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For this first episode to be recorded after the results of the presidential election, I've brought on my friend and former colleague ⁠⁠Walter Olson⁠⁠. Walter is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a staunch defender of democracy and liberal institutions, and an expert in the processes and law of American elections. We talk about why the election went the way it went, avenues for electoral reform, and what lessons liberals should take from the results, given that we now need to commit ourselves, over the next four years, to a rigorous defense of liberalism.

Produced by Landry Ayres. Podcast art by Sergio R. M. Duarte. Music by Kevin MacLeod.

Transcript

Aaron (00:05.221) There was a question going around Bluesky that I thought might be a good jumping off point for our conversation today. You, like me, like many of us, had thoughts and expectations leading up to election night, and then election night happened. And so the question is, what did you get wrong? What surprised you? What did you think was going to happen that turned out not to be the case?

Walter (00:37.324) Well, quite a bit. Guess it's good to start in confessional mode. I thought Harris was going to win and thought that we were going to come in around where the polls were. So I was expecting Congress to split. And if you had revealed one card from the deal to me and that Trump was going to win. I would not have predicted that he also would carry both houses of Congress because he has not tended always to have coattails in the past and this time it looked, you know, somewhat as if he did. Nor would I have predicted that the national shift in Trump's support would have been so uniform across regions. I stay in touch with New York enough to realize that there have been rightward trends in New York, but this was really remarkably, you know, even Massachusetts. Mean, you can't, unlike New York state, you can't chalk it up to local matters of governance being particularly bad in one place. This was a broad nationwide shift and I wasn't predicting that at all. So.

I Was left as so often happens humbled by the fact that the voters thinking is so different from what I would try to get into their shoes and and and think they were thinking.

Aaron (02:16.995) And We should note there was a story in the days immediately following the election that this was all about depressed turnout. Effectively a significan't portion of the Biden coalition had just stayed home, whereas Trump hadn't really gained support over prior years. But our friend Andy Craig has been doing a pretty good job of

Posting the numbers as they continue to come in, it turns out it takes California far longer than makes any reasonable sense to count all of it's ballots. And that's not the story. That this was legitimately a shift to the right.

Walter (02:58.006) And I Saw people not taking that late West Coast counting into account. I saw people making lots of honest mistakes from all over the political spectrum. And then, of course, they're also hatched these little conspiracy theories on both left and right from the same data. On the right, you had...

Tucker Carlson And others saying that the then lagging Democratic vote, which if you looked at it like the Thursday or so after the election, was like 10 million behind. Now they've made up seven or eight of that. So in fact, you know, it's much closer to an even popular vote and it's a much more typical turnout experience. I think slightly lower turnout, but not a huge drop from the bang up turnout.

Proceeding and again explained by the same thing you see on a state by state basis which is about four percent of shifting some of that is turnout changes of some people staying home and others coming out but a lot of it is just constituencies changing who they voted for and so a traditional kind of election behavior rather than the dramatic ones of someone boycotting the election or something that had been posited.

Aaron (04:19.899) Do You have a sense of how much of that turn, so people who legitimately shifted from voting Biden last time around to voting Trump this time around, were voting for the Trump who campaigned this time around? So the person who had the Madison Square Garden rally, the person who has been pledging mass deportations and so on, and whose rhetoric was even more extreme than it was?

His prior campaigns, versus they were voting for effectively memories of the first Trump administration. That this was a time when food costs less and I was getting big checks in the mail, and so I felt more financially stable. And it wasn't quite about the rhetoric and the particular promises of this campaign.

Walter (05:15.506) Let Me of course preface it by saying that with my spotty prediction record, you should probably ignore what I say. And also of course, the Trump voters that I'm exposed to in my very purple little...

