John Nichols urges Democrats to regain the trust of working Americans. He will be speaking at the Fogartyville on Saturday.
By Johannes Werner
Original Air Date: December 4, 2024
Host: As the national affairs correspondent for the Nation magazine, John Nichols views national politics through a progressive lens. He will put the election in perspective during a presentation and discussion at the Fogartyville Community Center this Saturday, 7 pm. WSLR’s Peace and Justice Report host Tom Walker interviewed Nichols this morning.
Johannes Werner: Nichols sees the outcome of this election as part of a bigger trend. U.S. voters have been whipping us back and forth since the early 1980s, and Trump and his MAGA movement are far from having the last word.
John Nichols
John Nichols: We are in a moment of whipsaw politics. And what I mean by whipsaw politics, if you know about a whipsaw, it flips back and forth. The last president of the United States of America who served a four year term with a Congress where his party was in control in the majority, a full four year term in such a circumstance, was Jimmy Carter. Since 1980, we have had a circumstance in this country where we have empowered presidents in elections and then disempowered them in midterm elections — re-empower, disempower — and in the last three elections, we’ve seen a situation where the party that was in power was replaced by the other party, and usually with a quick congressional majority only to see that majority fall apart and the presidency lost at the next election.
What I mean is at the simplest level, this is chaos. We’re in a time of political chaos, and Trump took advantage of it, won the presidency, got a Congress that is very narrowly on his side, but anybody who thinks that this is something that’s going to remain, that this is steady, is a fool. It’s just not the case. We are whipsawing back and forth as a country.
JW: The outcome of these elections has been narrower than most Americans believe.
JN: Donald Trump won one of the narrowest victories in American history of the presidency. He didn’t win 50% of the vote. Overall, he’s in the 49.5% range. Kamala Harris won or lost, I apologize, by about 1.5%. She got beat, but she didn’t get beat by much. This is a much closer election than the vast majority in American history. Yeah. When you translate over into the legislative branch, you see a reflection of that. The Republicans have a 53–47 majority in the Senate, but they’ve got several members who have explicitly opposed Donald Trump, including Lisa Murkowski, who said she hasn’t voted for him, from Alaska, and Susan Collins, while a very imperfect player politically, also tried at many points to distance herself from Trump. And so you’ve got a couple others there, but they’ve got a majority, but it is a complex majority and one worthy of analyzing. And then over in the House, what you have — and it looks to be settled finally, although there’s still a little wrangling about a couple races — but it looks like they’re going to have something in the range of a Republican majority of about five seats. Five seat advantage. What that means is that, a handful of special elections or retirement, something like that, could even flip that majority during the course of this term.
JW: When forced to govern with such narrow majorities, presidents in the past have tried to reach across the aisle. But Trump is not showing any intent to do so, and that opens up an opportunity for progressives, Nichols suggests.
JN: What progressives need to understand, what they need to figure out, is that their short term strategy obviously is to challenge Trump to oppose many of his cabinet picks to try and make sure that he doesn’t do tremendous damage, which obviously he threatens to do in many cases, also to renew their fortunes in 2026 and 2028.
But there’s also a longer term project here, and that is to get beyond the chaos, beyond the whipsaw politics, toward a vision that is sufficient to actually win and retain the support of the great majority of Americans. That’s not an impossible concept. That’s not something beyond the realm of doing. It’s frankly what Franklin Roosevelt did back in the 1930s and 1940s with great success. To some extent, and this is on the other side of the equation, it’s what Ronald Reagan did with some success in the 1980s. We have these points in our history where someone comes along and sort of rocks things. Opens things up, gets us to another place. Now some people say that’s Trump. But the fact of the matter is Trump is entirely backward in his agenda. What progressives and Democrats have to figure out in this moment is how to be forward in their agenda.
JW: Nichols talked about how Democrats should respond to sinking support from their traditional voters – working Americans, women, Hispanic voters, in addition to a big drop among young voters. He also got into how to respond to the changing picture of newsmedia, and how to directly reach people.
Again, John Nichols, the national affairs correspondent for the Nation magazine, will be talking about the elections and a progressive outlook this Saturday, 7 pm, at the Fogartyville Community Center. To register for Nichols’ presentation, go to wslr.org.
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