[EAI Online Seminar] COVID-19 and the New World Order 1. American Democracy at a Crossroads: The 2020 US Presidential Election is Not Just About Trump vs. Biden

YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2v6W-uVEMg

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The East Asia Institute (EAI) hosted "Prospects for the 2020 US Election" as the first session in its online seminar series, "COVID-19 and the New World Order." The upcoming US presidential election is highly unpredictable, not only due to the close contest between candidates but also because it is deeply intertwined with the health and economic crises currently facing the United States. In this session, Professor Paul Pierson and Professor Taeku Lee from the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, discussed the election outcome and its implications for US domestic and foreign policy.

• Date: Friday, May 15, 2020, 10:00–11:30 (KST)
• Speaker: Paul Pierson (Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley), Taeku Lee (Professor of Law and Political Science, University of California, Berkeley)
• Moderator: Son Yeol (Director of EAI; Professor, Graduate School of International Studies, Yonsei University)
• Discussant: Son Byung-kwon (Professor, Department of Political Science and International Relations, Chung-Ang University), Chun Jae-sung (Director, EAI Center for National Security Studies; Professor, Department of Diplomacy, Seoul National University)

I. Summary

Unpredictable US Presidential Election Requires Greater Caution from Political Scientists

• The challenges confronting American society and its political system have been directly reflected in US politics, with the political system, in particular, tending to be swayed by the presidential election (outcome). Amidst current crises encompassing economic and social issues, unemployment, and the public health emergency of COVID-19, political scientists argue for a cautious approach to forecasting the US presidential election.
• Helmut Norpoth's "Primary Model," one of the election forecasting models, predicts Trump's re-election with a 91-95% probability. Conversely, all A-list polls reported by FiveThirtyEight show Biden leading Trump by approximately 7-10 percentage points. This lack of consensus, coupled with the societal, economic, political, and public health shifts brought about by COVID-19, has rendered predictions even more uncertain. Even Helmut Norpoth, who predicted Trump's victory with 91-95% probability, acknowledged that the large-scale changes due to COVID-19 might necessitate a revision of his forecast.

Trump Seeks Re-election, Will He Become the Underdog?

• Several structural advantages exist for Trump's potential re-election. Notably, his unique ability to control and dominate conversations and attract media attention is significant. Furthermore, he is highly adept at capturing and focusing public attention. A more fundamental advantage lies in the Electoral College system, where the Republican Party's rural base is advantageous compared to the Democrats' urban base. This is because in a winner-take-all system, a party with broader geographic reach within each individual state holds an advantage.
• For instance, Trump's recent campaign strategies demonstrate his keen understanding of what works to his advantage. He employs populist rhetoric to identify targets for voters' animosity and anger. Trump strives to intensify the mobilization of these working-class voters; however, this may prove more challenging now due to the severe economic downturn, which has significantly impacted many working-class individuals.
• Moreover, the diminishing support among white working-class voters, a demographic crucial to Trump's past success, is noteworthy. Elderly voters are particularly important in US elections as they represent a key demographic. While voter turnout in US elections is not exceptionally high, the turnout among the elderly is. However, Trump's support among this group appears to be weakening, partly due to COVID-19 and Trump's rhetoric, such as "Don't worry too much about the elderly, let's get the economy going again."
• Furthermore, Trump suffers from a weakness of historical unpopularity. His approval ratings have consistently remained very low, posing a significant risk for a president seeking re-election. He faces challenges not only from those who are simply dissatisfied with the president but also from a substantial number of strong opponents. Trump's re-election bid is hampered by declining approval ratings, an economy characterized by dismal unemployment rather than the previously favorable conditions, and the ongoing, significant challenges related to the pandemic. The outcome of these factors remains uncertain. In this context, Professor Paul Pierson characterizes Trump as the 'underdog' in the 2020 US election, suggesting that Trump's unique strengths may not be as influential.
• Both Professor Taeku Lee and Professor Paul Pierson agreed that Trump would not target China as an adversary, as Trump has not found a strong enough incentive to turn away from China. They also stated that anti-China sentiment in the US is unlikely to rise significantly in the coming years. Poll results, indicating that only a small minority of Americans refer to "COVID-19" as the "China virus" or "Wuhan virus," support this assertion.

Democratic Backsliding in the United States: How Far Has It Progressed?

• The United States is experiencing polarization so extreme that it is being described as unprecedented since the Civil War. The current polarization is characterized by the infiltration of polarized divisions between the two major parties, organized at the national level, down to the grassroots across the country. In particular, over the past generation, Republican political elites and powerful interests within the party have increasingly relied on appeals that are intensely and extremely directed at white working-class voters. These voters perceive themselves as losing their footing within the United States, seeing their economic and cultural status erode as the nation slowly moves toward a multicultural democracy that has long threatened them.
• The Trump administration represents a novel type of governance in the United States, which can be viewed as part of an international trend toward a softer version of authoritarianism. Alternatively, as described in "How Democracies Die" by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky, it signifies democratic backsliding, where elections may continue, but the nation becomes increasingly unbalanced and unfair as it moves toward a more authoritarian system. While some American political scientists may resist this characterization, substantial evidence indicates that democratic backsliding is already occurring in the United States.
• Professor Pierson discussed the potential impact of white working-class nationalism on the election, noting the Republican Party's strategy to appeal to economically disadvantaged voters and its decision to abandon efforts to broaden the racial diversity of its coalition. In this regard, echoing Professor Lee, white working-class nationalism, once utilized by Trump as a 'strategy,' has now become deeply rooted as an 'identity' in the electoral landscape.
• Professor Taeku Lee argued that the 2020 election is unlikely to be a typical election that can be reliably predicted using political science models or opinion polls. He cited the 2016 election as the first reason, where all major political science forecasting models predicted Hillary Clinton's victory, yet she lost. The 2016 election provides at least two reasons to be skeptical about the utility of forecasting models in 2020. First, Trump disrupts political norms and institutions in peculiar and effective ways, sometimes in shocking or even fatal ways. Second, the United States is highly vulnerable to 'October Surprises' that can completely overturn predictions about who will win or lose, such as foreign interventions or domestic polarization.
• The fundamental factors influencing the decisions of American voters and their future changes can be understood through four aspects: institutions, identities, ideologies, and information. Firstly, institutionally, bipartisan cooperation between the two parties is increasingly disappearing, polarization is growing, and the proportion of Americans unaffiliated with either party is increasing.
• Regarding identities and ideologies, American politics is increasingly defined by "cleavage lines." However, the traditional cleavage lines that divided the country by party, ideology, and identity are being reconstructed around the issue of being pro-Trump or anti-Trump. A significant trend here is the gradual shift in power struggles in American politics from what political scientists call the "first face of power"—for example, who gains the upper hand on policy issues—to the "second face of power." The second face of power involves struggles over the rules of the election itself, such as the fight over checks and balances, the application of the rule of law, the constitutionality of certain executive actions by the commander-in-chief, and conflicts over who can vote and how.
• Ultimately, all of this culminates in a struggle over the very exercise of democracy, which we are likely to witness in the future. The significance of this lies in the possibility that the outcome of the 2020 election may hinge not on traditional and familiar factors such as which party was better organized, which candidate had better ideas, who had more money, what voters fundamentally wanted, or whether voters desired change or the re-election of the incumbent—but rather on the outcome of the battle over the rules of the election itself.
• In terms of information, the ability of voters in a democratic society to express their opinions without being constrained by the sophisticated tactics and strategies employed by various actors to gain an advantage in institutional and ideological spheres depends on whether fair institutions providing accurate information to the public fulfill their roles. However, institutions striving for fairness, such as mainstream media, academia, and the scientific community, are currently under attack.

What if Democracy is No Longer the 'Only Game in Town'?

