Meet the new Dems. Same as the old Dems?

Democrats are going to have their biggest Senate majority since 2010. In the House of Representatives, the swing toward Democrats is on pace to be the most significant since the post-Watergate era in the mid-1970s. So what are they going to do with this majority? It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover politics. I'm Elena Moore. I also cover politics. I'm Eric McDaniel, and I cover Congress. And Elena, before we get to this new majority, I want to spend just a little time talking about the youth vote. It is something you specialize in, and it's a demographic that every party wants to win. They're the future, after all. How did things turn out in this election? Yeah, they're also increasingly part of the electorate. By 2028, Gen Z millennials will make up more than half of all eligible voters. So there's legitimacy to my obsession. That's just what I wanted to start with. Democrats are going to have to make up more than half of all eligible voters. Democrats needed to win young voters, voters under 30, I guess, by a margin of 20 points in order to have like a good night. They got a margin of nearly 50 points. Oh, my God. It was 48 points, according to exit polling. That can change. There are other estimates from other, you know, places that have it slightly lower, still historically high margin. And again, comparison here, two years ago, Kamala Harris won the same group of 18 to 29 year olds by 11 points. That was historically low. That's a 40 point shift between elections. I mean, yeah. So, I mean, to say that these are like eye-popping numbers, I think, is an understatement. It's still, you know, voters under 30 were counted in exit polls to be around 11 percent of the vote. That's lower than older generations. But the intense partisan lean can go a long way in these close races. I'd also like to talk about the actual people who got elected. We saw something crazy happen. So you hear a lot of comparisons to Watergate because of the high turnout and all of the other things that have happened this election. But that class was known as the Watergate babies. It dropped the average age of Congress at the time from about 53 to about 51. So a two point drop in the average age of House Democrats specifically. This time, the average age of House Democrats dropped by nearly three full years. So the average age of a House Democrat is going from 58.3 to 55.4, which is still older than during the Watergate era. There's no question about that. But it's down from a high of nearly 61 in 2016. So in the last decade, the average age of House Democrats has dropped by five years. All right, Eric, let's talk about what Democrats are going to do with this wave, this historically large swing in their direction. What are they going to do with their majority? They're going to try and tackle the things that they campaigned on. So we talked over and over again on this podcast about the top two issues that Americans. Wanted to see action on one was the cost of living and the other was government corruption. So as far as cost of living, Democrats are going to try and pass big bills focused on five different areas, including health care and the cost of cash and groceries, cost of goods, cost of housing. And to do that, they've been working in classic Democratic fashion in working groups behind the scenes with a a progressive or left leaning co-chair and a more moderate or centrist co-chair. One good example of this is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Representative Terry Sewell of Alabama. They have been heading up the health care group trying to come up with proposals that the next Democratic caucus could have what Leader Jeffries has called a family conversation about to figure out how to move forward on those things. So they will try and unveil legislation over the next couple months to move at the beginning of the new administration. The other part of this, of course, is congressional investigations, which we've talked a lot about. Is the idea that they are going to move bills on health care and corruption and some of these other issues right away, like that there will be a sort of shock and awe of votes on the House floor? I think that's the intention. I mean, we'll have to see exactly how all of that stuff comes together. But because they have such a large majority in the House, they can afford to lose some folks either in the conservative margins, the blue dog Democrats, the group of conservatives is nearly doubling in size. We obviously have a growing progressive contingent, so they can lose some of those folks, too, and try and, you know, move consensus proposals and still allow folks to vote their conscience. And we should say, I mean, it feels almost like an obvious thing at this point. But Hakeem Jeffries, who's currently the House minority leader, he is very likely going to be the next speaker of the House, the first black speaker. And so that's why, you know, Eric is mentioning him as kind of the leader of these talks. But that will be a vote. That'll be the first vote. And I think that's going to be the first vote. And I think that's going to be the first vote that this new incoming class takes even before they're sworn in. And so that will be the first test of what this caucus looks like and how they do or don't work together. OK, so we just talked about their ambitious plans. President Trump is still president in January. You mean Mr. Vito. Yes. And he posted a hat, a picture of a red MAGA hat that now says Vito. Yes. So a couple of things. Yeah. I mean, we've got a savvy audience. People know that the president has veto power and neither the House Democrats nor Senate Democrats are projected to have veto proof majorities. So they will need to work with the president to get things signed into law. That is not a given. In fact, it's far from a given. But that said, there are must pass pieces of legislation in Congress, things like government funding or something called the NDAA, which is like essentially funding for the Pentagon and other national defense resources. There are lots of points of leverage, things that have to get done. The Democrats will be able to extract some concessions around is their intent. And so, yes, I imagine there will be some messaging bills that the president is never going to sign, but there will be points of leverage that they can use to get some of their priorities across the line. And do you know whether House Democrats are talking to Senate Democrats? Is there like a coordinated plan? You know, it's interesting that you ask that, I think, in part because there was, you know, such a surprise that Democrats