Dialogue Minnesota

Reflections On the JFK Assassination

U of M Humanities Professor James Norwood

Download

SPEAKERS

Jim du Bois, James Norwood

Jim du Bois  00:00

Dialogue Minnesota...conversations about the issues that matter to you. I'm Jim du Bois. November 22, 1963, was a typical Friday in the United States. With Thanksgiving celebrated on the following Thursday, many people were looking forward to a short workweek and the upcoming holiday season. But all that changed when President John F. Kennedy was cut down by gunfire in a Dallas motorcade. For the next four days, Americans saw history unfold on their living room televisions. 59 years later, the fascination with the Kennedy assassination continues. This week on Dialogue Minnesota, a conversation with retired University of Minnesota Humanities Professor James Norwood, who has extensively studied the assassination and its aftermath. Professor Norwood, take us back to that day, Friday, November 22, 1963. The presidential motorcade was coming through Dealey Plaza in Dallas. What happened around 1230 Central time in the afternoon?

James Norwood  01:03

Yes, on this occasion, President Kennedy was eager to start his reelection campaign for 1964. He went to Texas expressly to mend some fences. He was not popular as a whole in Texas, but he was warmly greeted by the crowds in the various cities of Texas when he arrived. Now on Friday, the 22nd, he arrived in Dallas, got off the airplane got into the limousine. And these extraordinary crowds greeted him as he moved through the city. One can see the images of the progression of the limousine, the motorcade and really be shocked at the lack of security, the lack of protections that the President had.

Jim du Bois  01:57

Once the President is in Dealey Plaza in his open limousine and shots ring out, why don't you point out where the principal players were at this time in Dealey Plaza and take us through who they were and how they have played a part in the continuing story about the JFK assassination.

James Norwood  02:16

Actually, if you'll permit me to give our audience a kind of tour of the Dealey Plaza site, and we can see some of the eyewitness testimony, where the people were standing, where, what they reported, we might be able to break down this particular question to shed light on not only how many shots were fired, but the direction from which the shots came. Keep in mind that the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald fired three rounds. They all came, of course, from behind the Presidential limousine. Now, one key witness and one of really unimpeachable character is William Newman. Bill Newman and his family were the closest in proximity to the President as the motorcade was lumbering down Elm Street. And William Newman is depicted immediately after the assassination on the ground, as he urged his family to basically take cover hit the ground, and one can actually see photographs of Mr. Newman covering, trying to protect his children. Mr. Newman claimed that he heard shots coming from behind him and sensed the bullets actually whizzing by. That is why he urged his family to duck for cover. Then immediately across the street from Bill Newman, standing in the area of the plaza lawn, this was the eyewitness, Jean Hill. Jean was standing right next to Mary Mormon, who took one of the most famous photographs of the assassination, and in that photograph, we can see Jean's actual position, facing the knoll area and the picket fence. Jean testified before the Warren Commission that she heard four to six shots and that she actually saw the flash of light and a rifle behind the picket fence. If we then turn to Elm Street, two cars behind the Presidential limousine, Senator Yarborough of Texas later testified that he saw a puff of smoke coming from the area of the picket fence, and he actually then smelled the smoke as the limousine and the motorcade proceeded down Elm Street. Yarbrough witnessed that. Directly in front of him was the follow-up car with the Secret Service and two of the most loyal assistants of President Kennedy, Dave Powers and Kenneth O'Donnell. Both Powers and O'Donnell described the event as an ambush as if they were walking into a fusillade of gunshots, certainly more than three. Dave Powers later after seeing the Oliver Stone film, said he got it right in the depiction and recreation of the assassination scene. Then we have S.N. Holland, who's standing up on top of the freeway overpass, it was actually railroad track. And Holland testified that he saw also a large puff of smoke coming from behind the picket fence. Then, immediately after the motorcade had passed, a Dallas police officer, Joe Smith, followed the crowd that was moving up the knoll area. They didn't go to the book depository. The people who were the eyewitnesses generally felt that the bullets were coming from directly in front of the president up in the knoll area. Now, Joe Smith, the officer, went behind the picket fence, and he was in the process of making an arrest on what he thought was a suspicious person who then pulled out ID and claimed that he was a Secret Service agent. Now it turned out there were no secret service agents on the ground in Dealey Plaza. They were all in the motorcade. So, Officer Smith let that gentleman go. The final witness is Ed Hoffman. This gentleman was standing up on the freeway well in back of that first overpass, it's called the Triple Overpass, and he pulled his car over on the freeway and had a bird's eye view behind the grassy knoll area, and Ed Hoffman actually witnessed the shooting from behind the picket fence. He saw a rifle. He saw a man disassemble the rifle. He saw a man in a suit, who then walked away casually, and he actually witnessed the man who was nearly arrested by Officer Smith. Officer Smith may have come close to arresting one of the assassins in the JFK death. Now, the reason I'm spending some time on this is to underscore the importance of eyewitness testimony. Often our physical evidence, in this case, fails us. And that is the case with the endless attempts to try to identify how many shots were fired, looking at the Zapruder film, discussing the ballistics. When all of that fails, we have to rely on eyewitness evidence. Sometimes the eyewitnesses disagree, but in other instances, we can get a consensus of eyewitness testimony. And that is certainly the case in those eyewitnesses who are in Dealey Plaza and can help to identify both the number of shots fired and the all-important question of the direction of the shots

Jim du Bois  08:17

Well, given the testimony of these witnesses in Dealey Plaza, did the law enforcement authorities and, ultimately, the Warren Commission disregard what they reported? Or did they find holes in their stories?

James Norwood  08:31

Well, this really gets us into the whole topic of the Warren Commission, how it came about, what it accomplished, and above all, the process that it used as an investigation. And as it turns out, the incoming President Lyndon Johnson did not want to set up a commission of this order. He was hoping that the FBI could handle the case exclusively. When there was criticism about that approach, LBJ then decided, reluctantly, to form this panel. It was supposed to be a blue-ribbon panel of unimpeachable men who we're going to investigate the case impartially. And so, a week after the assassination, the Warren Commission was formed, and then they convened in early December. This chronology is important because, as it turned out, in that time of several weeks that had elapsed after the assassination, there was no conventional investigation. It was unlike virtually any other crime scene that one can imagine. All of that time that elapsed was crucial in missing important leads. That delayed the process of finding out really what happened. That first-day evidence, much of that, obviously, and tragically was lost. Then in the commission itself, certainly one of the key members of the commission, and actually, the first name that came to the mind of Lyndon Johnson was that of Allen Dulles. Now, Allen Dulles was the former head of the CIA, who was fired by President Kennedy after the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion when he first acceded to the presidency. Dulles was fired and in disgrace. After that event, JFK vowed that he was going to reevaluate the status of the CIA. And so, to put Allen Dulles on the commission was a curious choice. At the very first meeting of the Warren Commission, Dulles informed the other commissioners that the outcome of their investigation would undoubtedly show that the assassination was committed by a lone gunman because that's the way all of the other assassinations of American presidents were committed. Of course, he didn't note that in the Lincoln assassination, eight people were convicted of being involved in a plot to kill President Lincoln, four of whom were eventually tried and executed for the death of Lincoln. But from the outset, it was clear that the Warren Commission was starting on the premise that Lee Harvey Oswald was guilty. He sat in his perch on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, fired off three shots. One of the shots missed the president and the limousine as a whole, actually wounding a bystander, James Tag, and the other two bullets did the damage to both Governor Connolly and President Kennedy. Now, the Warren Commission did its work. It called its witnesses. And as you were asking, a number of the witnesses who presented views that opposed the position of three shots, one lone gunman firing from the back, those witnesses were often discounted. But you still can read in Warren Commission testimony of people like Jean Hill, who are claiming that she heard four to six shots. But many witnesses were simply not called by the Warren Commission when their views opposed the foregone conclusions of the Commission. It was especially in the investigation of Oswald that the Warren Commission attempted to devise a profile. And so, if one reads the Warren report, it's a pseudo biography of Oswald, trying to very, in a very difficult manner, come to some sort of motivation about why he would kill the president.

Jim du Bois  13:06

Let's focus for a moment on Lee Harvey Oswald. He was a suspect almost from the beginning. Who was Lee Harvey Oswald, and why was he so early on looked upon as the sole suspect in the Kennedy assassination?

James Norwood  13:20

Well, the reports about Oswald identifying him for a subject, as the suspect, begin within an hour of the assassination. And that is very curious because there appears on a list that was typed by one of the Dallas police detectives a list of the employees of the Texas School Book Depository, and at the head of the list was the name Harvey Lee Oswald, not Lee Harvey Oswald but Harvey Lee Oswald. How that name came to be reversed is a subject of great interest because it comes out in the 1970s, during the House Select Committee review, that Harvey Lee Oswald was in the files of American intelligence, and so many of the files referred to Lee Harvey Oswald, and other others refer to Harvey Lee Oswald. Jack Rebel, who typed up that list, had met with an army intelligence officer who just happened to be in Dealey Plaza, which was the eventual source for that Harvey Lee Oswald. We then see in some of the earliest press releases references to Harvey Lee Oswald. And so early on, Oswald was the first suspect. He was the only suspect, and there were never any other alternative suspects in this case, despite overwhelming evidence that Oswald did not act alone even if he did involve. The evidence suggests that he never purchased the rifle that he was alleged to use. His images splashed on the cover of Life magazine weeks after the assassination holding the rifle. When he was interrogated, Oswald told the police that that picture was a fabrication. It was his head pasted on someone, on someone else's body. He did not own a rifle. He did not bring a rifle to work. And he actually told the media as he was being paraded in front of the cameras before the Dallas police officers, "I didn't shoot anyone. I'm just a patsy."

Jim du Bois  15:48

Now during the weekend that began on Friday, November 22, when the President was assassinated, there are some other extraordinary events. Probably the most extraordinary was the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald as he was about to be transported out of, I believe, the Dallas Police Headquarters. He was shot by Jack Ruby. Who is Jack Ruby, and why did Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald intersect so fatefully?

James Norwood  16:13

Yes. First, it must be mentioned that there was another murder committed on the day of the assassination, and that was the death of Officer JD Tippit. Tippit was killed also under very murky circumstances. And after he was killed, almost immediately, it was argued that Oswald was the killer of Tippet as well as JFK. Now that murder didn't get investigated either. So, when one studies the Tippit killing, it is also a kind of Rashomon of evidence where one can see conflicting stories, different eyewitness accounts, very confusing forensic evidence, and the actual placement of Oswald in the location at 10th and Patten in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas, when the all of the evidence points to him already been seated in the Dallas theater at that time, the Texas theater on Jefferson Boulevard, suggest that Oswald did not kill Tippet either. Now, the shooting of Oswald occurred on Sunday, it was Sunday morning, following the assassination over the weekend. And it is arguably the first live killing ever shown on American television, where to the horror of the viewers who were following the events the assassination weekend, Oswald was being transferred from the city headquarters of the Dallas Police to the county facility actually right in Dealey Plaza, where it was believed he would be more secure, ironically. So, the transfer took place on Sunday morning. And as Oswald was being protected, at least in the security of approximately 70 Dallas police officers, a nightclub owner by the name of Jack Ruby entered, somehow got into the basement, stepped forward, and shot Oswald in the stomach. Oswald was then transferred to Parkland Hospital, the same hospital where JFK was taken and pronounced dead. And it was there that Lee Harvey Oswald was pronounced dead as well from the shot from Jack Ruby. Ruby is a shadowy figure whose background, if we trace it very carefully, shows ties to the American government. He was a known FBI informant going all the way back to the time of Richard Nixon and the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1940s. He was a gun runner in the employ, obviously, of the CIA, and running guns to Cuba. And so there are many unanswered questions about Jack Ruby.

Jim du Bois  19:26

After the Warren Commission report came out, there were subsequent reports that came in later years, for example, the Clark Panel, Rockefeller Commission, the Church Committee, and the House Select Committee On Assassinations. What did these subsequent investigatory bodies reveal or perhaps even contradict from the Warren report?

James Norwood  19:46

This is an important topic, and to study those stages of the assassination, inquiry, and the aftermath is extremely instructive because each one of those investigatory bodies eventually uncovers new and important information about the assassination. So, it's worth our while to have that timeline, the chronology, of all the new things that we learn decade by decade in the various investigations. A turning point really is one that's not a government investigation but a personal and private investigation by Jim Garrison, the district attorney in New Orleans, because he really sparked a new interest in the case in the late 1960s, when he formally charged, arrested and charged one man that he thought was complicit in the assassination of JFK. The Garrison trial then unfolded, and Clay Shaw, who was put on trial, was acquitted by the jury, who, after the case was over, said that Garrison had made a very strong case that there was a plot to kill the president, they just couldn't find conclusively that there was evidence against Clay Shaw. The key issue on which Garrison's case revolved was that Clay Shaw was associated with the CIA. He denied that on the witness stand. Garrison was able to, unable to provide definitive proof. But years later, due especially to the House Select Committee in the 1970s, the truth came out that Clay Shaw was, in fact, associated with the CIA. So, the Garrison trial was significant as a turning point. It then led, especially in the wake of Watergate, to more accountability from government, that led to the Rockefeller Commission, the House Select Committee on Assassinations. And then in the 1990s, the ARRB, the Assassination Records Review Board that came about due to the effect of Oliver Stone's JFK film, and then unsealed files, released new documents for the public and conducted key interviews that were especially revealing to shed new light on the case. So, we now have so much information that it's possible to pull it together and understand what happened in the death of President Kennedy.

Jim du Bois  22:38

Why do you think people of all ages, of all generations, remain so fascinated with the Kennedy assassination?

James Norwood  22:45

Well, one reason certainly is that we do not have closure yet on this subject. And no matter what the degree of expertise or knowledge, people get involved in this a little and realize that there is just so much confusion and contradictory evidence that it's an incomplete episode in our nation's history. Another important fact is that of the significance of the event itself, what a turning point it was in our nation's history. Keep in mind that on the Monday following the assassination, a major policy of our nation had changed. And that was our commitment to the war in Vietnam. JFK was ready to withdraw the advisors. He had formulated a plan to bring back 1000 advisors by the end of ‘64 and to completely end any involvement of America, in Vietnam, by 1965. All of that changed with the incoming president, Lyndon Johnson, and it happened almost instantly over the assassination weekend. And so, Dan Rather, the CBS commentator, said famously that on Tuesday, Americans went back to work, and we went back on our course as Americans. Well, the course of America did change on that date because the Pentagon had already concluded that the draft was going to be increased and that we had to anticipate approximately 50,000 casualties of American military in the commitment to Viet Nam. So our history radically changed with that event. It was a turning point. And in studying the assassination, it sheds light on the entire evolution of our nation. It's also important, I think, to study this topic because of the actual legacy of President Kennedy. This was a man who is interested in looking at diplomacy as a main way to solve the world's problems as opposed to necessarily military engagement. He had developed plans for detente with Khrushchev in the Soviet Union, with Castro in Cuba, kinds of approaches that anticipated what would not come until the 1980s with Mikhail Gorbachev and his policy of Glasnost. And even in Africa, even today, John F. Kennedy is celebrated as a great liberator, someone who championed the nationalism of African nations and actually championed Arab nationalism in the Arab states, especially Egypt. So, it's worth our while to understand the man and his legacy that really marks a watershed in our history in the last half-century.

Jim du Bois  25:48

Professor James Norwood, thank you so much for joining us.

James Norwood  25:51

Thank you, Jim. It was a pleasure.

Midterm Elections Analysis

U of M Associate Professor of Political Science Kathryn Pearson

Download

SPEAKERS

Jim du Bois, Kathryn Pearson

 27:28

Jim du Bois  00:00

Dialogue Minnesota...conversations about the issues that matter to you. I'm Jim du Bois. Election Day was this past Tuesday, but we're still awaiting the results of several key races which will decide which party will control Congress. This week on Dialogue Minnesota, University of Minnesota Associate Professor of Political Science Kathryn Pearson joins us with an election analysis. Professor Pearson, welcome back to dialogue Minnesota.

 Kathryn Pearson  00:28

Thank you, Jim. Great to be here.

 Jim du Bois  00:30The anticipated red wave did not materialize on election night. Did the results on Tuesday surprise you at all?

 Kathryn Pearson  00:38

Yes, they did. Political scientists have studied midterm elections extensively. And given the fact that Democrats hold the White House, and President Biden's popularity is pretty low hovering in the low 40s. The expectation was based on economic forecasting models and sort of understanding these fundamentals, that Republicans would pick up many House seats. And while Republicans did pick up House seats, the gains are clearly not as extensive as expected, as Republicans haven't yet reached that 218 magic number and the Senate is still too close to call. And usually, in wave election years, competitive races and state legislatures and for the governor's office all go toward the party that does not occupy the White House. And that just didn't happen on election night.

 

Jim du Bois  01:28

While many media outlets jumped on the story that Republicans didn't do as well as expected, it seems increasingly likely, as you said, that they will retake the House, and the Senate remains in play. Are the Democrats perhaps a bit premature in celebrating the midterms as a success for the party?

 Kathryn Pearson  01:47

In some ways yes, in some ways no. Nationwide, if you sort of add up the state legislative races and the governor's races, it definitely was a better night for Democrats than anyone expected. But you're absolutely right, it looks very likely that Republicans will take control of, majority party control of the House of Representatives, which will mean that President Biden's agenda will hit many roadblocks going forward. Democrats won't be able to use, for example, the reconciliation process to pass major legislation as they have during the past few years. But four states went solidly Democratic, Minnesota, Michigan, Maine, Maryland. So Democrats did have a better night than expected. There's no doubt about that.

 Jim du Bois  02:32

In what areas of the country did Republicans do well, and where did Democrats do well?

 Kathryn Pearson  02:38

Republicans did extremely well in Florida and New York. If you look at statewide races, if you look at pickups in House seats, I think it is possible that the pickups in Florida and New York alone will be enough to give Republicans majority party control of the House when all the ballots are counted. We'll see. But those are two states where Republicans did extremely well. And Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, won quickly and easily on election night, and that was a big victory for him in his own governor's race, but it was probably a bigger victory for him as he thinks about his position going into the 2024 elections.

 Jim du Bois  03:19

What victories or upsets surprised you the most on election night?

 Kathryn Pearson  03:24

Well, I was not thinking that the DFL would enjoy unified party control in St. Paul in January. So clearly, it's very narrow. And we knew that whoever won the margins would be narrower, but for the DFL to retake the Minnesota Senate and to maintain the House, and to win all four statewide races, particularly the governor's race by the margin that Walz had was a bit of a surprise. Minnesota is a state that leans Democratic, but yet in a year that's good for Republicans, I expected the statewide candidates to be more competitive. And I thought that the Democrats’ best hope was to maintain control of the House, but I wasn't thinking that they would regain the Senate. So, that was certainly surprising. The fact that Republican Congresswoman Lauren Bobert, that race has not been called, she's narrowly ahead in Colorado, that is a solidly Republican district. So, you know, there were some surprises like that on election night. But the bottom line is, in many states, Democrats and Republicans are pretty evenly and narrowly divided. And so the fact that there's so many competitive races and so many that haven't been called, at some level really isn't that surprising.

 Jim du Bois  04:43

Was election night a good night for first-time candidates and challengers, or was it a better night for incumbents?

 Kathryn Pearson  04:50

I think overall, it was a better night for incumbents. If you look to Wisconsin, for example, again, a state where Democrats and Republicans are pretty evenly divided. Governor Evers, the incumbent, hangs on his position as governor, but yet Republican incumbent Ron Johnson holds on to his US Senate seat. So their incumbents did pretty well. That's not to say that there weren't some surprises, both in congressional races and other races looking at incumbents who were defeated. But by and large, the incumbency advantage does appear to have helped candidates in tight races.

 Jim du Bois  05:31

There's still likely a lot of data to suss out from exit polls, but from what you've seen so far, what issues were most important to voters this year?

 Kathryn Pearson  05:41

Well, we know the economy was important. We know inflation was important. But we also know that abortion was important. And although it never topped the economy and inflation in polls, the fact that it regularly showed up in polls is a change from the past. And of course, that is due to the Dobbs decision back in June, and DFL candidates talked a lot about abortion. And I think that issue really motivated the Democratic base to come out and vote. We saw in the states that had initiatives about abortion that all of the states that had abortion on the ballot, passed an initiative at the statewide level to maintain abortion rights.

 Jim du Bois  06:23

Since he emerged as the Republican presidential front-runner in 2016, former President Trump has been a powerful and often divisive force in the GOP. How did the candidates who aligned with Trump or had his endorsement fair on Tuesday night?

 Kathryn Pearson  06:40

Not very well, and that narrative has definitely been one that has been repeated many times since Election Night that former President Trump's candidates did not perform as anticipated. JD Vance, the Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio was certainly a notable exception. He won, he won easily early on election night. But if you look at Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, President Trump's endorsement of Oz likely helped him win that Republican primary, and then he lost decisively on election night. And Pennsylvania is a state that a Republican could have won if it had been a different Republican who would run a better campaign. So that was clearly a failure for the former president. And then in Arizona, the president endorsed Kari Lake, a 2020 election denier, as governor in Arizona, and that race is still too close to call. But certainly, his endorsement did not help Republicans in Arizona.

 Jim du Bois  07:37

Well, as you mentioned, Governor Ron DeSantis handily won reelection, and Tuesday was a good night for Republicans in the state of Florida. Did this win give DeSantis a boost for a presidential run in 2024?

 Kathryn Pearson  07:50

Yes, there's no question that now DeSantis, he was always going to be a contender, but his win in what used to be considered a swing state definitely gives him an advantage going into the nominating contests. Now, how that will translate in terms of endorsements and money is too soon to tell. But there's no doubt that the narrative coming out of the 2022 midterms is that DeSantis really helped Republicans in Florida, and Trump contributed to some key Republican offices across the country.

 Jim du Bois  08:23

Well, neither DeSantis nor Trump have formally announced their candidacy for the GOP nomination for president in 2024. But given the current situation, do you see a coming showdown between Trump and DeSantis as likely?

 Kathryn Pearson  08:38

Yes, I do. And we're already seeing it play out with the former president insulting DeSantis, and sort of clearly realizing that if the former president does announce on November 15, as many anticipate, he says he has an important announcement that they will be quite competitive if they indeed both run.

 Jim du Bois  09:03

Turning to the Minnesota races, Trump endorsed Dr. Scott Jensen for governor and Kim Crockett for Secretary of State, both of whom lost. What does this say about President Trump's influence on the GOP in Minnesota?

 Kathryn Pearson  09:17

Well, significantly, he endorsed them very late in the race. And so unlike some of these other races that we're talking about, his endorsement was not key to their primary win, for example, and neither candidate really touted the former president's endorsement very much, sort of, I think realizing that in Minnesota, it would not help them with independent voters. But it does say that President Trump is not popular in Minnesota. I mean, he's lost Minnesota twice, by a greater margin in 2020, of course, but it does speak to some of the the factions and the divides within the Republican Party. We saw those divides play out at the Republican convention. And I think that less extreme Republican candidates statewide would have likely done better. I don't know that they would have won, the margin of victory for Governor Walz and Secretary of State Steve Simon were pretty substantial. But I don't think that the Trump style will do well in Minnesota. Many elections have shown that.

 Jim du Bois  10:20

The Democrats have a split in their party between progressives and moderates. How would you compare the performance of progressive Democratic candidates versus moderates on Tuesday night?

