Pennsylvania Democrats Win State House in Truly Unbelievable Way

Pennsylvania Democrats will keep their majority in the state House, eking out an improbable victory after Kamala Harris failed to win the state (and most of the country).

Incumbent Democratic state Representative Frank Burns defeated Republican challenger Amy Bradley on Friday, allowing the Pennsylvania Democratic Party to maintain a slim, one-vote majority in the state House: 102 seats to 101. Burns was able to do this in Cambria County, a district that President-elect Donald Trump has won by at least 30 percent for the last three elections. In 2024, Trump beat Harris in the county by 46 points.

Burns, a conservative anti-abortion Democrat, has drawn the ire of the Pennsylvania GOP for some time now, as his seat was viewed as a vulnerable blue dot in a sea of red. But he was able to maintain his seat thanks to an influx of cash ($3.4 million from the Pennsylvania House Democratic Campaign Committee) and a potent advertising blitz to keep Democrats in control of the state House.

One ad the Burns campaign ran capitalized on his conservative views, stoking anti-immigration based fear and casting Bradley as against Trump’s draconian immigration plans. “President Trump supports secure borders and putting America first. But Amy Bradley doesn’t,” the ad stated menacingly. It was a successful tactic for Burns in his otherwise deep red district.

This win gives Democrats in Pennsylvania and beyond at least one thing to smile about in a despair-filled election cycle. The rest of the state was dominated by Republicans, as Trump won nationally, incumbent Democratic Senator Bob Casey lost to Republican Dave McCormick, and two blue congressional seats were also lost.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went full scorched earth on Friday, blaming Vice President Kamala Harris’s stunning loss on Joe Biden’s late exit from the presidential race.

In an interview with The New York Times, Pelosi suggested that Biden had crippled the Democratic Party’s chances at keeping Donald Trump out of the White House.

“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said. “And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened.”

Pelosi also blamed Biden for not making way in time for an open primary, which could have created momentum around a new candidate who would have performed better with the Democratic base.

“And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time,” Pelosi said. “If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”

Pelosi’s public comments about Biden’s candidacy played a critical role in his decision to step away from his presidential campaign. Pelosi had refused to combat the many calls for Biden to drop out after his disastrous debate with Trump, and cryptically said the decision to drop out was up to him (even after he’d already supposedly decided not to do it).

The California representative also suggested that the Democrats’ loss of working-class support was the result of cultural forces, not economic ones.

“Guns, God and gays—that’s the way they say it,” she said. “Guns, that’s an issue; gays, that’s an issue, and now they’re making the trans issue such an important issue in their priorities; and in certain communities, what they call God, what we call a woman’s right to choose.”

American Muslims broadly rejected Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, according to a new exit poll.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations released the results of its national election poll of 1,575 verified American Muslim voters, and they do not reflect well on the efforts of the Harris campaign to hold onto what had been a solid Democratic constituency. The poll shows that Green Party candidate Jill Stein received 53 percent of votes, followed by Donald Trump with 21 percent, and Harris with 20 percent.

In a Michigan-specific poll of 502 registered Muslim voters, Stein got 59 percent support, followed by Trump at 22 percent, and Harris with a tiny 14 percent of the vote. The results show a significant backlash to the Biden administration’s handling of Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, which has killed at least 43,508 Palestinians, including more than 16,765 children, as well as how the Harris campaign chose to tackle the issue.

“Our final exit poll of American Muslim voters confirms that opposition to the Biden administration’s support for the war on Gaza played a crucial role,” said CAIR National Government Affairs Director Robert S. McCaw in a statement. The poll was conducted by Molitico Consulting LLC through text messages, with a margin error of 2.47 percent.

CAIR’s exit poll from 2020 was less extensive, only polling 844 registered Muslim voters, but had 69 percent of respondents saying that they voted for Joe Biden, with 17 percent choosing Trump, showing a big drop-off during this election. Another 2020 poll estimated even more Muslims backed Biden, a whopping 86 percent.

CAIR’s findings are different from the results in Dearborn, Michigan, the country’s largest majority Arab American city, where 42 percent of voters chose Trump, 36 percent went for Harris, and 18 percent went for Stein. But in CAIR’s poll as well as Dearborn’s results, the common factor was that Harris was rejected and that Stein received a much bigger portion of the vote than in the national results.

The Harris campaign refused to have an Arab or Palestinian speaker at the Democratic National Convention in August, and last week, the Democrats’ messaging to Muslims and Arab American voters included Bill Clinton saying Israel was “forced” by Hamas to kill civilians in Gaza at a rally in Michigan, which drew a large backlash.

