I’m Michelle Goldberg.
I’m Ross Douthat. And this is a very special election edition of “The Argument.” [MUSIC PLAYING] This election week, an anxious America waits for the final tallies to be counted. And we try to make sense of what we know so far. All right, here we are. How you doing, Michelle?
I mean, not good. And probably worse than I should be, given the circumstances. I mean, I think that what is going on, not just for me, but for a lot of liberals is two different things. Partly the way that these results have trickled out and the order in which they have trickled out has been extremely traumatic. There was this moment on election night with Florida where it just felt like you were kind of recapitulating 2016, which, as I’ve said before, was the second worst night of my life, was this event that a lot of people have spent four years thinking about how they were never going to have to go through again. If I told you then that this would come down to a nail biter in Georgia and Arizona, people would have felt pretty good, right? I mean, I think that as we tape this and things are far from clear —
Right, I should say for our listeners that we are recording this Thursday morning. It is 9:43 a.m. at the moment. And hopefully we’re going to get this discussion to you as quickly as possible. But of course, something unexpected could always happen between the moment that we’re speaking and the moment that you hear our words.
Right, and as I say this, I think that Trump is ahead by 18,000 votes in Georgia. The Georgia official just said that there’s about 61,000 mail-in absentee votes that aren’t counted. Those are expected to be overwhelmingly pro-Biden. So who knows? It’s 2020. But you’d rather be Joe Biden. You’d rather be the Democrats right now than the Republicans. But I mean, the Senate is particularly devastating because of what it says about what a Joe Biden presidency is going to be like, right? I mean, I think that they’ve already sort of announced their intention to sabotage his transition, to Mitch McConnell is going to kind of try to have veto power over who can serve in a Joe Biden administration. It’s far from clear to me that they will confirm a single Biden judicial nominee. I think that the prospect of expanded healthcare access is extremely unlikely. New York City has been really counting on aid from the federal government because of the unprecedented crisis that we’ve just come through. And that seems to be on the table, and not just in New York City, but in places all around the country. And so, what we saw with Obama was Mitch McConnell determined to make him a one-term president, to sabotage him at all costs in the hopes that voters would blame the president for what went wrong. And that seems likely to be what they will do again. And so the question to me is whether Joe Biden, who is, obviously, far more of an institutionalist than Donald Trump, will be willing to act in sort of similarly unilateral ways to get around Senate nihilism, is maybe a better word. And then there’s also this other piece, which is maybe a little bit more petty and not that important, I guess, except for a kind of class of privileged political obsessives. But —
[CHUCKLES] Don’t talk about our audience that way.
But this was so — and again, I don’t think that — these last four years was so painful for so many people. And if it was just me who was going through this, I would kind of shut up about it and just talk about it with my therapist. But when I talk about it publicly, I know I’m not the only one. I know I’m not the only one who was psychologically brutalized by the last four years, who found it— I look at pictures of my family, and I feel like a black cloud descended on all of our lives in November. And just every moment, every day has been ruined since then. Everything has been ruined since then. And there was this fantasy of catharsis, right? As terrified as I was that Trump was going to win again, I was also thinking in the run-up, do I wake my kids up if people are dancing in the streets? You thought that there was going to be this moment when this thing was over. And maybe there still will be, right? Maybe the reason people are feeling this anxiety is because it’s still not over. And once we know that he’s going to be gone, something will break, or something will lift. And people will be able to feel it. But right now, they haven’t, I don’t think.
Yeah, and I mean, I think some of that reflects what you just described, right? The sort of the weird way that everyone predicted, but has still been weird to watch. That votes have been counted and ballots have come in, the weird stages of vote counting created by this incredibly unusual year. [CHUCKLING] I’ve approached this election with a certain kind of calm throughout. But it’s also that the catharsis that people expected involved — I mean, it involved the kind of scale of repudiation that seemed to be visible in some of Biden’s polls. And that’s not what we got.
