The Journal. - Red, White and Who? It's Trump.

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

After flipping Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Donald Trump will become the 47th President of the United States. In the early hours of the morning, Molly Ball and Ryan Knutson discuss election night and Trump's victory. Further Listening: - Red, White and Who? Playlist  - Red, White and Who? An Electoral College Blowout?  - Red, White and Who? The Undecided Voters Who Could Decide The Election  Further Reading: - Live Coverage from WSJ  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You could be honest. How do you, how, I mean, it's 3 11 a.m. How do you feel right now? I'm, I'm wide awake. It's election night. This is the exciting time when we finally get to learn the answer to the question that we've been asking for so long. All right.

So, well, let me, let me ask you that question. Red, white, and who? Well, Ryan, it appears, ding, ding, ding, we have a winner. It is red, white, and Donald Trump. This is a magnificent victory for the American people that will allow us to make America great again. So at this moment, we're talking just after 3 a.m. and the race hasn't officially been called at this moment,

but there doesn't seem to be any path for Kamala Harris to win at this point. And Donald Trump has declared victory. The one thing that is the most surprising to me is that we know who the winner is tonight. I mean, we thought for such a long time that there would be days potentially before we would get an answer. And it turns out they were much better at counting votes than we thought. And also the margins are not quite as close as we feared. That was the reason, remember, that we thought that it might take days to get an answer was

just because if the margins were going to be as close as 2020, where it was 12,000 votes in Georgia, for example, then we really might still be waiting. But as of this moment, it looks like Donald Trump is winning Georgia by about three percentage points and more than 100,000 votes, which means we don't have to wait for the last five

or 10,000 votes to come in to know who won. What is the significance of this moment? You have to say that this is one of the greatest comebacks in American political history. A lot of people counted Donald Trump out. There's only been one time before in our history that a president who has lost an election has then come back and won again later.

And a lot of people didn't think he could do it, but it appears that Donald Trump will be both our 45th and our 47th president of the United States. OK, Molly, well, let's let's get into it. States. Okay Molly, well let's let's get into it. From the Journal, this is Red, White and Who. Our show about the road to the White House. I'm Ryan Knudsen and I'm Molly Ball. It's Wednesday, November 6th. Coming up on the show, Donald Trump looks set to retake the White House. It's hockey season, and you can get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats.

Well, almost, almost anything. So no, you can't get a nice rank on Uber Eats. But iced tea, ice cream, or just plain old ice? Yes, we deliver those. Goal tenders, no. But chicken tenders, yes. Because those are groceries, and we deliver those too. Along with your favorite restaurant food,

alcohol, and other everyday essentials. Order Uber Eats now. For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See app for details. What do Ontario dairy farmers bring to the table? A million little things.

But most of all, the passion and care that goes into producing the local, high-quality milk we all love and enjoy every day. With 3,200 dairy-firming families across Ontario sharing our love for milk, there's love in every glass. Dairy Farmers of Ontario. from our families to your table, Everybody Milk. Visit Milk.org to learn more. You're at the Kamala Harris official watch party at Howard University in Washington, D.C. tonight.

What was the mood there, like, right now and over the past few hours? Well, it started out very joyful and cheerful, and, you know, they had this big field where the event was going to be held, and it was full of Harris supporters and Howard students, so a big big crowd stretching as far as the eye can see and there was a DJ spinning and people were dancing and it was festive. That was before the polls started to close and after the polls started closing and as the hours were on and it became clear that the results were looking more and more and more dire for Kamala Harris, people started to sit down, people stopped dancing, people got pretty quiet and you started to see much more of a somber mood until finally

at about 1230 in the morning, Cedric Richmond, who is a co-chair of Kamala Harris's campaign, came out and said, she will speak tomorrow. You can come back then. But if you came here hoping to see Kamala Harris, that is not going to happen tonight. We will continue overnight to fight to make sure that every vote is counted, that every voice has spoken. So you won't hear from the vice president tonight.

As the night wore on, people started to trickle out, started to leave. Our senior producer, Rachel Humphrey, spoke to several of them as they were leaving. I'm feeling like we've just suspended the judgment until we get the votes in. Right, so there's no... Because a lot of people are saying Trump has won. How do you react to that? Nowhere in any scenario does he win in my book. I have to believe in women and democracy.

