These Political Scientists Surveyed 500,000 Voters. Here Are Their Unnerving Conclusions.

How does the popularity of a president’s policies impact his or her party’s electoral chances? Why have Latinos — and other voters of color — swung toward the Republican Party in recent years? How does the state of the economy influence how people vote, and which economic metrics in particular matter most? We can’t answer those questions yet for 2022. But we can look at previous elections for insights into how things could play out. John Sides and Lynn Vavreck — political scientists at Vanderbilt and U. C. L. A., respectively — have routinely written some of the most comprehensive analyses of American presidential contests. Their new book, “The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy” — written with Chris Tausanovitch — is no exception. The book’s findings are built on top of numerous layers of data and analysis, including a massive survey project that involved interviewing around 500,000 Americans between July 2019 and January 2021. We discuss the core questions of 2020: How did Donald Trump come so close to winning? Why did Latinos swing toward Republicans? What role did Black Lives Matter protests have on the outcome? How did the strange Covid economy of 2020 affect the election results? And of course, what does all of this portend for the midterm elections in November? Mentioned: “Polarization and State Legislative Elections” by Cassandra Handan-Nader, Andrew C. W. Myers and Andrew B. Hall Identity Crisis by John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck “Losers’ Consent” by Christopher J. Anderson, André Blais, Shaun Bowler, Todd Donovan and Ola Listhaug Book Recommendations: The Increasingly United States by Daniel J. Hopkins Groundbreakers by Elizabeth McKenna and Hahrie Han The Loud Minority by Daniel Q. Gillion Rock Me on the Water by Ronald Brownstein State of Terror by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny “Bono Is Still Trying to Figure Out U2 and Himself” by David Marchese Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. (And if you're reaching out to recommend a guest, please write “Guest Suggestion" in the subject line.) You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  We are not far from an election. And so I want to begin today's episode with a warning. Elections receive the most attention, the most analysis, when we know the least about them. You can see it right now with 2022. Every new poll is a news story, every tick up of the forecast or tick down of the betting markets. But you also see it in the immediate aftermath. People want to know what happened in the election at a really deep granular level, 48 hours after the vote, maybe sooner. But in most cases, we really don't know what happened then. Maybe we know who won, depending on how fast the votes got counted. But it takes time to collate the data and run the numbers and verify the voter files

• 1:07Ezra Klein?

  to see what this subgroup or that group did. So we often don't know really what happened on a deep level for some time. But we do eventually get a clearer picture. It just takes a minute. And after the past three presidential elections, the political scientist John Sides and Lynn Baverick, working with co-authors, have been trying to assemble just that kind of picture. It's taken them a couple of years each time. So a lot of people have moved on by the time they released their book. But I've found each one of these really detailed data-rich look backs completely invaluable. Their latest book, co-authored with Chris Tausanovitch, just came out. It's called The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge

• 1:48Ezra Klein?

  to American Democracy. And I would say this one is more than a detailed analysis of the 2020 election. This one is really a model of how American politics is working right now at this point in our history. And in particular, it's a model that pits two opposing forces against each other. Calcification, the ways in which our political preferences have become more fixed and less movable, for reasons you'll hear about in this conversation. And that's made voters far more predictable and less willing to switch parties or ticket split. And parity, the reality that the parties are very, very closely matched in power, very competitive in elections. So extremely small shifts in voter turnout or preferences can radically reshape the direction of the country. And it's really worth lingering,

• 2:31Ezra Klein?

  and you'll hear it in this conversation, on how weird this is. On the one hand, almost nobody is changing their vote. We have maybe never had a period in American politics where politicians have this little to fear from voters, where politicians have this little accountability. But on the other hand, because a shift of a half percentage point of the electorate, or two points in the electorate can completely change who controls Washington, there's actually a lot of tumble in our elections, and very small mistakes can have a very, very big impact. But the book is more than that. As Sides and Tisonovich and Baverick developed this theory, they look at a lot of what we thought we knew about 2020 through the data we've been able to assemble over the past couple

• 3:14Ezra Klein?

  of years, the role of COVID, of the George Floyd protests, of the economy, of the actual policy decisions Donald Trump made and more. And I think a more realistic understanding of what happened in 2020 is going to prove a better guide to 2022 than most of what we currently think we know, or are being told. And so I asked John Sides and Lynn Baverick to join me on the show to walk through it all. As always, my email for guest suggestions, for feedback, for things we should watch, or hear, or read, [email protected].

• 3:49Ezra Klein?

  John Sides, Lynn Baverick, welcome to the show. Thanks. Thank you very much, Ezra. So the core tension of this book is that 2020 is this wild, extraordinary year. Donald Trump, COVID, crazy economic numbers, the George Floyd protests. I covered this period. It was an unbelievably intense period.

• 4:14Ezra Klein?

  For us to get functionally the same result we got in 2016 with a bit of change on the margin. In the book, you all talk about this as a calcified politics. Tell me about this idea of calcification.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, the central challenge of the book is the one that you just identify, that 2020 is a remarkable year on almost any dimension that you can think of, and yet it is basically a replay of 2016. How does that happen? And as we started researching, we draw on more than 500,000 interviews that we conducted as a part of this large data collection called Nationscape. We were in the field every week interviewing 6,000 people for 87 weeks. And we thought, well, maybe something interesting will happen. And we got the most interesting

• 5:06Speaker 01

  things you could imagine, and, you know, nothing changed. And so that led us to this idea that you mentioned, calcification. And just like it does in the human body, calcification makes our politics rigid and inflexible. And it is a long time in the making. There are a number of components to it, which I hope we'll get to talk about a little bit as we spend time together. But mostly, you can think of this as a long sorting and reshuffling of people into the parties. Within parties, people are more alike than ever. And between the parties, there's more distance than ever. And then, more recently, we have shifted

• 5:50Speaker 01

  the dimension of conflict that we're fighting over from the New Deal sorts of issues and on to identity-inflected issues, which are very divisive and very personal. And then, the last component, Democrats and Republicans are in rough balance in the electorate. And you mash all that together, and you get this state of politics that despite what's happening around us, people know what kind of world they want to live in, and they don't want to live in the other side's world.

• 6:22Ezra Klein?

  I want to pull out that last piece here, John, because I think of these as the two fundamental forces in opposition in your book, in opposition in our politics. So you have calcification. People are rarely switching sides, even when really extraordinary things are going on. But then you have parity. So you might imagine calcification would make a politics where nothing changes, but parity makes a politics where things are changing really dramatically all the time. So, so tell me about parity between the parties.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Sure, you can see that in a couple of different ways. You know, the large democratic majorities of the post-New Deal era have just shrunk over time. And at the national level now, it's roughly even. You can also see that in the way that Congress is configured. We cite a book by the political scientist Francis Lee called Insecure Majorities, which points out that whether we're looking at the White House, at the House, or at the Senate, control is up for grabs in almost every election, the same way both chambers are up for grabs in 2022. So as a consequence, you have very small shifts from election to election in what voters are doing, but you might get very big shifts in which party is in power

• 7:36Speaker 02

  because the balance of power is so narrowly divided. And in fact, in some ways, we think that this partisan parity probably makes calcification even more likely because if you think that you have a chance as a party of regaining power two years away, there's not much incentive for you after you've lost a presidential election, let's say, to try to rethink the party's image, to rebrand, to have that kind of self-reflective process that you saw, for example, the Republicans have after they lost in 2012. In 2020, they just didn't do it. There was no autopsy, there was no sort of big party conversation,

• 8:19Speaker 02

  hair pulling, hand wringing. And that makes sense if you think, well, we probably take that Congress back in 2022. So when parties don't change themselves, there's very little that would provoke voters to change. And so you end up even more calcified than you otherwise would be.

• 8:36Ezra Klein?

  So I'm a big fan of that Francis Lee book, and I want to draw out some of its logic here for this conversation. So one of the things that she argues, and I think shows, is that if parties are structured such that we have a majority party and a minority party that seem pretty stable, which we've had in many periods in American politics. I mean, Democrats controlled the House for about 40 years. At one point, Republicans were very dominant in the post-Senile War era. Then it gives the minority party an incentive to cooperate because the only likely effect you're going to have on policy on the country is you're having good relationships with the members of the majority party, getting them to put your amendments in bills, getting them to get your input on bills. But if you think you can win every time,

• 9:21Ezra Klein?

  if you think you can make the majority the minority and you can take their power, then the incentive structure flips not just to competition, but I would go all the way to say to sabotage, that it is in your interest to make the majority party fail in their ability to govern. And that we've been in for much of American politics in the first scenario, where you had this sort of sun and moon party for different periods. And now we're in the parity scenario where you have a constant reason for the minority party to try to push the majority party and to some degree the country off the cliff. So one thing I think embedded in there is that the Republican Democratic Parties we

• 10:01Ezra Klein?

  have today are not the ones we had 15 years ago, 30 years ago, 70 years ago, 100 years ago. And I think this is pretty easy to miss. The stability of their names makes it sound like what we are describing in politics is more similar era to era than it actually is. You all have a really striking chart in the book in which you show voters answer to the question, do you perceive major differences between the parties? And in 1952, only 50% did. Only half of voters thought there was a major difference between Democrats and Republicans. By 2020, it was 90%. Lynn, tell me a bit about that and how that changes politics.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  This is one of my favorite figures in our book. And it's one of these moments where you literally say to yourself, wow, we must have really messed something up. You know, because it's so striking to go from 50% to 90% over 70 years, but it's pretty linear. And

• 11:01Speaker 01

  The fact that nine out of 10 Americans today say they see important differences between what the Democrats offer and what the Republicans offer is all part of what we're talking about here, why it feels like we're so stuck. People understand, they get it. The other side is really far away. And the world they want to make is really different than the one I want to live in. And so, in the past, when that other world wasn't quite so different, especially on the things that were priorities for people, size and role of government, tax rate, how involved should the government be in my life?

