You Can't Outrun Voters' Feelings About The Economy
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Hey, this is Ebony Tower from Rat City Roller Derby in Seattle, Washington, and I just got back from watching the Global Championships of Roller Derby in Portland, Oregon. This podcast was recorded at 12.08 p.m. on Wednesday, November 6th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I'll still be celebrating Rose City taking home the Hydra. Okay, here's the show.

Hey, congratulations. The Hydra. Congratulations. I don't know what that is, but it sounds like a fancy trophy. I'm being told in my ear it's a trophy, so that's correct.

I feel like I've been in a roller derby, just the lack of sleep that we've all been having. I was going to say there's a roller derby joke to make, but my brain is a little too tired to make it. So hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Frank Ordonez. I cover the campaign. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And just after 5.30 Eastern time this morning, the Associated Press, a

This wasn't just a Trump victory. This was a Trump whooping.

all over America. Yeah, I mean, those details speak to that whooping. I mean, this was a big win. Polls showed us that this was supposed to be a photo finish. It was supposed to be a coin flip. It was supposed to be one of the closest races in modern history.

Instead, it was the biggest win for Republicans since 2004 when George W. Bush won the popular vote and Trump looks like he is on the way to win the popular vote. He came out yesterday saying that he had a mandate. He pointed to all the flipped Senate races and he said he was going to do his thing. He said God saved him so he could save the country.

Let's talk about mandate more. Trump campaigned on a lot of clear and sometimes provocative policy ideas, and he intends to make good on them. Let's start in the short term. What should people be looking for? Yeah, I mean, Trump's talked about this. He's talked about his first day. He's talked about his first few hours, which he said he would use to close the border. He's also said he would start drilling. Of course, his famous line, drill, baby, drill, which is he promises to gut the

Biden's climate subsidies and resume an energy exploration and the issues with energy as perhaps the biggest driver of inflation and therefore drilling to be the biggest thing to help address inflation. He's made it very, very clear that his main goal is to unwind President Biden's policies and basically preserve where he left off after his first term in office.

And I'll just add on the foreign policy front, you can expect him to start waiving that threat of his favorite word, tariffs, against adversaries and frankly also against allies. And he's also promised to end the wars in Ukraine and Middle East. He said he could end the fighting in Ukraine actually before he even took office.

I mean, his Republican allies on the Hill have already been talking about an aggressive 100-day agenda. Right out of the gate, the Senate Republican majority is going to want to confirm Trump's cabinet picks. He's going to have the votes to get them through.

Maybe on day one.

Senate Republicans, House Republicans are keenly focused on renewing Trump's 2017 tax cuts, adding additional tax cuts that Trump has campaigned on. And that's something they want to get done really quickly. He promised mass deportations. He has promised a lot of things.

It's not clear how quickly all of those things can happen, but trying to unwind some of the Biden era policies seems like a place where they could certainly start. Tim, to me, there's two stories out of this. On the one hand, this is a story of MAGA dominance all over the country. But last night,

saw what I think is fair to call a collapse of the Democratic Party coalition. Not only did Harris not yet win a single contested state, but even in reliably blue states like New York and New Jersey, she dramatically was underperforming Biden's performance in 2020. So if you look at there are these maps out there that show what direction counties moved. And

basically it's all a bunch of red arrows to the right all over America, all over the country. And, you know, there are a lot of things going on here and we will be analyzing this forever. Certainly you saw among core groups that have been part of the Democratic coalition, a softening of support. You saw Harris simply just not perform as well as Biden did in a lot of places. Let's think about what has happened in the country in the last,

you know, 10, 15 years. You had the Obama era. You had the Great Recession. You had COVID. And there's been sort of this back and forth in American politics, this sort of whiplash. It is a relatively narrowly divided country, maybe not as narrowly divided as we thought. But there is just this tug and the country has sort of been swinging back and forth and

And if you look around the world, that has also happened. There has been massive backlash to the incumbent party all over the world in elections that have been happening. And Harris tried to have the mantle of the change candidate, but she also never separated herself from President Biden. She could never explain what she was going to do differently or what she would have done differently. And in the face of that,

People voted for change. Deirdre, this was also a resounding victory so far for Republicans down the ballot. Republicans have taken the Senate. They're guaranteed at least a 52-seat majority. That could climb as high as 54, 55. There's about five races still not called.

One thing I think is important to think of in the context here is this is a different Republican Party than when Donald Trump won in 2017. So different. I mean, you think about the incoming class of Senate Republicans, you know, Montana Senator-elect Tim Sheehy, Ohio Senator-elect Bernie Marino. These are candidates that were recruited in conjunction with Trump, right?