Area that is not nationally typical because it is about evenly divided which means that the people who explained to me that they're voting Trump will not necessarily have the same issues or use the same language as people in a very very red state might use but for them

One Syndrome that I saw a whole lot and here I describe people who are either swing voters or at least feel the need to explain themselves across voting lines but they a lot of them say we just screen out what he says on a day-to-day basis you know he has his audience and he's a showman and we don't pay attention to that the line that I would hear again and again is don't listen to what he says pay attention to the actual results and the actual results and

The first administration and we can talk about whether this is filtered through the rosy haze of memory. That rosy haze of memory comes out with a recollection of the economy doing great. The COVID to the extent that it is remembered at all is remembered as something that well he was trying his best and he probably did as well as anyone could have done even though there were

Problems and the but they remember the idea that he cut taxes that he was always talking about abundance and economic growth and different things which generally they like and the and they remember also a vague feeling that well wasn't he for

Walter (07:14.702) You know, having more free speech or something. Now, you and I can go at great length about why that's not an accurate, you know, reading as history will read Trump, but it is surprisingly widespread one. The, with respect to...

The Democrats and Harris never did shake the idea that she was going to deliver a second Biden administration. You'd think in some ways that she's sufficiently different in persona and so forth. Would have thought, she's going to be worse than Biden. Well, mostly the argument was, well, it's going to be more of the same of Biden. And we remember that inflation. And sometimes there'll be a couple of other things like the disarray of the Afghanistan withdrawal.

Was an important one.

And So I would get and I continue to get as we go through the transition, this business about ignore everything he says. And I guess also we have to add ignore everyone he insists on appointing as captain members that somehow or other it flows over all of the boulders in the river and comes out as a smooth stream of peace and prosperity. And peace comes up fairly often. This is something that classical liberals don't always confront.

In the Trump appeal, but his people, his voters, will often credit hI'm with four years of peace in a way that they don't credit Biden. And it's interesting to me to see a Republican leaning electorate that is voting Republican for reasons of peace. That's not the old Republican electorate that I grew up knowing.

Aaron (09:00.155) You Mentioned, you know, they remember it as a good economic time when, course, the economy was good for part of his first administration, but it also crashed for a decent chunk of it when COVID hit. And at the same time, like the Biden administration has seen

A pretty good economy in terms of the numbers, inflation going down, growth going up, unemployment going down, for particularly middle and lower income earners have been going up. Like every indicator seems to be that this is a successful economy and arguably more successful than, you know, the good times of Trump's. Is this an election that, you know, we talk about low information?

Voters. And the point that I always try to drI've home to people is if you are like the kind of person who's listening to this podcast or you're the kind of person who is on social media talking about politics, you are particularly weird in like your degree of knowledge and engagement and that the people who fall into those camps, I think, wildly overestimate how little the typical voter

Knows and how little they pay attention. Had the, you saw those spikes in Google usage on the day of the election about asking whether Biden had dropped out. You see now a spike in Google searches for who pays for tariffs, which I suspect part of that is, is angry Democrats Googling good sources to send to their Trumpist family members. But

How Much of a role did this, did the degree of low information voter-ness surprise in this one?

Walter (11:09.208) Well, Okay, let me back up and start with one thing that might seem to explain some of this, although it doesn't explain all of it, which is that post-COVID, the governing parties in virtually all of the democracies found a surge of voter anger and the ones that were left-wing got thrown out in favor of righties and the ones that were right-wing got thrown out in favor of lefties. The US happened to change administrations.

In the middle enough so that it's not clear that COVID and it's response was all that clearly associated with Trump more than Biden or Biden more than Trump. But, so you start there. But one thing that is different is that the US economic research after COVID has been stronger than those other democracies. We just have objectively done better than those European countries, even though COVID behaved in much the same way everywhere. And

So, So that second more refined question is, okay, you know, the US is doing better than the comparable democracies. Why didn't Biden and the Democrats at least get credit for that?

I Have to say I think there's a large amount of people not...

