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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. As the country anticipates a second Trump presidency, with hopes, with dread, with ambivalence, depending on who you are, one thing that happens after a big-margin election like this is that the party that lost begins a reckoning. Do you remember in 2012, after President Obama's first two years in office, Democrats took what Obama called a "shellacking" in the midterm elections? Control of Congress flipped from blue to red and Republicans took control of around 19 state governments. I think it was 19. A humbled Obama went before the nation and said this.

Barack Obama: A couple of great communicators, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, were standing at this podium two years into their presidency getting very similar questions because the economy wasn't working the way it needed to be. There were a whole range of factors that made people concerned that maybe the party in power wasn't listening to them.

Brian Lehrer: "Maybe the party in power wasn't listening to them." Obama in 2012 acknowledging that maybe he lost touch with the voters on the economy. Though, as he also pointed out, the party in power, when voters are feeling economic pain, often takes those kinds of hits regardless of party. What kind of Democratic Party reckoning needs to start today?

When Trump came within five points in New Jersey, when he rose from a fifth of the vote to a third of the vote in New York City, when he beat Joe Biden's 2020 vote among Latino men by 34 points nationally, when he went all three blue wall states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, when Vice President Harris, despite the abortion issue and despite the potential to become the first woman president, only got 53% of women's votes, all these numbers according to the exit polls, what questions should Democrats be asking themselves and with what early answers?

Or as some voters were just saying on the BBC, maybe you were listening, it was mostly racism and sexism, and the Democrats actually didn't do anything wrong. Democratic listeners, we open the phones for you right from the start today on those questions. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text. What questions should Democrats be asking themselves and with what early answers? You might add to that, what kind of opposition or political resistance, if you want to call it that, to the second Trump presidency do you think is called for now, or do you have to see what he actually tries to do? 212-433-9692.

Joining us for this is Astead Herndon, New York Times national politics reporter and CNN political analyst and host of The New York Times podcast, The Run-Up, for which he spent so many months traveling and talking to voters across the country. Astead, always good to have you join us and especially at this moment when you must be exhausted. Welcome back to WNYC.

Astead Herndon: [laughs] Always happy to do it. Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: First of all, everyone seemed so surprised by the magnitude of Trump's win. After traveling the country for The Run-Up as your full-time job this year, did you see it coming more than most or not even you really from what you could tell from voters?

Astead Herndon: Well, I think the fundamental truth that the election map showed us was an overwhelming rejection of the administration. That part, the Joe Biden unpopularity, the out-of-touchness of Democrats to really wrestling with that, that's been clear for our journey for the last couple of years. We were one of the first and only, I would say, folks asking Democrats in early 2023, exactly why were they consolidating around an incumbent president that had deep unpopularity ratings in the data are reporting on the road anecdotally was showing that? Then most importantly, a lot of Americans just didn't think he was old enough to serve a second term.

Brian Lehrer: Too old, yes.

Astead Herndon: Too old to second term, yes. We got such dismissiveness from Democrats at that time that it really set in a presidential race where it felt like they had ceded the mantle of change to Republicans. Now, I think in the last three months, there was some changes on the ground because of the new energy that Harris brought to the race, the clarity of some issues. I basically had arrived today before Election Day of thinking they had brought it to 50/50 as the numbers had told us.

I guess I wasn't too surprised when I saw the result because it certainly matched up with all of the things that we have been hearing from folks throughout the year. There was a sense of shock that Biden was running for re-election and the sense that he had broken faith with the American people for an implicit promise that he would be a transitory figure. I really think Kamala Harris paid the price for that. I would just say that I think that it's really a rejection of the Democratic Party writ large. I would say that may be the biggest factor too, but there's some downstream ones, I think, we'll discuss also.

Brian Lehrer: President Biden is expected to address the nation next hour. We'll carry it live. We heard the Obama clip from 2012 admitting being out of touch. Think we'll hear anything like that from Biden or remorse about not having dropped out earlier like you were just referencing or not even run for re-election, knowing his cognitive decline or helping to undemocratically anoint Harris rather than start a competitive process when he withdrew? Anything like that?

Astead Herndon: Well, I think that in part of my head, I think that would be a natural thing to do and I think a welcome thing to do. The reporting that we see right now doesn't really suggest that. Biden has taken this personally over the last three to four years. Even on the issue of something like inflation, they spent the first year or two of the presidency telling people that their feelings were wrong, that the economy was doing good.

