Election 2024: Brazil's Far-Right Bolsonaro Family at Trump's Mar-a ...
Trump Flips Georgia
By Christina Lu, an energy and environment reporter at Foreign Policy.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has won the hotly contested battleground state of Georgia and its 16 electoral college votes, according to The Associated Press.
Trump secured 50.9 percent of the vote, while Harris took 48.4 percent, with 94 percent of votes counted, The AP said. Trump’s win in Georgia, a key swing state, narrows Harris’s potential path to victory.
Wednesday morning’s result stands in sharp contrast to what occurred in 2020, when Trump—running against then-Vice President Joe Biden—became the first Republican presidential candidate to lose the state in nearly three decades. Biden narrowly won the state by a margin of just under 12,000 votes, a victory driven in part by an 84 percent surge in Asian American voter turnout, as I reported for Foreign Policy.
Republicans Retake Control of Senate
By Christina Lu, an energy and environment reporter at Foreign Policy.
For the first time in four years, Republicans have regained control of the Senate.
Republicans retook control of the chamber on Tuesday after businessman Bernie Moreno flipped Ohio’s Senate seat and West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice secured the state’s open Senate seat. In Nebraska, the incumbent Republican senator, Deb Fischer, also fended off independent challenger Dan Osborn and held onto her seat.
With Moreno’s and Justice’s victories, Republicans will now command at least one chamber of Congress, giving them enormous sway and political leverage in the event of either a Harris or a Trump presidency.
In Ohio, Moreno secured 50.3 percent of the vote, defeating his Democratic opponent, incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown, who won 46.3 percent, with 95 percent of the votes counted, according to The Associated Press. Moreno is a Colombian immigrant who owns a number of car dealerships and was backed by Trump on the campaign trail.
For more on key congressional races, check out my colleague Lili Pike’s reporting.
Is the U.S. Becoming More Like Nigeria?
By Nosmot Gbadamosi, a multimedia journalist and the writer of Foreign Policy’s weekly Africa Brief.
U.S. presidential elections matter to African nations because they serve as a barometer for democracy. Extreme polarization, disinformation, and hatred have marred Nigerian ballots—often resulting in violent protests and the refusal to accept election results. Other familiar practices, such as vote buying, are now being observed in the U.S. campaign. Elon Musk’s $1 million-a-day giveaway to voters via his political action committee feels eerily familiar in Nigeria, where politicians’ use of money to influence voters is commonplace.
The dissatisfaction with democracy is also familiar. About 94 percent of Nigerians view politics as corrupt, according to polling firm Afrobarometer. Asked to describe the state of politics last year, about 79 percent of Americans used words like “corrupt” and “divisive” in a Pew Research Center survey.
African politicians “can point to the American political landscape, rife with polarization and chaos, to justify their own authoritarian tendencies and abuse of democracy,” wrote development specialist Chinedu George Nnawetanma.
But the United States can also learn about accepting ballot results from recent elections in Senegal, South Africa, and, most recently, Botswana. Botswana oversaw a smooth transfer of power on Monday after a crushing election defeat for the Botswana Democratic Party, which had enjoyed 58 years in power.
Former President Mokgweetsi Masisi conceded defeat even before full results were announced. Masisi has said he will not run for political office again, despite having served only one out of two possible five-year terms.
“Botswana today sends a message to the whole world and says democracy is alive here, democracy is in action,” Botswana’s newly elected leader, Duma Boko, declared after taking office.
Democrats Win in Virginia
By Allison Meakem, an associate editor at Foreign Policy.
Vice President Kamala Harris has earned Virginia’s 13 Electoral College votes, though by a far slimmer margin than most polls had predicted, The Associated Press reports. Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine also won reelection, beating out longshot challenger Hung Cao, a former U.S. Navy captain.
Cao, a Trump acolyte, was born in Vietnam and made anti-communism the centerpiece of his campaign. In an interview with Foreign Policy, Cao said that he was “basically the standard bearer” for Virginia’s Vietnamese American population, the country’s fifth-largest. But as I reported from the Washington, D.C., suburbs last week, the reality is more complex. The community skews Republican, but there is strong support for Democrats as well.
Kaine, who has served in the Senate since 2013, is a member of the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees. He gained national prominence as Hillary Clinton’s running mate in the 2016 election—and again over the weekend, when he appeared on Saturday Night Live (along with Harris and pop star Chappell Roan).
