Harry Litman [00:00:00] Hi, Harry here, just with a quick note about our Patreon site: it's for subscribers, so there is a small monthly fee, but there's really a wealth of original material there, one on one discussions with experts about really cutting-edge topics. Just in the last few days, we've dropped discussions about the Bill Barr memo, or the Harvard admissions case that might be the vehicle for the Supreme Court to rewrite affirmative action, or the letter from AUSA's protesting against Bill Barr, or the national security implications of Barr's dragging his feet on the transition. Just check it out at patreon.com/talkingfeds , that's patreon.com/talkingfeds . See what there is to see, and you can decide if you want to subscribe after you've looked at the offerings there. OK, here's our episode.
Harry Litman [00:01:09] Welcome to Talking Feds, a roundtable that brings together prominent former federal officials and special guests for a dynamic discussion of the most important political and legal topics of the day. I'm Harry Litman. It's a measure of the degradation of our democracy during the Trump years that notwithstanding a decisive Biden victory, a large percentage of the electorate feels uncertain about who will be president come January. President Trump has launched a litigation campaign that, for the most part, doesn't even allege and in no way begins to demonstrate, the sort of irregularities that would call Biden's election into question. That part is common ground yet somehow there are nagging doubts that he can pull off what, in essence, would be a coup and the end of American democracy.
Quite apart from his quixotic effort to overturn the election, Trump signaled that he will go out and Trumpian style, firing his defense attorney Mark Esper in a tweet for questioning his use of active duty troops to quell street protests, and then replacing top Pentagon officials with more Trump loyalists. He seems to all but have abandoned his public duties, he stayed mostly out of sight this week behind a wall of tweets, even as the country was breaking records in new virus cases and hospitalizations on a virtual daily basis, spiking to 160,000 daily cases by week's end and raising discussions of lockdowns across the country. Joe Biden, meanwhile, seems unfazed by Trump's stonewalling and petty antics. He is going ahead with the work of the transition, beginning with two important moves: the selection of a coronavirus task force - heavy on science and the sort of expertize Trump has shunned - and the selection of longtime confidant and Washington insider Ron Klain to be his chief of staff. These early post-election moves provide important indications about the governing strategies of the Biden administration and the Senate Republicans, and the role Trump intends to play in exile. To explore these issues, and also take a closer look at important aspects of the election returns, we have three superb guests.
They are: Peter Baker. Peter has been the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times since 2008, he's covered four presidents over his career at the Times and The Washington Post. He's the author of six books, including the recent "The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III," co-written with his wife, Susan Glasser, and a really terrific read about not just Baker, but Washington in those now halcyon-seeming days. Baker’s won all three major awards dedicated to White House reporting: the George R. Ford Prize for distinguished coverage of the presidency, the Aldo Beckman Memorial Award and the Merriman Smith Memorial Award. He's also a political analyst for MSNBC and a regular panelist on PBS's Washington Week. Thank you very much, Peter, for being here.
Peter Baker [00:04:16] Thanks for having me.
Harry Litman [00:04:17] Laura Jarrett: Laura is the anchor of CNN's Early Start. Since joining CNN in 2016 after a very successful but brief legal career in private practice, she's focused on the Justice Department and many high profile legal issues there. Laura, thanks for coming, as always.
Laura Jarrett [00:04:38] Thanks for having me, as always.
Harry Litman [00:04:40] And Robert Raben, the founder and president of The Raben Group, a progressive public policy firm. He was assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice under former President Bill Clinton, where we first met, and worked extensively on Capitol Hill, cutting his teeth with Representative Barney Frank and serving seven hard-fought terms, I would say, on the House Judiciary Committee. Robert Raben, thanks for being here.
Robert Raben [00:05:04] Thank you for having me, Harry.
Harry Litman [00:05:05] So let's start with the Trump holdout here. You know, it's it's on the one hand unprecedented, yet it seemed almost predictable, this kind of giant sulk by the president. The question on everyone's mind, sad to say, is, is there any possibility that he can reverse the result of the election and as Pompeo, among others, has predicted, transition to a second Trump term?
Peter Baker [00:05:32] Short answer, no.
Robert Raben [00:05:33] Highly unlikely.