Terms like "Bidenomics" were meant to shift the sentiment on that rather than reflect or speak to people's concerns. I think that there has been a consistent lectury tone that came from top versions of the Democratic Party. I think that's what they have to wrestle with right now. That clearly did not work. I think a big difference from 2016 to now is the scope of the victory across demographic groups.

You could tell yourself that Trump was an aberration of the white working class in 2016, but I don't think you can say that now. I don't think we should go the opposite way and say that he's created some multiracial coalition. I do think we see increasingly that the identity markers that Democrats have told themselves, race, gender, sexuality, the demographic destiny belief that as the country gets more Black and brown, that would make it more liberal.

All of those assumptions did not factor in the way people actually live their day-to-day lives. They don't view their politics through those rigid markers. I think the party has to understand that. The next version of Democrats, the person who reignites the kind of coalitions they need will speak to those concerns more clearly. I think right now, they were just using old language for a new electorate.

Brian Lehrer: I pulled a couple of clips from your latest edition of The Run-Up with a voter named Monica from Michigan you interviewed, who, for background for our listeners, had earlier been undecided and then told you this week she ultimately decided on Trump after she got laid off from her auto industry job. She has more faith in him to do the things that would help her find another job, things like this.

Monica: Rolling back the EV mandates, making it so that my company could keep making the vehicles like the Ram 1500 for firefighters and construction workers. That truck got moved to Mexico because it's cheaper to make over there. Tariffs aren't great. If a vehicle built outside of the US costs so much more than one inside the US, then maybe we'll just keep buying American. It's a Hail Mary. I don't think he's going to fix everything for us. I'm not dancing up and down my driveway saying, "Yay, I'm getting my job back tomorrow because Trump won the election." At the same time, I feel like that was where my best odds were for US manufacturing.

Brian Lehrer: Voting her self-interest, Monica in Michigan from Astead Herndon's New York Times podcast The Run-Up. Astead then asked her then more specifically, "Why not Harris?

Monica: Flip-flopping, a lot of the policies even. I'm someone who lived in Mexico for two years teaching English when Los Zetas were running amphetamines across the border with some of my students' parents. It was a messed-up situation. I speak from a very specific life experience. A lot of the policies I'd have to say I agreed with Trump on, the one that was definitely a save grace on the Democratic side was the right to choose. I do believe in the right to choose. At the same time, it's been given back to the states. Even if Trump did want to come in and say no exceptions on abortion, I don't think that the people that we have in office, my governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who is a Democrat, is going to allow that to happen in our state.

Brian Lehrer: Astead, there's so much in those clips. Climate, the economy, the border, voting Trump despite the abortion rights issue. Was Monica from Michigan representative to you of various big reasons that Trump won the election the way he did?

Astead Herndon: I think she was representative of a macro thing, I think, a lot of people were wrestling with. We would meet people all the time who were understanding this election through the prism of not liking both of their options. That was consistent. That was a feeling that was mostly put in place when Biden was in office, but I think it was the mountain that Harris was climbing after she got in the race. These are people who, and Monica said in other portions of this, did not like Trump.

She said that she was looking for a reason not to vote for Trump and I believe her. I guess what she also talked about was feeling like her life had changed in such a way, specific to her job, that she had to prioritize who she felt gave her the best option of getting that job back. I would ask, "What about the kind of collective you could place abortion rights over everything else?" She would say, "Well, yes, but I just don't think that's going to be the most tangibly affecting thing for my life here."

I think there was a real interesting thought process that she went through. Actually, the real reason I was thinking about her on election night is because the last time we talked, she said how she had went to a Trump rally and she had felt an extremist fringe energy there that scared her. When she ends up voting for Trump in the end, I asked her, "Why was that energy, that fear, that disruption of the political system not enough for you to say, 'Hey, I can't vote for this guy?'"

She went back to Gretchen Whitmer. There is some sense among voters that hear a lot that they just don't believe that Trump can be as radical as the Democrats and Harris were framing it. They just don't think the Project 2025 could happen. They believe in some of these guardrails. I would say, I don't know if that belief is a good one. [chuckles] I think as someone who listens to Trump, who goes to his rallies, he sounds more radicalized.

