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Jordan Heath-Rawlings
It’s always a good sign when, a week before a big election that could shape the future of a country, someone tries to kidnap and break the kneecaps of the third most powerful person in that country. Flanked by security and staff, Nancy Pelosi left her home to go visit her husband Paul in hospital. Police now allege the suspect broke into the House alone, armed with a hammer, zip ties, and duct tape. You probably don’t need me to tell you this, but things in the United States seem dangerously close to going off the rails entirely. Next week in the midterm elections, both the House and the Senate will be up for grabs. Access to abortion is obviously on the ballot.
Jordan
So are inflation and health care and climate change in all the usual polarizing issues. But is this a bigger election than even those topics?
James MccCarten
Sometimes before a really important election, or even just an election that a politician really wants to win, a candidate will declare that democracy itself is on the ballot this year. In America, that doesn’t appear to be hyperbole. There are many Republican candidates running and expecting to win who refuse to acknowledge the winner of the 2020 presidential election. And they have plans that they’ve announced to challenge basically any results that don’t go their way. Some of them are running for positions that would put them in control of how those votes are counted. So what do Canadians need to know about America’s midterm election? What happens if Republicans take control of the House or the Senate or both? How quickly could our relationship with our neighbor change if things go sideways? I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. James McCarthy is the Washington correspondent for the Canadian Press. Hello, James.
James MccCarten
Hello there.
Jordan
Usually as a Canadian podcast, we wouldn’t cover the US midterms, but here we are, and it’s the second episode we’ve done on them. Before we get into the details, maybe just in broad strokes, as a Canadian reporter in Washington, what’s so important about this election?
James MccCarten
Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s important for a number of reasons, but I think it’s also important to consider that it’s a good show, right? Politics, I’ve found down here, is very much bread and the bone. People tend to live and breathe it even when they are kind of removed from it. You don’t actually encounter a lot of cynicism these days in terms of people opting out of the system. They are engaged, they are plugged in. Now, admittedly, over the last seven years, it’s been kind of a hard thing to avoid, and it’s been, in many respects, kind of a slow motion train wreck. And so it’s compelling. There’s no getting around that. It is riveting. And so I think right out of the gate you have to acknowledge that it’s good ratings, it’s good entertainment. It’s hard to look away from in terms of importance. That’s a big part of it, right? The stakes seem higher than they’ve ever been.
There’s this persistent message that you hear from politicians both in Canada and the US. Now, I think with some regularity, that this is the most what’s coming up is the most important election you’ll ever participate in. We are talking about issues like guns, we’re talking about abortion, we’re talking about crime. We have a landscape now where there is a heightened threat assessment from Department of Homeland Security and some other agencies that pay attention to these things. This is all in the post January 6 world that we’re living in. And so it definitely feels more consequential, right? It feels like the vote is no longer a thing where you cast your ballot, your person wins or they don’t win. You don’t necessarily feel that connected to the system.
Jordan
Now you cast a ballot for someone and you have to think about, is this person dedicated to my interests? Is this person dedicated to the country’s interests? Or is this someone who, given the opportunity, wants to burn the system down?
James MccCarten
I mean, that’s a real question that people are asking themselves in this country. And I think that alone tells you that, yes, there’s a lot at stake for people in this country. And because it’s the United States, people around the world, I can only imagine. And I do want to come back later to the politics as entertainment and horse race angle, because I think there’s a lot there. But first, as I said in the intro, which you didn’t hear, there are the really polarizing issues. Abortion obviously is huge.
Jordan
You mentioned guns, health care, climate policy, all of that is on the ballot. But one thing that I’ve heard from many, mostly Democrat politicians and a ton of media members covering this is that democracy is on the ballot. A lot of people have said that many times. It’s generally hyperbole. Is it this time?
James MccCarten
It sure feels like it’s not.
Jordan
It sure feels like that’s a real thing, right?
James MccCarten
We collectively survived four years of Donald Trump in the White House. But it is hard to get past the sense, and I think this is true on both sides of the aisle, of the political divide, that another four years of Donald Trump could very well be existential right for the system as it stands. These are serious. People talk about these issues and they talk about them with straight faces that, yes, there is a real danger that the system, which I think it’s important to understand, there’s a tremendous number of people in this country who feel deserted by that system, who feel abandoned by it. And so for them, it’s not that much of a reach for them to turn their backs on it. It hasn’t worked out for them over the course of the last 30 years, and they are struggling to survive, quite literally.
