SIO216: The NYT Polling Panic

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, this is episode 216, I'm Thomas, that's Jamie, how's it going, Jamie?

0:00:35 Jamie: I'm tired from daylight savings, Thomas, but otherwise good.

0:00:40 Thomas: I know, I joke, you, I, I, I'm calling your bluff right now, I said off-air, you thought this was some blackmail material. The minute Trump supports making daylight savings time permanent, I've, sorry, make America sleep right again. I'm, I'll convert. That's my, I am a one-issue voter, and currently, nobody is, like, promising on a federal level to fix that. Because it has to be federally, I I'm pretty sure states aren't even allowed to do it. Like some got grandfathered in or whatever. But anyway, long story short, that's my one issue. And I think Trump's too, too stupid to figure this out. But if he did that, I would have some soul searching to do. I'm just saying. That's all.

0:01:19 Jamie: Yeah, so I'm glad that, you know, my refusal to vote for Biden now is the least controversial of our lines in the sand. So that's good, good.

0:01:24 Thomas: Yeah. You know what? I'd come around or I'd vote third party. No, I'm just kidding. I would come. I'm jesting. But Democrats, you might want to, you know, jump on that one because it's daylight savings. Savings time is the dumbest. Well, I know everyone has to be the correct everybody. I care about the changing of the time. I literally don't care what the meaningless symbols. It could be a picture of a chicken and like a moon. It doesn't matter what the symbols are on the clock. What matters is the fact that we decide to change them by one symbol twice a year. That's all I care about. Pick one. That's it. It doesn't matter to me. Oh, sorry. Drives me nuts. It's when you have kids and you work for their precious bedtime and you feel so good about having accomplished a bedtime that works and it's good for their mental health and also for your mental health.

0:02:18 Thomas: And then I'm not screaming. And then it's like, oh, sorry. Well, we're just changing this for no reason. Why? Because we want to kick ourselves in the balls for no reason. We all want to do it to ourselves every single year, except for a couple of lucky states. You lucky states, Arizona and somebody. Gosh.

0:02:34 Jamie: I hope this goes viral. That was such a great rant. I hope you remember this always.

0:02:41 Thomas: Anyway, what are we here to talk about? We're here to talk about. So I think we have a lot to discuss here, but there was a New York Times. They did their own polling and I listened to the Daily episode where they discussed it. They had to, and this is a, well, not really a side topic. It's a, it's another component of this, similar to the great Onion headline, "Joe Biden Leads By a Billion Points in Rotary Phone Own Poll," uh, similar to that, this is still how we have to do polling, is call people, which is, you know, which has its problems. And one thing they discussed in this, uh, in the Daily podcast, where they talked about this, is they had to call something like 500,000 people to get this. I think they got 7,802 respondents. So, like, yeah, it's tough. And, you know, some of that, there's a lot not involved.

0:02:45 Jamie: I

0:03:37 Thomas: I mean, for one thing, I, it was a 10 minute, you know, survey that they're trying to get people to do. So that's hard to get, call somebody and be like, Hey, do you want to do a 10 minute survey for no reason really that won't benefit you in any way? Uh, so that's tough. That's a challenge. And I don't know that might make the data, I might bias it in one way or another. I'm not sure we can talk about that, but that's one component. So anyway, they did this and the results in my mind were pretty, I don't if shocking is the right word. I mean, it's the same with 2016. And, you know, you and I didn't know each other back then. So we've talked a little bit about it. But I was actually very shocked and surprised when Trump won. I'm not going to pretend that I saw it coming. You know, I'm not going to pretend that I thought that we lived in a more rational world than we live in.

0:04:26 Thomas: And especially because of how little a percentage it takes to matter. You know, my thinking was, well, Trump is just so bad that even if, like, you know, three or four percent of Republicans are like, I just can't do this, that should make an enormous difference. It should swing the election. And I was wrong. And a couple of times subsequently, I have wanted to have this feeling. My brain tries to go back to the, like, well, surely we've had now three years of this guy, surely people are like, "Ah, wow, what a mistake we've made," you know, like, of course we're going to get this guy out. And then you see something like this, or or other things that have happened, and and it's a stark reminder that, like, oh, no, things haven't changed all that much. Now, maybe they've changed a little, but, but maybe not. And that was my preliminary, prima facie reaction to this poll. Why don't you, uh, before I go on forever, what was your, uh, first reactions to seeing this article in this polling.

0:05:28 Jamie: Was less surprised by this than it sounds like you were. In part, I was less surprised about Donald Trump's victory in 2016 than it sounds like you are. In fact, in 2016, I was one of those people screaming at Democrats that we weren't taking this seriously enough.

0:05:40 Thomas: Sure. I mean, you weren't on the podcast, so that's convenient of you to claim that, but okay. No, I'm kidding.

0:05:49 Jamie: I mean, you can you can go back through my Twitter feed and my Facebook. I was, you know, I was concerned. I Was concerned that Democrats were not taking seriously how historically unpopular Hillary Clinton was, and how entrenched the hatred against her was. And, you know, I had a friend at the time who used to say that, you know, Republicans can dominate a ham sandwich and run it against Hillary Clinton and get 45% right out of the gates. And so an actual, you Know, beating heart was better than a ham sandwich. Although policy

0:05:53 Thomas: I'm teasing you. Yeah, no, that's fair.

0:06:29 Jamie: Wise, I'm not, I're not sure. Well, and, you know, in terms of Republican turnout, like fair or not, and most of it's not fair. This This has been like a decades long effort in conditioning the American electorate to hate Hillary Clinton, and it paid off. But that said, you know, I'm not sure a lot of the commentary that's been done on these polls is getting it right.

0:06:29 Thomas: I don't know about that. Yeah. Um,

0:06:55 Jamie: But again, that itself is sort of meaningless, because we're all sort of trying to play at Nostradamus here. And I think we're mistaken about what we should be covering. And we're not doing ourselves any favors by focusing strictly on the horse race aspect of the polls.