He has talked about a more affirmative, authoritarian vision this time around. It's not as if voters, I think, are necessarily ingesting all that information. I guess I'm just telling you, it was consistent both with Monica and other people we talked to that they kind of dismissed that argument as a scare tactic. The one they bought from Trump was, "He'll help my job. He'll help my life."

Brian Lehrer: By the way, one correction to something I said in the intro. I was talking about Obama's first midterm election when he lost control of the House and lost so many state houses or the Democratic Party lost so many state houses. I think I said 2012. Obviously, that was the year that Obama got re-elected. The midterm election in that stretch was 2010. I think I said 2012. It was, of course, 2010. Actually, the fact that Obama got re-elected and fairly easily in 2012 is an example that might be worth mentioning, Astead, as to how quickly things can turn one way and then the other way in our national democracy.

Astead Herndon: Oh, absolutely. I don't think that we should read Tuesday night as America's rubber stamp of the MAGA movement broadly. I think it would be easier for me to believe that, and I know I'm beating a dead horse at this front, if Democrats had had a primary nominated someone around the set of ideals and then there was two competing visions that were at play. If America chose Trump in that context, I think that there would be clear to me that this was some rubber stamping of MAGA ideology.

I think this was a rejection of the status quo. I think it was a rejection of the administration. I think that was a sweeping one. I guess to your 2012 point, that doesn't mean that once Republicans get into office, maybe a unified White House and Congress, that their agenda could be seen as too radical by a lot of Americans, even some who voted for him on Tuesday. I think that for Democrats, it's not as if all hope is lost. It's just that in their own language, this was a crossroads election.

Donald Trump's ability to reshape government, reshape the courts, to implement his vision of a more powerful presidency that doesn't have to go through bureaucracy, all of that is now possible. I think the biggest reason for that being true is because Democrats did not take the threat of Trump as seriously in their political actions as they were telling voters. I will have one example of this. Early 2023, we are at the Democratic National Convention as they are making the primary steps easier for Joe Biden to get renominated.

Again, we're asking them. The dumbers say that this might be a bad idea or at least a risky one. One of the things that a lot of those Democrats kept coming back to was that they felt that Donald Trump would be inherently weak in the general election because they assumed that January 6th was invalidating. They assumed the legal cases would be invalidating to the public. Those are really bad assumptions and they really came back to Biden.

Brian Lehrer: Couple of texts that are coming in. Listener writes, "Blaming Biden is wrong. Blame the misinformation." We have a few coming in like that. There was so much misinformation, disinformation over Fox, over podcast. Another one that asks after the clips of Monica from Michigan from your podcast. Listener writes, "In her belief that Trump would be better for manufacturing, did you ever mention to her about the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the huge manufacturing projects all over the country? People are so ignorant of what's going on with US manufacturing."

Astead Herndon: Well, let me take the misinformation, disinformation first. Of course, that's an issue. I'm not saying that there's only one reason this race went the way it did, but all I'm saying is I don't think that explains the uniform national shifts that you saw on Tuesday. I think that map is a fairly undeniable rejection of the administration. It did not just come in the battleground states or red states. There was huge drop-off in blue areas also.

I think that it was somewhat unfathomable to a lot of Democrats that Republicans could win a popular vote. If that is where we land at the end of this race, which looks likely, I don't think you can just say that is misinformation or disinformation, but an act of choice on behalf of a lot of people. In some of these battleground states, Democrats got the turnout they needed. The electorate looked makeup-wise. It wasn't a stay-at-home problem. It was often a persuasion problem. The people who were coming out were simply choosing the other option.

To the point about manufacturing, I did bring up some of that. Monica's gripe was specific to the EV mandate, which is how she responded to that. It wasn't a sense that Biden had not invested in manufacturing but that his investment came at the expense of her company and then she would say specific. We heard that a lot, honestly, in Michigan. There has been that back-and-forth about the EV mandates in this moment, but her feeling was specific to that issue.

Brian Lehrer: Dee in Westchester, you're on WNYC with Astead Herndon, political reporter for The New York Times and host of their podcast, The Run-Up. Hi, Dee.

Dee: Good morning. How are you? I think that this is a combination of several things. I do think that this is race-related also. I believe that there is protection of the fact that there's a white minority that is coming. Unfortunately, there's a fear of what is not like us. That's part of it, but I also think that there's a bigger piece, which is that there is a set of moderate Republicans and Democrats that are at a point now where we do not want to have all of the rhetoric that's coming around being progressive.

