How Bad Was The Poll For Biden?

David Plotz
Hello and welcome to the Slate political Gabfest, May 16, 2024. The how bad was that poll for Biden edition? I am David Plotz of Citycast in Washington, DC. I got a little bit of a potential cold, so if I sound strained, difficult, hoarse, that might be why. Or I might just be all right.

Emily Bazelon
Already with the meditation. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Somebody's coming out, coming in with real force. Thanks, Emily Bazelon of New York Times Magazine, Yale University Law School.

David Plotz
Emily's fresh, probably from clearing an encampment. She's got so much fire in her voice this morning. Oh, my God. Hello, Emily. Spoonful of pepper.

Emily Bazelon
Hi, David. Hi, John. Now I'm going to be super mild and plain for the rest of the taping. Then there's John Dickerson of the CB's Daily report with John Dickerson from New York. Hello, John.

John Dickerson
Hi. This week on the Gabfest, we will dig into Tuesday's primary election results and into that New York Times poll that seems so dismal for Biden. Then Biden and Trump will debate in June and in September, which seems like a not terrible idea. He says he hazards maybe it's not so bad, even though I think I've been skeptical of that. Then will Michael Cohen's testimony convict Trump?

David Plotz
Plus, of course, we'll have cocktail chatter. Hi, I'm Josh Levine. My podcast, the queen, tells the story of Linda Taylor. She was a con artist, a kidnapper, and maybe even a murderer. She was also given the title the welfare queen, and her story was used by Ronald Reagan to justify slashing aid to the poor.

John Dickerson
Now it's time to hear her real story. Over the course of four episodes, you'll find out what was done to Linda Taylor, what she did to others, and what was done in her name. The great lesson of this for me. Is that people will come to their. Own conclusions based on what their prejudices are.

Subscribe to the Queen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now. There's something bizarre happening in the presidential race, which is, I was thinking about this. The polls indicate that Biden is doing relatively best among older and whiter voters, and Trump is doing relatively best amongst black, brown and young voters, which is not what I would have expected. Black, brown, and young voters have historically been hugely important to Democrats and presidential races, but they have abandoned, according to polls, at least according to New York Times. Sienna poll in particular, abandoned Biden in astonishing numbers, and his reelection will be very unlikely unless he can win a lot of them back.

David Plotz
I think John what are the chief findings of this New York Times Vienna poll, and what's the story they're telling us? First, let's do the caveat like shake and shimmy. It's one poll, polls are snapshot, et cetera. But I think the benefit of the Times poll here is that findings are across these battleground states. They also suggest, as Nate Cohen has written at the Times, a problem that is particular to Biden because these findings I'm about to talk about are particular to Biden and not true for the democratic Senate candidates in those states.

John Dickerson
So anyway, with all those caveats aside, well, I guess that's both a caveat and a reason that this poll should be paid attention to and not just thrown out the window. The findings that you're referring to is that Trump and Biden are essentially tied among 18 to 29 year olds and with hispanic voters, even though each of those groups gave Biden more than 60% of their vote in 2020. That's one. And then with black voters, Trump wins more than 20% of black voters. And if that tally were to hold all the way to the election, it would be the most, the highest level black support for republican presidential candidate since the enactment of the Civil Rights act in 1964.

And as David, you quite rightly pointed out, the reason this is a problem, but also a potential, and we can get to this later, upside for Biden is that this is Trump eating into the democratic coalition. Whether he's eating into it for positive reasons about Trump or negative reasons about Biden, we can discuss either Biden is up in Wisconsin or Michigan, depending on whether it's a likely screen or a registered screen. But the top line is that Trump is ahead. And in the Sunbelt states, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, he's up by a lot. Whereas, and we can get to this, too, in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, Biden has a fighting chance.

David Plotz
Emily. It is, as we say, it's a poll, blah, blah, blah, poll, poll, poll. But it seems to be a real thing that's happening. The defection of Latinos from the democratic party, the attraction of a significant number of black voters to the republican party, and a lot of young voters who are certainly disillusioned with Biden and may also be lining up with Trump or with Kennedy. What is the, is this inflation?

Is this Gaza? Is it immigration? Is it housing prices? Is it these young people in their TikTok? What is it?

Emily Bazelon
Let's take the most paternalistic, scornful, it's young people on their TikTok explanation. I don't think we know the answer to that. Exactly. It seems like people want change. They probably correctly see Trump as the candidate of change and seem less concerned at the moment with what kind of change that would actually mean.

And maybe that in itself will change as the election gets closer and people actually focus on what's at stake. But right now, it seems like there's a lot of churned up frustration. And as I understood it, for different segments of voters, different parts mattered the most. Like latino voters seemed especially concerned about the economy, though for everybody, that is a big looming shadow. The war in Gaza and foreign policy mattered to a sliver of young voters, most of whom seemed to be very concerned about Israel, about the war in Gaza, and interested in palestinian rights.

And they were a small fraction of the whole, but significant in the sense that everything is significant when you're losing. You want to try to pull your coalition back together. Did it seem like most of the people who were leaving Biden were on the more moderate and conservative side of the democratic spectrum? Right, John, in terms of their views. That'S at least what the Times said in reading their analysis.

John Dickerson
And what struck me about that was that those. So in other words, these aren't flaming liberals that are abandoning Biden. But then one thing that the times, uh, pointed out is that this concentrated group of moderate and conservative democratic leaning voters nevertheless thought that the system needed major changes and needed to be torn down altogether. And what struck me about that is a nearly 70% of the voters say that the country's political and economic system needed major changes. Um, so what does that mean?

