President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he is nominating Linda McMahon, a billionaire professional wrestling mogul and small-business champion with minimal schools experience, as secretary of Education.

The nomination of McMahon, a major Republican donor, caught many education experts by surprise. She was not on the Trump transition team’s shortlist of Education secretary candidates, an informed source said, and many had expected leading opponents of diversity and equity programs to be tapped for the job, including state superintendents of Oklahoma and Louisiana.

Trump, in his announcement, touted McMahon’s “decades of leadership experience” and said she would work for what he called parents’ rights, including the ability to use taxpayer-funded vouchers to allow children to attend any school, public or private. He also said she would spearhead efforts to “send Education BACK TO THE STATES,” possibly alluding to earlier pledges to dismantle the federal Department of Education.

“Linda has been a fierce advocate for Parents’ Rights … giving children the opportunity to receive an excellent Education, regardless of zip code or income,” Trump said in a statement. “As Secretary of Education, Linda will fight tirelessly to expand ‘Choice’ to every State in America, and empower parents to make the best Education decisions for their families.”

Reaction was swift — and divided — over McMahon, who is said to have wanted the job of Commerce secretary but lost out to Wall Street investor Howard Lutnick.

She will spearhead the Trump administration’s education policies, which could reshape federal financial aid, federal research funding and civil rights for LGBTQ+ people and those accused of sexual assault. Trump is also expected to roll back President Biden’s student loan forgiveness efforts.

Other areas of potential scrutiny are teacher job protections in K-12 schools and Head Start preschools.

In Sacramento, Gov. Gavin Newsom told The Times he knew little about McMahon other than her background as a wealthy Trump donor who comes from a family of entertainers.

“I don’t have any idea of her qualifications on education, and I’ve not heard her enunciate a vision that gives me much confidence that it’s anything other than payback for political support,” he said.

Shaun Harper, a USC professor of education, public policy and business, slammed the nomination. “America’s schoolchildren and college students deserved an Education Secretary who brings deep education experience to the role,” he said. “Instead, they got a former World Wrestling Entertainment executive. This is embarrassing and a slap in the face to our nation’s talented educators.”

Others praised Trump’s selection.

Madison Miner, the Orange County chair of Moms for Liberty, a conservative organization that opposes curricula about LGBTQ+ rights, race and ethnicity, called McMahon a “wonderful choice.”

“She is an advocate for parent rights and the protection of children,” Miner said. “She will make a huge difference in our department of education. … I would love for all parents to have rights over their children.”

Sonja Shaw, president of the Chino Valley Unified School District board, who has become a national figure among conservative parents and school leaders, said McMahon’s appointment seems like a strategic move.

“She has proven her ability to manage money and run a business, and now she has the opportunity to redirect funding to where it truly belongs — back into classrooms, focusing on the fundamentals like reading, writing, and math,” Shaw said. “Resources have been wasted on bureaucracy and, far too often, on indoctrination instead of empowering students with the skills they need to succeed.”

Some expressed more cautious views on her selection.

Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning think tank, praised McMahon’s executive experience but said giving her the education portfolio as a “consolation prize” for losing out on the Commerce job demonstrated the “low priority” Trump places on education.

Jason Altmire, president of Career Education Colleges and Universities, which represents 1,300 for-profit campuses across North America, said he was optimistic that McMahon would lead the department to take a more “reasoned and thoughtful approach in addressing many of the overreaching and punitive regulations put forth by the Biden administration, especially those targeting private career schools.”

Rick Hess, an education expert with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he also was not familiar with McMahon but cautioned against quick judgments.

“Those seeking reflexive celebration or condemnation should look elsewhere,” he said. Referring to current and former Education secretaries, he added: “After the admirable performance of ‘outsider’ Betsy DeVos and the profound ineptitude of veteran school administrator Miguel Cardona, I’d avoid gross assumptions based on biography.” DeVos was Education secretary in Trump’s first administration, and Cardona currently holds the position.

McMahon served for two years on the Connecticut Board of Education and has been a board member of Sacred Heart University, a Catholic school Connecticut. Born Baptist and a convert to Catholicism, McMahon has significantly greater experience in business, including being the longtime CEO and president of the World Wrestling Entertainment Inc.

Her husband, Vince, founded the company and was a household name as televised commercial wrestling exploded in popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. McMahon also twice ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate, losing to Connecticut Democrats Richard Blumenthal in 2010 and to Christopher S. Murphy in 2012.

During his first term, Trump tapped McMahon to lead the Small Business Administration. When she resigned in 2019, she did so on good terms with Trump — unlike many appointees — and later became the chair of the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-connected policy think tank.

While McMahon’s views on many hot-button education issues are not well-known, the institute’s website focuses its priorities on “school choice,” parental approval of curriculum, basic skills and “teaching the truth about America’s history.”

