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      Biden library reportedly under threat by Democrats enraged by Hunter pardon

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      Senior Democrats are reportedly considering withholding contributions to Joe Biden’s future presidential library amid a mounting backlash over his decision grant a blanket pardon to his son Hunter.The threat has emerged as simmering anger among congressional Democrats – already building over the president’s insistence on seeking a second term before belatedly stepping aside as the party nominee in favour of Kamala Harris – has burst into the open over Sunday’s pardon, which Biden had previously vowed not to give.Axios reported that party grandees were considering taking out their “rage” on Biden’s library project. Planning for the library, in the president’s home state of Delaware, is being spearheaded by the White House deputy chief of staff, Annie Tomasini, and Anthony Bernal, senior adviser to Jill Biden, the first lady.“If they had their shit together, they would have been doing the work on this over the summer – right after he announced he was stepping aside,” the site quoted one unnamed Democrat as saying. “Now, it’s just too late. Hopefully they are rightsizing their expectations and budget!”Presidential libraries – a tradition begun by Franklin D Roosevelt – are generally funded by a combination of private donors, state and local governments, and university partners. Maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration, they are used to house presidents’ papers and documents after they leave office.A source familiar with Biden’s project played down the possibility of donations being withheld, telling Axios: “That sentiment hasn’t come up in a single donor conversation, and work is well under way.”However, the fact that it is being publicly mooted is a sign of the internal party disenchantment following the pardoning of Hunter Biden, 54, who was convicted of lying on gun ownership application forms and separate charges of tax evasion. He had been due to be sentenced on both convictions this month. The act of clemency came less than a month after a demoralising election defeat that many privately blame Biden for.Biden, in his statement, said his son “was treated differently” than other people who had been late paying taxes because they were undergoing addiction problems. Biden pardoned his son for all possible offences committed between 2013 and 2024 – foreclosing the possibility of the incoming Trump administration reopening a case against the younger Biden that might be driven by the president-elect’s often-repeated desire for “retribution” against his political enemies.The judge in the tax case, Mark Scarsi, accused the president of “rewriting history” in a ruling penned after the pardon. He added that Hunter Biden’s tax offences had been committed after the period of his drug and alcohol addiction.A procession of Democratic senators and congressmembers have publicly accused Biden of putting his feelings for his son above the national interest and handing Donald Trump an excuse to abuse the presidential clemency powers.Even Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate and normally a loyal ally of the president, damned him with uncharacteristic reticence this week, telling reporters “I’ve got nothing for you on that” when asked his view.But party insiders say the outrage is a lightning rod for lingering resentment over Biden’s refusal to drop his bid for a second term until it was too late for Harris or other presidential contenders to be stress-tested in primaries and launch a well-prepared presidential campaign.“The pardon is simply a resentment delivery vehicle, like dressing on lettuce,” Philippe Reines, a veteran strategist who helped prepare Harris for September’s debate against Trump – which she was widely viewed to have won – told the New York Times.David Axelrod, a former adviser to Barack Obama, said the pardon gave “a free throw for people who think they can gain political advantage” from separating themselves from an unpopular, outgoing president.“But,” he added, “there’s also genuine concern and anger about the way the last year went down.” More

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      ‘This is not time for retreat or apathy’: Black women dissect Harris loss

