Spoke to thousands on campus lamenting how we are all disheartened by last night, as if it was just obvious that every member of 60 or 70,000 in the University of Michigan community was obviously obviously had pulled the lever for Hillary Clinton.
There was just a mindset, I think, that took place.
This accelerated in 2020, both between the pandemic and then during, you know, after the killing of George Floyd.
And I think what higher ed finds itself at now is this point where it has steered so far to the left, not only of the new administration, but of the median voter and certainly of kind of working class Americans, that there's just this fundamental disconnect.
And so I think what you have seen with the embrace of neutrality, of institutional neutrality, what you've seen with campuses trying to put new guardrails in place regarding protest, what you've seen with some of these efforts around efforts to create new campus centers is both an effort from the outside, from the right, to drag campuses back to a place that's more reflective of the whole state community, but also I think you see the part on a lot of college leaders who feel like they're stumbling at the edge of the cliff.
How do they figure out how to backpedal in a way that's credible and where they can actually maintain the respect of the campus community?
And I think we're going to see a lot of this playing out over the next few years.
I think one of the challenges though is that we're conflating political ideology with civility and our nation's identity as Americans and in democracy.
And so it's not just that people are concerned.
You even questioned the dark, the way the New York Times described the Trump campaign.
I think when you talk to parents and everyday families, they want their kids to be nice, to have treat each other with civility, and to treat each other fairly.
And the rhetoric is so high and negative that it's very easy to say politicians should be out of the schoolhouse, right?
It's very easy.
Lots of people agree with that.
We also want to have sort of a sense of like our rights and values and public institutions respect those.
And so I wonder, like, is it just an ideological divide, or is it that we actually would just like to have more respect and civility in the way we debate these things?
So, I mean, I think, I mean, A, that's a completely valid distinction.
And look, even those of us who, you know, were happy with the way last night's elections generally came out, I'm the first to concede that I think Trump, you know, even in his victory remarks, kept detouring into things which were both uncivil and unproductive.
So sure, absolutely.
And it's not just, oh, Rick, you're a snowflake.
I mean, the way that we talk and engage matters.
So I totally agree.
On the other hand, I think part of the problem on the right is that we saw colleges that in 2016 were bringing students before biased response teams for chalking a Trump for president on the sidewalk.
That this was something for which you could be reported to campus.
This was problematic behavior.
We saw campuses lecturing about microaggressions repeatedly.
Students were brought up.
Lauren Kitness at Northwestern University was brought up on Title IX charges because she wrote a scholarly article critiquing Title IX.
And then suddenly, after October 7th, when we saw campus protests burning flags, when we saw Jewish students barred from campus at UCLA, when we saw students threatened and bullied on video that went viral, suddenly higher ed was saying, well, no, no, it's complicated.
We have to have a great deal of respect for these strong points of view.
All of that talk of microaggression turned out to feel extraordinarily insincere and hypocritical.
And so I think what you see on the right, and again, this is complicated.
I don't want to speak, there's absolutely a civility problem in much of American life right now.
But I think what, you know, for somebody like me, and I'll only speak for myself, the problem is not that campuses are being civil.
It is a problem is that campuses are using talk of civility as an ideological weapon to silence certain perspectives, to advance certain viewpoints.
And that is the problem that I'd like to see campuses address.
And I think that's what you're going to see a Trump 2.0 potentially aggressively moving the counter.
Can I jump on this?
Because I think there were two points that got kind of raised there.
And one is totally agree on the civility point.
You know, we run a fellowship that's about political civility, left, right-center people together.
It's like it's hard to hate up close, and that is like a very important thing to me.
So on the one hand, I think there is like a fallacy to the way that people are thinking about schools, like all schools, and in particular K-12 schools, which is that there is some magical world in which there is no politics, no culture.
There are culture wars, which I just use as a shorthand, because there is consistently a war for the culture, right?
Like who we are as Americans, our institutions, in particular, our schooling institutions, are places that transmit values.
To have a valueless school is kind of like not to have a school, right?
So instead of accepting that, instead of thinking, oh, how do we extricate this, maybe we should just accept that this is like a core part of it.
And that's a different conversation, I think.
So I just want to put that out there.
The second thing, though, and here I will shiv my party, is like you can't be the party of college-educated people and not have a K-12 strategy to make more college-educated people.
Like if you were at the RISE summit last year at the Reagan Institute, where Dr. Joe Biden showed up to give remarks on the president's behalf, it was very clear what the agenda was.
Pre-K and college and loan forgiveness.
That was it.
Pre-K and loan forgiveness.
Everything that goes on in between, like we don't know what that is, right?
And so I feel like this is like such a, this is such a drop ball.
This is so outrageous.
And at least you can disagree with it.
