Presidential Transition: Polling: What Is On The Minds Of Americans | Reimagining American Institutions | Hoover Institution - Talks from the Hoover Institution

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[MUSIC]

>> Eryn Tillman (00:04):
Good morning.
My name is Eryn Tillman, an associatedirector at the Hoover Institution, and
we'd like to welcomeyou to today's webinar.
This is the third hosted bythe Hoover Institution Center for
Revitalizing American Institutions.
It is also the fourth and final session ofAmerica Votes 2024: Stanford Scholars on
the Election’s Most Critical Questions,a series co-sponsored by Stanford's Center

(00:27):
on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law,the Institute for the Research in
Social Sciences, and the Center forRevitalizing American Institutions.
Today's session will consist of 60 minutesof opening remarks and discussion,
followed by a period where our panelistswill respond to questions from audience
members.
To submit a question,
please use the Q&A feature locatedat the bottom of your zoom screen.

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We will do our best to respond toas many questions as possible.
A recording of this webinar will beavailable at hoover.org/rai within
the next few days.
Before we begin,
we'd like to share briefly about eachof today's sponsoring organizations.
The Center on Democracy, Development and
Rule of Law is housed inthe Freeman Spogli Institute for
International Studiesat Stanford University.

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And bridges the worlds of scholarship andpractice to understand and
foster the conditions foreffective representative governance,
promote balanced and sustainable economicgrowth, and establish the rule of law.
Our second sponsor is the StanfordInstitute for Research in Social Sciences,
also known as IRISS.
It's a unit within Stanford's School ofHumanities and Sciences and facilitates

(01:36):
first-rate interdisciplinary research,trains the next generation of scholars,
and incubates research projects toaddress critical societal issues.
IRISS ensures that world -classevidence-based research is produced to
meet evolving problems inareas of governance and
democracy, economic inequality,immigration policy, and
other social issues that affectcommunities across the globe.

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Our third sponsor, The Center forRevitalizing American Institutions,
also known as RAI, is a testament toone of Hoover's founding principles,
ideas advancing freedom.
RAI was established to studythe reasons behind the crisis and trust
facing American institutions, analyzehow they are operating in practice, and
consider policy recommendations to revealtrust and increase their effectiveness.

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RAI works with and supports Hoover fellowsas well as faculty, practitioners,
and policymakers from across the countryto pursue evidence-based reforms
that impact trust and efficacy ina wide range of American institutions.
All three of today's sponsorsare excited for this timely topic for
the opportunity to bring togetherour four experts who can help us

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understand what is on the mindsof Americans through polling.
And with that, it gives me greatpleasure to introduce today's moderator,
Brandice Canes-Wrone.
Brandice is the Maurice R Greenberg SeniorFellow and Director of the Center for
Revitalizing American Institutionsat the Hoover Institution.
She is also professor of Political Scienceand Professor by courtesy of

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Political Economics atthe Graduate School of Business.
She served on the faculty of MIT,Northwestern and
Princeton until several years ago when wewere able to woo her back to the firm.
And now, Brandice Canes-Wronewho will introduce our guests.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone (03:20):
Thanks Eryn, I'm delighted to be here and
introduce this esteemed panel.
David Brady is Senior Fellowat the Hoover Institution and
Professor of Political Science Emeritus.
He's published seven books andover 100 papers in journals.
Among his well-known publications is Redand Blue Nation, Characteristics and

(03:42):
Causes of America's Polarized Politicswith Pietro Nivola.
This was published bythe Brookings Institution Press.
Dave and one of our other panelists,Doug Rivers, have been co-leading
a major panel survey co-sponsored byRAI at Hoover on the 2024 elections.
This panel has over 100,000respondents as they'll describe, and

(04:03):
we're looking forward to hearingabout this recent work today.
Doug Rivers is a Senior Fellowat the Hoover Institution and
a Professor ofPolitical Science at Stanford.
Doug's career has combined publishingcutting-edge research articles in
the leading journals ofpolitical science and
quantitative methods with innovation andsurveys in the private sector.

(04:23):
He is currently the Chief Scientist atU-Glove, which is a global polling firm.
Daron Shaw is a distinguished teachingprofessor at the University of Texas,
Austin.
He served as a strategist in the 2000 and2004 election campaigns of George W Bush.
He's also one half of the bipartisanteam that conducts the Fox News Poll.

(04:46):
He's also part ofthe Fox News Decision Desk.
His most recent book is Battleground,Electoral College Strategies,
Execution and Impact in the Modern Era,which is with Oxford University Press,
and that's co-authored with Scott Atlas,excuse me, Althaus and
Costas Panagopoulos.

(05:07):
He's published articles in the leadingjournals of political science as well.
Last but certainly not least, but lastin alphabetical order, is Lynn Vavreck.
She's the Marvin Hoffenbergprofessor of American Politics and
Public Policy at UCLA.
She's the author of numerous books andarticles,
including a series of highlypopular books, both in academia and

(05:32):
more general public,that dissect each presidential election.
The most recent one, since it's a littleearly to have the 2024 elections out yet,
is the Princeton University Press book,The Bitter End, which is with John Sides
and Chris Tausanovitch, which dealswith the 2020 presidential election.
Political consultants on both sides of theaisle refer to Lynn's work on political

(05:55):
messaging from her Princeton UniversityPress book, the Message Matters as,
quote, required reading, unquote,for presidential candidates.
All right, so again, we're delightedto have these four panelists.
As Eryn mentioned,
we're going to have each panelistgive some brief introductory remarks.
I'll have some questions forthe panel, and

(06:16):
then we're very much looking forwardto your questions in the audience.
Doug, you were kindly offered to lead,and so we'll start with you.

>> Doug Rivers (06:24):
Thanks Brandice.
As you mentioned, at Hoover,
we've been doing a very largesurvey with over 100,000 people.
I think we're actually up tomore 200,000 at this point,
that we're interviewing repeatedlyover the course of the year.
We're not quite done yet.
We expect by January we will havedone up to 20 interviews with people,

(06:50):
so we're able to follow themover the course of the election.
For the third election in a row,the polls,
including ours, were one to two points,too democratic.
We thought Kamala Harris wouldprobably win the popular vote by
a narrow margin, butwe had no idea who would win the election.

(07:15):
In fact,it looks like Donald Trump will end up
winning the popular voteby a bit under two points.
It's not gonna be the three and
a half points that peopleare reporting after election day,
which didn't include a lot ofthe vote on the West Coast.
But despite this,I'd say the polls had a decent year.

(07:41):
If you're reading the polls,you wouldn't, or
at least you shouldn't have been surprisedthat Kamala Harris lost the election.
The polls,aside from one notorious outlier in Iowa,
correctly told you whichstates were battlegrounds.
We consistently showed Democrats doingworse overall than they had in 2020 and

(08:06):
even 2016.
In the battlegrounds,the races were all close.
In the pre election polls, including ours,
Harris was up by something onthe order of a point or less.
In the blue wall states of Michigan,Wisconsin and

(08:26):
Pennsylvania, Trump was leadingby a couple points or more.
In the Sunbelt states, Arizona, Georgia,
all these results werewithin the margin of error.
But I wouldn't say that'sreally the relevant point.

(08:47):
If the problem with the pollswas sampling variability,
which is what the marginof error measures,
we should have been too high in some andtoo low in others.
In fact,what we see is a kind of across-the-board
bias in all of the states where wewere one to two points too Democratic,

(09:12):
which is what statisticians call a bias.
If you shifted all the polls inthe same direction by that you get very
close to the final outcome.
That is, with Trump winning verynarrowly in the Midwest and
winning by larger margins in Georgia andArizona.

(09:37):
I'd like to say we couldeliminate this kind of bias, but
it's really hard and frankly,we don't know how to do it.
But I think overall we still cantell the story accurately of what
happened in this race.
So let me turn to that.
At one level,a lot of things happened in this election.

(09:59):
A presumptive nominee dropped out107 days before the election.
There were two assassination attempts,two critical debates.
And another level, not much happened.
In January,Trump led Biden by about 2 points.
In November,Trump defeated Harris by about 2 points.

(10:23):
In between,there was a lot of sound and fury.
Biden's support, for example,collapsed after the first debate,
though it took several weeks forthat to happen.
Harris started out at orbelow Biden's numbers in our data,
but quickly surpassed Trump in the polls,

(10:46):
estimating the national popular vote, and
after the second debate ledhim by roughly two points.
But does this signify anything?
Democrats were pretty optimistic aboutHarris's chances after the second debate,
but there were some obvious warning signs.