And, I mean, the right for women to want to control their own bodies. There's no way. Lots of disbelief among Harris supporters, I'm sure. Was there a point in the night when you started thinking that things were looking good for Trump? We started getting some clues early on. Florida was one of the first states to report, and it was very, very red.

In Florida, once an electoral battleground that has moved right in recent circles, CBS News projects Trump will win the Sunshine State. And at first, I think it was tempting to write that off as an outlier, just because Florida has been trending rhetoric and rhetoric for years. But when you started to look under the hood, you know, you look at some of the individual districts or some of the different geographies. One part of the state in particular, the Orlando area, which is where a lot of the Puerto Ricans in Florida live, was very strong

for Trump. He won Miami-Dade County as well, which has historically been a Democratic and a heavily Latino county. So those were clues that this bluster we'd been hearing from Democrats about how Latinos were swinging massively in their direction in the wake of the Madison Square Garden incident, that that might not actually be true. And then, you know, as the other East Coast polls started to close, you got little clues like in Virginia, where I live, a suburban county, Loudoun County, that has turned democratic in recent years. Harris was underperforming Biden's vote share in that county by eight points. So while she

was still winning it, she wasn't winning it by nearly as large a margin as Biden did. And if you recall what we've talked about with Harris's strategy, she needed to blow out Biden's margins in areas like that. She needed to win bigger than he did in suburban and exurban areas in order to compensate for what we expected would be Trump's large margins in rural areas. So that was the first clue that we got that this was Not going to be a blowout race in Kamala Harris's favor What do we know about who showed up for Trump? You know? On the one hand you can dissect this and say this group went well for him and that group went well for him

But this was really an across the board improvement for Trump. He basically did better than expected. He improved a lot on his 2020 showing with minorities, with Latino voters, with black voters, with young voters, with male voters. But he also did not suffer the enormous deficits with women voters, with educated voters, with suburban voters that Harris was expecting would compensate for some of those losses. So he really just did well across the board in almost every group compared to where he had been in the past.

And sort of the inverse of that question, like, where do you think things went wrong for Harris tonight? Well, there's going to be a lot of rending of garments and gnashing of teeth among Democrats over the weeks and months to come over that question. And some of them may point fingers at specific strategic decisions made by her campaign. But in making sort of

a first round of calls to my smartest Democrat and Republican friends this evening, they mostly said they didn't think there was much she could have done, that this was really a race that was about the fundamental dynamics of this election. And the fundamental dynamic of this election was that the electorate wanted change. The electorate was broadly unhappy with the course that the country was on, and they really wanted a different direction. And so for Harris, who is part of the incumbent administration and who really refused to differentiate herself from Joe Biden.

She was given many opportunities to do that, and she basically said that she agreed with the administration's decisions and had been a part of them, rather than expressing any sort of regret for some of the things that many Americans see as failures of this administration. She wasn't able to position herself as a candidate of change at a time when that was what so many voters wanted. All right, so we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're gonna talk about some key House and Senate races, the other stuff that was going on on Tuesday night.

going on on Tuesday night. Or just plain old ice? Yes, we deliver those. Goaltenders, no. But chicken tenders, yes. Because those are groceries, and we deliver those too. Along with your favorite restaurant food, alcohol, and other everyday essentials. Order Uber Eats now. For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.

Metrolinx and CrossLinx are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crossttown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware. And stay safe. So obviously the big question of the day is Trump or Harris, but there were also some House and Senate races that will be important for how the next president governs.

Coming into this election, the Democrats had control of the Senate, and Republicans had control of the House. How are things looking now? Well, we know Republicans have taken the Senate. Some of the key races that we've talked about on this show, you may remember we talked a lot about the Ohio Senate race. Mm-hmm, Sherrod Brown, yeah. And Sherrod Brown has lost that race.

