bureaucracy in the federal government for one thing. Hope they have gotten the message.
To the GOP: the “mandate” is to govern. It’s not a mandate to rule.