The economic perceptions driving U.S. politics

Another presidential election has come and gone. Reactions to the reelection of Donald Trump are wide and varied. And we’re facing a growing divide across our nation as we transition, once again, from one party in control to another. How did we get here? Are these truly unprecedented times? On this riveting episode of Access to Excellence, President Washington is joined by two experts on the political process—Jeremy Mayer and Jennifer Victor, associate professors of political science in the Schar School—to discuss the impacts of polls, economic perceptions, and more on the 2024 presidential election. 

 

 

Episode Transcript

(00:04):
Trailblazers in research;innovators in technology;
and those who simply have a good story.
All make up the fabric thatis George Mason University.
We're taking on the grand challengesthat face our students, graduates,
and higher education is ourmission and our passion.
Hosted by Mason PresidentGregory Washington:
this is the Access to Excellence podcast.

(00:26):
Another presidentialelection has come and gone.
Reactions to the reelection ofDonald Trump are wide and varied,
and we're facing a growing divideacross our nation as we transition
once again from one partyin control to another.
How did we get here? Are thesetruly unprecedented times?

(00:51):
Today I'm joined by two expertswhose combined knowledge covers the
breadth of the political processfrom presidential history to current
social networking methods.
Jeremy Mayer is an associate professorand director of the political science
doctoral and master's programs in theSchar School of Policy and Government at

(01:13):
George Mason University.
He's offered political commentaryon topics such as presidential
image management,Christian right politics,
and comparative politicalsocialization to major networks,
as well as to many national newspapers.
Jennifer Victor is an associateprofessor of political sciences in the

(01:38):
Schar school.
Her public scholarship ontopics such as legislative
organization and behavior,
political parties andlobbying has also appeared in
the New York Times, Theeconversation, OUP blog,
and LSE U.S. Politics blog.

(02:02):
Jennifer and Jeremy, welcome to the show.
Great to be here.
Good to be here.
Well, great to have bothof you here. Well, look,
we gonna have to jump right intothis thing. This is .
I've actually been lookingforward to this episode.
Now,
we've seen both of your names in themedia recently offering your perspectives

(02:25):
on the presidential campaignsand the outcomes of the election.
So the first thing Ijust want to get to is,
was the outcome of this electiona surprise to either of you?
I wouldn't say it was asurprise, exactly. You know,
coming into the election therewere seven so-called swing states

(02:47):
where the polls were essentiallyall within the margin of error.
Um, and it looked like the election was,
could really go either way dependingon what happened in those states.
I saw in the last five orsix days before the election,
some signals that I thoughtmight have indicated that Harris

(03:10):
was pulling ahead in a few places.
I clearly misread those becausethe election turned out to be
a sweep in that Donald Trump wonall seven of those swing states. So,
not a surprise exactly,
but certainly a more compellingresult than perhaps I had
anticipated.

(03:31):
And I, I would agree with that. Iwasn't shocked like I was in 2016.
I got that election all wron. Thistime, I knew it was very close.
But I will say this, once again,
the polls were off and theywere off systematically.
They were off in their underestimationof Trump's support and the

(03:51):
fact that he won all seven swingstates and some of them being close,
but he won all of them.And then the whole nation,
90% of counties swung upwardin Trump's support compared to
2020. That's a very strong showingfor Trump and the Republicans.
Can I push back a littlebit on that, Jerry?
So nothing that you said isinaccurate except that the polls,

(04:16):
I would say did pretty well this year.
They were off in that therewas a systematic error,
but I think upon reflection,once we get all the data in,
we're gonna find that the polls werepretty good in terms of being within those
margins of error.
And the pollsters that were usingthis prior presidential vote

(04:36):
as their corrective device that a lotof folks were skeptical of turned out
to...even that wasundercounting Republican votes.
But it turned out to be a pretty goodway to, uh, get closer to the estimate.
So they're off systematically,but as a whole,
polling did pretty well thiselection relative to the last couple.
So let's talk about thatfor a second because

(05:00):
I'm actually one of a few peoplewho think the polls did absolutely
predicted the outcome of therace. And let me explain.
You had seven swing states. Thelast set of polls that I looked at,
every single one of thoseseven was in a margin of error.
That's right.
The challenge is that asAmericans, we don't understand

(05:24):
the math.
That's right.
If a state has Harris up by two points
and the margin of erroris plus or minus three,
that means that in that state,Harris can actually be down a point,
or she could be up five.

(05:45):
If a state had Trump up one point, right,
with a three percentagepoints margin of error,
Trump could actually be up fourpoints in that state or down
two points or, I'm sorry,or down one point, right?
Yep.
So

(06:07):
it's the margin of errorpiece that I think we lack a
fundamental understanding of.
And as long as there'sa margin of error there,
you actually can't call itone way or the other. Right?
Well--
If I were to push back and say,you know, but Trump won all seven,

(06:29):
the fact that they were swing statessays that all seven were in a margin of
error, right? What Iwould predict as a loss,
or the poll getting it wrong,
is that they actually predicteda Harris state that Trump won,
or they predicted a Trumpstate that Harris won.
And I didn't see that happen in thiselection. There were seven swing states.

(06:51):
Trump took all seven. They wereall within the margin of error.
He didn't take any of the sevenbeyond the margin of error.
At least that's how I read it.Now you all are the expert, but--
That's absolutely correct.
Well, if I'm the poster doingthe polls, I'm like, eh,
I think we got it right here, not wrong.

