Ustad Herndon (3:21)

I think that in 2016 you could have told yourself that America didn't know what it was selecting. And I think now you can. Right. Like it's not just his literal return, it is the fact that he has been so explicit in the run up to that return, the convictions, the sexual assault liability, the like, you can go on and on and on, but there's not a lack of evidence on who Donald Trump is and what he is promising. And so I think that that is the thing that largely sits with me. And I think on the other side, the Democratic refusal to see the unpopularity of Joe Biden, the dismissal of anyone who talked about a primary, the demanding a party loyalty, all of that looks ridiculous. And the national picture that shows a consistent desire for change I think has to be ready as first and foremost a rejection of the current administration. And there was a lot of signs that pointed to that for a long time. And so in the same way I think there is an active embrace of Donald Trump you can ignore. I think you also have to point out that the strategy that Democrats took, the self belief that they had, that they were certain of has put them in this situation.

Michael Barbour (4:45)

We're gonna return to that for sure instead in a little bit the soul searching within the Democratic Party, all the decision making around Biden. But first, Nate, your quick reaction before we get into the question of how we actually got here tonight.

Nate Cohn (4:57)

Well, Ested took what might have been the gist of mine, so I'll offer a slightly I'll zig where others zagged and reflect on the potentially extraordinary consequences of a second Trump term on almost every major issue that there has been consensus on in the United States since World War II, whether it's foreign policy or immigration or trade norms for constitutional government. Now a majority or near majority of Americans will elect someone who potentially in the most radical ways will try and overturn that consensus.

Michael Barbour (5:31)

Nate, just how much of a victory does this appear to be for Trump? How close was this?

Nate Cohn (5:39)

By most measures, it's still going to be a fairly close election. It should be noted he is favored to win the popular vote, which is extraordinary given that he lost the last two times that no Republican has won it in 20 years. But he may only win it by a point or two. Biden won it by four and a half and we didn't consider that to be a landslide. He's probably gonna sweep all of the swing states, but that would put him just over 300 electoral votes, not 370 like Obama. So you can't call it a landslide, but it's a clear victory.

Michael Barbour (6:07)

Okay, I wanna talk about how Trump pulled this off. And Nate, I wanna stick with you because you were on the show yesterday outlining various scenarios for the outcome of this race, and the one that appears to have played out is what you identified as, and correct me if I'm wrong, the Trump realignment scenario, a pretty significant set of gains that extend and you could argue, complete this populist revolution that he began back in 2016. When I look at the map on the Times homepage that shows the differences between 2020 and tonight, it actually seems in a way to be bigger than that, what Trump did, because that map shows that between those two elections, the country moved. Right. It would seem, across the board. And on top of that, that map shows pretty much nothing broke. Kamala Harris way. How did that happen? Based on what we know so far.

Nate Cohn (7:04)

From the data on a spectrum between a close 2020 repeat and a realignment, I would put it somewhere in the middle. But, yes, this is a decisive victory. And it's noteworthy that it was very broad. There are very few parts of the country where Harris ran as well as Joe Biden. There are very few demographic groups where Harris ran as well as Joe Biden. There were places that are traditionally liberal that swung conservative places, Hispanic places, white, working class. Every kind of county swung towards Donald Trump. That says a lot about the deep seated revulsion that was being expressed here at the status quo. This is very different to me than 2016, where there was this narrow Trump breakthrough among white college graduates that let him get over the top in the critical Midwestern battleground states by a hair. This is a much more comfortable and broadly based victory. And I do think it counts as the culmination of the sort of broader Trump era of elections. You know, he started in 2016 with this narrow breakthrough, and now he has extended what had been a narrow coalition to something that is, you know, hardly. We're still, again, talking about a relatively modest victory, but one that is still fundamentally much more broadly based than it once was. And again, we've now changed what American politics is about in some way. We have a new political division in the country, and there are a lot of different people in demographic groups that previously did not support Donald Trump who appear to be receptive to different elements of that message.

Michael Barbour (8:31)

Can you just explain what you mean when you say we're never going back?