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      Misogynoir, the intersection of racism and sexism, was the main reason behind Kamala Harris’s loss in the 2024 general election, a panel of Black female experts argued, noting how post-election coverage has failed to contend with how white supremacy undergirded the election results.In a conversation titled “Views from the 92%: Black Women Reflect on 2024 Election and Road Ahead”, several academics dissected how and why the vice-president lost, particularly given Trump’s problematic history.The panel was hosted by the African American Policy Forum, a social justice thinktank co-founded by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and Columbia University.“Racism is designed in such a way to make you question your humanity, but sexism is also. Sexism is really a power move,” said LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund. “When you combine those two things together, I think that that best explains what [Harris] experienced.”Throughout the 2024 election campaign, Trump and other conservatives launched an onslaught of racist and sexist attacks against Harris: repeatedly claiming that Harris “slept her way” into political power, was unintelligent and that she was not a Black woman.Such attacks are unsurprising given American’s history with racism against Black women, the call participants said. But what was especially frustrating were platforms Trump was given to spread disinformation, Crenshaw argued, specifically calling out Trump being featured at the 2024 National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention.Karen Attiah, the former co-chair of the convention, who stepped down after the announcement that Trump would be interviewed, said the interview was a “viscerally painful experience” which was excused by many “white liberals”. During the contentious interview, Trump questioned Harris’s race, saying she suddenly “became a Black woman”. “Is she Indian or is she Black? I respect either one but she obviously doesn’t because she was Indian all the way and then all of sudden she became a Black woman.” Trump was also repeatedly combative with the interviewer Rachel Scott, the senior congressional correspondent for ABC News, accusing her of being “rude”.“The responses that I personally got for stepping down from white allies or people who are white leaders, was, ‘Well, he was racist and he destroyed your conference, but we needed to see that’ and I was like, ‘At the expense of our dignity[?]’,” she said.Following the general election on 6 November, exit polling showed that 53% of white women voters still supported Trump, calling into question who the legitimate allies of Black women’s interests are, said Melanie Campbell, president and CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation.“After going through this last presidential election, we really have to reassess and have real deep conversations about when these people say they’re your allies. What does that really mean?” she said, arguing that internal organizing of Black women needed to continue taking place.“There was a majority of white women who voted against democracy, against women’s interests, for a racist, for somebody who is proud to have taken away our right to choose.”Crenshaw also called out the mainstream media for failing to hold Trump accountable, as well as post-election coverage that ignored voter suppression tactics carried out by Trump supporters, including a multimillion-dollar initiative led by the billionaire Elon Musk.“Donald Trump was the biggest beneficiary of identity-based preferential treatment in terms of his media coverage,” she said. “He was like a Teflon-coated pan. Unlike Kamala, who was rendered by the media like a static, clean repository, anything would stick to her over and over again. It’s hard to imagine anybody other than a wealthy white male claiming he could shoot someone in broad daylight and get away with it, and then prove to us that this is, in fact, virtually true.”In light of Trump’s win, Black women – who voted for Harris more than any other demographic, need to be prepared to deal with racist attacks from far-right Republicans, argued Barbara Arnwine, president and founder of Transformative Justice Coalition.“It is critical for Black women to not just talk about our magic … We gotta talk about how we fight, how we become a fighting formation, how we are able to know that these battles are going to come, that these kind of things are going to be said, that these kind of attacks are going to be launched.”Looking forward, experts emphasized the importance of continuing to organize internally despite feelings of despondency.Rebuilding freedom schools – educational programs in marginalized communities – creating spaces of communication on social media, akin to “Black Twitter”, targeting disinformation being spread by artificial intelligence, and addressing ongoing attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion are just some of the potential strategies, said the speaker Fran Phillips-Calhoun, an Atlanta Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta.“This really is not time for retreat or apathy,” said Phillips-Calhoun. “We really do have to turn inwards so we can build again.” More

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      Donald Trump didn’t win by a historic landslide. It’s time to nip that lie in the bud | Mehdi Hasan

