Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris on Tuesday night to become only the second president in US history to win two nonconsecutive terms. (The last one? Grover Cleveland in 1892.) Trump won the presidency following one of the most tumultuous election years in modern US history—one that included an incumbent president pulling out of his reelection bid, the vice president becoming the Democratic nominee a few short months before Election Day, and two assassination attempts on Trump.
A majority of voters elected Trump to return to the White House following a campaign often filled with violent rhetoric, misinformation, and disparaging comments about women, immigrants, and people of color. Harris was unable to build a coalition to defeat Trump, losing both the Electoral College and the popular vote after a campaign that initially energized Democrats around the country after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
“America has never had a Black woman governor,” says Mother Jones editorial director Jamilah King. “So the fact that America’s never had a Black woman president is not surprising. I don’t think we as a country were quite ready for it.”
In this Reveal podcast extra, host Al Letson sits down with King, as well as Mother Jones’ David Corn and Ari Berman, to break down how Trump won, why Harris’ campaign faltered, and where the nation goes from here.
Dig Deeper
Listen: Red, Black, and Blue (Reveal)
Read: America Meets Its Judgment Day (Mother Jones)
Read: Republicans Defeat Ohio Anti-Gerrymandering Initiative With Brazen Anti-Democratic Tactics (Mother Jones)
Read: Trump Wins the White House in a Political Comeback Rooted in Appeals to Frustrated Voters (Associated Press)
Credits
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Production managers: Steven Rascón and Zulema Cobb | Digital producers: Nikki Frick and Kate Howard | Music and mastering: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson
Transcript
Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson, and I’m back again midweek for another bonus election episode. It was a historic election night, and no matter who you wanted to win or lose, it was a lot. So take a deep breath. All right, you with me? |
| Donald Trump was elected to a second term, only the second president in history to win two non-consecutive terms, the first since Grover Cleveland back in 1892. Vice President Kamala Harris conceded the race on Wednesday. Republicans meanwhile flipped seats in Ohio, West Virginia and Montana gaining control of the Senate while the House at the moment is still undecided. In seven states, voters approved abortion rights amendments while California and Colorado protected same-sex marriage. | |
| To help me make sense of it all, I’m joined by three of my colleagues from Mother Jones. David Corn is a veteran reporter and Mother Jones’ DC bureau chief. David has written extensively about the presidential election and spent part of last night with the Harris campaign at Howard University. Welcome, David. | |
| David Corn: | Hello, Al. |
| Al Letson: | Ari Berman joins us from New York. Ari is the national voting rights correspondent at Mother Jones. Ari, thanks for being here. |
| Ari Berman: | Hey, Al. Good to see you. Thank you. |
| Al Letson: | And also joining us from New York is Jamilah King. She is an editorial director with Mother Jones, who has also been covering Kamala Harris for more than a decade. Thanks for being here this morning, Jamilah. |
| Jamilah King: | It’s good to be here, Al. |
| Al Letson: | All right, well, let’s get into it. So obviously, this was a little bit of a surprise. I think it was definitely a surprise for me. I’m curious if Trump winning the presidential election, not just in the electoral college but also winning the popular vote, was that a surprise for you as well, Jamilah? |
| Jamilah King: | So I was definitely surprised. I was not shocked, which is I think the commonly held emotion that a lot of progressives and Democrats felt in 2016, but I was surprised especially by him winning the popular vote. That I didn’t see. That to me showed just how fractured we are as a country along class lines, and that’s not something that I think was talked about a lot heading into the election. |
| Al Letson: | What about you, David? What’d you think? |
| David Corn: | I was surprised a bit by the outcome. All through the campaign, once Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, we looked at poll numbers that kept showing the race was close. A lot of the polls were within margin of errors, and people were obsessing about them far too much. |
| But I always wondered at the end of the day, could a Black woman win a national election? We’ve never run this experiment before, even against a convicted felon who has been described as a fascist who is awaiting sentencing and who has been adjudicated as liable for sexual assault. And there’s more. He tried to overthrow American democracy four years ago, and he mismanaged a pandemic that led to tens of thousands of avoidable deaths of Americans, of our fellow citizens and neighbors. | |
| So up against that, could a candidate unlike any other candidate we’ve had before demographically speaking, succeed? I thought the race would be close, but at the end, it was far more separation between the two than I had imagined it would be. | |
| Al Letson: | Ari, what were you thinking as the results were coming in? |