• The 2020 US presidential election will be an absolute watershed moment in determining the future direction of American society. The choice facing American voters in 2020 is whether to continue moving toward a less free and less open society, one governed by political favor rather than the rule of law, as has been evident in recent years, or conversely, to move toward the gradual and evolving multiracial democracy that the United States was progressing towards before 2016.
• A litmus test for the stability of democracy, as Adam Przeworski's adage suggests, is whether "democracy is the only game in town, and nobody imagines acting outside democratic institutions undemocratically, and all losers want to try again within the same institutions they just lost within." However, it is anticipated that regardless of who loses the 2020 election, that loser will not wish to compete again within the same institutions that led to their defeat.
• Professor Taeku Lee presents four scenarios: 1) Trump wins, and the Democratic Party accepts the outcome. 2) Biden wins, and Trump accepts the outcome. While the first two scenarios are conventional, Professor Lee adds two further assumptions. 3) Biden wins, but Trump refuses to concede, plunging the country into chaos and political violence. 4) Trump wins, but the Democratic Party refuses to concede, leading the country into disorder and political violence.
• Professor Lee discusses how the two scenarios where the loser does not concede may be more plausible than imagined. Trump is an individual who stands in opposition to political norms and institutions, and his threats to invalidate democratically held elections were foreshadowed in the 2016 election through public questioning of the election's legitimacy, anticipating his potential loss. Similarly, if the Democratic Party loses due to foreign interference, voter suppression, or other forms of corruption or manipulation, it is unlikely that candidate Biden and the Democratic Party would quietly accept it, unlike Al Gore in the 2000 election.
• The presenters anticipate that President Trump will not leave the White House quietly. The process will likely expose the uglier aspects of American (politics), and at that time, the role and willingness of Congress and the courts will be crucial. For instance, it is not inconceivable that on election night, President Trump might declare, "This election has been stolen!" Due to COVID-19, absentee and mail-in ballots cast after polls close will be tallied slowly, a process that could take up to ten days for all ballots to be counted. In this context, Trump is highly likely to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election process.

Return to 'Pre-Trump Normalcy': Implications of the 2020 US Election for South Korea

• Given Biden's extensive political experience and relative strength in foreign policy, if elected, US foreign policy is likely to be reorganized in a manner similar to the Obama and Clinton administrations. Unless there is a strong progressive push from within the party, such as from Senator Sanders, Biden's primary objective in terms of foreign relations will likely be to restore a degree of normalcy comparable to the pre-Trump era.
• Looking ahead to future administrations, a Biden administration would likely aim to broadly replicate the type of foreign policy demonstrated by Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. The challenge lies in the fact that dismantling the Trump administration's approach is far easier than rebuilding relationships based on trust. Other countries will likely be more cautious in negotiating with the United States and more skeptical about the prospect of the US being a reliable negotiating partner. This will present another crisis for the Biden administration. Reassembling the pieces broken over the past four years will be an arduous task.
• Restoration is more difficult than destruction, and Professors Pierson and Lee argue that the core of returning to the pre-Trump era lies in regaining lost trust. Biden's greatest strength is his foreign policy expertise, accumulated through his long political career. Having served as a senator on the Foreign Relations Committee for over eight years and as Vice President, he possesses an extensive personal network, having met and formed personal relationships with numerous figures on the global political stage. This network provides a solid foundation for rebuilding the trust necessary to return the US to its former role as an ally and global leader.
• If the US returns to its 'pre-Trump state,' countries like South Korea, in particular, will expect the US to fulfill its roles as a 'reliable ally,' a 'steadfast trading partner,' and a 'global leader.' Furthermore, the US is expected to re-emphasize alliances and promote multilateralism.
• However, it is important to note that other countries have also changed during the period of US transformation. For instance, NATO is no longer the NATO of the pre-Trump era, and the UK is also different from its pre-Trump self. In the context of COVID-19, revitalizing the Paris Agreement also appears challenging. Considering the economic situations of Asian countries that have undergone changes over the past few years, reviving the TPP would also be a very difficult undertaking. It is not just the United States that has changed over the past few years; the entire world has. Even if Biden attempts to return to the pre-Trump normal state, these changes will pose significant constraints.

■ Paul Pierson_ John Gross Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University. He writes columns for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and The New Republic. He has served as an editor for the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, and Annual Review of Political Science, and as Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His main research areas include American politics and public policy, comparative political economy, and social theory. His books include Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality (forthcoming, with Jacob S. Hacker), Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Abandoned the Middle Class (2010, with Jacob S. Hacker), Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis (2004), among others. His book Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment (1994) was selected as the best American politics book by the American Political Science Association in 1995, and “Path Dependence, Increasing Returns and the Study of Politics” received the American Political Science Association’s award for best article in 2000 and the Aaron Wildavsky Prize in 2011.

■ Taeku Lee_ Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. He has served as co-principal investigator for the National Asian American Survey and the Bay Area Poverty Tracker, executive director of Asian American Decisions, and a member of the National Advisory Committee for the U.S. Census Bureau. He has also served as a board member for the American National Election Studies and the General Social Survey, treasurer and executive council member of the American Political Science Association, department chair at the University of California at Berkeley, and associate director of the Haas Institute. His main research areas include race and ethnic politics, public opinion research, identity and inequality, and participatory democracy. His books include Oxford Handbook of Racial and Ethnic Politics in the United States (2015), and Asian American Political Participation(2011).

■ Son Yeol_ Director of EAI and Professor at the Graduate School of International Studies, Yonsei University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. He has served as Dean of the Graduate School of International Studies at Yonsei University, Dean of Underwood International College, President of the Association for Japanese Studies, and President of the Korean Political Science Association. His main research areas include international political economy, Japanese foreign policy, and East Asian international relations. His recent books include "Diplomatic Security and Political Economy of Low Fertility and Aging Society" (2019, co-author), Japan and Asia's Contested Order(2018, with T.J. Pempel), "South Korea's Middle Power Diplomacy" (2017, co-author), and Understanding Public Diplomacy in East Asia(2016, with Jan Melissen).

■ Son Byung-kwon_Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Chung-Ang University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan. His main research areas include American politics, U.S. foreign policy, and comparative legislative and party politics. His recent research includes "Is American Congressional Politics Still a Model of Democracy?: The U.S. Congress Captured by Party Politics" (2018) and "Understanding the Emergence of American Nationalism in the Trump Era" (2017).

■ Jeon Jaesung_Director of the EAI Center for National Security Studies and Professor at Seoul National University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Northwestern University and has served as a policy advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Unification. His main research areas include international political theory, history of international relations, and ROK-U.S. alliance and Korean Peninsula studies. His major books and edited volumes include "Sovereignty and International Politics: The Imperial Character of the Modern Sovereign State System" (2020), "Northeast Asian International Politics: The International Politics of Partially Sovereign States" (2020), "East Asia and the Korean Peninsula Amidst U.S.-China Competition" (2015), "Is Politics Moral?" (2012), and "East Asian International Politics: From History to Theory" (2011).

■ Managed and Edited by: Lee Young-hyun, EAI Research Fellow

Inquiries: 02 2277 1683 (ext. 207)  ylee@eai.or.kr

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Video Script

Hi, welcome to East Asia Institute. I'm your host, Yourson, and I'm currently president of East Asia Institute and Yonsei University professor. I'd like to thank everyone for joining us today. This event is the first of the EAI virtual seminar series titled "The New World Order after COVID-19." Today's topic is the U.S. presidential election, which is arguably the most consequential election in the world in the years to come. It is tremendously difficult to predict the upcoming election not just because it's

already a close race, but also because of the extraordinary circumstances the United States currently faces. The crises of both health and economics will discuss election outcomes, domestic politics, and foreign policy implications. We have two speakers to present today, followed by two designated discussion of customs and a Q&A session at the end, which is open to all of you. We encourage you to participate by asking questions. You can type your question, either in English or Korean, at any time during the talk

using the Q&A function at the bottom of the room. The seminar will keep track of all the questions. Please remember also to include your name and affiliation when giving a question. With that, I'm pleased to introduce our two distinguished guests. First is John Gross, Endowment Chair and Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Paul authored many books, including "Off-Center Politics in Time: The Transformation of American Politics" and "Dismantling the Welfare State?", which is the winner of the