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      Remember the “big lie”? In 2020, Donald Trump lost the presidential election so Republicans just brazenly lied and insisted he won.In 2024, we have a new post-election lie from the Republican party. Trump didn’t just win, they say, but he won big. He won a landslide. He won an historic mandate for his “Maga” agenda.And it was Trump himself, of course, on election night, who was the first to push this grandiose and self-serving falsehood, calling his win “a political victory that our country has never seen before” and claiming “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate”.Republican politicians, masters of message discipline, quickly followed suit. The representative Elise Stefanik called his win a “historic landslide” while the senator John Barrasso called Trump’s a “huge landslide”. “On November 5 voters decisively elected Donald Trump with a mandate for sweeping change, and they deserve to get it,” wrote the “Doge” co-heads Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in the Wall Street Journal on 20 November.None of this is true. Yes, Trump won the popular vote and the electoral college. Yes, Republicans won the Senate and the House. But, contrary to both Republican talking points and breathless headlines and hot takes from leading media outlets (“resounding”, “rout”, “runaway win”), there was really nothing at all historic or huge about the margin of victory.Repeat after me: there was no “landslide”. There was no “blowout”. There was no “sweeping” mandate given to Trump by the electorate. The numbers don’t lie.First, consider the popular vote. Yes, Trump became the first Republican for two decades to win the popular vote. However, per results from CNN, the Cook Political Report, and the New York Times, he did not win a majority of the vote. Barack Obama did in both 2008 and 2012. Joe Biden did in 2020. But Donald Trump failed to do so in 2024.And the former president’s margin of victory over Harris is a miniscule 1.6 percentage points, “smaller than that of every winning president since 1888 other than two: John F Kennedy in 1960 and Richard M. Nixon in 1968”, as an analysis in the New York Times noted last month. In fact, in the 55 presidential elections in which the popular vote winner became president, 49 of them were won with a margin bigger than Trump’s in 2024.We actually know what a landslide in the popular vote looks like: the Democrat Lyndon Johnson defeated the Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964 by an enormous margin of 22.6 percentage points!Second, consider the electoral college. Trump won 307 votes, which is 37 more than is needed to secure victory in the electoral college. But it’s still far fewer than Bill Clinton won in 1992 (370) and 1996 (379) and far fewer than Barack Obama won in 2008 (365) and 2012 (332). And it is pretty similar to what Trump himself won in 2016 (304) and what Biden won in 2020 (306). Trump’s margin of victory in the electoral college ranks 44 out of the 60 presidential elections in American history.We actually know what a landslide win in the electoral college looks like: the Republican Ronald Reagan won re-election with a whopping 525 electoral college votes in 1984!By the way, did you know that Trump won the crucial blue wall states – Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – by 231,000 votes? So if just 116,000 voters across those three swing states – or 0.7% of the total – had switched from Trump to Harris, it is the vice-president who would have won the electoral college … and the presidency!Third, consider the so-called “coattails” effect, where a presidential candidate’s massive margin of victory also boosts their party’s numbers in Congress. In 2024, Republicans flipped the Senate and held onto the House but Trump still ended up having “limited coattails”, to quote from the New York Times analysis. Of the five battleground states (Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania) which held Senate races in November, the Republican candidate triumphed in only one of them (David McCormick in Pennsylvania, by a narrow 16,000 votes). Democrats held on to the other four.So where were the Trump coattails in the Senate?Meanwhile, over in the House of Representatives, Republicans held onto control of the chamber with the aid of an extremely partisan and anti-democratic gerrymander in North Carolina, signed off by a conservative-majority state supreme court. They are on course for what the CNN election analyst Harry Enten is calling a “record small majority”.So where were the Trump coattails in the House?And yet, the president-elect and his army of Republican sycophants cannot stop bragging about the landslide that wasn’t. You almost have to admire their chutzpah.But there is also method to their megalomania. As the political scientist Julia Azari has observed, when a president and a party claim a sweeping mandate it has “historically been connected to unprecedented expansions of presidential power” and can become a way “to give an unchecked executive the veneer of following the popular will”.Trump, the 49.9% president, doesn’t represent the popular will. Yes, he won the election fair and square, and won the popular vote for the first time, but if we are to prevent him from expanding his power in the Oval Office we must resist this new Republican election lie. We must not allow him to pretend that he has some sort of special “mandate” for controversial policies and personnel.Repeat after me: there was nothing unique or unprecedented about the election result last month. Republicans may feel they won a huge victory over the Democrats. And Trump may feel his election win was historic. But, to borrow a line from the right, the facts don’t care about their feelings.

