Election 2020: Who is Left to Sway?

DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson Institute at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Trending Globally's producer and your guest host, Dan Richards.

About seven months ago, just as the coronavirus was starting to spread in the US, we had Wendy Schiller on the show. Wendy is a Watson faculty fellow and chair of the political science department at Brown. And we talked about how the pandemic would shape the presidential campaign in Twenty-Twenty

Now, as you're probably well aware, we are just about a week away from Election Day itself. And as we enter this final, final stretch of the presidential campaign, we are lucky to have Wendy back on the show to discuss the state of the race and what's changed since the last time we spoke.

We talked about the debates, the campaigns, and even about who is left to sway in this election. While we don't get too deep into predictions, we do talk about the possible range of outcomes come November 4 and what they could mean for the country. And perhaps more interestingly, we talk about what we've learned from this unprecedented election, no matter who wins.

We recorded this a few days ago, but I think you'll find that it's all still relevant and that Wendy's analysis is incredibly helpful for this nerve wracking homestretch. We started with last week's debate, the final debate, and the two very different realities the candidates laid out for viewers. Here's Wendy.

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, I certainly think that President Trump did a much better job in this presidential debate than he did in the first debate, and not just because he wasn't interrupting Biden or he was more polite. But he really focused on what he sees as the strengths in his administration and appealing to the people who elected him the first time.

So he really focused on border control. He focused on the economy and how successful he says it was before COVID and making the case, listen, if I can do it once I can do it again, and that he was successful in spurring job growth, not just for middle class people, but for people of lower incomes, certainly people who are Black, Latino. He basically said, I actually was doing a good job before a worldwide pandemic struck. And then it's not my fault that it didn't go so well for us, and we're still struggling with it.

DAN RICHARDS: Yeah, almost in terms of tone and in terms of the content minus the pandemic, there was something about it that reminded me a little bit more of ways he talked almost in the last campaign in Twenty-Sixteen.

WENDY SCHILLER: Trump is a consummate believer that you stick with what got you to victory. And nobody expected him to win last time, but he did win the Republican presidential nomination through the party. And they didn't want him either, at least a lot of people in the party at that time. So he believes that he knows best.

He did listen to his advisors about how he spoke. You could tell he was sort of staying on message for the first 50 minutes. And then he started to really want to let loose, and he started to make fun of Joe Biden and mock him the way he does at rallies. He really wanted to jump out of that really more restrained mode, but he kept it mostly under control until the end.

And I think he understands he needs every single person who voted for him last time to vote for him this time and then some. You don't have the same kind of third party expected effect from Jill Stein, for example, being on the ballot. You'll have third party effects but not to the same extent. So he's really facing a candidate who has the potential to get a coalition of people together to vote against him that will be the winning coalition.

DAN RICHARDS: And for Vice President Biden, what do you imagine his strategy was in this debate, and how do you think he executed whatever that was?

WENDY SCHILLER: When you're theoretically ahead, let's just say, in the polls, you have a "do no harm" strategy in this last debate. You can almost call it a Rose Garden strategy. You rely on the kind of themes that have polled very well for you. So he did that. And I think he did well in some respects by really addressing COVID, addressing racism, addressing the economy, addressing the fact that middle class and working class people have fallen so far behind in terms of wages while the wealthy have just gotten richer. So I think these are solid themes that seem to be resonating quite well with him.

He did not lose his cool the way he did in the first debate. He didn't insult the president. He just kept saying, come on, man. He had one slip up maybe, and so he was good in that respect. He was cogent. He was coherent. He was knowledgeable. He looked like he could run the country.

Where I thought he didn't do as well as he possibly did in the first debate which is to take advantage of some of the things that he could have attacked the president on. So as the president's attacking Biden for not getting things done in the Obama-Biden administration over eight years, he should have come back and said, you promised an Obamacare replacement. And you had four years to do it and you didn't do it. And you had a Republican Congress and you didn't do it. How come you didn't do it?

