MANDY NGUYEN: Hi. This is Mandy Nguyen (ph) on Misti Volcano in Peru, taking a break at base camp, 15,000 feet above sea level. This podcast was recorded at…
DEEPA SHIVARAM, HOST:
10:37 a.m. on Thursday, November 14, 2024.
NGUYEN: Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I’ll still be on my five-month empty-nester adventure around South America, Oceana and Asia. All right. Here’s the show.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
SARAH MCCAMMON, BYLINE: Wow. That sounds amazing.
RYLAND BARTON, BYLINE: That sounds dreamy.
SHIVARAM: Say hi to our colleague, Asma Khalid, who is also in Peru right now.
Hey there. It’s the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Deepa Shivaram. I cover the White House.
MCCAMMON: I’m Sarah McCammon. I cover politics.
SHIVARAM: And NPR’s Ryland Barton is here. He covers many things, state legislatures among them. Thanks for being here, Ryland.
BARTON: Hey. Glad to be here.
SHIVARAM: OK, so we’re going to do a big breakdown of all of Donald Trump’s cabinet picks so far and the role that people like Elon Musk will play in the federal government. That’s all coming in our round-up episode tomorrow. We’re holding off until we can get, you know, as full a picture as possible. But today, we know that Republicans have won 218 House seats, giving President-elect Trump full control of the federal government. Sarah, this is good news for his ability to push through a lot of the priorities he campaigned on. What are some of those promises?
MCCAMMON: Right. I mean, let’s not forget, the Conservatives dominate the Supreme Court. Trump is going to be the president, and now Republicans will have control of Congress. So that is pretty much a clean sweep. And it does mean that Trump will have a much easier time getting his agenda through. You know, it’s not clear yet exactly what his first priority will be. I think immigration is very high on that list. We all heard him talk about that a lot during this campaign cycle. One thing I’m curious about, as someone who’s covered abortion for a long time, is what will happen there. Trump has sent mixed messages about what he intends to do. But he’s under pressure from many people in his base to find ways to restrict abortion, whether through federal agencies or through Congress.
And, you know, whether it’s immigration or economic policy or abortion or whatever the case may be, Republicans will still have to contend with the filibuster in the Senate. But let’s not forget, you know, on that issue of abortion, Vice President Harris just said in an interview in September that the Senate – under Democratic control – should do away with the filibuster to pass abortion protections. So the shoe is about to be on the other foot. Who knows what Republicans will do and what Trump will prioritize? But bottom line, he’ll have a much easier time getting his agenda through with control of Congress.
SHIVARAM: Yeah, absolutely. And Ryland, one of the under-discussed results of this election is the control of state governments because that’s been pretty significant, too. Republicans will control just over half of state legislatures. But based on what you’ve been reporting, they were maybe hoping for more, is that right?
BARTON: They were hoping for more. Also, Democrats were hoping for more. They invested so much into this year’s races. The Democratic campaign on – put about $60 million toward it compared to 45 million for Republicans. But then Democrats also had these two big outside spenders – the States Project, which put aside $70 million for it, and another group called Forward Majority had 45 million. So there was, like, $170 million that were coming down on the Democratic side. And they were hoping to, you know, win some legislatures – win more seats, at least. And there were some small successes for them, but really, if anything, they just kind of held steady. And this is part of a longer trend of Republicans just being much more successful at the state legislative level, going back to, you know, at least 2010. That’s when they made a big blitz to pick up a bunch of legislative seats. And Democrats are still playing catch up, but they are at least starting to spend a lot of money trying to do it.
SHIVARAM: Yeah, you said some small wins there. What did Democrats gain in terms of state legislatures?
BARTON: The biggest one is that they broke apart the supermajority in North Carolina – actually, just in the House in North Carolina. So that means that Republicans had enough seats there to override the governor’s veto there, even if it’s a Democratic governor, which North Carolina has. So now Democrats – now that that supermajority doesn’t exist in the House, it means incoming Democratic Governor Josh Stein can veto things and not worry about being overridden by the legislature as long as Democrats can stick together. They did just win it by one seat.
Another one is, you know, they had really ambitious goals of winning both chambers in the Wisconsin legislature, and that didn’t happen. There were new legislative maps there that were supposed to, you know – were thought to benefit Democrats. And they won a few seats there, which they’re counting as a success. And really, you know, this is a multicycle project, I think, of theirs to try and win back some of these legislatures. And Wisconsin is one of those that they – OK, now they feel like they saw some success, and they’re hoping to get more down the road.
SHIVARAM: And for Republicans, what gains did they make?
BARTON: So they were able to break apart a couple Democratic trifectas. That’s where a party controls both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s office. So big one was in Michigan – they flipped the Michigan House. So that means, you know, the Democratic trifecta there under Governor Gretchen Whitmer had passed a whole raft of progressive policies, you know, enshrining abortion rights, also, you know, some pro-labor things like undoing the state’s right-to-work law. So then there’s also in Minnesota, that used to be a trifecta under Governor Tim Walz. The state House there is now a tie. I believe there are still some recounts going on there right now, but it’s looking like it’s going to be a tie, which breaks apart the trifecta. It forces that chamber to go into kind of a power sharing agreement. And same deal – they had passed all these progressive policies there in recent years.
