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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. With me now, New York Times correspondent covering campaigns, elections and political power, Lisa Lerer. If that last name sounds familiar, I'll say it only sounds familiar. It's spelled differently from another Lerer you may hear in this segment, and there is no relation as far as I know. Lisa Lerer writes the On Politics email newsletter for The Times, among her other duties. Thanks for coming on, Lisa. Welcome to WNYC.

Lisa Lerer: Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be on with another Lerer.

Brian: Somewhere, though, generations ago, your family started spelling your name wrong by dropping the H.

Lisa: [laughs] I will tell my grandparents your assessment here.

Brian: I will let that go. Mostly we're going to talk about your recent article called Joe From Scranton Didn't Win Back the Working Class, but let's start on the news. The COVID relief bill passed by very large veto-proof majorities in both houses, but now there was also some bipartisan grumbling from Ted Cruz, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and from President Trump. What's this backlash about?

Lisa: Yes, that was quite the surprise, although perhaps, given the year we've had and the administration, we've all just spent the past four years watching. Perhaps it wasn't all that much of a surprise, but these negotiations have been going on for nearly nine months. Republicans and Democrats had been wrangling back and forth, they finally thought they had reached a deal, they passed it through the House with veto and the Senate with veto-proof majorities, and the president's team went out and praised the package, this is so great, they were so happy that they got this $900 billion COVID relief bill through Congress, and then yesterday, the president comes out and basically blasted.

His major point of contention seems to be the stimulus checks included in the legislation, which, at most, are $600 a person, he would like those to be nearly double that, $1,200. Sorry, $2,000, which is higher than the $1,200 that people received in the first round of relief in the spring. If there is some bipartisan support for that, Josh Hawley, a Republican, and Bernie Sanders wanted a much larger check, Alexander Ocasio-Cortez wanted of those checks to be larger, but Mitch McConnell and the vast majority the Republican Party were concerned about that size of the check, and that's part of the reason why the president's own aids and own teams came up with the $600 number, so that was a compromise.

In the last minute, the final hour, the president just basically went on Twitter and gave a speech and blew it all up.

Brian: Is there any possibility, given a certain amount of bipartisan support, and I'm sure people are listening with great interest with respect to their own finances, is this check that I'm anticipating for $600 possibly going to become a check for $2,000 besides the names we already mentioned? I think Nancy Pelosi said, "Yes, Democrats wanted a bigger check all along, a bigger spending package all along, let's do it."

Lisa: If there's one thing I've learned over the past four years, it's not to make any predictions about what is going to come out of Washington. I think it would be pretty unlikely. Democrats seized on this call by President Trump because, as I said, they wanted that number to be higher from the beginning of these negotiations, but the logistics of getting this through Congress are really hard. Nancy Pelosi has said that she's going to introduce a proposal to pass this $2,000 amount tomorrow, but if any Republican in the House objects to it, which feels likely, especially given sort of the more fiscally conservative folks, they're hearing in the House that that proposal will die.

In order for such a proposal to pass the Senate at this point in time, it would have to pass with the unanimous support of the entire Republican Party there, all the Republican senators. That also feels unlikely considering that there were six folks who voted against the passage of this bill, and they were all Republicans, and some of their concerns were the size of the package.

It doesn't seem particularly likely, but it is always hard to judge, especially at this moment that we're in right now, the political sway President Trump can still command over the Republican Party. We've seen that Republicans have been, throughout the administration, very reluctant to break with the president, even when it seemed like the path the president was going was perhaps not in their best political interest or sort of the ideological interest of their party, but now we're in a really different moment because the president is a lame duck. We don't really have quite the same gauge of what his hold remains on his party at this moment.

Brian: It does squeeze Mitch McConnell in an unusual way, if Trump and Pelosi are saying, "Yes, let's do it. Let's increase these checks from $600 to $2,000." McConnell is the one caught in the middle, especially because, Lisa, you know how they say all politics is local, I think right now all politics is local to Georgia and the Senate runoffs there. I don't know if you know yet, I don't know yet, but since the president came out with this position regarding increasing the checks to $2,000 last night, have the Republican candidates for the Senate and the Democratic candidates for the Senate in Georgia taken a position on this?

