Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us today for our post-election debriefing on the future of american democracy i'm suzanne mettler professor in the government department at cornell and i'd like to welcome you to this final webinar in the democracy 2020 series this series has been organized by the american democracy collaborative an initiative to consider the state of american democracy through historical and comparative analysis this project is spearheaded by jamilah mitchner robert lieberman tom popinski ken roberts rick valley and myself we've been so appreciative to all of you who've attended these events in this series over the past six months if you've missed some or would like to listen again we've posted the recordings of each of them at our website american democracy collaborative dot org i want to take this opportunity opportunity to thank everyone who has worked behind the scenes and so generously made this series possible we're particularly appreciative of the of the inaudible center and the institute of politics and global affairs both at cornell university and their directors rachel riedel and doug criner and most especially the tremendous talent and expertise of jessica ames scott beamer and sherry england this series could not have happened without them i'm also particularly happy to introduce the moderator for today who happens to be my co-author robert lieberman he is the krieger eisenhower professor of political science at johns hopkins university he's a scholar of american political development race and politics public policy and democracy and the author of several prize-winning books his most recent book is four threats the recurring crises of american democracy which came out of the work of the american democracy collaborative and which rob and i wrote together he previously served as provost of johns hopkins and as dean of the school of international and public affairs at columbia university rob i'll turn it over to you thanks suzanne and welcome everybody as suzanne said over the course of our democracy 2020 series this summer and fall we've explored some of the challenges and opportunities that this extraordinary year has posed for american democracy including violence and policing protests and social movements free and fair elections polarization and partisanship and the transformation of the administrative state today as 2020 uh draws mercifully to a close we'll also bring our series to a close by reflecting on the tumultuous 2020 election season and what that election and its aftermath might pretend for the state of american democracy in 2021 and beyond to help us think through some of these issues we're very fortunate to be joined today by three very wise and distinguished guests so let me introduce them uh very briefly and then we'll dive right in first francis lee francis is a professor of political science and public affairs at princeton second we've had we're joined by christopher parker who is the stewart a sheingold professor of social justice and political science at the university of washington and finally paul pearson who's the john gross professor of political science at the university of california at berkeley so thanks to each of you for being with us today and one last bit of housekeeping before we begin let me just remind everyone that our panelists will be answering your questions toward the end of our webinar today so as questions occur to you please use the q a function to type your questions and we'll get to as many of them as we can and finally finally if you're a twitter user we encourage you to tweet about the webinar using the hashtag democracy2020. so let's dive right in and and to begin let me ask each of you to sort of set the scene and give us an overview of where you see american democracy at year's end the 2020 election tested the political system and brought american democracy close to the brink as many observers have noted president trump uh fanned the flames by making continued claims both before the election and since about fraud involving male imbalance even during a pandemic and he encouraged his supporters including white nationalists to disrupt the voting process long after his loss became clear he and other elected republican officials still refuse at least publicly to accept the election results and persist in making unfounded claims of fraud so i ask you to reflect a little bit on how well the political system has responded to these historical challenges how has this election shown american democracy to be resilient or are we still at risk of deteriorating towards some kind of authoritarianism so let's start with chris hi everybody uh thank you for having me i'm i'm really thrilled to be on this panel of um such distinguished scholars um and thank you for canal now bernadi center for hosting this okay so let me jump right in with this um i think it's um somewhat paradoxical and uh out the state that we've currently find ourselves in so on the one hand you know as many have written um you know that democracy has really received you know a stress test you know unlikely received like certainly in the last century or so and the fact that the matter is is that you know some people want to say you know everything turned out okay ultimately because trump is out of office and you know we're set to write the course what i would like to do is caution people on drawing that conclusion because it took a once in a century pandemic and frankly a moderate old white man for trump to lose and it was still too close for comfort so let's just let's pump our brakes on this just for a second um by the same token so what we're seeing right now is and here's the paradox part of this is that yes we've received a stress test however democracy can be seen as resilient in a following way is that even though you know you have trump and his supporters you know that completely just ran roughshod over the rule of law um you know um you know making deals behind you know trying to you know threatening a lot hillary clinton up you know making those chants and calls for that um you know really setting the cause of racial justice and gender equality back right um the issue is that ironically it mobilized those same constituencies and it so more people had their voices heard in this election than any other election in our history so if democracy can be considered as you know people turning out and voicing their preferences at the polls the democracy is indeed very strong but so so i would say that we're faced with this paradox on the one hand you know we have you know this man and his supporters who really gave democracy american democracy a run for its money but on the other hand you had those constituencies that were most affected that turned out to beat the tide back now this is only a temporary thing because he got roughly 10 million more votes than he got last time and so even though he's going to be off the political stage as far as the white house is concerned there's still this thing called twitter right there's still this thing called the internet and he will continue to hold sway over the republican party and so that makes us i don't think we're any less divided now than when we were on november 2nd for i that's just has to be the case and the another thing i want to bring to bear is that even if he doesn't run again in 2024 some people have speculated there are going to be some republicans that use his recipe um to try to get elected governor senator perhaps even president and and that is a serious problem and it's not without precedent we saw what happened in the 1960s when richard nixon took up george wallace's approach and devised the southern strategy right uh and some people would argue that that sent us on the divisive course that we're on right now so i'll leave it there great thanks francis how about you so i'll approach this your your large question