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From Here Forward shares stories and ideas about amazing things UBC and its alumni are doing around the world. It covers people and places, truths, science, art, and accomplishments with the view that sharing better inspires better. Join hosts Carol Eugene Park and Jeevan Sangha, both UBC grads, in exploring solutions for the negative stuff out there — focussing on the good for a change, from here forward.
[00:00:00] Carol Eugene Park: Hello, friendly alumni. You've once again returned to From Here Forward, the informative but funny UBC Podcast Network podcast. We're your girls, Carol and Jeevan.
[00:00:13] Jeevan Sangha: Oh, okay, new intro.
[00:00:15] Carol Eugene Park: Yeah, I was just getting tired of saying favorite because like, who am I to assume that we're their favorite podcast in the UPC pod network, you know? Like, free the pod.
[00:00:24] Jeevan Sangha: Oh, okay. Well, loving that signature cheerful optimism from you, Carol. But hey, I'll take it. I mean, at least we're funny.
[00:00:29] Carol Eugene Park: But you know, I am clearly keeping the chaotic energy, so not much has really changed. So why don't we just move right on? Why don't you do the honors of introducing the enlightening but stressful conversation that we had?
[00:00:42] Jeevan Sangha: My pleasure. So, last month, we heard about Carole's enthusiasm for fall, and along with the leaves changing color and delicious seasonal drinks, this year, the new season also means it's the Canadian and U. S. election season. As Canadians, it's difficult to ignore the U. S. presidential election [00:01:00] because, well, it's everywhere, but the upcoming election seems to have higher stakes for the future of democracy in the U. S. So, we caught up with Paul Quirk, who is a political science professor at UBC and holds the Phil Lind Chair in U. S. Politics and Representation at the university.
[00:01:14] Carol Eugene Park: And Paul is very concerned about the future state of democracy in the U. S., and as Jeevan and I learned, we all should be. So, let's roll that tape.
[00:01:24] Jeevan Sangha: So, the run up to every U. S. election seems to have a certain degree of drama and theater, but what is it that's unsettling about this election in particular? Why do you feel that democracy may be at stake?
[00:01:36] Paul Quirk: In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Donald Trump and many of his supporters, including quite a large part of the Republican party, have claimed that he was the rightful winner of the election. And that's without anything approaching credible evidence for that fact. And despite numerous losses in court cases, in which he [00:02:00] and his supporters attempted to demonstrate that they were the rightful winners in various states. So, there was a really concerted, and it is still an ongoing effort on the part of, Trump and many Republicans to deny the legitimacy of that election.
[00:02:16] In addition, Republicans in many places have made efforts to assert more partisan control over the process of election, including the actual collection, counting, reporting, and certifying of votes. So, there's nothing very subtle about the degree to which the Republican ticket, Donald Trump in particular, have threatened legitimate electoral processes. And if they win the election, despite all that, they would have very strong opportunities and very powerful incentives to be even more aggressive and more ambitious about interfering with elections in the future.
[00:03:02] I'm giving a talk on a lot of these issues, at the Vancouver Institute, I'm, planning to make the remark that my talk will not be the feel-good lecture of the year.
[00:03:13] Carol Eugene Park: What outcomes of the election might impact the Supreme Court and the rights and freedoms of Americans?
[00:03:19] Paul Quirk: What's important to watch is, is a few things, most of all, who is elected president, but then also the elections in the House and the Senate. It could be critical [00:03:30] which party controls the House and which party controls the Senate. And both of those are in play. Most people would say That the Democrats have a, quite a good chance of winning the presidential election, if anything, it looks like they're ahead at this time, but not by much. It would be a long shot for Democrats to control the Senate after this election in the U S only one third of the Senate is up for election each election.
[00:03:55] So it turns out that there are a lot of Democratic senators who are up for re-election and they're in vulnerable seats, uh, but hardly any Republicans who are vulnerable. So, it'd be hard for the Democrats to maintain control of the Senate, although not impossible.