Peter Baker [00:05:35] Well, the longer answer is that there's no allegation out there that would reverse the election. I mean, short of something extra-constitutional, there is no legal challenge that would prompt any court to reverse tens of thousands of votes in three or more states. I mean, remember, we talked about the Florida 2000 as if that was a precedent for this. It's really a different situation. You had there one state that made all the difference, one way or the other, whoever won that state would win the presidency. And in the end, on election night, there was a difference of 1700 and some votes.
By the end of the machine recount, it was 300 and some votes, 350-some votes, what that meant is Al Gore had a plausible argument to make that he could perhaps have 350 more votes after that machine recount and then win the state and win the presidency. Here, you'd have to switch 52-53,000 votes in Pennsylvania alone. Not going to happen. Never happened, and again, as you point out in the introduction, there is no allegation of any widespread fraud other than simply saying it, there is no actual specific allegation out there on which you could hang such an outcome on.
Harry Litman [00:06:35] All right. But you said short of extra-constitutional, which would normally answer it, but not necessarily in the Trump years. What about some raw power play by state legislatures or secretaries of state?
Robert Raben [00:06:48] Yeah, that's the more salient political piece, which is the states most likely to help him, sort of the conservative or Republican political establishment in Georgia and Arizona, don't seem to be doing what many of us predicted could happen. So people who did scenario planning about all the awful things that we were on track to see and praise God, many of them we haven't seen with foreign interference and outright corruption of ballots, but you're not seeing Republican officials, in states that could, make moves to appoint parallel electors or say this is an outrage or talk about fraud. You're only seeing US Attorney General Barr do it, but you're not seeing Republican officials in the states do it where it matters.
Laura Jarrett [00:07:30] But you're also seeing Republicans in positions of power, like in Georgia and even in Philadelphia, pushing back strongly against Trump's baseless claims, right? Think about Al Schmidt going on 60 Minutes saying his office is getting death threats, for God's sakes. I mean, this is not somebody who is some sort of flaming liberal. This is somebody who could be couching things in the way that we're hearing from Republicans in Washington, but the folks on the ground in the states are not doing that.
And also, to Peter's point about the court cases, the bifurcation bizarro world of what's going on between what Trump is saying on Twitter and what his lawyers are saying in court is like night and day. The court cases are not about fraud by and large. Now, every day Rudy Giuliani says, oh, there's a new case coming, or we found some new affidavit. By and large, the cases were largely about poll workers not being able to observe the ballot counting, or they didn't have the right distance because of COVID. And in a few cases, the judges threw them out of court. I listened to one case in Michigan where the judge literally said, all you have here is hearsay, and dismissed it. So the judges are able to see through what's happening here, but I wonder if the president has actually read his legal filings sometimes, because the court cases bear no resemblance to anything that he and his allies have been putting out on FOX.
Peter Baker [00:08:46] He's been told in the last few days to stop using the F word, stop saying fraud, and use rigged. You can say rigged, according to this logic in the White House, because rigged is not a legal term, it's not a specific allegation that you have to prove because there is no such thing as rigged in an election law contest.
Harry Litman [00:09:01] Yeah, OK. I think it was 0 for 12, but more more notably, every single case failed even to allege a Florida-type scenario. Now, some lawyer somewhere has tumbled to it, so the latest allegation in Pennsylvania is that there is an equal protection violation, in what? In the two tiered system. Some people do mail in ballots, some people do in-person ballots. That's actually all they could reach for to try to get something that would be all encompassing.
Peter Baker [00:09:30] A policy disagreement, not a fraud, not a corruption, which is what the president is saying. And if you have any of you invalidate mail in voting because of an equal protection argument, you're invalidating many elections going back all the way to the civil war. I mean, we had mail in balloting since the Civil War.
Harry Litman [00:09:43] And not to mention all of the ones in this very term. I get the sense also that the Republicans are winking and signaling that they're humoring him, and let it just go a little bit longer. Of course, that's in its own way, pretty pernicious, but there's a downside to the pretense that the election isn't settled.
Laura Jarrett [00:10:05] But don't you also wonder, like, why are they so afraid of him? He lost.
Harry Litman [00:10:07] Still, yeah. Why are they so afraid - what? Who is this guy?
