1) Over the course of your career, what shifts have you seen in the demographics of the electorate?

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• Main Points:

  • The U.S. is moving toward a majority-minority population.

  • Political realignment: Democratic Party losing working-class whites; gaining college-educated and suburban voters.

  • Voting obstacles for minorities and working-class whites.

  • Demographics have complicated the assumed political advantages for Democrats.

​

• Key Quotes:​

  • “What we also know is that there's been a significant backlash against these demographic changes, especially among working-class white voters who feel as if they're losing their position of primacy in the country. And that's been a major lure of Donald Trump, in that direction.”

​

• • “The Democratic Party was the party of working-class people, union people, and that's working-class whites and minorities. And they always wanted a higher turnout. The Republican Party, which was much more the party of the college-educated and upper middle class voters, did whatever they could to keep to put obstacles in the way of voting….now done much better among college-educated voters and suburban voters.”

​

• • ​”We have moved pretty much inexorably towards being a country that is no longer majority white. And, so it's a majority minority, soon to be. And that's, of course, three broad categories: African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans.”

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2) Have you noticed a shift in how meaningful people think their vote is, in terms of election denial or the idea that ‘because I'm in New York, it's gonna go blue, so I don't need to vote’?

​

• Main Points:

  • Election denial increased, especially after Trump's rhetoric.

  • The Electoral College and gerrymandering decrease voter trust/confidence.

  • Many feel their vote doesn't count in non-swing states.

  • Rising legitimacy crisis in U.S. elections.

​

• Key Quotes:

  • “Election denial, of course, has been a phenomenon that was deeply enhanced by Trump. And it's basically, if I lose, it was rigged. If I win, it will be fine…there's kind of an asymmetry. Democrats generally don't think that there's some conspiracy to overturn the legitimate outcome of an election. They lose. They know they lose.” 

​

• • ​”There's no point in paying any attention to presidential candidates in more than 40 of the 50 states because the outcome is foreordained. And so it comes down to, as we saw this time, seven states. And it means that we're gonna have more and more instances where the winner of the popular vote loses the presidency.” 

​

• • “So you're gonna have a growing sense that the election is not necessarily legitimate, that when you vote, it doesn't matter. And if you're voting for a president in a firmly blue or firmly red state, it's a performative act as well.”

​

3) What do you think about younger voters versus people who have been voting for a longer time?

​

• ​Main Points:

• Young and first-time voters increasingly face roadblocks to voting.

• Some states remove college students’ ability to vote locally.

• Diminished voter motivation due to a lack of perceived efficacy, especially at larger scales.

• Elections in the U.S. have significant barriers to participation compared to other countries.

​

• Key Quotes:

  •  “Well, certainly, we have to worry that if people do begin to believe that their votes don't matter, they won't vote. And we have to worry, including now, with a combination of many states that are very pernicious in terms of putting up roadblocks to voting for younger voters. Like, for example, we have many states that are trying to take away the ability of college students to vote in the states where they're going to college.”

​

• • “Most elections are run by states and localities. We're seeing a lot of instances where very bad groups are trying to put in place election officials who will tamper with the votes and till the outcomes. But we also know that we're having real trouble getting poll workers. And mostly, the poll workers are older. They're retired.”

​

4) How do you think that the majority of people choose who they're voting for?

​

• ​Main Points:

• Most people vote along party lines; negative partisanship is a strong driver.

• Straight-ticket voting has increased.

• Issue-based voting is rarer, more evident in low-turnout elections.

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• Key Quotes:

  • “Most people identify with the party. You can hear a lot of, well, we are one third independent, one third Democrat, one third Republican. But the fact is, if you look at those independents, a third of them say that they are independent, but they lean to the Democratic Party, and another third are independent and lean to the Republican Party.”

​

• •  “We've become more partisan as we have polarized more, and people vote as much based on what some of my political science colleagues have called negative partisanship. It's not so much because you embrace what your own party stands for or even know in many cases, and it's more that the other side is evil, and we've gotta make sure they don't get in power.”

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• • “Now, are there some people who vote based on an issue? Well, we've seen that in the midterm elections, where turnout is lower. This last time in 2022, when Democrats did better than most people expected, the abortion issue was a big one for voters.”

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5) How much of someone's vote and their decision do you think is based on their political stance versus their character?

​

• Main Points:

• Character has limited impact; partisan identity and issues are stronger influences.

• Cognitive dissonance leads voters to dismiss negative information about preferred candidates.

• Strong tribal cultural identities and single issues matter occasionally.

