The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The Day After The Night Before -- The Race Next Door (#19) with Bruce Anderson

Episode Date: November 4, 2020

Another day timer -- as the post mortem begins! Enjoy.

oh boy i don't know how you spent your night i don't know how late you stayed up i don't know how early you got up but this story well you know, we've been kind of warning ourselves for the last few weeks that this is a crazy time, and that's kind of crazy town in the race next door. And it sure turned out that way, because here we are, all these hours later, we still don't know who won. And we may not know until tomorrow. So we're just going to assume we're going to do something here and we're going to put it out early like we did yesterday and you you um

i give you something to listen to give you our thoughts bruce is in ottawa as he always is i'm here in stratford ontario um i can tell you that I, I don't know, I was up till around 1.30 or 2 when I finally said, okay, this is not going to resolve itself tonight. So I'm going to get a good night's sleep. Well, a good night's sleep lasted until about 5 and then I got up and I've been watching it ever since. And I don't know.

I think there's lots to talk about here, but let's not get trapped into talking about which state's up here and which state's up there, and this could happen and that could happen, because lots could happen. Right now, nobody's declaring a winner. Well, I shouldn't say that. Trump declared a winner at 2 in the morning himself, but everybody's kind of laughed that off.

But it could still happen. Anything could still happen. Biden people saying they're feeling good as the counting keeps going. Trump people saying they're feeling good. Everybody's talking to their lawyers. It's a good day for lawyers. Lawyers in there, they're just putting down the

checkbooks and they're saying, here, sign here, sign here. We're on your side. We're going to take this all the way. I don't know. So tell me, first of all, how you watched last night, and then we'll get into the number of areas on this. I watched it with mounting dread.

It was not the entertainment value at all. It was just dread. And I was kind of, you know, you're generous, Peter, to say that we've all been saying that it's kind of hard to tell that sort of thing. I wasn't saying that. I was saying Biden's going to win and we're going to know fairly early. And so for me, there was another layer of, wait, what? I must have consumed 250 polls in the last five days and hundreds probably over the course of the weeks that we've been doing this. And I've been in the polling business for almost 40 years. I've never seen anything that made me wonder more than I do today, whether there's something broken in the whole way in which we can gather that kind of information. So it's not a criticism of any one company.

It's more I watched it with a sense of not only was I amazed that that many Americans after four years of looking at Donald Trump would vote for him, I was amazed that the professionals who measure this in advance weren't able to understand how many Americans were going to do that and tell us. So I probably fell asleep for the first time at one and the second time at three and the third time at four. I kept waking up kind of wondering what was the dream and what was real. And it was all kind of a bad dream, but I don't know how it's going to turn out now either. You know, we've talked about this polling issue before. And it, you know, is it as simple as people just lie or they don't answer the phone?

We know they don't answer the phones anymore, and that's why there's been the move, I guess, to a lot of internet polling. Are the questions wrong? Or is the decision on who to talk to wrong? But, I mean, there's obviously something rotten at the core of polling data to be out to this extent. I mean, I'm sure somebody's going to come up in the next week and say, here, we got it. We had it right on.

Nobody listened to us. But that may be the case. But the majority of polls seem to have not be in the ballpark. Yeah, I think it's, you know, we're going to need more information over time to understand exactly what the different frailties were because there wasn't just one in my view. There are three plausible ones that I can think of. One is a shy Trump vote. Simply people saying, look, I don't feel like I want to tell everybody that I'm going to vote Trump, but I probably will.

