The NPR Politics Podcast - Most Americans Believe The Election Results—Some Don't.

Episode Date: December 9, 2020

A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll shows that just one quarter of Republicans believe the election was legitimate; ot was. And: could old-school pork barrel spending be the solution to Washington gridlock?This episode: correspondent Scott Detrow, congressional correspondent Susan Davis, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.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

This is Anna calling from my backyard in Fort Worth, Texas, where I'm going to get my first haircut since March from my husband, who has no experience cutting hair, but has watched a few YouTube videos. This podcast was recorded at... I've lived that life. It turned out okay. It is 2.04 Eastern on Wednesday, December 9th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Hopefully my hair will be shorter, but not too much shorter. All right, here's the show. It's only hair, right? It grows back. Yeah, absolutely. You're good. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I'm covering the Biden transition. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor

and correspondent. We've got some big news in D.C. today. Our very first snowflakes of winter. So that was exciting. Yeah, I used it as an excuse to work from home. Waka waka. Domenico, in addition to terrible jokes, you have a brand new poll for us today. A new NPR PBS NewsHour Marist survey asking a whole bunch of different questions. What are the top lines? I mean, terrible is so subjective, Scott. I mean, I feel confident in that one. I don't know.

We'll see. Anyway, the top lines from this poll, you know, we wanted to ask people during this transition period and while people are still dealing with coronavirus how they're feeling about things. And when it comes to the results of the election, the top line here is that 61 percent say that they trust the results, including two-thirds of independents. But that is only including 24 percent of Republicans. Only a quarter of Republicans say that they trust that the results of the 2020 election that Joe Biden won are accurate. And they're clearly taking a cue here from President Trump, who still denies that he's lost this election more than a month now after Biden was declared president elect. 61% seems low to me. I mean, that does not a very faith-making figure to me right now that just 61% of the

country has faith in the election. No, especially considering this is the thing that the United States is supposed to be good at, which is putting on elections and separates us from corrupt countries around the world. Look, it takes a toll no matter how many times we report that almost everything the president is saying here is false, is not true, that Joe Biden won the election. Clearly, the president repeating this for more than a month clearly has an effect. But Joe Biden did win the election. He will become president on January 20th. So what did the poll tell us about how America views this new president? Well, you know, it looks like that he's got a little bit of room to run here. President-elect Biden, a lot of people are saying that they trust that he will be able

to handle the coronavirus. 62% say that they have confidence that he'll be able to deal with that, which is going to be the thing that he's most going to be judged on, especially in that first year with vaccine distribution. And you've got 56% of Americans saying so far that they approve of his handling of himself during this transition. And that's more than the 49% that approved of the job that Trump was doing, they felt in the 2016 transition. Also, you know, obviously, Scott, you were on the campaign trail with Biden, he ran on unifying the country, not being a divider. 59% of Americans buy that. They say that they think that Biden will do more know, probably about as much as you're going to get in our divided country, has some good faith from voters going into this. How much of a difference

can that make in a month or so when he starts saying, hey, Congress, here's what I want to do. Here's my agenda. Here's my plan. I think it matters a lot. I think if the president has a 56% approval rating, you know, people pay attention to that. It seems pretty clear that Biden's first acts with Congress are going to continue to be about the coronavirus. The transition and his team have said they're already in the lame duck session. But because I think, you know, this administration in the country did send a message that they wanted to change course with who was handling the pandemic. It seems like that's going to be the first order of business and that he has an element of trust to be able to do that job right now. So I'm not sure it would serve Republicans too greatly to put up too big of a fight on that front. But I'm sure there will be plenty of other things for them to fight about. And I think this is why you hear Biden sort of tacitly saying that he thinks Democrats should take something in this lame duck session, because he feels like he'll be

able to get something bigger and add on to that for a coronavirus relief package later when he becomes president. And usually presidents get one or two major legislative items in their first six months. You think about President Obama, you know, getting the big stimulus bill through for the Recovery Act during the Great Recession, and then of course, healthcare, and that was about it, right? So I think Biden is banking on using a little bit of this political capital and those relationships that he's had on Capitol Hill to try to get at least one big legislative coronavirus relief package through in his first few months. Yeah. And speaking of the pandemic, here we are, over 200,000 new cases a day, more than 2,500 deaths a day. I mean, we are worse than we were at the peak of the spring at this

point, and hospital beds are filling up. How are Americans feeling about all of this? What jumped out to you from the pandemic questions? Well, you know, they still don't approve of the job that President Trump is doing. Only 37% of the country does. It really does feel like a lot of people are moving on from this president, looking to Joe Biden now for what he's going to be able to do in his first few months. And I think that's why we see that two thirds of people in this poll say that they don't think Congress is doing enough. Really, the message here to Washington is do more, you know, and two thirds of people want Congress in general to compromise, and only a quarter think that it's a good idea to simply stand on principle. I mean, Domenico, there are like so many things that I would like to know what the country thinks right now.

Any other specific questions that you asked in this poll that are interesting? No, I think the big thing is that people are saying that they're going to get the vaccine. 61% of people saying that when it comes available, they will get the vaccine. That's lower than what public health experts are saying needs to be. About 70% of the country vaccinated. That's up from about 49% in September during the heat of the campaign. So maybe that's something going in a direction that public health experts would think is a good thing. The thing that I found really interesting here is that Republicans are split. And what's driving that split are Republican women. Just 34% of Republican women say that they're going to get

vaccinated when one comes available compared to 61% of Republican men. So really, that's all being pushed by Republican women. And you know, a lot of Americans themselves are taking steps for the holidays. They view that as particularly risky. 51% say that it's a major risk. Another 28% say that they think it's at least a minor one. All right, you can read a lot more of that latest survey on NPR.org. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk earmarks. Sue has some reporting on how this controversial practice might be coming back to Congress. Support for NPR and the following message come from YouStudio. Today's business world requires remote communication for training, sales enablement, and more.

