Vox: All Posts by Ezra Kleinhttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52517/voxv.png2020-11-30T11:10:00-05:00https://www.vox.com/authors/ezra-klein/rss2020-11-30T11:10:00-05:002020-11-30T11:10:00-05:00The most important book I’ve read this year
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<figcaption>The landscape glows after the main fire swept over in a fast run toward Lake Hughes on June 1, 2013, in California. | David McNew/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>How climate change will force humanity to rethink capitalism, borders, terrorism, and currency.</p> <p id="CP30Bb">If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ministry-Future-Kim-Stanley-Robinson/dp/0316300136/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr="><em>The Ministry for the Future.</em></a></p>
<p id="ZTDjm5">Best known for <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Red-Mars-Trilogy-Stanley-Robinson/dp/0553560735">the Mars trilogy</a>, Robinson is one of the greatest living science fiction writers. And in recent years, he’s become the greatest writer of what people now call cli-fi — climate fiction. The name is a bit of a misnomer: Climate fiction is less fictitious speculation than an attempt to envision a near future that we are likely to inhabit. It’s an attempt to take our present — and thus the future we’re ensuring — more seriously than we do. Robinson’s new book does exactly that. </p>
<p id="5N4Uxo">In <em>The Ministry for the Future</em>, Robinson imagines a world wracked by climate catastrophe. Some nations begin unilateral geoengineering. Eco-violence arises as people begin to experience unchecked climate change as an act of war against them, and they respond in kind, using new technologies to hunt those they blame. Capitalism ruptures, changes, and is remade. Nations, and the relations between them, transform. Ultimately, humanity is successful, but it is a terrifying success — a success that involves making the kinds of choices that none of us want to even think about making. </p>
<p id="dInRXL">This conversation with Robinson was fantastic. We discuss why the end of the world is easier to imagine than the end of capitalism; how changes to the biosphere will force humanity to rethink capitalism, borders, terrorism, and currency; the influence of eco-Marxism on Robinson’s thinking; how existing power relationships define the boundaries of what is considered violence; why science fiction as a discipline is particularly suited to grapple with climate change; what a complete rethinking of the global economic system could look like; why Robinson thinks geoengineering needs to be on the table; the vastly underrated importance of the Paris climate agreement, and much more.</p>
<p id="b48Xmh">My <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-most-important-book-ive-read-this-year/id1081584611?i=1000500763227"><strong>full conversation</strong></a><strong> </strong>with Kim Stanley Robinson can be heard on <a href="https://www.vox.com/ezra-klein-show-podcast"><em><strong>The Ezra Klein Show</strong></em></a>.</p>
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https://www.vox.com/2020/11/30/21726563/kim-stanley-robinson-the-ezra-klein-show-climate-changeEzra Klein2020-11-13T08:20:00-05:002020-11-13T08:20:00-05:00The crisis isn’t Trump. It’s the Republican Party.
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<figcaption>US President Donald Trump stands alongside US Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) during a Keep America Great campaign rally in North Charleston, South Carolina, on February 28, 2020. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>Anne Applebaum wrote the book on why people choose to collaborate with authoritarian regimes. So what does she think of the GOP?</p> <p id="iDY2vt">The most alarming aspect of the past week is not Donald Trump’s anti-democratic efforts. He is doing exactly what <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-election-fraud-biden-pennsylvania-lawsuit-voting-transition.html">he has always done</a>, exactly what he said he would do. It’s the speed at which Republican elites have consolidated support around him. Without the Republican Party’s support, Trump is just the loser of an election, ranting ineffectually about theft as a way to rationalize defeat. With the Republican Party’s support, he’s a danger to the country. </p>
<p id="OLsFPS">Some Republicans, like Lindsey Graham, have wholeheartedly endorsed Trump’s claims. On Monday, the South Carolina senator <a href="https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1325995192055328770">said</a> that Trump should not concede the election and that “Republicans win because of our ideas and we lose elections because [Democrats] cheat.” <a href="https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1325269651274657794">Others</a> — including Vice President Mike Pence and Sens. Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley — have signaled solidarity with the president, while not quite endorsing his conspiracy theories. The message is clear: When faced with the choice of loyalty to Trump and the legitimacy of the democratic process, Republicans are more than willing to throw democracy under the bus.</p>
<p id="TVuZVr">Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for the Atlantic, a senior fellow of international affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and most recently the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Democracy-Seductive-Lure-Authoritarianism/dp/0385545800"><em>Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism</em></a>. In it, Applebaum, once comfortable in center-right elite circles, grapples with why so many of her contemporaries across the globe — including right here in America — have abandoned liberal democracy in favor of strongman cults and autocratic regimes. </p>
<p id="vIJk3q">We discuss why most politicians under increasingly autocratic regimes choose to collaborate with the regime, how Graham went from outspoken Trump critic to one of Trump’s most vocal supporters in the US Senate, why the Republican Party ultimately took the path of Sarah Palin, what we can expect to happen if and when a much more capable demagogue emerges, and much more. </p>
<p id="uHatGJ">A lightly edited excerpt from our conversation follows. The <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-crisis-isnt-trump-its-the-republican-party/id1081584611?i=1000498254726"><strong>full conversation</strong></a> can be heard on <a href="https://www.vox.com/ezra-klein-show-podcast"><em><strong>The Ezra Klein Show</strong></em></a>.</p>
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<p id="0yJdef">Subscribe to <em>The Ezra Klein</em> Show wherever you listen to podcasts, including <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1081584611&referrer=vox.com&sref=https://www.vox.com/2020/9/10/21430547/covid-19-julia-marcus-the-ezra-klein-show-outside-inside-risk&xcust=___vx__e_21287092__r_vox.com/ezra-klein-show-podca"><strong>Apple Podcasts</strong></a>, <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RoZUV6cmFLbGVpblNob3c%3D"><strong>Google Podcasts</strong></a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6NOJ6IkTb2GWMj1RpmtnxP"><strong>Spotify</strong></a>, and <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/vox/the-ezra-klein-show"><strong>Stitcher</strong></a>.</p>
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<h4 id="GfkJ1L">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="qa5Ood">How do you think we would cover what Trump and the Republican Party are doing and saying right now if it were happening in another country?</p>
<h4 id="N2sOdl">Anne Applebaum</h4>
<p id="tZ9Xvy">If this were happening in another country, we would be talking about a populist authoritarian seeking to create disillusion with democracy in his country in order to have a base of supporters who will help him return to power. But I don’t think we have to talk about it as if it were another country. I’m very happy to use the same language that I would use if this were happening in Brazil or Argentina or anywhere else.</p>
<h4 id="rdxuu4">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="9GwJE4">I think that Americans — and I would include myself in this — have had an implicit exceptionalism in the way we understood our country’s immunity to some of the political trends and dangers that afflict other countries. As if authoritarianism can’t happen here, as if our parties can’t turn against democracy here. That just no longer seems true. <em> </em></p>
<p id="W8t6Zc">Is it time for Americans to be disabused of the idea that there is any special protection to our system, our political culture? <em> </em></p>
<h4 id="64ubEp">Anne Applebaum </h4>
<p id="2GwJKw">This is a conclusion that I came to several years ago through the agonizing personal experience of living in Poland and watching one of the political parties here become a populist authoritarian party. Watching it try to undermine democracy, undermine the courts, undermine the media once it came to power. And then, glancing over at the United States and realizing that I was seeing many of the same things. </p>
<p id="IdWkkv">I think you’re absolutely right. I think it’s partly American exceptionalism. It’s also partly our incredible luck over the past six or seven decades. We had a stable democracy, we had an expansion of prosperity, we were the leading country in the world, and others were following us. And we somehow came to assume that it was always going to be like that — just because it had been like that for 60 or 70 years, it would go on indefinitely. </p>
<p id="GgT9Ng">We forget that even in our own history, we had <a href="https://www.vox.com/21455267/ruth-bader-ginsburg-supreme-court-american-democracy-crisis-four-threats">previous moments when democracy was in doubt</a>. We had a civil war. And even if you look at our own Constitution, it was written by people who also had doubts about democracy and also wondered whether it would succeed. One of the reasons we have some of the odd institutions that we do is that the Founding Fathers were people who had doubts about human nature, who wanted checks and balances, who wanted some control over the president, who were reading Greek and Roman history where there were lots of stories of democracy going wrong. All of that was coded into the system from the very beginning. </p>
<p id="oiIxTu">I think that the last several decades have blinded us to our own history and our own origins. <em> </em></p>
<aside id="ZHeGlc"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Trump is attempting a coup in plain sight ","url":"https://www.vox.com/2020-presidential-election/2020/11/7/21554114/trump-election-2020-voter-fraud-challenge-recount-biden"}]}'></div></aside><h4 id="8H2248">Ezra Klein</h4>
<p id="lBloh5">I want to put my cards on the table for a moment: I don’t find Donald Trump very interesting in this story. I think what he is is known. He’s a very familiar type historically. </p>
<p id="jpKEr9">What I am interested in is how quickly the Republican Party has fallen to somebody like Trump. The architecture of your book is about watching people you admired and respected — people who fought alongside you against tyrannies and strongmen for liberal democracy — become functionaries in populist-right, authoritarian parties, and often authoritarians themselves. </p>
<p id="kueRjs">Why do you think that happens? What separates the people who end up as dissidents in those moments from those who become functionaries in them or accommodate themselves to them?</p>
<h4 id="Hzt7de">Anne Applebaum </h4>
<p id="9k4Dgw">I’ve tried to stay away from sweeping vast generalizations. But there is one sentiment, I think, that links the people who were once part of the center-right — the anti-communist movement in Poland or Reaganism or Thatcherism — and who began to change in a different direction over the past decade or so: disappointment. </p>
<p id="sGL76b">These are very often people who are disappointed, and they are almost always disappointed with their society. Whether it’s the superficiality of modern democracy, the demographic change that they don’t want or like, the decline in morals and values that they see all around them, or, in the case of Britain, England’s loss of its voice in the world. It’s a feeling of loss or disappointment, and sometimes it’s quite an extreme form of disappointment — a kind of despair. “My society has ended.” </p>
<p id="ekEiNb">I think anybody who has that view of the contemporary world — that it’s over, it’s finished, my civilization is dead and gone, my society is decayed — leads you almost inevitably into a kind of radicalism. If you have that feeling that it’s over, then why wouldn’t you try to smash everything? </p>
<aside id="R6cFWG"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The post-Christian culture wars ","url":"https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/26/20978613/donald-trump-christians-william-barr-impeachment"}]}'></div></aside><h4 id="yUWqVM">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="bIncFa">As a very quick typology of the Republican Party, I think you could cut people into three groups. There are the people who liked Donald Trump from the beginning, or bought into an apocalyptic understanding of America that Donald Trump seemed to share. A good example is Patrick Buchanan. Then there are people who don’t have unbelievably strong feelings about Donald Trump, but they really hate the left. They’re the anti-anti-Trumpers. And their dislike for the left is enough to make them make peace with him. I would probably put Mitch McConnell in this category. </p>
<p id="6zamp3">But the people I’m most interested in are the people who saw exactly what Donald Trump is and loathed it and then also accommodated it. Somebody I want to use here as a case study, because <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/trumps-collaborators/612250/">you’ve written about him</a> and I’ve spent some time reporting about him, is Lindsey Graham. He ran against Donald Trump in 2016 and called him “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” And he said, “if we nominate Trump, we’ll get destroyed, and we’ll deserve it.”</p>
<p id="M2CjE4">Now, <a href="https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1325995192055328770">he’s out there</a> telling Trump not to concede the election. He’s saying that if Republicans concede, they’ll never win again. He’s telling Sean Hannity that Democrats only win elections when they cheat. What do you think happened to Lindsey Graham? <em> </em></p>
<h4 id="aSkyZl">Anne Applebaum </h4>
<p id="y7d8sb">Lindsey Graham is particularly difficult to explain when you look at his background. If you were to look at him as a type, you would imagine him to be the most loyal American patriot and admirer of the Constitution. He has a very strong affiliation to the military. He got through college on a military scholarship. His parents died when he was young, so he had a hard-knock story and was saved by the American military. And he’s said that many times. If you were to imagine a type of person who would never betray American ideals, it would be Lindsey Graham.</p>
<p id="gEY0K3">But this is where you have to get into questions of personality and personal weakness. Graham is clearly someone who needs to be around a leader. For many, many years, he was John McCain’s sidekick. And in those years, he was a McCain Republican. I saw him at conferences in Europe where he talked about America’s role in the world, America promoting democracy. And then when McCain died, he seemed to need another role and he attached himself to Trump. </p>
<p id="ztN9xT">He appears to like the role of a power broker. When he runs into journalists in Washington, he likes recounting how he was just on the phone with the president. So the feeling of being close to power, of being next to someone important, this seems like a role that he is psychologically attached to playing. It’s a recognizable personality type. <em> </em></p>
<p id="kXY3Jn">If you look at the story of other nations that have been occupied by others or where people are part of political systems that they don’t admire, you will always find people like Lindsey Graham who give up their ideas, who move close to power, and who then seek to play some kind of role in the new system benefiting them. </p>
<h4 id="Ks6Qj8">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="kQl1Cc">My<em> </em>understanding of Graham — and I spent a bit of time with him over the years — is that in the middle of the Trump era, as he began to make this transition, his explanation was if he flattered Trump enough, he could direct Trump in important ways on things that are important to him, particularly foreign policy. This ends up failing. The abandonment of the Kurds, for instance, was a huge blow to Graham. But he does try to become this adviser to Trump, and from what I understand, there was a certain level of realpolitik about that. </p>
<p id="yrVCaX">And then slowly it became something other than that. He began to look at things through new eyes. He was very radicalized by the Kavanaugh [Supreme Court] hearings. He’s out there <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/magazine/lindsey-graham-what-happened-trump.html">telling people</a> that the thing about the left is they hate us. All the smart people out there, they hate us. </p>
<p id="7qRJqJ">Something that you emphasize in the book is the way that cooperating with a regime like this often is a product not of one big decision to change sides, but of a series of small decisions, a series of small accommodations. And eventually you wake up and you’re on the other side. Can you talk a little bit about that process? </p>
<h4 id="oVstDb">Anne Applebaum</h4>
<p id="VBVCgn">There’s actually <a href="https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=35919">social science studies of this</a> and usually it’s done in the form of examining corruption inside companies. How do people end up going along with corruption if their company is carrying out some kind of scam? </p>
<p id="ocO3Ti">The studies show that it’s always a step-by-step process. You accept one aspect of it: “Well, everybody else is keeping double books, so I can, too. That’s just what people do in this company, and it’s normal.” And then the next step is: “I’ll do this transaction in cash and I’ll keep it in the drawer. And I’m still a good person; I’m still a good worker. I’m doing this to help my company stay out of trouble or keep its head above water.” As each step becomes normalized, as people get used to the situation, then they can take the next step. </p>
<p id="D4UKRk">This is very similar to what happens in occupied countries. I’m not saying that the United States is Vichy France or occupied East Germany. But these are useful parallels to look at because they show you what human psychology is like when someone is working inside a system whose ideology they previously disagreed with or disliked. You see <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Iron-Curtain-Crushing-Eastern-1944-1956/dp/140009593X">the same kinds of patterns</a>.</p>
<p id="kEF7Ba">Something like that also happened inside the Republican Party: People who thought of themselves as patriots, as good people — as politicians working in the interest of the United States — made small decisions over time, each time reminding themselves of why what they were doing was for the good of the country. </p>
<p id="7b7pop">For Lindsey Graham, it was: I’m here to guide Donald Trump in the right direction. And then, at each stage, the situation becomes normalized. Eventually Lindsey Graham came to see his opponents as anti-American radical leftist socialists who he had to fight against. He still probably thinks he’s playing the same role — that he’s a good person fighting for American values — even though what he’s doing is almost precisely the opposite of what he said he would do or the kind of person that he was four years ago. <em> </em></p>
<h4 id="FDZd43">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="czvs81">I want to talk about one of those decision trees that I think is happening right now, which has to do with the stolen election narrative that is taking hold among the Republican base. </p>
<p id="rOKwfS">Donald Trump is simply saying outright, in all caps, that he won the election and that the election has been stolen. There are some Republicans, like Graham, who are <a href="https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1325995192055328770">siding with him explicitly</a> on that. But <a href="https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1325269651274657794">many of the others</a> are doing something that I would describe as signaling emotional solidarity with Trump’s claims while not quite buying into them but not disputing them either. On Saturday, Marco Rubio tweeted, “The media can project an election winner, but they don’t get to decide if claims of broken election laws & irregularities are true. That is decided by the courts and on the basis of clear evidence and the law.”</p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">The media can project an election winner, but they don’t get to decide if claims of broken election laws & irregularities are true <br><br>That’s decided by the courts, and on the basis of clear evidence and the law</p>— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) <a href="https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/1325252341789052928?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 8, 2020</a>
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<p id="tyfQfW">I agree with everything in that tweet. But the point of that tweet is to signal solidarity with a president saying something quite different. I think there is a belief among many elected Republicans right now that their base needs to grieve the election, that Donald Trump needs to grieve the election, and so it’s best to indulge the idea that it might have been stolen. Let them process the law slowly, let the courts shut that down, and then you can move on in a less emotionally traumatic way for your base. I just don’t think they’re going to be able to control it in that way. I think this is going to overtake them just like all the other conspiracies have overtaken them. </p>
<p id="rzIpek">But I’m curious, do you have sympathy for that view? Is there something to be said for that strategy? </p>
<h4 id="qnJofX">Anne Applebaum </h4>
<p id="Ya9xbX">I’m afraid that I think it’s a little bit more sinister than that.<em> </em>I think that — certainly on Trump’s part, and other Republicans are probably coming to see this the same way as well — this is an attempt to create a new kind of base: an enraged receiving base, which will always think that the election was stolen and which will always assume that something went wrong and will always feel that they were deprived of something. And this base will then have uses in the future. <em> </em></p>
<p id="1tgrk0">I don’t believe it will be all of the Republican Party. I can’t tell you right now how many of them it will be. But it will be a significant number of people. And in some congressional districts and some states, it could even be a majority. And this will be a base that is usable. This will be a base that not only dislikes the Democratic Party or disagrees with them, it will think that the Democratic Party is evil and anti-democratic — that they have stolen the election. </p>
<p id="R5E0fx">Think about what that means. That means that they aren’t even a legitimate political party. It means that there is a base of people who will be not just skeptical of mainstream media — whatever you think mainstream media is, which <a href="https://twitter.com/BernyBernstein/status/1324824839174213634">may even include Fox now</a>. They will be not just skeptical of Fox, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. They will think all of those institutions are part of a deliberately constructed conspiracy to steal the presidency. And that kind of feeling — that conviction that the other side isn’t just wrong, it’s evil and traitorous — that’s then a useful group of people who can be motivated politically and maybe in other ways in the future.</p>
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https://www.vox.com/21562116/anne-applebaum-twilight-of-democracy-gop-trump-election-fraud-2020-biden-the-ezra-klein-showEzra Klein2020-11-12T11:40:00-05:002020-11-12T11:40:00-05:00The crisis isn’t too much polarization. It’s too little democracy.
