0:00:01.1 Daniel Rivkin: I'm Daniel Rivkin in Public Affairs here at the Ford School. So welcome everybody to the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and this discussion of the 2024 elections. We are joined by an excellent panel, J. Alex Halderman from the College of Engineering, Vince Hutchings, professor of Political Science an Afro-American and African Studies, Barbara McQuade from the Law School and the Ford School's, Javed Ali and Rusty Hills. All with perspectives, different perspectives, on the elections and its results. Our own Mara Ostfeld will open and be our moderator. So thanks everybody for being here. A quick note about the format, each of the panelists will give an opening statement of about five minutes, and then we'll continue the conversation, after about 45 minutes we'll open it up for Q&A, which we'll be moderating over here. For questions in the room, please use the QR code cards that have been distributed. And if you're watching online, the question link can be accessed on the event page or in the event description on YouTube, LinkedIn, or Facebook. Mara, over to you.

0:01:23.4 Mara Ostfeld: Thank you, Daniel, for organizing this, and thank you everyone for coming out as we all process the results of an election that many of us did not anticipate this outcome. And so I'm really thrilled to be here. I am an associate research professor here at the Ford School of Public Policy. I also work at NBC and Telemundo as part of their decision desk analysis team, where I helped design the exit polls and analyze the exit poll data as it comes in. So it was a really remarkable time to be doing that. A lot of the data was not in line with prior polling. And as I worked on a team and we were taking that data in, there was, really four broad shifts that we observed in American partisan coalitions that I wanna just open by highlighting, open for input from our team, and then transition to talking specifically about the really notable shift we saw among Latino voters.

0:02:18.3 MO: So the first thing that we noted is that overall there was a noteworthy reduction in the number of Americans who were identifying as Democrat. It was actually the lowest mark this century. According to the exit poll, 32% of voters identified as a Democrat down from 37% four years ago. There was a comparable increase in the number of voters identifying as Democrat or something else this century, with Republican voters, or the number of voters identifying as Republican staying at about the same at around 35%. There was also a shift that we've all been discussing and all been observing and how education fits into partisan coalitions. In 2008, about 53% of voters with a college degree, and about 53% of voters without a college degree both supported the Democratic presidential candidate at the time. Since then, we've seen the number of voters with a college degree steadily increasing the amount who are voting for Democratic candidates.

0:03:18.3 MO: With 2024, we observed 57% of voters with a college degree supporting the Democratic presidential candidate. And at the same time, we've seen a reduction in the number of non-college voters supporting Democratic presidential candidates. So it went from 53% in 2008 to 44%, a 13 percentage point reduction in 2024. We've also seen shifts in how age maps onto party coalition. Overall, Trump increased his support among the 18 to 29 demographic by about seven percentage points about 36 percentage of the 18 to 29 electorate voted for him in 2016 up to 43% in 2024. This was true among both young men and young women. We saw a lot of coverage of what people referred to as the bro vote. There was an increase, a larger share of young men supported Trump, but we saw an increase in both young men and young women supporting Trump.

0:04:19.7 MO: We did see a shift, although a much smaller one, in the number of voters who are 65 and over supporting the Democratic candidate. It went from about... And now I'm trying to find these numbers, about 49% supported Trump, or 45% supported Harris or the Democratic candidate in 2016, up five percentage points in 2024 to about 49 percentage points of voter 65 and older supporting Harris in 2024. Which is a smaller difference that we observed. But because voter 65 and older vote at much higher rates, that was a really big and noteworthy shift.

0:05:02.1 MO: We also saw what I think surprised a lot of people that 2024 interestingly marked a significant reduction in racial polarization in the US electorate. The US electorate has long been characterized by deep divides in how white and groups broadly classified as non-white participate in the American electoral process. And in 2024, we saw one of the smallest gaps that we've seen in recent political history. 57% of white voters supported Trump in 2016 to 21% of non-white voters. 2024, we saw 55%, a little bit of a decline support Trump in 2024, and then compared to 32 percentage points of non-white voters supporting him in 2024. So a really big increase in the number of non-white voters supporting Trump, a small increase in the number of white voters supporting Trump since 2016.

0:06:00.5 MO: Interestingly, what we also saw is that Harris, a black and South Asian candidate, did exceptionally well among white voters, as I just noted. She actually increased her support among white voters relative and did better than either Biden or Clinton did among white voters, which surprised a lot of people and added another dimension to this conversation about racial polarization in the American electorate. And that brings us to the Latino vote, which was probably the most remarkable shift we saw in this election. When we break down demographic groups, these broad demographic groups, probably the largest shift we observed was among Latinos who voted for Trump. About 32% of Latino voters supported Trump in 2020. In 2024 is about 45% according to the exit polls, a 13 percentage point increase. What's also noteworthy is that is the highest amount of support a Republican candidate has received from Latino voters since we've been recording Latino voters' opinion. That exceeds the amount of support that Bush got in 2004, which was 40%, and a remarkable high at that time.

0:07:09.5 MO: I wanna offer an important caveat to that point. What we don't know yet when we talk about the Latino vote is whether Trump mobilized more repub... You know, right-leaning Republican voters, whether there was a lot of left-leaning Latino voters who didn't turn out because of relatively low favorability ratings for Harris. Or if, alternatively, what a lot of people are reading is true, that many Latino voters shifted right, voted for a Democratic candidate in the past and shifted to supporting Trump. In reality, it's probably a combination of two, the change in the denominator, a change in the electorate, and some rightward shift. I wanna highlight that this was evident across states. In the past, we really saw a rightward trend in the southwest among Latino voters. This year, we saw it across all states. I do wanna caution people against over-interpreting the state numbers for Latinos. Those are very small samples. So I don't want people to over-interpret what looks like really big jumps in, for example, Pennsylvania or Michigan's Latino vote. Those are very small samples of Latino voters, but there definitely was an increase.

0:08:17.3 MO: There's been a lot of questions about why, why were Latinos shifting their support towards Trump. Some people have highlighted that many Latino voters had conservative views on immigration and were actually receptive to Trump's views about deporting immigrants. That's true, that's always been true, that's a very... That's a minority of Latino voters. About one in four Latino voters supported his deportation proposal. That's a much smaller share than other ethno-racial groups. About 75% of Latino voters support a legal path to citizenship for those who are in the US without legal authorization. What we saw really stand out among Latino voters this year was the economy. And if I said this three weeks ago, I would say like, "Okay, we know that the economy is always the most important issue for Latino voters." It's almost always the most important issue for every group of voters. What was different this year is that wasn't true for other groups of voters. Every other ethno-racial group actually prioritized other issues like the state of democracy, that stood out among most racial groups, including black voters as the most important issue shaping their vote.

