Offline with Jon Favreau - Bad Vibes v. Good Results. Lynn Vavreck on the ’22 Midterms

Episode Date: November 13, 2022

Dr. Lynn Vavreck, professor of political scientist at UCLA and contributing columnist to The Upshot at The New York Times, sits down with Jon to talk about 2022 midterms. After 2020, Lynn and her colleagues interviewed over 500,000 voters, leading them to conclude that our politics aren’t just polarized, but calcified. She argues that calcification has placed our politics on a knife’s edge, raising the stakes of every election and that 2022 was the biggest case of calcification we’ve seen yet. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

Talking about the midterms, like how did your expectations heading into this midterm match up with the results based on your theory of calcification? Yeah, I mean, it was a good night for calcification. Like, and I'm kind of surprised, like, you know, I obviously believe the idea very much or I wouldn't have written a book about it and be here talking to you about it. But still, I thought, like, could we really be like that stuck? Like, you know, we're going to see this midterm that by all accounts should have a huge midterm swing. Are we really going to wipe that all out? And it looks pretty much like it will be a very close replay of the last midterm election. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. My guest today is Dr. Lynn Vavrick,

professor of political science at UCLA and contributing columnist to The Upshot at The New York Times. So, we had an election on Tuesday. And one thing we've talked about a lot on this show is how following politics online isn't the best way to get the most accurate understanding of what's actually going on in the minds of the American electorate. Social media and Twitter especially have never been representative of most voters. And that's certainly true right now, as Elon Musk has given blue check marks to parody accounts impersonating people like Joe Biden, Jesus, the Pope, and brands like Tesla, which has been making 9-11 jokes. Wonderful. Anyway, I figured it'd be useful to talk to someone who can

give us the not-extremely-online view of what happened in the 2022 midterms and how the results fit into what we know about politics, how we process information in the internet age, and what that means for the choices we make about who leads us. Lynn is the co-author of the books Identity Crisis and The Bitter End, which are some of the leading accounts of the 2016 and 2020 elections. For the latter, she and her co-authors conducted over 500,000 interviews with voters over two years. Quite a sample size. And what they concluded is that our politics aren't just polarized, but calcified. They argue that what's led to our current stalemate is increasing homogeneity in our parties, the emergence of identity as the most important axis of conflict, and the near parity between people who call

themselves Democrats and Republicans. I talked to Lynn about how calcification has placed our politics on a knife's edge, the red wave that never came, and what Democrats can do, if anything, to carry us out of this moment. As always, if you have any comments, questions, concerns, or even episode ideas, please email us at offlineatcrooked.com. And please take a moment to rate, review, and share the show. Here's Lynn Vavrick. Lynn Vavrick, welcome to Offline.

Thank you. So we focus a lot here on all the ways that internet and social media can distort our perception of reality. That's especially true in politics. It's especially true around elections. Polls become narratives, narratives become vibes. And I feel like that's partly how expectations got a little out of whack over the last three elections, certainly with this week's midterms. So I wanted to talk to you because as a political scientist, you take a much broader and longer view of politics. And your recent book about the 2020 election is based on more than 500,000 interviews with voters over two years.

It's true. Which is a lot more illuminating than a poll of 400 people or a focus group or a Twitter punditry. But before we get to the midterms, what did you learn about the 2020 electorate from all those interviews? Well, I would say that one thing, maybe the biggest thing that we learned about people in 2020 is that not a lot moves them. So my colleague at UCLA, Chris Tisanovich, when he and I sat down and dreamed up, could we really have a thousand people in every congressional district in the country? Could we do that many interviews? How would we do it and who would pay for it? And shout out to the Democracy Fund for stepping up and the Klarman Family Foundation. So valuable to have that. It's a huge resource, this data set. But we thought, okay, we're going to do it.

Maybe something interesting will happen. We just needed the world to cooperate in that tiny little way. We said, maybe one of the candidates will say something outrageous or have a rally where something happens. And we got this year, 2020, which was the most remarkable campaign year you could imagine. Global pandemic, massive social justice movement, and the most unusual presidential campaign, which we could have a whole separate conversation about, like one guy campaigned from his basement. This is weird stuff. And nothing really changed. And that leads us to this, the book that we've written about this moment in time in politics, we call The Bitter End. But the key concept is calcification. And it's people are kind of stuck.

And can you talk about this concept of calcification and how it's different from polarization, which is how people usually describe the electorate these days? Yes. So calcification does sound like polarization, but I like to think of it as polarization plus. And the plus is really important. It's not just that people are far apart. When we think of polarization, we think of two ends and they're far apart.

So that's a part of calcification. But there are four things that make up this calcified state. So it's that the parties are farther away than ever in the electorate, but also people within each of the parties are more alike than they've been in the last 60 or 70 years. Democrats are more alike on ideology, on issue positions, on characteristics. Same for Republicans. So homogeneity within the parties, but heterogeneity between them. And then this is the plus part that, because that might be polarization.

