Alexandra Lieben 0:00

Welcome to today's discussion and event about where we are and what's going on in our world, in our political world. My name is Alexandra Lieben. I'm Deputy Director of the Burkle Center for International Relations. Very happy to have all of you here and our extraordinary speakers here. Thanks also to the Department of Political Science that is cosponsoring today's event and and the Department of Public Policy as well, of course. So without further ado, let me introduce our speakers here. Next to me is Lynn Vavreck, who is our politics expert, elections expert here on campus, and we're always grateful to hear her insights. She's also the Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American politics and public policy at UCLA, a contributing columnist to the upshot of The New York Times, and a recipient of the Andrew F Carnegie prize in the humanities and social sciences. She's an expert on campaigns, elections and public opinion, with an emphasis on how Canada behavior affects voters. Lynn is co author of The Bitter End the 2020 presidential campaign and the challenge to American democracy, which contemplates the long term impact this campaign. She's also the co author of identity crisis, the 2016 presidential campaign and the battle for the meaning of America. I cannot wait to see what her next book is. Her work draws observations and insights from nationscape a wide a wide ranging weekly public opinion survey of the American electorate, for which Lynn is a principal researcher. Next to Lynn is Andrea Rommele, who is Professor of Political Communication and the Vice President at the Hertz school in Berlin. Her research focuses on comparative political communication, political parties and election campaigns. Joseph Fulbright, Distinguished Chair in modern German Studies at the University of California in Santa Barbara, visiting fellow at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC and the Australian National University in Canberra. She was a member of the election campaign teams of Gerhard Schroeder, former German chancellor and Hillary Clinton. Andrea Rommele is currently a Thomas Mann House fellow in Los Angeles. It's her second stint this year. She has been working on mega trends and democracy. Her most recent book,Demokratie Neu Denken (Rethinking Democracy) was published in September 2024 and she actually wrote it while she was here in the spring, during her first stage. So my first question goes to Lynn. Why are we again where we are with an election on knives edge, with electorate seemingly evenly split, what's going on?

Lynn Vavreck 2:44

Great question. Thank you for having me. Thanks everyone for coming. This is a question that everyone wants to know the answer to, how is it possible that the election is this close? And what I would like for you to think about is that the answer to this question is not complicated, and it turns on a couple of factors. But the big one, there are two big ones. The first is that we have two political parties in the country, and at this moment in time, they want to build very different worlds. They want to build worlds that are more different than they have been at any point, probably in anyone's lifetime who is in this room. So the parties are farther apart than ever, and what they're putting on offer is distinct, and voters know it. So voters tell survey researchers, do you see important differences between the two political parties? We've been asking this question since the 1950s in 1950 50% of Americans said they see important differences between the parties. Move across time, that's going to increase, increase, increase, but we get to 2020, and 90% that's nearly everyone in the population. Nine out of 10 people say, I see important differences between the two parties. So they're putting two very different worlds on offer, and voters know it. And the second important answer to this question is we just happen to be at a moment in time where the two political parties are in rough balance in the electorate. So the number of people who call themselves Republicans and the number of people who call themselves Democrats are roughly the same share of the population. And so those two things kind of get mashed up together, and they lead us to a point where people know which kind of world they want to live in. They know which party is going to deliver that world, and that divides the electorate roughly in half, and that's where we are, and that's why the election is so close. And it's just not more complicated than that.

Alexandra Lieben 4:53

It seems intractable. What's the European perspective?

Andrea Römmele 4:57

Well, the European perspective on this. This is we consider it being complicated. I, of course, as a political scientist, fully get your your point. And I think that the country I come from, which is Germany, but I think I could expand that to all over Europe. I think it would be good if we had parties that really are different from one another in terms of their party platforms, right? We had, we are moving away from that a little bit. But for the last two decades, we had the problem that especially the two large parties, were quite interchangeable. If you looked at their at their party platform and what and our long time chancellor and Angela Merkel, who is from the Christian Democratic Party, sort of more of the Conservative Party. She could have easily been an SPD Chancellor, a chancellor from the Social Democratic Party. Why, I think it's a little bit more complicated from a European perspective than you've just described Lynne, is that what we learn when we look at your system, we learn that people or candidates are more dominant than parties, and that's where it starts to get complicated, because, because, from our perspective, a candidate like Donald Trump does not He would, first of all, in a parliamentary system, he would, he most likely, would never reach a candidacy. And the second point is, you don't you vote for the platform, but you also vote for the person. And I think these unpolitical attitudes, or these unpolitical characteristics, as we say in electoral research, don't really speak for Donald Trump, and I think that's why it's a little bit more complicated.

Alexandra Lieben 6:50

Then can you take us back and just talk about how political communication works? Basically. How do we approach this?

