Preview: President-elect Donald Trump's election victory means he will likely be able to delay, or end, all the criminal proceedings that have been lodged against him.

Preview: Qualcomm reported fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday that beat Wall Street expectations for earnings and revenue, and guided to a strong December quarter.

Preview: President-elect Donald Trump has proposed stiff tariffs on imported goods, which could lead to higher prices and softer spending.

Preview: Coinbase's success in helping its candidates win their elections on Tuesday sent the company's stock price soaring, lifting CEO Brian Armstrong's net worth.

Preview: President-elect Donald Trump won the presidential race against Vice President Kamala Harris and Republicans flipped Senate control.

Preview: E.l.f. Beauty raised its full year guidance after posting a 40% jump in sales.

Preview: Markets are pricing in a near-certainty that the FOMC will lower its benchmark rate by a quarter percentage point.

Preview: Leaders including Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and Tim Cook congratulated the president-elect and said they looked forward to working with his administration.

Preview: President-elect Donald Trump proposed sweeping new tariffs on the campaign trail that may raise prices for consumers and trigger job loss, economists said.

Preview: Although fewer women ran for Congress this year, female candidates notched historic wins across the U.S.

Preview: • Fox-Dominion trial delay 'is not unusual,' judge says • Fox News' defamation battle isn't stopping Trump's election lies

Preview: The judge just announced in court that a settlement has been reached in the historic defamation case between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems.

Preview: A settlement has been reached in Dominion Voting Systems' defamation case against Fox News, the judge for the case announced. The network will pay more than $787 million to Dominion, a lawyer for the company said.

Preview: • DeSantis goes to Washington, a place he once despised, looking for support to take on Trump • Opinion: For the GOP to win, it must ditch Trump • Chris Christie mulling 2024 White House bid • Analysis: The fire next time has begun burning in Tennessee

Preview: • 'A major part of Ralph died': Aunt of teen shot after ringing wrong doorbell speaks • 20-year-old woman shot after friend turned into the wrong driveway in upstate New York, officials say

Preview: Newly released body camera footage shows firefighters and sheriff's deputies rushing to help actor Jeremy Renner after a near-fatal snowplow accident in January. The "Avengers" actor broke more than 30 bones and suffered other severe injuries. CNN's Chloe Melas has more.

Preview: It's sourdough bread and handstands for Jake Gyllenhaal and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Preview: A tiny intruder infiltrated White House grounds Tuesday, prompting a swift response from the US Secret Service.

Preview: An arrest warrant has been issued for controversial Biden administration official Sam Brinton in connection with a second alleged theft at an airport in Las Vegas. Brinton, who works for the Department of Energy, was already placed on leave after he allegedly stole a woman’s luggage at Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) International Airport late last month. ...

Preview: Inside the Illinois State Capitol sits a display of several religious exhibits for the holiday season, which includes a Jewish menorah, the Christian nativity scene, and the “Serpent of Genesis” from the Satanic Temple, as reported by local radio media. Consisting of a leather-bound copy of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’ “De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium” — which ...

Preview: The latest release of the “Twitter Files” Thursday evening revealed that leftists at the highest level of the company, who have all since been fired or been forced to resign, targeted one of the most popular right-wing accounts on the platform with repeated suspensions despite the fact that they secretly admitted that she did not ...

Preview: The second installment of the so-called “Twitter Files” was released Thursday evening after the company turned over documents to a journalist who then started to publish the findings on the platform. Musk released internal company communications through journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday about the company’s censorship of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story ...

Preview: The transgender community has turned on a once revered surgeon specializing in sex change surgeries after a patient posted graphic photos of an allegedly botched operation. Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher, a Miami-based surgeon specializing in double mastectomy surgeries for transgender-identifying patients, has been heavily criticized for performing the elective surgery on minors. She has also earned ...

Preview: Video emerged Thursday afternoon of Brittney Griner being swapped on a runway for convicted Russian terrorist Viktor Bout after Democrat President Joe Biden agreed to the trade. The video showed Griner, who is wearing a red jacket, walking across the tarmac with three men while Bout walked toward her with a man standing next to ...

Preview: After a woman claimed to be the daughter of a serial killer in a recent interview, a search of the supposed location of buried remains has turned up nothing. Federal, state, and local authorities did not find any evidence or remains after scouring the earth for several days in Thurman, Iowa, a small town just ...

Preview: A FedEx contract driver strangled a 7-year-old girl after hitting her with his van in Texas late last month, according to arrest warrant documents. Tanner Horner, a 31-year-old from Fort Worth, has been arrested and charged with capital murder of a person under 10 years old and aggravated kidnapping in the death of Athena Strand, ...

Preview: Disabled veteran Congressman Brian Mast (R-FL) took issue with fellow Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) over the way she chose to transport her American flag while she was moving from one office to another. Mast, who lost both legs and his left index finger in 2010 when he stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED) while ...

Preview: Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, slammed President Joe Biden Thursday for releasing notorious terrorist Viktor Bout in exchange for Brittney Griner. Griner, who has a criminal record in the U.S. stemming from a domestic violence incident several years ago, was arrested in Russia back in February on drug charges, ...

Preview: THE MORNING AFTER THE NIGHT BEFORE... (Top headline, 1st story, link) Drudge Report Feed needs your support!   Become a Patron

Preview: WORLD IN SHOCK (Main headline, 1st story, link)

Preview: KAMALA CONCEDES; PLEDGES PEACEFUL TRANSFER OF POWER.. (First column, 1st story, link) Related stories: Walz cries with hand over heart... Loss Triggers Soul-Searching, Recriminations Within Party... Fails To Outperform Biden in Single State... Blame Game Begins... Dem Consultants Deceived Donors, Spent Nothing on Promised Voter Turnout...

Preview: Walz cries with hand over heart... (First column, 2nd story, link) Related stories: KAMALA CONCEDES; PLEDGES PEACEFUL TRANSFER OF POWER.. Loss Triggers Soul-Searching, Recriminations Within Party... Fails To Outperform Biden in Single State... Blame Game Begins... Dem Consultants Deceived Donors, Spent Nothing on Promised Voter Turnout...

Preview: Loss Triggers Soul-Searching, Recriminations Within Party... (First column, 3rd story, link) Related stories: KAMALA CONCEDES; PLEDGES PEACEFUL TRANSFER OF POWER.. Walz cries with hand over heart... Fails To Outperform Biden in Single State... Blame Game Begins... Dem Consultants Deceived Donors, Spent Nothing on Promised Voter Turnout...

Preview: Fails To Outperform Biden in Single State... (First column, 4th story, link) Related stories: KAMALA CONCEDES; PLEDGES PEACEFUL TRANSFER OF POWER.. Walz cries with hand over heart... Loss Triggers Soul-Searching, Recriminations Within Party... Blame Game Begins... Dem Consultants Deceived Donors, Spent Nothing on Promised Voter Turnout...

Preview: Blame Game Begins... (First column, 5th story, link) Related stories: KAMALA CONCEDES; PLEDGES PEACEFUL TRANSFER OF POWER.. Walz cries with hand over heart... Loss Triggers Soul-Searching, Recriminations Within Party... Fails To Outperform Biden in Single State... Dem Consultants Deceived Donors, Spent Nothing on Promised Voter Turnout...

Preview: Dem Consultants Deceived Donors, Spent Nothing on Promised Voter Turnout... (First column, 6th story, link) Related stories: KAMALA CONCEDES; PLEDGES PEACEFUL TRANSFER OF POWER.. Walz cries with hand over heart... Loss Triggers Soul-Searching, Recriminations Within Party... Fails To Outperform Biden in Single State... Blame Game Begins...

Preview: STOCKS SOAR ON ELECTION VERDICT... (First column, 7th story, link) Related stories: Bitcoin hits all-time high... Dollar jumps!

Preview: Bitcoin hits all-time high... (First column, 8th story, link) Related stories: STOCKS SOAR ON ELECTION VERDICT... Dollar jumps! Drudge Report Feed needs your support!   Become a Patron

Preview: The task force investigating both assassination attempts against former President Donald Trump says the ATF has "failed to produce" certain materials relating to its probe.

Preview: Five people were killed in Mesa, Arizona, when a small jet crashed into a vehicle after taking off from a local airport, authorities said.

Preview: Police in Seattle arrested five individuals who allegedly damaged property during a protest in the Capitol Hill neighborhood on Tuesday.

Preview: A Missouri couple died on Tuesday in flash floods while driving to a voting site. They were two of five people who lost their lives in rising waters on Election Day.

Preview: Authorities have unmasked the Nashville drone terror plot suspect, 24-year-old Skyler Philippi, who is charged in a foiled effort to blow up the power grid.

Preview: Faith leaders are reacting Wednesday to Donald Trump's presidential election victory, saying that they hope he looks "to God every day for His guidance and wisdom."

Preview: A man who drove from Michigan and smelled of fuel was arrested at the U.S. Capitol with a manifesto, flare gun and blow torch, police and sources said.

Preview: Voters in Arizona have approved a measure that would allow local police to arrest migrants suspected of illegally entering the state from Mexico.

Preview: Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox.

Preview: Nathan Hochman, a former federal prosecutor, defeated incumbent progressive prosecutor George Gascón in the race for Los Angeles County district attorney.

Preview: Watch live: Harris delivers concession speech after Trump victory  CNBC Election live updates: Harris concedes  The Associated Press Watch LIVE: Harris speaks from Howard University after losing to Donald Trump  FOX 5 DC Harris is expected to call Trump to concede the 2024 presidential race  NBC News Liberal tears after Harris loss conjures up memories of 2016 Clinton defeat  Fox News

Preview: Special counsel Jack Smith expected to wind down Trump prosecutions: Sources  ABC News What happens to Trump’s criminal and civil cases now that he’s been reelected  CNN US special counsel to wind down criminal cases against Donald Trump  The Guardian US Special Counsel Jack Smith taking steps to wind down federal cases against Trump  NPR How Trump’s Win Helps Him Fight Off His Legal Charges  The New York Times

Preview: Hurricane Rafael makes landfall in Cuba as a Category 3 storm  CNN Cuba hit by second nationwide blackout as Hurricane Rafael approaches  The Guardian Hurricane Rafael To Strike Cuba, Then Weaken In Gulf  The Weather Channel Hurricane Rafael forms in the Caribbean Sea and expected to enter the Gulf of Mexico  NPR Hurricane Rafael makes landfall in Cuba as powerful Category 3 storm after knocking out power on island  ABC News

Preview: On Ukraine's front and in Kyiv, hope and pragmatism compete when it comes to Trump's election  The Associated Press Trump’s victory could mean US withdraws support for Ukraine in war with Russia  CNN Zelensky Urges Trump to Help Defend Ukraine Against Russia  The New York Times ‘A gift to the Kremlin’: uncertainty over Ukraine’s future after Trump victory  The Guardian ‘Our survival depends on American aid’ Ukrainians react to election of Donald Trump  The Independent