You might think of that as polarization. But the two other things are much more recent. The first two take a long time in the making. That's taken us decades to get to where we are on the polarization part. The last two are much more recent. So the third component is the shifting of the dimension of conflict that we're fighting over. So the stuff that we're arguing over, we used to fight about the New Deal type stuff like the role and size of government or the 2008 election. That, the Muslim ban. So immigration, abortion, these kinds of person-based issues, which are much more divisive. And that's going to make it harder for voters to try out the other side when, for example, their party nominates a candidate who they think they don't like the character or the style of that person. OK, so that's thing number three, the rise of identity inflected stuff. And then the last component of calcification is, again, sort of just this moment in time.

We've reached a point where people who call themselves Democrats and people who call themselves Republicans are in rough balance in the electorate. So we're at this moment of sort of partisan parity. And that that leads us to a whole bunch of perverse outcomes. Victory is always within reach for both sides. So you mentioned 2012 a minute ago. After 2012, Mitt Romney lost, the Republicans went back and did the autopsy. They wrote this hundred and whatever page report, the growth and opportunity project report, to sort of think about how we're playing the game. People didn't like what we were selling. We need to play the game differently. But now the incentives are not to go back and

rethink how you play the game, but instead to say like, wow, people like what we're selling. We almost won. We just need the rules of the game to be a little different so that our side can win. And it's the mashing up of those four things, the polarization part, but the rise of identity and the partisan parity. And that's what gets us to this moment where voters are sort of stuck where they are. The other side is farther away than ever, and they want to build a really different world. And I can't try them out. the, say, 15 to 20% of people who pay very close attention to politics and who tend to be partisans ideologically, you know, more ideological. And the vast majority, 80, 85% of people in this country who don't pay that much attention to politics. And I went out in the

country and spoke to, you know, people who were Biden voters but don't follow the news that much and sort of people who are on the fringes of the electorate and who come in and out of the electorate. Sometimes they vote, sometimes they don't. And they may be registered Democrats or independents. There was a few Republicans, but mainly they don't have like super strong partisan ideological feelings. Is what you guys are saying that those people are rare or that at the end of the day, your partisan identification and how you're registered is still going to say more about how you vote than anything else? Yes to both. Okay. Can I say yes to both? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think yes to both.

I mean, I agree with you. Every time people want to say to me, this is a nightmare. We're so divided as a country. I like to remind people that 30%, 40%, 50% of people are not voting, even in presidential elections and governors and Senate elections. There's a whole bunch of people who are just not interested. Right. And so, you know, just keep that in mind. And the divide between those people and the people who are participating is big. But the divide between those people and the people who are super interested, who are listening to this podcast, is even bigger.

Right. So this is all on a continuum, really. I think so. But I think like what we're saying is that among the people who participate in elections and our study was general population. It was not just registered voters or likely voters. So, you know, general population. But, you know, maybe if you're not that interested in politics, by the time you get to minute five and we're asking you, you know, again about your position on the 20th issue, maybe you're like, I'm done with this survey. So we probably get a sample that skews a little bit more interested in politics. And so among those people, so there are a couple of things I think that are interesting about this.

They have positions on lots of issues. We asked about 53 issues. And they're not all aligned with their party preference. Most people have a party preference. If you push them, hey, do you lean? Even people who are registered independents, even people who say they're moderate, if you push them, they lean. Definitely moderates. So just thinking about party, people say, are you a Democrat, a Republican, or an independent? And a lot of people will say independent. But if you follow

up and say, hey, do you lean one way or the other? All but about 6% of people will say, I lean one way or the other. So everybody kind of leans. But even those people who you can say are either fully in or sort of in a political party, all of their issue positions don't match their party. Most people will describe themselves as moderates. So there are moderates in the Republican Party and the Democratic Party and independents. And most people have a mix of liberal and conservative positions on issues. But the key thing is, one of the things that we really wanted to do in this big project that we called Nationscape, that's the 500 person thing, it's called Nationscape. We invested in a method to get people to reveal to us what was important to them politically.

And so we have these impact scores for issues. So people have liberal and conservative views on all these 50 whatever issues in each party. But on the things that are at the top of the impact list, they are aligned with their party. And can you talk about this experiment a little more? Because I think it's so fascinating. Basically, what you did is you continue to give people a choice between a couple issues and say, which one do you prioritize? Sort of, but not quite. It's actually super simple. Marketing people do this all the time. It's called a conjoint experiment. And they do it because they want to figure out, like, should I have Jon Favreau endorse this product or Lynn Vavreck? And, like, you don't really need an experiment for that, but, like, that would be something they would do.

Yeah. So they show the product and have lots of different people endorsing it, and they figure out who's the strongest endorser. was we basically presented people with two baskets of goods, issues, like policy outcomes, and kind of like two different worlds, world A and world B. And we just say to people, which world would you rather live in? But they were always oppos border. Abortion is never legal, but there's a massive investment in climate. And then World B would have the opposite. There is a wall on the border. Abortion is always legal, and there's no investment in climate. So each basket wouldn't line up exactly with the party in order to force people to prioritize certain issues over the other. Yes, exactly. And so everybody played this

little game 10 times. So we had 5 million iterations of this thing. And then from those 5 million plays of this game, we're able to figure out what are people willing to trade away in order to get what they want. And people are trading away Joe the Plumber's tax rate. I don't want to say nobody cares. I'm exaggerating. So it is not important to people right now whether we raise taxes on rich people. The Green New Deal actually didn't do that well. Healthcare, not at the top. The things that are at the top, should there be a wall on the border? Should we separate children? Should dreamers be able to become citizens? Should there be a pathway to citizenship? Abortion is up there. Should there be a religious test to enter the country? So these identity things are at the top for people.