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<figcaption>Thousands gathered at Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House to celebrate Joe Biden’s projected win in the presidential election on November 7. | Samuel Corum/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>If Republicans couldn’t win so much power while losing votes, the US wouldn’t be in the current crisis.</p> <p id="SnPi4V">Imagine that, four years ago, Donald Trump lost the presidential election by 2.9 million votes, but there was no Electoral College to weight the results in his favor. In January 2017, Hillary Clinton was inaugurated as president, and the Trumpist faction of the GOP was blamed for blowing an election Republicans could have won. </p>
<p id="1jJ4Md">The GOP would have been locked out of presidential power for three straight terms, after winning the crucial popular vote only once since 1988. It might have lost the Supreme Court, too. </p>
<p id="yjoyPE">And so Republicans would likely have done what Democrats did in 1992, after they lost three straight presidential elections: reform their agenda and their messaging, and try to build a broader coalition, one capable of winning power by winning votes. This is the way democracy disciplines political parties: Parties want to win, and to do so, they need to listen to the public. But that’s only true for one of our political parties. </p>
<p id="UHRo09">Take the most recent election. Joe Biden is on track to beat Donald Trump by around 5 million votes. But as my colleague Andrew Prokop <a href="https://twitter.com/awprokop/status/1326667865622241281">notes</a>, a roughly 50,000-vote swing in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin would have created a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College, tossing the election to the state delegations in the House, where Trump would’ve won because Republicans control more states, though not more seats. Trump didn’t almost win reelection because of polarization. He almost won reelection because of the Electoral College.</p>
<p id="05uMiE">The Senate tells a similar story. It is likely, when the votes are counted, that Democrats will have won more Senate votes in each of the last three Senate cycles, but never controlled the Senate in that time. Vox’s Ian Millhiser calculates that if Senate Democrats lose the two <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/11/6/21550979/senate-malapportionment-20-million-democrats-republicans-supreme-court">Georgia runoffs</a>, they will still, in the minority, represent 20 million more people than the Republican Senate majority. </p>
<p id="V2AY4w">I wrote <a href="http://whywerepolarized.com/">a book</a> on political polarization, so I’ve gotten the same question over and over again in the past week: What are we going to do about all this polarization? </p>
<p id="tIKMAb">America’s problem right now isn’t a surfeit of political polarization. It’s a dearth of democracy. The fundamental feedback loop of politics — parties compete for public support, and if they fail the public, they are electorally punished, and so they change — is broken. But it’s only broken for the Republican Party. </p>
<h3 id="ScJWon">The asymmetry of the American political system</h3>
<p id="YcOUAI">The simplest way to understand American politics right now is that we have a two-party system set up to create a center-left political coalition and a far-right political coalition. </p>
<p id="cQGOlA">Two reinforcing features of our political system have converged to create that result. First, the system weights the votes of small states and rural areas more heavily. Second, elections are administered, and House districts drawn, by partisan politicians. </p>
<p id="WBA2FW">Over the past few decades, our politics has become <a href="https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-density-divide-urbanization-polarization-and-populist-backlash/">sharply divided by density</a>, with Democrats dominating cities and Republicans dominating rural areas. That’s given Republicans an electoral advantage, which they’ve in turn used to stack electoral rules in their favor through aggressive gerrymandering, favorable Supreme Court decisions, and more. As a result, Democrats and Republicans are operating in what are, functionally, different electoral systems, with very different incentives.</p>
<p id="K5vRMh">To reliably win the Electoral College, Democrats need to win the popular vote by 3 or 4 percentage points. To reliably win the Senate, they need to run 6 to 7 points ahead of Republicans. To reliably win the House, they need to win the vote by 3 or 4 points. As such, Democrats need to consciously strategize to appeal to voters who do not naturally agree with them. That’s how they ended up with Joe Biden as their nominee. Biden was not the choice of the party’s more ideological base. He was not the choice of those who wanted to see Democrats reflect the young, multiethnic, majority-female voters driving their electoral victories. </p>
<p id="Co9dJI">Biden was the choice of Democrats who favored <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/19/democrats-are-picking-nominee-based-factor-theyre-worst-evaluating/">electability</a> above all. Electability is a weird idea: It asks not that you vote for who you find most electable, but for who you think a voter who is not like you would find most electable. </p>
<p id="NUkGDI">Biden promised that he could lure back some of the white, working-class voters who’d powered Trump’s 2016 victory, and he could do it explicitly because he was an old, moderate, white guy who could talk to the parts of the electorate that feared the ideological and demographic changes sweeping the nation. Democrats bought that pitch, and Biden, to his credit, delivered on it. The Democratic Party is led by a center-left leader because that’s what it believed it needed in order to win. And winning <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/01/us/politics/2020-electability.html">mattered above all else</a>. </p>
<p id="Sh7i99">For Republicans, the incentives are exactly the reverse. They can win the presidency despite getting fewer votes. They can win the Senate despite getting fewer votes. They can win the House despite getting fewer votes. They can control the balance of state legislatures despite getting fewer votes. </p>
<p id="xHruUQ">And so they do. Their base, like the Democratic base, would prefer to run more uncompromising candidates, and their donors would prefer a more uncompromising agenda. A party that needed to win a majority of the popular vote couldn’t indulge itself by nominating Trump and backing his erratic, outrageous, and incompetent style of governance to the hilt. A party that needed a majority of the popular vote to win the Senate and the House couldn’t keep trying to rip health care away from tens of millions of people while cutting taxes on the richest Americans. </p>
<p id="ImaQOw">Republicans are not irrational for spending down their electoral advantage on more temperamentally extreme candidates and ideologically pure policies. The process of disappointing your own base is brutally hard — just look at the endless fights between moderates and leftists on the Democratic side. What motivates parties to change, compromise, and adapt is the pain of loss, and the fear of future losses. If a party is protected from that pain, the incentive to listen to the public and moderate its candidates or alter its agenda wanes. </p>
<p id="RcDwz1">An argument I make at some length in my book is that polarization is not, in and of itself, a good or a bad thing. What matters is the way it interacts with the broader political system: how elections are won, how legislation is passed, how disagreement is resolved. At the simplest level, higher levels of polarization will make parties more desperate to win, which in turn will push them to adapt the strategies needed to win in the system they inhabit. </p>
<p id="7aEjIp">But our electoral system is imbalanced, and it’s led to imbalanced parties: It forces Democrats to lean into the messy, pluralistic work of winning elections in a democracy, and allows Republicans to avoid that work, and instead worry about pleasing the most fervent members of their base. It forces Democrats to win voters ranging from the far left to the center right, but Republicans can win with only right-of-center votes. </p>
<h3 id="iRjlh5">America needs a better Republican Party. But it won’t get one under this system. </h3>
<p id="bR1mqS">And that is how we come to the situation we face today: A party that adapts to anti-democratic rules will quickly become a party that fears democracy. A party that knows it can’t win a majority of the vote will try to make it difficult for majorities to vote, and have those votes count. A party that isn’t punished for betraying the public trust will keep betraying it. </p>
<p id="iWQTDx">If Republicans were more worried about winning back some of Biden’s voters rather than placating Trump’s base, they wouldn’t be indulging his post-election tantrum. It would be offensive to the voters they’re losing, and whom they’ll need in the future. But they’re not, and so they have aligned themselves with Trump’s claims of theft — with profoundly dangerous consequences for America. </p>
<p id="quGF2y">Trump is not in the White House, refusing to accept the results of the election, because America is polarized. He is there because of the Electoral College. Mitch McConnell is not favored to remain Senate majority leader because America is polarized. He is favored to remain Senate majority leader because the Senate is the most undemocratic legislative chamber in the Western world, and the only way Republicans seem to lose control is to lose successive landslide elections, as happened in 2006 and 2008. </p>
<p id="A4RYuQ">In politics, as in any competition, the teams adopt the strategies the rules demand. America’s political parties are adopting the strategies that their very different electoral positions demand. That has made the Democratic Party a big-tent, center-left coalition that puts an emphasis on pluralistic outreach. And it has let the Republican Party adopt more extreme candidates, dangerous strategies, and unpopular agendas, because it can win most elections even while it’s losing most voters. </p>
<p id="iNgqAg"></p>
https://www.vox.com/21561011/2020-election-joe-biden-donald-trump-electoral-college-vote-senate-democracyEzra Klein2020-11-07T15:50:00-05:002020-11-07T15:50:00-05:00Trump is attempting a coup in plain sight
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<figcaption>President Trump boards Air Force One in Miami on November 2, while on the campaign trail. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>How do we cover it when it’s happening here?</p> <p id="NO20Bx">A few years ago, there was a boom of articles called “If it happened there,” imagining how the American press would cover this or that story if it happened in another country. How would we cover <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/09/potential-government-shutdown-how-would-the-u-s-media-report-on-it-if-it-were-happening-to-another-country.html">the government shutdown</a> if it happened in another country? The <a href="https://www.vox.com/2014/8/15/6005587/ferguson-satire-another-country-russia-china">Ferguson protests</a>? The <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/01/how-the-u-s-media-would-cover-the-oregon-siege-if-it-happened-in-another-country.html">Oregon militia siege</a>? <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/29/how-western-media-would-cover-minneapolis-if-it-happened-another-country/">George Floyd’s killing</a>? <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/11/if-it-happened-there-how-would-we-cover-mike-bloomberg-if-he-were-in-another-country.html">Mike Bloomberg</a>? </p>
<p id="nh6TGv"><a href="https://slate.com/tag/if-it-happened-there">Slate’s Joshua Keating</a> popularized the form, but other outlets, including <a href="https://www.vox.com/2014/8/15/6005587/ferguson-satire-another-country-russia-china">Vox</a>, have deployed it. The intent was to use the tropes of foreign coverage to create a sense of what the literary critic Darko Suvin called “cognitive estrangement”: severing us from the familiarity and overconfidence that can dull our awareness of extraordinary events. And so <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/09/potential-government-shutdown-how-would-the-u-s-media-report-on-it-if-it-were-happening-to-another-country.html">you’d get leads like</a>, “the pleasant autumn weather disguises a government teetering on the brink. Because, at midnight Monday night, the government of this intensely proud and nationalistic people will shut down, a drastic sign of political dysfunction in this moribund republic.”</p>
<p id="BDhorI">But the slight air of parody lent the whole enterprise a sense of unreality. America isn’t a banana republic. It wasn’t happening <em>there</em>. It was happening here, and that made all the difference. In order to even see the danger, to recognize the depth of tensions or the possibilities of fracture, we had to control for American exceptionalism, for the implicit belief that we were the United States of America, and we were different. </p>
<p id="5YNTc2">If the past four years — and the past four days — have proven anything, it’s that we are not as different as we believed, not as kissed by providence as we hoped. Perhaps we are not different at all. We need to cover it as if it happening here, because it is.</p>
<h3 id="AUqPiv">Donald Trump is trying to discredit an election he is losing</h3>
<p id="0ZhGLu">Joe Biden has won the presidency. But the current president of the United States, Donald Trump, is attempting a coup in plain sight. “I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!” he tweeted on Saturday morning. This came after he demanded that states cease counting votes when the total began to turn against him, after his press secretary shocked Fox News anchors by arguing that legally cast votes should be thrown out.</p>
<div id="c9Acal">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">I think the important part of this video isn't the flagrantly illiberal theory the Trump administration is selling, but the fact that the Fox News anchors aren't buying. <a href="https://t.co/zauokaYnji">https://t.co/zauokaYnji</a></p>— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) <a href="https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1324180087986532352?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 5, 2020</a>
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<p id="ORrznx">The Trump administration’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/11/7/21554080/trump-reject-media-calls-joe-biden-victory">current strategy</a> is to go to court to try and get votes for Biden ruled illegitimate, and that strategy explicitly rests on Trump’s appointees honoring a debt the administration, at least, believes they owe. One of his legal advisers <a href="https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1324479822194565121">said</a>, “We’re waiting for the United States Supreme Court — of which the President has nominated three justices — to step in and do something. And hopefully Amy Coney Barrett will come through.” </p>
<p id="6zlTIp">If that fails, and it will, Mark Levin, one of the nation’s most popular conservative radio hosts, is <a href="https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1324423779288707073">explicitly calling</a> on Republican legislatures to reject the election results and seat Donald Trump as president anyway. After Twitter tagged the tweet as contested, Trump’s press secretary <a href="https://twitter.com/kayleighmcenany/status/1324816498230255617">weighed in</a> furiously on Levin’s behalf.</p>
<p id="M6Jmz0">That this coup probably will not work — that it is being carried out farcically, erratically, ineffectively — does not mean it is not happening, or that it will not have consequences. Millions will believe Trump, will see the election as stolen. The Trump family’s Twitter feeds, and those of associated outlets and allies, are filled with allegations of fraud and lies about the process (reporter Isaac Saul has been doing yeoman’s work tracking these arguments, and his <a href="https://twitter.com/Ike_Saul/status/1324435797374808066">thread</a> is worth reading). It’s the construction of a confusing, but immersive, alternative reality in which the election has been stolen from Trump and weak-kneed Republicans are letting the thieves escape. </p>
<p id="Xruyva">This is, to borrow Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar’s framework, “<a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/7/10/21318625/donald-trump-surviving-autocracy-masha-gessen-the-ezra-klein-show">an autocratic attempt</a>.” That’s the stage in the transition toward autocracy in which the would-be autocrat is trying to sever his power from electoral check. If he’s successful, autocratic breakthrough follows, and then autocratic consolidation occurs. In this case, the would-be autocrat stands little chance of being successful. But he will not entirely fail, either. What Trump is trying to form is something akin to an autocracy-in-exile, an alternative America in which he is the rightful leader, and he — and the public he claims to represent — has been robbed of power by corrupt elites. </p>
<p id="8LCDA5">“Democracy works only when losers recognize that they have lost,” writes political scientist <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/05/trumps-baseless-claims-damage-american-democracy/">Henry Farrell</a>. That will not happen here. </p>
<h3 id="5CvNo9">The corruption of the GOP will outlive Trump’s presidency</h3>
<p id="rpUeEI">Members of the Trump family are explicitly, repeatedly, trying to make the acceptance of their conspiracies a litmus test for ambitious Republicans. And it is working. To read elected Republicans today — with a few notable exceptions, like <a href="https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status/1324763757105602561">Sen. Mitt Romney</a> — is to read a careful, cowardly double-speak. Politician after politician is signaling, as Vice President Mike Pence did, solidarity with the president, while not quite endorsing his conspiracies. Of course every legal vote should be counted. Of course allegations of fraud should be addressed. But that is not what the president is demanding — he is demanding the votes against him be ruled illegal — and they know it.</p>
<div id="51v6fI">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">The media do not get to determine who the president is. The people do. When all lawful votes have been counted, recounts finished, and allegations of fraud addressed, we will know who the winner is</p>— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) <a href="https://twitter.com/HawleyMO/status/1325136203851526145?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 7, 2020</a>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">I Stand With President <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@realDonaldTrump</a>. We must count every LEGAL vote.</p>— Mike Pence (@Mike_Pence) <a href="https://twitter.com/Mike_Pence/status/1324503069447593988?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 6, 2020</a>
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<p id="bfltKK">What we are not seeing, in any way, is a wholesale rejection on the right of Trump’s effort to delegitimize the election. And thus there is no reason to believe Trump will not retain his hold over much of the party, and much of its base, going forward. </p>
<div id="JcYvmh">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Far from over. Republicans will not back down from this battle.</p>— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) <a href="https://twitter.com/GOPLeader/status/1324759580472127491?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 6, 2020</a>
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<p id="jCsRxh">Even if Trump is rejected in this election, the Republican Party that protected and enabled him will not be. Their geographic advantage in the Senate <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/11/6/21550979/senate-malapportionment-20-million-democrats-republicans-supreme-court">insulates</a> them from anything but massive, consecutive landslide defeats, and their dominance over the decennial redistricting process has given them a handicap in the House, too. </p>
<p id="VZFp1y">That divergence almost saved Trump: Though the presidential election will not be close in terms of the popular vote, the margins in the key Electoral College states were narrow, and the would-be autocrat was almost returned to office. How much more damage could he have done to American institutions and elections with another four years? It could have happened here, and it truly almost did. </p>
<p id="64zYbj">Here’s the grim kicker: The conditions that made Trump and this Republican Party possible are set to worsen. Republicans <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/11/5/21551388/democrats-republicans-state-legislative-races-election-results-redistricting-gerrymandering-census">retained control</a> of enough statehouses to drive the next redistricting effort, too, and their 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court will unleash their map-drawers more fully. The elections analyst G. Elliott Morris <a href="https://twitter.com/gelliottmorris/status/1325146467938361345">estimates</a> that the gap between the popular vote margin and the tipping point state in the Electoral College will be 4 to 5 percentage points, and that the GOP’s control of the redistricting process could push it to 6 to 7 points next time. </p>
