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Hello and welcome to the 538 Politics podcast, I'm Galen Droog. It's been over a week since Joe Biden became the apparent winner of the presidential election. And with all the states now projected, it looks like Biden will win three hundred six electors. The likelihood of any legal challenges or recounting process is changing. The topline result is essentially nil. But President Trump has refused to concede the election. He has instead promoted conspiracy theories about voter fraud, and Republicans have largely backed the president's refusal to concede.

Today we're going to talk about that, what it means for the transition process and for democracy more broadly. We're also going to begin to take a look at some of the meaningful trends and divides we saw in the electorate in twenty twenty. It looks like education and geography continue to be hardening lines in American politics, while some new trends also appear to be emerging.

So here with me to discuss it all is editor in chief Nate Silver Hagelin. Also with us is senior politics writer Claire Malone. Hey, Claire Hagelin and senior politics editor Perry Bacon, Jr..

Hey, Perry, thank you.

So as recently as this morning, President Trump is claiming that he won the election. He didn't. And his legal challenges have gone basically nowhere. So what's happening right now?

How does our system deal with a political leader who refuses to concede?

I mean, for the most part, his concession has no bearing on the way the Electoral College works. Who constitutionally becomes president on January 20th at 12:00 p.m.? Obviously, there are delays with respect to the transition. Dr. Fauci was concerned this morning that the very good news we've gotten on vaccines the past couple of weeks could be undermined. If you have nobody in charge of having a rollout plan, that could take a little longer. Obviously, Biden can do some stuff with respect to appointing a shadow cabinet, but like it can make his life harder in various ways.

There's a question of stimulus needing to be passed. I mean, I guess I'm sound like non alarmist about it. There's another point of view that, hey, maybe you could have some court cases where this could work somehow for Trump. I tend not to think that's the case. I think the tangible signs of like what you would need for there to actually be any doubt about the results are not there. He's losing these court challenges. Republican state legislatures seem not to be seriously entertaining the possibility of overriding popular vote in their states.

The margins are not close enough to be overturned by a recount. But, you know, in the long term, if you have a whole bunch of people thinking the election was stolen, then probably not great.

Yeah, I mean, it's basically formal and informal when you say political system and on the formal side, it's like half OK. Half of it is things are moving on, but half of it is Biden's transition team doesn't have access to the things that they should have access to, and that's extremely bad. And then on the informal side, this isn't the formal organs of the political system, per say. But like in civic society, even if most people in the country think that Biden won, it's still a problem that there is a vocal and amplified minority that thinks he didn't.

It's not a good situation.

And I think the new position among Republican senators is Joe Biden should start getting intelligence briefings, those of us saying Joe Biden won. And congratulations. It seems to me Joe Biden should get briefings, which is still an acknowledgement that Joe Biden won.

But they've also said, let's let the process play out like President Trump has the right to bring these legal challenges, et cetera, and in some ways giving credibility to these conspiracy theories surrounding voter fraud. Instead of saying, you know, all the secretaries of state said that this has been an election conducted with integrity, a secure election, et cetera. I mean, are there any long term problems for like small D democracy in the broader Republican apparatus? Not forcefully rebutting this for sure.

I mean, even though we all know that read through the lines, he should get security briefings means we think he won the election. There's a big difference between saying that and saying he won the election. Let's move on. It's not a healthy sign. It's not a good thing. This is not me saying, like American democracy is over, but it is me saying, like, in order to stay healthy, you eat well and exercise. And this is people like smashing hamburgers and like shooting heroin into their veins.

That's quite the metaphor. Thank you. What are other people think?

It's hard to know, right? Because, I mean, on the one hand, you have a lot of liberals who are very concerned about the court's ruling in partisan ways. And the courts seem to not be having any of this really. I mean, I don't know. I think the stakes tend to be that this is going to be electorally advantageous to the GOP in the end because people will be really angry and turn out if they think there was a stolen election.

I mean, maybe I think we don't really know. I mean, one thing we don't know is like how is connecting outside of the bubble? Because you do see these theories popping up a lot on Facebook, for example, which clearly doesn't seem to give a shit about rooting out misinformation. Sorry, Mark Zuckerberg. Twitter will put disclaimers on them, but different parler, all these are social networks, it's not clear how much that is versus mainstream, like the average moderate Republican in the Charlotte suburbs who kind of grudgingly voted for Trump.

