[EAI Online Seminar] After Trump Series 1. America After the Election

YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ngr0MhxabSw

The East Asia Institute (EAI) hosted "America, After the Election," the first session of its online seminar series, "After Trump." In this seminar, EAI discussed the analysis of the US presidential election results, the challenges facing the new administration, and the domestic foundations of future foreign policy with Professor Paul Pierson and Professor Taeku Lee from the University of California, Berkeley, as presenters; Professor Son Byung-kwon from Chung-Ang University as a discussant; and EAI President Son Yeol (Professor at Yonsei University) as the moderator.

• Date and Time: Tuesday, November 10, 2020, 10:00–11:20 (KST)
• Presenters: Paul Pierson (Professor, University of California, Berkeley), Taeku Lee (Professor, University of California, Berkeley)
• Moderator: Son Yeol (President, EAI; Professor, Yonsei University)
• Discussant: Son Byung-kwon (Professor, Chung-Ang University)

Summary:

Can the Biden Administration Bring Back American Normalcy?

Declining Democracy, Racial Conflict, Political Division, and the Decline of Global Leadership

I. Analysis of the 2020 US Presidential Election

Highest Voter Turnout in American History

• Both Professor Pierson and Professor Lee agreed that this US presidential election recorded the highest voter turnout in American history since the 20th century. Both professors also noted that this record turnout was the result of effectively mobilizing supporters of both the Biden and Trump camps, and simultaneously highlighted how remarkably close the election was. Professor Taeku Lee projected that once the final vote count is completed, approximately 150 million Americans, or two out of every three eligible voters, would have participated in the election. He also anticipated that Trump would receive approximately 9 million more votes than in 2016, while Biden would receive about 11 million more votes than Hillary Clinton did at the time.

An Election Campaign Characterized by Racial Conflict (Race War)

• Professor Taeku Lee identified racial division within the United States as the second major characteristic of this election. While the US was already struggling with racial issues before President Trump's inauguration, he pointed out that these divisions were further exacerbated by President Trump's rhetoric and policies that incited racial division and promoted white supremacy.
• Citing exit poll results, Professor Taeku Lee assessed that the Biden-Harris camp won due to the overwhelming support of Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American voters. According to a vote survey conducted with Hispanic and Black voters, focusing on these demographic groups, 89% of Black voters, 70% of Hispanic voters, 68% of Asian voters, and 60% of Native American voters cast their ballots for the Biden-Harris ticket. Conversely, only 41% of White voters voted for Biden-Harris. The Biden-Harris ticket garnered approximately 43% of the White female vote, 49% of the White college-educated vote, 46% of the White suburban vote, and 46% of the White vote among those aged 18-29, illustrating the racial divisions in this election.

A Fiercely Contested Election with Unexpected Results

• Professor Taeku Lee highlighted another noteworthy aspect of this election: despite Biden and Harris receiving over 5 million more votes, the election was extremely close. He noted that if just 50,000 votes, a mere 1% of the total vote difference, had shifted to Trump and been evenly distributed among Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona, the outcome would have been different.
• Professor Pierson observed that the unexpectedly close contests in "Blue Wall" states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, traditionally considered Democratic strongholds, indicate that traditional regional party preferences are shifting along with changes in the racial composition of the US. While the Democratic Party showed relatively sluggish performance in Blue Wall states, the Republican Party achieved unexpected gains in Sun Belt states such as Arizona and Georgia, which are Republican strongholds. Professor Taeku Lee also cited Georgia, where the non-White population has increased to 58% compared to 2010 when the majority of the population was White, as a factor contributing to the Democratic victories in some regions, pointing to these demographic shifts.
• Professor Pierson identified Biden's success in securing the support of a significant number of suburban voters, along with some white working-class voters in the Midwest, as a key factor in his victory. Professor Taeku Lee also commented that Biden's strong performance in these states is particularly noteworthy, considering that Trump focused his efforts on mobilizing his base in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan during the election campaign.

II. The Future of the Biden Administration

Continued Political Division in the US, Making Reforms Under the Biden Administration Virtually Impossible

• Professors Taeku Lee and Pierson identified the greatest challenge for the upcoming Biden administration as operating within a context of political division and eroded democratic values in the United States. Professor Taeku Lee pointed out that the US is experiencing ideological and racial polarization, underpinned by weakened social institutions, a collapse of social trust, and a belief in conspiracy theories and fake news. He argued that the US has lost much of its public space for the free exchange of ideas, which has been replaced by the exchange of information filtered through filter bubbles and political agendas. While these phenomena existed before President Trump's election, Professor Taeku Lee stated that they became more pronounced during his presidency and are expected to continue after this election.
• Professor Taeku Lee anticipates that this domestic division will present significant challenges for the Biden administration in its COVID-19 response, including coordinating the national distribution of masks, personal protective equipment, diagnostic kits, and ventilators, as well as procuring vaccines.
• Professor Taeku Lee predicted that in the polarized US context, Biden will face the dual burden of confronting staunch opposition from Republicans and Trump supporters while also needing to reward his core supporters for their electoral support. Policies related to police reform and racial justice, intended to reward Black voters, Biden's most steadfast base, are likely to face strong Republican opposition.
• Professor Pierson noted that while Trump lost the election, Biden also did not perform as strongly as expected in key states, and this limitation will hinder the Biden administration's ability to pursue ambitious reforms. He suggested that the January elections will be a variable, but the Republican Party is still expected to control the Senate, and the Republican party led by Mitch McConnell will act as an obstacle to the Biden administration's pursuit of reform legislation.
• Professor Pierson emphasized that while some elected Republican officials, including Mitch McConnell, undermined the spirit of American democracy by amplifying President Trump's claims of electoral fraud, former Republican leaders such as George W. Bush avoided this path, conceded the election results, congratulated Biden, and upheld democratic values. He projected that this mature political culture is something we can expect from the Biden administration going forward. He added that supporting Trump's unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud would only serve to divide the Republican Party without offering any benefits to the party as a whole.

Escaping a Burning House, But the Fire Still Burns

• Professors Pierson and Taeku Lee explained that while the regression of American democracy became noticeable during President Trump's term, and Biden's election represented an escape from a burning house, the fire has not yet been extinguished. They projected that the ongoing regression of democracy and national difficulties would continue for several years. They warned that the erosion of American democratic norms is comparable to phenomena observed in countries experiencing democratic backsliding, such as Brazil, Hungary, and Poland.
• Professor Taeku Lee warned that President Trump's refusal to accept the election results raises doubts about whether the US is a functioning democracy and shakes the foundations of American governance. He described Trump's four years in office as "dark clouds over democracy" and urged a return to the "pre-Trump normalcy." He stated that the election results were akin to the American public ousting an authoritarian leader through the ballot box without shedding a drop of blood. However, he projected that Trump's future actions and the potential for his supporters to regroup and militarize would pose a significant threat to American democracy going forward.

