11.04.19 / Just 364 days to go!

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SEAN RAMESWARAM (host): You know that election you keep hearing about? The one that decides whether or not Donald Trump gets another four years? And all those Democrats who want to run against him? Well, the good news is it’s officially just one year away now!

        SOUND EFFECT: Celebration

SEAN: Less good news is we still don’t really have any idea who’s running against Donald Trump on November 3rd, 2020.

TARA GOLSHAN (Vox reporter): We have no idea.

                SOUND EFFECT: sad horns

SEAN: Before I asked Tara Golshan at Vox to explain what we do know about the Democractic field, we took a moment to remember all those who have passed…. out of the race.

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TARA: Eric Swalwell was the first to drop out. He's the congressman from California who is probably best known for being on the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees that have done a lot of the investigations into Trump. But he also saw very early on that he was not going to be president.

<CLIP> CONGRESSMAN ERIC SWALWELL: It’s time to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans.  

SEAN: OK, who came after Eric?

TARA: And there was Mike Gravel. 

SEAN: Who?

TARA: Was the very, very old man from Alaska, former senator from Alaska.

SEAN: I don't remember this. Did he make a debate?

TARA: He did not make a debate. His candidacy was actually propped up by a bunch of teenagers.

<CLIP> CAMPAIGN MANAGER DAVID OKS: We joke that our goal is to make Bernie Sanders look boring and moderate and young.

TARA: He didn't make it on the debate stage, but his presence was felt.

SEAN: Well, we wish him all the best. Who came after that?

TARA: Then there was John Hickenlooper...

SEAN: Hickenlooper!

TARA: ...of Colorado. He really famously said he would never run for Senate or maybe he didn't say he'd never run for it. But he really like shit on being a senator.

<CLIP> FORMER COLORADO GOVERNOR JOHN HICKENLOOPER: Being a Senator would be meaningful, but I’d hate it.

 TARA: And now he's running for Senate in Colorado.

SEAN: Mmm. That makes sense.

TARA: Yeah, he is a really good chance winning.

SEAN: Okay.

TARA: And then Jay Inslee.

SEAN: Inslee! The environment!

TARA: He kind of became like the patron saint of climate change in the Democratic Party.

<CLIP> WASHINGTON STATE GOVERNOR JAY INSLEE: The time is up, our house is on fire, we have to stop using coal in ten years and we need a President to do it or it won’t get done.  

SEAN: He's got a cabinet position for sure.

TARA: Oh, yeah, definitely.

SEAN: If.

TARA: Well, yeah, we'll we'll see.

SEAN: OK. What is he going to do next? Do we know?

TARA: He is running for reelection as governor.

SEAN: Perfect. So that's a nice consolation prize.

TARA: Yeah.

SEAN: After Inslee. I know he wasn't the last one.

TARA: He was not. Seth Moulton.

SEAN: Seth. Yeah.

TARA: Yeah.

SEAN: Kinda? No which one was he again?

TARA: Seth Moulton is one that's kind of like centrist Democrats — House representative from Massachusetts. And yeah, he was vocal in his opposition to Nancy Pelosi. He lost that fight, obviously, and also lost the race for the presidency.

SEAN: When do we get to de Blasio?

TARA: We're not there yet.

TARA: Then we have Kirsten Gillibrand.

SEAN: Oh, no, RIP Gillibrand!

TARA: Yeah. And it was kind of surprising that she didn't make a bigger splash in the race, but she is really well known for her work around the #MeToo movement in the Senate.

<CLIP> SENATOR KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND: If our party is going to punish women who stand up for other women, then we are absolutely going in the wrong direction.

TARA: She couldn't really make a mark on the presidential trail, so she'd dropped out.

SEAN: Hmmm. Rough.

TARA: Now we're at Mayor Bill de Blasio.

<CLIP> NEW YORK CITY MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO: Donald Trump is playing a big con on America, I call him Con Don.

SEAN: What happened to him? He couldn’t make the money? I read about that one.

TARA: Yeah. He couldn't make the money. He also just wasn't polling very well. And the narrative around him was that everybody didn't like him. So.

<CLIP> ABC ANCHOR GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: There is a new poll about a month ago, Quinnipiac poll that showed 76% of New York voters, 73% of New York Democrats say you shouldn’t run. So what should the rest of the country think, when so many of your fellow New Yorkers are saying, ‘Don’t run.’