But, you know, Kay Brumley, Kirsten Baszler, Amy Gudera, these are state superintendents.
These are red state state superintendents.
They have K-12 agendas.
Science of reading, improved teacher pay, expand school choice, like no charter caps, all of these things.
Like there is at least something in the vacuum.
So I don't want to skip over this.
This would have been a great opportunity for presidential leadership to be like, here's what we care about on K-12.
And at least on, you know, Democrats still need to answer that problem right now.
Jeremy, let's be honest as to why the party does not have a K-12 agenda.
And you mentioned.
Would you like a softball?
Yeah.
Thank you very much for that.
And you mentioned Joe Biden, who is a very proud union member.
So the union NEA and AFT likely made it very clear to the party, we got this.
We got you.
We take dues from our members and we spend millions of dollars to elect you.
You'll do what we want.
So the union-controlled politicians kept their hands off of K-12.
The AFT, the American Federations of Teachers, is a bit of a misnomer because there are actually something like six AFL-CIO bargaining units within that entity.
Only one is K-12 teachers.
The other are early childhood providers, graduate students, and individuals who work in higher ed.
And then a rapidly growing health care unit.
So anything that you see in a Which is why growing pre-K makes so much sense.
Yes, that is my point.
So you're saying that they were addressing things on the other sides of K-12 because they're like, no, no, no, we've got this, but we want more unionized jobs.
So please grow these other entities through an agenda so that we can have more unionized workers sending us dues.
I want to say one thing as the K-12 girl and maybe the Democrat on the stage, but I think that, oh, that's you too.
You too?
Oh, I didn't even know.
And there is a real art and skill to that.
Well, I think growing jobs is probably a good thing at this point in our country.
And in fact, we need more men, to speak of the gender gap, in these care work and in these education jobs.
And for a long time, 30, 40, 50 years, we've seen a feminization of the profession.
We also need more diversity in our teaching ranks.
And attacks on DEI, however poorly done, won't get us there.
We have to be committed.
Also, an unbundling of the system, to use your word, is also not going to get us there.
Because the vast majority of kids are in public schools.
And your point about funding is, I think, still an open question about whether we're actually fully funding our public schools.
So go get a voucher in Arizona.
You can afford a trampoline.
Can you afford a high-quality education with that voucher?
And I think that's really important before we just settle that because we've got a lot of pandemic.
Let's get there.
Before we jump in, I got to do this one thing now, because this is really important.
And the research on diverse teachers is really good, totally there for that, right?
But this whole thing about bundled, unbundled, and diversity, I think is worth taking on.
What we have organized is the best way to segregate education in America.
And it is assigning kids to school based on where they live.
And that is giving, like, the schools today are more segregated than they were before Brown.
So I think the argument that trying another way, maybe open enrollment, maybe like other ways to bring kids, like we should try that because we know what we have right now, which is like the most brilliant way to make sure that a black kid never sees a white student in a classroom with them.
A jump there and nothing.
Just a moment.
But before we do, it seemed like we talked about the Harris campaign not really having a K-12 agenda.
Does the Trump campaign have a stated K-12 agenda that I missed?
I mean, there's the to I think it's the Republican platform that basically dropped in the summer.
That's what I've been attributing to.
There was a little bit more on that.
Well, I mean, there was a compendium of Trump tweets.
Social.
But, you know, I mean, it's interesting.
Folks should also keep in mind that President-elect Trump has also repeatedly disavowed anything to do with Project 2025.
And so in reading these tea leaves, there's, you know, certainly the Harris campaign tried to promote the notion that Trump was running on Project 25.
Trump consistently said he was not.
So what relationship that will have to whatever comes out as a strategy?
Let me bring it back actually to something Heather just said about the DEI piece.
I think, you know, Heather, I heard you say in the last week or two, I thought a point which I found really compelling, was you said, look, well, if we're going to make the case for publicly funded or public education, it's because there are certain values we have in common.
And I heard you talk at that point, I think you mentioned the Pledge of Allegiance, my country, you know, all the children knowing my country, Tissavi, as it kind of shared touchstones.
And I would argue, if you look at the crosstabs last night on the election, that Trump has done historically well for Republican among Latino voters, that he did extraordinarily well.
Best Republican has done with black voters in half a century or more, and particularly well with black men, that part of that appeal was that the Democratic Party is nervous about those traditional markers of shared American identity.
That the 1619 project, which was promoted by the Biden Department of Education, talks about America as a slaveocracy.
In San Francisco during the pandemic, they were trying to strip Abraham Lincoln's name off of schools.
Forget Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.
That there has been this disdain for popular shared culture.
And I think one of the opportunities here is to the extent that as Democrats are asking themselves, what happened with the Latino vote last night?
