Mildred, the vice president raised a billion dollars.
She had money on her side as well.
But it wasn't that.
Like, she didn't go pay off the voters or pay a lottery to get them to vote or say they would be loyal to a certain pact.
That's where Elon Musk came in, and he only did the news is talking about how he only did it for the people in the slave states.
Mildred, there is a lot of people.
That makes you wonder.
Yeah.
David in Frankfurt, Illinois, Independent.
Hi, David.
Hi.
Thank you for taking my call.
And David, your reaction to campaign 2024 results.
Not surprised either way.
Both candidates are evil.
Both candidates should not be in.
It should have been Jill Stein and the Green Party.
For those who think that that is a, quote, throwaway vote, it's not a throwaway vote.
If she can get 5% of the vote, then we can have a third party in that occasion, or eventually.
Maybe it will take years from now, but that's what this country needs right now: neither side in office.
And Jill Stein supports freeing Palestine.
That's what needs to happen right now.
David, you and our other viewers can go to cspan.org slash results.
You can dig into each state in this presidential contest.
Jill Stein on the ballot in some of the states, and you'll be able to see how she performed.
If you click on a state, you'll get the results from each of the candidates.
Norman in Wisconsin, Republican.
Hi, Norman.
Hi.
I'm glad that Donald Trump had got elected president because he represents family values according to what God says in the Bible.
And I'm glad that the unborn have a voice.
All right.
We will leave it there at that phone call.
We're going to pick up with another conversation tomorrow morning on the Washington Journal at 7 a.m. Eastern Time.
Again, there are several uncalled races in the presidential contest, the Senate, and in the House for the balance of power in Congress here.
Go to c-span.org slash results for real-time updates on where those races stand to follow along with the balance of power.
Thanks for watching.
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Coming up, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, holding a press conference with reporters after Republicans won a majority in the Senate.
From Capitol Hill, this is about 20 minutes.
Let's make some space, please.
Well, good morning, everyone.
This is certainly a happy day for the GOP.
And let me start by congratulating President Trump.
What he's accomplished has not been done, as all of you know, since Grover, Cleveland, which was a while back.
I also want to commend the Trump campaign for running a sharper operation this time, and I think Chris LaSabita and Susie Wiles deserve a lot of credit.
They ran a spectacular race.
With regard to the Senate, you guys know how long I've been around.
I had really hoped I'd be able to hand over to my successor, the majority.
I've been the majority leader, I've been the minority leader.
The majority is a lot better.
And I think based on the fact that we haven't got all the results, and we certainly already know we're going to be in the majority, we're hopeful that that might actually grow some.
And I want to give particular credit to Steve Daines.
I had that job at the NRSC a few years back.
I've never seen a better performance.
He focused on getting quality candidates, making sure they actually got the nomination.
And as I said, to some criticism, candidate quality is absolutely essential.
I also am proud of the job the Senate Leadership Fund and its related groups did.
Overall, they were able to raise $425 million, and they made decisions to invest.
It will lead this program here for a live discussion on the 2024 presidential election results.
It's hosted by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. If you are watching online and want to ask a question, send one to nathan.more, M-O-O-R-E at AEI.org, or use the hashtag election, sorry, AEI Election Watch on XTwitter.
So we have a fantastic panel today.
You know Chris Steyerwalt, who's with us here at AEI, but has been at NewsNation and been up, I don't know how many hours in the last 24 hours.
I mentioned Carlin Bowman, now Emeritus Senior Fellow, unfortunately, but still somebody who comes back and joins us, really an expert on public opinion for many years, and really the person who made this all happen is making it happen today.
Nathan Gonzalez, who heads up Inside Elections, where he has been for a number of years.
Years ago, it was the Rothenberg Report, and he runs it today, and they are one of the premier places that really can look, especially at House and Senate races.
I will say they do all sorts of things, but one thing that always impresses me, and you tell me we're still doing this, is that you basically interview all of these people who are looking at running for Congress.
So some sort of insights that very few people have.
And Sean Trendy, who is a senior fellow here at AEI, who is also with Real Clear Politics, has written interestingly on election demographics, and is joining us today.
So we are going to start.
I'm going to throw it to Chris, and then we're going to go down the line and have a little conversation, and then we'll turn to you.
All right.
Well, this is a very fine thing, Carlin, that you've made for us here and that AEI does.
And it is a very good tradition.
It is a very good institution.
And it's a very good institution because not only do we get people like Nathan, whose work I will be stealing ruthlessly and relentlessly for the next two weeks as we wait for the last ballots in California to come in by dog sled from Yosemite, but because we have real people with real expertise with real divergent points of view who come together for a frank conversation.
And that's all very good.
And I'll tell you what else is really good.
The smartest thing that I've heard about this election was said on this stage at Election Watch, at a previous Election Watch session.
And it was from Bill McInturf, who's the pollster who does half of the NBC, the widely esteemed, many people are saying the best, poll that he does with Heart Research for NBC News.
And I thought this was a Vibes election, right?
It's a Vibes election.
We're on Vibes.
And Bill McInturf said, it's a fundamentals election.
This is not about Donald Trump and Kamala Harris and their vibes.
It's about the fundamentals, how people feel about the economy, how people feel about the direction of the country, how people feel about the party that's in power.
And I said, ah, it's more, it's vibier than that.
It's different than that.
And he was right.
And their poll was good, and they put it right on the screws.
And I learned that on this stage.
And I cannot wait to find out what we're going to learn.
But the last thing I'll say, and this is not Trump doing the weave at 2.30 in the morning, I'm not going to keep you here until the polls close again next year.
But I will just say this as a note.
This is a difficult day.
If you're a Republican, you're very happy today.
You're very happy today, a lot of you.
If you're a Democrat, you're very sad today.
This is a hard day.
This is a really difficult day.
It's not shocking like it was in 2016, but it's difficult.
And I would say that this is a moment for patriotic grace.
And I hope that as you craft your questions and think about what you want to ask, that you'd remember if you're a Republican, there are people out there who are hurting.
You may not think that their hurt is legitimate, but it is real to them.
And I would say that if you're a Democrat and you want to ask a question, just remember that we've had an election and now we don't have to have another one for two years so we can live in the world as it is.
So with that, we're going to have Carlin.
Are we going to have Carlin start us out or you want to start out down there?
Carl?
I think Carlin should go first.
She made this house.
We ought to let her go first.
Thank you very much and thank you, John and Chris, for those kind comments.
Election Watch has been an absolutely wonderful tradition.
But for me especially, for the last 40 years, I've been looking in these sessions at top-down results.
But for the first time, I decided I wanted to do it bottom-up yesterday.
And I signed up about a month ago to be an election official in Alexandria, Virginia, my precinct.
It was a fabulous experience, and it reminded me that Americans have gone to the polls freely for 60 quadrennial elections.
That's a record unbroken anywhere else in the world.
And it's a very impressive accomplishment.
But it was also a very long day for us.
We had one rehearsal about a week before, two weeks before we started, and then 20 volunteers, most of whom didn't know each other at all, got together at our precinct at 4.45 a.m. to start setting up the precinct.
We did everything from put the signs up to hook up all the electronic machines.
We got them out of a big cage that had locks on it.
It was an amazing experience.
And so we worked throughout the day, and we had about a thousand people come through, and we had to reconcile the votes at the very end of the day by looking at the machines that tabulated the votes and the machines that we all worked on that checked people in.
It was just an extraordinary experience.
But again, what also impressed me, and this was absolutely stunning, was how many people brought things for the volunteers to the polling place.
We got two huge boxes of donuts.
One woman I'd never seen before in my life said, Can I walk to the bakery and get coffee for you and all the people at the welcoming table?
And this happened over and over again throughout the day, and it just reminded me of Tocqueville's little platoons of how we make this democracy work.
So that was a very affirming experience overall, bottom-up versus top-down.
But now I'm going to go back to what I usually do in these sessions and talk about top-down results.
And I'm going to go through some of the things that we heard so much about during this election campaign.
And I can't tell you how many stories there were.
You probably read most of them that the gender gap was going to be larger than it had ever been before.
Not true.
The gender gap was 20 points in this election.
In 1980, it was 17 points.
