From WNYC Studios.

I'm Brian Lehrer.

This is my daily politics podcast.

It's Monday, November 11th.

This is the pivotal four years.

We're going to understand whether something like an American strongman can arise within our system

right now or not. That was Susan Glasser near the end of the New Yorker radio hour this

weekend. Maybe you heard the whole thing. Susan Glasser will join us in just a minute to discuss

that question and many others. For example, what does it mean that Donald Trump's vote total was actually about

the same as in 2020? He got about the same number of votes as he did when he lost to Joe Biden,

but Vice President Harris got 11 million fewer votes than Biden did. Yes, some Biden voters switched

to Trump this year, but the much bigger story is the much

bigger number of people who apparently sat this election out. Another question to be answered,

as the Democratic Party has begun to do, why did they lose this badly? You've probably heard

some of the leading theories by now. One is because every Western leader who saw a pandemic inflation on their

watch has gotten slaughtered in their next elections. Harris only did as well as she did because

Donald Trump is so unpopular. Or Biden dropped out too late, leaving Harris too little time to introduce

herself to voters.

Or the Democratic Party is too identified with censorious and extreme-sounding identity politics,

see Maureen Dow's New York Times column yesterday,

or the Democrats fail to offer a true populist economic alternative to Trump's economic populism, even though Trump's probably going to make things worse, see Bernie Sanders yesterday on CNN. Or disinformation ran around

the World Wide Web before the facts could put their shoes on. Or maybe it's a little bit of all

...