patheur

Answers to six questions about the 2024 election results, from Trump’s legal cases to polls

Sakege November 8, 2024

Why is it so surprising that President-elect Donald Trump nearly swept states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin? What is your conclusion on what Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign did wrong?

These are just some of the questions you have in mind after Trump’s presidential victory over Harris On Wednesday. The Republican, who was accused twice, survived two murder attempts and it was convicted of 34 serious crimeshe collected more than 270 electoral votes, won all seven key battleground states and secured the popular vote. Harris granted on wednesday nightpromising to “never give up the fight for our democracy.”

USA TODAY political reporter Aysha Bagchi joined reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Reuters and Yahoo News for a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) hours after the race was called to answer some of your questions about Trump’s return, polls leading up to the presidential race and more.

Here are six highlights from the discussion:

Ask: What happens now (legally) regarding the court cases opened against Trump? Especially the upcoming sentencing for his conviction and also the other open cases?

Answer: A colleague and I have a story. here which delves into this deeper. Simply put, Trump’s election victory has likely transformed his criminal situation.

Many legal experts think Judge Juan Merchán would not be able to impose a criminal sentence against Trump that would significantly interfere with the presidency. Merchan could decide to suspend the entire sentence, currently scheduled for November 26.

The other three cases – one from Georgia state prosecutors and two from federal prosecutors – face similar problems. Additionally, Trump has already said he will fire special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading federal prosecutions.

Early information indicate Still, Smith’s office may be investigating how to end those prosecutions. a department of justice memorandum of 2000 said that prosecuting a sitting president would “unduly interfere” with the president’s job responsibilities.

Q: Can you comment on the Iowa Seltzer (sic) survey? Can you explain how a professional, unbiased polling source can be 16 points off the mark?

TO: Good question. Our Team at the Des Moines Registry said Selzer would be reviewing his data to determine the disparity between the poll results and Trump’s victory.

Here is more information from the Registry, which published the final survey which showed Harris leading Trump in Iowa:

Selzer has long been considered Iowa’s standard pollster, and Tuesday’s results represented a rare blip in her assessments of the Iowa electorate. From 2008 to 2020, the poll accurately reflected the winner of the presidential race in Iowa

Although Selzer said he planned to look deeper into the data, there were a few things he was looking at Tuesday night.

“Technically, the poll had some ‘concession’ in that none of the candidates reached 50%,” he said. “So people who said they had voted or would vote for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. could easily have switched to Donald Trump. Those who made the latter decision could have gone for Trump in the final days of the campaign after it was completed. the interview. “People who had already voted but chose not to tell our interviewers who they voted for could have given Trump an advantage.”

The Iowa poll showed that Kennedy, who had ended his presidential bid but was still on the ballot, won 3% of Iowa votes. Less than 1% said they would vote for Libertarian presidential candidate Chase Oliver, 1% said they would vote for someone else, 3% were unsure and 2% did not want to say who they had already voted for.

“Maybe I can get clarity on that 9% and an underlying disposition toward the presidential race,” Selzer said.

Can read more about it here.

Q: Were there any obvious signs of election interference, such as bomb threats, disinformation campaigns, etc., by foreign actors?

TO: There were signs of foreign interference in the elections before and on Tuesday.

I’m reporting from Georgia this week. The Republican Secretary of State here, Brad Raffensperger, announced on tuesday that some voting centers had to temporarily close due to bomb threats from Russia. The FBI issued a statement saying bomb threats were made from Russian email domains to polling places in several states.

Before Tuesday, Russian actors engaged in a campaign to undermine confidence in the U.S. election and stoke divisions among Americans. according to the fbi. For example, a debunked video that federal intelligence officials said came from Russia. introduced a Haitian man who outlined a plan to vote for Kamala Harris more than once in the 2024 election.

The Iranian government has also been interfering in the US elections, federal intelligence officials say. Before Joe Biden ended his campaign, Iranian hackers sent the Biden campaign unsolicited information they had stolen from the Trump campaign. the government did not discover any evidence that Biden campaign associates responded to emails containing excerpts of the stolen material.