Walter (12:33.4) Grasping the economics in detail, whether that's new or not. I will remember how popular price controls were back in the days of Richard Nixon and the fact that no amount of economic education seemed to be able to break through to the public about what the sources of high prices were. And the Democrats, in fact, had this whole internal debate themselves between the economists and their friends who said, don't.

Bring up fallacies about why prices rose. You know, let's be realistic and explain that some degree of inflation was necessary in order to flood the economy with substitute wages and different things. It was a risk worth taking and we got better results out of it than if Trump had been managing things. In fact, no Democrat actually who was up for election wanted to run on the basis of there are inevitable trade-offs and policy would have been fairly similar whether you'd had

Trump In or us, even though that's an accurate way of saying it. They didn't want to run on that. They wanted to run on the idea that the opponents are the essence of evil on economic policy and we can gI've you all good things simultaneously, which is certainly Trump's way of running on economics and every other issue. So when you are running on a basis of we have delivered perfection and the other side would not have shared any of this policy, then of course you

Maximize people's chance to blame you for the bulge of inflation. And I still wonder why didn't, you know, why can't you train people better to understand, you know, changing rates versus the rates themselves, you know, that why the drop from 8 to 2 % is not just like, no, it's gone from 8 to 10 % because there's been another 2 % on top of the 8. You know, those are two different questions, you know, we've from an economics background.

Learned all this stuff and have never lost it. But for a lot of voters, the fact that prices continue to go up, even if at a 2 or 4 percent rate, instead of an 8 percent rate, added to the grievance.

Aaron (14:45.595) Well, And it's not just that they continue to go up even at a slower rate. That they didn't, I think for a lot of people that they didn't go back down. That they have, they can remember food prices being lower. Can, in Denver where I live, think restaurants saw something like 25 % inflation throughout the period. Which the period is not very long. And so I can remember when restaurant prices were a lot lower and taking a family of fI've out was a lot easier.

Walter (14:53.058) Yeah.

Walter (15:15.74) This

Aaron (15:15.983) And I Think that a lot of people simply thought what it means for inflation to go away is for prices to return to what I remember.

Walter (15:24.92) Part Of it, I think, is that most of the electorate, aside from the oldest couple of quintiles, doesn't really have much memory of the inflation that peaked under Jimmy Carter and then was ironed out under Ronald Reagan. And if you don't remember that, those differences between a rate of 10 or more and a rate of two or three are...

They'Re not fresh in memory. They're not fresh in memory for anyone really. But yeah, I took a picture at the supermarket the other day of the price of eggs because I somehow wanted history to know because if history reads the actual news coverage of the past few years, they are going to assume that the egg crisis was never solved. We would keep on as it were flopping our wings saying, avian flu, you the chickens all had a flu.

Just like humans had a pandemic and they had to destroy many, many millions of them and egg supplies were interrupted. Wait for them to rebuild the flocks, which doesn't take all that long because of the life cycle of chickens. Well, so there they were at three dollars a dozen, which is not too different from, know, it's much better than the four and a half dollars or fI've dollars. But what was the big egg price contratom on social media? It was that someone had gone to Whole Foods and Whole Foods

Supply of their special pampered eggs with humane conditions had been interrupted, seriously interrupted. Some of their suppliers had not been able to them things. So when I went to Whole Foods, which I do just for Christmas shopping to buy special ingredients, I'm not made of money, they had eggs there for like nine and a half dollars and there was a limit of buying one dozen. I, okay, that's where that guy got that picture of eggs around $10 that...

Social media was buzzing about as if it were the most important news of the day. And again, the life of someone trained in economics to some extent is one of constant despair about public education. It's why people have funded multimillion dollar education in economics programs, both for schools and just as important for grownups.

Aaron (17:44.89) Want to ask about looking ahead and the lessons we should draw for how we respond, but before we get there...

