Gerry-rigged

Gerry-rigged Hour.wav

SM Sarah McConnell

AS Audio Sample

MG Michael Gilbert

QK Quentin Kidd

EL Elizabeth Losh

SF Stephen Farnsworth

00:00:00

SM All across the country, grassroots organizations devoted to gerrymandering reform have been growing. In Virginia, the group called OneVirginia2021, has been working hard to get its message out.

[music] Just change the bounds, re-draw lines, the people in these districts vote the wrong way every time

SM This is a song OneVirginia2021 commissioned from singer-songwriter Chris Anderson. It's played in a documentary called GerryRIGGED that was supported by the organization and by Community Ideas Station WCVE of Richmond

[music] To steal elections, discriminate. Well, the other party may fight on, but it will be too late. We'll blame the others as we did nominate, and weíll hold all the purse strings by coincidence, or fate.

SM from Virginia Humanities, this is With Good Reason. I'm Sarah McConnell. And today, a closer look at the gerrymander battles raging throughout the states. Later in the show, are Virginia state politics a bellwether for other southern states.

AS: States like Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, used to be reliably red states are trending blue and purple. And so there is this kind of realignment going on.

SM But first, politicians from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan have called gerrymandering a cancer on our democracy.

[music fades]

SM My first guest is Michael Gilbert from the University of Virginia School of Law. He says gerrymandering is unpopular for a number of reasons.

MG Well, gerrymandering makes people mad. And the reason it makes them mad is because it seems in at least two ways to run contrary to what democracy is supposed to be about. And I think the first way, is that it produces - or at least it can produce disproportionate outcomes. So I'll give you a couple of examples. Which one of which we might come back to. North Carolina: over the last, say, six or eight years, Republicans statewide in North Carolina have commanded about 50 to 55 percent to the statewide vote share, and they're getting 10 of the state's 13 congressional districts. So both sides do it, disproportionality results. And that just seems fundamentally anti-democratic. There's a second reason to that, I think relates in a way to the first, and that makes people angry. Gerrymandering sometimes reduces competitiveness. So as a consequence of manipulating the district lines, you might have a incumbent in office whose party makes up 70 or 80 percent of the vote share in that district. And that incumbent doesn't effectively face competition in the general election. And so if you're in the minority in that district, you feel like you have no voice, you feel like your vote is diluted, and you feel like this representative can more or less do whatever he or she wants and they're going to get reelected.

SM Conversely, what would happen if you had more fair reapportionment of the lines? You might have a district that's more evenly stacked with voters on both parties and therefore the politicians going to listen?

MG Well, that's the theory. If you have a 80 to 20 district, say, the 20 percent Democrats or Republicans, whoever happens to be in the minority in that district, the incumbent who represents the district doesn't have much reason to listen to them or to pay attention to them. Whereas if you have a 50/50 district, you've got to secure your base and also get some votes from the other side, which means you have to listen to both sides, you have to govern in a different kind of way.

SM So redistricting itself, not gerrymandering, but redistricting is mandated in the Constitution?

MG That's correct. So the U.S. Constitution requires the federal government to run a census every 10 years. And the purpose of the census, the principal purpose in the Constitution, is to apportion seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. So you have to know each state's population to figure out how many seats they get. OK, now we have some more constitutional layers on top of this. Once you know how many seats your state gets, you have to divide the state into an appropriate number of districts. And according to the Supreme Court, the Constitution requires you, when doing so, to have about the same number of people in each district. So this is part of the reason that we now have to draw the lines every 10 years, because every 10 years people have moved around. So whereas the lines when they were drawn, you might have an equal number of people, more or less across them 10 years on, they're big discrepancies. And the Constitution tells us, OK, we have to redraw the lines. We have to equalize the populations.

SM Give me an example of how it typically goes down.

MG So it's a little hard to generalize, but I'll take a stab: After the census, each state gets the information from the federal government, telling them more or less who lives where. How many people. And then with that information in hand, the legislature - or a committee in the legislature goes about drawing some potential district lines, and they might hear from other politicians and they might hear from some engaged groups in the community, the state. They almost certainly, in this day and age, they have experts in the room with line drawing and mapping software, and they work through various iterations of their plan. And at some point, they come up with one that they agree on. And it goes to the full legislature for a vote. So what's putting the lines in place is - it's effectively a statute that gets enacted by the legislature and then depending on the exact rules in your state, signed into law by the governor. And it has the force of law for the next 10 years.

