The Big Wow Election

Wow, what a week, I came in here and I said wow, what an amazing week

A quick note — on Wednesday the 13th comedian James Donald Forbes McCann will be in D.C. for a special comedy performance — email me if you’re interested in attending!

Here’s audio from my weekly radio appearance on Hugh Hewitt’s show this morning — we went long on all the lessons from the election:

Welcome to Thunderdome. I have been part of the television coverage of election nights going back twenty years. I have stories from all of them that are of note. Election nights bring out the craziness in people: they lose their minds, lose the plot and react with a jittery manic mindset based on disabused assumptions about the world they inhabit. This happens often. I even made Jamelle Bouie so mad he left the CBS bureau in 2016 to take a walk.

That’s how much of a jerk I can be on election nights when people are desperately holding on to hope for their candidates… Since my candidates always lose, I don’t care about their feelings, and that’s very freeing. Oh, your hopes for the future have been irrevocably dashed? This must be something new for you. I don’t give a crap.

On election night in 2024, I was more than happy to join the Fox News set where the people, even those who disagree with me, are less prone to manic behavior. It was a surreal experience, since so much of the lead-up contained the idea that this was going to be an election that played out over weeks. I was in the lonely corner saying I thought we’d have an early night.

Well, I turned out to be right. And I’m not surprised at all — it was an option that was vastly under-indexed by people in the last several weeks. If Kamala Harris misjudged the priorities of this electorate there was always the possibility that she was headed toward a disaster of Dukakis-like proportions, but no one wanted to hear that. And on the Trump side, many people seemed to think his only path to victory was threading a needle, which — while very possible from my perspective — seemed less likely than the idea that the RNC theory of this election (fundamentals! I say again: fundamentals!) was much more powerful than the vibes + celebrities + ads approach that Kamala utilized.

Trump’s enormous win is a good thing for the country. I’m not saying that as someone more ideologically inclined toward his direction, which I obviously am — I’m saying it as an American who thinks it’s good to have the popular and electoral vote line up. Eliminating that doubt, that feeling that the Electoral College is some antagonizing agent, is a good thing.

Now the Democratic Party is licking their wounds. They’re trying to figure out who can possibly win nationally from their cadre in this environment. They want someone who is normie, culturally moderate, scans as middle+working-class, pro tech, buy American, law and order, no time for “wokeness,” pessimistic about capacity of bureaucracy vs public+private, gives Catholics space and respect, speaks fluent non-Wall Street economic views, abortion safe-legal-rare, market Hamiltonian foreign policy…

In other words: they believe in Harvey Dent.

When the election was called, I was standing in the green room between Kevin McCarthy, the former speaker of the House, and Karl Rove, longtime consultant for every Republican. Knowing that Donald Trump would soon emerge to claim victory, it felt awkward to be standing in the Fox bureau’s green room just waiting to see him in action. So I left, wandering through the dark New York streets (oddly quiet given the result) to end up at Connolly’s Pub, where about three dozen drunken Irish couples were singing “Proud to Be an American” together as Trump took the stage. It was a much more memorable scene.

The Trump victory is complete: a sweep of the swing states and of the demographics that long eluded him, he’s now a president granted new authority and faith thanks to his unique positioning. What he does with that? It remains to be seen. This was a revenge tour — and he’s achieved that. What comes next?