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The Blaze Media Feed
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A win (and a loss) for democracy
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A win (and a loss) for democracy

The American electoral system was stronger when the sun rose Wednesday than it was the morning before — but not simply because President-elect Donald Trump won the White House. Nor was it left without suffering some lasting injuries, either. Two things are essential for electoral government to function. One: Votes must be fairly and accurately tallied and reported. Two: The public must believe that is the case. If the first breaks down, the system is no longer representative. If the second breaks down, it doesn’t matter anyway. Accuracy and trust are the essential foundations of a free society (a key reason that “democracy” can’t simply be airdropped into Iraq, Afghanistan, or other places where governing honesty and mutual trust are not ingrained in the society). The Democratic Party faithful were not asked who their nominee would be — they were told. The experts knew better, and maybe they did? Going into Tuesday, both suffered in the United States. The previous presidential election was beset by “glitches,” new regulations, broken rules, and suspicious counts. It’s unlikely we’ll ever understand how 129 million people voted in 2016, 137 million in 2024, and a whopping 155 million in the mail-in no-check days-long COVID-emergency election, so let’s not dwell on it any longer. Either way: The trust was shattered. The necessary ingredients to rebuilding that trust were not just a return to expectable numbers, but a quick election decided while Americans were awake. That’s a hard thing to pull off, but to their everlasting credit, election officials did it. While counties that (rightly or wrongly) had garnered suspicion publicly stated that it might take days or even weeks to count the ballots, by and large, results came in. Better yet: Urban counties kept up with rural counties. Again, rightly or wrongly: Large, late-night, election-altering ballot dumps from partisan cities do a lot to undermine the opposition’s trust that the election is being run fairly and properly. And then there’s the money. Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign and its friends raised nearly $1 billion in just months — almost three times the money Trump and Co. raised. Since the dawn of American politics, people have grumbled sagely that money buys elections. As with 2016, 2024 was a blow to this rule. That’s not to say the person with the most money deserves to lose — just that it’s healthy to see it happen from time to time. Then there are the powerful interests, which have earned their reputations as the bogeymen of the republic since slaveholding planters first battled it out with Northeast traders. While Trump earned wider high-profile backing than at any other time in his political career, Harris garnered the support of the vast majority of the country’s rich and powerful. That billion-dollar campaign wasn’t built on $5 donations. Sometimes the rich and the powerful are correct about what direction the country should be heading in, but again, it’s good to know they can’t always make that decision for us. And that’s where we get to the bad parts for American democracy: what it means and how it functions. There is a powerful contingent among the American elites, in the federal and state bureaucracies, and in the sprawling world of international and national non-governmental organizations who believe that their strategic interests, plans for your children, novel concepts of fairness and justice, and opinions on morality, science, gender, and sex are the proper “democratic beliefs.” In this framework, opposition to their agenda is “anti-democratic.” You see this method of thinking all across the United States, the Anglosphere, and the European Union. The United Nations is a particularly egregious offender. Like it or not, an overarching message since January 2020 has been that the experts don’t care what you think – and further, the experts will tell you what you think. As an exercise, next time you hear someone complaining about Trump’s “assault on democracy,” replace the word “democracy” with “the elite agenda” or “the bureaucracy.” There you’ll have it. Harris’ nomination was the epitome of this and is both the reason the past four months have seen the worst of this rule-by-experts since COVID — and the second wound the Democratic Party has laid on American governance. The Democratic Party faithful were not asked who their nominee would be — they were told. The experts knew better, and maybe they did? A primary would have been messy, and the money already raised needed to be protected, after all. The transition from President Joe Biden to his running mate might have been forced on the old man, but in public it would need to appear peaceful and seamless. The Democratic voters told whom they had picked, however, didn’t quite buy it. Worse: It set a very undemocratic precedent. While it didn’t work out for Harris and the Democrats, we have now officially determined that you can replace a nominee without an election if it’s clear that the nominee is not going to win. That’s not great. It undermines the system and the trust, simultaneously. Of course, few of the guilty parties are going to talk about that, if they even realize it at all. There will be no introspection, no autopsy. Harris will be blamed as the weak and lazy candidate she always was. Biden will be blamed as the fading and elderly, power-obsessed man he always was. But the people who put them there won’t look inward. After all: Everything they did, they did for their democracy. And you don’t want to be undemocratic, do you? Sign up for Bedford’s newsletter Sign up to get Blaze Media senior politics editor Christopher Bedford's newsletter.

