Election 2024: Defining moments and challenges

NICK EICHER: Today is Wednesday, November 6th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Up next, making sense of the 2024 election. Here now to talk about it are three experts who write for WORLD Opinions: former National Security Council staff member Will Inboden, political scientist Hunter Baker, and Wisconsin-based attorney Daniel Suhr.

EICHER: Gentlemen, thanks for joining us!

WILL INBODEN: Great to be here.

LINDSAY MAST: So what moments stand out to you from election 2024? Hunter, why don't you kick us off with that?

HUNTER BAKER: I think the thing that you have to look at is this switch from Biden to Harris, right? That has to be the biggest thing that happened in this election, followed by the Trump assassination attempt. That short period of days has got to be one of the most interesting, exciting, strange sort of series of events that has happened in recent American political history.

EICHER: Daniel, I'm curious what you think about the lawfare aspect of it. It didn't happen during the campaign so much, but it was certainly in the lead up to it.

DANIEL SUHR: Absolutely. We have seen a whole new level of using the criminal justice system, right? We've often seen complaints about election law, campaign finance, recounts, there's always been litigation around elections. But we've never seen this use of the criminal justice system, the FBI breaking into the home of a former president to serve a search warrant, right? A former president being charged in multiple different courts on multiple different counts. It's a whole new level. And I think a lot of Americans identified with President Trump, felt that he was being persecuted, but more deeply that there were fundamental values that we hold as a country that we don't use the legal system to prosecute and punish our political opponents and that those principles were really being undermined by the various prosecutions we saw this year.

EICHER: So let me ask Will Inboden, are you surprised given that there is a hot war going on with Israel, there is certainly a lot happening between Iran and Israel, that foreign policy didn't seem to have that big of a, play that much of a role in the campaign?

WILL INBODEN: Yeah, it's a good point, Nick. There's a real disconnect between conditions in the world, which is a very, very dangerous place right now, and the fact that the campaign has largely been fought on and contested on domestic issues. And I understand that in some sense, but still it bears remembering that, you know, whoever wins here will be our new commander-in-chief and will inherit obviously a hot war with Israel fighting for its life against, you know, threats from on multiple fronts, most of them prompted by Iran.

Of course, you have the ongoing war in Ukraine with Russia's invasion there. You have China continuing to threaten Taiwan, and you have North Korea threatening to do another ICBM test here. And you have the potential resurgence of ISIS and Al-Qaeda. And so, you know, the world is very unstable and dangerous right now in need of a strong America. And those issues just have not been really at the forefront in the presidential race or many of the congressional races either.

MAST: So, let's talk policy a bit. What do you make of the candidates and how they've shifted in their positions? Trump on abortion, for example, Harris on economics…

BAKER: Well, I would say that Harris has tried to moderate. She has tried to look more interested in the immigration question. Now, when it comes to economics, I'm not sure how much moderating actually occurred. I mean, I could go back to fairly recent history and you could still find one of her economic advisors on CNBC defending a wealth tax, defending an unrealized capital gains tax. That is pretty radical stuff. So I think that they felt like they could do that, but she did have to moderate on the border.

EICHER: Speaking of moderation, this is for Daniel Sur, isn't it interesting that Donald Trump and JD Vance both were essentially what we would call pro-choice Republicans, were they not?

SUHR: Pro-life voters across America are justly disappointed in the lack of leadership from the Trump campaign this time around, especially because he was so good last time around. I think a lot of us look back to the 2016 debate he had with Hillary Clinton when he described the abortion procedure in a way that really put in very sharp contrast exactly what we were fighting about. He appointed great justices. His great justices delivered Dobbs. There was such an incredible record here. And it felt like that just got tossed overboard. We literally tossed the baby out with the bathwater in order to avoid a political problem.

And what we've seen in Florida, for instance, is that it doesn't have to be a political problem. That there are ways to talk about abortion that work with voters. At the end of the day though, the solace I take, Nick, is that President Trump is still going to appoint great judges. He's still going to appoint pro-life people in important policy positions at the Department of Justice, at Health and Human Services, right? We're not going to see prosecutions of people engaged in peaceful sidewalk counseling like we have the past few years. So, I do think there will be a shift in policy in the pro-life direction, but ultimately this is going to be a fight that continues to be fought state by state and not at the federal level.

BAKER: I just wanna add, I think that it's very early innings on abortion. The Dobbs decision has clearly changed everything. I think a lot of pro-lifers had the idea that when you win that case, that all of a sudden America becomes a pro-life country. Instead, what it did was to reveal, that when abortion becomes true retail politics with active campaigns that are going to affect current public policy, that that changes the way voters receive it. And so that's part of why it's so important that Florida was able to send a pro-life message. This is the first really encouraging thing to come along since Dobbs opened things up.

