The Best And Worst Post-Election Hot Takes
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What did everyone do with their first post-election weekend? I went for a long walk in the woods. It was delightful. I also went for a long walk in the woods, actually. Took a four-mile hike around a lake in Maryland. Okay, Hillary Clinton. Yeah, seriously.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. It's been a little less than a week since Trump's victory and the narrative building and finger pointing about what led to his win and what it means for the country is going strong. So today,

we're gonna do a hot takedown. I've got a list of hot takes that have been making the rounds, and we're gonna see how well they hold up to scrutiny. Have Democrats abandoned the working class? Did the polls fail? Also, the election is still not over, so we're gonna talk about where things stand down ballot.

As of the time of this recording, Republicans have flipped the Senate with 52 seats projected for them. Projections are still outstanding in Pennsylvania, which currently leans toward the Republican David McCormick, and in Arizona, which currently leans toward the Democrat Ruben Gallego. In the House, Republicans are four seat projections away from securing what looks likely to be a slim majority. But for the time being, they've secured 214 seats and Democrats have secured 210.

And here with me to discuss it all is senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich. Welcome to the podcast, Nathaniel. Hey, Galen. How was your weekend? Did you finally get some rest? I did get some rest. Well needed. Well needed. How about you? Ah, yes. I felt like the more I slept, the more tired I became, which was not ideal, but... Amen. Amen, brother. I don't know how it works, but...

Also here with us is senior researcher Mary Radcliffe. Welcome to the podcast, Mary. How's it going? Are you rested up? Good morning, Galen. Yeah, I had a great weekend. Went for a walk, slept in normal schedule. Didn't look at the polls? Nope. So as far as the Senate is concerned, where does the tallying stand in Pennsylvania and Arizona, Nathaniel?

As you mentioned, McCormick, the Republican, is up in Pennsylvania and Gallego, the Democrat, is up in Arizona. I'm fairly confident that both of those will remain the case and that we'll end up with a 53-47 Senate. But it's kind of interesting in Pennsylvania, the Associated Press has actually already called the race, but it's the only one. So, for example, we at

The ABC News aren't yet reporting a projection. And there was some kind of question about how many outstanding votes there were left to count late last week. Basically, the some estimates from the state itself were that there were perhaps as low as 36000 mail ballots left to count. And then the AP called the race and then the secretary of state immediately, like within 30 minutes, got on Twitter and said, actually, there are 100000 votes left to count.

And so that was a little bit of a, oh, wait, this might not totally be over. But I do want to emphasize that even if it's not callable in the sense that like there is no path for Democrats to come back, it's still very, very likely that the Republicans will flip the seat because even if there are 100,000 ballots and it would take Casey, the Democrat there to flip the vast, vast majority of them in order to take the lead there. So I'm not betting on that happening. Right now, they're separated by 40,000 votes. Right. Yeah.

In Arizona, the race kind of looks close on paper. So it's 50 to 48 percent between Gallego and Lake. And there are still tens of thousands of votes left to count because Arizona is a mostly vote by mail state and it counts slowly. But most of what is yet to report is expected to be very Democratic friendly. So it doesn't really seem like there is a path for Lake to come back. But we don't want to kind of foreclose the possibility until those votes are actually counted.

Mary, if you were a betting woman, where would you bet that the house seat share lands?

In the House, I would expect the final seat margin will be something like 220 seats for Republicans and 215 seats for Democrats. So just a five seat difference. There's a number of races out there that are not yet called, particularly in California, although there's several that I think we can say are probably going to be leaning toward Democrats. There's several we can say are probably going to be leaning toward Republicans. There's really only a few seats at this point. I think that we don't have a great sense of what's going to happen

We still have to wait for a bit more vote counting, particularly in California, before we get those final margins. But I think that we can say it should be somewhere around a five-seat majority for the Republicans. Okay, so let's just say that Republicans have 53 seats in the Senate and they have 220 seats in the House. We all know how difficult it has been for Republicans to govern in the House with the slim majority that they had before. This could be

just as narrow this time around. But the main difference will be that there will be a Republican in the White House. So with Trump in the White House, do we expect that he will be able to get his

non-philibusterable priorities through the House and Senate with the majorities that we've just described? Or is there enough, you know, discord within the House and Senate Republican caucuses that this is going to pose some challenges for the new administration?

