 Good afternoon and welcome to the first of three election post-mortem panels organized by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies. My name is Cristina Mora and I am Associate Professor of Sociology and Co-director of IGS, along with Professor Eric Schickler in Political Science. Thank you for being with us here today. Now, last week's election was historic in so many ways. Americans came out in unprecedented numbers to make their voices heard as the nation endured in the grips of a pandemic whose health and economic impact has exacerbated the racial and income inequalities of our time. Today we sit on the verge of placing a woman of color, Kamala Harris, in one of the highest ranks of elected office, and in Joe Biden some see a continuation perhaps of Obama-era policies and practices. At the same time, the Trump administration and many in the GOP are fixated on casting doubt on last week's outcome, and Americans seem to be caught in political limbo. It seems like more than ever, clarity and clear analysis is needed to understand what got us here and what can potentially lie ahead. To do this, we've invited some of the nation's top experts in politics. Cristina Beltran is Political Scientist and Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Her award-winning work lies at the intersection of Latinx politics and political theory and has appeared in numerous academic journals and edited volumes. Her new book, Cruelty as Citizenship, How Migrants Suffering Sustains White Democracy, explores the American right's deep antipathy towards migrants from Mexico and Latin America. She's a public scholar of race and politics and a frequent guest on MSNBC. Steve Schmidt is a campaign and political strategist. He has been a top strategist on numerous Republican campaigns, including those of President George W. Bush, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Senator John McCain's presidential bid in 2008. He is an MSNBC political analyst and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a political action committee made up of lifelong Republican strategists seeking to prevent Trump's re-election. Theta Scotchpole is a Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. Her award-winning research covers a broad spectrum of topics touching on health care reform, public policy, and civic engagement amidst the shifting inequalities and partisan polarization in American democracy. Her most recent book is an edited volume, Upending American Politics, Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance. In addition to her teaching and research, Professor Scotchpole also serves as a director of the Scholar Strategy Network, an organization that encourages nonpartisan public engagement by university-based scholars. And our moderator for today is Scott Schaefer. Scott migrated to KQED in 1998 after extended stints in politics and government to host the California Report. Now he covers these things as more as senior editor for KQED's Politics and Government Desk. He co-hosts the weekly show and podcast political breakdown, and he recently collaborated on a series, The Political Mind of Jerry Brown, which focuses on the extraordinary political career of the former governor. The Washington Post included him on their 2020 list of outstanding political reporters covering state politics. So I want to thank our panelists for being here today, and I'll turn it over to Scott. Christina, thank you so much, and thanks to everybody. We were joking before we began that we just have to keep checking our phones and our headlines to see if there's anything else we need to be talking about, given that things are happening so quickly. But let me begin with a sort of a general question to kick things off, and I just want to ask each of you, what surprised you the most about this election? And I don't mean a particular race, but in general kind of a big picture thing. And Christina, why don't you get us started? Sure. Well, thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here. And I have to note that, you know, the Lincoln Project has been one of the little shining bits of, you know, light and humor and integrity in this last period. So it's fun to be on here with Steve, and I've known Theta forever. And so it's just lovely to be here. And Christina Mora's work is amazing. So this is a really exciting place to have a conversation. I think like a lot of people I was surprised by I was surprised in that I was hoping for a larger repudiation of Trump. And so I was surprised that we didn't do as well in the Senate. There were Senate races I thought we were going to take. I was expecting Steve Bullock to do well or Sarah Gideon. So there was the disappointment that with this massive out, you know, turnout that 71 million people continue to support Trump. And I think the fact that, you know, we were, I think in 2016 we told ourselves a story or maybe I told myself a story that they really dislike Hillary Clinton or a lot of people just wanted to turn the system upside down or, you know, that sort of thing. There was a chance to kind of maybe turn to a businessman who might shake things up. But I think the depressing fact for me that was sort of shocking the night I went to bed Tuesday night which I think was a traumatic night for a lot of us was just the realization that, that people had seen this nightmare for the last four years, and had decided that that was good, that that was, that was something that they wanted to continue on with that to me was the sort of biggest shock and I have other thoughts but I'll circle back to some of those. Steve, why don't you go next. Um, I think that I think that the election met my met my expectations but but it didn't meet my hopes and my hopes were that there was going to be a very high price to pay for us senators who knew that Trump had told the most deadly lie in the history of the country that knew how deadly Kobe it was who just didn't exercise any of their oversight any of their constitutional duty to keep a president in check that that being said. It is a very significant victory for the Vice President. It was the largest electoral victory since 1932 by, you know percentage of the by percentage of popular vote on the ballot. It's, and as we as we get to see what these numbers are, you know as they as they come in and we're able to look at the picture to see that he had one of the broadest most diverse coalitions in the in the history of the country and Donald Trump was repudiated. We have to understand I think that in this moment is we have an authoritarian movement with fascistic markers that's rooted itself on American soil in the form of Trump and Trump ism and we're going to see some real substantial people's faith and belief in the Democratic institutions of the country because we're watching a conspiracy theory form in real time before our eyes over this baseless claim that there was widespread or systemic fraud in the