How do they feel about this? Do they buy into it or not? I don't know. I guess we got a test of that to some extent in Georgia in January.

Well, do we have any polling that shows how people view the results of the election or how likely they are to buy the accusations of fraud?

You can't trust the polls anymore, David. I know I haven't asked your polling. I've given it like a week or so without asking any polling questions. I feel like we're covered now. So what does the polling say?

So the polls show that most people accept the fact that Biden won said nearly 80 percent of Americans are getting. More than half of Republicans recognize President elect Joe Biden as the winner of the November 3rd election, according to a Reuters Ipsos poll. So that would suggest that some of this is a little bit more in a bubble of to put it frankly, extremists and extremists have loud voices on social media. Extremists have loud voices in the White House. The president is an extremist.

It doesn't necessarily mean that all of his voters are.

So where does this all lead to in the short term?

We've talked about the long term. This isn't healthy for democracy to have either a large chunk or even a smaller but vocal chunk of the electorate on the population not believe in the integrity of elections and to not have it become just like standard culture in the democracy for the losers to concede, etc.. What happens in the next few weeks?

I'm leery of predicting because I don't know what Trump is going to do. And on some level, the American presidency has a lot of power in it. But as long as he kind of keeps going in this course of not conceding that everybody else around him sort of having is if he's leaving on January 20th, there are impacts. But I think that's where we're headed, is like he's going to pretend like he did lose, but everyone else going to behave like he did lose.

I've seen reporting that other Republican candidates have not conceded their races in down ballot races.

Does this become part of elections now that people declined to concede when they've lost and maybe undermined further faith in elections? Claire mentioned hamburgers and heroin. How serious of a problem is this in the broader picture of American democracy?

I mean, democracy relies on a lot of types of consent. One important type is that losers recognize that they lost and maybe adjust their strategy as a result. I mean, I don't know. Right. Usually parties, if they lose elections, they say, OK, that didn't work. Let's try something different. If the GOP says we didn't really lose this election, so let's do the same thing and somehow ensure that these things that didn't happen but we allege happened won't happen next time.

I don't know. I mean, that might be bad for the GOP if the GOP is making excuses for Trump ism, which resulted in a one term presidency which resulted in very large losses at the midterms, which resulted in some degree of policy successes, but maybe not robust ones, apart from the Supreme Court, which would have happened under any Republican president. Maybe those size things up and say, hey, look, this isn't actually so great. We lost Arizona and Georgia.

That's not so great. So we'll see. Right. We'll see what happens with these Georgia runoffs and see what happens if the midterms and see what happens with various special elections. But like if it prevents the healing process and the process of change that would occur within Republicans, then I'm not necessarily sure that's actually good for them long term. You can also have the specter of like, OK, is Trump going to be the nominee again in twenty twenty four, which at the very least could affect how the rest of the field develops.

There's a lot to be seen. And Joe Biden also will walk into the presidency, maybe with unlike Obama in 08, maybe with a little bit of a tailwind from the economy, from these vaccines, they get seriously up and running by January or February. You could have the spring and summer be a time of healing and getting back to normal. I think there is reason to be optimistic about these vaccines in the medium term here. So, you know, maybe you're staring down a fairly popular president and Joe Biden and maybe you're losing twenty, twenty four.

And now all of a sudden you've lost four to five elections and you've lost eight out of nine in the popular vote. I don't know. I think Democrats are so used to like everything turning out badly for them when really it was just kind of like the 2016 election that turned out badly for them that like well in twenty, fourteen, etc.. 2010.

Well, you painted a rosy picture for Democrats here, but isn't it also a possibility that Republicans, whether they believe that it happened or not, more seriously pick up the mantle of voter fraud going forward and act a bunch of legislation that could potentially make it harder for people to vote?

The baseline outcome is that the president's party got spanked a little bit at the midterm and then gets re-elected if it's a first term incumbent. So we'll see if either of those baselines is violated. Then parties maybe have to start asking some questions. But we'll see. I mean, again, I think people are like way too quick to like. Rationalize everything as like part of some efficient strategy, as opposed to, you know, these people are to some extent some combination of a sore losers, be scared of defying Trump, whether it's rational or not, and see truly deluded.