I would never bet on House Republicans forming a unified front on anything. And it's worth mentioning that this five seat majority is actually going to end up probably getting a little bit smaller because Donald Trump is planning on appointing a few members of the House to cabinet positions, which makes that even more difficult.

I'm generally not confident that that Trump is going to be able to corral all of those Republicans, especially on some of the priorities that were a little less popular, a little more hot button issues. Yeah, I do think it's worth noting that historically parties in the majority are more

more cohesive than parties in the minority, because when you're in the minority, you can kind of afford it's not as important to kind of corral every last person. But I do generally agree with Mary that in such a narrow

majority, perhaps more narrow than we have right now. Republicans are still going to have real trouble passing things through the House. Mike Johnson perhaps has the hardest job in politics right now, if he even gets to keep that job, which I guess we'll find out early next year. In the Senate, I think there's a little more leeway. Fifty three seats, assuming that's where we turn out, is kind of in between a what I would call like a comfortable majority and a kind of dicey one. So, for example,

Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are just two people. There are a couple of other Trump skeptical senators out there like Todd Young and Bill Cassidy, who maybe if the four of them joined together, they'd be able to defeat some of his cabinet nominees.

But they would all have to stick together. So he could afford Trump could afford a couple of defections in the Senate and still get most of his stuff done. So, you know, I would say that it's not a guarantee. Like if he were to try to appoint Elon Musk to be secretary of state or something like that, like I don't think that would get through the Senate. But I think most of what he plans on doing would probably be able to pass the Senate. It's the House that he has to worry about.

So this will all become clear in time. And I will say that for what it's worth, Democrats had a very slim majority when Biden took office in 2021. And sort of the pressure, the bully pulpit of the White House and the sort of pressure from rank and file voters and all of that served alongside Democrats.

Nancy Pelosi's leadership to form a somewhat cohesive Democratic Party, even in the face of really slim margins. And so, I mean, I don't think it would be shocking if on some of the big priorities for Republicans, they were able to replicate that.

that will all come with time. Right, exactly. And I think it's worth noting that Republicans have one of those things, which is a president in the White House that they want to deliver wins for, but they don't have the other, which is Nancy Pelosi's strong leadership. She really like the numbers bear this out. She was extraordinarily effective at corralling her caucus in a way that Republicans haven't been. So that's why I think I'm kind of expecting maybe Republicans will be a little more functional than they were last Congress, but I don't think they will be as functional as Democrats were under Biden.

Okay, back to the results for a second. So Democratic Senate candidates clearly outran Harris in the battleground states, outran her by just a couple points in the Midwest, but by more like six or seven points in Nevada and Arizona. Why?

I mean, I think at this point we we won't be able to say exactly why any particular outcome happened until we're able to get full data and more polling and things like that, talking to voters about the decisions they made. Changes down ballot tend to lag changes at the top of the ticket. So if you look at, for example, the southern part of the United States that used to consistently vote for Democrats, where

When it started shifting red, it shifted red at the presidential level first, and then down ballot seats sort of followed years later. So there may be a lagging indicator there of some realignment among some voters. There may also be a situation where certain voters maybe weren't happy with the Biden administration, weren't happy with the leadership of the Democratic Party, but do still consider themselves Democrats and were willing to cross party lines just on the presidential level. I will also note that we saw a

a significant number of ballots that had voted for Trump and nothing down ballot, just didn't vote at all down ballot, which might be a big flashing warning sign for Republicans in the future. If you've got voters that are only showing up just to vote for Trump and then don't care about any of that other stuff, that could be a problem. I think in Nevada was like 60,000 voters cast a ballot for Trump and then just didn't even vote for Senate. Yeah. And that's going to be a big part of how Jackie Rosen managed to hold on to that seat.

