Biennial Post-Election Analysis with Bill Galston and Bill Kristol, joined by Ramesh Ponnuru

uh ladies and gentlemen good afternoon this is the program on constitutional government at Harvard I'm Harvey Mansfield we've got a program today so we're going to uh of presentations by our three speakers first then questions and answers we'll stop at six for uh barbecue dinner or supper and resume at seven for another hour of questioning and make sure everyone who has a question gets it answered during that or at least addressed I'll introduce our speakers in the order in which they're going to speak and so that's the first is Bill Crystal is writer and editor of the bulwark he and I founded a program on government together about 1985 and we've been having this election analysis ever since pretty much I think this is the 16th time that we've had the two bills and we are fortunate to have uh Ramesh for a reason I'll tell you later Ramos paluru uh but Bill Crystal well he's um how should I say he's a republican but a never Trumper and this moved him leftward towards uh I think he's now a Democrat and uh he graduated from Harvard and got a PhD had also at Harvard and the government Department I guess I knew him then he's had a important career he was Chief of Staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and the first Bush Administration he taught at the Harvard Kennedy School the University of Pennsylvania he is a friend an assistant to uh the wonderful Daniel Patrick Moynihan you see him all the time on TV he's moved from Fox to ABC to CNN and he comes from a notable family his father Irvin crystal is a so-called father of neoconservatism and his mother Gertrude him afarb was a very gifted historian then bill galston he's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution before that he was a professor at the school of public policy at the University of Maryland he's participated in six different presidential campaigns in 19 3 to 5 he was Deputy assistant to President Clinton in the White House um got it went to Cornell got a PhD in Chicago is the author of a number of books I like to mention always his first book on Kant Kant and the problem of history and uh more recently most recently anti-anti pluralism the populist threat to Liberal democracy 2018. before that the practice of liberalism that's just one of several books on liberal political Theory as in as bill gallston is a major figure and um in in liberal political Theory and he writes a weekly column for the Wall Street Journal he's you could say the house liberal at the Wall Street Journal does a very good job and right right yeah right and um and you can tell from his his erect posture and his Resolute face that he was once a United States Marine so now we got Ramesh panu roof we needed to have a conservative it turned out and we're very happy to have him he is a journalist he's the editor of National Review which is sort of most important conservative magazine founded by William F Buckley so he's continuing that he's a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute being Asian-American he couldn't go to Harvard so he had to go to Princeton and he got a summer laude working with Robert George and wrote a senior thesis of 107 Pages it said in uh maybe incorrectly off by Page or two possibly on abortion these days and he's written a book on this called the party of death that refers to I think the Democrats abortion and euthanasia and it's this book has been widely praised and reasonably too so um and he's here with his wife April Panera who's a major figure in conservative circles and uh all right uh let's mention the women so there's uh Susan Crystal eminent classicist and mother and Miriam galston who's a lawyer and a student of Islamic political philosophy and my wife Anna who's uh a woman about town who now has a country house all right so uh I think I think that'll do it and let's start with Bill Crystal I should say just about the election we've had just another surprise one surprise after another there already except maybe it wasn't a surprise to you a little yeah a little less of a surprise for once I was sort of right about an election that happens once every 10 elections or so so that's great well it's good to be here good to be back at Harvard it's great to be on this panel again with both friends this is the only room in Harvard I believe the only place at Harvard where being introduced as someone who was once astonished Republican and conservative and now is not such a staunch Republican maybe even a fellow Travelers the Democrats and then maybe not so fully conservative anymore it's the only place at Harvard where that would be greeted with groans and just and disapproval I'm sort of more used to coming to Ivy League schools and being phrased for that but that's okay it's a free it's a free world free country it's good that you can have both points of view it's good that Harvey can have affirmative actions for people who've stuck with affirmative action for people like my friend Ramesh who stuck with conservatism despite all the flaws that have been exposed over the last few years so it's a it's nice to be a we started the program for constitutional government honestly to provide more diversity views and more and ensure that there was freedom of speech and arguments and thought at Harvard and I'm sure it but do our best to Foster it so I think that's this is very much in that in that spirit um I've I don't have extremely uh well organized or elegant presentation because it's been kind of a crazy 48 hours but and I don't know that I fully I don't haven't really fully thought through all the implications of what happened and I'm sure we'll all be wrong at different times about those implications but it's a very if there's one thing I've learned over the years is if there's a surprising election the surprises don't end you know when the votes come in right there all kinds of implications the second third order implications and consequences that people don't think through ahead of time there are limits to our ability to forecast this is a I would say a conservative truth a hayekian truth and their unanticipated consequences that's a neoconservative truth so I still do believe in some of these conservative teachings but um so I'll just make really a few points of what I think what didn't happen what did happen and what could happen as a result of the election what didn't happen pretty obvious there was no wave people who's who people are under 40 I'd say in Washington who dominate the discourse probably these days uh and sort of you know and certainly on Twitter but in political analysis circles and so forth have only seen wave elections really in off your elections 0-6 for the Democrats uh 2010 and 2014 for the Republicans 2018 for the Democrats and they sort of took what had what is a real historical Trend no question about it uh as if it were somehow foreign to the degree I was more right in doubting that which I did doubt it this year than it turned out to be right it was partly just my contrarianism a disliking inevitable historical Trends and claims about them rather than any deep analysis of what was what was happening but it is a real Trend no question about it and uh the Democrats did resist uh overcame some history and resisted gravity if you want the natural wish of the American public to balance off a president whose party controls both houses of Congress I mean since Carter every time a president has every time there's been an off-year election with the president the new president whose party has controlled Congress the vote have taken back one or both houses in the first off your election since 78 that's happening every time and it didn't well and it did happen this time barely probably for the Republicans but it didn't happen in the way people with the magnitude people thought uh 75 of the public thought the economy according to the exposed was poor or bad or poor President Biden was underwater another correlation in terms of his approval another correlation in the last several Cycles uh really going pretty far back is that if voters in a state think the president disapproved the president the candidates of that President's party running in that state tend to lose and that sent away was a very good predictor in 2010 if in states where Obama was most unpopular Democrats even if they were very different from President Obama tended to lose same in 2018 my congressional district in Northern Virginia had been a republican districts uh voters there classic sort of Opera middle class Suburban voters swung against Trump and against the Republican party and voted out Barbara Comstock who was anti-trump pretty much as but a republican member who was going to vote for McCarthy for speaker and so forth and uh they just didn't want they wanted a house we wanted a house to check Trump and that means you have to have a Democrat so the national the nationalization of Elections the wish to have divided government reasonable wish that sometimes may be foolish um it does tend to swamp everything else which is why history does produce these these count these wave elections to check the president and the party that's been in power um I mean the disapproval of Biden and the exit polls is like a 45 approval of 54 disapprove a little higher than where he's been in other polls but something like 15 of Voters who disapprove different state by state voters who disapprove of President Biden nonetheless voted for democrats for the senate or the house higher numbers for governorships some places but that's more instead it was a Governor's not a federal race so it has its own Dynamics and that's a very high number compared to history more voters were willing to say I don't I'm not thrilled with the performance of the party in power but I'm nonetheless going to vote for the candidate of that party whether he or she is an incumbent or the Challenger ended up or someone in an open seat then it's historically been the case so that's how there was a bit of that's why history didn't quite obtain this time having said that the other thing that didn't happen so I think it didn't happen as I say is history it was a surprise uh the normal thing didn't happen the other thing that didn't happen though was any major reversal of the current state of American politics so those of us who would have liked for example to see just a massive repudiation of a trumpy Republican party to to then lay the groundwork maybe for a healthier party and healthier politics one really can't say that happened either I'll come back to Trump personally who I think had a bit of a rebuke in the election but a party that was totally comfortable with having in its ranks at least election deniers conspiratorialists various kinds of figures didn't do terribly you know the Republicans probably won the overall vote for the house the national popular vote for the house by about half a percentage point they had lost it by about two and a half percentage points in 2020 but I just won by about four and a half points he was he was stronger than the house Democrats but so just Apples to Apples so to speak the Republicans picked up three points over the last two years in the actual National vote for the house they probably will end up picking up I don't know eight seats or something like in the house very hard to tell there are many many very close races and we don't have the ballots counted especially out west and some of them they will probably end up losing one seat in the Senate so I got 30 000 feet come down from Mars you look at the country in 2020 2012 election 2020 2022 very similar so the thing that didn't happen was a realignment a repudiation a dramatic move one way or the other the surprise was that there wasn't the punishing of the presence of the party in power the others are surprised but the other striking thing that didn't happen was no repudiation particularly of a trumpy Republican party some punishment of the of the jumpy of the trumpy candidates I do think if someone looks at the numbers I haven't looked at this I'm not sure we've had two elections back to back where the number where the results were so much the same as if someone came along and just gave even Bill and Ramesh let alone less educated people just the the printout of to the 2020 and 2022 exit polls and results and didn't say which year it was it wouldn't be so obvious right away to say you know you got a 50 50 Cent 5149 Senate the social economic groups looked the way they did some very small moves but basically the all the trends we've seen over the last uh certainly since Trump but even before college educated versus non-college the Sorting of the country the separating out of the country the uh solidifying of these two blocks in the country so that even a very good candidate can't win in certain States and even a bad candidate from the right party can win in those States all that remained Tim Ryan probably everyone thought Tim Ryan ran the best campaign ever Democrat uh for Senate this year but he was very strong and he lost by seven or eight points to JD as he ran ahead of the democratic gubernatorial candidate in Ohio to be sure so there was some split ticket voting but it's that bill and I were talking about this the idea that Ohio and Florida are now safe Republican states these were these swing states of 2000 2004 Barack Obama carry both of them in 2012. Colorado and Virginia gone the other way in a couple other states probably at the presidential level Michigan by far the biggest Democratic gains this year maybe that becomes sort of Ohio in reverse and becomes more safely Democratic they want everything in Denver in Michigan who knows but but big picture again the country looks surprisingly like it did two years ago electorally what did happen then if if these things didn't happen I do think it was a bit of a setback for presidents former president Trump ex president Trump whatever we're supposed to call him Trump I just called Trump personally you know um the candidates he personally selected or endorsed got through primaries in swing States tended to lose we'll see what happens with Terry Lake in Arizona which seems too close this would not resolved at this point JD Vance won almost all the others in tough races and tough States lost so it was might have been better to not have nominated uh oz in Pennsylvania maybe McCormick wins there if he's not the nominee maybe the conventional candidate the Republican candidate in Arizona wins if it's not Kerry Lake but that's not a massive repudiation some sense that being a trumpist republican was sub-optimal in some of these swinging states on the other end plenty of other states I mean Arizona which state Biden carried it's worth really reflecting on this for a second it's against my interest to do so but uh that's what we're that's why that's why we get the big bucks here to come to this panel tell the truth even the unpleasant truths Arizona State dividing one that has two Democratic senators uh Carey lake is dead even and if you ask me to rate the kind of craziness of Republican Presidential gubernatorial candidates Karen Lake would be extremely high on the on the charts and yet there she is you know running even with a very not a very impressive Democratic candidate but a secretary of state who's it offensive and a conventional Democrat so the Republican brand has not been damaged by Trump nearly as much as it could have been or as some of us think it should have been the other thing I would mention that I think is worth talk just thinking about his abortion Dobbs was I think the Dodge decision did give the Democrats or helped give the Democrats a huge relatively speaking a big bump in the summer that subsided some in September October but enough a bit held up to make it a surprisingly good election for the Democratic party and I think some of that is due to the continuing uh uh effect of that issue playing through politics maybe it'll all sort itself out I'm not sure that's a longer term thing maybe federalism will obtain and there'll be one set of laws in Texas and another in Michigan and Michigan where it was on the ballot where the state was not ready for the a a ban on abortion which is what could have happened with the Republican candidates they ran on um it was a big assistance I think to Governor Whitmer and to all the Democrats and other states it made no big difference in Texas where there's a pretty one of the more one of the stronger let's call it pro-life laws and there was a huge amount of publicity where everyone went into effect and it doesn't seem to have hurt Governor Abbott particularly and didn't seem to have much effect on other races so it's I think this is somewhat geographically uh contingent where abortion has a big effect but it remains a big issue and I would say going forward it remains a big issue and then on a turn to what could happen going forward briefly what could one thing on that issue is I think that a republican candidate Republican presidential candidate who could run on a federalist platform on the life issue on abortion would be okay would be fine let the states decide a republican candidate who has to be for or chooses to be for federal legislation Federal pro-life legislation um even if it's qualified a little bit I think that's a tough sell just based on the returns Tuesday in Michigan probably in Wisconsin probably in Pennsylvania so in some key States at least we haven't really litigated that issue we'll see what happens if Republicans win the house will they try to actually do something it won't matter because Biden will stop it and the Senate won't pass it but um I think that issue is a bit of a wild card I mean whatever it's a it's a serious issue it's an issue strong people have strong opinions about it was a 49-year Supreme Court decision it was overturned five to four with three recent appointees making up three-fifths of the of the five just unusual to have that happen in the middle of an election campaign so we'll see how that plays out over the next couple of years Republicans I think Trump is the huge question a lot of uh hopes among my Republican friends that uh Trump can be shoved aside as a result of this election I hope they do I think it'd be good for the country even though DeSantis or someone youngin would be a stronger candidate I think in 2024. uh there are lots of moments where people thought Trump should be shoved aside and he wasn't shoved aside lots of moments were people privately said he should be set aside and didn't say so publicly lots of moments where they didn't ultimately step up and shove them aside where they could have you know like impeachment to mention an obvious what in February of 2022 where he couldn't be 2021 where he couldn't I assume it would be couldn't be running it if he had been successfully convicted after being impeached um let's see you know I think the next few months or two will be very interesting how many people publicly publicly say Trump shouldn't be the nominee or don't just say gee I'm a little concerned about it but say nope I'm organizing to make sure we can support someone else and indeed we're going to organize to try to make sure that the other candidates don't you know we