The NPR Politics Podcast - Democrats Win Control Of The House; Republicans Expand Senate Majority

Episode Date: November 7, 2018

In what was considered a referendum on Donald Trump's presidency, Congress splits control between Democrats and Republicans. The win-win marks a shift in the levers of power in Washington. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political reporter Asma Khalid, congressional reporter Kelsey Snell and political editor Domenico Montanaro. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Sarah in Atlanta, Georgia. This is Heather from San Diego, California. Hi, this is Marshall. And Tess. And we're calling from Bel Air, Maryland. This is Jessica from Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I just voted at the local synagogue. We just took our eight-day-old baby on her first outing to vote in the midterm elections.

I'm running late to work because I just voted in the 2018 midterm election. This podcast was recorded at 1 10 a.m. on Wednesday, November 7th. Things may have changed by the time you're hearing this. Okay, here's the show. That was really nice. All that democracy in action and maybe the exhaustion, I almost teared up just now. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. In a midterm election that was considered a referendum on Donald Trump's presidency, Republicans have retained control of the Senate, and Democrats have won control of the House.

A Democratic Congress will work for solutions that bring us together because we have all had enough of division. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. All right. So let's just call it a split decision. Maybe. Well, I mean, I mean, it is split in the sense that Democrats will have control in the House. Republicans will have control in the Senate. And it will be much, much harder for the president to get his agenda passed.

But it will also be incredibly hard for Democrats to get anything done. So it's split in the sense that it's going to be two years of people just not getting a lot done in Washington. Or potentially, who knows, crazier things have happened in split government before. That is true, though right now we're at a time when Democrats and Republicans are just absolutely at each other's throats about everything. And then the president himself also, you know, is staking this out as a victory for him. I mean, he was out campaigning in a number of states where we both saw governorships as well as Senate races go towards the Republican Party. And so, you know,

you can make the argument that it was President Trump's rallies or votes for, say, votes against Brett Kavanaugh that some of these senators make. Or you can just argue that overall, it was the geographic and political climate in some of these places. I'm not really sure. But overall, the president, in my mind, does feel increasingly emboldened now to believe that his agenda is something that is being endorsed by a number of people, whether or not that's a more complicated story. He did tweet, quote, tremendous success tonight. Thank you to all.

Look, the fact is, President Trump wants to be able to say and is going to argue, of course, that he had some big victory tonight. He didn't have a big victory tonight. They lost the House of Representatives. His agenda now is potentially stalled and gummed up for the next two years unless he makes the decision to reach out to Democrats and Nancy Pelosi to work with them. Democrats are now going to control oversight. And that means the I word, not impeachment investigations. So sure, the Republicans may gain a seat to maybe three in the Senate. And sure, they can take a little bit of solace in that. But that is not anything to write home about.

In fact, Democrats and a lot of Democrats are disappointed because they feel like they didn't get the governor's races, all the governor's races that they wanted. They didn't get the tsunami that they thought maybe they could. Sure. But I don't think they should have expected that. And frankly, they should be very happy tonight because essentially what they got was an injunction for the steamroller to stop at their property line. That is quite an image. But for all of that objective reality aside, both parties are going to come to Washington next year claiming that they had a mandate and that this election gave them some sort of mandate. And they're going to want to try to capitalize on that. Let's get specific here with the Senate.

Where were the big wins and the big losses? So some of the big wins that for Republicans in the Senate were in Indiana, where Joe Donnelly lost and Mike Braun won. That's a place where President Trump played pretty heavily. Four trips to Indiana. He took this one personally. Another one was Missouri Senate seat. Claire McCaskill lost there. She barely, narrowly won the last time. And it was always going to be a really tough race for her. But she lost to Josh Hawley, another place where the president has visited. One of the really interesting places was West Virginia, where Joe Manchin won. The Democrat won in that very hotly contested seat in the state that won for President Trump in 2016, in part because he was a person who voted with the president sometimes.

The other state I want to chime in on that I think was really interesting tonight is Florida. And it was, I think, to some folks kind of a surprise state because it's not in the same bucket as Missouri or Indiana, North Dakota. It's not considered to be as Republican leaning of a state. It's just a much more competitive state politically when we look at the overall electorate. And we should point out NPR has not yet called the Senate race there. But Rick Scott has declared victory over the Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson. And what's interesting is Nelson was the only Democrat to control any statewide office in Florida. And if he loses, as it seems he may be on track to at

this point, then that means that Republicans would control every statewide office, the governor's right, the governor's seat, as well as the Senate at this point. And and that, to me, was sort of a surprise. I don't know that people would have anticipated that at the beginning of this night. Ohio also stands out. This is one where there was a Democratic victory. This is Sherrod Brown is the senator in Ohio. He won.

