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      Don Bacon Defeats Tony Vargas for House Seat in Nebraska

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      The victory of the four-term Republican, who has resisted his party’s veer to the right, dashed Democratic hopes of flipping a critical district.Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, one of the most politically vulnerable Republicans in the country, has defeated his Democratic challenger and won a fifth term, according to The Associated Press. His victory denies Democrats one of their best opportunities this year to pick up a seat and bolsters his party’s drive to hold its majority.The race was the second matchup between Mr. Bacon and Tony Vargas, who came within 6,000 votes of unseating the congressman in 2022. Mr. Vargas came up short again on Friday evening, even after top Democrats including Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader, and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, then the vice-presidential nominee, traveled to the Omaha district to support his campaign.The contest between Mr. Bacon, 61, a former brigadier general in the Air Force, and Mr. Vargas, 40, a former public-school teacher who is the son of Peruvian immigrants, featured debates over national issues including abortion rights, taxes and public safety.But it was also a test of whether there was still a place in the G.O.P. for a mainstream lawmaker like Mr. Bacon, who has staked out a reputation on Capitol Hill as an independent voice in a party increasingly dominated by the hard right — and whether he could survive in a liberal-leaning district won by President Biden.Nebraska’s Second Congressional District centers on Omaha, often referred to as the “blue dot,” in reference to its uniquely liberal leanings in an otherwise red state. But Republicans have represented it in the House since the mid-1990s, with the exception of one two-year term from 2015 to 2017.Mr. Bacon was first elected in 2016, in a year when Donald J. Trump also carried the district. But he was able to appeal to voters across the aisle; in 2020, when Mr. Biden won the district, Mr. Bacon was re-elected by the widest margin he has ever enjoyed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Is About to Face the Choice That Dooms Many Presidencies

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      As happens every time a new president is elected, Donald Trump is experiencing a sudden role reversal. His campaign to earn support from voters has ended abruptly and a new one has begun among donors and activists to earn his support for their priorities. The election was about tax cuts, or maybe cryptocurrency, the arguments go. What Americans really want, sir, is fewer protections on the job and a weaker safety net.This is the first moment when presidencies go wrong. Rather than prepare to govern on behalf of the electorate that put them in power — especially the independent swing voters who by definition provide the margin of victory in a two-party system — new presidents, themselves typically members of the donor and activist communities, convince themselves that their personal preferences are the people’s as well. Two years later, their political capital expended and their agendas in shambles, their parties often suffer crushing defeats in midterm elections.As he looks toward his new term, Mr. Trump could claim a mandate to lead however he wishes, huddle with his supporters at Mar-a-Lago and then see how much of their agenda he can advance before his popularity falls too far to effect further change. That is the formula that has left a nation seemingly resigned to the loss of both common purpose and institutional competence. It is not a formula for a successful presidency, let alone for making America great again.He has another option. He is an iconoclastic leader with a uniquely unfiltered relationship to the American people and a disdain for the chattering class of consultants. He is also the first president since Grover Cleveland to get a second shot at a first term. He has already experienced the bruising tax fight that helped bring his approval rating down to 36 percent a year after his inauguration, the failed attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act and the loss of more than 40 House seats and control of the chamber in a midterm election. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, he made a promise to “every citizen” that he would “fight for you, for your family and your future” and that “this will truly be the golden age of America.” Achieving that will require focusing on the challenges and respecting the values broadly shared by not only his voters, but also many others who might come to support him.Take immigration. A promise to secure the border has long been a central aspect of Mr. Trump’s appeal, and Democrats are now clambering to get on his side of the issue. A Trump administration serving American voters would stanch the flow of migrants with tough border enforcement and asylum restrictions, reverse the Biden administration’s lawlessness by removing recent arrivals and protect American workers and businesses by mandating that employers use the E-Verify program to confirm the legal status of the people who work for them. That program, which strikes at the harm that illegal immigration does to American workers, is wildly popular. A recent survey of 2,000 adults conducted by my organization, American Compass, in partnership with YouGov, found 78 percent support overall and 68 percent support even among Democrats. Law-abiding businesses tend to like it, too — they’re tired of getting undercut by competitors that get away with breaking the rules.That’s the path to solving the problem. Mr. Trump will hear a lot of counterarguments from the affluent and influential class that builds its business model on underpaid, undocumented labor, especially in industries such as construction and hospitality, where he has personal experience, as well as in agriculture. Those voices are likely to suggest that instead he condescend to the masses with border theater and hostile rhetoric, while expanding temporary worker programs. To this end, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who opposes the E-Verify program on libertarian grounds, has already been mentioned as a potential candidate for secretary of agriculture. Moves like that will keep the guests at Mr. Trump’s golf clubs happy but ensure growing frustration and disillusion elsewhere.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Howard Lutnick Is Scouting Trump’s Nominees. Some Will Oversee His Interests.

