The New Yorker's Political Writers Answer Your Election Questions

This episode addresses complex and urgent questions from listeners about the U.S. political climate, particularly concerning Donald Trump's persistent influence and the challenges journalists face when interviewing MAGA politicians.

1. Trump's Appeal: Despite controversies, Trump retains significant support due to his perceived authenticity and anti-establishment stance.
2. Media Challenges: Journalists face obstacles in conducting candid interviews with MAGA-aligned politicians due to distrust and media manipulation.
3. Political Polarization: The episode discusses the deepening polarization, which complicates journalistic neutrality and public discourse.
4. Biden's Communication: Concerns about the effectiveness of Biden’s communication strategy and the visibility of his legislative successes.
5. Future Elections: Discussion on the potential for and challenges of introducing a third-party candidate in a deeply polarized environment.

1. Introduction by David Remnick

Remnick sets the stage by highlighting the confusion surrounding the political landscape. He introduces the episode's structure, based on listener-submitted questions.

• David Remnick: "This presidential election is, to say the least, confusing and anxiety provoking."

2. Trump's Undying Influence

Exploration of why Trump continues to be a formidable figure in American politics, focusing on his unique appeal.

• Andrew Marantz: "He might be self-dealing, but at least he's honest about it."

3. Challenges in Political Journalism

Discussion on the difficulties journalists face when trying to engage critically with right-wing politicians.

• Susan Glasser: "Engaging with Trump...he doesn’t take in your question and spit out back an answer."

4. Political Misinformation and Media

Examination of how misinformation affects journalism and the broader implications for democracy.

• Claire Malone: "It politicized the media in the partisan America."

5. Third-Party Viability

Debate on the viability of a third-party candidate in the current two-party system dominated by polarization.

• Jill Lepore: "Ranked choice voting...would allow for the blossoming of third parties."

1. Critical Media Consumption: Evaluate sources critically to combat misinformation.
2. Engage in Local Politics: Local involvement can influence national outcomes.
3. Support Electoral Reforms: Advocating for systems like ranked-choice voting can facilitate third-party viability.
4. Foster Dialogues: Encourage conversations across political divides to reduce polarization.
5. Educational Outreach: Increase awareness about the impacts of legislation like Biden's to improve public understanding.

At the beginning of 2021, it seemed like America might be turning a new page; instead, the election of 2024 feels like a strange dream that we can’t wake up from. Recently, David Remnick asked listeners what’s still confounding and confusing about this Presidential election. Dozens of listeners wrote in from all over the country, and a crack team of political writers at The New Yorker came together to shed some light on those questions: Susan B. Glasser, Jill Lepore, Clare Malone, Andrew Marantz, Evan Osnos, Kelefa Sanneh, and Benjamin Wallace-Wells.

People

David Remnick, Susan Glasser, Andrew Marantz, Jill Lepore, Claire Malone

Content Warnings:

None

David Remnick
This is the political scene. And I'm David Remnick.

This presidential election is, to say the least, confusing and anxiety provoking in a lot of ways. At the beginning of 2021, it seemed like America might be turning a new page.

Instead, our political life feels like a strange dream we cant wake up from.

A couple of weeks ago, we asked you whats on your minds and whats still confounding you about the whole election season. And dozens of you wrote to us from Signal Mountain, Tennessee, Salem, Virginia, Eugene, Oregon, Dolores, Colorado, all over the place. You asked some very complicated questions about the electoral college and campaign strategy, and some questions that might seem simpler but really dont have simple answers. So I'm going to tackle just a few of your questions today with help from my esteemed colleagues, staff writers at the New Yorker, covering politics in different ways from different perspectives. And we'll shed some light where we can.

So let's begin. One question many of you are dying to understand is a variation of this one from a listener named Jane. And Jane writes, I remain profoundly puzzled why nearly half of Americans, according to polling, continue to support Donald Trump now, four years after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, that they view him as their redeemer when everything he does and says shows himself to be a self serving power monger with no respect for the law.