But it looks like in the governor's race, Mike DeWine, who is a Republican, won. So there you go with the split decision. I mean, that is one of the places I think we're going to be watching pretty closely because it makes there was an argument being made that Ohio was maybe no longer a place for Democrats and that this was now becoming a white working class state that would fall in the bucket of Trump forever. Well, if you have a Republican governor and a senator who's a Democrat, that really calls that whole concept into question. Sherrod Brown is someone who is aligned with Trump on trade and maybe that and very few other things. But he's also very popular in the state. I mean, it reminds me of Senator Manchin in both Ohio and West Virginia. What I hear from people on the ground is how beloved both these senators are to people. And they don't always cut across clear party lines. You meet people who are independents, in some 2016, tailoring candidates to the places where they were running.

And both of those two senators are testaments to the fact that that concept can work. So heading into Election Day, there were Republicans and there were Democrats. And they were both arguing that this election was in a way about the soul of America, about what kind of country this is. I have two clips of tape here. They're actually both from Republicans, Republican senators elect Marsha Blackburn in Tennessee and Mitt Romney in Utah. They seem to have come to different conclusions about what this election means for what America is. If we don't secure that southern border, it turns every state into a border state, every town into a border town.

The victory tonight is more than a victory of a candidate for the United States Senate. I believe it's a call for greater dignity and respect. I believe it's an affirmation that regardless of one's gender or ethnicity or sexual orientation or race or place of birth, that we are all equal, not only in the eyes of God, but also in the respect and dignity we are due from government and from our fellow Americans. That's going to be an interesting Senate cloakroom. Easy for him to say. He had an easy race. You know, I mean, he's like, you know, I think Democrats and from our fellow Americans. That's going to be an interesting Senate cloakroom. Easy for him to say. He had an easy race.

You know, I mean, he's like, you know, I think Democrats would have a different takeaway for what they think tonight was about. And they would say that it's about a tax cut plan that Republicans put in place that ballooned the federal deficit and was really an excuse to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. In fact, you know, let's take a listen to Jennifer Wexton tonight who won in a House race in Northern Virginia outside Washington, D.C. We don't have to live in a nation where people are stripped of their health care.

We don't have to live in a nation where our kids go to schools that are crumbling. We don't have to live in a nation where children are torn away from their parents at the border. And we don't have to live in a nation where people live in fear of being gunned down in synagogues, churches, workplaces, movie theaters, or anywhere in their communities. This goes back to my point of what do you do when both parties think that they've come to Washington with a mandate and their mandate, their idea of what that mandate is, is just so different. First of all, I think if anybody thinks that they ever have a mandate, they're completely wrong. I mean, we've seen this time and again in politics where people win races like 51-48 and then they think, you know, I've had a, I have a mandate, right? Come to Washington. That might sound familiar to some people because that's exactly what George W. Bush said after his 2004 reelect. He didn't quite have a mandate, a large backing of the entire country. This is a very divided country on a lot of things. But I will say I believe that the House is far more representative than what we saw tonight in

Senate races, where you have a lot of Republicans, a lot of conservative states that were up. You had a streak cut across the suburbs with independents and women in particular that should send a message to the White House. And if it doesn't, Democrats are perfectly happy keeping President Trump's agenda on the shelf for the next two years until there's a presidential election. I mean, I think it would be wise for both parties to kind of heed what voters were feeling as they went in to cast their ballots today. And you look at both the exit polls as well as this new big pre-election survey we have from Fox News and the Associated Press, and they both sort of found this very similar message. I mean, a lot of voters were really, really pessimistic. A majority of them felt like the country was headed in the wrong direction.

And these are things that we saw in both surveys. And it doesn't feel like people feel optimistic. So for either party to come away and sort of say that they have a mandate doesn't really seem in sync with what voters are feeling. I mean, you have three quarters of Americans saying that they feel like the country is more politically divided than before. That's not a great sort of feeling that you would think as you're going in to cast your ballot, regardless of who you went in to vote for. Okay, we are going to stop here with the Senate and we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, a look closer at the House as well as governor's races. Support for this podcast and the following message come from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, developing solutions to support strong families and communities to help ensure a brighter future

for America's children. More information is available at aecf.org. Sam Sanders here. This week, I'm talking to Abby Jacobson. You know her from her Comedy Central show, Broad City. We're going to talk about a solo cross-country road trip Abby took recently and why she wrote a book all about it. That is on the latest episode of It's Been a Minute from NPR. And we are back. And let's start with the House. We know that Democrats won control of the House, but let's peel that back a little bit. What is underneath that? Are these all just districts that Hillary Clinton won that had Republicans in those seats? Or is there something more going on there? There are also a lot of seats where Republicans retired. Moderate Republicans, rather than face a difficult reelection, chose not to run, and Democrats picked up a lot of those seats. There are also a couple of places, some surprising places where Republicans should have won but didn't.

