In case you didn’t hear from the two dozen other newsletters in your inbox, America reelected Donald John Trump as president yesterday.

We will leave it to the professional horse-race spectators and tea-leaf readers to break down the results and divine its implications in the days ahead. There is more to unpack on the policy front, which of course is our focus.

But we can’t help making a few observations about what last night’s decisive victory means for the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

First and most important: last night was the vindication of Donald J. Trump, who, if he had not done it before, has cemented his place in history as a pivotal figure. Trump survived impeachments, politically motivated prosecutions, media-driven character assassination, and literal assassins’ bullets, and he won in a significant wave. This election is foremost about Trump. But it is also about his movement.

Last night was the coming out party of the “multi-racial working-class GOP.” What started in 2005 as a dream and a prayer with Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s “Sam’s Club Republicans” and Grand New Party has emerged as a dominant electoral force, capable of retaining the Sunbelt for the GOP while blowing huge chunks out of the Democrats’ Blue Wall.  The same coalition already propelled Trump to victory in 2016, but in a squeaker that many could reasonably dismiss as a fluke. Last night’s result was definitive.

It was definitive in large part because non-white voters showed up to vote for Donald Trump in record numbers. In 2016 and 2020, there were signs of racial depolarization of the electorate, but Trump’s coalition drew heavily enough from the “white working class” that Beltway pundits could dismiss his base of support as “whitelash.” This dismissal drove eight years of outrageous comparisons to Hitler and fascism—comparisons made as recently as last week by Kamala Harris’s overconfident campaign, which was endorsed by Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer, perhaps the two most prominent overt white nationalists in America. 

For once, the scare tactics didn’t work. The excellent election analyst Sean Trende observes that Trump won last night “with the most racially diverse Republican coalition in a long, long time.”

It is apparent that upwardly mobile, second- and third-generation Hispanic Americans are tilting strongly to the GOP, much the way Italian Americans and other successful ethnic minorities came out for Reagan in the 1980s. According to exit polls, 45 percent of Hispanics voted for Trump, a greater share than George W. Bush earned in 2000 and a 13 point swing from 2020. In Florida, Trump won outright in majority-Hispanic Miami-Dade and Osceola countries—the latter of which is home to the largest concentration of Puerto Rican in the United States. Ryan Girdusky, one of the smartest observers of national populism as a political phenomenon, notes that Trump won by 16 points in Starr County, Texas, the most heavily Hispanic county in America.

Trump’s support among black Americans increased somewhat, as well, to 13 percent in 2024 versus eight percent in 2020.  Fully one-quarter of black men voted for Trump in the Georgia.

Far from just being the party of the white working class, the Republican Party now has a credible claim to being the party of the working and middle class, full stop—the party of dissenters from the woke madness and ruinous policies of liberal establishment.

Meanwhile, this result was a stunning rebuke to two different visions of the future of the Democratic Party. First, Joe Biden’s. Biden, the last survivor of the pre-Reagan years and of the Great Democratic Moderation of the 1990s, fancied himself a new LBJ, who would once again wed working class voters of all races to the Democratic Party through industrial policy and other big government programs: the problem is that in the 2020s economy, his big spending plans only caused inflation which hit middle class pocketbooks and put the lie to his promise of returning competence to the White House. The Democrats then jettisoned this relic to install another fantasy of their future: the professional managerial class’s fantasy of a coalition of cultural and educational elites and low-income minorities, a supercharged McGovern’s dream. Harris ran primarily on the fears of professional managerial class women of a looming 1000 year Trumpenreich and handmaid’s uniforms, hoping to sway “moderates” by promoting (of all things!) the figure of Liz Cheney. Democrats now have some real soul-searching to do.  

What does this mean for policy? We will flesh this out in detail in the coming months, but for now a few observations will suffice.

This was already true before, but it bears repeating now: the Republican Party is not going back to the way things used to be pre-Trump. The 2012 postmortem is dead as a doornail. Hardline immigration policy and border security, skepticism of globalization, and a pragmatic rather than ideological small-government approach to government and its programs are now undisputed pillars of the new Republican Party orthodoxy. 