And it's reasonable to assume that there was a certain amount of that. And, you know, we see that sort of thing happen in other elections. We know it can be a phenomenon if there is a candidate or a party that is not as socially acceptable to say that you're going to support. Sometimes people don't say that they will in the numbers that they actually do. The second thing has been a problem for a long time, which is pollsters trying to figure out who actually will go out and vote, how many people will, and who are the people who will. And so for several elections, wherever we've had failures of polling, meaning we've missed by margins larger than the expected error margin, we usually can

look at the predictive aspect of who's going to turn out and say, OK, well, didn't expect this group to turn out in these numbers or something like that. And so that could be a factor here, too, especially since the pandemic created this huge burst of advanced voting with mail and that sort of thing. And because the Trump campaign had a giant on the ground effort to say, put away your mask, go out and be a patriot and risk the pandemic and vote in person. So turnout expectations and predictions could be a factor. And the last one, and this is the one that my colleague David Coletto and I were talking about this morning, and maybe the more problematic one for polling going forward, is that if there is a cohort in society that we have trouble reaching more than any other, it might be younger men. And there may, in fact, be a younger male demographic that looks at Donald Trump, doesn't do polls, doesn't sign up to do online polls, won't answer the phone if we call, but likes something about him. Call it a bro segment if

you want. But that's one of the things that we're going to be looking for to see if there's evidence of that. But those are just three hypotheses at this point. Okay. Let's try and move a little bit into the aftermath because we've always talked about how America is divided, and it has been, and it's very polarized. Perhaps never more so than it is today because no matter who wins, they're going to win on a razor's edge. It's going to be, you know, very close.

And so we're looking at a very divided America. And when you look at a divided America, you have to ask the question, can it even be governable in the state it's in right now? I mean, the little I got from today in terms of getting a sense of how this is being seen overseas, I mean, remember how Brian Mulroney described last week to us, that he couldn't imagine any of the Western alliance leaders wanting Trump to be re-elected. Well, he may end up being re-elected, and even if he isn't, the country that they'll be dealing with

is a very divided country on a lot of issues, including some that deal directly with them. But it makes me wonder whether the government they're going to get, which is the government they will have elected, is even able to govern, given the kind of split. And, you know, you can look at it simply by looking at the red blue map and say oh well you know rural voted trump and you know urban voted biden and there's some degree of truth to that but the divisions are deeper than just that and the question then is as i've said immediately here in the last couple of minutes, is it even governable?

Yeah. Well, I do think that's a very real question. I think when I think about the results, I can't help but notice that there were some things that people didn't use to decide how they were going to vote. One was the competence of the incumbent. I think by any, even if we trust some aspect of the polling over the last several years, it's fair to say that a lot of people, including a lot of people that voted for a reasonable number

of people who voted for Trump in 2016, thought that he had kind of fallen short of fully competent on some critical issues, including pandemic management. They also weren't looking for ideas. I don't think it's reasonable to look at these results so far and say, well, there were a whole lot of people who voted Democrat because they liked Joe Biden's platform, and there were a whole lot of people who voted for Trump because they liked his platform. I don't know that Trump actually really put out a platform. He really just kind of talked about himself and the things that he hated about the other people. And so I don't think they were also people were also voting for solution.

You know, I do think the people who voted for Biden voted for him because they thought he would do a better job of helping solve this pandemic thing. But I think there's a danger of overstating that competence ideas or solutions were really important in a dynamic compared to really two things. One is, are you a Democrat or a Republican? Are you red or blue? Which sweater is your sweater? Which team is your team? Which is quite a worrying thing to see happen because it kind of replaces the thought process for voters.

If they don't feel like they need to do anything other than stick with their group, then we all know how easy it is to be distracted these days and not pay attention to the choices, to the confidence, the ideas, to the solutions. They also voted, I think, on the basis of values. I think Trump's values resonated with more people than maybe most of us in Canada really want to think is possible in America. But they did. I mean, Trump didn't change America. He reflected about half of America.

And those values that he represented greatly offended a lot of people who voted Democratic. And so when I kind of think about the question of governability, I think the issue is, you know, not just the process of how do you get things through if the Senate is of another party? And what role are you now expecting the courts to play in adjudicating what are normally political disputes, it really goes to are there people with one set of values who really don't agree with the values of the other group in society? And these elections just play themselves out as a, you're horrible, no, you're horrible.

