Ken Mayer: The Electability of Republicans

Ken Harbaugh: Hi everyone, it’s Ken. Before we start, I want to share some exciting news: We’ve paired with Meidas Touch, so you can now watch these interviews on YouTube. Just search for the Meidas Touch YouTube channel, or click the link in the show description. Thanks, and enjoy the episode.

Ken Mayer: Well, the explanation I think for that is that the Republican Party is in a little bit of a bind. And a lot of the leaders have said this (Pence and McConnell and Pompeo and others) have sort of suggested or indicated that they think Trump is old news, that they think the party should move beyond him.

Ken Harbaugh: I'm Ken Harbaugh, and this is Burn the Boats, a podcast about big decisions.

My guest today is Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an expert on elections and campaign finance.

His current research focuses on evaluating recent state level campaign finance reforms. Ken, welcome to Burn the Boats.

Ken Mayer: It's really good to be with you.

Ken Harbaugh: So, you're a political science professor and researcher in a battleground state, a state that is sure to be at the epicenter of the 2024 presidential race.

I'm just wondering if it's a coincidence that you found yourself there. Did you intentionally place yourself at this political fulcrum so you could observe it firsthand, or did you just get unlucky?

Ken Mayer: I just got lucky. I grew up in California, did my graduate work on the East Coast. And as a Californian, the joke is the flyover country, that old New Yorker cartoon where everything west of New Jersey is just desert. And I had never been to the Midwest. I think I flew through O'Hara, but this was a job that opened up, and my wife was actually an undergrad here. And we came here in 1989 and we love it.

And it's a battleground state now. It hasn't always been a super battleground state. In the 1990s — well, from 1988 through 2016, it was a reliably democratic state in presidential elections, and in state elections. It was sometimes competitive. We frequently had one Democratic and one Republican senator. But from 1989 to 2000 when we were here, the governor was Tommy Thompson, Republican, and was wildly popular. And I would get phone calls from reporters when the primary season was starting and asking who I thought the Democratic nominee was going to be. And it's like my response was, the only question for the Democrats as far as the governorship goes, is who gets the blindfold and cigarette? Because Thompson would win with 60, 62, 59% of the vote, and they were never close. Since 2004, when it was very, very close for the presidential election, I think it was decided with maybe 4,000 votes, it's been pretty close. And obviously, in 2016 and 2020, when in 2016 it went for Trump by 23,000 votes, 20,000 votes, and roughly, the same margin in 2020 with Trump.

So, it's a hotly contested state. Most statewide elections are now won or lost by very thin margins, very narrow margins. And the consequence that students that we kind of live through — we get a huge number of campaign ads. There was a time when Wisconsin had more campaign ads, higher number of ads than any interstate in the country; more than Ohio, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania. And it just seemed like that's all you would see when you're watching the evening news. And you would have the ads that would show the two-thirds of them seemed to be maybe more, seemed like there were political campaign ads. It was exhausting.

Ken Harbaugh: I bet. Well, you had a firsthand view of Scott Walker's governorship as well, and he was seen for a while as the future of the Republican Party. I bring him up even though, thankfully, he's old news because I think his experience is instructive. When we look at the new future of the Republican Party, Ron DeSantis, how do you think about Scott Walker's meteoric rise, and then equally, I don't know if the adjective is right, but his equally meteoric crash into irrelevance, and compare it to what we're seeing with Ron DeSantis today?

Ken Mayer: There are some real parallels that Walker was the darling of National Republicans after his first few years here, came to Office, won in 2010 and really enacted some very, very conservative policies and even some extreme policies, essentially eliminating public sector unions, enacting what was, and still is, one of the most gerrymandered set of legislative districts in modern American history. And really, had adopted a very sharp-edged politics. The way that I described it is he won with 52, 53% of the vote, but governed as if he had 90% of the vote. And positioned himself as someone who was unintimidated by protests and opposition. And so, it was pretty clear he was running for president after he won in 2014. And many, many years ago, I think it was David Broder who mentioned, or someone who was in that class of famous political journalists of the sixties and seventies who talked about the great mention. There's some unseen force that sort of delivers a message of who is going to be taken seriously as a presidential candidate; who the journalists are going to take seriously, and who, at that point, kind of the gatekeepers would take seriously. And Scott Walker was clearly one of those people.