Jordan
And so where is the incentive for them to stick with or want to stick with for altruistic reasons, for purely rhetorical reasons?
James MccCarten
A system that, as far as they’re concerned, has ignored them, has disadvantaged them, has left them by the side of the road. While it carries the 1% and the connected and the elites in Canada, we like to think of them as the Laurentian elites, right? The people that are widely resented for having influence, for having education, for ignoring the needs and the priorities of this group that Hillary Clinton famously called the deplorables in the 2016 campaign. When you think about what could have happened on January 6, I don’t think most people really yet have come to terms with how close the US. Came to losing some pretty fundamental pillars of the system then. So in a kind of a post January 6 world, I think we have to assume that democracy is in serious trouble.
Jordan
So a week before the vote, then, just quickly, because we’re not going to get into the X’s and o’s of this entire playbook, but for Canadians who have been lucky enough not to have to pay attention to this on a daily basis, which party is favored to control the House and the Senate?
James MccCarten
I know, regardless, Joe Biden will be president, but his whole agenda depends on the next week, really. It’s been an interesting few months, for sure. First of all, the midterms always carry with them a lot of baggage for the party that’s in the White House. Right. It’s become now a pretty standard pattern that the party that’s in the White House takes a beating in the midterms. It seems to be part of the sort of whole check and balance system that exists down here. So that was already baked in. And the Democrats there’s a tremendous amount of dissatisfaction with Joe Biden. Anybody who has ever seen him perform in a news conference or an announcement, whatever it may be, he comes across as fragile, he comes across as old, and the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a real low point in his presidency. There are a lot of people and of course, there’s post pandemic stuff right? There’s the economic issue, there’s the price of gas, crime. The statistics do bear out that crime has been on the rise as well. This is all grist for the mill, for the Republicans, right. In many respects, it’s sort of a perfect political storm for the Republicans. So there were a lot of headwinds coming in as far as the Democrats were concerned. And then along came this Roe v. Wade decision, which really gave them something to talk about and gave them a really compelling argument to take into the summer, which was, you want to put the Republicans in Congress, and if abortion rights are important to you, you better say goodbye. So there was a real sort of momentum swing in the middle of the summer that has now petered out. Abortion seems to have been priced in and you’re seeing the resentment and the frustration with things like gasoline prices, with inflation, with all of these economic consequences of the pandemic. There’s still very much a labor shortage down here. And so these are all things that people see on a daily basis, right? They experience them. There is nothing worse for an incumbent political leader than price pressures. Anything that hits the pocketbook. That’s kind of the gold standard in politics. If you have a compelling economic argument to make against the other guy, you are in really good shape. Right. And so the cars have always really been sort of leaning the Republicans way and we’re now seeing that, I think, come to the fore. We’ve just seen a number of districts on the House side of Political Report, which is one of the big media that’s down here that’s very granular when it comes to looking at this stuff. They’ve taken ten districts and moved them collectively, not on to the Republican side, but closer to right. There’s a couple of districts in places like California that are supposed to be solidly Democratic that are now very much either in the toss up category leaning Democratic. All of that points to weakness. Right. Kathy Hockey in New York who took over for Andrew Cuomo in New York State, a Democratic governor is supposed to be a pretty safe bet and she’s in a tight race. So those are things that tell you the Democrats are in trouble across the board. So the House, I think, is probably a foregone conclusion. I think the Republicans are going to control the House. The Senate is where things are very interesting because it’s already 50 50, right? 48 Democrats and two independents who caucus with the Democrats, 50 Republicans, and then of course, the Vice President who breaks the ties. There are somewhere between five and seven, maybe eight different states where the race for the Senate is very close within the margin of error. Some very interesting candidates on both sides, including a number of folks who are Donald Trump backers and who have been endorsed by the former President. And these are races, these are tossup races that are tremendously close. They really shouldn’t be. And the Republicans would probably be running away with a lot of them if it weren’t for the fact that some of these candidates are very divisive. JD. Vance in Ohio, Mendeaus in Pennsylvania, Hershel Walker, of course in Georgia. All of these candidates have a tremendous amount of baggage and are weighing down the Republicans to a certain extent and yet are still very much in this thing, right? So it’s anybody’s game at this point.
