On the menu today: Let us marvel at all the ways 2024 was the “it turns out” election — all the manners in which the Democratic Party’s preferred narratives turned out to be false, misleading wish-casting.
Low-Energy Joe
It turns out that Joe Biden does not have so much energy that White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre can’t keep up with him, as she contended during an appearance on CNN in June 2022. In that same interview, Jean-Pierre insisted that the notion that Biden’s age would be an issue in his reelection campaign was “fallacious.” I suppose we could argue that’s technically correct because it wasn’t “an” issue, it was “the” issue.
When Jean-Pierre said in November 2023 that she would put President Biden’s stamina up against anyone’s, she wasn’t telling the truth, either.
Some of us have been writing about Biden’s lost marbles, his light schedule, and the glaring signs that something is wrong with him, for years. For this we were denounced as offering the “gross, lowest-common-denominator politics that drive people away from public life.”
Yesterday, Israeli journalist Neria Kraus asked President Biden if he thought that he could get a hostage deal done by the end of his term. He offered a bizarre, hostile, non sequitur answer, commenting on the number of cameramen in the room: “Do you think that you can get hit in the head by the camera behind you?”
Grandpa gets confused, kids, and when he’s frustrated, he lashes out.
Mighty Casey Has Struck Out
It turns out that stubbornly and irrationally denying the legitimate results of an election is not the worst thing an elected official can do; otherwise, Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat representing the state of Denial, would be getting more widespread criticism.
Today, the editors of National Review declare it’s time for Casey to concede to reality and the will of the voters of Pennsylvania. As of this writing and a count completed by 11 p.m. last night, Pennsylvania senator-elect Dave McCormick leads Casey by 29,290 votes. There are about 80,000 provisional ballots still to be reviewed. Provisional ballots are conditional votes cast by people whose registrations could not be immediately confirmed by poll workers. So some number of those provisional ballots will not be counted because the voters were not registered.
Problem number one for Casey is that even if all those provisional ballots are legit, he would need to win almost 70 percent of them to emerge on top.
Twenty Pennsylvania counties have yet to report their provisional ballots. Beaver, Berks, Cambria, Cameron, Carbon, Crawford, Cumberland, Fayette, Fulton, Lawrence, Lebanon, Luzerne, McKean, Schuylkill, Somerset, and York counties were all won by McCormick, often by wide margins. Northampton was narrowly won by the Republican, 49.2 percent to 48.4 percent.
Delaware and Montgomery counties were won by Casey; Erie County was narrowly for Casey, 49.4 percent to 48.1 percent.
In other words, Casey’s “path to victory” is to win more than two-thirds of the remaining uncounted ballots in a bunch of deep-red counties. The math doesn’t add up. There just aren’t enough potential Democratic votes in those counties.
Donald Trump’s stubborn denial of his defeat — his refusal to accept the legitimate election results of 2020 — was bad. January 6 was terrible.
But we saw a similar rejection of election results from Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams two years earlier, and she became a Democratic hero — literally wearing a cape in one photoshoot — and a favorite subject of the Democrats’ celebrity-industrial complex. (And remember, she’s apparently exempt from masking for Covid, while kids sitting right next to her had to stay masked.) She may never become governor of Georgia, but she can always be proud of holding the position of President of United Earth (selected, not elected).
To review, Abrams’s denial of election results was forgivable, Trump’s was the trigger for “the worst attack on democracy since the Civil War,” in Biden’s words, and now Casey’s denial is just a prudent desire to see every vote counted. You don’t have to be Columbo to recognize a suspicious pattern in which a Democratic candidate’s denial of election results is excusable, but a Republican candidate’s denial of election results is a dangerous threat to American governance.
You Can’t Jedi-Mind-Trick People about Inflation
It turns out that you cannot convince people that the cost of living and the economy are not that bad after a long bout of the highest inflation in 40 years.
Harvard professor Jason Furman: “On average, food purchased for use at home is 25 percent more expensive than it was in February 2020. Turkey is up 37 percent; eggs are up 43 percent. There are a lot of items that are much more expensive than they were a few years ago.” For decades, food prices climbed on average by 2 percent annually. In 2020, food went up 3.9 percent, in 2021 it went up 6.3 percent, and in 2022 it went up 10.4 percent.