• 11:43Speaker 01

  If the other side wasn't so far away on those kinds of things, maybe you could drift and in an election or two, or in a race or two, you could vote for the other side. But when you appreciate that the other side is very far away on issues that have to do with, does religion matter for you to come into this country? Who gets to call themselves an American? Who is going to be allowed to gain citizenship? What people are going to be able to do with their bodies? On those kinds of issues, when the other side is super far away, you're not leaning over to vote for them in an election or two. The stakes are much higher now.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  And this ability that the difference exists, that the distance exists, that people appreciate all of that, is all part of the story about why things feel so stuck right now.

• 12:34Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, the metaphor you all have, the imagery, is calcification. And I think it's a very good one. But I also think about it, and in my book on polarization, talk about it in terms of distance, that it's easier to jump over a crack than a chasm. Right? If you don't love what Democrats are doing, and you don't think Republicans are that different, then you might vote for them. If you don't love what Democrats are doing and you think Republicans are monsters who are going to take away reproductive choice from you, who are going to build a giant wall on the border, who are going to end elections in this country, or at least spare elections in this country, then the fact that you don't love Joe Biden may not change your voting intentions at all. And so, John, I think it's worth grounding

• 13:16Ezra Klein?

  this a little bit in one difference to maybe represent how this has changed. You all give a capsule history of the way immigration has gone from a functionally non-polarized issue between the parties to a hyper-polarized issue between the parties. Can you trace that story for me?

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Sure. As best we can tell with the available polling data, we can start the story around 1965, which is actually the passage of one of the major pieces of congressional legislation on immigration that completely reformed the system and really probably helped to produce the larger numbers of immigrants into this country that we've seen since. The poll that we looked at, which is from Gallup, has asked this question about what do you think the right level of immigration is? Do you think we should increase it? Or do you think we should decrease? Or do you think it should be kept at its present level? So just sort of three categories of response. You go back and you look at these polls from the 1960s into the 70s, into the 80s, into the 90s, and there's just very few

• 14:17Speaker 02

  differences between Republicans and Democrats in their views on this question. It's just not that polarized. And that mimics to some extent the way that elites were starting to vote in, especially in the 1965 bill. It just wasn't as polarizing an issue. In the 2000s, that starts to change. And people who lived through this era will start to remember, I think that there was certainly more pushback within the Republican Party, especially from more conservative Republicans, to different kinds of proposals to reform immigration. You know, George W. Bush tried to do this and failed, couldn't even convince his own party to get behind it. So you start to see a gap opening up where Democrats look more supportive of immigration, more willing to increase it.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  By the sort of eve of when Trump's going to become a presidential candidate, you're talking about like a difference of like, say, 30% of Democrats want to increase immigration, 11% of Republicans. So like, you know, a 19 or 20 percentage point gap. But that accelerates so quickly once Trump becomes president. In part, we argue this is Democrats reacting to Trump's agenda. So they are updating their views on immigration in the opposite direction that they think Trump is taking the country. And so the polarization on that question grows between 2015 and 2021, like over about five or six years, grows as much, if not more, than it did in the previous two decades. It's that quick. It's that fast. And that's the sort of shock that we think that the Trump presidency helped to create in the country

• 15:45Speaker 02

  in terms of moving people rapidly, not these longer term, we call them tectonic shifts that explain other kinds of polarization. When we're looking at identity, it's even more dramatic. And I should, by the way, to update that graph, if you looked at opinions since Biden's taken office, the percentage of Republicans who want to decrease immigration has increased quite sharply. And so there's even more difference between the two parties now than there was when we finished the book not that long ago.

• 16:15Ezra Klein?

  And you can really see this if you go back into the rhetoric. Democrats love putting out the Ronald Reagan quote where he says, "I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally." I mean, Democrats love Ronald Reagan on immigration. And at the same time, if you look at Bill Clinton's party platforms, they basically sound like the Republican Party under Donald Trump. I mean, they are very, very border enforcement focused. Even if you look at Barack Obama's 2008 platform, no Democrat nationally could get away with that platform today, given again, how focused it is on immigration as a threat, on how focused it is on enforcement. And so these things really change, and I'll use one other example that I talk about

• 17:00Ezra Klein?

  in my book on polarization, because it's nice to track this through one person. Joe Biden is a pro-life politician early in his career. He says that it is a very, very hard question for him, but he is against the Roe decision. Now Joe Biden is president while one where it was functionally gutted or appealed by the Supreme Court, and he is very, very pro-Roe. He is very, very pro-abortion rights. He is part of a Democratic Party that has tried to push in the Senate a very expansive abortion platform. And as such, like he himself just shows a shift towards, say, abortion being a relatively non-polarized issue. There's pro-life Democrats, pro-life Republicans, pro-choice Democrats, pro-choice Republicans

• 17:44Ezra Klein?

  to a very sharply polarized issue. And Lynn, I think this gets to something interesting, which is the role that negative polarization plays in all this. You all have some useful data about the ways in which people's feelings towards their own party haven't changed that much, but their feelings towards the other party have changed a lot. Could you talk through that?

• 18:05Speaker 01

  Sure. So, happening at the same time as people appreciating the big differences between the two parties is this emotional component where they also have more negative feelings toward the other side. They like the other side less than they ever have. They've always liked their side, maybe they like their side marginally a little more now, but they dislike the other side more than ever. And they think that people on the other side are unpatriotic and immoral, you know, relative to average Americans. And so there's this summary judgment about people like that, people in that group are

• 18:49Speaker 01

  just not good people. And, you know, that is not new, but it is happening more now than it has in the past.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Part of the challenge, by the way, with that Ezra is that these perceptions of the opposite side are basically exaggerated. When you ask Republicans to describe the sort of demographic composition of the Democratic Party, they thought that almost half of Democrats are black, which is about twice the actual number. And Democrats, for their part, they thought that almost half of the Republican Party was wealthy, made at least $250,000 a year, when in fact, of course, only about 2% of the Republican Party is that wealthy. So part of what's happening here, I mean Ezra, and like you can see this in the way I think that our political parties are presented to us in news coverage and elsewhere, is

• 19:41Speaker 02

  that when people are asked these questions about the political party, you know, the people that they tend to call to mind when they think about who is this political party I'm being asked to evaluate, they tend to be people who are more ideologically extreme, more activist, you know, maybe political leaders themselves to some extent. So this is where I think you get a lot of sort of self-reinforcing feedback loops that are very difficult to unpack, where, you know, you do have these real objective changes in who the political parties are, as Lynn was describing. Those are presented to voters magnified, perhaps even in the way that the news covers politics. And so voters develop these misconceptions, perhaps a little bit about who the opposite party is, if they were just to go and meet the other party, like voters, you know, at the coffee shop or in their daily life.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  And so then you face a world where stereotypes reinforce negative feelings, which reinforce stereotypes, and there's nothing, again, to really break these loops and to create something that is perhaps more reflective of reality, where we would acknowledge our differences, but perhaps would not accompany those differences with the same level of emotion.

• 20:46Ezra Klein?

  Okay, but I want to push back on this a little bit. So I'm familiar with a study where Democrats and Republicans are tremendous, numbers of them are rich, are old, are evangelical Christians. Republicans, tremendous numbers of Democrats are black, are LGBTQ, are union members. And it's a, it's a good and it's a funny study. But I'm not as comforted on this as you seem to be, and let me tell you why. I think that there is a way in which the tendency to see the more extreme wing of the other party ends up strengthening that wing and making the other party more like what you think they are. I mean, the media, and in particular, social media, is an important mediating force here.

• 21:29Ezra Klein?

