Update on the 2024 General Election in America

Now that most of the results of the 2024 General Election in America have been certified, some additional observations can be made from those I had posted last month. There was not a majority of votes for the Trump-Vance/Republican United States presidential Electors and there were no coattails for Donald Trump. Although Republicans gained 4 seats in the Senate to regain the majority, partly from picking up open seats in GOP-leaning States, the ruling Republicans suffered a net loss of one seat in the House of Representatives, as each party flipped a handful of seats from the other party. The Trumpist Republican U.S. Senatorial candidate in Arizona, who had been a frequent candidate for statewide office and denied the results of her and Trump’s 2020 general election loss, was rejected by the voters. Thus, there was no popular mandate for Trump or Trumpism, only, as I had posted, the exploitation and exaggeration of grievances based on populist appeals and even demagoguery based on xenophobia, conducted with false or misleading statements by Trump and his supporters and amplified by continued Russian interference that had already altered public opinion. The overtly populist Republican presidential campaign for protectionism, nativism and isolationism marked a sharp transition away from the GOP’s conservative messaging of the last four decades. Although there was some relatively more conservative messaging in congressional races, even those federal elections were influenced heavily by populism. It is even clearer now that more center-right organizations, whether political action committees, caucuses, or even a new political party are necessary for conservatism to compete with and even prevail over far-right populism, as voters in many foreign States, particularly with parliamentary systems allow for such an alternative choice, which is attractive to the electorate, as I have posted. One other noteworthy aspect of the election of interest to conservatives is that while pro-abortion Democratic candidates did not fare as well as they had hoped, nearly every pro-life Democratic candidate was elected, in contrast to less success for pro-abortion Democrats.