New Hampshire’s New Republican Governor Stands for Exactly Nothing

Abortion flip-flopper and former Trump critic turned stooge Kelly Ayotte has emerged victorious from the most competitive governor’s race in the country.

The former Republican senator defeated Democratic challenger and former Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig to maintain Republican control of the governor’s mansion in New Hampshire. The Associated Press called the race Tuesday evening, with Ayotte leading 52.1 percent to Craig’s 45.8 percent, and 62 percent of votes reported.

If Ayotte stands for anything but winning, it’s not clear what that may be, as she’s changed her stances on two of the biggest issues this election

The former senator said in 2022 that she wouldn’t alter a state law that restricts abortions after 24 weeks, but voted for a federal 20-week ban while she was in Congress. Ayotte also promised to strike down any more stringent anti-abortion laws, but maintains close relationships with anti-abortion lobbying groups.

Ayotte also reversed course on Donald Trump when realizing it was politically beneficial. In 2016, she unendorsed Trump after the Access Hollywood tapes surfaced, stating, “I think those statements are fundamentally talking, unfortunately, about assault.”

But after losing her election in 2016, she has reversed course and fully endorsed Trump, explaining that “there’s no question he’s the right choice for the White House … especially on this border issue.”

When asked about her sudden pivot on Trump during her final debate with Craig, Ayotte couldn’t come up with an answer.

“You’re never going to stand up if your party’s in … that office. You’ll never stand up because you’re a party-line person. I’ve stood up to my party,” she said in a rambling, nonsensical answer. Ayotte has notably not stood up to her party.

Former President Donald Trump has won Iowa in the 2024 presidential election and taken its six electoral votes, according to the Associated Press.

Trump won with 56.5 percent to Kamala Harris’s 41.9 percent, with 65 percent of votes reported. Trump’s win gives the former president a total of 207 electoral votes, closer to the 270 total needed to win the White House. Harris has 91 votes.

The win puts a damper on Kamala Harris’s momentum. Just days before the election, one poll in the Hawkeye State showed a stunning three-point lead for Harris in a Midwestern state that hadn’t been won by a Democratic presidential candidate since 2012. The poll shocked Trump and the political establishment and led many to believe Harris’s path to victory—and the Democratic Party’s control of the House–would be all but guaranteed.

In 2020, Trump won the state by eight points, earning 897,672 votes to Joe Biden’s 759,061. Trump also won the state in 2016, while President Barack Obama took Iowa in 2008 and 2012. Previously, Democrats won every other presidential election in the state going back to 1988, with the exception of George W. Bush’s victory in 2004. Trump won the state by a margin of 156,193, according to the AP’s count thus far.

Trump will be glad to have won Iowa, especially after the last-minute shock poll. The rest of the battleground states are still in play.

The Michigan Supreme Court has flipped blue in a serious way.

Democratic nominees Kyra Bolden and Kymberly Ann Thomas each won judicial elections Tuesday night, taking over a court that Republicans had controlled for decades. Bolden is the first Black woman to serve on the Michigan Supreme Court. The state Supreme Court now sits at a 5-2 Democratic majority, with five liberals, one conservative, and one moderate.

This victory may signal optimism for Democrats in Michigan, as the crucial swing state comes down to the wire between presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The presidential election has not yet been called. Issues like reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, and other hugely impactful policies are now under Democratic jurisdiction.

Donald Trump won Anson County, North Carolina, on Tuesday, the first time the county has supported a Republican candidate since the 1970s, and only the second time in more than one hundred years.

Trump received 51.8 percent of the vote compared to Kamala Harris’s 48.3 percent, with 91.8 percent reporting, per NBC News.

Since U.S. Reconstruction, Anson County has voted for the Republican presidential candidate just two times: the first being Richard Nixon in 1972, and now Trump, according to WFAE’s Steve Harrison.

Anson has been experiencing a rightward shift observed in other rural counties in North Carolina, according to WUNC.

North Carolina has yet to be called in the presidential race.

Bomb threats have been made against four voting sites in Navajo County, Arizona.

The threats are unsubstantiated, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said, adding, “We have no reason to believe any voters or polling places are in jeopardy.”

The threats originated from a .ru email address, but Fontes said there was no confirmation that the threats came directly from Russia.