Laura Jarrett [00:10:11] I wondered about that a lot this week, and I think I got my answer from Lindsey Graham. Lindsey Graham basically said, 'the writing's on the wall here, it's about Georgia.' And if it were not for this runoff in Georgia, we might see Mitch McConnell ditch him sooner. We might see other Republicans in leadership ditch him sooner. But because they have this race that's going to change the balance of the Senate, potentially, if the Democrats win back those two seats, I think that it's changed the dynamic for them on the ground, and they feel the need to still galvanize supporters. They feel the need to not brush past the president's wildly popular base. And I think they're worried that if they do anything to anger him and to bruise his ego even more, it would hurt them come January.
Peter Baker [00:10:56] And he got 48%, or whatever the final number will be, of the vote. He got five million or again, whatever the final number will be, more votes than he got four years ago. So if you're a Republican, you're looking at somebody who commands the loyalty of the party unlike any other Republican figure even in a defeat. He's not repudiated, or doesn't feel repudiated, or doesn't seem to be repudiated from the Republican perspective in the way that George H.W. Bush, or Jimmy Carter, or other one term presidents who were defeated were. He's going to, he's going to continue to be a force and may not be that he can run again in 2024, anything like that, but it doesn't mean that they can afford to, from their point of view, to anger him unnecessarily.
Harry Litman [00:11:35] I guess that's right, because the one thing he can do, even if he's not a likely nominee in a couple of years, he certainly has shown himself willing to cancel politicians, right? Anyone who crosses him, he will be unabashed about doing that. But I think Laura's point is, when you hear people whispering, why are you doing this? That's what they say, they need to keep the base energized for Georgia.
Laura Jarrett [00:11:57] But this idea that it doesn't have a cost, right? Let's give them a minute to lick his wounds. The 9/11 report finds that the messed up transition is part of the reason we missed the ball on that, right? So there's actually, there is a cost to this. There is a tangible downside to letting his ego ride the day.
Harry Litman [00:12:18] I totally agree. Among other costs, I'm sure you guys have been doing the same in the last week, talking to people who are really engaged, thoughtful voters, and they really don't know if he's going to somehow pull it off. They're jumpy from the past, that's sort of the same as saying they don't know if we still live in a democracy. That's a real tangible cost, I think. Robert, you're giving me a, kind of a jaundiced no here.
Robert Raben [00:12:41] It's a personal business and it's very, very hard for most people who are unmedicated and untherapized say to their peers, 'hey, it's time to go.' We're having a hard time doing that with Senator Feinstein on the left. It's hard. It's a personal business, and people don't like saying tough things to people. But the other thing you're seeing is the Vichy government didn't dismantle itself either. People have been on a power gravy train for three and a half, four years, McConnell being the lead of that. They've gotten some unbelievable judicial wins out of it, and they don't want to stop it, and there could be things that happen in the next 30 days. They're continuing to run judges through the Senate. I don't know that I would want to stop that either.
Harry Litman [00:13:22] They now want to have a confirmed Department of Homeland Security, having not had it for most of their tenure, right?
Robert Raben [00:13:27] I think mostly it's about not wanting to poke a bear who has shown a willingness to say demonstrably horrible things about you over, and over, and over again. And it's extremely damaging. 95, 96% of Republican voters vote for Trump.
Harry Litman [00:13:45] And one other point about this Trump campaign is he's again leveraging his cronies in government. You have Pompeo, I don't even know what you make of that kind of smirking statement. But then the Bill Barr memo to the field that was taken broadly as a signal that maybe DOJ is going to march in in a heavy-booted way and at least support the notion that there's fraud afoot. Any, any thoughts about what Barr's doing here?
Peter Baker [00:14:16] Well, I thought your column, first of all, in the L.A. Times today was super interesting about the consequences of it, and what actually added up to. I had not recognized early on that he was actually overturning a longstanding policy of no federal investigation between the election and the certifications, which is really interesting, and again explains the resignation of the elections chief in a clearer way than I had understood before. I tend to think that what Barr thinks he was doing was to placate the president without actually, in his mind, doing anything of any genuine consequence, because the caveat that he put in the order, which is that they could investigate fraud on such a level that it would actually overturn the election in a state is such a high bar, you would think, because there is no such allegation out there that would do that, that my guess is he saying, well, I can tell the president I've been investigating fraud if there's any out there, but he's telling us attorneys you can only do it if there's really something genuinely big, and there isn't anything genuine. But as you say, there are consequences that go beyond this next couple of weeks.