I'm seeing it a lot on the Democratic side. There's a lot of people who are saying, "I want a platform that is going to help me help the economy, help my family, help my community, but I don't always want to hear the things that are all the way on the fringe." I'm not saying that we should not deal with issues that are happening across our community.

If we concentrate strictly on the things that are on the far side of the progressive side and not concentrate on what we need to look at to take care of us on the moderate side where we can work across with Republicans that are moderate who, as you see, were willing to do that when they were willing to come out and support Kamala, we are going to continue to have a problem. We need to look at the platform that we're putting out there. How does it go about helping us as a whole, not just always leading with, "Here's the progressive and the rest will follow along." Because as we've seen, the rest are not always going to follow along.

Brian Lehrer: Dee, thank you very much. We appreciate it. I want to follow up with you in a minute on a couple of things that Dee said there, Astead. Let's get a few more voices on first. Shane in Nassau County, you're on WNYC. Hi, Shane.

Shane: Hey, Brian. How are you doing? First-time, long-time, right? I keep thinking that she was not prepared with the very first question that a vice president running for president should be prepared to answer, and that is, "What are you going to do differently?" She was asked that question, I think, at the debate and also by Bret Baier on Fox News. She flubbed it. That should be the very first talking point that her team should have helped prepare her on and they could have honed that--

Brian Lehrer: Oh, okay. Shane said a bad word you're not allowed to say on the radio. We're getting his point, though, as we have to dump his call. Sorry, Shane, that she didn't distance herself or she didn't say how she would be different from Biden if voters were judging the Biden presidency negatively. Let's get one more in this set. Nate in Mahwah, who's, I think, going to be the opposite of Dee from Westchester. Nate, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Nate: Hi, Brian. I'll try to keep this short and sweet. I'm not at all surprised that Trump won. For the past year, I've just been telling myself he's probably going to win. I really think that the Democrats need to stop trying to be the centralist liberal party that just appeals to everyone. I think they need to stop with the overtures of bipartisanship because the Republicans abandoned bipartisanship years ago and they're the ones winning elections now. Clearly, there's nothing left to be gained from trying to work with these people. I think they need to focus on more progressive issues, more working-class issues, and they need to win.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Astead, an interesting set of three there. I guess part of this conversation about a Democratic Party reckoning is that there seem to be at least two competing schools of thought. One is that Harris failed to run a more populist working-class movement campaign. The caller we just had on was making that case, right? Maybe like Bernie Sanders did. Bernie did well among Latino men. The other is that Democrats tacked too far to the left, too much identity politics, as I think the first caller was saying, and paid a price for that. What have you heard out on the road?

Astead Herndon: I hear both of these and I think there's some truth to them. Let me sift through what I think those sentiments often come from. I don't think that Kamala Harris ran a particularly progressive campaign. I also totally agree with the caller who said that the inability to create distance from Biden ends up being a mistake in retrospect. I think that that was the question I was asking of them at the DNC, which happened. Is this a change in style or is this a change in substance? They didn't really have an answer for that.

I think it speaks to the ways that political tradition and deference have gotten them in trouble this whole time. It's the same deference that caused folks not to call out Biden's, I think, fairly reckless attempts to run for re-election over public concerns. That same deference caused Kamala Harris to say that she did not want to break from him after she had taken over the switch. Both of those, I think, people will look back and see as electoral mistakes because it tied Democrats to the status quo.

I think Democrats are really brand-wise to the caller's overly progressive identity politics point. Brand-wise, they're still paying for that 2019 primary and the 2020 summer in which the party had really been captured by a very specific lens of progressivism. I'm talking an academic, non-profity, identity politics-driven language that, we should say, really did capture the party for the time. Kamala Harris's original presidential run was really wrapped up in a lot of that language.

A lot of the positions she ended up having to walk back come 2024 were things that were really done in that time. I think, though, you can't say that that's where they were now, right? This is a Democratic Party that's tracked to the middle on immigration, has really dropped some of those more cultural issues. It's just that voters still have lodged in their heads some of the things from years ago. I keep going back to this, but I would say this is, again, the importance of a Democratic primary.

If there was one heading into this election, the party would have had a chance to recalibrate from 2019 and track back to the center, or at least figure out what the unified message that they want to put out is. Since that did not happen, they really created a through-line, I think, for voters from the last time they heard from the party writ large, which I do think a lot of folks do think was too progressive.

