Professor Austin Sarat leads a post-election conversation with Tom Davis ’71 H’09, Chloe McKenzie ’14, Jennifer Peter ’90 and Paul Smith ’76 P’09 H’15.
- I teach in political science and in law, jurisprudence and social thought at the College. I'm very pleased to welcome you to our discussion tonight that I know you're gonna find very interesting and very insightful. This is the third in a series of events sponsored by the College to reflect on the recently completed national election to ask what happened on Tuesday and what is happening in the wake of the election. And I'm really thrilled tonight that four distinguished graduates of the College have agreed to join in an hour long conversation to try to make sense of what happened and what is happening. And I'm gonna start by introducing each of the panelists. And then I'm gonna say a few words to set the stage, about the background of what happened, and then we will proceed. I will ask some questions. I wanna remind you who are viewing, please feel free at any time to ask a question by going to the question and answer part of your Zoom and typing a question into that place. We'll come to those questions in a little bit, but first let me introduce our panelists. First is a Congressman Tom Davis, a graduate of Amherst in the class of '71. Congressman Davis majored in political science, and in 2009 was a recipient of an honorary degree from the College. Congressman Davis was a seven-term member of the House of Representatives and among his other leadership positions, he was chair of the house government reform and oversight committee. And since his retirement from Congress, among other things, he's been a distinguished professor at George Mason University. Welcome Congressman Davis.
- Thanks for having me.
- It's a special pleasure to welcome back to the College Chloe McKenzie of the class of 2014, Chloe graduated from Amherst with a major in Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought. Chloe was active in many things on the campus, including being a member of the women's soccer team. Since her graduation, Chloe has done extraordinarily interesting work, exploring the intersections of education of financial sustainability and social justice. She is now a PhD candidate in sociology and a researcher on financial trauma. Welcome Chloe.
- Thanks for having me.
- Next is Jennifer Peter. Jennifer was a graduate of Amherst in the class of 1990, but Jennifer is a Senior Editor at The Boston Globe. Prior to becoming a senior editor at the Globe. Jennifer served as the Globes Metro editor, and prior to that was the city editor and also the State House editor. At Amherst Jennifer majored in English and fine arts. And like Chloe was a participant in women's soccer. Welcome Jen,
- Great to be here, thanks.
- And our last speaker tonight will be Paul Smith. Paul graduated from Amherst in 1976, with a major in political science. The college honored him in 2015 with an honorary degree. Currently Paul is a professor at the Georgetown Law School and is Vice President for Litigation and Strategy at the Campaign Legal Center. He's also currently a member of the Emeriti Board of Trustees. Welcome home, Paul.
- Thanks, nice to be here.
- So let me just say a word about the election to kind of remind you of what we all already know. The polls yet again got it wrong. What the polls anticipated which was a broad scale democratic sweep, did not occur. Well, President-elect Biden is now more than 4 million votes ahead of President Trump, with more votes to be counted in California. That lead is certain to increase. While the president-elect achieved a substantial victory, Democrats lost ground in the House of Representatives and did not take the Senate. Moreover, it appears that Democrats lost ground at the state level, losing ground in state legislative races across the country. While Joe Biden got the most votes of any presidential candidate in American history, President Trump also got substantially more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016. The president succeeded, among other things, in carrying, in winning, nine out of the 10 states with currently the highest per capita COVID infection rates. And also it turns out that most of the so-called red states in the United States got redder in 2020. In 2016, President Trump got over 60% of the vote in nine States. In 2020, he got over 60% of the vote in 11 States. It appears that a high turnout among minority groups and persons of color in the United States carried the day for the Democratic Party. And one of the questions that we're gonna talk about is what does all this mean for the future of the Biden administration and for the future of political competition in the United States? And lastly, we face a period of some uncertainty given the president's refusal to concede and the threat of litigation that he has already been bringing and says he will continue to bring across the country. Okay, so let me start by asking Congressman Davis, why in your view, did the president lose? And at the same time, why didn't Democrats gain more in Congress? Why did they lose seats in the House of Representatives and why did they not gain more in the Senate?
- Well, first of all, let me just, Austin. I left Congress undefeated, not indicted. You forgot to say that. That's why I'm proudest of. Look, the president lost not because of COVID, although COVID wiped out some of the economic gains that he'd been able to bring before. But if you look at his presidency, he's the only president that never, in his four years, was he ever over 50% in approval. It's difficult to win under those circumstances, but why he lost was his lack of discipline as a candidate and his personal proclivities, which killed him with suburban women and stepped on his message more days than not. The fact that Republicans were able to outrun him underneath him in house races and Senate races, I think it is a tribute to the fact that on issues, this is still a very closely divided country. And it's not so much, I think, a rebuke of him on the issues as much as his personality at this point, which was, particularly in the suburbs, hurting.
- And what does this portend for divided government and the ability of the national government to respond, to COVID to deal with economic problems, to deal with the problems of racial injustice and climate change. We're looking forward to divided government. And as you said, it doesn't appear that this was a blue wave. It seems like a really divided election. So what does that portend in terms of the next four years?