0:07:13 Thomas: Who's we, when you say that, I don't know. Are you saying, is it, I mean do you care, should New York Times have not even bothered to do this poll? What do you think? Is this I mean, it's kind of a meta question, but polling in itself, I mean is it worth doing?

0:07:17 Jamie: Collectively, all of us, you and I individually, the political.

0:07:29 Jamie: Yes. So there's a professor at NYU by the name of Jay Rosen, who's a press critic, and he's done some analysis of this. And he says, three-fourths of our news coverage regarding elections is about the horse race. And we don't actually dive into what the candidates are talking about, or how things like taxation policy or immigration or healthcare actually touch our human lives. And so what ends up happening is a lot of people spend too much time thinking about, you know, the pragmatics of voting, right? Everybody wants to vote for the candidate that's electable. And so we sort of like like psych ourselves out trying to play this three-dimensional chess game instead of focusing on what actually matters to us and that motivating the conversation. I

0:07:46 Thomas: Yeah.

0:08:21 Thomas: At the same time, doesn't this contradict what you said a minute ago about Hillary Clinton? I mean an argument would be, well Democratic primary voters didn't take into account this very thing. The fact that she might not fare well in the general and that would seem to kind of contradict what you were saying a moment ago. What do you think about that?

0:08:44 Jamie: I don't think so because one of my biggest criticisms about Hillary Clinton's campaign is that it was never really clear what her message was other than I'm better than Trump. And she didn't spend a lot of time talking to voters about what mattered to them or how the policies that she was going to pursue Do Would Meaningfully Change Their Lives.

0:09:03 Thomas: Well, I don't agree with any of that. And I feel like we're

0:09:06 Jamie: I

0:09:06 Thomas: Going to get into a debate that we didn't want to get into there. I don't agree with that. I feel like the also how is anybody going to run against Trump? Like it's the most difficult. She had to do something nobody had ever done. And the media didn't help her by not letting her spend any time on policy ever. But I guess with trying not to get into that argument.

0:09:28 Thomas: Do you think then I guess I'm trying to get your opinion on whether or not you do think that we should be trying to vote, keeping in mind who's going to win in the general. Or do you think in the primary we should just try to vote for whose policies we want, even though something like this polling could potentially tell us that we are destined to lose if we do that?

0:09:54 Jamie: I don't think we can meaningfully extrapolate from these these polls in either sense. And so my opinion is that the best thing to do in the primary is vote for the candidate you think is the best. And you know, if after the primary, your candidate doesn't get through, then at that point, you just vote for whoever is not Trump.

0:10:12 Thomas: Well, yeah, absolutely.

0:10:13 Jamie: Right. But so you know one one of the things that stood out to me in these polls was, you know, a lot of the commentary was that the electorate isn't as left as the Democratic Party wants to believe itself. Jonathan Chait had an article that Democrats were living in a fantasy land, and they needed to come back and be more moderate in order to win the election. And this to me just doesn't seem right. He's got this one line in the article where he says, you know, normally, it's not good to take any one poll too seriously. And it seems like he's willing to sort of set that aside, unless that poll conforms to what I want to be true.

0:10:13 Thomas: Absolutely.

0:10:49 Thomas: However, yeah. Unless I have a deadline for this article I'm writing, in which case.

0:10:56 Jamie: And so, you now, to me, one of the things that stand out, it doesn't really make a lot of sense to me to say that these polls show that the Democrats or the electorate isn't as, you know, left or as progressive as the Democrats fantasy land wants to believe. Because again, after Joe Biden, the two candidates who come the closest are as far to the left as it's possible to get in a Democratic primary in 2019.

0:11:23 Jamie: And furthermore, Bernie is doing better than Warren, and he's to her left. And so it just seems to me insincere to say as a result of these these polls, that Democrats are in a fantasy land and need to move back to some sort of mythic center. A mythic center, mind you, that if we're to take Jonathan Chait at his word, includes 55% of Americans who thinks discrimination against white people is as severe as discrimination against minorities.

0:11:53 Thomas: Yeah, there's a lot there. There's lot I wanted to get to. Let me stick just for the moment. Let's talk about polling. I think we might as well we touched on that. We might as well try to deal with that first, since it's kind of a broader meta question. I saw a lot of responses to this. Well, why don't we discuss sorry we should first say exactly what the polls found, more or less.

I mean, there's a lot of different crosstabs and all that, but overwhelmingly the feeling is Biden fares very well in these six important states. Uh, the ones they highlight are Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona, and North Carolina. Those are swingy states, those are battleground states. Obviously, I, I would assume Florida means the most of any of those. I would have to assume that would be the most important, important one. Um, and would, I think, if we win Florida, like the other ones don't even matter, I'm pretty sure. Um, but, you know, I could be a little off on my math, but if we went Florida, certainly some number of those don't matter. But anyway, those are the states they looked at, and Biden does around three, four, you know, points better in some of those. Uh, even in Michigan, um, loses to Trump by two in North Carolina, whereas Bernie is kind of split.

Bernie wins in Michigan, in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Trump wins in Florida, Arizona, North Carolina. Whereas Warren, it says even in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the only state she beats Trump in is Arizona, which Sanders doesn't, which is interesting. I wonder what that's about. But anyway, and then Trump beats her by six in Michigan, which has like the highest differential of any of these.

0:13:27 Thomas: So that's the polling in general that we're talking about. There's some other stuff. There There's a racial breakdown that maybe scares me even more for different reasons that we'll get to. But that's the point we're talking about. And I wanted to talk about the preliminary responses of, yeah, but polls don't mean anything or they're not right or think about 2016, how wrong they were. And I want to make a couple of points about this. And please feel free to respond after I'm done here in any way you want. But we're only one year out. And I think a lot of people are acting like, you know, well, we're one year out. I mean, so much is going to change in one year. We're only one year Out. And furthermore, when you talk about name ID, like name ID was one of the excuses.

