Today, union membership stands at historic lows of 10%, a stark decline from the 33.5% peak seen in 1954.

Despite a surge in unionizing efforts last year, from Starbucks and Amazon to Trader Joes and Uber, national membership rates fell for the second year in a row. This was due to the rise in non-union jobs, which largely offset the 191,000 new private sector unionized jobs.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Dorothy Neufeld, shows the industries with the highest union membership rates in America, based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Top 10 Most Unionized Industries

As we can see in the table below, roughly a third of public sector jobs are unionized, led by the local government sector by a wide margin:

When it comes to the private sector, utilities and transportation have the highest union membership rates, both providing essential services in highly-regulated industries.

For instance, the Utility Workers Union of America represents 45,000 members across the country, including employees at major firms such as Exelon, Duke Energy, and Southern Company. While 19.9% of utilities workers are unionized, it has fallen from 28.3% since 2010.

In the transportation and warehousing industry, over one million workers are unionized, at 15.9% of the workforce. However, it too has seen unionization declines, falling from over a quarter of workers in 2000.

As one of the largest unions in the country, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters has 1.3 million members across the U.S. and Canada, and is one of the primary unions for the transportation sector. Often, union members receive regular wage increases, pension plans, job security, and wages that exceed industry standards.

We can see that unionization rates in the film industry also falls above the national average, at 12.1%. Last year, the historic Writers Guild of Americas strike led to key pay negotiations, minimum staffing requirements, and new guidelines on the use of artificial intelligence as technological advancement reshapes the entertainment industry.

Overall, 14.4 million workers in America are unionized, with the country ranking 27th across 31 OECD countries by union density based on the most recent figures. By contrast, five countries have over 50% of workers that are unionized, including Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden.

To learn more about this topic from a geographic perspective, check out this graphic on union membership by state.

Authored by Ross Pomeroy via RealClearScience,

Our collective perception of flame is clouded.

When asked to picture a flame, most people probably envision an orange streak dancing to and fro over a pyramid of burning wood, or a tidy blue radiance emanating from a cooking stove. Both are correct conceptions. But in each instance, fire’s purest form is masked by periodic table ‘pollutants’, so to speak.

Above a roaring campfire, we only perceive orange and yellow hues as tiny carbon and sodium particles from the wood fuel are illuminated in the burning maelstrom.

Under a boiling pot of water on a stove, we see blue flames as methane combusts into carbon dioxide and water.

But there’s a more elemental flame that most people have never witnessed. Not only because it’s rare in everyday modern life, but because it’s nearly invisible in daylight and only seen as the faintest pale blue in darkness. This is a hydrogen flame.

When combusted in the presence of oxygen, hydrogen (the lightest element on the periodic table) transforms into water, a chemical process that yields almost no visible light. To see such a flame at all, thermal imaging cameras are often needed.

While hydrogen flames are an infrequent sight today, they could grow more common. As the cleanest burning fuel in existence, hydrogen may become an integral part of a green energy economy, finding use in steel furnaces, heavy-duty vehicles, and aircraft. A phasing out of fossil fuels will not only change the world, it might even alter our view of fire itself.

This graphic breaks down the global equity market into five major pieces as of Dec. 31, 2023, using data from S&P Dow Jones Indices.

Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu highlights the massive share of market capitalization that is located in the U.S., particularly within the S&P 500 index.

Data and Key Takeaways

The figures we used to create this graphic are listed in the table below.

As of the end of 2023, companies listed in the U.S. accounted for 59% of global stock market value. Most of this value is in the S&P 500 index, which consists of the 500 largest publicly traded companies in the country.

Nearly all of the world’s trillion-dollar companies belong in the S&P 500: Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta (also known as the Magnificent Seven)

Looking Outside the U.S.

After U.S. markets, Developed Markets ex-U.S. account for the next biggest share. Shown as the green segment in the chart, developed markets are economies with established financial systems and high levels of income.

Excluding the U.S., the largest developed markets (by capitalization) according to S&P are Japan, UK, Canada, France, and Switzerland.

Finally, there’s Emerging Markets (yellow section) and China (red section). China is considered an emerging market, but was shown separately given its significance to the global economy.