Speaker 1 7:00

From my perspective, when you are thinking about how to message to voters in a presidential campaign, you have a very you have, again, a very simple task. You have to identify where your strengths are. And that's not enough. They have to be strength relative to the opponent's weaknesses or constraints. So if we're running an election against each other, and I want to run on the fact that I have spent my career developing an expertise in political communication, I have a PhD. I'm a college professor, that is my strength that I bring to the table, but Andrea brings the same strength to the table. That's not an advantage for me, right? There's no better way to make something not an issue in a campaign than if both candidates share that trait, characteristic or idea. So that might be my biggest asset, but that's not going to win me this election. So then I have to find an asset of mine where Andrea is constrained, so something on which I'm closer to most voters, and she is stuck in an unpopular position. Once you do that work, then from my perspective, it is not about the the method of communication. Am I doing it on broadcast, television, advertising? Am I messaging on Twitter? Am I messaging on Tiktok? Am I on cable? It's it's not about those avenues of communication. It's about the overall message, the sort of argument for your campaign, that's the important part. That's 90 90% of it. You've got to get that right. And then once you get that right, as they say in sports, you flood the zone. And so everywhere that your messaging, you're reinforcing this idea. So I'll use Trump as an example of this, when he was running against Joe Biden. Biden was not talking about the economy, so Trump talked about the economy. He understood that he could own that, because Biden wasn't defending his economic record. What was Biden saying? He was saying, This guy's a threat to democracy. Democracy is on the ballot. This is a fight for the soul of the nation. That was his idea of that's where he thought he had an advantage relative to Trump, and that's what he was all in on. So Trump said, well, great, I will take the easy road. Voters are not happy with the economy, and so I will talk about how my economy was better when they were happy. That advantages me. Your stock winner for me. But then this is like a great, you know, natural experiment in campaign messaging. All of a sudden, Biden's out. Harris is in. She rolls up with opportunity economy, I feel your pain. I know you're not feeling the growth. Vote, the economy is booming, but I know you don't feel it, so let me tell you how I'm going to help you, loans, all these programs, right? And Trump finds, oh, okay, now she's trying to come over and say the same thing I'm saying. And all of a sudden, if the campaign is about this, votes are going to get split on this. Okay? So he has a decision to make. What's he gonna do? He has to pivot. And he pivots to the one thing he knows he's advantaged on. Most people agree with him that immigration is a problem, the border is a problem. This is a lopsided issue on his that favors him. And he goes right back to 2016 singing from that same song book that he sang from in 2016 he knows this is a winning strategy because he did it before, and it's not how he started the 2024 campaign, but he pivots very easy for him. It's very natural, and he's all in on that. And Harris is constrained, because in a million years, she is never going to say any of the things that he says on this, and most voters agree with him. So the messaging and then, and then you just, that's what you say right the minute that you're talking about something else, oh, I'm talking to, you know, college students in the Midwest, so I'm going to, so I'm not going to talk about my message. I'm going to talk about this other thing the minute that you start to carve out and pivot, you're losing traction, right? So you have to identify that message and be disciplined about it. That's how I think about political communication in electioneering.

Andrea Römmele 11:37

Yeah, I would completely second to what, what Lynn just said, and perhaps at the European perspective, I think what's different in Europe, and what's different from my observations within Germany, is, first of all that we have way stronger party identification, then, then you have here. So, so I'd say, like 70% of the population already lean towards one party or the other. It's strong in the western part of the country than it is in the eastern part of the country due to the historical experiences voters had there. So that's one difference. A second big challenge is that, in our country, you have, you have to have a government. You have government coalitions. And until, let's say the 2015 2010s 2015 you normally had a governing coalition of two parties. Now it's three plus, very often, and then you you as a as a governing party. And sometimes you have three governing parties, right? You come, you govern in sort of the mode of compromise, because that's what you have to do. Otherwise you couldn't reach agreements. And then you're out on the campaign trail again, and you have to separate, to some extent, from your from your colleagues with whom you still run the country. So, so that is, that is a big challenge. I think so so party identification is stronger. Coalition government sort of limits your abilities to to some extent, and I think a major important difference is also simply the length of the campaign. I mean, our campaign, I'd say it's the hot campaign phase, probably is two months. You could say that it starts perhaps half a year before slowly, but it's nothing, nothing compared to your experience here, we also have give candidates and parties free air time according on how well they did in the last election. So raising money, spending money on air time, on social media and so on, is just not that big of an issue. So the communication environment, just simply is a very different one. I think if I just could add one more thing, I think the really interesting part now in the American election is that you don't you have sort of an you actually you have two challengers, but you have an ex president and a vice president, so it's this mixture of incumbent, Challenger candidates, which gives an additional twist to it.

Alexandra Lieben 14:30

I had a question for you on the national experiment right of Harrison, yeah, and what you just raised the shorter campaigns, is that actually beneficial, right? Would that be better for us here? Because part of the polarization, I feel like the messaging is like it sort of it gets stickier and stickier the longer it goes on.

Speaker 1 14:51

Well, you know, be careful what you wish for. Because long campaigns mean, I mean, this is de. Demonstrated with evidence that more people learn more about what the parties and the candidates stand for. That is typically something that we think is good in a democracy. People complained when voters were showing up to vote and they didn't know anything about the parties you want. Voters showing up and they don't know anything. Have a short campaign. The longer the campaign is, the more people learn about where the parties stand, who the candidates are, and what the candidates stand for. So sure, we could make it short, but I'm not sure that's great for democracy. You could argue that, you know, having a four year campaign is too long, but we'd have to, you know, we'd have to define what we what dimensions are we trying to maximize? Comity is not on the table. Harmony is not on the table. We are fighting about things that are very different than the things that we have fought about for the previous parts of your lives. We are not fighting about the New Deal. We are not fighting about the role and size of government. We are not fighting about the tax rate. We are not fighting about whether government should help people in need. We are not fighting about those things anymore, and we will not be fighting about them again. Okay, that's over. Stop waiting for it to come back. We are fighting about person based issues, things that are incredibly divisive because they are personal. They are about people. You know, they maybe are people. They are about you. Maybe even who gets to have membership in the National Community, who gets to consider themselves an American? Do you have to be white Christian, a native born citizen, to be an American? Or is membership in the National Community open to all people who gets to make decisions about women's bodies and families, women and doctors, or the federal government who gets to make decisions about a religious test to enter the country. These are incredibly divisive issues, and that is why it feels hard, but it's also why the sides are so cemented. Because when it was the tax rate, you might say, oh, I want it to be 35% you want it to be 30% let's compromise that 32 and a half. I give a little, I get a little, and we can both live with it. But you can't be married on Monday and Tuesday, not on Wednesday and Thursday and on Friday, only if you feel like it, where we can't compromise on same sex marriage, you got to be either recognize it or not. And so voting for the other side seems very far away. You can't entertain that vote. And that's why people are more cemented where in these, these, you know, positions, a short campaign along can none of that is going to bring harmony to this. It's hard. We have to legislate on hard topics over the next 20 to 30 years, trans policy, bathrooms, sports teams, this is what's coming for us. It's and it's just not going to be easy.