TARA: And then comes Tim Ryan,. 

SEAN: Tim Ryan, Congressman Tim Ryan.

TARA: Congressman Tim Ryan. 

SEAN: Made it to some debates.

TARA: Made it to some debate.

SEAN: Kind of a moderate flavor.

TARA: Yes. Moderate flavor. A very feisty against a Medicare for All like you to kind of go after Warren and Sanders. He also was the person who tried to oust Nancy Pelosi and ran for speaker. Also failed at that, also failed at the presidential thing.

SEAN: And finally on Friday, our boy Beto dropped out of the race. 

TARA: Yeah Beto dropped out on Friday.

<CLIP> FORMER CONGRESSMAN BETO O'ROURKE: … and those 38 electoral college votes in Texas are now in play and I can win them. That is how we defeat Donald Trump in November of 2020 and how we bring this divided country together again in January of 2021.

SEAN: What happened?

TARA: He just couldn’t raise the same amount of money and he couldn’t poll as well as everyone else and it just ended for him.

SEAN: Will he run for the Senate in Texas like everyone wants him to?

TARA: He has said so many times he is not going to run for the senate.

SEAN: It was just less than a year ago that he wanted to be there.

TARA: That is true, but there are also a lot of other candidates in the race.

SEAN: Fair. Tara, Thank you for going through that with me. RIP to all of those candidates. The great news is they’re still alive.

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SEAN: Who does that leave in the race? Still a whole lotta people right?

TARA: They're 17 candidates.

SEAN: Seventeen, all of those people are out and there are 17 left.

TARA: There are 17 candidates left.

SEAN: Okay, well let me just pull up a list here so I don’t get it wrong…. We’ve got Bennett. Williamson. Yang, Biden. Booker. Bullock. Butigieg. Castro. Delaney. Gabbard. Harris. Klobuchar. Messam. Sanders. Steyer. Warren. Is that all of them? Did I get all of them?

TARA: You forgot Joe Sestak.

SEAN: Who didn't forget Joe Sestak?

TARA: He just walked across the state of New Hampshire.

SEAN: <laughs> That's why we forgot him, ‘cause he was walking.

TARA: It's a great move. Power move.

SEAN: Alright. Seventeen people. Who are the front runners? Same old, same old?

TARA: I think it's fair to say at this point that three candidates have consistently been polling at the top. And that's Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Senator Bernie Sanders.

SEAN: How has this Ukraine drama affected the candidacy of Joe Biden? Has it? Can we see anything discernible?

TARA: I wouldn't say that I’ve seen anything particularly notable in the national polls, he’s still polling ahead of everybody else, he’s still doing well in head-to-head polls against Trump, but there are still some warning signs. Like we saw a recent poll in the state of Iowa, obviously the first race, very important for candidates to prove that they are viable candidates and he came in fourth there.

SEAN: Fourth?

TARA: Fourth.

SEAN: Fourth to Warren, Sanders and…

TARA: Pete Buttigieg

SEAN: Wow. I hear his campaign coffers are much lower than they should be, too.

TARA: That is something that is noteworthy, is that he has had to go to these fundraisers and kind of explain why people shouldn't worry about this. And of course, that is something that that's different than the other candidates that you have to tell your donors, hey, don't worry about this. I'm still electable. The scandal won't destroy my candidacy. Just keep giving me money. This was in the news recently because his campaign is opening the doors to having super PACs. And that's something that we've seen a lot of Democratic candidates really balk at.

<CLIP> SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS: You know when billionaires and wealthy people contribute they are not doing it out of the goodness of their heart. They want something. And that is one of the great problems in American society.

SEAN: Bernard! How’s Senator Sanders doing post-heart attack?

TARA: So in the last three months, he raised twenty five point three million dollars with more than a million donors. So he reached that record faster than everybody else. I mean, Warren was a close second. She she raked in twenty four point six million dollars. But noticeably, Biden was far behind that. He raised 10 million less than them in the third quarter.

SEAN: Hmm. Plus, Bernie got that AOC endorsement!

<CLIP> CONGRESSWOMAN ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: We right now have one of the best Democratic Presidential primary fields in a generation, and much of that is thanks to the work that Bernie Sanders has done in his entire life.

 SEAN: So what effect does that endorsement had on his campaign? Anything?