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      Howard Lutnick, co-chair of the president-elect’s transition team and a Wall Street financier, is leading the search for appointees while still running his businesses.The financier Howard Lutnick has been given a high-profile assignment from President-elect Donald J. Trump, one that raises questions about the Wall Street executive’s dual role and what he might gain from it.As co-chair of the transition team, Mr. Lutnick is in charge of identifying 4,000 new hires to fill the second Trump administration, including antitrust officials, securities lawyers and national security advisers who have global expertise.But Mr. Lutnick has not stepped away from running financial firms that serve corporate clients, traders, cryptocurrency platforms and real estate ventures around the world — all of which are regulated by the same agencies whose appointees he is helping to find.Given his sprawling business interests, it’s not known how Mr. Lutnick might keep from violating the transition’s own code of ethics, which echo federal conflict-of-interest guidelines for transition team members. The Trump transition guidelines say that individuals who work on the team must disqualify themselves from matters that may directly conflict with their own financial interests or those of an organization with which they do business.It is not clear whether Mr. Lutnick, who gained national attention when many of his employees died in the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, has signed the code of ethics or whether he has recused himself from providing lists of possible nominees for any specific agencies that have oversight of his businesses.Mr. Lutnick declined an interview request from The New York Times. People who work with Mr. Lutnick say that he is careful about separating his private business from his transition work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Could the Bond Market Stymie Trump’s Economic Plans?

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      Some fiscal hawks worry that Trump’s policies would increase the deficit and fuel inflation.With Republicans poised to seize control of Congress, Donald Trump’s economic plans could face little legislative resistance. The president-elect has vowed to escalate tariffs, extend a corporate tax cut and introduce tax breaks on tips and Social Security benefits, policies that some fiscal hawks worry would increase the federal deficit, and with it, inflation.But even if Trump faces meager resistance on Capitol Hill, another force may temper his policies: the bond market.While stocks just pulled off a record-setting week, with the S&P 500 gaining roughly 5 percent since Election Day, a volatile bond market signals that investors have some worries that an unchecked Trump agenda might stimulate growth but worsen the country’s debt burden.“If the Trump administration runs excessively stimulative fiscal policy, with lots of spending and tax cuts, leading to even wider deficits, I think then that may cause the bond vigilantes to push yields up to levels that create problems for the economy,” Ed Yardeni, the president of Yardeni Research, told DealBook.Yardeni, a veteran Wall Street analyst, coined the term “bond vigilantes” in the 1980s to describe the influence that frustrated bondholders can have on the policy agendas of politicians and central bankers. He sees a potential for bond vigilantes to pose a risk to the Trump agenda, too.The United States sells Treasury bonds and notes to fund big parts of the federal government. These auctions provide the lifeblood of the U.S. economy, and the yields on Treasuries are viewed as a real-time gauge of the country’s financial health. Yields tend to climb when investors anticipate economic growth accelerating inflation, and expect the Fed may have to raise rates to slow the economy. Higher yields mean the government pays more to borrow.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Democrats and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics

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      Some Democrats are finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke.Donald Trump won a majority of white women and remarkable numbers of Black and Latino voters and young men.Democratic insiders thought people would vote for Kamala Harris, even if they didn’t like her, to get rid of Trump. But more people ended up voting for Trump, even though many didn’t like him, because they liked the Democratic Party less.I have often talked about how my dad stayed up all night on the night Harry Truman was elected because he was so excited. And my brother stayed up all night the first time Trump was elected because he was so excited. And I felt that Democrats would never recover that kind of excitement until they could figure out why they had turned off so many working-class voters over the decades, and why they had developed such disdain toward their once loyal base.Democratic candidates have often been avatars of elitism — Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and second-term Barack Obama. The party embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation, and it supported diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like “Latinx,” and “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).This alienated half the country, or more. And the chaos and antisemitism at many college campuses certainly didn’t help.“When the woke police come at you,” Rahm Emanuel told me, “you don’t even get your Miranda rights read to you.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Elites Had It Coming

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      Everyone has a moment when they first realized that Donald Trump might well return, and here is mine. It was back in March, during a visit to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, when I happened to read the explanatory text beside an old painting. This note described the westward advance of the United States in the 19th century as “settler colonialism.” I read it and I knew instantly where this nation was going.My problem with this bit of academic jargon was not that it was wrong, per se, or that President Biden was somehow responsible for putting it there, but rather that it offered a glimpse of our poisoned class relations. Some curator at one of our most exalted institutions of public instruction had decided to use a currently fashionable, morally loaded academic keyword to address a visitor to the museum — say, a family from the Midwest, doing the round of national shrines — and teach them a lesson about American wickedness.Twenty years ago I published a book about politics in my home state of Kansas where white, working-class voters seemed to be drifting into the arms of right-wing movements. I attributed this, in large part, to the culture wars, which the right framed in terms of working-class agony. Look at how these powerful people insult our values!, went the plaint, whether they were talking about the theory of evolution or the war on Christmas.This was worth pointing out because working people were once the heart and soul of left-wing parties all over the world. It may seem like a distant memory, but not long ago, the left was not a movement of college professors, bankers or high-ranking officers at Uber or Amazon. Working people: That’s what parties of the left were very largely about. The same folks who just expressed such remarkable support for Donald Trump.My Kansas story was mainly about Republicans, but I also wrote about the way the Democrats were gradually turning away from working people and their concerns. Just think of all those ebullient Democratic proclamations in the ’90s about trade and tech and globalization and financial innovation. What a vision they had: All those manifestoes about futurific “wired workers” or the “learning class” … all those speeches about how Democrats had to leave the worker-centric populism of the 1930s behind them … all those brilliant triangulations and reaching out to the right. When I was young, it felt like every rising leader in the Democratic Party was making those points. That was the way to win voters in what they called “the center,” the well-educated suburbanites and computer-literate professionals whom everybody admired.Well, those tech-minded Democrats got exactly what they set out to get, and now here we are. At the Republican convention in July, JD Vance described the ruination visited on his working-class town in Ohio by NAFTA and trade with China, both of which he blamed at least in part on Mr. Biden, and also the human toll taken by the Iraq War, which he also contrived to blame on Mr. Biden. Today Mr. Vance is the vice president-elect, and what I hope you will understand, what I want you to mull over and take to heart and remember for the rest of your life, is that he got there by mimicking the language that Americans used to associate with labor, with liberals, with Democrats.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      This Is All Joe Biden’s Fault