What do you, what do you really mean? Because if that's driving you to Donald Trump, I mean, turning the steering wheel is a kind of change, but throwing the steering wheel completely out of the window, you're going to get change, but it's not going to be maybe the kind of change you want. And so I'd love to know what people really think about when they think change. Or is it just a kind of kick the dog kind of change? You're just angry at the person who happens to be in power.

David Plotz
I think it's shoot the dog, apparently, and grab the steering wheel to drive you to the Capitol on January 6. Lunge at the steering wheel. That's what the metaphors you're reaching for. Yes, I threw as many metaphors out there in as little time as possible. But what struck me about that desire for change, and why I'm interested in it, is when the pew topography poll came out a couple of years ago, and basically chopped up the electorate into its component parts.

John Dickerson
One of the things that struck me is that the deepest part of Trump's base wanted wholesale reorganization of the system. They were much more burn it all down. And the democratic base, where they were liberal, they had liberal ideas and they wanted redistribution and all of these, you know, typical liberal thinking, but it was within a system, there was much less of a burn it down for the purpose of liberal goals than there was on the, on the republican side. Now, that seems to have possibly shifted. And the reason I think that's a challenge for Biden is that Biden's an institutionalist.

He is the incumbent. So he's, you know, it's perforce. Oh, fancy word. He's the person who's in the system. So it's hard to say I'm going to burn it all down when you are a member of the system.

Although, of course, Trump was able to try and pull off that trick, too, because he was just such a square peg and round hole. What did you guys make of the fact that the democratic senate candidates in the swing states were running significantly ahead of Biden? I mean, does that mean that voters just don't hold them accountable for this big, like, change agenda they claim to have right now? I am suspicious of it being lasting in deep, but that's what they're saying. Or is that Biden has some particular weakness.

Emily Bazelon
That means we have to go back to the whole, like, should he be the presidential candidate? Conversation, which I personally do not really want to revisit. Speaker one, I took it as he's the guy in charge. We don't like what's going on. You know, he gets a special dose of upset about the current state of things.

John Dickerson
And one of the questions within polling is whether that translates to a vote against him. In other words, you might tell a pollster, I don't like what he's doing. I don't know. But this is a, an opinion preference about your feelings at the moment, not actually an assessment of Biden. Now, believing in that thing I just said might spell doom for the Biden.

But, and this is why you have to take these polls seriously, because you can't risk thinking that's what's happening. But there was some evidence in the midterm polls that people's negative feelings about Biden and which, which a lot of analysts thought would trickle down to the actual candidates, it didn't actually happen. Now you'll see whether it would really happen when he's on the actual ballot. But I think there's just this, there's a way in which presidents get blamed and in this case is being blamed. I think that's right, John.

David Plotz
I was very frustrated. I'm not usually like a person who gets worked up about, oh, voters are so dumb. But this was a poll that really made me feel like, God, voters are stupid, because there was this figure which the 20% of voters blame Biden for Roe v. Wade being overturned. Just the idea.

And there's, of course, all these misapprehensions about the state of the economy, about the scale of immigration, about the effects of inflation. That's not to say, I mean, obviously people can misapprehend things but still feel them. And the feeling is valid even if their specific facts are wrong. But that thing about Biden and abortion just made me crazy. It's like, how dumb are you?

How low information? It's beyond low information. It's like negative information to have gotten to that point. Well, this is where there's hope for Biden in these findings, which is that Trump's strength is concentrated among irregular, disengaged voters who are not paying close attention to the politics and they are from the democratic base. So the old cliche is that Trump in these polls is renting these voters and that once they are reminded of things, including that Joe Biden is not responsible for overturning Roe v.

John Dickerson
Wade, they'll come back into the democratic fold. That, plus the fact that all Biden has to do is win. I mean, there's no small thing, but he doesn't have to win all six of those states. He has to win Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and can still get to 270. So the states in which he's doing a little bit better, that's all he needs to win.

So those are the two of the positive or two things that could give a Democrat hope out of these numbers. Here's the thing that your point about the voters, David, that I think about a lot. The people who have to figure out how to reach those low information voters are themselves very high information people. Like you don't get to work in the campaign unless you know all this stuff. And we also are extremely high information people.

Emily Bazelon
And I really wonder about how you bridge that gap. I mean, I guess you watch a lot of the TikTok videos and figure out, like, what is hitting, and then you try to imagine what kind of messaging would work or something. It's the problem of beginner's mind, right when you're writing something and then you learn too much about it and you have to go back and, like, remember what it was like when you had your beginning questions, which everybody reading or, or watching or listening will have those questions. I really, I struggle with that. I mean, I don't work for a campaign.

It's not my problem. But I do think it's an issue that also besets us in the media because the things we're interested in, we get bored of the things that people need to understand to make, like, good, informed decisions, and we move on to these other intricacies. And we don't necessarily keep issues in proportion. And that causes its own set of problems. I mean, this is one of the things that's so interesting about the latino support for Trump is that I think what happens is, it's not that.

David Plotz
I mean, obviously one voter at a time changes their minds, but there's certain key institutions within Latino America, in particular, evangelical churches that are frequented by Latinos, where you have a few people who have, who are quite, I mean, politics are quite conservative. People are quite conservative. I think there's probably those, I bet those, if you looked at when people shifted from being Democrats or non voters into being Republicans, I bet it happens really quickly. I bet, like, there are certain institutions that do because that's your community, because that's where you hang out, because that's where all your information is coming from. And if that's a strong, if that is strong, like, I think those communities flip pretty quickly.