And they read information that is not reliable and they believe the bullshit that they're spinning out. I mean, human nature is very flawed. Humans, especially the stage of social media. Right. We kind of see what we want to see. It doesn't do with IQ per say, right? I would call it a kind of a character flaw, isn't it? More than that. It's a character flaw plus an intellectual flaw.

Yeah, I think what's the weird conversation when we have these like DYAR democracy is unhealthy conversations is that they're often on podcasts like this or they're in media like this and like everyone else is kind of like, oh, people are being ninnis and they're worrying too much and like it's just one election and we'll get over it and things will go back to normal.

And I don't necessarily think that's the case. And it makes me uncomfortable that some of these conversations about the health of democracy might be confined or written off as like. ALLETE concerns are not day to day concerns when I think they are, and I think the difficulty of having I mean, I think we've talked about this before in passing, but the difficulty of having a large, multiracial, geographically diverse democracy is that people can become complacent and feel loved and safe in their place as we are all cogs in a very large social contract.

Right.

And when we are lulled into the feeling of things are OK, then sometimes bad things can happen. If people who are paying attention realize that, like, they can not even necessarily like do things maliciously, but cut corners in order to bring themselves short term wins. And so in some ways, like, yes, it's a larger philosophical conversation, but it's also quite immediate and important.

And I struggle with how to talk about that without sounding like an asshole. Cassandra.

And that has been an interesting thing to turn over in the past week.

This is not to say that, like, only people who went to college are worried about small D democracy. That's not what I want to say. But I do feel like it's an actual conversation that we should be having pervasively.

And there are real problems facing this country. Like the biggest news story and the biggest problem facing this country is covid and covid spikes. And like the fact that there is a group of a coterie of elite people buffering the president's ego and trying to soften his loss should not be the biggest news story.

But like there's bigger problems that this country has.

And it irritates me that those people have just essentially distracted from that for like a period of two weeks, probably three weeks, probably four weeks.

All right. So this is something that we've talked about plenty on this podcast I'm sure that we will come back to. We will also talk about the governmental response to covid. I do want to spend a little bit forward and talk about how Biden is handling this transition period, starting to name people, et cetera. But first, today's podcast is brought to you by Lifestream Stream. The average interest rate on credit card debt is over 18 percent. APPR refinance your high interest credit card balances and save with a credit card consolidation loan from Lifestream rate start at five point nine five percent APR with auto pay and excellent credit, the rate is fixed.

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Despite President Trump's refusal to concede the election, President elect Biden is moving forward with beginning to name people to posts that people float their names in the media, etc.. Perhaps most notably, he named his chief of staff, Ron Klain. Perry, what can we tell about the kind of administration that Biden is putting together while still in this awkward transition period?

So the important thing about Klain is the chief of staff. Two things. First of all, he was in charge of managing the Ebola response during the Obama administration. So he's someone who has been picked in part because it's a signal that Biden understands, obviously incorrectly, that covid is going to be the biggest challenge of his administration really at the beginning of it. The second thing is like Klain. Well, you know, as somebody who has some respect and credentials with the more centrist part of the party, but also the more left wing parts to Elizabeth Warren, said a tweet praising Klain when he was picked.

So I think that tells me Biden is going to try to unify the party as much as possible, pick people who both the left and the center left, like in the other big thing I think is happening is that Biden has been very focused on talking about covid. And you're seeing in blue states, I think, or in states run by Democrats, let's say Oregon, New Mexico, Michigan, among them, Washington, some new efforts to increase coronavirus restrictions.

Michigan is banning indoor dining. So I think you're seeing people are sort of treating it as if Biden is kind of already leading the country. And I think you're seeing some and Biden is leaning in to like fighting Koban. I think you're seeing people align with Biden who are already in charge of state government, is going to take different approaches uncovered because of the rising cases, but also probably because they know the president who's coming in is going to support those kinds of efforts.

Yeah. What else have we learned in the in the early days of the Biden transition process about what kind of president he wants to be on January 21st?

I mean, not much yet in some ways. Like first of all, I don't think Biden is going to be a particularly surprising president. Like if he a surprising president, I'll be surprised. Ron Klain being picked is a pretty unsurprising thing. I mean, he was just the compromise pick. Like progressives were fine with him. He's of Obama world. He's very establishment. So that's an unsurprising pick. Like if he had picked Rahm Emanuel again, you'd be having a whole news cycle.