Read it here: In Virginia, a Vietnamese American Community Divided
By Catherine Osborn, the writer of Foreign Policy’s weekly Latin America Brief.
Among the foreign observers at former U.S. President Donald Trump’s election watch party at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida is Brazilian lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro. The younger Bolsonaro posted a photo with Donald Trump Jr. to X in which he praised the “good company.”
Jair Bolsonaro was banned from running for office until 2030 after a court ruled that he abused his presidential power. But his brand of far-right politics is still influential in Brazil—and it leans heavily on Trump for strategic cues. In objection to their loss in a presidential election months earlier, Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed the Brazilian seat of government in January 2023.
Eduardo Bolsonaro traveled to the United States with a handful of other conservative Brazilian lawmakers who similarly used their social media profiles to boost Trump’s messaging.
The State of Play at 11:30 p.m.
By Lili Pike, a reporter at Foreign Policy.
The night appears to be heading down a familiar path for U.S. election watchers: a nail-biting tally of the votes in the final swing states, with former U.S. President Donald Trump in the lead. Neither candidate has pulled off an upset; instead, the race is so far trending along the lines of what the polls projected. Trump appears likely to win Georgia and North Carolina, where the news and polling analysis website 538 had him up by a point heading into Election Day. Vice President Kamala Harris would have to make up ground in the urban areas where the votes are still being counted in order to turn those states around.
If Trump wins those two key states, it is likely that the race will come down to the big three “blue wall” states: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which helped deliver President Joe Biden to victory in 2020. Harris had a slight advantage in Wisconsin and Michigan in the final polls, whereas Pennsylvania was dead even.
The odds are looking increasingly tough for Harris—the infamous New York Times needle has swung to “likely” for Trump.
What We Know—and Don’t—About Bomb Threats During the U.S. Election
By Rishi Iyengar, a reporter at Foreign Policy.
Pennsylvania. Georgia. Arizona. Michigan. Maine. The list of states in which dozens of polling locations have faced bomb threats on Election Day continues to grow.
Authorities at the federal, state, and local levels—including the FBI—have all stressed that none of the threats so far have been considered credible, and no bombs have been found at any location, but the threats nonetheless led to temporary suspensions of voting in several counties. Many of the affected polling places will now stay open later than usual so people can cast their ballots.
Several officials, including the secretaries of state of Arizona and Georgia, said they believed the bomb threats originated from Russia, though neither provided any evidence to back up that claim. The FBI also said bomb threats in several states “appear to originate from Russian email domains.”
Russia does have a long track record of attempting to interfere in U.S. elections, including this one. And it’s not the only time they have been accused of using bomb threats to interfere with the vote during an election—Germany made similar allegations during the ongoing Moldovan election on Monday.
But there isn’t a smoking gun just yet. One U.S. official told the Wall Street Journal that there hasn’t been a formal assessment of Russia’s involvement in the bomb threats.
Polarization Is on Display
By Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University.
By most accounts, this presidential election will be close. We don’t have the kinds of landslide elections we had in 1936, 1972, or 1984. Instead, we have elections that come down to a handful of swing states and slivers of the electorate within those states.
The landmark book Insecure Majorities by my colleague, Princeton University political scientist Frances Lee, explores this instability. She explains that before 1994, congressional majorities were quite stable: Democrats had controlled the House since 1954 and the Senate for most of the time (aside from 1981 to 1987). Since then, however, we have entered an era in which control flips back and forth, and the size of these majorities has shrunk.
When Democrats had large and stable majorities, they could afford to make compromises, and Republicans had to reach across the aisle if they wanted any influence. Once that ended, the incentives for partisanship intensified. The potential cost of compromise increased as concessions could flip seats in the next election. Partisan battles became endless.
Presidential campaigns are now driven by similar dynamics. As fault lines have calcified, it has become increasingly difficult to know which way the electoral winds will blow. Candidates must slug it out over very small parts of the electorate, and the stakes of each fight have become greater. The 2000 election ushered in this era, when the parties entered a bare-knuckles battle over the vote count in Florida.
Although the colors of some of the states have changed, including Florida, we have been living in the shadow of that contentious election ever since.