​

• Key Quotes:

  •  “Well, if character really mattered all that much, Donald Trump would never have gotten elected again. What we've seen is there are two things, I think, that matter here. One is, some people say, yeah, he's not a good person, He's done these bad things. But when he says he'll create a dictatorship on day one, I don't really believe it, or, you know, he's gonna deport 12,000,000 people. What's also the case is that we've seen a lot of these psychological studies. If people believe something, their brain synapses work to reinforce those beliefs. And even if there's incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.”

​

• • “So, you know, character only goes so far. Values matter. Culture matters. And the tribal identities matter. And that's probably more important for hosts of voters than issues.”

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6) What do you think about the role of a third-party candidate—is voting for the third party better than abstaining? What would motivate someone to vote for a third party?

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• Main Points:

  • U.S. political structure heavily favors two-party dominance; third-party runs can distort outcomes.

  • Ranked choice voting could lessen spoiler effects and open space for third parties.

  • Most voters for third parties do so out of dissatisfaction, but their impact is constrained.

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• Key Quotes:

  • “Our system is set up…to be a two-party system. So there are other parties. When they run for president, they can often distort outcomes, and that is what we saw in 2016. Jill Stein, the candidate for the Green Party, who had been supported by Russia and was applauded by Trump, pulled more votes from Hillary Clinton in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania than Trump's margin of victory.”

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• • “The biggest thing that we could do at the presidential level is to have ranked-choice voting…if we'd had that, for example, in 2016, it's more likely that Hillary Clinton would have won because it's very likely that the second choice for most of the Green Party voters was Clinton, not Trump. But at least, you'd take away the idea that a spoiler candidate could emerge just to try and distort the outcomes.

​

7) How have you observed campaign strategies shift over the years?

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• Main Points:

  • Campaigning has shifted from TV ads to social media and more targeted messaging.

  • Social media platforms now influence information flow and narrative control.

  • Large-scale volunteer turnout efforts and celebrity endorsements are more common.

​

• Key Quotes:

  •  Well, certainly, one of the things that's happened is that we have seen a shift away from the traditional kind of campaigning that was television advertising. We still see plenty of that, but towards social media and more specialized media. And we're gonna see that, I think, expand even more as time passes. And it becomes a problem in part because of how easy it is to manipulate social media. And, of course, this time around, Elon Musk turned Twitter into effectively an arm of the Republican and Trump campaigns.”

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• • “What'll be interesting to follow from this is that there was a huge effort made, especially on the Democratic side this time around, to create a very effective turnout machine.”​

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8) How much time do presidents choose to spend in which states?

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• Main Points:

  • Major campaign time spent in swing states, especially Pennsylvania.

  • Candidates focus on maximizing turnout where it matters most.

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• Key Quotes:

  • “This time, it could be a lot of time in Pennsylvania, and in the end, it didn't really help. Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure how they'll be able to handle this. It's hard not to do whatever you can to make sure that your voters turn out, but they may have to find other ways of trying to do that.” 

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9) Campaigning and swing states—how much does visiting matter to the vote?

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​Main Points:

• Celebrity endorsements and major rallies can excite voters but rarely shift outcomes significantly.

• Local messaging and practical impact (such as voter guide videos) matter more than excitement.

​

• Key Quotes:

  • “Having the Taylor Swifts and Bruce Springsteen's endorse, which one might have thought would make a difference with young voters, with Taylor Swift, for example, and some older voters with Bruce, who did a very compelling video about why he was endorsing Harris. But, obviously, it didn't work. You can maybe build a little excitement with celebrity endorsements. And it's more than just endorsing.”

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10) Do you think social media and celebrity involvement in campaigns have shifted effectiveness compared to older strategies?

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• Main Points:

  • Celebrity endorsements and social media can generate attention and excitement, but rarely change actual vote outcomes.​

  • Endorsements are still sought because they bring crowds and media coverage.​

  • Campaigns are likely to rebalance toward more traditional tools as they recognize that online buzz does not necessarily translate into votes.

 

• Key Quotes:

  •  I think you always wanna get those endorsements. It brings headlines. It brings people out to hear your message, at least. But I think it's pretty clear that they're not dispositive. So I would expect a return to more traditional things, at least in terms of the focal point. But if you wanna get a huge turnout for a campaign event, it certainly helps to have a Taylor Swift there, but there are a lot of factors that go into it

​

11) How do candidates choose their running mate, and does it matter?

​

• Main Points:

  • Running mate choice aims for demographic or strategic balance but rarely changes votes.

  • Examples show little evidence of running mates shifting election outcomes.

​

• Key Quotes:

  • “It used to be the case that candidates would look at the possibility of winning a state that they might not win otherwise by choosing a running mate from that particular state. And sometimes it's, you pick your biggest rival to try and unite the party together. Other times, it's trying to find a demographic balance in different ways so that you can have a broader appeal to the different constituencies that you have. What we know is there's very little evidence that running mates matter in terms of how people vote.”