I think I saw it was impeaching Trump up there too. Yes. Absolutely. Because this was all 2019 and 2020 for sure, whether or not to impeaching Trump up there too? Yes, absolutely. Because this was all 2019 and 2020, for sure. Whether or not to impeach Trump. This is fascinating to me because if you talk to Democratic pollsters, and I'm sure Republican pollsters as well, and they say, like, what do you care most about? Economic issues usually rise to the top. Healthcare rises to the top. Taxing rich people, super popular, which I guess both things can be true, right? That these issues come up to the top of typical surveys,

but when you force people to prioritize, they don't necessarily pop up. Yeah. A lot of times people will say to survey respondents, how important is this issue to you? Very important, somewhat important, not, you know. And people can just say everything is very important. When you're just asking people to report, sometimes they ask them to rank, rank these in order of importance. And those are very different ways of measuring what we're trying to get at, which is the impact of these issues on people's choices. So you're right. The answers to the survey question, what's the most important thing to you could be the economy and inflation and taxing rich people. Now, our project stopped in 2021.

So I don't know what it would reveal today. But in that run up to 2020 and throughout the year and into the insurrection, it was all this identity inflected stuff at the top. And people would trade away the other stuff to get what they wanted on those things. But to circle back to where we started with this, there are lots of people who are cross positioned with their party. Okay. But this is one of my favorite things that we learned from the project. Consultants, pollsters, people who think about winning elections, always talk about cross-pressured. Oh, we got to get those cross-pressured voters. There are very few cross-pressured voters. There are a lot of cross-positioned voters.

And what's the difference? And that is to say that on the issues on which people are out of alignment with their party, those things are not priorities for people. And so there's no pressure. They don't care about them very much. And if you just stop to think about that for a minute, it makes so much sense. If you're a Republican who wants abortion to be always legal, that issue can't be very important to you. Because if it were, you'd be a Democrat. You'd be a Democrat. Right. That's very, very interesting. I mean, you talked about the other big concept or what's feeding calcification is sort of this partisan parody. How can it be in a diverse country with more than 300 million people, the majority of voters have calcified around two parties

that command roughly the same number of voters? I know. I don't know the answer to that. Okay, you and I can figure this out right now. Let's think about it. Let's crack it. Let's think about it. Because's think about it. So because it hasn't always been this way. And for a long time, Democrats outnumbered Republicans. Now,

I'm talking like starting in the 50s. Yeah. We know why that is, right? The Southern Democrats, the South was solidly Democratic for a long time. So for a long time, Democrats outnumbered Republicans. And if you just imagine a figure in your head with time on the horizontal axis, and then the share of partisans over time, the Democrats are going to come down, down, down as the South sorts out after the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. And that's really a huge player in where we are today is, you know, sort of those people figuring out that they're going to start calling themselves Republicans. And then you get into the 80s.

And this is the part where, like, you know, what do you think? Like, I think regulation and maybe religion is important here. But the parties kind of create these new coalitions, you know, just maybe instrumentally. But then that gets us into the 90s and the Clinton era. And, you know, slowly we just kind of end up at this place now where people have sorted or possibly because information is so much more easily available to everyone. They've been calling themselves a Democrat or Republican for so long. They didn't really know. Like they're a single issue voter.

They didn't really know what the Democratic position was on all the other issues. But now it's easy to learn that because of Twitter and Facebook and whatever. And so now they adopt those positions too, even though they're not really that important to them. Well, that was my next question is, however we got to parity, which I think that's what you just went through is as good of an explanation as any. What are the factors that fuel calcification in our electorate right now? Like, why is the electorate so immobile? This is where I really, the combination of the identity-inflected issues being the thing that we've been fighting over and the other side being so far away.

Those two things, I think, make it very difficult for, imagine if we were fighting over the role and size of government or the tax rate. This is where I can't figure out what happened because, like, I was just on a campaign. I guess it was 10 years ago now. It's a long time ago now, John. It was a campaign where, and I remember Barack Obama. I remember writing the convention speech in 2012 and him being like, the argument over the size and role of government is the debate of our time. And it's been the debate between parties forever. And sometime around 2016, that all went away. And I think obviously part of it is Trump and what he did to the Republican Party, right?

More than part. And I also wonder, and one of the reasons that I did this show, Ditching of the Wilderness, is I wonder how much the internet and social media have fueled that. Yes. Yeah. I think that even this is hard. We're trying to figure out how everything changed. Okay, so we're not going to sit here and say, because everything changed, that's not that interesting. So let's try to see if we can pull out some major interesting ideas. I think we want to go back one step to Barack Obama. And the presidency of Barack Obama simplified the politics of race for a lot of people who really hadn't thought much about race and politics. Okay, so that's an important moment. And then Trump comes along,

not out of nowhere, He thought about running before. Right. But maybe largely because of the Obama presidency. And then he comes down that escalator and he loads up on identity. And it's who he is. All the comments about women and it's just so he is the catalyst. He didn't create the attitudes in the population that he's waking up. He's just the alarm bell that is activating those attitudes. Mitt Romney, John McCain running against Barack Obama, you know, in the ways that they talk

about that campaign, in the ways that their advisors talk about those campaigns, looking back, they say, we weren't going to go anywhere near identity because of who our opponent was. So they were constrained or tried to be- And we didn't want to go near identity as explicitly as we might have, or I think even as explicitly as Democrats do today, because Barack Obama was very conscious of the fact that I am the first black president and everyone knows that. Right. And the more I talk about race explicitly, the more I am going to throw gas on that fire.