Laura Jarrett [00:15:13] I agree that it's toothless in action, as Harry writes, but that it was, it was done for a purpose and it was done for a reason, and it was done in a way that was so disturbing that the chief of election crimes had to step down because he felt like he couldn't do his job with a level of integrity that he was comfortable with, given this long standing policy, a 40 years policy was overturned. And it reminded me so much of the situation surrounding Roger Stone, because a DOJ official told one of my colleagues about this, that Barr wasn't asked by anybody to do it.
And every time they say things like that, it's just so clear, he doesn't have to be asked to do it. He knows exactly what the president wants him to do, because the president tells them every day on Twitter what to do. The only thing that he hasn't done, that the president really wants, is to come after Obama, Biden, Comey, those are the, the high-dollar figures that Barr has not gone after, that has created such a situation that the president is disappointed in his performance. But the memo really makes it clear, I think, that this was for show, because the cases that had been brought so far do not impact the vote totals, and they have to impact the vote totals in order to be brought before certification. And so really, nothing is going to change on the ground, and I think U.S. attorneys in the field know that, U.S. attorneys in the field saw exactly what this was.
Harry Litman [00:16:35] Yeah, 'thanks Attorney General, if I can bring you the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West, I'll be right in court'. It's not as if this happened to be the policy and he shifted it, this is the very core of the policy that you do not want the federal government mucking around precisely between election and certification, lest they look as if they're putting a thumb on the scale for the incumbent. That's the very reason we have it. All right, Laura called this a bit of the bizarro government, let's go back to the real emerging government now and what we've seen of Biden as he begins to exercise the powers that will move to him on January 20th. His two big moves seem like the antithesis of Trump. This task force is full of exactly the kind of experts that Trump has not just shunned, but disparaged, and then Ron Klain, he probably, would have maybe been the choice in any event. But a competent Washington guy, does it tell you anything in particular about Biden's going to govern, or given Ron's very long and close relationship with Biden, he went directly from a clerkship that we did the same year to chair of Biden's Judiciary Committee at like age 29, was it pretty much a foregone conclusion that he was going to get the nod?
Peter Baker [00:18:02] I think it's likely Klain would have been the choice no matter what. He brings a lot to the table, decades of experience with Biden going back to his days on the Hill. He was his vice presidential chief of staff, he was a candidate for chief of staff under Obama. So everybody sort of thought of Ron as a chief of staff in waiting for years. Ron Klain, it's a back to sort of more normal mode in Washington. Everyone in Washington knows who Ron Klain is, if they don't know him personally, they know who he is. Republicans and Democrats respect him, obviously I would think Republicans think of him as a partisan and obviously he wouldn't be their cup of tea, but they don't, I've never heard anybody say anything bad about him. I think that he's got a widespread respect because he's been here for a long time. And that's the opposite of the Trump people, who came in sort of pulling together an administration out of bits and parts of people who had no experience in Washington whatsoever, had no idea how the place worked and a few people who did.
And I think that the Klain's choice tells you that Biden is just sort of returning back to the status quo ante, in effect, in terms of how you put together a White House, the kind of people you put in power, and how you move forward structurally. Now, he may not be able to get away with the status quo ante in terms of policy, or in terms of leadership, because this is a different era. But in terms of staffing his White House, I think we'll see a lot of places that are familiar people in Washington.
Robert Raben [00:19:14] Obama, Clinton, Carter, all terrific presidents, all came from outside of Washington and prided themselves appropriately on bringing a new class of leadership to populate the top tier of the government. Obviously not completely, but that was the ethos. Here we have something the Democratic Party hasn't seen in at least 50 years, maybe since LBJ, where it's accepted and trusted that the people who were closest to the president are deeply experienced, good and bad, at how Washington operates. It's just going to be interesting to return to that.
Harry Litman [00:19:50] I think that's fair, and everyone does know Ron Klain, and I think he's considered a affable person that they can talk to, a sort of good cop. So is there going to be a bad cop here?
Robert Raben [00:20:03] It's a great question. The finest president in my lifetime, Barack Obama, amazingly put Rahm Emanuel...
Harry Litman [00:20:10] Well, the ultimate bad cop, right?
