(upbeat music) - The 2024 general election is in the books.

History was made, for better or worse, in the presidential election.

We're going to dissect that and talk about some of the other races impacting Central Illinois.

From the Political Science and International Studies department at Bradley University, we're joined by Associate Professor Dr. Megan Remmel, and Assistant Professor Dr. Taraleigh Davis.

Thanks for coming in, ladies.

- Sure.

- Thank you.

- Megan, we'll start with you.

Are you surprised by the turnout of the presidential race?

- So, for weeks leading up to the election, I had thought that the house was going to go Democratic, and the Senate was gonna go Republican, and the presidency was gonna go Republican, and then that last week some of the polls were a little wonky.

And so, I started thinking maybe the presidency was gonna go to Harris.

So, I think political scientists were also kind of with most pollsters of being, like, it could kind of go either way.

I think the bigger surprise for me was that it appears President Trump won the electoral college, or won the popular vote on top of the electoral college.

I had anticipated that he would win the electoral college, but not the popular vote, and that does not seem to have been the case, so that's the thing that I'm more surprised about.

- Taraleigh, you?

- I agree with Megan with kind of what we were thinking beforehand.

I think what most surprised me is how Trump gained, pretty much everywhere, including, like, very blue cities like Chicago and even New York, where we saw, you know, Harris winning, or Biden in 2020 winning by maybe 70, and then Harris not winning by 70, but getting 70% of the vote, and Harris maybe only getting, like, 59 or 60.

So, I think that was pretty surprising to me.

- Let's dissect this and, you know, play Monday morning quarterback.

Do you think, Megan, was it Trump's campaign doing that well or Harris's campaign not doing as well, or a little bit of both?

- I think Harris was obviously at a disadvantage in a number of ways.

Yes, she was a latecomer to the race, but I think part of the consequences of that is she inherited a campaign machine that was not hers; it was not designed to be hers.

So, obviously they had to pivot really, really quickly.

So, the ability of the campaign to sort of adapt was forced in a really short order.

So, I think that the campaign was just starting off on kind of its back foot to begin with.

The Trump campaign, I still heard a lot of differences between Trump's advisors versus Trump the candidate.

And it does seem like Trump the candidate's instincts may have been correct.

He really was erring on the side of focusing on immigration, whereas his advisors apparently continuing to try to get him to focus on an economic message, and he appears to have been more correct.

So, some of the exit polls I've seen have immigration being back towards a higher priority issue than it had been for most of the summer or fall.

So, I think he was able to get that back up on the radar.

So, to me it's sort of Harris not necessarily running a bad campaign, but running a very short campaign and not having a lot of time to adapt to the circumstances, and Trump having two years to be able to kind of perfect that campaign.

- Taraleigh, do you think that Kamala Harris focused on the correct things in terms of, you know, the economy seems to trump all, so to speak, when it comes to things people are concerned about, and it didn't seem like she had a definitive plan on how to make the economy better.

She just said she was going to make the economy better.

Do you think any of that had an effect on the race?

- I mean, to be honest, it's too early to tell specifically what has... you know, we don't have all the data in front of us.

I will say that, based on, you know, coming in with about 100 days to the election, she came in as kind of an unknown name, even as vice president of the United States.

So, not only did she have to get her economic plan across, but really introduce herself to the United States, whereas the Trump campaign, he's been running a campaign since 2015, so he's had nine years of kind of on the political running at a national level.

And so, I think anything maybe that had been missing from, you know, specific plans, could be possibly attributed to having to introduce herself and who she even is to the American public.

- I'm curious.

You know, you both teach, obviously, at Bradley, and you're around young people.

Have you ever talked about how endorsements have an effect on young voters?

You know, for instance, Kamala Harris had all the big celebrities, and Donald Trump kind of had the B and C and D list celebrities.

Do your students ever talk about if that has any effect on them and how they vote at all?

- I can't speak to Taraleigh's students, but mine, I'd say pretty much no.

There's research on the effects of endorsements, and it's pretty negligible.

And so, our students are either kind of apathetic, just because they've grown up in a time where they've never seen politics particularly functional.

So, very few people might be able to motivate them to actually be passionate enough to really get involved beyond anything just voting.

But I don't think any of the people who were already Beyonce fans were probably on the fence about voting for Harris.

