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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. The Martin Luther King Day deadline set by Democrats for voting rights legislation to advance in the Senate continues to approach with still no deal with democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, to vote to suspend the filibuster for this issue. On yesterday's show, civil rights leader Reverend Al Sharpton was here and he told me he's got a meeting with Manchin about this coming up. I asked Reverend Sharpton, given the months of meetings with Manchin on the Build Back Better bill that went nowhere, does he have any reason to believe this will end differently?

Reverend Al Sharpton: I have no reason to believe that it will, and I have no reason to believe that it won't. I think that it puts us in a position that if Manchin and Sinema say we're willing to keep talking. For us to say we're not willing to talk, I think would be our shooting down and giving them an excuse saying we were willing to talk, but they would not continue engaging the conversation.

Brian Lehrer: Reverend Sharpton here yesterday. An article on the DC news site, Punchbowl News this morning focuses on how much political capital Biden and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer are spending on a likely failed effort. It says, for example, "We all understand that it's unlikely to pass, right? And there are plenty of Senate Democrats and many on the house side too that wonder why the White House is pressing so hard on this, and why is Schumer forcing vulnerable lawmakers to do away with the filibuster?

The vast majority of Democratic senators are ready to scrap the 60 vote threshold if they can win, they can't right now, and worse than that, Senate Democrats don't have a graceful way out of this political jam. It's a bit reminiscent of when Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell said he wouldn't lift the debt limit earlier this year. McConnell's position was unsustainable, and in the end, he had no choice left but to fold." That comparison from Punchbowl News, the relatively new news organization founded by three former political correspondents. The Washington Post had an article yesterday called, How pollsters say Democrats should talk about voting rights. It cites Biden's 2020 campaign pollsters Celinda Lake saying this was probably the most effective part of President Biden's Tuesday speech in Atlanta.

Biden: The facts won't matter. Your vote won't matter. They'll just decide what they want and then do it.

Brian Lehrer: Lake's take is that high-minded talk about defending democracy isn't as effective as more direct warnings like that one, that Republicans are trying to take away American's right to vote. With us now, Washington Post political reporter, Theo Meyer, who also writes their morning newsletter called The Early 202. 202 remember is Washington DC's area code. Of course, they're running out of 202 phone numbers. Maybe they'll have to rename the newsletter The Early 202 or 771, but in any case, Theo, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC. Hello from the land of 212, 917, 646,347, 929, and 718.

Theo Meyer: Glad to be with you, Brian. I am actually a 917 number myself.

Brian Lehrer: [chuckles] You know there was a time when all of New York City, maybe you know this if you're an expert, had the 212 area code, then only Manhattan. The other boroughs were given 718 and now there are all those others I mentioned too. Now that we've settled that, let's start on the tick-tock of this countdown to Martin Luther King Day, just four days away. Is there any Joe Manchin watch news as of right now?

Theo Meyer: No, I think there's really no Manchin watch or Sinema watch news. This is played out in a relatively predictable way over the last few weeks. The expectation is that Democrats will bring this up for a vote, Republicans will filibuster these two voting rights bills that they are trying to pass. Democrats will then attempt to change the rules and they will come up two votes short absent any great surprises with Manchin and Sinema declining to vote with what will probably be 48 Democrats, the other 48 democratic senators voting to change the filibuster rules in some way so that they can pass these two bills.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, my producer reminds us that there was a whole Seinfeld episode where Elaine becomes a 718 and no one would date her anymore, but you heard the Al Sharpton clip from yesterday's show. Do you know what these ongoing negotiations with Manchin are like?

If I heard your answer just now correctly, it's like this is a done deal. There's going to be no deal. There's going to be a vote and it's going to fail, but they're going to get everyone on the record, but I mean, they have these conversations with Manchin for months over Build Back Better. The leadership kept expressing hope with all these seeds of compromise that they were planting and the flower never bloomed. What happens at these meetings?