0:09:28.0 MO: Latino voters were both more likely to list the economy as the most important issue affecting their vote, and again, more likely than other ethno-racial groups to do so. To add additional dimension to this, when they were asked who they thought could better handle the economy, Latinos broke for Trump by a pretty large margin. And I think what's also noteworthy when interpreting that is that we also asked in 2020, every group of voters: Who do you trust to better handle the economy? Only 30% of Latinos said Trump in 2020. This year, 47% of Latinos said they trusted Trump more to handle the economy. There was a gender dimension to this. Latino men were both more likely to list the economy as their most important issue, and more likely to say that they trusted Trump more to handle the economy. Interestingly, Latino men were significantly more likely than Latinas to say that their financial situation had significantly worsened over the past four years.

0:10:26.0 MO: Latino men were more likely than any other race, gender, group, to say their financial situation had worsened over the past four years. Over 50% of Latino men said their situation had worsened over the last four years, which pushed them far and above every other race, gender, group. I could talk about this data for days. I literally spent the last couple days talking about this data, and I'm happy to talk about it more with you. But I hope that offers some context that our amazing panel of speakers can further elaborate on. So with that, I'll turn it over to Rusty for your interpretation and take.

0:11:01.2 Rusty Hills: Okay. Thanks very much, Mara. I appreciate that too, by the way. Thanks for kicking us off. You know, last month Gallup did a survey of voters and it showed that the question we ask on every campaign, right direction/wrong track, 25% said America's on the right direction, 75% America's on the wrong track. So it was three to one that we were going in the wrong direction. No candidate, no party has ever won reelection with that sort of number. And even after the change, Kamala Harris was still yoked to Biden, who by the way, his fave/unfave was like 40/60, so he's 20 points underwater himself. So that's where we started. And on top of that, if you look at the key issues, whether it's inflation, the economy, as you talked about, immigration, on those three top issues, voters favored Trump's position more than they did Harris, Biden, the Democrats.

0:11:56.8 RH: So when you step back and look at it from 20,000 feet, those are the fundamentals. And I realized that a lot of people were surprised because they were energized by Harris, this black South Asian woman, all the things that were going for her. But again, as Tony Fabrizio, the Trump pollster said, the fundamentals did not change. And that's why Trump won. And I would offer three things in retrospect from the Harris campaign. The first I would look at the convention, which I think most people thought was quite good, right? Upbeat, positive, it was very patriotic. But here's the deal. The two most powerful themes in politics, and I teach my students this all the time, are change and reform. If you run for office, you wanna be the change and reform candidate, why? Because something always needs fixing, and clearly Americans thought that something needed fixing here.

0:12:52.1 RH: The economy, prices needed to go down, the border needed to be controlled, whatever the case might be, she needed to run almost as a third party candidate. Someone different, new, exciting, better than the two unpopular people who had been running Biden and Trump. So her whole convention should have been around change and reform. That should have been her mantra. That should have been the theme, that should have been the start and the conclusion of every single speech that she gave. So when she was interviewed on The View and asked, "Well, what would you do differently from President Biden?" She could have... Doesn't have to say anything bad about Biden, not at all. Just say, "Look, on day one, we're gonna start my year of reform and here's the reform agenda," and go through ways in which she's gonna help people who are struggling because they've got more month than paycheck.

0:13:42.9 RH: And that's true for college kids like you. It's true for two-earner middle class families that have kids and are trying to figure out how to pay the bills. And it's true for seniors on fixed income. And she had to specifically address that. And I think at the end of the day, there were enough people that didn't think she had addressed that. And, you know, the... My very last point, coded to this, there was an effort at the end to talk about Trump as a fascist, or Trump is a very bad person or what have you. That was baked in a long time ago. Look, if the Access Hollywood tape wasn't gonna get you off the Trump train, you know, Tony Hinchcliffe or some, you know, crazy comedian at Madison [0:14:25.5] ____, that wasn't gonna work. So just that train left the station a long time ago, that line of attack was not gonna work. I think she needed to hammer change and reform. And that sort of explains where we are today.

0:14:42.8 Speaker 4: All right, well, so, I'm going to try to address the election mechanics and security of the voting process questions. And I always have to preface that with an audience like this by reminding people that what you already think about the security of elections seems to depend more on whether your preferred candidate won last time than anything else. Republicans and Democrats in just a few months after the last presidential contest switched places in surveys about whether they trusted election mechanics and believed that it was trustworthy. So, prefaced with that, I wanna remind everyone that the truth of the matter about election security is somewhere in between that nobody can trust elections and that elections are perfectly well secured. From my perspective as a security person, the election this week was an incredible relief because on Monday it looked like the whole thing was going to come down to margins of less than 1% in about six different states.

0:15:53.2 Speaker 4: That would have been an incredibly chaotic outcome. All election processes are huge distributed systems, and there's inherently some amount of error that happens every time, there's some vulnerability to fraud that may or may not be exploited, but is there. And when elections come down to very, very, very small margins, that's when those things might actually affect the result. Every election official's prayer is, "Please let it not be close." Because it's those close elections that are the ones that stress the system. So the good news from this week is that it wasn't close. It didn't come down to small margins in six states. And for that reason, I think, there's very, very little chance that error or fraud of any sort could have possibly affected this election outcome. The bad news is that that doesn't mean it was well secured. And as someone who is working with state officials poking at election systems in different ways all the time, I have to say the situation very much is still a patchwork of strength and weakness.

0:17:02.1 S4: Just a few examples. Less than a month ago, I disclosed a critical vulnerability in one of the close states voter registration systems that would've let anybody, even without a technical background, obtain and vote someone else's absentee ballot. In Georgia, the state went into the election this year with vulnerabilities in its voting equipment that I found myself four years ago as part of a long running court case. And these were some critical problems, but the Secretary of State announced 18 months ago, he was going to defer patching them until after the presidential contest. Here in Michigan, our machines from Dominion that we use for accessible voting were discovered just two weeks ago to have a software bug that made it so straight party voting just didn't work if you split the ticket. That somehow slipped through all of the federal and state testing, even though it was a glaring basic functionality bug, which I think speaks volumes about how well those tests are conducted and whether they can achieve security. So, these are just a few examples. We have a lot of work left to do to secure elections to the standard that this country needs to withstand another close presidential contest.

0:18:27.0 S4: So I worry a lot what is going to happen four years from now. The optimist in me hopes that now that we have a contest that is not tainted by large fractions of the population openly doubting the result, perhaps that will make space for some bipartisan work towards real solutions on election security. And I will point out that the best bill in the Congress during the first Trump administration was a bill authored by Kamala Harris on election security. The second-best bill in the house was one authored by Mark Meadows. So there is room, I think, for bipartisan compromise, but the pessimist in me worries that now that we've had an election that has been decided by large margins and has been declared by many sides to be secure and beyond repute, just to avoid public doubt, well, this issue may completely fall off the radar. And then what about next time? So good news and bad news. Thank you.

