What Just Happened?

Last week, the American people elected Joe Biden to be the forty-sixth president of the United States. This was an incredibly contentious and complex election. We decided to get together to try and make sense of what just happened.

We discuss what message the historic turn out, for both candidates, sends about Trumpism and the increasing left-wing of the Democratic party, why the polls got everything so wrong, again, and what a Biden Presidency will look like given the likelihood of a divided government.

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

Listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you enjoy podcasts.

Transcript 

Anthony Fowler:

I am Anthony Fowler, and this is Just Another Politics Podcast. We've just made it through another grueling, taxing, tiring, exhausting, challenging, perplexing, interesting, stimulating election. Most of the results are in, and we got together to record another episode and discuss what just happened. We recorded this on Friday when we had a pretty good sense of what had just happened in the presidential election. What does it mean about the state of public opinion and American voters? What does it mean about the state of American democracy, and what's likely to happen going forward, and what interesting things are we going to want to pay close attention to going forward? So even though we recorded this last Friday, we think the things we discussed are going to be relevant for a long time to come. So I hope you enjoy it. Please have a listen.

William Howell:

I assume we've gathered to talk about the big news of the week, which is the bachelorette. Did you guys—

Anthony Fowler:

Oh, that's good. You led with a good joke.

William Howell:

It's big news. No. Do you know what I'm talking about or—

Anthony Fowler:

No.

William Howell:

So normally, the way the bachelorette works is you spend about three weeks or so dating a bunch of different guys, and you find out who you really love, and then you get engaged at the end of it. This season, that was too fast for the bachelorette, and she decided she already fell in love after like three conversations with the guy. So they got engaged and it ended early.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Well, the opposite of an election.

William Howell:

It was a big shock. Yeah. In contrast with the election show, where they really drag things out for us, and we had to wait a long time to see what happened.

Anthony Fowler:

I'm really interested to hear what you guys think. I mean, I've been hitting refresh every 30, 40 seconds, knowing that it's not healthy. This is no way to live, but I keep doing it. I guess—

William Howell:

I feel horrible about it. I've been telling reporters for months now that we shouldn't get too fixated on what happens on election night. It's going to take a few days for everything to be resolved. We've known that all along, and yet I couldn't help myself on Tuesday night. I was constantly refreshing that, and we're looking at those early returns come in. In some cases, they were way off from what we expected in terms of the polls. So it was a big shock. It's been kind of a wild ride this week.

Anthony Fowler:

It has. A perfectly predictable and wild ride. Then also, we've been told all along by the president himself that he's going to contest this, and sure enough, that's exactly what he's doing, and yet it's hard not to feel affected by it.

Wioletta Dziuda:

It used to be enough pretty well. At least to me, it was surprisingly well. So how do you think about that?

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah. I mean, if you come in just looking at the polls, and if you're a Democrat, and you look up at Trump and think, "Oh my God, everything about him is some flavor of awful," that then what we were on the precipice of was a grand repudiation of Trumpism in the Republican party, and there was going to be this blue wave, and that decidedly has not happened.

William Howell:

It is worth, of course, stopping to point out that most incumbent presidents do win, about two-thirds of them win, and he lost. So maybe in some ways, this was a bit of a repudiation of Trump, but perhaps not as large as you would have expected if you thought about the fact that he was impeached, he was written by scandals his entire presidency. He had what seemed to me to be a disastrous response to a global pandemic, et cetera.

Anthony Fowler:

If you look at Trump and his behavior and sort of the centrist or left of the political setback term, and you look at his behavior, you look at the pandemic, you think this is somebody who has been profoundly bad for the country, that then the hope for repudiation is not just of him, but of all those who stood by him. What we're most likely to be entering into is a world in which McConnell is most likely going to remain the majority party leader of the Senate. The Democrats lost seats in the house. Plenty of state legislatures are going to remain as they were before. So I think the hope, it wasn't just that they would be a repudiation of Trump, but anybody who was willing to put up with Trump, and that clearly has happened. In that sense, I think there's a sense that it was a disappointment that is surely to be felt on the left.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Also, we have a historic turnout, which means that yes Trump lost. But there were another people that came out to vote for him and a lot of first-time voters for him, people who didn't vote for him four years ago. So for me, this cannot be perceived as a repudiation of Trumpism, as we are tired. We want to try something new. It's more like, we actually liked a lot of aspects of what he did. This was puzzling to me. I felt that maybe he would hold on to the majority that he had before, but it seems that he has gained new voters.