Alexandra Lieben 18:00

So this identity bait

Andrea Römmele 18:02

I would, I would, I would agree and disagree, right? I agree. It's on person based it's on person based issues now, and that's very different than our debates were 20, 3040, years ago. And that's, by the way, where we have similarities in your country and in most of the countries of Europe, but I would say much more than that is at stake in this election, right? And that comes back to my first question, to the first comment I made, to your to your comments. It is also about the candidate the Republican Party has put up, and that candidate openly says that, or gives, gives, gives signs that that democracy is, is at stake. There are things like, you know, if I win, this is, this is the last time you have voted, saying that, that there will, will be military forces. And so I do think that that is very big difference. We have the same, you know, the AFD basically calls for the same.

Lynn Vavreck 19:13

Here 's the thing that that I think about when I think about this topic, and it here's where it's helpful that Trump is an incumbent president. He has been in the White House before, and in 2016 if you remember, if I asked you to say, what is the thing he said the most often at his rallies in 2016 three words, lock her up. Was everywhere, and people freaked out. You know, if he wins, he's going to go after his political enemies, and political enemy number one, Hillary Clinton. He did win. Hillary Clinton is not in jail. He did not pursue her. And I think when people hear him say, I'm going to. Find the enemy within. I'm going to hunt down Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, and I'm going to, I'm going to send the military to get them. They think about the past. The past is the best guide to the future. And they say, like, he says these things, and then he doesn't act. And when people say to me, like, how can anybody vote for these things he's saying, well, because he's he's done this before, and he got in the White House now, he did a whole bunch of other things that got him, you know, impeached, but not those. And so I think there's a bit of you know it. This is not new, this is not new behavior. So nobody's updating

Speaker 2 20:40

Trump to point out could be different, though

Lynn Vavreck 20:44

Anything's possible, but people, but voters, have to make decisions based on something. And though we know that the past is a great way to know what's going to happen in the future, it's why people vote for incumbent parties when the economy grows, I know how they manage the economy in the past, and so I have confidence in them in the future. It's a very simple heuristic, and it's if we think it works, we have to think it works on a number of dimensions, not just policy dimensions.

Alexandra Lieben 21:14

So project 2025, right? That's a form of narrative. Let me ask you. Is like, what? How much stock do you put into that? And then also both of you, narratives. The role of narratives.

Lynn Vavreck 21:27

Narrative is huge.

Andrea Römmele 21:28

Narrative is super big, right? So basically, what democracies need to have is they have to have a positive narrative into the future, because democracy only functions in the long run, if you have a positive story to tell for the future, if you can promise your electorate that they will be better off in four years, eight years, 12 years, and and so on. And if I look into my country and into the government we are having right now, they our government, had a very promising narrative that sounds doesn't sound so well in English than it does in German. Daring more progress, but it sounds good in German, and it leans towards a big a big social democratic Chancellor, Willy Brandt in the 70s, who said, dare more democracy. And that vibrated really well at the very beginning, but then with the Russian invasion into the Ukraine, everything was about zeitenwende, that's also a German term, where the government actually did quite well in steering the German public into supporting, sending arms to to the to the Ukraine, but stopped spreading or talking about any positive narrative into the future, and that's where the population sort of is, is stuck now, especially if you look in into the eastern part of The country, right? They don't see any hope, any prosperity in the near future. There is no positive narrative for them. So that's where a lot of dissect dissatisfaction with democracy comes about. And when you, when you sort of build your campaign messaging, I mean, you basically, you start off with the narrative is sort of your baseline, right? And you use, you develop the messages there from and that's why it's so important to have a narrative, and have to have a positive narrative. And you, if you look into the narrative, the of the AFD, also in the into the narrative of of Trump, or the the right populist parties within within Europe, they all have a narrative that leads you into the past. So the future is the past. That's what I find really interesting with with those right wing populist parties who also get a lot of support in Europe.

Speaker 1 23:55

Ill recommend a book to you if you haven't read strangers in their own land. By Arlie Russell Hochschild, she's a sociologist at Berkeley. This book is fantastic. It is about Americans living in Louisiana, in the bayou, and it was published in 2016 just before the election. Was not meant to be about the election, but ends up being a great explainer of what happens, and in this book, she talks about the deep stories of these white Louisiana bayou residents. And it's a way that sort of helps me understand how the past can be an appealing vision of the future for some people, for lots of people. And in a nutshell, the idea is that the famous part of her book sort of has this quote that says all of these people had a vision of. The American Dream for themselves, work hard, get ahead, and that's what that's what they were trying to achieve. And so they did. They worked hard. They got jobs. They worked in the factories that came to southern Louisiana. And even as those those businesses let them down, polluted their water, polluted their air, even as profits from those companies weren't reinvested in the community. The schools in Louisiana were not you know they but those companies gave them jobs and enabled them to take their families on vacations, to buy new cars, and so they were very loyal to their employers, and it's all about this identity that they have as hard working Americans getting ahead, making their families better off. And then all of a sudden, around 2000 and, you know, I don't know, 456, ish, all of a sudden, other people are coming in, and they're in line, working hard. But then these other people are cutting in front of them in line, and the government's helping them, and these would be immigrants coming into America. And person you know, number one is Barack Obama, and they're skeptical of him. How did he get ahead? You know? Was he born here? Did he go to Harvard? How did that happen? And now he's president, you know, and he wants to help other people like him. And so that's a big moment in this book for clarifying the politics of race, the politics of immigration. And it's a story about deservingness and about then grievance. And she tells the story really well, and so they those voters are uncomfortable with the new normal and with how government is supporting the other people, and they want nothing more than to go back to this time when they were trying to achieve the American dream, and government was helping them do it. And the quote is literally, I feel forgotten, like government has forgotten me, America has forgotten me, and that's where they are. And you know, this is not unique to the US, right?