I mean, there were a lot of Republican candidates who ran in 2016. I think the count was 17. And there were a few people who pretty clearly were kind of the 2016 version of Maryanne Williamson for the Democrats in 2020. But Walker was for a while, a front runner in polls. And this was back in 2015 before the primaries got underway, but there were debates and lots of candidates announcing and jockeying for a position. And he did not do well in his first major exposures to national audiences. In debates, he was not much of a presence to the point where-

Ken Harbaugh: I feel like you're foreshadowing. Is this a commentary on what we're seeing now?

Ken Mayer: It's possible. So, in those respects, DeSantis is like Walker in that he is governing clearly from a kind of populist stance. Very conservative, very in your face, and really, I think going after his political opponents, whether they are politicians or even powerful corporations like Disney in Florida.

Unlike Walker, he won in a landslide in his most recent election. I think he won by 20 points. Although, his opponent of the Democratic candidate, Charlie Crist was not really a primetime candidate. And so, this is like the great mentioner is positioning DeSantis as the alternative for Republicans going forward, if they want to move on from Trump.
Right now, no one is in a position where you can directly compare them to each other. They're not on a stage, they're not attacking each other, which we really haven't seen Trump go after him in any kind of sustained way. I mean, he's doing his Trumpian things by giving him nicknames.

But one of the things I tell my students is that one of the things that we needed to learn from 2016 is to be more judicious and modest in claims of forecasting what's going to happen. And so, should DeSantis formally decide to run, I think it's quite likely, but we don't know for sure. He could be thinking, do I want to go for 2024? Do I want to wait until 2028? He's young. What will happen when he comes in front of a national audience in a directly confrontational setting where it's not him against what you might think is kind of typical Republican — people who Republicans are opposed to; liberals, teachers whatever, and it's you're scrapping with other Republicans for the base. What will happen then? And I think it's hard to say with a lot of confidence which way that's going to go. It could be that the people unite, Republicans unite behind him, and he becomes by acclamation the future of the party, but it's also possible that he may fizzle out.

Ken Harbaugh: I know you're reluctant to forecast, but you've long been a keen observer of presidential qualities and the qualities of presidential candidates, and I'm wondering if there are tells. Are there indicators before someone reaches that point of whether they have what it takes or not? I don't know if you're familiar with the book, What It Takes? It's an oldie, but a classic by, was it Richard Ben Cramer? Just a fantastic insight into what it takes in America's political context to run for and win the presidency. Are there things that stand out or not when you're looking at Ron DeSantis?

Ken Mayer: So, one of the things that I think we know in investigating or trying to think about how a president's background affects how they operate as president. There have been times when people have come to office and were not considered to have the skills that a president needed. Probably, Harry Truman comes to mind. There are presidents who seem to have all of the characteristics that the public looks for in a president. Rating presidents is difficult to do outside of our own priors. Most of the time when you ask the public who the great presidents are, there's a recency bias, but you get kind of the standard names and obviously, different answers from Democrats and Republicans.

But to get back to the question of trying to think about how a president's going to behave in office, I think one of the best predictors of how a president will behave in office is how they behave before they get in office. I mean, that is almost always a very accurate way of thinking about how a president is going to approach the office. When we're thinking about Reagan and Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon and Obama and George H. W. Bush, and Trump, that what they do in office is generally — well, “generally” is probably too weak a word; almost always completely consistent with how they behaved prior to coming to office. And if we think about what are the skills that the public thinks presidents should have, we can idealize this.

But a lot of the skills that the public wants presidents to have are contradictory. We want someone who's going to be decisive, but also someone who knows how to make deals. We want someone who is going to listen, but we also want someone who is going to do what they think is right, even if the public doesn't like what they're doing. Public says they want presidents who tell the truth, but mostly people want to hear what they want to hear. How is the president going to behave in office? They're generally going to behave in office the way they behaved before they got into office. And I think when we think of modern presidents for the last 70 years, presidents since Roosevelt. You can even go back further than that. We can look at presidents in the 19th century, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, George Washington — they behaved the way that they have behaved before.

So, it really is difficult to point to a particular person and say, this person has the qualities that a president should have. But that's a little subjective.

