Not Another Politics Podcast – Episode 16

On this "Just Another Politics Podcast Special", we join our fellow political podcasts in sitting back in our armchairs and sharing our thoughts on the Presidential debate.

The day after the debate, we recorded a response to what happened and what we think its affect on the 2020 election could be. We think this insightful conversation is worth sharing with you, even if it breaks our usual format.

We'll be back next episode with serious-minded research and science that looks at our political system!

The show is hosted by three professors at the Harris School of Public Policy: William HowellAnthony Fowler and Wioletta Dziuda.

Listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you enjoy podcasts.

Transcript

Wioletta Dziuda:

I'm Wioletta Dziuda.

Anthony Fowler:

I'm Anthony Fowler.

William Howell:

I am Will Howell, and this is Just Another Politics Podcast. So, if Not Another Politics podcast is about research and scholarship and reflecting upon what we learn from political science in a serious-minded way. Just Another Politics podcast is us leaning back in our armchairs and holding forth as frankly, most politics podcasts do. We're going to join company with them.

Wioletta Dziuda:

We were working very hard on academic papers, trying to bring you some serious science and serious discussion. And then we got distracted on Wednesday. Am I right? Do I remember correctly?

Anthony Fowler:

Tuesday.

Wioletta Dziuda:

It seems like the entire month has passed since that happened. So yeah. So today we are just going to listen to Will and Antony discussing their emotional reaction to what happened during the presidential debate. I am going to bring a big bag of popcorn and see what they have to say.

Anthony Fowler:

So we haven't stopped doing our Not Another Politics Podcast. We will continue doing that and we'll continue to discuss research papers. But Will and I got together and we just felt like we had to air some thoughts about the debate that mostly did not have to do with any political science research. And so that's why we're calling this Just Another Politics podcast as opposed to Not Another Politics Podcast, but we hope you enjoy it nevertheless.

William Howell:

Presidential debates in some ways, offer at least an opportunity, this moment where average citizens can come together and at once learn about policy in ways that they wouldn't otherwise have that opportunity. And to get clarity about the differences and the stakes involved in a presidential contest in this case. And so here we go. That was the promise of presidential debates, right? We were going to come together, we're going to learn something. What did you think? Did it live up to that promise? It obviously did not. The answer to that is obviously no. But how do we think about what might've been learned or not learned? What did you take away?

Anthony Fowler:

We kind of knew this one was going to be different and if you've been paying close attention to the Trump presidency, you're not all that surprise, but even then it was pretty disappointing. Even relative to what we should have expected, there was almost no policy content discussed. It was atrocious, it was atrocious. It was embarrassing for our country. It was a sad day for our democracy and for voter information. It was terrible in all respects. And there was even like a small part of me that thought, well, maybe at the very least it'll be entertaining. I don't know what you thought about. Gosh, do I regret having ever, ever thought that? I mean, it wasn't entertaining. It was just horrifying in respects. The thing that most people remember from this debate is just Trump's demeanor.

And in some ways that's kind of a sad thing that what people will remember is Trump's demeanor, that he was a bully and he interrupted a lot and so on because there were a lot of horrifying policy ideas also to the extent that there were any policy ideas discussed. There were some very troubling things for democracy, like you said. Like Trump telling white supremacists to stand by and like Biden, not stating whether or not he would or wouldn't pack the courts.

I would be interested for a moment to just talk about Joe Biden's performance, because I think Donald Trump's performance is kind of the thing that everyone is going to remember. That was the big headline, but in some ways it's hard to separate Biden's performance from Trump because who knows what anyone would do under these circumstances where you're just being constantly interrupted and berated and yelled at and challenged and so, it was just unprecedented, but if you try, I mean, I'm curious to hear what you think as well, if you try to separate, take Donald Trump out of it and just imagine that Biden had been debating Mitt Romney up there last night. How would we have then thought about Biden's performance?

I think we would actually have been pretty disappointed in Biden's performance. I think we would have said, there were a few blunders, like not even answering the question about whether he would pack the courts. I think his position on the Supreme Court was a little bit hard to defend, this idea that the president shouldn't get to fill the seats, which is essentially the same argument that Mitch McConnell made in 2016 and all the Democrats said that was a repugnant idea. And now all of a sudden that's the same argument that Biden is making in 2020. I thought that was very surprising and jarring.