How do they kind of recapture kind of a feel for the working class coalition that so famously carried them for decades?
Part of it is I think they need to ask whether this Oberlin sociology professorial kind of faculty set has taken them into a place on culture, on traditional markers, on patriotism, that is anathema to a huge share of Americans, however they feel about tax policy, however they feel about abortion.
And that seems to me a real opportunity for us to get back to a conversation which is grounded in we can all agree on these things, even if there's some extremists on either end who are uncomfortable with them.
And that provides a foundation for moving, you know, into a conversation about science of reading, about math instruction where we don't, you know, California is disdained eighth grade algebra because it's racist.
Oregon has said asking students to show their work in math is racist.
I think we have an opportunity to get back to shared values that starts to shove aside some of the excesses that I think have distorted our conversations over the last five or ten years.
And the distortion that we're seeing, not just in society, but in K-12 on into college campuses, I think could probably be traced back to the education schools, right?
So if you're training up teachers to think the way that you're describing, and then those teachers aren't learning the science of reading and are ignoring other aspects of like good quality teaching, but being programmed, and then they're going into the K-12 system, you're making society sicker.
So there is an opportunity that the Trump administration maybe has not addressed in this articulated K-12 agenda that you were alluding to to really tackle the ed schools and figure out what's going on there, trace the federal funding that's going to those and find out how some levers can be tweaked to change the culture and to improve the quality of instruction that budding teachers are getting.
But as far as the K-12 agenda from the Trump administration, he's made it very clear that he supports universal school choice, that he'll sign what's now called the Educational Choice for Children Act, which is a federal tax credit.
And he's made it very clear that there won't be men in women's sports, which we can interpret as plans to address the Biden administration's Title IX regulation.
Those two things are huge, and I think a robust agenda right there.
And then there's other things that we've seen.
I did hear him articulated as I want them to teach arithmetic and reading, but not woke.
So I did hear that articulation, which fits in there.
Jenny, let me ask you about school choice.
Really interesting results last night.
On the one hand, Republicans did very well.
This is definitely a Republican issue.
We've seen it sweep red states in terms of ESAs over the past five or six years, and in two states where Trump took the vote two to one, essentially.
We had these referenda on school choice that went down two to one.
Help me understand that.
Yeah, absolutely not surprised.
I think any school choice advocate who's been around for a little while would be like, Yeah, of course that was going to happen.
The unions are very good at throwing a lot of money at these ballot initiatives.
They always have, they always will.
It's not the way to move something that should be handled through the legislative process and is very effectively being handled through the legislative process.
Over 30 states have private scholarship programs or what's called education savings counts or ESAs.
12 states now have nearing approaching universal school choice.
Legislative process is fine.
For those ballot initiatives in Nebraska, Colorado, and Kentucky, you're talking about over $7 million in Little Nebraska that the NEA, the National Education Association, and then their Nebraska affiliate put into an organization to oppose.
That's a lot of ad buys right there.
That's a lot of money, $7 million in Nebraska.
And that is not even accounting for them flipping the switch and telling their members how to vote.
Jimmy, let me push back a little because I'm curious how you'll respond.
I mean, one thing is it seems to me part of the momentum by the pro-choice side in the abortion debate has been just remarkable success at initiatives, which has intimidated their opponents.
And this is kind of the opposite of that.
And the second is, I was in Kentucky last week, and one of the things that folks were telling me was that, I mean, Harris just outspent Trump two to one, and that didn't seem to kind of turn the tide there.
But, you know, they were telling me that a lot of the pro-school choice referenda stuff came down to, you know, Rand Paul talking to the camera, talking about how markets work, and folks talking about how your local public schools stink.
And it seems to me that if there are any messages that generally don't work for the school choice advocates, it's market theory is swell, your local schools stink.
And I thought we had learned that after 2020, after 30 years, and moving into look, everybody should have options to make sure they're kids.
And I mean, you're closer to these referenda than I am.
Is that actually how these things got argued?
And why didn't it?
And if so, why was this not driven by more effective messaging, fueled by what we've seen folks learn over the last three, four years?
Okay, so specific to Kentucky, I followed his wife, Kelly Paul, more, and I felt like she messaged it very effectively.
But you're up against a machine.
You're up against a political juggernaut, directly spending and being very clear about how to vote on this one thing, or else all public schools will be closed.
You're killing public education.
The fear-mongering is always going to turn off people's critical thinking to any sort of alternative.
But they called Trump a fascist, and he won the state two to one.
That's fear-mongering, too.
It's a very narrow issue, though, versus a complex issue or a complex vote that involves like how much my groceries cost or how inflation is impacted.
And Trump doesn't go to your neighborhood school.
I mean, here's the one thing I would say, because it's like, think about, let's book in Massachusetts, right?