So, I don't think they were necessarily surprise endorsements that would, other than, like, a Liz Cheney, but our students are not going to really be paying attention to Liz Cheney as an endorsement.

So, I personally haven't seen that.

But maybe you have?

- Actually, it's really interesting, 'cause I have a Teach American Government this semester, and every class period, we kind of come in with, "Hey, what have you been seeing in the news?"

And just last week, you know, the students came in with what was said at Trump's Madison Square Garden rally and not that Beyonce was in Houston.

- Yeah.

- And so, I don't think that they're really paying attention to actual endorsements, to be honest.

- What about the ways that they get their news?

Because I know, for instance, when Donald Trump went on Joe Rogan's podcast, I think 33 million people downloaded it, whereas if he had gone on 60 Minutes, I'm not sure that many people would've seen it.

Do your students ever talk about how they get their news and how they get their political information?

- All the time.

(Taraleigh and Megan laugh) I think I ask twice a week, you know, "What's on TikTok right now?"

They get their news from TikTok and Instagram and Snapchat.

They actually don't listen to a ton of podcasts, so I'm not sure if the whole podcast circuit really reached, you know, younger 18 to 22-year-old voters at this time.

So, yeah.

- And I definitely don't think it reached new people.

So, Joe Rogan obviously has something like an enormous fan base, right?

And I don't think Donald Trump being on Joe Rogan necessarily brought in a ton of new people who weren't already kind of maybe in and out of the Joe Rogan sphere, for instance.

Same with Kamala Harris being on Call Her Daddy.

I don't think that really changed the demographics of who was listening to Call Her Daddy.

Maybe people actually listened to this episode rather than skipping it to another episode.

But to Taraleigh's point, our students don't really listen to podcasts.

I listen to a ton of podcasts (laughs) but I don't think our students really do.

And so, when you ask them what they've seen, they're always like, "Well, I saw something on TikTok."

And you're like, "Yeah, but what did you see?

Who put it out?"

And that's where things get a little iffy, because you can definitely get unreliable sourcing, or it becomes a lot of hearsay of somebody stitching somebody else's stitch, somebody else's stitch.

So, you can get this sort of telephone thing going on there about what information they're getting.

So, I would say it's predominantly from social media.

- Taraleigh, you broke my heart telling me these kids are getting all their news from social media.

- Well, I mean, I do require them to get it from other sources for purposes of our class, but we do always end up, you know, leaning towards there eventually.

- Yeah.

Let's talk about the future of both of these parties.

I mean, it's kinda crazy.

With the Democrats, what do they need to do, you think, to get back on track, and to get their messages heard and out there?

- So, there are a lot of quirks of human psychology that are sort of amenable to the way that the Republican party is currently operating.

So, I think the Republican Party is very good in recent decades at harnessing people's frustration and anger and disillusionment with government and trust in media.

And people are oftentimes much more motivated by anger.

So, there's all sorts of research about how negative campaign advertising actually tends to possibly increase voter turnout.

It's at least negligible, but it doesn't hurt voter turnout.

So, people are drawn to the more negative stuff.

And so, I think the Democrats, both as just kind of what their policy positions are, who tends to be democratic, they tend to appeal more towards sort of optimism.

And so, I think that there may need to be some sort of kind of internal reckoning within the Democratic party of how to play in this sort of new field, 'cause the Republicans have definitely changed how politics operates, what norms or things that we would still abide by, and which ones we'll just throw out the window.

And so, if the Democrats continue to struggle to adapt to this new system and keep trying to play by old rules, I think they are going to be in trouble, whereas their policy positions are pretty popular.

If you kinda ask people individually what their policy preferences are, they align with the Democrats, but the Democrats just haven't figured out how to operate in this sort of much more negative political environment.

And somebody like Joe Biden is something that we would call an institutionalist and really has faith in the system.

And I mean, he served in the Senate for decades, and so he had all those internal relationships that made him a very productive senator.

That doesn't exist anymore, but his memory is still that.

And so, the way the Democrats have still been led by, you know, your Nancy Pelosis and your Joe Bidens and your Chuck Schumers, they're still at this old school that somehow we can negotiate and compromise and engage in a bipartisan way where I don't think the Republicans think that way anymore.

And so, I think you're getting a younger generation of Democrats who are more amenable to changing how they operate.