Yeah. To put some numbers on that, I was just looking that up. I think it's a really important dynamic. So Jackie Rosen got 47.9% of the vote. Kamala Harris got 47.5% of the vote. So they basically ran exactly even. Trump got 50.6% of the vote. Sam Brown got 46.3% of the vote. So there is that kind of drop off just on the Republican side that you're talking about. We should say in other states like Arizona, you did see the Democratic Senate candidate Ruben Gallego so far is running

significantly ahead of Kamala Harris. He's at 50 percent. Harris is at 47 percent. So it's not just that. But yeah, I think it's a combination of some voters who were mad at Biden

it, Biden and wanted to send a message and think that Trump is the guy to shake things up are just loyal to Trump and not necessarily loyal to Republicans down the ballot, which I completely agree with. Mary is a bad sign for the Republican brand when Trump isn't on the ballot in 2026 and 2028. But then I also think there is kind of the same dynamic we've been talking about for a while in this cycle when we were kind of commenting on polls of Democratic Senate candidates being stronger than than for Biden and then eventually Harris.

A lot of those Democratic Senate candidates are stronger and Republican Senate candidates are weaker, whereas at the top of the ticket, Biden was clearly the kind of the weaker candidate between the two.

One more down ballot question before we get to hot takedown, which is abortion ballot measures. So in a state like Missouri, Trump won by over 18 points. The abortion ballot measure passed by four points. In Florida, Trump won by 13 points. And while the measure didn't reach the required 60% threshold, 57% of Floridians voted for the abortion ballot measure.

We predicted this to a large extent, saying that voters would be able to see the difference and be able to cast a ballot in favor of abortion rights and also in favor of Trump. But does this tell us anything about abortion as an issue going forward? Like Republicans sort of drop it at this point, see that it's popular even in red states, or do Republicans who won despite the popularity of abortion rights try to pass legislation on it?

We wrote about in 2022 how common it is for Republican voters to support ballot measures that seemingly go against Republican policy positions on issues like minimum wage, Medicaid expansion, all these kinds of issues. This is a longstanding tradition in American politics that Republican-leaning voters are willing to vote for seemingly liberal policies on

on very specific issues. There's sort of a priorities question here, right? Voters might be voting for Republicans because of certain priorities, even though they might align with Democrats on other issues that they're willing to express in a ballot measure. I think that dynamic is probably going to continue. All right. Well, with that, let's move on to Hot Takedown. But first, a break.

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All right. The way that hot takedown works is I am going to share a take with you all that is out there in the ether, and we can either back it up or take it down based on the evidence that we have. Are you all ready, Nathaniel and Mary? Ready. Sure. All right. So let's start with one that's sort of personal here at FiveThirtyEight. This comes courtesy of the Wall Street Journal. The title is Pollsters Were Blindsided by the Breadth of Trump's Win.

Basically, this take is that the polls weren't accurate. Quote, pollsters as a group had prepared Americans for a very close presidential race, and that is the way it turned out in several battleground states. But the polling performance was a big miss in another way. The pervasiveness of Donald Trump's popularity wasn't fully telegraphed to the public. I see Mary making squinty eyes. Do you see me rolling my eyes?

If you can't see this year as some of the strongest evidence for how polls can help us understand elections, I don't know what to tell you. We came into this.

knowing that it was going to be pretty much a toss-up race. We weren't sure which candidate was going to win. The polls were within, what, two and a half points on average in all of the swing states. We've been saying for months that based on the polling we have and what we know about polling, it was very likely one candidate was going to sweep all of the swing states. Polls foreshadowed that Democrats would outperform the presidential ticket. They gave us

exactly the right states to pay attention to. They were very close on the margins in all of those states. I don't know what people want from polls if it is not this way of understanding elections. What is it that you would like this data to tell you that it did not tell you? They want the polls to tell you who's going to win within like, you know, point five of a point, like which is just not realistic for polls, as anybody who has listened to this podcast knows. That's simply not how math works. Exactly. Yeah. It's just not how math works. So as

is often the case with polling, is there's good news and there's bad news. The good news is our colleague, Elliot Morris, actually crunched the numbers that we have so far and concluded that nationally, the polling error was 2.7 percentage points. And in the battlegrounds, it was just two percentage points. That is the most accurate

accurate presidential election year polling that we have on record, so at least going back a quarter of a century, if not further. The average, as we have mentioned many, many times, is about four percentage points of error. So this

well outperformed the average. That's clear, and to the extent that we say polling is supposed to give us an understanding of what Americans want or hope for or opine on, the polls did exactly that. The bad news is that polls have underestimated the Republican candidate three presidential elections in a row. And so...