Anthony Fowler:

He gained some. But he also lost a lot as well. We can dig into some of what we know already from who did he seem to lose and where did he seem to pick up votes. You're right. I mean, turnout was historically high. So he did get a lot of votes, obviously, numerically speaking. But there also must have been lots of people who showed up who typically vote for Republican candidates. They voted for Republicans for governor and senate and state legislature and house and so on, and they voted for Biden. That's not a lot of people, but maybe it looks like there were maybe a couple percent of Americans did that, and that is unusual.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Okay. So let's talk about this. So what do you think that means for the Republican party? What takeaway should they take from this election?

William Howell:

I think it's an open question. I guess I'm really struck by the kind of grip that not just Trump as personality, but what he represents, the populism that he channels, that it's a profound force, that even in the aftermath of this catastrophic, I mean, we're in the midst of it, it's catastrophic pandemic and a mess of a campaign. I mean, this couldn't have been sort of a worst year for Trump in many ways, and yet we see tens of millions of people willing to continue to support him. I think that speaks to his appeal, and that appeal will be available to somebody else within the Republican party, one who wants to channel the same kind of disaffection with the political system, the sense that things aren't working, that their voices aren't heard. It's going to be available to them.

So I don't expect there to be the kind of in the aftermath of like the 2012 race where the Republicans got together and said, "You know what? We need to rethink our base and to start reaching out to broaden it." It's not obvious that what's going to happen this go round. What do you think, Anthony?

Anthony Fowler:

Well, I mean, there clearly is something about Donald Trump that defies expectations constantly, right? I mean, nobody took him seriously as a presidential candidate in 2015, and yet here we are. He has 10 times a day what we would have normally called a major gaffe for a politician and something that would have been almost defined the presidency of a previous president 10 times a day and what support he has. Even though he's not overwhelmingly popular, it seems fairly unwavering. There's something about him that we maybe can't even quantify.

At the same time, it's hard to imagine that Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee this year or John Casey wouldn't have done better. So as to the question of what should the Republican party do going forward, if they're smart and they're thinking about their own survival and their own prospects for electoral viability, they should be telling themselves this was a wild ride with Trump. So maybe some mistakes were made even though we got some wins, we got tax cuts and so on. Our chances for success in the future are better if we don't go that route. That's what I would advise them if they ask me. I would say, "This is not your path for success."

Wioletta Dziuda:

So I'm curious why you think that Mitt Romney or someone like Mark Rubio would have done better because on the other hand, you think those candidates would actually gather such a support, would manage to have this historic turnout, and that's for true. So if that's the case, is it because you think there was something wrong on the left that discouraged people, that made people come out and vote against them? I don't know. It might be still that it's Trump's appeal that he's just this kind of fear that at least a lot of people charismatic in some sense, and that's why we have the historic turnout on the right.

William Howell:

I think Romney might well have done better this go round. The reason is not so much because of what he represents or the kind of charismatic appeal that he has or lacks as the case may be, but rather that he would have done a much better job of dealing with the pandemic, and that presented extra politically a real opportunity not just for leadership, but for building a base that... I mean, we know that rally effects are short-lived. But it was a rally effect that was available in an election year that a president who gathered unto himself all the responsibility to Marshall a real response, and had we performed well, that he could have presented himself as the man of the hour. This is exactly what we need in order to meet this global challenge, and look, we're performing better than other countries.

Anthony Fowler:

When we discussed this on our podcast a long time ago, we talked about the pandemic and what implications it's going to have for this election. We had said, and I think we were right to say it at the time that this was a great opportunity for Trump, that if he handled this well, people would completely forget about that whole Ukraine scandal. Nobody would even remember that he was impeached.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Which they did anyway it seems.

Anthony Fowler:

All they would be talking about was COVID. I think to some extent, that was true. I mean, that was such a pressing thing on people's minds, and the election almost became about, do you agree or not with, so what Biden is saying versus Trump saying, or should we have some large-scale lockdowns, et cetera, as opposed to thinking about all of the other information that we had about Trump? Maybe that did actually advantage Trump, even in the end, even though he lost the election. But I think you're right. Had he just been a little bit more competent, maybe that would've made all the difference.

