Happy Thursday! This tractor-trailer filled with energy drinks that crashed on an interstate in Nebraska on Tuesday was carrying roughly the same amount of caffeine the Morning Dispatch and Dispatch Politics teams collectively consumed to get through the past 48 hours. 

• Vice President Kamala Harris called President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday to concede the 2024 presidential election. Harris told Trump she would work to ensure a “peaceful transfer of power,” according to her campaign staff. President Joe Biden also called Trump to congratulate him on his victory, inviting him to a meeting at the White House and pledging a smooth transition. The Associated Press has not yet called the races in Arizona and Nevada, which have 69 and 87 percent of the vote counted, respectively. 
• Harris delivered her concession speech later in the afternoon on Wednesday at Howard University in Washington, D.C. “We must accept the results of this election,” she told a crowd of her supporters and campaign staff. “A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results.” But she also urged her supporters to keep fighting for the goals of her campaign. “In our nation, we owe loyalty not to a president or a party, but to the Constitution of the United States, and loyalty to our conscience and to our God,” she said. “My allegiance to all three is why I am here to say while I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign.” 
• The Associated Press on Wednesday morning called Montana’s Senate race for Republican Tim Sheehy, who unseated Democratic incumbent Sen. Jon Tester. But Democrats got some additional calls of their own in Michigan and Wisconsin, where Rep. Elissa Slotkin and Sen. Tammy Baldwin won their respective senate contests. The Senate races in Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania remained too close to call at the time of publication. 
• Republicans on Wednesday looked increasingly likely to hold a majority in the House of Representatives. As of 5:16 a.m. ET today, the Associated Press had called 206 House races in favor of Republicans, including one where Republicans flipped control of the seat. Several Republicans in close races, including Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, successfully fended off their Democratic challengers. Democrats hold 191 seats with no flips, with 38 races yet to be called. Either party would need 218 seats to command control of the chamber.
• Multiple outlets reported on Wednesday that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and special counsel Jack Smith—leading the case against President-elect Donald Trump for his alleged mishandling of classified documents and election interference related to the 2020 election—is looking to wind down the cases, in line with DOJ policy that a sitting president cannot be actively prosecuted. Officials reportedly recognize that the cases are unlikely to go to trial before the inauguration, when Trump will once again become the head of the executive branch. 
• Voters favored expanded access to abortion in seven of the 10 states where abortion referenda, amendments, and ballot measures were up for a vote on Tuesday. Nebraska voted in favor of a pro-life measure, while abortion rights amendments failed in Florida and South Dakota. Voters in Maryland, where abortion is already legal, added language to the constitution protecting a woman’s “ability to make and effectuate decisions to prevent, continue, or end” a pregnancy. Nevada voters also approved a measure that would include a right to an abortion in the state constitution, though it will face a second vote in 2026 before it can be officially added. 
• Voters in four states—Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon—on Tuesday rejected ranked-choice voting initiatives that would have transformed their state’s voting system. Meanwhile, Washington, D.C., voters approved a ballot measure to institute the ranked-choice voting system as well as allow open primaries in the heavily Democratic district. Voters in Missouri—a state that doesn’t currently use the system widely—approved a measure banning ranked-choice voting in the state with a carve-out for St. Louis. 
• Eight states—Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wisconsin—approved constitutional amendments enshrining explicit bans on noncitizen voting in state constitutions. It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and they were already prohibited from voting in state elections in the eight states that approved the amendments. 
• Californians on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure that increased criminal penalties for some nonviolent crimes, like shoplifting and drug offenses. The measure rolled back a 2014 initiative that had made shoplifting of items under a certain value, plus other nonviolent crimes, misdemeanors. Proposition 36, the measure passed Tuesday, was targeted at repeat offenders, as well as imposing harsher penalties on people dealing fentanyl, the deadly opioid. 
• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday appointed Gideon Saar to be Israel’s foreign minister after tapping the previous foreign minister, Israel Katz, to replace Yoav Gallant as defense minister. Saar—who leads his own opposition party, New Hope—had quit the Netanyahu government earlier this year, but rejoined the prime minister’s ruling coalition in September. 
• The Ukrainian military carried out a drone strike on a Russian naval base along the Caspian Sea on Wednesday. The attack reportedly damaged several missile carrier ships and represented the first Ukrainian strike in the Caspian Sea region. The targeted base lies hundreds of miles away from the frontlines and nearly 1,000 miles from Kyiv. 