And people are obsessed with like Rahm Emanuel finding his way into a cabinet position or something, which is a whole other thing.

But like we're seeing covid plans coming out from their side of things, it's what we expect Biden to be. I'm happy to like talk about things in more detail, but I think Biden is coming into a country like in crisis. There's going to be a stimulus that's going to be probably needed to be navigated through. There's going to be a vaccine rollout, which will be very difficult, particularly in partisan America. So I think there's a lot of just behind the scenes work that's kind of getting rolled out into the news now.

I mean, prior to Ron Klain, the other part of his cabinet, if you will, that Biden picked was Kamala Harris, who was always considered the front runner for that position, has a lot of fairly obvious strengths, you know, in part because of the lack of drama around Biden's transition. And by the way, I think about Ron Klain to that period. There were also it's like this is a very Biden esque picking that he's someone who will satisfy both the center and the left.

You're not going to see huge objections. It's a very do no harm approach with Biden low drama. So that gives us more time to worry about those covid spike, I guess, and about Trump's refusal to concede for whatever that ends up.

Meaning when the press has asked Biden about Trump's refusal to concede, he said that it was embarrassing when asked about whether or not he would bring lawsuits in order to make sure he could get funding from the General Services Administration to aid his transition. And he said not at this point. On one hand, I have read plenty in the press about how this could be a challenge to Biden's ability to roll out covid plans quickly and efficiently could also be a challenge in terms of getting the presidential daily briefing, etc.

. Biden doesn't seem to really want that fight at this point in terms of challenging Trump's refusal to concede. He's just kind of brushing it off. Is that a tactical move in some sense? You know, it's hard for me to tell, but what is he doing there?

I think in the same way that we in the media are supposed to be trying to strike a balance between informing people of what is going on and also not wanting to elevate misinformation. That's probably what Biden is doing. So, yes, it's strategic. He doesn't want to make the six weeks or two months of his transition all about Trump. So he's not talking about them, but also to go back to our small democracy conversation. I also don't think he wants to have a news cycle where he's talking about a not smooth transition of power.

That's not a good look for America. So Joe Biden's probably avoiding talking about it. So it's both strategic, but also just like response. I mean, clearly, the Biden campaign kind of believes in the no bedwetters philosophy to use an overused Southy inside baseball phrase, but throughout this election, they have not been the ones, at least publicly sounding the alarms on the post office or on refusing to accept the results are on well, mail ballots get disqualified or stuff like that.

It kind of been no drama. It's hard to know if they think that privately as well. But certainly the public attitude. Why is that?

Why is that? I mean, you know, I mean, you could say they're kind of why this would be one way to put it. I mean, look, they played a long game. They played a long game in the primary thinking, OK, well, there'll be swings, but we're going to have our black voters and our older white voters and we'll win. Played a long game in the general election. I mean, to some extent, we have reason to be confident they kind of won these two elections despite a lot of drama.

Biden was also on the winning ticket for the two Obama elections, despite a lot of drama. So maybe they're just like, hey, keep doing our thing and things work out in the end.

The two things worth noting, I mean, first of all, I know for a fact the Biden people did not assume this would be the easiest transition, that the Trump people would comply and so on. So they knew this coming in. And secondly, one thing about Biden with Ron Klain and so on is the transition staff and Biden himself are full of people who were already in the government in 2016. So they're not walking in cold, I think.

Will they actually need briefings from the Trump person in Job X who they want to ignore? I'm sure ultimately, I think they're actually pretty well prepared to take over. And in some ways, the transition funding may matter some, but I think they're pretty ready to go. Is my sense of it.

All right. Well, we'll come back to this as well in the future. But let's talk about some of the electoral trends that we saw in twenty twenty. We've mentioned this before, but exit polls are imperfect at this point. Although give us some sense, what might be even more indicative is looking at counties or precincts where all of the vote has been tallied and knowing certain things about the geography or demographics of that area. But narratives are starting to form and we are starting to see where the dividing lines in the 2020 election were.

So starting off this conversation, I kind of want to go around and just ask everyone, what did you all see as the primary electoral divides in this election? Claremont, start with you.

To me, the divides were a continuation of things that we've been seeing. So the divides were educational, which I think plays into more complicated ideas of class, which is the whole thing to dig into in America, which we don't talk about enough.