Lisa: I think, so far, the Republican candidates are following the time-honored tradition of their party during the Trump administration, which is to dodge the question and try to remain silent on these issues for as long as possible, but the larger political dynamics that you bring up are really important. In the short term, there is these two crucial runoff races in Georgia, and a lot of what Republicans have been trying to do is certainly, as it relates to President Trump, has been not to jeopardize their chances in those races, because what is at stake is the Senate Majority for next year, and that's a really big deal, particularly when you have this new democratic administration coming into office.

I think that those races are weighing very heavily on everything Mitch McConnell is doing in all his calculations, and this reluctance to tip the balance, but it's been a tricky line for him to walk, because not only do you have this new dynamic of what's going to happen with this relief package, you also have President Trump's ongoing refusal to accept the results in the election.

There was some concern that has largely diminished among Republican strategists, but was really, really active two or three weeks ago, that the president's refusal to accept the results in Georgia in the November election in Georgia could prompt some voters there to boycott the runoff election, because Republican voters don't believe that anything that's happening in elections in Georgia is legitimate because the president has been pressing that case.

How the dynamics in Washington intersect with the dynamics on the ground in Georgia is really interesting and something that, I think, both parties are keeping a close eye on. Clearly, Democrats think it's in their best interest to be pushing for more relief for people in this really hard time. I think there's a larger dynamic that's worth watching tier two, which is how the Republican Party is going to change after Trump leaves office, Trump really remade the party in his own image in a lot of ways.

He is someone who takes a much more populist approach, he is someone who endorses ideas like direct payments, ideas that based on traditional Republican ideology should really be anathema to what that party believes, so he has cheesed the party on a number of issues, free trade comes to mind, foreign policy comes to mind, and where the party goes once he is out of office and what positions they stake out, and sort of those internal, that internal wrangling within the party, I think, will be fascinating to watch, and we're really getting a preview of some of those dynamics right now in this spat.

Brian: While we've been talking, we've been furiously searching the four candidates in the two Georgia Senate runoffs to see their positions, and the one thing we can find so far is the Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff tweeted last night, "$2,000 checks now," so that strange coalition of Donald Trump and Jon Ossoff in Georgia taking shape, we'll see where else that heads.

You are following the crucial Georgia Senate runoff, so let me ask you another question about that. We know Republicans are sending mixed messages about absentee ballots being subject to fraud on the one hand, and urging their voters to vote absentee right away on the other, and on the Democratic side, one thing you wrote about this month, Biden's recent agenda has been driven, you write, to a degree not always obvious by his desire to take control of the Senate. Last week, he privately urged civil rights leaders to delay pushing for criminal justice reform by a few weeks so their rhetoric would not be used by Georgia Republicans to target the Democrats. Biden said, "We need those two seats," according to a tape of the call obtained by The Intercept. How do you see the dilemmas for the two parties in these races that are so high stakes, but seem uniquely unpredictable?

Lisa: It is a uniquely unpredictable race. In part, yes, there really isn't a template for what we're seeing in Georgia. We had historically high turnout in Georgia, all over the country really, but certainly in Georgia during the presidential election runoff traditionally has savored Republicans and have been rather low turnout elections, they're off cycle. People don't really understand what they are, even in Georgia where they're part of the system there, and Democrats in particular, who often do have lower propensity voters tend not to turn out and they just have favored Republicans.

It's really not clear if that's going to be the case this time. There's a lot of Democratic energy in Georgia. I think Democrats in that state feel really good about flipping it in the November election for the first time since Bill Clinton. Nobody really has a sense for what the electorate is going to look like there, or who's going to come out. In fact, what I learned this past week is Latino activists, who are out there trying to get Latino voters in Georgia who generally vote Democratic and are key part of the base there, they actually didn't have a word in Spanish for runoff. They had to basically invent a word so voters would understand what this race was.

That gives you a sense of how low the knowledge level is, even given that runoffs are part of the system. There hasn't been one since 2008, in Georgia. We just don't really know who's going to show up at the polls, and both parties are fighting to get their voters to the polls in any way possible.