TARA: It shows that the progressive wing of the party and the most famous face of the progressive movement is still behind Bernie Sanders. There's been this whole debate about whether Bernie should still be the face of the progressive movement. You have someone like Elizabeth Warren, who has the credibility among progressives, has a very progressive track record and policy platform. But still, people like AOC. People like Ilhan Omar. People like Rashida Talib are going for Bernie Sanders. And that does strengthen his appeal on the left.

SEAN: But Elizabeth Warren doesn't seem to be hurting as a result.

TARA: Elizabeth Warren has just consistently been going up in the polls. She kind of just sits in that tied for first/second place in the polls consistently. And that's a huge change for her from from when she first got in.

SEAN: What about everyone else? What are the other fourteen candidates doing? Anything interesting?

TARA: I think there are definitely candidates that people expected to be doing better than they're doing. Candidates like Kamala Harris, who last week her campaign had to announce that they had to make budget cuts. She was perceived as someone who could be the front runner and the nominee for the Democratic Party. And now there are questions around whether or not that's going to be possible. And then there are candidates like Pete Buttigieg, who had this kind of early rise when he announced his candidacy, had this like huge media cycle, was just everywhere. You couldn't open a newspaper or a website without seeing articles about Pete Buttigieg, and then he kind of had a slump where he wasn't in the headlines as much and he wasn't kind of registering as much support. And now we've kind of seen him come back, especially in early states like Iowa, where he is having a significant showing. 

SEAN: OK, so it's a long road ahead. A whole year. But we do start to get into primary season in just a few months. Is that when we'll actually find out who this candidate will be?

TARA: So in February, the Iowa caucuses will happen. And then we'll very quickly go into New Hampshire and Nevada and South Carolina and the Super Tuesday states. And at that point, we will have a better idea of who is going to be able to rack up enough delegates to be the nominee in the Democratic primary. At this point, the polls are very much so just a snapshot in time of now. And if you talk to any pollster who's tracking this, there are a lot of undecided voters and that's typical, going into Election Day people decide in the final weeks. So we're still kind of months away from when voters really are kind of coming down to the nitty gritty of who they're going to vote for. That said, we might find out a little bit earlier next year who's going to be the nominee because states like California are much earlier in the calendar. So that's a lot of delegates that are going to be decided a lot earlier. And that could really make or break candidacies for people.

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TARA: If you look back at past elections in 2008, for example, Hillary Clinton was leading a Democratic primary at this point and Barack Obama obviously was the candidate. Rudy Giuliani was leading again, he was not ever the nominee.

SEAN: But when will we know finally when? When will all the candidates come out and I don’t know, Elizabeth Warren’s husband plays with balloons at, at the Democratic National Convention?  

TARA: July.

SEAN: July.

TARA: July of 2020. 

SEAN: Yeesh.

TARA: Yeah.

SEAN: Okay. <laughs> Can't wait.

TARA: Can't wait.

SEAN: After the break, Ezra Klein ponders what these Democrats need to do to beat Donald Trump. This is Today, Explained.

[MIDROLL]

SEAN: Ezra, we spent the first half of this show talking about the Democrats and where they stand right now one year away from this election. And I just wonder, where does Donald Trump stand right now with the American people? What are his approval ratings?

EZRA KLEIN (Vox Editor at Large): What's extraordinary is Donald Trump stands exactly where he has stood more or less has for the entire time of his presidency. We have never had a president in the post-World War Two period who has been as stable and as nonvolatile in approval ratings. His lowest, I think, is around 37, as high as round 44, 45. So, you know, he's in the upper range, but he's been there for quite a while. And I think the big note there is we've had a lot of stories happening recently, right, in Ukraine, impeachment, Baghdadi and even as those filter into the ratings. Nothing's happening, which is to say people have decided if they like Donald Trump or not. And nothing that they're learning or have learned over the past couple of years seems to have changed that underlying structure of opinion in any real way.

SEAN: I can imagine the people who support Donald Trump are unwavering in their support because things like the Mueller probe and and Ukraine and, “Send her back!” and even “Good people on both sides,” don't really get in the way of appointing Supreme Court justices, which he's done, or tax cuts for the rich, which he's done. But what about stuff like the wall? I mean, he hasn't accomplished that in over two years of his presidency. Does that not affect him in some way?

