What happened

... plus curiosities from Japan's nuke treaty, reporters' notebooks, and more

Welcome back to another edition of The Detour! My name is Kelly, and I’m the newsletter’s founding writer. With every issue of The Detour, I hope to deliver you an honest, dynamic, and engaging newsletter that cuts through the noise of the internet and sparks curiosity from all corners of the globe.

If you've enjoyed reading, I would be so grateful if you supported it with a paid subscription. Every dollar you put toward this newsletter goes directly to me (hi!), an independent journalist who is passionate about nuanced, underreported stories centered on U.S. and global affairs.

Thank you for reading,

Kelly

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In this issue:

🗳️ The most consequential U.S. election numbers from swing states

📒 ‘This is a global issue’ — Inside the notebooks of four reporters who covered the U.S. presidential election this year

🗾 Japan really, really wants to make a fissile cut-off treaty happen. Will it?

Republican frontrunner Donald Trump has won the 2024 presidential election. This week’s World in Numbers section hones the key figures that helped shape America’s swingiest swing states.

Kelly Kimball for Frame Media. // Source: Wikimedia Commons and Canva

34 — The number of felonies the 2024 presidential election victor Donald Trump has been convicted of. (His sentencing is scheduled for later this month.) So far, the Republican leader has had a federal indictment dismissed in Florida regarding his flouting of U.S. law on protecting national security secrets. Trump has also made clear he would use his executive power to avoid the federal case against him for his role in the January 6, 2024 attack on the U.S. Capitol. A Georgia racketeering case involving him and others accused of trying to subvert the 2020 election result is pending.

“The fact that Trump is a convicted felon resonated with a lot of folks. Many people with criminal records saw themselves in Trump and believe that having a person with a felony record hold the highest office in the land will change legislation and daily life for them, as well as open more opportunities for them to build their careers and achieve wealth and success.”

— Allison Lau, a producer and editor who spent the last six months telling the stories of Independent, Democratic, and Republican voters from seven key battleground states. She explains more in our cover story further down.

3% - 4% — The percentage of Americans who voted third party during early voting last week, according to Economist/YouGov and Times/Siena polls. This is a greater vote share than the one percentage point that separated Trump and U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris this election.

Did votes for Jill Stein, Cornel West , and Robert F Kennedy Jr. actually shave off support for either Harris or Trump in consequential ways?

Last week, one expert predicted … maybe? But today, it’s still too early to tell.

“This year third parties seem to be getting very little traction and are likely to play a very limited role, but [in] an extremely close election, where a few thousand votes in three or four states could determine the outcome, a third party that draws even in the tenths of 1% could make a difference.”

— Boston University political history professor Bruce J. Schulman, in an email to Forbes.

319,000 — The number of eligible voters in the swing state of Arizona that are Native American. That number, while just a portion of the 5.2% of Native Americans that live in Arizona, is not nothing. The AP hasn't called the state’s race yet.

“We are the sleeping giant,” April Ignacio of the Arizona and Mexico-based Tohono O’odham Nation and Co-Founder of Indivisible Tohono told Reckon News on Tuesday. The power of that [voting potential] would be so astonishing.”

She’s right: U.S. President Joe Biden won Arizona by only 10,500 votes, and the Native American vote statistically tipped the odds in their favor. And yet, this year’s election had even thinner margins in the state.

$400,000 — The amount of money offered by a Democratic-aligned PAC to the Uncommitted National Movement, which prevented the political movement from endorsing a candidate other than Kamala Harris, Middle East Eye reported Monday.

This may explain why several leaders of the Uncommitted movement re-aligned with Harris just days before Election Day after having led a months-long campaign rallying Arab, South Asian, and Muslim American voters in Michigan to pledge to vote uncommitted because of both Harris’ and Trump’s take on the war in Gaza. Many who identified with the movement stood for the idea that unless Harris or Trump put their support behind a ceasefire and arms embargo on Israel, neither candidate would earn their vote. What happened instead was a massive fissure in the Uncommitted National Movement.

What will likely be Trump’s foreign policy toward Israel? A global affairs reporter shares his experience.