Let's Find Common Ground - Special Episode: Lessons From the 2022 Midterm Elections

Episode Date: November 15, 2022

Democrats feared and Republicans expected a "red wave" election, but it didn’t happen.  Why was the outcome such a surprise?  Who gets the credit and blame? How do results impact the near-term future? What are the prospects for finding common ground in Congress where both the Senate and House will have razor-thin majorities?  We discuss these questions with two of America’s most experienced political thinkers: Democratic consultant Bob Shrum and Republican strategist Mike Murphy. Both men serve as co-directors of The Center for the Political Future at the University of Southern California.  Mike Murphy is one of the Republican Party’s most successful political media consultants, having handled strategy and advertising for more than two dozen successful gubernatorial and senatorial campaigns. Bob Shrum was once described as "the most sought-after consultant in the Democratic Party," by The Atlantic Monthly. He was the strategist in over 25 winning U.S. Senate campaigns, eight successful races for governor, and numerous campaigns for Congress and statewide offices.

Democrats feared, and Republicans expected a red wave election. It didn't happen. Why was the result such a surprise, who gets the credit and the blame? How could the results impact the future? And what are the prospects for finding common ground in a Congress where both the Senate and House will have such small majorities. This is a special post-election episode of Let's Find Common Ground. I'm Ashley Milntite.

And I'm Richard Davies. We hear from two of America's most experienced political thinkers. Democratic consultant Bob Schrumm and Republican strategist Mike Murphy. Both men have decades of experience with political campaigns and today they serve as co-directors of the Center for the Political Future, the Doorkn'sife Center, at the University of Southern California. As you'll hear, Mike Murphy and Bob Schramm are good friends. While they disagree on many policies, they agree about the need to strengthen American democracy and reform primaries and voting systems.

I asked Mike Murphy the first question. What are some lessons from the election? This was an earthquake, this election, because it was not what was expected, nor was it what was historically normal. By all accounts in a high inflation midterm, the normal pattern would be for the ruling party, the Democrats to be really hammered. Instead, the Republicans way underperformed the expectations,

and that has created a rage, not shock and ought, shock and anger, within the Republican party, fundamentally directed at Donald Trump. So for the first time, you see open criticism of them. shock and anger within the Republican Party fundamentally directed at Donald Trump. So for the first time, you see open criticism of him. Now he's resilient, but we are in a new post-crackup Republican era, and it may really curb Trump's power. Now, will populism go away?

There are a lot of Trump impersonators out there. So I'm not sure they're completely the same thing, but there's no question that the wrong track in this election was not just about the economy. It was an indictment of politics in general and some of the extreme populist hard-eaged politics coming out of the Republican Party. So the debt has been shuffled now

and we're gonna see where it goes. Bob, in the weeks leading up to the election, you know, some pretty dire questions were raised about what might happen, quite recently, the presidential historian Michael Beschloss said, we could be days away from losing our rule of law. Do you think some of those claims of democracy being under siege were a bit overdone? claims of democracy being under siege or a bit overdone? Yes, where I think there was a danger to democracy was if we had elected a whole brace of these Secretary of State candidates who were determined to see to it that only Republicans could win in those states no matter what way voters chose

cast their ballots. I think that was the biggest danger and then you had people like Kerry Lake in Arizona and that race is still up in the air, the Senate race has been called. And she's another person who I think if Joe Biden or the Democrat carried the state in 2024 would probably refuse to sign the certification that has to be sent to the Congress to count the electoral votes. Bob, you mentioned secretaries of state.

That's a job that never had much attention until the last election. In the case of Georgia, where the Republican Secretary of State stood up to Trump, who was trying to change the result of Georgia where the Republican Secretary of State stood up to Trump who is trying to change the result of the election there. Just tell us briefly what does the Secretary of State do and why has this job become so important and even controversial? Well, normally it's a ministerial function.