Preview: Abortion: Seven US states expand rights as Florida ballot fails  BBC.com How Ballot Measures Will Change Abortion Access  The New York Times Abortion rights were on the ballot in 10 states: Here’s how they did  Fast Company How abortion measures fared on the ballot in the 2024 election  CBS News Abortion rights ballot measures pass in 7 states, fail in 3 others  NBC News

Preview: Trump isn't first to be second: Grover Cleveland set precedent of nonconsecutive presidential terms  The Associated Press Can Donald Trump run for president in 2028? Why the US Constitution says no  NBC Washington Can Donald Trump run again in 2028? What the Constitution says  NorthJersey.com Donald Trump will become the second person to serve non-consecutive terms as president  USA TODAY Like Trump, Grover Cleveland Secured a Second Nonconsecutive Term  The New York Times

Preview: Live updates: Trump wins the 2024 presidential election, CNN projects | CNN Politics  CNN How big was Trump’s win? How it compares with the past 10 presidential victories  USA TODAY Trump-Harris presidential race news  NBC News Election 2024 Live Updates: Harris To Address Nation Later Today  Forbes Trump's Return to the White House  Bloomberg

Preview: Nebraska voters opt to keep 12-week abortion ban in place : 2024 Election: Trump wins second term as president  NPR Voters back Nebraska's ban on abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy and reject a competing measure  The Associated Press Nebraska Voters Pass Measure Limiting Abortions  The New York Times Nebraska Ballot Measures: Election 2024 Live Results  NBC News Nebraska passes abortion-restrictions amendment, bucking national trend  Nebraska Examiner

Preview: Trump took Wisconsin by scoring broad gains, and by stemming GOP bleeding in suburbs  Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Video: CNN projects Trump will win presidential election | CNN Politics  CNN Trump Wins Wisconsin, Reclaiming Battleground He Won in 2016  The New York Times Why AP called Wisconsin and the White House for Donald Trump  The Associated Press Live 2024 election coverage  Wisconsin Examiner

Preview: AP VoteCast: Voter anxiety over the economy and a desire for change return Trump to the White House  The Associated Press What just happened? It was the economy, stupid  CNN You can't outrun voters' feelings about the economy : Code Switch  NPR Voter anger over economy boosts Trump in 2024, baffling Democrats  The Washington Post Why Donald Trump won and Kamala Harris lost: An early analysis of the results  Brookings Institution

Preview: Vice President Harris on Wednesday conceded the 2024 presidential contest to President-elect Trump during remarks at her alma mater, Howard University, in which she also encouraged a peaceful transfer of power. “We owe loyalty not to a president or a party but to the Constitution of the United States and loyalty to our conscious and...

Preview: Former President Trump has won the election in key swing states such as Georgia and Pennsylvania, and is projected to win the necessary 270 Electoral College votes, while Republicans have taken back the Senate majority.

Preview: Vice President Harris fell short of making history as the first woman — and first woman of color — to ascend to the presidency on Tuesday, but multiple other candidates of color did seal their place in the history books. Here are five candidates of color who made history this election. Lisa Blunt Rochester Rep....

Preview: Former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he won’t take away vaccines from people when President-elect Trump takes office in January. Kennedy, who is expected to serve in a second Trump administration, said in a Wednesday interview with NBC News that he wants the American people to have the information to make informed decisions...

Preview: Plus: Harris set to address supporters {beacon} Evening Report   © Lynne Sladky, Associated Press Trump set for swing state rout with broad coalition Former President Trump is poised to sweep the battlegrounds states against Vice President Harris on the back of a political realignment, with Trump harnessing the support of a multi-cultural working class coalition...

Preview: Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 election has presented an opportunity for Democrats to curb the corporate-regulatory state monster and work collaboratively on shared goals, while also allowing them to define themselves and clarify their differences in approach to these goals.

Preview: ABC's “The View” host Sunny Hostin expressed disappointment with the outcome of the presidential election, calling it a “referendum of cultural resentment.” Hostin and the other hosts of the show gathered Wednesday morning to discuss President-elect Trump’s victory. The women openly and frequently criticized Trump, but many, excluding Hostin, were upbeat. “I’m profoundly disturbed,” Hostin...

Preview: Workers in three states are now entitled to paid sick leave for the first time. In Alaska, most workers are now entitled to at least 40 hours of paid sick leave a year. Larger employers in the state can allow 56 or more hours of paid sick leave a year with those days carrying...

Preview: Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D) is projected to win the hotly contested Senate race in Michigan, according to Decision Desk HQ, keeping a key swing-state seat in the Democratic column. Slotkin, a three-term House lawmaker and former CIA analyst, bested former Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers (R), who was recruited to run for the seat. She...

Preview: Welcome to The Hill's Sustainability newsletter {beacon} Sustainability Sustainability   The Big Story Global climate community braces for Trump 2.0 The reelection of former President Trump is rattling environmental leaders worldwide, as they brace for potential backpedaling on U.S. pledges to climate accords. © Greg Nash "The U.S. election result is a blow in...

Preview: Elections have consequences, even for comedy shows.

Preview: The end of Trump’s federal cases may be nigh.

Preview: Many social media users ignored anything related to politics on Wednesday by posting videos of playful cats, swimming rabbits and Hollywood horror stars instead.

Preview: Authorities say a man who was recently fired from his job at Navy Pier returned to the Chicago tourist attraction and killed two workers before fleeing.

Preview: The multibillionaire was accused of spiking the paper’s endorsement of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over Trump.

Preview: The Republican beat back a historic challenger calling for independence from the U.S.

Preview: Votes are still being tallied but at least one Jan. 6 defendant already had eyes on the days after inauguration.

Preview: Congress will welcome its first openly trans member, and the Senate will include two Black women simultaneously for the first time.

Preview: History is repeating itself.

Preview: Frank Luntz, while on NewsNation, said the following about the president-elect’s potential impact: “Whomever he wants is going to end up on the Supreme Court.”

Preview: AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. reported better-than expected third-quarter revenue and a narrower loss after market close Wednesday, with the movie-theater chain and original meme stock pointing toward a box-office rebound.

Preview: As housing costs soar, what does a Donald Trump presidency mean for the real-estate industry?

Preview: Dow transports and Dow industrials closed at records simultaneously for the first time in three years on Wednesday.

Preview: A weekly look at the most important news and moves in crypto, and what’s on the horizon in digital assets.

Preview: Stocks surged Wednesday after Donald Trump won the U.S. election.

Preview: Gilead Sciences Inc.’s stock rose 2% in after-hours trading Wednesday, after the biotech blew past third-quarter earnings estimates and raised its guidance, boosted by demand for its HIV and COVID-19 treatments.

Preview: Elf also gained market share and saw international sales nearly double.

Preview: The question for investors is what happens once the postelection euphoria wears off.

Preview: The president-elect has pledged to lower prices, cut taxes and slap huge tariffs on imports. But don’t plan on a quick fix for inflation, experts say.

Preview: The Russell 2000 index jumped 5.5% on Wednesday after former President Donald Trump’s electoral win.

Preview: Steve Kornacki breaks down results from the 2024 presidential election.

Preview: The president-elect's two federal criminal cases are as good as over. And don't expect him to face state proceedings while president.

Preview: After Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris, it’s important to remember that our democracy is not built around one person or one job.

Preview: Watch live coverage and analysis from MSNBC as votes are tallied across the country to determine various state-level races and whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will become the 47th president of the United States.

Preview: Latest 2024 election results: Donald Trump has defeated Kamala Harris to win a second presidential term, NBC News projects. Now what? We already know.

Preview: 2024 election results: Trump wins, defeating Kamala Harris and demonstrating a widespread discontent with the progressive left.

Preview: The Republican Party's takeover of the Senate will help Donald Trump in profound ways, some of which might not be immediately obvious.

Preview: Michigan Democrats grew their lead on the state Supreme Court while Ohio's top court is now almost completely GOP-controlled.

Preview: I suppose some observers might think Donald Trump’s first term represented rock bottom. My advice for those thinking along those lines: Wait.

Preview: X owner Elon Musk pushes QAnon messaging, suggesting his relationship with Donald Trump has become unhealthy and dangerous.

Preview: Prince William's eco-initiative celebrated its fourth year.

Preview: With control of the White House and Senate already in the bag, Republicans are one step away from claiming the coveted political trifecta. All they need is the House of Representatives, which is currently in limbo.

Preview: The couple, both 43, moved to Florida after a tumultuous few years in Washington D.C. where they both worked in Trump's 2017 to 2020 administration as advisers.

Preview: The Nuggets host the Thunder on Wednesday night in a rematch of their season opener as Denver looks to build on its two-game winning streak.

Preview: BETHLEHEM, Pa. — Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Matt Cartwright has conceded to GOP challenger Rob Bresnahan in one of the year’s most closely watched House races. Bresnahan leads Cartwright 51% to 49% in the 8th Congressional District, with 99% of all votes counted, the Associated Press reports. “Thank you for your support, and congratulations to Rob...

Preview: "I thought it was a map to kill a grave digger or something," said the kindergarten student.

Preview: "It is historically unprecedented in the modern era," said GOP pollster and strategist Patrick Ruffini.

Preview: On election night, journalist Kate Couric preemptively warned Americans that votes rolling in for former President Trump on Tuesday night were simply "a red mirage."

Preview: If anyone deserves the VIP treatment it’s this Swiftie! Taylor Swift’s brother Austin made one disabled fan’s night extra special when he gave her floor seats after the stadium’s accessible seats were not the most accommodating. Watch the full video to learn more about Austin saving the day for one of his sister’s biggest supporters. ...

Preview: Kendrick said hearing from other filmmakers has been a "really cool" outcome of her directorial debut.

Preview: In the end, Donald J. Trump is not the historical aberration some thought he was, but instead a transformational force reshaping the modern United States in his own image.

Preview: He played on fears of immigrants and economic worries to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris. His victory signaled the advent of isolationism, sweeping tariffs and score settling.

Preview: Although some people were not sure which policies Donald J. Trump would focus on first, they were relieved and elated by the win.

Preview: The candidate largely let the billionaire run his $175 million ground game — a gamble that future candidates could look to emulate.

Preview: This was a conquering of the nation not by force but with a permission slip. Now, America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history.

Preview: By triumphing at the ballot box, Donald Trump can dispense with federal charges against him while postponing or derailing other pending cases that have dogged him.

Preview: Democrats picked up two seats in New York and defended others in Michigan and New Mexico, but Republican gains have narrowed their path, setting up a potential G.O.P. trifecta.

Preview: During this presidential campaign, Donald Trump played on economic worries and fears around immigration to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris. Shane Goldmacher, a national political correspondent for The New York Times, explains.

Preview: After picking up seats in West Virginia, Ohio and Montana and winning an unexpectedly close race in Nebraska, the G.O.P. sealed a majority. Tight races in swing states will determine their margin.

Preview: Mr. Vance’s victory caps his ideological reversal from anti-Trump author to pro-Trump senator.

Preview: Should I cut my losses?

Preview: There are clear lessons for the Democratic Party.

