Monday Morning Politics with Amy Walter

( Patrick Semansky, File / AP Photo )
Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good Monday morning, everyone. Coming up today, we'll begin a week of call-ins for teachers and other school personnel on how cultural war politics are affecting your classroom and your school communities. Today, part one, it'll be calling for social studies teachers on if you're feeling pressure to teach or not teach any particular content.
When I say social studies teachers, not just the official social studies subject teachers in high schools, but really this starts right in kindergarten, or even pre-K, with the politics around that, as you know. That'll be around 11:30 today. We'll talk about why New York City has only regained about 80% of the jobs lost in the pandemic while the country as a whole has recovered all the jobs lost, statistically.
We'll talk to Greg David, economics journalist who has a new article in the city about that. Maybe you saw the New York Times article yesterday, I'll bring this up with Greg, about how audiences for theater and other live performances remain way below pre-pandemic levels even though just about everything has reopened. That's true in New York and that's true elsewhere as well, but we will touch on that.
Also, it may be raining today. In fact, the National Weather Service has issued a flash flood warning for Somerset and Hunterdon counties. Heads-up New Jersey if you're in Somerset or Hunterdon counties or headed that way, there was a flash flood warning in effect from the National Weather Service until about 1:45 this afternoon. It may be raining today, but there are actually some wildfires in our region this month and fire safety warnings from the state, things we don't generally associate with New York State or New Jersey or Connecticut and here in the northeast, generally.
What's the risk of wildfires and what do you need to know to prevent them in your own life as climate change makes them more possible even around here? We begin here. If you heard our generational call-ins last week on midterm elections issues, you probably noticed that democracy broke out above the economy, or crime, or the climate, or abortion rights, or anything else as the number one thing that people mentioned, democracy itself.
That was true from our youngest cohort, callers in your 20s and below, who we started with last Monday, all the way to our oldest group, those of you in your 90s or above on Friday, and by the way, happy birthday again to Barbara in California who turned 100 last Wednesday and then became our first ever centenarian caller on Friday, but democracy, democracy, democracy. Even though I always say our calling polls are informal, unofficial, and thoroughly unscientific, which they are, it turns out that we were onto something.
A new NBC News poll released this weekend finds democracy is the number one issue on people's minds nationally among those polled. It also finds a very close national race for control of the House and Senate, which they say is surprising since the party in power usually loses seats in the midterms, especially when most people see the country as being on the wrong track as the polls show that people do today and when the incumbent president is pretty unpopular, which Biden is, but even Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell is acknowledging the Democrats might hold their Senate majority and he implies, you'll have to read between the lines here, but he implies it's because too many Republican candidates might be too radical for America's tastes. Listen to McConnell.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell: [unintelligible 00:03:59] different statewide. Candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.
Brian Lehrer: Candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome. I know he was pretty off-mic there. That was probably hard for some of you to hear, but he said it was more likely for Republicans to take the House than the Senate because races are different statewide, and candidate quality, as he put it, has a lot to do with it. We'll talk about what that means and more with Amy Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief of The Cook Political Report. You also see her as a PBS NewsHour political analyst every Monday and sometimes elsewhere, and of course, she used to host The Takeaway here on Fridays.
Amy Walker had an article on The Cook site last week called Vibe Shift, which picked up on some of the same trends and questions as the NBC News poll. Amy, always great to have you on. Welcome back to WNYC.
Amy Walter: Hi, Brian. It's great to be with you.
Brian Lehrer: Can we start with democracy itself as perhaps the leading issue nationally right now. I want to play a clip before you answer. Chuck Todd said this about the NBC News poll findings yesterday on NBC's Meet the Press.
Chuck Todd: For the first time ever, when asked what is the most important issue facing this country, the top answer was not an economic issue, it was threats to the democracy, higher than cost of living, or jobs, or guns, or even abortion. This is the environment in which voters are going to the polls this November.
