Like, literally, Thanksgiving is like all the things that I like about food, why it's too heavy and it's heavy. I like, you know, lean, spicy.

I'm going to put that in a dating app. What are you looking for? Lean and spicy.

Hello and welcome to the 538 Politics podcast. I'm Galen Truk. Three weeks out from the election, President Trump is still refusing to concede and is instead making attempts to undo the results of the election. As his legal arguments have repeatedly failed in court, he's turned to lobbying local elections officials to refuse to certify results and lobbying state legislators to send electors to the Electoral College who would overturn the will of the people in their states and vote for Trump. Those efforts don't appear to be working either, but they are unprecedented in modern American history and contradict the tenets of American democracy.

Meanwhile, coronavirus cases continue to surge, and the country's death toll from the pandemic recently passed a quarter of a million. There is still little in the way of a national plan, but we'll take a look at how states are responding to the rise in cases and whether the politics of the pandemic have changed now that the election is behind us.

If that sounded like a grim introduction to the podcast, I should also say happy Thanksgiving to everyone. I know this year will be a little bit different, but hopefully people are finding meaningful ways to mark the holiday. And so with that here with me today, as usual, is Editor in chief Nate Silver. Hey, Nate.

Hey, David. Hey, everybody. Also our senior politics writer, Claire Malone. Hey, Claire Hagelin. And senior politics writer Perry Bacon Junior.

Hey, Perry. I do. So before we get into everything that I just mentioned, let's ask one of our favorite questions that we haven't asked in a while. And that's good use of polling or bad use of polling. And today's example comes from pollster David Hill writing in The Washington Post. His article is titled The Dirty Little Secret Pollsters Need to Own Up To. And he writes about how response rates to polls have fallen dramatically during his career as a pollster from around one in five decades ago to closer to one in 100 hundred today, meaning that pollsters have to call a lot more people to get a single interview.

He says that as a result, the one person who responds to a pollster out of those 100 people ends up being not all that representative of the other ninety nine. And therefore, polling is no longer truly a random sample.

This has been an ongoing challenge for pollsters, but his suggestion is that at the very least, pollsters should publish their response rates along with their polls, to inject some sobriety, as he calls it, into what exactly the poll is capturing. So I guess the use of polling here is pollsters, including the response rates, and we can get into that. But I guess, first of all, I should just ask me, do you agree with the overall premise here that declining response rates does pose a challenge to pollsters and means that we're not getting as much of a random sample as we once were able to through polling for sure?

Yeah, I mean, I think most versions of what went wrong with the polls in recent elections has to do with the fact that some people are more likely than others to actually respond to surveys and that it's not random and you can do waiting and do other things to try to improve it. But you're not truly getting a random representative sample. You have to massage the data to some degree. And, you know, I think for a long time, people like me were concerned about declining response rates.

And we're like, well, we've had pretty good years. Your polls in 2008, for example. But this might catch up with people sooner or later. And I think this is a year where it might have a little ironically, I think response rates improved during the pandemic, which may have also caused issues.

If they improved more for Democrats and for Republicans, doesn't that unreliability call into question the importance that we should be placing on polls?

Well, but it's a lot more reliable than like some columnists opinion, sure.

But that's always been the false dichotomy of this day, which is like it's either shoeleather journalism or it's polls. Right. So I'm not asking that stupid question. I'm asking the balanced question, which is in the balance of we need actual reporting and talking to people and we need data to help us undergird our assumptions.

Isn't that a problem? And let me spin it out even further, which is like forget horserace polling. We also rely on 538 on a lot of polling data that has nothing to do with who's up and who's down in a race. But there's like, how do people feel about vaccines or how do people feel about institutions like that kind of polling? Like should we be worried about the accuracy of that stuff?

Well, I think it's not two things you can mix. You can mix like polling, and they're not oppositional. You can mix polling, shoe leather reporting and existential uncertainty. Right. I'm saying that if you reliability of polling that there's not really reporting that you're going to do, it's going to make up for that. In some ways, reporting is harder if you aren't guided by also looking at polling. So there's just a few more things that we say, oh, we're not really sure about this.

We have to wait until we verify it by looking at people's behavior, by looking at voting, for example.

So a greater comfort with uncertainty. Yeah. Or a greater X. A nation of uncertainty and there's no way around it, and it's also not going to be any kind of new fangled alternative to polling that's going to magically be incredibly accurate. I mean, first of all, it's still about whatever its opponents actually become less accurate if you kind of plot out over time. 20 was fairly bad, but twenty eighteen was quite good. So it's debatable in the first place.

But yeah, I mean, I'm sure people will fill the vacuum with all types of stuff. But it's not like if you don't know, like which groups are changing, you might not know where to send a reporter. Sure. If you didn't know that, like Hispanics in south Texas, we're going to have this big turnout boom for Trump. And you wouldn't know until that actually happened.