As Far as this election goes, there was a lot of worry. I remember a lot of people talking about that there was going to be election malfeasance. And of course, a lot of that was coming from the Trumpists as a way to, in case he lost, have a narratI've in place to dispute it. But a lot of it too was coming from Democrats who, know, the governments in red states had had four years to manipulate the system.

To set up voter suppression systems to do whatever it was they were going to do in order to ensure victory.

Did We see any of that? Like how did this election go from the concern of like free and fairness?

Walter (18:42.126) Well, You have gotten me on to my big issue of recent years and I will say that first, the 2024 election was remarkably honest with very few integrity problems, just like the 2020 election, which was also remarkably honest with very few integrity problems. The difference was that in 2020, you had Donald Trump personally leading a massI've campaign.

Aaron (18:46.468) That'S why I asked you about it.

Walter (19:12.064) Of falsification in order to get people to distrust what had been a trustworthy process. And this time you didn't. Now, especially after years of being trained in conspiracy suspicion that something must be going on, it was colorful and interesting to see on both sides the emergence of some of these theories you found on the left side.

People Coming up with theories about Elon Musk's Starlink, which was used by a few jurisdictions to like transmit the data for their polling books. Now, if you know elections, polling books have nothing to do with tabulation of the vote. They simply are a continually updated directory like a phone book of who the voters are that you can let in. So even if you somehow hacked them through Starlink,

You could not change the outcome of anyone's votes. You might be able to cause problems of looking someone up when they weren't in the directory, but you'd, people would quickly figure out that there was a problem in the database then. Anyway, so no, there was no such hacking. And then during that period, when the West Coast slowness to report, and I could go on about how they should mend their ways and report votes faster, but that's it. That would be a different podcast. During that period, when they were eight million votes,

Short of counting them all. Had various, mostly online commentators from the left saying, 8 million Democratic votes have been suppressed. Look right there. Trump is running around as well as he did last time. And the Democratic vote is nearly 10 million votes short.

They, So they squeezed from that the idea that voter suppression, although by and large it is charged to go on in the same states that were Republican then and are continue to be Republican now. As I like to say, the two elections 2020 and 24 went on largely with the same personnel under the same laws, using the same procedures, and they produced two different outcomes. The most economical

Walter (21:26.082) Way of explaining that is that some voters changed their mind not that a serious amount of massI've illegality appeared or disappeared between the two years.

Aaron (21:39.023) Did Anything come of the, on election day, I remember that there were the bomb threats being called in to polling places in some cities, and then there was some talk that that might have been related to Russian operations, but then I haven't seen anything from it.

Walter (21:55.83) Yeah, The the war bomb threats, it's hard to pin down exactly from war because things can come from Russian domains on the internet, but not in fact originate with even Russian individuals, let alone with state action. So it was left somewhat hanging and perhaps at some point investigation will learn more. These were aimed at democratic polling places in swing states and

Perhaps creating a grievance if the...

If the states were close, that perhaps votes had been suppressed by the bomb threat. The votes were not close enough and it is a tribute. And there are so many ways in which these elections have been a tribute to the largely volunteer workforce that makes American elections happen. They were put through so much stuff, including vicious harassment,

You Know, many of them were, were, you know, harassed at places of work and so forth by, you know, MAGA, Stop the Steal type people. And yet they had a public job to do. They, by and large, are very idealistic. Is, by and large, a very bipartisan atmosphere in which people from opposite parties have known each other in administering the things. And they were heroes.

Hope that even libertarians can occasionally nominate public actors as heroes. But we have to have elections and they did a great job on that. Now, and there wasn't as much as far as violence. There were a few fire bombings of drop boxes of votes in the Pacific Northwest, probably done by one person who had some specialized equipment that ordinary arsonists would not have and was able to do more damage than many of the plans had expected, but still.