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• •  “And I think it would be very hard to make a case that Tim Walz or JD Vance affected any votes. What you want in a vice presidential nominee is somebody who might build some excitement in places where it matters.”

​

12) Do the backgrounds of VP candidates affect perception? Did Pennsylvania/Jewish identity matter for Kamala’s choice?

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• Main Points:

  • Running mates are chosen to project balance or broaden appeal (demographic, geographic, or stylistic), but evidence that they change votes is minimal.​

  • Tim Walz was chosen in part for his working‑class, teacher background and his folksy, non‑vicious way of attacking Republicans.​

  • Even when a VP’s identity (state, religion, or other background) seems strategically important, it rarely shifts enough voters to alter outcomes

​

• Key Quotes:

  • “Tim Walz was picked as much as anything. I mean, there were a couple of reasons. The first is that he had come from a working-class background as a teacher. Second was that he had this folksy method of being able to attack Republicans without seeming nasty or vicious, calling them weird, and saying Mind your own damn business about getting involved with women's health issues. They didn't exploit that as much as I would have expected they would. Those were effective messages, but it's pretty clear in the end that it didn't sway the votes you needed to have swayed.”

​

13) What advice would you give to someone young person seeking to get involved in politics?

​

​Main Points:

• Media literacy and critical thinking are essential to navigate misinformation.

• Engagement opportunities: poll worker, intern, volunteer, nonprofit involvement.

• Encourages young people to help protect democracy through direct action.

​

• Key Quotes:

  • “One thing I would say is first, really work hard at becoming media literate so you can sort out fact from misinformation and disinformation, because it's very easy to get caught up in stuff that ends up not being true.”

​

• • “We're in uncharted territory here with a president who's basically indicated he wants to blow up the political system... if you're looking for a way to get involved, now would be a good time to work with some of the candidates who will become very important in the midterm elections. … think about becoming a poll worker or working as an intern in the election office. And then it's a lot of our power is gonna be in the NGOs. It's the nonprofit organizations that are gonna step up and try to protect democracy.

​

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Transcript

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Norman Ornstein: I went to school at the University of Minnesota, and then I went to graduate school at the University of Michigan. And I came to Washington to work for a year on Capitol Hill, went back and finished my PhD, went off to teach in Italy, then came to Washington. And I taught at Johns Hopkins University and Catholic University for thirteen or fourteen years, and then went to the think tank full-time. And I'm now Emeritus there, meaning I'm not going anymore.

​

Anyhow, from a very early stage, I was involved with politics, especially the reform of these institutions. That's what I had written a lot about. I began to do a lot of media while I was teaching, starting mostly with public television, which, back in the old days, we didn't have cable, and we had these three networks plus public television. And when Richard Nixon got involved with these hearings on Watergate, the only ones who covered it, the hearings, gavel to gavel, were public television, and so I would do a lot of the color commentary for them. And then I began to do more with them with what's now the NewsHour, but what was then the McNealaire Report. And I wrote a lot for newspapers. And then in the seventies,  I also worked in the Senate, on a committee that I was the staff director of that reorganized the Senate's committee system, and I was involved with all kinds of reform efforts all the way through, including campaign finance reform and ethics reform, civil service reform, a lot of that stuff. So I've been sort of a public commentator on a lot of this over many years. 

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Lauren: That's very interesting. I saw that you spent a lot of time at the American Enterprise Institute, and you created this guide called Vital Statistics. And you did, as you mentioned, a lot of election reform, and you did a project on that, as well as being an on-air election analyst for BBC News. So could you speak a little bit more on those things? 

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Norman Ornstein:  Yeah. Well, I was actually for thirty years, I was an election analyst at CBS News. So I would go in for election week and work mostly with their correspondent, Bob Schieffer, who was one of their main figures, but also with their anchors, Dan Rather and Katie Couric, and more. So I did, at AEI, my colleague, Tom Mann, and I we've written several books together and run a bunch of projects, and started something called the Congress Project. And the first thing we did was a guide, vital statistics on Congress, which has been done every two years since. And that was an idea I had because I used to get called by reporters all the time wanting to know what had happened with staff, how many had gotten elected in different years, what the party's majorities were, and the like. And I'd have to search all over to find the answers, and this way we could put it all in one guide. And then we began to work on just a whole bunch of projects on election reform, on the independent council, and on continuity of government, after 09/11. 

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Lauren: Yeah. That's super interesting. I mean, you talk about all these things, and I'm very interested in seeing how these elections have changed over time and just political evolution in general. So the first question that I had was, over the course of your career, what shifts have you seen in the demographics of the electorate?