Brian Lehrer: Chuck Todd on Meet the Press yesterday. He is going to be a guest on this show tomorrow, by the way, Chuck Todd fans, but Is that how it looks to The Cook Political Report, Amy?
Amy Walter: Yes. You know what's so interesting, Brian? If you think about elections, they really do follow certain patterns. Whatever is front and center in voters minds, a lot of that is driven by what's front and center in the media. What are people covering? What are people listening to or hearing about? If you think about where we were, say, at this point a year ago, what were we listening to, talking about, and experiencing, it was Afghanistan, it was COVID, we were still trying to figure out this whole Delta variant, it was inflation. Those were the things that were really driving the conversation and top of voters minds.
What have we done for the last, let's call it six to eight weeks, maybe even a little bit more? We've had the January 6th hearings. Certainly, that's been front and center. We've been talking a lot about Donald Trump, his involvement in these primaries, who he's endorsed, who he's rallying behind, how many of the candidates that Donald Trump's supporting are election deniers, that many of those candidates have won their primaries. Then finally, the FBI investigation into documents sitting in Mar-a-Lago, and that has really overshadowed almost any other news.
Obviously, the cost of living, inflation is still an issue that is top of mind for Americans, but in thinking about the other sort of stuff that's swirling out there, that's really been front and center. You're right, when I'm looking at this NBC poll, and yes, threats to democracy tied with cost of living among all voters as the top two issues that Americans say are out there, but then if you look at it by party, Democrats do see it as a top issue. 39% of Democrats say that's their top issue, even compared to abortion which is at 28%.
Now, among Republicans, it's immigration that's still the top issue. Among independents, it's still the cost of living as the top issue. I think that it is an issue that all parties put an emphasis on, but in terms of where Democrats see it much more, this is a driven-- In terms of a top issue is much by Democrats as anything else.
Brian Lehrer: I wonder if abortion rights is completely separable from the issue of democracy-
Amy Walter: Well, that's a great point.
Brian Lehrer: -because of the Supreme Court, and I wonder if they overlap and some people who are very concerned about abortion rights might have said, "Democracy is my number one issue."
Amy Walter: Or to the other point, it's like when we try to ask voters about the economy and health care, those two things get intertwined, too. If you're worried about the cost of your health care, is that an economic issue? Is that a healthcare issue? I do think you're right that, look, asking people to say what are your top two concerns is complicated because we're all humans, we get cross-pressured all the time. You have one vote, so what is it going to be? What's driving you to the polls and what's going to help you make that decision?
I do think the fact that Donald Trump and this issue about January 6th and the continuing narrative among the many Republicans that the election was stolen is a net negative here for Republicans. When you think about the midterms, they wanted the election to be simply a referendum on Joe Biden and a referendum on the economy. Joe Biden, still in that same poll we just referenced, pretty unpopular, he's at 42% job approval rating, only 30-something percent approve of the job he's doing on the economy. 70-plus percent of Americans still think the country's headed in the wrong direction. These under the surface would be terrible numbers for Democrats, and yet the enthusiasm number, the interest in the election has gone up among Democrats. I think in large part because of Trump and the focus on what happened post-election 2020.
Brian Lehrer: To that point, I played that Mitch McConnell clip at the top saying he thinks Democrats could hold the Senate this year and that candidate quality is one reason. Would it be right, in your opinion, to read between the lines and say that there are these very Trumpy election deniers and people who want their states to have veto power over election results in some key races for Senate seats?
Amy Walter: Yes. We've seen a number of these Republican candidates, especially in a place like Pennsylvania, go through really bitter bruising primaries. They all were trying to find a way, although Republican candidates, to show their fealty to the former president, who, let's face it, still has a pretty significant and serious hold on Republican-based voters. By doing so, they moved pretty far out of the mainstream, and especially on issues like abortion, they also took positions far outside of the mainstream. No exceptions, for example, on issues relating to abortion.