APSA Best Book on American Politics. Paul is also an active commentator for New Times and Washington Post. Our second speaker is Keiko Lee, who is also a UC Berkeley professor. He is a George Johnson Professor of Law and Political Science. Keiko is the author of "Mobilizing Public Opinion: Transforming Politics, Transforming America," "Why Americans Don't Join the Party?", "Asian-American Political Participation," among many others. Taeku also serves on the National Advisory Committee for the

US Census Bureau. Now, Paul, we are delighted to get your first guy. You can speak about 12 to 15 minutes. Okay, great. Thank you very much, Professor Son. It's a pleasure to be with you. I'm just going to start my stopwatch here so I can make sure I don't go on too long, and it's a pleasure to have a chance, even from this distance, to speak with a South Korean audience. I think Americans who are aware of the broader global picture are very conscious of the striking contrasts between the way that the South Korean

government and society have dealt with this crisis and the way that the United States has dealt with this crisis, or rather failed, I think, failed to deal with the crisis. And I start by saying this not just to congratulate you and your countrymen, but but also because I think the kind of dysfunction, the political dysfunction that has been on display in the United States is unfortunately not just a one-off experience. I think it's reflective of some deep, deep challenges and problems facing American society and the American

political system in particular that really hang over this presidential election. And I think we need to understand that broader political context to say anything helpful about the election. So, a few quick remarks before I turn to talking specifically about what's going on in the election this year. And the first is just a caveat that we should be very humble. I think after 2016, political scientists in the United States learned to be humble about predicting presidential elections, and they should probably be

even more humble this time around because we've never experienced, certainly in the modern era of polling and focus groups and electoral forecasting, we've never experienced an election against a backdrop of this kind of economic and social crisis. The U.S. will almost certainly be facing 15 or 20 percent unemployment through this year. Congress is, I think, as it is on so many issues, gridlocked and it's going to find it very challenging to respond forcefully to the economic crisis that we're facing. And of course,

at the same time, there's a public health crisis which is also likely to continue to be severe, even though the exact course of that is unpredictable. So, any of the standard things that people who study presidential elections might say about predicting what's going to happen this fall, I think need to be approached with enormous caution under these kinds of circumstances. And the second thing I want to say is a little bit about the nature of the deeper political turmoil facing the United States. The country is

extraordinarily polarized, polarized in a way I would say it has not been since the period leading up to the Civil War. I know some political scientists argue that our polarization is not that unusual in American politics, but I think the kind of polarization that we see now, in which two political parties that are organized on a national level are coherent national political entities, where the same kind of cleavages work all the way from the top all the way down to locations around the United

States, and you see the same kinds of divides, the same kinds of folks falling on opposite sides of those divides all across the country, and you see a lot of rhetoric and a lot of behavior that suggests that people see the other side not just as their opponents, but as a threat, a potentially existential threat to things that they value. And I want to emphasize that I think that that is especially true on the political right in the United States. I don't think that it's equally balanced in the same

way. I don't think that Joe Biden represents a radical figure in American political life in the way that Donald Trump represents a radical figure in American life. And you see that reflected in the coalitions. And over the past generation, what has happened in the United States is that Republican political elites and powerful interests within that party have increasingly found that they have to resort to increasingly intense, extreme appeals, and particularly to white working-class voters who see themselves

as losing ground in America, losing ground economically, losing ground in terms of cultural status, who see the United States' slow but steady shift towards being a multiracial democracy as something that is threatening to them. And powerful groups within the conservative coalition, you can think about groups like the National Rifle Association, right-wing media, especially Fox News and talk radio, evangelical Christians as an organized political movement, have really amplified this sense of threat

and that development generated the extraordinary presidency of President Trump. And that's the other factor that I want to just talk about briefly before turning to the election. This is a new, a very new kind of presidency in the United States, and it's one that I think should be seen as part of the international trend towards kind of soft versions of authoritarianism, or what Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky in their book *How Democracies Die* describe as

democratic backsliding, where you can have elections, but they're increasingly unbalanced and unfair as a country slides towards something that looks more authoritarian. And while some American political scientists would be resistant and say that me raising this is alarmist, I think there's actually enormous evidence to suggest that considerable democratic backsliding has already taken place in the United States. That since Donald Trump became president, he has engaged in increasingly aggressive

attacks on any independent source of political mobilization or organization in the United States, whether it's the judiciary or the civil service, where he is systematically, along with his allies, systematically tried to replace anyone who shows any kind of real independence with somebody who is going to be loyal to him. The same thing is happening with the media, the same thing is happening with the political opposition. So, just in the last 24 hours, the president has indicated that he

thinks that both his immediate predecessor, President Obama, and his current opponent, Joe Biden, should be in prison, which is something that he already, of course, has said repeatedly about his opponent in the last election, Hillary Clinton. So, even though there are people who want to dismiss this as loose talk, if we look at other countries, Hungary or Turkey or Brazil, they would recognize this kind of behavior and the way in which President Trump's party has

embraced that behavior as something that we would call democratic backsliding and something that represents a real threat to the democratic practices that have been such a core part of American political history. So, I see 2020 as an absolute watershed election. It is going to be, I think, a moment where the United States is going to decide what path it is going to be on: whether it is going to continue on the path that it has been on for the last few years of moving, slipping towards a less free, less

open society, one that is not governed by the rule of law but is governed by whether or not one is in political favor or not, or whether we will steer away from that direction towards the path that I think the United States was broadly on before 2016, which was a gradual, very difficult, turbulent, but gradual evolution towards a multiracial democracy. That's what's on the ballot in 2020. Now, I've already said there's enormous uncertainty about how this is going to play out. Obviously, a lot of things are going to happen between now and November. We've never had circumstances like this before. President Trump has a couple of important structural advantages that I just want to mention quickly. One is his unbelievable ability to control the conversation, to direct the conversation and direct the attention of the media. He doesn't always do that to his benefit, but he is very good at attracting attention and getting people to focus on things that he wants people

to focus on, and I think that that is an advantage. More fundamentally, he has an advantage in the Electoral College, which decides who wins the presidency. And the advantage that exists there is because the Republican base is more rural, the Democratic base is more urban. And as when you have a winner-take-all system for each individual state, that provides an advantage for the more widely dispersed party. As you probably know, President Trump actually lost the popular vote by almost three million votes in 2016, but

won the Electoral College. The projections are that this time around, because a lot of that rural-urban split has only intensified, that it's possible that he could lose the popular vote by four or five percent and still win the Electoral College by winning the more rural states and by winning some hotly contested states that lean slightly Republican, and that could carry him over the top in the Electoral College. So, he has those advantages. Against that, he has the disadvantages that he's not popular by historic

standards. His approval rating has always been pretty low. It's definitely in the danger zone for a president running for re-election, and there are lots of people who don't just disapprove of the president, but who strongly disapprove of him. So, he's going to have a hard time winning them over. So, he can't afford to lose much more support before his prospects for re-election become really critical. And he now has to do that not with a decent economy at his back, but with an economy that is going to be

probably with depression-level unemployment in the fall and probably very significant continuing difficulties with the pandemic. It's very hard to know how this will play out. On balance, I think I would consider President Trump to be an underdog. I think that those challenges at least somewhat outweigh the structural advantages that he has. If we have open, free, fair elections where people feel like they can safely go to the polls in November, I would say that he is likely to be a slight underdog. But

I don't take it for granted that we will have those electoral circumstances in November. I feel like things have gotten to a point in the American polity where the level of conflict and now the level of social crisis is so high that we cannot be fully confident that we will have a free, open, easily contested election in November. I'll stop there. Thank you, Paul. Excellent presentation. You know, before moving on to Taeku, I just have a quick question. I'm just curious. I mean, you said there's an uncertainty

about free and open elections in America. What do you mean? I mean, it's not like, you know, a coup or something. Can you elaborate more on that last point?