Keys to the Success of the Future Biden Administration: Personal Decency and Foreign Policy

• Professor Taeku Lee suggested that Biden's personal decency and interpersonal skills could foster a leadership of consensus, leading to a coordinated federal response in areas such as COVID-19 containment amidst division. He also noted that the American public is generally weary of the past four years and cautiously projected that Biden could unite the American people based on their desire to end the chaos and crises of the Trump administration and return to normal politics.
• Professors Taeku Lee and Pierson see potential for positive change in foreign policy, in contrast to the struggles in domestic politics. They anticipate that Biden, a veteran in foreign affairs, will be able to fulfill the aspiration of restoring the US as a leader of the global liberal order. Professor Taeku Lee specifically mentioned that not only the American public but also many political elites, including a majority of Republican politicians, are dissatisfied with the instability caused by the "America First" foreign policy of the Trump administration. Professor Pierson also stated that foreign policy is an area where the President has sole authority, and Biden is expected to focus on restoring alliances that have been damaged over the past few years under the Trump administration. He added that given the Democrats' failure to secure a Senate majority and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, foreign policy is the area where the President can exercise executive power.
• However, Professor Pierson pointed out that the foundation of trust with US allies has been significantly weakened by President Trump's unilateral actions over the past four years, making the restoration of alliances fraught with difficulty. He stated that while Biden personally commands the trust of traditional US allies and will strive to restore alliances after taking office, these allies harbor doubts about whether the United States as a nation will uphold its commitments in the long term, having already lost trust.

■ Paul Pierson_John Gross Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a 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 New Republic. He has served as an editorial board member for the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, and Annual Review of Political Science, and as chair of the Political Science Department 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). His bookDismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment(1994) was selected as the best book on American politics by the American Political Science Association in 1995, and his article "Path Dependence, Increasing Returns and the Study of Politics" received the Best Article Award from the American Political Science Association in 2000 and the Aaron Wildavsky Prize in 2011.

■ Taeku Lee_George Johnson Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. He has served as a 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 served on the supervisory boards of the American National Election Studies and the General Social Survey, as treasurer and executive committee member of the American Political Science Association, and as chair of the Political Science Department and associate director of the Haas Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. His main research areas include the politics of race and ethnicity, public opinion research, identity and inequality, and participatory democracy. His books include:Oxford Handbook of Racial and Ethnic Politics in the United States(2015),Asian American Political Participation(2011).

■ Son Byung-kwon_Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Chung-Ang University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan.

His main research areas include American politics, US foreign policy, and comparative legislative and party politics. His recent research includes "Is American Congressional Politics Still a Model of Democracy?: The US Congress Captured by Party Politics" (2018) and "Understanding the Rise of Nationalism in the Trump Era" (2017).

■ Son Yeol_President of EAI, Professor at the Graduate School of International Studies, Yonsei University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. He previously taught at Chung-Ang University before joining Yonsei University's Graduate School of International Studies. He currently serves as President of the East Asia Institute (EAI). He has also served as Dean of the Graduate School of International Studies, Head of the Underwood International College, Director of the Institute for Sustainability Studies, and Director of the Institute of International Studies at Yonsei University. He was a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), and the University of California (Berkeley). He served as President of the Korean Association of International Studies (2019) and President of the Association for Modern Japanese Studies (2012). He has held fellowships such as Fulbright, MacArthur, Japan Foundation, and Senior Fellow at Waseda University's Advanced Research Center. He has served as an advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Korea National Diplomatic Academy, the Northeast Asian History Foundation, and the Korea Foundation, and as a specialist member of the Committee for Northeast Asian Affairs. He is currently a member of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Self-Evaluation Committee. His areas of expertise include Japanese foreign policy, international political economy, East Asian international politics, and public diplomacy. His recent books include:Japan and Asia's Contested Order(2019, with T. J. Pempel),Understanding Public Diplomacy in East Asia (2016, with Jan Melissen), “South Korea under US-China Rivalry: the Dynamics of the Economic-Security Nexus in the Trade Policymaking,” The Pacific Review(2019), 32, 6, "Middle Power Diplomacy in Korea" (2017, co-edited).

Video Script

hello everyone welcome to east asia institute's online seminar uh america after the election uh i'm your son president of eai and beyonce university professor uh i'm excited to host uh today's seminar um as the beginning of of our four consecutive webinar series titled after trump the themes include u.s korea cooperation under great power rivalry iraq u.s alliance and its future under the new administration and economic partnership under the great economic decoupling this one also uh is a sequel to

our previous webinar held in may last i mean this year so it was six months ago uh the title prospects for the upcoming u.s election today we are featuring uh the same panelists as before uh professors uh paul pearson tagli and pyeong won zone i'm actually thrilled to have all them back because their predictions made six months ago are very very accurate they said that trump is clearly underdog biting wins trump might not succeed concede um existing forecasting models are most likely fail and copied elections etc so um

it's truly a great gathering again um for uh our first speaker uh paul pearson um is the john gross professor of political science at the university of california berkeley he is an active commentator on on public affairs whose writings appear in various places including new york times washington post and new republic his is the co-author of the forthcoming book let them eat towards how the rights rule in the age of extreme inequality a very interesting topic title and he has many prize-winning books including uh politics and time

dismantling uh the welfare state et cetera and uh his article i think it came out long time ago uh past dependence increasing returns and the study of politics is a must read uh you know article to every you know graduate students in political science so um very famous work and our second speaker is professor teku lee who is the george johnson professor of law and professor of political science at the university of california berkeley he has hands-on experience with surveys and elections he is a co-principal investigator of the

national asian american survey co-principal investigator of the bay area poverty tracker and managing director of asian american decisions he also serves on the national advisory committee for the u.s census bureau and he previously served as a member of the board of overseers of the american national election studies and member of the board of overseas of the general social survey as well as treasurer and executive council member for the american political science association long list um and his research uh obviously focused

on the racial and and um ethnic politics and public opinion and survey research uh etc so and his recent publications include oxford handbook of racial and ethnic politics in the united states and asian american political participation with that today's uh discussant is professor son byungwon of chung university who is a leading scholar in the field of american politics in korea he has published many books including climate change and dilemma for the us germany and is the united states congressional politics

still a model to follow the u.s congress captured by the partisan politics et cetera today's format uh webinar format is is that it is divided into three so first maybe first round we will discuss elections past elections and the second round will be what comes next for the biden presidency and finally we'll have q a section from the audience actually we have a long list of questions from the audience and i i just you know oversee it and there are very interesting questions there so i will introduce them

