Matt answers your US midterms questions live(ish)

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0:59G'day, Matt Bevan here. This is If You're Listening. The US midterm results are still coming in, but already the Democrats have won the US House of Representatives and the Senate in basically a landslide. Surprisingly, in an interview on Fox News, Donald Trump said that he will accept the results, saying the Democrats have some good people who fought hard and that the Republicans lost because voters didn't like the candidates. The next two years are looking very good for the Democratic Party and very bad for Donald Trump and the Republicans. We did our first live stream this afternoon on our brand new YouTube channel to watch the US midterm results come in live and take viewer questions. And it was way smoother than any of us expected.

1:43We had over 5,000 people tune in from all over the world, from Lima in Peru, to the Avatar Mountains in China, to Japan, to Cordoba, Argentina, to the Sutherland Shire Hospital in Sydney. So without further ado, here are some of our favourite questions and my answers to them. Rachel Magner asks, how does the American voting system work? Is it consistent across the country or different in each state? Well, the answer is it's extremely different in each state. As you can see, there is a map of 50 US states. The DC also votes in the House of Representatives. Basically, what you have here is a picture of 50 different voting systems, all of which get to decide their own voting maps, their own the way that they vote.

2:39Some states have adopted rank choice voting like we have in Australia, and some states haven't. They're actually going to potentially, you know, start to really become quite interested in the vagaries of rank choice voting if Maine is a close race. We'll have a look at that in just a minute. But yes, all of those different states have their own little electoral commissions. They pass their own voting maps and they make decisions about how the election should be run. MC3926 asks, should Republicans lose the House and or the Senate? Should we expect an increase in executive orders by Donald Trump? What can and can't be included in an executive order? Well, I mean, I don't know how you could have much of an increase

3:30in the number of executive orders from Donald Trump. He's basically been ruling by executive order since the start of his presidency, apart from the one big beautiful bill, you might remember, got passed through the House and the Senate sort of in the middle of last year. He hasn't really bothered coming to the Congress with any questions of what he wants to do. Of course, the issue with running things through executive order is that they're very easy for another president to repeal and get rid of, as Donald Trump repealed a huge number of executive orders of both Joe Biden and Barack Obama as soon as he took over from them. So there's that. There's also the Congress can pass laws that contradict you, that basically tell you things that you need to do, which they almost

4:18certainly will. But of course, those laws can be vetoed by the presidency. That does make things pretty complicated. The president gets to basically have a veto over most legislation that passes through the Senate. And in order to defeat that veto, they need to have a two-thirds majority in the Senate. A two-thirds majority for the Democrats is impossible at this stage. So, unless Republicans decide to vote with them. The majority, so which side takes control of the Senate, is decided on the 50th slash 51st seat, because, of course, the Republicans holding the White House, J.D. Vance is the Vice President, he's a Republican, and tied votes get decided by a tiebreaker vote from the vice president.

5:07So if there was a tie, if both sides were at 50-50, then the Republicans kind of de facto win because J.D. Vance would be able to come in and basically break all the ties and break all the ties in their favour, assuming that all 50 sitting Republicans voted with the President. But the interesting thing is if Congress does things and then there is a clash between the executive orders written by Donald Trump and the things done by the Congress, then the Supreme Court would need to decide who is in the right and really who knows what happens in that sort of a situation. Andrew Cowell asks, does the Trump administration have any legal right to stop each state from certifying results? No, not the Trump administration, if you know what I mean.

6:02All of these seats, all of these elections are being run at the state level, as we were talking about earlier. All of those states have their own electoral commissions that run the elections and certify the elections. What happened in 2020 when Donald Trump was getting involved in trying to avoid the certification of certain votes that went against him in Michigan and in Georgia and that kind of thing. What happened was Donald Trump was basically either calling up officials in those areas and trying to encourage them not to certify the vote, which in pretty much every case they ended up doing, but that's basically what was happening there. Or trying to install people that would not certify a vote

6:51that wasn't for the Republicans. It hasn't been successful for him. We did do a whole series about whether that was something that was potentially going to happen in the 2024 election when Donald Trump won that election. It ended up being moot. He was perfectly fine with the result in 2024 because he won. We've got another question here from Adair, who is, I think, one of our producers, who is asking, I mean, unless the Adair asking the question has the same name, but Adair Shepard, one of our producers, asks, what are your favourite quirky ballot measures this year? I'm so glad you asked that the Adair asking the question has the same name, but Adair Sheffield, one of our producers, asks, what are your favourite quirky ballot measures this year?