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      Kamala Harris lost the election this week, but I mostly don’t blame her. At least, I don’t blame her because of anything she did recently. Since she became the unofficial nominee in July, she played a difficult hand about as well as she could have, running a disciplined campaign that sought to reassure Americans about the economic issues that trouble them most, in a political environment that was very rough for Democrats and for incumbent parties around the world.But where did that bad hand come from? It was dealt to her by two people: President Biden, who produced a governing record she could not effectively defend or run away from; and herself, with all the toxic position-taking she did in 2019, generating endless attack ad fodder for Donald Trump. And Mr. Biden even bears blame for Ms. Harris’s pre-2020 baggage, since he put her on the ticket in full awareness that she was carrying it.In his own campaign rhetoric, Mr. Biden focused on the idea that democracy itself was on the ballot this year. But if democracy was on the ballot, his actions should have matched his rhetoric at every turn to ensure Democrats would win the election. Instead, he prioritized his own ego and profile.His electoral instincts weren’t always so misguided. During the 2020 primary campaign, Mr. Biden seemed to understand that the left-wing fever dreams that drove that Democratic cycle were electorally hazardous. So, unlike Ms. Harris, he never pledged to ban fracking or abolish private health insurance. He never even filled out the A.C.L.U. questionnaire that prompted Ms. Harris to support federally funded gender-transition surgery for prisoners and detained immigrants.After winning the nomination, Mr. Biden made his first big mistake that would set Democrats on a path with no route to win the 2024 election: He selected Ms. Harris as his running mate.Perversely, Ms. Harris’s apparent weakness as a potential presidential candidate was an asset to Mr. Biden. It helped insulate him from calls to step aside. The case for him running again was simple, and I even made it myself, before June’s disastrous debate: Ms. Harris had run a terrible campaign in 2019, and at the time she regularly polled worse than he did; if Mr. Biden did not seek re-election, it was highly likely that she would end up as the nominee; therefore, he had better run again.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump and Harris Supporters on Election Night

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      The election results came a lot faster than most people expected. On Tuesday, it was just voting and waiting and anxiety and an inner sense that anything was possible, and then by Wednesday morning, one answer: Donald Trump had shifted the country toward him in a decisive win.A scene in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, Nov. 6.Jonno Rattman for The New York TimesTimes Opinion sent a group of photographers — including two students — to Kamala Harris’s watch party at Howard University in Washington, and Mr. Trump’s watch party in West Palm Beach, Fla., to document reactions to the election.At Howard University, supporters of Vice President Harris celebrate as they await the election results.Damon Winter/The New York TimesWaiting for election results at a Trump watch party at the Palm Beach Convention Center.Mark Peterson for The New York TimesHarris supporters in Phoenix show their enthusiasm.Jesse Rieser for The New York TimesAt the election night parties, the photographers captured the true supporters, people experiencing the surge of promise in the results and then the diverging paths. First, in Florida, the exultation of each success as it rolls in, feelings of vindication and validation of Mr. Trump’s decisive win, and an almost disbelief at it. In Washington, there is a hopeful crowd; then, in later photos, the slow and devastating realization that their earlier excitement and vision of the future has faded.Before and after the parties, in other parts of the country, photographers also captured people not knowing what the outcome would be, or knowing it and grasping it in celebration or still recalling the remnants of their Monday excitement that had become, by Wednesday, for Harris supporters, disorienting disappointment.Harris supporters linger on the Howard University campus the day after the election.Damon Winter/The New York TimesHarris supporters at Howard University.Mia Butler for The New York TimesIn Philadelphia, the day after the election.Jonno Rattman for The New York TimesThe sheer size and diversity of the country — at least 69 million people voting for one candidate and at least 73 million voting for the other, joined together by American flags — can be hard to visualize. All of us have been living through the Trump era, which will be another four years.Trump supporters celebrated near Mar-a-Lago the day after the election.Mark Peterson for The New York TimesSupporters of Vice President Harris listening to her concession speech at Howard University.Mia Butler for The New York TimesKatherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and Threads. More