That's why companies like Nike, AT&T, and Dell all trust YouStudio. YouStudio securely hosts and distributes fully branded podcasts for businesses to communicate effectively with their employees, customers, and partners in a media-first mobile experience. Get started for as little as $1 per user. Visit theletterustudio.com today for your personalized demo. Writer Baratunde Thurston says this democracy experiment requires more than just voting. This is incumbent on all of us. It takes two, It takes two to make a thing go right. It takes two to knock it out of sight. And both parties in a national level discourse, both sides have to still remain committed. How to be a good citizen. That's on the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We are back. Let's talk some earmarks. Yeah, let's do it. So in our current everybody hates Washington world, this is kind of a shorthand, a dirty word. But before we talk about why we are talking earmarks, can you remind us what exactly earmarks are?

Sure. And I imagine a lot of our listeners, you know, have no clue what earmarks are because, you know, they've been gone for a really long time. About 15 years ago, back in the mid-aughts, I guess we would say, there was a bunch of big scandals out of Washington that involved earmark spending. And earmarks are essentially line items of money put into legislation that tend to benefit a singular state or congressional district that a member or a senator can request. Pretty simple stuff. But they became sort of this national focus of scandal because there was a couple of corruption scandals. A couple of members went to prison over sort of pay to play politics. They were sneaking earmarks into bills that were benefiting lobbyists who were kicking back campaign money to them. And so over the course of a couple of years, they were a very controversial thing in Washington. They were

reformed. And then when Republicans took over in 2011 in the House, they effectively banned them. They just said, we're not going to put them in our bills anymore. So we've, for the past decade, there has been essentially no earmarks coming out of bills in Congress. What has happened is, you know, obviously money's still getting spent. That didn't stop any money going out the door. It just kind of shifted some of that decision-making ability on where these pots of money should go away from Congress and into the executive branch. And it's one more example of how sort of administrations and presidents have gotten a little bit more powerful over the years. OK, so that's the pros, the cons. Like our favorite 90s TV shows, they seem to possibly be on their way back right now.

What is the conversation? Who is making that decision? Well, what's interesting this time is it's really coming from the top. You have almost all of the top Democrats in the House, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, and the incoming Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, who just won a three-way chairman's race to take over the spending committee next year, all on record calling to bring earmarks back. There was also this two-year effort, a bipartisan committee that was established by Democrats, but it was a very bipartisan committee that was looking at how do you make Congress work better. And they issued a big final report in October. And one of their conclusions was bring back earmarks in some

capacity. Now they're calling for it with limits. You can only direct them to certain projects. There has to be a lot of transparency, but that they need to come back. So there's a really big push in the House to make this happen. The big question mark is, what are Republicans going to do? And what's Joe Biden going to do? You know, what's the advantage that they see of bringing them back? The one thing you will always hear from people who like earmarks is that it helped Washington work better, that when Republicans and Democrats had common cause to get a bill passed because you had something in it for you, it was a lot easier to get to yes.

And now it's a lot easier to get a bill passed because you had something in it for you, it was a lot easier to get to yes. And now it's a lot easier to get to no. You know, they've been gone for a decade. And I think that there is an argument to be made that you can point to now to say, you know, the past 10 years in Washington have been pretty unproductive. And we've had lots of government shutdowns. And we've had lots of standoffs. And could earmarks have greased the skids to make that all work a lot better? Opponents, budget watchdogs will say, like, look, you've got to just figure out how to govern without a practice that could be easily corrupted or overly benefit the most senior, the most powerful people in Washington. I mean, there's still a lot of people out there who think that earmarks are not this like cooling salve to all of our wounds in politics. I think it's funny that, you know, we're using this metaphor about Greece, because a lot of people would say that they brought home the bacon when they were able to get earmarks.

And that all came from because as sort of a way to combat the pejorative on earmarks was calling it pork barrel spending, right? Yeah. So we've kind of come full circle here. Well, it'll be interesting, too, to see what Joe Biden does. And Scott, I don't know if he's weighed in on this, but President Obama was, you know, really famously against earmarks. He said he would not sign any bills that came to his desk if they had earmarks in them. And if Biden changes his tune there, it's going to be another way for him to sort of break with the administration he served in in the past.

Yeah. And, you know, I was thinking about this. I was at the press conference he held Friday. And, you know, Barack Obama was in the Senate for four years, but clearly was not like the greatest lover of Capitol Hill. I think that was pretty clear. He was not into the nuts and bolts of legislation. President Trump, as we have talked at length about four years, often did not understand a lot of the basics of the legislative process. I think that's a pretty fair thing to say. Now you have this president who has spent decades in the U.S. Senate, loves the U.S. Senate, and just listening to Joe Biden talk about the ins and outs of the latest negotiation for coronavirus relief on a bill that, you know, he's not even sitting president yet, and he was clearly deep in the weeds on that. He is going to be someone who has a lot of things to say and a

lot of involvement in the legislative process. So I think certainly he will be a key voice in all of this and like everything else that goes on on Capitol Hill. All right, that is it for today. I'm Scott Detrow. I'm covering the Biden transition. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. Domenico, sometimes your jokes are funny. I do want to end the podcast saying that. Well, you got to throw a lot of them out there, you know, so that some of them stick. Thank you for listening to the Imperial Politics Podcast.