Lisa Lehrer (8:35)

I think there's definitely a political realignment. For a long time, we had this sort of Obama era of politics. Where demographics would be destiny and a more diversifying nation would definitely go towards Democrats. And that was the belief and we're seeing, granted it's still early, that that is not what's necessarily going to happen. Something very different appears to be happening. And so we're entering, I sort of see it as ending one political era in terms of the polit and entering another one. But I think there's a larger, slightly more philosophical question as well, which is there was this sense that Trump was an aberration in some way, that he was a deviation from American politics and his term and his win was a deviation. And all these things he did, be it stoking January 6th or refusing to accept the results of the 2020 election or even just how he talked about people, those things are not an aberration in our politics. Those things are our politics now. And that's where I think the country is. And that I think is what a lot of people probably tomorrow morning are going to have to confront.

Michael Barbour (9:41)

Nate, you just mentioned how much success Donald Trump had with a variety of voting blocs that as Lisa, you just pointed out, Democrats had long believed were going to remain loyal to them. And.

Ustad Herndon (9:55)

But why, but why, why, why did they believe that? Like that evidence has been clear about the drop off for a long time. Right? Like we've had 2012, we've had 2016, we've had 2020. Like we've actually had a lot of evidence to say that the demographic destiny undertone is one that is a faulty premise. The fact that they are holding onto the Obama era, in my opinion is a racist assumption. I don't mean it like in a capital R way, but I mean it.

Michael Barbour (10:23)

In race based assumption.

Ustad Herndon (10:25)

I mean, I think it's, I would say lowercase racist. I would say that there is an assumption that this, it was a failure of imagination, that it couldn't be true.

Lisa Lehrer (10:33)

Yeah, I hear you. But I think there is a sense of like, yes, we saw this drumbeat coming. We saw that more people were identifying as Republicans in like all these polls. We saw that Democrats had moved towards the more conservative position on issues like immigration.

Ustad Herndon (10:48)

We saw that representation did not motivate people.

Lisa Lehrer (10:50)

We saw that, yeah, that's, you know, representation, representation isn't enough. But at the same time you're saying.

Michael Barbour (10:55)

Having a black candidate.

Lisa Lehrer (10:57)

Yeah, people don't vote just on representation.

Nate Cohn (10:59)

There's another half of this though, which is that Democrats lost sight of why they were winning voters like this in the first place.

Ustad Herndon (11:06)

Thank you. Preach.

Nate Cohn (11:08)

Which is, well, one reason that I think is worth mentioning is the economy and helping working people against the establishment and corporations. It was the Democrats who used to be the party that was advocating change, that was against the establishment, that could channel the emotions of a disaffected young person. Donald Trump is that candidate. And so they should in no way be surprised that they have lost those people.

Michael Barbour (11:30)

I just want to make sure I understand what I think you're all hinting at, which is that Donald Trump and the Republican Party have completed a journey in which they are the party of disruption. They are the party that assaults the establishment. They are the party that says not just to the white working class, but to the working class in a number of different demographic groups, including black and Latino working class Americans, that we are your refuge from an unfair, broken system.

Ustad Herndon (11:58)

And I would only add that their ability to do that was made easier by a Democratic Party who seated the mantle on that front.

Nate Cohn (12:06)

Absolutely.

Ustad Herndon (12:07)

The biggest character in this race to me, was not on the ballot. It was Joe Biden, in my opinion, like Joe Biden's refusal to do what he has implied he would do in 2020 and transition to a different type of generation, allow Democrats to have a broader conversation about change, allow Democrats to be freed from the status quo, is not what happened. I think it would be easier for me to say that Donald Trump completed this mass realignment among the working class if we had a universe where the Democrats had a primary, where the Democrats nominated a candidate that was based around some set of ideas and it was not tied to this administration so clearly and the status quo. But since that is not what happened, I think it has made the Republican ability to be the agents of change so much easier that I find it the biggest thing that has happened in this race and I think speaks to what we're saying about what's happened over the last three months. The place that they were in before the candidate switch happened made it such that you could run a perfect race or whatever. And still, and you are still playing on ground that brings you to 50, 50. Because the biggest thing, in my opinion, that happened was they tied themselves to an unpopular administration and with it the.

Michael Barbour (13:18)

Status quo that did not represent Chase.

Ustad Herndon (13:19)

And there was a lot of evidence that that was a bad idea.

