Recorded on Monday, Nov. 18, 2024
TRANSCRIPT
Jason Zengerle ’96 Welcome, everyone. It is great to have you with us. Thank you so much for joining us for this SwatTalk about the 2024 election featuring Arlie Hochschild, class of 1962, Daniel Laurison, class of 1999, and Eva McKend, class of 2011. My name is Jason Zengerle. I'm the class of 1996, and I'll be the moderator tonight.
Before we dive in with our panel, I just wanted to go over a few preliminary pieces of business. SwatTalks is a speaker series brought to you by the Swarthmore Alumni Council, of which I'm a member. We've now been doing these talks for almost five years, but I want to put in a plug for them at this particular moment. If you're on the zoom, I'd imagine that Swarthmore is a place that means something to you. And I think right now it's never been more important to have a strong community in which we can have honest and supportive conversations. I believe SwatTalks is that sort of forum. And while not every SwatTalk will be as on the news as tonight's, a lot of them will be. Next month, for instance, we're going to have Bob Putnam do a SwatTalk about the state of American community. But even when these talks are not as tied to current events, I hope that you'll continue to attend them. And just as important, I hope you'll continue to view them as a resource in what could be a stressful and disruptive time. Tonight's session will be recorded, so you'll be able to find it online at the SwatTalks page on the Swarthmore College website. Normally, the recordings aren't posted for a couple of weeks, but because of the interest in and the timeliness of tonight's talk, the college's communications team will have it posted within a couple of days. So thank you to Melissa Hendrixson and other people at the college for making that possible. If you're interested in watching previous talks, you can also find those on the SwatTalks page.
For those of you who are new to SwatTalks, or for our regulars who just need a reminder, tonight will go like this: I will ask questions of our panel for the first half hour or so, and then we'll spend the second half hour taking questions from you, the audience. Please ask those questions by using the Q&A feature at the bottom of zoom, and please be sure to include your name and class year when you do so, I will get to as many of your questions as possible.
So I'd like to briefly introduce our panelists. Arlie Hochschild is one of America's most esteemed sociologists. She taught at the University of California at Berkeley for several decades. Most recently, she has written two fantastic books about, for lack of a better term, red America Strangers in Their Own Land in 2016, and Stolen Pride, which was just published in September.
Daniel Laurison is a sociologist who not only attended Swarthmore but now teaches at the college where he runs the Politics and Equal Participation Lab. One of the lab's projects is interviewing poor and working class people in Pennsylvania to learn about their thoughts and experiences with electoral politics. Daniel is also the author of two books, including 2022 Is Producing Politics, which was a deep study of the professional political operatives run campaigns.
And Eva McKend is a correspondent for CNN, where she covers national politics. She's also a regular guest on National Public Radio's One A and PBS Washington Week and Review. Most recently Eva was CNN's top reporter in Kamala Harris's presidential campaign. So we're especially grateful to her for joining us tonight, when she probably should be on vacation.
And finally, just for the purposes of tonight's panel, I thought I'd mention that I'm a reporter for the New York Times Magazine where I cover national politics.
I thought I'd start tonight by asking our panelists to each give a few top line thoughts about what just transpired in the election. So Daniel, would you start us off, please?
Daniel Laurison ’99 Sure. Hi, everybody. I can't see you, but it's nice to be here with you. Let me just share my screen real quick.
So I just want to start with sort of - as we're all trying to make sense of what happened in this election this is probably the map that we've all seen over and over. Maybe we watched it fill in, until early in the morning, Tuesday night a couple of weeks ago. But I want to start with a reminder that this is not what the country actually looks like. And I think that's really important for any question about what happened in this election and how do we make sense of it, right. So the country is actually, much, much, much more purple than these maps indicate. This is just colored, by the percentage votes for each candidate total rather than who won. And when you look at population, the country looks a lot more purple towards blue than this sort of overwhelming lead. So that at least for me as a trans man living in a country where the where the campaign was largely predicated on attacking trans people, is helpful for me at least, to sort of remind me that not everyone is, you know, the country doesn't look like the map in the upper left hand corner.
And in fact, when you look at the results of this election, as compared to the results of the last few elections in terms of the popular vote, you see what I would consider a fair amount of, persistence of lack of change overall. So I just took the totals, for each candidate from the New York Times, and mapped them out here for the last four years. And it's not, you know, the shift in power over the each of the last three elections is radical. The shift in how people voted is very, very small and I think that's incredibly consequential, but very small. So I just want to sort of have that out there to frame the conversation that we're going to have.