[00:04:11] You also asked about the Supreme Court. As of right now, there are no seats on the Supreme Court for the next president to make appointments to. Some of the members are getting on in years, but it would be actually kind of ambitious to predict that anybody in particular will be leaving the Supreme Court during the next presidential term.
[00:04:32] Jeevan Sangha: I'm curious about your thoughts on the electoral college system, which was conceived in a very different time. In your view, does it still reflect the will of the people, so to speak, or is there validity to the argument that it may be undemocratic?
[00:04:46] Paul Quirk: Use of the electoral college to pick the president was established for reasons that made a whole lot of sense, I think were possibly even compelling in 1789 and which have no validity whatsoever now. One reason was because the framers of the constitution believed that most people in the country, you know, this is a country with a mostly rural, not that much literacy, people were not, would not be informed well in order to choose the president. And so originally the members of the electoral college, the people, actually decided who they were going to vote for based on their knowledge of candidates and so forth.
[00:05:26] That disappeared over time as each of the states, one by one, decided to make their appointments to the electoral college depend on who won the popular vote in their state. So, that aspect of it is gone entirely. The other big purpose of the Electoral College was to prevent a candidate from campaigning exclusively to win the support of one region of the country. So if you had an election with three or four or five candidates, [00:06:00] some candidate might have decided well, I can win this, get the most votes by concentrating entirely in, say, the south, try to get, you know, 80 or 90 percent of the support of those people and forget about the rest of the country. So, the Electoral College was, was devised to prevent that. Now that there is actually a two-party system in the United States, there's no such thing as campaigning in such a narrow way.
[00:06:30] So those were two quite serious and defensible purposes for creating the electoral college. But neither of them has even the slightest bearing at this point. And it does threaten the election of a president who has Minority rather than majority support. That's a serious problem in itself. In the last couple of elections, the potential for discrepancy [00:07:00] has been greater. The best example in 2020, Donald Trump probably would have won in the electoral college if he had managed to come within 3 percent of the vote that Joe Biden got, actually, Joe Biden won by 4. 5 percent and won the Electoral College somewhat comfortably. But so, there's a pretty big difference there.
[00:07:24] But then there's another, another thing entirely different from that, that's a problem with the Electoral College. And that is, that means that only the votes of people who live in competitive states are worth contesting. Often, it's about 15 or 17, something in that range out of the 50 states that have competitive contests, and the candidates basically ignore the rest of the states. You know, so there are really serious problems with the Electoral College, and it would be very hard to make a principled defense of it.
[00:07:57] Republicans like it right now because it has been favoring them in recent years. There's nothing that actually guarantees that it will continue to favor them. And in fact, the state of Texas has been trending toward democratic in recent years. That's partly from immigration, migration from other parts of the country, it's partly from Mexican immigrants becoming citizens. And if Texas would become democratic, the Republicans would have a huge disadvantage in the electoral college. So, it's something that you can't really make a case for. It's, it's just a terrible outmoded system, but the provisions for amending the constitution to get rid of it are just insuperable.
[00:08:38] It requires ratification of an amendment to the constitution by three quarters of the states. And there are states that see benefits in keeping it. So, it's not going to happen. It's a bad situation, but it can't be fixed. Actually, it can't be fixed directly. There is a kind of an indirect fix that people are attempting and it's kind of complicated, And it [00:09:00] involves the idea that states can pass laws that say that they will give their electoral college vote to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of the winner of the vote in their state. And they passed laws that say they will do this, provided that enough other states Passed the same law that the national popular vote will automatically determine the outcome of the election.
[00:09:28] So there's a big movement going on and so it's not something that gets a lot of attention, but there are there are a large number of states that have actually passed that law and at some time in the Relatively near future it is possible that the Electoral College will be abandoned in effect through that means.
[00:09:51] Jeevan Sangha: I had no idea that there were these options available. You look at it from, especially from a Canadian perspective, so it's really interesting to hear. You know, beyond the presidential election, there are a lot of other important votes taking place on November 5th. Are there any races that you particularly have your eye on that seem influential or interesting to keep tabs on?