AI’s Role in Election Misinformation
By Rishi Iyengar, a reporter at Foreign Policy.
One of the biggest fears around this year’s U.S. presidential contest was how widespread and impactful political misinformation would be—particularly with artificial intelligence and its ability to generate realistic images, audio, and video on demand. So far, the impact has been muted; the handful of AI-generated videos that have gained traction have been quickly debunked (and mostly attributed to Russia) by U.S. intelligence and security agencies, and much of the AI content on social media has been what author and tech journalist Brian Merchant described in a post on X as “the worst and corniest propaganda you’ve ever seen.”
At the start of 2024, however, ahead of the dozens of national elections around the world that took place before Americans went to the polls, the impact of AI was a far more open and troubling question. In an article for our Winter 2024 issue, I dug into the implications of AI on election misinformation—including the causes for concern and the case for calm. Read it here: What AI Will Do to Elections
A Historic Victory in Delaware
By Allison Meakem, an associate editor at Foreign Policy.
Democrat Sarah McBride was elected to represent Delaware’s sole seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, The Associated Press reports. Her victory is historic: McBride will be the first openly transgender person to serve in Congress.
McBride’s victory comes amid widespread anti-trans sentiment in the United States, particularly among Republicans. This year alone, 45 anti-trans bills have passed in 43 states, according to the Trans Legislation Tracker. Former President Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, have made anti-trans messaging central to their campaign.
McBride currently serves in Delaware’s state Senate and was previously the national spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign.
Florida Called for Trump
By Anusha Rathi, an editorial fellow at Foreign Policy.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump has once again secured Florida, winning 30 electoral votes with a projected 56 percent of the vote, according to The Associated Press. Some 94 percent of the vote has been counted thus far.
Once considered a swing state, Florida has gone to Trump in three consecutive presidential elections. Despite his mass deportation plan, he remains popular among the state’s growing Venezuelan diaspora, who favor his economic policy and hard-line approach toward Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. According to CNN, initial exit polls indicate that 57 percent of Florida’s Latino votes went to Trump—with both Latino men (64 percent) and Latina women (51 percent) preferring the former president.
Although the state’s Senate race was deemed tight by some watchers, the Republican incumbent, Sen. Rick Scott, won some 55 percent of the vote, defeating former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell by a 13 percent margin, with 93 percent of votes counted.
Read more: Venezuelan Americans Could Be Key Voting Bloc
U.S. Election Results Have High Stakes for Taiwan
By Lili Pike, a reporter at Foreign Policy.
As the election results trickle in, the Taiwanese are among the foreign audiences with the most at stake. Under a Kamala Harris presidency, U.S. support for Taiwan is expected to remain consistent. However, if Trump takes the Oval Office, he might shake up the relationship.
In recent months, Trump has suggested that he thinks Taiwan isn’t giving the United States enough in exchange for U.S. defense support. What a better deal might look like according to Trump isn’t clear, but experts previously told Foreign Policy that it might entail pushing Taiwan to increase the percentage of GDP it spends on its military—the same demand Trump has made of numerous U.S. allies. Another concern for Taiwan: Elon Musk, one of Trump’s top supporters this cycle, has suggested that Taiwan should be made into a special administrative zone of China, like Hong Kong.
A recent poll shows that Taiwanese people support Harris over Trump by a wide margin. Jason Hsu, a former Taiwanese legislator at-large and current fellow at the Hudson Institute, told Foreign Policy on Tuesday: “I don’t think we are nervous about a Trump second term, but we must ensure we handle it with practicality and clear-mindedness. We must understand Trump is transactional, and if he does a favor for us, he may ask for something bigger in return.”
Andy Kim to Become First Korean American Senator
By Ravi Agrawal, the editor in chief of Foreign Policy.
Democratic Rep. Andy Kim of New Jersey will become the first Korean American in the Senate after winning his race against Republican Curtis Bashaw. Kim’s victory keeps the seat in Democratic hands after it was vacated by former Sen. Bob Menendez, who became embroiled in a corruption scandal this year. Kim, 42, will also be the third-youngest member of the Senate.
Kim is a former diplomat whose work with the State Department and the National Security Council has taken him to Iraq and Afghanistan. In Foreign Policy in 2021, he described his experience growing up as a second-generation Korean American. When “I see Asian Americans across this country declaring with one, proud voice that they belong,” he wrote, “that feels like an act of defiance against the hate and the violence we’ve endured.”
