The Winged Nike of Pennsylvania Avenue: It Wasn’t Just the Presidency

The Winged Nike of Pennsylvania Avenue (full series)
It Wasn’t Just the Presidency | The Current American Plurality
How the Left Lost | Cautions and Conclusions

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Around 6:30 PM on Election Night 2024, Hamilton County, Indiana—home to Carmel, a leafy suburb of Indianapolis famous for its European-style traffic roundabouts—reported about half its votes. They broke 50 percent to 49 percent in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris over former (and future) President Donald Trump, giving hope to Democrats and Democratic Party supporters like Bill Kristol that Ann Selzer might have been right. Selzer’s polling of her home state had forecast close national races in 2016 and 2020 and forecast a Democratic sweep in 2024.

But that ballot drop, consisting of early votes, was a “blue mirage.” President Trump won Hamilton County, the national ballotage, and the Electoral College—the Electoral College by a convincing if not landslide prospective margin of 312-226 (pending the potential for faithless electors). Democrats, who had convinced themselves that the unlikely return of the 45th President as the 47th was impossible, were left stunned more than outraged.

The results are easily shown by the New York Times election-swing map. Unlike 2020, in which the swing-from-2016 map shows many counties that shifted against the change in the national margin toward the Democrats, the 2024 swing map shows a nearly universal red shift, with only the Seattle and Atlanta metropolitan areas noticeable for some counties drifting bluer. All 50 states and the District of Columbia swung Republican from 2020.

Unlike in 2016, the Left could not blame dead white men who wrote the perfidious Electoral College into the Constitution for their loss of power. Trump won a plurality of the “national popular vote” and adding the half-percent of votes thrown to withdrawn candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the longtime environmentalist campaigner and vaccination skeptic whom President-elect Trump nominated for a Cabinet post in the post-election period, would make a majority. Unlike in 2016, ample evidence indicated the election could be close, with mathematical handicappers like Nate Silver projecting nearly-to-literally equal likelihoods that either major-party candidate could win.

The Left was, by its own lights, fairly beaten. Winged Nike, the ancient Greek goddess of victory, had sided with them in 2020, but that victory betrayed a hollowness as electorates voted in the Biden administration with numerous state-level checks on its power and the barest of federal legislative majorities. But the Biden administration governed not as a caretaker or a soft proponent of the “progressive centrism” of the Bill Clinton era, but as the representative of “the Groups” with a capital “G”—the institutions of left-wing politics and advocacy familiar to readers of InfluenceWatch.

But on what Republican Party has Winged Nike landed? Its leader, former President Donald Trump, is familiar, but much else was not. The trends in non-white communities that trended right as the nation swung left in 2020 continued, making Trump’s third coalition the most ethnically diverse Republican coalition since the Civil Rights Era. It was the financially least-well-off Republican coalition in living memory, with exit polls showing the Democrats winning the 40 percent of the electorate with household incomes over $100,000 and the Republicans winning the 60 percent making less than that amount. The “gender gap,” projected by many commentators to favor the Democrats as women stormed the polls to support abortion access even if they had to keep their Harris votes secret from their husbands, actually favored the Republicans, with former President Trump winning men by 13 points while Vice President Harris won women by eight.

It is notable that Trump won over what Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster and author of the book Party of the People, called the “multiracial working class” without adopting a tax, spend, and regulate economic policy. While he opposed reforms to old-age entitlements and continued his longstanding support for tariffs and other restrictions on international trade, Trump’s economic campaigning focused on combating inflation, cutting middle-class taxes, and cutting federal regulations—all policies that would have fit comfortably in the Republican coalitions of the Presidents Bush or Ronald Reagan. Despite the his selection of American Compass favorite Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) as his running mate, Trump’s campaign was not a campaign of the Hewlett Foundation–funded conspiracy to abandon (excuse me, “reimagine”) capitalism; it was a campaign of capitalism for normal people.

The Left’s defeat, which also saw Republicans retain the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and take the majority in the U.S. Senate, led not to a reprise of the forceful #Resistance of 2016 but rather a circular firing squad. Democratic-aligned commentators like Ezra Klein questioned the positioning of left-wing Groups as pollsters found evidence that Everything Leftist positions on immigration non-enforcement and transgender coercion combined with the inflationary effects of the Everything Leftist spending packages of the Biden administration dragged Harris down. The efforts of the organized “Never Trump” activists, nominally of the Right but funded by and campaigning alongside the Left, failed comprehensively, with the 22nd Amendment rather than any electorate set to retire Trump from the presidency in 2029.

