William Kristol: “George Orwell wrote that in our day ‘restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.’”

“So let me restate the obvious: January 6, 2021 is a day that should live in infamy.”

“But for the next four years January 6th won’t live in infamy. Because in two weeks the man who incited January 6th, the man who now excuses it—no, celebrates it—will be sworn in as our next president.”

“So the obvious if unpleasant fact is that today we as a nation are in a worse condition, facing a more ominous future, than we faced four years ago.”

“It’s the fourth anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, a solemn reminder of a day that rattled U.S. democracy and set off far-reaching legal and political ramifications,” the Washington Post reports.

“But it’s an especially disheartening occasion this year for those who spent last year campaigning against Donald Trump on the issue of democracy, hoping that his central role leading up to Jan. 6 would disqualify him among voters.”

“Instead, they handed Trump a second term in the November election, and he is returning to the White House largely unapologetic about the events of that day — and even promising to pardon those charged in connection with the attack.”

John Ganz: “We are accustomed to repeating now that Trump’s coalition is fragile or that there are intrinsic weaknesses in his governing style. True so far as it goes, but how fragile is a coalition that reformed and expanded after he attempted to overthrow the U.S. government? And how weak is someone who managed to suffuse the atmosphere with a sense of total credulity about himself and total cynicism about his opponents?”

“This is an attitude now shared even among those who do not consider themselves his supporters. There is now a process of retrospective legitimation, as if the vote somehow wipes the slate clean, and makes lies the truth…”

“Some of that can be blamed on the failure of the media or the opposition party, but some credit has to be given to Trump himself. The great insult comic has landed his jibes: he has embarrassed the opposition, he has humiliated them. They are forced to laugh along now or look like spoilsports.”

David Ferris: How the January 6 insurrectionists won in the end.

Playbook: “Every indication is that it will go smoothly. No riots, no storming of the Capitol, no delays. Of course, a few things are different this time compared to 2021: There’s a formidable fencing system up around the Capitol, the overnight snowstorm has made it difficult to get around the city and no Democratic congressional leaders are doing what many Republican leaders did four years ago by publicly questioning the validity of the election results.”

Joshua Spivak: “At least 108 recalls went to the ballot in 2024, with 77 resulting in removal and 31 officials surviving the vote. Sixteen officials resigned in the face of a serious recall effort, and one official in Flint, Mich., died before the recall vote was held.”

James Carville: “I thought Kamala Harris would win. I was wrong. While I’m sure we Democrats can argue that the loss wasn’t a landslide or take a little solace in our House performance, the most important thing for us now is to face that we were wrong and take action on the prevailing ‘why.'”

“I’ve been going over this in my head for the past two months, all the variables, all the what-ifs, all the questions about Joe Biden’s re-election decisions and what kind of Democrat or message might have worked against Donald Trump. I keep coming back to the same thing. We lost for one very simple reason: It was, it is and it always will be the economy, stupid. We have to begin 2025 with that truth as our political north star and not get distracted by anything else.”

Playbook: “As we say goodbye to 2024, a whipsaw of a political year, it’s worth stepping back in a newsletter obsessed with what’s driving the day and reflecting about what drove the year.”

“This year will be forever branded on the American political consciousness, one remembered for the first criminal conviction of a former president, not to mention half a billion dollars in court-ordered payments and a defamation case; two assassination attempts; the current president dropping out after a disastrous debate performance and endorsing his own running mate to succeed him on the ticket; and that same former president storming back to win 312 electoral votes.”

“If you’re like us, you haven’t caught your breath since the election, even as a new year promises — or threatens, depending on your point of view — to reveal itself.”

Judd Legum: “Musk spent nearly $300 million to elect a president with a virulently anti-immigrant agenda and now is telling Trump’s anti-immigrant supporters to ‘Fuck yourself in the face.’”

“Unclear who Musk thought was voting for the guy who blamed immigrants for all of America’s economic problems.”

Seth Masket picks the biggest political story of the year:

“Democrats: In the seven weeks between the Trump/Biden presidential debate and the Democratic National Convention, the Democrats pushed their scandal-free, well-accomplished incumbent president off the ticket because they thought he would lose. That’s an amount of party power we don’t often see in the U.S. Yet it was not completely without precedent — similar things happened when Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson declined to run for reelection in 1952 and 1968, respectively. In all three cases, the exact same thing happened: a replacement candidate almost certainly did better than the incumbent would have (possibly saving some congressional seats in the process) but still lost.”