That said, you know, it looks like Trump got, either exactly 50% or maybe slightly more of the popular vote. But what that also leaves out is the question of what, of, who wasn't voting and that's where a lot of my work is. So again, if you look at 2024, and include the people who didn't vote, you see that only about a third of people voted for each of the two major party candidates, and a little more than a third of people stay at home. And that looks, again, remarkably like 2020. We had, it looks like, total turnout was down about two percentage points over 2024 in 2020. And again, about a third of people voted for each of the major party candidates. Obviously, the difference in the percentages matters a lot, but as sort of a, you know, a zoom out, the country hasn't changed radically since the last two elections. The behavior of voters hasn't changed radically since the last two elections. And that's, you know, the main difference from 2016 is just the percentage turnout. Again, you know, the results were split fairly evenly between the two major party candidates. So, a lot of my work then is about thinking about how do people who are in that green, people who didn't vote, how do they differ from everybody else? And what is the composition of our electorate?
So just briefly, I won't make you think about the numbers after this slide. But on the left, I'm showing just the percentage of, the percentage turnout by precinct, by the income and in precincts across the country. And this is from a paper I have, working paper I have, and the key thing I want you to notice looking at the red and the blue lines there is that while turnout increased in 2020 over 16 and increased most among people in relatively well-off precincts, in the poorest precincts down at the lower left hand corner there, the turnout was about the same, even though there was a six percentage point increase overall. And that means that, when you look at the income composition or the class composition of voters in 2020, over on the right hand side, you see that nonvoters are much more likely to be low income than people who vote. There's a real class disparity or class gradient in who participates in politics.
And I did a quick look at exit polls, and this should be taken with a fair amount of salt, because exit poll data notoriously shifts a lot once we have better data. But it looks to me like the composition of the electorate, based on exit polls, at least, was substantially better off in 2024 than it was in 2020. The portion of people who had incomes over $100,000 in 2024, was about 40%, whereas it was closer to 25% in 2020. Some of that is going to be inflation, but inflation doesn't explain that big of a shift. So with that sort of context, I just want to say a little bit about what politics looks like to regular people, the poor and working class people, which is pretty different than what it looks like to most of us who went to Swarthmore or affiliated with Swarthmore in some way. So these are some quotes from some interviews that I've done with poor and working class people across Pennsylvania. On the left is Lala, who is a black single mother in her 20s. When we interviewed her, she worked at a donut shop in West Philadelphia, and she told us things like, you know, “People tell you that your vote matters and I feel like it doesn't. Every time [the candidate] is a person who really doesn't get us or isn't there for us”. And we asked her to define politics, what does she think of when she thinks of politics? And she said, “I think of people in power that have money and that are above us, and they don't really fully understand struggles like being in debt or having a child or being on welfare. I think that's what it's like a disconnection that's probably what I associate it with”. She also said that “I think as black people, we feel like our vote doesn't matter”. We heard these kinds of things over and over from people we talk to. So Ryan, a white man from Chester, told us that politics feels like something completely out of his control. He said, “I have a checkered past, so I don't feel like I'm the type of person that people really listen to. I don't think I have much of a say. I don't think there's anything I could do to change what's going on”. And the last thing I want to share is just, people also talked about feeling like politics doesn't make a change, make a difference. And that there's not much difference between Democrats and Republicans. So, Alex, who we interviewed in Pittsburgh, who was a dishwasher there, said, “When I think of politics, I just think of fakeness and games. He said, I look at my paycheck and I'm like, I'm still being screwed. You're still taking up all the money. I just think it's all hooey. I, you know, candidates tell you what you want to hear so you can vote them in and maybe they might make little changes”. And he and many other people said, you know, Democrats and Republicans behind the scenes, it's all the same. Now, I don't think that's accurate in terms of what the policies actually are and how they affect people, but this was something we heard over and over from a lot of people we talked with. And I think one of the key takeaways from this election, one of the key interpretations is that, you know, fundamentally, people vote based on their sense of how they're doing and a lot of people just vote for something different if they feel like things aren't working and that's a lot of what we saw was it's not all a full embrace of Trump and his policies for some number of people, and probably the people who made the difference, it may have been more a sense of just this isn't working, so I'm staying home or this isn't workings o I'll just vote [inaudible].
There's a lot more going on and a lot more to be said, but I just want to end on that politics doesn't look the same to poor and working class people often, as it looks to those of us who are deep in it, in our professional lives, for our work, through our education. Thanks.
Jason Zengerle ’96 Eva you want to go?
Eva McKend ’11 Yeah. Hi, everyone. Thank you for being with us tonight. I just got off, four months on the campaign trail with the Vice President in all of the battleground states. I actually started traveling with her a few weeks before Biden stepped aside. The very first trip was actually in New Orleans when she was at the Essence Festival, and I was with her on the road ever since.
I think some of my observations are, I feel like a lot of this was baked in. You know, there will be a deep assessment of the Harris campaign, the strengths and weaknesses. But ultimately, I think the President Biden's decision not to step aside from the jump really was perhaps the most consequential because this was, I think, a real rejection of incumbents and the current administration and a message from voters that they were looking for something new and, you know, I asked Vice President Harris about this, and I asked the people around her about this consistently, how could she credibly make the argument that she was a new way forward, a new generation of leadership? She would like to argue when she was in the administration, and she tried to thread that needle, but evidently it wasn't enough for enough voters to ultimately win the election. So I think that is a key component there.
