vote tallies iced it does the vote tally -- vote tally state-by-state. go to c-span.org/election. washington journal continues. host: our first guest of the morning is paul waldman, senior writer for the american prospect. guest: good morning. host: what do you think of the -- newlyted device minted president joe biden? is an extraordinary time in our nations history. it was amazing seeing a spontaneous celebrations all across the country. it is not a -- not because people are excited about joe biden. liberal america was waiting for a repudiation of donald trump and that is what is making them

celebrate. it is hard to imagine now a period where we won't have to get up every morning and ask ourselves what crazy thing the president tweeted. i like to think it will be a of calm and ordinariness in our politics. trueis probably not either. we are headed towards a period of great unrest and dissension. my fear is many who supported trump will take this election and say it proves that politics no longer works for them. he has been telling them for a couple years that any outcome that does not result in him winning is proof that the system is corrupt, it was rigged, it alone -- aand that lot of them will say after this election "we lost and we will try to win the time."

politics doesy " not work, we need to do something else." on the fringes, some may decide violence is the answer. a very dangerous situation. it is good to hear joe biden come out into say " i will be a president for all americans. we need to unify." barack obama said he would try to unify the country, george bush said it before him, bill clinton said it before him. that is the kind of thing we want to hear from our leaders even if it is not possible for the president to bring the country together. it is that kind of thing the thinkent -- the kind of the president should say. at the very least he should not

be actively making it worse. if nothing else, it is good to hear the person soon to be president say that is what he will try to do. host: what is the tallest turtle for joe biden? the tallest hurdle for joe biden? guest: the senate. naived to have this belief that if you have a president from one party and a congress from another party that the result will be moderation and compromise but we are in an incredibly polarized time and that does not produce compromise, it produces gridlock. it is in the interest of the republican party the biden presidency fail. well.mcconnell knows this it is the strategy he used during the obama presidency and it was effective. mitch mcconnell is brilliant in opposition.

this is assuming the democrats do not take both of those senate seat in georgia, which there will be runoffs in january, which they could, but if they do not, mcconnell and other republicans will look at the situation and to say " we can make the biden presidency a failure by not allowing any legislation of significance." all of those things biden ran on -- if you went to his website he had policy papers from here to sunday -- all those things he said he would do, bringing a public option to health care, raising the minimum wage, if republicans take the senate, you can lock them away in a file cabinet because they will not matter.

where doesestion is mcconnell into the republicans take it from there. they could ramp up opposition in a more significant way. at the end of the obama administration, mcconnell shut down all confirmation of judges. he could say he is just going to decide that not only will they not fill any supreme court seats that come open during joe biden's tenure, but they will not fill any judgeships at all. crazy, hethat is would never go that far," but the republicans have taught us they are willing to go pretty far. in 2016 before the election, there were republicans in the senate suggesting they will not allow hillary clinton to fill four years.eats for

i could very definitely see some republicans in the senate saying youat if we just tell him can only appoint republican judges?" you could even extend that to the cabinet. we have already seen some signs from lindsey graham for instance that he would be willing to vote on biden's cabinet officials if they were not crazy liberal. you could get into long drawn conversation over his cabinet officials. at the president has to fill about 4000 positions in the executive branch. need senatef those confirmation. they could shut down that process. the president could use the vacancies act to fill a lot of those appointments. there are some rules you have to follow, but he could move

aggressively on that front if he gets that kind of stonewall, but , let democrats take both of those seats in the georgia senate races, we could be in for of gridlock. host: if you want to ask him 1uestions, it is (202) 748-8000 if you support joe biden. you can text us at (202) 748-8004. i was someone who supported bernie sanders, what am i looking for from the president-elect today? tot: biden took great pains

bring those people into the party. he formed these taskforces with bernie sanders supporters. they put out a large document that try to bring those more progressive ideas into the party. at this point, there is that old expression that personnel is is policy. personnel democrats are watching to see who biden appoints to positions. in the treasury department, fill it with people from wall street, but just of the democrats on wall street. or is he going to look for people who have a view on economic matters that does not come from wall street? who is going to be secretary of health and human services? that will be an important position because even if the supreme court does not strike down the affordable care act,

there will not be the public option joe biden wanted it, but the department of hhs will have to do a lot of things to try to enhance the number of people who have health coverage. is that going to be someone who wants to move aggressively on that front? positionsa lot of biden will have to fill. the executive orders that come out in the early days, we are already getting indications that the biden administration wants to move quickly to undo a lot of the executive orders president trump signed. thosen flip back a lot of things pretty easily but if he does not have a senate in democratic hands, how aggressively is biden going to move forward on some of those progressive goals using the tools at his disposal within the

executive branch? the progressives during the campaign found a lot of reason to be as happy as possible with joe biden. if you look around at the progressive vented democratic parties, they worked their tails off to get joe biden elected. i'm not sure, had the nominee been bernie sanders that the centrists would have worked as hard, but they did it. there have been years in the past where people on the left said "i am going to vote third party because this is the lesser evils."you heard no one on the left saying that now. keepingd a good job of them in the fold, but now they will be trying to make sure that he is being as progressive as possible. one thing also about this -- when out of the things many of

