Six questions about the 2024 election results, from Trump legal cases to polls, answered
Why is there so much surprise that a near-sweep of states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin happened for President-elect Donald Trump? What's your takeaway on what Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign did wrong?
These are just a couple of the questions on your mind following Trump's presidential victory over Harris on Wednesday. The Republican, who was impeached twice, survived two assassination attempts and was convicted of 34 felony counts , gathered more than 270 electoral votes, won all seven key battleground states and secured the popular vote. Harris conceded late Wednesday , vowing 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 comeback, the polling leading up to the presidential race and more.
Here are six highlights from the discussion:Question: What happens now (legally) in regards to the open court cases against Trump? Especially the upcoming sentencing for his conviction - and also the other open cases?
Answer: A colleague and I have a story here that delves into this more deeply. In a nutshell, Trump's election victory has likely transformed his criminal situation.
Many legal experts think Judge Juan Merchan wouldn't be able to impose a criminal sentence against Trump that would significantly interfere with the presidency. Merchan could decide to put the entire sentencing – currently scheduled for Nov. 26 – on hold.
The three other cases – one from Georgia state prosecutors and two from federal prosecutors – face similar issues. Plus Trump has already said he will fire special counsel Jack Smith, who leads the federal prosecutions.
Early reports indicate Smith's office may be looking into how to wind down those prosecutions anyway. A Justice Department memo from 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] poll? Can you elaborate on how a professional, unbiased polling source can be 16 points off reality?
Good question. Our team at the Des Moines Register said that Selzer would be reviewing her data to determine the disparity between the poll results and Trump's victory.
Here's some more insight from the Register, which released the final poll that showed Harris leading Trump in Iowa:
Selzer has long been considered the gold standard pollster of Iowa, and the results Tuesday represented a rare miss in her assessments of the Iowa electorate. From 2008 through 2020, the poll accurately reflected the winner of the presidential race in Iowa
Although Selzer said she planned to do a deeper look into the data, there were a few things she was eyeing Tuesday night.
"Technically, the poll had some 'give' in that neither candidate reached 50%," she said. "So, the people who said they had voted/would vote for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. could easily have switched to Donald Trump. The late deciders could have opted for Trump in the final days of the campaign after interviewing was complete. The people who had already voted but opted not to tell our interviewers for whom they voted could have given Trump an edge."
The Iowa Poll showed Kennedy, who had ended his presidential bid but was still on the ballot, got 3% of the Iowa vote. Fewer than 1% said they would vote for Libertarian presidential candidate Chase Oliver, 1% said they would vote for someone else, 3% weren't sure and 2% didn't want to say for whom they already cast a ballot.
"Maybe I can gain clarity on that 9% and an underlying disposition toward the presidential race," Selzer said.
You can read more about this here .
Q: Were there any obvious signs of election interference, such as the bomb threats, disinformation campaigns, etc. from foreign actors?
There were signs of foreign election interference before and on Tuesday.
I'm reporting from Georgia this week. The Republican secretary of state here, Brad Raffensperger, announced Tuesday that some polling sites had to temporarily close because of bomb threats that came from Russia. The FBI put out a statement saying bomb threats from Russian email domains were made to polling locations in several states.
Ahead of Tuesday, Russian actors were involved in a campaign to undermine confidence in U.S. elections and stoke divisions among Americans, according to the FBI . For instance, one debunked video that federal intelligence officials said came from Russia featured a Haitian man who described a plan to vote for Kamala Harris more than once in the 2024 election.
The Iranian government has also been meddling in U.S. elections, federal intelligence officials say . Before Joe Biden ended his campaign, Iranian hackers sent the Biden campaign unsolicited information that they had stolen from the Trump campaign. The government didn't uncover any evidence that Biden campaign associates replied 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 8 years?
Final tallies are still coming in, and polls do come with margins of error, but this is the third presidential election in which many pollsters appear to have underestimated Donald Trump's support. Even when Joe Biden won in 2020, he won by a smaller margin than polls were generally predicting.
In the post-mortem following those two previous elections, some polling experts thought that Trump was attracting voters who didn't consistently vote and so weren't sufficiently captured by pollsters as likely voters. Polling experts also talked about the possibility that a relatively large number of Trump voters are more suspicious of institutions, and that might carry over into less willingness to respond to polls. And polling experts said some Trump voters might be reticent to say they are planning to vote for Trump. The pandemic could also have factored into problems with 2020 because Democrats may have been more likely to stay at home and respond to polls.
For the 2024 election, many polls tried to correct the previous undercounting, for example by adjusting polling results to take into account how people responding to polls say they voted in 2020. (It was a technique to try to make sure the polls were capturing a more realistic number of Trump supporters.) Some even thought the adjustments this time around could mean polls were now overestimating Trump support.
What will the post-mortem on polling look like for the 2024 election? It could reflect some of the same possible issues we've seen before. But time will tell.
Q: The Jack Smith probe is effectively cooked but Trump still has these state cases and sentencing for all of those. What happens there? Where does Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment enter into this after the SCOTUS ruling from earlier this year?
It's true Trump has said he would fire Jack Smith, the special counsel leading the two federal prosecutions.
Some legal experts have previously argued that move could expose Trump to charges of obstructing justice. But the Supreme Court's July 1 presidential immunity ruling may also protect Trump from that risk. The conservative wing of the court ruled that Trump was absolutely immune from prosecution in his federal election interference case for his alleged conduct involving discussions with Justice Department officials. Maybe that means a president/former president can't be charged with obstructing justice for ordering the DOJ to drop a prosecution against him?
Trump could also try to pardon himself in his federal criminal cases. Legal experts differ over whether that's allowed. The Supreme Court hasn't ever ruled on the issue.
Those are two options Trump doesn't have in his New York and Georgia state criminal cases. But his election will still be good news for him on those fronts, too. Trump's lawyers can now argue that going forward in 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.
Because Trump is the first president-elect in this situation, we don't know how that argument about the state prosecutions would go. But the Supreme Court's immunity decision talks about not wanting the judicial branch to interfere with the executive branch. Trump's lawyers can say that means state courts shouldn't interfere with the presidency. And they can also point to a clause in the U.S. Constitution that says federal laws take precedence over state laws (the supremacy clause), and say that means state courts/prosecutors aren't allowed interfere with the presidency.
Q: Are you going to continue to report as you have the last four years considering the president elect wants to jail journalists and do you expect he will do that to his enemies?
We will absolutely report on Trump's next presidency.
Many Justice Department observers are concerned that Trump could try to use the department to go after enemies. He has shared images on Truth Social that depicted 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 indicted.
There are reports Trump tried to go after rivals in his first term. Jeff Sessions, Trump's first attorney general, told prosecutors that Trump asked him to un-recuse himself from campaign-related investigations and order the Justice Department to prosecute Hillary Clinton in 2017, according to the Mueller report . The New York Times reported that Trump told White House counsel Donald McGahn in 2018 he wanted Hillary Clinton and James Comey prosecuted.
Some fear Trump could face less resistance in a second term. His allies have indicated he will be looking for loyalty and commitment to his agenda in picking personnel for his next administration.
For a deep dive, I've written more about these concerns here.
