Tuesday’s election was a repudiation of the Democrats as much as an embrace of Donald Trump and Republicans. By now, Democrats have had a good cry and can begin walking it off and figuring out What Happened. What will it take for them to come back from the abyss?

Matt Yglesias has what could be called the “Clintonian” strategy for renewal. Earlier this week, he posted a list of nine principles that “Common Sense Democrats” could embrace to win again. Largely, his principles involve throwing progressives under the bus and triangulating on cultural and economic issues. Yglesias calls for scrapping CRT (“we should, in fact, judge people for the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin”), transgender politics (biological sex “is not” a social construct), and climate doomerism (“climate change is a reality to manage”), while delivering “robust economic growth” for the working class.

Refreshing, but we think the list demonstrates just how difficult a pivot this will be in practice for Democrats. Some of those principles sound, word for word, as though they were written by Republicans. The elite, over-educated, progressive staffer class that runs comms and policy for practically the entire Democratic apparatus would choke on the words trying to say them. The NGO and media complex that bankrolls and provides fire support for the Democrats would go berserk. Yglesias seems to acknowledge this problem in his sixth principle, “academic and nonprofit staffers do not occupy a unique position of virtue,” but that acknowledgment will do little to break those staffers’ actual grip on power. 

An even bigger problem: Yglesias himself, in his self-appointed role as truth-teller, does not use the word “immigration” once. He alludes to illegal immigration, maybe, in the eighth of his nine principles: “the American government can and should prioritize the interests of American citizens.” But that’s it. The author of One Billion Americans does not seem willing to concede much ground on that issue, arguably the pivotal issue driving the Western populist revolt. And if he can’t do it, those further left will have an even harder time.

There are more radical critiques of the Democrats on offer. Call it the “red team” assessment. Bernie Sanders, for instance, released a scathing statement about how the Democrats have abandoned the working class for corporate interests, and the working class has abandoned them in return. His solution, unsurprisingly, is socialism and an embrace of progressive causes like defunding Israel. Given the rank unpopularity of the latter, it is unclear how that would help Democrats electorally, but we can expect to hear similar lines from an emboldened Left in the years to come. 

Unmentioned by Bernie, the one-time foe of open borders? Immigration. Yet another sign of how difficult this transition will be for the left.

Ultimately, we expect the Democrats to shake off this loss and chart a path back to power. It is very possible Republicans will do the work for them, by fumbling badly on “quality of life” issues or doing something else unpopular the Democrats can seize on. We also expect Democrats to perform a tactical retreat on losing issues like transgenderism and CRT, just like they did on school bussing in ages past. These will be bandages to staunch the bleeding rather than genuine changes of heart for the party’s elite cadres and funders, however.

Structural transformation of the Democratic Party will likely need to come from outside the elite power structure, driven by entrepreneurial figures who are marginal now, but who are capable of slaughtering sacred cows and burying the Democrats’ dead consensus. Figures, in other words, like Donald Trump.

The Democrats spent more than a decade in the wilderness before the “Man From Hope” rode onto the scene. Democrats today should pray their avenger shows up more quickly.

Policy News You Need To Know

#Infrastructure — The Manhattan Institute has published a series of papers on bringing private-sector innovation to public infrastructure projects. Essayists include Judge Glock, who asks the contrarian question: do we really need so much infrastructure (and infrastructure spending) in the first place?  

#Chyna — Beijing just announced details of its long-anticipated stimulus package, though it ended up light on “stimulus.” The $1.4 trillion bond package is mostly a lifeline to local governments struggling under high debt burdens.

#Chyna #Chips — Speaking of China, TSMC just announced it is suspending sales of advanced AI chips to Chinese customers. Components made by the Taiwanese company had recently been found in Huawei hardware, despite tightening U.S. export controls. Now it seems TSMC is trying to get on the right side of Washington, particularly as Trump enters office a second time.

#AI — Adam Thierer at R Street considers what Tuesday’s election results mean for AI policy. He predicts a rollback of the Biden administration’s “dismal” EOs on AI, plus a concerted effort to harness American AI for competition with China.