So when it comes to actual uses of polling that there's no new fangled thing, that we're going to be able to replace polling with one. Are there different ways to pull that seem promising? And then two, when it comes to just injecting some of this uncertainty into the equation, does David Hels idea sound like a good one, posting response rates along with the polls to give people a sense of these aren't really random samples. There are very few people who actually respond to polls?

Well, I mean, I'm sure there'll be lots of people who say, oh, we've solved the problem of polling. I'd be a seller on those methods. Now, it is true that like online polls don't have the same. Response rate issues, because you generally have higher response rates, but the problem with it is it's not a random sample, right? You can't randomly date when I can't randomly make you and Perry and Clare do something on the Internet.

I can't pick you randomly on the Internet, but they have higher response rates that might not fall victim to a particular problem. So here are the two issues. I mean, in general, obviously, we're big fans of transparency. And the issues here are a number one, there are ways to calculate response rates and the people who might calculate it in one way might not be able to address how to calculate. Another way, too, is that there's always a lot of bad faith arguments about polling.

And there's something to be said of if you publish this data, when people use it in bad faith and because people are idiots and assholes, answers, of course they will. It still might be useful to do it on balance, especially kind of track how response rates are changing over time. But it would be better if like an industrywide benchmark, like a paper collecting that data, as opposed to like individual polls and not becoming one other thing for people to, like, skew Perry as someone who uses polling a lot in your reporting, like all of us, what do you think of this?

Is this a good use of polling? Would it be helpful to know response rates when you're talking about a poll or your writing based off of polling?

This is a hard question, in part because if we're saying that the people who respond to polls are not representative, I don't know how they are. So I guess if they are overwhelmingly rich or overwhelmingly we're to guys out of their home or they're overwhelmingly poor or whatever, they'll be one thing I don't think I totally have a great sense of what exactly the unrepresented in this is. So that's one question I would sort of start with. But I have the same as does, I guess, in terms of publishing the response rate that's really low.

I think you'll get a lot of these polls are fake and I'm not sure I believe that. I guess my broader point might be polls about who's going to win the Maine Senate race when it's like forty five to 50 or so are one thing. But I think it's still useful to know, will most Republicans vote for Trump? Will most African-Americans vote for it? And I still think most polling questions are not in this. Forty five fifty to zone, but in the 70 30 zone.

I still think public opinion polls are useful, particularly when they're not showing very close margins. We're separating. Are we predicting an election in a closely divided purple state versus are we trying to get a sense of public opinion on broad questions that we don't know already that are not 50 50?

Yeah, I guess that's a good way to pose a given that what we saw in this election was something of like a four point error nationally. If we're looking at data and this goes back to your point about issue polling, why do Americans favor shutdowns or do Americans favor keeping schools open and things like that? If we're looking at a 20 point margin, should we be less concerned about errors in polling? How should we view this in the context of what Perry is saying when things are not super close, but we still want to get a sense of what Americans think.

I take note and Perry's point that we'd rather have polls than not have polls to tell us where they're at least fainting in one direction. If we don't have enough information on this or this group is changing or this is generally what the bulk of this demographic group is leaning towards. But then on the other hand, I have this larger journalistic worry and I guess this extrapolates some from the sort of alarming, I would say, early indications that a lot of Republicans or I think that pollsters, he said a lot of older men in general, it's harder to get in touch with them and to reach them.

I see that as kind of an extension of a trend journalistically where a certain demographic of America just rejects participation with journalism, rejects participation with believing the media. Like I do see that as an extension of this problem that we've been seeing in our industry. And I do think that that's a problem. Now, people might say, well, it's OK because like the white male dominance of America is changing, which is true right in the long run.

But also I find it a pretty big problem that a big part of or a big plurality to use the five year term of the American population isn't engaging is a disturbing thing. Like it's just like not an existentially good path to be on.

Does this seem like something that in a different political context would change, do you think? We're going to continue to see large portions of the American public distrust the media and therefore not be inclined to talk to pollsters? I mean, I guess it's hard to predict the future, but this is the eternal reversion to the mean or exacerbation of current trends. Question, how does this play out?

I'm not sure it's totally established that that's the reason why the polls were off a little bit. Let me let me say one word, Gruchy. Think.

OK, just one more just one more for the rest of my life partners, you know, but this is like because polls actually publish a number at least horserace polls, right, that you have accountability. You can compare what actually happened against the results. I would love if we all had other types of journalistic claims made that are verifiable and say how many of them ring true, you know what I mean? Like, I know when I've had stories written about myself or 538 or just like basic details wrong.

Not like interpretation like, oh, you said I talked to that organization about working there and never had any conversations at all. Just factually wrong. Right.

This is published in various you sound like a celebrity complaining about their like it's not bad, but I'm saying I can verify facts around things that I actually know are true or not in my own life. So when you see things published that are like just factually wrong from credible reporters, I mean, it's just kind of disturbing. It makes you wonder how accurate any thing is.

Right.