- Well, if you go back 40 years, we've had divided government at 75% of the time. It's kind of the new normal in American politics. Usually the correction comes in a midterm election when voters vote to put a check on the president, rather than giving him a blank check. This time it came in a presidential election. I think it's probably likely to continue. What's the Rolling Stones? You can't always get what you want, but you can get what you need. And I think this was probably needed at this point. There's been a lot of change in the world. A lot of change in the country. It's very polarized. Biden I think you need to look how Biden works with McConnell. McConnell has no relationship with Schumer. McCarthy has no relationship with Pelosi, but Mitch McConnell and Biden had worked before. There are a lot of pressures on both of them not to work together in some ways, particularly on McConnell with the Republican base and the echo chamber out there in the media and super packs and the like. But I think you'll see that he's been able to step up at the appropriate times and it'll go slow, it'll be incremental. Secondly, I know that if you look at the new governance model, really since the 2010 midterm elections, it's been not through legislation, it's been running the government through executive order and regulations. Biden now is gonna have to move his regulatory appointees through the Senate. But I think they'll give him some room on this. Biden's a creature of the Senate, he's an institutionalist. If there was ever a person that could take advantage of divided government at this point, and it's still very tough because a lot of the pressures on members is in the primary elections. For 75% of the members, the only election that counts is the primary, you know, November, it's just the constitution formality. So it looked at their primary voters, but I think it's tuned up here to really move some things forward in a [inaudibel] moderate way to kind of bring part of the country along with them. Then continuing this polarization that I think might've continued if you'd had a blue wave where it's kind of one way or the other way.
- I'll be back to you in just a minute, I wanna follow up on this observation you made about polarization. But before that, let me pose a question to Chloe. And the question begins with the observation which I made. And it's now pretty much kind of widely made, which is Joe Biden owes his election to the work of Black women organizers and to the substantial margins that he ran up among African-Americans in major American cities. I believe that he prevailed by about 90% among Black women and a slightly smaller percentage among Black men. And so the question is kind of what now, what is it that we should expect by way of last night. President-elect Biden acknowledged it. He said, to the African-American community, you had my back, I promise you I will have your back. And I just wonder as you think about this, what is it that we should expect and demand of a Biden administration in the way of efforts to cope with systematic racism in the United States?
- Yeah, that's a good question. And even before I start, what I think is also important to note is how Hispanic women organizers also turned out to vote, particularly in places like Arizona, but also not just Hispanic women there, but also the indigenous population as well. So, and I appreciate the way that you framed this as well, Austin, because I think what's important when we think about this issue is it's not that we, we should no longer perpetuate this narrative What really happened was Black women weren't doing something in service of everybody else, but rather to ourselves. So let's just kind of start with that. Abd to your point, and, you know, the kind of overwhelming, or the overarching theme for President-elect Biden was this idea of healing, which we need a lot of in this country. But what I feel like we're already, starting to slip away from is what are we healing from? We like to say division, we're using a lot of kind of euphemistic language for my liking. So let's just call it what it is. The real sickness that we need to heal from is white supremacy. And if we're, you know, we quoted the Rolling Stones, I'm going to quote Lizzo, right? The truth hurts, ultimately. And so one of the things that we need to understand about trauma specifically is that if we don't ultimately heal from it, then it continues to show up in our behavior. And so one of the things that we need to kind of identify is this, is go back to the very thing that has been living within us. It lives within our policies. It lives
- Chloe, I think you may have frozen a bit.
- And created
- All right, still Chloe we're having a little bit of trouble with your connection. Okay, I'm gonna come back to Chloe
- Am I frozen?
- Still frozen.
- So I'm gonna come back to Chloe in a minute. In the meantime, let me go on to Jennifer Peter. Jennifer, one of the president's favorite targets was the media and the press. Among other things early in his term he referred to the media and the press as called the enemy of the people. And one of his favorite targets was the so-called fake news. It appears that the idea that the news is unreliable is now a widely shared feeling, not only among conservatives, but among so-called, some so-called progressives. And I wonder what you think we can do, or what will be done or what should be done to rehabilitate truth. Rehabilitate fact, let me give a comma rather than a question mark. Comma do you think that news reporters should now refrain from making appearance on editorial programs like MSNBC, where I see news reporters all the time, or they write their stories and their lines under a new story, and then they're on Morning Joe or they're on Rachel Maddow or they're on some other MSNBC program. I wonder whether you think that contributes to this sense of truth, facts, news, opinion.
