On Wednesday, Nov. 6, Donald Trump declared victory in the U.S. presidential election, and in a tent camp for migrants in Mexico City, a Venezuelan boy named Yorjan turned 7 years old.

Neither knew of the other’s special day, but Mr. Trump’s victory means their lives are now intertwined. Yorjan and his family are trying to cross the U.S. border, the same one the president-elect has promised to “seal” when he takes office in January.

Yorjan was blissfully unaware of that pledge as he excitedly accepted a wedge of vanilla birthday cake laced with icing squiggles from a volunteer.

But sitting beside him was his mother, Yojani, whose eyes pricked with tears. So much – from the economic collapse that caused them to flee Venezuela to the rats scurrying through their tent – felt out of her control as a mother. And now this. “My fear now is that the [U.S.] president won’t receive us,” she says. “That Trump will send us back to the jungle.”

Every four years, Americans choose who will fill the world’s most powerful office, and this year they’ve selected a leader who touts as one of his greatest foreign policy strengths his unpredictability. At a time of broad global conflict, with mass human migration, major wars in the Middle East and Europe, and China jockeying to surpass the United States as the world’s superpower, Mr. Trump’s “America First” mantra will bend the arc of the world’s future.

Political leaders and foreign diplomats are on alert. But this week, it was parents around the world who absorbed the news of Mr. Trump’s victory with particular immediacy. Some feel that an American “strongman” could finally put an end to the instability that has shadowed their children’s prospects. Others feel his erratic approach to global affairs has the potential to upend their dreams.

“Sometimes you pay for problems that aren’t yours,” says Yojani, whose last name we are withholding for her security.

“I die a hundred times a day”

As the sun dipped below the horizon on American Election Day, casting long shadows over a tent camp in central Gaza, Sawsan Swirky’s heart broke again.

She wasn’t thinking of Mr. Trump or Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, but of Mousa. One year to the day earlier, her 16-year-old son had walked out of the gates of Al Quds Hospital in Gaza City, where the family was sheltering from Israeli airstrikes.

Ghada Abdulfattah

Sawsan Swirky sits in the tent her family built near the beach in the north of Gaza Nov. 7, 2024.

In his hurry to get to safety, Mousa left his beloved rescue cat, Mishmish, at home.

Now, as the bombs fell and the sirens wailed, he couldn’t bear the thought of Mishmish scared and alone, looking for his master in the rubble. So Mousa and his cousin decided to go back to find him.

The bomb struck them on their way. Onlookers carried the severely wounded boy back to the hospital, where he died in front of his mother’s eyes.

Now, she says, “I die a hundred times a day.”

But as she listened to news about the American election results, a single hope pushed its way through her grief: Maybe Mr. Trump could end the war that had so far killed at least 42,000 Palestinians. “I wish he would bring a cease-fire” that would allow Palestinians to return home, she says.

She knew that plenty of people thought it was possible. Mr. Trump had told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he wanted an “end to hostilities” before his Inauguration Day, according to Israeli media.

Far from those backroom negotiations, Ms. Swirky was simply desperate to keep her family alive. She longed to see one of her daughters, who lived on the other side of an Israeli checkpoint. And every day, she feared another of her nine children might die doing something ordinary like collecting water.

Waiting for Mr. Trump’s next move, she revisited her memories of Mousa, the boy who loved okra with beef, had an incredible laugh, and died for the love of an innocent.

In her grief, she hoped only that the next American president would make sure “No parent in the world sees what I have seen.”

“He says he wants to make peace”

Three hundred ninety-six days.

That was how long it had been, on American Election Day, since the last time Idit Ohel had seen her son Alon. That October evening, he sat at the family piano in a village in northern Israel, his fingers gliding across the keyboard as he played a popular Israeli song about longing.

Courtesy of Idit Ohel

Alon Ohel poses beside his mother, Idit Ohel, in 2022. Alon, an accomplished pianist, was taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023.

Nothing suggested it was the eve of the family’s greatest nightmare.

But early the next morning, on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas militants stormed the Nova music festival where Alon, 22 years old and an aspiring jazz pianist, had gone with friends. They dragged him by his curly hair, tossing him into a pickup truck with others he had been sheltering with and drove them into Gaza.

Since then, Ms. Ohel’s life has been consumed by a single thought: Alon must live.

And for Alon to live, the war must end.

By American Election Day, her son had become a familiar face to Israelis, his image plastered on posters across the country, along with others taken captive that day, and carried through the streets in mass protests. The Israeli government’s failure to return him and the other hostages wasn’t just a reminder of the country’s most catastrophic intelligence failure, or the war it had sparked. It was also a challenge to a fundamental covenant of Israeli society: Leave no one behind.

Ms. Ohel never had much interest in politics, seeing herself as merely a person “interested in ... doing good in the world,” she says. But now she had no choice but to care, because her child’s life depended on the choices of politicians.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remained steely in his resolve to fight in Gaza until what he calls “total victory.”

But like Ms. Swirky, Ms. Ohel saw hope in Mr. Trump, though it was a faint one. He wasn’t a man who took no for an answer. He projected “aggression and power.”

“He says he wants to make peace here,” she says, her voice soft and exhausted.

Maybe, she thought, that would be enough to finally bring Alon home.

Two mothers, one wish

Marina also knows what it is like to live in the unspeakable space between your child’s life and their death.

In March 2022, her son Volodya abruptly stopped calling.

At the time, he was a junior intelligence officer serving in the Russian army in the Russian-occupied Donbas region of Ukraine. When she stopped hearing from him, Marina, a real estate agent whom we are calling by a pseudonym for her security, first approached the local military office. It didn’t have an answer, so she went to Moscow, and then to Donbas itself.

There, she traveled from town to town with a photo of Volodya, clean-shaven and baby-faced, barely out of his teens, asking every soldier she met if they had seen him.

Each “no” ached, but it also gave her hope that he was out there somewhere, perhaps captured by the Ukrainians, but still breathing.