Trump sought to capitalize on Democrats’ missteps, visiting Dearborn in the week before the election and attacking Harris for campaigning with Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney. Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan do not think highly of the elder Cheney’s support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, but they also remember his daughter’s reputation for supporting torture and anti-Muslim bigotry.

Trump likely drew votes from Muslim and Arab American voters for this reason and picked up endorsements from metro Detroit Muslim and Arab politicians. Likewise, Stein’s support of an arms embargo against Israel, her support for a cease-fire in Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon, and the fact that she held a campaign event in Dearborn in September helped her gain Muslim and Arab American voters in Michigan and the U.S. overall.

These survey results show that the Democratic Party will have to seriously reevaluate its policy stances in order to win back Muslim and Arab American voters. At the very least, they seem to have cost Harris valuable votes in the state of Michigan, which she needed to win. In the future, Democrats can’t neglect or ignore the issues that Arab American and Muslim voters care about like they did this year.

Kamala Harris raised more than $1 billion for her presidential campaign … which ultimately failed. In the afterglow of stunning defeat, some Democrats are now asking how she could have possibly spent anywhere near that much money and still lost her shot at the White House.

The Harris campaign finished out the race with at least $20 million in debt, two sources familiar told Politico’s Christopher Cadelago, who wrote on X Wednesday night that of the $1 billion Harris had raised, only $118 million remained in cash as of October 16.

With the realization that all of that spending ultimately accomplished very little and cost the party control of the White House and Senate (and maybe even the House), Democrats are now beginning to point fingers.

“We spent money in stupid ways because we had a really bad strategy,” a former consultant to the DNC told Puck’s Tara Palmeri. He cited money sent to fund Representative Colin Allred’s failed challenge against Texas Senator Ted Cruz, as well as money directed to help in Iowa, a state Democrats never, ever win. 

“Instead of owning any mistakes, or being transparent about the voter data and strategies that were so obviously wrong, they shut off their Twitter account and are patting each other on the back,” the former consultant said. “We dug out of a deep hole but not enough.”

Inside Harris’s crumbled campaign, some feel that they were misled about her chances, and led to believe it would be a margin-of-error race. In reality, Trump blew apart Harris’s play for the blue wall states and beat her by more than four million votes.

“People are depressed and frustrated about the overconfident leadership of the campaign,” one staffer told Axios.

One Biden staffer put it more simply: “How did you spend $1 billion and not win? What the fuck?”

Harris’s campaign budget was closely guarded by campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon, so it’s unclear exactly how funds were allocated. An official for the DNC said that the majority of campaign spending was toward major events, paid media, and Harris’s supposedly expansive ground game—one that ultimately didn’t drum up that many votes at all.  

What’s clear is that Harris ran a very expensive campaign, one that dwarfed Donald Trump’s efforts. The campaign spent an average of $7.5 million a day in August, in comparison to the $2.7 million that Trump spent. In September, the Harris campaign spent $152 million on advertising, more than double the $63 million that Trump shelled out.

Unfortunately for Harris, dollars didn’t seem to translate into votes. And even after Harris lost, her campaign is still sending out slates of fundraising requests.

Conservatives are aiming high for their slash-and-burn goals during the next four years under a Republican trifecta, and next on the chopping block could be the Federal Reserve.

On Friday, incoming Department of Government Efficiency head and world’s richest man Elon Musk elevated a post on X (formerly Twitter) by Utah Senator Mike Lee, who posited that the central banking agency could be cut from the second MAGA administration.

“The Executive Branch should be under the direction of the president. That’s how the Constitution was designed,” Lee wrote Thursday night. “The Federal Reserve is one of many examples of how we’ve deviated from the Constitution in that regard. Yet another reason why we should #EndTheFed.”

During a press conference on Thursday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell addressed the mounting pressure against the financial institution by Donald Trump and his allies, telling a reporter that he would not step down from his post if Trump asked him to. Powell also noted that Trump’s election would “have no effects” on the central bank’s policymaking decisions “in the near term.”

Despite appointing Powell, Trump directed plenty of vitriol at the Fed chair during his first term in office. And the president-elect has been plenty vocal about his belief that the traditionally apolitical institution should bend the knee to his administration.

“I feel the president should have at least a say in there. Yeah, I feel that strongly,” Trump said during an August 8 press conference at Mar-a-Lago. “I think that, in my case, I made a lot of money, I was very successful, and I think I have a better instinct than, in many cases, people that would be on the Federal Reserve or the chairman.”

The Federal Reserve, which was created in 1913, has long been under attack by certain political subgroups in the United States, but Musk’s pointed attention toward the plan for control effectively brings it to the forefront of far-right thought.