“The motive appears to ensue chaos, not to impact any political outcome,” Fontes said.

“This is another—we believe—probing attack,” Fontes added. “We also have reason to believe—although I won’t get into specifics—that this comes from one of our foreign enemies, namely Russia.”

Also in Arizona, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office is investigating a bomb threat made inside the Maricopa County Superior Court where the recorder’s office is located. The threat is similar to the other threats in Arizona and elsewhere around the country, the sheriff’s office said.

“This is a national and state trend we are seeing with bomb threats. The information contained in the threat has been the same to all the other areas in the county. MCSO and our local partners are taking this matter seriously and will investigate. At this point there is no credible information to this issue,” Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office Sergeant Joaquin Enriquez said in a statement.

Bomb threats have been reported in several other battleground states, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. None have been shown to be credible, the FBI says.

District Attorney Fani Willis was reelected Tuesday in Fulton County for a second four-year term. Willis is most known for bringing charges against former President Donald Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.  

Willis defeated her Republican opponent, Courtney Kramer, an attorney and former Trump White House intern.

In 2023, the Fulton County District Attorney’s office indicted Trump and 18 others on felony charges in a large-scale racketeering case for their attempted election interference. Trump and other defendants continue to delay the case, successfully pushing back the first hearing to December. One successful tactic has been to try to throw doubt on Willis’s credibility in the case.

In her time in office, Willis has faced extreme Republican vitriol and threats, but her reelection means that Trump will hopefully have to face the music down the road. 

Donald Trump’s revenge tour is underway, and he’s starting with the media.

Multiple journalists who were credentialed to cover the Trump campaign’s watch party have been barred from the event.

The first attack was toward former ABC News White House correspondent and current Puck senior political correspondent Tara Palmeri.

Palmeri was slated to provide coverage for the Amazon Election Night Special, live from the former president’s rally on his Palm Beach, Florida, property. But her credentials were pulled at the last minute.

Palmeri’s revoked credentials are likely directly linked to the way she’s covered the Trump campaign. Last week, Palmeri tweeted that “the Trump campaign has paused its premature celebration and fallen into sweat mode, as early-voting numbers indicate more women are turning up than men in must-win PA.”

Senior Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita took particular offense to Palmeri’s analysis, responding to her tweet with, “Actually this bullshit tweet is a result of the fact that ‘famed’ gossip columnist @tarapalmeri was DENIED credentials to enter Mar-a-largo to cover election night due to her ‘proclivity’ to write bullshit. well well well.”

Palmeri isn’t the only reporter that Team Trump has targeted. Three Politico reporters and a photographer also received notice Tuesday that they were banned from the same event over an accurate story they had written the day before about a Pennsylvania Trump field director who was fired for being a white nationalist. Axios reporter Sophia Cai was also banned from the election night event after publishing a story about Trump’s “anxiety.”

These petty blacklistings are indicative of what’s to come under another Trump term: a president who is openly antagonistic toward even the most standard reporting.

In one of the most expensive Senate races in the country, Democrat Angela Alsobrooks prevailed and won Maryland’s open seat, defeating former Republican Governor Larry Hogan by a nine-point margin.

The Associated Press called for the race for Alsobrooks on Tuesday evening, with Alsobrooks leading Hogan 54.6 percent to 43.3 percent, with 52 percent of votes reported.

Alsobrooks defeated the moderate Hogan, who ran as an anti-Trump (but not pro-Harris) Republican and who enjoyed widespread popularity in Maryland during his two terms as governor despite the state being solidly Democratic in presidential elections. Alsobrooks is the county executive of Prince George’s County in Maryland near Washington, D.C., and will be Maryland’s first Black senator.

Over $105 million was spent by both candidates in the race, making it the fourth-most-expensive Senate race in the 2024 election cycle, according to nonpartisan organization OpenSecrets. In contrast, the previous holder of the seat, retiring Democrat Ben Cardin, spent only $5.1 million in his 2018 reelection effort.

Hogan’s entry in the race in February made what was considered a reliable Democratic Senate seat competitive and seemingly put Democrats’ plans to retain control of the chamber in jeopardy. Republican megadonors poured money into Hogan’s campaign, with one conservative super PAC flooding Maryland’s airwaves with attack ads against Alsobrooks. In the end, it wasn’t enough, as Alsobrooks was able to overcome the onslaught much like her victory over another well-funded candidate in the state’s Democratic primary, Representative David Trone.