You, in most states, help run the elections. There are a whole set of rules about how to do that You make sure the ballots are counted you then Certify or ratify the results Brad Raffinsburg or the Secretary of State in Georgia the conservative Republican was true to his oath of office and Absolutely refused President Trump's request to find what was it 11,780 votes. That's all I need, one more than Biden and I'll carry the state.

You have the rise of Secretary of State candidates who basically said, I will cooperate with the kind of mega theory that somehow or other, these elections are rigged. We'll have only hand counting of ballots. Although it's the same time in a counter-dickery fashion, they say we want the election results the same night as the election. Well, if you hand count the ballots, that could never happen. Those folks were, they were trying to alter the role of the Secretary of State. And I have to say, you know, Raffensberger is not my political cup of tea, but I have an enormous respect for him and for what he did in 2020.

Mike, do you disagree with Bob? No, no, I think it's right. This is a new era where we weaponize the Secretary of State. You know, on the old days, some of them used to run the DMV, and so they were well-aided per legitimate reasons. But now they've become the tip of the partisan's spirit, some places. It's part of this new postmodern ultra-synicism and politics, where all institutions are suspect.

Elections are rigged, the media is corrupt, the news is fake, and that is an acid upon the fine clockwork of our politics. And it's something that Bob and I, even though, you know, we all know Bob's wrong on almost every political issue, we've disagreed for decades. What we try to do with the Center for the Placo Future USC is to remind people you can have a real tough football game. That's good, but you don't burn the stadium down if you lose. And this election appears to be a rejection of that hookum, which is a really, really good thing. That's the time that might be turning, and that would be great for our country.

Do you think that, I mean, this time that we saw a stronger role for the center, you know, for independence and other people who split their ballot and voted for both Republicans and Democrats? Well, you know, the many obiturers have been written about the Tickets' splitter, which was a classic feature of American politics. It appears to be having a small, green-shoot recovery here. The big trend other than populism has been the growth of independent voter registration, which is people who just don't want us wearing allegiance to either party. And in almost every state that's been growing for the last 20 years. I think there is a comeback coming of ticket splitting, but the counter force is strong. It's the tribalism in our parties,

where we're right, you're evil. So we can do anything to you and you have to stick with us or you're a traitor So you know that's that's the battleground. We're now going to face particularly in the Republican party Voters are always described especially around elections as either being D's or R's red or blue and yet there are a lot of voters who are completely dissatisfied with both parties. So Bob, do you think that the media has kind of got it wrong or that we are fed this line that we're always divided into neat tribes, whereas for normal folks, that's not true in many cases. We have politically been sorted into tribes to a degree that we have seldom seen before.

There was a rejection of election denialism in these midterms. There was a rejection of the idea that Donald Trump should just dictate candidates who, in many cases, were buckets of bolts. I mean, the preposterous candidates, and then you were supposed to vote for them just because they had an R after their name. If you look at New Hampshire, for example, Maggie Hassan in the Senate, could very well have been in trouble, but she ended up running against Don Boldick, who was an election denier, and who spent days before the election talking about children in grammar schools being forced to use

kitty litter boxes. I mean, it was not true. I'm not sure. I've got to stop reading those emails from Fox News. You know, Maggie Hassan won convincingly, not by a little, but by a lot. I do believe there are many groups of voters, women in the suburbs in particular, moderate Republicans who are tired of what their party has been giving them over the last six years. One of the things that happened here was that they deserted it. So we didn't have the normal midterm.

