The End of the Tracks for the Trump Train?

Happy Thursday! It’s been less than 48 hours since Election Day, and our politics are already healing. Virginia’s Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin confirmed yesterday he sent Speaker Nancy Pelosi a handwritten apology last week after he seemingly made light of the recent attack against her husband at a rally last month.

A spokesman for Pelosi said she had accepted Youngkin’s apology.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Election results—and concessions—continued to roll in on Wednesday, though key races remain undecided. Some updates are included below:

Senate

• Georgia: The race will head to a runoff on December 6 after neither Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock nor GOP challenger Herschel Walker cleared the state’s required 50 percent threshold. The races in Nevada and Arizona are still too close to call, meaning the runoff in Georgia could potentially determine which party controls the Senate.
• Pennsylvania: Republican Mehmet Oz formally conceded Wednesday morning to Democrat John Fetterman, wishing him and his family all the best, “both personally and as our next United States Senator.”
• Wisconsin: Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes conceded to Republican incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson.
• Alaska: The seat will remain in Republican hands, with GOP incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski advancing to the final round of ranked-choice tabulation alongside her Republican challenger Kelly Tshibaka. The support of approximately 13 percent of voters in the state will transfer to their second-ranked candidate after Democrat Pat Chesbro and Republican Buzz Kelley were eliminated.

House

• New York: Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney—chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—conceded to GOP challenger Mike Lawler in the state’s 17th Congressional District, marking the first time a DCCC head has been defeated in more than 40 years. Republicans have significantly outperformed expectations in New York, with some election analysts attributing the party’s success to the state’s new court-drawn congressional maps.
• Washington: Republican Rep. Dan Newhouse won reelection in the state’s 4th Congressional District. Newhouse is one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump in 2021 and is, thus far, the only one confirmed to still be in Congress come January. Another of the 10, Rep. David Valadao of California’s 22nd Congressional District, was leading his race Thursday morning with most of the vote still uncounted.
• Colorado: As of Thursday morning, incumbent GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert trails Adam Frisch by fewer than 100 votes in Colorado’s 3rd District.
• Arizona: Republican Eli Crane flipped the state’s 2nd Congressional District, defeating incumbent Democrat Tom O’Halleran 54 to 46 percent.
• Iowa: In the competitive 3rd Congressional District, Democratic incumbent Cindy Axne fell to Republican challenger Zach Nunn. 
• Michigan: Republican John James narrowly edged out Democrat Carl Marlinga in the 10th District.

Governors

• Michigan: After initially declining to accept election desk calls, GOP gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon conceded to Democratic incumbent Gretchen Whitmer on Wednesday morning. 
• New York: After a surprisingly close race, Republican Lee Zeldin conceded to Democrat Kathy Hochul.
• South Dakota: Republican Kristi Noem won reelection by a nearly 30-point margin over Democratic challenger Jamie Smith.
• Arizona: The race between Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and Republican Kari Lake remains too close to call. 

Ballot Initiatives

• South Dakota: Voters approved—with about 56 percent support—a measure expanding the state’s Medicaid program under the Affordable Care Act.
• Massachusetts: Voters approved a ballot initiative amending the state constitution to impose a 4 percent surtax on individuals’ annual income higher than $1 million—to be adjusted yearly with cost-of-living increases. The constitution currently requires uniform taxation for all income levels. 

