Jerry Mayer, US Elections

[MUSIC] You're listening to Not Simple, a cultivating leadership podcast. [MUSIC] >> Hello everybody and welcome to today's episode of Not Simple. I am delighted today to be joined by Jerry Mayer. Jerry is a professor of political science at the Sharps School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He's been studying presidential campaigns since 1996, and has written a book called Running on Race which follows how race played a role in all of the campaigns in the center half of the 20th century. And he's a self-described obsessive when it comes to all things presidential campaign. Welcome, Jerry. >> It's great to be with you. >> Thank you. I want to remind everybody about why we're talking today. We started Not Simple because we cared deeply about the way we as humans tend to oversimplify the complex problems of the world. And we want to encourage ourselves and others to think differently. So many of today's challenges are not simple and the complexity is going to remain whether we like it or not. We think if we can learn how to embrace it, even to have a little bit of fun with it, then we'll all be better equipped to tackle some of the big challenges we face. So what are we talking about today, Jerry? >> Well, we're talking about America on the precipice of an election which could result in dramatic changes in how we do government, but also an election that may not be decided the night of the election or in a week or two weeks thereafter. And there's some-- there's a lot of complex scenarios that could emerge. >> Oh, boy, yes, complexity abounds in American politics today. And with this election, for sure, I can't wait to talk with you about this. But before we get into it, why does this matter so much to you? Why do you care? >> Well, it matters to me because I've been reading about politics since I was a tween. And I loved politics from a very early age. And I think politics in America has become increasingly toxic. And it is less enjoyable for me as an individual, but that's trivial. What's more important is that the stakes in American elections keep going higher and higher and higher, and the hatred and the toxicity keeps getting more serious. And that could have devastating consequences. It already has had serious consequences, but really, with the 2020 election, we could be looking at very devastating consequences for the entire country. >> Yeah, whoo, indeed. I know for myself, I can't remember a time when I felt my vote was more important than this year. So I am with you on the potential consequences challenge. >> And by the way, that's another complexity. As people used to think, oh, high voter turnout is a good thing. And low voter turnout is a bad thing. And I spent years teaching students, yes, not so simple because turnout among Jews in the elections that brought Hitler to power was very high because they were scared out of their minds. Turn out among African Americans in the David Duke election when he was the Republican nominee for governor in Louisiana was very, very high. And high turnout this year, yes, I guess it's a good thing. But it also shows you that so many people on both the left and the right are either scared out of their minds or unbelievably raging hot balls of rage. And so high voter turnout is not simply a good thing in a democracy. It can be a distressed signal. >> Wow, wow. >> Okay, so there's one of the things we oversimplify when we think about elections, just this idea that voter turnout high equals good, low equals bad, not necessarily. So what I hear there is a sort of sense that potentially high voter turnout is a signal, kind of a symptom of an underlying fear. >> Right, if we had regular 90% turnout, then having 91% turnout this year wouldn't be so bad, but we don't. We tend to have around 55 to 62% turnout for presidential elections. We're probably going to beat the record in modern times with this election. And again, I think it's because a lot of people with that voting doesn't matter that much. Everybody's pretty much the same. For some people, they see Joe Biden as the first step towards communism. Or very close to communism. And others see Donald Trump as an actual fascist who will destroy our constitutional order. That's not necessarily a healthy reason to vote. >> Yeah, yeah, even in those labels, there's a bunch of simplicity, right? If I label Biden a communist or if I label Biden a savior of democracy, each of those is equally simple. If I label Trump a fascist or if I label Trump a savior of capitalism and our economy, each of those is equally simple. And only a small part of what either of these two humans would bring to their governance. >> Yeah, I agree. >> Yeah, so as we, I mean, we are recording this 10 days before the election. As we head into this election, what are some of the other ways that we tend to oversimplify? We've already pointed out to the way that voter turnout isn't necessarily automatically great and the way we label each other in politics. What else? >> Well, I think this could be the year that Americans find out that there's simple assumption that we do elections well or right will be