Ultimately, Hogan’s war chest was not enough to overcome Alsobrooks’s advantage in the polls and Democrats’ counter-fundraising. The fact that he publicly criticized Donald Trump and admitted that he wouldn’t vote for the former president didn’t win him enough Democrats or independents to carry the state. Democrats can breathe a sigh of relief that they’ve held onto the Senate seat, which will bolster their efforts to retain control of the Senate. As it stands, they hold a 10-seat deficit, with 18 Senate races still to be called.

Despite losing his state’s gubernatorial race by a landslide, North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson isn’t ready to acknowledge his campaign’s shortcomings.

In his closing remarks Tuesday night, Robinson claimed that he was satisfied with his run for the highest seat in the state’s executive branch since he “ran a race where I did not have to lie.” But that, in and of itself, appears to be a lie.

The 56-year-old self-described Nazi was caught red-handed in October when CNN published a sprawling investigation about his pre-politics proclivities, connecting Robinson to a flurry of comments on online pornographic forums via a “litany” of common biographical details and a shared email address. The comments revealed Robinson as a man who had, at least once, desired to own slaves, peeped in women’s locker rooms, and enjoyed transgender porn.

But the kicker that eventually led to a mass exodus of his top staffers came when Robinson rejected legal aid as well as several external offers to help him track down the original source of the comments, instead opting to vehemently claim—without evidence—that the CNN report was incorrect.

Weeks later, at a sparsely attended news conference, Robinson and his attorney Jesse Binnall announced their intention to sue the “left-wing” news outlet for defamation, seeking $50 million in damages for “reputational harm” over what he described as a “high-tech lynching.” But weeks later, Robinson quietly tweaked that number, amending the lawsuit to instead seek just over $25,000 in damages.

Even Donald Trump’s campaign had seemingly pulled their support from Robinson, reportedly telling the Hitler-quoting, gay-bashing, conspiracy-flouting antisemite that he was no longer welcome to attend rallies for either candidate on the Republican presidential ticket, according to an anonymous source that spoke with the Carolina Journal in September. Local Republican strategists had also reportedly called on Robinson to exit the gubernatorial race in order to save Trump’s chances in the battleground state.

Delaware Democrat Sarah McBride has made history by becoming the first transgender person elected to Congress.

McBride was elected by more than 15 percent  by Delaware voters in the state’s only congressional district, according to the Associated Press, which called the race on Tuesday evening. In her race, she beat out Republican John Whalen, a retired police officer.

Though McBride has tried to lead with her policy rather than her identity as a transgender woman, her Republican opponent made an effort to publicly endorse the Heritage Foundation’s radical agenda Project 2025, which classifies “transgender ideology” as equivalent to pornography.

“There are a lot of people right now in this country who don’t see themselves reflected in government, and they deserve to see that,” says McBride about her gender identity. “But on a day-to-day basis, it’s not what I’m talking about or thinking about. It’s not what voters are talking to me about.”

At the age of 34, McBride has already made waves in her political career. In 2016, at age 25, she became the first openly transgender person to address a major U.S. political convention when she spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. And in 2020, she was elected to represent Delaware’s 1st Senate district, becoming the first openly transgender state senator.

During her time in office, McBride helped to pass universal paid family and medical leave. Most recently, she introduced successful legislation to generate more than $100 million in new Medicaid funding for Delaware. Her efforts are in part to honor her late husband, who died of cancer in 2014. In Congress she hopes to “shift our health care system from a sickness system to an actual health and wellness system,” she told The 19th.

But in Congress, she’ll be met with Republicans who have banked their political careers on opposing the bogeyman of “transgender health care.” According to the Trans Legislation Tracker, a staggering 662 anti-trans bills have been introduced across the country this year, 80 of those on the federal level. That makes this the fifth year in a row that a record-breaking number of bills targeting transgender people have made it to politicians’ desks.

With McBride in the House of Representatives, both transgender people and Delawareans will have another voice advocating for them. “I’m running to make historic progress for Delawareans,” said McBride. “I’m not running to make history.”