You're socialist, no, you're racist. That's a bad place to be and i kind of feel like the united states of america is a is in danger of being a fiction as an idea it's not very united right now and i don't know how it gets more united and the other great fiction and i'll stop at this point. For all of my life, I listened to the United States proclaim itself the leader in marketing democracy around the world, the place that says we know how to do it. We almost invented it. We believe in it. We perfected it. Our Constitution makes it so special. And nothing is more important than democracy. But we look at what's happening today. And if this was happening in another country, we'd all be talking about, shouldn't we send observers next time to kind of try to manage the situation there? Because those people don't seem to know what their laws are for, or how to manage their

way through an electoral process. And this isn't the first time they've had a problem. This is just the worst version of it that we've seen so far. Yeah, I see all those arguments. This is no longer a shiny place on the hill that the rest of the world and struggling nations around the world who are looking for examples of how a future can be carved out of the mess they're in, it's how they look at this and see some inspiration. I don't know. Let me take it a little bit of another direction,

not disagreeing with anything you said there, because I think you've got some great thinking there in terms of where we're at. I also want to applaud you from earlier, right out of the gate, talking about how you were wrong in terms of what you thought was going to happen. I mean, I think we were both wrong.

I mean, you were just a little more, you were a little more bold in the way you put forward your argument. But let me take it a couple of different ways. You know, and some of this, you know, we talked about this, I think, the other day about where is it that Trump has this kind of, where does he in fact have a gift in the art of politics? It may not be a gift you appreciate or like or admire or want to see others copy, but here's one. I mean, when he spent the last month, at least the last month, last six weeks, going around calling Kamala Harris a communist, a socialist, a Castroite, everybody kind of sloughed it off and laughed at it, except those people in Miami-Dade County,

those Cuban-Americans, those who care a lot about Cuba and hated Castro. And they were obviously listening because that county, you could argue, cost Biden Florida. If he'd done as well as Clinton had done in Miami-Dade County, it would have been much closer. Might not have won it, but it would have been much closer.

So there's the impact of just using a couple of words. In a direct spot, in one area that he knew he had to turn, right? And he turned it. He turned hundreds of thousands of votes in Miami-Dade County. This is Trump, back to him. And it probably had an impact beyond there, which I'll get to again in a moment. The other part is his constant portrayal of Biden as this old fart, you know, sleepy Joe, blah, blah, blah.

I think that connected with some people more than we might have given it credit for, especially coming from another septuagenarian. He was able to paint Biden as this kind of doddering old guy who some young people may have decided, and as you said, we don't quite understand that psyche of young males in America right now, may have decided, you know, that's turning the page back, and we're not going to go there. We may have difficulties with Trump, but at least we know what we're going to get,

and I'm not willing to go there. The Democrats got to do better than that. Here's a third one. And I raise this delicately. But, you know, I raise this as somebody who's been around a little bit. I've seen what's happened in the past when women are on the ticket, not just in the U.S., but elsewhere. But you look at Geraldine Ferraro, when she ran, and the analysis after was that when she was on the ticket with Walter Mondale in 84 as the vice presidential candidate,

that that had a negative impact. That many Americans weren't ready to see a woman a heartbeat away from the presidency. Now, as it turned out, Reagan won that on a landslide, and there were other issues at play. But it was generally agreed that that was a problem. And then it was years before another woman appeared on the ticket, and it was Hillary Clinton last time around in 2016.

And was that gender issue part of the issue? Because he made, Trump made gender an issue not always directly on her but he did make gender an issue and then this time around you have kamala harris proven you know senator california state legislature attorney general in california very smart very effective in the Senator, California State Legislature, Attorney General in California. Very smart, very effective in the Senate. But here she was as a woman, a black woman, a heartbeat away from the presidency with a guy who's 76 or 77 years old? Was that a play?