(07:13):
Yeah. So my complaint, and I've,
I've had this complaint for anumber of years now, and I've,
I've written about it is notso much with the polling,
although there is some challenges inpolling, particularly it looks like when,
when Trump is on the ballot.
And I think they did better this yearthan previously in 2016 and 2020.
But my complaint is with how the pollinggets communicated and how it gets

(07:35):
reported. And I don't wanna go on aanti-media tear 'cause that's not fair,
but I think it is appropriate to becritical of how these things get reported.
Because what's happening is themedia has an interest in promoting
the horse race,
in talking about who's ahead andprojecting a sense of certainty

(07:55):
even in the face of complete ambiguityabout what's going to happen.
And I think part of thereason that happens is because we live in such partisan,
polarized times, and whenthe parties are so far apart,
people feel election losses much harder,
and they truly dread electionlosses much more than during

(08:18):
times when the partiesare not that far apart.
Because a loss just puts the statusquo way far from your ideal point,
so to speak. And the media knows that,
and they're sort of counting on people'semotions and trying to, in essence,
project perhaps more of a senseof either alarm or certainty
or calm or whatever it is that they'resort of playing on. Where, in fact,

(08:42):
what the message should be that lastweek is nobody knows what's gonna happen.
And focusing on those, as you said,they'll say like, Harris up one point,
Trump up two points,
whatever...is really a false way toreport it because it's all a range,
it's all a margin. And the thepolls got it within those margins.
And so mathematically it was correct,

(09:05):
but the perception thatpeople had, I think,
was quite a bit differentthan that reality because of how it gets communicated.
I can accept that.
So let's move from math .Let's talk about history,
because the other thing thatI've been hearing bantied around

(09:25):
throughout the press, throughoutthis whole process is that we live in
unprecedented times.
That whole tagline has workedits way into the common lexicon
over the past four years.
Is it really unprecedented times? Right?
You're experts on elections, you arepresidential historians, you know this,

(09:49):
you know, how does the 2024 presidentialelection--I even heard this,
the greatest comeback in history, thegreatest comeback in history, right?
How does this compare over previous ones?
So I think it is unprecedented.I think the word is overused,
but for this election, I don'tthink it's overused. And here's why.

(10:10):
You have a president whofaced two impeachments,
who tried to steal the lastelection by causing a riot, uh,
to stop the count.
And everyone in this town from MitchMcConnell on down assumed that Trump could
never make it back from theshame and humiliation of
January 6th, 2021. But he did.

(10:33):
And so Trump's comeback, well,it's not the biggest victory,
it's like the 41st largest electoralmargin, which is not that large.
He should be labeled an unprecedentedvictor in the sense that no one has ever
come back from this kind of infamy.
It would be like Nixon after Watergatesomehow working his way into the

(10:56):
1980 election. And that wasabsolutely inconceivable. Well,
Trump conceived it and accomplished it.
Yeah, I I think that's right.
I agree with criticism ofoverusing the phrase unprecedented.
And I agree with Jerry's take aboutwhat makes the upcoming presidency
unique.

(11:16):
But another point of view tooffer is that some of what we are
experiencing in US politics now is a
populist wave that is anchoredin the Republican party that
has an anti-democratic/authoritarianstreak to it.

(11:37):
And arguably that is notnew in the United States.
Arguably, between about
1877 and 1965,
the entire southern region ofthe United States operated in an
era of Jim Crow thatwas authoritarian rule.

(11:57):
One party sort ofundemocratic, uh, states.
They still experienced elections,
they experienced a lot of the trappingsof what looked like democracy.
But most scholars would look at thatregion in that time period and say,
that wasn't democratic.
And so to say that the US is enteringa period with a political party that is
willing to counter the norms of democracyand willing to challenge some of the

(12:19):
institutions of democracyand so on and so forth,
one pushback against that is to say,yeah, and we've been here before at,
at least, you know, not in a lot ofpeople's lifetimes. Um, you know,
a lot of folks who pay attention topolitics today maybe either didn't live
there or didn't experience, uh,that, but it it wasn't that long ago.

(12:40):
It's not that unique.
Let me push back a little bit onboth of you relative to this, and I,
I wanna throw something out andget your reaction to it. Okay? I,
I definitely agree thatyou had two impeachments
, you had behaviorsthat some would consider just

(13:01):
abhorrent. You've had all of these issues,
but yet still DonaldTrump wins and wins by a
comfortable margin, right?
This was not a closeelection in the end. Okay?
So even though it was close interms of number of votes in terms of

(13:21):
the electoral college,it wasn't that close.
So when you look at itfrom that perspective,
and I'm gonna harken backto the four words echoed
by another former USpresident Bill Clinton during

his campaign (13:40):
"it's the economy, stupid".
You all remember that one?
Oh, yeah.
So we're at a time nowwhere you can say, okay,
the, uh, the, the general, wedon't have huge unemployment,
but we still have significantinflation. Wages have not kept up.

(14:02):
People haven't been able--
Actually they have.
Yeah, I was just gonna point that out.
This inflation was terrible in theimmediate aftermath of the pandemic.
It is now under control,wage growth matched it,
and our economy is theenvy of the western world.
There's not a European major nation thatwouldn't trade places with our numbers

(14:25):
right now in terms of GDP growth.
No, no, no. I, I, I agreewith you with all of that,
but perception is not always true.
It's always real. If I wereto say what I have seen,
the biggest mistake thatwas made by the Harris

(14:46):
campaign
was that they never really embracedan economy that was the best
house on the block right? Now,
I would contend to youthat every party in power
across the world experienced lossesin elections this year, right?
That's not happening because of, uh,

(15:10):
of people's perceptions thatthings are not necessarily
better. Uh, you know, people perceivethat things are somewhat worse,
and whether it's true or not,
it's real to the people who feel it.
I have members of my family whogo back to what the price of

(15:33):
a dozen of eggs was. Yes,inflation's under control now,
but those increases, the,the increases stayed,
the price never went back down. It'sjust the rate of increase slow down.
So to a person buying, uh, you,you know, it's really interesting.
You go back and look at the price.