- That's interesting. I appreciate the question. And coming out of this election, figuring out how to revive the truth and revive facts as a currency that we can all agree on. Even if we disagree on what they mean, is my top concern as someone who's been a journalist for almost 30 years now. And we traffic in facts on my side of the newsroom, which is the news reporting side, truth and facts are incredibly important. And it does make me uncomfortable when reporters are expressing their opinions. I don't think you have to go. And I don't watch MSNBC as much as I have other channels blaring on, you know, in the newsroom. But I think to the degree, you can go and talk factually about what's happening without expressing your opinion. I don't have an issue with that, but I think this president and even having this conversation is a little uncomfortable for me because as a journalist, you know, from the get-go, when I was working on a weekly paper in Idaho, you don't express your opinion. You register as an independent, you don't take contributions. You don't put political yard signs in your yard. You have beliefs, you do, you can vote, but you're talking about the facts. And if there's an issue that comes up, there was something that was once sort of honorable, which was, which they now call both sides where you say, you know, here's an issue and this is what one side thinks, but here's what the other side thinks. And the last four years we've had a leader. And again, I felt uncomfortable talking about this because, but he didn't, when he says something is untrue, if something that's untrue. we need to call it a lie, but it makes us sound like we're having an opinion, but we believe in the truth. Right, and if he says, and at the start, I think there was this dynamic where you would... attribution and context to allow the reader to come to the realization that he wasn't telling the truth, sort of like the idea of like, you know, President Trump said today that the sky was green and you quote him saying that, and then you say most experts and most observation shows that the sky is blue. Well, over time, more and more news organizations are saying, hasn't Trump told a lie about the color of the sky. Is there... Do you need to tell both sides when there's someone saying that something is blatantly untrue, do you need to set both sides? And we would argue not. When he says something that is racist, I mean, we argued a lot about the comment about the various countries and the phrase he used, you know, can we call it racist? And at first I think we were saying, some people call it racist. And they were like, no, we should say that that was a racist comment. Can you then call him a racist? And we're constantly trying to figure out how to report on what's happening. And frankly, most news organizations, which I think have been unfairly labeled liberal, there's always a sense of trying to do everything we can to be, we're not doing this because he's a Republican, we're doing this because we're holding them accountable in a way that's important for the news media to do. I think you see more and more. And I certainly saw a ton of it this week, I happened, I wasn't on MSNBC, but I'm sure it was happening there. But on CNN, the president came out on Thursday night and said things that seem to have no basis in fact, and they were being called lies and on the Daily Show and the New York Times, Michael Barbaro wouldn't play the president's speech because and he said, this makes us uncomfortable. This is a difficult journalistic conversation, but he's saying things that aren't true and Twitter has begun blocking him much more, frequently, if you look at his Twitter feed now everything is labeled it seems. And you know, Facebook is beginning to suppress some election misinformation. But I do, obviously Fox News remains a news outlet out there, the most popular, I believe, the highest ratings. And it acts as an amplifier. And I don't know exactly what we do about that in terms of the pursuit of the truth. And there are certainly news journalists on there who play it much more down the middle. And then there are people at night who speak their opinion and often align with some of what President Trump is saying, I don't have an answer, but I think, I don't know how we totally move forward in the new administration and start to bridge this divide without at least agreeing on what the facts are.
- It's gonna be hard in light of what Congressman Davis indicated about polarization to come to an agreement about what the facts are. And as you indicated, a quite segregated media environment, I mean, I turn on MSNBC at six o'clock at night. I turned it off at midnight. It's the same old, same old, occasionally I go and I visit Fox, but I'm back to MSNBC. I read the Globe, I don't read the Herald. So I think there's a very segregated meeting environment. And I just wonder whether you see anything in journalism that's actually trying to figure out a way to kind of cross those divides, or do you think it's really a problem that has to be dealt with in the society at large, not at the level of the news media.
- I mean, I wish I had the answer and I think I have naively thought in the past that if we continue to speak the truth, if we continue to do our job, regardless of the accusations that are coming at us, that you know, that we are lying, that we're creating fake news I've naively thought it will all in the end work becasue we have to stay true to our principles. I've come to think, particularly in this last week, that there's more, as uncomfortable as it makes me, there's more of an activist role to play and not to hesitate when someone is saying something that is either blatantly untrue or not proven. But I have friends who are Republicans. I have friends who support Trump and I have heard they will go to Fox News and they will see a totally different reality that is out there and Fox deliberately distorts. And, you know, I can try to explain to them, well, you know, they have painted with a broad brush but I'm not sure I'm getting there. I don't know exactly the way forward when you have an organization that's as powerful, frankly, as Fox News is.
- So before going on to Paul Smith, I wanna come back to Chloe because there seems to be the connection here between what Jen Peters is referring to, which is speaking the truth, and your reference to Lizzo. I must say I don't know from Lizzo. So in any case, that's my problem, not Lizzo's problem, but I wanted to come back to you because you seem to be saying that progress on race matters, dealing with racial injustice depends upon speaking an uncomfortable truth. And I just want to make sure that I heard that correctly. And then I just wanted you to say more about what that means.