Well, where did we get on that one? Why does half the country and maybe more support Donald Trump? Well, I'm going to start with Andrew Marantz, who's written about politics and extremism. Andrew, what say you? What's so appealing about Trump at this point? Maybe not in spite of, but perhaps because of his seeming disregard for the law.

Andrew Marantz
Yeah, I think at this point we can admit that he's funny.

I mean, there might be some sort of hard nucleus of supporters who will deny to the ends of the earth that Donald Trump is self dealing or that he's self serving or that he's corrupt. But I think many of his supporters know that. And it's a very time honored tradition of saying, yeah, he might be a little bit self dealing, but at least he's honest about it. At least he's authentic.

David Remnick
But, Andrew, it can't be just because he's a great insult comic that he's got this appeal. It has to be something on a political level, however visceral.

Andrew Marantz
Well, yeah, the question mentioned, I'm your redeemer or I'm your vengeance, and it has to do with the essence of reactionary conservatism. So there is a promise being made there.

David Remnick
Julepoor, as a historian, as a political observer, what do you see as Trump's appeal?

Jill Lepore
I think any explanation that goes to Trump as a showman, obviously, there's a great deal of truth to be found in that. But that relies on dismissing the preferences of his supporters as misguided. And they're not, therefore, guided by policy, by political preferences, by commitments to political, genuine political ideas. It's to sort of participate in the dismissal of the far right that liberal intellectuals committed in the 1950s, the sort of liberal consensus theory. You know, there is nothing but liberalism. That's an idea in american history. Everyone else is a paranoid nut job and commits, you know, as Hofstadter would have said, you know, participates in a paranoid style. So I just, I would say, I think that. I think there is an obligation to understand what those policy preferences are. And over the course of the 20th century, the far right ideology that has moved from the far right to the entirety of the right is an objection to the power of the federal government to federal power over the states, an objection to the moral high handedness of liberals and then of progressives.

And, yeah, you can sort of watch the kind of Trump safari daily show version of let's go quiz these people and see how stupid they are.

That just generally has no interest in what it could be about the nature of the exercise of federal power through the administrative state. That could genuinely be disappointing and be failing to deliver goods to people.

David Remnick
So a listener by the name of Lawrence emailed to ask this. I'd love to know why you and your staff, like Evan Osnos, Susan Glasser, and Jane Mayer are not doing critical interviews with people like Donald Trump or other high level MAGA politicians or enablers on a regular basis. It doesn't seem like top level journalists like yourselves have a chance to challenge these people to their faces. Are they not willing to speak with New Yorker journalists, or is there some other reason? So, Susan Glasser, you were a biographer with your husband, Peter Baker, at the New York Times of Donald Trump. What say you?

Susan Glasser
Well, thanks, Lawrence.

You know, I did do two very interesting, but not necessarily very revealing interviews with Donald Trump. I spent three and a half hours with him at Mar a Lago after the 2021 events unfolded.

You know, like many engagements with Trump, it is shocking, but not surprising. And, you know, he's not an interview subject in a conventional sense. And it's not just because he only goes on HannItY and they give him softball questions. The challenge of engaging with Trump one on one, whatever news outlet you represent is that, you know, he doesn't take in your question and spit out, back out an answer. There's no noun, verb and a period to end a sentence. And, you know, essentially, he does the same kind of free form discourse, more or less, that you, that you see in his rallies.

Joe Biden
And they never mentioned me. I'm up here sweating like a dog.

Secret Service said, we have to make sure everyone's safe. I said, what about me? Oh, we never thought of it. They don't think about me. I'm working my ass off. I'm working hard. This is hard work. Front row Joe. Front row Joe.

