Welcome to Politically Speaking.

I'm Elizabeth Bennion, chancellor's professor of political science and director of Community Engagement in the American Democracy Project at Indiana University, South Bend.

This week, we're taking a deep dive into the results of the 2024 presidential election.

Donald Trump swept all seven swing states and nearly every demographic shifted in his favor.

At the same time, several swing states elected Democratic senators showing signs of significant ticket splitting.

Joining us to help break it all down are two political experts.

David Campbell is the Packey J. Dee professor of American democracy at the University of Notre Dame and director of the Notre Dame Democracy Initiative.

Tiffany Bohm is the lead faculty in political science and director of LMC votes at Lake Michigan College.

We'll discuss the key factors behind Trump's victory, demographic trends, and what this election means for the future of U.S. politics.

David, I want to start with you.

Donald Trump won a decisive victory in terms of getting that majority he needed both in the popular vote, but also the actual Electoral College, which determined his victory.

To what do you attribute his win?

Well, I would say that there's really two tales to be told about this election.

One is, if you look around the world, incumbents have had a rough year.

In fact, in every democratic country where there has been an election, the governing party has lost ground.

And by that standard, the margin by which Trump won is actually on the lower side compared to other countries.

If we just look in the United States, the fundamentals, as they call them, particularly the perception of the economy, were definitely against the Democrats.

So whoever is at the top of the Democratic ticket was always going to have a tough slog.

And so one interpretation of this election is that it went pretty much the way you would have expected.

The incumbents didn't do well.

The challenger did.

But, of course, the other tale about this election is a little more complicated because the person who won is not just any presidential candidate.

Not only has he been president, but he has made promises that I think it is fair to say are unique in American history.

And so to the extent that any individual voter had that in mind, that's a sobering thought.

Where we are as a country, where we are as a democratic society, that Donald Trump would be reelected.

So what do I attribute his victory to?

I actually lean more toward.

It was a bad year for incumbents, but I can't rule out the possibility that, of course, there were at least some voters who like the message that Trump is giving.

It's not just that he wasn't the incumbent.

It's that he was saying things that resonated with them.

And again, that is something that I think as a country we need to think about.

As you talk about it being sobering, what kind of policies do you have in mind?

We have never had a presidential candidate who has vowed retribution on his enemies.

We've never had a presidential candidate actually use the term enemy to refer to his political opponents, to refer to the enemy within.

And that doesn't even get into the fact that Donald Trump is a convicted felon, that Donald Trump did refuse to concede the 2020 election.

All of these things are absolutely unprecedented and we truly are in uncharted waters.

So whatever the reasons that people might have voted for Trump or for Kamala Harris, for that matter, we now have a situation in the United States that we have not seen before.

And it's, of course, worth watching.

But it's also something that I think should be of concern.

And Tiffany, David mentioned the economy, and the fact that incumbents, post-pandemic recovery, some economic struggles, including international inflation.

One of the things that we know in terms of the U.S. economy is there seems to be a gap between people's view of the economy and what economists say.

Economists say this is actually a strong economy with the exception of the Swiss.

We have record purchasing power.

We have high wage is we have inflation coming down.

Negative inflation would be ruinous for the country.

You don't want the value of the dollar to go down.

You don't want wages to go down.

So we're moving in the right direction.

But that doesn't seem to be what people feel about the economy, is that what matters?

I agree.

Yes.

I think when people go to the grocery store and when they're purchasing the things that they've been purchasing for the last couple of years, and and nothing has changed as far as products, but the price of the products and the cost of a shopping cart has dramatically changed.

So the prices that we see locally or or that affect people in their homes and their kitchens and what they're trying to do in their personal lives has been impacted greatly by the economy.

So on a large scale, we've seen the interest rate has started to trickle down.

We started to see the economy have glimmers of recovery stabilizing, but it hasn't been fast enough.

It wasn't quick enough to make an impact for the election.

So David, that sort of continues, that sense of discontent among people that you talked about initially and one of the explanations I've seen, particularly progressives use is this fact that really it is true the bottom 80%, the bottom 90% are not making much headway over the last 40 years, not just the last four years.

Now, there is this sense that somebody else is doing well and I'm angry.

And even if that money is going to the top and some of the economic policies that Donald Trump is promoting, such as tax cuts for the highest income brackets and the slashing of the corporate tax will also go to the top.

He at least gave voice to their sense of anger and discontent.

Do you buy this storyline?

yes, indeed.

If you look, as you said, not just over the last four or eight or even 12 years, but over the last 20, 30, 40 years, we have seen a decline in economic mobility in America.