from the vantage point of you know what are we learning about american democracy now here in the contested aftermath of the 2020 elections first sort of a small thought that uh i find myself with a new appreciation for the federal nature of election administration which is more resilient to efforts at delegitimation than any centralized federal election administration could be a president or a party bent on delegitimizing the election would find it much easier to do so if they had a single target a central federal agency responsible for carrying out national elections instead they have to fight against election processes across multiple states in many in states where their own party controls the election machinery note how much harder it is for president trump to contest the election outcomes across so many different closely contested states arizona wisconsin michigan pennsylvania nevada and georgia than it would be if he had just one target and one set of election officials to focus on so polly has long shown that americans have much more trust in their state governments than they do in the federal government and that trust in many ways was vindicated by the uh the performance of those election officials uh in these in these elections that despite the tremendous challenges of administering an election in the midst of a pandemic we have uh amazingly notched a new high for turnout the highest turnout we've seen in a presidential election or national elections since women had the right to vote having elected officials at the state level then go on to defend electoral processes and certify election outcomes rest them on a firmer foundation of public legitimacy than would or could exist at the national level looking more broadly there's no question that democratic institutions have been put under huge pressure throughout his whole time in public life donald trump has sown doubt about the u.s electoral system among his supporters even before the 2016 elections he never indicated a willingness to concede defeat should the vote counts not go his way he repeatedly said that he would only regard the outcome as legitimate if he won this kind of rhetoric is normal for populist leaders who frame themselves as tribunes of the true and virtuous people a populist leader regards opponents as illegitimate enemies enemies of the people in fact trump regularly uses that terminology in trump's case it's you know you know people who do not support him are not real americans any election loss must therefore be the result of fraud or election rigging even in 2016 trump denied that he lost the popular vote despite the tallies showing him losing by more than 2.8 million votes he set up an ill-fated commission to investigate election fraud in the 2016 election a commission that notably failed to get cooperation from state election officials including even in republican states in response to a commission data request mississippi's republican secretary of state literally told them to go jump in the gulf of mexico given that president trump didn't acknowledge the legitimacy of the election he won it's hardly surprising that he does not acknowledge defeat in 2020 and he's pursued every option available to him to contest the outcome but thus far he's had no success through institutional processes the the courts have rebuffed him repeatedly with the third circuit court of appeals decision handed down by a panel of three judges all appointed by republican presidents including an emphatic opinion written by a judge trump himself appointed stating that the campaign's claims have no merit election officials in all the contested states have moved to certify the election results state legislative leaders have indicated no willingness to appoint trump electors despite the election outcome the campaign has lost 38 of the 39 cases it's brought it brought and the 39th merely adjusted the time available for voters to cure defective ballots in pennsylvania so it's pretty cure that the institutional barriers to democratic backsliding are holding here the most worrisome effects of trump's efforts have been his successes in persuading many republicans to question the election results recent polling has shown that 70 to 80 percent of republicans say that they doubt the outcome but i wonder how seriously to take those polls if there are 50 million americans out there if there are 50 million americans out there who believe that the um that uh the election was you know fraud you know fraudulently overturned why are there not protests on the scale of the women's marches in 2017 or the black lives matter protests from this summer out in the streets so it may be that those who profess beliefs of this kind are just cheerleading and expressing themselves as unreconciled to the outcome but it's not yet clear how it's not yet clear how consequential these developments will be in in public opinion they are worrisome election officials in the swing states have received threats from trump supporters who probably genuinely believe that vast fraud is underway but it's not clear how broadly shared those convictions are so at this point i would caution against declaring the death of democratic legitimacy on the basis of what people will say in public opinion polls i'll stop there thanks francis and paul how about you well i want to say first i want to say thanks to the organizers for putting together this great panel and so um privilege to be sharing the discussion with two two really fantastic and insightful scholars um and amazing to see on zoom i mean i'm gonna miss you when you're gone in some ways um to see uh 450 people in the audience from from all over the country and beyond it's you know we should take a second to appreciate the kinds of conversations that we've been able to have about these challenging issues with um you know a really wide-ranging audience so i look forward to people's questions um i'm gonna begin taking out from uh francis's comments but not i'm not gonna stop there i i think it is worth pausing for a moment um to celebrate american democracy um it is i think it is clear at this point that we should characterize donald trump as a would-be authoritarian uh you know i you know for a while people kind of joked around about why was it that he seemed to like authoritarians so much and speak so fondly of them and i think if there was doubt before we know the answer now right if he could be that kind of political figure he would be that kind of political figure so removing someone like that from office is no small thing we know uh from what we've learned in recent years about the experience of how democracies can slide into authoritarianism that it is very difficult to turn that process around and the longer it goes on the harder it is to turn around another my own view is that the american political system as we've known it would not have survived another four years with donald trump in the white house so that is cause for celebration right we dodged a bullet all right um but if you dodge a bullet you probably don't want to stand in the street celebrating um first of all dodging a bullet is not easy right he came very close to being re-elected uh in part because of the electoral college uh and significant part because of the electoral college right would have been it's really easy to imagine a few more votes in those critical states are producing an outcome where uh where the current president lost by something like four percent of the national vote but nonetheless won the electoral college without having to resort uh to the kind of pressure politics he's been trying to produce in the last uh in the last few weeks that's frightening uh and it is also um frightening to realize that just a little bit more political savvy coming out of the white house probably would have produced a different result a little bit of empathy for the victims of the pandemic a little