were able to make such waves in the Senate that, you know, I think there was, I heard at least less from the Senate Democratic side about all of their big plans. But that was a real point of friction in the House and Senate leadership. This Congress, I think it's much less likely that we'll see friction between Hakeem Jeffries and likely future Senate Majority Leader, New York Democrat Chuck Schumer, although they're different bodies. And to get stuff across the line. In the Senate, most of it takes 60 votes, which will also require some Republican support. So one thing about this massive incoming Democratic majority, and at the time we were taping this podcast, we don't know exactly how massive because there are still a number of races yet to be called. More than 240. Yes, the majority will be more than 240. It could be as large as maybe even 260, something in that neighborhood. And that's out of 435 total votes. So it's a very, in modern times, a very large majority. And these new members of Congress are coming from a lot of places that have voted Republican in the past. I mean, pretty much any Republican that was in a district where President Trump won by 10 points or less is like packing their bags. So that's a lot of new Democrats who are immediately going to be to become what you would call frontline Democrats. They are going to be targets for Republicans to kick them back out again. And can we think about this for a second? Like North Carolina, famous for being hyper gerrymandered for a very long time, a dominant Republican conference that is now a overwhelmingly Democratic majority delegation to Congress. The Republican member who was in charge of their like coordinated congressional campaign effort, Richard Hudson in North Carolina, he lost his race, which is that happened to Democrats a couple years ago. It's pretty embarrassing when the man leading your campaign arm ends up losing his own seat. And so you have folks in Montana, South Carolina, loads of people from Texas, loads of people from Pennsylvania, Arizona, Kentucky, like places that you're not used to seeing Democratic delegations sweep in. They're going to have Democrats in the House. So what does that do for how they govern? Well, Elaine has done a lot of excellent coverage on the left flank of what, what Democrats look like. But there are also now conservative Democrats to contend with. The Blue Dog Democratic Caucus is touting this idea that they will have 22 blue dogs and counting. These are conservative Democrats, and they're more than doubling the size of this group. So they have a right flank to contend with, too. On election night, we were all part of NPR special coverage. And we heard from Democrats who kind of fall across the ideological spectrum, you know, from leadership to maybe even folks outside of Congress that embody this left. And they really all coalesced around the idea that this is a caucus that is focused on rectifying the economic situation of this country. And I think that the labels of conservative Democrat versus moderate Democrat versus progressive leftist Democrat are kind of in flux right now because of that, especially given, you know, in my conversations with more progressive leaning folks, like more than anything, they're emphasizing populism, which is something that can overlap. It depends how it's messaged across the aisle or within the party. Yeah. I mean, and one of the things they're looking at are some of the most unpopular things that happened during the Trump administration that could help score wins for centrist Democrats, progressive Democrats and conservative Democrats across the country, like addressing health care subsidies. The cost of health care is a huge issue. The one big, beautiful bill, Trump's signature domestic policy bill that passed last year into law restricted subsidies for health care. Those are going to start hitting next year, driving premiums even higher. Democrats will want to use any leverage they can to restore things like that. They'll also try and restrict funding for the Iran war in an effort to try and pressure the Trump to end that conflict and hopefully bring gas prices back down. OK, when we come back, we're going to talk about the growing number of Democratic socialists in the Democratic caucus. Welcome back, Elena. One part of this blue wave that, as you said before, got a lot of attention, especially in the primary, is the increase now of Democratic socialists coming into the Democratic caucus. Walk us through what happened with them on Election Day. Yeah, it wasn't a surprise. I mean, we saw six candidates win in, you know, very traditionally liberal cities from New York City to Philadelphia to Detroit to Denver to Los Angeles. Solid blue spots. But they will have incoming members that really had a central pitch of wanting to move the party further to the left. And these are people that were endorsed by either DSA National, Democratic Socialists of America or their respective local chapters. Those six people coming in effectively quadruples the number of Democratic socialists in Congress, which sounds like a lot. I mean, it goes from two to eight. Yeah, absolutely. And there are also candidates who are not strictly speaking DSA candidates, but who either let their membership expire or otherwise are adjacent. Yeah. I mean, you know, this is where we get into like how much do labels really matter versus like progressive leftist DSA, because we definitely saw a lot of candidates this cycle. If they weren't affiliated with the DSA or that movement, they still spoke on a lot of the same issues. Abdul El-Sayed, who is going to be the next senator from Michigan, he didn't run as an endorsed DSA candidate, but he still centered his campaign around Medicare for all. And so I think that there's going to be a broader kind of group of people that are aligned ideologically, regardless of those labels. Eric, I am thinking about the struggles in the House Republican conference right now. They have a much more narrow majority than Democrats are going to have. But Speaker Mike Johnson had a lot of trouble getting bills through. They were constantly having like failures to get things out of committee and get them to the floor and all of this drama because he had, you know, a freedom caucus and like factions of his conference that wouldn't go along. Does math mean that Democrats aren't going to have the same problem? There are a couple of ways to think about this. I think we will see very lively, very visible discussions and disputes in the Democratic Party over policymaking, but because they are not in total control of the government and these things aren't coasting to the