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Brian Lehrer: It’s the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Joe Biden is going to work, Donald Trump is going to court. For Biden, the presumed president-elect, the work doesn't officially begin until January 20th, but really, it begins today.

Joe Biden: On Monday, I will name a group of leading scientists and experts as transition advisors to help take the Biden-Harris COVID plan and convert it into an actual blueprint that will start on January the 20th, 2021.

[applause]

That plan will be built on bedrock science. It will be constructed out of compassion, empathy, and concern. I will spare no effort, none, or any commitment to turn around this pandemic.

Brian: That was Biden from his victory speech on Saturday night, and sure enough, he's already appointed a Coronavirus Advisory Board and will give a pandemic policy address we are told, today. At the same time, the election isn't really over until it's certified or President Trump stops challenging the count in court. The most menacing scenario is that even with no evidence of voter fraud, Trump could just tie the process up in courts in a few states until after the December-eighth deadline for certifying the votes, and then, get the Republican state legislatures, like they have in Pennsylvania, for example, to declare a deadlock and designate the electoral votes themselves, and flip them from Biden to Trump.

Then, our divided Congress would have to decide which delegation to seat, the Nancy Pelosi house might vote for the Biden delegates, the Mitch McConnell Senate for the Trump ones, and what would happen after that is anyone's guess. Now, that's a very long shot scenario, but it is possible and reports are that Trump is at least considering giving it a try. Remember, that would be without needing to prove any voter-fraud.

Later this hour, we'll talk to an election-law expert about that and other scenarios with the multiple lawsuits already or about to be filed. Before we consider that or other vexing potential futures, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg writes, "Before Democrats begin their reckoning over their apparent failure to take the Senate and their reduced numbers in the house, before the intraparty recriminations between centrist and progressives, let's take a moment to appreciate what's before us. After four grueling years, Donald Trump has been defeated." We will start there, with New York Times columnist, Michelle Goldberg. Hi, Michelle, welcome back to WNYC.

Michelle Goldberg: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian: Where are you this morning on the spectrum from ding-dong, the witch is dead to anxiously looking over your shoulder every five minutes at the kind of zombie scenario that I described in the intro?

Michelle: I would say, I'm more on the ding-dong, the witch is dead side. I mean, I do think that it is disturbing that-- Look, it's predictable that the president is not going to acknowledge his defeat. It's disturbing that, so far, almost the entire Republican Senate is in lockstep with him. I think two things are important. The first is that they haven't actually been able to find a legitimate source of controversy.

The thing that scared me in the run-up to the election is three or four Bush v Gores, where you have a tranche of ballots that they have been able, for some reason, to dispute either victories that came down to provisional ballots or ballots that came in after Election Day, as allowed by the rules in some states, but that would certainly be challenged by Republicans. I think that given any kind of even threat of a pretext, you would expect the Supreme Court to rule in Trump's favor. So far, it's hard to even pinpoint a case. They're making a lot of noise, but you can't describe what the actual controversy is because Biden's win was pretty clear, and it wasn't based on ballots that are in any sort of contention.

Brian: Right. We will talk to a legal expert in the following segment after you about how much trouble they could make even in the context of what you just said. That's coming up. We'll stay with you on more of the politics in the right and wrong of the larger moment. You mentioned senators not distancing themselves from Trump on this. For people who haven't heard this yet, former President George W. Bush has recognized the election of Joe Biden. The last Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, now in the Senate, has recognized the election of Joe Biden. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, an ally of Trump, politically, as we know, has sent Biden his congratulations. On ABC this week, yesterday, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said this about all the president's lawsuits.

Chris Christie: If your basis for not conceding is that there was voter fraud, then, show us because if you can't show us, we can't do this. We can't back you blindly without evidence.

Brian: Chris Christie, not that far from Michelle Goldberg in what she said and that doesn't happen every day, but Republican Senator Roy Blunt who, unlike Christie, is actually in office said this on ABC.

Roy Blunt: I thought that Vice President Biden did a great job last night talking about where the country wants to head, and one way to do that is to finish this election the way it deserves to be finished.

Brian: Senator Roy Blunt. Michelle, with the two Senate runoffs looming in Georgia with the control of the Senate at stake there, how do you see the Republican Party's motivations right now for dividing up between support for, let's call it, a reality-based Electoral College and support for whatever stunt Donald Trump might try to get away with?