Then, in early 2024, she received a notification from the army. Volodya’s remains had been identified. He died a hero, she was told. But the platitudes felt hollow.

Dominique Soguel

Ukrainian refugee Juliia Kozak poses with her daughter, Dana, in front of their home near Basel, Switzerland, Nov. 7, 2024.

“This hell is over for me now. But so many other mothers are still going through it,” Marina says.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump pledged repeatedly that as president he would end Marina’s war in “24 hours.” Juliia Kozak wants her war to end too.

The Ukrainian mother was seven months pregnant when Russia invaded her country. She was on vacation at that time, and her flight home was canceled. So she flew to Zurich, where she had a friend who could give her a place to stay.

Today, her daughter, Dana, is growing up like any other Swiss suburban child, in Basel now, splashing around in toddler swim classes and speaking to her mother in a babbling mix of English and Ukrainian.

Ms. Kozak is grateful Dana’s first memories won’t be of hearing air raid sirens and hiding in basements, but she also cannot help but long for the life they do not have. Just before she left Kyiv, she had bought an apartment there, where she imagined she would raise her daughter in comfort, surrounded by friends and family – not as a refugee in a foreign land.

Watching the American election results this week, she felt conflicted. While she likes the Democrats, they were unable to stop the war or help Ukraine win it. Mr. Trump strikes her as “a crazy person,” but his unusual methods might just be her country’s best hope now. He “wants to be a hero ... and if he does stop the [Ukraine] war, then he will be a hero.”

Marina, who this spring held Volodya’s funeral in the same church where she had brought him to be baptized two decades earlier, is silent when asked if the American president-elect can usher in peace.

Finally, she says, “I’ve always believed that everybody needs to sit down at the negotiating table and put a stop to this slaughter. If this Trump can do that, I will support it.”

Peace above all

Indeed, Mr. Trump promised in his victory speeches that he would make the world a more peaceful place. “I’m not going to start a war; I’m going to stop the wars,” he proclaimed.

Those words brought comfort to Li Zhandong. Though he has never lived through war himself, he, too, knows its costs.

Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor

Li Zhandong, a music teacher at a public school in China's Shaanxi province, hopes Donald Trump will fulfill his campaign promise to avoid war.

Like other Chinese of his generation, the 44-year-old music teacher was raised by relatives who had survived two violent conflicts: the Japanese occupation around World War II and then the Chinese civil war just after it.

His grandfather barely eked out a living from tiny, terraced fields in the drought- and famine-prone hills of China’s northwest Shaanxi province. His parents, meanwhile, grew up in the turbulent aftermath of the 1949 communist revolution, hunger and political unrest hanging low over their childhoods, too.

By contrast, Mr. Li was born at a moment when China was stabilizing and flinging itself open to the world.

That allowed him to study music education at secondary school, a level of learning his parents couldn’t dream of. His own children have done even better. His eldest son is now 20 and a university student in a technical field.

Lately, however, the peace that made all this possible has begun to feel precarious to Mr. Li. Amid growing U.S.-China tensions, the Chinese military was stepping up operations around Taiwan, the self-governing island of 23 million people across the Taiwan Strait that Beijing claims sovereignty over.

A war for Taiwan would ensnare the U.S., too, and so much depended on the American president-elect, a man who often seemed to despise China but also promised geopolitical pragmatism.

“That is the best,” Mr. Li says. If there was one thing he knew intimately, after all, it was how much depended on peace.

A time of rumor

In Mexico City, Yojani spent much of Yorjan’s birthday listening to postelection rumors whistle through the migrant camp at warp speed. People spoke of mass deportations. Of the border closing.

Yojani didn’t know what was true, but she was shaken. In July, she and her husband made the painful choice to leave home so that her children could “have a future,” she says. They made a journey she would never wish on any child – walking hungry through jungles that echoed with the howls of wild animals – to end up here. And now it felt like it was all at risk.

As she spoke, Yorjan reappeared, rosy-cheeked with damp hair, after a shower he cheerfully described as “freeeeezing cold.” He wore a new hoodie, plucked from a table of donated clothes.

He had chosen the red, white, and blue uniform of Captain America.

Special correspondent Taylor Luck contributed to this report.

Editor’s note: A caption in this story, which was originally published Nov. 8, 2024, has been updated to clarify the name of the authorities with whom migrants seeking entry into the U.S. meet.

Susan Walsh/AP

Supporters look on as Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a concession speech for the 2024 presidential election, Nov. 6, 2024, on the campus of Howard University in Washington.

Krissy Fraelich was “shocked” by the election results. Not only that Donald Trump won, but that he won so decisively. She saw it as a strike against women’s rights, particularly reproductive rights, and as a blow to her hope to see a woman in the Oval Office. Twice now, American voters have chosen Mr. Trump over a woman for the presidency.

“It’s a slap in the face,” says the professional actor from Springfield, Pennsylvania. “I had my 25-year-old daughter call me in tears from Florida and say, ‘Why does America hate women so much?’”

Across the United States, many women are reporting feeling devastated, pained, and fearful of Mr. Trump’s return to the White House. They wonder how his supporters – 45% of whom are women – voted for a man found liable for sexual abuse, and who coarsely insults women and brags about overturning Roe v. Wade.

What does it mean that Mr. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 and returned in 2024 to trounce Vice President Kamala Harris? Will a woman ever break “the highest, hardest glass ceiling,” as Mrs. Clinton describes it?

Women are indeed electable, as evidenced by Mrs. Clinton’s winning the popular vote eight years ago, says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. Last year, women held a record number of seats in Congress (151, or 28%), and with this election women now hold a record number of governorships (13).

This week, Mr. Trump announced his campaign manager, Susie Wiles, will be his White House chief of staff – the first woman ever to hold that job.

Still, says Ms. Walsh, when women like Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Harris run for president, they are trying to disrupt the notion of who can hold the most powerful position on the planet – one long associated with masculinity and, except for President Barack Obama, white men.