We didn't have a blowout. We didn't have a red tie. We hardly had a red puddle. I mean, we have a primary system that often rewards the extremes, right? Do you think it's time for open primaries where independence Convote not just Republicans or Democrats. Yeah, we have some of that in California. I've always been for it

I think Bob has to on the theory that you make the primary marketplace look more like the general election marketplace Because you're right when you have basically two groups of 12% of the electorate 12 to 15 Control it it turns the general election into a magic trick where pick any card you want, you're always going to get either the Ace of Spades or the Queen of Hearts. And that's one reason so many people are frustrated with politics. They don't like their choices. You know, independence were plus two for Democratic Congressional candidates according to the AACID polls. that's unprecedented. It's

just unbelievable that independence would break that way. So you're both in favor of open primary, is allowing independence to come in. What about rank choice voting, where voters are allowed to number the candidates by preference? Is that a good idea? What about Rank Choice voting? Yeah, I'm inclined to like it myself. Go ahead. Well, I'm, yeah, we're going to agree again.

I think I'm here. I think it makes, it's good. It makes a lot of sense. Alaska, I think, Lee Sermorkowski will be reelected. Should we reelect because of Rank Choice voting? You know, the Sarah Pellens comeback was squashed by Rank Choice voting. It takes the tribalism out. It's a different incentive. It incentivizes candidates

to be non-tribal and reach out. Yeah, and so you have Lisa Murkowski, who sometimes, by the way, for example, votes to confirm Democratic judges to the courts, sometimes votes with Democrats on other issues. And you have Mary Plattola, the Democrat in Congress, who succeeded Don Young, the Republican who had been there for 50 years, and she's the same kind of reach across the aisle person. Rent, choice, voting, rewards. I think this voting system like that could unlock the fact

we're down to only a few dozen swing seats. It could take the 25 we have now, get up to 50 or 60, which would loosen up politics in the House for more deal making the way it used to be. It used to be about 95 or 100 members of Congress between the most conservative Democrat and the most liberal Republican. Now it's narrowed to single digits.

And a ranked choice voting can start to undo that a little bit. Okay, so we promised our listeners, Shrumb the Democrat, Murphy the Republican, and I'm sure they tuned in expecting, you know, a verbal tussle between you two, and yet not only, not only, have you been agreeing with each other a lot during this interview, but you're also friends,

even though you often worked in your past careers for opposing candidates. So tell us a little bit about that, how Murphy, the Republican and Trump, the Democrat, became good friends. Well, let's not tell this story. I just want to interject, you know, we tend to agree on process repair and fixing the car. Once the car is working, we have very different ideas of what to do with the steering wheel on policy. But anyway, go ahead, Bob. You tell the other.

Yeah, this one I was gonna say, look, the questions you've asked so far have been basically about how do we protect our democracy? How do we make our democracy work? And I think we agree almost completely on what we ought to do here. I've known my 30 years or more than 30 years, we ran campaigns against each other, we were for different candidates almost up and down the board

over and over again, but that doesn't mean you can't be friends. You don't have to pick your friends by their politics. Increasingly, that's happening in America. I have never felt comfortable with that. So when I was, we were in the process of launching with Center for the Political Future, I called Mike and I said, let's have lunch with this Mexican restaurant. I didn't tell him why.

And we went there and I said, we think you should be the co-director of the Center. And he said, well, he'd think about it for a day or two. And then he came back and said, yes. And it's because we're both committed to a politics where we respect each other and we respect the truth, where we debate from a common base of knowledge. Exactly. It's funny because people look at us sometimes in the modern politics

like a freak show. You're actually friends. On the truth, there's some friends with plenty of democratic consultants. It's not an odd thing. It's an historically normal thing. The very fact that people find it weird is kind of indictment of our system because we self-select. I mean, here's a fascinating statistic that I think explains a lot of the polarization of American politics. We have about a little bit over 3,100 counties in the U.S. to kind of the key building block of the way we vote in our political system. Of those 3,100 counties, Joe Biden carried about 560 of them.

Trump carried the rest. Trump had 85% of the land area. Biden had 15. But Biden had more votes because those counties tend to be bigger, and they're very different cultures in those two places. People live with people who think like they do, Biden's counties create 70% of the GDP, Trump's 85% of the land area, and vast majority of the counties only create 30%. So there's this widening to America's Gulf. So I can sit in San Francisco and make a living with my brain and think God, those morons and Alabama,

if they're fried food and guns, they're evil, gotta do some about them. And then I can go into the deep south where they never miss a recruiting quota for the military when there's fighting to be done in the national interest and say all those liberal elites are trying to destroy America with their woke socialism and everybody's very happy hating the other. That is the poison that the country's got to get beyond.