Preview: What will happen in Ukraine and Gaza?

Preview: I used to vote Republican. There’s no way “You can vote in secret” would have spoken to me.

Preview: There are a thousand reasons to despair—and a few to hope.

Preview: Voters who thought they could put Trump back in the White House while preserving or expanding reproductive rights are in for a brutal shock.

Preview: The party’s current strategy will lead only to more losses. Here’s what it needs to do to survive.

Preview: When will I get these back?

Preview: Test your wits on the Slate Quiz for Nov. 6, 2024.

Preview: Take a quick break with our daily 5x5 grid.

Preview: Michiganders had to choose between a hawkish Democrat with an intelligence background and a hawkish Republican with an intelligence background for Senate.

Preview: Despite a few bright spots, the disappointing returns suggest that the road to pharmacological freedom will be rockier than activists hoped.

Preview: Voters rejected Amendment 6, keeping court costs low and pushing lawmakers to fund law enforcement pensions responsibly.

Preview: With control of the House still undecided, a Democratic majority could serve as the strongest check on Trump's worst impulses.

Preview: A ballot initiative to create a new category of medical providers for animals is winning approval, though votes are still being counted.

Preview: My quick glance at the posted vote totals suggests that there are about 16 million votes not yet counted.

Preview: Coercing defendants into plea deals is poor training for convincing people to vote for you.

Preview: A University of Delaware page reports: The State Law of 1791 moved the county seat in Sussex County from Lewes… The post Burying the Hatchet Post-Election in Delaware (with Special Bonus Ox Roast) appeared first on Reason.com.

Preview: I liked this piece (by someone who "voted reluctantly for Harris"), and thought I'd pass it along. An excerpt: How,… The post Bret Stephens (N.Y. Times) on the Causes of Harris's Defeat appeared first on Reason.com.

Preview: “Beardstown…exemplifies the opposite of the falsehood that is being spread about Ohio.”

Preview: See who's running

Preview: All four cases explained

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Preview: Start the day smarter ☀️

Preview: After Hurricane Idalia made landfall on Wednesday, Florida communities are emerging to see its destruction with hopes and plans to recover.

Preview: Downgraded to a tropical storm, what had been Hurricane Idalia powered across Georgia and the Carolinas on Wednesday evening.

Preview: The 81-year-old Republican Senate minority leader struggled to answer reporters' questions in Kentucky, requiring help and drawing questions about his health

Preview: Nebraska volleyball set a women's sports attendance record Wednesday night as 92,003 fans descended on Memorial Stadium to watch the match vs. Omaha.

Preview: At least 73 people died when a fire ripped through a multi-story building in Johannesburg overtaken by homeless people, authorities said Thursday.

Preview: As the storm moves away from the shore, it can cause an additional life-threatening hazard: inland flooding. Georgia and the Carolinas are at risk.

Preview: An ICE detention facility managed by the private GEO Group in 2013. | John Moore/Getty Images Donald Trump rode his way to a comeback with a quintessential law-and-order campaign: He exaggerated crime trends, talked about American cities as though they were war zones, and directed his ire at migrants, flooding the Republican National Convention with “Mass Deportation Now!” signs. It’s hard to know exactly how Trump’s harsh immigration policies will play out, but his campaign press secretary said that his new administration will start its mass deportation operation on day one. Trump won’t take office until January, but if you’re wondering whether he’ll make good on his promise to arrest, detain, and deport migrants, here’s one chart that paints a grim picture of what might be ahead: Private prison giant Geo Group —which already has over a billion dollars in ICE contracts to manage immigration detention facilities—sees its stock soar on Trump's win. pic.twitter.com/QOy2L5S8np — Avi Asher-Schapiro (@AASchapiro) November 6, 2024 GEO Group, a private prison corporation that has had billions of dollars worth of contracts with the US Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE), saw a steep rise in its stock price on Wednesday — about 38 percent by the afternoon — after Trump was declared the winner of the presidential race. While that doesn’t translate to policy, it does show that the markets are betting that the private prison industry will likely flourish under the next Trump administration. This kind of market behavior is to be expected, since investors often overreact to news events. But even if today’s movement is a temporary price spike, that doesn’t change the fact that the company itself has been betting on a Trump presidency to make a fortune. GEO Group’s spending on its lobbying efforts peaked during the Trump administration, and slowed down after President Joe Biden announced that he would phase out the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) contracts with private prisons. The company had also donated to Trump’s inauguration in 2017 and even hosted one of its annual events at one of his properties.  This time around, GEO Group’s PAC maxed out on its contributions to Trump’s campaign and gave a pro-Trump super PAC a $500,000 contribution. The reason is obvious: The company views a second Trump term as a boon to its business, which relies on government contracts. And since Trump is planning a mass deportation campaign, that would likely mean the federal government will arrest and detain more migrants. In a recent earnings call with its investors, GEO Group  executives suggested that if Trump won, his policies could bolster the amount of money being sent to its detention facilities that have contracts with ICE. While Trump liked to tout his bipartisan criminal justice reform bill, which was enacted in 2018, signs like today’s market response to his victory show that private, for-profit prisons are expecting to see big returns when he returns to the White House. That’s an alarming reality because conditions in private prisons, including ones run by GEO Group, tend to be worse than in federal facilities, as a 2016 DOJ report pointed out. The problem was so bad that in 2016, the Obama administration announced it would phase out contracts with private prisons after the DOJ determined that they were less safe for inmates than federally run facilities. (Trump swiftly reversed that policy.) The markets don’t always predict policy. But when it comes to where investors are putting their money and who private prison companies like GEO Group supported for president, the bet they are making is clear: A second Trump term is lucrative if you’re in the business of incarcerating people. It’s a pretty good bet.

Preview: Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) presents a golden gavel to Vice President Kamala Harris outside of the Senate chamber at the US Capitol on December 5, 2023. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images Support independent journalism that matters — become a Vox Member today. Kamala Harris lost the presidential election and Democrats lost control of the Senate.  But when you zoom in on the details of that result, there’s a striking pattern: Democratic Senate candidates are outperforming Harris. Or, put another way, Republican Senate candidates are doing worse than Trump. In recent years, the outcome of a state’s US Senate race has increasingly matched the outcome of its simultaneous presidential race. Ticket-splitting has decreased in our era of polarization and partisanship. The vast majority of people voting for a presidential candidate also vote for their party’s Senate candidate. But not everyone does that. And there’s still some variation in how much better or worse Senate candidates do compared to the top of the ticket. Looking at that variation can provide clues about what sorts of candidates overperform (even if they don’t actually win). It can also help shape our understanding of national trends. Was there a nationwide backlash against all Democrats? Or was the backlash mostly limited to the presidential candidate? In 2020, Republican Senate candidates overperformed Trump in most swing states, suggesting that Trump was a drag on the GOP. This year, Democratic Senate candidates overperformed Harris in almost every key race — though often it wasn’t by enough for Democrats to win. Here’s how the Senate candidates in key races performed compared to Harris. The counts aren’t yet finalized so the margins are subject to change, but this is how things looked as of early Wednesday afternoon. Nebraska: Independent Dan Osborn’s vote share is about 7 points higher than Harris, but he lost. Montana: Sen. Jon Tester’s vote share is also about 7 points higher than Harris. He also lost. Ohio: Sen. Sherrod Brown’s vote share is about 4 points higher than Harris. He lost. Arizona: Rep. Ruben Gallego’s vote share is about 4 points higher than Harris and he’s currently leading even though Harris seems on track to lose there. Texas: Rep. Colin Allred’s vote share is about 3 points higher than Harris, but he failed to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz. Nevada: Sen. Jacky Rosen’s vote share was about 2 points higher than Harris. Her race is too close to call. Wisconsin: Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s vote share was less than 1 point higher than Harris’s, but Baldwin defeated her challenger, Eric Hovde, while Harris lost the state. Michigan and Pennsylvania: Both Democratic Senate candidates in these states (Rep. Elissa Slotkin and incumbent Sen. Bob Casey) have vote shares about 1 point higher than Harris’s. Neither race has been called. The pattern was also evident in less competitive races like Minnesota, New Mexico, New Jersey, and Virginia, where Democratic Senate candidates outperformed Harris. One notable exception to Tuesday’s down-ballot overperformance trend was Florida, where Debbie Mucarsel-Powell did about the same as Harris (and lost). There’s also Maryland, where Angela Alsobrooks won but did significantly worse than Harris — but that has an obvious explanation in that the state’s popular former governor, Larry Hogan, was the Republican Senate nominee (though his popularity wasn’t enough to power him to a win in an otherwise blue state). So why were there so many voters casting their ballots for Trump and Democratic Senate candidates? Some might argue for racism or sexism explaining Harris’s struggles, but I’d note that several of the Democratic candidates who overperformed Harris were nonwhite or female. Others might argue that she was a uniquely flawed candidate or campaigner, but President Joe Biden was on track to do much worse if he’d stayed in the race. My suspicion is that Harris’s electoral struggles were more about Biden’s unpopularity and her association with his administration than any newfound love of the American public for the Republican Party generally. (This is also reflected in the House of Representatives contest currently looking somewhat close and in Democratic success at the state level in places like North Carolina.) Call them the “I don’t like Republicans much, but the economy was better under Trump” voters. Biden lost them, and Harris failed to get them back.