Robert Raben [00:20:12] Not just a bad guy, but who believed it was saintly to get up every day and be a bad guy. An interesting decision by Obama who, that is not as it goes to put that person in charge. So we don't have that in Ron Klain. Now, push back a little bit on the premise, whether you you have to be a bad person, male or female. There are extremely affable people who know how to say no, and work with private sector ferocity to have them do the dirty work. So I'll sort of push back on the premise, but I will point out Biden knows what he's doing.
Harry Litman [00:20:45] Yeah, but that is a fair point. They know how to apply the pressure.
Peter Baker [00:20:49] Can I sort of disagree with that a little bit, at least? I mean, like we're getting the Republicans, OK, because obviously Republicans are going to be a unique challenge. The question for me is how he's going to discipline or keep the Democrats behind him. I mean, one thing we've seen about Trump, like him or hate him, he kept the Republicans behind him. They did not break with him, as we're seeing even today, and that's something we haven't seen, I think, by any president, frankly, going back many years. I mean, every other president, Republican and Democrat, had to deal with this set within their own party, in fact, quite often that was the most frustrating part about being president.
Certainly that was true with Obama and Clinton and sometimes with Bush during the Iraq war and Reagan even, I mean, had a lot of Republicans from time to time would balk at him, including Dick Cheney, for instance, over a major tax bill, those kinds of things. And Trump basically didn't have that. He had more uniformity, even though they didn't like him very much, among his Republican lawmakers than any president we've seen. Is Biden going to be able to enforce that kind of same discipline, or is he going to be sitting there constantly dealing with whack a mole moderates who are upset about this, and the liberals are upset about that. His coalition is so fragile to begin with. It was basically built on animus toward Donald Trump, not out of any ideological cohesion. So that to me is going to be a really important challenge for him.
Laura Jarrett [00:21:55] One of the times I think you're going to see this come up pretty quickly is with who he picks for some of the more sensitive posts, thinking of attorney general, thinking of secretary of state. AOC tells The New York Times he can't pick Rahm. Now, I don't know that Rahm was in the running for anything in Biden's cabinet, but the fact that she said that in that interview, I thought was noteworthy and sort of a warning shot of what's to come, to Peter's point about some of the Dem-infighting that we've seen already. And to the extent that people, I think, had a conception that McConnell had such a longstanding relationship with Biden that they might be able to reach deals together given their past.
I think the past week has shown us that that may not be such a safe bet. I think there was this idea that's even explored in President Obama's latest book about the idea that the first black president didn't get the same respect that some others had, and that they were able to work with Biden in a way that they were tone deaf to the president. But I think that they're going to put up a fight on some of these nominees, and it's going to expose some issues there with Democrats and the president elect.
Robert Raben [00:23:01] It's shimmera, it's an oasis to think that he's going to have that kind of hegemony among the Democrats, he's not. That's not who the Democrats are, one. Two, you've got some amazing evidence in front of you that he was able to do it from the basement, ran a very disciplined campaign. He picked an African-American woman to be the vice president, a woman, an African-American, a South Asian, in an interracial marriage. So he's shown some tremendous ability to navigate what is, by definition, our fractious party, and I think that will continue. But it's not going to be pleasant. Both the left and the right have very, very important intraparty - I won't say warfare, but serious conversations about who we are, and that's because the parties are movements treated as if they're C3 organizations. But they're movements, and movements are fractious.
Harry Litman [00:23:49] Talk a little bit about what you see is the schism within the Republicans between the - well, who are the jets and the sharks there?
Robert Raben [00:23:56] They're going to go back to regular order, which is what Reagan codified. And it was a outside conspiracy, because I'm on the left, but it was an agreement between the Chamber of Commerce and the then Christian Coalition, which was the Moral Majority, which is now the Federalist Society, that said, we will each look the other way. You do what you need to do on social issues, as long as we get deregulation and lower taxes.
Those two wings created a symbiotic political - I think we're going to go right back to that. And Stephen Schwarzman, who has been a rah-rah for Trump, is now going to have to figure out, does he stick with Trumpism? And I don't know if that's Tom Cotton or Nikki Haley or whom, or go back to the Chamber of Commerce Republican Party, where those, he and his other CEOs were happy for years. That's what I think is going to happen on the right, there's going to be the Trump mantle, which used to be the Christian Coalition, which used to be the Moral Majority, and it's going to be the Chamber of Commerce. Now, I'll stop with, note the actual Chamber of Commerce, I was using that metaphorically, the actual Chamber of Commerce is figuring out how to get along with Democrats.