Susan Glasser
This is not the Republican Party that it was in 2015 or even in 2016. And that's a phenomenon that's been very interesting to observe as someone who spent a long time reporting in Washington. You know, someone like Marco Rubio, for example, was someone I interviewed for one of the first pieces I did for the New York guy. This is a guy who called Donald Trump a kook who ran as a national security minded presidential candidate, really the choice of the republican establishment in many ways in Washington and non Capitol Hill in 2016. Just the other day, I noticed that he tweeted that Joe Biden was a sick and deranged old man, as if Donald Trump had seized his phone and was tweeting for him. And so I think that it's important to recognize that the world that we're operating in as journalists has changed as well.

David Remnick
Claire Malone, you've had some experience with this. How would you answer that question? Why is it so difficult sometimes to do critical interviews with politicians and influencers on the right?

Claire Malone
I guess my experience with this was not interviewing President Trump, but talking to Candace Owens, who's a pretty prominent right wing, reactionary media personality. And I did a profile of her, and she did agree to let me come and speak with her and talk. But she wanted to make sure that she was always able to record. She sort of wanted to limit where I was allowed to interact with her. It was basically just at the studios of the daily wire.

She sort of felt a deep, I think a deep suspicion of me. What was also interesting is in some ways, she also didn't care. The way she sort of put it to me was like, I don't care how this piece ends up for me, because essentially it either braces her profile or it proves the point that the mainstream media attacks those on the right wing, which I thought was an interesting, and I think she's a savvy person and a savvy reader of her audience.

There's also kind of the interesting element of we in the mainstream media, because Trump really, I guess, cannily played into a lot of institutional distrust that people have had for decades of the media. But he really accelerated this feeling that we are, as we all know now, the phrase he used, the enemy of the people. And I think that that did an interesting thing where it made our job of calling out what's true and what's not and trying to wrangle misinformation, something that I think is a pretty impossible task these days. I do think that that did this interesting thing where it almost politicized the media and it's in the partisan America of you're on this side, you're on that side, you're on the republican side, you're on the democratic side. The Democratic Party does not have the same problem with misinformation and the alternative reality that the republican party does. And so I think inevitably that sort of has placed us more on the well, you're in the democratic camp. That's not to say that democratic politicians dont take liberties with the truth or spin things, but I just think in the binary, there is an interesting dynamic that makes right wing politicians less likely to talk to mainstream media.

David Remnick
So lets talk about Biden. A listener named Jim expresses a concern that we know is pretty widespread. So let me quote it directly from his letter. Im very frustrated by Bidens arrogance to deny all comments about age and unfavorable poll ratings. Why are Democrats not pulling out all the stops? And why are they so casual and foolish based on the stakes?

Susan Glasser
Susan GlASSEr I do think that Biden and his team in the White House have stoked the idea that somehow he's getting an unfair rap from the media. And what I have perceived certainly in Washington, is a lot of what you might call working the refs, kind of an inside game from the Biden campaign in the Biden White House. They've hauled in individual news organizations for meetings at the campaign headquarters in Wilmington.

There's a sense that if only somehow he would get a fair shake from the remnants of the mainstream media, this would be different. I don't think that the information such as we have bears that out right now. If you look at surveys, it's very, very clear that Biden would be winning this election in a landslide if it was only readers of the New York Times. There's a huge problem with Biden breaking through with the platforms that younger voters tend to be on, in particular those people who only get their information from social media are essentially a very different segment of the entire rest of the population in terms of their views about Biden.

David Remnick
Now, Diana, who's a listener from Massachusetts, has a concern about Biden's communication with us, with american voters, and she asks, why aren't Americans, and thus voters, understanding the magnitude of Biden's legislation that will improve our country for years to come? For example, build back better, the Inflation Reduction act, the infrastructure bill, these affect and improve red and blue states alike. I'm confounded by why this message is not getting across. Evan as ness yeah, I think the.