Something else I would say is that Democrats can't be afraid to be Democrats. I think that we saw throughout the election, and I talked about this quite a bit on television. Democrats retreat on issues like immigration and climate and to me, covering it, it didn't seem genuine because some of the issues that they talked about, even, you know, just four years ago, like, calling the former president's policies on immigration, white supremacist policies, and then the Biden administration championing those very same policies once he was in office. I just think that, you know, my assessment was that it kind of set them up for failure on that argument because they weren't able to distinguish enough and distinguish themselves enough on this issue with voters. And then I think that they would have benefited in my assessment from making an affirmative case for immigration, right? This was a time to crowd out asylum seekers, you know, tell their stories, tell the stories of these recipients who are making tremendous impacts in all of our communities and how vital they are to our economy. And that was not done. It was retreating. It was mirroring some of the rhetoric that we have seen from Republicans on the border. It was trying to be tough on the border, which nobody believed, because historically that hasn't been the position of the Vice President. You know, in her memoir, she speaks very compassionately about immigrants. It was her number one issue when she went to the Senate and it was the first group that she met with after she was elected to the Senate in 2016, was an immigrant rights group in California. So, you know, I think she actually might have benefited from embracing those groups in a different way and telling their stories and then trying to persuade people who had real concerns about immigration. I think that another area that's worth examination is this constant pursuit, really by the consultant class of pursuing the elusive middle and white moderate voters. We're still all assessing the numbers, but it seems like it wasn't all that effective. You know, this full embrace of Liz Cheney, this country over party message and that perhaps, you know, certainly the folks working on the campaign and then some of the groups that they contracted to target black voters, they tell me now that there was frustration that there wasn't more of an emphasis on that. They recognized early that they were struggling with recreating Biden's 2020 multiracial coalition. They recognize that pretty much immediately when the changeover happened. And Biden himself, when he was the nominee, was struggling to recreate it. And instead, I think there's questions about, well, why weren't more of the resources channeled towards matching that multiracial coalition? Why was there this chase for white suburban women? The campaign will argue that they did both, but strategist, Democratic strategists of color say that it was a missed opportunity. And then to me, I'll end with this - I was really surprised by the level of sexism that I saw, because honestly, it's not something that I think a lot about. You know, I'm a black woman living in America and I think about my black identity quite a bit, but I don't think about just my female identity separate from that. But I was at a turning point, which is, I'm sure many of you are familiar a conservative activist group supporting the former president and the left.
Jason Zengerle ’96 Young activists. Right? Like college activists?
Eva McKend ’11 College activists. You know, you see t-shirts like ‘Just say no to the hoe’ and, you know, even a sports star that was supporting the former president, like, talked about Trump or the tramp. And I didn't realize how much certain parts of Trump's coalition were animated by this sexism until I was out on the campaign trail and I saw it up close. And so maybe there needed to be a more direct conversation about that. I know that from covering the Vice President, she was really resistant to centering identity. Even when I asked her about the history making nature of her candidacy, she really resisted that and talked about how she wanted to be the president for all of America. But I wonder, it was kind of the elephant of the room, right? How parts of her identity were an issue for some voters and I wonder what it would have looked like if they would have talked about that and confronted that in a more robust and honest way for people that evidently still have concerns about that, you know, in 2024. So those are some of my observations.
Jason Zengerle ’96 Thanks, Arlie.
Arlie Hochschild ’62 Yeah. So interesting. I spent the last several years in Pike County, Kentucky, which is part of the whitest and second poorest congressional district in the country and writing a book, Stolen Pride and, I found there a kind of micro version of a larger story that gets us to think about the white working class as a sector. And, I think that goes to the heart of what we've just seen. The large story, it seems to me, is kind of got three parts. If we back up two decades, the white non-college segment, 42% of the population, has been actually downwardly mobile, in income and in property. And, so it's also other things, it's been a social logic associated with more people living alone, high incidence, blue collar white men of the seasons of despair. And that that includes, opiate addiction, and suicide and alcoholism. So it's got both an absolute downwardly mobility and relative because if we look at whites with BA’s, they've been going up. And if we looked at blacks with or without BA’s starting at much lower economic level, the direction it's been up. So, what I've been doing is studying, kind of a group of people who are kind of a subset of that and they are in coal country - coal is gone out, opiates have come in and, they feel downwardly mobile, looked down on the shamed. And, I think that they're not feeling good. And the second piece of that, of course, is that they've given up on regular government, turned to a charismatic figure. And I think, Donald Trump has been, actually, brilliant in a way that he appeals to that shame, turned to blame, through a, it's a kind of a logic of emotions that he's been following doing that. And, this is a part of the country that used to be Democratic and now it's Republican. And what struck me is the kind of talking to people, a kind of a fixity. I think all of the explanations sort of come in as to why we lost this election. Talk as if a little change in Harris's strategy would have changed things and came back with that feeling. No, this a hard wiring to this that I think leads us to look, at these kind of basic structures. And then I think the Democratic Party hasn't appealed to this downwardly mobile whole sector. It hasn't reached out so that white men are feeling excluded, and they'll say, “Look, I'm not a racist and I'm not a sexist, but, hey, you're talking about me as privileged, but let me tell you, I didn't have a toothbrush until I was 14”, that kind of story. And so, that's I think the main thing I want to say is that we do need to somehow not cut out this group, I think, is too big a group to ignore. And, they don't want to be ignored. So I think they're coalition possibilities, but we have to take them. I guess the last thing I would say is hoping that Harris would win, I was gonna suggest that she begin her presidency with a listening tour to go around to different sectors. “Hey, tell me, you know, I'm really interested in how you see this situation”. And, one way or another, I think representatives of the Democratic Party need you to do that. Be a good idea.
