The Daily - Donald Trump’s America

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

As the fallout from the election settles, Americans are beginning to absorb, celebrate and mourn the coming of a second Trump presidency.Nate Cohn, chief political analyst for The Times, and Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent, discuss the voting blocks that Trump conquered and the legacy that he has redefined.Guest: Nate Cohn, chief political analyst for The New York Times.Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: Mr. Trump made gains in every corner of the country and with nearly every demographic group.His victory will allow him to reshape the modern United States in his own image.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

My name is Ava. I live in Atlanta, Georgia. I am 33 years old and I am so relieved. Daddy's home, baby. Welcome back, Donald J. Trump. The results of the election are amazing and just and the real true voice of the people. I'm excited, jubilant. I feel a sense of pride in my country. It just feels like a heavy burden has been lifted off of me. Last night it was like finally earning a certain type of respect. It was redemption.

Wars are going to finally end and America will be back on the hands of Americans again. I feel like God answered our prayers. I feel like God's giving us another chance. My name's Meredith Turner. I live in Virginia and I'm heartbroken and I'm terrified. I'm feeling more than just sad. I'm scared. I'm worried for my patients who might not be able to be covered under the Affordable Care Act.

I'm so surprised. I really thought that we were ready to move on from this guy. I feel like I'm out of touch with America. I guess the opposite is true. More people love him than ever. I just feel like I don't know this country anymore. From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. On Wednesday, Americans began to absorb, celebrate, and mourn the reality of a second Trump presidency and the sheer scale of his victory over Kamala Harris.

Today, my colleagues Nate Cohn and Peter Baker, on the voting blocks that Trump conquered and the legacy he has redefined. It's Thursday, November 7th. Nate, welcome back to the same studio where we spoke, it feels like, just a few hours ago. It really doesn't feel like it's been long at all. No. And I think the lack of sleep confuses the chronology even more. I want to talk to you about what we didn't get around to talking about in our conversation

in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. The one I walked out of. The one I walked out of. The one you walked out of because you needed to call Pennsylvania. We just didn't have a lot of granular data that took us under the hood of Trump's victory. So that's what we want to do with you now and understand really the sweep of his victory

in the smallest possible details. So where do you want to start? Well, Donald Trump made large gains in places all over the country. He made large gains with many, in fact, most demographic groups. One example is the Latino vote. Overall the exit poll found that Harris only won the Hispanic vote 52 to 46. That is the best result for a Republican since we have been asking about Hispanic ethnicity in exit poll data.

There's a county in South Texas called Star County. It's almost entirely Latino where Trump won by more than 15 points in a place that Obama was winning 80% of the vote just a few years ago and where Democrats have won in every election since the 19th century as long as we have election results and suddenly trump not only Best Kamala harris, but by 15 points by a lot. Wow, miami-dade county Trump won by 11 That's a place where hillary won by 30 just a few years ago. That's extraordinary It's a huge shift hillary won by 30 trump wins by 11 and I'm not so good at math, but that's a 40 point swing.

You've got it. It's a huge swing. It's the sort of swing that in a polarized country you might think isn't possible, and yet it happens. So Latino voters show up for Trump in a huge, and I think we are safe in saying historic way. For a Republican, yes, and it's part of why Trump did so well in Texas and Florida. And the next group I think we should talk about might be Muslim or Arab American voters. Dearborn, Michigan, a place where Arab Americans represent a larger share of the population than anywhere else in the country. Donald Trump won it, 42 to 36 36 with Jill Stein getting 18. Joe Biden won Dearborn 69 to 30 four years ago. So we can do our quick math of 39 plus six. It's a 45 point

swing in Dearborn in which Donald Trump gains among Arab American Muslim American voters. We have to suspect because of The protest vote against the sitting vice president for the Biden administration's policy towards Palestinians That's exactly right to me Maybe the next most surprising area of strength is just in general in the blue states when Donald Trump won in 2016 There was something fundamentally narrow about it was just concentrated on white working class voters in the Midwest. And if you were in a highly educated metropolitan area, you might've thought Hillary Clinton was going to win decisively.