“There are absolutely people out there who are not comfortable with women holding positions of leadership like that,” says Ms. Walsh. She adds, “Donald Trump fed into, in a lot of his rhetoric, that unease that some people are willing to talk about, and some people don’t want to talk about.”

In his criticisms of Ms. Harris, Mr. Trump ridiculed her as having a “low IQ” and said she would get “overwhelmed” and “melt down” going up against male authoritarian leaders. Last week, he laughed at a rallygoer’s shout that Ms. Harris “worked on the corner” – a reference to prostitution.

“This place is amazing,” he said to the cheering crowd. “Just remember, it’s other people saying it. It’s not me.” Similarly, in his final rally, he called former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi an “evil, sick, crazy” and then mouthed the “B” word. “It starts with a ‘B,’ but I won’t say it,” he said. He added: “I want to say it,” which got some of the roaring crowd chanting the word.

Exploiting or avoiding gender stereotypes?

Mr. Trump has leaned heavily into masculinity, and successfully drove up his support among men, particularly Latino men. He did targeted interviews and appeared at football games and mixed martial arts fights. Pro wrestler Hulk Hogan ripped off his shirt at the Republican nominating convention. While most candidates look to expand their base, says Ms. Walsh, the Trump campaign focused narrowly on strengthening its appeal to men. “He’s made a decision that [women] are not voters that are going to be there for him.”

Brendan McDermid/Reuters

Donald Trump walks onstage during a rally at Lee's Family Forum in Henderson, Nevada, Oct. 31, 2024.

Unlike Mrs. Clinton, who leaned into her gender during her campaign, Ms. Harris played down her candidacy as a woman – the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother. Instead, she stressed women’s rights, particularly reproductive rights. She criticized Mr. Trump as the man who took those rights away with his Supreme Court appointments, and warned that, if elected, he would sign a national abortion ban.

On Election Day, Julianne DeCosterd, a student at Montana State University, stood in line for five hours to vote for both Ms. Harris and for a ballot measure anchoring the right to an abortion in the state constitution. Ms. DeCosterd said that she was tired, hungry, cold, and under the weather. But she stuck it out – because she said she was “really bothered” by the idea of women not having a choice in whether to start a family.

“I definitely wanted to vote to allow abortion to be available in Montana,” she said via text.

The measure passed in the ruby-red state, but not with the help of Piper Butler, another student at Montana State who helped easily elect Mr. Trump in Big Sky Country. She voted against the abortion measure and appreciates that the former president helped send abortion back to the states to decide. That’s a kind of choice, says Ms. Butler, who believes that God has a plan “for every single little individual” but also grants freedom of choice.

Evan Vucci/AP

Women show their support for Donald Trump as he arrives to speak at a campaign rally at J.S. Dorton Arena in Raleigh, North Carolina, Nov. 4, 2024.

Referencing the 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Mr. Trump boasted crudely about grabbing women by the genitals, she says, “Obviously, no one wants to hear that. Nobody at all.” But when picking the country’s leader, Ms. Butler put her emotions aside and focused on which candidate had the best policies. She believes that Mr. Trump will lower gas and housing prices and will exhibit pride in his country. And she’s “highly doubtful” he’ll implement a national abortion ban, which he says he’s against.

Despite Ms. Harris’s efforts to mobilize women around reproductive rights, she ultimately won a smaller share of female voters than Joe Biden in 2020 and Mrs. Clinton in 2016.

Sexism or headwinds?

Both women presidential candidates carried baggage and faced headwinds, says Dianne Bystrom, director emerita of the Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University. Mrs. Clinton contended with investigations of her work and her husband’s, as well as his infidelities and impeachment. Ms. Harris got off to a late start, was not vetted by voters through a primary, and had the challenging task of separating herself from an unpopular administration – particularly her association with skyrocketing illegal immigration.

At the same time, “we still live in a sexist society,” says Dr. Bystrom. “This election displays that.” She adds that Ms. Harris, as a woman of color, faced a “double whammy” of both sexism and racism.

She points to a Pew Research Center poll from last year in which only 1 in 4 American adults said it’s extremely or very likely that the U.S. will elect a woman president in their lifetime. They cited gender discrimination, Americans not being ready to elect a woman to higher office, and women having to do more to prove themselves than men. While Democratic presidential candidates have won the women’s vote overall since 1992, that’s largely because of women of color. A majority of white women have voted for Republicans in every presidential election for the past 20 years – including this one.

Mr. Trump’s polarizing character and boorish rhetoric about women have contributed to his low favorability ratings: More than half of voters (53%) view him unfavorably, according to exit polls. But even if they don’t like him, Americans know what they’re getting, and many are willing to support him. 

“Donald Trump makes misogynist remarks. Donald Trump does not have a good history when it comes to how he treats women. But to say that makes a voter who supports him also misogynist, I think, is a leap too far,” says political scientist Amy Black, who specializes in women and politics as a professor at Wheaton College in Illinois.

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Vice President Kamala Harris delivers remarks at Howard University conceding the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

In this election, the opportunity to elect the nation’s first female president was not a high motivator, according to AP VoteCast, a national survey of voters. Only about 1 in 10 voters said that was the most critical factor determining their vote.

Traditional gender roles, “a willingness to call the kettle black,” and lowering grocery store prices were the top issues for Susan Inveninato, a Trump voter shopping at a grocery store in Whitemarsh Island, Georgia, after the election. “These days, if it’s not on sale, it don’t get bought,” she says.

What hurt Ms. Harris the most with Ms. Inveninato was her failure to separate her cultural and economic policies from President Biden’s – including her support for transgender rights, which, in Ms. Inveninato’s view, creates inequalities for women in sports.

“In the end, Kamala never really focused on what she was specifically going to do differently from Biden to help Americans across the board when it comes to food costs and taxes,” she says.