election. So this idea that the election was stolen from from Trump and the refusal of Republicans and elected office to bow to this reality, regardless of whether there are political calculations or not or not and there are there are certain politics for Republicans but the politics should not overwhelm a duty and a responsibility to the country, and understand also that, you know the great miracle of the country is the uninterrupted peaceful transition of power, which endures from 1797 through World War Civil War through depression through assassination. This is the crown jewels of the American experiment. And what we're seeing over these last couple of days are shameful acts by Republicans and Washington in positions of power is they're utterly faithless to the roads of Republicans and are betraying the Constitution that they sworn out to protect. What about you sticking with the election because I know that there's some of things that Steve just mentioned that you're, but I want to follow up and ask you about but in terms of the election what what is it that, you know, surprise you disappointed you the most. So the most pleasant surprise, which I'll just note without going into was what's happened in Georgia in this election. And I always interested in surprises where I don't fully understand it at first glance so that one is suggest to me that there are strings and possibilities that that I hadn't imagined because I thought North Carolina would be more likely to follow a route that Virginia has fallen but let me just back up and say that this is an amazing election in many ways. It is the highest stakes battle since the Civil War in the middle of the 19th century. I'll just say that now I said that going in because you had the clash of two very different understandings about what America has been and what it can be. They were carried by grassroots citizens movements, the Tea Party that erupted in the first years of the Obama presidency, and the resistance which certainly has elite parts to it very distinguished elite parts to it, but really spread across the country to 3,000 citizen formed groups all over the United States in the weeks and months after Donald Trump was elected. And I think that those widespread citizen upsurges where the stakes were understood to be moral as much as economic self interest in fact often people going against their self economic self interest, certainly regionally differentiated metropolitan American versus and suburban America versus X urban and rural, but those drove the largest turnout of voters, eligible potentially eligible voters since 1900 120 years. And I expected a high turnout but I don't think I quite expected that, given that this election unfolded in a deadly pandemic, in which many people had to worry about what it meant for those of their own families and friends to go to the polls to vote in many of the modalities that were available so that is a very in many ways. And I think many Democrats went into the selection thinking high turnout means us means we sweep. There was never a problem I had, I was always aware that the Trump people and many of the Republicans who have been so amazingly and in many cases shamefully transformed by this ethnic ethno nationalist authoritarian movement that they would turn out and they did, but the other side simply turned out more. Well, and I want to ask Christina question about turning because and you know I think one of the things that surprised me and many other people about the election is how well Donald Trump did with Latin ex voters, and not just in Texas, but in Florida, but in other places as I think the pollsters seem to have missed that. It's so counterintuitive, given the rhetoric and the policies at the border the family separation all those things. What do you make of that. And do you feel that you have enough data is there enough data at this point to say in fact yes that Donald Trump did much better with Latino voters. Yeah, it's a really it's fascinating and it didn't particularly surprised me. I think 10 years ago called the trouble with unity and it actually one of the things that argued is that there are Latino voters but there is no Latino vote that Latinos are an ideologically diverse group not just by national origin but when you think about differences in age gender sexuality education. I really think about all those things you have to address the fact that this is a profoundly diverse population and I think, you know, I think the Democratic Party has, on the one hand, Joe Biden did about as well with Latinos as Hillary Clinton did he didn't mean the exit polls we have now are kind of garbage I don't think we're going to know all the depth of this for a little while but I think one thing we did see was that Joe Biden did pretty well but Trump was able to peel off people, and it wasn't just conservative Cubans you know that I think that's the story that often gets told is. Oh well that's the side of Latinos that is conservative. But you know but Mexican Americans in the in the Rio Grande Valley and these areas. There's clearly an interesting rural urban divide amongst Latinos. And I think there's also generational and educational differences. The gender divide is important. If you just stick with one air like you mentioned the Rio Grande Valley, an enormous switch toward Donald Trump. So, you know that's you're looking at one specific place it's not taking into account different states and different ages and all that it's just this this location what. So what do you make of that. Yeah, well I mean I think a couple of things I think Republicans were really in there. This is a community that has been poorly served by the Democratic Party as well. So I think that when Republicans went in there and tried to organize and reach out to this population. I think that had a huge impact I mean I think the fact that I think one thing people often get confused about with anti migrant violence is that when you're attacking immigrants and you're attacking non citizens. When you're attacking you're attacking people trying to get in at the border. That is a different population than Latino voters because all Latino voters are citizens. So this is a can this is an issue that is a solidarity issue for a lot of Latinos. It's not like status families, but every voter is a citizen. So I think that matters enormously and I think the other thing that is important to think about here is that there was the urban, the people who are in these rural communities. A lot of the jobs that are holding now are working for things like the border patrol. Right so I think that you have 50% of the border patrol now is Latin X. Right, so you have a lot of you're working for the for the border patrol you have a lot of people you have a lot of folks who are in the military or in the police. So you have a whole kind of subculture that does involve a certain amount of people involved in carceral and policing