them realized is biden is pretty malleable and susceptible to pressure, but in a good way. he is not somebody like sanders who has believed the same 10 things for his entire career. he positions himself at the center of the democratic party. he is a guy who wants to make deals. he does not say "if i do not get these specific things i will take my ball and go home." to pressure,pen willing to make a compromise and if you are a progressive, that can be good or be bad. able tons you might be exercise influence to try to pull him left. that theyd feel successfully did that in the primaries. moreoe biden of 2020 is progressive than hillary clinton barackr years ago or

obama was. office,when obama took that was something obama himself said. version of joe biden, that was the centerpiece of his health care plan. host: let's hear from some colors. this is joy. she is a supporter of the president elect. [indiscernible] host: joy, i am going to have to stop you there. your connection -- if you could try to move around and see if you can get a better connection. up until that point, let's get georgia,in brunswick, a supporter of joe biden. good morning. caller: how important is georgia

going to be for the upcoming georgia 2021 election? host: thank you. guest: the entire political world is going to go down there. you will have 10 to 15 people a day knocking on your door trying to get you to vote one way or another. up fornate seats are races. if the democrats win them both, the senate will be 50-50. if republicans win one or both of them, then they have control of the senate. to sayot an exaggeration that the fate of joe biden's presidency rests on what happens in georgia in january. every ad on tv will be about these senate races. there will be a huge mobilization effort on the ground. that itself will be something

extraordinary like we have never seen before. get ready because you are going to be under siege. if you love politics, it will be good and if you do not, it may be something of a nightmare. host: from mechanicsville, new york, a supporter of president trump. paul, i read your articles and i like them. i have a statement to make. i voted for trump. i really think of biden's presidency for the next four years is going to be under a cloud. i think there are permanent divisions in the country. no other president in modern history had to face the obstacles that donald trump had to face. was corrosive. i have never seen anything like it in my life.

twitter, the new york times, even the washington post, constant bashing of trump. .e was not being treated fairly you also have big tech as i mentioned. --t recently the polls come came out. voter suppression is something we need to be concerned about. 17 point lead in wisconsin and he won by a small margin there, biden. one of the things that is most concerning, at least among people i spoke to, was the president-elect's relationship relationship to the chinese. he will need to take a strong posture regarding our relationship with china. host: john from new york.

ahead.dman, go guest: we have a situation that is going to continue where we have some nonoverlapping media universes where people live. if you are somebody in the conservative media universe ended lives there every day, you would have heard that -- and lives there every day, you would have heard that biden is the one that is corrupt. thatacts just do not bear out. we never got the full picture of donald trump's conflict of conflicts of interest. showed somerns rather extraordinary things. there was an effort on the part of trump himself signed they republicans to say that joe biden was corrupt and his son did all kinds of terrible things.

there is a reason it never worked. there just was not enough there there. you can try to sort of jenna bus scandal out of whole cloth and up a scandal out of whole cloth, but then you have to give up the goods. if you do not have any facts that will actually show something people need to be concerned about, in the end it will not go somewhere. republicans tried so hard to come up with a scandal that would be on the order of iran contra or watergate or some of the big scandals of the past. they would find something that went wrong in then agency somewhere that was not within 100 miles of the white house and then hold hearings after hearings. there were eight congressional investigations of the benghazi, which was a terrible thing and

four people died, but it was not a scandal of malfeasance on the part of barack obama or the administration. americanse 245,000 who have died of coronavirus into there have been no congressional investigations of been noand there have congressional investigations of that. i hope there will be. one thing we will see over the next four years is within that conservative media universe there will be all kinds of stories that come up where somebody in the department of agriculture did not collate the report correctly and if republicans retain control of the senate there will be senate investigations. they will try to turn it into a scandal that it will be about as effective as the efforts the republican senate made in creating a scandal out of whatever was going on with hunter biden in ukraine.

next call, eleanor in new jersey, a supporter of the president elect. biden and hisort administration. after following presidents in my 88 years from franklin delano supportt and eleanor, i all the presidents in the democratic party except for a few republicans that i truly loved and honor. if you watch the body language of every president we have ever had, look into their eyes when isy speak, you can tell who truthful and who is deceitful. we all bleed red in this country , black white or blue. i am totally in favor of every first responder as a democratic

person. we need to look after each other in this country. we need to make concessions and we have to love their neighbors as ourselves. thank you for listening and i hope america is listening. host: that is eleanor. guest: those are wonderful sentiments. we can pre-much predict how joe biden is going to act as president. he will try to get republicans to join with him, but there is a fundamental substantive problem with that. we have this myth that if everyone would just put aside their petty partisanship bend get in the room and rolled up their sleeves they would be able partisanship and roll uphe same room and their sleeves they would be able

to solve all the problems, but they have fundamentally different ways of solving our problems. these are not really bridge bull gaps. it is not about can we just e gaps.-- bridgeabl it is not about to we just decide. one of the big questions about how divisive things are -- you can have a situation where everyone is not vilifying their theirs and trying to get particular policy vision enacted by in a way that is civil and polite, but one of the big questions will be what happens within the republican? trump may be gone but there -- trumpism will still persist.

watch the people who would like to run for president four years from now. if you look at people like ted cruz, tom cotton, josh hawley, what haley, keep an eye on kind of tone they take on. there will be many in the republican party who want to distance themselves from trump. he was particularly unpopular. they will see their path to per -- their path to success perhaps in a revision to a normal republican. there will be people who look at the party as it is now and to say trumpism is still very inerful and i need to mimic a stylistic away what he did, which means i need to bombastic and insult people and vilify democrats and that is what will get me support from that great bass that loved donald trump and is still there.