But when you just look at the vote totals and you see the extent to which Trump underperformed other Republicans, even this year, it seems to suggest that there's something, there's something about Trump that actually turned off a lot of even regular Republican supporters, or that's not a typical thing that you see. If anything, we usually talk about the coattail effect, where the presidential candidate is the person who really drives, drives turnout, and determines how well the party does overall, all in all those down-ballot races. That doesn't appear to have happened this time around, so—

Wioletta Dziuda:

There's another way to interpret this under performance of Trump compared to other Republicans. So it may be the case though because of the polls, that we've been seeing for the last few months, people just assumed that Biden would be elected in a landslide. The Republicans just wanted to make sure that we have a divided government, that we actually have some checks on the left on what Biden brings to the table. So I wonder what your thoughts are of that, to what extent the outcome of that election is because people like Trump or didn't like him or people on the right or to what extent this is a reaction to how they were perceiving Democrats and their platforms.

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah. There's some evidence to support this idea, actually. Despite all the arguments that Americans are hyper-partisan and so forth, there are actually a lot of Americans who seem to prefer divided government. If you ask them in surveys, they say, if Biden's going to be president, they'd rather have a Republican Senate. Obviously, empirically speaking, there is this famous the midterm slump that we talk about, where the president's party tends to lose, and you might think one story for that midterm slump is preference for divided government. Although it could also just be kind of a coattails effect in regression to mean.

The one place where we have more opportunities to learn about this or in gubernatorial races and the state legislative races, where we just have a bigger sample size, and there have been several nice studies documenting that it does really look like there's something like a preference for divided government, that even if you do kind of an RD design, and you look at governors who barely win, that just barely lose, that governor's party loses seats in the next election. So I think that's part of the story, for sure. So maybe voters really believed Biden was going to win, and so they, okay, I'm fine with Biden winning. I'll vote for Biden, and I'll vote for Republican for the Senate. That's plausible. Although, the fact that they went that way, it does reveal something about Trump and his popularity.

William Howell:

It is a curious thing though, the idea that people have a preference for divided government, as opposed to say, I have a preference for moderation, and I can't get it if I just go all in on one party or the other. But if I split the difference between them or I have a preference for policy stability. I don't like lots of change, and I recognize that if any party takes control over the apparatus of government, but things can be steady.

Anthony Fowler:

I think that is what's going on. Right? I mean, yeah, I don't think people think people who say they support development—

William Howell:

This and divided government.

Anthony Fowler:

... per se, right? It's that they know that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are way to the left of their preferences and Donald Trump and Mike Pence are way to the right of their preferences, and they can't get someone who's really in the middle. So they'd rather have some kind of gridlocked government that doesn't do a whole lot, given that.

William Howell:

So this has implications for the storyline in early January, 2021, which is that all signs point towards there being two runoffs in Georgia. If the Democrats pick up both of them, then if all signs point towards it being 50/50 and it being unified government, we can expect gobs of money to pour into Georgia, right, over the next month and all kinds of talk about this and all the possibility that you see, "No, we could draw on the left. We can get McConnell out."

But thing that you're saying, Anthony is people will recognize that, "Wait, it's Georgia, folks. It's still Georgia." The idea that you're going two go two. Getting two Democrats in, unlikely. But moreover, precisely because it hangs in the balance, that subset of people who aren't comfortable with the liberalism of a Biden-Harris ticket are going to come out and vote the other way, and they might otherwise entertain a Democrat, but they're going to look to balance it out.

Wioletta Dziuda:

So what does it tell us about what kind of policies we are going to have moving forward? Are we getting a gridlock in Congress? Are we doing to have constant fight? Is it all going to go to the courts? Are we going to have lots of executive action? What's your thinking?

William Howell:

I think it's pretty clear actually. I mean, we don't have a crystal ball about anything. But this is one where I think we have a pretty strong sense that most of the action is going to take the form of unilateral action by the next president, by President Biden, who's going to work to undo all of the deregulatory activity that's going on within the administrative state of the law over the last four years. There's that. The talk about packing the court. We can set that aside. The idea that we're going to append and completely redo the tax code. Probably not. That's not to say that the legislative agenda is going to go to zero and it's going to be pure gridlock. But the kinds of things where we might expect to see action are going to be of the form of say another stimulus action. Maybe some action on infrastructure. We're not going to redo the healthcare system. We're not going to pass comprehensive immigration legislation. It's just—

Wioletta Dziuda:

You're not painting a very big picture. If you think we can applause things that were sort of more bipartisan in the past, that is they were perceived as issues that were more bipartisan, such as infrastructure, that might actually be a good time for us, and also, it's going to be a period where we can calm down those divisions and work on something that we agree on, and then maybe we can revisit all our glorious ideas about healthcare and environments four years from now.