<p id="46pGFx">To say that America’s institutions <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/joe-biden-wins/616960/">did not wholly fail</a> in the Trump era is not the same thing as saying they succeeded. They did not, and in particular, the Republican Party did not. It has failed dangerously, spectacularly. It has made clear that would-be autocrats have a path to power in the United States, and if they can walk far enough down that path, an entire political party will support them, and protect them. And it has been insulated from public fury by a political system that values land over people, and that lets partisan actors set election rules and draw district lines — and despite losing the presidency, the GOP still holds the power to tilt that system further in its direction in the coming years. </p>
<p id="4aolt9">What happens when the next would-be autocrat tries this strategy — and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/trump-proved-authoritarians-can-get-elected-america/617023/">what if</a> they are smoother, more strategic, more capable than this one?</p>
<p id="9aKaT4">This is not a story happening elsewhere. It is a story happening here, now. </p>
https://www.vox.com/2020-presidential-election/2020/11/7/21554114/trump-election-2020-voter-fraud-challenge-recount-bidenEzra Klein2020-11-07T12:50:00-05:002020-11-07T12:50:00-05:00How Joe Biden changed, and changed, and changed — and made it to the White House
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<img alt="Irish Relatives Of Joe Biden Celebrate His Presidential Victory" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/yRLhm7ek8Ic75rLMtr4ZWl-2p5E=/0x0:4949x3712/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/67753379/1229508941.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>American flags seen in Ballina, Ireland, where Joe Biden’s distant relatives hail from. | Charles McQuillan/Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Joe Biden, explained.</p> <p id="eAA6lH">Joe Biden has <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/11/6/21534594/joe-biden-wins-2020-presidential-election">won the 2020 presidential election</a>. He will be the 46th president of the United States. And — counting the votes of people — it won’t be close. If current trends hold, Biden will see a larger popular vote margin than Hillary Clinton in 2016, Barack Obama in 2012, or George W. Bush in 2004. </p>
<p id="eXP7M6">Commentary over the past few days has focused on the man he beat, and the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020-presidential-election/2020/11/7/21554114/trump-election-2020-voter-fraud-challenge-recount-biden">incompetent coup</a> being attempted in plain sight. But here I want to focus on Biden, who is one of the more misunderstood figures in American politics — including, at times, by me.</p>
<p id="LRTgWs">Part of the difficulty of understand Biden is, ironically, the length of his time in office. He has been in national politics for almost five decades. So people tend to fixate on the era of Joe Biden they encountered first — the young widower, the brash up-and-comer, the centrist Senate dealmaker, the overconfident foreign policy hand, the meme-able vice president, the grieving father. But Biden, more so than most politicians, changes. And it’s how he changes, and why, that’s key to understanding his campaign, and his likely presidency. </p>
<aside id="mw3aXa"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Joe Biden has won. Here’s what comes next.","url":"https://www.vox.com/2020/11/6/21534594/joe-biden-wins-2020-presidential-election"},{"title":"How Joe Biden, the ultimate insider, defeated Donald Trump, the ultimate outsider","url":"https://www.vox.com/21545969/joe-biden-2020-election-winner-trump-vote"}]}'></div></aside><p id="3Vt3OP">Evan Osnos is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of <em>Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now</em>, a sharp biography of the next president. In this podcast, Osnos and I discuss: </p>
<ul>
<li id="G17oCJ">The mystery of Joe Biden’s first political campaign</li>
<li id="HDavfC">Why the Joe Biden who entered the Senate in 1980 is such a radically different person than the Joe Biden who ran for president in 2020 </li>
<li id="FUXcv4">What the Senate taught Biden</li>
<li id="0QEgOK">Biden’s ideological flexibility, and the theory of politics that drives it</li>
<li id="555Ego">The differences between Biden’s three presidential campaigns — and what they reveal about how he’s grown</li>
<li id="avE3uh">The way Biden views disagreement, and why that’s so central to his understanding of politics </li>
<li id="RQhaSV">How Biden’s relationship with Barack Obama changed his approach to governance</li>
<li id="jgfRCZ">The similarities — and differences — between how Obama and Biden think about politics </li>
<li id="SgePhQ">Why Biden is “the perfect weathervane for where the center of the Democratic Party is” </li>
<li id="Q213lx">Biden’s relationship with Mitch McConnell</li>
<li id="T8srHu">How Biden thinks about foreign policy</li>
<li id="xlYouN">Why Biden has become more skeptical about the use of American military might in the last decade </li>
</ul>
<p id="Lwpwsy">And much more. Listen by subscribing to <a href="https://www.vox.com/ezra-klein-show-podcast"><em>The Ezra Klein Show</em> podcast</a>, or streaming the episode <a href="https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdst.fm/e/chtbl.com/track/524GE/traffic.megaphone.fm/VMP4223289618.mp3">here</a>.</p>
<div id="vZELdh"><iframe frameborder="0" height="200" scrolling="no" src="https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=VMP4223289618" width="100%"></iframe></div>
https://www.vox.com/ezra-klein-show-podcast/2020/11/7/21554198/joe-biden-evan-osnos-president-2020-election-white-house-donald-trumpEzra Klein2020-11-06T15:24:53-05:002020-11-06T15:24:53-05:00Stacey Abrams on minority rule, voting rights, and the future of democracy
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<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/xUDvtvWDW4x04VR7oD-xdgYrM1g=/119x0:2960x2131/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/67725408/1282041182.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams at a Democratic campaign event for Joe Biden in Las Vegas, Nevada, on October 24. | Ethan Miller/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>In 2020, democracy is on the ballot.</p> <p id="HR1Aj2">This conversation was first published on November 2, before any election results had come in. On November 6, 2020, Joe Biden became the <a href="https://www.vox.com/21551547/georgia-competitive-democrats-biden-2020">first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since 1992</a>. As of January 6, 2021, it has <a href="https://www.vox.com/22216028/georgia-senate-results-ossoff-loeffler-perdue-warnock">two Democratic senators</a>, thanks in part to the <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/1/6/22216677/georgia-senate-election-results-black-voters-turnout-warnock-ossoff">get-out-the-vote efforts of Abrams and others</a>. Read the original conversation with Abrams below. </p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="GmONLP">
<p id="XmpvYE">We’re one day away from the election, though who-knows-how-many days from finding out who won it. But there’s more at stake than whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden will be our next president. Democracy itself is on the ballot.</p>
<p id="Jy7j8D">Democracy has, in particular, become Stacey Abrams’s animating mission. In 2018, Abrams lost the Georgia gubernatorial race by a razor-thin margin amid rampant voter suppression. Since then, as the founder of Fair Fight, she’s turned her attention to the deeper fight, the one that sets the rules under which elections like hers play out. In her recent book, <em>Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America</em>, Abrams makes the case that the fight over democracy is the central question of our politics, with more power and clarity than any other politician I’ve heard. </p>
<p id="ol0Kc0">In my view, Abrams is right. And so she’s exactly the person to hear from on the eve of the election. In this conversation, we discuss the GOP’s turn against “rank democracy,” the role of demographic change, how Republicans have cemented minority rule across American political institutions, why we potentially face a “doom loop of democracy,” the changing face of voter suppression in the 21st century, what a system that actually wanted people to vote would look like, why democracy and economic equality are inextricably linked, and much more.</p>
<p id="1OgN5e">One thing to note: You won’t hear Trump’s name all that much. It’s the Republican Party, not just Trump, that has turned against democracy, and that is implementing the turn against democracy. And it’s the Democratic Party, not just Joe Biden, that will have to decide whether democracy is worth protecting, and achieving. Democracy is on the ballot in 2020 and beyond, but it’s not just on the presidential voting line.</p>
<div id="mHoqUf"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/episode/6aUXLNtiqE6ntyMYRwi4dp" style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 232px;" allowfullscreen="" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div>
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<p id="fhHpwd">You can listen to our whole conversation by subscribing to <a href="https://www.vox.com/ezra-klein-show-podcast"><em>The Ezra Klein Show</em></a> or wherever you get your podcasts. A transcript, edited for length and clarity, follows.</p>
<h4 id="Yn4Jmw">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="hX64b8">A few weeks ago, Mike Lee, the Republican senator from Utah, <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21507713/mike-lee-democracy-republic-trump-2020">tweeted</a> that “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”</p>
<p id="zuNt0i">What did you hear when you read that? <em> </em></p>
<h4 id="SA2gSl">Stacey Abrams </h4>
<p id="EtgAVO">I heard the quiet part out loud — a Republican Party that has abandoned its pretense of changing minds and intends to manipulate rules. </p>
<p id="DZVJdd">What [Lee] was saying is that if we have reached a stage where our ideas can no longer garner sufficient votes to elect us, then we just have to do what we must to ensure that <em>our</em> vision of prosperity and liberty is the prevailing vision, regardless of whether the people want it or not.</p>
<h4 id="sqe3vS">Ezra Klein</h4>
<p id="4zUwh2">What do you think “rank democracy” means? </p>
<h4 id="rb44If">Stacey Abrams</h4>
<p id="OzrizD">I saw it as an insult. Typically when someone uses the term “rank,” what they mean is the most puerile, the most base, the least cultivated. So for him it was very much a disparaging term. This notion that the populace, the lowest of the low, get to make decisions for themselves through this act called democracy — that to him was revolting. <em> </em></p>
<h4 id="F8L2NR">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="tSaeBN">I had <a href="https://www.vox.com/ezra-klein-show-podcast/2019/7/18/20698397/george-will-conservative-sensibility-republicans-donald-trump">George Will on this show</a> a while back because he wrote a book called <em>The Conservative Sensibility</em>. In it, he places James Madison’s “catechism of popular government” at the core of the conservative project. And he writes, “What is the worst result of politics? Tyranny. To what form of tyranny is democracy prey? Tyranny of the majority.”</p>
<p id="GgmBHR">This is the sort of argument a lot of Republican thinkers make: that democracy is a trampling of the rights of minorities by the majority. In response to <a href="https://www.vox.com/21524807/donald-trump-joe-biden-2020-election-voting-suppression-democracy?utm_campaign=ezraklein&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter">a piece</a> I wrote on democracy, Ilya Shapiro, the director of constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, <a href="https://twitter.com/ishapiro/status/1319331916601004039">responded</a>, “So you want majorities to violate the rights of minorities (and individuals)? Because that’s what pure democracy is.” </p>
<p id="fuIWao">What’s your response to the idea that the anti-democratic impulse is motivated by the protection of minority rights?</p>
<h4 id="PXNlGS">Stacey Abrams </h4>
<p id="S8zw3j">There’s a dual reaction. It’s so unabashedly ... I’d use the word facile because this is an attempt to twist something that is not just anti-democratic, but anti-civil rights, and to form it into something that seems noble, which it is not.</p>
<p id="ysjSVo">But the second reaction is it’s a cry of loss. It’s this recognition that their ideological underpinnings no longer have salience — that they can no longer lean on this majority they created because that majority is now quickly becoming a minority. And embedded in this argument is a fear that what they have visited on others through the trampling of civil rights, through the trampling of human rights, through the exclusion of so many communities will now be visited upon the Republican Party and upon conservative thinkers. </p>
<p id="Tqr1jX">But before getting to that, I think there is this very basic misapplication because what democracy has garnered for the last 243 years, when it has been appropriately applied, has been the expansion of rights for minorities. The expansion of inclusion. Their argument is that inclusion has become too effective. And in order to preserve their ideological constructs, that inclusion must be thwarted. </p>
<p id="7Jz87D">They are trying to use James Madison and his arguments to undermine the entire experiment because the outcome of the experiment no longer caters to their ideological belief systems. <em> </em></p>
<h4 id="UFYquf">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="h1Amyi">In your book, the election of Barack Obama is a central part of the narrative about the attack on voting rights. What did Obama’s election set off? </p>
<h4 id="rrz81P">Stacey Abrams </h4>
<p id="VhcwG6">The Obama election was proof of the fruition of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. When coupled with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act was the embodiment of the protection of the rights of the minority. It said you will be able to participate in your governance for the first time and those who would intercede or block you will be restrained from doing so. </p>
<p id="Gr6NB2">When Barack Obama was elected, it was among the most effective elections we’ve ever had because it brought out communities that had long been denied access, who had long excluded themselves because they did not believe they were welcome, who had never been engaged or even invited into participation. Because of the nature of his campaign, because of the nature of his election, and, yes, because he was a Black man who represented so much of what had been done wrong in America and could be made right, his election was emblematic of what democracy could achieve. </p>
<p id="SKssZF">What Republicans saw in that election was the worst nightmare of a party that refuses to meet the moment and to adapt to a changing populace. They are still governing from a space of irritation that anyone else would dare to think their voices matter. And so what we saw following [Obama’s] election was the immediate retrenchment of almost any right that could be pulled back and pulled away from minority voters. Because their participation at such numbers was able to create this sea of change in what it meant to be a president in the United States. </p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/fwUVisfibfcYuXj9voRoXuyQEmE=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22007224/1229386824.jpg">
<cite>Drew Angerer/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Former President Barack Obama speaks at a Joe Biden campaign rally on October 31 in Detroit, Michigan.</figcaption>
</figure>
<h4 id="ZlQPEH">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="rMWLzQ">One of the things that your book emphasizes is the connection between demographic change in this country — of groups also attaining power in our democracy — and the rollback of voting rights. What seems to be happening here is a lag between the power of this rising generation and the geography of this country as it exists, the way elections are actually run as exists, and, of course, the Supreme Court. </p>
<p id="NjOnXF">You emphasize the <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/25/18701277/shelby-county-v-holder-anniversary-voting-rights-suppression-congress"><em>Shelby v. Holder</em> decision</a>, which gutted much of the Voting Rights Act, as setting the stage for a really different equilibrium around voting rights than we had even 10 years ago. Can you talk a bit about that case and what it allowed to happen? </p>
<h4 id="9r9pfS">Stacey Abrams </h4>
<p id="HAYuwk">To understand the impact of <em>Shelby</em>, you have to first understand the nature of the right to vote in America. There is no constitutional right to vote. There have been three constitutional amendments that removed restrictions on who was permitted to vote: the 15th, 19th and 26th amendment. In the 15th Amendment, Black men were granted the franchise; in the 19th Amendment, women were granted the franchise; the 25th Amendment expanded the franchise to those 18 to 21. </p>
<p id="nalC1W">But the reality is that the right to vote does not exist as an affirmative opportunity. What does exist in the Constitution is the delegation of authority for the administration of elections to states, which sounds very benign until you realize that for most of American history, voter suppression has been almost entirely the construct of states. </p>
<p id="8ryNYs">What the Voting Rights Act did in 1965 was shatter the impermeable nature of states to say who could and could not vote. The Voting Rights Act said you could not use race — and, by 1975, that you could not use language — as a way to preclude access to the right to vote. It said that states could not take proactive steps to block the right to vote through poll taxes, literacy tests, closing of polling places — any action that would interfere with the right of people of color, or people who spoke English as a second language, to vote. In states that had a long and storied history of blocking the right to vote, no new voting laws could be countenanced without having the Department of Justice approve. </p>
<p id="ZdmQXw">Fast forward to 2013. By that point we’d had this extraordinary success where the Voting Rights Act not only increased the number of people who were participating in our elections, it also increased the number of people of color who were being elected to higher office. And from its very beginning, there were attacks on the Voting Rights Act because it was seen as too interventionist. It was seen as taking away states’ rights to discriminate against who could participate in elections. </p>
<p id="9yVc9p">In 2013, the Supreme Court <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/25/18701277/shelby-county-v-holder-anniversary-voting-rights-suppression-congress">eviscerated of the Voting Rights Act</a> with the gutting of Section 5. That was essentially a get out of jail free card for states that wanted to discriminate; what was different this time is that it was no longer relegated to those states that participated in voter suppression through Jim Crow. </p>
<p id="bbywUA">You had a proliferation across the country of voter suppression techniques that had been prohibited clearly by the Voting Rights Act. That’s why you saw the rapid shutdown of polling places. That’s why you saw the expansion of restrictive voter ID laws. That’s why in 2020, we are seeing so many cases that essentially challenge state laws designed to restrict who has access to the right to vote. </p>
<h4 id="o7kr1K">Ezra Klein</h4>
<p id="wyBgRk">The Voting Rights Act was built to deal with voter suppression specifically on the basis of race. But something I want to draw out in the argument you make there is that, in this period, while race is still a huge component of modern-day voter suppression, the Republican Party’s partisan incentives have actually <em>broadened</em> who they target as a part of these efforts. The intent of voter suppression is to promote a national party’s interests, not just to protect southern racism.</p>
<h4 id="LZUDm9">Stacey Abrams </h4>
<p id="mIK4Ih">Agreed. One of the reasons I always include the 26th Amendment in my litany is that some of the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/voting-college-suppression.html">most aggressive attacks on voting rights</a> have targeted young people. Young people are the least likely to have the types of ID that are required and have faced restrictions on the types of IDs they can use. </p>
<p id="6QuWYr">The most popular example is in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/voting-college-suppression.html">Texas,</a> where you can vote with your gun license but you cannot vote with your student ID. The <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/new-hampshire-confusion-around-new-law-could-threaten-young-voter-n1117486">New Hampshire legislature</a> has attempted to restrict the domicile of students because they knew students have an impact on their elections. In Florida, Republicans <a href="https://www.tampabay.com/florida-politics/buzz/2019/06/19/are-republicans-desantis-making-campus-early-voting-in-florida-impossible/">removed early voting locations</a> through legislation because too many students voted in the last election. </p>
