Polling: What Is On The Minds Of Americans | Reimagining American Institutions

>> Eryn Tillman: Good morning. My name is Eryn Tillman, an associate director at the Hoover Institution, and we'd like to welcome you to today's webinar. This is the third hosted by the Hoover Institution Center for Revitalizing American Institutions. It is also the fourth and final session of America Votes 2024: Stanford Scholars on the Election’s Most Critical Questions, a series co-sponsored by Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, the Institute for the Research in Social Sciences, and the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions.

Today's session will consist of 60 minutes of opening remarks and discussion, followed by a period where our panelists will respond to questions from audience members. To submit a question, please use the Q&A feature located at the bottom of your zoom screen. We will do our best to respond to as many questions as possible.

A recording of this webinar will be available at hoover.org/rai within the next few days. Before we begin, we'd like to share briefly about each of today's sponsoring organizations. The Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law is housed in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

And bridges the worlds of scholarship and practice to understand and foster the conditions for effective representative governance, promote balanced and sustainable economic growth, and establish the rule of law. Our second sponsor is the Stanford Institute for Research in Social Sciences, also known as IRISS. It's a unit within Stanford's School of Humanities and Sciences and facilitates first-rate interdisciplinary research, trains the next generation of scholars, and incubates research projects to address critical societal issues.

IRISS ensures that world -class evidence-based research is produced to meet evolving problems in areas of governance and democracy, economic inequality, immigration policy, and other social issues that affect communities across the globe. Our third sponsor, The Center for Revitalizing American Institutions, also known as RAI, is a testament to one of Hoover's founding principles, ideas advancing freedom.

RAI was established to study the reasons behind the crisis and trust facing American institutions, analyze how they are operating in practice, and consider policy recommendations to reveal trust and increase their effectiveness. RAI works with and supports Hoover fellows as well as faculty, practitioners, and policymakers from across the country to pursue evidence-based reforms that impact trust and efficacy in a wide range of American institutions.

All three of today's sponsors are excited for this timely topic for the opportunity to bring together our four experts who can help us understand what is on the minds of Americans through polling. And with that, it gives me great pleasure to introduce today's moderator, Brandice Canes-Wrone. Brandice is the Maurice R Greenberg Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions at the Hoover Institution.

She is also professor of Political Science and Professor by courtesy of Political Economics at the Graduate School of Business. She served on the faculty of MIT, Northwestern and Princeton until several years ago when we were able to woo her back to the firm. And now, Brandice Canes-Wrone who will introduce our guests.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thanks Eryn, I'm delighted to be here and introduce this esteemed panel. David Brady is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor of Political Science Emeritus. He's published seven books and over 100 papers in journals. Among his well-known publications is Red and Blue Nation, Characteristics and Causes of America's Polarized Politics with Pietro Nivola.

This was published by the Brookings Institution Press. Dave and one of our other panelists, Doug Rivers, have been co-leading a major panel survey co-sponsored by RAI at Hoover on the 2024 elections. This panel has over 100,000 respondents as they'll describe, and we're looking forward to hearing about this recent work today.

Doug Rivers is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a Professor of Political Science at Stanford. Doug's career has combined publishing cutting-edge research articles in the leading journals of political science and quantitative methods with innovation and surveys in the private sector. He is currently the Chief Scientist at U-Glove, which is a global polling firm.

Daron Shaw is a distinguished teaching professor at the University of Texas, Austin. He served as a strategist in the 2000 and 2004 election campaigns of George W Bush. He's also one half of the bipartisan team that conducts the Fox News Poll. He's also part of the Fox News Decision Desk.

His most recent book is Battleground, Electoral College Strategies, Execution and Impact in the Modern Era, which is with Oxford University Press, and that's co-authored with Scott Atlas, excuse me, Althaus and Costas Panagopoulos. He's published articles in the leading journals of political science as well. Last but certainly not least, but last in alphabetical order, is Lynn Vavreck.

She's the Marvin Hoffenberg professor of American Politics and Public Policy at UCLA. She's the author of numerous books and articles, including a series of highly popular books, both in academia and more general public, that dissect each presidential election. The most recent one, since it's a little early to have the 2024 elections out yet, is the Princeton University Press book, The Bitter End, which is with John Sides and Chris Tausanovitch, which deals with the 2020 presidential election.

Political consultants on both sides of the aisle refer to Lynn's work on political messaging from her Princeton University Press book, the Message Matters as, quote, required reading, unquote, for presidential candidates. All right, so again, we're delighted to have these four panelists. As Eryn mentioned, we're going to have each panelist give some brief introductory remarks.

I'll have some questions for the panel, and then we're very much looking forward to your questions in the audience. Doug, you were kindly offered to lead, and so we'll start with you.

>> Doug Rivers: Thanks Brandice. As you mentioned, at Hoover, we've been doing a very large survey with over 100,000 people.

I think we're actually up to more 200,000 at this point, that we're interviewing repeatedly over the course of the year. We're not quite done yet. We expect by January we will have done up to 20 interviews with people, so we're able to follow them over the course of the election.

For the third election in a row, the polls, including ours, were one to two points, too democratic. We thought Kamala Harris would probably win the popular vote by a narrow margin, but we had no idea who would win the election. In fact, it looks like Donald Trump will end up winning the popular vote by a bit under two points.

It's not gonna be the three and a half points that people are reporting after election day, which didn't include a lot of the vote on the West Coast. But despite this, I'd say the polls had a decent year. If you're reading the polls, you wouldn't, or at least you shouldn't have been surprised that Kamala Harris lost the election.

The polls, aside from one notorious outlier in Iowa, correctly told you which states were battlegrounds. We consistently showed Democrats doing worse overall than they had in 2020 and even 2016. In the battlegrounds, the races were all close. In the pre election polls, including ours, Harris was up by something on the order of a point or less.

In the blue wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Trump was leading by a couple points or more. In the Sunbelt states, Arizona, Georgia, all these results were within the margin of error. But I wouldn't say that's really the relevant point. If the problem with the polls was sampling variability, which is what the margin of error measures, we should have been too high in some and too low in others.

In fact, what we see is a kind of across-the-board bias in all of the states where we were one to two points too Democratic, which is what statisticians call a bias. If you shifted all the polls in the same direction by that you get very close to the final outcome.

That is, with Trump winning very narrowly in the Midwest and winning by larger margins in Georgia and Arizona. I'd like to say we could eliminate this kind of bias, but it's really hard and frankly, we don't know how to do it. But I think overall we still can tell the story accurately of what happened in this race.

So let me turn to that. At one level, a lot of things happened in this election. A presumptive nominee dropped out 107 days before the election. There were two assassination attempts, two critical debates. And another level, not much happened. In January, Trump led Biden by about 2 points.

In November, Trump defeated Harris by about 2 points. In between, there was a lot of sound and fury. Biden's support, for example, collapsed after the first debate, though it took several weeks for that to happen. Harris started out at or below Biden's numbers in our data, but quickly surpassed Trump in the polls, estimating the national popular vote, and after the second debate led him by roughly two points.

But does this signify anything? Democrats were pretty optimistic about Harris's chances after the second debate, but there were some obvious warning signs. She stopped gaining in the polls, the perception of her as being too left wing continued. And the debates themselves didn't seem to move support for Donald Trump.

