 Great. Thank you so much, Professor. With that, I wondered if we could open the court to questions and get some questions from folks. Does anyone have a question for Professor Shal? Yeah. Mohamed, why don't you step up, please? On what extent does the foreign policy actually represent the people? You know, there are no amount of obligations with the foreign policy. On what extent does it actually represent the people? Yeah, Nathan, could you repeat the questions because they're coming through choppy from the microphone? Okay, yeah. He asked to what extent does the electoral college represent the American electorate or the popular vote? He said, especially because hypothetically they could vote for whoever they want. So he's asking to what extent is this group representative of the American people? Well, there's two ways to ask this question. One is, how does the electoral college totals relate to the popular vote? And in all the states, with two exceptions, the winner of the popular vote in the state wins all of the electoral college votes from that state. It's a winner-take-all system. And as we saw in 2000, the person who gets the most popular votes nationally may not, in fact, and is not guaranteed to get all the majority of the electoral votes. Al Gore won the national popular vote by about a half a percent over George W. Bush, but lost the electoral college to Bush, who was elected president, as we know. If he's asking specifically about the actual electors, the actual 538 people across the 50 states and here in Washington District of Columbia, these people, for the most part, vote exactly as the state popular vote results go. And the reason is because they are selected by each campaign, has a slate of electors in each state who are loyalists not just to the party, but specifically to the candidate. So Maryland is the closest state here to D.C. where I teach. And Maryland has 10 electoral votes. And so in advance of the election, Hillary Clinton's campaign designated 10 people to be her electors. And Donald Trump designated 10 people to be his electors. Maryland's already been called for Hillary Clinton. She's won it. So her 10 electors will go to the state capitol next month. And presumably all 10 of them will cast their votes for Hillary Clinton because they're Hillary Clinton loyalists. Now, there are a couple of stories out about a couple of electors who may not vote in accordance with how the state vote results go. And in many of the states, about half of the states, they are not bound necessarily to vote for the candidate who won their popular vote. These are called faithless electors. But historically, electors who didn't vote as expected are extraordinarily rare. We had one in 2000. We had one in 1988. We had one in 1972. So we've only had three faithless electors in the last, you know, 40 years. So this is a very, you know, unusual occurrence. Although I suppose in a very close election, some, you know, shenanigans or what have you, or shifting of votes among electors could affect the electoral college outcome. Okay. Thank you so much, Professor Shalak. Do we have another question? Yeah, please. Why don't you step up? I'll turn this on. So speaking of this, but yeah. Yes, hi. Thank you so much for staying with I have a question in terms of the way the elections have been patting out this time around. These have been very contested elections. And we know that the American people have been quite divided. And I'm wondering, if you're expecting about who wins the elections, it's going to be a very difficult job for the incumbent president. Could you tell us what this means in terms of domestic politics and perhaps also foreign policy? Yeah, I think there's going to be, you know, a good half of the country that's going to be sad, at the least and upset, no matter who wins this election. It's been a very nasty, very negative election. It's very been very personality driven, more than policy at times and issues. And, you know, I hope if Trump wins, there aren't recriminations of the sort that his supporters and that he himself has promised, like, you know, investigating and putting a special prosecutor on his opponent, Hillary Clinton, we've never had a case where a candidate said if he wins, he will use the power of the White House to potentially imprison the loser in the election. So it could get pretty tense here if Trump wins. And I think if Hillary Clinton wins, a significant element of the Trump base of support will be upset with the election results. On the other hand, I do think we'll have and I hope we'll have a, you know, peaceful transfer of power as we have in every election going back to the first election, George Washington 1789, our first president. We have peacefully transferred power every four years for more than 200 years at this point. And we're the longest continuous constitutional democracy in the history of the planet, which is the good news, of course. I think what will be more interesting is what happens in policy. If Hillary Clinton wins, you won't see dramatic differences in policy because Hillary Clinton in many respects is running as a third term to Obama. She's running as a continuation of the Obama era and clearly positioned herself, frankly, very closely to Obama, more closely as an heir to him and his legacy than an heir to her husband, Bill Clinton, and his legacy from the 