(15:54):
We're looking at another vehicle forour home, and I looked at vehicles,
the same make and model of a vehiclethat I bought three years ago. Same,
make, same model, same options.
The cost is 30, 35% higher.
Wow.
Just amazing. I, I don't,
I don't think we all realize how much

(16:18):
prices have actually changed and gone up,
but there are sensitiveportions of the population that
actually do feel that.
And when 30-40,000 votes one way or
another can swing an election,
and you just keep getting themessage beat into you that a,

(16:40):
it's worse than it was four years ago,it is so much worse than it was for you.
And you start to believe it. Theysay, oh, look at the prices of eggs.
Look at the prices of meat.Look at, right. And you do that, guess what happens?
You, and so maybe it's just something,it's not unprecedented at all.
Americans may just be votingtheir perceived pocketbooks,

(17:01):
and that's what they did.
Well, you're the one thatbrought up, "it's the economy,
stupid." And I do think Harris had atough job similar to what George Bush the
first did in 1992. We had beenin a short, sharp recession,
and the numbers said we werecoming out of the recession, right?
And his team told George Bush,the elder, Hey, claim victory.

(17:23):
But as he did that,
he looked like he didn't care aboutthe suffering of the average voter.
So Harris had a tough,tough messaging saying,
I'm going to claim thebest house on the block,
while acknowledging the painof the inflation that the whole world went through.
And she, she didn't land thatvery difficult messaging.

(17:44):
I, I agree. And to me, that's the point,Jeremy, I think you're nailing it.
You're hitting and hit. II feel this was, you know,
people said, look, hey, yeah, theremay be things I like about Trump.
There may be things Idon't like about Trump.
There's a cohort of the populationthat loves him that is real.
And for that cohort of thepopulation, he can do no wrong,

(18:08):
he's gonna carry that cohort of votes.
And it's incredibly sticky.
You know,
I wanna come back to an observationthat you made a a minute ago though,
which is that every singledeveloped democracy on the planet
that had elections this year,and there were a lot of them, uh,
saw incumbent losses.

(18:30):
And so there's an argument to be madethat it didn't matter who the Democrats
ran or what the message wasor who the candidate was,
that the Democrats weregonna lose this election.
That we were gonna see that county bycounty swing towards Republicans relative
to 2020 in this election. And that'slike a very institutional, you know,

(18:52):
it doesn't have to do withthe candidates or the message,
it's not anything about that. It'sjust it was gonna be a Republican year.
I think what's gonna happen over thenext year or so is some political
scientists are going to dig in and answerthis question that I think you rightly
posed, which is, is itthe case that in fact,

(19:12):
it was just the institutions,
this is just like a covidinflation hangover election.
And that's what we saw votersvoting on, as you were just saying.
And it didn't matter who wason the ticket or, you know,
all those numbers from the UnitedStates that said, you know,
our economy was doing better, we hadgrowth, we beat the inflation, yada yada.

(19:33):
It would not have been unfair to look atthis election beforehand and say, yeah,
sure, all of the democracies areexperiencing incumbent election loss,
but we've done better than them. And sowe should expect our election to also,
uh, the, the incumbent partyto not get hit as hard. Right?
That would be a reasonable expectation.Now, that's not what happened.
And so the question going forward forthe political scientists is gonna be why

(19:55):
is that because the institutions of theinflation just took over and that's what
explains the variance? Or was itwhat you're talking about with,
they didn't hit the messagingon the head, you know,
maybe there's some racial animus withrespect to and or hostile sexism with
respect to a black female candidateat the top of the ticket. Like,
are there other thingsabout the candidate,

(20:16):
about the campaign that explainedwhy the US didn't do better than
we might have been expecting basedon some of those aggregate or,
or macroeconomic indicators.
So let me pose it this way. Thereality of the situation is this:
clearly the economic issuesthat we saw sweeping the rest
of the world meant that even in thiscountry, even though we're doing better,

(20:40):
you probably had a windowthat wasn't as open.
Your margins were tighter.
Right.
Right?
And then when you couple that with thefact that you're running against an
iconic candidate for whatever peoplebelieve yes or no about Trump,
he is, he is iconic in, in,

(21:01):
in who he is and what he represents and--
And is unprecedented,to use that word again,
he has survived so many scandalsthat would've torpedoed any other
candidate in living memory.
And I've said he's a battleshipthat floats on exploding torpedoes.
Absolutely!
One scandal happened before we canfocus on it, we're onto the next one.

(21:23):
Just this morning, he has aguy next to him, Boris Epstein,
who's been selling accessto the nomination process.
And if Harris had had someonelike that this summer,
who'd been selling, youknow, Secretary of Treasury,
give me a hundred thousand dollars amonth retainer and I'll make sure you're
Secretary of Treasury, it would'vebeen a huge scandal. The phrase is,

(21:47):
she had to be flawless and he canbe lawless because this is not going
to bother him. This should, in anyother White House in transition,
this would be days and days and days ofscandal. What did the president know?
When did he know it? Why didn't he knowit? Trump is just gonna ignore this.
You know, it's, it's amazing,but you hit the nail. This is,

(22:10):
but both of you are knocking this thingout of the park. It is really funny.
But let me ask the questionin a slightly different way.
You all remember theJohn Edwards campaign?
Oh yeah.
Great campaign. He has,
he's still the best stump speech I'veever seen in person. He was amazing.
But that thing crumbled over a scandal

(22:33):
that today would seem, oh, really?
that would be,uh, there has been--
for a Republican.For a Republican it would,
because the Republican party hasshown, particularly with Trump,
but also with some others,
that they just don't care if someoneon their tribe does something.

(22:54):
So Democrats had asenator from Minnesota who
clearly took liberties with some women,and Al Franken was gone from the Senate.
Even though, if we judge bythe severity of the crime,
it's nothing compared to whatwe've seen on the other side.
And that is tolerated.