 Kathryn Pearson  10:30

Well, it really depends which districts we're talking about. So for example, Congresswoman Angie Craig from Minnesota Second District is a moderate, and she campaigns and governs as a moderate, and she defeated her challenger, Tyler Kistner, by a bigger margin than people were anticipating. This was a rematch for them. She had also defeated him in 2020. On the other hand, progressive Democrats in Minnesota, for the most part, won their seats quite easily as well. And so a lot of the differences really have to do with the districts that they, that they represent, and by and large, moderates tend to represent swing districts, and so it's harder for moderates. But moderates in the DFL did, did pretty well on election night. There was a surprise that Mary Murphy, a long-serving incumbent, a moderate DFL'er in the in the statehouse lost, but nonetheless, DFL'ers did pretty well on election night in Minnesota. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, many predicted that women would be motivated by this decision. Was there a strong turnout by women in this election who were energized by the abortion issue, and did they tend to vote for Democrats? Yes, the answer to both those questions is yes. Since 1980, there has been a gender gap in the electorate, where women are more likely to identify as Democrats and vote for Democrats than men are. The source of that gender gap by and large is actually not disagreement over abortion. The source of the gender gap overall is a disagreement over the size of government and the role of government. Having said that, I think this election cycle was a little bit different in terms of motivation, that women were motivated to come, to come to the polls. You know, that said, we'll, we'll look at the final exit polls as they and the results as they continue to trickle in. But partisan differences above all else sort of explain differences on positions on abortion, but women are more likely to identify as Democrats and to support abortion rights.

 Jim du Bois  12:41

How did women candidates for both parties fair in this election? Was any progress made toward creating a more gender-balanced Congress?

 Kathryn Pearson  12:50

No, in fact, the number of women will go down in the 118th Congress. There are caveats in that many of the races haven't been called. But, but it looks like the number of women in the US Congress, in the US House, will go down pretty significantly. So far, there's a drop among women in both parties. And that's not necessarily because women are more likely to lose, although some prominent women in the House have lost such as Elaine Luria in Virginia. But just the numbers of new women running weren't high enough to bring in a new cohort of women. And then many women have also retired.

 

Jim du Bois  13:29

We talked about a potential Trump versus DeSantis showdown for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. On the Democratic side, we don't know yet if President Biden will run for re-election. And some Democrats are hinting that Biden may not be the party's best choice for 2024. What signals did this election send to Democrats who may be thinking about seeking their party's nomination in 2024?

 Kathryn Pearson  13:54

Wow, that is, that's a tough question. And I think Democrats will certainly be looking to the Republican Party to see what they're doing because I think that many Democrats actually do think that Biden would be the best choice to run against former President Trump. But I think it's less clear that he would be the best choice to run against a Governor DeSantis. And so, the other question, of course, that is complicated for Democrats is if not, not Biden, then who would be the best choice? And that is not particularly clear. And so, after the 2016 election, Democrats were looking, first and foremost, to the most electable candidate. I don't know that Joe Biden sort of generated the most enthusiasm among Democrats. But Democrats were enthusiastic about him because they thought that he offered the best chance of defeating President Trump, which indeed he did. And that calculation will certainly be on their minds as they think about 2024. There are obviously a lot of talented Democratic senators who could get in the mix. But I think a key question for Democratic actors and those who donate money and endorse would be, you know, would any of these candidates be more electable in a general election than President Biden? And I don't know the answer that.

 Jim du Bois  15:10

In Minnesota there was definitely not a red wave on election night. In his concession speech, GOP gubernatorial candidate Scott Jensen said a blue wave had actually swept through the state on Tuesday, with all the Democratic incumbent constitutional officers winning their races. The DFL also held on to its House majority and picked up the Senate. Was Jensen's characterization of a Minnesota blue wave accurate?

 Kathryn Pearson  15:35

I don't know that I would call it a blue wave. There is no doubt that it was a surprisingly good night for the DFL in Minnesota. But if we were truly to see a wave, that would have meant that DFL candidates won in every competitive legislative election, and we did not see that happen. There were many competitive elections where Republicans indeed won. But Democrats just won a surprising number of them, enough to maintain their majority in the House and take the majority in the Senate. And then, of course, the statewide candidates all won, even if two of them did win narrowly.

 Jim du Bois  16:09

With the Democrats in full control in Minnesota now, what do you expect Governor Walz will try to accomplish in the 2023 legislative session?

 Kathryn Pearson  16:18

Well, I think there are a lot of Democrats that are likely already making demands on, on Governor Walz. A $9 billion surplus, which is really extraordinary. Democrats and Republicans got close to a compromise on that surplus in the last session. And I suspect that Democrats are breathing a sigh of relief that they didn't reach a compromise, and Republicans are not happy about that. It was surprising at the time. Perhaps some thought that Republicans were strategically waiting until they may have enjoyed majority party control of both legislative chambers, which obviously did not happen. So, I think Democrats will feel a lot of pressure to spend additional funds on education, on sort of health and human services, on the environment. Also to legalize marijuana, that's been an issue that has long been discussed. And so, I think that there will be just a lot of issues sort of coming to the forefront, some that were worked out in the last session, and some that will be new. And obviously, Democrats are in a great position in Minnesota. That said, the majorities are extraordinarily narrow. And so, in order to pass this legislation, they'll need every vote in the Senate and nearly every vote in the House. And so, compromises within the party will still need to be made. I'm sure there'll be some effort to reach out to some Republicans as well. But in this polarized era, I'm not sure how that will go.

 Jim du Bois  17:49

It looks like the GOP will control the US House of Representatives. What does this mean for Minnesota Republicans? I'm thinking in particular, of Sixth District Congressman Tom Emmer. Will he perhaps have a more prominent position within the party, assuming the GOP takes control of the House?

 Kathryn Pearson  18:08

And that is a great question. So before the election, a lot has a lot was made about the fact that Emmer is one of three Republicans who would be vying for the position of Republican Whip. And so that is, you know, a senior leadership position, and Emmer seems well positioned to do so. He has been the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee. So, in other words, in charge of Republican House candidates, recruiting funding, sort of getting the party to victory, and certainly regaining majority party control is a lot to celebrate. On the other hand, House Republicans did not have the night that they were anticipating. The gains are not certainly not as large as anticipated. And so, I'm not sure how costly that will be to Emmer in the battle. He's clearly well respected by his Republican colleagues and well positioned to be in the leadership, but the thinking was that the election would be a big victory for him. And although it still seems like it will be a victory, I don't know that it will be quite as big as he was anticipating or how that will affect us leadership bid.

 Jim du Bois  19:16

The midterms are often positioned by the media and political pundits as a referendum on the president or the party in power. Do you think the issues that were of concern for Minnesota voters mirrored those of voters nationwide or were there specific local issues that drove Minnesota voters to the polls?

 Kathryn Pearson  19:34

I think this was a very nationalized election, both in Minnesota and across the country. Minnesotans, the candidates and voters alike, were talking about the economy. They were talking about inflation. They were talking about crime. And they were talking about abortion. And those are the same issues that candidates were talking about nationwide. Now, that doesn't mean that, you know, when some of the legislative candidates were door knocking, they were not also mentioning issues specific to their legislative districts and communities and neighborhoods. But the elections were really very nationalized.

 Jim du Bois  20:06

Incumbent DFL Attorney General Keith Ellison held on to his seat by about a 20,000 vote margin, much tighter than other state races where incumbent DFL constitutional officers defeated their GOP challengers. Does Ellison's comparative underperformance on Tuesday night signal that Minnesotans split their ballots between party lines in this particular race?

 Kathryn Pearson  20:30

Well, that is always sort of the the narrative is that Minnesotans like to split their ticket. But if you actually look at the votes, I mean, most partisans still voted straight party line. But it didn't take that many Minnesotans to either slit their tickets or to drop off, in other words, vote for the top of the ticket but not some of the, the other races, such as Ellison's, to produce this result. So, the vast majority of Minnesotans probably voted straight party line, but enough supported Walz and not Ellison to create this difference.

 Jim du Bois  21:05

The Georgia Senate race will not be decided until after a runoff between Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock and GOP challenger Herschel Walker. That's because neither candidate received over 50% of the vote on Election Day, and according to Georgia law, such an election has to go to a runoff. A Libertarian Party candidate received just over 2% of the vote. Let's talk about the role of third parties in this election. Did any make a significant showing, or do many of them simply play the role of spoiler for a major party candidate?

 Kathryn Pearson  21:37

By and large, they play the role of spoiler, and that is particularly true in the two states that require a runoff if neither party's candidate gets to that 50% plus one margin. Minnesota obviously does not have that rule; otherwise, we'd be going to a runoff for some of these races. So, third-party candidates, you know, in those states really affect the outcomes, but they can affect the outcomes in other places as well if voters are voting for a third-party candidate instead of one of the two major party candidates, even if you know absent the third-party candidate, they would have voted for them. But what we don't know about third-party candidates is whether or not the voters who support them would just not vote in that race otherwise or if they would give their vote to someone else. The other way in which third-party candidates are affecting the race is they encourage voters to talk about their issues. Certainly, the presence of the marijuana candidates, I think, really prompted Democrats to keep talking about the legalization of marijuana to try to ensure that third-party candidates didn't siphon support from them.

 Jim du Bois  22:45

So far, it seems that candidates from both parties have been fairly gracious losers. They have made concession speeches where they acknowledged that they lost the election. They congratulated their opponent. Do you think this is a trend perhaps that we might see some of this election denialism go away in this, following this cycle, or is this an anomaly?

 Kathryn Pearson  23:12

I certainly hope it's a trend. It has been a great relief to see the losers concede. It seems striking to have to say that, but at this particular point, it has been a real relief to see so many candidates who have lost, including those who have denied the results of 2020, concede their own races. Now, we'll see what happens in Arizona with gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake in that very close election. She has made false allegations about Arizona election workers. So, we'll see what happens there.

 Jim du Bois  23:46

There are several outstanding elections, not just in Congress, but also at the state level and even the local level. A few that come to mind, two in particular. One is the gubernatorial race in Oregon, where there's a very tight race between the Democratic and the Republican candidates. If by chance the governor's seat in Oregon would flip to the GOP, that'd be the first time in 40 years that a Democrat has not held that seat in Oregon. We're also seeing something rather interesting playing out in Los Angeles, the mayoral race, where there is a billionaire businessperson challenging the Democrat, and that race is coming down to the wire as well. Do you think in those particular locations, and maybe we tie in a third one here, we know that in the suburbs surrounding New York City, there was a swing to the GOP as well. So, if we look at Los Angeles, New York, and at the state level in Oregon, we've had obviously some crime issues in the Portland area. Do you think crime may be weighing on these particular races and might be one of the reasons why more voters tacked to a GOP candidate in areas that are normally considered pretty safe for Democrats?

 Kathryn Pearson  25:00

I do. I mean, I think all of the issues are still in the mix, and the fact that the election fundamentals still favored Republicans because President Biden occupies the White House and is not very popular and the economy is struggling, so all those things still matter. But yes, I do think crime had a particular impact on some of these races.

 Jim du Bois  25:20

Let's talk about some of the demographics coming out on the exit polls. We did hear that younger voters showed up in greater numbers than was anticipated. And also some interesting trends, I think an AP poll was indicating that more younger Blacks tacked to the GOP in the midterm elections. We also know there was some loss of Latino voters to the GOP, too. Normally Latino voters have been pretty loyal to the Democratic Party. Do you think it's a little too early to try and draw any conclusions about whether these trends will continue? And should the Democrats be concerned, especially with the potential loss of two bases that have been a very important part of the party's support?

 Kathryn Pearson  26:06

I think overall when looking at younger voters, Democrats should be encouraged. Because the youngest age group, whether it's 18 to 25, or 18 to 29, however you parse it out, is the most Democratically inclined age cohort in the country. And political science tells us that partisan identification for most voters is actually fairly stable. So, to the extent that younger voters are voting democratic, those voters will likely continue to vote Democratic. Now, turnout was greater than anticipated among younger voters, but it was still lower than every other age cohort. So, Democrats are well aware of this and really tried to mobilize younger voters because of this issue. And we actually, I think, you know, same-day registration states likely will see a larger turnout of younger voters because younger voters are the most residentially mobile. And so, in general, I think Democrats are encouraged by the vote choices of younger voters but really need to not take them for granted, especially as they're harder to mobilize to turn out.

 Jim du Bois  27:17

Kathryn Pearson is an associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. Professor Pearson, thanks again for joining us on Dialogue Minnesota.

 27:26

My pleasure, Jim. Great to be with you.

Midterm Elections Preview

U of M Associate Professor of Political Science Kathryn Pearson

Download

SPEAKERS

Jim du Bois, Kathryn Pearson

 25:02

Jim du Bois  00:00

Dialogue Minnesota...conversations about the issues that matter to you. I'm Jim du Bois. The midterm elections are a couple of days away, and the stakes for both the Democratic and Republican parties are high since control of Congress hangs in the balance. At the state level, all 201 Minnesota legislators and our constitutional officers are up for election. University of Minnesota Associate Professor of Political Science Kathryn Pearson joins us for a look at where things stand as voters prepare to go to the polls on Tuesday. Professor Pearson, welcome back to Dialogue Minnesota.

 Kathryn Pearson  00:38

Thank you, Jim. It's great to be with you.

 Jim du Bois  00:40

The midterm elections take place on Tuesday, November 8. Many see this year's midterms as a referendum on Joe Biden's presidency. There's a long-standing pattern in American politics where the party controlling the White House loses congressional seats in the midterms. What are some of the reasons why it is so hard for the party in power to maintain its numbers in Congress?

 Kathryn Pearson  01:03

That's right. Over the last century, there have only been three midterm elections where the president's party has actually picked up a few seats in Congress. In every other cycle, the President's party has lost seats in the House, usually, on average, about 30 seats. The losses are fewer in the Senate. The Senate is more variable because only a third of the seats are up. But typically, two years is not enough time for the President to get a lot done and to really make a mark so that voters are enthusiastic about the President's performance. And in the case of President Biden, his approval ratings have hovered in the low 40s. And so, that really makes it difficult for Democrats in this particular midterm cycle. We have high inflation, people are pessimistic about the economy. And so voters, Republican voters are more enthusiastic about turning out to vote against Joe Biden, even though he's not on the ballot, and vote for Republican candidates. And there is some Democratic enthusiasm caused by the Dobbs Supreme Court decision back in June, but in general, polls are showing that Republicans are more enthusiastic. So, the combination of an unpopular Democratic president and a faltering economy make this midterm cycle particularly challenging for Democrats at every level.

 Jim du Bois  02:25

Well, let's talk about what the polls are indicating this year. How close is the battle for the House and the Senate expected to be?

 Kathryn Pearson  02:32

Well, the question about the House of Representatives is how many seats do Republicans pick up, not whether or not they will pick up seats. And it seems highly likely that they will pick up many more than the five that they need to regain majority party control of the House of Representatives. And so, having said that, many of the competitive races are very close. And so, if we see a strong Republican tide on election night, Republicans could pick up 20 House seats. If we don't see a strong tide, it could be around 10. So, we really don't know just because so many of the House seats are tossups and so close, but Democrats are defending many more competitive seats than Republicans are in this particular cycle. The US Senate is a trickier question. Of course, only a third of the seats are up. It's currently 50-50. And there are several very competitive races. The electoral cycle definitely benefits Republicans, but Republicans have nominated some candidates in some states that are having a really hard time. I'm thinking about Oz in Pennsylvania and Walker in Georgia. These are two states where a strong Republican candidate would likely have a pretty big lead in these states. But that's not the case, and so these are two states that are very close.

 Jim du Bois  03:50

Which gubernatorial races will you'll be watching most closely this election cycle, and do you expect to see any red or blue shifts in these races?

 Kathryn Pearson  04:00

Well, even though we're talking about President Biden and the House and Senate, state legislatures and governor’s races are also affected by these national trends. And so, we saw in 2010, when Democrats fared so poorly, losing 63 seats in the House, Democrats also lost many state legislative majorities and several governor's races as well. And so, the top electoral cycle for Democrats sort of affects governor's races as well. Being in Minnesota, I'm, of course very closely watching Minnesota's race. The incumbent DFL Governor Tim Walz has a lead in the polls, but there's no doubt that this tough electoral cycle is making it a competitive race in Minnesota.

 Jim du Bois  04:47

In 2016, virtually no major poll predicted that Donald Trump would win the presidency. Why were the polls so off in 2016, and have the issues leading to those inaccuracies been addressed?

 Kathryn Pearson  05:01

Well, the polls were off in 2016 because they underestimated support for President Trump. They actually got support for Hillary Clinton, they captured that pretty accurately. But what they didn't capture was support for President Trump, especially in some of those key swing states, like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, because they undercounted, they, they didn't have enough respondents, white men who lived in rural areas without college degrees, who also really shifted from 2012 to 2016 in favor of Republican candidates. Those voters were less likely to respond to polls, and when they did, pollsters did not adjust the polls enough to account for their preferences that went heavily toward Trump because of this shift from 2012 to 2016. So, pollsters are aware of this and are trying to improve the polls. But I think the reality is that it is increasingly difficult to poll in this era, even with you know, many different polling options, whether it's cell phones, or texts, or online polls, it is still difficult to get a representative sample of voters to respond to polls. So, I think we really need to consider polls to be a snapshot in time and not necessarily predictive of election results. The other thing about polls is that we should really look to polls that are aggregated, so taking together instead of just relying on one particular poll, because the power of aggregation of many polls is that they get a more accurate estimate of a snapshot in time, but they don't predict election outcomes. And I think that the media sort of leads us to believe that that's the case. And then voters and candidates and strategists are understandably very frustrated when they're wrong.

 Jim du Bois  06:49

When the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this year, the country saw an uptick in women registering to vote. Polls this summer indicated that many Americans disapproved of the ruling and blamed the Republican Party. Are abortion rights still a significant issue for voters given concerns about inflation, gas prices, the border, and crime to name a few?

 Kathryn Pearson  07:12

That question will be easier to answer after election day. But one thing is clear: abortion is a bigger issue in this election than it has been in previous elections. Does that mean that it's as important as the economy, inflation, crime? Not necessarily. But polls suggest that younger voters are very upset by this decision. And it is the case that majorities in most states in America are opposed to the Dobbs decision that overturn Roe v. Wade. But if that decision is not sort of the primary motivating factor in vote choice, then it won't necessarily have the impact that it looked like it might have earlier in the summer. It is also the case that more women did start registering to vote than men after the Dobbs decision, which is interesting because historically, over time, polls have shown that divides on the question of abortion aren't really divides along gender lines, they're divides along partisan lines, or ideological lines, religiosity, those are the types of factors that sort of predict differing opinions on abortion, not so much gender. Typically, equal percentages of men and women sort of support or disapprove of abortion rights, even as a majority of the country tends to be in favor of access to abortion with some restrictions.

 Jim du Bois  08:37

We mentioned at the start of the show that the midterms have much to do with the presidency of Joe Biden and how voters view his presidency. But are there local issues that you're seeing in Minnesota this year that are taking center stage?

 Kathryn Pearson  08:52

The issues that we're seeing in the ads in Minnesota are, by and large, the same issues that we're seeing nationally. So, Democrats in Minnesota are talking a lot about access to abortion in the wake of Dobbs. Republicans in Minnesota are talking a lot about crime, and they're talking about the economy and inflation. Democrats are talking about the economy as well, sort of making their case about the economy. But these are the same trends that we're seeing nationally, and in general, elections have become much more nationalized. And we saw this in the 2018 midterms with, at that point, a record number of voters voting straight party line, not splitting their ticket, just voting for one party's candidates. And so, even though the races are closely divided here, most voters in Minnesota will vote straight party line.

 Jim du Bois  09:46

Minnesota since eight US House members to Washington. Currently, there are an equal number of Democrats and Republicans. Do you expect this balance to change after the midterms?

 Kathryn Pearson  09:56

Well, Minnesota's Second District is home to one of the most competitive, expensive House races in the country. And so, it is certainly too close to call at this point. I think it's likely that the other seven incumbents will win in the other seven races. There's, you know, there's a lot of money being spent in Minnesota's First District, so, but with a good year for Republicans, I think that is very likely to stay in Republican hands. But the Second District is just too close to call. It's a toss-up race. Democratic incumbent Angie Craig is running for re-election, has raised millions of dollars. And she's been challenged again by Tyler Kistner, who has not raised as much money as Craig for his campaign, but really benefits from millions of dollars in outside spending from groups running attack ads against Craig. And then Craig is also benefiting from outside money running attack ads against Kistner. So, this is an incredibly close race and incredibly expensive race. And both parties are looking to Minnesota Second District as one of the races that could help determine which party controls Congress or in reality, how big the Republican margin is.

 Jim du Bois  11:08

Let's talk a bit more about the First Congressional District which encompasses southern Minnesota. Republican Brad Finstad won the seat this year in a special election to fill a vacancy that was left after Representative Jim Hagedorn passed away. He now faces his Democratic challenger, Jeff Ettinger, who is a former Hormel CEO. Is it still possible for a Democrat to win in a district that has shifted red in the Trump years especially given the fact that Governor Walz had multiple terms in the First District?

 

Kathryn Pearson  11:38

Right, in the first district. If we were talking about this race in the context of the 2018 midterms where Democrats had a big advantage, I would have said yes, the First District would have been in play in that type of electoral context when that election was a referendum on President Trump, and Democratic enthusiasm back then was so much higher. But in 2022, in the context of a year that heavily favors Republicans, even though Finstad is only a recent incumbent and doesn't have the long-standing advantages that most incumbents have running for reelection, you know, a full two-year term, he is still advantaged as an incumbent and even more so as a Republican in a district that has shifted Republican at the presidential level.

 Jim du Bois  12:23

Representative Hagedorn was married to the former chair of the Republican Party of Minnesota, Jennifer Carnahan, who resigned after a federal grand jury indicted a prominent GOP fundraiser on sex trafficking charges. From what you can tell has this scandal affected the Republican Party in Minnesota at all this year?

 Kathryn Pearson  12:42

It's not something that voters are talking about necessarily. I think that if somehow Carnahan had been the Republican candidate in the First we'd be hearing a lot more, a lot more about it. But I think in terms of, you know, the party's ability to sort of, you know, maintain cohesion, and not have staff turnover and sort of internal issues It has affected the party. In terms of being an issue for voters that they're talking about, I think this election is so nationalized, and everyone is focused on, you know, the issues of the economy, inflation, crime and abortion, that this is sort of a peripheral concern, if at all, for voters in Minnesota in the cycle.

 Jim du Bois  12:42

You had mentioned that it's deja vu in the race in the Second District again this year. One other item interesting about the Second District is back in 2020, there was a third-party candidate on the Legal Marijuana Now ticket who died prior to the election, but his name stayed on the ballot. The same thing has happened again this year. And I guess the question is, how much did the third-party candidate impact the election two years ago? And do you think this will have the potential to throw a wrench into the race again this year?

 Kathryn Pearson  13:56

Because this election is so close, a third-party candidate could matter and could be determinative. It, of course, is very sad that Paula Overby has passed away and her name remains on the ballot; she will get fewer votes than she would have, in all likelihood, if she were still campaigning and still alive. But it is definitely possible that voters either who haven't followed the news or who just want to vote sort of symbolically in favor of the legalization of marijuana may still cast their vote for her, just as was the case two years ago. I think the question that's hard to know is if her name were not on the ballot, would those voters have voted for one of the two major party candidates or would they have just you know, voted in the governor's race but not voted in that congressional race at all? And we don't know the answer. I think in such a very close race, it is possible that a third-party candidate could make the difference If some Republican voters, you know, or Democratic voters who feel very strongly about the legalization of marijuana sort of, you know, put their support behind Overby instead of Craig, yes, it could make a difference. But once again, we don't know what those voters have just, you know, passed on voting in the Second District race more generally. So, because it's such a close race, yes, it could make a difference. But it's hard to know at this point.