Harry Litman [00:25:07] Yeah, got it. And just a quick comment on the more publicized divide within the Democratic Party, there may be a crazy way in which, assuming the Dems don't win both runoffs, Biden's path is a little easier with McConnell as majority leader, at least on some issues where he can just say, look, I've got to play ball with him versus trying to bring everyone from Joe Manchin to Sheldon Whitehouse along on a particular issue. Let me ask, is anybody watching a particular appointment that Biden's going to be announcing as a bellwether or tell about his presidency?
Robert Raben [00:25:47] White House counsel and A.G.
Laura Jarrett [00:25:50] Same.
Harry Litman [00:25:50] Same.
Peter Baker [00:25:51] Yeah, I'm interested in what he does on secretary of state, just because I think that it tips you on whether the election scrambled the choice. Susan Rice had seemed to be the obvious frontrunner prior to the election, does that change because of McConnell still possibly controlling the Senate, I don't know. I think one of the things that was really interesting about that cabinet is all four top slots, the most obvious candidates for each of the four are women, and he can make a real statement, having already now chosen a woman as a vice president, if he gives those four slots to the candidates who seem most likely to be in line anyway, right? Susan Rice at State, Lael Brainard at Treasury, Michele Flournoy at Defense, and maybe, maybe Sally Yates, but there are some more candidates, A.G. to Sally Yates, and maybe Sally Yates is also harder because of the Republican Senate, assuming they keep control.
Harry Litman [00:26:36] Yeah, I'm thinking of A.G. also because of the very thing we were just discussing about Barr. He's got a lot of very solid candidates, but many of them come traditionally from the political world, even though they're perfectly qualified. And Adam Schiff, for example, but he may want to signal a real return to, quote unquote, professionalism at the department, and that would weigh in favor of an old hand who's made his or her bones in the department itself, like a Sally Yates. OK, well, we'll be seeing this over the next few weeks, and my guess is that also will relate to what we were talking about up top, once he's named four or five or six important cabinet members, the charade that Trump's trying to carry on will get harder and harder.
OK, it's now time to take a moment for our Sidebar feature, which explains some of the terms and relationships that are foundational to the world of law and politics that we discuss. Today, we're continuing a sort of back to basics stretch about federal prosecutorial practice, explaining the charge of mail and wire fraud, which is sort of the all purpose Swiss Army knife of the federal prosecutor. And to explain, we are very pleased to welcome Matt Tyrnauer. Matt's an American writer, director, producer and journalist. He directed the documentaries Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, Studio 54, and Valentino: The Last Emperor, which was shortlisted for an Oscar nomination. He is also an award winning journalist, and is currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. So I give you Matt Tyrnauer on mail and wire fraud.
Matt Tyrnauer [00:28:26] What is mail and wire fraud, and what is included within it? Federal prosecutors may only investigate and prosecute federal criminal and civil law, which under the Constitution is limited to certain subjects called enumerated powers. So, for example, Congress could not pass a criminal law that prohibits all fraud. However, over the years, Congress has used its enumerated powers to pass criminal laws that cover a wide variety of subjects. A good example of this is the mail and wire fraud statutes, which were passed under Congress' power to establish the post office and regulate commerce.
Violation of these statutes carries a term in federal prison of up to 30 years per offense. These crimes cover any fraudulent scheme that includes the use of mail or interstate wire communications. Wire communications include telephone and Internet, and this language permits prosecution of a wide variety of frauds. The use of mail or wire communications does not have to be essential to the fraud, just a step in the plot. These crimes are a good example of how Congress can often, 'make a federal case out of it.' This is Matt Tyrnauer, for Talking Feds.
Harry Litman [00:29:36] Thanks very much, Matt Tyrnauer. Tyrnauer is now working on The Reagans, a four part docu-series set to premiere on Showtime in early 2021.
All right, I wanted to talk just a little bit more about the campaign postmortem, we're learning more things as the analysis comes in about the current state of American life. First, it does seem that for whatever reason, Biden was the right guy for this juncture. You had a lot of Democrats tepid about him, but he outpolled many of the Democratic nominees for Senate. And it really seems like his elder-statesman, good guy credentials were just the sort of anti-Trump tonic that the country was looking for.