So when they did question.
What did they talk about what they did?
So when they did question two, which would have like I can't even come up with an adjective that would describe how small the increase in the number of charter schools would have been, right?
This was 10 years ago.
Yeah, that's right.
Statewide referendum when Charlie Baker was governor, he spent a ton of money on it.
I think for folks watching not here, the charter schools in Massachusetts have been studied in great detail.
They're highly effective.
They're wonderful at closing the achievement gaps for low-income kids of color.
They've done everything.
Mal Holyoke was like, nah.
So that went down two to one.
There you go.
Again, right?
And the teachers union in Massachusetts was like, they're going to put one in your place.
They're going to disrupt your local schooling, whatever.
So that happened then.
And yesterday, Massachusetts, right, puritanical shining light on the hill of high standards, also voted basically two to one to nuke its college, its high school exit exam, right?
Which we get, and we have another conversation about standards.
I mean, let's talk about the exit exam.
Yeah, no, which I actually think is very important because a lot of people think that, well, if you're talking about a more open system, that you don't want accountability.
And I'm like, no, this is being eroded from the left right now in very significant ways.
And I think the Massachusetts referendum is super important.
But I just highlighted.
I'm not really nobody's sweetheart right now.
That's right, that's right.
I just highlight those two things to say that, like, whenever you're doing a referendum change on an existing thing, it's incredibly hard.
And this is why Arizona worked because they had the program already.
The Arizona ESA was universal.
There were people using it.
It was basically a positive right at the time that you couldn't take away.
And then when people are like, yo, we're going to take it away, they're like, no, I'm not having that.
And that's very different than Colorado, Nebraska, and Kentucky.
And just on Massachusetts, the union spent $14 million to kill the exit exams.
Just want to put that.
So unions are political and spend money, y'all.
There's another lesson in this MCAS defeat, which I support the MCAS, which I think I'm still in love with accountability.
Local control won.
Not only did teachers' unions or any unions spend money, local control won.
And unfortunately, we still have communities that have a lot of just disparate outcomes.
And local control won in Massachusetts.
Well, we've been seeing this as ASDs too, though.
There's an important distinction here, too.
We're talking about MCAS accountability.
So this is the Massachusetts school reform, which was done 30 years ago, 1993, Briscoe, et cetera.
Bipartisan, they adopted an exit exam for high schoolers in 2001.
10 years later, Massachusetts was scoring highest in the country in reading and math, fourth and eighth grade, international at the level of South Korea and Japan, the top of the class.
Here's the thing: accountability has got a bad name, both because we made a hash out of No Child Left Behind when given an opportunity, and also because we have backed away from kind of eat your vegetables education.
I just love teachers.
In all countries.
But the other part of this is that I would argue that MCAS graduation requirements are not K-12 accountability.
That's about testing kids every year and giving schools A's or F's and rating teachers.
This is about: should kids know how to do English, math, and science at a high school level before you give a high school diploma?
That strikes me as different from accountability.
This is about making sure we're not just passing kids along because it's easier.
And Massachusetts voters, after having this stuff work for them for 30 years, said, nah, 5941.
Let me ask you about the eat your vegetables question because I really like it when politicians ask our schools to like Google Snaps.
And I didn't see much of it.
Is there, I mean, we have pandemic learning laws.
We have, don't get me started on chronic absenteeism.
We also have a sort of, you know, no one seems to care that much about rigor.
Is there somebody somewhere in election night that took a stand for eat your vegetables?
No.
And can I drop two things on this?
Because I think they're very important.
One is we should not ignore that part of this is symptomatic of something else.
I just think, excuse the term of art, we screwed so many kids over so hard by keeping schools long closed longer than they needed to, that when the news started to come out about how bad that was, people were like, I don't want to see this information anymore.
And so one of our EDCs said to me, it's like the national debt now when you talk to people about what's going on with student performance and learning loss, which really stuck with me.
So that's like living here on one side.
At the same time, you could argue we've almost never really had a system of accountability.
At our best, we've had transparency.
School grading, like how many, like the act of holding the schools accountable, changing who was in charge, reconfiguring them, whatever, like that almost never happened.
So if you accept that at best we had a system of accountability, then that changes what we think about right now, like substantially.
And I actually think that's probably a good thing.
If we could get to honesty about like, look, we're in the information phase and we're accountability people, like we care about these interventions and stuff.
But if for the next five years, the news is going to be so bad that nobody's actually going to do anything about it, how do you make sure a parent knows how their kid is doing?
That's a policy question.
Like, let's talk about that.
Should you be able to go any place you want and get a diagnostic to find out where you because the schools don't want to do it.
Let's talk about that.
Should we give you some money?
Let's talk about that.
Let me push back.