Polling is easier to hold accountable because their individual numbers that you can compare to other individual numbers, and it's not the same for the broader journalistic ecosystem, for much of anything really or for much of anything really no accountability.

So I know there was a push for a while to look at like Google searches and use data from that. So I am hopeful of other forms of data to be used if you can figure out a way to do them like after the election. We have county data, we have precinct data. So I'd obviously prefer that. So like if you're writing about Georgia now ahead of like the runoff, you have precinct, you have county, I think there probably is a view of the world where we use polls, lists, maybe we use polls.

But if we think that Republicans are now responding to polls perfectly, maybe a poll of like New York City is more accurate since there's not many Republicans of your polling in New York City race. Maybe the ABC News is calling you live in Atlanta. You live in New York City, you live in L.A. You know, you don't have an anti media things in your Fynes. I think that there's a probably a nuance here where we use alternative methods. We think about is Wisconsin.

Maybe it's harder to poll in this environment than Minneapolis. So I hold this column was helpful and I think it was like thoughtful and I thought it was well done. We still need measures of broad public opinion and we still need to have some skepticism that they are perfectly capturing everything.

Yes, very thoughtful way to approach all of this.

I'm less interested in the polling discourse narrowly than I am in the journalistic discourse broadly.

Just on a personal level, I agree because we talk about issue polling on this podcast all the time. Like that was one of the main tools that we used when the pandemic hit to try to understand how Americans were reacting. Now, we're never going to find out because we didn't have one hundred and sixty million Americans go to the polls to vote for whether or not they wanted a shutdown. Like both journalists and politicians, lawmakers themselves are going to be relying on this information to try to make decisions.

And so for me, that's almost more important than like where the polls off by five points in X or Y state.

Yeah, and in an election year like, yes, a lot of our journalism at 538 is based off of horserace polling. But the rest of the time and in addition to it, is supplemented by that issue polling, which is important. That's what I have to say on that.

So one thing I do not buy I do not want to talk about that. Oh, well, the issue polling is different and somehow immune from any issues you might have. If anything, it's the opposite, right? The polling that we can actually verify and validate is the horse race polling, because that's where you get a test against real world outcomes.

Oh, that's exactly my point, Nate, is that I'm more worried about the issue polling and like, we don't know how accurate that is. And so if we're seeing problems and the horse race polling, then there may well be problems in the issue polling, but we don't really know to what extent they exist. I agree.

I mean, I'm saying like sometimes you'll hear pollsters, literally pollsters, not people like us who are polling smart journalists, you know, they'll say, oh, well, the issue and will be affected by this. Like, it is true, you don't have to estimate turnout. And so that is one thing that you're removing. But, you know, it's basically to say that somehow issue polling would have the same issues as horse race polling.

All right. Well, in conclusion, would we say good use of polling on the part of David Hill in The Washington Post arguing that pollsters should be more transparent about the challenges that they're facing in terms of response rates?

I think so. Yeah. Well, everyone should be more transparent. Everyone should be OK. All right. So good use of polling. Well, rate that. Good use of polling. Congratulations. Let's move on and talk about some of Trump's attempts to overturn the election results. But first, today's podcast is brought to you by neutrophil.

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Politics at checkout. There are, by my count, I think four ways that President Trump has been trying to subvert the results of the election, the first in the court of public opinion by making arguments on Twitter, sending out surrogates to networks to give misinformation to viewers. The second way is in actual courts. The third way is by lobbying local elections officials not to certify the results. And then the fourth way is lobbying state legislatures to send electors to the Electoral College that would overturn the preferences of voters in those states.

This all is kind of amazing to be reporting on happening in the United States that we think of as a developed democracy. But here we are. It doesn't seem like any of these efforts are really working at this point, but we have to take note of them and report on them nonetheless, because what's happening is quite serious. So just lay things out. Those four different attempts that the president is making, am I missing anything? And how are those different efforts going, which seem to be the most successful between public opinion, actual courts, state legislatures and elections officials who would be certifying results?

I mean, he's getting his ass kicked in the courts. So that's not a successful avenue. The other three, it's a bit less clear. I mean, we just had this long discussion about trusting polling. There are different polls that say larger or smaller shares of Republicans believe that he had the election stolen from him. Depends how you kind of phrase the question, right? There's a group of people who seem to think that, yeah, I acknowledge by one, but it's because there was fraud and stuff that we can't really undo it.

And there's people who said, oh, this is like the Sydney Powell crazy land stuff. I mean, so far we haven't seen any attempts by and around by state legislature has come to fruition yet. There are some that could conceivably happen. Michigan, that seems to be the one, despite actually not being that close to a state where there might be the best chance of that. It does not seem like even if those steps occur, that it's going to be successful for Trump in the long run.

You have Democratic governors in Michigan and Pennsylvania, for example. You had the vote certified in Georgia, by the way, Biden might win with enough electoral votes that even if for some reason Michigan did not apply its electors, then it wouldn't be enough anyway. But like none of this is really very successful and you might have some things that are somewhat successful. But part of the problem is like the fact that it very likely won't be successful changes the stakes a lot in different, complicated ways.

