Politics Is Everything

Robert Costa, chief election and campaign correspondent for CBS News and a scholar at the Center for Politics this academic year, shares his approach to covering campaigns, elections and politics to help the public make sense of the complex issues facing the nation. "It can become a blizzard that's hard to follow," says Costa, "You have to report deeply and you want to break news...Unless it's breaking ground on the biggest players, it's important, but not THE story."

Links in this episode:

• Peril
• Watergate at 50: The political scandal that changed Washington
• Rep. Liz Cheney Speaks joins Robert Costa, CBS Sunday Morning, June 5, 2022

There's been some mixed electoral indicators - including the recent rise in President Biden's job approval rating and Democrats doing better in the generic ballot - that are making the 2022 elections more challenging to analyze. Henry Olsen, Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Washington Post columnist joins us to discuss why the Republicans are now being underrated, including through persistent and unaddressed biases in survey research, and what that means for the 2022 elections. "We should be very careful when we're looking at state-level polling," says Olsen.

Links in this episode:

• Ethics and Public Policy Center
• The Midterms Swing Voter: People who Disapprove of Biden Only a Little
• Yes, the Polling Warning Signs Are Flashing Again, Nate Cohn, New York Times

Kyle Kondik, Managing Editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball at the Center for Politics, talks about redistricting, the special election in Alaska and new ratings for House of Representative seats.

Links in this episode:

Notes on the State of Politics: Sept. 7, 2022, https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/notes-on-the-state-of-politics-sept-7-2022/

In August, Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) became the seventh House Republican to fall to a Donald Trump-backed challenger since 2018. Rep. Cheney has taken a prominent role in calling for accountability for the January 6, 2021 insurrection and calling out false election narratives. In this episode, we talk with Leah Askarinam, senior editor at Grid News, about the extent to which and where have Mr. Trump's endorsements mattered in the 2022 election and why. "Trump undoubtedly is the most powerful endorser in the Republican Party, but even that has its limits," says Askarinam. Askarinam also discusses the role of candidate quality, the impact of the Dobbs decision, the economy and other issues and why this might not be a typical midterm election year.

Before joining Grid, Leah was co-author of the On Politics newsletter for the New York Times and editor in chief of National Journal's Hotline.

Links in this episode:

• Leah Askarinam on Twitter, https://twitter.com/leahaskarinam
• Leah Askarinam, "Senate candidates might not be able to ride a red wave. Can they paddle their way to the majority?," Grid News, https://www.grid.news/story/politics/2022/09/03/senate-candidates-might-not-be-able-to-ride-a-red-wave-can-they-paddle-their-ways-to-the-majority/
• Elena More, Tracking Trump's endorsements: Here's how his picks have fared in primaries, NPR, https://www.npr.org/sections/2022-live-primary-election-race-results/2022/09/06/1120652541/donald-trump-republican-primary-endorsement-performance

In Sabato's Crystal Ball this week, Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman write that Democrats are hoping to make the 2022 election more of a choice than a referendum. Democrats are benefiting from some damaged Republican candidates in several key races as well as the emergence of abortion as a key issue in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision. In this episode, they discuss how the political environment has changed and what it portends for Senate races.

Links in this episode:

• Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball: https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/
• Election Spending Overview, Center for Responsive Politics, https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview

What would American democracy look like if everyone participated? Americans turned out to vote in record numbers in the 2020 presidential election and turnout has been on the rise in other recent elections. However, voter turnout in the United States still lags behind other countries. In this episode, we discuss 100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting with co-authors Miles Rapoport, executive director of 100% Democracy: An Initiative for Universal Voting and the Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, and E.J. Dionne, Jr. senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, university professor at Georgetown University, and visiting professor at Harvard University.

Universal voting is in effect in 26 democratic countries in Europe, Latin America, Asia. Most notably, Australia adopted nationwide mandatory voting almost 100 years ago, in 1924. The participation rate immediately jumped from 60% to 90% and has stayed there in almost every election since.

Rapoport and Dionne make the case that universal civic-duty voting would make the voting electorate more fully representative of the universe of American citizens and that campaigns would significantly improve, since candidates and parties would have to appeal to all voters. "When the electorate is fully reflective of the population as a whole, the responsiveness of government is likely to increase," Rapoport says during our conversation. Instead of the "enrage to engage" that comes with great cost to our democracy, universal voting "would almost certainly produce a less ideological electorate," says Dionne. The implementation of universal voting could also significantly improve civic culture in the United States.

Links in this Episode:

• 100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting
• Civic Duty to Vote Act, Introduced by Representative John Larson (D-CT-1)
• Compulsory Voting Around the world, IDEA International

In the lead up to the 2020 election, the Pew Research Center asked voters whether they would split their ticket, that is to select a Republican for one office and a Democrat for another. Just 4% of registered voters said they would do so. Less than four percent of members of the House of Representatives (16 of 435) represent districts that voted for the opposing party's presidential nominee in 2020. At the state level, 90 percent of state Senate and state House districts around the country voted for the same party for president as they did for the legislature. In 2022, six states - Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Oklahoma and South Carolina - will offer voters the opportunity to choose a party's entire slate of candidates with just a single ballot mark in general elections that applies to all partisan offices on the ticket, including federal, state and local races.

There has been a precipitous decline in voters who split their ballots as the political parties have sorted ideologically and sharpened their differences over issues and policies. Despite this trend, J. Miles Coleman discusses which states that have elections in 2022 for senate and governor might see split outcomes and why.

Read Miles' full analysis on Sabato's Crystal Ball: https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/

Tim Miller is an MSNBC analyst, writer-at-large at The Bulwark, and the host of "Not My Party" on Snapchat. Tim was communications director for Jeb Bush's 2016 presidential campaign and spokesman for the Republican National Committee during Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign. He has since left the GOP and become one of the leaders of the "Never Trump" movement. He is author of Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell that aims to explain why Washington DC politicos who knew better went along with Trump and he joins us on Politics is Everything to discuss his book and what we can do to fix the rage machine he helped to create.

Links in this episode:

https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Did-Travelogue-Republican/dp/0063161478

The president's party has lost governorships in 16 of the 19 midterm elections since World War II. In this episode, Kyle Kondik, Managing Editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball discusses the most competitive gubernatorial races in 2022. He shares how a variety of factors - including presidential approval, incumbency, the state of economy and other issues, the year in which gubernatorial elections are held - converge to shape the outcome of gubernatorial elections.

Links in this episode:

• https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/

The difference in experience among Senate candidates is one of the story lines Kyle Kondik, Managing Editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball, is following in the 2022 midterm elections. As a group, Republican Senate (and gubernatorial) candidates have less experience running for office and than do Democratic candidates on the slate this election. How will candidate experience and qualities impact election outcomes?

Also in this episode, Ahmed, a student who participated in the Center's Global Perspectives in Democracy Program, shares about his experience in the United States this summer and his views on democracy in Iraq.

Links in this episode:

The Long Red Thread, by Kyle Kondik