(11:07):
She stopped gaining in the polls,
the perception of her as beingtoo left wing continued.
And the debates themselves didn't seemto move support for Donald Trump.
In our data,where we interviewed just before and

(11:29):
after the first debate,Trump gained no support.
After Biden's disastrous performance,
Biden lost support, butTrump didn't gain any.
And then in the second debate,Trump didn't lose any support after what?
There was widespread agreementamong our poll respondents and

(11:51):
nearly everyone who watched.
They didn't do very well in that debate,and
Harris didn't pick up anysupport after that debate.
I think there's perhaps a newlaw of physics that nothing ever
seems to change the public'sbeliefs about Donald Trump.
It's like a universal constant.

(12:14):
Having said that, how did we getfrom Trump losing by 4 points in
2020 to winning by about2 points this year?
The obvious explanation is we had a veryunpopular incumbent running in an economy
that people thought was bad.
So it looks like Jimmy Carter in 1980 orGeorge H.W bush in 1992.

(12:37):
And substituting the sittingvice president for
the incumbent president doesn'treally change that formula much.
Nearly every group was lessDemocratic in this cycle.
The biggest change, and you can see itin the county level voting patterns,
was among Latinos,
who've become more Republicanconsistently over the past three cycles.

(13:03):
All other groups moved in tandem,
despite expectations there wasno change in the gender gap.
Expectations that the Dobbsdecision would create a larger
gender gap never reallyappeared in our data.
White college and non college bothvoted more Republican this year,

(13:25):
though the changes were relatively small.
Blacks moved along with whites by aboutthe same amount, as best we can tell.
And until we get the voterfile after the election,
we won't have much confidence about this.
But it appears that these effectsare due more to turnout changes

(13:49):
than vote switching.
There was no last minute swing.
We were tracking the same people andthey did not swing toward Trump or
away from Harris in the exit polls.
Trump did a little better among thosewho said they decided in the last week.
But this was a very small group,not enough to explain anything.

(14:11):
Bobby Kennedy Jr. at one point waspolling in double digits in our polls,
the highest he ever got was 7%.
The Kennedy voters split evenlybetween Trump and Harris, so
I don't think he ended upbeing a factor in this race.
But turnout did change.

(14:32):
Turnout decreased essentiallyin every state except for
three of the battleground states.
In the battleground states,
turnout was about the samein 2020 as it was in 2024.
Within battleground states,you can see that turn up was up in

(14:53):
counties that Trump won in 2020 anddown in those won by Biden.
So you can explain changesof this size with people
deciding not to vote ratherthan vote switching.
Finally, is it a realignment?
Political scientists have accuratelypredicted five out of the last

(15:18):
three realignments.
After every election,people come out with confident predictions
that we live in a new worldwhere everything has changed.
I'd say from our data we show,aside from Latinos,
there's not a lot of evidence of groupsshifting more than a few points,
the typical kind of shifts you wouldsee from having an unpopular incumbent.

(15:43):
The real realignment, such as it is,has already happened.
This is the third election ina row with Donald Trump, and
it's resulted in roughly the sameconfiguration of voters across
these three elections, butwith different levels of support for.
Parties and turnout.

(16:03):
So I will stop there andget back to you, Brandice.

Thanks so much, Doug.
Really appreciate thoseinsightful comments.
Okay, next we're gonna turnit over to Daron Shaw.
Who we appreciate being a guest,as already mentioned,
from the University of Texas, Austin.

>> Daron Shaw (16:20):
Thanks, Brandice.
I noticed that you got to Sonovich butyou couldn't get Panagopoulos,
so 50% betting average ispretty good on co authors.

[LAUGH].

Let me see if I can go five points in five minutes,
that's my goal here.
So point one is that the fundamentalsmattered in this election,
and it's gonna be some redundancy towhat I'm sure the four of us will say.
But 80% wrong track, 40% approval foran incumbent president,
63% rate the economy as either poor or,you know,

(16:53):
only fair,which is a negative in our not so good.
That's at least 2/3 of the electorateessentially wanting something different.
I think they wanted change.
And that created problems for someone whowasn't clear whether Kamala Harris was
the heir to the throne or a continuationof the Biden administration.

(17:13):
But I'll rely on a story.
One of my first electioncampaigns was 1992.
And in 1991, in December, Fred Steeper,a longtime Republican pollster,
went to talk to George W Bushat the White House.
And Fred presented the benchmarkpolling data and said,
if the election were held today,we would lose.

(17:33):
And there was silence in the cabinet room.
And Charlie Black basically uttereda profanity and he said, there's no way,
he says, we would run a better campaign.
There's no way we would lose toBill Clinton or any the Paul Tsongas or
wherever the Democraticcandidates were in late 1991.
And Fred Steeper said incumbents with 37%approval ratings don't get reelected.

(17:57):
And so at one level, I think this was anelection that was, as Doug suggested and
I'm sure Lynn,given her theoretical background views.
Which is it was an election in whichthere were very strong headwinds
against the incumbent party.
So second point, flip side,I guess, campaign effects.
Doug mentioned this,I put it a different way.

(18:19):
This is the most boring campaign ever forabout six months.
And then it turned into the most eventful,
tumultuous election campaign Ithink many of us can ever remember.
But it's unclear exactly whetherHarris could have moved the numbers
very much at all.
I mean, that's one of the kind ofinteresting questions in the postmortems.

(18:39):
Is to what extent did Harris runa great campaign, A flawless campaign,
in the words of Joy Reid,or a terrible campaign.
And I think the truth isprobably somewhere in the middle.
You're talking about a candidate whohad roughly 100 days to basically
distinguish herself from her 2019 self.
Were you serious in 2019?
Do you want to defund the police,you want open borders?

(19:02):
At the same time clarifying herrelationship with the incumbent
administration.
Wait, are you defending Biden's record?
And I don't think it's a real criticism tosay she never really threaded that needle.
The question I guess for us and for theaudience is the extent to which threading
the needle would havehelped her very much.

(19:24):
I do think there's some apt criticisms,but I think that the two
basic messages were, Trump's closingmessage was they broke it, I'll fix it.
Whatever you think about Trump,that's a pretty good message, right?
Given the mood of the electorate.
Her message seemed to be some version,it was we won't go back.
Which you could also translateinto the two components,

(19:45):
which are orange man bad and abortion.
Those seem to be the two messagesthat Harris was running on.
I don't know how much to make of that.
I read the same sort of thing that Dougread in the polls, were there was a sugar
high after her dissension and throughthe debate, and then it began to wear off.

(20:05):
And if you're of the view, and I don'twant to put words in people's mouths, but
I think a lot of us thoughtthat was a bit of a sugar high.
The question was whether she couldhave put any kind of substance under
that to sustain it for a period of time.
And I don't think she did that, I'm notsure that's a real damning criticism.
Third point on realignment.
I don't think I disagree with Doug.

(20:25):
I think, if I'm hearing Doug right, hebasically said there wasn't a realignment,
in this election there's a long-termrealignment that's already happened.
That I completely agree with.
Just a couple of numbers that I ran.
If you look at,
let's take a look at a couple ofreally kind of critical groups here.
Voters under 30 in the 2012election plus 23 Democratic.
There were plus 11 Democratic inthis election, a 12 point movement.

(20:50):
Income under 50K, plus 22 forthe Democrats in 2012, plus 3 for
the Republicans this time around,it's a 25 point movement.
Education, no college degree,plus 4 in the second Obama election for
the Democrats, plus 14 this time around,it's an 18 point shift.
But the race and ethnicity breakdown.

(21:12):
African-Americans, plus 87 forthe Democrats in 2012, plus 72 this time,
it's a 15 point movement,it's about twice that for black males.
Latinos, plus 44 in 2012, plus 6 thistime around, it's a 38 point movement.
Asians, plus 47 in 2012, plus 15 thistime around, that's a 32 point movement.

(21:38):
There's not much morerealignment than you can get.
I mean, that is just an enormous movement.
I think the misnomer is that thosegroups are now swing groups.
It's not that they're Republican groups,they're just swing groups.
African-American's not,it's just a question of the margins.
And it does create an enormous problem forDemocrats because you have to mobilize
more African-Americans giventhe diminished margin.

(21:58):
I think that's a problem in states likeGeorgia and Michigan and elsewhere.
Fourth, point turnout,Doug mentioned this.
There've been conspiracy theories onReddit, which I wouldn't advise you go on,
about the 15 million missing Biden voters.
Well, that number is shrinking by the houras we count the California votes.
I do think it is the case thoughthat you're gonna end up.

(22:19):
I think Harris is now at 71.2 million.
Biden was at 81.3, I think she'll endup probably about 5 million short.
And yeah, mobilization was a problem,
probably more of an issue thanpersuasion in this election cycle.
But turnout went up in Georgia, it wentup in Wisconsin, it went up in Michigan.
It essentially flatlined in Carolina,Nevada and Pennsylvania.