And to take some other recent elections, in 2012 it was 18, 2016, 24 points.
2020 it was 23 points overall and this year 20 points.
So that story didn't turn out to be true.
Kamala Harris did less well with women than Joe Biden had done by four percentage points in 2020.
And if you look at the married unmarried gap, and remember in the exit poll, unmarried people are not single people.
They're people who are single, widowed, or divorced.
The marriage gap was once again slightly larger than the gender gap at 21 points overall.
But again, men looked very different from women.
Looking at the racial and ethnic makeup of the electorate overall, we saw something really unusual in this election.
For the first time since 1996, the share of racial minorities in the election did not go up.
It was 29% in this election overall.
That's the entire group.
And once you begin to break that down and look, for example, Trump got 8% of the black vote in 2016, that's up to 12% in this election overall.
And if you look, for example, at some of the subgroups overall, Trump did very well with black men, 20% up five points from the past, and among black women, seven points overall.
If you look at Hispanics, of course, the big story here is Trump's strength among Latinos, 45% overall, very important, I think.
Biden won that group by 33 points.
In this election, it was 12 points overall.
So a huge shift in the electorate overall.
Looking, moving right ahead to look at the vote by white and black men and women, again, some really important stories here.
And we've heard quite a bit about them in the news overall.
As you know, Trump won white women 52 to 47 percent, and he also won white suburban women.
We talked a lot about Harris's strength among those groups.
It didn't happen overall.
The big story, I think, looking at black men, 20% for Trump.
That again is a very impressive standing, but just a gender chasm between black men and black women that we've seen over time.
92% of black women voted for Kamala Harris, compared to 78% of black men.
So that's another very big story, I think, of this election.
And I like a question that the Democratic pollster John Bennison asks about this area overall.
And here's the question.
He says, I like, when I cast my vote, I like having more women in office, but the thing that really matters to me is whether someone is a Democrat or a Republican, someone is a member of my party.
Party ties are very important in American politics, and we saw that once again.
Only 5% of people defected from the Democrats.
Only 5% of people defected from the Republicans.
The 18 to 29-year-olds were not a larger share of the electorate.
And they were more the Republican than in any of the past five elections overall, though there were some significant differences.
One group I'm going to be watching sort of carefully going forward is seniors.
They split evenly in this election between Trump and Harris.
That's an interesting movement.
I'd like to know what the rest of the panel thinks about that, because I think that's something fairly new in American politics.
The diploma divide continues to be one of the big divides in our politics, like density, like diversity.
Those are the big divides in politics overall.
But again, there were some really important stories, I think, here.
Overall, as I said, party ID was really important over time.
This was the first time in this election that Republicans outnumbered Democrats in all of the exit polls that have ever been conducted.
Now, we saw a movement toward the Republicans throughout this election campaign, but that is, I think, a very significant fact overall.
Voting by religious groups, I always look at white Catholics.
They have a pretty good track record of voting for the winner.
And in this election, they voted 60% for Donald Trump, once again.
Vote by other groups, first-time voters were 8% of all voters over time.
Biden won them by 32 points in 2020, and Trump won them by 9 points in this election.
Now, a lot of those first-time voters are young, so that's, I think, a very big story.
Let me just touch on a couple of issue things in the exit polls.
In 2020, 51% of all voters said abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
That was 66% in this election overall.
We're still waiting for a couple of results on the abortion referenda.
It went down in Florida, as did the marijuana referendum.
It's very hard to get to that 60% threshold, I think, overall.
In Nebraska, there were two on the ballot in this election campaign, and whichever one ultimately gets the most votes is going to be the law of the land in Nebraska, and it appears to be the more conservative.
In the other states, I think abortion rights or expanding abortion availability was pretty much enshrined.
There was one really interesting question in the exit polls, and they asked about your family's financial situation compared to four years ago.
24% said it was better, and 45% said it was worse.
That 45% is a worse response than in the Great Recession of 2008.
So, I think a very, very significant finding over time.
Harris was able to close the gap on handling the economy, but in the final analysis, people thought Trump would do a better job handling the economy.
Union households were 19% of all voters, 54% Harris, 44% Trump.
Again, I think that's important.
And people who made up their minds in the last days of the last three days of this campaign voted for Trump as they did in 2016.
That's sort of significant, I think, and we probably didn't capture a lot of those in the polls.
The pollsters asked about characteristics that were important to you and the candidates you voted for.
Change voters were 27% of all voters.
They voted 73% for Trump, 25% for Harris.
And the other interesting one was has the ability to lead.
30% said that was the most important characteristic to them.
They voted 65% for Trump to 34% for Harris.
So that's a quick sketch of a few groups, and I'm happy to talk about more of them later.
Top, down, bottom, up.
Very good.
Very good.
Go ahead, John.
Oh, okay.
So before we kind of go into the specific questions and really dig down, I do want to start this off on kind of an optimistic note.
I was, it's a long story, but I got locked out of my Twitter account in like February of this year.
And I got it back in late September.
And I was like, David Burnham talking heads like, oh my God, what have I done?
Within like 20 minutes of it.
Because it's just, there's so much negativity in the country.
And I was on last night.
So this is my first point.
I was on last night, and the dunking on Kamala Harris was just gross.
My first point is, whatever you think of her and her policies, she conducted herself admirably in what was an almost impossible task.
She is the equivalent of being in the Super Bowl and you're down 10 points going into the fourth quarter and the quarterback suddenly comes out of the game with a game ending injury.
And it's your job not only to carry the team forward, but to make up that deficit that the previous quarterback had opened you up for.
I think there's choices she could have and should have made differently.
There's things she said I didn't like.
But she was, I think, the piling on about her candidacy.
Normally, candidates make their rookie mistakes and define themselves through the primary process.
No one remembers that Barack Obama's first debate was an embarrassment in the Democratic primaries in 2008 because he did it in March of 2007 when no one was paying any attention.
He came off the stage and was like, whoa, I got to up my game.
And so he got a chance to do that.
He got a chance to develop his themes during the Democratic primary.
Harris had none of that.
She was just, boom, Democratic nominee, go out, reach 150 million people and convince them you're the better candidate.
So I'm going to start out before we get into some very valid critiques of tipping my hat to her.
The second thing, I'll say Carlin stole a little bit of my thunder on it, but that's fine.
She does a much better job of it than I would have.
For all the talks about polarization and division, this is the least divided election we've been through in a very long time.
Donald Trump is going to win with a coalition that is less heavily dependent on white vote than probably any Republican candidate in history.
The race gap is the smallest it's been since the 1950s.
The age gap is the smallest it's been since the 2000s.
The income gap is the smallest it's been probably ever.
The union voting gap, like all these gaps that have defined our politics have shrunk.
That doesn't mean there's not nastiness and division out there, but the real like demographic fault lines that people are always worrying about in American politics did not show up in this election.
The third point I want to make is for the Democrats that are either in the audience or watching.
It's a positive note for you and a cautionary tale for the Republicans.
The founders get all sorts of criticisms, some of which I agree with, some of which I don't.
Some people don't like the Senate, some people don't like the Electoral College, blah, blah, blah.
One thing, we can debate those merits in some other forum.
One thing they did, in my mind, indisputably right, is that, well, actually, they would have had him sworn in in March, but now he's sworn in on, you know, in January 21st, or 20th, Donald Trump will be sworn in as president.
22 months from then, there will be another election.
Okay?
If the Republicans and Donald Trump don't do a good job, the American people get their chance to render their verdict 22 months afterwards, throw the bums out yet again.
If they do a great job, American voters are actually pretty good about not punishing them as heavily.
There's lengthy political science research on how voters respond to different stimuli.
So this isn't the end of the road.
Republicans, I think, learned some tough lessons in 2018.
Maybe they didn't learn them, but same thing with Democrats in 2010.
I mean, in 2008, the big message was like Barack Obama had built this like unbreakable coalition that was going to dominate American politics for the next 30 years.
And I'm really not exaggerating.
If anything, I'm understating the case that was being made at the time.
No.
22 months later, the American voters decided they did not like they were seeing and threw out 63 Democratic members of Congress, which was a record going back to 1938.