I'm not sure that there's many of that sort of community, churches are the strongest of that sort of community still left in american. And I'm not sure that the ones that the Democrats, Democrats are involved in have as much pull on people's emotions. And therefore, it may be harder for Biden and Democrats to kind of win people back to that. And to your point, Emily, about the press, which is, of course, 100% right, I wonder also how that blinds us to either the success or failure of local efforts by both campaigns because this race is really taking place in six states. And so when Biden goes to Wisconsin to announce a new $3.2 billion Microsoft effort to develop AI in Wisconsin at the location of the never opened Foxconn plant that Trump had promised, that almost never gets, that doesn't get covered at the national level except on one broadcast available 06:00 p.m.

John Dickerson
Eastern to seven on streaming on CB's, it doesn't get covered. And so people are like, oh, what's Biden out there doing? But in Wisconsin, it might get covered in a way that actually is effective. Now, having said that, since the last New York Times poll, everybody freaked out about Biden, has done a great deal of advertising in these states, and the stock market is up 25 points and Trump has been on trial. And none of that has changed the dynamic in these state levels polls.

So to the extent that they've been paying attention to these states, it hasn't changed anything within the Biden coalition, which would be places you would expect some of those voters to move around based on all the effort that campaign is making in those states. Finally, let's just touch on the Tuesday primary results. I think that for me, the consequential one as a Washingtonian is the Maryland Senate race where Angela Osobrooks, who's the county executive of a suburban DC county, beat David Trone, whos a sitting democratic member of Congress in the democratic primary. And also, Brooks is a black woman, Tron is a white dude, the winner of that primary. Also Brooks is going to face Larry Hogan, another white dude Republican who was a pretty successful and pretty popular governor of the state and really the last Republican to have statewide pull in Maryland.

David Plotz
And Tron spent an insane amount of money, couldn't quite pull it off. Also, Brooks is really good candidate. She's really smart. She's been a very good county executive, very popular. I think there's a strong sense that she'll mobilize, certainly black voters, young voters, women, and it would be exciting if she wins.

She'd be, I think, the second black woman elected to the Senate. Third, maybe the third. And there's somebody else running in Delaware. So, yeah, and so I think it will force the Democrats to spend more money on that race than, because Tron could have, Tron, who has an infinite amount of money, would have self funded a race against Hogan. But I also think also Brooks is probably a stronger candidate against Hogan.

And she's just good. She's just good. She's just like an interesting cat. Marilyn, in also Brooks, Jamie Raskin, Wes Moore has three of the really, really compelling Democrats around and more, and also Brooks young ones, too. What strikes me about also Brooks and which is maybe a little different than those four Senate Democrats who are polling well ahead of Biden in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona, articulating why Donald Trump is not just objectionable relative to the norms of democracy and all of trying to overthrow an election and bungling the response, the pandemic is a democratic candidate somewhere who tries the old fashioned thing, which is this is what we care about, and this is, we are the people who think about you all the time, and you have an ally in the White House who thinks about you all the time and is trying to lower your college loans, is trying to get you some relief for childcare and elder care, and who essentially connects the policies of the president with the lived experience of those voters who are going away from him, and explains that what's at stake is not just that you might elect somebody who will challenge democratic institutions, but that you will put somebody in office who will not try to give you a fair shot at the american dream, who has no particular interest in you.

John Dickerson
I'm speaking now in the voice of a Democrat who might try to make this argument, the old kinds of arguments that Bill Clinton used to make. I don't know whether those work in politics anymore. That might be the pundits romantic desire for the kind of rhetoric that is the easiest thing to cover on a campaign. Because what's easier than you roll in, you hear a speech, and you draw grand conclusions from the speech, but the speech doesn't have the kind of real world effect that you that you think it has. On the other hand, if somebody is going to emerge from the various candidacies to give that kind of speech, that then reminds Democrats why they believe in what they believe in and what the stakes of the case are, it felt like also, Brooks is one of those such candidates.

David Plotz
Do you want to hear more from us after this episode? Well, too bad you can't hear more from me and John, but you can hear more from Emily if you stick around. For our bonus segment on Slate plus today, Emily is going to talk to fellow times reporter Azine Girishy about her fascinating interview with Hillary Cass about the evidence around medical treatment for trans children and the big report that Cass just did in the UK. But that segment just for Slate plus. So if you are a slate plus member, thank you.

If you're not a slate plus member, we'd love it if you signed up and you get to hear that segment with Emily. And bonus segments on every episode of the Gabfest, as well as other slate podcasts and special discounts to live shows and no paywall on the slate site. Much more so if you're not a member, go to slate.com gabfestplus to become a member today. That's slate.com gabfest plus. This episode of the Gabfest is sponsored by Aura Frames.

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D
Plane being came and rammed into our left wing. With relations increasingly strained, what are the chances of things spinning out of control? The western world was asleep. I'm Gordon Carrera. I'll be exploring the friction in this most important of relationships and asking, has the west taken its eye off the ball?

David Plotz
You cannot ignore China. From BBC Radio Four, this is Shadow China and the west. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

E
If you want to understand what is happening in the United States right now, you really need to understand what's happening with the courts, the law and the Supreme Court. The battle between democracy and whatever this cage match is that we're witnessing, it's going to be won and lost at the ballot box, but it's also going to be won and lost in the courtrooms. I'm Dalia Lithwick. I host Slate's legal podcast amicus, and we are doubling our output, bringing you weekly episodes from here on in. Because how else can we keep an eye on the many trials of Donald Trump?

The conservative legal movement's assaults on our rights, the Supreme Court's latest slate of environmental gutting, gun safety eviscerating cases on the docket. So follow amicus wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes dropping every Saturday morning.