Peter Baker [00:32:09] Yeah, I would say so. Look, I mean, Democrats want to put up the anti-Trump the anti-Trump was somebody who was inoffensive,, and likable and didn't polarize their own coalition. And that was who Biden turn out to be, right? Now, the problem for Biden, or the challenge for Biden is translating that negative mandate into a positive mandate, right? The mandate that many Democrats saw in this election is we got rid of Trump, but they don't agree on what the positive mandate is. OK, we want sweeping legislation on climate change, on guns, on health care, all these trillion dollar plans that were put out there during the primaries, all of which seem sort of laughable given a Republican Senate. So we don't yet really know, I think, how Biden takes this this election victory, which is more, more convincing than it look like on election night, but less than a Reagan-like sweep, and translates that into the next four years, other than not being Trump. I think that's the really interesting question going forward.
Laura Jarrett [00:33:00] It's a convincing victory, but given that we're still in the middle of a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, it was a remarkably close race given, given where we stand as a country, given the president's leadership on such an important issue, the number of people and conversations that I think all of us have had this week with people who are just confounded by that result, I think tells you something about just the divide in the country, that people can live in almost two different universes in this country. I mean, I don't know about where you were, Harry, but at least where I was in New York, the sounds were deafening. And not just for five minutes, but for hours. You walk the street, people are hugging, people are crying, people are clapping, horns are blaring. It's as if a dictator had been been dethroned, it's as if a war had ended. I mean, people talk about a pressure valve, I think it was way more emotional than that.
And yet there are millions of people who are extremely disappointed, who think this entire thing was rigged, to use the president's word, and have no confidence in our electoral system. And so I think there are, there are questions to be thought about how the media tells that story better, and how we get to the divide better. We do profiles on all of these little pockets of the country, but I still think there's so much more work to be done to explain better how you can just live in two different universes here, in order to try to get to, to what happened last week.
Robert Raben [00:34:37] Well, one thing the Democrats do, cycle after cycle after cycle, is refuse to figure out how to talk to evangelical whites. And increasingly, they've sort of written them off as an other world. Well, it's the United States of America, guess what? I don't know if they're a plurality, but it's a very significant bloc, and I point to the Democrats' success with evangelical African-Americans as Exhibit A that you can be deeply religious, you can worry about reproductive rights, you can worry even about homosexuals like me and still vote Democratic. But the party apparatus and all of the sort of concentric circles around it - the Sierra Clubs and the Human Rights Campaigns and the other - that make up the progressive establishment, have yet to figure out a strategy to speak to evangelical whites in a way that's remotely respectful. And it's malpractice, it's a political malpractice.
Harry Litman [00:35:27] Yeah, I mean, you would think that if ever they had the opportunity, having Trump as their banner-waver really gave an opening. But you're right, the evangelical community stuck with him. Love the sinner, hate the sin, plus the judges. But let's go to the race question, actually, because I think a lot of people were perplexed, or at least found it noteworthy that Trump marginally increased his vote among African-Americans and pretty significantly among Hispanics. And, is that a harbinger of trouble going forward for the Democrats?
Peter Baker [00:36:06] First of all, it's a harbinger of trouble for the political world to - and a reminder not to make assumptions about people based on categories that we are, we ought to be much more careful about that. I think we are too easy to say X type of people demographics, whether it be racial or religious or gender or whatever, fit into this kind of box. And they don't. And they don't. And he was probably our most racially incendiary president we've seen going back decades, if not longer. And yet, you're right, there's a really interesting result in some of these exit polls - how much we believe the exit polls, of course, is up for grabs - but it does seem like he increased his numbers. Now, among the African-American vote is still relatively small, right? Still, it's still at eight percent. It was better among African-American men, terrible among African-American women. Among Hispanics. I think it was something like 39% or something like that.
Harry Litman [00:36:55] And it was decisive in Florida, although that, it's always sui generis, Florida.