EZRA: Polling is always hard to get to the heart of what people really think. Right. We only have this number and it is an imperfect summation of people's views. But I suspect that on something like the wall, the way Donald Trump supporters understand that, is not that Donald Trump is not built the wall, but that the lame stream media, the failing New York Times, the do-nothing Democrats have stopped Donald Trump from building the wall. And there he is out there fighting on their behalf, trying to get the wall built. And he's at war with deep state and the swamp and everyone else. I mean Donald Trump, I think, typically does not get blamed for a lot of what he does. It's why I think one of the few things it did appear to hurt him was the House Republican health care bill, because that was something where Donald Trump during the campaign, he promised he would not cut Medicaid. He promise he would give everyone better health insurance. And then he signed on to this bill. He signed on. He supported this bill written by Paul Ryan that would have taken health insurance away from tens of millions of people. That would not have been better for people, that would not have protected preexisting conditions. It would have cut Medicaid very dramatically. So that was a moment where the ability to say Donald Trump is being stopped by others and that is why he is not doing what he promised evaporated. And you had to say, ‘Oh, Donald Trump is actually just betraying his promise.’ And that seemed to have an effect. It's why when you talk to Democrats, they want to run against Donald Trump's embrace of more traditional Republican policies on health care and the economy and tax cuts and other things; they don't so much want to run against the craziness of ‘ The Trump Show’ — the tweets, the eccentric behavior, because to them, the people who don't like him for those reasons already don't like him. The place we can find new allies and new votes are in the people who there's a dissonance between what they wanted Donald Trump to do and what he has been doing. And it's in Donald Trump's embrace of the traditional conservative agenda that you can begin to open up that wedge.

SEAN: Is it unusual for a president to have such steady approval ratings? Or did Obama have a 30-40 percent margin that he could just never lose no matter what he did?

EZRA: It is unusual. And there a couple reasons is unusual. So one is that Obama, for instance, had much bigger swings around his early honeymoon period, right? Very high approval ratings, which Donald Trump never had. And there are some bigger swings around things like killing Osama bin Laden, but it is also true that most of the time Obama was in a fairly narrow band. So if you looked at the course of his presidency, you would see a larger potential variation. But if you looked at any given month, you would not see a huge difference from where Donald Trump is. Obama was somewhat more popular than Trump, and he was somewhat more popular than Trump amidst a much worse economy, which suggests to me that Trump is underperforming his potential approval ratings quite dramatically. The thing I'd say about Donald Trump's approval ratings in the big picture is that he is in a condition right now where he should be quite strong. He has a pretty good economy. Unemployment is quite low. Historically, we have had steady job growth. We've had steady GDP growth. We've had, even in the last year or two, reasonable wage growth. So that plus the fact that we are not currently embroiled in a huge new war, I think one of the good things I will say about Donald Trump is he did not take the advice of any of in his administration and try to go to war with Iran. You could imagine a president in these conditions at 55 percent, not 70 percent, given the structure, partisan polarization, but sure 55. The fact that he is at 42 speaks to the effect that his own unusual behavior, his tweeting, his fights, his just eccentricities, his recklessness. It speaks to the fact that he's not Teflon, that that has imposed a cost, a penalty on his approval ratings. And the thing I always think about Donald Trump is that he did not win in 2016 by much. He did not win the popular vote at all. And even Pennsylvania you would have had to change about 40,000 votes for Donald Trump to lose too. And so it was such a close election. And the demographic trends are sufficiently in Democrats’ favor that Trump to get reelected in 2020, he doesn't need to match his performance in 2016. He needs to do better than it. And there is no evidence in his polling that he has expanded his base. 

SEAN: A thing I tend to think about from time to time is that people exist in this country who voted for Barack Obama and then, several years later, voted for Donald Trump — which I guess often amazes people outside of this country. How do the Democrats win those particular voters back?