In a long interview with me on FP Live last year, just days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, he described how policymakers needed to reflect on lessons from 9/11 and the war on terrorism and “be very mindful about what comes next.”
Philadelphia Officials Refute Trump Election Fraud Claims
By Christina Lu, an energy and environment reporter at Foreign Policy.
Philadelphia officials have asserted that there is no evidence of election fraud in the city, sharply refuting Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s earlier unfounded claims of “massive cheating” there.
Trump refuses to acknowledge losing his 2020 reelection bid to current President Joe Biden and has long peddled unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary. The former U.S. leader has intensified those claims in recent weeks, fueling concerns that he may be laying the groundwork to contest a potential election loss.
On Tuesday, Trump alleged in a post on Truth Social that there was “a lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia,” without offering any evidence. He added: “Law enforcement coming!!!”
His claims were swiftly repudiated by Philadelphia officials. “There is no factual basis whatsoever within law enforcement to support this wild allegation,” Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner said in a statement on Tuesday, which noted that officials have “invited complaints and allegations of improprieties all day.”
“If Donald J. Trump has any facts to support his wild allegations, we want them now. Right now. We are not holding our breath,” Krasner added.
Seth Bluestein, a Republican Party member and a city commissioner in Philadelphia, said that Trump’s claim was “yet another example of disinformation.”
“There is absolutely no truth to this allegation,” he wrote on X, adding that the city has been in regular contact with the Republican National Convention. “We have been responsive to every report of irregularities at the polls to ensure Philadelphians can vote safely and securely.”
Murphy Coasts to Reelection in Connecticut
By Allison Meakem, an associate editor at Foreign Policy.
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy has won reelection in Connecticut, beating Republican challenger Matthew Corey, a business owner and U.S. Navy veteran, The Associated Press reported.
Murphy is a leading progressive voice in U.S. foreign policy and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He is also a semi-regular contributor to Foreign Policy. In his most recent piece, he reflected on a recent visit to Kenya, arguing that the United States should devote more resources to promoting good governance abroad.
“Poor governance creates a vicious circle of corruption, inefficiency, and underdevelopment,” Murphy wrote. “In Kenya and elsewhere, it has also provided fertile ground for predatory foreign actors such as Russia and China to bribe their way into contracts and influence.”
Read it here: Kenya’s Anti-Corruption Protests Are a Wake-Up Call for Washington
Why This Election Feels Different
By Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University.
Millions of Americans are watching their television sets, refreshing their screens, and filling up their coffee cups in anticipation of a late night, all feeling tremendously anxious about the forthcoming election projections and results.
Why do Americans feel this degree of emotional intensity? The answers may seem obvious. Of course, the policy stakes of either outcome are high. Moreover, voters have extraordinarily strong partisan feelings in 2024—a level of animosity toward those who support opposing sides that goes well beyond policy preferences. Part of this sentiment stems from Donald Trump himself, one of the most divisive figures in modern American history.
But a large part of the tension revolves around an existential question: What is America’s character in 2024? In the final days of the campaign, Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris offered fundamentally different views on what the country is about. In her closing argument, Harris embraced the values of democracy, pluralism, bipartisanship, and hope. In his, Trump chose fear, danger, rage, and reactionism.
Presidential elections certainly don’t define a nation. The United States is more complicated than that. Yet this election falls in the category of those that bring us closer to an answer. And for this reason, voters are watching with bated breath.
First U.S. Electoral Results Roll In
By Alexandra Sharp, the World Brief writer at Foreign Policy.
The first results are in. Former U.S. President Donald Trump has taken Indiana’s 11 Electoral College votes, Kentucky’s eight, and West Virginia’s four, according to The Associated Press, which called the races. All three states went to Trump in the 2020 and 2016 presidential elections and have historically leaned conservative.
Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris received Vermont’s three Electoral College votes, according to the AP. The northeastern state went blue in the past two presidential elections, to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.
The candidates need 270 Electoral College votes to declare victory. Most eyes are on Georgia and North Carolina, the first two key swing states of seven to close voting Tuesday night.
What a Trump Win Would Mean for Germany
By Cameron Abadi, a deputy editor at Foreign Policy.
