After a month of desperately trying to prevent Democrat Roy Cooper from taking office even though he won the gubernatorial election, the North Carolina Legislature has changed tack:

After calling a surprise special session, Republican lawmakers who control the General Assembly introduced measures to end the governor’s control over election boards, to require State Senate approval of the new governor’s cabinet members and to strip his power to appoint University of North Carolina trustees.

Republicans also proposed to substantially cut the number of state employees who serve at the governor’s pleasure, giving Civil Service protections to hundreds of managers in state agencies who have executed the priorities of Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican.

Unbelievable. Every time you think Republicans can’t get any worse, they get worse. I’m curious: Have any conservatives denounced this banana republic behavior? Breitbart? The Weekly Standard? National Review? The Wall Street Journal? Anyone?

Was Hillary Clinton such a crippled, establishment candidate that voters stayed home in droves because they were so unenthusiastic about her? With all the votes now counted, here’s the raw data:

The 2016 election had the third-highest turnout of the past ten elections, so there was no general lack of enthusiasm. However, the Democratic share of the turnout was a couple of points lower than usual. I don’t think we have the data to know exactly what caused this, but the most likely explanation is that a small number of dedicated Sanders supporters decided to stay home rather than vote for Clinton. The Republican share of the turnout was about the same as in 2012.

Roughly speaking, there weren’t any major shifts in turnout, and if you dig down into the exit poll data you won’t find any big shifts in vote share by race or income or age. You’ll mostly find a few small shifts (negative among young voters, people of color, and high school grads, positive among college grads, married women, and high-income voters) but only of a few points. For political professionals there are some lessons here, but in a broad, national direction sense, there’s really not a lot to see.

Two days after promising that he will be “leaving” his businesses, which will henceforth be run by Eric and Don Jr., Donald Trump held a “private” get-together with various leaders of Silicon Valley firms, presumably to discuss his plans as president. Neither the assembled CEOs nor Trump revealed what they had talked about, but there were a couple of outside business executives who got a detailed briefing: his children.

It’s just corruption all the way down and Trump doesn’t care who knows it. Most presidents would at least do stuff like this on the sly, via telephone calls or personal visits. But Trump invites his kids to meetings and then brings in the cameras to make sure everyone knows they’re there. He knows there’s nothing we can do about it, and nothing that Republicans in Congress will do about it, so he figures he can just thumb his nose at the entire country. I guess he’s right.

NBC News tells us today that the CIA assessment of Russia’s hacking goes further than previous reports have suggested:

Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the officials said.

Putin’s objectives were multifaceted, a high-level intelligence source told NBC News. What began as a “vendetta” against Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show corruption in American politics and to “split off key American allies by creating the image that [other countries] couldn’t depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore,” the official said.

….The latest intelligence said to show Putin’s involvement goes much further than the information the U.S. was relying on in October, when all 17 intelligence agencies signed onto a statement attributing the Democratic National Committee hack to Russia….Now the U.S has solid information tying Putin to the operation, the intelligence officials say. Their use of the term “high confidence” implies that the intelligence is nearly incontrovertible.

This comes from William Arkin, Ken Dilanian, and Cynthia McFadden, who are all pretty careful reporters. Arkin adds this via Twitter:

My story tonight: 3 months work. I think Russians lucked into fantasy outcome. Absence of nuanced understanding of success part of our loss. https://t.co/tkLAeEt7Fs

— William M. Arkin (@warkin) December 15, 2016

This makes sense. Nobody had any idea that Donald Trump would run, let alone win the Republican nomination, when the hacking operation started. And even after Trump did win the nomination, nobody thought he had much of a chance to win. All of Putin’s hacking would have been for nought if he hadn’t had some help from James Comey and a rogue group of FBI agents in New York.

So yes, Putin got lucky. But that’s the way intelligence operations work. You try a lot of stuff and hope that a fraction of it pans out. This probably seemed like a low-cost-low-probability exercise when it was first started, and ended up succeeding beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

At the Wall Street Journal today, Damian Paletta notes that Donald Trump is announcing his cabinet picks at a faster pace than his predecessors:

But there also are signs some of Mr. Trump’s choices haven’t been rigorously vetted during the informal deliberation process….That leaves open the possibility that the first officials to study such material will be the Senate committees that next year will conduct the confirmation hearings, a process that can be grueling and disqualifying.

….People involved in the process said Mr. Trump is running an unorthodox transition process—much like his campaign. He is making some decisions based on gut instinct and his chemistry with people, and at times has revealed the name of a nominee before his transition team was ready for the announcement.

Well, that’s about what we expect from Trump. But the Journal’s headline writer concludes that this means Trump’s picks are “likely to face heavy Senate vetting.” Raise your hand if you believe that. Anyone?

Over the weekend I was diddling around with some charts because that’s apparently what I do now when I’m trying to take my mind off Donald Trump. Here’s one I did that never made it into a post because it didn’t seem to show anything interesting:

So let’s crowdsource this post. What’s interesting or unexpected about this chart? Anything? There sure is a big drop in the number of people getting education degrees.

The volume of hot takes about how Hillary Clinton—and Democrats more generally—blew the election is getting way, way out of hand. Of course Clinton made mistakes. Every campaign makes mistakes. But her margin of loss was only 80,000 votes among three states. She won the popular vote by 2 percentage points. She outperformed the econometric models. And she accomplished this despite the headwind of the Comey letter, the Russian hacks, and the media’s insane preoccupation with her email server.

Over at the Niskanen Center, Jacob Levy has written a much-discussed piece about identity politics. But he also makes some more general points about how this election unfolded:

The pundit’s fallacy when applied to losses takes the form of a morality play: because you fools did the thing I don’t like, the voters punished you. [Mark] Lilla solemnly noted that “those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.”