David Plotz
Like a divorced couple that comes together to plan their daughter, Sweet 16, the Biden and Trump campaigns have put together a surprise debate season for us. The campaigns have secretly schemed up a pair of debates, June 27 on CNN, September 10 on ABC. They circumvented the Commission on Presidential Debates, which has planned debates for decades. Honestly, for reasons that we can get into, it doesn't seem like a terrible situation. So, Emily, why does each side want a debate?

Emily Bazelon
I think they both have something to prove, right? And also, this is like part of running for president. You're supposed to get up and try to beat the other person rhetorically in front of an audience. I mean, Biden needs to show that he is vibrant and youthful, or at least not desiccated and old. Donald Trump lost two debates to me in 2020.

D
Since then, he hadn't shown up for debate. Now he's acting like he wants to debate me again. Well, make my day, pal. I'll even do it twice. So let's pick the dates.

John Dickerson
Donald, I hear you're free on Wednesdays. And Trump needs to show that he's coherent and also he can never resist, like, any kind of forum that involves attention. So, yeah. What do you think of the fact that the first debate is actually quite soon? It's the third week in June, and also they're doing this without an audience.

Emily Bazelon
That's such an interesting twist. Have we seen that before, John? Well, the original Kennedy Nixon debate took place in a studio, I believe, without an audience and an audience. Audiences behaved mostly in a fashion, really, up until Trump arrived, where they were pretty docile and you wouldn't even have known they were there when they were there. And people should, or we all should remember the difference between primary audiences and a general election in primaries because the debates are often used as a way to raise money.

John Dickerson
They sell tickets to the various friends and fans of the candidates. So there's a, a real cheering section. That's not the case in these presidential debates that have been overseen by the commission on presidential Debates. That obviously is something that Biden, he doesn't want an audience because Trump uses the audience in ways that are unfair to the process, and that turned it into a circus. I think, obviously, Biden also wants this to be a choice, not a referendum.

The faster you pull trump into a clinch, the more you can portray the race as a choice between two people and not a referendum on Biden's stewardship. And also, Biden's trying to show that he's vibrant and ready for the fight, and this suggests that as well. So what do we know about the format? Moderators for the CNN debate will be Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. I mean, seems good.

David Plotz
They're both really smart. And the ABC debate will be moderated by David Muir and Lindsey Davis, whose work, I don't know. Have they worked out all the niggling details? Like, if someone goes long, will there might be cut, for example? Well, Lindsay Davis, first of all, very important to know that Lindsey Davis is the anchor of ABC's primetime streaming show, ABC News Live prime.

John Dickerson
So we want to not the daily report with John Dickerson in the CNN debate. Anyway, there is, the mics will get cut off if somebody goes too long. So that's one thing that's been reported. I don't know if that's locked in the contract, but that's, it says it's been reported, and that's obviously a great benefit. I think it's also, it'll be interesting to see how two debate moderators works.

The upside is that with a chaos candidate like Trump, who has used previous debates as a chaos theater, one of the great questions of this debate is whether Trump and Biden are engaged in the same project. Are they engaged in the traditional debate, which is about illuminating ideas and showing the downsides of your opponent and generally engaging with the presidential sets of topics? Or is the moderator of foil? Is the event much in the way Trump has talked about the judges in his various criminal cases? Is the moderator, or are the moderators used as something to continue his grievance campaign?

And in that case, it has really nothing to do with the debate itself. The debate is, is a vehicle to something else, and we'll see what happens there. But if you're a double moderator, one of you can deal with the wrangling that might be required in a given instance, while the other is thinking about the questions, the follow ups and all of that. The downside is that with two, it can sometimes be maybe harder to coordinate. So it'll be fascinating to see how, how that works.

But for me, the biggest thing is just whether Trump is engaged in this, in anything remotely approaching good faith. These debates, if they come off, will mark possibly the end, certainly a cesura in the commission on presidential debates, which have actually nonpartisan, bipartisan commission that has, over the past several decades, organized the presidential debates and vice presidential debates. And I think I would like to spend a minute diagnosing this. The era where there are neutral, bipartisan institutions in the United States is really kind of over. And it's terrible.

David Plotz
It's a terrible thing. And you can't, there are not trusted institutions that everyone will agree, oh, this is a trusted institution. And it should organize the debate unless you said, like, Yellowstone National park will organize the debate unless it was like, that's the only one that could do it. I mean, and so, absent those institutions, both Democrats and Republicans had called into question the commission and its trustworthiness. And no one is willing to say, yes, this is an above it all organization which will act in the best interest of the country, because no one, very few people believe in that anymore.

And certainly politicians don't act like that is the case anymore. So we've lost these refereeing institutions. And that just means that the two sides kind of had to hammer it out, like, with each other, and they decided for their own interests, they were going to hammer it out with each other rather than rely on some mediator, some neutral arbiter to do it for them. I quote myself only because I don't want to pretend like this is the first time I've said it. But the essay I did for the show last night is that one of the things that's different about these debates is that they will not only address issues that are important to the country, but they will themselves.

John Dickerson
The debates themselves will confront two of the biggest challenges to american democracy right now, which is the verifiable. Is there such a thing as verifiable facts and who has authority? I mean, right now, Donald Trump has created a whole new party around the idea of malleable facts and convenient creation of truths on the fly. And he's also asserted that elections are illegitimate. All the authorities that might say that the election was fair are illegitimate, and all the jurisdictions charging him criminally are illegitimate.

And it's become now a test of your fealty to his party. When you're asked, as a senior Republican, whether you're going to support the 2024 election outcome, to not say that you will, but to leave it open. So you're pre skeptical of the authority of the next election. So authority is really up for grabs, and facts are up for grabs. And those are two cornerstones of a debate.