(22:41):
And my guess is it'll end up flatlining orgoing up slightly in Arizona.
So in the states wherethe election was decided,
turnout wasn't as big an issueas it was nationally.
All right, fifth point, the polls.
Professor Rivers mentioned the polls.
Not too bad.
Last time the average miss was about3.9 percentage points in the national.

(23:01):
In the statewide, the aggregation ofstatewide battlegrounds was about 4.3.
That's absolute but
it's also close to directional since itwas off almost the same way everywhere.
This time around, I ran some rough anddirty numbers, it was about 2.6 on
the national, about 2.4 was the absolutelevel of the air in the statewide.
So about 60% of what the airwas last time around.

(23:26):
I think Doug's right,we still have some polling issues.
I think you saw some evidence ofherding in this particular cycle.
People didn't want to get too farout from basically a tied race
in the battleground states.
I think there continues to be a misuseof polls by journalists even as data
consumption has gotten more sophisticated.
I think that's a problem, and I do thinkthe assumptions of the polls about

(23:49):
the makeup of the likely voteruniverse remain a little problematic.
The main problem we found from 2020 wasnot to make everybody's eyes glazed over,
but something called non ignorable,non Response bias.
That is to say, the people who didn'twant to do your poll tended to have
particular political predispositions,that continues to be a problem.

(24:10):
And the distinction is amongst pollsters,it's not so much that we're
not getting enough Republicans,although there's a little bit of that.
It's a compositional effect.
It's the sort of Republicans we'regetting are not the right Republicans.
And so amongst the best practices Iwould advise, in addition to leveraging
the voter files to sample offof lists of registered voters.

(24:31):
I think mixed mode is absolutely essentialright now, because there are people on web
who won't do a phone, people who willdo phone but won't do a text to web.
So mixed mode is a big deal.
I do think we ought to be askingquestions within our surveys
about level of MAGA support.
And the question we were asking fora long time was,

(24:52):
do you think Biden waslegitimately elected?
That allowed us in the polls I wasinvolved with to get a better sense of do
we have the right Republicans?
Because those numbers neededto be at certain levels.
And if you were below those levels,
your sample wasn't kind of MAGA enoughto properly estimate the Republicans.
So that's five points in seven minutes.
Yeah, más o menos is not too bad.

(25:12):
With that all turned over,I think Dave goes next, right, Candace?

No, so you're mostly right.
Your comments on the [LAUGH] Election,I think we all think are right.
But the next to speak will be Lynn,Vavrik joining us from UCLA.

>> Lynn Vavreck (25:30):
Thanks so much, Lynn.
And thanks, Darren.
Thanks, Brandon.
You had a 50/50 shot, Darren.
[LAUGH] It's really great tobe here with everyone today.
And I mean, leave it to Brandice tobring a bunch of political scientists
together andget them to agree on everything.
And so I'm gonna sort of try to mashup a little bit what both Doug and

(25:55):
Darren have said andkind of take a bit of a wider view and
talk a little bit about how I'mthinking about the 2024 election.
I sort of start by thinking aboutit over the last 100 years.
So let's just say 1930 to 2030, the nextpresident will take office in 2029.

(26:18):
And when you think about that,
we're more than a quarter of the waythrough the 21st century, and so much is
different about life in America in the2000s than it was in the 1920s and 30s.
But I'm worried that we stillthink a little bit about
politics through this ideaof the New Deal Coalition.

(26:41):
And as Doug and Darren both laid out,that coalition is gone.
And sothe New Deal is a long time ago now.
We're not fighting over relief efforts.
We're not fighting over the role andsize of government.
Trump may get into reorganizingthe federal government and downsizing and
deregulating, but that's a different thingthan the kinds of things we were talking

(27:03):
about all through the 20th century andinto the first part of the 21st century.
And I agree with Doug thatthe pivot on this really happens
in 2015 in advance of that 2016 election.
If you think back to 2008,Barack Obama and John McCain spent
the better part of three weeks fightingabout a guy named Joe the Plumber.

(27:30):
And whether Joe's taxes were gonnago up under Barack Obama's tax plan
because his small business,he was a sole proprietor.
And that meant, as John McCain said tohim, congratulations, Joe, you're rich.
Joe didn't feel rich, andthe two candidates fought about this.
Fast-forward to 2016, we're fighting abouta completely different set of issues.

(27:53):
And so my view of this is that in 2016,the dimension of conflict
in American politics really shiftedfrom those New Deal issues.
Role and size of government, the tax rate,what should government do in your life?
Two issues that are identity inflected oridentity based.
And those issues have some particularcharacteristics that change the tenor and

(28:18):
the feel of politics.
They're more divisive,because they're about people.
And essentially we're fighting,if you remember back to 2016,
the border wall,a religious test to enter the country.
You could lump into this set of things,same sex marriage and
now trans policy, bathrooms, sports teams,all of these person based issues.

(28:43):
And I wanna stress the issue partbecause these are things on which
policy has to be written.
This isn't like the 1980s,
when the Republican Party talkedabout the Moral Majority.
We don't believe in divorce.
We believe in families having a mother anda father, no single parent.
This is bad for the fabric of society.

(29:04):
They weren't gonna write lawsoutlawing single parent families or
outlawing divorce.
That was a moral argument.
What's happening now is wehave to write policies on
these person based issues,that's incredibly divisive.
It's essentially about who gets to havemembership in our national community,

(29:26):
which is personal to people.
And it's hard to compromiseon many of these things.
You can't be married on Monday andTuesday, not on Wednesday and Thursday and
on Friday, only if you want to be in theway that you could compromise on the tax
rate and give a little and get a little.
So we're fighting overa different set of issues, and

(29:48):
the nature of those issues are verydifferent than the old New Deal issues.
This is all happening while there'sbeen a change in the electorate,
where we have people identifying withboth political parties in rough parity.
So roughly, the same amount of people saythat they call themselves a Democrat as

(30:09):
they call themselves a Republican.
And that means that bothparties are competing hard and
winning, oralmost winning every election since 2016.
And that's gonna produce allkinds of strange externalities,
like you're unlikely to goback to the drawing board and
reinvent what your message is if you'rewinning or almost winning every time.

(30:34):
The American National Election Study,which Darren is a part of, tells us that
voters appreciate the two partieswant to build very different worlds.
Nine out of 10 people say they seeimportant differences between the two
political parties.
That's a massive increase from where wewere in the 20th century, when only 5 or

(30:55):
6 out of 10 voters said that.
And you can think of obviousreasons why that's true.
And the American National Election Studyalso tells us that
people have more emotionalreactions to political parties.
So all of this is happening since 2016,2020, and 2024.
And as Doug said, Donald Trump isinvolved in all of those elections.

(31:19):
So the 2020 election islargely a replay of 2016,
county by county across the country.
The absolute average shift inthe Democratic Party vote share,
very small, low single digits.
2024 is a replay of 2016.

(31:40):
I think Doug mentioned this, that in 2020,
we see a uniform shift up in Democraticvote share from 2016, that's Covid.
That's retrospective voting,
let's give a shout-out toStanford Professor Mo Fiorina.
Looking back at 2020 andthe pandemic and saying.
Saying, I'm gonna kickthe incumbent party out.

(32:03):
So Biden picks up vote sharealmost everywhere relative to how
Clinton did in 16 and in 2024.
This is the second Covid election.
This is a re equilibration,sort of back to where we were in 2016 and
retrospective voting again,voters looking out and saying,
I don't feel this recovery.

(32:24):
I think the citation that Douggave to 1992 is exactly right.
In 1992,it was a jobless economic recovery.
And that opened the door for Bill Clintonto say, change versus more of the same.
It's the economy, stupid.
People think it's the economy, stupid,meant that the economy was in the dumper.
That's wrong.

(32:45):
His message was, I'm gonna builda bridge to the 21st century.
Change versus more of the same, we needa new economy for the new 21st century.
And that's a lot of whatis happening here in 2024.
Objective indicators suggest growth,but people aren't feeling it.
Prices are still high.

(33:06):
And so it's a price stagnant recovery.
I don't know, some economists willcome up with a better word for
it than that, but that makes itvery hard for the incumbent party.
And so we see that shift down fromwhere the Democrats were in 2020,
again, uniformly across states and
with another average county swingthat is in the single digits.

(33:31):
So these elections,they feel like very big things
are happening because the partythat wins is changing, and
the parties want to buildvery different worlds.
And so that feels to voterslike these are all huge shifts.
But as analysts, I think what wesee is that the shift is actually

(33:54):
quite small because the outcome changes.
It has serious consequences forpeople's lives.
But politics is locked in for most people.
And that just will lead me tomy last point about polling and
surveys, which is largely thanksto Darren and Doug and David,

(34:15):
the innovators in surveyresearch who are on this panel.
Surveys have come sofar in the last 20 years.
And we've always been looking for
these changes, forthese voters who are changing.
And first, in the early 2000s,the innovation was, let's get more power.