SM Why does it seem in the last 20 years or so, there's been more outrage over how these legislatures have conducted gerrymandering?

MG I think part of the story has to do with visibility. I don't know to what extent it's social media, the digital age, but people are just more aware that this is happening now than they used to be. But there's something else going on, too. Technology is improved and legislators are better at gerrymandering than ever before. So, a kind of notorious case that people are discussing these days is North Carolina. The statistics run like this: the state is just over half Republican, but Republicans are winning 10 out of 13 congressional seats there consistently. When a member of the legislature there who is a Republican and who played a key role in drawing those district lines, was asked why the map is 10 to 3 in favor of Republicans, his answer on the record was, ìI couldn't find any way to make it 11 to 2î in favor of Republicans. So that's gerrymandering that benefits Republicans. And that statement and just owning up to it, that made a lot of people mad.

SM However, courts have struck down what has called racial gerrymandering.

MG Correct. So just as you can draw the lines with an eye towards, say, disadvantaging Democrats, or Republicans, whoever your political opponent is, you can also draw the lines with a focus on race instead of partisanship. We're going to move, for example, these African American voters into that district over there and move these white voters over here. That, the courts have been very clear you cannot do. When you manipulate the lines on the basis of race, you run afoul of the Equal Protection Clause and the 14th Amendment.

SM So which states recently have tried to overturn their system and go to something more equitable?

MG There are a number of examples across the country. I can mention two for you now: Arizona and California. They have both in the last 20 years, more recently in California, used direct democracy to bypass the legislature and create a new districting commission that operates really outside of the legislature's control. And there are lots of institutional details here. But the short version is, we're trying to take it away from the legislature and give it to a group of citizens, and we're gonna give them information and we're going to tell them not to focus on politics and we're going to try to remove some of this taint from the process.

SM There are other states that have opted for reform of this process.

MG That's correct. There are lots of states that try different systems. And I don't think there is any kind of best practice emerging at this point. I'll just give you one other example. Iowa has a longstanding and as far as I know, unique process. The legislature, in fact, votes on the lines, but the maps are produced by a set of nonpartisan officials inside the legislature who, when they draw the maps, among other things, are not given information about the political leanings of voters or even the addresses of incumbents in the legislature. So, among other things, they can draw district lines that move an incumbent from inside her district to outside of it. Then these maps are proposed to the state legislature. The legislature gets a vote, but it's up or down. They don't have a chance to amend it, and the thinking is that saps some of the politics from it. So for people who are interested in changing the method by which district lines get drawn, one seemingly promising approach was to challenge district lines in court, and specifically federal court. And there's been litigation about this, lots of it recently, where the claim is that having the legislatures draw the lines and specifically producing a map like the one in North Carolina, the one in Maryland - that violates the federal constitution. And we want the courts to come in and say, you can't do that. And in the process, have those courts sort of structure this process in a way going forward, providing guidelines to legislatures that makes them do this in a fairer way. That approach has failed, and it has failed because the Supreme Court has told us in a very recent opinion that the federal courts are closed for business. They can't hear these kinds of claims.

SM So what if I'm saying to the court, here's an example of what I think should not be constitutional. That I have a state with roughly 50/50 party affiliation and I, the slightly dominant party, have come up with Congression-, you know, with the vast majority of the congressional seats.

MG So, this is exactly the kind of claim that was brought to the Supreme Court recently. The court, even the majority of the court that wrote the opinion, they're sympathetic to the claim that something seems amiss here, but their challenge is to find out how to evaluate that. What would a fair map or a constitutional map look like? And it turns out it's really hard to tell. So let me just give you a simple example that will maybe help us think about the challenge. Suppose you have a state that has 200 people only - to make it easy - in it. And 100 hundred of them are Republicans and 100 of them are Democrats. And you need two districts each with 100 people. So one natural way to do it is to create one district with 100 Republicans and one district with 100 Democrats. Well the second you do this, you're gonna make a lot of people mad because you've sapped away all political competition. If you're in the Republican district and you were even thinking of leaning left, well, your vote is completely diluted. You have no say here. And likewise, if you're on the other side. So we lose the political competition that is not just good policy, but which we might think is central to the very democracy that the Constitution is supposed to produce. So you don't want to do one hundred and one hundred. Here's the other natural way to do it. You make each of the two districts 50/50. But there's a problem. First of all, to 50/50 districts are in no way guaranteed to produce a legislature with one Republican and one Democrat you could with just the slightest wave. Either way, get two Democrats or two Republicans and now you have your disproportionality problem again. There's a second dilemma, too, which is when you draw a 50/50 district, you are drawing a district in which you know that about half the population is going to be unhappy with the election. And in a country in a democracy that's trying to promote good representation, that's a kind of funny way to do it. So that's why I say there are these competing values at stake. No matter which way you draw the lines, you're either bumping up against competition or proportionality or just a sense of good representation. And this is what motivated the court to say the doors closed - we don't know how to do it.