Republicans saw that Democrats won in November largely- they were helped at least by their big advantage in early and absentee voting. They're trying to cut into that advantage, and the Republican Party in Georgia and the candidates have really been encouraging their voters and mailers and other kinds of contexts to go and vote early and vote absentee if necessary.

They have in-person voting and early voting by mail, but look, the president spent the past year or so talking about how voting by mail was running this information campaign against voting by mail. Those really are conflicting messages for Republicans in Georgia. It'll be interesting to see how that all plays out and whether Republicans will be able to cut into the Democratic edge there.

Brian: Here's some push-back from a caller, Jim in the South Bronx, on the universality of the checks, whether they're $600 or up to $2,000, the universality of them going to any American who makes up to $75,000 a year, and then phasing out towards zero, including any partial payments to Americans making up to $99,000 a year, Jim in the South Bronx. You're on WNYC.

Jim: Hi.

Brian: Hello. Hi, Jim.

Jim: Thanks for taking my call. Yes. What I wanted to say is that there seems to be a lot of talk about the politics of these checks, but nothing about the policy. I said back in the spring when they said it was the $1,200, that people like me who didn't lose a job, in fact, in my job we actually got a new contract, so I'm actually doing a little bit better now, should not be getting these checks. That money should go to the people who really need it. If you give it to people who really need it, you can give them 24,000, 3,600 so they'll spend it right away.

If you want to do it as a Keynesian policy, which seems to be what this is, it makes much better sense that people who lost the job, who really need the basics like food and rent and whatever we'll spend the money. With me, I just simply banked it and bought a couple of things in my house like a floor lamp. It makes no sense as policy, but no one wants to talk about that. They want to talk about the politics.

Brian: Jim, thank you.

Jim: That's my [unintelligible 00:14:10].

Brian: Enjoy your floor lamp. Lisa, did they debate this seriously in Congress? Why should somebody, who's got a stable job making $75,000 a year, get the check rather than concentrate the payments to people who are suffering more financially? As Jim also argues, that would make it more of a stimulus in the traditional Keynesian sense of that word because they then would have more incentive to spend it right away.

Lisa: There was some debate over that. I think the major focus of debate really was centered around expanding the unemployment, the additional unemployment insurance which was expanded for an additional 11 weeks. There were some debate over whether that was the right thing to do. This was a compromise legislation. Democrats entered asking for $1.8 trillion package, McConnell for a long time didn't want to go above 500 billion. They ended up at 900 billion, which was notably shy of 1 trillion because Republicans really didn't want to go break that $1 trillion barrier and doing that if expanding the size of those checks would have done that.

This is a compromise. Democrats didn't get everything they wanted. They wanted more of money for state and local governments, which was something, here in New York, that Governor Cuomo, of course wanted. Republicans wanted legal immunity for companies that they couldn't be sued by workers and COVID cases. They did not get that included in this legislation. This was really a compromise that was hashed out over many, many months.

Brian: Another possible unfairness related to what the caller brought up is, is this based on your 2019 tax returns? Because probably a lot of people who made even more than 75,000 or $99,000 a year got left completely unemployed this year, and they're not going to be eligible for the checks.

Lisa: That's a really good question. I believe it is based on your 2019 and 2020 tax returns, like you potentially either, but I haven't checked that.

Brian: Yes, because the 2020's wouldn't be in yet. That might be [inaudible 00:16:27]

Lisa: Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, you're right, it's the 2019.

Brian: Yes.

Lisa: If you didn't file in 2019, you can pull up your 2018-

Brian: Use that-

Lisa: -and take a look to determine your AGI, yes.

Brian: -to qualify. We're going to continue in a minute with Lisa Lerer, no relation, New York Times correspondent covering campaigns, elections and political power. We're going to get next into her deep dive on how the election for president actually turned out, and her particular article called Joe From Scranton Didn't Win Back the Working Class, stay with us.