(34:36):
Let's get more people in these surveys sothat we can find small changes.
And then in the mid-2000s,we increased the tempo of surveys.
So now that we had more people, we startedsurveying them with more frequency again,
looking for change, looking for change.
And then we mashed up power in cadence.

(34:57):
Big, big surveys goingout at short intervals.
And then this year, David and Doug andtheir collaborators with the Data
just bringing the panel component in as,again, a way to measure change.
Let's measure these people a year ago,four years ago, and

(35:18):
let's keep interviewing the same people.
It's an incredibly powerful design.
We're building better andbetter telescopes, and
we just happen to be doing it at a momentin time in politics where there's so
little change to actually seethe areas that Darren talked about,
the groups that are moving.

(35:41):
There are groups that are moving, but
they're not large segmentsof the population.
And so we're in this unfortunate positionwhere we've built incredible telescopes
that now aren't powerful enough to seewhere the change is actually happening.
They are powerful enough to tellus a lot about those groups, but

(36:01):
we will wish we had more.
And so I just, I think that,you know, the state of polling and
survey research, we are in such a betterposition than we were 20 years ago.
Just we happen to be at a moment in timewhere politics is largely locked in place.

Thanks so much, Lynn, for those complimentary.
And here, I mean,I am complimenting you, but
with [LAUGH] The comments to Darren andDoug, and now I'm gonna turn it
over to someone who needs no introductionif you're logging on as a Hoover or
a Stanford guest to our webinar,David Brady.

>> David Brady (36:42):
So I'm gonna do a little bit of what Doug and Darren Lynn did,
but not much.
So when the surveys,the question for the surveys was,
would we be as wrong aswe were in 2020 and 2016?
And so even though we made somecorrections in terms of increasing
the number of rural voters, etc.,that wasn't clear what would happen.

(37:06):
So I tried to look at the Bidencoalition in 2020 and
a little bit on the Hillary's coalitionin 2016 compared to where Harris was.
And so in our surveys, it was about right.
We had Biden in the people whosaid they voted 2020 was four and
a half point winner.

(37:27):
So when I looked at that,the two big things that struck me as
different in our pollfrom the others was one,
the gender gap was nowhere near aslarge as some people were making it.
Some people had it 13, 14 points.
We did not have it as that big.
And that struck me as that was a problem.
That was a problem for Harris's coalition.

(37:48):
But the biggest one wasamong Hispanic voters,
where Hillary had won them bya large margin, Biden won them,
right, and her margin haddropped fairly dramatically.
And that showed, by the way, in the 12counties in Texas along the border,

(38:09):
the six counties that have the Mostwhites voted for Trump in 2020,
but the six counties that over85% Hispanics, they voted for
Biden in 2020, and all of thosecounties voted for Trump in 2024.
So then I turned to the question of, well,

(38:29):
what about there's only threesources of votes, right?
You can get your partisans the base vote,
you can get some defectors from the otherparty, and you can win independents.
So Biden's win in 2020 was infact a win based on the fact
he got about 95,96% of Democrats to vote for him.

(38:51):
He won a few more among defectors.
He won more Republicans thanTrump won Democrats to him.
And finally he aboutsplit the independents.
But when I looked at the Harris candidacy,she was about that.
She was about 96% of Democrats voting forher.

(39:12):
Among people who were gonna defect,she had done a little bit better.
So she had more Republicans defecting toher than Democrats going the other way.
And this is the last surveywe had before the election.
And then but among Independents,she was trailing by 10, 12 points.

(39:33):
So I looked at the issues to find out andthe three big economic issues,
inflation, jobs, and I'm sorry,the third issue is immigration.
On those issues,if you were a Democrat and
cared about immigration,only 89% of them were voting for her.
So she lost Democrats on inflation,lost big on Independents on inflation,

(39:56):
lost on immigration,she lost again Independents.
And in the two areas whereDemocrats should have done better,
she did a little bit, but those issueswere not as large to the voters.
That was the democracy issue and abortion,
where she did actually pickup some Republican defectors.

(40:16):
But the combination of thoseled me to think that her
coalition was not good enoughto win in the election.
I wanna turn to the notion of realignment,which everybody has spoken about.
The first thing, Lynn,I think Leonard's right.
But the fundamental question inthe area of realignment is previously,

(40:42):
realignments that we know andhave written about.
There's a situation in which in order forthe majority,
you have to have an actualmajority party that wins elections
over a consistent time periodto pass the policies that
change American,change American, change America.

(41:05):
And then the result of that is,in the long run,
the other party has to accept it.
So if you look at Roosevelt,
the Republicans refused to say,no, we don't need aid.
There's no aid that we can deal with.
So the Republicans,in order to become competitive,
became a party that said a partyof less aid, not more aid.

(41:25):
The Democrats were more Republicans, less.
Now, Lynn's right, that coalition is gone.
But I do not see, in terms of whatshe said about these key issues,
where you can't trade them off.
I do not see a majority party out there.
We have a party that is primarilyconservative, the Republicans.

(41:49):
We have a party that is primarilyDemocratic and that's primarily liberal.
And the point of that is, can we havea majority conservative party or
a majority liberal partyin the United States?
And that certainly is not clear to me.
Donald Trump has transformed theRepublican Party, and he's made it a party

(42:11):
that's much more blue collar,less well-educated, more competitive.
And he's won two orthree elections narrowly, in each case.
But none of this seems to me as thoughthat we have now created a situation
in which you're gonna havea majority party that can, in fact,
resolve the issues that Lynn mentioned.

(42:31):
And that in large part is becausethose issues are cultural.
And I guess the last point, so we're ina situation where we really don't know.
In regard to the last point aboutthe cultural issues, I agree with Lynn.
They're gonna be much tougher,much, much tougher to deal with and

(42:52):
get a final resolution on.
And therefore, you're likely tocontinue to see this flip-flop back and
forth as exactly that setof issues like abortion and
other things will fracture the RepublicanParty over the next two to four years.
And who would be surprised if in 2026the Democrats came back big and I guess,

(43:16):
the last point I do want to makeis the economy will come back.
Both political parties have totallynegated the fact that the deficit and
Social Security programs,Medicare, Medicaid,
those programs are not in good shape.
The percent of the economy that has togo to pay down the debt, that's high,

(43:39):
that's not going away.
And neither party, did anythingto deal with those issues at all,
and things like that don't go away.
Arithmetic and math are there.

Thanks so much, Dave, and thanks to all of you.
So I'm gonna lead off with a fewquestions of my own for the panel, and
then we're gonna launchinto audience questions.
So if you're listening, andyou want to ask a question, this would be,
and you haven't already, a great timeto start writing it in to the chat.
So most of the attention goes tothe presidential election, and

(44:11):
there's been this big shift in powerover time to the press presidency.
But Congress is still Article1 of the Constitution.
And an arguably surprising resultof these elections is that
in four of the seven swing states,
Democratic senators take the Senateseat while Trump wins the state.

(44:32):
So we've got Nevada with Jacky Rosen,Michigan, Alyssa Slotnick,
Wisconsin, Tammy Baldwin, and thenRuben Gallego recently called in Arizona.
So what do you thinkcontributed to this outcome?
Why is Trump winning?
I know these are small margins, butstill, these are clearly called races.

(44:55):
And things are shifting Democraticin kind of down ballot,
but pretty high ballotin the Senate as well.
Who wants to?
Dave, you've writtenon divided government.
Do you wanna lead on this?

Candidates if you look at the candidate in Arizona,
candidates make a difference.
And Trump, as he did in Georgia, helpedpick candidates that aren't so good.
So I think there's a split vote anda swing there.
But the other point is the states wherethey held, those are states where

(45:31):
the Democrats campaigned heavily andput a lot of money in, and they did.
They did lose Pennsylvania, Ohio.
I thought for Brown,that was a tough case.
So I was not surprisedthat they held those.
I thought they might hold Pennsylvania,but
I wouldn't have been surprisedif they'd have lost one more.
But I thought 54 was sort of the top forRepublicans in the Senate.

(45:56):
And I thought it would be more likely tobe 52, because I thought Casey might hold.
But the others did hold.

Okay, I'm gonna see if Lynn wanted to comment because I
also think, Lynn,your comments about the cultural divide.
So what's going on?
Are people coming in, and they're mixedon the cultural divide they like or
is it, Trump's not,as Brady's comments pointed out,
maybe the most economicallyconservative on the deficit.