The Republican, Bernie Marino, has won it. Republicans also won West Virginia. So that means game over. They've taken the Senate. And they look like they're well positioned to compete in many of the other Senate races as well, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin. We expect they will probably

win Montana. So it's really just a question now of the size of the Republican majority. The House is a different question. We don't know that for sure yet. It's still pretty up in the air and both parties have flipped some seats. So I think it'll be a while before we have a sense, just given the closeness of the margin of which party controls the House of Representatives. Which would be a big deal, of course, because if Donald Trump wins the presidency, as we expect, Republicans have taken the Senate.

And if they also take the House, there's also a super majority of conservatives on the Supreme Court, all of which would clear the way for a pretty unencumbered Trump presidency. Absolutely. If he has a trifecta, which most presidents get when they come into office, control of

the House and Senate, that would really give him a governing majority, the ability to implement his agenda starting on day one. And what we know from reporting on the Trump campaign over the past year or so is that they've done a lot of planning for this, unlike 2016 when it was such a shock to Donald Trump that he won that he didn't have a lot of plans in place. He and his allies have really spent their their years in the wilderness doing a lot of planning for the presidential transition and for The policy making that he expects to do once he gets back to Washington

any other surprises you know While a lot of people are going to be shocked by the idea of Donald Trump returning to the presidency I think the thing to say about this result is it actually isn't very shocking. It's pretty much what the polls were telling us. The polls were telling us that this was a tied race within the margin of error in either direction.

And indeed, it looks like one candidate will narrowly prevail in the popular vote. The polls were telling us that this was a close race in all the battleground states and that either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump had the opportunity to win all of those states by a narrow margin. And indeed, it looks like one candidate will win most, if not all, of the battleground states by a narrow margin. So, you know, there was a lot of silly speculation over the past few weeks about maybe there's some hidden factor that we're not seeing and actually it's going to be a blowout in one

direction or the other. But it turns out the polls were right. This was a really close race. And in the end, it came down to turnout. And the turnout favored Donald Trump. Where do you think the country is going to go from here? I mean, Democrats have used such strong language about the democracy being on the ballot and calling Trump a fascist, but now he's going to be the president of the

United States. So how do you think it's possible for the country to unite? think it's possible for the country to unite? Let the record reflect there was a long pause before I figured out how to answer this question. You know, I asked one of my sources this question as I was writing my analysis of the race this evening. Carlos Cabello, a former Republican congressman from Florida, no fan of Trump, he didn't vote for either candidate in this election. He wrote in Peyton Manning. Good for him. Peyton Manning is a legitimate American hero and would probably make a great president. But we were talking about this idea that,

you know, how will it be possible to heal the nation's wounds and bring people together and try to unite America around a way forward. And he said, you know, it's really on the candidates. It's on both of them to try to do that. And I said, what do you think is the likelihood that that happens? And he said, less than 50%. So I think there's going to be a lot of sad and angry and fearful Democrats.

And you know, we'll see how Harris handles this. We'll see how Trump handles this. But he, number one, is not someone who has really taken care to bring his opponents into the fold in the past. And number two, he has promised to do some pretty radical and potentially destabilizing things. So if he actually carries out his plans to conduct, you know, mass deportations, for example, that's going to send a lot of shockwaves through the American populace. If he carries out his plans to impose massive tariffs on all imported goods across the board,

that's going to send shockwaves through the American economy. So we could be in for quite a destabilizing period. All right. Well, thanks so much, Molly, as always, for your time. Go get some sleep and we'll talk to you again in a few days. There's still a lot more to learn about what exactly just happened. So I look forward to it. All right. Thanks, Molly. Before we go, a reminder that this is not the

last episode of Red, White and Who, which means we still want your questions. What do you want to ask Molly about the results? Email us a voice note to thejournal at wsj.com. That's thejournal at wsj.com. Red White and Who is part of The Journal, which is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Our senior producer is Rachel Humphries.

Our producer is Pierce Singie. Our editor is Catherine Whalen. I'm Ryan Knudson. This episode was engineered by Peter Leonard and Griffin Tanner. Our theme music is by So Wiley and remixed by Peter Leonard. Artwork in the series by James Walton. Special thanks to Kate Linebaugh, Sarah Platt,

Ben Pershing, and the whole journal team. Thanks for listening. Red, White, and Who will be back as usual on Friday team. Thanks for listening. Red, White and Who will be back as usual on Friday morning. See you then.