Mike Murphy with Bob Schrum. This is Let's Find Common Ground from Common Ground Committee. I'm Ashley. I'm Richard. We've got a special live public event to tell you about, and it's coming up two days after we've released this podcast. Yes, November 17th at 3pm Pacific Time, 6th Eastern. Our podcast guest Bob Schrum will be moderating what promises to be a very lively conversation between Democratic political icon James Carville and former Republican National Committee chairman, writes previous. You can attend this free event live at the University

of Southern California, but space is limited so register now. Find out details of the Finding Common Ground on the State of our Democracy Live event at our website, commongroundcomity.org. And if you can't get there, you can also register online to watch it live. And if you're listening to this podcast after November 17th, go to CommonGroundCommity.org to find out how to watch the recording. Now back to our interview, Mike Murphy gets the next question. What are the prospects for common ground in the country? Do you think the country is any less divided after this election?

You know, if the politicians play it right, they could take the real lesson of the election wrong. I was a little disappointed with President Biden's news conference. It's understandable because he did what Bob and I both worked for a million incumbents like Joe who would, you know, well thank God you finally heard about my accomplishments. You know, let me let me review them one more time. You know, you owe me your vote for these reasons. And that's natural psychology. I've heard a lot of Republican candidates I've worked for say that.

Like, well, I'm gonna go tell them what the hell I've done. They owe me their vote. What I think you could have done a little more with is say, you know, this was a vote against splintering our democracy, questioning our elections. It was a vote to return to bipartisan normalcy where we disagree every day, but we can do it agreeably. So, a bit of a lost opportunity there, but I think if people read the mood of the country

right after this, so I think it will get better but slowly. I would give President Biden a little more credit than Mike. We got to disagree on something. He did talk about, he did talk about bipartisanship, he did talk about his desire to work with Republicans. I think he will make that effort. I think voters would actually reward Republicans who did it, voters in general, but there, and this goes back to an earlier question you asked, a lot of those folks are terrified about primaries, about the closed primary where only Republicans can vote and where Donald Trump may come after them. Maybe

that will decline a little bit now. But the idea of an orange hatch, for example, agreeing to work with the Ted Kennedy, I think today, hatch might look at him and say, you know, Ted, I agree with you, but I don't think I can get away with it with my Republican primary voters back home. Ashley and I wanted to ask you a little bit about the future. Both of you mentioned President Biden at the 2024 election. He's going to be nearly 81 years old. Anybody who has watched Biden closely is seeing a man who is clearly not as energetic

or maybe even as sharp as he was when he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee years ago. I know the Democrats did better than people expected, but you think they'll be pressure on Biden to step aside. Not a lot. There are some progressives who are saying, oh, we've got to have a more progressive, more left-wing candidate to win. We've tested this theory in a number of places, this cycle. Mandela Barnes, for example, in Wisconsin, who lost to Ron Johnson, who was the most vulnerable Republican.

I'm known Joe Biden for about half a century. That ages me as well as him. He has wanted to be president for almost all of that time. He is not gonna walk away if he's healthy and if he has a decent prospect of being reelected. And I don't think most sensible Democrats who might run would actually do that if Biden is running. I think Biden's principal problem is now syntax. It's because the stuttering problem of his youth has returned, and so he has to struggle

sometimes to make sure he gets the right word out. This is another one where we disagree a little bit. I think Biden's got a story of look. I'm not perfect, but every time I go to the ballot, we beat Trump, we held off the historical wave, we held on to the Senate. He's got a story now that's not political failure, and that's very valuable to him. The problem he has, I think just in the world of politics, is if I were the president of the United States, and I was doing pretty well, and I had a lot of things to talk about,

and I just had a political victory, and I went doing pretty well. And I had a lot of things to talk about. And I just had a political victory. And I went to bed happy. And I woke up the next day and I suddenly had four foot antlers coming out of my head. And I went to do the press conference about what do you hear about my new trade plan? The press conference said, yeah, what about your antlers? What the hell's going on with the antlers?