The one place I think maybe you see a little bit of eat your vegetables is the science of reading stuff that Durrell and Ginny have talked about.
So Mike Braun last night in Indiana signaled clearly during the campaign that they're going to keep on keeping on with what Governor Holcomb has done about, you know, and partly this is about taking it to the schools of education and telling them however you guys would like to teach reading, here's how you're going to teach reading.
Partly it's about telling teachers.
But it's also, there's a larger cultural debate.
There's a solda story piece by Emily Hadaford, which has also worked very hard to say to teachers, you guys are victims of bad advice too.
And I think that's an important part of kind of the shift.
I don't know if in this kind of brittle, angry, very online debate that we're kind of in the middle of, if it's possible to have that kind of multi-layer push done successfully.
This conversation is really interesting to me because this movement away from accountability at the K-12 level, we're seeing the exact opposite in higher ed right now.
That accountability is very much in vogue.
The Republicans' main higher ed reform bill would create this very complex system of carrots and sticks, probably a very effective one to try and get colleges to shape up.
We're seeing movement at the state level too.
I mean, Texas just passed this massive overhaul of community college funding formulas to actually only fund the colleges if they're getting their graduates into good-paying jobs.
And I think if there is a Republican trifecta, we'll see what happens with the House.
That's probably going to be a major push.
And I think it's just very interesting that at higher ed, we're seeing this push for accountability and that we seem to be going almost in the opposite direction.
Say more.
So College Cost Reduction Act.
So Chairman Fox has pushed in the House.
Obviously, one, she's term-limited.
So even if the Republicans keep the House, there's a new chair.
And two, what's been the response from Democrats?
Is it possible to see getting to, say, 60 votes in the Senate or Democrats passing their version of a bill if they take the House?
Yeah.
So she has about, I think, 160, 180 co-sponsors on the College Cost Reduction Act in the House right now, including the folks who will probably be, who are the leading contenders to be chair of the Edmund Workforce Committee.
So, I mean, I think that, you know, even though Fox is term limited, this or something like this will probably set the agenda on higher education for Republicans going forward.
I think that they might have originally been hoping to get some Democratic co-sponsors on this.
I mean, there were some sweeteners in there.
But honestly, I think the reality is that Democrats in Congress right now are just very captive to the higher education lobby, and they're very going to much resist any kind of form of accountability, which is a shift from a few years ago when you did have Elizabeth Warren and folks like that, you know, pushing accountability for colleges.
You don't see that much.
But you can't do anything like CCRA through reconciliation, right?
You would have to pass legislation out of the state.
You could do components of it through reconciliation.
But not the accountability pieces, or could you?
You could potentially do the accountability pieces.
I mean, a lot will depend on what the Senate parliamentarian says, but a lot of those accountability pieces are directly affecting revenue in terms of requiring colleges to pay back a portion of unpaid student loans, cutting back, cutting off aid eligibility to some schools.
I mean, these directly affect the federal budget, so it's possible they would get through on reconciliation, but we'll see.
But to repeat that, for the folks who aren't as expert, that means that just if, in case the House actually goes to the Republicans, that doesn't mean it's a slam dunk to run these things through.
There's going to be someone at the Department of Education who's going to need to fill that post.
Cardona's going to be out before too long.
Who's going to fill it?
And what do you want to see them do?
Is he going to reapply like a charter school rework?
Before we speculate, I just want to call everyone's attention to Rick's piece on Cardona.
I think you have some opinions on the fellowship.
It was paywall.
Yeah, well, and then I interviewed.
I'd like to see the reapply interview.
I think that'd be another thing.
I interviewed Chairwoman Fox for an upcoming podcast, and she shared your sentiment that this has been an extremely poor leadership in a failed Department of Education.
But I don't know.
Darrell mentioned Cade Brumley, Louisiana's state superintendent and chief, and that name gets thrown around a lot.
But we're hearing a lot about higher education here, and we haven't mentioned the FAFSA debacle and the impact there.
There's a lot of cleanup to do when it comes to FAFSA and when it comes to higher education.
So great if there's leadership with some serious financial experience and higher ed experience.
Yeah, I mean, the FAFSA for next year has already been delayed by two months.
There are still, I think, GAO identified 20 outstanding technical issues with the form that they still haven't fixed.
So, I mean, this is going to be a debacle next year as well.
And, you know, Cardona has really done his successor no favors here.
He's leaving them a lot of messes to clean up.
FAFSA is just one, but also, you know, the student loan repayment transition.
He had the on-ramp, kind of this transition period for loan repayment expired a couple months ago, and so people are going to start going into delinquency on their loans.
That's going to hit right around inauguration day, something the next Secretary of Education is going to have to clean up.
You know, on FAFSA, I just want to say, I mean, let's be fair, is it really reasonable to expect somebody to simplify a digital form in just four years?