Jason Zengerle ’96 Thanks. Eva, you said something about the lack of resources you thought the Harris campaign spent on going after, black voters. And I don't know if you feel the same way about Hispanic voters as well, but, I want to ask you, like, follow up with you on that, because, you know, one of the really striking things about the election results was Harris lost ground with every voting category, I think, except for white voters. I think she improved with white voters over Biden, but lost with blacks and Hispanics, you know that still won those overall categories, but not by as much as Biden do you think is a question of resources? And also, is it a question of message, like, is there a message that you think the Harris campaign missed out on with black voters, with Hispanic voters that they weren't making as opposed to just it? Was it a question of effort or what they were actually saying?
Eva McKend ’11 Let me pull up this story that I did when I spoke to a Georgia organizer who, okay, so a Georgia organizer, this was in October, was sounding the alarm and essentially saying that the level of disinformation that she thought was specifically targeting black men was too much to overcome. That's what she told me. And she said, I'm reading a quote from her, “Those are incredibly nuanced conversations that need to be had and there is no 30 second or 60 second ad that can provide that much nuance”. So she was talking about how black men in particular, were hearing about immigration, how they were hearing about the economy. And she felt like there needed to be more resources into having long conversations to basically disrupt the narratives that these communities were hearing. You know, I yeah, you know, I guess I can speak honestly, with my Swarthmore alum, I, as a black woman in this country, am under no illusion that I'm going to get, you know, reparations if some undocumented person is getting an emergency grocery card or temporary housing, right. To me, I'm abundantly clear that they do not, like, present a threat to me at all, but I think that what was effectively done was weaponizing marginalized groups against one another and that took real, authentic, real, you know, conversations that can't be articulated with a mailer. This was door to door grassroots work that needed to happen in a short span of time to basically do some unlearning here. And my sense from organizers was that was not happening. You know, there is, I think, a limit to what you can achieve when there's just a constant ecosystem of ‘migrants are the problem’, you know, ‘migrants are presenting every single problem for your life’, you know, and especially if it's pumped, pumped into black communities. And I think that that's what played a part in his increase in support among black men in particular. So and then also the early messaging, the prosecutor versus felon framing, I think that that was problematic, based on my conversation with voters, if you notice, she didn't stick with that. She received feedback on that, that that was not working. And she didn't reiterate it even when people like surrogates did, because I was in Philly speaking to black men and they were insulted by that, right? Some of them were justice involved, and they told me that they felt like a kinship with Trump because of his felony convictions. And when I would come back to DC and tell Democratic strategists this what I was hearing on the ground, they would be insulted, right? Like, oh, this is so this is such an insulting thing. And I'm like, listen, I'm black, I'm speaking to black voters, and this is what they're telling me, so it's not about, you know, being precious about this stuff. This is what they are saying. And this is something that is clearly a misstep. So that I think played a factor as well.
Jason Zengerle ’96 Daniel, you wanted to say something.
Daniel Laurison ’99 Yeah. I just think the thing you said about the need for real conversations is so key to all of this. And, you know, I always said it and so that's one of the points I made in Producing Politics is that, you know, people who work in politics, they're trying to win, they're doing their best, but they are in a bubble, essentially, of people who are very similar to themselves. They're very likely to have gone to elite colleges, the feedback that they get is largely either filtered through polls or that they write, or from sort of reactions to ads on the other side. And so, you know, there's only so much that commercials, ads, speeches, mailers or even, you know, as we saw - Harris had a great field campaign, for Get Out the Vote, but even just sort of transactional one off door knocks at the end of a campaign, there's only so much that can do to really move people. People want to feel heard, they want to feel listened to, they want to feel connected to politics. And I think that's what's really missing for a lot of regular people, poor and working class, of all of our callers is a sense that someone in politics is paying attention to them. And I think, one of the things that's happened is that Trump has given that to some poor and working class white people and middle and upper middle class white people, too, just to be clear.
Arlie Hochschild ’62 I just want to add that, we should look at the decline of the labor movement, which now just, you know, represent some 9%, private sector workers. And it used to help with what Eva is talking about this divide and rule, you know, you get one group, set out against another, and be the middleman between, I would say, of the working class in the Democratic Party and we haven't figured out another way to either beef it up or substitute that.