Well, so, here I think I would point to the kind of argument that Levitsky and Ziblatt make in their book, which is that we need to recognize that democracies in the real world are not pure. They often have impurities in them, and that often democratic backsliding is about just increasing the amount of impurities. So

like, if you can make it more difficult for your opponents to vote, then that gives you a big advantage. And one of the things that's interesting in the United States now is that because the electoral coalitions are so predictable for the two parties, there are all sorts of interventions that you can make. And conservatives have already been doing this, and been in many ways, to try to raise the thresholds, make it more difficult for voting to be carried out for opposition voters to

get to the polls. And of course, one thing that's very unusual about the United States is that local and state elections are often run by political officials, not by neutral, independent officials, but by political officials who may be associated with one party or another. And there are many decisions that they can make. In Wisconsin, there was an election a few weeks ago in which, in the middle of the pandemic, Democrats were arguing that it was important that people have a chance to vote by mail, to

vote remotely so that they wouldn't put their lives in danger by going to the polls. Well, Republicans in Wisconsin thought that, and the Republican-dominated court prevented Democrats from pursuing that vote-by-mail strategy because they thought it was going to be to their political advantage that the turnout among Democrats would be harmed more than the turnout among Republicans. Actually, Democrats ended up winning that election. Voters weren't happy, I think, with that, but it

gives you an illustration of the kinds of things that potentially could be done. Okay, thank you. Let's turn to Keiko, and those hoping to touch on as well in my remarks. For me, in order to be able to keep to my time, I have to read some prepared remarks, but I wanted to first just sincerely thank President Son for the opportunity and the honor to deliver some thoughts on the 2020 presidential elections in the United States. The United States and South Korea are special allies with a linked history, at

least throughout my lifetime, and I very much look forward to sharing my thoughts with you this morning. I want to begin in the same place that all began in most of the U.S. presidential elections in my career as a political scientist. There's a familiar cadence and rhythm between the moment that candidates declare their interest in running for president and the evening when results are counted and a winner is declared. Somewhere along that road, political scientists like Paul and I might wager our forecasts as to who will win, and all

the way along that road, pollsters will gauge the sentiments of American voters with horse race polls that give us a further fine-grained sense of who is likely to win and why. Political science forecasting models, using variations on a theme of indicators such as economic well-being and presidential approval, can often predict who will win the Labor Day before the year of an election. And even this year, the first of the most commonly recognized half-dozen or so forecasting models, which is Helmut Norpoth's primary

model is already out with a prediction in case you missed it in January of this year Norquaff declared that Donald Trump had a 91 to 95 percent certainty of being reelected. At the same time, there are also poll aggregators like 538, the Princeton Election Consortium of Automatic, that are also remarkably good at not only predicting who will win but also estimating the margin of victory in a given election. And here aggregators like 538.com currently predict the exact opposite outcome.

At the present moment, if you look at all the A-grade polls reported by 538, they all show Biden ahead of Trump by about a seven to ten percent margin. And that leads to my first key point, which, and this really not only should surprise nobody in this learned audience, but you've already heard this from Paul: the 2020 election is unlikely to be a typical election in which we can rely on these political science forecasting models or polling aggregator predictions. The first reason for this is that we only need to remember the 2016 election.

When all the major political science forecasting models confidently predicted a win for Hillary Clinton, and then Clinton lost the 2016 election. This gives us at least two reasons to be skeptical that forecasting models will be useful in 2020. One is the lesson that we continue to learn, often in shocking and even lethal ways, which is that Donald Trump is an uncommonly effective disrupter of political norms and institutions. The other reason is that the United States, for a whole host of reasons from foreign

intervention to domestic polarization, is increasingly vulnerable to October surprises that could completely upend our expectations about who will win and who will lose. And 2020 is shaping up to be an election in which there could be an unusually high number of potential October surprises, from legal challenges to release Trump's tax returns, which we're currently seeing, constitutional challenges in terms of the emoluments clause, tell-tale books that are currently being written and ready to be published by Trump's former confidants

and appointees, not to mention the possibility of Russian interference again, or the fallout from another wave of COVID-19 in the fall. Of course, one major surprise is already upon us in the social, economic, and political and public health earthquake, which is the coronavirus pandemic. And there's no understanding the extent to which COVID-19 is a once-in-a-century crisis with really unpredictable consequences on American politics, so much so that even Helmut Norpoth, the person who had the 91 to 95 percent prediction of a Trump win,

has updated his website to say the massive disruptions caused by the corona virus outbreak may prompt me to revise my forecasts. So how should we think about what is likely to happen in an upcoming election if existing models are unlikely to be useful and if we continue to face this unprecedented once-in-an-epic crisis? So here's my second point: I think we should think about the coming election by identifying and understanding what has changed and what continues to change in the United States in terms of the basic

building blocks of border preferences. And I'm going to refer to these alliteratively as stories about institutions, identities, and ideologies, and then information. And a lot of my thoughts here are a common thread with comments that Paul has already shared, so I'll try to be brief here. Each of these things could be an entire treatise by themselves. So in terms of institutions, political parties in the United States are really a a living organizational form that is currently undergoing major changes. On

the right, the Republican Party continues a metaphor Phasis that we started to see in 2016, if not before, with the Tea Party movement, from being the Grand Old Party that most of us grew up with to what could now be called the Party of Trump. One consequence of that is that we cannot continue to expect things like party leadership and party discipline independent of what Trump wants and where Trump is taking the party. On the left, the Democratic Party is, as much as it has been for a couple of generations,

on the threshold of a deep divide between a Clinton-Obama-Biden old guard and an angry insurgent, mobilized Sanders-Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez leftist wing. One immediate consequence is that it is yet unclear whether Biden will or should try to win back independents and moderate Republicans by moving to the center during the election and maybe naming somebody like Amy Klobuchar as his running mate, or whether he will or should tap the enormous potential of a re-energized left by naming somebody like

Warren, Kamala Harris, or Stacey Abrams as his running mate. And in this backdrop of parties reorganizing, at the same time, we also see norms of bipartisanship continue to erode, polarization continue to grow, and the proportion of Americans who I don't who don't identify with either party continue to grow. My own personal view here is that Biden would do better to move to the left, but I can save that for further in labor. So that's institutions. In terms of identities and ideologies, American politics more and more is defined by

cleavage lines. But the cleavage lines that have traditionally divided the country by party, by ideology, by identities are increasingly become becoming redrawn along a pro-Trump or anti-Trump axis. One important trend here in American politics is that power struggles are increasingly moving from what political scientists would call the first face of power, who wins or loses on, for example, a policy issue, to struggles in the second face of power. Without getting too into the weeds of how political scientists think about

power in the United States, the upshot here is very similar to President Song's question to Paul about how this might not be a free and fair election, which is the second face of power is all about battles over the rules of the game itself, such as battles over checks and balances, whether we will be governed by the rule of law, or the constitutionality of certain exercises of executive power, and conflicts over who gets to vote and how we get to vote. And these all come down to likely battles we will see in

the future over the exercise of democracy itself. So this matters because we need to expect in 2020 that who wins and how they win may very well be in a story about who wins the battle over the rules of the game, and not so much what we're used to, which is an election which is characterized by which party was better organized, which candidates had the better ideas or more money, and whether voters fundamentally wanted to change or more of the same. Then third, the pro-Trump, anti-Trump axis is also increasingly redefining and re-sorting

Americans by social cleavages around race, religion, gender, class, citizenship, and critically redefining and re-sorting America around relatively new ideological beliefs such as the belief in fake news, the prevalence of conspiracy theories, and a renewed distrust of science and evidence. This is the third key to understanding what may happen in 2020, and this is a story of information. In terms of information, the ability of Democratic voters to voice their opinions against elite-level tactics and strategies over institutions and

ideologies depends crucially on the health and functioning of mediating institutions that inform the public and adjudicate facticity. Those institutions, most prominently the mainstream media, but I would also add universities and the scientific community, have been under assault. We are witnessing the lethal consequences of it this very moment in terms of COVID-19, and we will witness, unfortunately, I think, much much more of this between now and November. So, so far, I've stressed two key points about the