And then gender. President Trump made inroads with men of all races and continued his strength with white men in particular. But the idea that whether or not you went to college and whether or not you're a man or a woman makes a huge difference in how you vote for me. Those are the two biggest takeaways. And it makes a lot of sense because in the past four years, we've been talking a lot about Mutu and the ways that men and women see the world very differently.

And for most of my adult political consciousness we've been talking about and writing books about and all this stuff, how there are two Americas to use the John Edwards ism that we live in a country where since the 70s, 80s, we've had a stagnation of middle class or lower middle class wages, and that the kind of life you live depends very much on whether or not you are a white collar, blue collar worker.

And so those trends continue to magnify, not to get all like Thomas Piketty up in here. Tickety remember that hole?

Was that 2014, what was it called, G or some letter? I read part of that book. If I did you I read the first 11 pages. You should get a cookie for that. For real.

Can you explain what you're talking about for those in the audience and me who have no idea what you're talking about?

Oh, God, I want to remember it.

I did not read the book, but Piketty was basically this. It was basically this French economist. His work looks at the rate of capital accumulation in relation to economic growth over 200 year spread from the nineteenth century to present his novel use of tax tax records enabled him to gather data on the very top economic elite who had previously been under and to ascertain their rate of accumulation of wealth and how this compared to the rest of society and economy.

OK, so to bring this all back to where we were, this book talks about different cars being created in American society. Claire, you're saying that those are the same electoral divides that uses overarching in the twenty twenty election period. Let's move to you. So what are the primary electoral divides that you saw? And they may be similar or different?

The obvious one is partisanship. And I think that gets into a little bit of like there may end up being a few less Republican. Biden voters, I think I would have yes, we don't know yet, but it's my suspicion we'll look at and calls it the density divide. This is a sort of a newer thing in politics. The closer you live to the urban city, the more likely you voted for Democrats and then the sort of inner suburbs, a Democratic leaning more and more, the outer suburbs are a Republican leaning rural area is a Republican.

That's a huge divide. The education divide is a huge one, particularly like the really white noncollege college was white. College is going to be a big divide. And still the racial divide is huge, where most people of color vote for Democrats and most white evangelicals still vote heavily Republican as those divides still remain as well.

What did we see as different from 2016? What we've mentioned so far seems relatively similar because there were some changes, obviously, where the differences.

So Biden clearly did considerably better than previous Democratic nominees with wealthy moderate suburbanites. And that did swing ultimately states like Georgia and Arizona to Democrats. That obviously helped in the suburbs of Philadelphia, for example, or Milwaukee, which are very Republican suburbs that are becoming a bit more purple. Biden did not particularly do better among white working class voters. He did a bit worse among voters of color, but there was high turnout among voters of color. So it kind of is a bit more offsetting anything.

Probably overall, the shift of some Hispanics, particularly lower income Hispanics, toward Republicans is a worrisome development for Democrats and Joe Biden. There is some evidence that, like Vietnamese Americans, for example, swung a little bit toward Trump relative to 2016. Even in cities like Milwaukee, you know, you had slightly lower shares, her bite because of maybe a very minor shift of black voters toward Trump relative to 2016. But look, I mean, overall, Biden is going to win the popular vote by four or five points versus two points for Clinton.

So it's obviously a decent coalition for him. If you had had the Hispanic vote stay the same as it was in 2016, and then Biden gets the shift among white suburbanites and you have maybe this seven or eight point win, which is kind of what polls showed originally. But, yeah, there's a little bit of an inversion now where Democrats are kind of becoming the party of the bourgeois, you know, and the professionals. Yeah.

Again, to go back to like I'm still not processing things in like particular exit poll numbers or whatever it is. Again, I'm processing things in the aggregate. And the thing I keep thinking about, about the election results is like the farther you are geographically from opportunity, the more likely you are to vote for Republicans like that. This proximity to opportunity to being in a first tier American city versus a second or third tier American city or to be in a rural area or whatever it is, or or an exurb, places that are often more disconnected from economic opportunity.

Because let's go back to the the Amazon headquarters conversations. You remember was this a year ago where there were all these second tier and I use that like population, economic wise, second tier American cities competing flat out in a like a semi humiliating way for Amazon to come to their city. And where did Amazon choose? Right. They chose New York City and DC. Right. And they were like, wow, we want to make sure that we're in places that attract talent, places that people want to go.

