What are presidents for?

Some final thoughts before the election.

Good morning! It’s Monday, November 4, 2024. Election Day is one day away.

Wow, we’re almost there! I hope everyone is holding up amid the crazy. This morning, I want to share some final pre-election thoughts to cap off the policy guides I sent out last week. Tomorrow, my Horse Race Moratorium will officially end — and I’ll bring you a complete guide of everything to watch as results roll in on Election Night.

Also: If you want more final analysis from me, I’ll be on NPR’s “1A” at 11 a.m. Eastern if you want to tune in.

Let’s do this!

A close-up of the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. (Photo by the White House)

I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the last few weeks talking to subject-matter experts in a range of policy areas, in order to put together my voter guides ahead of the election. (See the issues on immigration, the economy, energy, health care, and education.)

If there’s one thing I took away from the exercise, it was striking how many of the experts — completely unprompted — said something very similar to me over the course of discussing the two candidates’ agendas: Well, you know, no matter who wins the presidency, there’s really only so much they can do to impact [insert policy area].

Both candidates have placed combatting inflation at the heart of their economic agendas — but, the Tax Policy Center’s Howard Gleckman reminded me, the president doesn’t actually have much power over the rise and fall of prices. “The only functioning lever for dealing with inflation is monetary policy, and it’s largely succeeded,” Gleckman said. “I mean, the funny thing is, we actually won the war and nobody knows it.”

But, he acknowledged, it would be “bad politics” — to say the least — for a candidate, when asked what they would do about inflation, to respond: Nothing! Inflation’s already going in the right direction, so I’ll just sit back and let Jay Powell [the Federal Reserve chairman, who oversees monetary policy] keep doing what he’s doing. “That’s gonna get you, like, negative votes,” Gleckman said. “But that’s what the reality is.”

Similarly, on immigration policy, the Migration Policy Center’s Kathleen Bush-Joseph said that a president’s border restrictions (or lack thereof) can make a difference — but, also, any administration is inevitably at the mercy of seasonal trends and foreign crises out of their control.

“Crises in Latin America and in the Western Hemisphere have led to millions of Venezuelans and hundreds of thousands of Haitians leaving their home countries,” Bush-Joseph said. There’s only so much any administration can do in the face of those trends — especially if Congress refuses to act. “The executive actions that the administrations have taken have been extremely vulnerable to litigation,” she added. “And without the resources to be implementing these executive actions, it’s extremely difficult for the agents on the ground to even be trying to implement some of these measures.”

Same story when it comes to energy. As president, both Trump and Harris would likely encourage investments in both clean energy and fossil fuels — although presumably Harris would try to tip the balance more towards clean energy than Trump would. But, at the end of the day, “in the United States, the doesn’t really control the production of energy,” said Joseph Majkut of the Center for Strategic and International Studies “All this is done by private firms.”

“The falling costs of solar and wind power are pushing markets toward cleaner solutions,” Majkut continued. “Utilities and states and a variety of other decisionmakers are targeting emissions reductions. So even if a president comes in with a very ambitious climate agenda or a lackluster one, a lot of the trends are just market evolution, and we would fully expect that to continue regardless of who's elected next year.”

Of course, presidents can still impact all of these issues on the margins through regulations and other executive actions. But, in all, I found the conversations a strangely calming reminder that — despite all the (deserved) attention paid to the 2024 election — market trends will ultimately continue to move in the same direction. Seasonal trends and foreign crises will work their somewhat random will. The Federal Reserve will do what it’s gonna do. And Congress will maybe pitch in with some policy changes here and there, but — especially if there’s divided government, but even just if there’s still the Senate filibuster — the impact of those changes will be muted, too.

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Then again, I also think that — even though I absolutely believe the media should spend time discussing what the candidates are actually proposing on education, and health care, and other issues — there are also important facts of this election that policy guides on the issues I presented leave out.

Because, yes, presidents only have so much power — but the two candidates running this year also have very different conceptions of the presidency. So, in a way, presidential power is another issue on the table in this election, and the candidates’ plans there tell you things that merely ticking through their policy proposals will not.

According to a count by NPR, Donald Trump has “issued more than 100 threats to investigate, prosecute, imprison or otherwise punish his perceived opponents” over the course of his 2024 campaign. He has promised to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the “Biden crime family.” He has shared a social media post calling for Liz Cheney to face “televised military tribunals” and written one suggesting that Mark Milley should be executed. He has talked about arresting the attorney general of New York, the CEO of Facebook, and Hillary Clinton. He has pledged to fire Special Counsel Jack Smith — and even mused about prosecuting and deporting him.

He has threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses for television networks whose coverage he dislikes and said that journalists who don’t reveal their sources on national security stories should go to jail (and then joked about those journalists being raped in prison). Just yesterday, at a rally in Pennsylvania, he gestured to the bulletproof glass in front of him and said: “I have this piece of glass here, but all we have really over here is the fake news. And to get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don’t mind that so much.”

Normally, many of these threats would be considered idle — just like many of a president’s policy proposals are considered doomed — but Trump has also signaled that, if re-elected, he will break the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump and his allies have been eying “candidates for attorney general who share his expansive view of presidential authority and would be more willing to do the White House’s bidding.” With the right AG — something, it should be noted, Trump was unable to find in his first term — many of these prosecutions would be possible.