2020 election: First, that we should not look to traditional forecasting models for our expectations about what will happen this November. And second, that we instead need to understand how some of the fundamental elements of American politics, its institutions, identities, ideologies, and information channels, are currently operating and evolving. I want to make one last, third key point about 2020, which is that we need to also keep in mind that for 2020, there are more than two possible outcomes to the presidential election. In stable,

consolidated democracies, there are two outcomes to accompany two major party candidates: either candidate A wins or candidate B wins. And the litmus test for democracy stability, as Adam Przeworski once famously put it, is when democracy is the only game in town, when no one can imagine acting outside democratic institutions, when all the losers want to do is try again within the same institutions under which they have just lost. To me, it is unclear that in 2020, that all the losers on either side will

want to do is just try again within the same institutions under which they have just lost. Specifically, I think we need to keep in mind that in 2020, there are probably four possible scenarios for what may happen. The first two are familiar: one, Trump might win, and the Democrats would accept that outcome; two, Biden could win, and Trump might accept that outcome. But they're also two other scenarios: one, where Biden wins and Trump refuses to accept that outcome, throwing the country into disorder and political violence; and fourth, Trump

could win, and the Democrats could also refuse to accept that outcome, throwing the country into disorder and political violence. This third and fourth scenario of the loser not conceding, I think, is more plausible than most of us would like to imagine possible. As noted before, Trump is a preternatural disrupter of political norms and institutions, and for Trump, the threat to delegitimize democratically held elections is already rehearsed in the 2016 election when he repeatedly voiced his worries publicly about the

legitimacy of the election, anticipating that he would lose. And he has been waving the flag of electoral fraud throughout his presidency as well. For Biden, if the Democrats lose because of things like foreign interference, voter suppression, or other kinds of corruptions or shenanigans, it is entirely plausible to me that Biden and the Democrats also will not go as quietly into the night in defeat as Al Gore did in 2000. So the third key point is that we need to expect political potential scenarios in 2020 where our

constitutional electoral democracy itself is under threat. In addition, and I think this is a really important point, in only one of those four scenarios will there be a strong impetus to return to some sort of pre-Trump normalcy. That is, in particular, for countries like South Korea, a return to normalcy in which the United States can be a reliable ally, a regular trade partner, and a global leader. Only one of those four scenarios. And even if Biden wins and Trump peacefully concedes the election, this will only happen if Biden wins by moving

more to the center rather than fight and winning by moving to the Sanders-Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the Democratic Party, in which we might return to something other than the Biden of the Obama-Biden years. So this is a lot of doom and gloom, but I think a realistic assessment, at least on my part, about the upcoming election, for both personal and institutional reasons, I am personally very invested in the scenario in which Biden might win and Trump might concede the legitimacy of that election,

but I am also far from optimistic that that will actually be the outcome we are all faced with come Wednesday, November 4th, 2020. And I'll just stop there. Thank you. Thank you, Teague, for your excellent but gloomy presentation. What would your poor trading, what your trading America is not the country that we know. So yeah, with that, let's turn to our designated discussants. The first is, I'd like to invite Professor Sun-Yim, one of China University, who is a leading spirit in American politics here in Korea. Mo, please.

No to progresses. Thanks for your presentation, and it helped me a lot to have her understanding of the workings of American democracy and your concerns about the prospect of future American democracy. And I do not have much time, so I recalled directly to the questions I have in mind. The first question I'd like to ask, that I'd like to ask the first question to Professor Pierson, and the second question to Professor Li, okay? And the first question is about the, you know, the repetition of the 2016 white working-class nationalism. And my question is, is this:

What would be the influence of the American white working-class nationalism and the anti-American sentiment in the 2020 presidential election cycle compared with the 2016 presidential election? Would they be weakened or strengthened or remain at the same level? And related to this, you know, rampant COVID-19 chaos, how would they COVID-19 affect the influence of the white working-class nationalism in this 2012, 2020 presidential election? That's my first question. And the second question to this

time, Professor Lee, is list about the satisfaction and, you know, in the team of the Sanders faction within the Democratic Party and their relationship with the old guard, you know, the Biden faction. So my question is this: What would be the prospect that the Sanders supporters and satisfaction in the Democratic Party also supports Joe Biden with the base of pop Joe Biden? And if they would, why would they vote Joe Biden instead of being stuck at home on election day? And what kind of counteroffer

should Joe Biden prepare for gaining their support? Center section, and if Joe Biden embraces the left-wing agenda, can there be risk of losing middle-ground voters on the 2020 presidential election day? That would be my second question to Professor Lee. And this is a very trivial question, the last one. I hope Professor Terribly answered this question. You, you know, dividing the old guard Democratic fraction and, you know, insurgent, you know, very, very angry fraction. Let my cut, okay? So caucus and, you know, Sanders and

you, you know, categorized former President Obama as the old guard, you know, Democratic leader. Can you say that, you know, he's in between, you know, Joe Biden and Sanders? So, uh, if you add more, more, you know, explanation on that, it would be fine for me. That's my questions. Thank you. Thank you, Pin One. Yeah, I think, you know, each of you have questions, and then the last question, I think it goes to the polls. So Paul, who you want to start first? Sure. Thank you very much for that great questions, and I'll just say a little bit

about Trump and the white working class. And, you know, it's part of a longer evolution, right? Where this is the direction the Republican Party has been moving for some time, is shifting in the direction of really bolstering its appeals to more down second, uh, economically downscale voters with less education, pulling back from trying to expand the the racial diversity of the Republican coalition, around, you know, becoming hard, more hardline on immigration and so on. And Trump just accelerated that process. And what's interesting is that since the

2016 election, he has just intensified that movement in the party. You might have thought that he would actually, maybe at that point, sort of moderate a little bit and find ways to expand his electoral coalition and reach out to voters who traditionally had voted Republican. I'm thinking especially of white suburban college-educated people, many of whom did vote Republican because they liked low taxes and so on. And Trump has made no effort to expand his coalition in that direction, quite the opposite. And in fact, there's been

movement away from him among those among those suburban voters, which is partly why Republicans lost the House of Representatives in 2018. So during the current campaign, I think we can see he only really knows how to play it this way, which is to do the kind of red meat appeals, populist kinds of kinds of rhetoric, where it's all about who you, who you should hate and and who you should be angry at, and so trying to continue to mobilize and just increase and increase the intensity with which you try to mobilize these white

working-class voters. Now, that's going to be more challenging now because the economy is performing so much worse, right? And many of those voters are going to be badly damaged by this change in the economy. But, but it's clear already, I think, that this is the direction that he's going to go in, trying to generate hostility to China. Um, you can see already that he's tried various rhetorical moves, hostility to China being a prominent one, that he's going to try to use to mobilize that, that kind of sentiment.