(46:23):
What's happening to these voterswho are split ticket votes?

My hunch, and this is just a hunch,
is that it is not that complicated andmay go back to something that Darren and
Doug both talked about, which wascomposition of the electorate and turnout.
I think, and maybe, somebody cancheck me on this while I'm talking.
I think that some of those Senate races,

(46:52):
more people voted in the Senate racesthan voted at the top of the ticket.
So usually, we think of rolloff as you vote at the top, and
then you don't vote down ballot.
But I think I was looking,
although I have looked at a lot of thingsin the last few days, so I might be.
I'm putting a huge caveat on this, butI think that there are some of those races

(47:16):
where more people are voting inthe Senate race than for president.
But whether one way orthe other, part of this is
surely who's not everybodyvotes in every race.
And so there could be people who justturn out, they're indecisive for
that race for president, but
they know what they think aboutthe Senate candidates and vice versa.

(47:40):
That has to be a large part of the story.

Can I?
The story is not that complicated, but Ithink we even political science have tied
ourself up into a littlebit of a nod on this.
Because we've been so focused onpolarization, polarization, no deviation,
no defections, that the expectationis that you're just gonna get
a straight party linevote across the board.
The reality is, if you look at each ofthose races, I mean, look, Jackie Rosen

(48:04):
dumped $85 million of negative advertisingon Sam Brown's head in Nevada.
I mean, that's the story.
Kerry Lake was known unlike theseother Republicans in these races, but
was known negatively in Arizona.
McCormick won,
McCormick had the most robust campaign ofany of the ones we've been talking about.
McCormick actually ran half ofTrump's campaign in Pennsylvania and

(48:28):
probably ought to get credit for it.
The Slotnik seat in Michiganwas an open seat, but
she had a massive advertisingadvantage in that race.
And Lynn and I are, I think,at least partially responsible for
moderating the expectationsabout what money advantages can
actually drive in these races.

(48:48):
On the other hand, a lot of thesecases were Republicans seeking to
defeat incumbents who were well known.
And the incumbents is taking advantage offinancial advantages to just bash the heck
out of these people beforethey really got going.
So what you saw was they were lagging 13,14 points early on,
especially Brown in Nevada,they made up a bunch of that.

(49:09):
These partisans mostly came home, butthere was enough of a residual so
that they ended up holdingin a couple of these states.
That's why I think it's a simple story,but
one that we need to get our act togetherin political science and figure out, wait,
under what circumstances do campaignsmatter and do they not matter?
Because we haven't been reallyclear on that, I guess.

Doug, do you have anything to say?
And I don't know if adding on to that,the House majority is razor-thin.
And I guess at least at the start ofthe webinar, unofficially called.
I know it could be calledany moment [LAUGH].
And it looks likethe Republicans will win, but
there don't seem to be a lotof coattails here, right?

(49:50):
That we often associate withpresidential elections.

So we were puzzled in the summer because the Democratic Senate
candidates were polling sofar ahead of Biden and
then Harris, andthat did not come to pass in the end.
In the end, these were pretty close, andSenate races have been nationalized.
So I think idiosyncratic factors likeHarriet Lake is a weak candidate,

(50:19):
advertising advantages, incumbencyadvantages and so forth explains it.
The House is moreinteresting in my opinion.
Republicans are going towin the house by 3 to 4% in
the popular vote aggregatedacross the districts.
There is roll off in those races, so

(50:39):
it will be significantlybelow the presidential grace.
It used to be the case that Housecandidates could insulate themselves from
what happens in the presidential election?
We are gonna get a very close, but
it looks like I think Republicansare gonna get about 222 roughly.

(51:00):
Still depends on some Californiaraces that are close, but
the House vote is pretty muchfollowing the national vote.
So this was a great year forRepublicans in the House.

Thanks, several of you mentioned young voters and
the fact that young voters swung,not so far that they voted
in favor under 30,they did not vote in favor of Trump.
But they did swing ina discernible direction towards
the Republicans fromtheir usual base rate.

(51:37):
What do you think is causing that?
And I'm just gonna actually note, I don'thear anything about this in the press, so
this is probably totally crazy.
But I was at a conference in Europethis summer where a number of
European voting scholars statedthat they believe young voters
had become less enchanted with the leftbecause of their experience under Covid.

(51:58):
Again, we hear nothing about that, and Iknow the standard in political science is
once it's a few years away, everybodyforgets about everything, nothing matters.
But if this has no relevance,and it's a European thing,
perhaps only what's driving the change foryoung voters?

I'll take a whack, because I was gonna zag, but nobody zigged.
So here's my zag.
There's this assumption that youngpeople are all a bunch of liberals,
walking around carefree.
And then as they get older andmore curmudgeonly,
they become conservative like Dave Brady.
But actually, the evidence is that thedefining characteristic of younger voters

(52:37):
is that they're less engaged, lessinvolved, less interested in politics.
And so up until around 2000, they came inlooking like everybody else, even more so.
In the 80s, they were for Reagan.
In the 90s they were for Clinton.
They pick up on the loudest message.
My zag is I think the anomalymight be the 2000s to 2020 era.

(52:58):
And an anomaly in the sensethat the electorate's 5050 and
young people came in 65, 35 Democratic.
And I have some pet theories aboutthat for which I don't have good data,
which is I think a littlebit was cultural issues,
that they're moreprogressive on those issues.
I think there was a fear of the draft andof the military engagements in 2004.

(53:20):
I know in my conversations with students,they all thought they were going to get
drafted and sent to Iraq andAfghanistan, I think.
So what happens?
You move a generation away from that,and they got caught up,
Obama was an exciting candidate.
So all those short term forces pusheda particular cohort in a direction.
I think now the interesting thing isthere's no real short term forces

(53:43):
necessarily affecting younger peopledifferently than everybody else.
So that's my zag.
I think we might actually be returning toan era in which young people are actually
even more affected by whatever the shortterm forces are, whether pro Republican or
Democrat, rather than being reliablyliberal or progressive on certain issues.
I guess the caveat would be if youcontinue to have this sort of cultural

(54:06):
divide, young people do seem to be moreprogressive on cultural issues and
maybe that pushes them in that direction.
But I think we may be returning tothe era that we had before know,
before the millennials came of age.

So this is a question more for, I guess, Len and Doug, but
there was a bunch of stuff made aboutthe difference between young men and
young women, where women are much moreDemocratic and men were more conservative.
How much, how much of that is relevantto this question about youth?
I mean, I haven't pursued it,I looked at it a little bit.

Yeah, so I agree with Daron.
The conventional wisdom is alwaysindependent swing more one direction or
the other due to forces ina particular election, and
younger voters are more independent.
The thing that's unusual aboutthe recent era is that we

(55:02):
have not had a landslide inthe adult lifetime of Millennials.
The elections have all been close.
So there hasn't been muchof an opportunity for
the group to swing a lot inone direction or the other.
Our own data shows lessdifferences by age than what

(55:22):
you're seeing in termsof movement over time.
There were polls earlier in the yearclaiming an inversion that younger
voters were gonna vote more Republican,I don't think that came to pass.
So I'm on them.
My view is not less has changedthere than people think.

(55:43):
In 2020,they were overwhelmingly Democratic.
This year they were much less soin 2012, in 2008,
incredibly Democratic group,not so much in the other years.

I was just gonna add that I suspect once we get the post election.
Waves of the data thatthe say project is collecting
will be able to see andI suspect this will be true.
A lot of the movementof these young people,
from the Democratic Party in 20 tothe Republican Party in 2024 is going to,

(56:21):
I think we can do thiswith your data collection,
Doug, will be driven by what they're.
Their sort of ideology was in 2020.
So it's conservative, young conservativeswho are coming to Trump in 2024,
they voted for Biden in 2020.

(56:42):
Maybe that's retrospective voting a littlebit, Covid kicked the incumbents out and
some of them are coming hometo the Republican Party and
some of them are just like, white,non-college educated voters.
And other voters have been doingover the last decade and a half,
moving out of the Democratic Party and
into the Republican Party because of thesenew issues that we're fighting over.

(57:05):
And I think that this panel data,this is why panel data is so, so powerful
because we have measures of these basicattitudes in a previous point in time.
And that allows us to anchor people andsay,
then how are they movingnow in the future?

Thanks.
Okay, and so one final question from mebefore we turn to the audience questions.
So, several of you mentionedthe Latino vote as one of the big
factors that may be a more lasting shift,at least perhaps.
And of course, some of that movementstarted even before this election,

(57:41):
but then became an evenmore prominent factor.
Dave, you mentioned that Trumpwon the Rio Grande Valley,
which at one point used to be calledthe Dem's Blue wall some elections ago,
not in the most recent ones, but in Texas.
Trump also won Miami-Dade county and
made substantial gainsnationwide with the Latino vote.