0:14:11 Thomas: Everybody knows who Trump is. So, like, if you're asking these people in these swing states, hey, who's the choice, Trump or, and they don't immediately say anybody but Trump, the other, just the other person every time, the other person, other person. They don't immediately shout at the pollster on the phone. That's already, you know, like a pretty big indication. Like if they're like, well, Trump or Biden, you're like Biden, but not saying, you know, like if you even have to think about it, that already is troubling. And I don't know that a year of campaigning is going to move somebody who's like 50-50 on Trump and some of these candidates, depending on who it is. I don't know what that year is going to do. Also, when you compare these poll numbers to the 2016 results, which it does particularly in this graphic on a racial breakdown.

0:15:00 Thomas: So white college educated, white, no college, black support, Hispanic and other. It's like really in line with 2016. It is pretty close. So, you know, it is not as though that would indicate to me that like this isn't some crazy abnormal early polling. The numbers seem to be pretty close to what they were in the actual election of 2016. And final point on this thing, and then I'll stop talking and let you go, is the 2018 polls were pretty much right on, actually. And the sense in which the polls were wrong in 2016 was actually the opposite of this. The polls were, we had trouble with polling in 2016 because there weren't enough swing state polls.

The national average was pretty much right on, but we didn't have the detailed information and enough polling data in some of these swing states. Uh, and, and what we did have showed them pretty close, but since they all were like one point for Hillary, you know, it, it didn't, we weren't properly able to comprehend what that meant. Like, that means some percentage of the time Hillary's gonna lose all of those or some of those or whatever. And this is the opposite of it. This is just polling in swing states. So this isn't the kind of polls that you would say like, oh, in 2016, they were so far off. Not really. So those are my points about polling. What do you think?

0:16:19 Jamie: So a couple of things. Generally, yes, national polls tend to be more reliable than, than state polls. The problem is we don't elect our president via, you know, national popular election, right? We do elect them through this like bizarre electoral college system, in which it does come down to individual states. And so we're sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place with how to balance this. So that's one. The other thing that stands out to me as I went back and I looked to see, you know, how similar are these margins compared to presidential elections historically. And with the exception of Barack Obama's election in 2008, over the last 20 years, presidential elections have come down to a margin that's roughly 4%.

0:17:11 Jamie: And so these differences between Republicans and Democrats aren't that far out out of line with the historical difference between how Americas tend to line up between the two party. So in some ways, there's... there's a real consistency here. And I think this says more about, you know, American system, politics, and just, quite frankly, like, the level at which like, a lot of people are still disengaged. The thing that stands out to me the most from 2016, 2016 is that only 55% of Americans voted. And what's most alarming to me is less that, you know, as you mentioned, people aren't just saying like, whoever isn't Trump, I'm going to vote for. It's that, those 40% of people who stayed home aren't like, I got to get involved. And so what I really worry about is, to me, this suggests there's something fundamentally broken with our politics when this many people are just not even bothering to participate, giving the stakes. And it suggests there's this real divide between our political process

0:17:33 Thomas: Yeah. But

0:18:21 Jamie: And the extent to which people think it actually matters for their everyday lives. And that's what's really worrying to me. Right.

0:18:29 Thomas: Part of it actually mattering means I agree with what you're saying, but I don't know how we can fix that when there is no bipartisanship anymore. More. So the only way things happen is if one side gets control of three branches of government. Otherwise, nothing happens. And then it feels pointless. But the only Way to get control of those three branches Of government is if we vote enough, and feel like it matters enough. So it's like it feeds on itself. And it becomes a big problem. Another thing about this polling is among likely voters, it's even worse for Democrats. Trump just trounces Warren in every state pretty pretty much, except Arizona. And then and I don't know how they're evaluating likely voters. Some some pattern of questions, you know, I'm sure.

0:19:14 Thomas: But Sanders wins in only one state and Biden actually still wins in five of six states. But that that one that graphic scared me even more than anything. The likely voters graphic.

0:19:26 Jamie: And again, I can say as someone who is no fan of Joe Biden, if it comes down to Trump Biden, like, I'm going to vote for Biden. And I'm not going to continue to insist that, you know, in a presidential election, given the stakes that, the world has to move over to where I am. I do think it's sort of mistaken, though, to take a poll like this and try to extrapolate too much out of it about, you Know, where the country is. You know, Jonathan Chait in his article, for example, he's very tongue in cheek that like, Democrats are delusional about thinking thinking that everybody agrees with them on their issues. But when you actually poll people on the issues, or where they stand on the issues, like for example, Medicare for all or universal health care, you have something like 92% of Democrats actually support that, you know, and like 76% of independents.

0:20:19 Jamie: And so where it seems to go kind of off the rails is once you once you tack on these blue or red labels. And this gets to the point that I was talking about earlier, that I think we're losing something important when so much of the conversation is motivated by the horse race and not the bread and butter of these actual issues.

0:20:25 Thomas: Yeah.

0:20:39 Jamie: Warren, for example, recently put out a health care plan. I wonder how much more this would change if instead of talking about, you know, Biden being tied with Trump in Michigan a year out and Bernie being seven points up in Ohio high-o a year out, which was released in an Emerson poll that the New York Times obviously didn't include, how much that would actually change if people were confronted instead with, you know, an analysis of what their daily, like, medical costs would be under these alternative plans.

0:21:12 Thomas: Yeah, no, I hear you. And I think that, you know. I want to talk about it from, I think, your mind and your perspective on this, which is we're fans of the progressive people were, you know, I, I won't speak for you, but I know that from the show, like I I'm a Warren fan, you're, you'RE somewhat of a Warren fan. You're a Sanders fan. I'm also somewhat of the Sanders fan, like, I'm, I'm talking about this purely on a, what is the, this poll is scaring the shit out of me kind of thing. And I, I agree that, uh, I would like the wider media to focus more on policy. Um, I totally agree, But I for today's purposes, you know, I don't I kind of more want to talk about like what this means for for the election.