7:27I'm so glad you asked that, Adair, because there are some fantastic ones. So ballot measures, if you're not aware of this, in the United States they can have a situation where people can basically petition to put sort of a referendum or a plebiscite or a statewide or a local vote on a particular issue, they can petition to have that put on the ballot on election day. And this happens a lot. There are a huge number of ballot measures related to data centres where people are trying to prevent local and state governments from approving data centres in their areas. But there's also a few more, let's say, eclectic ones. And let's have a look at this one. So in Idaho, there is a vote for, it's a poll basically,

8:17where they're asking Idaho voters to select which of six firearms should be the official state gun of Idaho. And as you can see, so far with 10% of votes counted, the Winchester Model 1873 gun that won the West, a .44, is leading in that ballot, defeating the Winchester Model 1894. So, you know, a boil-over result there. Who would have thought that the gun that won the West, apparently, is Idaho's favourite gun and potentially will become Idaho's official state gun. The other interesting ballot measure that is getting a fair bit of attention is the Washington DC Initiative 86, prohibiting forced feeding of birds. Basically, they're prohibiting the sale of foie gras in Washington, D.C. And as you can see, it's overwhelmingly looking like it's going to pass,

9:18only less than 1% of votes in, but so far the vote's very much going towards banning foie gras in Washington DC with apparently serious financial penalties for restaurants or supermarkets that are caught selling foie gras. That's the kind of thing that we're seeing a lot of through, I mean, there's not that many unusual ballot measures, but there's a lot of ballot measures right across the country. There's a couple of ballot measures in California. tax on all billionaires in the state, which, well, unfortunately, we will probably not still be on air by the time the votes are being counted in California, but that's one to watch later on in the day. The next question we've got from Ghost Who Chats, is there a real danger that

10:19this now means two years of unending litigation in the courts and legislature, more grandstanding and still no action. Yeah, probably. I think it's pretty likely. The power that the Democrats are going to have in the Senate here is mostly the power to make a noise, to, yep, grandstand, to hold inquiries, investigations, to impeach the president. Last time Donald Trump lost a midterm was in 2018. And in 2020, he was impeached. And then in 2021, he was impeached again. Of course, neither of those were upheld by the Senate. So he was impeached, but it wasn't upheld by the Senate. And look, I mean, Congress at the best of times is pretty much about grandstanding. So it seems pretty likely that that will continue, particularly when you've

11:10got a situation where the presidency is held by a different party to the party that holds the House of Reps and the Senate. Neil Howard, will Trump start videoing everything that is not supported by the GOP? Potentially, but there are a lot of things that the House, the Congress can do, apart from pass legislation. The main thing being investigations. They can trigger and hold and really cause a huge amount of chaos through holding investigations into what Donald Trump is doing, subpoenaing people, pulling, you know, subpoenaing documents, getting documents released. I mean, it'll be interesting to see what happens to the still redacted parts of the Epstein files under full democratic control

11:58of the House and the Senate. You know, vetoing laws is really about trying to stop longstanding changes through legislation. You know, legislation is obviously much more difficult to repeal and get rid of than executive orders. So Donald Trump may decide that he wants to stop various bits of legislation coming through. But I can't imagine that there's going to be a huge amount of progress in terms of legislative change in the next two years. There'll likely be a lot of chaos, though, as Trump and, more importantly, his aides face a lot of investigation from both the House and the Senate. The other interesting thing, of course, is what happens if any Supreme Court seats come up. If the Democrats have control of the Senate, then theoretically they've got the

12:51right to put Supreme Court justices in place. Many of them are very elderly, so we'll see what happens with that. But Trump could get in the way. It will be interesting to see what happens if a Supreme Court seat comes up in that time. Normino, Norman who? 1793 asks, if the Democrats sweep the House and the Senate, what do you think will be number one item in their in-tray? Will it be a vote to end the war, to cut the tariffs? What are the odds of them bringing forth articles of impeachment? I think impeachment's pretty likely, to be honest. They've done it twice. They will almost certainly have the numbers to do it again. They won't have the numbers to carry it through, obviously. Yeah, so, look, I don't know which of those they'll choose to do first,

13:42but a vote to end the war would be likely. The power that the Democrats theoretically have, that the Congress theoretically has over war, is not so much the declaration of it, because apparently America doesn't really bother with that anymore, coming to the Congress in order to declare war, but the budget, the Defense Department budget is, theoretically the Congress has the power of the purse. So preventing Donald Trump from being able to continue to finance the war could be something that they do. But of course, Donald Trump may try to, as he did kind of during the Doge era, cut things in order to divert funding to his preferred projects. Decreasing funding for ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, will probably also be something that is on their to-do list. But

14:32whether Donald Trump sort of, you know, just starts shutting down various federal agencies in order to divert funding to ICE, it's going to be a very interesting sort of a situation. Shaky Snake 82. If the Democrats win, will they be able to get in touch with a better swimming pool guy to fix the reflection pool? You know what? I'm not exactly sure whose jurisdiction the reflection pool comes under. It may be under, I think it's under the Department of the Interior. I think it's the Department of the Interior that controls the reflection pool outside the Lincoln Memorial and all of the big national monuments there in Washington, D.C. So I think it'll still be the Trump administration who is in charge of the reflecting pool.

15:18I don't know that the Democrats can override him and contact a different pool guy. So no, I don't think so. Good question though. With these results, is J.D. Vance still likely to be on the 2028 GOP presidential ticket? You may have seen earlier this year, we did a series called Black Swans, where I basically said that trying to predict the future is pointless. I mean, I don't know how much this really changes for J.D. Vance. Donald Trump has, you know, is certainly the far more prominent figure in Republican politics. Whether, you know, this counts. Oh, we've got a new post from Donald Trump on his Truth Social account, which I'll show you in just a moment. But, you know, whether this changes his chances at becoming the nominee for the Republicans in 2028, I have absolutely no idea.