<p id="KzdIat">So, yes, what began as an attack on largely African Americans — and Latinos and Native Americans in Arizona — has expanded. People of color have always been the target, and then you layer on top of that young people and poor people. In that you see a coalition that has long suffered from oppression under conservative ideology and would be much more likely to access good policy if their ability to participate in “rank democracy” was real. <em> </em></p>
<h3 id="veUosf">How Republicans have used the “doom loop of democracy” to cement minority rule </h3>
<h4 id="EoCezg">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="cBmxab">Something that I worry about a lot right now is what I’ve taken to calling the <a href="https://www.vox.com/21524807/donald-trump-joe-biden-2020-election-voting-suppression-democracy">“doom loop of democracy.”</a> You have a Republican Party that increasingly wins power through winning a minority share of the vote. The president lost the popular vote. The Republican majority in Senate represents something like 15 million fewer people than the Democratic minority in the Senate. Then they appoint Republican judges to the Supreme Court, which makes crucial decisions about what forms of voter suppression and electoral rigging are constitutional.</p>
<p id="V9zLZG">So you have this situation where a party that wins power undemocratically uses that power to then make it easier to win undemocratically, setting off the loop again and again and again. And that can really lead a country in a deeply undemocratic direction because if you rewrite the rules of the game, then ultimately the other party has no choice but to follow them. <em> </em></p>
<p id="DcBD1e">How serious of a risk do you think that is if Republicans are able to keep winning this way? <em> </em></p>
<h4 id="pr4jEP">Stacey Abrams </h4>
<p id="GhdRXW">It’s absolutely the risk that we face. </p>
<p id="Zy3IkD">One of my dear friends William Dobson wrote a book called <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Learning-Curve-Inside-Democracy/dp/030747755X"><em>The Dictator’s Learning Curve</em></a>, and he uses this approach as one of the examples of how authoritarian populists become dictators, how they gradually accrue power. They use the systems to their benefit and when the systems no longer benefit them, they manipulate the externalities of those systems to give themselves permanent power. </p>
<p id="sRIwML">In the United States, what we’re watching through gerrymandering, trying to restrict access to absentee ballots during a pandemic, creating laws and rules that, by their own admission, are intended to limit access to democracy — it creates this loop where you can keep using the system to strangle democracy until, to misappropriate Grover Norquist, you make it small enough that you can drown it in a bathtub. </p>
<p id="D8DE0g">The challenge is that, given the structure of our system, as long as they can maintain a certain degree of power, even the overwhelming majority of Americans are insufficient to guarantee that democracy works. That’s the challenge of the Electoral College. Its genesis was grounded in racism and classism, but its longevity is grounded in this notion that this is the last vestige of a type of system that will permit victory. Not to those who can win the greatest number of votes but to those who can manipulate the system to their benefit. <em> </em></p>
<h4 id="aWhfoN">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="lAtZy1">The reason I started our conversation by focusing on the building of a genuine anti-democratic ideology in Republican and conservative circles is that this kind of thing is hard to do if it is in too much conflict with your rhetoric, or it’s in too much conflict with what the people in your party believe.</p>
<p id="HJeQCy">When gerrymandering comes on the ballot, it often loses. You’ve seen red states move toward independent commissions. There are a lot of ordinary Republicans who have pretty small-d democratic ideas about how government should work. But as the party’s elites become more committed to an actual anti-democratic ideology, then what seems reasonable to do in the examples we’ve been talking about becomes very different.</p>
<p id="aOYy0X">If part of your animating purpose as a party is to not allow “rank democracy” to overturn the rights of the minority — by which you mean your rights as a political minority who’s losing elections to stay in power — then these things become necessary. You’re waging a noble war against the mob. </p>
<p id="7cByM8">The power grab here, I think, is actually driving the ideological change. But the ideological change ends up over time justifying ever more extreme versions of the power grab that would have been shocking to people, say, 10 years ago. <em> </em></p>
<h4 id="REmt9c">Stacey Abrams </h4>
<p id="foUVDM">We know that what is being couched by Mike Lee and others as nobility and protection is nothing more than fear. Even calling it sore loser-dom underwhelmingly describes what’s happening. </p>
<p id="fLBGbc">We know that the demographic shifts in the United States portend a very dramatic shift in the allocation of resources and power. Part of that is the fact that for so many years these communities were denied access to those resources, denied access to that power. The responsible retort to that is to invite these new persons into the shared power structure that is our democracy. That’s the right thing to do. There is absolutely a negotiation that should happen about how fast and what the remedies are, but instead of engaging in that dialogue, Republicans have decided that the answer at the macro level is simply to refuse to play the game fair. </p>
<p id="iQBAAm">In 2018, 65 percent of Floridians restored the <a href="https://www.vox.com/voting-rights/21440014/prisoner-felon-voting-rights-2020-election">voting rights of ex-offenders.</a> This was not done along party lines. It was a bipartisan solution to a problem that was grounded in slavery and racism. And yet, because it was going to cost them elections, the will of the people <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/9/15/21436148/voting-rights-trump-courts-wisconsin-florida-texas-supreme-court-age-constitution">was absolutely ignored</a> by a Republican governor, a Republican legislature, and then by conservative control of our court system. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="4ZPl1j"><q>“Republicans have decided that the answer ... is simply to refuse to play the game fair”</q></aside></div>
<p id="lVHzOH">The moment the Republican Party decided that it could not win based on actually meeting people where they are, that the only way to win was to rewrite the rules of the system, and that they were going to undermine 243 years of a commonly held belief in our nation that democratic processes are a native good — that desperation has, I think, done more damage to the longevity of the party than almost anything else I’ve seen them do in recent years. <em> </em></p>
<h3 id="UE1vNa">The pernicious logic of voter suppression in the 21st century </h3>
<h4 id="Dvv1Hw">Ezra Klein</h4>
<p id="egtquU">To reiterate just how deep this has gotten, <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2014/02/05/271937304/rethinking-the-17th-amendment-an-old-idea-gets-fresh-opposition">Mike Lee</a> is now among <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/make-the-senate-great-again-11599589142">a number</a> <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/344275-huckabee-calls-for-repeal-of-17th-amendment-after-healthcare-failure">of elected</a> <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2014/02/05/271937304/rethinking-the-17th-amendment-an-old-idea-gets-fresh-opposition">Republicans</a> who has argued for the repeal of the 17th Amendment, which would end the direct election of US senators. </p>
<p id="qY41hH">Of course, the reason is that Republicans are much stronger in state legislatures than they are in actual statewide elections. If you just looked at the way the legislatures are broken down now, repealing the 17th Amendment would give Republicans at least 58 seats in the US Senate. The thoroughgoing nature of the move away from democracy is bigger than people recognize. </p>
<p id="nlH17L">But I want to sit in this tension between how much Republican elites have begun to turn against democracy and the degree to which that turn still conflicts with the way people understand fair elections. Something you write about really eloquently in the book is the way voter suppression now has to cloak itself in the guise of “user error” — the idea that your vote is getting rejected not because we didn’t want you to vote but because you screwed up. Can you talk a bit about that? </p>
<h4 id="dL6SYk">Stacey Abrams </h4>
<p id="PHviFL">When I decided not to concede [Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial] election, I acknowledged the legal sufficiency of the numbers. I challenged the system that permitted those numbers to be the tote board, and I challenged the legitimacy of a system that could permit voters to be denied their rights — not because they weren’t eligible but because of some failings of rules and bureaucratic restrictions. </p>
<p id="tHatWj">The insidious nature of voter suppression in the 21st century is that it no longer uses the blunt instruments of law enforcement or the literacy test as obstacles to voting. Instead, you see different versions of, say, the poll tax. The poll tax is now <a href="https://www.vox.com/voting-rights/21440014/prisoner-felon-voting-rights-2020-election">making ex-offenders pay fees and fines.</a> There’s also a poll tax in making people stand in line for hours on end. In most states, you do not get paid time off to vote, which means that you have to spend what essentially amounts to a day’s worth of pay. If you’re in Georgia or Texas, standing in an eight hour line, you have lost those wages and you have threatened or jeopardized your job. </p>
<p id="rX8BE3">But when people look at it from the outside, they say: Well, those people made that choice. It is not a choice that should be foisted upon any American to decide between keeping your job and casting a vote. But we make it the personal responsibility of each individual citizen as opposed to questioning a system that works with extraordinary fluidity in wealthier parts of the community, and works with the pace of a snail in Black and brown communities. </p>
<p id="bMwKP7">Another example is when <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/26/thousands-polling-places-were-closed-over-past-decade-heres-where/">polling places close down</a>. When that happens, the argument is: If you really wanted to vote, you would make your way to vote. Well, if you live in a community without public transit and the one or two polling places that were near you are now 10 or 15 miles away, you physically are precluded from being able to exercise the right to vote. But that’s often attributed to your failure to plan. </p>
<p id="TsSWR8">With <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/25/18010928/2018-midterm-elections-voting-rights-purges">voter ID laws</a>, it’s the most aggressive pseudo-logic that I’ve ever heard. America has always required that you prove who you are to vote. What is different today is not that you need ID — it’s the <em>form</em> of ID you have to have. And it’s the extraordinary difficulty of accessing those specific forms of ID that gets elided. People get treated as though they’re just too lazy. They have the ID they need to get on a plane or buy beer but not to vote — which is completely untrue. </p>
<p id="5XGJnx">Those are examples of how bureaucratic rules take on the veneer of logic but have the most heartless effect, because they distract from the responsibility of the state to engage in providing the right to vote. They also convince citizens that it’s either too hard, or that they were not worthy enough, and that they didn’t work hard enough. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="A3i52f"><q>“It is it is not a choice that should be foisted upon any American to decide between keeping your job and casting a vote”</q></aside></div>
<p id="wPA18w">And when you do that, you not only block them from voting — you discourage entire communities from voting. Those stories become legend and that legend becomes truth. Communities decide it’s not worth it because it’s just too hard. And it’s not that they didn’t try; it is that the barriers to access were nearly impossible. And why keep beating your head against a stone wall? <em> </em></p>
<h4 id="TwTrGa">Ezra Klein</h4>
<p id="CLYigf">Something you articulate really nicely in the book is that this suppressive, unresponsive voting system creates another feedback loop. </p>
<p id="FIsLxk">Let’s say you’re a voter and you fight your way through this obstacle course. You end up waiting in line for four hours to vote a day when you’ve got parenting responsibilities and occupational responsibilities. And it was hot and you just sat there. And then you vote for somebody and, even though they win the majority, they don’t actually get put into office; or they do but can’t do anything because of the filibuster or a last minute power grab. So nothing changes for you. You did all this just to be disappointed. </p>
<p id="NqRKLB">I think it becomes very rational after that — when so much is being asked of you to vote and so little comes back from your vote — to begin to detach from the system. Exhaustion is a very powerful tool of voter suppression. </p>
<h4 id="8UqWbm">Stacey Abrams </h4>
<p id="VPI8Kn">Absolutely. Exhaustion and despair are both incredibly legitimate reasons for not participating. There is a legitimate reason to feel despair if you’ve lived in intergenerational poverty and every time you’ve attempted to participate in the system, the response has been not simply to make it difficult but make it worthless. The solution isn’t to harangue someone into voting — it is to do what you can to mitigate those obstacles. </p>
<p id="2VnkXQ">I think that’s the place where the crafty nature of the Republican Party has been situated for 20 years. They can count. They know that we have reached a demographic inflection point that is no longer simply one of numbers but numbers that have power attached to them. </p>
<p id="a6GXv4">That’s why it is no longer feasible to simply use the traditional means of voter suppression. The nuclear option that has been employed is designed to try to meet a moment that has been predicted for 30 years but has only come to real fruition in the last decade. </p>
<h3 id="MIsKnk">What a system that actually wanted people to vote would look like </h3>
<h4 id="YrDGfE">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="4qFIwS">What would a system that <em>wanted</em> people to vote look like? </p>
<h4 id="LFikNv">Stacey Abrams </h4>
<p id="iWq0tR">Oregon and Washington do it pretty well.</p>
<p id="1BW4pG">One is automatic registration. Not this notion of automatic registration when you go and get your driver’s license and can register at the DMV. That is still making a condition of suffrage that you have to go and get an ID. Your birthright as a citizen should be your guarantee of suffrage in the United States. Therefore, it should be the government’s responsibility to register you to vote automatically. </p>
<p id="T1M9i6">Number two is same-day registration. You should have to register to vote when you get to a new place, but you shouldn’t have to time your move to figure out the deadline for showing up. You should be able to register on the day you go to vote and be able to demonstrate that you are who you say you are and you live where you say you live. </p>
<p id="O4ZnLV">We should have automatic mail-in voting. We should have automatic access to early voting. And, of course, same-day voting. We should have voting centers. You should not have to rely on a precinct-based system because what early voting proves in every single state where it is active is that you don’t have to actually go to the schoolhouse down the street from you in order to cast your ballot. </p>
<p id="5PGX85">We should have voting as a holiday in addition to making certain that every person gets paid time off to go and vote. Both are necessary. The holiday recognizes that the majority of people are probably going to take Election Day as the day they cast their ballots. But we have populations, including those who are caregivers to the disabled, who will need to be working on Election Day. You have entire populations that cannot meet a single day of opportunity. So we need to provide paid time off to go and vote. </p>
<p id="WSG6in">And we need to have systems that mean that you don’t have to give someone eight hours of time off to go and vote because the systems should be equitable, not equal. Equal says you need this exact same thing. Equitable says we meet you and your needs where you are. And often for communities of color, namely Black communities, the challenge is that they are still resourced at their pre-engagement level and at the last level of any attention being paid. So they have fewer resources. They do not account for surges in voting and they often have substandard equipment. </p>
<p id="pFpsNL">Those are the major pieces to it. There is a lot more that I could go into but those basics would transform our elections because the architecture of voter suppression is, Can you register and stay on the rolls? Can you cast a ballot? And does your ballot get counted? Same day and automatic registration take care of the first; early voting centers and making sure that people have time off take care of the second. </p>
<p id="EKJ1Bg">And the third is making certain that because we now have uniformity in the ways we vote, we then diminish the likelihood of votes being cast out. That’s the most important piece: If you make it through this gantlet, you should be secure in the fact that your vote will count. </p>
<h4 id="1tElsp">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="vZxOBR">We’ve been talking here about the way the Republican Party has become the anti- democracy party — the way they’ve become ideologically committed to that and have become somewhat creative in trying to to make that more of a reality. </p>
<p id="yulplx">Has the Democratic Party become the reverse? They passed <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/3/8/18253609/hr-1-pelosi-house-democrats-anti-corruption-mcconnell">HR 1</a>, which is a big package of voting reforms, and <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/11/18126138/terri-sewell-democrat-voting-rights-act">HR 4</a>, which is an attempt to restore key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, through the House in 2019. Are those sufficient? Do you think the party is committed to this in the way the Republican Party is committed to its opposite? </p>
<h4 id="7yUCxI">Stacey Abrams </h4>
<p id="MOrFnG">I think we are. And I think it’s because the composition of the Democratic Party is antithetical to the composition of the Republican Party. The Republican Party is predominantly white. Almost everyone else are Democrats. Because we have a two-party system, that’s what we have. So it’s a matter of survival, I think, for Democrats to actually pay attention to the nature of how democracy should work. </p>
<p id="1u2vbu">One of our challenges has been that for many years we knew voter suppression was real, but we had been coached into not calling it out because the fear was if you spoke it aloud it would have the effect of dissuading voters. I grew up in the South. Voter suppression has the effect of dissuading voters. So my willingness to call it out comes about because whether you say or not, we are experiencing it and we have the responsibility to actually name the enemy and can advocate for change.</p>
<p id="7rJDA9">So I do think that HR 1 and HR 4, which is the John Lewis Voting Rights Enhancement Act, but also <a href="https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-introduces-bill-to-protect-voters-and-elections-against-covid-19-risks-by-mandating-emergency-vote-by-mail">[Sen. Ron] Wyden’s bill</a>, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/04/14/834460134/sen-klobuchar-on-her-bill-to-ensure-mail-in-voting-rights-and-on-joe-biden">[Sen. Amy] Klobuchar’s bill</a> — we’ve seen good bills that have come out during Covid that I think move us further than HR 1, because I believe automatic absentee balloting and mail-in balloting need to become the law of the land in every state. </p>
<p id="ziyBoI">And every state should have uniform rules. We should not have 43 cases being waged to determine if you make a mistake, you get to fix it? Do you have to find a witness in the midst of quarantine to get your ballot in? Do you have to have a notary public who is not allowed to have human contact authorize your absentee ballot? </p>
<p id="mOFb0J">We should use our learnings from Covid to make certain that no matter where you live in America, you have the same baseline access to democracy. If a state wants to do something to make it easier, they should be able to, but no state should be permitted to make it harder.</p>
<h4 id="Wu2vVg">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="M8vKQi">If Democrats win the House, the presidency and the Senate, HR 1 and HR 4 will will pass the House again and will die immediately in the Senate due to a filibuster. There is absolutely no chance they will get through a filibuster. And they can’t go through budget reconciliation. </p>
