Jon Wiener: From The Nation Magazine, this is Start Making Sense.  I’m Jon Wiener.  Today’s questions: how did we get here? and, what do we do next? We’ll ask John Nichols — in a minute.
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John Nichols, of course, is National Affairs Correspondent for The Nation. We reached him today at home in Madison. John, it is very good to talk to you on this very bad news day.

John Nichols: I am honored to be with you as always, Jon, and I can tell you that it is a bad news day, but as a reporter, I can tell you we don’t know how bad, or maybe even if there are a few rays of sunlight.

JW: I should say, we are speaking on Wednesday at two o’clock in the afternoon Eastern Time, and we don’t yet have complete results on the three or four key Senate races. We don’t have results from the West Coast states, especially California, which will take a week or two until we may know the final results of all those House races. The big picture at this hour is that Trump carried the swing states and along the way, brought down some of our best senators.
Seems like a landslide in the electoral college and in control of the Senate, and that means the consequences are huge, but the change in the vote in the swing states was actually quite small. Trump got one or two, or in some cases, three points more than Harris there, and Trump’s total in the popular vote, 72 million, is actually smaller than he got four years ago when he got 74 million. Obama’s victory was much bigger than Trump’s. Reagan’s was much bigger. Of course, nothing compares with LBJ. What for you is the big picture of what went wrong?

JN: Well, a lot went wrong, and let’s be clear about that. I think it’s important to emphasize ‘a lot’ because it wasn’t just one thing. First and foremost, I think it’s important to understand, this has been an incredibly chaotic year.
I remember in the summer, talking to a friend of mine and saying, “Look, in the last 10 days, we have seen an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate. We have seen a national convention of a major party that introduced an unexpected candidate for Vice President. We have seen a former President address that convention and deliver an incoherent speech that took the energy out of it. We have seen the sitting President decide to stand down as a candidate for reelection, and then we saw the first instance in American history where a Black woman, the child of immigrants from India and from Jamaica, suddenly was thrust into the national spotlight as a presidential candidate.”
All of this, that was in 10 days, and we kind of had that happen again and again throughout the year. In the midst of this chaos, it is very, very difficult to deliver a message. I think the Democrats struggled in this campaign to deliver their message. It doesn’t mean that they didn’t – I think in many ways, structurally, Kamala Harris ran a very good campaign.

JW: Yeah.

JN: There was an arc, there was a plan, and as you say, in a number of these battleground states, my own state of Wisconsin, it’s a marginal shift, right? This is a state that voted by about 22,000 votes for Trump in ’16, voted by about 20,000 votes for Biden in ’20. This year, it looks like about 30,000 votes for Trump. It’s this marginal thing, but what we have to understand is that while a lot of things went right, I do think there are a couple things that went wrong.
They were choices that were made that I don’t think were necessarily wise. One of these was to spend an immense amount of time with Liz Cheney, and the Republicans trying to find some way to win Republican votes. I want to tell you, you take a good serious look at the results from last night, you’re going to find that that didn’t work very well. That didn’t move the votes that people hoped, or thought were going to move. In fact, that’s exactly where a lot of things fell apart.
Too much time with Liz Cheney, too little time in union halls with Shawn Fain, and Sara Nelson, and other union leaders to deliver an economic message. Polling tells us that people were really looking for that economic message, and an economic message that doesn’t just say, “Boy, Biden gave you a great economy,” but one that acknowledges pain, moves forward with a recognition of what you have to do.
One other element of that too, look, everything about our history, and Jon, we’ve talked about this. Everything about our history tells us when a sitting President has led the country into a very unpopular foreign policy, Lyndon Johnson, Vietnam, Joe Biden, support for Israel, as regards Gaza, when that President stands down as Johnson did and as Biden did, and hands off the mantle of the party to another candidate, that candidate who steps in has to address that very unpopular foreign policy.
I know that Kamala Harris mentioned it at the convention and a couple other settings, but it was insufficient. I think that as we look around the country and we see not just votes out of Michigan, which I think media covers this issue very badly because they think, “Oh, well, it’s just a couple of towns in Michigan,” and we shouldn’t dismiss that. That’s significant, because very vital, but this is on campuses across the country. This is in communities across the country. There are all sorts of people who really do care about this, and it just needed to be addressed.