And that is particularly true for those who are on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

And if you live in a world in which you have a difficult time imagining yourself or your children improving your life situation, which is the American dream, it is easy, perhaps, to see why people might turn to a candidate either on the left or on the right, who promises something different, who promises to change things up.

And that is much of Trump's appeal.

Now, I don't want to make it sound as though his only appeal is economic, because I do think that wrapped up into these economic questions are also issues of what we sometimes call the culture war and things that do not necessarily affect your pocketbook, but instead speak to people's values or their sense of identity.

And Trump definitely taps into some visceral reactions there, too.

Now, in terms of swing states, Michigan was one that everybody was watching.

Well, nobody was particularly surprised with the fact that Indiana gave all of its electoral votes to Donald Trump.

And the Republican Party swept the statewide elections in Michigan.

There was a lot of attention to what would happen with the Electoral College votes, what would happen to the Senate seat that was vacated by a long time incumbent, Debbie Stabenow, and what would happen even with the state legislature.

So what would you say is a story of Michigan in this election cycle?

I think Michigan is a very good example of how divided our country is.

Michigan went red for President Trump and a national administration.

But for the senator, Elissa Slotkin won.

She won by a very slim margin, but she won in most of the counties in Michigan and they trended red.

There was a very few that went blue or stayed solid for Harris and maintained local seats right around the southwest Michigan.

Berrien County stayed blue, but up northern, everything trended red.

I think voting nationally for Republican sees a national picture.

We want to nationally improve the economy, but on a local level, we tend to believe more progressive or the Democrat elected officials are closer to us and see us and will represent us locally better.

I think it's textbook of how divisive and partizan we are.

It's interesting.

Slotkin, of course, had a big lead in fundraising early on.

The Republicans governors and Republicans dumped a lot of money into that Senate race when they saw that Trump seemed to be doing well in the state.

Was it too little too late for her Republican challenger, or you think there was an intentional attempt to balance government going on?

I'm not sure if it was an attempt.

I think it was maybe too little too late.

I also think the Michigan State House turned red.

So I maybe her track record, I'd really have to think about that.

And I think in a couple of months when we see how people really voted and if people voted for Trump and actually continued and voted down ballot, or if people with high voter turnout showed up to vote for President Trump, only and then left the rest of the ballot blank, that will be interesting to see.

Now, voter turnout is another piece of this puzzle.

And it's interesting that there are also two stories there about whether or not this really was a grand victory for Donald Trump in this type of sweeping language you've been using because of the final results of what went in the win and loss category, or whether this is really the story of Democrats staying home and being uninspired or perhaps disappointed that they're not feeling like they're getting anything from the Democrats, even if they don't like Trump.

And so it seems like Donald Trump did better and got more votes in certain key states and constituencies than before, but also that Harris got significantly less votes than Biden in these key states.

Is this just more of that disengaged sort of disenchantment?

Well, you make a good point.

When interpreting election returns, we always need to pay attention not only to the choices voters make, but who is actually turning out to make those choices in the first place.

Turnout matters.

We know overall in the country that voter turnout in 2024 was just a little below about two and a half points.

Percentage points below what we saw in 2020.

2020 was a high point.

So 2024 basically returned to where we were in 2016.

But that does suggest, as you mentioned, that there were Democrats staying home.

And I can assure you that over the next few months and years, there will be many debates and discussions and papers and panels on exactly that question.

Why did more Democrats, why didn't more Democrats turn out?

Why did so many stay home?

Was it because of the war in Gaza?

Was it because of something about Kamala Harris, or was it just because, as you were suggesting, there are at least some of the Democratic Party who feel that the party has not delivered for them part of that economic perhaps frustration that we were mentioning earlier, but they couldn't quite bring themselves to vote for Trump, so they just decided to stay home.

All of those are undoubtedly true.

Which of them is the dominant factor, if there is one?

We don't yet know.

But it is nonetheless a reminder that for all of the money and effort that the Democrats put into voter mobilization, there seemed to be a piece missing there.

That is a puzzle because they definitely anybody who is in a battleground state knows that they poured an incredible amount of effort into getting their people to the polls and yet somehow they fell short.

And that will be part of the autopsy, if you will, that the Democratic Party will now conduct upon itself over the next few years.

Tiffany, Michigan represents a little bit of a break from the national story, which is high turnout but not as high as 2020 for Michigan, it appears that people came out in really high numbers, but also that if you look at a place like Dearborn, nearly half the population is of Arab descent.

Trump won decisively.

Does that go back to Gaza and that push to be uncommitted, rather than to give your votes to the Democrats?

What do we know about that?

