Mara Liasson shares her thoughts regarding 2022, 2024 elections

The NPR correspondent and Fox News contributor Mara Liasson (left) speaks on the increasing political divisions in America with political science professor Lori Cox Han (right). Photos by Renee Elefante, News & Politics Editor

NPR correspondent Mara Liasson, who is also a contributor to Fox News, spoke at Chapman University Sept. 29 as part of the Bill and Ronna Shipman Distinguished Speaker Series in Presidential Studies presented by Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and Lori Cox Han, the director of the presidential studies program.

The program promotes discussion on relevant and significant subjects associated with the American presidency. Liaison was the second speaker in the series, the first being journalist and national affairs analyst John Heilemann in October last year. 

Liasson discussed the upcoming elections in 2022 — specifically midterm elections in Congress — and the 2024 presidential election. She also discussed the increased political polarization in America, the changing forecasts for the midterms throughout 2022 and the potential contenders for the 2024 presidential election.

“American politics is just too apocalyptic,” Liasson said at the event. “Instead of just being your opponents, the people you disagree with are your enemies. They are traitors. They should be locked up.”

Liasson emphasized that American politics is too divided, creating polarization and gridlock.

“Our system can only work with compromise, and our politics makes compromise almost impossible,” Liasson said. “With very few exceptions, we have a dysfunctional, gridlocked Congress. We keep having change elections.” 

According to Liasson, “change elections” are where the dominant party of one or both houses of Congress switch. She further continued to share why seven of the past eight elections were change elections, comparing the American system of government to parliamentary governments.

“In a parliamentary system, a party comes into power, they get to enact their agenda, voters take a look at it and decide if they like it or not,” Liasson said. “In our system, a party comes into power, they are the majority, but for a variety of reasons, including the filibuster, they don’t get to enact their agenda, voters get frustrated and they vote them out of office.”

For the 2024 presidential election, Mara Liasson believes that Donald Trump or Florida governor Ron DeSantis are the strongest contenders to win the Republican nomination and that there are no particularly strong contenders for the Democratic nomination.

Liasson also discussed Americans’ tendency to live in communities of people similar to them, a sociological concept known as the “big sort.”

“Americans tend to live in communities near people who vote like us, worship like us, look like us and get their media and information from the same sources,” Liasson said. “We have sorted ourselves out into homogeneous communities that don’t trust the other communities. In other words, we are a low trust society, and that makes for unstable politics.”

Liasson then went into detail about the changing predictions for this year’s midterms. She explained that the forecasts for Congressional elections have generally favored Republicans since the dominant party — currently the Democrats — usually lose control in the midterm elections due to issues like inflation and illegal immigration continuing to prevail. 

Over the summer, the predictions favored the Democrats as inflation slightly decreased and the overturning of Roe v. Wade motivated Democrats, especially women, to register to vote. 

Currently, Liasson thinks the Republicans will take the House of Representatives and control of the Senate could go either way.

“I would say that the House will go Republican, but not by the 20 to 25 or 30 seats they were predicting a year ago,” Liasson said. “In the Senate, I think it’s way too close to call … I can see Republicans coming in with 51 seats and the Democrats with 49. I can see the Democrats losing one and picking up one and having the same 50-50 split we see now.”

For the 2024 presidential election, Liasson believes that Donald Trump or Florida governor Ron DeSantis are the strongest contenders to win the Republican nomination and that there are no particularly strong contenders for the Democratic nomination.

After Liasson’s speech, attendants had the opportunity to ask Liasson questions on the upcoming elections and the current state of American politics. The Panther asked Liasson her thoughts on whether or not American democracy can last as a two-party system, to which she responded that she believes so.

“It will depend a lot on how those two parties evolve,” Liasson told The Panther. “Both parties have to believe in diversity of views and tolerance for other views, and they have to accept all of the institutions of a democracy like free press and an independent judiciary.”

Over 60 people attended Liasson’s discussion, including junior peace studies and political science double major Michael Pepito, who attended the event after hearing about it from his friends.

“I love hearing about the news and people's takes on what's going on in America and also the midterms are coming up,” Pepito told The Panther. “So, I thought it'd be really interesting to catch up.”

Pepito thought Liasson was an effective speaker and found her talk interesting.

“I think overall, she's a really engaging speaker, so everything she talked about was very easy to listen to and interact with,” Pepito said. “But by far, my favorite topic was her takes on polarization and especially the outcomes of the midterms.”

Junior political science and economics double major Zohal Noorzaye learned about Liasson’s talk in a class about the presidency class, taught by Han.

“(Han) had Mara come into our classroom for a Q&A session, and they encouraged us to attend this event as well so we could hear what she had to say about her career and just her opinions on the future elections,” Noorzaye said.

Noorzaye’s favorite topic of the night was civic engagement, especially bettering civic engagement lessons in K-12 education.

“She talked about how public schools have kind of drifted away from covering civic engagement in schools and that teaching kids at a young age can really help benefit people in understanding American politics, American law and American government overall,” Noorzaye said.

Despite the current issues within American democracy, Liasson is still optimistic about its survival.

“I believe America is the greatest democracy that ever existed and that Americans want to keep it that way,” she said during the event. “They will do the hard work necessary to make the reforms to make it happen.”