Your questions about the 2024 election results, from Trump trials to polls

Why is there so much surprise that President-elect Donald Trump nearly swept a slew of states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin? What is your conclusion about what Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign did wrong?

These are just a few of the questions you follow Trump’s presidential victory over Harris on Wednesday. The Republican, who was impeached twice, survived two murder attempts and wash convicted of 34 crimescollected more than 270 electoral votes, won all seven major battleground states and secured the popular vote. Harris admitted late Wednesdayin which he vowed to “never give up the fight for our democracy.”

USA TODAY political reporter Aysha Bagchi joined reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Reuters and Yahoo News for a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) hours after the race was called to answer some of your questions about Trump’s comeback, the polls leading up to the presidential race and more.

Here are six highlights from the discussion:

Ask: What happens now (legally) regarding the open lawsuits against Trump? Especially the upcoming sentencing hearing – as well as the other outstanding cases?

Answer: A colleague and I have a story here which goes into this in more detail. In short: Trump’s election victory has probably changed his criminal situation.

Many legal experts believe that Judge Juan Merchan would not be able to impose a criminal conviction against Trump that would significantly disrupt the presidency. Merchan could decide to suspend the entire sentencing – currently scheduled for November 26.

The three other cases – one from Georgian prosecutors and two from federal prosecutors – face similar problems. Moreover, Trump has already said he will fire special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the federal prosecution.

Early reports assign Smith’s office may investigate how these prosecutions can be reduced. A Ministry of Justice memo in 2000 said that prosecuting a sitting president would “unduly disrupt” the president’s job responsibilities.

Q: Can you comment on the Iowa Seltzer (sick) poll? Can you explain how a professional, unbiased polling source could be 16 points off reality?

A: Good question. Our team at the Des Moines Register said Selzer would review her records to determine the difference between the poll results and Trump’s victory.

Here’s some more insight from the Register, which shows the latest poll which showed Harris leading Trump in Iowa:

Selzer has long been considered Iowa’s gold standard, and Tuesday’s results represented a rare miss in her assessment of the Iowa electorate. From 2008 to 2020, the poll accurately reflected the winner of the Iowa presidential race

Although Selzer said she plans to dig deeper into the data, there were a few things she was looking forward to Tuesday night.

“Technically, the poll had some give because neither candidate reached 50%,” she said. “So the people who said they voted/would vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could easily have switched to Donald Trump. The late deciders could have chosen Trump in the final days of the campaign, after the interviews were completed. People who had already voted but chose not to tell our interviewers who they voted for could have given Trump an advantage.”

The Iowa poll showed that Kennedy, who had ended his presidential bid but was still on the ballot, received 3% of the vote in Iowa. Less than 1% said they would vote for Libertarian presidential candidate Chase Oliver, 1% said they would vote for someone else, 3% weren’t sure and 2% wouldn’t say who they had already voted for.

“Maybe I can get some clarity on that 9% and some underlying bias toward the presidential race,” Selzer said.

That’s possible read more about this here.

Question: Were there clear signs of election interference, such as bomb threats, disinformation campaigns, etc. from foreign actors?

A: There were signs of foreign interference in the elections before and on Tuesday.

I’m reporting from Georgia this week. The Republican Secretary of State here, Brad Raffensperger, announced on Tuesday that some polling stations had to close temporarily due to bomb threats from Russia. The FBI has released a statement saying that bomb threats have been made from Russian email domains to polling places in several states.

Before Tuesday, Russian actors were involved in a campaign to undermine confidence in US elections and stoke division among Americans. according to the FBI. For example, there was a debunked video that federal intelligence officials said came from Russia featured a Haitian man who described a plan to vote for Kamala Harris more than once in the 2024 election.

The Iranian government is also interfering in the American elections. say federal intelligence officials. Before Joe Biden ended his campaign, Iranian hackers sent the Biden campaign unsolicited information they stole from the Trump campaign. The government has not found any evidence that Biden campaign officials responded to emails containing snippets of the stolen material.