And so it's very hard with the age thing. It's out there. It's huge. And the stutter, however you, you know, explain it, and I'm sympathetic to Biden and that, I used to have a big speech impediment. So believe me, I'm extremely sympathetic to him. The way we cover politics now, people will not stop talking about the damn antlers, and that is, gets in the way of all the good stuff. Now, I don't think it wipes them out, but it is a thing. No doubt.

This is a question about a different type of future. So something I've heard a lot in the last few days is that Trump's popularity may ev, okay? If it does, though, I've heard it said that Trumpism will abide. But what is Trumpism without Trump? Well, that's a great question. I one hand you have the Trump cult of personality. I'm the tough guy. I fired Gilbert Godfried on national TV, so I'm a can-do businessman, you know, the whole myth of Trump, the strong man. And that's hard to replicate. That pop culture fame is hard to replicate. On the other hand, the kind of Yahooism of its tribalism. Here's

our group, here's the other group. The other group is bad, they're cheating, they're stealing your jobs, they're tunneling in from Mexico, because Trump likes to add icing to his cake of racism. You know, that posture has imitators now. Now the good thing is the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the First, dating Trump because I think that's how they get elected. And if the Trump formula starts to rot like old lettuce, they're going to change. And I'll take a cynic over a madman anytime, though not with any great delight. I think that new pop is Republican Party, which you never hear about fiscal conservatism. It's all cultural resentment grievance issues that has grown some roots in the party now, and it'll be a wild to dewey them.

I agree with that. I think Trumpism will survive even if Trump fades. A rendez-santist who might just mention the governor of Florida, I think, would be a very likely Republican nominee. Look, the Democrats went through something like this. It was politically unwise, not morally corrupt, as I think a lot of this is. In the 1980s, and finally Bill Clinton came along and said we have to have a somewhat different kind of Democratic Party.

Not give up the basic values, but we have to sort of adapt it to the times we live in. If Trump runs and loses again in 2024, there'll be some rethinking in the Republican party. If a Trumpist runs and loses, I think there'll be some rethinking. But it may take several cycles to get this out of the bloodstream of the GOP if we, in fact, ever do. As you've mentioned, independence played a key role in the election and leading up to the vote. Ticket splitters, moderates, independence, they didn't receive a lot of coverage from the media. That's one trend that came out of the vote. But what are others worth noting, Bob? This is the, I think it's all the way back to 1934

to get a midterm election in a president's first term where the other party didn't capture any state legislative body that it didn't already have. That's unprecedented and it tells you that there was something going on out there. There was a resistance to this proclamation of a red wave of trunk picking candidates of the overturning of Roe v. Wade. I think it was a genuine popular uprising.

You know, if there's the old line that dogs don't like the dog food, well, it turned out the voters didn't like a lot of what they were being fed by the Republican Party Biden should have been the dominant issue. dissatisfaction should have been the dominant feeling. But Trump made sure that he was center stage and McConnell made sure that you got a Supreme Court that overturned Roby Way. Unlike by the way Ronald Reagan, who in 1982 when he was appointing Sandra Day O'Connor, told his people that they could not ask her a question about her position

on Roby Way that would be improper. I think he was actually being quite shrewd and understood. He did not want to go into the 1984 election with a Supreme Court that looked like it was going to overturn Roe v. Way. I think a couple things we learned was that to presumption, this was what we call a wrong track election. Most people say things going to wrong track was no longer purely economic. If it was, the repubs would have had the red wave. This time it was a disgust with the offerings, as Bob said. Prostration with the creepy, Trumpy populism. Another thing we learned is that the era of the