Ken Harbaugh: The historians I talk to, and the ones who've been on this show, are incredibly cautious when it comes to rendering verdicts on presidential performances. They're conservative, not in the political sense, but in the sense that they wait a long time to pass judgment. I suspect that political scientists aren't quite as cautious, and you've been pretty outspoken in rendering verdicts on certain aspects of Donald Trump's presidency. With a couple of years of hindsight, what are your thoughts and how do you apply those to the risks of him returning?

Ken Mayer: Well, so one of the things we were clear about Trump from the very beginning, and I'm thinking about how I describe presidents to students. What I tell students is that I am not going to try to make my priors their priors. I don't take partisan positions in class. My role is to explain frameworks and give students a set of skills they can use to kind of organize facts and think about their own views. So, I'm not going to try to take partisan positions in class and get students to accept those as true. I just don't do that. I've never done that. But I also say I have an obligation to tell them the truth and call things by their right names. And this is all on the public record. There was a dispute where I was criticized by a student for taking what they perceived to be biased positions against Trump in 2019 when I was describing what Trump's supporters liked about him, and what his critics disliked about him. And I had done the same with Obama and George Bush, all the way back to Bill Clinton. And it became viewed/portrayed as a professor taking these extreme biased positions and trying to enforce those views on students. And that's not what was happening, but that's where we are as a country when even saying something as a plain objective fact can be viewed as partisan. I don't think it's in dispute, although it will be perceived as partisan. I think it is beyond dispute at this point that Trump is not committed to democratic values. He's not committed to the rule of law.

We saw that throughout his presidency, and obviously, and most dramatically, with the events after the 2020 election leading up to January 6th. That is perceived as a partisan statement by a lot of people. I don't think it is. And I think there's overwhelming evidence that that is in fact, the case.

Ken Harbaugh: Well, could I submit that I think it is entirely fair, but it may also be a partisan statement in that the Republican Party writ large, has demonstrated some fundamentally anti-democratic values. So, the idea of partisanship has taken on a new valence in this political environment where the Democratic party is pro-democracy. And the Republican Party, I mean, almost by definition, when you look at the vote on January 6th, not to certify, is not pro-democracy.

Ken Mayer: Well, so, I mean, that's true, that there are things that you can point to, and certainly leaders in the Republican Party who take positions that are profoundly at odds with the way that we typically think about democracy. And my colleagues who study comparative politics, and I assign readings in my presidency class by political scientists who study comparative politics, who have studied authoritarian movements not just recently, but throughout the 20th century. And this movie has played before these events, these sequences, purposely and falsely undermining faith in the integrity of electoral processes. I mean, the texts that have been released over the last couple of days where you have sitting members of Congress urging the president to declare martial law. And I don't think they had any idea what that actually meant, or would-

Ken Harbaugh: Well, they can't even spell “martial.”

Ken Mayer: Well, that's also the case, but it's like what do they mean by that? Well, the actual sequence of events that would involve martial law, they're not talking about — I don't think they're talking about George H. W. Bush federalizing the National Guard in Los Angeles in 1992 to deal with riots. What they're talking about, it's like find a way to get the military to participate in overthrowing the results of an election. And I think that's shocking, and it ought to be uniformly and resoundingly condemned. But it’s not. There are some who are, but one of the weaknesses of democratic institutions that they don't operate automatically. They have no characteristics that go beyond the people who make up those institutions and processes. You have enough elected officials who are willing to overthrow that, then you've got a real problem.

And so, what I became the subject of criticism in 2019 and accused of having Trump derangement syndrome, is that I said Trump's critics see him as an overt existential threat to democratic structures. I think that was correct at the time, as something that critics were saying about him. But I think what we saw on January 6th is that that was a true statement.

Ken Harbaugh: Well, and it has gone even beyond that. What was once whispered is now screamed through a bullhorn. You commented recently on Twitter about Trump's push to ignore parts of the Constitution. And I'll just read your tweet. You said:

“Maybe it's just me, but a former president calling again for the termination of the Constitution seems more newsworthy than the other thing.”

That might be a partisan statement because it is directed against the leader of the Republican Party, but it's true, and it's right.