16:15I feel like this is probably more likely to be pinned on Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth than J.D. Vance, but we'll see how it goes. Okay, let's have a look at the browser because Donald Trump has just posted this on Truth Social. Just a giant MAGA hat, except instead of MAGA, it says veto. In answer to the question that you were saying, that people were asking earlier about the veto, I think it seems pretty likely that people are going to, that he's going to be, you know, wielding the veto stamp or a pen or whatever it is, perhaps an auto pen. If he has enough bills that he needs to veto, he certainly seems like that's the way that he's planning on working with the Democrats. Okay, so the other post that Donald Trump has put up here,

17:03because apparently, you know, this is the best way of me getting some information. I'm going to become a political pundit, both good and bad, on the reasons these candidates won and lost President Donald Trump. Can't wait to hear it. The result in the House has been called by all the major networks in the United States that was called before we even came on air, saying that the Democrats are going to get there and they're going to exceed that number. Actually, it's worth pointing out the reason that that matters. The reason that a big victory matters for the Democrats, particularly in the House, is as opposed to in Australia, where the political parties in Australia tend to be fairly cohesive

17:46when they are in power. They hold together, you know, they deal with their problems in the party room, they come up with legislation that they want to pass, they come up with their strategy, they come up with the direction, and then when they come to the floor of the parliament, the floor of the house, it's basically been decided by the majority party what they're going to vote for and they'll pass that legislation. Whereas in the United States, when you have a situation where it is a very solid two-party system like the United States has, if you compare the Democrats to Australian politics, they're members of, you know, it's really a situation like if you bolted the Labor Party in Australia and the Greens together into one party and said, go and find things that you agree on.

18:34There are certain things that they agree on, but there are lots and lots of things that they don't agree on. And that plays out very publicly in the United States inside the Democratic Party and inside the Republican Party at times, though not recently, because the Republican Party is kind of a permanent coalition of everyone from the right wing of American politics. So the equivalent in Australia would be a permanent coalition of one nation, of the liberals, of of the Nationals and all those parties. And you can also imagine that those parties would struggle to agree on things and would struggle to pass legislation. But in the United States, they are bolted together in two coalitions and permanent ones,

19:24and they're called both the same name. But a big victory in the House, if they win the 218 seats and then 20 or 30 more, then what that potentially means is that they will be able to find common ground with enough of themselves to pass things. When it's a narrow majority, then they really need to get every single one of themselves to agree with each other. And they need to, you know, whip, you know, the party whips need to be very powerful. This was apparently, you know, this was the thing that everyone would always talk about, was Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's big power was by, you know, being better than most people at keeping the Democrat Party together and voting on the same things. Although even she

20:11was better than other Americans. Nothing as cohesive, nothing like as cohesive as you see in Australian politics. So a big majority for the Democrats means that they may not need to, they may be able to pass more things without the consent of their most centrist or their most progressive wings, which, well, I mean, I don't have an opinion about whether that's good or bad, but it's likely to be more productive for the Democrats. We've got one more question. What will Trump's next two years look like? A bit different, I think. He will not necessarily be more constrained. He will not necessarily be unable to do the things that he wants to do. But he is going to have a lot more noise against him.

21:07The Democrats will, and this is the big thing, I think. The Democrats can subpoena Donald Trump all they want. They can ask him as many questions as they want. They spent the first time that they were in power in the Congress while he was the president, so the period between 2018 and 2020, you know, investigating him constantly and subpoenaing him constantly. He doesn't care. Donald Trump has been on trial. He has been convicted of crimes. He has been investigated more than really any other modern American politician that I can think of. The thing that is going to make things more difficult for the Trump administration now is not what's going to happen to Donald Trump, but I think what's going to happen with the Democrats going after his aides,

22:01going after people in his administration. It's potentially going to be very uncomfortable to be a prominent member of the Trump administration in the next two years, because you're going to be hit with legal subpoenas, you're going to be asked to come and explain yourself in a million different hearings, and either you have to, you know, spend time and resources and talk to lawyers a lot and do that, or you're going to need to basically say no and dare the Democrats to send the bailiffs after you. And I don't really know, you know, what people are going to do. You know, which of those two would Pete Hegseth choose? Which of those two would J.D. Vance choose? Which of those two would any of the prominent figures in the Trump administration pick?

22:56I don't know. But it's going to be difficult, and it's going to be particularly difficult, I think, for his administration members. Now that we've got our own YouTube channel, we're planning on doing more live streams and bonus content. So make sure you subscribe to our channel. Just search for If You're Listening and make sure you've got notifications turned on so you don't miss anything. Because results are still coming in, we're delaying our podcast from Thursday to Friday morning, so look out for it in your feeds. We'll be digging into the role that gerrymandering played in this outcome. Did all of the frantic district map redrawing that's been happening over the last year matter in this election? Did it

23:43actually help the people who were doing the redrawing of the maps? And what does all of that mean for the future of American democracy? And who is Jerry? That's coming up on Friday. I'll catch you then.