0:19:38.1 Speaker 5: Good afternoon everyone. I guess my comments will hopefully be relatively brief, at least at the outset. I think I might take issue with a couple things I've heard so far, but only I think of the margins. First with respect to when I think about the election, obviously we don't have a lot of data at this point beyond the exit polls. So my impressions are going to be tentative at this stage because we're only a few days out. But there were a number of big takeaways, for me, at least in my initial pouring through the exit poll data. And they mostly sent around the notion of race and the racial divide. So I might disagree a little bit with my friend and colleague Mara Ostfeld regarding the diminishing racial divide in this country. It actually just depends on how you look at it.

0:20:34.2 Speaker 5: One of the big takeaways for me, and actually Mara did touch on this as well, is the substantial divergence of people of color away from the Democratic Party in every instance except for one, African Americans. So every other non-white group in the electorate, at least according to the exit polls, that would be Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans, moved in double-digit fashion away from the Democratic Party and towards the Republican party. So when we collapse those groups and refer to them as non-whites and say, "Oh, look, the racial divide is diminishing." Well, it's diminishing when you combine those groups. But if you compare whites and African Americans, it looks pretty much like it's looked for the last 60 years.

0:21:32.3 S5: So there is change that's unfolding, or at least there was change relative to recent presidential contest. But it's the change that's occurring among people of color, not change that's occurring between people of color and whites, because... My perusal of the exit poll data indicated that one group just stood out relative to every other group, and that was blacks, that numbers... There was a lot of ink spilled, a lot of discussion prior to this election, as there is every four years that, "Oh, Black Americans, aren't they gonna move this time? Isn't it finally gonna happen? Isn't this the one?" And then it never seems to happen, almost as if there's something endemic in the American political system where African American voters vote en masse for one candidate and the majority of whites consistently vote for the other candidate. That dynamic has been a part of American history for some time, and it didn't change on Tuesday.

0:22:45.4 S5: So that was the big takeaway for me. Mara talked a lot appropriately about the significant shift in Latino voting. It's too soon to know, this is the other kind of quibble I guess I would have about diagnosing what happened on Tuesday. I think it's just too soon to know. So, I understand the urge to try to impose some narrative on why Harris lost and Trump won. I don't know yet, in part because the available data doesn't provide me with the necessary ingredients. And by that I mean exit poll data is built on the premise that people vote on the basis of issues. And so let's just ask them about the relevant issues and see how they evaluate the various candidates. The problem is that people don't always vote just on the basis of issues. They also vote on other things that exit polls don't ask about, like groups, like race.

0:23:44.5 S5: So we will have other data in the near future that will allow us to evaluate the extent to which issues per se, be it the economy, immigration, crime, whatever, or perhaps other less savory considerations like gender, like race, whether they influence people. But at this point, we are really not in a position to make that call because we don't yet... The exit poll data by definition, is gonna be relatively limited in that regard. Mostly it focuses on demographics and some high profile issues. And again, I'm not saying that issues don't matter, but what I am saying is they are not the only thing that matters, and sometimes they're not indeed... Frequently they're not the most important thing that matters. And I'll stop there. Thank you.

0:24:33.6 Barbara McQuade: Well, thanks very much for the invitation to be here today. And thank you all for coming. I know it takes a lot to try to listen to facts and dissect an election when you had a lot at stake in it. It's sort of like, when Michigan football or the Detroit Tigers lose a high stakes game, I can't even read the media the next day. It's 'cause it hurts me. And this is so much more profoundly important that... You know, I've felt miserable for the past few days and it's been difficult almost to get up out of bed. And I've tried to push forward because I know students want to be together and need support and wanna hear what's happening. So congratulations to all of you just for getting yourselves here to try to move forward because it's very difficult and I think you should give yourself time to grieve.

0:25:28.7 BM: I know that... I'm sure some of you voted in various ways, but for those of you who feel very disillusioned as I do by the outcome of this election, it's okay to spend a little time just being sad. We've suffered a loss. I mean, I've had friends say, "It feels like someone died." And I agree with that. You know, there are moments when you can laugh and then suddenly it just hits you outta the blue how devastating this loss feels. And it feels that way to me. So it's okay to feel that way. For me, a huge part of the blow comes as someone who spent my career working at the Justice Department. I spent the bulk of my career as a federal prosecutor caring very much about the rule of law and the absence of partisan politics in the rule of law.

0:26:09.8 BM: And I'm very, very worried about the future of the rule of law. A president who has promised to pardon people who committed acts of violence at our Capitol. What would that do to political violence to enable and bolster the idea that as long as you are fighting for the winner, then anything goes and violence will be not only condoned, but applauded. The cases against Donald Trump, where he was charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States in the election and unlawfully retaining documents, likely to be gone. The case in New York where he was convicted of 34 felonies, likely to see no prison time, the Georgia case, at least at the very best on hold on ice for the next four years. So I think that's a devastating blow to the rule of law. But I also, you know, I appreciate the analysis by people who are experts on this about what caused the outcome that we saw.

0:27:05.9 BM: And I think it's a lot of things. Certainly it's the economy, certainly it's race. I think there is racism and sexism that is still there, and as a woman who's waited my whole life for a woman president, really devastating to see us go again another step back. And what does this mean for 2028? Do people say, "We're clearly not ready for a woman president." You know, when will we be ready for a woman president? That's devastating for people who are women and girls who have been taught to believe we can be anything we wanna be. It's another slap in the face that maybe we can't. And if not now, then when. So it's devastating in that way. But the other thing I wanna mention is the role of disinformation in this election and my fear about whether this is a problem that's gonna get better or now get worse.

0:27:51.0 BM: There was so much disinformation in this election by Donald Trump who stoked division in society using some of the age-old tactics of Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin and Putin. You know, "They're eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio." What is that all about? Fear-mongering and division in society to cause us to be an us versus them society instead of unity, claiming falsely that Joe Biden was weaponizing the Justice Department to go after his political rivals. There's zero evidence of that. And it is completely contrary to all of the policies and protections at the Department of Justice that we have. Calling Kamala Harris, a Marxist and a socialist, a communist comrade Kamala. And I agree that that is an effort to make people think that he'll be better for the economy than they are. But it's just a lie. It's an absolute lie.

0:28:49.1 BM: He's not gonna make middle class people better. This is all a lie. He's gonna cut tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations, this is going to increase the income disparity. The reason people in the middle and lower class are worse off today than their parents were isn't because of immigrants. It's because of economic policies that favors the wealthy over lower class people and we're only gonna see that gulf widen. So all of these lies, it is also doing the bidding of Russia, who on election day was pushing out all kinds of false claims that echo these themes. Russia posted a video of people claiming to be unlawful immigrants in Georgia bragging about voting in the election, fake. They posted a video of somebody tearing up ballots in Pennsylvania, fake, they pretended to be the FBI and told people that there were threats of violence at polling places. So don't go.