What we're seeing now is those candidates, it's post-primary, they're trying to tack back to the middle. This happens every election, you have a primary where you got to try to get your base excited, but then in the general election, you got to get back to the middle to get those independent voters. It's going to be harder for many of those Republicans, I think that's exactly what Senator McConnell was saying, it's going to be harder for those Republicans to be seen as credible on some of those issues, as a credible centrist, so to speak, because of the positions that they took during the primary or continue to take now.
If you're McConnell, you've been through this before, in 2010, it wasn't Trump, but it was the tea party, and they were the disruptive force within the Republican party. They were nominating all kinds of candidates who said they were going to come to Washington and shake things up and burn the whole thing down. Many of those candidates went on to lose in 2010 in what should have been very winnable races.
Brian Lehrer: Wait, wasn't 2010 a midterm election year, the first midterm elections during Obama, when the Republicans did really well and took control of the house away from the Democrats?
Amy Walter: They did. They didn't take the Senate, which everybody had predicted they would because the wave was so big and so strong. What prevented that flip was the quality of candidates. That happened again in 2012, it wasn't a midterm year, but the map was very favorable to Republicans. Yet they failed to win in places like Missouri and Indiana, places that are very Republican, because of candidate quality. In 2014, McConnell Republicans said, "Okay, no more of this. We're not letting these tea party people run our party. We're going to get more involved in these primaries and get better candidates through." They were very successful in 2014.
In the era of Trump, this ability to go in and play in primaries has been really challenged because Donald Trump isn't interested in what Mitch McConnell wants. He's not particularly interested in what Mitch McConnell thinks or what the professionals in Washington think. He picks his candidates and he sticks with them. There's no guarantee that those candidates, even in a good year, are going to be able to succeed.
Brian Lehrer: What was that number you gave before about how many-- What percentage of Democrats listed democracy as their top issue compared to Republicans? Do you have that in front of you? Was it big for Republicans too?
Amy Walter: Overall, double digits for both, but for Democrats, 39% said that was one of their top two issues. Republicans, it was 24%.
Brian Lehrer: Oh, that's still a quarter of Republicans calling democracy their top issue. I wonder what you think that means, because when I see that democracy is an issue for Republicans, are those Liz Cheney Republicans, or when I hear election-- You hear the rhetoric, when the election deniers repeat the big lie about the stolen election and run on it in their midterm races this year, they too use the language of saving our democracy, "We have to save our democracy from this election fraud, this massive election fraud, this stealing of elections." Even though it's a lie, they're running on democracy.
Amy Walter: 100%. It's pretty clear that all of what's happening at Mar-a-Lago now and the FBI, all of that I think is also driving this interest in threats to democracy among Republicans. We're seeing in some data that, and I'm hearing from a lot of Republican sources that what Mar-a-Lago did was really help generate enthusiasm for Donald Trump within the party. If we're talking 2024, that was a big boost for him, but what it is also doing, of course, is generating interest for 2022 among Democrats.
I've always believed midterm elections are a referendum on the party that's in charge, and it's pretty clear who's in charge right now, it's Democrats, they have to House, the Senate, and the White House. It's very hard to make the party out of power the center of attention in a midterm election, but Donald Trump, right now at least, has successfully been able to manage that.
We'll see if it continues whether he decides to announce that he's running for president during the midterm election or whether he's going to wait until afterward, how long are we going to hear from-- we've got whatever's coming out of Mar-a-Lago, we've got a lot of other issues going on in places like Georgia in terms of the election integrity issue there.
Brian Lehrer: The investigation into whether-
Amy Walter: Investigation into whether-
Brian Lehrer: -Trump illegally meddled with the election count.
Amy Walter: Exactly. Now, are any of those decisions going to come out before the midterms? I don't know. I would doubt it as we get closer and closer to the election. There may be some desire to not put down any decision before that, but I do think any time that Trump is in the news, that this idea of election denial's in the news, the January 6th is in the news, again, I don't think people are focusing on it, I do think partisans are very focused and interested in it, but it's just this mood out there now which says, "Gosh, this just looks really messy and ugly." It really distracts from, as I said, what Republicans strategists would much rather be talking about.