I think we need to talk about the scale of repudiation because part of this is, again, just a function of our broken institutions, right? So right now, it looks like Biden is set to get a bigger share of the vote than Ronald Reagan got in 1980. And I don’t just mean more raw votes, right? ‘Cause there’s a lot more people voting. I mean, he’s set to do a lot better than — Reagan got 50.7 [percent] in 1980. Biden’s set to get more than that, as a percentage of the total vote. And yet, it’s not a landslide because of the way that vote is distributed. It’s distributed among people who, frankly, count less, right? So by any measure, Biden is coming into this with a huge mandate from the American people. By any measure, the American people have pretty overwhelmingly repudiated Donald Trump. They just haven’t repudiated him in the places that have political power in this country. And that’s, again, is part of what’s so painful, that they can get more of the vote than Reagan or that they can get a higher share of the vote than Reagan and still be unable to govern because of the way our institutions are set up. I mean, to me, it just reinforces everything that I and many others have been writing about and worrying about the way that our Constitution increasingly subverts democracy rather than enables it. I mean, I don’t feel the sort of raw panic I would feel if Donald Trump was winning. And I think there’s going to just be a huge boost to the world, to American life when he is out of there. And one thing we’ve seen is that a president can do a lot of things unilaterally or administratively. But I still think politics in this country are so irrevocably broken. And I was texting my mom just to double check that the ancestors that left Germany didn’t leave during the time that would possibly make me eligible for EU citizenship.
So before you leave for the European Union, let me —
Well, I can’t. But I would say —
Well, look. Wait, wait, wait. All right, but look. So I think that you’re right that Biden is on pace to win a relatively clear or clear popular majority. I don’t think historically, though, in the U.S. that people would have looked at an election like this one and described it as a sweeping mandate, a landslide win, and so on. One of the traditions in American life has been that for presidents to get a lot of things done, they usually need to win big landslides. And if you look at presidential elections in US history, especially in the 20th century — and the 19th century is much more of a complicated mess. But in the 20th century, the norm in presidential elections is for successful politicians to win big, conclusive victories that then set the table for them to legislate effectively, even if the opposition party controls either the House or the Senate. Ronald Reagan, yes, he won a lower share of the vote than Biden is winning in 1980. But there was John Anderson as a third party candidate, who was a former Republican candidate. And Reagan’s margin over Carter was much bigger than Biden’s margin over Trump. And if you then extend 1984, Reagan wins a huge landslide. 1988, George H.W. Bush wins a big landslide. Clinton wins a minority of the popular vote, but wins by a larger margin over both Dole and Bush than Biden is going to win over Trump. And go back earlier — Eisenhower wins two big sweeping victories, right? So—
Well, I don’t think you can really go back earlier. I don’t think you can go back earlier because you’re just talking about a —
But this is the point. The system in the U.S. is set up so that minorities — it’s not a simple majority rule system, obviously.
But no, it’s not a majority rule. Nobody wants a simple majority rule system. I mean, let’s be clear about that. But I think that we are much closer to a minority rule system.
Well, sort of. I think you arguably were under the Trump presidency. But if Joe Biden pulls through and the Democrats control the presidency and the House of Representatives, I don’t see- – what you have there is a situation where a 48 percent minority, which is a really big minority by the standards of American politics, has a lot of blocking power. And that’s a problem for our system’s effectiveness, that the problem lies in the polarization itself. That the system is set up to accommodate big minorities, and we just have ended up with a level of polarization that ensures that you will always have these big minorities. And I mean, to me, I said this in a column. As someone who wants the United States to become governable again, there was part of me that, yeah, if Biden was going to win, I wanted him to win bigger. Because it would show that you could still win a landslide. And one of the lessons of this election is definitely, I think, that it’s just really hard to build a landslide coalition in American politics, even under conditions that, at least to people in the elite media, seem like they should be conducive to it.
Well, and the Republican Party that’s coming in is so much more poisonous even than the previous Republican class, right? We’ve got some QAnon people. We’ve got this kid, Madison Cawthorn, who’s made a bunch of winks and nods towards his admiration for Hitler and whose first post-victory tweet was, “Cry more, libs.” Right? I mean, these are not people you can work with. You’ve got angry mobs outside polling stations. It’s just —
All right, no, well, so this is — again, this is all a provisional — this is a snapshot in time, right? But I want to claim some vindication for my repeated suggestion that if the election was close but Biden was pretty clearly ahead, there would not be a collapse into a Trumpian coup and widespread violence and so on. And so far, the story of Trump’s coup is that he tweets about how he’s claiming Pennsylvania’s electoral votes. And other Republican politicians are like, yeah, not so much, right?
Right, but partly because —
When does Bill Barr send in the Proud Boys, right? Wasn’t that supposed to happen?