  So attention is a big part of politics now. You all focus in your 2016 book, I think, much more on Donald Trump's ability to get through the primary because he dominates attention so fully. But what generates attention, as Trump understands, is controversy, is outrageousness, is extremism. And because those kinds of figures and those kinds of comments and actions get a lot of attention from the other side, they get a lot of airtime, they get a lot of social media algorithmic lift, and those kinds of politicians become more potent. I don't think you can look at Republicans now and not think that they all, that a lot of the ambitious ones believe they need to speak more and more and more like Donald

• 22:14Ezra Klein?

  Trump to be a national figure. So you look at both, you know, ones who maybe are coming up like a J.D. Vance, or you look at some who have been there for a long time, like a Ted Cruz. And there is a tendency for Republicans to sound more and more just like Donald Trump. At the same time, I think it's been well remarked, and it's true, that there's been a very fast move on Democrats to the policy left. I mean, Joe Biden in 2020 is far to the left of Barack Obama in 2016 or 2008. And Joe Biden was understood as to Barack Obama's right when he was brought on board. But Joe Biden was working very, very, very hard to win over not just supporters of Bernie Sanders, but a younger part of the party that certainly his staff believed was more

• 22:58Ezra Klein?

  in line with an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with a, you know, Sunrise Movement, Varshini Prakash. People like that were on Joe Biden's transition kind of coalition committees, that sort of set of committees he created to build bridges to the Sanders side of the party once he had won the primary. And so I do think there's very much a way in which the politicians who are attentionally dominant are the ones who create more conflict with the other side. And that in being attentionally dominant, they develop influence and then others in the party don't necessarily go all the way to where they are, but they do have to grapple with that influence. And that either means coalitions, it means concessions, it means mimicry. I mean, I think we see that all over.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  So I think that this is really complicated. And the part that, you know, I want to sort of hone in on is, is what's driving that move in this example by Joe Biden, the people to the left of him in his party? And the point that I'll just bring up as we think about this is, a few minutes ago, John told the story about changes in immigration attitudes over time. And if you remember, those sort of start in the early 2000s and then they really kick up in 2015.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  And so in the electorate, attitudes are liberalizing among Democrats and not just on immigration, on lots of different identity-inflected issues. And so another plausible explanation is that those changes, and let's put a little sticky note here and say like, we have not really said a lot about what's causing them other than what John said, which is that they're a thermostatic response to, for example, Trump getting elected. But those changes could be producing both support for candidates like Bernie Sanders and the move of Joe Biden to the left because he's a politician who wants to win elections.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  And so I think it's slightly difficult to say that he's drawn to the left because those other candidates are there. All of those candidates are doing what they're doing and saying what they're saying because of changes that are happening in the electorate. And just because I know John wants to say this, some of those changes in the electorate are being driven by what elites are saying. That's absolutely also true. But in this case, it's Donald Trump who is the elite that people are reacting to.

• 25:36Ezra Klein?

  I don't think I disagree with that. But I think there were always, I mean, there's clearly been an increase in the number of, say, Democrats who self-identify as liberal. But there was always quite a few Democrats who were quite liberal. And the party was more able, through different ways, to keep boundaries on who spoke for it than it could in the era when Bernie Sanders, you know, following in the footsteps of candidates like Barack Obama, like Howard Dean, was able to use the internet to fundraise, to get attention, to drive media coverage. And the same thing for Donald Trump. I mean, again, you all have, I think, the best chapter on this in your 2016 book about how much Donald Trump was able to own the media coverage and how that allowed him to break into the party.

• 26:19Ezra Klein?

  But let me also open up the other side of this, which is, it is true that there are issues on which the parties maybe want to go further to the edges, but there are also issues where the parties are conflicted. And the hope for Democrats always has been that there are many, many Republicans who, if you ask them, they say, yeah, look, I want to raise taxes on rich people. I don't want to see Medicare cut. And there's always been this view that Democrats can peel those voters off. And John, you all have pretty interesting experiments in the book suggesting that the reason that keeps failing is that while Republican voters do say those things in surveys, they don't really care about them that much. Can you talk a bit about that, that question of prioritization?

• 27:03Speaker 02

  Sure, absolutely. This is one of the innovations of the NationScape survey project that Lynn was describing. Lynn and our co-author Krista Sonovich designed a set of experiments where Each respondent to the survey is presented with two sets of policy positions, maybe three or four positions in each set, and each position has its opposite, right, in the other set. So let's say the set that you got is, let's have a Green New Deal, let's have a border wall with Mexico, and let's raise the minimum wage. And then the other package is no Green New Deal, no border wall, and no minimum wage increase. So then the question is, which of those two do you prefer? So you have to make a trade-off, right? Because not, if you're a liberal, you're not getting what you want. I mean,

• 27:48Speaker 02

  you don't want a border wall, even though you might want to increase the minimum wage. So we've asked people to make these choices over and over again, and we randomly assign, like, which issues show up in each of the two packages, and they do this choice, you know, 10 different times every week of the survey. And so we're accumulating, like, all of these experimental results. And what you can back out of that is, how important is each issue? If that issue, that position, if increase the minimum wage is in the set, how much does that increase the likelihood that you are going to take that set, right? So it'll show you which are the most important issues. When we did this in these surveys, what pops to the top are issues like, do you want to impeach Donald Trump or not?

• 28:33Speaker 02

  And Republicans really don't want to impeach Trump, and they think that's the most important issue. Banning guns, having reparations for slavery, late-term abortions, building a border wall, those are the things that came to the top for Republicans. Much further down are the issues that you were describing, where you think, oh, there are some interesting liberal tendencies among some Republican voters. Isn't there a potential for some sort of bipartisan compromise on increasing taxes on the wealthy? No, because that's just simply not a high priority. We saw the same thing for Democrats, to a large extent. It was kind of the same issues that would pop to the top. It wasn't the stuff that oftentimes even the presidential candidates were talking about. It wasn't the agenda

• 29:14Speaker 02

  that was focused on the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, those kinds of policies. Again, it's not that those are unimportant, it's just that they don't rise to the top. So to some extent, our argument is that- That I think what helps keep the parties kind of stuck where they are is that not only do they have different views on lots of issues, but the issues that they care about the most are also the issues on which they have the largest disagreements.

• 29:38Ezra Klein?

  Lynn, let me ask you about the causality of that because you study messages and agenda setting in in politics and you talk a lot about the ways in which politicians decide what to emphasize. Is that because in this period, what is being emphasized are cleavages on impeachment, on guns, on abortion, on immigration? And if it was Bernie Sanders running against Mitt Romney, and they were arguing about economics all the time, it would be the economics issues that would dominate in these prioritization tests? Or do you think this is getting something that is deeper within the psyche of the electorate?

• 30:12Speaker 01

  I'm gonna cop out and say both of those things are true, Ezra, but I really mean that. I think that it definitely matters what the candidates are talking about because the issues that John mentioned that percolate to the top of this impact list are very Trump centric. And without him, those probably wouldn't be at the top of this list. At the same time, conditional on those issues having percolated to the top. And what that means really is a shifting off of fighting over New Deal issues, the dimension of the New Deal, right, a shifting

• 30:56Speaker 01

  to fighting over a new dimension. It's like we had a pie and we were fighting over it. We used to cut it horizontally. And now we've changed and we're cutting it vertically. So a new dimension of conflict. But now that we're cutting the pie vertically for Bernie Sanders and Mitt Romney to come along and say, hey, you know what?

• 31:18Speaker 01

  We're going to fight over Joe the plumber, like whether to raise taxes on small businesses. That's not going to be enough to take us back to cutting horizontally. And so in some sense, there's an interaction between what is out there in the landscape and what people are already talking about and what public opinion is and what people care enough about for you to leverage. And that's Trump in 2015 figuring that out. There's an interaction between all of that and what the candidates go on to say. I always like to tell people in 2012, John and I went around and followed a bunch of candidates around and we heard Newt Gingrich say over and over again, you know, talking about colonizing the moon. We're going to go to the moon. We're going to go to the moon.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  And every rally, you know, as many times as he said that, he was not able to reorient the debate in 2012 around whether we should colonize the moon. It's not enough to just say it. It has to interact with what's in the ether.

• 32:37Ezra Klein?

  Let's then talk about some of the, the issues and the events that at least feel to us like they dominated in 2020. And I want to begin by talking about COVID. You have a really interesting analysis in the book comparing county level COVID deaths to 2020 voting patterns. Tell me a little bit about what I found.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  We went looking for that correlation because there has been this research over time that's identified how local conditions can lead voters to punish incumbents, maybe even unfairly because it's not like incumbents are necessarily always creating these negative circumstances. So people have looked at like war casualties at the local level and do voters punish the incumbent president when more American soldiers from their communities are dying in war? And so COVID seemed like a natural analog to that. But what we found was not at all what you would expect. And certainly, it's not what the Biden campaign was hoping.