don't have aiding them running and they divide the vote we're gonna you know donors could do this right you could get together if you were a serious Republican who wanted to stop Trump and try to organize the nomination for someone else or for someone else from a group of someone else's uh we'll see if they have the nerve to do that or whether a they don't object that much to Trump and B they're not so sure that he would lose and see they're scared of him and so we'll see if people run right if the scientist runs it and you don't get in many many others so it is very revealing about the Republican party that Mike Pence who was very loyal if you like Trump's Administration you should like Mike Pence and if you like Trump's Administration but don't like January 6 you should really like Mike Pence because that literally is what Mike Pence is right and he's the one guy who stood up when he had the most to toughest time in a way standing up on January 6 otherwise he was a totally loyal trumpist so why shouldn't they all be for Mike Pence well they can't before him because he took on Trump camp in Georgia excellent conservative if you're conservative an excellent governor of Georgia we elected easily into swing state he should be the one they're all rallying to right you want a non-trump Republican party that's totally conservative pro-life pro-market pro-business slightly Pro voter suppression you know kind of the pure Republican dream you know and they uh they're not rallying to Camp why because you can't he took on Trump in 2020 and you can't be for someone who takes on Trump so you have to be someone who's for someone who's sort of trump adjacent it's kind of quiet about Trump but young Canada DeSantis we'll see how that all works out um and maybe I'm wrong maybe there'll be a camp boom lid here after his big victory in Georgia but I wouldn't I wouldn't count on it um Democratic party huge questions Joe Biden maybe you notice this is a little elderly to be president of the United States and won't be any younger two years from now it wouldn't be any younger six years from now at the end of a second term um he beat Trump on the other hand I think is a very unusual moment where the nomination of both parties is very much up in the air in my opinion though Biden for now is helped by the election As Trump was for now somewhat hurt by the election and there'll be a sense of hey we did fine with Biden as president what's the safest thing to do just to keep him on the other hand you just don't know you know how that looks a year from now whether any Democrats have the nerve to really shove them aside a little bit I don't know a lot of other wild cards I'll mention Liz Cheney who had a pretty good election night actually the Democrats she went in to help against election deniers look like they've won we'll see what happens in Arizona but she's without a party and and a little hard to know quite what her future holds electorally final Point um just to clarify this kind of forward-looking point so if you do a matrix assuming no third parties or no major third parties and independent candidates which could be wrong this time it has been right A lot of the time so there are only four possible match-ups in 2024 to oversimplify here a little bit I think hopefully Trump Biden non-trump Biden no Santos you know et cetera um non-biden Trump so that would be Biden decides he can't run again and it's Whitmer or Shapiro or whoever you want or vice president Harris or you know Buddha judge or something against Trump and non-biden non-trump those are the only four if I got the math right here ways this thing can work out um the most the best thing for the country in my view would be non-biden non-trump and that's the least likely of the four and the worst thing for the country would be Trump versus Biden and that's the most likely of the four [Applause] thank you well you know now that Bill Crystal has demonstrated that the classic political scientists two by two table exhausts all human possibilities we can we can move on uh uh demonstrating once again that the reign of Hegel is not yet ended I too have three points uh you know or 0.1 what happened 0.2 why did it happen and 0.3 what does it mean I told Harvey before this session began that if bill went Crystal went before me that I'd be able to cross out significant portions of my remarks and so efficiency has been served I'm happy to inform you so what happened at the altitude of 30 000 feet well in most midterm elections particularly the first midterm after a president takes office uh you see a mobilization of the out party and the demobilization of the in party uh by contrast in presidential elections you usually see the mobile mobilization of both parties and one of the distinctive features of this midterm election is that in its broad shape it looks more like a presidential election there was a mobilization of both political parties and that itself is remarkable and it helps account for the fact that I think the Winner's Edge the Republicans Edge in the popular vote is going to be substantially smaller when the dust settles than the edge of the winners the big winners in 2010 and 2018. let's just use those two as a baseline in 2010 the losing party the Democrats who managed to shed 63 seats in that all in that midterm election got 44.9 percent of the popular vote uh eight years later when the tables were turned and the Democrats picked up 40 seats the Republicans got 44.8 percent of the popular vote I don't know what the final numbers are going to look like in 2022 when all the votes are crowded but I can pretty much guarantee you is they're not going to look like that just doing a back of the envelope calculation based on the exit polls which means you're piling conjecture upon conjecture and uncertainty upon uncertainty unfortunately I would guess that the Democrats got between 47 and 48 percent of the two-party votes and a little bit less than that of the total popular vote because you always lose some to independent and independent and third party candidates and I think that that very simple fact helps account for the fact that the Republican seat turnout the seat gain is going to be so much lower than almost anybody anticipated some people got it right I talked to a leading young Democratic pollster at a party a couple of weeks ago who told me that the Republican gains would be about 15. that may turn out to be spot on but most of the rest of us even those of us like me who wrote article after article trying to explain why the ceiling on Republican gains was so much lower this time that it has been in some of the wave elections of the past I didn't dare to predict that Republican gains in the house would be as small as they're turning out to be but this phenomenon of dual partisan mobilization unusual for midterm election helps to explain that as as Bill said uh there is there was no large change in the shape of the two parties coalitions a little bit of air was pumped into the Republican Coalition compared to 2020 a little bit of air was taken out of the Democrats 2020 balloon and I picked up one indication that Democrats may be running into trouble with Asian voters although you know drawing inferences from exit polls is risky and if so I think I can understand why that maybe may be happening ah but let's turn to the state level for a minute because important things happened there you know the Democrats actually picked up two governorships relative to the prior Baseline with a chance to get a third it is possible that Republicans will pick up a single governorship depending what happens in in Nevada and I think equally significant Democrats almost swept the governor's races in the most important swing States for 2024. certainly in Wisconsin Michigan and Pennsylvania and interestingly looking forward to possible voting Wars in 2024 uh the Republicans hoped to make gains in the Wisconsin legisl the house in particular so that they would have a super majority that would enable them to override the governor who was re-elected that did not happen and uh and in and in Michigan the Democrats flipped both the house and the Senate so suddenly Michigan is a trifecta State who would have thought that and in Pennsylvania uh Democrats Democrats picked up I believe the Senate but I'll check that at any rate so in those key States Democrats are in a much better position than they would have been previously to resist efforts to challenge the 2024 presidential election results in Georgia uh we have we have a republican governor who has demonstrated his intention and his capacity to stand against fundamental vote manipulation which leaves Arizona which I confidently predict will be the epicenter of craziness in 2024 I can hardly wait uh so there were you know Democrats losses at the national level were much smaller than expected and their gains at the state level and both governorships and state legislatures turn out to be quite significant looking forward to 2024. okay so much for what happened if we had a lot of time I'd go into details about the small changes in the size of the democratic Coalition in 2022 relative to 2020 but we can do that in Q a if anybody really wants me to drill down so let's let's get to number two why did it happen I'll start with what was the biggest surprise for many uh the 2022 midterm election was expected to be a referendum on Joe Biden it's closer to say that it was a referendum on the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court lost and I can go into great deal on detail on why the Supreme Court lost but suffice it to say that when it comes to what I'll call the abortion regime you have about 60 percent of Americans who say that abortion ought to be legal all or most of the time versus about 40 percent who say that it should be illegal most or all of the time and the share of Americans who think it ought to be illegal all the time is under 10 percent so if you're perceived to be anywhere near that position which some Republicans were in this cycle uh you have a very very Steep Hill to climb and many of them you know Michigan would be an excellent example conspicuously failed to climate uh and it is really dramatic you know looking at pre-election expectations that this would be a predominantly inflation driven election that the number of people leaving the polling booths who said that abortion was their top issue was almost as large as the number who said inflation 31 percent for inflation 27 percent for abortion and when you look at the swing States the results were even more dramatic there are actually two important swing states where the voters coming out of the coming out of the voting booths said you know more voters said that abortion was their top issue than inflation those two states were Pennsylvania and Michigan in Michigan 45 said that abortion was their top issue and only 29 said that inflation was their top issue figures are similar but a little bit less dramatic in Pennsylvania and in each one of the key swing States other than Georgia uh there is near parity in the number of people citing those each of those two issues and I think that was a major driver probably the single biggest surprise of the election uh and I think it accounts for a substantial a substantial portion of the difference between what people expected the outcome would be and what it actually turned out to be so why it happened Factor number one referendum on the Supreme Court referendum on the abortion regime number two yes Virginia there are swing voters and they pay careful attention to the character and quality of individual candidates uh if Herschel Walker had gotten as many votes as Brian Kemp you know we would be looking at a Republican Senate but he trailed fire he trailed Governor Kemp by five percentage points and I don't think it requires a detailed analysis to explain why and you know speaking of candidates deed speaking of trump candidates it is true uh that JD Vance you know did you know won the election handily in Ohio but he ran almost 10 percentage points behind the Republican gubernatorial candidate running for reelection uh Mike dewine and I could I could go on uh now this brings me to my third point and I flatter myself that it's a bit original but we'll see Democrats did surprisingly well among the people I will call lukewarm voters as opposed to passionate voters what do I mean by that well despite predictions of mass desertion among independents uh Democrats carried Independence in this cycle by two or three points depending on which poll you're looking at they they got 56 percent of the moderate vote and and helping to explain a point that bill Crystal made they got 49 of the many many people who said that they somewhat disapproved of Biden's performance as president but did not strongly disapprove of it the problem with looking at the raw job approval number is that it smushes together people who strongly approve of the president and only somewhat approve and people who somewhat disapprove and people who strongly disapprove and it turns out that that four-point scale tells a much more accurate story than the two-point scale does uh moving right along with our lukewarm voters if you look at the group of people who were discontented about but not angry about how things are going in the country Democrats got 48 percent of those voters uh and they got 60 percent of the voters who said that abortion should be legal in most but not all cases so you know my thumbnail analysis of the three big things that happened uh number one the referendum on the Supreme Court uh number two the non-disappearance of Swing voters and number three the fact that we can see in the exit polls that people who were unhappy about the way things were going and about the president but not really angry about it uh turn you gave a lot of their votes to Democrats okay question number three what does it mean here I'm just going to throw some ideas on the table uh and very quickly because Bill Crystal has already mentioned some of them uh you know just just to look at the surface in the Democratic Party if things had gone badly I speak as a veteran of the famous Democratic circular firing squad it will not form up this year instead I get to observe a republican circular firing squad fortunately their aim is terrible so there'll be as many Republicans left standing at the end of the circular firing squad as there will at the beginning I confidently predict but they'll probably be mattering to each other uh and so this removes the pressure on Joe Biden to stand down and create an open contest for the Democratic uh presidential nomination I think he was he was very much inclined you know to put himself forward for renomination before this election and now I'm almost certain that he will and I would be very surprised if a major Democratic candidate stood up to challenge him uh within the Democratic parties memories of what happened in 1980 are still fresh if you challenge an incumbent president you probably will not beat him if you will certainly weaken him for the general election unless that's what you want to do for example that's certainly that's certainly what Liz Cheney would want to do if she put her hat in the ring as a republican against Donald Trump but unless you want to weaken the eventual nominee of your party you don't do that and I don't think that's going to happen a second subtler thing that's happened within the Democratic party is the nature of the issue debate I know for a fact that a whole bunch of Democrats were locked and loaded if things had gone badly to argue that it was a huge mistake to focus on abortion as much as the Democrats did that you know James Carville was right all along it always was the economy stupid and people should have been banging away on a progressive economic agenda going far beyond what Biden uh what what Biden and Company got done during the first two years of what I hope will be his first term uh and that's not going to happen now right and you know the argument in favor of giving due attention to cultural issues in the Democratic party has been much strengthened by this now that can easily overreach the fact that the Democrats were on the winning side of what turned out to be the core cultural issue in this election does not mean that they would be on The Winning Side of all of the other cultural issues that many Democrats like to push but overreach is us uh and so I'm not confident but that's an that's an important dog that didn't bark uh in the post-election dialogue I think this certainly diminishes Trump more than perhaps Bill Crystal suggested it diminishes Trump not only depending on how things go for the second consecutive election he will have deprived the Republicans and Mitch McConnell of an entirely achievable Senate majority but also because a lot of the people running for offices like Secretary of State in the states who strongly identify themselves with the Trump view of the 2020 election they lost as well uh I will footnote here you know our mutual friend Bill Crystal Sarah Longwell who makes this point you know in great in great detail uh third we are witnessing the emergence of Governors once again as key leaders within the party and as potential presidential candidates down the world down the road I view this as a very positive development especially because many of the governors are big state Governors and I've long argued that being governor of a big state is the best possible preparation for the presidency by contrast I've long argued that being the governor of a small state is the worst possible preparation for the presidency and uh you know I'm happy to argue that point if anybody wishes to contest it among among the Democrats you have the emergence of Gavin Newsom in California uh of Doug Shapiro in Pennsylvania and especially Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan whose star is much in the ascendancy on the Democratic side she was the biggest gubernatorial winner from this election and of course on the Republican side you see the emergence of Brian Kemp as a strong figure in Georgia Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida and speaking of Ron DeSantis holy cow I mean to win by 20 points in a state that as Bill Crystal pointed out not too long ago was one of the principal swing States this takes Florida off the Electoral College map for democrats for this foreseeable future and with regret and commiseration for the people in the audience who come from the great state of Ohio the same is true of Ohio uh and by the way uh Democrats are now going to be in a good position to resist the Texas temptation you know beetho O'Rourke gave it the old College try and he didn't get close and that is no accident comrades at present especially with Republicans in Texas Statewide for running for Statewide office regularly getting 40 percent or more of the Hispanic vote and by the way uh Republicans across the country according to the exit polls got about 40 percent of the Hispanic vote uh there's no way that the numbers will add up for Democrats in Texas period full stop so you now have a very substantial clarification of the Electoral College possibilities for Democrats and Republicans going into going into the fall going