On the one hand, it's hard to know how people would behave if this really could change the outcome and prevent Joe Biden from being president. On the other hand, if you're like Michigan or something. OK, well, Biden's going to win anyway. So all that happens if you delay this process as you just wind up looking like some frickin tools who are trying to subvert democracy and it doesn't actually affect anything. Maybe if there's belief I mean, there are people in the country who are deluded, who are not living in reality, and there's no way around that.

Maybe if enough people fall further out of touch with reality that people will believe we actually we can get enough support in enough states if something changes. And I don't know, I think it would ultimately get slapped down by the courts if it got there. But I don't know. It's number one, dangerous. Number two, unlikely to succeed. Number three, being pulled off of this incredibly amateurish way. So, as Nate said, it seems like the efforts in the courts are failing.

It seems like to some extent, Trump is successful in persuading Republicans not to trust the result of the election because more immediately important would be whether or not Republicans are going along with it on the state and local level or on the national level. Michigan is where everyone's eyes are right now. Does anyone have more insight into how successful the president has been in lobbying these state legislators or local elections officials and the broader Republican apparatus?

I mean, I think that he has been, I guess, the most noise and the most inroad he has made. And there is very little inroad that the Trump campaign has made in trying to overturn these election results. I don't even know how to phrase that because it's all kind of wild and not true. But Trump has had the most success in calling these local election officials, I would say, particularly in Lake Michigan, let's say to Wayne County Republicans who are on the local elections commissions, basically like signing these affidavits for the Trump campaign where they said, well, we certify the results of the election, but we felt pressure.

And so there's sort of this odd like they're trying to have it both ways. And I think that Michigan will officially certify or not certify, I guess, election results this afternoon. Is that correct?

Yeah. Today is the deadline in Michigan. In Pennsylvania, yeah. So by the time you're listening to this, I guess you'll know probably potentially how successful Trump has been on that route. But my guess is he will not be successful. But I guess the president's personal leaning on these local officials who are Republicans has been most effective because he's the president and their local Republican elected officials who feel. Intense pressure, yeah, and of course, there's also election officials, for example, in Georgia, the secretary of state who rejected all of the pressure from the president.

Perry, how is the broader Republican Party reacting to all of this? The last time we talked, it seemed like not that many Republicans were pushing back on it or any more.

Now, we're still in a small number of Republicans who are pushing back against that. I know that Senator Portman from Ohio just kind of said Trump needs to let this transition go forward.

So you are still in the more moderate Republicans, Portman, Murkowski, Romney says, I think Rubio has been signaling this way, too. You're getting more. Republicans say Biden should get intelligence briefings. You're getting more Republicans say the transition should go forward. They're not quite saying Trump needs to concede, but there's more in the congressional in Washington, Congress members who are sort of moving on from this. Pat Toomey has been pretty strong in saying Trump lost.

So you're seeing that at the local level? I would say it's a little different. I'd say, well, depends on who you're talking about here. But, you know, like on Friday night, for example, state legislative leaders in Michigan, the Republicans went to the White House. They wouldn't quite say what about their meeting? They stayed at the Trump Hotel that night, which is useful to talk about, because on Sunday they came out with these statements saying basically, well, if we let the oddity continue, we should check everything and make sure nothing's wrong, basically giving you an excuse to continue this search for irregularities.

John James, the Michigan person who ran for the Senate, who has today similarly kind of questioning the results, The New York Times, the story, Jim Rutenberg wrote it and the headline is Republicans Rewrite an old playbook on Disenfranchising Black Americans. And I think it's worth concentrating that we have Trump, but also officials in states who are really trying to create lots of problems for votes to be counted in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Detroit specifically. And I would argue this, not just Trump that's also being supported by officials in those areas.

So Trump is very unlikely to succeed in this job. And almost only president January 20th. I do worry. We are now setting a precedent where if you lose a close race in a purple or red state in a heavily black area, is the area where you lost most you find for irregularities in voting that happen in every county you say can't be certified. And it looks like there's a few Republicans in that county going to support you and you may be able to move forward.

I really am worried about what I'm seeing not for the presidential, but in races where we're not covering it. Is being black and living in Detroit mean that your vote can be disqualified based on, I would argue, silly, disingenuous pretexts?

I think that's a massive question here. And maybe the most important one is what does this all mean for future elections in America? Is it a now Republican position that all elections that you lose should be questioned or maybe even the elections that you went, as Trump did in 2016 and still claimed three million illegally cast ballots in California? What does happen going forward? How does this shape our democracy from here on out?

I mean, we've been talking about this for five years. I think that's what's so alarming is like is at the same time the most important kind of political discourse and the most basic, almost insulting to the American people level of discourse like this is all we're talking about, the validity of elections. And there are huge problems facing the country. So it's terrible for the country. It's terrible for future election. Like, that's the bottom line. It's pretty easy to diagnose the problem.