professions. And I think that has an impact on people's politics as the as the sort of militarization and security state of the border has grown but but I want to make there's something else that I think really matters here though as well. And that is, if a population is being abused, that doesn't necessarily produce, like, just an affiliation with the alternative. Right. I mean that's like assuming that if you beat women they become feminist, like people interpret and experienced and make sense of the traumas in their communities and communities they're adjacent to in a lot of different ways. And one thing I've always talked about or I've talked about recently because I've been doing some work on Latin X conservatism is the fact that third generation Mexican Americans, in many ways, profile not dissimilar from from working class whites. If you're a non college educated third or fourth generation Mexican American in the Rio Grande Valley. So your ethnic affiliation or your sense of Mexicanness in terms of how that fits in with your ideology is is very is very up for grabs. So I do think that one of the real issues here is that both political parties need to spend a lot more time organizing in these communities, reaching out to these communities. But the Latino vote has been about 25% conservative in every election. 27% voted for, you know, Bob Dole Mitt Romney 32% I think voted from McCain, Georgia, George W Bush got about 40%, which was a bit of a heightened amount. But roughly 30% of this electorate is conservative. So you're going to get there are Republicans, they're not they're not anything else. So I think we just have to also acknowledge that Latinx conservatism is a big part of is or is a part of Latino politics. Did you want to jump in? Yeah, you know, I think that we in the scholarly world and in many cases the pundit world are drawn into these very broad categories that are measured through national public opinion polls or demographic polls. And I don't think that they're very helpful for anything. But, but for reasons that Christina has started to lay out there particularly unhelpful for the various Latin populations that live in different parts of the United States come from different locations. I just want my former student Alexandra Caffrey who wrote the chapter in Upending on Florida was on a zoom with E.J. Dion and I and others yesterday and she pointed out also that probably the suspension of door to door contacting that Democrats adopted in this election because of the pandemic conditions. And Republicans did not and also Republicans use church networks and other kinds of on the ground networks more effectively in many cases than Democrats do. That was particularly harmful. She felt in Miami Dade and the message about socialism also hit home not just with Cubans but with Colombians and Venezuelans. And I want to say something that probably will get me into trouble in California, but the slogan up defunding the police is poison in many working class at lower middle class communities. And I think the white and, frankly, African American and Latino alike, because many of the sons the brothers the cousins are in the police forces, and in many cases these communities are susceptible to scare mongering about what happens if you call the police and they don't come. So I just think that was a concoction by a bunch of people in Minnesota who didn't even read the rules of their own. They didn't even know they could achieve it. And it was harmful in my opinion, in this particular election. I want to say that at least one person in my family who voted for Hillary Clinton flipped this time because of that very thing for what that's worth the focus group of one. Steve Schmidt you coast coast started the Lincoln project, one of the never I could say somebody who the group wanted to root out Trump ism either in the White House and but and in the Congress as well. You raised according to the FEC about what $67 million. What do you have to show for it. I think that we were successful when we look at where we played in the states and Georgia in Pennsylvania in Wisconsin, you know our target states where we spent substantial money where all the states that ultimately wound up being the conservative states we made a decision for example to pull out of Florida at about the three week mark and went into Georgia and I think where you can look at the numbers will will will think that we'll be able to show really good results but this was pointed out. You know we just we just got to wait, you know because a lot of the exit data is just garbage at this point and so we're evaluating all of that. I think that what the Lincoln project did is it injected some fighting spirit into the campaign at a moment that the Trump campaign was talking about its billion dollar Death Star turning on as Joe Biden was coming out of the primary process as he didn't have any money, as they were putting a general election campaign together, and we took the fight to Donald Trump, and we destabilize Donald Trump's campaign, and our activities led to the decapitation of his campaign with the firing of a car scale. When Donald Trump returned to the campaign trail and went to the Tulsa rally. We made fun of him. In the days before for, you know I think how he sipped water how we walked down a ramp at West Point right the size of the crowd size in a way that we know for media accounts, really troubled him, you know for weeks. He went to the Tulsa rally and he talked about his ability to drink water, he talked about walking down the ramp at West Point for 25 minutes. And so we, you know our organization. That was an insurgency we thought about how to fight. How do you fight a billion dollar political enterprise, starting off from scratch. We raised money off of the ads, you know, most of which went viral and accumulated billions of views. We built an organization with 500,000 donors that has millions of followership that is an activist organization that, you know, was excited that turned people out to vote and I think played a, you know, played a role and every time that, you know, the that Trump turned and attacked one of us, you know, or fought fought us for a day was a day they weren't attacking Joe Biden, and we succeeded in our aims of becoming, you know, part of his, you know, his principal antagonists. We succeeded in that and, you know, I think that we took the fight to him. And when we look in all of the, when we look in all of the states, you know, the part of the campaign that exists below the waterline like an iceberg. You know, we think we'll be be successful with the Republican numbers, you know that ultimately defected and voted for Joe Biden in this. I don't want to drill into deeply on this but I think of all the people who survived the one that surprised me the most, or one of them is Susan Collins. And she was one you really went after early and often. Why was she able to withstand all of that