Could that have been a factor as well? I mean, I think we're going through a lot of different factors here, and we still don't know who's going to end up winning, but everyone is, to a degree, and I think some Republicans included, are surprised at the vote result and kind of what's happened in the last day or two. I think all those play into it as well. They're not in the big thinking category like yours,

but I think they're all interesting things to consider. Yeah, I think that's interesting. I've been listening to some commentary this morning about the African-American vote in Florida and the Latino, especially the Cuban and the Venezuelan Latino vote in Florida and people kind of saying, look, bias against women is not only seen in other groups in society. And I want to be careful how I say this because these are just theories that people are putting forward for a softer result for the Democrats among those groups. And I think we need to know more before that sort of speculation really deserves more oxygen. But I think that it's a very legitimate question to say why that ticket underperformed in some areas and with some demographic groups relative to expectations. I tend to be a little bit more in the direction of one of your earlier points, I think, which is

that you used the reference point of Trump's name calling. If we want to call it his gift for name calling. I think we live in a time when people consume very, very, very surface elements of information. And if all they hear is Sleepy Joe, maybe they decide, I don't need to know more about that. If all I hear is Little Marco, maybe that's all I need to know. And there's such a temptation for people to graze lightly at the table of knowledge these days that if a politician is gifted at saying, you don't need to dig deeper, I'm just going to tell you, and I'm going to tell you a funny shorthand version of what you need to know. And you're going to find it funny enough because you don't really expect somebody

who lives in the White House to use language like that. And you're going to tell your friends, that's kind of funny, isn't it? I think that is part of the culture around this race that Donald Trump created, and he created it in 2016 as well. And the last thing that occurs to me is I was looking at the lyric of, I was trying to remember a song lyric that went, a man hears what he wants to hear and he disregards the rest. And I was thinking, is that Bob Dylan? No, it was Simon and Garfunkel. And I think we are

in such a period of time in politics now, where in American politics anyway, the risk is a person hears what they want to hear and they disregard the rest. And the political parties have become these, they're almost like, what if political parties became artificial intelligence robots? They learn from what response they get when they try something, and then they do more of it. And we need to make sure on some level that humans actually make those decisions on the basis of some sort of moral integrity in the future. Otherwise, I do fear that those machines will just keep on doing the things that allow people to hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest.

That's probably the thing that's going to keep me up at night. But I also want to say that I do still think that Kamala Harris is going to be vice president when the dust settles on this. So having been wrong before, I'm prepared to be wrong again. But I think that's the way this is going to go. I think it'll be great if she is. And I think that, you know, listen, I've admired Kamala Harris for a long time. And I think she's been, you know, she's been a terrific questioner in the Senate. And I think she'd make a great vice president.

But we don't know what's going to happen there. Let me, seeing as I just mentioned the Senate, let me bring something else up. Because I find this fascinating too. For most of the last four years, and especially for the last year, one of the most common questions has been, what the hell is the matter with the Republican Party?

Why doesn't anybody stand up and tell Trump that the actions he's taken are unacceptable and he's got to change them and we're not going to support him anymore. That's been a constant. It's been like a drumbeat. And the answer has always been, no matter how many of them feel that way,

they can't actually do it because they're afraid they're going to lose their position in the House or the Senate because of the retributions that Trump can pull on them in terms of making their race for the seat, whether it's in the House or the Senate, that much harder. That's always been the reasoning. And we've, you know, a lot of people have said that's crazy, they're gutless, they're cowards, they're this, they're that.

And then we get to last night. And, you know, quite apart from how you thought Trump himself might do, there was a lot of expectation, excuse me, that a lot of Republican senators and congresspeople were going to take a hit for their support, their enabling of Trump. Didn't happen. I mean, there have been at least a couple of Republican senators who lost, but there also was a Republican senator who defeated a Democratic,

or a Republican Senate candidate who defeated a sitting Democratic senator. There were a number of victories for Republicans in the House of Representatives. So this further goes, I think, to what you were talking about, Bruce, the misreading a lot of us made about the American people and where their true sensibilities were and their support was. Because it seems that in those cases, those Republicans who have been criticized for the last couple of years may well have been right in just holding back and not saying anything.