Evan Osnos
Question raises a really interesting point, which is that by any ordinary measurement of electoral credentials, Joe Biden's kind of going into this race with a pretty strong hand. You have, violent crime right now is at basically a 50 year low. You've got the stock market hitting all these highs. Unemployment is at record lows. So why, why is it that he doesn't get any credit for that? The usual answer in Washington is, oh, it's the communications. He's not, you know, somehow it's getting lost in this static. One of the things that's going on is that we are much more discombobulated, dysregulated by the effect of the last four years, including really at the heart of it. Covid in a way that we don't adequately describe. I just think it has thrown off so much of how we perceive ourselves as a political community and our leaders that it makes it almost easy for people to forget that they are looking at a legislative record that in any other year would pretty much guarantee reelection.

David Remnick
So we're answering some of the questions that listeners have sent us about the election over the past couple of weeks. Kellif Asana, here's a question for you, and it's pretty blunt. How did we wind up with this rematch of Biden versus Trump redux?

And why are there no inspiring leaders? Is it too costly to challenge the wealthiest candidates?

It doesn't have to be that way. The question goes on, we do need to change that, or we are doomed to the same old, same old.

Kelifa, what say you?

Kelefa Sanneh
Well, yeah, I mean, part of that might have to do with the weakness of political parties, right? That it's hard for either party to either step in and say, no, we don't want this person, or to say, no, we really do want this other person. Sometimes what you see in the absence of that is that you get candidates who are either celebrities, rich and famous, or you get candidates who are extremely old and have been around forever. And, you know, obviously, in this race, once again, for the second time in a row, we have an old person versus a celebrity who also happens to be quite old.

David Remnick
Claire Malone, I want to come back to you here on the Biden Trump rematch. There were other potential presidential candidates out there, weren't there? What exactly happened to them?

Claire Malone
There's sort of a whole generation of voters now, or millennials even, who have sort of been waiting for the baby boomers to stop running for office. I mean, I think I, Gavin Newsom maybe wouldn't admit it, but he sort of seemed to be doing some sort of shadow. Hey, I could be the guy.

Pete Buttigieg has long been a person who appears on Fox News pretty regularly.

So. Gretchen Whitmer.

Gretchen Whitmer. Yeah. Yeah. So I think there were, there was a moment, but I think, like in a lot of things in life, inertia just sort of set in and everyone looked around and no one jumped in, the democratic party specifically. And I think that's how we end up here with the rematch.

David Remnick
Jill? We have a question from a listener named William, and it requires a sense of history as well as a sense of the structure of how our political system is organized. William writes this, independent observers and many within both parties feel that the two party system is controlled and dead ended. Is there a realistic, viable way to establish a third party candidate for future elections? And I know you've done a lot of research, and our democracy, God knows, over time, what's the history behind that two party system? And would a multi party system like you see in the UK or many other countries be a better course for the United States?

Jill Lepore
Well, I think there is an extraordinary amount of frustration with the two party system. I think, as both Claire and Ben had pointed out, especially with young people, the two party system, which is not in our constitution, is something that evolved over time, is in considerable tension with some of our structural separations of power in the constitution, and makes it very difficult for certain features of our constitutional order to work. And it's a much bigger problem when the parties are polarized. So I think sometimes when people are complaining about the two party system, what they're really reacting to is the polarization of the parties. What are the prospects for change? I mean, there are some great exciting ideas out there that people can become involved in if they're committed to them, and I think some of them are surely possible.

Daniel Allen does a whole series for the Washington Post that's about reimagining our democracy. She's a big advocate of ranked choice voting, which is one of the mechanisms that would allow for the blossoming of third parties and multiparties. I think it's a little hard with our presidential system to imagine a really vibrant multiparty system unless we had a parliamentary structure. And I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. It all kind of goes to that feeling of brittleness and rigidity, right. That I think, for young people is also associated with being elderly. That, like, everything is creaky and everything moves slowly and is half broken and geriatric. And there's something not just about these two presidential candidates, but about our constitutional order that just is that way.

David Remnick
A listener named Andrew asks this what happens if the Republicans in Congress refuse to certify the results and essentially install Trump? Jill, what can you tell us here? Who has control in the event that Biden wins?

Who or what can ensure a peaceful transition next January? We don't have a repeat or worse of January 6, 2021.