[music]

SM Michael Gilbert is the Martha Lubin Karsh and Bruce A. Karsh, bicentennial professor of law at the University of Virginia School of Law.

00:13:20

SM Since 2016, states like Pennsylvania and Ohio have made news for turning toward the Republican Party. Democrats, meanwhile, see hope in traditionally red southern states thatíve been turning blue. Quentin Kidd is a political scientist at Christopher Newport University. He's written about political realignments in history and says we're seeing something similar today.

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SM Quentin, last month, Democrats in Virginia took control of both houses in the General Assembly and they have a Democratic governor. Is this what we call Trump effect voting on the part of Virginians in the last election? Or has there been a migration from more liberal northern states and Northern Virginia to influence the electorate?

QK The answer is yes on both of those parts. There has been a migration into Virginia of people from many other states, northeast being among the larger regions of the country to give Virginia residents. Northern Virginia right now, which is sort of all of that area that is ñ thatís right up against Washington, D.C., it's about three million people. More than 50 percent of them are not from Virginia. And nearly 50 percent of Hampton Roads, which is in the Norfolk area, were all in the naval and military bases are, about 50 percent of them are not from Virginia. So Virginia, the two largest metropolitan areas in Virginia right now are dominated by residents that don't have historical ties to Virginia through family. They're not born here, they've moved here for some reason. And so they have brought their politics to the state with them. And those politics tend to be a little bit more liberal than Virginia was prior to them coming. However, we see strong evidence of a Trump effect and we see that in increased voter turnout. For example, in the last election, that was like this current election that we just had, which is that both houses of the - of the of the legislature were up, the Senate in the House of Delegates, four years ago. Turnout was 28, almost 29 percent. This year, turnout is going to be 43 percent or so. And there were some districts, some election districts this year that had turnout that approached presidential-level turnout. That is the Trump effect. Those voters that are that were engaged and energized as a result of 2016 and are voting because of that, are voting Democratic. They're not voting Republican. And so that's why you've seen in the last two election cycles, Democrats have picked up 21 seats from Republicans in the House of Delegates. So they've really benefited from Donald Trump. I sort of characterize Virginia politics in Virginia elections right now, is one where there is a steady wind that blows from the north, and that is where that wind is, Donald Trump. And I think that's true in a lot of other states, not just Virginia.

SM You know, Virginia, Republicans were gleeful last winter when there was scandal in the state House and several top Democrats were accused of having worn blackface when they were younger. And Republicans said this is going to doom Democrats at the polls in November and they will lose their African American base. That didn't happen.

QK No, it did not happen. It did hurt the governor, Governor Ralph Northam for a while. But a couple of things save Democrats, if you will. One, younger voters, those are voters under 40, whether black or white, didn't like the black face scandal. And they did pull away from Ralph Northam in terms of their support. However, older African-Americans, those older than 45, never really abandon Governor Northam. And so while his approval ratings did drop pretty dramatically into the low 40 percents in our own polling, the drop was because younger voters, millennial voters, really found blackface to be distasteful and really rejected it. And as a result of that, you know, when the governor disappeared from the campaign trail and focused on governing instead of campaigning, it didn't hurt Democratic candidates on the campaign trail as much because their African-American base was still with them. Remember, in state legislative elections, you know, voter turnout is typically half of what it is in a presidential year election. And the voters that that typically pull away and don't vote in state legislative elections are younger voters. So the very voters that didn't like black face the most, are the very voters that are least likely to vote anyway in a state legislative election.

SM For years, the legislature in Virginia was very much male-dominated. There were very few women. And yet there was a surge of women who came into office in the Virginia legislature two years ago. And this year, more women ran as Democrats than men for the first time in Virginia history. And Virginia has its first ever woman speaker of the House. How much did women voters, do you think, play a role in the election?

