From WNYC Studios, I'm Brian Lerer.

This is my daily politics podcast.

It's Thursday, November 7th.

As the country anticipates a second Trump presidency with hopes, with dread, with ambivalence, depending on who you are.

One thing that happens after a big margin election like this is that the party that lost

begins a reckoning. Do you remember in 2012 after President Obama's first two years in office,

Democrats took what Obama called a shalacking in the midterm elections. Control of Congress flipped

from blue to red, and Republicans took control of around 19 state governments. I think it was 19.

So a humbled Obama went before the nation and said this. A couple of great communicators,

Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, were standing at this

podium two years into their presidency, getting very similar questions.

Because the economy wasn't working the way it needed to be. And there were a whole range of

factors that made people concerned that maybe the party in power wasn't listening to them.

Maybe the party in power wasn't listening to them. Obama in 2012, acknowledging that maybe he

lost touch with the voters on the economy, though, as he also

pointed out, the party in power when voters are feeling economic pain often takes those

kinds of hits, regardless of party.

So what kind of Democratic Party reckoning needs to start today?

When Trump came within five points in New Jersey, when he rose from a fifth

of the vote to a third of the vote in New York City, when he beat Joe Biden's 2020 vote among

Latino men by 34 points nationally, when he went all three blue wall states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin,

Michigan, when Vice President Harris, despite the abortion issue

...