Well, I think that part of the thing is that what’s happened so far has been so straightforward, there hasn’t even really been a controversy for people to get on both sides of. We’re not in a Bush v. Gore situation, right, where there’s just a lot of legitimate contention over dispositive ballots. And I think if there were, that’s when you would see a lot more strong man tactics. I mean, part of the problem right now is that they can’t even come up with a plausible legal theory, right?
Right, and I want to be clear. We’ve been back and forth on this about the show enough. I’m not so much arguing with you as I am with a narrative that was very common in sort of, I’d say, highly educated, center left media, without naming any publications in particular, right? Where there was this assumption that if you had this period where Trump was ahead and then Biden was coming from behind, in that window, there would be all kinds of potential violence at polling places, that there would be Republicans lining up behind Trump’s claims of victory. And I just want to say that having never thought that would happen, it doesn’t surprise me at all that when Trump is demanding a recount in Wisconsin. Scott Walker, nobody’s idea of a nonpartisan guy, is taking to Twitter, saying, look, we’ve done recounts before, and they don’t change things. And probably Trump’s going to lose, right? Oh, it doesn’t surprise me that Fox News was actually too quick to call Arizona for Biden. But certainly, with the exception of Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, has been throwing cold water on Trump’s arguments. Trump just never had the institutional—
Wait, but let me say this. With the exception of their most popular and prominent primetime hosts, I mean, that’s a pretty big exception. I totally take your point about Fox News calling Arizona. And I feel like that might — even though I agree with you that that was probably a premature call —
It was wildly premature.
It might end up being the kind of wildly premature call that saved democracy because I think it legitimized, at least for some people, the idea that Trump could really be losing. Although I also think we are really defining deviancy down if we say, yes, there’s only a few armed mobs shutting down polling places. That’s not good. I mean, it’s not just that that’s not good. That would have been shocking to us just a few years ago before we became this desensitized.
I guess, I would say I agree that there have been real breakdowns in American political culture in the Trump era. I’m just very provisionally, like Trump himself, maybe too soon, declaring victory over a certain style of what I would call anti-authoritarian pornography that I think consumed the liberal imagination in the last month or so. But I may have to walk that claim of victory back. We’ll see. Let’s take a short break, and we’ll come back and talk a little bit more about all of what happened.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And we’re back. So Ross, in the last episode, David French talked about how if Biden won Texas — those were more innocent days — it would be the nail in the coffin for Trumpism in the Republican Party. And obviously, that didn’t happen. But we are on track for Biden to win Arizona. And this is a nail biter in Georgia, which nobody would have considered a swing state four short years ago. And so, I guess, I’m wondering how does this change the landscape for Republicans at all? I mean, it seems pretty clear to me that the fever isn’t breaking, even though Republicans are sustaining real losses in some of their old strongholds.
Well, I mean, my take on all of this, right, is that on the one hand — well, I guess my take is that there are many things that could be described as Trumpism, right? There is the president’s personal style. There’s the coalition that he appealed to. There’s this sort of inchoate policy agenda that seemed to be attached to it. And since I’m in favor of some version of conservative populism and have been for 20 years, I guess, I see some hope for the Republican Party in the kind of voting outcomes that we got, right? That the fact, for instance, that one of the big problems for the Republican Party is its fear of demographic change, right, and its sense that as the country changes, the only answer to these changes are sort of retreating into Senate redoubts and passing voter ID laws. And so the fact that the Republican Party under Trump in this election seems to have done better with minority voters than it’s done in any election, at least since 2004, possibly at any point in decades — the exit polls are obviously dodgy at this moment — that’s good news for anyone who wants the Republican Party to try and compete as a political party in a multiracial democracy.
One of the whole justifications for Trumpism is that we have to stop demographic change in this country. That was the thesis behind that famous essay, “The Flight 93 Election,” which is that we have to sort of charge the cockpit to maintain America as we know it. Do you think any of that becomes tempered in the Republican Party if they no longer have to worry that increased immigration spells their doom?