Brian Lehrer on WNYC. By the way, if you're interested in national politics conversations like this, sign up for and tell your friends around the country about our daily politics podcast, it's called Brian Lehrer, A Daily Politics Podcast. It's a national politics excerpt from the show every day, and it's free wherever you get your podcasts. Brian Lehrer, A Daily Politics Podcast. We continue now with New York Times correspondent covering campaigns, elections and political power, Lisa Lerer, spelled differently, no relation. An article that you wrote, and I'm just getting that in front of me right now, called Joe From Scranton Didn't Win Back the White Working Class, an economic analysis of the counties that Joe Biden won and lost.

It shows how the two parties are continuing to realign, and one fact that you focus on is that while Biden improved substantially over Hillary Clinton in suburban counties, where many people have college degrees, he got crushed in counties where people mostly work in non-college jobs. He only won 15 out of 265 counties where that was the case. Most of the jobs were non-college. Is this part of a big realignment in American politics?

Lisa: It's certainly a cause for Democratic concern. If you look at the overall results of the selection, Joe Biden won the election, he got an unprecedented more than 80 million votes. He'll win the popular vote by more than 7 million. He won the electoral college by a really good, strong margin, but underneath that victory Democrats lost a dozen House seats. They underperformed in the Senate. They did much worse. It's unclear if they'll even win control of Senate. All, as we were talking about in the last segment, hinges on those Georgia runoffs, and they didn't capture any state legislatures. This is a huge disappointment for Democrats.

Before the election, when I was talking to Democratic strategists, they were telling me how it was going to be a blowout, how they're going to pick up six Senate seats, flip all these state legislatures, that did not happen. Now, a lot of Democrats are just trying to figure out why. When you look at how Joe Biden won, you see that he won largely on the support of these fairly well-educated, likely more affluent, suburban counties that he flipped from- in some cases, he flipped them from Trump to supporting him to Democratic, in other cases, he just drove up the margins in those places, but in other parts of the country President Trump did better. He did better with working class voters in counties where people are less likely to have a college degree, where they're more likely to have, perhaps, a more blue-collar job. He did better, he drove up his margins in rural counties. While Democrats won, Latino voters and Asian voters, there are some signs that their margins dropped in those and among those groups. Those shifts are making some Democrats really nervous. The concern is that these suburban counties that went for Biden, this time around, that was largely an anti-Trump vote.

Democrats are just leasing those voters with the help from Donald Trump, really. That one song, Trump is not on the ticket. Those voters will go back, or some portion of those voters will go back to the Republican Party, and the Democratic coalition will be smaller. It's really a repudiation of something we heard a lot about during the Obama years, which was that demographics are destiny, right? That as the country changes and grows more diverse, it will inevitably become more democratic. Maybe this election shows, Democrats are worried that that may not be the case,

Brian: Right. Instead of demographics, you're right, maybe it's degrees, college degrees that are destiny. To dig a little deeper on that, on the crossing racial lines aspect of it, I don't know how far it actually goes or could go. You note that while voters of color still backed by overwhelmingly, Trump did a little better than in 2016.

I would say, despite all his pandering to white supremacists, but it was a few points better. It was a few points better among Blacks. There was a few points better among Latinos. It was a few points better among Asian Americans. How far do you think that really has to go in a future Republican Party that might continue its white supremacist rhetoric that people are thinking Trump isn't as the key to victory.

Lisa: Look, you could argue that it perhaps costs those few points, perhaps costs Democrats Florida, right? If you look at Miami-Dade, it went from being 34% for Trump, in 2016, to 46% for Trump, this time around, right? It's still win, in the end, for Biden, but it was a lot narrower. If you combine cutting those margins, some drop in margins among Latino voters for Democrats with what increased turnout among in rural and more working-class areas for Republicans, the numbers start to get tight.

We are a tightly divided country. I think the concern for Democrats is that Republicans are starting to mobilize this multi-racial coalition of working-class voters and that maybe voters aren't casting ballots in the ways that Democrats think they are, that in some ways their brand is not resonating in the ways that they need it to, because a lot of the proposals that Democrats are talking about are fairly popular, things like increasing the minimum wage or legalizing pot, or even expanding healthcare. Of course, it depends how you pull that, right? Asking people about universal healthcare coverage is more popular than asking people about single-payer socialized medicine, but there is some evidence that these Democratic proposals are popular, but it might be that the party is not popular or that Republicans have done an effective job in branding the Democratic party in a way that makes it harder for them to market themselves to these working-class voters.