QK So I think - I think women in particular are the reason Democrats are in the position that they're in right now. After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, almost immediately, within days, I started getting emails from groups that eventually became known as Indivisible or Resistance; the Peninsula Resistance, the Hampton Roads Resistance. One of them called the Liberal Women of Chesterfield County, which is a which is a suburban county south of Richmond. These groups popped up within days of the election of Donald Trump and they became mobilized, they became energized, and they never really stopped being mobilized and energized. They carried that - that energy and that mobilization into the 2017 state legislative races ñ races, where Democrats picked up 15 seats from Republicans, many of those women, the first transgender woman elected to the Virginia legislature. They carried that momentum, that energy into the 2018 midterm elections where Democrats picked up three congressional seats from Republicans. All three women won those seats and two of those three women had never run for political office before. That was a characteristic of - of a lot of the women candidates, is that they didn't have prior political experience, which means they were energized by - by the election of Donald Trump. And then in this 20 - 2019 legislative races, I think women also carried the day. There was one particular race that I that I find interesting because it fits a lot of a lot of interesting storylines. And that is, there's a state Senate district just south - south and west of Richmond. You know, that is relatively rural in most in most parts of it, even though another part of the district is in a pretty urban, suburban area. It just elected the first Muslim woman in Virginia. So we have a Muslim woman who will join the Virginia state Senate. Her name is Ghazala Hashmi. If you had told me five or six years ago that this district would elect a Muslim woman, I would have told you that I'm not sure that we're talking about the same Virginia. That's how rapid this change has been in Virginia.

SM You wrote a book about how the southern states in America changed from majority Democrat to majority Republicans over, what era was that?

QK It was basically from the 1950s through the 19 - early 1990s.

SM How former conservative Democratic politicians in the South left the party and became Republicans. Do you think we're about to see another national realignment of the two parties? Where do the moderates live in the future?

QK What seems to be happening in some states in the South and in some Midwestern states is that older generations of conservative voters are giving way to younger voters that aren't as conservative. Their sons and daughters and perhaps grandchildren, and new voters, immigrants or migrants. That's the story of Virginia's transition, politically, it's the story of - of what's going on in North Carolina. The triangle area of North Carolina is to North Carolina, what Northern Virginia is to Virginia. It's this growing region that has people from all over the country and the world, moving there to work, and their politics look very different from North Carolina's politics. And they're ultimately driving some change in North Carolina that might not be where Virginia is right now, but it's probably not far behind. That's the story of Atlanta, where the suburbs of of Atlanta are booming, people moving there from all over the world and in fact, sort of a reverse migration. Where were African Americans who two or three generations ago maybe left the south for Chicago or Detroit or other large northern cities; their children and grandchildren now coming back to the south. And a lot of them are coming back to Atlanta. So it's sort of a Atlanta's going through this, you know, Renaissance period in - in some ways, and what's going on in Atlanta is driving change in Georgia. So that's - that's what's driving change in those southern states. And then in Midwestern states, you have older unionized workers who whose economies have - have left them essentially, the auto industry and the steel industry. And they're giving way to younger workers who are having to find ways to make a living in this new economy, that where - there's not the guarantees of a union and union wages and all that. And so their politics are changing also. And in those states, you have people leaving, because their economies aren't so great and they're seeking work in other places and it's changing the politics of those states. And in some ways, these two things are - these trends are going in the reverse direction. So in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, used to be very blue states are now trending purplish and red. In states like Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, used to be reliably red states are trending blue and purple. And so there is this kind of realignment going on. And then out west, you know, places like Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, it's the story of immigration. Latino populations that are burgeoning. People moving out of California into Arizona, Nevada, Colorado. And it's changing the politics of those states as well. So there's a lot of realignment going on in the country. And it isn't clear to me as I sit here right now, whether at the end of the day, that results in a strong Republican majority, a strong Democratic majority or - or both parties, both coalitions kind of equally incised. And so, you know, the sort of political fights that we've been having continue.

SM So it's not like water seeking, it's - it's level. It's not that always the parties will find that moderates and progressives and the right wing and the left wing eventually sort of settle out.