It's not as if the Democratic Party in 2019 and '20 was laying out a vision of how they would fix the border, right? It's not like they were laying out a vision then speaking about inflation. It was a kind of progressive lens. I think that's honestly what a lot of people have tracked onto, even though I do agree with the caller who says that what Harris did more recently was try to track to the center, Republicans, Liz Cheney.

That type of democracy protection, that clearly did not work out for them. There does not seem to be a constituency for that message. I think a lot of progressives, I get the reason why they're saying, "The biggest break you should have had for Biden would probably have been to signal a difference on the war on Gaza or to signal a difference on the economic policy or something that was really core to people's concerns." Without doing that, they were basically running a different candidate with the same message and campaign.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, but it wasn't just her positions from 2019 that she was distancing herself from. Then you get that voter from Michigan who we played the clip of from your podcast who said she was flip-flopping. It's not just that Medicare for All was gone. Medicare for All might have been more popular than just running on "Trump doesn't have a plan," although Trump definitely shot himself in the foot politically on health care in the debate when he said he didn't have a plan.

She also distanced herself from Biden policies that were more progressive and maybe more clear in terms of articulating something they would do for people about the cost of living. Biden was proposing universal pre-K. Biden was proposing paid family leave. Biden was proposing national rent control. He couldn't get them through Congress, but this is part of the critique from the left. She was being so cautious to look safe to the center, emphasizing Liz Cheney, things like that, not leading an economic movement.

Astead Herndon: We had Mark Cuban on our podcast, who they elevated as a really key surrogate in this race. He was saying something that I think was really important. He was like, "There is a big difference between Harris's campaign and Biden's." It's that she has shown her openness to big business and she's created distance from that kind of populist rhetoric as you're talking about.

They were sifting those signals to business leaders, to billionaires, to signal a kind of openness to Silicon Valley and the like, but it's not as if that had big returns in terms of creating this coalition. I just think that there is a way that Democrats, and I would say as someone who covered Harris's presidential campaign, she's been reflective of this, have tried to be everything to everyone. It has not served them.

I think that there is something about the Trump era that prioritizes authenticity and prioritizes people getting a sense that they know who you are and what you stand for even if they disagree with that. I remember voters back four years ago who would be torn between Mike Bloomberg and Bernie Sanders. You would ask, "How can you hold those two people in your head at the same time?" It wasn't really about ideology. It was about a consistency of belief and a trust in that person to follow through on it.

I think sometimes parties and campaigns and consultants can galaxy-brain themselves into problems because I think the biggest thing Harris could have done, whether it was four years ago or now, is clearly articulate who she is and how that is a distinction from the rest of the party and what she would have done if elected president. Those are the type of direct things sometimes, I think, folks stay away from in the hopes of being everything to everyone when, really, there's a risk of the inauthenticity becoming a bigger problem, I think, particularly with Donald Trump on the other side.

Calling Donald Trump consistent is ridiculous, but on immigration, he has basically said versions of the same thing for a long time. Voters feel like they have a sense of what he would do. If you're someone who thinks it's a problem, you know that Donald Trump shares that belief. There is a consistency of issues that I would say really matter here. Democrats can do a lot better job of laying that out and articulating an affirmative vision.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, I want to apologize to our caller, Shane from Nassau, who we dumped saying that he said a forbidden word. Turns out our control room misheard when he said the word "flubbing" and thought he had said another word that sounds a little bit like that and starts with the same letter. If you run into Shane from Nassau shopping on Jericho Turnpike or something like that this weekend, don't say, "You said a bad word on the radio?" Say, "Brian Lehrer apologized to you on the radio for mishearing you," so just wanted to set the record straight on that. All right, we'll continue with Astead Herndon and more of your calls. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with New York Times political report reporter Astead Herndon, who also has been hosting their podcast, The Run-Up, where he's been traveling the country all year talking to voters in the run-up to the presidential election. Laurie in Brooklyn has been doing a little version of that herself, canvassing for Democrats in Pennsylvania, I believe. Laurie, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Laurie: Hey, thanks for having me. I'm frustrated with the pundit class giving these wiping critiques of what the Democrats didn't do and Kamala wasn't authentic as if somehow Trump is more authentic instead of a massive liar. Here's what was going on. Yes, I have canvassed a total of probably six weeks between the last two elections in Pennsylvania and just got back yesterday. Here's what's happening.