And I think there were moments where he should have seized on that and be much more direct in his attack back at Trump, and he missed those moments. So I think in that way, I don't think it did him a lot of harm. But I don't think it did him all that much good.

DAN RICHARDS: It did feel like there was more of an emphasis on Biden having to answer for Obama's presidency than Trump having to answer for his own presidency, which does seem like an odd little switcheroo.

WENDY SCHILLER: Yeah. I mean, Trump is really, really clever in making it seem like he's the challenger again in Twenty-Sixteen rather than the guy who's responsible. And I think Biden really tried to keep going at him, but he lost that part of the debate and that structure. And certainly, he was nicer than Trump to Kristen Welker, who's an African-American woman.

And he's losing in the suburbs, quote unquote, with the polling by 20% to 24%. That's the most historic gender gap we've ever seen. And that's a certain kind of woman. That's a better educated woman, theoretically, and maybe somebody who makes more money and maybe someone who's independent or Republican.

So he understands that if he does lose by that margin in the suburbs, he's going to have a very hard time winning the election. So he didn't do anything to aggravate that set of voters.

DAN RICHARDS: And of course, I think with these debates, also, people are wondering exactly how many voters are there left to sway? It reminded me of something you said when we talked about seven months ago. You said six months from now, if things are calmer, you could argue that Trump could survive this catastrophe. The question is, what's the impact in those six months? How badly are people hurt?

I would venture to say that his handling of this pandemic has not won him a lot of new voters or new approval. And certainly, things have not calmed down in the last six months. But is there any way you think now, six months later, that he can still survive this, still come out and win re-election?

WENDY SCHILLER: Yeah, I think the way that he does it is a little bit of what he did last night in the debate and what he's doing not so much at the rallies. And this is the fine line he has to walk.

When he says listen, we'll get out of it. We'll get a vaccine. We'll distribute it. We'll get people to get the shot, and people will take it and then they'll be immune, like me. That's what he's selling. And though there's much better treatments, fewer people are dying-- he made that point-- still, more than 1,000 people in America are still dying every day from COVID, which seems stunningly unacceptable in the abstract.

But offering people a path out, offering people hope, and faced with the kind of constraints that everybody's had, much less the economic devastation, having kids at home, not being able to resume any part of your normal, quote unquote, life, people get tired of that. They don't want that to last forever. They don't want to be told that they're entering a dark time. I thought that was a mistake by Biden. They want to have hope. They want to believe this is going to get better and be over.

If Trump can survive this, that's the way he survives it, offering people hope about what comes next rather than warning them that it will get so much worse.

And that's what Biden's saying. He's like, look, don't fall for that. It's going to be here no matter what Trump says. It's not going away. And if he mishandled it now, he's going to mishandle it later, and we're not going to get better. But the devastation is so widespread. And it might be enough. It might be enough to give traditional Trump and Republican supporters enough pause to say, wait a minute. You got us here, and I don't have any faith you're going to get us out. And that is the line that Trump is trying to walk.

DAN RICHARDS: Something that undergirds a lot of these conversations is polling and the accuracy of polling, which I wanted to ask you about.

The Twenty-Sixteen election created, I think, a lot of skepticism for a lot of people. I guess it brings up a question. As we're trying to think who's left to sway and how swayable they are and what the strategy should be, should we be listening to polls at all right now? And if so, why? What has changed since Twenty-Sixteen in terms of polling?

WENDY SCHILLER: Let's break it apart. Let's do the polling part, and then let's do what does it tell us about this particular election? So when you think about the polling, what happened at the national polls were right on target. They predicted Hillary Clinton would win by 2.5, give or take, percentage of the national vote, more than Trump, popular vote, and that's what she got. So they were spot on. And what happens is Trump supporters, either they didn't pick up the phone, they didn't have a cell phone, they didn't want to talk to a pollster. They were left out. They didn't get enough of those people, and new voters, or people who hadn't voted in a long time, maybe eight years or 12 years, and decided to come back out and vote.