Back in July 2021, Joe Biden stood before the country and insisted, “Some folks have raised worries that this could be a sign of persistent inflation. But that’s not our view. Our experts believe and the data shows that most of the price increases we’ve seen are — were expected and expected to be temporary. . . . There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way — no serious economist.” It isn’t just that inflation is a presidency-killer, it’s that at the start of the inflationary cycle, Biden assured Americans that it wasn’t going to happen. That, along with the Afghanistan-withdrawal debacle, are what ensured that Biden’s approval rating went underwater and stayed there.
Despite the spin, the adults were not back in charge.
It turns out that the early surge in migrants crossing the border was not, as Biden insisted, a seasonal pattern that “happens every single solitary year. There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. It happens every year.” Encounters with migrants at the border with Mexico took off at the start of Biden’s presidency and stayed there, only declining to pre-Biden numbers in recent months.
It turns out that Americans do want their immigration laws enforced, and do notice waves of migrants putting a strain on social services, particularly when they get bussed from border states to large cities. It turns out that the American people don’t really care if Harris’s title was more accurately described as the “migration czar” than the “border czar.” Hey, where were all those migrants headed toward, again? Oh, that’s right, the border.
It turns out that, despite the confident predictions of abortion advocates, that issue did not send droves of women to the polls in 2024, eager to elect Democrats and rebuke Trump and pro-life Republicans.
As Michael J. New observes, “On the issue where Democrats invested the most time and money, voters preferred Harris’s position by a margin of only four percentage points.” After a long run of pro-abortion-access successes in state referendums, in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota, more stringent restrictions were either left in place or approved. Not only was the abortion issue not enough to carry Harris to victory, it wasn’t enough to help her win any of the seven contested swing states. Nor was it enough to ensure continued Democratic control of the Senate. While it’s not official, it appears abortion didn’t help Democrats recapture the House, either.
According to the exit polls, Trump won 45 percent of the women’s vote overall, 53 percent of white women, 38 percent of Latino women, 37 percent of women from age 18 to 29, 43 percent of women age 30 to 44, and 50 percent of women from age 45 to 64.
It turns out that the public is not interested in taxpayer-funded sex-change operations for prisoners. It turns out that attempting to cancel anyone — even a Massachusetts Democratic representative — who questions the wisdom of those born male participating in teen girls’ athletic competitions does not make the issue go away or get the public to agree with you.
It turns out Georgia’s election law was not “Jim Crow 2.0.”
It turns out that Tim Walz was not widely beloved as “America’s Midwestern Dad.” In the latest YouGov poll, the figure on the presidential tickets with the combination of the highest approval rating and lowest disapproval rating is Vice President-elect J. D. Vance, a turn of events that some might describe as “weird.” The entire conceit of the movie Glass Onion is that a character who’s obviously supposed to be Elon Musk is actually an idiot.
It turns out that Kamala Harris did not, in fact, bring much “joy.”
It turns out that Democrats were not on the verge of winning Senate races in Florida, Texas, and Nebraska.
It turns out that the Biden administration’s attempts to placate the anti-Israel crowd were not the key to winning the state of Michigan. It turns out that the enraged, antisemitic, and sometimes violent anti-Israel protesters on college campuses didn’t really speak for young people or any other significant voting demographic.
As noted in the Corner yesterday, it turns out that beginning events and publications with “land acknowledgements” does not particularly impress the communities of American Indians.
A common headline is “everything you know about X is wrong.” But that’s not true. A lot of what you know — or at least suspect — is correct. A lot of what you’re told by Democrats and their media allies is wrong.
ADDENDUM: To clarify a few misconceptions about yesterday’s newsletter, I wasn’t predicting what I think will happen. I was doing just what the headline said I was doing: envisioning the best-case scenario for Trump’s second term. We rarely get to witness the best-case scenario.
With that said, we can already see the outlines of some those changes taking shape — Canada is expecting more migrants who don’t think they’ll be welcome in the United States, the embrace of nuclear power is already underway, Republicans are preparing to put a lot more conservative judges on the federal judiciary, Qatar is expelling Hamas, a majority of Germans support a “significant increase” in defense spending, and Taiwan wants to buy a lot of U.S. arms.