People are not investigating the positions of Kamala Harris. What does she stand for? What is really going on with the economy? How is Pennsylvania impacted by the Biden massive influx of money helping this state? No, no facts. No facts. The people who made up their minds are making up their minds for emotional, being inside the gladiator ring, and rooting for Trump, and incredibly close-minded. Many of them extremely violent in their rhetoric even when you're canvassing with them.

I take issue with a lot of what your speaker is saying there. It's not that the Democrats have been unable to articulate an economic vision. It's that people don't want to learn or hear any facts about what is going on with the economy. When I would say to people, "Did you know inflation went down to 2.1% this week," they would just call you a liar. Incredibly frustrating. Here it is. They're repeating the exact words they hear on Fox News every day for four years, day in and day out.

I've been in those households myself. I know how unbelievably negative it is. There's 30%, 40% of the population that's listening to nothing but Fox News. This has nothing to do with or very little to do with the Democrats on actual policies. What it does have to do with is the Democrats have not dealt with the immigration issues for years and years. Neither have the Republicans. They've been afraid to. They haven't successfully done it.

It gave Trump the window he needed to be a basher and a hater and a divider for the last year. In some of the small towns I was in, they're not impacted by immigration. They're impacted by Fox News's haranguing about what the immigrants are actually doing. By the way, I think this is a big issue. I'm open-minded about this, but it's whatever Fox News says. I take issue with some of what your speaker is saying about--

Brian Lehrer: Laurie, stay there. Astead, you want to talk to Laurie? You talk to voters for a living.

Astead Herndon: Yes. In the same way that you've been in those houses, I've been in there for years. I would just say that I can't imagine a worst position to take to try to win elections than to tell people what they're feeling and experiencing is wrong. I can't imagine looking at the electoral map that came out on Tuesday and saying that that's all Fox News watchers. That's not. I don't get how we can look at the consistency of the map across the country and say, "That's 30% of the country." That's not, is it?

Laurie: I'm going to say if you look at how many people actually rely on Fox News, you're going to see that almost 50% of the country is watching Fox News. Let's say that I'm wrong and it's not 100% of the problem. Let me tell you for sure, it's 60%, 70%, 80% of the problem because they have heard nothing positive about the Biden administration during his entire time.

I would talk to people and challenge them because I know a fair amount about the economy and they simply did not want to hear it. They didn't believe it. They didn't listen. They resorted to this, "Flip-flopper. She's a flip-flopper. She slept her way to the top. She only cares about trans people. She wants to change our children into the other gender." Come on, these are not voter-- A lot of people, not all, but some percentage of them are not people you can get through to even when things are going brilliantly their way.

Brian Lehrer: Laurie, let me leave it there unless you want to--

Astead Herndon: I guess I just don't get--

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead, Astead.

Astead Herndon: I guess I just don't get them, how Democrats expect to win elections. If you take that tone and you tell people that the problem is not anything that Democrats are doing, it is just how you feel about what they're doing, why would they vote for you? I have no idea why. I don't even think Democrats believe that that's actually the right message to take if anything. I will say something I agree with, though, is that by the time Harris had taken on the mantle of this race, the narrative about this administration was already set in.

This is why I talk about the importance of Joe Biden and the lack of a primary and setting this up from years ago is because one of the ways Democrats could have gotten a different message to those voters or could have emphasized the threat that Donald Trump poses to the political system and made that more of a priority for people was to act like that from the start. [chuckles] I think it completely undercut the message of urgency to run an 81-year-old for two years and pretend that most Americans wanted that.

I guess I would say I'm not saying this is all Democrats, that misinformation does not matter, that Republican attempts to set communities against each other have they have not made issues like transports and put that on Democrats in ways that aren't true, all of that is true. I guess I'm just saying what I think the biggest factor is, is that Democrats ceded that ground to them. They did so by tying themselves to an unpopular administration and the status quo and no one made them do that.

Brian Lehrer: You agree to disagree. Laurie, thank you very much for calling and engaging. Keep calling us. On the racial and gender gap in the outcome, I'm sure it's hard to put a number on racism or sexism. Maybe America still isn't ready for a woman president. Maybe America isn't ready for a Black and South Asian president. We had Obama, of course, with a Jewish spouse. I don't know. Nobody says that to the exit pollsters. They all talk about their issues. I wonder if you were able to tease out those elements in your many interviews with voters this year, expressed in code or expressed in things they didn't say or anything like that, and can quantify in any way how much of the vote that was.