However, this party will also contain multitudes. Vigorous debate will continue, about the wisdom and extent of industrial policy, tax cuts, abortion, and much else. Clearly, the “natcon” faction is ascendent. But remnants of the old, small-government GOP will endure and may flourish, in part because the voters flocking to the party today are refugees from the failed policies of the Democrats. They voted for an alternative to these policies, not a copycat. A successful Trump II will have to synthesize these competing interests and views, no small feat.

We’ll conclude with this. Last night also vindicated the mission of this outlet, PolicySphere. The Republican Party is coming into power once again, and that means its intramural debates over policy will have huge ramifications for the country and the world. 

We will continue to present these debates to you and offer our insight however we can.

Policy News You Need to Know

#Economy — WSJ’s Greg Ip is always worth reading. Today’s column, about what a second Trump term will mean for tariffs, taxes, regulation, and inflation, is no exception.

#Life — The pro-life movement ended its post-Dobbs losing streak at the polls last night, as voters rejected pro-abortion ballot measures in three states: Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Especially interesting is Nebraska, which affirmatively passed a pro-life ballot measure enshrining the state’s 12-week abortion ban, in addition to voting down a pro-abortion measure. The pro-life movement can breathe a sigh of relief at this outcome, but it cannot rest easily. Even these three victories were close-run, thanks in part to massive spending by left-wing groups. And pro-lifers lost in more states than they won.

#Life — Speaking of, Jonathan Abbamonte at Heritage is out with new research showing that the FDA’s decision to scrap in-person dispensing requirements for the abortion pill increased the number of ER visits due to complications from induced abortion. Expect this requirement to be reconsidered by the incoming administration.

#Crime — James Lynch of National Review notes that law and order won on the ballot in California. More than two-thirds of Californians voted to stiffen criminal penalties on shoplifters and drug dealers. Elsewhere in the state, voters threw out soft-on-crime DAs George Gascon and Pamela Price. Democrats may rule in California, but it seems there is a limit to the disorder and chaos that ordinary Californians are willing to endure. The spirit of Governor Reagan lives.

#LGBT — More from Lynch, who reports that 70 percent of New Yorkers voted to enshrine an anti-discrimination provision that will allow males to compete in women’s sports and make it harder to enforce federal immigration law in the state. Supporters of the amendment cloaked these more radical outcomes, presenting the measure as way to enshrine Roe v. Wade in the state’s constitution. It is unlikely the measure would have fared as well if the transgender elements were forced to stand on their own.

#FamilyPolicy — Over at the Institute for Family Studies, Clara Piano, Vincent Geloso, Lyman Stone, and Anna Claire Flowers have just constructed a fascinating new tool, the “Child Care Regulation Index,” to illustrate the burdensome role that regulation plays in making childcare unaffordable in America and thereby suppressing fertility. The index has a helpful map, so you can see how much of your sky-high daycare prices are due to regulatory burden.

#Chyna #Trade — A new working paper, “The China Shock Revisited,” examines manufacturing job losses from Chinese imports more closely. Interestingly, it finds that many manufacturing companies shrunk their (blue-collar) production workforce but expanded their (white-collar) service workforce. This finding is little consolation to the many factory workers who found themselves out of a job, but it also shows an expected feature of globalization: Western countries outsourced production but, at least for a time, retained and specialized in high-value service work. 

#Chyna #DrugCrisis — Speaking of China, Anthony Ruggiero at FDD spotlights the trial of two Chinese-born individuals who laundered tens of millions in drug money for transnational criminal organizations. The trial demonstrates China’s key role in the opioid crisis killing tens of thousands of Americans each year, and in illicit finance of the drug trade.

#Tax — Jared Walczak of the Tax Foundation has a report on a revolt brewing at the state level over property taxes, which have risen “almost 27 percent faster than inflation since 2020.” Walczak offers suggestions on how the tax could be reformed to provide relief to homeowners, without discarding the advantages of this relatively efficient type of taxation. 

#Energy — Tech is all-in on nuclear, but Cato’s David Kemp asks an interesting question: is nuclear worth its current, sky-high construction costs? Kemp notes that subsidies to nuclear power remain high, and existing alternatives like natural gas remain far cheaper. Perhaps the social benefits to carbon-free nuclear, or the innovation benefits from its energy density, are worth it. But it is a debate worth having.