So for the Democrats, you'll have your chance to make your case in another 22 months.
For Republicans, you need to do your job building a record that you can sell to the American people.
All right.
Break it down for us, Mr. Gonzalez.
And it's great because I like to break down elections with 35 minutes of sleep.
All of those minutes took place on an airplane next to the largest person on our airplane.
So here we go.
It's always live in front of lights and cameras.
What's remarkable about this election so far is that there are some, it feels like 2016 in some ways, all the way down to, I remember in 2016, Virginia wasn't called at poll closing time, and that ended up kind of being a sign of things to come, and we felt that last night.
But there are big differences in that no one should have been surprised that Trump won, that Trump could have won this election because everyone was saying it was a close race.
Where it became a surprise was in maybe some of the non-battleground states where the margins were just a lot closer, New Jersey, Illinois, Maryland, closer than what anybody expected.
But then when you go to the Senate and the House and you start breaking it down, there are some key races that have not been called yet, but our projections and projections of our friends and competitors were actually pretty good.
So on one level, you have yet more sort of uncertainty with Trump at the top of the ticket and how he performed, but the Senate and the House so far have been acting pretty normal.
So coming in, a Republican Senate was the most likely outcome or the most known outcome, and that ended up being the case.
Still we're waiting on Nevada and Arizona, but Republicans will be at least plus three, could be plus four, plus five, depending on the outcome there, and some very close calls in Wisconsin and Michigan.
I think one of the things that we've learned is that personal brands, the idea of political brands only takes you so far.
There's only so far you can overperform.
And we heard for 24 months about John Tester.
He always wins in Montana.
Sherrod Brown, he always wins in Ohio.
And it turns out there's a limit to which a hole that they can dig out of that was being dug at the top of the ticket by Harris.
But she was able to keep it close enough in Wisconsin and Michigan in order to make the difference.
So Republicans, we're waiting to see whether it's going to be plus three or plus four, sorry, plus four or plus five.
And that margin matters.
If we look ahead to 2026, since we have 2024 already figured out, 2026, there are actually very few takeover opportunities for Democrats.
If there is a backlash midterm election that Sean kind of mentioned is a possibility of Republicans overreach, we're really looking at Maine, Susan Collins.
I don't think she's going to run for re-election, but that would be an opportunity.
North Carolina, Tillis is up for re-election.
We'll see if he ends up running or not.
And then the list starts to get significantly different.
I mean, Texas, it's really Alaska.
You're kind of reaching, really reaching if you're a Democrat, even in best case scenarios.
So keeping it close is important for Democrats, even though they lost the majority.
All right, let's go to the House.
This, to me, coming into was as close as the presidential race, and it's actually going to end up being closer, I think, than the presidential race.
We were watching 65 House races, and I've been trying to keep track of what's been called.
I believe there's 28 of 65 still have not been called officially by a major media entity.
It looks like, in my opinion, I would rather be Republicans in terms of holding the House by a seat or two, but there is still a path for Democrats to get the House.
It would not be by a large margin.
Coming into the election, our projection was anything from a Republican gain of a seat to a Democratic gain of nine seats.
That was our range.
Democrats needed four to get to the majority.
And it feels like, based on how everything else has been going at the top of the ticket, they're going to end up coming up short, maybe by a seat or two.
But we're waiting.
We just got to wait and see.
In California, we may, hopefully, we'll know by Christmas how these California races, since they count.
I think they count one ballot a day.
They're just like, one.
Okay, let's call it a day.
But one bigger picture thing, and then I'll hand it back over.
Every election, I'm constantly, we have to watch what lessons the parties learn from the election.
Like we can all tell you today what we think happened in the election, and hopefully we are correct and insightful.
But in a way, that doesn't matter as much as what the two parties think happened in the election, because that is going to guide their future actions.
For example, on what, 2.45 in the morning this morning, I think it's already starting to run together, when Trump took the stage in front of 7,000 flags.
I was very impressed with the number of flags behind him.
He talked about a mandate.
America has given us, I think, a strong, it's always a strong mandate.
And I'm not convinced that even though Trump's victory was broad and impressive in the coalition, that that meant voters really understand or know what mass deportation looks like or wanting fluoride out of their water or putting RFK Jr. in charge of vaccines or all these things.
I'm not sure that that's really, I think it was more about a rejection of uncomfortability with the economy, the direction of the country.
But if Republicans push too far, we have that correction, I think, that Sean talked about in the midterm elections.
And so looking ahead to 2026, if Republicans can, sorry, if Democrats can keep the House close, getting the House back in 2026 looks like it would certainly be within reach, depending on how Republicans act.
And the last thing I'll say about lessons learned, we have to listen to how Democrats process this election.
Right now it feels like they've kind of gone dark.
They just don't know how to, they feel like, you know, they were, with Biden at the top of the ticket, things were in a death spiral politically.
Harris breathed new life into it and they did, I think, everything in their power, in their mind, everything in their power to make this happen.
I was talking to our next door, our neighbor across the street.
He was talking about being in Philadelphia this weekend, this past weekend, and knocking on 600 doors.
And they did everything they could, and it wasn't even close.
And so they're trying to figure out what happened.
But how Democrats process, do they think this was a message problem, a messenger problem?
All of the above, that's going to guide what they're going to do as a party moving forward.
Great, thank you.
And I think Nathan laid out some of the themes that I'm going to talk about.
First, I guess I want to talk about voter turnout.
We anticipated, and I think we were right about this, although we don't know the exact number, that this would be our second highest voter turnout in, at least in modern history.
We've done pretty well, actually, since 2004.
We've been getting 60-ish% of the eligible voters voting, up and down a little bit.
And then 2020 was nearly two-thirds of voters.
We're probably going to land in like the 64-65% range.
Again, some of that is determined by the fact that we don't know how long it's going to take California to count these votes and tell us how many votes there actually are out there.
But we are expecting a pretty good number, very good turnout.
And I do think some of it is, of course, you're right that there are not fissures of one sort, but I think we still are a country of extreme intensity in these elections.
Intensity of feeling is what drives these things, not all of the reforms that we do or even the parties.
Yes, the parties do matter in swing states and they drive things, but we saw a turnout up overall in a way that makes sense from a perspective that people care about these elections and they really don't like the other side.
One thing, again, and I echo a little bit what Nathan said is it is interesting, in some ways this resembled the 2022 midterm.
That was seen as a disappointing midterm for Republicans, and it was in many ways.
But overall, Republicans won the House vote.
They did pretty well.
They probably didn't win it by as much as they should have won it.
But all of a sudden, in these key states, they lost all the important races.
And some of that was probably a better demographic for Democrats in the midterm elections.
They're more college-educated voters.
But also that they had resources and they put them to these things.
And so a combination of resources and educated voters meant that they could win in all these important places while the trends were still kind of against them.
The other thing I'll add that seems similar to the 22 election is we had this uneven sort of turnout or uneven results in this election.
The results in Florida, in Texas, in New Jersey, in New York, in actually a lot of the sort of most progressive New England states of Massachusetts or Maryland or Rhode Island were massive swings, swings sometimes of 10 percentage points from the last election.
And then what we saw in these swing states was, yes, a swing, an important swing for Trump, but relatively narrow swings.
Again, very contested places.
Some of them, extremely surprising.
I would say Wisconsin arguably is one of the most surprising that Wisconsin, the most Republican of the three blue wall states, the last couple elections, was actually the least Republican, the closest state, the closest of all the seven states it looks like that Donald Trump has barely won.
And that has spilled over to the Senate seats where you can look at Republicans thinking, well, nationally, we did very well.
We might have swung the national popular vote by, we don't know whether Trump won the national popular vote we think he did, but probably it's a swing from four and a half points in the Democratic direction to a point or perhaps more in the Republican direction.
And yet these Senate seats moved only a little bit and Republicans are going to lose at least a couple by just less than a percentage point, maybe more than that, where in many ways this looked like a big wave election in lots of parts of the country.
So one interesting perhaps exception is Nevada, which actually did move a fair amount, went from being the, In 2016, the most Democratic of all these states, to the second most Democratic in 2020, to perhaps, we're still waiting, we don't have all the ballots, and perhaps the best state for Republicans.
