The Munk Debates Podcast - How could the mainstream media and their pollsters once again get the U.S. election results so wrong?

Episode Date: November 10, 2020

The election wasn't supposed to turn out this way, according to months of American election polling. Survey after survey and breathless media commentary predicted that Joe Biden would beat Donald Trump in popular vote by upwards of 6, 8, even 10 percent. The same polls and media commentators projected the Democrats with winning margins in the key battleground states of Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Idaho. Bullish predictions included a Democratic sweep of Senate, more Democratic seats in the House of Representatives, and Biden flipping the traditional Republican strongholds of Georgia and Texas. So far none of these predictions came to pass and, instead, a Democratic cakewalk into the White House has morphed into a contested election with possibly weeks if not months to go before a winner is officially declared. How did this happen? Why, after 2016, is much of the media, and seemingly the majority of pollsters, so clueless when it comes to fathoming voter's intentions on election day? Is it time, once and for all, to give up on public opinion polling as predictive tool? What is the effect on democracies of faulty polling and a media only too happy to widely publicize survey results that 2020 would suggest have little real bearing on what voters actually think? Sources: DW News, MSNBC, NBC, NBC Local 33Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I think it's time for this toxic binary zero-sum madness to stop. We're not an imperial power. We're a revolutionary power. We are no longer in a world where you can plot out moves statesmen to statesmen like a chessboard. You don't know anything about my background to where I came from. It doesn't matter to you because fundamentally I'm a mean white man. We can't do this to the next generation because America will cease to exist. Welcome to the Monk Debates. Every episode we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. Free of spin, focused on the facts, and animated by smart conversation.

To arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind. Today, a conversation about one of the key questions coming out of the U.S. election. How could the mainstream media and their pollsters, once again, get the U.S. election results so wrong. We're going to take a look at some races in detail. And at the moment, it's not looking too good in Florida for Joe Biden. Let's not forget that. You said it, Miga.

It is incredibly, incredibly close here at the Clark County Election Center. The first poll workers. Here in Georgia, the numbers are still very much up in the air. So the counting is really coming down to the wire. And here in the state, a winner still hasn't been declared in the 2020 presidential election. And it's unclear. when one will be announced. In New York, the moment the entire country has been waiting for after a very close race, NBC News now projects that Joe Biden has won the Keystone State, Pennsylvania, and its 20

electoral votes. And that means we can now project that former vice president Joe Biden has been elected president of the United States. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. Well, it wasn't supposed to turn out this way according to months of American election polling. Survey after survey and breathless media commentary predicted that Joe Biden would beat Donald Trump in the popular vote by upwards of six, eight, even 10%. Bullish predictions included a democratic flip of the U.S. Senate, more Democratic seats in the House of Representatives, and the possibility of Joe Biden winning traditional Republican strongholds of Georgia and Texas. None of these predictions came to pass and instead a Democratic kickwalk into the White House has morphed into something very different, a litigious contested election that could drag on for weeks, if not months. How did this happen? Why after 2016 is so much of the media and seemingly the majority of pollsters so clueless when it comes to fathoming voters' intentions on Election Day? Is it time once and for all to give up on public opinion polling as a predictive tool?

And what is the effect on our democracy of faulty polling and a media only too happy to widely publicized survey results that have little real bearing on what voters actually think? On this installment of the Monk Debates podcast, we look for answers to one of the key questions coming out of the 2020 U.S. election. How could the mainstream media and their pollsters once again get the election results so wrong? For some straight talk, we've invited back on the Monk Debates podcast, two top political strategists who are our go-to team for understanding all things U.S. politics. Jeff Rowe is the founder of Axiom Strategies, a firm that specializes in congressional, senatorial, and statewide campaigns, helping elect 74 congressmen, eight senators, and six governors. Most recently, he was campaign manager for Ted Cruz's 2016 run for the Republican nomination, for president. Terry Sullivan is a founding partner of the public affairs firm Firehouse Strategies. Terry has played a senior role in over 100 campaigns, including Senate, gubernatorial, and

presidential campaigns, and he's worked with some of the biggest names in U.S. politics, including Mitt Romney, and most recently Marco Rubio, who he served as campaign manager on his presidential bid. Jeff, Terry, welcome to the Monk Debates. Thanks. Thanks for having us. Well, hey guys, so great to have you back on. You know, pre-election, we were able to tap your big brains, your kind of storied U.S. political campaign experience for one of our most successful episodes recently. So the chance to come back to you after the election, and I think have this conversation. I think we all agree.