to to you so with that said for the first round let's start with the election given the trump presidency actually damaging the united states inside in ice outside this election 2020 election is a in a sense watershed and probably uh the most consequential since world war ii or some may say since civil war uh so um let me uh first uh you know ask uh you know paul and then uh tegu uh what's your takeaways from this uh election paul it's uh it's great to be back in this conversation um with you um so and i

i was planning on starting with uh with what you finished with which is i think it is right to say uh the most consequential election since at least world war ii but but arguably you you could go back even further than that and um so the fact that we're saying that i think is indicative of how deep the structural challenges are facing the united states today and how deep the divide is and so um rather than going into too much detail about all the twists and turns of the campaign and the election

i wanted to start by just um framing it by imagining three possible outcomes uh that could that could have come about on tuesday uh which is each seemed plausible and each i think would have had very different consequences we'll get into the more details of the consequences in the second part now that we i think know where we are which path we're on uh but i think we can really understand things best by thinking about the three alternatives so that the first would be um president trump being re-elected um

and even though uh joe biden won the popular vote by it looks like you know ultimately it'll probably be four or five percent um you know it was close enough in uh the electoral college that you don't have to imagine all that many votes switching hands to imagine a world in which president trump was re-elected and if we had been on that path i don't think it would be alarmist to say we would have been continuing down the path of democratic backsliding what steve lavitzky and daniel ziblad have called democratic backsliding in

their book how democracies die because there has been a steady erosion of the guardrails of democracy in american society during the trump presidency and with four more years to fill the courts to fill the national security and law enforcement apparatuses to launch assaults on the media i think and without the shadow of an impending election hanging over him um i think we could certainly have expected that we would have seen the continuing slippage of democracy that you've seen in some other countries like

hungary um or brazil or poland uh to have taken place in the united states the second possible um outcome was um you know what we call here the blue wave scenario um in which which i think you know many pollsters anticipated and maybe we'll want to talk a little bit about the polling but a blue wave election which would have involved a big democratic victory um with um a clear repudiation of the trump presidency a substantial enough victory in the senate to give democrats at least a small but working majority in

the senate um that would have put us in on a very different path it would have opened up at least some prospects for significant political uh and social reform uh the biden and you know the the president-elect um had talked about his plans recognizing that he was going to be in a kind of new deal kind of situation biden himself i think pretty moderate but seeing that this was going to be a moment for aggressive reforms and whether whether you're talking about climate change or dealing with the pandemic or the kinds of political

reforms that would address i think some really deep dysfunctions in the american political system like the existence of the filibuster which makes it very difficult to legislate um so the second path would have been the blue wave path um we got neither of those paths in the election um we're on the the third path um which involved um uh i think a clear defeat of uh president trump um you know the election results in both the electoral college and the popular vote are clear um biden uh is is ahead in the in the electoral

college uh in some ways it's kind of the mirror image of what happened in 2016 same same likely electoral college a vote count though with somewhat larger margins uh in the in the critical states than was true when hillary clinton was defeated by donald trump um and then a clearer popular vote uh majority of course um but we'll probably have to get into this there is discussion about fraud and so on there is no evidence no evidence of any significant regulate uh irregularities uh in the election uh this is something

uh these accusations in many ways i think are completely predictable uh given the nature of the man in the white house but um but the electoral result was was clear although there is likely to be a fair amount of noise around it in in the weeks to come but democrats did not capture the senate um they still could if they win um both of the runoff elections that will be held in uh in the state of georgia in early january they will not be favorites uh to win those races i i think it's fair to say um and we will

be in a very different situation uh if they are or not able to uh win those races because if they are not uh which i think again is more likely then republicans will continue to hold majority control in the very powerful u.s senate which means that a president biden essentially will not be able to pass legislation unless it is acceptable to the majority leader of the senate mitch mcconnell and will not be able to appoint judges unless the republican senate majority is willing to let him do that and they may

let him appoint a few and judges mattered tremendously in american in the american institutional framework so we got a mixed result uh which is and and although there's i think understandably enormous focus on the fact that um president trump is going to have to leave office we need to recognize that it is a mixed result and that it leaves the united states continuing to be in the world that it has been in now for really i think i think one could argue almost a quarter century um a very deep divides between the parties

um and with the parties being quite evenly matched both presidential candidates received more votes than any presidential candidate has received in american political history right which indicates that both sides were really able to mobilize their supporters um and the outcome was a pretty close thing so um i i will can get into this more and then maybe in the next round of the discussion but the american political system is prone to gridlock the way the system is designed and it encourages particularly i would

say the conservative party which is less committed to the idea of having government actually function it encourages that party to engage in ways that that threaten the legitimacy of the system and make it as difficult as possible for um for the government to function well that's so it's it's very much a mixed outcome even though you see hundreds of thousands of people celebrating in the streets and i think with reason for those who are concerned about the health of democracy the next few years are likely to

continue to be quite difficult once thank you thank you uh thank you paul um kind of pessimistic uh uh evaluation uh you know one one on one one quick follow-up question you said um the highest turnout in in the u.s history right this uh election how that uh actually played out uh in in the race uh is it for biden or for um you know trump do you have uh any analysis of that turnout uh well so it's the the highest turnout in 100 years as a percentage i think of the la of those eligible to vote um but just

numerically the highest turnout ever you know parker's the population has grown and there are a lot more people who are eligible to vote um but um you know i i i think it was a case where both sides really mobilized their voters uh and i mean we can talk take you would be is much better position to talk about this and i am about some of the changes around the edges that are interesting people who maybe switch sides or where there was a disproportionate growth but i think the overall story is that

both sides really got their voters out um and if there was anything surprising there uh you know if if folks watching were following the lead up to the campaign you know i think pollsters expected on average a bigger victory than biden got you know they were looking for him to win by maybe eight or nine points where it looks like it'll end up being something like five and my my sense of that is um that the the biggest mistake there was once again as happened in 2016 underestimating the capacity of donald

trump to get out small town and rural voters who are sometimes not regular voters but they came out to vote for donald trump thank you thank you paul i think yes uh you know tegu you it's your turn uh yeah tell us more about uh the election uh particularly uh just last point of uh paul that uh you know there's a still a discrepancy between um you know uh you know polls uh you know forecasting and the actual result uh the gab is uh three four uh percent uh overall and how do we explain that um so

including that question uh it's your your turn sure thank uh thank you so much thank you again president son and east asia institute for the opportunity to bring bring us back to recap to 2020 elections uh a lot has happened since may and so it's a pleasure and honor to be invited back to take stock uh of the past half year uh i'm i'm gonna get to the question of polling uh at the end because it'll require a little bit of getting into the weeds but i think first in terms of analyzing the election results