So I think that's one thing to watch.
But we still don't know if the Senate race will go with him, with Trump, but we might see the Republicans get that.
House districts, I think I feel the same way, that we, you know, again, have very few seats.
I usually don't like to attribute things to gerrymandering or to having not so many competitive seats, but I think the number of seats out there was very small.
Despite these waves in places, waves were washing over Florida and there were no seats to be had, right?
And waves were washing over Texas.
And in theory, they could have went on the border and they didn't.
But still, generally speaking, there really weren't seats to be had when these waves were washing over in strong directions.
So again, a small change in the House, perhaps almost no change in the House, even though we see these big, big, big, big trends.
Two last things.
One, I think it was a well-run election.
I follow a lot of how we run elections.
I spent a lot of election day talking to secretaries of state and other local election officials.
In many ways, some states that are really not counting the votes very quickly.
And it's now become a theme that we really won't know the House of Representatives, who controls the House of Representatives until a week or two.
There were some good messages put out by people, good government people to say, oh, it's okay to wait.
But I do think there also are some systems out there, California and Arizona in particular, which just the combination of the set of laws and procedures means that there's just a bunch of ballots that don't get counted quickly and sit and sit and sit and sit.
And it wouldn't be too hard to fix some of these things, even maintaining a lot of voting by mail.
But we are seeing this delay and delay.
And that's, if we were to look to something that didn't go as well in terms of running elections, I think we're still in parts of the country not doing a very good job of that.
I am not stealing this from Nathan.
I will steal lots of Nathan's work, as I say, in the coming couple of weeks.
But he touched on something crucially important, which is it's not what happened, it's what they think happened, right?
What do they think happened?
So I'm going to tell you a story, which is Donald Trump created chaos that eventually fertilized the garden in which the flower of his second term could grow.
In January of 2021, Donald Trump went down to Georgia and acted crazy.
He acted just crazy.
He went down to Georgia and he made sure that the Republicans would lose both those Senate seats down in Georgia.
He went, now you don't usually want to do this.
He went down and told people not to vote, that they could not trust the elections process in Georgia.
Georgia is a pretty Republican state.
And Georgia is represented by two Democrats in the Senate, one of them very progressive.
How is that possible?
And the answer is because Trump wouldn't accept the results of the election and went bananas.
Okay.
That gives the Democrats the Senate.
Joe Biden, who ran as kind of a caretaker president, arrives for the beginning of his term in the aftermath of January 6th, and the historians begin to whisper.
They say, are you more like FDR or are you more like LBJ?
No, Lincoln.
I don't know.
What's it going to be?
What are you going to do?
And now with Democrats in control of the Senate, he goes big.
He says, we got to go big, baby.
We got to go big.
We have a mandate from the people.
We're going to make this happen.
And instead of playing small ball and doing things like the very popular bipartisan infrastructure package, they focused on a bunch of other stuff and they got very aggressive and they pushed hard.
And they ripped out all the immigration restrictions that they could and they went for sweeping change.
So, to Sean's point, what's supposed to happen in two years after you do that?
Well, you take a beating, right?
That's what happened.
That's what the American story is.
You come in, you overreach, you get spanked in the midterms, you readjust, and then you win reelection.
That's the story.
It happened to Ronald Reagan.
It happened to Bill Clinton.
It happens, it happens, it happens.
The only president who did not have that experience was George W. Bush, and that was in large part because of 9-11.
So then Donald Trump says, hold my beer.
He comes in, and as Republicans are poised to clean up in 2022, he says, I want you to meet Herschel Walker.
I want you all to meet and know Herschel Walker.
And what about Dr. Oz?
He has some beetroot supplements that he thinks will make things a lot better in Pennsylvania.
Oh, boy.
Right?
And they had a bunch of really odd, the term of art here in Washington, of course, we say candidate quality.
Well, candidate quality was a big issue for Republicans in 2022.
And instead of having the year that they thought they were going to have and supposed to have, what'd they get?
Meh.
They got a fizzle.
So now rerun the tape.
We already talked about what would happen if Joe Biden had not had a thin Senate majority for the first two years.
Now tell yourself the story about the Republicans come in and whack them hard in midterms.
Does Joe Biden even run for reelection?
Does the drumbeat in the Democratic Party become so intense after a shellacking, this guy's too old, it's not working, we've got to have a primary, we've got to do all of this stuff?
But they kind of got away with it.
And what Democrats concluded was Trump is enough.
Donald Trump is sufficient to motivate our base to dissuade and frighten persuadable suburbanites.
He can get it done.
They got the results in 2022 that confirmed in their minds that Donald Trump was sufficient for them.
What we saw this week, what we're seeing this week, is an election that is not about Donald Trump.
We saw this week an election that was about the Democratic Party.
We saw an election that was about immigration, migrant crisis stuff, and we saw an election that was about the high cost of everything.
When we look at the Rio Grande Valley and we go down there and we see these, what are we talking about, 15, 20 point swings, these giant swings in these districts that hadn't been won by a Republican since the 19th century, what's that about?
Some of it's about Kamala Harris being a woman?
Sure.
There's some of that in there.
There's a bunch of everything in there.
But basically, this was this, we thought that this was, like I said at the beginning, we thought it was a VIBES election.
And it was a referendum on the party in power.
And the party in power took a beating.
So I want to ask, starting with Nathan, that's what I think happened.
Republicans, I don't know what Republicans think happened, whether Elon Musk spaceship gave them a victory or whether Joe Rogan delivered victory for them.
I don't know.
What do you think?
I want to hear from everybody, but what do you think Democrats think happened?
I've been giving Democrats a break a little bit.
I mean, I've tried to reach out to a few, but realizing that I don't know that they have answers.
I mean, and I, in reaching out, it's not in an accusatory way, you know, because sometimes if they're sharing polling numbers that weren't necessarily accurate, although we could talk about that as a separate question, it certainly wasn't intentional.
I don't know that they have answers.
And in the immediate aftermath, the Harris campaign, you might have seen, didn't really even have any guidance for surrogates or anything because I don't think they really know because in their mind or in their power, they did everything in their power.
I mean, they were putting people on buses in New York to go to Philadelphia.
I mean, they had the operation running and it was not sufficient.
And so if they do that self-reflection at some point, which they should after this, I think they will see that it's not anyone, it's the message, it's the messenger, it's the branding.
They're going to have to move beyond the woke, soft on crime, all of those issues.
But it's going to be hard as a party to shed that label when you don't have the levers of government in order to enact some policies, right?
Being in the minority or being out of the White House, they won't have an opportunity to show, okay, this is really what we're for.
You might have heard this, this is what we're for, because they're not going to have power in the immediate aftermath of the election to do that.
Carlin, I talked to an elected Democratic woman today, and she said that the Democratic Party will never nominate another woman for president again.
That the conventional wisdom, well, they'll say, well, that didn't work.
They did it twice and they lost twice, and now that they're going to be put off it.
How do we think about so the gender gap is really interesting here?
How do we think about in terms of how did gender play into both the attributes of Kamala Harris, but also the way the electorate broke?
Well, one of the interesting things that Americans have been saying in polls about Supreme Court justices, about presidential candidates, it's just not that important to them anymore to have a woman in a top job.
It's nice, but not something that they feel is absolutely necessary.
So the public has moved a lot.
The public has moved significantly, I think, on those kinds of questions over time.
Sure, there's still some misogynistic things in this electorate overall, but I think they could easily nominate a woman.
And I think there are certainly a significant number of Democratic women who could become president.
Or Republican women.
Or Republican women.
Absolutely.
Why wasn't the gender gap bigger?
They came home.
The Republican-leaning women came home, the same kind of gals, women, who had not been there for Republicans in the way they should have in 22 came home to the Republican Party.
That's right.
Okay, Sean.
What do you think Democrats think happened?
Well, so it's kind of like the stages of grief, and right now there's kind of like anger and denial.
And look, both parties go through it after a tough election loss.
But that's what I'm seeing is a lot of falling back on the narratives that have really defined the Democratic Party really since Obama, you know, that it's about race, it's about gender.
And it's tough because I don't deny that there's racism and sexism in America, a lot of it, but that's more or less a constant, right?
