To offset gains that Donald J. Trump made in rural and suburban America in 2024, Kamala Harris needed to do better than Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s strong 2020 electoral performance in cities. But she ended up doing worse in urban America — getting 15 percent fewer votes than Mr. Biden in some cities. A New York Times analysis of precinct-level election results — the most detailed available publicly — across 11 cities shows how it happened.

In Atlanta and its suburbs, both candidates found new voters, but Ms. Harris’s gains in precincts where white voters were the largest racial or ethnic group were canceled out by losses elsewhere. Mr. Trump’s uptick in support from voters of color across Atlanta, along with improved performance in the state’s rural areas, was enough for him to win Georgia — a swing state he narrowly lost to Mr. Biden in 2020.

Chicago is emblematic of the chief problem the Harris campaign faced in urban areas — a big decline in votes in Democratic strongholds. Even though Ms. Harris won the city by a 58-point margin, she lost ground in nearly every precinct. She picked up just 127,000 votes in Mexican and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, 47,000 fewer than Mr. Biden earned in 2020. Mr. Trump made small gains across the board, but Ms. Harris’s losses were much steeper.

In Wayne County, which includes Detroit, Ms. Harris struggled to capture the support of Arab-American voters, many of whom had been turned off by the Biden administration’s Middle East policies. In a swath of voting precincts spanning Dearborn and Hamtramck, which have the nation’s highest concentration of people of Arab ancestry, Mr. Trump picked up thousands of votes compared with 2020, while the Democratic Party lost an even bigger number. Countywide, precincts with high shares of Arab residents made up just 6 percent of the electorate but accounted for more than 40 percent of the decline in Democratic votes.

The story in Houston was more about Ms. Harris underperforming Mr. Biden’s 2020 vote totals than about Mr. Trump achieving sharp gains, especially in Latino neighborhoods and lower-income areas. Ms. Harris’s vote total was down 12 percent overall from Mr. Biden’s in 2020, and 28 percent in low-income neighborhoods where Latino voters are the largest group.

In this rapidly growing area, red shifts were most evident in Latino neighborhoods. While Ms. Harris matched Mr. Biden’s vote total overall, Mr. Trump made significant gains throughout the area.

Mr. Trump was already popular with the county’s large Cuban American population, but in this election, his support surged with Latino voters from other groups as well. He received 20 percent more total votes in Latino neighborhoods where Cubans are not the predominant Latino group, like those with large populations of Nicaraguans or Colombians. This helped him flip Miami-Dade County for the first time since 1988, further cementing Florida as a decisively red state.

Mr. Trump saw gains on the city’s South Side, where there are Latino precincts with large Mexican populations, and his increased support coincided with Ms. Harris’s losses there. Ms. Harris picked up votes in some white neighborhoods, but those gains were erased by the losses elsewhere, allowing Mr. Trump to cut into the Democratic margin and flip the state back to the Republican column.

Latino neighborhoods accounted for nearly half of Mr. Trump’s total gains in his home city compared with 2020. While Ms. Harris won these precincts by a 40-point margin, that fell short of Mr. Biden’s 66-point margin in 2020. In a city with a diverse population of Latinos, Mr. Trump’s vote share grew among all of them — Puerto Rican neighborhoods, Dominican neighborhoods and Mexican neighborhoods alike.

Ms. Harris outperformed Mr. Biden in some parts of the city — especially in white precincts near the downtown area. White voters were the largest racial or ethnic group in 24 of the 25 precincts where she gained the most votes. But Ms. Harris lost some support in Latino and Black neighborhoods elsewhere in the city, and the Democratic margin fell to 59 points, from 64 points in 2020.

More than half of the Democratic vote decline occurred in Latino neighborhoods, even though these precincts accounted for just 16 percent of the overall vote total. Ms. Harris still won Latino neighborhoods by 23 points, but it was a 12-point drop from the 2020 margin of Mr. Biden, who narrowly won Arizona, a Republican stronghold won only twice by Democrats since 1952.

Even this city — known for its liberalism and its importance to Ms. Harris’s career — swung toward Mr. Trump. Ms. Harris’s losses were especially noticeable in the city’s Asian neighborhoods, which are predominantly Chinese but include thousands of voters from other groups. Though Ms. Harris still won the city by a 68-point margin, Mr. Trump gained more than 6,000 votes on top of her vote losses.

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France’s borrowing costs have risen above those of Greece for the first time, as investors fret that Michel Barnier’s government could fail to pass a belt-tightening budget.

The 10-year yield on French government debt briefly reached 3.02 per cent in early trading on Thursday, crossing above the 3.01 per cent yield demanded by lenders to Greece, before switching back.

The crossover reflects an upheaval in the perceived riskiness of Eurozone borrowers and underscores investors’ concern about France’s political and fiscal outlook at a time when Barnier’s minority administration is struggling to push through €60bn of tax increases and spending cuts.

“Looks like French politics are about to collide with the bond market,” said Andrew Pease, chief investment strategist at Russell Investments, as he suggested that market turmoil would eventually force politicians to accept fiscal discipline. “I think we know who wins.”

Under intense pressure from opposition parties, Barnier could face a crunch no-confidence vote as early as next week. On Thursday he made a major concession to Marine Le Pen’s far-right party by abandoning a plan to raise electricity taxes, in a bid to convince it not to bring down his months-old government.

“We can still be responsible and work together to improve the budget . . . or there is another road of uncertainty and . . . leaping into the budgetary and financial unknown,” said finance minister Antoine Armand, who also sought to dismiss any comparison between the French and Greek economies.

“France is not Greece,” he added on BFMTV. “France has . . . far superior economic and demographic power which means it is not Greece.”