People rightly wonder if there is something about Trump that makes it difficult for pollsters to get an accurate read on his popularity, which is what the Wall Street Journal gets at, but I think way overdoes it with the whole blindsided narrative and that pollsters as a group didn't prepare Americans. I can't speak for

Yeah, no, I think you put it exactly right. You know, there was still a slight systematic undercurrent.

underestimation of Trump in the polls. And yeah, that does suggest that pollsters haven't 100 percent figured out what the issues were in 2016 and 2020 in terms of getting Trump voters on the horn. And that is something they're going to have to continue to look at. But that said, it is encouraging. I think that it was a much smaller miss than in past years. And they are at least getting closer. Maybe they've identified some of the factors and fixed some of the factors, but then some of them are more intractable. I don't know if I agree with that. Really? OK. I

I think this is a normal thing to happen mathematically, right? That's true. You are going to miss. This is within the range of reasonable and expected outcomes. I mean, I think the miss in 2016 was much more significant in terms of understanding the electorate and understanding the bifurcation of the electorate along educational lines, which we hadn't seen in previous elections. And that...

correction, I think, has done pretty well. And I don't necessarily buy that because polls happened to be in the same direction error three times in a row, that's evidence of systemic problems in the polling industry. I think this year we were so close as evidence, in fact, that they may have resolved some of those systemic problems and that this is just

how math works. Yeah. It's a 50% shot that this would have happened versus polling being wrong in the other direction. That's true. Yeah. You can flip a coin three times and get heads three times in a row, and it doesn't mean you have a weighted coin. That's absolutely true. But I do think at the same time,

Given kind of the stakes here, I don't think we can just ignore it and be like, oh, well, like everything's fine. It's probably just a mathematical fluke. And we also know right from studies that have been done that like Trump voters do have trouble responding to polls and like they are less trusting of institutions and things like that. I take your point that, yes, it's possible that it was just chance. But I also think that it probably wasn't, but also that it's not a crisis in a way that it would have been if we had seen a 2020 level polling error.

Let's move right along. Our next hot take comes courtesy of Bernie Sanders.

which is that Democrats have abandoned working people. He says, quote, it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party, which has abandoned working class people, would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. Do we have evidence that supports or rejects Bernie Sanders' hot take, Nathaniel? I just don't buy this because I think that the...

Biden administration in particular did a lot of pro-worker things or tried to do a lot of pro-worker things or things that Bernie Sanders would have liked. And it didn't really help his popularity. And I think for the large part, a lot of the blame for Harris's loss falls at Biden's feet for just being so unpopular. I think, you know, you look at like the infrastructure bill, you look at the fact that, you know, Biden, he like walked the picket line all

All sorts of things. And it just didn't penetrate with the electorate. They cared more about other things like inflation and immigration. And I think in terms of data to support this, I think the best piece of evidence is the fact that you look at the presidential results in Vermont, where Kamala Harris actually did better than Bernie Sanders did. So obviously, that's just one state, but it's also a state that Bernie Sanders is a very strong brand in. And that result really surprised me. And so I'm

I just don't think that being Bernie Sanders would have won this election for Democrats. I think as we discussed on the Tuesday Night podcast, there were much broader, frankly, inevitabilities at play.

Yeah, Nathaniel, I would actually go a step further. So I would agree with Bernie Sanders that the working class has abandoned Democrats. That conclusion, I think, is correct. So if you look at the exit polls, it looks like Trump won voters who make less than $50,000 by three percentage points. And that compares with 2020 when Biden won them by 11 percentage points. Of course, that's not final data, but it seems like there was a shift there. There was further polarization along educational lines. I mean, this was one of the first, I think, the first election where you could say, you

that the Democrat won college-educated white voters clear and away. There's no question there. It's been—it was close and questionable in 2016 and just a small margin in 2020. And here, Harris clearly overperformed with college-educated voters, underperformed with non-college-educated voters. But when it comes to the diagnosis from Sanders—

It's almost like the exact opposite. So it's the precise policies that Bernie Sanders promotes that Joe Biden adopted that caused this problem. When it comes to the American Rescue Plan, that was a $2 trillion bill that

Biden signed into law sort of straight away after getting into office. At the time, Larry Summers was saying this is terrible economic policy. It's going to be inflationary. This was also after Trump had already signed into law $3 trillion of COVID-era stimulus. And by the end of 2021, the San Francisco Fed Bank concluded that sort of excess governmental stimulus had contributed 3% to annualized inflation.