QK Eventually, yes. But, you know, as - as this plays out, like, you know, do - do the moderates find their place only to discover that their place is moving even as they found it? And I think that is part of what happens a lot of times. Let's just take, you know, the Republican Party from 1980 to present. Right. So in in 1980, Ronald Reagan is elected president. And that's the culmination of those conservative whites who used to be Democrats in the South moving to the Republican coalition. It's the culmination of - of the of what - what we came to call the Moral Majority, the evangelical vote moving to the Republican coalition and away from Democrats. And so in the early 1980s, the Reagan Republicans - the Reagan Democrats were very conservative. They were they were what you would call movement Republicans. They were this sort of conservative base of the Republican Party. Once Newt Gingrich took over as speaker of the House of Representatives, we can look back on this and realize that Newt Gingrich ushered in a new energy in the Republican coalition that resulted ultimately in the Tea Party and resulted ultimately in the Trump coalition of voters. So that now what is or was a Reagan Republican doesn't really find themselves a home in the Republican Party. I was talking to somebody who was the classic Reagan Republican. She had worked in the Reagan White House, she was involved in Republican politics pretty actively. And she says, I just don't have a home in the Republican Party right now, there's no place for a Republican like me. And - and I can remember when the Republican base was the Reagan Republicans. And so, you know, when it when a moderate finds a place in a party, it could very well be that that place is, in fact, moving as they found it.

SM Quentin Kidd, thank you for sharing your insights. This is fascinating.

QK You're more than welcome. Glad to be with you.

[music] Just change the boundary, redraw linesÖ

SM Clinton Kid is a professor of political science, Dean of the College of Social Sciences and director of the Judy Ford Watson Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University. He's the author of The Rational Southerner: Black Mobilization, Republican Growth and the Partisan Transformation of the American South. This is With Good Reason. We'll be right back.

00:28:00

[music]

AS And I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news ñ itís fake, phony, fake. I am not going to give you a question. You are fake news.

SM Welcome back. From Virginia Humanities, this is With Good Reason. I'm Sarah McConnell. It's having a resurgence, but fake news has long been used as a way to demonize opponents on both sides of the political spectrum. Elizabeth Losh is a professor of English and American studies at William and Mary, who specializes in democracy and new media. She says fake news spread via social media is growing and needs to be addressed. How far back does the history on concern over misuse of technology when it comes to spreading stories go?

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EL Well, a lot of people think about the famous War of the Worlds broadcast in the 1930s about the invasion of the United States by Martians. And after that story was broadcast, many people wrote to the federal government wanting the government to reign in fake news. Actually, if you go back even before radio to the beginnings of the printing press, there were astrological guides that were causing panic all over European cities because they were printing these stories about potential floods that might happen. And so cities were building these barriers and walls against these natural disasters that they thought were headed their way.

SM That never happened.

EL Never happened. But see, anytime you have a new technology, that means you're taking a gatekeeper away who can decide what information reaches an audience and what information gets held back. When you have the printing press, that means that manuscripts in church archives are no longer the final word on something. When you have something like radio, it means that you can create your own radio station and disseminate information.

SM Have we enjoyed a long Halcion several decades without the fear of fake news?

EL Well, when the term fake news becomes popular again, it's in connection with shows like The Daily Show by Jon Stewart, who was at one time described as the most trusted man in fake news. So when you look at shows like Laughiní or Saturday Night Live that created these fake news broadcasts, there was a sense that fake news could actually educate the public or at least entertain the public. So since the beginning of the Internet, we can follow three different phases of fake news. The first is - I call Fake News 1.0, and that's the period where the Internet was used to share clips from comedy shows like The Daily Show or The Colbert Report. In that period of time, fake news was often seen as a way to learn about the real news. And it was also a way to sort of bond with people who might share your political opinions. Then you get to Fake News 2.0, and that's after September 11th. And what we see there is a distrust of the government, a belief that there could be crisis actors who are pretending to be things that they aren't really. And then we get into our present era, which I call Fake News 3.0, where the term fake news becomes a sort of way to think about an undermining of truth altogether, a mistrust of media that's so profound that all news seems to be alternative facts.

SM So is the fake news era we're in now, which to me seems like it began with the candidacy of Donald Trump because he's specifically been using the phrase over and over again. Is it really that recent?

EL Not at all. I think that really this mistrust of the news media actually has a much longer history and we can look at all kinds of self-made media, including independent newspapers, as part of the ways that people have looked for alternative news sources. One thing that's really changed, that has very little to do with the Trump administration, is the way that we received news. It used to be that people had a daily cycle where they open the newspaper in the morning, and they watched a news broadcast at night. And now we're exposed to the news all day long and we're exposed to the news through our mobile devices. We're exposed the news through social networks. And so all day long, we're getting news. I think the problem now that we're in, is that search engines and social network sites are very powerful and very unregulated. And for those organizations, fake news is very profitable because people are more likely to click on a fake news story than a real one, because it - they tend to have catchier titles and they're more likely to actually share a fake news story than a real one, because it seems like new information. It seems like something that maybe their friends and their social network haven't heard about. We live in a nation that doesn't believe in regulating communication media a lot. If you look at the rolling back of the Fairness Doctrine under the Reagan administration, you see the beginning of that deregulation period

SM Remind us of what the Fairness Doctrine was.