French borrowing costs remain well below levels that would signify a bond market crisis, and 10-year bond yields fell back to 2.95 per cent later on Thursday, compared with Greece’s 2.99 per cent. France’s spread above German yields — a key measure of the riskiness of French bonds — has dropped back to 0.82 percentage points from a 12-year high of 0.9 points earlier in the week.

But Thursday’s moves underscore how investors are reclassifying Paris as one of the Eurozone’s riskier borrowers.

France’s government bond market endured its worst bout of selling in two years during the five trading days to Tuesday, according to flow data from BNY Investments. Geoff Yu, senior markets strategist at BNY, said it was the “most concentrated round of selling . . . since the height of the European energy crisis in late 2022”.

Greek bond yields have also fallen markedly as the country’s economy has recovered since its bailout during the 2012 crisis. Last year, Athens’ credit rating was lifted to investment grade for the first time.

Hedge funds have also built up bigger bets against French debt than during the nadir of the 2008 global financial crisis, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Bonds out on loan — a measure of hedge fund short selling, or betting on a falling price — are now €99.7bn, compared with just under €85bn in September 2008.

Since the government lacks a majority in the assembly, it will probably have to use a constitutional mechanism to override lawmakers, which in turn would allow the opposition to call a no-confidence vote.

The French budget’s fate and that of Barnier’s administration remain largely in the hands of the far-right RN party, which is the biggest single party and a key voting bloc in the National Assembly.

Despite Barnier’s concession on electricity, the RN kept up pressure on the government and threatened to vote to bring it down if its demands were not met.

“There are still difficulties. It’s Thursday. He has until Monday,” Le Pen warned in Le Monde newspaper on Thursday night.

RN party leader Jordan Bardella hailed the government’s climbdown on the electricity tax as a “victory”.

“Other red lines still remain,” Bardella added in a post on X, reiterating the party’s calls for protecting the purchasing power of the public, particularly retirees and a “serious crackdown” on migration and crime. 

Concessions the government has made to the proposed budget in recent weeks may render impossible its goal to bring back the deficit to 5 per cent of national output by the end of 2025.

France overshot its deficit target for this year and will finish at above 6 per cent of GDP — far above the EU limit of 3 per cent of GDP.

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At an FT event a few years ago, Microsoft’s co-founder Bill Gates was asked what painful lessons he had learnt when building his software company. His answer startled the audience back then and is all the more resonant today.

Gates replied that in his early twenties he was convinced that “IQ was fungible” and that he was wrong. His aim had been to hire the smartest people he could find and build a corporate “IQ hierarchy” with the most intelligent employees at the top. His assumption was that no one would want to work for a boss who was not smarter than them. “Well, that didn’t work for very long,” he confessed. “By the age of 25, I knew that IQ seems to come in different forms.” 

Those employees who understood sales and management, for example, appeared to be smart in ways that were negatively correlated with writing good code or mastering physics equations, Gates said. Microsoft has since worked on blending different types of intelligence to create effective teams. It seems to have paid off: the company now boasts a market value of more than $3tn and will celebrate its 50th birthday next year.

Gates may have learnt that lesson early. But while many of his fellow US tech billionaires share his original instinct about the primacy of IQ, few appear to have reached his later conclusion. There is a tech titan tendency to believe that it is their own particular form of intelligence that has enabled them to become wildly successful and insanely wealthy and to champion it in others.

Moreover, they seem to think this superior intelligence is always and everywhere applicable. 

The default assumption of successful founders seems to be that their expertise in building tech companies gives them equally valuable insights into the US federal budget deficit, pandemic responses, or the war in Ukraine. For them, fresh information plucked from unfamiliar fields sometimes resembles God-given revelation even if it is commonplace knowledge to everyone outside their bubble. One young American tech billionaire, a college dropout who had just returned from a trip to Paris, once asked me with wide-eyed wonder whether I had heard about the French Revolution. It was incredible, apparently.

Inevitably, this leads to questions about the fungibility of Elon Musk’s IQ given his omnipresence in the US economy and now politics. The South African-born entrepreneur is blessed with an exceptional form of intelligence and clarity of vision that commands respect, even from his fiercest competitors. “I think he’s a fucking legend,” the chief executive of one rival electric vehicle company told me, even though he was personally appalled by the ways in which Musk had used his social media company X as a propaganda tool.

Although Musk excels at building cool cars and rocket ships, his personal brand extension into social media is flailing and he is facing a user and advertiser exodus at X. Still, Musk used the $44bn megaphone he bought to help elect Donald Trump. In turn, the incoming US president has now invited the “super genius” Musk to become one of two co-heads of the planned Department of Government Efficiency. 

To cut bureaucracy, Musk is advertising for “super high IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting”. Musk has already said he would like to axe three quarters of the federal government’s 400 departments. “99 is enough,” he posted.

These days, Musk prefers to troll Gates rather than listen to him. Yet he might still reflect on Gates’s painful lesson: the smartest people in one field do not always have the best ideas in others.

No doubt there is massive bureaucratic waste to be cut, but it will take many different types of intelligence to understand all the public benefits, competing agendas and conflicting interests surrounding government spending. 

There is also a certain irony in tech billionaires trumpeting superior human intelligence when they are also developing AI that may one day overtake it. Google’s co-founder Larry Page labelled Musk a “speciesist” for defending human intelligence so doggedly in the face of advancing technology. 

Naturally, Musk is working on a solution: he plans to upgrade our biological wetware using electronic brain implants developed by his company Neuralink to merge human and machine intelligence.

That prospect will terrify many but may, in a different way, prove the ultimate test of whether human IQ is fungible.

john.thornhill@ft.com