In 2016, Donald Trump turned the political world upside down. In 2020, Democrats thought they had set it back on course and ended an error. In 2024, it was made clear that there was no return to the time before the Golden Escalator.

It Wasn’t Just the Presidency

In 2020, Republican resiliency below the presidential ballot demonstrated the weakness of President Joe Biden’s victory. Republicans had narrowed their deficit in the House of Representatives, came within a few thousand votes in Georgia from retaining control of the Senate, and expanded their control of state governments. In 2024, the down-ballot results largely confirmed that the Republicans had secured a comfortable if narrow plurality of national support, with Republicans holding the narrow majority in the U.S. House of Representatives they had won in 2022 and retaking the Senate with a 53-seat Republican Conference, despite the best efforts of Marc Elias and outgoing Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) to conjure enough dubious ballots to overturn Casey’s loss to Sen.-elect Dave McCormick (R-PA).

While the gubernatorial campaign of North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson (R) imploded spectacularly, former U.S. Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) retained the New Hampshire governorship and the state government trifecta for the Republican Party. Republicans broke Democratic trifectas by retaking control of the Michigan state House of Representatives and by evenly dividing the Minnesota state House of Representatives. Democrats lost their legislative supermajority in Vermont and failed to gain a legislative supermajority in Nevada, giving those states’ Republican governors more powerful vetoes.

Conservative and anti-progressive politics also gained at the local level. The Chicago Teachers Union, a strong backer and former employer of embattled Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D), lost a majority of the elected school board seats contested in the fall election despite throwing just under $1.75 million at the races. District attorneys supported by George Soros and other left-wing billionaires pushing the progressive prosecutor project did poorly across California, as Oakland-area voters overwhelmingly recalled Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price and George Gascon, the prototype progressive prosecutor during his time as San Francisco distict attorney, was defeated for re-election as Los Angeles County district attorney.

The red tide even washed over America’s far-flung dependencies. Puerto Rico, the focus of a firestorm late in the mainland presidential campaign over a comedian’s intemperate jokes at a Trump campaign rally in New York City, elected former territorial Republican Party chair and sitting Resident Commissioner (Puerto Rico’s title for its nonvoting delegate to Congress) Jenniffer Gonzalez-Colon governor as the candidate of the pro-statehood coalition. Republicans gained a territorial governorship in the Pacific as well, as Pula Nikolao Pula, a former civil servant in the federal Office of Insular Affairs who opposed the Biden administration’s appointment of a Puerto Rican to lead the office, won the American Samoa gubernatorial election. On Guam, Republicans took the majority in the territorial legislature. The Northern Marianas Islands will send a Republican nonvoting delegate to Congress, Kimberlyn Kay King-Hinds, to complete the Pacific delegate sweep alongside re-elected Delegates Amata Radewagen of American Samoa and Jim Moylan of Guam.

And ballot measures mostly went the way of the conservative/anti-left coalition. Arizona comfortably passed a ballot initiative making certain immigration offenses state-level crimes and requiring use of E-Verify to determine the immigration status of people seeking government benefits. Ohio voters rejected a “nonpartisan” redistricting commission, and voters in four states rejected ranked-choice voting schemes. Both Dakotas rejected marijuana legalization by majority vote, and a measure to legalize the drug in Florida failed to reach the supermajority requirement. And while several states passed abortion-access measures in 2024, the issue’s post-Dobbs v. Jackson winning streak was broken, with Nebraska and South Dakota rejecting creating rights to abortion by majority vote and a Florida measure creating an abortion right failing to achieve a needed supermajority.

California, the Golden State of plebiscitary democracy, voted to reject a measure pushed by the radical-left AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) that would have authorized local rent control measures while simultaneously punishing AHF for pushing extremely costly ballot campaigns by passing a measure restricting non-health-services spending by certain health providers that participate in a major state prescription-drug benefits program. Voters in every single county in California voted to increase punishments for certain drug- and theft-related crimes. And perhaps most astonishingly, California voters brushed aside a $10 million campaign from Blue Apron investor Joe Sanberg and rejected an increase to the minimum wage, an outcome that is so rare no statewide electorate had done it in the 21st century.

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In the next installment, a multiracial populist coalition supersedes the New American Majority.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-winged-nike-of-pennsylvania-avenue-part-1/