• 33:39Speaker 02

  They were, I think they wanted to prosecute the case that Trump had mismanaged the pandemic. And so the responsibility for these many illnesses and deaths, you know, belonged to him. And so you would expect places that had more of these deaths to have more support for Biden, less support for Trump. If anything, it was the opposite. The places that had larger numbers of COVID deaths per capita actually were probably a little bit more likely to vote for Trump, even taking account of how they had voted in 2016. Now, we're careful in the book to say, we don't think this is probably a direct causation. We think that probably what is true is that there are other aspects of those places that led them to become a little bit more pro-Trump.

• 34:22Speaker 02

  Those also happen to be places that had a larger number of COVID deaths for a variety of reasons. But still, it tells you the pandemic itself is not having that kind of punishing effect on the incumbent. There may be other ways in which Trump was hurt by the pandemic, but it's not a direct correlation between local COVID deaths and how people voted.

• 34:43Ezra Klein?

  So I find this really astonishing. Lynn, when I wrote my book on polarization, as you know, I have a lot in there about political psychology and the way much of politics is an abstraction, right? You know, what should we think about currency manipulation in China? Or what should we think about, you know, the proper policy towards Russia? Or what should we think about what's going on in the broad global climate and how that will change in the future? But one of the things I believed nevertheless was that the less abstract policy becomes and more tangible it becomes, the more people will vote on those outcomes. So, you know, if you get a direct check from the government, that is very different than a kind of vague sense of macroeconomic management.

• 35:28Ezra Klein?

  And if your friends and neighbors and family are dying from a pandemic, that that is the kind of thing that will break through political polarization. And that's not what we see. Why do you think it's not what we see?

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is another one of these astonishing moments of 2020 data analysis. And I think that the best way that we can describe it is to say that all of these moments in 2020 and 2021 that are unexpected and shocking, COVID, the murder of George Floyd, the social justice movement that follows, the Capitol insurrection, these unexpected events in 2020 get subsumed by this new dimension of conflict, this identity dimension.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  And some of that is because Donald Trump, for COVID, goes out. For the first three weeks or so, there is partisan unity on COVID mitigation. Everybody is staying home largely because they have to, but washing their hands more, canceling travel, both parties, lots of support for COVID mitigation. Trump sort of quickly, I think, figures out that this is bad for me. If the economy doesn't come back, I lose. And so he goes out and says, hey, liberate Michigan, take your state back. Tell your governors you want to go back to work. And in that moment,

• 37:08Speaker 01

  when he makes COVID about your personal rights to be able to work, it reorients right into this new dimension of conflict. And the same thing is going to happen with the murder of George Floyd and the Capitol insurrection. There are brief moments of unity, followed just very quickly by the separation that already exists. And that's how powerful the separation between the parties and the parity in the electorate. That's how powerful calcification is.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  There's a deep irony in that, by the way, Ezra, as far as Trump's concerned, because it's absolutely true that when his rhetoric changes between March and April 2020, Republican support for these kinds of restrictions, like travel restrictions or closing certain businesses, starts to decline, following along with what he says. The irony is that the other thing that follows along is his popularity starts to decline. You know, he had a brief moment when he started taking the pandemic more seriously in March. His approval rating actually crept up a few notches, which is not typical for him. But then it comes back down and barely recovers by the end of the fall campaign. And when we compared Trump to other world leaders, we compared him to approval ratings of all the US governors.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  I mean, one of the things that emerges is that for a lot of politicians, the pandemic actually becomes a political opportunity. They're able to leverage that crisis to enhance their own political fortunes, which is, of course, a typical pattern in lots of different kinds of crises. And so Trump, in some sense, was presented with a chance, and all he probably needed to do was just continue to maintain that level of concern and seriousness. And it might not even have mattered how bad the pandemic got. I mean, there were certainly politicians like Andrew Cuomo in New York, who benefited politically, even as their state was experiencing some of the worst parts of the outbreak early on. So for us, I think, you know, one of the interesting things about COVID is it gets

• 39:11Speaker 02

  subsumed into these partisan battles, as Lynn was saying. And when there was a moment for Trump to act differently, it was clear it might have helped him politically, but ultimately, he wasn't able to follow through and continue in that vein. And at the end of the day, that might have been ultimately what helped keep him from leveraging the pandemic to actually maybe even get reelected.

• 39:35Ezra Klein?

  Well, this seems like a good place to see the ways in which calcification and parity operate against each other. So I think one way of reading the story, to me, the correct depressing way, is almost a lull, nothing matters, right? You can govern almost as badly as you want, and it will not do you very much damage. But because the parties are so closely matched, because the election is so close in key battleground states, Lynn, You end up with a situation where very, very small shifts, right? Just doing a good enough job to get another point in the polls, right? Which is nothing in terms of public opinion.

• 40:18Ezra Klein?

  Might have been enough for Donald Trump to win the election. So maybe actually how he governed really, really mattered, even though it only mattered to a few people.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  It's, I think even, I don't want to say more anxiety provoking than that, but sort of the way I think about this is that it's not that there are no swing voters out there, persuadable voters. Of course there are. There are probably fewer of them than there have been in the past. But those voters who are undecided, especially in an era where nine out of 10 people can see important differences between the parties. Voters who are undecided are less interested in politics. They pay less attention. They have a harder time making sense of the political world in a partisan way. And all of that means that the kinds of stuff you just talked about, you know, what, what has this party done for me lately?

• 41:11Speaker 01

  How's the country doing generally? Is the economy growing or shrinking? These sorts of moments where you say, am I better off than I, I was four years ago? Reward the incumbent party or punish it? Those kinds of judgments, those are what these swing voters are relying on. And worse yet is that elections are on such a knife's edge that almost anything can nudge enough voters one way or the other. And that is one of the weird things about this moment that we're in is all this stickiness doesn't mean the same party's always winning.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  It means we're stuck on the knife's edge and we're just going to have big changes in policy and in the world we're living in, depending on which way the elections lean.

• 41:58Ezra Klein?

  Well, what's extraordinarily frustrating to me about that, John, is that you want politics to have larger forces of accountability than that. I mean, in many ways, Donald Trump as a politician does almost everything he can to turn the electorate against him. You all track how his personal comportment is quite unpopular, the way he insults people, his erraticness. A lot of Republicans who vote for him, or even say they they support him for president and the job he's doing, they don't really like or admire him personally. But you might think, oh, okay, then what's going on with Donald Trump is he's a ill-tempered, competent executive, right? Like a like a CEO you don't like, but you gotta admit

• 42:43Ezra Klein?

  the guy's doing a good job and, you know, and running things efficiently. But not only do people not think that, but you all have evidence in the book that Trump's policies, the things he actually pushed as opposed to the things he would sometimes talk about doing, were very unpopular. His his major legislation was less popular than the policies of of really any president in the last 30 plus years. And then in addition, he does a terrible job, I think broadly, I think this is broadly agreed upon, managing COVID, and yet ends up like a hair's breadth from winning reelection. So I guess my question here is, how do you think about that? And was there a delta for Trump? If if Trump

• 43:24Ezra Klein?

  had pursued popular policies, if he had done popular executive actions as opposed to unpopular ones, you know, could he have been a like a behemoth of a politician?

• 43:36Speaker 02

  It's less clear to me that popular policies have a sort of direct relationship to how popular a politician is. I would be perhaps a little bit more persuaded if there is evidence that popular policies had clearly helped Biden, because he did pursue some that polled better than many of the ones that Trump pursued initially and and his other kind of legislative priorities, like repealing Obamacare or passing this tax cut. And yet Biden's approval rating can, you know, slumped in his first months in office despite these popular policies. I mean, there's a sort of an argument that it would have slumped even more if he hadn't passed these policies, but I don't know. That strikes me as hard to

• 44:20Speaker 02

  assess. So ultimately, we kind of come away with a sense that it's not popular policies that are probably the ticket. I mean, I do think there was the potential for more competent management, or at least the ability to signal some degree of care incompetence with regard to the pandemic could have helped Trump. Even a few percentage points increase in his approval rating might admit the difference between winning and losing, given how closely divided we were and the fact that, you know, Republicans maintained a little bit of an electoral college advantage. So just Trump's ability to shrink Biden's share of the national popular vote by a few points would be enough, perhaps, to keep him back in the White House. So yeah, I don't think the, I think there are, the changing incentives for politicians, I guess, it depends a little bit on how they want to think about it. I mean, you could say, oh,

• 45:05Speaker 02

  it doesn't matter what I do. You know, most of my party is going to stick with me through thick and thin. But on the other hand, if the remaining couple of points of vote share that you need to actually win the election does hinge, at least in part, on how well you're doing in office, that might give you, at least in theory, some incentive to do it differently. If I were Republicans looking at Trump, I would say, here's a guy who is chronically unpopular, couldn't do much to help himself, kept getting in his own way, and he lost, he lost the election. So there's maybe some comfort in the fact that the election was as close as it was, but it's a pretty cold comfort, because ultimately, he doesn't win.

• 45:44Ezra Klein?