I think — I mean, again, potentially, right? But I think what’s notable is that it’s happened in a different way than the way it was supposed to happen under George W. Bush. The theory of the Republican Party under George W. Bush, which the party itself then rejected, was that you needed to respond to demographic change by, in effect, increasing immigration, right? That the way to win Latino votes was to support more Hispanic immigration. One of the underlying realities that the closer than expected outcome of this election suggests is that a lot of people really liked the Trump economy, which really did have faster growing wages at the bottom for reasons that we can argue about another time than the last years of the Obama economy. And people sort of carried a positive feeling about the Trump economy forward, even through the pandemic in a way that I think we in the media may have underestimated. But anyway — but I mean, basically, I think these kind of outcomes just sort of set up and pre-stage future battles within the Republican Party over to what extent do you want to lean into the party’s transformation into a multi-ethnic working class party? And to what extent do you want to resist it in a way that just sort of takes you back to what Romney and Ryan ran on in 2012? And I have no idea how that battle turns out. And the other thing, just to sort of strike horror deep into your heart that this closer than expected outcome suggests, is that Trump could run again in 2024. I think a landslide defeat would have made it very unlikely that he would run again. But I think losing by four points with a sort of cadre of people around him talking about voter fraud and so on, I think that totally sets him up to make a comeback in 2024.
That doesn’t strike horror into my heart.
All right, good.
I mean, I think that —
It strikes horror, actually, into my heart.
I think that —
Because I am —
I think in the next four years, Letitia James is going to have her way with him, right? I mean, he’s going to leave office. I think he’s going to face a ton of federal pain. Joe Biden has already said that he wouldn’t interfere with Justice Department investigations into Trump’s many apparent crimes. And there’s this ongoing investigation of him in New York, which the federal government doesn’t have anything to do with. He’s got a ton of debt coming due. Who knows? But in four years, he may be a very diminished figure. We’ll see about that. My question for you, as somebody who wants some version of right-wing populism, is if you think that there is any incentive in the Republican Senate to provide it? I mean, because my worst fear about the next four years is that the Republican Senate rediscovers its inner Paul Ryan, right, and are going to force a really destructive austerity on the country that’s going to keep unemployment artificially high and retard economic growth ostensibly in the name of the debt and the deficit, but really in the name of trying to destroy Joe Biden’s presidency.
I mean, I don’t know. McConnell has already said that he wants to pass a new Covid relief bill, but that could just mean he wants to pass something before Biden becomes president so that Biden doesn’t get credit for it. But I think you’ll be able to get something through the Senate as long as the coronavirus crisis is ongoing. And then the question is, what happens after that? Obviously, sweeping liberal legislation is off the table. I think it’s an open question whether Biden could sort of pick specific groups of Republican senators, like pick Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney and others who’ve endorsed sort of family friendly tax reform and say, all right, we’re going to do a narrowly tailored bill there, whether that could happen. But I don’t know what the dynamics will be there. And I think from my perspective, in terms of the future of the party fights, a sort of total return to Tea Partyism is both a possibility. And it seems to me probably a really bad thing for, again, the party’s capacity to govern the country, as opposed to just being a blocking formation, which is what it will be right now. But I also think the coronavirus is just such a different dynamic from the Great Recession that you could imagine, I think very plausibly, a situation where Biden does very little and remains quite popular if there’s a va — I mean, most of the first couple of years of the Biden presidency are going to hinge on vaccine distribution politics, which will be their own kind of nightmare.
But actually the sort of thing that the Biden administration, I think, is fairly well set up to do. He has a lot of people around him who’ve thought a lot about pandemics and the logistics of responding to them, which is the sort of base level competence that is underrated, but that is part of the reason why things have been so disastrous under Donald Trump. That’s the thing that you want Ron Klain in charge of, not Jared Kushner.
Yes, I have more confidence in Biden’s vaccine team than I would in Trump’s. Before we end, let me ask you, just on the basis of these results and the Democratic disappointment in the Senate, the oh so close defeats in places like Maine, what do the arguments look like on the Democratic side? What are the big fractures? What does the party fight over between here and 2022?
