Winners and Losers.

A second-grader called the police.

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1. Americans’ confidence in their nation’s judicial system and courts dropped to a record-low 35% in 2024. The result further sets the U.S. apart from other wealthy nations, where a majority, on average, still expresses trust in an institution that relies largely on the public’s confidence to protect its authority and independence. Between 2006 and 2020, Americans’ perceptions of their courts were most often in line with the median for OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, with a majority in each typically expressing confidence. Since 2020, confidence in the courts across the other OECD countries has been stable, while the U.S. has seen a sharp decline -- 24 percentage points -- in the past four years. The resulting 20-point gap in confidence between the U.S. and the median of OECD nations in 2024 is the largest in the Gallup trend, which dates to 2006. (Source: news.gallup.com)

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2. With nearly every state’s vote count certified, Donald Trump captured about 77.3 million votes (49.81%) to Kamala Harris’ 75 million votes (48.33%) — a 1.48-point margin that’s less than half the 3.12-point margin Trump led by when we first launched our National Popular Vote Tracker two days after Election Day and the closest popular vote result since 2000. The post-election “blue shift” has become a quadrennial fact of life as urban areas and blue states with more liberal voting laws take longer to count provisional and vote-by-mail ballots than rural areas and red states. But it does mean Trump’s triumph now looks like slightly less of a “mandate” than some pundits made it out to be in the immediate aftermath of Nov. 5. In the end, the 2024 election was decided by 229,766 votes across Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin out of about 155.2 million cast nationally, with Pennsylvania (a 1.7-point Trump margin) finishing as the “tipping point” state in the Electoral College. As narrow as it was, that’s about triple the 77,744-vote margin by which Trump won the Great Lakes trio in 2016, and five times the 42,918-vote margin by which Joe Biden won the decisive trio of Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin in 2020. (Source: cookpolitical.com)