Q: Why do you think pollsters have been consistently and egregiously wrong about Trump over the past eight years?TO: Final counts are still coming in and polls have margins of error, but this is the third presidential election in which many pollsters appear to have underestimated support for Donald Trump. Even when Joe Biden won in 2020, he did so by a smaller margin than polls generally predicted.

In the postmortem after those two previous elections, some polling experts thought that Trump was attracting voters who did not vote consistently and therefore were not sufficiently captured by pollsters as likely voters. Polling experts also discussed the possibility that a relatively large number of Trump voters may become more distrustful of institutions, and that could translate into a lower willingness to respond to polls. And polling experts said some Trump voters may be reluctant to say they plan to vote for Trump. The pandemic could also have played a role in 2020’s problems because Democrats may have been more likely to stay home and respond to polls.

For the 2024 election, many polls attempted to correct previous undercounting, for example by adjusting poll results to take into account how people who responded to polls said they voted in 2020 (it was a technique to try to make sure polls will capture a more realistic number of Trump supporters). Some even thought the adjustments this time could mean the polls were now overestimating Trump’s support.

What will the autopsy of the polls for the 2024 elections be like? It could reflect some of the same potential problems we’ve seen before. But time will tell.

Q: The Jack Smith investigation is effectively set, but Trump still has these state cases and sentences for all of them. What’s going on there? Where does Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment come into play after the SCOTUS ruling earlier this year?

TO: It’s true that Trump has said he would fire Jack Smith, the special prosecutor leading the two federal prosecutions.

Some legal experts have previously argued that the move could expose Trump to charges of obstruction of justice. But the Supreme Court’s July 1 presidential immunity ruling may also protect Trump from that risk. The court’s conservative wing ruled that Trump had absolutely immunity from prosecution in his federal election interference case over his alleged conduct involving discussions with Justice Department officials. Maybe that means a president or former president can’t be charged with obstructing justice for ordering the Justice Department to drop the case against him?

Trump could also try to pardon himself in his federal criminal cases. Legal experts differ on whether that is permissible. The Supreme Court has never ruled on the issue.

Those are two options that Trump does not have in his criminal cases in the states of New York and Georgia. But his election will also be good news for him on those fronts. Trump’s lawyers can now argue that moving forward with the Georgia case, or sentencing him on Nov. 26 in the New York case, is unconstitutional because it interferes with his responsibilities as president-elect and potentially later as president.

Since Trump is the first president-elect in this situation, we don’t know how that argument about state prosecutions would play out. But the Supreme Court’s immunity decision speaks to not wanting the judicial branch to interfere with the executive branch. Trump’s lawyers may say that means state courts should not interfere with the presidency. And they can also point to a clause in the United States Constitution that says federal laws take precedence over state laws (the supremacy clause), and say that means state courts and prosecutors cannot interfere with the presidency.

Q: Are you going to continue reporting as you have for the past four years, considering that the president-elect wants to jail journalists and expects him to do the same to his enemies?TO: We will absolutely report on the upcoming Trump presidency.

Many Justice Department observers worry that Trump may try to use the department to go after his enemies. She shared images on Truth Social showing Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden in jumpsuits and called for those who served on the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol to be prosecuted.

There are reports that Trump tried to go after his rivals in his first term. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general, told prosecutors that Trump asked him to withdraw from campaign-related investigations and direct the Justice Department to prosecute Hillary Clinton in 2017, according to the Müller Report. The New York Times reported that Trump told White House counsel Donald McGahn in 2018 that he wanted Hillary Clinton and James Comey impeached.

Some fear that Trump could face less resistance in a second term. Your allies have indicated He will seek loyalty and commitment to his agenda when selecting personnel for his next administration.

For a deep dive, I have written more about these concerns here.

Click here to read the full AMA.

This article originally appeared in USA TODAY: Your questions about the 2024 election results, from the Trump trials to the polls