JW: Those are the fundamentals. I want to talk about the popular vote. Right now, Wednesday midday, they’re saying Trump won the popular vote. That would be huge, the first time a Republican will have done that in 20 years if it holds, but we don’t yet have the vote from California, which usually makes the difference. Joe Biden four years ago got 9 million more votes than Trump did this year. The real key here is the fall off in the Democratic vote.
That’s what we need to understand, and that’s where the big question of what happened arises. I think I’d like to look a little more at Wisconsin, your state. Trump ended up with 49.7%, less than 50%, let us know, but one point more than Harris, but incumbent Senator Tammy Baldwin won reelection by one point. How come Kamala lost and Tammy Baldwin won in Wisconsin?

JN: That’s a very, very good question. Look, I think there’s so many factors, so many cross currents in this election, that we should be careful about extrapolating from any one of them. I think we have to recognize that race and gender continue to be huge factors in how people make choices as regards politics, good choices, and frankly, choices that I disagree with on both sides of this, the equation. We can’t fail to recognize that.
We also can’t fail to recognize that this campaign saw the introduction of all sorts of incredibly crude attacks on Democrats as regards to their stances on immigration, trans rights, a host of other issues. All of that’s in play there. I don’t want to miss any of that as we talk about this, but I will tell you, one distinction in Wisconsin that is interesting is that Tammy Baldwin, who is a three term, she would like to do a third term in the US Senate, longtime political figure, faced a very, very wealthy opponent who spent lavishly, and basically imported all of the Republican attacks against her.
All the issues we’re talking about, really brutal attacks. Happens that Baldwin is an out lesbian. She was even attacked in advertising with pictures of her partner and stuff like that. This thing went to places that I have not seen before in politics. It was vagrantly ugly. Yet one of the things that Baldwin did that was fascinating was she remained resolute in her focus. She had a plan from the start of the campaign, and she saw it through to the end.
There were times when she, there’d be like a prominent figure come to the state and say, “Why isn’t Tammy Baldwin appearing with that person?” It wasn’t that Baldwin was like trying to run away from the ticket, she appeared with Harris many times, but if she had a plan to go to some small town in Wisconsin, she went there. She stuck to a plan that saw a vision for how to speak to the whole state.
As part of that, she never ever lost sight of the multiracial, multiethnic working class of Wisconsin: factory workers, farmers, et cetera. Her ads were different than a lot of the ads you saw, the generic ads you saw for Democrats in other places. To give you an example, she had ads on farms with farmers in the barn. She had ads with shipbuilders talking about saving their industry up in Northeast Wisconsin. She had ads with Teamsters sitting on, one Teamster after another, multiracial, multiethnic, men and women, sitting on a chair. Each one would sit on a chair, and they would talk about some aspect of what happened when they lost their pensions, and when Tammy Baldwin fought to get their pensions back.
I will tell you that overall, that formed, even amidst all the negatives and the brutal attacks, that formed a narrative that I think helped her to get some portion of people who voted for Donald Trump to vote for a pretty progressive US Senator. I mention all this, only because it’s my sense that in this very dark and very difficult moment, there are some lessons to learn about how to run a winning campaign. We’re seeing quite a few Senators go down, quite a few Senators who got beat, good Senators, in some cases. The fact that Baldwin pulled it off, I think, is quite significant.

JW: One finding in the CNN exit poll I thought was noteworthy, exit polls, who knows what they’re actually measuring, but they’re there, and maybe we can learn something from this one. CNN’s exit poll found that just 44% of voters had a favorable view of Trump. 54% had an unfavorable view, and 55% of voters in the CNN exit poll said, “Trump’s views are too extreme.” Now, there’s an opening for us there.