0:29:50.1 BM: They were posting false claims claiming to be from the FBI on election day, claiming that voting machines were malfunctioning, all false, all in partnership with the same kind of lies that Donald Trump traffics in, incredibly dangerous. And now we've got Elon Musk who owns Twitter, who put $120 million into this campaign to further bolster these lies. And why? He says it's because he cares about free speech. I think he cares about Elon Musk. He's going to get better policies, he's gonna get government contracts. Donald Trump has even promised him on a role in the government for government efficiency. And so what are we gonna do about these things? I don't know what the answers is, but I hope you'll agree with me that the one thing we can't do now is be silent and let this problem and all of these problems get worse.

0:30:39.3 BM: We need to find ways to push back against the role of lies and disinformation in our politics and help people get better information so that when they cast their ballots, whoever they vote for, they're doing it on the basis of accurate information and not on the basis of this media infosphere that has now taken on lying as not just okay, but the preferred and successful method of communication. May I just end with one more thing, because I think it is easy to get discouraged in these times. And what I wanna do is lean in to your anger, lean into your disgust, lean in to the power that you do have to affect change. And I wanna end with just what Hillary Clinton said in her concession speech. And I know Kamala Harris also gave a graceful and dignified speech when she conceded. And, but what Hillary Clinton said gives me hope. What she said is, "I've had successes and I've had setbacks. Sometimes really painful ones. Many of you are at the beginning of your professional public and political careers. You will have successes and you will have setbacks too. This loss hurts, but please never stop believing that fighting for what's right is worth it. And so we need you, we need you to keep up these fights now and for the rest of your lives."

0:32:14.4 Javed Ali: Well, thanks for being here. That part was very powerful. I am not going to be that inspirational, I don't think. But just wanted to... And I also recognize I'm standing between the Q&A period, so I'll try and be brief here. But for those of you who don't know me, my name is Javed Ali. I've been teaching here at the Ford School for six years. And I am, for the most part, very national-security-focused, because prior to coming to the Ford School, I was in the trenches, so to speak. Not literally, but figuratively in Washington DC working in places like the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, I also worked in the Trump White House from 2017 to 2018, and I can answer questions about that, but again, I spent my whole career in government focused on national security issues and threats to the US both at home and abroad, and trying to help keep the country safe.

0:33:04.5 JA: And I've taken that same philosophy here in the classes that I teach. And I see some students and a former colleague, Carl, who is my sort of mentor on the cybersecurity side. So really honored to be part of this. So taking a step back and using that national security framework in the runup to the elections, I was thinking of these two sort of parallel tracks of threats and potentially where possibly would they intersect as we got to election day. So on the one hand, there was a whole series of concerns about cyber-related threats. And we've already heard some of those from Barb and Alex in terms of disinformation and misinformation operations, both sort of being generated here domestically, but probably more significantly or as significantly from countries like Russia, China, Iran, and to a lesser extent, Cuba and Venezuela and North Korea.

0:34:00.6 JA: And that pace of operations directed into the US has been relentless over the past year. And how much of that affected anyone's perception of a candidate, even to the day of the elections? I don't think there's a way to empirically know that, but the intelligence community, the world that I was in, in my government career has been very transparent in sharing those insights that in different moments over the past year that all those countries have just cranked up the wheel on launching those operations into the United States. So we know that for a fact because that's what the US intelligence community has told the American public that's been going on. Impact, again, hard to measure. As Alex has mentioned, it's still too early to know if there were any foreign-directed interference operations that may have impacted the machines or the voting databases.

0:34:53.7 JA: Hopefully the answer to that is no, but maybe it's still too early to tell. And then on the other side, there was a question of, "Okay, would there be physical threats manifesting in the runup to the election? Would we see similar types of attempts that we saw against President Trump in the summer?" There were two assassination attempts against him, "Will there be other sort of lone wolf, or lone offender attacks?" Thankfully we didn't see those. And on the flip side, would there be anything even remotely resembling a January 6th style large scale mobilization of people who are really angry and trying to storm a building or facility? And thankfully again, that didn't happen. So that's kind of where we are up until now, but I don't think we're outta the woods either. So between now and the Electoral College Certification event on January 5th, I think, or 6th of 2025, the US Capitol, between that event and the inauguration on January 20th, there are still, all those concerns that I just talked about, are still probably top of mind for all my colleagues back in Washington DC.

0:36:00.8 JA: So I still think we're looking at a very dynamic threat environment and on the sort of the things we should be most worried about the Electoral College Certification event and then the inauguration. Thankfully, both of those events have now been designated by Secret Service, Homeland Security, as National Security special events, which means they are going to get the full package of security at the federal state, and local level. So anyone who is living in DC or is going to visit DC over that two-week period, you're gonna see Fortress Washington. It is gonna be locked down, certainly on the Mall, the Capitol, probably other government buildings, and that's to prevent anything that would remotely resemble another January 6th. Although the possibility of that now seems pretty remote, but that's kind of where the threat landscape looks like or looked like, I think, in the run up to the election, and then over the next couple months. We're not out of the woods. I still think there are a number of things we need to be concerned about.

0:37:01.0 MO: Thank you guys. I really appreciate that we all were able to approach this from such a distinctive angle. I do wanna come back to something that I think was an important point that Vince raised. I think when we have this surprising outcome, it's easy to return to the limited data we do have. But I really wanna echo his point about the limitations of the exit poll, which is some of the only data that we really have right now. It is... It's short, it's not designed for... It's definitely not designed to capture the issues most salient to basically non-white groups or any smaller sect of the population. It's really focused on things that are most relevant to the largest shares of the electorate. So it isn't able to get into a lot of the nuance that we talk about. And it's problematic in how it's weighted and a lot of the statistical tools used, it's problematic in that it grouped together all non-white people.

0:37:50.8 MO: 'cause it had such a small sample for so much of the exit poll's history. And so then we make these inferences that really do mask a lot of the differences. So I think it's worth echoing that. I also wanna highlight something else that he said that a lot of these trends that we saw, I highlighted that the reduced racial polarization, if you were to group all non-white groups together, but that was largely driven by the significant shift among Latinos as what... Just the age gap among, the age shift, among youth that actually white young people actually shifted towards Harris. Whereas it was Latino young people that were shifting towards Trump. The gender gap was most pronounced among Latinos. So it, overall, it looked like it remained pretty constant. But it was really, it was 17 percentage points among Latino men and women, with Latinas being far more likely to support Harris. And so I think I just wanna echo that point that there's these broad generalizations that we often rely upon for statistical power, really mask a lot of important differences. I could talk about public opinion forever, and I could talk to each of these experts forever, but I know you guys each came here because you have your own questions. So I do wanna open it up and see what you are most curious about or what you most wanna talk about relating to the election.