By the summer of 2022, we reached 9% annual inflation. As we talked about at the time, inflation affects everyone, whereas unemployment, while it can be bad and scary to be in fear of a layoff, it doesn't affect you every single time you purchase something, for example. And voters were clearly allergic to this kind of inflation. So it was, yes, a global phenomenon, but also a specific policy decision that Democrats made in the face of that global phenomenon. Immigration is the same thing.

The migrant crisis is a global phenomenon. And Biden and Democrats made decisions that actually aligned with Bernie Sanders pivot to being more liberal on immigration that made voters allergic to Democrats in some ways.

When Donald Trump left office, the encounters at the southern border were starting to peak, reaching 150,000 encounters in a month after an average of about 50,000 encounters per month during Trump and Obama's presidencies. During Biden's administration...

encounters continued to be at or above 150,000 per month and then reached a record high of 300,000 in December of 2023. And Biden did absolutely nothing about the issue the entire time until we got into a presidential election year and then said, OK, we'll try to come to some conclusion when it's common knowledge that like big bills don't have a lot of success in a presidential election year.

Then after, of course, Donald Trump did what he did in stymieing that, he proved to everyone that he could have done something about the migrant crisis all along because he enacted an executive action that closed the border between ports of entry to asylum seekers. So on the two issues that Americans said they care most about, it is the...

sort of more liberal than ever before policies of the Biden administration that put Democrats in the position that they were in. And they're absolutely the policies that the Bernie Sanders wing of the party support.

Right. And I think that you also have to give credit to the Republicans. Donald Trump has embraced protectionist trade policy. He has embraced anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies. And those are the things that working class voters are looking for. They are not looking for some of the things that Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden kind of wish that they were looking for.

Well, then let me go to our next hot take, which comes courtesy of, I guess we're going back and forth between which side of the political aisle we're getting our hot takes from. So it was the Wall Street Journal, then it was Bernie Sanders. Now it's Barry Weiss on Fox News. Her hot take is Democrats lost because they ran on, quote, niche cultural issues. She says, quote, it turns out running on these extraordinarily niche issues like gender fluidity or defunding the police don't actually matter or frankly feel profoundly out of touch to ordinary Americans.

Mary, are we supporting or taking down this hot take?

So first of all, I would love to see an example of a Democrat in 2024 in a competitive race talking about or running ads on trans issues or defunding the police. If she could send that to me, then I would really deeply appreciate it. Democrats did not run on those things. Republicans did run ads on those things about Democrats. There's a point inside here that's worth making.

But it's not the Democrats' fault what Republicans say about them. It is the Democrats' fault that they were unable to respond to those critiques in any meaningful way that stood out to voters. If the Republicans are going to lob all these attacks and the Democrats are not going to respond, not going to put those issues out there and be clear about what they stand for and believe in, I think that's a problem for Democrats. I think there's a broader problem here, which is like the view of the Democratic Party

party is being sort of defined in voters' minds by some of these extreme positions. So that's something that I think is a little tricky to

for Democrats to get passed. On the other hand, I don't really think there were many voters that were like single issue, trans issues voters. Not very many people are probably in that camp. There's probably a handful, but not a lot. So even if the Democrats are seen as extreme on this relatively niche issue, I don't know if that's going to drive a lot of voters to make up their mind based on that specifically.

Right. I mean, we know, again, from polls what voters care about and what they don't care about. They care about inflation and immigration. They don't care about transgender issues and defund the police or like crime. It just doesn't rank very high as a priority at this particular point in terms of voters issues. I would still question whether all those Republican anti-trans ads actually were responsible for their win. I think it was, again, these much broader structural factors.