Jason Zengerle ’96 Yeah. Daniel had a question for you about voter turnout. You know, 2020 was the highest since I think women were given the right to vote pretty high this time. I mean, not too much below 2020 and I think in the swing states it was even higher than it was in 2020, the exception of Arizona, I think it was about the same. You know, the conventional wisdom has always been that high turnout benefits Democrats. Does the 2024 election suggest that high turnout benefits Republicans now? And if so, why do you think that's the case?
Daniel Laurison ’99 Yeah, that's a great question. And it's one I'm honestly still sort of thinking through. You know, my assumption, in doing this work is that, this work on inequalities and political participation is that, you know, more people participating in democracy is good. And I think that is true broadly, but it does look like, you know, I mean, I think there's still some more math and some more work to be done to really make sense of exactly what shifted. So we did have, many, many million fewer votes for Harris than for Biden. So if those people had turned out, I mean, some of them may have switched, but if those people had turned out and we had an even higher turnout election, it may have been that Harris was able to win. But it's also, it's really hard to do counterfactuals like that, right? You know, you could make up any story about if X, then Y. You know, why people might have done something different and you'd have a different result. I do know that there's some evidence that, lower propensity voters, on average, are a little more likely to vote Republican versus Democrat,
Jason Zengerle ’96 Even after the 2020, because it seems like since the story since 2016 is in elections when Trump is not on the ballot, Democrats do well and those are low turnout elections. That's why Democrats always win these special elections. That's why they do well in the midterms, but when it comes to presidential elections, when more people tend to vote than these other elections, Republicans do well. And, you know, and now appear to have actually won the popular vote. I guess I'm just, I feel like that maybe we're at an inflection point there and that these low density voters are more likely to vote Republican now than Democrat. And what that what that says.
Daniel Laurison ’99 Yeah, that does seem to be, there's some indication of that. But it's also really hard to, and there's, you know, there's a shift that's happening where higher income and higher education people are moving more towards the Democratic Party and those are the same people who tend to be the most likely to vote. But I also think it's, when you just speak in terms of averages, there's plenty of people who are not very likely to vote or who never vote who, if they were moved to vote, would vote for Democrats, right? That didn't turn out this time. So I think, you know, if you just talk in terms of average, the median, low propensity voter is probably a bit more right wing than they were a few elections ago, 15 or 20 years ago. Yeah, but turnout isn't, you know, how shouldI say this, it's not the case of rising turnout always will have the same effect in any election, right? It's a question of who is turning out and how they're being turned out, and who's connecting better with people who might otherwise stay at home. So I don't want to just sort of assume low turnout is better for Democrats forever and ever going forward, even though it has looked that way, at least in congressional elections versus presidential elections the last few times,
Jason Zengerle ’96 Arlie when you look at white working class voters and the people you’ve been talking to and writing about so much in these last however many years, do you think their relationship with Trump and the Republican Party has changed since he first came down the golden escalator? Do they identify with him more now than they did before and identify with the Republican Party more now than they did before? I know more of them now are motivated to vote, maybe than they were before they were sitting things out because they didn't think that the politicians were speaking to them.
Arlie Hochschild ’62 They've gone through several stages, I think. Stage one - skeptical: who is this guy? Billionaire. Not sure, but he's something new, so I think it's sort of a loss story. Other groups are rising up, we're losing, and he's appealing to that. So they list that caught their attention and he was an outsider. He wasn't a regular politician and they liked that. Oh, he's not business as usual. So those were the initial appeals. And it was, you know, the rest of us would say, well, he doesn't have any experience - that's not a good thing. But they thought not having much experience in government was a good thing. It was almost like, this sort of American icon of the Lone Ranger coming on his horse from the villages in distress and then it's a stranger that comes and rescues the small town. And, that's kind of a cowboy ethic. That Trump fits, he’s the outsider who's going to set things straight. He's almost a magical figure. We all know, Max Faber distinguishes between bureaucratic, rational leaders and charismatic leaders and Trump has been an example of the charismatic leader, Biden, a wonderful example of bureaucratic, rational leadership in which he will say, “Look, look at what I've done. Look at the Build Back Better act. Look at the Inflation Reduction Act. That's what I've accomplished. Don't judge me. Don't look at my face. Look what I've done”. That's the paradigm. Trump obviously is the opposite. He doesn't talk to what what he's done. “Look at me personally. I have magical qualities. I know everything I need to know. I don't need to read books and science”. It really is a classic case of the charismatic character. So we have to ask, back up and ask, why are more people predisposed to give such a person the benefit of the doubt? And there I think we have to look at their sense of anxiety that offshoring, automation, loss of oil or coal, main resources. There is just a sense of anxiety to which charismatic leader like Trump is appealing. Also, all the bad things that have happened - COVID, starting with 2008, was an economic hit, but it hit the working class and poor harder. COVID, it hit the working class and poor harder. So I think although such sources of anxiety feel detached from politics, they create in people a kind of ‘I'm looking for something magical’, and I think that Donald Trump has fit that. I think that actually we're looking for rational reasons and that there is a kind of logic to emotion that we must now turn to. So that's what I think. It's a shame to blame.