Michelle: I think what it shows you is that even when they don't actually have to fear Donald Trump anymore, they still do. I think it has a lot to do with positioning themselves for the next election, whether it's the primaries in 2024 or worrying about being primaried in their next Senate election. It just shows you the degree to which even Donald Trump's loss hasn't punctured his cult-like hold over this party.

It shows you how difficult it's going to be for Joe Biden to govern with these people if, in fact, Republicans are able to hold on to control of the Senate. It shows you just how important this upcoming runoff in Georgia is going to be. At the same time, I can't imagine that this petulant refusal to acknowledge Biden's victory in the election is going to help Republican candidates in Georgia, where Democrats just narrowly won.

Brian: As you're writing your column, the president lost Pennsylvania but he received far more votes in the state, close to 3.3 million when I last checked, when you last checked, than he did in 2016 when he won it. Joe Biden got more votes in Texas this year than Trump did in 2016, and it still wasn't nearly enough for a flip. There was, in fact, a red wave. You’re right, it just wasn't big enough to carry Trump to victory. Michelle, as Joe Biden sounds like he wants to earnestly reach out to everyone, what do those results say to you about what those 70 million Trump voters want? It can't be that they're all just members of the Proud Boys, right?

Michelle: I think it's hard to generalize about 70 million people, except to say that I do think that the Republic is in trouble when 70 million people look at the last four years and say, "We want more of that." There's been fascinating reporting on how Trump won over some people in South Texas. One thing that I thought was really striking is how some people were influenced by seeing Trump's name on the stimulus check and attributing the stimulus to him.

Those are the populist-authoritarian tactics that Donald Trump adopted to personalize his control over the federal government, to act as if taxpayer aid was somehow a personal gift from him. You see that that kind of stuff works. There's a reason that autocratic populists are often very popular and hard to dislodge.

Brian: The Democrats did lose some seats in the House, and notably, in this year of the census, did not flip any state legislatures, which would have been a key to a more friendly redistricting for the next decade than they got after the 2010 census and the election year, which was a backlash election to various things in the Obama administration, and they got clobbered at the state level and that had such implications for the last 10 years. I want to get your reaction to this clip that's being widely played of Democratic Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, a more moderate, if that's the right word. That's the word people use, whether it's right or not, Democrat from more of a swing district in Virginia. We will delete the exploitative in this clip.

Abigail: We need to not ever use the word socialist or socialism ever again because while people think it doesn't matter, it does matter, and we lost good members because of that. My background, I know you all know it, coming from CIA, the first thing you do is always do an after-action and you dig into everything you did right and everything you did wrong. If we are classifying Tuesday as a success from a congressional standpoint, we will get [expletive] torn apart in 2022.

Brian: That was an effing that was bleeped there. What do you think about that dilemma, Michelle? Maybe we should call it the plight of Democrats in districts like Congresswoman Spanberger's and the large number of maybe on the other side of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren supporters and others in the Green New Deal movement and et cetera who feel like Joe Biden's '90s centrism got the country into much of the current mess.

Michelle: Well, look, I think one fundamental progressive assumption that really took a hit in this election, and Dave Weigel has written about this today, is the idea that increased turnout necessarily benefits progressives. I think there's always been an assumption in progressive politics that people who don't vote are alienated because they're not being offered what they really want and that if you give them more progressive promises that will get them out to the polls. What we saw is that everybody turned out, not everybody, but you had record turnout on both sides, and what they opted for is sort of '90s style centrism and gridlock in many cases.

When you're looking at this brewing intra-party fight in the Democratic Party, I think it's important for both sides to realize that they need each other. In a way, they're both right. It's true that a lot of this left-wing rhetoric-- I believe people like Abigail Spanberger and Conor Lamb and some of these Democrats in more conservative districts when they say that this rhetoric has been really, really challenging for their re-election and has cost some other candidates their election. At the same time, I also don't think that there is any question that people like AOC and Ilhan Omar are getting more young people involved, are increasing the margins for Democrats in cities that they need to win states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.