In our data, where we interviewed just before and after the first debate, Trump gained no support. After Biden's disastrous performance, Biden lost support, but Trump didn't gain any. And then in the second debate, Trump didn't lose any support after what? There was widespread agreement among our poll respondents and nearly everyone who watched.

They didn't do very well in that debate, and Harris didn't pick up any support after that debate. I think there's perhaps a new law of physics that nothing ever seems to change the public's beliefs about Donald Trump. It's like a universal constant. Having said that, how did we get from Trump losing by 4 points in 2020 to winning by about 2 points this year?

The obvious explanation is we had a very unpopular incumbent running in an economy that people thought was bad. So it looks like Jimmy Carter in 1980 or George H.W bush in 1992. And substituting the sitting vice president for the incumbent president doesn't really change that formula much. Nearly every group was less Democratic in this cycle.

The biggest change, and you can see it in the county level voting patterns, was among Latinos, who've become more Republican consistently over the past three cycles. All other groups moved in tandem, despite expectations there was no change in the gender gap. Expectations that the Dobbs decision would create a larger gender gap never really appeared in our data.

White college and non college both voted more Republican this year, though the changes were relatively small. Blacks moved along with whites by about the same amount, as best we can tell. And until we get the voter file after the election, we won't have much confidence about this. But it appears that these effects are due more to turnout changes than vote switching.

There was no last minute swing. We were tracking the same people and they did not swing toward Trump or away from Harris in the exit polls. Trump did a little better among those who said they decided in the last week. But this was a very small group, not enough to explain anything.

Bobby Kennedy Jr. at one point was polling in double digits in our polls, the highest he ever got was 7%. The Kennedy voters split evenly between Trump and Harris, so I don't think he ended up being a factor in this race. But turnout did change. Turnout decreased essentially in every state except for three of the battleground states.

In the battleground states, turnout was about the same in 2020 as it was in 2024. Within battleground states, you can see that turn up was up in counties that Trump won in 2020 and down in those won by Biden. So you can explain changes of this size with people deciding not to vote rather than vote switching.

Finally, is it a realignment? Political scientists have accurately predicted five out of the last three realignments. After every election, people come out with confident predictions that we live in a new world where everything has changed. I'd say from our data we show, aside from Latinos, there's not a lot of evidence of groups shifting more than a few points, the typical kind of shifts you would see from having an unpopular incumbent.

The real realignment, such as it is, has already happened. This is the third election in a row with Donald Trump, and it's resulted in roughly the same configuration of voters across these three elections, but with different levels of support for. Parties and turnout. So I will stop there and get back to you, Brandice.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thanks so much, Doug. Really appreciate those insightful comments. Okay, next we're gonna turn it over to Daron Shaw. Who we appreciate being a guest, as already mentioned, from the University of Texas, Austin.

>> Daron Shaw: Thanks, Brandice. I noticed that you got to Sonovich but you couldn't get Panagopoulos, so 50% betting average is pretty good on co authors.

>> Daron Shaw: Let me see if I can go five points in five minutes, that's my goal here. So point one is that the fundamentals mattered in this election, and it's gonna be some redundancy to what I'm sure the four of us will say. But 80% wrong track, 40% approval for an incumbent president, 63% rate the economy as either poor or, you know, only fair, which is a negative in our not so good.

That's at least 2/3 of the electorate essentially wanting something different. I think they wanted change. And that created problems for someone who wasn't clear whether Kamala Harris was the heir to the throne or a continuation of the Biden administration. But I'll rely on a story. One of my first election campaigns was 1992.

And in 1991, in December, Fred Steeper, a longtime Republican pollster, went to talk to George W Bush at the White House. And Fred presented the benchmark polling data and said, if the election were held today, we would lose. And there was silence in the cabinet room. And Charlie Black basically uttered a profanity and he said, there's no way, he says, we would run a better campaign.

There's no way we would lose to Bill Clinton or any the Paul Tsongas or wherever the Democratic candidates were in late 1991. And Fred Steeper said incumbents with 37% approval ratings don't get reelected. And so at one level, I think this was an election that was, as Doug suggested and I'm sure Lynn, given her theoretical background views.

Which is it was an election in which there were very strong headwinds against the incumbent party. So second point, flip side, I guess, campaign effects. Doug mentioned this, I put it a different way. This is the most boring campaign ever for about six months. And then it turned into the most eventful, tumultuous election campaign I think many of us can ever remember.

But it's unclear exactly whether Harris could have moved the numbers very much at all. I mean, that's one of the kind of interesting questions in the postmortems. Is to what extent did Harris run a great campaign, A flawless campaign, in the words of Joy Reid, or a terrible campaign.

And I think the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. You're talking about a candidate who had roughly 100 days to basically distinguish herself from her 2019 self. Were you serious in 2019? Do you want to defund the police, you want open borders? At the same time clarifying her relationship with the incumbent administration.

Wait, are you defending Biden's record? And I don't think it's a real criticism to say she never really threaded that needle. The question I guess for us and for the audience is the extent to which threading the needle would have helped her very much. I do think there's some apt criticisms, but I think that the two basic messages were, Trump's closing message was they broke it, I'll fix it.

Whatever you think about Trump, that's a pretty good message, right? Given the mood of the electorate. Her message seemed to be some version, it was we won't go back. Which you could also translate into the two components, which are orange man bad and abortion. Those seem to be the two messages that Harris was running on.

I don't know how much to make of that. I read the same sort of thing that Doug read in the polls, were there was a sugar high after her dissension and through the debate, and then it began to wear off. And if you're of the view, and I don't want to put words in people's mouths, but I think a lot of us thought that was a bit of a sugar high.

The question was whether she could have put any kind of substance under that to sustain it for a period of time. And I don't think she did that, I'm not sure that's a real damning criticism. Third point on realignment. I don't think I disagree with Doug. I think, if I'm hearing Doug right, he basically said there wasn't a realignment, in this election there's a long-term realignment that's already happened.

That I completely agree with. Just a couple of numbers that I ran. If you look at, let's take a look at a couple of really kind of critical groups here. Voters under 30 in the 2012 election plus 23 Democratic. There were plus 11 Democratic in this election, a 12 point movement.

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

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

There's not much more realignment than you can get. I mean, that is just an enormous movement. I think the misnomer is that those groups are now swing groups. It's not that they're Republican groups, they're just swing groups. African-American's not, it's just a question of the margins. And it does create an enormous problem for Democrats because you have to mobilize more African-Americans given the diminished margin.

I think that's a problem in states like Georgia and Michigan and elsewhere. Fourth, point turnout, Doug mentioned this. There've been conspiracy theories on Reddit, which I wouldn't advise you go on, about the 15 million missing Biden voters. Well, that number is shrinking by the hour as we count the California votes.

I do think it is the case though that you're gonna end up. I think Harris is now at 71.2 million. Biden was at 81.3, I think she'll end up probably about 5 million short. And yeah, mobilization was a problem, probably more of an issue than persuasion in this election cycle.

But turnout went up in Georgia, it went up in Wisconsin, it went up in Michigan. It essentially flatlined in Carolina, Nevada and Pennsylvania. And my guess is it'll end up flatlining or going up slightly in Arizona. So in the states where the election was decided, turnout wasn't as big an issue as it was nationally.