• Control of the House is still up in the air, but House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy formally announced his bid to be speaker on Wednesday. GOP Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana said he will run for majority leader, more or less clearing a path for McCarthy to ascend to the speakership assuming Republicans retake the House. Depending on the size of the GOP’s majority, however, McCarthy could have to make significant concessions to hardliners in his conference in order to secure the position. 
• Although a handful of election-related entities—including Mississippi’s secretary of state and the Champaign County Clerk in Illinois—experienced website connectivity issues on Tuesday seemingly related to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) cyberattacks, election officials said such disruptions had no impact on voters’ ability to cast a ballot or have it counted. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Jen Easterly said Wednesday that the agency had seen “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was [in] any way compromised in any race in the country.”
• Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu ordered troops to withdraw from a large part of Ukraine’s southern region of Kherson on Wednesday, pulling the country’s forces out of the regional capital and back to the eastern bank of the Dnipro River. Ukrainian officials warned the development could be a feint, noting that Russia maintained a sizable presence in Kherson, but Gen. Sergei Surovikin—Russia’s commander in Ukraine—claimed Russian forces could no longer be properly supplied in the area and keeping them there would be “futile.”
• Brittney Griner’s lawyers said Russian officials began transferring the WNBA star and Olympic medalist—who was sentenced to nine years in prison on drug charges—to a penal colony on Friday. Conditions in these detention facilities vary, but the State Department reported in 2021 that they are “often harsh and life-threatening.” President Joe Biden said Wednesday that he hopes the Kremlin will be more open to negotiating her release “now that the election is over.”
• South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff reported Wednesday that North Korea had launched a short-range ballistic missile targeted at waters off its east coast. Japan’s Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada said the missile flew about 155 miles before landing in the East Sea. North Korea has now conducted at least one missile test on 32 different days this year, up from eight tests in 2021 and four in 2020.
• Israel reportedly conducted airstrikes in eastern Syria on Tuesday against a convoy suspected of smuggling Iranian weapons after crossing the border from Iraq. The strike destroyed several vehicles—which Iraqi officials claimed contained legal fuel shipments destined for Lebanon—and killed at least 10 people, including Iranians. Iran has a long history of smuggling military equipment to Lebanese Hezbollah and other regional proxies through Syria, and Israel—which declined to comment on Wednesday—has a long history of targeting such shipments.
• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees on Wednesday that the company will lay off more than 11,000 people—about 13 percent of its workforce—after a second consecutive quarter of declining revenue amid sinking advertising sales and competition from TikTok. Meta’s stock price has tumbled more than 70 percent so far this year.

Knives Out for Trump

Be grateful you weren’t a Mar-a-Lago ketchup bottle on Wednesday.

We cannot confirm that the former president chucked any condiments at the wall yesterday, but we can speculate—with a reasonable degree of confidence—that he was angry enough to have at least considered it. Less than a week away from the scheduled announcement of what is expected to be a third presidential campaign, Donald Trump stewed on Wednesday as Republican officials and pundits—allies and opponents alike—placed the blame for the party’s electoral underperformance one day earlier squarely on his shoulders. His political obituary, it seemed, was being written in real time. 

Publicly, he maintained that all was unfolding according to plan. “There is a fake news narrative that I was furious—it is just the opposite,” he claimed in a Fox News interview. And when asked about potentially delaying his big announcement—which he teased in an email to supporters as perhaps “the most important speech given in the history of the United States of America”—Trump scoffed. “We had tremendous success,” he said. “Why would anything change?”

Trump referenced an “amazing” statistic multiple times on Wednesday, touting that 216 of his endorsed candidates won their races this week, compared to just 19 who didn’t. “While in certain ways yesterday’s election was somewhat disappointing, from my personal standpoint it was a very big victory,” he boasted. But the vast majority of those 216 candidates were incumbents or generic Republicans who would’ve won with or without his support; in some cases, Trump endorsed them only after they won their primary. From Dr. Oz and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, to Tim Michels in Wisconsin and Tudor Dixon in Michigan, the former president played a much more direct role in selecting the 19 losers.

Republicans noticed. “The more MAGA a candidate was, the more they tended to underperform,” outgoing GOP Sen. Pat Toomey—whom Oz was running to replace—told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I think Donald Trump’s influence gradually but steadily declines, and I think it accelerates after the debacle that he’s responsible for to some degree.”

Toomey has long been a Trump skeptic—he was one of seven GOP senators to vote to convict the former president in his second impeachment trial—but he was far from the only Republican expressing those sentiments on Wednesday.

Tim Anderson—a MAGA Republican state delegate in Virginia—declared publicly what “many of [his] colleagues” think privately: “It’s time to move on.” Longtime Trump adviser David Urban told the New York Times Republicans were following the former president off the side of a cliff, and former GOP Rep. Peter King of New York—a Trump ally when he was in Congress—said he “strongly believes” Trump should “no longer be the face of the Republican Party.” New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu slammed Trump’s upcoming presidential announcement as a “terrible idea,” and even former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany suggested her former boss put his plans on hold through at least the Georgia runoff next month.

Trump’s unlikely to heed her advice. With Ron DeSantis’ political star rising seemingly by the day—and several criminal investigations closing in around Trump—the former president will probably go ahead with the launch next week to a) wrest the spotlight back on himself and b) more credibly paint any upcoming indictments as “politically motivated.”