forever destroyed. Because America has, without a doubt, the worst election administration system in the industrialized world that I used to give a lecture called, I'd rather wrote in Mexico structural flaws in the American electoral system. Because Mexico had a catastrophic stolen election in the last, I think it was '88, and then they fixed their election system. So that today, Mexicans, all of them, have a biometric linked photo ID card that is transferable all over the great nation of Mexico wherever they move. By contrast, America, alone among advanced democracies, has its sub-governments, its states run the mechanics of the election, which is a really stupid idea because we have 50 different registration systems so that a number of people are registered to vote in multiple states. Now Republicans who are all worried about voter fraud never talk about that because people who tend to have homes in multiple states tend to be rich. And that doesn't bother Republicans, that alleged fraud. But that's just the beginning. When we set up democracies in Japan, in Germany, in Italy, in South Korea, in Iraq and Afghanistan most recently, we didn't say, hey, let's let each province run the election rules and run a voter registry and make usually in most states, it's run by a Democrat or Republican, an elected Secretary of State or an appointed Secretary of State. That is a really dumb way to do it. We should have federal elections run by the federal government. We wouldn't be so scared because we are, again, on the precipice, not just of having an election where you may or may not like the winner, but where we don't know the winner for weeks and weeks after the election. That could happen. Yeah. So let's pause there for a moment and just if we can lean in a little bit, what do Americans not understand about what else do Americans not understand about their election system that we really ought to know? And what if we were looking at it and it's kind of full complexity, that also might help us at least understand enough to navigate this thing. So I think most Americans don't understand that the way we do things in America in terms of politics is the oldest in the world. We like to think of ourselves as innovators as a young nation and we are a younger nation than those crusty bastards in France and England and whatnot. But what they all operate under, the British say they have an older constitution, but it's not a written constitution so they don't get any points. We have the oldest written constitution in the world. And we still operate anyways under rules written in a hot summer in Philadelphia in 1787. So the idea that every province, every state runs its own election is more than 240 years old. And that is something we should have updated decades and decades and decades ago. So we Americans, I don't think understand how creaky the rules of the Electoral College are, the way we decide a tie. All of these things are our centuries old and they may have served a function at one time. But the Electoral College, I like to compare it to the appendix in your stomach. The appendix used to do something pretty important, but that was like a million years ago, biologically. We all still are born with appendixes. We only notice them when they explode. That's the Electoral College. But just as babies are still getting born with appendixes, we're still running elections every four years with this Electoral College. And we only notice it when it explodes and gives us either no winner or gives us a winner who didn't win. And if we sat down to write a new constitution, there is no chance in how that we would choose this archaic anachronism. Yeah, yeah. So as I listen to that, and I think about the ways we often teach about complexity, this idea of adaptation, we're not adapting. The context is dramatically different, the context in which we operate now. We've, we're a modern nation, much bigger, the way the rules work is different, the way we communicate with each other is different. We have technology. Like they're just the whole system around our elections is quite different. And yet, what I'm hearing you describe is that we are adhering to a set of rules that was much more fit for purpose 240 years ago than it is now. And we're, and it's become rigid in a way that makes it vulnerable in a sense. Right. And there's so many ways in, in which the Electro College doesn't work today. Let me give you another example. The largest population state in 1789 was New York. And New York was only about seven times larger than Delaware and Rhode Island, the smallest of population states. Today, the largest state, California, is 72 times larger than Wyoming, which creates an incredible inequality in the Electro College because those two extra Electro votes that Wyoming gets for having two senators. Every state gets a number of Electro votes equal to its representation congress. That triples the Cowboys representation. But the Californians, when you add two to 53, they don't even notice that extra representation. And so when those votes are counted up, every voter in California is one seventh or one eighth as powerful as a cowboy out in