So he made continuing gains after 2016 with these groups that were sort of offset by his loss of white suburban votes. So the question is, what will now happen over the next six months? And I think one aspect of this that is really interesting to watch is that it appears like he's losing ground among white Americans who are over the age of 65, which had become a very strong voting bloc for him. And that's a very important voting bloc because these are people who actually turn out. As an issue in American

elections, we don't typically have very high turnout in our elections, but older people, though, that's been a very reliable constituency for Trump among white, whites over 65. And 65 year olds in the US or, you know, there's a much higher proportion of people in that age group that are white in the US. But that, that support seems to be really softening. And in part because, in part, I think because of the virus, because his, his eagerness to essentially say, let's not worry too much about Grandma, you know, let's get the economy going

going again. That doesn't sound as good to some voters who, who are grandmas and grandpas, right? So, so I think that's going to be an interesting thing to watch. And then, and then the other aspect of it is that those voters mostly don't find Biden very threatening. Right? Biden actually appeals, he's well-known by older voters, so he, he has more appeal to them than, than Hillary Clinton did. Now, now whether Biden can, will lose votes among younger voters, it looks like he's not, he's not as popular as either

Obama or Hillary Clinton was at this point among younger voters. So that, but that feeds into the question you asked, Teague. So I'll leave, I'll leave that for him. Great. I can't resist the opportunity to say, I think Paul just predicted that Biden would win Florida. Well, if I were them, I'd be worried about, if I were the Republicans, I'd be worried about Florida for these reasons. Yeah, I think, I think, I think those are great comments to think about. The one addition I would say, even though I know the question was mainly directed at

Paul, is I think one thing that's happened during the Trump presidency is that he, he's moved himself from white working-class nationalism as a strategy to win the election to white working-class nationalism as an identity. And I think in the process of that move, I think the potential electoral base around white working-class nationalism has shrunk a little bit, and in a close election, that might, that might matter. You know, in terms of the Sanders faction, I, you know, I think the two important parts of that

question are, you know, will, will they move over to Biden, and will they actually turn out to vote? So, will they move over with enthusiasm? I think the easy answer is to say, you know, it depends in large part on who he picks as his vice presidential candidate. But that is also probably putting far greater weight on vice presidential candidates than that it deserves. And I think on Biden's part, if he picks a vice presidential candidate that really outshines him as a presidential candidate, that too can be a liability. And if you

know about Joe Biden's performance as a political candidate, it's probably not too hard for a vice presidential candidate to outshine him. So I think he has to be very careful about weighing too heavily on that decision of a vice presidential candidate to do the work for him of bringing the Sanders voters over to his side. I think potentially much more promising is the consequences of COVID-19, which I think it has been such a crisis in the United States that it really reveals a lot of structural problems in the United States, both in

terms of its economy and the way in which politics works in the United States. And if the core of the Sanders-Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing is a structural critique of business power and American political economy, I think voters are much more open to hearing that argument now, even voters in the center. Arguments such as the need to universalize our healthcare system to something closer than what they have in the United Kingdom than what we've traditionally had in the United States. I think it's

inconceivable that we would have been at this particular place, but for the fact of this crisis. So I think to the extent that Biden uses that opportunity to move towards a, to move the Democratic Party towards more of a structural critique of the American economy and business power, then I think that could do more work to bring Sanders voters over to, to his side than picking the right vice-presidential candidate. In terms of Obama, you know, I think I described Obama as part of the old guard in part because of my own personal views

of Obama, where I thought he was a transformational candidate and a very old guard president. So I think he was, there was much more continuity in terms of how he governed with Democrats of the past, such as the Clinton-Gore administration, than there was anything that was distinctly different about it. So I think he was very transformative in the way he thought about mobilizing voters to win elections in ways that I think we continued to see in the 2018 midterm elections, when there was large-scale repudiation of Trump in

elections that usually see very low voter turnout. And I think we'll, you know, remain to be seen whether Biden is able to tap into some of that as well. So I think, you know, Obama as a candidate is quite different from who Obama was as a president. And I would read Obama as president as part of the old Democratic Guard. Okay, thank you. Now let's turn to Jack on Qian. Yeah, please, please go about it. Thank you. I'm Jin Seong Chun. Thank you for your great insightful presentation. I have two questions related to the U.S. foreign

policy. It's not directly related to your presentation, but there are many audiences in South Korea who are interested in, you know, U.S. foreign policy. First question will be about the bilateral relations between US and China. The second one will be about the expecting foreign policy of the new administration from next year. So what will be the top priorities of the foreign policy for the next administration, whether you will be Biden or Trump administration, both two professors, if possible. The first one is

Well, we expected that the coronavirus situation will be a facilitator of the bilateral cooperation between US and China because that's the common threat to the public health in teacher terms. But it turns out that for the virus is not bad enough or fatally enough to facilitate the bilateral cooperation. So there are many discourses and never it is about blaming game, who will be more responsible for this aggravation of the situation. So do you expect this type of the escalation of confrontation starting

from both countries will define the short-term bilateral relations until the election times? Will it be the short-term President Trump's election strategy to blame China, probably to aggravate that the trade tension in the coming months, promised by starting the second phase of the trade deal? Or is it the result of the long-term aggravation of American public's perception of China, saying that China is the disseminator of the international global collective bats, such as virus by mishandling a divided

situation, the initial phase? So will it be the result coming from this generally aggravating American public's perception of China? So what will be the long-term prospect of this Alero confrontation? How will that define the American foreign policy becoming a month in years? So that's the first one. The second one, when we go back to the 21st century in general, under the US unipolarity, many American administrations started with crisis. We should measure with the terrorist attack, an Obama administration

with the 2008 economic recession, and now the next administration will be confronted with a serious challenge coming from the COVID situation and public health. So we expect that top priorities of the next American administrations will be very different from the past ones or exceptional. So we can easily expect that the top priority is how to deal with this health situation. The second one will be to revitalize American economy. The question will be, what will be the third? Well, if there is a Trump

administration, a second term, will he be different in dealing with the foreign policy situations? Thinking probably the legacy in his mind is to change his courses to foreign policies. There are a possibility of that. The more interesting question will be, what would be the foreign policy of the candidate Biden, if he becomes the president? So we expect that there might be turned to the pre-Trumpian normalcy by, you know, reassuming American global leadership and providing international collective goods to other countries. But still, there

is a concerns that in this very different situation, even though he will pursue different foreign policy, but there will be a continuing somehow Trumpian American First type of foreign policy even under the Biden administration because there are a lot of lack of American capability to deal with the situations. But in South Korea, there is expectation that new American administration will put more emphasis on the importance of alliance and revitalizing the importance of multilateralism. And what will be the

public support in those states about reassuming the American leadership generally for the next administration? Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for those questions. At this time, why don't we start with Teague and then Oh, sure. So, I mean, those are great questions. I think in terms of bilateral relations between the US and China, I'm thinking a bit about the presentation I gave at a KAS conference in the fall, where I thought out loud about this theory in international relations about domestic audience costs, and why it is

that you would expect the idea behind a theory is that when a leader makes a lot of threats, empty threats, and engages in a lot of cheap talk that's hostile towards another party, oftentimes that leader has to bear domestic audience costs, audience costs for having done so. In Trump's case, especially with respect to China, there seems to be close to zero domestic audience costs for the kind of vituperative rhetoric he has engaged in with respect to China. And there's a lot of reasons why that might be the case,

but I think the upshot of, if that's a fair characterization of the absence of domestic audience costs in Trump's case, is that he is freer to basically move around as, as he chooses to in terms of how he thinks about and uses US-China relations for his own personal political purposes. And I think anything that concerns predictions about a second Trump administration, I think has to start from observations about his record in his first administration, which is, in my reading, not an administration that has

some grand design either with respect to domestic politics or foreign relations, but really emanates from the, the personality himself of Trump. And so from that perspective, I think if Trump sees it necessary or expedient to try to cast China as an enemy for the purposes of political gain, he's certainly going to do that between now and and November. It's important to keep in mind, though, that to the extent that he has already done that in the last three years of his presidency, for the most part, it hasn't

had that much traction with American voters. So in the polls that I've looked at, for the most part, Americans still value the idea of a globalized economy, they still like the idea of America being engaged in multilateral relations with other countries. They certainly think of that as being the way forward in terms of how we move on from the current COVID crisis, in terms of, you know, having coordination with the WHO, for example. And so there's some slight uptick specifically in terms of how the US thinks about China in

slightly more negative terms, but I don't think we are in a situation so far, from based on the first three years of the Trump presidency, of Trump really being able to rail against China and against everything and create this mass upsurge of angry Americans and angry sentiments towards China. So, for example, if you try to project far, far ahead to a worst-case scenario about whether or not US and China might be engaged in, you know, military conflict as a result of this kind of incendiary rhetoric, I don't see

any appetite on the behalf of American voters for anything like that. So even though I think Trump likes to opportunistically choose enemies for personal political gain, and China certainly is low-hanging fruit from that perspective, I don't really see him as being able to gain that much from from doing that. You know, I think that the, and for the most part, I've already touched on some parts of an answer towards your second question about top priorities. The one other thing that I would add is, you know, I think Biden really sees foreign

policy as his strong suit. That's really been one of his top priorities and one of his areas of, you know, unique policy expertise from his years as a senator. And I think based on his record from those years, unless there's a really strong pull towards the left from the Sanders wing of the party in a way that really compels Biden, I think Biden's first goal, if he were to win the presidency, would be to try to try to return the United States to some semblance of a pre-Trump normalcy in terms of foreign relations. Thank you all.