[00:10:11] Paul Quirk: The races that matter apart from the president are on the one hand, a considerable number of races in the House of Representatives, there are 435 House members, and most people don't know very many of them. The ones that tend to be well known are up for re-election, but most of them are in relatively safe seats.
[00:10:34] So what matters is out of 30 or 40 elections in The House of Representatives that are fairly competitive who wins the majority of those states, and it's not obvious. but oftentimes in the House of Representatives, what you expect is that there is some swing back from whichever party did very well in the election two years earlier.
[00:11:01] So two years earlier, this was a midterm election for President Joe Biden's presidency. And in the midterm elections, the opposite party, the off party, in this case, the Republicans, always do well. They always make gains, but those gains were much less significant in 2022 than normal. If anything, you might expect there would be some swing toward Democrats. But it might be small and it's not totally [00:11:30] reliable, but the Republicans hold the majority in the House of Representatives right now by about three votes, the margin is just tiny. So, if the Democrats do well in the House, they would take control of the House of Representatives.
[00:11:44] In the Senate, there are something like eight or nine Democrats representing states that are in general more likely to elect a Republican than a Democrat. So, these are people who are very vulnerable. On the other hand, some Democrats have been doing well in races where they weren't expected to do well. There's some signs that Senator Ted Cruz, the Republican in Texas, he's not the most popular politician in his party, but polls on that election are quite close.
[00:12:15] For the Democrats to continue to hold the majority, they basically have to win all of those nine or so seats that are considered to be vulnerable, unless they manage to pick up a few Republican seats, such as Ted Cruz's, which is a possibility. And just to kind of point out why all this matters, if Kamala Harris were to win the presidency, she would not be able to do very much in policy if she doesn't control both houses of Congress, both the Senate and the house.
[00:12:49] Carol Eugene Park: It's not a lot of hope.
[00:12:50] Paul Quirk: I understand why you're finding some of this, uh, sobering. Well, okay. So, from a democratic policy perspective, this is something that can be somewhat deflating.
[00:13:02] When the presidential candidate’s campaign, they talk constantly about what they're going to do as president. Kamala Harris says that she will gladly sign into law a bill that guarantees abortion rights, uh, nationwide. It's virtually inconceivable that Congress will pass a bill that guarantees abortion rights nationwide, even if the democrats do very well in the election, because in the Senate, there will still be the filibuster even if the Democrats have majorities in both houses.
[00:13:39] And with the filibuster, the basic requirement is that to pass ordinary legislation, kind of legislation other than things like budgets and some other special matters, essentially requires 60 votes, not 51 to pass them. And Democrats are not going to have anything approaching. 60 votes. It's actually worth noting why some really significant things did happen in the Biden administration.
[00:14:07] The most important legislation was the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. That was a strange name for a law that had a lot of policies in it that had nothing particular to do with inflation. Uh, and in fact, was the most important environmental legislation, carbon mitigation, by far that the [00:14:30] United States ever passed. It was presented as a kind of budget matter. If policies affect the budget, that is, they determine spending or taxing, they can be considered under procedures in the Senate that cannot be filibustered because the Senate knows that it has to pass a budget. So, it has procedures for passing budgets that aren't subject to filibuster. But something like abortion rights would have essentially no budget implications for the [00:15:00] federal government would be treated as ordinary legislation and would be filibustered. And that applies really to most of the Harris policy agenda, there really are not conditions that are conducive to a great deal of action. I'm so sorry.
[00:15:19] Jeevan Sangha: It's tough being the bearer of bad news, huh?
[00:15:23] Carol Eugene Park: So, there's a lot of talk about, you know, this has never been done before, this is crazy, this is unprecedented. I'm just curious, as an expert, is there anything from previous elections, not maybe in the last five years, that we can kind of look to, say, if Trump does win, and we have kind of something to kind of work with, in terms of progress, hope, yada yada yada.
[00:15:47] Paul Quirk: Well, there has certainly never been anything at all like the threat to democracy that Trump and the Republicans present.
[00:15:58] Carol Eugene Park: Like ever?
[00:15:59] Paul Quirk: Ever.
