BONUS: Biden's Speech At White House, Trump's Victory, Administration Transition

0:02In her concession speech, Vice President Kamala Harris promised a peaceful transition of power, a bedrock of American democracy that her opponent and president-elected Donald Trump threatened in 2020. But Harris also promised this. While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign. Trump is on track to win the country's popular vote, the first Republican to do so in two decades. His party controls the Senate and may take the House, so he'll assume power come January with fewer political ways to check a leader who flippantly said that he'd be a dictator, but only for his first day in office.

0:43I'm Leila Faldil, that's A Martinez, and this is a special bonus episode of Up First from NPR News.

1:13three-month five-gigabyte plan required. New customer offer for first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. This message comes from NetSuite. What does the future hold for business? Can someone invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 42 ,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one AI cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're able to peer into the future and seize new opportunities. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash story.

1:59This message comes from Lisa. Lisa mattresses are meticulously designed and assembled in the USA for exceptional quality, and each mattress is designed with specific sleep positions and feel preferences in mind. Plus, they back it all up with free shipping, easy returns, and a 100-night sleep trial. Visit Lisa.com for 25 % off mattresses, plus get an extra$50 off with promo code NPR. That's L-E-E-S-A.com, promo code NPR. This morning, President Biden made his first public comment since the results. Following months of division and polarization on the campaign, he spoke about unity. I know for some people, it's a time for victory, to state the obvious.

2:44For others, it's a time of loss. Campaigns are contests of competing visions. The country chooses one or the other. We accept the choice the country made. I've said many times, you can't love your country only when you win. You can't love your neighbor only when you agree. Now, as the transition begins, analysts continue to splice the demographics of the electorate this year. Black voters and Latinos were down as a share of that electorate. Meanwhile, white voters went up compared to 2020. That's the largest single voting group in the country, and Democrats don't typically win the majority of them.

3:28That included Harris this year, although she was slightly up with that voting base. Meanwhile, Trump's record margin with Latinos for Republicans, specifically with Latino men, was something Harris could not overcome. Whether Trump turned out new Latino voters or convinced committed voters to defect from Democrats is a question Mark Hugo Lopez helps answer. He's the director of race and ethnicity research at the Pew Research Center. On the one hand, there are many new first-time voters for Latinos because we have so many new Latinos being able to vote for the first time. They've come of age. They've entered adulthood.

4:01But it also looks like there's been a shift among Latinos. And this is something that's been going on for some time. It's not new to this election, but we've been seeing Trump do better with Latino voters in 2020 compared to 2016. And also now it looks like in 2024 compared to 2020. Here's what Lopez had to say about how some Latino voters may have weighed up their decision. It was really the economy, the rise of inflation, prices for food and other goods, housing prices as well, which Latinos continue to point to. And they point to Donald Trump as being the better candidate, or at least they were split on whether or not Harris or Trump are the better candidate on economics.

4:38On immigration policy, for example, you'll find that about one-third of Latinos say to improve the situation at the border, we need to have an increase in deportation to people who are in the country illegally. But at the same time, you'll find that the majority of Latinos want a pathway to citizenship or some sort of support for those who are in the country living here already illegally. Now, we've talked a little about women voters on this podcast and Harris's hopes they turn out in record numbers for her. A majority of women did vote for Harris, but not more women than those that typically vote Democrat.

5:08In fact, she got a smaller proportion of women than President Biden did in 2020. We heard from Debbie Walsh, who directs the Center for Women and Politics at Rutgers University, for more on the gender gap. We've seen this gender gap and the difference between the way men and women vote since about 1980. But there is a lot of variation among women. Women are not monolithic. And so you want to look at the different sort of slicing through the different demographic groups to really see and understand the women's vote. So 57 % of white college-educated women voted for Harris. White women without a college degree, 35%.

5:51And in fact, when you look at all of the different groups of voters, men, women, by race and ethnicity and college and education level, The one group that actually improved for Kamala Harris is those white college educated women. Joe Biden got 54 percent of that vote. Hillary Clinton got 51 percent. Kamala Harris got 57 percent. Now, she got 57 percent of college educated women. But that jumped way up when you look at black women. Eighty nine percent voted for Harris and up when you looked at Latinas. They voted at 60 percent for Harris. On why she thinks women voted the way they did. I think what happened that we are seeing across the board has to do in large part with economics and class and a sense that the economy was primary.