According to S&P, the largest emerging markets (by capitalization) are China, India, Taiwan, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia. Emerging markets are economies in the process of rapid growth and industrialization, as well as higher volatility.

As of October 2024, the most valuable emerging markets companies are Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Aramco and Taiwan’s TSMC.

If you enjoyed this post, check out The World’s 50 Most Valuable Companies on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.

Authored by Rupert Darwall via RealClearWorld,

“Congratulations President-elect Donald Trump on your historic election,” British prime minister Sir Keir Starmer posted on X at 3:21am ET on Wednesday. The best that can be said about this tepid concession is that Starmer got his concession in before Kamala Harris. Make no mistake. This is not the result Labour wanted. Starmer’s Labour party was heavily invested in a Harris win and did everything it could to bring it about.

On July 4, Starmer won a landslide majority in the House of Commons with the lowest share of the popular vote (33.7 percent) for a winning party since 1919. Yet within a month, Sofia Patel, the Labour Party’s head of operations, was emailing Labour staffers to “help our friends across the pond elect their first female president”—Patel adding somewhat condescendingly, “Let’s show those Yanks how to win elections.”

More importantly than Labour foot soldiers pointlessly stomping around North Carolina for Harris, Starmer dispatched several of his top aides—including Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s campaign strategist and now Starmer’s chief of staff, and Matthew Doyle, Downing Street director of communications—to brief the Harris team at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Little good did it do.

In September, they were followed by Deborah Mattinson, who had run focus groups for Tony Blair and served as Starmer’s director of strategy until Election Day. She would tell the Harris campaign “to put the ‘hope and change stuff’ to one side,” one of her colleagues told Politico. Both Starmer and Harris are former prosecutors. Like Starmer, Harris would be “relentlessly pushing this message that she’s a prosecutor who has put criminals behind bars,” explained Jonathan Ashworth, director of the Labour Together think tank. That didn’t do much good, either.

Labour’s hatred of the new president-elect is personal and visceral. In June 2019, during the Conservative leadership election, Starmer posted: “An endorsement from Donald Trump tells you everything you need to know about what is wrong with Boris Johnson’s politics and why he isn’t fit to be Prime Minister.” In 2017, Wes Streeting, now Starmer’s health secretary, tweeted: “Trump is such an odious, sad, little man. Imagine being proud to have that as your President,” an insult aimed not only at Trump but also at Americans.

The most sustained anti-Trump vitriol came from the Harvard Law School-educated foreign secretary, David Lammy. In 2017, Theresa May, the then prime minister, planned a state visit for President Trump. “Yes, if Trump comes to the UK I will be protesting on the streets,” Lammy tweeted. “He is a racist KKK and Nazi sympathiser.” In an unhinged rant denouncing the visit, Lammy condemned Trump for his “shameful behavior on the international stage. We stand with the American people, but we absolutely say, ‘our democratic values are opposed to the misogyny, opposed to the racism, opposed to Steve Bannon and the horrible white supremacy he seems to stand for.’”

In an August interview with The Spectator (its new editor, Michael Gove, endorsed Harris as “the lesser of two evils”), Woody Johnson, Trump’s ambassador to the Court of St James in his first term, described Lammy’s description of Trump as a “neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath” as “not a wise comment,” but then allowed, “those things happen in politics . . . there’s always a way to recover if you want.”

To his credit, Lammy has been doing his best to mend fences. In July, he told the BBC, “Donald Trump has the thickest of skins,” and observed that JD Vance, whom he’d met several times, had used some pretty choice language about Trump in the past. Of the new Vice President-elect, Lammy said they shared similar working-class backgrounds and addiction issues in their families. “We’ve written books on that, we’ve talked about that, and we’re both Christians. So I think I can find common ground with JD Vance.”

Harder to paper over than the history of personal insults is the yawning policy gap between the Labour government and the incoming Trump administration. To Labour, there is no issue more important than climate change. Ed Miliband, Labour’s climate change secretary, whom Charles Moore rightly describes as Labour’s spiritual leader, is a net-zero zealot. On the day Americans were voting for Trump and the return of American energy dominance, Miliband was giving the Cabinet a bleak picture of climate change. “Climate change is a threat to national security and growth, given [it] could force more than 200m people globally to migrate, the global economy could be 19% smaller in 2049 than it would be otherwise & it could put an additional 600,000 people in UK at risk of flooding,” Pippa Crerar, The Guardian’s political editor, reported him saying.

This puts Labour on a collision course with Trump and his pledge to pull out of the Paris climate agreement. With the Senate in Republican hands, Trump might well go a step further than what he did in his first term, and send the agreement—a treaty in all but name—to the Senate for its advice and consent, as required by the Constitution. Doing so would make it impossible for a future president to rejoin. It would lead to howls of outrage from the climate industrial complex and render their unachievable and unaffordable net zero programs pointless.

And it’s not only climate change. A week before the election, Labour unveiled a massive tax, spend, and borrow budget. In its first budget in 14 years, Labour raised taxes by £40bn ($51.6bn), borrowing by £28bn ($36.1bn), and public spending by £70bn ($90.3bn). The budget constitutes a doomed-to-fail bet that transferring around 2.5 percent of GDP from the wealth-generating private sector to the zero-productivity-growth public sector will, by some undefined form of alchemy, improve Britain’s poor economic performance.

It is here that President Trump’s second term could well have the biggest positive impact on Britain—by holding up Labour’s disastrous economic policies for comparison with Trump’s supply-side economics.

Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClearFoundation and author of The Folly of Climate Leadership: Net Zero and Britain’s Disastrous Energy Policies.

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

Putin might agree to freeze the conflict along the Line of Contact in spite of prior rhetoric against this scenario in the event that Trump threatens to escalate the conflict as punishment if he doesn’t…

Trump’s pledge to resolve the Ukrainian Conflict in 24 hours is unrealistic, but he’ll inevitably propose a peace plan at some point in time, thus raising questions about what it would look like and whether Russia would agree to it. More than likely, he’ll seek to freeze the conflict along the Line of Contact (LOC), wherever it may be by that time, as he’s not expected to coerce Ukraine into withdrawing from the regions whose administrative borders Russia claims in their entirety.

Nor is Russia expected to obtain control over them by the time that Trump’s proposal is made. It still hasn’t removed Ukrainian forces from Donbass, which is at the heart of its claims, and therefore is unlikely to capture Zaporozhye city, that namesake’s areas on the side of the Dnieper River, nor Kherson Region’s aforesaid adjacent lands either. It might gain some more territory if Pokrovsk is captured, but the US might dangerously “escalate to de-escalate” to stop a run on the river if Ukraine is then routed.

This could take the form of threatening a conventional NATO intervention if the political will exists to spark a Cuban-like brinskmanship crisis, the odds of which would greatly increase if Russia made any move in that scenario to cross the Dnieper and thus risk the collapse of that bloc’s Ukrainian project. Be that as it may, no such run on the river is expected, with the most that Russia might do is lay siege to Zaporozhye city, but even that might not materialize by the time that Trump shares his peace plan.

Russia will therefore almost certainly be asked to freeze the conflict along the LOC, albeit without rescinding its territorial claims just like Ukraine won’t either, under the threat of Trump ramping up military support to Ukraine if the Kremlin refuses to cease hostilities. This prediction is predicated on summer’s report that some of his advisors suggested that he do precisely that as punishment for Russia rubbishing whatever peace plan that he ultimately offers it.

Considering his tough-talking personality and proclivity for “escalating to de-escalate” on his terms if he feels disrespected, which he flirted doing with North Korea during his first term as a negotiating tactic, he’s thus expected to comply with the aforesaid suggestion in that event. Given Putin’s consummate pragmatism as he understands his style to be and his aversion to escalations, he might very well comply, but he could also request that Trump coerce Zelensky into making concessions to facilitate this.

These might include rescinding 2019’s constitutional amendment making NATO membership a strategic objective, promulgating legislation that Russia considers to advance its denazification goals, freezing further weapons shipments to Ukraine, and carving out a buffer zone within part of Ukrainian territory.

In the order that they were mentioned, the first one would be superficial after this year’s raft of security guarantees between Ukraine and several NATO countries already made it a de facto member of the bloc.