Jordan
So let’s talk now. That was a great primer, by the way, especially for Canadians who haven’t followed it. And those are the Senate races that I guess we’ll be looking very closely at. But I want to talk now about Election Day specifically and maybe we’ll start when people are at the polls. You mentioned earlier that Homeland Security has elevated a threat level. Given what we just saw at Nancy Pelosi’s house, the attack on her husband violence must be a real concern. What are the chances of some kind of violence on election day at the polls?
James MccCarten
It certainly feels to a watcher from afar that things are dangerously close to getting out of control. For whatever reason, we all want to think about these things as being organized, right? Like January 6 was an example of something that had a kind of a siege feel to it, right. It felt like it was orchestrated and organized. That is not a serious threat. As far as the folks that I’ve spoken to about what may ensue, no one is particularly concerned about an uprising, if you will. What concerns them is exactly, I think what we saw play out in San Francisco. These individual actors who are frustrated, who are maybe having mental health issues, whatever it may be, they are the real danger. And I think that’s what you see reflected in a lot of the notices from the Capitol Police and other sort of larger police departments and Department of Homeland Security, FBI, that type of thing. Everybody is operating in an environment where the threat is elevated. We’re not on the verge of a crisis necessarily, but what we are, I think, dealing with is a snowball that’s rolling down a hill and getting bigger and bigger and bigger. That’s what it feels like right now. It feels like we’re in a stage of development and nobody quite knows where the bottom of the hill is. Nobody quite knows how big that snowball is going to get and nobody really has a good sense of what’s in its way. And that’s, I think, the sense that you get. There’s a tremendous sense. I wouldn’t call it fear or panic or concern. You talk to voters and they’re all pretty much going about their lives and they’re casting their ballots. And I’ve spoken to people in North Carolina and Georgia and elsewhere who say, I don’t think we’re going to see another January 6. What I do think we’re going to see potentially is more of that type of thing. And then I think you’re going to start to see the sort of the walls around these people. The Nancy Pelosi’s of the world started to be a little bit more fortified. Clearly now she’s going to have more security in her house than she did before, even when she’s not there. And none of that bodes well. Right. That’s all just part of this snowball process. Unfortunately,
Jordan
On election night itself, once the polls closed and the results start to roll in, that was one of the big issues with 2020, was that because of the number of people voting by mail, the early results all sort of trended towards Trump and the Republicans. And then of course, as those ballots were counted, it trended back towards Joe Biden. What do we know about what we should expect this time? Would it be something similar?
James MccCarten
I think so. I think so. I mean, I think as much as they would like to be able to count early ballots, absentee ballots and that type of thing more quickly, in a lot of jurisdictions, the law still is that they’re not allowed to start counting those until election night. Right. I think in Georgia there is, I think, a real push to get in there ahead of time because Georgia has one of these statewide election law landscapes where the lines get really long and the process can be really arduous on Election Day itself. So people tend to vote more early down there. And I don’t know that we have a clear sense that they are prepared for particularly midterms, right, because midterms aren’t supposed to be like a presidential. They’re not supposed to have the kind of turnout that we’re already seeing in a lot of places. This is going to be it’s definitely going to blow away 2018 and it’s going to approach 2020 levels. So, yes, I think we are in for another very familiar sort of situation. The one saving grace is that we don’t have a Donald Trump who’s going to be able to stand up on election. I can claim victory won’t some of those mini Trumps, some of those Republicans around the country. Carrie Lake, as you mentioned, who knows about Herschel Walker or whatever, this is what I want to get out next. Won’t some of those people refuse to concede or claim victory early? Oh, yeah, I think so. I really do. And the other thing that’s interesting about that, too, this is something that a lot of Canadians probably don’t understand. Americans vote for everybody, right? There’s an old joke about I wouldn’t vote for that. I wouldn’t like that guy dogcaster. They kind of do down here. They vote for judges. I was looking at the California ballot actually, just the other day. There are us. Senate candidates, there are governor candidates, lieutenant Governor, secretary of State, controller, treasurer, attorney General. These particularly Secretary of State, these are people who orchestrate the elections, right?