[00:16:00] Jeevan Sangha: Like, wow. Wow. Okay. Can you explain that?
[00:16:02] Paul Quirk: Yes. No prior president attempted to overturn the result of an election that he had lost. Trump not only attempted to do that, he has stuck to that position. During the vice-presidential debate, Governor Walz asked the Republican vice-presidential nominee, did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? And Vance avoided [00:16:30] answering. He said, I'm thinking about the future and thinking about the threats to democracy that come from censorship, referring to some policies Democrats had adopted about, trying to censor misinformation about COVID and so forth on social media. So, there's never been anything even slightly like this.
[00:16:51] Jeevan Sangha: Like going back to that challenging election results point, what do you think the likelihood is of having a definitive result on election night? And further than that, should the election swing towards the Harris administration, is it likely in, in your opinion, that Trump will challenge the results?
[00:17:10] Paul Quirk: The election, from all of the polls, the election is likely to be very close. When the election is close, nowadays, it's not decided within a day or two of the election, or certainly not the evening of the election, and probably not a day or two afterward. I do think that there is some possibility that the election won't to be close if that were to happen, it would be because Kamala Harris won handily. That's I think a possibility.
[00:17:40] The reason for thinking that that's a possibility is mostly that Democrats have overperformed in relation to polls the last couple of years. And there's a pretty good reason for understanding why that might be happening. I think that a lot of Republicans have a half a mind to reject Donald Trump. You know, they [00:18:00] understand uh, all of the problems that he's causing, they have some, at least suspicions that he might actually be guilty of crimes and they're sick of his extremism and so forth. But they still are not Democrats, and when they answer poll questions and they're asked who they're going to vote for, they say they'll vote for Trump.
[00:18:21] But people like that are more likely to fail to actually show up for the election than people who are really enthusiastic about their candidate. This is a factor that is actually difficult to measure. The polling companies, the people who analyze polls, are extremely sophisticated in what they do, but there just is no basis for estimating how many Trump voters might not actually turn out. So, I think there's some possibility that the election won't be close. And if that's the case, it would be because Kamala Harris and the Democrats won the election quite handily.
[00:18:58] You also asked whether Trump would challenge the current election. I think it's absolutely certain that he will challenge the next election. He was asked during one of his debates, I forget which one it was, whether he would commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election. And what he says is, I'll accept the results if I think they were fair, and that, if you know Trump, is him saying, I'll accept the results if I win. So this messy situation in which [00:19:30] he's claiming to have won elections and pressing for recounts in various places and bringing lawsuits, making bogus claims about errors in the vote count or corruption in the vote count or fraud; really hard for me to imagine this election occurring without a repeat of that.
[00:19:50] Now, I do think that a second time around, he might get a lot less traction for those complaints. One thing that's important is that people who have helped him in that effort in 2020 have faced a lot of hard times. Many of them have been indicted for various things, disbarred, you know, the attorneys who made his case in court, four different ones have been disbarred for the false claims that they made.
[00:20:20] There was an election official in Colorado, actually, she was the county clerk, that's the office that generally manages elections at the local level in the United States, who she was sentenced to nine years in prison for her cooperation with that, uh, fellow Mike Lindell, the pillow guy, who was running around claiming to be able to prove that Trump won the election. And what she did with him was give him access to the voting machines, from her county so that he could do some sort of forensic analysis of these machines, totally irregular and illegal, and she's going to prison for it.
[00:21:04] So I think there would be a lot less likelihood of aggressive support for Trump's claims this time around, than there was last time.
[00:21:15] Jeevan Sangha: You know, Canada is about to enter an election cycle of its own as well. And, you know, the state of democracy in Canada, how might this election impact Canadian politics or Canadian democratic rights, if at all?
[00:21:29] Paul Quirk: The most important thing here about democracy in Canada is that if Trump and Republicans win the election and it doesn't lead toward a serious erosion of democracy in the United States, what that would mean more concretely is that the United States would have elections in the near future in which there were so much pressure on electoral management systems on the administration of elections. [00:22:00] And so much facilitation of cheating, possibly intimidation of people who don't cooperate using the powers of government so that there would be elections that really weren't. There would still be elections, but they would not really be competitive because of the degree to which the sums on the scales were favoring Republicans and then a government in power due to those things, right?