“Today’s contentious debates over using classrooms for political activism rather than teaching a complete and accurate account of American history have reinvigorated calls for greater parental and citizen involvement in the curriculum approval process,” the site says about curriculum.

Regarding history curriculum, the website says: “Racially divisive policies and theories and false teachings of the American founding are indoctrinating America’s youth with an anti-American ideology instead of preparing them for engaged citizenship by teaching rigorous subject matter.” The section directly targets the 1619 Project by the New York Times, which ties the founding of the United States to its history of slavery and racism.

The institute also notes: “Many high school graduates finish school not knowing how to create a budget, balance a checkbook, read bank statements, or plan for savings.”

If McMahon aligns with the America First Policy Institute and related super PAC, “it seems that ending DEI and accreditation reform are on top of her list, along with promoting vocational education,” said John Aubrey Douglass, a senior research fellow and research professor of public policy and higher education at the UC Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education.

A major question is whether Trump will direct McMahon to move forward on his desire to weaken the Education Department — or eliminate it — which would require an act of Congress.

Pedro Noguera, dean of the USC Rossier School of Education, warned that Trump officials who move to do so “should prepare for lots of resistance, because the public generally supports public education, especially in rural areas.”

Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, said he looked forward to working with McMahon.

“Higher education and our colleges and universities work hard every day to build America and improve lives,” he said in a statement. “Ensuring college access and affordability, supporting student success, and advancing cutting-edge research that saves lives and protects our national security are just some of the common priorities we look forward to working on in the coming months with Secretary-designate McMahon and her team at the Department of Education.”

David Goldberg, California Teachers Assn. president, said the nation’s public schools face a critical moment — needing more funding for safe and stable learning environments, higher pay for teachers and more support for special needs students.

“We need an Education Secretary who understands these issues and will work alongside educators to secure more resources for public schools and protect the institution of public education,” he said. “Our students and communities deserve no less.”

It may seem like a clear story: Donald Trump won the election by winning the most votes. He improved on his totals, adding about 2.5 million more votes than four years ago. But just as consequential to the outcome were Kamala Harris’s losses: She earned about 7 million fewer votes compared with Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s performance in 2020.

Ms. Harris failed to find new voters in three of the seven swing states and in 80 percent of counties across the country, a New York Times analysis shows. In the places where she matched or exceeded Mr. Biden’s vote totals, she failed to match Mr. Trump’s gains.

We can’t yet know how many Biden voters backed Mr. Trump or did not vote at all this cycle. But the decline in support for Ms. Harris in some of the country’s most liberal areas is particularly notable. Compared with Mr. Biden, she lost hundreds of thousands of votes in major cities including Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, and overall earned about 10 percent fewer votes in counties Mr. Biden won four years ago.

Mr. Trump, by contrast, found new voters in most counties, with significant gains in red states like Texas and Florida and also in blue states like New Jersey and New York.

Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, acknowledged that Biden voters who swung toward Mr. Trump played a part in Ms. Harris’s loss, but pointed to low Democratic turnout as the larger factor.

“They just weren’t excited,” Mr. Sabato said of Democratic voters. “They were probably disillusioned by inflation, maybe the border. And they didn’t have the motivation to get up and go out to vote.”

The national rightward shift is a continuation of voting patterns seen in the last two elections. Even in his 2020 defeat, Mr. Trump found new voters across the country. (Both parties earned more votes in 2020 than in 2016.) And although Democrats outperformed expectations in 2022, when some had predicted a “red wave,” they lost many voters who were dissatisfied with rising prices, pandemic-era restrictions and immigration policy.

At the local level, three distinct patterns help illustrate the overall outcome in 2024:

1. Where both candidates gained votes, but Trump gained more.

In hard-fought Georgia, both parties found new voters, but Mr. Trump outperformed Ms. Harris. For example, in Fulton County, which contains most of Atlanta, Ms. Harris gained about 4,500 votes, but Mr. Trump gained more than 7,400.

In addition to his gains in the Atlanta area, Mr. Trump won new voters in every other part of Georgia. He flipped the state back to Republicans after Mr. Biden’s win there in 2020. He similarly outran Ms. Harris where she made gains in Wake County, N.C., Lancaster County, Pa., and Montgomery County, Texas.

2. Where Trump gained a little and Harris lost a little.

In Milwaukee County in swing-state Wisconsin, Ms. Harris lost 1,200 voters compared with Mr. Biden’s total in 2020, while Mr. Trump gained more than 3,500.

Ms. Harris still won the county at large, but her margins there and in other liberal enclaves of Wisconsin were not enough to hold off Mr. Trump’s victories in rural, blue-collar counties that voted Republican in 2016 and 2020.

Democrats’ inability to maintain their vote totals in battleground states was also apparent in the crucial areas around Charlotte, N.C., Flint, Mich., and Scranton, Pa.