Wyoming. And so the mathematical possibility of someone winning the popular vote and losing the Electro College, sorry, is increasing every four years because the discrepancies just getting worse over time. Yeah, I get that. I get that. I mean, Jerry, I grew up in Montana. So I am, I'm really familiar with this. And it's one of the conversations I often have with my parents about the idea, your vote matters so much more than mine. Don't get me started on the Senate because if the Senate was allocated by population, the Democrats would have a solid majority and the Supreme Court wouldn't look like it's about to look like. But because of the overrepresentation of small state populations, the Senate is what it is. Yeah, and at the same time. So what would you say to somebody who is from Montana, who grew up there, who is afraid of being over a run or being completely meaningless? How would you talk to them? Well, I would say, hey, Montana, you are completely meaningless in every presidential election in my lifetime because no one ever campaigns there because of the Electro College, not because you're small, but because you're overwhelmingly one side or the other. So what the Electro College does now that we have polling is that we only have about 10 states every year that see a presidential election. Montana doesn't get visits from Joe Biden or Donald Trump during this election. Again, not because you're small, but because you're one sided. So New Hampshire, which is a smaller than Montana, certainly geographically, it's about the same population. They get visited every four years because they are a battleground state. So the Electro College disenfranchises people at a random basis depending on what the balance of power is in their states. The three biggest, the four biggest states in our country by population, New York, Florida, California, Texas. Only three of them have seen a presidential campaign in the last 30 years because I could have told you that the Democrat was going to win California a year ago. And Trump would lose California to a dead man. And I could tell you a year ago who was going to win the Montana will not vote for a Democrat unless Jesus Christ comes back from the dead and runs as a Democrat, and even then it'd be close. So it's, if you're an unbalanced state, you don't get a vote, really. So fascinating. So fascinating because having grown up there and seeing the politics, very often the senators are split. I always think of Montana as purple. The governor is very often a Democrat. And yet, presidentially, you're right. It does have a history of prairie populism, not quite as strong as South Dakota. So there have been moments when the agrarian movement in Montana, and it's more ranching than it is farming, had a chance at winning a state like Montana. And there is also what I also love about some of the western states is a libertarian current. And this is a complexity beneath the simplicity of saying Montana is red. Because if you can get the Democrats to look a little libertarian about leave me alone, that's how Bullock and some of the Democrats can win in a state like Montana. Fantastic. Okay. So we've gone off on Montana because I am personally interested. But I think it's a neat sort of subsection of kind of the way the way the electoral college works and some of the ways that it's broken and some of the ways that this old system kind of keeps us stuck. So if we were, if we were making traction on this, what kinds of conversations would people have? If we were going to move towards a more appropriate or fit for purpose electoral system in the United States, what kinds of, what kinds of things would we be doing? So there are reforms that are being considered. One of them is already being used in Nebraska and Maine. And that is the one where you take your electoral votes and you divide them up. The two Senate votes go to whoever wins statewide. And then every congressional district is its own state in effect. Whoever wins a majority or plurality there gets that one electoral vote. Now the sad thing is it's being done in two states where it really doesn't matter because Maine and Nebraska compete for being more rural and more uniform. Now every now and then somebody wins one of those. Trump actually won one vote from Maine in 2016 because there's a more conservative, just narrowly conservative part of Maine. If a big state like Texas or California or Illinois, you know, there's a lot of Republicans in Illinois. There's a lot of Republicans in California that just can't win. And there's a lot of Democrats in Texas but they can't win statewide. They might have a chance this year but I don't think so. So that reform would basically eliminate the possibility that someone could win the popular vote and lose the electoral college if a lot of states did it. There's also an interstate compact where some states have passed state laws saying we will pledge our electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote once enough states sign this compact to make a majority in electoral college. That's a dubious constitutionality. That would be litigated always from court. The other thing to do