Jason Zengerle ’96 That makes sense. We have a lot of questions from the audience. I want to get to those and move through them as quickly as possible. So I'm sure people want to get their questions answered. This is a question from Jim Saylor, class of ’90, relates a little bit to what Arlie was just talking about, he notes that, you know, Biden was the most pro-labor and pro-working class president since FDR. And, there's this whole theory the Democrats had about deliverable-ism. You know, that they would deliver these things, and then these people would vote for him and I think what Jim's wondering, and other people are wondering, too, is the takeaway from this election that policy doesn't matter and that it's really only rhetoric that matters. So anybody want to try to weigh in on that one? I mean, does policy matter anymore? You know, Trump's policies were all over the map.
Daniel Laurison ’99 One issue is not whether policy matters exactly, but how it's not policy or communication, it's the combination, right? And a lot of the policies that Democrats are able to do, it's hard to see the direct effect. Even for somebody with a college degree, even for somebody who's paying a lot of attention. So like a story I always think about as my partner works at a, at a nonprofit in Delaware County, and there's a program funded by one of the Biden bills to get doulas to work for women in Chester as they're going through the birthing process and afterwards, right? And that's funded by the federal government, by a bill that Biden has passed. No one involved in that program, including the people who work in the nonprofit will ever know that, right? And I don't know that they should, I don't want to doulas wearing, like, Biden t-shirts. But, those kinds of policies that really make people's lives better, come, you know, the money gets funneled through, you know, one nonprofit to another nonprofit to a program. And so a lot of and not to mention, major macroeconomic policy and all of these things, are really hard for people to see the direct effects of, even when they're experiencing them. And we don't have mechanisms and this is the sort of, we need massive organizing, we need some replacement for the union movement. Theda Skocpol made the point about just the hollowing out of all kinds of civic institutions that connected people to democracy, right? We don't have those mechanisms ,so there's no way for anybody to know what policies were passed that actually help them. Never mind the issue of the sort of counterfactual right, like your Social Security could have been cut if the other guy had won, but it wasn't because this guy won is just like, that's not very compelling, right? So I think that's one of the issues. It's not that policy doesn't matter. It's that policy without a mechanism for people to understand it by itself doesn't matter. Or at least doesn't do nearly as much as we might hope it would
Arlie Hochschild ’62 I'd like to add a piece of evidence supporting what you're just saying, Daniel. I got a telephone call from Mitch Landrieu, who's part of the Harris’s election team and he had been going around to a lot of Midwest red states saying, here is what Biden policies have done for you. This is the money. Actually, some 85% of the money is from the Inflation Reduction Act goes to red states. And so he was going around saying, ‘Look, so many billion dollars are going into your state for such purposes, so many thousands of new jobs’. And he didn't feel heard. So that isn't an answer, but it's just evidence that what you're saying is true, that we need to find a new mechanism for feeling heard.
Daniel Laurison ’99 I think the other piece of that, though, we have to be I think real about is that a lot of those policies Biden was able to pass didn't make big changes in most people's lives, right.
Arlie Hochschild ’62 That didn't bring down inflation. Yeah.
Daniel Laurison ’99 The people I talked to, you know, their lives haven't changed radically through however many presidencies. We still have enormous poverty in this country, we still have enormous disinvestment in poor, especially black and brown neighborhoods, we still have, all of these larger issues. And that, you know, no amount of communication can change that, without some mechanism to give people some hope that their vote might actually lead to some change
Jason Zengerle ’96 All right, well, let's move on to some other questions. This one comes from Alicia Wilson and she is wondering about voter suppression efforts. And she cites some reporting about some micro-targeting of certain groups. I think the Trump campaign did with Elon Musk, you know, sending sort of pro-Israel messages to Arab voters in Michigan and pro-Arab messages to Jewish voters. I mean, do you think that that suppression was much of a factor in this race, as much as motivation for Trump voters?
Eva McKend ’11 It was a part of it. And Democrats engage in stuff like that to like, elevating some of the right wing, more right wing candidates in the Senate races during Republican primaries. So ultimately they are the nominee and the weaker person for the Democrat to go up against. But I don't think that his margin of victory, I don't think it explains for all of it right? It was just one of the factors. And it isn't illegal, right? Like it's shady, but it's not illegal. And so Democrats have to have enough of a strategy and enough of a base of support and enough of a plan to factor that in, that there are going to be these suppression tactics. Oh, by the way, that they engage in too, in some level, in some of this nefarious behavior as well.
Daniel Laurison ’99 One of the things that you can see looking at the results is that Harris did much better in swing states than in non swing states, implying that the you know, I think all of the sort of like if the campaign had done A B C D or E well the campaign where it was active reduced the shift to Trump substantially. As compared, with places where the campaign wasn't active. So, I have a lot of sympathy for everybody's wish for what the Democrats could have done different in the campaign and it's possible that one of those things might have made the difference, but California shifted 6 or 7 points to the right. I'm not going to get it exactly right. And Pennsylvania, only 3. And that was true across when you compare most of the swing states to most of the non swing states.