JN: Oh, unquestionably. Look, this is one of the things to understand: in this election campaign, there are many people who voted for Kamala Harris because they really liked her, and I think a whole bunch of people voted for her for that reason. There’s another bunch of people who voted for her because they don’t like Trump.
What we have to understand is that in a dynamic where people are voting for one candidate because they like them, but also sometimes against things like that, that for Trump, I think he recognized, his campaign recognized early on, that those numbers that you just cited – I think those are probably consistent numbers throughout the campaign. What they sought to do was to make more people dislike Kamala Harris, right?
To throw so many negatives at her that it would bring the debate down to a level where Trump could get a vote from someone who didn’t even like Trump. I saw it in Wisconsin. I would see ad after ad after ad. They never referred to her as the Vice President or Kamala Harris. They referred to her as Kamala, and they were brutally negative and blamed her for everything you can imagine, and even went to levels, the claims about her stances on immigrants, on trans rights, on a host of other issues, were just so over-the-top.
Yet, when you put tens of millions of dollars behind that, I think it has some impact. Again, you can dislike Donald Trump, but if Donald Trump makes you dislike somebody else more than him, you open up that potential that he gets the vote. I think you saw some of that.

JW: One of the most dismaying things about the election four years ago was the way Trump won 52% of white women – 53% last time, four years ago, he won 53% of white women. Turns out this year, at least according to the CNN exit poll, he won 52% of white women. This is after he said he would protect women, whether the women like it or not, he always painted these terrifying scenes of criminals, immigrants, murderers breaking into the kitchens of women while they’re home alone and cutting their throats.
He did pose as the defender of endangered women. It seems like white women still like Donald Trump, even though a lot of them voted for the abortion referenda in their states.

JN: Absolutely. Look, again, we spoke a moment ago about Donald Trump or about Kamala Harris’s campaigns efforts to reach out to suburban women, especially Republicans, with lots of appearances with Liz Cheney, and she did multiple appearances in Wisconsin with Liz Cheney. That just didn’t gain much traction. There’s very little evidence that that worked. Then we ask a strategic question. I think this is an important one, if we learn from an election result, and that is, what might she have done differently to get where she needed to be?
Well, I can tell you, on the Madison campus, there was under-performance for the Democrats, young people. There was not a connection there. I would go so far as to say that not just appearances, and she did appearances with some celebrities, and things like that, but policy, and really kind of an outreach that focuses on fundamental issues. Who’s very popular with young people? To this day, I saw it just a week or so ago in Madison, Bernie Sanders, but Kamala Harris didn’t appear with Bernie Sanders. She appeared with Liz Cheney. Didn’t appear until the last day with AOC, but she appeared with all sorts of Republicans.
I would suggest to you that first and foremost, a policy shift on some of these issues we’re talking about, not just Gaza, but also on a real sense of economic opportunity for young people going forward might have had a major impact with people who she could actually win over. Not trying to swing Republicans, but swinging what Reverend Barber refers to as that broad mass of people, many of them young, who incline toward progressive positions, but do need to be invited into the process, do need to be invited to cast their vote.
I think that’s at the heart of it, Jon, is that there was a mis-focus, even though I’m very complimentary to some aspects of the campaign, I think there was a mis-focus on where the outreach needed to be, and the outreach needed to be toward bringing in people who are on your side, not convincing people who actually don’t agree with you on a host of issues that they should vote for you because they don’t like Donald Trump.

JW: I also want to ask about Latino men. We were told throughout the campaign that the polls showed that Latino men were switching their allegiance to the Republicans, and that CNN exit poll showed that a majority of Latino men, 54%, voted for Trump. What do you think’s going on there? The simplest explanation is Latino men don’t want to vote for a Black woman.