U.S. voters know that they are determining their own government in this election, but do they know that they might also decide Germany’s?
The so-called traffic light coalition, which includes Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats, the German Greens, and the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP), has been in power for three years. For the last year, it has been hanging by a thread: The parties are bickering over pretty much everything, most recently over how to stimulate the economy after years of stagnation.
Whether the coalition manages to limp on will depend on whether there is an electoral advantage to be gained by preempting the regularly scheduled election next year. Germans are known for prizing stability, but recent polling seems to indicate that they simply want the current coalition put out of its misery.
Last week, FDP leader and Finance Minister Christian Lindner circulated a document that amounted to a request for divorce, seemingly calculating that Germans would reward the FDP for blowing up the government and forcing an early election.
But the election of Donald Trump in the United States could change that. Trump represents nothing if not the threat of instability for Germany, whether in the form of new tariffs on German cars or a cease-fire deal in Ukraine that leads to new waves of refugees.
The last thing Germans will want then is a government thrust into an unplanned election campaign, unable to act in a moment of crisis. A second Trump administration, in other words, could give Germany’s government a new lease on life.
The Military’s Unusual Role in This Election Campaign
By Amelia Lester, a deputy editor at Foreign Policy.
In a Fox News interview last month, Donald Trump suggested that election chaos could be handled by the military, “if really necessary.” His remarks, which drew condemnation for politicizing the military, came amid the first presidential election with both post-all-volunteer force and post-9/11 veterans on the ticket: Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, served as a junior enlisted Marine, and Harris’s, Gov. Tim Walz, was a senior enlisted noncommissioned officer in the Army National Guard. “What should have been a positive—that both vice presidential candidates volunteered to serve in the country’s all-volunteer force at a time when most Americans did not—has instead become a potential negative, with partisans on both sides casting aspersions on their service,” Peter D. Feaver wrote in September.
Military leaders have played an outsized role in this campaign, with retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly recently calling Trump, his former boss, an “authoritarian,” and Mark Milley, a retired Army general who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Trump administration, telling journalist Bob Woodward for his new book that Trump is a “fascist to the core.” Milley’s comments have been used in Harris campaign advertising to suggest Trump is “not fit” to serve as commander in chief.
Despite these unusual interjections from top brass, military veterans remain a Republican-leaning group, a recent Pew Research Center survey shows. About 60 percent of registered voters who say they have served in the military or military reserves favor Trump. Six percent of the population overall has served in the military, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, down from 18 percent in 1980.
Read it here: Stop Politicizing the Military
The Democratic Process Is Working—So Far
By Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University.
Irrespective of who wins this election, there is some good news from the hustings for all of us: U.S. democracy seems to be working.
Although there have been some problems with equipment and a few unsubstantiated bomb threats against polling places, the voting process has been relatively smooth thus far. Poll workers have been able to do their job safely, long lines have been moving, and ballots are being processed. From early accounts, rates of participation are high, as was early voting. And thankfully, despite the toxic rhetoric stemming from former President Donald Trump, there have been no major incidents of violence reported.
It’s a good reminder that despite what happened after the 2020 election, the before and during of the process worked well. Even in a polarizing pandemic, election officials throughout the country put into place systems that allowed Americans to vote by mail and through drop boxes while figuring out how to move citizens through polling places safely on Election Day. Turnout rates were high—almost 160 million, a sizable boost of more than 20 million from the 2016 election. None of this was easy. Some even called it a “miracle.”
No matter who comes out on top, there will be bitter tensions in the electorate, and the postelection period will remain fraught with danger. Yet, assuming the current patterns hold, it is worth celebrating what state and local law enforcement, poll workers, election officials, and most importantly voters themselves have accomplished within a deeply divided map. Americans are exercising their hard-earned right to vote, and the infrastructure supporting this right has held firm.
What Do Indians Think of Harris?
By Michael Kugelman, the writer of Foreign Policy’s weekly South Asia Brief and the director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center.
On Tuesday, The Associated Press published an Election Day story from the southern Indian village of Thulasendrapuram—the birthplace of Vice President Kamala Harris’s maternal grandfather. Residents there revere her and hope that she becomes the next U.S. president.
But this is just one of many views that Indians hold of Harris. Her Indian ancestry may provoke warmth and respect in her grandfather’s hometown, but other Indians perceive that she has held back from embracing her Indian roots, at least publicly.