It's not like it all of a sudden pops up like, hey, this is the election where it matters.
You know, I think you need a better story to tell.
And it just denies the obvious thing in the face.
Joe Biden had a 40% job approval.
Presidents don't win when they have 40% job approvals.
She was the vice president in an administration with a 40% job approval when asked what she would do differently said nothing.
Easy.
Like that, that is just such an easy story to tell.
But because the Democratic, at least the activist base of the Democratic Party, has become so dependent on these identity-based stories, I think it's very difficult.
These identity-based stories that have kernels of truth to them, but don't have the overall explanatory force that they put behind it.
It's almost like, I mean, it is almost like religious fundamentalism, that you can have like a soft belief in God or a strong belief in God, but you don't have to make it a totalizing ideology.
It's become a totalizing ideology on that side, and it just makes you rigid and unable to see alternative viewpoints.
Speaking of totalizing ideologies, Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
The number of Republicans, and John, I hope you will address this first.
The number of Republicans who secretly were hoping Donald Trump would lose this election were many.
They were many.
And some of them are in the United States Senate.
There were many who said when you talked to them, and I'm sure Nathan had the same conversations that I did when you talked to them and say, well, you know, Trump's probably going to lose, but if we get the Senate, then that'll be okay.
Whose party is it?
It's got to be Donald Trump's party.
And what do they think happened?
What's the story that Republicans are going to tell?
Well, it's interesting because we have Trump coming in as a now one-term president, right?
He can't run again.
So we know there's going to be a race after this, and we know there's going to be a race on the Democratic side.
And I think, you know, sort of to answer both of your questions, one way our politics is different than the rest of the world is we don't just now say, oh, we're going to put in a minority leader and put our message up.
We sit for a few years, and then we have these primaries, and then the people decide, or at least people at our party.
So there's a lot of, sometimes things don't turn out the way we expect them to, like in 2012 when we were doing the autopsy, and then we end up with Donald Trump as the nominee.
So, you know, I think there'll be a little of that.
I think on the Democratic side, just quickly, I think that's a more significant thing.
A little unfair to Kamala Harris, because I agree with you, you know, she was put in a difficult position, but her concession speech was very generous in all sorts of ways.
But she also said, you know, the movement continues.
I'm going, I mean, I think it's going to be very hard for Kamala Harris herself to be that person.
I don't think she's going to be seen as the leader of the party until those primaries, frankly, don't think she'll do super well.
But on the Democratic side, I do think we've got all these people that people were talking about that seem attractive, Gretchen Wittner and Josh Shapiro, and they'll probably be around.
But there is a wing, or at least there's a place, maybe not for a winner, but there is definitely a place for a progressive candidate.
And it's unclear who that is.
I assume we have Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who are, I don't know about our politics, but probably too old to play that role in 2028.
So I think that's what's happening.
On the Republican side, look, I think it is Trump's party.
I think the people who are thinking it's going to snap back to a kind of pre-Trump Republican Party are wrong about that.
But it is a broad party, right?
It's not like a European party where European right-wing populists are in a small party.
It's kind of a coalition of establishment and populist people with a populist bigger wing.
So, you know, we're going to have this race in 2028.
I think the winner will be somebody who sounds something like Trump.
And of course, Trump will be around, we assume, and maybe will put his hand on somebody.
So that's the other thing that we have to consider, right?
That he may not just step off the stage and not be part of that.
So I think it will be a Trump-like party.
And maybe the person can't fill that role very well, but I don't think it's going to be a snapping back to a kind of pre-Trump politics.
The sound you hear is JD Vance and Nikki Haley in a Sergio Leone Western backdrop as they prepare for a four-year-long duel.
Yeah, I think there are a chunk of Republicans who believe that Trump has ushered in a semi-permanent reforming of the two parties, that the coalitions have fundamentally changed.
And I'm skeptical.
I'm just skeptical that this coalition that Trump just won with is transferable to another candidate.
I think that when we've seen other candidates try to be Trump, it doesn't work.
People look meaner or they just look silly.
It just looks like a cheap copy of the original.
And so, yeah, I mean, Republicans won.
Have your day, right?
I mean, but I think that there's still big questions about the durability of this coalition when Trump is not a police officer.
But to Carlin's point on the other side, Democrats did not seem to, and we will learn a lot more.
So the windfall from Trump are these suburbanites.
I call them the Youngin' Biden voters, right?
The windfall for Democrats are these affluent, educated suburbanites who should be available to the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party hasn't been able to make them part of their coalition in the way that Republicans have very,
I did not expect to see a mixed martial arts imprimatur on the stage at a Republican celebration, but the Republicans have enthusiastically embraced the working class voters who were previously at the core of the Democratic coalition.
Can Democrats absorb these suburbanites?
They have not closed the deal because I think when Biden came into office and there was Democratic overreach like you talked about, I think that that, for voters, I'm thinking specifically about Orange County, California, that voted Republican for a generation or two, pushed Trump away.
They were not in favor of Trump, but then when Democrats got into office, it reminded them of why they didn't vote for Democrats for so many years.
And so that is the tension that Democrats are facing right now.
And John, I swear we're going to go to questions.
I swear we're going to go to questions, but I'm greedy.
I'm very greedy.
And it's nate.moore at AEI.org, is that correct?
Correct.
N-A-T-E, NateTheGreatmore at AEI.org.
Or you see the hashtag up on the wall.
It's hashtag electionwatch AEI.
If you have a magnificent question, please give us, people are saying that it's the best hashtag, so you should do that.
Do that straight away.
And I gave it backwards, so I thank you for correcting me here.
You can put it in any way you want.
Nate just makes up the questions.
And then we'll, of course, get to your questions here.
We'll get in a moment, but after I do my one more greedy thing, which is, Carlin.
Yes.
The Republicans are super excited because they're not losing minority voters at the numbers that they were.
How much of 2016 and 2020 were aberrant in that way?
Which is to say, George W. Bush got 40% of the Hispanic vote.
It wasn't weird for Republicans in the not-so-distant past to get a decent chunk of the black vote in the United States.
How much of this is returning to normal, and how much of this is building a new coalition?
I think a lot of it is actually building a new coalition.
And I think the one thing, well, Patrick Raffini was a guest at Election Watch, and he's talked a lot about those two constituencies and what appeals to both groups, particularly economic opportunity, a lot of things that Republicans have talked about for a long time, but particularly among Hispanics.
I think we've overlooked the fact that a lot of Hispanics are second and third generation Americans at this point, and they do not look like first generation immigrants overall.
And in that sense, that may be something more permanent.
The geographic difference is that Arizona is a different state from Florida, that's a different state from North America.
Right, exactly.
A lot of diversity in that community.
Okay, I'll stop being greedy now.
One, I share Nathan's skepticism that maybe Trump just is able to pull this together.
But two things.
One, I think the Republican Party is going to think that's the way to go, whether it is the way to go or not.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But some evidence that perhaps there might be a path.
I mean, I look at Florida and New York and both the last couple of elections.
Trump did really engineer a big Florida win in 2022.
That was DeSantis and others pushing that.
New York, Lise Eldon, whoever you want to give the credit to, it wasn't really a Trump phenomenon.
Then they've done well again.
So I don't know if that's lasting, but it is a kind of suburban voter that maybe we're not thinking of.
It's new ethnics.
It's also old ethnics, right?
It's Italians and others from past generation.
So there are people in the suburbs who may be part of this coalition that can be put together by other people.
I'm not sure they put it together as well as Trump, but there are some signs that parameters.
Sean is going to call on the first person as soon as Sean, who's asked for a moderator's discretion.
Real quickly.
So the thing about the W win with Hispanics versus this one actually, I think, gets to where I think Democrats are having a hard time processing this.
W won the Hispanic vote by identity politics.
Yeah.
Or at least that was the story, right?
He treated Hispanics as Hispanics and pushed immigration reform.
Bad Spanish.
Exactly, spoken kind of Spanish.
And that was the argument for Jeff, right?
Like he can modulate his accent.
You know, there was the argument that to get black voters, you have to push on civil rights, and to get women, you need to push abortion rights.