And then across the country, Republicans just added to their majorities in a lot of places. They now have supermajorities in South Carolina, in Iowa. They were also able to break apart some Democratic supermajorities in New York, actually – New York state, also Vermont. And then they fended off Democrats in a couple of places where Democrats were trying to get a supermajority – Nevada and then Kansas. So Republicans did very well across the board, just as they did at the top of the ticket. But I think overall, Democrats still feel like they didn’t do as poorly as things could’ve been.
SHIVARAM: Is it fair to say that, like, the pace of winning or the pace of growth, I guess, in terms of Democratic gains in these state legislatures – has it just generally been slower for Democrats here than Republicans?
MCCAMMON: I mean, Republicans have been strategic for, really, more than a decade now – a couple of decades almost – at targeting all levels of government to achieve their policy objectives. I mean, this is how Roe v. Wade got overturned. Republicans understood that they needed conservative senators in order to approve conservative Supreme Court picks, and they succeeded there. And then they also understood that at the state legislative level, they needed to have the policies in place that would restrict abortion or carry out their policies on a variety of issues. And we’re seeing the fruit of that now. And as Ryland just said, I think Democrats have come to understand that they need to focus on these state legislatures as well, but they’re playing catch up.
BARTON: Yeah. And just going back to your previous question, it is a very slow process. It takes a long time to kind of – one, just partly because so few people pay attention to these legislative elections, but also that these legislatures are so polarized right now. There’s way more of one party than the other. And it’s going to be really hard to do the work of going about flipping any of those. And when we’re talking about, you know, how powerful legislatures are in this moment when the U.S. Supreme Court has kind of, like, empowered them and also Congress has largely gridlocked or has been, legislatures have kind of stepped up. And it’s just all the more important and all the more difficult to move the needle on that.
SHIVARAM: Yeah, absolutely. All right, we’re going to take a quick break here, and we’ll be back with more.
And we’re back. And Sarah, as we talk about these state houses and legislatures shifting and moving around, they’ll also play a big role in either supporting or opposing Donald Trump’s key priorities. We talked about immigration, and you mentioned abortion as well. How do those state legislatures play into what could be the president-elect’s agenda?
MCCAMMON: You know, we’ve seen, both to some extent during the first Trump administration, and I think we will see more of this now, the reality that with Republicans fully in control of the federal government, the states will be one place where people who disagree with those policies have some power to push back. So, you know, again, we saw this with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the way that the red state-blue state divide became very important, and you see very different policies from state to state depending on who’s in control of the legislatures. A number of state lawmakers and also Democratic governors have passed protections for abortion rights. You know, for example, Illinois passed protections for abortion providers as well as patients to avoid prosecution in other states. Governors of New York, California and Massachusetts, for example, have stockpiled abortion pills because those were under threat. And so we might see similar moves with other types of policies. That said, of course, federal policy on many issues trumps state policy, so it’s unclear exactly how much states will be able to do.
SHIVARAM: Yeah. Ryland, I want to bring you back in here, too, because, you know, we were talking about these big investments that Democrats have tried to make, winning over more seats in state legislatures. I mean, that was in response to something, right? And so, with so much control that Republicans have in the federal government right now – total control, we could argue – do you anticipate there to be, like, a response to that in terms of, like, more fundraising, more of a push to try to win more, you know, seats the next time around?
BARTON: I think there could be. I mean, if there’s any trend that we’re seeing, it does seem like Democrats are investing more than they have in the past. They were really at an all-time low, say, like, around 2016 or so. And now they’re a lot more active and in places that they hadn’t really been before. I mean, this year, I’m thinking about there’s some races in North Carolina that had long been Republican-controlled. And Democrats were, you know, actually trying to show up and have competitive candidates and whatnot versus in years in the past where they just wouldn’t field anybody. I don’t know if we can draw a direct connection between that and them winning a few more seats this year, but I think that that’s – you know, that is how Republicans did it back in 2010. They just started fielding candidates in as many districts as they could. And, you know, anybody who’s looked at legislative maps in a conservative state just knows Democrats are not really finding as many candidates in a lot of these places. A lot of these races are just going uncontested.
So yeah, I think that there’s an attempt to do that, but it’s going to be a long road ahead for them. When Republicans did this ahead of 2010, it was really a concerted effort to, instead of, say, losing $100 million in a Massachusetts U.S. Senate race, they could spread that $100 million across the country in lots of legislative races. And that’s what it takes. It takes that concerted effort. And I think that Democrats are starting to show that, again, with the fundraising numbers that we saw this year. It just takes a really long time to kind of, you know, rebuild the brand that has gotten so unpopular in a lot of places, especially rural places. And…
SHIVARAM: Yeah.
BARTON: …That’s a multiyear effort. It’s been – part of that is changing what it means to be a Democrat in some of these places.
SHIVARAM: All right, we’re going to leave it there for today. NPR’s Ryland Barton, thanks so much for joining us.
BARTON: Thank you.
SHIVARAM: I’m Deepa Shivaram. I cover the White House.
MCCAMMON: And I’m Sarah McCammon. I cover politics.
SHIVARAM: And thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
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