“President-elect Trump’s victory was driven by gains among young voters that the campaign targeted through a media blitz in the final months leading up to the general election,” Axios reports.

“It’s another lesson in how hyper-targeted communications — identifying what resonates with these audiences, meeting them where they are and engaging with voices they trust — should be a key part of the comms playbook.”

“While Trump and Vice President Harris leveraged a mix of traditional and new media channels to reach young, minority voters, the scale of Trump’s outreach was bigger and broader.”

“Eight years ago, conservative Christians wondered if Donald Trump, who had just been elected president, would truly be their champion. They were weary, and angry, after wandering in the wilderness of the Obama years when liberal values seemed ascendant and they felt powerless,” the New York Times reports.

“Now, as Mr. Trump’s sweeping re-election victory brings them to new heights of power, they believe his return is more than an electoral mandate: they believe it is a divine one.”

“President-elect Trump plans fast action on a business-friendly agenda of tax cuts, deregulation and expanded energy production,” Axios reports.

“Trump plans to load his White House and Cabinet with business- and tech-friendly executives, and stretch the powers of the presidency to force quick changes.”

“Trump advisers believe in retrospect that they wasted early opportunities in his first term, because they were unfamiliar with maximizing government power and restrained by a divided staff. There are several reasons to expect a very different outcome this time.”

Washington Post: For Trump and Republicans in Congress, “everything is in play” on tax cuts.

Ron Filipkowski collected every campaign promise Donald Trump made — and has them on video.

“Even before Donald Trump was re-elected, his best-known backer, Elon Musk, had come to him with a request for his presidential transition,” the New York Times reports.

“He wanted Mr. Trump to hire some employees from Mr. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, as top government officials — including at the Defense Department.”

“That request, which would seed SpaceX employees into an agency that is one of its biggest customers, is a sign of the benefits that Mr. Musk may reap after investing more than $100 million in Mr. Trump’s campaign, pushing out a near-constant stream of pro-Trump material on his social media platform, X, and making public appearances on the candidate’s behalf across the hard-fought state of Pennsylvania.”

“After helping engineer Donald Trump’s improbable and sweeping victory in the presidential race, Susie Wiles, the president-elect’s unassuming co-campaign chief, is seen as the frontrunner to become his White House chief of staff,” NBC News reports.

Electoral-Vote.com: “The dominant story of the election thus far is the turnout. Donald Trump collected 62 million votes in 2016, grew that to 74 million in 2020, and will check in at a bit less than 74 million this year. In other words, to the extent that he won new voters over this year, they were offset by voters who jumped ship. He really does have a pretty hard ceiling.”

“On the other hand, Hillary Clinton collected 66 million votes in 2016, Joe Biden got 81 million in 2020, and this year, Kamala Harris is going to end up with about 68 million.”

“‘Where did all those Biden voters go?’ is a question that will haunt Democratic operatives, not to mention political commentators, for months or years.”

Derek Thompson: “In 2022, pollsters and political analysts predicted a red wave in the midterms that didn’t materialize. Last night, polls anticipated a whisker-thin election, and instead we got a red wave that carried Donald Trump to victory.”

“The breadth of Trump’s improvement over 2020 is astonishing. In the previous two elections, we saw narrow demographic shifts—for example, non-college-educated white people moved toward Trump in 2016, and high-income suburban voters raced toward Biden in 2020. But last night’s election apparently featured a more uniform shift toward Trump, according to a county-by-county analysis shared with me by Thomas Wood, a political scientist at Ohio State University.”

Said Wood: “The really simple story is that secular dissatisfaction with Biden’s economic stewardship affected most demographic groups in a fairly homogeneous way.”

President Biden vowed he will ensure a peaceful transfer of power following President-elect Donald Trump’s resounding election victory and told his supporters “a defeat does not mean we are defeated,” USA Today reports.

Said Biden: “Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable. We all get knocked down, but the measure of our character – as my dad would say – is how quickly we get back up.”

CNN: Biden tries to reassure dejected Democrats as he promises a smooth transfer of power to Trump.

“A depressed and demoralized Democratic Party is beginning the painful slog into a largely powerless future, as its leaders grapple with how deeply they underestimated Donald Trump’s resurgent hold on the nation,” the New York Times reports.