Lynn Vavreck 27:16

No, no, we have the same experience in all over Germany, especially, of course, in the eastern part of the country and in the eastern part of the country, they there are citizens there have gone through a tremendous transformation, especially the older generation, through a tremendous transformation after reunification. I mean, their whole lives were upside down, right, and some of them managed through hard work. And it's, it's a little bit for them. And there is a very nice book by a colleague whoever reads German. I'm sure it's going to be translated in a very soon, Stefan Mau un Einstein, sort of unequally united, and basically the feeling of citizens in the eastern part of the country is they have to run, run, run, in order to stay at the same spot, to not fall back. And they've barely managed that. And now in 2015 we had this huge pour in from migrants from mostly from Syria. Now, of course, also from the from the Ukraine. And Merkel, at that time, Chancellor, said, We can do this. This is something we can do. But like you said, you know, the people there in especially in the eastern part of the country, because of these, this traumatic experience of the transformation in in 1990 that now again, having to to transform, and feeling left behind and and not being supported enough by government is absolutely something, something we have to but I coming back to the narrative thing. I don't think, in the long run that a narrative that resonates back to the past. You cannot build back the past, right? That's very, very difficult. No, I You cannot build back back the past. You could you. I mean, it's about the values you had in the past. You can bring the values from the past into the future, but at least what the AfD does is really to try to build back the past.

You can't both be afraid that if you elect Donald Trump, he will be a dictator and and go after his enemies and do whatever he wants and do away with democracy, and also believe that you can't rebuild the past. If you believe that he could get elected and change everything, then he definitely can get elected and say religious test to enter the country. Nobody who's not native born gets to be like,

Andrea Römmele 29:55

Yeah, I believe we have to, I think we have to define what rebuilding back the past actually means, right? I think, if for, I mean, I can't, I can't, you have to talk about the US. But I can say for Germany that, that, for example, we, we need, we desperately need migration. Because, if my, you know, if we would not let in people from whatever country, our economy, our economy would be ruined. We are having troubles already, right? But the way our demographics are we, we absolutely need migration. If we do not have migration, I think in 10 years down the road, our economy, our economy would be a disaster.

Lynn Vavreck 30:37

Yeah, yes, yes, yeah. I understand what you're saying. The difference is would it be successful? Is a different question, right? Yeah, right.

Alexandra Lieben 30:42

So, let me ask you questions like, now, now, all these grievances, right? They drive people to what we call echo chambers, media echo chambers, right? Like, where do we, where do I find resonance? Right, for other people who feel like it's not just...

Lynn Vavreck 30:54

Its not just the people with grievances, right, who are in echo chambers, okay

Alexandra Lieben 30:58

Okay, but, but I have grievances about other people who basically object to everything I believe in. So, so here's like, we all retreat right to these bubbles of information. How do you message? How do campaigns message to people who have their personalized news feeds? Right? Like, sometimes we feel like we live in this country, effectively, is several countries, when you listen to people's telling you.

Lynn Vavreck 31:24

I think, like, the first thing you have to remember is that they don't have to win all the votes. They only have to win more than the other person. We of the two party vote, right? 50% plus one. That's all they need. Yeah. Okay, so, like, a huge chunk of people out there are not going to vote for you, and you know that there's no way. Okay. So, you know, I have a political consultant friend who calls those people, those are your sinners. They are not you're not saving them. Okay? Then you got a whole chunk of people who are always going to vote for you. No matter what you do, they are always going to vote for you. And he calls them your saints, right? So he got your saints, and then in the middle are the salvageables. And those are the people, those are the people you need to get. And you don't need all of them. You just need more than the other guy. Yeah, okay, so, so who's watching Fox News? Who's watching CNN? Okay, who knows how many people tune in to the average Fox News or CNN program on any given day? I know Mark probably knows, but right about 3 million people are watching Fox News program. About a million people are watching a CNN or an MSNBC. That's nobody. Okay? That is nobody. Are those people, the salvageables? No, those are the saints and the sin, right? So when you so, you know, sure, the South, what are the salvageables interested in? They're not obsessed with politics. They are not you. They are not here at 1215, on a Tuesday afternoon to listen to us talk about this, you know, they're interested in what's going on with Tom Brady and his calling these football games, you know, the Dodgers, the you know, and maybe they're interested in their kids performance in the school play. They have other interests. So it's not so much like I need to get into their siloed political news feed. It's I need to get into their lived experience, their their life in some way. And I think that's why you see candidates do things like, I'm getting out Bruce Springsteen, and he's coming to Pennsylvania with me, because some of those people are going to be Bruce Springsteen fans, right? Or, you know, I'm going to drag Liz Cheney to the main line in Philadelphia because, like, some of those people maybe are Republicans who liked her dad and okay, but it's not so much about, how do I get in their Twitter feeds? Or, you know, it's, you know, you're not getting those people.

Andrea Römmele 33:59

Can I just... I fully second what, what Lynn said. Just want to add one more European aspect to that, because you said all you need is 50 plus, you know, plus. This is absolutely right. Just giving you the perspective of a parliamentarian system, you know, our chancellor was elected with 20. He Yes. He has 24% of the vote behind him. Yeah. So, so even less, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alexandra Lieben 34:22

Celebrity endorsements do they work, yeah? Like, I don't know, like with Taylor Swift, like registration went up, but do people actually come out and vote?

Andrea Römmele 34:32

So she has another appearance next week. Who knows?

Speaker 1 34:34

I mean, the answer to that is when we are talking about a presidential election that might turn on 5000 votes across three states. Yeah, everything matters. Yes, right, this election is on the knife's edge. So are the effects of Taylor Swift's endorsement huge in absolute value. No, absolutely not. Okay, we can say that with. 100% certainty. Could it be pivotal? Yes, because this election is turning on this many votes. And so, you know, in 2008 when the Obama campaign was out there talking about their massive field operation, and the field operation won the election. And like you know, he won by a huge relative to today, a huge amount. You know, the field operation didn't win that election, right? It was this. He won by a huge amount. And the effects of the field operation are small. But in 2024 these elections are much closer, and so every little thing that you can do is potentially pivotal.