-- that great base that loved donald trump and is still there. there will be push and pull within the democrat -- within the republican party to determine which direction they will go. waldman, our next hugo gurdon. trump lost ground among his deplorable's, but agree with republican support in every other ethnic group." what do you think of that assessment? guest: it is quite remarkable.

it will take us a while to unpack what happened. we have all seen some of the weaknesses in polling, and it will be difficult to tease out in future poles that we take, exactly what happened -- future , exactly whattake happened. this is one of the strangest stories of this election. one of the interesting things you saw is that it seems at some point trump campaign may have realized this was happening. if you notice during the course of this campaign, especially in the last couple of months, trump did not talk about immigration at all. was very different than he was four years ago. he was not out there talking about immigrant criminals that would rape your daughters and kill your family. that rhetoric disappeared. it was as if they realized that

in places like miami-dade county in florida they were picking up support from latino subgroups and they did not want to endanger it. he had a racist appeal to other -- on other grounds. he spent a lot of time talking about how he had to protect the suburbs from low income people. it was rhetoric right out of the 1960's, but that seemed to fail. he seems to have a misunderstanding of what the suburbs are in america, that it thet like how it was in 1950's. the people there, their biggest concern is not keeping people out of their communities. on immigration, that rhetoric disappeared. one of the things it reveals is that the latino population is diverse and contains different subcommunities that look at this different.

places joe biden overwhelmingly one latinos. there was a big backlash -- overwhelmingly won latinos. there was a big backlash against trump's policy. it may have helped him win georgia, but then you had a situation in florida where trump did well with cuban-american communities. it was a much more complicated picture and it will take us a while to figure out exactly what happened, but that was certainly without question one of the most fascinating things that happened this year. host: let's hear from robert. you are on with paul waldman. go ahead. caller: yes her. i just wanted to -- yes sir. i just want to tell the

president ii like to dedicate h. dire straits. so far away from me. thank you. host: ok. mr. waldman, any response to that? , i don't know what song people might want to dedicate to the president. host: let me ask you this. you talked about results of this election. we sell republican seats gain in the house. how much of that is a concern to you? what does that mean as far as readership elections in nancy pelosi's tenure as house speaker? >> she said before she wanted to serve one more term. she could have one more shot to do the thing she does best which is passing legislation. i don't know if anyone is going to bother to challenge her. if they do, they will lose. her hold on the democratic

caucus and the house of representatives is absolutely secure. i don't think there's any concern about that. in terms of the losses the democrats suffered, we have seen some sniping between the progressives and the centrist and the party. some of the centrist members are saying it's because they were saddled with these things the progressive members said so that the fact that the representative from seattle, she calls herself a socialist and therefore that would be a problem for a democratic member of congress running an election 3000 miles away. the trouble with that is that if you look at who lost among the democrats in the house this year , almost all of them are people you absolutely would have expected to lose. you take a member like kendra horn in oklahoma, it looks like she's going to lose. by 14strict, trump won

points in 2016 and probably will win by a similar amount this year. you see over again people who were swept in and the democratic wave in 2018 managed to win in republican districts. 2020, it's a presidential year. turnout among republicans and democrats. if you are representing a heavily republican district, you can moderate your positions, you can try to convince your constituents that you are a centrist, but it's going to be really hard for you to win that election. happens at the presidential level and the house level are almost exactly the same. there's a really tight correlation. be plenty of democrats who represented republican districts and republicans who represented

democratic districts. every single race is nationalized now. it's not surprising at all. democrats came in hoping there would be this gigantic repudiation of donald trump and it would sweep down the ballot and they would pick up seats and hold onto the seats they gained in 2018 in those republican districts. it just wasn't going to happen. we can see it was absolutely predictable that a lot of those democrats who won the surprising victories, there was not going to be anyway they were going to hold on and a high turnout presidential year election. host: before we let you go, what do you think you are going to write? people in my business have been asking ourselves, if donald trump goes, how are we going to have enough to say every day? he was nothing if not a fountain of news.

i think the subject i'm going to turn my attention to is this transition in the new biden administration. what are they going to be able to do, where are they going to move ideologically. what are the issues that are going to be most important to them because those are the things that will ultimately affect our lives. i think that's the most important subject for the next year or two. host: you can see paul waldman's work at the american prospect. website at c-span.org. >> the people of the station have spoken they have delivered us a clear victory, a convincing victory. for we the people. we want with the most votes ever -- won with the most votes ever cast for a presidential candidate, 74 million.