1990s. Donald Trump, on the other hand, will be a striking departure, not just from Obama and Clinton, but he's already proved to be a striking departure from traditional Republican platforms and traditional Republican orthodoxy on issues including immigration, issues like trade, even issues like Social Security in the Welfare State, which he said he's not going to touch Medicare and Social Security. So he is very different from the modern Republican Party in many respects, and he has transformed the Republican Party. And if he wins the election, I think we'll see significant transformations in American domestic policy and in American foreign policy. So the morning from Dubai, I heard from a professor here at AUD that some states are voting using the electronic system and some are voting using the traditional way. So does this affect the chances of every state to vote? And when we see after 40 years an electronic system of voting in all the states? Thank you. I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understood. Is it about early voting? What about the chance of people voting in all the states? Can you repeat the question for me, Nathan? It's about the way of voting because some states are voting in electronics, especially for those who live outside the states. And some of them are voting traditional way or sending their votes by email, and some states are sending their votes using the traditional way. Oh, I see. Yes. So we have a federal system with 50 states and the District of Columbia all participating in the presidential election. And then so there would be variation in the form of the ballot and the electoral rules from state to state. So just a few examples. Some states allow early voting. And in 2012, we had a record 31% of Americans who voted before election day by either mail-in ballot or some states opened the polls earlier a certain number of days before the election. We will probably see a higher percentage this year who early voted. Some states use mail-in ballots and allow you to mail in your vote. Some states use computers. Some states use a paper ballot that you fill in a circle or connect the lines. So there's lots of different variations across the states. And in fact, there's even variations in the ballot within states across counties. And for those of you old enough to remember, the 2000 election, which we had a 36-day recount, part of the problem was some of the states had more modernized equipment with electronic voting, and other states had old-style punch card with the little Chad punch card ballot voting. So we've upgraded the system significantly since 2002 when Congress passed the Help America Vote Act. And many states have upgraded their systems. But if you move from county to county, or certainly if you move from state to state in America, the way your ballot looks, not the candidates who are on there or the parties, but the form of your ballot is very likely to look different if you move to different parts of a state and certainly if you moved from one state to another. Okay, great. Yeah. I have a question as to how do you feel that the results being released of the early voting affects the general election? How are the results different among the early voting versus the general election? I mean, we have to make some inferences about early voting based on who votes, like what their party registration is or what their race is. But we don't necessarily know how they voted because in some states they collect those votes, but they don't reveal the totals in some states they do. So you can make some inferences and projections about it. And usually they can make some pretty strong inferences about people who vote early versus people who, as we call same day on election day vote. The other way we know is that polls will ask people in states that have early voting, especially polls late in the election, election week polls, election eve polls, they'll say, did you vote or will you vote tomorrow and for which candidate? And so then assuming that voters tell them the truth, they can see that, oh, okay, people who voted in the early voting period went this percentage for Trump, but people who voted on election day went this percentage for Trump. So based on polls and people self reporting of how they voted and then when they voted, we can find out. So there are some states, for example, where Romney beat Obama on election day voters four years ago, but Obama had built up enough votes in early voting that Obama won the state anyway, such as Florida in 2012. And I'm sure we'll see some cases this year, one way or the other, where the early vote winner was Clinton and the same day voter, winner, vote winner was Trump or vice versa, because it's very unlikely, especially in a close state, that the percentages are exactly the same. And of course, we'll see some states where the early vote winner and the same day vote winner were the same candidate, either Trump both times or Clinton both times. But you know, early voting is, you know, it can be controversial because people are casting votes before all the election information is out. Some people cast their votes before, for example, the controversy over James Comey saying that the investigation was going to be reopened in Hillary Clinton's email. And then three days before the election, saying there's no new information here. Some people had already