All right, fifth point, the polls. Professor Rivers mentioned the polls. Not too bad. Last time the average miss was about 3.9 percentage points in the national. In the statewide, the aggregation of statewide battlegrounds was about 4.3. That's absolute but it's also close to directional since it was off almost the same way everywhere.

This time around, I ran some rough and dirty numbers, it was about 2.6 on the national, about 2.4 was the absolute level of the air in the statewide. So about 60% of what the air was last time around. I think Doug's right, we still have some polling issues.

I think you saw some evidence of herding in this particular cycle. People didn't want to get too far out from basically a tied race in the battleground states. I think there continues to be a misuse of polls by journalists even as data consumption has gotten more sophisticated. I think that's a problem, and I do think the assumptions of the polls about the makeup of the likely voter universe remain a little problematic.

The main problem we found from 2020 was not to make everybody's eyes glazed over, but something called non ignorable, non Response bias. That is to say, the people who didn't want to do your poll tended to have particular political predispositions, that continues to be a problem. And the distinction is amongst pollsters, it's not so much that we're not getting enough Republicans, although there's a little bit of that.

It's a compositional effect. It's the sort of Republicans we're getting are not the right Republicans. And so amongst the best practices I would advise, in addition to leveraging the voter files to sample off of lists of registered voters. I think mixed mode is absolutely essential right now, because there are people on web who won't do a phone, people who will do phone but won't do a text to web.

So mixed mode is a big deal. I do think we ought to be asking questions within our surveys about level of MAGA support. And the question we were asking for a long time was, do you think Biden was legitimately elected? That allowed us in the polls I was involved with to get a better sense of do we have the right Republicans?

Because those numbers needed to be at certain levels. And if you were below those levels, your sample wasn't kind of MAGA enough to properly estimate the Republicans. So that's five points in seven minutes. Yeah, más o menos is not too bad. With that all turned over, I think Dave goes next, right, Candace?

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: No, so you're mostly right. Your comments on the Election, I think we all think are right. But the next to speak will be Lynn, Vavrik joining us from UCLA.

>> Lynn Vavreck: Thanks so much, Lynn. And thanks, Darren. Thanks, Brandon. You had a 50/50 shot, Darren. It's really great to be here with everyone today.

And I mean, leave it to Brandice to bring a bunch of political scientists together and get them to agree on everything. And so I'm gonna sort of try to mash up a little bit what both Doug and Darren have said and kind of take a bit of a wider view and talk a little bit about how I'm thinking about the 2024 election.

I sort of start by thinking about it over the last 100 years. So let's just say 1930 to 2030, the next president will take office in 2029. And when you think about that, we're more than a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and so much is different about life in America in the 2000s than it was in the 1920s and 30s.

But I'm worried that we still think a little bit about politics through this idea of the New Deal Coalition. And as Doug and Darren both laid out, that coalition is gone. And so the New Deal is a long time ago now. We're not fighting over relief efforts. We're not fighting over the role and size of government.

Trump may get into reorganizing the federal government and downsizing and deregulating, but that's a different thing than the kinds of things we were talking about all through the 20th century and into the first part of the 21st century. And I agree with Doug that the pivot on this really happens in 2015 in advance of that 2016 election.

If you think back to 2008, Barack Obama and John McCain spent the better part of three weeks fighting about a guy named Joe the Plumber. And whether Joe's taxes were gonna go up under Barack Obama's tax plan because his small business, he was a sole proprietor. And that meant, as John McCain said to him, congratulations, Joe, you're rich.

Joe didn't feel rich, and the two candidates fought about this. Fast-forward to 2016, we're fighting about a completely different set of issues. And so my view of this is that in 2016, the dimension of conflict in American politics really shifted from those New Deal issues. Role and size of government, the tax rate, what should government do in your life?

Two issues that are identity inflected or identity based. And those issues have some particular characteristics that change the tenor and the feel of politics. They're more divisive, because they're about people. And essentially we're fighting, if you remember back to 2016, the border wall, a religious test to enter the country.

You could lump into this set of things, same sex marriage and now trans policy, bathrooms, sports teams, all of these person based issues. And I wanna stress the issue part because these are things on which policy has to be written. This isn't like the 1980s, when the Republican Party talked about the Moral Majority.

We don't believe in divorce. We believe in families having a mother and a father, no single parent. This is bad for the fabric of society. They weren't gonna write laws outlawing single parent families or outlawing divorce. That was a moral argument. What's happening now is we have to write policies on these person based issues, that's incredibly divisive.

It's essentially about who gets to have membership in our national community, which is personal to people. And it's hard to compromise on many of these things. You can't be married on Monday and Tuesday, not on Wednesday and Thursday and on Friday, only if you want to be in the way that you could compromise on the tax rate and give a little and get a little.

So we're fighting over a different set of issues, and the nature of those issues are very different than the old New Deal issues. This is all happening while there's been a change in the electorate, where we have people identifying with both political parties in rough parity. So roughly, the same amount of people say that they call themselves a Democrat as they call themselves a Republican.

And that means that both parties are competing hard and winning, or almost winning every election since 2016. And that's gonna produce all kinds of strange externalities, like you're unlikely to go back to the drawing board and reinvent what your message is if you're winning or almost winning every time.

The American National Election Study, which Darren is a part of, tells us that voters appreciate the two parties want to build very different worlds. Nine out of 10 people say they see important differences between the two political parties. That's a massive increase from where we were in the 20th century, when only 5 or 6 out of 10 voters said that.

And you can think of obvious reasons why that's true. And the American National Election Study also tells us that people have more emotional reactions to political parties. So all of this is happening since 2016, 2020, and 2024. And as Doug said, Donald Trump is involved in all of those elections.

So the 2020 election is largely a replay of 2016, county by county across the country. The absolute average shift in the Democratic Party vote share, very small, low single digits. 2024 is a replay of 2016. I think Doug mentioned this, that in 2020, we see a uniform shift up in Democratic vote share from 2016, that's Covid.

That's retrospective voting, let's give a shout-out to Stanford Professor Mo Fiorina. Looking back at 2020 and the pandemic and saying. Saying, I'm gonna kick the incumbent party out. So Biden picks up vote share almost everywhere relative to how Clinton did in 16 and in 2024. This is the second Covid election.

This is a re-equilibration, sort of back to where we were in 2016 and retrospective voting again, voters looking out and saying, I don't feel this recovery. I think the citation that Doug gave to 1992 is exactly right. In 1992, it was a jobless economic recovery. And that opened the door for Bill Clinton to say, change versus more of the same.

It's the economy, stupid. People think it's the economy, stupid, meant that the economy was in the dumper. That's wrong. His message was, I'm gonna build a bridge to the 21st century. Change versus more of the same, we need a new economy for the new 21st century. And that's a lot of what is happening here in 2024.

Objective indicators suggest growth, but people aren't feeling it. Prices are still high. And so it's a price stagnant recovery. I don't know, some economists will come up with a better word for it than that, but that makes it very hard for the incumbent party. And so we see that shift down from where the Democrats were in 2020, again, uniformly across states and with another average county swing that is in the single digits.