Michael Barbour (13:23)

I wanna turn to what happened with women in tonight's election. It seemed, despite everything we're talking about here, like the Harris campaign was relying on women to save the Democratic coalition. And the view was suburban women, even moderate Republican women, post the overturning of Roe v. Wade. And given all of Donald Trump's character flaws was going to put Kamala Harris over the edge, despite the fact that perhaps she didn't speak to and embody change in the way that so many other Americans wanted. Did those women not show up? Or did they show up? But it didn't matter because of all the other voters who showed up for Trump.

Lisa Lehrer (14:11)

So it's a little hard to say at this point. Like, men and women live together in all precincts, it turns out. So it's a little hard to separate that out. I do think we can say something about the power of abortion rights. You know, Since Dobbs in 2022, that had been such a motivator for Democrats. And I think now, maybe even because of all those state referendums, you had a sense that voters could support both abortion rights and former President Trump. And that was different than what we had seen in the 2022 midterms. So I wonder if the power of that issue was a little diminished in some way.

Michael Barbour (14:46)

That's interesting.

Ustad Herndon (14:47)

I would also only add, like, and this is anecdotal, of course, but a lot of folks we met in our travels understood Donald Trump as having a different position on abortion than the rest.

Lisa Lehrer (14:57)

Of the Republican Party. Yes, that's definitely true.

Ustad Herndon (14:59)

And one thing that Donald Trump.

Michael Barbour (15:00)

You just explain that in the last.

Ustad Herndon (15:01)

Year and a half, he's created distance from the most evangelical wing of Republicans. He has upset some of them. And I think we have to acknowledge, I think some of that worked, frankly.

Michael Barbour (15:12)

In other words, people did not buy the idea that he was a true believer in the opposition to abortion.

Jon Stewart (15:18)

I guess.

Lisa Lehrer (15:19)

I'm not saying they never have.

Ustad Herndon (15:20)

I'm just saying, like, the idea that abortion had to be placed top of your list because Republicans represented a existential threat to that. Right. I have had people articulate to me how that does not apply to Donald Trump. People have mentioned consistently that Donald Trump is different than other Republicans on abortion rights. Now, I would also say that I think there is some failure of imagination on behalf of voters about Donald Trump. Like, I think that folks can have that feeling and it not be true. Right. Like, he's still wrapped up in the conservative ecosystem that is anti abortion.

Michael Barbour (15:57)

I just think we have to acknowledge, since we're talking about gender, that in two of the last three presidential races, a woman running against Donald Trump lost. This race meant a lot, as Hillary Clinton's campaign against Trump meant a lot to women.

Lisa Lehrer (16:14)

Yeah. And I wonder what happens now. Right. What we saw in 2016 was obviously the Women's March, and everyone got out with their hats. And then you saw this flourishing of the MeToo movement that prompted this really public and private reckoning around gender and gender equity. And then you saw all these women run and succeed. You know, in 2018, you had record breaking numbers of women elected to Congress. In 2019, you had six women, an unprecedented number, run for the presidency. So much so that Biden, you know, promised to pick a woman. He selected Harris and put her in as vice president. And now after all of that, this movement that seemed like it was building towards the White House, in fact it wasn't. And I just don't think anyone's gonna be out marching with their little pink hats this time around. I think the reaction will be something different, but I don't know what it will be.

Nate Cohn (17:05)

I agree this is one of the best questions about what happens next is what is the visceral emotional response from what eight years ago was called the resistance. But broadly speaking, from liberals and college graduates, the sort of groups that have powered Democratic successes in midterms and special elections. I personally don't see how it could be the same. Having him win again and like this is going to hit very differently. And there's also a sort of natural exhaustion, I think, to this sort of response to Trump over time that I felt, I personally thought I observed in this campaign. And it was reflected in the data as well, in terms of lower voter registration and so on. I don't know what will be the reaction in an emotional way for the Democratic activist. Rank and file.

Michael Barbour (17:54)

We're going to take a very quick break and we're going to try to stay on schedule, Nate, so you can get back to the needle. So we'll be right back.

