The NPR Politics Podcast - Why 2024 Is Unlike Any Previous Election

Episode Date: January 17, 2024

Disinformation. Threats to election workers. A potential presidential rematch. We look at why this election season is different than others before, and what it means for voting. This episode: White House correspondent Asma Khalid, voting correspondent Miles Parks, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.Our producers are Casey Morell & Kelli Wessinger. Our editor is Erica Morrison. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Fact checking by Jeongyoon Han.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Russ in beautiful Pella, Iowa. The Iowa caucuses might be over, but my semester teaching at Central College is just beginning, and I'm about to go teach the mathematics of vote counting, apportionment, and political power. This podcast was recorded at 1.05 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, January 17th of 2024. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Okay, here's the show, and go Dutch. I might be reaching out for a one-on-one. I feel like I need like an hour, a little like cram session. Maybe we could schedule it for like October. Pella, Iowa, people should know if you've heard that name, Pella Windows. Start there. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House.

I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And today on the show, the mechanics of voting and what makes this election season so different than any we have seen before. False claims surrounding the integrity of the 2020 presidential election sowed doubt among some Republicans. They also created fear for many election workers. But before we get there, Miles, you cover voting. I am so glad that you were with us today on the show. The 2020 Iowa caucuses were a bit shaky. I remember being there and, you know, Democrats had this app. That's an understatement, right? Yeah, I think it was maybe like a disaster, a tobacco. It didn't work, basically, the app. But this time around, we had Republicans caucusing there in Iowa.

Would you say that there were any really major hiccups or headaches that you saw? No, it seemed to go really well from everything we saw and we were monitoring. They did also use an app and design an app just for this. And it worked. And it seemed to have worked, right? I mean, we got results very, very quickly. And then it was interesting watching. This was our first, obviously, election event of 2024. And it really was like this microcosm of, I think, what we're going to be watching in 2020 in the entire election season where everyone's hyper focused on the vote counting process in a way that like, I think, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, it was kind of like, I mean, yeah, 2000 and notwithstanding. But like vote counting is a thing that the average American cares about now. And then on top of that, we were all monitoring the candidates.

So are they going to accept the results? We've got DeSantis camp kind of calling out saying this is election interference at one point. And we're just kind of watching the vote counting process very closely. It's just kind of a whole new beast from a voting perspective. You mentioned DeSantis' claims of election interference at one point. And Domenico, it seems like what he was referring to was the fact that this race was called. The Associated Press called it about 31 minutes after people started caucusing. They called it for the former President Donald Trump, even before some folks even had a chance to finish the process. Why did the AP make that vote call so soon?

Maybe even before some people started voting at all. I mean, we started to get results from the caucuses really within 15, 20 minutes after the caucuses even opened, which were at 7 o'clock Central Time, 8 o'clock Eastern Time. The AP was obviously able to make the call because they had a significant statistical confidence that Trump had an enormous lead in their entrance polls, one that was insurmountable. And then when they started to get actual results from key precincts around the state, they saw that that would be held up and that there was not a chance for Trump to lose even if other people voted different ways. It still strikes people as a little funny. Yeah, there's the ethics of doing that. Yeah, because I think that, and look, it's not our call. We don't make calls at NPR. We follow what the Associated Press does. It wasn't just AP. Every other network that makes calls did this this way. I understand it when

voting ends at a certain time or that polls close at a certain time and no one can vote anymore. And then you make a call right at, you know, zero percent in because the exit polls just show, you know, such a massive lead for somebody. That's why they're able to do that in a place like Wyoming or, you know, California or whatever in a presidential election. It's a little odd to do it when the voting starts. I will say, though, that Miles made a good point to me the other day in saying that, you know,

the state party controls this process. And if they didn't want to release results, they could have held those results, right? Do you mean the Republican Party? Exactly. That's what I was going to say is basically, it kind of highlighted that this is a party-run process. This caucus is not a government-run process, right? And when we have elections run by the government, usually what happens is they wait until polls close to start releasing results. As soon as they started coming in and there were about half a dozen counties that started reporting results and the AP felt like it had enough data, it made its call. To me, if you're a candidate who has an issue with that, you don't have an issue with the AP making the call.