Brian Lehrer: Listeners, your calls on the midterm elections for Amy Walter from The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter and the PBS NewsHour, 212-433-WNYC. You can be the political analyst or you can ask Amy a question. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. I'm going to take Beth in Margaretville, New York, first, who doesn't even like one of the terms that we're using with respect to people who spread the big lie about the stolen election. Beth, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling in.
Beth: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. Election deniers just makes it seem benign, almost like they have a little cold or something. It seems to dismiss the gravity of what's going on, of the threat to the democracy. [crosstalk]
Brian Lehrer: We say election deniers, we say science deniers. I also certainly talk about people who spread this big lie that the election was stolen. What language would you prefer? Do you have something better than election deniers in mind?
Beth: I don't have something better. No, I know. I don't know. I understand that you need a small soundbite in a way to say it as journalists in the media, but I'm not so sure what the right thing is, but it starts to feel less and less important the more and more it's said.
Brian Lehrer: Got it.
Beth: I wanted to dovetail, sorry, on something. I actually got a phone call from candidate up-- I'm in the 19th district, that's a big election up here, and-
Brian Lehrer: Oh, I've got to talk about that too. Go ahead.
Beth: -someone called me to poll in. They wanted to know what were my issues, what was my most important issue for this election. They listed a bunch of stuff. The first thing they listed was election integrity. I'm a politically savvy person and I'm very left. I was like, "Oh, yes, that," because for me, the integrity of the election means that it's being eroded by the big lie and all this other stuff. Then I went, "No, that means I'm saying that I believe that elections are fraudulent," and I took back my answer and changed my answer to abortion. I thought that people could be confused by these questions in the polls. Again, election integrity is, and you just spoke about that actually while I was on hold. You just spoke about that.
Brian Lehrer: Well, Beth, thank you very much. That's a great report from the 19th-
Amy Walter: It is, I love it.
Brian Lehrer: -about how somebody may be trying to do a pro Republican push poll by putting that issue at the top of the multiple choice list, election integrity, which is the Republican election denier or stolen election big live framing on the 2020 race. Amy, you're such a detailed watcher of polls. What do you make of the way Beth described what they were after?
Amy Walter: It's such a great, great point. It helps to really underscore how challenging polling really is, especially when we're talking about traditional polling. My definition of democracy, what does protecting democracy mean may be different from yours, Brian, or somebody else's, so you can't really get that, what is it that voters are actually thinking about, talking about when they answer that question, which is why I'd like to spend as much time as I can listening to focus groups, because there you can get underneath what it is people are thinking and saying.
Now, it's pretty clear when you talk to swing voters, independent voters, again, not partisans, that what they are frustrated about is the looking backward piece. They don't want to re-litigate 2020. They do not believe that Donald Trump won the election. At the same time, they're more concerned, or at least this was true, say, a couple of months back, or maybe I'll call it about two or three weeks back, the last time I was in one of these groups, where they're much more concerned about the fact that groceries are still really expensive. They're very concerned about the price of gas. These were the things that are occupying the top of their mind.
I was in a group the other week where those issues were still coming up, but what was underneath all of it was just this deep discontent, the sense that things were really off kilter that politicians and politics had really gone to this very bad place. Now they weren't talking about threats to democracy, they didn't use those terms, but what they were feeling was politicians who were out of touch with the concerns important to them and they were more concerned with the fighting and the relitigating and all of that rather than the things that matter in the day-to-day lives of these voters.
I've seen it in other empirical data as well, where there's a group called the Navigator Research, and they're polling publicly. They're a Democratic organization, and what they found over the last few months, so from May until August, voters overall thought that Republicans were addressing the issues that were more important to them and Democrats weren't. Now in August, it's not that people said that they thought Democrats were addressing the issues most important to them, but they believed that Republicans were also not addressing the issues more important to them.
