On Nov. 9, Claremont McKenna College’s Open Academy hosted a Saturday Salon titled “Assessing the 2024 Elections” at CMC’s Kravis Center, featuring government professor Ken Miller, director of the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at CMC, and Pomona College politics professor Amanda L. Hollis-Brusky.
The session focused on the deterministic factors and future implications of the 2024 presidential election, which concluded with former President Donald Trump winning both the Electoral College and the popular vote.
Miller discussed several key factors that contributed to the Democratic Party’s defeat.
“I think the country is still in a way experiencing a [COVID-19] hangover,” he said. “When people look back to the last four years, it was [COVID-19] shutdowns, job losses, economic stresses, losing family members and all of that.”
According to Miller, when people engage in “retrospective voting,” whereby they attribute their immediate experiences to the incumbent government, that incumbent party tends to “take a hit.”
He further characterized President Joe Biden as being a weak incumbent president and how his initial reluctance to step down had hindered Kamala Harris’s ability to become a stronger candidate.
Miller then went on to explain that although issues around abortion benefitted the Democratic Party in the 2022 midterms and recent ballot measures, Trump’s campaign put a lot of money into ads against “wokeness,” “transgenderism” and “pronouns,” which they believed to be effective in persuading voters toward the Republican ticket.
Speaking on the large shift of marginalized racial groups toward the Republican Party, Miller said that Trump is now “driving a wedge into the Democratic coalition.”
“I think Democrats have to wrestle with how to talk about cultural issues, how to connect with the working class, with people without a college degree because those voters were not as on board with progressive viewpoints as [the Democratic elites] thought,” he said.
Hollis-Brusky then discussed the possible policy outcomes for the incoming administration, arguing that the Republican Party, despite winning the trifecta — the presidency, House of Representatives and Senate — may still face various constraints.
“Recent Supreme Court rulings in the past 20 years have actually set progressive states up quite nicely to fight what might be the scarier Trump 2.0 administration,” she said.
In the last century, the Commerce Clause, which grants Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce, has been frequently utilized to implement progressive social policies. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, was passed using this power.
Since the mid-1990s, conservative Supreme Court justices have been pushing back against progressives’ use of the Commerce Clause to their advantage. Now, however, this limit imposed by conservatives may in turn obstruct them from restricting abortion on a larger scale.
“If Republicans do try to pass a ban on abortion, they have to use the Commerce Clause as their rationale,” Hollis-Brusky said. “If the Supreme Court is going to be consistent with its own conservative precedent, then there’s a strong likelihood that they would have to strike that down.”
Hollis-Brusky moved on to argue that the Anti-Commandeering Doctrine, which reinforced state independence and forbade the federal government from co-opting local officials for federal programs, may impose obstacles to Trump’s immigration policies.
“If the Trump cabinet intends to commit to mass deportations, they would likely require the cooperation of local law enforcement to share information or help them carry out deportation raids,” she said. “And the whole idea behind sanctuary states is not denying the federal government has this power, but if you’re going to do this, you can’t make us cooperate with you.”
Attorney generals in blue states, she added, could also use litigation to deter policies from the Trump administration and mitigate their impact.
Michael Fortner, associate professor of government at CMC, also joined the discussion. In response to a student’s concern about the survival of democracy, he drew on the lived experiences of his Black heritage and urged people to rise above pessimism.
“I come from a people who have not experienced real democracy, people who have faced institutions that are prejudiced against them,” Fortner said. “Our response was to have a radical empathy for the democratic project in this country. What you need to do, I think, is draw upon those sources of people who have been beaten down, who’ve never had democracy, but persevered and kept perfecting this union.”
Hollis-Brusky concluded the session by suggesting everyone take care of themselves and hold compassion for others.
“I am going to work in whatever ways I can to mitigate what I know will be damaging to a lot of people I love and people in my community,” she said. “I’m going to do the work. I’m going to lock arms with others who want to do the work.”
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