Andrea Römmele 35:41

Yeah, Lynn, can I come back to one point? I want to challenge you again on that has been on my mind for the last 15 minutes. And that really goes back to my first question, and your answer that, and I fully second what you say. Of course, you know the best predictor for the future? Yes, the past, right? And Donald Trump did say, lock her up, lock her up. And then he didn't. He's saying worse things now. And I think the big difference between your country and my country is we've been there.

Lynn Vavreck 36:12

Yes, I don't disagree with that.

Andrea Römmele 36:13

So I must as a voter, I'm, to some extent, must believe in what the candidate says. I think...

Lynn Vavreck 36:29

Context matters

Andrea Römmele 36:30

Thats why I think it's not that easy. The explanation is not that easy.

Speaker 2 36:35

Context matters 100% for sure.

Alexandra Lieben 36:41

What happens to local politics? It seems our national candidates are sucking up all the oxygen in the room. Do people pay attention to their local candidates? And what's happening as a result?

Lynn Vavreck 36:52

In the US, the votes down, up and down the ballot are aligning more and more on party lines, and that's because of all the reasons I already talked about the parties are probably around there they stand. There they stand for mostly the same thing, whether it's at the state level or the national level. So a lot of that has been becoming more correlated over time. So you know, in some sense, I'm sure that in places where the local races are hotly contested, people are paying attention. But if you said ask me, Are they paying less attention today than they were 20 years ago? My gut instinct would be to say, no, but, but I don't know for sure, yeah, yeah.

Andrea Römmele 37:38

I would also say in our system, it, it it aligns. I mean, look, you know, the way you vote regionally, you also sort of in the state election. You tend to also, more and more so vote in the in the national lecture. And there are a couple of instances that come to my mind where local incidents actually influence had a heavy influence on the state election. For by I don't know if anyone recalls the debate about this train station in Stuttgart, Stuttgart, 21 which had a huge influence on on Baden wooden on a state election, and then also on a national election.

Alexandra Lieben 38:18

I would like to open it up questions from the floor.

Burkle Center 38:24

Very interesting topic. Thank you very much for educating us. First of all, I have a disclosure that I'm not a law student, and this is the reason I come for these kind of seminars to learn more. Now here are the things that kind of as a voter, I voted like for the last maybe 10 elections or so. What about the things that are unsafe that are going to uncover after the elections are done? For example, you know, like population of the Supreme Court and things like that that are not talked about. And I find that the candidates are also transcending what you call the Constitution, if you will. And there are so many transcending messages that are come that are not relevant or conforming to the Constitution. So in these cases, how is their kind of ignored news, like me, for example, going to decide what they are going to do and how it will harm me in the future.

Andrea Römmele 39:23

I mean, I can say for, for for Germany and for Europe for the last 10 years. I mean, what you what you cast your vote on, right? You cast your vote on what the parties campaign for in what the parties campaign can campaign for during the campaign. Then it's also trust in the candidates, of course, these sort of unpolitical attributes. And then there is the coalition contract. Those are the three sort of elements. Yeah, the coalition contract, of course, comes after the election. But if you look at German politics over the. Last 10 years, you know, there was, we were so much in crisis mode that you could that the coalition contract, if I look at the coalition contract now, that is an old piece of paper. That's an old piece of paper. What we are dealing with right now is the war in the Ukraine. That's number one. That's the big, big, big, number one issue, security issues within Germany, whether we should have, you know, people should, should be forced to military service again. And that's that's just come up two years ago. Then we have the migration crisis. I don't like the word migration, migration crisis, but that's just the way we we label it. That hasn't been part of the campaign, because the campaign was before and then the refugees came. So there is so much crisis management at the moment that I think to some extent, people also vote for the parties and the candidate on the basis of how much they trust them, because the issues they will have to govern on might not even be visible for the voters.

Alexandra Lieben 41:11

Students, students,

Audience Member 2 41:12

Hi, yeah, Lynn, I think you alluded to it earlier, but Harris has pretty much erased Trump's lead on the economy, she's not errased his lead on immigration at all and the electorate is probably more anti immigration at any point in time. In American politics in my lifetime, how would you assess their approach on immigration? And do they really have a feasible way to even you know, when any voters over on it, or is it something you kind of have to concede? I mean, I know they thought that he stopped the bipartisan border bill, but is a voter really saying, oh, like, this bill in Congress, I don't know anything about was stopped by Trump and looking at that and putting any weight to that, or is it just sort of a intractable issue?

Speaker 1 41:58

Yeah, so by they, you mean the Democrats, how can they, yeah, yeah, it's a tough spot. I think, I think that they thought that this was not going to be a problem, because they could point to Trump calling his buddies in Congress. We had this problem licked. He stopped us from solving it. Well, okay, does that mean you're ineffective as legislators? Maybe right, like you let this guy derail your bipartisan coalition bill, like that. Maybe was not a fully thought through strategy. You know, it's a little bit like I had all the right tools. And then this guy came in and took one and, well, why didn't you lock your tools up? You know? So, so they're a little stuck. Because what she's not going to say is, you know, I agree that, you know, communities are struggling to make sense of how they're changing, because people who are different than white Christians are coming in, right? Like that's just not an authentic message that that a Democrat, or in particular, Kamala Harris, can deliver. So she's, she's a little stuck, and he knows it. And you know that's that she's her best play. And, I mean, this is what they're doing. They've made very few missteps. Her best play is to not give oxygen to it. Like, the more she's talking about the thing he wants to talk about, the more that she's losing the election. So he wants to eat cats. Go all in on eating cats and dogs, and what about the geese and all the things he's still saying, like he literally said two days ago, what about the geese? You were getting? The geese, you know, and she does not take the bait. She should not take the bait, because if she starts saying how, you know, crazy that is, and the sheriff says no, and the governor says no. And then we're talking about that, and people agree with Trump, right? So she just goes all in on, you know, let me talk to you about what I can do for you, in terms of helping you buy a house, in terms of helping you find a job that you want and and that's the right play. You're not persuading people to change their mind. Persuasion is hard. So you can you're just battling to keep the thing that you're advantaged on as being the thing that the election is being decided on. And that's what the fight is over.