i would start where i ended um my part of the presentation back in may where i ended by saying that you know it's not clear in 2020 that democracy would be the only game in town where the only thing the losers would want to do is to try again within the same institutions under which they had just lost which is a famous description of stable consolidated democracies and that there were specifically four possible outcomes you know trump wins and the democrats accept the outcome trump wins and the democrats refuse to

accept the outcome biden wins and trump accepts the outcome or biden wins and trump refuses to accept the outcome and you know by now it is clear that biden has won but it is far from clear that trump will accept the outcome and if he does not accept the outcome what that means for whether we are still a functioning democracy and what that means in terms of governance uh for the united states now to be realistic it is still i think more likely than not that trump will have to accept the outcome once

his litany of legal challenges which have so far been facially meritless have run their course and when that happens it may well be the case that the dark clouds over our democracy for the last three or four years will lift and the us as a government if not as a people will awake from this sort of long period of bewitchment under the trump presidency and return to some semblance of pre-trump normalcy where i think you can maybe again think of the united states as aspiring to return to its standing as global leader staunch ally

reliable trade partner and a force for positive change on problems requiring multilateral solutions like climate change and the future and the threat of future pandemics i think that is still the likely road ahead but it is still possible that we won't go down that likely road and a lot still depends on how deep and resolute trump's support among voters is or you know it's hard to even think in these terms or what fraction of his voters are militant and militarized and much still depends on whether institutions like the

republican party and its leaders and the conservative media and its spokespersons put the cult of personality that is trump ahead of the nation's 233-year history as a constitutional electoral democracy and you know here i'm of the same mind as paul that so far distressingly few national leaders of the republican party have even acknowledged the legitimacy of the 2020 election despite there being no shred of evidence to suggest that the election is not legitimate then in terms of analysis of the

outcomes itself i think there are at least two key stories to the outcome one of which you have undoubtedly heard a lot about and paul has mentioned as well and that is the story of turnout the other key to the outcome is one that i think is still relatively less talked about or talked about in terms that i think are misleading and that is the story of race the turnout story is clear and to an extent uncomplicated a record number of americans voted voted by mail voted early voted on election day and when the final

tally is reported we'll see that nearly 150 million americans will have voted or two out of every three americans eligible to vote and as paul mentioned that's going to be the highest proportion of voter eligible americans to have voted since the early 20th century what we're learning from the vote count is that this record turnout is the result of mobilization on both sides of the campaign so trump is on target to get nine million more total votes than he did in 2016 and biden is on target to get 11 million

more total votes than hillary clinton did in 2020. so this last weekend you may have seen you know even in korea accounts of hundreds of thousands of americans spilling into the streets in festive celebration of biden's electoral victory uh and in mainstream media with the exception of fox news i think one repeated theme in the coverage of these celebrations was that american voters without shedding a drop of blood had ousted a uh you know authoritarian ruler in the making using just the power of the popular vote

and when the dust settles and all the votes are finally tallied i think one side biden harris will have received five million more votes than the other side so that's all to the good to an extent but i think we still have to keep in mind that the ouster of authoritarian rulers or wannabe authoritarian rulers which i think is a fair characterization of donald trump often takes more than one election and in the key respect of the electoral college vote i think the 2020 outcome was remarkably close

still so the total vote margin is going to wind up being about 5 million and that's a huge number but if you just pull off one percent of that total vote margin 50 000 votes and you distribute that selectively across wisconsin georgia and arizona you would have had an entirely different outcome in terms of the electoral college vote in 2020 and we could instead be here talking about what another four years of a trump pence presidency means for the united states for korea and for the world i mentioned

that the second story of the 2020 election is a story about racial division in america and that this story is either buried behind the lead or covered in misleading way so let me say a little bit about that uh to start with um the u.s was already divided by race before donald trump ascended to the presidency but it is clear that he has deepened those divisions with his rhetoric and with his policies trump may not have invented racial polarization or white supremacist movements but he has unmistakably fanned their flames

the exit polls show clearly that biden harris won because a coalition of black latino asian american native american voters coalesced to deliver the white house for the democrats and in polling that i've conducted along with posters whose septa who specialize in targeted representative samples of latinos and african-americans we find 89 of blacks 70 of latinos 68 of asian americans voted for biden and harris and by contrast only 41 percent of whites voted for biden and harris moreover had trump and pence been

re-elected it would have been because a solid majority 56 percent of white voters were fined with further democratic backsliding they would have been fined with a descent into authoritarian rule and they would have been fined with re-electing a president who dog whistled to white supremacists if you follow the news from the us on race and the 2020 vote i think you would what you'll read is a lot about conservative latinos in miami-dade county and along the rio grande in texas you'll probably read a little bit about

rap music artists like kanye west and ice cube trying to mobilize the african-american male vote in greater numbers for donald trump in 2016. and uh then they in 2020 than they did in 2016. uh but you almost surely won't read many stories um about the fact that there was this uh enormous coalition of voters of color i think what you see in the news misses the forest for the trees the margins favoring biden over trump and these demographic groups remain very very high plus the turnout grew enormously in 2020 and because of

that combination high margins and voter turnout biden won on the other side i think if you follow the news you'll see a lot of pundits and pollsters uh who will go on at length they did before the election and many have since tuesday about the key role that different demographic segments of white voters may have played in the success of biden's victory focusing on white women white college educated voters white suburban voters white young voters and what they have yet to unearth in election results and exit polls is

that biden and harris did not win a majority of the counted votes in any of these demographic subgroups of white voters so they won 43 of the white female vote 49 of the college educated white vote 46 of the suburban white vote 46 of the 18 to 29 year old white vote so the racial division in the american electorate really i think determined the partisan outcome in the election now in terms of polls and whether or not polls raise expectations in terms of the final vote count i think uh paul is on to one key part of

the story which is that there's sort of a mismatch in terms of pre-election polls between their predictions for the likely outcomes in national elections which remain pretty good and the extent to which they have missed their call in state level elections which sometimes they've missed really badly part of it is because it is really hard to include certain segments of the american population into surveys but part of the reason why that is is the technology of polling in the united states has increasingly shifted

towards list-based polling um online polling and polling which is not based on represent representativeness but based on targeted quotas meaning when people especially in states are trying to get what they what they would call a representative sample let's say of texans they only focus on trying to get 20 latinos 50 women you know 24 18 to 29 year olds and once they hit those targets they'll claim to be representative but the methodology for getting people in those numbers in those different demographic groups

is not the same as representative random sampling and so when you do that and you're very reliant on lists you have to ask who is not likely to be on a lot of these vendor lists that parties are using and that mainstream media sources are using and it tends to be people like rural voters the hard to reach voters that trump was very successful in mobilizing in 2016 and in 2020 so i think there are some systematic sources of bias in the way posters have been doing their work and it's not easy to think about how