bit more willingness to get the deals that democrats were willing to offer to boost the economy and we probably would be looking at a second term for president trump but the bigger reason uh to not stand in the st street and celebrate is that we know that um sliding into authoritarianism is something that can happen gradually um and while yes the guard rails of democracy have held so far it's a little like the story of a guy who's falling from a building and as he passes the fourth floor he says so far so good um the thing that i worry about most and maybe i worry about it more than than francis does is the reaction of the republican party and republican party leaders to the behavior of donald trump's entire presidency but especially the appalling uh appalling behavior of the last few weeks in which he does everything he can to delegitimize elections has been met with essentially not a peep from leading figures in the republican party with just a handful of exceptions and for every one person who protests uh there are a number of leading republican officials who have cheered it on um we'll get into this more i'm sure in the conversation but i think that behavior is a deep concern it suggests that trumpism or something like it is not going anywhere and indeed is likely to strengthen its hold on the republican party solidifies hold on the republican party uh and i think there there's reason for deep concern about how well american democracy can function if one of its two major parties uh remains attached to that kind of a political framework thanks paul um so that that answer that you just gave to the opening question leads directly into the second question i want to ask you all to address and that is about the the parties in the wake of this election obviously elections divide parties um but during this election season as during the trump era generally uh partisan division seems especially acute so i wonder what's the likely impact of the election on the future of these parties of partisan division or polarization should we as paul just suggested worry about the willingness of many republicans to go along with trump's false claims about election results does this indicate that um that one of the country's major parties is really in the end not fully committed to democracy or should we as francis suggested a few minutes ago to take comfort from the many republican state and local election officials and judges and others who acted with integrity to protect the electoral process and on the other side what about the democrats the democrats are are in many ways what stands between um um us and uh some kind of democratic decline but is the democratic party too divided or dissipated to play a meaningful role in safeguarding uh democracy um going forward so um paul do you want to go a little bit deeper into the partisan angle that you were just discussing a minute ago yeah i'll probably i i'll focus on the republicans maybe i can circle back to the democrats later or let let one of my colleagues talk about that um but let me just say why i i feel like um trumpism or something like it is here to stay for this foreseeable future in american politics when barack obama was dealing with the tea party republicans uh in his administration he famously said we just have to wait for the fever to break right we have to wait for the republicans to come come to their senses and come back to a kind of bipartisan a compromi compromise based kind of politics in which each side exercises forbearance um and recognizes that they need to they need to get get along to some extent with with the other side um but i think fever is actually the wrong metaphor the a better metaphor is addiction i think the republican party the dynamics of the republican party jake packer and i tried to explore these dynamics in um in our last book um that there's been a process in which the republican party has fed this kind of behavior and has developed relationships with surrogate groups whether it's right-wing media or the national rifle association or elements of the christian right that feed this kind of intense zero-sum us versus them our life is our lifestyle is under threat kind of politics um and that's not going to go away um it's not going to go away first because as chris was saying donald trump brought out that vote to an astonishing degree and actually down ballot republicans benefited enormously from it it's a big part of the reason why they over performed so republican politicians um you know who are concerned about their own political ambitions are gonna not be excited about trying to they're gonna recognize that that force is out there uh and that challenging it does not make a lot of sense uh for their political careers um the second thing is that the surrogate groups right-wing media especially have every incentive uh to continue to generate this kind of politics they profit from it you know literally and figuratively they profit from it all right and uh opposing it there's just no there's no upside really to opposing it um you're just going to get taken over by other groups that are willing to feed it and i you know you're not you're not it's not going to pay off for you for you individually and then finally republicans learned mitch mcconnell learned back in 2009 that obstruction pays right that um that um you know a scorched earth policy of resistance to a president of the other party pays off right uh so i don't expect um the republican party um to offer any olive branches or accept any olive branches uh either in washington um or beyond washington thanks paul uh francis how about you how do you see the parties going forward so i'll start out by saying a bit about what i see happening in the democratic party in the wake of the elections and here i see that the fallout from the 2020 elections is to sow discord within the democratic party to say that democrats were disappointed in the 2020 elections is is an understatement you know two days after the elections house democrats held an emotional three-hour meeting at which moderate members blamed progressives for embracing messaging such as defund the police that got used in attack ads against them progressives in turn responded by pointing to the importance of engaging with the young people and the urbanites whose party who support the party needs one progressive member accused the moderates of only caring about appealing to white people in suburbia so this was not a pleasant conversation none of this bad blood is good for holding together a party on tough votes note furthermore it's a it's a party with an extraordinarily narrow majority it looks like democrats are going to wind up with only 222 votes in the house of representatives and at the best they can hope for is a 50-50 senate now it looks like pelosi will have no difficulty winning reelection as speaker but her reservoir of trust among her members has been depleted and not enlarged meanwhile republicans are basking in congratulations at a moment like this nobody is second guessing republican leaders are quibbling about strategy senate republican leader mcconnell already commanded great trust among his colleagues these outcomes just cement that further house republican leader kevin mccarthy has elevated his reputation so the upshot at least in the near term is that democrats will likely have more trouble with internal cohesion than republicans the midterm elections will loom over the next congress as house republicans see themselves as within easy striking distance of retaking the majority in 2022 same would be true obviously for republicans in the senate should they fail to get the majority after the georgia runoffs the party not controlling the presidency has gained seats in congress in every midterm election since 1860 safe too so republicans will only need to flip a handful of seats to get there and they will be focused on doing what it