Preview: Donald Trump pumps his fist moments after an assassination attempt. In 1992, voters sent a record number of women to Congress, leading the media and political scientists to call it the “Year of the Woman.” When the final votes are counted in the 2024 election, we might have a new way of referring to the 2024 election: The Year of the Man.  President-elect Donald Trump won men by 10 points this year, according to early exit polls, a result that could change once the final votes are tallied. Vice President Kamala Harris, meanwhile, seemed to win women by 10 points — but if the exit polls are correct, she lost ground with women compared to Joe Biden’s 2020 results. The exit polls also suggest a rightward shift for Latino men. In marshaling men’s votes, and holding on to a slim majority of white women, Trump was able to overcome his weaknesses with the broader swath of female voters and build a dominant lead, allowing him to decisively capture the presidency.  Exit polls are notoriously unreliable, and it will likely be days before we have a clear sense of how Trump won. But there’s no denying that Trump tailored his campaign to appeal to men. Trump spent the months leading up to Election Day engaging in intense outreach to male voters, appearing on podcasts and doing interviews with influential media figures like Joe Rogan, Logan Paul, and Theo Von. He portrayed himself as a strong leader capable of restoring the nation’s lost glory — returning it, in other words, to a time when men were undisputedly at the top of the social hierarchy. After a man attempted to assassinate the former president at a rally this summer in Pennsylvania, Trump stood defiantly with blood on his face and his fist raised in the air, projecting an air of strength that was praised as iconic. Throughout the campaign, Trump demonstrated the aggressiveness that has defined his life in the public arena, relentlessly attacking his Democratic opposition, the media, and anyone he deemed insufficiently supportive.  Trump specifically sought to get young men of all races and men without a college education to the polls. It was a risky strategy because the voters Trump was seeking have historically been among the most difficult to mobilize. But in appealing to them, Trump hoped to pull off another win similar to that of 2016, when he won men by 11 points. In 2020, Biden was able to defeat Trump in part by erasing his large advantage with male voters. This year, it seems, Trump won men back.   There are many reasons why male voters have been dissatisfied in recent years and might have been receptive to his messaging. Inflation has made the cost of living painful for millions of people post-pandemic. Men are falling behind women in education. Their wages are stagnating or declining as women’s wages grow, and fewer men are working. They are struggling with an epidemic of loneliness that doesn’t seem to be affecting women in a similar manner. Feminism has gone mainstream, making some men feel like they aren’t as valued.  What lessons should women take from this election? The polls leading up to the election showed a massive gender gap, with women preferring Harris by double digits and men preferring Trump by the same. Since 1980, female voters have preferred Democrats, and in general, they have registered and voted in greater numbers than men.  Trump’s struggles with women were largely of his own creation. As a candidate in 2016, multiple women accused him of sexual assault, and he was caught on tape bragging about sexual assault. It wasn’t enough to dissuade voters from electing him. As president, he appointed the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn federally protected abortion rights. Now, there are abortion bans in more than 20 states, including some that don’t make an exception for victims of rape and incest. Last year, Trump was found legally liable for rape. He has repeatedly criticized women he doesn’t like, including Harris and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, in crude, sexist, and vulgar terms. In the days leading up to the election, recordings of the convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein calling Trump his closest friend became public.  None of it was enough to convince voters not to give him another shot at the most important job in the country. It seems that his winning coalition included white women, a majority of whom voted for him in 2024, according to exit polls, just as they did four years ago. For a very real moment, it looked as though female voters, as a broader, multiracial group, might help send a Democrat to the White House, like they did in 2020.  In the end, it wasn’t enough. American voters have now twice chosen Trump over eminently qualified women.  The last time Trump won, women took to the streets in a historic protest. In the next election cycle, the United States elected more women to Congress than ever before. That helped pave the way for a new generation of women leaders, including the six women who ran for president as Democrats in 2020. It’s possible that will happen again. Ultimately, it will take several more days to tally the final votes, and figure out what they mean. But one conclusion seems obvious. Donald Trump ran a campaign geared toward dissatisfied men. It worked.

Preview: President-elect Donald Trump dances off stage at the conclusion of a campaign rally on November 4, 2024, in Raleigh, North Carolina. President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election was powered by a remarkably consistent nationwide trend of voters turning against the Democratic ticket. Vice President Kamala Harris performed worse than President Joe Biden did in 2020 nearly everywhere: in big cities and rural areas, in blue states and red ones. Most of the conventional explanations for why a campaign fails — things like messaging choices, or whether candidates campaigned enough in the right places — cannot account for such a sweeping shift. Such factors matter on the margins and among specific demographic groups, but Harris received a decisive, across-the-board rebuke.  To explain what truly happened, we need to look at global trends as a point of comparison. And when we do, a clear picture emerges: What happened on Tuesday is part of a worldwide wave of anti-incumbent sentiment. 2024 was the largest year of elections in global history; more people voted this year than ever before. And across the world, voters told the party in power — regardless of their ideology or history — that it was time for a change. We saw this anti-incumbent wave in elections in the United Kingdom and Botswana; in India and North Macedonia; and in South Korea and South Africa. It continued a global trend begun in the previous year, when voters in Poland and Argentina opted to move on from current leadership. The handful of 2024 exceptions to this general rule look like true outliers: The incumbent party’s victory in Mexico, for example, came after 20 straight defeats for incumbents across Latin America. Given Trump’s victory, we can confidently say the United States is not exceptional. Three different exit polls found that at least 70 percent of Americans were dissatisfied with the country’s current direction, and they took it out on the current ruling party. (While exit polls are based on preliminary, rather than comprehensive, data sets, it is notable that so many polls appear to be picking up on the same trend.) Trump registered as the change candidate despite being a former president himself, and the voters rewarded him accordingly. Once we start thinking about the US election result as part of a global trend, rather than an isolated event, we can start to make a little more sense of what just happened here. Why you can’t understand Trump’s victory without the global trend Reading the American press today, you see a lot of focus on granular campaign choices. Did Harris lose because she picked the wrong vice president? Emphasized the wrong issues? Targeted the wrong kinds of voters? Appeared on the wrong kind of media? Perhaps one of these theories will prove to have merit. We don’t have enough data yet to be sure. But if the story were fundamentally about messaging or targeting, you’d expect her to improve on Biden’s total in some places and do worse in others. The problem is that none of them on their own can explain a truly uniform shift across the country.  You can’t explain Harris’s defeat in terms of losses with the white working class when she also seems to have done worse than Biden with nonwhite workers and college graduates based on early data. You can’t focus primarily on her stance on Gaza alienating Arab and Muslim voters when her margin of defeat was far larger than the defections in that group. Ditto with Latinos, and every other subgroup that postmortems are beginning to focus on. Uniform swings call for uniform explanations. And the most plausible one, given global context, is anti-incumbency. “The central plot lines of the [2024 election] are already clear, and not that dissimilar from four years ago,” the political scientist John Sides writes at Good Authority. “In 2020, an unpopular incumbent lost reelection. In 2024, an unpopular incumbent’s party lost reelection.” Such an explanation makes more sense than a pure focus on ideology. In fact, the global context suggests that a Republican president likely would have also performed poorly if they were in office. While some right-wing insurgents have performed well in the past two years, most notably Javier Milei in Argentina, right-wing incumbents have often underperformed — with ruling conservative parties in Britain, India, and Poland all suffering notable setbacks.  If we are indeed seeing America fall in line with the global pattern, it clarifies some of what just happened. But it also raises a new, difficult question: Why are people so dissatisfied with their governments at this particular point in time? One credible answer is inflation. Countries around the world experienced rising prices after the Covid-19 pandemic and attendant global supply chain disruptions, and voters hate inflation. Even though the inflation rate has gone down in quite a few places, including the United States, prices remain much higher than they were prior to the pandemic. People remember the low prices they’ve lost, and they are hurting — hurting enough that they see an otherwise-booming economy as a failure. As much sense as the inflation story makes, it remains an unproven one. We’ll need a lot more evidence, including detailed data on the US election that isn’t available yet, to be sure whether it’s right. But we can be fairly confident, given reams of polling data showing Americans were dissatisfied with the country’s direction, that a desire for a change in leadership played at least some role in Trump’s return to power — part of a global trend away from stability and toward upheaval, however chaotic or even dangerous it will prove to be.