pro-business moderate Democrat, a species that had been in danger for a while, is coming back. Spanberger, winning in Virginia in that district, showed that her cross-party appeal worked. The same thing in New Hampshire won the Chris Papas. You can kind of go down the list. There's general election support for moderate pro-business Democrats who kind of walk away from some of the loudest orthodoxy coming out of the House progresses. And what's ahead for the Republican Party? It's looking like it could be the beginning of a reformation, but we're safe. And it's going to go either Trump

again, or there's going to be a civil war in the party. And it'll be interesting if not Trump, what what it lands on for the the great moment in American politics, where we always find out who we are, which is presidential elections with big primaries. And it looks like we're heading to one might have one of the democratic side Biden decides not to run. And there's definitely I think turbulence coming on the Republican side. And that'll be good for the country. So even though I'm a conservative and I'm not wild about some of the people who got elected on the D side, I am delighted

that now the third great Republican ballot box failure is clearly owned by Donald Trump because I'm a raving issue. Probably can tell, anti-Trump Republicans. So I want to have that civil war and it's now started in the party. Well, finished with a common ground-y question because we're less fine, common ground. What do you think? What are the prospects after this election for a less rigidly divided form of politics? Are there green shoots when it comes to finding common ground in America? There should be. The message of this election is that that's what voters would like, but if Kevin McCarthy has like a two or three seat margin in holding the House, he's got a choice of going one of two ways.

One way he could go is to try to reach out, get some Democrats, find some common ground as you suggest. That would be good for the country. I think it's more likely the so-called House Freedom Caucus will hold him hostage. You won't have one speaker of the House if you have a margin of two or three in terms of controlling it. You'll have like 219 or 220 because any one or two people who defect can prevent you from passing legislation. So he may give in and actually we may go through at least a brief period where things get more fraught. But there are people in the Freedom Caucus who say, we won't vote to raise the debt limit.

We ought to hold this hostage, which by the way could crash the economy and shut down the government, demanding that there be changes in entitlements like social security and Medicare. Now wiser heads like Mitch McConnell and even Kevin McCarthy, I think understand that having tried that with Newt Gengrich in the 1990s, it's a really, really bad idea politically. But it's going to be tough, given the math, to avoid having that kind of problem. But maybe after you go through that,

you'll get to a kind of sainter place where people are able to find some common ground. I agree on that. Speaker to be McCarthy is in real trouble, too, in the caucus. Freedom caucuses tell them in order to get our votes to be McCarthy is in real trouble too in the caucus. Freedom caucus is telling them in order to get our votes to be speaker. We have to have an ejector button to fire you anytime we want on a simple vote. He can't agree to that. So it may not be McCarthy.

One bit of green shoots we can look at right now. It's highly likely in the lame duck session they will pass the Electoral College Reform Act, which patches a lot of the very dangerous 1859s holes in the Electoral College Reform Act, which patches a lot of the very dangerous 1859s holes in the Electoral College County. That is the most unknown yet vital piece of legislation of the last few years, and there's now Republican support for 10 votes led by McConnell. So it's highly likely that's going to get done, and that's really important. So it's a little thing in the popular mind, but a huge thing in the mechanical way we pick a president in the future and it's an insurance policy against trouble.

So I'll take that win. Mike Murphy and Bob Schram on a special edition of Let's Find Common Ground. And we'll stay topical with our next podcast too. We'll get some tips on how to have a more agreeable Thanksgiving with relatives or friends who have very different political views than your own. And speaking of current events, don't forget to register for finding common ground on the state of our democracy, a live event this Thursday, November 17th. Find out more about our live events and podcasts at commongroundcommitty.org.

I'm Ashley Muntite. I'm Richard Davies, and thanks for listening. This podcast is part of the Democracy Group. This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.