Q: Why do you think pollsters have been consistently and blatantly wrong about Trump over the past eight years?A: Final numbers are still coming in and polls have margins of error, but this is the third presidential election in which many pollsters appear to have underestimated Donald Trump’s support. Even when Joe Biden won in 2020, he won by a smaller margin than polls generally predicted.

In the post-mortem after those two previous elections, some polling experts thought Trump attracted voters who did not vote consistently and thus were not sufficiently identified by pollsters as likely voters. Polling experts also discussed the possibility that a relatively large number of Trump voters are more suspicious of institutions, and that this could lead to less willingness to respond to polls. And polling experts said some Trump voters may be reluctant to say they plan to vote for Trump. The pandemic could also have played a role in 2020’s problems, as Democrats were more likely to stay home and respond to polls.

For the 2024 election, many polls attempted to correct the previous undercount, for example by adjusting poll results to account for how people responded to polls and said they voted in 2020. (It was a technique to ensure that the polls show a more realistic number of Trump supporters.) Some even thought that the adjustments this time around could mean that the polls now overestimate Trump’s support.

What will the post-mortem on the 2024 elections look like? It could reflect some of the same potential problems we’ve seen before. But time will tell.

Question: The investigation into Jack Smith has effectively concluded, but Trump still has these state cases and the conviction for all of these cases. What’s happening there? Where does Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment address this after the SCOTUS ruling from earlier this year?

A: It is true that Trump has said he will fire Jack Smith, the special prosecutor leading the two federal prosecutions.

Some legal experts have previously argued that the move could expose Trump to charges of obstruction of justice. But the Supreme Court’s July 1 ruling on presidential immunity could also protect Trump from that risk. The court’s conservative wing ruled that Trump was absolutely immune from prosecution in his federal election interference case because of his alleged conduct involving conversations with Justice Department officials. Maybe this means that a president/former president can’t be charged with obstruction of justice because he ordered the DOJ to drop the prosecution against him?

Trump could also try to pardon himself in his federal criminal cases. Legal experts differ on whether this is allowed. The Supreme Court has never ruled on this issue.

Those are two options that Trump does not have in his criminal cases in New York state and Georgia. But his election will still be good news for him on those fronts. Trump’s lawyers can now argue that continuing with the Georgia case, or convicting him on November 26 in the New York case, is unconstitutional because it interferes with his responsibilities as newly elected president and possibly later as president.

Since Trump is the first president-elect in this situation, we don’t know how that argument about state prosecutions would play out. But the Supreme Court’s immunity decision talks about not wanting the judiciary to interfere with the executive. Trump’s lawyers may say this means state courts should not interfere in the presidency. And they can also point to a clause in the US Constitution that says federal laws take precedence over state laws (the Supremacy Clause), and say that means state courts/prosecutors cannot interfere with the presidency.

Question: Will you continue to report as you have done for the past four years as the president-elect wants to jail journalists and do you expect him to do that to his enemies?A: We will absolutely report on Trump’s next presidency.

Many Justice Department observers are concerned that Trump could try to use the department to go after enemies. He has shared images on Truth Social depicting Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden in jumpsuits and called for indictments of those on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

There are reports that Trump tried to go after rivals during his first term. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general, told prosecutors that Trump asked him to stop recusing himself from campaign-related investigations and order the Justice Department to prosecute Hillary Clinton in 2017, according to the US newspaper The Guardian. Mueller report. The New York Times reported that Trump told White House counsel Donald McGahn in 2018 that he wanted Hillary Clinton and James Comey prosecuted.

Some fear that Trump will encounter less resistance in a second term. His allies have indicated he will look for loyalty and commitment to his agenda when selecting personnel for his next administration.

For a deep dive, I’ve written more about these concerns here.

Click here to read the full AMA.