Preview: President-elect Donald Trump, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance (R-OH), and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) at the Republican National Convention in 2024. Johnson and Vance will have to shepherd any safety net cuts through Congress. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images Now that it is clear Donald Trump will become president again and will have a Republican Senate and almost certainly a Republican House to back him, it’s important to ask: What will he do with these majorities? And given his track record last time, what will it mean for poor Americans and the programs they rely on? The last time Trump won the presidency, in 2016, I wrote a piece predicting a huge rollback of the safety net. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), with its massive expansion of Medicaid and patient protections, would be repealed; Medicaid itself would see its funding slashed and its guarantee of coverage to poor people eliminated; food stamps would be cut deep and maybe turned over to the states, much as welfare for single parents was in 1996, largely destroying that program. I was wrong. Trump, and especially then-House Speaker Paul Ryan, did try to do all of that, but in the end enough Republicans realized repealing the ACA wasn’t viable. Medicaid and food stamps survived more or less intact. A Democratic House after the 2018 midterms and, more importantly, a global pandemic, meant that by 2020, the safety net was significantly stronger than in 2016. I do not know that the same scenario will play out in 2025, and I certainly hope the pandemic part does not repeat. But despite the devastating electoral blow to Democrats, there are reasons for safety net supporters to be optimistic.  The Senate is solidly Republican but not a total blowout, and four defections would be enough for a bill to fail. With Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, who opposed Obamacare repeal in 2017, still in the chamber, it’s not difficult to imagine them and two allies blocking serious changes again.  The House results will not be known exactly for weeks but look, if anything, closer. And while House Speaker Mike Johnson surely wants to slash the safety net, he is not Ryan. Shrinking government is not his all-consuming passion the way it was for 2017’s House speaker, who once famously said he dreamed of cutting Medicaid while drinking out of kegs as a college student. Here’s what Republicans might attempt to do to safety net programs, and why achieving it might be difficult. Health care programs will shrink, but serious cuts will be challenging to pass On health care, Republicans have one victory that’s more or less baked in. As part of the 2021 stimulus package, Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress adopted expanded subsidies for the ACA’s marketplaces. If you were an individual or small business buying private insurance, the tax credits you received to offset premiums were larger. Subsidies were no longer cut off for people making over 400 percent of the poverty line (about $125,000 for a family of four), and subsidies for people below that were made more generous. These provisions were later extended through the end of 2025 as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. It’s hard to imagine a Republican Congress voting to extend these measures past next year, though insurance companies will certainly lobby for it. Trump’s past budgets have also zeroed out subsidies for private health insurance entirely, which would be a much larger shift. But subsidies for private insurance are a relatively small part of federal spending on health care. This fiscal year, they amount to $125 billion — very significant, but piddling next to $858 billion on Medicare and $607 billion on Medicaid. Trump has promised not to cut Medicare, much as he did in 2016, and while his budgets as president did envision spending reductions, they were mostly minor and came from cutting provider payments rather than limiting eligibility. He did, repeatedly and explicitly, propose cutting Medicaid. The most recent Trump budget to explicitly lay out its plans, for fiscal year 2020, entailed at least $1.1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and the ACA over a decade, per the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). At that time, the agency was projecting $6.2 trillion in 10-year spending on non-Medicare health programs, meaning Trump was calling for a cut of over 17 percent. Trump waffled on how clear he wanted to be in calling for Medicaid cuts. His 2021 budget was too vague for the CBO to even model. But when he was clear, the proposals had three steps: Repeal the ACA’s Medicaid coverage expansion and replace it with a “block grant” for states to spend how they like on health programs. Place a “per capita cap” on the rest of Medicaid, meaning states would only be granted a set amount per covered person by the federal government, regardless of what health care they actually received. Impose a work requirement, specifically to “require able-bodied, working-age individuals to find employment, train for work, or volunteer” in order to receive Medicaid. What unites these proposals, especially the per-capita cap and block grant, is that they mean Congress and the White House don’t have to make granular decisions about who specifically is covered and for what. They can simply cut spending and pass decisions on how to spend what’s left to the states.  Without knowing the exact cap and block grant amounts for the future, it’s hard to say exactly how big these cuts would be, but the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Gideon Lukens and Allison Orris analyzed how Medicaid would’ve been cut if per-capita caps had been put in place in 2018. By 2020, most states would’ve had to slash spending on disabled enrollees (by 12 percent in Pennsylvania and 13 percent in Kentucky); seniors would have seen cuts in 21 states, including cuts of around 17 percent in California; children would have seen cuts in 28 states.  The point here is not the specific numbers but that the idea can, in practice, amount to significant reductions in resources for the program. There is not much room to cut Medicaid without reducing access to the program. Physicians are already paid about 28 percent less by Medicaid than by Medicare, and Medicare in turn pays roughly 22 percent less than private insurers. Medicaid, in other words, pays maybe half of what private insurance pays. Further cuts to prices paid to providers would almost certainly reduce the number who accept the program, making it that much harder for poor people to find care. More likely, states would respond to federal cuts by restricting eligibility and kicking people off the program. Whether Trump can make these plans a reality depends strongly on what moderate Republicans (like Murkowski and Collins in the Senate and Don Bacon and David Valadao in the House) feel about them. While we don’t know margins for sure right now, it’s looking like Republicans will have 53 Senate seats and fewer than 225 House seats (they need 218 to pass a bill there). That means that even a small number of defections would be enough to defeat legislation, even legislation that is advanced through the budget reconciliation process and thus needs only 50 Senate votes plus Vice President-elect JD Vance’s tie-breaker. Murkowski and Collins alone wouldn’t be able to sink a Medicaid cuts bill, but they would only need two other defections to help them. Remember that in 2017, the bill that Sen. John McCain famously killed with them by making a thumbs-down motion on the Senate floor was the so-called “skinny repeal,” which would have only repealed the individual mandate and a few other provisions. The idea was that this bill could then go to a conference committee with the House’s Obamacare repeal bill, where they’d hash out a compromise measure.  Some Republicans who voted for the skinny repeal, like Lindsey Graham and Ron Johnson, did so only after being promised that the House’s bill, which included deep Medicaid cuts, would never become law. There was rather deep opposition to passing sweeping cuts, even outside the three Republicans who blocked the Senate bill. As West Virginia Republican Shelley Moore Capito said that summer, “I did not come to Washington to hurt people.” All this suggests to me that getting 50 votes for sweeping Medicaid cuts in the Senate will be rather difficult. More difficult still might be the House, where Republicans will have to defend a number of seats where Kamala Harris won and where candidates will not want to enter 2026 midterms with votes to shred Medicaid hanging on them like albatrosses. Food stamps face brutal cuts The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), colloquially called food stamps, is perhaps the most important safety net program for people who are very poor. Seventy-five percent of recipients are at or below the poverty line, and over 1 in 5 report having no other source of income besides food stamps. The share of single parents living on less than $2 a day is nearly 10 percent before you include SNAP benefits. Food stamps take the number below 3 percent, slashing it by over two-thirds. Because the program grew out of efforts to prop up crop prices by redirecting “surplus” crops to poor people, it is the province of the Department of Agriculture, and is renewed every five years in a “farm bill” controlled by the House and Senate Agriculture Committees. The last farm bill, from 2018, expired on September 30, meaning that writing a new farm bill will be one of Congress’s main priorities early next year. Glenn Thompson, the Republican chair of the House Ag Committee, released his proposed farm bill in May. Its most striking provision would limit the ability of the Department of Agriculture to update its Thrifty Food Plan, upon which SNAP benefit levels are based. This would amount to a $30 billion cut over a decade, and is a response to the Biden administration updating the Thrifty Food Plan, which resulted in a nearly 30 percent hike in benefit levels. Trump’s past budgets have envisioned much more sweeping cuts. His last one proposed a nearly 30 percent cut to the program, including new work requirements on top of those already in the program and a plan to shift a big share of the program into a “Harvest Box,” a plan in which households would not get to choose the food they buy but instead be sent a monthly box of shelf-stable foods that the government picks. Realistically, I suspect the Harvest Box plan in particular will struggle to get traction, in part because major retailers like Walmart and Kroger rely on revenue from customers using food stamps and will fight efforts to redirect funds from them to government provision of food. What’s more, farm bills usually go through regular order, meaning that they’re subject to the filibuster and will need Democratic support in the Senate, which will not be forthcoming for sweeping cuts. That said, Trump has been consistent about wanting to restrict SNAP as a program and will have Ag Committee chairs in both houses who are broadly on his side. The potential for sharp cuts is definitely present. The 2021 child tax credit is gone, but the credit might improve all the same An area where Trump is unlikely to sign sweeping cuts and might even oversee modest expansions is the child tax credit. Harris ran on reviving the 2021 version of the child tax credit, which expanded it from $2,000 to as much as $3,600 per child and for the first time made it fully refundable, so poor Americans could benefit even if they were out of work. She also proposed a “baby bonus” of $6,000 to families with newborns. Those dreams are dead for at least the next four years. But with the 2017 Trump tax cuts expiring next year, including their doubling of the child credit from $1,000 to $2,000, changes are likely coming to the credit all the same. While returning to 2021 is impossible, it’s likely that the end result will direct more money to poor Americans than the credit does under current law. Republicans have been insistent that any credit include a “phase-in,” or a provision stating that families must have some earnings to receive the child tax credit. But within that framework, they’ve expressed openness to increasing the amount working families receive.  Vance notably called for a $5,000 baby bonus, only to be one-upped by Harris’s $6,000 bid. This past year, Republican Jason Smith, the chair of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, cut a deal with Democrat Ron Wyden, the outgoing chair of the Senate Finance Committee, to expand the child credit by altering the way it phases in. Smith will still be the head tax-writer in 2025 and is likely to push for this provision to stay in. The complication is that Republicans face a wide array of expiring tax provisions next year, and while some, like incoming Senate Finance Committee chair Mike Crapo, suggest they don’t want to pay for extending those provisions, the reality of higher interest rates (meaning government deficits are now more costly to run) suggests that they probably can’t pass everything they want. Given a wish list that runs from extending those cuts to exempting tips and Social Security income from taxation to letting people deduct interest on car loans, that means that expensive provisions like child tax credit expansions will likely get squeezed. It’s hard to say what exactly will make it into the final package. One of the least-trumpeted changes of the past half-century is the steady growth of America’s safety net. In 1979, the average lower-income American got $5,300 from government programs aimed at poor people. In 2019, that number was $15,800. America’s commitment to poor people more than tripled, and the result was a marked reduction in poverty. Trump’s reelection threatens that trend. But his first term, and those of Presidents Bush and Reagan before him, were not enough to reverse it. There are reasons to think it could continue even through the next four years.

Preview: Once Donald Trump becomes president, he will have control over the US Department of Justice, and can order it to drop all the federal charges against him. President-elect Donald Trump was indicted four times — including two indictments arising out of his failed attempt to steal the 2020 election. One of these indictments even yielded a conviction, albeit on 34 relatively minor charges of falsifying business records. But the extraordinary protections the American system gives to sitting presidents will ensure that Trump won’t be going to prison. He’s going to the White House instead. The federal charges against Trump are doomed Two of the indictments against Trump are federal, and two were brought by state prosecutors in New York and Georgia. The federal indictments (one about Trump’s role in fomenting the January 6 insurrection, and the other about his handling of classified documents) are the most immediately vulnerable. Once Trump becomes president, he will have full command and control over the US Department of Justice, and can simply order it to drop all the federal charges against him. Once he does, those cases will simply go away.  The White House does have a longstanding norm of non-interference with criminal prosecutions, but this norm is nothing more than that — a voluntary limit that past presidents placed on their own exercise of power in order to prevent politicization of the criminal justice system. As president, Trump is under no constitutional obligation to obey this norm. He nominates the attorney general, and he can fire the head of the Justice Department at any time. Indeed, Trump is reportedly considering Aileen Cannon, a judge who has consistently tried to sabotage one of the Justice Department’s prosecutions of Trump, to be the US attorney general. Cannon, who oversees Trump’s federal classified documents’ trial, even tried to disrupt the Justice Department’s investigation into Trump before he was indicted. There’s no indication that her apparent loyalty to Trump would diminish if she becomes the nation’s top prosecutor. The fate of the state charges is a little more uncertain, but they are unlikely to amount to anything either The fate of the state charges against Trump is a little more uncertain, in large part because there’s never been a state indictment of a sitting president before, so there are no legal precedents governing what happens if a state attempts such a prosecution (or, in the case of New York, to impose a serious sentence on a president who was already convicted). It is highly unlikely that the state prosecutions can move forward, however, at least until Trump leaves office. On the federal level, the Department of Justice has long maintained that it cannot indict a sitting president for a variety of practical reasons: The burden of defending against criminal charges would diminish the president’s ability to do their job, as would the “public stigma and opprobrium occasioned by the initiation of criminal proceedings.” Additionally, if the president were incarcerated, that would make it “physically impossible for the president to carry out his duties.” There’s little doubt that the current Supreme Court, which recently held that Trump is immune to prosecution for many crimes he committed while in office, would embrace the Justice Department’s reasoning. The Court’s decision in Trump v. United States, the immunity case, rested on the Republican justices’ belief that, if a president could be indicted for official actions taken in office, he “would be chilled from taking the ‘bold and unhesitating action’ required of an independent Executive.”  The kind of justices who favor such “bold and unhesitating action” over ensuring presidential accountability to the law are unlikely to tolerate a prosecution of a sitting president. These same practical considerations would apply with equal force to a state prosecution of a president, and there’s also one other reason why a constitutional limit on state indictments of the president makes sense. Without such a limit, a state led by the president’s political enemies could potentially bring frivolous criminal charges against that president. This argument may not seem particularly compelling when applied to a convicted criminal like Donald Trump. But imagine if, say, Ron DeSantis’s Florida had attempted to indict, try, and imprison President Joe Biden. Or if the state of Mississippi had indicted President Lyndon Johnson to punish him for signing civil rights legislation that ended Jim Crow.  In constitutional law, the same rule that applies to liberal democratic presidents like Biden or Johnson must also apply to an anti-democratic president like Trump. One open question is whether Trump could be incarcerated during the lame-duck period before he is sworn into office. The only state that could conceivably do this is New York, the only place where Trump has been convicted. Trump is currently scheduled for a sentencing hearing on November 26 in that case. The question of whether an already-convicted president-elect can be incarcerated is unique — this situation has thankfully never arisen before in US history, so there’s no definitive law on this subject. But it’s worth noting that neither the New York prosecutors nor the judge overseeing this case have pushed for a quick sentencing process. Judge Juan Merchan chose to delay sentencing until after the election, and the prosecution did not oppose this move. Merchan may decide to delay matters even further now that Trump has won the election. And even if the sentencing does move forward, the charges against Trump in New York are relatively minor, and could only result in him being fined or sentenced to probation. Again, there’s never been a state prosecution of a sitting president before, so there are no precedents to rely on here. It’s possible that, once Trump leaves office, New York or Georgia (the other state with an open case against Trump) may try to resume its long-pending prosecutions against him — although that assumes that the 78-year-old Trump survives his second term in office, and that these states still have the will to prosecute him four years from now. The bottom line is that these prosecutions are likely dead. And they are almost certainly going nowhere for the next four years.

