Washington Wednesday: Highlights of 2024

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 1st of January.

This is WORLD Radio and we’re glad you’ve joined us for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Time now for Washington Wednesday.

The books are closed on 2024, and what a year it was in politics!

FLAVIN: Donald Trump wins big in the first in the nation caucuses.

COVINGTON: Washington is deeply divided over the Supreme Court's historic ruling Monday on presidential immunity.

KIRCHER: President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump clashed on stage at CNN's Atlanta headquarters.

MELLINGER: The pressure on President Biden to give up his reelection bid is intensifying.

COVINGTON: This year's convention in Milwaukee will be unlike any other, kicking off just hours after a would-be assassin’s bullet pierced the right ear of the former president.

COVINGTON: Party leaders say Vice President Kamala Harris will be the nominee replacing President Biden at the top of the ticket.

MELLINGER: Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris will square off in at least one presidential debate.

COVINGTON: Former President Donald Trump is now once again president-elect Donald Trump. He declared victory early this morning, shortly after Fox News called the election for the 45th and soon to be 47th president.

MAST: Here now to talk through a few of the big stories of last year, and what’s coming up this year are Carolina Lumetta and Leo Briceno. Both of them from WORLD’s Washington Bureau.

Good morning!

CAROLINA LUMETTA: Good morning Lindsay.

LEO BRICENO: Good morning.

MAST: Carolina. Starting with you, the presidential campaign was a whole saga of stories. What stands out to you from the reporting that you did last year?

LUMETTA: Well, it certainly was a wild presidential election cycle. We had a embattled president in the courts. We had assassination attempts, we had a switch of the candidate at a very late point. So what I had heard throughout the year was that this was going to rely on turnout, whichever side could convince more low propensity voters to come out and vote.

One thing that really stuck out to me, though, is that the Republican Party decided to embrace mail-in voting. That was a surprising shift from 2020 where the party and President Trump claimed that mail-in voting led to election fraud, or the very least irregularities in the 2020, presidential election. However, this year, they really changed their tune, and said that not only are we going to improve the system, but we want voters to use that. I covered a story about mail-in voting back in April, and I'm especially focused on Pennsylvania, where Republicans were really hoping to flip that crucial swing state from blue to red. I spoke with Guy Ciarrocchi, who is a former congressional candidate and a senior fellow at a Pennsylvania think tank.

GUY CIARROCCHI: The Democratic party saw this as an educational tool to increase and improve voter turnout, having little or nothing to do with COVID. And the Republican party still, I think up until the recent past, saw it as an outgrowth of COVID and didn't want to do it. The biggest change is the recognition that without adapting to this extra tool, that we weren't going to win.

LUMETTA: So the Republican National Committee then stepped in and created this system that went through several name iterations, but ended up with "Swamp the Vote," where they were convincing Republican voters to turn out well before election day, either through early voting or that mail in voting. Along with that, they set up an aggressive litigation team that swept the country with lawsuits anywhere that they saw any voting irregularities the state not enforcing the law as defined on the books or trying to add new laws to safeguard the mail in voting practice that left Trump's campaign team free to work on those low propensity and undecided voters across the swing states. Fast forward to election night. We all saw that Trump was on the glide path to win as soon as Pennsylvania flipped, and then he ended up carrying every single swing state.

MAST: Of course, on election night, it was Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris, but for most of the year that was not the case. Can you walk us through what stood out to you leading up to the switch in candidates?

LUMETTA: So actually, as early as the New Hampshire primaries in January, Democratic voters told me that they didn't love Biden as their option. They had a couple concerns about his age, but they trusted that he was the only one who could beat Donald Trump, because he has before. They also weren't thrilled with they also weren't thrilled with Vice President Kamala Harris's track record so far and nationally, neither of those moods seemed to change over the year.

Then we had the presidential debate in June between Trump and Biden, and that's when the age issues really catapulted to the forefront of the presidential campaigns. President Biden stumbled over his words frequently. He struggled to complete sentences and thoughts, and he had a very raspy voice from what the campaign said was a cold. I watched the debate with the Georgia Republican Party at a watch party just outside Atlanta, and I spoke to Chairman, Josh McKoon right after that debate ended.

MCKOON: Tonight really painfully, put it on display for an hour and a half that there's some appear to be, some real deficits in being able to lead and being up to this challenge, and so I certainly expect you'll hear more of that as well.

