On Nov. 12, the Center for Civic Engagement and WDIV Local 4 hosted another town hall event for the “Decision 2024: Your Vote” series entitled “24 Election Debrief: Now What?” going over Trump’s election victory and the changing political landscape.
Hosted at the Oakland Center’s Winter Garden, journalist Christy McDonald and OU professors Nicole Asmussen Mathew and David Dulio hosted an open discussion among students, visitors and OU administrators.
“Oakland University is like a community spot, I think, here in Oakland County, so when you can open it up to the community to be able to come in and you have a range of audience, from students to people across the community, you really get a sense of what people are talking about,” McDonald said.
As a moderator, McDonald took the Political Science professors from the national to the state level in a reading of campaign successes, changing policies and upcoming bipartisanship.
“I think the presidential race, for me, was a change election, and I think that’s reflected in the fact that Trump won the popular vote,” Dulio said. “Trump won all seven of the swing states, and the country shifted pretty dramatically from coast to coast, in terms of support for Trump, moving, in some cases, heavily or significantly more Republican in each county.”
While the effectiveness of the Trump campaign was highlighted, Mathew underscored the lower performance of the overall Republican Party. A lack of public endorsement of Republican judicial candidates was highlighted as one of the main reasons these votes slipped.
“The Supreme Court race was really a failure of the Republican Party to get their candidates elected,” Mathew said. “They turned out a ton of people to vote for Trump, but some people left the Senate blank, a lot of people left the Supreme Court blank.”
McDonald then shifted into ad campaigns and messaging on the last days of election season. Mathew and Dulio focused on the shortcomings of the Democratic Party and their emphasis on abortion.
“The Harris campaign thought that they were going to over-perform with women, and they just performed, and they needed to do better than that,” Mathew said. “And I thought they were emphasizing the abortion issue because they thought that was going to really stick while it turns out a lot of states abortion rights are protected … that wasn’t as big of an issue for women voters as they thought it was going to be.”
“Abortion was pretty much all Democrats had, right? I mean, they couldn’t talk about the economy because people were perceiving it to be negative,” Dulio said. “They couldn’t talk about immigration, right? Those were the two big sort of policy issues … so Democrats smartly tried to make it about something where they had an advantage, and that was abortion.”
The conversation navigated through Michigan’s lame-duck session, and bipartisanship in the Senate to ultimately evaluate the integrity of the vote in times of political polarization.
Mathew offered a last view on the coming Republican trifecta, which historically has been short-lived, highlighting that while favorable, they have many factors to work with before the midterm elections.
“Trumps got a lot of policies that might turn out to be incredibly unpopular. Tariffs on goods from other countries could exasperate inflation. Rounding up a bunch of illegal immigrants is going to produce a lot of news stories about children being separated from their parents,” Mathew said. “We’re going to have pictures of crops on the rotting on the vine because there’s no one there to pick it. So, I think that Trump’s got some work ahead of him to actually show that he can solve some of the problems that he said he was going to solve. And I think Democrats are likely to have a good year in the midterms.”
To view the full conversation, visit Local 4 Plus.