Preview: Ranked choice primary advocates deliver supporters’ signatures to the Idaho Secretary of State at the Idaho Statehouse in Boise, Idaho, on Tuesday, July 2, 2024. | Darin Oswald/Idaho Statesman/Tribune News Service via Getty Images Tuesday might have been the last traditional Election Day of my life in Washington, DC, where I’ve been voting for the past 12 years.  The ballot included Initiative 83, a measure adopting ranked choice voting (RCV); it passed overwhelmingly. While it’s possible that the DC government could just refuse to implement the measure (they’ve done it before), it’s more likely that from now on, I’ll be ranking candidates for the DC Council and mayor — not just voting for one candidate per post. This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Ranked choice is an electoral reform that felt like a pipe dream only a few years ago, but has been becoming mainstream over the past decade or so. Alaska, Hawaii, and Maine, have adopted it for some elections to Congress or statewide office. While a small handful of municipalities like San Francisco and Minneapolis have used it for decades, they were recently joined by New York City, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. Alongside DC, the states of Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon all voted Tuesday on adopting the system, and Alaska voted on whether to keep it. Interestingly, only in DC did the system pass. Full disclosure: I voted yes on the DC initiative. I think it probably does more good than harm in the context of our city. First-past-the-post voting clearly has deep flaws, which is why so many places are jumping on the RCV bandwagon. But I also think RCV’s benefits have been oversold and that we should experiment with other ways to make our elections more proportional. Ranked choice voting, explained In ranked choice voting (also called “instant runoff”), voters rank candidates in order. All the first-choice ballots are counted. If no candidate has a majority of first-choice votes, then the candidate with the smallest share is eliminated; their votes are then redistributed based on who their supporters ranked second. This continues until a candidate has an outright majority. I first encountered the idea after the 2000 election. In Florida, 97,488 people voted for Ralph Nader; of whom only 537 would have had to vote for Al Gore to give him the win in the state and thus the presidency. What if those Nader voters — who were overwhelmingly liberal — had been able to rank Gore second? Then this would’ve happened naturally, and the failure of left-of-center voters to coordinate wouldn’t have resulted in George W. Bush’s presidency, the war in Iraq, etc. This rationale is also why I support the idea in DC. Here, like a lot of coastal cities, almost all the political competition occurs in the Democratic primary, which is often incredibly crowded. Every four years, good-government folks here try to unseat Anita Bonds, our notoriously ineffective and incompetent at-large city councilor, and every time, multiple challengers wind up dividing the anti-Bonds vote. Two years ago, she won renomination with 36 percent of the vote, while two challengers each got 28 percent. RCV would make it harder for unpopular incumbents to get renominated by dividing the opposition. As a narrow tool to avoid spoiler effects, RCV works quite well. But its supporters also have grander ambitions.  Katherine Gehl, a wealthy former CEO who has bankrolled many recent RCV initiatives, argues that her particular version (called “final five” voting) will almost single-handedly make politicians work together again. Gehl wrote two years ago: Barriers to cooperation fall. Senators and representatives are liberated from the constraints of negative partisanship. They are free to enact solutions to complex problems by reaching across the aisle, innovating and negotiating. The theory is elegant. In final five voting, all candidates — regardless of party — participate in a primary. The top five contenders are then placed on the general election ballot, where voters can rank them.  The hope is that this eliminates the dynamic where partisan primaries push party nominees to ideological extremes, and where fear of such a primary prevents incumbents from compromising or defying their party (see the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, of whom four lost renomination when challenged by a pro-Trump Republican). Then, ranked-choice voting in the general election means candidates compete for No. 2 and No. 3 votes, reducing the incentive to negatively campaign. The case(s) against RCV Sounds great! So why would someone oppose RCV? One possible reason is the finding by political scientist Nolan McCarty that under RCV, precincts with more ethnic minorities see more “ballot exhaustion” (failing to rank as many candidates as one is allowed to). That means, McCarty has argued, that the reform tends to “reduce the electoral influence of racial and ethnic minority communities.”  Work by Lindsey Cormack, an associate professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, has similarly found that “overvoting” (using the same ranking more than once, which means ballots can’t be counted accurately) is more common in minority communities, while University of Pennsylvania’s Stephen Pettigrew and Dylan Radley have found that ballot errors in general are much more common in ranked choice than traditional elections. Anything that raises the specter of reducing electoral influence for minority communities in the US is worth worrying about. That said, I’m not sure this case is disqualifying either. Ranked choice is a significant change that takes time for an electorate to understand and adjust to. I’m not sure that higher error rates for a newly adopted approach to voting indicate these error rates will persist as the practice becomes normalized. To me the more compelling counterargument is that RCV seems unlikely to do anything to reduce partisanship and encourage cross-party compromise. The reason why has to do with the classic case against instant-runoff voting, which you might have heard if you’re friends with social choice theory nerds (as, alas, I am).  One thing you’d want a voting system to do is elect the person who would win in a one-on-one race against every other candidate. This is called the “Condorcet winner,” and while there isn’t always one in an election, when there is one, it seems like a good election system should give them the win, as the person the electorate prefers to all alternatives. Ranked choice voting does not always pick the Condorcet winner, and we’ve now seen multiple real-world elections in which the Condorcet winner (which you can figure out from ranked-choice ballot records) lost. In Alaska’s US House special election in 2022, which used ranked choice, the Condorcet winner was Republican Nick Begich, but Democrat Mary Peltola won. Something similar happened in the 2009 Burlington, Vermont, mayoral race. Importantly, in both cases the Condorcet winner was the most moderate of the three main candidates. Begich was to the right of Peltola, but to the left of Sarah Palin (!), the third candidate. In Burlington, the left-wing Progressive Party nominee beat both the Democratic and Republican nominees, though the Democrat (a centrist in Burlington terms) was the Condorcet winner. RCV advocates note that these are two cases out of thousands of RCV elections, and that in practice, Condorcet failures are rare. I’m not so sure about that.  Research from Nathan Atkinson, Edward Foley, and Scott Ganz used a national ranked choice survey of American voters to simulate what elections would look like under the system nationwide. For each state, they simulate 100,000 elections with four candidates. They find that in 40 percent of cases, the Condorcet winner loses, which suggests that the rarity of Condorcet failures in practice may just be an artifact of RCV being relatively new, and that such outcomes would become more common in time as the method spreads. Worse, the simulation paper finds that the system results in much more extreme winners (that is, winners who are farther away from the median voter) than one that picks the Condorcet winner. Indeed, “the states where [the system] performs worst (including Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia) are among the most polarized, whereas the states where [it] performs the best (including Massachusetts, North Dakota, and Vermont) are among the least polarized.” The system seems to actually encourage polarization, not avoid it. DC aside, voters themselves on Tuesday mostly opposed RCV. In Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon, electorates all voted down ballot initiatives that would have introduced some form of RCV. In Alaska, a ballot initiative to repeal that state’s RCV is currently slightly ahead. New America political scientist Lee Drutman was once such a great fan of RCV that he wrote a book calling for it, but has in recent years come to think it’s hardly the cure for polarization and dysfunction he once viewed it as, in part due to findings like Atkinson, et al. A better solution, he argues, is to strengthen parties and encourage more of them to form.  States should allow “fusion voting,” in which candidates can run on multiple parties’ lines (New York already does this), and for legislatures, seats should be allocated proportionally: If there are 100 seats, and Democrats and Republicans each get 45 percent of the vote and Greens and Libertarians each get 5, then they should get 45, 45, 5, and 5 seats, respectively. This is a much more radical change than ranked choice voting, and requires a real rethinking by politicians. It’s hard to imagine a DC with multiple functional political parties, or where anyone important isn’t a Democrat. But it’s worth trying it and experimenting. We have learned a lot from trying RCV, and we can learn even more. Update, November 6, 11:19 am ET: This story was originally published on November 6 and has been updated to include the results on numerous state ballot initiatives around ranked choice voting.

Preview: Children as young as 5 have shown to already have a basic understanding of presidents and elections. Support independent journalism that matters — become a Vox Member today. Following a heated presidential contest, political coverage and commentary can feel unavoidable. Kids are not immune — they might be picking up information about the election results from the adults in their lives, at recess, or on social media. As much as parents may think their children are oblivious, research shows kids, including very young ones, are paying attention. One study found that nearly all of the surveyed kids between the ages of 5 and 11 could name the candidates running for president in 2016.  “Kids as young as kindergarten and first grade can name candidates when they see their pictures,” says Erin Pahlke, an associate professor of psychology at Whitman College and a co-author of the study, “and they have a sense of what the candidates believe.” You don’t have to have an in-depth discussion with your child every time they encounter a political topic. When it comes to political conversations with kids, experts say you should answer their questions and quell any fears they may have — but avoid telling them how to think. When kids are young, teach them about civic engagement Since children as young as 5 are shown to already have a basic understanding of presidents and elections, you can use this early exposure to guide and inform their knowledge. Kids of all ages can learn about civic engagement through activities like mock elections in school or accompanying their parents to the polls on Election Day, says clinical psychologist Melissa Goldberg Mintz, author of Has Your Child Been Traumatized? How to Know and What to Do to Promote Healing and Recovery.  You can use this experience to teach kids how elections work. Children as young as 5 can grasp that voters are choosing between two major candidates from opposite parties and for laws that affect where they live, Pahlke says. If an elementary school-aged child has particular interests — maybe they love trains and buses — you could explain how proposed legislation would impact transportation in your city or town, Goldberg Mintz says. But don’t get too in the weeds or too prescriptive. “Something we would not want to do,” she says, “is talk about ‘With global climate change and increasing natural disasters, our city is doomed if we don’t have these protective flood measures.’” Allow kids to lead the dialogue Although children are exposed to more political information than their parents realize, their understanding or the conclusions they draw is sometimes incorrect, Pahlke says. Parents have a responsibility to clear up these misunderstandings, she continues, so ask your kids what they know about certain topics. Watching or reading the news together can be an effective way to start a conversation, says Nicole Caporino, an associate professor of psychology at American University. If any stories trigger fear or confusion, you can discuss the likelihood that their fears will materialize, point out hopeful news stories, and assure them the family will cope with any potential challenges together, Caporino says. Caporino’s research has suggested that most children and adolescents were worried about political issues. Don’t downplay their concerns, Goldberg Mintz says. Do your best to give them an honest answer, but try not to give into fear or negativity, even if you are feeling scared. You might say, “I hear that you’re worried about that, and I have some concerns too. But we’ll figure out ways to get through it if that happens.”  Parents should open the door to these conversations, because chances are children might already be thinking about these topics, Pahlke says. However, you shouldn’t offer up too many details if your child isn’t interested. For example, if you ask your elementary-aged kid, “The presidential election is coming up. Have you heard anything?” and they don’t have a strong opinion or say they haven’t talked about it with their friends, you can leave it at that.  “We don’t ever want to volunteer bloody details or gory information that kids don’t already know about,” Goldberg Mintz says. “We want to be a trustworthy source for them. And if we don’t know the answer, we want to show them how to get to a trustworthy source.” Teens who are closer to voting age can handle discussions about specific policies, Pahlke says, and parents can explain various perspectives and potential outcomes. Parents can also talk with their teens about the importance of voting, Goldberg Mintz says. Encourage them to fact-check what they see on social media Teens are increasingly turning to social media to stay informed, with one 2022 survey finding that half of Gen Z adolescents source their news from online platforms. If your kid asks you a question about something they’ve seen on social media (or sounds as if it originated there), use this as an opportunity to fact-check those claims with them. Check sources like AP Fact Check, Politifact, and Snopes and show them where they can find trusted reporting. To determine a source’s credibility, the News Literacy Project recommends quickly researching the source of your news, determining if the organization has ethical standards, and assessing the quality of the outlet’s other coverage.  “We don’t ever want to volunteer bloody details or gory information that kids don’t already know about.” If your teen doesn’t come to you directly with what they’ve been watching online, you might need to gently broach the conversation. In the case of viral disinformation campaigns, you can ask your child, “Did you see people talking about this on social media?” This way you can glean information about what your kid is seeing online and correct any inaccuracies. Let them come to their own conclusions High schoolers will have more nuanced understandings about certain current events and policies and it’s appropriate to discuss these topics with them, Pahlke says. But rather than paint various candidates or points of view as “good” or “bad,” help them consider different perspectives. Explain why people with various experiences would have different opinions on a topic. It’s fine if they align with a particular candidate or policy, but they should also be able to see where the other side is coming from. Perspective-taking can help them in other relationships, too, Pahlke says. Teens may also have a clear understanding of their personal values and can reflect on how certain candidates or policies reflect these values and goals, Goldberg Mintz says. You can show your teen where to find credible information from trusted news sources on specific candidates and policies and let them make up their minds. “Rather than trying to get in the weeds about ‘This is the candidate that our family can support, and it’s because XYZ’ is trying to define a kid’s beliefs for them,” Goldberg Mintz says. “We let our kids come to their own decisions.” Update, November 6, 11 am ET: This post, originally published on October 31, has been updated following the US presidential election results.