In 2009, former Texas Representative Ron Paul—a flip-flopping libertarian—advocated for the demise of the central bank, arguing in his 2009 book End the Fed that in “the post-meltdown world, it is irresponsible, ineffective, and ultimately useless to have a serious economic debate without considering and challenging the role of the Federal Reserve,” which he claims prioritizes big banks in the U.S. financial system via bailouts and surreptitiously bankrolls U.S. warfare by way of inflation and devaluation.

But the Federal Reserve’s institutional predecessors, as well as the mere concept of central banking, have been contentious issues since the foundation of the country. Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury under the fledgling U.S. Constitution, argued in favor of a nationwide banking system to solve some of the country’s key issues in the aftermath of the Revolution.

The Democratic-Republican Party opposed the idea, perhaps most notably Thomas Jefferson, who believed that such a banking system would create a monopoly that could undermine smaller financial institutions and skew federal policy in favor of creditors over debtors, who tended to be plantation owners and farmers.

But Jefferson’s qualms would not thwart the inception of the institution, which proceeded to morph and reinvent itself over the nation’s 248-year history. Now, just about every nation in the world—especially every developed nation—has a central bank acting as the financial arm for its government. Stripping that away, which Trump’s key advisers seem to want to do, would place the United States on a short list alongside Andorra, the Isle of Man, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and a small handful of other nations.

Just hours after Donald Trump won the election, Elon Musk was already flexing his power over the new administration, joining a phone call with the man he helped elect to office and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Axios reported that the world’s richest man made a guest appearance on a phone call between Trump and Zelenskiy on Wednesday, even chiming in at several points during the discussion.

The call did not delve into specifics, but an Axios source noted that nothing Trump said to Zelenksiy was “alarming or made us feel that Ukraine is going to be the one who pays the price.” Musk also told the Ukrainian president that he will keep supporting Ukraine with his Starlink satellite network.

Still, Musk’s surprise addition to the call is a troubling sign, to say the least. Like Trump, the billionaire has a close relationship with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. A bombshell report last month revealed that Musk is in regular contact with Putin, and the Kremlin may have even implicitly threatened him. That could explain his past refusal to let Ukraine use his Starlink internet network to carry out a surprise attack on Russian forces, or his public ridicule of Zelenskiy’s requests for aid.

However, the 25 minute call apparently left Zelenskiy feeling upbeat and reassured. “I had an excellent call with President Trump and congratulated him on his historic landslide victory — his tremendous campaign made this result possible,” Zelenskiy wrote on X after the call on Wednesday.

Bob Woodward shared a warning about Donald Trump in the hours after his election win.

Speaking with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, the longtime journalist was asked about his thoughts on Trump’s election, having interviewed the president-elect more than 20 times. Woodward mentioned Trump’s relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“I talked a couple of months ago to Dan Coats, the former director of national intelligence under Trump, and I said, what’s going on in this relationship between Trump and Putin? And Dan Coats said, ‘It’s almost, it’s so close. It seems like it might be blackmail,’” Woodward said.

“CIA director Bill Burns said Putin manipulates. He’s professionally trained to do that,” Woodward added. “Putin’s got a plan just to do this exactly, and it’s what he did when Trump was in office previously, and he’s planning it again at playing Trump.”

Woodward’s warning came as Putin himself stayed silent on Trump’s victory, waiting until the next day to congratulate the president-elect in what could be a power play for the Russian leader. Putin’s congratulatory message came on Thursday and didn’t include any acknowledgment of Trump’s promise that he could end the Ukraine War in “24 hours,” and perhaps signaled the opposite.

Last month, Trump tried to avoid a point-blank question about whether he was still speaking with the Russian autocrat even after leaving office, telling Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait, “Well, I don’t comment on that, but I will tell you that, if I did, it’s a smart thing.” One week before, an excerpt from Woodward’s book “War” alleged that Trump and Putin still speak frequently.

On Election Day, bomb threats at polling stations around the country seem to be a product of alleged Russian election interference. It seems that with Trump’s return to the White House, the shadow of Putin is not far behind.

Incoming Department of Government Efficiency head and world’s richest man Elon Musk has proposed cutting $2 trillion in government spending—more than Congress’s entire discretionary budget. But some of Donald Trump’s key allies don’t see anything wrong with that picture.

In an interview with Fox Business on Friday, Virginia Representative Ben Cline claimed that it “absolutely is” possible to slash that much cash from the budget.

“We can do it, and make sure that we focus funding toward the American people and not toward bureaucracy in Washington,” Cline said.

Just a reminder: Congress’s discretionary budget funds practically the entire executive branch, doling out funding for the military, national security, and federal agencies.

And one cut in particular proved exceedingly uncontroversial for the Virginia congressman: public education.