| Ari Berman: | It felt like Americans had very short memories about what Trump’s America looked like. The fact that they just seemed to disregard so many people dying during COVID, that they had seemingly forgotten or not cared about the January 6th insurrection which in and of itself should have been a disqualifier, I think was very jarring. And it felt like this was a referendum on Biden’s presidency rather than Trump’s presidency. |
| And what I think the polls underestimated was the depth of anger at Biden’s presidency, which Harris was unable to rebuild. I think Harris probably did better than what Biden would have done, but she wasn’t able to rebuild. Lots of cracks in the Democratic Party. And the thing that’s scary about this election result, it’s not one demographic or another demographic, the Democratic Party did poorly among so many different demographic groups. It did worse among African-Americans, Latinos. Even women, there was not this surge of women voters that were predicted. It looks like, once again, Trump won white women. | |
| So many of the things that Harris said she was going to do, she was unable to do, I don’t think because of her fault but because of Biden’s baggage. And then Trump’s support was just a lot more durable than I think we believed. And he was able to hold his margins or in fact improve on his margins despite what had occurred, not just during the four years of his presidency, but what happened after the way he behaved after leaving office. | |
| And it’s sobering to think that not only did he win all of the battleground states, but that he’s going to win the popular vote most likely. I don’t think we definitively know that yet just because a lot of California and other places haven’t come in, but he’s certainly on track to do that. And it feels like instead of a fluke, this was America voting, at least in part, not just against Biden but voting for Trumpism. | |
| David Corn: | It’s not just hate against the Biden administration, having attended some Trump rallies including one just a couple of days ago, it’s a deeper and wider hatred. It’s against the Democrats and Biden for sure, but against liberals, progressives, people who care about climate change and women’s rights, against academia, against the media. Even against corporate America which is bizarre, we don’t have time to go into all that. |
| It’s the politics of hate. And when I think you’re in that mode as a voter, nothing else matters. Whatever Trump did on January 6th, whatever he did during COVID, it doesn’t matter because he shares your hatred. He has the same enemies that you think you have. And to me, that’s what’s truly disturbing here, that it’s not just about Trump, it’s not just about one single Democratic administration, it’s almost a way of life. | |
| Al Letson: | A lot of the reporting that I was seeing prior to the election, it seemed like Trump had lost a step and that his support wasn’t as strong as it had been in previous election. Smaller rallies for Trump compared to the big, huge rallies and the enthusiasm for Harris. But Trump, he ended up winning even at this point when it looked, at least from the news reports that I was reading and the videos, the TikToks, the Instagram messages. All of it, it seemed like he’d lost a step, but clearly he has not. Jamilah, what do you think about that? |
| Jamilah King: | I think there’s this sense of alienation that’s hard to capture in pop culture, right? David, you alluded to this at the rallies that were a little bit smaller but still very, very filled with people who had a deep sense of alienation and were willing and excited almost to take that out on the Democratic Party. And I think that alienation for me was really interesting to see play out particularly amongst Latino men. |
| I was really surprised, and maybe I shouldn’t have been, but I definitely have been reporting and working on projects at Mother Jones over the past few months looking at Black Republicans and the sense of alienation that you are tired of being talked down to, you are tired of being accused of being a bad person. I think that is definitely a through line. And I don’t know how Democrats recover from that. I don’t know how Democrats can reframe themselves as the party for working people. I think this is less about being a party of Trump more, and it’s more about people were casting votes against the Democratic Party. | |
| David Corn: | But it’s not just working class issues. I mean, it’s not a clear economic divide here. You go to these rallies, there’s a lot of racism, there’s a lot of misogyny going on here, and it’s attacking labor unions which seem to work for middle class, working class people. So it’s beyond, it’s sociological. It’s a lot of religion to it as well. |
| So we’re talking about a massive movement here of Trumpism that is sliding towards fascism. And people, to your point, Al, they don’t care if he’s slurring his words and talking about Hannibal Lecter and electric boats and doesn’t make sense. It’s again, he is their leader in hatred and that’s good enough. | |
| Ari Berman: | One of the things that’s interesting to me, Al and Jamilah and David, is there obviously are real grievances that Trump supporters are reacting to. Then there’s a lot of invented grievances that seem to motivate a lot of Trump supporters believing that the 2020 election was stolen when it was not. That was a key part of how Trump held his base saying that Democrats were letting migrants cross the border to vote illegally in American elections. |