EICHER: Well, this is where I'd like to bring Will Inboden in, having recently become a Floridian. Will, you watched that whole thing unfold. I know that Florida was a real prize for the pro-abortion side, and it looked like it had a lot of momentum, but something happened, something changed, and we found out early last night that the pro-life side prevailed.

INBODEN: Yes, and this was really encouraging because the pro-abortionists went all in here on Florida. They massively outspent the pro-life side, did some horribly distorted propaganda pushing Amendment 4, which is a very radically pro-abortion amendment, was going to essentially eviscerate not just any of the existing restrictions, but parental notification, fetal viability tests, and so forth. And so the fact that it went down pretty decisively is really encouraging. All credit, well, not all credit, but certainly significant credit to Governor DeSantis, who was a very courageous and principled leader on this and shows that the pro-life side can win when we have a political leader who will make the case, as well as on the substance. I think enough Florida voters saw the pro-abortion side for the extreme position they were trying to take. That said, we also have the 60 % threshold here, and it did get 57 % for what we would call the pro-abortion side.

You know that that really troubles me like I wish it would have been a clear majority against. But again considering the recent national trends of most other states that have had these referenda the pro abortion side has won, Florida was a real watershed. And I hope it will, you know, indicate a change in momentum for pro-lifers. You know we won with Dobbs, but now we need to win in the court of public opinion and we need to make the case for the American people on how sacred life is, on our obligations to protect it, and how just extreme the pro-abortion side is in the positions they're pushing.

MAST: I was out yesterday in Georgia across a number of different precincts, talked to many different voters. And the thing that stuck out to me was that among these voters who may have been voting for different candidates, but even within the ones who were voting for Harris or Trump, they had a wide variety of reasons on their main issue and why they landed on the person that they landed on. And I'm curious about what that means going forward, both for the candidates, but also for the country in that people feel very differently and are coming from multiple perspectives on where they want to see the country go. Hunter, do you want to take a stab at that?

BAKER: Yeah, I think that there were several major issues in this campaign that were motivating different people. So for example, I think that the headline issue is inflation. I think that probably there are a lot of voters who are super motivated by inflation, just simple, the impact on their pocketbook and how they react to that. And that's why you have Trump kind of putting forward that Reagan-esque question, “are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

But for other people, the revolution in human sexuality may be the top issue, particularly as it comes to biological men participating in women's sports. Or you may have a significant number of people who are aligned with Robert F. Kennedy and then kind of being tied to Trump on these questions like vaccines and national health and things of that nature. And of course the whole woke issue, right? There's a group of people who are concerned like Elon Musk that sort of this woke movement represents a major threat to free speech. And so there are lots of different kinds of ideological planets that people can be revolving around in this election.

SUHR: Lindsay, if I can add just one thought, I think there's a significant personality portion of this as well that's sort of separate from issues. The American people have no idea who Kamala Harris is. She has just burst onto the scene in 100 days. And I think there's a deep concern about whether or not she's up to the job. And conversely with President Trump, in four years, in our human nature, we often forget the bad parts and just remember the good parts. And so people look back on the first Trump administration. They don't think about January 6th. They think about the economy doing well. They think about the world being at peace. And there's a strong sense that he's competent, right? We might not agree with him on every issue. We might not like his personality and style, but we know that when he was in charge, the trains ran on time and things were okay. And there's this deep concern that there's not just not a track record, but that you know, the vice president's a lightweight in the world's most serious job. And so I would layer on top of Hunter's absolutely accurate issues profile, just a reality of who the candidates are this time around and how many swing voters can feel confident with the vice president in the top job.

INBODEN: Yeah, and Lindsay if I can chime in there and reinforce some of what Daniel was saying, and this is where this is a pretty, I'm speaking as a historian here, it's a relatively unprecedented election, and that both candidates can plausibly claim to be, “outsiders,” know, agents of change, while both of them are also plausibly incumbents, right? I mean, you know, we haven't, you know, Trump is the first time since Grover Cleveland back in the 19th century, that we had a former president who, you know, didn't get a second term and then run again. And so is he an outsider or is he incumbent? Well, a little bit of both. And then Kamala Harris has been this relative nonentity as vice president. On the one hand, she's running as an incumbent. She has been in the office for four years, even though as Daniel rightly said, no one really knows what she thinks or believes. And so she's been trying to run as this agent of hope and opportunity and change. That has meant trying to distance herself from the pretty abysmal Biden record of the last last four years. And so and I think a lot of American voters come down different, you know, differently on this question. Who's the who's the outsider? Who's the incumbent? Who's the agent of change? Who's the agent of continuity?

EICHER: All right, National Security Council staff member, Inboden, that's who you were just listening to prior to that. Daniel Sir, a Wisconsin based attorney and political scientist, Hunter Baker. Gentlemen, thank you so much for being with us this morning.

INBODEN: Thank you, great to be with you.

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