I mean, yes, I think there's, here's my two cents.
I think one of the things that the Republicans would benefit from immensely is if they have somebody go in the department who is value-aligned and has a track record of being able to run large bureaucracies and actually knowing the law inside out, partly because for Republicans, the Department of Ed isn't away game.
A lot of, you know, if you actually go around and you pull the folks there, they are not going to be generally kind of less.
That's why I went with Glacial earlier.
But away game is better.
So, you know, for me, the obvious call on this is Kate Brumley, who not only is Louisiana's veteran state chief, a career public school educator, a teacher, a principal, a former superintendent, who is, you know, managed remarkably to do science of reading, to do kind of shared values.
So that's what another way to go, especially given how central higher ed is going to be, is we mentioned a moment ago that the chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee is going to have to turn over the gavel in a couple months.
She knows all of these issues inside out and has driven legislation.
I think Virginia Fox could be a fascinating appointment.
All right.
Well, it is time to go to audience QA.
We have a couple of rules here for asking questions at events.
Please give your name and then ask a question.
If you don't ask a question, I'll cut you off.
So if you can raise your hands, we have some folks.
There's a question up front here.
Also, just to repeat to those online or on C-SPAN, you can tweet us questions at 2024Election.
Hashtag 2024Election.
Mark Lerner, I've been involved in DC's charter school movement from the beginning, about 30 years ago, and frankly, we haven't seen the results that we thought we would.
There's still, even pre-COVID, probably a 60% gap between affluent and poor kids.
I'm wondering, for those of us in favor of school choice, should we give up on charter schools and just go to ESAs?
I hope not.
No, no.
Although I do think there are lots of ways for them to play well together in states where that's allowed.
I think charter schools have a lot of strategic expertise that can be very beneficial in the ESA world.
And I think in particular, ESAs bring down the cost to try.
So if you want to do something new, you get 10 kids with 10 families in one part of the building instead of having to authorize a whole new thing and get a building and start at 500 kids.
I would just say that charter schools are on a continuum and the continuum is growing and the continuum is important.
They used to be the fulcrum between private school choice and open enrollment.
And now there's a whole universe of activity happening over here, which I call it like the half bundle, and then there's homeschooling and go your own way and all this other stuff.
And so that has changed where the balance point is.
So I know that's not a particular thing in DC, but there are things that charter schools specifically do very well, especially those formerly known as no excuses like Prince, which is closed achieving gas for low-income kids of color.
I'm on the board of Success Academy.
I'm ride a die for it.
They are an important feature of the ecosystem and they need to be protected and supported.
Any thoughts on how the charter ecosystem might be affected by this election or is it cruise control either way?
I would okay.
I think that it's time to go back and revisit all of the concessions of the last 30 years in charter world.
Because particularly at the state level, there are states where people are writing checks to families and saying, you figure it out.
And at the same time, being like, oh, and there are no more caps on charter schools, e.g., Arkansas, for instance.
If that's the risk tolerance for people, all of the unnecessary things that have accreted on how charter schools are regulated that basically make them like the public schools that they're not supposed to be, I think we should revisit that.
I also think it's a really good time to think about revisiting how we talked about school finance overall, a little bit to Heather's point earlier.
The whole like, hey, you can do this, but you don't get a building.
Or you choose this option, your education is worth 50% as much as if you choose this option.
Like, I don't think a kid's education should be worth less because of where they live.
So, that's a thing we can revisit, as well as why local property taxes are so ensconced in how we fund schools.
Like, there are all kinds of negative incentives that are sort of built into that that dissuade open enrollment and a whole bunch of other stuff.
So, with a million fewer kids in the system and fiscal cliffs coming all over the place, like there's never been a better time to revisit how we support all of America's kids so they can become the best version of themselves.
Jenny, I just want to follow up with you.
Have charters sort of sunset in the Trump coalition?
Is it the sort of dusk for them and it's private school choice, or is there a major play there?
I can't speak for the Trump coalition.
I don't think, again, I heard keep men out of women's sports, but I didn't hear revise the charter school program restrictions.
But I am fairly certain that we will see a revision to the federal charter school program funding mechanism because the Biden administration put on a lot of restrictions that will hurt the growth of the charter movement.
And I think we're going to see support from Senator Cassidy, likely help committee chair, and for innovation and expanding options.
And I think charters still have a role.
I've got a question right here in the center.
Is that the political center or the you'll see?
Hi, Ethan Pollock with Jobs for the Future, and thank you so much for organizing this, especially so quickly, too, and responding to events last night.
I actually have two questions about higher education finance.
So one is about the federal loan program, which obviously is mired in a lot of legal process.
So one question is kind of what's the future of the federal loan program?