3. Where Trump gained a little and Harris lost a lot.

Mr. Trump won Florida’s Miami-Dade County, becoming the first Republican to do so since 1988. But again, Ms. Harris’s loss was just as much of the story as his gain: Mr. Trump won about 70,000 new votes in the county, while she lost nearly 140,000.

Other counties that Mr. Trump flipped had similar vote disparities. In 21 of these 77 counties, Mr. Trump received fewer votes in this election than in 2020, but the Democratic vote drop-off was much steeper. This happened from coast to coast, from Fresno County, Calif., to Pinellas County, Fla.

Joel Benenson, the chief pollster for Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, said he thought Democratic turnout was hurt by the party’s lack of a presidential primary. (Mr. Biden dropped out of the race in July.) That process, he said, helps energize core voters who get involved with volunteering, making phone calls and knocking on doors early in the year.

“That was a real challenge for Vice President Harris, who had a short runway and would have benefited from a real primary season,” Mr. Benenson said. “Republicans had a contested primary — even with a former president, they didn’t just hand it to him.”

Mr. Trump was clearly able to harness enthusiasm beyond his base. He made gains across almost all groups ranging in demographics, education and income, including those that traditionally made up the Democratic coalition. Ms. Harris failed to match Mr. Biden among the same groups.

Pre-election polls showed minority voters swinging toward Mr. Trump, and he appeared to make gains with those groups. He picked up votes in majority-Hispanic counties and in Black neighborhoods of major cities, a preliminary analysis of precinct data shows. But he lost votes, as did Ms. Harris, in majority-Black counties, especially those in the South where turnout dropped overall.

Mr. Trump found new voters in more than 30 states, including in the battleground states that were the sites of robust campaigning. His gains were modest in most other places. Ms. Harris was able to improve on Mr. Biden’s performance in only four of the seven battlegrounds and just five states overall.

John McLaughlin, Mr. Trump’s campaign pollster, said the campaign was focused on finding supporters who were not reliable voters and making sure they turned out to the polls. He said that internal polling showed that voters who cast a ballot in 2024 after not voting in 2022 or 2020 supported Mr. Trump, 52 percent to 46 percent.

“The strategy was very much like 2016, to bring out casual voters who thought the country was on the wrong track,” Mr. McLaughlin said. “These voters blamed Biden and Harris and generally had positive approval for Trump.”

The incoming Trump administration has reinvoked chatter about the possibility of the United States purchasing Greenland, an idea floated during the president-elect’s first term in office.

In his first term, Trump tweeted an image of coastal Greenland with an edited, glossy Trump tower building superimposed on the landscape. It was captioned, “I promise not to do this to Greenland!”

In August 2019, President Trump confirmed to reporters that he was interested in purchasing Greenland, an idea that raised both curiosity and debate.

“Denmark essentially owns it,” Trump said. “We’re very good allies with Denmark, we protect Denmark like we protect large portions of the world. So the concept came up and I said, ‘Certainly I’d be.’ Strategically it’s interesting and we’d be interested but we’ll talk to them a little bit. It’s not No. 1 on the burner, I can tell you that.”

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The Wall Street Journal first reported Trump’s interest, citing sources who said he had mentioned the idea with “varying degrees of seriousness.”

The idea was shelved after Joe Biden took office in 2021, but has resurfaced online in the wake of Trump’s victory earlier this month.

Republican Congressman Mike Collins of Georgia posted what appears to be an electoral map featuring Greenland on November 7, with the territory voting GOP. It was captioned, “Project 2029.”

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Since then, a member of parliament in Denmark has pushed back on the idea of the United States purchasing Greenland as an American territory. According to a post from Rasmus Jarlov, the Danish parliament does not intend to offer the territory to anyone, especially the United States. 

“Greenlandic independence requires approval by the Danish parliament[sic] and a change of our constitution,” wrote Jarlov. “I can guarantee you that there is no way we would approve indepence[sic] so that you could buy Greenland. Nice fantasy but forget it.”
 

This is far from the first time that the United States has considered purchasing the strategically beneficial Arctic landmass.

After World War II, President Harry Truman offered Denmark $100 million for it in 1946, but Denmark refused.

The idea actually came up earlier in 1945, when Senator Owen Brewster, R-Maine, called Greenland a “military necessity” supported by American military leaders. 

Houses on the coastline in Nuuk, Greenland. (Marli Miller/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

In 1946, a State Department official noted that the Joint Chiefs of Staff believed the U.S. should aim to purchase the territory. That December, Secretary of State James Byrnes even made an offer directly to Denmark’s Foreign Minister Gustav Rasmussen, suggesting a sale might be the simplest solution.

American interest in Greenland goes back even further. In 1867, the State Department explored buying both Greenland and Iceland, recognizing their strategic importance.

If Denmark hypothetically agrees to sell Greenland to the United States, it would be the largest expansion of American territory in history, topping 1803’s Louisiana Purchase.