Yes, and there was high profile protests in Dearborn, Wayne County went for Harris, but the Dearborn specific county went for.

Do I have that backwards?

I want to make sure I check my notes.

And Dearborn is largely voted for Trump.

Yes, that's correct.

I had to check my data there with 42% and I do think that there was lots of protests against the Biden administration's policies.

And rather than cast a vote for some of the they might not have been compelled to vote for, they stayed home.

And so you saw a more greater turnout that voted for Trump and everybody that would have preferred to vote for somebody who had come out in support of the Palestinian or against some of the controversies that they just stayed home and didn't vote.

So that's why you saw the the breadth of vote that we can't measure with voter turnout, because you don't know until we get the exit polls who those people voted for.

And so we see these voting patterns.

We see a difference in turnout patterns.

We see differences in the results.

But it seems that this could be a factor in that particular looking more broadly at different demographic groups.

Donald Trump did do better among Latinos, particularly young Latino men, and even young African-American men.

We're not talking about winning a majority here necessarily, but these shifts we hear a lot about.

What do either of you make of this?

the exit polls actually do suggest that, to the surprise of many, Donald Trump did win.

Latino men, not African-American men, did a lot better among black men than he's done previously, but not enough to actually win that category.

But in close elections, just improving a margins can help.

Yeah, I think what this tells us is something that social scientists have known for a long time but perhaps doesn't necessarily permeate into the national conversation about politics, which is that politics is about a lot more than any single factor.

It's about a lot more than demographic identity.

And so what I think we're seeing is a transformation of the Republican Party so that the working class, whether we're talking about the white working class or working class folks of color, either way, we're seeing that population increasingly fall under the Republican column.

This has been happening now for a number of years.

It's not like this one election is the earthquake that changed it all.

And in fact, this all predates the emergence of Donald Trump on the scene.

Trump has probably accelerated it, but it was definitely happening before he was on the scene.

This is a new divide in American politics.

This is not something that we've seen before.

And I would say that it's on par with similar transformations that we've seen in the past.

The Deep South, for example, which once used to be heavily Democratic, becoming Republican white evangelical Christians, which used to be a fairly Democratic group, now swinging very heavily toward Republicans.

So now we're seeing the same thing happening with the working class, not just the white working class, but the working class broadly defined.

That is going to shape American politics for the next generation.

And it's an issue that the Democrats definitely need to grapple with.

Well talk about demographics and religion, A majority of Protestant's did go for Donald Trump, particularly strong among itself, declared white evangelical Protestants a lesser support among black Protestants.

Catholics are roughly split more in favor of Trump among white Catholics and more in favor of Harris among Latino Catholics.

But a lot of those differences within religious groups seem to track more along racial ethnic lines than they do religion, per se.

Say what religion you identify with writ large A your one of your areas of expertise is religion and American politics.

Are we seeing sort of a shifting and a realignment there?

I would say no, not in 2024.

Everything that you just said about the election results in 2024, you could have said about 2020, in 2016 and frankly, 2012 and elections before that as well.

The realignment, the transformation that I was describing with the working class, drawing a parallel to religious groups, that has already happened.

This is the world that we live in just to take the the case of Catholic voters, Catholics writ large.

On the one hand, it is fair to say that there is no single Catholic vote in the country.

Catholics generally, as a group vote the way the whole country votes.

But when you break the Catholic vote up and look at the, as you said, Latino Catholics versus white Catholics, or perhaps you compare Catholics who are more frequent mass attenders versus less frequent mass attenders, that's where you begin to see significant differences when you look at other religious groups.

I mentioned that the white evangelical Christians, they have been a core constituency for the Republican Party for a long time.

That is not new to Donald Trump.

What is new to Donald Trump is the level of enthusiasm that you see among evangelicals.

So evangelicals were voting for Mitt Romney and for John McCain, but they weren't terribly enthusiastic about them.

They're very enthusiastic about Donald Trump.

But that continues to be a puzzle for people like myself who study religion.

Try to understand that because you're right, it probably has something to do more with other factors about Donald Trump than certainly any particular religious view that he espouses has a lot to do with the policy positions that he takes and just the worldview that he espouses, this sense of and battlements that he's your guy, he's the one sticking up for you and your values and the way you see the world.

And Tiffany, one of the things that you study is youth politics, the young people.

And we talk about what this means for the future of US politics.

They did swing as predicted more heavily toward Harris.

Any surprises there?

I think college educated women.

So what we're seeing now, the women coming through, getting degrees, I think is going to be telling in four years, if we follow the youth vote, if we look back at 2016 and 2020 and we follow the people that voted, I think they might have started one way and maybe voted differently in this election.