The part of the problem with the Democratic Party is that it's just a much more heterogeneous coalition than the Republican Party is, and it is at a fundamental structural disadvantage in a country where the tipping point districts are to the right of the country where the Senate gives conservatives such disproportionate power. I hope that centrists can appreciate the fact that groups like the Sunrise Movement, like the Justice Democrats, that were disappointed with Biden's election-- I mean, with Biden's nomination, put that disappointment aside and really, really worked all out to get him elected.

I hope that progressives can recognize that people like Abigail Spanberger and Conor Lamb know their districts and know what works, and something that I think is important is that some of this is about fundamental policy differences that just have to be hashed out, and sometimes, the just policies are unpopular. LBJ understood, when he signed the Civil Rights Act, that he was losing the south for a generation and it was worth it. The Civil Rights Movement was never popular in its own time even though Martin Luther King is a bipartisan hero, in retrospect. Sometimes, it's the right thing to do to push the party in unpopular directions but there's a cost for that, and politics is constantly weighing those two things.

Brian: Listeners, if you're a Democrat now that you've danced in the streets and honked your car horns and thrown open your windows and played your vuvuzelas, how do you see the good and the bad of the election that just went down? 646-435-7280. 646-435-7280. If you like Biden talking about unity, what are you willing for that to mean from your side? 646-435-7280. Republicans, what would be meaningful to you if Biden hopes to keep his word to be a president for all the people including those who didn't vote for him? 646-435-7280.

Democrats, what do you feel he has a responsibility to do and not just lay down and try to be too nice to people who didn't vote for him? 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or you can tweet a question or a comment for Michelle Goldberg, New York Times columnist, @BrianLehrer. As the calls are coming in, Michelle, Biden will get to work today on a coronavirus briefing or he will give a coronavirus briefing we are told. I saw a stat of the counties where coronavirus has been surging the most recently in the United States, Trump won 93% of those counties. Did you know that?

Michelle: Yes, I saw that. In a way, I think that that's not terribly surprising because you could flip it around. In the Trumpiest counties, people did the least to protect themselves from coronavirus. I don't think that we know which way the causation runs at this point. I mean, it's also true that just sickness in general-- People who are sicker, in general, had tended to vote for Donald Trump, controlling for other factors in 2016.

It's also not surprising that you would have more underlying ill-health in, at least, some of the districts that went for Donald Trump relative to other districts. My guess is that it's the first thing. If you have people who refuse to wear masks, if you have people who insist that the coronavirus is just like the flu, people who refuse to social distance, people who go to Trump rallies, people who go to these very crowded events, once again without masks, I don't think it's that surprising that you would see coronavirus rates rising there the quickest.

Brian: Biden is reportedly considering a mask mandate for federal facilities standing up a Federal PPEs with more aggressive use of the Defense Production Act if necessary for PPEs and other supplies and some other things, but in the context of a divided America, the Washington Post, for example, reports that several health experts including some advising the Biden campaign said it will be critical for him to have an effective communication strategy that targets not only his supporters but also red-state officials and residents. Building consensus not relying on Federal mandates will be the strategy they said, that from the Washington Post. I'm curious if you have a take on what Biden might or should do in this respect.

Michelle: My guess is, and again, who knows, that when there is a vaccine, red-state officials will have an interest in getting people in their states to take it because it will obviously lessen the burden on the hospitals and increase their ability to return to some sort of social and economic normalcy. I think it's really, really good news that we got this morning that the Pfizer vaccine, who knows and this might just be provisional, that it's around 90% effective instead of around 50% effective, which reduces the number of people that you need to get it to achieve herd immunity.

What I think is most important with Biden with regard to the coronavirus is that he's going to need to create this huge- to overcome this huge logistical hurdle around getting the vaccine out, around developing some sort of distribution system. That's one of the ways in which Trump's refusal to acknowledge that he's lost the election, the GSA's refusal to sign the paperwork that would begin the transition process is going to handicap the whole country because it just shortens the amount of time that Biden has to start developing some of this administrative capacity.

Brian: Let's take a phone call. Abdul in the Bronx, you're on w NYC. Hi, Abdul.