(23:15):
That's kind of how it is.
I think, you know, when we seethings like this in politics,
it's common to just point at itand say, well, that's hypocrisy.
Like just folks are beinghypocritical. They forgive it here,
they don't forgive it there. Andwhile that's a fair critique to me,
it's unsatisfying as a critique.
Like hypocrisy itself isn't, I'm sorry,

(23:38):
we're all hypocrites ,
like we're all humans with flawedbrains that can't keep stuff straight.
We all have contradictingideas in our heads,
like it's part of the beauty ofbeing a human being. So to me,
it's not the hypocrisyitself that is such a charge.
It's that when you identify thehypocrisy, it reveals a set of values.
And it's the values that I thinkare, can be fairly criticized, right?

(24:03):
So republicans saying, okay,
we'll forgive Matt Gaetz forhis sexual improprieties,
but we won't forgive Al Franken for his.
That is revealing something about havinga higher bar of forgiveness for people
of your own political stripe that showsthat your values about sexual morality
are not in fact true valuesabout sexual morality. It's,

(24:25):
it's saying that yourpartisanship matters more.
Let's dig into that a littlebit. Is that actually the case,
or is it more nuanced and complex?
Could it be that when youfeel that the world is against
you,
or when you feel the media is againstyou as a group of individuals,

(24:46):
right? And you feel that thisis polarized against you,
that you let some things slidethat you would not have let
slide because oh,
this is just another example of these folk
who are coming after me. I mean,
governments do this all the timewith their people, right? You know,

(25:10):
don't look at the challengesin my administration.
Don't look at how poorlywe are performing.
It's the Americans who are doingthis to us. It is such and such,
or it's the Russians or it's whoever,right? You, you name your country.
Could, could that be the reason, Jennifer?

(25:30):
Yeah. I mean, what we, what,
what the political science tellsus is that we view the world
through the lens of our own identities,right? Everybody's got identities,
everybody's got multiple identities.
And over the last 20 or so years,
what we've seen in the UnitedStates is this phenomenon where

(25:51):
partisanship is increasingly animportant part of people's identities,
much more so than it was in the eightiesand nineties and, and previously.
And so what happens is,whatever's happening in the world,
whatever scandal is going on,whichever parties in power, etc cetera,
people are looking at that criticallythrough the lens of their own partisanship

(26:13):
and evaluating. If it seems liketheir co partisans are in favor of it,
then they, you know, havea more rosy view of it.
And if it seems like their outpartisans are in favor of it,
then now they don't like itand they're critical of it.
You can see this reallyclearly in economic indicators where you ask people how
they feel about the state of the economy.

(26:34):
Just in the couple of weeks sincethe election, since November 5th,
over the course of the last few weeks.Prior to the election, Democrats,
if you could just go ask public opinionpolls, just like Gallop or whatever,
ask people, how do you feel about, like,
what's your general feeling about theeconomy? Democrats were saying, ah,
pretty good, you know, up like 80%or so. And Republicans would say, no,

(26:54):
it's terrible. You know, 20% whatever.And in the few weeks since the election,
those numbers are already starting toshift where Democrats are starting to say
the economy is getting worse.
And we're seeing it actually more on theRepublican side, I think, because, uh,
Trump is getting a lot morepress these days than Biden,
where republicans are already startingto feel better about the economy,

(27:15):
more rosy about things. So we'reall viewing political events,
economic indicators, all of thisstuff through a partisan lens.
And we're not, I'm sorry, we're notcoming up with these ideas on our own.
We're listening to the media,we're listening to elites,
we're listening to politicians, we'relistening to members of Congress,
how they're talking about it,

(27:36):
and we're incorporating thatinto how we understand the world.
So if you go and interviewany random schmo,
Democrat or Republican about theirpolitical attitudes, more often than not,
you will hear them parrot things thatyou hear on Fox and MSNBC and so forth.
They use the same words,the same language,
because that's where theirideas are coming from,

(27:57):
from whatever elites they're listening to,
from whatever media they're consuming.
That's how they'relearning about the world,
and they're just deciding if they'reagreeing with it or disagreeing with it
based on their own co partisanshipor, or out partisanship.
No, I hear you. I hear you.It's actually interesting.
It seems to me thatpresident-elect Trump is now

(28:19):
president.
Yeah.
If look at how the market is reacting,
if you look at how foreigncountries are, if you look,
look at what happened in inUkraine, you know, war in Russia,
you look at what's happening inthe whole Hezbollah, Israel, Gaza,
uh, conflict,
countries are now makingmoves based on what

(28:43):
they know is coming. And that's having a,
at least on the surface ofthings as we know them right now,
a very positive effectfor president elect Trump.
So I think this is--
Donald Trump is a media genius.
We have to remember how good he is atusing the media and training attention

(29:07):
on him. Um, so that, that's partof what's going on. Sorry Jerry,
I didn't mean to cut you off.
Well, I, I absolutely agree to, tojump on your point, uh, Trump has, uh,
one great skill, and that is theability to manipulate the media.
How many rich people have had divorcesin New York City in the last a hundred
years? Dozens upon dozens. He wasthe only one to run the tabloids.

(29:29):
So that his mistress' statement,
"best sex I ever had" was a headline.
And he did that by being his ownbackdoor source, a guy named Baron,
a name that he's always loved.
So he has this abilityto lead the media stream
that gives him greatpower. But your point,

(29:51):
President Washington about the transition,
"Trump already seems like president."One of the weird things about American
politics is the very long periodbetween the election and inauguration in
Britain, in Germany, inmost other democracies,
you have an election and sometimesthe next day the moving vans
arrive and Downing Street empties out.

(30:13):
And that's a more modern way.
We have the oldest writtenconstitution in the world.
And so we have embeddedthis long two month period,
used to be five months,
where we don't have the newpresident that we just elected.
And we should reallyconsider changing that.
Oh, wow. That's really interesting.

