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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. As our post-election coverage continues, still too close to call with many States in play for the Presidential race. With us now, Errin Haines, editor-at-large for The 19th. A news organization founded this year dedicated to covering gender politics and policy named after the 19th Amendment.

The one that gave women the right to vote, which turned to 100 years old this summer, but it's the 19th with an asterisk because so many Black women at the time, the amendment was passed were not able to vote under the law. Errin, thanks for coming on in the morning after I imagine very little sleep. Welcome back to WNYC.

Errin Haines: Brian, thanks for having me and thanks for mentioning that asterisk. Very important as we recognize the centennial of suffrage.

Brian: As a Pennsylvania voter yourself, do you want to just react to what you heard there? I think you were listening in with the governor and the Secretary of State.

Errin: Yes. Listen, I think that they are just trying to manage expectations as they were trying to do headed into this election. I've been here in Pennsylvania for five years and in 2016, the situation was that you could only vote on election day.

There was no voting before election day without an excuse and so this was a new process for Pennsylvania, obviously because of the pandemic. The governor is saying that the delay is a sign that the system is working and the secretary of state is saying, "Listen, we literally have 10 times more mail-in votes than we had four years ago."

I think that we just owe it to ourselves as a country and as a democracy to let this process play out and to really let the idea of one person and one vote be executed in this moment. I know people are waking up to tremendous uncertainty as States, including Pennsylvania, we still have outstanding results, but this is an unprecedented election and so the process to be sure, was going to be unprecedented as well.

Brian: I read your article from a few days ago about your own voting experience in Philadelphia and emerging exhausted, demoralized and enraged as you put it after four hours of standing in line at your polling place. Would you tell us your voting story and how you think it might relate to the bigger undetermined picture in Pennsylvania right now?

Errin: Yes, and let me just start by saying I wrote that column not to portray myself as any victim, because I believe that as a journalist in this country, I certainly have a certain level of privilege.

That means that I can wait in a line for four hours, but really I wrote it to bear witness on behalf of the countless number of Philadelphians who frankly do not have four hours to wait in a line, who maybe had a job that wouldn't give them paid time off to cast their ballot or certainly wouldn't allow them to take four hours to be off the job to participate in our democracy or maybe who had to pick up children in the middle of this pandemic or balancing caregiving responsibilities with their ability to cast the ballot safely in this time.

Really thinking about them, thinking about the poll workers who were at the precinct where I was. There were only three poll workers in a precinct that was in an arena, a sports arena. I was at the The Liacouras Center at Temple University and that is simply unacceptable for the volume of people.

To be sure, I think we saw a lot of voter enthusiasm, a lot of voters motivated to participate in this process and to participate in it early. A lot of voters, especially Black voters in particular told me that they voted early because they did not want to leave room for error in this election.

There was tremendous voter excitement, but I don't want to confuse that with-- The presence of voter excitement is not the absence of voter suppression. They were both present in what I saw here and what we saw, I think in the long lines across the country as the infrastructure simply was not there to handle the sheer volume of voters who wanted to be a part of this election.

I think in the middle of this pandemic, it is remarkable that so many people wanted to participate and so their vote, their voice should be heard and I just worry about those who may have been disenfranchised, not even by the long lines, but folks who saw those long lines and maybe couldn't stop had to keep going and maybe never made it back.

Brian: How intentional do you think they were?

Errin: To the voters or?

Brian: No. How intentional was the creation of the system that created the long lines that disenfranchised people in the way you just described?

Errin: Despite the knowledge that we learned in the primaries, that voting in a pandemic was going to be challenging, we did not see the federal resources that a lot of States were asking for to help with this process months in advance and knowing what those challenges were going to be.

I think that it is clear that we have seen that there is one party in this country that is not particularly interested in expanding the electorate and expanding access to the ballot box and there's another party in this country that has been trying mightily to do that and to not only restore parts of the voting rights act, but to expand the voting rights act so that as many Americans as possible are able to exercise their rights as citizens.

I think that what this has shown is that the issue of voter suppression and voter access, particularly in this Centennial year of suffrage is something that should not be partisan and something that has to be addressed not just in election years, but in the time in between. This is something that should be a priority for all Americans who reject the politics of voter suppression,

Brian: Errin Haines, editor-at-large for The 19th with us. We can take some phone calls for her on the entire post-election situation, any aspect of it relevant to our conversation, 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280.

Errin we aired the news conference with the governor and the secretary of state of Pennsylvania. I gather that just before that, you were listening in to a Biden campaign news conference. Can you give us any report on it?