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Norman Ornstein: So well we know a few important things there. One is, of course, that the country's demographics have shifted, and we have moved pretty much inexorably towards being a country that is no longer majority white. And, so it's a majority minority, soon to be. And that's, of course, three broad categories: African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans. The Hispanics are more complicated because they're made up of people from a wide range of countries. The same is true of Asians. There have been a lot of expectations that, as we moved in that direction, it would inevitably work to the advantage of the Democratic Party, and that's not entirely proven to be true as we have seen.

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What we also know is that there's been a significant backlash against these demographic changes, especially among working-class white voters who feel as if they're losing their position of primacy in the country. And that's been a major lure of Donald Trump, in that direction. What's another sort of interesting twist on this is that for a long time, the Democratic Party was the party of working-class people, union people, and that's working-class whites and minorities. And they always wanted a higher turnout. The Republican Party, which was much more the party of the college-educated and upper middle class voters, did whatever they could to keep to put obstacles in the way of voting.

​

Draconian voter ID laws, of course, much of it going back to the era where there were all these moves made to suppress black votes. A lot of them are coming back. And we saw some state legislatures that use the process to make it much more difficult for people to vote, while Democrats have wanted to make it easier for people to vote. But what we've seen in the last few years is that working class white voters, because of these changes in demographics as much as anything else, for many of them, it's also because of the shift in the country on social issues, whether it is, abortion or LGBTQ, issues, or, just, you know, lower standards and, ethical issues. You've seen many people, and it started with working-class Catholic populations, but I'm from Minnesota originally. The Northern Part of Minnesota, what we call the Iron Range, was always a stronghold for Democrats. It's mining country. It was, you know, really a home of a lot of Eastern European ethnic background people who were working-class background. And then as the abortion issue and also some of the environmental issues move forward, they become more Republican. So Democrats have now done much better among college-educated voters and suburban voters.

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And this time, just as an example, we saw Republicans who had decried voting by mail as corrupt, deciding that actually it wasn't such a bad thing. So we see different attitudes around what we do with voting based on which party thinks they're doing better with different groups of voters. But we're in flux right now. We know that, despite what happened at the end of the campaign at Madison Square Garden, where you had all these people with a Trump rally, saying that Puerto Rico was an island of garbage and making all kinds of slurs, a very substantial number of Puerto Rican and other Hispanic voters in critical states went for Trump. And, Democrats who assumed that, partly because of the immigration issue, they would end up doing as well with Latinos as they've done with African Americans now have to do a lot of additional work to figure out why they're not getting those votes. 

​

Lauren: Right. And, you speak a lot about the demographics and African Americans versus Asians, and even just the country's demographics of Democrats versus Republicans. But have you noticed a shift in how meaningful people think their vote is in terms of election denial or the idea that, oh, because I'm in New York, it's gonna go blue, and so I don't need to vote. 

​

Norman Ornstein: That's a big problem, generally, given the larger tension within the constitutional system that is not set up for a country like the one we have today. So, starting with election denial, of course, that has been a phenomenon that was deeply enhanced by Trump. And it's basically, if I lose, it was rigged. If I win, it will be fine. And we saw that reaction this time. And there, there's kind of an asymmetry. Democrats generally don't think that there's some conspiracy to overturn the legitimate outcome of an election. They lose. They know they lose. It's a difference in the norms surrounding the process. You know, we have a lot of sore losers now. So that's one part of it. 

​

Certainly, you're right that you have an electoral college, and you have a combination of senate races that are now in states where there's usually very little contest, and house elections in so many states where partisan gerrymandering and racial gerrymandering stack the deck. And it means that the system is not working the way it was designed or was supposed to. You know, an electoral college, of course, originally, it was supposed to be a group of people, where the popular vote was not the important thing. It was what these electors decided. Then we moved in the, you know, nineteenth, twentieth centuries, in the twentieth century especially, to where 48 of the states and the District of Columbia said, no.

​

There'll be physical electors, but, basically, they will have to vote on the basis of what the state does, in the popular vote. But if that's the case, and the whole idea of an electoral college was so that people would pay attention to states, small and large, there's no point in paying any attention to presidential candidates in more than 40 of the 50 states because the outcome is foreordained. And so it comes down to, as we saw this time, seven states. And it means that we're gonna have more and more instances where the winner of the popular vote loses the presidency. And, of course, it can happen just because there are very small margins.

​

 In this case, in this election, Trump won the popular vote, although he didn't win a majority of all the votes, and he won it by about 1.6%. But he was able, by pretty small margins, to win those swing states. But what we saw in 2016, of course, was that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by more than 3,000,000 and lost the electoral college. So you're gonna have a growing sense that the election is not necessarily legitimate, that when you vote, it doesn't matter. And if you're voting for a president in a firmly blue or firmly red state, it's a performative act as well. 