So it would be more interesting probably if I disagreed with my colleague, but I don't about about anything that he said there. But those are both great questions. Let's, it's very quickly on the first one. I agree, I don't think President Trump would hesitate for a moment to turn China into a demon if he thought that it would help him electorally. But I agree with Teague, I actually don't think the evidence so far suggests that that's likely to work all that well. Just as not seen polling, for example, on, you know,

what percentage of Americans have actually picked up this language of calling it the the China virus or the Wuhan virus. And it's, it's vanishingly small, like, you know, it just. And I think that in all their additional obstacles, but like the fact that Trump is on video, you know, saying, you know, many of the things that he wants to accuse other people about with respect to being duped by China. So I, I just, he, he wouldn't hesitate to play, play that card, and I'm sure that they will try it, they'll try anything they can, they wouldn't hesitate.

but I I'm I'm doubtful that it will end up that there will be a big rise in anti-Chinese sentiment in the US and in the in the coming year you know looking ahead to future administration's so just I think the the thing that I would say about a Biden administration is that I I'm sure that Biden would want broadly to recreate the kind of foreign policy that you might associate with Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama and you know that he that he would aspire to do that the challenge is going to be that it

that it's a lot easier to break things the way that the Trump administration has than to re-establish relationships that are based on a trust and credibility and reliability and I think I I would expect other countries to be much more careful in their dealings with the United States and in the future and and much more skeptical the idea that they can expect a reliable negotiating partner and so that's going to be in addition to all the other crises and by an administration would face I I think that's just a it it is going to be very

very hard to put back together the pieces that have been broken over the last four years now a second Trump term I would just so again I'm I will be blunt like I I do not think that his foreign policy is America first I think it is Donald Trump first and and but you know pulling out of the constraints that are created by international agreements agreements and alliances is a way for him to put himself first and I think one of the many things that are that are I think are genuinely alarming about the

situation the u.s. finds itself in now is that I think a second Trump term and I think we're already seeing this in the last year of the first Trump term he is unshackled now he is Unchained he is quite confident that the checks and balances that are built into the American political system do not constrain him he does not have to worry about Republican senators removing him from office increasingly he does not have to worry about the courts checking him and if he has another four years in office my guess is he won't be as

worried about the media he'll feel like he'll have more leverage over the media as well and one of the nice things about Trump first or America first foreign policy is that when he's negotiating with foreign countries he can accept a massive side payments to his personal economic financial interest right um that you know that will not be visible especially won't be visible if all the checks have been removed and you know that's there are lots of countries that would love to negotiate with a broken

superpower that is willing to make concessions in return for private benefits so so I agree that his foreign policy in many ways is incoherent but I think that kind of coherence is what we might expect out of a second Trump term okay thank you yeah we have featured two discussions and replies from on the presenters now let's turn to the audience we have already have lots of questions from from the audience the first question I mean this is really the first question that we got is I guess yes as a question from from an American

working in in Korea is it projected that the Tony Tony R presidential election will be held by absentee ballots only across the 50 states question mark kind of you know technical question and second question also it's about I mean we have three questions you know asking same thing how many independent candidates will be and how important will independence be in the election who do you want to I mean I think on the first question I think everything should be preparing for the possibility absentee mail and balance only but I

think that circumstance would only arise if there were a second wave of this outbreak that spread across all 50 states and there will be a lot of states as Paul pointed out that will play out the dynamic that we witnessed in Wisconsin where if Republicans are in power in a given state and they see value and holding elections at actual voting booths because they think it will have the effect of suppressing voter turnout and depressing the turnout and ways that will benefit Republican candidates and Donald Trump then we will

probably see even if there is a massive second wave of that spreads across the country we'll probably see a lot of states that will insist on having real elections as well on the second and the second question I think there's typically a libertarian candidate and I think this year Justin Amash is running as a candidate for that party's ticket but there's nothing else that I've heard of and I think so far the positive the biggest threat would have been if somebody like Michael Bloomberg chose to run as a third party

candidate and for a range of reasons so far does not seem that even though there you could argue that he was treated poorly as a candidate but maybe only as poorly as he actually performed as a candidate for the Democratic nomination doesn't seem like he's motivated to to for any personal reasons to run as a third party candidate he seems more motivated to actually defeat Donald Trump thank you here's here's a question from Maria hiko from Salaam University this question goes to Teague you you said

that the the scenario Biden wins and Trump refused to accept what do you think are the direct actions trunk would take you know I think this these are the kinds of scenarios that I really think especially political scientists in advanced industrialized democracies like the US are really not trained to think about you know I think part of an answer is the way in which Trump regularly especially at his rallies talks about how he has the military on his side and how he has the police on his side I I

think I wouldn't put it past our president to play out scenarios in which he would not peacefully leave from his political office and that involves a lot of ugliness domestically in the United States and most of those scenarios are not ones that that I'm trained as a political scientist to really carefully think about and a lot of it also will depend on what role you know the Congress is willing to play in that situation and what role the courts are willing to play in that situation yeah I mean I want to say first and I

know I have some of the same discomfort that I think take you you know with this it's quite extraordinary i yes i i i was trained to teach about and do research about a very peaceful and highly stabilized at least in terms of its formal institutions democracy and it feels very peculiar to have to wrestle with these kinds of questions but i don't think that we can i I don't think we can hide from them I think that the realities are apparent that which is not to say that we're necessarily going to

slide in this direction but there is enough going on that it's just to me it is not intellectually honest to not to attempt to wrestle with it and so and just as an illustration of that so today the state legislature in the state of Michigan announced that they were going to go into they were they were going to go out of session of the legislature because they were fearful about the armed groups that had been protesting including inside the Capitol building the building where the legislature meets

people carrying automatic weapons and and protesting against the fact that that there were stay-at-home orders in place in in Michigan and the situation there serious enough that the state legislature actually Republican majority in the state legislature decided that they had to go into hiding they could not need in public session and so now imagine what happens if a president who has been saying for years that the other side is cheating and stealing elections and is backed by powerful media that is taken

as gospel by tens of millions of Americans imagine that on election night he declares that the election has been stolen from them what would happen then I don't know but it's a it is not an implausible scenario at all if the election is closed and of course one thing that's also going to be the case in the US and will be probably even more the case because of the virus is that the the absentee vote the mail-in vote comes in slowly you know the vote in California comes in slowly I live in California you know

most people in California now vote by mail it takes it takes can take ten days to count all the ballots in the various districts so it's you know it's quite possible that you know that a president could declare fraud at that point thank you here's here's a question on identified question in in in I mean the recent Korean election I mean generally election we see the rising generation gap amount of voters for the United States for example like you know millennial voters the youngsters is there any political characteristics you

know from those voters and particularly today support America's global leadership I can start wheat you know one thought I had and listening to that question is if America's young voters were like South Korea's young voters Trump would not have won in 2016 and the question over who's likely to win would be much less of a debate so that even in the there was an election this week in California in Southern California to finish the term until November of currently of a elected member of Congress in 2018 who

had to resign because of an affair that they had with one of their staffers and but that was a democratic member of Congress and they lost their seat to the Republican candidate running to fill that seat until November and that surprised a lot of people but part of the story of that election especially during the Komen crisis was that older Americans turned out to vote and younger voters in that district did not turn out to vote that's a very very old story in the United States the 2018 midterm congressional elections were really an