into the 2020 presidential election the focus I think will almost entirely be on the upper tier of Midwestern states and the two key Sunbelt States and the other 44 States would be very lucky if they see a presidential candidate and with that I will subside all right those were um very insightful remarks by both of our bills I'm here as the the token non-bill uh I uh agreed with the with a lot of what they had to say I was a little surprised that bill galston was saying that the worst possible preparation for a president was being the governor of a small state I I think in the Q a we should find out how it Stacks up against being the host of an NBC reality show as as preparation for the presidency but you know maybe maybe there's something uh maybe there's something interesting there to be said Reagan always said that he couldn't imagine having succeeded as president without having been an actor uh so I wanted to make a few points um about this election and then make some more maybe General points about the shape of our politics right now uh which I think um have not really been much changed by it even though there's something there was a somewhat surprising result uh in that uh what we sort of thought of as a typical midterm pattern failed to materialize uh there was no no Republican wave no out party wave or maybe there was a there was a kind of checked wave a wave that uh that was sort of counteracted in a substantial enough way that it uh that it netted out to be a ripple and like the bills I will uh I was struck by the fact that uh the people who say they somewhat disapprove of Biden's presidency in a Biden's job performance broke um slightly for the Democrats four point uh margin for the Democrats according to the exit polls that is surprising that is not the typical midterm pattern and I think that uh you know at the risk of sort of belaboring an obvious point I think one of the one of the reasons that's the case is that Joe Biden is not the sort of central character you know sort of the dominating character in our political drama in the way that every president from 1992 onward has been um you know the Clinton years really were dominated by a very personalized politics surrounding Clinton and same for George W bush and Barack Obama and certainly Donald Trump and uh you know Trump arguably if you actually if you look at the exit polling on the question of did you want to send a message of support for Biden or opposition to Biden and they also asked support for Trump or opposition to Trump right they didn't ask that about previous presidents they don't usually like nobody said in 1994 did you want to send a message to George H.W bush um and the fact is the Trump numbers are very very close to the Biden numbers people were almost as uh moved to register supporter opposition to the former president as to Biden by I think it's a I think it's a good thing I don't I don't say this is a way of sort of diminishing by and I think it's a good thing that we have a politics that is a little bit less obsessed with the person uh in the white house right now but I do think that that helps that helps explain a number of things about this presence I think that explains some of the things about the legislative record of this um Administration where some of the some of the great bipartisan successes um uh legislatively really happened because the Biden White House hung back waited until the last minute to uh to come in and and get what credit there was to be had uh so that I think is part of it that this this we were all primed to expect a different to expect these sort of post-cold War pattern to um obtain here and it just didn't but then second uh this is a something that we that we've heard a lot about I probably have seen the phrase candidate quality in the coverage of this race more than I have of you know previous uh 10 uh election Cycles um and that that covers a vast range of things and there is a certain risk that you say well uh the person who won was somebody was obviously a good candidate and the person who lost was a was a bad candidate um so there's there's the danger of a certain circularity but I do think that there is something to be to be said for sort of objective indicators of candidate strength like has this person run for office before um does this person take positions on issues that are very very far from the median voter um does this does this candidate have uh uh you know uh an unclaimed child in every County um and one of the things that I think happened on the Republican side of our politics was a sense arising from Bill from from Donald Trump's really remarkable success both in the primaries and the general election of 2016. that the normal laws of political gravity no longer apply now you could say outrageous things you could have these crazy scandals you could have this lack of experience you could you could behave in a kind of unprofessional Manner and it wouldn't matter um now in fact it didn't matter even to Donald Trump even in 2016. and it's why he you know lost the popular vote against um either the first or second most unpopular presidential candidate in U.S history who was a major nominee um Hillary Clinton uh and it has continued to hurt him I think it's a big reason he lost in 2020 and it certainly uh to whatever extent these laws didn't apply to Trump um the exception seems to have been for him only it is not something that is transferable and you do see um this this these candidates who get mired in controversy and it does in fact drag them down now if you are in a state where the partisan lean is strong enough in your favor um you may be able to out overcome this but you are going to underperform the typical member of your party in that state so for example JD Vance already been discussed he did do 10 points worse than Mike dewine running on the same ticket for governor he also underperformed the state auditor the state Secretary of State two supreme court justices on the Republican side who are up he was the weakest member of that ticket and uh and I think that that wasn't an accident I also think that the candidate quality question became mixed up with uh with another question and that is the um you know question of democracy the question of election denial and so forth it certainly does seem to me that the deeper a candidate in a competitive race was into uh Trump's nonsense about the 2020 election the worse they did and you can see for example you know oz in some ways you know wasn't just wasn't didn't have all the candidate attributes one would want such as you know like being from the state um but he outperformed mastriano who was much much deeper into uh that uh uh that kind of um 2020 truthrism and I think that there are a number of reasons why um why uh they're involved why candidates involvement in that and it mattered uh and it wasn't just voters again oh my goodness this is a threat to democracy although you know obviously that was an element of it I also think it's just kind of weird it's a signal of weirdness on the part of a candidate to be obsessed about this um you know what happened to voting machines uh someplace um two years ago when there's all these issues in front of your country and it's a sign of weakness it means that you are going to cater to one particular person really uh more than you are going to be your own person or somebody who's who's listening to the voters and it's one reason why I think some of these candidates just didn't reach the threshold of acceptability that might have led those people who somewhat disapprove of Biden again to actually vote for an alternative to Biden and his party um it seemed to me be in the run-up to the election that the debate over this question of democracy and denial and so forth uh had gotten a little flattened that um you know I think it was a mistake for any of the Republicans in the house to vote against certifying um votes uh the electoral votes of their states um or of other states you know Pennsylvania and Arizona and Georgia uh and I think it was worse for them to do it than it was for say Barber boxer and members of the January 6 committee to have done the exact same thing in 2005 or 2017 because of the context of a sitting president who's pretending that he didn't lose the election and so on and so forth but it does seem to me that you know they did have the excuse while this has become in our politics a kind of protest vote and it doesn't mean that I'm in favor of a coup and these people all of these Democrats who did it are in complete good standing and nobody's questioning them and the Democrats are putting them all forward but the fact is the voters I think were kind of discriminating on the question of what constituted real participation in um the you know so-called stop the steal um rhetoric and action of uh uh of trump and they've voted accordingly so one more thing on the uh the election of course big topic that's been uh talked about by uh both the bills abortion um and here on the Democratic side I think that there is a pretty strong consensus this issue helped um it helped Democrats cut their losses cut would have would have normally been their losses in the midterm on the Republican side there's a little bit of a debate as to how much of a factor that really was and um in favor you know the Republicans who say this was a big this was a big issue we'll point to things like the success of pro-choice referenda the failure of pro-life referenda um and just the the basic fact that we didn't have the normal midterm um pattern but the people who say well this is being over estimated as a factor in the election will look at other things so for example you've got all these Governors who signed uh pro-life legislation who not only got reelected but re-elected handily through Georgia which you know was a state that went for Biden it's true of course in Florida which was recently a swing state Ohio which has also been recently a swing state um New Hampshire which is more of a mixed case because the new news is nominally pro-choice but he did sign pro-life legislation and he romped to uh to to Victory as well none of this you know voting for Mike dewine and against JD Vance is not the natural move to take to make if your number one issue is abortion uh and in fact there's other data in the the you know what limited data we have which is I think raises some questions about the abortion narrative about this election so for example uh you you um people who are pushing the idea that abortion was going to be a big issue in this election was going to make the difference going to be a political earthquake as Paul bagala put it for example they'd say it's you know it's really driving turnout um there's going to be huge turnout uh among unmarried women uh in particular unmarried women were the same proportion of the electorate as they were in uh 2018 23 both times uh the margins by which they voted for Democrats were about the same each time Republicans did slightly better among women uh than they did in um 2018 uh when everything was uh in fact in fact their improvements was Stronger among women than it was among men uh even among um white college-educated women uh constituency that's typically thought of as being one of the groups that's going to be most moved by a pro uh Choice message uh Republicans did better among them than they'd done in the in the previous midterm none of which I think means that abortion didn't help the Democrats but I think should make us question the magnitude of that effect um so where we're left and and Bill Crystal meant this made this point about how sort of the similarity of the 2020 and 2022 elections and I think actually you could go back further right I mean I think you could say from 1994 onward we have been in a period of uh intensifying trench warfare between two large coalitions that are pretty evenly matched and you're fighting for a very very narrow strip of territory in between them now occasionally there'll be a massive event that temporarily seems to disrupt this pattern so 9-1-1 you have uh you have 2002 and 2004 which are more Republican years than you would normally have seen or than you've seen for most of this period 2008 you've got this amazing conjunction of uh total meltdown in the economy that happens you know what becomes hugely visible six weeks be before the election coupled with aware a war that the U.S is losing and an extremely unpopular president and that disrupts it on the Democratic side but basically you've got this pattern of oscillation um you've got these You've Got A system that is um dominated by negative partisanship where each party Coalition is Unified less by any philosophical principle or set of policy objectives than by antipathy to the other side fear resentment dislike of the other side and and increasingly the other side's voters um and you've also got a situation in which each Coalition is sorely tempted to believe that it actually represents a majority of the country uh and that its setbacks are um are the result of certain sort of artificial constraints you know if if you're a republican so if you're a republican obviously you know it's the Deep State it's the media it was rigged by you know Mark Zuckerberg somehow um the Democrats have uh have their own version of this which is you know which obviously didn't have as flawed an expression as we got in 2020 on the Republican side but it's you know it's it's Russian interference it's um it's dark money it's the Koch brothers um it's gerrymandering and so forth uh and the the the the fundamental truth that neither of these Coalition wants to face is that it doesn't represent a majority of the country there is a there is a majority that doesn't like the Republicans and there's a majority that doesn't like the Democrats these are overlapping majorities that's the real state of our politics and I don't think it is a condition from which the most recent midterms have delivered us the [Applause] questions the Democrats will put I got just one of the numbers here maybe a bill knows more than I do but I I think the two-party vote is going to be well like 51.50.5 to 49.5 it's not going to be 47 or 48 for the Democrats when California comes in and I think it's going to be like eight seats that they will end up the Republicans will net out um because the Democrats are now winning seats in some places so I think it's a little more dramatic over performance by democrats you stressed absolutely correctly the state level numbers which are really striking I mean I mean obviously uh uh the Sanders winning by 20 points in Florida just kind of jaw-dropping we were running about 11 in Shapiro winning by 16 in Michigan and Pennsylvania is also pretty startling which is that's making Governors are different incumbent Governors are different and cupboards did well incidentally it's just something alluded to it we didn't stress this point uh and certainly Governor said well incumbent senators and house members did well for all the talk about everyone's extremely upset they want a total change get rid of everyone they didn't get rid of many people at all there were a few house members who lost at each party what was there one how many incumbent Center years lost I must uh Done Right fetterman flipped the seat that was given up by the incumbent Senator we don't know what's happened yet in Nevada but I think she'll hang on so and Kelly in Arizona so anyway just a long way of saying that I think it's it's there are a lot of con interesting little contrarian tidbits in this election just you know just to underscore that point when I checked this morning there were 45 undecided House Seats 27 of them are in California that's why we don't know and there's a lot there's a lot of vote outstanding which is why I think it's hard to know the popular vote numbers California to be technical California is for cocktail voting rules uh uh make it almost impossible to count the votes in any reasonable amount of time California ain't ready for reform I'm afraid could I just good could I just throw in a comment on a on a point that Ramesh made which is absolutely true and I just want to extend it you know this idea of you know if you think of it in sort of plate tectonic terms two plates right up against each other locked you know an enormous amount of energy building up but no motion whatsoever uh I actually recently did a kind of 100 Year study of residential elections you know from 1920 to 2020 and they divide into two interesting groups the majority of Elections between 1920 and 1984 were resolved by 10 percentage points or more since the 1984 election no candidate of either major party has gotten anywhere close to a 10-point majority during that 1920-1984 period there were a number of Elections that were resolved by 20 percentage points or more it sounds astonishingly now I mean you had a you had a series of Florida elections you know for the U.S presidency and you know and the absence the absence of any play in the system uh this is what you know this is this is what uh you know sides and you know and fabric and their co-author now have call in their latest book calcified politics right and at some point and I think both parties are yearning for this at some point some candidate is going to figure out how to reconfigure the fault lines of American politics to break out of this 50 50 configuration and that's what has some Republicans salivating at the thought of running Ron DeSantis because they are you know bring making themselves believe that he could do for the country what he did for Florida I'm skeptical of that but at least you know the difference between his first election when he won by less than half of a percentage point in his second election when he won for 20 has grabbed a lot of people's attention yeah and just just to add to the the point about the the trench warfare so I think a lot of the character of our politics can be explained by the fact that each party knows that if everything breaks just its way it can win everything but also that everything they can lose everything and uh and that may be combined with the particular character of our political class uh has led to a kind of ethos of um do unto others first but I could just add one caveat to the Chinese Warfare which I've used that metaphor myself and it's true to a degree but there's been a big shifting of groups on each side so it's not exactly calcified I mean there's been a massive trade as people like to say of upper middle class you know Suburban voters to from The Edge college educated from the Republicans to the Democrats and of white working class voters over to the Democrats it wasn't a trade anyone they chose to make but it happened for various reasons some of the political some of the social economics some of them cultural some of the regional and we were discussing Florida and Ohio before and you know Virginia when I moved there was Republican state and I was pretty safely Democratic despite Junkin so winning with very close race in an off year so I mean I think the degree to which it's an interesting moment but since both Council it's both trench warfare and pretty big movements beneath the surface so you end up looking at the same 50 50 Senate but representing different