​

There's a bigger issue here, which is that we're almost at a point where 70% of Americans will live in just 15 of our states. And that's because people move to the big states where the jobs are. And, what that means is that, before very long, 30% of Americans will elect 70 of the 100 senators, and they're not gonna be representative of the country or its diversity. And then with the gerrymandering, we're increasingly, Donald Trump aside, gonna be at a point assuming we continue to have elections and no matter how fair they are, where the votes don't seem to count. The voters are gonna start to view our elections as not legitimate because we have a republic. The republican form of democracy is that voters elect their representatives, and their representatives are supposed to represent them. And what happens when the voters vote, and they don't get represented? And we see this already now. The House of Representatives is supposed to be the body that is most responsive to public opinion. Well, 90% of Americans want background checks on guns. It goes nowhere. So, you know, we have a crisis ahead in legitimacy, even if Donald Trump just plain disappears. 

​

Lauren: So, I mean, you mentioned the 2016 election versus the 2024 election. Donald Trump actually did win the popular vote, which is interesting compared to the first time, you know, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but she didn't win the overall election. And it makes me think more about the younger voters and how people who have voted in the elections before might, you know, be more inclined to vote and think that it has more of a purpose. But for the people who are first-time voters, and they see how the electoral college has sort of become less efficient over time, like might incline them not to vote. So, I wanted to hear more about what you think about the younger voters versus people who have been voting for a longer time.

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Norman Ornstein: Well, certainly, we have to worry that if people do begin to believe that their votes don't matter, they won't vote. And we have to worry, including now, with a combination of many states that are very pernicious in terms of putting up roadblocks to voting for younger voters. Like, for example, we have many states that are trying to take away the ability of college students to vote in the states where they're going to college. 

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Lauren: Right.

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Norman Ornstein: And these are Republican states mostly. But it's also, people get frustrated. Now, having said that, you have a whole lot of house races, especially this time, and state legislative races and races for judges that are decided by a handful of votes, very small numbers. So individual votes do matter, but just not at some of the higher levels, not so much in the Senate and the House. But we have to try to find ways to make voting easier and more pleasurable and not a burden.

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Other countries do this much better than we do. We put the burden on the citizens to register. We put up all kinds of roadblocks. It wouldn't surprise me that in this Congress, with Trump, they'll try and pass a nationwide voter ID that, you know, will only affect a small proportion of people, but depending on how they define it. Like in Texas, where they have a voter ID law, a state-issued, concealed carry gun permit counts as an ID. A student ID from a state university does not. 

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So, we have to be concerned about that. We have to be concerned about what they might do with all the reins of power, and especially if they, you know, blow up the filibuster in the Senate. But we're having ongoing struggles, and then we have a couple of other problems. I mean, most elections are run by states and localities.

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They don't wanna spend a lot of money on these. If you're a county and you have responsibility for your voting system, you have a limited amount of money, and people are demanding that you use it for garbage collection or other purposes, and the garbage gets collected twice a week, and people notice it. And if you vote, every year or every two years, they don't notice so much. So they don't put the money into it. We're seeing a lot of instances where very bad groups are trying to put in place election officials who will tamper with the votes and till the outcomes.

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But we also know that we're having real trouble getting poll workers. And mostly, the poll workers are older. They're retired. They're not gonna be around for that long. If you have electronic machines, they have no idea how to operate them. So we're gonna have to find a different way, and we're gonna have to find some resources to make sure that we can make voting work. 

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Lauren: Yeah. Another question that I had was, how do you think that the majority of people choose who they're voting for? I mean, some people may just vote for whom their parents vote for, which is obviously not the way one should go by that.

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Norman Ornstein: That. And, you know, this could be in terms of the most recent election or, in past ones, too. Most people identify with the party. You can hear a lot of, well, we are one third independent, one third Democrat, one third Republican. But the fact is, if you look at those independents, a third of them say that they are independent, but they lean to the Democratic Party, and another third are independent and lean to the Republican Party.

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And they vote the same as the ones who say that they're Democrats and Republicans, stronger. So people vote mostly based on party, and we've seen straight-ticket voting increase. That's happened more. It used to be more and more that people would split their tickets. They might vote for their partisan identity, for president, but then, you know, in a senate race, they might have a different view of a candidate, or the house race, or a local race.

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And we still see a little bit of that, but much less than we used to. So we have states like Montana and Wyoming, where they used to be Republican, but they used to elect Democrats as governor if they thought that they were more competent. That just doesn't happen very much anymore. We've become more partisan as we have polarized more, and people vote as much based on what some of my political science colleagues have called negative partisanship. It's not so much because you embrace what your own party stands for or even know in many cases, and it's more that the other side is evil, and we've gotta make sure they don't get in power.