William Howell:

No, I agree. I mean, I think that's really consequential. I don't mean to... But I think the talk—

Wioletta Dziuda:

But I thought you were more pessimistic given your book and all—

William Howell:

So yeah, everything's still is on fire. But I do think that we do face profound, big challenges. Climate change is a profound, big challenge. It's not going away, right? The failures of our immigration system are profound, and it's not that nothing can be done. Some things can be done, but they're going to be done not in the service of systemic, comprehensive, legislative change. They're going to be much more targeted. As you say, they'll also be a change in the tone of our politics, and frankly, we need that. There's also all foreign policy, right? That our relationship to the rest of the world will shift.

So if you listen to the Democrats in the primary season about how they were finally going to set everything right, and you were feeling hopeful about our politics, because, ah, this is our chance to deliver on those promises. It's just really unlikely, right? A narrow or a majority in the house, you still don't have the Senate and a six to three conservative liberal on the Supreme Court.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Can we talk a little bit about Democrats? What lessons they should they take away from that? Do you think two years from now, should they be talking about climate change and healthcare reform, or should they actually, say let's sit tight for four years and try to work with Republicans in whatever we can?

Anthony Fowler:

Sure. Yeah. I mean, one of the reasons maybe Biden underperformed expectations was because of the somewhat extreme positions coming out of the Democratic party. Even sometimes Biden himself may not endorse those. But if you look at the positions that the Democrats said they were excited about and the things they said they were going to do under a Democratic administration, there were lots of regular Americans who were pretty moderate who say, "No, I don't want a Green New Deal. I don't want the defund the police, et cetera." I think as the Democrats are taking stock of things and seeing maybe many of us are out of step with the general public, and we need to reevaluate our positions.

William Howell:

The soul searching that's going to happen on the Democratic party is exactly this form. It's on the one hand, there's that. On the other hand, what people will say is that, "No, you need to get excited about a candidate." The way you get excited about a candidate, is you have somebody who has bold vision and who's willing to act on them, and in turn, these big problems are real problems. We're not imagining them, right? It's not just in the service of tickling our liberal fancies. It's that, "No, we do in fact have a broken healthcare system, a broken immigration system, and climate change is real, and we better start taking it seriously."

So while we recognized because we're political realists, that we're not likely to make advances on those fronts, at least legislative advances in the next two years, four years, what we ought to begin doing is setting the table and structuring conversations that more responsibly attend to those issues than we have up until now. I think everybody recognized very much including Biden that his presidency is kind of a placeholder presidency. It's kind of an opportunity to say, "Oh, calm down. Let's get a grip and reassess our priorities and how we're going to move forward." Wioletta, what do you see on this?

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah, I wonder. So if I were to advise the Democratic party and thank God, I'm not because probably my advice wouldn't be good, I would tell them what Anthony said, that I think the general public did not really believe that Joe Biden would follow through with his moderate policies. I think everyone was scared that he would be influenced by more radical side of the Democratic party. So I think for me the outcome of elections suggest that they should try to go back to the center a little bit more.

Having said that, following some tweets that's already okay and then listening a little bit about how they are at discussing who would be the next speaker of the house and so on. I'm not sure this is going to be the general lesson that overall everyone on the left is going to take. The things that I worry about is the fact that in fact, the next four years will be just an input within the Democratic party.

William Howell:

I guess I'm less worried about it. I think it would be a good thing for them to think long and hard about this. Let me just push a little bit on the other side, which is that Democrats pick the moderate for the standard bear. They had ample opportunities to pick somebody far off on the left. They pick the most moderate, most establishment person available to them in the primary season. To say though that the most involved, the most interested Democrats are at the extreme and are driving kind of a socialist train I think mischaracterizes what's going on in the Democratic party. I'll also say that we see these huge demographic changes happening around the country are going to make Texas. Four, eight years from now, it is likely to turn blue. When that happens, it's like a sea change. It's like the Republican party as it's currently constituted is going to be on its heels.