voted before that. And so I think you're going to hear some commentary, maybe even some criticism about whether early voting is good and how early should it be and should it be in some states and not others. Thank you. We have another question from the audience. Can you repeat the question, Nathan? Do you think there's any what? Peaceful transition. Yeah, I still can't understand. Do you think there will be a peaceful transition to power out of these levels? People seed their power after a peaceful transition of power? Yes, I do. Either way. Again, it's a little choppy. I heard that after the election parts, repeat the question in the beginning. If Congress will continue to be conservative following if there will be a Republican or Democratic president. The Supreme Court or the Congress? Oh, yes, Republicans will absolutely control the Congress regardless of whether Hillary Clinton wins or not. As we already have enough Senate seats in results to know that Republicans are going to hold the Senate, which the Democrats had had a chance there. And there was really no chance for the Democrats to win the House. So Republicans will control both chambers of Congress. And then the only question left is whether they'll have the White House with Trump or not. Okay. Another question from the audience. Please. I think there's a lot of thinking here. Thank you so much for answering our question. I have a question on whether we lose this. So whether we lose this tonight, which party do you think will face more challenges in reorganizing their strategies? This is an interesting question. I mean, the conventional wisdom going into this election is that the Republicans were going to have to do some soul searching and that there was going to be an intra-party war. And a lot of that speculation was based on the presumption that Trump would lose. And I think if Trump loses, that will in fact happen. If Trump wins, then it really becomes Trump's Republican Party. And I think there will still be a war within the party. But it'll be interesting to see how Trump manages that and whether or not the party ends up changing and become more like Trump, more protectionist on trade, more aggressive on immigration. You know, we'll see. I mean, I think the fight among Republicans would have been more dramatic if he loses than if he wins. With the Democrats, if Hillary Clinton loses this election, that raises a very interesting question about her failings as a candidate and the problems that she had in the challenge from Bernie Sanders and whether or not the Democrats have sufficiently tailored their message to working class voters, particularly whites, and aptly responded to sort of this populist insurgency and this disgruntlement among Americans, regardless of their partisan affiliation, with what they see as a system that favors the wealthy and the powerful. And you know, I think the Democratic Party will have to do some research about whether, you know, they should have turned to somebody like a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, who sounds a more aggressively populist labor left message, whereas Hillary Clinton has been criticized as being sort of too corporate, too mainstream, too Wall Street friendly of a Democrat. Thank you. Any other questions? Another question for the audience? Yeah. I was wondering at night, for those of us supporting Hillary Clinton, what are the states that we have to pay for right now? It's funny, but I didn't get it. What was it? What was the question again, Nathan? Yeah, it was for those who are supporting Hillary Clinton, what are the states that we have to pay for now? What are the states that we have to pay for? Oh, states that you have to pay for? Okay. You want to know the scenario? Okay. No, not Alaska. She needs to win Nevada. She needs to hold, she already won Colorado. She needs to hold Nevada. She needs to hold Pennsylvania if it hasn't been called yet. I'm not sure, because I've been on the TV for a while. She has to hold Pennsylvania. She has to hold Nevada. She has to hold Michigan, the upper Midwest states, Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin. And then I guess she needs to win New Hampshire as well. So it's pretty close. There's a way she can thread the needle in a way that we thought Trump was going to have to thread the needle. Certainly, if she loses Pennsylvania, she can't win. If she loses Michigan or Wisconsin, she can't win. Right now, a lot of the Democratic precincts haven't reported yet. I think she'll hold on to Pennsylvania. I think she'll hold on to Minnesota. And I think with the Latino vote, and given how she won Colorado, she'll win Nevada. So it's going to come down to Michigan and Wisconsin. Wisconsin was the closest state overall during 2000, 2004, and 2008. And we kind of missed that because Florida was the closest state in 2000, but Wisconsin was second. And Ohio was the closest state in 2004, but Wisconsin was like second or third. But overall, Wisconsin has been one of the more competitive states, even though the Democrats have carried it now four times in a row. So it's possible that if they can't, Hillary Clinton can't hold Wisconsin, she could lose the presidency in the upper Midwest. Thank you. Who posted the question? Yeah. Why do you think the polls fail to predict that Trump has a great choice of what he's got? I'm sorry, can you repeat