0:21:57 Thomas: And I do think that we can extrapolate something from this polling. I think it's unfair to say anything about the whole nation based on swing state polling. That doesn't make sense. But it tells us something tells us nothing about these swing states. Polling data is powerful, like statistics are powerful. If they're done right, they tell you something about what people believe. So I don't know. I guess that's what I'd say to that. I mean, I do agree with you, though, that nationally and in their wider media, I do wish there was more time spent on policy and what these things are actually going to do.

0:22:34 Jamie: Sure. I mean, I understand what you're saying. I think it's sort of premature, and I, I would disagree with, you know, the push toward panic at this point. I do think, you know, so it may be the case that like polls a year out aren't entirely useless. I think it's also true that a lot of people aren't meaningfully engaged. And they aren't meaningfully paying attention to it right now, because they don't actually pay attention to politics until a few weeks before they have to vote. And so the people who are being, being polled, you know, I don't think are generally like that informed as to what's going on and what's at stake in these caricatures of this person's really far to the left and this person is moderate.

0:23:20 Jamie: I'm not sure that that actually means anything. And if it were just a matter of voters wanting someone moderate, I think we'd see Buttigieg, for example, higher in the polls. I think we see Cory Booker higher in the polls or Amy Klobuchar. And that's not what's happening. So it doesn't seem right to me that the analysis that seems to be sort of getting the most oxygen right now is that Democrats have moved too far left and that they should be, you know, worried about this and try to tack back to the center. That seems to me to be not quite borne out.

0:23:54 Thomas: Yeah, OK, there's a lot going on. I think I want to fully agree that this data isn't enough to tell you that question. You know, this data. Now, I don't know. There might be some data that is there might be some polling that could tell you that. But this data certainly isn't that. So I want to fully agree with you there because this tells you what a handful of people in swing states thinks. This tells you, and even, even though these numbers look pretty stark when you talk about the difference between how Warren is doing versus Biden is doing in these swing states among likely voters. That's like the biggest difference. It's still only a handful of percent of people. It's 6% of people who would vote for Biden over Trump, but wouldn't vote for Warren over Trump. It's six percent. So it's not a ton.

0:24:40 Thomas: But the only the problem is that makes a huge difference. Like and here's this is kind of a wider you'll have to tell me the proper philosophical term for it, but it's sort of a like an epistemic problem or something. The truth has to get written through the most bizarre process. You know, like we have one election and the result is binary. The result is Trump wins or Trump loses.

0:25:07 Jamie: Yeah.

0:25:07 Thomas: And then all these things, all these truth claims get tested against that. You know, well, this thing, he, Trump won, therefore this, Trump won, there for that. When if you took a more fine grained view of it, it's OK, ten thousand people in this state plus forty thousand people in this state plus, you know, whatever it was, 30,000 people, one more state. That was the difference. And what those people think might not really be right.

You know, so like we're all, we are scrambling and it's just impossible. It's so hard to deal with cognitively for all of us, I think. But like scrambling to deal, when you make a broad statement, when anyone, I mean, makes a broad sentiment of like, well, they were too far to the left, or Hillary was to This or whatever was to that, you're talking about the difference of 80,000 people in three states. You know, so it's, it's so hard to keep that in mind at all times that what might convince that six percent, if we're talking about this polling that's six percent of people who would vote for Biden but not Warren, what might convince them shouldn't be what our entire system relies on, our entire like what we try to do politically, where what health care plan we want, whatever. But like, because of our stupid system, the electoral college system, it might just be that that is who, functionally, you know, functionally decides the truth on some of these things, right?

0:26:32 Jamie: And so that might be the more important takeaway from these polls, is that our system of elections itself is in need of significant reform, because this is not workable. Um, and you know, getting to to what you were mentioning, there's a philosopher at Georgetown by the name of Jason Brennan who has a, who had a book out a couple of years ago called Against Democracy, um, and he argues something similar to what you're suggesting here. And it's, and it' it's kind of uncomfortable to read, um, but some of the listeners may be interested. And he basically says that, like, on average, like the average voter, like, just doesn't have enough meaningful understanding about what's at stake to be informed in a way that's like morally relevant to the responsibility that one is tasked with voting. And he says, you know, this isn't even something that we should hold them particularly blameworthy for, because the impact of one single vote really isn't that great.

And given all the other cognitive demands on a person's life, it makes sense, you know, from a rational self interested point of of view, that, you know, someone that has to work, you know, 10 hours a day, and then come home and cook dinner and go grocery shopping and take care of the kids and do the laundry and vacuum and all that other nonsense, you know, isn't allocating their resources to make sense of healthcare policy or immigration reform, right?

That they're just sort of like, deferring to what the headlines are, or what their peer group is saying, and they're not meaningfully engaged. And this, he says, you know, might be a compelling argument

0:27:12 Thomas: Hmm. Wow.

0:28:04 Jamie: Against our sort of democratic form of government, because people aren't meaningfully well enough informed to be tasked with these decisions.

0:28:14 Thomas: Yeah, interesting. I'm trying to think, I've maybe heard an interview with with that guy or something, because it sounds very familiar. But uh, that for me is why I don't really buy into the argument, and apologies, I think I'm disagreeing with you here. I don't really buy the argument that, like, like, these polls are less meaningful because people aren't paying attention. The people who we're talking about are Trump, Biden and Sanders. And Warren would be like the least known of those four people, but is still quite well known. It's pretty much a known quality, quantity. But even if you forget, like throw away her polling, just don't even talk about that, Trump and Biden are known quantities. These are people who, if they at least paid attention in 2016, if these are people, people who are even going to vote, they at least know who Trump is. They know who Biden is.

0:29:00 Thomas: I'm not really buying that a whole lot is going to change in this final 12 months. Personally, I could be wrong, but we'll see. I don't know.