That's going to open up real opportunities for a presidential candidate to come forward to say things that right now may not play well electorally. Because if the Democratic party has Texas, New York, and California, right, how do you overcome that on the Republican side? So there's both this kind of the shift to the Democratic opening up opportunities to take more liberal positions combined with, I think the ready willingness of many of the most extreme Democrats right now to say, "All right, we're going to go with Biden right now because we want to win suggests that some introspection isn't going to lead to the radical left wing taking over the party."

Wioletta Dziuda:

Should we talk about the polls a little bit?

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah, we got time.

Wioletta Dziuda:

This is on everybody's mind. So everyone says the polls were awfully wrong, that this is the end of polling, and people should find it unjust. We talked a little bit yesterday just about this, and you seem to have a slightly different view. So can you tell us something about what you're thinking?

Anthony Fowler:

About the polls?

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah. Were they wrong? If they were, why were they wrong?

Anthony Fowler:

The polls were definitely wrong in many cases. There were some big misses. It looked like Florida was way off expectation, for example, and Ohio was way off expectations. Those also were some of the earliest states where we had a pretty good sense of what was happening. So there were huge alarm bells going off, like, "Man, the polls are way off everywhere." I don't know for sure what happened and why that's the case. It's it seems like there probably really is something going on, and it could be something that has changed over time that's led our polls to be less reliable, or it could be something Trump specific that's led those polls in 2016 and 2020 to be less reliable.

But if you had things to document is that the response rates for these professionally conducted polls keep going down and down. It used to be the case that you might get. In the 1950s, you would call someone up on the phone and say, "I'm going to ask you a political poll." That was kind of an exciting thing. You get 80% response rates. And now, they're down in that 6% to 8% response rates, something like... So they're very, very low, and you always worry that the kinds of people who are responding to polls are different. You could imagine that there are lots of Trump supporters who maybe they're conservative, but they don't love Trump, but they're going to vote for Trump, and they just say, you know what? I don't want to answer the poll, or they answer the poll, and they say, "I'm not sure I'm decided when really they're probably going to vote for Trump."

Similarly, it's even conditional on who answers the polls. It's very difficult to predict who's actually going to turn out to vote. So polls are always kind of... There's always a chance for there to be some kind of systemic error, and it seems like it just so happened that these last few presidential elections, we kind of overstated Democratic support and understated Republican support by a couple percentage points, both in 2016 and 2020, and yeah, it'll be interesting to know is our polls just worst going forward because our response rates are worse, or was it something unique to Trump where there were these kind of shy Trump supporters? I think we don't really know yet.

William Howell:

Can I add a couple of things to this? 2016, the polls were really quite good actually on the national level, the problems at the state level. I think in the main, that's what we're observing this go round as well, which makes me think that a big part of technically the problem is the sampling problem. It's that everybody's on there. It's not just that response rates are low. It's also that everybody's on their cell phone, and the area code for your cell phone mean correspond with the state in which you live and vote. So if you can get a roughly representative sample of the country, it's easier to do than to get a roughly representative sample of say Florida.

So I think that's a contributing factor. If I could add two things to this though, one is that I would love for the talk about the polls, frankly, to go away. I mean, I've spent the last three months sort of obsessing about where things at. The amount of horse race coverage and the greatness of these pollsters who are seen as oracles, right? Nate Silver is a kind of a god that we sort of look to, to find stability about where we are in the political universe, by virtue of his ability to have picked the 2008 election.

Maybe a thing that we ought to be doing is rather than talking about the latest polls going forward is having some harder conversations about what we see, what arguments are out there. I don't mean just the merits of particular policies. We can do that. But also, I mean, this goes back to this question about, what is the Democratic party going to stand for? What is the Republican party going to stand for? To kind of have more space for those kinds of conversations, particularly in our campaigns, where instead, what we're treated to is a steady diet of slogans from the candidates and horse race coverage from the media. It's just as an impoverished engagement of politics.

One last thing, which is that to the extent Anthony... I think that you're right that people aren't answering what they truly believe. That may be a contributing factor why the polls are off. That two is worth us kind of puzzling over. What are the features of our politics that we're not seeing? What leads somebody to say, "I really do support Trump. I really, really do, but I just feel like I can't tell you"?