You have an issue with the party for starting to release those results. They could have waited if they wanted to, but it's just a really tough, because if you don't make that call, if you're the AP, you're getting all these early results, hundreds of votes in, and people don't know how to read early results in. If you have one candidate ahead early, it's really helpful to have a call so that way the average listener, the average reader isn't looking at the results, not knowing how to read them. The average listener tuned in at 9 p.m. and they saw Donald Trump has won the Iowa caucuses. And that ended up being what happened. You know, I was going to say it's a lot easier, I think, in conservative circles in particular, but among all politicians to be mad at the media as opposed to mad at their own party.

Our co-host Sarah McCammon was in Iowa at a Nikki Haley event on Monday night, and she spoke there with an 18-year-old first-time voter, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth's mother, Molly. And I think it gets to this conversation that we're having. We hadn't even voted at 7.30, and they're calling him as a winner. Maybe it was a little disheartening because, guys, I haven't even voted, and you're calling it. So that's hard.

So, Domenico, even if the Associated Press had the right to do this or the Republican Party has the right to do this, is there not the issue of a voter feeling like you really don't want to influence what voters will do at all. In the media, you want to sort of be flies on the wall, not influencing what happens. Now, whether it actually changed people's votes or made people go home in such a large block that it changed statistically what the outcome would be, that's not likely the case considering Trump won by 30 points. I feel like it's also just like a kind of a lose-lose when you're thinking about when to release election results or when to call a race, because the alternative of this, let's just play this out for just two seconds here, is the AP doesn't make a call, right? And let's just say a scenario where DeSantis is ahead after an hour or two hours of counting,

you know, he's at 60% and Trump's at 40 percent or something like that. But let's just say the think the AP is probably trying to balance all of these things that by calling the race, you really kind of shut down that possibility that a candidate who looks ahead based on early vote totals is able to claim victory before, you know, all the votes come in. On that note, let's take a quick break and we'll be back in a moment. And we're back. Miles, let's talk about the mechanics of voting. This is your beat, your area of expertise. So I want to know from you, what are, say, the top three issues that you are most closely watching for this election season? Because we have said this is a rather unprecedented moment for your beat. It is. Yeah. I mean, 2020 changed everything in all these different ways. And I've been kind of breaking it up into three sort of buckets, right? Now, the first bucket is candidate behavior. And I think specifically the thing that we are all going to be watching in 2024 is concessions. This is the concessions election where Donald Trump's behavior in 2020 opened up the door for candidates to not concede, even in situations where they have clearly lost.

And so every election going forward this year, and this happened in 2022, where we had all of these Senate candidates who had teased the idea that the election was going to be rigged or that somebody was behind some sort of election fraud, we were watching very closely how those candidates behaved in the time after voting ended. And that's going to be the same thing this year. Every one of these candidates, Republican and Democrat, I think we're going to be monitoring how they behave in the time when votes are being counted. Okay. So that's one major bucket. I think a very important one because it does make our job as journalists, I think, very challenging too, when and if candidates don't potentially-

Exactly. So much other thing. I mean, all of the violence that came after 2020 was, it was in part because of the fact that Donald Trump continued saying that, no, I actually have won. This is not I'm not accepting this result. What's the second issue you're looking at? The second is who is actually going to be in charge of running our elections, because the environment around running elections has gotten a lot harder in the last couple of years, as we know. I mean, we've talked a lot on this podcast about the threats that election workers have been facing, right? And so that's led to a lot of people leaving the profession in the last few years. Are people who are more – have more kind of partisan aims coming into those jobs either at the professional or volunteer level? And then also even outside of that, there's just going to be a lot of inexperienced people, people who have never administered elections who are going to be working this year and that can lead to more mistakes. Yeah, I think the attrition at the sort of professional level of counting votes and for election workers at the state level is a huge problem. I mean, every time I've traveled to other states, and this is a thing that people keep

talking about who are within state parties or have been involved in counting votes previously, that they're very concerned about a loss of really a lot of institutional knowledge. And I think one of the things, I was reporting a story last week about this, and I was asking an election administrator, Lori Edwards, in Polk County, Florida, had a long conversation with her. And I was asking her about the threat environment that election officials are facing. And she kind of stopped me. And she was like, yes, there are election workers in the U.S. who are under threat.