Plus the state polls tend to be slightly smaller in their sampling. They tend to be about 900 people. That's a 4.4% margin of error. So even if Hillary Clinton was up by eight points in Michigan, she still was actually possibly not up by 8 points, maybe only three points. And then you add in the missing people from the poll. And you get to a point where they mispredicted. And look at Michigan. She lost Michigan by 11,000 votes. That's nothing, given a population size of Michigan. So that's what went wrong in Twenty-Sixteen.

Here's why pollsters are making the argument that Twenty-Twenty is a little more accurate. First of all, they've worked much harder to get Republicans to answer the phone, or Trump supporters. Second, Trump supporters are interested in defending Trump. So instead of saying, oh, I'm embarrassed about voting for this candidate who's run a pretty nasty campaign, now it's I'm defending the President of the United States who won and deserves to win again.

So I think the reluctance of people to say they're supporting Trump is not there. I don't think there are a lot of hidden Trump supporters. I think if you're a Trump supporter, you're all in.

Second, what's really important about seniors, seniors tend to dominate some of these polls because they answer the phone, particularly if you use a landline, and they're home all day. And I think that to me is interesting because the polling of seniors since June has been consistent, meaning the traditional Republican advantage of about seven to 12 percentage points for the Republican candidate over the Democrat among people over the age of 65 has disappeared. Disappeared.

So at best for Trump, they're tied. And at worst for Trump, he's 10 points behind in this demographic. But more of them are answering the phone. So yes, they're still dominating the poll.

But what they're doing is they're shifting. So the shift you see towards Biden in some of these state polls, particularly in Arizona and Florida, places like we know that have a significant number of people over the age of 65, even Iowa does as well, those people have changed their minds. And so I give a little more credence to the polling. It's still, if you look closely at the polling, pretty close to the margin of error, remembering that state polls are about 4.4% margin of error. If you look, and Biden has a six or seven point lead, it's not much of a lead, right? It's not a solid lead. So it could be higher, but I doubt it.

That's why I think the polling is better this time around. But I still think it's probably three to four percentage points closer than what you're reading in the state by state polls.

DAN RICHARDS: I don't know how many elections and years it's going to take people to come to terms with the margin of error.

WENDY SCHILLER: Yes. Well, there is a difference between a margin of error, which is statistically pretty simple to figure out, you have plus or minus, and actual bias in the polling where it trends towards a different result because you've left out people. And I think that, to me, is the real key difference.

The other thing that you want to look at, if you're looking at actually the polls, is again trend. So is it the case that Biden and Trump are trading places, which Hillary and Trump did in terms of the overall lead or within the margin of error? On things like competence and character, Hillary was ahead. But in general, they traded places. And then Hillary had a national lead.

So with Biden, the same states have been trending in Biden's direction since June or July, which is true of the Obama-Romney campaign. The polling in June of Twenty-Twelve turned out to be pretty much close to the actual result. So in that sense, in some states that are close, like North Carolina, Arizona, Florida, it's impossible to know who's going to win that state right now from polling. No way, anybody knows, because they're all within the margin of error.

We should also talk about early voting. Should we rely on polls in the next 10 or 11 days? And I think not. And here's why I think not. We know now from the US Election Project-- professor Michael McDonald of the University of Florida is the most accurate vote counter or keeper in the whole country. And you can go on the website and see who's voted and how they voted. And what's fascinating, 51 million people have already voted. 51 million people.

Now in Twenty-Sixteen, 137.6 or something million people cast a ballot for president. 51 million people on October 23 is a phenomenally high number of people who voted. Just to give you perspective, in Texas, as of this morning, 71% of the turnout in Twenty-Sixteen has already happened. Now if turnout goes up to 145 million or 150 million, then you've still got 40 million people to vote. But the chances that the 40 million people who vote on Election Day are fundamentally different in their political preferences than the 110 million that voted early in terms of the distribution is probably pretty small.

