We are delighted to have you here and look forward to your questions. Ofwelcome the College Class 2024. As you begin your journey here at harvard. We wish you all the very best. We hope you engage the institute of politics, attending forums, working with our fellows and the range of programs we have. We welcome you to campus. We look forward to your engagement with the activities of the institute of politics. Tonight, we are fortunate to have four National Reporters who know harvard well and know the institute of politics well. Two graduates of the college. And two former resident fellows. The chief correspondent of the Washington Post, who continues as our senior fellow. We are fortunate with expert moderation to have the three journalists discuss election 2020. It has been an eventful few weeks after the republican and democratic conventions. As we look to the future with the debates, the key states, so a real chance for us to gain their inside perspective and insights into this critical election. This really starts off our election 2020. This will be a big part of the framework for the semester. Next week, we have two important forums, one with andrew yang for his perspective on the race and policy ideas he advanced on tuesday night. On thursday, we will welcome this years fellows at the institute of politics. We will have a former journalist from the New York Times editorial board. Jorge vasquez. We welcome back the former mayor of philadelphia, and alice stewart. It is a great group, they will be here on thursday. Gratitude we , welcome you back to the institute of politics. We wish we were at the forum, but we look for your return to that venue. We are grateful you joined us in this way. Thanks again for moderating. Thank you. Let me add my welcome to everybody. It is great to have everybody on this zoom. We will be all virtual this semester at the institute of politics, but things will be very busy. There is a lot of programming we are in the process of planning. We hope those of you who are not familiar with the iop will check back regularly. Those who are familiar will find your way back in the way you have in the past. We are our focus this year will be the election. So much of our programming content will be built around election 2020. That is the topic tonight. We have been through two unconventional conventions. We are heading into the final 60 days of what is likely to be a tumultuous election. This is being called the most important election in our lifetimes. I think that is said without any real exaggeration. The candidates are out on the campaign trail in a way they havent been, particularly Vice President biden. He was in wisconsin today. The president will be having a rally in pennsylvania shortly after we finish tonight. We will be then very soon beginning early voting in some states. That will accelerate from late september into october. The debates begin september 29. There will be three president ials and one Vice President ial. I believe they end october 22. There is much to talk about tonight. I am thrilled to have the three journalists with me tonight. They are the best in the business. Seasoned political reporters who have covered campaigns with distinction. Margaret from axios. Abby from cnn and alex from the New York Times. I want to start out with what might be an obvious question. I think it is important to set the scene and the tone. I go back to the point i just made that this is the most important election we have gone through. Alex, how do you describe the stakes of this election and how they compare with what we have seen in the past . First, thank you for the introduction. Thanks to all of you for tuning in. It has always been a thrill for me to return to the iop in any fashion. It meant the world to me as an undergrad and it continues to. Whatever i paid for with my senior thesis was entirely worth it. Having said that, this is my third and a half president ial election as a reporter. When i was a freshman and watching my first forum, it was the election between john kerry and george w. Bush. The stakes of that election felt quite high as well. So did the stakes of 2008, which was unfolding in the midst of a Global Economic meltdown. I do think it is important to contextualize it always feels like the stakes are apocalyptic for one reason or another. I do think that we view the candidates themselves and the supporters of the candidates and your average voter talking about the stakes of this election in different terms than in the past because when you listen to the conventions that we just heard, particularly the democratic convention, president obamas speech, none of us in our lifetimes have seen a former president talk about the very survival of democracy being on the ballot. That is the kind of language you hear in other countries that are younger democracies or more historically unstable democracies, not the kind of thing we typically hear in the u. S. Or have heard again in my lifetime, hearing a president talk about attacking the legitimacy of an election the way this president has. The stakes are existential, whichever angle you approach this from. I wonder how much that affects the debate over the next two months. On the one hand, the stakes are immense and, in some respects, greater and more abstract than elections in the past. The survival of democracy is not just a matter of what your tax bill is going to be at the end of the year. At the same time, for most voters, they are grappling with concrete challenges related to the pandemic and economy. For me, for the next few months, trying to figure out the interplay of those two forces, the World Historic stakes of the election and the concrete and in some respects more ordinary stakes of the election, but no less urgent for your average voter. I dont think we have any idea how those forces are going to play out in conflict or intention in tension. The convention, the pandemic was the overriding issue in the campaign and on the minds of people. The president