So this is I love this point. I love this point because I'm always reminding people that the number one way to make something not a part of a conversation in a campaign is to have both candidates have the same position on that thing. There's no leveraging that. And so we have these two cycles where we're not talking about this, but then Trump comes along, comes down the escalator. And here's another great example. He knows pretty much he's going to be running against Hillary Clinton. And so he sees the leverage. I mean, maybe I'm attributing too much to this tactic, but I think that he gets that, certainly, that I'm very different from her. And we are different on these characteristics and on our orientation and disposition about talking about

these characteristics. And so he thinks he can load up on that and he does, but he didn't create the attitudes in the population. They're there. John McCain knew it. Mitt Romney knew it. You guys knew it, but he lights them up. He like pours gasoline on the embers. And that flame, that really pretty soon Hillary Clinton's talking about identity stuff. And nobody's talking about the economy. Nobody's talking about how the Democratic Party got us out of the global financial crisis and people are back on their feet. Well, and in fact, and part of the reason that she didn't as much is because she had just been in a primary against Bernie Sanders, where she made an argument against Bernie Sanders that all he does

is talk about the economy and he ignores issues of race and gender, et cetera, et cetera, which then highlighted those for the general against Trump. Yeah, this is this is all I mean, all very interesting that she's actually perceived as being more liberal than Barack Obama by voters in 2016 and is in many ways talking and using language that would convey that to voters relative to Barack Obama. It's interesting, too, because obviously after 2016, there were plenty of studies done about how racial resentment explained a lot of the white defection away from the Democratic Party and towards Donald Trump. My first reaction to that was always like, okay, I could have understood that if in 2008, a majority of the country votes for Barack Obama, there's a financial crisis,

there's a bunch of people who have attitudes that are lined up with racial resentment, racist attitudes that still hold their nose and vote for Barack Obama because there's a financial crisis. It doesn't explain then why he still gets so many white working class voters in 2012 after they've had four years of him. So just the fact of his presidency does not necessarily engender the racial backlash on its own, right? Which I think some people, it sort of gets lost a little bit. It's like, there was a 2012 election. People had four years to decide they didn't like the guy. They voted for him again. It wasn't until Donald Trump came around in 2016 that he really, like you say, poured gas on the fire. Yeah. And, you know, they voted for him less in 2012 than they did in 2008 by a little bit.

But that's the elasticity. Like those people who you're talking about, whether they're going over to vote for Barack Obama because, boy, we got to get the Republicans out because this financial crisis, what a disaster. They just can't stay in. OK, that elasticity. Maybe you don't want to raise taxes on rich people. And maybe you do want smaller government and you don't want government involved in health care.

But man, that financial crisis. Yeah. And I got to penalize this party. Like, so I'm going to go vote for this other guy who, quite frankly, like, you know, I'm not sure he's going to be able to get this stuff through Congress anyway. Like, and, you know, it's a historic moment. I'd like to be a part of history for whatever reasons. The elasticity, they're able to stretch. That's gone.

That's that elasticity is gone. That's calcification is the opposite of that. It's like just like in the human body, it makes bones stiff and rigid. It makes voters stiff and rigid. So those people, once Trump lights up identity and we're fighting over the border and separating the children and dreamers, once that is the conversation, nobody is saying, oh, sure, I don't want to separate those kids from their families, but, you know, I'm going to I'm just going to vote for the other side because the economy is in the dumper. Right. It's it's too far. The parties are too far apart for people to make that stretch. How do you think education polarization plays into this calcification dynamic. Can we only say words that end in Sean? Because I feel like the other, like the divide that seems to define politics today, between

the two parties, at least, is a college diploma, certainly among white voters. Yes. And increasingly, some evidence that some Latino voters and maybe black men as well. And that's something that has, even though we're calcified and at parity, that is something that certainly shifted over the last decade or so,

is that white voters with a college degree have started drifting from the Republican Party towards the Democratic Party. And white voters without a college degree have gone the other way. Yes. There are so many people thinking about this and trying to figure out what is it. Okay, so one way to think about it is it's something about going to college. That's probably not exactly right. That might be a small part of it. Another way to think about it is there's something about the kinds of people who go to college, right? The kinds of families they're from. And so it's a lot of that. One of the books that I really like that helps me think about this

is a book by a sociologist at Berkeley named Arlie Russell Hochschild. And the book is called Strangers in Their Own Land. And I just really enjoy the book and thinking about the ideas in it. And the core idea is basically, there are these white voters, and they feel like the American dream was just within their reach, and they were working hard to get it and following the rules and playing by the rules and they deserve the next step, which is the realization of the dream. But then something happened and Barack Obama was elected president and all these people from other countries started coming to America and they all got jobs and they got my job. And now I am no longer next in line for the dream. I'm like the thousandth person in line. So it all centers around this sense of