#Housing — We missed this result on Tuesday: Arizona passed a ballot initiative, Prop 312, that will compensate property owners if they can show their property value suffered because local government did not enforce laws against homeless encampments. Hopefully this proposal puts pressure on government to enforce the law and clean up the streets.  

#VotingRights — Another positive result from Tuesday. Initiatives to ban non-citizen voting passed everywhere they were on the ballot. Nevada, a critical swing state, also passed an initiative to require photo ID to vote. Steven Malange has the details at City Journal.

#LGBT — The WSJ has a good write-up of the Trump campaign’s ads on transgenderism (“Kamala is for ‘They/Them,’ Trump is for you”). Not mentioned in the report but notable: social-conservative trailblazers like the American Principles Project have been pushing transgenderism as a campaign issue for years. Now their efforts have paid off. “Boys in girls sports” is in the big leagues, and it proved mighty effective.

#Education — AEI’s Michael Brickman highlights four bills on education and workforce development that Congress should consider during the lame duck, including Senator Lankford’s ACCESS Act, which would remove college-degree requirements for federal contractors. 

#Trade — Politico reports that Trump advisers are in contact with House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith on how to use tariffs as an offset for tax cuts. If Congress included tariffs as part of tax negotiations next year, it would be a sea-change for a legislative body that hasn’t raised tariffs by statute in a century, since Smoot Hawley.

#Drugs — Jeffrey Singer at Cato writes about how effective oral decongestants containing pseudoephedrine were locked behind the pharmacists’ counter as part of the War on Drugs. They were replaced on the shelf by decongestants containing phenylephrine. Only problem? It turns out phenylephrine doesn’t work, despite having been FDA approved for a half century. The next time you have a cold, skip the store shelves and go straight to the counter.

Friday Essays

The race to interpret and define Trump’s victory is on, and contestants from all over the right are making their cases. 

Over at Tom Klingenstein’s website, Oren Cass says Trump’s victory represents a decisive break from the libertarian agenda once prominent in the Republican Party. He criticizes the “National Libertarianism” proposed by Vivek Ramaswamy as a return to the pre-Trump consensus and argues it has little real support. We’re not so sure. Trump’s coalition this time around included Elon Musk, Silicon Valley tech types, crypto enthusiasts, and others chafing under the Biden administration’s government overreach. Whatever one thinks of a “National Bitcoin Reserve,” this is a real base of support and inevitably will have a seat at the table in the incoming administration. The “National Protectionists” will need to scoot over and make room.

In the New York Times, Dan McCarthy writes that this election was not so much Trump vs. Kamala as Trump vs. the Elites as a class. Trump won.

R.R. Reno writes that religious believers won on Tuesday. Kamala Harris was of course a serious threat to religious liberty, but the challenge posed by her campaign was deeper. The media spent the election portraying evangelicals and other Trump-supporting people of faith as authoritarian menaces, fascists-in-waiting. That narrative went down in flames along with Kamala. 

Matthew Continetti at the Free Beacon writes the epitaph of the Biden administration. His verdict: “Biden's presidency is ‘historic’ not for its accomplishments but for its ultimate outcome: Donald Trump's reelection, the first nonconsecutive presidential terms since the 19th century, and a working-class realignment toward the GOP.”

Brian Potter’s Construction Physics is one of the wonkiest, nerdiest, and best blogs out there on technology and industry. This week he examines a claim that was floating around X after Hurricane Helene slammed into western North Carolina: does the entire world economy really hinge on the supply of extremely pure quartz mined in Spruce Pine, North Carolina? The answer is, not really, but chip supply would be disrupted and much more expensive without it.

Earlier this week, we covered some of the surprising conservative victories in California on issues like crime and drugs. In City Journal, Joel Kotkin has a good analysis of the Golden State’s rightward shift.

The great Santi Ruiz interviewed Anduril’s Trae Stephens and Trump’s Chief Technology Officer, Michael Kratsios, about the role tech could play in Trump 2 and how to “rebuild the arsenal of democracy.” There’s a transcript, or you can watch. Either way, worth your time.