      Mehdi Hasan is the CEO and editor-in-chief of the new media company Zeteo More

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      What does it actually mean when we talk about the American ‘working class’? | Rebecca Solnit

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      In the aftermath of the election, the working class was constantly invoked and rarely defined – invoked as a badge of authenticity, as the people who really matter, as the salt of the earth, the ones politicians should woo or be chastised for failing to woo sufficiently. Who exactly is in this category? I asked around, and the definitions didn’t just vary – they wobbled, clashed and blurred.The more nebulous something is, the more it can mean anything useful to the speaker or writer. I thought of Alice Through the Looking Glass:
      ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’
      ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
      When a word means whatever you choose it to mean, it becomes a cudgel for your cause, while it fails to do what I want words to do, which is to describe the world in ways that make things more clear and coherent.So what is the working class? Is it income levels or education, when some who work in the trades earn splendid annual incomes and some white-collar work mires people in poverty? Is it the kind of work or the status of being an employee, when the person who works for a construction company may go on to become a contractor herself?A Marxist told me it’s about whether or not you own the means of production, but this theoretical contractor, like many a construction worker, owns a F250 pickup truck and a lot of tools and maybe a garage workshop, just as many farmers own or inherit land.Someone else said it meant being paid by the hour, rather than salaried, but lawyers and legal experts bill (lavishly) by the hour. And more and more people work in the gig economy or are otherwise casual labor seen as self-employed or as subcontractors, not employees. Someone else insisted it’s about whether or not you have unearned income, but many a union person or employee of a big firm has a stake in a pension fund invested in the stock market.Another criterion was education levels, though quite a few people’s time in college netted them little but debt to be paid off via pink- or blue-collar work. In California, our public universities claim a lot of first-generation students, but the community college system defines that as people whose parents did not go to college at all, while the University of California system defines it as anyone whose parents didn’t graduate from college. The California State University system, meanwhile, has wobbly definitions: “In one scenario, 31% of CSU students are considered first generation; according to another definition, 52% are.”What’s clear about first-generation students is that some who grow up in blue-collar families become white-collar professionals and thereby have a foot in both worlds and sometimes an identity in tension with their current status. A lot of us worked entry-level jobs before entering a profession – before I was 21 I supported myself as a salesperson, a dishwasher, a data processor and a waitress. Upward economic mobility is central to the American dream and the draw for immigrants; downward mobility, debt peonage and destitution have been at the heart of the American nightmare set up by Reaganomics and the other forces creating a super-elite and a desperate underclass.One thing that’s been dismally obvious since 2016 is that by working class some speakers really mean white men, and imagine that group in nostalgic terms, as hardhat wearers and factory workers or as red-blooded rural Americans, even though much of the lower-income population is not white or male or rural. It’s janitors and nail salon workers and hotel maids, casual labor and delivery people and home healthcare aides.I’m not arguing that the working class doesn’t exist, and there are a lot of workers we would probably all agree belong to this class – but the borders and thereby the definitions are blurry, and the frame is too often invoked for other agendas.The idea that the working class is white men too readily becomes a justification for politics that pander to white male prejudices and entitlements, since white men are the single most right-leaning demographic. Framed that way, it often seems to mean: shut up about rights for women and non-white people. Meanwhile about 92% of Black women, a great many of whom meet most of these definitions of working class, voted for Kamala Harris, which is a reminder that talking about class without talking about gender and race flattens out a complex terrain (the same goes, of course, for talking about gender or race without the other two).Harris mostly spoke about the middle class, which many identify with whether or not they fit some of these criteria for the working class; I don’t think her rival used the term “working class” at all but pandered to white racism, misogyny and transphobia, each of which can fracture solidarity and even the perception of common ground, including economic common ground.In the end, all that’s clear is that we had an election in which the party that was supposed to be elitist was not the party whose candidate was a billionaire, the one put back in office in no small part through the machinations of the richest man in the world because they agreed on an economic agenda of cutting taxes for the rich and further impoverishing the poor.“Elite” is another nebulous word that pretends that somehow human rights are an upscale product like designer handbags or that the majority of us in this country – if you add up women, Bipoc, queer and trans people, immigrants, etc – are a special interest group. In this framework, the 26% or so that is white and male is imagined as the majority, perhaps because they once owned and ran nearly everything.White male grievance is a powerful force that cuts across class, as exemplified by the habitual whining of the billionaires. Those billionaires also own too many of the means of information production, from Twitter and Facebook to the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post. Those and other means encouraged people to perceive themselves by many criteria that don’t include class or economics, but do include a lot of kinds of resentment.This was part of a package deal, of a whole lot of people getting a lot of misinformation about the sources of their problems and the potential solutions, which encouraged many of them to vote against their own and their economic peers’ self-interest. The lack of clarity about what the working class is is only one part of the ongoing problem of misinformation and missing information.

