This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Heading into the presidential election, voters voiced concerns about many issues: abortion, housing, the war in Gaza, immigration. But the one that really resonated at the polls had long dogged the Biden administration, appearing over and over as the top concern on voters’ minds: the economy. In the end, abortion—much as Democrats tried—wasn’t the policy issue that defined the race. Instead, millions of Americans cast their vote based on fear and anger about the state of the economy—all stoked by Donald Trump, who claimed that he was the only one who could solve America’s problems.

On Tuesday, Americans unhappy with the status quo rebuked the current administration for COVID-sparked inflation, following an anti-incumbent pattern that is playing out in elections worldwide. As my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote this week, the “everyday indignity” of heightened food prices, in particular, haunted and enraged American voters even after inflation cooled meaningfully from its 2022 peaks. Though the economy improved by many measures under President Joe Biden, the message from Democrats that you’re doing fine didn’t land—and even seemed patronizing—to Americans who saw high prices all around them. And as Annie noted, although wages have outpaced inflation in recent months, “people interpret wage gains as a product of their own effort and high costs as a policy problem that the president is supposed to solve.”

Trump’s proposals on the economy were frequently incoherent; he scapegoated immigrants for Americans’ financial woes and made promises about tariffs that economists said would lead to higher prices. Still, voters said consistently that they felt that Trump was the right person to handle the economy (even as Kamala Harris started to close in on Trump’s lead on the issue), perhaps because of nostalgia for a pre-pandemic economy that’s unlikely to return. For all the criticism Harris faced early in her campaign for not issuing clearer policy proposals (she ultimately did), Trump was the one whose appeal was rooted largely in “vibes”: He brought heavy doses of hateful culture-war rhetoric to the race, spreading false and dangerous messages about transgender people, blaming immigrants for societal ills, and smearing women, including Harris.

Even though Trump was president just four years ago, he framed himself as the candidate of change, whereas Harris was pegged as the status-quo candidate and struggled to differentiate herself from Biden. Harris, of course, is not the incumbent president. But she was an imperfect messenger on the economy. Even as she started releasing more detailed economic-policy proposals, which included tackling price gouging and making housing more affordable, she was still the governing partner of a president whom voters blamed for inflation—a president whose policies she did not seem willing to openly break with. Trump seized on that dynamic, framing her as a continuation of the current administration and surfacing clips of Harris defending Bidenomics.

Democrats, meanwhile, tried to center abortion rights. When Harris took over for Biden, some pundits saw the issue as a strength for her. It was reasonable for Democrats to think appeals on abortion could work, Jacob Neiheisel, a political-science professor at SUNY Buffalo told me: In 2022, emphasizing abortion proved a decisive issue for Democrats in the midterm elections (though, he noted, it actually helped Democrats only in specific parts of the country—just enough to fend off a midterms “red wave”). But this time around, the economy mattered more: CNN national exit polling found that only 14 percent of voters said abortion was their top issue, compared with more than 30 percent who said that about the economy. And Trump, it seemed, managed to muddle the message on abortion enough that many voters didn’t view him as patently anti-abortion (even as Democrats emphasized that he was responsible for the fall of Roe v. Wade). More than a quarter of women who supported legal abortion still chose Trump, according to exit polling.

Fears about the future of democracy were also at the top of voters’ minds more commonly than abortion, according to CNN exit polling: 34 percent of voters said it was their top issue, suggesting that the Harris campaign’s rhetoric about the existential threats posed by Trump did have some effect on voters’ perceptions. My colleague Ronald Brownstein noted today that in national exit polling, 54 percent of voters agreed that Trump was “too extreme,” “but about one in nine voters who viewed Trump as too extreme voted for him anyway.”

For nearly a decade now, Trump has felt like the dominant figure in American politics. But as David Wallace-Wells noted in The New York Times yesterday, a Democrat has been president for 12 of the past 16 years. Democrats, he argues, for a generation now have been “the party of power and the establishment,” with the right becoming “the natural home for anti-establishment resentment of all kinds—of which, it’s now clear to see, there is an awful lot.” Ultimately, much of the dynamic in this race came down to whether voters were hopeful or fearful about their and their country’s future. When people have the choice to “vote hopes or vote fears,” Neiheisel said, “fears tend to override.”

Related:

What swayed Trump voters was Bidenomics. Why Biden’s team thinks Harris lost

Today’s News

In a speech about Trump’s electoral victory, President Biden urged Americans to “bring down the temperature” and promised a peaceful transfer of power. Special Counsel Jack Smith has been speaking with Justice Department officials about how he can end the federal cases against President-elect Donald Trump, in accordance with the department’s policy against prosecuting sitting presidents. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz fired his finance minister yesterday, ending his coalition government. Scholz pledged to hold a confidence vote, which will likely lead to early elections in March.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: In 2015, David A. Graham wrote about America’s dire lack of talented and experienced politicians. Almost a decade later, Stephanie Bai spoke with him to ask how much of his argument has held up, and how much has changed. The Weekly Planet: A tiny petrostate is running the world’s climate talks—again, Zoë Schlanger writes.

More From The Atlantic

Triumph of the cynics Democrats actually had quite a good night in North Carolina. What the left keeps getting wrong

Evening Read

Sources: Israel Sebastian / Getty; Scharvik / Getty.