So these elections, they feel like very big things are happening because the party that wins is changing, and the parties want to build very different worlds. And so that feels to voters like these are all huge shifts. But as analysts, I think what we see is that the shift is actually quite small because the outcome changes.

It has serious consequences for people's lives. But politics is locked in for most people. And that just will lead me to my last point about polling and surveys, which is largely thanks to Darren and Doug and David, the innovators in survey research who are on this panel. Surveys have come so far in the last 20 years.

And we've always been looking for these changes, for these voters who are changing. And first, in the early 2000s, the innovation was, let's get more power. Let's get more people in these surveys so that we can find small changes. And then in the mid-2000s, we increased the tempo of surveys.

So now that we had more people, we started surveying them with more frequency again, looking for change, looking for change. And then we mashed up power in cadence. Big, big surveys going out at short intervals. And then this year, David and Doug and their collaborators with the Data just bringing the panel component in as, again, a way to measure change.

Let's measure these people a year ago, four years ago, and let's keep interviewing the same people. It's an incredibly powerful design. We're building better and better telescopes, and we just happen to be doing it at a moment in time in politics where there's so little change to actually see the areas that Darren talked about, the groups that are moving.

There are groups that are moving, but they're not large segments of the population. And so we're in this unfortunate position where we've built incredible telescopes that now aren't powerful enough to see where the change is actually happening. They are powerful enough to tell us a lot about those groups, but we will wish we had more.

And so I just, I think that, you know, the state of polling and survey research, we are in such a better position than we were 20 years ago. Just we happen to be at a moment in time where politics is largely locked in place.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thanks so much, Lynn, for those complimentary.

And here, I mean, I am complimenting you, but with The comments to Darren and Doug, and now I'm gonna turn it over to someone who needs no introduction if you're logging on as a Hoover or a Stanford guest to our webinar, David Brady.

>> David Brady: So I'm gonna do a little bit of what Doug and Darren Lynn did, but not much.

So when the surveys, the question for the surveys was, would we be as wrong as we were in 2020 and 2016? And so even though we made some corrections in terms of increasing the number of rural voters, etc., that wasn't clear what would happen. So I tried to look at the Biden coalition in 2020 and a little bit on the Hillary's coalition in 2016 compared to where Harris was.

And so in our surveys, it was about right. We had Biden in the people who said they voted 2020 was four and a half point winner. So when I looked at that, the two big things that struck me as different in our poll from the others was one, the gender gap was nowhere near as large as some people were making it.

Some people had it 13, 14 points. We did not have it as that big. And that struck me as that was a problem. That was a problem for Harris's coalition. But the biggest one was among Hispanic voters, where Hillary had won them by a large margin, Biden won them, right, and her margin had dropped fairly dramatically.

And that showed, by the way, in the 12 counties in Texas along the border, the six counties that have the Most whites voted for Trump in 2020, but the six counties that over 85% Hispanics, they voted for Biden in 2020, and all of those counties voted for Trump in 2024.

So then I turned to the question of, well, what about there's only three sources of votes, right? You can get your partisans the base vote, you can get some defectors from the other party, and you can win independents. So Biden's win in 2020 was in fact a win based on the fact he got about 95, 96% of Democrats to vote for him.

He won a few more among defectors. He won more Republicans than Trump won Democrats to him. And finally he about split the independents. But when I looked at the Harris candidacy, she was about that. She was about 96% of Democrats voting for her. Among people who were gonna defect, she had done a little bit better.

So she had more Republicans defecting to her than Democrats going the other way. And this is the last survey we had before the election. And then but among Independents, she was trailing by 10, 12 points. So I looked at the issues to find out and the three big economic issues, inflation, jobs, and I'm sorry, the third issue is immigration.

On those issues, if you were a Democrat and cared about immigration, only 89% of them were voting for her. So she lost Democrats on inflation, lost big on Independents on inflation, lost on immigration, she lost again Independents. And in the two areas where Democrats should have done better, she did a little bit, but those issues were not as large to the voters.

That was the democracy issue and abortion, where she did actually pick up some Republican defectors. But the combination of those led me to think that her coalition was not good enough to win in the election. I wanna turn to the notion of realignment, which everybody has spoken about.

The first thing, Lynn, I think Leonard's right. But the fundamental question in the area of realignment is previously, realignments that we know and have written about. There's a situation in which in order for the majority, you have to have an actual majority party that wins elections over a consistent time period to pass the policies that change American, change American, change America.

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

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

We have a party that is primarily Democratic and that's primarily liberal. And the point of that is, can we have a majority conservative party or a majority liberal party in the United States? And that certainly is not clear to me. Donald Trump has transformed the Republican Party, and he's made it a party that's much more blue collar, less well-educated, more competitive.

And he's won two or three elections narrowly, in each case. But none of this seems to me as though that we have now created a situation in which you're gonna have a majority party that can, in fact, resolve the issues that Lynn mentioned. And that in large part is because those issues are cultural.

And I guess the last point, so we're in a situation where we really don't know. In regard to the last point about the cultural issues, I agree with Lynn. They're gonna be much tougher, much, much tougher to deal with and get a final resolution on. And therefore, you're likely to continue to see this flip-flop back and forth as exactly that set of issues like abortion and other things will fracture the Republican Party over the next two to four years.

And who would be surprised if in 2026 the Democrats came back big and I guess, the last point I do want to make is the economy will come back. Both political parties have totally negated the fact that the deficit and Social Security programs, Medicare, Medicaid, those programs are not in good shape.

The percent of the economy that has to go to pay down the debt, that's high, that's not going away. And neither party, did anything to deal with those issues at all, and things like that don't go away. Arithmetic and math are there.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thanks so much, Dave, and thanks to all of you.

So I'm gonna lead off with a few questions of my own for the panel, and then we're gonna launch into audience questions. So if you're listening, and you want to ask a question, this would be, and you haven't already, a great time to start writing it in to the chat.

So most of the attention goes to the presidential election, and there's been this big shift in power over time to the press presidency. But Congress is still Article 1 of the Constitution. And an arguably surprising result of these elections is that in four of the seven swing states, Democratic senators take the Senate seat while Trump wins the state.

So we've got Nevada with Jacky Rosen, Michigan, Alyssa Slotnick, Wisconsin, Tammy Baldwin, and then Ruben Gallego recently called in Arizona. So what do you think contributed to this outcome? Why is Trump winning? I know these are small margins, but still, these are clearly called races. And things are shifting Democratic in kind of down ballot, but pretty high ballot in the Senate as well.

Who wants to? Dave, you've written on divided government. Do you wanna lead on this?

>> David Brady: Candidates if you look at the candidate in Arizona, candidates make a difference. And Trump, as he did in Georgia, helped pick candidates that aren't so good. So I think there's a split vote and a swing there.

But the other point is the states where they held, those are states where the Democrats campaigned heavily and put a lot of money in, and they did. They did lose Pennsylvania, Ohio. I thought for Brown, that was a tough case. So I was not surprised that they held those.

I thought they might hold Pennsylvania, but I wouldn't have been surprised if they'd have lost one more. But I thought 54 was sort of the top for Republicans in the Senate. And I thought it would be more likely to be 52, because I thought Casey might hold. But the others did hold.

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

What's happening to these voters who are split ticket votes?