      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More

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      How anti-woke spin hit home for Donald Trump | Letters

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      While Nesrine Malik is right in stating that woke talking points weren’t a key part of Kamala Harris’s campaign, she is incorrect in concluding that progressive stances on social issues were in no way responsible for Donald Trump’s election victory (‘Woke’ didn’t lose the US election: the patrician class who hijacked identity politics did, 25 November). Like Malik, I see structural issues as the primary determining factor, my focus as a Democratic activist being on an economy touted as thriving but in fact failing to benefit a populace struggling with obscenely high grocery prices. But having heard Harris equivocate rather than reject controversial statements that were catnip to Trump, I can assure you that there was palpable cultural antagonism too.Those ads of Trump packed a punch, not least “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you”, which capitalised on Harris’s failure to clarify her 2019 support (based on a reading of constitutional law) for taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgeries for prisoners. But just as Harris failed in this regard in 2024, the Democratic leadership has mangled election messaging over many years – opening itself to charges of cultural (certainly not economic) extremism.I find it interesting that Malik has to define “defund the police” after claiming that “even a cursory glance shows” it “is not to abolish policing”. No, a cursory glance at this ludicrous slogan implies, however unintentionally, just that. And to refuse to believe that anti-woke propaganda, sometimes false but often made possible by Democrats’ own missteps, played a part in the disastrous 2024 election results is to refuse the obvious.Karen Thatcher-SmithSonoma, California, US Nesrine Malik argues that a “cursory glance” would show that “defunding the police” was never about abolishing the police but rather a call to invest in preventive measures. This rather begs the question: why on earth did progressives campaign with such a slogan? It is hard to imagine populist agent provocateurs coming up with a more effective means of separating well‑meaning progressives from the public at large.Alex CampbellBrighton, East Sussex Nesrine Malik is right that the “common enemy is the way in which society itself is designed”. The economic moguls ruling the patrician class successfully sold to many a self-fulfilling investment in a fearful characterisation of wokeness as an absurd and impertinent intrusion in our lives. It is a compelling, too-easy answer when an underlying fear of loss of privilege or self‑challenging the pain of false beliefs around our rightful place in the social order is at stake. Inertia rules – for the moment.Genuine, universal change is hard. It’s hard for the privileged to give up their luxuries and for the oppressed to imagine deserving and enjoying a better life in a truly egalitarian society.Wokeness itself is not the problem. There is no such thing as woke, there is only waking. It is a never-ending process. It is a journey that we must all undertake – towards a society that fully values and expresses the spirituality, democracy, caring, sharing, learning and joy inherent in a naturally evolving life, and no one must be left behind.Daniel O’SullivanMcLeans Ridges, New South Wales, Australia More

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      Democrats ignored pleas to address price of ‘eggs and gas’, campaigners say