Abdul: Yes, our plea is very simple. If Ilhan Omar, Rashida, AOC not part of the cabinet, then, we're going to launch a revolution called COP, C-O-P, Caravan of Prosperity and remove Biden. As soon as we put them him, he'll be out. We want action, no more drama, no more Obama, no more eight years of Obama chain, you can believe, all of we were left with that was loose change in our pocket. Enough of that [unintelligible 00:20:50] and we want action, Medicare for all, end of endless wars and social equality.

Brian: And end of student debt, you told our screener, right?

Abdul: End of student debt, yes, all progressive agendas on the table. Otherwise, we put Biden in there and we can remove him too. It'd be faster than the four years.

Brian: It'll be faster than four years. Abdul, thank you very much. There's a voice from one wing of the party, Michelle, not the last we will hear that.

Michelle: Look, I think that Biden can and I hope that he will do something about student debt administratively. When people complain about Obama's eight years, one of the reasons that we had more austerity than we should have during the Obama administration, of course, was because we had Mitch McConnell in charge of the Senate for a lot of it. Mitch McConnell's stated goal was to make sure that Obama didn't get a second term even if it meant economically harming the country, even if it meant retarding the recovery from the Great Recession. That's why it's going to be so dangerous to have him in control of the Senate once again, as the country emerges, once again, from the calamitous aftermath of a failed Republican presidency.

Brian: He talked about putting AOC in the cabinet and maybe it's premature for her with her level of experience, but you can imagine a lot of lobbying to put Elizabeth Warren in the cabinet as treasury secretary and people like that in positions like that.

Michelle: Right but this, again, goes back to the problem with having Mitch McConnell in charge of the Senate. Most of these appointees, most of these cabinet positions are Senate approved, so it limits the options for Biden administration to shape his own cabinet. Also, as much as I would love to see Elizabeth Warren as treasury secretary, with the Senate as closely divided as it is, I don't think that Biden is going to be giving any democratic senators in states with Republican governors cabinet positions because the Republican governors would, of course, appoint their replacements.

Brian: Who could they get through? I don't expect you to have the name for treasury secretary, but what kind of person who wouldn't make a lot of Democrats cringe?

Michelle: I think this is going to be the question. Right now, you see this extreme recalcitrance, extreme nihilism from basically the entire Republican Senate caucus with just a couple of exceptions, whether or not they're going to consent to let Biden have a cabinet at all strikes me as an open question, and then, the next part of that is Donald Trump basically gave up on getting Senate confirmation for a lot of his nominees. He's been operating with a lot of these acting officials. On the one hand, Biden has been promising a return to normalcy or return to regular order of the normal functioning of American government, but if American government can't function normally with the Republican Senate, I hope he'll be as aggressive in nominating acting officials.

Brian: Let's take another call. Actually, I'll read you a tweet from a listener who writes, "I'm from South Texas, living in New York. The president made gains in South Texas because of issues, because oil and law enforcement jobs are some of the best paying jobs in an economy full of low-wage jobs." What would you say to that listener?

Michelle: I think that's obviously true, at least, from all the reporting that I've seen. Again, I hate to keep harping on the Senate, but the democratic rejoinder to that has always been that green jobs are also going to be stable, high paying jobs. That was Biden's line throughout this whole thing that when he talked about green energy, to him, that meant jobs, but in order to put forward a real climate plan, in order to make green jobs part of a post-COVID stimulus, he's going to need some legislative partner.

Brian: Leila in Miami Beach, you're on WNYC. Hi, Leila.

Leila: Hello, Brian, how are you?

Brian: I'm okay, thank you. How about you.

Leila: Good, good. I’m calling you from Miami. I'm Latin American. I'm Mexican, Guatemalan, and Indian. I'm one of the little Kamalas that came here, became a biochemist. I've been here since I was 14 and moved to Miami, came from-

Brian: I thought you were going to say you were here since 1491 but, Leila, go ahead.

Leila: Can you hear me?

Brian: Yes, I can, go ahead.

Leila: Okay. I would say that most of the Latin Americans that voted for Trump here in Miami are Cubans and Nicaraguans with a strong alliance to the Republican Party because of historical references, but you have a lot of Colombians and Venezuelans, which have a lot of mistrust to government. Most of the people don't know what socialism is. I lived in Germany. I married a German. I lived in Germany for six years, and it's a very well-functioning society, and it's socialism. I think the answer to a lot of our problems is that we can't be quiet for three years, and then, expect everyone to understand what we're talking about. I think it has to be a continual education thing.