But right now, there's this tension in the party between kind of the older guard and the younger guard.

- Along those lines, Taraleigh, do you think we'll see the Democratic Party go even further left as opposed to being moderates or, you know, centrist?

- I'm not really sure that it's a policy issue as in a campaign issue.

So, if you look at the campaigns, you know, a democratic way is, you know, knocking on doors, postcards, get out the vote.

And you don't see Republican party doing that.

And so, that's the way that it's always been done, get out the vote.

And that that vote is gonna be for Democratic candidates.

And we're seeing that that's not necessarily the case.

And so, I don't know.

It's too early to tell, you know, if it's gonna move further left, or even, you know, Kamala Harris tried to kind of bring in the bigger umbrella, and so more people under that umbrella.

And so, I'm not really sure, to be honest, of how that's gonna impact policy positions of the Democratic party, but I do think there's gonna be some soul-searching about campaign tactics moving forward - If we can get our crystal ball out, a lot of people are worried that, you know, this is, we think, Donald Trump's second and last term; we'll see in four years, I guess.

But a lot of people are worried that, you know, instead of, you know, working on the border, working on this, working on that, he's just going after, right away, everyone who he perceives has ever wronged him.

What could that do to a presidency and our country if our leader is just hellbent on revenge for the first year or so of his next term?

- I would say that he can do both simultaneously (laughs).

So, he can seek revenge in certain ways just by putting certain other people in these positions.

So, anybody who kind of wronged him, as he might see it on something like immigration or on even how the Department of Justice has behaved under the Biden administration, because he's constantly talking about it being weaponized.

I think a lot of the changes that he can make, just in personnel, will inevitably lead to some sort of revenge kind of mentality to it.

Plus he's seeking ways to influence the government that could have that same sort of effect that aren't as obvious.

So, at the end of the Trump administration, they tried to propose changing how many people were Senate confirmable, so how many appointments that the president would make that are confirmed by the Senate.

And right now, it's a few thousand.

It's, like, three to 4,000 positions in the federal government, and he wants to change the classification and add thousands and thousands of more people who would be kind of his loyalists that the Senate then confirms.

And he's got a Senate that's gonna be amenable to doing that.

So, even the policies that he gets out of these different agencies, if they make that many more positions Senate-confirmable and full of Trump loyalists, the policies that they enact can still end up acting as a kind of form of revenge on some of the people who he feels have wronged him.

- I guess the bigger picture now, too, is not only did President Trump win another term, but we're looking at the House and Senate races nationwide, and what kind of an effect is that gonna have on his presidency?

- So, we know now that the Senate is Republican controlled.

It looks like the house is that way, but we don't know for sure yet.

It makes it a lot easier for any president, you know, if they have the trifecta where that means the party holds the presidency, the Senate, and the House.

They're able to pass, you know, their agenda, their priorities for budgeting.

So, it would make it easier for that.

However, there is still the filibuster in the Senate to where you do need 60 votes to have a vote.

So, there is kind of that in place that might, you know, kind of slow some of that down.

But it does make a difference whether or not the House becomes Republican controlled.

- Yeah, so right now, I think they've got it totaled to 211 is the Republicans, and 199 is the Democrats, but there's still about 20 races that haven't been decided yet, or haven't been called.

The California races are pretty democratic.

The other ones are a little iffier, and there may be some that end up on automatic recounts, or somebody demanding a recount.

So, it could be a while till we actually get the final numbers for the house.

But to Taraleigh's point, yes you've got the filibuster in the Senate, so on legislation, you could slow things down.

But the Democratic party in 2013 opened the door to killing the filibuster on judicial nominations.

And so, that door has been fully opened.

And so, one of the biggest impacts the Trump presidency had was just absolutely, and I love how I'm speaking about this when this is our judicial scholar, has absolutely packed the courts with Trump loyalists.

And so, he's obviously gonna have even more opportunity to do that now.

I'm seeing people call for Justice Sonia Sotomayor to retire, and President Biden appoint her, and Chuck Schumer just, like, fast track this nomination because she's the oldest of the Democrats who are on the court.

So, even if you can slow down legislation in the Senate, for instance, I think the effect of things like the courts being super Trump-friendly and him having the ability to issue executive orders that are probably gonna get approved of by the court system, could still end up having the kind of legislative effect without actually needing Congress to do anything.