(30:34):
That's not the first thingI would change though.
Oh no, me neither.
.
The sitting duck periodis kind of silly. It,
we have the old Congress and theold president with a tremendous
amount of power if they choose to use it.
And that has not always workedout well for our democracy.
That is interesting. Wow. Oh man,

(30:54):
there are so many directions wecan go with this. This is really--
Well, can I, I,
something else that you said like 20minutes ago is still ringing in my head
because you brought up the,
the famous James Carville line fromthe 1992 campaign. "It's the economy,
stupid", and to some extent yes,I, I see what you're talking about,
about applying that to this election,but I think more accurately,

(31:16):
rather than it being the economythat fully explains what's going on,
"it's the inequality,
stupid" that really helps explainwhat's happening in the United States
today. You know,
we can talk about people's focus onidentity and partisanship and filtering
things through differentlenses and so on and so forth,
but all of that sort of dismisses, um,

(31:37):
the fact that a lot of Americans are superfrustrated and that economic mobility
is more hampered today than it hasbeen in any of our lifetimes. Right?
So the ability of when I was a kid,
the probability that I would wind upbeing more economically successful than my
parents, that probability was muchhigher than, than it is for kids today.

(31:59):
Economic mobility is just becomestagnant for a lot of Americans,
and I think it's because of crisesin four particular policy areas.
We've got a crisis in housingand being able to afford housing.
We've got a crisis in healthcare becausewe got a ridiculous healthcare system
that costs a lot of money.We've got a crisis in education,
which I don't have to explain tothis crowd because it costs so much.

(32:21):
And we've got a crisis in dependent care,
whether that's for young childrenor the elderly. Those four things,
those four costs are sodraining on so many Americans
that it's making it difficult for themto advance economically beyond where
their parents were.
And I think people are superfrustrated and rightfully so by that.
And I don't think either politicalparty has come up with good answers for

(32:44):
these, for these problems. And I thinkthat's some of what we're seeing.
Yeah, it's some of it.No, go ahead, Jeremy.
So I agree,
but I do think that it matterswhat answers the campaigns
gave the people for thatsense of inequality.
And I really believe that Harris had somevery good policies that addressed some
of those questions.

(33:05):
And Trump had almost nothingexcept he addressed the
inequality and the unease and thefrustration by telling America,
you should be mad at trans people.
No, actually I think he didsomething, he did do that,
but I think he did somethingdifferent that is not as nefarious.
He continued to say, "Hey,

(33:28):
all of these economic trialsyou had just go back and
remember when I was president. Youdidn't have them then, right?".
But we did.
If it's the inequality that Jennifer'stalking about that was present during his
four years, people have this falsememory. And I, I will say though,
that he did have that one brilliantpolicy proposal about making tips

(33:53):
tax free. Now that is really, reallystupid from a policy perspective,
but it does speak to a lot ofthe Americans at the margins,
and we should consider ways tohelp them, just not this way.
And I heard a Republican pollster saythat when he talked to swing state voters
about what was the image of the campaignthat resonated after the election,

(34:14):
the biggest one was Trumpworking at the McDonald's.
And I can't tell you how myliberal friends made fun of that.
My democratic friends are like,what an idiot, you know, dad.
But it's to people,
people that said he understands wherewe eat, what we eat, why we eat,
where we eat. It wasn't true.But he's got that gift of,

(34:35):
of symbolism that breaks through inways that the elite don't even get
the charisma that he has.
That's correct.
Could I, could I bring up something that,
that I wanted to say somethingabout the trans issues.
People are saying now that Harris neededa Sister Souljah moment from the '92
campaign where Bill Clintonwent to the Jesse Jackson group,

(34:56):
the Rainbow Coalition, andcriticized a rapper who'd said,
it's now time to kill white people fora week after the '92 Rodney King riots.
Bill Clinton did it in '92.
Barack Obama did it on gay marriagein 2008. He was not for gay marriage.
She needed to do something likethat because the trans issue really
worked for Trump. It was his biggestad, it ran on sporting events.

(35:20):
Harris needed an answerand she had nothing.
Yeah, I wanna piggyback on that becausewe were super critical of Republicans,
uh, earlier in the podcast. So now wecan do some criticism of Democrats.
I think Jerry's right,
and I think one of the challenges thatthe Democratic party has been having and
continues to have is that theircapacity or their strategy

(35:44):
for building a big tent,like all political parties,
have to be some big tent thing.
Their strategy for building abig tent is to not anybody off.
It's to keep everybody a little bit happyso that you don't lose people out of
the coalition. But that's nonsense.
Trump's way of building a coalitionwas not about not people off.
It was about directly people off, right?
What the Democrats should be willing todo, and now they're in this, you know,

(36:08):
sort of, we've lost period of reflection.
How are we gonna reformbefore our next, uh,
chance of the ballot box isfiguring out how to engage in a more
strategic,
rational coalition politics inwhich they may be willing to
anger some elements of their coalition.
Does that mean that those people willleave the coalition? Maybe, but maybe not.

(36:31):
Because where else are they gonna go?
You know, I would caution against anygroup Republican or Democrat making
broad changes
in policy and platform after
a minor loss in an election.

(36:52):
In an election that was sodriven by macroeconomic trends.
Without question, I think every, youall will do this. This is what you do,
right? Over the next couple of years,you will examine everything, right?
Theses will be written, oh, there'ssome great theses that will be,
can be written on what happenedduring this. Uh, you, you, you,

(37:14):
you know what I'm saying? I tellour young people all the time,
this might be the best timeever in history to be a student,
right? Especially to be a politicalscientists without question.
I've learned things about our constitutionand about the inner workings of

(37:34):
government more over the last five yearsthan I've learned over the previous 40.
And that is withoutquestion, right? I mean,
from January 6th on the intricaciesof our government and how it's
structured, oh my goodness,
it's just for those who reallywant to learn and understand,

(37:55):
it has been a gift, tobe quite honest with you.
You are in an exciting fieldat an exciting time, right?
Even though it's fraught with uncertainty,
we got polarization, we hadall of these issues, but to me,
that's kind of what makesit exciting right now.