Alexandra Lieben 44:29

Communication strategy. So migration is a big issue political. Yeah, right, yeah. How is that being?

Andrea Römmele 44:36

Yeah, it's very big issue. And, and basically, I mean, one of the big mistakes the the centrist parties, whether it's the CDO or the SPD, also the greens, who have also moved very much towards the center, have have done they have, I wouldn't say they've neglected it, but it was not on top of their agenda, right? And they did not talk enough about potential solutions, and basically the AfD was the party who really pushed on migration, and this is dominating the political agenda, and is pushing the parties now that the parties in the center towards a position that's quite right of them on the right side of the middle. And yeah, it's and if you look at the AfD, you know, the AfD was founded in 2013 as a party, actually against the euro. The AFD wanted to run the camp, the campaign against the euro, and with the refugee crisis, with the refugees coming into Germany in 2015 the AfD immediately saw that this will be a very, very a highly debated issue, and sat on it, and has been sitting on this issue forever, And is Chase, chasing the other parties and the public debate, uh, finding a position on it. So, so the the parties in the center are actually not in the driver's seat when it comes to defining the issue, it's the AfD that's in the driver's seat. And if you look at the we currently had state elections in the eastern part of the country, where the AfD in one state, in in turinga, is the strongest party with over 30% of the of the vote. In Saxony, it's just runner up with less than 1% difference to to the strongest part. So the AfD is extremely present in that part of the country, and its dominating the agenda.

Alexandra Lieben 46:41

The irony is that we all need immigration and yet it is politically so divisive. Next question.

Audience Member 4 46:47

Now what I just want to say, first of all, thank you for being here. And I just wanted to ask, as you know, cable television has been going downhill in terms of leadership. How do you think that like platforms such as Twitch, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, are trying to engage younger audiences, and then I've noticed as well, like a lot of podcast posts, have been trying to garner attention by posting like Kamala Harris or President Trump. How do you think that's going to influence this particular election?

Lynn Vavreck 47:23

Yeah, it's definitely a changing moment. You know, some of you may remember in 1992 when Bill Clinton went on a late night talk show and played the saxophone, yeah, talked about whether he wore Boxers or briefs, you know. Like, instead of talking about policy, he talked about some non policy thing that was very personal. And people just thought this was like, like, presidential candidates don't go on late night talk shows, you know. And this is kind of like, the same the same moment, but not quite as mind blowing. Going on these podcasts like this is where the audience is. And so, you know, you kind of go where the people are, and people weren't listening to podcasts 20 years ago, so nobody went there. But now lots of people listen to them, and so they just have to go where the people are. And it's not so much a strategy to get young people engaged. Young people are hard to mobilize. We know this. Candidates know this ever so and this isn't a strategy to get young people invested. This is just a strategy to reach voters where they are. And I think it's probably a permanent shift, yeah,

Andrea Römmele 48:36

and if I can add to that, one of the reasons the Democratic Parties in Germany, or the parties in the middle in Germany, have not done so well, or have been to some extent, disconnected, also, also in the European election, from the especially from the younger generation, but not only from the younger generation, is that they are not in these spaces. If you look, if you check out AFD candidates or members of parliament, AFD Members of Parliament, whether it's the national parliament or the state parliament, there are all over Tiktok. There is not one now, listen to this. There is not one member of the CDU who's active on Tiktok, right? So, so they leave that space completely open to the AfD, completely open to the AfD.

Audience Question 5 49:25

Thank you so much. First of all, to the Burkle Center for setting up this panel and for our panelists for coming and speaking to right now, I feel like it's very important for us to be having these conversations, and I wish that the voters that needed to be reached would be here. And so I think, in light of what you're saying about the population of like salvageables, and that also pertaining to like a younger population that we're seeing. On campus. I just want to understand the concerns when UCLA provides a platform to a character such as Ben Shapiro, who's feeling such inflammatory rhetoric and calling UCLA professors Marxist to such a young, influential population, even if there are students there that are there to debate him. My fear and my concern as someone who believes in these principles of equality is the rhetoric that is circulated so insensitively is so dangerous, and even if it's not a policy act this like direction of the American consciousness towards these very nativist tendencies is concerning, and I just wanted to hear the concern about that and any thoughts that you may have.