EL The Fairness Doctrine was the idea that televised media and radio had to present both sides on a political question.

SM What led to the deregulation of that?

EL Well, it was part of a general deregulation of all sectors of the economy under the Reagan administration. But now under the Trump administration, we're seeing the deregulation of Internet service providers with things like the end of network neutrality.

SM Do you think there will be a re-regulation further?

EL We might learn something from our European allies. There's a lot more work that's done on funding media literacy, on regulating Internet service providers, on reining in search engines and social network sites generally on controlling fake news here in the United States. I think the chances of getting any legislation on fake news anytime soon is pretty low, because if you look at the Congressional Record, what you see is Democratic elected officials trying to introduce legislation about fake news, and then it's blocked in committee by Republican legislators. I think one of the things that's depressing is that as these social media giants have tried to regulate the spread of fake news, legitimate news organizations are actually finding their content being filtered out by Facebook. And a lot of what Facebook is now saying is, oh, we really want you to spread content that's created by friends and family instead of content that's created by journalists. And so I think that in some ways, that attempt to filter out fake news has really hurt real news as well, so that there are more filters. A news story will be lower on your feed than someone's a picture of their baby or kittens.

SM So are you saying not useful - to try to regulate Facebook, Twitter, Google?

EL I think that they should be regulated, but I think that the part that needs to be regulated is the part that allows them to track and monitor us. The reason that fake news is profitable is that they can figure out more things about us and that in Europe, where there are more laws regulating privacy, it's harder for social media companies to have the kind of detailed profiles about citizens. And so there's less incentive to start - to spread fake news stories.

SM We all want that. Don't we all want what Europe is doing?

EL Well, I think that there's a long tradition of the marketplace of ideas, that's - that we believe should be a sort of rough and tumble, unregulated space. We tend to believe that people should be allowed to hear what they want to hear and say what they want to say. What I do think we can do, though, is I think that we can have better media literacy. If you look at countries like the Netherlands or Germany, they invest more public dollars in the curricula for media literacy. And I think it needs to start early. I think it needs to be part of K through12.

SM You are part of an international organization of scholars looking at this very issue.

EL People who are studying the ways that our society is changed by new technology are thinking about the rise of simulation. Computers make it possible to create very convincing replicas of political figures giving speeches, news stories that seem to come from real places. That technology is something we haven't really figured out what to do with. We're living in a world that is more and more simulated. When you watch a movie with 3-D visual effects, you might have a false sense of physics and that false sense of reality can cover a lot of different domains. Everything from artificial intelligence to robots to fake news can potentially be a product of this new culture of simulation.

SM So you're saying strap in?

EL I'm saying strap in. But maybe also for us to really support expertise in the humanities. These are going to be very difficult problems to solve computationally. We're gonna need to think about our values. We're going to think about the things that we know as human beings.

[music]

SM Elizabeth Losh is a professor of English and American studies at William and Mary. She's the author of four books, including Hashtag. Coming up next, is it the personality or politics that makes a President?

00:38:35

SM Social media has given the president a new way to shape policy and tout reforms. But it also magnifies the president's personality traits for good or bad. Stephen Farnsworth is the director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies at the University of Mary Washington. His latest book is Presidential Communication and Character: White House News Management from Clinton and Cable to Twitter and Trump.

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SF For a long period of time, you had your national television nightly news programing, the Reagan administration. They got up in the morning and they said, how do we get what we want on the evening news at 6:30 or 7, whenever you might watch it. The first president to really appreciate the importance of what cable I think could do for a president was Bill Clinton, who used a lot of the talk shows and a lot of the conversation to talk about who he was as a person. And so the conversation became less about policy and more about the person. And this is where Clinton is really the pivotal figure. And then, of course, as technology changes and different kinds of media become more important, you have different communication styles by different presidents. But over the last 20 years, we have seen more change in media environments that presidents have to master than in the 50 years before that.

SM So after Clinton, we had Bush the younger. What did he master in terms of the media landscape?