Preview: A voter marks a ballot at a polling location in Crockett, California. | David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images Since the pandemic prompted a spike in crime, politicians from both parties have been running fearmongering, law-and-order campaigns. And it’s becoming clear that many Americans, including liberal voters, are shifting rightward when it comes to their views on criminal justice, despite the fact that crime rates have actually been falling since 2021. Proposition 36, a ballot measure in California, asked voters if they wanted to toughen penalties for drug- and theft-related crimes. And on Tuesday, voters said yes by an overwhelming margin. (With more than half of the votes counted, the yes campaign had won more than 70 percent of the vote.) That Californians — some of the country’s most reliable Democratic voters, who previously passed a ballot measure to reduce penalties for low-level offenses — passed a tough-on-crime measure is sure to lead people to believe that Americans more broadly are looking to roll back some of the progressive reforms that many states have passed. The result didn’t come as a surprise. Polls showed that an overwhelming majority of voters supported Prop 36, and various Democratic and Republican politicians had endorsed it. And while California Gov. Gavin Newsom opposed it, he also wasn’t particularly vocal about doing so, and Vice President Kamala Harris, who’s registered to vote in the state, declined to say how she was voting on the measure. “It goes to show that there is a real disparity between what is right as a matter of policy and then where the temperature is as a matter of politics,” said Insha Rahman, the director of Vera Action, a criminal justice reform advocacy group. It’s not just California. Another ballot measure, which would require some people to serve more time in prison before they qualify for parole, passed by a comfortable margin in Colorado, a reliably blue state, on Tuesday as well. All are further signs that the criminal justice reform era — that is, the movement that successfully pushed for a more forgiving criminal justice system and for policies to decrease the US prison population — is facing a stubborn and serious backlash. At least for now.  Why voters aren’t moved by falling crime rates The way people feel about crime doesn’t tend to match up with actual stats. Before the pandemic, crime had been steadily declining across the country for almost 30 years. (Violent crime and shoplifting briefly rose during the pandemic, but overall crime rates have continued to trend downward since.) But almost every year during that period, the majority of Americans thought crime was getting worse, according to Gallup. The last few years have been no different. In 2023, the same poll showed that 77 percent of Americans believed that crime was increasing despite FBI data showing the opposite. In 2023, murders were down by nearly 12 percent, and in the first half of this year, murders declined by another 23 percent.  As I wrote earlier this year, there are two main reasons Americans tend to overestimate the extent to which crime happens: Media coverage of crime can often overstate trends and sometimes sensationalizes incidents that grab people’s attention. And law-and-order campaigns — the kind of campaigns that Trump ran, for example — are a mainstay of American politics and appear in virtually every election cycle in local, state, and national races.  In the decade before the pandemic, however, criminal justice reform advocates succeeded in highlighting racial disparities in the prison system and the many injustices in various sentencing laws. As the prison population boomed after the tough-on-crime era of the 1990s — and peaked around 2008 — Americans became more open to having a more forgiving criminal justice system, and law-and-order campaigns saw fewer successes.  Many progressive reforms aimed at reducing the prison population — including lowering penalties, legalizing drugs, and declining to prosecute petty crimes — passed. States across the country, both Republican and Democrat, implemented laws that aimed to reduce their overall prison populations. California was a part of that push, and in 2014, voters passed a ballot measure to reduce penalties for low-level offenses.  The crime spike in 2020, however, put a stop to that momentum, and Americans started to look at a few of those reforms with some regret. California and Colorado voters aren’t alone. Oregon, for example, recriminalized drugs after decriminalizing them in 2020, and Louisiana passed a slew of laws that reduced parole eligibility and imposed harsher sentences. Progressive prosecutors who championed lowering penalties and loosening enforcement of petty crimes have been voted out of office. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Americans are irrational: The United States is, after all, a relatively violent country and has a higher homicide rate than its peers. But while crime is a problem, lawmakers tend to react too quickly to crime trends, often by passing shortsighted tough-on-crime laws that bolster the perception of public safety by, say, putting more cops on the streets, but end up exacerbating the existing flaws of the criminal justice system, including sending poorer and more marginalized people to prison. In California’s case, voters have really been pushing for tougher law enforcement. Earlier this year, San Francisco voters passed a ballot measure that would subject welfare recipients to drug tests and expanded police surveillance. Now, the rest of the state showed that the appetite for tough-on-crime laws isn’t going away. And the ballot measure in Colorado showed that other parts of the country are probably feeling the same way. What Prop 36 means for California — and the rest of the country The new California law would roll back some previous reforms from the 2014 ballot measure that reduced penalties for low-level crimes. Specifically, it would turn some thefts that are currently classified as misdemeanors into a felony charge if someone has already been convicted of theft at least twice — no matter the value of stolen goods. It would also turn certain drug possession charges that were previously a misdemeanor into a “treatment-mandated felony.” That means that people caught with certain amounts of hard drugs would be required to seek treatment, but if they fail to complete it, they could end up serving up to three years in prison. Over the last two decades, California’s prison population has significantly declined. But laws like Prop 36 will likely reverse some of that progress. “It is likely that jail and prison admissions will go up in the state of California,” Rahman, of Vera Action, said.  More than that, the ballot measure’s success will likely encourage other states to enact tougher laws. If even California’s liberal voters supported the measure, then wouldn’t other constituencies across the country want something similar, if not even tougher? “It will absolutely put wind in the sales of opponents of [criminal justice] reform,” Rahman said. Colorado voters will add to that sentiment. Under Proposition 128, which also passed by a wide margin, people convicted of violent crimes — including second-degree murder, sexual assault, and aggravated robberies — will have to serve at least 85 percent of their prison sentence before becoming eligible for parole, up from 75 percent.  That said, these ballot measures don’t necessarily provide the full picture. Rahman, for example, highlights lower-profile battles that criminal justice reform advocates have recently won, including some drug decriminalization and legalization efforts.  For now, though, there’s one lesson for criminal justice reform advocates: “The big story here is to say that just because we had one high-profile prominent loss, doesn’t mean the momentum for criminal justice reform is dead,” Rahman said, referring to Prop 36. “Reform is still happening, but it’s in the shadows, and it’s on us to pay as much attention to those wins as it is to the one big loss.”