<p id="h2h5FJ">I thought one of the most striking things that happened this year was when <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/7/30/21348382/obama-filibuster-jim-crow-relic-john-lewis-funeral-voting-rights">Barack Obama </a>stood at John Lewis’s memorial and told the assembled Democrats that if they wanted to honor John Lewis, they should pass these bills. And if the filibuster stopped them, they should get rid of the filibuster because it has always been used to stop voting rights, civil rights, and racial equality in this country. </p>
<p id="Boqeua">What do you think about the filibuster? And what would you say to Senate Democrats who say they are committed to democracy but worry that getting rid of the filibuster would undermine the political system and the comity and compromise needed to make it work? <em> </em></p>
<aside id="L1rBFe"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The definitive case for ending the filibuster","url":"https://www.vox.com/21424582/filibuster-joe-biden-2020-senate-democrats-abolish-trump"}]}'></div></aside><h4 id="CPi2N5">Stacey Abrams </h4>
<p id="jys8RE">I would refer them to the statement that opened this conversation. Mike Lee was saying the quiet part out loud. I believe in eliminating the filibuster because if we can guarantee permanent access to the right to vote in the United States, we will have the obligation at the federal level and the Senate level to actually negotiate in good faith.</p>
<p id="SFqpM5">The filibuster has been a useful tool, but it was only useful when people actually believed in and abided by the basic rules of the system. The Republican Party has shown itself incapable of following rules it does not like. And we cannot get to a nation where citizens get to participate in the selection of senators if we do not eliminate the filibuster to create the very baseline democracy that we require for this time. </p>
<h4 id="IpVSOu">Ezra Klein</h4>
<p id="Zy0LOC">I’m going to nudge a bit on this idea that the Republican Party has been unable to follow rules it doesn’t like. What I think is interesting about the Republican Party is that they will follow the rules. It just turned out the rules created a minoritarian path to power and a minority path to obstruction. </p>
<p id="v23XEK">I think you get the political parties and the political system that your rules will deliver. If you can block everything as a minority party, you will. If you can’t, then maybe you accept a compromise to get things done because having your hands on a bill is better than being useless and out of power. If you can’t win with 46 percent of the two-party vote, as the Republican Party did in 2016, then maybe you’ll pick standard-bearers who might win 51 percent of the vote. I think we’ve lost this idea that you want to create rules that are going to give you the kind of political competition that you want. </p>
<p id="qxfx3F">My one piece of optimism about the Republican Party is that I think if they had to compete for votes, they would. It’s just that the rules don’t make them compete for votes, so they don’t. </p>
<h4 id="ONGnT4">Stacey Abrams </h4>
<p id="M0ep7U">This notion of the filibuster, to your point, is a romanticized idea that this is what gives the Senate nobility. No, it gives the Senate deniability. They get to pretend that they couldn’t come to a decision because they couldn’t get to 60 out of 100. </p>
<p id="SvAVLQ">We haven’t always had 100 senators. We also have not always had the filibuster. And what we do need is begin to restore the building blocks of our democracy. We’ve got to make sure that certain Americans can vote. Which is why, in my mind and in the mind of President Obama, if you have to destroy a made-up rule to save the basic notion of who we are as a nation — a republic that elects its leadership and a democracy that determines how that leadership takes shape — it is worth doing. </p>
<h3 id="gKCFwK">Why democracy and economic equality are inextricably linked </h3>
<h4 id="TxjwjG">Ezra Klein</h4>
<p id="Wbfbd4">We’ve been talking so far about the political aspect of democracy — the access to the political system itself. But I want to, in the time we have left, talk about a couple of the other components, one of which is the economic dimension. </p>
<p id="s0qHOG">We live in a time of extreme income and wealth inequality. We also live in a time when a lot of people have very, very little. They don’t have a job. They don’t have Medicaid in many states that have not expanded the Affordable Care Act. And there are ideas of democracy that go well beyond the political aspects — that argue that there’s a certain amount of sufficiency needed and equality needed in order for there to be a better level of democratic equality in relations between people. </p>
<p id="fftlTH">I’m curious how you think about that economic dimension of it and what it does or doesn’t demand of us.</p>
<h4 id="WjpVR5">Stacey Abrams </h4>
<p id="T7wRXY">That is what animates me as much as anything else. <em> </em>When I did not become governor, I had some time. I created <a href="https://fairfight.com/">Fair Fight</a> to focus on protecting access to democracy and protecting the franchise itself. I created <a href="https://www.faircount.org/">Fair Count</a> because the US Census is the least understood and most powerful instrument of strategy, planning, and investment in this nation. And I created the <a href="https://theseap.org/">Southern Economic Advancement Project</a> because the reason we need the right to vote and the reason we need a fair and accurate census is that the policies that govern our daily lives, particularly those economic policies, determine the quality of life that we get to live.</p>
<p id="J9SV0q">I believe in democracy because I think it is the best system available for governments. I believe in voting not because of its mystic power as an act but because voting is how we get to the things we need. </p>
<p id="dZJyf7">For me, the pragmatism of a fair and active and abled democracy is that it is the only way we can tackle these intractable issues: income inequality, wealth inequality, lack of access to health care, an education system that is entirely predicated on your zip code and your race — these challenges cannot be met if we do not have an active and engaged democracy that includes the voices and the lives of those who suffer most when we do not make the best choices. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="muPGKr"><q>“I believe in voting not because of its mystic power as an act but because voting is how we get to the things we need”</q></aside></div>
<p id="TlgLvy">So, yes, the economic dimension to me is the motivating factor. I grew up working poor in Mississippi and in many ways my parents were able to either abrogate the effects of poverty or work around it.<em> </em>But people aren’t born into the world with my parents. And so my obligation, my commitment, my drive is grounded in this idea that our economic well-being is entirely premised on our access to democracy. <em> </em></p>
<h4 id="YPXe5g">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="LjDZNu">You tell a story in your book about a Republican colleague of yours who pulls you aside during a debate over spending on education and says, “Well, look, you didn’t have any of this and you turned out fine.” Could tell that story? I think it speaks a lot to the dueling ideologies around this particular question. </p>
<h4 id="y21FNa">Stacy Abrams </h4>
<p id="D00f16">Yes. He was from wealth and he represented two counties: one that was a very wealthy white county and the other that was a poor and a majority county of color. And in this debate about investment in education, he was just befuddled by why I would argue for pouring more resources into communities that, in his mind, had simply refused to educate themselves. </p>
<p id="4L0KiS">He said to me, “Well you, Stacey — you turned out fine. Why would we need to do this?” And my answer to him was, “Not everyone is born with my parents.” My parents figured out the cartography of Gulfport, Mississippi, to get us zoned into the best deal possible while we still lived on the poorest street imaginable in that side of town. And that was before GPS. <em> </em></p>
<p id="eBCxWQ">Families should not have to do the type of navigation, manipulation and prayer that my parents had to do to guarantee opportunity for their children. That is antithetical to who we hold ourselves out to be as a nation. I believe that there is no guarantee of equality of success but there should be a guarantee of equality of opportunity.</p>
<p id="mlDrR9">If our systems are situated properly, if we are doing our work right, then we can achieve equality of opportunity and we can achieve equity of outcome that meets what people are willing and able to put into the systems. </p>
<h4 id="gmtauJ">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="Mnz5jf">That story left me thinking about something Jared Kushner just said in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/us/politics/kushner-black-racist-stereotype.html">an interview on <em>Fox and Friends</em></a>. “One thing we’ve seen in a lot of the Black community, which is mostly Democrat, is that President Trump’s policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they’re complaining about. But he can’t want them to be successful more than they want to be successful.” </p>
<p id="ANkszB">I think what animates some of the Republican Party’s attack on democracy itself is the idea that there are no power differentials. People just want an unfair hand up. If you don’t win the competition, it’s on you. If you can’t navigate the election system, it’s on you. And in the meantime they’re throwing up barriers to that. </p>
<h4 id="Kz2vkF">Stacey Abrams </h4>
<p id="393ZB3">I think that animating dynamic in the Republican Party is real. It is pervasive and it is unlikely to be eliminated in the single election cycle — or three. I do not believe that we elect saviors. I am hopeful that a Biden administration will approach these questions not just with empathy with but with an actual understanding of historical impediments that are not long ago history. </p>
<p id="iZ0EAN">We have to remember when the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized in 1975, that was the first time it actually took care of Native American and Latinos who were still being subjected to literacy tests by the man who went on to become <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eagle_Eye_(United_States)">the chief justice of the US Supreme Court. </a>The inability of Blacks to build wealth through housing is <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/">directly related to federal policy.</a> And so there is either a misunderstanding of history or a deliberate refusal to acknowledge the connections of the laws and policies that have guided the lives of so many who have been oppressed or underinvested in for so long in this country.</p>
<h4 id="I4eWS3">Ezra Klein</h4>
<p id="J4EAT5">If Joe Biden and the Democrats win, do you think that will actually bring change in a way that people will notice in their lives?</p>
<h4 id="oER5OR">Stacey Abrams</h4>
<p id="w2h0kD">If you read Biden’s Build Back Better plan — if you look at what is in <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/8/19/21372408/joe-biden-racial-justice-policy">the racial equity plan</a> — it is an incredible acknowledgment of what remains to be done and it is still not enough. That is why democracy in its fullest form is so important — because we need people who wake up and believe that they get to vote for a mayor, for a governor, for a president, but then they also get to vote for school board members who do not run on the proposition of eliminating access to their education. </p>
<p id="VLDvtU">When you have a robust democracy that is fully engaged and that is fully accessible to those who are eligible, what you then see are actual changes in the outcomes of lives. In part because, again, there are more of us than there have been before. The demographic inflection point isn’t simply a change in who votes for Democrat or Republican. It’s a change in who can participate and force those changes to be permanent. I think that is the most terrifying part of this evolution for Republicans. It was one thing to try to block communities from participation — and it was quite convenient that certain communities exempted or simply didn’t participate because of past history. That was not actually their direct fault in 2020, but they’ve enjoyed it. </p>
<p id="1Lie9M">But the reality is, whether it is a Democrat or Republican or a federalist who imposes voter suppression, if we as a nation can finally break those barriers and create opportunity for participation, I believe that we can make the changes we need. It will not happen in a single Biden administration. It will not happen in a decade. But we can lay the foundations and we can make aggressive progress because the most important part of the demographic changes we are seeing is that they’re not going to stop. </p>
<p id="TbNaYb"></p>
https://www.vox.com/ezra-klein-show-podcast/21540804/stacey-abrams-2020-biden-trump-election-voter-suppression-laws-republicansEzra Klein2020-11-06T09:52:16-05:002020-11-06T09:52:16-05:00How Joe Biden, the ultimate insider, defeated Donald Trump, the ultimate outsider
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<figcaption>Joe Biden has become the 46th president of the United States. | Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>The lessons of Biden’s unusual campaign.</p> <p id="ngHJVa">From one angle, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/11/6/21534594/joe-biden-wins-2020-presidential-election">Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election</a> takes on an aura of near-inevitability. Biden is well liked, experienced, known. He served as vice president to Barack Obama, still the <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/blog/meet-press-blog-latest-news-analysis-data-driving-political-discussion-n988541/ncrd1237294#blogHeader">most popular figure</a> in American politics. He ran against Donald Trump, who has never won a majority of the vote in an election or cracked 50 percent approval in polling averages. The campaign was set against the devastation wrought by the coronavirus, which has killed more than 230,000 Americans and left millions more jobless, gasping, and afraid. </p>
<p id="6yxnR0">Yet to get here, Biden shattered the conventional wisdom about how modern American politics works, shook off a vast procession of critics and detractors, and assembled and held together an unlikely coalition that stretched from democratic socialists to moderate Republicans. He ran a decidedly old-fashioned, understated campaign, based on a picture of the electorate many considered outdated, an approach to the media that seemed archaic, and a transactional form of politics that many thought discredited. </p>
<aside id="CLP9pK"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Joe Biden has won. Here’s what comes next.","url":"https://www.vox.com/2020/11/6/21534594/joe-biden-wins-2020-presidential-election"}]}'></div></aside><p id="IfYmxT">In the era of Trump’s “I alone can fix it” approach to politics, Biden ran on relationships and compromises, a campaign where the candidate — in defiance of political trends and fretful advisers — frequently faded into the background of the coalition he was assembling. Democrats fretted almost continuously that Biden wasn’t doing enough to enthuse voters, to dominate the conversation, to turn out the base. But in the end, he won in the highest-turnout election since <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/11/4/21549010/voter-turnout-record-estimate-election-2020">perhaps 1900</a>, mobilizing more voters than any candidate in history. </p>
<p id="WEsVoI">It will likely be weeks before we know the final tally, but if the current trends hold, Biden will see a larger popular vote margin than Hillary Clinton in 2016, Barack Obama in 2012, or George W. Bush in 2004. The Electoral College, and Pennsylvania’s achingly slow vote count, turned the election into a nail-biter, but in terms of support, it was never even close. </p>
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<cite>Drew Angerer/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Joe Biden visits a neighbor’s house after stopping by his childhood home in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on November 3.</figcaption>
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<p id="X2kgYR">At the core of Biden’s candidacy sits a professionalism we often deride in presidential politics. Biden is a politician, in the truest, deepest sense of the term. In a culture that rewards the performance of uncompromising conviction and the aesthetics of anti-Washington outsiders, Biden delights in the pluralistic, messy work of political negotiation. </p>
<p id="o5WfFQ">His politics isn’t about what he believes, but about finding the intersection of what he believes, what he believes the country believes, and what the people he needs to win over believe. That makes Biden a more protean, mutable figure than we’ve seen in recent presidential campaigns. And it speaks to the kind of presidency he’s likely to have.</p>
<p id="bA87u2">“The word ‘politician’ has become a bad word,” says Jared Bernstein, a top economic adviser to Biden. “But if you think of a politician as someone who recognizes the policy zeitgeist and has the chops to implement it, that’s a good skill set. And that’s Biden.”</p>
<p id="eCYGWa">As the coronavirus crisis brought a Senate majority into view for Democrats, there was talk of an <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21340746/joe-biden-covid-19-coronavirus-recession-harris">FDR-size presidency</a> for Biden. That talk has quieted. It may be months before we know the final composition of the Senate, as both Georgia seats look likely to go to a January runoff. But the probable outcome, as of now, is that Mitch McConnell retains his position as majority leader. So Biden, the dealmaker who still prides himself on his ability to win Republican votes, will face the ultimate test of his approach.</p>
<h3 id="QerDah">The personal is political</h3>
<p id="vWIOGK">If you were to go searching for the molten core of Joe Biden’s politics, you could do worse than this passage from his book <em>Promise Me, Dad</em>:</p>
<blockquote><p id="ukiOAc">My old friend Tip O’Neill, the twentieth century’s most colorful and successful Speaker of the House, famously said, “All politics is local.” I’ve been around long enough to presume to improve on that statement. I believe all politics is personal, because at bottom, politics depends on trust, and unless you can establish a personal relationship, it’s awfully hard to build trust.</p></blockquote>
<p id="y7j4Cg">This is the core of Bidenism. It’s also the core problem of it. As his many critics have pointed out — <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/26/18715650/joe-biden-2020-primary-democrat-senator-segregation">myself included</a> — the relational politics that defined the Senate decades ago have fallen before the structural polarization of modern American politics. Biden often seemed caged by his affection for the Senate of yore, musing proudly of the deals he cut with segregationist senators like Mississippi’s James Eastland. But that Senate, for better and for much, much worse, was a product of the mixed political parties of the past. It’s gone now.</p>
<p id="pwJEE8">Yet Biden’s focus on personal relationships bore more fruit in the campaign than I, for one, expected. The primary was defined by a battle between the Democratic Party’s more establishmentarian, moderate wing and its growing leftist faction. Biden won, in the end, in a dramatic Super Tuesday victory driven by his success in South Carolina and a slew of big-name endorsements and dropouts. The stage was set for division and mistrust. </p>
<p id="XfP2R5">Biden smoothly united the party, and it was his attention to personal relationships that set the foundation. “I think the difference now is that, between you and me, I have a better relationship with Joe Biden than I had with Hillary Clinton, and that Biden has been much more receptive to sitting down and talking with me and other progressives than we have seen in the past,” onetime presidential rival Sen. Bernie Sanders <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/bernie-sanders-is-not-done-fighting">told</a> the New Yorker.</p>
<p id="VFlktw">As Biden wrote, personal relationships build trust. And trust builds a foundation upon which negotiation and compromise — the core work of politics, as Biden sees it — is possible. And so the Biden-Sanders relationship birthed the Biden-Sanders <a href="https://www.vox.com/21317850/joe-biden-bernie-sanders-task-forces-progressive-agenda">task forces</a>, which was, to my eyes, the most impressive and interesting decision of Biden’s campaign. </p>
<p id="KMYjBG">Rather than taking his victory over Sanders as an opportunity to define the Democratic Party, Biden took it as his opportunity to unite the Democratic Party. And that meant reopening his policy agenda, and giving a slew of critics and detractors a voice in his campaign.</p>
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<cite>JoeBiden.com/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Sen. Bernie Sanders endorses Joe Biden during a livestream broadcast on April 13.</figcaption>
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<p id="9RhUwC">Varshini Prakash, the executive director of the environmental group Sunrise Movement, was one of those detractors. The Sunrise Movement had given Biden an “F” on climate during the campaign, a position his campaign considered grossly unfair given the ambition of their plans. But when the Sanders team proposed Prakash as part of the task force, Biden’s team didn’t flinch. </p>