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Michael Barbour (19:07)

To wrestle with some of the realities of Donald Trump's weaknesses. And Nate, whenever we've talked to you in the past, you spoke of whether it was Trump's role on January 6, his convictions in the hush money scheme, not to mention the tax fraud, his increasingly racist race baiting rhetoric, which we really saw at the end of this campaign at some of his rallies as his single biggest vulnerabilities. And I want to understand in your mind if a victory here means that voters were looking past those things or if as in 2016, but obviously the facts on the ground are different. We need to see this as part of the appeal of what voters liked about Donald Trump this time around.

Nate Cohn (19:55)

I think that voters have never liked Donald Trump, but I have to say he's a lot more popular today than he was in 2016. In 2016, his unfavorable rating was like rather his favorable rating was like 30%, 35%. Now it's close to 50%. A lot of people who didn't like him eight years ago, they've come around to him. That is partly because I think he ran a much more disciplined campaign than he did eight years ago. I think it's partly because he's become normalized for lack of a better world. He's something we're all accustomed to and he has positive attributes as well, whether it's his perceived economic stewardship or that people think he's funny and so on, and that he's not politically correct. And those combination of things can lead someone to come around to him and look past his liabilities. That said, I still don't think that on net, Trump is a strong candidate. I think that the balance of his strengths and weaknesses at best cancel out and may well be on net worse than a different Republican candidate. That's not to say they would have won in the same way, but I do think that Republicans have probably left votes on the table by having Donald Trump as their front runner, even though someone like Donald Trump is the only person who could have turned the Republican Party into what it has become. And in 2016, I don't think you I thought it was very easy to argue that it was as much about Hillary Clinton as it was about Donald Trump and her weaknesses outweighing his. I think that in this election it is as much about his strengths outweighing the Democratic Party's strengths in a way that wasn't true previously.

Michael Barbour (21:27)

I just want to break in to say that Fox News has called the overall election for Donald Trump. So far, it's just Fox News. I Don't know, Nate, what that means for your ability to even stay at this table.

Nate Cohn (21:37)

I'm probably just going to get up and leave. Isn't that great content?

Michael Barbour (21:40)

I know that your time, you may needle back. You should check your phone and make sure that someone's not screaming at you to get out of here. But did you want to respond to what Nate was saying?

Nate Cohn (21:49)

We do think this is pretty done.

Lisa Lehrer (21:51)

Yeah.

Michael Barbour (21:52)

Yeah. And just to explain the math of this all because we didn't do that in the first segment, Trump has won the southern swing states, which meant Kamala Harris had to win the northern blue wall states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. And it's now clear she's not going to be winning all three of those states.

Nate Cohn (22:07)

Seems highly unlikely, though. We haven't called it yet, though. Maybe that's what I'm about to go to. I don't know.

Michael Barbour (22:11)

Some real live kind of facts on the grass. Yes. So, Nate, thank you for being here. You have to go.

Nate Cohn (22:16)

Thank you.

Michael Barbour (22:16)

We are going to keep you in our thoughts. Literally, Nate is leaving us.

Lisa Lehrer (22:19)

He's blocking out the literally go.

Michael Barbour (22:23)

He has to help us make some. Really.

Lisa Lehrer (22:26)

I'm going to try to regain my training composure. Yeah. I think what you were wrestling with, that question that you asked Nate, that he very well answered, was whether America, what they were voting for, were they voting for economic policies, were they voting for sort of strongman government? And it's probably some mix of all of the above because we know a couple conflicting pieces of information. We know that some Trump supporters sort of shrug their shoulders at some of the more controversial policies he's put out there, like deporting millions of undocumented immigrants. But we also know that there's polling that shows the country is increasingly open to strongman leadership. Like that has shifted.

Ustad Herndon (23:06)

Right.

Michael Barbour (23:06)

And the thing you have mentioned and Asad, I'm curious how you think about it when it comes to what Americans may or may not have processed is what a second Trump term is likely to mean for Democratic norms. And Lisa, you started to mention those at the very top of our conversation. But let's just review a couple of the things that Donald Trump has said in this campaign and that those around him have said about what he will do expanding presidential power by bringing independent agencies like the Fed directly under the thumb of the president, using the Department of Justice to prosecute his enemies and ensuring that no one within the executive branch will stand in his way, that there will be no one there to object voters in giving Trump a second term. You can argue have endorsed a fundamentally different vision of the presidency and democracy itself.