Of course, it’s important to point out that Kamala Harris has been part of the first administration in U.S. history to prosecute its political opponent (Trump himself, for retention of classified documents and attempt to overturn election results). But no evidence has emerged that either she or Joe Biden played any role in those prosecutions (although Biden said of Trump last month, “We’ve got to lock him up”).

Harris has also endorsed proposals that would have the effect of weakening guardrails on her power, including eliminating the Senate filibuster and reforming the Supreme Court. Both of these actions would water down the power of institutions that often block presidents from carrying out their will; these are not proposals to rejigger the executive branch but, if enacted, they would expand that branch’s power.

But she has never, on the campaign trail, called for a perceived opponent to be jailed, killed, or deported. She has not, as Trump has, mused about being a dictator for a day. A recent Washington Post report suggested that her Justice Department would likely take highly charged political positions — “she would probably want her Justice Department to act as a bulwark against laws from Republican governors restricting abortion, voting and transgender rights” — but gave no indication that she plans to direct the DOJ to prosecute anyone, as Trump has repeatedly threatened.

Notably, both candidates have evolved in their conceptions of presidential power in the last five years, although in opposite directions. Trump is contemplating a presidency much more expansive than his first go-around — both in public policy (mass deportations, universal tariffs) and in areas of pure fiat (threatening prosecutions, firing federal employees, bringing independent agencies under direct presidential control).

Harris, meanwhile, has been articulating designs of a presidency much weaker than the one she sought in 2019, when she supported unilaterally giving a path to citizenship to certain undocumented immigrants, imposing an electric vehicles mandate, and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), among other far-reaching proposals.

Presidents are, in part, vessels of public policy, as last week’s policy guides showed. But they are also stewards of the constitutional order, with the extent of their policy powers ultimately dependent on their own visions of the office — and here the two candidates this year differ as much as they do in any policy area. Harris has indicated support for a presidency that would face fewer veto points than the office is currently hemmed in by — but nothing on the order of Trump’s proposals to “demolish the deep state,” limit the power of independent agencies, require the “loyalty” of government workers, give himself more power over government spending, and generally take the dispersed levels of federal power and place more of them directly in the Oval Office.

As much as we debate them, love them, hate them, praise them, and blame them — presidents are often mere figureheads, powerless against the whims of the markets, of Congress, sometimes even of people who — by simply glancing at an org chart — appear to be their own subordinates. Unless, of course, they decide to buck against these guardrails, something that Donald Trump has placed at the center of his current campaign platform like no presidential candidate before him.

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More news to know

Clean up on Aisle Johnson. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

NYT on Sunday’s display of dueling closing messages: “Ms. Harris began her day at a Black church in Detroit where she told congregants that the nation was ‘ready to bend the arc of history toward justice,’ invoking the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Mr. Trump began his at an outdoor rally at an airport in Pennsylvania where, his shoulders slumped and his voice subdued, he threw out his prepared remarks to tell supporters that he ‘shouldn’t have left’ the White House after his loss to President Biden in 2020.”

Trump said that a proposal by RFK Jr. for him to ban fluoride in water on Day 1 “sounds OK to me.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled support for repealing the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, before later walking it back. (In response to a question from a Syracuse University student journalist!)

A new survey from Iowa’s most trusted pollster showed a shock result.

Pete Buttigieg isn’t closing the door on a run for Michigan governor. Rudy Giuliani isn’t closing the door on a run for New York City mayor.

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The day ahead

The candidates are criss-crossing the battleground map on the last full day of campaigning…

Vice President Kamala Harris will campaign in Scranton, Allentown, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

• Gov. Tim Walz will campaign in La Crosse, Stevens Point and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Former President Donald Trump will campaign in Raleigh, North Carolina; Reading and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Grand Rapids, Michigan.

• Sen. JD Vance will campaign in La Crosse, Wisconsin; Flint, Michigan; Atlanta, Georgia; and Newtown, Pennsylvania.

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Before I go…

There will be a lot of conversations over the next few days about election workers and election administration — and a lot of bad-faith actors who attempt to spread distrust of our voting system.

Which is why I want to share a Substack post sent to me by a Wake Up To Politics subscriber, Gloria Bilchik, who offers a rare inside glimpse into what the vote-counting process is actually like.

I highly recommend the post — you just might come out the other end with a little more trust in how our elections are run. Here’s one excerpt:

Our two-person team processed about 600-700 ballots each shift. As of the weekend before the election, more than 30,000 ballots had been received, with more on the way. Do the math: It takes a boatload of person-hours to complete the job. (Imagine, then, how long it would take to hand-count all ballots—as some people are suggesting—when there can be tens or scores of contests to be tabulated separately!)

Not to be glossed over or lost in the mechanics is the lesson of bi-partisanship at the heart of the ballot-opening gig. My partner and I, as I have noted, left our political views outside the workplace. But in three shifts together, we did have conversations—they kept us sane—and we gleaned a lot about each other. We are total political opposites—each as scared of the outcome of this election as the other. Yet, we worked together extremely well, collaborating on a system to keep ourselves on track, accepting each other’s mistakes, sharing tales from our life experiences, and even joking about subjects that were safe from politics. We didn’t talk about candidates or policies. We made it work. And in the end, we agreed that—even in today’s caustic political environment—everything doesn’t have to be about politics—and we can work together for a higher cause. Kumbaya, I know. But I find that heartening.

So do I. Read Gloria’s illuminating post here:

Three days in the life of a "ballot opener"