(38:16):
Well, it's the old curse,
"may you live in interesting times." AndI can't tell you how many people come
up to me and say, oh my gosh,you're a political scientist.
You must be having the time of your life.Honestly, it doesn't feel like that.
.
Because I got into this lovingthese institutions and I very
much fear they're on fire.
Some of them are, but not, youmentioned something both of you,

(38:38):
and I wanna go back to it.
You talked about these fourinstitutions and how they're in trouble.
And you mentioned educationrelative to cost, right?
Again, there is perception which are real,
and that is the real perception ofmany Americans. But then there's truth,

(38:59):
right? If you take the privates out,
which in my opinion there's far too muchdiscussion on institutions who serve
far too few Americans, okay?
I literally can take most of the IvyLeague and put it in George Mason,
most of the whole Ivy League.I'm not talking one institution,
I'm talking Harvard, I'm talking Yale,I'm talking Dartmouth, I'm talking Brown.

(39:23):
I can take all of those institutions andput 'em in Mason and still serve more
students. Okay? I just wanna makesure you get an idea of scale here.
And we're one single public, right?
Most of our Americans are beingeducated in public institutions,
and the average public debt,
the average debt of students graduatingfrom a public institution is about

(39:45):
30,000 dollars. I mean,not a year, about 30,000,
okay?
You can't tell me what big ticketitem can you buy for that price,
right? And if I go back andlook over the last 10 years,
the growth in public highereducation cost is around inflation.
It's not actually muchhigher than inflation at all.

(40:09):
And debt over the last 10 years hasactually gone down for public higher ed,
not, uh, that's the way themajority of Americans are educated,
but that's not the discussion. And so...
Let's go back to your point aboutperception, though. So I, I'm,
I'm here to listen to you evangelizehigher education all day long.
That's my cup of tea. However,I think for a lot of folks,

(40:33):
they're looking at whathappened, you know, in the,
the middle and latter part of the20th century where people could get a
summer job and earn enough wagesto pay tuition at the local public
school for the upcoming year. Andthat's just not possible anymore, right?
Even at George Mason,
the percentage of the overall budget ofthe university that comes from the state

(40:56):
today is significantly smallerthan it was 50 years ago,
right?
Like the whole valueproposition where government is
supporting this public good of highereducation has just been compromised.
It's been practically demolishedover the last couple of generations.
And it means that higher educationis more inaccessible to more people

(41:20):
and more and more people are apparentlyhostile to even the idea of higher
education and not seeingthat the value is worth it.
And I think that's a huge shamebecause I think everybody's better off.
I, right? No, no, I get it.
Better off raising all that.
I get it. But it's all a perception.It doesn't match the data,

(41:40):
it doesn't match the facts. We havea perception problem in higher ed,
and I could, this is not a discussionon that, but you've given me an idea.
I need to do a podcaston this issue and I will.
But the reality is that inall of those factors value
what you're getting outrather than what you put in,
salaries after graduation, and the like,

(42:03):
and debt all favor public higher ed.They don't necessarily favor privates,
but it actually all favors publics.
You all have highlighted a coupleof things that I do want to
steer us in a direction to talk about.
There are a couple of programs comingout of both of your orgs that I want you
to talk about.

(42:23):
I want you to talk about the outcomesof those programs relative to what we
saw in the election. And so, Jeremy,
you have your class onpolitical polarization, right?
Where you looked at exit pollsin three Fairfax precincts.
Have you been able to take a look at thatdata and talk about what you found out
relative to how people were voting inwhat their feelings are in terms of

(42:48):
the candidates and the politics?
Sure. So we ran exit polls inthese three precincts and Fairfax,
we selected them because they werebellwethers of how Virginia voted in
2020. What that means is the outcomein these three precincts was within one
percentage point of the statewideoutcome for Biden/Trump in 2020.

(43:08):
And we thought that'd be a goodpredictor. It's an old method, you know,
modern exit polls, they would cover many,
many precincts all over thestate if they wanted to call it.
But we did what we could. Andwhat we found is polarization.
So these precincts which had mirroredthe statewide outcome were now
15 points overestimating Biden's supportbecause they were blue precincts.

(43:31):
And so the hatred for Trump went deeperin those areas. The polarized people.
We found the ones that hatedTrump and loved Harris.
That was one of our definitions. If youactually chose to say you hate Trump,
they tended to be many moreDemocrats than Republicans.
The Republicans that we had in thoseprecincts tended to be the more moderate
non haters. And so we gotthe whole state wrong.

(43:54):
We really thought that Trump wouldnot do even as well as he did in 2020.
And in fact, we missed the surgenationwide and statewide for Trump.
But I do think that our results taughtthe students a great deal about how exit
polls work. And also when welook back at our refusers,
one of the reason we got it wrong,
and one of the reasons I think the pollsstill are systematically wrong is our

(44:15):
refusers look more like Trump voters.
And one of the reasons the pollswere systematically wrong towards,
uh, or against Trump is I thinkbecause his people tend to just hate
academics, hate the media,and choose not to participate.
But they vote.
But they vote.

(44:36):
So Jennifer, your researchproject, "The Choice is Yours",
work with volunteers fromthe First-Year Democracy Lab,
residential learning community touncover the most effective way to promote
greater voter turnout inthe 18 to 24 demographic.
Do we have any data on how thatdemographic turned out in this election?

(45:00):
And what are your findings?
We don't have the data about thecampus turnout overall yet because
people can vote in lots of differentstates and it'll take us a while. But I'm,
I'm really excited to talkabout this project a bit.
So this is my third year andI'll be rotating off next year.
So I won't do this again next year.
This has been my third yearrunning the Democracy Lab,

(45:20):
which is this first year residentiallearning community of all government
students. They live in the same dormand I do academic programming for them.
And we do one of these projects eachyear around student voting and under
questions, research questionsrelated to voting. In Virginia,
we run elections everyyear. So it's pretty easy.
Every year.
And in the previous one yearwe did a panel wave survey.