they might get more accurate especially at the state level based on the way that they're conducting these polls all right thank you tegu uh let let's uh uh invite uh pyongyang song um i think uh he has uh he's an uh election expert so he has uh questions to you so uh i'm very happy to see you all again and this is a great honor for me to join this discussion and you know i heard uh from all of you that this election was no landslide victory for biden and its so called the regular thin election and

as professor tagli said it's you know uh and also paul peterson said this election is you know an election of deep division in terms of parties in terms of ideology in terms of you know uh race and we learned a lot from what you have talked so far and um i have several questions after not several one question to each you know of you uh after listening to your presentation the first thing is that as we know that uh the the focal point of this election to my reading is that whether uh you know uh democratic

candidate biden can take again the blue the great the blue or three states you know wisconsin michigan pennsylvania that was the first focal point in this election to my mind and he finally succeeded in getting them back but the you know the margin was very very you know close at least you know particularly in pennsylvania michigan was the margin was pretty big given that can we say that you know uh the blue collar workers in those three blue states they you know uh what are they what what is what are

their stance for example we can't say that they cross the point of no return to the democratic party or you know um if we had a stronger candidate this than this biden can a stronger or more popular candidate you know had would have gained more support from those blue collar candidates or you know we now can normally say that you know the blue color you know the the blue world is no more in the bullwork of the democratic party that's the first question i want to ask to you know paul pearson and the second

question to you is that you know what happened to the sunbelt you know states like arizona and georgia so why you know more voters supported you know biden than we expected compared to 2016 election so there is it you know because of incoming you know influx of you know latino migrants from the south or what what was working there you know giving more votes compared to 2016 to you know democratic candidate that's the question i want to ask to you know paul pearson and the question and comment to professor lee is that

i'm afraid to think a little bit otherwise then you have reported on racial division when i saw the ndc exit poll you know um the the result is slightly different uh from what you have just said in this presentation which means that the nbc expo says that you know uh 51 we if we mix race and education 51 of white college graduates supported by slightly more than 50 percent you know it depends on what you have seen in survey and it depends on you know nbc and cnn other survey organization and at the same time mdc expo reports

that 54 percent of white women college graduates supported you know uh joe biden too so we mix education and race the result is slightly different not you know all together you know say no to what you have presented but slightly different what you gave in this presentation that's the as a question i want to ask you thank you paul uh do you want to reply to that sure i'll start that's a um a great question um hard to give a short answer to but i'll try i think one way to think about the democratic

coalition the evolving democratic coalition is that the midwest what you call the blue wall michigan wisconsin pennsylvania is the past of the democratic party and the sun belt is the future of the democratic party um much of that for the reasons that tegu was was uh indicating in his com comments the the changing racial makeup of the coalition and and um you know which especially if you look forward in time is is just going to continue um i you know we don't know you know it is early days to try to do a fine-grained analysis

of the voting um you know i think it will take some time to have confidence about exactly which groups voted uh voted for whom but but but my read on biden in the midwest was you know that he did just enough though mostly not by recapturing white working-class voters though there was some of that um but mostly um by making some gains in the suburbs um some significant gain in the suburbs um and um whether biden gets responsibility for this probably not but some improvement again in the race and and the turnout of

uh people of people of color um in urban areas around urban areas um in those states just enough right to swing the balance i mean actually you know turnout among democrats and the vote for for biden was substantially higher than it was for hillary clinton but it needed to be because uh turnout and vote for donald trump in these states was also higher um so than it had been in 2016.

my educated guess is that Biden was the right candidate for the party at this moment, that those suburban gains and at least staunching the slide of white working-class voters toward the Republicans were necessary, and that Biden was the best person to make those kinds of gains. One initial piece of evidence of that is that I think in all these states, Biden ran ahead of congressional Democrats; he got more votes than congressional Democrats did, which suggests

that there were voters out there, my guess is that a fair number of them were in the suburbs, who voted for Biden at the same time that they did not vote for Democrats for congressional seats. Turning very quickly to the Sun Belt, it is, from the Democrats' perspective, a big deal that they carried Arizona and Georgia. If in fact they end up carrying both those states, they've carried neither of those states. I think the last time they carried

Georgia was 1992 or maybe 1996, and they haven't carried Arizona since, maybe much longer back than that. So those are indications, I think, of how that electoral environment is changing for Democrats. They now hold all eight Senate seats in the Southwest, if you look at Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, California – those are all Democratic seats. That's an extraordinary change, especially in Arizona. So I think Democrats can feel

pretty good about the gains that they made there, even though it's a different story if you look at Texas and Florida. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Tegu. Sure. I'd like to give a quick answer to the question that Professor Song posed to me, but then I'd also like to say a couple of things about the questions posed to Paul, if I may. So, I don't disagree. Well, one thing is, if there's a discrepancy in the numbers you're seeing and the numbers I'm seeing with mainstream media exit polls

in the U.S., in part the discrepancy may be due to when you are checking the exit poll results, because part of what they do is they do some post-election re-weighting of their results so that their final numbers wind up looking like the actual numbers in the states. It's almost so that they can't be wrong. So they'll do some adjustments afterwards. So that might be part of the difference. But I think the bigger point for me is that you have to really drill down to cuts of demographic groups down to

being able to say, white women college graduates, you know, and maybe if you said white women college graduates living in California, you'd get up to 58%. But you really have to break up the white electorate down to those groups to find a majority that voted for Biden. And the question is, why does it matter so much? Like, why are media pundits so focused on what the white electorate did? And my reading on that is, Biden's sort of campaign slogan was 'The Battle for the Soul of America',

and I think what he meant by that was the battle for the soul of white America, because it's clear that for non-white voters, for the last four years, they've wanted to oust Trump from the White House. And really, the puzzle was what white voters would do in response to having a president who really fanned the flames of white nationalist groups in the United States. And I think the jury is still out because of the way the white vote was split in 2020. I think that battle for the soul of white

America is still ongoing. If you look at states like California and New York, I think you'll find that a greater share of white voters voted Democratic than they may have in the past. But if you look at the heartland of America, I think it's gone the other way. And to your point about the Blue Wall states and the Sun Belt states, it's hard for me to imagine a candidate that would have done better in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania than Biden did, conditioned on how well