Okay, so let me pose this to you then. A postmortem by Democratic polling firm Blueprint did find that cultural issues were among the reasons voters gave for not voting for Harris, although the economy and immigration were bigger factors. So they tested different messages. The number one issue is inflation was too high under the Biden-Harris administration. Far and away, you know,

by a 24-point margin. That's what folks are saying. Then second is too many immigrants illegally cross the border under the Biden-Harris administration. That matches inflation almost exactly. We've already talked about that. Then Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.

They also concluded that for swing voters who eventually chose Trump, so maybe late deciding folks or people who had not necessarily voted for Republican in the past, for those people, cultural issues ranked slightly higher than inflation. So I don't know if we can totally conclude based on the evidence that the cultural issues don't matter.

But I do think this gets at the cultural cleavage that Bernie Sanders is describing. I mean, once again, even if the prescription isn't necessarily right, but the whole, you know, college educated, non-college educated voter divide may come from these kinds of cultural issues. Nathaniel, do you disagree with that? Yeah, I mean, I don't think that taking unpopular positions helps a party, obviously. But I also think at the same time that

I don't know. Democrats have done a pretty good job, I would say, of distancing themselves, for example, from defund the police over the last four years. Like that's something they have actively run against, I would say. And I think it has at least neutralized that as a factor against them. I think, you know, there was a tweet from political scientist John Sides who noted that some of the wording in that blueprint study was, you know, a little bit lewd.

leading because you're saying, you know, Kamala Harris is focused more on culture issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle classes. That's something that I think that's easy for swing voters to agree with. I'm open to that, I guess, Galen, but it's also it's early. We're going to take a lot of time to to dig through these results and see.

I think also we just can't stress inflation enough. In some ways, inflation plus the immigration double whammy. Yeah, I mean, and we've talked about this before, but this is like the thing we've been seeing globally, right? Around the world that incumbent governing parties, regardless of which side of the aisle they they fall on or where on the political spectrum they fall, governing parties have been punished around the world this year.

So this brings us to then a hot take. I don't know if it's a hot take. It's a very database take from John Byrne Murdoch, who's been on this podcast before he's at the Financial Times. And he wrote, the incumbents in every single one of the 10 major countries that have been tracked and held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters. This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records. And then he charted the

the vote share, the loss of vote share for all of these major parties and concluded that the U.S. Democrats had almost the best performance globally in 2024 of any incumbent party. Good take. Yeah.

Yeah, I think this goes to the fact that Democrats did about as well as they could with the hand that they were dealt, I think. Well, hand that they were dealt and hand that they dealt themselves, Nathaniel. Sure, that Biden, I should be more precise, I guess, that Biden dealt them. But the fact that they decided not to run Biden was, I think, in retrospect, a good one. I think Harris ran a strong campaign.

I think a telling stat along these lines is that in the battleground states, Harris ran about three points behind where Biden ran in 2020, which obviously wasn't good and it was enough to lose the election. But, you know, it's not a horrible performance. In other states, she ran about six points behind Biden's 2020 performance on average. And I think that goes to show that kind of when you take the control environment of no campaigning and no kind of messaging,

there was a lot of drop off. There was a lot of dissatisfaction with Democrats and Harris was able to mitigate that somewhat in the swing state. So that's why I basically don't think that much of any of this loss can be laid at Kamala Harris's feet and why I think that Democrats aren't doomed as a party going forward. I don't think their brand is doomed to oblivion. I think that also shows that

Donald Trump is still a flawed candidate and a flawed messenger in the Republican Party as well. We still have two parties that are unpopular among the American people. I think Gallup's favorability numbers for both parties were underwater at last measure. So I think that John Byrne Murdoch's take is a good one.

Well, perhaps this leads to the next hot take, which is one that Trump made himself, and you'll hear plenty from his allies, which is that he has a, quote, unprecedented and powerful mandate. This is what he said in his victory speech. And of course, mandates are always a hot topic for political scientists in the wake of presidential elections, because how...

election results get interpreted by the public are almost as important as what the actual elections results are. This is why we're doing this sort of hot takedown exercise around narrative building. So unprecedented and powerful mandate. Mary, yes or no? This is definitely not an unprecedented mandate. If voters wanted to give the Republican Party a mandate to carry out whatever they wanted in their agenda—

They would not have chosen Democratic senators in four states that Donald Trump won at the top of the ticket.

