It seemed as if nature was telling us something: Wednesday, Nov. 6, wasn’t just an unseasonably warm day across eastern North America but a record-setting mini-heat wave. Temperatures broke 80℉ in New York, Boston and Washington — for our international readers, that's about 27℃ — in all cases exceeding record highs for the date by at least three degrees.
You can read that as a fluke, a demonstration of climate change or a metaphor: What had unfolded over the previous night and into early Wednesday morning was certainly a form of explosive combustion. Donald Trump’s sweeping victory across all the so-called swing states and in the national popular vote wasn’t just a defeat for Kamala Harris and the Democrats. Losing the U.S. Senate seats in Ohio and Montana, although disappointing, could be understood as the normal operation of pendulum-swing electoral politics. Trump’s massive win could not.