- Yes, and again, I know, especially media outlets, we're all kind of skeptical on the exit polls that we continue to use about, you know, who voted for whom, but ultimately it's this, it's the first kind of question after the long laborious task of watching the news. So I can imagine, Jennifer, your role the last week, but you know, each day before the election was called, I continued to come back to this larger question is how can someone like me trust that white people are doing the work to dismantle white supremacy? Because it's ultimately not incumbent upon me and people who look like me. It's the people who also are living with the trauma that lives within them about how white supremacy has played out in their lives and benefited them. And so, yes, the idea behind truth-telling is I think for a long time, there's all of these, my work, it's always like what's your business case for doing X, Y, and Z to achieving some type of parody or equity or equality. And I think that that's not truth telling, that's narrative building, and narrative building we ultimately know doesn't get, it could maybe touch people in some certain kind of way. But ultimately what we have to do is, narrative building is the equivalent of respectability and what I'm calling for, if we're really gonna be truthful, especially for people who look like me, is the end to respectability politics. I'm no longer interested in making other people feel comfortable about the serious and intractable and damaging experience or inequality that I face that is unique to somebody who looks like me or somebody who shares one of the minoritized identities that I identify with. And so to heal, we ultimately have to deal with that truth and to kind of quote something that I learned from the late and great Nasser Hussein and his class, Law and Historical Trauma, which is ultimately if we are to heal from trauma, which our country's traumatized, not just from the last four years, but I think as a Black woman, I'm kind of like, well, yeah, welcome to it, folks, is that we have to put together a cohesive understanding of what we've experienced. And that requires this very, very blunt truth about how white supremacy is operating, how white supremacy is very alive and well, given the numbers and what is incumbent upon different groups to do about it. And for me, I say this to all of the other students of color at Amherst, it's incumbent upon us to end respectability. It's no longer our job to make people feel comfortable.
- So I'm gonna come back to you in a minute to ask you to think a little bit out loud more about what ending respectability might mean in the Biden administration. But before I do, I wanna bring Paul Smith into this conversation. Paul, my questions so far have been premised upon the idea that the election is over. And we know that in the advance of the election, I think the number was about 400 election-related lawsuits were filed in about 44 States. Since the election the president and his allies have started to generate or attempted to generate and are threatening tomorrow to unveil a kind of full program of litigation. I wonder whether you could talk with us a little bit about what that might be, how much of a threat it is to the election. How likely is it that the Supreme Court is gonna take up any of those cases?
- Thanks Austin, let me step back and talk a little bit about the pre-election period. When those 400 cases were being litigated, some of them by me, basically in the sector, I'm in, the sort of nonpartisan, pro-democracy organizations, [inaudible] legal center and our allies, we spent the last year worrying about basically two things, what's gonna happen on election day, what's gonna happen after election day. And those lawsuits were mostly about election day. Trying to make it possible for people to vote in the time of pandemic, getting access to voting by mail, making sure the votes would count, trying to give people due process if they're ballots were being thrown out and we won some we lost some. Generally I think the system responded pretty positively. A lot of early voting opportunities were opened up and, you know, we got to election day and we were reasonably pleased with the way things went. And I think we need to celebrate that 150 million people were able to successfully vote without much in the way of glitches. Now, there were a lot of other things we worried about happening on election day, that didn't happen at all like Russians hacking the registration rolls and the electric grid going down and intimidation at the polls and the troops in the streets. All these things were major scenarios that we worried about. A lot of Americans were worried about before the election. So election day turned out to be kind of, wow, and the run-up to it, a hundred million people that voted before we even got to election day, which is really quite remarkable. But then there's the post election period. And we had lots of learned scenarios about that too. Disruptions of the counting, the Brooks brothers riot of 2000, coming back 10 times worse, chaos with the ballots, the mailed-in ballots, long delays. And a lot of those fears have also proved to be over-hyped. And another one, I think that people really over-hype is the idea that lawyers and litigation are in some way going to have a significant effect on the resolution of this election. It turns out, contrary to what us lawyers all like to think that you can have as much lawyer time as you want and tell them that you want them to accomplish X, but if they don't have any facts and they don't have any law to work with, it just doesn't work. So we've been watching lawsuit after lawsuit being filed since election days, certainly 12 or 15 or 20, one less important than the next, less impactful. They're all silly, talking about how far away the observer can be from the ballot opener in Pennsylvania, or is it okay to use a computer to do the signature matching on the absentee ballots in Nevada? Is a sharpie okay as a pen to mark the ballot in Arizona? So it would appear that there is no significant problem with the way the election was conducted, that the word fraud simply shouldn't be being used 'cause there is no evidence of any significant fraud in the election. And I don't take seriously the idea that Monday morning, they're gonna be in court, some new grand legal strategy. If they had that they would have done it already. It's been five days. And every day that goes by Trump's position has gotten worse because of the counting of the votes, the declaration that he's lost in all of that. And so I don't think this is going to be a litigation denouement here. There's really no reason to think that the Supreme Court is gonna have any significant role. There is a case that's pending up there now about late arriving ballots in Pennsylvania, but there's not nearly enough of them to make a difference. Pennsylvania's gonna be decided by something close to 85 hundred thousand votes. And so it turns out you can't just decide you want the Supreme Court to give you the answer you want. You have to have a case that's worth their attention. And he doesn't and his lawyers don't have that. So what is it they're left to worry about those of us who have spent the last year in sort of abject terror of all the things that could go wrong with this election, well, there is the last scenario out there the nuclear option which was the option that first got public attention in the article Bart Gellman wrote in the Atlantic magazine, which is persuade some Republican dominated legislatures, places like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, to decide that they will declare the election was a failure, that it was infected with fraud, that the results don't actually, ain't reliable enough and just decide that they will exercise their power under article two of the constitution to pick new electors for the state and they're gonna pick the Trump electors. And that's really out there as a potential thing to worry about it's certainly like nothing like that has ever happened. It's almost certainly illegal, but you know, what's striking is this is not something that people are ruling out. They asked Lindsey Graham about it the other day.