We're kind of debated out right now. So we're going to have a little bit more of a conversation to debate about this question that's on everybody's minds, which is how the heck could the mainstream media and their, pollster friends, once again, get the election results in the United States so wrong. And both of you, again, have that unique lens of having run campaigns at the state level, at the national level, and probably more experience with polling between the two of you than I can imagine. So such a privilege to have this conversation with you. So, Jeff, let me pass the microphone over to you first. And you, on our pre-election show, took the contrarian view that there was a path. for Donald Trump to the presidency.

These election results, you know, kind of justify that analysis that you gave. And I guess what did you see going into the election that allowed you to kind of predict that there was a path? And what happened during the election that you think created that path for President Trump to come as close as he did,

really defying, again, a lot of the mainstream media and pollster analysis of where this race was headed? Well, I actually, thanks again for having me on. I actually believed that the map was shrinking for the president. And not that his path was shrinking, but that his map. And when you're in a political campaign, you know, you would think the more options you have, the better. But it's actually not true. You need to really resource allocation, particularly with the president, having less money for direct voter contact than Biden having down the stretch.

I thought that really played in his advantage. for a few reasons. One, I thought that Florida was in the bag, and two, I thought that North Carolina was in the bag, or very close. Of course, you have to maintenance in the bag states. I thought that Iowa and Ohio was in the bag. And I frankly thought, and so I don't need to, like, you know, mess with words here. I thought Michigan was out of reach. And so I saw a map coming down to Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. And so if you're an income, president and the Democrats really had to run the table in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, they got to take everything away. And you only have to fight on a very few fronts. That's actually a good opportunity.

And so I thought also, as we're coming down the stretch, fog of war, I don't remember exactly what day we taped, but we were certainly down the stretch. I thought he'd recovered from the first debate enough to put those kind of natural battleground states back in play. I also thought there was a very stubborn four or five, some states even as high as 7% undecided. And frankly, if you are still deciding about Donald Trump or not, you're probably going to go his way. You're not waiting for Joe Biden to produce his energy plan or something.

I mean, you're probably already there. And so I think those things are the ones that, Those were the reasons why I thought the landscape had solidified enough that the major states that you always have to worry about were pretty much kind of handled. The hype about Texas and Ohio and Iowa and all this stuff was overblown. And so if you don't have to worry about Bloomberg spent, you know, 100 million bucks against you, if you don't have to worry about some of the old purple states that become red states under Trump like Ohio, like Iowa, And you could really hone in on Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, play a little offense in Wisconsin, even though that was a state that he won.

And that was a very doable map for him. And that coupled with the second debate performance, coupled with even with rising coronavirus cases, a return to a actual choice election. And this is a choice election for the last three weeks, the only three weeks of the last, you know, 52 that we've been in the presidential, year. But so those are the reasons I thought really gave him a real good opportunity to close it out. Thanks, Jeff. Terry, you were in our pre-election podcast. You were more skeptical that the president had a pathway to re-election. And indeed, you may be proven right. Joe Biden once all the votes are certified, odds on. He's the next president of the United States. But I'm wondering maybe what surprised

you in the election or the election results that gave the president this showing, at least, that pushed back against a lot of the media's conjecture that he would lose Florida, that bigger states, traditional Republican states, were in play. Where did this president surprise you with the electorate in terms of performing on the upside? Well, I think there's multiple things at play. Frankly, he was faced with. with insurmountable hurdles. You know, a, the economy, not just overall, was so bad off, but even on the closing few days,

some of the biggest losses in the market in recent months happened days before the election. Cases were spiking. Like, this was the worst environment imaginable. And he still kept it closer than anyone had predicted. And you look at, you know, Florida, I was a little skeptical on always because, if there's if there is a caricature of a Florida voter, it's Donald Trump, a northeastern

retiree, brash individual moves to Palm Beach. I mean, like, there are about five million Donald Trumps in, in South Florida. But I do think that his ability to keep it close in the upper Midwest was a real surprise. And the polling just got it so wrong, not just public polling, but private polling, and not just for Trump. This wasn't a Trump issue. This was Republicans across the board outperformed their polling numbers. You see that in Senate race after Senate race, where Republicans who were predicted to go down in flames and everywhere from Maine to North Carolina won.

