Former Obama advisors Jon Favreau, Dan Pfeiffer, Tommy Vitor and Jon Lovett appeared shocked Wednesday on their podcast while breaking down President-elect Donald Trump’s victory from Election night.
Late Tuesday evening, outlets began to call the presidential race between Trump and Vice President in favor of the Republican candidate, shortly after Fox News declared he had won Pennsylvania. On “Pod Save America,” the four Democrat hosts went over the exit data polls revealing Trump’s lead across the nation as he was projected to win both the electoral and popular vote as of Wednesday evening.
“Got my emotional support animal on my lap right here, Leo’s here, let’s get to it,” Favreau said. “Donald Trump won.”
“Trump’s win was quite broad. He improved on his 2020 performance in almost every county among every demographic,” Favreau added. “So a majority of the country that includes all ages, races, genders, religions, and political beliefs chose four more years of Donald Trump, either because they like him or they like his agenda, or they don’t see him and his agenda as enough of a risk, or they voted for him based on bad or incomplete information.”
Favreau went on to note how “incumbent leaders all over the world have been losing” since the pandemic, before asking Pfeiffer to jump in and give his take on the results.
“The polling was telling us this for years now. Three quarters of voters think the country’s on the wrong track,” Pfeiffer said.
” … There will be a ton of second guessing and nitpicking and all of that, but we have to recognize the political environment we’re operating in and the changes in the country politically over the last four years,” Pfeiffer continued. “And it’s the changes that have been going on since 2016, that we were able to win in 2020 by a tiny bit, but we’ve been moving in this direction for a while now, and it came home in a really brutal way last night.”
Vitor joined in to highlight how the party may need to do some “soul searching” in order to win the next cycle, noting that current exit polls are “spotty” as the data is still trickling in.
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“The one thing I just wanted to tell folks is just to be — I really want to know what happened, because I want to do some personal soul searching and the party do soul searching to fix this and to do better next time,” Vitor said. “But I think we just have to tell everyone that we’re going to do our best to sort through the information that’s available, but it’s exit polls that are spotty at best. It’s county by county data.”
Vitor continued to state that Harris only had a limited amount of time to “introduce herself to the country” in comparison to Trump’s campaign. Lovett then added that while he believed their case against Trump was true, he thinks Democrats need to find a way to understand why millions of Americans voted for the former president.
“I mean, what I was thinking about this morning is, okay, the case we made against Donald Trump was true. The truth is the truth,” Lovett said.
“What I think we have to figure out now is that millions of Americans who agree with our concerns about Donald Trump, who agree that he has terrible character, that he has terrible traits for leadership, decided that their concerns about the economy, their anger at the establishment was enough to justify taking that chance,” Lovett added. And there’ll be a lot of reasons for that. There’ll be a lot to unpack about why that happened.”
Data from exit polls as of Wednesday evening show Trump made gains with key Democratic voting blocs, including Hispanic and Black men. While Harris won 52% of Hispanic voters nationwide, Trump received 46% overall, specifically capturing 55% of Hispanic male voters, marking an increase of 14 percentage points among Hispanics overall and 19 points among Hispanic males compared to 2020 exit poll data, according to Reuters. Additionally, Trump gained 2 percentage points from 2020 among Black male voters, winning 21% of their support, while Harris received 71%, the outlet reported.
Featured Image Credit: U.S. Army photo by Pvt. Gabriel Silva