- Yeah
- All options are on the table,
- Alright.
- You're getting reports that there's a significant lobbying campaign to these legislators that they should do this, that the president said that the election is fraudulent and they need to respond by appropriate measures. The Republican leaders of the house and Senate in Pennsylvania felt that they had to actually put out a statement a couple of days ago, denying that they were going to do this, which makes you wonder how serious is the pressure for them to do it. And, you know, the political cost, of course, to that kind of anti-democratic move would be pretty severe. And I think that the conditions under which this might even be imaginable are not really there. If the election had been a big mess and it looked like we were gonna wait six weeks to find out who won Pennsylvania, and that was gonna be the state that decided everything, maybe you can imagine this happening, but I will tell you, people who like to make sure we're gonna get to the end of this process, that is the thing that they have left to worry about.
- Yeah.
- And that is something that there is a lot of talk about in the right wing blogosphere. And it is striking that people like Senator Graham would not just flatly laugh that off.
- Yeah, yeah. Well, I've entertained that possibility and written advising democratic governors that if the legislature certify a slate of electors that do not reflect the popular vote, that they should certify a different one, but we'll come back to that. I wanna ask, go back to Congressman Davis. If you were advising the Republican leadership in the Congress about what they should do with the present moment, what would you advise them to do? It appears that almost none of the Republican leaders of the Congress, I think only Mitt Romney and Chris Christie, and a couple of others, qhat would you advise them to do? Would you advise them to make a gesture of reconciliation, acknowledge that Biden has won, what would your advice to them be?
- Well, none of these votes are certified. I mean, let's get down to it. They do a canvas and then these will be certified in the next week or two, and most of these States. And I think at that point, the jig is up. You know, I agree with Paul, he doesn't really have many ways to come forward on this. Look, the Florida house in 2000 did vote to send us the Bush state of electorates but the Senate wouldn't go alone. Tom Feeney, who was chair and who was the speaker of the house, ended up going to Congress and serving with me. But I just think this is way out. This is part of the echo chamber right and left at this point. And I don't think this is a problem we should waste much time on it. These margins are too big to overturn. Fraud does go on in elections. I can tell you that. I was chairman campaigner, but it's minuscule compared to the kind of margins that we're seeing in this point. I can explain how it happens and why it happens. But there's nothing here that I think is jeopardized at all.
- If I was to be quarrelsome, I would say the notion of waiting to the certification is--
- I'd say canvas wait to the canvas.
- It's not been traditional in American politics that we've waited to the canvas. So the idea that Republicans are talking about canvas and certification, why don't they just come out and acknowledge the reality that Biden is the president-elect?
- Well, I think they probably, oh, I know that they privately do, but you've got to understand most of these members aren't fond of Trump on a personal basis, but their voters are, their primary voters are. And remember, that's the, those are the people that elect them. So I think they'd walk gingerly on this. And, so the feeling is look, he wants to file these lawsuits. He said he's got some. Show us.
- Okay.
- We'll give him that space. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Don't be so eager it's gonna be just fine. The key is what happens after that? When they get to Washington, will they sit down with President Biden or is this going to be like it was before where we say, look we're just going to undo your presidency. We're gonna sit here and fight it for four years. That's not what we want. So at this point let me just say, the house aside, which is gonna be close at this point and will be fought out in the midterms after reapportionment and redistricting and that's gonna be on the bubble. I will tell you that McCarthy, every decision he makes, starting now, is gonna be, what's gonna get me to the majority in two years.
- Yeah, yeah.
- That's the thought and by the way, the four points are the same thing. I mean, how do we stay in the majority? Where do we pick our fights? And this is not the fight they wanna pick with their base right now. The other question is, what happens to Donald Trump if he loses? Does he try to come back and hold the party without the presidency? How do we handle this guy in a way where you come back and be competitive in the suburbs? Because Trump's, if you look at his coalition, it's long-term a losing coalition in terms of the people that are coming. It's not the growing ascendent group in the country and they got to tap into that.
- Yup, yup. So I wanna come back to Chloe to pick up on that notion of Trump's coalition versus the emerging democratic coalition. And if you don't mind, I wanna ask you in a sense, the same question that I asked Congressman Davis, but before I do, I just wanna remind people who are tuning into the Zoom, that if they have questions, please put them in the question and answer Chloe, my question to you is, if you were advising president-elect Biden about the need to confront the truth of white supremacy, what would you advise him to do that would convince you that he was confronting the truth of white supremacy?
- Well, I mean, to be, to his credit, I would imagine that that was one of the reasons why he picked Kamala Harris in the first place that I think Black women have such a unique experience about the implications and effects and externalities of policy that gets written. I do wanna respond quickly to what Tom said. I agree with you that, you know, there are Republican congress people who ultimately privately, you know, don't vibe with the president, but his, you know, the primary voters do and here in lies what is absolutely horrifying, is to my point from earlier, maybe I cut out, but I talked about the fact that, you know, if we don't heal from said trauma related to white supremacy, then it not only shows up in our behavior. And so if we were then to personify our political institutions, if we don't heal from it, then it also is going to show up in our policy making. And so that's ultimately what I would want, how I would advise president-elect Biden, which is to say that if we look at everything that's going on, between COVID, between the economic devastation that people are beginning to face or have already been facing, it's disproportionately affecting Black people. So ultimately, my advice would be, yes, there is a time and place for reconciliation and conciliatory measures, but when it comes to making sure that we are protecting the very people that he thanked, there has to be very deliberate action around this. And if it's so happens that it ultimately, for example, this could be crazy, and as you know, Austin, I love to kind of pose these really outlandish, ambitious things in classes to get the conversation going. But one thing could be that the next round of PPP can only go to minority and women-owned businesses. Would everybody freak out over that?