Trump did in mobilizing his base in those states in the last couple of weeks, which I think is something that a lot of people, maybe because of a liberal bias in analysts like Paul and I, and maybe some media outlets, we wouldn't have anticipated that level of mobilization from Trump's base in those three states. And given that fact, it's hard to think of another candidate that would have done better than Biden did. And on the Sun Belt, I think you are right that a lot of the story behind what's

happened in those states is the story of demographic change. So, to give just one example, Georgia's Seventh Congressional District, which just flipped from Republican to Democrat and had been a Republican stronghold for decades and decades. In 2004, the Democrats didn't even field a candidate because it was that non-competitive. Since 2010, that district has gone from being 8% Asian American to almost 16% Asian American, and from being about 12% Latino to

more than 22% Latino. And if you add to that the 20-something percent who are African American, it's now a majority non-white. And that is the biggest reason why districts like that are changing to the extent that they're changing. So, you get that sort of effect more broadly across all these Sun Belt states. That's the story of Colorado, that's the story of Nevada, that's the story of New Mexico, that's the story of Arizona. Thank you. Okay, thank you. So, I think that's pretty much about our

first round, which deals with the election per se. And now, I think, actually, the audience in South Korea is more interested in what actually lies ahead for the Biden presidency, if he becomes president. And the question is, is it really a beginning of the end of Trumpism or Trumpian politics, of depolarization, democratic backsliding, racial division, and all the other things that

Tegu and Paul have mentioned today? And it sounds pessimistic about the future. And also, externally, the United States is clearly a damaged great power. Trump's unilateralism, problems with alliances and partnerships, international institutions in disarray, and American soft power is really being undercut. So, things like that. So, whether Biden can turn around this country in four years of his presidency. So, that's kind of the question that we want to ask you. So, again, this time, maybe we start from Tegu first.

Sure, happy to. You know, in terms of challenges and difficulties in the road ahead, I think I would start where I ended my analysis on the election, which is that I think the United States is just deeply, deeply divided as a country. I think we are divided by ideological polarization and racial polarization, and those things are set against a backdrop of much weaker

social institutions, vanishing social capital, the rise of conspiratorial thinking, pervasive distrust in the institutions that adjudicate things like facts – mainstream media, our criminal justice system, science, and the academy. We've lost a lot of what we've had in the past in terms of having a public sphere for the free competition of ideas, which is the pulse of flourishing democracies, both as an ideal and as a practice.

And instead, that loss has been replaced by the exchange of information that's channeled through filter bubbles, political deliberation that is siloed into echo chambers. And this was all true of the U.S. before Donald Trump was elected president, and it has become much, much more true during his presidency because of his presidency. And for the foreseeable future, I think it will continue to be true in the United States. So, electing Joe Biden as our 46th president may have rescued, in the short run, the U.S. from further

dissent and further democratic backsliding, but it will likely have little effect in the short term on these sources of erosion in our body politic. So, I think the most obvious challenge and difficulty is that President-elect Biden will have to govern in this environment and under these circumstances, and that'll be extremely hard. It'll be especially hard if Trump decides, after he leaves office, to be something of a professional gadfly who is committed to obstructing anything that Biden tries to do.

So where one side will claim an electoral mandate and try to undo many of Trump's policies, the other side may continue to question the legitimacy of the election results with unsubstantiated allegations of electoral fraud. Or to take another example, governing in this environment will also be hard if, on the democratic side or the law and order side, there are prosecutors who investigate and indict President Trump for crimes committed during and prior to his presidency, where

one side will see moral high ground and signaling that nobody in America, even an outgoing president, is above the law. The other side will continue to see the dark reach of a deep state that is hell-bent and single-minded in terms of wanting to prosecute Donald Trump. So, on the domestic side, I think it's entirely possible that the new Biden administration will just face constant roadblocks and potholes at every step of the way trying to enact its legislative agenda. Now, I'd like to believe that there are

some consensus issues, or at least issues that somebody of Joe Biden's political skills and personal relationships could build a consensus around, where the President-elect is less likely to face these kinds of daunting challenges, such as executing a coordinated federal response to mitigate and combat the coronavirus pandemic. But I think even there, things are likely to be very, very difficult in the road ahead. And if that's the case, I think Biden faces a further challenge. It's almost a double-edged sword: on

the one hand, facing unwavering opposition from the Republicans and remaining Trump supporters, all the while being unable to deliver the policies that are needed to keep his hard-won coalition of independent, centrist Democrats, and leftist Democrats behind him to support him. I think perhaps the biggest challenge is the time-tested rule of thumb that you have to reward your base, you have to reward the people that put you into office, those core voters most responsible for winning the election for you.

And I think for Biden, that core starts with Black voters. And for Black voters, beyond addressing COVID and the economic fallout from COVID, the two top issues in this election were police reform and racial justice. And even in the last week, those issues specifically have already divided the Democratic Party in terms of how poorly the Democratic Party did in Senate races and in congressional races. And that just adds to the difficulty, even among Trump's supporters, that he will not be able to deliver on the issues that they

voted him for. So, is there no possible hope for a successful Biden presidency? Here, I think the future Biden administration could assemble the building blocks to a successful presidency by looking for early wins on two issues that I think might be less likely to be contentious. The first of these is that I think the country, even many and maybe most Trump supporters, are just frustrated and fed up with how polarized our politics is, and we are hungry for less division and more decency, for less constant chaos and crisis, and

more regular, routine, boring, normal politics. I think that the country as a whole is just tired from the last four years. And here, I think Joe Biden can unilaterally lead by example. If he can successfully not only keep repeating his invocation of being the president for all Americans, including those who didn't vote for him, and then show the skeptics what that means in terms of his initial set of policy priorities, he could potentially flip this otherwise dismal script. The other issue is foreign policy and

returning the United States to its once preeminent place as leader of the free world, or at least embracing that as an ambition. And the reason I think that this is a potentially less contentious issue is that I think for most ordinary Americans, and maybe especially for Trump's base, they don't care so deeply about this issue. But I think political elites do, including many of those in the Republican Party who have been deeply unhappy with the instability and the precarity that Trump's sort of

seemingly random, tweet-driven version of an America First foreign policy has given life to. So, I think here, clear, very early, very public signals about America's aspirations and what other nations can expect from the United States as an ally or as an adversary under a Biden administration could go a long way. I think decency as a person and credibility in foreign policy – these are Joe Biden's two strongest suits as a person and as a politician. So, his successes on these two fronts could be a foundation for

successes elsewhere. Thank you. And so, we are actually running out of time. We have about 25 minutes. So, let's quickly turn to Paul, your views, and then get to Q&A's. All right, I'll try to be brief because we do, of course, want to hear people's questions and address those. I'm going to start also with the Republican Party because I think in order to understand what's going to be possible in American politics, one has to start there, and the future of Trumpism, if you want to

put it that way. Because in the American political system, whether you can expect any cooperation from the other party is a decisive question, especially with as close a balance as we have. And so, I begin by recalling that when Barack Obama became president with a clear majority, actually 60 seats in the Senate – it's kind of unimaginable now to think that at that point, Democrats were able to win 60 seats in the Senate – the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, said that his top priority was to make Barack