Walter (23:56.32) Not that much damage. Yeah, I think he incinerated 100 votes, but they were able to get word out in time saying, you people who dropped in this particular box, you know, come in and we'll make sure you get to cast a vote. And they did, and that was fun. I wanted to, before we moved on from the species fraud theories, of course, the ones with really big platforms that had the species fraud theories were the Tucker Carlson's of the world.

Who said when they saw the eight million fewer democratic votes temporarily before California had weighed in, aha, the eight million additional democratic votes four years ago were ballot box stuffing. What does he think his listeners, mean, how stupid does he think they are? Anyone who wanted to make a big investigation of this would start by asking, okay, what states were they missing in? Whoops, end of inquiry.

You Wouldn't need to, once you have moved past the fact that the vote in Pennsylvania and Georgia and Michigan and Wisconsin was not in fact, because all those states had reported, you would have your answer right there. And Tucker Carlson, of course, has access to as many sophisticated election analysts as he wants. He wanted to mistake the data. He did not want a good faith answer.

Aaron (25:19.567) Another Aspect of this election that was interesting and ties into your work, so I want to pick your brain about it, is alternatI've voting methods performed pretty poorly. Ranked choice voting, I think it survived in Alaska, if I remember correctly, but it did not do well.

Walter (25:36.738) Barely by a whisker.

Aaron (25:43.662) What'S up with that? Because it does seem like the story of there are better ways for us to be voting that will reduce partisanship or produce results that are more representatI've of the will of the people is a fairly compelling one. So why did the voters turn on these kinds of ideas?

Walter (26:00.706) Well, I Got my humility in double servings because, of course, this had been a big issue for me. I had closely covered the 10 or so state ballot measures, which represented a very ambitious attempt to take the Alaska model. And in a moment, I'll explain what that is for readers who may not have followed it and spread it to like fI've more states, all of them in the West. And it was.

Clobbered. Alaska voted to retain it's system by a whisker. A few states like Nevada, Montana, Colorado came pretty close like 54-46. So there was a substantial popular support for them, but it did not in fact pass and Arizona and Idaho were even less close. The Alaska model

What People describe as ranked choice voting, but that's really kind of the cherry on the sundae. The main thing that Alaska does is to abolish party primaries in favor of a one big primary for everyone. Everyone can run in it and everyone can vote in the same primary. And the idea there is that a lot of the bad candidate choice and polarization that you see in much of the rest of the country

Is an artifact of America's pretty unusual party primary system, not one that is found in a lot of other Western democracies in which you have what can be a very low turnout primary. Sometimes only 10 % of the electorate will come out. Sometimes it's somewhat higher. The point is that in order to get on the general election ballot, the candidates have to go through this bottleneck.

And subject themselves to a gauntlet of the base of one party or the other. They either have to get past the Republican base or they have to get past the Democratic base. And lots of candidates get weeded out at that point for not having flattered and wheedled the base enough. Alaska adopted it in part because Senator Lee Sumerkowski, who is nominally Republican but in practice represents just about exactly the 50th percentile.

Walter (28:21.262) Ideologically a very, very, very moderate Republican who votes with Democrats on quite a lot of things. She had no particular path other than creating her own party or being a writing candidate to ever get re-elected because she could never get through Republican primary. That's what Republican primaries are like in almost every state. And it's not as if this doesn't affect the Democrats because the Democrats had seen a lot of veteran, know, often fairly respected figures picked off by

More ideologically militant primary challengers themselves. So here Alaska comes in and says, okay, no more power to the party base. The independents who I think are as high as like 70 % of the Alaska electorate, may not be quite that high, but it's a very large number who are shut out of partisan primaries can come in and vote. Those who, as is quite common in Alaska,

Like To ticket split and pick a Democrat for one level and Republican for another level and maybe an independent for yet another one Can vote all of that in the same primary as opposed to so-called open primary systems in some other states in the lower 48 where you have to go into the ballot box and either Pick the Republican one even if you dislike most of the people on it or pick the Democratic ballot even if you dislike most of them You can pick the best people whichever party you're with in at the primary stage. So lots of appeal

And Alaska Has had, in my view, really good, good results in that, at least if you like the idea of breaking up the ideological control, Alaska would in most other circumstances be controlled by MAGA types because it is Republican primarily and the MAGA voters are.