is the impossible. A constitutional amendment. Constitution has 27 amendments but it really has only been changed 18 times because the first 10 amendments all happened at once as a deal with ratifying the constitution itself. So one of the things about our constitution as compared to other world constitution is it's incredibly hard to change it. Yeah. What would you like to see people, citizens? Those of us who are listening to this, what would you like to see us be talking about? What questions would you want to see us be asking? Well, I think that Americans need to lose their reverence for the constitution as almost a biblical document. You know, if you read right-wing literature, there is this association of the way you should read the constitution with the way you should read the Bible. When Judge Barrett talks about I'm an originalist. I look at the many of the words that rings echoes and feels good to fundamentalists and evangelicals because that's the way they want to read the Bible. Not the way those liberals did. I mean, if you get to it, the roots of American fundamentalism religiously are because people were doubting the veracity of the Bible and 100 years ago, they stood up and just fought in the theology schools and that's playing out in our politics today. So I think we need to lose some of that reverence and say, hey, we've got to change some of these things. And one positive thing about all the turmoil is that it's hard to argue this system is working. You know, just take if we had a more parliamentary democracy like Britain, then it would have been possible in 2017 for the Republicans in Congress to go, you know what? This guy really is dumb and dangerous and corrupt. And we've made a mistake. And we're going to vote him out and replace him with Mike Pence or Nikki Haley, not give it up to a Democrat. And impeachment is not like a parliamentary system. In a parliamentary system, the majority party can say, we don't like our own leader. Now you lose face and you might lose the next election, but you don't have to wait four years. So I think it's time to learn from some other countries that are having more successful democracies. Look at COVID. The way we handled COVID is going to be studied for decades as how not to do things. And I'm embarrassed as an American that our response was so pathetic. Yeah, yeah. Me too. As an American who works in a global firm, I'm often faced with kind of the shame that has started to settle on my shoulders about being American. And that makes me so sad. Yeah. As a privilege of lecturing in Germany for the State Department under George W. Bush, under Obama, and under Trump. And Germans didn't like George W. They were angry at us about torture and about the invasion. Then they were way too happy about Obama. And then the attitude when I was in Germany about Trump was different. It wasn't anger. It was more like pity. America was an old friend of Germany that had terminal cancer. And they they were worried about us. And boy, I don't like pity from overseas as a proud American. That's not what I want. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so here's the question though. We can't. We don't think we're going to immediately hit the point of a constitutional amendment. What's the small step? What's the what's the one small move that or a small move or an experiment that we could try around the dinner table? Yeah. Our town. Well, here's one. I have a PhD student working on ranked choice voting, which is being tried in a couple states and a couple local elections. And that would be a radical alteration into how electoral votes are allocated. You don't have to do the winner take all system. You don't have to do what Nebraska and Maine do. You could actually allocate by proportion of vote. Now, every state is allowed because of federalism to decide how it will allocate its electoral votes. If California said we're going to go with rank order voting. And if your first choice gets 10%, which you know, there's always a cut point, then they'll get five electoral votes. Suddenly, Greens would be voting in the electoral college. Libertarians might be voting in the electoral college. And that would be exciting and new. And I think that'd be a good thing for our democracy. Americans on both the left and the right are deeply unhappy with the system. So new ideas like ranked choice voting may be right for being tried out when previously are pride. You know, why would you change anything about American democracy where the best in the world? I think there's fewer and fewer Americans who believe that. And related to the shame conversation, maybe we can start having that conversation about the fact that we're not the best in the world anymore. I'm not sure we ever were. I mean, because this is sort of gets at that make America great against slogan. And one of this brilliant comedian who happened to be black was going around the Republican convention saying, hey, when was America great? And they would say a date like 1787 and they'd say, oh, when I was a slave, when people looked like me, where a slave was that great? And they don't, well, there were problems. But we