It's like, how do you fix it? I mean, part of how you fix it is you have people who are elected officials who are Republicans say this is crazy. He's not in power anymore. This is crazy. These votes in these cities count do better to win people in those parts of the country.

There's obviously not much to say about the problem itself. It's pretty clear that the problem is it's the solutions where no one is particularly stepping up on the partisan side of things.

Is there any precedent for this in American history? And I ask that question broadly, but also some Republicans have compared what's happening now to Al Gore's push for a recount in Florida, Hillary Clinton's claims that Trump is an illegitimate president, or Stacey Abrams essentially at the end of her election, acknowledging that Brian Kemp would be the governor of Georgia, but saying that she wouldn't actually concede the election. How do those all compare to what we're seeing right now?

I didn't think what Stacey Abrams said was great. But I think it's also like an order of magnitude different from what Trump is doing. I mean, if Trump just said, well, I acknowledge that Joe Biden won, but I'm not going to concede because of voter fraud, whatever. Right. I mean, that's much less serious of trying to persuade state legislatures or elections officials to go along with it and find all these court cases are totally wild theories.

I mean, I think that's much more severe. I mean, he said repeatedly that earlier, though it is hard to know how different actors behave differently if the election is actually on the line. One thing that would be true, if they get to a point where they seem to have some daylight, some chance of success, I had imagined you'd see much bigger public protests because it's not like there's not going to be a world in which an election is stolen and then people just go about their business.

I mean, I think like a lot of American commerce, a lot of American life would shut down and then there would be protests that were much bigger than anything we saw this spring or the summer. You know, it would not be a very stable country.

I read a good piece by Clint Smith in the Atlantic, basically comparing this to 1860 for, I think, the comparison about the election procedures. Twice in a controversial election procedure. We've had things like that. I think the divide in the country and these sort of unacceptance, particularly right now, the Republican Democratic victory appears to be a lot of Republicans just do not believe should be legitimate. I think that's a different case. And I do worry that the right parallels are to are we increasingly have two blocks of people who cannot work together, cannot live together of different values, do not want to live together.

Yeah, the civil war comparison is the one that I think everyone is afraid to make and which I remember hearing for the first time. I'm like a Slate podcast, maybe two or three years ago. And I was kind of like, this is a lot. But I think as you watch things develop over the course of the past couple of years, it is pretty alarming. I mean, we thought we were divided during the Obama administration. We thought Fox News was a really malicious force during the Obama era, the Bush era.

But then if you spin it forward to now where we're talking about people questioning the legitimacy of American elections pretty openly, pretty publicly everywhere and with extremely little evidence or just no evidence whatsoever, like made up out of whole cloth.

Right.

The amount of credence given to that. It is an uncomfortable comparison. But like we do have a extremely bloody. Instance, within our history of people being incredibly divided over in the case of the civil war, a single issue, and now, you know, it's the party slate of issues, but it's the disturbing comparison to make. But it's not a crazy one.

I guess the one thing would be different is like we've not had any these other cases, a person who we know does not abide by any rules or systems and is willing to overturn them. I didn't have any doubt that Stacey Abrams would choose to try to occupy the state capital if she wasn't becoming the governor. Like I think Trump will leave on January 20th.

But I'm not 100 percent sure because he you know, we've had five years of him behaving differently. I never had any doubts about Al Gore or people like that. So I think that's a huge difference is Trump's record of behavior. But that said, I think in a Pennsylvania county today, this fight over certifying the results, I don't remember this previously being a partisan fight. There was a county in Pennsylvania where the Republicans voted against certification that Trump won.

So that's where I get to the point is, like, if we're now the point where if the Democrats win election, some Republicans will oppose certification in counties that Trump won. That's really dangerous territory. I don't see an obvious precedent to that. Yeah.

I mean, in some ways, a lot of the concern that Democrats expressed pre-election is, oh, the courts will kind of. Steal it for Trump, and that's been quite wrong, but these other people in the process, secretaries of state, I guess someone in Georgia did not let Trump steal Georgia, right. But, you know, canvassing boards and other elected officials have no one's ever like Paris had thought about very much. And if those people start acting like partisans, then you have big issues where the court seems to be a little bit more grounded and you actually have to have some theory of the case and not just make things up kind of whole cloth, because even the state of Georgia has been put in this odd position where him saying the election was not a fraud has become like he's taking the liberal side and there's rumors about him facing a primary.

Like you don't want every electoral decision to be in this context where if you're a Republican or if you're a Democrat and the other party wins in your area, it becomes a will you be primaried if you accept? The result is a really terrible precedent. And we haven't seen the primary yet. But the secretary of state of Georgia, I would argue, is sort of been forced to come out there and seem like he's taking a breather. And it shouldn't be a brave action to say Joe Biden won Georgia.

I mean, Perry, what you're saying is that actually whether we live in a democratic society has become a partisan issue in that whether or not the votes cast by the American people to determine what government they want, whether we accept that or not, is partisan.