takes looking back and this is something that paul just referenced mccarthy will recall how effective a tough confrontational approach had been in dealing with president obama after a congress in which republicans refused to work with obama on stimulus financial regulatory reform or health care house republicans won a resounding victory in retaking the majority in the 2010 midterms mcconnell ii was senate republican leader under obama and pursued a similar strategy of confrontation and non-cooperation and his efforts were rewarded with retaking the senate majority in 2014. a congress of unified government under trump and a long stretch of being able to confirm conservative judges to the federal courts so with a track record this successful i expect republicans will likely follow a similar playbook in dealing with president biden the big question looming over republicans at the presidential level is um you know is trump here to stay or will there will there be a successor i think as long as trump wants to be the leader of the republican party out of power i think he will continue to be um that uh you know he he he can he can still command a a a megaphone that no other republican leader can um can match i don't know if republic if if there is a if trumpism is here to stay post-trump however i think we need that that trumpism needs trump that he he was the most famous man in the world before before becoming the republican nominee most famous a celebrity in politics somebody's been famous since his cameo long before his cameo appearance in home alone like everyone knew who he was and he had this reputation of being this uh you know tough executive who was going to run government like a business and then he speaks in this plain spoken way that resonates with his constituents out in the broad public in ways that no other politician can match so the question is whether he's still around if there is a post-trump republican party or not uh and that's that's an open question and it's one we don't have any good presidents to guide us on so whether he'll be able to retain support perhaps even you know build support the in andrew jackson style talking about the corrupt bargain of the 2020 elections or something like that to to build support towards 2024 or whether republicans will need to find a successor i think finding a successor will to change the republican party significantly thanks francis how about you see uh parties going forward you know i want a piece of this let me tell you guys something all you guys out there the audience right tropism doesn't need trump trump was trumpism was already here right he just brought all this stuff to the surface all of this stuff was already here matt and i in our 2013 book said like hey look we got the tea party here yeah they're bringing this stuff out right and so when the tea party kind of went away the people with those same sort of dispositions and predispositions remain trump came right along and tapped into it boom here we got truck i'm one of the very few people in this country that said this guy was going to win and it's because trumpism was already here and it's not going anyplace it does not need trump right trump is a symptom he is not the disease racism sexism homophobia xenophobia intolerance that is the disease that trumpism taps into not going anyplace and it will continue to cleave the republican party all right thanks that so that leads perfectly into the next question that i want you all to address and that um has to do exactly with with um with racism in the american political system so you know after a year that saw the killings of george floyd and ahmad arbury and brianna taylor among others early in the year a summer of historic black lives matter protests all around the country that captivated our attention and shaped the context of this election really brought issues of violence and policing and systemic racism into the campaign as an area of sharp difference between the parties and the candidates what is this election and what are the results of this election tell us about the prospects for these issues going forward for the prospects for progress um in the fight against systemic racism and and on those um conditions that that you were just uh talking about chris you wanna you wanna um go a little further into that yeah and i'll try to keep it confined in two minutes um so i mean so i mean just think about once again look i mean everything nothing ever like really changes the context changes um sometimes but the issues rarely do so once again let's revisit the 1960s right we all know this very well when johnson you know seeking his own campaign seeking his own presidency on his own terms staked out an issue of racial progress right um and racial reconciliation right and so what did goldwater do goldwater went the opposite way right and staked the republican party on racial regress right this is not really any fundamentally different now than it was back then so the more the democrats need people of color um you know to to help the party i mean because let's keep it a hundred percent black people are the backbone of the democrat party and black women are the backbone further of the democrat party i mean i've done some experiments that that show this is exactly the case so so we see the same thing happening right now we see this polarization happening right now along racial lines so this and this is all it goes back to what paul said and what i said before that many years ago this is about a threat to these people's way of life right the republican party is a really white man's party and white men feel under threat and so as long as the democratic party continues to need the votes of people of color and women and specifically feminists right then we're going to continue to have these divisions and race race and racism is not going any place we saw what four years of this guy in office did and he still came too close to winning right and he's still saying that all this racial rhetoric and so and you know with george floyd right with with briola taylor let's say her name brianna taylor right this and these police got and they used this this the black kentucky ag let these guys skate so the bottom i mean i get too emotional about this stuff so let me just try to calm down for a second look the bottom line is racing racism hasn't gone any place for 400 years right it's not going any place then and it's not going any place anytime soon especially as people of color continue to exercise our power in the political system white people and the republican party going to continue to see that as a threat paul you want to weigh in on this yeah well i think first of all i think chris is right to put this at the heart of what has been going on in our politics and what is going on in our politics um and i guess a couple of things that i would add are um that not everything stays the same that the demography of the country is changing um uh slowly but steadily in ways i think that that amp up the sense of threat along with some other things that are happening in american society amp up the sense of threat uh among whites especially uh white men especially whites without a college education but that demographic change does mean i think that there is a prospect of moving um the us towards a genuinely multi-racial democracy i wish i could say that i was more optimistic that we'll be able to complete that journey but i certainly think it's a plausible future and one of the things that's happened in the last um year or two i think under the under the impact of black lives matter is um that you see many white americans um especially college educated white americans especially younger white americans um shifting at least the answers that they give to questions in a direction uh in direction towards racial liberalism and towards an understanding of the realities of structural racism you