<p id="EzDyCg">“They could’ve said, ‘I don’t want Varshini to be part of the task force; her organization has been mean to me,’” Prakash told me. “But they didn’t, and I give them credit for it.” </p>
<p id="cbvWcX">This was, for the Biden campaign, a risk: Adding Sunrise to the task force would shine a spotlight on them, give them more clout, and make it far more damaging if the organization once again decided to torch Biden’s commitment to climate. But that’s not how it played out. The Biden camp listened. Their plan changed, strengthened. </p>
<p id="YYRna5">“I was standing behind Bernie Sanders when he unveiled his climate plan in 2016,” Prakash says. “The fact that Joe Biden’s climate plan now is more ambitious than Bernie Sanders’s plan in 2016 is mind-blowing.” </p>
<p id="aICEyx">The result was that the Sunrise Movement, rather than feeling defeated by the Biden campaign, bought into it. “There’s a reason we’ve made hundreds of thousands of phone calls and sent hundreds of thousands of postcards to defeat Trump,” Prakash says. “It’s not about the political champion or the political savior. It’s about the broader mission at hand.”</p>
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<cite>Justin Sullivan/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Joe Biden greets a person in a polar bear costume during a campaign event in Hudson, New Hampshire, on February 9.</figcaption>
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<p id="0EzQzu">Biden has long maintained that the same approach will help him peel off Republican legislators. “I’ll say something outrageous,” he told me in July. “I think I have a pretty good record of pulling together Democrats and Republicans.” He predicted that some Republicans will feel “a bit liberated” if Trump is defeated, and will be ready to work with Democrats on issues like infrastructure and racial inequality.</p>
<p id="c2pYrf">“In my career, I have never expected a foreign leader or a member of Congress to appear in the second-edition <em>Profiles in Courage</em>,” Biden continued. “But I’m fairly good at understanding the limitations for a senator or leader and helping them navigate around to what they want to do from what they’re having political trouble doing. I have been successful in helping my Republican friends find rationales to help me get what I’m pushing over the top.”</p>
<aside id="HeuIA8"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"How reality caught up with the reality TV president","url":"https://www.vox.com/21500899/president-donald-trump-loses-reality-tv"}]}'></div></aside><p id="2FR08v">Biden remains proud of his role in the Obama administration as the one Democrat who could still cut a deal with Mitch McConnell — deals that, in some cases, liberals loathed — and confident that the relationships he’s forged with Republicans will bear fruit under his presidency. Biden is, I suspect, the Democrat who can maximize the amount of legislation that happens so long as McConnell is majority leader. But that may mean accepting deals many Democrats dislike. So the question, then, is how Biden balances the left of his party with the Republicans he’ll need to work with in the Senate. </p>
<p id="Owoz9m">Evan Osnos, author of <em>Joe Biden: The Life, The Run, and What Matters Now</em>, put it best to me. “Personal relationships are a tool of political statecraft. Biden used it first in a regional conflict, in his own party, and next he’ll have to figure out if it works in international warfare. And who knows? He’s not really operating with a rational actor. But the campaign has been a bit of a corrective on the power of these fundamentally sentimental assets in politics.” </p>
<h3 id="FjXoJM">The country changes, and so does Biden</h3>
<p id="6592n9">Biden’s agenda, at this point, places him well to the left of Hillary Clinton in 2016, or Barack Obama in 2012, or Joe Biden in 2008. This is something of a surprise given Biden’s history as a relatively centrist Democrat — in his final Senate term, he was the 26th most liberal member of the Senate Democratic caucus, placing him smack in the middle — and, in some quarters, it’s occasioned mistrust. Biden has such a long record in politics that he’s been on multiple sides of myriad issues, and hypocrisy, or insincerity, is always an easy conclusion. </p>
<p id="hx9zBb">So, too, is the fear that Biden is a secret conservative. Who’s the real Biden — the one who <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-02-24-mn-35754-story.html">cosponsored</a> a balanced-budget amendment in 1995, or the one who is explicitly tying his administration to FDR’s legacy in 2020? The politician who voted against the first Iraq War, or for the second?</p>
<p id="as23M9">But another read of Biden’s career is that as the country changes, he changes, and he does so proudly. That, to him, is the job of a politician — to absorb the disagreements and needs of a fractured, diverse country and use the channels and institutions of politics to steadily perfect the union. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="PFnS51"><q>Biden is a politician, in the truest, deepest sense of the term</q></aside></div>
<p id="wnAm8v">Osnos’s book includes a quote from an unnamed White House official reflecting on Biden’s early embrace of marriage equality. “He is very much a weathervane for what the center of the left is. He can see, ‘Okay, this is where the society is moving. This is where the Democratic Party is moving, so I’m going to move.’ ”</p>
<p id="KKvRce">Here is where I make an argument I believe but cannot prove. It’s not just that the world changed; it’s also that Joe Biden changed. I’ve covered Biden for two decades. When he ran in 2008, no one thought to define his campaign by pointing to his empathy or his gentleness. Biden was a notably arrogant figure in Washington, good at making deals but always spoiling for a fight, desperate to be seen as the smartest in the room. He was quick with a cutting dismissal and often contemptuous of those to his left, or those he saw as less schooled in the ways of politics. </p>
<p id="aM6gVs">As he’s gotten older — and particularly after serving as Barack Obama’s vice president, and then losing his son Beau — that arrogance burned away, leaving a more open-minded, and open-hearted, man. I don’t think the Biden of 2008 would have won the primary and welcomed in his critics. I think the Biden of the past had more to prove than the Biden of the present, and the softer, less ego-driven approach to politics he practices now has served him well.</p>
<p id="gZeFjP">Either way, the country is changing now, and that permitted Biden to run an unusual strategy in 2020, one that may have profound consequences for his presidency. Sanders and Elizabeth Warren ran as the proud standard-bearers of the left. That let Biden run aesthetically as a moderate — he wants a strong public health insurance option rather than Medicare-for-all; sharp limits on fracking rather than an outright ban; policies that would <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21456242/joe-biden-poverty-checks-kamala-harris">cut adult poverty by 50 percent and child poverty by 75 percent</a> rather than a universal basic income — even as he designed an agenda that, if passed, would be the most profound overhaul of domestic policy since Lyndon Johnson, at least. </p>
<p id="YParlm">The Trump campaign was flummoxed by this. They tried relentlessly, and at times hilariously, to paint Biden as a radical socialist who’s a tool of the left. There is a kernel of truth in their portrayal: Biden is offering the leftmost agenda of any presidential nominee in modern history, and his agenda has been influenced by Sanders, Warren, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others on the party’s left. But Biden’s long career in politics, and the candidates he ran against, turns the efforts to hype his supposed communist sympathies into unintentional camp.</p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">This would be Joe Biden's America <a href="https://t.co/qCILb8SMNo">pic.twitter.com/qCILb8SMNo</a></p>— Trump War Room - Text TRUMP to 88022 (@TrumpWarRoom) <a href="https://twitter.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/1323320005941972994?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 2, 2020</a>
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<p id="G0goPS">“The magic of Joe Biden is that everything he does becomes the new reasonable,” Andrew Yang <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/8/20/21394924/dnc-joe-biden-andrew-yang-magic">said</a> during the candidate roundtable at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. “If he comes with an ambitious template to address climate change, all of a sudden, everyone is going to follow his lead.”</p>
<p id="AhJpOj">Biden is likely to be more constrained on domestic policy, where he will have to negotiate with Senate Republicans, than on foreign policy, where the president has more power. But there, too, the changes in Biden’s thinking have been notable. Biden pushed hard for humanitarian interventions in the 1990s, and supported George W. Bush’s request for authority to go to war in Iraq. But the failure of that war chastened him, and he proved one of the Obama administration’s consistently cautious voices on military intervention, arguing against an Afghanistan surge and the (disastrous) Libya intervention, and even pushing for an airstrike on Osama bin Laden’s compound, rather than the riskier plan of sending troops in on the ground. </p>
<p id="nJACgQ">“You mentioned Joe having voted for the war in Iraq,” Obama said in a <em>Pod Save America </em><a href="https://crooked.com/podcast/barack-obama-on-2020/">interview</a>. “He learned a lesson from that. And as you know, he was probably the person who was most restrained in terms of use of military force among my senior advisers during the course of my presidency.”</p>
<h3 id="TwjRDM">A quiet candidate in a loud time</h3>
<p id="hRpwha">The tendency in every election is to refight the last war and counter the previous election’s winning strategy. In 2016, Trump won a shocking upset in part by dominating media attention. He was inescapable, inexhaustible. And so a conventional wisdom quickly congealed: To beat Trump, in the modern era of social media-driven politics, you had to disrupt his ability to set the agenda, shut down his talent for controlling the conversation. You needed to fight him on Twitter, on Reddit, on Facebook, on YouTube. </p>
<p id="Pmdcxj">But Biden simply refused. “Biden Is Losing the Internet. Does That Matter?” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/technology/joe-biden-internet.html">fretted</a> an April New York Times headline. “Mr. Biden has just 32,000 subscribers on [YouTube], a pittance compared with some of his rivals in the Democratic primary race and roughly 300,000 fewer than President Trump,” it warned.</p>
<p id="9Eid4h">Biden ran an oddly modest campaign, and it got even quieter after the coronavirus hit and in-person events ceased. “Does Biden Need a Higher Gear? Some Democrats Think So,” warned a Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/us/politics/joe-biden-campaign.html">article</a> in September, in which a variety of Democrats worried over the way “Biden’s restraint has spilled over into his campaign operation.” Trump was holding daily press conferences, appearing at rallies, owning the nation’s attention. Where was Biden? </p>
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<cite>Drew Angerer/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Joe Biden rallies supporters in Philadelphia on November 3.</figcaption>
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<p id="wsb0oW">But Biden was clear about his strategy. “The more he talks, the better off I am,” the candidate <a href="https://twitter.com/jdawsey1/status/1263841847773970433?lang=en">said</a> of Trump in May. Biden’s bet, in the primary as well as the general, was that Americans were tired of the loudest voices in the room, tired of the grievances and disputes that dominated political media. The same strategy that led Trump to victory in 2016 would drive him to defeat in 2020, so long as Biden didn’t get in his way.</p>
<p id="vOyzb2">“There were all these people who in March or April were saying Biden has to be out there every day, that he’s invisible, that he needs a daily briefing,” a senior Biden adviser told me in June. “But people are not looking for a Trump 2.0. They don’t want a Democratic Trump. They want a president. The best way to run against Trump is to go be the president they don’t have in this country right now.”</p>
<p id="cxRpeW">As my colleague Jane Coaston has <a href="https://www.vox.com/21504280/trumps-2020-campaign-too-online">written</a>, Trump ran the most Extremely Online campaign in history, often emphasizing issues that were inscrutable even to professional political reporters. To follow along with ease, you had to be deep into the Fox News cinematic universe, easily conversant in right-wing memes and conspiracies. Trump’s campaign was angry, negative, and alarmist, but it was also just confusing, a reflection of the president’s idiosyncratic interests and obsessions. </p>
<p id="NXQL4C">Biden’s strategy was the opposite. At times, his campaign felt transported from another era, with kitschy, post-partisan ads narrated by Sam Elliott and a vibe that Trump officials <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/mr-rogers-trends-twitter-trump-adviser-compares-biden/story?id=73656690">mocked</a> as lifted from an episode of <em>Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood</em>. But after four years of Trump, President Mr. Rogers sounded pretty good to plenty of voters.</p>
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<p id="uItvV8">“Biden ran a campaign that is not a Twitter campaign,” says Yanna Krupnikov, a political scientist at Stony Brook University. “He has a T-shirt in his store that says ‘Tweet less, listen more.’ That’s aimed at Trump, but it’s indicative of the overall campaign. This was a campaign trying to reach people who weren’t political junkies.”</p>
<p id="0XMAJJ">That was also reflected in Biden’s media strategy, which didn’t reflect the heat of anti-Trump discourse in the Democratic Party. Despite running against a deeply unpopular president, Biden ran an unusually positive ad campaign in a bid to reach voters who didn’t loathe Trump so much as they just wanted a candidate, and a presidency, that felt different from the current one. </p>
<div id="rf7YpS">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Pro-Trump ads are increasingly negative since mid-Sep. In the past week, over 60% of Trump ads were pure attacks, and fewer than 10% were purely positive. <br><br>Biden is airing mostly positive or contrast ads, with about 10% being pure attacks.<a href="https://t.co/kSt9kEMQxv">https://t.co/kSt9kEMQxv</a> <a href="https://t.co/IZlAPfeaWg">pic.twitter.com/IZlAPfeaWg</a></p>— WesleyanMediaProject (@wesmediaproject) <a href="https://twitter.com/wesmediaproject/status/1321873181314031616?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 29, 2020</a>
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<p id="PibCZC">Trump’s central strategy in the campaign was playing up polarization, emphasizing divisive issues, trying to split the country into two halves in the hopes that his half would be bigger, or at least more efficiently distributed across the Electoral College.</p>
<p id="zhHT5x">Biden’s strategy was the opposite: He ran a strategy built on defusing negative partisanship, a campaign designed to deprive Trump of a boogeyman to run against even if that meant avoiding some of the messages, policies, and controversies that would have motivated Biden’s own base. That’s a strategy that likely would have failed against a more graceful, less polarizing candidate than Trump, but Biden was running against Trump, not that hypothetical alternative. As a result, Biden could effectively outsource Democratic base mobilization to Trump while focusing his efforts on the kinds of voters who wanted a calmer, kinder alternative. </p>
<p id="6z7WB0">If, in 2016, Trump proved the potency of running an offensive campaign, recognizing that outrage generated its own energy, Biden’s 2020 strategy proved that a strategically inoffensive campaign could be a potent response. It will require full results and more granular data to truly judge this strategy, but so far, it looks like Biden ran ahead of both his party’s Senate and House candidates, suggesting there was something to the contrast he chose to draw with Trump. </p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/stu5MeHywKku1GSNwbt2bwxhc_Q=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22011053/GettyImages_1229425068.jpg">
<cite>Drew Angerer/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Biden ran an oddly modest campaign, and it got even quieter after the coronavirus hit. But Biden was clear about his strategy. “The more [Trump] talks, the better off I am,” he said in May.</figcaption>
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<p id="8bHylF">For Biden now, the question is what all this looks like without Trump as a foil. Can the Democratic base hold together when they’re riven by disagreements over legislation rather than united by opposition to the president? Can Biden, as president, ignore Twitter controversies and try to hold marginal voters when the focus is on him and his actions? Is there any possibility of a successful governing agenda so long as Republicans hold the Senate and the Supreme Court? </p>
<p id="qJWkLk">Biden’s strategy worked in the context of Trump’s presidency. And now we’ll see how it holds up in Biden’s presidency. </p>
https://www.vox.com/21545969/joe-biden-2020-election-winner-trump-voteEzra Klein2020-11-04T21:00:00-05:002020-11-04T21:00:00-05:00Chris Hayes and Ezra Klein process this wild election
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<figcaption>A man at the Cochise County Republican Headquarters in Sierra Vista, Arizona, gestures at the TV as he watches Virginia results come in on November 3. (Virginia was called for Joe Biden, despite early returns showing a Donald Trump lead.) | Ariana Drehsler/AFP via Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>The MSNBC host discusses the problems with the polls, the future of democracy, and Trump’s surprising inroads with Latino voters.</p> <p id="XtG2nh">This is not the post-election breakdown I expected to have, but it’s definitely the one that I needed.</p>
<p id="EpfKD5">Chris Hayes is the host of the MSNBC primetime show, <em>All In</em>, and the podcast <em>Why Is This Happening? With Chris Hayes</em>. He’s also one of the most insightful political analysts I know. We discuss the purpose of polling, the problems of polling-driven coverage, the epistemic fog of the results, the strategy behind Trump’s inroads with Latino voters, how Democrats might have won the presidency but lost democracy, what happens if Trump refuses to accept the election results, and much more.</p>
<p id="u4lkCi">More than anything else, this conversation on <a href="https://www.vox.com/ezra-klein-show-podcast"><em>The Ezra Klein Show</em></a> has helped me make sense of everything that’s happened in the last few days. I think it will do the same for you.</p>
<div id="sT84Rd"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/episode/5yfC3PM1pIjYyNdKsN5R7R" style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 232px;" allowfullscreen="" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div>
<p id="ZL9MUn"></p>
<p id="HZUwsJ">Subscribe to <em>The Ezra Klein</em> <em>Show</em> wherever you listen to podcasts, including <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1081584611&referrer=vox.com&sref=https://www.vox.com/2020/9/10/21430547/covid-19-julia-marcus-the-ezra-klein-show-outside-inside-risk&xcust=___vx__e_21298621__r_vox.com/ezra-klein-show-podca"><strong>Apple Podcasts</strong></a>, <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RoZUV6cmFLbGVpblNob3c%3D"><strong>Google Podcasts</strong></a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6NOJ6IkTb2GWMj1RpmtnxP"><strong>Spotify</strong></a>, and <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/vox/the-ezra-klein-show"><strong>Stitcher</strong></a>.</p>
<p id="WwbKZL">If you want to follow the latest election updates after listening, we’ve got you covered.</p>
<p id="EOcKZL">There’s no guarantee when we’ll know whether Trump or Biden won the election, but <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/11/3/21540609/election-2020-live-results-presidential">you can track live results here</a>, powered by our friends at <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21535103/when-will-we-get-election-results-calls-networks"><strong>Decision Desk</strong></a>. </p>
<p id="McZAK5">And this election is not just about the presidency: Whoever wins, their plans depend on the makeup of Congress. You can follow <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/11/3/21537694/senate-election-live-results"><strong>Senate live results here</strong></a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/11/3/21545835/house-congress-2020-live-results"><strong>House live results here</strong></a>. </p>
<p id="s2vCep">Finally, here’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21535103/when-will-we-get-election-results-calls-networks"><strong>how Vox (and other media outlets) are making calls</strong></a>.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2020/11/4/21550380/trump-biden-presidential-election-2020-the-ezra-klein-showEzra Klein2020-10-30T08:50:00-04:002020-10-30T08:50:00-04:00Nate Silver on why 2020 isn’t 2016