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Now, are there some people who vote based on an issue? Well, we've seen that in the midterm elections, where turnout is lower. This last time in 2022, when Democrats did better than most people expected, the abortion issue was a big one for voters. These are elections where the turnout is lower, but the ones who turn out are the most motivated. And, it's easier in a midterm to focus on one issue than it is in a presidential election.

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Democrats thought that the abortion issue and the issue of women's reproductive freedom would be more significant this time because of what happened in the midterm, and it didn't prove obviously to be the case, because there are a whole bunch of other issues that emerged, or just the culture. Just, you know, I may be a Republican, and I may be for choice, but I just don't like what Biden has done. There's inflation, all of that stuff, or others that might be the Middle East.
 

Lauren: Right. And how much of someone's vote and their decision do you think is, you know, based on either their political stance versus the poll, the candidate's political stance, versus their character?

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Norman Ornstein: I mean, in this most recent election, I think I mean, I've heard a lot of people talking about the actual character of these two candidates versus, you know, their actual policies, and how important do you think that is? Well, if character really mattered all that much, Donald Trump would never have gotten elected again. What we've seen is there are two things, I think, that matter here. One is, some people say, yeah, he's not a good person, He's done these bad things. But when he says he'll create a dictatorship on day one, I don't really believe it, or, you know, he's gonna deport 12,000,000 people. What's also the case is that we've seen a lot of these psychological studies. If people believe something, their brain synapses work to reinforce those beliefs. And even if there's incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.

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And we know from some of the studies done about this election that you had a lot of people who decided, okay. I'm gonna vote for Trump because I don't like the inflation, and I don't like what happened under Biden. And then when they're told what Trump has said or and you know, assert that he will do certain things, even using his own words or his own actions, they deny him because it causes cognitive dissonance. 

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So, you know, character only goes so far. Values matter. Culture matters. And the tribal identities matter. And that's probably more important for hosts of voters than issues. Now, were there other issues that matter this time? We know, for example, in Michigan, where you had a very substantial number of Muslim Americans in a state that has a big population of them, who rebelled against what Biden had done with Israel and Gaza, and said, Okay. We're gonna vote for Trump. And now they're having second thoughts because they're seeing who he's appointing, what he's saying about it, and it's like, oops. Maybe that wasn't the smartest thing to do. But, you see that sometimes with single issues, and sometimes it doesn't work. 

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Lauren: Mhmm, yes. I think that's really interesting. And another thing that you've said was that when voters hear something that Trump did, they deny it. And I've seen all those videos where someone will actually say to a Trump supporter something that he did, but pretend someone else did it. And then, they'll think, oh, my gosh, that's the most awful thing. And then the person says, Well, you know, Trump actually did that. And then they were like, oh, well, it's not that big of a deal. So I think that was something I've seen and thought was very interesting because it's like, well, is it the act? How bad do they actually think the action is? And is it different because Trump did something versus if someone else did it?

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Norman Ornstein: They really, I think, people pinned a lot of hate on Kamala because, you know, if Trump did something, it was okay. But if she did the same thing, it possibly could have been different. Yeah. And what we've seen with Trump and with a lot of people, especially on the Republican side, is a lot of projection. They attack Democrats for things that they've done, and that gives them a little bit of insulation against whatever revelations there are about it. Even just look at voter fraud. You get all of these claims of voter fraud, of individuals voting twice, and it turns out that, of the tiny fraction of cases where we have seen this, they're almost all done by Republicans. So, it becomes more muddled and confusing for people, and so they fall back on their tribal identities.

Lauren: Mhmm. Another part of the election that when I was doing my research, I thought was very interesting is the third-party candidates. I feel like it's not something that's so talked about. But what do you think about the role of a third-party candidate, and is voting for the third-party candidate better than abstaining from voting? And what would be someone's motivation to vote for the third-party candidate? 

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Norman Ornstein: We know that, you know, one, our system is set up partly because of the structures, in some cases, because of laws, to be a two-party system. So there are other parties. When they run for president, they can often distort outcomes, and that is what we saw in 2016. Jill Stein, the candidate for the Green Party, who had been supported by Russia and was applauded by Trump, pulled more votes from Hillary Clinton in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania than Trump's margin of victory. And we know that Ralph Nader in the past and Pat Buchanan have helped to distort outcomes as well. In some ways, the fact that the system is only a two-party system is unfortunate if you think about voters who don't feel as if they have a home in either party and have no real place to go if you're gonna have an impact.

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And that's partly because our Congress, for example, is what we call a single-member district first-past-the-post, meaning that there's no proportional representation. It's all, it's winner takes all, and it's whoever gets the most votes. And that means in a country where most people identify with one of the two major parties, getting any kind of a foothold, having, for example, you know, seats in Congress, becomes almost impossible unless you are a regional party where there's a strong resentment in the region. That, I think, could be dealt with in a couple of ways. One is that we change our system, and that's hard to do.