And so I think what surprises me most about this is that the electorate that turned out did not match previous electorates, and therefore the polling was just atrocious in so many places. Well, thanks, Terry. That's exactly where I want to go next with both of you, because that's the question that we're discussing today. And just to remind listeners, today is more of a conversation than a traditional debate. We're all feeling a little debated out. So instead of giving you a hard, pro and con view today, we're instead just having the opportunity to reflect with two storied political campaigners in the United States on this question of how could the mainstream media and pollsters once again get the election results so wrong. So Jeff, let's let's go there. And I know

there's a lot of different factors to explain why polling kind of let us down, so to speak. But could you pick the top one or two that just caused this kind of meltdown in the models in terms of what, you know, Nate Silver and 538 and that whole crowd was thinking versus what, what results resulted. Yeah, I talked about on your last show, which was, by the way, private polling is fine. And I know we're not debating, but our private polling was not off. It was stark in the difference between private polling and public polling. And there's a few reasons why. But I went through this last time. If you take a look at it, and by the way, also, I don't believe that Terry is right, although there'll be more analysis.

The electorate looks remarkably similar to the last election cycle. In 2012, there was 31% Republican turnout, 33% Democrat turnout, 36% nonpartisan. In 2016, there was 32% Republican, 34% Democrat, 34% nonpartisan. I think we're going to have the same numbers. And by the way, that's an Obama reelect in 12, Democrat president, and a Trump election in 16. and I think 20 looks remarkably similar. The problem is you get pollsters, and I'll just pull out some of my favorites,

two election cycles, two wildly different outcomes, 2% margin for the Democrat on the natural, and you have change research, you have 31% Republican, 39% Democrat. You have Ipsos, whoever the hell that is, a 6% margin for the Democrats. You have the Hill, 5% margin for the Democrats. Democrats. You have USA Today 6%. Like there's a few things. And then you go to the racial.

It's by the way, very static numbers again. White vote, 68%. I'm sorry, 74% in 2012, 73% and 16. And the Hill has it at 68. And USA Today has it at 67. And change has it at 69. And I mean, it used to go on and on and on. And I think there's only a few things that it can be. It can be well-practice or it's gross incompetence where they just didn't screw up like they're just you cannot get it right or I think potentially worst case it's purposeful now there's a couple other options there's actually one other option to do a real survey in a state to get it right you really need to spend about 20 grand because you need to get surveys multiple ways now we used to be able to call landlines and like that was it and easy easy going

Gallup, as you know, when they started surveying in the 50s. They used to go door to door, so it gets cheaper now than then. But it's about $20,000 to call people on their cell phones. You know, you can text, you can text people, you can do social media interviews. So there's a lot of different ways to get an interview. I don't think these guys are paying 20 grand. I think these guys are paying $2,000. And pulses then have a problem and that they could either give an outlier survey,

which is out of bounds of what everybody's doing, or they can torture the math enough to get their polls in line with the current narrative. And I think that's what they do. They're not polling to get the right answer. They're polling to write a story. And when you have these guys that are just created, I mean, I don't know why some of these schools

set up a polling division and do it. I don't know, maybe it's all good, well-intended. I bet if you look at the endowment for the polling firm, though, I bet it's not what it should be, and I bet it's not bipartisan. But I just don't believe it. I think they're in the freaking tank. There's no other excuse. And I'm sick of people saying, oh, it's hard to call people on itself.

No, it's not. You can do a poll and get the right answer if you freaking want to. And these guys are skewing elections. They're costing campaigns, money. I mean, if you're in a Senate race and poll after poll after poll has you down 14 points, 11 points, like Martha McSally, nine points, 10 points. I mean, although we were never outside of the first. five or six points in our worst day internally.

And we had polls coming out weeks before the election, having us down 14 points. Like, you can't tell me that's an accident. And so I think that they're in the tank and then the bag and it's purposeful. I will allow, maybe it's just gross incompetence. But I don't think that's what it is. I don't think they're investing the money. I don't think they're investing the resources.

I think they're a bunch of, I'll keep it, you know, PG. Give it clean. But I think they're, I think they're effing with them. is what they're doing. And I don't think it's anything short of that. I want to go to that next. But Terry, just to have you reply first, man, what is it in competence? Is it something, you know, again, the difficulty in actually reaching the average voter? Like, what's the psychological profile, the person that's going to pick up the phone and have a conversation with you? Is that an accurate reflection of the person who's actually going to go out and vote an election day? What, you know, is this a technical problem that can be fixed or is it something bigger? Look, I agree with Jeff, there is a lot of crap polling out there. And in life, I view all of this in a very free market conservative business person kind of mindset. You get what you pay for in life.

