Hmm

How the votes were cast:

• Trump had 74,650,000 votes as of this morning Sunday 11/10.
• This edges out his tally in the 2020 election of 74,223,974 votes.
• Harris had only earned approximately 71,000,000 votes.
• Back in 2020, Biden gathered 81,283,501 votes.

I do not have a source to hand about the outstanding vote count for 2024, but it appears Harris will not reach Biden’s high-water mark from 2020. Did fewer people vote? Did COVID-19 kill off enough Americans to reduce the pool of registered voters?¹

Regardless, Trump gets another four years and he will have done it while winning the popular vote. That’s good.

And yet it was simply the low bar to clear in order to say this was a democratic choice. Trump’s 312 electoral votes in 2024 do not measure up to Obama’s 365 in 2008, Clinton’s 379 in 1996, George H.W.’s 426 in 1988, Reagan’s 525 in 1984, and Nixon’s 520 in 1972. Mandates have to be earned, and not every victory counts as one. It is a curiosity as of late that so many post-millennium presidential contests are being decided by relatively small differences in the electoral vote count.

From Taegan Goddard, Political Wire:

There’s a brutal clarity in this result.

The majority of Americans are not concerned with Trump’s blatant racism or sexism. They are not concerned with his vows of retribution on his political enemies. They are not concerned with warnings of “fascism” by his former top aides. They are not concerned with his extensive criminal and fraudulent behavior.

Clarity. And all the talk of a ‘rigged’ election immediately fell away last week on Wednesday following the result.

Of course, Matt Levine has/had an insightful take:

[The fundamental principles that rule the United States] can’t automatically enact themselves, that they only work if the human actors in the system choose to follow them and to demand that others follow them. They persist because the people constrained by them believe themselves to be constrained by them. The Constitution, separation of powers, religious liberty, freedom of the press, an independent judiciary, the rule of law, equality of all citizens: There is a complacent sense in America that these things are independent self-operative checks on power. But they aren’t. They are checks on power only as far as they command the collective loyalty of those in power; they require a governing class that cares about law and government and American tradition, rather than personal power and revenge. Their magic is fragile, and can disappear if people who don’t believe in it gain power.