0:29:08 Jamie: No, and it And it may not. But this is, this gets back to what I was talking about earlier, you know, when people think that what politicians are advocating doesn't meaningfully touch their lives, or it's not going to meaningfully make a difference. It's very easy to sort of tune out, and then the rest just sort of happens on cruise control. And so, you, you know, I think that this should be a wake up call in the sense that Democrats need to take more seriously the possibility that Trump may get reelected. And that they need to think amongst themselves about what to do. You know, this may be a good time for like four or five or six of the presidential candidates to just drop out and throw their support behind someone else to see if maybe, maybe that makes a difference. Rather, yeah, yeah.

0:29:51 Thomas: Yeah, congrats Beto, by the way. Thank you, Beto for dropping out. That's that much more likable.

0:29:58 Jamie: Yeah. And so, you know, there should be some other candidates ready to do that. Although, you Know, I'm not, I'm not so sure that, you know, Bennett dropping out or Steyer is going to like meaningfully move the needle or even, you know, Booker for that matter. But it might be time to sort of corral our resources to more meaningfully present a unified front against Trump and to get out that message and to engage with people and to make them aware, you know, that this election has real impact on their lives, but definitely the lives of other people.

0:30:02 Thomas: Some other Betos. Yeah, absolutely. Just the Supreme Court, the federal bench and kids in cages. I mean, that's already enough. I we need to get people to realize how much that is, that that those things to me overwhelm so many other considerations, at least when you're talking about the presidential election. It has to be. We have to elect whomever. I will be voting for Biden if he's the guy, even though I don't want him to be, but I want to talk about something you were talking about earlier. I want to go back to because I think I think it's right on. I agree. And I had a couple more things, which is to say some of the reaction I saw online when I posted about this was essentially, you know, one comment was like, well, if the Democratic Party goes to centrists and alienates the far left, then they won't vote and then we'll be stuck with Trump and that kind of thing.

0:31:20 Thomas: And, you know, I am thinking about it. And again, as someone who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary of 2016, just want want to remind everybody. And as somebody who supports Warren, you can easily say that the other way around. Nobody owns the patent on the democratic party. You don't get to decide that it is what you want it to be at, which is good. You know, it's good and bad. It would be nice if I could decide it'd be nice if Jamie could decide what it is, but it's, it is what the party of people decides it is. And the time to decide what what it is, is the primary. If you can't make your case that you are the guy or the girl or whoever, if you can't make your case that you are the candidate in the primary, then you didn't make your case.

0:32:05 Thomas: And you don't get to then say, well, sorry, the party lost me. None of the voters are going to vote. No, sorry. That is when we have this battle. That's when we have to fight about it. It just has to be that way. And then once it's the general, you have to unite behind the person that's just, that's what the party is, that's what it is to have democracy.

0:32:16 Jamie: Yeah. Yeah, and so I'm going to say this as someone who was a delegate for Bernie Sanders in 2016. You know that if you consider yourself a leftist, if you, you consider yourself a progressive Democrat, you tend to do that because you care about the well-being of other people, that you think other people's rights and interests matter as much as yours do. And it is the height of hypocrisy and inconsistency to, you know, pat yourself on the back for taking that moral high ground position and then sit out this election because your, your preferred candidate wasn't chosen, given what the stakes are. There are children in cages. Our president is financially compromised in ways that is resulting in actual genocide right now in Turkey.

0:33:12 Jamie: It is absolutely unforgivable to sit this out because the Democratic Party didn't do what you wanted it to do. Suck it up. Lick your wounds. Fight for electoral reform, fight for party reform, but Jesus Christ, don't not vote. I

0:33:34 Thomas: Great message, totally agree, and, and, and I mean that, though, by all means, fight now, like, that this is the time to do it. And, and honestly, it seems pretty wide open, like Biden, Sanders, and Warren, at least of those three. And I honestly, I think Buttigieg is kind of surging, and with the advantage he has in Iowa being, you know, what is it, the first primary or an early primary, one of it might be the first, um. Yeah.

0:33:58 Jamie: Think I was first.

0:33:59 Thomas: That's, that's going to give him a big boost, I think, and so it could be a pretty wide open four-person race. There's still time for all, for, you know, these candidates and their supporters to make the case. One thing that sucks is, I was listening, I can't remember if it was this daily or if it was another podcast I was listening to, someone referenced research, and I want to look more into this, maybe you've heard of it, uh, there's some research into, like, how bad we even are at picking candidates that we would want most, like, if, you turns out we're not actually that good at it. You might think that's an obvious thing, like, of course I'm good at picking the can, whatever, but I, I, they were referencing some experiments where if you take, you know, what people believe and want to happen, and then ask them, like, okay, which candidate you support, they're actually not even very good at supporting the person that lines up with the beliefs they have, which, which makes, makes sense, because we're just not that rational.

0:34:51 Thomas: Honestly, we're very, you know, we have a lot of biases in various ways. And one of those, I think, is very evident in this very polling, which you already referenced. And it was another thing I want to go back to, which is Sanders doing so much better than Warren, despite Sanders being, I think they're honestly pretty similar in my view. But, you know, I'll grant that perhaps Sanders is perceived as more left. And, you know, maybe that's right, he is a bit more left, and so to make it about a left versus centrism thing when clearly there could be something else going on with the fact that Warren is a woman, and there's some other biases going on. That's part of the equation too.

0:35:35 Jamie: Yeah, I think that's absolutely part of the equation. I Think it's also worth pointing out that this poll came out right at the same time that we're having elections, right? And let's keep in mind, Kentucky just elected a Democratic governor. And now, in fairness, he did not win by a particularly wide margin. But he does seem to have won and he ran on a platform of protecting Medicaid, paying teachers and protecting their pensions. And so, you know, he's described as a moderate in some of these articles, because he didn't also run on impeaching Donald Trump. But to me, that seems sort of insincere, given that his actual policy positions are in line with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who are on the left flank of the Democratic Democratic Party.