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But we could change it, for example, to have more multi-member districts. And, the biggest thing that we could do at the presidential level is to have ranked-choice voting. So you vote for your first choice, but then you rank the other candidates. And it's sometimes called instant runoff voting. So if nobody gets 50%, then the lowest number of votes, if there are, like, five candidates, the one who finishes fifth, the second-place votes get allocated to the other candidates, and then you keep doing that until somebody gets over 50%.

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So if we'd had that, for example, in 2016, it's more likely that Hillary Clinton would have won because it's very likely that the second choice for most of the Green Party voters was Clinton, not Trump. But at least, you'd take away the idea that a spoiler candidate could emerge just to try and distort the outcomes.

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 And we had that last time for a long time with this group, no labels, that kept talking about putting up a candidate, and some of their officials were very explicit that it was to draw votes back then from Biden, so that Trump could win. If you had ranked choice voting, it's not gonna happen that way. And you're also gonna probably open up the dialogue a little bit more and encourage some of these parties to run because they're not gonna be used to distort the outcomes.
 

Lauren: Right. And I mean, there's probably so much effort that goes into a campaign, and you mentioned Jill Stein and that she actually got a good amount of votes. Obviously, it was nowhere near Trump or Kamala, but is it worth it to vote for her? I mean, the system that you said with the ranked voting seems like a great system. Obviously, it's not what is present now, but for the people who are voting for her, you think it's because they don't want to not vote, but they don't want to vote for the other two candidates? Or, you know, what does that process look like?

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Norman Ornstein: I think most of the people who voted for Harris were voting for the Democratic nominee. And some of it, of course, was trying to repudiate Trump. What we did see this time is partly, I think, based on what's happened in the past few elections, where the third-party candidates did have a role in tilting the outcome; they did not do very well this time. You know, we can't say this time that Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Nevada, because Jill Stein or another independent candidate or a libertarian candidate pulled more votes away. They got many, many smaller percentages. That may not last. We may see them come back and play more of a significant role. But I think most people saw the stakes this time a little bit more and voted for the two-party candidates for that reason. 

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Lauren: Right. That's really interesting. And even for me, as I watched the election and watched the polling, it shocked me. I didn't think it was gonna. I mean, it was close, but it wasn't as close as past elections and even Hillary beating Trump with the popular vote. I mean, yeah. I've seen, you know, people saying, Oh, well, Kamala, she's probably gonna win the popular vote, but he might still win the election. I mean, he won both. So I think that's a very interesting way to look at it. Something that I was also very interested in is how you have observed campaign strategies shift over the years. You know, now there's a lot of messaging and marketing, and I was hoping that you could speak more on that. 

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Norman Ornstein: Yeah. Well, certainly, one of the things that's happened is that we have seen a shift away from the traditional kind of campaigning that was television advertising. We still see plenty of that, but towards social media and more specialized media. And we're gonna see that, I think, expand even more as time passes. And it becomes a problem in part because of how easy it is to manipulate social media. And, of course, this time around, Elon Musk turned Twitter into effectively an arm of the Republican and Trump campaigns. And Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have not been terribly vigilant about keeping foreign actors from intervening or misinformation from taking place, or lies from being perpetrated. So that's certainly one of the things that we've seen. 

What'll be interesting to follow from this is that there was a huge effort made, especially on the Democratic side this time around, to create a very effective turnout machine. And, you know, they got tons of volunteers as well. So I know from my own experience with plenty of my friends, the number of people who went up to Pennsylvania to knock on doors and try and get turnout up was astonishing. I don't think I've seen anything like it before.

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But it didn't have all those videos online. In the end, it didn't matter. And, you know, I think we're gonna see a recalibration of campaign strategies going forward. The other part of this is the debates, and we had first Trump and his previous chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna Romney McDaniel, abandon the debate commission that had been in operation for several decades. And we ended up with just one presidential debate and one vice presidential debate. What used to be a major form of discourse in the campaign, three presidential debates, one vice presidential debate, which got pretty high ratings. You know, what'll happen if we do have an election next time around? We might not even have any debates. 

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Lauren: That's a really interesting point. And, you know, along with all of the attempts in Pennsylvania to knock on people's doors, what do you think about, how much time the presidents, like, choose to spend in which states? 

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Norman Ornstein: This time, it could be a lot of time in Pennsylvania, and in the end, it didn't really help. Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure how they'll be able to handle this. It's hard not to do whatever you can to make sure that your voters turn out, but they may have to find other ways of trying to do that. 