Jason Zengerle ’96 This is a question from Chris Carr class of 1993. And I'll just read it and you all can jump in. This seemed to be an election of white power, rage, grievance and retribution punctuated with deep misogyny and trans hate. This is how Trump will govern. The electorate was not open to persuasion by a black female. How is this analysis an error? Anyone want to say how this analysis is an error? Or that's exactly, exactly right?
Eva McKend ’11 I mean, think that those were definitely factors and I think that there is this resistance in some corners to just acknowledging those plain facts, right? Because it makes some people uncomfortable to really have to look at our country in the mirror and talk about the legacy of racism and sexism and how it played a role. But it wasn't everything, right? It wasn't the whole story, but certainly it was part of the story. And I've just been trying to answer some of these questions in the chat, just typing back, because I know we won't get to them all, but you know, this idea of the Democrats they're too caught up in identity politics. I answered to, one of our, fellow, Swarthmore alumni tonight that, you know, Republicans also engage in a form of identity politics, demonizing, black and brown immigrants,, centering trans folks when they're, such a small part of the country in the election argument, as part of the election argument, millions and millions of dollars spent on messaging around trans folks. That is a form of identity politics, too. And so, yes, Democrats perhaps relied too much on the fact that they can have this multiracial winning coalition. But I will also say that when I spoke to the campaign, they would often say, well, “Latino voters and black voters were treating them as persuadable voters”, we're not taking them for granted. But yes, racism and sexism played a huge role in this campaign. I certainly won't be the one to minimize it in my coverage, or any time that I have the opportunity to have, I'm like, I will always amplify that. Although it wasn't the whole story
Arlie Hochschild ’62 I'd like to pick up at the end of what I've just said. Of course, there's racism and sexism, but it's not the whole story. How can we pick up the story there? I met a guy, this is in eastern Kentucky, who the first time I met him, he said, “ SoI’m trailer trash, okay?”, so very diffident and I didn’t know what I was doing there, right? And asking people questions. Anyway, he tried to give me an understanding of how he felt confused with a racist, male chauvinist, and how he didn't feel he could find an answer in the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. So don't confuse me with any of the nonsense on the Republican side. But to Democrats, it's all identity politics. And he said that's it's like, if you are he said, just use this word ‘narrative’. “There's no narrative for a guy like me”, he said. If you are white and middle class people say, well, good for you, you must have worked hard, and you got, to be successful, your middle class, and if that's the American dream. Or if you're black and poor, you say, well, you're poor because of racism and that's what happened to you. And we’re not going to shame you for that, that's your story, that's your narrative. But I'm poor and well and white, and people will say, if you're white, you're privileged. So why are you poor? The only reason you would be poor is that you're lazy and stupid or addicted. And so he felt, that was the pair of glasses he saw through. And I think there are probably other whites, not just in eastern Kentucky but elsewhere, who feel - what about us? They feel looked down upon by the educated class and that they don't have an excuse for their poverty. So they feel shamed. And he loved Bernie Sanders, but, he felt cut out of the Democratic Party. So maybe part of the agenda is to reach out to a guy like that, say, no, no, hey, we get it. Poverty is the real thing. And that there is this new book by Reverend William Barber, called White Poverty. And you know who he is? He's kind of the heir to Martin Luther King, but he's doing it by trying to get across race class to sort of to strike that chord and that chord seems to me one missing when we forget about social class. I think it could be unifier and now it's not.
Jason Zengerle ’96 We actually had a question about Barber and the Poor People's Campaign that I'm now scrolling through, trying to find. I don't know if you saw it was,
Eva McKend ’11 Yeah, it was, faculty that asked it, Saba.
Jason Zengerle ’96 Saba, yeah. That's right. Yes, I'm looking for it because that actually was.
Eva McKend ’11 Yeah, it's an answer because I typed a little bit too out of fear we would not get to it. And I was, you know, she did receive the support of Reverend Barber late in the campaign. She had a thousand faith leaders from across the country endorse her. Reverend Barber was one of them. I went to a Poor People's event and the voters that I spoke to were very supportive of her, very supportive of the Democratic ticket more broadly. But even, the Reverend lamented the Democrats could have done more, could do more to feature the experiences struggles of poor people. Actually, her brother, Tony West, was at a meeting in Milwaukee with NAACP members, her brother in law, rather, and one of the comments that he got was that there was so much focus on the middle class. But what about people who can't even make ends meet? And so that, you know, in the assessment of the campaign, in the assessment of Democratic messaging, you do have to ask, why are they so afraid to say the word poor? Why are they so afraid to talk about people in poverty, you know, they vote too. So that's a good question by Saba but yes, institutionally, the Poor People's movement, the Reverend, they did embrace her, even though she didn't really adopt the messaging that directly focused on the poor.