Arizona has a guy running for Secretary of State who is an avowed election denier. So, yeah, there’s an issue for sure on November 9 or the night of November 8, but then there’s this even bigger issue of 2024. And if you have a whole bunch of people in these in these state houses who are in a position to say to reject outright the outcome of a 2024 presidential election, one in which potentially Donald Trump could be the Republican nominee, that’s quite an alarming situation. Potentially. The last thing that I want to ask you about is the climate from this going forward into 2024, and in particular with reference to what you brought up right off the top, which is you know the way that this is, and it is entertainment, at least for the networks that are using it for clicks and views and subscribers.
Jordan
And I guess that’s fine, but how much of that pushes people into their two separate camps and furthers the kind of breakdown in actually caring about the issues as opposed to my team or your team?
James MccCarten
And the reason I ask this is because and I don’t you can agree with this or disagree if you want. I feel like we see more and more of that up here, and we’re always just a couple of years behind the United States when it comes to political trends. So that stuff worries me, for sure. I’m the same way I’ve been noticing for years. I don’t want to overstate the case, but you can certainly see a pattern where something develops in the US. And then over a period of time, you tend to start to see it manifest itself. In Canada, I feel like the Freedom Convoy, as much as there was weird, there was something strange going on there. I don’t think we have clear answers. It may have been misinformation. It could have been foreign powers sort of trying to capitalize Justin Trudeau he’s an icon around the world as a progressive leader, right? And so he’s got a target on his back not only in Canada but elsewhere as someone who could be valuable as suffering a bad defeat. So in some respects, that wasn’t surprising. But I agree with you that there is, I think, a bit of a lag time that you do eventually see these things manifest. In Canada, 2018, I was covering the midterms. It was not anywhere near the kind of scope it is now, but I went out and started talking to voters in southern Virginia. And one of the things I noticed right away was when you spoke to people who were supporters of Donald Trump, they were invariably parroting back talking points. These were just ordinary people. These were not political operatives. These were not people who were themselves. They weren’t campaign volunteers or anything like that. They were just people out shopping, right, running errands. And you would hear these sound bites from them that were absolutely verbatim from things that had been talked about the previous few nights on Fox News. It was chilling, really, to hear exactly the same sorts of terms of phrase. Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court justice, was a big issue at the time. He was going through a confirmation hearing, and you would hear these conspiracy theories about, oh, this is all just an attempt to sabotage this. I don’t believe any of it. There’s these little tiny kernels of truth that folks would latch on to and say, this is evidence that this is all made up, et cetera, et cetera. I think that right there is probably a pretty indication, a pretty clear indication that your democracy is not healthy.
Jordan
So democracy to go back to your question about is democracy on the ballot?
James MccCarten
Democracy doesn’t exist unless people want to sort of take part in it, right? And it’s one thing when voters will turn out or won’t turn out 30% 40% turnout rate. That’s nothing terribly surprising to Canadians. We often have that problem. But I think the bigger issue is if people aren’t participating in their voting, but they’re not voting with their heads, they’re sort of voting out of some other motivation. They’re voting for someone because they want to spike the other side. They’re voting for someone because they want to spike the system. They want to burn the system down. To me again, to go back to the snowball analogy, that is a snowball that’s picking up speed. And that’s the scary thing, I think.
Jordan
James, thank you so much for this really in depth. Appreciate it.
James MccCarten
Anytime. Appreciate it.
Jordan
James McCarthy in Washington for the Canadian Press. That was the big story. I know that some people get upset when we cover American politics on this show, and frankly, I’m sorry, there is no other country in the world whose elections impact the actual lives of Canadians as much as the United States. More than that, whatever happens down there seems to find its way up here sooner rather than later. It might take a year or two or four, but the political trends in our neighbour to the south always show up during our own elections. So listen, I’m not asking you to care that much about American politics. I understand the desire to tap out of it, but just be aware of what’s going on and how close we might be to something pretty bad. You can find the big story at thebestorypodcast CA. You can also talk to us on Twitter at thebigstory FPN. You can write us emails complaining about our biased coverage of the American election. It’s. Hello? At thebigstorypodcast CA. You can call and leave a voicemail 416-935-5935. You can find this podcast wherever you get podcasts and you can listen to it on your smart speaker by saying play the Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heathrowings. We’ll talk tomorrow.
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