Vice President Kamala Harris officially conceded the 2024 presidential race on Wednesday afternoon, first in a private call with former, and now-future, President Donald Trump. During the call, she underscored her commitment to the peaceful transfer of power, as an email from campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon put it, “unlike what we saw in 2020.” 

On Wednesday afternoon, Harris addressed supporters at Howard University, her alma mater, in Washington, D.C., where revelers had first gathered on Tuesday night. But instead of a triumphant address late on election night, as she’d surely hoped for, it was a somber, if hopeful, concession speech to a disappointed crowd. “A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results,” she said. “That principle as much as any other distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny, and anyone who seeks the public trust must honor it.” 

A fuller picture of Tuesday’s election results emerged Wednesday as world leaders, Washington politicos, and voters began to come to grips with Trump’s surprising comeback. In races down the ballot, Democrats largely lost out, failing to hold the Senate and likely losing the House; their one bright spot came from the passage of more than half a dozen abortion-rights ballot measures. 

But Wednesday was focused on a process that Americans can no longer take for granted: the peaceful transition of power. Harris never discussed Trump directly in her remarks, but she certainly made some veiled references to the former president: “In our nation, we owe loyalty not to a president or a party, but to the Constitution of the United States, and loyalty to our conscience and to our God,” she told supporters. “My allegiance to all three is why I am here to say, while I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fuels this campaign, the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness and the dignity of all people, a fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation, the ideals that reflect America at our best.”

Leaders around the world congratulated Trump on his victory. “Congratulations on history’s greatest comeback!” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted late Tuesday night. During Trump’s first term, his administration moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem in an important symbolic move to recognize it as the capital and negotiated the Abraham Accords, a pact in which Israel normalized relations with Arab countries including the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Netanyahu, a politician of the right, likely feels a greater kinship with Trump than he did with outgoing President Joe Biden, though the pair’s relationship hasn’t been without its issues.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called Trump to congratulate him, saying that he hoped the “special relationship will continue to prosper on both sides of the Atlantic.” 

Some world leaders are likely more apprehensive about Trump’s return to the White House. Ukrainian President Voldomyr Zelensky played a prominent role in the president-elect’s first impeachment and has been the target of snide remarks by Trump, whose support for Ukraine’s war against the Russian invasion has been hot and cold and sometimes just tepid. Still, Zelensky praised Trump on X for his “impressive election victory,” likely mindful that the incoming president—who has said he would end the war in Ukraine on day one of his presidency—has the power to make or break his nation’s defense.  

“I appreciate President Trump’s commitment to the ‘peace through strength’ approach in global affairs,” Zelensky said. “This is exactly the principle that can practically bring just peace in Ukraine closer.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose intelligence agencies reportedly were behind false bomb threats to Democratic-stronghold districts on Election Day, was more circumspect. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Putin had no plan to congratulate Trump, citing the frigid diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Russia. “Let’s wait and see what happens in January,” Peskov said. 

Come January, it won’t just be Trump sworn into his new office: Members of the House of Representatives and a third of the Senate will take their seats, too. Many of the new members of Congress will be Republicans. Whatever one thinks of the idea of a presidential mandate, the new Senate majority for Republicans will certainly help enact Trump’s policy agenda. At the time of this writing, the GOP had flipped Democratic Senate seats in Ohio—held by Sen. Sherrod Brown—and Montana—held by Sen. John Tester—as well as the West Virginia seat held by Sen. Joe Manchin, a retiring independent who was a Democrat until earlier this year. 

With Senate races in Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania still too close to call, Republicans will hold, at minimum, a 52-seat majority with the possibility of 55. There is also an uncalled election in Maine, which independent Sen. Angus King is widely expected to win, but votes will take some time to be counted because of the state’s ranked-choice voting system.

A call on which party controls the House of Representatives could still be some days away, as races in swing districts in California and New York go down to the wire. But Republicans are feeling increasingly confident that they will hold onto their narrow majority. 

The GOP is proceeding like a governing trifecta is in the offing. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, told Axios that it was unlikely that a Trump victory would accompany a loss of the GOP’s House majority. Johnson—an unlikely speaker who has weathered his stormy conference for more than a year—also sent a letter to the House Republican conference Wednesday asking to be reelected as speaker.

Down-ballot Republicans seem to have been buoyed by Trump’s incredibly strong showing … basically everywhere. He currently stands likely to win the popular vote at nearly 51 percent, significantly outperforming his 46 percent vote share in 2016 and his 47 percent finish in 2020. It is the first time since George W. Bush’s presidential reelection run in 2004 that a Republican candidate has won a popular majority, and with 295 electoral votes, Trump has already exceeded Bush’s electoral college margin. 