….The [white] backlash hypothesis is of this sort. Trump got a lower share of the white vote than Romney did (58% vs 59%)….Fundamentally, voting patterns didn’t change enough between 2012 and 2016 to justify big claims about new national moods or about Trump’s distinctive appeal. I believe the consequences of this election will be deeply abnormal. But the voting behavior that brought it about was, in the end, very normal.

An 80,000 vote margin in a 137 million vote election, about .05%, is susceptible of almost endless plausible explanations….But anyone trying to generalize about popular beliefs or the electorate’s mood should be very wary of any of them….An explanation that…implies some large shift in opinion or mood toward Trump, is a bad explanation overall.

So too is any explanation that is incompatible with the observed variation in the polls over the course of the campaign. The worst moments for Trump’s campaign focused on egregious episodes of political incorrectness….In other words, the more the electorate focused on his proud political incorrectness, the more they recoiled from him….[This] didn’t stop a normal level of white voters from voting for him.¹ But the poll evidence suggests that they were most reluctant to support him at the moments when these things were most vividly on their minds.

Everyone wants to draw big, world-historical lessons from this election. That’s understandable, since the result was the election of an unprecedentedly dangerous and unqualified candidate. But the data just doesn’t support any big lessons. Barack Obama won the popular vote in 2012 by 3.9 points. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by 2.1 points. That’s less than a two point difference, despite the fact that Obama is unusually popular and Clinton had to run after eight years of Democratic rule. In the end, she did slightly worse than Obama, which is about what you’d expect. Unfortunately, a little too much of that “slightly worse” happened to be in three must-win states.

Nevertheless, the identity politics critics insist that the lesson for Democrats is to ditch identity politics. The economic lefties say the lesson is that Democrats need to be more populist. The Bernie supporters are sure that Bernie could have won. The DNC haters think it was a massive FUBAR from the Democratic establishment. The moderates blame extremism on social issues for alienating the rural working class.

These have one element in common: All these people thought all these things before the election. Now they’re trying to use the election to prove that they were right all along, dammit. But they weren’t. This election turned on a few tiny electoral shifts and some wildly improbable outside events. There simply aren’t any truly big lessons to be drawn from it.

But that doesn’t make anyone feel good, and it doesn’t make good fodder for a “smart piece” on what happened. There has to be someone to blame when something bad happens. But sometimes there isn’t.

Except for James Comey. Feel free to blame him all you want. Unfortunately, there aren’t really any lessons to be drawn from that.

¹OK, fine, you want a big lesson? Here it is: our country is now so polarized at a partisan level that it almost literally doesn’t matter who runs. Republicans will vote for the Republican and Democrats will vote for the Democrat. There’s probably not much more than 3-4 percent of the population that’s truly persuadable anymore.

POSTSCRIPT: This is all about national-level politics. I don’t think there’s any question that Democrats took a huge beating at the state and local level, where they were already weak. If you want to write a smart piece about what’s wrong with Democrats, that’s the place to start. Forget Hillary Clinton. Tell me instead why Democrats have such dismal prospects at the state level.

From YouGov’s Will Jordan:

Here is Republicans and Democrats on Vladimir Putin since July 2014. pic.twitter.com/s4I6FY5cbt

— Will Jordan (@williamjordann) December 14, 2016

In mid-July, Democrats and Republicans both had an extremely unfavorable view of Putin. On July 18-21, Republicans hold their presidential nominating convention, and a few days later Republican enthusiasm for Putin spiked up. On November 8, Donald Trump was elected president and Republican enthusiasm for Putin spiked up yet again.

What did Putin actually do during this period? He escalated the siege of Aleppo. He escalated military activities in Ukraine. And he released a whole bunch of emails hacked from Democrats and Democratic organizations. I wonder which of these accounts for the sudden bounce in Putin love among conservative Republicans? Hmmm….

In the middle of a story about Teresa May’s scandalous $1,250 leather trousers,¹we get this:

President-elect Donald J. Trump had been able to fashion himself as a working-class hero despite his luxurious Brioni suits, which can cost as much as $17,000. Mrs. May’s predecessor, David Cameron, who….

Yikes! A $17,000 suit? Fine: I’m a yokel who doesn’t get clothes. But if you told me that Trump drove a $500,000 car, I probably wouldn’t blink. Still, I was curious, so I hopped over to the Brioni website. It turns out you can buy this gray continental three-piece suit for $5,250. Or you can buy this seemingly identical pinstripe version for $6,900. Someone help me out. Why do pinstripes cost $1,650?

But there’s more! Even if I don’t really get it, I sort of understand how a suit from a famous Italian designer can cost a fortune. But Brioni also sells other, more pedestrian stuff, like this burgundy polo shirt—for $795. I wonder if Trump owns any of these? And even in theory, what can you do to a polo shirt to make it worth $795?

For what it’s worth, if you want to Dress Like Trump™, the cheapest thing you can buy from Brioni is a baby-blue tie with an embroidered B on it. It’s only $230.

¹Seriously. It’s called Trousergate.

The election of blue-collar hero Donald Trump is already paying off:

A Dow 20000 milestone would have Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to thank….Shares of the Wall Street firm are up 31% since Election Day, rising to within striking distance of their all-time closing high of $247.92, which was hit in October 2007. That compares with a 8.6% rise in the Dow industrials.

And it’s not just Goldman Sachs. Bank of America has done even better, and the rest of America’s megabanks are doing pretty nicely too. It’s a wonderful time to be on Wall Street.