and everything else that was thrown at her. Well, you know, there were no polls that had Susan Collins ahead so I was definitely surprised about the outcome of that. Look, we are in the fight right to defeat Trump and Trumpism. And look, at the end of the day, we were a small percentage of the total amount of money that was spent there right the race between Sarah Gideon and Susan Collins. If we look our shot, we think the shots were fair. And the reasons we attacked Susan Collins so hard are on display tonight with most of the Republican senators refusing to congratulate the president elect of the United States is that she decided his behavior was complicit with her silence. And we are in one of the great tragedies one of the great crises in the history of the country with the same mortality rates that that the Germans did, there'd be 170,000 more of us alive today. But look, at the end of the day, we went into the Senate races and we were successful on the right side in Colorado and in Arizona. You know, Ernst was reelected in Iowa that's too bad. And so we have these two Georgia Senate races, the Lincoln Project will be involved in, and then our top targets will be Marco Rubio and Ron Johnson in the 22 Cycle. And I don't know if we're going to get them, but we're going to tell the truth on these guys. And every one of them deserves to be held to account for their political cowardice over these last years, and we'll be in that business for the next years. There's a lot of talk in this campaign about, you know, you mentioned defund the police data. There's that, you know, obviously there's racial reckoning that's going on here in California we had affirmative action on the ballot. People failed to end the ban. And I'm just wondering, what role do you think race played in this so we there's a lot of talk about race in terms of white black, but the dynamics within communities and between communities of color can be interesting and important also. Do you want to take a stab at that or Christina either one. Well I'm sure we we all have a take of course race is racial differences are at a boiling point in our politics over the last decade and I think if we look back over the sweep of American history. Whenever African Americans in particular, begin to gain rights and political power and obviously, from the point of view of popular conservatives ethno national minded tea party years for example, Barack Obama's presidency was shocking and frightening and frightening is is a very appropriate word because fear really motivates people to very extreme things and hateful things. But it's also a period that comes at the tail end of immigration and masses of new immigrants arriving in the United States and immigrants have have always been the strength of America they're what make this one of the things that makes this country extraordinary. But if you look back over two centuries of American history at the end of periods of new arrivals coming in large numbers. There is always a massive nativist reaction. This is against the Irish, in particular in some of the Germans and earlier than Southern Europeans and Jews, and in this period against immigrants of color from particularly Mexico Central America but also Asians, and you know, for that to coincide with this period in which African Americans are building a participation and power and making claims including claims about policing that have been suppressed and and and pushed out of sight for a long time. That creates just an absolute tinderbox for often elites on the right who have no interest in those intrinsic issues you know I study the coke network I've studied the millionaires and billionaires who give to the far right. And when I interview them they they show that they don't care at all about any of these questions they find it distasteful. Trump managed to fuse those two forms of extremism and race is a large part of it, but I just want to end on a conclusion that my research on the popular movements on the right and the left. The ones that are spread across the entire country not just the ones that occur in the liberal coastal areas convinced me that what we're seeing in this period is a civil war among white Americans. It's about what the meaning of the country is. And on one side there's a sense that we can celebrate and grow and be strong through immigration and multiracialism and black empowerment and on the other side there's an absolute terror about that. Christina, what would you do with that? Before you jump in I just want to add one thing which is you know Trump made a real play for black male voters and also Latino men in particular. And it worked in part. Man find the strong man thing appealing. Yeah, Christina. I'm just going to say I mean I think I think Theta and I agree on a lot of this because I think that you really are seeing a story of on the one hand yeah certain kind of masculinity but I think this issue of a diverging white, the way that the white vote itself when we talk about a deeper partisanship in this era, a big part of it is because white identity is itself diverging in two different directions. And I think having to really theorize what that means politically is a real task of this moment. There's a couple of things that interest me here about the fact that we are living under conditions right now of not only high levels of immigration, but massive economic inequality. So we have more economic inequality now than we've had in generations. And then we have a global pandemic that is making people feel very frightened about their, even if they're surviving, they know lots of people who are barely surviving or not surviving, who are losing jobs and getting laid off and struggling in all kinds of ways. But it's in that particular context when you have a language of something like socialism or you have, you know, which is actually a call for creating economic, you know, more economic equality, more justice rising tide for all communities. But I think the kind of anxiety about letting go of whatever little you have, I think it sparks a kind of conservatism or just a desire to not make any changes that feel too dramatic, too different. So I think the combination of racial difference and economic inequality right now is such a, is such a challenging dynamic. And the fact that I think for a lot of, you know, a certain kind of white voter, they do not have a sense of futurity, right? And they can get caught up in a kind of discourse of nostalgia of a yesterday, whereas for communities of color, I mean, I'm a Mexican American Jewish woman. There is no other time in the world I would rather be alive living my life. My life was not possible two generations ago. All right, my grandmother was a domestic. My mother didn't get to go to high school because nobody cared in 1958 what Mexican American girls who were smart got to do, right? So so we don't have the luxury women of color in this country. Don't have the luxury