(45:41):
Last year we did an experifield experiment design.
And this year we implemented some ofwhat we've learned and now we're doing a
post-election survey.
So what we learned lastyear is we randomized
classrooms into either classroomsthat got email encouragement
to their students for voting,
or a in-person presentation from ourstudents who would come and talk about

(46:03):
voting or they were in a control groupand they got none of these things.
And what we found was that the studentswho were in the classrooms that got the
in-person presentation were 11points more likely to vote than
the email group or the control group.
So it was really a much larger effectthan we even anticipated. Of course,
the downside of this is it means if wewant to encourage, uh, voting on campus,

(46:27):
we can't just email kids and hopethat they will turn out to vote.
We really got to, you know, pressthe shoe leather and talk to people.
Conversations are, arereally what it's about.
So this year what we did is we tookthat finding to heart and I had 75
students,
50 Democracy lab students and another 25student volunteers that we called Mason
Voting Ambassadors.

(46:48):
And in coordination with the localchapter of the League of Women Voters,
the provost office,
through their office of CommunityEngagement and Civic Learning,
and through Housing and ResidentialLife, the Mason Votes Organization,
all of these units were coordinated.
We had a Monday morning quarterbackingcall every morning for the last,
for the two months,
three months before the electionstarting in August in which we all got

(47:09):
coordinated.
And we got these Mason voting ambassadorsinto as many classrooms as possible.
So they talked to thousands of students,
they gave dozens and dozens ofpresentations. There was tabling,
there was voter registration,
there was just this all out campuseffort towards getting students to vote.
And what we found was really remarkable.
So if you look at the turnoutdata across the state of Virginia,

(47:32):
every single county inVirginia had lower turnout in
2024 than they did in2020. Every single county.
Actually the turnout was more down indemocratic leaning counties than in
Republican leaning counties.
You can already see that sort ofswing just in the turnout data.
In Fairfax County, there's22 or something like that,

(47:52):
precincts across Fairfax County. Again,
every single county had lower turnouton average lower turnout in 24
relative to to 2020. And on average,
Fairfax County precincts weredown nine points. But as you know,
there is a voting precinct on GeorgeMason's campus in Merten Hall,
and we were pushing students to registerto be able to vote at that voting

(48:14):
precinct. And that votingprecinct, yes, had lower turnout,
but it only had one percentage point downlower turnout. It was one point lower,
whereas all the rest of the countywas on average nine points lower.
So that to me says ourefforts to encourage Mason students to vote had an eight
point impact.
We did eight points better than wewould have in terms of voter turnout at

(48:35):
Merten Hall at that particular precinctthan we would have in the absence of
this effort we put together.
Wow, that's amazing.. So a year from now,
Virginians will return to thepolls to elect, among other things,
a new governor, right?
How do you hope the work that bothof you have been involved in will

(48:57):
influence how candidates approachour demographic, our young people?
Oh, you asked a totally differentquestion than I thought you were gonna ask
.
Yep. .
So historically,
the pattern of politicsin Virginia is whichever
candidate,
whichever political party wins theWhite House in the presidential election

(49:21):
year.
The other party wins the governor'smansion in Virginia the following year.
So Donald Trump Republicans won theWhite House this year. That means, uh,
ostensibly the Democrats willhave an edge in the election.
So there's this typical sort ofanti-party swing in Virginia.
It's very much looking like highly likelythat Abigail Spanberger will be the

(49:41):
Democratic party nomineefor governor in Virginia.
So she'll be out in force and campaigningand she will certainly focus attention
on Northern Virginia because there's alot of democratic votes to be won here.
You basically can't win as a democraticcandidate in Virginia if you don't get a
strong turnout from NorthernVirginia. So I do expect, uh,
she'll probably be on campus, uh, inthe fall, if not even in the spring.

(50:02):
What message will she be bringingto our students? I don't know.
But I do hope our students bring theirA-game and ask the tough questions about
how George Mason University can getparity from the legislature in terms of
funding relative to someother publics in the state,
such as the flagship down there inCharlottesville. I hope that, you know,
they ask her questions aboutcampus safety and keeping

(50:26):
tuition down and maybe they've gotquestions about gender and, and sports.
I,
I don't really know exactly what issuesare of greatest concern to our students,
but I know that they've got strongvoices and I expect that they will bring
them, uh, to the candidate and towhoever the Republican candidate is too,
of course.
Alright. Jeremy?

(50:48):
So I don't think there is much in myproject that will help us predict how
next year will go,
but I agree with Jennifer that Virginiahas that traditional role of going
against the national tide.
I think the question for theRepublicans of Virginia is,
do they look for anotherYoungkin who had that foot in

(51:08):
establishment Republican politicsand a foot in the Trump world.
And he never, I mean,
no one in America playedthat better because it's so easy to offend Trump if you
don't embrace him.
And it's so easy to get hitby Trump fire if you're too
close to him.
And Youngkin is a great politician andwe'll see if the Republicans try to

(51:30):
find another one or if they go witha fully Trumpy kind of candidate.
If they go full Trump,
I would expect the Democrats willhave a much easier time beating them.
Wow, that's amazing. Let's, as, as we,
as we wrap up here, I, I wantto talk about some fringe,
more fringe type issues because

(51:53):
you actually saw less of thisinfluence in this election,
but you're seeing a greaterinfluence on the backend.
And this is this whole dealabout third parties, right?
You always have this gaggle of youngpeople talking about third parties,
the Green Party, the LibertarianParty, so forth and so on.
That wasn't as big of a pushthis to go around, was it?

(52:18):
Or this whole deal withRFK, is it? It's RFK,
it is RFK, right? ?
Yeah, definitely.
He was a third party candidate that thenthrew his support behind Trump and now
is a nominee for a major secretary.
Help me to understand howall of that, you know,

(52:38):
what happened to thirdparties in this election and
what's happening in the aftermath.
So polarization is reallyhurting third parties.
So many of the partisans on the left orthe right are Democrats not 'cause they
love the Democrats, they're Democrats'cause they hate Republicans.
And even more so on theirRepublican party side,
they just literally think theDemocrats are demonic communists.