>> Lynn Vavreck: My hunch, and this is just a hunch, is that it is not that complicated and may go back to something that Darren and Doug both talked about, which was composition of the electorate and turnout. I think, and maybe, somebody can check me on this while I'm talking.

I think that some of those Senate races, more people voted in the Senate races than voted at the top of the ticket. So usually, we think of roll off as you vote at the top, and then you don't vote down ballot. But I think I was looking, although I have looked at a lot of things in the last few days, so I might be.

I'm putting a huge caveat on this, but I think that there are some of those races where more people are voting in the Senate race than for president. But whether one way or the other, part of this is surely who's not everybody votes in every race. And so there could be people who just turn out, they're indecisive for that race for president, but they know what they think about the Senate candidates and vice versa.

That has to be a large part of the story.

>> Daron Shaw: Can I? The story is not that complicated, but I think we even political science have tied ourself up into a little bit of a nod on this. Because we've been so focused on polarization, polarization, no deviation, no defections, that the expectation is that you're just gonna get a straight party line vote across the board.

The reality is, if you look at each of those races, I mean, look, Jackie Rosen dumped $85 million of negative advertising on Sam Brown's head in Nevada. I mean, that's the story. Kerry Lake was known unlike these other Republicans in these races, but was known negatively in Arizona.

McCormick won, McCormick had the most robust campaign of any of the ones we've been talking about. McCormick actually ran half of Trump's campaign in Pennsylvania and probably ought to get credit for it. The Slotnik seat in Michigan was an open seat, but she had a massive advertising advantage in that race.

And Lynn and I are, I think, at least partially responsible for moderating the expectations about what money advantages can actually drive in these races. On the other hand, a lot of these cases were Republicans seeking to defeat incumbents who were well known. And the incumbents is taking advantage of financial advantages to just bash the heck out of these people before they really got going.

So what you saw was they were lagging 13, 14 points early on, especially Brown in Nevada, they made up a bunch of that. These partisans mostly came home, but there was enough of a residual so that they ended up holding in a couple of these states. That's why I think it's a simple story, but one that we need to get our act together in political science and figure out, wait, under what circumstances do campaigns matter and do they not matter?

Because we haven't been really clear on that, I guess.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Doug, do you have anything to say? And I don't know if adding on to that, the House majority is razor-thin. And I guess at least at the start of the webinar, unofficially called. I know it could be called any moment.

And it looks like the Republicans will win, but there don't seem to be a lot of coattails here, right? That we often associate with presidential elections.

>> Doug Rivers: So we were puzzled in the summer because the Democratic Senate candidates were polling so far ahead of Biden and then Harris, and that did not come to pass in the end.

In the end, these were pretty close, and Senate races have been nationalized. So I think idiosyncratic factors like Harriet Lake is a weak candidate, advertising advantages, incumbency advantages and so forth explains it. The House is more interesting in my opinion. Republicans are going to win the house by 3 to 4% in the popular vote aggregated across the districts.

There is roll off in those races, so it will be significantly below the presidential grace. It used to be the case that House candidates could insulate themselves from what happens in the presidential election? We are gonna get a very close, but it looks like I think Republicans are gonna get about 222 roughly.

Still depends on some California races that are close, but the House vote is pretty much following the national vote. So this was a great year for Republicans in the House.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thanks, several of you mentioned young voters and the fact that young voters swung, not so far that they voted in favor under 30, they did not vote in favor of Trump.

But they did swing in a discernible direction towards the Republicans from their usual base rate. What do you think is causing that? And I'm just gonna actually note, I don't hear anything about this in the press, so this is probably totally crazy. But I was at a conference in Europe this summer where a number of European voting scholars stated that they believe young voters had become less enchanted with the left because of their experience under Covid.

Again, we hear nothing about that, and I know the standard in political science is once it's a few years away, everybody forgets about everything, nothing matters. But if this has no relevance, and it's a European thing, perhaps only what's driving the change for young voters?

>> Daron Shaw: I'll take a whack, because I was gonna zag, but nobody zigged.

So here's my zag. There's this assumption that young people are all a bunch of liberals, walking around carefree. And then as they get older and more curmudgeonly, they become conservative like Dave Brady. But actually, the evidence is that the defining characteristic of younger voters is that they're less engaged, less involved, less interested in politics.

And so up until around 2000, they came in looking like everybody else, even more so. In the 80s, they were for Reagan. In the 90s they were for Clinton. They pick up on the loudest message. My zag is I think the anomaly might be the 2000s to 2020 era.

And an anomaly in the sense that the electorate's 5050 and young people came in 65, 35 Democratic. And I have some pet theories about that for which I don't have good data, which is I think a little bit was cultural issues, that they're more progressive on those issues.

I think there was a fear of the draft and of the military engagements in 2004. I know in my conversations with students, they all thought they were going to get drafted and sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, I think. So what happens? You move a generation away from that, and they got caught up, Obama was an exciting candidate.

So all those short term forces pushed a particular cohort in a direction. I think now the interesting thing is there's no real short term forces necessarily affecting younger people differently than everybody else. So that's my zag. I think we might actually be returning to an era in which young people are actually even more affected by whatever the short term forces are, whether pro Republican or Democrat, rather than being reliably liberal or progressive on certain issues.

I guess the caveat would be if you continue to have this sort of cultural divide, young people do seem to be more progressive on cultural issues and maybe that pushes them in that direction. But I think we may be returning to the era that we had before know, before the millennials came of age.

>> David Brady: So this is a question more for, I guess, Len and Doug, but there was a bunch of stuff made about the difference between young men and young women, where women are much more Democratic and men were more conservative. How much, how much of that is relevant to this question about youth?

I mean, I haven't pursued it, I looked at it a little bit.

>> Doug Rivers: Yeah, so I agree with Daron. The conventional wisdom is always independent swing more one direction or the other due to forces in a particular election, and younger voters are more independent. The thing that's unusual about the recent era is that we have not had a landslide in the adult lifetime of Millennials.

The elections have all been close. So there hasn't been much of an opportunity for the group to swing a lot in one direction or the other. Our own data shows less differences by age than what you're seeing in terms of movement over time. There were polls earlier in the year claiming an inversion that younger voters were gonna vote more Republican, I don't think that came to pass.

So I'm on them. My view is not less has changed there than people think. In 2020, they were overwhelmingly Democratic. This year they were much less so in 2012, in 2008, incredibly Democratic group, not so much in the other years.

>> Lynn Vavreck: I was just gonna add that I suspect once we get the post election.

Waves of the data that the say project is collecting will be able to see and I suspect this will be true. A lot of the movement of these young people, from the Democratic Party in 20 to the Republican Party in 2024 is going to, I think we can do this with your data collection, Doug, will be driven by what they're.

Their sort of ideology was in 2020. So it's conservative, young conservatives who are coming to Trump in 2024, they voted for Biden in 2020. Maybe that's retrospective voting a little bit, Covid kicked the incumbents out and some of them are coming home to the Republican Party and some of them are just like, white, non-college educated voters.

And other voters have been doing over the last decade and a half, moving out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party because of these new issues that we're fighting over. And I think that this panel data, this is why panel data is so, so powerful because we have measures of these basic attitudes in a previous point in time.

And that allows us to anchor people and say, then how are they moving now in the future?