definitely had a moment in America where the world looked to us for leadership, not just in what we do internationally, but the way we ran things domestically. And I think that's gone. And in order to recapture that if we want to, we're just to improve our own lives. We're going to have to change some fundamental things. Yeah. So how do we learn to let go? Like one of the things that as we think about change, part of change is acknowledging the past, but being able to let go, being able to not just embrace something new, but let go of something old. And it's really hard to do. If you look at the great constitutional changes, they tend to come in ways. So the civil war produced three amendments, changes the constitution. There was the rising tide of progressivism from 1890 to 1920 that produced several changes. And then there were liberal changes like giving DC electoral votes and ending the poll tax in the mid century of the 20th century. So if you pile up the unhappiness with the COVID response with the economic downturn associated with it. And then you add in the fact that in 2008, we had the worst recession since the Great Depression because of Wall Street fraud. And now one person was held criminally accountable. They held more people accountable for the Great Depression than they did for this one. And we like to think we're a little more advanced. We're not. So I think if you started accumulating all the unhappiness and the stagnation of wages in the middle class, for example, I think you could get some serious changes even up to the point of a constitutional amendment or two. Here's hope in. So as we look ahead, as we look ahead to 10 days from now, 12 days from now, what do you, what do you see coming? What do you think that we ought to be looking for? So 538 politics, which is the best place to get news about predictions, says there's 12% chance that Trump wins and an 87% chance that Biden wins. And what's the other 1%, that's the chance we'll get a tie, which is a whole nother conversation. But the Electoral College can tie, although it hasn't happened since, well, 1824 wasn't a tie, but it was no one got a majority. So it works the same way. But it's a creaky system. And so there's, it's more likely that Biden gets a mammoth victory in the Electoral College than that Trump wins. If Biden gets a big victory in the Electoral College and he wins the Senate, which is tougher, it's about 50, 50, maybe 60, 40, the Democrats take the Senate, then there's going to be a wave of changes because Democrats are not going to be in a mood to compromise. They won't be held back by their moderates. They're going to make big changes, changes that they're furious, they're angry and they're going to change. But there's also a dangerous possibility that is, I think, the scariest and that is that on election night, we won't know who won. The map is going to look like Trump won because Democrats have been voting early and by mail. And in most states, those aren't counted right away, particularly the mail ballots. Some states won't be done counting them for a week. And if those are overwhelmingly democratic votes, then we won't know who won, but Trump, whose claim is to never have made a mistake and never lost even when it goes bankrupt, is certainly to declare victory. And the turmoil that could come from a slow count in key states is going to make Florida look like a bad PTA meeting in 2000. And there's something else that people aren't thinking about when they look back at 2000. Oh, it all worked out. The Supreme Court decided it. Yeah, but we had an incumbent president who wasn't on the ballot and he was a very responsible president. One of Bill Clinton's finest moments was the way he led the nation through the two months of turmoil in Florida in 2000. He said, "Become, there's a process. Trust the courts will work this out. Donald Trump will be pouring gasoline on the fires that emerge on election day." And so he will be encouraging his party and his followers and militias to fight, to save his reelection. And that is how democracies die. When people start bringing guns to the polling places, that's a bad sign for democracy. All right, I'm officially scared. Not that I might not have been before. What would you ask us to do? What, how would you ask us to or encourage us, normal humans, to be, to be in the-- I would remind Americans of all political affiliations that you have a higher loyalty to the country than you do to a party or a politician. And when you hear rage boiling up inside you or inside a member of your family, remember what Lincoln said about the angels of our better nature. And don't respond with rage, even to provocations. So if the other side is bringing guns to the precincts or guns to the recount, don't go and get guns yourself. That's not going to help. That's not a solution. If the other side is choosing violence, don't choose violence. Don't break the law. Let's all obey the law. Let's try and let our weakened institutions get to the right answer. There's a lot of different ways this could go. It might not end up in the courts. It might end up in state legislatures deciding that, well, we