Right. And you were surprised on election night. This time, Trump made big gains in blue America, including where we are right now in New York City and in New York State where right now Kamala Harris is only winning by 12 points. You say only 12 points what's the... Biden won by 23 huh just over the river in New Jersey right now Kamala Harris is only up by four. Wow. Closer than Arizona and Nevada if we were redrawing the battleground map New Jersey has as good of a case as some of the states that the Kansas have been visiting over and over again. The margin right now is eight points in Illinois and she's only up by 17 points right now in

her own home state in California. Donald Trump made big gains in the sort of places that seem to be the heart of the opposition to him four and eight years ago. So overall, what seemed to be the kinds of gains that rewrite a party's and a candidate's relationship with the electorate, with entire ethnic groups and entire regions of the country? Yes, but I have to say that I am more struck

by the breadth of Donald Trump's gains than I am by any narrow breakthroughs that he made among particular demographic groups. Donald Trump gained almost everywhere. If you go to the New York Times results page, we have this map that shows where places shifted from 2020. Right, so a series of red arrows. Red arrows if it's towards Trump, blue arrows if it's towards Harris.

Everywhere is red. I mean, there are a handful of exceptions, especially in like the sparsely populated West, but this is an election where Donald Trump made inroads among almost every group and in almost every county and almost every region. And that tells me that Donald Trump was propelled by something that's equally broad, something that cut through across demographic lines. That this wasn't a story fundamentally about narrow demographic changes or groups, but instead something you, I think that to explain what happened, you need something that explains all of these shifts.

And I think it's harder to do that if you focus your explanation on what caused the Hispanic vote to shift or what caused New Jersey to shift. There's something that was doing it everywhere. A grander theory. A grander theory. And that theory resonated somewhat differently from different groups, but a lot of it has to be coming from the same thing for the same pattern to emerge more or less everywhere. Okay, so now that you've brought us to this stage, please lift the curtain.

Give us the grand theory. It's not too grand. I think it's pretty simple that this comes down to some of the most basic fundamental things about how elections work. Voters wanted change. They were deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. They were deeply dissatisfied with the president and the economy. And they were not willing to send the vice president back into the

White House as a result. And just to put a fine point on it, no party has ever retained the White House when so many voters disapprove of the president and think the country is heading in the wrong direction. Never. Never. Now there were plausible reasons to think that the opposition to Donald Trump was so strong that Democrats could defy political gravity. That was a plausible theory for what would happen in this election. Listening to you say this, it doesn't make a lot of sense that Democrats were so confident

that this was plausible, but they were pretty confident, or at least they acted like they were very confident. Where do you think that confidence came from, given the rules of political gravity you just described? I think it all goes back to the midterms. To 2022. To 2022. Because the Democrats seemed to defy political gravity in that election.

You may remember that was supposed to be the red wave. Biden's approval rating was bad in that election. Midterms are usually bad for the party. Where inflation was happening in that election. But the Democrats were competitive in the House and they swept key Senate race after key Senate race where the Republicans had nominated MAGA backed candidates, stop the steal candidates. The Kerry lakes, right. The Kerry lakes of the world. Candidates who Democrats thought and who frankly I also thought were basically akin to Donald Trump. And so the implication was that voters dislike Donald Trump and the MAGA movement so much

in the wake of January 6th and the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe versus Wade that Donald Trump or his allies would not be able to win even the most classic battleground states, even in an environment where they really ought to win. And I think that outcome is behind a lot of the assumptions that people made about the 2024 campaign. And the assumption was that even against some pretty serious economic headwinds, a Trump style candidate, thus perhaps Trump himself, would not prevail given the baggage of Roe and January 6th.

That's right. And it seemed very plausible in the wake of the midterms. And especially when Donald Trump was looking ahead to the next two years of criminal indictments and so on. But that's not the way that it turned out. And why? I mean, if the lesson of 2022 was mistaken, where did it go sideways? I think that the core mistake was in drawing an equivalence between Donald Trump and the