And then Biden also had some, just little kinds of gaffes, like the kinds of gaps that we used to make fun of George W. Bush for making. He said the wrong thing a few times. And he said that he supported the Green New Deal and it was clear that that was an accident, he took it back. He said, 9/11 call instead of 911 call, things that he said kind of angrily. He said, I am the democratic party. You understand why? In context he was saying that, but that's a very strange thing for a presidential, kind of like an arrogant, angry, strange thing for a presidential nominee to be saying. Those are all things that had Trump given a more typical presidential debate performance, we would be talking about those things. And we'd be, I think pretty disappointed in Joe Biden.

William Howell:

I think that's right. My guess though, is a number of the things he wouldn't have said had he not been goaded throughout and pestered and harassed and insulted. It is really hard to sort of replay history and imagine what Biden's performance would have looked like had a reasonable sparring partner been standing at the other podium. but look, he wasn't stellar. He wasn't especially eloquent. He doesn't speak in whole paragraphs. He's not the sharpest, quickest debater. All of that is true. It isn't clear though, to me, at least that that is the standard to which he was being held both because, and the press said a lot about this, that Trump has been spending the last few weeks and months talking about how he is addled, he is senile. And he was not addled and he wasn't senile.

Anthony Fowler:

So he didn't illustrate the kind of arguments that Trump has been leveling against him just as there's a lot to be said, I think, in those moments for him to just remain calm as best he can and to take those moments as best he could to look into the camera and try to say something coherent. And so when he looked into the camera and sort of implored people to say, vote, vote, vote. Those were good moments for him and then he saw that through. This is what's at stake here. And the power resides with you. It's not with this guy across the stage who is insisting he may or may not stand down. It's not up to him. It's up to you. Those were better moments for him. It's not that they were stellar moments.

William Howell:

I agree, that was a good strategy on Biden's part. Most of the time, it almost seemed like he was trying to ignore Donald Trump and just talk to the camera and just get out some of his ideas, some of his messages. And I think that was smart. And in the few moments where he lost track of that, and he instead, said, "Just shut up, man." and called them a clown and so forth, I think I understand why he would do that. I understand why any of us would probably do that in that situation, but it probably wasn't a good idea. And it was more effective when Biden just stuck to his messages and spoke directly to the American people.

Anthony Fowler:

I think that's probably right. That's very tricky though. What does it mean to respond presidentially to a heckler, which is what Trump was doing? Well, I can just one, sort of just pretend he's not there and throughout just talk to the camera. And at what point do you say, knock it off. I'm not just a pushover. But look calling him a clown, he's not a clown. First of all, that's not what was being illustrated up there. What was being illustrated up there was a strong man who was doing everything he could to ridicule an opponent, to insist that the upcoming election is rigged, that his supporters need to stand by, not just the white supremacists, but members of his own party need to go to polling stations and monitor what's going on. And in speaking in the kind of most extreme terms about how this election is getting ready to be stolen and we had better be ready for the fallout and laying out, we should expect this to go to the Supreme Court.

And it's a Supreme court that, right now, he's putting on one of his own to adjudicate any kind of fallout, any sort of dispute about the outcome of the election and that's deeply, deeply troubling. Those are really, so that's where like the heckling is not just somebody behaving in ways that are of really poor taste. There was plenty of that, to be sure. Many of which involved Biden's family, but there are deeper stakes involved. At the top, you recognized there wasn't much talk about policy. That was this lost opportunity for the possibility for us to both learn about policy and learn about the differences between them. And there are real differences between them that we should get some clarity about, but there was a kind of degrading of our democracy that was playing out there. And that's a source, not just of shame and disappointment, but also alarm.

William Howell:

You did say, you said at one point you said Trump is not a clown. To what extent was this an explicit strategy on his part? I mean, he didn't come into this as if he hadn't prepared. Many of his rants seemed very prepared. In fact, maybe he's been watching a lot of Fox News and he's got his rants down pat and he's ready to unleash them at any moment. But to what extent was there some thought put into this by Trump, as opposed to just, he can't help himself and this is how he behaves.

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah. I don't think it was him behaving impulsively. There was talk about whereas Biden was prepping for this and preparing, and you could see it. He had these quotes that he was ready to roll out. And these lines that he was ready to unfurl. He, being Biden. Whereas Trump, he was on his game. He came in ready for a slug fest and to just ridicule his opponent and to raise all kinds of concerns about the legitimacy of the upcoming election and he was doing that. He wasn't distracted. We have this idea that, he's not a clown who is sort of joking and all over the place and the guy who plays too much golf and who shows up on his heels, not knowing what he's doing. He was leaning forward throughout and it showed, and he looked a lot more like a strong man to me than a clown.

William Howell:

You could even imagine that, if you don't have a good COVID response plan, which Trump doesn't seem to, if you don't have a good comprehensive healthcare plan, et cetera, if your case is not strong on the merits, this is not an unreasonable thing to try, to try to come into the debate and instead of having people talk about your COVID plan or lack thereof, have people talk about your demeanor. you go in and you try to make a big splash. You interrupt, you disrupt any meaningful policy conversation, instead make it about your brash personality and the fact that you're a little bit of a bully. And instead of the fact that, on the merits, Biden might have better policies than you do.

Anthony Fowler:

That's right. You and I are talking about his performance and not talking about the catastrophe that was the US response to COVID and the fallout of it, and the challenges of climate change that are incredibly complex and daunting and that we see leading to on one coast, fires, but on the other coast, floods. And an immigration system, which is not fixed. It was his first issue, what he ran on. He, being Trump. What he ran on in 2016 was a broken immigration system, which remains every bit as broken as it was when he assumed office and who was swept to office with discontent over the Affordable Care Act. And to this day has yet to even articulate, which he was called out on, what a comprehensive healthcare reform plan would look like. And so instead what he does is he just insists, Trump insists that no, no, no, no, it's all good. It's all spectacular. I'm on top of it. Like nobody's ever seen how great this is, and then pivots to this sort of outlandish behavior, which then preoccupies all of our attention.

But I guess I will say here is that it's not just the behavior, it's signaling what lies ahead, not just next year, but in the coming weeks. I mean how this election is going to be held in ways that are safe, that ensures that people's votes are counted, that there is a recognition on the part of these candidates, although it should be counted and honored as such. He's really playing with fire here, because there are tens of millions of people who are willing to follow him along. And even if Biden wins and is installed, he's going to have to govern a country wherein these people, what does it mean to start covering a country wherein tens of millions of people think that you stole an election?

William Howell:

Absolutely. It really does. I mean, this is where it matters per se, what the president says. I mean, the health of democracy depends on what the president is willing to say or not say. And when he's asked whether he's willing to denounce white supremacy and he balks at it, that matters per se, over and above any other, because it changes the way people feel about our democracy and whether their voice is going to be heard and if they're going to be safe and so on. And when Donald Trump says, no, he will not ask his supporters to remain calm and just wait for the results of the election to come in. And when he refuses to do that, that's a very troubling thing for a democracy. We need leaders who respect elections and respect the results of elections and are willing to say publicly that they respect elections.

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah, it's a kind of vulnerability that democracies have. The reason why the 1800 election was such a big deal is the first time we saw a transfer of power. And it wasn't clear that what would happen if somebody refused to stand down. Now there are norms against this. There are people who we would count on to come forward and to say, no, you must stand down. We might hope that Mitch McConnell and the Republican party will step forward and to say, Trump, you've got to, you've got to stand down. We don't see that Republican party right now, speaking out against this president in the aftermath of what he said last night. And so what does it then mean when people are really worked up and the election looks close and worse yet, wherein Trump looks like he's ahead on election night, but that then those leads start to dwindle and maybe flip in the days that followed. What does that look like? And is the party that Trump is making and remaking one that would stand up against him. I guess I'm less and less hopeful.

William Howell:

One question I want to ask you is, again, another Trump strategy question is it seemed to me that one of Trump's strategies last night, to the extent that he had an explicit strategy in his mind was to try to attack Biden. But it's a very funny thing. Attack Biden for various policy proposals that often he has not endorsed, but policy proposals that have been endorsed by other Democrats and in some cases, even, and of course that was what led Biden to say, I am the democratic party, which I think was a regretful line. But nevertheless, you understand why he said it.

Anthony Fowler:

Yes. These are positions that Biden has not endorsed, taken by candidates that Biden is, in many cases, beat in the primary. And Trump is trying to kind of throw them at Biden and hope some of them stick or something. It was such an unusual strategy.

William Howell:

Yeah. It is a bit unusual in the sense that you want to paint your opponent as being extremist or being more extreme than he or she actually is. And that's what he was doing. It was sort of a one-two punch though. It was, your Green New Deal. No, I don't believe in the Green New Deal. Oh, you don't believe in the Green New Deal? Well, you've just lost the whole radical left, which is your base. And so you can't win either way. You either, under his formulation, or being asked to endorse something that he is arguing is extreme. And if you refuse to do so, well, then your entire basis lost and you're all alone. In one moment, he's trying to equate Biden with Sanders and in the next, trying to drive a wedge between them.

Anthony Fowler:

You know, most of our evidence from political science would tell us that Biden is right to try to stay closer to the middle and say, electorally speaking Biden is better off saying, no, I did not want to defund the police. No, I did not support the Green New Deal. No, I did not support the Bernie Sanders/ Elizabeth Warren tax plan, et cetera. But Trump is almost, maybe even trying to goad him a little bit into pushing out further or tempt him. And by threatening him saying, you're going to lose the left, which empirically speaking isn't really true. There's not any evidence that Biden is going to lose the left just by maintaining these kinds of center left positions. So Biden was mostly doing the right thing, but there's maybe a logic to what Trump is doing. Like almost trying to

William Howell:

There could be. I mean, I think you're trying to in ridiculing the opponent, lead them to be dispirited and then just have some members say, I just find this all so sickening. What's the point, Trump's going to win anyway, because this isn't going anywhere. And meanwhile, with his performance, Trump can, he can present himself as the strong man who's going to stand up against the socialists threat.

Anthony Fowler:

In a post-Trump world, whenever we get to a post-Trump world, will the tenor of presidential debates kind of go back to normal or has Trump opened Pandora's box, so to speak. And are we in a whole new political world now where the strong man approach that has not been a big part of American politics could become a big part of American politics going forward?

William Howell:

What does American politics look like beyond this election? I mean, that's a massive, massive question. To answer it, the things to watch for, to my mind, are, does this lead to a repudiation of Trump within the Republican party, or does the Republican party look more and more like the party of Trump? I think we should look for and we should continue to track the rise of populism in our politics. This is something I have a book out, Terry Moe and I wrote called Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy in which we argue that this is a force that's born of big structural features, which isn't going to go away. It's not. Trump is channeling it right now, is benefiting from it right now, but it isn't going to go away. And there's nothing to keep other versions of Trump to run for future elections and to leverage the outrage and the fear and the anxiety and the bigotry that his base now feels and that they will feel even more acutely in the aftermath of election that they see as being stolen and rigged. What do you think?

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah, I agree. I agree. You should all read Will's book. It's a great book, but I agree. I agree completely. I think it's something to pay very close attention to. And in one sense, Trump is just another symptom of populism increasing in democracies around the world. We've seen a lot of examples of them, but he's a very successful one. He's a model in some ways. And so it's a very concerning thing to see this from a sitting president. And you worry that a lot of other politicians are going to see that this is a strategy for future success. So I hope that's not right, but I don't think we know yet. We don't have enough compelling theory or evidence on this. And there's some parts of Trump's strategy that seemed to work for him. I'm curious also to ask you about, and this is, I'm sure this is something that is on the minds of lots of people. How much does this matter? How much does this matter? We've talked about how much it matters for kind of the health of democracy. And that's very troubling. How much does it matter for who wins the election?

William Howell:

Let me give you my best guess. And then I want to hear from you because this is up your alley. You're really the election expert here. My sense is that it's not going to reorient the direction of this election. It intensifies certain trends when we were expecting it to be combative, not this combative, but it doesn't redirect it in a deep way. The kinds of conversations that are going to follow in the coming weeks that would obviously benefit Trump. Trump's down by seven points, eight points in the polls. And in this sense, in the main, you'd say, it's not the performance you have been hoping from Biden, but it wasn't so bad for Biden. We also don't have a whole lot of evidence looking back that debates matter a whole lot, that any single event matters a whole lot, including campaign conventions.

You see a minor campaign convention bump in the aftermath of a whole lot of attention paid to these spectacles, but that they dissipate pretty quickly. Now that's drawing upon previous history and the evidence has been available. And to your point that you just made is that well, Trump is pretty different in a lot of ways. And so the lessons that we learned from history may not apply this go round, but I guess I'd also say that there is this present bias. We always think that this moment is special, that this is the one that is going to force us to rethink paradigms and well, those paradigms do an awfully good job. The structural features do an awfully good job of predicting electoral outcomes. And right now, given the state of the economy and given public opinion on Trump, it looks like a Biden win. I would say. What do you think though?

Anthony Fowler:

I agree with that assessment. I think for a presidential election, we already have so much information about the candidates and especially, Biden and Trump, especially they're such high profile candidates. Trump has been a celebrity forever, and Biden's been a prominent politician forever. And it's hard to imagine that many people tuned in last night and significantly shifted their beliefs about either of them, because we already knew a lot about their personalities. We knew a lot about their policy positions and so on. And on one hand, we know that things in campaigns don't have huge effects. We know that television advertising has tiny effects that dissipate quickly over time and so forth. But if there was ever going to be one moment that really made a difference, it would be something like a presidential debate where the whole country is tuning in and we're learning a lot.

And although many of us, probably many of our viewers right now pay very close attention to politics and have been paying very close attention to the Trump presidency. There were probably a lot of Americans who haven't paid very close attention and they glance at a headline every once in a while, and they have a rough sense of how the economy's going, but maybe they haven't really tuned into a Trump speech since 2016. And they tuned it in last night and they might've thought, man, it's worse than I thought. And I know a lot of people, I know some Trump supporters who contacted me today, who told me, gosh, that was embarrassing. Gosh, that was the worst performance by any candidate in a presidential debate. And they're really questioning their positions.

So if there ever was going to be a moment where you'd expect to see a big effect, it would be something like this. One highlight, low light for me last night that hasn't been getting a lot of attention, but I thought it was actually somewhat revealing and troubling about the Trump presidency was when he was asked about his position on healthcare and I pulled up the transcript, I'm going to just going to read the quote and to do my best job. He said something like, then I had a choice-

William Howell:

In Trump's voice?

Anthony Fowler:

No, no, I'm not going to do that. Even though, even though Ethan, our colleague, said that should reenact the debate. I'm not going to try to do that. But maybe it's better if I don't do it in the Trump voice and you could just appreciate the words for what they are. He said, then I had a choice to make, do I let my people run it really well or badly? He's talking about healthcare. If I run it badly, they'll probably blame him, where him is Obama, but they'll blame me. But more importantly, I want to help people. Okay. I said, you've got to run it so well.

So what's going on there. I mean, you could give your color on this as well, Will, but one way to interpret this is Trump is admitting publicly that while he was president of the United States, he contemplated intentionally sabotaging the US healthcare system with the thinking that people would mostly blame Obama if it happened. But then he thought about it and he thought, well, they'll probably also blame me a little bit too.

And I guess I shouldn't do that. And so I told my people run healthcare. On the one hand, that's like a kindergarten view of what it's like to be president. Like you're sitting at your desk and you're like, do a good job with health care, not a bad job with healthcare, which is just hilarious in and of itself. But there's also this revelation that the sitting president of the United States seriously considered sabotaging the country and sabotaging our healthcare for personal political gain. That's the kind of thing that is totally unprecedented

William Howell:

It's unbelievable. I would differ it just in one small way. I'm completely with you. And I'm glad that you read this because people aren't paying attention to today and we ought to shine a light on that claim, which was made in response to questions about what is your comprehensive health care policy? What does it mean to resuscitate a broken healthcare system? And in so many ways, our healthcare system is in fact broken. Exhibit A, our ability to respond to the pandemic, or our utter inability as the case may be. The one place that I differ is my sense is that it's not that he seriously considered that is that he wants to be liked in some way. But again, I want you to notice I could have done this thing and I didn't. And you should sort of applaud me for that. You who liked to criticize me.

Anthony Fowler:

That's like the leadership of like the mafia or something. It's like I could have done something bad, but I didn't and so you should like me. I mean, It's amazing.

William Howell:

Exactly. But having said that, I'm reticent for us to go too far down the road of playing armchair psychologist on this man, because I think really what he's doing is playing from a playbook and it's a populous playbook. And it has to do with undoing a democracy. When we think about what the stakes are involved to my mind, it really has to do with the degradation of our democracy, our faith in government, our belief in a free and fair open elections, our willingness to look to leaders for guidance about hard policy issues. These notions have been under assault for some time now. And that, I thought, was laid bare last night in ways that were at once shameful and alarming. I don't know, I left feeling a fair bit of kind of a mix of anxiety and despair after the debate last night. I don't know how you felt.

Anthony Fowler:

Yes, no, of course, absolutely, absolutely. It's very troubling. One interesting possibility is that because the presidential debate contained so little policy content, and if there is an appetite among the public, maybe a lot more people will want to tune into that vice-presidential debate to actually hear what Pence and Harris say about the actual policy agendas of their parties and their administrations going forward.

William Howell:

That could be. I mean, we're accustomed to think, it's usually the vice president is the one that is blasting the other side, is playing the role of pugilist and that we're going to look for decorum on that side and insight into what we should do to address these pressing national issues. I mean, I'll say, I wouldn't hold my breath in that. What we can expect Pence to do is to just defend Trump's record and to mimic Trump, not his posture, not his affect, but mimic the kinds of claims, the grandiose claims about how fantastic the economy was and how terrific US response was to COVID. It'll be interesting to see how Kamala Harris plays it.

Anthony Fowler:

We'll see. All right. Well, this has been really fun, Will. It's great talking to you as always.

William Howell:

It is great talking to you.

Anthony Fowler:

Thanks for listening to Not Another Politics podcast.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Our show is a podcast from the Harris School of Public Policy and is produced by Matt holdup. Thanks for listening.