This was not 2016 when Donald Trump lost the popular vote but prevailed in the electoral college with 306 votes to Hilary Clinton’s 232. Last week, Trump garnered 74,677,434 votes to Harris’ 71,147,994 votes and won the Electoral College with 312 electoral votes to Harris’ 226. No previous Republican presidential candidate has ever won this many popular votes. All this in the face of a relentless media campaign painting Trump as a fascist, an insurrectionist, and a danger to American democracy. So, what are we to make of the results?

President-elect Trump has, in the past, been at odds with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on monetary policy. Trump will likely favor lower interest rates and an easier monetary policy than Powell. However, Powell and the Fed act independently of the presidency, at least nominally, and when asked if he would step down if Trump asked him to, Powell said no.

In The Theory of Political Spectrum, I presented three critical factors that influence the polarization of political ideologies: attitudes toward private property rights, the state of consciousness, and the degree of wealth redistribution. The article demonstrates that an assault on private property, the collectivization of consciousness, or widespread and involuntary wealth redistribution—either individually or collectively—are methods of making society more oriented to socialism. The last factor, wealth redistribution, has a close relationship with private property rights but is often ignored by mainstream academics and policy analysts. They have become so accustomed to extensive social programs and progressive taxation as normal conditions of a modern state that they fail to recognize the underlying economic and moral flaws. Neglecting this factor overlooks the central role it played in the gradual adoption of evolutionary socialism in the United States.

A second lesson of 2024 rings the death knell of the National Popular Vote (NPV) Initiative or Compact, intended by its supporters to avoid election “inversions” in which the presidential candidate winning the popular vote loses in the Electoral College. The compact was first introduced in 2006 but reinvigorated by Donald Trump’s 2016 defeat of Hillary Clinton.

There is an old proverb known as the “law of holes.” It goes something like this: “Let me tell you about the law of holes: If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”

Most political pollsters were wrong about how close the 2024 U.S. presidential election would be, especially in so-called battleground states, which were expected to be toss-ups just days before November 5. Why did the polls underestimate Donald Trump’s popular vote margin wildly and, by extension, his dominance of the Electoral College?

Millions of Cubans remain without power in the wake of Hurricane Oscar, but bad weather is not Cuba’s real problem. Its centrally planned socialist economy is the root cause of the blackout and most of its other problems. 

In a global landscape marked by supply chain shifts, rising state-led economies, and new geopolitical frictions, America’s trade policies have been a focus of the news cycle this presidential campaign season. Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have proposed anti-free trade approaches, and these strategies raise questions about the implications for markets, individual choice, and the true cost of protectionism. Let us take a look at how their records stack up.

Ready for a pre-Halloween scare?

For forty years, the dominant political philosophy on the mainstream American right was the fusionist conservativism of Ronald Reagan. Under Reagan’s formulation, the right formed an alliance between free-market economics, social traditionalism, and a strong anti-communist defense policy. The American right has changed in recent years, with the current GOP presidential ticket looking more like a bean bag chair than Reagan’s three-legged stool. While elements of the other planks remain, nowhere is this shift more apparent than in the political right’s retreat from free markets. In its place we have seen the emergence of a populist New Right typified by Ohio senator and vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance.