Welcome to the week from Prop Media, where we break down what mattered and what it all means. I'm George Hahn, and it's Friday, November 6th.
Today, a historic night for the Democrats and what comes next. Then, why Wall Street is losing patience with big tech. And finally, a Stanford psychiatrist on how to log off. Let's get into it.
After months of buildup, the midterms are over and the results were stunning. Democrats now have a majority in Congress with 54 seats in the Senate and 240 in the House. They also won five new governor seats around the country, giving them a majority of 29 governors nationwide.
Some of the biggest upsets came from deep red territory like South Carolina, Kansas, and of course, Texas. On Wednesday's Raging Moderates live stream, Scott tried to make sense of it all.
I mean, all right, Kansas, first time in a hundred years they've sent a senator. Two things struck me. Well, a bunch of things, but the two I'll reference and then I want to hear what struck you. One, South Carolina, what the data shows is that if they had just put up someone and put an R next to their name that no one had ever heard of and did not have Trump endorse this person or get near this person, that person would have handily beaten the Democrat. That it was Trump's association with Darlene and her de facto association with Trump vis-à-vis being Graham's sibling that basically sunk her. That if they had just said Bob Smith, you've never heard of him, but he's a Republican and Trump got nowhere near it. I mean, this is such a clear... I mean, we call it a blue tsunami. It was a tsunami riptide.
The other thing that I want to point out is that, and this has been a big thing, young men are... theme of mine, young men are the swingiest swingers in voting. And that is they vote mostly on economic issues. You know, on crime and immigration, Republicans are steadfastly seen as the better or the more serious party. On things like sometimes around what I'll call empathy, better tax policy, whatever you want to call it, the Democrats pull stronger. Young men go with the economy, and the economy flips back and forth. Sometimes people think that Republicans are better for the economy. Sometimes they think Democrats are better for the economy. And I'll come back to that because I have data on that.
But if you look at what happened, if you look at who pivoted the hardest in this election, it is just striking what happened. And that is if you look at white women, they swung 11 points towards Dems this election. White non-college swung 14 points. Black men swung 16 points back towards Democrats versus 24. Hispanic people 28 points. Young people 32-point swing. And then the biggest swing of any group, and arguably the biggest swing we have seen in any cohort in recent history in an election, is males age 18 to 29 swung 38 points.
So for those of you who have this lazy thinking that young men are just Neanderthals, not worth saving, who drag their knuckles along the ground, they're paying attention. They're focused on economics so they can form households. They're less socially minded or less concerned, I should say, over geopolitics or social issues. They want to know who's going to give them the prosperity that their parents had.
Republicans also lost ground with rural voters, the heart of their base. And in Florida and North Carolina, Democrats won in the same districts Republicans had redrawn to keep them out. Later in the live stream, Jessica Tarlov made sure to call out the irony of cheating and still losing.
Rural vote was one of the most interesting facets of this race that was a particularly big deal in South Carolina. And once those numbers started trickling in, folks knew that it was going to be a very bad night. Those are core Donald Trump voters. And JD Vance has posted this long, long tweet about what happened and saying, you know, it was the war in Iran and even the president says this. He did some Israel blaming. It's very interesting to see, you know, those voices kind of converging, but he talked about traditional Republican voters leaving the cohort and what a shot across the bow this is for Republicans.
And by no means does last night's results indicate to me that this coalition is now enduring on the Democratic side. I mean, there are, you know, people who definitely showed up to vote yesterday who may have no interest whatsoever in the Democratic ticket come 2028 if there are normal people on the Republican side of it. But the collapse of the rural vote was a huge storyline that every gerrymander ended up being a dummy-mander. Those Florida numbers as they came in for Kathy Castor, for Jared Moskowitz, looking at North Carolina didn't pick up one seat out of that. Like they cheated so badly. How embarrassing to be that low and that corrupt and not even be able to pull it off.
Some Republicans have been walking away from the party for a while. David Brooks spent most of his life as a conservative and he doesn't recognize what the movement has become. On Thursday, we reaired his conversation with Scott where he traced the split back to his own early days on the right.
Yeah, I became a conservative in my 20s after being a police reporter in Chicago. And the two heroes for me were Edmund Burke, who was an Irish conservative statesman and philosopher who believed in epistemological modesty. The idea is the world is really complicated and when we do change, we should do it constantly but incrementally.
And my other hero was Alexander Hamilton, who was a Puerto Rican hip-hop artist from upper Manhattan. Now, and so Alexander Hamilton believed that progressives believe in government to enhance equality and libertarians believe in limited government to enhance freedom. Hamiltonianism believes in limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility. And so those are the two north stars for me. And of course over the course of the Trump administration, I've come to believe that whatever conservatism is, it's not what Trump is producing. He's producing reactionary politics, something completely different. And so I went back to those books that I used to read from Edmund Burke and people like Isaiah Berlin and a guy named Michael Oakeshott, and I loved them all over again. I think the essential conservative truths are still very profound, but they are nothing like what is called conservatism today. There is nothing like Fox News.
And I go back to one moment in my formation where now in retrospect it looks like there was a crucial fork in the road. I came out of Chicago and I read Burke and Adam Smith and these books and I worked at National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Weekly Standard, and we believed in promulgating conservative ideas. At the same time I graduated from Chicago, there were a couple people graduating from Dartmouth who had worked at the Dartmouth Review. And people may recognize Laura Ingraham, Dinesh D'Souza. They were in this group. And I've come to see they were not pro-conservative. They were anti-left.
They were in elite institutions, but they hated the progressive lean of those institutions. And so they were sort of the rebel bad boys. The defining feature of the Dartmouth Review was in 1986 some progressive students on Dartmouth's campus erected a shanty town to protest apartheid, and in the middle of the night the editors of Dartmouth, about a dozen of them, descended on the shanty town and took sledgehammers to them. And it was an attempt to dismantle the left really, and to me it was like Gestapo tactics, and I was shocked and appalled because apartheid really is worth protesting. But I've come to see that difference between being pro-conservative, which I would say John McCain was, Mitt Romney was, George W. Bush was, and anti-left, which is what Laura Ingraham is, which is what Pete Hegseth is, what Vivek Ramaswamy is. That to me is a crucial difference.
Our allies have been watching all of this, too. On Tuesday's Special Conversations episode, Fareed Zakaria told Scott how countries like Canada and India are rethinking their relationship with the US and why that won't change overnight.
But it gets to a central question, which is, are other nations so burned by the two Trump elections? One could be a fluke, but two makes them think, look, do we need to buy insurance? Okay, you guys come in, some nice Democrat comes in, he starts saying all the right things just as Joe Biden did. But what happens if 10 years from now or even just six years from now we get another Trump-like character? We get JD Vance, we get Don Jr., we need some protection, we need some insurance, and we are going to... So I see this, for example, with Canada.
Canada made a fundamental decision decades ago, and Brian Mulroney and George Bush Sr., to bind the US and Canadian economies together, to almost create a North American economy. And the car industry, for example, is currently a North American car industry. The parts move 15 times across borders to make the most efficient North American cars. The Canadians are thinking, if that dependence on America has proved to be a vulnerability because America will use it to squeeze us, to punish us, to bully us, we've got to get some leverage back. And so he's making... Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, is making deals with the European Union, with China, with India. Now I think he's going to keep doing that even if a Democrat is elected in '28.
India was going to wean itself off its dependence on Russian arms. But then watching the way that Trump behaved towards India, but also the way he behaved towards Ukraine, I'm sure the Indians... I know the Indians are thinking, well, you know, we'll wean ourselves off the Russians a bit, but maybe slower than we planned to, and we'll diversify. The big order they placed this year was actually for French fighter planes, not American. And there had been a hope that India would essentially trade its dependence... 80% of Indian weaponry comes from Russia, we trade that for America. And there were many people in India advocating that, but the Trump administration's attitude has completely changed the way Indians at the elite level look at America in general. Indians are still wildly pro-American, but at the elite level it's changed.
So this gets to the question you're asking. I think we have set in motion, you know, kind of a series of motions that people are going to buy insurance. So I think we can get a bunch of it back. I think we can stabilize the system again, but we can't go back to the way it was because once you sow that level of mistrust, that doubt, that sense that we need a bit of insurance, it's hard to see how you get... We did the impossible, you know. For 50 years, the second and third richest countries in the world, Germany and Japan, said we don't need to have major defenses, you take care of us. We are basically subcontracting our national security policy to you, the number one country. The idea that the number two and number three economies in the world would subcontract their foreign policy to the number one country, again, historically never happened in the world. And it was American genius. And it has now been American stupidity and recklessness that has wrecked that system.