deservingness and this sort of very American idea of work hard, get ahead. I think that that's a pretty good start at what's going on with the college education and non-college educated reshuffling of the electorate. I also wonder if now that the Democrats have become a party whose coalition is based more on people with a college education and college degrees, materialist concerns are sort of deprioritized because in their own lives, they tend to be doing better financially. And so the issues of most concern are other issues, whether it's immigration or abortion or democracy or issues like that. Yeah. I think about this a lot in terms of where this is headed. And people always, they push me like,

oh, we're back to the economy. Like identity's over because look at what happened on Tuesday night, for example. Everyone said it was inflation and I'm not even not so sure, like I'm sure that's not right actually. So I thought about it for a little while, but I was like, yeah.

And really, all it took for me was going to stick it to those woke people. And, you know, those woke people, those college educated people who want to expand rights, right, those people are in the Democratic Party, obviously. So what, you know, He's setting up the us versus them fight again. And it is about identity. But now we're moving into, it's not immigration, right? We're moving into a different set, bathrooms, pronouns. And there's so much more of this identity marathon to run. this is not over. Well, so talking about the midterms, how did your expectations heading into this midterm match up with the results based on your theory of calcification? Yeah. I mean, it was a good night for calcification. And I'm kind of surprised. I obviously believe the idea very much or I wouldn't have written a book about it and be here talking to you about it.

But still, I thought, could we really be that stuck? That we're going to see this midterm that by all accounts should have a huge midterm swing because history tells us that's what usually happens. Are we really going to wipe that all out? And it looks pretty much like it will be a very close replay of the last midterm election. So district by district. I was looking at some of this yesterday. How big were the swings district by district? This is one way that we think about is calcification manifesting itself in the electorate. In 2020, we looked county by county. So we took all the counties in the country, looked at 2016 vote, and then we looked at 2020 vote. How did they swing?

The absolute value of the swing, the movement, was the smallest between 16 and 20 that it's been in any year since the New Deal. Wow. It was like about three points of swing. It was a replay. 2020, crazy year, was a replay of 2016. That's calcification. elections district by district on Tuesday are going to look very similar, more similar than they typically do to the last cycle. Well, what's so interesting about this is I listened to you and your co-author John Sides on Ezra Klein's podcast, like the weekend before the election.

You had been on a couple of weeks before, but I was like, I was like on the plane home from Vegas. We were just helping some campaigns out there. And I was listening to you guys. And at the very end. I'm glad you qualified that. I thought maybe you were gambling. Both, both. Yeah.

I went to Nevada. And I'm listening to. And at the end, you know, you guys had said that one of the strongest predictors of what ended up happening in 2020 was President Trump's approval rating. And that the election sort of turned on what you would have expected based on his approval rating. And then I think Ezra asked John, like, well, Biden's approval rating is pretty terrible right now. And sure enough, that wasn't the polls being wrong. Like all the exit polls showed that Biden's approval was the worst approval of any president

in the post-war period heading into a midterm. And yet we saw what happened. Yeah. So like is presidential. So I guess this idea of calcification is maybe even more powerful than presidential approval or sort of a force like inflation. I love this question because I was thinking about this a lot yesterday. What is going on with this? And I had this idea. Tell me what you think of this.

That maybe now that calcification prevents you from crossing over to vote for the other side, you just can't do it. You're a Democrat, and can you go vote for Ron DeSantis or you know, or Herschel Walker, like you can't, you want some, you're not happy about something about what your party's doing, but that's a step too far. One of the things you can do is register your discontent through approval ratings. And so I thought maybe that's the thermometer really for like, you know, what it's really in party. It's in partisans because we know the out party they're rating since since Obama. They're rating the president who is not in their party very low, never moves low floor. That's true for Democrats rating Republicans and Republicans rating Democrats. So it's not about the out party.

The fluctuations are coming from the in party. They start very high always. For Trump, the Republicans just hung out there really high on the ceiling. But what's happening is Democrats and independents now are providing that variation. And so maybe this is one of the ways you can declare your discontent.

That makes perfect sense to me. I love it. Well, after the focus groups that I did. So I had this experience where I did all these focus groups and different demographics, different kinds of, they were all, most of them were all Biden voters. And so my my question was like will they show up or will they show up and switch to republicans and um i left them feeling so dispirited as a democrat because first of all not one person in 50 voters wanted joe biden to run again they ranged from either he's a nice guy it's not entirely his fault but i'm annoyed to like what has he done this is horrible right but it wasn't just him. I did not get any

wonderful views of the Democratic Party from all of these Biden voters. Right. They'd say the Democrats are disorganized. They can't get their shit together. They're not, whatever the complaint, complaint, complaint. So I kind of left all, but then, and I would ask them not just about Joe Biden, but other Democratic candidates and even people like Stacey Abrams, Raphael Warnock, they were not super excited about. And I was like, oh, this could be bad for us. But then I thought back to them. And when I asked about the Republican Party, in every single focus group, the most common word used to describe the Republican Party was extreme. And I had this experience in Atlanta with this group, and it was young,