How Harris lost the election
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How Harris lost the election

President-elect Donald Trump secured his victory over Vice President Kamala Harris early Wednesday morning, and exit polling indicates which demographics may be responsible. Harris failed to drive support among voting groups like women, Latino men, and young voters, despite being historically Democratic, according to a CNN analysis comparing exit polls from the past three election cycles. While Trump was able to mobilize support among unlikely demographics, Harris' inability to secure these key groups likely cost her the election. While different demographics shifted in Trump's favor, his greatest advantage over Harris may have been one key issue. Although Democrats have historically secured the female vote, Harris underperformed compared to her predecessors. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton won the female vote by 13 points in 2016, while President Joe Biden won it by 15 points in 2020. Harris, on the other hand, won the female vote by just 10 points, according to the latest CNN exit polling. At the same time, Trump regained an edge with male voters that slightly slipped in 2020. Trump won the male vote by 11 points in 2016 but dipped down to just an 8-point advantage in 2020, according to CNN. This time around, Trump won the male vote by 10 points.Latino men, more specifically, also shifted away from Harris and toward Trump. Clinton won Hispanic men by a staggering 31 points in 2016, and Biden won them by 23 points in 2020, according to CNN. Trump completely reversed this trend in 2024, winning Latino men by 10 points.Minority voters across the board also swayed in Trump's favor. In 2016, Clinton won by 50 points among minority voters with a college degree and 56 points among minority voters without a college degree, according to CNN. Biden lost some ground in 2020, winning college-educated minority voters by 43 points and non-college-educated minority voters by 46 points. Harris continued this downward trend, winning among college-educated minorities by 35 points and non-college-educated minorities by just 32 points. Trump also gained ground among young voters. In 2016, Clinton won among voters aged 18 to 29 by 19 points, while in 2020, Biden won among the same age range by 24 points, according to CNN. This time around, Trump shrunk the Democratic advantage among young voters, with Harris winning by just 13 points. While different demographics shifted in Trump's favor, his greatest advantage over Harris may have been one key issue.In 2024, roughly two-thirds of voters said the economy was poor, and nearly half of voters said they are doing worse now than they were four years ago, according to CNN. This sentiment inevitably gave Trump an advantage over Harris, who has served alongside Biden during these last four years. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

How Latino voters helped put Donald Trump back into the Oval Office
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How Latino voters helped put Donald Trump back into the Oval Office

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Former President Donald Trump will soon be called President Donald Trump once more after his historic victory on Tuesday night, soundly beating Vice President Kamala Harris after a hotly contested election.One reason why Trump will head back to Washington, D.C., is because of his eye-popping gains among Latino voters. That voting bloc has grown in recent election cycles and was typically seen as a reliable pool for Democrats in national elections, but Trump has increased his support among the group since his first run in 2016.'It's misogyny from Hispanic men.'Trump won counties in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas this year, which has been a historically deep-blue pocket with an overwhelming majority-Latino population in the Lone Star State in counties such as Hidalgo, Starr, Cameron, and Maverick. President Joe Biden carried the aforementioned counties in 2020. Those same counties along the U.S.-Mexico border were hit hard by the border crisis the Biden-Harris administration started in 2021.In his home state of Florida, Trump won urban and Latino-heavy Miami-Dade County by 11 points.But it wasn't just southern states that experienced a large swath of Hispanics breaking away from the Democratic Party. The voting group in Michigan went to Trump at 60% versus 35% for Harris.Overall, NBC News reported Trump received 45% of the Latino vote, with Harris getting 53%. Harris' support from Latinos is a steep decline from Biden, who got 65% in 2020. It was Latino men who largely helped Trump this time around, supporting him over Harris by 10 more points.The dramatic shift caused an outrage on social media and on the airwaves once the results came in. MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said misogyny is the reason why those voters did not support Harris in greater numbers."But it's not just misogyny from white men. It's misogyny from Hispanic men. It's misogyny from black men. Things we've all been talking about, who do not want a woman leading them. ... A lot of Hispanic voters have problems with black candidates," Scarborough told Al Sharpton on Wednesday."Perhaps massive deportations will affect how they see Trump," Mother Jones D.C bureau chief David Corn said in response to the election results. "If we’re talking about a Latino realignment, it seems quite possible that if Trump proceeds with an inhumane mass deportation that disproportionately affects a community, members of that community who have switched their support to Trump might come to have second thoughts about him, and this might affect that realignment."Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Jake Tapper cannot hide his shock when he learns just how bad Kamala performed compared to Biden: 'Holy smokes'
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Jake Tapper cannot hide his shock when he learns just how bad Kamala performed compared to Biden: 'Holy smokes'