[00:22:25] So the thing that I think is most relevant about this is that authoritarian governments don't like neighbors that have actual democracies. The leading examples of that are, uh, Russia and China, both of which have authoritarian systems, have been very concerned to try to prevent that dissatisfaction within their own countries and pressure for democracy within their own countries by finding ways to harm other countries that had democracies.
[00:23:01] I think it's actually quite realistic to say that in the worst-case scenario where the United States has highly compromised democracy or even mostly authoritarian system with basically bogus elections in the near future. The government's put in place by that means would put pressure on Canadians, find ways to make it difficult for Democratic parties and Canada find ways to prefer parties that strayed from democratic practices and moved toward authoritarian practices. So, I think there is a risk to Canada.
[00:23:40] There's another kind of risk, which is less dramatic, and that is just the risk of imitation. That is, if looks like you can persuade the public to re-elect you in the United States, after Taking actions to try to steal an election, a party in Canada could infer the same thing [00:24:00] might be possible in Canada just by means of imitation. I have no basis for making any accusation that any party in Canada has been influenced by that kind of reasoning, but it is a possibility. But I think maybe the more important one is that an authoritarian United States would be hostile to democracy in Canada.
[00:24:23] Carol Eugene Park: I'm sure there are people who, you know, want maybe an overview or a book recommendation on this topic. Do you have any that might be palatable for the average person?
[00:24:34] Paul Quirk: Well, I have two things that I think I can recommend. One is, in general, the work of a scholar named Rich Hasen. He's the leading American expert on election law, and he's very involved in, interest about threats to democracy, including misinformation. But he has a new book, called, A Real Right to Vote: How a Constitutional Amendment Can Safeguard American Democracy.
[00:25:03] And then if people are interested in particular about the relation between the American democracy and the Canadian democracy, there is a book that I edited in 2019 for Oxford University Press, and it's called, The United States and Canada: How Two Democracies Differ and What Difference it Makes.
[00:25:26] Carol Eugene Park: Amazing. Thank you so much for that insightful, but somewhat depressing conversation.
[00:25:31] Paul Quirk: OK.
[00:25:32] Jeevan Sangha: Very informative. Very informative.
[00:25:35] Paul Quirk: Alright, thank you. Thank you very much.
[00:25:39] Carol Eugene Park: On a scale of 1 to 10, how hopeful do you feel for the North American future of democracy, Jeevan?
[00:25:46] Jeevan Sangha: Well, if 10 is like the most hopeful ever, I think I'm coming in at a solid 3. These are disconcerting times, and even as the idealist that I am, I can't lie, it's hard not to feel deflated at times.
[00:25:58] Carol Eugene Park: Lots of feelings to unpack, but that's okay. On that note though, it is very important, more than ever, to channel that anger and grief. So don't sit around on your couch and have your potato chips, go out and vote. You know, the system may be flawed, but it is our civic duty to participate in democracy, even if it is facing threats.
[00:26:18] Jeevan Sangha: You sound like a civics teacher.
[00:26:19] Carol Eugene Park: Thanks.
[00:26:20] Jeevan Sangha: And whatever the result, if you want to hear more about how the election shaped out, check out the upcoming webinar called U. S. Elections 2024: Analyzing the Trump- Harris Showdown, where our friend Paul will be a guest speaker. The event is taking place on November 7th from 12-1:15 P.M. It's open to everyone, but you have to be registered to attend. Links to the event and the books that Paul mentioned in our chat will be listed in our show notes.
[00:26:42] Carol Eugene Park: Thanks everyone for listening. Make sure you catch our next episode by subscribing or following our show on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're feeling your feels, please drop us a review. We'd love to see it, not a lot of you do it. You can find me on Twitter @Caroleugenepark.
[00:26:59] Jeevan Sangha: And me @Jeevanksangha. From here forward is an alumni UBC podcast produced by Podium Podcast Company.