(58:06):
To what extent do you thinkthese flips are Trump-specific?
Do they have implications for
how we should think about Latinovoting patterns moving forward?
Daron, you run the Texas Lyceum Poll.
I hope I'm pronouncing that right.
And I'm assuming that thathas some insight in Texas.

(58:27):
Do you wanna lead on this?

Yeah, I'll take a whack at it.
Dave mentioned the border countiesin Texas and South Texas.
So there's 18 border countiesfrom El Paso down to McAllen.
In 1996, two of them went Republican,16 went Democrat,
in 2024, 14 of them went Republican andfour went Democrat.

(58:51):
We've been talking about turning Texasblue for a long time in Texas and
the idea was, is that the demographicshift, young people coming of age and
a burgeoning Latino population alongwith the burgeoning Asian population,
would essentially create a muchmore competitive environment.
And the assumption was always that, mysort of take on it was that that's true,

(59:15):
so long as the populations you'retalking about remain 65, 35 Democratic,
Republican.
Well, they're not.
And in fact, I always think it wasridiculous to have expected them to.
The Latino middle class in places likeSan Antonio and Austin is absolutely going
through the roof, there's an explosionof sort of wealth in Latino communities.
There's been an economic diversification,

(59:37):
there's been a cultural diversification inthe Latino community such that I always
think a theory that's predicated onpolitics remaining static is a bad theory.
And that was the problem with that theory,it's like, yeah, sure,
if everything remained exactly the same,then Texas would be blue by now.
But people change andwhy would you expect these populations as.

(59:59):
San Antonio is a really interestingplace it's in a lot of ways it's like
the Hispanic capital of the United States.
I've heard people refer to Atlantaas the African American capital of
the United States because theentrepreneurship and the business sort of
the business power that's concentratedin Atlanta around black businesses.
San Antonio is becoming that way forHispanics and as that's happened,

(01:00:23):
the politics of the Hispanic communityhas come to look more diverse.
And let's be clear,they're not Republican,
they're just lessDemocratic than they were.
And I think maybe the key thing I'd sayabout the takeaway point is the Hispanic
population was never as firmly committedto the Democratic Party as, let's say,
the African American population has been,right.

(01:00:44):
It doesn't have the historicalconnectedness to the civil rights
movement and
even going back further to the New Dealthat the African American community had to
the Democrats, it's always been kind ofa marriage of convenience in some ways.
Well, I'm nominally moreDemocratic than Republican.
Well, that's what's changed is thatthese voters have become more,
even more independent andthey've been voting Republican.

(01:01:07):
So Brennus, you asked aboutwhether it's a Trump thing.
I think it's deeper than that, I don'tthink it's something that will go away,
but a chunk of it is not cultural,it's economic.
And if Republicans presideover a bad economy,
there's no real deep-seated allegianceamongst Hispanics to the Republican Party.

(01:01:28):
A lot of that support will melt away.
What I don't think you're gonna get issort of strengthening of commitment to
the Democratic Party yet.
Unless there's a match of issues tothe particular conditions of the Hispanic
community, I don't see either side beingparticularly innovative in that regard.

>> Doug Rivers (01:01:43):
One point on that is Democrats depend very heavily on doing
reasonably well among Hispanics forgetting a national coalition together.
The combination of college-educatedwhites is too small by itself to win,

(01:02:03):
and particularly to win inthe Sunbelt states without
winning decent majorities of Latinosis a real problem for Democrats.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone (01:02:17):
Lyn or Dave, did you wanna weigh in here or
do you wanna go to audience questions?

>> David Brady (01:02:22):
The hard part of trying to put a coalition together that brings
Hispanics and progressives ofthe Democratic Party together so
they consistently stay there,I think that's just hard.
It's not even clear to me thatthe college, that the tendency for
college graduates to now be voting forTrump,

(01:02:43):
I don't think that holds if you comein and you want to raise taxes on them.
So we have not found in Lynn's termsany a coalition that is capable of
creating a majority to answer this set ofquestions that she and others have raised.
So I think it's hard to put thosecoalitions together that we

(01:03:05):
haven't done it yet.
And I don't see it, I don't see, I don'thave any clear idea of how that happens.

>> Lynn Vavreck (01:03:14):
Yeah, Brandis, I'll just jump in to say I love the way that,
Dave sort of clarified what I was tryingto say about the New Deal coalition and
then the anti the opposite side of that.
And that right now, if you'rethe Democratic Party, like there is
this one sense that like you're winning oralmost winning every time.

(01:03:38):
So one negative externalityof that is we'll just change
the rules of the game sothat you win the next, right?
And we saw that sort ofhappening after 2020.
Could we change the rulesof the game a little bit?
So more of my voters got to turn out,find more votes.
So that's one negative externality ofwinning or almost winning every time.

(01:04:01):
But another one is sort ofwhat Dave is suggesting,
that it's just whenthe parties are in rough
parity like this andthese elections are close and
you see yourself slowlyover time losing voters.

(01:04:21):
How are you gonna build this coalition forthe future, knowing you
are on the wrong side of public opinionon the cultural issues that are coming?
So on trans policy,on bathrooms, on sports teams,
the Democratic Party is onthe wrong side of this,

(01:04:41):
and public opinion is massivelylopsided on these issues.
And so that's a tough spot to be in.
And you've got to think about it bothin terms of what are your policy goals,
but you also wanna win elections.
So how are you gonna build this coalition?

(01:05:04):
And maximizing on those two dimensions,
I think,is gonna require imagination for sure.

Thanks,
we've got some great questionsfrom the audience here.
Hopefully we'll have time toget to as many as we can.
So our first one is from Lisa, and she'sasking whether you think that the loss
of faith in government institutionsplayed a part in this election outcome
in addition to the factors thatyou've already identified.

>> Daron Shaw (01:05:36):
Yes, [LAUGH] Trump's the disruptor candidate.
Harris talked about change and, but
it wasn't exactly clear whatchange she represented.
I think she was a little bit stuckbecause the closer she got to trying to
tap into that, the more she had to defend.

(01:05:57):
Well, wait a sec,
do you mean you're gonna do thisstuff that you talked about in 2019?
I really think she waskinda hamstrung there.
But Trump's been throwingbombs since 2015.
And soan electorate that has an appetite for
not just change at the margins,but substantial change.
I think we asked a question, I wanted aquestion that Fred Steeper asked way back

(01:06:19):
in the day, which is revolutionary change.
I remember in 92 he asked that question,we got,
I wanna say in the 20s who saidthey wanted revolutionary change.
I think we asked formajor upheaval this time and
we got a big chunk said major upheaval.
I think it was close to 20%.

Darren.
You know what I'm gonna ask you, andI don't know if you know the answer to it,
but where are we on my all time favoritesurvey question about government?

>> Daron Shaw (01:06:49):
[LAUGH] For Fox, we designed a question that Lynn loves and
it was, what's the main messageyou wanna send to Washington?
Lend me a hand or leave me alone.
And it's varied considerably over time.
You'd think it'd be pretty, butit actually flows quite a bit.
And we got a huge uptickin Leave Me Alone.

(01:07:13):
That is, as the campaign went on,the lend me a hand made a comeback.
But it was about what you'd expect ina close to a 50/50 election [LAUGH].

See, I think that's so interesting because at this moment in time
when people are saying,I can't afford to buy a house,
everything costs more,I can't take my family on vacation.
In the choice between leave me alone orlend me a hand, they're at leave me alone.

>> Daron Shaw (01:07:42):
Yeah.

Right, that to me requires some thought.

>> Daron Shaw (01:07:47):
Yeah, I know.
It reminds me of the Reagan,what's the Reagan joke?
The most chilling sentences in the Englishlanguage are, I'm from the government and
I'm here to help.

Yeah, exactly.
This is a problem.

>> Daron Shaw (01:07:59):
Yeah, so it's a great question, this disaffection and
this declining trust in institutions.
And we've seen it, I know Doug andDave have seen this, I know Lynn has.
It's across the board.
Even the military, even the mostsacrosanct institutions historically,
we're seeing declines in confidence andtrust, and

(01:08:20):
hopefully we can do somethingto better those numbers.

>> Doug Rivers (01:08:24):
So one institution I'm hoping we will see an increase in trust in
is our election system.
That suddenly Donald Trump's findingmillions of noncitizens voting and
voting machines changing numbers andso forth,
that seems to have disappeared at leastfor a few days off of the agenda,

(01:08:47):
and that would be a good thing foreverybody.