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      Saru Jayaraman tried. As far back as January, the president of low-pay campaign group One Fair Wage recalls telling Democratic leaders in Washington DC that voters were worried about the cost of living.“It just went on deaf ears,” she said. “One of the biggest challenges we faced was they kept wanting to talk about the economy. And we kept saying, it’s not about the economy, it’s about our economy: it’s about my economy, my ability to pay for eggs and gas.”“And so, it was no surprise to us that people did not turn out, why people did not feel incredibly motivated – whether they didn’t vote or they voted for Kamala or they voted for Trump,” said Jayaraman, director of the food labor research center at University of California, Berkeley. “There was a universal feeling of ‘you’re not listening to us.’”A single mom working three jobs as a waitress, and struggling to make ends meet on a sub-minimum tipped wage, is “not going to take time out of her three jobs to vote for either person”, she added. “There’s no future for the party unless they really address the needs of working people. And I use the word ‘address’. It isn’t just running on the issue.”Democrats face calls to actSam Taub has worked as a server for the past 10 years in Michigan, one of the key election swing states, which swung from Joe Biden in 2020 to Donald Trump in 2024. Taub was not that surprised by this year’s result.“You see a lot of generalizations of people who live in the midwest, people who are working class and people who are working-class in the midwest,” he said. “And as somebody who is one of those people, it is a little bit frustrating to hear people say that they’re listening to you – and then not actually listen to you.“The message that Democrats really need to understand is that they can’t assume that they already know what people think and what people need.”View image in fullscreenTaub is one of hundreds of service industry workers who backed an open letter, organized by One Fair Wage in the wake of the 2024 election results, urging the Democratic party to do more to address the needs of working people.Democrats at the state level need to fight to protect workers rights even more given the upcoming second Trump administration, he argued, and push back against industry efforts to scale back or prevent policies, such as raising the sub-minimum wage for servers in Michigan, from taking effect.“It’s pretty obvious Donald Trump is not going to protect workers’ rights, so it’s really important for politicians at the state level to do everything that is within their power to protect workers,” said Taub. “By getting rid of the sub-minimum wage, which is something that’s happening gradually, we can help a lot of people.”Juan Carlos Romero, a bartender in New York City, has worked in the restaurant industry for 16 years. “It’s really hard to try to make ends meet” in this economy, he said.Under Trump workers in the service industry aren’t going to see improvements, he suggested, arguing that the incoming administration’s proposals – such as eliminating taxes on tips – overlook the fundamental issue that so many service workers are in precarious economic circumstances because they rely on tips and sub-minimum hourly wages.Democrats must use the final weeks before Trump takes office “to support us”, he added. “I think our desperation comes from the reality that we see, and especially if wages stay like this, [that] they’re going to continue to affect people on a daily basis. So it really is a call to action that is desperately needed by folks in the industry.”Fears of recessionCampaigners and academics fear the Democratic party’s losses of the White House and Senate majority, and its failure to retake the House majority will leave workers on lower incomes – especially immigrants – vulnerable.“One of the consequences of this election is that the government backs away from having people’s back when they want to join a union,” said Sharon Block, executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School. “There’s just a cool irony to that that I think is just devastating: this is a time when people need to be in a union more than ever.”Deportation plans targeting undocumented and temporary workers are already inciting fear among these workers. Immigration groups are pushing Biden to solidify protections for immigrants before he leaves office in January.“I think that the anti-immigrant fervor out of Trump and his acolytes is terrifying and defies humanity,” said Judy Conti, director of government affairs at the National Employment Law Project. “And I think immigrant workers everywhere have reason to be worried about discrimination, potential violence, workplace raids.”Trump’s proposed tariffs, and the impact they may have on the costs of basic goods and necessities, are also causing concern.“If they’re not talking about raising wages, which they’re not, but they’re talking about making all of the goods and services that we need for our day-to-day lives 20% more expensive,” warned Conti. “I have fears of recession, and certainly fears that things are going to be less affordable for the people who can’t afford it most.”Democrats who still hold office nationwide are facing calls to help such people when Trump reaches the White House. “Even if you fail,” the One Fair Wage letter said, “at least we’ll see you fighting for once.” More

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      Trump victory not a mandate for radical change, top election forecaster says

