Detailed graphs. Worth a read. So, nobody wants to be taken for granted or to be predictable. 

How shifts among key demographic voting groups sealed Trump’s 2024 election victory | The Independent

Exit polls have given us some insight into how different groups voted — and there have been some drastic shifts since 2020. At first glance, the expected gender divide between men and women was less drastic, but strong splits emerged among Black and Latino voters. Latino men leaned Republican overall for the first time, and 1 in 5 Black men voted for Trump.

Covid figures in both of these yet Trump’s ineptitude and willfulness killed millions. And weeks before the election, we learned he sent rare equipment to Putin that was needed here. 

None of the conventional explanations for Trump’s victory stand up to scrutiny | Ben Davis | The Guardian

I propose a different explanation than inflation qua inflation: the Covid welfare state and its collapse. The massive, almost overnight expansion of the social safety net and its rapid, almost overnight rollback are materially one of the biggest policy changes in American history. For a brief period, and for the first time in history, Americans had a robust safety net: strong protections for workers and tenants, extremely generous unemployment benefits, rent control and direct cash transfers from the American government.

The US has lost faith in the American dream. Is this the end of the country as we know it? | Donald Trump | The Guardian

It broke all over again during the Covid pandemic, when the economy ground to halt, unemployment rocketed and prices of everyday goods spun alarmingly out of control. Democrats have controlled the White House for 12 of the past 16 years, yet their idea of consensus has failed to reach much beyond the big-city limits. Trump’s ‘golden age of America’ could be an unrestrained imperial presidency Read more More appealing by far to those on the outside looking in are Trump’s promises of retribution, of tearing down the entire system and starting again. Those promises may also prove to be hollow over time, but to people only intermittently focused on politics as they struggle to put food on the table for their families, they feel at least fleetingly empowering. In a zero-sum world, blaming migrants for the country’s woes feels like its own kind of victory. It means some other group is at the bottom of the social heap for a change.

How Trump won over Latino and Hispanic voters in historic numbers | US elections 2024 | The Guardian

His victory was fueled largely by the support from Latino and Hispanic voters, particularly Latino men, that was repeated in county after county in swing states elsewhere as the Democratic party’s blue wall crumbled and the former president was elected to also be the next. Fear in undocumented communities over Trump’s mass deportation threats Read more In Pennsylvania, hordes of Puerto Ricans who saw their homeland demeaned as a “floating island of garbage” at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally barely a week before, flocked to give him their vote. In Wisconsin, exit polls showed a six-point rise from 2020, to 43%, in Trump’s Hispanic support, despite his condemnation of certain immigrants as “drug dealers”, “murderers” and “rapists”, and promise to conduct the largest deportation effort in US history soon after he takes office.

I’ve survived Nixon, Raygun, DUHbya, and Trump One. Each has been worse than the one before. So far, the real America has come back each time. Maybe not this time. 

The Real Inaugural Address | mjh’s blog

Greetings from Richmond, Virginia, the Capital of the Confederacy. My name is Jefferson Davis and I am here to accept my mandate — the people have spoken! It was never red versus blue states; it was always Blue versus Gray. [more …]

Authoritarians like Trump love fear, defeatism, surrender. Do not give them what they want | Rebecca Solnit | The Guardian

I believe this election turned out the way it did in no small part because a large number of Americans are now submerged in new factories of lies more insidious than anything Orwell imagined, and that while the worst of it is the foreign and far-right intentional distortion of reality, too much of the mainstream media has been deferential and will be more deferential to authoritarianism and will not stop letting the right set the agenda about what to be concerned about and what matters. In fact, I don’t have to believe that disinformation is impactful; I know it because it’s been documented. The data group Ipsos reports: “Americans who answer questions about inflation, crime, and immigration incorrectly are more likely to opt for Trump, while Americans who answer those questions correctly prefer Harris.” …

The outcome of this election is the result of disinformation and the rise of a huge rightwing media industry, both as enterprises like Fox and Newsmax but also the hordes of blogs, podcasts, Russian-produced propaganda on social media, Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, online subcultures of misogynists and white supremacists and the rest. Finding and sharing good sources of information is part of the job.

I spent hours trying to persuade US voters to choose Harris not Trump. I know why she lost | Oliver Hall | The Guardian

After all those conversations, I think the main reason that Harris and Walz lost this campaign is simple: Trump. Ultimately, he was simply too much of a pull again. Despite the gaffes, despite his views on women, despite his distaste for democracy and despite an insurrection, voters just didn’t care. For reasons that I’m sure will be studied for decades, when he speaks, people listen. When he speaks, people believe him. After all those calls, I can be shocked at this result, but hardly surprised.