states and different uh uh points of view and constituencies and just to lean a little bit against ramesh's sort of both sidesism and G the political classes kind of out of touch they don't give up you know one party does in 2016 which is I wasn't a huge fan of Hillary Clinton did concede the election and one president handed over the reins politely and on January 20th did nothing to make the transition hard President Obama though his entire team was horrified at the thought of Donald Trump become president and the other thing didn't happen between November 3rd and January 20th uh 2020 2021 and I am going to say the words January 6th because I don't think it's appropriate to have a discussion of American politics to pretend well that didn't happen and you know they're quibbling about what happened in the past isn't that kind of crazy for Republican candidates to be obsessing about what happened two years ago they're not obsessing on what happened two years ago the point of elections in Ohio is election subversion going forward and they say that mastriano said it the Wisconsin Governor's candidate said it that's why some people got a little more upset about what was happening on the Democracy front than just gee it's kind of unfortunate the tempers are kind of heated and you know there's a little bit of vulgarity on some of the way people are saying things so there the good news is pretty good I should have I didn't mention because I've been following this fight so much anyway I didn't even think of it was too obvious to me but yes the election deniers had a pretty bad night yeah so we focused on 12 on 14 of them in our little Republican accountability project and 12 of them seem to have lost so that's good for 2024 so I think one can be a little more confident about uh 2024 the guardrails have been somewhat strengthened though the general spirit I would say of politics in general particularly of the Republican Party Remains Not as respectful of the rule of law the truth that's another word maybe we should just mention and not telling big lies and accepting election results and being even gracious and urging people to Rally behind the new governor and so forth uh that I think remains very problematic so a couple of points um there first year yeah so first of all of course yeah as I said Trump um Trump's effort to um prevent the will of the people from being implemented after the 2020 election was different and worse than what we've seen from anybody else uh who's occupied the presidency no uh uh David I said that I'm happy to say it again um I I do think that uh again this is a question of um uh distinction so Mark fincham for example running for Secretary of State on exact kind of platform that uh bill was talking about you know uh or or uh Michael's the guy running for governor of Wisconsin who said you know we're never going to lose an election again in Wisconsin they lost they lost um by you know they were repudiated whereas other Republicans who you know they maybe they haven't denounced Trump as much as I have uh you know they didn't vote for impeachment as I think they should have you know that kind of thing voters didn't treat them as being morally equivalent as being just as you know a big part of this problem they they made this distinction that uh that Democrats uh and and frankly some of my never Trump friends haven't always made I love it when Republicans and former Republicans start fighting it makes my life so much easier you know I think we need an infusion from the audience so guy can you uh can they kind of Mike please be uh offered to her perhaps we need a volunteer to carry it around thank you I I love these sessions so thank you Bobby for doing them um so I want to pick up on the the earthquake metaphor of sort of you know the two plates grinding against each other I mean I think Bill so K is exactly right that what's an my metaphor is getting hopelessly complicated here what underlies the two plates has has shifted sides or something like that but nonetheless because so what I want to ask you all to do is speculate so when you get the two plates bumping up against each other eventually you get a huge block right I mean you can't PNG it turns into confidence or something like that um so where would that dramatic transformation what are the what are the fault lines along which it's going to occur of course nobody knows but I so one version is generational right I mean young adults voted more than they have in the past down maybe up to a quarter or 27 or 28 and you know they voted Democratic so so and of course we have a gerontocracy who's running the country so so one version of the earthquake is a generational Story another version which the Democrats have been pursuing me too for decades is the racial ethnic story which seems to be kind of dissolving out from under us um another version is I don't know climate change another version is gender combined with something like gender fluidity or gender you know so oh maybe it's economic I mean maybe we have a new class so so how do we think about what that when the plates crash against each other and actually create the earthquake what's the dimension along which that's going to occur recognizing that this is you want to bet I'm willing to go Where Angels Fear To Tread yeah right first of all you know I do want to challenge the proposition that this great switch in the nature of the party coalitions is something that's happened recently uh this is a long story but to cut to the chase the hajjirah of the white working class away from the Democratic party started in 1968. right and it was essentially complete by the time of Ronald Reagan's re-election campaign uh and I can testify to that because I was Walter mondale's issues director I can give you a day by day Blow by blow ill account of the way Ronald Reagan drove the message that he didn't leave the Democratic party the Democratic party left him and up and down you know the Connecticut River Valley in my home state of Connecticut you know all of those old industrial towns see heads nodding that's right Bill Clinton is hailed as this great force for bringing the white working class back to the Democrats he broke even with the Republican candidate in both of his presidential campaigns even he couldn't do it right so this this reconfig and and decades ago you had James Q Wilson writing articles about the rise of upscale Highly Educated reformers within the Democratic party so this in my judgment has been a Continuing Story and it became a big story because Donald Donald Trump managed to Galvanize the turnout of a class that had turned against Democrats but disproportionately did not vote that was you know that was the big thing that he did he intensified the salience of the sentiments and preferences that they'd had for 20 or 20 or 30 years so that's on the that's on the coalitional point and frankly I don't think there's any turning back you know they're they're ways in which Democrats can take the edge off the majority preference of white working-class voters but for all sorts of reasons I do not think that they can reverse that with any means that they would be willing to contemplate uh so to your second question I think you get critical mass for change when unmet needs of a large number of people pile up during a period of gridlock let me give you an example we have an emerging housing crisis in this country which disproportionately affects young people and so they're being they're being driven out of the starter Home Market they're being driven out of the rental market by explosive increases a record high number of young people are now living with their parents so you know reversing more than half a century of History uh if you have if you have young families who cannot find a place to live at a price they can afford sooner or later that is going to become a big political issue now you and my assessment of what's been happening in recent years is that unmet needs and unmet needs have been piling up let me give you another example uh we have we have been functioning with and dysfunctional immigration system now for decades it's costing us dearly you now have substantial portions of the population screaming that they can't find the workers they need this affects this affects rural communities at least as much as it affects urban communities at the same time you have a majority of of of Mexican Americans saying that they trust Republican Governors to deal with the Border more than they trust Democratic Governors or challengers I could go on okay we but the country can't go on this way indefinitely the first candidate of either party who comes up with an approach to the subject that passes the test of logic and evidence to the extent that politics ever permits those tests to be passed uh and who can sell it to the American people is going to pick up a lot of the marble I have a long list of issues like housing and immigration where I believe there are majorities ready to be made but the internal logic of the two political parties has prevented candidates from articulating sentiments that could Galvanize the support of a substantial majority of the American population as I said the first candidate of either party to pick that block is going to change American politics so um just just two observations on that first part of what we're talking about in terms of trading constituencies is just an equal and opposite reaction right so in the 90s Republicans finished realigning Southern whites and to pick up a lot of House Seats as a result that's largely the story of the 1994 Republican takeover of the house but they um they alienate a lot of uh Northern Northwestern upper Midwestern white voters in the process and you know so the coalitions change I think something similar happens in terms of um the the bifurcation of whites based on college degree versus not having college degree when a party sort of caters more and more and is made up more and more of of people with college degrees it's going to be for various reasons less able to reach people without them particularly if they have different interests and different preferences and vice versa right the party that becomes more representative of of whites without college degrees has a harder time appearing to whites with college degrees like they belong in in that party so that's that's part of it and the the other thing I would say is that if you try to think of things that were reconfigure um Party politics maybe give one side a lasting majority or just just change this pattern I think it's those historical examples are crises right something that happens that just changes what politics is about what the arguments are about whether that's the Civil War or the Great Depression or maybe in some ways you could say the Industrial Revolution is obviously a little bit more of a gradual process but still something that that really shakes things up I don't know if I can think of a time when he really had a situation of just sort of slowly mounting problems that that neither party is is addressing that really has that kind of effect I think that that it tends well you know so the Progressive Era like if you think of so if you think of 1896 as being the big change in in sort of you know you end the a period of trench warfare it's that kind of the Republican Party gets on the right side of the Industrial Revolution really and we're going to be the and and then you certainly at the presidential level you just have they run things with um with exceptions when they're split like 1912 and 1916. um so yeah it doesn't mean that this the future is for ordained that it has to be some kind of um sort of apocalyptic event um that causes uh that causes a realignment but it sure seems more likely that that would change things than that other things would I mean I just want a word for contingency if I can just do that for a second I mean yeah yeah you like that I mean and I like that too I mean yes they're unmet needs and they build up I kind of agree we're in a situation a potential A combustible situation let's put it that way uh that's one reason why some of us were more alarmed about Trump than otherwise because of the demagogue in a combustible situation is more dangerous than a demagogue in a stable Placid you know uh country but I think a lot depends on just contingent events as Ramesh said and leaders you know there were plenty of needs in Russia in 1880 1990 1900 1910 and then you had a war and a defeat and Lenin and Trotsky and people who took advantage of the moment and it's not like it wasn't for ordained that they couldn't have had a different kind of Revolution you really haven't left Bill what's that you really have moved left the French Revolution I think I don't I'm not an expert on this I defer to Harvey on topmost analysis of it but I don't think people I mean they had you know simmering problems with the class system in the church and a million things going on and just Revolution and the rising Bush residency but it happened when it happened for all kinds of contingent reasons it wasn't like and in fact if you look at history I believe this is true I once you know 40 years ago looked at this for 10 seconds I mean the and it wasn't like everyone in 1787 was saying whoa that France that's gonna blow up that was not in fact the conventional view they hadn't had a horrible military defeat they had a competent bureaucracy they were doing pretty well economically then they had a minor recession and there was a revolution of rising expectations and and they had Webb's fair and and the rest is history as they say and it turns out afterwards everyone sees oh my god of course this was going to happen because look at what in the last 60 years you know so I think it's very contingent Trump to his credit shows that people can do things that no one thought you could do we'd never elected a President Who hadn't either been an elective office or a cabinet in the cabinet or a United States Army General never in all of our history and Trump ran and I thought well you can't go in the nomination and then I did actually think he could win the election because he was the out party in a time of discontent but he wins and he governs and then then he tries to over during the election and then he's still the leader of the party some of us thought that was for like 36 hours after January 6th so that might not happen but of course there he is and he's going to announce next week I suppose and we'll be the front runner on the Republican side so that tells me that I give Trump credit for this he had the nerve to sort of just go for it I mean shamelessness maybe too and it would be nice if more moderate Centrist responsible people showed a little more uh had a little you know took a shot at doing the dealing with some of these problems so picking the lock is a nice way is a nice it makes it seem like it's a very polite and sort of you just have to kind of get that right combination on the safety you know and do it it's a little more maybe entrepreneurial in that I would say fair enough well welcome to the 32nd additional of the edition of the structure versus agency debate yeah Paul Ken yeah Bob already has the mic Paul go ahead I might I'll be I'll be brief Paul um I'm on a very simple Point um which is um I understand polarization in that whole the image you've been using now is this tectonic plate thing and I think there's a lot to that but the way it was originally formulated here was falsely symmetric that these are two evenly matched plates and that's empirically not true how many times how many years in a row have the Republicans lost the election that has lost a popular vote along I mean I don't remember the last time seven out of the last eight pardon seven out of the last eight except for 2004. um and yet they've so what I'm trying to say is that's driven not by any sociological or even political stuff it's simply driven by the Constitution and federalism in particular that's not a trivial point because you have I I of course I agree that the Constitution's not going to be changed but we shouldn't act as if sort of in political sociology terms these are too equally matched or that they are equally responsible for polarization they're not every study around says that the Republicans are much more responsible for polarization they've moved much for the the right than the Democrats have and they've paid the price for it they believe they've not won an election or one let me whatever it is one out of the last eight elections so I'm just this is familiar I don't mean that this is a novel to me but I think it's even in this sophisticated context we ought to be remembering that the asymmetry is false so the Symmetry is false if I could just pick up on one in pure empirical Point Bob uh I actually added up all of the votes cast for Democrats and Republicans starting with uh the 1988 election and continuing until 2020. uh and it came out about 51 for Democrats and 49 for Republicans now I certainly take your point uh that narrow minority losses in the popular vote have through the operation of constitutional processes been transformed into majorities at the national level that's yes of course that's that's correct you know but the idea that there's this normal this enormous arithmetic asymmetry between the two political parties it's being distorted out of all recognition by the Constitution by our constitutional forms I think just empirically is not correct uh if you're asking do the Democrats have a modest Edge the answer is yes is it anything like periods of Democratic or for that matter Republican dominance that have existed for long stretches of the past hundred years not even close the only period you can find historically in American history that looks like this is the period between the Civil War and 1896 where you can go through a similar exercise and you'll get very similar results I think that makes a difference right because the inability of either party to to mobilize a stable governing majority that doesn't get overturned two years later is one of the dominant political facts of our time I believe now that doesn't touch at all the substantive question of who's responsible for polarization and who has moved more that's a much longer conversation I just wanted to make the empirical point you know any expert any person any serious political scientist who thinks that the the polarization that that second kind of polarization has been symmetric I don't know any well there are the score of the series okay yeah look this is you know once again this it depends Bob on the time period that you're looking at if you're looking at the period that ends in 2010 you're obviously right if you're looking at party changes since 2010 it gets to be a much more complicated story but we that this would get us very deep into the weeds I propose a lunch or a dinner or Zoom call to continue that yeah since well just to add one little thing since I gather that was directed at me I would say look I think roughly evenly matched I didn't use the word roughly I should have um but you know the key thing it seems to me about the situation is one neither party really has a stable and durable majority so um you know like you know