 Jim du Bois  15:27

Let's look at the Minnesota gubernatorial race. Governor Tim Walz has held an early lead in the polls against Republican opponent Scott Jensen. Has Jensen been able to chip away at this lead as we approach the election?

 Kathryn Pearson  15:40

Yes, Jensen has absolutely chipped away at Walz's big lead that he enjoyed early on in the cycle. And I think that's for many reasons. The number one reason is that sort of partisans come home. For the most part, strong partisans support their party's candidate. And so, even the Republicans who may not have supported him in the nominating process, are at the end of the day going to support their candidate. I think the real question is the sort of very weak partisans or independents who may or may not vote in a midterm election where turnout is usually about 20 points lower or are still perhaps deciding between two candidates that they may have some issues with. In general, incumbents are advantaged in gubernatorial races, but again, in 2022, Republicans have a huge advantage because of President Biden's low approval ratings. And so I think that Jensen's stance against vaccines is perhaps hurting him among independent voters. I think it's possible that a candidate who had not taken such extreme positions, a Republican candidate who had not taken such extreme positions, would be doing better in the polls than Jensen is right now.

 Jim du Bois  16:53

Like many other states, rural Minnesota tends to trend conservative and the metro areas trend liberal. Does this mean the battle for the governor's office will be waged in the suburbs?

 Kathryn Pearson  17:04

Because this is such a close race, it really will be waged everywhere. And what I mean by that is that, yes, Walz will win overwhelmingly in the metro. But turnout will be key here. Again, midterm elections are about 20 points lower than presidential years. And so, in order for statewide candidates to do well in Minnesota, they rely on a big turnout in the metro. And so, if the turnout isn't big in the metro, that can be very harmful to DFL candidates. But yes, the suburbs also matter. The margins between Republicans and Democrats are much, much closer in the suburbs. And we see that with the Second District being so competitive. And we see that in the exurbs as well. Democrats, of course, are trying to hold on to a couple of seats, Senate seats in the Iron Range, a seat in St. Cloud, but I think you know, really given how close this race is, the battle is everywhere.

 Jim du Bois  17:59

While Governor Walz has maintained a consistent lead in the polls, the race between incumbent Attorney General Keith Ellison and his GOP challenger Jim Schultz is extremely tight. Why is this race so tight for Ellison this time, and of course, back we should mention when he was first elected to the office, the margin was very close back then as well. What headwinds are working against Ellison in this particular election cycle?

 Kathryn Pearson  18:26

First off, it's a good year in general for Republican candidates. And then I think the issue of crime. I think that many voters don't have a clear understanding of what the attorney general's office does. And as Schultz is sort of making promises about combating crime, some of these promises are actually outside of the purview of what the attorney general can do. But that's not particularly clear to voters. There's a lot unknown to voters about the office. And so given the fact that crime is such a concern to many Minnesota voters, I think that is definitely hurting Ellison as he is running for reelection. And his race, again, as you mentioned, was narrow four years ago, and that was a year that really favored Democrats. And so, it's not surprising that it is a highly competitive race and one of the closest.

 Jim du Bois  19:14

We should also mention that a statewide race the typically attracts very little attention is highly contentious this year. Incumbent DFL State Auditor Julie Blaha is in a tight race with her GOP challenger Ryan Wilson. Blaha is facing criticism because of the massive fraud associated with Feeding Our Futures. How close is this race at the moment?

 Kathryn Pearson  19:38

Oh, it's extremely close, both because of the Feed Our Futures fraud that you have brought up, and because once again, it's a good year for Republicans and you know, her incumbency status, we would typically think that would be helpful, but because of the scandal, I think it's actually making it more difficult for her to sort of get her message out. And so, strong Democrats will vote straight party line, strong Republicans will vote straight party line and then in some of these more competitive races there either might be just fall off people not voting, or more independent voters or weaker partisans being willing to cross party lines. for some of these candidates.

 Jim du Bois  20:16

Minnesota is one of the few states to have a split legislature. Democrats control the House, Republicans control the Senate. Do you expect this dynamic to change after the midterms?

 Kathryn Pearson  20:26

Well, because the divisions are so narrow, and the majority is so thin, really anything is possible. It is certainly possible that Republicans could control both chambers. It is also possible that the current split could continue. I think, I think it would be hard for the DFL to control the State Senate. But again, because these races are so close and so competitive, nothing is impossible, but I think one likely scenario would be the status quo.

 Jim du Bois  20:54

In 2020, two major events changed the way many Americans thought about education. First, the pandemic disrupted in-person learning for many students and angered parents on both sides of the aisle. Second, following the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, many schools reexamined how they teach about race. These two issues have inspired many people to run for local school boards. How do you think these types of very local races and issues are impacting the entire midterm election in terms of the salient issues that voters are concerned about?

Kathryn Pearson  21:31

Well, the nationalization of local school board races is really a troubling trend because it takes attention away from whatever particular issues a school district is sort of wrangling with and imposes national issues in local elections that really may not be relevant to a particular school at all. You know, most K through 12 schools do not teach critical race theory it; you know, it's something that is taught in law schools. It's, you know, discussed among academics. And so, I think some of the examples that are being used are teaching about history and incorporating race to a greater extent in the teaching of US history. But the debate over critical race theory really, sort of if you're thinking about the issues that schools, that most schools are facing, really does not make a lot of sense. But it has mobilized a lot of voters, a lot of candidates. And it's made the electoral environment more challenging for school board races as well. It's sort of taken something which used to be nonpartisan and really focused on whatever particular issues schools were facing and turned it into sort of a national issue with a lot of partisanship and conflict infused and so it's, it's not a good development in terms of thinking about how to best identify and sort of solve problems in local schools.

 Jim du Bois  22:59

Many conservative candidates running in local and national races this year have asserted a belief that Joe Biden did not legitimately win the presidency. How is this issue shaping our national and local races?

 Kathryn Pearson  23:12

Well, it is it's something that a lot of Republican candidates are repeating as well. And so, it's, it's deeply troubling that the election, which was certified by the secretaries of state of all 50 states, Democrats and Republicans alike, it's just not true, that, that Joe Biden did not legitimately win the election. Of course, he won it legitimately. And so, it's troubling in terms of what it means for future elections. Does this mean that if a candidate doesn't like the result, they'll say that the election was not legitimate? It's troubling as we think about moving forward because who knows what will happen in 2022, 2024 if certain candidates don't like the results.

 Jim du Bois  23:59

Do you think local election officials and our voting systems are prepared this year for what many think will be an onslaught of challenges and lawsuits?

 Kathryn Pearson  24:09

I think they have been preparing, but it is hard to know if they are prepared given that we don't know exactly what will happen after the election. It is certainly troubling to hear the reports of potential violence at polls, sort of, you know, hostility toward volunteer judges, poll workers, it is deeply troubling. You know, our democracy relies on free and fair elections.

 Jim du Bois  24:35

Kathryn Pearson is an associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. Professor Pearson, thanks so much for joining us on Dialogue Minnesota.

 Kathryn Pearson  24:44

My pleasure. Thank you, Jim.

 

The Russian Invasion of Ukraine & Putin's Nuclear Threat

University of Minnesota Associate Professor of Political Science Mark Bell

Download

SPEAKERS

Jim du Bois, Mark Bell

Jim du Bois  00:00

Dialogue Minnesota. Conversations about the issues that matter to you. I'm Jim du Bois. The invasion of Ukraine is being met with widespread international condemnation and the imposition of unprecedented economic sanctions against Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin has raised the specter of a nuclear response against countries that might provide military assistance to Ukraine. This week on Dialogue Minnesota, University of Minnesota Associate Professor of Political Science Mark Bell, who is an expert on foreign policy and nuclear weapons, joins us to discuss the situation in Ukraine. Professor Bell, welcome back to Dialogue Minnesota.

Mark Bell  00:42

 Okay, it's good to be here.

Jim du Bois  00:43

As Russian forces advanced into Ukraine this past week, President Vladimir Putin put Russia's nuclear forces on a high state of alert. What exactly does this mean? And how serious is the threat that Russia could use nuclear force?

Mark Bell  01:00

There's a fair amount of ambiguity about exactly what it means in terms of sort of what it means operationally. I think we can assume that it involves somewhat higher levels of readiness for Russian nuclear weapons to be launched quickly if given the order to do so. It might mean some additional nuclear submarines being put out to sea or staying out to sea longer. It may mean additional checks being conducted on missiles before they would be launched, and so on. I think we don't know exactly what kind of combination of different things have actually been sort of authorized. I think what's clearer is what it means politically. I think what Putin is trying to signal is to the United States and NATO more broadly, to stay out of this conflict, to stay out of the war in Ukraine, and that any direct involvement, and remember, this was, you know, where he made this comment and put these forces on alert, this was sort of in a period when some in the United States and elsewhere in Western Europe, were talking in terms of potential no-fly zone, and so on. I think what this signal was, was basically to say, stay out, don't get involved in this. And if you do get involved, you'll be risking significant escalation, potentially up in, up to the nuclear level.

Jim du Bois  02:19

Russia has more nuclear weapons than any other nuclear power. Can you walk us through exactly what their nuclear capabilities are and how they compare to the US and other countries that possess nuclear weapons?

Mark Bell  02:31

Yeah, I mean, Russia has a, has a lot of nuclear weapons, as you say, slightly more than than the United States. But I wouldn't put too much weight on that slight difference. Both the United States and Russia have have more than enough nuclear weapons to destroy each other as functioning societies several times over. And so, you know, in an all-out nuclear war, there would not be much left standing in either the United States or Russia. And that's sort of the, the nature of the nuclear balance and the nature of what these weapons can do.

Jim du Bois  03:01

If the Russians were to use nuclear weapons, where does the greatest threat lie? Are we talking about Russia targeting sites, potentially in Ukraine? Or is there a danger to other European countries or even to the United States?

Mark Bell  03:15

I think the the purpose of Russia's nuclear weapons, you know, at least to the extent we understand it, is less about, you know, the threat of sort of a, a bolt out of the blue attack against Paris, or London or New York or Washington DC. You know, that would be an obviously suicidal move for Putin to take. And, you know, whatever else we think about Putin and his personality and what drives him, I think it's pretty clear, he's not suicidal. That said, you know, there are potentially sort of uses of nuclear weapons that might appear more attractive, you know, in the same way that the United States used nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki to try to bring Japan to its knees, right, you could imagine at least sort of, in theory, Russia using nuclear weapons against a sort of Ukrainian city or is it or in the Ukrainian countryside as a demonstration of its will, to try and sort of bring the Ukrainian population to its knees right to force a surrender. I think that's, that's unlikely, but not not impossible. And then the other thing you could imagine is, if US involvement or NATO involvement does seem to be becoming more likely, and Putin wants to signal, you know, his resolve, and that this is unacceptable, and to try and stop that from happening any further, you could also imagine sort of demonstrations of nuclear weapons, nuclear tests being conducted additional sort of alerting signals, again, to try and signal kind of the seriousness with which he, he takes this. You know, in the same way, that, you know, the United States conducted various sort of nuclear signaling efforts during the Cuban Missile Crisis, right, to try and communicate to the Soviet Union, you know, we really care about this issue, you need to back down. You can imagine Putin trying to do somewhat similar things. And there would be various ways that he might be able to do that.

Jim du Bois  05:06

So far, most NATO countries have condemned Russia's attack on Ukraine, but they have not opted to send troops or provide air support. While some NATO countries have sent weapons to Ukraine, most of the response has been in the form of sanctions. Can this hands-off response to Russia's war on Ukraine be attributed to Russia's nuclear capabilities? In other words, do you think the response would be different if the aggressor country had no nuclear weapons?

Mark Bell  05:36

Yeah, I think it can be partly attributed to that. If NATO were to intervene, or the United States were to intervene in a direct way, I think that would be an escalation of this conflict, essentially, to the level of World War Three and World War Three fought between countries with nuclear weapons has the, you know, it might not automatically escalate to nuclear use, but that would be a very significant possibility. I think it's also a reflection of the fact that, that Ukraine is not in NATO. You know, the United States has obligations, or has at least committed to obligations to defend allies within certain treaties, right? That's what the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is. NATO is not part of that. And so, the United States simply does not have an obligation to Ukraine in the same way that it has an obligation to other countries to which it has extended those guarantees. And so, you know, some of the West's reticence to get involved is also partly due to that. It simply does not have the same level of obligation, and allowing a sort of violation of the territorial integrity of a country that is not a treaty member, does not send the same sort of signal about the United States' credibility, say, as it would as if the United States allowed Russia to do this to, to a NATO ally, for example.

Jim du Bois  06:50

As someone who studies nuclear weapons and proliferation, does this conflict appear likely to resurrect the Cold War era?

Mark Bell  06:59

I think it depends a little bit what you mean by the Cold War era. Certainly, I think it's likely to resurrect it in the sense that US-Russian relations are going to take another nosedive. I mean, they were pretty bad before; they’re going to be even worse in the aftermath of this. So, you know, to the extent that the Cold War was characterized by pretty hostile relationships between the United States and the Soviet Union, I think that kind of hostility between the United States and Russia is going to exist for the foreseeable future. Where I think this is different is that Russia is still a country a fraction, with a fraction of the power that the old Soviet Union had. You know, the Soviet Union had a huge army, was in control of most of eastern Europe, had a vastly more significant, you know, more potent economy than Russia has today. It's not to say Russia is not a, not a great power can, you know, does not have a lot of military capability. But Russia is not a sort of peer competitor of the United States in the way that the former Soviet Union was.

Jim du Bois  08:02

Since the Cuban Missile Crisis and up to former President Donald Trump's tweets regarding North Korea, nuclear threats periodically seem to flare up but eventually fizzle out. In the post-Cold War era, what do you think is kept countries with nuclear capabilities from using them, and how precarious is this situation been, despite an end to the Cold War?

Mark Bell  08:26

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, in the, in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, nuclear weapons, in a certain sense, dropped off the agenda somewhat. People sort of emerged from living under the sort of imminent fear of nuclear war that had, had kind of existed for long periods of the Cold War. And you entered this sort of period of where the United States was sort of by far the most powerful country in the world without any real peer competitors, right? The Soviet Union had disappeared, China's rise was at that point, still a long way off. And in that world, to the extent that nuclear weapons were relevant, they were primarily relevant for adversaries of the United States trying to stop the United States from invading them, right? And so, you know, for North Korea, nuclear weapons were still very relevant because they worried about the United States potentially invading them. For Iraq or Iran, potentially nuclear weapons were potentially attractive. Why? As a way to make potentially the United States think twice about invading them. So nuclear weapons were, were still relevant in various aspects of international politics, but they weren't sort of occupying the minds of sort of average Americans in the in the way that they were during the Cold War. But what you've seen over time is that you know, U.S. power has somewhat declined. Chinese power, somewhat risen. Russian power has, has recovered somewhat from the collapse of the Soviet Union. And in that world of kind of great powers interacting with each other and interacting with each other in increasingly sort of hostile ways, I think nuclear weapons are sort of inevitably kind of going to become or are becoming again a more prominent feature of international politics. In terms of what's restraining their use, you know, in the relationships between these great powers, we hope that sort of mutual deterrence is sufficiently strong, right? These countries have sufficient capabilities to be able to do to each other unacceptable damage. And you hope that that results in those countries sort of being somewhat cautious in the interactions they take with each other. And I think that's what you're seeing today in terms of both, you know, what the United States and NATO, you know, an explicitly nuclear alliance NATO, are doing with, with Russia today, right? They're keeping a certain amount of distance; they’re not sort of accepting what Russia is doing that they're doing all sorts of things to punish Russia. But they're being very clear that they are not going to directly get involved militarily. And I think that's the, that's the sensible thing to do.

Jim du Bois  10:58

During his presidency, Donald Trump withdrew the US from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, or INF, which was first signed by former US President Ronald Reagan and former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. Last February, President Biden extended the new START, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which aims to reduce the US and Russian nuclear arsenals. During this current conflict, what role do these treaties, whether the ones that we are still a party to or the ones that we've dropped out of, come into play?

Mark Bell  11:37

I mean, in a somewhat limited way. I mean, I think, you know, one of the, in some sense one of the more useful features of some of these treaties is that they provide kind of an institutional venue to facilitate cooperation, even in periods when there are significantly, you know, very hostile relationships between these countries, right? So, you know, I think, to the extent that it would be preferable for the United States and Russia to have, at this point in time in higher points of tension, as many sort of avenues for communication and as much transparency about what each other, of what both countries are doing with respect to their own nuclear forces, the better, because we know that absent those kind of institutional venues and those avenues of communication, you can very easily sort of spiral into conflicts unintentionally. We saw that in, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in which various kind of essentially mistakes or misinterpreted events during the crisis could easily have led to nuclear war, despite the fact that both leaders wanted to avoid that. So, I think these kinds of arms control agreements, you know, when you get into a crisis, you know, it's less about, you know, the effects they have on the precise number of nuclear weapons that each country has. But it's more about the kind of the institutional avenues and the, and the professional kind of contacts between senior-level policymakers in both countries. And that's sort of the way in which they're potentially more useful during these times of crisis.

Jim du Bois  13:10

During the Cold War, we heard a lot about the so-called hotline between Washington and Moscow, where presumably, the US president could almost instantaneously communicate with the Soviet president if there were some issue that posed the threat, perhaps of a nuclear exchange. Do we have any kind of mechanism like that in place today?

Mark Bell  13:32

Yeah, I believe that the hotline still exists. And I mean, and this is sort of one example of what I'm talking about, right, that this was a, you know, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the two leaders were sort of communicating in these, through these kind of complicated back channels. It took quite a long period of time to like, just, just for the logistical things like translating the communications that came from, from Khrushchev. And this was a real problem during the Cuban Missile Crisis; it made a peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis much harder. And so, in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, this, this sort of institutional setup was, was put in place to allow very high level, reasonably swift communication between the political leaders of both countries. As far as I know that still, that's that is still in operation. And it's good that it is.

Jim du Bois  14:18

Obviously, there are other countries that the US is watching closely with nuclear capability. One in particular, of course, would be North Korea. We know there were some exchanges between former President Trump and the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un. What do you think countries and leaders like Kim or President Xi in China may be looking for as they watch how this unfolds, this tension between NATO and the Russians? Are they watching this carefully? And if so, could it potentially inform their future actions, thinking in terms of China, particularly with regard to their potential designs on Taiwan?

Mark Bell  15:01

Yeah, I mean, a lot of people have sort of made this, made this comparison. And certainly, at a sort of superficial level, there certainly are some, some similarities, right? Taiwan also has a somewhat ambiguous alliance relationship with the United States in the same way that Ukraine does. And therefore, you know, people have sort of said, well, maybe China will be kind of taking the lesson from this, that the United States would stay out of a fight with Taiwan if China attempted this. And I think that's one possible lesson. To me, the more likely lesson is that China or indeed North Korea would be observing the, the degree of isolation, and the degree of Western unanimity, and the degree of economic damage that is going to happen to Russia, and think that this is not something they want to attempt. So for me, the more likely lesson is actually the opposite one, that actually this makes an attack on Taiwan, say or an attack on South Korea, somewhat less likely, but we'll see. I mean, you know, I think we're, we're seeing that leaders who are sort of surrounded by yes men who, you know, can take very dangerous and very escalatory actions, even when it doesn't seem to necessarily be in their, their country's interests, at least from sort of our perspective looking, looking from the outside. And so, you know, while it's not impossible that they might be drawing that lesson, I'm inclined to think that the opposite lesson is actually the more likely one.

Jim du Bois  16:24

We know that the invasion of Ukraine is not going as the Russians would have hoped. There is much greater resistance than they anticipated. There are issues with their own supply lines, getting adequate food to the soldiers, fuel for vehicles, vehicles getting stuck in the mud, almost reminiscent of the, the Nazi invasion of Russia, back during World War Two, when the weather conditions bogged the Nazis down to the advantage of the Russians. Given the fact that this is not going the way that Putin envisioned, does this have the potential to isolate him? Clearly, we know that the public opinion in Russia, we've seen video of surprisingly large demonstrations, although the numbers have gone down since the authorities have cracked down on these demonstrations, anti-war demonstrations. And even you wonder under his, his, with his own oligarchs in Russia, some of them have expressed concerns about the direction this has taken, is there a possibility that Putin will find himself not only isolated from the international community but even isolated from other Russians and perhaps people in his own government?

Mark Bell  17:35

I think that's, that's definitely a possibility. And to the extent that it is a possibility, these sort of dynamics can shift very quickly in authoritarian regimes. And so, you know, I mean, people are sort of talking, you know, about, you know, well, maybe this is sort of the end of Vladimir Putin. And I guess that's a possibility. And if it were to happen, it might happen quite quickly. I would just sort of add two kind of notes of caution to that. One is that we're still in the very early stages of this war. And certainly, it is true that it has not gone, we assume, in the way that Putin would have wanted and had, had anticipated it would go. But there is still a lot of time left in the course of this war. Russia has an enormous amount of military capability that it can still bring to bear on this situation. And so I don't think, you know, I mean, I understand that there's sort of a fair amount of optimism about Ukraine situation, given how the extent to which their their military forces are sort of outperforming expectations. But Russia is still a very powerful country and can send an awful lot of soldiers to die if need be, in order to take Ukraine if they, if they choose to. Second, you know, to the extent that we worry about sort of nuclear use, or these sort of additional escalations, in some ways, the most dangerous scenario would be if Putin feels that the only way he can survive this, and I mean, survive in sort of a political sense, or maybe even a literal sense, right? Authoritarians often don't get, you know, cushy retirements and, you know, nice pensions. Alright, so if he feels that his own sort of personal survival is kind of on the line, those are exactly the circumstances in which you might expect him to become more prone to escalation, more willing to take, you know, highly risky, highly dangerous steps. And that might be in terms of, you know, greater human rights abuses, more indiscriminate uses of violence within Ukraine. It might be in terms of nuclear, sort of additional nuclear demonstrations, additional signaling, or even, or even nuclear use. And so, you know, while I get that there's sort of a certain amount of, a certain extent to which people are sort of relishing Putin's sort of demise or the possibility of that, you know, that that also comes with a certain amount of danger attached to it.

Jim du Bois  19:56

We've heard numerous comparisons to what's happening currently in Ukraine with really what led up to the start of World War Two. The designs that Hitler had, for example, on creating a greater Germany, as he called it, bringing back territories into Germany where there were large percentages of people who spoke German, who had some sort of German ancestry. We're hearing Putin saying some of the same things, although he is claiming that actually Naziism exists now in Ukraine, and that's one of the purported reasons why they're going into topple that regime. Do you think there are parallels to say 1938, 1939? And what can we learn from history? Maybe what should we be considering, especially the West, as they take a look at the designs that Putin may have on essentially resurrecting the former Soviet Union?