I do think you had we did have enthusiasm in southwest Michigan for turning out and voting in the election.

I am not surprised with where Southwest Michigan voted.

I am a little more curious to see how 18 to 24 year olds voted up around McComb and the Detroit some of the other larger areas.

I do think there might be some indicators that the youth vote might be transitioning over to the Republican Party as well.

So lesser support than assumed for Democrats and also this college non-college divide seems to be quite striking in today's politics, where we do see that folks who didn't go to college are decidedly more likely to vote for Republicans than those who did.

It seems like it may even be affecting policies and congressional attitudes or Republican attitudes were generally toward toward colleges and universities.

So that we'll be watching, I guess, in in the future.

So we think there is a global trend.

There seems to be an economic trend.

There seems to be also in addition to the realities, the strategy and the campaigning, what does this mean for the future of US politics?

David, you've already mentioned a lot of open questions because we have some things that we haven't seen before as Trump makes his cabinet picks, we see folks who have stood by him and the promises he's made.

He said that he promises to deliver, deliver on his promises.

These include things like retribution against political enemies as well as mass deportation.

How likely is that with a favorable Congress, that these things would sail through?

Or are we just going to see a lot of battles in the courts?

Well, one thing that I have learned is that prediction is hard, especially about the future.

So I'm always hesitant to make specific predictions.

I do think, however, we can nonetheless make some reasonable inferences about what is likely to happen, or at least, you know, different scenarios that might unfold.

I think it is clear in this immediate wake of the election as we hear about the various appointments that Donald Trump is intended to make, that he is definitely testing his allies in Congress, how far can he push them so that he can put his loyalists into office?

And we will see whether or not the Senate pushes back on this.

And I don't think we really know we can.

I think safely assume that the I think this is accurate.

The chaos that we observed when Trump was first elected in the 2016 election was largely because he had not installed loyalists.

There actually weren't that many loyalists for Trump to to install.

And so you had a number of people in his administration who were not necessarily on board with his agenda.

That is very different now.

The people who are not on board with his agenda, they are not active in the party and they are definitely not on the list of people who are going to be appointed to things.

Whether or not he will succeed in seeing all of his appointments, people like Matt Gates for attorney General, for example, whether he will succeed in getting those names through the Senate.

I think at this moment, as we are recording, this is an open question and it is very much a test.

I think, of the Republican Party.

And if it turns out that he is able to install basically whoever he selects, that his allies in Congress just go along with whatever it does, suggests that we are in for, as I was saying earlier, a completely unprecedented four years under this administration.

Tiffany, one of the things that people are doing is looking for the states, and some states are already taking actions to try to enshrine abortion protections into their state constitutions, to try to create certain kinds of protections for immigrants, etc..

So it's particularly blue states.

Do you expect more debates and disputes between this blue states and the administration to be a lot of what we'll see?

I do.

I see there was ten states that had abortion measures on the ballot.

Seven succeeded in protecting it at the state level.

I think if you see any national even in his campaign president, President Trump backed away from a national ban on it.

But I do think if there's a push or if there's anything like that, the states will come up and and you'll see court cases and they'll try and prevent that.

And they want to keep it at the state level.

As far as the immigration, I do think that that's going to be a really hot topic, really somewhat divisive issues.

It's going to be contentious in Congress as far as the states enacting laws, sanctuary laws or protection laws or whatever.

I think we may see those.

I think depending on who is the Department of Justice and attorney general and how the immigration pans out with the new borders are, I think is going to be telling.

But I think it's going to be interesting, like David said, and support for states rights and autonomy supports for the filibuster.

All of this may change now that we see changes in the composition of government, right?

Yeah, Although it'll be very interesting to see how much of this unfolds.

I mean, I think Tiffany is entirely correct.

The battleground has now moved to the states.

You mentioned abortion, you mentioned immigration.

There are a variety of other issues, environmental protections, for example.

So we could rattle off a long list where the states have a lot of authority.

And the history of this country has always been the tug of war between the states and the federal government.

And when we have a Democratic administration, it's Republican states that are mobilizing against it.

And now the tables have turned.

And so we'll see the Democratic states mobilize against the Republican administration, and it definitely will keep the lawyers busy, keep the lawyers busy.

So to be continued, because that's all the time we have for this week's Politically Speaking, I want to thank political scientists David Campbell and Tiffany Bohm for joining us today and for sharing their insights.

I'm Elizabeth Bennion reminding you that it takes all of us to make democracy work.

We'll see you next time.

This WNIT Local production has been made possible in part by viewers like you.

Thank you.