0:36:20 Thomas: Yeah, so that's it. That's a great opportunity to transition over to that because I did want to also talk about the recent results. Yeah, that's Right On. I think there's some stuff going on, some insights I've gathered from reading and stuff that I wanted to share because I think it's important. I, for one, was like, how in the world did we just win a statewide election in Kentucky? I'm sure a lot of listeners are wondering the same thing. And I saw a lot people that were like, ah, this doesn't bode well for McConnell because McConnell is very unpopular and that's a statewide election. So I want to say a couple things about that. As much, as much as I want nothing more than Mitch McConnell to lose, I don't really think this means Mitch McConnell is going to lose. So Kentucky is like a 30 point Trump state. Like it is an incredibly, incredibly Trump state and so you ask, well, then how did they just, how did Democrats just win the governor?

0:37:12 Thomas: Well, the other guy was so historically unpopular and was just an absolute dumbass. Like, he was terrible, very unpopular. And, um, you know, some part of it is a response to Trump, I think, I mean, it's not, it's impossible to say that no part of this is that, things could be swinging against Trump a little bit, but, like, if you look at the down ballot races, you know, Republicans just mop the floor because it's a Republican state. So, and the other thing you have to think about is Mitch McConnell has the benefit of getting to be up for re-election in a presidential year, uh, this particular time. So, so that's incredibly fortunate for him and unlucky for all the good people in the world because he gets to go stand for election in Kentucky when Trump is on the ballot.

0:37:59 Thomas: And that it is very difficult to imagine that in a general election year, a Republican is going to lose in Kentucky in the statewide election. It's not impossible, I guess, but it's very, very hard for me to imagine that. But here's another thing. I wanted to talk about this, about these elections. One thing that I think is a it really sucks these days that there's almost no such thing as local politics anymore. And I think that's very unfortunate because you just referenced it yourself. This guy, the Democrat, he didn't run on he didn'T run on impeachment, but also he'S running for governor there.

0:38:46 Jamie: Right.

0:38:46 Thomas: Don't do anything with that. And, like, and the other part of that is the Republican ran on impeachment. So the Republican was like, look at these Democrats running on impeachment, and that became the campaign. Think about how stupid that is. His campaign for governor of a certain state was, look at the people in a body of government that has nothing to do with this election, look what they're doing to a guy you might also like, so therefore, vote for me.

And that, that's what our politics has become, is just truly terrible and sad, and I think it's getting more and more that way. And how long until it's just sports, honestly, how long until it is just sports? Now, I know I'm not doing a both sides thing here, um, I, I do think one side is very much worse at this, but unfortunately, when one side goes this way to an extreme, it kind of forces the other side to also kind of go that way, because it's like, well, we do have to just vote against this guy. We don't like this guy, we got to vote against this guy no matter what. And it's really unfortunate.

0:39:49 Thomas: Go ahead, I thought you were going to, yeah.

0:39:51 Jamie: Yeah, no, I think a lot of that is right. I do think in some uncomfortable ways, our politics has already devolved into something similar to sports, where it's red team versus blue team. And a lot of us at the end of the day are voting for laundry instead of people or policies. I think that's part of how we got here. I mean, that's a part of what's at play in these, these poll results that we saw in the New York Times.

0:40:00 Thomas: Yeah.

0:40:17 Jamie: Some People

0:40:17 Thomas: Can I make a clarification? I'm sorry to jump in. I actually think it wouldn't be that bad if it were just about laundry, as you say, if it was just about teams, because then at least you could say this is about party and policy platforms. What I find particularly disturbing is it being about people, and not just the people in the race, people outside of the race. So every race has become, do you like this guy Trump or not, even if the race has nothing whatsoever to do with Trump? And that I find even more disturbing, personally.

0:40:18 Jamie: Sure. Yeah.

0:40:48 Jamie: But that, that's sort of what I mean when I say we're voting on, on laundry, because the reason, you know, do you like this guy matters, is because he wears a red shirt instead of a blue Shirt.

0:40:56 Thomas: I actually don't. Sorry, I got to disagree. I don't think that's right. I think it's a cult of personality. I think that Trump came. He wasn't even really a Republican in many meaningful sense, in any meaningful sense.

0:40:56 Jamie: Yeah.

0:41:06 Jamie: No. I, I Think I think that's true, um, but I think something similar is at play, you know, with sports, if, like, Tom Brady suddenly got traded to, you know, the New York Giants, um, as soon as he put on a different uniform, you know, people at the stadium are going to start rooting for Tom Brady, despite the fact they've spent decades hating him. I think that there's something similar at play here. In a lot of ways, Trump has delivered on Republican priorities. He has stacked the courts. He's made a significant number of lifetime appointments to the judicial branch at all levels of government. This has been something that evangelicals, for example, Apple have been waiting their whole life for. Trump has done more to advance the anti-abortion movement than many Republicans in the decades before him. That's worth it to them. And so that's what I mean in the way that they're sort of voting for Laundrie and they're voting for party. He's delivering on their agenda. These tax cuts that he's passed have been the apple of Paul Paul Ryan's eyes for years, like they couldn't be happier.

0:41:35 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Right.

0:42:17 Jamie: In many ways, he has given them what they want. And so like, who cares that there are some brown kids in cages, that's like a totally plausible and fair price to pay, you know, for a lower marginal tax rate. For some people, I'm not saying that's the correct moral view. I'm saying that that is the view, you Know, that some people adopt. On the flip side of that, though, I'm, I think, you Now, the death of local politics might be a bit exaggerated. I don't think we can make sense of the Democrats' victory in Virginia, for example, without conceding that they did local politics, that they didn't make their elections a referendum on Trump. They went out into their communities and they flipped districts that had been historically Republican and they won.

0:42:31 Thomas: Right? Right.

0:43:06 Thomas: Yeah. Well, let's see. I think that the campaign rhetoric and talk revolved around national issues. And I think more and more when you look at just the data, split ballots are just not, you know, what is the proper term for that? People don't, is that it? People don't split their ballots as much. Split tickets, yeah. That split ticket voting is just down. It just doesn't happen as much, and so many of these elections can now be run on national issues that really have no logical connection to the race themselves. The only thing I want to say one more time on that thing is, I guess I don't have as big of a problem with merely partisan voting.