  Let me ask you something about that, John. Since the election, there's been a debate in the Democratic Party over what gets called now populism. In some ways, I think it's almost better understood as a kind of policy literalism. So David Shor, the Democratic kind of pollster and strategist, is part of this debate. My friend, Matthew Iglesias, who was on the show recently, he's part of this debate. And the argument is that

• 46:08Speaker 02

  What you do and say on policy is the central lever you have to affect how the electorate thinks of you. And Democrats have strayed too far from basically poll-tested policies is the way I think it's fair to put it. And in doing, they are giving up an advantage they could have. But this argument does depend quite centrally, I think, on whether or not the electorate is making decisions and shifting decisions based on policy. So how do you understand that? What have you thought watching the sort of populism or policy literalism debate roll on? I think the best evidence that we might have for populism is that there appears

• 46:47Speaker 02

  to be some penalty for extreme politicians when they go on to compete in the general election and then lose a little bit of vote share at the ballot box. That's a find that it comes mostly from down-ballot elections, not from presidential elections, where we don't have that many cases to examine. That's the best case, but I think there's two issues. One is that that penalty seems to be declining over time. There's a study by Andrew Hall and some co-authors that looked at this at the state legislative level and found that that sort of extremism penalty for being kind of out of step was much smaller now, essentially zero. And that's, I think, pretty indicative of what a calcified politics might look like. The second issue,

• 47:30Speaker 02

  I think, to me is it's one thing to say that, you know, don't be too extreme, but it's a little bit hard to sort of say, well, but then what exact position should you take? What is the value of having a more populist position on some issues versus less popular on other issues? Like, the exact recipe for success here, to me, remains a bit opaque.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  This question really captures my imagination on two levels, Ezra. One, that you just were talking about a moment ago, about social media and the caricatures that are developed of each of the parties because of the way that people who are in the tails at the sort of edges of the party get covered. And so I think two things can be true. If you're someone who is, let's say, more liberal than the average member of your party or more conservative than. You want the world to be different than it is, and you know you're not going to get the thing that you want, that very, very liberal outcome. So part of what you're doing, though, is trying to pull the party toward you,

• 48:34Speaker 01

  a little farther left, a little farther right. Without you, it might stay at the status quo, right where it is. So you're trying to pull the party to the edge, knowing you're not going to get it all the way there. But while you're doing that, you're saying these things that are so different than what other members of the party are saying. You get all this coverage, and then voters on the other side caricature the whole party that way. And this sort of was all happening at the same time. And now, all of a sudden, it seems like voters on one side think everyone on the other side is on the edge. And so I think part of the populism idea is, boy, if we could stop talking like that, the other side wouldn't caricature our side that way,

• 49:17Speaker 01

  and we might be able to get some of those swing voters in the middle.

• 49:21Ezra Klein?

  The epicenter of this debate, Lynn, really, I think, comes out of the George Floyd moment. The protests, the way the Democratic Party changes rhetoric and, in some cases, policies after that, what people will and won't say about violent protesters. Tell me a bit about what you all found when you looked at what the protest did and what policies like "defund the police" ended up doing or not doing in your data.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Boy, there's a lot to say about that moment in 2020. And here, we had the help of our previous co-author, Michael Tesler, to help us work through all of this. And we did something similar to what we did with COVID. We looked at the local level, at county levels, at the number of events, protests, that were held in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. And we tried to just map that on to voting behavior in those counties, the same way we did with local COVID deaths. And we got the same basic result that the pattern, if there is one, it is not overwhelming. It is not clear.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  And, you know, we even tried to break down the protests, violent, nonviolent. And then from what part did the violence emerge? From law enforcement or from protesters? And we pushed as hard as we possibly could on those data and really found the same thing we found with COVID deaths, basically no effect of those events on vote choice. And again, if there was any, it might have been that Biden picked up slightly, but with all those same caveats that John gave about COVID, that that could be for other reasons as well.

• 51:09Ezra Klein?

  One of the striking things about about that finding, where counties that had more violent protests, if anything, moved a little bit more towards Joe Biden, for whatever reason, is really at the epicenter of a lot of the populism fights and the fights about how the Democratic Party is changing, was this moment where David Shor, who at that point was working for Civis, a Democratic consultancy, he tweets out a political science paper by Omar Wasso, who shows that in 19, I think it's 68, if I'm not wrong, violent protests end up taking away from Hubert Humphrey's vote share to a degree that might have been enough that it elected Richard Nixon. And Shor, like there's a, people yelled at him on Twitter,

• 51:53Ezra Klein?

  and then he gets fired and somewhat martyred for this. And I think becomes like a, like a bigger voice in the party. And also this episode, I think reasonably, in my view, gets looked at as a Democratic Party that doesn't even want to hear that there might be things it could say or things it could do that would be unpopular if they find that advice uncongenial. But what's interesting about this, putting aside what happened to Shore, is that what you find is Wasso's data no longer holds. What happened in 1968 doesn't happen here, which is a pretty interesting finding, John.

• 52:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's actually consistent with some other research that's been done, looking at the effects of, well, one study of the Rodney King riots that occurred in Los Angeles in 1992, and other work that's looked at the effects of other kinds of racial justice protests, such as those affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement prior to George Floyd's murder. Those studies have actually found that if there are political consequences or partisan consequences, they might be actually better for Democrats, unlike what happened in 1968. So I think our findings about the effects of the local racial justice protests in the summer of 2020 are in line with those studies.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  And I think the empirical evidence is a little more complex than just what was true in 1968. I also think part of the challenge here in terms of thinking about the impact of Floyd's murder and the protests gets back to the same type of partisan-driven dynamics we were discussing earlier. In the populism debate, the premise is that if you take an unpopular position, you are pushed toward the other party and away from the party taking the unpopular position. Well, one of the things that we could track with our data is people's views of the police and people's views of the Black Lives Matter movement. And we can track that over time. We can track that among the same people we interviewed, both in 2016 and in 2020.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  And by far, the prevailing pattern is one of additional partisan polarization, where Democrats come to have a less favorable view of the police and a more favorable view of Black Lives Matter. And the opposite's true for Republicans.

• 54:05Speaker 02

  That's mostly because partisans are updating their views of the police and the movement. It's not because people are changing their partisanship. So, again, what we lack, what would really nail this down, would be if we had had a question about policing policy, you know, four years ago or five years ago, then we really could attract these changes. We don't have that. So, we're very careful to acknowledge the limitations of that evidence. But I think we lose sight a little bit if we only assume that the causal arrow goes in one direction without sort of stopping to think about how people's pre-existing partisanship might ultimately drive the attitudes they form in reaction to events like Fuller's murder.

• 54:44Ezra Klein?

  I always think this is an important and subtle weirdness that we don't talk about enough, Lynn, which is, I think we're used to the idea that race and our views on race structure our politics. And I'm not saying that isn't true. But we seem to see over the last like 20 years, a lot of evidence that our politics, our partisan identity, our views on politicians, ends up structuring our views on race and racial issues.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Both things are definitely true. And Michael Tesler, who is our co-author on Identity Crisis, the 2016 book, really likes to remind us that the election of Barack Obama, that election did more to clarify for people how race and partisanship map onto one another, and not demographically, policies supporting Black Americans, for example. Policies and partisanship map onto one another. That election did more to clarify that than, for example, before 2008, the differences between people being able to sort the parties on

• 55:59Speaker 01

  their racial policies, the difference between non-college educated and college educated people, that gap closed when Barack Obama was elected. And just that event helped people figure things out. So, yes, I think both things are true, and it would be silly to think otherwise.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  But so there's something then weird that happens in the outcome of the 2020 election, because I think if you don't know what the vote ends up looking like, and you hear this conversation, you'll think, oh, okay.

• 56:30Ezra Klein?

  So, politics is polarizing and centering deep divisions around issues of race and other kinds of identities. You have a huge racial reckoning, followed by protests, both nonviolent and violent. Surprisingly, those protests are pushing people a little bit in the cities where they happen, maybe towards Joe Biden. That's interesting. Wow, it looks like we're going to have yet more racial polarization in the outcome here. And if Joe Biden, you know, does better, it'll be because he does better among black voters, among Latino voters, among Asian American voters. And that is not at all what happens. We have racial depolarization. Joe Biden does better among white voters. Donald Trump does better among black, Hispanic and Asian voters.

• 57:14Ezra Klein?

  John, why? And how does that outcome fit with this broader story you're telling?

• 57:19Speaker 02

  We think there's one simple explanation, which is that over Trump's presidency, he's perceived to be more conservative than he was when he was initially elected. At the same time, illustrating what you described earlier, Biden is perceived as more liberal than Clinton was in 2016. And we have several different sets of analysis that illustrate these differences in people's perceptions. So, the natural thing you would expect then is that people's own ideological proclivities, whether they think of themselves as conservative or moderate or liberal, should also therefore have a larger effect in 2020 than they did in 2016, simply because the choices in their minds were even clearer. And that's exactly what we find.