Kerry Lakes or Doug Mastriano's of the world. Candidate for governor of Pennsylvania. Candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, stop the steel guy. If you are in our political analyst shoes, Lake and Mastriano and Trump, they seem like peas in a pod. These are all candidates who are distinguished by the effort to overturn the election and by their conduct that defies the norms of usual politics. And so when a Lake and a Mastriano go down, you might infer reasonably that Donald Trump

will also suffer the same fate But it is clear with hindsight that voters do not necessarily see an equivalence between Donald Trump and Carrie Lake or Doug Mastrano in fact, we saw it last night Carrie Lake is probably gonna lose right cuz now she's running again She's running again for Senate in Arizona and she's probably gonna lose With the same group of voters that's about to send Donald Trump back to the White House by maybe a comfortable four point margin. So clearly there are a lot of voters who look at Kerry Lake and look at Donald Trump and say, actually, I'm fine with Donald Trump, but they're not fine with Kerry Lake. That's not something I would have assumed a few years ago. I think that one way to think about it is that Donald Trump is sort of reaping some

of the advantages of being an incumbent. An incumbent who skipped a cycle. An incumbent who skipped a cycle. And maybe that's even better than being an actual incumbent given the anti-incumbent mood not just here in the US but all over the world. To become nostalgic. Yeah, the people looked back on Donald Trump's presidency as a time of relative stability. There weren't wars abroad, the prices were lower.

And Donald Trump today is a much stronger candidate than he used to be. And I think it's the same factors that make Donald Trump stronger today are the same ones that distinguish him from a Kerry Lake, even though they seem to be more or less the same kind of politician. So just to make sure I understand what you're saying here

about 2022, the mistake that political analysts seem to have made, the mistake that perhaps Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the entire democratic establishment made was to think that when MAGA acolytes of Donald Trump faltered in those midterms, it meant that he would falter. When instead, what we have seen from your grand theory explanation here, and all the gains within it among these different groups,

is that wasn't the case, and Trump did well with all these voters in all of these states who had real objections to the mini-me candidates. That's exactly right. Nate, all of this makes me wonder whether Trump's victory is a political realignment. Because that word gets used. The R word. When a candidate fundamentally alters their relationship or their party's relationship

with the entire electorate or major groups within the electorate. It's the high watermark of what someone can do in politics and we look for it really closely. And I think all of us have wondered if this race, because Trump seems to have done so much better with so many different groups, is that realignment. I'm personally listening to you starting to doubt that it is a realignment because it sounds like he did really well because of these age old political forces that are at play in this race. Unpopular president, bad economy does not necessarily a realignment make.

I can definitely see the case for that, especially if we're only looking at the 24 election in isolation. But I knew there was going to be a, but there's going to be a, but if, if we step back and take the three Trump elections together, 16, 20 and 24, I think there's a real case that we have witnessed a Trump realignment, a change in the basic conflict in American politics between the two parties. That Donald Trump redefined what the Republican Party was. It is no longer the lower case C conservative party of the establishment and the status quo.

It is now an anti-establishment party that advocates radical at times changes to the American establishment. Right, on issues like immigration. Immigration, trade, foreign policy, issues that were a consensus between the two parties in many cases. And as a result, I think this election looks

like the culmination of a realignment that really started in 2016, when Trump made those enormous gains among white working class voters. He didn't make the same gains among black, Latino or younger voters in that election in part because he wasn't experienced, he offended millions of people, he was seen as a sexist and a racist and so on. And for whatever reason, eight years later, those concerns have gradually faded and the

dissatisfaction with the status quo has risen to the point where now working class black voters, working class Hispanic voters, young voters, who previously would have been part of the opposition to Donald Trump have now joined white working class voters and built a fundamentally different political coalition than the Republicans had at the beginning of the Trump era. And to me, that meets the definition of a realignment if it lasts after Trump, if it's added up to a lasting change in politics rather than just be about this celebrity who's occupied center stage in American life for eight years. And I think that is where our colleague, Peter Baker, is going to pick up where you just

leapt off. So, Nate, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. I hope you do get some sleep. I do too. You too. We'll be right back. Peter, we just spoke to Nate Cohn about the mechanics of Donald Trump's victory across the electoral map and these broad gains that he made with pretty much every single group of voters. And for so long, Democrats have been telling a story about how Donald Trump is a fringe

candidate whose victory was a fluke in 2016. And what's clear now is that that's not true, which is what you, our chief White House correspondent and our resident presidential historian, have been thinking about since election day. So tell us about that. Right, exactly, because the question always was, is Donald Trump the asterisk in history or the inflection point where things have actually changed in a meaningful, sustained way?

