What Now For The Democratic Party?
The NPR Politics Podcast
NPR
4.4 • 25.7K Ratings
🗓️ 3 December 2024
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode: voting correspondent Ashley Lopez, congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh, and senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson.
The podcast is produced by Jeongyoon Han and Kelli Wessinger, and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all on the web at theshmit.org. |
| 0:14.5 | Hi, this is Kelly in New Jersey. I have reached the clean-out-the-spice cabinet portion of unemployment. |
| 0:24.2 | This podcast was recorded at 106 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, December 3rd, 2024. |
| 0:31.4 | Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Hopefully I've found a job. If not, it's on to the linen closet. Here's the show. |
| 0:44.7 | A lot of spices going in the garbage. Yeah, I'm crossing my fingers for you, but I do love |
| 0:49.7 | just like deep cleaning every inch of my apartment. It is the best feeling. Oh, no thanks. |
| 0:55.6 | Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting. |
| 1:00.5 | I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. |
| 1:02.2 | And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. |
| 1:05.3 | And today on the show, we're going to be talking about the future of the Democratic Party after a pretty bruising election cycle. Deirdre, |
| 1:12.7 | I want to talk about Congress first. First of all, let's talk about the balance of power in each of the |
| 1:19.8 | houses first. Right. Well, Republicans took control of the Senate. They flipped four seats in Ohio, |
| 1:26.4 | West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Montana. So they will have in January a 53-seat |
| 1:31.6 | majority with the Democrats having 47 members in their caucus. In the House, Republicans will keep their |
| 1:40.8 | super narrow majority, but believe it or not, they are still counting votes in one |
| 1:45.2 | race out in California. So it's unclear if they will have 220 seats or 221 seats, which, as you can |
| 1:52.8 | imagine, is a razor thin majority with, you know, 218 being the magic number in the House. The other |
| 2:00.3 | challenge Republicans in the House are |
| 2:03.1 | already facing going into January is that a couple of their members have been tapped to serve |
| 2:08.5 | in the Trump administration. Another member, Matt Gates, who was initially tapped to be |
| 2:15.1 | Trump's nominee as Attorney General ended up withdrawing, but does not plan to |
| 2:19.3 | come back to the House. So House Speaker Mike Johnson is facing vacancies along with a narrow |
... |
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