Theo Meyer: Well, I think there's a big difference between the negotiations over Build Back Better which is a bill in which there's real disagreement on substance, a big complicated bill in which Manchin has things that he wants, ways in which he would prefer the bill to be constructed, and Kyrsten Sinema has the same thing. Here, there is no disagreement at all on the substance of the bill while Senator Manchin had objected to the Democrats earlier ethics and voting rights and election reform bill that they had introduced last year.

He spent months working on this. The bill that they are now trying to advance is a bill that he helped construct. There's no disagreement on the substance on this. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin are both very much for both of these pieces of voting rights legislation. The For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The only disagreement here is on whether or not they're willing to change the filibuster permanently in order to pass these bills.

That is something that Manchin and Sinema have been pretty steadfastly against. There has not been a lot of movement in their positions. There's really a lot less to discuss here in terms of negotiations that can drag on for weeks or months.

Brian Lehrer: I mentioned the Punchbowl News take this morning, your former colleagues from Politico, Anna Palmer and Jake Sherman with some Democrats worrying that Biden is spending so much political capital on this issue, especially if it's likely to fail, and vulnerable senators up for reelection this year could also face blowback in their swing states with the Democrats on the verge of losing the Senate. Do you hear that grumbling and second-guessing too?

Theo Meyer: Well, it's a damned if you do damned if you don't situation here, in that for months the White House did not put as much political capital as a lot of people on the left would have liked to have seen into this issue, and took a lot of flak for that. The White House and Democratic leadership have made the calculation that there is so much desire among their base to address voting rights, to address this issue to, as they would put it, protect democracy a year after the January 6th attacks on the Capitol.

That it's worth it to make a full-throated push on this, to try as hard as they can even if there's not a clear path to getting it done. That if it fails, at least they are able to say to their voters, we tried as hard as we possibly could to pass this.

Brian Lehrer: That would be the strategy, even if it lines up with the vote that loses 48 to 52, to break the filibuster so they can go forward with these bills that Chuck Schumer must think that that's going to do more to turn out people in the base who are glad they tried than it's going to do to scare away maybe people in the center who might vote for a Democrat, who don't like the idea of ending the filibuster?

Theo Meyer: Yes. I think in some ways you have seen still more criticism that President Biden and Democrats are not doing enough. Some groups boycotted President Biden's speech in Georgia on Tuesday. Stacey Abrams did not show up to the speech saying that she had some scheduling conflict. She still has not been clear about exactly what that scheduling conflict was. Generally, if the president invites you to do something you are able to find a way out of most other things that you would be doing with your time.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few phone calls on how to get to yes on voting rights on whether the Democrats should be spending this much political capital on this issue since it seems headed for failure, maybe it will succeed, but seems headed for failure or how do you think your party, whatever party you're in, should run in the midterms or anything related for Theo Mayer from the Washington Post 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692.

Yes, we are still a 212-433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer. Your story on Biden's campaign poster, Celinda Lake characterizing what kind of voting rights messaging might be most effective. We played that Biden quote that you included in that story as the thing Celinda Lake likes. Why that line?

Theo Meyer: As Celinda told me, she thinks that there are several different ways in which Democrats talk about the need to pass voting rights. Part of it springs from what happened on January 6th, in a sense of needing to defend democracy. Part of it springs from the restrictions that Republicans in many different states have imposed in the wake of 2020 elections to try to make it in some ways more difficult, Republicans would say, to make elections more secure, but Democrats would say to make it more difficult to vote.

She told me that it's not particularly strong to talk about making voting hard or easier that people don't necessarily think that voting should be that easy. That they feel that it's our responsibility and if you have to go to a little effort to vote, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Instead, she said that Democrats should really point to who the villains are in this and to say that Republicans are trying to take away people's right to vote and that's a much stronger message.