It really marked this pivot point for the Democratic Party, even though President Biden didn't drop out until nearly a month later, that put the whole party on the defensive roughly 100 days before an election with a lesser known candidate, with Vice President Kamala Harris, who voters were already not that thrilled about.

MAST: Well, Leo, you've been watching Congress. What was the biggest story there in 2024?

BRICENO: Obviously, many different stories that we could touch on, but probably the single biggest change that happened in Congress happened over in the Senate, where Senator Mitch McConnell has represented the state of Kentucky since 1985 he's led that chamber since 2007 but in February of this year, he announced that he would be stepping down from the role and letting someone else take his place.

There were concerns about his age. In particular, there were two separate freezing instances where the senator paused for multiple seconds after trying to give a response to the media during press conferences that left bystanders kind of shocked and really concerned about his clarity of mind, his state of health that year, he also suffered a fall that hospitalized him for a good bit. And so there were so many different concerns coming into his decision this year that it was just a matter of time before McConnell was probably going to have to relinquish this role.

Now taking the reins of McConnell is Senator John Thune, who was voted in by his party this past November following the November elections, and so kind of an institutionalist like McConnell. McConnell has said and maintained that the filibuster is a very important component of the Senate and how it functions. Thune takes a very similar approach in opposition to kind of, maybe some of the changes that Trump would like to see in the Senate. It's going to be really interesting to see how Thune rises to the challenge in 2025.

MAST: And what about big stories from the other side of Congress?

BRICENO: Yeah, I think a predominant theme throughout the 118th Congress was just kind of the small majority that you saw over on the other side of the building, over in the House of Representatives. US House Speaker Mike Johnson and his predecessor US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy both had to contend with, historically, the smallest majority in the House of Representatives ever. And so that majority started out at about five seats, and at one point, shrunk down to just one seat, that continued to cause headaches and problems for the leadership team there at the GOP, because really, they could only afford to lose 1-2-3-4, votes, depending on who was in the chamber at the time. That was a headache for for Republican leadership all throughout the 118th and it's also a very relevant story to bring up, because it's going to be, again, a big headache for the Republican party going into the 119th where they are looking at just a two seat majority to start the year. And so definitely something that raised its head throughout the year in 2024 and something to keep an eye on going forward.

MAST: Well, looking forward now…as Donald Trump heads back to the White House later this month, what stories are you watching, Carolina?

LUMETTA: Well, most immediately, we have several confirmation hearings to get through. As Trump tries to staff his second term, he has some very controversial picks for key cabinet positions, and so we will be. Covering that very closely from January into February, hopefully not into March, but we'll see. I'm also looking closely at Trump's tariff proposals. He suggested that he would impose heavy tariffs against China, Mexico and Canada to combat the flow of illegal fentanyl. However, Washington lawmakers are concerned that this will cause economic headaches here at home, it's already also causing shifts with allies like in Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is facing calls to resign over his response to Trump. He's already battling a very high cost of living there, his finance minister resigned because they disagreed on what to do about this threat of tariffs. And so I'm interested to see the ripple effects that a second Trump presidency will have. I'm also interested to see how he intends to follow through with a lot of his campaign promises, which include closing the southern border and improving the economy.

MAST: What about in Congress, Leo?

BRICENO: A Lot of different priorities coming in for the Trump administration in the first 100 days, everything from border policy to cutting government waste and inefficiency, but definitely one of the biggest priorities the Trump administration will want to hit right away is extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. This was a length. This was a land not a land mine. This was a landmark piece of legislation for the Trump administration in 2017 it cut taxes in virtually every area. And so if this doesn't get extended, you're going to have a kind of fiscal cliff type situation where you know the amount of taxes that businesses, that individuals pay could go up. But coming into the election, one of the biggest questions was, well, can they do that in divided government? Will these tax cuts get extended? That was one of the things that we knew that Congress was going to have to deal with in 2025 what we didn't know was that the Republican Party was going to have the benefit of having the House, the Senate and the White House, all under the same party control. And so the question now isn't so much, are these tax cuts going to get extended, but really, how and in what form do they stay the same, or are there going to be changes? But really, what it boils down to is, Can Republicans get on the same page to pass their priorities as far as tax goes, and can they do it in that first 100 day window when they're also going to be struggling to deal with government spending and some of the other priorities that they've also got on their plate.

MAST: Leo Briceno and Carolina Lumetta cover politics for WORLD’s Washington Bureau. Thanks so much, and happy new year!

LUMETTA: Thanks, Lindsay.

BRICENO: Happy New Year.

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