In Milledgeville, Georgia, Jasmine Daniels, a 20-something restaurant worker, says that she would like to see a woman as president. And she liked Ms. Harris’ stands on many of the issues important to her – including reproductive rights and gender equality. Yet economic concerns ultimately pushed Ms. Daniels toward voting for Mr. Trump, whose character she sometimes questions.

“It was a tough choice: morality versus economical,” she says. “I chose economical.”

For most people, a fork is just a fork.

But when Olivia Schneider spears a stalk of asparagus, she prefers the plastic-handled type dating back to the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR).

It’s the kind of cutlery her East German grandparents eagerly trashed back in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, 35 years ago this weekend. Finally decades of austerity fell away, and Grandpa and Grandma Schneider set their hearts on filling their house with “really nice West German stuff,” explains Ms. Schneider.

That’s how her grandparents found themselves at one of many impromptu parking lot markets that had popped up, only to be cheated by a West German salesman into paying three times the going rate for cutlery.

“People were just happy they could finally buy things, but they had no idea how much things should cost,” says Ms. Schneider, recounting the tale 35 years later in a café in Dresden, a regional center of the former East Germany.

That silverware scam lives on in three generations of Schneider lore. Ms. Schneider’s brow wrinkles at the story of family indignity as if she’d been personally mistreated. “People just took advantage during the reunification years. It makes me so mad.”

Today, a 28-year-old consumer, Ms. Schneider can buy whatever her budget allows, yet she finds herself choosing the stuff of the now-defunct GDR: that bright-orange bread-slicer, pastel-colored melamine bowls, a stark black veneer dining table.

“I just have this feeling that I want to bring back things that were seen as negative. It’s empowerment to revive them in a better context,” says Ms. Schneider, a social worker and influencer around all things East German with a 30,000-strong Instagram following.

Henrik Merker/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

If you lived in East Germany during the communist era, this AKA electric AS-101 bread-slicer was probably your mother's utility cutter. It could cut anything that had to be cut – bread, sausages, or vegetables. It was a welcome wedding gift for young couples.

The Berlin Wall fell and landfills swelled with Soviet junk

Thirty-five years after millions of East Germans tossed their Soviet-era stuff as quickly as dump trucks could haul it, young people who were not born when communist rule ended are finding joy in certain GDR collectibles.

They’re reveling in the pedestrian crossing symbols Ampelmännchen – the plump little traffic-light men – boxy Trabant cars, sleek Simson motorbikes, and the bright-blue clothing of GDR-era youth clubs. This gravitation toward symbols of a defunct state exposes cracks in German unity that were supposed to have disappeared along with the Berlin Wall; it’s also a celebration of an East German identity that young people connect with.

“I’m not surprised at all that young people are consuming and presenting East German things. They’re pursuing a collective identity that’s different from the West, and also a critique of the way reunification was pursued,” says historian Justinian Jampol, author of “Problematic Things: East German Materials After 1989.”

“East German things have gone from being derided to collected to thrown away to exhibited. That ongoing process is a mirror and reflects just how much the history of East Germany is still conflicted,” Dr. Jampol adds.

East German goods were built to last

German youth might not use the word Ostalgie – constructed from the German words for “east” and “nostalgia” – yet many hesitate to discard an East German identity the West tried to crush during reunification, says Dr. Jampol.

Their devotion to East German things is exuberant, but also respectful of clean design and construction that was “built to last,” says Benno Auras, 35, a social worker born in 1989.

“East Germany was a country where there was nothing or very little – obviously it was about making products that wouldn’t break the day after tomorrow,” says Mr. Auras. He still tinkers with his Simson using “50-year-old GDR power tools that still work,” he says. “Respect. Nowadays you see only junk which costs a fortune.”

People who collect GDR artifacts certainly aren’t longing for the wall, the Stasi secret police, or the communist regime, explains Katja Hoyer, a historian and author raised in east Germany. “More than that, there’s a personal history, and a family history that’s connected to these items. It’s your cultural product, something that gives you identity and roots especially in times of uncertainty.”

Henrik Merker/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Benno Aurus displays his Simson Enduro, a rugged moped made in the former East Germany. It was – and still is – the No. 1 means of transportation in the countryside.

A persistent economic divide certainly feeds Ostalgie, as well as a sense, for some, that “The past has been better, or should be revived in some ways,” says Johannes Kieß, a political sociologist at the University of Leipzig.

East Germans still lag behind west Germans in disposable income and inherit only half as much wealth. Nearly two-thirds of east Germans say they still feel like second-class citizens.

East German, and proud of it

Back in Dresden, Ms. Schneider sips a cappuccino as she recounts her parents’ post-Berlin Wall life paths. Her mother became a chef’s apprentice, and her father landed a job as a Wrigley chewing gum salesman.

They had jobs, yet on a student trip to Hamburg, Ms. Schneider still noticed a gap. Her west German peers got monthly allowances, their mothers didn’t work, and they could travel abroad on a moment’s notice with family funds.

“I was a bit jealous that they had rich parents,” says Ms. Schneider. “No one funded my lifestyle. I always had side jobs, working at the Christmas market, or as a barista or nurse.”

Soon after, she began reading what she dubs the “East German bible” for youth, “Ostbewusstsein.” The full title translates to “Eastern Consciousness: Why Postreunification Children Fight for the East and What This Means for German Unity.”

Today, Ms. Schneider is a social worker and an Instagram influencer whose buoyant missives about East German identity have a defiant undertone. One post about the East German mustard Bautz’ner Senf clocked 800,000 views, and she has attracted brand sponsorships from companies such as Filinchen, the “original GDR crispbread.”

Her parents find it ironic that she is celebrating stuff from the GDR scrap heap; in 1990, East Germans tossed out an average of 1.2 tons of material per person.

“It’s a pity. My parents always told me they threw everything out because they just couldn’t bear to see it anymore in their house,” says Ms. Schneider.

“They had this dream of a unified Germany.”

Editor’s note: This article, originally published Nov. 8, was updated to correct the spelling of the German word Ampelmännchen.