CNN anchor Jake Tapper could not hide his astonishment when he learned that Vice President Kamala Harris badly underperformed compared to President Joe Biden four years ago. Around 2 a.m. Wednesday morning — after Donald Trump had already won Pennsylvania and sealed his path to victory — Tapper sought to better understand why Harris lost, asking CNN chief national correspondent John King if Harris was overperforming in any areas of the country compared to Biden in 2020. Harris' dismal performance is raising an ironic question: Would Biden have been more competitive than Harris? King then showed Tapper hard data showing that Harris was not outperforming Biden statewide in any state. "Holy smokes!" Tapper reacted, according to a clip of their exchange. "Literally nothing?!" "Literally nothing," King confirmed. Next, King showed Tapper counties where Harris had overperformed by 3% or more compared to Biden in 2020. At the time, only 58 counties in the entire country could be included in that tally. Harris' dismal performance is raising an ironic question: Would Biden have been more competitive than Harris? For their part, Tapper and King believe he would not have been. "I don't want to be disrespectful to the president of the United States," King began. "The vice president of the United States looks like she's about to lose the presidential election. She was campaigning vigorously from the second she got the nomination until the votes counted today. Is there any evidence on the table that the president of the United States could do half of what she did?" "No," Tapper responded. "A third of what she did?" King added. "No," Tapper affirmed. Trump's historic overperformance and a national red shift are two of the key reasons why he is headed back to the White House.Trump, in fact, improved on his 2020 margins in more than 2,300 counties across America, while his margins decreased in fewer than 250, according to New York Times analysis.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Markets surge to record highs, dollar jumps following Trump victory
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Markets surge to record highs, dollar jumps following Trump victory

President Donald Trump promised to usher in the "golden age of America" in his victory speech early Wednesday morning. At the open of trading hours later, the Dow gained over 1,320 points (in excess of 3%) while the S&P 500 index increased by 1.9% and the Nasdaq rose by 2.2%. CNN indicated that this is the first time the Dow has jumped over 1,000 points in a single day since November 2022.While some analysts suspect the decisiveness of the win may have put some investors at ease, others figure Trump's policy proposals — especially those pertaining to deregulation and taxes — have investors excited.Michael Block, COO at AgentSmyth, told CNN, "There is this huge perception of [a] business friendly, tax-friendly regime coming into place, especially with them winning the Senate."'Business animal spirits could be rekindled once again.'Republicans have secured a majority in the U.S. Senate and are poised to keep the House."Assuming the House goes Republican, we expect that a Red Sweep outcome will play out in a similar fashion to the 2016 playbook but to a lesser degree given a more mature economic backdrop and higher equity valuations," Jeff Schulze at ClearBridge Investments told Bloomberg. "Business animal spirits could be rekindled once again from Trump's pro-business approach."As it became clear Trump was going to win in a landslide, the price of Bitcoin rocketed from south of $70,000 to over $75,000 overnight, zigzagging around $74,400 Wednesday morning. This jump was energized by Trump's embrace of crypto on the campaign trail. In July, Trump told crypto boosters at a Bitcoin conference in Tennessee that he would make the U.S. the "crypto capital of the planet."Not only did the U.S. dollar rise against the euro, the peso, the Japanese yen, and the Chinese yuan in response to Trump's landslide win — the biggest rise since March 2020 — the New York Times indicated that yields on U.S. government bonds also climbed sharply. Treasury 10-year yields reportedly advanced 18 basis points to 4.45%.While the American market was ostensibly made great again, European stocks took a tumble Wednesday afternoon. CNBC noted that the pan-European Stoxx 600 was down 0.68% by 4 p.m. London time.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!