And if something is free, it's probably not overly valuable. So from the standpoint of a lot of the free polls, a lot of these folks that just go out and poll for polling sakes so they can get press and all this stuff, yeah, there's a lot of bad stuff across the board. Not just on the left, but on the right, Jeff and I both. know those folks. But I also think that if your job is to be a predictor and you make money off of that, it is a pretty crappy business model to intentionally get things wrong publicly. I mean, it just doesn't help you make money. And I don't think that these pollsters are so nefarious that they are willing to tank their ability, their credibility and their ability

to make money as a business person to just turn out crap numbers on purpose. So I think that's a little suspect. And I do disagree with what I saw in private polling. I mean, look, there is nobody. There is nobody who had Susan Collins winning Maine by eight points. Just wasn't. And, you know, if Jeff can show me that person and can find the email that said, hey, Susan Collins is going to win by eight points.

He was in the last track, SLF, and NR. NRC she was up for. Well, shoot it to me. I knew she was closing strong and I thought there's a shot she could win. Nobody had her winning by eight points. So there's just case after case where I know the, you know, same thing in North Carolina. Look, it was going to be close. But it turns out that it wasn't nearly as close as everyone thought and Tillis outperforming the numbers.

South Carolina. I know the South Carolina team. I know those folks. They didn't think that they were going to win. I thought they'd win by more than they thought they would win. They didn't think they'd win by 12 points. So, I mean, we can go through and litigate this kind of thing about, oh, every private poll had it right. That's bullshit.

Sorry for the language, but that's, that's BS. There was, the turnout did not mirror in most states what the folks were polling, private and public. Was the public polling much worse than the private polling? Yes. but there is a flaw in what folks are looking at and from a pollster standpoint, and they're going to have to figure it out. Jeff, talk to us, you know, because you run campaign, so you ended your last answer. And so I want to go with you next. Like, what is the effect on you inside a campaign and voters in the democratic process when these polls get so much coverage, so much exposure?

do the polls drive voting intention at the margin? Like, do they actually impact the results of elections when people think, hey, my candidate is just not going to win, so I'm just going to, I'm not going to vote? So some people think that there's a suppression. There's no academic research to quantify that, but it's also very hard to get a control sample in that study. So I don't know that we know the answer to that. It certainly depresses, it depresses energy. it depresses donors, it depresses the insider class.

You know, if you're running a campaign for House or Senate in this country in a competitive race, two-thirds of the money spent on that campaign will be outside your control. So if you have a million-dollar congressional race in a competitive seat, $3 million will be spent on the outside, potentially even more, but two or three million, at least on the outside. So we're getting into a situation where campaign total, Democrat and Republican, control less than half of the message that's going out. And so those folks are funded by very wealthy, sophisticated donors.

And this is on both sides, Republican and Democrat, very wealthy, sophisticated donors. Some of these people have their own pollsters, you know. And so that, like, progression of surveys showing bad outcomes, absolutely leads to a lack of enthusiasm, energy, questions in the campaign. You know, it's every time one drops. And we used to fight them. They used to be rare enough.

And we still fight back some polls occasionally that are so bad that they just have to be taken to task. But you can't get a, you can't get a story. You know, they run the story and Survey USA does a poll and an online only poll that has you down 10, your internals have you down two, your three weeks out, yes, that has an impact. Of course it does. And the local paper runs the story that, you know,

it looks like CanadaX is getting ready to get blown out in the very critical, you know, CD-22 race, and you're stuck. There's no fixing it. You've got to go to a blog to like push back on it. So your folks at least have, you know, the real story that this is a very, close race. So it absolutely has an impact. And again, I'd love to give them an out, but the makeup of the electorate was not different. What happened is everyone assumed undecides wouldn't vote. They didn't look up at the composition of the undecides, which were very, they're much more

pro-Republican than pro-Trump to a degree. I don't believe in the theory of the shy Trump voter. I've never met a shy Trump voter. They typically, you know, have banners hanging from their cars going down the street. So it is it is a assumption that Biden was going to win in a blowout, a herd mentality among pollsters that if it's a coin toss, push it to the left. And you saw that with major prognosticators like Nate Silver, like David Wasserman, like a lot of these guys, all smart guys, by the way. There's no lack of brain cells there. They just get a poll from the NRCC that shows candidate X and X district is up to. They get a poll from a Democrat in the same district showing the Democrats up five,

and they got a decision to make. And that decision is not always based on data. It's based on what they think is happening overall. And so when it surprises everybody, it's garbage in, garbage out. And that's what, I mean, I don't know if there's a fix. I don't think you can ban. And by the way, the one thing that Terry said about the people worried about their

reputations, that's if they're people that have a, that have a competitive, a marketplace competitive product. but if you don't and you're privately funded, then there's no recourse for bad outcomes at all. What about Bill McIntirf? I mean, look, I'm sure you use POS at times. Those guys are great, sharp pollsters. That guy was on national tech TV with his name, his face,

one of the most well-known, well-respected Republican pollsters in the country, saying it was going to be 10 points for Biden, the weekend before the election. I didn't see that. But yeah, that's a penalty. I mean, Neil Newhouse, you know, several years ago, did the exact opposite, right, with Romney. So I got it. No, those guys do, and I don't know what he was seeing. I just know that the surveys, we did 94 congressional wins.