Michael Ho Wai Lee/SOPA Images/Reuters/File

Police officers investigate a crime scene after multiple people were shot following a Juneteenth celebration this year, in Oakland, California. Though violent crime is down nationally over time, it has had a short-term uptick in California.

True-blue California predictably delivered its 54 electoral votes to Vice President Kamala Harris this week. But farther down the ballot, Democratic voters struck a blow at a key progressive policy – and candidates – aimed at criminal justice reform.

The results are in step with national polls that show Americans – both Democrats and Republicans – increasingly concerned about crime, despite an overall drop in violent and property crimes since the 1990s. (Even surges during the COVID-19 pandemic did not see the overall rate reach levels of 25 years ago.)

Crime in particular is a local issue, says Mark Baldassare, survey director for the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. Regardless of statistics, what matters most to voters is how they feel about safety at home.

“With issues of crime,” he explains, “what’s important is perceptions. And we had been seeing in our polling that people were showing less confidence in their police and more concern about local crime leading up to this proposition.”

Violent crime down nationally, but public perception varies

California’s crime numbers are relatively high. Violent crimes, which have gone up and down over time, remain 15% higher than in 2019. Homicides involving guns are nearly 20% higher than pre-pandemic levels. Property crimes went down in most counties last year, but up in some of the largest, including Los Angeles.

Damian Dovarganes/AP

Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón (center) holds a campaign event last month for his reelection at the Magnificent Brothers Barber & Beauty Salon. Mr. Gascón, who lost Tuesday, had pushed for progressive criminal justice reforms like reduced penalties for low-level crimes in the state’s most populous county.

In response, California voters brought back felony prosecutions for some drug and theft crimes, and in Los Angeles, replaced Democratic District Attorney George Gascón with a former Republican who ran as an independent. Voters in San Francisco held on to a replacement for the progressive district attorney they recalled in 2022. And voters in Alameda County supported the recall of DA Pamela Price, a criminal justice reform advocate; in Oakland, where the count was not finished Thursday morning, the recall of justice reformer Mayor Sheng Thao looked to be winning in early results.

Mr. Gascón served as San Francisco’s DA before taking up the Los Angeles post in 2020 – amid the COVID-19 pandemic – winning with a platform that offered progressive criminal justice reforms like reduced penalties for low-level crimes in the state’s most populous county.

His loss to federal prosecutor Nathan Hochman (who lost two years ago as a Republican candidate for state attorney general) marks a notable shift toward more conservative policies. Mr. Hochman’s campaign promised sentence enhancements for violent criminals, a close working relationship with law enforcement, and accountability for crimes like shoplifting, which more than doubled under Mr. Gascón’s tenure.

With state Proposition 36, voters rolled back some progressive policies they’d voted for 10 years ago after a U.S. Supreme Court order mandated that the state thin out its overcrowded prisons and reduce its outsized share of racial- or ethnic-minority inmates. The prison population dropped nearly 23% between 2014 and 2023, but California continues to house disproportionately large Latino (46%) and Black (28%) populations, as a share of the total.

The new law allows felony charges for thefts under $950 if the offender has at least two previous theft or drug convictions. It replies to a wave of “smash-and-grab” retail crimes that swept through the country during the pandemic.

Damian Dovarganes/AP

In Los Angeles, voters replaced Democratic District Attorney George Gascón with a former Republican – Nathan Hochman (center).

Rebecca McDonald says she’s seen crime go up firsthand at the salon she owns in LA’s Echo Park, where she also finds people openly using illicit drugs. The self-described feminist and independent voter skipped the presidential race on the ballot – she didn’t like either candidate enough to vote for one, she said.

But her top two reasons for coming out to the polls were to vote Mr. Gascón out, and – like 70% of California voters – support harsher criminal penalties.

“I’ve had LAPD officers tell me that there’s nothing they can do if someone steals something out of my shop that’s valued at less than $950,” she says. “That’s not OK. Crime is crime, right? People shooting heroin in front of my shop, I’m not OK with that.”

Tougher stance on criminal justice is proof blue voters aren’t monolithic

But the crime votes don’t necessarily indicate a larger political shift, says Dr. Baldassare. Prop. 36 had widespread, bipartisan support. Other ballot measure results offer a mixed bag: Californians voted to amend the state constitution to protect the right to same-sex marriage; and they funded public schools and policies that protect the environment. But they voted against raising the state minimum wage, and against statewide rent controls. And voters declined to eliminate an exception to the constitutional slavery ban that allows unpaid prison labor.

The variances among Democratic voters are proof that the Californians, although liberal, are not monolithic. Despite a supermajority of Democrats holding state offices, “we still have a great deal of plural thinking,” says Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, a Democratic candidate for governor in 2026.

It’s the inflation, stupid.

As divided and demoralized Democrats sift through the ashes of the 2024 election map, most agree on two points: Vice President Kamala Harris was fighting strong headwinds when it came to how voters felt about the cost of living. And her inability to convince enough voters that she could do a better job than Donald Trump on the economy cost her the election.

Two-thirds of voters rated the economy poorly, according to exit polls. President-elect Trump won them 70% to 28%. Nearly half of all voters said their family’s financial situation was worse today than four years ago – and they backed Mr. Trump 81% to 17%.

And less-well-off voters were more likely to swing to Mr. Trump. In 2020, he lost voters who made less than $50,000 by 10 points. This year, according to exit polls, he lost them by just 1 point. He lost voters who make between $50,000 and $100,000 by 15 points in 2020 – and won them this election. The only group that moved toward Ms. Harris was voters who make six-figure incomes. She won them by 5 points this year, after President Joe Biden lost them by 12 points in 2020.

Democrats are uniformly alarmed that working-class voters who once made up the core of the Democratic base continued to abandon the party in droves. But they don’t agree on why that happened, with some pointing to a failure to focus enough on pocketbook issues and “soaking the rich,” while others slammed tin-eared and sometimes condescending messaging from a professional class dominated by white college graduates.