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Lauren: Yeah. I mean, because I think it's always the candidates; they try to spend a lot of their time campaigning in the swing states, and they bring celebrities to come up on stage and try to appeal to people. But in the end, how much do you really think that the campaigning and going to these swing states is gonna affect the vote in the swing states?

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Norman Ornstein: Yeah. Well, it's pretty clear that, despite having huge crowds for the celebrities and having the Taylor Swifts and Bruce Springsteen's, endorse, which one might have thought would make a difference with young voters, with Taylor Swift, for example, and some older voters with Bruce, who did a very compelling video about why he was endorsing Harris. But, obviously, it didn't work. You can maybe build a little excitement with celebrity endorsements. And it's more than just endorsing.

I mean, just as an example, I was able to help get Julia Louis Dreyfus to do a little video for Philadelphia, based on what was a mistake in the way they put their ballot together to make sure that people voting by mail in Pennsylvania knew just exactly what they had to do and what not to do. So you can have an impact that way, but it's not clear that you really get your turnout up just because you have endorsements for megastars. 

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Lauren: Right. I totally agree. And do you think that now, with all the social media and getting celebrities to help with the campaigns, do you think that it's shifted in the wrong direction compared to earlier elections, and how impactful it really is versus more of the original campaign strategies?

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Norman Ornstein: I think you always wanna get those endorsements. It brings headlines. It brings people out to hear your message, at least. But I think it's pretty clear that they're not dispositive. So I would expect a return to more traditional things, at least in terms of the focal point. But if you wanna get a huge turnout for a campaign event, it certainly helps to have a Taylor Swift there, but there are a lot of factors that go into it.

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Lauren: Mhmm. Right. And another aspect that interested me was choosing the running mate for vice president because, you know, we saw with the choices for Kamala, it was really interesting to see how she decided which out of, like, the three in the end would be most beneficial to her. And so, how do you think that the candidates choose their running mate?

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Norman Ornstein: It's no longer the case. It used to be the case that candidates would look at the possibility of winning a state that they might not win otherwise by choosing a running mate from that particular state. And sometimes it's, you pick your biggest rival to try and unite the party together. Other times, it's trying to find a demographic balance in different ways so that you can have a broader appeal to the different constituencies that you have. What we know is there's very little evidence that running mates matter in terms of how people vote. So one good example of that is in 1988, George Herbert Walker Bush, right before his convention, chose Dan Quayle, who was not widely regarded as qualified or experienced. And there was an enormous backlash, but it didn't affect the outcome. And I think it would be very hard to make a case that Tim Walz or JD Vance affected any votes. What you want in a vice presidential nominee is somebody who might build some excitement in places where it matters.

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And that could be if you have a woman as a running mate back in the traditional days, maybe you get women more excited. Having an African American, you'll get them more excited. And it's an expression of what kind of balance you have on a ticket, but it's not gonna affect many votes. 

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Lauren: This time around, she was deciding between someone from Pennsylvania and whether that really would have helped her in the end. And I also heard some talk about, well, the fact that he was Jewish and if that's gonna be an issue for her, or if that would help. And I think it was interesting to see the backgrounds of these people, whether that would change things when people are looking to vote. And as you said, obviously, it's more about the person who's running for president than the vice president, obviously, who would be running alongside them. But would that change someone's perception of who to vote for?

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Norman Ornstein: You want to have somebody who can carry a message forward that you want to have. So Tim Walz was picked as much as anything. I mean, there were a couple of reasons. The first is that he had come from a working-class background as a teacher. Second was that he had this folksy method of being able to attack Republicans without seeming nasty or vicious, calling them weird, and saying Mind your own damn business about getting involved with women's health issues. They didn't exploit that as much as I would have expected they would. Those were effective messages, but it's pretty clear in the end that it didn't sway the votes you needed to have swayed.

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Lauren: So, if you could give one piece of advice to Americans about political engagement or, you know, someone young and searching for more information on politics and looking for ways to get involved,d that might not know much about the different kinds of positions one could have in politics or the different ways in their community that they could get involved? What would you say? 

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Norman Ornstein: One thing I would say is first, really work hard at becoming media literate so you can sort out fact from misinformation and disinformation, because it's very easy to get caught up in stuff that ends up not being true. 

The second, and we're in uncharted territory here with a president who's basically indicated he wants to blow up the political system. So you hope that we will have a lot of young people who will fight back against some of these bad things. But if you're looking for a way to get involved, now would be a good time to work with some of the candidates who will become very important in the midterm elections. I think we will have midterm elections in two years, so he won't blow that up yet. But, you know, create a different balance in Congress, and think about becoming a poll worker or working as an intern in the election office. And then it's a lot of our power is gonna be in the NGOs. It's the nonprofit organizations that are gonna step up and try to protect democracy.

 

Lauren: Alright. Thank you so much.