We lost six of them. We were involved in three Senate races at a high level. And our polling was not demonstrably off the results. Terry, what is your view about, you know, what the media could or should do? Because, you know, after 2016, you know, there was a lot of mea copas and, you know, supposedly after-action reports and a new kind of realism about polling. But boy, that certainly seemed to go out the window as we entered 2020. And the speculation about a blue wave, it all became kind of rampant again.

Is there a fix here in the media? Is there a new humility in the industry that you sense since this outcome? Or are we going to be repeating this whole exercise? all over again in four years? You know, I've not found the national media to be terribly introspective in the past.

So I'm not counting on it this time. You know, I think the greater share of the blame goes to the media, more so than the pollsters or the aggregators or any of these other folks.

The media covers covers politics now like it's a sporting event, but with less accuracy and fairness. It's like the difference I can't understand when I watch the Washington Nationals and they're on ESPN why the reporters

or the commentators aren't in the tank for my guys because I normally watch it on the local network. And so that's what we've got now is reporters have become the local home team networks for so many of these. And then they feed in many cases, even if they're not biased, or they don't believe they're biased. They love covering the process, the horse race of it. This, who raised how much money there? How, how are you at in the polls? It is infuriating.

Instead of covering substantive things, policy things, they just cover this catnip of process. And so, you know, I would love to believe that that's going to get better, not worse. But I have absolutely no reason to believe because what's the media going to say? Oh, it's not our fault. It's the pollster's fault. They got it wrong. Well, maybe it's the fact that every one of you is conducting polling and every one of you is obsessed. I mean, it's not Nate Silver's fault that ABC News, he works for them.

It, you know, it's not Nate Cohen's fault when it's the New York Times he works for. They're the ones that are giving the amplification to this and drawing these folks in. And so I put a lot of the blame for. the obsessive nature of polling at the feet of the media and looking for just ways to cover things when they don't want to have a policy discussion or policy debate. Jeff, on our last podcast, you ended with a bit of a soliloquy on just how divided America was politically between Democrats and Republicans and these two tribes, you know, forget about politics. They don't mix in their communities.

They don't belong to the same clubs. They don't drive the same cars. they don't watch the same television shows. So is that like where the noise is coming from in terms of the mainstream media, that it's very hard for them to actually connect with real people because they're in one tribe, probably a tribe wearing a blue shirt, and the folks wearing the red shirts in the red states, you know, this is like terra incognito for the New York Times, USA Today,

the Wall Street Journal, CNN, you know, you name it. No, I don't think, well, so the question is, do I think that the coverage is skewed because they can't talk to real people? Yeah. Yeah, no, I don't think that. I think the big papers can. I think the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, not barely the post, barely, really barely,

those papers can. They have bureaus, they have offices, they have desks, they have people assigned to it. they can, I'm not going to tell you their coverage is fair, but they can, they can afford and can communicate with real people in timely fashion. The ones that can't are the ones that are in the, in the cities, you know, the, the hometown paper, they're the ones that can't. The political coverage has been shredded. They are now essentially an AP or Reuters repurposing paper, and they don't have a desk, they don't have a city hall desk, they only cover scandals.

They can't, like they literally can't cover in major metropolitan areas. They maybe have one reporter covering City Hall, maybe one. And 10 years ago, they'd have 15. And they'd report news, not just scandal. And so this isn't, by the way, new. I mean, this is how we started back with the handbills when we did, you know, campaign work in the early 1900s, you know, where you got a hand bill that you wanted because you wanted to reinforce your opinion. And so with more news being consumed on the internet and internet subscribers being more prevalent,

and I think the New York Times, I think I read, that they just passed online subscription rates, just passed in print subscription rates. You know what that means, not just for them, but for the body of the fourth estate, is that now they all become clickbait. and to Terry's point about the horse race, when it comes to politics, it's going to be scandal driven, it's going to be reinforce your opinion driven, and it's going to be, if you write, if you get a candidate or a politician or someone in government that drives news and clicks for you, then you're going to cover that person because that's the way your paper is managed. And that's why we see AOC on the front page of every Mastead in the last two or three days,

talk about how our parties, you know, selling out to the moderates already. So that's what I, that's why I think the body of the, of the, of the news coverage is going to go. And that's too bad. It used to get thrown in your paper and you paid a buck a day and 50 cents a day and went out and picked it up and read the whole thing. And that's not the case. Now you log on and you go to the headlines that get your attention. And that's where the, if that's where the money's coming from, that's where the coverage is going to go. And if that's where the coverage is going to go, that it's certainly going to get slanted both ways.