“The nationwide repudiation of the party stunned many Democrats who had expressed a ‘nauseous’ confidence about their chances in the final weeks of the race. As they sifted through the wreckage of their defeats, they found no easy answers as to why voters so decisively rejected their candidates…”

“The quiet criticism, on phone calls, in group chats and during morose team meetings, was a behind-the-scenes preview of the intraparty battle to come, with Democrats quickly falling into the ideological rifts that have defined their party for much of the Trump era.”

Kamala Harris lost running mate Tim Walz’s home county in rural Minnesota to Donald Trump, 50% top 48%, a defeat that will intensify criticism of her decision to run alongside Minnesota’s progressive governor, National Review reports.

The Economist: “A stunning victory has crowned Donald Trump the most consequential American president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. After defeating Kamala Harris—and not just narrowly, but by a wide margin—America’s 45th president will become its 47th. The fact that Mr Trump will be the first to win non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland in 1892 does not start to do justice to his achievement. He has defined a new political era, for America and the world.”

“In some ways the Trump era is very modern. It was made possible by technological changes and media fragmentation, at a time when distinguishing law from politics and politics from showbiz is hard. But it is also a return to an old idea of America. Before the fight against fascism convinced FDR that it was in his country’s interest to help bring order and prosperity to the world, the country was hostile towards immigration, scornful of trade and skeptical of foreign entanglements. In the 1920s and 1930s that led to dark times. It could do so again.”

New York Times: Trump will return to power with a more expansive agenda.

“As a late night host, people often say to me, ‘Come on, part of you has got to want Trump to win, because he gives you so much material to work with.’ No, no. No one tells the guy who cleans the bathroom, ‘Wow, you must love it when someone has explosive diarrhea. There’s so much material to work with!'”

— Stephen Colbert, on The Late Show.

George Conway: “We knew, and have known, for years. Every American knew, or should have known. The man elected president last night is a depraved and brazen pathological liar, a shameless con man, a sociopathic criminal, a man who has no moral or social conscience, empathy, or remorse. He has no respect for the Constitution and laws he will swear to uphold, and on top of all that, he exhibits emotional and cognitive deficiencies that seem to be intensifying, and that will only make his turpitude worse. He represents everything we should aspire not to be, and everything we should teach our children not to emulate.”

“The only hope is that he’s utterly incompetent, and even that is a double-edged sword, because his incompetence often can do as much as harm as his malevolence. His government will be filled with corrupt grifters, spiteful maniacs, and morally bankrupt sycophants, who will follow in his example and carry his directives out, because that’s who they are and want to be.”

Doug Sosnik offers his post-election slides:

“Dissatisfaction with the direction of the country was too much for Harris to overcome.”

“This election marked the 11th election out of the last 13 when the country voted for change. The exit polls showed that 73% of voters thought that Trump was more likely to bring about needed change in our country compared to only 25% for Harris.”

Garrett Graff: “Donald Trump’s victory is so striking, so broad, and so deep—touching every corner of the country, his support improving across virtually every demographic—that it should remove any second-guessing from Democrats about their candidate, Harris’s strategy, or even the core politics of the Biden administration.”

“Picking Josh Shapiro as veep wouldn’t have mattered; handling Gaza differently wouldn’t have made a difference; giving a few more interviews to mainstream news outlets wouldn’t have changed a thing. The economy was, by any objective measurement, as strong and robust as it could be, the Democrats outraised and outorganized the GOP, and none of that mattered a lick.”

“An angry America made a conscious, resounding, national choice for a different path on Tuesday. It was a total rejection not just of Democrats but of this century’s governing establishment—this campaign, of course, allied not just Harris, Biden, Obama, and the Clintons but also the Cheneys and the Bushes.”

Wired: “Over the final stretch of the 2024 campaign cycle, Trump went on a grand tour of podcast interviews, appearing alongside these popular influencers, streamers, and podcast hosts, and, perhaps more importantly, in front of their predominantly young male audiences. One of the Trump campaign’s most promising strategies, they believed, was to drive up the margins with medium and low propensity male voters.”

“To do so, the campaign took Trump away from the television cameras and in front of podcast mics, setting a new standard for how to run a campaign online.”