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thanks. Okay, and so one final question from me before we turn to the audience questions. So, several of you mentioned the Latino vote as one of the big factors that may be a more lasting shift, at least perhaps.

And of course, some of that movement started even before this election, but then became an even more prominent factor. Dave, you mentioned that Trump won the Rio Grande Valley, which at one point used to be called the Dem's Blue wall some elections ago, not in the most recent ones, but in Texas.

Trump also won Miami-Dade county and made substantial gains nationwide with the Latino vote. To what extent do you think these flips are Trump-specific? Do they have implications for how we should think about Latino voting patterns moving forward? Daron, you run the Texas Lyceum Poll. I hope I'm pronouncing that right.

And I'm assuming that that has some insight in Texas. Do you wanna lead on this?

>> Daron Shaw: Yeah, I'll take a whack at it. Dave mentioned the border counties in Texas and South Texas. So there's 18 border counties from El Paso down to McAllen. In 1996, two of them went Republican, 16 went Democrat, in 2024, 14 of them went Republican and four went Democrat.

We've been talking about turning Texas blue for a long time in Texas and the idea was, is that the demographic shift, young people coming of age and a burgeoning Latino population along with the burgeoning Asian population, would essentially create a much more competitive environment. And the assumption was always that, my sort of take on it was that that's true, so long as the populations you're talking about remain 65, 35 Democratic, Republican.

Well, they're not. And in fact, I always think it was ridiculous to have expected them to. The Latino middle class in places like San Antonio and Austin is absolutely going through the roof, there's an explosion of sort of wealth in Latino communities. There's been an economic diversification, there's been a cultural diversification in the Latino community such that I always think a theory that's predicated on politics remaining static is a bad theory.

And that was the problem with that theory, it's like, yeah, sure, if everything remained exactly the same, then Texas would be blue by now. But people change and why would you expect these populations as. San Antonio is a really interesting place it's in a lot of ways it's like the Hispanic capital of the United States.

I've heard people refer to Atlanta as the African American capital of the United States because the entrepreneurship and the business sort of the business power that's concentrated in Atlanta around black businesses. San Antonio is becoming that way for Hispanics and as that's happened, the politics of the Hispanic community has come to look more diverse.

And let's be clear, they're not Republican, they're just less Democratic than they were. And I think maybe the key thing I'd say about the takeaway point is the Hispanic population was never as firmly committed to the Democratic Party as, let's say, the African American population has been, right.

It doesn't have the historical connectedness to the civil rights movement and even going back further to the New Deal that the African American community had to the Democrats, it's always been kind of a marriage of convenience in some ways. Well, I'm nominally more Democratic than Republican. Well, that's what's changed is that these voters have become more, even more independent and they've been voting Republican.

So Brennus, you asked about whether it's a Trump thing. I think it's deeper than that, I don't think it's something that will go away, but a chunk of it is not cultural, it's economic. And if Republicans preside over a bad economy, there's no real deep-seated allegiance amongst Hispanics to the Republican Party.

A lot of that support will melt away. What I don't think you're gonna get is sort of strengthening of commitment to the Democratic Party yet. Unless there's a match of issues to the particular conditions of the Hispanic community, I don't see either side being particularly innovative in that regard.

>> Doug Rivers: One point on that is Democrats depend very heavily on doing reasonably well among Hispanics for getting a national coalition together. The combination of college-educated whites is too small by itself to win, and particularly to win in the Sunbelt states without winning decent majorities of Latinos is a real problem for Democrats.

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

>> David Brady: The hard part of trying to put a coalition together that brings Hispanics and progressives of the Democratic Party together so they consistently stay there, I think that's just hard. It's not even clear to me that the college, that the tendency for college graduates to now be voting for Trump, I don't think that holds if you come in and you want to raise taxes on them.

So we have not found in Lynn's terms any a coalition that is capable of creating a majority to answer this set of questions that she and others have raised. So I think it's hard to put those coalitions together that we haven't done it yet. And I don't see it, I don't see, I don't have any clear idea of how that happens.

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

So one negative externality of that is we'll just change the rules of the game so that you win the next, right? And we saw that sort of happening after 2020. Could we change the rules of the game a little bit? So more of my voters got to turn out, find more votes.

So that's one negative externality of winning or almost winning every time. But another one is sort of what Dave is suggesting, that it's just when the parties are in rough parity like this and these elections are close and you see yourself slowly over time losing voters. How are you gonna build this coalition for the future, knowing you are on the wrong side of public opinion on the cultural issues that are coming?

So on trans policy, on bathrooms, on sports teams, the Democratic Party is on the wrong side of this, and public opinion is massively lopsided on these issues. And so that's a tough spot to be in. And you've got to think about it both in terms of what are your policy goals, but you also wanna win elections.

So how are you gonna build this coalition? And maximizing on those two dimensions, I think, is gonna require imagination for sure.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thanks, we've got some great questions from the audience here. Hopefully we'll have time to get to as many as we can. So our first one is from Lisa, and she's asking whether you think that the loss of faith in government institutions played a part in this election outcome in addition to the factors that you've already identified.

>> Daron Shaw: Yes, Trump's the disruptor candidate. Harris talked about change and, but it wasn't exactly clear what change she represented. I think she was a little bit stuck because the closer she got to trying to tap into that, the more she had to defend. Well, wait a sec, do you mean you're gonna do this stuff that you talked about in 2019?

I really think she was kinda hamstrung there. But Trump's been throwing bombs since 2015. And so an electorate that has an appetite for not just change at the margins, but substantial change. I think we asked a question, I wanted a question that Fred Steeper asked way back in the day, which is revolutionary change.

I remember in 92 he asked that question, we got, I wanna say in the 20s who said they wanted revolutionary change. I think we asked for major upheaval this time and we got a big chunk said major upheaval. I think it was close to 20%.

>> Lynn Vavreck: Darren. You know what I'm gonna ask you, and I don't know if you know the answer to it, but where are we on my all time favorite survey question about government?

>> Daron Shaw: For Fox, we designed a question that Lynn loves and it was, what's the main message you wanna send to Washington? Lend me a hand or leave me alone. And it's varied considerably over time. You'd think it'd be pretty, but it actually flows quite a bit. And we got a huge uptick in Leave Me Alone.

That is, as the campaign went on, the lend me a hand made a comeback. But it was about what you'd expect in a close to a 50/50 election.

>> Lynn Vavreck: See, I think that's so interesting because at this moment in time when people are saying, I can't afford to buy a house, everything costs more, I can't take my family on vacation.

In the choice between leave me alone or lend me a hand, they're at leave me alone.

>> Daron Shaw: Yeah.

>> Lynn Vavreck: Right, that to me requires some thought.

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

>> Lynn Vavreck: Yeah, exactly. This is a problem.

>> Daron Shaw: Yeah, so it's a great question, this disaffection and this declining trust in institutions. And we've seen it, I know Doug and Dave have seen this, I know Lynn has. It's across the board. Even the military, even the most sacrosanct institutions historically, we're seeing declines in confidence and trust, and hopefully we can do something to better those numbers.