| That was the claim that Elon Musk made more than anything else in terms of why you should support Donald Trump. That was his closing argument to Joe Rogan about why you should support Donald Trump. That was completely made up. There was absolutely no evidence that exists, but that was the closing argument. You would see ads saying that Kamala Harris wants migrants to cross the border to give them transgender surgeries. Again, completely made up. | |
| So I do think we also have to just talk about the alternative facts, right? There was a significant base of people that were not in the “reality-based community”, that we’re voting for Trump based on invented grievances. And that’s one thing that we also have to sort through. What are the real things that Democrats can address, but then how do you address all these invented things that they made up that spread through social media and other disinformation networks that were so impenetrable and so hard to debunk? | |
| David Corn: | Don’t forget too Trump’s false narrative about crime, that there are criminal gangs literally taking over towns and cities across the United States, completely untrue. Even the people who represent those towns, even Republicans come out and say this is not true. And yet when you go to the rallies or you talk to people, they repeat this back as an article of faith. |
| The word you used, Ari, is very good, impenetrable. They don’t read the media and they hear what Trump says, and they take it at face value. And I don’t know how you get past that. | |
| Al Letson: | I want to go back to something, David, that you said earlier, and I think in my opinion, this is the big elephant in the room so to speak, is was America and will it ever be ready to vote for a Black woman? And I think we could talk about all of these different things, people having issues here and issues there and made up things. But the real thing is that we’ve never had a Black woman get this far in the process to become the President of the United States. And it feels like the country basically rejected that, clearly rejected it. |
| And I have this theory, and Jamilah, I’d be curious to see if you agree with me. It’s not based on fact, but I just think that when you look at the polls, a lot of people were saying that they were going to vote for Kamala. And I think that the reason why a lot of people who said they were and probably didn’t is because they didn’t want to be labeled as a racist, as a Trumpy. But when they got into that booth, they were not comfortable with voting for a Black woman. | |
| Jamilah King: | Yeah, Al. I mean, I definitely think that you’re onto something. America has never had a Black woman governor. So the fact that America’s never had a Black woman president is not surprising. I don’t think we as a country were quite ready for it, and certainly not with the truncated circumstances of this particular election. She had three months to campaign. I think it was an incredible, extraordinary sort of campaign that was run in those months. But ultimately, she had a huge problem sort of introducing herself and getting to know the American people. |
| David Corn: | And if you look to how they talked about her, Donald Trump continually demeaned her as low IQ. And when you go to rallies, they shout out, she’s a moron, she’s an idiot, she’s a puppet, Obama is running her. This is racism. This is misogyny, pure and simple. I mean, you may not like her, but she’s not dumb. She’s not low IQ, but that’s how they came to her. |
| And I do think that when it comes to a presidential vote in particular, it’s a psychological vote for many people. You’re picking your tribal leader who you think symbolizes your notion, your idea of America. And bringing in someone who’s a woman and someone who is Black, South Asian, I think for a lot of people, that was a bridge too far. When I look at her, it’s not what I think of as America. | |
| And so it’s not about, issues are involved but it’s not primarily about issues. In the presidential vote, people vote for the person more than they vote for the issues. And if they’re voting for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris, that tells you a lot. | |
| Ari Berman: | And to me, Al, this election really felt like a referendum on whether America was going to embrace multiracial democracy. And it feels like America didn’t embrace multiracial democracy. And there’s contradictory things here because Trump did better among Latinos and African Americans and Asian Americans. He did better among all these communities of color. But at the same time, Trump was running by and large to preserve the power of white Christian America, which they felt was under siege. |
| So you have these contradictory things where yes, Trump did better among communities of color, but the plan for the Republican Party is to implement a reactionary white Christian agenda. And so I think there’s going to be blowback from some of those constituencies that voted for Trump, not really realizing necessarily what they’re getting into here in terms of the people that are going to be running the federal government, the judges that are going to be on the court, all of those people. | |
| I’m not sure if they’re going to be standing for Latino men or Black men or Asian Americans or all of those people. I think that this is going to be very much a white Christian nationalist strategy that’s put into place in Trump’s second term. | |