Ustad Herndon (24:06)

Yeah, you can argue that. I mean, I think there's a. I'm like wrestling here because I think there's also a simple story here, too, like inflation is high, the administration is unpopular, and throughout the world, the developed world, we've been seeing incumbent governments lose because of basically those two reasons. There's a complicated story about, like, Trump and his policies and what he's promised, but there's also a simple one that says folks don't like the country as it is now and were willing to roll a dice on what it could be under him. Now, I think to your point is an important one, though, because at this table last week we talked about democracy, democracy and how Democrats don't offer an alternative vision about improving it. And I think that's a really important thing to really talk about here, is that when we lay out the ways that Donald Trump has undoubtedly promised a reshaped federal government that is in line with his praise of authoritarians across the world, I think we should also say that the response to that has just been to say that is wrong and not to say that there are fundamental concerns people have about the way government is working and what Democrats could do to it.

Michael Barbour (25:22)

The point you've made several times is if the strong man, if the man promising something that looks like authoritarianism is the agent of change, voters are more interested in the change that he represents than they are in the theoretical perils to democracy. And the Democrats have merely focused on the threat to democracy while missing the element of change.

Ustad Herndon (25:42)

They act as if there is this mutual democracy agreement that we've all come to and that that is a bedrock belief of all Americans. When I don't think that's true, I think there is somewhat of a shared agreement about that. But I think throughout our history, we've seen that take turns. And I just feel as if whether it is democracy, whether it is lecturing Americans that saying inflation's actually not that bad, that there has been a tone coming from Democrats to tell people the problems that they had are not legitimate. And I think that is at the core of their problems in this race. It's hard for me not to go back to the fact that when these issues were most clear and they had a chance to speak to those concerns, they decided not to, and they decided to double down on this administration to double down on the incumbent. And I feel like you cannot tell the country that Donald Trump is an existential threat and run an 81 year old for four more years.

Michael Barbour (26:46)

I have to ask you this and Lisa, because I think listeners are gonna wanna know it and we might as well ask it now, even in these early hours. If Joe Biden had gotten out of the way a lot earlier. Do you think it makes a difference?

Ustad Herndon (26:57)

Yes.

Lisa Lehrer (26:57)

You know, it's so interesting because I keep thinking about Clinton and one of the reasons that I think Clinton lost was that there was no real primary process in that race, as you remember. Right. She sort of blocked.

Michael Barbour (27:08)

It was kind of an annoying.

Lisa Lehrer (27:09)

Yeah, she blocked everybody out. She had the donors. Sanders ran he overperform, showing that there was an interest that she. It's not about who's the, you know, winning the presidency is about who meets the moment and the primary test, who meets the moment. So basically there was no primary. Then there was one with Sanders. He overperformed, which she was pretty much an anointment and she lost. And then you come into this race where as you point out, Biden hung on Harris. Basically the party made this rapid switch, anointed her effectively no primary, no competition, no primary.

Michael Barbour (27:41)

Of course, no one emerged to.

Lisa Lehrer (27:43)

But at that point it wasn't really possible right at that point in the process. So, you know, I think that in both those cases, the party failed to take the temperature of the country through a primary process. So they were left with a candidate that may have not been the best fit for the moment. And can I just say two and we're not twice was obviously not the best fit for the moment since they lost.

Ustad Herndon (28:05)

And I think the only time they really reset was after the candidate switch where it fell on Kamala Harris as an individual flip flopper rather than the party actually changing its median position. Where that would have happened was if they would have had a Democratic primary. Right. The whole party would have recalibrated.

Michael Barbour (28:22)

Okay, final question because you both need to go. We now have a call on one thing tonight, which is the United States Senate. It will be in the hands of Republicans. It will flip control. We don't have a call in the House, but our colleagues inform us that there's a reasonably good chance that that will fall into the hands of Republicans. We don't know. Takes a while in the west to count a lot of those races. There is now a strong possibility of unified Republican control of the entire government under a Trump led White House.

Lisa Lehrer (28:54)

So this is what I was going to say a little bit at one point earlier when you were asking about what people voted for or didn't vote for. Did they vote for this idea of undoing Democratic norms and all this kind of stuff. In some ways, of course it matters. It always matters what people believe they were voting for. But it also kind of may, at this point, may not matter that much. Donald Trump is coming into his second presidency believing that he has a mandate.