SF You have to remember Bush becomes president with a lot of people having doubts about whether he even won the election. And the challenge for Bush, then, is how you present yourself as a compelling, powerful leader. Now, what happened, of course, with 9/11 at first was kind of an unsteady response. It was only a couple of days later, I think, where he got his footing when he stood on top of that firetruck at Ground Zero and said, they're going to hear us all soon. And that's the moment he really becomes a president who masters the media. As you go forward through the Bush presidency, the war in Iraq and these issues, you saw a president who increasingly used Fox News. It had been a key issue, of course, in the Clinton impeachment right before Bush was elected. But it was a vehicle that gave a Republican president an opportunity to really speak at length. So even when things turned sour for the Bush presidency - the mishandled occupation of Iraq, the continuing war in Afghanistan, but on Fox News, it still didn't look that bad even at the end.

SM But would he have tanked if it were not for the economy tanking?

SF If you look back at those poll numbers for Bush, you really saw the big pivoting moment was Katrina, when you saw a really stumbling response to one of the most horrific natural disasters of the last 30 years in the United States. You then add to that the growing resistance in Iraq during Bush's second term. John Kerry, the 2004 election occurs maybe a year too early for the point of view of a Democratic candidate, because the problems of Iraq are much clearer in November of 2005, than they were in November 2004. And, you know, Bush got lucky that way in terms of timing. When things went sour, he was already in a second term.

SM So by the time Barack Obama is elected in 2008, does he become the master of social media?

SF Well, I think that what you saw with Obama was the idea that you had to take a much different attitude towards being president and being publicly president. With Clinton and with Bush, you saw the idea that they were, for lack of a better way to put it, sort of sun kings of the media, that you had to be in every story, you had to frame every conversation - every political event should go through the lens of the White House. With Obama - Obama picked his fights. He was a much more diffident president in terms of his approach to the mass media, but he picked his fights very effectively. He used the growing environment of Facebook and YouTube, for example. Which becomes a particularly valuable way to reach young people as a vehicle for getting to them. I mean, one of the true most successful media moments of the Obama presidency was when he went on Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis and exchanged jokes about Zach Galifianakis, his movies, and then while he was at it, he said, by the way, the deadline's coming up. Maybe some of you folks want to sign up for the Affordable Care Act so that you have some insuranceí. It was a - it was a genius moment, but it really spoke to Barack Obama getting what the new media could do for him. There's no way George W. Bush would've thought that.

SM You say there's no way you could dominate the news cycle but look at Donald Trump because he tweets and tweets all day, when he sits down with reporters there are 16 new stories to cover.

SF Well, what Donald Trump has done with Twitter has really sort of re-created the vision of the Reagan dominating the news cycle of the 1980s. But that's not so much because of what Donald Trump is doing. It's more because the way that the media choose to cover Donald Trump. If you pick up a newspaper or you watch a television news program anywhere in America, you're going to see stories day after day after day about what Trump said on Twitter the day before or the hour before. I mean, this is a assignment desk, really, for Washington reporters. What's on Twitter from Trump? Remember, Donald Trump's career was sort of as a media figure in New York City, and then he was a television star on reality TV. It shouldn't surprise us that Donald Trump is good at media. He gets it better than people who've been spending time learning about health care policy, for example.

SM When it comes to Donald Trump and the three predecessors, how did they portray their personalities to the American electorate once they were in the White House?

SF What you had with George H.W. Bush, the first President Bush, was somebody who was a really, really savvy person when it came to understanding policy, but not really able to connect with folks. And that was a problem because people felt like they were going through hard times in 1991, 1992. They wanted people to understand that. And when Bill Clinton comes on there and, you know, talks about feeling our pain in many ways, you know, talking about, you know, the difficulties in his childhood financially. You know, he seemed like, quote, an ordinary American in a way that George H.W. Bush could never, ever pull off. By the time the 2000 election comes along, we're thinking maybe a little bit more high-moral standard is a more useful approach. That Bill Clinton's libertine ways demonstrated throughout a year conversation about impeachment and - and all the rest that made us think maybe we want something like that. And so when Bill Clinton exudes regular person dynamics, George W. Bush offers up this kind of toughness. I think one of the problems with George W. Bush as a president was that he tended to trust his instincts. And sometimes those were good instincts, sometimes they weren't. And when they weren't, they really, really hurt him. And so that created a sense when 2008 rolls around that maybe be nice to have somebody who is more wonkish, who has a sense of, like how policy might work. They might have the opportunity to handle things.

SM And to fix the economy.