Speaker 1 50:50

Yeah, so Ben Shapiro is a UCLA alum, and was a student of mine, and so I teach Introduction to American politics. And when I was a sort of new ish assistant professor, here he was in my introduction to American politics class, and tells a story about that in one of the first books that he wrote, where he outed the 100 most liberal professors in America, of which I am one. But so I think that one of the ways that has been helpful for me in thinking about this exact topic that you're raising is taking it back to 2016 and thinking about when Donald Trump emerged on the scene, and was similarly, you know, comes down the escalator. Mexico is not sending its best. We're gonna have a Muslim ban, right, using this kind of very inflammatory, divisive language, and at the time, and at the time, and then, and then he's getting 25% of the vote in the primary, like overnight, and that's an exaggeration, but very quickly, and then more and more and more. And at the time, a lot of people were saying to analysts, wow, why is CNN giving him air like they are showing his rallies, and there's they're broadcasting his message, and all these people are now coming to him, and this is very similar to the argument that you're making, and what we were able to see in the data that we had at that time that we put into this book called Identity crisis is that those attitudes in the population predated 2015, when Trump came. They are they exist. And you can look at public opinion data going back decades and decades, people have these attitudes. Donald Trump didn't create them. You know, Ben Shapiro is not creating these attitudes, they exist in the population, right? What Trump was able to do is give people permission to say them out loud. So Mitt Romney in 2012 John McCain in 2008 previous Republican nominees, but especially McCain and Romney running against the first black nominee of a major party ticket in America, made conscious decisions not to talk about racial issues. Republican candidates, going way back, were not talking about them explicitly. They were implicitly signaling racial attitudes. And you know, we could have a big debate about whether McCain and Romney were successful in that, but they, they did not intend to talk about race. But Trump knows those attitudes are out there, and comes and he essentially lights them up. He ignites them and Okay, and so this is like, this is like a burning question is whether that okay? What if Jeb Bush had won that nomination in 2016 what would the 2024 campaign be about? I think it would be about different things, right? So I do think that that Trump so the characters are culpable. But does that mean that eventually we would not have gotten to a place where we are talking about these person based issues? Probably doesn't mean that we were eventually going to get to a place where we have to write policy on bathrooms and sports teams and same sex. So you know it's you can say, Boy, we should try to contain this. But really, the fact that these attitudes exist in the population always is raises the possibility that a political entrepreneur is going to come along and try to coalesce them ignite them and use those attitudes to their political gain.

Andrea Römmele 55:03

Yeah, I can fully, fully relate to that, also for for Germany, and we also, I'm sure you also have that we the AfD, actually, or supporters of the AfD sort of also coined a term for that. That's what Mondo sagen do. You know, I'm really allowed to say this now, it would translate into that, but we have exactly the same

Alexandra Lieben 55:27

That the thing about Holocaust deniers, right? Yeah, that it's, it's against the law in Europe to deny the Holocaust. Yeah? So burned in different ways. You had a question, sir, yeah,

Audience Question 6 55:38

I'm from Europe as well. And well one, peculiar thing about American political life, which I can't really grasp, and which is very vexing to me, is the discrepancy between popular vote and electoral vote, and how also the Republican Party, despite lack of popular vote, has been able to build such a strong base throughout the country in terms of judicial, local politics and so on. Any way to change that?

Speaker 1 56:10

Well, institutions matter, and so this institution of the Electoral College and the place based nature of it, yeah, it's shaping our election outcomes, and we're at this period of time where the popular vote is has been in the last several cycles, different from the electoral college. And so sure, we could change that and have a national popular vote for President of the United States, but it's worth thinking about what the negative externalities of that might be. Candidates would be drawn right now. They're drawn to battleground states, and there aren't that many of those, but they're 810, 12, something like that. If we didn't have the Electoral College, they would be drawn to large population centers, so New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, the big cities, and you could literally piece together your winning coalition by only going to three or four places. So that might be a negative externality. You also might, if you care about election fraud, you might make it easier for cheaters to come in and steal elections. So now, if you want to do that, you have to figure out which states are going to be closest. You have to figure out which voting machines they use in the biggest counties in those states. You've got to learn how to perpetrate fraud on those voting machines in those counties, or the voting method, whatever it is, you got to be right about those guesses. You've got to learn all that if it was a national popular vote, you just need to go into LA County and figure out, how do I, how do I, you know, steal 10,000 vote or whatever the number is. So there are some externalities to a national popular vote that we might not be happy with, but I agree that it feels like there's a tension here that can't persist very much longer. Yeah,

Andrea Römmele 58:22

if I can add to that, you know, from from a European perspective, coming from a system with proportional representation, looking at your race now that is so incredibly close, and no matter who wins, there will be one half of the population that will not get the candidate or the the world you said at the very beginning, you know, these are very, very different worlds that are are presented and and what happens to them? Right? And that's a question in a system of proportional representation, you basically don't have because you have to engage in so many compromises that at the end, the level of polarization basically isn't as high.

Audience Question 7 59:02

Hi, thank you for being here. I came to this talk because I understand that you arethe people who can tell us where the narrative is in the mainstream, and for that reason, thanks thats been very helpful. But I also find it extremely disappointing that we're kind of not talking about like this elephant in the room, which is the fact that if we follow your logic, if We say the best predicated feature is the past. I find it very convenient for us to say, well, let's just look back far enough to strangers on their own land, and that was the past. But the truth is, is that the American people are getting savvy to the fact that this land was founded in very unequal way. A and that our foundational documents. While we said, Oh yes, liberty and justice for all we spent the rest of the time legally making sure that not everybody got the same rights. Across the board, this country is based on and we continue to feel the ramifications of colonization, and as young people, we're becoming savvy to that. I mean, there's people right now on this campus who occupy this campus talking about decolonization and how our institution, like the gentleman mentioned over there, the Electoral College, it is an unequal way, because I agree with you, it would work the way you said it worked, unless there was no such thing as gerrymandering and things like this and money and politics. So as a young person, I'm just wondering when the mainstream is gonna finally really come to terms with our real past. Our past isn't you know, these people who were working so hard, getting ahead by corporations were polluting and killing our land. Our past is the possession of people, slavery, white privilege, and let's be honest, that's what the white Trump agenda is. They want to go back to that past. Let's not tiptoe around, okay, yeah, they just recommend also another book. It's called the colonialism human rights. Check it out. Very informational article. So I guess the question is, so, since this country has been on the track to self destruction since its beginning, will there ever be a U turn away from Empire and colonization? Will it ever be part of the conversation?

Speaker 1 1:02:00

Yeah, I think about the symbols of American democracy a lot, because in 2016 you know, Trump was able to co opt some like the flag, right? And so, but, but that sort of at the time, led me to think about, how do those symbols get infused with the meaning that they have in the first place? And where I came down on that was that there is something unique in America about like, when we start school in America, in kindergarten, we learn about all of these things that you just described, what the flag stands for, and and this is happening to us in, I am not a political psychologist, full disclosure, but in what psychologists would call pre adult socialization phases of our life, and then they always just carry that right with all the other attitudes that you're talking about. And so when I think about, how do you change that, I think that this actually has to start very early in these pre adult years, and has to start in the pre K and kindergarten years to change that story. And you know, it, like you said, it exists a little bit on college campuses, but I think it's got to start existing in pre K and kindergarten classrooms. And that's how I think the as you describe it, the U turn, that's where, that's where that U turn is is going to start, I think not my field of expertise, but that's, that's sort of how I think about it.