Those betting against Donald Trump’s political prospects have lost a lot of money over the years, and he’s been on the ropes before. Few imagined on January 7, 2021, for example, that he’d ever be even a remote possibility for 2024—let alone the frontrunner. His hold on the GOP base has proven remarkably enduring.

But still, something feels different this time around. The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and even some segments of Fox News have abandoned him for DeSantis in recent days, as have right-wing provocateurs like Candace Owens and Mike Cernovich. If even they are jumping off the Trump Train, it may finally be pulling into the station.

Where Does the Pro-Life Movement Go From Here?

Aside from Trump’s continued influence on the party and lackluster candidate quality, the overturning of Roe v. Wade may have been one of the largest contributors to Democrats’ overperformance this week. In a piece on the site today, Andrew looks at what that means for the future of the pro-life movement.

In October, abortion-related ads amounted to nearly half of all Democratic spending nationwide.

It worked. As Democrats turned out across the country in greater-than-expected numbers, exit polls suggested the number one issue on their mind was abortion. One particularly striking exit poll result from Pennsylvania—where Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman defeated Republican Mehmet Oz in a race for Senate despite having not fully recovered from a life-threatening stroke—found abortion to be the biggest issue among all voters, edging out inflation 36 percent to 29 percent.

Ballot initiatives—in red and blue states alike—also highlighted the electorate’s broad distrust for Republican efforts to curtail abortion.

Voters in Republican Kentucky, mimicking voters in Republican Kansas this summer, roundly defeated a constitutional amendment put forward by pro-life groups that would have made it easier to implement abortion bans already passed by the GOP legislature. Meanwhile, initiatives protecting abortion access outperformed Democrats on the ballot in Michigan, California, and Vermont, and may even have given Democratic candidates a tailwind: Michigan Democrats captured full control of state government for the first time in four decades.

Some pro-lifers believe Republicans’ willingness to let Democrats drive the narrative on the issue this cycle was a mistake.

“They plan to say absolutely nothing,” Frank Cannon—founder of the social-conservative think tank American Principles Project and chief political strategist for the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America—argued in August. “Instead, when cornered, federal Republicans will vaguely gesture towards the state legislatures and then reflexively pivot to a diatribe about gas prices and inflation.”

Parallel tensions played out in the Senate in September. At the urging of groups like Cannon’s, a coalition of Republican lawmakers led by Sen. Lindsey Graham introduced legislation to ban abortion nationwide after 15 weeks of pregnancy—a cutoff point that pro-lifers argue is nationally popular. Such a proposal, the thinking went, could help defang Democratic efforts to paint Republicans as dogmatic opponents of all abortions in all cases. But Minority Leader Mitch McConnell poured cold water on the proposal, telling reporters that “most of the members of my conference prefer that this be dealt with at the state level.”

The lesson from Tuesday, Cannon thinks, is that Republicans need to go on offense.

“The people who had no idea what their policy position was were the ones who were clobbered,” he told The Dispatch, citing Dr. Oz’s much-derided remark that he would leave the question of abortion to “women, doctors, [and] local political leaders” as an example of counterproductive dodging.

“The only strength the pro-life movement has is that it is an enormous force in the Republican Party and in the country that is a populist force, not an elite force,” Cannon said. “And as a populist force it has to exert itself in the primary process. I will guarantee to you that there will be no Republican nominee, no matter who you think it might be, who doesn’t support a federal role to protect unborn babies in all the states in the country.”