know and i think um there's there's a reason for hope in that i guess i would the to not end on that note of hope i would say um that um that really taking those kinds of issues seriously involves a lot more than say putting a black lives matter um sign in your front yard um or even being open to criminal justice reforms that may feel pretty distant to you um we have a society which has um hoarded opportunity uh for whites um in um in enclaves where they can um they can save their tax money for themselves they can save their schools for themselves uh you know trump tried to play on these emotions during the during the campaign you know joe biden is gonna let these folks into your suburbs right um and that is a part that's a part of american history that we are also gonna have to wrestle with um if we're genuinely going to move to a more um a more racially uh a society in which opportunities are spread more widely across races um so that that's a super challenging journey there are not very many societies if any out there that have really managed it in a democratic way um so it is it's a huge challenge and we're living through that thanks francis you want to pile on here so you're thinking about what these elections tell us about the the future of the fight against systemic racism in american society to say i i don't see much that's encouraging here in my view one of the most worrisome developments in american politics has been the extent to which race is becoming the main line of cleavage between the parties as the u.s population has become more racially and ethnically diverse since the 1960s virtually all of that diversity is represented in the democratic party you can see this starkly in the makeup of congress the the democratic party in congress has grown steadily more racially and ethnically diverse since the late 1970s such that nearly 40 percent of the party in congress now is currently black hispanic or asian meanwhile the nation's increasing diversity has just passed the republican by leaving its racial composition largely unchanged since 1990. non-whites have never made up more than five percent of republicans in congress it's no less apparent if you look to the composition of the two parties in the electorate as gauged by u.s census data the national population has declined from being 90 wide in 1950 to 61 percent white presently the the white share of the democratic party has declined in tandem after 1980 whites began to comprise a slightly smaller proportion of the democratic party than of the national population as a whole meanwhile the republican electorate has barely changed since 1989 in its demographic makeup so i don't think you can understand trump's emergence without taking into account these demographic facts about the parties i i certainly agree with with chris that trumpism was here before trump in that sense a major part of trump's appeal to voters was his willingness to violate taboos around political correctness involving race he was willing to capitalize on pills or appeals or make appeals to the electorate that other mainstream republicans wouldn't supply but i i i also don't think these elections give us much of a sense that that emerging democratic majority you know that multiracial democracy that paul referenced is on the horizon and uh it's a big there's a big question of where latino voters are going to side um in this uh in this racially divided party system and um biden's underperformance with latino voters is one of the most striking uh facets of the 2020 elections that the fall off in latino support for from between 2020 and 2016 is very notable and that explains the loss of some south florida uh house seats that uh that uh uh you know where the democrats expected to hold and that uh hillary clinton had carried in 2016 along with also a lot the the failure to win in a texas border district where republican incumbent was retiring and the democrats thought was a great prospect but it was the weakness biden's weakness with hispanic voters um that uh explains that uh that outcome and that's you know it opens up the possibility that um the that the the very uh you know complex and divided latino uh vote uh will um uh ensure that we don't move too quickly to a a a a a a party politics that can get beyond race well thanks uh and on that note we're going to turn from these round table questions to some questions from our audience and before we do that i just want to apologize to many of you we've got a stack of more than 40 questions in our q a so we're just not going to be able to get to all of these so to those of you who have asked questions that we don't get to apologies but thanks for your engagement so we'll begin with a question from jennifer mccoy who asks you all to look ahead to the next four years and jennifer wants to know what's more likely in the next four years and she gives you three this is a multiple choice question you have three options one political realignment of some kind and if so how two option two is wholesale rejection of the political class due to um governance failures and the rise of some kind of outside autocrat as in other countries and three um her third option is more of the same with a new uh more competent populist autocrat um within the established party within an established party who might come to power in 2024 so which of these paths uh do you think is is more likely who wants to start out and take that i can say a bit about that go ahead for instance so in the lead-up to the 2020 elections uh looking at the polling i thought we might look at we might be looking at a watershed election in 2020 and if you see a candidate up by 10 percentage points if that if that pans out in the uh in the actual popular vote that's a landslide win would be the first landslide that we've seen in presidential politics since 1984. clearly that did not happen uh democrats did not get the uh the yield the gains that they expected uh in the congressional elections either uh and in fact lost uh law seats so that the congress is divided down the middle so the the what looked to be a potential uh realigning or critical election wound up to be more wound up being more of the same i uh you know you know this trench warfare between the parties even evenly matched parties uh a 50-50 electorate the same 50-50 electorate that we've had since uh since 2000. even before that uh so these narrow divisions of power in our politics usually resulting in divided government any unified government does not last long now a rejection of the political class there's no sign of that emerging right now the the party's support is solid president trump's support uh you know first of all this was something chris emphasized in his opening remarks he he turned out 11 million more republican voters than he did in 2016. i don't think anybody would have expected that there were 11 million more trump voters out there uh and then and then that happened and so uh and and you know the the two parties maintain their coalitions election after election with only modest change trump's voters were also romney's voters and mccain's voters you know with with just changes at the margin so i i see i continue to see more of the same nothing has nothing we have seen has indicated any large shifts are depart major departures from the from the normal politics that we see yeah i i agree with all that i think that one of the most striking things about this election is how little how little reality affected um anybody's voting behavior right except i mean people were amped up and they came out but you know if you told me ahead of time that there was going to be an economic crisis on this scale and a pandemic and massive a massive social movement in the streets you know i would expect i would have expected i think that it would have shaken up voting more than it did and i agree with francis is totally uh on the on the margins