You know, you need to more or less try to hold people to facts and verifiable information, and the person who does that is the moderator who has to have a sense of authority. Which goes to your point, David. When there was a commission bestowing their choice on who the moderators would be, it conveyed or conferred a certain kind of authority on that moderator. And that's all up for grabs. And one of the larger challenges in american elections right now is who picks the turf on which the thing should be fought.

Do the candidates decide what the issues are? Does the press decide what the issues are? Do the voters decide what the issues are? Or are there an objective set of issues and standards that we should measure candidates by to decide whether they're any good for the job? And this is a furtherance of a situation in which the campaigns, with its own agenda, and the press, with its agenda, which is highly motivated by the commercial interest, are choosing the field on which this is going to take place.

And does that best serve the voters? Emily, what do you feel would be worthwhile coming out of this? What would you like to see? Historically, debates do not broadly change the outcome and course of elections. These are, who knows?

David Plotz
Maybe this will be the ones. These will be the ones that do. I'd like to see them come up with a format that forces the candidates to actually answer questions so that you can really get a sense of where they're standing and how prepared they are for the job, kind of telescoping forward into what it would actually be like to be president. I mean, so often there's a lot of ducking and weaving going on. You don't get straight answers.

Emily Bazelon
And especially when Trump is on the debate stage, there's all this bullying that has gone on in the past, like kind of just chaos agent. And that can really derail having any kind of exchange that is edifying in some way. I mean, I think the other thing about Trump is how much are the moderators going to fact check him in real time? So when he says things that are not true, people actually understand that, because that's not something that Biden, as the opponent can do effectively. Biden's job is to get his own ideas out, not to correct the lying, which is inevitable.

John Dickerson
The problem for all of us going back to this idea of verifiable information, is who grants the moderators the authority to check the facts? And how quickly does that disappear? You'll remember when Candy Crowley fact checked Mitt Romney in the 2012 debates. That became a cause itself. And whether it was valid or not, that takes the debate out of the debate now.

It's a our fight against the elites in media, which occludes any effort to understand the issues that's at the heart of the debate. So also, by the way, real time fact checking on the fly super hard. Everybody wants it, but it's really hard to do. And when do you choose to do it? And what if it's in the interest of one of the candidates to keep the whole damn thing pinned down, showing that he's a fighter against those damn elites.

And the other guy gets just completely, like, pushed back into the, into the background of the debate because there's this public spectacle going on because that one candidate has a totally different project than the other three people in the room. Well, that's a really good point. I wonder, though, if, at least on the question of the 2020 election results, they could have some facts and clips ready to go, because the obvious question is, Mister Trump, do you accept the results of the 2020 election? It would be great if he said yes. But if he says no, like, that's not a partisan stance.

Emily Bazelon
That is where, like, the press really can be hand in hand with american democracy, right? Yes, in fact. But if you were to say that, let's say you, you said the election was valid and true, Trump and his audience would think that's a biased statement. So what my point is that if they have a different project, I mean, you know, the majority of Trump voters believe the election was stolen. So there is a, there is a mass delusion on that point.

John Dickerson
And that's the up, that's the atmosphere in which this debate takes place and which creates this, this question about authority. If you, and for my money, that's all the debate should be about because it's not about the past. It's about being able to manufacture things that are not true in real time and get people to follow you. And that it's also about when the laws and the elections don't turn out the way you want, you get to take things into your own hands. These are all real time threats to the major pillars of american democracy.

This is not about the past. It's about the present and the future. And that's what the debate should be about. But it takes place with the problem you mentioned, Emily. Good luck to them.

David Plotz
We're going to take a short break. We'll be right back.

Michael Cohen, presumably the final prosecution witness against Donald Trump in his New York election interference business fraud case, testified this week that there was an Oval Office meeting where Trump agreed to pay off Cohen's expenses from his stormy Daniels hush money. Also, there was a pre election scheme to buy Daniels a silence and to crush, eradicate stories that might damage Trump's presidential campaign. Cohen's cross examination will finish. Maybe today, maybe it finished already. By the time you're listening, maybe Friday, the defense will seek to undermine his credibility.

We'll talk about how it's not yet clear whether the defense will present any witnesses or if Trump himself will testify. They may just say the prosecution didn't prove its case. It's done. So, Emily, first, is there any chance Trump will testify? No, there's not.

Moving on. I mean, is there any chance Trump will testify? No. You think there is? I don't think so, because he would not be in control of that interaction.

Emily Bazelon
I'm increasingly convinced that this trial is just not really about law and trying to do your utmost to avoid a conviction. It's about the political theater outside the courtroom. In that theater, I don't think it helps Trump to testify because inevitably he is reined in by the judge and made to seem subordinate in some way. And that's, like, the last thing he wants. So, no, he won't testify.

Also, presumably, he would have to lie on the stand to continue the defense that he has forced his lawyers to put forward, which is bad. It's called perjury. So I don't think he will testify much as George Conway has been enjoying baiting him into trying to do that, which is its own. Just like, side note of theater also. And maybe this is the point you're making, Emily, and I'm missing it, but it's also the, like, let me, Adam.

John Dickerson
I wanted to testify. Let me, Adam, come on. I was gonna like. But you have no intention of ever testifying for all the reasons you say. So it allows you to be both the hero of your story while cowering behind the not testifying.

Emily Bazelon
One thing that has struck me about Michael Cohen's testimony so far, you know, as you said, david, there's more cross examination to come today. But so far, he's been composed. He's been able to, you know, take all the questions about, like, aren't you seeking revenge? Aren't you doing this so you can sell more t shirts of Trump behind bars and just be sort of like, yeah, I do care about the outcome. Yes, my book is called revenge.

And yes, I'm selling stuff. And it doesn't necessarily do that much to impeach him as a witness in the way that the prosecution is using him. Right. The prosecution made it really clear that there's lots of unlikable kind of shifty stuff about Michael Cohen through other witnesses before he even showed up. I think relative to the standard they kind of set, he's come off pretty well.

And what he is there to do is to connect Trump to these fraudulent business records. That's it. He doesn't have some other big factual role to play. So I feel like he's doing well. And one thing that keeps striking me is that, you know, this, for him, is like the second go around.

He had a rehearsal in the civil trial, the New York case, that the attorney general of New York brought against the Trump Organization. And in that testimony, Cohen was kind of a mess. He was, like, all over the place. He didn't necessarily hold everything together. And lo and behold, if you get, you know, more than one bite at the apple, because everybody is trying to hold your boss legally accountable for some misdeed, you can do a better job the second time around, I think the.

David Plotz
Case is going to rise and fall. On whether the jury sees Cohen. Well, in part, on whether the jury sees Cohen as an honest liar or is a craven, an opportunistic liar. That seems to me to be a big issue. I find Michael Cohen's psychology absolutely fascinating.

I think it is very hard to be that much of a turncoat. I don't mean that in a pejorative term. I mean, he's literally a turncoat towards. And to sort of stand up to this much pressure and scrutiny, it would be so much easier for him to be like, there are lots of other people who have sort of said, oh, Trump is bad, Trump is terrible. But to go to the extent of seeking prosecution of him, helping out every attempt to demean and degrade him, and to go that hard towards someone who had been that much your support and your guidepost and all of your career up until that point, it's so hard.

It would have been so much easier for him to just be shut up and just not get involved in it. And for him to have turned so hard is fascinating to me. Doesn't he seem like someone coming out of a cult? Kind of. Well, that's how he described himself when they, during the cross examination, they said previously, you said Mister Trump was a great man.

John Dickerson
He said, yeah, that's because I was knee deep in the Trump cult.

I know you weren't implying this, David, but there are reasons that he's not doing this just for altruistic motives. He was denied a position in the White House or even being asked for one. And there are other reasons for him to have a grudge against Trump. But whether those are the motivations or not, everything you say, David, is quite right about the kind of human turn he was taking here. And we should remember that one of the things that's happening here is that Michael Cohen is being accused of having all of the qualities that made him such a useful employee for Donald Trump, which is an easy facility with lying and bullying and being basically somebody who does underhanded things on behalf of somebody else who wants to use shortcuts to maintaining their power and status.

He was not like some wonderful guy working for Donald Trump. He helped a lot of these schemes take place. And one thing I wonder about him as a super, highly compromised witness is whether the prosecution would say, does anything Michael Cohen says seem out of character with Donald Trump, as Trump has been painted in the rest of the trial? And that's the thing. And it's why the various politicians who've come to New York to attack the judge and Michael Cohen and all the other things that Trump can't do because he's barred by the gag order, none of them are coming as character witnesses.

None of them are coming as saying, this is not the man. I know this is inconsistent with the behavior of Donald Trump. None of them are saying that. It would be laughable for them to say it. And I wonder whether that has any power in the courtroom, which is, yes, Michael Cohen has built his life on a mountain of lies, but the behavior he describes does not in any way seem inconsistent with the person you've come to know, jurors, in your time here.

David Plotz
Emily, from a legal perspective, do you think there has been enough evidence tying Trump directly to these economic transactions? It's clear these economic transactions took place. It's clear they took place because a certain set of people were trying to keep by the silence of Stormy Daniels and also Karen McDougal and probably others. It's clear that the campaign thought it would benefit themselves. But is it clear that Trump himself is the arch orchestrator, knows exactly what's going on and is behind what is happening and that it is for the campaign.

Emily Bazelon
In the closing, I think you'll hear the prosecutors say, we don't have to prove that Donald Trump himself falsified these records. We have to prove that he knew about it and tacitly approved that. And that's what they're getting from Cohen. Now, Allen Weisselberg, the other Trump organization official here, who was involved allegedly in falsifying the records, is missing from the testimony. He's not testifying.

So unless he shows up as a defense witness unexpectedly. And so there is that kind of missing piece, I suppose, that the jury could be concerned about. There's a lot of circumstantial evidence the prosecution has submitted that suggests that Trump was obsessed with these kinds of details, like they never would have made this expenditure without him. They have that phone call of him saying, pay in cash. There's other proof kind of swirling around here that suggests that he was involved.

And so then the question will be whether that's enough for the jury. John one of Trump's defining qualities is his need to dominate and his insistence on fealty and humiliating fealty. And so we've seen this parade of republican politicians. Doug Bourbon, Burgam, excuse me, Doug Burgam, Vivek Ramaswamy, JD Vance, and then House Speaker Mike Johnson have all come to the courtroom and have all parroted the lines that Trump has been saying, criticizing the prosecutors, criticizing the judge, criticizing the entire effort of this case and calling it sham and not worthy of the american judicial system. What do you make of this parade of sycophants?

John Dickerson
I find this connected to what I find fascinating about the whole Trump phenomenon. Now, there are clearly people who are in his thrall and who he dominates and who he refreshes that sense of dominance whenever he's around them. JD Vance is, you know, he talks about JD Vance kissing his ass, Lindsey Graham kissing his ass. He refreshes that dominance, and they are good with it. And so that really fascinates me as a behavioral thing.

I am easily in the thrall of people. I don't think I've ever been in a situation where being insulted and demeaned by somebody has made me more anxious to be around them. So I find that sometimes. What do you call the gabfest? Well, that's just highlighting my own weaknesses, which is, I find a refreshing and bracing illumination of one's internal guidance system.