Clinton obviously outperforms Trump in the popular vote but a lot of that was peoples who were saying oh my God no not trump it wasn't like you know we're we're dyed in the world Democrats we love the Democratic party and vice versa when Republicans win majorities and then the second uh point is just because they are you know because Republicans you know the base Republican vote and almost any election you know absent shocking events is something like 47 48 and that makes it very hard to get that coalition to change because they don't think you know they're not going to be shut out um you know they're always going to be within shooting does distance of a majority and and vice versa if the Democrats have a have a reversal have a defeat it's not going to be a 1984 style so I'm not sorry to bring up bad memories defeat that causes them you know especially when it's Then followed by another big defeat in 1988 to really rethink things and and try to change themselves it's actually better to lose big than lose small because you have many fewer regrets well just because I mean that is very important because 2020 Trump lost but he was reasonably close in some of the key States decent popular vote margin and of course Republicans picked up a dozen House Seats and Senate ended up 50 50 that would look like they might even hold the Senate that had a big effect especially the House Seats the governors I think in limiting Republican rethinking or making it easier for those who were against shedding Trump in particular but also rethinking on some issues say well look we didn't do so badly was a pandemic and Trump screwed that episode of and he was Trump and he had all this baggage and they still came close we'll do fine next time or just you know hang on so to speak and Democrat and this time with Democrats doing pretty well uh there'll be that tendency among Democrats Bill expressed it well they won't Biden personally probably would like to run and also there's not going to be a huge amount of rethinking among Democrats they had a mix of progressive and Centrist candidates and some of this I'd say the Cypress candies did a little better but you know I wasn't being Centrist wasn't to it didn't help you win in a deep red State and on the Republican side there'll be a little more circular firing squad though that would be interesting on how much of a real we think will there be how much with a lot of tactical we need to sort of look a little better uh will be that that's a little more opportunity but again it wasn't they're going to win the house so they'll continue the the 40-year string of over taking one house back after the after losing the presidency and they'll tell themselves that Biden this weekend so I do think it's a yes it's a funny situation where both one would hope for fresh thinking in both parties and is not likely particularly to get it as to polarization Bob I think uh there would be conservative political scientists for example James Campbell in his book polarized who would contest that the cause was from the left from the right and not from the left however you told me to say that I don't think any conservative could be a serious political so just to change the topic um the there's a lot of themes here that sort of could come together um the earthquake is an interesting metaphor because of the fact that we are seeing perhaps a continuation of a long Trend but certainly an augmentation of a long trend of uh the Democratic party becoming the party of the elites where they used to be the party of the disadvantaged and so that's really quite uh quite a significant change and the hoi polloi out there might just decide to and that's sort of what Trump is capitalizing on the populist kind of anti-elitas sentiment out there and I think you could argue that Trump is the big winner of the current 2022 election not the big loser as the Wall Street Journal would have it in the headlines today because number one there's the the party needs leadership to contain Trump and the one figure that has some capacity to organize the Republican party is Mitch McConnell but he's a much more effective figure if he's the majority leader than if he's the minority leader in the Senate so I think the Republican establishment has been quite seriously damaged by Trump's ability to run candidates that couldn't win the general election um so he he's positioned himself in such a way and also it's going to be very difficult for all the other Republican candidates to say oh gee we got to get together I'm willing to step down and defer to that's not the way politicians work and you'd have to have some figure in the party who commanded great respect some senior figure that would have to be able to tell people you can't do this we've got to get behind DeSantis or somebody so I just see as as Bill said uh it's it's Biden Trump now if it's Biden Trump you can't rule out that we will not have a second term of trump because we could have in the next two years a significant downturn in the economy this the stage is set for that we haven't Rising inflation the Federal Reserve is determined to uh bring it to an end you can't bring it to an end without economic contraction how long it's going to be how quickly you can get out of it uh certainly uh Ronald Reagan got out of it pretty quickly but um it's it's going to not be easy to turn this economy around if they turn it around then Biden wins easily right he's going to win walk away with it but if he doesn't turn this economic cornered then we could easily have another Trump presidency and then you probably could imagine sort of uh structural change in the political order as we go forward I don't have any idea who would be the big winner so it could be either either way but I do think that there is a plausible chance we could have a major structural change I'll I'll bet that doesn't it should be an interesting question but I I completely agree that Donald Trump could possibly win the 2024 election could win the nomination and then go on to win the general election given the right set of circumstances I don't think he'd be the strongest potential Republican nominee but I certainly think that if you know if you've got a good enough set of conditions um he could win and that's one reason why I've cautioned against people who are opposing him among Republicans saying things like well we've got to defeat him because because he can't win but I just I think that is not actually true and I think in a way it's sort of not even plausible because people have heard people heard all through 2016 he can't win and anyone right you can you sort of can't keep playing that card but to be optimistic about it the optimistic case that that we will be able to retrospectively say that 2022 elections were bad for Trump I would think about Georgia why is it that uh trump-backed Challenger to Camp just gets slaughtered in the gubernatorial primary and also the uh um the the raffensberger heist race again uh raffensberger just just Rhymes in that race it's not like these are Georgia Republicans are moderate in general or Georgia Republicans were hostile to Trump in general I think largely it is Georgia Republicans go through a fairly intense experience of losing power losing two Senate seats because of trump and understanding it you know sort of it was in a way that it was almost impossible not to understand now so the optimistic case I think would be that that what the experience that Georgia had in that special election has now been replicated in multiple States in a way that will get through to Republican voters I'm not saying that's going to happen but I'm but I am saying it as a possibility and that is if if things turn against Trump now that's going to be the reason yes wait for another thanks I would like to add a comment from a personal point of view about the polarization issue I don't have statistics in front of me I have experiences from two domains I speak on the one hand as a political science professor at a reputable liberal arts college in New England and the advisor to its conservative student newspaper the counterpart to what used to be I don't know if it still is the Salient and I can report and I'm sure others have read about this how timid students are of expressing pro-republican I'm not speaking about pro-trump but pro-republican or conservative points of view out of fear of being canceled by their friends as well as graded down by their professors this has been going on for some years I'll add to that my wife and I who are yes long-time Republicans uh people who would not let Donald Trump uh step through our door but would still vote for him because we preferred his policies have been shunned by former friends dating back to my wife's fourth grade friend and relatives close relatives for the sheer fact of being Republicans now I don't have any particular experience with blue collar workers or January 6th deniers and so on so I'm in no position to make a general statistical Claim about this but gee from my experience as a professor and from an academic from the middle class there's been a hell of a lot of polarizing from the left as well as the right so um if you look at most of this polling on questions like would you be friends with somebody from the opposing party or from the opposing ideology those do tend to show um that Liberals are uh well let's say they take their politics more personally than conservatives do although neither of you know this phenomenon is not unknown among conservatives and I think it's gotten a little bit more pronounced uh in the last few years um where I certainly know of of uh of places where you know if you're not for Trump you're not welcome um uh I think it's I think it's it's a very related phenomenon to polarization but not quite the kind of publication we were talking about yeah I would I would just add David and this is the tip of an analytical iceberg that if universities and colleges were anything like a microcosm of the United States I would agree with you completely and the view from Academia is a very particular vantage point uh and uh you know I think that in order to see what's going on in the country uh those of us from the intellectual University classes have to try to elevate ourselves out of our immediate circumstances to see whether the rest of the country corresponds to what we're experiencing the answer is somewhere between no and hell no I think but but we could we could have a long discussion about that but I've been you know I've been now to a series of conferences in the past year uh involving University based and yes there are university-based conservative thinkers and each and every one makes the same assumption that what's going on in universities is either a microcosm of the country or a harbinger of things to come for the country and I think both of those assumptions are questionable yes Avi I have two questions one is we had to set up here inflation the economy being a problematic issue it's usually the dominant issue you had an a president who was at best say ineffectual certainly not charismatic maybe even senile and you had the off your election everything's set up for a republican large wave and it didn't happen is it possible that people had the sense of rejection of the party in power but the image of the Republican party has become so degenerate with people who are you know 80 percent supporting Trump something along those lines who believe that the last election was stolen so that people in the end couldn't bring themselves to vote for the sort of the opposition vote that ordinarily flows in the off-year election that's the first question the second has to do with as I understand it the Democrats poured in 53 million dollars across the country to nominate some of these election deniers and other candidates who they thought would be weaker and therefore could be defeated I think in New Hampshire Bolduc won over I remember his name by one percentage point and it turns out for a while they were I guess the Democrats are nervous it looked like some of these candidates might actually win it in Arizona it may have happened but that the strategy turned out to be basically correct a lot of these people lost but now what does it say about the system it's at the same time the Democrats were accusing these candidates of be being against democracy there's something wrong with our primary system that allows these kinds of machinations and defers to the most passionate and extreme elements in both parties to control the nominees and therefore the election there's something wrong when in a country of 330 plus million people the choice comes down to a Donald Trump and a Joe Biden so my question is are we really should we really be thinking about a reconfiguration of how we select the nominees for the parties in other words changing what is now the primary system I mean there's a lot of interesting stuff on the primary system we've also says the first I totally agree with you first point I guess maybe I should have made it even more clearly then maybe I didn't make it clearly which is yes I mean no TR without Trump being such a PR and I think Bill and Ramesh both made at this point in a way right without Trump being a uh made it's never been a normal ex-president you would have had a normal off-year election in 2022 based on all the numbers of Biden's favorability in the economy and Republicans would have done much better the nominees would have been McCormick and Pennsylvania they would have been not bolduck in New Hampshire and all these states would have been in play that weren't in play and uh I so I very much agree that yes and voters went to the polls with Trump in their mind almost as much maybe as much as Biden and the anti-trump vote was as big as the anti-biden vote and Ramesh was absolutely right they're both bigger than any pro vote and so we hadn't even election because you know Biden's in power so you got to sort of rebuke him but Trump's the face of the outer power party if Mr McConnell gone ahead and convicted Trump in the Senate if the senate had gone ahead and convicted Trump in 2021 and I mean who knows some Trump would have accepted that as sort of a a ticket to retirement so to speak but if he had yeah I mean so I very much think I don't approve what the Democrats did but but because it is irresponsible to play with fire like that though it worked out and it shows in fact the strength of it fits with your first point right I mean they turned out to be right that election the most extreme election deniers were unpalatable even though there was while they were they looked like they were running even with the possible exception of Care Lake in Arizona so I think that's right and that that reminds me just to sort of a close uh a loop that um of something I said earlier that yeah I mentioned that the somewhat the people who somewhat disapprove of Biden's job performance uh broke narrowly for the Democrats but they did break for Republicans who couldn't be fit into that mold the somewhat disapproved Biden people voted strongly for dewine they voted strongly for all of these Republican candidates who fit a kind of non-trumpy not too trumpy old and I think you know it's because again they just you know we we don't see this is a group of Voters that is cross-pressured right it doesn't want to vote for Democrats necessarily but the other but the Republicans have to pass this minimum threshold of acceptability and uh and too many of them decided to light themselves on fire instead I will take the second half or your second question and you know uh perhaps shock people some people in the audience by saying if I could wave a magic wand and restore the nominating system that we had before 1968 I would gladly do it now there are a million historical and sociological reasons why that wouldn't be possible but if in this science fiction experiment you know I could reinstitute a system of peer review and actual structured parties within states that connected the Grassroots with the different elements uh uh I would do it you know the the uh the Illinois I'm not old enough to remember but what happened in 1968 well you know things sort of blew up in the Democratic party and in the country are you listening over here yeah but you know but the Republicans change their nominator they did and I I you know figure out why they chose to emulate the Democrats on this point and not the others where Democrats are always right but that's a different question so because it looks more democratic to have a primary with a small D yeah that's right and so and so it's you put yourself in too much of a defensive position not to uh not to copy you uh the the the Democrats in the in this regard well uh that will get us started and there was a conservative Insurgency right in the 1970s that wanted that because because Reagan would not have beaten Ford you know would not have come as close to beating Ford as he did in 76 if the old primary system had been maintained and wouldn't have wanted 80 volleys I mean the conservative populism had its own you shouldn't you know you should give more credit to the conservatives for having their own populist instincts and their own desires and they're not just reacting to the Democrats they're scared of looking this was scared of uh looking as if they're not Democratic they wanted the new system they were pop they were conservatives they were conservative populists so the establishments of both parties got steamrolled obviously in the 70s maybe the Democrats went a little bit ahead well so is the problem the primary or is it just Trump both yeah both because Trump is a problem in and himself but can you imagine under the old party system that elect Donald Trump would get Fair the Democrats now have a more responsible primary system because they have proportional representation which I'm not crazy about in certain ways but in fact Trump was the nominee because he was able to win 35 percent of the vote in a whole bunch of states and they have winner take all the Republican side because having imitated the Democrats I mean if somebody suggests they went further than the Democrats and you know and they decided to go it's got its own problems and its own issues and you have another Hillary Obama race that goes on forever and all that but the truth is the Democrat I mean yes I would say yes compared to the current the current Republican system is sort of the worst of all worlds I would say there's no establishment to control things there's a kind of crazy there are 20 people run and it's what it's like oh so it's sort of like when someone gets all these delegates Trump never got to 50 in any state until he had the nomination locked up by winning now he was popular don't get me wrong and he might have wondered if it was if it wasn't winner take all so I don't want to overstate this but I think the combination was sort of very damaging and it sort of fits in with Bill's earlier point just to be clear these things have been going on a long time and that you know Trump didn't suddenly come along and and take a wonderful system that was operating terrifically in all kinds of ways and and Destroy and that's two of the party changes too but I do think he sort of supercharged an awful lot