Alexandra Lieben 1:03:39

Each country has its narrative, by the way, right, sort of a build up that does not necessarily correspond to reality.

Audience Question 8 1:03:46

Yeah, this sort of falls on this. And thank you. This has been extremely informative. And I know just about Andrea, but I went for a long time, so I know we're really getting a very powerful political perspective on elections. But there is something, and it just goes back to these comments, which is another elephant in the room, I think is, is been the normalization of Donald Trump, and everything you've said is I understand quite accurately from things I know as well. And yes, there's that underlying population that we can signal to and speak to it directly. But where I want to go with this is part of the to the extent there is progress in this country, part of the progress in this country is those people felt they had to be silent. They couldn't really be overt, and the candidates couldn't be over. Donald Trump has now said, no, no, no, no, you can go back to that and go back to that in full force. And there are several things that are just that kind of goes back to yes, we're very evenly divided. But how is it that Donald Trump still is in a position to almost win this? Election when he's the first can nominee or president to ever speak this way, to ever use this rhetoric, of all kinds of things that would always have been avoidable in the past or not in the past, he is the first to there's never been an incumbent president running for election or re election, in which so many people from his administration, including his cabinet, including the military, including national security, this guy should never be in office. That's never happened. He did have that term in office, and we also know he had a record of lying more than anybody has ever lied in American public. And so kind of just kind of extraordinary differences from the past to set him apart as a candidate, as a nominee for president. And so it kind of goes back to how, how is it matters? And is that just reinforcing what she just said, which is, we are a profoundly darker country than we really want to believe. Or is it possible that this election isn't as close as it seems to be, and when push comes to shove, people are going to make a different contest?

Speaker 1 1:06:23

Oh, Mark, no, I think it is really close. So I think it is...

Audience Question 8 1:06:28

I agree, okay, okay, but there was an election that was really, really close. It was knife edge, and it was the weekend before the election, when it shifted. This was a 1980s election, and Carter and Reagan were very close, and then what's his name was Carter's pollster came in that weekend. So I'm sorry, Mr. President, you're gonna lose the election. And it turned out to be, yeah, well, as people having to get comfortable with Ronald Reagan, who was thought to be the satellite once they were comfortable with Ronald Reagan, okay, when you go with it, in this case, people really don't know are uncomfortable with Kamala Harris, Donald Trump.

I'm gonna give a quick answer. You know, basically that was my thanks for bringing up that question again, because that was okay. My question was beginning. I'm in the I'm in the terrain of speculation now, at this point, because I don't have any data or evidence to support this, but it's such, I think, and to think two things are true, everything Mark said, but also, like the language that people use in Congress has also gotten more caustic, right? People would never swear in Congress in the 1980s and not and now they swear all the time. Okay, so the so something about the degradation of norms more generally, okay, but just hold that aside, this normalization of Trump, here's the question I often wonder about so he's not a politician, right? He is a business guy. And I wonder if we had someone who was a politician who had dedicated their career to politics, which people used to think was a dirty word, right? Like, oh, you wouldn't want to tell someone you were a politician, you know. But it turns out they were really kind of adhering to a set of norms that had to do with the public good and service. And along comes Donald Trump from the business community, and he's sort of the candidate from the business community nationally who has gone the farthest. And so there's a different set of norms in that profession. And I just wonder if in some way people hold him to different standards because he's not a politician. And if that's part of it. I don't have any evidence for that, you know, I don't know the apprentice. I think the television show, you know, for those of you who never saw it, is hugely popular. It was hugely popular. It was the most popular show on television in its first two seasons. And that character that he played, was a tough guy and spoke truth to power and made tough decisions and all that kind of stuff. And then, I think then he runs for president, and for a lot of people, he's that character, and that's a part of this. But, you know, I don't the question is, if JD Vance inherents The Trump mantle which, by the way, it's kind of interesting to think that vice presidential nominees on losing tickets have never gone on to be successful politicians in the future. But let's say he's different. Let's say Trump and Vance lose, and Vance inherits the mantle. And. It, you know, can he come and be the same? Will it be authentic for him? I don't know. And will people tolerate it? I don't know, but those are the two things I think about, that he's from the outside, that he had this character, that people already had relaxed norms around and that norms are declining generally in politics, those are things I think,

Andrea Römmele 1:10:24

yeah, I mean, that's, you know, that's also my, my big question, which coming as an outsider from Europe, I I just don't understand. And I, and I'm also, I'm also, so, so, so, I mean, whenever I'm, you know, somewhere playing tennis. Yesterday evening, I was, you know, Monday, Monday evenings, I play tennis. And we sat afterwards. We sat together afterwards and had a beer. And they asked me, So, what are you doing here and so on? And say, I'm here to observe the the election. And then they asked me, So, so how does Germany see the election? I mean, how many are for Trump, and how many are how many support Trump, and how many support Harris and, and that's just a zero question in Germany, because the I think your explanations are really, I would buy into that. And I think that's really, I didn't think of that this way yet, but, but he's, like, for he's so incredibly off, from our perspective, like, so incredibly, incredibly off that even as a political scientist, and, you know, we, we sort of, we read the same stuff, we do the same numbers and so on, but you're, you're 100% good argument that you know the past is the best predictor for the for the future and different options and so on, which is very clear and easy argument, and I would normally fully buy into that. I can't. I can't because I just don't get it

Alexandra Lieben 1:12:03

On that note were out of time. What a great way to end.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai