George Mason’s Access to Excellence Podcast

Podcast — EP 63: The economic perceptions driving U.S. politics

Sarah Holland — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 20:23:07 +0000

Podcast — EP 63: The economic perceptions driving U.S. politics Sarah Holland Wed, 12/11/2024 - 15:23

Another presidential election has come and gone. Reactions to the reelection of Donald Trump are wide and varied. And we’re facing a growing divide across our nation as we transition, once again, from one party in control to another. How did we get here? Are these truly unprecedented times?

On this riveting episode of Access to Excellence, President Washington is joined by two experts on the political process—Jeremy Mayer and Jennifer Victor, associate professors of political science in the Schar School—to discuss the impacts of polls, economic perceptions, and more on the 2024 presidential election.

"Every single county in Virginia had lower turnout in 2024 than they did in 2020, every single county. But as you know, there is a voting precinct on George Mason's campus in Merten Hall. And that voting precinct, yes, had lower turnout, but it only had one percentage point down lower turnout. It was one point lower, whereas all the rest of the county was on average, nine points lower. So that to me says our efforts to encourage Mason students to vote had an eight point impact. We did eight points better than we would have in terms of voter turnout at Merten Hall, at that particular precinct than we would have in the absence of this effort we put together." — Jennifer Victor

"I think the word [unprecedented] is overused, but for this election, I don't think it's overused. And here's why. You have a president who faced two impeachments, who tried to steal the last election by causing a riot, uh, to stop the count...He should be labeled an unprecedented victor in the sense that no one has ever come back from this kind of infamy. It would be like Nixon after Watergate somehow working his way into the 1980 election. And that was absolutely inconceivable. Well, Trump conceived it and accomplished it." — Jeremy Mayer

Read the Transcript

Intro (00:00:04):
Trailblazers in research; innovators in technology; and those who simply have a good story. All make up the fabric that is ��AV. We're taking on the grand challenges that face our students, graduates, and higher education is our mission and our passion. Hosted by Mason President Gregory Washington: this is the Access to Excellence podcast.

President Gregory Washington (00:00:26):
Another presidential election has come and gone. Reactions to the reelection of Donald Trump are wide and varied, and we're facing a growing divide across our nation as we transition once again from one party in control to another. How did we get here? Are these truly unprecedented times? Today I'm joined by two experts whose combined knowledge covers the breadth of the political process from presidential history to current social networking methods. Jeremy Mayer is an associate professor and director of the political science doctoral and master's programs in the Schar School of Policy and Government at ��AV. He's offered political commentary on topics such as presidential image management, Christian right politics, and comparative political socialization to major networks, as well as to many national newspapers. Jennifer Victor is an associate professor of political sciences in the Schar school. Her public scholarship on topics such as legislative organization and behavior, political parties and lobbying has also appeared in the New York Times, Thee conversation, OUP blog, and LSE U.S. Politics blog. Jennifer and Jeremy, welcome to the show.

Jeremy Mayer (00:02:06):
Great to be here.

Jennifer Victor (00:02:07):
Good to be here.

President Gregory Washington (00:02:08):
Well, great to have both of you here. Well, look, we gonna have to jump right into this thing. This is . I've actually been looking forward to this episode. Now, we've seen both of your names in the media recently offering your perspectives on the presidential campaigns and the outcomes of the election. So the first thing I just want to get to is, was the outcome of this election a surprise to either of you?

Jennifer Victor (00:02:38):
I wouldn't say it was a surprise, exactly. You know, coming into the election there were seven so-called swing states where the polls were essentially all within the margin of error. Um, and it looked like the election was, could really go either way depending on what happened in those states. I saw in the last five or six days before the election, some signals that I thought might have indicated that Harris was pulling ahead in a few places. I clearly misread those because the election turned out to be a sweep in that Donald Trump won all seven of those swing states. So, not a surprise exactly, but certainly a more compelling result than perhaps I had anticipated.

Jeremy Mayer (00:03:31):
And I, I would agree with that. I wasn't shocked like I was in 2016. I got that election all wron. This time, I knew it was very close. But I will say this, once again, the polls were off and they were off systematically. They were off in their underestimation of Trump's support and the fact that he won all seven swing states and some of them being close, but he won all of them. And then the whole nation, 90% of counties swung upward in Trump's support compared to 2020. That's a very strong showing for Trump and the Republicans.

Jennifer Victor (00:04:09):
Can I push back a little bit on that, Jerry? So nothing that you said is inaccurate except that the polls, I would say did pretty well this year. They were off in that there was a systematic error, but I think upon reflection, once we get all the data in, we're gonna find that the polls were pretty good in terms of being within those margins of error. And the pollsters that were using this prior presidential vote as their corrective device that a lot of folks were skeptical of turned out to...even that was undercounting Republican votes. But it turned out to be a pretty good way to, uh, get closer to the estimate. So they're off systematically, but as a whole, polling did pretty well this election relative to the last couple.

President Gregory Washington (00:04:55):
So let's talk about that for a second because I'm actually one of a few people who think the polls did absolutely predicted the outcome of the race. And let me explain. You had seven swing states. The last set of polls that I looked at, every single one of those seven was in a margin of error.

Jennifer Victor (00:05:17):
That's right.

President Gregory Washington (00:05:18):
The challenge is that as Americans, we don't understand the math.

Jennifer Victor (00:05:25):
That's right.

President Gregory Washington (00:05:27):
If a state has Harris up by two points and the margin of error is plus or minus three, that means that in that state, Harris can actually be down a point, or she could be up five. If a state had Trump up one point, right, with a three percentage points margin of error, Trump could actually be up four points in that state or down two points or, I'm sorry, or down one point, right?

Jennifer Victor (00:06:04):
Yep.

President Gregory Washington (00:06:05):
So it's the margin of error piece that I think we lack a fundamental understanding of. And as long as there's a margin of error there, you actually can't call it one way or the other. Right?

Jennifer Victor (00:06:22):
Well--

President Gregory Washington (00:06:23):
If I were to push back and say, you know, but Trump won all seven, the fact that they were swing states says that all seven were in a margin of error, right? What I would predict as a loss, or the poll getting it wrong, is that they actually predicted a Harris state that Trump won, or they predicted a Trump state that Harris won. And I didn't see that happen in this election. There were seven swing states. Trump took all seven. They were all within the margin of error. He didn't take any of the seven beyond the margin of error. At least that's how I read it. Now you all are the expert, but--

Jennifer Victor (00:07:05):
That's absolutely correct.

President Gregory Washington (00:07:07):
Well, if I'm the poster doing the polls, I'm like, eh, I think we got it right here, not wrong.

Jennifer Victor (00:07:13):
Yeah. So my complaint, and I've, I've had this complaint for a number of years now, and I've, I've written about it is not so much with the polling, although there is some challenges in polling, particularly it looks like when, when Trump is on the ballot. And I think they did better this year than previously in 2016 and 2020. But my complaint is with how the polling gets communicated and how it gets reported. And I don't wanna go on a anti-media tear 'cause that's not fair, but I think it is appropriate to be critical of how these things get reported. Because what's happening is the media has an interest in promoting the horse race, in talking about who's ahead and projecting a sense of certainty even in the face of complete ambiguity about what's going to happen. And I think part of the reason that happens is because we live in such partisan, polarized times, and when the parties are so far apart, people feel election losses much harder, and they truly dread election losses much more than during times when the parties are not that far apart.

Jennifer Victor (00:08:20):
Because a loss just puts the status quo way far from your ideal point, so to speak. And the media knows that, and they're sort of counting on people's emotions and trying to, in essence, project perhaps more of a sense of either alarm or certainty or calm or whatever it is that they're sort of playing on. Where, in fact, what the message should be that last week is nobody knows what's gonna happen. And focusing on those, as you said, they'll say like, Harris up one point, Trump up two points, whatever...is really a false way to report it because it's all a range, it's all a margin. And the the polls got it within those margins. And so mathematically it was correct, but the perception that people had, I think, was quite a bit different than that reality because of how it gets communicated.

President Gregory Washington (00:09:13):
I can accept that. So let's move from math . Let's talk about history, because the other thing that I've been hearing bantied around throughout the press, throughout this whole process is that we live in unprecedented times. That whole tagline has worked its way into the common lexicon over the past four years. Is it really unprecedented times? Right? You're experts on elections, you are presidential historians, you know this, you know, how does the 2024 presidential election--I even heard this, the greatest comeback in history, the greatest comeback in history, right? How does this compare over previous ones?

Jeremy Mayer (00:10:01):
So I think it is unprecedented. I think the word is overused, but for this election, I don't think it's overused. And here's why. You have a president who faced two impeachments, who tried to steal the last election by causing a riot, uh, to stop the count. And everyone in this town from Mitch McConnell on down assumed that Trump could never make it back from the shame and humiliation of January 6th, 2021. But he did. And so Trump's comeback, well, it's not the biggest victory, it's like the 41st largest electoral margin, which is not that large. He should be labeled an unprecedented victor in the sense that no one has ever come back from this kind of infamy. It would be like Nixon after Watergate somehow working his way into the 1980 election. And that was absolutely inconceivable. Well, Trump conceived it and accomplished it.

Jennifer Victor (00:11:03):
Yeah, I I think that's right. I agree with criticism of overusing the phrase unprecedented. And I agree with Jerry's take about what makes the upcoming presidency unique. But another point of view to offer is that some of what we are experiencing in US politics now is a populist wave that is anchored in the Republican party that has an anti-democratic/authoritarian streak to it. And arguably that is not new in the United States. Arguably, between about 1877 and 1965, the entire southern region of the United States operated in an era of Jim Crow that was authoritarian rule. One party sort of undemocratic, uh, states. They still experienced elections, they experienced a lot of the trappings of what looked like democracy. But most scholars would look at that region in that time period and say, that wasn't democratic. And so to say that the US is entering a period with a political party that is willing to counter the norms of democracy and willing to challenge some of the institutions of democracy and so on and so forth, one pushback against that is to say, yeah, and we've been here before at, at least, you know, not in a lot of people's lifetimes. Um, you know, a lot of folks who pay attention to politics today maybe either didn't live there or didn't experience, uh, that, but it it wasn't that long ago. It's not that unique.

President Gregory Washington (00:12:41):
Let me push back a little bit on both of you relative to this, and I, I wanna throw something out and get your reaction to it. Okay? I, I definitely agree that you had two impeachments , you had behaviors that some would consider just abhorrent. You've had all of these issues, but yet still Donald Trump wins and wins by a comfortable margin, right? This was not a close election in the end. Okay? So even though it was close in terms of number of votes in terms of the electoral college, it wasn't that close. So when you look at it from that perspective, and I'm gonna harken back to the four words echoed by another former US president Bill Clinton during his campaign: "it's the economy, stupid". You all remember that one?

Jennifer Victor (00:13:47):
Oh, yeah.

President Gregory Washington (00:13:48):
So we're at a time now where you can say, okay, the, uh, the, the general, we don't have huge unemployment, but we still have significant inflation. Wages have not kept up. People haven't been able--

Jennifer Victor (00:14:04):
Actually they have.

Jeremy Mayer (00:14:05):
Yeah, I was just gonna point that out. This inflation was terrible in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. It is now under control, wage growth matched it, and our economy is the envy of the western world. There's not a European major nation that wouldn't trade places with our numbers right now in terms of GDP growth.

President Gregory Washington (00:14:27):
No, no, no. I, I, I agree with you with all of that, but perception is not always true. It's always real. If I were to say what I have seen, the biggest mistake that was made by the Harris campaign was that they never really embraced an economy that was the best house on the block right? Now, I would contend to you that every party in power across the world experienced losses in elections this year, right? That's not happening because of, uh, of people's perceptions that things are not necessarily better. Uh, you know, people perceive that things are somewhat worse, and whether it's true or not, it's real to the people who feel it. I have members of my family who go back to what the price of a dozen of eggs was. Yes, inflation's under control now, but those increases, the, the increases stayed, the price never went back down. It's just the rate of increase slow down. So to a person buying, uh, you, you know, it's really interesting. You go back and look at the price. We're looking at another vehicle for our home, and I looked at vehicles, the same make and model of a vehicle that I bought three years ago. Same, make, same model, same options. The cost is 30, 35% higher.

Jeremy Mayer (00:16:11):
Wow.

President Gregory Washington (00:16:11):
Just amazing. I, I don't, I don't think we all realize how much prices have actually changed and gone up, but there are sensitive portions of the population that actually do feel that. And when 30-40,000 votes one way or another can swing an election, and you just keep getting the message beat into you that a, it's worse than it was four years ago, it is so much worse than it was for you. And you start to believe it. They say, oh, look at the prices of eggs. Look at the prices of meat. Look at, right. And you do that, guess what happens? You, and so maybe it's just something, it's not unprecedented at all. Americans may just be voting their perceived pocketbooks, and that's what they did.

Jeremy Mayer (00:17:03):
Well, you're the one that brought up, "it's the economy, stupid." And I do think Harris had a tough job similar to what George Bush the first did in 1992. We had been in a short, sharp recession, and the numbers said we were coming out of the recession, right? And his team told George Bush, the elder, Hey, claim victory. But as he did that, he looked like he didn't care about the suffering of the average voter. So Harris had a tough, tough messaging saying, I'm going to claim the best house on the block, while acknowledging the pain of the inflation that the whole world went through. And she, she didn't land that very difficult messaging.
President Gregory Washington (00:17:44):
I, I agree. And to me, that's the point, Jeremy, I think you're nailing it. You're hitting and hit. I I feel this was, you know, people said, look, hey, yeah, there may be things I like about Trump. There may be things I don't like about Trump. There's a cohort of the population that loves him that is real. And for that cohort of the population, he can do no wrong, he's gonna carry that cohort of votes. And it's incredibly sticky.

Jennifer Victor (00:18:14):
You know, I wanna come back to an observation that you made a a minute ago though, which is that every single developed democracy on the planet that had elections this year, and there were a lot of them, uh, saw incumbent losses. And so there's an argument to be made that it didn't matter who the Democrats ran or what the message was or who the candidate was, that the Democrats were gonna lose this election. That we were gonna see that county by county swing towards Republicans relative to 2020 in this election. And that's like a very institutional, you know, it doesn't have to do with the candidates or the message, it's not anything about that. It's just it was gonna be a Republican year. I think what's gonna happen over the next year or so is some political scientists are going to dig in and answer this question that I think you rightly posed, which is, is it the case that in fact, it was just the institutions, this is just like a covid inflation hangover election.

Jennifer Victor (00:19:18):
And that's what we saw voters voting on, as you were just saying. And it didn't matter who was on the ticket or, you know, all those numbers from the United States that said, you know, our economy was doing better, we had growth, we beat the inflation, yada yada. It would not have been unfair to look at this election beforehand and say, yeah, sure, all of the democracies are experiencing incumbent election loss, but we've done better than them. And so we should expect our election to also, uh, the, the incumbent party to not get hit as hard. Right? That would be a reasonable expectation. Now, that's not what happened. And so the question going forward for the political scientists is gonna be why is that because the institutions of the inflation just took over and that's what explains the variance? Or was it what you're talking about with, they didn't hit the messaging on the head, you know, maybe there's some racial animus with respect to and or hostile sexism with respect to a black female candidate at the top of the ticket. Like, are there other things about the candidate, about the campaign that explained why the US didn't do better than we might have been expecting based on some of those aggregate or, or macroeconomic indicators.

President Gregory Washington (00:20:26):
So let me pose it this way. The reality of the situation is this: clearly the economic issues that we saw sweeping the rest of the world meant that even in this country, even though we're doing better, you probably had a window that wasn't as open. Your margins were tighter.

Jennifer Victor (00:20:47):
Right.

President Gregory Washington (00:20:47):
Right? And then when you couple that with the fact that you're running against an iconic candidate for whatever people believe yes or no about Trump, he is, he is iconic in, in, in who he is and what he represents and--

Jeremy Mayer (00:21:03):
And is unprecedented, to use that word again, he has survived so many scandals that would've torpedoed any other candidate in living memory. And I've said he's a battleship that floats on exploding torpedoes.

President Gregory Washington (00:21:18):
Absolutely!

Jeremy Mayer (00:21:20):
One scandal happened before we can focus on it, we're onto the next one. Just this morning, he has a guy next to him, Boris Epstein, who's been selling access to the nomination process. And if Harris had had someone like that this summer, who'd been selling, you know, Secretary of Treasury, give me a hundred thousand dollars a month retainer and I'll make sure you're Secretary of Treasury, it would've been a huge scandal. The phrase is, she had to be flawless and he can be lawless because this is not going to bother him. This should, in any other White House in transition, this would be days and days and days of scandal. What did the president know? When did he know it? Why didn't he know it? Trump is just gonna ignore this.

President Gregory Washington (00:22:06):
You know, it's, it's amazing, but you hit the nail. This is, but both of you are knocking this thing out of the park. It is really funny. But let me ask the question in a slightly different way. You all remember the John Edwards campaign?

Jennifer Victor (00:22:22):
Oh yeah.

Jeremy Mayer (00:22:22):
Great campaign. He has, he's still the best stump speech I've ever seen in person. He was amazing.

President Gregory Washington (00:22:28):
But that thing crumbled over a scandal that today would seem, oh, really? that would be, uh, there has been--

Jeremy Mayer (00:22:43):
for a Republican. For a Republican it would, because the Republican party has shown, particularly with Trump, but also with some others, that they just don't care if someone on their tribe does something. So Democrats had a senator from Minnesota who clearly took liberties with some women, and Al Franken was gone from the Senate. Even though, if we judge by the severity of the crime, it's nothing compared to what we've seen on the other side. And that is tolerated.

President Gregory Washington (00:23:15):
That's kind of how it is.

Jennifer Victor (00:23:18):
I think, you know, when we see things like this in politics, it's common to just point at it and say, well, that's hypocrisy. Like just folks are being hypocritical. They forgive it here, they don't forgive it there. And while that's a fair critique to me, it's unsatisfying as a critique. Like hypocrisy itself isn't, I'm sorry, we're all hypocrites , like we're all humans with flawed brains that can't keep stuff straight. We all have contradicting ideas in our heads, like it's part of the beauty of being a human being. So to me, it's not the hypocrisy itself that is such a charge. It's that when you identify the hypocrisy, it reveals a set of values. And it's the values that I think are, can be fairly criticized, right? So republicans saying, okay, we'll forgive Matt Gaetz for his sexual improprieties, but we won't forgive Al Franken for his. That is revealing something about having a higher bar of forgiveness for people of your own political stripe that shows that your values about sexual morality are not in fact true values about sexual morality. It's, it's saying that your partisanship matters more.

President Gregory Washington (00:24:27):
Let's dig into that a little bit. Is that actually the case, or is it more nuanced and complex? Could it be that when you feel that the world is against you, or when you feel the media is against you as a group of individuals, right? And you feel that this is polarized against you, that you let some things slide that you would not have let slide because oh, this is just another example of these folk who are coming after me. I mean, governments do this all the time with their people, right? You know, don't look at the challenges in my administration. Don't look at how poorly we are performing. It's the Americans who are doing this to us. It is such and such, or it's the Russians or it's whoever, right? You, you name your country. Could, could that be the reason, Jennifer?

Jennifer Victor (00:25:30):
Yeah. I mean, what we, what, what the political science tells us is that we view the world through the lens of our own identities, right? Everybody's got identities, everybody's got multiple identities. And over the last 20 or so years, what we've seen in the United States is this phenomenon where partisanship is increasingly an important part of people's identities, much more so than it was in the eighties and nineties and, and previously. And so what happens is, whatever's happening in the world, whatever scandal is going on, whichever parties in power, etc cetera, people are looking at that critically through the lens of their own partisanship and evaluating. If it seems like their co partisans are in favor of it, then they, you know, have a more rosy view of it. And if it seems like their out partisans are in favor of it, then now they don't like it and they're critical of it.

Jennifer Victor (00:26:27):
You can see this really clearly in economic indicators where you ask people how they feel about the state of the economy. Just in the couple of weeks since the election, since November 5th, over the course of the last few weeks. Prior to the election, Democrats, if you could just go ask public opinion polls, just like Gallop or whatever, ask people, how do you feel about, like, what's your general feeling about the economy? Democrats were saying, ah, pretty good, you know, up like 80% or so. And Republicans would say, no, it's terrible. You know, 20% whatever. And in the few weeks since the election, those numbers are already starting to shift where Democrats are starting to say the economy is getting worse. And we're seeing it actually more on the Republican side, I think, because, uh, Trump is getting a lot more press these days than Biden, where republicans are already starting to feel better about the economy, more rosy about things.

Jennifer Victor (00:27:17):
So we're all viewing political events, economic indicators, all of this stuff through a partisan lens. And we're not, I'm sorry, we're not coming up with these ideas on our own. We're listening to the media, we're listening to elites, we're listening to politicians, we're listening to members of Congress, how they're talking about it, and we're incorporating that into how we understand the world. So if you go and interview any random schmo, Democrat or Republican about their political attitudes, more often than not, you will hear them parrot things that you hear on Fox and MSNBC and so forth. They use the same words, the same language, because that's where their ideas are coming from, from whatever elites they're listening to, from whatever media they're consuming. That's how they're learning about the world, and they're just deciding if they're agreeing with it or disagreeing with it based on their own co partisanship or, or out partisanship.

President Gregory Washington (00:28:11):
No, I hear you. I hear you. It's actually interesting. It seems to me that president-elect Trump is now president.

Jennifer Victor (00:28:21):
Yeah.

President Gregory Washington (00:28:22):
If look at how the market is reacting, if you look at how foreign countries are, if you look, look at what happened in in Ukraine, you know, war in Russia, you look at what's happening in the whole Hezbollah, Israel, Gaza, uh, conflict, countries are now making moves based on what they know is coming. And that's having a, at least on the surface of things as we know them right now, a very positive effect for president elect Trump.

Jeremy Mayer (00:28:58):
So I think this is--

Jennifer Victor (00:29:00):
Donald Trump is a media genius. We have to remember how good he is at using the media and training attention on him. Um, so that, that's part of what's going on. Sorry Jerry, I didn't mean to cut you off.

Jeremy Mayer (00:29:12):
Well, I, I absolutely agree to, to jump on your point, uh, Trump has, uh, one great skill, and that is the ability to manipulate the media. How many rich people have had divorces in New York City in the last a hundred years? Dozens upon dozens. He was the only one to run the tabloids. So that his mistress' statement, "best sex I ever had" was a headline. And he did that by being his own backdoor source, a guy named Baron, a name that he's always loved. So he has this ability to lead the media stream that gives him great power. But your point, President Washington about the transition, "Trump already seems like president." One of the weird things about American politics is the very long period between the election and inauguration in Britain, in Germany, in most other democracies, you have an election and sometimes the next day the moving vans arrive and Downing Street empties out. And that's a more modern way. We have the oldest written constitution in the world. And so we have embedded this long two month period, used to be five months, where we don't have the new president that we just elected. And we should really consider changing that.

President Gregory Washington (00:30:31):
Oh, wow. That's really interesting.

Jennifer Victor (00:30:34):
That's not the first thing I would change though,

Jeremy Mayer (00:30:36):
Oh no, me neither.

President Gregory Washington (00:30:37):
.

Jeremy Mayer (00:30:38):
The sitting duck period is kind of silly. It, we have the old Congress and the old president with a tremendous amount of power if they choose to use it. And that has not always worked out well for our democracy.

President Gregory Washington (00:30:52):
That is interesting. Wow. Oh man, there are so many directions we can go with this. This is really--

Jennifer Victor (00:30:58):
Well, can I, I, something else that you said like 20 minutes ago is still ringing in my head because you brought up the, the famous James Carville line from the 1992 campaign. "It's the economy, stupid", and to some extent yes, I, I see what you're talking about, about applying that to this election, but I think more accurately, rather than it being the economy that fully explains what's going on, "it's the inequality, stupid" that really helps explain what's happening in the United States today. You know, we can talk about people's focus on identity and partisanship and filtering things through different lenses and so on and so forth, but all of that sort of dismisses, um, the fact that a lot of Americans are super frustrated and that economic mobility is more hampered today than it has been in any of our lifetimes. Right? So the ability of when I was a kid, the probability that I would wind up being more economically successful than my parents, that probability was much higher than, than it is for kids today.

Jennifer Victor (00:31:59):
Economic mobility is just become stagnant for a lot of Americans, and I think it's because of crises in four particular policy areas. We've got a crisis in housing and being able to afford housing. We've got a crisis in healthcare because we got a ridiculous healthcare system that costs a lot of money. We've got a crisis in education, which I don't have to explain to this crowd because it costs so much. And we've got a crisis in dependent care, whether that's for young children or the elderly. Those four things, those four costs are so draining on so many Americans that it's making it difficult for them to advance economically beyond where their parents were. And I think people are super frustrated and rightfully so by that. And I don't think either political party has come up with good answers for these, for these problems. And I think that's some of what we're seeing.

President Gregory Washington (00:32:47):
Yeah, it's some of it. No, go ahead, Jeremy.

Jeremy Mayer (00:32:49):
So I agree, but I do think that it matters what answers the campaigns gave the people for that sense of inequality. And I really believe that Harris had some very good policies that addressed some of those questions. And Trump had almost nothing except he addressed the inequality and the unease and the frustration by telling America, you should be mad at trans people.

President Gregory Washington (00:33:15):
No, actually I think he did something, he did do that, but I think he did something different that is not as nefarious. He continued to say, "Hey, all of these economic trials you had just go back and remember when I was president. You didn't have them then, right?"

Jeremy Mayer (00:33:39):
But we did. If it's the inequality that Jennifer's talking about that was present during his four years, people have this false memory. And I, I will say though, that he did have that one brilliant policy proposal about making tips tax free. Now that is really, really stupid from a policy perspective, but it does speak to a lot of the Americans at the margins, and we should consider ways to help them, just not this way. And I heard a Republican pollster say that when he talked to swing state voters about what was the image of the campaign that resonated after the election, the biggest one was Trump working at the McDonald's. And I can't tell you how my liberal friends made fun of that. My democratic friends are like, what an idiot, you know, dad. But it's to people, people that said he understands where we eat, what we eat, why we eat, where we eat. It wasn't true. But he's got that gift of, of symbolism that breaks through in ways that the elite don't even get the charisma that he has.

President Gregory Washington (00:34:43):
That's correct.

Jeremy Mayer (00:34:43):
Could I, could I bring up something that, that I wanted to say something about the trans issues. People are saying now that Harris needed a Sister Souljah moment from the '92 campaign where Bill Clinton went to the Jesse Jackson group, the Rainbow Coalition, and criticized a rapper who'd said, it's now time to kill white people for a week after the '92 Rodney King riots. Bill Clinton did it in '92. Barack Obama did it on gay marriage in 2008. He was not for gay marriage. She needed to do something like that because the trans issue really worked for Trump. It was his biggest ad, it ran on sporting events. Harris needed an answer and she had nothing.

Jennifer Victor (00:35:24):
Yeah, I wanna piggyback on that because we were super critical of Republicans, uh, earlier in the podcast. So now we can do some criticism of Democrats. I think Jerry's right, and I think one of the challenges that the Democratic party has been having and continues to have is that their capacity or their strategy for building a big tent, like all political parties, have to be some big tent thing. Their strategy for building a big tent is to not anybody off. It's to keep everybody a little bit happy so that you don't lose people out of the coalition. But that's nonsense. Trump's way of building a coalition was not about not people off. It was about directly people off, right? What the Democrats should be willing to do, and now they're in this, you know, sort of, we've lost period of reflection. How are we gonna reform before our next, uh, chance of the ballot box is figuring out how to engage in a more strategic, rational coalition politics in which they may be willing to anger some elements of their coalition. Does that mean that those people will leave the coalition? Maybe, but maybe not. Because where else are they gonna go?

President Gregory Washington (00:36:35):
You know, I would caution against any group Republican or Democrat making broad changes in policy and platform after a minor loss in an election.

Jennifer Victor (00:36:52):
In an election that was so driven by macroeconomic trends.

President Gregory Washington (00:36:56):
Without question, I think every, you all will do this. This is what you do, right? Over the next couple of years, you will examine everything, right? Theses will be written, oh, there's some great theses that will be, can be written on what happened during this. Uh, you, you, you, you know what I'm saying? I tell our young people all the time, this might be the best time ever in history to be a student, right? Especially to be a political scientists without question. I've learned things about our constitution and about the inner workings of government more over the last five years than I've learned over the previous 40. And that is without question, right? I mean, from January 6th on the intricacies of our government and how it's structured, oh my goodness, it's just for those who really want to learn and understand, it has been a gift, to be quite honest with you. You are in an exciting field at an exciting time, right? Even though it's fraught with uncertainty, we got polarization, we had all of these issues, but to me, that's kind of what makes it exciting right now.

Jeremy Mayer (00:38:16):
Well, it's the old curse, "may you live in interesting times." And I can't tell you how many people come up to me and say, oh my gosh, you're a political scientist. You must be having the time of your life. Honestly, it doesn't feel like that.

President Gregory Washington (00:38:27):

Jeremy Mayer (00:38:27):
Because I got into this loving these institutions and I very much fear they're on fire.

President Gregory Washington (00:38:34):
Some of them are, but not, you mentioned something both of you, and I wanna go back to it. You talked about these four institutions and how they're in trouble. And you mentioned education relative to cost, right? Again, there is perception which are real, and that is the real perception of many Americans. But then there's truth, right? If you take the privates out, which in my opinion there's far too much discussion on institutions who serve far too few Americans, okay? I literally can take most of the Ivy League and put it in George Mason, most of the whole Ivy League. I'm not talking one institution, I'm talking Harvard, I'm talking Yale, I'm talking Dartmouth, I'm talking Brown. I can take all of those institutions and put 'em in Mason and still serve more students. Okay? I just wanna make sure you get an idea of scale here.

President Gregory Washington (00:39:32):
And we're one single public, right? Most of our Americans are being educated in public institutions, and the average public debt, the average debt of students graduating from a public institution is about 30,000 dollars. I mean, not a year, about 30,000, okay? You can't tell me what big ticket item can you buy for that price, right? And if I go back and look over the last 10 years, the growth in public higher education cost is around inflation. It's not actually much higher than inflation at all. And debt over the last 10 years has actually gone down for public higher ed, not, uh, that's the way the majority of Americans are educated, but that's not the discussion. And so...

Jennifer Victor (00:40:22):
Let's go back to your point about perception, though. So I, I'm, I'm here to listen to you evangelize higher education all day long. That's my cup of tea. However, I think for a lot of folks, they're looking at what happened, you know, in the, the middle and latter part of the 20th century where people could get a summer job and earn enough wages to pay tuition at the local public school for the upcoming year. And that's just not possible anymore, right? Even at George Mason, the percentage of the overall budget of the university that comes from the state today is significantly smaller than it was 50 years ago, right? Like the whole value proposition where government is supporting this public good of higher education has just been compromised. It's been practically demolished over the last couple of generations. And it means that higher education is more inaccessible to more people and more and more people are apparently hostile to even the idea of higher education and not seeing that the value is worth it. And I think that's a huge shame because I think everybody's better off.

President Gregory Washington (00:41:32):
I, right? No, no, I get it.

Jennifer Victor (00:41:34):
Better off raising all that.

President Gregory Washington (00:41:36):
I get it. But it's all a perception. It doesn't match the data, it doesn't match the facts. We have a perception problem in higher ed, and I could, this is not a discussion on that, but you've given me an idea. I need to do a podcast on this issue and I will. But the reality is that in all of those factors value what you're getting out rather than what you put in, salaries after graduation, and the like, and debt all favor public higher ed. They don't necessarily favor privates, but it actually all favors publics.

President Gregory Washington (00:42:11):
You all have highlighted a couple of things that I do want to steer us in a direction to talk about. There are a couple of programs coming out of both of your orgs that I want you to talk about. I want you to talk about the outcomes of those programs relative to what we saw in the election. And so, Jeremy, you have your class on political polarization, right? Where you looked at exit polls in three Fairfax precincts. Have you been able to take a look at that data and talk about what you found out relative to how people were voting in what their feelings are in terms of the candidates and the politics?

Jeremy Mayer (00:42:49):
Sure. So we ran exit polls in these three precincts and Fairfax, we selected them because they were bellwethers of how Virginia voted in 2020. What that means is the outcome in these three precincts was within one percentage point of the statewide outcome for Biden/Trump in 2020. And we thought that'd be a good predictor. It's an old method, you know, modern exit polls, they would cover many, many precincts all over the state if they wanted to call it. But we did what we could. And what we found is polarization. So these precincts which had mirrored the statewide outcome were now 15 points overestimating Biden's support because they were blue precincts. And so the hatred for Trump went deeper in those areas. The polarized people. We found the ones that hated Trump and loved Harris. That was one of our definitions. If you actually chose to say you hate Trump, they tended to be many more Democrats than Republicans.

Jeremy Mayer (00:43:46):
The Republicans that we had in those precincts tended to be the more moderate non haters. And so we got the whole state wrong. We really thought that Trump would not do even as well as he did in 2020. And in fact, we missed the surge nationwide and statewide for Trump. But I do think that our results taught the students a great deal about how exit polls work. And also when we look back at our refusers, one of the reason we got it wrong, and one of the reasons I think the polls still are systematically wrong is our refusers look more like Trump voters. And one of the reasons the polls were systematically wrong towards, uh, or against Trump is I think because his people tend to just hate academics, hate the media, and choose not to participate.

President Gregory Washington (00:44:32):
But they vote.

Jeremy Mayer (00:44:34):
But they vote.

President Gregory Washington (00:44:36):
So Jennifer, your research project, "The Choice is Yours", work with volunteers from the First-Year Democracy Lab, residential learning community to uncover the most effective way to promote greater voter turnout in the 18 to 24 demographic. Do we have any data on how that demographic turned out in this election? And what are your findings?

Jennifer Victor (00:45:02):
We don't have the data about the campus turnout overall yet because people can vote in lots of different states and it'll take us a while. But I'm, I'm really excited to talk about this project a bit. So this is my third year and I'll be rotating off next year. So I won't do this again next year. This has been my third year running the Democracy Lab, which is this first year residential learning community of all government students. They live in the same dorm and I do academic programming for them. And we do one of these projects each year around student voting and under questions, research questions related to voting. In Virginia, we run elections every year. So it's pretty easy.

President Gregory Washington (00:45:36):
Every year.

Jennifer Victor (00:45:37):
And in the previous one year we did a panel wave survey. Last year we did an experi field experiment design. And this year we implemented some of what we've learned and now we're doing a post-election survey. So what we learned last year is we randomized classrooms into either classrooms that got email encouragement to their students for voting, or a in-person presentation from our students who would come and talk about voting or they were in a control group and they got none of these things. And what we found was that the students who were in the classrooms that got the in-person presentation were 11 points more likely to vote than the email group or the control group. So it was really a much larger effect than we even anticipated. Of course, the downside of this is it means if we want to encourage, uh, voting on campus, we can't just email kids and hope that they will turn out to vote. We really got to, you know, press the shoe leather and talk to people. Conversations are, are really what it's about.

Jennifer Victor (00:46:36):
So this year what we did is we took that finding to heart and I had 75 students, 50 Democracy lab students and another 25 student volunteers that we called Mason Voting Ambassadors. And in coordination with the local chapter of the League of Women Voters, the provost office, through their office of Community Engagement and Civic Learning, and through Housing and Residential Life, the Mason Votes Organization, all of these units were coordinated. We had a Monday morning quarterbacking call every morning for the last, for the two months, three months before the election starting in August in which we all got coordinated. And we got these Mason voting ambassadors into as many classrooms as possible. So they talked to thousands of students, they gave dozens and dozens of presentations. There was tabling, there was voter registration, there was just this all out campus effort towards getting students to vote. And what we found was really remarkable. So if you look at the turnout data across the state of Virginia, every single county in Virginia had lower turnout in 2024 than they did in 2020.

