The NPR Politics Podcast - Despite Conspiracy And Insinuation, The Electoral System Worked—This Time.

Episode Date: December 1, 2020

Local officials continue to certify results despite political pressure from President Trump and his allies, who are seeking to subvert the electoral system in order to keep the president in office. And though that effort appears to have failed at its near-term goal, it may still have a destabilizing effect on elections in the years to come.This episode: correspondent Scott Detrow, congressional correspondent Susan Davis, and voting reporter Miles Parks.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey everybody, it's Scott Detrow, and before we start the show, I've got a favor to ask. Today is Giving Tuesday, and I'd love it if you can take a few minutes to support your local public radio station. Supporting your station means you are supporting this podcast, a podcast you have turned to every day over this crazy year to make sense of what was happening with the pandemic, the election, and everything else that happened. We are able to report the facts because of your support. And I know it's a really tough year. It's a tough year for everybody.

And if you're not in a position to make a contribution, that's okay. But if you are, and you have a few minutes, head to donate.npr.org slash politics to get started. This is a politics podcast, so I should say that this is an urgent pressing deadline and that will triple match your funds, but we're not going to do that. We're just going to ask you again to go to donate.npr.org slash politics if you can. Thank you so much and enjoy the show. Hi, this is Kate calling from my quarantine hotel in Adelaide, Australia. It's day 10 of my 14-day quarantine, and if I close my eyes, it's almost as if I'm listening to the politics podcast from my house in Houston, Texas. This podcast was recorded at...

It's 2-0-4 Eastern on Tuesday, December 1st. We are in the 12th month of 2020, and let's take a moment and appreciate that. Deep cleansing breath. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but hopefully I'll be out of this hotel and helping image the Hayabusa 2 capsule as it reenters Earth's atmosphere. Here's the show. I think she kind of buried the lead there. Yeah, yeah. I was like, what kind of vacation is this?

Oh, okay. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the Biden transition. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the Biden transition. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. And I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. So yesterday, Wisconsin and Arizona certified their election results, and all five of the states that Joe Biden flipped from Republican to Democrat have now certified their results.

And that's despite repeated calls from President Trump and his allies for officials to overturn election outcomes. Miles, what stood out to you as Wisconsin and Arizona did their thing yesterday? Well, it was kind of a similar situation that we've had for the last couple of weeks where we had the normal election mechanics that normally would not be making news. We'd probably be talking about Biden's transition team today or something else. But we, again, still have the Trump campaign continuing to say they're going to fight these election results, even as the kind of process continues to roll on, though we did get this kind of amazing, very cinematic moment yesterday as Arizona was certifying their results, where the Republican governor there, Doug Ducey, was in the process of signing the papers. And a little backstory here,

he had said back in over the summer that he had changed his ringtone to hail to the chief so he would know when President Trump or Vice President Pence was calling him. And so as he's signing the papers, you can actually hear the hail to the chief phone ringing in his pocket and he pulls it out, silences it, and then continues signing the papers. That's my ringtone when Sue calls me as well. Oh, that would be cool. Although you pick up every time I call. But I mean, that is just like the perfect image because you have had President Trump, you know, relentlessly badgering, lobbying, criticizing elected officials on the county level, on the state level, to do what boils down to

overturning the result of a free and fair election. And by and large, state after state after state, they've ignored him. They have. And I mean, I feel like it's been more of a more bark than bite situation where I feel like there's been this constant worrying about people who are focusing on election integrity as President Trump and his campaign have made it clear that they want to overturn all of these states, despite what the vote tallies show. But then we're seeing all of these local election officials. I saw this great quote from Clint Hickman, who's the Republican chairman of Maricopa County's Board

of Supervisors in Arizona. And he said, I was disappointed in the outcome of a couple races, and I was extremely happy with the outcome in others, but I'm not going to violate the law or deviate from my own moral compass, as some have pushed me to do. So I think that kind of encompasses the state of the local election officials at this point, who are feeling really more pressure than arguably they've ever felt before from the national political atmosphere, but are kind of persevering. Miles, has the president's attack on the election and the ongoing suggestion that it was rigged or riddled with fraud, has it been a distraction from what is sort of the other story or the accurate story of the 2020 election, that there has been no reports of foreign