Worth Your Time

• Republicans looking for a silver lining in Tuesday’s election results can find it in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis secured a runaway victory that inched him closer to pole position in the shadow GOP 2024 primary. As DeSantis’ success indicates, “normal” doesn’t have to mean “squishy,” Ross Douthat writes in his latest column. “Instead, his sweeping success in Florida proves that you can be an avatar of cultural conservatism, a warrior against the liberal media and Dr. Anthony Fauci, a politician ready to pick a fight with Disney if that’s what the circumstances require. You just also have to be competent, calculating, aware of public opinion as you pick your fights and capable of bipartisanship and steady leadership in a crisis. The basic Trump combination—cultural pugilism and relative economic moderation—can work wonders politically; it just has to be reproduced in a politician who conspicuously knows what he’s doing‌ ‌and who conspicuously isn’t Donald Trump.”
• What they lack in numbers they more than make up for in influence. In a piece for the New York Times, Katie Glueck and Ruth Igielnik talk to ticket-splitters—voters who support candidates from multiple parties—about their thought processes. “In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, defeated the Democratic candidate, Stacey Abrams, by about 8 percentage points, while the Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker, embroiled in significant controversies in his personal life, narrowly trailed Senator Raphael Warnock, the Democrats’ nominee, on Wednesday afternoon ahead of a runoff election,” they note. “Jeffrey Hackling, 72, said he voted for Mr. Kemp and Mr. Warnock. His decision to vote for Mr. Warnock was ‘tough,’ he said, and he felt pressure from other Republicans in his life, including his wife, to vote for Mr. Walker—but he couldn’t get there, alarmed by Mr. Walker’s record. ‘I did not like Herschel Walker, all the lies that he did and said,’ said Mr. Hackling, a Republican from Milton, Ga. ‘A lot of people wanted to talk me into voting for a Republican but I did not like him, I did not like the person.’”
• Death to vibe-based predictions, long live the blue-chip polls? As Derek Thompson points out, high-quality polls actually did a decent job of forecasting Tuesday’s results if you ignored the partisan spin being layered on top of them. “One lesson of the 2022 midterms is that the polling industry is not existentially screwed,” he writes in The Atlantic. “High-quality polling still exists, even though it is hard to do in an age of cellphones, caller ID, and low response rates. It means that the direction of polling errors is still random enough that people shouldn’t automatically subtract several points from every Democratic vote-share figure they read. Another lesson is that Republicans seem to have given more weight to vibes than polls throughout the past year. Here are several things that poll terribly: Donald Trump, the foiled insurrection on January 6, explicit plans to reject democratic elections, overturning Roe, and installing abortion bans. To believe that one’s party can win a landslide election while embracing all five, one must, at some level, believe that unquantified bad vibes are worth more than quantifiable polling.”

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Toeing the Company Line

• If you’re pessimistic by nature, being wrong isn’t the worst thing in the world. “I thought the conventional wisdom was correct that a red wave was en route,” Nick writes in yesterday’s Boiling Frogs (🔒). “I thought candidate quality wouldn’t matter in Senate races. (It didn’t in Ohio, alas.) I thought Republican-friendly pollsters like Trafalgar would put the establishment polling industry out of business. And I thought the so-called ‘fundamentals’ would overwhelm any backlash to the Dobbs ruling and sweep conspiratorial MAGA cranks to power across the country. You want a bite of this crow? It’s really tasty.”
• There’s no getting around it, Jonah writes in Wednesday’s G-File (🔒): Donald Trump was the prime mover behind Republicans’ midterms faceplant. “Doug Ducey would have crushed Kelly in Arizona, Chris Sununu would have steamrolled Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire, and Pat Toomey would have been reelected in Pennsylvania in a cakewalk,” he writes. “But none of those guys ran, at least in part because the price to their dignity or the risk to their reputations in a Trumpified party was too high.”
• Brookings Institution fellow Shadi Hamid joined The Remnant on Wednesday for a conversation with Jonah about his new book on the state of democracy. What is “democratic minimalism,” and should we embrace it? Why is democracy particularly well suited to a society as large and diverse as the United States? And what should primary elections be replaced with?
• And on today’s episode of The Remnant, American Enterprise Institute fellow Ken Pollack joins the podcast to answer questions about the demonstrations in Iran. What do the protesters want? Could the regime actually collapse? Is there anything the Biden administration could do to accelerate that?
• David and Sarah can’t resist indulging in some post-election punditry on today’s episode of Advisory Opinions, but they eventually pivot and discuss the latest on New York’s gun laws, an effort to make SCOTUS recognize a right to make a living, David’s all-time favorite songs, and much more.
• Declan is joined on today’s episode of The Dispatch Podcast by David Luckey, a senior researcher at the RAND Corporation and author of a recent government report on combating the fentanyl epidemic. Why has the illicit use of synthetic opioids skyrocketed over the past 10 years? Are dealers trying to kill their customers? And can stricter border enforcement actually make a dent in the flow of these drugs?
• On the site today, Harvest reports on election deniers’ weak showing in secretary of state elections across the country. 

Let Us Know

Do you still consider Trump the favorite in the 2024 GOP presidential primary? What would you need to see to change your mind?