- Yup
- Maybe, but who cares? Like whatever, that's kind of what I'm saying is like, yes, will there be political backlash, probably, or there'll be other types of backlash, probably. But at that point, that's what I'm saying, you ultimately have to begin to have more targeted measures to address where white supremacy is showing up. White supremacy has been around for a long time. So we're dealing with what's happened historically, but then also how that's playing out in this particular moment. And so that's kind of one example where I would say you need to have a very specifically targeted measure that's going to address how white supremacy is showing up in that unique experience that people have in this moment.
- Great, thanks. Jen, I'm gonna ask you the same advice question, except the advice I'm gonna ask you about is what advice would you give to Biden's press secretary or the way in which he structured his press operation? How is it that a Biden's press operation could help deal with the things that you surfaced earlier? You know, the segregation of people's news consumption, the sense that people don't know what's true and what is not true? Is there anything that the president's press secretary could do?
- I mean, I feel like my only advice is so remedial and after a presidency that has had press secretaries that I think, I mean, have really strayed from the truth quite a bit, you know, having you know, publicly, obviously not doing that, even when some of the truths they have to tell about their guy are not comfortable to share. But I think, I'd like to think, talking publicly and behind the scenes with those outlets that are deliberately distorting what the president is doing or what is being communicated. But again, I feel naive. I don't think that saying so-and-so lied last night an the cable show, people who don't wanna hear it, don't hear it. I do think, I think social media can play a big role. I don't know, I mean, yes. I hope that the administration has more of a, a better relationship with the truth than the previous administration. But I think it's not an easy question and I'm sorry I'm not coming with the silver bullet here.
- No, I don't think it's an easy question. I do think it is, in a sense, the question, which is how is it that we're gonna reconstruct a public sphere that is willing to confront the truths that Chloe was talking about, among others? I do think that's the question, but let me ask Paul a question. Oh, go ahead, Jen.
- No, sorry. I think it's critical. And I think talking about the truths that Chloe is addressing is an even harder discussion to have, I mean, really essential, but shoot. I mean, we can't agree on very basic things that would not even seem to be controversial, in terms of what's true or not. And I think what Chloe is talking about in terms of white supremacy and racism gets to a whole other level and incredibly important conversation to have, and really difficult to figure out the playing field we have it on.
- Paul, let me ask you a question that's been posed by a member of the audience. Many people are concerned that Trump's waning days in the White House will be filled with reckless actions. What do you think about that and what most likely will happen in Trump's last days in office, at least as you might understand it or imagine it.
- Well, I'll try I'm not sure I have any more expertise in predicting his behavior than anybody else who's lived through the last four years in this country, but it would appear to me that a big part of his motivation now is the prospect of losing his presidential immunity from prosecution before the statute is run on an awful lot of things. And so, I would imagine that he will spend much of the month of January or the first three weeks of January, if not before, but December, using his pardon power in various strategic ways. It will be odd, it would seem to me, not for him to try to pardon all of his people that have already gotten in trouble. He presumably would offer pardons to his own family members if they're interested in having them. I don't know if they are, and try as best he can to nterfere with the perspective prosecutions, which appear to be on their way. And that raises a whole second question of whether the Biden attorney general Lee ought to be using federal power to go after an ex-president, or might be better to let the state and local prosecutors in New York do that.
- Yeah.
- But that seems to me that's gonna be his main concern after he finally has come to accept that the election is over. Maybe others have different psychiatric insights. I'm not sure.
- Jen is shaking her head on psychiatric insight. So I don't know whether any of you have any other insight about the president. Let me ask Congressman Davis, another question that's come in. How will the increased use of mail-in ballots change future elections?
- Well, we'll get better at it. Look, Oregon, Colorado, Utah use mail-in ballots, and they've got a pretty good way to cutting down on fraud. Most of the fraud that gets coming on mail-in ballots let me explain how it works is you give people bounties to go out and collect these. And sometimes when you pay people for bounties, they don't always observe the rules. They're getting paid. You know, it's not an a large scale, but a lot of this is on, but States have gotten pretty good at doing this. So as we go as states adopt this, I think some states will go back to the way it was before, they use COVID as an excuse. The important thing to understand is that any regime is gonna write the rules that favor their incumbency, whether it's gerrymandering and redistricting, or whether it's election law, you know, who votes, do we have voter ID? And the same goes with this. There'll be a calculation in different legislatures and governors, does this help us or hurt us? But I think mail-in ballots when done efficiently and fairly probably don't hurt either party. If they're done well. It's just that, you know, in New York, the 12th Congressional District, Carolyn Maloney, my friend there, won her primary by 3,800 votes, 30,000 ballots were disqualified. This is a Democratic primary. This isn't Republicans. This was people who didn't know what the rules were. They just weren't equipped to do this. And we saw some of that this time, but you know, if the states wanna move to that there is a way to do this safely and Paul can speak more candidly about this. I think that it should be easy. I personally think voting six weeks ahead of an election is kind of ridiculous because so many things change during that time, but we've gone so overboard. Things change a lot within six weeks of election. People still have plenty of opportunity if you make it four weeks out or three weeks out. But the different States are laboratories of democracy. You're gonna deal with is different ways. And States who will adopt mail-in we found out it can work and it can [inaudible]
- Yep, did you vote by mail?