“Republicans: In the seven weeks between Trump’s felony criminal conviction in a Manhattan courtroom and the Republican National Convention, the Republicans absolutely did not push their expected nominee off the ticket, instead doubling down in their support for him. This despite polling suggesting that some independents were moving away from Trump as a result of the conviction and they could lose the presidential race as a result. It nicely depicted the two very different attitudes across the parties about just what an electable candidate looks like and how important that trait is.”

“Joe Biden regrets having pulled out of this year’s presidential race and believes he would have defeated Donald Trump in last month’s election – despite negative poll indications,” The Guardian reports.

“Dean Phillips has some regrets. Not about his decision to launch a quixotic primary challenge to President Joe Biden. He stands by that move, which alienated him from his party even as it proved prescient after Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump,” Politico reports.

“But in an exit interview… the retiring Minnesota Democrat said he wished he had been more successful at fixing what he says is a deeply broken Congress and that he could have delivered more for his constituents. And he made clear he was leaving Capitol Hill extraordinarily frustrated with his party.”

New York Times: “Former President Bill Clinton and Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, don’t agree on much. Yet, recently the ideological adversaries found some common ground on a political question that has quietly endured over nearly two decades.”

“Yes, a woman can win the White House, they agree. But she’s probably going to be conservative.”

Nate Cohn: “Whether you call it a realignment or not, American politics hasn’t been the same since Mr. Trump won his party’s nomination. The two parties clash over areas of former consensus, even as they reach détente on issues that defined the polarizing 2004 and 2012 elections. It can be disorienting for anyone who came of age before Mr. Trump. It can even feel like American politics has been turned upside down.”

“Until Mr. Trump, there was a lot about American politics that you could take for granted. The meaning of the two parties seemed clear. Republicans represented Reagan’s three-legged stool of small-government fiscal conservatism, the religious right and foreign policy hawks. Democrats represented the working class, change and the causes of liberal activists.”

New York Times: “Heading into the 2024 election, the conservative group Turning Point Action made a risky and expensive bet as it tried to fix Republicans’ early-voting problem: It zeroed in on infrequent voters who seemed to lean to the right.”

“Calling its effort ‘Chase the Vote,’ the group focused heavily on Arizona, where it is based and says it spent tens of millions of dollars to help elect Donald Trump. Hundreds of paid staff members worked to build enduring relationships with Arizonans whom Turning Point saw as friendly to Republicans, targeting a smaller universe of voters than traditional canvassing operations.”

“Turning Point’s gamble appears to have paid off, at least in Arizona.”

Cook Political Report: “Republicans’ success at the ballot box in 2024 was decisive but not overwhelming. The GOP owes its continued control of the House to a mere 7,309 votes spread across three districts. At the presidential level, Donald Trump owes his Electoral College victory to 229,766 voters out of 155.2 million cast. And in the Senate, while Republicans easily picked off Democratic-held seats in the red states of West Virginia, Montana and Ohio, they managed to capture just one purple state — Pennsylvania — and by just 15,115 votes.”

“The results of this election, like those of 2016 and 2020, proved that neither party can claim a mandate or even a lasting and pervasive political majority. Instead, our politics is fought on the margins, with just a few thousand votes making the difference between who controls Congress and the White House. For the last 18 years, voters’ support for the status quo has been waning. Since 2006, every election but one (2012), has seen a change in party control of the House, Senate, or White House.”

Tony Fabrizio: “If you look at all the events that took place and said, now we’re going to have an election and just one of them is going to occur — you’d say, ‘Wow, that’s incredible.’ You have two assassination attempts. The incumbent candidate leaving in the middle of the race. You had his replacement being chosen without getting a single vote. You had all of these different things happening — candidate getting indicted. Candidate getting convicted.”

“Those were all challenges that we faced. Nothing was inevitable to us. We knew that the environment was primed for us to be victorious. But it was us — think about a farm, right. You got all of this fertile land but if you don’t farm it right, you’re not going to get a crop.”