And Donald Trump just like, I mean, that was the RNC famous autopsy in 2012, which someone whose name rhymes with Wendy blew up.
But Donald Trump is the one who really blew it up.
He said, no, like, I'm going to make progress with these voters, but it's not going to be by treating blacks as blacks and Hispanics as Hispanics and women as women.
I'm going to make an argument on how I think the culture should look, and I'm going to make an argument by abandoning some of the economic libertarian positions on Social Security and Medicare, which drives a wedge between the Republican Party and make a more class-based argument.
And that worked too.
And that's incredibly important.
That's what has really, I think, to the extent that the Trump, I do think we can start to call this the age of Trump versus the age of Obama, which I actually kind of put W into a little bit, is completely changing the emphasis on how demographic groups in the electorate are dealt with.
Okay, thank you, Wendy.
So we're going to go to the let's go here, right?
Side there, and please identify yourself and, of course, ask a question.
Yes, Leon Pease.
And I wanted to ask, at the last event, just before the election, I suggested that there might be a silent majority in opposition to the more extreme positions of the Democrats.
To what extent do you think this result is from voters voting against the policies and the cultural changes that they refuse to accept?
Now, as I recall last time, your question was about abortion specifically, right?
Well, it was those initiatives that are on the.
Right, right, right, right.
And sometimes it was weed, and sometimes it was whatever else.
Yeah, the whole cultural.
So, ballot initiatives, what can we tell about, and Nathan, if you'd guide us, what can we tell about where the electorate is based on states where Donald Trump won handily, but pro-choice referenda passed?
Sort through the social and cultural issues versus the parties.
And Carlin might be able, any of you might be able to help.
Again, I'm on 35 minutes' sleep.
It appears that there was a slowing of the access to abortion measures, although the 60% threshold in Florida made that a little bit more complex, or contributed to that slowing.
In general, I do think, I mean, talk about a majority in this election.
Trump is going to, it looks like he's going to have a majority finally.
He was winning, he was consistently at 46.1% in 2016, which was enough to win the Electoral College, and 46.8 in 2020, which was not enough in 2020, which was not enough.
And now he more broadly, I think, is going to have a majority.
And that I think is a reflection, though, of the Democratic Party not being in line with the majority of voters.
And so I don't have the individual, some of the other individual ballot measures and states in front of me, but I don't know if anyone else does.
All right.
I mean, I only had two hours of sleep, but that was pretty good for 35.
Nate, does the internet want to know anything?
We have a viewer online wondering about the Jewish and Arab American vote.
Ooh, juicy.
You got something?
Yeah, Sean.
So everyone remembers 2000 where we had nuclear war in Palm Beach County and the crying Jewish women who had accidentally voted for Buchanan and all the hanging Chads.
Because that's where Al Gore focused his ballot.
He focused on the most Democratic counties in the state, and Palm Beach and Broward County were like 65% for Gore.
Donald Trump almost carried it.
He only lost Palm Beach County by, I think, five points.
And that was my like, my head exploded.
Like, this is not going to go well for Democrats statistic.
And it's one of the most heavily Jewish areas of the country.
But he also won Dearborn.
So Kamala Harris got like 15% of the vote, didn't she?
And Jill Stein got 35, and Trump got 40%.
So there's some pressures on the Trump coalition as well.
There's cross-pressures.
But it kind of gets to the point you were making that these elections are really about the party in power.
Donald Trump doesn't necessarily have a way to make his Jewish supporters and his new Arab supporters happy.
Right.
But neither did Joe Biden, and that's why the Harris candidacy was rejected.
Yeah, I don't think Dearborn, if they didn't like the perceived pro-Israel bias of the Biden administration, they're really not going to like what they're getting in the Trump administration.
They are really not going to like it, but it may be enough to punish the incumbent.
Carlin, you picked up the piece of paper meaningfully, and now I want to know.
Yes, I did.
Among Jews, Trump got 21% of the vote, Harris, 79.
That looks pretty similar to the AP vote cast 6830 in 2020.
But that could be geographically concentrated, right?
The story could be different for Jewish Americans who live in the New Jersey numbers, the bananas, the huge swing in New Jersey, large Jewish population in New Jersey, large Jewish population in suburban Philadelphia, and of course New York.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay, so let's go here.
Right here.
Atman Vakila, EI.
I know we talked a lot about ticket splitting last time as well, especially in statewide races.
It's almost always the presidential candidate and the statewide candidate from the same party.
What happened in Wisconsin and Michigan, and why have we seen ticket splitting at higher levels down ballot as well?
I mean, I think here, one obvious point is this rule against ticket splitting can't be so strict.
Think if these were closed races these, these were candidates that actually didn't.
We thought they would be further apart from the presidential candidates, or at least the polling showed it would be, and they ended up closing up and lots of, lots of Senate candidates were running very similarly to Trump, but they fell slightly on the one side of one line or the other.
Um, I mean, Ron Johnson did not, was not one of these cases, but he, he in the last election won very narrowly, might have easily been, you know, if it was a presidential year on the other side.
So I I think it's more important to think about these other uh candidates who are far away from their, their presidential candidates.
Really we, you know we're probably only going to have one after this election.
Susan Collins is going to be by far the candidate who looks different from her state on a presidential level.
Everybody else, you know they're going to be kind of around that, and so it's not.
It's not like we broke some rule, because we were just just just across the line and, unless something's been called uh since i've been up here uh, which I hope they're not doing without me but the uh, so we're going to end up with ticket splits in Wisconsin and Michigan, Wisconsin and Michigan, potentially Pennsylvania Arizona Arizona uh, and maybe we don't know about Nevada and we don't know about Nevada.
So I think, I think John is a hundred percent right.
Susan Collins was remarkable because the delta was so big.
Right, Donald Trump won Maine by so much and she we thought well, if she'd be lucky, if she can hang on by her toenails, and she did much better than that and she beat expectations widely.
What we saw in these states was the senate candidates trued up to the partisanship of the general electorate and and, in the end, reflected the partisanship of the general electorate.
Uh, that that's why John Tester lost.
That's why uh, Shared Brown lost.
Uh we, I think we're still waiting to call Pennsylvania, but it got real close in uh, Wisconsin and it got a lot closer in Nevada and it's because they they the, they reverted to their partisanship.
Democrats gonna be kicking themselves about Texas, where there were Trump calling all red voters, but Parrot just got clobbered, you know, in Texas took multiple steps back compared to where Biden was in 2020, and so it wasn't enough to win.
What's another hundred million dollars spent on a Texas senate race that you'll never get to I?
I want one interesting thing, Andy Kim, who's the gonna be the new senator from New Jersey, and it was an open seat.
He won it by about eight.
Now, of course, Trump did extremely well and lost by about five but um, you know that was.
That was probably a little surprising, but again, it showed that he was following the party rather than his own brand away.
Okay well, we'll go right here on the front.
So right right behind you and on the Pakistani spectator.
My question is how much um uh media play a role in uh vice president defeat, given that Biden was not handing her over because she was more unpopular than him, And but after Biden backed off, media just made her some kind of profit that she is very, very competent or this, this.
And my second question about fundamental value.
I went to Montana, Bozeman, and Philadelphia knocking the door for Trump.
And most people don't like the idea of changing the sex of children and then having taxpayers to pay for it.
And similarly, they don't want Pentagon to waste their money on changing people's sex.
So, I mean, mostly we thought that this abortion issue is going to sport or favor Democrat, but actually, I don't know if it went against them.
Thank you.
Okay, so the part of the question is about the way transgender issues interacted with this electorate.
And I got to tell you, did anybody here watch much college or pro football in the past few weeks?
If you did, you saw in heavy rotation one of the most effective ads that, and mean, mean and effective ads that I have seen, which was about transgenderism and girls' sports.
And what's the tagline?
She's for.
Yeah, he's for you, she's for they, them.
Yeah, mean.
And that's right, he's for you, she's for they, them.
And they played it in heavy rotation in these football games.
Now, I can tell you this about the way people consume media.
Football is the last thing, other than the local news, thank God, that Americans will watch on television.
Everything else is there's 900,000 people watching a squid game episode, and that's about it.