EZRA: So there's a huge amount of research now and attention on this quite small percentage of voters who switched from Obama to Trump, and particularly in some of these Midwest states. My read of that research overall suggests that in general, these were voters who were reasonably high in what social scientist called racial resentment. And you might say, well, how could they elect Barack Obama then? And the answer is that feeling away about a group of people doesn't always drive how you feel about one person. Obama did a lot of work to calm white anxieties, to sort of appear to people as somebody who was operating outside of some traditional enmities, you could kind of feel like you're getting past some of that. When Hillary Clinton then ran a much more explicit campaign arguing, you know, in favor of Black Lives Matter, talking about systematic racism and systemic racism on the campaign trail, those voters who are higher in racial resentment and have more intensely negative views about immigration went over to Donald Trump. I do not know how winnable they are. If you talk to a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, what they will tell you is that those voters are upset by Washington support for free trade deals. They weren't helped enough by Democratic policies over the past 10 years and a more unvarnished form of economic populism will win them back. If you talk to Joe Biden, what he won't quite tell you, but I think what is believed to be true there is Uncle Joe is a sort of older white guy, comforting figure. These folks believe he's on their side, like maybe the move over to him. I think that it is a mistake for Democrats to think about this all in terms of winning the last war. They'll probably get a cut of some of these people back and by running a different campaign and running a more popular candidate than Hillary Clinton. They can get some of them back, but they also would've won the election if African-American turnout had been at the levels it was under Barack Obama. That's probably very hard to reconstitute. But it's not necessarily impossible. Parties rarely come back from a defeat in the way you expect them to. So after 2004, there was this huge belief the Democrats had lost white evangelical heartland voters. And, you know, maybe they'd become too open to gay marriage or they were too socially liberal. And, you know, John Kerry was an effete, you know, French-speaking, windsurfing, et cetera, et cetera. And there is this whole discourse in Democratic Party about becoming more culturally conservative and economically populist. And then who actually wins? It's an African American guy with a middle name ‘Hussein’ from Chicago, right?

SEAN: Right.

EZRA: Like that was not anywhere in the theory. But that's what they did. So I suspect that if Democrats win in 2020, it will not be because they managed to sort of reverse engineer Donald Trump's victory. But they bet that they nominated a candidate who, in being themselves an exciting, interesting, unique political force, created their own political dynamics that Donald Trump had to respond to and was not quite able to.

SEAN: And what do you think that dynamic should be?

EZRA: I don’t know...I think that what's really important is that Democrats do not just run as anti Trump. I think that the Democrats need to have a vision and a theory and an inspirational charge of their own. And if they don't have that, that creates a lot of space for Trump to dominate the conversation. I think the biggest mistake Democrats could make would be to be constantly reactive to whatever grenade Donald Trump is lobbed on Twitter that morning. I mean, if you look in 2008, I would not say that what Barack Obama ran on was an extraordinarily ambitious policy agenda. It was ambitious in the way the presidential initiatives are ambitious. But he himself represented something in politics that excited people. He ran on a theory of how politics could be, how it could look, how we could relate to each other, how we could fix it. And that generated a momentum that really reshaped American politics for eight years. And I think that what Democrats are going to need to do is to not just sit around clapping back on Donald Trump, but have something that in its ambition, in its intensity, in its controversy, sets the conversation on their terms.

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EZRA: One of the only times Donald Trump is actually reactive to Democrats is when he is arguing against their socialism. It's one of the only times he responds. And so the ways in which I think particularly Warren and Sanders are able to use big, ambitious policies to set the agenda such that it's at least a conversation happening on their terms. I think that's powerful. I think some the other candidates are able to do it in some other ways sometimes. But certainly they're the two who've been able to set the terms of Democratic debate. And I think that as a meta level of the campaign, being able to set the terms of the debate is a genuinely important qualification for the Democrat in 2020.

SEAN: Ezra Klein is the host of Impeachment, Explained — a brand new weekly podcast from Vox. It drops every weekend and you can find it in your favorite podcast app right now.

Today, Explained is proudly putting on our first live show EVER this week! And we’re doing it in Toronto, Canada. We’re gonna talk about the huge year of wins and some disappointing losses the country’s had. And I’ll be joined on stage by some really sharp Canadians, including a dude I used to watch on the TV growing up, George Stroumboulopoulos. The show’s this Saturday and you can find tickets at podcasts dot vox media dot com slash events.

Today, Explained is produced in association with Stitcher and we’re part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

I’m Sean Rameswaram. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. Brigid McCarthy, Amina Al-Sadi, Haleema Shah and Noam Hassenfeld make the show. Noam also makes music.

The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder makes even more music. Oliva Exstrum has been checking facts. And Jared Paul has been engineering for Efim Shapiro this week.

More tomorrow. Ciao for now!