“Give me one idea in terms of what’s significant that you think, ‘That’s got to go right away?’” asked Fox’s Maria Bartiromo.

“Well let’s just look at the Department of Education and how billions of dollars stay in Washington, funding bureaucrats whose simple goal is to interfere in the decisions about educational choice at local and state levels,” Cline responded.

But that’s not an accurate picture of the DOE. The federal government provides 13.6 percent of funding for public K-12 education across the nation. In Virginia specifically, it spends $2,020 per pupil per year, providing approximately 12 percent of the state’s education funding, according to the Education Data Initiative.

Trump himself has said that his Department of Education plan involves handing the reins and lofty responsibilities of public school administration over to parents, who famously have all the time in the world to oversee educational curricula while simultaneously working jobs and raising their children.

During a rally in Milwaukee in October, the MAGA leader promised that his vision for the nation’s educational system would involve very limited oversight from any government, including the states.

“I figure we’ll have like one person plus a secretary,” the soon-to-be forty-seventh president said at the time. “You’ll have a secretary to a secretary. We’ll have one person plus a secretary and all the person has to do is, ‘Are you teaching English? Are you teaching arithmetic? What are you doing? Reading, writing, and arithmetic. And are you not teaching woke?’”

He also openly admitted that it would, unfortunately, be to the detriment of a great swath of states—particularly poorer ones in the middle of the country.

“We’re going to have 35, like, different ones—Iowa will do good. A lot of the states will do very good. I can think of probably 30, 35 will be do—five will be OK, 10 will be OK. You’ll have four or five that will be terrible, but that’s OK, we have to control it,” Trump told 5,000 people in Indiana, Pennsylvania, in September. “But you’ll have, you’ll have Idaho, you’ll have Idaho will do a great job, no debt, they run a great state.”

But slashing the Department of Education was always part of the agenda. Despite attempts to distance the campaign from Project 2025, Trump allies have outright admitted in the wake of election night that the 920-page Christian nationalist manifesto was actually the blueprint for Trump’s second administration all along.

And it’s not all political smoke and mirrors. When it comes to budget cuts and the economy, experts believe that Trump is more than likely to keep his promises.

“He’s not very movable on trade issues, and he does what he says he’s going to do,” William Alan Reinsch of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told Yahoo! Finance in October, in an assessment of the Republican leader’s 2016 economic agenda.

“I think he means it, and I think he’ll do it,” Reinsch, a former trade lawyer and undersecretary of commerce, said of Trump’s tariff plan on Chinese goods. The outstanding question will be whether or not the courts attempt to block it.

A federal judge on Friday granted special counsel Jack Smith’s request to vacate the remaining deadlines in Donald Trump’s election interference case.

In a new filing earlier Friday, Smith requested that “the Court vacate the remaining deadlines in the pretrial schedule to afford the Government time to assess this unprecedented circumstance and determine the course going forward consistent with Department of Justice policy.”

Department of Justice policy prohibits the government from pursuing charges against a sitting president. Smith’s request cites that Trump is “expected to be certified as president-elect on Jan. 6, 2025, and inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2025.”

Prosecutors asked for the government to file “a status report or otherwise inform the court of the result of its deliberations” by December 2.

Judge Tanya Chutkan granted Smith’s unopposed request shortly after it was filed.

With this latest development, it seems Trump will escape all culpability for his role in interfering with the certification of the 2020 presidential election and allegedly inciting the January 6 riot at the U.S Capitol.

The same fate is likely for Smith’s other case against Trump, which concerns the president-elect’s alleged mishandling of classified documents during and after his first administration. That case landed in the lap of a pro-Trump judge who dismissed the case—landing her on the short list for Trump’s next attorney general.

As Smith scrambles to wind down his two cases against Trump, it’s worth noting that the former president has promised to fire Smith on his first day in office, and even threatened to have him deported.

This story has been updated.

Reports of a Latino Democratic exodus may be slightly exaggerated.

Anxiety was high after exit polls showed that 46 percent of Latinos, and 55 percent of Latino men, voted for Donald Trump. While it is a significant blow—Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton won Latinos at 65 and 66 percent respectively—a more detailed breakdown by heritage offered some pushback to the generalized narrative.

The Americas Society Council of the Americas research showed that of the largest Latino groups in the United States, Cuban Americans were the only one in which over half of voters chose Trump, as they went for him by a decisive 58 percent. Mexican Americans—by far the largest Latino community in the country—only went 33 percent for Trump, with Puerto Ricans at 37 percent and Central Americans at 36 percent.

This poll reminds us that, like any group, Latinos are not a monolith. And the “new coalition” that Republicans are celebrating may not be as solid as they think. Democrats just need to sift through the rubble and reevaluate how they message to Latino voters.