The NPR Politics Podcast - Election Night : What We've Seen So Far

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House, and it is now 10.08 p.m. on election night. That is Eastern Time. And we don't have a full picture yet, and we won't for some time. But already, it has been a night of firsts. Vermont has finally elected a woman to Congress, the last state in the union to break that barrier. Becca Ballant is headed to the House. Arkansas elected former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders governor, making her the state's first female governor. In Massachusetts, Maura Healey became the first woman elected governor in that state and also the nation's first openly lesbian governor.

Starting point is 00:00:51 Maryland elected Democrat Wes Moore as its next governor. He's the state's first Black governor and only the third African-American to become a governor nationwide. And Florida is sending the first Gen Z lawmaker to Congress, Maxwell Frost. He's a Democrat. We're going to take a quick break and when we get back, you will hear from two people who you know quite well. And we're back. And I'm going to pull in two key members of our pod squad for a quick chat about what we know so far. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And so we are going to do sort of a can't let it go style version of this night because it is so early, so few races have been called. But Sue, why don't you go first? There

Starting point is 00:01:39 is a race that has been called. At this point in the night, I'm obsessed with Florida. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has decisively won the governor's race against Democrat Charlie Crist, also a former governor who ran as a Republican before, and Senator Marco Rubio also looking at potentially a double-digit victory against Democrat Bill Demings. I think it's interesting for a couple of reasons. One, DeSantis, obviously someone being talked about in the mix, is a 2024 candidate, potential challenger to Donald Trump. I don't know how someone wins Florida as decisively as this, and that isn't the conversation we're having about him tomorrow. We're already seeing conservatives talk about this. Also, one of the things we've talked about so much on the podcast, Latinos. If you look at the results coming out of Florida tonight, this is an absolute five alarm fire for the Democratic Party. You look just one example, Miami-Dade County. This is a county Hillary Clinton won by 29 points in 2016. Ron DeSantis carried it tonight. Looking at potentially double digits, Democrats should be very, very scared about what that might be telling them about where the Latino vote in this country is headed. Mara, there was a time when Florida was the ultimate swing state. In fact,

Starting point is 00:02:49 it was such the swing state that we had to wait for the results to decide the presidential election in the year 2000. Is that completely over? Is Florida just 100 percent a red state? Well, I think for now, Florida is a red state. That doesn't mean it can't change in the future. Like you said, you know, not that many years ago, Hillary Clinton did really well in Miami-Dade. And, you know, today, the Democrats collapsed. I actually think the Democrats nominated two pretty plausible candidates, Charlie Crist, Val Demings. Those were, you know, they ran relatively good campaigns. I think the story about Florida is the Democratic Party collapse in Florida. Why Democrats haven't made the investment to be competitive in Florida year after year after year instead of just showing up, you know, around election time. And this has been a problem that Democrats have talked about for a long time, but I think it really reached its tipping point tonight. The interesting thing about what Sue said about the conversation about Ron DeSantis,

Starting point is 00:03:48 that conversation has begun, and guess who's in it? Donald Trump, who said, you know, that he thinks if DeSantis runs, it's going to be very bad for him. So yes, we're going to have this potential cage match between DeSantis and Trump dissected over the next couple of weeks. And, you know, that's going to be a lot of chatter for 2024. If DeSantis decides he wants that cage match. Right, if he does, and he's a young guy, and maybe he wants to wait till Donald Trump is really off the stage. All right, I'm going to go next. And as we said, a lot of races haven't been called yet.

Starting point is 00:04:22 But, and it's very early, and and maybe it will change and maybe we'll get results from the West Coast in seven days and find out that, in fact, it was a red tsunami. But right now it just doesn't look like a red tsunami. There are races in House districts that are not looking as competitive for Republicans as in theory they were supposed to be. And an advisor to President Biden I was texting back and forth with said, yeah, we don't know. But the fact that we're looking around at each other wondering if this is a good night or a bad night is actually a sign of a pretty good night for Democrats who should have been having a very, very bad night. I mean, it's still likely to be a pretty good night

Starting point is 00:05:03 for Republicans, at least in the House Party, still heavily forecast to take the majority there. But you're right, Tam. I mean, if this was going to be a seismic year, we're not seeing it in the early data. Another example of that in Colorado, Michael Bennett, the incumbent, easily cruised to reelection. He was facing Republican Joe O'Day, you know, the kind of Republican that also was a pretty good candidate for Colorado, ran as a centrist, just didn't really show there. And I think that that was another place people were watching to see if O'Day could come close or make this a competitive race. It does suggest that, you know, maybe the blue states are hewing blue and the red states are hewing red. And there will be surprises, I have no doubt. But I don't yet feel panic among the Democrats I'm talking to or over enthusiasm from Republicans. Yeah. And we just had a guest on the special, Robert O'Brien, former national security advisor

Starting point is 00:05:53 in the Trump White House, who was predicting a 10 to 20 seat Republican pickup in the House. That is very small by historical standards. Oh, that would be quite small. Now, it doesn't matter when you're in the majority, you got the majority and you have subpoena power, you have the gavel. But yes, the predictions of a giant red wave so far have not materialized. I mean, if that ends up being the number that is well below the historical average, especially when you're looking at a president whose popularity ratings are underwater, as President Biden's are. So Mara, what are you thinking about tonight? What's sticking out to you so far? Well, I guess what's sticking out is we haven't seen the red

Starting point is 00:06:32 wave yet. And what I'm waiting for is to see if the Republican candidates who have refrained from promising that they would accept the election results if they were not declared the winner, and there are a lot of them, and they're in key races for governor and secretary of state, races that have a lot to do with the election machinery in battleground states, are they going to accept the results if they don't win? That's, to me, one of the biggest question marks about this election. And that's why Democrats say democracy is on the ballot, because so few Republicans were willing to say that they would accept the election results if they weren't declared the winner. And I guess we will need to wait and see what those results are before we can

Starting point is 00:07:16 find out if people are going to accept them or not. Also, we're still tracking the races of huge imports, Senate races in Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona. It's still way too early. Those races are too close to call. And we frankly might not know the answer there for a couple of days. I guess we'll leave it there for tonight. Check out NPR.org for the latest. And we will be back with you at our regular time tomorrow with much, much more, many more results.

Starting point is 00:07:44 I hope. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. And I'm Mara Liason, National Political Correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

The NPR Politics Podcast - Election Night : What We've Seen So Far

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