To explain, they all entail commitments to resume their existing military support for Ukraine if its conflict with Russia flares up again upon its eventual end, and this selfsame support arguably aligns with NATO’s Article 5. Contrary to popular perceptions, it doesn’t obligate them to send troops, but only to provide whatever support they believe is necessary to aid allies under attack. This is what they’re already doing, yet Russia never escalated in response to this being enshrined in their bilateral military deals.

As for the second speculative concession that Putin might request that Trump coerce Zelensky into making, the returning American leader and his team haven’t ever signaled any interest in helping Russia denazify Ukraine, and coercing it into promulgating legislation might be seen as bad optics abroad. Since Russia can’t force Ukraine to do this, that particular goal of the special operation will likely remain unfulfilled, in which case it probably wouldn’t be discussed much anymore by officials and the media.

Moving along to the third, Trump probably wouldn’t agree to freeze arms shipments to Ukraine, but they might naturally be curtailed as he refocuses America’s military priorities on containing China in Asia instead of continuing to contain Russia in Europe. About that, his reported plan to encourage NATO members to take more responsibility for their defense is already being implemented under Biden as explained here, and they might continue arms shipments even if the US curtails its own.

Even so, the potentially natural curtailment of US arms shipments to Ukraine could be spun as partially fulfilling Russia’s demilitarization goal, as could any buffer zone that Trump might agree to coerce Ukraine into carving out on its own territory to prevent it from shelling Russian cities. That’ll be a hard sell for Putin to make, and Trump might be pressured by the “deep state” (the permanent members of the US’ military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies) into resisting, but it can’t be ruled out either.

The reason for this cautious optimism is because it would provide a “face-saving” means for Russia to freeze the conflict despite not achieving its maximum objectives instead of risking a Cuban-like brinksmanship crisis by rejecting Trump’s expected proposal to “save face” at home and abroad. Trump wouldn’t make idle threats and certainly wouldn’t let Putin call his bluff even if that was the case so he’s expected to go through with arming Ukraine to the teeth if his peace deal falls flat.

That said, he also campaigned on ending the Ukrainian Conflict, and he’d personally prefer to replenish America’s depleted stockpiles in parallel with arming its Asian allies to the teeth against China instead continuing to arm Ukraine and risking a major crisis with Russia. His Sino-centric New Cold War focus is shared by a minority of the “deep state”, the majority of whom want to continue prioritizing Russia’s containment in Europe over China’s in Asia but who still never recklessly escalated with Russia thus far.

They’ve indeed escalated, but this was always preceded by signaling their intent to do so (such as via the provisioning of various arms) long before this happened, thus giving Russia enough time to calculate a response instead of risking an “overreaction” that could spiral into war with NATO. These anti-Russian hawks might therefore begrudgingly go along with any buffer zone that Trump might agree to if it avoids a potentially uncontrollable escalation like what he might threaten to do if Russia doesn’t take his deal.

Subversive “deep state” elements might even try to provoke such an escalation in order to avert that buffer zone scenario or any other that they consider to be unacceptable concessions to Russia, which remains a risk before and after his inauguration, but it’s clearly not their faction’s preferred scenario. This conclusion is arrived at by recalling on the abovementioned observation about how they always signaled their escalatory intentions far in advance thus far at least in order to avoid a major escalation.

Even if Trump doesn’t comply with any of Putin’s speculative requests to help the latter “save face” by freezing the conflict despite not achieving his country’s maximum goals in the conflict, he could always dangle the carrot of phased sanctions relief of the sort proposed by Richard Haass earlier this week. The former President of the hugely influential Council on Foreign Relations suggested that this could encourage Russia’s compliance with a ceasefire, and it’s possible that Putin might agree to this.

The Russian economy weathered the West’s unprecedented sanctions regime, but Russia’s grand plans to create alternative financial institutions and pivot to the non-West haven’t been as successful. This analysis here about how the latest BRICS Summit achieved nothing of tangible significance at all points out how none of this association’s ambitious initiatives were rolled out. It also hyperlinks to proof that the Chinese-based New Development Bank and the SCO Bank surprisingly comply with US sanctions.