Jennifer Victor (00:47:38):
Every single county. Actually the turnout was more down in democratic leaning counties than in Republican leaning counties. You can already see that sort of swing just in the turnout data. In Fairfax County, there's 22 or something like that, precincts across Fairfax County. Again, every single county had lower turnout on average lower turnout in 24 relative to to 2020. And on average, Fairfax County precincts were down nine points. But as you know, there is a voting precinct on George Mason's campus in Merten Hall, and we were pushing students to register to be able to vote at that voting precinct. And that voting precinct, yes, had lower turnout, but it only had one percentage point down lower turnout. It was one point lower, whereas all the rest of the county was on average nine points lower. So that to me says our efforts to encourage Mason students to vote had an eight point impact. We did eight points better than we would have in terms of voter turnout at Merten Hall at that particular precinct than we would have in the absence of this effort we put together.

President Gregory Washington (00:48:40):
Wow, that's amazing. . So a year from now, Virginians will return to the polls to elect, among other things, a new governor, right? How do you hope the work that both of you have been involved in will influence how candidates approach our demographic, our young people?

Jennifer Victor (00:49:03):
Oh, you asked a totally different question than I thought you were gonna ask .

President Gregory Washington (00:49:06):
Yep. .

Jennifer Victor (00:49:10):
So historically, the pattern of politics in Virginia is whichever candidate, whichever political party wins the White House in the presidential election year. The other party wins the governor's mansion in Virginia the following year. So Donald Trump Republicans won the White House this year. That means, uh, ostensibly the Democrats will have an edge in the election. So there's this typical sort of anti-party swing in Virginia. It's very much looking like highly likely that Abigail Spanberger will be the Democratic party nominee for governor in Virginia. So she'll be out in force and campaigning and she will certainly focus attention on Northern Virginia because there's a lot of democratic votes to be won here. You basically can't win as a democratic candidate in Virginia if you don't get a strong turnout from Northern Virginia. So I do expect, uh, she'll probably be on campus, uh, in the fall, if not even in the spring.

Jennifer Victor (00:50:02):
What message will she be bringing to our students? I don't know. But I do hope our students bring their A-game and ask the tough questions about how ��AV can get parity from the legislature in terms of funding relative to some other publics in the state, such as the flagship down there in Charlottesville. I hope that, you know, they ask her questions about campus safety and keeping tuition down and maybe they've got questions about gender and, and sports. I, I don't really know exactly what issues are of greatest concern to our students, but I know that they've got strong voices and I expect that they will bring them, uh, to the candidate and to whoever the Republican candidate is too, of course.

President Gregory Washington (00:50:46):
Alright. Jeremy?

Jeremy Mayer (00:50:48):
So I don't think there is much in my project that will help us predict how next year will go, but I agree with Jennifer that Virginia has that traditional role of going against the national tide. I think the question for the Republicans of Virginia is, do they look for another Youngkin who had that foot in establishment Republican politics and a foot in the Trump world. And he never, I mean, no one in America played that better because it's so easy to offend Trump if you don't embrace him. And it's so easy to get hit by Trump fire if you're too close to him. And Youngkin is a great politician and we'll see if the Republicans try to find another one or if they go with a fully Trumpy kind of candidate. If they go full Trump, I would expect the Democrats will have a much easier time beating them.

President Gregory Washington (00:51:41):
Wow, that's amazing. Let's, as, as we, as we wrap up here, I, I want to talk about some fringe, more fringe type issues because you actually saw less of this influence in this election, but you're seeing a greater influence on the backend. And this is this whole deal about third parties, right? You always have this gaggle of young people talking about third parties, the Green Party, the Libertarian Party, so forth and so on. That wasn't as big of a push this to go around, was it? Or this whole deal with RFK, is it? It's RFK, it is RFK, right? ?

Jennifer Victor (00:52:25):
Yeah, definitely.

President Gregory Washington (00:52:26):
He was a third party candidate that then threw his support behind Trump and now is a nominee for a major secretary. Help me to understand how all of that, you know, what happened to third parties in this election and what's happening in the aftermath.

Jeremy Mayer (00:52:45):
So polarization is really hurting third parties. So many of the partisans on the left or the right are Democrats not 'cause they love the Democrats, they're Democrats 'cause they hate Republicans. And even more so on their Republican party side, they just literally think the Democrats are demonic communists. And when you think that way, you're unlikely to take a gamble on a third party, either the Libertarians or some other right wing or on the left the Greens. So that's sucking the lifeblood out of third parties. What's working in third party's favor though is that Americans are so sick of the polarization that we've created so that there is this opportunity for something like the No Labels movement to come along and rise up and for a brief shining moment be non-polarized the way Macron in France and his first campaign was above the standard debate in politics, but No Labels didn't make it to November in part because the Democrats did a very good job of making sure no credible Democrat entered in and took the nomination. So, there's a lawsuit now about that. We'll see where that goes. There is an opportunity for third parties in American politics given how unhappy we all are, but polarization works against them.

Jennifer Victor (00:54:04):
I agree with that. I would add that really what we're seeing is textbook, it's exactly what we would expect to see in how third parties operate in US politics. The dominance of the two party system in America is not driven by whether or not you've got quality candidates or quality alternatives coming out of these third party movements. It's driven by the way we run elections, the election rules. Any system that has majority rule wins for special post elections and single member districts. So we elect one member of Congress per congressional district to the house for example. Any system that has those two features tends to have two political parties. It's like a theorem in in political science, right? Duverger's law, we call it. And what happens is when third parties arise in one of these systems, one of the two dominant parties, one winds up incorporating whatever that movement is into their dominant coalition.