of nostalgia to another time, right? But I think that very sense of futurity for some populations, including immigrants and migrants and that lack of sense of futurity is a really interesting kind of effective emotional question. But I want to just finish with one thing. I think that, you know, we are we are currently really interested in the conservative multiculturalism, the fact that, you know, Trump did pretty well with a little bit better with certain segments. And it's really worth studying. And I think it's really important that we don't look away from it, that I think some scholars might not like that story. So they want to maybe deny it or say they're white identified. I think we need to study multicultural conservatism and all its complexity. At the same time, I do think we have to really look hard at what they were saying in terms of looking at whiteness, that the majority of white voters in this country. tried to reelect Donald Trump, right? So the only reason that did not happen was because a multiracial coalition of a majority of black people, a majority of Latinx, a majority of Asian and a majority of Native American, alongside with a large minority of white voters created a multiracial coalition that saved democracy to fight another day. But it's really important to sort of think that through. And I think one of the ways we need to think about that is we often talk about Donald Trump's impulse towards authoritarianism. And we talk about his his racism and we talk about his impulse towards authoritarianism and his impulse towards racism as if they're two different things, but they're actually profoundly related because racism taught generations of white voters how to reconcile freedom and tyranny, right? It how to reconcile state sanctioned violence and assertions of the rule of law, how to engage in violence and call it justice, right? So some of the things we're seeing now where people are being called anti-citizens who are white, right? Who are called auntie father or whatever. Like we're seeing some of the discourse that is very comfortable dispossessing people of their political rights that used to be a practice that was targeted to racialized populations. It's that anti-citizen is now becoming a multiracial population for the GOP, but its roots lie in a politics of white supremacy that has that is that is civic, that is democratic, that that that politics had a political and democratic quality. When Adam Sauer says the cruelty is the point, you know, my point is it wasn't just pleasurable, it was civic. And we have to really look at that and think about it much harder than we have. What are your insights about the Republican Party? I assume you're still a member of it. Maybe you're not. But, you know, obviously, Trump made a real effort to pull enough African-American voters just if he could get it up a few points. He figured that could help in places like Wisconsin and Michigan. How does the Republican Party think about the kinds of things that Christina was just mentioning, you know, for decades now? Ronald Reagan, I think, used to say that, you know, Latinos are fundamentally culturally conservative, you know, because of religion and abortion and things like that. You know, how does the Republican Party think about it? And how should they think about it? You're muted. You're muted. I left the Republican Party in 2018 and have been an independent since then. Look, I think that Trump has been a racial arsonist. He has weaponized race in a way that no president has has done. This is what the wildest presidency very much would have would have looked like. He has encouraged and incited these militia groups, white supremacist groups, white nationalist groups, has mainstreamed them as part of normal politics in this country. And, you know, we should understand that it's a dangerous thing when militia groups storm a state capital with AR-15s demanding to meet with the state's governor. So look, I think that the conversation we're having and I think the insight was spot on about the commonalities between white working class and Hispanic men in their shared experiences matters. And you look at the Rio Grande Valley, you look at, you know, Joe Biden in the last eight, what he said about the petroleum in the energy industry. You know, on any one of a number of these number of these fronts with the defund the police, the socialism message, it's important to remember that, you know, on all these issues in 1930s America, you know, more than 30 percent of America's Jews were against further Jewish immigration. You know, there's always a component of that, that the immigrants classes that have arrived, that have assimilated are not for an open door, you know, behind them, you know, to some significant percentage. You know, but when you when you look at the demographic changes in the country, you look at the opportunities that Joe Biden will have as he governs the country competently. And, you know, I thought that you saw someone who was just pitch perfect today in his news conference, for example, you know, you hope the fever breaks on some of this stuff, but I'll say this much. You know, certainly certainly it's the case that there's very little regard paid to reaching out to any of these communities from inside the Trump White House, you know, wanting to do good or right in the communities. You know, it's these these been a terrible, terrible president. And you know, and last but not least, you know, we're going to, you know, COVID is going to kill at least one out of every thousand black people in this country. Right. This is this is a can you imagine if this was happening in the white community in America at that at that level? Right. One out of one out of every thousand people. And this is raging out of control in our minority communities across the country. We we see tonight the slowing of the transition process, which was one of the things that was attributed to a lack of preparedness around Al Qaeda's attack on 9 11 was a was a shortened transition. That nothing good came out of that. We have we have we're going to have a winner of death in America. And the amount of people that are going to get killed is going to be tied to the chaos of this transition process that's starting to fold out and that's going to fall disproportionately in communities of color all over the country. You know, I want to ask you about Kamala Harris. I can tell you might want to respond to something else, which is fine. But I also want to do ask you about your thoughts about Kamala Harris, somebody who was daughter of immigrants, you know, part African American, part Asian American mom from India, but also from San Francisco, you know, the old San Francisco Democrat thing with socialism undertones of too much gay rights and all those things. So if you could respond to that, eventually, I know you want to say something else, too. But go ahead. Well, I want to say just one quick