exception to that and I you know I would be very pleasantly surprised if young voters continued to turnout and mobilize in the way that they did in the 2018 midterm elections I worry that they might not in particular given that Donald Trump is at the head of the ticket for the Democratic Party Biden you mean what could I say I said from oh sorry Joe Biden yeah that's right yeah I mean I I do think that's one of the the biggest to the extent that there's a campaign here to follow I do agree with daegu that this is one of

the biggest questions is what is going to happen with young voters and they're not going to vote for Donald Trump you know there's a there is a big gap young voters have been tilting you know strong strongly Democratic in recent years and trumpets just accelerated that trend the question is more how many of them will potentially could be for a third party but it doesn't really look like that's gonna be that's gonna be a big issue it's more whether they will turn out to vote and I have to say I I remain inclined to think at the end of

the day that youth turnout is likely to be pretty high that it is actually likely to look like 2018 and if that's just because and I think it actually probably depends a lot less on what Joe Biden does than just the fact that that Donald Trump is going to be on the ballot and the election is going to be a referendum on his presidency and which is what I mean that is a traditional thing in American politics is that when a president runs for the second term the election is you know mostly about how

people feel about the president's first term or at least the end of the president's first term and you know I think there's a lot of reason to think that that's a big problem for for Donald Trump thank you here's a question both of you mentioned democratic backsliding which is which you know occurs across the world particularly you know advanced industrial countries do you see any particular American element in in comparative perspective yeah that's a that's a great question and I mean I think they're I think the American

system is peculiar in in certain respects having to do with the nature of our institutions and traditionally our institutions I think did provide a pretty strong check against that that kind of dynamic because the political system was so fragmented that the idea that you would really get a national coalition around a figure like say Donald Trump where and who would not be effectively checked by other parts of the political system that had their own power that just seemed like a really hard thing to pull off and so one of the

things that I think has been really stunning and it has to be explained if I got a book coming out with Jacob hacker that tries to explain some of this it that that the Republican Party really has rolled over and or you know I I watch Game of Thrones and the famous the line over and over and Game of Thrones was will you bend the knee you know will you bend the knee to the person who is asking for your loyalty and basically Republicans have at the end of the day they have bent their knee and and that

wasn't supposed to happen in a in a Madisonian you know separation of powers political system so it's interesting to understand why that that might take place and then the other thing I think that's interesting about the American case for this is that you do have this kind of unusual possibility in the American system which is that you can get what Jacob hacker nark are calling a minority Rhian government right that you can have a unified minority of the country because of the way that they're located geographically that is actually

able to govern over a majority so the Senate in the u.s. you know is bears no resemblance to the population of the United States and so if you're a strong party in rural areas of the country you're gonna have a real advantage in in getting a Senate majority and that so Republicans have lost the overall national vote in the Senate in in most recent elections but they have a majority of the Senators because of this rural advantage and the same advantaged help present Trump to win even when he lost the popular vote in the presidency

and then I don't want to get into all the complications of it but it even helps Republicans in the House of Representatives because demo wastes so many of their votes in urban districts so you potentially have a system especially if you can then stack the Supreme Court with your supporters you have a system where you you don't actually command the support of a majority of the country but you you can run the country and so that's a little different than the kind of democratic backsliding that levissi and zib lat

talk about but it's part of the part of what's going on in the US yeah I would just add to that I think anytime you ask a question about whether the United States something that's happening in the United States is exceptional compared to what happens in other countries in the world I think you have to think about the role that race plays as an organizing principle in American politics in a way that it rarely does in a lot of other countries and so part of what's happening today I think is one party's reaction to what seemed to be

almost inevitable demographic change which was likely to secure the long term dominance of the Democratic Party at the national level electoral II in the United States and the way the Republican Party already even before Trump had begun to prepare for that inevitability was to change the contest from a contest over who wins and who loses to a contest over what are the rules of the game whose votes get to be disqualified whose votes get to be suppressed and so on and now with Trump it further becomes I mean

Trump almost doesn't exist without Obama as a president that preceded him and so it's hard not to at least entertain the argument that the trigger for Democratic backsliding in the United States was the Obama presidency it's not clear that the Trump the Tea Party movement on its own had enough momentum to really fundamentally a brute American social political economic institutions in the way that three years of the Trump presidency has done and I don't think the trump presidency would have happened

without the Obama presidency okay it's almost time the final question to you I mean each of you if Biden wins would that be a in terms of foreign policy would that be a true rigorous course you know really going back to pre Trump normalcy or I mean he tries but basically it'll be the continuation of the current leadership which is in decline who do you want now so I'm not an expert on foreign policy at all so this is it is highly highly speculative but maybe I can answer in one way they kind of ties it back to

some things that I do know more about I thought I've thought more more deeply about you know I did that the the challenge' Biden administration would face in foreign policy is you know you how do you glue all this back together particularly in a context where American power is seen as an as in relative decline and I do think that is a I think that is a huge challenge it would it's a very very heavy lift on even under favorable circumstances for an American president the one thing that I think might if one hope for that kind of

outcome the one thing that I think might generate some optimism would be the following and it really follows from what take who was saying a minute ago which is that the Republican Party in some ways has been engaged in a race against time right they're pursuing a political strategy that that makes no long-term Democratic sense in in the context of an American democracy right and they're alienating minority populations that are growing they're alienating anybody under 45 so you know as Lindsey Graham senator

Lindsay Graham described we're not producing enough angry white guys anymore enough or they're not making enough old white angry guys to maintain this strategy all right so so if you accept that it suggests that there is the hope has to be that the Republican Party at some point is going to have to change course right if American democracy can hold itself together and get through this dark tunnel then the Republican Party in order to be competitive is going to have to change course away from the very narrow targeted narrowly

targeted constituency that it's been Android and and so if you and of course American foreign policy traditionally depended upon that kind of bipartisanship and that kind of consensus so that's my general take about American politics more generally we need a healthier Republican Party if the American polity is going to is going to thrive you can't you know in our political system you you can't have one of the two major parties not be a healthy political party and have the system hold up in an enduring way so if

I were going to try to paint an optimistic picture of the future of a bright Abidin foreign policy it would be that me and I'm sure they are thinking in these terms that they do want to try to engineer a shift towards a different kind of future for the Republican Party that is less based on a you know a strategy of burning everything down I think Paul is absolutely right that it's much easier to break things than to build them back up and I also agree that a key part of building it back up is building rebuilding a lot of trust that

has been frayed and so here I think there's sign of signs of potential optimism and signs of potential pessimism I think you know one of Biden's strong suits is not only the fact that he sees foreign policy as his area of expertise but over the many years that he was a senator on the Foreign Relations Committee and over eight years of being vice president he just literally knows a lot of people on the global political stage and has personal relations with them and that's a good foundation to start rebuilding a

lot of the trust that is necessary for the u.s. to return to the position that it has been in the past as an ally and as a global leader I think reasons for pessimism are the United States is not the only country that has changed over the last few years you know I think NATO is not the NATO that it was before Trump stepped into the presidency the UK is not the UK it was a number of years ago it is very difficult to think about how you could resuscitate the Paris Accord given koban 19 it's very difficult to see how you

might resuscitate the TPP given a lot of what's happened a lot of Asian economies in the last few years so it's not just that the United States has changed quite dramatically over the last years but a lot of the world has changed quite dramatically over the last years and that also will be a constraint in terms of the likely success of Biden bringing us back to some pre Trump state of the world thank you we are slightly over time so it's time to close it's been a truly intriguing and an enlightening

discussion today and thank you Paul and tegu for sharing your insight with us great to be with you and also thank someone and Chesham for and and also the audience for you know excellent questions I apologize those of your questions didn't really get to answer but we have another time I mean another opportunity coming soon and last but not least eai is is grateful to Ministry of Foreign Affairs or Korean government I mean are okay for sponsoring this event before you leave I would like to kindly ask if

you fill out a brief survey about the webinar you know your feedback is absolutely indispensable for us to improve and the survey could be found in the public opinion polls somewhere below once again thank you all for joining us today and I'll see you next time with our second webinar posting very soon goodbye from Seoul thank you you

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