0:39:20.3 Carly Mulvihill: Firstly, thank you guys so much for being here today. My name is Carly Mulvihill. I'm a political science student here, third year. And I'm just so interested in all this. So thank you so much for speaking with us today. So one of the questions that we received is: What are the major shifts in foreign policy, particularly with regards to the African continent and the Middle East? What is expected during the Trump administration? And how do you think countries in these regions may or may not change their priorities in order to present as a more appealing to the administration? [0:39:57.5] ____ do you wanna take that? 

0:39:58.1 JA: I'll try and take a stab at that one and obviously other others can as well. So I think that's a great question to which there aren't necessarily clear answers right now, and there's... But I do think there will be some indicators about what that new foreign policy approach may be, whether it's specific to the Middle East, Africa, other parts of the world. So things to look for over the next couple months. Obviously statements from President Trump, I mean, he's going to signal his priorities for the world and that vision, there won't be any concrete document that captures that for a while because one thing that every administration aims to do when they come into office either by the end of the first year or into the second year there's something that the national security council produces called the National Security Strategy of the United States.

0:40:50.3 JA: So that document, when it does come out, again, it usually takes about a year, will be the vision blueprint for this administration in terms of how they see the world, what are the threats, and then how will our government sort of try to align itself or array itself against those threats. But that's more of a long-term thing. In the short term who will be some of the key people picked to go in national security positions or foreign policy positions depending on who those people are. And we don't know the answer to that yet, that will also sort of give an indicator in terms of how they may see the world. Right now another one of these more early indicators is on January 20th, 2025, sort of day one of the Trump administration, there are going to be a whole slew of executive orders that drop.

0:41:37.0 JA: We don't know what those are right now or what they're gonna look like, but within that menu of executive orders, I have to imagine there are gonna be some that are national security or foreign policy focused. And again, they may align to different parts of the world. I do think president Trump is going to continue some things that I... And this is total speculation on my part. I'm not plugged into either side of the aisle here. I do think President Trump will continue to be tough on China, much the same way he was when he was in office the first time, and much of the same way President Biden was. I don't really think... I think of anything. They just may be a tougher line on China than before. I think they are gonna go back to being very hard on Iran as well. And maybe that'll be part of this new strategy for resolving some of the conflicts in the Middle East. The relationship with Russia, again, will they default back to the more kinda nuanced or friendlier approach to Russia, even though now we've got a... Russia's into the third year of the war with Ukraine. That's an open question. But these are all things to look for in the coming weeks and months.

0:42:48.2 RH: Pardon me for sort of Alex and perhaps Barb. You're talking about misinformation and disinformation. Now with the growth in AI, this is all gonna get a bit more difficult and so how do we either technologically or through the legal system, how do we get a handle on that? How do we try to regulate that and make people understand what's real and what isn't? 

0:43:13.3 BM: Yeah, we've already seen disinformation through deep fakes in this election cycle. There were robocalls using sampling of Joe Biden's voice urging people to stay home during the New Hampshire primary that utilized artificial intelligence to create those robocalls. We saw a video ad of Kamala Harris, utilizing real video of her at campaign events, rallies, talking to voters, but with, again, a generated version of her voice saying, "I'm the DEI candidate, I got to run only because Joe Biden is senile. If you don't vote for me, you're both racist and sexist," and then laughing. So we're already seeing it. And so what do we do in the future about it? I think a couple of things. One is trying to educate the public and become more literate about what is going on in the media and what we should believe and not believe.

0:44:15.7 BM: I think another thing should come from requiring labeling of things generated by artificial intelligence. Now in this future a deregulation federal agency world, I don't know how lucky we'll be with all that sort of stuff. But states are already taking this up. We are seeing states that are requiring labeling. In Michigan, for example, there was a requirement that campaigns label any campaign ad utilizing artificial intelligence just to say that, "This ad was generated with artificial intelligence." And it's tricky because there is a first amendment right to free speech and free expression, and people may want to express themselves through images created with AI. But I personally think that labeling is the best way to get through this. Now if you've got bad actors going online they're not gonna care, right? If they're coming out of Russia and other things.

0:45:12.2 BM: And so there, I think our best defense is either to rely on the platforms to label through content moderation. Good luck with that life in the era of Elon Musk. But I think that we can work to build our own resilience by learning to recognize deep fakes, or at least to question whether something might be a deep fake and do further investigation as to what is the source, what is the credibility before we believe it. And I worry that if we become too skeptical of everything we see online, we lose the ability to gather information so that we can inform ourselves. You know, there's the phrase, "Seeing is believing." And "A picture tells a thousand words." But I think in our future we need to really rethink that when we see images and whether we can believe that they are true or newscasts or other kinds of things.

0:46:06.7 JA: Now, I think when it comes to AI in disinformation, I honestly, I think that the problem is a little bit overhyped because we've been able to generate false and misleading information forever. AI at best reduces the cost of generating that information a bit. But you didn't need a simulated video to fool people who were susceptible to being fooled before AI technology came around. And I think it's mainly a factor at the margin. The biggest influence of AI on the contest this year is almost certainly the AI behind the recommendation algorithms that determined what people saw on social media. And I think the more interesting battleground is going to be whether politically interested parties figure out ways to try to game or manipulate those algorithms in order to get their preferred messaging into people's feeds.

0:47:11.0 JA: I also think on disinformation more broadly, we have to be really, really cautious about lumping in, name-calling, lying by politicians, and so forth with the kind of orchestrated bot-driven campaigns that, say, Russia, or Iran has been directing at the United States for so many years. Because the tools that you need to combat these things are different. And also we have to be really, really careful about asking for construction of infrastructure for filtering or even censoring messages that maybe we just don't like. I think that that tendency has already generated significant political pushback that this election partially reflects. And moreover, it's downright dangerous if that kind of mechanism of control falls into the wrong hands. Historically, such tools have much more often been used to suppress minority or outgroup ideas than they have to somehow correctly be arbiters of truth.

0:48:15.2 JA: So in addition to what Barb is calling for in terms of better education, better critical thinking, something I think would really help would be encouraging more conversation across political boundaries, because voters learn much more by having their ideas challenged by people who are their friends, their neighbors, their family members, and maybe you as the person challenging them, learn things you didn't know too. But I think to the extent that we're arriving at a common truth, a common foundation of truth with people who may have different principles or different fundamental beliefs than we do, that's going to be a powerful deterrent to the cyber world somehow trying to influence our worldview.

0:48:57.5 BM: Everything that Alex just said, I just wanna add one thing, which is I believe in a robust first amendment and I agree that we do not want to censor content, but I have also seen big tech pushing back against any sort of regulation, the algorithms, the collection of private data, the removal of bots, as censorship. And because when you put up that word, people flinch and say, "Don't call me a censor. Anything but that." So I think we need to be cautious when they label something censorship. Is it really about content or is it about process? Because I think process is fair game for regulation.

0:49:35.7 CM: Thank you. We've received some questions regarding the inaccuracy of the polls, specifically Vince and Mara, could you share with us some insights about why polling was once again inaccurate? 

