After the election in November 2024, American Heritage Professors Chris Karpowitz and Kelly Patterson held a Q&A with their students to answer questions about ballot results across the country. It’s part of their commitment to have lectures and discussion in the course that model civil dialogue when talking about topics that can be politically charged.
“Our students at BYU have an important role to play both now and in the future, to support the ideas and principles in the Constitution and to become peacemakers,” says Karpowitz. “In that effort, we emphasized with our American Heritage students the importance of understanding the basics of the constitutional system, how it's evolved over the years, and how the nation has changed. We want to help them reflect on the role they can play in a contemporary politics that is deeply divided and polarized.”
Now that newly elected officials have taken office — including President Donald J. Trump for a non-consecutive second term — Karpowitz’ and Patterson’s analysis and insights continue to hold value. Not only do they provide a deeper understanding of the political landscape, but also a foundation for elevated discourse. Read on for what they have to say about the election and what to watch for in the next four years.
What contributed to the swing toward Republican votes in so many states? Do you think this is a long-term trend?
Kelly Patterson: While many of the jurisdictions in the country showed movement toward the Republican party, it was still an incredibly close race.
Chris Karpowitz: Often, election outcomes are a reaction to what people have experienced in the previous four years. So the fact that Republicans won this time doesn't mean that it won't be close next time. A lot depends on what happens in the next few years and how people respond to President Trump's administration. In this case, the facts are that Americans didn't like inflation and that the incumbent, President Joe Biden, was not popular. Circumstances like that often cause a shift to the party that's out of power. The outcome this time shouldn't necessarily be thought of as what we'll see next time. It could easily move back in the other direction.
Compared to other traditionally red states, Utah voting statistics showed a less dramatic increase in votes for Republican candidates. What insights can we pull from this data?
Karpowitz: It means there's a set of people in Utah who tend to vote Republican but are less enamored with Donald Trump specifically. Utah is a very red state. It's a conservative state, a Republican state. It's likely to remain so for the time being, but it has had a somewhat different relationship with Donald Trump than other conservative states. This dynamic began with his first run for the presidency. Utah has been, comparatively, slightly less enthusiastic about Trump than other very Republican places. That hesitancy to support him certainly didn’t prevent him from winning the state. He's won Utah in the last three election cycles.
Patterson: It really is important to look at specific context when you're talking about
elections because there are macro factors that matter, like inflation. But there are other
considerations that often affect a local election jurisdiction. All of that will affect the dynamics of who turns out and how they vote. In a place like Utah, much of the growth has been in some of these urban areas, like Salt Lake County, which is more of a mixed jurisdiction in terms of its split between Republicans and Democrats. You wouldn't expect to see a lot of movement in some of those areas toward the Republican party.
Remember too that Representative John Curtis replaced Senator Mitt Romney, who is a frequent critic of President Trump. Sen. Curtis is a little less conservative than other politicians, but still very conservative. This seems to indicate that there's a slightly different brand of Republicanism in Utah, as Professor Karpowitz was saying. President Trump won overwhelmingly, but it's clear there's a ceiling.
What power do presidents have to affect politics and policy-making in such a large and extensive country?
Karpowitz: Presidents in our constitutional system set the political agenda. Agenda setting is an ability to focus the nation's attention — lawmakers’ attention, policymakers’ attention, and voters’ attention — on a given issue. President Trump is remarkably successful in getting people to talk about the things he wants them to talk about, and I’m pretty confident he will continue with that success. In this last election, he had a set of things that he wanted to focus on, including inflation and immigration. He was very good at making sure that was the terrain on which the election was fought. This is an area where President Biden really struggled. He was not an effective communicator and was thus not able to focus the country’s attention on his preferred set of concerns.
During the election, Kamala Harris became the nominee comparatively late in the process and so was more constrained in her ability to set the agenda for the campaign. The fact that she was a member of the current administration also hampered her ability to emphasize her own set of priorities. In many ways, the election played out on precisely the terms that were most beneficial to Donald Trump. The question now is how the nation will respond to what he says and does while in office.
Patterson: As Congress goes back into session, we see that President Trump and his staff and advisors are getting ready to introduce specific pieces of legislation. It's often a game of “follow the leader.” Congress goes along with the president’s agenda and the media goes along by covering it. That's because our political and constitutional system revolves around the executive. It's important to realize that the agenda-setting power is not absolute. There are external forces that challenge the power of the president to focus the nation's attention on a given policy subject. How a president responds to those external forces, such as changes in the world economy, outbreaks of conflict abroad, and political outcomes in other nations, and refocuses attention to their own agenda matters for whether or not they have a successful legacy.
What can we predict about Trump’s presidency when it comes to minority groups, such as immigrants?