I'm looking at places like Iowa and Virginia and Oklahoma, places that Democrats previously really wouldn't have been able to compete but made serious gains. Kansas. Oklahoma, wow. Yeah, and Kansas. Yeah, so Kevin Yoder, and this race is one that I talked about in the last podcast and one that I think says a lot of things, but Kevin Yoder is this Republican congressman in a district that included a lot of suburbs, and President Trump went to Kansas and held a rally, and Kevin Yoder was washing his hair. He did not go to the rally.

He was literally washing his hair? No, but like, you know, it was like, I have a scheduling conflict with something that's not that big a deal. So he had a scheduling conflict. He didn't go to the rally with President Trump. He was trying to distance himself at times from President Trump and he lost. And you could look at other candidates, numerous other Republicans who distanced themselves from Trump are not going to be in the House. Take Carlos Curbelo south of Miami. He was probably the most anti-Trump Republican running and he lost. In a Clinton district.

In a Clinton district. And, you know, I think that says a lot about where the House is heading, because the places moderate Republicans, or I guess you could call them business Republicans, drew them into districts with Democrats who became more Democratic over time, and it just changed the face of the electorate. I mean, this is one of the things that we've seen has been a slow kind of shift, I would say, for the past couple of election cycles, which is white college educated voters tilting more and more towards the Democratic Party. We saw indications of that yet again today with the exit polls. And there's this sort of random quirky fact that I find very fascinating. So there are a whole bunch of congressional districts you can look at by their best highly educated districts.

And overall, most of them have Democrats who represent them. There were only two represented by Republicans. One was VA 10, which is now going to be represented by a Democrat. And the other is the Georgia 6th congressional district, which has not yet been called, but it is actually extremely close right now. The other bucket of races that I was really tracking pretty closely throughout the night, and we're still going to have to, you know, figure out some of the final results on it, were these Obama-Trump districts, districts that President Obama won in 2012 and President Trump won in 2016. To me, that was going to signal where the country had moved. And when you look at the races as they stand now, Democrats are leading in 13 of the 21, leading or have won in 13 of the 21 districts that President Trump won in 2016. That's two thirds of the districts that were

Obama-Trump districts that have now swung back to Democrats. We've just had election after election of very dramatic swings, midterms where, you know, in 2006, Democrats took control. 2010, Republicans took control of the House. Republicans held the House for a long time. And now we're back to Democrats having the House. It's just very swingy. We're getting a lot of whiplash from all the waves. I mean, honestly, like, you know, above 20 seats is generally considered a wave election or a change election. So, you know, depending on how big your wave is or not, you know, President Obama's losing 63 House seats in 2010 was a tsunami, you know, which just washed everything out. Right. But, you know, hey, if Democrats pick up, you know, 25, 30 seats, that's that's a wave.

So we're having this volatility. It's like this era of discontent, a very long era of discontent. And I mean, you know, think about it even above the district level. We had Barack Obama win the presidency in 2008, which was really a reaction to George W. Bush. You probably couldn't find somebody who was more opposite of George W. Bush than Barack Obama. And you certainly probably couldn't find somebody more opposite Barack Obama than Donald Trump to win the presidency in 2016. I mean, I think, Dominica, what you're saying is really interesting, because I do think, you know, to go back to this

idea of a split decision and who is this really a win for, I think that when you look at the overall election results, it's a mixed bag. But when you look at exit polls, there is really no question that every single demographic group tilted more Democratic than it did, say, four years ago during the last midterm election cycle. And you could even argue more so than in the last presidential election cycle. And it's really group after group. It's, you know, white women, white men, men, 18 to 29 year olds, it's every single group tilted more democratic. And I think that's something that you don't see when you look at the macro results on a huge level, that this was actually quite a bit of democratic enthusiasm. It's just that the overall electorate that you're starting out with in a midterm year tends to not be a democratic favorable electorate.

OK, so with a democratic House, the question becomes, how is this going to work? Nancy Pelosi, who is currently the minority leader and may or may not get the speaker's gavel, but with that, maybe that's a conversation for tomorrow's podcast, or I guess at this point this afternoon's podcast. Do you really want to say may or may not? We know the answer to that. That was a question in the exit polls, too. She did not fare particularly well with the general public.