DAN RICHARDS: Wow.

WENDY SCHILLER: Yeah, it's pretty amazing. But I'll tell you just one more thing about that. There's a 2 to 1 ratio in returning ballots by mail, Democrats or Republican, but they're even in in-person voting. So in-person voting is about 15 or 16 million people so far, and vote by mail is about 35 million people so far. But of the people who vote in person, it's basically right down the middle for Republicans and Democrats.

But another couple of million people who don't have a party affiliation have also voted in person. So predicting how this is going to go is going to get much harder, I think, over the next 10 days because you're dealing with already voted, maybe you're going to vote on Election Day.

DAN RICHARDS: Are you worried about how these votes are all going to get counted after Election Day? What are your main concerns with the possible outcomes come November 4 and beyond?

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, there's a couple of scenarios. I think they'll get counted. Courts have already extended deadlines for ballots to come in in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, among others. North Carolina, it's the rejecting of ballots.

So North Carolina has already shown in one county that it was rejecting black voters' ballots by a 2 to 1 ratio. There are five states left under the Voting Rights Act that collect racial information when you register to vote. And two of them in there are swing. I think it's Georgia and it's North Carolina. So when you think about that, that's the concern.

So there's a consent decree in North Carolina that says if your ballot's rejected, they have to tell you that as a voter and give you the opportunity to mail another ballot in. That's not true in every state that has vote by mail. So we know that every time-- we had more than 30 million mail-in ballots in Twenty-Sixteen-- people's ballots get rejected, and there's no recourse. So my concern is rejection of ballots much more so than the counting.

I think they'll get counted accurately. They're all put into a machine in America. They're paper, and then they get put into a machine, or they're electronic and they're counted. I'm not too worried about skewing that, but certainly, the idea of rejection and the ballots arriving.

And I think so far, electoral commissioners have said in states like Ohio and North Carolina, important swing states, that they're getting the ballots fine, that they're receiving them fine. And things are going well there. So it's the ballot rejection rate that I think is the most worrisome thing, particularly for Democrats.

DAN RICHARDS: But your money is on-- it's going to go well past November 4 at this point, just the mere counting and figuring?

WENDY SCHILLER: In a perfect world for Joe Biden, if he's close in Florida but loses Florida, Florida can count votes. They count them when they get in the mail ballots. So Florida's already had 4.8 million people vote.

DAN RICHARDS: And these votes are getting counted now?

WENDY SCHILLER: They have a total of 5.9 million mail ballots requested. They start early voting the latest, Florida, actually. They haven't started early voting yet. They start, I think, on the 24th. I think they start tomorrow for early voting.

So all of the ballots I just said are mail-in ballots. And they count them and they process them. Same with Rhode Island, as a matter of fact. They get them, they process them. So they're counted. It's Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that don't actually start counting. They process in terms of verifying the validity of the ballots before Election Day. But they don't start counting one at 7:00 in the morning and one when the polls close. They're estimating 2 to 2.5 million mail-in ballots. That's going to take a while.

So if Biden is close in Florida, super razor thin close, it might suggest that he can win the upper Midwest, only because that would mean that the turnout among people that the Democrats needed, they got out in Florida. If they got out in Florida, they probably got out the door in the Midwest. So if Florida is super close and too close to call, it suggests that once all the ballots are counted in a lot of the other states, Biden might win.

But if Trump wins decisively in Florida, that's a signal that he's probably going to maintain his strength in Arizona, not an exact same demographic, but similar. And if North Carolina goes for Trump, then I think you're starting to look at a scenario where Biden loses. And it puts the spotlight on Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in particular, which could mean legal challenges, which could draw it out for weeks.

But given turnout is so high, it inches towards the inkling that Democrats have succeeded in mobilizing their base. They did win by 3 million popular votes in Twenty-Sixteen. If Biden wins by 6 million popular votes, they're not all in California.