“Working-class voters vote more on their perceived economic self-interest than abstract debates over things like democracy,” says Jeff Hauser, a Democratic strategist and former spokesperson for the AFL-CIO, the largest union federation in the United States. “Unfortunately, Democrats ran a campaign that in their national message was predominantly about abstract concerns like democracy, and less about the economy.”

The big disagreement among Democrats isn’t about the national headwinds. It’s whether Ms. Harris and the party could have made major strategic decisions in the race’s closing months to prevail anyway. Some are griping that the party didn’t message effectively enough on the economy, and took for granted Hispanic voters until it was too late. They are also debating whether they fundamentally have too many college-educated liberal white people who come off as insincere when talking to blue-collar voters of all ethnic backgrounds.

“I think we’ve done a lot to demonstrate that we’re a party largely of white elites,” says Democratic strategist Andy Barr, who pointed to issues like student loan forgiveness as a way to alienate blue-collar voters.

“Most people in this country don’t go to college, and we sort of act as if they do. Most Latinos in this country aren’t fixated on immigration policy, and we sort of act as if they are,” he says. “We’re running campaigns that sort of serve us and our interests, and not the people we say we’re running to represent.”

One former Biden White House strategist, who asked that they not be named in order to speak candidly, said the party needs to do some deep soul-searching about why Latinos and working-class voters of all stripes decided that Mr. Trump was their best bet economically.

“Democrats are going to need to take some time to analyze, to rethink the way we engage voters, and talk about policies, and talk about our accomplishments,” they said. “The party does need to tackle that issue head-on. It’s probably the most important thing for the rebirth of the Democratic Party.”

Democrats may simply have forgotten Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. People prioritize basic needs first – finances, stability, safety – and subordinate everything else if those primary issues aren’t addressed. Inflation, illegal immigration, and crime, all of which spiked in the first few years of the Biden-Harris administration coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic (before dipping over the past year), were more salient and immediate to many voters than issues like protecting democracy or abortion access. Nearly one-third of voters who believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases voted for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump even won some voters who admitted they didn’t like him and worried about his policy views. By a 10-point margin, voters said he’s “too extreme,” while a narrow majority of voters said Ms. Harris wasn’t; of the 53% of voters who hold an unfavorable view of him, 9% voted for him anyway.

Strong economy, but high prices

The unemployment rate is hovering at historic lows, and the stock market has boomed. But rent and groceries are still expensive – and that hurts a lot more for voters with limited means.

Mike Blake/Reuters

Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz is comforted by second gentleman Doug Emhoff, during Kamala Harris’ concession speech at Howard University in Washington, Nov. 6, 2024.

Some leading figures on the left are now saying Democrats lost because they didn’t do enough to fix it.

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said in a postelection statement. “First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

But around the globe, voters have punished incumbent parties on the left, right, and center for inflation – which was fueled by pandemic-driven supply chain interruptions and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as massive government spending that many countries undertook to keep their economies afloat during the depths of the COVID-19 shutdown and its aftermath.

A Financial Times analysis found that in all 10 developed countries that have held elections this year, the governing party did worse than in the previous race – the first time this has ever happened. In fact, Democrats saw their vote share drop by a smaller amount than other ruling parties.

Still, U.S. voters clearly weren’t happy with the state of things. A majority, 59%, disapproved of Mr. Biden, including 45% who strongly disapproved. Ms. Harris, as his vice president, had an albatross around her neck the whole campaign.

One challenge was that many of Democrats’ economic achievements were tucked into sprawling packages, with benefits that were only going to emerge in the long run or were already being phased out. The bipartisan infrastructure bill is just getting shovel-ready projects going. The Biden administration passed a hard cap on out-of-pocket Medicare spending – which will save money for a lot of older adults – but it doesn’t kick in until 2025. The $3,600 child tax credits that were included in their 2021 pandemic relief package helped pull millions of children out of poverty, but expired after one year – which left families feeling, rightly, like they suddenly had less money now.

Even President Biden acknowledged that on Thursday, saying the “vast majority” of the good economic work his administration had done for the economy won’t be felt for years, with policies and projects “only now just really kicking in.”

The Biden factor: “a deep hole”

And even if there were an economic record to sell, many Democrats gripe that they didn’t have a candidate who could sell it for the past few years. As President Biden became more visibly frail, his staff limited his public appearances, turning down even traditional layups like the pre-Super Bowl interview. His disastrous June debate eventually forced him out of the race, leaving Ms. Harris just 107 days to build a presidential campaign and define herself to voters.

David Plouffe, Ms. Harris’ top adviser, posted on the social media platform X that the campaign had “dug out of a deep hole” – an implicit criticism of Mr. Biden.

There are some signs that the Harris campaign’s ad messaging and ground game actually did make a difference – even though it wasn’t enough. She lost far less ground compared with in the 2020 election in the swing states where she campaigned than she did in the rest of the country. Milwaukee County, which includes the city and some inner suburbs, was the rare place where Mr. Trump only improved on his 2020 margins by 1 point. Mecklenburg County, North Carolina (Charlotte), moved just 2 points to the right, as did Fulton County, Georgia, which includes much of Atlanta.

But the shift toward Mr. Trump was much more dramatic in some major metro areas that the campaigns didn’t seriously contest.

Miami-Dade County moved 19 points toward Mr. Trump, who became the first Republican presidential candidate to carry it since 1988. In New York City, where most of the vote has been counted as of Thursday, Ms. Harris was winning by a 38-point margin, down from Mr. Biden’s 54-point margin four years ago. Cook County, Illinois (Chicago), shifted 11 points toward Mr. Trump.

Brendan McDermid/Reuters

Donald Trump sits inside a garbage truck at Green Bay Austin Straubel International Airport in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Oct. 30, 2024. Mr. Trump pulled many working-class Latino voters his way despite controversial remarks about immigrants.