Preview: Donald Trump undermined public health measures during the Covid-19 pandemic. What would he do in a future health emergency? | Win McNamee/Getty Images Donald Trump left his first term as president amid a raging global pandemic. Now he will return to the White House with public health authorities on high alert for another disease threat. Public health preparedness is not usually a top question for voters and neither Donald Trump nor Vice President Kamala Harris were meaningfully pressed on the issue during the 2024 campaign. But they should have been. During Trump’s first term, we saw the damaging consequences of a leader who is disinterested in science and unwilling to tell uncomfortable truths to his political base. The Covid-19 pandemic would have challenged any president, but evidence suggests that Trump’s leadership contributed to unnecessary deaths: As many as 40 percent of American lives lost in the first year of the pandemic, according to one estimate.  Now we are staring down the threat of H5N1, or bird flu, which continues to spread through America’s dairy herds and infect an increasing number of humans. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced Wednesday that the virus had been detected in a pig at an Oregon farm; scientists have long worried about the virus crossing into pigs, as they resemble humans genetically more than dairy cows or chickens do. That could increase the risk that H5N1 will evolve in a way that makes it more transmissible among humans. If bird flu were to spiral into a pandemic, we would look back at this as a critical time to prepare. But while the Biden-Harris administration’s response has certainly been lax in some respects, Trump was on the campaign trail threatening to defund schools that require their students to be vaccinated and pledging to install anti-public health establishment crusaders into senior roles in his White House.  If the worst comes to pass again, would the sequel be any better?  Probably not, experts told me. I started reporting this story with a smidge of optimism: While Trump had clearly been a problematic communicator during Covid-19, his administration was responsible for Operation Warp Speed, which delivered effective vaccines in record-setting time and likely saved hundreds of thousands of lives. That was a major, unexpected accomplishment for which the Trump administration deserves credit. But rather than lay claim to such a big, beautiful success, Trump has mostly shunned it. Instead, he has embraced America’s most notorious vaccine skeptic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and promised him a prominent place in the White House. (Republican Sen. Marco Rubio told CNN on November 6 that he expects the Senate would be open to confirming Kennedy to a high-level position should Trump decide to put him forward.) That is probably a better signal of what would happen in Trump’s next term.  In a future emergency, Trump “would make a political calculation, and not one based on what needed to be done,” Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me before the election. “Infectious disease in general has been completely subsumed by a tribal lens, and the tribe that is supportive of him is antagonistic to a proactive approach to public health.” What an H5N1 response might look like under Trump Let’s establish a couple of things. First, while there has been sustained concern among infectious disease experts this year about H5N1 due to a steady drip of human infections, the virus has not yet ignited a pandemic. Maybe it never will. H5N1 has been infecting humans off and on for more than 20 years.  Whether it’s bird flu or something else, new diseases have been emerging more often in the 20th and 21st centuries, and many scientists expect the frequency of pandemics to only increase as climate change and globalization create more opportunities for diseases to cross over in humans and spread among them.   It’s inevitable that we’ll face another pandemic. The question is only what will cause the next one, and when. For now, H5N1 is the suspect drawing the most attention.  Second, the Biden administration’s response to H5N1 has been very flawed. Vanity Fair recently investigated the inaction of the USDA, which has taken primary responsibility for the H5N1 response so far because most of the cases have been in livestock animals: chickens, turkeys, and now dairy cows.  This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Experts say the federal agency has been overly accommodating of agricultural industry interests, which has allowed the virus to continue escaping containment and tear through dairy farms across the country. The USDA has largely deferred to states to take the lead on H5N1, and state agricultural officials, especially in big farm states, are typically even more deferential to agribusiness than the federal government.  In Missouri, state officials have been slow to act after the discovery of a human case with no obvious connection to farm animals. “They are overtly evading the fact that dairy cattle in Missouri are infected. They don’t want to find them,” Adalja told me. Adalja said Trump, after he takes over, could actively weaken the federal government’s ability to respond to a pandemic threat.  Trump has said he would “probably” shutter the White House pandemic office, tasked with coordinating a response across the government in a future crisis. He has threatened to cut off federal funding for schools that institute vaccine or mask mandates. He has also pledged to slash the government budget and singled out the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as a candidate for cuts. And while the bird flu response under Biden has been dysfunctional, there has at least been some attempt to centralize a response. The administration has offered nearly $100 million for dairy farms to take preventive measures and has also signed a deal with Moderna to develop a new H5N1 vaccine, while adding to the stockpiles of existing flu vaccine prototypes.  But in another Trump presidency, states could be empowered to take an even more relaxed approach to public health, and leaders in Republican-controlled states would be motivated by the same public health skepticism as their conservative voters. The political environment would be ripe for a free-for-all in state-level responses, amplifying the divergences we saw during Covid-19, when some states allowed businesses and schools to reopen months before others did and even banned cities from setting mask or vaccine requirements. A second Trump administration will likely also be staffed by people who are even more skeptical of public health interventions than we saw in his first term. In 2020, Trump still had credible infectious disease experts on his team, like Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Deborah Birx, who served as the White House Covid response coordinator, even if he frequently undermined them. Next time, it’s unlikely there would be any such voices in the room. The internal deliberations would instead be dominated by the likes of RFK Jr. or Florida Surgeon General Joseph Lapado, another vaccine skeptic who has been floated as a possible Trump appointee. To lead the USDA, Trump is reportedly eyeing Texas agriculture commissioner Sid Miller, who told Vanity Fair that bird flu is “not a big deal. It’s not even a little deal.” He has refused to cooperate with the CDC on testing farm workers in his state. “Those types of people are all that’s left” to serve in a Trump administration, Adalja said. “People with expertise are not going to want to be part of it or be selected.” It’s a frightening scenario to contemplate, and it illustrates our collective difficulty planning for unlikely but potentially catastrophic events. We all just lived through an experiment in what happens when the government struggles to respond to a health crisis. Yet even at the beginning of Covid, I heard from public health experts who worried we would not internalize the pandemic’s lessons, that public health would be shunted to the side after the urgency had passed. They’ve mostly been proven right. To be clear, the failure to learn from the example of Covid and prepare now for future pandemics with smart policies — many of which you can read about in Future Perfect’s Pandemic-Proof package — is bipartisan. There was a stark absence of public health plans from the 2024 campaign, even having endured a pandemic so recently and staring down the possibility of another one so soon. We may end up worse off as a result. Update, November 6, 9:27 am ET: This story, published October 30, has been updated multiple times, most recently with the news of Donald Trump’s presidential win.

Preview: BMW reported a sharp drop in profitability for its key automotive unit, hit by costs of a recall and weak demand in China, even as it forecast stronger earnings in the fourth quarter.

Preview: The pharmaceutical giant narrowed its full-year guidance after its blockbuster Wegovy weight-loss drug beat sales expectations in the third quarter.

Preview: The German chemical and consumer-goods company, which owns brands including Persil and Schwarzkopf, reported higher sales and backed expectations for the year.

Preview: The Danish jeweler now sees 2024 sales coming in toward the high end of its previous forecast despite a sluggish environment for luxury goods.

Preview: Commerzbank raised its full-year outlook after net profit came in ahead of analysts’ expectations.

Preview: The Japanese auto giant cut its annual forecast for group vehicle sales after its second-quarter profit more than halved due partly to weaker sales globally.

Preview: UniCredit lifted its earnings guidance for the year after reporting a net profit increase that exceeded expectations.

Preview: The real-estate company posted a net loss of 592 million euros for the first nine months of 2024, and continues to expect its full-year result to reach the upper end of its guidance range.

Preview: The French lender reported a better-than-expected fall in net profit and confirmed its guidance for the year.

Preview: The Japanese automaker cut its annual forecasts for car sales and net profit after posting a drop in first-half earnings due partly to weakness in its auto business in China.

Preview: Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday conceded in the presidential race against President-elect Donald Trump, officially closing the book on one of the most tumultuous elections in U.S. history.

Preview: American University historian Allan Lichtman, famed for a model that has correctly predicted the popular vote in almost all recent presidential elections, took to social media to admit his mistake and take a swipe at a fellow prognosticator.

Preview: In response to Donald Trump's presidential election victory, various liberal and activist groups have expressed different approaches to handling the next four years. While some groups called for healing and community support, others prepared for active resistance and legal battles.

Preview: Just as consumers may finally be coming to grips with the cost-of-living crisis, legislators in several states are poised to restrict access to credit in 2025.

Preview: What if you were allowed to vote only because it didn't make a difference? What if no matter how you voted, the elites always got their way?

Preview: It was the equivalent of a political earthquake. Former President Donald Trump's historic White House win reverberated Wednesday through Washington, D.C., and the nation after an astonishing comeback that upended political expectations, pollsters and the party elite.

Preview: On today's Front Page: Donald Trump will return to the White House as only the second person to win a non-consecutive term as president of the United States, Republicans will take control of the Senate in the next Congress after flipping the minimum two seats, and more.

Preview: In late October, the Israeli parliament passed two laws that ban the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East -- UNWRA -- from operating in Israeli territory and prohibits Israeli cooperation with it.

Preview: Senate Republicans, fresh off winning the majority, will pick a new leader next week in a three-way race that could stir up some discord at what should be a unifying moment.

Preview: Vice President Kamala Harris may call her administration's policies progress, but for millions of hardworking Americans -- especially Hispanics -- these policies have drained wallets, dashed dreams and stolen hope.

Preview: Against the will of Liz Cheney, Jennifer Lopez, and Democracy itself, Donald Trump has been elected the 47th President of the United States.

Preview: WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a stirring concession speech following last night's election loss, Kamala Harris announced she would work to ensure a peaceful transition of power to the man she called Adolf Hitler for the last year.

Preview: U.S. — The entire world was still abuzz this morning following the results of the U.S. presidential election, as President-Elect Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris, Hollywood, the news media, the Deep State, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, universities across the country, the Department of Justice, political experts, science, the medical community, and all of Diddy's homies.

Preview: U.S. — With the final votes coming in from the post office out in Calhoun County, the Babylon Bee Decision Desk announced it is now ready to call Alabama for former President Donald Trump.

Preview: PALM BEACH, FL — The day after scoring a sweeping win to retake the White House, President-Elect Donald Trump stunned the American people and proved true what so many had tried to warn about by sporting a new mustache for his victory speech.

Preview: WASHINGTON D.C. - In the wake of their crushing defeat in the 2024 presidential election, Democrats have begun to call for abolishing the popular vote.

Preview: SCRANTON, PA — With the election finally over, the Presidential candidates finally found common ground in their joy over not having don't to visit Pennsylvania ever again.

Preview: U.S. — The gender gap was once again proven to be real as a woman was only awarded 78% of the vote that a man got.

Preview: U.S. — The votes are in. The people have spoken. Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States, has just won his third presidential election in a row.

Preview: U.S. — President Donald Trump has officially beaten yet another woman, remaining undefeated against women.

Preview: The post Today’s Historic Front Page: November 6, 2024 appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: WASHINGTON—Calling on all Democrats to step up and donate in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election, a fundraising email sent out Wednesday by the Democratic National Committee pleaded for a donation of $20 to help cheer them up. “ATTENTION VOTERS: Kamala Harris and her fellow Democrats woke up this morning […] The post DNC Email Pleads For $20 To Cheer Them Up appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: STEWARTSTOWN, PA—With Donald Trump decisively winning a second term as president, local sources reported this week that those tireless civil rights crusaders weren’t so smug now, were they? “This ought to shut up those self-satisfied supporters of civil rights for a while,” said Trump voter Henry Pluss, stressing that it was about time somebody put […] The post Tireless Civil Rights Crusaders Not So Smug Now appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: WASHINGTON—In a historic outcome that promised to halt the rising scourge of the United States in its tracks, America has defeated America at the ballot box, sources confirmed Wednesday. “After 248 years of tense and often divisive conflict, we can finally say, as of this morning, that the nation turned out at the polls and […] The post America Defeats America appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: WASHINGTON—Sinking deep into the blissful delusion that they were the “Chairman of the Board,” residents of the mentally broken nation reportedly began dressing and speaking like Frank Sinatra on Wednesday. In what appeared to be an increasingly bizarre coping mechanism, the deeply unwell Americans—regardless of their age, their cultural background, or what part of the […] The post Mentally Broken Nation Starts Dressing, Speaking Like Frank Sinatra appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: PALM BEACH, FL—In a five-minute phone call that both campaigns described as largely cordial, President-elect Donald Trump reportedly called Vice President Kamala Harris Wednesday morning to congratulate himself on winning. “Madame Vice President, I want to be the first to congratulate myself on running one heck of a campaign, and to let you know I’m […] The post Trump Calls Harris To Congratulate Himself On Winning appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: The happy couple exchanged nuptial vows after meeting four years ago on the dating app WeFuck.  The post James Howington IV and Charlotte Glass-Genevoix appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: A Russian court has demanded Google pay $20 decillion—or 20 followed by 33 zeros—for restricting Russian state media channels on YouTube, a sum so unfathomably large that it dwarfs the size of the entire global economy. What do you think? The post Russia Fines Google $20 Decillion appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: WASHINGTON—Crossing their arms and tapping their feet impatiently, election officials across the nation announced Tuesday night that they wouldn’t release the results of the 2024 presidential race until you had brushed your teeth and put on your jammies. “The results are in, the 47th president of the United States has been chosen, and all the […] The post Election Officials Announce Results Won’t Be Available Until After You Brush Teeth, Put On Jammies appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: WASHINGTON—Squirming and saying “no, no, no” while aides attempted to calm him down, second gentleman of the United States Doug Emhoff was forced to sit in a corner at his wife’s election night watch party after getting too hyper, sources reported Tuesday. “Okay, Doug, I know it’s exciting to watch Kamala run for president, but […] The post Doug Emhoff Forced To Sit In Corner Of Election Party After Getting Too Hyper appeared first on The Onion.