The only thing that gets mass audience anymore, look at the list of the most watched television broadcasts every year, and eight or nine out of ten will be football games.
And the Trump campaign zeroed in on those games and pushed in on this message about transgenderism.
And who's the target?
Men, right?
And when we look at these numbers and we look in the data and we see young men coming in for Republicans in ways that we have not seen in the past, and Carlin can tell us the exact numbers, but a big shift.
There's a lot of reasons.
The Joe Rogan podcast and all of that stuff is all part of it.
But you're absolutely right that the messaging around transgenderism is a big deal.
As for the media piece of this, I second my colleague's emotion on how well Kamala Harris did.
She ran about as good a race as a human being could run under those circumstances.
She moderated her positions.
She said she'd shoot somebody if they broke into her house.
She was for fracking.
She was for securing the border.
She said, let's clean slate.
Let's go again.
And Republicans said she didn't do interviews.
She did, in the end, a lot more interviews with legacy outlets than Donald Trump did.
Donald Trump wouldn't do a second debate.
She wanted him to do a second debate.
He wouldn't do a second debate because he lost the first one.
So in terms of Kamala Harris and the media, I don't know.
But what I do think is interesting, we will never talk about media in a presidential election exactly the same way because what Donald Trump figured out was he doesn't need it.
He doesn't need us.
He doesn't need us anymore.
You don't need to do the 60 Minutes interview because you can go on Theo Vaughn's podcast and have Theo Vaughn describe to you what it's like to be on cocaine.
And Donald Trump go, that's fascinating.
What was that like?
That's amazing.
So you don't need to do CBS and you don't need to do, you don't need to sit down and look important.
You can just go on and riff with people and circumnavigate or circumvent the mainstream press.
One other thing.
I'm sorry, but because you brought up that ad, one other thing, maybe one of the youngs can correct me on this, but I believe the.
Standby.
Yeah, I believe the host was Charlemagne the God.
It sure was.
Right?
Which everyone here is like, the older people here like myself are like, huh?
But like, it's that hammering home to, and he's black.
Right.
It's not just men that's targeted with that ad.
That was the ad.
Yeah, and if you didn't see the ad, it is just clips of, so Charlemagne the God is the breakfast crew is one of the most popular on African-American urban radio, most popular radio show, morning drivetime radio shows in the country.
And it was them having a very normal kind of discussion about what they think about transgenderism and sports and girls' sports.
And they just cut it, they took the real audio, cut it together, made an ad out of it, and it was exactly what you said.
And that's just after the Merovingian vote that he's trying to get.
That's a gene touch.
Aachen comes in big for Trump.
15 seconds as a member of the media, I get frustrated about the narrative that the media was working in concert to promote Vice President Harris.
I've worked at media outlets, Chris, you can probably say, I have worked in media places where I don't even know what the person three cubicles away is doing, let alone coordinating with other competitors and news outlets.
It's just, I understand it.
It's a nice narrative, but it's not, it's just, it's crazy.
One other brief thing just on that point.
You know, I kind of don't ever want to hear another argument that the media swung an election for Democrats, because I will say, I don't think that they collude, but like most people in the media are Democrats, and you can't completely set aside your priors and it influences how you evaluate events.
And I don't, I mean, Kamala Harris, especially in that first month and a half, just got fawning press coverage.
Absolutely.
Some of it I think is justified, right?
Like it's a big deal that the president dropped.
It was a great story.
Like, I get that, but I think it was more than that.
And I think if you had polled media folks before the election about who they think was going to win, it would have been like 99% thought Harris would win, even though the data I don't think supported that.
And it didn't matter, right?
Donald Trump still won like a bigger victory than 2016.
So the media, I think, does have a strong bias.
I think the Republican criticism there is strong, but I just don't think it matters.
But I think the Republicans are arguing with a media that doesn't exist anymore.
Yeah.
Right?
So the Republicans are mad at a media that was the way that it was when it was three networks and Huntley and Brinkley and that this is how it was.
I am here to tell you it is long gone.
There is no media anymore in the sense that there is a monolithic entity that exists in New York and Washington and calls the shots.
It is atomized, dislocated, decentralized, and the audience, individual audiences are much smaller.
And as we found out this year, who's got the more viewers, who's got the more listeners, who's doing whatever, this thing is in flux.
And you know what else didn't matter this year?
Yet again, money.
Kamala Harris had enough money that she could have bought Elon Musk, right?
She had raised all of the money in the world.
She had raised all of this money.
And they spent it and they did it all.
And no.
And we now have election after election.
Jeb Bush, holy crokino, right, raised a half a billion dollars to run in a Republican primary.
Please clap, nothing.
And we go through and we see that the cash advantage that people perceive makes the difference.
When I travel the country and go places, people say, well, what about the money?
Money, moneyed interest.
I don't think so, not anymore.
Barriers to entry are very low.
And I don't think just having a cash advantage makes a difference.
Nate, anything else?
Oh, we got one from the internet wants to know.
Do you think Democrats will go through a significant policy reckoning, a shift towards the Senator Ahla Bill Clinton in 1992?
Who might lead that shift?
Carlin, who's going to?
We're in the beginning of the recriminations phase right now.
And so...
And this will go on for a while.
And the recrimination space seems to be sort of blaming it on Joe Biden at this particular point.
Now, that's going to change a little bit over time.
And we'll see who the leader might be.
And this goes back to the original question, which is about what they think happened.
And how many times, if Democrats believe that Trump is a baron, right?
This is just, he's the black swan that came in and he did all of that stuff.
They could push off thinking seriously about how to rebuild a coalition for another four years.
Is that right?
Yeah, I'm trying to think of what Democratic leaders are going to be remaining.
I mean, Hakeem Jeffries is going to be the leader in the House.
Who knows what the Senate will look like?
I wonder if Democrats are going to try to look for an outsider.
I mean, one dynamic that we haven't talked about at all is that Trump continuously benefits from being held to a different standard because he's viewed as an outsider and not a politician.
that voters have such a low view of government and politicians that because he has a brand as a successful businessman and celebrity, that if any politician does one thing that he has done or said, their career is over.
So I wonder if Democrats are going to try to look for.
I don't think it's going to be Mark Cuban.
I mean, maybe they try to look outsider instead of within the governor, go to the governors that have been.
If you go back to the election week in 2004, 20 years ago, there's a piece because George W. Bush won the, I forget what we were talking about that year, was it NASCAR dads or security moms or whatever?
It was more fun.
We used to give nicknames to different demographic groups.
Dayton House one.
That's right, the Dayton House.
It was cute.
It was more cute.
But the conclusion was reached that Republicans had won by getting people on social issues, God, guns, and gays, right?
And the narrative that came out of the 2004 election was, I'm from West Virginia.
West Virginia, if you want to know how much realignment there's been in the United States this century, West Virginia was a swing state.
And West Virginia ain't a swing state, right?
It'll be the second or third most Republican state in the country this year.
And it's a state that went for Michael Dukakis in 1988.
But the conclusion among Democrats, and you can read the article in the New York Times, they said, well, he's getting the NASCAR dads and he's getting it then.
And so they said, will it be Mark Warner in 2008?
As the Democrats look to the future, should be a red state, should be a moderate, somebody who can appeal to da-da-da-da.
You know what nobody said?
Probably a guy with the middle name, Hussein, who is not yet in the United States Senate.
And it'll probably be him, and he'll win the biggest victory for Democrats since 1996.
Yeah.
I think one thing that's important, you know, I use the analogy that hardcore social progressivism is like a fundamentalist religion, and I think it does function that way.
If you think about it that way, a lot of what you see that seems weird makes a lot of sense.
So when we're talking about how to change, like I think of the analogy, when you say something like, you know, maybe you should back off the transgender care for kids, like that's a little out there.
Like you can get 99% of the deal and probably get most Americans on board, but that's just a bridge too far.
The trans kids in sports is kind of unpopular.
If that's something, the corollary I always come back to, though, to use the religion analogy, is I would always hear people say like, Republicans just really need to moderate on abortion if they want to win.
And I would always think like, okay, maybe, but like, how do you ask someone that thinks that abortion is murder to moderate?
Right?
Like, this is something that they believe sincerely and believe in.