In other words, it's not that people are feeling better about Democrats, but they were feeling worse about Republicans and their ability to tackle the issues that mattered most to them. I think part of that is because what they saw Republicans engaging in was the, and again, I don't know what the better word is here, but the election denial-
Brian Lehrer: Yes, that's the fight over the 2020 election ongoing.
Amy Walter: -the fighting over 2020. Exactly.
Brian Lehrer: Yes. It interesting. It brings up another critique from a listener, this one via Twitter, about a poll question. Listener writes, "Right direction, wrong direction," which you brought up before in the context of the NBC News poll and I brought it up too, with the assumption that if people see the country is on the wrong direction, that's bad for the party in power, but the listener writes, "If you're a Democrat and you're worried about the rise of MAGA and the fight over the legitimacy of an election, you'd say wrong direction. If you're GOP with the then president, you'd say wrong direction too, so the question means nothing."
Amy Walter: What I'm looking for, I do still think it's important because the intensity of it is important. Ultimately, the group of voters I'm super interested in are independent voters. These are voters who don't wake up every day putting on a red or a blue jersey. They probably vote overwhelmingly Republican or Democrat, maybe not overwhelmingly is not the right word, consistently democratic or consistently Republican, but they could sit out an election if they're feeling particularly ambivalent about the party they normally vote for or angry with the party that they normally vote for, so they stay at home, or they actually do change their mind, they say, "Most of the time I vote Democratic, but I just feel like they're falling short," or "Most of the time I vote Republican, but I don't really like Donald Trump." Whatever it is, they come out and their vote is really critical.
We've seen in these last four, five midterm elections, the party that won that midterm election, it's not just that they got their base out, they won independent voters by double digits. Right now we're seeing Democrats, we don't have much polling here, so we'll see it coming up in the next few weeks here, are only behind by a handful with independent voters, or in this new NBC poll, they're actually ahead with independent voters by two point. That's a group of voters that I'm paying attention to.
Then the other thing is optimism. Voters have been very pessimistic, whether we see voters as consumers, we're looking at consumer data, the Michigan consumer index, I pay attention to voters were incredibly pessimistic in June, the most pessimistic about the state of the economy in the history of the Michigan consumer index. CNBC poll, similar. Even in the depths of the 2009 and '10 financial crisis, voters were not as pessimistic about the future as they were in May.
What I'm curious to see is not simply do people just turn things around and say, "Oh, yes, I feel great now about the economy," of course not. They're not going to turn on a dime like that automatically just because gas prices went down and say the economy's great, but do they feel like the future is looking better, that there's a light at the end of the tunnel? That's another thing that could be helpful for Democrats. If you can combine those two things, increasing optimism about the state of the economy, increasing pessimism among Democrats and independents about Republicans being in charge because they see them as a threat to democracy, that's a pretty good combination for Democrats.
Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Amy Walter, editor and publisher of The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. When we come back, Amy, besides taking some more calls for you, I want to come back to that House race in the Hudson Valley that our caller from Margaretville mentioned, which is not a primary tomorrow, it's actually an election to go to Congress and it's being watched as a bellwether in the climate we've been talking about. We'll focus on that and more as we continue with Amy Walter and you on WNYC. [music]
Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Amy Walter from The Cook Political Report and PBS NewsHour, you're still on the NewsHour on Mondays, generally, right?
Amy Walter: Absolutely, every Monday night, getting ready to go tonight.
Brian Lehrer: You're upstaging yourself here this morning. Thank you for doing that. I mentioned tomorrow is congressional primary day in New York and Florida, but also, here in New York, there's one special election to fill an open house seat in a swing district in the Hudson Valley. It's the seat that Congressman Antonio Delgado, a Democrat, vacated a few months ago when he became lieutenant governor of New York. It's just one district, but are you looking at that race to see how much of a bellwether you think the results might be?