Brian: Where Trump lost ground compared to 2016, ironically, was among white voters. He won whites by 17 points the first time, he only won them by 13 points this time. That may not seem like such a big drop, but whites are the dominant group in the voting population, around 70% of voters still. Those few points represent millions of total votes, and it was a major reason that Biden won by so much. All these numbers are consistent with something here in New York. Trump lost the diverse borough of Queens by a landslide.

Don't want to diminish the fact that he lost Queens by a landslide, but he did a little better in Queens than in 2016, about five points better. I asked the new Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, why he thinks that was, and here's part of what he said.

Donovan Richards: I think fearmongering had a lot to do with it, especially his messaging around public safety. There were a lot of people- even one of my opponents, painted me. As I remember, she sent the Halloween piece out that Queens would be less safe with Donovan Richards. It would be a scary, spooky extravaganza if I was the borough president.

Brian: Anything to that in your analysis, Lisa, because he brought in the issue of scaring people about crime and how that may have crossed racial lines? He was trying to scare people in the suburbs about crime, more than anything. Yet, Biden did better in the suburbs than Clinton did, in 2016.

Lisa: Right. That's the irony here is that you remember Trump was talking all about suburban housewives and keeping the suburbs safe, and those arguments really didn't resonate in the suburbs. The suburbs were the area of the country that, really more than anyplace else, helped Joe Biden win the presidency. Trump's campaign there didn't work, and in part, I think that's because the suburbs themselves have changed.

Inner-ring suburbs are much more diverse, racially, socioeconomically, but the point that he brings up is a good one. I think it's worth pointing out that Queens isn't the only place where Trump did better. He did eight points better in the Bronx as well, this time around. There's a number of-- Democrats really aren't sure why Trump did better in those places.

They have a whole bunch of theories. One of them is that the scare tactics resonated. Some people will argue that these claims of socialism resonated, particularly with some Latino and Hispanic immigrants from countries that have been decimated by socialism.

There's an argument, particularly that you hear a lot in Rust Belt areas, places like Ohio, that the Democratic Party is just really bad at messaging to rural and working-class voters, that they need to focus much more squarely on an economic agenda, to talk about an agenda for manufacturing, infrastructure spending, tax cuts, that the Democratic Party in those areas is really selling a message designed by college-educated people for college-educated voters. People will point to the focus on student loans rather than paying, helping people pay for daycare and childcare expenses which are really expensive.

There's a theory that there's a cultural thing going on here, that maybe working-class Latinos have more in common culturally with working-class whites and this focus on terms like Latinx that doesn't resonate, even with some Latino voters who tend to see themselves more as affiliated with their country of origin and that there's something about the Democratic message around cultural issues that isn't working with these voters, but the reality is the party doesn't really know. That's part of what strategists are trying to figure out now.

Brian: Last question on this then. If you look by income, according to the data site Statista, Biden won a majority among people making $0 to $99,000 a year. Everybody who would be eligible for a stimulus check, $0 to $99,000 a year went to Biden. Trump won among those making $100,000 and up. Unless you have different numbers, how does that fit with the other parts of this economic analysis?

Lisa: I think overall income is one thing, but when you look at how these counties break down, this isn't a national vote. I think what worries Democrats is the structural issues here. I think there are some people, some Democrats in the party who worry that if they cannot win, the party cannot win a share of working-class voters that they cannot ever win the control of the Senate, it gets really hard.

It gets a lot harder to win the Electoral College, although they did this time, but I think there's an assumption that some of those suburban voters that help them win time go back to the Republican Party, so that the way the system is set up structurally, the way our political system is set up, makes it really hard for Democrats to win if they can't get a broader coalition that can reach into different areas of the country, or at the very least cut their margins in rural areas. I don't think a lot of Democratic strategists expect them to win those areas. They just can't get totally blown out of the water.

Brian: Lisa Lerer, no relation, spells her name wrong, writes the On Politics email newsletter for The New York Times, among her other duties, generally being a New York Times correspondent covering campaigns, elections, and political power. Thanks for joining us, Lisa. Good to have you.

Lisa: Thanks for having me.

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