um and you know political scientists actually i think thought quite a bit about why this is the case now the way in which partisanship is becoming a form of identity politics a kind of tribal politics uh in which um it sort of stacks on top of a bunch of other identities and becomes something that's very very hard to dislodge i guess the one thing i would take from the question that i would juxtapose with with that is i do think what we can look forward to probably regardless of the result in georgia although i think the result in georgia will make a pretty considerable difference and we might want to talk about that a little bit um is um a trend that i see is long-standing in american politics that coincides with the intensification of polarization which is massive governance failure um you know the federal government to my mind barely functions now um you know we're dealing with you can see this with the pandemic you know it's quite extraordinary we haven't talked about the pandemic the president doesn't talk about the pandemic even though something like 3 000 people are dying every day and congress is not able to do anything about the pandemic you know on a larger scale the climate change crisis right slow moving but extremely serious crisis that you need governance to deal with there is no prospect right given the way american politics is currently organized i think that the federal government is going to be able to engage on anything like the scale that needs to happen to confront those kinds of issues eventually it is hard for me to believe that continued failure of governance um you can see declining life expectancy in the us i mean really the problems are just the list goes on and on and it's serious and then and and serious and comparative perspective we look a lot worse uh on a lot of these dimensions than other democracies do it's hard for me to believe that that can go on indefinitely without introducing some kind of radical shock to the system as the as the question uh suggested that it might but i don't i don't think there's any reason to expect that that's going to happen in two years or four years but we certainly see a lot of warning signs chris you will have anything to add to this in the interest of time i will let you know my colleagues did a fine job so what they said okay great thank you all right let's move on we're really lucky to have in our audience today uh tracy metrano who was a candidate for the house of representatives um this year um in the new york 23rd district which is a district that includes uh uh ithaca and cornell and and such we've got a question from the trenches as it were um and tracy asks um the focus on the national election uh avoids the discussion about what happened in house races you've all alluded to this in some respects um but tracy says if one were to ask me here are the three principal factors that that defeated her one is money she says my tea party party opponent was so well funded by money interest she couldn't get her message out two is media the media she says are not critical there's no effective investigative journalism in her district and a third is a democratic blind spots the national democratic party she says does not appear to have a clue about what they missed with working in agricultural classes in districts such as hers the finger lakes and southern tier new york so she's just wondering if you have thoughts about these as factors in what happened in the 2020 election and prospects going forward money media and the sort of disconnect between the democratic party and large swaths of what seemed to be trump's core constituency i'd be glad to speak to that that question that you know so this these elections were quite i mean they were disastrous for democrats um from the congressional elections i mean the presidential election is another matter but the the the the elect the congressional elections uh came out worse than you know anyone expected for democrats i don't think money can explain the outcome broadly democrats outraised republicans they had ample supplies of money at the party level now that's not to say that this is true for in each individual race um so it's not it's not a story of inadequate fundraising on the part of on the on the part of democrats whether it's a question of democratic blind spots uh is unclear in the sense that we could have predicted where democrats lost you know 13 democratic incumbents lost most of them are were a freshman who had won in trump districts in 2018 those districts just flipped back in most cases that's largely the story the large it's largely a story of democrats didn't have to contend with trump at the top of the ballot in 2018 and they did again in 2020 and they lost accordingly so they democrats were unable to uh appeal to uh to to districts that were not already inclined democrats way in a presidential election second reason for democrats under performance was the surprising shift in the latino vote um which uh you know sheds light on a number of outcomes around around the country and then third split ticket voting um was harmful to democrats there was not a lot of split ticket voting in the election more generally but what there was was harmful to democrats voters were less were more likely on not to stick with the party down ticket than trump's voters you can see this in the if you compare the total vote that biden received to the total vote that congressional democrats received and then look at that difference and compare it to the difference between the total vote that trump received and the total vote the congressional republicans received there's much closer correspondence in the latter that that biden won by attracting voters who are who do not see themselves as democrats and did not support democrats down ticket now you know it's not this is not a large share of the electorate so mostly it's a story of no split ticket voting at all but where it occurred it showed that biden's appeal transcended the democratic party and he had no coattails chris paul anything to add to that i i think that's a great answer i agree with i agree with all of that um i guess i guess though the only thing that i would just add uh partly because it was it was part of the question i do think it's striking the democrats have failed to sell their economic message in in rural america right or at rural and small town america um they did a little better i think biden did a little better um uh than hillary clinton did um but um but that's a pretty striking failure um and uh and certainly and that's why you know i think that's part of the explanation for what francis was saying was that that he had no coattails fine had no coattails um you know and and and i think without uh without the ability to sell any kind of economic message in small town in rural america you know that's gonna that's gonna make it a hard hard climb for a lot of democratic candidates who have to have to win more votes in those areas so let me say something to um what paul let me add to this what paul and francis just said especially what paul just said so it couldn't be the case i'm just throwing this out here that um that because the democrats have for the most part thrown in their lot with people of color and feminists that maybe maybe just maybe this economic message even if they had a more robust one it would be difficult for it to be heard right i'm just i'm just kind of throwing that out there totally agree with that i totally agree with that i mean i do think i mean that i think that is part of the underpinning for the kind of identity politics that we see in the parties you know that um you don't have to scratch very far below this surface of well with trump you don't have to scratch below the surface at all but even with other republican candidates you don't have to scratch very far below the surface to see a lot of highly racialized themes you