This idea that, like, we reward the already successful cities, I guess you could make an argument that New York is potentially on the the decline.

I say sitting in New York that, like people perceive not incorrectly their economic perspectives to be different based on where they live. And like it makes sense in some ways that they see the Democratic message as being like out of touch with what they want to hear about.

Listen, I'm not a democratic messenger or PR person, right? But like, yeah, they had a certain mixed message that, you know, they talked about defunding the police. They talked about socialism, which are like core values of a lot of people and in the party and like there are racial justice reforms in the party that don't use that language but have similar goals. And like national media environments being what they are like, certain things rose to the top about what people in America heard about the Democratic Party versus I don't know, what were the other top line messages, restoring the Soul of America.

Yeah, thank you. That wasn't a bread and butter message.

The detailed policy idea of restoring the soul of America. Yeah.

Yeah. How do we make sense of what's going on here where it seems like most of Biden's gains compared to Clinton came from wealthy suburban areas, well educated suburban areas. Most of Trump's gains, compared with his performance in 2016, came from maybe non-white voters, but more specifically, the Hispanic community. And we saw not just in South Florida, where a lot of that has been chalked up to Cuban-Americans, but also in the Rio Grande Valley and other parts of the southwest where.

That usually go overwhelmingly for Democrats were in some cases almost 50/50 this time around, what's going on there? One thing that I think was successful at was realizing the true axis on which political conflict occurs. It's kind of between like people who gravitate closer toward the people who have made it, who are kind of cultural elites, maybe multicultural elites, you put it that way. And people who are on the outside and feel grievance, whether it is racial grievance, bitterness and a lot of cases or economic grievance or just kind of feeling disconnected.

And so your average lawyer who went to maybe an elite Ivy League school or maybe a very good public school is making three hundred thousand dollars per year, has a nice home, shops at Whole Foods. Culturally, they are much closer to other elites, I guess, than maybe a Hispanic farm worker making twenty five thousand dollars a year in Fresno, California, or something. So in some sense, it's a story that makes a lot of sense. It shows that people are not necessarily voting their narrow economic interests, kind of like a further refutation of that.

If you remember, like, what's the matter with Kansas argument? It's like, why do people vote their pocketbooks? People are willing to pay slightly higher taxes if it means that they think the party that is the right party for their friends and the right party on immigration and gun control and these cultural issues that feel like they're affiliated with, they're willing to ignore maybe pocketbook concerns. I think Trump was smart to recognize that maybe it was instinct and not actual cunning or whatever.

Right. But like that really does divide America a lot more, I think. So my assumption was that Biden would really substantially close the white noncollege gap. He'd run much better with that group than Hillary Clinton did. It looks like he might have run better in some areas, but it isn't like it's a big issue. We ought to see more data it doesn't like. It's a big shift. And that did surprise me. In fact, it looks like Trump both a lot more white, non college voters voted this time than in 2016.

If there was a bigger turn on that group and that he won a percentage, meaning the turnout appears to have increased and it didn't really help necessarily helped Democrats who may have helped him in some ways. And he so I thought Biden would close that gap. And the fact that he didn't strikes me as like either Trump did something well or Biden didn't. And the second part is the suburbs. You know, I was looking at some data on like the George Soros, particularly like the plurality of black Americans now live in the suburbs, not urban areas, not rural areas.

According to a couple of data like the suburbs around in Georgia are very diverse, meaning they have white, Asian, black, Hispanic. So I think part of the story might be that the suburbs are themselves changing in particularly in Arizona or Georgia. I think in Pennsylvania, the suburbs are more white, but not all white. In Georgia and Arizona, that's a complicated story of the diversifying metro area, really swinging to the left right now. And I think it's a complicated story in education, but it's also race.

It's also density, like I said, was interesting story in those suburbs.

Just to complicate the suburbs, which out is complicated. The suburbs are more diverse than they ever happen, but they're also people tend to live with people of the same race. So there might be like a black suburb and a white suburb or black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods within those suburbs, which adds to its own complicated politics within those places. But then also, I would guess, like in more local elections or one thing I've been thinking a lot about is that like we often say, like Trump speaks politically incorrect.