Obama a one-term president, and which was rational for him in many respects. The American political system creates both the incentive for the minority to obstruct and the capacity for the minority to obstruct. And if they can make the president less popular, they win. So, just watching the last, just over the last day, we've watched in the U.S., I think for many people who care about the health of American democracy, with great dismay, as Republican elected leaders amplified President Trump's accusations

that the election was illegitimate. And that includes a majority of Leader McConnell and the leading Republican in the House, Kevin McCarthy. Retired Republicans did not do that. George W. Bush came out with a congratulatory statement. Dan Quayle, who had been H.W. Bush's Vice President, came out with a congratulatory statement and said that there was no fraud. And of course, the last presidential candidate on the Republican side, Mitt Romney, also did this. But very, very few elected Republicans have behaved in a

way that involved putting democracy and the capacity for the U.S. to govern ahead of Donald Trump and their party. They fanned the flames. And I think this is quite revealing about what we can expect in the days ahead. I don't think it's just that they want to soothe the president's pride. I think it's that they believe that they benefit from being able to continue to mobilize their base. They'll benefit in the Georgia runoff elections if they can make their base so angry that they believe

that the election has been stolen from them. And again, it's completely baseless. There is no evidence to support that anything remotely like this happened. And in many ways, it was predictable that President Trump would do this. What was slightly less predictable, and saddens me, I must say, is that so many elected Republicans would go along because, one, they're terrified of what would happen if they challenge the base with Donald Trump amping things along. And he's not going to go

away unless he goes to jail, which is possible. I think it's quite possible that he will ultimately end up going to jail. But in the meantime, he's going to amp up his base, and he will turn that base against any Republican who supports bipartisanship or just an acknowledgment that Joe Biden legitimately won the election. So this creates an enormous challenge for President Biden. Domestic legislation, I think, and most is going to be extraordinarily difficult. It will be because it will require the agreement

of Republicans in the Senate, and they have strong incentives to withhold that agreement to make the president look bad. So that will be extremely difficult. There are some things that a president can do through executive action. Many of Trump's executive orders can be reversed on the first day. The United States will rejoin the Paris Climate Accord, for example. The Muslim ban immigration ban will be repealed by executive order. But even there, a president's ability to act unilaterally is going to be limited by

a Republican-dominated Supreme Court, an increasingly ideologically conservative Supreme Court, which is likely to be much more critical in its views of executive power when that executive power is wielded by Joe Biden instead of Donald Trump. The one place where a president is likely to have considerable room to maneuver is in foreign policy. Their presence can do a lot unilaterally, and they're less subject to scrutiny from either Congress or from the courts. The challenge there, which Tegu is

already alluding to, I think, is Joe Biden. I think Joe Biden does have a lot of credibility among countries that have traditionally been allies with the United States. But I think those allies are going to have to ask themselves, as the Trump experience has shown, how much can we rely on the credibility of the United States? We may be able to rely on the honesty and accept the interest and cooperation that comes from the person who is currently the leader, but do we believe that he can credibly

commit to things that we can expect the United States to follow through on five years from now or ten years from now? And building an alliance in the absence of that kind of confidence is extraordinarily difficult, even without all the other challenges that the international community faces. Thank you. Thank you, Paul. I think it's almost a consensus between you and Tegu. This is really a doom and gloom projection of the Biden administration for the next four years. But the one bright side is foreign

policy. You can obviously go over the partisan politics. So, I think I have a long list of questions from the audience, and actually most of them are foreign policy issues. I know Poland and Tegu do not squarely work on foreign policy, American foreign policy, but the audience really wants to hear from you. So, there are several questions. I think we have to do this first, and then if time remains, go back to Pyongyang

for further questions to you and comments as well. I think the U.S. policy toward Korea, alliance issue, and also what will be the new administration's North Korean policy – these two questions are the most frequent questions that I have. So, if you want to, who's going to first go first on Biden's foreign policy toward the Korean Peninsula? I'm guessing you're probably in a better position to talk about that. Well, I think a lot will depend on, first, who Biden picks for his

transition team, and then who he winds up picking for important cabinet positions. But I think the default would be to assume that it will be more like the U.S. approach to foreign policy vis-à-vis both South Korea and North Korea that characterized the Obama years, and possibly also the Clinton years, than what we've seen over the last four years. You know, I think at the same time, I think there has been substantial momentum towards thawing North Korea's relations with South Korea and with the United States

that might be an opportunity to do something slightly different. But I think my default hypothesis would be that it would be very much in line with the Obama presidency's view towards South Korea as an ally. I got a question about Kamala Harris: What would be her role as Vice President in the upcoming government, and what type of issues will she take care of? And also, how popular is she nationwide?

I think we don't know yet. I assume that she would be – it won't be a situation like with Obama and Biden, where I think Biden devoted a lot of his energies towards foreign policy, while the president, at least initially, focused on the domestic agenda. I mean, I think Biden had tremendous experience in foreign policy, and I think Harris's strengths are more on the domestic side. And of course, there's a challenge there because the domestic agenda is going to be really

constrained, unless the Georgia Senate race turns out differently than we think that it is likely to do. I mean, I think one thing to keep an eye on, in addition to Vice President Harris, her background as a prosecutor and as Attorney General in California, who Biden chooses as his Attorney General is going to be quite significant, I think, because there is – this is most – we're nearing the end of the most corrupt administration in American history. I think we know that even before there's

more sustained investigation of it. And obviously, in a deeply polarized country, it is going to be really challenging to figure out how the administration wants to handle that, how they want to do it in such a way that criminality and corruption is punished rather than rewarded, but that it doesn't seem like some kind of vendetta. And so, I think Harris's advice on that would probably play a really important role in the administration, given her experience. And of course, the other thing is she is

in many ways, she embodies the party's future for the reasons that Tegu was talking about before. And I think that her role in outreach, communication, mobilization to younger voters and to people of color in the U.S. – that's going to be a really important part. How that's going to be connected to policy is less clear to me, but I think that's going to be a really important part of her role. Question: One question, can I really quickly just add to what Paul said? I'll go out on a limb and make

a prediction about Kamala Harris's initial role, which is there are two really important areas where I think a President Biden will have to show demonstrated interest, even if you can't make any progress in terms of legislation or policy, and those are criminal justice reform and reform to our electoral system in terms of voting rights and so on. And so I would predict that President Biden will set up some sort of presidential initiative to investigate those issues more deeply until he can pull more political

capital together to try to do something legislatively. And Kamala Harris is the natural person to lead those initiatives. The one other thing I'll say really quickly is I'm a lot more – well, I don't know if I'm a lot more optimistic, I'm a lot less pessimistic than Paul is about our ability to win the two Georgia Senate races. Okay, so here is the question: What are the most pressing problems that President-elect Biden will face between now and his inauguration?