know that are you know very closely connected to the arguments that that make republican the republican party attractive to a lot of their voting days yeah and just one other thing just to add real quick and maybe that's one of the reasons why biden was effective in this regard because they saw him as safe you know moderate middle-of-the-road old white man i totally agree um but democrats thought that would do more for them than it did and would and it would have a bigger i mean it didn't have to win the election again that's not to be that's not to be downplayed but i think you know to bring it back to what francis was was saying which i think is totally right um they thought some of that would carry over um to other candidates and um and it and it clearly didn't you know in the and so you know if below the presidential level republicans kind of got the best of both worlds right they got um they got all those voters coming out that trump brought out um but they didn't get the backlash to trump uh that trump got in say a lot of you know the the suburbs uh where um you know that where he really got hurt this time around um so they got the benefits of trump without a lot of the downside of trump all right um our friend uh rob mickey asks a provocative question that's sort of along the same lines thinking about the dynamics of these party coalitions rob wants to know will u.s democracy be best served by greater incorporation of hispanics into the republican party on the view that this might moderate the party's white nationalism and the attack on free and fair elections i can just uh just speak uh speak to that briefly so so we saw this increased support for republican candidates among latinos here in 2020 after four years of president trump with um you know the harshest imaginable rhetoric um around uh immigration and not just rhetoric actually you know you know action uh you know the border wall and you know the the um you know humanitarian disasters we saw at the borders with you know with uh you know family separations and yet improvement in republican performance among latino voters so this hardly discourages republicans from uh you know from actions that they might have shied away from if we go back to the you know to the to the you know immediate aftermath of the 2012 elections when republicans believed that immigration reform was needed in order to improve the party's standing with latino voters that you know this was the autopsy report after romney's loss that the the party needed to move uh in a more inclusive direction it moved in a less inclusive direction and wound up with a more inclusive coalition so it's it's nothing that's happened right now i think is is moving in the direction that mickey's question um uh uh you know takes us yet one would expect long-term a more diverse uh republican party to help to moderate on race issues but we we we're not seeing that right now in fact less moderation on race issues resulted in a um a more diverse coalition and notably also a more downscale coalition it may be that you know that the the republican party is becoming the party of of the white working class and potentially uh you know uh you know drawing in a large chair of latino vote increasingly large share of latino voters going forward as well can i speak to this so yeah please go ahead i think one thing i want to make clear is that you know latinos that is a pan-ethnic label but lots of ethnicities right so you know in florida you might have cubanos and some venezuelans that got on board with the republican party but in arizona you know where you know most latinos are mexicans right then they came out really strong for the democrat ticket so let's let's put that on the table right now um and then we have to think about the motivations so yeah i mean so the socialist label apparently the poll suggests really stuck with some right and so that was a reason but a lot but there were some that also voted you know for trump for economic reasons right and some you know like many latinos are very religiously conservative right look what he's done on the court right uh conservative but mainly religiously conservative so so i i so to rob's question i don't see incorporating you know latinos more latinos in the in the republican party is moderating itself because those are specific kinds of latinos who are already on board so i just don't see that happening i i well i'm actually i may be a little bit more on rob's side um i don't disagree with any any anything anybody said about this but if one is looking at the long-term trajectory for the for the country and for the health of american democracy then it seems to me it's likely to be a good thing if the republican party is highly motivated to make appeals beyond whites and to recognize that that's going to be critical to their electoral success i'm not saying that's the solution to all problems because i agree agree with what uh chris said and the one thing i would add add there you know there's a lot of uncertainty i don't think we know yet about a lot of these things there's a lot of research to be done to figure out exactly as best we can who actually voted who actually voted for trump and why um but we know some things but um but the thing i would add to the list that chris just gave is um is masculinity right a particular notion of masculinity which may have resonated among among some minority voters and actually one hit want him some appeal there but in all of this we shouldn't forget um uh we shouldn't forget that what what did trump get maybe 35 of the latino vote right um that that's still that that still means that the lion's share of a large and growing electoral bloc in the united states is going to the democrats um and so as that share of the electorate continues to grow one can imagine as rob is imagining his question that the that the incentive for uh republicans to try to figure out ways to reach out to growing elements of that growing uh voting bloc will be there and for the health of american democracy and particularly if we're concerned about about the country polarizing increasingly intensely along lines between whites and everybody else um you know that seems like a good thing if they're trying to reach out to them let me just follow that up just very quickly um so embedded in rob's question was that you know that latinos you know are you know that they you know that they are less racist right look there's some latinos that don't like latinos right so so so so let's just put that out there right now okay i just want to just be clear about that all right um let me change gears a little bit and put together two questions that are kind of two sides of the same coin so on the one hand paul morance asks about uh protections against autocracy that seem over the last few years to have failed or broken down he says the republican party didn't prevent trump's nomination in 2016. um the voters didn't reject him in 2016 and congress repeatedly failed to check his on autocratic impulses uh over the course of his administration and paul wants to know what does this suggest about the state of safeguards against a future autocrat for example in 2024. on the other side of the coin tom popinski asks given what seems like the iron grip that trump has had on uh gop elites why has it proven so hard for trump to convince important republican politicians such as secretary of state raffensberger in georgia to help him actually steal the election so i'll take the last part if you don't mind go ahead um i think there are still some never trump like really establishment republicans that are out there right who put country before party and so i don't think i don't think we should completely discount them because i think they're out there and i think they can be part of a hopefully moving forward you know a coalition you know that will help dilute trumpism as it were so it's not