I mean, I didn't as cleanly as you just did or it has the potential to be in right now in this moment. You know, look, maybe on January 20th, Biden walks into the, you know, the Oval Office. These issues do not look like where they are, but these certification votes are not comforting. They're weird and unprecedented, like Biden one Detroit. Nobody really who thinks Biden didn't win Wayne County by an overwhelming margin. The fact that we're debating this is is insanity.

The one thing that I guess if we're talking about historical comparisons during the 2000 recount, like a slim majority of Americans, they didn't trust the vote count going on in Florida. People were sort of divided, partisan. They had their horse in the race. But when all was said and done and George W. Bush was going to be president, they did polls that were like, do you accept the results of this election? And people said, yes, right.

That was the overwhelming response in polls that people said, OK, I didn't think the vote count was fair, but I accept Bush as president. I mean, can you imagine that happening today? Like, that's the thing I keep on going back to. It's this level of detachment from our system of democracy. That lack of common faith in it is disturbing.

People in America aren't genetically disposed towards democracy versus autocracy. It's that we teach these things generationally. You're not inherently born with them.

Yeah, I think as we have all pointed out here, this is a challenging discussion. And yeah, democracy is not a predisposed condition. It's something that takes institutions and buy in from all the different political parties and actors. And so it seems like for now this is a conversation we're going to continue having and hopefully, as you mentioned, was the case with Florida and the recount in 2000. Once this is all said and done and Joe Biden is president, people will have faith in the process, having worked appropriately because there is no evidence otherwise.

So with that, let's move on and talk about the search and coronavirus cases and maybe how the politics of covid have changed.

This past week, we surpassed 250000 deaths from the coronavirus pandemic in the United States and cases are continuing to surge around the country. States are still taking rather different approaches to dealing with the virus, and Trump has done little during his lame duck period in order to address the challenges on a national level.

So I want to talk about one just putting this moment in our pandemic process in context, but then also to whether the politics have changed at all post-election. So, Nick, can you kick us off with the data and putting this on perspective of how bad is it right now compared to where we were in the spring earlier this year?

So we're now detecting generally around one hundred and fifty to one hundred and seventy five thousand cases per day. That is by some margin worse than the previous peaks when which came in the spring, one of which in the summer. We are doing more testing now, which accounts for some of that, but not most of it. It's believed that we're now detecting around one in three actual infections, which means that every day about hundred thousand Americans are infected with coronavirus three point five million people.

You see, hospitalizations are rising as a reaction to that inevitable rather result of that deaths are rising. It is true that the death rate is a bit lower than it was in the spring. But if you have a still pretty high rate, if lower on a very large number of cases, and that means less. People are dying and we're probably going to die. I hate to say it, but they're going to probably get back up to a peak of two thousand or more deaths per day.

Unfortunately, there are a few states where things are slowing down a little bit. So you can kind of look at the second derivative, right? I mean, frankly, there are some states where, like North Dakota, South Dakota, where so many people got it, that there is some degree of community immunity. If 30 percent of people in the state have had covid, then there are fewer people to infect. So it's bad enough that, like you have some states unwittingly getting this strategy where partial immunity might reduce the numbers some.

But we're in for a really long few weeks. I think one open question is like, will this keep getting worse for another few weeks or will like the previous peaks, will there be a peak and then a decline again? I don't know. But this period, with the weather turning colder, with holiday travel, with just people's covid fatigue, I think is going to be rough.

Unfortunately, from the beginning of the pandemic, we have tried to some extent to discern why outbreaks happen when they do and whether or not it's related to politics, partisan identification, and whether or not people are following the rules. Also, whether there are greater restrictions in one part of the country or another, and also whether density there's all kinds of different factors. But have we been able to better discern why outbreaks happen when they do so?

I think people miss sometimes is that relatively small changes of behavior accumulate over many weeks can make a lot of difference. If you have so are is how fast a disease which affects how many other people do transmitted to when you get it. If hour is zero point nine, the disease declines to the point where in theory it would eventually die out if it's one point one and it grows to the point where you start to have really severe problems after a period of time.

And like and that's all we're talking about. Some states may be able to get are down to one some it's one point two and then settle things make a big difference. So clearly we see now the data tells a more unambiguous story than it did in the spring, which is that in red states where people are taking fewer precautions, then there's more spread. The fact that rejecting more cases now than we were in the spring, even if you adjust for that and trying to run the numbers, then it's clear that states like North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, obviously earlier this summer, Arizona and Florida have tended to have worse outbreaks than most blue states.

New York City being an exception. But now North Dakota is caught up so that North Dakota probably has had as much covid even as New York, if not more. So, you know, it's kind of what the scientist said, that if people are less cautious, then it will spread. With that said, I mean, look, I think some of this is just kind of human nature. It's awfully hard for people to isolate themselves from other people for what's now been nine or 10 months.