Mark Bell  20:50

I mean, I think there are, there are some parallels. I think there are some big differences as well. I mean, the the primary difference is I don't think there's much evidence that Putin has as expansionist aims as Hitler had. He may do, but I don't think there's evidence for that yet. So that's one thing we should, and if that's the case, we would just expect that Putin's goals would sort of necessarily be more limited. It's not to say that they're not significant. It's not to say they're not, you know, unacceptable. But I would be quite surprised if Putin had the same level of territorial ambition that, that characterized Hitler. Secondly, the big difference is we live in a nuclear world. And that makes even the most aggressive dictator or the most aggressive country, it sort of forces them to think twice, I think, about any sort of, you know, effort at kind of conquering NATO allies, regardless of as I said, before, you know, what you think about Putin. I mean, I don't think there's much evidence that he's suicidal, and for him to invade a NATO ally would be taking a huge gamble with his own survival. You know, it's not to say he won't do it. But that would be a vast increase in the sort of risk he's chosen to take on compared to what he's currently taking on. I think it's unlikely. You know, full disclosure, I thought that him doing what he's currently doing was also unlikely. So, you know, so maybe I should reevaluate that. But, you know, to really take on NATO directly, and the risk of nuclear escalation, that that would involve, I think, would be a huge escalatory step. There's no indication that he, yet that he's interested in taking that sort of step.

Jim du Bois  22:34

There has been some speculation that while Russia may indeed conquer Ukraine that the resistance movement in Ukraine would continue well beyond that. We know that citizens are making Molotov cocktails, they're arming themselves, there seems to be a pretty large degree of partisans who are taking up arms to try and combat the incoming Russians, even if they're not members of the military, per se. Insurgencies over the last 60, 70 years have generally not fared well for powers with conventional military forces, the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan being a couple of prime examples of that. Is there a chance that essentially Putin could win the battle but lose the war if an insurgency continues, and Russia gets bogged down in Ukraine for a war that seems to be endless?

Mark Bell  23:28

Yeah, I think that's, that's very plausible, you know, in the same way, that, as you say, right, that happened returned to the United States in Vietnam, happened to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, it happened more recently to the United States in Afghanistan and the United States in Iraq. Yeah, it's hard, you know, in an age of nationalism, clearly, the Ukrainians today think of themselves as a nation. And with every day that passes, they think of themselves as a nation to a greater extent, right? I mean, Putin is actually creating, in some ways, the sort of independent and nationalist myths and ideologies that make up the sort of, you know, nations' understandings of themselves by the actions that he's taken, right? He's sort of reinforcing Ukrainian nationalism. And so in a world in which that is the case, and a world in which external powers are able to supply those insurgencies with, you know, significant forces, yeah, I think it's going to be very difficult for Russia to sort of effectively subdue a country as large and populous as Ukraine. Ukraine may be able to stop Russia from sort of winning the peace in a sense, but Ukrainians will pay the price if they do that, right? I mean, this is not an easy sort of out. This would be a long, bloody insurgency that would be characterized probably by very high levels of violence, high levels of violations of human rights, and all sorts of kind of nasty tactics, and violent, bloodthirsty tactics that, that countries tend to use when they're fighting counter-insurgencies. So, you know, yeah, I think that might well happen. It's, it's not something we should relish. And if it does happen, you know, Ukraine would, would suffer tremendously. And Ukrainians would suffer tremendously in that event.

Jim du Bois  25:14

The Doomsday Clock has measured the likelihood of the human-made global nuclear catastrophe since 1947. Do you think this latest conflict has moved us closer to midnight on that clock?

Mark Bell  25:28

I mean, they you know, that the Doomsday Clock is not, the methodology that goes into the creation of that particular time is not, I would say, the most rigorous, but it gives sort of a, sort of a dramatic sense of where we are. Yeah, I mean, there's no question that this is a dangerous period. And the possibility of, of nuclear escalation, is certainly higher than it was, you know, before Russia undertook these operations, I still think we're in a, you know, we're generally less likely to see nuclear war breaking out than we were at certain periods of the Cold War. So the level of danger, I think, is not, is not unprecedented, but it's certainly, it's certainly high. With nuclear weapons, we care a lot about sort of the small probability of things happening, right? I mean, you know, I don't think we're at a place where the probability of nuclear war is anything close to, you know, 50% or maybe, you know, or even 10% or 1%. But, you know, when you're dealing with events that could potentially have serious consequences for, you know, the future of civilization, we care very much even about small increases in in risk.

Jim du Bois  26:36

Mark Bell is an associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. Professor Bell. Thanks so much for joining us on Dialogue Minnesota.

Mark Bell  26:44

Thank you.

The Pandemic's Lingering Impact On the U.S. Economy

University of Minnesota Economics Professor Timothy Kehoe

Download

SPEAKERS

Jim du Bois, Timothy Kehoe

Jim du Bois  00:00

Dialogue Minnesota...conversations about the issues that matter to you. I'm Jim du Bois. The COVID 19 pandemic has exacted a toll on the US economy. Inflation is at a 40 year high. But there's some recent good news about the job market. University of Minnesota Professor of Economics, Timothy Kehoe, joins us with his insights on the state of the economy. Professor Kehoe is also an adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. His views are his own and do not reflect those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis or the Federal Reserve System. Professor Kehoe, welcome back to Dialogue Minnesota.

Timothy Kehoe  00:39

Well, thank you, Jim. It's good to get together with you again.

Jim du Bois  00:43

Well, here we are two years into the COVID 19 pandemic. Looking back to when local, state, and federal authorities in the US first began taking measures to curb the spread of the virus, what were your initial thoughts on the sort of aid the economy might need to avoid a calamity? And how does that initial reaction of yours look to you now, nearly 24 months later?

Timothy Kehoe  01:08

Well, we are in unchartered territories. And what that means is there's constantly new surprises. Okay, so one of them is when we have had big waves of COVID, as we did, for example, a year ago at this time, right after the Christmas, holidays, and so forth, in 2021, in the new year of 2021. That was a bit of a jolt economically to the economy as a whole. Whereas this recent explosion of COVID-19, because of the omicron variant, it hasn't had much effect at all on the economy. We see restaurants closing once in a while because some of the staff have been infected and others are quarantined. So, it's had that kind of impact. But you know, the job market is doing great. Now, I would like to get into a bit of detail on that. We see unemployment at really record low numbers. Wages and salaries, especially for lower-income workers, going up in a way that they haven't done since the 1980s. So, there are things that are going very well with the US economy. And we didn't really skip a beat. Even though we have new cases. New cases or at record high levels, or have been, they seem to be going down rapidly in the last week or two. But new cases are at high levels. In the US, we have higher death rates than a lot of other countries, because we just don't have as many people vaccinated, and we don't have enough older people who got the booster. And death rates are still kind of high. But we always have to remember who's dying or people who got their infection two or three weeks ago. That is why we can see these things where new cases are falling rapidly. And it won't be another week or two until we see that death rates are falling that quickly. But all that being said, January was a tremendous month for job creation. Almost a half-million new jobs, Jim, this is a kind of record-setting number. And it turns out that the US government Bureau of Labor Statistics has redone their job numbers for November and December, and they were higher than we thought. So, you see there are some things that are going great about the US economy. Now I said there was a caveat. And I was recently reading, one thing the pandemic has done for me is put me on social media more, on Twitter and such, although you can imagine I tweet mostly about economics. I now have more than 13,000 followers, and let me admit most of them are probably economists and economic grad students from all over the world. But a friend of mine, a labor economist with the Carlson School at the University of Minnesota, recently posted something, and it was related to an article in Fortune magazine that he was quoted in. And he was pointing out, and this is something we always have to remember is that the onset of COVID-19, and you'll remember we talked a couple of times about this really was brutal, brutal, especially for working mothers. And interestingly enough, not for working fathers, not as much for working fathers. That's how we got to, you know we're doing as a society, we're doing better and better on gender issues. But when a crisis like this hits, it's often the woman in the household who bears the brunt of it. Well, a lot of people dropped out of the workforce. You know, a lot of people lost their job, and they stopped looking for jobs. And that, things are doing better there. But we are not back to where you would have predicted in 2019 as far as where the labor market should be. We're for 5 million jobs short of where we want to be. And you know, since we have an order of magnitude more than 100 million people working, more like 130 million people, we're really talking about, there's 3%, let's say, three, maybe 4%. It's not called unemployment, because these people are not looking for jobs. And often, in the midst of a recession, we see people dropping out of the workforce. They don't look for jobs, because there are not jobs to be found. That's not what's going on now, Jim. There are jobs to be found, it's just things are tough. And once again, the most identifiable group are working mothers. It's not easy to get good childcare. But one thing that there was in the Build Back America bill that I thought was good, was support for the government to get involved both with subsidies and regulations in childcare. And what people don't remember, because, you know, people, my parents’ age, the so-called Greatest Generation, they remember these kinds of things. But unfortunately, we're losing those people. So, there's not enough people around to remember that during the Second World War, when the US labor force had millions and millions of men going into the service, and they put America's women to work. And in fact, it was in the 50s, when America women who had worked during the war, remembered that they liked doing that and wanted to get back to it. That started this trend in the United States that was way ahead of other countries of getting women to work. Well, how did all those women work during the war? The US government did all sorts of things to subsidize and to, you know, sometimes the private market works well, sometimes, with services like this, it didn't. And so, the government got involved and promoted massive childcare. Of course, that's one reason that the United States and of course, we had, we had a lot of people die during the war. But we didn't have numbers of people dying that the Russians or the British, you know, the Chinese who are allies did. And we certainly didn't have the number of people that the Germans or the Japanese who were our enemies had die. But what won the Second World War in one sense was that all the women in the United States went to work. And I remember seeing reports of what happened when the Germans were analyzing this and they said, oof, we just can't do that with our society. Of course, Germany's changed and now German women do work. But that was a big change for the United States, putting all those women to work and had a lot to do with government-sponsored or subsidized childcare. And to really get us going again, we have to think seriously about stuff like that.

Jim du Bois  09:38

Well, clearly good news in the job numbers but not such good news with regard to inflation currently at the highest level we've seen in 40-some years. Let's talk about inflation. What are some of the leading causes of inflation? I know we hear very basically, it's too much money chasing too few goods. Is that still a good definition?

Timothy Kehoe  10:00

That is a good definition. And let's talk about that in a couple of ways. One is the too much money angle. And then the other will be that we can talk about is the too few goods angle. Okay. So, people of moderately high income, you know, not the really rich people, but people like my wife and I who both have good salaries. What did we spend our money on? Well, we spent our money on a lot, on travel and restaurants and things like that. But the point I'm trying to make is we spend it on things that we classify as services. Okay. Now, what happened, of course, is with the COVID 19 pandemic, we really cut back on that. But we still got our jobs, fortunately. A lot of Americans of course lost their jobs. But people like us, my wife and I are both university professors. And we were able to keep working, using the technology you and I are using to talk now. Although I do used to enjoy when you would come to my office and get everything set up, and we do these chats, but we've learned to do a lot of stuff with Zoom. When I had my office hours this morning with my students, I do that by Zoom. And there's advantages to that. But restaurant meals, travel, things like that, you don't do that by Zoom. Those were industries--travel, hospitality industries--that were really hit hard by the pandemic, and they're coming back. They're coming back now, but we're nowhere near where we were in 2019. So, all of a sudden, you're so-called upper middle class in the United States who kept their jobs but lost the opportunities to spend the money on what they used to spend it on, they started putting into durable good consumption. Now, that's why we saw a boom in housing and especially nice condos in Minneapolis- St. Paul, for example. But you know, my wife and I, we moved from one condo to another, we did it in a good time because those places have gone a bit crazy. But then we wanted some new furniture for a new condo. We had to wait seven months to get that furniture. So, there was a big switch in spending patterns. And I'm simplifying here. But I've looked at the numbers. And what I'm saying is the basic truth. Out of services into consumer durables. Well, then we also had a series of shocks to supply chains. Although it didn't affect us much, it affected Europe and Asia a lot. Remember, we had a blockage of the Suez Canal. But we also had that we get a lot of goods, both intermediate goods for our own manufacturing production and final goods from China. And there was just a big backup at the Port of Los Angeles. And that's the name of the place, you know it's in Long Beach, California, just down the beach from Los Angeles city. There's big backup there as container carriers were trying to pull into the port, they were anchored out in the bay, you've seen all these pictures. And so, that caused big backlogs. Okay. We had a switch in demand to exactly what those container carriers were carrying, and we had a shock to the supply there. So, we had lots of money going after a reduced number of goods. Now, economists like me, and on Twitter and so forth, I got involved in the conversation on this. And I am a bit surprised how this kind of inflation has persisted. The demand's still there, but I figured oh, they'll get those supply. problems worked out, and to some extent they have. Prices aren't going up as fast. The most recent data, it shows that the prices aren't going up as fast as they were before, but they're certainly not going down. So, we have, we do have high levels of inflation. Now, what economists were tempted to say is, oh, this is what we call a supply shock. And it's something that's temporary. And it's something that the Fed, and as you know, I'm not going to talk about Fed policy, because I'm not allowed to. But it's something that the Fed should not worry about. A number of economists were prone to say things like that. I was reluctant to say anything like that because I also study a bit of economic history. And I've been around for a while. So, back during the 1970s when we had the two oil crunch shocks, I was an undergrad at first and then later, I went to grad school at the end of the 70s. And so, these were topics I was interested in, talked to people about, watched the news about. And if you remember, we had, there was a very distinguished economist named Arthur Burns, who was the head of the Federal Reserve Board. And at the beginning of the 1970s, October 1975, 76 or so. And we'd gone through the first oil price shock. He said, look, the inflation we have in the United States is due to supply shocks. This is nothing that the Fed should get involved in. This is transitory, and you heard that word transitory, they always say it means temporary. We're gonna pass through it. Well, you know, the decade of the 1970s really changed economists’ thinking about things, because that was the period we call stagflation. We had inflation, with an under-employed economy. We had high inflation and high unemployment. It's curious, there are people pushing, although, you know, Arthur Burns was a kind of conservative person politically, but we are having people push, even in the US Congress, and they're representatives of the political party I often vote for, the Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who I find to be a very admirable person in some ways. But she's pushing these views now which somehow get called the new monetary theory, modern monetary theory, MMT. There's no theory to it. The people there don't just don't seem to understand economic theory at all. But the view they push is as long as there's unemployment, printing money to finance government spending is going to cause no problems. Now, they had often heard the objection, especially from people like me, that yeah, but that only works if you have what they call monetary sovereignty, you kind of control the denomination of your government debt. So, a Latin American country borrowing in dollars, they can get into trouble by borrowing too many dollars to print more pesos if something happens to the exchange rate between pesos and dollars. Now, I've been working studying Latin American economic history, and there are countries like Argentina and Brazil, that went for long periods of time without doing that. They printed bonds, not in dollar denominations, but in their own currencies. And I could name what they call some of the currencies, because they had such disastrous experience with that during some periods, and they had to keep chopping zeros off. And so, they'd be constantly giving the…Argentinian peso went through a period, it was called the Austral. The Cruzado, oof, Brazil went through all kinds of names. Now they're finally on the Real, but just having control over the denomination or your debt is not quite right. And if certainly, if you can't get inflation by printing money until you have full employment, then what the heck do they think started what happened in the 70s where Arthur burns made that mistake? And Arthur Burns kept saying, oh, no, it's supply shocks. And if you hear some of these modern monetary people, I guess I should call them theorists, that's what they call themselves. But I don't see any coherent economic theory to what they're pushing, they sound like Arthur Burns. And as I said, Arthur Burns was a very distinguished economist, economic researcher, and professor and held a number of important government posts. And he is remembered as maybe the worst modern Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He was the guy who oversaw stagflation. Now, unfortunately, we're hearing people talking in Washington that way now. My views are my views only, not those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis or the Federal Reserve System. But that's the kind of thing I'm allowed to talk about. I can't speculate with you, what government, what Fed policy is going to be because someone will think, well, he works with those people, he talks with those people. So, I'm not going to do that. But when you asked me to talk, I thought this will ring bells for people who are following the economic debate in Washington. And the debate you see on the financial pages of The Washington Post, New York Times, or the Star Tribune. We do have to get inflation under control. And let's see what happens. We're in a good situation now. We have a Secretary of the Treasury, kind of the person who controls fiscal policies, spending tax policy in the United States, Janet Yellen, and the Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Jerome Powell, who kind of see things eye to eye and get along together. And I expect us to do well. But more than that, I'm not going to say.

Jim du Bois  22:27

When we look at the stagflation of the 1970s into the early 1980s, what finally got us out of that? I remember, there were many efforts undertaken. Former President Gerald Ford had the Whip Inflation Now program, he had WIN buttons made. That failed. Then it was the Carter presidency, and it seemed like the stagflation actually accelerated during that time frame. And then Reagan elected president in November of 1980. And then, by '82, '83, another recession in that area, but then we slowly started, you know, climbing out of that stagflation? What happened to get us out in that scenario?

Timothy Kehoe  23:07

Okay. And that is, again, a topic I've looked at, and it involves the Fed, but it's historical stuff, I can talk anything I want about history, I just can't tell you my guesses for what the Federal Open Market Committee is going to decide. And for people who invest in securities, that's the kind of thing they'd like me to say, and whether my prediction would be a good one or not, it's not even one I'm allowed to think about giving you. Yeah, so what happened was, Jimmy Carter, selected Paul Volcker to be the chair of the Federal Reserve Bank during his presidency, and then Volker continued under President Reagan. Volcker decided that he and the Fed were going to stop inflation by raising interest rates until inflation stopped. He started that with Jimmy Carter. But somehow that became too painful. And I'm not sure what machinations took place, but he eased up on that. But then, Ronald Reagan was elected President. It's hard to remember but at that time, someone like me who's been a Democrat his whole life, I was so kind of disillusioned with Carter. Jimmy Carter is a wonderful human being and is maybe the best ex-president we've ever had. But I didn't think much of him as president. You remember the Iran hostage situation and so forth. So, in Massachusetts where I lived, and I wasn't the only person, a lot of people voted for John Anderson. But John Anderson was an alternative to either Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan. But it was Ronald Reagan who got elected. And Reagan just kind of gave Paul Volcker, the freedom to do what he had to do to get inflation under control. And he did it within two years. He kind of broke the expectations of inflation in the United States, but it was very painful. We had a, what they called a double-dip recession, because there was a little bit of recovery in that, the rules they had for calling them a recession. They call it two separate recessions, one kind of in 1980 into '82. And then another one, end of '82-83. They called that the double-dip recession. Now, I think that in retrospect, you would get economists to give you views that it might have been easier to use interest rate policies in coordination with some other kind of measures to get inflation under control. But that's not what they did. They just said keep raising interest rates. And it was painful. There were higher unemployment numbers during that double-dip inflation than there was in 2008-2009. I remember people would say, oh, the so-called Great Recession, the global recession, a part of it that hit the United States in that period, 2008 to 2012-13. The US was already recovering weakly by the end of that, although countries in Europe and so forth, weren't necessarily. That wasn't necessarily the worst economic recession since the Great Depression in the 30s. You know, the press, once they start saying that, without having anyone check on it, they keep saying it. No, in some ways, that 1981 to '83 period, the double-dip recession was worse by a lot of measures, especially job market measures. So, people don't want inflation again, because they don't want to cure it with a big recession. And I sympathized with that. And I think it was good that we whipped inflation. It wasn't Gerald Ford. Although, you know, to my way of thinking he was a fine president too, he just got tied up with the bad reputation because he had pardoned President Nixon. But finally, under President Reagan, we did whip inflation. And so, we don't want it coming back. I don't want it coming back.

Jim du Bois  28:02

Timothy Kehoe is a professor of economics at the University of Minnesota. He's also an adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. His views do not reflect those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis or the Federal Reserve System. Professor Kehoe thanks so much for joining us again on Dialogue Minnesota.

Timothy Kehoe  28:20

Well, thank you, Jim. It's good to get together with you again.

How To Keep Your New Year's Resolution To Get Fit & Improve Your Diet

Personal Trainer Brent Goodermont

Download

SPEAKERS

Jim du Bois, Brent Goodermont

Jim du Bois  00:00

Dialogue Minnesota...conversations about the issues that matter to you. I'm Jim du Bois. We're a little over a month into 2022, and many of us are looking to improve our fitness and overall health this year. If your New Year's resolution to start or resume an exercise program is off to a slow start, we have some advice from an expert. Brent Goodermont is a certified personal trainer, and during the pandemic, he left a major fitness company to start his own business called Health 171. Brent, welcome back to Dialogue Minnesota.

Brent Goodermont  00:35

Thanks, Jim. Thanks for having me back.

Jim du Bois  00:37

Well, it is a new year, and many of us have made resolutions, and probably one of the most common resolutions is to return to a more fit lifestyle and perhaps lose some weight. First of all, Brent, though, let's talk about how you decided to become a personal trainer. It was a bit of an encore career for you, wasn't it?

Brent Goodermont  00:56

That's a true statement. You know, I was in a corporate position for over 25 years. Liked that. It was challenging. I liked the social aspect of it. I liked solving problems, and all of that. But in the back of my head, I didn't think I wanted to work until I was 65, or seventy years in a corporate environment. And I always wanted to try something different. And that was helping people and probably to become healthier. I knew I wasn't going to be a medical doctor. But watching my father pass away at a young age, he was only 53 when he passed away, and in my corporate life, seeing medical claims, you know, rising. And some of the reasons why these medical claims came through was because of obesity, or people that were overweight, and some of the secondary issues that came after that. And so, I thought maybe, just maybe, I could help people in my second career avoid hospitalization, maybe not be overweight, maybe be able to move better. And I thought, physical therapy, personal training. Personal training came around. I had some individuals in my life that were very good personal trainers at the health clubs here in town. And they were my role models. And so, I started asking them questions. One thing led to another, took some tests, and got hired, and away I went, and that was in 2005.

Jim du Bois  02:18

Well, what should you do before you start a fitness program, particularly if you are an older adult?

Brent Goodermont  02:25

Well, first thing you should receive permission from your doctor. Your doctor will know your internals in terms of your blood pressure, your resting heart rate, and some of those issues, maybe even your joints and the way you move arthritis issues or what have you. Are you cleared for exercise? Because if you're going to exercise, you probably are going to increase your intensity. And you're going to be putting your body in new movement patterns and maybe lifting weights, maybe your heart rate is going to be elevated more than it's been in the past. And so, with that in mind, one has to get that medical clearance.

Jim du Bois  02:57

We know that the pandemic has really upended a lot of people's fitness programs and activities. You know, some people obviously, like the atmosphere that a gym or fitness center provides, the camaraderie, the energy. What should you look for if you are comfortable working out in a gym environment? How do you go about choosing a good place to work out?

Brent Goodermont  03:24

Some of it might be geography, can you get there on a regular basis? Part of health success or a successful health plan is consistency. And if it's hard to get there because of traffic, or it's too long of a drive, you don't like the parking, you might not be going there on a consistent basis. So, I think geography is one. To your point, the camaraderie, can you connect with people in a group setting? Can you find a trainer that can help you one-on-one? Are there programs that fit what you sort of like to do? That could be yoga, that could be Pilates, that could be group training with strength training, that could be a cycle class, that could be a step class, and you want to sort of see that type of programming offered at your club.

Jim du Bois  04:15

Many people are wary of working out with others in an indoor setting, given the pandemic. What advice could you give someone who would like to work out in their home but really doesn't know where or how to start?

