Election

Ballot Access -  The voters of the District of Columbia approved an initiative to use ranked choice voting in future primaries and general elections. 

HuffPost -  Ranked choice voting, the controversial balloting method in which voters select candidates in the order of their preference, saw voters in Colorado unexpectedly reject it Tuesday.  Similar measures in Idaho, Oregon and Nevada were also losing as of early Wednesday morning, according to partial results from state election departments. 

Wall Street Journal: “One reason Republicans performed so well is because of the major inroads Trump made with younger male voters. Voter survey numbers from Tuesday showed Trump won 18- to 29-year-old men by 11 percentage points, securing 54% of that group compared with 43% for Kamala Harris. In 2020, VoteCast data showed that President Biden won those voters by 15 percentage points, 56% to 41%.”

AP News -  Voters for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump who cast their ballots for Tuesday’s presidential election had vastly different motivations — reflecting a broader national divide on the problems the United States faces. AP VoteCast, an extensive survey of more than 115,000 voters nationwide, found that the fate of democracy appeared to be a primary driver for Vice President Harris’ supporters. It was a sign that the Democratic nominee’s messaging in her campaign’s closing days accusing Trump of being a fascist may have broken through. By contrast, Trump’s supporters were largely focused on immigration and inflation — two issues that the former Republican president has been hammering since the start of his campaign. Trump has pledged that tariffs would bring back factory jobs and that greater domestic oil production would flow through the economy and lower prices. 

NY Times - Senator Ted Cruz of Texas fended off Representative Colin Allred, dashing hopes among some Democrats that years of demographic changes and urbanization could start to flip the state. Read more 

Susan B, Glasser, New Yorker -   Electing Donald J. Trump once could be dismissed as a fluke, an aberration, a terrible mistake—a consequential one, to be sure, yet still fundamentally an error. But America has now twice elected him as its President. It is a disastrous revelation about what the United States really is, as opposed to the country that so many hoped that it could be. His victory was a worst-case scenario—that a convicted felon, a chronic liar who mismanaged a deadly once-in-a-century pandemic, who tried to overturn the last election and unleashed a violent mob on the nation’s Capitol, who calls America “a garbage can for the world,” and who threatens retribution against his political enemies could win—and yet, in the early morning hours of Wednesday, it happened.

CNN - World leaders are reacting to Donald Trump's election victory today by offering congratulations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Trump's win "history's greatest comeback" and said Trump's return to the White House "offers a new beginning for America and a powerful recommitment to the great alliance between Israel and America." Additionally, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he appreciates "Trump's commitment to the 'peace through strength' approach in global affairs" and expressed interest in developing "mutually beneficial political and economic cooperation." During his campaign, Trump suggested he would end support for Kyiv's war effort and claimed he could settle the conflict "in one day."

NBC- After Trump carried white women by 11 points in 2020, Harris narrowed the gap to 5 points, according to the NBC News Exit Poll. Biden beat Trump by 9 points among white women with college degrees four years ago. Harris expanded that advantage to 20 points, arguably her most significant demographic triumph among a historically Republican-leaning cohort.The education divide also grew overall: Harris gained a few points among college graduates, while Trump picked up a few points among voters without college degrees.And the generational divide flattened somewhat, as Trump gained among men under 30, winning 47% of them, compared to 49% for Harris...

Without a doubt, the issue of abortion and the backlash to overturning Roe v. Wade helped Harris. The NBC News Exit Poll found that abortion ranked as the third-most-important issue for voters, and Harris won those who cited it by 52 points.

But abortion wasn't the defining issue of the cycle, with the economy and democracy trumping it. Trump handily won those who cited the economy as their top issue, while Harris comfortably won those who said they prioritize the state of democracy. 

MSNBC -  We can expect Trump will pardon the Jan. 6 rioters and summarily fire the prosecutors who tried to hold him accountable. Having been immunized by the Supreme Court, he may instruct the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents. He will likely abandon Ukraine and begin the process of weakening our alliances. A newly empowered Trump can, if he wishes, go about trying to gut or kill Obamacare outright, while also trying to impose massive new tariffs on the economy.

We also know that the guardrails will not be sufficient, because they were not before. If they had been, none of this would have happened. Neither the impeachment process nor the justice system blocked his return to power. And now the ultimate guardrail has failed.

Whatever the final outcome, the American people (or enough of them) have returned this unfit man to power. In the end, nothing mattered. Not the sexual abuse, the fraud, the lies or the felonies. Not the bigotry of his campaign; not insults, not threats. In the most graphic terms imaginable, the American people were warned of the danger. His previously loyal vice president refused to endorse him; his top general called him a “total fascist”; some of his closest aides and Cabinet members described in detail his erratic character and his indifference to the Constitution. 

MSNBC - We must worry about a possible significant uptick in political violence. By making not-so-veiled public threats, like his recent comments about former Rep. Liz Cheney, Trump risks putting a target on the back of anyone who opposes him. People can make excuses and say he didn’t mean it, but the reality is that he could have called her a “war hawk” without saying there should be “nine barrels shooting at her.”The free press could increasingly face intimidation: comply or else.

And should he pardon the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, as he has promised to do, he would effectively grant immunity to extremists who could commit acts of violence on his behalf...

The media landscape could change dramatically. We’ve already seen anticipatory obedience by The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and other outlets that declined to make presidential endorsements this year, and Trump has filed a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against CBS, which he has threatened to shut down. 

NBC News - Latino voters swung toward Trump by a staggering 25 percentage points compared with four years ago.Trump won the support of 45% of Latino voters nationally compared with 53% for Harris, the NBC News Exit Poll found. That's far better than the 33-point loss Trump suffered among Latinos in 2020, when he won 32% to Joe Biden’s 65%. And it may end up being the strongest GOP performance among Latinos in a presidential race since George W. Bush carried 44% in 2004. Nationally, Latinos accounted for 12% of the electorate, and Trump’s gains are boosting his margins across a host of battleground states, from Pennsylvania to Arizona, which complicated Harris’ path. 

NPR - Former President Donald Trump has been elected president again, according to a race call by the Associated Press. Trump won the key states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, with a combined 29 electoral votes to clinch more than the 270 necessary to win the presidency. As of 6:15 a.m. ET Wednesday, Trump had 277 electoral votes total. Several states, including Michigan, Arizona and Nevada are still outstanding...

Trump said he won the popular vote, but those results have not been tabulated.

He will return to the White House after falsely claiming the 2020 election was rigged and stoking the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. He is also the first convicted felon to win the White House.

Republicans have retaken the Senate. They could very well have in the neighborhood of 55 to 56 Senate seats when all the counting is done.

The House will not be determined for some time. It could take a week or so, as there are many close races. Sixty-two seats remain uncalled at this hour. Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take control of the House. It appears they may come very close. But whoever wins control will do so by a very small margin.

Now that Republicans have reclaimed a Senate majority, Trump will have the opportunity to appoint more judges and increase his influence over the courts...

 Two Black women will serve together in the Senate for the first time in U.S. history. Maryland’s Angela Alsobrooks and Delaware’s Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester doubled the number of Black ever women elected to the U.S. Senate from two to four. Both are Democrats.

Delaware State Sen. Sarah McBride also made history. She is the first openly transgender person elected to serve in Congress. About McBride

 

Arizona voters have approved a GOP-backed immigration measure allowing state and local law enforcement to arrest undocumented migrants.