Jill Lepore
I came across this book written in 1899 called President John Smith, in which this same thing happens, and there's an insurrection in the Senate floor during the joint session, on the floor of Congress during the joint session to certify the electoral college.

David Remnick
And this was to certify whom?

Jill Lepore
This was to certify this fictitious President John Smith in this 1899 dystopian novel that was set in the future. That I just want to say, people thought about this problem a long time ago and didn't solve it, didn't fix it.

Remember when you could just go catch a flight and just walk into the airport with your bag and walk onto the plane?

We won't have an election like, where you could just walk onto the plane anymore.

Until we get through this era of american history and an all but unprecedented risk of political violence.

David Remnick
And is that era of political history defined by the presence of Donald Trump, or do you think it goes beyond that?

Jill Lepore
I think if Trump had vanished from the national political stage after 2021, it would have ended with Trump.

But I think no matter how this election goes, it will go beyond this.

David Remnick
That is a grim forecast for whats coming. In other words, what youre saying is that no matter what happens in November.

Jill Lepore
We need TSA at the electoral College certification. Yes, that's what I'm saying.

David Remnick
Ben Wallace Wells, you've been covering the Trump campaign, and you've watched the MAGA movement evolve since 2015, 2016.

What have you observed?

Benjamin Wallace-Wells
I think it's interesting and maybe bears on this question to think about the 2016 version of Trump and the Trump movement relative to the 2024 version. And some of this is inevitably nebulous and sort of anecdotal, but in my experience, the Trump campaign and the Trump rallies in 2016 were much scarier. They were much more violent. People got beat up in the stands. There were angry protests, street fighting outside Trump himself. People walked into those rallies and had no idea what was going to happen.

When I look at Trump himself today, it's a diminished figure. He's not able to generate the same energy. His crowds are smaller.

It's a less intense effect. At the same time, and somewhat moving in contradiction, his movement has become much more openly opposed to democracy, to democratic institutions. His party is much more completely behind him. And so I sometimes wonder if when I walk away from a Trump rally, I've been artificially reassured by how mediocre he is.

David Remnick
I had this feeling, too. I went to the rally in the Bronx, and Trump was telling stories about the Woolman skating rink and various real estate moguls that he knew and the Yankees in the era of Steinbrenner. And it was, politics aside, it was like listening to Grandpa at thanksgiving, but without the. Even the bile that you're kind of used to, it was odd.

And yet, Kela Fasana, looking at you here, when we watch him walk into an arena for some kind of boxing match or whatever it is, the crowd.

Kelefa Sanneh
UFC.

David Remnick
For UFC. The crowd goes nuts. Nuts.

Kelefa Sanneh
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there is that core of people who love him. There's the core of people that are just happy to be in the same room as a celebrity. But I think it's also important to bear in mind the awesome power of negative polarization.

I sometimes have liberals ask me, how could anyone vote for Trump just out of kind of knee jerk partisan fealty? You know, okay, you're not people who aren't crazy about Trump, but are just willing to vote for him against Biden. And I have liberals who say to me, like, how could anyone support this guy? And I say, picture if it was reversed. Imagine if the Democrats nominated, like, 50 Cent. And 50 Cent is running on a campaign to, I don't know, end police brutality forever. But he's also saying all sorts of things that seem to flout democratic norms and seem to maybe encourage violence, and it's, you know, it's unsettling. What would it take for you as a liberal to vote for Ted Cruz instead? And I think for a lot of people, that would be a hard ask, because there is this idea that no matter how bad the person on our side is at least hes not like those people on the other side.

David Remnick
Thanks to all of you who wrote us your questions about the election.

Im sorry we couldnt answer every single one of them. And thanks to my colleague, Susan Glasser, Jill Lepore, Claire Malone, Andrew Marantz, Evan Osnos, Kela Fasana and Ben Wallace Wells, you can read all of them on politics and the state of the nation@newyorker.com. dot from Prxheen.