it for me, Nathan? They're coming in really garbled. She asked, why did the polls fail to predict Trump's performance tonight? I don't know the answer to that question. I don't think a lot of people do. There's some suspicion that maybe voters didn't want to tell pollsters that they were voting for Trump even though they planned to or had to. When we see the turnout rates, it's possible that there are simply more first time newly registered voters, mostly white voters who voted for Donald Trump. There's some evidence that there are people who voted for Barack Obama and voted for Donald Trump, who's going to be puzzling political scientists and pollsters probably for decades at this point. There are a lot of potential factors. African-American vote may be down in a post-Obama era and we'll see if both their turnout levels went down and if their share, though it's still going to be overwhelmingly Democratic, if maybe they only went 80 or 85% for Hillary Clinton and fell as a share of the electorate, whereas they were 13% of the electorate for Obama and went 95% for him. So we could see that it's a declining share and a declining Democratic support among black voters coupled with a rising surge in what we call downscaled, non-college educated white voters and when you put those two things together, Hillary Clinton probably could have won with only one or the other of those things happen but can't win with both of them happening. And by the way, just as an aside, the non-white voter share has been steadily going up every four years. So when Obama won in 2008, non-white voters were 26%. 2012, they were 28%. Based on just population growth, particularly Latino and Asian-American voters, we expected it to be closer to 30 this year. We may see that the non-white voter share didn't go down but it just simply didn't go up, which would be remarkable given that the white population as a whole is decreasing, but we might see that white voters in 2012 stayed at 72% where they were in 2012 and a higher share of them went for Donald Trump. And I suppose it's even possible when we get the final exit poll results and the Census Bureau data that maybe even white voters increased from 72 to even 73%, which would be a remarkable reversal of a long-term trend that was supposed to accelerate this year, not reverse. And I think a lot of the politics in the country is very much about the rapidly changing racial configuration of the country, and it's creating a significant amount of tension between, frankly, white and non-white voters. Thank you very much. Do we have another question from the audience? These are great questions, by the way. Thank you. Are you surprised about the fact that Minnesota is changing so fast? Am I surprised something about Minnesota? Yeah. Are you surprised Minnesota is still too close to call? I'm surprised that a lot of the states are too close to call, including Minnesota and Wisconsin and Michigan. And I don't think that bodes very well for Hillary Clinton because these are states that should have been called probably an hour ago if she was leading in them in the margins in which the polls before the election suggested she was. So the longer those states aren't called for Clinton because they're expected to be part of her coalition, they may still break her way. But the longer it takes to call them, she kind of runs out of time, runs out of precincts, runs out of voters, runs out of counties that haven't reported. Now, there is a traditional historical pattern because of the density of the population in urban areas that urban areas tend to report a little bit later because there's so many more voters there, and it takes a longer time to certify whether that's in Southeast Florida and Miami, Dade, Broward counties, the counties that were a big part of the recount in 2000 in the Gore-Bush race, or whether that's Detroit, Michigan, or Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which came in very late. So there is a sliver of hope, and Hillary Clinton holds Pennsylvania, she holds Michigan, she holds Wisconsin, and of course Minnesota and Nevada, she can still win, but if she loses really any of those, it's going to be very difficult for her. Even Virginia took very, very long tonight. An East Coast state where the polls closed more than two hours ago. I believe they only called Virginia the networks like 45 minutes or so ago. It took that long. Florida wasn't called by CNN until I got on this call. Same time zone. I mean, there's some voters in western Florida who are in the central time zone, but Florida, you know, was very, very close, eventually fell to Trump. So I'm surprised. It testifies how close these states are, really. Great. I think we have time for one final question. Great. If anybody has a final question. Okay, all right. We'll have a round of applause for the person now. Thanks, guys. Fun. Just before I go, we're still online through the night until about two in the morning, and we have another event if you aren't, it looks like you're having a lot of fun there, but we're having an event with the embassy in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia at 12.30, our time, 12.30 a.m., which is in about a half an hour. And you can also go to share.america.gov if you want to send online questions or follow us online. So thanks for coming out, and thanks for your interest in the election.