thing, which is I think instead of thinking in broad ethnic and even class categories, we should look at place as a very important part of the story. The electoral dynamics in recent times and the social and economic dynamics are pulling metropolitan and suburban America apart from a small town and exurban areas. And this is a federated political system in which the challenge that the two parties face is different. There are built in advantages for Republicans, even as they hurdle to the right on various dimensions that Democrats simply do not enjoy. They must bridge between very liberal, even progressive, labeled, self-labeled areas and the Midwest and the Upper South, very different kinds of communities to have even a chance to win legislative majorities. Now, that Kamala Harris, I think one of the Senate Republican senators from Indiana today said, well, the election was just about even if you leave out California. Now, you know, we can all laugh at that. And I would nominate, say, some other states, perhaps, to be left out. But the California is, in many ways, a small nation state in a very separate world, culturally, politically, economically. And so it's going to be very interesting to see this woman who really symbolizes many different strands of America in our time. Certainly her blackness and the fact that she went to a black college and deliberately made a choice to be part of that community, her immigrant parents and heritage, but her California-ness and her Northern California-ness is going to matter in all of this. I've been struck by the symbolic partnership that seems to be functioning pretty well between Joe Biden, who's, you know, blue collar origins, Pennsylvania, rust belt places, Irish all the way, and certainly old and white and male with this. They seem comfortable together. They seem to be forming a partnership, which I think has symbolic importance for the next four day years, as well as governing importance. But I will say this, the challenge remains and I want to put this on the table for all of us. This election resulted almost very likely in Mitch McConnell retaining control of the Senate. If there is one perfidious politician who nevertheless understands power and knows how to exercise it ruthlessly, it's not Donald Trump. Donald Trump is a very American kind of character. He's a seller of nostalgic dreams. Think Elmer Gantry. Think many of the religious, you know, purveyors of false hope that have been there that have been there throughout American history. We have 71 million buyers. He's and he sold hope about the pandemic to a lot of men who said, yeah, those masks, those are sissy things. Let's get back to work. Let's not let us defeat this. I think we underestimated the appeal of that to large numbers of people, especially in parts of the country where the pandemic hit later than it did earlier. So he's that. But I think that the the the reality is that Mitch McConnell is the one who's orchestrated most of the policy victories for the more elite authoritarian wing of the of the Republican Party during this period. Yeah, he's still going to have a throttle on legislation, including legislation that appropriates the money that is needed to bring economic relief and opportunity to people who have suffered terribly in this pandemic. Yeah, we have a lot of audience questions. Christina, you jump in and I'll get to the first audience question. Yeah, yeah, I was just thinking about the Kamala Harris question. I think is interesting in the sense that it's funny that we used to talk about California as the place that was the future of America. You know, that was the discourse around California was always that like what happened there would happen later across the country. And I think there's still some truth to that. You know, I think we I think we still see, you know, I think there's a lot of things going on in Texas and Houston and those places that look like California in certain ways. So I do think there there might some. But I'm just struck by the fact that California is now the odd outlier when it used to be sort of the the figure of the future of the United States. But I also am just thinking about this question of the left and the right of the party. And I think I think two things that are going to be something we have to keep thinking about is is clearly what this election showed is that both sides of the party need each other to survive. Both sides of the party need each other to, you know, we need both wings to fly. Like you need both sides of this party to be a functional majority. And I think that means, you know, it's really important to figure out a strategy of persuasion, as opposed to a defensive attacking strategy. Like I have very little patience to hear moderates just attacking the left of the party, in part, because if you actually stop, we're just using that language of the left and right and think for a minute, like the left keeps getting it right. The left got it right on the Iraq war. The left got it right on police violence. The left got it right on sexual assault. The left got it right on climate. The left got it right on the car. So, you know, prison development. So the left is the canary in the coal mine that often talks about gay rights. LGBTQ rights. I mean, again and again and again, where we go ethically, morally and politically is where the left goes first. So I think it's just important, but I also think that the left has not been very good. You have to wow left and stay addressed. Let me just finish real quick. I just think that the left is very good at persuading people. I think we have to engage in a politics of persuasion on both sides. And I think sometimes these slogans don't help us in the work of organizing. And I think one thing Donald Trump has created is a kind of celebration of expressiveness, where you just sort of take pleasure in saying whatever feels good to say in the moment, where the work of organizing is trying to grow the grounds of agreement. And it means that moderates have to figure out how to talk to their conservative constituents and grow the ground of agreement and say, AOC is not your enemy. AOC wants to see your thriving. And it requires AOC and the squad to find better ways or new ways or more capacious ways to talk about how their politics impact rural America in productive ways. But we need to get back to a better politics of persuasion and organizing, as opposed to a kind of expressivism that I think Donald Trump has taught us feels fantastic in the moment, but doesn't actually grow the ground of agreement. Well, that's a good basis for the first audience question here. And Steve, I guess I'll put this to you because actually they mentioned you or the Lincoln Project question is I'm very interested to understand what are the primary drivers of difference and how can movements like the Lincoln Project, both foster recognition of commonalities and increased cooperation and unity where