Brent Goodermont  04:29

Hire somebody to help them. I think if you're somebody who hasn't worked out before, you haven't been part of a gymnasium or a fitness center, you're going to need some guidance. There are some resources obviously on the internet. There's a lot of digital applications you can subscribe to in order to have a class on demand. In the cardiovascular world, Peloton is a shining example of that. With a subscription you can follow along. Now, you have to invest over 1000 or $2,000. I don't know the price of a Peloton. But now you have that piece of equipment in your home, and you will be led through safe and hopefully effective workouts for you. That's one thing you could do. But there are many people now during the pandemic, who started their own businesses, and they will train clients via Zoom, via FaceTime, and walk them through, understand their goals, map out a program, train them during that program, hold them accountable during that program, measure their results, etc. Those are two things that I would consider.

Jim du Bois  05:40

What should you look for when selecting a personal trainer. Are certifications important to look for?

Brent Goodermont  05:45

They are important, it shows that somebody has taken time to invest probably their own money, certainly their own time. And the certifications are worthwhile. You learn about the body in terms of its anatomy. You'll learn how it's moved in the form of kinesiology. And you'll learn about the profession itself in terms of how to interact with different personality types, how to program, how to use weight training, how to use cardiovascular training, to your advantage. And I think that's, that's important. But I don't think it's the end all be all if somebody has six or seven of them. I think somebody who has a base certification, and beyond that, it's really how well the trainer connects with the client, listens to the client, and really has the client's needs first and foremost. When a client really feels like they are being listened to, and that trainer is on their side, good things can happen. That's the more important part of the equation. Certifications, yes. But even more important is that connection with that individual

Jim du Bois  06:53

Brent, you just mentioned that as a result of the pandemic, quite a few personal trainers hung out their own shingle, went into business for themselves. That certainly was the case for you. You had worked for Lifetime Fitness since 2006. How big of a change was that for you, and also for your clients?

Brent Goodermont  07:13

It was a big change. And almost all of it positive. There was a slight emotional cost of not being in the gymnasium and around the energy that was Lifetime Fitness. It was wonderful energy. And whether it was the music, the one-on-one conversations, being part of a group, whether it was a row challenge, or in a part of a big spin class, or riding outdoors, some of the outdoor ridings that I led, I missed all of that. But in return, in return, I started a business where if something goes right or wrong, I look in the mirror. And it's me. And I like that. That was an unexpected benefit of doing this and filing an LLC, choosing an accounting system, and running a small, small business. But I'm in charge. And I'd like that. And I'm responsible for its success, and any mistakes I've made along the way. The other is simply, I don't miss driving on icy roads, snowy roads, cold temperatures, walking five minutes from the parking lot into the gym. I don't miss any of that. And on a positive side, I'm home, I'm safe during the pandemic, I'm close to my wife, I can schedule time throughout my day to have a nice meal and eat a meal slowly instead of rushing. And finally, the connection with my clients, I think is even stronger. Because remember, when personal training session happened at Lifetime, great equipment, great space, great energy, lots of people. One problem with lots of people, sometimes a client might have something they want to talk about that's pretty private. A lot of clients did not like talking about those conversations in front of a lot of people. And now, there's one on one training. When they're in the comfort of their home, the quiet and privacy of their own home, and I'm in mine, they're more apt to talk even longer and deeper about certain subjects. And sadly, I have some clients who are going through cancer treatments. And so, talking about those issues are far more feasible in this new format. And secondly, thanks to big screens on my iPad, I can really see my clients. You know, they move their camera or phone the way I need it. I can see every articulation. I can see the way their feet might be moving, incorrectly or correctly. And I don't have any problem cueing. And so, I think my clients are getting even better results than they did when we were doing it in person at the gym.

Jim du Bois  09:57

Brent, you formed your own company called Health one 71 What's the significance of that name?

Brent Goodermont  10:02

Health 171 was named after my clients. What I did when I retired, Jim, is I added up the years of tenure of this small group of individuals that I've been training, a lot of them since 2006. It added up to 171 years, that was in July of 2020. And I just thought, it's not a real creative marketing, pizzazz name. But it was an authentic name. And sincerely, I wanted to honor my clients who are really the reason I was successful, that I had clients that stuck with me, I retained them, I wound up being good friends with them. But more importantly, I believe I helped them develop healthier habits. And as a result, they have healthier lives.

Jim du Bois  10:47

Brent, if someone is just starting out working out, and they've resolved to do this for New Years, and they look around and say, gee, I really have no equipment whatsoever. What kind of exercises can you do simply using your own bodyweight?

Brent Goodermont  11:03

If you have a floor, you can try to do a push-up. If you can't do a push-up with straight arms and going down, you can go on your forearms and do a forearm pushup. You could lie on your back, and you could try to roll like a baby does in his or her crib without using your hands or your feet on the floor. You can do a squat, you can do a lunge, you can do a jumping jack, you can climb stairs, you can walk backwards, you can walk sideways, you can sit in a chair and practice getting out of a chair. That's a very functional movement. You could do a backbend, you could try to touch your knees, you could try to touch your toes, you could rotate your arms in 360-degree circles and feel all the muscles that attach to your scapula or your wing bones. And feel those stretch out. You could do a warrior pose, you, there's a lot of different things you can do with just your body and a floor.

Jim du Bois  12:04

What are some relatively inexpensive types of fitness equipment that are suitable for working out at home?

Brent Goodermont  12:10

One is called a hip circle. And it's just a circular strap that's elastic that goes around your knees just above or just below. And as one exerts pressure by separating their legs, it fires up your glute muscles. It's portable, it probably cost $25. And it's very, very effective. Another would be a piece of resistance tubing with or without handles. And you can do different exercises with tubing. You can wrap it around a doorknob and do some punching, you could step on the middle of the tube and hold on to the handles and do bicep curls. You can pull it apart and fire up those muscles that attach to the scapula again. Those are two pieces of equipment that could get you started for under $40. That's the very basic

 Jim du Bois  13:02

At some of the big box stores now, they have a dedicated fitness area in the store. Target comes to mind, and they have a pretty wide range of equipment. What are your thoughts on hand weights? What kind of hand weights might be worth investing in?

Brent Goodermont  13:16

I'm a big fan of hand weights for a couple of reasons. One is when you have one in each hand, and you do either an overhead press or some exercise, it isolates the limbs and sometimes we can discover, hey, it's easier with my right than my left. Well, that tells us something that maybe we need to do something about the left. Two, heavyweights are relatively inexpensive, and they're effective, it just clearly adds more stress. So, instead of doing a walking the stairs with your bodyweight, if you had two extra hand weights or two hand weights in your hand, and they're each 10 pounds, now it's like 20 pounds of weight going up the stairwell. So, hand weights have a great advantage because they don't take up a lot of room, either. One person does not need to have 20 pairs of hand weights. You can start out, to your point, if somebody is just starting out, a pair of five pounders, a pair of eight pounders just to start.

Jim du Bois  14:17

What are some fitness equipment options for folks who are willing to make a more significant investment?

Brent Goodermont  14:24

I would say a rowing machine. I'm a little biased because it's one of my favorite exercises. The reason I like the rowing machine, Jim, is it works just about every single muscle in the body. It's easy to learn. It does take up a little bit of room in a home. But if someone is willing to spend a little bit of money, I think a rowing machine would be my first choice. For those that don't like sitting down on that rowing machine, the Peloton, as I mentioned earlier, is a highly popular piece of equipment. Sample size of three, but I have three clients who really enjoy their Peloton experience and their Peloton investment. Beyond that, the company called TRX makes some equipment. The company bowl work. Bought the ball worker makes a piece of equipment to do isometric exercises. I've had some clients buy medicine balls. I've had clients buy jump ropes, that's not a very expensive investment. And they've developed a little bit of a home gym. I installed pull up bars in our basement. That was a $70 investment. Glad I did.

Jim du Bois  15:39

What advice do you have for people who struggle to stay motivated and engaged in a workout program?

Brent Goodermont  15:46

One is to find a workout partner. One is to find a trainer. One is to set a very simple goal. And just go after that goal. Don't have the goal of I want to have a perfectly chiseled body by the Super Bowl, or I want to lose 40 pounds before my high school reunion in June. You know, goal setting can be as simple as one goal. And it can be, say, drink five glasses of water a day. And you keep track of it on a paper calendar, on a digital calendar. You tell someone about it and say, hey, for the month of January, the month of February, I'm going to try to drink one extra glass of water or X amount of glasses of water every day. And just start like that. If you want to ramp that up in terms of exercise, how far can you walk? Can you walk for five minutes, can you walk for 10 minutes? And sometimes the power of measurement and watching yourself progress can help you. And if you share that goal, and some of this is basic goal setting 101 that many of us learn in either corporate life or in other forms of social interactions with goals. But in fitness, if you establish a reasonable goal and start measuring it, and not be scared about, I've got to get everything done in one month, you know, time passes by so quickly and maybe three, four or five, six months from now, you find yourself walking more than you ever have. You find yourself drinking more water than you did before. Maybe it's an elimination goal, you've started to eliminate the amount of Diet Coke you drank or the amount of white wine you're drinking, or the amount of ice cream you're having a nine o'clock at night. Or now you can do, instead of that one pushup you couldn't do on January 15, hey, I now can do 10 push-ups because I tried to do one additional push-up each week. And all of a sudden, six weeks later, 12 weeks later, all right, now I'm on a roll. Not saying that will happen for sure. But that's a great way of starting, setting simple goals. Probably a simple goal and having a way of tracking that. Better yet if you can share it with somebody.

Jim du Bois  18:00

How can you best avoid injury when working out?

Brent Goodermont  18:05

Do not try to get healthy overnight. It's clearly baby steps, small incremental changes. And taking time to listen to your body. If you think you have an ache or a pain and your ankle's hurting, maybe I'm not going to go for a long walk today. Listen to your body. If something's acting up, take a day off. I'm not a big fan of just saying hey, go drink a bunch of water and take some Advil, but no, listen to your body, and don't overdo it. And don't try to get all your weight goals done right away. Small steps. If you can do one pushup, don't try to do 15 the next day. Do two the next day or two the next week.

Jim du Bois  18:51

Are there any exercises or stretches that you do not recommend and could actually cause injury, if done improperly?

Brent Goodermont  18:59

I try to avoid having clients bending over forward at the hip, and then rotating their shoulders. Rotating their spine while the hips are flexed forward can be an unsafe motion, especially if you're doing it with weights in your hand. Or you're doing it fast. I don't really see too many people hurting themselves stretching for two reasons. One, I think people will feel pain if they're stretching too much. And the body thankfully has some things in place that will retract the muscle if you're stretching it too far. The body will say not so fast, not so far, I'm retracting and not allowing me to do this. So, I don't, I haven't seen too many people hurt themselves stretching too much. I've seen people hurting themselves doing movements that are unwise.

Jim du Bois  19:53

Many people want to lose weight as well as improve their fitness. While we should point out that you are not a registered dietician, what advice can you give to people who want to improve their diet and avoid unhealthy eating?

Brent Goodermont  20:06

Find a registered dietitian, and realize that our weight loss, 80 to 90% of it, is what we eat. In general terms, I find people who are truly self-aware, they have a pretty good idea what's wrong. And it's some of the things I mentioned earlier. Ice cream at night, maybe more than one glass of white wine with dinner. Too much diet soda, too much processed foods, too much food at every meal. Eating for emotional reasons, not eating for fuel. And so, I've written about this before. Even though I'm not an author, I send out a newsletter, a tip every week to my clients. I think one key and again, I'm not a registered dietitian, thanks for clarifying that, but for those individuals that can find food that is healthy, that they crave or that they like, is a key. Because I'm not a big fan of green beans, and even though they might have a healthy value, I'm not gonna eat them because I don't like green beans. But I've come to really enjoy roasted broccoli. So, I'll eat that whenever I can. I like roasted broccoli. I like sauteed spinach with eggs. And so, the more combinations and patterns I can find foods that I like that are healthy, I don't, I don't worry about counting calories. I enjoy every meal. And I know I'm getting a pretty balanced diet. And so, I don't think it's very hard for anybody who's listening to this to understand what good food is. And now, it's just a matter of finding those foods that you like. That's the advice I would give people.

Jim du Bois  22:07

Brent, as someone who has studied fitness and done a lot of reading on the subject, are there any authors or books or perhaps online resources that you have found particularly helpful, and you might recommend to someone who is interested in learning more about fitness and starting a fitness program?

Brent Goodermont  22:25

Absolutely. I'll start with a medical doctor, Dr. Mark Hyman. He runs the Cleveland Clinic. We've actually used his services in the past. He wrote a book called Ultra Metabolism, which changed the way I viewed eating. Dr. Mark Hyman. Gray Cook, physical therapist, absolute master on movement, has plenty of videos out on YouTube. I've read many of his books, have bought many of his DVDs. Gray Cook. Dr. Eric Cobb. He is a Doctor of Chiropractic Medicine, but he didn't like chiropractic medicine because it was putting a bandaid on problems. It wasn't finding the root cause, at least from his perspective. He started a company called Z Health, the letter Z Health. His website has a blog, and you can type in just about any joint or body part. And he has wonderful five-to-seven-minute videos with a transcript, which can walk you through how to improve performance or reduce pain or eliminate pain with simple exercises. Dr. Stuart McGill, probably one of the top five experts in the world on the spine. He's a professor of spine biomechanics. And he used to teach out of Waterloo University in Toronto. And he has written many books, has many DVDs out there as well as YouTube videos on how to train the core. Those are my top four where I send people right away.

Jim du Bois  24:02

Brent, you touched on this a bit earlier. But how important is it to have reasonable expectations when you begin a fitness or perhaps even adjust your diet to eat more healthy foods? Do you need to pay a lot of attention to being realistic? I mean, certainly, there are things you might set as a goal that are clearly unrealistic. You may not realize that, but any kind of change and improvement in your health or fitness is a gradual process, and you can't expect overnight results. How should you set reasonable, attainable goals?

Brent Goodermont  24:38

I think you could start with weight loss. Most medical experts will tell you that a pound a week is on, near the high end of how much weight to lose. I don't think I'd want anyone trying to lose more than two pounds a week. So, a pound a week maybe. And check with your doctor, what they might think as well. There could be some low-hanging fruit for somebody who might be in a obese category. And that person may have some early on success losing more than one pound a week. And I think with strength training, you do not want to try to increase the amount of weight you do more than say 5%. So, if you can, if you can lift 10 pounds, try not to then go to lift 20 pounds, try to lift maybe 11 or 12 pounds. Reasonable expectations are absolutely key because it's the number one, not number one, but it's one of the top reasons why people hurt themselves, or why people quit, stopped. Because it was too frustrating. They wanted to try to be like the other person at the other end of the gym, or somebody in their office or somebody in their neighborhood, who said, hey, I'm running a marathon in June, I'm running Grandmas. Well, if you haven't run before, and it's April, more than likely, you're not gonna have success, should you get a bid for Grandmas. Same thing with weight loss, same thing with how your biceps look, same thing with the way you move. You have a long-term view of it, do this in small increments. And after a while, your body will adapt and say hey, I can move that elbow much better. I can squat deeper. All right, let's add some weight. Now, I want to squat faster. It'll come with time. It'll come better if you have somebody holding you accountable from a professional standpoint. But I'm not here to make a commercial for personal training. I'm just saying you can do it on your own. Just be careful.

Jim du Bois  26:45

Brent Goodermont is a certified personal trainer. His company is Health 171. Brent, thanks so much for joining us again on Dialogue Minnesota.

Brent Goodermont  26:55

Thanks again, Jim. Thanks for having me. Take care.

 

Minneapolis City Elections Are Attracting National Attention

Hamline University Political Science Professor David Schultz

Download

Jim du Bois  00:00

Dialogue Minnesota...conversations about the issues that matter to you. I'm Jim du Bois. Municipal elections typically don't attract much attention outside of the city where they are being held. That's not the case, however, for this fall's Minneapolis mayoral, City Council and Park Board elections, which include three controversial charter amendment questions, one of which would replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a new Department of Public Safety. Talk of reforming policing in Minneapolis began in earnest following the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020. Proponents of the charter amendment say it would enhance public safety by offering alternatives to a police response in situations where people are experiencing a mental health or housing crisis. Opponents say the proposed amendment is too vague, and that no tangible plan exists regarding how public safety would be addressed should the amendment pass. The controversy over the future of policing in Minneapolis is reverberating throughout the state in the wake of a spike in violent crime in that city and elsewhere in Minnesota. Some Democrats fear that the controversy surrounding police reform will cost the party votes in the 2022 midterm elections. This week on Dialogue Minnesota, Hamline University Political Science Professor and University of Minnesota Visiting Professor of Law David Schultz, discusses the Minneapolis city elections and the impact they may have far beyond the city limits. Professor Schultz, welcome back to Dialogue Minnesota.

 

David Schultz  01:36

Thanks for having me again on the show. And thanks to the listeners.

 

Jim du Bois  01:39

Early voting has already begun in Minneapolis, and voters will elect the mayor, City Council, and Park Board, and also vote on three charter amendments. We'll get into these races and the charter amendments a bit later. But first, let's talk about the impact of George Floyd's killing on this election. Given the steep rise in crime in the city, what do you think voters will be more concerned about: police reform or public safety?

 

David Schultz  02:06

I think that in some sense is really what the million dollar question here because there's no question after George Floyd's death, and now we can say murder because there was a conviction in that case there, is that people were very much concerned about race and policing, all about what was a perception that that the police were out of control, that they really need to do something to bring more alternative ways of providing law and order and peace and security to the city. But then at the same time, as we've seen over the last, I'm gonna say year, year and a half, crime rates have accelerated across the United States, including in Minneapolis. And now, I think we've got two competing different sort of views at this point. One, on the one hand, is how much reform can we do, how much can we really move away from a traditional policing model versus to what extent do we still need to have police out there performing a lot of the functions, especially at a time, you actually pointed out, where violent crime and other types of crimes are increasing? And that's really what we're going to find out, you know, what the, you know, with the election returns, is that are the reformers, are they going to carry the day? Or is there perhaps somewhere out there almost a Richard Nixon silent majority out there, who are going to push back on it. Polls that we've seen so far are suggesting some very close elections, and a very evenly divided city.

 

Jim du Bois  03:35

The charter amendment that's attracting the most attention is question number two: should Minneapolis replace the police department with a new Department of Public Safety? Both sides on this question have brought lawsuits over the wording on the ballot. One judge ruled in favor of the yes side, and one judge ruled in favor of the no side before the state Supreme Court stepped in. Can you walk us through the legal fights over this amendment's wording? And why was there so much back and forth between the amendments advocates and opponents?

 

David Schultz  04:05

Wording matters. That's the simple answer here that even though we may think that absolutely everybody in the city of Minneapolis knows that this amendment is on the ballot, exactly what it's going to do, I think is a matter of of a lot of debate and a lot of confusion at this point. So, for a lot of voters, they're looking to see exactly what the amendment and perhaps what the explanation is, in terms of what's going, what it's supposed to mean. Now, take us back to just a very short period of time after George Floyd died or after he was killed. We had what, if I remember correctly, nine City Council members, you know, in a park all declaring that they wanted to defend the police department. We saw signatures gathered with the idea of saying let's for the advocates, let's actually reform the police. And the reason why I say that is that for many people, the, what this amendment is about is what, it's changing the the city charter to what, to defend the police. That's how it was originally described. That's what many people think it's about. That's what nine council members said it was about. So, on the one level, it's being depicted as that. However, if you actually read the amendment all's it does is removed some mandatory language in the Minneapolis Charter that requires there to be a police department, removes language about the minimum level of policing, and simply says that city council gets to decide on matters of public safety. If this was the end of the story, we could say, that technically speaking, the amendment does not defund the police. All's it does is say City Council gets to make the call. However, given the fact that it was described as the defund the police, and given the fact that for many, nobody knows what city council would do, if it's given us the authority, and who's going to be on city council next year, people are left wondering what does this amendment really mean? And again, for people who have been pushing for the amendment, they have not put out a clear proposal saying this is what it means. And so we're left with kind of saying, okay, it was originally described as defund police. Now it's something else, what exactly is it? That's what makes it so confusing. No, one's really quite sure what it really means. On the most simplest level, it's just about what, taking away the charter amendments and giving city council more authority to address public safety issues. And that's why I think the fight's over the language because I think the two sides are trying to maneuver the language in a way to game the system to their advantage.

 

Jim du Bois  06:56

If the amendment is defeated, would that send a signal that police reform is not likely to happen in Minneapolis anytime soon?

 

David Schultz  07:05

Possibly. I mean, what's interesting about this amendment, or this charter amendment, it's not just an amendment for Minneapolis. As we know George Floyd's death took on, you know, national, if not International, sort of fame here. I think Minneapolis is being viewed as a test case. A test case on police reform across the United States, and were this amendment to fail, I think many people would interpret it as saying that what, at the end of the day, the public wants some reform, but it's very much still concerned about law and order issues. And I think it's going to be difficult to figure out, what's the window for reform? What what are we looking at here? Are we talking about reducing the number of police? Are we talking about changing their functions? Reform isn't impossible, but it's not going to be clear if it gets defeated in terms of what the public wanted? Was it a vote on the status quo? What does it really mean?

 

Jim du Bois  08:05

If the amendment does pass, do you foresee a barrage of lawsuits over how the new Department of Public Safety will be structured?

 

David Schultz  08:13

I first see that if it passes, there'll first be a bunch of lawsuits challenging the amendment itself and arguing that the amendment still was not properly worded. There are rules across the country, including in Minnesota, that require at the end of the day ballot initiatives to be clear, unambiguous and to be of a single subject. And why you have a single subject, you can't be expected to vote yes or no on something that has two different parts to it or something like that. So, I think if it passes, lots of legal challenges first. Okay, assuming those legal challenges are defeated, then I think you're correct. What's going to happen first is there's going to be a, have to be a proposal from presumably, I think, the new City Council and perhaps maybe a new mayor. We don't know that yet next year, exactly what the reform is going to look like. And I suspect those reforms will get challenged in court.

 

Jim du Bois  09:12

Professor Schultz, you mentioned the photo from the summer of 2020 depicting nine City Council members standing on a platform in a city park and pledging support for defunding the police. As we know, all 13 City Council seats are up in this election. First of all, how much do you think a stance on defunding the police will determine who gets elected? And second, is there a scenario where question number two about establishing a Department of Public Safety actually passes but some of those on the council who support it are voted out of office?

 

David Schultz  09:47

I think that's a likely scenario. We've already seen...the latter is a likely scenario. We've already seen for example, Councilman Ellison, who has been one of the strongest proponents of this, what, he failed to get get his party endorsement, you know, for running for re election. I think more so than anything else this November, this police funding ballot measure drives the election. In some districts, it's going to be, what, the difference that gets them elected in some districts, it could be very well what, the difference that leads to defeat. It just depends on sort of the politics of a local city council, our local council race or something like that. So yes, there's no question about it. And I can see all kinds of interesting scenarios. One of them that says that, for example, it passes but several council members lose. Or let us say, it loses but one of the more progressive democratic mayoral candidates that supports the amendment passes, you know. It's...and then we also don't forget, we have another ballot measure there that would give more authority to what, more authority to the mayor. So, we can have all kinds of scenarios where where council's given more authority on policing, ballot measure passes, some council members lose, and then the mayor is given more authority in the city. How do we interpret all of that? I have no idea.

 

Jim du Bois  11:16

Well, this is the perfect segue to the next question, and that is looking at question number one on the charter amendment ballot. The question asks if the city government should change to an executive mayor legislative council structure. Minneapolis, of course, currently has a weak mayor system. How does the current form of city government function? And how would this amendment change the balance of power between the mayor and the council?