I think a lot of medical advice, a lot of the kind of scolding takes on the left kind of ignore human nature and downplay the importance of in-person socialization and could start from a place of more empathy and understanding. I mean, it's complicated, but you could argue all day about this. You could clearly the Trump administration's response has been a disaster except in vaccines, which is a very important exception. On the other hand, most European countries have had roughly equal problems to the U.S. So I don't know all that to feel like they simply want this right now.

Yeah, maybe one question that we can try to address here is whether or not the politics of all of this have changed after the election. For months, it seemed like there was a clear divide between Democrats who are more in favor of restrictions and quite critical of the Trump administration that was trying to, quote unquote, reopen the economy, open schools, et cetera. And then Republicans, on the other hand, who wanted fewer restrictions and to keep the economy open, etc.

Have those politics changed at all now that the election is behind us?

It's a good question. I mean, I think that on the issue of unfortunately and this has been the thing that I've been most disturbed by, whether or not you thought the vaccine would be safe became during the presidential election a political issue. And I thought it was pretty irresponsible by several high profile national Democrats to cast aspersions on a a vaccine that would be released under a Trump administration with the obvious indication that, like, yes, Trump was also trying to push forward a vaccine and trying to say, look, there's going to be a vaccine by the time the Election Day rolls around.

I thought the politicization of the vaccine was bad. I do hope that on the vaccine issue, more Americans will trust a vaccine over the next six months, that there will be a lot of public policy. You know, the ad council is trying to roll out these trust vaccine advertisements, particularly in black communities, where obviously there's a long history of people being afraid of vaccines because they have reason to be because of, you know, things like the.

Tuskegee, syphilis trial, things like that, so I would hope that a steady, deep politicization of vaccine trust will be a good change, but the lockdown stuff has always been I think they pointed out a lot of the trickiness about people's personal risk. I think this whole pandemic is about how you deal with personal risk. That's kind of what it is at the end of the day. But by reading our partisanship onto that, it's become this really sticky issue, you've probably had fights within your own family.

If you're a listener about what is the safe way to do things around Thanksgiving, for instance, and I don't think that stuff is going to go away, like, I think maybe we'll get a little bit more push back to the hardcore, close everything down.

But I'm not really sure. I mean, I do think one thing I know for sure is a lot of people are upset at the lopsided public policy response when it comes to focusing on reopening businesses versus reopening schools or making schools a priority.

That's something that I think a lot of Americans probably on both sides of the partisan divide are pretty upset about. Now, you get into a lot of complicated should we have supplemented such and such workers and such and such industry in order to make sure that schools open safely? I don't think the political fight on that stuff are going away, but I do think you could probably make a good argument that a lot of people feel our policy priorities were a bit out of whack in the pandemic.

So it's hard, a little hard to separate the timing. The election happened and the spike happened sort of in the same timetable. So it's hard to sort of separate those out. But that's these last few weeks we've seen is blue states are doing more restrictions like, you know, states with Democratic governors are often going back to sort of shutting down restaurants after 10 o'clock or no indoor dining or something on bars of the 10 o'clock or knowing they're dying. So they're going back to more aggressive ones.

And you're seeing some of these sort of more conservative states, at least push mass in sort of like push dozers. And they're being more pro mitigation than they were in other times as well. There is a partisan divide. It's like the liberal states are more aggressive than the conservative states are. But I think in general, these last three weeks, you are seeing more governors and leaders taking this seriously as a whole. And I think that is significant.

I'm not surprised California is more effective than Iowa, but the fact that Iowa is being more pro mass than they were two months ago is important to reemphasize something, Claire said.

I think partisanship can kind of be used to stand in. I mean, this is part of a partisanship is you take this complex range of issues, relatively few of which you might actually have particularly strong intrinsic feelings or knowledge about, and use that to develop what you believe is the correct behavior or policy response on a host of unrelated things. Because I think what to do about covid is very tricky. I mean, there's nothing that irks me more than like people on Twitter, like just the marshmallow test.

You know, can we just be patient for a couple of months here? And I mean, like that like doesn't understand human nature. People want to get together physically to do stuff. Learning is a lot better when physically the kids can be in the same classroom together. And so the really difficult decisions, the difficult for lots of reasons, in part because if you do lockdown's you may just push cases into later. I mean, now there's a much more coherent case for Lockdown's because of these vaccines.

Then there's a much more like, oh, we actually are buying something with our time and we can stave off rather than merely delay these deaths. But, you know, these are difficult decisions. And anyone who thinks that, like there's an obviously correct response to the connection to the U.S., but around the world where Europe was very reluctant to impose new restrictions, but things are getting very bad there now. They have. Right. And most countries will probably follow the same route, I would think.

But people use partisanship as an excuse to ignore what a wicked difficult problem this is. People should not be ashamed to say that, hey, being able to socialize with other people, it's not like in the long run, it's really not optional is for us people. Right. It's pretty essential. And to kind of deny that, I think is maybe part of why there's a disconnect between the way people signal about how they behave on social media. And yet you walk by any block with a number of restaurants in New York and they're totally full indoors, outdoors, whatever.