I mean, they may have been wrong morally, but they may have been right politically. Yeah. I mean, they think is going wrong? Or is it okay for them to pursue the path of least resistance and most likely success electorally? And I think you and I probably come down on the same place there. So notwithstanding the fact that more of them got reelected than maybe we thought were going to get reelected, I do think it's important for us to say it was still wrong for them not to call him out. But I think one or two things happened along the way that are occurring to me. One is that

it became okay to say Trump's kind of an awful person. But let's set that aside. He tweets like a madman. And it's insulting, and it's demeaning, and it's bullying, and it's all of those things. But let's set that aside. And I think that the Republicans kind of became familiar with the fact that there were a large number of voters who were willing to say, as long as we agree that he's not a very good person, or we don't like his behavior, or we wish he didn't tweet that much, then let's also just agree that we don't want the socialists and that when we see these instances of police brutality, that we'll think about it as a law and order issue rather than a human rights issue. That when we think about COVID, we won't think about all the people who died. We'll think about how quickly Trump got better and so it goes back

to this a person hears what they want to hear and what's the shorthand version and once you sort of extinguish the are you really standing behind this guy's behavior issue because there's codes from all these politicians one way or another saying yeah i wish he wasn't tweeting that way i wish he didn't sort of say things that way. Sometimes I wish he was a little bit more dialed down. And they, it seems like a bunch of them found that zone that was just below the ceiling, which if they had gone a little further,

Trump would have chopped their heads off. And they just, they just underneath that so that if people wanted to go, ah, I'll continue to support that person because I know that they think like I do that Trump's a bit of a nutter. But come to think of it, I do worry about law and order and those riots, you know, I'm not, I don't know that Breonna Taylor woman and I don't really know exactly what

would happen there, but I wouldn't want those riots in my neighborhood. And COVID, I'm really worried about the economy. And he's worried about the economy too. And yeah, sometimes he should wear a mask and he doesn't, but sometimes I should wear a mask and I don't. You can just sort of imagine that kind of syndrome where, again, people hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest. And I think the thing that you will be really acutely aware of, again, people hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest. And I think the thing that you will be really acutely aware of, Peter, with your career in journalism is that the role of journalism isn't what it used to be. It doesn't get to play that adjudicator of truth role

and kind of put the guardrails up around the conversation role. It tries. And some days it succeeds better than others. But most days it's swamped by Facebook. It's swamped by Twitter. It's, you know, it's just not getting that kind of, it doesn't get to play that role anymore. I really worry about where things are going for the media in general. You know, I've worried about this for a number of years, you know, before Trump, but because of all the different influences on it with the different media landscape and the different platforms that exist.

And I think this is yet another what's happened in the last couple of days, no matter which side you're coming from on this, it hasn't been good for the media. The trust factor has dropped down another notch on the part of many people, once again, from either side of this issue, in terms of their belief that they're getting the real story from the media, or at least a story that they can identify with, that reflects them in the way stories are being told. And I think the media, at some point, and I include myself in here,

have to understand that the trust in them has dropped considerably, and there's an issue of the need to be much more transparent in the decisions that are made about how they do things, the stories they cover, the way they cover them, the emphasis they place on them, the guests they pick, the polls they do, you name it. In all these areas, there is a real problem on the trust factor for the media.

Two other points, and I'll sign this off for a little bit, but two other points which, Bruce, you can jump in on if you wish. One, I left the impression that the only women who've appeared on presidential tickets were Geraldine Ferraro, Hillary Clinton, and now Kamala Harris. Of course, there was in 2008 Sarah Palin. How could she be forgotten? Because she was quite the, cut quite the figure in the John McCain campaign as his vice presidential candidate. But she also lost. So all the women who've been on the ticket have lost.

