Election analyses this soon after the election are nearly all based on exit polls. Exit polls are subject to “sampling bias,” meaning that members of various social or economic groups aren’t necessarily represented in the polls in the same proportion as they are in the actual population. For instance, college graduates and younger voters tend to be over-represented. Also, the overall winner of the exit poll must match the winner of the actual election, and if it doesn’t the pollster will make statistical adjustments to the results, which can further exacerbate the over-representation.

In 2020, for instance, exit polls underestimated the share of voters who were white without a college degree, and overestimated the share of white women who voted for Trump. As Wired’s Gilad Edelman wrote, though “None of this is to say that any of the emerging narratives about how various groups voted this year are wrong. We just don’t know yet.” More accurate analyses must wait until states finish updating their voter files – some time next year – and public information about who did and did not vote will be available. At that point studies validated against voter files will be released, such as Harvard’s Cooperative Election Study and the Pew Research Center’s validated voter survey.

As of this writing, the Cook Political Report’s National Popular Vote Tracker, which uses official sources from the states, shows Trump with 49.83% of the vote, vs. Harris’s 48.28%. A Trump victory, yes, but not the grand mandate his minions have trumpeted, and in fact – as we noted on our home page – in the history of presidential elections only five popular vote winners have prevailed by less.

So with the caveats above in mind, let’s take a look at the exit polls.

It'd be a shame if something happened to it...

The visible deterioration of Donald Trump’s cognitive ability on the campaign trail, including babbling, disinhibition, and canceling media appearances  has intensified focus on vice presidential candidate and Washington newcomer J.D. Vance. Vance has less political experience than any vice presidential candidate in the last nearly 60 years, has held one elected office for just twenty-some months as of this writing, and none of the 34 bills he personally sponsored became law. Media-and-politics website mediaite.com labeled Vance the Marjorie Taylor Greene of the Senate, “stomping and shouting but getting nothing done.” In his article “Why Trump Chose J.D. Vance,” Time magazine’s Eric Cortelessa suggests that Vance was chosen as “a leading light of the right-wing populist movement spawned by Trump’s rise….” This is at best a nuanced characterization as Vance has an extensive record of critical comments and remarks about Trump, dating back to at least 2016.

In June Vance participated in a Trump fundraiser at the home of David Sacks, who with fellow investors Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk, among others, founded PayPal and went on to form other tech firms. Vance met Thiel in 2011 when Thiel spoke at Yale Law School where Vance was a student. Vance subsequently described Thiel’s talk somewhat obtusely as “the most significant moment of my time.” In 2015 Vance became a partner at venture capital firm Mithril Capital, which Thiel had co-founded. Mithril is the fictional precious metal in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, described as harder than steel and more beautiful than silver. As documented by Disconnect.blog’s Paris Marx, Thiel has named at least nine companies after people, places, and things from Tolkien’s world.

Tolkien’s Middle Earth apparently holds an almost mystical appeal to many Silicon Valley denizens....

Trump and Beyond

The 2016 Republican primary featured 17 candidates. Pop data analysis website fivethirtyeight.com has an analysis of each failed candidate’s arc titled “How the Republican Field Dwindled From 17 To Donald Trump.” The reasons are varied, from Ted Cruz being too extreme and disliked, to Marco Rubio lacking a base, to Republicans liking Ben Carson, but not enough to vote for him.

"W" to the Tea Party

“Poppy” Bush's son, George W. Bush (aka “W”), worked with campaign manager Lee Atwater during Bush senior’s presidential campaign. In W’s 1994 campaign for Governor of Texas his master of disinformation was political operative and self-described “nerd,” Karl Rove. Rove remained a key advisor to Bush until 2007.

Ford to Gingrich

Gerald Ford had been appointed Vice President under the terms of the 25th Amendment in December 1973 following Spiro Agnew’s resignation. When Ford assumed the presidency in August 1974 following Nixon’s resignation, and chose Nelson Rockefeller as his Vice President some saw it as a resurgence of the moderate wing of the Republican party.

Hoover to Nixon

In 1928 the Democratic candidate for president was Alfred E. Smith, a Roman Catholic and opponent of prohibition. Republican Herbert Hoover defeated him as Republicans carried the former Confederate states for the first time since Reconstruction. Republicans resisted government intervention in the economy in response to the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression.

Origins

In 1820 the Missouri Compromise was enacted by the US Congress as an effort to preserve the balance of political power between slaveholder and free states. Missouri was admitted as a slave state; Maine was admitted as a free state. Perhaps more significantly, slavery was also prohibited in the former Louisiana territory north of latitude 36° 30’, which was part of the boundary between Missouri and Arkansas.

Introduction

“The Republican Party is an authoritarian outlier,” wrote Vox’s Zach Beauchamp in September 2020. Beauchamp was writing in the context of the rush to confirm Federalist Society darling Amy Coney Barrett as a Supreme Court justice following the death of liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, despite several Republicans having refused to consider a nominee to the court “in an election year” during the Obama administration. Citing experts on comparative politics including Harvard’s Steven Zilitsky, who with Daniel Ziblatt authored New York Times bestselling How Democracies Die, Beauchamp writes that the GOP should no longer be considered in the same category with traditional conservative political parties such as Canada’s Conservative Party (CPC) or Germany’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU), but rather as an extremist party like Orban’s Fidesz in Hungary, or Erdogan’s AKP in Turkey, which “actively worked to dismantle democracy in their own countries.”

In this series of articles we’ll trace the evolution of today’s white nationalist authoritarian Republican party from its origins in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, through the party’s nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and his “Southern Strategy” appealing to racial fears of southern white voters, to Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” to the Tea Party, and Donald Trump. In conclusion we’ll look at predictions by Zilitsky and Ziblatt and others, and their prognoses for the Republican Party and American democracy.

• Origins
• Hoover to Nixon
• Ford to Gingrich
• "W" to the Tea Party
• Trump and Beyond

To read the ABC News headline you'd think the nation was awash in vast protests decrying the stay-at-home orders implemented in many states. From a survey of protests over the weekend, however, Forbes found relatively few participants. For example, in Austin TX, a city of approximately one million people, only a few dozen showed up to protest. In Franklin, KY, Raleigh, NC, and Columbus, OH, about 100 protesters each appeared. And in New York City only about 30 protesters could be found. Protests such as that in Lansing, MI, which attracted several thousand cars and around 100 people on the state Capitol lawn, were apparently the exception....