Well, there were so many ads. Kelsey, the verdict? Anyway, let's hear from Pelosi. She declared victory tonight and then struck sort of a bipartisan-ish tone. We will have accountability and we will strive for bipartisanship with fairness on all sides. We will have a responsibility to find our common ground where we can,

stand our ground where we can't, but we must try. We have a bipartisan marketplace of ideas. There were some thin woos there for the bipartisanship. Yeah. Were there two people at that party or were there just a bunch of Democrats who weren't excited about bipartisanship talk? And it will be interesting to see how much bipartisanship people are in the mood for once she's done doing the accountability part she mentioned first. More on that to come. But what have Democrats been saying about what they want to do? One of the things that they're talking about is campaign

finance reform. It's this bill called the Disclose Act that House and Senate Democrats have been talking about for some time. It would force outside groups to say where they get their money from. But that is not some big blockbuster of a bill. It doesn't really fit in with like the big hope for change that people are talking about. If we believe that a wave election is, you know, is an indication that the country wants something vastly different, I think campaign finance reform might not scratch that itch. Yeah, well, Democrats will have one half of one third of the government. That ain't nothing. You know, you know, that ain't nothing. What's nothing is nothing.

And like the fact of the matter is when you're not in control of anything is when, again, you get steamrolled. And, you know, Republicans would have absolutely done all they could to push their legislative agenda forward. And now they're just not able to. All right. Let's turn to governors, because this is another area that we've been watching and where it's been a mixed result. There is not one overriding message, but there are a lot of really interesting races, Asma. Yeah. I mean, look, this was a situation where there were many pickup opportunities for Democrats and they didn't pick up maybe as many as some really eager Democrats would have hoped for. But I would say that there were some interesting wins. I mean, you have a Democrat who won in Michigan.

You have a Democrat who won in Illinois. And perhaps the most interesting to me was you had a Democrat who won in Kansas. And we should point out that the opponent there, the Republican on the ticket was Chris Kobach, who you may recall was Donald Trump's, I believe it was his very short lived election voter integrity, voter fraud commission. He was the vice chair of that. So he was a key Trump ally. And this is a situation in which we see being highly associated with Trump did not necessarily pan out in this governor's race. He was also highly associated with Sam Brownback, who is the former governor of Kansas, who is wildly unpopular. So it's not a totally decisive. Kansas was complicated and there was a third party candidate. And there are still several complicated races out there that have not been resolved as of the time that we were sitting here. And I think that maybe we'll see a stronger trend when we come back this afternoon. I mean, one of the big one of the things I should point out, though, is that, again,

in Florida, which a lot of people were watching. Some of the polls had indicated that Andrew Gillum had a lead, the Democrat, and Ron DeSantis, his opponent, the Republican, pulled out just by about a percentage point or so in the end. So you could argue it was probably within some of the margin of errors for some of these polls. But that one, I think, did tilt in a way that Democrats probably would have hoped had gone the other way. And the Trump White House is very excited about that one because Trump endorsed DeSantis in the primary and he went to Florida twice in the last week. This is another one of those races where his pride was on the line. And in the end, his candidate won. Final thoughts. What are you coming away from tonight?

One of the things Democrats had to prove this year is that they aren't just a party of the coasts. They came away from 2016 having that as being a very potent allegation about the party, that they could only represent big cities and big liberal bastions. And they went about finding new ways to recruit candidates that reflected a very different version of the party. And they're coming out of this midterm election being able to say that they can win in Iowa. They can win in Oklahoma. They can win in Kansas. And they can be a party that has a place for more than just people who live in big cities. And to piggyback off of that, though, Kelsey, I think it raises already these questions as we look ahead to 2020, about what kind of party the Democrats want to be, and what type of candidate they think is really a likely candidate who can win in different places. And I think we've already

begun to see that with some of the internal conversations, debates, you could say, within the Democratic Party. And a lot of the governor's races were supposed to be a testament of that. And I do wonder to what degree people will say, you know, sort of this progressive movement that we saw would say Stacey Abrams or Andrew Gillum is just not something the party wants to necessarily pursue because, hey, it didn't turn out to be successful in some of these governor's races. Democrats won the House. It's a very big deal. It's a very big deal that Democrats are going to be able to stop whatever President Trump wants to do for a big picture legislative agenda, be able to investigate this administration. It's something we haven't seen. And Washington is going to take on a brand new tone and tenor starting in January. And divided government sometimes is successful government. It sometimes brings compromise. And you have a president who is a volatile, not ideologically set. Yeah. So you never know.

But what does he think politically is in his best interest to run against Nancy Pelosi in 2020 or to compromise with Democrats? I can tell you that the lesson he is clearly taking away is that all of his rhetoric on immigration worked. It worked in the states that he wanted it to work in, in most of the races that he wanted it to work in. And even though President Trump called Nancy Pelosi to thank her for her nice bipartisan rhetoric, there is one thing that he loves to have, and that is an enemy. But as we said at the very top, it is possible that divided government could wind up being successful because after the midterm, maybe the political heat will turn down and people will have

a year or so when they can try to come together on something like, I don't know, infrastructure, something they both talk about a lot. And with that, we will be back in your podcast feed very soon. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.