0:49:47.3 MO: I would start off by saying there's always a margin of error, and the polls did call the election within the margin of error. So I think that's always tricky. I think the smaller the poll that you're looking at, so state polls are gonna have a bigger margin of error 'cause it's a smaller sample. I think... But I... I think what's really tricky with a lot of polling is one, people increasingly do not like taking surveys. And that's more true among right-leaning Americans. And so then the question becomes, well how much are we underestimating? And among these people who traditionally haven't voted in that high percentages young voters or low-education voters, do we think... Trump invested a lot into turning out low-education... Non-college voters as they were broadly classified. Do we think he's really gonna change that? 

0:50:44.5 MO: And so then we have to draw on all these other indexes. We ask a bunch of questions. Are you registered? Do you know where your polling place is? Are you interested in the campaign? And we try to make estimates of how likely they are to vote. But at the end of the day, like I met someone when I was getting coffee on the day of the election, still trying to figure out if she was gonna vote. So if she wasn't sure, how is some poll gonna predict for her what she was gonna do? So I think as someone who works in public opinion, I always feel deeply disheartened when we can't get smaller margins of error. And I feel like a sense of heartbreak for these people who feel let down by the polls because I share that, but I always... The margins of error were big. Every race that went red that we weren't sure about was said to be like a statistical tie.

0:51:37.7 S5: Yeah, I agree completely with Mara, I think part of the disappointment and probably what motivated the questions that we're responding to is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what public opinion polls are designed to do. So in addition to all the constraints that Mara made reference to between response rates and the differential response rates across ideology and partisanship, people want the polls to tell them who's going to win. But the polls are not designed to tell you who is going to win. The polls are designed to provide estimates within a margin of error based on scientific sampling processes. And that is what they did. And they performed exactly as they were designed to do. So the issue is not with the polls and the polls being inaccurate. The problem is with people wanting the polls to be a crystal ball, and the polls are not now, nor will they ever be crystal balls.

0:52:38.7 MO: Okay. But I wanna add one more point. I think there's other points, like all the pre-election polls that looked at Latinos, no one came close to the estimate of what happened. And that's 'cause we do a terrible job at reaching out to Latinos before... Latinos, African Americans, Arab Americans, Asian Americans, every basically non-high propensity voter or group of voters that is not estimated to be high propensity, is not contacted till late in the campaign. They're not surveyed till late in the campaign. They're not surveyed in large numbers. So then what we wanna call the margin of error is really big for them. But it's also just a really big disappointment too because then we're... They're misrepresented in our democracy in a lot of ways. So I think that's a really valid point of frustration.

0:53:25.5 DR: Rusty, I wanna bring it down to the Michigan level a little bit. You talk about broad strokes of what should be in a campaign. What do you think were the... I mean, we're swinging back and forth in this state and full democratic election two years ago, Biden winning, Trump winning before that. Now Trump winning with a big margin. What were the biggest swings in the Michigan contest in your opinion? 

0:53:50.5 RH: Well, I think Trump is a phenomenon. I mean, he really is sui generis the way I view it. And I have no idea what's gonna happen after Trump, but nobody's really thinking about that now. We'll tackle that when that comes. I do think 2026 probably right now looks to be a very interesting Democratic year because I think there's quite the likelihood that it could repeat 2018 where there's a reaction to Trump having won. And at that point, the out party tends to really get its Irish up and come out to the poll. So I would anticipate there to be a groundswell of support for democratic candidates once they make it through the primaries in 2026. You know, but because Trump did well, Republicans did well. And so Rogers, Mike Rogers came very, very close to winning that Senate race, losing by 18,000 votes.

0:54:46.7 RH: And even though he came up short, I think it's the most votes any Republican senate candidate has ever amassed. And he did it being outspent five to one and essentially with a dysfunctional state party for at least half the cycle. No small thing. So he really overperformed, even though he lost, which just goes to show you can run a good race and still come up short in politics. And then that was reflected down ballot as well, where you saw Tom Barrett take Slotkin's old seat. So Slotkin won the Senate race, but a Republican replaced her in her former congressional seat. That doesn't normally happen. Ironically, the last time that I can remember that happening was back in 2000 when... If I... Was it... No '94, I think it was, when Spence, I'm trying to remember here, Spence won the Senate race and Debbie Stabenow won the congressional seat, something like that. But it's been a while since that happened. And that also reflected in the Republicans taking back the State House, again, that Trump phenomena managed to filter its way down ballot. And it was reflected most dramatically, I think with the statewide board candidates, which are essentially a ballot party test. Nobody really knows who these candidates are, so you just vote R&D and Republicans won five of the six, I think. That's how I interpret that. I dunno if anybody has any thoughts on that.

0:56:21.0 CM: Many people are concerned with the likelihood of SCOTUS, the executive branch, and likely the legislative branch, all being aligned with one party and raising many concerns about the strength of our democracy, essentially. We're just wondering what kind of insights you can offer about the strength of our democracy and what we can expect in the future and the longevity of American democracy? 

0:56:53.4 BM: Yeah, I have concerns about that. The idea of three separate branches of government is to serve as a check and balance on each other. But one thing that we have seen is that party seems to be a lot stronger than branch these days. We saw in the last Trump administration that when he was impeached in the house, the Senate members of his own party refused to convict him either time including for the election interference at which time Mitch McConnell said, "The courts will take care of that. We don't need to convict a president." So it seemed that that was the opportunity to hold Donald Trump accountable for those things. And then of course, when the case got brought criminally, the Supreme Court said, "No, the best place to hold a president accountable is through impeachment, and he's immune from criminal prosecution for things that he does while in office."

0:57:49.3 BM: So now we're kind of without both of those checks, the legislature's not gonna check him, and the courts are not going to check him. So I think we're in a dangerous place. What I think might be most important is, I guess the house is still up for grabs, right? We don't have the house. So the house perhaps can provide some check there in terms of legislative power that it has in refusing to pass certain kinds of legislation to which they object. I also think it's gonna be a really important time for state governments to be pushing back against some of these things, state attorneys general. One of the things we saw in the Biden administration was the Supreme Court really work to weaken the administrative agencies. There was a time when a decision by an administrative agency was entitled to deference.

0:58:41.4 BM: The courts can still overrule them, but it was referred to as Chevron deference. And the Supreme Court said, "No administrative agencies don't do that. The legislature has to be very specific about what it is saying, and we're not gonna defer to agencies to interpret the law. Courts are going to do that." So I think we're going to see that now with state attorneys general challenging acts of agencies within the Trump administration. These new executive orders, which I agree with Javed, will be issued early. I think we will see state attorneys general challenging some of those kinds of things. Schedule F is one that frightens me the most, which is coming back for sure. It was something that Donald Trump had issued in the end of his administration. Joe Biden removed it when he started, and that is what says that any policymaking member of the administration will become a political appointee as opposed to a member of the civil service. And so it's 50,000 positions estimates at, perhaps that is one that will be challenged by state attorneys general and at least delayed in its implementation. So I think we need to look to states to maybe pick up the slack as a potential check on the overreach of presidential power.