of stuff that was going in a certain direction I suppose if we had a ranked Choice vote based primary system rubia would have been the nominee in 2016 but well Marcus Marco land is last last person between us and barbecue so why don't we proceed a question that may keep us from barbecue for a little while because I'm going to use two words that no serious political scientists should use in talking about electoral politics and those words are Asian and Hispanic right the two least descriptive terms I can think of and yet you couldn't read Real Clear Politics for the last six months and not hear about the wave of Hispanic voters to the Republicans and then more recently hope of a wave of the Asian voters to the Republicans so could you deconstruct these two I think essentially useless terms and talk about uh those those questions well accepting that these are Census Bureau categories it is you know it certainly is the case if you look at the 2018 midterm elections Republican candidates got 25 percent of the Hispanic votes in the 2022 midterms they got 39 of the Hispanic vote that's a big change and it's not an accident comrades because if you look at what if you look at what happened comparing 2016 to 2020 Donald Trump got a 10 10 percentage Point larger share of the Hispanic vote in 2020 than he did in 2016. so something is happening and it's no longer possible for Democrats to imagine you know that Hispanic politics Will resemble African-American politics that was the template for a lot of the demographic determinism argument of the first decade of the 21st century no serious analyst can go down that road anymore I alluded briefly in my opening remarks you know to the fact that the single big loss if you look at the exit polls and compare 20 22 to 2020. the single biggest loss for Democrats occurred in this Asian category a 10 percentage Point decline however because Asians are only two percent of the electorate right now what you're talking about is a number of Asians in the sample with a very large margin of error but not quite large enough to wipe out the statistical significance of that finding so something's going on that serious political you know you know political strategists as well as political scientists ought to be looking at is it possible that the conflicts over Elite high school and college admissions which have had an impact on Asian American boats in California have gained a kind of critical mass in attention in those communities I don't know the answer to that question but it's worth considering um it's related to this uh you know it's long been the case that the Democratic Coalition is inefficiently distributed you get all of these uh useless extra votes in California that don't actually affect the outcome of Elections um but I think there is some evidence that the Republican Coalition is now beginning to become a little less efficient and and partly it is this reduction in racial polarization that is causing it because it's not just the Asian vote is small it's also it is disproportionately in places that are not swing States um and to some degree the same thing is true of Hispanics the funny thing about the Hispanic vote I think back to the 2000 election of course famously close election if no Hispanics had voted in that election George W bush would have won the popular vote and lost the electoral vote right because he wouldn't have gotten Florida uh in uh um with the the Cuban vote of that era um at the same time you know Republicans do seem to be picking up Asians do seem to be picking up Hispanics uh but not necessarily the places they need them uh in order to affect things like electors and I would just say I think it's a good thing for the country that these groups don't stick together as uh you know they there's a Melting Pot so to speak I said this 20 years ago I mean I was trying to make the case for immigration the political case for people who were demagoguing it and saying these are all going to be Democrats they're not going to be Democrats they may not be they made their first Vote or two they may not be but they're ultimately going to be like Italians or Irish or anyone else and the truth is I mean if I'm not mistaken Latino Or Hispanic Americans as hither differential issues have like an intermarriage rate already of a third and what does even mean is Ted Cruz are Ted Cruz's kids like Hispanic voters I mean but what Ted Cruz is you know the son of genuine immigrants from Cuba you can't sort of say in Canada and Canada right so you can't say that it's not legit and maybe that's what the census will call them or I guess it's self-selected a little bit right so I think and also incidentally the whole lumping them together is really raw as you know better than I but your question sort of suggested this but we really is wrong I mean the Democrats retook to the Rio uh Grand Valley cease in Texas which are totally Hispanic seats which so that seems to put a dent in the Republican surge that but of course in Florida the Santos must have gotten a ton of Hispanic votes to get that 20 margin 57 so Florida is a different country from I think yeah some of the Expo data instantly is is Shaker than one might think it's that's why I like actual voting data but it's very different so great that's good about America you know what Hispanics of Florida can be different from Hispanics in Texas and Venezuelan immigrants can be different from Mexicans and a lot of them are going to end up not being recognizably Hispanic anyway because what is it going to mean two generations from now anymore I mean people will have you know one quarter Italian or one quarter Irish and half whatever you know Venezuelan and that's that's so I think the good news while we're into all this this depressing you know cataclysmic earthquake you know America with unmet needs is You could argue that weirdly for all the identity politics for all the stupid bad immigration policies for all the bad things going on in universities the old-fashioned American if I'm still allowed to use the term Melting Pot is working surprisingly well and the same is true of Asian Americans who have a massive intermarriage rate again so you know what is that going to mean even exactly a generation or two from now so I think that is actually that part of the American success story actually is somewhat in the actual real America this is sort of an anti-polarization point and a sort of point that Bob and others have made Mophie Arena you know the real America there's less polarization and less identity we don't live identity lives even if we do sort of indulgent identity politics or I don't think any more than we used to so that's that's that's a somewhat encouraging fact I think well a delicious light supper awaits and we'll reconvene in an hour Martha Bays oh hi um I have a question um about the public forum in which our politics is played out and I'm rather struck that it hasn't come up in the discussion it very rarely comes up and that is of course the media and I was wondering if any of you had any observations um going back several years to the changes in the media when Nelson pollsby wrote about the party reforms of the of the late 60s he said at one point if this goes on this way with the primaries some celebrity will be able to come along and walk into the White House and he wasn't talking about media but I think it could be safely said that the result of those reforms was not to give the power to the people it was to give the power to the media and that was back in the days of regulated broadcast Outlets who had a fairness Doctrine and all that that was deregulated in the 80s I'm struck that the year after they you can say I'm sure there's a lot to say pro and con for the fairness Doctrine and we don't live in that media landscape anymore I know that but the year after the fairness Doctrine was taken was repealed uh Rush Limbaugh went on the air he could not have gone on before because he had a completely one-sided uh very amusing radio program that was intended to correct the liberal bias of the mainstream media and that was the beginning of extremely partisan extremely commercially minded partisan media all this before the arrival of the digital age and I think we everyone in this room has some sense of how the social media have functioned to incite anger and extreme emotion send people down rabbit holes and all that kind of stuff and surely that has something to do with the the sort of rigid eye polarization and the degree of demonization that is accompanying it and I'm just curious if any of you would underline what I said would disagree with I said or add to what I said about it if you think it's a particularly important factor or does this election make it look less important foreign for the remnant that is still here I've decided I'm going to say what I really think um well so I think that um so partisan polarization is both a cause and effect of these changes in the media um you know it's not the reason why um sort of the the rise of partisan media is not the reason why we have more Landslide States and Landslide counties than we used to I suspect the fact that we have more Landslide counties and Landslide States helps explain why we have a more partisan media than we had but I just think not just sort of the regulatory environment but the economic environment has changed and it it and um sort of the click bait model of uh journalism um is not one that can be readily replaced on an economically viable basis so we we for many years so if you think about newspapers the fact that they were able to bundle the things that people actually cared about right local news weather local sports um and classifieds right and then actually even before Facebook helped to cannibalize it Craigslist help to destroy the economic basis of these Publications I'm not I I wouldn't say that we're doomed not to find an economic basis for Quality journals and I think that there is still an audience as large as there ever was for it but right now there is no economic model um that makes sense people are searching for them right there's the sort of the billionaire philanthropist kind of you know effectively philanthropist there's the non-profit kind of model but I I don't know if that where that we're there yet um I certainly I would also add that that Twitter in particular has had and had an effect on our politics far beyond um what you might think from the percentage of Americans who are actively engaged in it and and that effect seems to me to be not entirely baleful but 80 percent Bill full I mean I just I agree and I mean it's a big topic the technology the social media and so forth Which social media I think Facebook the algorithm in Facebook has done more damage than Twitter is annoying and can be silly and can speed up reactions and headlines and so forth at the end of the day you post something and everyone can read it I mean the algorithm might drive more people than uh to yours than someone else's is more like the old like a very shortened headline you know clickbaity version of a Public Square but it still is public Facebook's algorithm is genuinely weird when you think about it because it selects things for you you only see things that you have stayed on and that your friends like and then you stay and then you and the things you say on the most and things that get you the most angry and engaged or engaged turns out to mean angry a lot of the time and then it has a terrible self-fulfilling character in a way that I think is particular but then I guess the only qualification I would have is I don't know if I was just reading about this the other day so I was in my mind father coughlin's radio it's like a footnote when you read about the 30s unless you're a genuine historian that like there was these crackpots father coffin on the air it was unbelievably popular it was bigger as a percentage of the radio audience than Rush Limbaugh at the time Henry Ford's independent was one of the most widely read newspapers in America from 1925 to 1930 it was mandatory distribution at every Ford dealership which at that point had you know 70 or something of American Auto Sales and it was like just vitriotically anti-semitic it wasn't even like g a little bit of rabble-rousing or something so uh course they're ready others so I I guess I'm slightly on the skeptical scale of thinking the media is called It's both cause and effect but I'm slightly on the it's a reflection of things more than a cause and that there's always been in a big Mass democracy you're going to have problematic mass media well let me just let me just pick up a a piece of the big can of worms you just opened and that is this whole idea of celebrity right up because what strikes me about all of the candidates that Trump in particular has put forward is that their celebrity pre-exists any political activity and Donald Trump clearly believes that in the same way that his celebrity was a path to political power that more generally celebrity is a path to political power because you start off with 100 name recognition which is true as far as it goes I mean I don't think there's a voter or even a non-voter in the state of Georgia who doesn't know who Herschel Walker is or was uh and if you've been on if you've been on Oprah for a decade there are relatively few people who don't know who Dr Oz is and you know and after hillbilly allergy yo JD Vance was a celebrity you know while he was still thinking about making his move into Venture Capital let alone politics although it turns out we didn't know him actually well but but we thought we did yeah and he enjoyed he enjoyed name recognition and so there is there is a celebrity Theory that is driving the single most influential politician in the United States and uh the question it seems to me is whether the results of this election will call that theory into question right will you know will people who've spent their lives as political professionals start saying you know wait a minute I don't know oh but I mean Trump is such a massive I mean and the Trump outweighs it off your election with a couple of bad celebrity candidates and it's it is a fact so I think I mean but look it's always that sound like you now from the earlier part it's always been that way to some degree right and we went to Daniel abortion write his book about the image you know which is an effect about this right that people have the image is everything it's taken over from that was 1960 I think something like that and the celebrity the athletes going into politics goes to Jim bunting was a senator from Kentucky I don't minimize it because I think it's different uh the one thing I underestimated the most about Trump in the primaries in 2016. when I thought he wouldn't win is I thought he's just another business guy who's trying to run that happens every Republican cycle it's Steve Forbes it's Urban Kane it's plus he combined a little Pat buchananativism so maybe it's a little more potent but then it's a little pro-like but ultimately those things don't those people don't become presidents and I've totally underestimated the celebrity side of it that he was hugely I mean hugely famous and had been on a show for 14 years which made which he was the hero and which she insisted of course the DB the attract active hero the kind of talking but kind of kindly you know business guy anyway I mean so I just totally so I agree with you that I mean it was so important for Trump I mean I would like to think that a couple of bad instances of celebrities will now deter the celebrity recruiting celebrities to run that's an interesting question but I'm pretty doubtful the advantages when you need to raise a lot of money in politics and where Name ID is so valuable if you're not well known it's such a big advantage to start with right that I think it's a that's a problem such a a couple Oddities about Trump's celebrity status in the first week the name recognition was a big part of it but also the free media right CNN somebody said in 2015 was covering covering him like it was a missing plane and um the it wasn't just celebrity but the kind of celebrity it was a type of celebrity that was extremely appealing to Republican primary voters an executive a businessman who got things done you know made made executive decisions of course like the the version of him we saw on TV was nothing apparently like the actual way he acted as a businessman but the you know that you know and of course it turns out to be as president in some ways extremely indecisive incapable of firing anybody directly but you know he had that um he had that image and I don't think that I don't think that other kinds of celebrity you know like a rock star running in the Republican primary would not have had that same kind of effect the idea of you're Fired yeah the dream of every voter but interestingly as I tracked the history of presidents almost none of them can fare to fire people right they all they all use cutouts and intermediaries right no matter how tough talking they are you know the idea of looking someone in the eye and saying they can't do it it's amazing you know one other thing that sort of surprised me every once in a while you know you see you watch an old movie but the Home Alone movie and he's there right I mean Trump was has just been a presence in our popular culture forever I remember as a teenager in Kansas City I'd heard of him yeah look you read dunesbury and he was there all the time question uh here so I have a question for you in particular the others are welcome to comment um now that we're in the nocturnal Council bill um so you you've changed your views a lot since like a couple of times ago when we did this and um or some of you've used my impression I don't read all I don't read all your tweets I I but um I I I I see the the hostility Trump and and I I feel he's a tremendous threat to the country and and completely agree with you about that but it seems like you've also shifted on abortion of affirmative action some other issues and number of people have said so why why has he made these changes and so I just wanted to throw that out to you have you changed on those things and if so what what led to the change of mind so I think I've changed on some issues not maybe as many as people think or not as radically as people think I'm less I think on some issues I was kind of on autopilot for 20 years as you know part of the conservative movement and I had the things I actually knew about and thought more about I think and some others I haven't changed like the most controversial things by foreign policy I actually have at least I think I've thought about those a lot I kind of stick with My Views basically on that and other things I just have either learn new things I think maybe it is partly uh I'll come back to Trump in a second but um you know you shouldn't have exact same views at age 69 that you had at age 49 or 29. I mean honestly I would say it'd be kind of weird right you didn't you know you were right when you were in your 20s and nothing has happened in 40 years to make you rethink anything right so that's my first reaction to this oh yes I have changed my views I'm not going around publishing articles against same-sex marriage and I