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah. Maybe it has something to do with a lack of trust in institutions, which is correlated with being Trump's voter. That's what Trump was actually telling people, that we shouldn't trust institutions. We shouldn't trust the media. I think that might have skewed the response rate if you are pro Trump and if you buy into this narrative that media are part of the elites, then why would you even answer their questions? But I'm completely in agreement with you that I think we paid too much attention to the polls. At the end of the day, these are just some predictions. If they were always right, we wouldn't have to have elections.

So I think this constant focus on who is going up, who's down, who's winning the debates, who is not winning as opposed to discussion about what is this candidate actually proposing? Can she achieve it? What are the consequences of whatever she's proposing? Yes. I think that's a completely misplaced discussion. The discussion that we're having right now about why were posts so wrong, which is playing out in the media is also a distraction, I think.

William Howell:

Okay. So let's stop it.

Wioletta Dziuda:

So let's address the big elephant in the room. So Trump is contesting the elections. He was trying to contest the elections. He filed many lawsuits, big and small. What do you make of that? Is this what you were expecting?

Anthony Fowler:

I guess we were ready for this, right? We were expecting this. But it's troubling. It's a very troubling thing to have a sitting president trying to undermine our democratic institutions. It's a real low point in modern American history.

William Howell:

Yes, and it's a low point with consequence. I mean, Biden is going to have to govern this country, right? In the middle of a pandemic, which calls for trust in institutions, it requires a measure of trust in one another and coordination, how you effectively meet that kind of a challenge when you have then millions of people coming away from a close election, a reasonably close election, thinking that it was stolen, or it was illegitimate in some way and see thing in the aftermath of that, it's really not good. The one thing I would point to is something to feel good about, at least for the last 72 hours is that Trump has been talking about launching all these court cases, and we knew exactly the kind of rhetoric that he would be employing, and sure enough, he's behaving to type his own type. I mean, the script that he told us that he would be reading from.

But it isn't just that he's not getting traction in the courts. It's that he also isn't really displacing the national conversation. I mean, he kind of comes on and says these crazy things, and then we're back to seeing what the latest vote returns are and getting the latest from, what are the votes coming out of Atlanta, right? In that sense, we're not obsessing about the details of his claims. There's a broad recognition that they lack merit. They lack any factual basis. I guess I'm grateful to see that, because instead, we could be obsessing about his speech, and then there would be a conversation back and forth about it, as opposed to simply a repudiation of it and then returning to the thing that matters, which is how did people actually vote?

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah. I think, as you said, it's all about expectations. So my expectations were very low. I was expecting Trump to tweet throughout the entire election. I was expecting him to come out strongly saying that this election has been stolen from him. Frankly, I was expecting Republicans to remain silent, and this is not what's happening. The elections went quite pretty peacefully, and Trump is fighting all these lawsuits. But after his speech yesterday, basically everyone that I could see on TV said this is unacceptable, even Fox News, even the [inaudible 00:28:58] on CNN, they were all saying, "Well, I hope that I've never heard this kind of speech from president." So I'm actually also very optimistic that when push comes to shove, we do have institutions and our political class seems to believe, at least in this last institution of elections.

On the other hand, the fact that he is filing those lawsuits, that might be good because my guess is the courts, which we know are now heavily skewed conservative, my guess is they're going to throw those suits away, that nothing is going to really happen. There wouldn't be a lot of discovery of huge fraud. That might go a long way in calming down the mood and convincing people that perhaps there isn't much there, that this was just Trump sounding an alarm, but there's not much heavy then. So I hope at the end of the day, we'll be better off.

William Howell:

Yeah. This is a moment for the courts to kind of shed the legacy of Bush v. Gore, in which they were seen to be patently political. I mean, it's easy for them to do so, and it's nowhere near as close as the 2000 election vis-a-vis the popular vote. But it's not hanging on one state, and there's no actual merit too. We haven't actually observed any kind of factual basis for believing a recount is needed or an additional investigation is needed because of some impropriety.

Anthony Fowler:

I hope you guys are right. I agree there have been some reassuring things that have happened in the last couple of days for the future of our democracy. Obviously, there's a norm. There's nothing in the constitution would induce the president to make a concession speech. That's just always been the norm, and that's always been one of these most important things that has kind of preserved our democracy is that we acknowledge the election results and the person who lost says, "Good job, but it looks like I lost it." Then we move on, and it is reassuring to see some prominent conservatives coming out and saying, "Look, these claims don't have any basis. There's no evidence," and so forth.

