America's Talking - Mandate? Trump’s Big Win Fuels Talk of Policy Actions

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

Former President Donald Trump is on track to potentially receive 300 electoral votes or more. He won the national popular vote by about 5 million with votes still being counted. As a result, some analysts and Republicans say Trump and the GOP have a “mandate” to aggressively push forward with their agenda. "America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate," Trump said in his speech early Wednesday morning, creating a refrain echoed by his supporters. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, Chief Content Officer at Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire Service. We are recording this on Friday, November 8th. Former President Donald Trump is now President-elect Trump after his historic win in Tuesday's election. Joining me to discuss this is Casey Harper, Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief for the Center Square. Casey, we've been saying for months that this was a tight presidential race, turns out it wasn't. What happened? Well, Dan, I mean, we did intimate this for weeks and weeks, which is that Trump had a slight lead in every swing state. And it turns out those slight leads all panned out,

those electoral votes pile up. And so in some sense, it was close in the swing states. You know, Trump did not win these swing states by 10 points. But it was not close in the sense that he won basically all of them, which was not expected. And, of course, the votes were still being counted. And, you know, we don't want to overstate anything. But he's really dominated Kamala. It's no other way to put it. He's on track to be well over 300 electoral votes and, you know, leading the popular vote by four million.

I think that's the most surprising part, Dan, when you talk about it wasn't close, is the popular vote. because you could say, well, every swing state was pretty close, and he just happened to win every swing state narrowly. So, and those votes piled up. But the popular vote wasn't close at all. I mean, he was the, he's the first Republican to win the popular vote since 2004 when George W. Bush did so. Romney, you know, didn't win it. Even Trump was elected didn't win the popular vote the first time around. So that is really the most amazing part of all this to me is that he ran up the total on the popular vote, really crushed Kamala, sweeping win in the Senate. Republicans will have control of the Senate. And it's still too early to say definitively, but it looks like they're on track to have a narrow lead in the House as well. So really a ringing endorsement, as some have said for Trump, for Republicans, for his agenda.

Trump's calling it a mandate. and I think he has every right to do that right now. So let's talk about the swing states here for a minute. The swing states on the eastern side of the company, including the blue wall of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. He swept all three of those. He also won Georgia and North Carolina. So voters resoundingly rejected Vice President Kamala Harris.

versus campaign essentially in favor of Trump. Now, Arizona and Nevada are still to be determined. Votes are still being counted. But last I checked, Trump has significant leads in the two states. What I'm looking at here is 52% to 46% in Arizona, 51% to 47% in Nevada. So while votes are still being counted there, it's likely, in my, non-expert analysis, going to be a clean sweep of the swing states. On the popular vote side, Trump, the last I checked there, had about a 4 million vote lead. There are still plenty of votes to be counted,

particularly on the West Coast states, the blue states of California and Washington. But Democrats are unlikely to close that significant gap right there. So obviously, President Trump declared victory early Wednesday morning. Yesterday, President Biden finally spoke and said there would be a peaceful transfer of power. What's next in terms of the presidential election? Well, now it really comes down to,

can Trump correct the mistake that he made the first time around? Many, but even most of Trump's supporters acknowledge that Trump made a big mistake in choosing personnel for the White House. It was a very tumultuous White House, a lot of turnover and personnel, people leaving, people writing books, people later, I mean, John Kelly is probably the best example, later going on to trash Trump. And so there's this perception in the Trump camp with Republicans broadly that Trump's Achilles heel was that he put the wrong people around him. So this is a second chance. He's got to put a new set of people around him. I would say Republicans are a lot more

organized this time. They're a lot more prepared. The Republicans admitted last time around that they did not expect him to win in 2016. And so they really weren't prepared for the transition and to govern quickly. And so they were really behind the ball on this one. So this time around, you know, Trump has named his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who who helps run his campaign, is pretty respected in the Republican Party. And, you know, Trump and her are going to have to quickly but effectively and efficiently just line up these cabinet heads, the personnel. And then, you know, all the talk about Project 2025, which was an ad nauseum reference in this campaign for some of the policy proposals.

And of course, those policy proposals were pretty conservative and, you know, for that reason, a lot of on the left didn't like them. But the Project 2025 started as a resume bank to fill the new administration with Trump loyalists. Right. So Project 2025 actually is going to really come in handy right now. People are being vetted. They have this giant bank of resumes that are sort of are being pre-vetted and so that they can staff all these agencies with, you know, sort of via the Heritage Foundation's group. And there's a lot of other conservative groups involved. But they can staff the administration with loyalists. And so this is really the next step for Trump. Of course, he's got some policies he wants to lay out. but I think right now it's all personnel.

So Trump essentially ran on a few key issues. The economy, during the Biden-Harris administration, we saw 40-year high inflation prices more than 20 percent since they first took office. Of course, the border crisis with about more than 14 million illegal border crossers, and by far an all-time high for any administration says he's going to close the border, deport, criminal, illegal immigrants who are in the country. And then for lack of a better term, took on sort of the woke America, the woke left with all these DEI initiatives, things like that. Is he, with him in the White House, Senate controlling, the Republicans controlling the Senate,

likely to control the House, is he going to. going to be able to get the things done that he wants to get done? He's going to be able to, but will he do it? I mean, I think it comes down to prioritization, Dan. I've already seen these Republicans, some of these Republicans like vultures are circling around, just ready to supplant Trump's agenda with their own agenda. I think this really did happen last time around in many ways. There's people who are very entrenched in Washington, you know, here where I'm based, who've been doing this for a long time. They know a lot of people. They know, the policy forward and backwards. The bills are already written then. I mean, there's legislation that's

written years ago in the tank waiting for a Republican president. And so what I think Trump's mistake last time was, and I think he has the potential to correct it, but you can only pass so many bills. A new president only has the political capital to do a few things. With Obama, Obama was such a popular president, but he spent most of his political capital on Obamacare. Right. It was a grueling fight that he finally, you know, finally got it passed. And after that, I mean, you know, he had some things around the edges, but he, you know, he couldn't pass for Obamacare level things. And, you know, Biden, what did Biden do? He, he didn't even have anything on the level of Obamacare. He passed a lot of spending, really. He just spent a lot of money

with the help of, sometimes with the help of Republicans, sometimes without their help. So I think Trump really has to prioritize if he wants to get anything like this done, because if he starts off, with tax reform like he did last time, and then he tries to repeal Obamacare. He might turn around, and it's been a year, and he hasn't done anything on immigration or the things that he more focused on when he ran for office. Thank you for joining us today. Casey, listeners can keep with all things about the transition of the government and more at thecentersquare.com.