>> Doug Rivers: So one institution I'm hoping we will see an increase in trust in is our election system. That suddenly Donald Trump's finding millions of noncitizens voting and voting machines changing numbers and so forth, that seems to have disappeared at least for a few days off of the agenda, and that would be a good thing for everybody.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Doug, we'll make a plug. You can come back and listen to Ben Ginsberg and Justin Grimmer in January on this webinar where we'll be talking about trust in elections and their work on it. Dave, did you wanna say something to this on institutions and trust?

>> Lynn Vavreck: Brandice, can I say one more thing?

Just on this question of like, this goes back to my new deal, 1930 to 2030 idea. The basket of goods that we think about when we think what does this cost for people, when we measure inflation, it's like milk, eggs, bread. Yes, people still need those things. But I think that on average in the population now, there are a whole bunch of other things that people feel like they can't get by without.

Basically, everybody's carrying around a $1,200 computer in their pocket, everybody. And nobody drinks regular coffee anymore. Everyone's $5 for a cup of coffee. You don't drink water out of your faucet. You want it to be in a bottle. The world is really different for people. And if government could come and help people with some of those costs instead of just saying, well, you shouldn't be buying coffee at Starbucks or drinking bottled water.

But this is how people have come to live. And so I feel like increased confidence in government, there could be increased confidence. To go back to Darren's thing, I'm from the federal government, I'm here to help. What if the government were actually helping people afford mobile phones and just live their lives in a way that wasn't just about milk and eggs?

>> David Brady: So, Brandice, I will say Mike Spence and I wrote a piece for Project Syndicate after the 2020 election on trust and institution and elections. And one of the points is in order for governments to have trust, they have to do what they say they're gonna do. And as far as I can tell, in campaigns, the campaigns promise things that are absolutely not doable.

Even starting with Ronald Reagan, we're gonna have more money, but we're gonna tax you less, it's gonna happen. And I just see American voters as over a long time period, I'd say from maybe Reagan on, but not meeting the goals that they say they're gonna meet. And in the 2024 election, or 2020, Biden's gonna bring us together.

He didn't in 2020, and it's hard to do. But when you make these huge promises during the campaign, I think that over time, people's trust in government, their ability to do what they say is just, it's gone away. I mean, how many of you on the panel actually trust any candidate to do a portion of what they say they're gonna do?

I'm pretty much very low on that dimension. I just think that over time we got People have promised way more than they've been able to deliver. And you gotta deliver in order to have trust.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thanks, I wanna move to a few of the other questions. So we have a question from Andy and it says it's from Andy Rutten.

So if this is the Andy Rutten I know, hello, Andy. And if it's not, we still appreciate the question. So would the politics have realigned in the same way from the New Deal to identities without Donald Trump? Or was this reconfiguration or if we wanna call it a long term realignment, was it coming and he just sort of was the candidate that took it up?

I don't know if, Lynn, since you talked about this and the historical sweep like to start.

>> Lynn Vavreck: I'll try to do this very quickly. Excellent question, Andy. So part of this is long term and is happening over decades. People are sorting into the political parties as politics is becoming more clear to them.

Barack Obama gets elected, that massively simplifies the politics of race for people. There's some sorting, people within parties are changing their minds. So this is all happening over decades or at least a decade and a half. But you're right that then Trump comes along in 2015 and he is a catalyst.

He is going to speed up that process. If it wasn't him, would it have been someone else in 2015? I don't think so. I don't think Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz were going to go all in on the identity inflected issues the way Trump did.

Does that mean it was never gonna happen? Maybe not. Maybe Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush would have gotten that nomination. Hillary Clinton probably would have won that election. Maybe she would have been reelected in 20, maybe not, maybe that would have been a Republican. Like, could we have gotten to a point in time where we're past the idea of who gets to have membership in the national community?

I don't know the answer to that, but it's a combination of both things. But Trump is definitely implicated in speeding up the process.

>> David Brady: I would say that what happened is that what happened is the Democratic Party declined. It was in the dominant party really controlling the House of Representatives for 60 to 64 years, and those are until 1994.

But what happened in the 60s because of the race issue, the Democrats lost some votes in the south, some states in the south, and you got a series of Republican presidents even though Democrats were the majority party. With Ronald Reagan, you got a swing, prior to Reagan there were equal Rights Amendment for Women.

There were more Republicans that were pro-choice than pro-life, that switched. Second under Reagan, the economy, which was a Democratic issue, is gone. What Trump did, in my view, was he brought less educated voters, which is a term we now use for blue collar. He brought blue collars into the Republican Party.

I agree with Lynn, I don't think any of the other candidates could have done that. But now you've added to the cultural issues, you've added the blue collar. And part of the reason he gets them is cultural issues.

>> Daron Shaw: Can I take a quick stab at this? There's a sort of left, right continuum that's existed since the New Deal, probably prior to the New Deal, where scope of government questions.

And the question erased, bisected that, as Dave says, in the 1960s. What was interesting is I think this is an orthogonal dimension to that realigned system. And the orthogonality is populism, and I think it was latent. And it was latent as a critique of the system. So what Trump did was he came along and said, the system's broken.

It's run by elites, it's stacked against you. And he brought that grievance to life and kind of drew those voters in. Could someone else have done it? Bernie Sanders was doing it in 2016, right? What was interesting was that it came from the right. And by the way, we've seen this internationally, right.

And we've seen it in Latin American companies. The populist dimension tends to come from the left. It's insurgent, it's challenging these bureaucratic authoritarian regimes. In Europe, it's come from the right. But populism doesn't necessarily have to come from the right or left, it just has to animate a salient grievance that exists in the society.

The tricky thing, and so I don't see this, what caught me off guard was, first of all, the number of less well educated white voters who were in some of these upper Midwest states in particular. It absolutely altered the balance of power. Those states were gone from the Republicans like Dave was saying.

Winning Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were sort of pipe dreams in 2008, 2012, but those voters were there and they flocked to Trump and the Republicans. The sticky question is, okay, so they buy into your statement of the grievance, but what do they stay for? When you're actually governing?

And I think the Republican Party has a real issue. I'm with Dave on this particular element of it. What does the Republican Party do to retain them now that looks like they're gonna own the keys to the kingdom here for a little while at least, right, is it tariffs?

Lynn mentioned these cultural issues that I think have some appeal. And are the Republican elites even on board with this entirely? That's one of the things that's been interesting left last week or so, is it seems like they're all on board now in a way they were in 2016.

But anyway, I think we need to be attentive to the possibility that there was this sort of undercurrent. And I'm getting to the question's core, which was identity politics. I think the Democrats have mistaken that populism for some sort of form of identity politics. And I think that's the question is whether they recalibrate on that, I'm not sure they will.

Both parties have a problem right now making a sense of what's happening with the American electorate.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: We have a question from Preeti Mehta. No one has mentioned yet the role of the media in getting out and or controlling the messaging of the candidates. Some feel that the mainstream media news outlets have lost credibility in this election and that the future is about meeting voters on podcasts and dispersed non corporate media.

Do you think the mainstream media is in trouble going forward?

>> Lynn Vavreck: It depends on what you define as mainstream media. If we're talking about legacy media outlets like ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, The New York Times, I don't think that they're in any more trouble today than they were two or three weeks ago.

If mainstream media means television, so including cable, very few people watch cable news. And mostly those are people who are very interested in politics, I don't see those people changing either. So if the question is really like, is streaming and podcasting, you know, citizen sort of media going to change the way that legacy media outlets and cable news does business?