Moreover, “Russia & China’s US-Provoked Payment Problems Caught Most BRICS Enthusiasts By Surprise” in early September after RT published a feature analysis about this politically inconvenient development, which shows that the Chinese centerpiece of Russia’s grand plans isn’t fully on board with them. There’s also the similarly inconvenient fact that Russia’s pivot to the non-West mostly only consists of resource sales to such countries and has yet to become anything more significant.

It accordingly wouldn’t be surprising if Putin appreciated promises of phased sanctions relief in exchange for agreeing to freeze the conflict along the LOC no matter how disappointing of an end this may be to its special operation in the eyes of its most zealous supporters. After all, Foreign Minister Lavrov told a group of ambassadors last month that Russia demands “the lifting of Western anti-Russian sanctions”, so it’s clearly on the collective Kremlin’s mind no matter what its perception managers claim.

Even if Trump makes such promises, however, keeping them would be difficult since many of America’s anti-Russian sanctions are codified into law after being voted on by Congress. They might go along with any request to rescind them, but they also might not, thus throwing a wrench in Russia’s plans. The US also can’t force the EU to rescind its respective sanctions, and anti-Russian countries like Poland and the Baltic States might create obstacles to the resumption of trade with Russia if the EU’s ties with it thaw.  

Should they be implemented even if only semi-successfully, then Trump could claim a victory in “un-uniting” Russia and China like he promised to do even if those two’s trade continues to grow (mostly through Chinese resource imports and replacing lost Western products on Russian shelves). He could also sell this phased sanctions relief proposal to anti-Russian “deep state” hawks and the Europeans on that basis to help secure their support and deflect from claims that he’s doing it as a favor to Putin.

Reflecting on the insight that was shared in this analysis, Trump’s peace plan isn’t expected to have any surprises, nor would it be surprising if Russia agrees to it for the reasons that were explained. The US holds the cards and will only agree to any of Putin’s speculatively requested concessions in order to make it easier for him to “save face” for freezing the conflict despite not achieving his maximum goals. Neither wants a major escalation and both are fatigued with this proxy war so such a deal might work.

It’ll therefore be interesting to see how the rhetoric from Russian officials and their global media ecosystem might change as reports leak out about what exactly Trump has in mind. He and the minority “deep state” faction that supports him are motivated by their desire to “Pivot (back) to Asia” in order to more muscularly contain China, hence their interest in wrapping up this proxy war. As for Russia, it’s beginning to realize that a compromise of some sort is inevitable and must thus prepare the public.

Something unexpected might of course happen to completely change this analysis such as if hawks on either side convince their respective presidents to double down on the conflict, but the arguments made therein cogently account for each side’s interests, especially Russia’s. If everything more or less unfolds as written, then observers can expect a “Great Media/Perception Reset” in terms of Russia’s narrative towards the conflict, which would be required to facilitate whatever compromises Putin might make.

Authored by Nic Carter via X (emphasis ours),

My view of the election is that Trump and Harris were locked in a spiritual battle. Many, including myself, felt that the sparing of Trump’s life in the first assassination was an act of clear divine providence. For him to turn his head at that precise moment to avoid the assassin’s bullet, suffering only a grazed ear – it defies belief. I don’t believe in coincidences like that. Trump himself leaned into the religious overtones, understanding that many Christian supporters had come to see him as a messianic figure. Personally, I do believe – and there are many examples of this in the Bible – that God selects certain individuals to carry out His plans on Earth, and there is no doubt in my mind that Trump is one of those individuals. (Isaiah 6:8 says: “I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me”)

Trump’s travails have been almost Job-like. Stripped of virtually everything, impeached, battered, humiliated, almost killed, slandered, deplatformed, sued, on the verge of being thrown in prison for the rest of his life, Trump found the strength to mount a remarkable campaign and win. It is the greatest political comeback in American history. Many see his resilience as superhuman and divinely inspired.

Now on the other side we have another religion, one I consider idolatrous, but a religion nonetheless. See when you strip God from life, you don’t leave people intact, but rather you leave them with a God-shaped hole. Today’s left has eliminated (or corrupted) the Church, and in its place they have adopted secular religions (some call this ‘gnostism’). Harris and her progressive supporters subscribe to three of these cults: climate doomerism, wokeism, and to a lesser extent AI safety. Broadly, these all fall under the umbrella of decel-ism.