I don’t think that’s clear yet. You’re already hearing some sort of Bernie would have won. And I don’t see anything in the results to substantiate that. I would prefer a Bernie presidency to a Biden presidency, but I just don’t see anything in these results to suggest that a more left-wing candidate would have done better, right? I mean, particularly when you think about the fact that we lost Florida because they were able to tar Biden as a socialist. There will be arguments over procedural hardball, right? There will be demands that some of the powers that Trump has grabbed for the executive branch, there’s going to be demands that Biden exercise those. You’re already seeing that in terms of Mitch McConnell saying he’s going to ax the check on who Biden puts in his cabinet and people saying, well, since when does the Senate get to do that, right? We’ve operated with acting secretaries for years now. There’s going to be a lot of anger with congressional leadership. But it’s not clear to me exactly how much of that is ideological as opposed to tactical, which is not quite the same thing. You’re seeing some conservatives or some moderates are going to challenge Nancy Pelosi for the speakership. But I think progressives are also really angry at Nancy Pelosi and just feel like she kind of fell down in terms of supporting House candidates. And so I think you’ll see challenges to Nancy Pelosi from both directions. And I also think you’re just going to see much, much more disenchantment with the American structure of government. The first column I wrote when I became a columnist for The New York Times was about the problem of minority rule. Not a lot of people were talking about that at the time, and I feel like a lot of people are talking about that now. There’s a sense that the structures of American government have become incompatible with democracy in any meaningful sense. And it’s not clear that people can really act on that sense right now because they can’t expand the court. They can’t expand the Senate. They can’t grant statehood to Puerto Rico if Puerto Rico wants it, which I think they recently voted in favor of it in a referendum. They can’t grant statehood to Washington, D.C. But I do think that you’re going to see a much greater sense that it is the structures of American government that have ossified and that are a big problem. The last time, we talked about secession. And I still think you’re right. That’s still a pipe dream. It’s far in the future. I feel more strongly today than I did last week that as impossible as that would be, it would be better than what we have.
Don’t you think that kind of focus is likely to be just incredibly self-defeating? I mean, the whole thing here, right, is tha t—
Well, look, I think —
— Democrats — just wait.
OK.
Democrats, in order to govern the country, right now, in a hypothetical Biden administration, the Democrats needed to win, let’s say, one to three more Senate seats in races that they almost won and were leading in the polls in many cases. So it seems to me that — and all of the other things that you want to do, all of the restructuring, just abolishing the filibuster, adding more states and so on, to do all of that, you need to figure out how to win an extra two to three Senate races in one given electoral cycle. It just seems to me that focusing on that in a really zealous way is infinitely more constructive for the Democrats than talking endlessly — it’s not like you’re 10 Senate seats away from governing the country. You’re 1.5 Senate seats away. You need to figure out a slightly more conservative synthesis, right?
I think that you’re talking about two different things, right? Because obviously I don’t expect Chuck Schumer to be talking about the structures of our ossified Constitution. [BOTH LAUGH] But in terms of kind of Democratic intellectuals, the disaffection, I mean, I do feel like, increasingly, the Constitution feels, to me, like a prison that has set us up for permanent minority rule with occasionally a few breaks as a treat, if you can get a truly extraordinary majority. To me, that’s going to be the conversation on the left, not the conversation among Democratic electoral elites who, yes, they’re going to be actually only talking about what they can do for Georgia because —
It just seems like maybe the intellectual should think a little more about Maine and Georgia. But all right, we’re going to wrap up here and just add as a kind of mini recommendation, how are you getting through these 72 hours, Michelle? What do you recommend? What kind of election management strategy do you offer to our listeners?
I mean, am I allowed to recommend Klonopin?
Are you allowed to recommend Klonopin, Michelle? I don’t know. [LAUGHTER] They’ll be sponsoring our show next year. No, well, let me — I’ll recommend since, at least here in the Northeast, we’re having a run of beautiful weather. It’s like a nice burst of the best of autumn. That people should go outside, should go away from their screens. If they happen to have a larg group of small children, as I do, yesterday, at like 4 p.m., I took a break from staring at Arizona’s election returns and went to the park and played an extremely vigorous game of Wiffle ball with my children. You can play Wiffle ball alone, just hitting fungos into the outfield, if you care to, but generally doing something outside with children who themselves don’t care about the election returns. And that’s our election special. Thank you so much for listening and for being with us through this crazy time. “The Argument” is a production of The New York Times Opinion section. Our team includes Alison Bruzek, Vishakha Darbha, Phoebe Lett, Elisa Gutierrez, Isaac Jones, Paula Szuchman, Kate Sinclair and Kathy Tu. Special thanks to Corey Schreppel and Michelle Harris. And we’ll see you next week. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m, like, four Klonopin into the last four days. OK. [CHUCKLES]