- No, I voted in person. I like my precinct. I like to look at how my precinct are voting and what my neighbors are doing, but so many voted absentee that you can't tell anymore.
- Yeah, yeah. I voted by mail and I must say it fell to me a little bit like the first time I used Amazon, I felt like I had crossed some major hurdle in my life. And the idea of going back in a voting booth with that big lever feels very 19th century to me. Let me go back to Chloe and ask again, I want to just focus in on the particular. So you study financial trauma. First of all, can you just tell me, give me a succinct definition of financial trauma. Number one. And number two is the financial trauma of the unemployed, former coal miner in West Virginia, white working class, different from the financial trauma of let's say, Black women in American cities. So is there a difference, is there a racialized dimension to financial trauma?
- So I'll start with your first question. And I actually did this work that was just published out of the Georgetown Law Center on poverty and inequality. Financial trauma is essentially the cumulative effect of oppression that ultimately had some type of influence or impact on a person's wealth-building capability. And that's based on another researcher's definition of insidious trauma, which is, has something to do with a person's identity. So race, gender, socioeconomic status. So to answer your second question, the answer is yes. I think one of the things that we failed to do, and this is also another controversial thing that I often say, is when we talk about the racial wealth gap, I don't like that phrasing because historically one, we look at kind of these social problems at the intersection of you know, economics and finance and wealth and value one dimensionally anyway, whereas we know that the way that money makes us feel it's usually in vortexes, that's multidimensional, but it also then renders people with multi-dimensional identities invisible. And so, you know, I'm very particular about how the unique experience that Black women face because obviously our race and gender taken together means that we're gonna have a very unique experience in terms of the impact that pretty harmful, or I would say financially abusive policies has on our experience with trying to enter into the wealth-building arena.
- Great, great, great, great. It's really important to think about what you've described as multidimensional identities and the way it plays out. So, Jen Peters, I wanna pick on a particular annoyance I have. Why did the polls get it so wrong? And what, if anything, can be done? The news coverage is so much taken up with reporting on polls. I wonder whether you think that's a salutory thing and why did the polls get it so wrong? And why did the Boston Globe report so much on polls?
- Yeah, I mean, I think that was, I said before this election I said, if President Trump wins, we should just do away with polling because, you know, they were wrong last time. There was, it seemed like there was all of this reassessment of how we do the polls and much more focused on the state by state polls rather than the national polls, which obviously don't really matter. And yet, you know, they were still terribly wrong. I think there are people who would argue, you have to wait for more of the votes to come in, that it's not gonna be quite as wrong as it seemed on the original. And I'm not standing here as a defender of polls. I mean we, well, I mean, you know, up in Maine, Susan Collins won and not one poll ever showed her ahead. And frankly, the Globe, we used to have a bigger budget in general, and we definitely have a bigger poll budget. And in 2010, three days before Scott Brown beats Martha Coakley, we put a story on the front page of the paper that said Martha Coakley was 18 points ahead and you know, since then it happened, you know, but since then we've been really reluctant to invest money in it. But then we do, various polling organizations will say, we're doing a poll out of New Hampshire. Do you want, we've... probably this should be off the record, but we don't pay for these polls anymore, but we do when there is something that gives a snapshot what we believe is a reputable organization, giving a snapshot in time, we do, we will report it. We prefer polls that will look at the issues rather than the horse race, 'cause in the end of the day, I'm not sure how valuable that is. 'Cause even if someone is ahead, six weeks ahead of time, will they be still the person? But I mean, as I was listening to I've been, this is one of the things I was thinking about when you're talking about the truth, every news, the Globe reported about it, the Times as a whole operation with money, you know, all the news networks, the Post, they spend so much money and effort assessing this. So I do think there's gonna be, have to be a huge recalibration, I think But what does a world without polls? I mean, I think for our readers, that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but obviously political campaigns, I think need polls and Tom, you could speak to it. Like you need to know where your support is, wou wanna know what issues you have to.. I mean, you could just speak from your heart, I suppose, but you know, that's not--
- You could actually tell could you believe.
- Can I interject a comment here?