Steve Daines, the head of the Senate Republicans campaign arm, made a strategy to focus on coordinating closely with Trump to avoid kind of the mistakes of the last cycle when some of Trump's endorsed candidates weren't so much vetted and fell short. We expected Republicans to take

control of the Senate. But they did better, I think, than a lot of people expected in a lot of these blue wall states. I mean, some of these races were still waiting to be called. But I think with this 54, maybe 55 seat majority, they have a cushion. They have the votes to get Trump's picks confirmed for his cabinet, for the federal judiciary, potentially for the Supreme Court. They

They could lose a couple of moderates on nominees and still get things through.

Right. And right.

Republican leaders in the House are all very confident that they're going to hang on to their very narrow majority. It's not going to be

significantly different than the majority they currently have. But the difference is, obviously, night and day with the balance of power with partners in the Senate and a partner in the White House, they feel like they have a mandate now, based on these election results, to push through some pretty aggressive policies. I mean, they feel like the country wants a strong border security bill. There isn't going to be any

feeling like they have to broker any sort of bipartisan kind of compromise the way they did a few months ago. And, you know, Trump killed that. And that kind of thing is just not on the table anymore. So I think you're going to see a whole series of conservative policies being

push through the House and Senate. You know, narrow margins, we should remember, there's always a chance that you have a couple of members who don't want to play along with the team. But I think there is going to be a massive incentive for the party to sort of stay on the same page. But in terms of the

The makeup of Congress, the moderates, the people who were concerned by Trump, the people who voted for impeachment, those people are gone. For the most part. They either lost their races or they left. And and so this is Trump's Republican Party far more than it was in 2017. I mean, Franco...

Trump at this point just seems like an almost unstoppable force in American politics. He also in 2025 will enter the White House better prepared, more experienced, a very clear agenda he wants to execute, which was very different than he entered in 2017. And frankly, a lot of axes to grind. And in terms of velocity, I think the country should be prepared for a pretty intense beginning of the new administration. Do you think that's fair to say?

I think that is fair to say. I mean, he's come in with many promises and of course he's not the first, you know, president elect to make big commitments, but he has something else. I mean, he also has four years of, you know, experience of, of knowing how to do these things. Uh,

many very controversial things. Let's just talk about one, the travel ban. It took him about two years to kind of figure out how to do the travel ban, fought it in the Supreme Court. It went back and forth. They tweaked it this way, they tweaked it that way. They added some countries, they took some countries back.

But in the end, he had a travel ban that blocked residents from Muslim majority countries to come into the United States. It's that kind of experience that he now has. Of course, there are limitations, though, as well to immigration. Tam was talking about immigration and the mass deportation policy that he's promised.

Well, there are real operational challenges to do that, political challenges to carry out that kind of thing. You know, I question whether the American public would really stand for such a thing. But the practicality, you just would need, it would just cost so much to build the manpower to do that. You would have to, and the rules and laws that you would have to change in order to get, to extend military power, to extend,

police force power to to kind of carry that out and I'll just add one more thing

You know, we've talked about how the guardrails are off this time. When he goes into office, he won't have some of the kind of more moderate established people on his staff. And he looks he's going to have more of his own people there. Well, he is not the only one who's going to be prepared for this. You know, you have groups like the American Immigration Council, the ACLU and others who are taking steps.

to kind of prepare for this second administration. And you can expect that those civil rights groups are going to be ready and have their legal pens out and ready to go to the courts as soon as they can. Okay, let's take a quick break. We have a lot more to say when we get back.

Okay, so does this sound like you? You love NPR's podcasts. You wish you could get more of all your favorite shows. And you want to support NPR's mission to create a more informed public. If all that sounds appealing, then it is time to sign up for the NPR Plus bundle. Learn more at plus.npr.org. And we're back. And, Tam, I think we need to dig in a little bit more to what happened in the Democratic Party and the coalition last night.

Just one of many data points that I think Democrats are going to find staggering is that according to the exit poll data that we have now, which could, of course, still change, Kamala Harris performed worse with women than either Hillary Clinton did in 2016 or Joe Biden did in 2020, which I think Democrats will find staggering considering how much they focused on women in this campaign and how much they thought the debate around abortion rights would result in the largest gender gap potentially in our lifetimes. And that didn't bear out. Right. And...

the Harris campaign also spent a huge amount of time focused on the suburbs, focused on college educated white women, focused on trying to persuade squishy Republicans to come to her to sort of make up for deficiencies in other parts of the traditional Democratic base. And in the end, it just didn't happen. In the end, Harris didn't perform any better in the suburbs, didn't perform any better with women.

And the reality is there are a lot of women, likely, there are a lot of women who went into the polling booth and in many states voted in favor of expanded abortion access and also Donald Trump. This is, to me, what has to be the siren for Democrats is that a lot of voters have clearly cleaved that issue in their mind, that they can support abortion rights and vote for Republicans. And for Democrats, that has to be

An absolute panic moment in politics. I mean, they clearly underestimated the massive unhappiness about the economy. And I think that you see that across demographic groups and clearly among women. I mean, the issue of abortion was sort of the issue they kept saying over and over. All the Democrats that you talk to going into this election in House races and Senate races, that's the issue that's going to bring out women. You know, the gender gap is going to bring us over the top.