Trump has so far won at least five of the seven swing states, including all three “Blue Wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, as well as the southeastern states of Georgia and North Carolina. At the time of this writing, Nevada and Arizona were still too close to call, with roughly 71 percent of votes reported in Arizona and 92 percent in Nevada. 

Arguably as striking, if not more so, than any of the state-level returns was the consistent nationwide shift to the right. Rural, suburban, and urban voters all expressed a greater preference for Republican candidates. Deep-red rural districts, like White County, Georgia? A 2-point shift towards the GOP, from 82 percent to 84 percent. Suburban counties with relatively high levels of college-educated voters, like Fairfax County, Virginia? A 7-point swing to Trump. And dark-blue urban bastions like New York County, home to New York City? A 9-point shift. 

There was one bright spot for Democrats: a number of highly publicized abortion-related ballot measures across the country. Ten states voted on ballot measures to expand abortion access or enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution: the pro-abortion measure passed in seven states, including notably conservative states like Montana, Arizona, and Missouri, where voters overturned an existing ban on abortions except in the case of rape or a medical emergency. 

However, abortion rights measures were defeated in Nebraska, South Dakota, and most notably Florida. The proposed Floridian measure, Amendment 4, which would have established a constitutional right to abortion before fetal viability or to protect a woman’s health, fell short of the state’s 60 percent threshold for constitutional amendments, with 57 percent support.

To be clear, the election was far from a landslide victory for Republicans, and many of the counties that shifted toward the right were still relatively clear Democratic victories. But it also was not, really, a realignment election—that would require larger margins and a reordering of the electoral college map. But, as Jonah wrote on Wednesday, it appears that “while the parties are stuck in a logjam, the coalitions making up the parties are changing dramatically.” 

While early exit polling should be taken with a sizable grain of salt, it is clear from county-level returns that Trump improved on his already-impressive-for-a-Republican performance with Latinos. Trump won all eight of South Texas’ heavily Latino border counties. He won only one in 2020. In Florida’s heavily Hispanic Miami-Dade County, Trump won by 12 points; he is the first Republican to win the county since George H.W. Bush in 1988. 

Overall, the election was a continuation of the shifts that brought Trump to the White House in 2016, made the election far closer than expected in 2020, and delivered victory in 2024: a decline in Democratic support among minority voters, especially Latinos; improvements for Republicans among the working and middle classes; and electoral strategy that increasingly caters to male dissatisfaction. 

Democrats are already trying to assign blame for the loss. Many point the finger at Biden for deciding to run for reelection. “This is no time to pull punches or be concerned about anyone’s feelings,” Jim Manley, a former top aide to the late Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, told Politico. “He and his staff have done an enormous amount of damage to this country.”

But other Democrats think that the election had more to do with deep structural factors than a particular candidate. “It said more about America than it did about Kamala,” Donna Brazile, the veteran Democratic operative, told the Washington Post.

To the extent that any election says something about America, this one had a clear message: Trump is back, bigly. 

• Writing for Foreign Affairs, Stephen Hadley argued that the U.S. faces a new axis of autocratic convergence that makes for the most challenging international environment in decades. “One of the most disconcerting features of this environment is the burgeoning cooperation among China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia,” he wrote. “What should be done about this cooperation is another matter. Some strategists argue for ruthless prioritization, focusing on the members of the axis that represent the greatest threats. Others believe that only a comprehensive effort will succeed. But the best strategy would borrow elements of both approaches, acknowledging that China is the primary long-term concern for U.S. national security strategy—‘the pacing threat’ in the U.S. Defense Department’s framing—but also a different kind of global actor than its rogue-state partners.”  

Fox News: RFK Jr. Argues ‘Entire Departments’ in the FDA ‘Have to Go’

BBC: Raygun Retires From Breaking After Olympic Backlash 

A new season of Netflix’s The Diplomat dropped last week, but we were, um, a little busy. Now, though, maybe we’ll be able to find the time to catch up—or at the very least rewatch that scene from season one when Keri Russell’s character beats the tar out of her husband, played by Rufus Sewell. 

• In the newsletters: The Dispatch Politics crew took stock of Republicans’ historic comeback, Nick reflected ( 🔒) on his own vindication, and Jonah argued (🔒) that good things have downsides, and bad things have upsides. 
• On the podcasts: Jonah examined Tuesday’s events in a solo Remnant. 
• On the site: Charlotte reports on Naim Qassem, the new head of Hezbollah, and the status of Lebanon ceasefire negotiations. 

What did you think of Harris’ speech?