Amy Walter: I sure am. You're right, you have to always be careful with special elections because the turnout in a special election looks different than a normal election, plus New Yorkers are not used to voting in August. This is also new for many voters. Look, this is a district that in 2020 Joe Biden carried by about two points. This is a district that hasn't gotten a whole lot of tension this special election, at least not nationally.
We're hearing a lot more about the matchups in Democrat versus Democrat in some of these Manhattan districts, but I do think this is the most important one to watch, because for Republicans to be able to make big gains in the House this fall, they've got to knock off Democrats in districts like these, districts that are not really red, but they're narrowly or maybe they're light blue or are purple like this one.
It's also an opportunity for us to see what happens in real life as opposed to all the time we've spent on polling discussions, so what do voters think? Here we get a chance to see what they really think about the most important issues to them. What we're seeing, at least in the television advertising space, is Democrats really leaning in on the abortion issue, Republicans really leaning in on the inflation issue, and a lot of folks are going to walk away on Wednesday morning and say, "Okay, well, it looks like abortion is a bigger driver," or "It looks like inflation is still the biggest message."
I would be careful not to say that, but I do think that we can at least get a pretty good indication of how these issues are going to play out when real voters have to make these decisions at the ballot box and not just talking to a pollster or filling out a survey.
Brian Lehrer: A very interesting thing to watch in New York results tomorrow night. Joe in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, you're on WNYC. Hi, Joe.
Joe: Hi, good morning. A long time listener, first time caller. The question I have concerns the real absence of public discussion of the electrical college and the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact predicated on my belief that the big lie could not exist if we had popular vote presidency rather than electoral college presidency. I'm wondering if your guest believes that the swing toward democracy in the minds of voters on both sides of the political spectrum presents an opportunity to have at least the discussion about what's wrong with the electric college and how the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact might address that issue?
Brian Lehrer: Joe, thank you for that question, and hold your answer on that. Joe, be patient for one second because I think Javier and Harlem wants to bring up something related. We'll take the two of you together. Javier, you're on WNYC. Hi there.
Javier: Hi, Brian. Hi, Ms. Walter. I guess I'm calling because I feel the concerns about democracy show that the system itself is just not reflective in the way we vote or the way we believe in things, like winner take all versus proportional representation, also gerrymandering is a very big issue, or the politicians choose the voters and not the other way around. I guess my question to Ms. Walter is, do you believe that we should also be having deeper discussions about how the system itself works, such as the person who gets some of those votes wins all of one district and is supposed to then represent that district, even though they don't have the same vision as the people who voted against them?
Brian Lehrer: Two really provocative questions, Amy, and deep dive questions.
Amy Walter: These are really good questions and I'm just trying to do my math here in looking at the electoral college map for a second. It really gets to the core question of are there reforms that can be done that can help to alleviate what we're calling either threats to democracy, stress to democracy, lack of faith in our institutions that are everything from the Supreme Court to Congress to even just local elected officials?
We know that historically we have made changes, this country has made changes when our institutions weren't fulfilling what Americans thought their job should be. Right back in the progressive era, we made changes to ensure that regular people could show up and vote in primaries rather than having elected officials basically chosen in so-called smoke-filled back rooms.
We had direct election of senators rather than letting the clubby atmosphere of the state legislatures pick who our United States senators were. We've done reform in the past. What people talk about now to help some of these challenges that the listeners brought up were either, one, this idea of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact in which a state says it doesn't matter whoever wins our the popular vote-
Brian Lehrer: National popular vote.
Amy Walter: -whoever wins the national popular vote, it doesn't matter what our state said, that's who should be elected president. That way, even though we're not changing the constitution, the state say it's okay even if this person who won my state didn't win the popular vote- [crosstalk]
Brian Lehrer: That's one of those deeper issues, is the electoral college. We've talked a million times about the problems with that. Then there's the Senate, which, of course, has the same number of senators from Wyoming as it does from New York, or California, or Texas, or Florida. It's really not one person, one vote in that respect, but that's enshrined in the constitution in a way that's hard, if not impossible, to change. The filibuster can touch it, but it can't eliminate it.