You know, I talked to people when I was out on the trail and people were sort of like, inflation is really high. And I would ask candidates like, are people talking to you about abortion? They're like, we're also going to address high costs. That's also on our agenda. But it was not the top emphasis, at least in some of the races I saw. Franco, another group that I think –

And there's a lot of demographic groups that are worth talking about. But another one that I do think we have to highlight because it was one of the biggest swings between 2020 and 2024. And you flagged this early in the campaign. Latino men, they broke for Biden in 2020 and they swung big towards Trump in 2024. Yeah, specifically the Latino men swinging big was really eye-catching.

I mean, we talk a lot about the rhetoric against immigration, largely Latino immigrants, Latino migrants. But it's clear that Republicans have been making inroads with Latino voters, many of whom want a stronger border for many of the same reasons many Americans do. They feel competition for jobs. They're concerned about security issues.

And I would say that even though this the talk angers and rubs a lot of people the wrong way and makes people vote Democrat, they still voted Democrat in very, very, very large numbers. Let's be very clear about that. But a good number of Latinos just see that kind of rhetoric as.

as more bluster, more bark than bite. You know, I say a lot that Latinos are not a monolith. You know, so much depends on where they migrated from, what kind of income they have, what kind of education level they have. Another really big factor is kind of what...

when not only when they arrive, but what generation American are there? That was something that the Trump team told me that they really dialed into. And they found in their numbers, especially in key states, battleground states like Nevada and Arizona, that a good number of the Latinos were second and third generation Latinos. Therefore, they saw them voting largely along the same lines as every other American.

One thing that has been striking to me as we tape this around 1230 on Wednesday afternoon is the silence coming from the Democratic Party. Kamala Harris is scheduled to speak later tonight, but she has not yet spoken, even though the race has been called. Haven't heard much, correct me if I'm wrong, Deirdre, from Senate Leader Chuck Schumer, House Leader Hakeem Jeffries. I mean, the recriminations game begins now for the Democratic Party. I think I would just ask sort of, who are you watching here? What are you watching for? I mean, the Democratic Party has a lot of soul searching to do coming out of this election.

I feel like it's just sort of a funeral atmosphere that we're seeing from sources. They're tired. They're deflated. They're shocked and stunned. I think what I'm looking for is...

What's going to come out of it? I mean, are they really going to shake up their message? I mean, I've covered a lot of presidential election, congressional elections and Democrats at all these events were the party of the working class, were the party of the middle class. They got wiped out. And what is their message to what they think was the sort of backbone of their own party?

is that even their party anymore? And I think the other big question is sort of who are the next generation of leaders if there are going to be sort of new messengers for the party? And I wonder if there are people from, you know, the Midwestern states, other states, sort of like not typical Washington politicians from the House or the Senate, you know, that can show something different than what came out of Washington. I think what we are seeing, what little we are seeing is, uh,

Democrats coming at this with their priors. So people say, oh, well, we shouldn't have listened to the left. We shouldn't have kowtowed to the progressive left. And that's why. Or it's, well, we shouldn't have been trying to recruit the Liz Cheney's of the world. We, you know, we shouldn't have moderated as much what people really need as a progressive agenda.

I don't know where this lands. Usually it is the presidential nominee that determines where the party is. So it could be a few years before Democrats truly figure this out. But there has to be some kind of reckoning because this was a great big loss. Franco, we've said this a million different ways in this podcast, I think now over the last eight years.

But Donald Trump has really rewritten the rules of American politics just in this victory alone. He proved that you can run a base-focused national campaign and still win. He proved that you don't need to run a traditional, structured, RNC-driven ground-game operation to win. He also defied the maximum politics that the candidate that is generally more popular almost always wins. Kamala Harris had a higher net favorability rating in this campaign.

I think there's a lesson for all of us here that we sort of have to forget all the rules and start over from now. Yeah. Don't forget the first convicted felon to take the White House. I mean, this is kind of the most stunning political comeback ever.

ever. And, you know, just speaking to what Deidre and Tam were saying, I mean, it's, you know, something that Democrats are going to be wrestling with for a long time. I mean, he was able to tap into something so profound that Americans were, you know, willing to overlook all those things you're talking about, all the scandals, all the criminal indictments, you know, overlook the, you know, stoking of January 6th that, you know, created the attack on the Capitol.

I mean, it is a time that I think we're all going to be studying for quite a while. Really. And I'm sure we're going to have a lot more to say about that on the pod soon. But that is it for us today. Thank you all for the last 24 hours and the last couple of years. It's been quite a ride. We'll be back in your feeds tomorrow. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics.

I'm Franco Ordonez. I cover the campaign. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.