Ken Mayer: Well, so I stand by that as I stand by everything I put on Twitter. I don't post a lot, but thinking as a political scientist, how does a former president who is running for another term say something like that — that continue to insist falsely that the 2020 election was stolen, and to suggest or demand that. I guess, the post on truth social was that all existing procedures should be terminated, including those in the Constitution.

Ken Harbaugh: And not a word from Ron DeSrrantis or other leaders in the Republican Party.

Ken Mayer: Well, the explanation I think for that is that the Republican Party is in a little bit of a bind. And a lot of the leaders have said this (Pence and McConnell and Pompeo and others) have sort of suggested or indicated that they think Trump is old news, that they think the party should move beyond him. And they've done it in fairly gentle ways.

But the difficulty is that it's going to be hard for someone like DeSantis or Nikki Haley or Greg Abbott or Pompeo or Pence, or anybody who is positioning themselves as potential successors to Trump. They can't fully repudiate him because his supporters, his faithful, his base — and it doesn't matter if it's 30% or 40% or 70% of the Republican base, it's going to be extremely difficult or impossible to win without their support, certainly in the general. And this is a problem that you abstract not just to this circumstance, but a general problem for a political party trying to put together a set of coalition comprised of groups that will allow it to satisfy all of the demands of different supporters that are sometimes intentioned. How do you knit a party together when you have a combination of extremism with more moderate leaders who are trying to navigate and trying to keep that coalition together? I mean, Republicans will have a very difficult time winning national elections if 30% of their base says, “We're out.” I mean, in today's polarized environments when you're talking about in key states, it could be a hundred thousand or 150,000 votes or 200,000 votes — if you're talking about millions of people potentially abandoning a party, that's a real problem. And it doesn't take much when elections are decided in Pennsylvania or Georgia or Wisconsin — when votes are decided by margins of a few tens of thousands of votes. You simply can't afford to lose significant chunks of your base and expect to win.

Ken Harbaugh: You've got a front row seat to that there in Wisconsin. I heard that dilemma distilled really distinctly when someone told me that the Republican Party thinks it has a Trump problem. It doesn't. It has a voter problem. That those voters who should have gotten the message during the 2022 midterms that extremism wasn't going to carry the day with the general voting public, they didn't seem to get it. Those voters are still as fanatical as ever, and you cannot transfer a cult following from one person to another the way the Republican Party seems to want to transfer those voters away from Donald Trump.

Ken Mayer: I think that's right. And again, I often think about ‘how do I describe this to my students in a way that they can kind of understand and attach this to broader issues that go beyond any single set of candidates.’ We are all deeply connected to our prior beliefs, and it is very difficult. The process of changing those beliefs in response to new information is difficult. It does happen. There can be events that can cause people to rethink something on the order of 9/11 or something on the order of January 6th. Although, the magnitude of that rethinking and the number of people who are affected by that is going to be hard to pin down.

We can take Georgia as an example with a very narrow margin when Warnock beats Herschel Walker. You still had 90, 95%, 93% of Republicans voting. Most people, we still vote on the basis of party identification. That's the only thing that for most voters, they need to need to know, and things sort of line up. And if you get 10% of partisans to defect, that's significant. And there have been times when those party allegiances have been fluid. You saw that with the New Deal, in the 1930s. You saw that with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, where people who had previously been Democrats and had been part of coalitions as part of the Democratic party, they shifted. And again, holding to my position that forecasting, that we have to be modest about it, it seems plausible that for a lot of voters, they are in the process of rethinking that again. We think of who the swing voters are and how different candidates appeal to blocks of voters who are in play. But we're not going to know for a while.

Ken Harbaugh: Well, your research has explored certain electoral mechanisms or campaign finance mechanisms that might address this tribalism. Can you share some of that with us? I'm thinking about things like mandatory voting and how it operates in other countries or ranked choice voting, which we saw in Alaska was incredibly effective in defanging the extremist primary voters. What are you seeing as potential avenues for coming to terms with this reality in our political system?

Ken Mayer: Well, I mean, it's a fascinating question that doesn't really have a simple answer. And it is possible that things like ranked choice voting, where the voters will not just vote for one person, but they'll rank them. And if no one gets a majority, the last place candidate gets dropped out, and their votes redistributed. There are places that do that. Australia does that. They do ranked choice voting for their house. And they also have mandatory voting. I mean, you can actually articulate a reasonably defensible intellectual case about why mandatory voting is a good thing. It's never going to happen here. And I think there's a good chance it would be regarded as unconstitutional in any event. There's some ambiguities there, but it's never going to happen. And so, I think it's an interesting intellectual question, but practically, it's off the table.