But they did this time, didn't they?
They sure did this time.
After the guy got Roe overturned.
Like, he built up a street cred.
But, but, you know, and then I would say, like, you know, white evangelicals give Republicans more votes than all non-whites combined gave Democrats.
Like, where are Republicans going to make up those votes?
It's the same ask for strong progressives to ask them to back off their strong social progressive views.
They're things that they believe deeply in and believe strongly in.
And when you ask them to back off, like, you're asking them to back off something that's very much a part of their core.
Just analogize it to someone asking a pro-life or like, hey, can't you just give up on the baby Holocaust for election?
No, of course not.
Yeah, they believe what they are.
And just on your question, one more.
Political scientists sometimes have this term that talk about the party decides, meaning that party leaders are really shaping who the next candidate is.
They're picking people.
That happens occasionally.
I mean, I think in recent history, really, George W. Bush is probably the only case where a lot of people deferred to him.
A lot of other governors said, he's our guy.
He's the son of a president.
Who is that person out there?
I mean, there's probably, you know, there are going to be people we don't know about.
There are people who are likely candidates, and they seem modestly strong, but there's not a frontrunner among the various governors and Pete Bootiges and other people who are not.
No, Shapiro.
You don't think it's Shapiro?
Shapiro, Shapiro will be something, but the American people don't even know who Shapiro is, right?
I know there's this little moment where we say, oh, we could have won but for him, but he's a pretty unknown quantity.
So I think he's a candidate, and it's four years from now.
But again, I do think that there is going to be a progressive, right?
Part of the argument, and I think it would not be a good idea for Democrats to fully go this way, but there's going to be somebody who says, we need a progressive voice.
And all of those people we're talking about are kind of moderate-ish Democrats, right?
And there's nobody in that lane that's been occupied pretty well by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, getting pretty good chunks of the vote.
And in 2012, after the Republicans lost, there were those who said, we must moderate.
We must moderate.
And then there were others who said, hell no, we got to crank this thing up.
Donald Trump was not the most extreme candidate for Republicans in 2016, right?
He was not the most far out on policy questions.
Was that the year that Tom Tancredo had an ad of a terrorist, Mexican terrorist blowing up a shopping mall?
I think there were multiple cycles in the world.
Yeah, yeah.
Or when Herman Cain wanted alligators in a moat at the U.S. southern border.
The danger for Democrats is that if the conclusion is that Kamala Harris lost because she was too moderate, which sounds wrong, because it is, but if the progressive left says, you sold out, if you would have been pure, if you would have been true, then you might have won, because Republicans certainly went through that in 2016, and oddly, it worked out for them.
I'm going to put a flag in the ground in case three years from now.
There's a panel that I'm not on that year moderating.
Abigail Spamberger, Congresswoman, wins a high-profile Virginia governor's race next year and pushes her into the conversation.
If it happens, remember this day.
If it doesn't, let's forget this.
And she would be exactly the right kind.
That's an excellent point.
My flag in the right kind of woman.
Exactly.
My flag in the ground will be John Fetterman.
Whoa.
The WWE will just have it.
He and Vance will just wrestle.
Or he and Shapiro will wrestle.
You want someone who has outsider cred.
Totally.
Right?
Someone who can speak to average people, who seems like he at least might be able to take off a chunk of the Trump colleague.
He doesn't have to waste his money on a wardrobe.
He doesn't have to buy a suit.
Make hoodies great again.
I'll put my flag down for that.
Okay.
I am seeing right here.
Just one second.
Microphone.
Barbara Dello.
Does all the sophisticated polling and expensive single-issue advertising actually keep voters in the dark about many serious issues our country is facing and in some way kind of corrupt democracy?
And just one more comment.
I worked at the polls also.
It's a wonderful experience.
But when I changed to become a nope, I can't work at the polls anymore in my state, which is kind of hot.
Actually, Carlin, maybe you on the question of, I don't know, are there secret issues or issues out there the American people care about that we were just ignoring here that you're seeing in public opinion?
Or were we kind of tapping the polls up?
I mean, the horse race is just everywhere.
It just takes the air out of everything else.
But certainly the pollsters polled on many important issues throughout the campaign.
They just got no attention.
And we should also point out that no one knows anything.
So whatever you believe, whatever a person believes that they care about the most, confirmation bias is very powerful.
So if you believe that Donald Trump won because of Joe Rogan and jellyfish chemical enhancements or whatever, if you think that's true, if you believe in those things, then you will see it in the numbers.
You will say that's why.
The American electorate does not really give up its secrets.
We do a lot of survey work, right?
We have the Associated Press does this magnificent vote cast data that we will pour over 115,000 completed surveys.
And Nate and all of us will pour through that data and we'll try to come to conclusions.
And it will be mostly horse hockey, right?
Because we'll be guessing at, we'll be squinting at images on the wall and say, well, I think maybe if they said that they'd like that but they didn't like that, then maybe it's this.
I love the American voter because they're a jumble, right?
You have people you say, okay, let's talk about the pro-gay marriage Second Amendment enthusiast.
Wait a minute, who are you?
What are you doing in here?
We're more complicated.
The way that our politics works is it flattens and it flattens it from a great distance.
And we say, this is what Republicans are like, this is what Democrats are like.
That's not the case.
And what you see in these elections, and part of what's really affirming about these elections, talk about the Rio Grande Valley and these big swings.
They didn't change, right?
They're the same people.
They're the same people.
Circumstances changed, candidates changed, and they contain multitudes.
So we shouldn't flatten each other out either.
The parties and the campaigns flatten us out, but we shouldn't flatten each other out.
We should see each other's humanity, decency, standing as a fellow child of God or nature, and your fellow American.
And it's very easy to do.
And I will shut up by talking about the same thing I started.
So please, Chris, I think we have time for one more question.
Why don't you pick someone, a lucky person in the audience for our last question?
We'll go, yeah, right up front.
You're right here.
Michael Washura, in the campaign, was there anything that you heard Donald Trump say that you believe he believes is more or less an approximation of the genuine truth?
And if yet, yes, what was it?
So everyone forgets that Donald Trump, this was Donald Trump's fourth run for the presidency.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He ran in 2000 briefly for the Reform Party nomination.
Okay, Ross Perot's venue.
What did Ross Perot want?
Ross Perot wanted to cut off trade with NAFTA.
He thought NAFTA was a disaster.
He wanted to bring back trade.
The guy who won the nomination that year is Pat Buchanan.
Was Pat Buchanan shtick build a wall?
I think immigration and trade are things that are actually core beliefs of Donald Trump that he's 100% sincere about.
Beyond that, I don't know.
And we're getting ready to, how about this?
We're getting ready to find out.
The Wall Street Journal doesn't do endorsements, but in the piece that the Wall Street Journal wrote, basically endorsing Trump, they said he's crazy and dangerous, but we think he's probably bad at it, right?
We think he probably will be ineffective at doing this, but we think that Kamala Harris will be extraordinarily effective at doing the things that she wants to do, which are maybe less dangerous, but she'll get it done.
Donald Trump will fail to achieve the things that he wants.
Part of the reason that Donald Trump won is that when Democrats said he's going to have a mass deportation force, he's going to do this, he's going to do that, people said, well, he was president, he said he was going to do all kinds of stuff.
I don't know that voters take Trump either literally or neither literally nor seriously, right?
I think he's become a hood ornament for a Republican Party.
In the United States, we have a gas pedal party and we have a break party.
And the break party is the one that says too much, too fast, I don't like it, pull back.
And I think that's what they were voting for.
We'll find out literally as we walk out of here.
We will start to find out which Donald Trump do we have?
And I have no idea, and I don't think anybody else does either, whether he's going to be the guy who Democrats have been warning about, that we read about, or is he going to be sort of this ineffectual would-be guy that the Wall Street Journal describes?
I don't know.
Well, it's been a long year.
We've had a number of Election Watch in our series.
We've seen some of you come back again and again.
We'd like to thank our panel.
What a wonderful ending to this to have Sean Trendi and Nathan Gonzalez with us, but also appropriately the founder of Election Watch going to the beginning, Carlin Bowman.
Thank you, Patrick.
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