America Has an Onion Problem

By Nicholas Florko

Onions have an almost-divine air. They are blessed with natural properties that are thought to prevent foodborne illnesses, and on top of that, they undergo a curing process that acts as a fail-safe. According to one analysis by the CDC, onions sickened 161 people from 1998 to 2013, whereas leafy greens sickened more than 7,000. Onions haven’t been thought of as a “significant hazard,” Susan Mayne, the former head of food safety at the FDA, told me.

Not anymore.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Illustration by Matt Chase

Read. These seven books will grab your attention and make you put down your phone.

Listen. In the first episode of Autocracy in America, Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev look at how lies prime a society for a fall.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Certain foods are more likely than others to wreak havoc on your stomach. Cucumbers have carried Salmonella, peaches have been contaminated with Listeria, and eating a salad feels a bit like Russian roulette. Romaine lettuce, tomatoes, and sprouts are all considered high risk for foodborne illnesses. (Scott Faber, a food-safety expert at the Environmental Working Group, put it to me bluntly: “Don’t eat sprouts.”)

By comparison, onions have an almost-divine air. They are blessed with natural properties that are thought to prevent foodborne illnesses, and on top of that, they undergo a curing process that acts as a fail-safe. According to one analysis by the CDC, onions sickened 161 people from 1998 to 2013, whereas leafy greens sickened more than 7,000. Onions haven’t been thought of as a “significant hazard,” Susan Mayne, the former head of food safety at the FDA, told me.

Not anymore. Late last month, McDonald’s briefly stopped selling its Quarter Pounders in certain states after at least 90 people who ate them fell sick with E. coli. Last Wednesday, the CDC announced the likely culprit: slivered onions. This is the fourth time onions have caused a multistate foodborne outbreak since 2020, in total sickening at least 2,337 people, according to available data. In that same time span, leafy greens have caused eight multistate outbreaks that have affected 844 people. All of a sudden, the United States seems to have an onion problem—and no one knows for sure what is causing it.

The investigation into the cause of the McDonald’s outbreak is still ongoing, but the problem likely started where many foodborne illnesses begin: in the field. The culprit, in many instances, is contaminated water used to irrigate crops. An outbreak can also start with something as simple as a nearby critter relieving itself near your veggies. Any additional processing, such as when onions are cut into prepackaged slivers, can give bacteria lots of opportunities to spread. That’s why the FDA considers most precut raw vegetables to be high risk. (As with other foods, cooking onions to 165 degrees Fahrenheit kills pathogens.)

But the fact that onions appear to get contaminated with E. coli and Salmonella at all is striking. Onions have long been thought to have antimicrobial properties that can help them fight off bacteria. Hippocrates once recommended that onions be used as suppositories to clean the body, and onions were placed on wounds during the French and Indian War. Medical knowledge has thankfully advanced since then, but the onion’s antimicrobial properties have been documented by modern science as well. In various lab experiments, researchers have found that onion juice and dehydrated onions inhibit the growth of E. coli and Salmonella. And in 2004, researchers found that E. coli in soil died off faster when surrounded by onion plants than when surrounded by carrot plants, a result the authors said might be due to “the presence of high concentrations of antimicrobial phenolic compounds in onions.”

Onions have another powerful weapon in their food-safety arsenal: their papery skin, which research suggests may act as a barrier protecting the insides of an onion from surface bacteria. The way that onions are processed should add an additional layer of protection: To extend their shelf life, onions are left to dry, sometimes for weeks, after they are harvested. This curing process should, in theory, kill most bacteria. Stuart Reitz, an onion expert at Oregon State University who has intentionally sprayed onions with E. coli–laced water, has found that the curing process kills off a significant amount of the bacteria—likely because of ultraviolet radiation from the sun and because drier surfaces are less conducive to bacteria growing, Reitz told me.

But clearly, onions are not contamination proof. Onion experts I spoke with floated some plausible theories. Linda Harris, a professor of food safety at UC Davis, posited that bacteria could hypothetically bypass an onion’s protective skin by entering through the green tops of the onion and then traveling down into the layers of the onion itself. And although onions might have antimicrobial properties, that might not always be enough to prevent an E. coli infection from taking hold, Michael Doyle, a food microbiologist at the University of Georgia, told me; when it comes to antimicrobial activity, he said, “not all onions are created equal.” And the McDonald’s onions could have become infected simply by way of probability. One of Reitz’s recent studies on the effect of curing found that 2 percent onions sprayed with E. coli still had detectable levels of the bacteria after being cured.

Still, none of this explains why onions seem to be causing more foodborne illnesses now. Harris told me that she and a colleague have “spent a lot of time trying to figure out how these outbreaks happen, and I will tell you: We don’t have an answer.” Unfortunately, we may never understand the cause of the onion’s heel turn. In many cases, regulators are unable to figure out exactly what causes a foodborne outbreak. They failed to find a definitive cause in the three other recent onion outbreaks, and perhaps the same will be true of the McDonald’s debacle.

The entire situation demonstrates the maddening inscrutability of foodborne illness. The reality is that although these outbreaks are rare, they can be dangerous. One person died after eating a contaminated Quarter Pounder, and a 15-year-old had to undergo dialysis to stave off kidney failure. Yet for all of the technology and science that goes into food safety—the genome sequencing of foodborne pathogens, blockchain technology that traces crops from farms to store shelves—we continue to be stuck with more questions than answers. America has less of an onion problem than an everything problem.