Trump also speaks like the unfiltered language of the private zone. Right. Of the language that people in your family might use with you or your friends might use with you, like Trump uses it publicly. And what's interesting is by not doing as well with those white voters that we thought he was going to do well with. To me, it says something about like the Democrats reputation for speaking in, like the Latin X, more academic social terminology has stuck to Joe Biden, who I would guess, though cannot say probably has friends or family members who speak in the language of Trump.

Right. The unfiltered, not just right. Public parlance of the Democratic Party. And that's interesting. So it's all to say, like the suburbs are more diverse, but they also have their own racial segregations.

I want to continue this conversation because it's really interesting stuff that we're talking about here. But first, today's podcast is brought to you by ZIP recruiter.

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I mean, in some sense, it is about class in a way, and class is complicated. It's not purely economic well-being. But like one interesting result I'm looking at here and probably should wait for it to be confirmed, is that Trump did comparatively well with gay and lesbian voters. He won 27 percent of the vote as compared to 14 percent in 2016. Again, it's a small sample, so maybe it's not representative somehow, but there are lots of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender people and not all of them are members of the elite class.

Some of them are. But those people are more comfortable coming out. Some of them are not. And so maybe you do actually have more class based elections. And what kind of class means is complicated. I mean, to Perry's point earlier, right, in Atlanta, in Maryland and Virginia, you have some black suburbs that are pretty well off that might be different than black communities in urban parts of Philadelphia, where Trump does seem to have gained some ground a little bit.

So, yeah, in some sense, it's a good election.

If you think that class transcends these other demographic categories, so does class becoming the overriding electoral divide and class having a lot to do with education, put Democrats in a really bad situation, given that the American population is only a third college educated? Maybe.

I mean, I also think that the thing about this particular election is that Trump is ignoring and mistreating covid and only talking about the economy, did talk about the economy and did probably speak to the worries of a lot of people who are working in jobs that were thrown into question by the poor state of our current economy and people who didn't have safety nets. So talking about the economy, a lot resonated with those people. So like, you know, it can be the purview of both parties to talk about the economy.

It's kind of the weird politicization of our current moment where it turned into this what I think is sort of stupid bifurcation of like you're either for stopping covid or you're for restarting the economy. Right. Like that is the level of our political discourse right now, which is a whole separate conversation that we can't cede nuance. Again, I think the components of class are like education, conception of race, race itself, all that stuff. But yeah, I do think it's a bit of a problem that Democrats are perceived as being the party of the elite and that in America in general, it's also become a problem where your only way to have a or a one conception of your only way to have a good middle class life is to have a college education.

That is not the case. Like my grandparents didn't all have a college education and they had good middle class lives. Those are white people living in mid century America. And there was definitely a middle class cohort where you didn't need to have a college education, have a good life. Now, there's a certain threshold. Right. And this has been part of some of the conversation that politicians have had about like let's destigmatize community colleges. Let's not just make it like, oh, you couldn't get into real college or like you can't afford real college.

You have to go to the lower tier thing. Like there's a really complicated American conversation about that. But, yeah, it's a problem. The education gap is a problem for Democrats.

I actually don't think class is the biggest divide in American politics. And it's like the income class is more than income. But income is really a part of class. And it appears that Biden. Fifty thousand dollars. Trump won over a hundred thousand college graduates. Biden won. Those like noncollege is sort of close when you take away the. So the class religion is complicated by the fact that the overall majority of black people don't have college degrees. Voted for Biden, like with lower incomes, voted for Biden and most Hispanics voted for Biden.

So I would say racial attitudes are a much better predictor of where people vote than even among white people. If you get a racial attitudes story, then I think have the core divide is like, do you think black people have low incomes because of systemic inequality or because of racism or because of their lack of hard work? If you ask that kind of question, you get closer to getting people's votes here than I think. Any other questions? I think that's important just to note here.

Yeah, and I guess the question that I was asking here is someone throwing it forward, because obviously under the current dynamic, a college education is not the only dividing line. Otherwise there would have been an obvious landslide in the favor of Republicans. So it's more like if we look at where the trends are headed, if Republicans could increase their gains among non-white voters and create more of a coalition based on not having a college education. Right, like this is kind of more in the sense of, well, back when Obama won the conversation, was there some kind of demographic destiny where ultimately.

