Former President Donald Trump mopped the floor with Kamala Harris in a blowout comeback victory Tuesday night. As of the time of this report, Trump has a sizable lead in the popular vote and is poised to clinch the remaining battleground states.

Trump’s victory should be attributed to his strong policy, likability, election integrity team, and get-out-the-vote efforts. He would almost certainly have trounced Harris’ boss Joe Biden too, as Federalist CEO and Cofounder Sean Davis pointed out. But Trump’s historic win makes the effort to replace Joe Biden in a bloodless coup and install his unpopular vice president against the will of Democrat primary voters look a lot more ridiculous. It’s hard to imagine Biden — or a cardboard cutout for that matter — getting blown out of the water as majorly as Harris was.

“Biden still would’ve lost to Trump, but he would’ve done better than Harris and likely saved a handful of Senate seats for Democrats in the process,” Davis said on X. “Maybe even the House.”

Joe Biden still would’ve lost to Trump, but he would’ve done better than Harris and likely saved a handful of Senate seats for Democrats in the process. Maybe even the House.

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) November 6, 2024

CNN indicated early Wednesday morning that Harris failed to outperform Biden by 3 percent or more in any state.

Despite Biden’s age and visible cognitive decline, he maintained a strong connection to his Democratic base, especially minority voters and union workers

Enjoy this brief moment of self-reflection and candor from the media while it lasts. Regardless, they need to pay a heavy price this time.

We’re watching the immediate post-2016 election aftermath happen all over again. The news media are reluctantly conceding defeat to Donald Trump and finally admitting the obvious.

On the New York Times’ “The Daily” podcast, reporter Astead Herndon was one such illuminating case. “I just feel as if, whether it is ‘democracy,’ whether it is lecturing Americans, saying inflation is actually not that bad, that there has been a tone coming from Democrats to tell people the problems that they had are not legitimate,” he said. “And I think that is at the core of their problems in this race. It’s hard for me not to go back to the fact that when these issues were most clear and they had a chance to speak to those concerns, they decided not to and they decided to double down on this administration, to double down on the incumbent.”

That’s true but not so fast, sweaty. The media don’t get to act like mildly concerned bystanders now positioned to offer a sober account of what just happened. Kamala Harris’s defeat is every bit theirs as it is the Democrat Party’s, arguably even more so. The media banked that they still had enough cachet, even just by a sliver, to do the impossible — insist to American voters that what they could see and feel wasn’t real in order to

Former President Donald Trump has definitively won the 2024 presidential election. Even the lachrymose corporate media have begrudgingly conceded that fact. 

But it seems Vice President Kamala Harris has entered the witness relocation program. 

The Democrats’ replacement candidate was missing in action on election night, when she skipped her scheduled post-election appearance at her alma mater Howard University. 

Even as the writing was on the wall, as Election Day turned to the day after, Harris’ campaign chief Jen Brigid O’Malley-Dillon (the ultimate elitist-white-female-sounding name), told the dejected stragglers — by email — that Harris had left the building. Closing time. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here. A campaign staffer brusquely told news film crews to shut her down and pack it up. 

But O’Malley-Dillon assured supporters and the sycophantic corporate press that while Trump may have clearly won, the election was far from over. 

“We’ve been saying for weeks that this race might not be called tonight. Those of you who were around in 2020 know this well: it takes time for all the votes to be counted — and all the votes will be counted. That’s how our system works,” she wrote in an email. 

In other words, no concession speech. Harris supporters at the Howard election night watch party stumbled away, confused. 

Even as the Democrats’ once-vaunted “blue wall” crumbled  — first electorally essential Pennsylvania, then red-again swing-state Wisconsin — it was crickets from Harris and her team. 

As the wee hours of