1:00:01.4 S5: I'll just weigh in here briefly on this point. I think it's appropriate to be asking this question and even for reasons that weren't at least expressed in the way the question was conveyed. So it isn't just that the Republicans are likely to have control of all three branches, and there's some question mark about the house, but the most likely scenario is that they'll win control there as well. But it's that a single party will have control of all three branches, and it's a political party that fundamentally does not believe in democracy. We left that part out. That's probably worth highlighting. So you might think that's hyperbole, but let me just explain in a moment here why it is not hyperbole. The two hallmarks of democracy are believing in the notion of contested elections and accepting defeat when you encounter it and protection for minority rights. And it's clear that in both of those cases, and minority broadly defined, the Republican party does not believe in democracy. And so it's not just frightening because it's not unprecedented in American history, although it is relatively rare for one party to have control of all three branches. But it is relatively rare in modern American history for a single party to have control of all three branches and for that party not to believe in democracy, and to run on a campaign of, "We don't believe in democracy." And to win.

1:01:30.2 JA: I'll just pick up a kind of a nuance point that Barb referenced. So if there is this decision to bring in more people under... Or at least classify some civil servants, like I was a civil servant in my career, is Schedule F. Although I don't think my position in the intelligence world would've fallen into that. That'll be interesting to see kinda what that means. But another thing I've been thinking about even with respect to folks who might come into the National Security Council, are there really sort of important and sensitive national security positions? There's talk that perhaps some of those people, if they're pure political appointees, like career folks like myself, when I went to the White House I was on loan from the FBI, that they don't even have to go through the traditional background investigation process and all the other hoops that people like myself had to jump through even to get into government.

1:02:23.7 JA: And then every five years, you're continuously evaluated and all the hoops that you had to go through initially you just gotta do it again every five years. And trust me, it sucks. That's the best way I could describe it, right? It is not a fun process to go through that and be under that level of scrutiny just to do your job. But again, that's the kind of social contract you make. That may not happen for a lot of folks who are coming in as political appointees. And that is concerning to me as an intelligence person. And someone very national-security-focused. Because once you walk through that door and you have access to that level of classified intelligence, and you're dealing with real world sort of life and death scenarios, you wanna make sure you've got the people who are of the highest integrity and can handle that information and treat it appropriately. And that may not be the case for a new kind of cohort. So that's the thing that really worries me if that happens. Now, again, it's not clear if it will, but that's something that we need to be on the lookout for as well.

1:03:33.7 CM: We've also received some questions about what this election could mean for higher education or education in general in terms of censorship, research funding and aspects of DEI. What impacts do you guys see this administration having on education in general? 

1:03:55.3 S?: Nobody wants that.

[laughter]

1:04:00.2 BM: We've already seen Trump talk about wanting to ban critical race theory. We've already seen things move in a direction of reducing support for DEI initiatives. I can't imagine a world in which that wouldn't face serious obstacles.

1:04:16.7 RH: Yeah, the only thing I could say is that in Michigan, under the Michigan Constitution, universities are sort of autonomous. So our situation is different from, say, other states, like what you might see happening in, say, Texas or Florida where you could have gubernatorial control and oversight. Here not so much. The universities sort of are somewhat shielded or exempt from that because of the constitution. So I think that's a layer of protection we have in Michigan that other states don't enjoy.

1:04:47.5 S4: Well, and while we're politically isolated, I think we have to be very careful not to become even more intellectually isolated in this election and even the level of surprise that it brings to so many people at the university, maybe a kind of wake up call that we have gotten somewhat to insular compared to the people of the state, compared to the people of the country. So I think it's reason to take stock. And are we doing our best to both understand and reach out to the full complexity of this country? We could probably be doing a better job.

1:05:33.2 BM: I'll chime in on a couple things. Donald Trump has made it a campaign platform to abolish the Department of Education. Mostly the Department of Education has a civil rights component. It provides grant programs. So could we survive without that? Well, now states are left to fend for themselves. Here in Michigan. At the moment, I think we would do fine, but across the country, in Texas they have... Haven't they eliminated tenure which means your ability to have academic freedom is severely curtailed. I could imagine filing lawsuits by the Department of Justice saying that any DEI program is a violation of the 14th Amendment as a violation classifications based on race and equal protection of the laws. So I could see, and again, in Michigan, I feel good, but I'm worried about the other places.

1:06:41.2 BM: I know I have friends who work in the area of OBGYN and teaching, here at Michigan we have a robust OBGYN program at the University of Michigan Hospital. Thank goodness I delivered four babies there. I had very good care there. But if you live in a state where abortion is now illegal and appears that that will be the case going forward, those research universities... The University of Texas, right? I mean, those teachers are going to flee that state and go somewhere where they can practice their craft and where people can be trained in that craft, which means it's only gonna get worse for women's healthcare in states where abortion is now illegal. So I think education is such an important part of our ability as citizens in a democracy to participate. And I'm very worried about the future where we'll see this splintering of states where some states will permit DEI programs and academic freedom and other states will not. So I worry about what that might look like.

1:07:43.7 MO: I think the other way that we see support for different strands of research is through things like National Science Foundation funding. And in the past we've already seen things like political science funding be restricted. And I can imagine that taking place again where certain programs, certain initiatives, Vince and I both work with minority-serving institutions which get certain strands of funding. And I can imagine all of that just being cut.

1:08:10.2 DR: Right. And Javed has to leave us shortly. So I'll just toss a quick one to you about what you see as the biggest issues that are gonna come up in the first a hundred days. And then more generally as kind of a last question, the states of the parties right now, it seems that there's an ideological shift, I don't know, where so-called moderate Republicans who were backing Kamala Harris, where they find themselves. So is there a party realignment or is this just sui generis? So, but first I'll toss it to...

1:08:47.8 JA: Yeah, I just have a plane to catch at 2:30, so I gotta get outta here soon. But thanks for the question. And then I can't stay after I answer this, but so President Trump has already said on the campaign trail, that if he were to be elected, which now he's the president-elect, that within 24 hours of coming into office, that he will end the wars in Ukraine. And now the multi-front war Israel has against Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon. That is a pretty tall order to deliver on that quickly. Now, and he legally can't do anything even behind the scenes because he is not the president, commander-in-chief, yet to make that happen. So how is he gonna deliver on that promise that quickly? I mean, he's put it out there.

1:09:40.6 JA: I don't know the answer to that, but that is what he has said on the campaign trail. But I... Whether that... I don't think that is going to happen that quickly, but I do think within the first a hundred days, those are gonna be priorities for this administration. Like what are gonna be the grand deals that President Trump and his team can come up with that end those two wars? We don't know the answer to that, but again, he's reinforced that. And then going back to China, he's also said he's gonna increase tariffs on China. I'm not an economist, so don't understand how that will work either. But I don't think China's gonna take that one sitting down either. And does that mean that the prospects of China making a move on Taiwan increase if President Trump really carries out on those threats to increase tariffs on Chinese-made goods by 60%? I think that's the statement that's been made.