SF And to fix the economy, above all. And then, you know, and then you get Obama, who always seemed more or less up to the job. He might not come up with the best solution. I mean, he stumbled with respect to Syria and whatnot. But - but overall, you could look at Obama and say, here's a guy who recognizes that being president is tough and is prepared. Now, what Obama doesn't do well is connect with ordinary folk. And so in many ways, he's like George H.W. Bush being followed by Bill Clinton. And so when Donald Trump comes along, who speaks very effectively to the anger and the anxiety about the future that so many people, particularly in rural communities or in industrial towns, facing difficult circumstances - when he speaks, they listen. And that was his real genius as a political figure, knowing that the way to defeat the Democrats, was to go in a direction where Republicans almost never do. To be this aggressive, vigorous populist, speaking to working class concerns in a way that Republicans usually don't.

SM Had we ever heard a presidential candidate speak so darkly about where we are and where we're headed?

SF This is one of the reasons why a lot of people thought that Donald Trump was not going to win the election because this was so different. Every politician, Democrat or Republican, going back decades, none of them were anything at their core other than optimistic. But with - with Donald Trump, you got the feeling that he really believed that the best days of America might have been in the rearview mirror. And, you know, that's not really something that works in American political culture. One of the - one of the beliefs that we have, or maybe you would call it a myth, is that tomorrow is going to be better than today, that, you know, the kids are going to have a better opportunity than you did. You know, that's a little harder to sell when farm towns see all the little kids grow up and go to college and not come back. When industrial towns are filled with factories that haven't turned an engine in a year or 10 years. So much of what goes on in Washington doesn't relate to the things that matter to ordinary people. And that is a real challenge for politicians, because I think ultimately there's a hole in American politics. The Democratic Party might be more socially liberal and the Republican Party might be socially conservative. And that works for some. But a lot of voters are in the middle. They are socially conservative and economically liberal. And that's something that neither party has really done well with. But Donald Trump, when he says, look, here's what I'm going to do, I'm going to worry about coal. When's the last time you heard a politician running for national office worry about coal? I mean, he was probably gonna win West Virginia anyway. I don't think that coal made the difference. But he was speaking working class in a way that Hillary Clinton didn't, and arguably, Hillary Clinton couldn't.

SM And politically and psychologically, is it more important, do you think, whether a politician like Trump in this case fulfills the promise to the little guy that's going to make your life better, or better, that psychologically they feel like, ëhey, he makes me feel better because he gets it and he gets meí?

SF Well, that'll be the big question to be answered in 2020. Is channeling resentment enough to get Trump another term? Because when you look at the environment for coal or you look at the environment for factory towns, even with relatively good economy and relatively low unemployment, you're not really seeing these places bound back. If you're thinking about agriculture, for example, the trade wars with China are poisonous and that may not make it so easy for you to support Trump next time. And the same thing for folks who are looking at health care. If you're looking about the ways in which Trump behind the scenes has made it difficult for private insurance companies to offer a range of policies and given markets because of shrinking the pool of people who are going to be enrolling in these private insurance companies, you're looking at another environment where, you know, Donald Trump has made it worse for the people who need it the most. That is a painful reality that will be hard to ignore - that ultimately, the question of whether Trump really is an effective tribune for the people needs to be front and center in the Democratic conversation going forward. But when you're thinking about the public, it seems to me that the main concern that a lot of voters are going to have going into 2020 is to have somebody who can do the job. It'll be a lot like moving from W to Obama, you know, somebody who has basically played off his instincts for somebody who has more of a - of a technical understanding of policy. And so my guess is that this would be a significant thing.

SM Stephen Farnsworth is professor of political science and international affairs at the University of Mary Washington. His latest book is Presidential Communication and Character: White House News Management from Clinton and Cable to Twitter and Trump. He's also a recipient of the Outstanding Faculty Award by the State Council for Higher Education for Virginia. Major support for With Good Reason is provided by the law firm of McGuire Woods and by the University of Virginia health system, connecting doctors and patients through telemedicine to deliver high quality care throughout Virginia. The U.S. and the UVAhealth.com. With Good Reason is produced in Charlottesville by Virginia Humanities. Our production team is Allison Quantz and Cass Adair. Jeannie Palin handles listener services. The song I Just Changed the Boundaryî was written by Christine Anderson and performed by Christine Anderson, Dave Mallen and Seth Kible. Special thanks this week to Todd Washburn of WHRV in Norfolk. For the podcast, go to withgoodreasonradio.org. I'm Sarah McConnell. Thanks for listening.