Jennifer Victor (00:55:01):
They just suck up all the air in the room and they, they sort of eat them up. We're seeing some of that, you know, the way that, like you mentioned RFK Jr., he sort of wound up getting sucked up into the, the Trump side of the movement this year. One thing though that I think we can see as potentially, we need to wait for more data to come out, potential impact of some third party influence in this past election comes at more regional or local levels, right? So the whole two party thing, two party rule I just described works, but it doesn't always work on the national scale. It works really well at the local level. Um, makes a lot of sense at the local level. So where you go, for example in Canada you've got a Quebecois, you know, regionalist movement that acts as a third party spoiler in some Canadian elections.

Jennifer Victor (00:55:46):
But still in most places it's still two parties. It's just that the Quebecois is one of the parties, uh, that that dominates. Right? So, but if you go in this past election to some places in Michigan, I think we're gonna find that there were a bunch of Michiganders who were super disappointed, who were democratic identifying and were very disappointed in the Biden administration's policy on Israel and Netanyahu and the war. And who either stayed home or voted third party voted for Jill Stein. And I don't think any of that was enough to spoil Michigan or to turn the election or whatever. I do think that it shows that there are instances where third parties can have a significant impact in a regional or local way.

President Gregory Washington (00:56:30):
Understood. Understood. Well rapid fire as we wrap up rapid fire. So I'm gonna ask one question to you Jennifer and one question to you 'cause I got so many that I can ask Jennifer. What do you think President Biden's final weeks in office will look like?

Jennifer Victor (00:56:47):
Well, so I'll just go based on history. What we usually see presidents get involved in doing a few pardons. So we'll probably see a few of those. I expect we'll see some movement on some creating national monuments, national land kind of stuff. We saw that previously, like when Obama was leaving office. I expect he's going to try to solidify some of the things that we expect the Trump administration to do in terms of making it harder for the new incoming Trump administration to, for example, reduce the federal workforce, eliminate uh, particular departments and so on and so forth. I think the Biden administration is gonna try to tick as many boxes off of their to-do list, get as many of their waiting appointments as through as possible and run through that finish line at the end.

President Gregory Washington (00:57:33):
Okay. So Jeremy, what do you think the Trump administration's first moves will be as soon as he gets in office in January?

Jeremy Mayer (00:57:44):
So this is going to be a very different Trump administration. It's been a very, very different transition. It is a confident Trump. He was uncertain the last time he won in 2016. This time it's moving very, very fast and releasing very unusual names that show Trump's confidence. I expect that to continue into his first couple months. He's not going to have the breaks that he had before, the defense secretaries and the chiefs of staff who were either mainstream Republicans or mainstream national security people. He's going to have his own people. And so I expect him to move in a radical way on mass deportation. I expect him to move in a radical way on imposing tariffs, even in violation of treaties that he negotiated. So, uh, buckle up. It's gonna be Trump Unbound

President Gregory Washington (00:58:37):
. Alright, well I think I'm gonna have to leave it there. Jennifer Victor, Jeremy Mayer. Thank you. This is, I wish I had two sessions on this 'cause there are at least 10 questions I did not get to.

Jennifer Victor (00:58:55):
Come to class, man.

President Gregory Washington (00:58:57):
Come to class. Exactly. You know, a a a big part of this is for the others who are not here with us who need to get at, you know, get the wisdom that you two bring.

Jennifer Victor (00:59:13):
They're welcome in my class too.

President Gregory Washington (00:59:15):
Alright, well you might see some of 'em show up after hearing this, but thank you both. Thank you for your time. I know we're right before the Thanksgiving break. Thank you for giving us some of your time and happy Thanksgiving to you and your families.

Jeremy Mayer (00:59:30):
To you as well. Thank you for having us.

Jennifer Victor (00:59:33):
Much gratitude. Thanks very much.

President Gregory Washington (00:59:35):
Alright. I am Mason President Gregory Washington saying thanks for listening. And tune in next time for more conversations that show why we are All Together, Different.

Outro (00:59:51):
If you like what you heard on this podcast, go to podcast.gmu.edu for more of Gregory Washington's conversations with the thought leaders, experts, and educators who take on the grand challenges facing our students, graduates, and higher education. That's podcast.gmu.edu.

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In This Story

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Podcast — EP 62: What are the chances of intelligent life beyond Earth?

Sarah Holland — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 14:49:37 +0000

Podcast — EP 62: What are the chances of intelligent life beyond Earth? Sarah Holland Mon, 11/18/2024 - 09:49

Photo by Evan Cantwell/Office of University Branding

Since putting the first man on the Moon in 1969, scientists have continued to push our knowledge and understanding of life and existence in vast unknown frontiers of space. Whether through Mars colonies or alien life forms, we're all wondering what and who can survive beyond Earth's atmospheres.

In this episode of Access to Excellence, associate professor of computational and data sciences Anamaria Berea discusses her research on Mars settlements and Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon as she and President Gregory Washington debate the question on everyone’s mind: is there life beyond Earth?

^{"So we have an unidentified phenomenon, so it might be a new physical or atmospheric phenomenon that we haven't discovered yet, right? Because we don't know everything in science right now. Until we can actually scientifically analyze these, it's really difficult for us to say: what are these things? And we cannot say that only based on public opinion or allegations. We do need rigorous scientific studies so that we can turn that unidentified into identified."}

Read the Transcript

Intro:

President Gregory Washington: Trailblazers in research, innovators in technology, and those who simply have a good story: all make up the fabric that is ��AV. We're taking on the grand challenges that face our students, graduates, and higher education is our mission and our passion. Hosted by Mason President Gregory Washington, this is the Access to Excellence podcast.

President Gregory Washington: President Gregory Washington:

Anamaria Berea: Since putting the first man on the Moon in 1969, scientists have continued to push our knowledge and understanding of life and existence in vast unknown frontiers of space. Whether through Mars colonies or alien life forms, we're all wondering what and who can survive beyond Earth's atmospheres. Joining me today is someone who's working to unravel the mysteries of life beyond Earth, both human and otherwise. Anamaria Berea is an associate professor of computational and data sciences, researching the emergence of communications and fundamental patterns of communication in both living and non-living systems. Anamaria has worked with NASA and others to help humanity boldly go where no man or woman has gone before. Anamaria, welcome to the show.