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      Despite Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the presidential election, a political scientist who developed a model that correctly predicted his sweep of battleground states warns that voters have not necessarily given the president-elect a mandate to make radical changes.In a paper released with little fanfare three weeks before the vote, Cornell University professor of government Peter Enns and his co-authors accurately forecast that Trump would win all seven swing states, based on a model they built that uses state-level presidential approval ratings and indicators of economic health.In an interview with the Guardian, Enns said his model’s conclusions suggest voters chose Trump not because they want to see his divisive policies implemented, but rather because they were frustrated with the state of the economy during Joe Biden’s presidency, an obstacle Kamala Harris was not popular enough to overcome.“If this election can be explained by what voters thought of Biden and Harris and economic conditions, it really goes against the notion of a mandate for major change from Trump,” said Enns.“If Trump was looking to maximize support, being cautious about changes that are massive changes would be what the model suggests is the optimal strategy.”On the campaign trail, Trump promised norm-shattering measures to accomplish his objectives, ranging from deploying the military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants to levying trade tariffs against allies that do not cooperate with his administration.On 5 November, voters responded by giving Trump an overwhelming victory in the electoral college, and also by making him the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years.Both outcomes were predicted in the paper released on 15 October by Enns, Jonathan Colner of New York University, Anusha Kumar of Yale University School of Medicine and Julius Lagodny of German media firm El Pato. At the time, polls of the seven swing states showed Trump and Harris tied, usually within their margin of error, signaling that the election was either’s to win.Rather than focusing on the candidates’ support nationwide or in the swing states, Enns and his co-authors built a model that combines two types of data: presidential approval ratings from all 50 states using data from Verasight, the survey firm he co-founded, among others, and a Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia index measuring state-level real income, manufacturing and labor market conditions. Both sets of data were compiled more than 100 days before the vote.Enns first deployed the model in the 2020 presidential election, where it correctly predicted the outcome in 49 states, with the exception of Georgia. This year, Enns and his co-authors wrote that Harris, who took over as the Democratic nominee for Biden in late July, was on track to lose both the popular vote and the electoral college, including battleground states Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Georgia.“If Harris wins the election, we will not know exactly why, but we will know her victory surmounted conditions so disadvantageous to the Democratic party that the incumbent president dropped out of the race. She will have added major momentum to the Democratic campaign and/or Trump and the Republican party will have squandered a sizable advantage,” Enns and his co-authors wrote.The forecast wound up being accurate, though, with ballot counting continuing in a few states, Trump seems set for a plurality victory in the popular vote, not the 50.3% majority they predicted.Then there’s the question of whether Biden would have done better if he had stayed in the race. The 82-year-old president has been unpopular through most of his term as Americans weathered the highest inflation rate since the 1980s, even as the labor market recovered strongly from the Covid pandemic. Biden was also dogged by concerns about his age and fitness for office, which culminated in a terrible debate performance against Trump in June that led him to drop out of the race weeks later.“Given Biden’s low approval ratings and economic conditions, our model forecasted less than a one in 10 chance of a Biden victory if he had stayed in the race. Even after accounting for Harris’s approval ratings, which are notably higher than Biden’s, the Democrats face an uphill battle,” the authors wrote.If Harris had a chance to overcome the disadvantages she entered the race with, Enns said it would have required convincing voters she would be a very different president than her boss – which it appears she failed to do.“There’s some economic headwinds, there’s the Biden incumbency headwinds. And what I think that suggests is, given these headwinds that Harris faced, the optimal strategy would have been to differentiate herself more from Biden,” Enns said.But the vice-president’s fate may have been sealed in the years that preceded her bid for the White House, when she failed to build the sort of public profile that would have pushed her approval ratings up to the level that she needed them to be.“If she had been more popular, you can think about what could have happened to make our forecast wrong. So the fact that 100 days out, our forecast was so accurate, that really enhanced the campaign, had minimal effect on the outcome,” Enns said.“The task at hand was to outperform the forecast, and her campaign wasn’t able to do that.” More