• 58:05Speaker 02

  Trump does better among conservatives, Biden does better among liberals. But importantly, that is true not just among voters overall, but among white voters, black voters, Asian American voters, Latino voters, every group. It's the one, I think, explanation that can help us account for these surprising shifts in these different racial groups, without having to make recourse explanations that are like specific to individual groups. For example, after the election, you saw explanations that were specific to Cuban Americans, Venezuelan Americans, Puerto Rican Americans, Mexican Americans. All of these different groups, I really think the explanation comes down to yet more

• 58:44Speaker 02

  manifestation of sort of how partisans are increasingly better sorted in terms of their ideologies. What that meant for Trump is that he could win enough votes among moderate or conservative leaning members of these minority and racial and ethnic groups to offset his losses and ultimately do a little bit better.

• 59:02Ezra Klein?

  But I want to push you all on this because there's something about this story that doesn't quite make sense. We've seen rising partisan polarization for some time. We've seen rising ideological sorting for some time, but this has not been a linear trend at all. Mitt Romney was understood to be conservative. George W. Bush was a conservative president. Barack Obama was liberal. You know, I could kind of keep going down this line and it's a pretty big shift that happens, I don't want to say all of a sudden in 2020, but, but happens in a very striking way in 2020. And so it feels like you need some answer for what changed because the phenomenon of conservative black voters disproportionately

• 59:44Ezra Klein?

  support Democrats has been around for a long time. The phenomenon of Republicans think they should be able to win a lot more Latino voters than they do because a lot of Latino voters are conservative. That's been around for a long time and it keeps not quite happening. But then all of a sudden in 2020 it does. So I feel like there needs to be some answer then for what it is that is unlocking racial groups to accord more to their ideological predilections than was true before. What's your explanation of, of that part?

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  I actually have nothing but a fairly speculative answer to this Ezra, because I think what you're, what I understand your question is saying is why did this happen between 2016 and 2020 and not earlier? Like, why did conservative Latinos, let's say, not move to the Republican Party earlier? Part of the challenge here is I just don't know that we have a really impressive, reliable time series on how Latino Americans have voted over time and to compare it. Stretching further back and we're really only comparing this snapshot of 2016 and 2020 in the book. Here's my speculative explanation, I think, is that one of the things that was true about the Trump era in particular, and you sort of talked about this earlier when we talked

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  about the news media, was just the extraordinary amount of attention that Trump got, just the amount of coverage of Trump and his presidency and the 2020 presidential campaign as a consequence. So part of me wonders, again, speculatively, if what we had in some sense was just a lot more information reaching voters that would have allowed them to realize, oh, given that I think of myself as a conservative, this is how I should vote. Maybe that's one thing that's true in addition to these changing perceptions of Trump. So that was maybe a unique feature of his presidency that would explain why the timing of these 2020 shifts occurred when it did. But I, that's me trying to think about what would distinguish the period between 2016

• 1:01:40Speaker 02

  and 2020 from these earlier episodes. And I don't know that I have a great explanation, but I, it has to be something about the information that voters were getting that enabled them to make these linkages in a way that they hadn't previously made them. So I'm looking external to the voter, I'm looking for what might have been different in the information environment in the run up to 2020.

• 1:01:59Ezra Klein?

  Well, another argument I've heard is that we have this really rising level of educational polarization. You all talk about it more briefly in the book, but it gets called the diploma divide. And I always think it's very unclear what education is standing in for here, like what it is getting at as a variable you're tracking, because I don't think what's happening is simply stuff you learned in school. Like, I don't think that's what's driving the divide. But there's an argument that the Democratic Party is becoming not just more liberal, while the Republican Party is becoming more conservative, because I think those are actually in many ways very complicated questions. But the Democratic Party in its self-presentation is becoming much more.

• 1:02:43Ezra Klein?

  Educated, cosmopolitan, and the Republican Party is becoming, I don't exactly know the right way to describe the vibe of Donald Trump. But when you talk about the amount of coverage Donald Trump gets, the kind of coverage he gets is a vibe coverage. Like, he doesn't like the way the country is changing. He's gonna fight for you. I mean, he's a populist. And, you know, one thing many people argue is that it's not really ideology that began changing here, but that conservative black voters, conservative Hispanic voters, they're not necessarily conservative because they have super strong views on taxes, or they might be because of views on abortion, but that there is also a sense of these other

• 1:03:23Ezra Klein?

  cultural and temperamental markers that Donald Trump casts an unusually clear signal on, compared to, say, a Mitt Romney, Barack Obama election, and that that's what's doing it. So I'd be curious, Lynn, if you have views on how you separate the idea of the sorting here happening by ideology versus by education, where you can also see it.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is really hard to figure out what that education measure is actually getting at conceptually. I 100% agree with you on that, and I think it's a really interesting question. But it's very hard for me to imagine that there are voters out there who don't want to build a wall, want dreamers to be able to become citizens, want abortion to be legal under certain circumstances, who look around at the candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and say, boy, but I really like that

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  he's a tough guy. I really like that he wants to make America great and put America first. It's very hard for me to imagine, instead of saying ideology versus education, just I like to say, you know, what kind of world do you want to live in? And if you want to live in that world without the wall and with legal abortion, saying, I'm going to trade those desires away because I really like that he's a patriot, at least sounds like one, that's very hard for me to believe that that's that's a mechanism that's driving vote choice.

• 1:05:06Ezra Klein?

  Well, let me ask you why that's hard for you to believe, because that seems to me to be, we've had this conversation throughout this discussion about this question of policy literalism, and also the ways causality can actually run not in the direction we think it is, right, what I want the world to be to the politician who wants the world to be that way, but from what the politician I like wants the world to be to now what I want the world to be. I think the wall is a pretty good example of of how that might work. I mean, I'm not super convinced that the wall is a major is such a major voting issue in towards the end of 2020. And one argument I've heard from people who study the Hispanic vote is that one thing that helps Donald Trump is actually that COVID knocks a lot of immigration issues away from being at the top of people's minds.

• 1:05:50Ezra Klein?

  But there's a Donald Trump wants to, you know, get the economy back and lockdowns and lockdowns are very hard on on lower wage workers who are disproportionately black and Hispanic. But also, there's a, you know, Donald Trump, to use the language you used, is a tough guy, is a Donald Trump has a certain way of looking at the world. And the wall and things like that are an expression of that. And people glom onto them, but they're almost metaphors, things like dreamers in the wall matter. But there's an old Bill Clinton comment that sometimes voters prefer a politician who's strong and wrong to one who is weak and right. And I don't know, I think it is a mistake to underestimate the degree to which temperament

• 1:06:35Ezra Klein?

  and vibes matter, particularly given how much data you two and your discipline has assembled over time on the way that we will ultimately rearrange our specific political views to accord to the politicians who, for whatever reason, we choose to like.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  Part of what's unique about this moment is

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  The real distinctiveness between the two parties in the kind of world they want to deliver to voters and the fact that voters see that. And so I think to say that statements about policies like the wall, like abortion, like immigration are metaphors, that's just not where we are at this moment in time. Those are things that the parties want to enact as legislation and those are going to change people's lives and people know that. That doesn't mean that the other thing you said isn't happening, that I don't really know what world I want to live in, I don't pay that much attention. I see this guy, I like him and he wants thing A, B, and C and so, okay, I'm going to be

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  like that too, that following the leader. But in this era where people see important differences and the parties are very clear about what they're offering, I think the set of people who are out there saying, boy, I don't really know a lot about this right now, I think that set is pretty small.

• 1:08:00Speaker 02

  Ezra, you started this question by asking what education means when we divide voters based on their formal education levels and compare them. What is that tapping into? In our book on 2016, we did this for white voters because that was the educational divide that people were really struck by. And we found that you could make that sharper difference between voters who have less or more formal education in 2016, you can make that difference go away compared to 2012 if you just took account of their views of Black Americans and immigrants.

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  So part of our argument there was that at least one thing for white voters that education is doing is it's proxying values and beliefs related to minority racial and ethnic groups, much more so than it was proxying their economic situations or their economic insecurity. The economic insecurity didn't play the same role when we tried to see if that was an explanation for this growing diploma divide. I think it gets more complicated when we're looking not just at educational divides among white Americans, but among black Americans, Latinos and others. And it seems plausible to me that there is a constellation of things that education captures here. I think some of them might be linked to policy issues, but policy issues sometimes

• 1:09:23Speaker 02

  are not policy issues. Policy issues are statements about groups and who you like or dislike. There are reservoirs of sentiment in lots of different racial and ethnic groups that are more or less hostile to these groups. You could also argue, I think, plausibly, I'm not, I'm not actually going to disagree with you that there is a symbolic nature to the way that politicians present themselves and govern, which, you know, we could call toughness, or we could link it to some other kinds of attributes. And it may be that some voters are attracted to that. So it's not in that case about, you know, oh, I, I learned what that politician wants to do in terms of legislation and I voted for the politician whose legislation I like better. It's really about hearing the politicians talk and perceiving them as, in terms of

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  their personas or their personalities. I think that's perfectly plausible. I think one of the, what you've hit upon really now is just one of the limitations of our research, ours and others, in terms of our ability to really nail down these factors. It's, it's pretty over determined because there are lots of ways in which, you know, Latinos who voted for Trump in 2020 are different from Latinos who didn't. And trying to figure out what was the key factor moving them, for example, is a really difficult thing to do. So that's actually not a really satisfying answer, but I think it's reflective of where we can identify the uncertainties in our knowledge and our evidence. And we try in these books to acknowledge where those, where those places are. And I think, you know, this is one.