Doug, we'll make a plug.
You can come back andlisten to Ben Ginsberg and
Justin Grimmer [LAUGH] in January on thiswebinar where we'll be talking about
trust in elections and their work on it.
Dave, did you wanna say somethingto this on institutions and trust?

Brandice, can I say one more thing?
Just on this question of like,this goes back
to my new deal, 1930 to 2030 idea.
The basket of goods that we think aboutwhen we think what does this cost for
people, when we measure inflation,it's like milk, eggs, bread.

(01:09:30):
Yes, people still need those things.
But I think that on average inthe population now, there are a whole
bunch of other things that peoplefeel like they can't get by without.
Basically, everybody's carrying arounda $1,200 computer in their pocket,
everybody.
And nobody drinks regular coffee anymore.

(01:09:51):
Everyone's $5 for a cup of coffee.
You don't drink water out of your faucet.
You want it to be in a bottle.
The world is really different for people.
And if government could come and
help people with some of thosecosts instead of just saying, well,
you shouldn't be buying coffee atStarbucks or drinking bottled water.

(01:10:12):
But this is how people have come to live.
And so I feel like increasedconfidence in government,
there could be increased confidence.
To go back to Darren's thing, I'm fromthe federal government, I'm here to help.
What if the government were actuallyhelping people afford mobile phones and
just live their lives in a way thatwasn't just about milk and eggs?

>> David Brady (01:10:35):
So, Brandice, I will say Mike Spence and I wrote a piece for
Project Syndicate after the 2020 electionon trust and institution and elections.
And one of the points is in order forgovernments to have trust,
they have to do what theysay they're gonna do.
And as far as I can tell, in campaigns,

(01:10:56):
the campaigns promise thingsthat are absolutely not doable.
Even starting with Ronald Reagan,we're gonna have more money, but
we're gonna tax you less,it's gonna happen.
And I just see American votersas over a long time period,
I'd say from maybe Reagan on, but
not meeting the goals thatthey say they're gonna meet.

(01:11:20):
And in the 2024 election, or 2020,Biden's gonna bring us together.
He didn't in 2020, and it's hard to do.
But when you make these hugepromises during the campaign,
I think that over time,people's trust in government,
their ability to do what they say is just,it's gone away.

(01:11:43):
I mean, how many of you on the panelactually trust any candidate
to do a portion of whatthey say they're gonna do?
I'm pretty much verylow on that dimension.
I just think that over time we got Peoplehave promised way more than they've been
able to deliver.
And you gotta deliverin order to have trust.

Thanks, I wanna move to a few of the other questions.
So we have a question from Andy andit says it's from Andy Rutten.
So if this is the Andy Rutten I know,hello, [LAUGH] Andy.
And if it's not,we still appreciate the question.
So would the politics haverealigned in the same way

(01:12:27):
from the New Deal to identitieswithout Donald Trump?
Or was this reconfiguration or
if we wanna call it a long termrealignment, was it coming and
he just sort of wasthe candidate that took it up?
I don't know if, Lynn,since you talked about this and

(01:12:49):
the historical sweep like to start.

I'll try to do this very quickly.
Excellent question, Andy.
So part of this is long term andis happening over decades.
People are sorting into the politicalparties as politics is becoming more clear
to them.
Barack Obama gets elected, that massivelysimplifies the politics of race for
people.

(01:13:12):
There's some sorting, people withinparties are changing their minds.
So this is all happening over decades orat least a decade and a half.
But you're right that then Trump comesalong in 2015 and he is a catalyst.
He is going to speed up that process.
If it wasn't him,would it have been someone else in 2015?

(01:13:34):
I don't think so.
I don't think Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio orTed Cruz were going to go all in on
the identity inflectedissues the way Trump did.
Does that mean it was never gonna happen?
Maybe not.
Maybe Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush wouldhave gotten that nomination.
Hillary Clinton probablywould have won that election.

(01:13:57):
Maybe she would have been reelected in 20,maybe not,
maybe that would have been a Republican.
Like, could we have gotten to a point intime where we're past the idea of who
gets to have membership inthe national community?
I don't know the answer to that, butit's a combination of both things.
But Trump is definitely implicatedin speeding up the process.

>> David Brady (01:14:20):
I would say that what happened is that what happened is
the Democratic Party declined.
It was in the dominant partyreally controlling the House of
Representatives for 60 to 64 years,and those are until 1994.
But what happened in the 60sbecause of the race issue,
the Democrats lost some votes in thesouth, some states in the south, and you

(01:14:42):
got a series of Republican presidents eventhough Democrats were the majority party.
With Ronald Reagan, you got a swing,
prior to Reagan there were equalRights Amendment for Women.
There were more Republicans that werepro-choice than pro-life, that switched.

(01:15:05):
Second under Reagan, the economy,which was a Democratic issue, is gone.
What Trump did, in my view,was he brought less educated voters,
which is a term we now use forblue collar.
He brought blue collarsinto the Republican Party.
I agree with Lynn, I don't think any ofthe other candidates could have done that.

(01:15:25):
But now you've added to the culturalissues, you've added the blue collar.
And part of the reason hegets them is cultural issues.

>> Daron Shaw (01:15:34):
Can I take a quick stab at this?
There's a sort of left, right continuumthat's existed since the New Deal,
probably prior to the New Deal,where scope of government questions.
And the question erased, bisected that,as Dave says, in the 1960s.
What was interesting is I think this isan orthogonal dimension to that realigned
system.

(01:15:54):
And the orthogonality is populism,and I think it was latent.
And it was latent asa critique of the system.
So what Trump did was he came along andsaid, the system's broken.
It's run by elites,it's stacked against you.
And he brought that grievance to life andkind of drew those voters in.

(01:16:18):
Could someone else have done it?
Bernie Sanders was doing it in 2016,right?
What was interesting wasthat it came from the right.
And by the way,we've seen this internationally, right.
And we've seen it inLatin American companies.
The populist dimension tendsto come from the left.
It's insurgent, it's challenging thesebureaucratic authoritarian regimes.

(01:16:38):
In Europe, it's come from the right.
But populism doesn't necessarilyhave to come from the right or
left, it just has to animate a salientgrievance that exists in the society.
The tricky thing, and so I don't see this,what caught me off guard was,
first of all, the number of less welleducated white voters who were in some of
these upper Midwest states in particular.

(01:17:00):
It absolutely alteredthe balance of power.
Those states were gone fromthe Republicans like Dave was saying.
Winning Michigan and Pennsylvania and
Wisconsin were sort of pipedreams in 2008, 2012, but
those voters were there andthey flocked to Trump and the Republicans.
The sticky question is,okay, so they buy into your

(01:17:22):
statement of the grievance,but what do they stay for?
When you're actually governing?
And I think the Republican Partyhas a real issue.
I'm with Dave on thisparticular element of it.
What does the Republican Party do toretain them now that looks like they're
gonna own the keys to the kingdom here for
a little while at least,right, is it tariffs?

(01:17:44):
Lynn mentioned these cultural issuesthat I think have some appeal.
And are the Republican eliteseven on board with this entirely?
That's one of the things that's beeninteresting left last week or so,
is it seems like they're all on boardnow in a way they were in 2016.
But anyway, I think we need to beattentive to the possibility that there

(01:18:05):
was this sort of undercurrent.
And I'm getting to the question's core,which was identity politics.
I think the Democrats havemistaken that populism for
some sort of form of identity politics.
And I think that's the question iswhether they recalibrate on that,
I'm not sure they will.

(01:18:26):
Both parties have a problem right nowmaking a sense of what's happening with
the American electorate.

We have a question from Preeti Mehta.
No one has mentioned yetthe role of the media in getting out and
or controlling the messagingof the candidates.
Some feel that the mainstream medianews outlets have lost credibility in
this election and that the future isabout meeting voters on podcasts and
dispersed non corporate media.

(01:18:53):
Do you think the mainstream mediais in trouble going forward?

It depends on what you define as mainstream media.
If we're talking about legacymedia outlets like ABC, CBS, NBC,
PBS, The New York Times,I don't think that they're in any more
trouble today than they were two orthree weeks ago.
If mainstream media means television,

(01:19:19):
so including cable,very few people watch cable news.
And mostly those are people whoare very interested in politics,
I don't see those people changing either.
So if the question is really like,
is streaming and podcasting, you know,

(01:19:42):
citizen sort of media goingto change the way that
legacy media outlets andcable news does business?
I don't think the answerto that is yes either.
But I do think it changesthe way candidates campaign and.
So it will change thingsfrom the candidate side and

(01:20:03):
that will change things from the voterside because they'll be able to hear
these candidates in more placesthan they were 10 years ago.
And I think all of that is good,more information is better.
But I think those legacy media outlets,I don't think they're in any
different position after 2024than they were before it.