Some of Ms. Harris’ approach had similar problems as Mr. Biden’s. Her pledge to incentivize homebuilders to increase housing supply, for instance, was long-term and abstract – and wouldn’t do anything for people whose rent has spiked in recent years. And some Democrats expressed frustration that her campaign hadn’t stuck with populist messaging that Mr. Trump was a lackey for big business. She spent much of the end of the race focused on Mr. Trump as a threat to democracy, including in her closing argument speech on the National Mall.

Mr. Trump’s economic messaging seemed to be particularly successful with Hispanic voters. Exit polls showed Mr. Trump carrying 45% of the Hispanic vote nationally, a 13-point jump from his 2020 performance and the high-water mark for any Republican presidential candidate in more than a half-century. The only other Republican who has topped 40% of the Hispanic vote since the TV networks began conducting exit polls in 1972 was George W. Bush in 2004.

Attack ad on transgender treatments

It’s impossible to know how this race would have played out if Mr. Biden had decided not to run after the 2022 midterms and allowed Democrats to hold a primary for the nomination. Few Democrats would have struggled as much to get distance from the Biden administration as his No. 2. On the other hand, a primary could have led to a repeat of the 2019 contest, in which Democratic candidates were forced to the left on a bevy of issues by activist groups – and where some of Ms. Harris’ most damaging comments, which were later resurrected in attack ads by the Trump campaign, were made.

The Trump campaign spent the most money on an ad showing a clip of Ms. Harris promising to provide incarcerated transgender people access to gender-affirming care treatments. Democrats acknowledge that ad, and a follow-up ad featuring popular Black radio host Charlemagne tha God slamming her for the comments on his show, did serious damage to her, convincing some swing voters that she was “dangerously liberal,” as the ad said. According to an analysis shared by Ms. Harris’ leading super PAC with The New York Times, that spot shifted the race 2.7 percentage points toward Mr. Trump after viewers watched it. The tagline “Kamala Harris is for they/them. Donald Trump is for you,” emphasized that she was focused on the wrong issues.

While Mr. Trump appeared on scores of podcasts with large audiences of young men, Ms. Harris largely avoided them. Multiple Democrats faulted Ms. Harris for not accepting popular podcast host Joe Rogan’s invitation to come to his Austin, Texas, studio for an interview. Mr. Rogan, who leans right but holds fairly heterodox political views, interviewed Mr. Trump and endorsed him on the election’s eve.

Democrats don’t all agree on what went wrong – and whether Ms. Harris really stood a chance at fixing things. But they all agree that something needs to change.

“There are a lot of folks that look at how Democrats are portrayed, and say, ‘They care about all these other things, but they don’t care about what’s going on in my life,’” says Democratic strategist Rodell Mollineau. “There is a large chasm between what Democrats in Washington, D.C., think they are and what they stand for, and what the American people perceive them to be and what they stand for – and that’s what we have to address.”

Where may a child run freely – exploring without a screen blocking their view of the world or an overprotective parent shooing adventure safely away? In the pages of a book.

“Children have been underestimated for hundreds of years,” an old woman says in Katherine Rundell’s new fantasy, “Impossible Creatures.” “Why are you continuing the tedious tradition?”

None of these authors make that mistake. The six books demand a lot of both their young characters and their readers.

The possibility of change

Gayle Forman’s novel “Not Nothing” is an astonishing emotional feat that grabs a reader from the first page and leaves them in tears on the last. A 12-year-old is sentenced to work at an assisted living center after committing a hate crime. There, Alex meets Josey, a 107-year-old Holocaust survivor from Poland. The two strike up a friendship, with Josey telling him about the hero of his life, a girl named Olka who taught him to sew and saved his life. And Alex, whose mother disappeared over a year ago and who blames himself for the loss, finds someone who believes that “no one should be remembered for the worst thing they’ve done” when they’ve done so many better things. Forman delves deeply into “people’s capacity for cruelty, their capacity for kindness, and their capacity for change.” And, oh my goodness, does she stick the ending. The last line is a benediction.

“Not Nothing” is recommended by the publisher for age 10 and up.

Saving mythic critters

“Impossible Creatures” by Katherine Rundell – the first in a planned trilogy – was a runaway bestseller in Britain, racking up awards including Waterstones Book of the Year in 2023 and Author of the Year at the British Book Awards. And I defy anyone to come up with a better first line than, “It was a very fine day, until something tried to eat him.”

Christopher Forrester can’t go for a walk without squirrels approaching or crows bringing him paper clips – much to his overprotective father’s dismay. Then he runs to the top of a hill he’s not supposed to climb and finds a flying girl and a baby griffin. Mal Arvorian is on a race to save “the last magical place on earth,” an archipelago where unicorns and dragons the size of hummingbirds roam freely. It’s also home to krakens and talking green squirrels and sphinxes so old they have learned to hate riddles. But a grayness is taking over the land and emptying the seas. Rundell gets her characters in trouble on the first page and keeps them there. An older reader might like a beat to marvel at all the unnatural wonders, but there are mythic critters to be saved and the plot flies along, trying to keep up with Mal. “I can’t just stay indoors and sit on a chair all day,” she tells a character. “That’s how people turn to stone.”

“Impossible Creatures” is recommended by the publisher for age 10 and up.

A superfan disappears

What would you do if the magic world you dreamed of all your life turned out to be real? And you got to go there? And then it spat you out because you are not the Chosen One? You are, in fact, “remarkably unremarkable.” That’s the premise of Ransom Riggs’ “The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry.” Following his mother’s death when he was 12, Leopold “Larry” Berry disappeared into old VHS tapes of “Max’s Adventures in Sunderworld,” a quirky cult show set in an alternate Los Angeles. Aside from being a Sunder superfan who writes his own episodes with his best friend, Larry spends his days keeping his mother’s old Volvo roadworthy and trying to avoid his father. His dad, the author of “Only Losers Don’t Win,” is a successful motivational speaker who very much enjoys being paid to yell at people, particularly his disappointment of a son. Then a mechanical raccoon lights its tail on fire outside a window, some skyscrapers start disappearing, and Larry is afraid he’s having dissociative episodes. Either that, or maybe Sunder – and its magic – are real. Riggs, author of “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” creates a doozy of an opening salvo in his new series. I can almost forgive him for the cliff-hanger.