Peter Baker [00:36:59] But I remind you. Right, all Hispanics are not the same. Don't don't treat them the same. Cubans and Venezuelans and Salvadorans and Mexicans, everybody has their own different history and culture and background. And even within those communities, people have different points of view about things. And I think that he did well among Hispanics who take the abortion issue seriously and are maybe very Catholic and I think that that was an important issue for them. I think there are obviously some people who are here who think Cuba is the most important issue. There are some who came here legally and resent people who come here illegally, and therefore might have agreed with his anti-immigrant rhetoric, even as, even if they were themselves a product of families that came here at some point earlier in these decades and centuries. So, you know, we have to be careful about over-simplifying complicated communities.
Robert Raben [00:37:45] And the meta here, it's similar to what I said about white evangelicals. The party apparatus has not made the emotional decision that Latinos in the United States, who are 58 million people, are your peers, yet they are treated, like African-Americans used to be treated, as fungible widgets that get moved around an electoral chessboard every two or four years. And in fact, it is the fabric of America, and I'll, I'll do a sort of a distinction to show the disparity between how the Democratic Party treats different groups: Jewish Americans, of which I am one, we're much smaller, but the Democratic Party can tell you, down to the minyan, the difference between a Jew in Kiryas Joel or Williamsburg, as opposed to one on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, as opposed to a South Florida condominium Jew, as opposed to an Austin Jew.
They can tell you everything they need to know about that voter profile. And when it comes to Latinos, it's, it is just a huge brown iceberg. There is zero investment. And when I say zero, I am not being funny, there is zero investment in figuring out the nuance. And an exciting piece to look at is similar Mexican Americans - that is, very diverse groups of Mexican Americans - behave wildly differently in Arizona and Nevada than they did in South Texas, very similar polyglot of Mexican Americans, mixed immigrant communities, et cetera, et cetera. It's about organizing, it's about respect, it's about letting Latinos lead the effort. So I'm excited that hopefully this will be a wake up call to say - I hope to both parties, but clearly the Democratic Party - guess what? There's tremendous complexity and richness here, and if you want it, you got to fight for it.
Harry Litman [00:39:31] Great point. There's one other sort of nugget that's emerging from the postmortem, the election that in some ways speaks to the depth and the persistence of the partisan divide. Apparently, the pollsters are learning that Republicans, in a statistically meaningful way, are less likely to respond to pollsters in the first place. And that's part of what made for the - again not, not 2016 levels, but still - some important miscalculations. And it also to me, the most likely explanation, is that in the age of Trump, they're less likely to trust any institution. And that goes for the pollsters who are calling them up and asking who they're going to vote for. All right, so those are the bigger lessons learned, I think, from the election, which now blessedly stays behind us, we hope. We have time now just for our last feature of Five Words or Fewer, where we take a question from a listener and each of us has to answer in five words or fewer. Our question today is from Billy Schaff, who asks: Do the Democrats have a credible chance of winning both Georgia runoffs? And if so, what is the key for them?
Robert Raben [00:40:53] Yes, turnout.
Laura Jarrett [00:40:55] Yes, Stacey Abrams.
Peter Baker [00:40:56] Credible, but I wouldn't bet House.
Harry Litman [00:40:59] Long shot, but Abrams' efforts.
Thank you very much to Peter, Laura and Robert, and thank you very much listeners for tuning in to Talking Feds. If you like what you've heard, please tell a friend to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts or wherever they get their podcast, and please take a moment to rate and review this podcast. You can follow us on Twitter @TalkingFedsPod to find out about future episodes and other Feds related content. You can check us out on the web, talkingfeds.com , where we have full episode transcripts, and you can look to see our latest offerings on Patreon, where we post discussions about special topics exclusively for supporters. Submit your questions to questions@talkingfeds.com , whether it's for Five Words or Fewer, or general questions about the inner workings of the legal system for our Sidebar segments. Thanks for tuning in, and don't worry: as long as you need answers, the Feds will keep talking.
Talking Feds is produced by Jennifer Bassett and Rebecca Lowe Patton. Our editor is Justin Wright. David Lieberman and Rosie Don Griffin are our contributing writers. Production assistance by Matt McArdle. Our consulting producer is Andrea Carla Michaels. Thanks very much to Matt Tyrnauer for his sidebar on mail and wire fraud. Our gratitude goes out, as always, to the wonderful Philip Glass, who graciously lets us use his music. Talking Feds is a production of Dalito, LLC. I'm Harry Litman, see you next time.