It’s worth unpacking these slightly. Climate and AI doomerism are contemporary millenarian cults; that is, they are concerned with the apocalypse. Adherents to such cults believe that a reckoning is coming which will transform the earth, punish the sinful, save the worthy, or just wipe us out entirely. On climate, the idea is that we committed a grave original sin by debauching nature and emitting CO2; Gaia is punishing us by unleashing her wrath in the form of ever-intensifying storms (never mind that the cost to humans from climate-related disasters has been falling); and if we don’t sufficiently change our ways we will be extinguished in a final day of reckoning (think The Day After Tomorrow). AI safety is a newer cult, but very similar: we summoned a demon of sorts by creating AI, and we risk destroying humanity if we delve any deeper into machine intelligence. (There is a trippier variant of the AI doomer cult in which we achieve a rapture and merge with the Machine God in some kind of singularity.) Both cults stress the sin of industrial pursuit, and in both case the solutions are the same: slow down or even reverse progress.

Compare Trump and Harris on AI and Climate. Trump wants to re-energize America’s heartland, unleash our abundant energy resources for Bitcoin mining, AI, chip manufacturing, and so on. Trump recognizes that we cannot hamstring ourselves with a Merkel-style Energiewende. It’s suicide to sacrifice ourselves to the angry climate God via Thunbergesque atonement while China prints coal and nuclear plants. Meanwhile, Harris stands for an insipid green transition which simply hasn’t paid off anywhere it has been tried. The left’s infatuation for green transitions should be understood as superstition, not policy. (If they really believed in the existential risk from climate, they would be all in on nuclear, or even global cooling with aerosolized sulfates. They aren’t.) On AI, Harris stands for AI Safety, the self-aggrandizing Silicon Valley cult which both worships and fears the machine God. Trump instead sees AI as a vital strategic resource to be unleashed, making no underlying metaphysical claims whatsoever.

Leaving aside the decel cults, the most important spiritual lens through which Harris should be understood is wokeism. Wokeism is in some ways similar to those other two secular cults, in that it has rituals, priests, and has the elements of original sin – whiteness, privilege, etc. Wokeism even has a millenarian bent in that it presumes that the world is fundamentally unjust and subject to vast oppressive conspiracies (although it doesn’t clearly specify what the day of reckoning might look like). However the inherent flaw of Wokeism and the reason it doesn’t universalize well is that it offers no absolution. There’s no way for a straight white man (or anyone else near the top of the privilege hierarchy) to atone for their original sin. Compare with Christianity, which stresses (depending on the denomination) that all you have to do to be absolved of your sins is accept Jesus Christ into your heart. So wokeism can’t really sustain itself, because it’s dependent on a spiritual underclass of “oppressors” who are willing to continually submit to and elevate the least privileged (the trans disabled PoC, etc). But who would sign up for a religion that offers no atonement? Even the most ardent white wokes must feel a twinge of doubt at their membership in the cult, realizing that they are permanent Dalits in the woke caste system.

So I see the Trump Harris conflict through the lens of a spiritual war. Of course, the battle between right and left already has a spiritual component in that it’s not just two sets of rival policy positions but in fact a much more deep-seated set of mutually conflicting worldviews; individual versus system-level thinking, merit versus racial score-settling, small government versus collectivism, nuclear family versus the state as your family, and so on. In the case of Trump and Harris it was even more direct. Trump plays the role of an unintentional Messiah, almost accidentally thrust into this savior role. Though Trump’s faith may not be particularly sincere, his fans’ belief that he is a tortured savior chosen by God is. Meanwhile Harris is the purest representative we’ve seen of the progressive religion to date, being selected for the role not due to her track record in government but because of her anointed status within the woke cult. She is perfect: Black, Indian, a woman, and so on. (She merely lacked charisma, meaningful policy views, a distinct message of change, or a platform.) There can be no real dispute that she was more of an empty vessel for woke payloads than a genuine candidate. Her campaign was mainly focused on marshalling the high-propensity female vote on abortion, shaming minorities into falling in line, scolding men into voting “for their wives and daughters”, and so on. She abjectly refused to specify meaningful policy positions, keeping them deliberately vague, running instead on pure identitarianism.