6:46Even though the abortion issue was there and it really resonated for a lot of women and was clearly a motivator in the midterm elections, It appears that in this election cycle, this rejection of where things were with the economy, women who were feeling, as men were, that the economy wasn't working for them and that they were looking for change. Harris also leaned on centrist and self-described moderate Republicans appealing to conservative voters who couldn't deal with Trump's rhetoric. But that didn't seem to materialize. Daniel McCarthy says it was a rejection of traditional politics and legacy institutions writ large.

7:25He's the editor of Modern Age, a conservative review, and he talked about something he calls creative destruction and how that appealed to voters. Well, in economics, creative destruction is what happens when an entrepreneur, a new firm enters a market and discovers that the existing market relationships, the old firms that had been providing goods and services to people, were not providing goods and services that were of high enough quality or that were insufficient demand for those businesses to stay in business. So basically it's when a new competitor shows that the old competitors were inefficient and were unsatisfactory to the consumer base.

8:03And in politics, I say basically that Donald Trump has been a kind of new disruptive product or force that shows that a lot of our other institutions and political leaders have lost the trust of the public. Now, Trump has made some major promises on the campaign trail, from mass deportations of millions of people to ending the war in Ukraine to purging civil servants and replacing them with partisan loyalists. NPR's White House correspondent Asma Khaled reports on steps the Biden White House has been taking to future-proof a few of its key policies. So one big thing is that Biden has said he would make sure all remaining funds for Ukraine will be allocated by the end of his term, leaving no money for the next president's discretion.

8:46And then also this summer, NATO took on a larger role in coordinating military support and training for Ukraine. This is something that previously had largely been spearheaded by the United States. And then I think one really interesting thing is that just last month, the G7 announced a new plan to provide additional support for Ukraine via a$50 billion loan. The United States is going to provide a good chunk of that. And the goal is to get that money out the door as much of it as possible ahead of an inauguration day. Biden's administration was also thinking about that promise to get rid of civil servants, you know, the non-political government workers who make the government work.

9:22I mean, during the final weeks of Trump's first term in 2020, he issued an executive order creating a new class of federal workers known as Schedule F. These people would be exempt from the country's traditional merit-based civil service program. And Democrats saw this as a deliberate attempt to hire and fire people not based on their expertise, but on their political loyalty. So when Biden came in, one of the first things he did was rescind that executive order. This past spring, they issued a rule to make it very difficult to overhaul the federal workforce for ideological reasons. And this is key because once a rule is on the books, a president cannot just come in and change the existing rule via executive order.

10:05So a new Trump administration would have to propose a new rule, and that is a tedious regulatory process that could take months, maybe even years, get held up in courts. So, you know, it is still possible for the Trump administration to repeal the rule, but it is more difficult. A hallmark legislation of the Biden administration is the big climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, and that was passed in 2022. Republicans have already talked about rescinding elements of the law, specifically the tax credits for people who want to purchase electric vehicles could go up or the incentives to build electric charging infrastructure.

10:38I mean, there's not a whole lot that the Biden White House could do to protect this, but they've been trying to tout the bill's popularity and in spurring manufacturing projects in Republican congressional districts, hoping that that will somehow protect the bill from being repealed. But we'll have to see what happens. Names already being floated for key positions in the next administration. One-time independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is someone Trump says he'll let, quote, go wild on health. Kennedy is aiming for a big role in public health, although he has no public health or medical degrees.

11:10And he has trafficked in misleading or outright false conspiracy theories, including that Wi-Fi causes cancer and saying that chemicals in the water turn children transgender. Our co-host Steve Inskeep spoke to Kennedy yesterday, and he briefed on that conversation with NPR Science Desk correspondent Ping Huang today. Is this something that the administration is definitely going to do, recommend against fluoride? Yes, that's something that the administration will do. Okay, so Kennedy gave his reasons. He claimed that fluoride affects neurological development and lowers IQ in children, in addition to being good for your teeth, which is why it's in the drinking water.