They would not have chosen Democratic representatives in what will be something like 215 seats in the House of Representatives. A mandate would need a lot stronger majorities. I mean, I think ultimately the results of this election show what has been true basically since Donald Trump stepped onto the American political scene, which is that this is a divided nation and it still is.

Would you say that he has a mandate on certain issues? Would you say that he has a mandate on immigration, for example, or tariffs where polling suggests that Americans either agree with him or have come to agree with him after previously not agreeing with him there? I mean, because I'm looking at different pollsters have asked Americans about a lot of different policies that Trump has supported. And in general, on...

sort of trade protectionism and the border and deportations, Americans agree with Trump with outright majorities. But on things like, you know, threatening the independence of the Department of Justice or abortion measures or lowering the corporate tax rate to 15 percent or, you know, pardoning participants in January 6th or even, you know, sending U.S. troops into large cities to enact public order, those are well underwater.

Are they right to say that they have a mandate on part of Trump's agenda? Possibly. After the election, Reuters Ipsos ran a like election reaction survey. And one of the things they asked is whether voters thought it was likely that Donald Trump would do various different things. And some of them were these policy positions that you're talking about, like immigration and so on. And others were sort of not exactly policy, but things like would Congress try to block the agenda? You know, some various collection of outcomes.

Interestingly, there is only one thing on their list that when they asked voters, they said it was a majority of over 50 percent of voters said it was extremely or very likely that Donald Trump would actually do, which was order the mass deportation of people in the country illegally.

Nothing else on the list of priorities they asked about on the list of political outcomes. Nothing else had a majority of people saying, yes, I think that's going to happen. So, I mean, when you think about why people voted the way they did, what they what they chose, it seems to me that immigration is the one place where they actually think Donald Trump is going to do what he said and they want him to. Can I just chime in here and say that mandates are made up?

That's a great point. They are fake. They are social constructs. So as FiveThirtyEight contributor Julia Zari has studied and wrote about for the site all the way back in 2016, there is basically no correlation between like the

size of a candidate's victory and whether they are perceived to have gotten a mandate or whether Congress is particularly effective at implementing their agenda in the next Congress. It's actually a function of a couple of things. It's A, whether there is a media narrative that

the campaign has a or that the candidate has a mandate, which a lot of that is actually determined. The political science is found by the element of surprise. If if there was a surprise victory, then people have to explain it and be like, oh, well, the voters clearly wanted something different. And so, you know, there's a mandate for this. But another thing that can

that can do it is also the presidents themselves basically being like, I have a mandate. Do this for me, Congress. And like, actually, there there is some evidence that Congress does respond to that. Obviously, Trump, it looks like he's going to have control of both houses of Congress. So maybe they'll respond to that. But to Mary's point, they may not be able to because particularly in the House, they probably won't have the numbers.

All right. Well, we have not gotten nearly through all of the hot takes in our list for Hot Takedown. So maybe we will have to come back to this and make this a running activity in the interregnum period before inauguration. But we are going to leave things there. Thank you for your hot takedowns today, Nathaniel and Mary. Thanks, Galen. Thank you, Galen.

My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Trotavian. And our intern is Jayla Everett, or I should say our intern was Jayla Everett. Friday was her last day with us. And I just want to say a tremendous thank you for all of the hard work that she put into the show over the past year. We're really going to miss you and we wish you all the best in what comes next.

You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.

In the dry states of the Southwest, there's a group that's been denied a basic human right. In the Navajo Nation today, a third of our households don't have running water. But that's not something they chose for themselves. The Navajo Nation has been persistently denied

true sovereignty by the U.S. government because of the ongoing colonial relationship that we have. In this season of Reclaimed, I'll take you back over a hundred years to when a controversial deal was signed that would change the fate of the Navajo and how today a new deal being negotiated between the tribe and its neighboring states may do it again.

We will hear argument this morning in case 21-14-84, Arizona versus the Navajo Nation. Can the Navajo people reclaim their right to water? Our water, our future! Our water, our future! That's in the next season of Reclaimed, the lifeblood of Navajo Nation. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.