moderate black voters who were still undecided. And they complained about crime. They complained about inflation. All these things that when you see the online debate, everyone's like, oh, it's the media making up. These people are like, no, no, I'm worried about my car getting broken into. I can't afford to live in Atlanta anymore. The Democratic Party isn't helping me. I don't know about Stacey Abrams. Then I'm like, so you're going to work for, you're going to vote for Herschel Walker? And they're like, oh, no, he's fucking crazy. Oh, I'm not going to vote for Herschel Walker. And same thing in Vegas, this guy who was like, I'm going to vote for DeSantis in 2024. I'm like, oh, you're going to vote for Adam Laxalt? He goes,

oh, no, he embraced the big lie. I'm not going to do a big lie guy. And so as I think back on it, there was such discontent to the Democratic Party, for Joe Biden, for politics in general. But none of these people could bring themselves to vote for Republicans. OK, I have two questions for you. Is this new? Like we need we need to we need to talk to someone who is doing focus groups in 1984 and 1988. Like I want to know because I don't know the answer to this. Have people always just said like, ah, I'm so frustrated with the party? I mean, we saw, we heard it in eight and 12, but not to this level. I had never, I had never heard a group of voters as dispirited and angry as I did in both, particularly the black voters I spoke

to in Atlanta and the Latino voters I spoke to in Atlanta and the Latino voters I spoke to in Vegas. They were two of the most dispirited focus groups I'd ever heard. I think it's a tough time to be an American. I think this is, especially now, it's hard for people to think about buying a home. Unemployment's really low, but there are all these other problems with just making a life. Post-COVID, like the whole thing, it's just, it's a hard moment. But I have this other hypothesis that I want to see what you think of this. Sure, yeah. I think everybody's waiting for Barack Obama. And like, that guy's exceptional. There is not another, I mean mean he's an exceptional

candidate yeah i i thought about this a lot in the last couple weeks when he was out on the trail again oh yeah because everyone kept saying like oh why don't you know we we don't have this anymore we don't have this and i obviously in some ways i agree because I know the guy. I worked for him forever. But there's part of me that thinks he was incredibly disciplined in his messaging. Yes. And part of it was to not – consciously not light these fires everywhere. Now, again, one of the reasons I do this show is like I think that is harder. It is harder for anyone to run in this environment now. So interesting. Because I think that the internet, like when you're on social media, you know what people who are like you think about politics. Yes. And especially if you're a partisan

and you know what people on the other extreme think about politics. And so you think to yourself that the world is divided up between people who are just like you and people who are just like on the other side. And that there's no one in the middle who is cross pressured or has different positions or whatever else like that. And I think that in itself sort of feeds this kind of politics. And I think it influences politicians themselves so that they feel like they have to carry the banner for their team on every single issue and be as like and show as much fight on every single issue and then when you have a result like we just did on Tuesday yeah I think that only reinforces that behavior that to me as a Democrat Tuesday says like oh yeah everything we said about like like the democracy is at stake

and this is a huge battle and this is existential. Like, we needed to say that to get everyone out and we're going to have to say that again. I think that that is all right. And that is exactly, that is calcification. Like, the stakes of elections are very high. We're on the knife's edge. Anything is flipping these elections. And when they go one side or the other side, it's whiplash for voters because the world changes a lot. But I also think so. So do I think that the Obama candidacies of 08 and 12 could be transplanted to 2024 and work? No, obviously not. It's a really different time for all of the reasons that that you just stated. But I also fully believe, I'd be willing to bet a lot of

money on this, that he is exceptional in his ability to be disciplined on the right things, to figure out what those things are and to maintain that discipline. And he could come into 2024 and still be the best candidate for president, you know, right there with John Kennedy. Like if he hadn't run in 08, he'd come in in 2024. And in 2025, we'd still be talking about the two greatest orators and campaigners, John Kennedy and Barack Obama. I don't think it had anything to do with the time he ran. I think that he's just kind of great at it.

Yeah, I think that's right, too. I mean, look, I think part of, you know, when he came out on the stump in the last couple of weeks, he hit the economic issues very hard. He also talked about abortion. He also talked about democracy. Even the way he talked about democracy, though, is he was like, look, I know that so many of you are concerned about rising costs and inflation, and it doesn't seem like democracy is all that important. Well, let me tell you, in other countries where they don't have democracy, suddenly you miss it, you know? And it was a great way to be like, I'm going to meet you where you are. Yes.

And then I'm going to, but I'm not going to leave you there. Yeah. And so I do think that there's like, there's that element to it. But I think, you know, Democratic pollsters ad nauseum tell their candidates, talk about the economy, talk about the economy, talk about the economy. That's a hard issue to get covered. There's a media information. It is not. You start tweeting and posting about like Medicare cuts and taxes.

It's not going to go viral. Because nobody cares about this anymore. Hello. I mean, you know. Well, certainly not the people who are heavily involved in politics or cover politics. I just think that that question is broken. Like that way of asking people what's important to them is the wrong thermometer. Because, you know, there wasn't a lot of talk about immigration in the midterms.