like all the republicans are moving on mass you know and lining up completely without dissent behind trump there are a few holdouts who really put country before party and so and some research that i've done and there's there's a lot more that people think that are out there they just happen to be outnumbered in their four outs flanked by the trump wing of the republican party let me let me also um join in here which is uh you know i would um follow up on chris's remarks by pointing to the extent to which republicans in congress have been a check on trump they are not a vocal check they do not criticize trump they don't contradict him they are not speaking out in the in the aftermath of the election but they have been a check in the in the form of sitting still and in not doing what trump asks them to do every budget that the trump administration sent to congress was dead on arrival including when republicans had unified control president trump asked repeatedly for immigration reform the party did not give it to him in fact they could not even get to a bare majority in the house of representatives when they had republican control so trump doesn't dictate to the party they just sort of sit on their hands and congress continues to wield power in negative power as well as um as positive power and they send spending bills to the administration in most cases negotiated across the four corners so that they have broad bipartisan support and they to those spending bills is attached lots of different policy priorities though you know a lot of legislative action has taken that form throughout the trump administration trump has not been a legislative leader so the you know problems are questions regarding autocracy i think need to focus on the vulnerability of the party system and the inability of uh of uh republican office holders to gate check um the uh you know who becomes the party nominee but in terms of institutional operations i think you see in the relationship between uh trump and the republican congress um many of the same patterns that chris mentioned that you see with uh president trump and republicans out uh republican secretaries of state and election officials out through the country which so there are still meaningful checks of republicans of president trump so i have to say i'm much less impressed than either of you are with the behavior of republican elites you know even i mean tom's question you know why didn't the georgia secretary of state help the president steal a presidential election right that is a pretty low bar that is a pretty low bar right we know that many of these people will turn around in the months to come and introduce all sorts of ideas for restricting access to the ballot right as a result of uh what's gone on you know the the fantasies that have been uh that have been spread across the country in recent weeks we know that they delayed that they intentionally delayed the counting of ballots in many states right knowing that that would so uncertainty about the election result and in washington we know i think we know right that the president withheld foreign aid from an ally military assistance from an ally in order to essentially blackmail officials there into launching announcing an investigation of his most prominent political opponent and republicans did nothing about that right so i agree they have their own priorities right um you know they're much more you know they're much more focused on passing tax cuts uh for corporations and wealthy people than some of trump's top legislative priorities some of them they don't like and so they don't do them but in terms of protecting the guard rails of democracy i'm completely unimpressed and i'm worried wait wait let me just speak to what paul just said oh wait a second you suggested that i was impressed not impressed i'm not impressed i'm just acknowledging that there are a few holdouts that that that go against the grain i was being rhetorical for entertainment purposes but i want it but i want to emphasize and we can we can talk about the individuals who have stood up right and yeah that's that's you know you know the secretary of state in georgia is paying a huge professional price for that right so that's to be admired but just you know you know remember what it is that we're applauding him for right his unwillingness to steal a presidential election right and i and again i think one also has to ask even when one's looking at not his behavior but the overall pattern of behavior at the states right how much of that reflects them standing on principle and protecting the constitution and how much of it is them just making calculations about whether or not they think they'd be able to get away with it right so because one of the things is francis was saying like the fact that you would actually have to over return the results in multiple states right makes the challenge a lot bigger right well there's also the question of their own elections right that that yeah they would be they would be saying right well somehow in all the discourse around how the election was stolen um you know it's only the votes that hurt republi republicans right there and the outcomes that hurt republicans that are suspect not the other ones so you know if he's stealing if he's stealing the outcome in georgia why didn't they do a better job on the senate races um so but i i i would say i didn't mean to imply that i was highly impressed with um with uh republicans standing up to trump and but my point is that it's important to keep in mind the the negative power of a legislature and that you can't that the president cannot dictate to the to the congress even a congress of his own party and president trump most certainly did not succeed in doing so but this is so so where i think we have a disagreement i agree with that right and i and it's important in many contexts um but it is mostly about policy right where they have disagreements about policy um and to my mind that's mostly because you know there are particular powerful constituencies within the republican party that are important to mitch mcconnell uh you know and people like uh mitch mcconnell um they they have those views on policy but when it comes to actually protecting the guard rails of democracy um i see very little i mean i see very little evidence of republicans in congress standing up for that um you know or even for the power of the senate you know even protecting the power of the purse in a meaningful way um so um but you know especially i just think i think the impeachment case and you know which is you know and that's just that was the case they got the furthest in terms of exposing the profoundly corrupt and autocratic behavior of this administration you know but there are many other cases that could be considered along with it uh and you know republicans turned a blind eye they said it wasn't a problem all right well we are just about out of time so i'm gonna uh first apologize to the many many dozens of you in the audience who had uh terrific questions that we just didn't have time for um and i want to just close by uh thanking uh francis chris and paul profoundly for what was a terrific conversation very illuminating and at times a little bit uplifting and hopeful uh sometimes not so much um but very uh illuminating and clarifying all the same so thanks to all of you thank you very very much to all of our audience for joining us for those of you who joined us throughout the series we really appreciate your support um and i'll just remind everyone that we have been recording the sessions so tell your friends tell your family tell everyone that sometime next week it will be available on our website americandemocracycollaborative.org for viewing and you can also check the website for announcements of future events that we will be convening so thanks to everyone have a great afternoon and a great weekend.