The Associated Press called the 2024 presidential election for Donald Trump at 5:34am Eastern time, November 6, 2024. As Western states in particular finished the long process of counting all their votes, however, Trump's percentage of the popular vote dropped below 50%.
The 2016 Republican primary featured 17 candidates. Pop data analysis website fivethirtyeight.com has an analysis of each failed candidate’s arc titled “How the Republican Field Dwindled From 17 To Donald Trump.” The reasons are varied, from Ted Cruz being too extreme and disliked, to Marco Rubio lacking a base, to Republicans liking Ben Carson, but not enough to vote for him.
“Poppy” Bush's son, George W. Bush (aka “W”), worked with campaign manager Lee Atwater during Bush senior’s presidential campaign. In W’s 1994 campaign for Governor of Texas his master of disinformation was political operative and self-described “nerd,” Karl Rove. Rove remained a key advisor to Bush until 2007.
Gerald Ford had been appointed Vice President under the terms of the 25th Amendment in December 1973 following Spiro Agnew’s resignation. When Ford assumed the presidency in August 1974 following Nixon’s resignation, and chose Nelson Rockefeller as his Vice President some saw it as a resurgence of the moderate wing of the Republican party.
In 1928 the Democratic candidate for president was Alfred E. Smith, a Roman Catholic and opponent of prohibition. Republican Herbert Hoover defeated him as Republicans carried the former Confederate states for the first time since Reconstruction. Republicans resisted government intervention in the economy in response to the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression.
In 1820 the Missouri Compromise was enacted by the US Congress as an effort to preserve the balance of political power between slaveholder and free states. Missouri was admitted as a slave state; Maine was admitted as a free state. Perhaps more significantly, slavery was also prohibited in the former Louisiana territory north of latitude 36° 30’, which was part of the boundary between Missouri and Arkansas.
“The Republican Party is an authoritarian outlier,” wrote Vox’s Zach Beauchamp in September 2020. Beauchamp was writing in the context of the rush to confirm Federalist Society darling Amy Coney Barrett as a Supreme Court justice following the death of liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, despite several Republicans having refused to consider a nominee to the court “in an election year” during the Obama administration. Citing experts on comparative politics including Harvard’s Steven Zilitsky, who with Daniel Ziblatt authored New York Times bestselling How Democracies Die, Beauchamp writes that the GOP should no longer be considered in the same category with traditional conservative political parties such as Canada’s Conservative Party (CPC) or Germany’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU), but rather as an extremist party like Orban’s Fidesz in Hungary, or Erdogan’s AKP in Turkey, which “actively worked to dismantle democracy in their own countries.”
In this series of articles we’ll trace the evolution of today’s white nationalist authoritarian Republican party from its origins in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, through the party’s nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and his “Southern Strategy” appealing to racial fears of southern white voters, to Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” to the Tea Party, and Donald Trump. In conclusion we’ll look at predictions by Zilitsky and Ziblatt and others, and their prognoses for the Republican Party and American democracy.
To read the ABC News headline you'd think the nation was awash in vast protests decrying the stay-at-home orders implemented in many states. From a survey of protests over the weekend, however, Forbes found relatively few participants. For example, in Austin TX, a city of approximately one million people, only a few dozen showed up to protest. In Franklin, KY, Raleigh, NC, and Columbus, OH, about 100 protesters each appeared. And in New York City only about 30 protesters could be found. Protests such as that in Lansing, MI, which attracted several thousand cars and around 100 people on the state Capitol lawn, were apparently the exception....
Democratic Party action page. Volunteer opportunities relating to a range of issues and communities.
Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions
Democracy 2025 | The united legal frontline in the fight for our democracy
Vaccine Information Statements (VISs) Overview
Health-data analyst Charles Gaba has posted links to copies of CDC data archived most recently prior to the Trump admin at his site acasignups.net
American Medical Association (AMA) YouTube page.
Some of the information previously available from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Find a Mutual Aid Group.
Lamda Legal's Helpdesk: information and resources relating to discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, etc.
Indivisible.org is coordinating action with several unions and other community groups.
See also:
Simon Rosenberg's Hopium Chronicles (hope and optimism)
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington
American Civil Liberties Union
People for the American Way's Right Wing Watch
Anti-Defamation League - You may also wish to read the Forward's recent article on the ADL and its critics.