| Al Letson: | We’re going to take a quick break, but when we come back, more election night reflections with my guest David Corn, Ari Berman and Jamilah King. This is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. |
| This is Reveal. I’m Al Letson, and I’m here with my colleagues from Mother Jones, David Corn, Ari Berman, and Jamilah King. And we’re going to talk a little bit today just kind of moving over from talking about President Trump and focus on the Senate and the House. Ari, what happened last night with the Senate? Any surprises? | |
| Ari Berman: | Yeah. I mean, it was bad news for Democrats in the Senate. They lost a lot of races they were favored to hold. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown, just a stalwart for working America for so long, someone who should have been able to survive any kind of Trump wave, he lost. Much closer races in Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada. And that was scary because right now, you talk about a Trump presidency with a Republican controlled Senate. That means they can do whatever they want, not just in terms of confirming people, but the courts. And that I think is the most important legacy of the first Trump term was the three Supreme Court justices he named, and the fact that now they could solidify that majority on the court. |
| It’s not hard to imagine Trump having a majority on the court, five justices on the court if Thomas and possibly Alito retire. And so that’s something that lasts 40 or 50 years. And that I think is going to be the biggest legacy of Trump’s two terms in office, is just how he transformed the federal judiciary in such a really right-wing and reactionary way. | |
| Al Letson: | And what’s the latest with the House? |
| David Corn: | We won’t know. It takes a while for some of these House races to play out. And earlier in the evening last night, the Democrats are I think kind of hopeful that they could actually take back the House. As we’re talking, I’m not sure they’re as hopeful, but they’re still crossing their fingers. |
| And to Ari’s point, this is a very important thing. If Trump controls all of Congress, and the Republicans do and they’re Trump Republicans, he’ll be able not just to do what Ari just detailed on the Senate side but legislation. If he wants to kill the Affordable Care Act and he controls the House and the Senate, he may be able to do that. So if there’s no guardrail at all on Capitol Hill, he has a free rein and he can implement Project 2025 and anything else that he would like to do. | |
| And also, the important thing is if the Democrats don’t control the House, there’ll be no investigations of Trump misconduct, of Trump business deals. Whatever he may want to do to remake the federal bureaucracy and put in loyalty oaths, all that sort of stuff, taking money from foreign sources and monuments they called in the Constitution which he did during his first term, there’ll be nobody out there to say, “Hey, let’s look at this.” | |
| Ari Berman: | Can I just make one other point on that front? I think one of the things that is not getting enough attention is just the role the Supreme Court played in emboldening and enabling Trump to run and succeed for his bid for a second term. Think how different this campaign might have looked if we had a trial in the middle of a presidential election for Trump inciting the insurrection at the Capitol. That never happened because the Supreme Court essentially nullified it and canceled that trial. And then they’ve dramatically enhanced the danger of a Trump presidency by saying that Trump now has the power of a king to essentially do whatever he wants. |
| So I blame the Supreme Court and I blame Chief Justice John Roberts for not just helping Trump win office, but also for making him a much more dangerous president than he otherwise would have been in another Trump presidency. And I think that’s one thing that did not get enough attention throughout people’s minds, and people should have been voting on the courts, and it feels like a lot of people were not in fact doing so. | |
| Al Letson: | Let’s shift to some statewide ballot referendums. Ari, 10 states voted on an abortion rights measure. How many of those passed? |
| Ari Berman: | It passed in seven states and it failed in three states. Now, that’s a departure from what had happened before, because before this election, every state that had voted on an abortion rights initiative, it had passed in. But still, 7 out of 10 is pretty good. And we should also mention that abortion rights won 57% of the vote in Florida, but it failed because it was a 60% supermajority requirement. |
| So in pretty much every state it was on the ballot with a few exceptions, abortion rights got over 50% of the vote. It showed that there is still a strong majority for abortion rights in this country. The question is why did so many people vote for abortion rights and then vote for Donald Trump? | |
| Al Letson: | Yeah, I’m in Jacksonville, Florida. I didn’t know that you needed to have the 60%. So as the night was going on and I’m watching the results coming in, I thought like, oh, okay, so abortion is going to be protected in the state. And then I read the news articles that said, actually, no, it doesn’t matter that 57%. It seems to me like the idea that you’re going to get 60% on anything seems like a bar far too high to leap over. |