And the Texas numbers are staggering to me, that they're so high this early. Texas is a much more diverse state than it used to be. So it does suggest that African-Americans are getting out the door. They tend to vote about 88% Democrat, 11% or 12% Republican. That's what the polling is showing. That's what the results have shown for many years.

Latinos are more evenly split. They're about 29% to 30% Republican and 70% for the Democrats. If Biden is not polling a little under that, that's a problem for him in Florida and for Arizona and Texas.

So I think there are scenarios under which Trump wins. We'll certainly know that sooner. And people are saying if he loses Florida outright by 3:00 in the morning on November 4, then again, that indicates that turnout was high enough among Democratic constituencies that you'd expect the turnout to have been higher in the Midwest as well. And it may have some bearing in North Carolina.

DAN RICHARDS: So Florida once again a sort of bellwether.

WENDY SCHILLER: Florida is a bellwether because they'll get their voting counted and done before some other states. And then, of course, Pennsylvania. I think Ohio stays red and goes for Trump. Pennsylvania now becomes the crucial state. Michigan is probably going to go for Biden. And then Wisconsin's a bit of a toss up. But Pennsylvania is the real question mark, and that's how Hillary Clinton lost.

DAN RICHARDS: This election isn't just seeming like it's a threat potentially to President Trump. It's a threat potentially to the Republican controlled Senate. And I think what most people are seeing right now is that the Senate is pushing forward with the Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett and also explicitly saying we will not be engaging in some sort of stimulus deal. What do you see as Senate Republicans political calculus in these two parallel moves this close to the election?

WENDY SCHILLER: I see this as a shoring up for Twenty-Twenty-Two. I think the Republicans have a slightly better balance. It's not so out of whack for them. They're defending 23 seats. For Twenty-Twenty, it's 23 seats they're defending versus 12 for the Democrats. The ratio in Twenty-Twenty-Two is worse for the Democrats. There are more seats the Democrats are defending and fewer for the Republicans.

So you're seeing that the Republicans are looking ahead. And they're saying to themselves, first of all, the incumbent Republicans in the Senate don't want to get primaried. They want to make sure that they appease conservatives, get Amy Coney Barrett through when they have the opportunity of a conservative court, take credit for that.

They don't want to increase the deficit. The deficit is now $3 trillion. If you add a stimulus package now, it'll be another $2 trillion. That's a $5 trillion deficit to defend as you're going into a campaign year as an incumbent Republican Senator. You're going to get primaried by somebody who's fiscally conservative.

So what McConnell thinks is it's not worth it to us. We don't get an electoral benefit. So many ballots have already been cast. It's not going to save Susan Collins in Maine, or Cory Gardner in Colorado, or Martha McSally in Arizona. We can live with that. We're going to win Alabama. We'll have a 51-49 probably Senate ratio. And we look ahead.

And that's, to me, the biggest reason why even though there have been some people who aren't running for re-election in the Republican caucus who said no, no, no more spending, they tend to be outliers. Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, for example. It's indicative of the luxury that they have not to worry about it this year but also the idea this doesn't bias any votes in a Senate race, and it doesn't shore us up amongst our most conservative primary core base of voters.

And so it's actually really quite smart of Mitch McConnell to say I'm not making my senators vulnerable to a primary challenge and increasing the deficit. If Trump loses, then maybe we go back to the table. Maybe nothing happens at all, and we saved $2 trillion. So it's really the smart political money.

Nancy Pelosi was smart about her strategy. She didn't want to give Trump the benefit, that she did not want to have him claim credit for passing the stimulus. Even if he passes it next week, the money can't flow out by election day. And every day that you wait, as you look at early voting, more votes are cast. So she wanted to stall, and she did. We passed a bill in May. You could have passed our bill any time. That's what Joe Biden was saying last night in the debate. But you didn't. And Joe Biden again didn't hit the president hard enough, I think, on that.

Because of that, we're not going to have a stimulus now. Now, the markets are not going to like that. They were hoping for a stimulus. But now even that isn't probably going to matter. If you can get to the end of next week, none of it matters. It's all about people who've made up their mind and going out the door to vote.