And Democrats have said, as you rightly point out, throughout this campaign that he was an anomaly, an aberration, that he's not representative of the United States that we've all known for these many generations. In the final week of the campaign at Kamala Harris's sort of big closing rally, I was out on the ellipse. And one thing she said there was really striking. She says, you know, Donald Trump is not who we are.

This is not who we are. This is not who we are. And the only conclusion you can come to when you wake up after the election is that's exactly who we are. At least the majority of us, a majority who are voting clearly not only find Donald Trump to be acceptable, but their preferred champion. He's the one that they think does represent them. The things that outrage and offend his opponents are actually appealing in a lot of ways to his own base. Or at the very least, if they're not appealing, they're willing to put any concerns about them aside. And far beyond his base, as we learned from the fact that he's won the electoral college

and we believe the popular vote Exactly, and that's what makes this so striking. This is not 2016 when he got in through the electoral college, but still lost the popular vote That was always sort of an election with kind of a check mark next to it It did it, you know It obviously counts but he didn't have the support of the majority of Americans. By the way, not for a single day of his presidency did a majority of Americans say they approved of his job performance, unlike any president in our history. And of course, he didn't get a majority

in 2020 either. So the thought was he's always a minority candidate, one who succeeded in 2016, but really doesn't represent the American people writ large. This election shows that he does actually. And you're right, if he wins the popular vote, which is the way it looks right now, he will take that as vindication, that he was right all along. And in fact, what this tells us now is we've had a president who's done something that nobody has done,

no president has done in more than a century. Which is what? Which is to bounce back done something that nobody has done, no president has done in more than a century. Which is what? Which is to bounce back from a defeat and win again, right? Not since Grover Cleveland in the 1880s has a defeated president come back to win again. And what that means is that the Trump era isn't over. It's gonna go on for another four years. It will last basically at least 12 years

between the time he takes the office the first time and assuming he finishes the second term. That's an extraordinary amount of time. So what you're positing here is that by losing in the middle, Trump expands the timeframe of his influence over our politics from the traditional eight years of a two-term presidency to 12 years. Yeah, because in fact, who do we talk about most over the last four years? It actually wasn't Joe Biden. It certainly wasn't Kamala Harris. The person who dominated the national conversation for four years, even though he wasn't president, was Donald Trump. Why? Because he was indicted once, twice, three times,

four times. He was put on trial, convicted. There was another trial, civil trial, and another civil trial. And then there was his dominance in the primaries. And suddenly you realize that he's not gone away. He's not the pariah that I think a lot of people, even Republicans, thought he might have been after January 6. In fact, he's as powerful within his party as ever. Right. There was this temptation to see his loss as a very important repudiation of him, right? But it feels like his time outside the White House actually seemed to increase his popularity and make his return to power more possible. It really did.

And that's a unique thing in modern times. Our politics traditionally in our lifetime, Michael, has been that if you lose, you're done. You know, nobody wants you back. We're gonna move on. That never happened here. And he forced Republicans who might have wanted to move on to get in line behind him anyway. he forced Republicans who might've wanted to move on

to get in line behind him anyway. Because he showed that he had such a connection to the base, such a connection to the Republican voters that elected officials who thought he was bad news or wished he had moved on realized that they couldn't afford to do that because they themselves would be then on the outs. And his dominance of the Republican party allowed him to vault back into the arena

with a head of steam and then propelled him through this fall campaign with enough energy and enough enthusiasm to take on the, first the incumbent president and then the incumbent vice president and to force one out of the race and then defeat the other one at the ballot box. And not just defeat that other one at the ballot box. And not just defeat that other one at the ballot box,

but in a fashion that broadened the coalition that Trump had created back in 2016. Peter, this is gonna appeal to your historical mind, but there really only is a single president that I can think of whose legacy extends to something like 12 years. And that of course is FDR. I don't know if that's a comfortable analogy. I know Joe Biden wouldn't like it.