Errin: Sure. Yes, I was listening to Biden campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon and also Bob Bauer, the legal mind that's working with the Biden team on a lot of the potential legal actions around the votes that are coming in.

What the Biden team is saying is that Joe Biden is on track to win this election and they say that he will be the next President of the United States. O'Malley Dillon said that they expect you to Biden to win Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and not only win, but win by wider margins than President Trump did in 2016.

They said they also expect to win Nevada. They think that he could win Georgia and North Carolina, which would push Joe Biden beyond 270 votes, but what they stress is that they want all of the votes counted. They said that if Donald Trump got his wish and stopped counting right now, though Joe Biden would be the next President of the United States.

They're expressing confidence which tells me that they must know something that a lot of the rest of us don't, as we continue to look at our maps and refresh our screens. These are folks who do this counting for a living and so them getting out and asserting this, on the Wednesday morning, after a very tumultuous election with a lot of outstanding results tells me that, that they have spent beyond the time that most of us went to sleep, crunching the numbers and burning that midnight oil to get to the conclusions that they reached this morning.

Brian: Listeners, with lawsuits anticipated our next guest after Errin will be Dale Ho Director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project. We'll talk about some of the legal challenges will likely to come and what those might look like and what the arguments might be on both sides.

That's coming up next. Errin your article going into election day yesterday, was called women will decide the 2020 election and said women will decide who is electable? Do you have a gender analysis of the vote as it's knowable so far?

Errin: I think we still are looking at what the gender impact is, but what we know is that the record early voting that we saw was driven largely by women. Women were more than half of the folks who were early voting, particularly in key battleground States.

I think that that has implications obviously at the top of the ticket, but also with some of these races down-ballot. Still looking at that full landscape to see where we end up and frankly, where women ended up.

We know that all issues are women's issues, whether that was the economy or healthcare, which tend to be the top priority for all voters, or issues like energy, which came into focus towards the end of the campaign cycle with that last debate when you saw a clear contrast between President Trump and vice president Biden and what women in places like Pennsylvania and Texas heard when they heard Vice President Biden talking about things like fracking or talking about the non-renewable energy sources that frankly are a lifeline to a lot of economies that are off the coast.

I think the pandemic was absolutely political for women. It will be interesting to see how that motivated women to head to the polls, a lot of them who are making sacrifices in their personal life and are frustrated by the lack of a national plan around this pandemic.

Women as the majority of the electorate, the majority of the US workforce and the majority of our population, not to mention the majority of people who have been impacted by in responding to the Coronavirus crisis were absolutely a factor in this election and we're just still trying to figure out exactly what all that means for races up and down the ticket.

Brian: This is WNYC FM HDN AM New York WNJ TFM 88.1 Trenton WN JP 88.5 Sussex WNJY 89.3 net con WNJO 90.3 Tom's River. We are in New York and New Jersey public radio as our coverage continues. Let me follow up on what you were just saying.

Your article yesterday reminds us that more than 865,000 women dropped out of the workforce in September alone during the country's first female recession as you called it. Unable to balance work and caregiving, women have lost more than half the jobs in the pandemic and Latina unemployment, as you remind us is at an all time high.

Is it possible though that concern over the economy for exactly those reasons might've helped Donald Trump with his emphasis on opening the economy over protecting from the virus and that that helped him more among women, including Latinas than if the female recession wasn't happening?

Errin: Well, I think it may have helped Donald Tramp with white women. I think that the suburban white women that we talked about, especially down the stretch of this election, while we heard a lot of them saying that they were considering not voting for the President again, a lot of them were absolutely is still on board with reelecting him and enthusiastically cast their ballot for his reelection.

I talked to conservative women, especially after the last debate who told me that they felt like the President actually was doing a good job of handling the Coronavirus pandemic that they felt like because there was no blueprint for this once in a century event, that he was doing the best that he could, that they didn't feel like Joe Biden could have done any better.

I think hearing from voters and that was such a challenge, I think for those of us in the media during a pandemic, really getting out and talking to voters about where they were and what they were thinking in this pandemic.

This could mean-- I wonder what that means for a lot of those women who maybe were not as publicly vocal about the choices that they were going to make in this election, but nonetheless were no less committed to casting their ballot this cycle.

Brian: Let's take a phone call from Eliza. Is Eliza ready to go? Can I go to line one there folks? As soon as that gets released. All right, there we go. Eliza in Harlem, you're on WNYC with Errin Haines from the 19th. Hi Eliza.