used his convention to drive a law and order message. He has followed that up with lots more talk about law and order and the way he sees cities burning and the consequence of that. To what extent has he been able to change the conversation about this election . How is biden dealing with that . The president has a lot of power to determine what we talk about on a day to day basis. I also think it has been magnified because he has been so active in the midst of the pandemic. He has been traveling. He has been setting this narrative through his actions about what he wants to talk about. It has been an overriding message since george floyd, since lafayette park, when he cleared protesters in order to walk to st. Johns church to hold up a bible in front of it. Weve had a long time to get a sense of how this is working, if it is working at all. Yesterday and today, between the two days, we had an enormous amount of polling. I have been scouring the numbers to see what is going on with the law and order message, voters priorities in terms of what they care about and what they dont. The polling tells the same story. The first is people still think the economy or coronavirus are the top two issues for them. By and large, whether you are looking at National Polling or statebystate polling. When you look at criminal justice and policing you look at , law and order, public safety. I have been a little surprised to see biden is outpolling trump on voters about whether or not they think biden can keep them safe, whether he is better on the issue of law and order. As a political reporter, that is a little surprising to me. I think what we have seen is when President Trump starts to champion an issue, he moves republicans strongly in that direction. He has moved republicans in his direction on law and order, but it has not been enough to overwhelm bidens advantage or overwhelm the other factors. It has been interesting that this message seems to, based on where we are now, im not convinced it is working as well as perhaps the Trump Campaign thinks it is working. On the other hand, it is the dominant narrative. So much so that i think the Trump Campaign successfully pushed the Biden Campaign to go to kenosha in a way that they probably didnt want to have to do. Biden is now having this conversation that trump wants him to have, but he is trying to have it under different terms. There is still time left for these feelings to sink in. I do think the data we have up until this point suggests that this issue is not rising high enough in terms of peoples priorities. I think one of the reasons why is there are other things. The coronavirus and economy go hand in hand. People see the virus as tied to their economic state in the short and longterm. I think it is going to be difficult for the president to overwhelm that by talking about law and order. Especially when the facts are, crime is still at a 25 year low in the United States, even with increases we have seen this year. The idea that somehow the United States is being overrun by crime is not something that people are actually the vast majority of americans are living through. I think that also makes it more difficult for that argument to stick. Dan let me follow up with this question about biden. He doesnt seem he doesnt m to be he does see somewhat buffeted between his very solid base in the africanamerican community. He needs not just big margins, but he needs big turn out. We know there is softness among younger africanamericans, particularly young males. At the same time, he has got to worry about the strong support he has among white women in the suburbs, that that doesnt erode. He is also trying, in those upper midwest states, to get back some of those white midwest voters that have been with the republicans for a while. As you have watched him over the last week, how do you think he is handling that . How do you think he is feeling the pressure of trying to talk to different audiences about the same topic . Sorry, zoom fail. Great question. Hi everyone, welcome back to fall semester. [laughter] i think President Trump i mean joe biden has clearly shifted since the primary and since the conventions in terms of how he is messaging and presenting himself. His career in the senate began in 1972. He prides himself as a slightly left of center centrist. He was the pragmatist who could reach across the aisle. That was out of fashion in the primaries. He had to set it back. Not just for political reasons, but has taken much more of a leaning in position in terms of social justice and reforms in the wake of george floyd and a number of terrible things since the pandemic, including the pandemic and its disproportionate impact on race. Here is where the rubber meets the road in terms of cold, hard politics. It is not a national election. It is an Electoral College election. The demographics shifted the Tipping Point that has already occurred in population centers. Some of the largest states like california and new york are not at that point of wisconsin or pennsylvania. I think we have seen biden in the last few days realized he needs to define himself or be defined by President Trump. When you have President Trump saying things like, you know, that there is people in dark clothing on unidentified aircraft or people dont want to be raped or murdered in their suburban homes, that is something biden has felt like he needs to answer. Threading the needle between saying, i am for treating people equally and giving justice to people that are unfairly targeted, including by law enforcement, but at the same time saying, i am not for violence or violent protests. That is the message he is trying to juggle. It is complicated. You dont want to look like you are flipflopping or trying to make everyone happy. T we are seeing in our ash t we are seeing an hour wee are seeing in our just did a focus group out of wisconsin, not a poll, but what we learned these were predominantly swing voters who had been with barack obama in 2012 