Republicans will be unable to win elections because the electorate is diversifying too much when the reality was that back then, like 75 percent of the electorate was white, and that was assuming that Democrats were going to maintain all of their white voters, obviously they did not. And that's why the electorate is where it is right now. Democrats have lost a lot of white voters who don't have college educations. They have gained some that do have college educations. But right now, Republicans are gaining all kinds of voters, including Hispanic voters and even some black voters who don't have a college degree.

And so the question is kind of like spinning it forward. Does that create long term electoral challenges for the Democratic Party? And like, I don't know whether or not that's a trend that continues.

Well, look, I think if you're trying to take 2012 results, come up with a bunch of variables to predict what predict people's vote in twenty twenty, then clearly racial variables have more to do with than class or economic variables. If you model what caused the shift to twenty twenty four point sixteen, then it's more of a class driven stuff that would, I would argue to clarify. Let me say two things.

I guess if why Trump did better with black and Latino voters. I my sense of it actually is if we get down to the granular level, we might. I think the story with black voters, particularly because I did a story about this, was the older black voters and more college educated establishment black voters tend to be fairly close to the Democratic Party. Think the Democratic Party is successful, tend to be more churchgoing. So my sense of it is the black community itself has a part of it, this younger that's sort of less institutionally connected.

And therefore, that's a part that Republicans can appeal to. I think in some ways there's an opening there. There's not just they're saying Lotronex too much, but also that there's a real disconnected part in Trump's ads, really targeted younger black people who were not sort of in the Democratic Party establishment a certain way. I think that's what happened in Florida as well, is like there was more spending targeted by Republicans or to Latino communities that were maybe not automatically Democratic.

So part of it to me is like campaign strategies. Biden definitely tried to run a campaign for the white suburbanites. I do wonder if the next set of candidates like looking at these results approach this differently. Like if Sherrod Brown is the Democratic nominee in 2024, I don't think he runs this way. Biden did. I think he probably runs a class based coalition. I think he appeals to black people in a different way. Like one thing I found in Kentucky where I live was whenever any McGrath was asked about getting black support, she would talk about criminal justice reform.

Most black people are actually not criminals. And so it was a very weird sort of framing of those issues in that, like most Latinos in America, if they're voting eligible, they're not questioning their immigration status. I remember when I watched the DNC, I was struck by the fact that a lot of the coverage about Latinos, if there was any additional I think Latinos were excluded for the DNC in prominent role to some extent when they were spoken about.

There was a lot of focus on immigration. The black issues are sort of all about police shootings and this is reform. But I think if you actually want to appeal to black and Latino voters, I wonder if economics and education are the right way to start. And I sort of think Biden's team was not necessarily doing that well while the Republicans were doing some things well. And I don't think these voter trends are permanent, in part because I think these campaigns should run themselves differently, like a different Republican should not lose, like Senator Purdue did better in the Georgia suburbs than Trump did.

So telling me that even a Republican not named these like white college gains are definitely not permanent for the Democrats is sort of more normal. Republicans like Greg Abbott are on the ballot instead. I mean, when we look at it, too, is like if you're winning. Ninety three percent of one group like Democrats were among black voters under Obama. It's hard to maintain ninety three percent of anything or seventy five percent of LGBT voters. You know, because obviously these groups it's a cliche now, but these groups are not monolithic.

And so there's some kind of maybe reversion back to 50 50 in some ways. Not a long way, but a little bit. Yeah, well, these are all really interesting divides and challenges for the two parties that we've been talking about. In some ways, this electoral result, because it didn't give any party an overwhelming mandate or any rebuke of Trump or whatever, parties are going to have to do more potentially deep thinking about what they want to be, who they want to appeal to going forward.

And of course, we'll continue covering that here on the podcast. I think that's a wrap for today, though. I have other questions here about rural, urban, structural divides in American government and those types of things. But I think we'll save those for another day so we can fully fleshed them out. So for now. Thank you very, Nate and Claire for this discussion. Thanks, Gail, and thank you. Thank you, everybody.

And before we go, I imagine that folks should go check out the 538 store at 538 dotcom store. All kinds of hoodies, t shirts, hats, et cetera. There's five stuff there as well. Anyway, it's 538 dotcom slash store. My name is Gaylan. Tony Chow is in the virtual control room. Claire Videgaray Curtis is on audio editing. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at five thirty eight dotcom. You can also, of course, tweet us with any questions or comments.

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