And the second is then, you know, AEI had a really wonderful event back in May on private, you know, the role of kind of private lenders in higher education financing.
And so I'm curious also what's the future role of private financing in higher education?
Sure, I can take that one.
So we are in 2025 next year.
I mean, I mentioned the College Cost Reduction Act, which would put some limits on federal lending.
Another thing that we're going to see next year is the expiration of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
And it's a bipartisan priority to extend a lot of those tax cuts.
That's going to need to be paid for somehow, you know, potentially limiting.
We could also potentially limit loans to graduate students because that is a huge cost right now.
The graduate student loan program is going to be at about $130 billion net loss over the coming 10 years.
And so I would expect that, you know, Republicans, if they control Congress, which looks likely, are probably going to take a look at some of those programs as cost savers.
And given the recognition that I think the unlimited loans for graduate students have played a role in tuition inflation, have also led to the proliferation of a lot of very silly master's degrees out there.
And of course, that's also going to create more of a role for private lending because if you do pull back on the federal lending, well, there might be still some good programs out there that deserve financing.
So we might see more private lenders kind of step into the space to finance those students, which is, by the way, what we saw pre-2006 when back before when there were actual caps on federal lending to graduate students, we did see this thriving private market in graduate student lending, often at very reasonable interest rates.
So that is definitely a space that I'm going to be watching over the next year or so.
I expect there will be action there.
Yeah, you know, I mean, to Preston's point, I mean, one, you saw a bunch of, you know, efforts, interesting efforts by the capital markets to do risk-adjusted, kind of return-adjusted kind of lending, which offered, especially for folks who are majoring in things where we talk about jobs are needed, could get favorable rates if you were looking at the kinds of vocational preparation or career and technical ed options.
The second is that remember, when we went to direct lending, it was supposed to be a pay-for.
It was supposed to help pay for the Affordable Care Act.
Instead, what's happened is taxpayers have eaten hundreds of billions over the last few years.
And so I think part of the background for folks who are only casually following this is that there's a sense that what was promised to the public and to taxpayers has turned out not just to be off, but to be fundamentally backwards.
And I think that's going to inform any reevaluation.
All right.
We have a question right here.
Quickly.
J.P. Hogan, I've been writing about politics for a while.
The Supreme Court and the judicial bench with this election turning it to the president with popular vote and the Senate, it's almost like if you give the Supreme Court a case where they can rule that the department is like violating, infringing people's freedom of religion, you're running into, with the 250th coming up, a complex conversation on what does it mean to have your rights come from your creator and shouldn't that be a basic civic lesson?
If your rights come from your creator, how are schools not allowed to teach that?
So it seems like this court could go give them a case that allows them to rule like on Chevron, take away the authoritarian administrative state.
I'm just wondering if you're looking at the election yet.
I know it only hasn't been 12 hours, but.
So effects on the court?
I mean, I think there's two.
One, we've seen certainly in terms of jurisprudence an increasing kind of emphasis on recalibrating the balance between free exercise and freedom from establishment in the First Amendment.
And I think you'll continue to see that.
And that's what has opened the door in profound ways for tax credits and voucher programs and education savings accounts.
And I think you'll continue to see the court rule in that direction.
The other thing, the ironic thing, is that for all of the invective that the New York Times is and the NPRs of the world have directed at the court in recent years, I fully expect sometime next year when the Trump administration is trying to do something on education and they are challenged by Democratic State's Attorney General as having gone beyond the permissible bounds of the Higher Ed Act or permissible bounds of existing statute,
and they get dragged into court under Loper-Bright, under which this court has said there is only so much of freedom for a given administration to rewrite statute or redirect it.
I certainly hope that all of the folks who have complained about the way the court has gotten in the way of the preferred outcomes are going to have second thoughts and reflect on the way in which the court's putting constitutional strictures in place that require that the executive branch actually heed legislative authority and actually abide by statute actually protects all of us, whether or not we happen to be in the majority of the moment.
So I think the bottom line is look, some of the worst case scenarios that you're seeing in progressive circles this morning are not going to come to pass because Democrat attorney generals are going to be able to challenge the Trump administration under Loper Bright and I fully expect some of these Democratic challenges are going to succeed and that's actually Our system is working whether or not you happen to like the Supreme Court ruling at the moment it's issued.
A message of hope from Rick Hess.
All right, I have one question back here.
Thank you, Jeffrey Schulman.
I'm a PhD student.
I was just going to ask, is maybe an area of potential bipartisan cooperation, but also whether it'd be handled on like local or higher level.
There's a lot of talk about restricting access to cell phones in classrooms, and I'm wondering where you guys see all of that going.
Well, I think that you need to have a community conversation about it, but it has had a lot of traction with parents.