(53:02):
And when you think that way,
you're unlikely to take agamble on a third party,
either the Libertarians or some otherright wing or on the left the Greens.
So that's sucking thelifeblood out of third parties.
What's working in third party's favorthough is that Americans are so sick
of the polarization that we've createdso that there is this opportunity for

(53:26):
something like the No Labels movementto come along and rise up and for
a brief shining moment be non-polarizedthe way Macron in France and his
first campaign was above thestandard debate in politics,
but No Labels didn't make itto November in part because the
Democrats did a very good job of makingsure no credible Democrat entered in and

(53:50):
took the nomination. So, there'sa lawsuit now about that.
We'll see where that goes.
There is an opportunity for third partiesin American politics given how unhappy
we all are, but polarizationworks against them.
I agree with that. I would add thatreally what we're seeing is textbook,
it's exactly what we would expect tosee in how third parties operate in US

(54:12):
politics.
The dominance of the two partysystem in America is not driven
by whether or not you've got qualitycandidates or quality alternatives coming
out of these third party movements.It's driven by the way we run elections,
the election rules.
Any system that has majority rulewins for special post elections

(54:34):
and single member districts.
So we elect one member of Congress percongressional district to the house for
example.
Any system that has those two featurestends to have two political parties.
It's like a theorem in inpolitical science, right? Duverger's law, we call it.
And what happens is when thirdparties arise in one of these systems,

(54:54):
one of the two dominant parties,
one winds up incorporating whateverthat movement is into their dominant
coalition. They just suck up allthe air in the room and they,
they sort of eat them up. We're seeingsome of that, you know, the way that,
like you mentioned RFK Jr., he sort ofwound up getting sucked up into the,
the Trump side of the movement this year.
One thing though that I thinkwe can see as potentially,

(55:17):
we need to wait for more data to come out,
potential impact of some third partyinfluence in this past election comes at
more regional or local levels,right? So the whole two party thing,
two party rule I just described works,
but it doesn't always workon the national scale.
It works really wellat the local level. Um,
makes a lot of sense at thelocal level. So where you go,

(55:37):
for example in Canada you'vegot a Quebecois, you know,
regionalist movement that acts as athird party spoiler in some Canadian
elections. But still in mostplaces it's still two parties.
It's just that the Quebecois is one ofthe parties, uh, that that dominates.
Right? So, but if you go in this pastelection to some places in Michigan,
I think we're gonna find that there werea bunch of Michiganders who were super

(56:01):
disappointed,
who were democratic identifying andwere very disappointed in the Biden
administration's policy onIsrael and Netanyahu and the war.
And who either stayed home or votedthird party voted for Jill Stein.
And I don't think any of that wasenough to spoil Michigan or to turn the
election or whatever.
I do think that it shows thatthere are instances where third

(56:25):
parties can have a significantimpact in a regional or local way.
Understood. Understood. Well rapidfire as we wrap up rapid fire.
So I'm gonna ask one question to youJennifer and one question to you 'cause I
got so many that I can ask Jennifer.
What do you think President Biden'sfinal weeks in office will look like?

(56:47):
Well, so I'll just go based on history.
What we usually see presidents getinvolved in doing a few pardons.
So we'll probably see a few of those.
I expect we'll see some movement onsome creating national monuments,
national land kind of stuff.We saw that previously,
like when Obama was leaving office.
I expect he's going to try tosolidify some of the things that we

(57:09):
expect the Trump administration to doin terms of making it harder for the new
incoming Trump administration to, forexample, reduce the federal workforce,
eliminate uh, particulardepartments and so on and so forth.
I think the Biden administration is gonnatry to tick as many boxes off of their
to-do list,
get as many of their waitingappointments as through as possible and

(57:31):
run through that finish line at the end.
Okay. So Jeremy,
what do you think the Trumpadministration's first moves will be
as soon as he gets in office in January?
So this is going to be a very differentTrump administration. It's been a very,
very different transition.It is a confident Trump.
He was uncertain thelast time he won in 2016.

(57:55):
This time it's moving very,
very fast and releasingvery unusual names that show
Trump's confidence. I expect that tocontinue into his first couple months.
He's not going to have thebreaks that he had before,
the defense secretaries and the chiefsof staff who were either mainstream

(58:16):
Republicans or mainstreamnational security people.
He's going to have his own people.
And so I expect him to move in aradical way on mass deportation.
I expect him to move in aradical way on imposing tariffs,
even in violation of treaties thathe negotiated. So, uh, buckle up.
It's gonna be Trump Unbound.

(58:37):
. Alright, well I thinkI'm gonna have to leave it there.
Jennifer Victor, JeremyMayer. Thank you. This is,
I wish I had two sessions onthis 'cause there are at least 10
questions I did not get to.
Come to class, man.

(58:57):
Come to class. Exactly. You know,
a a a big part of this is for theothers who are not here with us
who need to get at, you know,
get the wisdom that you two bring.
They're welcome in my class too.
Alright, well you might see someof 'em show up after hearing this,

(59:19):
but thank you both.Thank you for your time.
I know we're right beforethe Thanksgiving break.
Thank you for giving us some of your timeand happy Thanksgiving to you and your
families.
To you as well. Thank you for having us.
Much gratitude. Thanks very much.
Alright.
I am Mason President GregoryWashington saying thanks for

(59:40):
listening.
And tune in next time formore conversations that show
why we are All Together, Different.
If you like what youheard on this podcast,
go to podcast.gmu.edu formore of Gregory Washington's
conversations with thethought leaders, experts,
and educators who take on the grandchallenges facing our students, graduates,

(01:00:05):
and higher education.That's podcast.gmu.edu.