A lot of people have not traveled to Europe. They don't know what socialism looks like. They only know what they see in this continent. I think instead of talking down to people, we have to become teachers. This is not up to Biden and Kamala. It's up to us. Your previous caller was saying that he's expecting action. Well, the action starts here. If Georgia doesn't get out and vote for those two senators, they have their hands tied. It's not like they're not doing their job. It starts with us. We have to show up for every election and we have to teach and we can't be condescending. We have to make United States united, and that's it.

Brian: Leila, in the context of Miami, have people tried to say to the Cubans and the Nicaraguans, for example, who you cited, when we talk about socialism, democratic socialism, as the party name goes, we're not talking about Cuba. We're talking about Norway and some of the other most functional democracies, happiest societies in the world and have that land, or do people try that explicitly?

Leila: We have tried. We have tried, but the thing is that you have to remember when you say socialism or communism, which is very different from socialism, that's a trigger.

Brian: Nobody is talking about communism, but go ahead.

Leila: I don't know if you have triggers, Brian. When somebody hits you with trigger, a lot of people just want to respond and they stop listening. We have to do something over time to get in. I was in pharmaceutical sales, I lost my job, but the thing is that I know from selling that you have to deliver a message, the same message 20 to 30 times before it starts getting into the brain. We need to do that.

We just can't do like cramming for a test, the last six months. Let's bring the Latinos in. Now we know it's not a whole political bloc, there is the Mexicans. Look at the Mexicans, they turned out. Look at the Puerto Rican, [unintelligible 00:28:59]. Look at the Cubans. Look at the other people that-- I also see Trump as a father figure. They relate to him more than they relate to Biden because they had a father like that, and they have a high mistrust of government. If Biden gets out there and he says, "I'm not a socialist," they're not going to believe in. It has to be a continual education thing. This is how we're going to get to be a nation again. We have to teach people to show up for every event, not to put down people, to have a conversation, to teach people.

Brian: Leila, thank you so much, keep calling us. Michelle Goldberg, what were you thinking listening to Leila?

Michelle: Again, I think it's one of the places where the centrist and progressive wings of the party are both right. The progressives are right when they say that you need to be organizing in all of these communities all of the time, that it can't just wait for elections, and you were hearing. a lot of warnings in the run-up to the election from Latino leaders and staffers in Florida, especially, saying, "We have a real problem here. We need more resources." Obviously, they were right. You need to invest much more in organizing these communities all the time, not just expecting them to turn out for elections.

At the same time, I think the centrists are right. There is no earthly reason to talk about Scandinavian social-- Excuse me, Scandinavian social democracy as socialism because it's not. Nobody in Sweden or Finland, Norway, they don't consider their systems to be socialism. They're a social democracy. It's a different thing. Why give this set of very popular proposals a name that designed, or if not designed, that's sure to inflame and frighten people and give them the wrong idea about what it is your calling for.

Brian: Michelle, last thing, a few days before Election Day, I saw you wrote a column called Finally a Chance For Women to Defeat Trump, but the AP VoteCast exit poll data I've seen indicates Trump did about as well among white women percentage-wise as he did in 2016. These are still considered preliminary results, but have you seen that?

Michelle: I have not been taking the exit polling that seriously, especially in this environment. Exit polling is always a little bit dubious, and in this environment, it seems particularly hard to get right. That piece that you're talking about, in particular, was about women in Georgia. It was about both the work that Stacey Abrams had been doing. Speaking about giving progressives more credit, you don't have a democratic victory in Georgia or even a chance of a democratic victory in these upcoming Senate run-offs without Stacey Abrams and the work that she has been doing for years to register and mobilize people in Georgia.

At the same time, the other piece of that is that you've had this sea change in districts like Georgia's 6th and Georgia's 7th. Georgia's 6th was won for Democrats in 2018. Georgia's 7th was one of the few democratic flips in this election, which is otherwise very disappointing, without the huge mobilization that you've seen among suburban women in those districts who were horrified and radicalized by Donald Trump's election.

Brian: New York Times columnist, Michelle Goldberg, thank you so much.

Michelle: Thank you so much.

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