And we now have new evidence that there are real damages to young people's attention, engagement, and classrooms.
And so, you know, we should prepare educators to do this, but we should listen to families about how they want their schools to manage the issue.
Yeah, I think because so many states have already banned cell phones, and that takes that looks different depending on where you are.
And the sky didn't fall, the world didn't end.
The parents were still able to, I don't know, email their high school student if they had to pick up question.
I think we'll just see it snowballing and we'll see it in more places.
And it certainly is a bipartisan thing.
Jonathan Haight, NYU professor, book, Anxious Generation, and the incredible media rollout of that earlier this year, I think, led to a national bipartisan conversation.
And so this doesn't have to be a controversial issue, and it's only going to be beneficial.
When we see international and national tests showing that students read recreationally at alarmingly lower rates than just 10 years ago, it's just a no-brainer.
They don't have the attention.
They don't read anymore.
Take the phone away, not just at school, but at home, too.
Can I say this one thing on this?
So, you know, we are state organizations, so this is all like very heady conversation for me.
But I will say that I think the most important thing you can do on a thing like this is not make it a federal issue.
It is like when states are invested in it, it happens.
And frankly, all the energy is in the states right now.
And if there's anything I could sort of advise whoever the next, you know, Secretary of Education is on, it would be to let the states lead and help them sort of get there.
One other thing I just want to say, Nat, you said this earlier and I forgot about it until right now.
You were like, yeah, a lot of this is really, you know, like school choice stuff in particular is very popular with Republicans and the governors sort of like New Hampshire, Missouri, Indiana, Montana, Utah, certainly whatever, all would back that up.
It's also very popular with Democrats.
They just happen to be the constituents.
So like when you separate it out, the electeds versus the people who actually use the programs, they're widely supported.
Well, we have run out of time, so you'll have to wait until the next election to get your questions answered.
I want to thank my fantastic panel.
You brought the energy and the civility that makes these events work.
And thank you for joining us.
Virginia Representative Jerry Connolly announced on Thursday that he's been diagnosed with esophageal cancer, stating in part, cancer can be tough, but so am I.
He added, with a great team of doctors, nurses, and medical technicians, we're very confident in a successful outcome.
Over the next few months, as I do my job here in the district and on the Hill, I may be a bit fatigued due to the treatment.
I hope you'll understand.
The congressman will be undergoing chemotherapy and immunotherapy.
The Democratic Representative just won his ninth House term on Tuesday, defeating Republican Mike Van Meter in Virginia's 11th district.
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum involving you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington and across the country.
Coming up this morning, Semaphore's Dave Weigel and NBC's Scott Wong analyze the political implications of unified GOP control of the executive branch, the Senate, and potentially the House.
C-SPAN's Washington Journal.
Join in the conversation live at 7 Eastern this morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN now or online at C-SPAN.org.
Book TV, every Sunday on C-SPAN 2, features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books.
Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend.
Beginning at 2 p.m. Eastern, Book TV presents coverage of this year's Brooklyn Book Festival.
Highlights include author conversations on the workplace, campus free speech, debt, and more.
And at 8 p.m. Eastern, political science professor Lindsay Cormick provides a guide on how to discuss civics with children in her book, How to Raise a Citizen.
Then at 10 p.m. Eastern on Afterwards, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton shares his book, Rights and Freedom in Peril, where he argues that the left is attacking American rights and freedoms.
He's interviewed by Washington Times legal affairs reporter Alex Wire.
Watch Book TV every Sunday on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org.
Next, political analysts dissect the 2024 election results, looking at key voter demographics and how the candidates use TV, podcasts, and other media to reach voters.
They also consider Democrats underperformance in important races.
From the American Enterprise Institute, this is just under 90 minutes.
Good.
Good evening and welcome to Election Watch.
This is a little bit of a new thing for Election Watch.
Election Watch started 42 years ago.
One of the founders of Election Watch is with us today, a longtime participant, Carlin Bowman.
But our post-election Election Watch has always been Thursday at lunch, where we have a little more time to digest the results.
But here we are the day after the election with some sleep-deprived panelists and looking forward to discussing with you what happened in the election.
We're going to talk.
Each of us will say something.
We'll talk amongst ourselves, but then we're going to go to you.
So just a few logistical points.
If you do want to ask a question to the audience, get ready.
But 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 Steyrwalt, who's with us here at AEI, but has been at News Nation 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 is the 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, sort of some sort of insights that very few people have.
And Sean Trendy, who is a senior fellow here at AEI, 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, nah, 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, in 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 had 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.
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 the Trump 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 Burn and 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 out 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, you know, 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 in 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.
They all took place in 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 as 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, 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.
Next.
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 you'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 percent 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 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, I'm going to 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, 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.