And maybe people disagree with me on this, but for some of the reasons you said earlier, when you were talking about how, look, we just don't know all the, we don't Know Everything as voters. We can't, we don't have the time, especially people who are not like you and I, who get to spend a bunch of time, you know, have the privilege of being able to kind of follow this stuff way too much. A lot of people don't even have that time. They don't Have that extra, you Know, just spare like attention to put into it.

0:43:25 Jamie: That's it. Split Tickets. Yeah.

0:44:18 Thomas: And for that reason, if someone just votes on party line, at least what they're doing is saying, I put my trust in these policies for the most part. And I think this side has the policies that I like better versus what I think has become alarming with Trump, which is all it's 100% culture war and personality. So it's it's not that the party I agree that there's... there's a there's an interplay of many things.

So you're right that he Trump, the smartest he's ever been, is in feeding certain things to actual Republicans. You're totally right on the judiciary, the tax cuts, a couple other things. But for the average voter, I don't know that that's affecting the average voter as much as, or at all really, the average Republican I think that's effecting the Republican establishment, But I think the people, you know, who are going to his rallies and stuff, I do not think that is effecting them whatsoever. I think for them it is a cultural battle in which everyone, even these lifetime Republicans, like Bob Mueller, like anyone who dares to say Trump has done something wrong, I saw it with my own two eyes, they become, well, it's just a Democrat who hates Trump. And that is like, that's not just laundry because these are Republicans, you know, they are Republicans.

They're more Republican than Trump. And that's kind of the additional thing that I'm talking about that is even more disturbing that I don't, I hope that can go away after Trump. There's, there's a possibility that it gets better because I don't know that there's going to be another demagogue that replaces him in the same way. Um, but I don't know.

0:45:53 Jamie: No, I think that that's right, and I don't mean to suggest that Trump doesn't pose unique dangers. There's certainly, um, that element at play here, um, that's that's real, um, and I don't know what's what's going to happen, um, and I'm not sure that I want to, it's

0:46:15 Thomas: Yeah. I, I, uh, I'm so scared about this election. I at the same time, another thing that troubles me as I was just going to bring up when we're talking about room for pessimism, I don't know. There are things I can find that can make me optimistic. You know, certainly this, I think this Virginia election is not nothing, you know, it is pretty notable that, that a statewide election went that way or sorry, Kentucky, um, Virginia as well as the other election, but those are, Virginia is already more anti-Trump. Um, but Kentucky being that far pro-Tramp and still, uh, Democrat winning. Yeah. I mean, it is notable and I, you know, 2018 was awesome. Those elections were great. Not as good as I wanted, but still great. Uh, there are rooms for optimism. Uh. There are signs of optimism, but for things that make me pessimistic, you know.

0:47:02 Thomas: Every time I think, you know, maybe, maybe Republicans will we'll impeach Trump. Like maybe they would convict him. You know, there's somebody said that if it was an anonymous vote, that almost all the Republicans in the Senate would vote against Trump. And I actually do believe that, but it's not an anonymous vote. And when you look at the house resolution for the impeachment, zero Republicans voted for it. Zero out of the 90 billion people that are in the house. I was blank on the number. Is it four? It's not 538, right? Right? That's the total of everything. So it's 400 and something, whatever. I can't remember the number. Anyway, sure.

0:47:38 Jamie: 435 members in the house. I think. Well, it was like 232 Democrats voted for it. One of them from New Jersey, um, did not vote for the impeachment resolution.

0:47:41 Thomas: Out of, which is, I think, what, 200-ish Republicans, 200 something?

0:47:54 Thomas: Yeah. So that Was what I was going to say. No Republicans voted the other way. Two Democrats voted against the resolution on the impeachment. And it's like that kind of thing where I'm like, what? How? You know, right when I want to be optimistic, and that could just be the difference between establishmenty, and I don't, I'm not in love with that word, but people who are, you know, in government right now and what they are seeing as their incentives to do stuff versus how the voters actually feel. But it's still alarming that not a single one voted for this. Not a single one looks at what happened with this Ukraine call and says, we should at least do some proceedings. Proceedings, like how staggering is that. Yeah.

0:47:54 Jamie: Yeah.

0:48:37 Jamie: And so that's what's absolutely frightening to me, um, and I think that's actually what trickles down to voters, because I think there's this sense where they're like, well, you know, if Donald Trump were actually that bad, if he were actually committing these sorts of crimes, then, you know, the representatives would hold him accountable, and the representatives aren't holding him accountable, so therefore it must not really be that bad, and The Democrats must just be doing to Donald Trump what Republicans spent the last, you know, eight years doing to Barack Obama.

Like As a Republican, I know that was complete and utter bullshit, um, so like this Is obviously just the equivalent, you know, partisan bullshit that's taking place, um, and I think, you know, it's going to be a really long time before we realize the damage that was done to our democracy under the Obama years while we put, we while we participated in this both sides-ism. And, you know, we continue to act as though like the Republicans were acting in good faith with their outrage about, you know, Obama being, you know, a Kenyan born socialist, radical Islam, a fascist hellbent on destroying America, and treating this with any sort of legitimacy instead of the insanity that it was. Because now that we actually have someone who is committing crimes against the United States while holding the highest office,

0:49:01 Thomas: Yeah. God. Yeah. That Is

0:50:00 Jamie: We just don't even have a framework for making sense of this because it's been reduced to sort of partisan political banter. Right.

0:50:07 Thomas: So right on, well put, and also, yeah, like there is no justice in this friggin world, because it's, you're so right, it's amazing that Republicans can for for like eight years run just these sham bullshit nothing Benghazi whatever things. And then when the shoe was on the other foot, they can be like, well, we all know those hearings are always nonsense because we made them nonsense for eight years. And you're like, but it's so frustrating, there is no justice.