differences remain? I'm not sure that was your goal, but you know, I mean, did the Lincoln Project build understanding and commonality or did it drive a wedge between people? Oh, well, well, it was a joyful wedge. I think I think that we live in a moment of democratic rescission all over the world where you see governments like Hungary and Poland that are no longer functional democracies. I think it's no accident that Nigel Farage, another proto fascist is on the stage with Donald Trump and Arizona. It's a global movement in the Republican Party with its authoritarian markers is much closer now to Orban's Party in Hungary than it is to what was a traditional center right European political party or the Canadian Conservative Party or the Australian Conservative Party. What what have you? And the democratic side of this cannot be the gentle side of the debate at all. It must be fierce. And we attack Donald Trump in a way that fit our profile of Donald Trump and would destabilize him and make him react. And that was that was successful. Now, in our politics, for example, we worked with a group of African American pastors in Philadelphia and in Michigan. We worked with the rapper offset in Georgia in the African American community. We worked with allies with whom we might have disagreements on a policy question for the common goal of removing Donald Trump from political power. We reached out to people that we have political disagreements with with an open hand in and in good faith and in good cheer to try to topple Trump. And so there's a way to talk to each other about a lot of issues. And one of the scandals of America's failed governance in this era is about 80 percent of us agree on solutions to a wide array of problems in this country, right, that are that are common sensical in nature. But the Lincoln Project, for example, believes it is essential looking at this election and looking at the rhetoric of Trump over these last years and will support the submission of a 2021 John Lewis Voting Rights Act and a 21 Civil Rights Act. We believe there must be an election security act. We must we believe there must be fundamental ethics reform. So the type of grift and stealing and the emoluments that took place, the level of corruption in this administration, the serial violations of the Hatch Act, the abuse of the taxpayer, that none of these things ever happened again. We're going to talk about budget in this country. We will eventually in America run out of money, right? Donald Trump added another eight trillion dollars to the federal debt, four trillion of it coming before COVID. When we talk about a budget, we should look at each other and be able to have a conversation, I think I would hope, that could start out with how much money does the government need? What's your number? What's my number? Right. We'll know what the high numbers are in the crazy low ones. Why does the government need that much money? How's it going to spend it? Does the service the government is trying to deliver actually work? Does it succeed? Does it sell false hope? Is there waste? Right. We have to look at the challenges the country faces in this profound hour of crisis that we're in, and we're in an hour of crisis, make no mistake about it. And there has to be the ability, I think, to look at each other with good faith, to understand that the whole point of the country is founded in disagreement. It's okay. You try to compromise and you try to move the country forward, but the fundamental question that divides the country now, and I know what side I'm on, is that the American idea and ideal is for everybody, everybody, and on the other side are people who are fighting that. The majority of the country believes it is for everybody. And that fight is going to be a definitional fight for a long time in this country because Trumpism, though Trump was defeated, is here to stay. Here's another audience question. I'll put this one to you, Theta. What can be done, given everything we just heard from Steve and the rest of you, what can be done at the federal level, given the divided government for the next four years, is Joe Biden going to have to govern by executive order until those things get to the Supreme Court? Theta? You really mustn't simply govern by executive order. There are certainly some important executive orders that he can execute. And there's a great deal of unglamorous, but absolutely critical repair work that needs to be done to revitalize the effectiveness and the morale of vital public agencies to show value, to show that civil servants who act in the public interest and who can deploy expertise and carrying are valued and needed. Nobody should underestimate how much damage has been done there, not just by Trump, but certainly by Trump, and that needs to be repaired. But I think it's going to be very, very important for Biden to figure out a way to play a combination of hardball and openness to compromise to get a certain amount of resources deployed in several critical areas that affect the daily lives of the majority of people and particularly lower middle class and working class people who live in all kinds of communities. Democrats have not delivered in many parts of this country because they have been blocked from doing so and announcing our intentions, if I can speak in my citizen capacity, is not good enough. People don't believe it. Think about Florida where the same electorate that rejected the Democratic ticket voted for the $15 minimum wage. Think of the conservative states across this country that have voted for the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare. That's an area that I study as an expert, and I can tell you there's been made a great deal of progress, even under in the Trump era, because people felt they could vote for the policy without voting for an entire political party whose entire package they did not believe in or they didn't believe that they could deliver. So Joe Biden has four years here in which he must deliver, despite some very, the fact that McConnell is going to try to run Obama to on him. He's going to try to starve him for resources and identify the Democratic Party with a sluggish and unequal economic recovery from this terrible pandemic downturn. I do think that if Biden is moving fast, he looks to me like he's moving smart. I think he can leverage a certain amount of resources that are needed to build out public health capacity to deliver a vaccine over the next year. And he needs to partner with civic groups of all kinds and many different political stripes around the country to actually show, in a visible way, that the government he leads can deliver things of vital value. And he's going to have to figure out a way to bargain and coerce a McConnell-led Congress into spending more on redistributive economic recovery than they want to do. I think he can do it, but he's going to have to get a lot of patience from the advocacy group