To the right, her great sacrilege was her primary campaign issue – the murder of unborn children. Other issues she stands for – the coercive chemical castration of children, for instance, are considered not simply poor policy by the right, but downright satanic. It’s unsurprising that Trump’s strongest campaign message was “Kamala is for They/Them. Trump is for You.” For Trump’s Christian supporters, the distinction could not have been starker. Many felt that this was the last election if she won. The left misunderstood this when folks like Elon said it. The idea wasn’t that there would never be an election ever again, but rather that the left would vastly accelerate their import of the third world and spontaneously grant them citizenship. This isn’t far-fetched. The left was quite explicit about their desire to do this, and they partially executed on it under Biden. Some on the left, too, felt that if Trump regained power, he would fashion the government into a fascist authoritarian regime and permanently leave democracy behind. So this election had a decidedly existential bent to it. Many on both sides felt that this would be last freely contested vote.

As a Christian and a conservative, I am encouraged that America resoundingly rejected these woke cults and their emissary in Harris. This was a realigning election which cannot be written off as a fluke like 2016 was. Hispanics shifted abruptly right, undermining the Left’s core coalition. Harris actually underperformed Biden with black voters, showing the weakness of her identitarian campaign. Black men in particular defected from the left quite markedly. Trump gained with young voters, a generally secular group that is still infatuated with wokeism. By contrast, Trump did astoundingly well with Catholics, winning them by 18 points, the largest gap in decades. Trump also gained with Protestants relative to 2020. Eighty percent of evangelicals broke for Trump, again a better margin than 2020. Harris’ campaign built around Roe simply wasn’t compelling enough. And some of her high-propensity supporters, like suburban white moms, were turned off by the left’s ritual sacrifice of girls at the altar of wokeism (by allowing males in women’s sports, for instance). Voters were more concerned with immigration and the economy.

The democrats should engage in soul searching and realize that by embracing cults like wokeism, and GDP-destroying fantasies like climate doomerism and AI doomerism, they are swimming against the current. Their Obama coalition has been shattered in the biggest realigning election since Reagan. Having lost the working class, Hispanic vote, and unable to import new voters as they had planned, if they continue down the path of racial shame and elevating DEI candidates, they will lose over and over. As for the right, they have resurrected their messiah. Expectations couldn’t be higher. But one thing is clear. Religion, real religion, is still a force to be reckoned with in American politics. The left has lost the Mandate of Heaven. It belongs to Trump now.

Almost exactly one year ago, we wrote that 2024 would be the busiest political year on record…

…. and it certainly has delivered, including these main highlights.

• The Taiwanese election in January 2024
• Indian elections in April/May
• European Parliamentary elections in June
• The US Presidential Election in November.

So with the main events of 2024 now in the rearview mirror we can conclude that this has been a catastrophic year for incumbents at elections.

And not just in the US where Democrats have lost ground relative to four years earlier, but incumbents have also lost ground in the UK, France, India, Japan and South Africa as well this year.

It gets worse: an even more amazing stat comes from the FT, which reports that every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share, the first time this has ever happened!

According to Deutsche Bank, it’s also the first time since the late 1800s that the incumbent party in the White House has lost three consecutive presidential elections.

A fascinating stat. So why is this happening across the world? Accord to Jim Reid there are three things going on:

1. The economy is a big factor for most if not all countries here, and growth has slowed down relative to previous decades. That’s left voters disappointed, having not seen gains in their living standards that they’d previously been used to. Even though growth is stronger in the US, voters have not tended to suggest this when polled, and have certainly highlighted inflation and the cost of living as a big issue.
2. Immigration. Many voters have been concerned that incumbents have no solution to their concerns over migration.
3. Selected mismanagement claims and domestic scandals. This is clearly not the case everywhere, but it’s cost incumbents in several countries.
4. Voters in general have become much more willing to change their vote from election to election. A smaller share of the electorate vote the same way all the time, meaning it’s easier to see big swings from one election to the next, as there’s now more swing voters up for grabs.