Right. a lot of talk about immigration in the midterms. Remember in 2020 that there were the ads with the caravan and they're coming and there's nothing stopped. There wasn't a lot of that this time. Yeah, they sort of crime replaced that for this time. Yes, which is also, has an identity component as well. But my guess is that if you asked people, are you willing to pay, you know, have interest rates be, you know, one point higher or lower or separate children at the border? Like they're going to take that immigration issue. They're going to take their preference on immigration issue over the one point of interest rates. Right. It's just it's, you know, but.

Unless the immigration debate is not about like separating children or not, but like, okay, we're going to let in this, you know, we're going to have this level of immigration instead of this level of immigration. And we're going to have a pathway to citizenship, but it's going to take this long, right? Like there almost has to be. I mean, that's where it has to go eventually. Well, that's what I was going to say. It has to be, but you probably need people in each party to do that. Yeah. Which makes me, which brings me to another question because it's like,

if you look at Tuesday's results and you're looking for any kind of rays of hope that were not as calcified as we thought there was, whether it's split ticket voting or whether it was someone just like voting for one candidate and leaving it blank on the other. We don't know yet until we get all the data. But like, you know, in in Ohio, Mike DeWine, Republican, does much better than J.D. Vance, the MAGA Republican. Yeah. In New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, much better than Don Bolduc, the crazy MAGA candidate. And it goes like that for all these Republican candidates throughout the country. So on that side, the less extreme candidate ends up doing better. And you're seeing a lot of the Democrats that held on, Mark Kelly, Catherine Cortez Masto,

Maggie Hassan, these are pretty moderate or at least mainstream Democrats. Yeah. There's some really nice evidence in political science about moderates, the power of moderates. And it has a lot of interesting kind of elements to it. When you nominate someone who is more, let's just say extreme versus more moderate, you motivate the other side more. So there are all sorts of weird externalities of it. But the fact that moderates do better, that's real and not new. And the Mike DeWine, J.D. Vance difference in the vote, one thing about calcification is it's not that we're stuck with the same outcome all the time. We're just stuck on the knife's edge. And so there are things that are going to flip these elections. And certainly candidate quality and experience, incumbency, like those are going to be part of the story of what's flipping things one way or the other. And, you know, that Mike DeWine election, that's not close. But that's about,

he has committed himself to Ohio politics for like 30, whatever, 40 years now, and people know him, and there's value in that. So to me, that's democracy at work. People feel like they're getting represented by him, or they feel like it's a performance evaluation and he's doing a great job. So there are these moments that stuff that should matter does matter. Well, and also, and I know you wrote about this in The New York Times right before the election and just mentioned it earlier, which is like one incentive of calcification is that one side, in this case, the Republicans over the last several years, say, like, we're just going to change the rules. That, of course, led to an insurrection. Thankfully, so far, most just about all the Republican candidates who have lost have conceded, even the election denier Trumpy ones.

What do you make of that? It's really important. I think it's really, really important to echo your echoing of Barack Obama. Like, that didn't have to happen. It didn't have to be this way. And there's this alternate world out there where there were no concessions. And worse than that, there were calls to action. And the idea that we didn't see any of that is really important.

Is it a step in the right direction? Yes, I think it is. It's not backsliding, which is that success. It's not democratic backsliding. So I do put a lot of value in that. So I'm a big believer in persuasion. It is like comes from my personality, from my time working with Obama, from being a speechwriter. And, you know, so I looked at Tuesday's results and I was like, OK, we won or at least tied among independents.

And that usually doesn't happen with the party in power and because the uh partisan split in the electorate was roughly even or republicans either probably ahead by any way from one to four points right um we must have done a lot of persuasion um to to have the result that we did now i talked to a democratic strategist yesterday who was like yeah well you look at the independent. A lot of those independents have been voting Democrat for a while or other independents have been voting Republican for a while. So it really might just be sort of the anti-Trump coalition showing up more so than it is a persuasion story. But that said, I do think that in a democracy, persuasion is the only way out of our current predicament, the only peaceful way?

Do you think persuasion is still possible in this calcified electorate? I think that persuasion is very hard. And you wouldn't disagree with that, would you? No. Okay. Believe me. So I think persuasion is very hard. And even when you successfully do it, it decays very fast.

People come home to where they – home is happy for people. And that's, you know, true in our physical environment but also in our beliefs. And so even when you can nudge them off, they just get pulled back. So that's quite frankly why there's so much advertising and so much nudging. You have to keep people at the place you've persuaded them to. Okay. Do I think that's still possible? Yes, absolutely. But I think we've always been talking about on the margins and we're still talking about on the margins. But I think there's another way to get out of it. So it doesn't have to be persuasion over this set of issues. I mean, I hope that's not the only way because that is going to be a slog. So the other, I'm going to say easier way that we get out of this current like calcified sticky state, we stop fighting over identity-inflected issues. So just the fight

changes again. Now, the fact that it didn't change since the New Deal until 2016 kind of tells you how easy or hard it is to shift the dimension of conflict that we're fighting over. It's pretty hard. It took like the civil rights movement, Yeah. Basically. It's not easy. Right. And we have a little bit more evidence of how hard it's going to be. A global pandemic, a massive social justice movement, an insurrection at the Capitol. None of these things reoriented the dimension of conflict off of these identity based things. In fact, they all got subsumed by it. COVID had a shot in the very beginning when everybody, everybody, Democrats, Republicans, everybody stopped seeing family,

stayed home, washed their hands more. In the beginning, it was a nationwide effort. But as everybody remembers, Trump very quickly figured out that if the economy continued to crater, he would not be reelected. And he thought the way to write that is to bring the economy back. And so he started saying things like, march on your statehouse, tell Gretchen Whitmer to open up Michigan, take your state back. And the minute that he says that, mitigation behavior, attitudes about COVID, they just get subsumed into this existing dimension of conflict. Yeah. And to the identity point, COVID became a debate over identity. Yes.