don't know who won this state, but we're the state legislature. And under the Constitution, we have a right to pick who gets the electra votes. That is an interesting claim. Florida made that claim in 2000, but it never got litigated. Some states may end up there. And by the way, in 1876, here's a complexity. A number of states sent two delegations to Washington saying, we're the electors that won. No, no, we're the electors that won. We could see that again. Okay. So what I hear in that is keep calm and listen. Yeah, listen to responsible leaders. There are still responsible Republicans. And I don't think Joe Biden is going to call on his followers to march on Washington with guns blazing. So yeah, listen to responsible people that you trust who sound like they care about this country. Yeah. I guess I'd say even I'm thinking about even listening to those I don't trust. It's very hard to fight if the person on the other side is not fighting back. If the person on the eats hard to to have a tug of war if I let go of the rope. Right. And the problem on the Democrat side is many of them feel that they gave up too easily and floored in 2000 that the guy leading the Republican recount was James Baker, a trained knife fighter in bureaucratic warfare. And the guy leading it was another former Secretary of State Warren Christopher. And the Democrats weren't willing to do the things like the Brooks Brothers riot that the Republicans were willing to do in 2000 to shut the countdown. So yeah, I hear you, but it is it is part of me. Here's that and goes what about 2000 because they're they're now gore been president on 9/11 because 9/11 probably would have still happened. You know, the warnings that Bush ignored probably would not have made too much of a difference. We would have gone to Warren, Afghanistan, but we wouldn't have invaded Iraq under president core. And that would have made all the difference, right? I mean, that's $6 trillion. That's healthcare for every American plus college and not just the money, but that's 5,000 Americans who'd be alive and about 150,000 Iraqis. Yeah. We have big stakes coming. We know that. We talk about tipping points in complexity. And I don't know if this is one or if we've already tipped. I'm hopeful that this is a tipping point where we tip back. And I'm hopeful that we will find a way forward. Whatever happens. I share some of those hopes. I think there is a hopeful scenario in which we have a clear winner on election day and Americans from all political views joined together to fix some things that we could all acknowledge our problems. If it's not the electoral college that the Republicans could agree on, maybe we can harness the Republican fear of fraud and say, okay, let's let the national government run the election system, like they do in all those other countries. Let's have a national voting registry. Let's have a national voter identification card where you register once and you don't have to re-register every single damn time you move. Yeah, or change your driver's license as would have been my case this year. I got a new real ID and learned later that my registration was canceled because I didn't somehow tick the right box when I changed my driver's license. In a number of states, voting has gotten so hard that it's almost like they don't want you to vote. And that's not the way a lot of advanced democracies run it. Voting should be as easy as any other interaction with government. In fact, it should be easier. Yeah. Instead, we make it very hard in this country. Yeah. And one of the things that I'm hearing there, which does give me a hopeful sign, is let's see if instead of using our differences to be divisive and to hate each other, we can find our differences and use them effectively. If you're afraid of voter fraud and I think it's unlikely, how can we both, how can we find a way to use both of our waves to find a better system? How can, I mean, we can read idea because one of the things Republicans say is, and Trump says it too, is I lost California because of all the illegal immigrants voting in California. If you're afraid of that, let the federal government issue voter identification to make it absolutely certain that illegal immigrants aren't voting. There are a couple legal immigrants voting every couple of years. It does happen. It's never in the numbers that would have cost him California. But hey, let's take the Republicans at their word. They want cleaner elections. Here's a way to do it. Beautiful. And with that, I'm going to have to bring us to a close. I feel like we scratched the surface in one side of what we could have talked about today. I would love to talk to you again. I'd love to talk to you again on the other side of this. Let's hope there is another side. I hope so too. Oh boy. All right, Jerry, thank you so much for my pleasure. I very much enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for listening. Not simple is hosted by Wendy Bidner and produced by me, Rebecca Scott. Our theme was composed by Dave Michalak. If you like this podcast and the ideas within it, please follow Cultivating Leadership on Twitter @readershipgroves.