>> David Brady (01:20:27):
No, I mean, the problem was that through the 50s and
60s there was a source,Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley,
so that if an event occurred likethe assassination of Kennedy,
there was a standard interpretation of it.
And with the breakup of the news andall the factors and

(01:20:49):
now adding the podcast,seems to me it creates
a situation like the biaspress of the 1880.
When Lincoln debated Douglas, he didn'thave to worry what the newspaper was gonna
say cuz the Whig papers are gonna be forhim, the Democrat papers were gonna be for
Douglas.
And pretty much when you turn onFox News and move through msnbc,

(01:21:13):
it's pretty clear what their views are.
Pretty clear what the New York Times andthe Wall Street Journal's views are,
the only places where it's not,it's like BBC, PBS, ABC, CBS.
So Lynn's right,there's been no big change.
That change has been going on forsome time and
it affects how candidates deal withthe election in ways that she and

(01:21:37):
the others on the panelunderstand better than I do.

>> Doug Rivers (01:21:40):
A question for Daron and Lynn.
How much did Kamala get for$1 billion of advertising?

A little bit, I think.
I think Darren and
I would both say a little bitless than a point, you know, but.
But here's something I'd loveto hear you guys talk about.
It does seem like the race was closer inthe battleground states than it was in
the non battleground states.
And what's that about?

>> Daron Shaw (01:22:12):
Yeah. >> Lynn Vavreck
That's about the campaign.

>> Doug Rivers (01:22:15):
Could have been the advertising in the ground game,
I'm not sure.

It could have been [LAUGH].
I mean, it's obviously like it's.
It's going to be closer there,that's why they're battlegrounds.
Like, I get it, butI think that's interesting.
I don't know, Daron, do you disagree?

>> Daron Shaw (01:22:32):
You're right.

>> David Brady (01:22:32):
Turnout was higher in those states, but it makes a difference.
It's hard to believe campaignsdon't make a difference.

>> Daron Shaw (01:22:39):
Yeah, I mean, the bigger question.

>> David Brady (01:22:42):
Yeah, exactly.

>> Daron Shaw (01:22:43):
The bigger question is, I'm doing a study right now with Jim Gimpel
and Grant Ferguson andMark Owens in Texas.
Where the Abbott people, after 2022,
we had a meeting with some politicalscientists about the midterm elections.
And we asked them, what could politicalscience tell you that you want to know?

(01:23:03):
And Dave Carney, who is Sununu'sadvisor in New Hampshire and
Abbott's advisor in Texas, said, I'd liketo know whether the amount of time and
energy we spend responding to newsmedia inquiries are worth it.
He says,because we put a ton of people on this.
And he says,I'm not convinced it does anything.
And so we did a study, they actuallyturned over all of their requests,

(01:23:24):
text messages, emails, all the requests,the record, whether they responded,
how they responded.
We collected all their clips andmedia coverage and coded it.
And turns out they probably shouldn'tbe spending a lot of time and
energy responding to the news media.
If what you're talking about isare they driving coverage and
then does that coverage affect, in thiscase, Abbott's favorability in Texas?

(01:23:49):
I think it's pretty obvious thatthe news media have gone from
an advertiser base of revenueto a subscriber base of revenue.
They're no longer interestedin making sure Chrysler or
Nike are offended bythe way they cover things.
They're interested in driving eyeballs.
And this is clear in the Times,the Washington Post, the LA Times,
it's all subscriber based.

(01:24:11):
That's what theirorientation is right now.
It's the fundamental change inthe nature of the news media.
The broadcast mediaare a little less that way, but
there's still that kinda reflection.
So they're one of a numberof sources of information in
this ecosystem bringingit back to the campaign.
What I thought was fascinating wasHarris basically saying early on,

(01:24:32):
I don't care about any of you,I'm not talking to you.
I'm gonna be on social media platforms.
I'm gonna niche media.
And the question I wouldhave is whether she was,
whether it helped her to gosort of come off of that.
I actually thought she shouldhave stuck with her guns.
What does she care whetherNorah O'Donnell gets an interview or

(01:24:54):
she goes on 60 Minutes?
I actually thought thingswere going pretty well.
We could argue that she.
I guess maybe what I would say is itbe that became an issue that got picked
up not only by the mainstream media,but by the niche media also,
because I was hearing it on,you know, conservative Outlets.

(01:25:15):
Why won't she go on?
Why won't she have a news conference andthat kind of thing?
So, my only hesitance onthey should just completely
ignore these people from hereon is that it becomes an issue.
And that actually seems to still getpicked up across these platforms.
Otherwise, also Doug's thing,you know the answer.
Everybody now is talking about connectedtelevision and getting your advertisements

(01:25:39):
in the streaming system andthe streaming platforms.
I'm dubious about how well that worked.
I got a Netflix accountwhere my kids are still.
If Netflix people are here,please don't listen to this.
Still free riding off of my account.
So I have the most complex, bizarrealgorithm because it's got my wife's,
my daughter's, my son's, andmy interests all bound up in it.
I got the weirdest politicaladvertisements this last cycle.

(01:26:02):
But that's the next train.
It's a little cheaper thanbroadcast advertising.
I don't know.

Darren, we are supposed to go on C-SPAN, so
if you're investigated by Netflix,do not blame [LAUGH] Us.

>> Daron Shaw (01:26:20):
I think they're onto the scam in the Shaw household anyway.

Okay, so we have time for hopefully,
at least one more question.
It may be the final question,depending on how long the answers are.
So a question from Mike Liverightis whether there's
a possibility to elect more moderates.
He's not looking to have a third party,but

(01:26:44):
he'd like to have a way forsome individual districts to vote for
representatives who are more willingto work on compromise than at
least it seems the representatives thatare being elected today are willing to do.
Very short answers [LAUGH].

I wanna say that I think the future is bright for moderates, but
I guess I mean that ina very particular way.
The part of what I think isgoing on with the challenge for
the Democratic Party that wewere just bantering about
a moment ago is that onaverage in the country.

(01:27:27):
It seems like people are sort ofcenterish, if not kind of center,
maybe leaning whitish, and especially onthese new issues that are confronting us.
And so if parties want to win elections,they got to go where the voters are.
And that, to me, is why I thinkthe future may be bright for,

(01:27:49):
you know, nationally speaking formoderate candidates.
On the other hand, it may not bethe parties want to win elections,
but they also.
Also have these policy goals that are notcentrish, and so that's the challenge.
But I think that we should be ableto see moderate candidates emerging.

(01:28:13):
They have to want to run, and yourcolleague Andy hall has written a great
book about that, why don't moremoderates actually run for office?
So they have to want to run,but I think if they do run,
there are voters there who will,who will vote for them.

>> David Brady (01:28:31):
I think that overtime, so if you look at the abolitionist movement,
the abolitionist movement hadvery little success politically.
But then when Republicans like Lincoln andothers put together and said free men,
free soil, free labor,that was a policy that could appear,
you could get your goal, butit was a slogan that appealed to people.

(01:28:55):
Same with Bill Clinton whenhe founded his movement.
To say the reason we're losingelections is we're too far to the left,
I have to say that is the waythat things get solved.
But when I look out there, I don't seethat in either party at this point.

Doug or Darren, did you wanna weigh in or
we're now narrowing in.
We have a lot of excellent questions here,which we unfortunately can't get.
I see that some of the panelists are veryresponsibly, it's not an obligation
on their part, but responding inthe chat to some of the questions.

(01:29:35):
And so we appreciate the extra credit and
the hard work cuz thereare more great questions here.
Thanks for this terrific panel.
We hope to all of our panelists,particularly to our guests for
coming into Stanford,at least virtually, and
to our Stanford Hoover fellows andStanford Faculty for joining us today.

(01:29:58):
Please come back on January 14th.
We'll pick up on Doug's point aboutelections and trust in elections and
all the efforts that at REI andHoover, Justin Grimmer and
Ben Ginsburg have been doingto help build that trust.

>> Eryn Tillman (01:30:14):
Thank you, Brandice.
Especially thanks to our panel,Dave, Doug, Darren and Lynn,
it's been a great conversation.
We appreciate our co sponsors,the center on Democracy, Development and
Rule of Law and the Institute forResearch and Social Sciences.
Thanks to the audience for great questionsand for all of those behind the scenes

(01:30:35):
that help make the event run smoothly,our events team.
This recording will be available on theHoover event webpage in the next few days.
And we encourage all attendees tovisit the series webpage to access
recordings of previous webinars andsubscribe to our newsletter to
receive updates on upcoming winter andspring webinar offerings.

(01:30:57):
We'll put the link in the chat, and wehope you have a wonderful rest of the day.
Thanks for joining.[MUSIC]

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