He saw himself as FDR-esque. Is that the right place to go? Yeah, this is one of these great geek questions that historians will sit there and argue about. But I think it's an important one because, obviously Trump is no FDR in lots of ways, and that's not a comparison either one of them would embrace. But to the extent that FDR was president for 12 years,

won a fourth term and would have been president longer had he not died in office, he dominated the American scene for so long that a whole generation grew up without knowing any other president. And I think about that today. Like you have 30 year old voters who went to the polls this week, who have never voted for a president that didn't, you know, contest did not involve Donald Trump in it. Right. He is now in the Republican nominee in three presidential elections in a row. And I think that his dominance is unlike any president I've seen in his own party. I don't think Reagan commanded the loyalty of the Republican Party in the same way that Trump does now. I don't think Clinton

or Obama did in the Democratic parties. I think that Trump is very sweet, generous here. Well, Peter, if we think that FDR is the closest analogy in this conversation to Trump, I think we can agree on what FDR and his legacy mean to us to this day, right? That it's the birth of a social safety net, it's social security, it's the promise of a government to the American people embodied by the New Deal. Many of those programs remain with us to this day. How are we supposed to think

about Trump's 12-year legacy and what it means to us? Right, absolutely. No, I mean, FDR changed the course of the country, right? He invented in effect a new American social compact. Reagan did the same thing. It was sort of like the reaction 40 years later to FDR. Well, now here we are 40 years after that, and we may have the next president who is changing the course of the country. In this case, Donald Trump, with 12 years both in power and influential on the stage, has rewritten our understanding of the politics of America, rewritten our understanding of the electorate, rewritten our understanding of the politics of America, rewritten our understanding of the electorate, rewritten our understanding of our place in the world.

And it's not on the same liberal conservative spectrum of an FDR at Reagan, it's a whole new version of that. His conservatism is nationalist and protectionist and isolationist and nativist, all of these things. At the same time, it's culture war and appealing to those who feel like the country has drifted away from what they remember it being. So it's its own unique Trumpian brand of politics. And I guess the question will be after 12 years, and this is looking too far ahead probably,

how enduring is it? What happens after he leaves? Does it continue to have an effect the way FDR did long after he was in office? Right, and Peter, in our conversation with Nade, he looked at all the things you just described and said that it amounts to a political realignment. But of course, what it may also amount to

is a policy revolution that of course was cut short in 2020 when Trump lost. Now there's gonna be a second term and we're gonna see if Trump is going to remake the country in pretty much his own image. Yeah, I think it's kind of an American realignment, not just a political realignment in that sense, right? It is one of these moments in history

where you can see things begin to turn. And so that's the question. I think you've framed it exactly right. We are gonna have four more years now of Trump in office. And then the question becomes, what is the impact after he leaves? What legacy does he leave behind? Has he changed us permanently, or at least for a sustained amount of time?

Years to come, is Trump still the guiding force, in effect, for where our country is heading and how it sees its place in the world. Peter, thank you very much. Thanks for talking to me. On Wednesday afternoon, Vice President Harris conceded to Donald Trump during a phone call. Shortly afterward, Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon. Harris addressed her supporters on the campus of Howard University in Washington, D.C. The outcome of this election is not what we wanted,

not what we fought for, not what we voted for. But hear me when I say, hear me when I say, the light of America's promise will always burn bright. In a speech, Harris said that while she had conceded the election, she would never concede the values that had animated her campaign. And so to everyone who is watching, do not despair. This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves. This is a time to

organize, to mobilize, and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom and justice and the future that we all know we can build together. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Wednesday, the Democratic Party's hopes of retaking the House of Representatives began to fizzle. Republicans held on to four seats that Democrats had sought to flip in New York, New Jersey, Wisconsin and Iowa. As a result, Republicans expressed growing confidence that they would keep control of

the chamber. If that happens, Republicans will control every lever of power in Washington—the House, the Senate, and the presidency. Today's episode was produced by Astha Chaturvedi, Shannon Lin, Mary Wilson, Luke Vanderplooke, Stella Tan, Nina Feldman, Claire Tenesqueder, and Will Reed, with help from Mujzadeh. It was edited by Devon Taylor and Brendan Klinkenberg, contains original music by Marian Lozano, Sofia Lin, and Rowan Yamisto, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsfork of Wonderly. Special thanks to Rhonda Cason. That's it for the day of me.

I'm Michael Baboro. See you tomorrow.