11:47What does the science say about this? Yeah, so Steve, as you mentioned, fluoride has been added to public water systems for a long time, since the 1940s, and the main reason is that it prevents cavities. Now, for all of those decades, it's had its detractors too. It's long been known to have stained teeth and damage enamel at high levels, And more recently, some studies have linked high levels of fluoride with lower IQ. That's at levels of fluoride that are twice what's recommended for drinking water. And it's not clear that there's any risk to lower fluoride levels, which have clearly been useful in preventing cavities.

12:22So there is a scientific discussion around IQ and high levels of fluoride that's happening. But Kennedy also said that fluoride in drinking water causes arthritis, cancer, other diseases. And those claims are just not part of the open debate right now. Now, there's another topic that we discussed in yesterday's interview. RFK and I talked about vaccines. How quickly will you act on federal support for vaccines or research on vaccines? I will work immediately on that. That will be one of my priorities to make sure that Americans, of course, we're not going to take vaccines away from anybody. We are going to make sure that Americans have good information right now.

13:03the science on vaccine safety, particularly, has huge deficits in it. We're going to make sure those scientific studies are done and that people can make informed choices about their vaccinations and their children's vaccinations. Okay, so he just wants to get information out there, which sounds fine, but his viewpoint on this is the information shows that vaccines generally are unsafe. What do we make of that? Yeah, exactly. As you're saying, what he's doing here is on the one hand saying that they, you know, we just want more information. On the other hand, he's challenging the safety of vaccines, which has long been established relative to the risks that they protect against.

13:41You know, Kennedy is a known vaccine skeptic. He's called COVID vaccines a crime against humanity, pushed claims that vaccines cause autism over and over. That is not true. It is disproven. Of course, President-elect Trump will also be the commander in chief of the Army and the Navy. Republican Representative Michael Waltz of Florida serves on House committees on military and intelligence matters. We heard from him about what changes he thinks could be on the horizon for the defense establishment under a new Trump administration. We still have a Pentagon that cannot audit itself despite years and years of trying to, the basics of understanding where every tax dollar goes.

14:20They just over and over again cost twice as much, deliver half as much and take twice as long as originally planned. And there is a whole slew of new technologies from Silicon Valley and elsewhere that are really chomping at the bit to help with our defense and security issues. The reelection of former President Donald Trump is also a historic first, the first time a convicted felon will be president of the United States, which raises questions about the future of the outstanding lawsuits and criminal cases against him. NPR's national justice correspondent Kerry Johnson has been reporting on the two federal cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith.

14:59There's a longstanding view inside the Justice Department. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have followed this view. It says a sitting president cannot be indicted or face criminal trial. The reasoning there is it would be too much of a burden that it would be unconstitutional and would undermine the work of the executive branch. Trump's attorney general, Bill Barr, and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise are calling on this Justice Department to drop the D.C. case against Trump. The writing is on the wall, Bill Barr says, and people have considered these allegations against Trump about election interference, but the voters rejected them resoundingly.

15:36OK, so it looks like the Justice Department will be winding those cases down before the inauguration. Another outstanding question is still whether or not Trump will face sentencing over his criminal case in New York.

15:53One more thing, though, before we go. The 2024 presidential election may be over, but maybe you're taking a break from election stuff for a while, or maybe you can't stop scrolling. Either way, do not stress about where to go for reliable information in the next few months and beyond. Across the NPR network, we're going to be working to explain the biggest stories and fact checks so you can keep a grip on what's happening. And if that sounds very valuable to you, please help make it possible. Go to donate.npr.org to get started. And if you're already a supporter, we're taking this moment to say thank you.

16:24If you're not, the link, again, is donate.npr.org. We're here to unpack what is going on every day, give you facts, give you context, give you data, and also fact check those in power. And that's it for this bonus episode of Up First for Thursday, November 7th. I'm Leila Falded. And I'm Amy Martinez. This bonus episode of Up First was edited by Lisa Thompson and produced by Katie Kline. It was made by the Morning Edition and Up First teams along with the entire NPR newsroom. It was also made in collaboration with our engineering and studio teams. Join us again tomorrow.

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