So, I just want to, just quickly following up on Tegu's comment, when I mean, I when I am pessimistic about Georgia in the sense that I think it's less likely that they win than that they lose, but maybe you're more optimistic than that. It is worth underscoring that foreign observers are going to want to really watch those races because, as I tried to emphasize at the beginning, were Democrats to win those races, we would be in a very different world. 50-50 with the Vice President breaking a tie

is still not great. And I read just before we started this program that Joe Manchin, the Democratic Senator from West Virginia, had announced that he would not support the elimination of the filibuster in the Senate, the rule which allows a minority of 41 to block – he would not support a reform to that even if Democrats won those two seats in Georgia. So that basically takes filibuster reform off the table. And that's a big deal. At least initially, it takes off the table, but you would be able to do

some very significant things. And I see they've been signposting what the main things that they want to focus on. So, there's no question about what their priority is, where they see the problems. The pandemic is job one. And it is, I think they realize that without a better plan for dealing with the pandemic, they will not be able to get the economy going again. And there is a place where the administration actually has some

autonomy. So, he can do a lot in the next couple of months to get ready. They've already got a team in place that was announced today. So that's one. Economic reform, economic recovery following from that. There they're going to need more help from Congress. Racial justice – Tegu was just talking about some things that could be initiated that they'll get going on right away so that they can hit the ground running. And the last is climate change. And there again, there are things that

a president can do even without the cooperation of Congress. The Environmental Protection Agency is a powerful agency. They can pursue significant policies having to do with climate change. The challenge there, though, is that the Supreme Court is looming. And I think it is quite – it is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which, following in Obama's footsteps, a Biden administration crafts and implements ambitious regulations with respect to climate change, only to see them gutted or struck down

in a couple of years by a conservative Supreme Court. Thank you. Yeah, we have some time left. So, Professor Song, do you have questions and comments? You're muted. Unmute, please. Okay, I have several questions, very quick questions, and any one of you can answer my question. The first one is that, you know, some Republican leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, are very reluctant to say congratulations to President-elect Joe Biden. Is it because he really believes that this election is fraudulent, or is it because he's fearful of President Donald Trump's response or revenge? That's my first question. And the second question is, this is a question from me, not necessarily as a professor, but as a Korean citizen. I'm very curious about what would be the future role of Donald Trump once he's out of office. Will he become a second Palin, just saying lots of things for the Republican Party and just a

believe that this election is fraudulent, or is it because he is fearful of President Donald Trump's response or revenge? That is my first question. And the second question is, this is a question from me, not necessarily as a professor, but as a Korean citizen. I am very curious about what the future role of Donald Trump will be once he is out of office. Will he become a second Sarah Palin, just saying lots of things for the Republican Party and just a

physical way over his center? Will it last several years from now? And finally, the other thing is, is there any possibility that Joe Biden would broaden his support beyond those who voted for him by successfully coping with the COVID pandemic situation? That's my question. Great, those were great questions. You want me to take a step, or do you want to go first? Well, let me, let me just talk about McConnell. I can let me do McConnell real quickly. I'll let you

take the other two. They are great, they are great questions. I think it has less to do with fear of Donald Trump and it has to do with fear of Trumpism and also recognizing that he gains an advantage from angering the base. And I think in many ways, this was a central part of the argument that Jacob Hacker and I made in this book, 'Let Them Eat Tweets,' is that the Republican Party, over a long period of time, well before Donald Trump arrived, had found that allying with

groups who could mobilize outrage, much of it linked to racial resentment, was a way to stoke political support among those who were receiving nothing from Republican economic policies. But the problem is, or a big part of it, there's a kind of Frankenstein's monster element to this, which is that once you've created this outrage machine, you can't really control it anymore. And of course, a conservative media, Fox News and so on, is a big, big part of this. And so I think Mitch McConnell could quite reasonably think

that not supporting these baseless accusations of an illegitimate election would fracture the party, would lead to fury on the right wing of the party in a way that would potentially cost Republicans the elections in Georgia. So, again, as they have so many times in the past, and in a way that is deeply damaging to our political system, they have chosen to amplify things in the pursuit of narrow, immediate interest, even though it's very costly for our

political system. Thank you. Thank you. Sure. I mean, I would add to what Paul said one thing about McConnell and the Republican Party in power today, which is that it is unrecognizable from the Republican Party pre-Newt Gingrich, 1994. And really, what's happened to one of the two major parties in a global superpower is that a sort of extremist fringe element of the Republican Party, all the way from the extreme right, over about a decade period, has essentially occupied the center of the

Republican Party. You know, McConnell is affiliated with the Tea Party movement, so was Mark Meadows, so were Mick Mulvaney, so are all these people who are currently viewed as the top brass, the top leadership of the Republican Party. And I have a quote here that I want to read from John Boehner, who was summarily ousted from his role as House Majority Leader when he was at the head of Republicans in Congress. Boehner said of the Tea Party, 'They can't tell you what they're for. They can tell you everything that'

they're against they're anarchists they want total chaos tear it all down and start over that's where their mindset is and if that's true and that's what's occupied the center of the republican party nobody should expect responsible party behavior from republican party leaders denouncing the actions of trump or declaring the election to be legitimate because trump is the perfect vessel for their political ambitions um in terms of what trump does in the future i think it's really i mean it's hard to tell but i i think

one thing to be fair to trump the person if i can actually say those words is i think it's too easy to think of trump as this sort of monstrous political outsider who came in and destroyed all our social and political institutions i think the country was ready for somebody like that and once trump stepped into that role it becomes endogenous i think he's really fed off of the amount the kind of adulation almost cult-like adulation he's gotten from his base and that becomes like a drug i think the

more of it i mean just think about the fact that his first plan in response to challenging the election beyond you know setting his lawyers off to michigan and pennsylvania and so on is to have another big rally so i think you know whatever trump does i think he's gonna have to continue to feed that need which i can very quickly pivot to say why i'm more optimistic about georgia i think the question you have to ask about georgia is will trump basically be able to look beyond his own political interests or his own personal

interests and do some campaigning in georgia for the good of the party i don't think he can i don't think he will i think he will be too much wallowing in his defeat in the 2020 election and if that is the case i don't think the republican party turnout in georgia is going to be anything like the democratic party turnout in georgia which is why i think that there are reasons to be optimistic about those two senate races okay uh thank you so much i think uh yeah we are uh we are on time so exactly uh on time so uh

i i will have to finish now um i don't think i need uh any further concluding remarks uh summarizing you know today's seminar because um it really is a great great seminar this time again uh thank you so much uh for uh you know paul tegu and pyongyang um it's uh again extremely interesting and intriguing and enlightening um you know time for for me and eai and and the audience so once again thank you so much thank you and i'm thinking of uh inviting you again if two years four years whenever knows so

once again thank you so much and um i think it's the end of the seminar okay thank you so much thank you so much to see you again and stay healthy thank you so much