Can get a majority in Republican primaries. That's just the way it is. So they would be running the show, were this another state with similar voting patterns. Instead, since Alaska introduced it's reforms, not only did Lisa Murkowski get reelected, not only did the House seat have a very interesting thing where Sarah Palin ran and lost because she was personally unpopular with Republicans, as well as Democrats.

Walter (30:44.178) So They made discerning selections there. This time they went back and picked a standard Republican because Sarah Palin was not running. And then most interesting, in both houses of the Alaska legislature, what formed were bipartisan coalitions in which the MAGA Republicans were excluded and a bunch of Democrats and bunch of Republicans instead vowed to cooperate at splitting committee chairmanship between them so that the state would have practical minded.

Leadership rather than screaming all the time. And so that's what happened in the one state that adopted it. I would think that would be pretty attractI've for other states, but voters disagreed. So I separate that from ranked choice voting. Alaska uses ranked choice voting after it gets it's final four. Then it uses that on election day to pick which of those final four advance to office. But most places where ranked choice voting is on the ballot.

It'S not bound up with primary reform. Is instead just a way of running an election. There a story that's been going on for quite a while, continue to go on, which is that cities really like it. Washington, DC became the latest and there were a couple of others like Oak Park, Illinois. And ranked choice voting, if this keeps up within not all that long a time, is going to be a standard way of voting in

Large and even medium sized cities. It's just making that kind of progress. But states are different. States, and one of the ways you can think of this is that cities typically have one party politics in which that primary makes all the difference in the world and rank choice voting allows them to adjust for some of it's faults, adjust for the problems that in non-rank choice voting cities in which someone can become

Mayor with 29 % of the vote over a split field. And they're actually not a very popular or a very good mayor, but everyone else was so split. And right-choice voting is beautifully tailored to that. Now that's not the way that states work in their elections for governor and other things. They are not typically one party. They don't fall into that. So states have been much more reluctant. Yes, the state of Maine passed it. Alaska passed it as part of this.

Walter (33:06.53) But If you look back only a few years ago, Massachusetts turned it down. Just about the most progressI've state. And there you get to the politics of both of these reform plans. But let me just stay on ranked choice voting for a moment. When ranked choice voting comes in, the party establishment of both parties typically reacts as if it had sat on attack on it's chair.

Jumps into the air and predicts absolute doom. The Republicans and the Democrats absolutely equally loud. You know, you can find a few exceptions. The Alaskan Democrats have turned in favor because they saw that it was, you know, better than the shot they were getting otherwise. A few Coloradans like Governor Jared Polis have been good on it. But by and large, the entire party establishment is negative. And then you have

Okay, So who also participates in the public debate about those these things? Well, you have the the interest groups and the pressure groups and the ideological groups. Now, just over the past few years, the conservatI've movement, which had been largely on the sidelines and to the extent that they had come up by reading economists, they might have been very favorably predisposed because economists have been historically just about the number one constituency for right choice voting, which is why Cato likes it, by and large. But anyway, the

The Conservatives had been mostly on the sidelines and Heritage Foundation and some large donors and others came in and have ginned up spending millions of dollars have have done a whole national campaign which has succeeded in making the conservatI've opinion pipeline just sort of a firehose of anti-rentress voting commentary. So that has changed. Meanwhile on the left.

Very interesting that the American prospect representing the more or less soft socialist part of democratic politics ran a very hostile piece in September by my, is it Harold Meyerson, I believe it was, saying, look, this is being pushed as progressive. Don't do any of this stuff. Our power currently consists of being able to.