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<img alt="A photo illustration of President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden on a smartphone screen, in front of an electoral map." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/rN7gHMu9fohyaraiyk_WkmRfPFU=/251x0:4438x3140/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/67713467/1229230492.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Photo illustration by Pavlo Conchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>The FiveThirtyEight founder on polling error, Trump’s chances, and the possibility of an electoral crisis. </p> <p id="kcEbsd">We are days away from the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020-presidential-election">2020 election</a>, and that means an anxious nation is obsessively refreshing FiveThirtyEight’s <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/?cid=rrpromo">election forecast</a>.</p>
<p id="NAXSNz">Nate Silver is, of course, the creator of that forecast, and the founder and editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight. His forecasting model successfully predicted the outcome in 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 US presidential election and all 50 states in 2012. And in 2016, Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gave Donald Trump a <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/?ex_cid=2016-forecast">29 percent chance of victory</a>, and Silver was rare among analysts in emphasizing that meant Trump really could win. </p>
<p id="D0jO09">So I asked Silver to join me on my podcast to talk about what’s changed since 2016, what’s new in his forecast this year, whether the polls can be trusted, how the electoral geography is reshaping campaign strategies, how Biden’s campaign strategy has worked, whether Trump is underperforming “the fundamentals,” and much more. </p>
<p id="xhD8GY">An edited transcript from our conversation follows. The <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nate-silver-on-why-2020-isnt-2016/id1081584611?i=1000496434843">full conversation</a> can be heard on <a href="https://www.vox.com/ezra-klein-show-podcast"><em><strong>The Ezra Klein Show</strong></em>.</a></p>
<div id="2NEw9v"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/episode/4KRRk0hR6QengH1HsXyAi4" style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 232px;" allowfullscreen="" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div>
<p id="XydeX4"></p>
<p id="40aJFu">Subscribe to <em>The Ezra Klein</em> <em>Show</em> wherever you listen to podcasts, including <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1081584611&referrer=vox.com&sref=https://www.vox.com/2020/9/10/21430547/covid-19-julia-marcus-the-ezra-klein-show-outside-inside-risk&xcust=___vx__e_21292308__r_vox.com/ezra-klein-show-podca"><strong>Apple Podcasts</strong></a>, <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RoZUV6cmFLbGVpblNob3c%3D"><strong>Google Podcasts</strong></a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6NOJ6IkTb2GWMj1RpmtnxP"><strong>Spotify</strong></a>, and <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/vox/the-ezra-klein-show"><strong>Stitcher</strong></a>.</p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="uOtUvC">
<h4 id="zCKZIw">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="KN9gaA">What went wrong in the polls in 2016? </p>
<h4 id="khzvSJ">Nate Silver </h4>
<p id="e1b5CE">Well, there are <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-accurate-have-state-polls-been/">degrees of wrong</a>. Polls often miss an election by 2 or 3 or 4 points, which is what happened in 2016. Ahead of an election, people need to be prepared for the fact that having a 2- or 3- or 4-point lead — which is what Clinton had in the key states — is not going to hold up anywhere close to 100 percent of the time. You might win 70 percent the time, like in the FiveThirtyEight forecast. </p>
<p id="1072Di">That said, there are a couple of things that are identifiable. One is that a bulk of the undecided voters in three key states — Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — went toward Trump. If those undecided voters had split 50-50, Clinton would have won nationally by 5 or 6 points. </p>
<p id="jGOxpM">The thing that I think you blame pollsters for is <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-pollsters-have-changed-since-2016-and-what-still-worries-them-about-2020/">education weighting</a>. If you just randomly call people in the phone book or use a list of registered voters, traditionally, you get older people more than younger people, women more than men, and white people more than people of color. So polls weight responses to account for those disparities. </p>
<p id="S6SsZ2">But it’s also true that people who are college-educated are more likely to respond to polls. It used to be that there was no real split along educational lines in who voted for whom, but now — at least among white voters — there’s a big split between the college-educated Biden and Clinton voters and the non-college Trump voters. So if you oversampled college-educated white voters and undersampled non-college white voters, you’re gonna have a poll that leans toward Clinton too much. </p>
<h4 id="Y7xkOL">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="apwIYA">Two questions on that, then. First, how does Biden’s lead compare to Clinton’s in 2016? And second, do you think pollsters have corrected the mistakes they made in 2016, such that their polls are likelier to be reliable this year?</p>
<h4 id="hsFF6H">Nate Silver </h4>
<p id="c2W0VD">First, let me back up and say, Trump can still win. In 2016, our final forecast said Trump had a 29 percent chance, and that came through; right now we give him a 12 percent chance to win in November. That’s not trivial, but it is a different landscape. </p>
<p id="msBE7a">One difference is that there are fewer undecided voters this year. In 2016, there were about 13 or 14 percent undecided plus third party; it’s around 6 percent this year. That’s a pretty big difference. So that first mechanism that I described that helped Trump is probably not going to be a factor. Trump could win every undecided voter in these polls and he would still narrowly lose the Electoral College. <em> </em></p>
<p id="DqQZsh">Biden’s lead is also a little bit larger. After the [FBI Director James] Comey letter, Clinton’s lead went down to 3 or 4 points in national polls and 2 or 3 points in the average tipping point state. Biden is ahead by more like 5 points in the average tipping point state. </p>
<p id="4siY9D">We can definitely find cases in the past where there was a 5-point polling error in key states — that’s why Trump can win. But a 2016 error would not be quite enough: If the polls missed by exactly the same margin, exactly the same states, then instead of losing those three key Rust Belt states by 1 point, Biden would win them by 1 or 2 points. He might also hold on in Arizona, where the polls were fine in 2016. So it would be a close call, but one that wound up electing Biden in the end, pending court disputes, etc. </p>
<h4 id="D7g4rD">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="uCQH34">The data analyst David Shor <a href="https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1234141584867897344?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1234141584867897344%7Ctwgr%5Eshare_3&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2F21538156%2Fbiden-polls-lead-election-trump-2020-2016">shared</a> a chart showing that the 2018 polls were still underweighting Republican voters in some of those same Midwestern states they did in 2016. Even though they were trying to use education as a proxy and weighting it differently, it still didn’t fully measure what was getting missed in the Republican electorate. </p>
<p id="N2umR3">Do you think that the way those states are being polled in 2020 is better? </p>
<h4 id="VRkbro">Nate Silver </h4>
<p id="yqWVQC">It’s possible that even within, say, the demographic group of non-college-educated people, Trump supporters just answer your polls less. That’s always a concern. </p>
<p id="kHimfi">But there is a long history of the direction of polling error being unpredictable: If the polls miss in one direction — say, the Republican direction — in one year, then they’re equally likely the next year to miss again in the Republican direction or the Democratic direction. </p>
<p id="sQNGNY">That’s because polling is a dynamic science and pollsters don’t want to be wrong. They particularly don’t want to be wrong the same way twice in a row, so they will make all types of new adjustments. So polls can be wrong, but it’s hard to know in which direction they’d be wrong if they were wrong. <em> </em></p>
<h4 id="56cvD1">Ezra Klein</h4>
<p id="ThOM1k">I think it is easy to imagine for people how the polls could be wrong in Donald Trump’s direction, because people lived through that and have a visceral feeling of it. But as you often point out, in 2012 the polls were a little bit wrong, but in Barack Obama’s direction. If the polls were wrong in Joe Biden’s direction, what do you think would be the likeliest reason why? </p>
<h4 id="gArRXQ">Nate Silver</h4>
<p id="6UXk32">So I think you have a story that would start with the fact that maybe pollsters were not prepared for this early voting surge. You have likely voters in polls. That’s based on some combination of their vote history and responses. Well, some of those people won’t vote. Their car won’t start on Election Day, or they will have a Covid outbreak in their area. However, if you’ve actually already voted, then you’re 100 percent likely to vote. So it may be that Democrats weren’t given enough extra credit for early voting. </p>
<p id="uuB8YS">It’s also worth thinking about incentives here. Imagine you’re a pollster and you have a choice between two turnout models. One is a newfangled turnout model that accounts for early voting. The other is a more traditional, conservative model. </p>
<p id="WbE0f9">One of them has Biden up 6 points in Wisconsin. And one has him up 10 points. There’s not much incentive to publish the 10-point lead. If Biden wins by 10 when you had him up by 6, people will say it was a pretty good poll nevertheless. But if Trump wins, you’re going to look that much worse. So I think there are a lot of incentives to be sure that you’re not missing the white working-class voters that may not apply to Hispanic voters in Arizona or to younger voters who have not been reliable voters in the past but are evidently turning out this year. </p>
<h4 id="g8s6gN">Ezra Klein</h4>
<p id="qlqFPN">As we’re speaking, <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/">the FiveThirtyEight forecast</a> has Biden at an 88 out of 100 shot of winning the election and has Trump at a 12 out of 100 shot. We’ve been talking about the probabilities on one side of that distribution, the one where Trump wins. What does the outcome look like on the other side? In the 12 percent of best-case scenario outcomes for Biden, what is he winning? </p>
<h4 id="LRXQNB">Nate Silver </h4>
<p id="Q4JXnS">A 5-point polling error in Biden’s favor means he wins by 13 or 14 points. That would be the largest margin of defeat for an incumbent since Hoover. It would exceed the margin that Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan in 1980. It would mean that Biden would win almost all of the states that are commonly considered competitive, including probably Texas, Ohio, Iowa, and Georgia. </p>
<p id="Pi2EJo">Once you get beyond Texas, there aren’t many other close toss-up states. In a lot of our simulations, a good Biden night tends to peak at him winning Texas. Beyond that would take a really big polling miss. </p>
<h4 id="BAk7bH">Ezra Klein</h4>
<p id="9XJXti">I think one of the really interesting things you’ve done in <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-fivethirtyeights-2020-presidential-forecast-works-and-whats-different-because-of-covid-19/">the FiveThirtyEight model in 2020 </a>is add an uncertainty index. What goes into that index, and what has it taught you so far? <em> </em></p>
<h4 id="PEzZ7n">Nate Silver </h4>
<p id="rb0lmz">We analyzed lots of factors that historically are correlated with uncertainty and they point in opposite directions this year. On the one hand, the fact that you have few undecided voters and few third-party voters. The fact that you have stable polling and higher polarization — those all lead the model to be more certain about the outcome. </p>
<p id="9WB35q">But there are other factors that point in the other direction. The two most important ones are the degree of economic uncertainty and the amount of news. This last one has become infamous. We use an index based on how many full-width New York Times headlines there are. The more of those you have, the more uncertain the news environment. When, for example, Donald Trump got Covid-19, that was a banner headline at the New York Times for three or four days. That is something that moved the polls. But for the most part, these monumental events have not moved the polls very much. </p>
<p id="HHDkQ6">When the US first had our Covid crisis, initially, there was a little bit of a sympathy bounce for Trump that <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/4/30/21231217/trump-cuomo-whitmer-coronavirus-covid-19-approval-rating-polls-world-leaders-governors">began to wear off</a>. Then in June, when you had this second peak more in Southern states plus the George Floyd protests, that moves things a little bit. But you have these monumental historic events and you go from Trump minus 6 to Trump minus 9. That’s not nothing, but it means like 1.5 percent of Americans are changing their vote. So people seem pretty darn locked in about how they feel about Trump and about Joe Biden. <em> </em></p>
<h4 id="czMdE4">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="Sm7Obg">I wrote <a href="https://simonandschusterpublishing.com/why-were-polarized/">a whole book </a>about polarization, and one of the big arguments I make is that as polarization goes up, American politics becomes more stable in terms of people’s preferences because the decisions are clearer for them. You all put that into the model. </p>
<p id="1WqWWj">But if you had told me a year ago what was going to happen over the next year — coronavirus, 200,000 Americans dead, the kind of economic volatility we’ve seen, George Floyd and the national protests — I would not have predicted that one year later his approval rating would be <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/9/2/21409364/trump-approval-rating-2020-election-voters-coronavirus-convention-polls">up by 1 point</a>.</p>
<p id="f8kNpf">Are you surprised by the level of stability? </p>
<aside id="szGfPh"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Can anything change Americans’ minds about Donald Trump?","url":"https://www.vox.com/2020/9/2/21409364/trump-approval-rating-2020-election-voters-coronavirus-convention-polls"}]}'></div></aside><h4 id="Cdoz6N">Nate Silver </h4>
<p id="F7z8tx">I certainly think the hypothesis that polarization begets more stable public opinion is pretty sound. It has been tested in a pretty good way this year. Although one other prediction of polarized politics is that you get narrower outcomes. So you have more close elections. </p>
<p id="AdQKB6">I’m not sure that Trump was necessarily going to lose this election absent Covid. It’ll be a famous debate if he does lose. But if you look at what polls of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania were saying in March or April, they were very close races — within a point or two. So things have shifted in ways that are meaningful, but only in relative terms.</p>
<p id="v9gfcD">One other funny thing about this election is that because of Trump’s Electoral College advantage, there is not much middle ground between a Biden landslide and an extremely competitive, down-to-the-wire photo finish. </p>
<p id="9yHidG">If Trump beats his polls by 2 points, that’s a toss-up. If Biden beats his polls by 2 points, then it’s Obama 2008, which people consider a landslide. So the Electoral College edge makes a big difference and is why there’s been this very bifurcated, binary kind of world where we seem to oscillate between, “oh, my gosh, 2016 again” and “Trump is Herbert Hoover.”</p>
<h3 id="oGoivb">The degree to which American political institutions lean Republican — and why that matters in 2020</h3>
<h4 id="6E4spr">Ezra Klein</h4>
<p id="SK1ire">There’s a finding by political scientist Alan Abramowitz that I think about a lot. He found that from 1972 to 1984, individual states would swing, on average, 7.7 points from one presidential election to the next. But since the 2000s, that change has been just 1.9 points. So there has been this really big drop in volatility. </p>
<p id="NtmW6a">It strikes me that there is a different incentive set for politicians who are at real risk of losing voters they had before as opposed to politicians who, basically no matter how they perform, are going to keep the voters they had before. I’m curious how you assess that. </p>
<h4 id="7tX4VC">Nate Silver </h4>
<p id="CpPc6H">There are two big fundamental things that govern every aspect of American politics. Number one is the increasing degree of polarization. It’s probably the most robust trend of the past 30 years that shows up in all types of ways. Number two is the GOP advantage in political institutions, particularly the Senate, because of overrepresentation of rural areas. </p>
<p id="9HZshB">We talked before about what a landslide it was when Obama won in 2008. He won by 7 points. The GOP has about <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-senates-rural-skew-makes-it-very-hard-for-democrats-to-win-the-supreme-court/">a 6- to 7-point inherent advantage in the Senate</a>, meaning that the median state is around 6 points more Republican in the country as a whole. So Democrats can win, but only if they win in a landslide. </p>
<p id="pVGebl">That has a couple of implications. One is that you have public policy catered to an older, more rural, whiter electorate. The GOP does not take advantage of that by saying, we’re going to win every election for all of eternity — we can have a stable, majoritarian coalition. Instead, they say, we’re going to actually pass very aggressive policies that the median voter would not like. But we don’t need to win the median voter. That governs a whole lot of decisions that they make.<em> </em></p>
<h4 id="O07qnn">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="J2X9rZ">How does that change for Democrats if they add DC and Puerto Rico decides to become a state as well? How would that change the Senate map? <em> </em></p>
<h4 id="VrEHDm">Nate Silver </h4>
<p id="bGZ9lO">That shifts it to around a +4 for Republicans. If Democrats were to add DC and Puerto Rico <em>and</em> divided California in thirds, where all those Californias were at least somewhat blue, then the Senate would be still a +2 lean Republican. </p>
<h4 id="zQ01uo">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="lOiyJz">What does the Electoral College partisan lean look like to you? How big is the GOP advantage there? And how durable is that advantage, given what demographics look like going forward? <em> </em></p>
<h4 id="tHTmPR">Nate Silver </h4>
<p id="wW9d5E">It was about 3 points in 2016. Clinton lost Wisconsin by about a point when she won the popular vote by 2 points. It looks similar for Biden — around a 3-point gap. </p>
<p id="ibbvvQ">I do think the Electoral College gap is more ephemeral. In 2008 and 2012, if you had had a photo finish election like you had in 2016, Obama would have won the Electoral College — he outperformed his national margins in the tipping point state. So it can flip back and forth pretty easily. </p>
<p id="GD5EaE">If Texas flipped, that would make a big difference. The one state that is underrated as a problem for Democrats, though, is Florida, which has a ton of electoral votes. Florida, if anything, has been one of Biden’s worst states this year relative to the fact that he’s ahead by 8 or 9 points nationally. </p>
<h4 id="mZ80pM">Ezra Klein</h4>
<p id="NGvWQY">Do you have an estimate on how big the Republican lean is in the House? </p>
<h4 id="vKBQRl">Nate Silver </h4>
<p id="TuBOn2">It’s a little hard to estimate in the House because the advantage is partly is tied into incumbency; once you gain the incumbency advantage like Democrats have now, that can be hard to overcome. But it’s probably around 3 or 4 points. It’s been a bit of a moving target because in 2010 you had a very Republican year, so you had a lot of gerrymandering that favored the GOP. There’s also a lot of clustering of Democrats in urban areas. And most urban areas are more Democratic than most rural areas are Republican. That creates an inequity that makes the median district more Republican-leaning. <em> </em></p>
<p id="r2jLDP">With that said, you had a lot of suburban districts that have become what are sometimes now called <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/08/10/the-republicans-big-gerrymander-could-backfire-in-a-major-way/">“dummymanders</a>.” If the suburbs of Houston or Dallas were 10 points in favor of the GOP in 2010 and things have shifted by 12 points, then all of a sudden now you have it perfectly inefficiently configured the other way where Democrats narrowly win all these districts in Texas or the suburbs of Atlanta or California or whatnot. So that advantages is less profound now. </p>
<p id="4NkAuu">One other inequity here is that when Republicans get the trifecta in a state, they will, generally speaking, gerrymander as much as they can get away with. Democrats will often appoint some type of nonpartisan commission so they fight things back to 50/50. </p>