On the other side of this, I saw an article in The New York Times yesterday about how some Republicans are even running away from democracy, running on the idea that the United States is a republic and not a democracy and that that difference matters. US Senator Mike Lee of Utah, for example, will do a separate segment on that as a threat on another day, but do you understand that distinction? It sounds to me that movement wants to go back to having the states pick their US senators. That, of course, gets exactly into the stolen election, not just lie, but future system that some Republicans are running on to allow the state legislature to overturn the electoral votes of the populist?
Amy Walter: Exactly. That is right. We're getting those two pressures on the-- You have Democrats saying we should just simply not have an electoral college and Republicans going even beyond the electoral college but to say the state legislature has the sole authority to pick electors regardless of what the "people are saying." There's also something else that's been going on and I think it's important for us to recognize, maybe some good things that have occurred in terms of reforms, and that's the top two or top four primary, we've seen the number of Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump, like Liz Cheney, for example, in many cases lose overwhelmingly in their all party primaries.
In places that have top two or top four primaries, in other words, every candidate runs on the same ballot, there's no Republican primary or Democratic primary, whoever the top two or the top four vote getters are go on to the general election, those are the candidates who have survived. They were Republicans who voted for Donald Trump, they survived their primaries.
Brian Lehrer: Voted for Donald Trump's impeachment, you're saying?
Amy Walter: Yes, they voted to impeach Donald Trump. This is a candidate, well, now incumbent in California, Washington State, and in Alaska, Senator Lisa Murkowski. If these candidates had run in traditional primaries, it's unlikely they would've won, but the theory behind a top-two primary or a ranked-choice voting like you had in New York last year, it requires a candidate to run a much more coalition-based campaign and it allows independent voters and voters who don't really align themselves strongly with one party or the other to show up and support the candidate as opposed to only the most fervent people on the left and the right showing up and picking their candidates.
Is it going to make everything better and save democracy in one fell swoop? No, but I do think that there is a moderating impact of having primaries that allow for everybody to be involved and for all the candidates to be on the same ballot.
Brian Lehrer: Well, let me finish with this question then. Do swing voters have a say for control of Congress in a meaningful way, or as we sometimes hear, is turn out of each party's base by far now the overriding concern, which, of course, if that's true that there really aren't that many swing voters left, and so it's really all about turnout that would push each party to cater to their base and polarize more?
Amy Walter: I'll give you Donald Trump as the example. Donald Trump ran on a base-only campaign in 2016. Actually, I'd argue much more in 2020 than he did even in 2016. That did not win him an election because he lost independent voters in 2020. His party lost independent voters by double digits in 2018. Catering to your base can get you 46%, 47%, but it does not get you to 50%.
You can definitely look at swing voters or whatever we want to call them, independents, and say they're a pretty small percent of the overall electorate. Sure, they are a pretty small percent of the overall electorate, but with elections being determined by 10,000, 20,000 votes per state or per congressional district, those voters really, really do matter. Turnout matters, but I think of your base, but you can't win if you are alienating swing voters, and Trump's proved it.
Brian Lehrer: It gets back to Mitch McConnell's point in the clip we played-
Amy Walter: Exactly.
Brian Lehrer: -because that becomes more of a factor, the swing voters become more of a factor in statewide elections, gerrymandering of house districts makes it a little less salient in the political races because whichever party has control of the state legislature in a given state can tweak the congressional districts in their favor, but certainly in the statewide races for senate and governor.
There we leave it with Amy Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief of The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. You also can see her as a PBS NewsHour political analyst every Monday night on the PBS NewsHour. Amy, we'll be watching tonight. Thanks so much for so much time this morning. We really appreciate it.
Amy Walter: You're welcome, Brian. Thanks so much.
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