I don't think the answer to that is yes either. But I do think it changes the way candidates campaign and. So it will change things from the candidate side and that will change things from the voter side because they'll be able to hear these candidates in more places than they were 10 years ago.

And I think all of that is good, more information is better. But I think those legacy media outlets, I don't think they're in any different position after 2024 than they were before it.

>> David Brady: No, I mean, the problem was that through the 50s and 60s there was a source, Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, so that if an event occurred like the assassination of Kennedy, there was a standard interpretation of it.

And with the breakup of the news and all the factors and now adding the podcast, seems to me it creates a situation like the bias press of the 1880. When Lincoln debated Douglas, he didn't have to worry what the newspaper was gonna say cuz the Whig papers are gonna be for him, the Democrat papers were gonna be for Douglas.

And pretty much when you turn on Fox News and move through msnbc, it's pretty clear what their views are. Pretty clear what the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal's views are, the only places where it's not, it's like BBC, PBS, ABC, CBS. So Lynn's right, there's been no big change.

That change has been going on for some time and it affects how candidates deal with the election in ways that she and the others on the panel understand better than I do.

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

>> Lynn Vavreck: A little bit, I think. I think Darren and I would both say a little bit less than a point, you know, but. But here's something I'd love to hear you guys talk about. It does seem like the race was closer in the battleground states than it was in the non battleground states.

And what's that about?

>> Daron Shaw: Yeah.

>> Lynn Vavreck: What's that about? That's about the campaign.

>> Doug Rivers: Could have been the advertising in the ground game, I'm not sure.

>> Lynn Vavreck: It could have been. I mean, it's obviously like it's. It's going to be closer there, that's why they're battlegrounds. Like, I get it, but I think that's interesting.

I don't know, Daron, do you disagree?

>> Daron Shaw: You're right.

>> David Brady: Turnout was higher in those states, but it makes a difference. It's hard to believe campaigns don't make a difference.

>> Daron Shaw: Yeah, I mean, the bigger question.

>> David Brady: Yeah, exactly.

>> Daron Shaw: The bigger question is, I'm doing a study right now with Jim Gimpel and Grant Ferguson and Mark Owens in Texas.

Where the Abbott people, after 2022, we had a meeting with some political scientists about the midterm elections. And we asked them, what could political science tell you that you want to know? And Dave Carney, who is Sununu's advisor in New Hampshire and Abbott's advisor in Texas, said, I'd like to know whether the amount of time and energy we spend responding to news media inquiries are worth it.

He says, because we put a ton of people on this. And he says, I'm not convinced it does anything. And so we did a study, they actually turned over all of their requests, text messages, emails, all the requests, the record, whether they responded, how they responded. We collected all their clips and media coverage and coded it.

And turns out they probably shouldn't be spending a lot of time and energy responding to the news media. If what you're talking about is are they driving coverage and then does that coverage affect, in this case, Abbott's favorability in Texas? I think it's pretty obvious that the news media have gone from an advertiser base of revenue to a subscriber base of revenue.

They're no longer interested in making sure Chrysler or Nike are offended by the way they cover things. They're interested in driving eyeballs. And this is clear in the Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, it's all subscriber based. That's what their orientation is right now. It's the fundamental change in the nature of the news media.

The broadcast media are a little less that way, but there's still that kinda reflection. So they're one of a number of sources of information in this ecosystem bringing it back to the campaign. What I thought was fascinating was Harris basically saying early on, I don't care about any of you, I'm not talking to you.

I'm gonna be on social media platforms. I'm gonna niche media. And the question I would have is whether she was, whether it helped her to go sort of come off of that. I actually thought she should have stuck with her guns. What does she care whether Norah O'Donnell gets an interview or she goes on 60 Minutes?

I actually thought things were going pretty well. We could argue that she. I guess maybe what I would say is it be that became an issue that got picked up not only by the mainstream media, but by the niche media also, because I was hearing it on, you know, conservative Outlets.

Why won't she go on? Why won't she have a news conference and that kind of thing? So, my only hesitance on they should just completely ignore these people from here on is that it becomes an issue. And that actually seems to still get picked up across these platforms.

Otherwise, also Doug's thing, you know the answer. Everybody now is talking about connected television and getting your advertisements in the streaming system and the streaming platforms. I'm dubious about how well that worked. I got a Netflix account where my kids are still. If Netflix people are here, please don't listen to this.

Still free riding off of my account. So I have the most complex, bizarre algorithm because it's got my wife's, my daughter's, my son's, and my interests all bound up in it. I got the weirdest political advertisements this last cycle. But that's the next train. It's a little cheaper than broadcast advertising.

I don't know.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Darren, we are supposed to go on C-SPAN, so if you're investigated by Netflix, do not blame Us.

>> Daron Shaw: I think they're onto the scam in the Shaw household anyway.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Okay, so we have time for hopefully, at least one more question. It may be the final question, depending on how long the answers are.

So a question from Mike Liveright is whether there's a possibility to elect more moderates. He's not looking to have a third party, but he'd like to have a way for some individual districts to vote for representatives who are more willing to work on compromise than at least it seems the representatives that are being elected today are willing to do.

Very short answers.

>> Lynn Vavreck: I wanna say that I think the future is bright for moderates, but I guess I mean that in a very particular way. The part of what I think is going on with the challenge for the Democratic Party that we were just bantering about a moment ago is that on average in the country.

It seems like people are sort of centerish, if not kind of center, maybe leaning whitish, and especially on these new issues that are confronting us. And so if parties want to win elections, they got to go where the voters are. And that, to me, is why I think the future may be bright for, you know, nationally speaking for moderate candidates.

On the other hand, it may not be the parties want to win elections, but they also. Also have these policy goals that are not centrish, and so that's the challenge. But I think that we should be able to see moderate candidates emerging. They have to want to run, and your colleague Andy hall has written a great book about that, why don't more moderates actually run for office?

So they have to want to run, but I think if they do run, there are voters there who will, who will vote for them.

>> David Brady: I think that overtime, so if you look at the abolitionist movement, the abolitionist movement had very little success politically. But then when Republicans like Lincoln and others put together and said free men, free soil, free labor, that was a policy that could appear, you could get your goal, but it was a slogan that appealed to people.

Same with Bill Clinton when he founded his movement. To say the reason we're losing elections is we're too far to the left, I have to say that is the way that things get solved. But when I look out there, I don't see that in either party at this point.

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

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

Please come back on January 14th. We'll pick up on Doug's point about elections and trust in elections and all the efforts that at REI and Hoover, Justin Grimmer and Ben Ginsburg have been doing to help build that trust.

>> Eryn Tillman: Thank you, Brandice. Especially thanks to our panel, Dave, Doug, Darren and Lynn, it's been a great conversation.

We appreciate our co sponsors, the center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law and the Institute for Research and Social Sciences. Thanks to the audience for great questions and for all of those behind the scenes that help make the event run smoothly, our events team. This recording will be available on the Hoover event webpage in the next few days.

And we encourage all attendees to visit the series webpage to access recordings of previous webinars and subscribe to our newsletter to receive updates on upcoming winter and spring webinar offerings. We'll put the link in the chat, and we hope you have a wonderful rest of the day. Thanks for joining.