Karpowitz: President Trump has promised to carry out mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Usually when presidents talk about issues, they try to take action on those issues. So I think we can expect some action on immigration. Exactly what that will look like, how it will affect immigrants and their families, and what the resistance to those actions might be, we don't fully know. We also don’t know how ordinary Americans will respond to that sort of effort or what the effects on our economy and communities might be. What we do know is that President Trump will try to take action on the issues that he has highlighted during the campaign, which is what all presidents do.
Patterson: Presidents face the challenge of translating simplified campaign rhetoric into policy action, which is nearly always a complex undertaking. Policy issues, like deporting undocumented immigrants, will require coordination and cooperation across multiple jurisdictions both within and outside the United States. You cannot deport people without a country to receive them. Agencies, both state and local, must also coordinate and have the necessary resources.
What should we expect concerning the economy under President Trump’s administration?
Karpowitz: We have lots of uncertainties here. People feel quite negatively about the economy of the last four years, but the record of job creation under President Biden is much better than people's actual evaluations. Right now, our unemployment is very low and the stock market is at record highs. By those measures, our economy is quite healthy. Inflation occurred earlier in the Biden administration and is much lower now. That doesn't mean that there aren't families struggling or people having a difficult time, but many of the indicators of economic health seem to have come back to a good place. President Trump is inheriting an economy that, on several measures, looks pretty good. So one question is what he wants to do beyond what's already been done.
People also often view the economy through the lens of their partisan preferences. For example, the day after the election, Republicans were much more optimistic about the economy, and Democrats were much less optimistic about the economy, even though the fundamentals of the economy did not change compared to the previous 24 hours. It will be interesting to see how ordinary people respond to what happens in the coming months and years. One thing that is important to clarify, though, is that presidents have only limited direct influence over the economy. For example, the institution with responsibility for inflation is the Federal Reserve. And other elements of the economy are the result of larger economic forces over which presidents have little control. If presidents could wave a magic wand and create a perfect economy, they would do so! Instead, they have to deal with the economic challenges that happen to arise during their term, and we don’t yet know exactly what challenges President Trump will face.
Another question that we don't fully know the answer to yet is what's going to happen with things like the tax cuts that President Trump passed in his first administration. They're scheduled to expire, but if they're extended that will have an effect on the nation’s budget deficit. President Trump has also promised massive new tariffs he says will preserve American jobs and drive substantial revenue. Whether new tariffs will actually have those effects is uncertain. It’s possible that tariffs will simply raise prices for the average consumer and won’t replace the revenue lost by the tax cuts. Of course, the question of what, exactly, happens depends on the specifics of what's done.
Congressional gridlock has been an ongoing concern for many Americans. With one party having the majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, how do you think that will affect the government’s ability to adopt new policies?
Patterson: The majorities that Republicans have in both the House and the Senate are quite narrow. While President Trump won a fairly comfortable victory in the electoral college, it was very close in the popular vote. In those cases where the nation is closely divided, you may still get gridlock that makes it impossible for political institutions to address certain problems. You might also have political leaders who are tempted to circumvent gridlock by using extra-constitutional methods to try and get things done. Both parties have been tempted to do this through the use of executive orders or arcane budget practices.
Instead of wondering about gridlock, or even a rubber-stamp Congress, I think we should be looking at the resilience of American institutions. It's important to remember that the Constitution is a document that helps us sort through and figure out some kind of answer to the most perplexing societal questions. We don't want to throw the Constitution overboard or undermine specific processes simply for a policy win that is not nearly as important as the enduring manner of problem solving. This is a moment in American history in which it would be nice if both parties stepped back a little bit and sought to reinforce the constitutional framework for policy making and protecting the rights that the founding generation bequeathed us. That needs to be something we support and reinforce, regardless of where the party majorities lie.
Karpowitz: Believing in a divinely inspired Constitution means that we support institutions that don't give complete power to any one person. Instead, our institutions divide power. It means that you have to get buy-in from lots of different kinds of people, which can be very hard to do in a big, diverse nation where we have vastly different ideas about many issues.
I want to put this in a gospel perspective because I think it’s important to see our current politics through the lens of the gospel, not to see the gospel through the lens of our partisanship. In other words, gospel commitments should come before partisan preferences. As members of the Church, our current prophet has asked us each to play a specific role of peacemaker. Being a peacemaker means that we connect with people who have different beliefs than we do, that we listen to them, that we recognize their rights, and try to move forward with what we can agree on. Disagreement is healthy in a big, diverse democracy, but contention and contempt for each other are not. We should find principled ways to move forward together to the extent that we can. The political system wants to pull us into competing partisan camps and, as political scientists, Dr. Patterson and I know that's helpful in some respects. It is an important aspect of the system, but it can't be the only aspect. In an age of deep partisan division, peacemakers are desperately needed.
Learn more about being a peacemaker in your community by participating in The Peacemaker Project, a BYU academic student association.