Walter (35:26.918) Roast moderate Democrats in the primary and force them to commit to all of our positions. If we lose that leverage, they're just going to govern as they think best for the general public. I'm of course paraphrasing. He did not put it that way. And he said, that's why in San Francisco and these and various other places where this has been coming in, it's considered just terrible by the most radical unions and the various nonprofit's that had been in charge of San Francisco government.

And In fact, indeed, I'd like to say as a sequel to all that, that San Francisco threw out a lot of the very, very left wing people who had been running it in favor of more moderate Democrats and ranked choice voting played a role in that. The most prominent socialist supervisor lost in ranked choice voting. He led in the first round because the moderates were split. And then as ranked choice voting redistributed the second choices of the moderates, he lost.

Aaron (36:28.941) Is There an angle or challenge in reforming voting systems that I mean, everything you just described. So when you were describing the Alaska setup, I can imagine it just sounding complicated. Like this is and people have been people have been voting. They know how the voting works. They know that there's two candidates and they pick the one that they want. They know that there's primaries they can participate in if they want to, but most don't.

Is There just a challenge of voters have misgivings about the current system, but

This Sounds like a lot. It sounds complicated. It sounds like I don't know exactly what's gonna happen if we do this. Just don't rock the boat.

Walter (37:18.222) That Is certainly some of it. And it's also something that works more against the schemes to abolish party primaries because they are more complicated. They do more and they are, let's face it, more radical leap into the unknown. Ranked choice voting in some ways is one of the most familiar and longstanding of these changes. It's been practiced for a long time. We know a great deal about how it works. Abolition of partisan primaries, not so much.

And We don't know how the players will adjust necessarily to that. We don't know whether the parties as this is one big concern, not just to people who run the parties, but there is concern that maybe the parties will be weakened by it and that that will have other knock-on effects in unrelated areas. And I think that's wrong, but again, it's not unrealistic to want a discussion of that and not to want to be rushed into again,

With most states with the ballot initiatI've process where people collect signatures, the good part is that you can get change that it's impossible to get any other way. The bad part is that if you haven't thought through all of the different details of how this, machine works, it's very hard to change afterwards, sometimes almost impossible to change afterward. And so, so you get this, you know, what's in the package, you know, is it going to explode if I pull the ribbon and open it and, and

So A lot of that is understandable. I think that if you look in an area like citizen redistricting commissions, which finally began to get some traction within the last 10 years or so, you see that it took them, it has taken about 25 years. Arizona went first and then it took about 10 years for California to go second and then it took a whole bunch more years before Colorado and Michigan and some other states. And typically,

With respect to the point I made, each generation had refined the models to avoid some of the problems encountered with the first couple of generations so that the Colorado and Michigan citizen redistricting panels adopted much more recently are much more highly functional and fairer in my view than the Arizona and California ones.

Aaron (39:41.944) Let'S turn to the promised looking ahead. So you and I share a commitment to defending liberalism and liberal institutions. Liberalism didn't do well in this last election and is likely to do fairly poorly over the coming four years.

And So we can diagnose the election all we want, but what matters now is like, what do we do now? What do we do next? What happens over the next two years, four years and beyond? If the story of the election is simply there was inflation, the US handled it better than most countries.

But there still was inflation. People remember when prices were lower and the US just like every other country saw it's incumbent party suffer losses, the party that had been in power during COVID suffer losses. Then the answer there then seems to be, well, then we just wait.

Next Time around, people will have had another four years or another two years for the congressional elections to get used to the new price levels. Or if Trump institutes mass deportations and high tariffs, they're going to have sudden shocks of much, much higher price levels than we have right now that they'll likely hold against the party in power. And so there's not much of a lesson for liberals to draw from this except

It sucks when inflation happens on your watch.

Aaron (41:33.998) But Is there more we should be drawing than that?

Walter (41:38.54) Yeah, And you have well set up half of the range of possibility, which is that if you believe that this last election was decided on quote normal unquote issues like the economy, then to that extent, we may be simply going through the normal cycling that has characterized the American. At some point, if Trump follows through.