Other changes in voting rules like California with a top two primary and or ranked choice voting in Maine or Alaska, it's had some interesting outcomes. I mean, I think in Alaska, it could easily have affected the results. We don't really know what the counterfactual is. We don't know that in a First Pass the Post where the results would've been different.

But I spent a long-time studying campaign finance at the state level, where you get lots of variation. Some states like Illinois and Virginia have essentially no restrictions on who can contribute and how much. Other states have either much more restrictive rules or the question that interested me was what happens when candidates can get public funding and they don't have to rely on private contributors. Again, you can make an intellectual case. You can make an argument about how this is a good thing — that reducing reliance on private contributors is normatively a good thing, and maybe you can expect to produce a different kind of politics.

But I think the evidence is that it doesn't actually seem to change policy or even elections all that much. It doesn't seem to have an effect on competitiveness and incumbency reelection rates. We found that hand in the short-term, it decreased the number of uncontested seats. But the expectation in some of these states, like in Connecticut in particular, which has a full public funding program, which is very, very well-funded and people expected it to turn state politics on its head, and it really didn't. It hasn't really resulted in huge changes in policy, and there may have been certain decisions that it might have made a difference. But the main characteristics of elections and representation here in the U.S. is driven by single member districts, First Pass the Post and the electoral college. The different ways of aggregating votes and the types of things that you can feasibly do within that, other than I guess, radically restructuring the electoral college so that every state allocates it on something other than the statewide vote. Congressional districts or something might dramatically change who gets elected. But it would take, I think, major structural changes in how we think about governing and representation to really change some of those issues. And I'm monologuing, but one more thing about that:

We think about the effect that has on possible extremists. The polarization and extremism is not remotely uniquely an American phenomenon. It’s happening all over the world. It happens in Australia and Great Britain and France and Hungary, and Scandinavian countries, that there's something deeper happening, which has resulted in these forces that it's not a function, it’s just what's going on in the U.S.

Ken Harbaugh: Well, that's a really interesting point, suggesting that the extremism we're seeing is not really a symptom of our extremist politics, but a reflection of something much deeper. And that addressing political corruption and campaign finance reform and all these things is maybe not going to get at the root cause. Is that where you're coming from?

Ken Mayer: I think that's right. So, I just got through teaching. I have an upper division undergraduate course in campaign finance. And one of the exercises we go through is you can characterize campaign finance practices in basically any country that holds elections or any country that holds fair elections. So, we can take authoritarian systems off the table. And there isn't always a strong relationship between things like allowing corporate contributions or allowing unlimited contributions, or even limiting expenditures. Some countries impose strict limits (United Kingdom), some countries prohibit parties and candidates and third-party groups from running campaign ads outside the allocation that they get from basically government sources. I mean, you can't deny that the United Kingdom is a democracy. Canada is democracy. Australia is a democracy. Mexico is a democracy. They've got some challenges that don't exist, say, in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, but it's not true that Canada is not a democracy, even though their campaign finance system is very different, far more restrictive than it is here. And you don't see a very strong relationship between campaign finance systems and levels of corruption using transparency, international ratings of corruption. There doesn't seem to be a strong relationship, and a lot of it is connected with things like history and culture and the traditions through which politics is practiced.

So, I don't think that even a dramatic shift to tightening campaign finance rules would make these issues or make these difficulties or questions about how politics is conducted go away.

Ken Harbaugh: Do you think political competition, and I mean outside of the two-party context would be a welcomed change? We just had a co-founder of the Forward Party, Miles Taylor on, who, obviously, is an evangelist for that approach. But as a political scientist, what's your take?