Overall, it feels like voters have ignored the extremely generous handouts after Covid – which ultimately sparked the biggest inflationary tsunami in 40 years – and instead focused on the costs of these in the aftermath. The top cost likely being inflation, and although it’s fallen back now, voters experience this on a cumulative basis, rather than a 12-month basis as economists often analyze.

The interesting question is whether this trend will continue. The fact that this is the first time in over 120 years that the US incumbent party has lost three times in a row might hint at a more structural problem where politicians are unable to deliver against expectations in a world of lower growth and fairly regular shocks.

Maybe, as Jim Reid concludes, James Carville’s “It’s the economy, stupid” remains the key going forward. A world where productivity growth remains low doesn’t help any incumbent promising a brighter future. So if we do get a productivity miracle at some point from AI then maybe promises can be kept. Then again, to assume that a bunch of woke chatbots can revolutionize the way we live and work, may be even more naive than thinking Kamala Harris could defeat Donald Trump.

One thing is certain: any political phenomenon which has even Alex Soros – who just wasted $1 billion backing the biggest Democrat loser in recent history – shocked that people everywhere are fed up with leaders who put globalist agendas above their own citizens, and are finally voting for leaders who actually serve them…

Before you beat yourself up about the elections pls read this:
The incumbents in every single one of the 10 major countries that have been tracked by the ParlGov global research project and held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters. This is the first time… https://t.co/XiO03kEDDj

— Alex Soros (@AlexanderSoros) November 7, 2024

… has got to be good.

Authored by Samantha Flom via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Two controversial ballot initiatives concerning illegal immigration and abortion easily passed at the ballot box on Nov. 5 with broad support from voters.

Proposition 314, a statutory amendment referred by the Arizona Legislature, prohibits illegal immigrants from entering the state directly from a foreign country at any location other than a lawful port of entry.

The law effectively empowers Arizona law enforcement officers to arrest illegal immigrants. It also bars illegal immigrants from knowingly submitting false documents to apply for public benefits or a job and makes it a class 2 felony for an adult to knowingly sell fentanyl that later causes the death of another person.

The proposition needed only a simple majority to pass and coasted to victory with 63 percent of the vote. Its success comes as Arizona has effectively become ground zero for the nation’s border crisis.

In fiscal year 2024, the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector in Arizona reported more than 463,000 encounters with illegal immigrants—the highest total among all nine sectors.

In August, U.S. Customs and Border Protection made its largest-ever singular seizure of fentanyl when it intercepted 4 million pills at the sector’s Lukeville port of entry.

A Noble Predictive Insights poll released in September had indicated widespread support for Proposition 314, with 63 percent of registered voters signaling their approval. It was also supported by majorities of Republicans (77 percent), independents (57 percent), and Democrats (52 percent) alike.

But Living United for Change in Arizona, an opponent of the measure, has expressed concerns that it might lead to “rampant racial profiling” and civil rights violations.

Abortion Amendment Passes

Arizona was also one of 10 states that voted on the issue of abortion this election.

In a 62–38 vote, the state approved a citizen-led initiative to establish a constitutional right to abortion through fetal viability, and when a “health care professional” deems it necessary to protect the mother’s life or health.

Proposition 139 also bars the state from penalizing anyone who assists a woman in obtaining an abortion.

At present, abortion is legal in Arizona through 15 weeks of pregnancy, though the issue has been a matter of contention in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision, which overturned the federal right to abortion.

The ruling gave way to a court battle in the state over the enforcement of a near-total abortion ban dating back to 1864. After the Arizona Supreme Court ruled in April that the law could be enforced, state lawmakers voted to repeal it.

Arizonans for Abortion Access, the group that put forward the new amendment, applauded voters’ decision to adopt it.

“We did it!” the group wrote in an X post. “Arizona has overwhelmingly voted to protect abortion access! We proved, yet again, that Arizona is a state that values freedom and individual rights.”

Opponents of the measure argued that the inclusion of an exception for the mother’s general “health” could be interpreted to authorize late-term abortions for virtually any reason. They also held that it would prohibit health and safety regulations to protect women and minors while removing licensed physicians from the equation.

By the morning of Nov. 6, a petition was already circulating online asking Arizona state senators to either repeal the amendment or enact new legislation to “help decrease the actual number of abortions performed in our state.”