JN: Yeah, but I think there’s a lot more to it than that. I think that one thing is every community, every demographic, has diversity within it. We have a long history of seeing folks who may vote for someone that I don’t agree with, or you don’t agree with, but they actually agree with them for whatever reason or whatever issue. I think we have to respect that and recognize that. My sense is that, again, this comes back to a couple of things.
First and foremost, yes, race and gender. We recognize that those are deep, deep challenges that exist in our society and have not gone away. That first, you have to recognize, but you also recognize that there are a lot of folks who are strivers economically. They want to make it in America, but they also want to have at least some base of social safety. I think Kamala Harris took a great stand in favor of a care economy, and getting people the aid they need to care for their elderly parents, to care for themselves if they’re in a difficult situation, to expand Medicare, Medicaid, social security.
Those are great positions for multiracial, multiethnic outreach, and including to, I would argue, Latino men and others, but that wasn’t always central to her appeal when she went out and talked about what she was trying to do. I think this is the problem, there was so much talk about how divisive Donald Trump was, what a bad player Donald Trump was. Well, true, I agree with it, but there wasn’t enough talk about what you wanted to get to, what you wanted to achieve, what you want to give people or get people if you’re elected President. I think that at the end of the day, rather than suggesting somebody didn’t vote for somebody because they didn’t like this or they didn’t like that, I think it’s important to understand that in many cases, people across the spectrum were not given enough of a sense of what might happen to the good in their lives, if Kamala Harris was elected.

JW: There’s one thing we certainly don’t know the final vote on yet, and that’s the composition of the House of Representatives. If Democrats regained control of the House, largely it would be because of elections which are yet unresolved in California, Oregon, and Washington. That would be a kind of firewall against much of the worst of what Trump as President could do. Let’s talk about that for a minute.

JN: It’s a huge deal, Jon. Look, I said before the election, and I might even have said it to you, that I thought that this would not be a close result. I thought that it would break one way or the other. It would either break toward Harris, and she would probably achieve a result similar to Barack Obama in 2012, an incumbent party seeking reelection that won the presidency, and then won the Senate, and maybe didn’t make as much progress in the House as it wanted but did a little bit there.
It was a positive scenario, the little variations. The other was a Reagan 1980, that a challenger to an incumbent party surged at the end, won the presidency, flipped a whole lot of Senate seats and had an opposing House, but a House that had to define itself in that new context. Well, I think we’ve ended up with the Reagan scenario, but it’s much worse because Trump is, I think, a worse player than Reagan, and also, he has much more control of his party.
In that scenario, what we have to remember is that the House of Representatives was a challenge for Ronald Reagan. He did have to compromise with it on some issues, and it’s good to study that. It’s good to think about that. It’s also good to recognize one of the dangers in so divided a moment is that the folks who are supposed to be the opposition start out saying, ‘Oh, well, we want to find ways to work with everybody. We want to find ways to cooperate.’ It is fine to cooperate on Donald Trump if he’s doing something really good.
Your initial message is that just Donald Trump was elected to the White House, and there’s a Senate majority, the House of Representatives, which the founders of this country thought of as the most grassroots organization, the one that’s closest to people, if indeed you’ve got Democratic leadership there, they have a right and a responsibility to say, ‘Hey, we too were elected. There’s a system of checks and balances, and we are going to check and balance Donald Trump on issue after issue after issue if he’s wrong.’
I think you can’t muddle that message, because it’s just such a narrow window in which to make sure that we can defend many of the things that we know from referendum results that people want. Remember that in referendums across this country, people voted for abortion rights, raising the minimum wage, voting rights. It’s kind of amazing. In Kentucky, 65% of people, in a state that Trump won overwhelmingly, voted against school vouchers, and in favor of a strong, robust public education system.
The bottom line is that we are a country that sends a lot of mixed signals, and if indeed the House of Representatives has Democratic leadership, which we’re not assured of, but if it does, the Democrats who are in that leadership have, again, a right and responsibility to say that they too must be heard in this next two years.

JW: Well, we’re only at day one. There’s a lot of time to come, in which we’ll be trying to figure out more about what happened and what we need to do. John Nichols, I’m sure, we’ll be coming back to you and asking these same questions several times over the next many weeks. Thanks so much for talking with us on this day.

JN: I appreciate you very much, Jon, and I hope that when we come back to talk again, we will know even more about the results.

JW: Okay.