 

David Schultz  11:41

Yeah, right now the best contrast to think about is between Minneapolis and St. Paul. Minneapolis is essentially a weak mayor government. The mayors really don't have that much authority. I think of mayors in Minneapolis as more having the bully pulpit. They're good cheerleaders. But the really the bulk of the power in the city resides in the city council, unlike in St. Paul where the mayor has pretty extensive powers, powers of veto, and really a lot of budgetary powers. And what this proposal is doing is suggesting in Minneapolis, a movement towards as you pointed out a more traditional strong mayor model, I'll say a model close to what we see in St. Paul, for example. And this would change the balance of power in the city. This would move the mayor from being again somewhat more of the bully pulpit, somewhat ceremonial, to having more more authority in the city. And so, a scenario could be again where we have a a strong mayor system comes into place. This ballot measure says that council has more discretion over policing matters. Depending on the ideological makeup here, we might very well not see reform. They could be at a loggerheads or the reforms would not go anywhere near as far as advocates hope or foes fear.

 

Jim du Bois  13:06

Why was the Minneapolis city government set up the way it is with a weak mayor system? How unique is the structure to the city of Minneapolis?

 

David Schultz  13:14

Well, first off, there are other cities across the country that have weak mayor systems. They generally were in cities that were smaller, you know, smaller cities and our older cities. And what's happened over time during the course of the 20th century, especially I'm going to say from the 1930s on post-World War Two, the trend was for larger cities to create stronger mayor systems because why, larger cities generally need more executive control, more executive power. So, I think Minneapolis originally was this way because of what, a fear of too much power for the city, or for the mayor I should say. And as a smaller city at that time, comparatively speaking, to not see the need to have a stronger central authority. And that's what's being sort of asked now, is that as Minneapolis is now over 400,000, I think it's getting close to what it ever was in terms of its largest time, where its peak population is, and it's going to soon, if you look at projections here, projections are it's going to be 450 or a half a million people. It's getting to be a pretty large city. And I think this ballot measure is there because some people believe that the city can't remain governable with what, 13 separate heads. It needs more of a central authority to be able to act.

 

Jim du Bois  14:37

Mayor Jacob Frye faces 16 opponents, and a poll found only about 35% of likely voters held a favorable opinion of him. Meanwhile, over in St. Paul, Mayor Melvin Carter is heavily favored to win reelection and has seemingly avoided much of the scrutiny Frye has faced. While George Floyd's murder happened in Minneapolis, both cities saw civil unrest and rioting, not to mention both mayor's had to navigate the impacts of COVID and the rising rates of homelessness. How different are these mayor's in their politics, and why do you think Frye has faced greater amounts of criticism than Carter?

 

David Schultz  15:15

OK, one again, we're looking at two different governing structures for the cities. You know, weak mayor versus strong mayor. I'm also going to argue that in St. Paul, especially in the last 20 years, the DFL, Democratic Farmer-Labor Party has really consolidated power in the city. And again, we're not really seeing any viable competition anymore. It's become more solidly a one-party town than Minneapolis. And I think that speaks to a lot of it, that you get the Democratic Party nomination in St. Paul, for almost anything, and you pretty much are guaranteed, you know, being elected to council or something like that. So, I think it's a strength of the strong mayor system. I'm almost gonna call St. Paul, almost classic old time machine politics, you know, in terms of how it's being able to hold things together. But I also think, in the case of Mayor Carter, you know, St. Paul is a majority non-white city now. Its politics is aligned differently than Minneapolis. And I think Carter has been able to speak to some of those concerns. And we should also point out here, if we talk about policing being an issue, Minneapolis has had decades of problems with policing, of which remember when Jacob Frye won, he beat the incumbent who said she was going to reform police. She was unable to do that. He takes over, now he's potentially vulnerable for it. Versus in St. Paul, the police in the community generally have a better working relationship. So it's not quite as antagonistic. So, I think there's a lot of variables that play out that distinguish the two cities. But it is interesting, that Frye is vulnerable. I mean, he's got a 35% approval. The best thing he has going for him is the fact that what, there is very divided opposition, and even at 35% with rank choice voting, it is still possible that he could win the election even though he's hugely unpopular in that city.

 

Jim du Bois  17:19

As we mentioned earlier, all 13 City Council seats in Minneapolis are up for election this year. Which of those races are you watching most closely?

 

David Schultz  17:29

I think the most important bellwether to me is Council Member Ellison's seat. I mean, there's several of them I'm interested in, but that's the one to me. We're looking at somebody, you know, who has really sort of defined and made defunding the police or reforming the police, I think a marquee issue for himself. And I think were he to lose, that would send an enormous signal across the city, and probably across the country, in terms of where voters, at least in Minneapolis, sit on the issue of police reform. So if I'm picking one race, that's the race that I want to look at. But what I should also point out that has really been fascinating, a few weeks ago, what was it NPR, KARE-11, StarTribune, did a poll. And one of the things that I thought was really interesting in that poll that most people missed was that when we looked at the issue of police reform in this charter amendment, more whites as a percentage than Blacks supported the change. And people think that's a surprise. Well, some people are arguing, and this is Dan Samuels, a former council member in Minneapolis, who's saying that what the Black community is disproportionately bearing the burdens of what, of the crime wave, and we need policing. So, that would be something else I'd be looking at is what are the regional patterns on voting that emerged, and I suspect there is a Black-white or a white-Caucasian-non-white Caucasian split in the city, but in ways that I think would surprise most people.

 

Jim du Bois  19:06

Park board elections rarely make headlines, but this year is an exception. How important are these elections to Minneapolis voters?

 

David Schultz  19:15

Well, they are important because even though we think well, it's just a park, well, the Park Board yields, you know, millions of dollars for what is really quite, as we all know, a quite gorgeous park system here. But again, there's also been controversies in terms of how the funds have been allocated, the names of parks, questions in terms of whether or not the park board itself is serving the needs of communities of color. And so, what normally would be a relatively sleepy affair is now starting to emerge into also a battle over racial justice, in terms of, again, how the funds are going to be allocated, future parks are going to be sort of maybe renamed or rethought of and so forth. The whole controversy with what changing the name of Lake Calhoun about a year ago to Bde Maka Ska sort of typifies, I think the the conflicts that have emerged with with the parks because normally nobody thinks well, you know, what's really the name of a park mean? It's usually oftentimes just what, symbolic or let's say honorific, but a fight over a park that was named for a slaveholder clearly is eliciting or did elicit lots of anger, and it's carrying over into the Park Board elections.

 

Jim du Bois  20:32

We'll move on now to charter question number three, probably the least discussed charter amendment on the ballot this year. Question three concerns rent control. Who put this question on the ballot, and why does the city need permission from voters to enact rent control?

 

David Schultz  20:48

Well, let's start with the latter question is that cities don't have the authority on their own to enact rent control. By state law, they have to get basically a charter amendment to be able to do that. So that's why it's on the ballot. There are many people, and we know this is true, Minneapolis and St. Paul, which also has an amendment on the ballot this November for rent control. The two cities as well as the metropolitan area is seeing dramatic increases in rent because of what, a shortage of rental units. And so, what the Minneapolis proposal would do is to say that the city would have the authority to do rent stabilization or rent control. But again, like with the police reform one, it doesn't indicate what it's going to look like. Across the country, there's about 180 cities in the United States that have some variations of rent control, rent stabilization. They all look different. They all operate slightly differently. We don't know what a city council and a mayor would actually do here in terms of creating rent control. Would it be like in St. Paul, the proposal, a flat cap of 3%? What kind of buildings would it cover? Would it cover only multifamily units? Would it cover ma and pa? We don't know. But this was driven by the community, by people who were concerned about the fact that Minneapolis has certainly not the highest rents of the country, but they certainly have grown dramatically in the last few years, and are taxing both low income, middle income and people of color.

 

Jim du Bois  22:26

We've talked a lot about Minneapolis voters, but how much could these decisions in this election impact Hennepin County residents as well as residents outside of the metro?

 

David Schultz  22:36

There's no question there's big implications. Let's just start, for example, with the rent control one. You know that, if depending on if it were to pass it, what it looks like, there is some evidence that red control or rent stabilizations oftentimes lead to what, to conversions of apartments over into condos or to townhouses, or in some cases developers, because they can't make money, move their development elsewhere. Apartments could shift development outside the city of Minneapolis. Same thing with a police funding measure that would this, perhaps, if it were to pass, would it scare some people to leave the city? Would it encourage some people to move in? So, we could have, for both of these alone, they could affect let's say migration patterns where people live, they could affect housing supplies. And then I'm going to sort of take us in a different direction a little bit here. I have a couple of friends who work for, let's say, the hospitality industry in Minneapolis. And they're involved in the business of trying to bring, let's say, conventions and conferences to the city. And my friends have told me that a lot of conventions are looking at what's happening in Minneapolis and saying, well, depending on where police reform goes, and what happens with policing there, are safety issues. You know, we may or may not be willing to bring a convention or bring a trade show or something to the city. And then of course, as we said before, if this ballot measure on reforming police were to pass or to fail, what is the signal it sends across the country about police reform? And as I've speculated, in wondering if it were to fail, does that mean we're in a post-George Floyd moment? That is, whatever we wanted to do after George Floyd has already passed.

 

Jim du Bois  24:25

Let's stay with the topic for a moment about how the election in Minneapolis might impact elections and politics nationwide. The Minneapolis StarTribune had an article several months ago where City Council Member Lisa Bender who represents Ward 10, was quoted as saying that prior to the 2020 elections, she was having a conversation with someone she called a Democratic operative. And this person said if police reform happens, and it's in the form of the department getting defunded, Minneapolis can be blamed if Democrats do poorly in the upcoming elections. Well, we do know in 2020, despite the fact that Joe Biden won the presidency for the Democrats, the Democrats fared very poorly in many state houses and also in Congress. So, what happens if let's say charter amendment number two is passed, and somehow the talk of forming this Department of Public Safety devolves into a movement to defund the Minneapolis Police Department, as we currently know it? Could this reverberate across the country and become fodder for Republicans who say if you elect Democrats, you could sacrifice public safety?

 

David Schultz  25:46

It's already fodder. Trump tried to make it fodder in 2020. And I think no matter what Minneapolis does, it's going to be. I mean, look at what's happened in the last few weeks. Governor Tim Walz, Peggy Flanagan have have come out against it. We also, if I remember correctly, I think was it, is it Amy Klobuchar came out against it. And Second District Congresswoman Angie Craig. These are all more, I would say, centrist Democrats worried that they will be tagged with defund the police, and it could hurt their prospects in 2022. And I think Democrats across the country are equally afraid, especially in swing districts, close districts. This could make the difference and hurt them.

 

Jim du Bois  26:33

David Schultz is a Hamline University Professor of Political Science and a Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. Professor Schultz, always a pleasure to have you on Dialogue Minnesota.

 

David Schultz  26:44

My pleasure. Thank you very much for having me and have me again some time.

University of Minnesota Initiative Seeks to Improve Public Discourse

U of M Sociology Professor Doug Hartmann

Download

SPEAKERS

Jim du Bois, Doug Hartmann

 

Jim du Bois  00:00

Dialogue Minnesota...conversations about the issues that matter to you. I'm Jim du Bois. Americans don't agree with each other on a wide variety of issues, but many of us do agree that we are a strongly divided country along political, racial, religious and ideological lines. Public discourse has become increasingly toxic in recent years, fueled by these divisions, and propagated through social media, talk radio and other channels. A new initiative by the University of Minnesota's College of Liberal Arts aims to help students become better able to understand opposing viewpoints and engage in productive dialogue with those who disagree with them. This week on Dialogue Minnesota, a conversation with U of M Sociology Professor Douglas Hartmann who's the director of this program called the Public Life Project. Professor Hartmann, welcome back to Dialogue Minnesota

 

Doug Hartmann  00:55

Always a pleasure to be here and talk.

 

Jim du Bois  00:58

The Public Life Project is a new initiative in the College of Liberal Arts. Tell us about this project. What does it all encompass? And how does it bridge the college's academics to larger discussions about public discourse?

 

Doug Hartmann  01:12

This initiative took shape a couple of years ago, as students and faculty as well as alumni and collegiate donors and supporters have been concerned about issues of polarization and social difference and conflict, both on campus and in our communities. And so, we started talking a lot about that from two different angles. One is the angle of access, inclusion, welcoming of students across a whole range of backgrounds. And then the other is with respect to the perceptions that some students have of being not well accommodated or included on campus. And that can be kind of from the leftish for, like first generation students, students of color, but also from more traditional communities that you might not think of like conservative students, or rural students, or students with strong religious beliefs. So, we've been thinking a lot about the research we do on those topics, but especially then, about how we deal with both these topics, and this wide range of students in our classrooms and on the campus generally. And we've also been thinking that we need to be a leader and a role model for the rest of our communities, our state and our region, in terms of how to deal with these really challenging issues of difference, division, and especially polarization in our nation today.

 

Jim du Bois  02:39

In the age of social media, what do you think public life means for most people? And what does public life mean in the context of this project?

 

Doug Hartmann  02:49

In terms of public life, I think what we're trying to signal is first and foremost, about how our college and our university you need to be involved in the broader community, that we're not just an ivory tower place that sits out or outside of or above everyone else. But we're very much of the public. We want to be part of that, and then model that for our communities. Public here, I think is a word that we've chosen to kind of capture the broad scope of who includes our citizenry, our communities. And it's supposed to kind of be very general and broad and inclusive, which can be extremely challenging in an era where we're often fragmented, siloed and disconnected, whether it's along political lines, racial lines, rural, urban, religious, conservative, or liberal. All these different ways that we're divided, where we tend to segregate ourselves, communicate only with others like us, and similarly, consume only media and information of the sort that we already know, and we're already hearing. So how do we overcome that? How do we create a broader community, a broader collectivity, a common, a public? And so that's, that's what we're very much trying to do here. I should say a lot of the impetus did start with our students and our curriculum. The original idea or title of the initiative was the Civic Readiness Initiative. That was really focused on students, and focused on preparing students from this wide array of backgrounds that constitutes liberal arts and university students at the University of Minnesota for Minnesota and all over the country, trying to make sure all of our students are prepared in terms of how to think and work and interact across all these different lines of difference. Not only on campus, but really for their lives after campus, for their lives in a world that is tremendously diffuse, difference and often divided, and where we still need to aim for, aspire to a broader commonality and public good.

 

Jim du Bois  04:57

Can you give us some examples of the courses and community events that are happening in the public life project this fall?

 

Doug Hartmann  05:05

Oh, absolutely. On the course side, I guess there's three things I'd call attention to. One is a signature course that our colleague, Howie Levine, who's also our Social Science Dean is offering about polarization, How to Understand the Other Side is the title of it. So it's really oriented. He's a political scientist oriented to kind of address partisan divides, understand the origins of those, why they're so difficult, and how and start to think about working across those. We also have a whole suite of freshmen seminars, very different angles and themes from different departments and disciplines, some of which are directly about issues of difference and polarization. Others are about more generic topics, but they want to make a point of bringing different perspectives onto those topics into the classroom. You know, there's geography classes, there's an art history class, an English class, we've just have a range of faculty who are teaching and then but really making a point of addressing difference and the differences that students bring into the classroom. And then of course, I got to mention my own class. I'm going to teach you a special one credit book class on this new volume Minnesota Historical Society put out called Sparked, which is essays mostly by scholars of color reflecting on the complexities of race in the Twin Cities after George Floyd. So, we're going to read those together. Why that's in this course, not only is it because race has been such a source of challenge for our community. But the original idea of that project was to capture both the possibility as well as the deep problems of race and racism in Minnesota. The kind of complexity of the racial gaps where in some ways, we have really progressive culture that's open and inviting in some ways, and then we also have these gaps on the other side. So, it's to grapple with all those. So, that's all on the student side. And then we've got some public events that go along with that. In November, we're going to bring Walt Jacobs who's the editor of that Sparked volume in to do kind of a big collective book club to feature that book. Working backwards, in October, we'll have Abbey Philip, an up and coming national journalist to talk about media, and the media's role in both perpetuating and maybe starting to alleviate some of the polar differences we see in society. And then we're going to do a launch and discussion of a series of vignettes that we produced with Twin Cities public television, about the initiative. Those have actually already been running. You might have seen a few of them, some of our listeners might have as well. There's three ones, one is kind of about the project as a whole, another is about media and misinformation, and a third is about religion. And these are featured where we interview faculty and students about how they understand and experience these issues on campus, and and how we are trying to address those in novel, creative and innovative ways. Our students have been remarkably engaging and excited to deal with these differences. And it's one of the really interesting things that's come out of that partnership with TPT. I think their audience tends to be a little older, and a little more afraid of all these issues, whereas our students embrace the challenges, and really see the necessity for us to dive right in on religious issues, on rural suburban issues, on political issues. And that's kind of heartening and exciting. And it's fun to see that and to see how our, our faculty are playing off of that.

 

Jim du Bois  08:44

Most Americans, while sadly not agreeing on much, would agree that we are a divided nation. How has this division impacted the U of M campus?

 

Doug Hartmann  08:55

For some, it has felt as if we're siloed. And some students then don't feel as welcomed in certain classes or classrooms or for certain subject matter as others. I don't think we've had as much of it as happened on other campuses around the country. And that can involve the kind of issue that we often call cancel culture where there's not a lot of tolerance for speakers who you don't agree with. Issues around academic freedom, as well as free speech have been at the fore. A lot of these issues. It's been hard to kind of see them the last year or two because we haven't been on campuses much. We've been on Zoom. We haven't been face-to-face. I think our campus has has not experienced as much of the intensity of those in a grand way as other places have. But we see it on in individual classrooms, and a few of those are alluded to in some of the vignettes that we produced. But I think that it is even as that you see some examples of that, I think there's a real hunger from students as well as faculty and staff to reconstitute the institution of the university and the campus as a place of engagement, of embrace of difficult conversations, of differences. But that's never easy. And so, even I think some of the examples where we try very systematically or deliberately to address difficult issues, whether it's from the right or the left, those often create difficult situations, and sometimes hard feelings. One other thing I'd like to say on that, I think, as a society, we often are really worried about and bemoan polarization and partisanship. We see these divisions as making it really difficult for us to govern and create legislation, creating large scale fights and contention in society. But I would say one of the other unique things on campus, especially from faculty, I think there's a whole contingent of faculty who are far more, I wouldn't say excited, but ready to embrace polarization, conflict and division, because for some of those folks, some of those issues we haven't talked about for way too long. And it's hard to make social change or say issues of race, or religious inclusion or exclusion, it's hard to change those if you're not confronting them directly, and then invites conflict as well as conversation and dialogue. So I'd say, a fair number of the faculty are teaching on this. Some are very worried about polarization, others think maybe it's time for us to really embrace it.

 

Jim du Bois  11:45

Do you think there are significant differences between the students of today versus the students of 10 or 20 years ago? Were students in the past perhaps more accepting of the challenge of learning different viewpoints? And if so, what has changed?

 

Doug Hartmann  12:02

Wow, I'm not sure how much individual students have changed, whether they're more accepting than they were. But I do think there's so much more awareness of and intensity of polarization, especially along political lines. That's me not just speculating now about our students or about campus life, but about our culture and society. In the last decade, we've really become a society where political identities and ideologies are extremely, not just divisive, which they are, but pronounced and salient, that they dictate an awful lot of how people think and who they talk to, and what they're willing to agree with or disagree with. And I think our students experience that. They bring that into the classroom. So they, I don't know that they're less willing or more willing to engage that, but it's a far more kind of contested, controversial and divided terrain in the world that they're encountering. You know, for some, they're just ready to dive in. Others, it can promote a certain kind of complacency. It's easier to avoid certain topics or step back. Frankly, that's the students I'm the most concerned about and most interested to reach out to, is that kind of quiet, middle of the road folks who want to just avoid a lot of society's problems and not have to talk about that in the classroom, and just stick to the subject matter or what have you. But I'd also say, to be fair and honest, I think there's a small contingent of students who are quite more politically motivated and mobilized. And maybe, maybe in ways that wasn't the case 10 or 15 years ago, want to make certain issues of focus, no matter what the subject matter of that conversation. I think that's far from majority. I think it's a small group. But it's a very, on different sides, very vocal, and very impactful groups because of the kind of sensitivities around all these issues for all of us.

 

Jim du Bois  14:20

How do you think social media has impacted American discourse, and have these impacts changed the way in which students engage with their course content and with one another?

 

Doug Hartmann  14:33

One of the TPT segments was about social media and media. And so, we've got some great experts on campus in the college on that. I don't want to trample on their ground too much. I think there's no doubt we have kind of polarization within the within media production and consumption that people in society listen to or follow different circles or niches of media. Students bring that in. I think that we're across our curriculum not only in Journalism and Communication, but across the curriculum, hoping to help students see this, understand it, be aware of it, and then have strategies to combat this so that they are getting information, finding facts, thinking about social problems from a variety of perspectives, but also where they're able to evaluate and adjudicate, where is knowledge, what is good facts, what stuff I need to be more skeptical about. I don't know if it's specifically and only about social media, but a lot of our faculty, I think one thing that they're all unified on, and we're not unified on a lot of things either, but one thing I think that we're very unified on, is the importance of facts and information. And I think we, many of us, regardless of field discipline, or research, we're committed to that. We're an institution of higher learning, it's about knowledge and information and facts that we all need. And so how we produce those facts, how we evaluate information and sources of information is very important to all of us. And I say that, because I think that cuts across ideological lines. And that's, that's not a liberal statement or a conservative one from our faculty, and from our stakeholders, and community members and alumni. It's more about what a public needs, what the common good needs, and we need a base of knowledge and understanding about the world that we live in, and, and all the different things around us. I mean, I don't necessarily know if you want to go into it, but I think the response to COVID and the science of vaccines, of public health, of masks and distancing, just remind us again in a highly intensified way of how divided we are on issues of information and science, and how difficult it is to operate as communities and regions and states and a nation when we don't have at least some kind of shared sense of what we can all agree on and the principles we can work from.

 

Jim du Bois  17:15

What are some of the key tools and coping strategies that students need to confront ideas with which they disagree?

 

Doug Hartmann  17:25

So, some of that is kind of empathy, a willingness to engage and embrace others, to take the positions and standpoints of people you don't agree with seriously, put yourself in their position. That's really the, Howie's signature class on polarization, I think is trying to operationalize that. I think there also then besides just the attitude of empathy and understanding, I think communication skills, being able to communicate your own ideas, but understand the different ways that other communities will communicate their ideas and their knowledge and understanding. That involves reading, that involves writing, that involves consumption of media. I think it also involves an understanding of facts and information, what's debatable and what's not. And that information could be about scientific things, about physiological things, but also about social things, about the realities of income distribution in our society or equity gaps in education. I think it's to develop an appreciation of knowledge and facts and how important they are, but then also how we produce knowledge, how we produce facts and information. Because we do, and I think it's super arrogant and inappropriate, a mistake that intellectuals make a lot, to not acknowledge and dig into the ways that we produce knowledge and information and all that's involved with that. We constantly are doing that. And what I hope our liberal arts students and others on campus are cultivating is an understanding of how we produce this knowledge, what's built into it, what it can do, and what it can't do. And then also being aware and attentive to aspects of human life that are not factual. They're not about information or science. It's about values and beliefs. And those are things we often will disagree on. And so, recognizing that, and then going back full circle, understanding how to engage and appreciate those kinds of differences. Making the world safe for difference is one of the most important things that we can teach in that respect.