Eliza: Hi. How are you?

Brian: I'm okay. Thank you.

Eliza: I just had a quick question. I'm very curious about the absentee ballot vote in Pennsylvania, and I don't think pollsters have correctly correlated, and I don't know how they would. The impact women like in the workforce and being so disrupted and Donald Trump's lack of handing the crisis well.

I think they're going to-- Maybe I'm cautiously optimistic, but I feel like they're going to be leaning towards Biden as we count these votes, the absentee ballots in States like Pennsylvania, they're the people that had the greatest impact on this and I feel like they're actually voting on it, but I don't know how that would be reflected in a poll at this point.

Brian: Errin, anything on that?

Errin: Yes. I mean, that's interesting. Certainly a lot of not only professional women, but also those essential workers, frontline workers, domestic workers that I spoke to very frustrated with the lack of a plan and having to balance concerns about public health with their need to earn a living.

I know that that was the thing that motivated them, not just to vote, but also to organize to phone bank, to text, to send postcards and to really try to galvanize other women to cast their ballots in this election and to cast them against President Trump, who they saw as not having an adequate response to the pandemic.

I think poll after poll showed us that there was a gender gap over who women voters trusted after handle the response to COVID-19 and that was a gender gap that favored Joe Biden going into this election. There were also a lot of women that I've spoken to in communities that were already hard hit even before the pandemic and that really found themselves on the break over the past several months.

When they hear the President talking about reopening the economy, about people getting back out into the country and going back to school, going back to jobs, that is the message that resonates with them because they are seeing their communities suffering and while they may also be living in places where the Coronavirus is spiking, or even in places where they're handling it, but maybe their economy hasn't fully reopened.

That is a message that resonates with them and that they are wanting things to get back to a place where those jobs and their livelihoods and households where they feel safer and more secure about their futures.

Brian: Eliza, I hope that answers your question to some degree. I know you've got to go on a couple of minutes, Errin. To that point, I was looking at the issue oriented exit polls from last night that they had released on the networks, not the exit polls about who people voted for, but the exit polls about what people were voting about.

Some of them along these lines were interesting to me and a little mixed. Maybe these just aren't great polls, I don't know. They were supposed to be a combination of people who voted early and people who voted yesterday. On people's top issue, 34% said the economy 21% said racial inequality.

That's scored very high. That doesn't usually come in second in national elections, 18% said the Coronavirus, and then further down 11% each, said healthcare and crime. Healthcare usually comes in much higher.

If this is an accurate number, as a reflection of the electorate in general, if 34% said the economy was their primary concern and just 18% said the Coronavirus, I wonder if that leans Trump a little bit more than one might've expected?

Errin: I think it possibly explains how close the selection is. Frankly, I think that that number around the racial reckoning also can explain how close this election is. Look, we knew going into this election that this country was still a very divided racially and politically polarized.

Racism was on the ballot for a lot of voters to be sure. That's certainly something that I asserted. At the core, there is perhaps a relationship between the economy and the-- My dog now wants to get involved in this, [unintelligible 00:18:28] Brian.

Brian: Many dogs have made their radio debut on this show. What's your dog's name?

Errin: Well, Ginger is joining us today from Philadelphia. She has a lot of feelings about the election [inaudible 00:18:42] we should bring her on a regular basis.

Brian: Did you say Ginger?

Errin: Ginger, yes.

Brian: Hello Ginger.

Errin: My 11-pound [crosstalk] and my pandemic hero.

Brian: Good dog Ginger. Now the phone's ringing, but go ahead. Finish the answer. I'm sorry.

Errin: No. I was just going to say, I don't think that the economy and Coronavirus response are unrelated. I think that you do have a lot of Americans who are balancing their concerns with the Coronavirus, with their concerns about the economy wanting to reopen safely and wanting a plan for that but not really hearing that from federal officials and frankly even necessarily from local officials.

I think a lot of elected officials who were on the ballot this year were being held to account by voters about what their plan was going forward for what the new normal is going to be, what the reopening of this country is going to look like.

Brian: Errin Haines, editor at large for The 19th, which if you don't know it yet is the new news organization created this year dedicated to covering gender politics and policy named for the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote in this country exactly 100 years ago this year, but 19th with an asterisk, because it didn't give Black women the right to vote. Errin, thanks as always for coming on with us. Let's keep talking.

Errin: Brian, thanks for having me. Let's see what happens.

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