Astead Herndon: I think that sexism really matters with any kind of candidate. I think masculinity in the kind of way Donald Trump was trying to create a specific coalition among male voters really mattered. I think that Black women face a unique amount of racism and sexism in combination. I don't think we could ever say that those things are not important. We obviously would hear those in conversations with voters. I think everything from her personal dating history coming up is a thing that would never come up with a male candidate.

I would be in Black communities and people bring up her having a white spouse. Those are obviously unique to the individual candidate. I think that those things certainly add certainly our pieces. I just don't think that you look at what happened on Tuesday and say that those were the overwhelming drivers. One thing I would say is we did an episode of The Run-Up from Wisconsin, Madison, specific to younger voters, Gen Z, and the gender gap you were seeing among those group.

We were talking to young men about what they see in Donald Trump. They would describe him as a kind of aspirational model of masculinity. That wasn't just because of business success. That wasn't just because he "tells it like it is" or the other things you see Trump supporters say. It was because they knew he offended some women in their lives and they like that, that he was a vessel for the backlash to MeToo or a backlash to what they feel is a type of liberal language about gender that is constraining to masculinity or anti-men in some way.

Brian Lehrer: They were willing to dismiss his actual being found liable in a court by a jury for sexual assault.

Astead Herndon: I'm saying all of that mattered in terms of him creating a sense of coalition among a group of men who were trying to thumb their nose at a language of gender and I think women specifically. I would never say that that stuff did not matter because we would see it playing out in people's articulations for supporting Trump. I think we saw it on the other side too.

One thing that I think the Harris campaign was betting on was that they had the better side of the gender gap and that a collection of women would take them over the top in states, particularly ones that had abortion rights on the ballot, places like Arizona. That just didn't pan out. Arizona voted for abortion access and for Donald Trump. The idea that that would be placed above everything else and they could create a coalition around reproductive rights did not pan out to be true.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, Florida too, right? The abortion rights amendment there got 57% of the vote. It won by 14 points even though it needed 60% to actually go into the Florida state constitution, but it won by 14 points. Trump won the state by more than that. It was clear that a lot of people, including the voter from Michigan who we played from your podcast, were splitting their votes, or at least managing to compartmentalize abortion from the presidential race in their minds. I know you got to go in two minutes. Let me play one quick clip of Kamala Harris from her concession speech last night. She conceded, but--

Kamala Harris: While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign.

[applause]

Kamala Harris: The fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness and the dignity of all people, a fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation, the ideals that reflect America at our best, that is a fight I will never give up.

Brian Lehrer: How do you see the Democrats taking the fight, however they define it, to a second Trump presidency?

Astead Herndon: That's a really hard question because I don't know. [chuckles] I don't think the same type of palpable resistance liberal energy is there. I remember last time Trump was elected, I was in Washington, DC. It was consumed by Not My President protest the day after. We don't see anything like that. I also think that the results are sweeping in scope. It kicks off an inevitable kind of soul-searching process. That's going to take a while.

There's a lot of reasons this happened and Democrats are going to have to comb through it. I think we can't assume, though, that the figures to create the new type of coalition are the figures we know in the Democratic Party right now. I think one thing we saw with, obviously, Trump's rise in 2016 was that there were clear divisions among the Republican base that the politicians as usual were not speaking to. It made it ripe for a disruption that he capitalized on.

I think there's some divisions among the Democratic base that I wonder when we look to the Future, will the 2028 primary be one of the kind of folks we know of the rising stars of the party, or is there an outsider that can speak to the party's base and the way that Trump spoke to the party's base on the other side? All of that landscape is completely wide open. I think you're going to see Democrats flail frankly for a little bit before we figure out what their strategy of comeback really is.

Brian Lehrer: Hey, by the way, is your podcast The Run-Up done now because it's obviously not the run-up to the election anymore and you go on to your next thing?

Astead Herndon: We have a couple of more episodes left. We wanted to have some takeaways to show folks. Yes, this was a big journey to get to this point and I need some sleep, so we're going to go away for a little bit. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: Well, thank you for staying up late in effect with us. Astead Herndon, New York Times political reporter, and he's been host of the podcast, The Run-Up, this election season. Thank you, Astead.

Astead Herndon: Appreciate it.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Much more to come.

 

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