Farming Areas are going to discover that half of their workforce has been deported even as a tariff wars destroy much of their market for the agricultural exports. And they may rethink things no matter how many subsidies he tries to gI've them if they've got that combination. But let me talk about the other half of the landscape which is the issues that are not typical of American election cycles.

I Know as one who was pursuing quote unquote democracy issues, I don't really like that term, but you some combination of rule of law and constitutional adherence and so forth. I was preaching that up and down every street in 2024, but Kamala Harris's pollsters consistently told her, I believe, that those issues did not.

Engage and rouse the public. Those were not big vote-winning issues for her. The people in the middle who were undecided didn't treat that as the deciding issue and even her base. And so that's grounds for possible deep concern if you believe that those issues are ones that will still be important to America long after

The Cycles have been forgotten of whatever damage is done by a cycle of high tariffs that followed probably by a free trade cycle after that. But damage to the institutions through which we are supposed to govern ourselves, damage to the question of whether or not we have strongman government, could last far, far longer than that. Is it that we're wrong? Is it the public doesn't understand what gives on this? And naturally, when I talked with people who were

Walter (43:57.998) Plan to vote for Trump. I've brought up these issues and again I don't speak necessarily to a random cross-section. It could be the people who want strongman government who do turn up in the polls. Polls indicate that something like 20 % of the electorate is willing to articulate a desire for strongman government. That's different from 50 % but it's still 20%. But the people that I talk to

Almost never put it that way. They would say, well, if you, yeah, I can see why you would be concerned if you think that there's a threat of strong man rule or he's using the government to prosecute people or he's going after the journalists and the press. But after all, and then I would begin to hear exactly the same litany, isn't that what we've been having? You haven't they been using prosecution against hI'm for political reasons?

And At that point, you get into a detail of the, in my view, the good grounding of the two federal cases and they're, they just don't want to stick around for that. But, hasn't we been getting censorship through, you know, the White House calling, social media, telling them who's supposed to take down. And I was against the White House doing that. So, you know, I, so I have to gI've them, you know, some leeway. You know, I agreed that the New York, legal actions against Trump, you know, were, clouded by

Instance indications that you know there was some political motivation you know it's not as if they had zero case on these things and and on strongman they would say well you know but biden just has thumbed his nose at the supreme court i've in you know in practice trump always winds up taking the lawyer's advice and i raised my hand and they admit okay maybe not after january not around january 6th but otherwise they say he always wound up taking the lawyer's advice

And So we've argued ourselves to something of a standstill there. They just don't believe he's as much of a threat. And they also take what to some extent has been an actual series of bad acts by the Democrats and Biden. And they blow up the danger. They refuse to acknowledge that on things like the White House calls to social media, you've had the courts and the agencies and others.

Walter (46:20.28) Pronounced on that and sort of everyone agrees that it was a bad example and so forth. So that leaves me with paradoxically a ray of hope in that if Trump begins doing the things that I fear and I think you fear he is going to start doing pretty fast, we can come to them and cash in their own stated principles and say, look, you you were very concerned about the appearance of political prosecution. Don't you think the prosecution of

Whatever, Jack Smith or Liz Cheney or whoever he decides to prosecute. Doesn't that look like a political prosecution to you? And I think get some people to recoil. Same thing if his actions on the press or on one man rule are as we fear they will. This bothered you when you saw the Democrats doing it. Doesn't it bother you all the more? And I think that thus might be the seeds of

Public's swinging back in the opposite direction with many possible outcomes including you know midterm return to divided government more public support for instances like with the US Senate against Matt Gaetz where Republicans decide to get some spine and say no on something you know if they're hearing from the public

No, We want you to do what Trump says. That's one thing. But I'm not sure that's what they're going to be hearing from the public if we do our job correctly of arguing the issues.