• 1:10:50Ezra Klein?

  At the same time, there is this other force happening in the election. So the shift particularly of Hispanic voters to Trump gets a tremendous amount of attention because I think it's so, it's such a violation of the conventional narrative that was, that was being told. But Biden does better than Hillary Clinton despite that shift. And he does better because he does better among white voters. Why? Which voters does he do better among? And what's driving that shift?

• 1:11:18Speaker 02

  Part of the story is he's doing better among voters who are left leaning. And these voters tend to be disproportionately represented among white voters who have more formal education, which is part of the diploma divide. They tend to be located in, you know, certain kinds of communities. So particularly suburban communities, you know, you've seen the maps around Atlanta and other similar metropolitan areas and the shifts there that were helping Biden. So I think part of the story clearly is that these voters have reacted, I think, against Trump to some extent, based on their own ideas and beliefs and ended up in Biden's camp and the Democratic Party's camp, perhaps going forward as a consequence of Trump and

• 1:12:03Speaker 02

  the way that he framed a lot of political issues and debates that just didn't strike these voters as particularly palatable or plausible.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  You know, one of the ways to think about this Ezra might be to kind of go back and think about, you know, the way we used to think about campaigns and elections. What is this election about? So like when we think about 1984, we say, oh, it was about the economy. You know, are you better off than you were four years ago? And we think about 2008, global financial crisis, 2012 referendum on the Democrats' performance and getting out of the financial crisis. Like we, we tend to try to reduce it down to what was this fight about? And I think what we're sort of saying is that the 2020 fight, quote unquote, like it could have been about COVID. That whole election could have been about COVID. It wasn't.

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  The fight was finishing off.

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  The battle, the sorting that had started in 2016 on these identity-inflected things. And it starts in 2016. The ideology and party nexus gets clarified during Trump's presidency, such that the 2020 election, despite all of the astonishing things that happened in the year, is really just about finishing off that sorting. And there aren't very many people left to sort. But the ones who do are doing it on that dimension. And maybe that's kind of the way to think about the remaining moves in 2020.

• 1:14:02Ezra Klein?

  Let's talk a bit about the economy. And one of the things that is interesting about 2020 because of COVID, because of the huge stimulus bills, is you have a very weird economy. Unemployment is high, growth is low, but people's incomes go up. So what mattered? When you look at what economic measures helped predict the election, what was actually valid?

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  We talk about the economy as being electorally ambiguous in 2020. And that's driven by having the economy shrink in its total sort of output as measured by something like gross domestic product. Of course, unemployment spikes because of pandemic job losses. And then, at the same time, the government passes the stimulus bill, so people's incomes actually go up, and they go up quite sharply. So ultimately, I think the answer is that the outcome is probably a bit more reflective of the recession that the GDP and unemployment numbers suggested than the boom that the growth in income would have suggested.

• 1:15:12Speaker 02

  But at the same time, both of those indicators are not as strong predictors as they used to be. Trump overperforms relative to what he would have been predicted to do, given the contraction in gross domestic product. But he really underperforms, underperforms.

• 1:15:31Speaker 02

  The growth in incomes. When we looked at people's views of the economy and how they related to the long time trend that we have going back into the 1950s, what was striking to me was that overall, people were, of course, became more pessimistic as a consequence of the pandemic and the recession. But their level of pessimism dropped to about where it was in 2012, when Obama and Romney were battling about whether the country had made enough progress in recovering from the Great Recession. Views in 2020 were nowhere near as pessimistic as they were in 2008, when Obama was elected in the middle of that recession.

• 1:16:13Speaker 02

  So again, to me, I think on balance, the economy might have been more of a drag on Trump than it helped him, but it was absolutely a much less clearer case overall, precisely because these indicators were pushing in different directions.

• 1:16:29Ezra Klein?

  So we have a weird economy right now, Lynn. We have really, really strong employment numbers. We have relatively strong wage growth over the past year or two. There was a bunch of money that got transferred into people's pockets in 2021 in particular. We also have very high inflation. If you look at that consumer sentiment number, it's considerably lower today than it was at this time in 2020. So does that mean Democrats are in trouble? Like, what do you think what we saw about evaluations of a weird economy in 2020 tells us about how the economy might play out in 2022?

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd be a little worried if I were a Democrat running for office, but I'd be more worried if I was Joe Biden thinking about 2024, or a Democrat thinking about 2024. The indicator that has often best predicted how the midterms are going to go has really all been filtered through presidents' approval ratings. And so that robust relationship with the nation's economy that John described a minute ago for presidential elections isn't quite the same for picking up or losing seats in midterms. But it seems to all get filtered through the approval rating. And so. Whether it's going to be a direct effect or filtered through approval, the arrow is pointing in the same way, and that would be toward worry.

• 1:17:49Speaker 02

  I'd be very worried. What's happened in the last year or so of Biden's presidency is that the inflation news has dramatically outweighed the positive economic news in the minds of voters. I think that's a function of two things. One is that prices are very visible to voters in their daily lives. And the second is that the negative economic news always gets more coverage than positive economic news. So, growth in domestic product or continued low unemployment is not going to get the same number of headlines as another report showing these increases in the inflation rate or this ongoing increase in inflation. The evidence for that, by the way, said the same measure of how Americans feel about the economy, I looked at it yesterday.

• 1:18:30Speaker 02

  Americans' views of the economy are as bad as they were in 2008. I'd be very worried for Joe Biden.

• 1:18:38Ezra Klein?

  One thing you've tracked, John, though, is this weird untethering of economic data.

• 1:18:43Speaker 02

  That's no longer true.

• 1:18:44Ezra Klein?

  No.

• 1:18:44Speaker 02

  It's not true for Biden.

• 1:18:45Ezra Klein?

  Tell me about that. Tell me about the untethering and tell me how it's changing.

• 1:18:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is fascinating. And, you know, this is one of those moments where some of what we talk about in our book, right, deserves a bit of an update, you know, when we release a paperback edition and add it afterward. What we show in the book is that historically, there's a very predictable relationship between how good people feel about the economy and how positively they feel about the incumbent president. But when Obama was elected, that relationship vanished. People's views of the economy got significantly better as his time in office went on because the economy was growing after the Great Recession, but his approval rating never really moved quite in tandem with that. Trump was the same thing. You know, you saw, as most political observers did, that his approval rating varied almost

• 1:19:31Speaker 02

  not at all, and it certainly didn't change very much when we went from having quite good economic growth to having this economic recession induced by the pandemic. But thus far in Biden's presidency, there's a pretty tight relationship between how people feel about the economy and how they're doing. And there's a couple of different explanations for that. I mean, one is that just the nature of this particularly challenging economy, you know, driven by inflation, might just register differently with voters. Barack Obama didn't experience this kind of economic like problem, like he presided over pretty sort of steady, but not very fast growth. And then the economic recession that Trump experienced was sort of a weird one, right?

• 1:20:14Speaker 02

  Induced by this pandemic, not because of sort of business cycle fluctuations. So I don't know if maybe the bad economy for Biden is just different than like the bad economy for Trump or the bad economy that Obama inherited. But at the end of the day, I think for Biden, it's pretty clear that a significant part of why his approval rating has gone down and maybe recovered a little bit is because of exactly these fluctuations in the economy were to reflect it in how voters feel about it. And so what I think is imperative for him, if he wants to win reelection is that has to change. That, to me, I would put that far and above questions about what are the popularity of the policies he's proposing, you know, all those kinds of debates that Democrats have

• 1:20:58Speaker 02

  been having now since 2020. It really is fundamentally about changing conditions in the country.

• 1:21:05Ezra Klein?

  One debate this pushes on now is whether or not we should think much about the polling. So in 2020, Joe Biden ends up polling significantly better, particularly in key states, than he performs. That's true for Democrats more broadly. They would have a much stronger Senate majority if the polls had been, had been right or even biased in their favor. But instead, what we saw in 2016 happens again in 2020, and the polls have a bias that undercounts Republican support. Right now, Democrats are polling, I mean, not unbelievably well, but better than you would think, given the inflation news, better than you would think, given Joe Biden's approval rating. There's a question about whether or not that same bias is there.