So the stimulus package was a victim of political calculations on the part of Nancy Pelosi, although they passed a bill in the House to her credit. And the Senate Republicans said, we don't gain a benefit. We're just upping the deficit. We're going to be primary challenged. We have a better time in Twenty-Twenty-Two. If we lose now, we're just going to get the Senate back two years from now.

DAN RICHARDS: Wow. So in some way, that's similar to a story we've been hearing for years, that many Senate Republicans are more worried about an attack from the right in a primary than they are from anything else.

WENDY SCHILLER: Yes. What's interesting is what happens if Martha McSally and Susan Collins and Cory Gardner who are Republican and have Republican voting records-- I wouldn't call them moderate at all, certainly not McSally. But they do tend to want to get stuff done when they can. And they will work with Democrats to do that. If those three are defeated by Democrats, then it even intensifies the notion among Republican GOP caucus that their only path to victory is to be super conservative. And I think that polarizes the Senate unfortunately even more.

DAN RICHARDS: Oh my goodness. I did not know that could happen, but all right.

So by the time most listeners hear this episode, we'll be about a week out from Election Day, maybe even less. I just wanted to end with, regardless of the outcome of the election on November 4 and beyond, what do you see as the big takeaways from this whole process, whether it's about technology, voting, the media, polling? What are the big takeaways from you in this really unprecedented election year?

WENDY SCHILLER: There are two takeaways. One is mechanical and one is broader on, I think, a moral dimension for the country. So the first is that now that everybody realizes you can vote by mail-- and I think what we'll see is that it generally worked out OK in Twenty-Twenty-- they're going to want to vote by mail forever. Now that they know you can vote early four weeks in advance, three weeks in advance, on the weekend, they're going to want that again.

So we have actually expanded the opportunity to vote because of COVID-19, which is obviously really quite tragic. But because we've done that, we will see more better turnout, higher turnout, more people voting, more people engaged, moving forward in America. And that changes everything about how we think about elections and how we think about enfranchisement and whose voices are represented in policymaking. So sad as COVID-19 was, this is a tremendously positive outgrowth for the democracy. That's the big takeaway for Twenty-Twenty.

And the second one is that Americans are portrayed and depicted as core divided on a range of political issues and interpretations, red state, blue state. Biden is trying to run a campaign that says we're one America, and even though we differ, we still have more in common than we don't. And in our core, we don't want a racist country. We don't want a xenophobic, fear of immigrants country. We don't want an anti-LGBTQ country. We want a country where people can live their lives, get educated, get a job, and live in peace, and not be attacked by people.

If America buys the message, if he wins, and if he wins by a decent margin, 4%, it tells us that the rhetoric that we've been experiencing and the divide that we live under is not permanent and can be not necessarily reversed, but can be challenged by voting, getting out the door and voting. And it won't perfect the democracy, and it won't cure it, but it is an effective mechanism.

And if Biden wins on that message, it tells the country that there is a bigger reservoir of support for unifying the country and not using the bully pulpit to divide the country than we would be led to believe if Trump gets elected. And I think that's the takeaway. And you may not like the takeaway. If Trump wins, you may like the takeaway if Trump wins, but I certainly think symbolically, a Biden win tells us a lot more about where America is even than a Trump win.

DAN RICHARDS: As we all are waiting on the edge of our seat for the Election Day or the election week or the election month, thank you so much for this perspective and for talking with us again on Trending Globally. Thanks again, Wendy.

WENDY SCHILLER: Thank you, Dan. And I appreciate the opportunity.

DAN RICHARDS: This episode of Trending Globally was produced by me, Dan Richards, and Elina Coleman. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield. Be sure to subscribe to Trending Globally on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And if you haven't yet, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.

For more information about this and other podcasts produced at Watson, go to watson.brown.edu. Thanks for listening, and tune in next week for another episode of Trending Globally.