1:10:32.4 JA: So that's another thing to look for. So that's at least three things on the national security side... Or the foreign policy side that we should all be looking for. Domestically, one of the executive orders that is most likely to drop soon is gonna be something very hard hitting on immigration. So again, how will that affect border security? And then sort of people inside the US, we don't know what that's gonna look like, but again, he has said he is going to move heaven and earth to follow through on that campaign promise to really do things differently when it comes to border security and immigration. So we're gonna have to watch that. And then another thing, this has been percolating the last few days and a couple media outlets are now picking up on it.

1:11:14.6 JA: A lot of people who have been sentenced and arrested because of January 6th, that number's over 1500 people already charged and sentenced or serving time in jail, think they're going to be pardoned by President Trump. And some of those people who think they're going to be pardon, are already openly expressing, not direct threats, but hinting at the fact that they are going to take revenge once they get pardon, if that happens, which I just think is nuts because they already got arrested once for breaking the law on January 6th, 2021. And if you're gonna re-offend the moment you get out, well, you're just gonna go right back to jail. But again, that might be another thing that sort of changes the domestic security [1:12:00.0] ____. Some of these people that may get pardoned because the crimes committed on January 6th, 2021, will they actually be so bold as to try and do something...

1:12:07.7 DR: Barb finish, I'll come around here.

1:12:10.9 BM: And the question was, where do the parties find themselves? I don't know. I'm not a politician, I'm not a political scientist, I guess I'm hearing two things from my students. I've had a lot of soul-searching conversations with students who wanna know what... They're really crushed by this. And I have suggested perhaps Democratic Party needs to rethink where it stands on issues pertaining to cultural issues, economic issues, the things that voters... Immigration issues, the things that voters seem to be saying matter to them. And I've had students say just the opposite, like, "Stop pretending to be the Republicans' light." Like, "Go all in on the left." Like, what do we care about what will motivate people to get out to the polls? And maybe that means more progressive than before. So I don't know, but I imagine the party will have to do some reflecting and talking to people who voted against them to have a better understanding about what voters really want.

1:13:15.1 S5: So it's of course, the... I'm sounding like a broken record here, because we don't really know yet. It's obviously too early what the parties are gonna do, but it... There is at least a hint of the possibility that wasn't going to apply to people of color to the same degree. But maybe we were wrong, at least with respect to non-black people of color. So it's too soon to know this. It's very tentative. I reserve the right to retract everything I'm about to say. But it is possible that we are seeing an expression of what we might call black exceptionalism in the sense that, of course, African Americans who become more affluent don't become Republican. But what about Asian Americans? What about Latinos? What about Native Americans? They're certainly starting to behave as if maybe they're just like previous generations of European immigrants.

1:14:10.9 S4: Well, let me just say that it felt this election cycle like both parties messaging inherently was just so negative and so divisive. And I think for the Democrats in particular, that just didn't resonate very well. Casting this election as a referendum on democracy itself, even though in some ways it may be very important for democratic institutions and their health in this country, I think, misunderstands fundamentally how people on the right see Donald Trump and see the health of our institutions. And ultimately what voters are going to the ballot box to vote for, which is predominantly about how they feel about the economy, not whether they want America to be more or less free or more or less democratic. So I would hope that the Democrats can find messaging that resonates better than suggesting that half of our country is somehow anti-democratic, is somehow only motivated by bigotry. Because even though on some level, perhaps some of those claims are true but we're not going to build a... The Democrats will not build a broader coalition by turning people against each other. We need to find ways to make this country come together.

1:15:41.9 RH: Okay, so three quick thoughts. I'll do Democrats not Trumpers and Republicans. So on Democrats, I highly recommend this Doris Kearns Goodwin book: An Unfinished Love Story, I recommend. I'm probably the oldest person in the room here so I can remember the 1968 campaign. And there's a great pass... I'm just gonna read one sentence where it says, "Both industrial blue collar workers and economically oppressed black people felt that Bobby Kennedy listened to them and recognized their problems." And then it goes on from there. Look, if I am the DNC chair, I would go out and buy copies of Jules Witcover's book: 85 Days, which is Bobby Kennedy's campaign, and I would send it to every single member because this is the formula. And believe me, I'm the last person on this panel that should be telling Democrats what to do because they should never listen to a Republican.

1:16:27.7 RH: But that's the formula for how to get back in power. Now, when I say formula, one thing that's important to remember is this is not a Disney movie. I don't say Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo, and my suit turns pink, right? You actually have to believe this. It's not enough for me to read it. The politicians actually have to believe that. That's why Kennedy was so successful, and that's how the Democrats become successful. Again, as for not-Trump-Republicans, like me, we're sort of a people without a country, and I don't know where we end up, but to the Republican point of view there are huge problems in Michigan and nationally. And now that the Republicans have gotten this majority, people want solutions to problems at the end of the day. The onus now is on the Republicans to be a governing conservative party and to solve problems.

1:17:18.2 RH: And if they don't, they're gonna get kicked out again. The problem is that when you have this divided government now, as Barb was saying, it's become so tribal that everybody just votes no on the other person's point of view. And what that means is nothing gets done, which means the public just gets more frustrated. And so every election's a change election. We just throw everybody out regardless of whether they're good, whether they're not. Somehow that doom loop has to be pierced. We've got to lance that boil and actually get some sort of either one party cooperation or two party cooperation to solve problems that restore people's faith in democracy in the political process.

1:18:00.9 MO: Okay, final notes. I guess I just wanna say that I don't... I wanna be clear, first of all, that non-White, these Latinos and Asian Americans, Arab Americans who shifted towards the Republican Party are not like white Republicans. They are far more liberal on almost every issue from affirmative action to climate change, to abortion, to obviously support for Gaza. So I think it's important to remember they are not necessarily shifting all of their policy positions. And in fact, a lot of people who supported Trump did not hold... They by and large majority supported abortion, majority supported... Now I'm forgetting the other big issue that we asked about. But they held... Majority supported the path to citizenship even among Trump supporters. Trump has not been replicated. Among all the candidates that have tried to be Trump, nobody has been effective at replicating Trump's success.

1:18:50.9 MO: So I'm not sure this is a big realignment. I think Trump was really effective at saying he was gonna be able to do amazing things that no party and no candidate can do. I think a lot of non-white voters are rightly frustrated that they haven't seen the change in their communities that they're repeatedly promised. And so there is a reaction to that, but I don't think it's necessarily because anyone thought that Trump was a godsend. I think it was a desire for some change, as was mentioned early on, a desire for some greater form of success. But we will see. So thank you guys all for joining us, and thank you to this amazing panel.

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