Though Harris has spoken about that background, including in her speech at the Democratic National Convention and while feting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a State Department luncheon last year, she hasn’t visited India often in recent years. (She has reportedly never been to Thulasendrapuram.)
Some Indians fear that as president, Harris would, like many Democrats, focus unwelcome attention on India’s internal affairs, including its human rights record. Others see her as a strong backer of the U.S.-India partnership who can build on two decades of growth in bilateral ties and fast-growing spaces for cooperation to take the relationship to new heights.
A Musk-Trump Election Watch Party
By Rishi Iyengar, a reporter at Foreign Policy.
Elon Musk will head to Mar-a-Lago, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s Florida country club, to watch the election results with the Republican candidate on Tuesday evening, according to the New York Times. (Vice President Kamala Harris, meanwhile, will be in Washingon, D.C., watching the election results at Howard University, her alma mater.)
Musk has marshaled his considerable resources toward boosting Trump in the weeks and months leading up to the election, donating tens of millions of dollars to Trump’s campaign, appearing with him at rallies, and unleashing a flood of often false or misleading political posts on X, the social media platform Musk purchased in 2022 for $44 billion. The latest of those came on Monday, when Musk shared posts claiming that Google’s search engine produced “where to vote” results for Harris but not for Trump. Google responded to Musk through its own X account, explaining that the discrepancy was because “Harris” is also the name of a county in Texas and that’s what the search results were producing. It had similar results for “Vance”—the last name of Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance—because Vance is also a county.
Musk, in a rare public acknowledgment of his mistake, reshared Google’s explanation with, “Thanks for the clarification.”
If He Wins, Will Trump Really Change History?
By Michael Hirsh, a columnist for Foreign Policy.
In an article published in Foreign Policy’s Fall 2024 issue, I quoted historians and political experts as suggesting that Donald Trump could transform the global system beyond recognition if he returns to the presidency.
The fear is that he’ll discard or ignore U.S. allies and pull out of NATO and possibly even the United Nations. As Joseph Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian, argued, the “Again” in Trump’s Make America Great Again movement means a return to the past. In this case, Ellis said, it suggests “going back sometime before 1940,” when isolationism dominated U.S. policy.
But others argued that the forces of inertia—or the status quo ante—may prove stronger than people think. Kiron Skinner, the former head of policy planning under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, noted that in his first term, Trump did not orchestrate “a pull away from the broad-based liberal international order.” In his second term, Skinner said, Trump would only seek to “right-size America’s role in the world” by demanding that U.S. allies step up more on defense.
Yes, Trump has altered the terms of the political debate more than any president since Ronald Reagan and, before him, Franklin D. Roosevelt. He has upended the postwar and post-Cold War consensus and transformed what Americans talk about, whether international economics, trade, alliances, or immigration.
But other than swearing by tariffs, he still lacks a coherent vision or program. Thus, it is also possible that when he passes from the scene, the 78-year-old Trump could eventually be seen as more of a historical blip than a world-altering figure. “Betting on inertia in U.S. foreign policy is a very good bet,” said Stephen Wertheim, a political scientist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It’s really, really hard to change U.S. foreign policy in a big way.”
Read it here: Is 2024 Really the Most Important Election in History?
Why Is U.S. Election Calling So Weird?
By James Palmer, a deputy editor at Foreign Policy.
The United States votes Tuesday—but we may not know the outcome for days to come. A critical part of this process will be the “calling” of results by different media outlets, chief among them being The Associated Press. It’s a system that doesn’t exist in most of the democratic world, where electoral authorities declare results once votes are fully counted.
There’s no legal role for the media to call U.S. elections. Like so many aspects of American political life, it’s an improvised measure that acts as a partial solution to a lasting problem—in this case, the size and disunity of the country. It was only in 1845, for instance, that the country passed a law to establish a single uniform election day; before that, states picked any date between November and December.
The AP began calling presidential elections in 1848, around the widespread adoption of the telegraph, and added other elections over time. The organization forecasts the vote of the Electoral College, which officially selects the U.S. president.
The AP’s call is a partial fix to the slowness of the U.S. count. In more average-sized countries, such as the United Kingdom or France, authorities return results within a few hours of polls closing. In India, with