You know, if I can jump in here, I agree with. with Jeff. One thing that I do believe those, I do think there is a biased amongst reporters. I don't believe that it's an intentional one in many cases. In some cases, it is. But I think it is, you are a product of your environment. I think I would argue that, and I may have even heard Jeff say, that he think that he would have a better handle on mainstream American electorate based on living where he does versus living in Washington, D.C. or New York City. And right now, there are 10 cities in America of a million people or more, only 10. I would venture to say that almost every single major reporter and TV broadcaster lives in those 10. There are over 15,000 cities in America

under 100,000. Cities under 100,000, those people look a lot different, act a lot different, interact a lot differently than in the big cities. And so they're missing middle America. And even if they travel and sure, it's great to be able to, you know, I, you know, you listen to these national reporters all the time talk about how they like Des Moines, which is bizarre because Des Moines's a terrible little town. But they talk about, oh, I love Des Moines. And it's such a great place. And I'm like, well, yeah, if you're there for a week every four years, you know, are you taking your kids to the park? Are you interacting with the folks across the street at the end of the cul-de-sac? And so I think there is a, well, the separation we're seeing in this country in so many ways

is between big city and small town. And that plays out in the news media's bias against those small-town perspectives. Hi, Rudyard Griffiths here, the moderator of the Monk Debates. I wanted to let you know that for the next month, we're offering listeners of this program a 30% discount on our new Monk Debate Digital membership. For as little as $7 a month, you can access our 10-plus-year online library of debates in streaming high-definition video, audio, and text. Members also get a free Monk Debates book publication of their choice

and three additional complementary online memberships to share with friends and family. To access your 30% discount on Monk membership, visit our website, monkdebates.com. Go to the membership selection and select your plan. and then enter the promo code, Monk 2020. Again, that promo code is Monk 2020 and the website, wwwwmunkdebates.com. Thank you for helping us restore the art of public debate, one conversation at a time.

Now back to our program. Look, in our remaining moments together, I've got to get both of your views on just where we're at in this election right now. Obviously, AP has come out and called Joe Biden the winner. but these results still have to be certified. There are races here that are exceedingly close in a variety of states. So, Jeff, what is your prediction about how this plays out over the coming weeks?

And do you have any kind of criticism for how the mainstream press has acted in the days following the election? You put me on tea here, right? So, yeah, I think that there's going to be, I don't want to say baffling, because I guess I should be used to it by now, but it is baffling to me how 20 years ago, you know, nearly to the day, we had one state that was very close,

in contention, more votes were outstanding than, than were needed to flip. And the press, you know, made mistakes in that election, too, called it, reversed their call, blah, blah, blah, and they waited for the process to come out and didn't feel this rush to call it. And in this case, I think CNN went first to the shock of no one. And within 16 minutes, every major publication called the race. More votes outstanding than needed to flip the results.

In the several states that are up, I think there's probably half of them that have real, you know, things it need to go through a process and it's a well-worn process we've all done it i mean carry back at his previous life was sitting in in uh election authorities watching recounts i mean that's we all go through this it's not unusual it's unusual and unsettling if you haven't paid attention to politics and you go to bed on election night and you have a lead and you wake up you know two weeks later and you lost that lead that's unsettling it happens to every cycle to those of us in the business but there are real questions and not just if they put up cardboard over a window or not there's real questions about the process, particularly in Pennsylvania, and at lesser extent in Georgia.

But there's a process to go through, and there's more votes outstanding that it would take to flip the vote, and there's going to be likely, highly likely recounts in Wisconsin and Georgia where these votes move around a lot. And because there's more in a typical campaign, absentee and mail-in ballots have a rejection rate of about 3%. I mean, that's very normal. Our side, their side, you know, it's just math. And three percent law, you know, one, which typically comes out to two percent to one percent, but one percent would flip some of these races. So the fact that we can't wait, literally just these guys are good at it, particularly in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania less so, because it's the first time they've ever done it. But the fact that we can't wait of just a few days to let this process play out is just,