But I see a lot of Republicans and a lot of conservatives kind of trying to hedge their bets a little bit or keep one foot in both camps. There are a lot of statements along the lines of, oh, legal ballots should be counted, which is saying nothing, of course, right? I mean—

William Howell:

But they are not locking arms in defense of our democracy. They're speaking in kind of coded terms and really cautionary language. But they're not coming up and saying uniformly. That's totally unacceptable what you're doing Mr. President. That's not how we behave in a democracy. I think, look, what's behind I think some of our conversation here, the lingering concern is that what the president is setting in motion politically outside of the courts, right, outside of his ability to hold on to office, what he's setting in motion is going to have real implications for the governability of the country. So we have a question from our audience that kind of speaks to this that I wanted to throw out. This is from Alex Wilson. He says, "Will you speak on the culture of hate, blame, and division that Trump has built upon and how some people in the US are loyal to him because of this?"

This is the policy disagreement. That's real. There also is that kind of roiling anger and disaffection and divisions that characterize our politics as well and that Trump seems to be caught up in, and that's not likely to sort of evaporate.

Anthony Fowler:

This is one of these places where the rhetoric from the president is really done at or just as we've been talking about. I mean, you wouldn't have... If you didn't have Trump saying what he's been saying for the last four or five years in public life, you wouldn't have armed people showing up in front of the Arizona election office.

Wioletta Dziuda:

So that would be helpful maybe with Biden. Biden is actually pretty good at this rhetorical of peace and happiness, and we are all in this together and all Americans are Americans. So perhaps we are going to see a little bit of coming down.

Anthony Fowler:

An important caveat there is that we do need the vast majority of Americans to accept that Joe Biden legitimately won the election. I hope we can achieve that.

William Howell:

Yeah, that's right. There are plenty of times I feel despondent when I feel hopeful in particular about a Biden presidency is that if he has a strength, that's this, right? I mean, the speeches that he's given, it's all about how I will be our country's precedent, and we need to lower the temperature in the room, and sovereignty lies with the people, these kinds of things, a moment in which you need a dynamic leader, who's going to advance widespread change and take off. He is going to be overwhelmed. But a moment in which we need to look up at Uncle Joe, right, and say, "Ah, things are out of hand, right?" I think it plays to his strengths.

Anthony Fowler:

Is there anything will that Biden can do to restore greater faith in the office and the greater faith in institutions other than just rhetoric? Of course, the rhetoric is important. But what else could President Biden do?

William Howell:

So look, he's constrained to what he can actually pull off. But I guess what I would like to see him do, and he's gestured towards this is one set to work on fixing our institutions, that really, in lots of ways, they are broken. He isn't going to kind of resurrect them all himself. But there are actions that he can take that are going to improve the functioning of the administrative state to stand up for science and expertise within the federal bureaucracy. He can also when he's gesture towards doing this as well build a set of commissions to study these issues, and I don't think that's... I mean, most of those write the reports from those commissions, just gather dust. But if that's part of something larger, which also includes, and this is this third piece also includes something of an admission, you know what, people are angry, and they're angry with cause.

Because in many ways, this has failed them and failed them for a long time, and we need to take stock of those failures, and we on the left can't just say the government is good and great and just believe in the government. It's like a PR problem. Once you believe in the government, if you just see all the goodness that it delivers, then everybody will come around it. No, there needs to be a recognition that the government hasn't performed, especially where we have an ineffective government. That can be a really important part of kind of constructive move towards resuscitating our democracy and getting our footing once again.

Wioletta Dziuda:

[inaudible 00:34:58] well. But I also think that there's a huge role to play by the Republican party in bridging those divisions. I think they actually have to take a stance. Here again, I'm hopeful a little bit because Joe Biden has a long history of being bipartisan and working across the aisle. He actually probably has a lot of friends on the other side of the aisle. So perhaps just by him having good relationship, personal relationship with Republicans, that might change their rhetoric, might actually make them move away a little bit from the most extreme place, and that might go even longer way towards bridging the divisions than just the speeches that Joe Biden can make and the institutional reforms.

William Howell:

Yeah. So it's not clear that... One story about the Republican party is it's the party of populism, and that's not going to go away with Trump's defeat, and somebody who is more disciplined and more capable is going to step into that same space. If they do so and they maintain a hold on the Republican party, that's not going to be in the service of institutional reform in the service of a more effective government. It's going to be in this roiling, the anger and disaffection of a base that's convinced that everything is broken and illegitimate and stolen. That's where, right, it's not clear how that's going to play out.