Here's my last point. It's actually more of a question to you, Bruce. And it comes out of this issue of trust. I got an email early this morning from one of our fans, at least he listens to us all the time, but he's a critic as well and thinks we were too anti-Trump during the campaign, David Arsenault, who wrote. And, you know, good for him. You know, he and I go back and forth on a number of things, but he was, you know, good for him. You know, he and I go back and forth on a number of things. But he was, you know, he was taking a few, as it turned out, to be easy shots at the two of us today,

given the results that he'd seen as of kind of midnight last night. But his suggestion is if, at this point, if Biden's able to turn this around in these final states that are being looked at and end up winning, he'll have only won because of fraud. That there be some boxes of ballots that dropped off the back of a truck somewhere and all that. And, hey, listen, he's not the only one who believes some skullduggery could take place on the part of either side to make this happen now that it's going to be going into a few other days. So my question to you is on that trust factor. And it kind of relates back into your, you know, maybe we should send in observers. But do you trust the system, the American system as it is,

over these next couple of days, a winner will be pronounced? Do you trust that the states that are working through late counting of ballots. I've watched them. I've looked at their Twitter feed. I've kind of watched them do interviews and press conferences today. And to a person, I have the feeling that what they're determined to do, whether it's in Michigan or Pennsylvania or Georgia, is make sure that every vote that

was cast appropriately is going to count. I don't trust that Donald Trump wants that to happen. I don't trust that the judicial system is going to stand up for that principle in every instance. I have questions about if something goes to the Supreme Court, will it act in a more partisan fashion or will it protect the integrity of the system? I have doubts about what happened when the president appointed somebody to run the post office who then went about dismantling equipment that would help process votes. So yes and no is the answer to the question. I trust that it needs to get better.

I trust there are some people who are trying to bring it to a safe and responsible conclusion. But I'm absolutely convinced that people are trying to undermine it. Where I probably disagree with David Arsenault is I think the people who are trying to undermine it have pretty clearly been Republicans. They've been trying to prevent people from voting. I saw a graphic the other day about Harris County, the same size as Rhode Island. It had one place where you could drop off ballots, whereas the Rhode Island map had dozens of them. And that only happens when one party is really trying to frustrate the intent of people to go out and vote. And so I do, like you, I'm glad David Arsenault is listening to us. I'm glad that he's got opinions about what we have to say. I personally think it would be

impossible to be too hard on Donald Trump. I understand he has a different point of view, but I kind of look at it and go, the 230,000 people that died, that's a lot of people that died because of this pandemic. A lot of them didn't need to die. The kids who are in cages, they shouldn't be in cages. I don't actually need a longer list than that, but there is a longer list than that. And so being too hard on Donald Trump, I just don't kind of comprehend that idea, I guess, on a personal level. But on the trust thing, you only see bad guy hats on Republicans. You don't see the possibility that a Democrat could be doing something to try and make these numbers work in their favor.

There's the possibility. But the Republicans haven't even alleged that. All they've done is say, we don't want votes counted after a certain day. And they've taken advantage of the fact that there's a pandemic. And so people were encouraged to vote by mail to say, well, first of all, we're going to slow down the mail processing. We're going to use our executive power to dismantle equipment and to appoint somebody to run the post office who's not going to process them.

And you saw probably as well as I did that the on-time delivery rates were ticking down in the days immediately before. Well, I wasn't the Democrat doing that. And you saw in the middle of the night last night, Donald Trump saying, stop the counting. It's over. I won. I just need to see some evidence of some Democrats trying to do something that prevents people from voting or their votes being counted. And I see a lot of effort on the other side, including a lot of support challenges that in some cases were turned down and

in some cases became problems. Okay. Listen, that's a good discussion. Like a really good discussion. And, you know, it looks like it's going to be our Wednesday night discussion on the race next door, because I don't think we're going to have anything final today. If it does,

obviously Bruce and I'll just kind of jump in and we'll, we'll try and do something, but there's lots for there for you to chew on there and putting it out early gives you an afternoon and an evening at least to, to have a listen. We appreciate all your comments and David Arsenal knows we appreciate his, but there've been lots more and there are lots more nice ones and we'll get around to doing some kind of collection of, of letters at some point,

but right now we're still kind of churning along with the story of the day. Bruce, thanks very much. We'll talk to you again later in the day, and we'll see whether or not we're going to put out another pod at some point today or if not, we'll wait till tomorrow. Thanks again. All right, Peter. Take care.