- Yes
- So, you know, I was chairman of the house, in the Republican campaign committee two cycles ran hundreds of races stay on this. And our polls were pretty good. We couldn't afford to be wrong. The Republican Senate committee this time had a model on that is a pessimistic model. So when you go into these areas, they're not going with all the happy talk. Predicting turnout is the hardest part, particularly when you get a random digit dialing and the like, and what we forgot this time, as opposed to Trump four years ago, Trump four years ago ran on a wing and a prayer and some duct tape. This time he had hundreds to millions of dollars and they put it on the ground and they found people and turned them out. And if we called asked them are you're gonna show up, they wouldn't know. You've got a number of States now with same day registration. That's not even picked up in this. So there were any number of reasons as you walk through this, why they could be wrong on a state-by-state basis.
- Yeah. Well, I have to tell you I didn't do polling, but I did make phone calling for my preferred presidential candidate. And I called people in Pennsylvania and people in Florida and people in Georgia. I did my best Georgia accent and 99% of the people that I called hung up before I got to the second syllable of my name. So I think people don't like Aw as the beginning hi, my name is Aw and I got hung up on. And I did think if that's the experience of people who are, you know, trying to make calls to encourage people to get out to vote, what must be the experience of pollsters. However, let's end on the following task. So this is the task for each of you. What is the one takeaway that you regard as the most important coming out of this national election? The one takeaway the most important lesson that you think we all ought to learn coming out of this election. And because I have now begun to see him on MSNBC, I'm gonna ask Paul Smith to answer that. So one, the one takeaway.
- That's a hard thing to do. At MSNBC, they'll tell you what questions they're gonna ask in advance--
- I know but this is Amherst. You know I guess mine, I come away with a positive assessment of the commitment of the American people to democracy to show up and the formation of a really remarkable multiracial coalition to support a really interesting ticket that won. So and I think that Mr. Biden has maybe the right temperament for this time to try to start healing America. So I'm reasonably hopeful but after the anxiety level of the past year and a half, this is going to be major relief.
- Chloe McKenzie, the one takeaway from this election.
- Black, indigenous and Hispanic women should be leading more campaigns and grassroots ground level work.
- Would you rather see Stacey Abrams stay in Georgia or do you rather see her appointed secretary of health and human services?
- I'm not gonna give her HHS but I think it's fine. We would need it a whole hour for me to decide--
- Okay, We'll get you back. We'll get you back. Jen Peters, the one takeaway from this election?
- Oh man, I mean, sort of to what Paul was saying. The power of democracy. I think one thing that was moving even before we knew what the result was that so many people waited in line, waited in rainy, you know, wait in the rain, waited in snow. In some places, people on both sides really felt like it was important for their voice to be heard. And there's something gratifying in that. Even if some of the results were surprising and upset.
- One of my colleagues, I thought brilliantly said that one of the most moving things was just to watch those views of the people who are counting the ballots. The kind of routinization, the ordinariness, the dailiness of it was kind of, he said, quite inspiring.
- I totally agree. I feel like that this was their moment in the spotlight.
- This was their moment. So Congressman Davis, Come on, the big takeaway. This is it now, you're in cleanup. So, come on, you've got to hit a home run.
- This is still a very closely divided country and Trump underperformed his message because he was such a flawed candidate. Couldn't stay on message, said stupid things did tweets and stuff that state, but the people under him, the Republicans under him outran him for the most part. Look, this is gonna be an opportunity. Divided government can end in gridlock, or it can produce some very productive things. Depending on the leaders. I was there with Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich when we balanced the budget for four years, because it was in everybody's interest to do that. Biden is probably a one-term president. I don't know that, but I'm guessing. He comes in as a one-term president. You don't need to destroy him if you're sitting in Republican. Let's sit down and deal and let's see what makes sense for both of us. We might not get the government the people wanted, but we probably got the government we need right now. Try to slow things down, move ahead slowly, gradually try to bring things together. And I think we have a great opportunity here.
- That's pretty fabulous. I must say not the government we want, but the government we need is a really good sound bite. Keep it up in it, keep it up and you'll get more on MSNBC. So, I wanna thank you all. I wanna thank Congressman Davis and Chloe McKenzie and Jen Peter and Paul Smith for what for me it has been a kind of thrilling and really interesting hour, the fantasy of a conversation across the generations at Amherst is realized tonight from the class of 71 to the class of 14, are passionate, insightful, truth-telling. I don't know what the world does well, but I know that Amherst College does a lot of things well, and it's really reflected in your presence tonight. So thank you. Thank you very much. And thanks to all who watched on tonight's Zoom. We wish you all well stay safe and good luck. Thanks again. Goodnight.
- Thank you.
- Thank you.
- [Organizer] All right, everyone you were you were clear. Thank you so much.
- Thank you.
- How fabulous was that? Nice.
Professor and Associate Provost Austin Sarat gathered four alumni experts on Zoom in the days after the 2020 election. During the wide-ranging conversation, he posed questions about why down-ballot Republicans overperformed Donald Trump. “Why he lost,” said Tom Davis ’71, “was his lack of discipline as a candidate and his personal proclivities, which killed him with suburban women and stepped on his message more days than not.” Among other questions, Sarat also asked how Joe Biden, who thanked Black voters in his victory speech, can confront white supremacy: “There is a time and place for conciliatory measures, but when it comes to making sure that we are protecting the very people that he thanked, there has to be deliberate action” through policymaking, said Chloe McKenzie ’14. Near the end of the hour, Sarat asked each panelist for one election takeaway:
