Category: Briefings

Trump Won in a Landslide With 4 Million Fewer Votes Than 2020 While Harris won 66 Million, Far Less Than Biden’s 81 Million in 2020

We begin with Trump’s win across the board for the presidency, flipping the US Senate to GOP control and likely holding onto the House as well as winning the popular vote for the first time. We discuss this upset win in the popular vote since Trump got 4 million fewer votes on Tuesday then he did in 2020 while Harris came in at 66 million and counting, far below Biden’s 2020 total of 81 million popular votes. Joining us is John Nichols, The Nation magazine’s Washington correspondent. His books include The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party: The Enduring Legacy of Henry Wallace’s Anti-Fascist, Anti-Racist Politics, and most recently, Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers: Accountability for Those Who Caused the Crisis. We discuss his recent articles at The Nation, “Wisconsin’s GOP Senate Candidate Has Made a Massive Blunder” and “Recipe for a Harris Win: More Obama, Less Cheney.”

The Education Divide With Harris Winning the Educated and Trump the Less Educated

Then we look into the education divide that characterized this election with Harris winning educated voters while Trump attracted the less educated voters and speak with Lily Geismer, professor of history at Claremont McKenna College whose research and teaching focuses on 20th century political and urban history in the United States, especially liberalism and the Democratic Party. She is the author of Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality and Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party. Her forthcoming book is Mastery and Drift: Professional-Class Liberals since the 1960s.

Will Trump and Vance’s “America First” Isolationism Define the Next 4 Years?

Then finally we assess the role of foreign policy in the election and how much the America First isolationism that Trump and Vance espouse will determine US foreign policy for the next four years. Joining us is Charles Kupchan, who was director for European Affairs on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. He is now a professor of International Affairs in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and spent the last 3 years of the Obama administration as Special Assistant to President Obama for National Security. He is the author of Power in Transition: The Peaceful Change of International Order, and How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace, and his latest book is, Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World.