Michael Barbour (29:22)

Right.

Lisa Lehrer (29:22)

There are fewer Republicans who oppose him than when he came in in 16. So whether or not voters endorsed all these plans or didn't endorse these plans.

Michael Barbour (29:31)

They'Re likely to get them.

Lisa Lehrer (29:32)

They are going to get them. And he believes, and his team believes that he has a mandate to push them through with this election.

Michael Barbour (29:40)

Last word of stead. I mean, this could represent pretty extraordinary scale change in the next four years.

Ustad Herndon (29:49)

Absolutely. I mean, the fear of Project 2025 as what a unified Republican government could do did not scare enough people to.

Michael Barbour (29:58)

Make a difference in the race.

Ustad Herndon (29:59)

Yes. And didn't make a big difference in the race. So not only does Donald Trump enter the White House with a mandate from public that he would have already taken either way, I think the Republicans now know that Donald Trump has outperformed their candidates and has reached people they cannot reach otherwise. And so I think we have seen so much deference to Donald Trump from Republicans already, but that probably will be even more so for the future. And so if you are asking yourself, does Donald Trump return to the White House under the conditions to reshape the country in his image and do so virtually unchecked, that also is a possibility.

Michael Barbour (30:40)

Yeah.

Ustad Herndon (30:41)

And so that's why I talk about failure, imagination among public is because I don't know. We know where that goes.

Lisa Lehrer (30:49)

Yeah.

Ustad Herndon (30:50)

And so all I'm saying is, I think that we can see this election as an endorsement of Trump's return, but I don't think we should see it as a full endorsement of all of what he has promised. But to Lisa's point, that doesn't really matter.

Michael Barbour (31:06)

Right.

Ustad Herndon (31:10)

Because he won and because Congress might look more Trumpy than last time. I don't think we have a full.

Michael Barbour (31:19)

Grasp of just how big and small.

Ustad Herndon (31:20)

Of just how big that reshaping can be.

Michael Barbour (31:30)

Well, you two, we started with three. We're down to two. I appreciate it. This is a historic night. I'm grateful for your time. Good luck with the rest of the journalism that I know you have to create tonight.

Lisa Lehrer (31:43)

Thanks.

Ustad Herndon (31:44)

Thank you.

Michael Barbour (31:45)

Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Ostead. And in absentia. Thank you, Nate. On Wednesday morning, Vice President Kamala Harris returned to her official residence without addressing supporters who had gathered at her alma mater, Howard University, for her election party. In brief remarks, to the crowd. An official from Harris campaign said that she would return to the campus later today for what's widely expected to be a concession speech. We'll be right back.

Charles Schwab (32:32)

At Schwab, how you invest is your choice, not theirs. That's why when it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices. You can invest and trade on your own. Plus get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs. With award winning service, low costs and transparent advice, you can manage your wealth your way at Schwab. Visit schwab.com to learn more.

Jon Stewart (32:56)

This podcast is supported by Comedy Central's the Daily show, this year's Emmy winner for Outstanding Talk Series Campaigning is finished and voting has ended, yet some of you still haven't decided. Join Jon Stewart every Monday and the news team all week as they rehash the ups, downs, ins and outs of the election fallout. They're helping America decide on what they'll indecide next. Comedy Central's the Daily show continuing Indecision 2024 coverage new weeknights at 11 on Comedy Central and streaming next day on Paramount.

Michael Barbour (33:29)

Here's what else you need to know today. In Tuesday's elections, Republicans won control of the Senate by picking up at least two Democratic seats. The first was in Ohio, where Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown was defeated by his Republican opponent Bernie Moreno. The second was in West Virginia where Democrats lost the seat opened up by the retirement of Democratic Senator Joe Manchin. That seat was won by the state's Republican Governor Jim Justice. As a result of those two wins, the Democrats 51 to 49 Senate majority has now been reversed. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko, Diana Wynn, Jessica Chung and Claire Tennesseeetter. It was edited by Paige Cowett and Rachel Quester, contains original music by Marion Lozano, Pat McCusker and Dan Powell and was engineered by Chris Wood and Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsfurk of Wonderland. That's it for the Daily I'm Michael Balbaro. See you tomorrow.

Jon Stewart (35:04)

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