Ken Mayer: Well, historically, the reason third parties have not had enduring success or much success at all at the national level, is because of the way that we do representation; winner take all, single member districts. But there's something deeper as well that I didn't hear that interview. But one of the things that third parties, Andrew Yang and Ross Perot with the Reform Party in the 1990s, is all this partisan bickering is exhausting. People just need to work together, and we need to find a way to find commonly agreed upon solutions. And that sounds great. The problem is what people are bickering about actually has some substance. And it's not as if you're going to pick an issue. I mean, it's not as if there are easily identifiable and commonly agreed-on compromise issues on highly contentious, polarized issues. And when elected officials actually benefit electorally from taking those positions, one of the things … just to kind of give you an example, that it wasn't until 2022 when people who denied the reality of the 2020 (election deniers) sort of running on the election was stolen, we need to decertify or redo the whatever — that was a strategy that paid off dividends. People won using that strategy.

They won primaries. They were able to forge connections and mobilize components of their base. People won doing that. And 2022, there were some election deniers who kind of took that tack, who won, a lot who didn't. So, now, there are now political costs to taking those positions.But the theory of can't we all just find a way to work together works in theory, but you have to deal with the underlying problem of people benefiting from taking positions and not working together in order to make that happen. And so, third parties have historically had a tough time. And one of the things that we can see with the Reform Party, or when a third party becomes big enough to actually threaten the two-party duopoly, one of the parties tries to absorb it and say, “Okay, we'll bring you under our tent.” And so, you saw that with the Reform Party in 1992 with Ross Perot. You still have the issue with third parties can be spoilers. Ralph Nader in 2000 in Florida. But I don't see a lot of prospect for third parties of any stripe becoming an enduring and electorally successful thing in the U.S. anytime soon.

Ken Harbaugh: How do your students feel about our political situation and our political future? I mean, you interact with young people on a daily basis in a swing state, at a public university. I would imagine you have a rare opportunity to observe their thinking and their evolution. And I'm wondering not just what you're seeing, but has it changed over the last few years?

Ken Mayer: Here's how I'm going to put it. So, I don't talk about partisanship with students a lot where I'm talking to them and I'm asking them to tell me what they think about this. Sort of having a political discussion where we're talking about partisans and candidates and things. Because I try not to do that because that gets me uncomfortably close to the role of me sort of acting like a campaign surrogate or getting them to think, “Oh, he agrees with me.” At Wisconsin, I tell them, they're all curve records. They are more engaged, they are more attentive, they are more likely to participate than people their age who are not students or who might be going to school someplace else. There's a range. I mean, I have students and classes who are campaign managers for Democratic candidates, or they are the head of the college Democrats and the College Republicans. And there's a lot of diversity, ideological diversity. So, it drives me to distraction these claims that universities are hotbeds of wokeness and, and indoctrination. And my colleagues, we often have trouble getting people to read the syllabus and how would we even if we wanted to, to indoctrinate them.

And I think it is the nature of students 18 to 23-year-olds to be questioning what they see around them. Students, people that age, they don't vote at rates that are as high as people as they get older. We can almost observe a straight line when the percentage of people of a particular age cohort who votes goes up from 18 to about 80 or so, and it's just a straight line. You know, tell them that they have an obligation as members of a democratic citizenry to engage and think and participate. And the cost is if they don't, that means someone else is going to be making those decisions for them.

The last almost three years — the last three years have been exhausting for students with COVID and the shutdowns. And we've been back in person at the UW since the fall of ‘21. So, it's been a little over a year. And even with things kind of getting back to normal, it's hard, it's difficult. I think it's still a little unsettling. We’ve seen clear increases in the number and percentages of students who are really stressed.

But yeah, I think the takeaway here is that students are far more diverse across ideologies and things that they want that they're certainly not monolithic.

Ken Harbaugh: Well, Ken, this has been a great conversation. Thanks so much for sharing with us. We'd love to have you back on.

Ken Mayer: Oh, I would absolutely love this. This was great fun.

Ken Harbaugh: Thanks again to Ken for joining me. You can find him on Twitter at @uwkenmayer.

Thanks for listening to Burn the Boats. If you have any feedback, please email the team at [email protected]. We're always looking to improve the show.

For updates and more follow us on Twitter @Team_Harbaugh. And if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to rate and review.

Burn the Boats is a production of Evergreen Podcasts. Our producer is Declan Rohrs, and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our audio engineer. Special thanks to evergreen executive producers, Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss. I'm Ken Harbaugh, and this is Burn the Boats, a podcast about big decisions.