Which you would think a health crisis. Yeah. It's a health crisis. Would have turned into a debate about identity. But it was on both sides. It was like, I'm wearing a mask. It's crazy. That is my identity.

It's crazy. And the mask became even a bigger signifier than the vaccines did. Because you can see them. Yes. Yeah. It is crazy. But that's the power of this. And Trump said, it's a blue state.

This is a blue state problem. So an interesting experiment is, what if he hadn't done that? Yeah. I don't think that COVID would have then become subsumed by this identity dimension. I don't like it's you know, it takes a match to sort of light that to light that fire. And he's he's like a problem match. He's struck a lot. Yeah. Well, that's why and that's what's tough, because, you know, if you're in the Democratic Party, you can do everything right. But the other side gets a say. And if there are people like Trump and the other side, then no matter what you do, you still could be playing on that field. Yeah, I think that it is also interesting to think about what are the equivalent kinds of things, you know, that maybe like conservative independents are saying like about Democrats, like, I wish they'd stop striking that match and lighting that up. That makes me uncomfortable, you know, and it is it is all the woke stuff. That is difficult for that segment of the electorate. And it's easy to sit here and say, like, but that's truth. But for them, it's kind of the same, you know, and you see this debate happening. Should we be talking about these things or not?

Well, that's, I mean, when I think about persuasion, I think about it in sort of the broadest possible sense, right? Like, it always drives me nuts when people say, oh, there's persuasion voters and then there's like mobilization. Right. Because I think that every voter is a persuasion target because part of this is not just persuading someone to like switch parties. It's persuading someone to like get off their couch and vote. Yeah. Yeah. And I also think I think the abortion ballot initiative in Kansas is a great example of this. Some of the ads that they ran in Kansas were like, you don't want another government mandate. And they actually showed a picture of a mask on one of the ads.

And it turned out to be this very effective ad at turning out conservatives or Republicans who happen to be on this one issue still pro-choice. And part of persuasion is not just the very narrow sense of like, oh, you're opposite where I am on this issue and I'm going to bring you to my side. Because I think that's, like you said, it's very, very tough. But part of it is like, look, there's two choices, two parties. And yes, we might disagree on this, but maybe this is more important this is democracies you know whatever it may be and that's that's how you can persuade i love the example about the mask and this is why i love talking to you about this stuff because as a speechwriter like you know that how you frame the conversation how you frame the choice for people that's the game because

persuading them to hop to the other side on controversial things is a losing battle. You're going to be chipping away at that block a long time. But if you can frame the choice in a way where you have more of a chance of getting them, that's where success comes. And that's political artistry. And it's what Obama is very good at. And I'm sure that you're a large part of that. But like that's the trick.

But the mask is exactly that. Like they needed a shortcut, a way to convey to people this very complicated thing that is happening right now everyone is talking about. It's not complicated. It's this simple. It's just like the mask. And they reframed the way people were thinking about it. And that's the power of political persuasion, in my opinion. So I have been sort of thinking about polarization, now calcification, since like after the 2016 election and like doing a deep dive into that. And each election since 18, 20, and now 22, even though I know the electorate is polarized and not much

changes and elections become more like censuses than anything else, because I am very online, I let myself in every single election sort of go with the prevailing narrative, right? And so in 18, thought the blue wave was going to be bigger than it was, they held the Senate. In 20, these polls, you know, Joe Biden's up 10 points. And then this week, I was like, oh, we're going to do really bad. It's going to be a bloodbath. But in the back of my mind, right before each election, there was like a moment. And this moment was when I listened to you guys on Ezra, where I was like, you know, it could just be Trump and Biden or DeSantis and someone else or whatever combination, recession, not recession, like, are we still going to be this roughly,

this calcified electorate that is roughly at parity? I think so. It's hard for me to imagine a set of candidates where we don't see that. I think that this is... Though I guess Trump was not something that we saw coming. Well, I hate this question because all of the people in 2016 who I promised, like, no, nothing like this has ever happened before. This is not going to happen. They never let me forget that. But using all of my expertise and knowledge and training to think about 2024, I think I do have to say that it's a good bet that it will look very similar to 2020 and 2016. The Ukraine situation is, you know, that's the one thing in the back of my mind where I'm like, that really could reorient the conversation. But hopefully that doesn't come.

I mean, it's a disaster, but hopefully it doesn't escalate to a bigger disaster. So I think 2024 is sticky. I think we're still stuck. So when you're reading the polls and looking online, in the back of your mind,

that's what I'm just, in the back of your mind, think we're pretty calcified. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Lynn Vavrick, it's always wonderful to talk to you. Thank you. It's great to be here. So much out of it. So thank you for joining Offline. You're welcome. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau.

It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Amelia Montooth, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Nar Melkonian, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.