interference or widespread fraud or, you know, any kind of ballot issues that would have any in any way substantively changed the outcome in any election. Absolutely. I mean, I think for four years, didn't we think that foreign interference was going to be the story of the 2020 election, whether it happened or whether it didn't happen? And the fact that, you know, I feel like Russia has not come up almost at all in the last couple of weeks is kind of amazing. And the fact that, you know, I feel like Russia has not come up almost at all in the last couple of weeks is kind of amazing. And what a lot of election officials and experts say is we should be kind of applauding these local election administrators. We actually heard that yesterday

from Chris Krebs, who was this fired election security official who was fired by President Trump last month. He said on Morning Edition yesterday in one of his first interviews since he was fired that that's kind of the untold story as we're talking about all these fraud conspiracies. This was a secure election. That is a success story. That is something that everyone in the administration should be proud of. But obviously, that has not been the story that anyone's talking about right now. Yeah. So Miles, you're talking about the fact that we all dwelled on Russia and foreign interference. And that was the story of last election, but not this election. And I could

take like a really good journalistic lesson from that and not try to look forward based on something that just happened. But I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do the exact opposite. We saw, as we talked about, state officials and local officials, by and large, holding the line, coming under tremendous pressure from people in their own party to overturn an election result, to meddle with the outcome, to throw out votes. You could say on one hand, enormous success, norms held, guardrails held. But I feel like the fact that this was openly talked about for so long, kind of does that send out warning signs about how things go forward? I'm especially thinking

about this because these are people who often run in partisan elections to be elected. Like, how does this play out when secretaries of state are running for election going forward? Absolutely. And I think you're right to think of it as kind of a warning sign, as opposed to a sign that everything's hunky dory because the system didn't break this time. I think viewing all of the Trump campaign's claims in context is really important. I've spent a lot of time over the last couple of weeks talking to election officials and experts. What I keep hearing over and over again is how similar these sorts of claims are to the sorts of claims that started popping up in 2009, 2010, 2011 within the Tea Party and how this is something that election officials are going to have to continue dealing with because it's become a fairly mainstream idea within the Republican Party. Sue, we're going to talk after the break about the different way that Republican members

of Congress have handled this last month or so. But I'm just wondering, have you gotten any sense, is there any feeling among all the elected officials you're in touch with that this is a one-off thing or this might be the norm going forward, that anytime there is a relatively close election, we're going to hear this was rigged, this was stolen, this was unfair? I'm not accepting the outcome. Well, you know, I don't know. We can't be predictive like that.

But I think as long as President Trump continues to be a force to reckon with with the Republican Party and that his rhetoric that has been embraced by so many others down the ballot who want to emulate him because they see that as the way to win, especially in primary races, then, yeah, I think you could see that being sort of more of a political tactic than necessarily one that's going to win. But it's this kind of message that has really resonated with Republican voters. And you see it among Republicans when they're asked about the attitudes towards this election. What President Trump has said about this election has really defined the way that many Republican voters are looking at their own elections. And, you know, we don't know what the impact of that will be. But Miles is right. It's not something that's just going to disappear after 2020. And we're going to talk a lot more about that after a quick break. Mitch McConnell has spent decades making sure there is more money in politics, not less. Why? We do it because we'd like to win. But all along, one

person opposed him on this, someone in his own party. There's too much money washing around, and this money makes good people do bad things and bad people do worse things. McConnell versus McCain on NPR's Embedded podcast. And we're back. And Sue, just before we took a break, you were talking about the fact that a lot of surveys show that a lot of Republican voters have been following the president's lead on this. I think you could argue a big reason why is that a lot of Republican members of Congress, especially high profile Republican senators like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have not been really out there contrasting or critiquing what President Trump has been saying about this race. No, if anything, Republicans on the Hill for weeks now have not necessarily embraced the president's allegations of fraud or it being a rigged election,

but giving him this sort of space to say he has his rights to challenge these results, to go through the court process. We're not going to tell him that he should leave the race. You've seen that shift in the past couple of weeks. There certainly have been more and more voices in the party saying the president lost, referring to President-elect Joe Biden, calling for the transition to begin. But when it is not coming from the top, when it's not coming from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, when it's not coming from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, yeah, it continues to be sort of this glaring thing that you can point at, that the Republican Party on the whole is not accepting the reality of this election.