 

Jim du Bois  19:43

How will the Public Life Project encourage open minded discussions?

 

Doug Hartmann  19:48

Well, hopefully, opening up our classrooms, course content and readings, but also pedagogy, how we do exchanges in classrooms. Hopefully, we've got faculty that are doing, we've always had faculty doing that, hopefully more of that and more self conscious about that. I think it's also having students be aware of that. And students be self-conscious of that, of what's needed to make that kind of engagement. Then also, I think we're hoping to bring some of our thinking, our strategies, our research to broader public audiences with these events that we're doing this fall. Part of that is to kind of give information and perspective. We're also hoping maybe to model how civic discourse can work in the context of real differences in a community or in an, in an audience. That's one of the things I'm really hoping we might see in the discussion of the Sparked volume about racism in Minnesota. I don't think everybody will or should agree on those issues. But hopefully, we can show conversations and exchanges that do that in a fashion that's engaging, that's respectful, that's empathetic, and can make us all the better for it.

 

Jim du Bois  21:00

It seems to be a growing trend on college campuses for students to protest certain professors and guest speakers who express opinions or research with which they disagree. Have you given much thought about how you and the Public Life faculty would respond if students disrupt or protest one of your events?

 

Doug Hartmann  21:22

Wow, um, the short answer on that is we haven't yet. Our our events in particular, we haven't because we are imagining them to be very attentive to appealing to a broad audience and inviting that. We've talked about it a little bit because I think we are imagining some speakers that might rub people of one orientation or another the wrong way, this semester or in the future. But I think others on campus have grappled with that more extensively, and recently in terms of their speakers and events. It's also really, a so one of the, it's really tricky on that with Zoom right now because like even for the fall, we're back to virtual events. And so, those are a little more controlled and contained. And we, I think it's less likely that we'd have the kind of disruptions that public events have had of late on on campuses. I'll say where we've probably thought the most about this, though, Jim, is even in just in classrooms, and we've had a number of examples of faculty who've felt threatened or silenced one way or the other for what they're teaching about in classrooms or how they've dealt with one group of students or another. And so, we actually are kind of working on that. The university has a pretty good set of codes for freedom of speech, on the one hand, academic freedom on the other, how those are balanced in classrooms, and the kind of role that faculty have. But we've been reviewing those and thinking those back through, and had more than a few cases, I think, across campus of individual classes where we're challenged again and again. Where are the boundaries on that? What are the, how far can students go? How far can faculty go? What are the responsibilities? So, I'd say we're stuck, we're working through those things, and the context is changing in terms of what's acceptable, what's not topics-wise or in kinds of the types of speech, but I think it's still pretty much of a moving target. And as we come out of COVID, and get back into the more regular campus life with public events, you know, that's where, holding my breath to see what we might experience on that front. But I think it would be naive to assume there won't be a lot of challenges on that as we move forward, especially as we embrace the difficult issues.

 

Jim du Bois  23:50

Doug Hartman is a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota. He is also the director of the U's Public Life Project. Professor Hartmann, thanks again for joining us on Dialogue Minnesota.

 

Doug Hartmann  24:02

Always a pleasure, especially in this case, because we're really hoping to take the work we're doing and bring it, bring it to our communities throughout Minnesota.

Analysis Of The US Supreme Court's Recently Concluded Term

U of M Morse Alumni Distinguished Prof. of Political Science & Law Timothy Johnson

Download

SPEAKERS

Timothy Johnson, Jim du Bois

 

Jim du Bois  00:00

Dialogue Minnesota. Conversations about the issues that matter to you. I'm Jim du Bois. The US Supreme Court recently concluded its term and issued several significant rulings. We're joined by University of Minnesota Morse Alumni Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Law Timothy Johnson who is a Supreme Court expert. Professor Johnson, welcome back to Dialogue Minnesota.

 

Timothy Johnson  00:25

Always a pleasure to be on. Thanks for having me.

 

Jim du Bois  00:27

Chief Justice John Roberts became a centrist figure on the court when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was still alive. Now that her replacement Amy Coney Barrett has moved the court much farther to the right, has Roberts continued to be a swing vote?

 

Timothy Johnson  00:43

So, I think the answer to that, Jim, is that it depends. And there are going to be times where he is not the swing vote, where he is going to end up being in dissent with the three justices in the liberal bloc, that would be Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan. But there are going to be other times where he will continue to be that force, if you will, of being the middle of the road moderate voice. And I think the way that he's going to do that is to have the Court end up having possibly more six to three decisions. And when he's in the majority as Chief, he enjoys one of his limited powers, and that is to decide who writes the majority opinion. That is, he has the assignment power. And many of these cases that are going to continue to come to the Court that might be very high profile that might change the law in dramatic ways, he will most likely assign many of them to himself so that he can limit how extreme those decisions are. But at this point, it's going to ultimately be a power on the Court that is divided between the Chief, if he decides to be in those six member majorities, or with Associate Justice Clarence Thomas who is now the Senior Associate, since as you said, Justice Ginsburg died last year. And so, if the Chief ends up in the minority with the liberal bloc, then it will be Justice Thomas who will get to assign the opinion. And that's where you might see some more stridently conservative opinions. And so that Chief, I think, has a much more difficult job that he did quite well if you are someone who wants the court to remain moderate. This past term, it is in question as to how long he'll be able to hold on to that ability.

 

Jim du Bois  02:21

Well, to what extent did we see the courts conservative majority actually flex their muscles this past term?

 

Timothy Johnson  02:28

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, the biggest flexing or the most flexing you saw was on the last day of the term, and I'm sure we'll talk about these cases, the voting rights case, as well as the freedom of speech case in terms of revealing to whom big corporations are donating money to during elections. And then a little bit earlier in the term, but in the spring, as well, also in a criminal rights case about putting people in jail for a lifetime without parole. But beyond those three cases where you had a pretty big, and your language, Jim, flexing of the conservative muscles, there are several other cases for, in particular, where you ended up having pretty large-scale majority 7-to-2, 8-to-1, or unanimous decisions, where you had members of the liberal coalition signing on to opinions with members of the more conservative coalition in what we would call very narrow decisions. So, the muscle was flexed, the conservative muscle was flexed, but not to the extent that I think commentators thought that it would be.

 

Jim du Bois  03:30

What is your take on Justice Amy Coney Barrett so far? Have any of her opinions or dissents surprised you?

 

Timothy Johnson  03:36

So, nothing has been incredibly surprising so far. I mean, I think the biggest surprise is probably that she has taken a more moderate tone than I think many detractors thought that she would. In fact, in a case involving the Environmental Protection Agency that dealt with the Clean Water Act, she actually signed on to a dissent with Justices Sotomayor and Kagan. I don't think anybody would have expected her to ever sign a dissent with the two most liberal justices on the bench, yet she did. She did, however, provide the fifth vote in order to strike down many of the COVID restrictions on religious gatherings beginning out in California, and then that dominoed to several other states, where those restrictions were actually upheld by a five-person majority while Justice Ginsburg was still alive, and Chief Justice Roberts actually provided that fifth vote. He in turn, that is Chief Justice Roberts, continued on the same course of action, that is siding with the liberal coalition but of course, that was just four justices. So, the one place where she really did show her conservatism, if you will, was in those religious gatherings cases. Other than that, she had decisions or or signed on to decisions and opinions that largely would be in keeping with her conservative jurisprudential outlook with the exception, or one other exception, of the election cases from 2020. She was in the majority to say we're not going to hear these cases.

 

Jim du Bois  05:02

Well, we'll segue right into that. As the Trump campaign sought to overturn election results in several states, the Supreme Court mainly let the state courts handle those decisions. Why did the Court largely stay out of the election fight?

 

Timothy Johnson  05:17

Yeah, I got to tell you, if you go back and read the scores of books that were written about Bush versus Gore, 21 years ago now, and the hundreds, if not thousands, of articles and analyses, both academic as well as other legal commentary about Bush versus Gore, one of the key themes you will get, Jim, is that the justices really wish in the end that they had not taken that case. Now, you heard a different drumbeat from Justices Scalia and Thomas, who said, look, we had to decide it, and Scalia's famous line was, we decided that Bush won, get over with it. I'm paraphrasing, but that's essentially what he would say in public talks. But I think even he and Justice Thomas would say that it was probably not good for the Court in many ways. It harmed the Court's legitimacy, at least in the short term. I know that there were psychological effects, that is the justices really had a difficult time knowing that they were going to upset for certain half of the country with that particular decision. And, and frankly, the justices said many times behind the scenes, sometimes publicly, that they never really wanted to get involved in a presidential election again, and in fact, they didn't want to get involved in the election game at all, aside from voting rights cases, about the Voting Rights Act. And you saw that when there was the recall election in California, the first time the one in 2001, 2002, when Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor, there were lawsuits, and the Supreme Court refused to hear those cases. And so, I think that the justices really wanted to stay out of the business of deciding a presidential election again, and fortunately for them, they had a really good out and that is, presidential elections or all federal elections, are generally controlled as per the Constitution by state governments. And therefore, they can say, this is not our purview. We don't have anything to say about this. And unless there was some unconstitutional decision made, we're going to stay out of it. And they did. And I guarantee you that made the Chief Justice as well as all eight associates happy.

 

Jim du Bois  07:22

How did the Court decide cases this term involving COVID restrictions? In the battle between public health versus individual freedoms, how did the court rule?

 

Timothy Johnson  07:32

Right. So, it initially ruled with the five person majority that included Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the other three liberals along with the Chief Justice, that most of those restrictions were constitutional, right? Remember, the Constitution says point blank, that one of the key powers or the key duties of the federal government and any level of government in the United States is to protect the general welfare, right? That is to protect the people. And those restrictions, even though they may have violated religious freedom to some extent, right, because it was stopping gatherings, the court said during a pandemic, those are legitimate restrictions that are put on even a fundamental right found in the First Amendment. That flipped however, as we just talked about after Justice Ginsburg died, and Justice Coney Barrett joined the bench, because now there was a five-person majority to say, no, those restrictions probably go too far. The problem in the end for the Court, and for people who are fighting the restrictions was in fact that by the time those cases were getting to the court, many of the restrictions were actually being lifted because the pandemic was less of a problem in many of those areas in California and several other states where the lawsuits emanated. And so, the states are already allowing more gatherings or larger gatherings for religious purposes to take place. So, in the end, you know, the Court upheld restrictions and then really was hands off to a large extent.

 

Jim du Bois  09:03

A majority of the current Supreme Court justices are Catholic. Are there any indications that this influenced how the Court decided cases involving religion during this term?

 

Timothy Johnson  09:13

You know, I think that probably has something to do with it although we don't have systematic evidence. Systematic evidence has never shown specifically that religious beliefs have an effect on how the justices decide. That said, and you can certainly infer that when you have justices who are not only Catholic but are very strong, religious adherents, if you will, that that might have some effect, and time will tell. What you did see was the court decide, for instance, in favor of Catholic Social Services in the Fulton versus Philadelphia case, the case where Catholic Social Services was part and continues to be part of the Philadelphia adoption program but was refusing to work with same sex couples. Philadelphia said we will no longer allow Catholic Social Services to be a part of our program to place potential adoptees with potential new parents. Catholic Social Services sued, went to the Court and in fact won in a unanimous decision. And that win, in the end, while it may have been influenced by the Catholicism of a majority of the justices was actually agreed upon by the remainder of the court as well. And that is, in a very narrow decision, the Court simply says, look, you still have to work with these folks. We have other agencies who, or Philadelphia as other agencies who can place potential adoptees with same sex couples, and we're going to violate the religious freedom of Catholic Social Services, if in fact, we keep them lock stock and barrel out of this program. So, in the end, it sounds like I'm punting. There may be an effect, but we don't know yet if there's a systematic effect because the only religion cases that we really have that would point to some effect would be those cases on COVID restrictions. And then this Catholic Social Services cases, and even that one, as I said, was unanimous with all three of the members of the liberal bloc signing on as well.

 

Jim du Bois  11:09

One of the cases that garnered significant media attention dealt with a high school cheerleaders f-bomb laden tirade on social media. How has the court ruled on student speech issues in the past, and did the justices apply previous rulings to this case, or did they set a new precedent?

 

Timothy Johnson  11:27

You know, it probably didn't set a whole new precedent. And largely, it did follow past cases, right? So, the precedent setting case is Tinker versus Des Moines, and that is the case from during the Vietnam era in the mid-1960s, where two members of the Tinker family as well as some of their friends wore black armbands to high school in Des Moines, and those black armbands had peace symbols on them. The school argued that those armbands disrupted the school and therefore as its power in loco parentis, that is, the school being the kids parents during the school day, in a technical sense, that they could stop them from wearing those armbands. And the court ruled, in fact, against the school district in favor of the Tinkers and said, your rights, in this case your free speech rights, do not end when you walk into the school doors. That said, what the Court did indicate was that there are exceptions to that. And that is if your speech is disruptive, if the tinkers had stood up in the middle of class and screamed anti-war sentiment during an exam, for example, or tried to interrupt the principal doing his or her job, that the school might be able to stop that speech. That's the precedent-setting case. And there have been several other cases since where the Court says, you know, there are some times where the school can regulate speech. So, for instance, there is an infamous case from the early to mid 1990s, where the class president of a school actually gave a speech where every single sentence, and I mean this sincerely, every single sentence was a sexual innuendo. He wasn't saying things overtly sexual or pornographic. But everybody knew what he was saying. The school ultimately suspended him, and his suspension was upheld. In another case, which is one of my favorites. It's known as the Bong Hits for Jesus case. It's a case that took place out of Alaska. And it so happened that the Olympic torch was coming through the town, and all of the kids in the high school got to go across the street from the high school and see the Olympic torch go by. And the litigant in this case, and some of his friends, held up this bizarre sign that simply said, Bong Hits for Jesus. And the Court ruled that because that sign ostensibly suggested that taking an illicit drug that would be, in this case marijuana, was being advocated or was advocated on that sign that the school could stop those students from having that sign produced. That brings us all the way to this case. The young woman in question in this case used her speech not on school grounds, not during the school day, in the privacy of her own home, using her private Instagram account. She never In fact, if you go back and listen to her saying f these people and f that sport and f that school, never called out coaches. Actually, she didn't say the school name. She said school, the sport, cheerleading, and so she never called out anyone in particular. And the Court in the end in an eight to one ruling with just Justice Thomas dissenting, said the school does not have the power to regulate student speech when that speech does not take place on campus with an exception. And that exception is if you could prove, in fact that that speech would ultimately disrupt the school day or student's education, then the school might have an argument in a later case. So, let's think for example, if this particular student had threatened teachers by name, that's something the court insinuated in the majority opinion that perhaps the school could regulate But because she was saying general things about school, about a sport, and still using expletives that that normally we would not use, that is going to be protected speech. So, the court sort of cut this path that said narrowly, yes, we're going to protect this. But just like in Tinker, there might be future circumstances whereby the school could regulate speech, even when it's not on school grounds,

 

Jim du Bois  15:24

The conservative justices delivered a blow to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Can you tell us some of the history of this act, and how has the court ruled on this issue in the past? Have conservative judges been chipping away at the act for a while now?

 

Timothy Johnson  15:40

Right, so the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was meant, as you and I and your listeners know, was meant to very much protect the rights of African American voters who were sometimes explicitly but most of the time implicitly, stopped from voting mostly south of the Mason Dixon in the southeastern states in the United States. Of course, it happened in other states as well. And we know that empirically. So, what the Voting Rights Act did was said, we're going to put in place mechanisms to make sure that states cannot continue to discriminate and stop people from taking part in the most fundamental right that we have in the United States, and that is voting for elected officials. There are two key provisions that are often talked about and used in order to protect this particular right. One was section two, which gives specific ability to prove or easier ability to prove that discrimination took place if a particular law was passed to stop a group of people from voting, and the other was section five, which is known as this pre-clearance section. And pre-clearance simply means this: if you were a state, and I always forget the exact number, but if you were a state where the percentage of African Americans voting was below a certain threshold, then if you wanted to change your voting laws, you would have to get pre-clearance from the federal government first, from a federal judge ostensibly, and this lasted for quite some time. Now, there was some chipping away of the Voting Rights Act during the Rehnquist Court in the early 1990s but not much, and Congress usually responded. It was not until Shelby County versus Holder was decided towards the end of the Obama administration between 2013 and 2015. I think Shelby County is the 2013 term. But I'm bad with terms, I apologize, your listeners, like I and you can Google this. That's neither here nor there. in Shelby County, the court actually, for all intents and purposes in the decision written by Chief Justice Roberts and the majority opinion, said explicitly, section five, that pre-clearance section is no longer needed. As Roberts put it, and this is me, paraphrasing him, we've come so far between 1965 and now the middle of the two thousand and teen decades or years, that we can get rid of that pre-clearance. And that really opened up the floodgates, if you will do allow states to put all sorts of regulations on voting rights that could really harm, in particular, people of color and other minority voices who want to get to the polls to vote, and also, in fact, made it very much more difficult to prove intentional discrimination that's under article or under Section Two of the Voting Rights Act. And so now you've opened up these floodgates, as I said, in Shelby County. And then the court gets the case this past term. And here, what the court says out of Arizona is that we're going to gut even further the Voting Rights Act by cutting out sections that stop states from changing regulations even more. We're going to go further, if you will, then then gutting Section Five. It's going to be easier now for states to put restrictions on people's rights to vote. And it's going to make it harder to challenge because the standard now is that if you're going to sue because you think your voting rights have been violated, you actually have to prove that there was intent to discriminate. And that is a high burden of proof in a trial court. And so yes, there's a long history, especially since the Rehnquist Court became so conservative in the early to mid 1990s. But the Roberts Court is no friend of voting rights. And it's going to be more and more difficult both at the state level and at the federal level in Congress, even though we've got the John Lewis Act still sort of percolating around Congress, to stop states from putting more and more restrictions on.

 

Jim du Bois  19:29

What other decisions caught your attention this past term?

 

Timothy Johnson  19:33

Yeah, so I think that importantly, once again, the Supreme Court showed no appetite for striking down the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare, as we know it, although it was a seven-two decision, and it was decided very narrowly. That case, Texas versus California, the Court said that the states really don't have standing, and so they kicked out the case on technical grounds, and there were two dissenters who would have wanted to decide the case. But there was just as I said, no appetite at this point to overturn the ACA and once again, Obamacare stands, and it has stood challenges through, again, the Roberts Court is very conservative, so it still challenges through one of the most conservative Courts in the history of the United States Supreme Court. But this power to make sure that people have healthcare in the United States has stood the test of time. Another interesting and important case was the NCAA ruling that came down. The ruling, which was unanimous, did not say that student athletes can get paid, but it's paving the road to student athletes being paid. What it said is, the NCAA cannot prohibit schools from trying to lure students to their schools by giving them additional monies for academic purposes. They can't just give them a pile of money to do whatever they want with but they could give them better laptops, they could give them better access to teaching assistants or other tutors, better access to better instruments if they happen to play music on the side of being a football or volleyball player. And so, it's that first step towards the Court saying we think the NCAA is probably regulating student athletes way too much. And the most important opinion in that case was actually Justice Kavanaugh's concurring opinion where he said explicitly, yeah, I think in the end, the NCAA probably is going to have to allow student athletes to be paid. He didn't have enough votes for his concurring opinion to become a majority, but he was really sort of foretelling the future. And then, you exacerbate that court decision that is handed down mid to late June with the July 1 deadline were in several states and now in every state because the NCAA capitulated to those few states, where student athletes can now be paid for their images. And we know that there are athletes on the Gophers football team, that's the first Gophers team that I've heard about who already have endorsements for several things, and it just came out that the new starting quarterback of the University of Alabama has over a million dollars in endorsements already where his image is being used to sell particular products. This is the first in a long line of cases that will get to the Court. And the Court with a unanimous decision really is insinuating that it's going to continue probably to rule against the NCAA.

 

Jim du Bois  22:23

In the upcoming October term, the justices will hear cases challenging Roe v. Wade, gun restrictions and affirmative action. Do you think we'll see a bolder conservative court next term?

 

Timothy Johnson  22:35

I think it's highly possible. As we talked about with your first question, which was a great way to start this conversation off, by the way, you're going to see this balancing act that the Chief is going to have to deal with and that is, does he want to end up in the minority with the three liberals, which I don't think would please him very much because while Chief Justice Roberts is quite conservative, he certainly is much more moderate than almost every other justice on the bench, or in the conservative coalition, save probably for Justice Kavanaugh at this point. I don't make public predictions. But what I'll tell you is I expect six-to-three decisions in all three of these cases that will be conservative decisions, but the Chief being in the majority in those cases, which is what is likely to happen, he probably writes the opinion in all three cases, if at all humanly possible on his part, and then he narrowly decides them. So I could see, for instance, upholding some semblance of the Mississippi restriction, 15 week restriction on abortions, but doing so on very narrow grounds and not overturning Roe vs. Wade at all, although that's highly possible because the other five don't need the Chief to do that, right? They've got five votes to overturn Roe vs. Wade. The same with affirmative action, the same with conceal and carry and the Chief is in a very precarious position. I have argued since the initial Obamacare case in, ACA case in 2012, I've argued that the Chief ruled the way he did and wrote the majority opinion because he really cares about the legitimacy of the court. He cares about how he will go down in history and the Roberts Court will go down in history, and he didn't want to be the Chief that took away health care from millions and millions of people. At this point, he can't stop any of these conservative decisions, but he will try mightily because he also does not want to be the Chief Justice going down in history as the Chief who had Roe vs. Wade overturned, and the chief who saw affirmative action be completely gutted to help minority groups get into colleges like Harvard, which this case that is docketed for next term is about. It is going to be an interesting term to see how conservative Justice Coney Barrett, is just how conservative Brett Kavanaugh, Justice Brett Kavanaugh is and then ultimately, as I said, what the Chief can do to stop a conservative onslaught.

 

Jim du Bois  24:53

During the Democratic presidential primary, the Supreme Court was a major issue, and some Democratic lawmakers are now pushing for term limits or adding more justices to the bench. Now President Biden has set up a Supreme Court commission. What can you tell us about the status of this commission, and in your opinion, what is the likelihood the commission will make changes to the court?

 

Timothy Johnson  25:17

So, the commission has only met twice. It has not released public records. It's been pretty much on what it's talked about so far. I suppose someone could issue a Freedom of Information request. I don't know that anyone has done so yet. This is a high, high level number of people in terms of their political and legal acumen inside and outside of the academy. You've got moderates, you've got liberals, you've got conservatives, all people who have a lot to say and have done a lot of writing and researching about the US Supreme Court over the course of their careers, both historically as well as politically, so they haven't done a whole lot yet. And the likelihood that they come through with recommendations to put in term limits which would actually take a constitutional amendment or increase the number of justices which would not take an amendment to the Constitution, it's probably not very likely. I believe that if those sorts of reforms are going to be pushed, they would have been done in the first three months or 100 days, right, the first 100 days, the honeymoon period of President Biden's term in office. They weren't done, so I'm not sure he's an incredible fan of doing so. But I could see a scenario under which changes could come out of the Biden administration. Let's just say that the abortion case overturns Roe versus Wade, that the guns case allows conceal and carry everywhere with no permit. Now, everybody doesn't need a, nobody needs a background check, nobody needs a permit, you can just put a gun in your pocket. And you, are it's perfectly legal under the Constitution to do so. And that we get rid of all affirmative action. I would imagine all three of those cases are so far to the right that it's unpalatable to a majority of Americans. And I would argue the number suggests that all three of those decisions would run opposite of what most Americans would like to see on those three legal and policy areas. You could see the Biden administration prior to the midterm election saying we need to change things, and we need to add a couple of justices to the bench. We need to do something. But again, the likelihood is very, very small that it will happen.