and voted for donald trump in 2016. Consistently what we heard from them, almost entirely white voters, one Asian American voter, was they dont like the way the Democratic Party talks about Racial Justice as if people of color are the only ones who get treated poorly by police or dont have systemic advantages. They dont like the rhetoric. If you use the word structural racism, those voters dont accept that is a thing. If you ask the question differently, if you say, is it fair for someone to be shot in the back . They will answer the question differently. Feeling that everyone gets a shot at a better life, it is not just things aimed at people of color and overlooking workingclass whites. It is a complex message. That is what joe biden is having to do in the last two months. Dan alex, there has been a slew of polls that have come out this week. Priorities usa, the democratic super pac, had a briefing yesterday to reporters. One of the points made was this is a durable race, a reasonably stable race. How do you read it at this point, particularly as people are being inundated with polls, what are the cautions you would offer people as they try to interpret this number, this work this states, that state . It is tough. I am as much of a polling junkie as anybody. I like to dig through the specific cross tabs of polls and take it seriously in the moment i am consuming it. Generally, as a consumer of polling information, you should use it to get the Broad Strokes of the race, not the granular details, until we actually know how different counties and municipalities voted and can say more specifically what happened. If you see one poll showing joe biden is leading by 20 points with hispanic voters in texas and another poll showing him leading by 12 points, i would not put that much weight on the difference between them. Similarly, i dont personally find it all that important in doing my job to parse the difference between the polls that show joe biden leading by six points nationally and nine points nationally. The point is he is leading and it is a substantially. It may not be a landslide, but it is substantial lead. Same thing in the swing states. He has a substantial lead nationally and it appears to be a smaller lead in the swing states. Not clear whether it is half as big or three quarters as big, or narrower than that. For a political reporter, it is not all that important to know exactly what the answer to all of those questions is. In terms of parsing the larger picture of the race, it is a pretty stable race. That is why people have a sense it is shifting in a significant way is that we have that set of polls in june and july, including by the New York Times and Washington Post, that show joe biden with an out of this world lead over the president nationally and in swing states. I think everybody at the time thought, this is not going to last. We dont live in a country where people win National Elections by 12 or 13 points. That has not happened in my lifetime and i dont expect it. Crossing my fingers that will be quite a while yet. It is always a more stable race when you have an incumbent president. People have pretty much made up their minds about that person. Doesnt mean they cant change their minds. Part of the reason why folks in the media are focused on voters like the ones margaret is talking about is because they seem like they could change their minds in one direction or the other. There is not a lot of those people left when you had a president for four years, a president like this one who has been so polarizing and has not tried to change peoples minds about him. The question is, what happens on the margins with turnout and participation . Then what happens with the , voters that did change their minds between 2012 and 2016 . Not just the obama to trump voters, but the obama to romney voters, those who participated in the past who did not participate this time. How does joe biden juggle those people . I think this is what we are seeing the president do right now. Is he delivering a message about reassembling the coalition in 2016 and trying to sweep this out again . Right now, we are not hearing or seeing anything from the polling that suggests he is reaching people that were not already pretty open to his message. Can i pop in on this . I concur with everything alex just said. I would add that one of the big differences between this cycle and 2016 is, unlike Hillary Clinton, joe biden is not a candidate who has unfavorability ratings that are as high. Voters do not feel as negatively toward him as they did toward her. I do think there is potentially a dynamic where you have some romney voters who sat out in 2016 or voted third party who come back into the political process. What does that do to the math . I think the math for trump in 2016 was threading a really fine needle. Some of it was obama voters who sat it out, some obama voters who flipped over to him, others who decided to Vote Third Party because they could not stomach him. That is a hard formula to put together again. Now there is this added dynamic that he is no longer running against a uniquely unpopular type of figure. They worked really hard to push up bidens negatives, but it has proven to be difficult task. I think it will continue to be. It is the most important task for the Trump Campaign to drive those negatives on biden up. There is another huge difference between this year and 2016. That is the percentage of ballots that will come in by mail, absentee and early, really could have a huge impact on the count, on legal challenges. This is not a guarantee, it is just a possibility, but there is a possibility that will impact the results to an extent comparable to how turnout affects results. People are voting right now, or they will be in a couple weeks. Obviously, election day has been election day per se for a long time, but we have never seen Something Like what we have seen this cycle where people have to turn in their ballots at a minimum 14 to 15 days before