0:50:39 Jamie: That's, that's exactly it. And now, you know, when these Trump aides are refusing to show up for their subpoenas, Republicans are like, well, you know, what about all those answers we didn't get about Benghazi, the Democrats and their double standards and for

0:50:51 Thomas: Right. When Hillary testified for like a day and a half straight. Yeah, sure.

0:50:54 Jamie: 14 hours. Right? And so, you know, that, that very, you know, cynical play paid off for them. Because they have thoroughly undermined, you know the basic frameworks for any sort of, you know consensus on truth or normalcy, they spent eight years attacking Obama over nonsense and not to suggest that there weren't legitimate criticisms to be made about Barack Obama, but that those weren't the ones that they they were making right and

0:50:55 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah it did.

0:51:21 Thomas: Right? Those weren't the ones. Yeah totally totally on board with that. Yeah.

0:51:26 Jamie: So you know they they created the circus and now that they're like, oh, the Democrats just have like Trump derangement syndrome

0:51:32 Thomas: Now they're like, look, it's a circus. And you're like yeah, but you made the circus. You put

0:51:34 Jamie: Right and they want to be like, well you know, it was a circus eight years ago and it's a circus now so it's just, it's morally equivalent um, when the reality was is that it just couldn't be farther from from the truth, we have a president who like committed a crime on live TV by asking a foreign government to interfere in our elections, like that's a crime, we have a president who's literally profiting off the office of the presidency, for fuck's sakes, he tweeted out the other day from his official capacity at the White House to buy his son's book, these are crimes, these

0:51:38 Thomas: Up the tent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep.

0:52:09 Jamie: Are crimes, um, and we've just become so used to the Republicans screaming about Barack Obama, you know, being a threat to our democracy in a constitutional crisis, that people are immune and they're now that we are actually in an institutional crisis where the president of the United States is literally openly committing crimes on live TV. We're like, oh, that's just what politicians say.

0:52:37 Thomas: Yeah, I mean, I think we, that's a good, not a positive note to go out on, but it's it's all the more reason that we have to realize, for one, I want to say that building something is so much harder than taking something down and obstructing. Obstruction is so much. That's why Republicans have such an advantage. There are so many ways that they have an inherent advantage. In addition to, you know, the Senate is kind of an inherent disadvantage given how our population is distributed. And the Electoral College seems to be that way, although that, I mean, that can change.

But for now, it seems to be that, and just the idea that they want to, having gotten through a few devastating things, you know, in these giant tax cuts, which I forget if we've even mentioned on this show, another New York Times article, I can't remember who did the study, if it was them or if it was, they just reporting on it, but the richest of the rich now paid the same or less in taxes than you and I, which is the, it wasn't true for the longest time, well, you know, a lot of a lot Democrats thought it was true, but

0:52:54 Jamie: Yeah.

0:53:40 Thomas: It kind of wasn't, really until now it is, because of these horrible tax cuts, which is just a joke, and they, having accomplished these things, uh, pretty quickly, they now can just obstruct and take stuff down, and uh, they're going to have that advantage, whereas we have to do everything perfectly, like we have to get everyone to vote to win in all three branches of government in order to try to undo some of this damage, all the while we're gonna face even worse attacks if we do happen to like get part of the way there. You know, we're going to face even more of the same Benghazi bullshit or whatever the next thing will be, all the way there. And it's it's, but it's just more, all the more reason, I guess, I'm trying to, it's not a positive message, but it is a message of, we have to do the work of trying to get people to vote.

0:54:29 Thomas: That's that's the biggest thing we can all do is try to I don't do whatever we can to get the vote out. I mean, especially if you're in one of of these swing states, that's where you might have the best effect. So that's my last word. What's your last word on today's show?

0:54:44 Jamie: So I have two. So one, to just reinforce what you've just said, if you're looking at these poll results and you're disheartened. Don't just tweet about it or post on Facebook. Get involved. Make phone calls. Whoever your candidate is, I don't care. Obviously, I have my preferences. I'm sort of polyamorous with my presidential candidates right now. I am going back and forth between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. But whoever it is, reach out to the office, make phone calls, knock on doors, donate if you can, bring somebody out to vote, get involved, help the people who are on the ground and who have been on the ground organizing. Find out what your local state elections are. Find out who's running for school board, what they need for help. Actually do the work. Secondly, tomorrow is Albert Camus' birthday and I just want to make sure everybody is aware of that and we celebrate that appropriately.

0:54:46 Thomas: Sure.

0:55:36 Jamie: He'd be 106 tomorrow, which he'd have never have actually made because he smoked like a chimney, but it is his birthday tomorrow. So everybody celebrate.

0:55:43 Thomas: Hey, You never know. Some people have those genetics where it doesn't matter. They're like, "What's your secret? You're 113." "Well, I smoke and I actually eat tobacco every day. I just like just write down the gullet and somehow it doesn't matter." Trump is one of those people, by the way, he'll live forever because we're because that's the world yeah that's the world we live in

0:55:58 Jamie: Yeah, because only the good die young. Yeah, so tomorrow is Alberto Camus birthday. So, you know, punch Nazis. It's good.

0:56:04 Thomas: Good times, uh, that's a great last word. I that was everything I wanted and so much more. Thank you, Jamie, as always. Uh, I think we, we always more to talk about and I think maybe someday we'll get to those Camu books that, uh, that we've both read that you can teach me more about because I'm sure I didn't get all of them. Uh We'll give on a later or date. And also keep the response coming, everybody. We are collecting email and voicemail, so we'll have a good listener response episode coming up. Those are like my personal favorite to do. I hope everybody feels the same because it's just so fun to hear from everybody. And we've got a backlog and that'll make for a good episode because we have a lot to choose from. So all that said, thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.

0:56:59 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com/seriouspod. The second best thing you can do is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, if you'd like to follow Jamie on Twitter, she's at Euthyphro. And follow me at SeriousPod. If you'd like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com Thomas podcast. If you're not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com/groups/SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.