<p id="kPkf9E">One other thing to keep in mind is because the GOP gerrymanders were so effective in 2010 in some states, it’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/4/11/18306059/wisconsin-supreme-court-power-grab-democrats">hard for Democrats to win back the state legislature</a> in states like Wisconsin. Usually you wipe the slate relatively clean after 10 years, but in a state where you don’t have a lot of demographic change — where it favors a party that already had a gerrymandering edge — that can become a repeating error that persists for decades. <em> </em></p>
<h3 id="Pb2xRX">Why Biden won the Democratic primary — and why he’s winning now </h3>
<h4 id="RpUGzf">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="LntVN3">If the presidency was decided by the popular vote in 2016, Donald Trump would have lost. In that world, I think there would have been a lot of frustration among Republicans that the Trumpist faction of the party had nominated a candidate who blew a winnable election. And, maybe, because of that, the Republican Party would have reformed itself. </p>
<p id="087PLz">The Democrats have the opposite version of this: They have to win by pretty big margins at the presidential level, the Senate level, and the House level. They’ve actually responded to that, and Joe Biden was their response in 2020. Joe Biden was not the favorite pick of most Democratic factions that I know of, but he was an answer to the question: Who would be acceptable to white working-class voters in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — the kinds of voters Democrats feared they were losing? </p>
<p id="pnttPI">The polls seem to be indicating that this has been strategically successful — that Biden is actually changing the coalition. Do you think Biden has actually changed the coalition? Or do you think this election would be the same under any Democrat? </p>
<h4 id="ZSAWLb">Nate Silver </h4>
<p id="enVMNX">In the primary, you had a fairly explicit contrast between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. Bernie’s pitch explicitly was: We are going to win this with a high turnout of younger people and people of color. We’re the biggest coalition. So we’re going to win and we’re going to win the White House that way, too. Turnout, turnout, turnout. </p>
<p id="RpWeR7">Whereas Biden is about persuasion and the median voter. The median Democratic voter liked Medicare-for-all but liked the public option a little bit more and felt like it seemed a little safer electorally. For better or worse, Joe Biden’s pitch has come true: The reason he is way ahead in these polls is not because Democratic turnout is particularly high relative to GOP turnout — it’s because he’s winning independents by 15 points and moderates by 30 points. He’s winning back a fair number of Obama-Trump voters and keeping a fair number of Romney-Clinton voters. The story the polls are telling is that Biden is persuading the median voter not to back Donald Trump. </p>
<p id="uOmsxV">Biden is a throwback politician in so many ways. He’s also a throwback in the sense he’s very coalitional. He’s not a very ideological guy. He gets branded as a moderate, which I think also reflects the bias that if you’re an older white man you can have the same policy positions but will be branded as much less radical than a young Latina might. But still, he’s able to perfectly calibrate himself to what the median Democratic voter wants, and is good about listening to different coalitions within the party. That’s why he’s been successful over a long time. He’s very transactional and good at listening to different demands from different party constituencies.</p>
<h4 id="sXMdr2">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="8zrX2J">After Democrats nominated John Kerry and lost to George W. Bush In 2004, there was this view that the Democrats have to win back the heartland. They started thinking about guys like Brian Schweitzer in Montana. And then what actually happens in 2008 is they run Barack Hussein Obama from Chicago, Illinois, and have this gigantic victory. </p>
<p id="kGmFU9">This is a way in which the immediate post-election punditry really fails. There is a desire to refight the last war. Democrats were responding to ’04, but ’08 was just a different election in a different context and something else ended up working. </p>
<p id="or9YVI">I think that’s happened here, too. One of the dominant views after 2016 was Donald Trump gave people something to vote <em>for</em>. You may not like him, but at least he doesn’t think the system is okay. So there was a rise in politicians who responded to that. Populist politicians on the left like Bernie Sanders or, in a different way, Elizabeth Warren. Other kinds of figures on the left who try to match Donald Trump’s energy but really push hard on a diversifying America. </p>
<p id="mjMczM">And here comes Joe Biden with what is almost a strategy of being inoffensive — he has popular policies, he says nice stuff. And what you see in these polls is 70-30 Trump voters say they’re voting for Trump, not against Biden. And roughly 70-30 Biden voters say they’re voting against Trump, not for Biden. And Biden is way ahead!</p>
<p id="nSgyuR">In a way, Donald Trump provides the enthusiasm and Joe Biden just keeps denying him something really significant to run against. Biden has this weird rope-a-dope of an election strategy that seems to be paying off. </p>
<h4 id="3HjsFi">Nate Silver </h4>
<p id="JR5ok2">I think to say 2016 was about enthusiasm is a misdiagnosis. If you look at David Shor’s work, he’s tried to break this down. Probably 80 percent of the shift toward Trump was Obama to Trump voters, and because of persuasion, not turnout. One basic piece of math behind that is that if I persuade you, Ezra, to switch from Trump to Biden, that’s a net +2 for Biden. You were -1, now you’re a +1. If I turn someone new out for Biden, that’s only a +1. So persuasion matters more. </p>
<h4 id="todhTV">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="tWv5Zq">I want to go back to the Bernie theory because I think we weren’t 100 percent fair on it. The Sanders campaign had a real theory about low-attachment voters — people who don’t turn out. And the idea was that those people don’t turn out because they aren’t given a clear enough choice. But if you propose ambitious policies like Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal and others — something the Bidens and Clintons of the world haven’t done — those folks will have a reason to vote. </p>
<p id="A0OsrL">That didn’t really pan out in the primary. A lot of those people didn’t come out to vote for Bernie Sanders. And that raises the question: Why don’t people vote? We often have turnout in the 50 to 60 percent range for presidential elections. What do we know about these marginal voters — people who may turn out but often do not? </p>
<h4 id="8s33k4">Nate Silver </h4>
<p id="VahInW">Generally, the idea that your views on 10 or 12 different issues are highly correlated makes sense for strong partisans, but that doesn’t make sense for a lot of voters. There was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/podcasts/the-daily/supreme-court-swing-voters-ginsburg.html">a great episode of <em>The Daily</em></a><em> </em>where they randomly picked voters to talk about the Amy Coney Barrett [Supreme Court] nomination. </p>
<p id="NuAeNT">There was one woman said, “Well, I’m pro-life, but if I’m really pro-life, then is Donald Trump really the pro-life candidate in this election?” She’s thinking more broadly about what that means, so she probably feels very conflicted. She likes Donald Trump’s Supreme Court picks; she doesn’t like his treatment of women or how he acts on Twitter or that he doesn’t seem to want to have a health care policy in the country. So I think as things become more polarized, then the people who drop out tend to have more heterodox political views. </p>
<p id="etx2xY">There are also people who feel like it’s going to be hard for them to vote or their vote doesn’t matter. Voter suppression has different effects based on different time spans. In the short run, if you try to suppress the vote and people find out about it, they might be more motivated to vote. In the long run, though, if I know that every time I have to vote, there’s a long line, that can have a cumulative effect.</p>
<h4 id="A9Hl3S">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="7kkLjQ">One implication of the polarization conversation we were having earlier is that there is less of a penalty for nominating candidates who are more ideologically extreme. Even if you think Ted Cruz is really conservative or Donald Trump is kind of nuts, you just can’t stand Hillary Clinton, so you vote for Trump or Cruz anyway. Or, on the other side, even if you think Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders are too liberal, you aren’t going to vote for Donald Trump, so you support a candidate more liberal than you are. </p>
<p id="i62mkI">So do you think it actually would have made much of a difference if Sanders were the nominee? How differently from Biden do you think he would have performed? </p>
<h4 id="b8l9ZS">Nate Silver </h4>
<p id="n8TXrz">So we actually find that there still is a pretty big effect from where you line up on the issues. It’s a little bit hard to define liberal versus conservative, so we look at how often members of Congress vote with their party. Members who break with their party more often do quite a bit better, other things held equal. And that advantage has not diminished since 1990, which is when our data set starts off. </p>
<p id="HJGVzN">I think that Bernie would have given Trump a different vector to campaign on, where he could say, “the socialists are coming!” He’s trying to say Biden is a Trojan horse for AOC [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and Bernie and Warren. Maybe that argument works for some voters, but you’re also conceding that Biden himself isn’t that bad, which is a weird strategy. </p>
<p id="v3wohB">Look, Biden’s up by 8 or 9 points. I think the penalty for being more left is probably not enough to make Sanders an underdog — he’d be the favorite. But I do think when we kind of look at this stuff and measure ideology, it seems to have an effect. </p>
<p id="sJRaAd">Now, Bernie could have been effective for other reasons. One thing where I think Biden’s people have not done very well is signing up new people to vote. They also were not doing a lot of <a href="https://www.vox.com/21366036/canvass-ground-game-turnout-gotv-phone-bank-tv-ads-mailers">door-knocking operations</a> until recently. So Bernie would have done certain things better. But I’m someone who still believes in the median voter theorem, I suppose. <em> </em></p>
<h4 id="P70pI1">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="9XpYft">Let me ask about the flip of this: Donald Trump. Trump has never won an election with more voters. He has never been above 50 percent in average approval ratings. Do you think another Republican candidate, a generic Republican, would likely be in a stronger position today than Trump? </p>
<h4 id="Ag6kZH">Nate Silver </h4>
<p id="cA38Az">One big question that’s pertinent to how we think about this election is where do the fundamentals point in our specification? That’s a very nerdy way to put it. But we actually think that a generic Republican should be running neck and neck with a generic Democrat because the economic recovery was pretty robust in the third quarter and because you have an incumbent and incumbents usually get reelected more often than not. </p>
<p id="HB4O30">If you look around the world, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/4/30/21231217/trump-cuomo-whitmer-coronavirus-covid-19-approval-rating-polls-world-leaders-governors">approval ratings for many leaders</a> went up during the early stages of coronavirus. I think if Trump showed some basic empathy uncovered and just said the right things and didn’t get in the way of basic things that every country needs to do — and then we have this 30 percent GOP rebound in quarter three — I’m not sure that he’d be losing his campaign. At the very least it might be close enough where his 3-point Electoral College edge would come in handy for him. So he has not been a very effective politician from an electoral standpoint. </p>
<h3 id="p291oN">Why Silver thinks we shouldn’t be too worried about the possibility of an electoral crisis </h3>
<h4 id="2xcM43">Ezra Klein </h4>
<p id="0XTvxH">When we talk about elections, I think people mentally index to the idea that there are two outcomes: win or lose. And in this election, it seems to me there are three: win, loss, and crisis. </p>
<p id="atuoTl">When we talk about, say, the possibility of a 3- or 4-point polling error in Donald Trump’s direction, that would make the election very close in the key swing states. In the world where you have lots of mail-in voting because of Covid-19, a bunch of Republican attempts to prevent or discredit those votes, and a Supreme Court with Amy Coney Barrett possibly having the last word on election rulings, that’s a situation where we could face a real legitimacy crisis over who won. As crazy as <em>Bush v. Gore</em> was, I really worry that if you replay that now, it gets a lot crazier. </p>
<p id="rm5BF5">Your models explicitly do not try to measure the effect of electoral chicanery, but I’m curious how you think about that possibility. </p>
<h4 id="wK75Pq">Nate Silver </h4>
<p id="J0iD7C">I always worry about these conversations because the chaos scenario is so bad that whether it’s 2 percent or 5 percent or 15 percent, you still have to be very worried about it. And it’s certainly somewhere in the low to mid-single digits, if not a quite bit higher — although not the modal outcome by any means. </p>
<p id="YM1x35">But I think there are a couple of things to keep in mind.<em> </em>One, people forget just how close Florida was in 2000. It came down to something like 537 votes in a state with 10 million people. That’s not just within the recount margin — it’s exactly on the nose. And it’s still quite ambiguous who ultimately really won Florida, depending on dimpled chads and the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County and everything else. </p>
<p id="icM4gt">Two, the issue most likely to affect the debate is ballots that are returned after Election Day. Those actually aren’t that many ballots, and <a href="https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1319322502057910272">may not be as Democratic as people assume</a> because Democrats are being more diligent about sending their ballots in early. If you look at mail ballots returned so far, Democrats have around a 30-point edge on partisan ID in terms of who has returned more ballots; if you look at the mail ballots that have not yet been returned but were requested, it’s only a 12-point edge for Democrats.</p>
<p id="9FQsrb">It’s possible that the attempts at voter suppression can backfire if they make the people you’re trying to suppress more alert. You can imagine Democrats being more diligent about getting their ballots in early, finding different ways to vote, following all the rules — in which case, these things might not help the GOP. </p>
<p id="lOOQz0">The last thing I think about a little bit is: Is it harder or easier to vote than it has been in the past? You’re always calibrating a model based on past history. There has always been voter suppression that disproportionately affects people of color and people who are more likely to be Democrats. That’s priced into the models. </p>
<p id="vZ9elE">However, it’s probably easier to vote now in most states than it ever has been. The Brennan Center does <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-2020">a write-up</a> <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-2019">every</a> <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-2018">year</a> on the voting rights that passed in the past year. And for the past couple of years, you’ve actually had more pro-voting laws than voter suppression laws, which is different than the era from 2012 to 2016. So it’s probably easier to vote now than it has been in the past. And that could potentially help Democrats. </p>
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https://www.vox.com/21538214/nate-silver-538-2020-forecast-2016-trump-biden-election-podcastEzra Klein2020-10-26T12:50:00-04:002020-10-26T12:50:00-04:00Sarah Kliff grades Biden’s and Trump’s health care plans
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<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/yjLJtvozRBZh1wDkOjDX8wisyz4=/425x0:7416x5243/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/67690443/1229229389.jpg.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>US President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden participate in the final presidential debate at Belmont University on October 22, 2020, in Nashville, Tennessee. | Jim Bourg/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>The former Vox reporter returns to The Ezra Klein Show to wonk out on the 2020 health care stakes.</p> <p id="yeLYzS">There are few issues on which the stakes in this election are quite as stark as on health care. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden plans to pass (and Democrats largely support) a massive health care expansion that could result in <a href="https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy-and-politics/21493251/presidential-debate-2020-biden-trump-health-care-plan">25 million additional individuals</a> gaining health insurance. <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/5/6/21249786/trump-wants-end-affordable-care-act">The Trump administration</a> is pushing to get the Supreme Court to kill the Affordable Care Act, which would strip <a href="https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy-and-politics/21493251/presidential-debate-2020-biden-trump-health-care-plan">at least 20 million Americans</a> of health care coverage. </p>
<p id="QZnGnb">There’s no one I’d rather have on <a href="https://www.vox.com/ezra-klein-show-podcast"><em>The Ezra Klein Show</em></a> to discuss these issues than Sarah Kliff. Kliff is an investigative reporter for the New York Times focusing on health care policy, and my former colleague at the Washington Post and Vox where we co-hosted <em>The Weeds</em> alongside Matt Yglesias. She’s one of the clearest, most incisive health care policy analysts in media today and a longtime friend, which made this conversation a pleasure. We discuss: </p>
<ul>
<li id="BJbBs9">The legacy of Obamacare 10 years later</li>
<li id="D8j2S2">Why the fiercely fought-over “individual mandate” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be </li>
<li id="7X1byk">What Biden’s health care plan would actually do and where it falls short </li>
<li id="uFqkgj">Whether a Biden administration would be able to pass massive health care reform and why it might still have a chance even if the filibuster remains intact </li>
<li id="c8dlVO">The ongoing Supreme Court case to dismantle Obamacare </li>
<li id="LjfYDt">Whether Donald Trump has a secret health care plan to protect those with preexisting conditions (spoiler: he doesn’t) </li>
<li id="VsWoG4">The hollow state of Republican health care policy </li>
<li id="lO1Kji">The academic literature showing that health insurance is literally a matter of life and death </li>
<li id="gulfQa">Which social investments would have the largest impact on people’s health (hint: it’s probably not expanding insurance) </li>
</ul>
<p id="Lu6OkX">And much more.</p>
<p id="dEqCFK">My conversation with Kliff can be heard on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/trumpism-never-existed-it-was-always-just-trump/id1081584611?i=1000495615760"><em><strong>The Ezra Klein Show</strong></em></a><em>.</em></p>
<div id="bHw5Tm"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/episode/4w7ezp9EPLO4VAutFe8EnV" style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 232px;" allowfullscreen="" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div>
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<p id="qkmI8X">Subscribe to <em>The Ezra Klein</em> <em>Show</em> wherever you listen to podcasts, including <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1081584611&referrer=vox.com&sref=https://www.vox.com/2020/9/10/21430547/covid-19-julia-marcus-the-ezra-klein-show-outside-inside-risk&xcust=___vx__e_21292308__r_vox.com/ezra-klein-show-podca"><strong>Apple Podcasts</strong></a>, <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RoZUV6cmFLbGVpblNob3c%3D"><strong>Google Podcasts</strong></a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6NOJ6IkTb2GWMj1RpmtnxP"><strong>Spotify</strong></a>, and <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/vox/the-ezra-klein-show"><strong>Stitcher</strong></a>.</p>
<h3 id="5VUNct">Sarah Kliff’s book recommendations </h3>
<p id="RPWp0I"><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/the-healing-of-america-a-global-quest-for-better-cheaper-and-fairer-health-care/9780143118213"><em>The Healing of America</em></a> by T.R. Reid </p>
<p id="QsriHY"><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/and-the-band-played-on-politics-people-and-the-aids-epidemic-anniversary/9780312374631"><em>And the Band Played On</em></a> by Randy Shilts </p>
<p id="eZto43"><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/dreamland-the-true-tale-of-america-s-opiate-epidemic/9781620402528"><em>Dreamland</em></a> by Sam Quinones </p>
<p id="JzQNlZ"><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/i-want-my-hat-back/9780763655983"><em>I Want My Hat Back</em></a> by Jon Klassen</p>
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https://www.vox.com/2020/10/26/21534580/obamacare-affordable-care-act-health-care-stakes-2020-trump-texas-californiaEzra Klein