 

Jim du Bois  27:16

Let's talk about the three remaining liberal justices on the court. What can we glean from their dissents this past term?

 

Timothy Johnson  27:25

Right. So, I think you can glean very clearly that they are going to stay as tried and true to their legal and political preferences as humanly possible. There will be times where they will cast strategic votes, that is, they will try to jump in the majority as they did in the Catholic Social Services case to try to narrow decisions as much as humanly possible to save what they can save from laws that might be overturned or particular legal doctrines that might be changed in a way with which they disagree. But they are staying pretty tried and true. And you're going to continue to see stronger, more strident, harsher dissents from these three. And you're going to, in particular, get the sense from both Justice Sotomayor and Kagan, the two most liberal members of the Court today, who are two of the most brilliant members of the Court today where they are going to take on point for point majority opinions. They did so in many cases this term, in particular, in the Voting Rights Act case as well as in the case that, the free speech case that allows corporations not to divulge how much money they're giving or to whom they're giving it when it's nonprofit organizations, and you're just going to see much more staunch dissent. They will stay together. The one who you will see that would break from that from time to time would be Justice Breyer because he is much more moderate than Justices Sotomayor and Kagan. And so you will see him break, but he will stick with the two of them most of the time.

 

Jim du Bois  28:53

As a Supreme Court scholar, do you feel that each court is unique to its particular time in history and the ideologies of the justices? Or do you see any parallels between today's court and any from the past?

 

Timothy Johnson  29:07

I think it's both, Jim. I think that they're all unique, but you can absolutely see parallels to the past, right? So, this is a court that is very similar to the Warren Court, the liberal Warren Court that had not only six most of the time, but for part of time a seven-two majority on the bench. And then this is also a Court where you've got the majority that that Roger Tawney had after John Marshall died in in 1835. And so, you've got this very strong majority that can't be stopped if it doesn't want to be stopped. But it also then, and this is the other part of both of your questions, it has its own unique thoughts about how it wants the law to be crafted, how it wants the law and policy to be interpreted. And, really, this is a Court that wants to focus on individual liberties. In that sense, it's much more libertarian probably than it is conservative, and you've got a court where you have not a majority yet but close to a majority who really are moving towards Justice Clarence Thomas' view that precedent doesn't have the power that we believe it does. And if you want a case thrown out because you think that it is no longer good law or should be good law, you should just throw it out. And that's what Justice Thomas wanted to do in the free speech case that we talked about a couple of minutes ago. And it's probably clearly what he would like to do in the abortion case emanating out of Mississippi for next term.

 

Jim du Bois  30:29

About three years ago, we spoke to you about a research project that you had underway that was analyzing the private handwritten notes of the Supreme Court justices. How is that project progressing at this point?

 

Timothy Johnson  30:43

Oh, it's amazing. So, we are done, all of the transcribing from our volunteers. We ended up having about 6800 volunteers over the three years do transcriptions for us. The algorithm has been fully run, and we are done at this point with that transcribing. And so, we are in the process now of hand-reading every single one of the transcriptions just to check to make sure that the mathematical algorithm that was used to make sure that the transcribing was done well, actually was done well. We have 33,000 images. I'm working with six research assistants. It's going to take us, we believe, about four months to get through all of the images. But right now, things are going incredibly well. We can see systematic patterns already emerging about discussions that the justices have about former precedent, precedents that might be involved in deciding a case in particular way, how often they talk about Congress and what Congress might think if they interpret a statute or in a particular way. And then they talk about each other, right? Here is what Justice Marshall said, and here's my response to what he had to say. So, we're in the midst of just cleaning those data over these next couple of months. And then we're going to begin analysis and write our first book, one of what I think will be several books that will come out of this project. I appreciate you asking.

 

Jim du Bois  32:05

Timothy Johnson is a Morse Alumni Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Law at the University of Minnesota. Professor Johnson, thanks again for joining us on Dialogue Minnesota.

 

Timothy Johnson  32:15

Thanks for having me, Jim. I appreciate it.

Fitness Tips From A Personal Trainer

Personal Trainer Brent Goodermont

Download

SPEAKERS

Jim du Bois, Brent Goodermont

 

Jim du Bois  00:00

Dialogue Minnesota. Conversations about the issues that matter to you. I'm Jim du Bois. The COVID 19 pandemic made it difficult for a lot of us to engage in fitness activities and sports. Many Americans also put on weight over the past 15 months. But now that the pandemic restrictions are lifting and summer weather is here, you might be thinking about getting back in shape and improving your overall health. This week on Dialogue Minnesota, a look at how we can get fit with just our own bodyweight or some very basic pieces of fitness equipment. Brent Goodermont is a personal trainer with 15 years of experience. He operates his own fitness company, Health 171. Brent, welcome to Dialogue Minnesota.

 

Brent Goodermont  00:45

Thank you, Jim.

 

Jim du Bois  00:47

Brent, your company is Health 171. What's the significance of your company's name?

 

Brent Goodermont  00:54

Jim, I started a career, a second career as a personal trainer in 2006 at Lifetime Fitness. And I was quite fortunate because I had some clients that I acquired right when I started, and many of them stayed with me until 2020 when Lifetime closed temporarily due to COVID-19. And during that shutdown, I made a decision to change companies. In fact, I started my own. And I wanted to come up with a name. I'm not particularly clever, but I am authentic enough to say, you know, I'm going to add up the combined tenure of my current clientele. It was 171 years. And I said, that's a good name, Health 171.

 

Jim du Bois  01:37

Well, Brent, as a second career, what drew you to the fitness profession?

 

Brent Goodermont  01:42

In my first career, I was in charge of compensation and benefits for a large high-tech company locally. And from time to time you would see an increase in medical claims. And then you, you try to find out why these claims took place. And a lot of times they took place because of obesity, and then the secondary diseases from obesity. And so, I thought, maybe if I do change careers, I could help people with this type of issue: overweight, obesity, high blood pressure. Secondly, my father died when I was in my 20s. And I just thought, you know, I do want to help people become healthier. I'm not a medical doctor, but I could maybe stop them or prevent them maybe from going to the doctor's as often as they did. Or maybe keep them out of the hospitals or maybe get them off of a pharmaceutical. So, in 2006, actually in 2005, I left my career, nice, long, lucrative, fun, career challenging career to become a personal trainer. Great decision.

 

Jim du Bois  02:48

Well, Brent, the past 15 months or so have been challenging on so many different levels. But it's been particularly tough for people who perhaps had a fitness routine and it got disrupted because of COVID. Perhaps they didn't feel comfortable going to a gym. What advice do you have for someone now who's looking at the beautiful weather, we have a nice day today when we're recording this, and they're saying, gee, I really want to get back on track. What's a good way to start?

 

Brent Goodermont  03:16

Start walking, start moving. You know, there's a famous, not famous but a saying by a gentleman by the name of Gray Cook. He said think movement, not muscles. And what better way to enjoy Minnesota spring, Minnesota summer, by moving a brisk walk, a gentle stroll beyond your bike, maybe go in the water and swim but move. And if you're deconditioned, walk around the block. If you can, walk around the block twice. Everything with fitness is usually about progressiveness, right? Can you go from one block to two blocks? Can you lift five pounds? Can you lift 10 pounds? These little minor progressions that you can measure. I would say get out and start walking.

 

Jim du Bois  04:05

Well, what should someone do if they perhaps were used to going to a gym or maybe just want to start working out, and they have access to little if any equipment? Can you do an effective workout with just your bodyweight?

 

Brent Goodermont  04:22

Absolutely. In fact, there are certifications by certain governing bodies in the fitness world to have a body weight certification. A push up is a good example of a bodyweight exercise. Squatting, lunging, walking, lying on the ground on your back. Can you roll out into your belly, then back onto your back? There are many ways in which one, you can walk backwards. You can walk sideways, you can walk up a hill, you can walk down a hill. Lots of things you could do. You can jump, you can skip. I have many clients about a year ago at this time who wanted just such a workout. They did not want to invest, at least then, in any equipment. They didn't want to spend money yet. Some people had some concerns about whether they would have a job or lose their job or, or unemployment or whatever the case may be. They weren't ready to invest in anything yet. And so bodyweight worked for them. And all you need is solid ground, and your body and a little bit of time.

 

Jim du Bois  05:28

If someone has had a very sedentary lifestyle, not only during the past 14,15 months or so, but even prior to that, is it a good idea to consult with a health care professional and essentially get a go ahead to start a fitness routine?

 

Brent Goodermont  05:45

Absolutely. Even if you think that you're in pretty good condition. If you haven't worked out in 14,15 months, I would still consult with your doctor just to make sure that your heart, your lungs, your joints, are ready to handle some of the rigors of walking longer than you've walked before or trying to do pushups or other type of activities. Yes.

 

Jim du Bois  06:06

Brent, you mentioned that a lot of good exercise can be done utilizing just your body weight. What if someone wants to invest in some very basic pieces of exercise gear? What kind of gear do you recommend, and what's the rough price point for some of these items?

 

Brent Goodermont  06:23

I'll name about three or four or five things that are all under $50. And that still could be a lot of money for people, I understand. Hand weights, five-pound hand weights, 10 pound hand weights. Something called a hip circle. It's a thick band of cloth that has a bunch of elasticity to it. And you put it around just below or above your knees, and you walk sideways. Tremendous exercise for your glutes. Something called a Pilates ring. It's round, it can be rubber could be made out of steel, all sorts of great exercises with a Pilates ring. You can get elastic tubing that has handles where you can pull apart the tube, do biceps, triceps, all sorts of different exercises with elastic tubing. All are available locally at Target, Dick's Sporting Goods, online as well. That's where I would start.

 

Jim du Bois  07:17

A couple of other items come to mind two that are pricier but are quite versatile. One would be a stability ball, and then a Bosu ball, which stands for both sides up.

 

Brent Goodermont  07:28

Very good!

 

Jim du Bois  07:29

Tell us about those pieces of equipment and why they might be a valuable part of your workout routine.

 

Brent Goodermont  07:36

I'm a big fan of the stability ball they can be had in several different diameters, 55 and 65 centimeters are the more common, and you can lie on your back, put your heels on that ball and elevate your hips and pull that ball with your heels. You can roll out on that ball; you can do pushups with that ball. So, I'm a big fan. Many of my clients own those. I'm not as big a fan as using it as an office chair for eight hours a day. Just imagine for a moment sitting on something like that. You are not going to be able to sit on that with any sense of stability in your pelvis, and imagine your pelvis going up and down when your spine is reacting to that over eight hours. So, I'm not a fan of it as an office chair. The Bosu offers an advantage of you can be on something that's somewhat unstable. And sometimes in life, whether it's ice, snow, grit, wet surfaces, that's an unstable surface, and we need to be able to handle that. I am as not a big fan of Bosu as many people are. I've seen too many turned ankles when people stand on the dome side up and try to go up and over that. So, I'm not a fan. Flipping it over and holding on to it and doing pushups? Big fan of that. But in rank order would be lower on the list than higher on the list as pieces of home equipment to purchase. brand.

 

Jim du Bois  09:05

How important is it to warm up and perhaps do some stretching before you start exercising?

 

Brent Goodermont  09:12

Very, it's a good way of preventing injury. It's a good way of preparing the mind that you're about to do some work. I'm a bigger fan of what's called dynamic stretching, moving like a lateral leg swing, jogging in place, doing some jumping jacks, doing some back bends as opposed to some of the old fashioned, you go to a Minnesota Timberwolves or Minnesota Gopher basketball men's or women's game, and you'll see them lying on the floor and somebody is cranking on their leg trying to stretch their hamstrings and holding it. I'm not a big fan of those static stretches before you work out. I'm a big fan of dynamic movement before you work out.

 

Jim du Bois  09:52

Can stretches be dangerous if they're not done correctly?

 

Brent Goodermont  09:56

Absolutely. Just about anything we've talked about can dangerous if done incorrectly. The muscle is pretty incredible that it has a couple of things inside which will give a warning sign that if you're stretching it too far, it will literally try to snap back. But if you go too fast and and too hard and too quickly, you could strain your muscle. And you're also teaching that muscle when you're stretching it for that long period of time to relax. I don't want my muscles all relaxed before I get ready to do some activity. Ergo, I will do that, I'll do that type of stretching after a workout.

 

Jim du Bois  10:40

How important is it to address parts of your body that may be feeling pain or tension or stiffness with a foam roller or something of that nature? Is that an effective device?

 

Brent Goodermont  10:56

Yes, first thing you need to do is make sure that that foam roller or any technique that you use does not put you in additional pain. Anything. Whether you're exercising, if you have, if you feel pain, you never want to put yourself into pain. So, a foam roller can get rid of some of those, sometimes they're knots and little collagen buildups in the in your the fascia system of your body, the fascia covers your muscles. But sometimes we can have some slight trauma to that fascia. And a foam roller can roll some of that out. It's almost like auto massage, self-massage. That will work. But if you find yourself being put in pain, you should stop. Oftentimes, the best remedy for pain is rest. Sometimes ice, sometimes heat can help. But I'm a big fan of resting something for a day or two. No one's gonna immediately become deconditioned in 48 hours. But oftentimes 48 hours can give you a clue whether that issue is certainly more painful or more serious, or was just some slight tissue damage, slight muscle fatigue that simply needed 48 hours of rest.

 

Jim du Bois  12:09

The COVID pandemic has changed the way many of us work. About I think 28% of workers now are still working remotely. Some are slowly going back to their offices. But a lot of companies are now saying that the work model going forward will be a hybrid of remote working and office working. For people, say an office worker who is used to going out to get lunch and walk through the Skyway system, say in downtown Minneapolis or they found themselves moving around a lot more within their corporate headquarters, and now they're basically stuck at a desk at their house for eight or nine or 10 hours a day. What should people do to perhaps move about a bit, maybe do some exercises to break up the routine and maybe make up for some of that activity that they had before they were forced to work remotely?

 

Brent Goodermont  13:05

I think some of it comes with can you play in time in your day? There's all sorts of electronic devices that will set timers to say you've been sitting too long, you've been sitting for 10 minutes or 20 minutes or 30 minutes. Some people will leverage that technology. And when the timer tells them to get up, they'll get up and climb the stairs, walk around the block, do 10 jumping jacks or something. Certain people are wired that way to have that discipline to set the timer, not ignore the timer, and do something. Others going to your lunch analogy, if someone does have time to be away from their workspace, and their phone or laptop for an hour, who says you can't walk 20 minutes to go get lunch, weather permitting, bring it home and eat it outside and then go back to your workplace? That's an example. Other people have invested in home equipment. There might be some of your listeners who have a treadmill, a rower, a Peloton and will maybe over their lunch hour or before or after their shift, get on there and move assuming the weather is not nice to be outside.

 

Jim du Bois  14:23

Brent, you have the opportunity to train clients both in person and remotely. What do you see is perhaps some of the advantages of training remotely?

 

Brent Goodermont  14:36

It's an interesting question and I've thought about this lately as to why my clients have stuck with me during the pandemic and have chosen not to return to a health club and work with me on a laptop or iPad. And some of the reasons would be they find themselves being able to have deeper conversations with me because they're in the privacy of their own home, instead of being surrounded by 40, or 60 or 70 people. They miss some of that energy of the club, but they like the remoteness and the privacy that we have one on one. They also like the fact that they're not spending a lot of time commuting to the club, and dealing with parking, locker room, space availability, loud music. Sometimes loud music is energetic, for some that loud music might just be that…loud music. And I think my clients have enjoyed that extra free time. And they've leveraged that in spending more of their time to train with me. Many of my clients are training more with me this way, digitally, versus when they met with me one on one at the health club before I left.

 

Jim du Bois  15:53

Brent, you mentioned some pricier pieces of exercise equipment, for example, a Peloton, a cycle, and a rower. Talk about each of those pieces of equipment and what kind of benefits do they give you as a workout device?

 

Brent Goodermont  16:10

First and foremost, you should select the piece of equipment that you think you're going to use. Most runners like to run, but some runners need some cross training because of the overuse of muscles. And they might need to do some cross-training and sit on a bike or get in a pool to save save their joints, if you will. The advantage of a rower would be the fact that you use more muscle groups than you would on a bike or running. A rower uses about 86% of your muscles. It's low impact so so individuals who have some knee, hip and ankle issues, they're not going to aggravate those injuries by running on a treadmill. So, I'm a big fan of that. It puts a tremendous amount of challenge to your core to keep your spine and upper body in a proper position while trying to push away from the rowing pads. So, I'm a big fan. I'm a bit biased because I do a lot of indoor rowing. It is my favorite piece of indoor exercise equipment. Most of my clients have been lucky enough and blessed enough to invest in their own and have their own home rower. A bike, especially Peloton, Peloton has done a really nice job of offering some great digital experiences with a ride leader, a ride coach. High energy high encouragement. They do a wonderful job of tracking your progress and giving you these little gold stars, or whatever system they use, every 50 rides, every 100 rides. They do a lot of good what's called cardiovascular zone training and give you different ways of an endurance ride, a power ride, a speed ride, etc. Peloton is great. It's a super leg workout. Your core gets a little bit of a break because you're seated. You're not getting a lot of upper body workout, but I guarantee you're expending a lot of energy and a lot of sweat doing one of these Peloton classes, and they've just done a really awesome job of bringing people into that community. That's a good thing. Treadmills, I think they're still popular. I don't think they're as popular as they were 20 years ago, but I, that's anecdotal. Treadmills are nice because a lot of people know how to do it. They walk. We, most of us know how to walk. It allows, certain treadmills allow you to maybe get an incline. You have some good measurement tools in terms of can I walk four miles an hour, can I walk five miles an hour? Can I do that for 10 minutes or 20 minutes? So, the treadmill offers that. Treadmill can be a little hard, even with a softer deck. A lot of treadmill can be some ankle issues, maybe some knee issues. But runners and walkers like to run, and they like to walk, and some people don't like to do that in the wintertime, or in the rain or in the cold. So, a treadmill is a fine piece of equipment to have at home. They're just a little bit bigger. They take up a little bit more space. They're hard to move around.

 

Jim du Bois  19:22

We should make a disclaimer that you are not a nutritionist, but I'm going to ask some questions that might be related to diet. A lot of folks have put on weight over the course of the pandemic. As a matter of fact, I saw one survey that said the average American has gained nearly 20 pounds. They called it the COVID-19, much like the freshman 15 that we've read about that college freshmen sometimes gain. How should you approach the whole process of weight loss? For example, is it a combination of both being more active and perhaps beginning to invest your time and effort in a healthier diet? Are both those elements important?

 

Brent Goodermont  20:07

They're both important. I've always made this claim, and I've had many my co-workers say the same. We feel that in our health and in weight loss, 80 to 90% of it's what you eat. Bad nutrition overrides good training. And so, for me, I think, again, thanks for the disclaimer, my approach has always been treating food as fuel. Not as a comfort event. It can certainly be a social event, but I think it needs to be considered as fuel. Fuel to allow us to get through our day with the proper minerals and macronutrients. Macronutrients being defined as fat, protein, carbohydrates, and maybe fiber. And that's where the registered dietitians come in to help people allocate those macronutrients. Maybe 20, 30 years ago, I was following the no fat fad. Everything seemed to be no fat in my refrigerator, from mayonnaise to whatever. But not all fats are bad. That's not true. So that's why the rise of avocado, olive oil, coconut oil, etc. Fish oil have been a bigger part of people's diet for good reasons. I'm not here to tell people what percentages, obviously. We've seen more and more individuals strive towards better quality of protein. No offense to McDonald's or Burger King, but maybe not as good as source of protein as pure organic grass-fed beef, and other sources of poultry, and vegetarian options from lentils to beans. Some people like eggs, some people like fish, salmon. Great, high quality sources of protein. We found, at least in my department, many people were not getting enough grams of protein in their diet. Finally, carbohydrates. Not all carbs are bad. But oftentimes people invest in bad carbs, almost like an empty calorie because many people enjoy chips, candy bars, ice cream. I'm not here to ding those foods. And even alcohol. Alcohol is considered a nutrient. But it's pretty much empty calories, but they are calories. And so, I think thinking of food as fuel, understanding and having some education of what good fat, carbohydrate, protein is all about. What is your minimum fiber requirement? What is your minimum protein needs for the day? Are you drinking enough water? A lot of this isn't really hard science, and you don't have to worry about should I be on a Keto diet, a Miami Beach diet, a Mediterranean diet? Maybe take that off your thought process and educate yourself on what are good macronutrients. And some of the science isn't that hard. What's hard is having the discipline to follow that. And when you think about it, especially my age, COVID-era aside, many of my social events that I attended were joyous events such as retirement parties, graduation ceremonies, birthday parties and weddings, but also sad events such as funerals. And as we age, we probably attend more of those. All those events that I just mentioned usually have a lot of food involved. And I haven't been to too many of these events where lentils and kale were the featured food items to celebrate a birthday party or a wedding. So we have to develop a plan as to how to handle that. My unsolicited advice is what I personally do before I go to some of these events. I eat a very, very healthy meal, almost as I'm walking out the door. So I'm not tempted. I still, I still want to enjoy life. I still want to celebrate with the celebrants. I still want to have a small piece of wedding cake. I still want to dance with the bride. I still want to have fun, but I do not want to fill up on a lot of bad food. And so, I tried to have that as part of my, my plan that works for me.

 

Jim du Bois  24:38

If folks plan on participating in aerobic activities, how important is it to pay attention to heart rate, and is a heart rate monitor a good investment?

 

Brent Goodermont  24:48

It can be, and there's some basic, basic pieces of information we should understand. And that is what is your maximum heart rate. Some people do that with an old arithmetic formula. And they would take the number 220. and subtract their age and say, well, that's my maximum. It can be a starting point. But it's not a very statistically valid number. You take 100 people who are 50 years old, I guarantee you, you're going to have a variety of conditions of those 100 50-year-olds. And so, I don't think every one of them would have a maximum heart rate of 170. And so, there's different ways one can calculate a little bit more accurately what their maximum heart rate is. And from there, you can tailor some of your programming. At issue is, once your joints are conditioned enough, and you can walk around the block 10 times or you can walk two or three miles, and you're ready to put a cardiovascular element into your weekly plan and try to achieve 120, 140, 160 minutes of cardiovascular activity, you should do it at some intensity to have a cardiovascular effect, or a cardiovascular improvement. If you just walk very slowly, that's better than nothing, that's better than sitting on a couch. But we want to force our heart, especially the left ventricle of our heart, to adapt. And when we go at a minimum amount of intensity, the heart will start to adapt. And that's called cardiovascular training. And it's science. It's part of the morphology of the heart. And I'm a big fan of finding that sweet spot and then training there. And then from time to time, going higher and try to do what's called more aerobic or high intensity intervals. They're nice as well. A nice combination of those two things can break up our weekly cardiovascular routine, with the majority of it being moderate intensity, longer duration.

 

Jim du Bois  26:53

Brent Goodermont is a personal trainer. His company is Health 171. Brent, thanks so much for joining us on Dialogue, Minnesota.

 

Brent Goodermont  27:01

A pleasure, Jim. Thank you for having me.