Wioletta Dziuda:

So my hope would be that the more traditional wing of their product and part has been recognized. So far, they had to stand behind Trump because Trump was the president, and he actually could deliver a lot, and he delivered a lot of what they wanted, the tax reform and so on and the regulation. But right now, they don't have to do that anymore. So my hope would be they would realize that this is our time to a little bit and capture all those voltages that this affected, but maybe capture them in a little bit different way. I think if they do that, I think they don't have to answer the question. I don't think they have to [inaudible 00:36:48]. I don't think they have to be amazing speeches during that when considered their speeches. I think they just need to stop using their negative rhetoric against Biden, stop undermining Biden's every move and every word [inaudible 00:37:00]. I think that's going to go a long way. People are just going to... I can see them stop following politics. Politics will become boring, and that's going to put us on the good path.

William Howell:

So where does this leave us? How are you all going to be thinking few days about what the intermediate future is going to look like for our country?

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah. I'm going to be very eager, just as we've been discussing this last hour to see what leading Republicans do, how they respond to this moment, how do they respond to a potentially contested election, where it seems pretty clear that Biden did win legitimately, and yet we've got one side refusing to concede. Similarly, how do they proceed when it is a President Biden? I think it could go in lots of different directions, as we've been discussing. It's easy to tell a story where they say, "You know what, the Trumpism didn't work for us. We've got to change course." Although you might've given that same argument in 2017 when you might've thought Paul Ryan would say, "Okay. This Trumpism, this is good for our party or cause, and they didn't."

So I don't know. I think it could be that the cat's out of the bag and populism is here to stay or some form of is here to stay for a long time. I think, Will, you're probably right about that. But there's some hope that things are going to be different. I mean, Will, you also mentioned demographic change and the electoral map changing gradually in this country, and that's going to be an interesting thing to see both parties respond to... But I don't want to make any strong predictions because it's hard to predict what these people are going to do.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I'm very hopeful that we finally are not going to have this very hateful rhetoric, that we are going to have a little bit of, as said, boredom in politics and a little bit of calmness, and maybe we can focus on the pandemic. So the one that I feel helpful. I'm tired. I'm exhausted. I don't want to be checking Twitter all the time. On the other hand, I do worry whether the parties will draw the conclusions that we seem to be drawing from selection as supposed to whether they are going to actually polarize even more. There's a lot to say about people feeding off each other, that they perceive the other side as polarized. We are not going to do the first step.

So I do worry that we might have four years of actually extreme frustration, hence from the right undermined Joe Biden. After four years, it might actually backfire, and we might have someone like Donald Trump Jr. stepping in. So yes, there are different paths. Ask me tomorrow, I'll tell you what I think [inaudible 00:39:29]. But I think it's extremely hard to put it.

William Howell:

I agree. I mean, I think that on the one hand, there's this talk about a return to normalcy, and thank goodness for that, a recommitment to basic democratic principles. Yes, yes, yes. But we also are looking at a world. I mean, what we're inheriting in the aftermath of this election is one in which there remains pretty clear divisions between the two parties. They're roughly equally balanced, right? So the Democrats are going to have the House and The White House, most likely, and the Republicans are going to have the Senate and the Supreme Court. When we say, well, that provides a moment to, well, pass some things and to reimagine what sort of first order principles are and their commitments are, all good, good. But we also have a pandemic which is going to be really hard to grapple with. We also have these big structural changes happening in the economy.

We also have a failed immigration system, a failed healthcare system. There's work to be done here and not least a democracy that is on its heels that has not just suffered, but its inadequacies had been revealed, and we're not going to attend to those inadequacies just through a set of executive orders and a president who speaks calmly and doesn't use Twitter in the way that the past president has. So therein lies the tension, yes. Return to normalcy. But boy, this may be a moment that requires some coordination and some reelection. I worry that we're not equipped, frankly, to do that kind of work. That may leave us in a place where lots of people remain angry four years hence, and we're going to do a do-over in 2024 of what we did in 2020.

Anthony Fowler:

For now, the sun is out.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah, go outside.

William Howell:

So good to talk to the two of you.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Likewise.

Anthony Fowler:

Good to talk to you guys. 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 Hodapp. Thanks for listening.