president's desk for the signature like we were expecting during the 119th. Congress on the president's key priorities. I think those disputes will matter slightly less in terms of the kinds of policy that comes out of it. But I also want to say these disputes are healthy, right? Like we live in a democracy where we can pick between two parties. That is a minority of what's happening in the rest of the world, right? There are lots of different things that don't sort neatly into two buckets. So when you have conservative Democrats coming in and centrist Democrats and leftists coming in, there's a lot of things that don't sort neatly into two buckets. Democrats who are all trying to figure out the best path forward. That's helping to represent a multiplicity of views of their base. And so we want to see those disputes happen in Congress as citizens who are invested in a representative democracy. And arguably, that was the same thing that was happening in the Republican Party, too, when you had folks more concerned about, say, deficits or more concerned about civil liberties and domestic surveillance, right? It just mattered much more on the actual policymaking front because the margins were so high. Yeah. And enraged the president. Totally enraged the president. So, Elena, how are these new DSA-affiliated candidates thinking about this majority and their place in it? Yeah, I don't think anyone's blind to the numbers, you know, that they're going from these, you know, dramatic, energetic campaigns to the halls of Congress, which can be a bit of a shock. And I think the first kind of test for what this group is thinking may be the speaker's vote when the House Democrats consider whether Hakeem Jeffrey should be the next speaker. One thing to keep in mind with this group is they may not have as much of a, you know, powerful role in shaping policy or moving things farther to the left always, but they're going to have huge followings online. You know, they're going to have a lot of attention regardless of how much actual, like, power they have in, you know, deciding whether they're going to be the next speaker. And I think that's going to be a big part of the Democratic base that has felt increasingly disconnected from the broader Democratic Party for a long time. Keeping this cohort happy or satisfied is still going to be important for Jeffrey's because it embodies this larger kind of disconnect within the party right now. Also, this is happening in Jeffrey's backyard, kind of, to be honest. You know, he represents part of Brooklyn and shares, you know, constituencies with local DSA members. Two of the DSA members headed to Congress next year are not far from him in Queens and Manhattan and so, and parts of Brooklyn. And so, like, he kind of can't escape this regardless of the numbers game. I also, like, don't want people to think of this just as, like, agitation or enthusiasm from the DSA aligned members or even the most far left members in the caucus. You have folks who, I think, are on the more progressive end, but certainly, you know, kind of establishment folks like Senator Chris Van Hollen, who told Bloomberg News a senator should withhold support from Schumer for leader until they get promises for bold action. Which is wild if you've followed Chris Van Hollen for a long time. This is, I mean, without, like, I don't know how to be, like, non-derogatory, but he's not a firebrand kind of guy, right? And so that's in the Senate. And then in the House, you have folks like Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who is, like, a constitutional law professor, and he was an impeachment manager. He's going to be head of the judiciary, likely, for Democrats. So there's going to be lots of investigations. But he's still, you know, arguing that there is an urge for bold action in a way that isn't just about, like, coming from an activist background. Yeah, I think Democrats know the stakes here. I think they know they've been increased trust by voters to actually follow through on these calls for change. And I don't think that's something people take lightly, regardless of their, you know, ideological kind of, like, home. I talked about this with Maylock Quiroz. She's the incoming congresswoman-elect for Colorado's first congressional district. It includes most of Denver. She ousted a longtime member, Diana DeGette, in the primary there. I asked her, you know, what is the risk of promising and not delivering? And here's what she said. And we have demonstrated as incoming members that there are consequences for not delivering material results for working people, that they will vote for someone else who will acknowledge how broken the system is and will say that they are going to address it. So the stakes couldn't be higher for people in the establishment, people in leadership to recognize that this cycle is not sustainable. And I also think, like, part of the question is, you know, what is the risk of promising and not delivering? And I think that's the goal for some of these folks, kind of on either end of the, you know, party fringe here, is going to be to shift the conversation, even if it doesn't. I mean, that's what Bernie Sanders has said forever, was part of his goal, you know, in running in 2016, is shift the Overton window, honestly, you know, and what the party is talking about. And I think that is going to be a big part of what these candidates do in office. They're going to be a face for, you know, shifting the party. And, Tam, let's bring this back to the margins conversation we were having at the top, right? You saw young voters swing, particularly young men, swing by huge margins. You saw that also with Latino and Hispanic voters swing by huge margins. Democrats still have something like a negative 14 party reputation, party favorability reputation. I don't think any professional lawmaker can look at those numbers and say, oh, this is a mandate because we have the best ideas. I think they know that with folks swinging that heavily, they need to work to keep folks in the right place. And I think that's going to be a big part of what we're going to talk about next. The best way to make sure you get those as soon as they're available is to follow the podcast. On Apple, that means look for the big plus sign on our show page. On Spotify and the NPR app, there is a follow button you can press. Make sure you have the latest developments for your evening commute, walking the dog, doing the dishes, wherever you like to listen. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover politics. I'm Elena Moore. I'm Eric McDaniel. I cover Congress. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. you