Emily Bazelon
That's like when you're asked a job interview what your greatest weakness is, and you turn it into a strength. John. Sure. Yes, exactly. Too humble.

John Dickerson
But I. But I don't think that's entirely what's at play here. And this is what really interests me. I mean, if you think. And there's not, you know, there has not been a shortage of legal analysis saying that this is maybe not really a real case, and that brag is trying to bootstrap a misdemeanor to a federal charge through this wacky kind of, you know, manipulation.

And it's not really a clean case. And he ran on it, and he's in a democratic city. I don't think it's that much of a leap to then think, you know what? This is kind of cooked. This looks like they're going after a guy, and it's not really on the level.

I don't think that's. I'm not saying that's my objective view. I'm trying to speak, and this happens. There's a problem often in the show is when you try to speak in voice, people assume that it's your most deepest belief. My point is that for me, it's not hard to imagine somebody getting to that place.

And if you've gotten to that place, then your trip to New York is a trip on the side of right and the side of the rule of law and not treating the system like some partisan thing, which you think the other guy is doing and that you could do, even with a head full of knowledge about Donald Trump's character deficiencies and every belief, which I'm sure they all have, that he engaged in this behavior. And I don't mean the falsification of records. I mean the cheating on his wife with a porn star. And so in that case, you could build a place for your conscience to rest while you would otherwise be doing things that you might find unconscionable. Yeah, it's true that this case, of all the charges against Trump, is the one that seemed optional and also the one that, if you were viewing it through a partisan lens, is the easiest for you to kind of scuttle in your own head.

Emily Bazelon
Like if you switched the actors around and imagine the prosecution against John Edwards, which is, was not the same but had some similarities. There were plenty of Democrats who thought that that was bogus. Let's go to cocktail chatter when you were having a drink with the crows in your life. Emily Bazelon in the nest. What are you going to be chattering about with them?

So I've been watching a bunch of documentaries about bands and musicians, like aged music stars, kind of by accident. Or maybe it's one of those things, like you watch one and then Netflix starts recommending more and you end up on a. So I watched one last week about Duran Duran, which was terrible. It's called Duran Duran. There's something you should know.

But it was, like, interestingly terrible. So the thing about the, should we. Save it for the morning after? Not watch it, but save it for the morning after. Yeah, exactly.

That's exactly what you should do. And I did enjoy hearing that song again, I liked Duran Duran as a tween or teenager in the 1980s. But the thing about this show is it falls into all the traps of the aging rock stars who are, like, just creating footage because they're supposed to be appealing, but they're not appealing. And then they're not even self knowing enough to know that they're not appealing. So I would skip this one, but there's some other ones which are really fun.

Like the one about the bee gees. I loved and learned so much about the bee gees. Who knew? And then the one about Joan Baez is so wacky because she's, like, really pretty weird. That one, for my taste, didn't have quite enough footage in it.

And then, of course, what's it called? The greatest night in pop music, which I think we talked about already. That was awesome. And the Jason Isbel one, he's not aging. That one is maybe my favorite of them all.

And, John, I think you're also a fan of that one. Yeah. Jason Isbel is getting younger, actually, since he's gotten his chompers fixed up. As he posted on some social media somewhere where people were giving him grief for getting his teeth fixed. He was like, I don't know if y'all know this, but I think I've mentioned that I drank for a long time and I grew up in poverty.

John Dickerson
Like, you know, he's like, basically like, geez, give me a break here. My teeth needed fixing. But he looks. He looks, you know, he looks younger, if that's possible. Anyway, I'm enjoying this subgenre.

Emily Bazelon
Apparently, there's one about wham, which is really good. I'm sure there are others. Listeners send me suggestions that are, like, opposite the Duran Duran one. Jon, what's your chatter? Well, my chatter is going back to the debate issue, and it'll be brief, but it just says, I've been thinking about what we expect of the moderators and of the moment, and all of that is I'm trying to think through what we should expect of ourselves.

John Dickerson
And I think, and maybe it's because I've been a debate moderator that I wonder what we should ask of ourselves as an audience. And going back to that question of fact checking, really, it's our job to penalize people for just making stuff up. And I know where, you know, a lot of people would say, well, we're well past that. It's been, you know, Donald Trump rose to power by furthering a birther lie and also working with the national Enquirer to spread lies about his republican primary opponents. But that doesn't matter.

You still have to assert the standard. And so I'm just trying to think through what programmatic and systematic way we could think that through for when these debates take place, because it's not just the debates themselves. It's a convening opportunity for all of us to think about this campaign and what we expect of ourselves and our leaders. So I don't know that's what I'm thinking about. And I hope other people are thinking about it too.

Because if we're all thinking about it, then maybe when the debate happens, it'll be more powerful in ways that don't just have to do with what takes place in the room. My chatter is one that digs back into history and into gabfest history. So I got a fantastic email yesterday that has me so intrigued. And I should note that this chatter has. I have not consumed the object that I'm about to discuss.

David Plotz
I just have been teased with it. The founder of the Gabfest was Andy Bowers, who worked with us at slate for many years. And Andy has had an incredible career in audio. And he's now at a company called Spooler. And at Spooler, Andy has spooled up with Jerry Goldman, the founder of Oye, a law professor.

They have created what sounds amazing, which is they've recreated the brown v board arguments from 1954 using AI. I loathe the idea of using AI to do things like mimic our voices or fake speech to create political mayhem. But this is a really creative idea, which is there is, of course, outstanding audio of people like Thurgood Marshall and Earl Warren and using the AI technology and the fact that we have a transcript but no audio from that case. And then sort of bringing voice actors in as well to create the intonations, the correct intonations and to use that to then recreate the full argument as it might have sounded. And they have done that.