left. It simply does not make sense to prioritize a series of professional advocacy goals that are highly moralistically relevant to people who work in professional offices in New York and Washington, but do not speak to the daily concerns of middle income and working class Americans across the country. Yeah, we're almost out of time. I want to pose one last audience question. I'll give you each a chance to respond to it. Christina, why don't you go first? The question is, do you think the problems demonstrated by this election and recent years will inspire significant changes in the presidency, Senate or the Constitution itself? Well, I hope so. I think that I think that there are a couple of things that have become much more clear to a large part of the population. And that is that we now have one political party that seems to no longer believe in majority rule, right? Like they they're not even trying to win majorities anymore. So I think there's a fundamental democratic crisis. I think Steve's point that we need we need a popular front to fight Trumpism. Right. And so I think this larger sense that we need to be engaged in in reform efforts that are ongoing, right? That it's not going to be one blissful election where we get everything we want, that this is going to be the ongoing work of building the kind of government we want to see. And I think one thing I'm really inspired by is when I teach my undergraduates and I talk to them and I say, you know, they're thinking about running for office in a way that they used to not be even 10 years ago. They there's sense that like it's broken. No one's coming to save us. I have to fix it. But I think another. And so I think that dynamic is powerful. I think the other thing that I think matters here is that even having the discussions we've been having, we were talking earlier about monuments and people tearing monuments down in the debates around that. But I think one of the things that's been healthy about that is we've often treated our Constitution as if it was this sort of perfect antique that we couldn't, you know, we lost what Pete Buttigieg called it. We've lost our sort of constitutional muscle in the sense of our willingness to think that that is a living document that works because we reform it, right? And we make it work for us. And so I think we now have a population of people who are thinking, yeah, we need to grow the courts. You know, we need to get rid of the filibuster. Like we actually have to make certain kinds of democratic reforms. These are the kind of debates that large portions of the population now are thinking and debating about. It needs to grow, you know, but I think that is the kind of work that that I think is going to be part of democratic activism, political activism across the divide as we try to kind of create a more healthy democratic, you know, polity at this point. Steve, what would you add to that? Well, look, in this moment, which I think is at a hinge of history and I think about where my politics are and the place that I came from, you know, as someone whose term 50 years old this year grew up in New Jersey and the Northeast in a working class town was a New Jersey moderate, you know, out of the Jack Kemp wing of the Republican Party on civil rights and other issues. When I look at ideologically, I think one of the focuses in politics, when I look across the spectrum, I think big is a problem. I think big government, right, can be terribly inefficient, but I also think big technology. I think big companies. I think big banks, big cable companies. There is too much control concentrated in too few places and in too few hands in an anti competitive and undemocratic manner. And we get to say as a society, how big and how powerful we want these entities to be. And we can have that discussion through a prism and a frame of the public good, which we should start trying to have again in good faith with one another. I also think and have come to a point of view that we need to amend the constitution of the United States in two areas. We have to fundamentally fix how we do redistricting and how we draw congressional lines. And this can only be addressed by constitutional amendment number one. And number two, I think that we need a renewed equal rights amendment that asserts into the nation's founding document that the liberties of the country are extended to women, to the LGBTQ community, that everybody is enfranchised in the country's documents by name who has not already been so, which should lower the level of litigation around some questions, right? We should just settle the question with language that covers it all. And I think in the years ahead, these are necessary things to be done as we deal with a lot of the structures and a lot of the problems that are residue from this Trump administration. We have to fix our institutions and make them stronger. Dita, you're hitting cleanup here. Final thoughts? You know, I think we're both in a hopeful and an apparelous juncture. And I think this juncture has at least another decade to 15 years to go before the issues that came to a head in one presidential contest here are resolved enough so that we can be sure that there's not going to be a slide into an American variant of fascism. And so I think it's a time for cold-blooded realism about how we can find the levers that are going to enable forces to build the power to maintain momentum that I think this Biden-Harris election does create in the right direction. And I think the only structural reforms that ought to be on the table right now are finding a way to guarantee voting rights and access for everybody. And that's not going to be easy, but I think that along with perhaps some mechanisms for reducing the most extreme forms of gerrymandering might possibly get a certain amount of broad buy-in beyond the ranks of the Democratic Party or one of its wings. We are not going to get rid of the Electoral College. We are not going to amend the Constitution. Alas, right now we are not going to get rid of the filibuster, which I hoped would happen. And we certainly are not going to be packing the Supreme Court in the near future. So along with delivering some real well-being and opportunity to large numbers of Americans living in many different kinds of situations and communities, let's fight for the reforms that will open the space toward more democracy and not these terrible long lines that people had to stand in just to cast their ballot in this remarkable year. Okay, it seems like you're freezing up a bit up. And unfortunately we're out of time as well. But I want to thank you all for listening, for joining us for all your great questions. I want to invite you to join Berkeley IGS tomorrow. There's going to be a post-mortem of the California part of this election. And that'll be tomorrow Wednesday from four to 5 p.m. Christina Beltran, Steve Schmidt, Theda Scotchbull, thank you all very much. Thank you.