Brian Lehrer: Heroes and villains, just like so much of politics, unfortunately, is these days. I wonder if Celinda Lake or anybody else has done polling, I don't expect you to know, on how hard people think it should be to vote. If they go down the list of things that tend to be in these various voting rights bills, should people not be allowed to mail in a ballot if that ballot is secure, should people have to wait more than a half-hour, more than an hour, more than two hours on a line because there aren't more polling places in their neighborhoods or aren't more days of early voting to ease that pressure?

All these things that come up in these bills that the Democrats want and the Republicans resist. I wonder if anybody knows how much people think it should be hard to vote, or if this is all based on the big lie about it being election security-related?

Theo Meyer: Well, there has been some polling on this issue since the 2020 election, there was a Monmouth University poll last year in which people were asked should early voting specifically be made easier or harder. 71% of people said that it should be made easier, only 16% said harder. When it comes to voting by mail, it was a little bit closer and 50% of people said it should be easier, 39% of people said that it should be harder.

Brian Lehrer: Theo Meyer knowing the poll results that I didn't tell him I was going to ask about. There's also a dilemma for the Republicans this year having to do with voting rights and the big lie. The background is that Trump just keeps insisting that the election was stolen despite overwhelming evidence of the contrary.

He did it again on Morning Edition with Steve Inskeep yesterday and then hung up on Steve for pressing for specifics. I'll pass on playing a clip that just repeats the lies without offering any evidence, but that happened yesterday on this station. At one point, Steve brought up Republican Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota, as an example of those in Trump's party willing to reject the scam. Here's Senator Rounds on ABC this week on Sunday.

Mike Rounds: The election was fair, as fair as we've seen. We simply did not win the election as Republicans for the presidency. That's the way we want to look at this. Moving forward, we have to refocus once again on what it's going to take to win the presidency. If we simply look back and tell our people, don't vote because there's cheating going on, then we're going to put ourselves in a huge disadvantage.

Brian Lehrer: That part, Theo, of Rounds point at the end that Republicans are going to lose congressional elections this year or risk losing them if they follow Trump's lead and run on something about 2020 that's demonstrably false rather than things that people need today and that are real, how much is that tension within Republican campaign circles real. How much is Senator Rounds out there by himself when everybody else is racing to embrace Trump's lie?

Theo Meyer: I think this tension has been present certainly since Republicans lost both Georgia Senate seats last year in an upset after President Trump spent weeks and months complaining about the unfairness of the 2020 election saying that he really won Georgia, saying that it was pointless to vote if Democrats were just going to cheat.

Republicans look at those Georgia results and they see something that they do not want to be repeated. There's a real divide in the party and it's not always predictable based on ideology where certain Republican lawmakers will fall when it comes to embracing Trump's claim or saying, no, the 2020 election was fair. It's 2022, let's move on. Mike Rounds is not-- he's not considered one of the most moderate Republican senators in the way that Susan Collins of Maine or Lisa Murkowski of Alaska or even Mitt Romney of Utah is.

Brian Lehrer: That brings up a contradiction in the world of all those people. That might be that and even Mitch McConnell, who does not accept the big lie and a fair number of other GOP senators not named Ted Cruz, they embrace the real election results but they still say the Democrats voting rights bills are unnecessary to protect against these state voter suppression laws that are being passed precisely based on the lie that there was massive fraud. Do voters just not get the contradiction there?

Theo Meyer: I think there is certainly a faction of Republicans, probably most Republicans who think the 2020 election was fair, who still feel that Republican-led states, if they want to make changes to their voting laws, that is their right and they should be able to do that.

I would say those things, at least in the minds of Republicans, are not necessarily connected. Even some of the most moderate Republicans in the chamber who have forcefully denounced President Trump's lies about the 2020 elections, people like Mitt Romney and Susan Collins are not on board with these Democratic voting bills.

Brian Lehrer: Raymond in the Bronx. You're on WNYC. Hi, Raymond. Thanks for calling in.