“The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry” is recommended by the publisher for age 14 and up.

With a last name like Sherlock ...

Riddles, puzzles, and the lost treasure of Al Capone power “The Sherlock Society,” a charming ode to South Florida by James Ponti. When Zoe and Alex Sherlock decide to open a detective agency as a summer job (“Maybe if our last name was Baker, we would have sold cupcakes”), they recruit their grandfather as “director of transportation and logistics.” This means he drives them and their two friends around in his classic Cadillac. But really, the retired journalist teaches the four youngsters about the power of asking “who, what, where, when, why, and how.” In the book’s first set piece – an escape-room game set in a library – Ponti name-checks beloved child sleuths like Harriet M. Welsch (aka Harriet the Spy), Claudia Kincaid (“From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler”), and Leroy “Encyclopedia” Brown (who also hailed from Florida). But that’s just the jumping-off point for a story that offers a deep love of local history, literature, and the irreplaceable natural realm that is the Everglades.

“The Sherlock Society” is recommended by the publisher for ages 8 to 12.

Cracking the Enigma code

Puzzles of a far more deadly kind lie at the center of “The Bletchley Riddle” by Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin, in which a college-age code-breaker and his younger sister try to find their missing mother. It’s 1940, and Jakob Novis, a Cambridge mathematician, has been recruited to Bletchley Park to work on the Enigma project. His 14-year-old sister, Lizzie, is determined not to leave England until she finds out what happened to their mother, a U.S. Embassy clerk who went to Poland and never came back after the Nazis invaded. Jakob is sure their mum is dead and just wants to help stop the Germans who killed her. Lizzie, who is drafted as a messenger, is just as sure that he’s wrong and deeply hurt that he won’t help her. Then messages start arriving by mail, and an MI5 agent implies their mother was a traitor. Sepetys and Sheinkin deftly weave the desperate urgency of the days before the Blitz with the real history of geniuses like Alan Turing who bent their brilliance to stop Hitler. They also highlight the work of Polish code-breakers Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski, and Jerzy Różycki. The history is enthralling, and the story of the people who cracked the Enigma machine is one very worth retelling.

“The Bletchley Riddle” is recommended by the publisher for age 10 and up.

A family divided by war

In “The Hotel Balzaar” by Kate DiCamillo, a young girl is waiting, “quiet, quiet like a mouse,” for her father, who’s been away at war. His last letter was a long time ago. Their home is gone, and her mother works as a chambermaid at the hotel, keeping her long black hair pinned under a cap. Mother and daughter live in a small room with a bed, a sink, and a battered chest of drawers. Aside from living in a hotel, Marta’s life is wholly unlike Eloise’s at The Plaza Hotel – there is no luxury, no Nanny. Just the imperative not to cause trouble. “I want you to know that war destroys everything, always. If anyone tries to explain it to you otherwise, in some other way, in words of nobility or valor, do not believe them,” Marta’s father wrote her in that last letter. Then one day, a countess checks in wearing a green parrot and promises to tell Marta seven stories. DiCamillo’s spare story and Júlia Sardà’s black-and-white drawings conjure the atmosphere of a fairy tale and the yearning of a family divided by war.

“The Hotel Balzaar” is recommended by the publisher for ages 7 to 10.

REUTERS

A Palestinian girl in the Gaza Strip looks out of a bus window as she waits to be transferred for medical treatment abroad.

After 13 months of mass destruction, the war in Gaza has taken an unexpected turn for peace.

In a religious ruling, the most prominent Islamic scholar in the Palestinian enclave says Hamas failed to keep its fighters “away from the homes of defenceless [Palestinian] civilians” – or, in effect, it used innocent people as shields against Israeli attacks on Hamas positions purposely placed in or under civilian buildings.

“Human life is more precious to God than Mecca,” stated Professor Salman al-Dayah, a former dean of the faculty of sharia and law at the Hamas-affiliated Islamic University of Gaza, in a six-page document.

The BBC, which reported on the religious edict, notes that Dr. Dayah cites Islamic principles that require Hamas to avoid “actions that provoke an excessive and disproportionate response by an opponent.”

In the past, Dr. Dayah has been respected enough to mediate disputes between Islamist militant groups within Gaza. His edict, or fatwa, could now further undercut Hamas’ claim that much of its legitimacy rests on its obedience to Islam.

Since the group’s Oct. 7 attack last year on Israeli civilians, many in the Muslim world have debated how much Islamic law and international law regarding rules of war apply to the conflict in Gaza.

The Global Imams Council, for example, condemned the massacre of Israelis. The world’s largest and most moderate Muslim movement, Nahdlatul Ulama in Indonesia, urged “that religious inspiration – including the values of universal love and compassion, human fraternity, and justice – be brought to the forefront of public awareness at all times, to help resolve conflict.”

Dr. Dayah’s ruling echoes similar calls by Jewish scholars for the Israeli military to honor international and Jewish law by protecting Palestinian noncombatants in both Gaza and the West Bank.

The core of the differences between Israelis and Palestinians “is the ability and willingness to empathize with innocent victims on both sides,” wrote Singapore-based scholar James Dorsey after the Oct. 7 attack.

Such empathy is shared by the three Abrahamic faiths of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. The late chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, Jonathan Sacks, wrote that all three faiths must contend with a dualism that claims there is not one reality but a grand conflict between two realities, good and evil. To end interfaith conflict, he said each faith must rely on its respective belief that every human being is created in the image of God.

“Can I see the image of God in one who is not in my image, whose color, culture, and creed are different from mine?” he asked in a 2015 speech. “That is the theological challenge, and it’s there in the Bible.”