think those of us who were against it we had genuine decent not mean spirited reasons or we thought we did but we were also wrong and many of the predictions we made about how this was going to be whatever the catastrophic effects of it we're going to be so I have changed my views on some things by rethinking in general which I generally recommend to people I would say the problem in the world is not that people change their views too often is that they stick with what they've were comfortable with at a certain age and never let evidence history course of events to affect them Trump has affected My Views a little bit on conservatism how could it not are we going to pretend that there's a giant movement conservatism does a lot of good things I was part of it a very important historical movement Trump it isn't produced by it at all but Trump becomes nominee and president a large percentage of that movement not all of it uh so come rationalizes them succumbs to him some non-trivial Trump part of it cheerleads for him it's got to make you think gee this this movement that I thought was a very kind of admirable honest decent unfairly attacked for bigotry and for close-mindedness and everything that movement maybe there was something not there's always a scene inside of every huge movement but maybe the senior side was a little seamier and a little less of a minority and a little less uh suppressed than I thought now it's also but it's also fair to say that things changed right my friend Charlie Sykes puts it you know there was always there were always been recessive genes in conservatism their recessive genes in every big movement you know it's different like movements are not the same as individual thinkers or even groups of thinkers and uh one thing I'm proud of and I think Ramesh and I very much work together on a lot of this and we suppressed a lot of these recessive genes that were you know I was against Buchanan I was against Ron Paul I was against various that was against America first um and I think that made American conservatism I would argue for much of its history uh you know on the whole a pretty admirable movement but those things aren't suppressed anymore and when they're not suppressed anymore you do have to look back and say maybe they were a little more there all along there were people who were genuinely gotten I was concerned about racial preferences or affirmative action and there are people who think it's very damaging in all kinds of ways there are a lot of other people who are against it because they didn't like the people who were getting certain jobs and they thought that no one of a certain skin color could be qualified for those jobs I don't think they were ever the main part of it they certainly weren't the leading part of it that wasn't a bit Romney it wasn't George W bush it wasn't you know Justice Scalia or whatever but were those parts of the conservative movement more I don't know there was there were more they were stronger I guess I'd say just in numbers there were more of them out there than I realized honestly so some of it's rethinking some of it is things in general some of it most of it isn't I haven't thought that much so most of them were talking about a limited number of issues here and a limited amount of free thinking to be honest but I'd say so I don't know I would do this but I do think yes I I have I think it'll be weird to say you could rethink everything and decide that you're still as much of a conservative on issues a b c d e f g h after Trump it'd be a little weird to have the conservative movement end up with Trump and not say what was kind of wrong with it that it was so susceptible to this why couldn't people stand up why couldn't people say what Ramesh is saying here why did so many people I worked with and knew well either don't have the nerve to say anything or went actually all the way on board you'd have to be kind of foolish I think not to ask yourself that question has it changed is your view now on that difference so why is always so my I mean it would depend on particular choices and issues and I'm generally in favor of very much a favor of color blindness I'm not sure that the notion that the 14th amendment requires every private institution as well as public institution never to take Grace into account at all I'm not sure that is actually the original understanding of the famous the 14th Amendment so if we're serious about originalism we probably should read up what Senator Sherman said in 1867 or whatever and when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1870s and not just say I love Justice harlins to set in 1896 but it's not clear that means that every racial every time race is taken into account that that deal legitimizes this game but no generally I'm against racial preferences I'm for very in fact I'm the last person around defending meritocracy I would say to get to often against conservatives who are now you know in favor of grievance politics and uh excusing people for their behavior and denying people's agency and so forth how can you expect conservatives behave decently when the lip when some liberals have been mean to them that would be ridiculous right so I'm I'm I hold to most of them those views but I will say this though I think I underestimated the continuing importance of race in American politics on policing I very much underestimated the degree of actual bigotry in police Behavior I thought there were very few bad apples and I think there are quite a few there are more bad apples than I thought and more importantly those bad apples were protected by the other police forces we've seen that time and time again and that's a systemic problem and if you're serious about reform of American institutions you should be serious about reforming the police as well now I'm not defunding the police I'm not for all these left-wing attacks I'm the police but I'm also not for Bowing and scraping and or saying oh I can't criticize the police because AOC said something stupid so we have to pretend that their behavior 100 perfect in all these cases so that's where I kind of am on some of those issues Peter another Peter yes thanks Harvey um a quick comment first about your comments about uh Trump I I'm just struck that they seemed very um kind of anodyne if I I think I want to say um in rather benign uh what what I didn't hear any any of you mentioned was the fact that um um his appeal to many many Americans it seems to me was was and is that he's a son of a but he's our or their son of a um it's also not inconsequential I don't think that he made his money or purported to make his money in real estate in a game that I mean a lot of Americans play and want to play and Bill pointed out earlier are increasingly unable to play but it's a game where people know that you can make money um and maybe you there's there's some shady deals involved but that's a game that they can play and he played it really well um you just seem to underestimate his his appeal and and and and that his and some of that is is is uh is is his genuine bile and nastiness I can I can speak to that because I have some direct evidence to be bring to bear on it uh uh first of all I have to say that Donald Trump's Financial history reminds me of the old joke you know how do you how do you make a small fortune on Wall Street answers start with a large one uh and uh you know so you know a self-made man he isn't I think it's fair I think it's fair to say but okay run the run the clock back six years to the fall of 2016. okay where uh Donald Trump has just gotten a share of the Evangelical Christian vote that Karl Rove and George W bush were not able to achieve I have some native informants and Leadership positions in you know in the Evangelical movement so I went to one of them afterwards and said what gives what explains the fact that polls in of evangelicals a year before the 2016 election found that only 20 percent of them said that they would vote a man of poor character into the presidency and in October of 2016 that 20 percent had turned into 70 percent what explains that so I I put these questions to my informant and he said bill you have to understand we think that we are in the process of losing everything you know the central issue in American society is culture and our culture is degenerating is being transformed before our very eyes we are facing a country that will no longer have a place for us forget about an honorable place a place you know we're facing a country in which what we care about will be prohibited by law or the opposite will be taught and enforced by law and we are so desperate that we no longer have the luxury of sorting the people on our side by character we have to ask ourselves a very different question namely will they be effective in defending our views traditional conservatives they he said have been totally ineffective in defending our cultural views we need a thug he didn't put it quite that way but that that was that was the bottom line I can tell you I've spent a lot of time in the past two years with some of the theoreticians of the national conservatism movement I've engaged with them personally I've engaged with their writings and their view is that view that I just articulated on steroids you know they view this as a national cultural emergency and you know and they they can name one traditional conservative leader and president after another uh that let them down they think or failed to prevent bad things from happening they hold the Washington conservative establishment in contempt and responsible for these reverses by being unwilling to do what was necessary that's what's going on uh and you know the I thought foolishly that when Michael Anton wrote that piece to Flight 93 election that he was speaking for a few Fringe elements even at The Fringe Of The Claremont Institute I no longer believed that he was speaking for millions and millions and millions of cultural conservatives who thought that their conception of what made America America was going down the drain and they were willing to do anything and everything to stop it and that's why they backed Donald Trump and continue to Bill could you uh what are is there one particular reverse cultural reverse that they have in mind or are there well which which cultural reverses are don't you think that was the rapidity of the change on same-sex marriage that I was about I was about to say you know same-sex marriage went from 20 approval to 67 approval like a rocket there's never been and then you know then to cap it all off the obergefell decision that was for them a real turning point in in their Consciousness but also also other thing other things that have been happening uh uh the you know they interpreted the black lives matter movement as a more as a mortal threat uh they they genuinely believe that what happens in universities today will dominate The Society tomorrow and I have to say you know extending the theme of changing my mind I used to believe that what happened in universities with State and universities I'm not I'm not all the way in sync with David Shafer on this one but uh you know but the question of what changes that begin in universities will have an effect on American society over time is not a trivial one and I don't want to I don't want to dismiss it and I think I I think I underestimated it so that is that I think is is the sentiment behind the rise of trump so just a couple additional things one I mean I've said it before but the power of negative partisanship even with intellectuals I think has turned out to be much much greater than I had originally thought I thought in particular during the family separation Fiasco I could see you know people who were we were very smart and informed they would just come up with one sort of sophistic equivalence after another to well you know Obama had kids in cages too yeah but it's you know there were differences but you know that it just had such a powerful pull on people to be on the right side and once he became the nominee in 2016 well we're not going to be with with the other side and we'll hold our nose and vote for him but then after you voted for him you kind of have to rationalize it and maybe he wasn't that bad actually and he's got all the enemies that we have and he's opposing all the things that we're opposing and the things that he's not the policies he's that he's not a regular Republican are things that nobody no most voters never cared about anyway like trade or or NATO um that's part of it then the other thing I always had the hardest time trying to figure out what do people mean when they say he tells it like it is because he's like it's like an illustration of I think it was what what Mary Mary McCarthy said about Lillian Hellman everything she says is a lie including Ann and the um but I think part of what it means is there is a level of artifice in which he does not engage he does not in some basic level pretend to be better than he is and we expected our politicians to do that we expected there to be a gap between our political culture and our general popular culture where we would all pretend to be a little better than we actually were I can't think of a moment I can think of moments in any previous presidency where the president has given us a piece of rhetoric which calls us to our better angels I can't think of a single time Trump ever did that um and and I think that that he gave people permission not to make that kind of effort Sarah Gustafson no that was a comment to which I've gotten a fulsome response but I didn't get a chance to ask my question if I might so my question is is directed uh primarily at Bill galston and it goes back to your response to David shaffer's query about the state of the universities and how how much that affects the rest of American society and I I I wanted to push back on your answer and to suggest that that influence uh I think is much greater and more growing than than your answer acknowledged at a time when we see and have seen for the last couple of years the kind of turmoil going on over cultural issues in our public schools and how that's roiling the waters um when we [Music] um um look at um what's been going on uh uh in in the legal profession uh we I I have a good a good friend who was a 20-year partner at uh Hogan and lovell's law firm uh who was summarily uh dismissed after 20 years of being there uh because she participated in a a woman's form after the abortion decision and dissented from the prevailing opinion and was shown literally shown the door uh and thrown out of the firm um um closer to hand uh the woman sitting next to me recently visited her gynecologist um and at the risk of embarrassing I think you've eliminated all the risk judging from the body language the report the report the report was that at every juncture this female gynecologist would request from my wife um I'm going to put my hand here now is that okay I'm going to put my hand here now is that okay um I would suggest that the the cultural ferment is loosed from the University long since and it's now invaded other sectors of American life of a sort that I think it's much bigger than you acknowledge bill and I wonder what you would say to that can I just interveniently are you get your thoughts together to defend it I mean we do need to stack up and make sure that all these things that are being Unleashed by the horrible universities where we are sitting at having a very civil discussion with a lot of majority I would say conservatives who are I know persecuted horribly and so forth but I mean I'm amazed we can meet here we can advertise it out there it was in the Harvard Gazette and that their actual professors here you know who haven't been fired I mean we have to specify exactly what is happening and exactly parts of it are very bad and I'm against many parts of it some of it is stupid and foolish but not the worst thing in the world and some of it is an attempt to correct genuine injustices and problems I I would say so I mean we can go look at the universities in 1970 and decide they were just wonderful you know and and this is where I do I'm less sympathetic I'm much much longer discussion but to the I'm less sympathetic to the social conservatives own account of their grievances as to that that's the entire truth of their grievances but they just looked out in America they're just analytical you know and they just saw geez these terrible things things are happening and then conservatives didn't succeed at all and so I get to be I get to be fully on board with Trump and as Ramesh very well put it I get to move from this is bad but we have to tolerate him for now to it's not really that bad to you know what he's great he's the only one who can fight and win and so I'm very um I'm much less sympathetic to that as an excuse for for a kind of uh turning against America as it is and I'm much and I'm just wary of of saying that you know because things are problematic in some parts of many universities and then they are problematic in some parts of corporate America you know or among Physicians for all I know I don't know my daughter-in-law is a physician I believe she's a good physician at the world she moves in at emergency rooms seems to be a reasonably healthy world are there excesses everywhere a healthy not a healthy world you know impressive Physicians healthier than it was when my father-in-law who's a wonderful physician was a physician in terms of relations among between the sexes in terms of harassment of people in terms of treating people not fairly and equally I mean are we allowed to be a little bit liberal here or is it all just horrible what's happened are we just instantly all these people are so upset about same-sex marriage which I think is legit and the court decision obviously was or that was not the right way to do it and so forth are they for reversing it no so what are they so I mean they're not actually right did Trump do anything to reverse it no so what's the actual thing there for so can I preempt Bill too since everybody's getting into the actors why not yeah I would just say um you know it's funny because because we mentioned Mike Anton of course he had a sequel to that book where it turns out that you know the original metaphor of being on a plane that is that is going to crash wasn't dire enough and everything's gotten worse and therefore we must re-elect the person on whose watch it's all gotten worse um but it says it does um suggest to me I do think the you know whether we call it Castle culture wokeness or whatever the excesses of what may in some respects be a benign tendency they've all gotten worse under Trump and it seems to me that that's not an accident that that there is a symbiosis between these cultural phenomena uh and that that Trump effectively ends up being an ally uh of wokeness rather than its great enemy because you know what the woke folks are saying is there are certain kinds of left-wing orthodoxies to which the only alternative the only opposition is just racism and bigotry and Trump's responses yeah well I can I can remember a time when Bill Crystal was to my right uh I was right when I was to your right and now I'm right when I'm slightly to your left uh no