- So, in the last 20 years or so, the presidential elections have changed quite a bit.

Our candidates seem to have changed quite a bit.

What's the message that you give to your students after the 2024 election in terms of democracy and going forward?

- So, we had class on Thursday, and it just so happened that we were talking about the presidency.

And so, what we did was we walked through different promises, actually from both candidates, and I had them explain to me, you know, what can a president and what they can't do.

And so, that's what I told my students to understand, when they hear information, to be able to process that, you know, with information and understanding to know what can really happen, so that they're not fearful when they don't need to be.

So, that's where we started.

I think, as for democracy, I mean, it held, you know?

Most of Americans even, you know, based on what Megan was saying about the popular vote, have, you know, chosen Donald Trump to be the president for the next four years.

- I will say that I have tried to impress upon my students that there is a complacency in the United States towards democracy.

And I think political scientists are always a little more concerned in the last couple of decades, but I think Americans just think, "Democracy's there.

It's always gonna be there."

And so, in the postmortem we had in my congress class on Wednesday, I got some people being like, "It'll hold.

We'll be okay."

Like, they weren't happy that Trump got elected or that the turned Senate Republican, but they're like, in four years, it'll change.

And I generally disapprove of that notion because, to me, and I've used this analogy a lot, is, to me, democracy is a marriage, and you need to keep going on dates.

You might need to go to couples counseling, and you kinda need to check in with each other at the end of the day, and make sure everybody's on the same page.

Like, it needs maintenance.

You can't just assume democracy is going to hold.

And so, I worry that some people are gonna feel complacent because things have been kind of peaceful in 2022 and 2024.

But also, I think some of that leads to our students being complacent of going, "Well, why should I vote?"

And if they really wanna change things, they need to change who's in office, and they're gonna have to vote to do that.

And so, I get concerned about this idea that democracy is gonna hold, and people then taking it for granted, and then at some point, it won't.

So, I want people to just be more active in engaging in what it means to be in a democracy personally.

- We're gonna get to the point where, the next 20 years, our country's gonna be full of people who have always known democracy; you know, the older folks who maybe have come from other countries or experienced wars aren't gonna be around.

So, that message, I think, needs to be ingrained in the kids now, the young people, that democracy is something special.

Let's talk about another race that we followed closely here for District 17 in the US House.

Eric Sorensen won another term, beating Judge Joe McGraw.

What kind of an effect do you think that could have on our area?

You know, it was very...

I think it was a contentious race, especially when you looked at the ads, and I think the ads for better or for worse, depending on what your opinion is, made a big difference in this.

What are your thoughts?

- So, first off, I thought Sorensen would get reelected.

Within the congressional research, there's something called the sophomore surge.

So, typically someone who's gotten elected tends to get reelected, and by a slightly larger margin than they did in the past.

And I think Sorensen had a leg up simply because he is the incumbent and has more name recognition than somebody like Judge McGraw did.

I will say that the Sorensen ad with Judge McGraw preying on the floors of his chamber got my students' attention, got my attention, got my parents' attention.

So, that one was a particularly memorable ad, and so I assumed that it got some people's attention.

And for some people, that might have actually made them more pro Judge McGraw because there's a kind of strong segment of the population who really would like Christianity in particular to be more interwoven with government.

But I think other people went, "I find that somewhat concerning in a judicial system."

So, I think that may have helped Sorensen as well.

Plus, Sorensen had tried to be active on the agricultural bill before it expired.

And so, I think there were local constituents who knew that he knew that that was an issue and that he was paying attention to it and he was trying to work on it.

And if you were to vote in a new person, you lose what tiny amount of seniority you have, and what influence you have, and what work you've already been able to do, and the connections you've been able to make with local interest groups and things like that.

So, some of it may have been, given the boundaries of his district, that they chose to stick with who they already had.

- And looking at ads, Judge McGraw, he ran a few ads, or he and his supporters ran a few ads.

You know, he was at the wall, down in the southern border.

He just recently put an ad out that said, you know, Sorensen is okay with drag queens talking to kids at libraries, and things like that.

Do you think those kind of... you know, that's not talking about the economy, that's jumping on one big hot-button issue.

What kind of difference does that make, if any?

- I think it is important to some people.

I think, for central Illinois, you know, what I noticed a lot about the, you know, democrats who run in central Illinois, they are very attuned to the rural community here and the farmers, and seem to care about them.

And so, you know, things that might not necessarily impact people right here that maybe are what some would call culture wars, I don't know if it hit as close to home here as maybe other places.

- And because we're relying on agriculture, for instance, some of the immigration stuff may actually have kind of backfired, knowing that, like, the meat industry and the agricultural industry are very reliant on immigrant labor.

They might have just immediately sort of tensed up and gone, "Well, what's gonna happen financially to my particular operation if there's really a huge crackdown on immigration?"

So, to me, the immigration thing might have actually backfired a bit.

- In our state house race, Sharon Chung defeated Desi Anderson, so she'll serve another term.

Dave Kaler won the state senate for district 46.

Any other surprises in this election?

Any other issues, topics that you were surprised that maybe people voted one way and not another?

- So, I was looking really closely at Peoria County, like, election returns as they were coming in, and I shared with Dr. Remmel yesterday.

- Yes, she did.

If you look at Peoria County does a great job reporting, and they have it broken down by early voting, voting by mail, and election day.

And if you look at the early vote, that broke Republican, like, let's just say, for instance, 70:30.

And then, if you look at the voting by mail, that was completely flip-flop the opposite, 30:70.

So, we saw a definite, you know, trend when it came in that, I think, has been different up until this point because republicans were pretty leery and not very supportive of early voting.

And we still see a strong, you know, democrat, you know, return on voting by mail.

The other thing that was actually pretty surprising is there was a 10th circuit judicial race that, at this point, the last time I checked was down to seven votes.

Spears won by only seven votes.

So, I got to go into my class and say "Every vote counts."

Everybody needs to vote.

- It really does.

- That could have been your vote.

So, yeah, the local returns were pretty interesting.

- In the eight years I've lived in Peoria, the number of races that have been decided by fewer than 50 votes is wild.

(laughs) - Yeah, it is.

- So, when people say their vote doesn't count, I'm like, "I do believe Rita Ali won by 40 something votes."

She lost by one vote when she was first running for city council.

We've got seven votes in a judicial race.

Like, maybe at the national level, you're not necessarily gonna be the vote that tips the balance, but at state and particularly local levels, yeah, you can really have the effect.

- Talking about voting early and mail-in ballots and things like that, do you think that's only gonna grow those numbers in the future?

'Cause, like you said, some people were kind of leery about doing that.

But do you think that's kind of the trend we're gonna start seeing?

- The Trump campaign was really active on trying to undo the narrative that they had done in 2020 about voting earlier, voting by mail.

Because, I think, what they were concerned about is, given the emphasis that they had on election integrity and Stop the Steal and things like that, that they might have actually depressed their own voters to the point that they might not show up to vote because they don't trust the system.

So, I think the Trump campaign actually had to do some work to try to reinstill some faith in in their voters, in the hopes that they could make sure that they turned out.

And so, a lot of the state and local Republican parties around the country had these election integrity projects that they were calling, and they were trying to make sure that their local voters would feel comfortable voting early or voting by mail.

So, I think it might depend on kind of the candidate at the top of the ticket about where they feel comfortable, because even though Donald Trump was encouraging them to vote that way, I think, now, especially on the Republican side of the aisle, there is a lot of skepticism about the quality of elections in the United States.

So, even though they're candidate won, I think there's still sort of this underlying concern about how elections are run.

And so, just because they won this election, I don't think they're necessarily gonna feel comfortable in the future.

So, to me, it kinda depends on how the party continues to emphasize or de-emphasize these different methods of voting.

- Taraleigh, do you think we're still gonna have lawyers lined up 20-deep for each party at election time?

- Oh, absolutely.

I mean, I saw a graph that showed how many posts on X, formerly Twitter, were about election integrity, and it was really high until about midnight, and then it kind of fell off and went to zero.

So, yes, absolutely, that will not change.

- Alright, well, ladies, I had a lot more questions but we are out of time unfortunately.

Thanks for teaching our kids.

Make sure they read magazines and newspapers and watch TV news.

- We'll try.

We'll try.

- And all that good stuff.

We appreciate your time.

Doctors Megan Remmel and Taraleigh Davis from Bradley University.

Thanks a lot.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- And thank you for joining us.

We appreciate it.

You've Gotta See This is next.