I don't know. It's, it's, I guess they're, I guess they get some award at a, press at a news association banquet on who called it first, I guess. I don't know. I don't know the rush. I just don't understand it. It's never that case. It's never that way. And so I, it's disappointing. But, you know, if I was on the other hat, I probably didn't complain about it when Trump won. So I'm not trying to, you know, me baggedat Bob here with the, you know, with the bombs falling behind me saying there's nothing to see. I mean, it's a bad outcome. It's, it's unlikely to change. But there is a process that ought to be gone through. And it's human error. And there's elements of, you know, fraud that are always concerned Republicans more than Democrats. And, you know,

I don't know, I don't have the philosophy that, that, that, that some have about this election, probably because I've gone through too many of them. But yeah, we should have gone through the process. There's no reason not to. And it's, it's, it's, it's, uh, characteristically inappropriate to do what they did. Terry, let's get your take on some of the president's very hot language after this election, um, you know, alleging that it was, you know, stolen, that they, This is an endemic fraud that we're seeing. I mean, can you set this record straight? I mean, is it possible to have fraud on this scale involving this many votes and this many states?

I mean, that would truly be like something out of a James Bond film with Dr. Noe in the background, wouldn't it? Well, first, let me say, I agree with most of what Jeff said, that this rush to say that it's completely over. It's 99% over. The body is dying. But there's no need to put your hand over the body's mouth. You know, this, this is, it is mathematically nearly impossible for the outcome of this election to be other than Joe Biden to win. But it's not done. I mean, all the people who are talking about counting every vote, you know, maybe we should count every vote.

They are still counting in some places. And so I think that that's an important, I agree completely with Jeff on that. As it relates to responding to Donald Trump's tweets, don't. Like on the same day that you decide that I'm going to delete real clear politics.com from my favorites page, unfollow Donald Trump's Twitter account. It'll just be healthier for everybody on both of those things. It is, I mean, the president words don't have a lot of value and he has devalued his words. by his poor choice of words for four years. And so, yeah, when you put it in the perspective of the President of the United States

is claiming that the outcome of the election was fraud and it was stolen, that sounds really, really horrific. If you put it in the perspective of Donald Trump doesn't think he should have lost, yeah, that sounds really believable. I mean, it doesn't matter what the outcome was going to be. I would expect to have read those tweets no matter what because it was never going to be his fault. It was always going to be someone else's fault.

And he was always going to be the winner because that's what he tells himself and tells others. So I think the important thing to do is table that stuff and not get caught up in it. Hold the media more accountable for just wanting to rush to the, to, you know, covering this like it's 100, done. There are down ballot races that are not 100% done. The smartest thing Joe Biden said in his speech the other night was America needs to lower the temperature. And I think that is,

I disagree with Joe Biden on policy after policy after policy. But I think that he, I'm hopeful that he will do more to lower the temperature than Donald Trump ever could. Look, I just want to remind listeners that post-election here, we're kind of taking a pause from our usual one-on-one pro versus con debate format to have more of a conversation. I really want to thank you guys. This has been civil, substantive, exactly what we've been looking for. So instead of, you know, a traditional closing statement from either of you, I think it would be fascinating for our listeners to hear from each of you. start with you, Jeff, and then you, Terry. What's the one big lesson that we should take away from this election?

Each election, I think we witness, you know, it sends out a signal. It's trying to tell us something. And, Jeff, give us your sense of what you think this election was trying to tell America. That might be too heady for me. What was trying to tell America? I don't know. I think it was a big meatball election right down the middle of the plate and everybody got a bite of it. And it meant something to everybody.

and I think that's why you see, I think we're going to see record turnout. I didn't get to my prediction, but I think it's going to be pretty high. Jeff, just to expand on that. Just allow me to give you a little bit more material to work with there. I mean, it's surprised, I think, a lot of people to see that the Republican Party was able to connect with a not insignificant portion of Hispanic voters, that it seemed to have, despite the noise around Trump, it seemed to have a kind of a kind of, kind of resonance with its policies, I guess, with a broad swath of the American public, despite the president. Is that one of the kind of messages here that conservatism in America

is actually maybe stronger than we think? Yeah, it's a center-right country. If everybody in America voted, we would have won. And I say that all the time, and not every state, by the way, but to the country at large. And I said, I talked about Texas. Everybody's telling me Texas is going to go. It's like, no, it's not. Every Texan votes, it's like the best thing can happen. And the President Trump, for all of us that voted for him, being called racist every day for the last four years, got more of the non-white vote than any Republican president, you know, since Eisenhower. And so this is, in many ways, there maybe will be a lowering of the temperature of Biden ends up winning because Biden got more of the white vote than any president since Clinton. And so,