Raymond: Hi, good morning, Brian. Good morning, sir. It's ironic, so many people have died over the years and suffered just to get the right to vote. I think that's advanced citizenship when you have a right to vote. Now you have so many state legislators that are changing the laws because they didn't win. What happened to having democracy? What happened to this freedom, these beautiful words that our forefathers wrote for everyone?

Everyone's created equal or everyone has this right. Now, because they didn't win, now, you want to resign it so you can have an advantage. I don't understand it. When are we going to be American again?

Brian Lehrer: Raymond, I hear you. I will take that as a rhetorical question. Mike in Manhattan. You're on WNYC. Hi, Mike.

Mike: Hi. I'm a frustrated Democratic realistic voter and it just drives me crazy that the Democrats keep complaining about the electoral college versus the popular vote and the filibuster and Joe Manchin. These are all realities that they just cannot seem to accept. I'll give you one example. There's an electoral voting act that Peter Navarro talked about, where he describes very specifically how the Republicans can legally throw the presidential contest into chaos.

Brian Lehrer: That was Trump aid, Peter Navarro, who was the main architect of what they were trying to do on January 6, by not certifying the election. Go ahead.

Mike: All it takes is one Senator and one House Member to cause hours and hours of debate, which can then throw this back to the state. The state legislatures have shown us that they might be willing to decertify their election results, and then the president would be chosen by the House of Representatives state by state. Mitch McConnell is on board with changing this.

Chuck Schumer comes out the other day and makes a big deal about the fact that this is not worth doing because there are these larger Voting Rights Act issues. No one's saying you can't do both, but get this loophole taken care of while you're in power. It drives me crazy that the Democrats don't just get things like that done, like mechanical things that they can do and have McConnell on board. Get it on, and then keep working the larger voting rights bills. If 2024 gets thrown into chaos, with the same plan that Navarro laid out, the Democrats only have themselves to blame.

Brian Lehrer: Mike, thank you very much. This is something we haven't talked about yet in this segment. It'll be our last topic as we run out of time, Theo, but there is that third voting rights bill, the ones we've generally been talking about, or the John Lewis Bill and the Freedom to Vote Act with various provisions we've been discussing. The caller is referring to the Electoral Count Act, which Republicans will support that is aimed at preventing that kind of, "Mike Pence could have stopped the whole thing and thrown it back into the laps of state legislatures around the country, or members of Congress could have--"

Yet, what I hear from Democrats is, that's kind of a distraction that McConnell is throwing out there. Because if they pass that bill, it'll take the wind out of the sails of all these other voting rights things, which are also so crucial, but what do you say to the caller? Is there a faction of Democrats who say, "Let's at least just fix that because we can and then deal with the rest?"

Theo Meyer: Yes, well, there certainly are Democrats who are interested in reforming the Electoral Count Act, but many other Democrats see Republicans' willingness to negotiate on this as an attempt to distract them from passing the signature of voting rights bills that they really want to pass. Right now, Schumer has shut down talk about reforming the Electoral Count Act, it remains to be seen if Democrats try as hard as they can to change the filibuster rules to pass these bills and come up short, whether discussions might be restarted about trying to reform the Electoral Count Act.

For what it's worth, the Center for American Progress, one of the leading progressive think tanks, put out some research a week or two ago making the case that Democrats needed to do all three things. If they wanted to defend democracy, they needed to pass these two voting rights bills that they had been trying to pass, but also to address the Electoral Count Act, which is not addressed. Some people see these bills as complementary rather than competing options.

Brian Lehrer: Right. The difference is that there's one that they can get passed now on the Electoral Count Act. There's two that they apparently cannot, but that Martin Luther King Day deadline for getting Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to, yes, to move those bills forward, now four days away, and apparently those talks are continuing. We thank Theo Meyer, who writes The Early 202 morning newsletter for The Washington Post. Political reporter, Theo Meyer. Theo, thanks so much. Great job.

Theo Meyer: Thanks for having me, Brian.

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