| Ari Berman: | Well, David and I were talking about this earlier in the night, but it’s a form of minority rule that you could have a 41% minority blocking something that’s supported by a 59% majority. And that’s essentially what happened in Florida. The 43% of people that opposed abortion rights blocked the 57% of people that supported abortion rights from preserving abortion rights in the state, not to mention that the Governor Ron DeSantis did everything he could to defeat this initiative including sending his “election fraud task force” to people’s houses, which was just really straight-up authoritarianism. |
| So that was one thing that direct democracy was a rare bright spot in this election, and it remains a rare bright spot. But Republicans did everything they could to try to thwart direct democracy in this campaign. | |
| Al Letson: | Besides the big news we’ve already discussed, what else was notable from last night in terms of firsts or ballot referendums? This is for anybody. What do you got? |
| Ari Berman: | There was one really scandalous thing, if I can just mention quickly. There was an anti-gerrymandering initiative on the ballot in Ohio that would’ve banned partisan gerrymandering in that state. Then Republicans rewrote it to make it seem like this anti-gerrymandering initiative was actually a pro-gerrymandering initiative. And a lot of Ohio voters said they voted against something that they actually supported and it failed. |
| And that was really an example of how Republicans just use their power to totally thwart and undermine something that was actually really popular. And it’s not a surprising thing, but it was just kind of jarring to see how you can use the process, how you can use your control to undermine something that people actually favor. Can I ask Jamilah and David something that I’ve been really struggling with? | |
| Al Letson: | Ask away. |
| Ari Berman: | So exit polls, and I know they’re unreliable, but they’re one indicator we have. Exit polls showed that the state of democracy was the number one issue people were voting on over the economy, abortion, immigration, other issues. Yet Donald Trump won in a country that cared about the state of democracy over every other issue. |
| Now that tells me that democracy means different things to the parties, that for Democrats, the threat to democracy was about Trump and the way that Trump tried to overturn the election and all the ways he tried to overturn democratic norms more broadly. But to Republicans, it meant any number of things that were different than that. The deep state, right? The swamp, the prosecution of an ex-president, all of those things. | |
| And that became, it looks like more of a rallying cry for Republicans than Democrats to redefine the threat to democracy. | |
| David Corn: | I’m glad you asked this because that was my pet peeve, this campaign with pollsters, because before the exit polling, they would ask, what do you care about the most? The environment, inflation, immigration, threat to democracy, and the threat to democracy always scored very high. And people in the Biden campaign, and then the Harris campaign said, “This is a winning issue for us.” But they didn’t ask the question correctly. |
| Al Letson: | What does it mean? |
| David Corn: | What does it mean? Do you believe Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, or do you believe the Democrats in power are a threat to democracy? And you never got a split on that. And so if you believe an election was stolen in 2020, then you care about democracy. People I talk to at Trump rallies, they believe they are democrats, small D, and that they are fighting to preserve democracy because it was stolen from them by the deep state, the media, the Democrats, Venezuela, China, and I don’t know who else. |
| So yes, we never got a clear understanding of that. And I blame the pollsters, and it’s a terrible question, and we are left with the idea here that not enough voters really worried about the fascist threat from Donald Trump, even after his own people called him that. And what does that mean for the future of American democracy? | |
| Al Letson: | This thing is a game changer, a paradigm shift. And I’m curious what the three of you will be reporting on in the future. Where do you see your lanes from here on out? |
| Jamilah King: | I mean, I’m really interested in the conservative shifts in communities of color, what’s driving that, what’s driving that along class lines. I do think it’s important to dig into that a bit. And I think just what a wild run and campaign this has been, particularly for Kamala Harris, and I think it’ll be instructive for a lot of future young women of color specifically who want to run for office. So I think a lot of people will be galvanized, hopefully. And I’m going to be following that too. |
| Al Letson: | Ari? |
| Ari Berman: | Well, I’m going to be following what happens to American democracy and do we still have a democracy? Do we still have a functioning democracy when Trump gets back in there and starts using all the levers of the power to entrench his own power? And I feel like there was a road not taken here where rights could have been protected and democracy could have been expanded, and we chose the other route. |
| And it feels kind of like this historical hinge point that’s not unlike the end of Reconstruction, which the question is, were we going to protect multiracial democracy or were we going to turn our back on it? And it feels like we’ve turned our back on democracy in a very kind of disturbing way. And I’m very concerned about what Trump is going to do through his appointments to the courts, through his appointments to the federal government, what states are going to do who are emboldened by Trumpism to further minority rule, to further undermining democracy. | |