• 1:21:45Ezra Klein?

  Something that you all point out, Lynn, is that if you looked at forecasts, like pretty basic forecasts using presidential approval and a little bit of economic news, they got 2020 pretty right. If you averaged them out, you know, they, they put Donald Trump at something around 47%. That's more or less where he ended up. What does that kind of forecasting tell you for the midterm?

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  Well, I think the answer to that is, again, pointing toward worry. That kind of measure, we're not really sure why that works. This is another one of these relationships that is very robust. But we don't, we don't really know at the individual level what people are thinking that makes that true. And to the extent that we're still seeing that kind of fundamental forecast that happens, you know, a year before the actual election, working well in 2016 and in 2020, despite all of these other changes to the electoral landscape, that would make me very concerned,

• 1:22:49Speaker 01

  particularly, again, in 2024, if the Democratic Party cannot get this economy righted.

• 1:22:57Speaker 02

  Those forecasts predict about 40 Democratic seat losses in the US House, Ezra, and maybe even a few more, given Biden's popularity. Income growth is negative over the year, in part because, of course, inflation is making people's dollars go, not go as far. So exactly as Lynn said, that's a real cause for concern if you're focused only on those models that have these national forces built into them. If you want to feel a little bit better, if you're a Democratic member or voter, maybe the way that the new district lines have been drawn just limits the number of seats

• 1:23:39Speaker 02

  that are really plausibly winnable for either party because there's fewer that are competitive. So maybe that puts a cap on what Republicans can expect to gain. Or you can also, as you said, look at the polls and say, Democrats are doing a little better than you might think they would expect. And the question would be, do we trust the polls? And I don't have a good answer to that question, other than to say, the challenges that polling faced both in 2016 and 2020, we have no way of knowing whether those have been resolved. So mentally, what I do is I just add more and more uncertainty into any estimate that's predicated on polling. So if a poll shows me a margin between the candidates, you know, with a particular margin

• 1:24:24Speaker 02

  of error, I just mentally double that margin of error and say, I have even less confidence exactly what the margin is between those two candidates.

• 1:24:32Ezra Klein?

  Well, the House and Senate split is very, very small. So even a small Republican win could give them control of both chambers. But if you're taking a John Sides, Lynn Bavreck calcification model, don't you say to yourself, well, those forecasts and models are built on past results. People are switching sides less often. They are more afraid of the other party. They don't like the other party even more. You know, we're in a post-Dob scenario where the possibility of Republicans getting power is more relevant to people. They see what that might look like. And so calcification is what will curb some of those losses. Isn't that, isn't that a way in which it's positive for Democrats, Lynn?

• 1:25:14Speaker 01

  I think I would say that, Ezra, yes. And I just think like the way to summarize that is that always with these arguments about how the macro economy sways the election outcome, we're always talking about at the margin, right? We've always known that party identification was the number one driver of vote choice. And so basically, as the set of people who are nudgable gets smaller, you know, that's sort of what we're saying is happening, but it hasn't gone away yet. And so, yes, you gotta win the persuadable voters. And to the extent that, you know, there are fewer of them, that's maybe good for your side if you're good at mobilizing your base.

• 1:25:58Speaker 01

  But it also means it's really important to win that tiny sliver of voters who are still out there making these decisions on, you know, sort of the state of the nation's economy.

• 1:26:10Ezra Klein?

  Let me end on trying to push you all into your political theorist stance. It's a nice data-rich look at 2020. It's all very calm. Doesn't this whole picture freak you out? I mean, as people who study the responsiveness of the American political system, who try to think about what is the role politics plays and how Elections and democracies, discipline outcomes and kind of push us towards a better world. I mean, a politics where you have radically different parties that seem to be able to make all kinds of crazy decisions without very much electoral input or backlash, and yet very small shifts in the objective situation through the economy or through the subjective situation because of how people feel about the president, leads to another party with

• 1:26:54Ezra Klein?

  a radically, radically different agenda that has not been disciplined by the electorate in a very long time coming into power. I mean, this is a crazy situation, it sounds like to me, not at all like we're told a democracy is supposed to work, not at all how ideal theory would put us. Are you guys freaked out?

• 1:27:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there are reasons to freak out, to use your word, Ezra, but mine are not the ones that you articulated. For me, the reason that I lose sleep at night in a post 2020 world is that these trends that we've discussed and that we call calcification have led us to this very unusual moment where when candidates and parties lose elections, there's no incentive to go back and rethink the game plan. And in fact, it's worse than that.

• 1:27:48Speaker 01

  There may be an incentive to instead change the rules of the game just enough so that the number of votes you got is the winning number. So instead of a first down being 10 yards, boy, my team, we always get eight yards. Well, instead of changing the way we're playing that game, let's just rewrite the rules so that first downs are eight yards now and then we win. And that's very dangerous. And that is the ultimate challenge to democracy that we're seeing play out. And I think is the thing that I will be watching on election night in 2022.

• 1:28:28Speaker 01

  It is very important who wins elections, but it is also very important who loses elections. Because what they do on Tuesday night in a couple of weeks could very well have consequences in terms of the next steps in the health of our democracy. And so that's the part that freaks me out.

• 1:28:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a nice book on this subject by some political scientists called Losers Consent. And when we have in our book, a discussion of the challenge to American democracy, which is part of the subtitle, I very much have in mind exactly what Lynn was describing. I'm not bothered by strong disagreements about policy. Disagreements even about policies like that are have identity inflected components like immigration. You know, some of that is to be expected. I think what is concerning to me is that if people who lose free and fair elections will not accept that outcome and will actively work to undermine it or subvert it. That to me is the biggest threat to democracy.

• 1:29:35Speaker 02

  And here again, I think, you know, you made a reference a little while ago to how Trump had changed the way that Republican politicians think they need to act and talk. And I think this is one of the examples of that. What Trump did after 2020 was not what Hillary Clinton did after 2016, or Mitt Romney did after 2012, or Al Gore did after 2000, when it was even closer, or Richard Nixon did. You know, Lynn was just describing these different moments to me the other day and these different quotes of these politicians when they lost. And you can really see the difference between someone like Trump and what these other losers have done. And so I, I think if we do not have effective guardrails that mean that losing candidates

• 1:30:19Speaker 02

  can rage all they want, but ultimately not do much to actually change the circumstances of their loss, that to me is the problem. And right now those guardrails are quite weak, in part because people that buy into what Trump claimed after the election are seeking the very offices that would allow them to influence the winner of the next election. So right now, that's that is what I think a lot about. And I just hope that we're going to have strong enough institutions and wise enough politicians to make that circumstance not come to pass. I think that's the place to end. So always our final question is, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:31:01Speaker 02

  The three books I chose, The Increasingly United States by Dan Hopkins, a political scientist at Penn. One of the really nice treatments about why American politics is so nationalized and all of some of these local elements of it have kind of been subsumed by these big national conflicts. It's exactly what we're seeing happen in 2022. I picked a book about a time long ago, the political campaigns of Barack Obama. The book is called Groundbreakers by Elizabeth McKenna and Hari Han. It's the story of how Obama built the campaign that he used to win. In particular, the volunteers that did all the fieldwork. I think it's worth thinking about that as we head towards 2024 because, you know, we

• 1:31:43Speaker 02

  had an election cycle with a pandemic and limitations, therefore, on how campaigns could conduct themselves. But I think it's it's time to think again about exactly how you build the army of staff and volunteers that you need to win. And there's an excellent treatment of that. And then finally, a book by the political scientist Daniel Gillian called The Loud Minority, and it is a study of protests. And it is both a study of how protests in American politics these days get subsumed into these polarized politics. But it is also a story about how protests, in particular protests elevating the cause of racial justice, can have impacts and in fact have impacts that kind of square with

• 1:32:24Speaker 02

  what we saw in the George Floyd protests, impacts that are maybe net beneficial for Democratic candidates at the end of the day.

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  So my three are different, two that I have really enjoyed and one that I'm looking forward to reading. The first is a book by Ron Brownstein called Rock Me on the Water, which is basically a love letter to Los Angeles in the 1970s about politics, film and television and music, and just a fun read. The second is a novel that Hillary Clinton wrote with Louise Penny called The State of Terror. And great story, great characters, kept me on the edge of my seat. And then the last is just based on this Times Magazine piece. An interview with Bono, sort of previewing a book that he has just written called Surrender, that I am really looking forward to reading.

• 1:33:16Ezra Klein?

  Lynne Bevreck, John Sides, thank you very much.

• 1:33:18Speaker 01

  Thanks, Ezra.

• 1:33:19Ezra Klein?

  Thank you, Ezra.

• 1:33:31Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klansh is produced by Amafa Agau, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, and Raji Karma. Fact checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristen Lynn and Christina Simuluski.