no look I'm I'm trying to look at the phenomena straight and I'm trying not to be defensive in response to your question whether I'll succeed or not is a different matter foreign here's what I think I think that the stuff that's going on in universities and to some extent is migrating into the broader Society will be subject to a democratic test uh and we've already seen that Democratic test in operation I think everybody can remember the sum this summer of 2020 when slogans like defund the police and abolish ice were the lingua Franca of a lot frankly not only of the left and not only the people in the streets but a substantial portion of elected officials in the Democratic party is that true anymore no it isn't because they discovered that that portion of the Creed was overwhelmingly rejected by the American people and by the way overwhelmingly rejected by the African-American community and the Hispanic Community people who were ostensibly and to some extent in fact the victims of bad biased policing they didn't think the right solution for biased policing was no policing I mean what sane person could believe that you know their standard view is we want more police and better police and I would say that this Democratic test you know has led them and my party in a much better Direction which Bears more than a passing resemblance to the the direction on policing uh that it followed in the Clinton administration uh and uh you know and and similarly uh I can tell you that the open borders faction within the Democratic Party is losing ground because people have seen what it amounts to operationally uh immigration policy has not been the Biden administration's finest hour but the the problems with not having some form of reliable border security have just become so palpable that they can't they can't be ignored by contrast and I'm not saying that a democratic test is the same thing as a moral test but I don't think it's an accident comrades that same-sex marriage approval thereof went from 20 to 67 percent in a matter of a decade and a half right because you because people got accustomed to the idea that despite the dire threats of cultural conservatives that same-sex marriage was not contributing to the unraveling of the institution as a matter of fact most of the same sex married people that I know are marriage Patriots right they're more fervently in favor of marriage you know than a lot of people who you know grew up with heterosexual marriage Etc so I am you know I'm less worried about these things in the short run in the long run than in the short run having said that you know I'm going back and forth now because I'm just trying to be honest with you I think that the that the suppression of speech that goes on not only in universities but to be quite Frank in think tanks uh and other institutions non-profit institutions Etc I think this is very bad and very dangerous but I detect a gathering revolt against it and I think it's just a matter of time before this bubble is pierced uh I've personally been affected by it and I know how it works and there are things that I won't say be perfectly blunt but I thank them uh and I S and to connect the dots here uh Donald Trump and I'm here I'm echoing in my own words something that moresh Ramesh said he made the unsayable sayable and that and even if people in the audience weren't willing to say those things the sight of someone who is willing to say them on their behalf was a source of immense emotional gratification almost in the same way that comedians stand-up comedians say the unsayable and they allow people to enjoy a kind of satisfaction that perhaps they don't have the shamelessness to carry out themselves this is a very complex phenomenon uh and so I think I think these are two sides of the same coin making the unsayable sayable and making the sayable unsayable is I think the worst aspect of contemporary culture uh and uh I don't think this regime is going to last forever any more than McCarthyism lasted forever I think it goes against the American grain but it's damned unpleasant right now I'll grant you that is on okay is it on yeah there we go okay um I arrived a little late so if you if you touched on this earlier you can redirect me to the recording um but one of the most interesting pieces of data that I saw sort of over the last few days about this recent election was from aei's Brad Wilcox and I'm just I'm going to read the Tweet so I don't so I don't get it wrong married men broke Republican by 20 points married women broke Republican by 14 points unmarried men broke Republican by seven points unmarried women broke Democrat by 37 points the Republican party is the Perry is the party of the married and increasingly unmarried men the Democratic party is the party of unmarried women so I I mean we can talk about I would rather my answer your answer to my question not sort of be framed around abortion because I think we can debate that add infinitum but my my question is more about what do you see the what do you see our politics becoming if trends like this continue so um well the answer shouldn't so so this Gap is not I think fundamentally a function of abortion uh because it is a gap that has um actually it they started asking the question in the exit polls I think in about 1984 and the marriage Gap just rows and rows and rows every election afterwards until 2016 when it shrank a little bit which is kind of interesting in itself but these are long-standing gaps and even on so on abortion itself there is a much bigger gap between the views in general of married people men and women and unmarried people men and women than there is between men and women um the there also seemed to be other types of differences um and particularly some of the biggest differences are seem to be between unmarried women and married women um I think that when we to the extent that we think about those differences in politics we tend to think about cultural issues um but I think there's also an economic Dimension to it um that uh unmarried women tend in general of course these are all big generalizations to which many exceptions apply but they tend to be less economically secure than married women and thus they're going to view a lot of government economic activism In a Different Light based on that um there's also some evidence I think what it's called the linked fate or shared fate hypothesis that that unmarried women are more likely to think of women as a block and think of the interests of women uh whereas married women and it's sort of in a way kind of like part of what marriage is Right tends not to think primarily in those terms or as much in those terms and and think a little bit more in terms of you know the also sharing the interests of the men in their lives so um I don't I don't see any evidence and as Bill I think was mentioning earlier some of these exit polls you know we there's not a we don't have really fine-grained evidence on which we can rely I don't see that that is something that has really grown in this election I think it's a long-standing thing but the proportion of people who fall into each of these categories is of course changing a lot because because people get married later and later that's I mean it's an interesting phenomenon very complicated I like Brad Wilcox I know well but I don't this is a problem with Twitter I welcome knowledge which is you have to have your country line at the end this is the party of married people I'm gonna make this up there 100 million votes this is going to be roughly correct I think in this off your election let's I don't know what the number of married 50 let's just say 50 million for the ease of like math here 50 million married people voted it sounds like from your data that married voters were what 15 more Republican than Democratic on average the win will it award the women a little less so that means it's I'll do the I don't know 28 million versus 22 million I mean it's just there's we should really be careful to take these General these Tendencies which are true and suddenly decide that every married person in America is a Republican and every unmarried person in America is a Democrat and it's it is a problem I think when people overdo the kind of attempt to say it's therefore it's the party of X it's the party of y i you know so I think it the absolute numbers in these groups matters a lot and it's one interesting thing I recommend you can get the state easily is look at the percentage of the voters of each party who are in a different category as opposed to the percentage of the categories it's the same number obviously it's just cutting it in the opposite way and it's not there's nothing fancy about this but it is is striking when you look at it that way there are a heck of a lot of married people who are Church growing and who have not been divorced three times like Donald Trump and you know Etc are playing around with porn stars and stuff who are Democrats they really are like tens of millions of them they really aren't enough you know single married female graduate students to produce half the votes in the country on last Tuesday and there is I mean believe me I engaged in this caricature a long time and and there's the uh you know from the right about the left and the left has a similar character on the right every single Republican or conservative is a trumpist lunatic you know who shows up in rallies with you know says he's very upset about the cultural degradation of things and shows up at rallies with you know horrible things written on his T-shirt what he with his kid in tow right so that's both are unfair but the absolute numbers do matter and what's striking about our parties I wish there were less polarization is they they actually do have large large numbers of both of both God of of all these different categories you know which is good average tends to bring the Sexes together I'm going to be strange isn't it [Laughter] can I finish yeah uh strange isn't it that people who tend to believe that there's no differences between the sex Sexes most illustrate that difference can I pitch in just a minute before we go to the next question yes Stefan coligno and I used to teach European integration across the street nowadays in Europe there are nearly everywhere people are asking how much can we rely on America and with the Republican Congress and people saying we are not going to give a blank check to silinski Etc the question is where is that where is that leaving us as Europeans and then projecting forward with Trump presidency coming back how can Europe assure its defense now this is a question everyone is asking in Europe and I wonder if you have an answer but listening to the discussion here I also wanted is there something what is going on in terms of the cultural change in the United States that people are no longer proud to defend what they thought where these deep American values internationally that's what I just did a zoom this morning with people in Berlin trying to reassure them and I think correctly that uh support in America for Ukraine is quite strong that the Republican Congress is not it is only going to be one Republican house of Congress and very narrowly at that and they're not going to cut off Aid they couldn't cut off eight anyway presidents are very strong and then actually if you had told me five six years ago when Trump ran and won on a literal America First platform that was his term that term has a history and I was remember at the times that we can't use that term or you could really pay a huge fights for using a term that was pretty discredited in 1940-41 I thought um the he paid no price and a lot of people just adjusted the term to be fair decent people sort of massage the term so they could make it into sort of a cousin of of reaganites you know conservative internationalism anyway if you told me after six years later NATO would be strong maybe stronger than ever that apart from the Brits getting out which wasn't our fault I don't think uh or Trump's wall for that matter with brexit that the EU integration is okay that the you know I mean and the sort of solidarity with Ukraine has been much stronger than people thought it would be a few years ago in the EU I think that's a fairly good news story so I think America is okay I think a second term of Trump would be a real test of whether America wants to continue to play the role it has it's not you know the European should be on it should be cold-blooded and open-eyed about what's happening over here I don't go over there I mean I do speak a lot to Europeans and try to mostly reassure them but I don't tell you you got to tell the truth also which is you know you've got to think hard about your own defense spending and about other ways of strengthening helping strengthen things back here or take away some of the irritants that would make it make it easier for Trump to say that they're not spending any money on defense and so forth but actually I would say divide Administration the I mean bill made this point in passing but I'm just gonna divide Administration is not a mcgovernment Administration I mean people can it got out of Afghanistan which I think was a terrible mistake but it's kind of Pretty forward-leaning in its foreign policy in terms of alliances and it's not doesn't want to that's Carter didn't achieve only we can get those troops out of Korea as soon as possible uh and so I feel pretty good about the possibility and if we get Beyond Trump I'd say the Republican party is still pretty internationalist down at the level of mixed the level of Congress so if you could get Beyond Trump phenomenon I actually think you could claim that you're closer to an Old-Fashioned American foreign policy with liberal internationalists and conservative internationalists than we are to you know a total break with the last 80 years but I worry about it because we four years of trump we made it through uh Biden is I think is fairly sound but not super good at explaining this stuff to the American public and stuff but and they would just get back to the election it wasn't as if people running on America First particularly helped themselves in the race right I mean that does not seem to have a particularly attractive part of the Republican message and the more they focused on just inflation and things like that at or you know conservative governance I think they were better they were better off so I'm slightly more I would be somewhat reassuring I'd be a little bit less reassuring just because I probably spend more time than is good for me looking at Trends in public opinion surveys and the share of Republicans who say that they think it would be better to spend the money that we're sending to Ukraine on things at home has risen quite dramatically since March uh and the next senator from the state of Ohio you know said and never retracted I can just about quote this he said to be honest I don't really care what happens to Ukraine and that's what America First means in practice for a whole lot of people at the Grassroots level you know they put it in the same category as foreign aid this worries me and I wish I were confident you know that the next Speaker of the House would stand up to this but of course he's the one who opened up the whole issue with an injudicious statement which he has not retracted about four weeks ago so you know I I think that if if I were in Europe right now I would be in a sort of a trust but verify mood and I wish I could tell you that America is going to be as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar for the next 75 years I can't honestly say that was it I mean look I was the head of the Weekly Standard we started at 95. the first editorial I wrote with Bob Kagan was an attack on Republicans who were voting to prevent Clinton from helping to feed milosevic for helping in Bosnia who wanted to cut off funds for that in 95 and that was being led by Phil Graham it was the key to his presidential campaign he thought Dole to his credit and McCain and the others beat it back so I would just say I don't disagree they think bill says it's a hard to balance these things you have some new members coming in but in the near medium term the Republican Congress is not going to cut off Aid to Ukraine I don't even think it'll be a priority even if Kevin McCarthy who's less responsible than McConnell they certainly don't have the votes in the Senate Biden could beat it back easily so I'm actually encouraged aren't you I mean don't you feel like the it's now mainstream Democratic talking points to say we're the party of liberal internationalism we love our allies we love the alliances including Japan I mean not just Europe even but I don't know don't you feel sort of heartened by that yeah I do I trust my party it's the other party well no I take it and I trust some of the Republicans if Trump is a huge problem look that number is entirely driven by don't you think by agitated by Marjorie Taylor green type agitation I mean voters out there aren't independently deciding gee you know I looked at carefully situation in Ukraine and five billion dollars was reasonable but 40 billion is too much is that there's always been a market for a certain kind of isolation anyway I don't know so my concern would be what happens to energy prices and it's not just a concern that is um confined to the United States I I would worry about the the resolve of of some of the Allies under those circumstances in some ways more since they're sort of more exposed um I think as the scenario that makes that is problematic for this next Congress would be you've got a narrow majority uh McCarthy can't pass anything without keeping everybody in line and if there are enough people on the right who have decided to prioritize the Ukraine thing then it becomes a problem I don't think he would have the votes do you think some of the Republican members would stick with it well he said I want to cut off Aid to Ukraine I think what would happen would be chaos you know a couple failed budget votes maybe you know it's not like there are no Republicans left no absolutely totally true including quite right-wing ones and ones I don't approve of in other ways who've been very good no but but I think in some ways if it if it had been a big if he had a bigger wave actually this would have been easier because it's not like McCarthy actually cares one way or the other yeah it's good that we end our with a question about foreign policy which races may be bigger issues than we're raised uh before or in this election so let's let's go because because we may be facing uh um a possible renewal of something like a cold war uh let me just say something personal at the end uh by way of thanks I mean Harvey you started this 30 Years Ago by my Reckoning and you've you've kept this institution going and uh I know I look forward to it every two years I don't think I'm alone and I'm you know I'm grateful for your commitment to this kind of dialogue I really am [Applause]

Channel: Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard

Views: 3,828

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Id: BfUBa74CjpQ

Length: 176min 42sec (10602 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 13 2022