From the experts I talked to, it seems like by not coming out and disavowing it, I don't know, is there that big of a difference between, you know, saying that there are doubts or questions about the election and just not saying anything as members of the party in which you are a part of, as well as the candidate who you have endorsed, are saying all of those things? Like, is that really that different? Yeah, I mean, I guess it's the question of silence complicity. Although I say this about all things when it comes to Congress, it is not a place where you look for much political courage. And I say this about all lawmakers, right? It's very rare for members of the House and Senate to attack or criticize the president of their own party. And that has been exponentially true in the past four years under Donald Trump, who has committed any number of offenses when it comes to traditional standards

or norms. And time and time and time again, there has been almost no criticism from within the party on Capitol Hill. So I don't see this as a new thing as much as a continuation of a well-established pattern. What's the off-ramp here? Because, you know, you have this increasingly awkward dance. I'm thinking of Roy Blunt, who chairs the committee that oversees the inauguration, saying, yes, we're going forward planning for a Biden inauguration, if he is the president, and not calling him the president-elect. Does this talk end when the Electoral College votes in a couple of weeks?

Well, President Trump seemed to suggest as much over the Thanksgiving weekend where he said he would leave when the Electoral College, you know, once it's certified, he would leave office. You know that or something is what he said. I just don't get the sense that there's any anticipation in Congress that there won't be a smooth transition of power, that the inauguration won't happen as it traditionally always does. I think the one big outstanding question is what does President Trump do?

Does he show up to the inauguration like most past living presidents will do or defeated presidents will do and stand behind Joe Biden? We don't know the answer to that. He seems to know the answer to that. He said he knows what he would do. He's just not telling us yet. Yeah. And Sue, I guess I'm curious, too, about what does this mean for how congressional Republicans are going to treat elections legislation next year? I mean, this kind of this implication that there were issues with the election that seems to be,

you know, the overwhelming sentiment within the Republican Party, the Republicans' excuse for the last couple of years for not passing election-related reforms or legislation or sending even more money to elections was kind of this idea that things seem to be kind of working as is at this point. Does that, I mean, does this say anything at all to how congressional Republicans are going to treat, you know, election reform or the possibility of giving more money to elections next year, for instance? I do think this is going to be continue to be a politicized issue. And one thing I would point to that happened recently that made

me think, oh, here's here's the effects of all this. Rick Scott, who's a Republican senator from Florida, he was just picked by Republicans to run their 2022 election operation. So he's going to play a much more political role for the party over the next two years. And he just recently put out a statement and is talking about legislation that Congress needs to support to prevent voter fraud, that this is must be of urgent importance, even though obviously we're coming off an election where there wasn't a lot of voter fraud or really any substantial voter fraud. But I think that messaging from Republicans is going to continue to be persistent, that voter fraud is out there and we have to do everything we can to combat it. And at the same time, I think Democrats continue to rally around things like campaign finance reform or expanding mail-in ballot access. And I don't see this being an issue where there's going to be a ton of room for bipartisan compromise because of the way it's been politicized by the president. And Sue, some real time news on that front. As we tape this, I'm just seeing an alert from the Associated Press that they sat down with the attorney general, Bill Barr.

He tells AP the Justice Department has not uncovered widespread voting fraud that could have changed the 2020 election outcome. So there you go. That from somebody who's pretty closely aligned with President Trump. All right. That is it for today. A reminder that we have a live show this Thursday at 8 o'clock. It is obviously not a live show in a theater, but it is a live show over the Internet. It'll be on Zoom.

So you can hang out with us as we talk about what the next four years might look like. We look back on covering a pretty weird presidential campaign. We're going to end it with some trivia. So head to nprpresents.org to sign up. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the Biden transition. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. And I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.