Jason Zengerle ’96 We are actually almost half time, which just went by fast, and we had a lot of questions that I'm afraid we're not going to get to. But since we are almost out of time. Oh, go ahead. I was going to say people should sum up. And if there's questions you want to answer, please do.
Eva McKend ’11 I'm not an expert in this, but I think maybe Daniel and Arlie could speak to this better than me because David, who is my college roommate's husband, so we do have to answer David D'Annunzio here. He asked, “Do the panelists have an opinion on how much gerrymandering affected the chamber outcomes compared to the other factors that have been discussed?” Anybody an expert in gerrymandering. Do you know,
Arlie Hochschild ’62 Daniel?
Daniel Laurison ’99 I'm more the numbers guy. I don't know off the top of my head.
Jason Zengerle ’96 I mean, I know a little bit about gerrymandering. Yes, definitely. I mean, they yes, they absolutely affected it. I mean, you have states that have, you know, I live in North Carolina and I think it's a purple state and it will be a 10 to 3 Republican advantage in the North Carolina district, I mean, the North Carolina congressional delegation. So, yes, absolutely, but that has been baked in for a long time. It is what it is. But yes, the narrow House majority that Republicans will have will be because of gerrymandering and, you know, if and when Democrats reclaim the majority, that will also be because gerrymandering is just kind of a fact of life.
But we should try to sum up, I think what you all think, if there are any if there are any things that that we have not talked about that you want to say, I think now is the time to say or forever hold your peace until 2028. Eva do you want to go first as we wrap up?
Eva McKend ’11 Yeah. You know, I think that people feel despondent some folks in this time. And I think it's important to keep the faith and remember that politics is just like one tool in our democracy, I guess, that I'm really curious in this political moment that we're in how different forms of, like, mutual aid operate, how different marginalized communities band together to support one another. Is there sort of like an underground railroad that starts for the most vulnerable in this country? What does that look like? How are people going to work together in these uncertain times? And I think that that's where me as a journalist, that's where my focus is on the most vulnerable in this moment and how people are using their own creativity and resources to support the most vulnerable. And I think that that, you know, yes, we want to understand the results of this election, but I think litigating it has its limits and now there should really be a focus on where does our country go from here? And this is something that upsets a lot of people, but be in constant communication and conversation with people who disagree with you to sort of understand how we got to this moment. And then and really, really, you know, look, you know, looking out for trans folks, for undocumented folks, for, the communities that are most at risk in this moment and reporting out what they're doing to survive.
Jason Zengerle ’96 Daniel?
Daniel Laurison ’99 I really appreciate what you just said Eva, but I think, you know, thinking about, going forward, I think one of the things we've said in a number of ways is that we really have to be able to think about economic inequality and class across, across race, right? So much of our discussions about disadvantages in this country use, you know, use race as a proxy for class or forget that they're that the majority of the working class is people of color or etc. And we also have to figure out, you know, in some way how to speak to the people that Arlie has been spending her time with. So I think that's one thing going forward and I also, you know, there's so much of our conversation and I'm guilty of this as well, focuses on national politics and there's something like 30,000 municipalities in this country, not to mention 50 state governments, etc., etc. and those are places where democracy also really matters and where, when there are people in power who want to do right, they can be pressured to help protect those most vulnerable communities as well. So I think, you know, one thing that I want us to focus on is what we can do at the local level, both in terms of communities outside of electoral politics and in terms of what elected leaders can do, who do have a fair amount of power in our as Jamila mentioned and put it in her book, Fragmented Democracy.
Arlie Hochschild ’62 Yeah, just to add to what's being said, you know, I think, we're not good at talking across the divide, and we need to, kind of, learn how to do it. Actually, studies have shown that liberals are more likely than conservatives to cut the conversation if someone says something that offends them. And so the paradox is that another finding is that conservatives are more likely to change their feeling about liberals if they get to sit down opposite them and talk. So we've got a job ahead to get better at this. And there are issues that, I think, lend themselves to crossover efforts. Biden has done some amazing work with the Build Back Better and Inflation Reduction Act, which put a lot of money, 85% of that money in red states. And now there's talk of undoing that, taking that back actually, because Biden did it - Trump doesn't like it. Well, that could be a point of agreement that left and right have in such states. Hey, we like this money. “Hey, we want solar panels, we want windmills”. I heard a lot of talk of environmentalism is a good thing, we need to save the earth, not this ‘drill, baby drill’ that you hear from Trump. So, I think, the need to cross the partizan divide is there. We could get good at it. And there are issues that lend themselves to it.
Jason Zengerle ’96 All right, well, thank you all so much Eva, Daniel and Arlie for doing this tonight. I know, it's a good commitment of time on your part and effort and, really appreciate you all doing this. Thank you to everybody who tuned in. We will be back next month with Robert Putnam and then as well as obviously next year. And we will see you soon. I hope you have a good rest of November, good Thanksgiving and see you all later. Good night. Thank you.