The project is at brown dot oya.org. And it sounds really cool. Sounds like an awesome idea. That is so interesting. And what is your opinion, just to get baseline readings here of the following two things.

John Dickerson
Colorization of photographs and film and gas fireplaces. Love colorization of photographs especially. I think the people who do that well are performing an amazing service for the world. Not every photograph should be colorized, but there are certain ones which, when they're done, marvelous. Do you ever see that World War one movie that Peter Jackson made, they shall not grow old, in which he created audio and colorized and synced up the audio to these ancient films of films of world War one.

David Plotz
And it brought World War one to life. The footage that we have of World War one is so creaky and sparse and wrong frame rate and there's no audio for it. And then for him to have used sort of lip readers to figure out what people in these films were saying, to have colorized it, it was an incredible act of historical reimagination and bringing something to life in a new way. And I love that. Gas fireplaces I have no opinion about.

John Dickerson
I'm just really glad you introduced me to they shall not grow old. How do I know this? How do I, how did I not know this exists? Anyway, you have the correct opinion, except I would only modify it by saying gas fireplaces are an abomination. Listeners, you sent us so many great listener chatters.

David Plotz
Please keep them coming. They are so astonishingly interesting. We had to skip a whole bunch of great ones this week. They're just too many. But please keep them coming.

It's my entertainment. Don't you want to keep me entertained? Am I not worth entertaining? Email them to us@gabfestlate.com dot and our listener chatter this week is, I think, a follow up to a chatter I did about submarines from Rob Jones. David, a while back you expressed an interest in any film that shows submarines surfacing through ice.

D
In that light, you will want to know about a YouTube channel called Smarter every day. It's run by a man named Destin Sandlin. Destin has a nine episode series detailing the trip he took on USS Toledo. He met up with the Toledo on an ice floe north of Prudeau Bay. I recommend that everyone watch all nine episodes because they give a great feel for what it's like to live and work on a fast attack nuclear submarine.

If you'd rather cut to the chase, though, than start with episode nine, at about the halfway point you'll begin to learn the complicated processes involved in surfacing through ice. It's fascinating and I think you'll learn. Like it? Rob out.

David Plotz
That's our show for today. The Gabfest is produced by Shayna Roth. Our researcher is Julie Hugin. Our theme music is by they might be giants. Ben Richmond is senior director for podcast operations.

Alicia Montgomery is the vp of audio for Slate for Emily Bazelon and John Dickerson of Ava Plots. Thanks for listening to you next week.

Emily Bazelon
Hey, Slate plus, it's just me today here with my wonderful colleague Azine Girishy. Hey, Azine. Hi, Emily. Azine is a science desk reporter at the New York Times, and part of her beat is gender, so she's written a lot about gender medicine with great fortitude. This is a difficult topic, especially when it comes to kids and teenagers, because emotions just run really high.

Azine has plowed through all of that, and today she's here to talk about the Cass review, which is this big new review of studies on gender youth medicine that's coming from Doctor Hilary Cass, a prominent pediatrician in Britain. So, Azine, let's just start with what is the cast review and what are its main findings? So, in England, basically, in the run up to 2020, there was sort of mounting turmoil around the question of how medical treatments are provided to young, transgender or gender diverse people. There had been a series of controversies that kind of had alarmed the NHS and made them realize that they had to figure out, they had to reassess or re evaluate how they provided this care. And the NHS is Britain's National Health Service or England's National Health Service.

F
Yes. Yeah. So the waitlist had grown to be thousands of kids long. People were waiting years to even get a first appointment. Ten whistleblowers in the country's one youth gender clinic had basically complained that they felt pressure, in part due to that waitlist felt pressure to approve kids for puberty blocking drugs.

This had leaked and become public and sort of obviously become quite controversial. And then a former patient at the clinic had actually, in a very high profile lawsuit, had sued the clinic, alleging that she was prescribed blockers as a teenager in a sort of wrote or in a series of, I think she said, crude or superficial conversations with social workers at the clinic. So the way this clinic was providing care was drawing more and more scrutiny. So in 2020, NHS England commissioned doctor Hilary Cass to sort of come in and evaluate all of the evidence for this care and evaluate how this, the country's soul youth gender clinic, was sort of structured and able to provide this care to this population. So Hilary Cass had been working on this review for the four years since, and as part of it, she did a ton of stuff.

So the cornerstone of her report is these two systematic reviews of all of the evidence in support of the use of puberty blocking drugs and masculinizing and feminizing hormones in adolescents. So these are two reviews that were published in the British Medical Journal, and they sort of informed, but did not completely determine her whole report. She also reviewed all of the international guidelines for this care. She interviewed clinicians in England and elsewhere. She met, I think, weekly with patients at the clinic and parents.

Emily Bazelon
Meaning kids? Meaning kids, yeah. Service users is the britishism that's used a lot in the report. She spoke with young adults who had moved through the service, she spoke with people who had de transitioned advocacy groups. She really tried to hit every sort of party that was invested in either providing or receiving this care.

F
But to start with the systematic reviews, I mean. So she commissioned the University of York, which has a specialized team that sort of does these evidence based reviews of the scientists? That was just a snippet from our slate plus conversation. If you want to hear the whole conversation, go to slate.com gabfestplus to become a member today.

David Plotz
If you want to hear the whole conversation, go to slate.com gabfestplus to become a member today.

How Bad Was The Poll For Biden?

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2: Analyzing Voter Shifts

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4: Political Strategy and Debate Preparations

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