you know, there is a, the cross-pollination of the Democratic. Democrats have to maximize the non-white, the Republicans have to maximize the white. There is a little bit of a cross-current that's coming out of this. The bigger thing that I have to say, because I don't get to say this very often, is we learned that television ads aren't as effective as we think they are. And that is a blow to the profession. There's a study done. They tested an audience, then watch the ads come through over a three-week period,

and then test them again, 36,000 impressions from advertising on, television and it had a negative effect, not negative. I mean, it was inverse to the effect that they wanted. So I think the way we communicate with people, the way people communicate with each other, a restoration to community engagement instead of just going on TV and running television ads at each other, I think that's going to be a way. And I also think that will help our politics, too. If you've got to go ahead and talk to your neighbors to convince them to go vote, that includes more people in the process and a more kind of healthy kind of living, right? Because you get, yeah, a better connected with your neighbors and with your friends and with your circle. And I think that's a better

way probably to communicate at the end of the day anyway, rather than remote control drone type of campaign activity. But the big thing is, I think that the people get to determine the direction of our country every four years. And I'm glad, I mean, by the way, that means a hundred million people didn't vote, which ought to shock the conscious, that were eligible to vote, but did not vote. But if we get up to the numbers where it's looking like we're going to get up to, it's going to be a historic turnout since, probably since like 1900. So that's good. And still, even at that number, there's 100 million people that didn't participate.

So we have a long way to go, but I think it was a, for all the cause, all the consternation, all the negative, you know, that the world has come to in the pandemic and the racial tensions and the economic conditions, you know, a good, healthy political campaign is probably at the end of the day, good for the soul, because anytime you can have a Democratic process, it's going to be good and it's going to restore a little bit of faith in democracy. Thanks, Jeff. Okay, last word to you, Terry. What was the signal coming through this election?

What was the message it was trying to send us? Well, I think on a micro level, I couldn't agree with Jeff more about the paid advertising being less effective than other, which is funny. Look, that's something that he and I learned. in 2016 because both of our candidates spent a lot more money on paid advertising running against Donald Trump in a primary than Donald Trump ever dreamt of. And we lost. He spent less on TV than any of the candidates who were top tier candidates in that primary. And he beat us all. And he beat us all through authentic communications, through using earned media. I literally started with my

business partner, a public affairs firm coming out of 2016 that is completely based on that, that paid advertising isn't as effective as it used to be. It is all about authentic communication. And it's why Donald Trump has really resonated with a lot of people because they don't necessarily agree with everything that he says, but they like that he's got the courage or the perceived authenticity to say them. And so I think what you see in American eye, I completely agree with Jeff that America is a center-right country on the policy issues. That's why you think you see a lot of down-ballot Republicans really outperforming Donald Trump. I mean, we, you know, I mean, we gained seats in the House while the President of the United States lost the election.

That's pretty remarkable. We way outperformed with these Senate races. That is really amazing. It's because conservative principles actually won the day in those races when it was. about someone's giant personality. It was just about policy. But I think that the biggest takeaway from the 2020 election is that America is more divided politically than it ever has been before. That this is a 50-50 split nation. It's not just split right now on who you think should have won.

America is literally split on who you think did win. I mean, that's how divided we are, is that there is a segment of the population that will, years later, I was talking to some of my Democrat friends the other day. And I said, and they said, oh, how could any Republican not realize and be rational enough to realize that Donald Trump lost fair and square? And I said, look, the people that print the not my president t-shirts have been in business for four years, and they're going to have another four years. They're just changing the colors from blue to red on those t-shirts. this is the environment we're in. Thanks, Terry. Well, and thank you, Jeff, guys.

You know, this is, I think, again, the type of conversation that's just so refreshing to have after such a heated, polarized political year and the opportunity to kind of tap all your storied campaign experience and to synthesize that into some real insights around our question today, not a resolution, a question. How could the mainstream media and their pollsters once again? get the U.S. election results so wrong has been a privilege indeed. So Jeff, Terry, thank you for coming on the Monk Debates. Thanks for having us. You bet. Take care. Well, that wraps up today's podcast. I want to thank our participants, Terry Sullivan and Jeff Rowe. You certainly gave us a lot to think about. The Monk Debates podcast is that special place for civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. To listen to more debates on everything from climate change to religion, to geopolitics, to the future of human progress.

our website, www.munkdebates.com. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public debate, one conversation at a time. I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffith. The Monk Debates are produced by Antica Productions and supported by the Monk Foundation. Redyard Griffiths, Marilyn Missouri, and Christina Campbell are the producers. Abu Rojasia is the associate producer. The Monk Debates podcast is mixed by Kieran Lynch. The president of Antica Productions is Stuart Cox. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating.

Thanks again for listening.