| And I think it’s going to be a sobering story. It’s going to be one, as David said, that we have to pay attention to because if people don’t pay attention to it, then they’re just going to do it all in the shadows. But I also worry that a lot of people have democracy fatigue, and they’re tired of thinking about it every single day, will America be a democracy anymore? And they felt like this question was going to be answered once and for all on November 5th. Unfortunately, it may have been answered, but not in the way that we like. | |
| Al Letson: | David? |
| David Corn: | Well, I’m still trying to get my bearings honestly on what the brave new world is going to be like, but I expect to be looking at the intersection of extremism with the new Trump administration. Who’s getting what positions, what are they trying to do, the influence of Christian nationalists in terms of policies and getting jobs, the role of money and big donors. I mean, we didn’t really get into this so much, but four pro-Trump billionaires gave basically half a billion dollars to Trump efforts, four. And that’s more money than he got from all the individual smaller donors to his campaign, Elon Musk being the most well-known of these people. |
| We will have more oligarchic influence over the Trump administration than we have ever seen in our lifetimes. And tracking that I think is going to be a very important task for members of the press and for Democrats within Congress. | |
| Jamilah King: | I’m curious, Ari and David, who’s the leader of the Democratic Party from here on out? |
| David Corn: | Up for grabs. I think it’s wide open. You got to look at who’s standing. There are a few governors out there who we talked about throughout the year, Gavin Newsom being one, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan. Who else? A good way to answer that question is for me to ask you who comes to your mind as the Democrat who’s going to lead the opposition. |
| It may depend too on what happens with the House. If there’s a Democratic house speaker, Hakeem Jeffries, he will become the most prominent national Democrat. And while he may not be in the running for 2028, he will become the face of Democratic opposition. | |
| Ari Berman: | I think it has to be someone who has no ties to the Biden administration and someone who’s not in Washington, because clearly that failed. And I think it’s someone that has to be able to talk to working people. And I think that it can’t be in another election where you’re only talking to one race or one gender or one side, and that’s how it was perceived. I’m not saying that was true, but that’s how it was perceived that rightly or wrongly, Kamala wasn’t talking to all the disaffected people that Trump was talking to. |
| So I don’t think they should go too far. I think for example, you ask is America ready for a woman president? I think Gretchen Whitmer would’ve done a lot better than Kamala Harris. So I don’t want to go too far in terms of making sweeping assumptions. Also, a Black woman, I think Michelle Obama would’ve won. I think Michelle Obama would’ve won if she ran. I think America’s ready for a Black woman. I just think Kamala had problems, I think, because she was tied so closely to Joe Biden. That’s what I believe. | |
| Now, maybe that’s wrong. Maybe I’m Pollyannish, but I don’t think it was her race or gender that was a principal problem. I think it was the fact that she was vice president for Joe Biden. Now, again, maybe I’m wrong about that, but I think the Democratic Party needs a clean break from Washington and from Bidenism. | |
| Al Letson: | I totally hear you, Ari. In the case of America and betting on racism, I’m always going to bet that America will choose racism. So I think that I agree that Kamala was weighed down by the Biden administration, but I think that race played a big part into it. And I think that Gretchen Whitmer, she probably would’ve done better than Kamala, but I think a lot of that would also be because Gretchen Whitmer is a white woman. |
| I mean, I’ve seen conversations between white women on Facebook that I know saying things like they wanted to see a woman be first, but they weren’t sure about Kamala. And I never followed up on it because I don’t interact on social media, but it was curious to me. So it’s going to be an interesting four years. I want to thank you all for joining me after a very busy election night. I know you guys were up to all times of the morning, and I really appreciate you coming in. David Corn, Ari Berman, and Jamilah King, thank you all. | |
| Ari Berman: | Thanks, Al. |
| Jamilah King: | Thanks, Al. |
| David Corn: | Thank you. |
| Al Letson: | This episode was produced by Josh Sanburn and Kara McGuirk-Alison. Nikki Frick was our fact-checker. Our production managers are Steven Rascón and Zulema Cobb. Music and engineering by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs and Fernando, My Man, Yo, Arruda. Our interim executive producers are Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis. Support for Reveal is provided in part by you, our listeners. We are a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson. And remember, there is always more to the story. |