So to that point, it does seem a little bit like the politics of this has changed in blue states, because earlier in the summer, there was a big pushback against the president's urging to open schools right now that basically de Blasio and the teachers unions have shut down schools. It seems like there are a lot more parents in New York City who want the schools to stay open and feel frustrated by those measures. Whereas earlier in the summer, the overwhelming it seemed like Democratic position was that the president was being irresponsible by urging people to keep schools open.

Well, and you want to be evidence driven, right? There's disputed evidence, but most evidence seems to point to the fact that No. One, schools are not a huge source of transmission. No two other kids can get it. They very, very rarely actually get severely ill from the coronavirus. And it works in both ways. We just know that, like indoor activity is, by some estimates, 20 times more dangerous eating in a restaurant indoors than outdoors.

Right. And so maybe you would permit everything to be happening outdoors as much as possible. Endora, things as much as possible might be the kind of following the evidence theory. I mean, I do need to say, like, I hate to say it, but like for an indoor Thanksgiving gathering that really checks off like a lot of the boxes for things that are bad for spread. Right. People of different generations traveling to share a meal in an indoor space without masks on because you're eating that really is unfortunately like quite bad.

If you can do outdoors, you can reduce your risk a fair bit. So that is one thing that people are appropriate to school about. I wish there hadn't been as much scolding, though, around like the beaches and joggers that wearing masks because that stuff is not really that hugely significant as far as bread goes.

I think back to the conversations that we were having on this podcast in March and April, which were really quite dark. And I mean, that's the only way to describe them. They were dark conversations and we spent a lot of time talking about how politicians in America were now faced with how do you make policies that have to Democrat or Republican factor in that a certain number of people will die. Basically, we're talking about like the ultimate moral choice of politics, which is like the acceptable risk to have society go on to know that a certain number of people will be infected because of these policy choices that you're making and probably a hopefully small but a subset of those people will pass away.

That's the conversation that we were having. Right. Which is about like how do you manage those risks? How do you make responsible choices? And I think with school reopening, you obviously have teachers unions arguing fairly. I think that some of them didn't sign up to be front line health care workers.

We have some people on staff who have spouses who are teachers. I have a sibling who's a teacher. You know, those people are also afraid for their health and for their families. There's understandable apprehension on their side of things.

But I just think that the politicization of all this has made our debate so dumb and nuanced and hasn't served the American public well to hit them over the head with the recognition that there will be deaths in this country. There have been far too many deaths in this country. But no matter what, we're in the middle of a deadly pandemic. Some of the choices we make, you might look back and say like that was the wrong choice, like nursing homes.

Cuomo looks back and I think that will be a huge part of his pandemic legacy, which is that, like, they kind of made the wrong call on locking all of those old people in nursing homes. But that was a policy choice that I think they made in the midst of a lot of things happening. But I think the dumbness of the partisanship over like shaming on social media about, as Neate says, like beaches and things like that overshadowed the real nuance, frankly, uncomfortable.

And no one will be happy conversation that people have to have about like how do you make sure that millions of kids don't get set back in life for years over not going to school? And how do you accept the fact that, like, yeah, our society was already deeply divided and like some people, like, frankly, all of us here on this podcast sit at home every day and can work, whereas like a lot of people in America can't, it increased our awareness of the divisions.

But frankly, I think a lot of that has gotten papered over by like people wagging their fingers and saying, like, are you wearing a mask outside?

These are really difficult tradeoffs. And like we have tried to operate by saying, oh, we can't let all these people die. Oh, we can't shut society down so that these two mutually exclusive things and you have to pick some combination of those. And like maybe we do need to be more explicit about those conversations. Yeah.

And so I think part of the lesson here, as with many things, is that it seems like partisanship has not served well, you know, or rigorous discussion using evidence and trying to get us to a place where we're talking about the actual issues versus signals and culture and things like that. And of course, the two parties felt that they had very particular political gains or losses based on the way that they framed the pandemic for most of the year. I guess we'll continue watching to see if any of that has changed now that the election is over.

And, of course, lawmakers and future President Biden are going to be talking about how to deal with this now, what kind of economic relief or stimulus, what kinds of if there are any national nationwide efforts to combat covid and then, of course, basically getting everyone vaccinated. So we will keep an eye on this and how our politics interacts with it. But I think that's it for now. So thank you. Thank you, Governor. Thanks, Claire.

Thanks, Galen. And thank you very Thanksgiving.

And just as a heads up to our listeners, this Thursday, of course, is Thanksgiving. We are going to be taking a break from our second podcast this week as a result. But I hope that everyone can enjoy whatever Thanksgiving they're able to have during these tough times, but until next week. My name is Gail and Drew. Tony Chow is in the virtual control room. Claire, Betty, Gary Curtis is on audio editing. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.

Com. You can also, of course, treated us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple podcast store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening. And we'll see.