But I'm also so tired of hearing about it because I have to recruit 2,000 volunteers to work the election this year. And here's what she said. Last thing I need is the news out there saying election officials are under siege over and over and over again. Like, I'm having a hard enough time finding people to do this. Let's not scare them. So the threats are real, but then, you know, what happens when all we do is talk about those threats? It's not a good job advertisement, I suppose. I mean, I like that. We all want good elections officials and people to count votes, but the reality is judges, I've talked to a few judges who in Georgia have dealt with some of the cases surrounding election interference and have had 24-7 security.

You know, this is a real problem. And this is directly correlated to the rhetoric that we've seen from the right. Are there concerns that these elections may not have sufficient numbers of workers to man them? I mean, we've heard that concern. I think it's really too early to say how this is going to affect volunteers. I will say 2020, we didn't even have vaccines yet, and they were able to get enough poll workers to work, COVID vaccines. And that was at a time when people were very scared to even leave your house.

And we were able to, and that, I mean, to be fair, that took a huge public campaign to recruit enough volunteers. But I will say that the fact that the country was still able to have enough poll workers to put on an election, despite all of the information about it, went very smoothly. I think many election officials are optimistic that there's going to be enough people to work, but it's just going to be another thing we're watching, a downstream effect of all of this rhetoric, like Domenico said. So third thing that you are watching for, what's that?

The third thing is how people are actually going to choose to vote, which I know sounds like, why does that matter? You know, in 2020 and in 2022, we saw Trump and other Republican candidates really take a hard line on mail voting. That's saying that telling their voters that they should not vote that way. And so what we've seen the last couple of election cycles. He made some strange comments in Iowa too the other night about mail-in voting. And I think a lot of Republicans are getting really uneasy about this as a political strategy,

just because Democrats have generally embraced mail-in voting, absentee voting and voting early as a way to kind of bank votes. And so I think the thing I'm going to be looking at is some Republican candidates seem to be trying to soften that and saying, look, we're giving up a lot of political leverage here by just telling our voters only to vote either on election day, or some people have said you should vote as close to election day as possible to mitigate the chance of fraud. That's not true. But what it means is like, it means making it makes being a Republican candidate really hard because you're just giving your voters less time and less chances to turn out. And so that I'm just curious to see if that trend continues.

That is just a harder game to play politically for Republicans. He had stepped back from that some and started to say that Republicans needed to vote by mail and every other way. But then on Monday, didn't he make some comments that seemed contradictory to that? Yeah, totally. And I think that this is a thing, though, you're just not sure which direction Trump is going to go quite often. And I think that that's a thing that's always concerned Republican strategists. They're just sort of banking on his strength of personality, certainly with the base. But we'll see if that changes in a

general election where right now he's making these kinds of comments because he's trying to strategically message that everyone's out to get him and out to get conservatives. And there are all these conspiracies that are going on. There's a deep state out to get you and all the processes are gummed up and messed up. And then we'll see if he continues with the get out the vote sort of rhetoric come, you know, April or May, if he does become the nominee by then. I was just thinking about a lot this week, specifically because the Iowa caucuses are on one day and we saw these crazy low temperatures affect, it seemed to have a huge impact on the amount of people that decided to come out. And so that just reminded me that like, when you decide that you're going to push

all your voters to either voting on one day or vote on this very tiny window, what if there's a hurricane in a battleground state like Florida or something like that? What if there is really cold weather or wet weather? You just, you know, it just puts your political campaign at the whims of nature. You just never know what's going to happen on that exact day. You're exactly right. And, you know, frankly, we're talking about accessibility, right? I mean, early voting has certainly helped with turnout because it's been able to give people the opportunity to, you know, if they have nine to five jobs or hourly jobs, to

be able to go to the polls and be able to cast their vote in a secure way. All right. Well, let's leave it there for today. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Myles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.