[inaudible conversations] voter fraud claims have the potential to resident with many americans who already question

the integrity of this country's elections. september "washington post" abc news poll found 46% of registered voters believe in luck for fraud happens at least somewhat often. more now on donald trump's charge of election rigging from a reporter on "washington journal." >> host: the headlines this morning on the front page of "usa today" voting officials insist no fraud is the headline. one of those voting officials is the secretary of state denise merrill adjoint us on the phone. she the democratic secretary of state in connecticut and also president of the national association of sectors that state. thank you for joining us.th what do you say to voters whos o are worried about their confident in their vote, what about these claims about vote rigging and voter fraud? >> caller: yes, good morning. i agree entirely with president obama.

i think this is been come by the way, a completelya unsubstantiated claim that somehow our election will be rigged. i'm not even sure what the word rig to mean. it sort of implies that local oc election officials or somebody at a very local level would tamper with the voting machine. i can't say it often enough. people should understand that there is no voting machine in america that's connected to the internet, first of all. and that right there tells you that it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to muster a conspiracy on a level that would affect a presidential election. >> host: what is the role of the secretary of state? if it could talk about works in state and who oversees these elections. >> caller: yes. that's one good thing that's come out of this, maybe we will

learn more about how our election surely do work. the most it's the second test most it's the sickest it what they call the chief election official.at we don'tes the actually operatee election system. we oversee it and try to maintain the laws in each state that govern elections. it's heavily regulated and each state this little bit differentt but there are federal over arching requirements for theor a standards on the machine, the actual voting machines. many states now have statewide electronic voter lists which is the database that everyone iss talking about, the voter registration databases that inti some cases there have been attempts to get into them but the voter registration database is not at all connected to the actual machines in which you vote. most states, and nothing in this new standard, but most states use a simple scanning machine really and votes still on paper

ballots which are then inserted into the machine and about is kept in the machine has a part in it that is read and that's the results the, at the end of the night. the entire system is overseen by local election officials. in most states that means thet county clerk, and then at more local levels states like the new england states, it's been really accountable. so even in tiny connecticut.evei 169 pounds, each down has itscid own election officials and moderators and poll workers all hired by local officials. so as you can see even at a state level it's extremely decentralized. the laws governing elections are mostly at the state level and they differ somewhat bistate. there is usually an election commission that actually overseu

any kind of enforcement ofof i infractions. let's say something is reported to our office, something is going on, maybe there's very long lies at the poll, for example, at some polling place. any citizen can call our hotline, and every state has a hotline as well, we would then report any infection that sounded serious to our election enforcement commission and they would be charged with seeing whether something should be done about it. so you can see there's about i think over 10,000 local' jurisdictions actually running e each election, and within that there are hundreds of polling places in each one of those jurisdictions tried what i want to vote -- focus on voter registration base. a senior policy advisor for the donald trump for the donald trump campaign has a column in today's "usa today" focusing part of that on the voter registration database is saying

there's two points 75 million people who have registration in more than one state, more than 1.8 million dead people are listed as voters because those files are wrong wants to keep people from showing up in another name or voting twice? >> caller: there's, again, it is heavily regulated. we are very, very careful before we take anyone off a list that usually explains why there's so many duplications. u and also most people don't realize that you have to change your registration every time you move. sometimes even within your own town.ov usually that is handled by various waste in connecticut we have separate list as a star next to it. first of all the list is printed so there is no, i think thehe chance that someone could go in, changed a lot of things on the

declined a bit in the bottom and all the gains are going to the top. even if it doesn't drive the circumstances of particular voters who take particular stance. the socioeconomic characteristics the trump supporters suggest it's more complex than just saying they are suffering in this economic era. we know non-college educated white men are disproportionately supportive of trump but those who support him over other gop nominees are not disproportionally affected by a foreign trade or immigration. so it's not as simple a relationship. nate silver did a bit of luck during the primaries of immediate income at a time when national media income is 56,000 the trump voters had median income of $72,000 a year. higher than those for those

sanders and clinton voters. since the sanders voters are younger, they were actually headed for higher median incomes than clinton voters. she is the inequality candidate in this contest. and all of them are lower than john kasich or marco rubio voters. think construction contractors, or lower level white collar, blue collar people. i go to breakfast at a working-class time in cambridge every weekday and the waitress tells me all the blue-collar guys and the firemen and police are trump people. this is massachusetts. the girls, she says, are not. [laughter] she calls them girls. i'm not being insulting here. and then most interesting finding recently, comes the border unless likely to have moved from their home

communities and, of course, you only need to drive around the united states to realize want to get beyond the metro areas and into the far suburbs and into the smaller cities and into the rural areas, you see the trump-pence signed. in many ways people live in communities that have not yet experienced some of the changes they are very afraid of and in many ways they are seen those changes displayed in lurid ways on the television networks that they watch and the radio that they listen to. the other thing i want to point to is that by the time the trump candidacy emerges the republican party has been hollowed out establishment. we are reading a newspaper, there are probably some members of the republican party establishment hears i don't want to be insulting, but the research that my colleagues and i then suggest that, for

example, when the couple was happening to the budgets of the republican party committees between 2002-2014, compared to the budgets, the resources controlled by older free market think tanks, a network of organizations tied to the brothers, even long-standing extra party groups like the nra and christian right organizations and, frankly, there was a huge drop in resources controlled by the party itself moving out to these far right flankers jerk we know in economic policy during the obama years elected officeholders in republican party and candidates almost to admit and woman entered older free market principles calling for reduction of free trade, reductions in social spending of all kinds. these are actually not positions that are popular even with most americans with both republican base voters. so the point i want to make is

that at the time the trump challenge emerged to elected republicans and to party leaders, they had the many ways already been outflanked in pushing directions ever quite at variance with their base. above all they are at variance with the base on immigration. and how to respond to immigration. i think immigration is the key issue, both the fact that it has increased and that it has shifted from being from europe, from being from latin america and more recently asia. this is what it looks like as a percent of the u.s. population over the last century. you can see we are not yet any period, it's about 12.9%, about where we are now, not yet any period where immigrants as a proportion of the total u.s. population are what they were a century ago. it looks like it's headed to more and more people.

that's what those who are fearful about changing society and a changing culture see when they look at immigration. just to help you understand, in 2010, the largest single immigrant group was from mexico. all over the country. there's some very good research that tells us why that's true. it turns out we have been building walls for quite a while. it's not a new idea. and social scientists have found that the major defect of the wall was to raise the cost of a rival, not to prevent the mainly young men immigrants from coming to the united states, but to make it hard for them to go home for easter or for christmas over grandma's funeral. so they responded in recent decades by bringing their families to the united states and by spreading out all over the country.

if you visit the heartland states in the middle of the country you're going to find large immigrant populations from central america and mexico, often helping the most difficult and lowest paid and least supported jobs with large numbers of children. that changes the cultural fabric in ways that are easy for politicians to exploit the anger of outcome if they choose to do so. this is what the largest immigrant groups looked like 100 years ago. mexico was there but mainly scandinavia, germany. french-canadians up there in name. so we have some pretty good research that shows that trump supporters compared of the republican identified voters and compared other conservative

identified voters forget about the democrats, are much more concerned about the growing number of newcomers from other countries as a threat to u.s. values, much more likely to see islam more than other religions as something that encourage violence, and believes it's bad for the country for blacks, latinos and asians to browse the, a majority of the population. so there are some differences that set the trump voters apart on demography, male, older males, no college degree but the really pronounced ones are the things that concerned about that have to do with the impact of immigration, it's reverberation with international terrorist incidents, and worries about the changing composition of american society. some of them come right out and say it.

this isn't typical but this is sort of an independent guy who was running for congress who temporarily put this site up that spelled it out. the other part of this is that republican base voters, and certainly the trump voters and the tea partiers before them but probably more than just those blocs of voters have been very angry at their party leaders at their elected representatives in congress. throughout barack obama's presidency, we know that the congressional leadership of the republican party and leading republican politicians have promised things about stopping obama, rolling back his chief initiatives, preventing them from being reelected, all of which they have been unable to deliver upon. in this poll that was taken in may of 2015, you can see that

democrat and republican voters alike have a lot of ambivalence is about the leaders of the parties, both of how pronounced it is among the republican identified voters. 60%, close to 60% say that their leaders, mitch mcconnell and paul ryan, we are looking at you, i'm not doing a good job, particularly on government spending, i.e. getting rid of obamacare, illegal immigration and same-sex marriage. so that opened the door for a candidate who, from the start, signaled that he was angry about mexican immigration in particular. didn't make any bones about it. challenge of political correctness, which i think if you listen to working-class people talking, that's what of the best things they like about trump. he says what everybody is

thinking and he doesn't worry about it. and the fact that he is challenging republican elites along with media elite and the democratic party is a big plus in their eyes. let me more quickly say something about the two anti-party insurgencies we saw in this election. bernie sanders when he first emerged that just as much derision from the pundit class as donald trump by the underground, didn't he? he was there for several months. in the end, in the final weeks and months of his campaign was deliberately targeting the democratic party as a rig establishment as you all will recall. so there are some similarities and differences that are think we need to be clear about.

these are fueled by male anger. something that susan talked about in 1996. i think it's fair to say we're in an era where white males are angry. about a lot of different things. but these two candidates in some ways that into that male anger. as somebody who, it won't surprise you, i'm an older female democrat, i'm a clinton person. i've been a clinton person all the alone. retard i would talk to women in that age group during the primaries, they would all described the terrible attack e-mails they got from sanders supporters who were young men using sexual act that's to describe their support for hillary clinton. where did that anger come from? i don't know but it was there. the differences that sanders supporters were disproportionately college educated or in college and younger voters, whereas a tilted mill group for trump is older

and tends to be without college degrees. they both have populist appeals. the economic populism, the core of the trump challenge despite gestures on the trade question, i would argue has been an appeal to ethnonationalism. they both wear panties by the media. i presented data earlier. bernie sanders losing you is just the fans but, in fact, he got a lot of coverage. he was never subjected to attack ads either from the clinton campaign or from the trump campaign that was hoping he would be the nominee. now, the centrist challenge present itself as a revolution but i have studied revolution. i know revolutions. this was not a revolution. this was the kind of challenge from the left of the democratic party that we see regularly in

bill bradley, howard dean, barack obama. only one of them has ever succeeded because it put together white liberals with african-americans, and that's barack obama. so this is a routine kind of event in presidential contest in the democratic party. it was certainly also a campaign that perfected the obama model of the reputed saudi donor contributions. these are not small donors. these are people with middle-class incomes and give repeatedly. but it is a way of raising resources that can generate huge resources in a different way than going to cocktail parties with very rich people. on the other hand, the sanders campaign, like the trump campaign, channeled most of its resources into rallies and in the media. in the trump case, mostly free media, but in the sanders case

they got a huge amount of the money raised on ads. it failed in the end the sanders jobs due to very little appeal to blacks and latinos who are very important constituencies and democratic primaries and it is has an impact on the party agenda by democratic party institutions were able to handle this challenge. i don't care what was in the wikileaks weeks. that was small potatoes. they showed a bunch of staffers at the democratic national committee were irritated at bernie sanders in april. i can to the democratic party person in the whole country was irritated at bernie sanders in april. it would've been surprising if it not been some fetching indo central enough. in its public stance of the dnc maintained his composure, made some concessions all the way through to the convention and managed to incorporate sanders,

and i would say most of his voters, into the coalition and we will give them a voice after the election if democrats control congress as well as the presidency. let me close my remarks by just asking the question that thing has been everybody's mind, including donald trump he was brought neil barrage over from britain to campaign for you. will this turn out like brexit did? i was in britain just before the brexit but i know everybody and associates said this isn't going to pass. i think there's once again some similarities and differences. white identity politics at the corporate. in britain they were not just muslims but also poles and italians. but immigration in britain was really not tailing off. it has leveled off into the

united states. more to the point, a candidacy that appeals to nativism and tries to revise the 1968 law and order campaign just faces a very different situation in the united states than in britain. in britain minorities are just not a major part of the electorate a look at the difference between 1968-2016 in the united states. the gray there are whites without college degrees. they were 80% of the eligible electorate in richard nixon's time. now less than half of the eligible electorate. whites with college degrees, who have been a very heavily trump throughout this entire campaign and are more so now, are now about more than a third of whites.

we have larg large blocks of asn americans, hispanic americans and african-americans eligible to vote. i did put in parentheses the turnout rates for these various groups in 2012. that's why the end of this election is so bitter. in many ways it's the turnout battle in which the trump forces, to the degree that a rational strategy, i tried out the turnout of noncollege whites, particularly males. and the democrats are trying to reassemble and deepen the coalition that we elect barack obama in 2012. there's a little bit of a struggle there because hispanic americans, only about half of the vote in 2012, of those eligible asian-americans only about half. a lot of those were eligible to vote are young and have been, shall we say, slow and reluctant

to come to support hillary clinton. big divide in this election is among whites, between the college educated and the noncollege educated as well as between racial groups. we've seen in this last phase that what may be the death knell for donald trump is the divide between men and women. the gender gap that is emerging is the highest gender gap we have seen. we will see if that turns out to be true at the polls. my friend, allen fitzpatrick, has written about women's quest for the presidency over a century and points out hillary clinton now has put all of her predecessors through margaret chase smith and shirley chisholm black, which is a combination of party support, money and foreign policy credibility, all of which has been held against her, of course. but she has it and chances are,

despite the demonization that has occurred in this campaign, and most recently commenting on her looks, which don't measure up, i think she's probably going to a symbol the final piece of the puzzle, which is a high turnout among women, including women like my waitress who is a noncollege educated woman, whose girlfriends are all for hillary. okay. stop. [applause]

>> do these things work? >> you have to turn them on. >> i'm not used to these. hello, hello? okay, good. hi. wow, what a speech. that you so very much. that was just wonderful. thank you. [applause] >> and so who am i? i'm marvin kalb and i'm here and been asked to be the moderator of this panel. i'm honored to do so. but whiny? because i was a good friend of suze and i think that's the

principle reason. if there are any other templates that i've been a reporter for a long time with cbs and nbc, and for the last 30 years have been associate with the kennedy school and i'm now a senior advisor to i think that's what they call me, at the pulitzer center here in d.c. i want to start our discussion in this panel by going back to something that the dean said at the very beginning we decided what sue had read about in her book, this peter finch line, which is i'm mad as hell and i'm not going to take it anymore. and the wonderful thing about suze use of that is that as a scholar she was capable of the most serious scholarship and all of the data that scholars go by. but she link it to something that people can understand who are not scholars. that was a great gift that she had and i wish that more

scholars have that. but the idea of the question is still very much with us, we are still not quite sure what happens now that this window has been opened. remember, she raised this question 20 years ago, and we're thinking about it now again and it is incumbent upon us around finally to come up with an answer. .. -

how donald trump got to where he has got an is voter anger the reason? i doubt it. i doubt it. was it the reason that bill clinton one was reelected in 1996? it was a major issue then, it is a major reason now and i think that the panelists are somewhat uniquely because here around washington we have lots of panelists from morning until night but they are awfully well-equipped to put all this issue of voter anger into a proper political context and i hope when they do it, they will as well incorporate perhaps some of the ideas that vida presented in her keynote address so now

to the far right, catherine kramer who is the director of foreign bridge center for political science at the university of wisconsin. he's the author of the politics of resentment, rural consciousness of wisconsin and the rise of scott walker. hector, cofounder of the congressional economic leadership institute and we will all remember he was the running mate in 1996 for the independent candidacy of ross perot. next to him, right smack in the middle is john edsall who's the new york times columnist, he's also a professor at the columbia graduate school of journalism . my immediate right, john man, the chair and a senior fellow in government studies at brookings and the resident scholar in the last couple of years at the institute of governmental studies at uc berkeley.

i would like to start and asked catherine to talk to us and all the panelists for three or four minutes for opening comments dealing with that central issue of voter rage >> thank you so much, it's a real honor to be here so thank you again for having me. i would say two things to start off. one is that the anger among women has certainly caught my attention in the past few weeks and i think it's interesting we are here to honor professor poulton who is both an expert in women in politics and voter anger and how interesting those two things are coming together and as theda alluded to, the withdrawal of college educated white women from the republican party in the past month or so or since at least early august is quite remarkable .

glenn has pointed this out, kerry purcell pointed this out as well. it's one thing i'll raise and others that i'm here to represent the midwest i think and i can report back to you on what marv very kindly said was the title of my book on resentment. it's in 2007 i've been spending time in primarily rural wisconsin listening to people and inviting myself into conversations in gas nations for the most part and hearing what i've called resentment because i see it as this slow burning sentiment that in many cases has corrupted into anger in the selection but it's the sense that those of us in a small community don't get our fair share. part of it is about economics but it's about many things. it's about not feeling we are not getting our fair share of taxpayer dollars, that are taxpayer dollars are being sucked in by the city and we don't see it in return but it's also about notgetting our fair share of power or

decision-making . people in many rural communities who i talked to say in all the decisions are made elsewhere based on kind of urban values and ideas and those folks don't understand what life is like for us in small towns, wisconsin is a small town usa and another thing i've heard is saying you know, evil in the cities don't actually respect us. they call us redneck racists. they don't understand our way of life and our values. and that resentment, i have definitely seen turn into support for donald trump. so i'll leave that for now. >> thank you very much. >> great being with you, great being with the panel. as background for my comments, let me note that i have, okay, good.

during my half-century career i've had policy positions with three governors, four presidents and involved in six presidential campaigns, three republican, two democrats and one independent. in sue's book, i think touches the essentially on a trajectory of change that has occurred during the past half-century. she opens this book which is really a very goodbook, i reread that coming out here, it's wonderful . i would recommend it to everyone. but since the quote, basically she says politics is a practice has always been the systematic organization of hatred.

the genius of the american system created in large part by john adams is to take and control and channel that hatred into a democratic process where it is not revolutionary in nature. what has happened in the source of changing anger is described by sue and others into visceral hatred which we are now seeing in this campaign has been a series of disastrous policies over the past 30 or 40 years, i listed some. vietnam, we relied on vietnam. the iraq war, the afghanistan war. the 8 million foreclosures of houses by the elimination of the last deal act.

the allowance of hedge funds. go from 20 trillion in debt to over 240 trillion in debt, literally we have hedge funds that have gambled our economy 12 times the gross domestic product. we had 8 million homes foreclosed, taken away brutally by people. we had $60 trillion of bailouts with the federal reservething , thank goodness to group bloomberg for their request. we spent 748 billion on tarp, we've had 50,000 plants, factory closings since the year 2000. we've lost one third of our manufacturing base, 5 million jobs. these job losses are falling on people who do not have education. it is the source of the inequality that we are speaking about.

and we have had our banks by the hundreds and our top 10 bank funds, $248 billion and no one has been held accountable . we can talk about how this happens and what we should do about it in our discussion. my point is there is very good reason. four people in this country to be angry. >> thank you very much, tom. >> it's an honor to be here and i'm honored to speak at a forum dedicated to culture. her work profoundly influential book and her husband wrote about work and that is important to me, i learned a great deal from it. i was very surprised to hear what he said that he's paying the check, it's quite an

unusual thing. i don't know, that's not fair. he's very generous. but i just wanted to get in on wisecrack. my contribution to this is that i think what has happened is that among white voters, that the party has flipped on their heads and under trump, republican party has become the party of the underdog and the democratic party has become the party of the over dog. this is preying on white voters. this is a huge difference from the democratic party that i grew up with which was to post to be for the working man and woman, joe sixpack, the blue-collar guy riding the subway in the morning. but now, and i mean that not justeconomically , i think

economics does play more of a factor to suggest that this is also true of the culture, the evangelical conservative christian now sees the world as tilted against them. they see themselves on the losing end of the cultural war , that the moral majority no longer exists. and i think they are actually dead right if you look at television, the changing attitudes towards gay marriage. they've lost that war. and they feel it. and they are angry and now they've combined that with their joining to the republican party and that discovery in 2008 that this party could not make the devastation of the 2009 collapse, that basically

created a revolt that did not find expression in 2015 in donald trump. and that process is now ongoing, how that's going to affect politics after 2016 is the real question, what's going to happen to the block of votes, 40 to 50 percent of the republican party, where will they bow? how can the two-party system adjust to this lesson mark is really internal on people in one party. those will be the major questions going forward. that's part of the genius of politics, >> to the other tom marty, karen, thanks for including me, i really appreciate being here and theda, you nailed

it. i think you've got it right. you've got the whole story right and all of its rich dimensions, i'm convinced that too would have been very pleased to listen to that argument. an important part of it is the fact that some people say well, it's all economics. john judas by the way continues to believe it's the story of entirely economic nationalism but these competing claim is wait a minute, this goes backa long time . it has cultural roots and the identity politics has changed its meaning. moving from the identities of

newly emerging minorities to the concerns and fears of a threatened, declining white majority which is working its way towards being a minority. dylan matthews in fox has summarized some of the research that theda referred to and i think it's important to keep in mind of course economics is important but the broad context is economic but there are a lot of people who came through this okay war champions of donald trump and so it tells us there's a tribalism at work here. that transcends personal economic well-being. reinhold weaver, the favorite philosopher of tj dion and

barack obama among others wrote a piece for the americans dollars, believe it or not in 1937 called pawns for fascism. our lower middle class. that's not something you might expect from me a but in fact he laid this out very clearly. true democrats may catalyze the mass movement by preying on their socialanxiety . partly based on racial resentment but also national prejudice area it's an equally strong force and i think the coming together of the changing composition of our society has made a

tremendous difference. second point, i've written about and said enough about it and theda gave me credit but the story is explained by what was in part happening in the republican party. for three decades, they didn't mean to get trump but in effect they made it possible. he faced populist demagogue, throughout our history. they've tended to be marginalized effectively. trump was the first to come forward and garner the nomination of a major party and scare the wits out of a lot of people in this country and around the world but the party is being so strong, that lent him a base that

made it possible for him to be elected. it wasn't ever likely but it was always possible and we're coming through this but it's scary and it reminds us that our democracy is vulnerable just like northern european social democracies are vulnerable with the very generous social safety nets to forces of tribalism built around race and nationalism. that can be quite potent. even in a country that is a nation of immigrants facing this had on. >> thanks very much. let's the four of you and theda as well. theda mentioned this but i didn't get it from any of the four of you and that was the

role of the media. i mentioned that particularly because from thetime that sue wrote her book, 1996 until today , we have the birth of fox, we have really the flowering of a radio right-wing circuit and going to you catherine to ask when you go to the gasoline states and talk to your people, if there were no television, 20, 30, 40 years ago, if they lived in their own world and were not connected to every argument taking place everywhere in the united states , especially the arguments up on the hill but you could listen to them for a while and have the feeling that nothing is happening, it's just words. that these people would not have the feelings thatthey have today . and none wondering that from all of you right now but starting with you catherine .

take the media, injected intoyour analysis and try to seek some way of understanding the broader context . >> what i have to say may not sit very well with people on the panel but what i learned led me to believe that we overstate the role of the media. that most of what people, the way they were understanding was not parroted back from something they heard on fox news for example. i find that much of it was their own reflections that they had created together in visiting with one another and often times there would be one person in a coffee klatch of regulars that met every day who paid attention to the news and he or she would communicate with everyone else but instead, the thing they were most often talking about was their own personal experience and their own economic struggles and their

own anxieties about becoming cultural changes, that's my phrase not theirs, that yes at times they had heard livers on the news media but it's not as if their interpretation of public issues was something they had gained in isolation from news media area that does that make sense? there's much more interpretation in their own specific location going on then i think we acknowledge. >> thank you, thank you very much. tad, would you like to comment on the role? >> i think people attempt to take their situation and put it in context and doing that contextual construction, what i think has happened in our society and why we are seeing the politics we are now seeing is we've lost the vetting functions. at one point the political parties would have vetted

donald trump out, he would have been gone. that has gone. that vetting is gone. print media was much stronger than what it was, the print media and the three major networks in pbs vetted out what was a legitimate discussion. we've had the rise of talk radio and now cable television that is driven by rage. donald trump got that much exposure then the networks for a simple reason that the cable networks were able to charge $5000 just regular cable and when trump was on they were able to raise that to 200. they made an enormous amount of money on that. that's why i'm totally convinced that trump and ailes will form a network.

i think he's going to lose the election, i hope he loses the election but i think they're going to form a media network and tried to cut into that billion dollars a year that fox news is making. they're going to get to the right of fox . trump is now building his audience for this tv network, his media network now but again, rage is profitable and that's what he's after. the idea of setting up a network is not an easy thing to do. the first thing you've got to have his hundreds of millions of dollars. he's got to get that from banks and banks these days are not in bed with trump. they're quite reluctant to deal with him as a matter of fact. the second thing, if you're going to have a successful network, you have to have stations all over the country carrying you and there has been so many efforts to set

these things up so he may try but he may be spending a lot of money and wasting it. >> he's going to enter the market with 25 to 30 million solid viewers that he can spend money on. >> get the money from marcia. >> they've already got the call letters, w pn. no, i think one, the media lost its credibility because of pluralism and the media, the vetting media now are all seen as left-wing media. it's a shift from the new york times, washington post, the networks, all of them are now dismissed as that's just mouthing off. secondly, financial problems facing all the media have

created a situation where trump could run roughshod because he produces viewers like he produced hits on the web. when i would write a column about trump it would get three times the column space and hits that a column on equality would get. there's money in trump. but the tough situation and the market is now defining whereas it used to be the media had so much money it could define itself which is no longer the case. >> listening to tom, on tomorrow from hillary, she didn't quite see that left-wing highest of the traditional media. if anything, they were very late coming to the guts of this campaign and the stakes

of this campaign and only in the last week have you seen the kinds of reporting on trump that might have been done last year. and the kind of things that they covered on clinton were i mean, unusual. but that isn't what i want to say. i think reality tv is more important to trump than the media. the news media. it was his basis of visibility and popularity and attention that allowed him to short-circuit all of the other processes. i think that's really important and was masterful in playing the media during the primary process. he knew how to do it but what i've come to believe is that in this world of asymmetrical

political polarization, the media, the traditional media hasn't done a thing to help the public understand what going on and why we have gridlock . it's not just the washington establishment. their search for equivalence as in effect neutered their important role in our politics and therefore they weren't present in a serious way until very late in the campaign to help us cope with the most serious threat to our democracy since the civil war. >> we could have a wonderful discussion about the role of the media and the coverage of trump and the entire campaign but i don't really want us to go there. what i would like to do is go back to sue's book and all about those who have taken a

look at that book. appreciate what it is that sue is dealing with at that time was writing and researching the early part of the 1990s and the book comes out in 9620 years have passed. what does she hear to do an update on that book . what are the issues that have emerged in the last 20 years that she would now spend a couple of extra chapters writing about or rewriting what it is that she had done earlier. >> i'll take a general one, that i think it's striking when i read the book and this was worth pointing out that at the time she was writing the book, americans had it better than at any time in history and i thought in the 20 years since then, that's not really the case anymore in many of the ways that theda pointed out and one thing i did was to look up this question that gallup has

asked for many years, at least since 1994 and probably going back earlier than i was able to find and it's just about general satisfaction in life and it goes like this. in general, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the united states at this time? not long after came out, the estimate of this put in 1999, it was at a nearly 20 year high so at that point in time in 1999, 71 percent of the american public said they were satisfied. now it's reversed. so that 72 percent say that they are dissatisfied and 21 percent say they are satisfied and i would imagine she would make something of that, that it's pointing something out that we needed to pay attention to and this election is a great reminder that it's if left unaddressed, it comes to a

crisis or near crisis moment. >> two things. i'd like to focus on. one is the 96 communication act that has in effect allowed the agglomeration of the media. prior to that, the any individual owner could only own a set number of tv stations, a set number of radio stations. now it is possible to homogenize that in two 1500, 2000 stations and be able to deliver a rush limbaugh or an alex jones and their message to the whole country.that's new and different, i think that should focus on. the second thing she would probably focus on because it's significant has been citizens united. and the whole question of money. arrow ran the 96 campaign on $135 million.

you can't do that in pennsylvania. and we wind up with a situation today where massive amounts of that money is dark money, we do not know where it came from. we do not know the agendas of the people behind it. those two things, the media agglomeration and thismassive flow of money , i understand six or $8 billion in this campaign. >> thank you very much. >> tom edsall? >> on the second point, i disagree. trump ran a campaign that is actually low-budget. relatively speaking, he's gotten a huge amount of free media, like 2 billion i think the latest data shows that he has raised and spent much less then hillary and especially, beyond that even in his advertising in every state area i think the

benefit shows that citizens united has not had the overwhelming consequence that we thought it would have. i think the other things that too would note, one in 1999, the high point of when everyone things were hunky-dory, that was the high point in the economy. it was like these golden years in this country and they were golden years for everybody across the board. low income, high income, middle income. everybody rose. since then, we've had a very slow growth. and have had rising inequality, very little growth of the middle and below, it's a big difference and if you're going to get pessimistic, there are grounds to be pessimistic for the majority of the electorate. >> thank you, tom? >> the category is all there. but each has changed.

the economy, the stagnation of wages but that then continued and we saw increasing economic inequality and then we had the worst global financial crisis and recession since the great depression so this unleashed a lot of the other forces and factors that she herself addressed. and i think she would have after viewing this sort of looked at the parties not together but separately and tried to see what's happening with all of the racial minorities in one-party and the other party being predominantly the white party . that's the kind of thing that has a way of really

exacerbating the positions that we managed to dampen at times in our history and the issue that comes out of that is of course the presidency of barack obama. so i would like to raise this question. if we are discussing the heart and soul of voter anger, to what extent, i don't want to prejudice my question, to what extent do you believe that the presence of the first black president in the white house in the last eight years has led to the depth of anger or is that irrelevant? >> it's totally relevant and i was going to raise my hand and asked if i can add in a second thing that i think is so important in the past 20 years and it is the presidency of barack obama and also the heightened attention to racism in this country. i think the events of the past few years have been, i

believe it's largely because of cell phones and that white america has seen in this fashion a kind of violence that's going on in our country. i think all of us are trying to make sense of the many bewildering things going on in this world. and i think when people are given a story and targets of blame, it rallies emotion including anger in a very kind of effective way and i think the manner in which anxiety about the changing cultural composition of our country has been rallied or targeted toward barack obama is a very big part of the story. he has become a target for a lot of the angst and emotion about the fact that we are no longer a white country. >> you want to pick that up? >> i think that what we have seen is a code word for

racism. in the attacks on barack obama and the whole question of birth or is. i find it astounding that something like 60 percent of republican voters believe this president was not born in the united states which means they believe he is not a legitimate officeholder. at the same time, i believe what we are also seeing here is misogyny on a massive scale in the reactions to hillary clinton.again, it is deep-seated. misogyny, it's deep-seated racism and we are in the process of moving this but i would like to say to tom on the question of citizens united, it is true. i agree with him on trial. he has been able to earn the media magnificently well but the influence of money has

felt itself in this campaign. down ticket, inside the republican party, the very fact that a mcconnell and orion and other republican leaders can be intimidated to not say anything lest they lose their funders has a major role. what we should have seen is the republican establishment responding forcefully to many of the statements and attitudes that trump has put out. it's that fear of that dark money that holds them away. >> either one of the tom's would like to comment on the role of barack obama, explaining the voter rage. >> i'm sensitive to the fact that he is black and you have the enactment of obama care which is the redistribution program , shifting benefits and taxes downward to a population that is disproportionately minority. that contributed to this

idea. to echo each other and he becomes the embodiment of liberalism and he is black so the two played together. that then gets a higher level of what bolsters racial apathy. >> i agree with that but obama is more than that. i think he's also the economy of meritocracy. someone you know, who goes to good schools and learns a lot and you know, in very refined ways, not much like hillbilly speak , yeah, a professor. this is the, so the race is an important part but it's by no means, the sense of

culturalalienation. these are the kinds of people that have taken over our country . racism is a part of it but it's also a tender feeling. obama doesn't act like strong males, assertive males in many ways. and that has i think opened an avenue for trump. >> another question that peter raised in her presentation that has to do with immigration and the number of people who are coming into this country, not a very high number but any of them are not white. so that adds to the perception and the problem and i'm wondering if you put those two together, the integration itself without

any linkage could be a very significant reason for the racist designate against the white male, not college educated supporter of donald trump. is that right? >> yes and i think integration is a great example of the way in which cultural anxiety and economic anxiety are intertwined. it's so often the conversation about immigration is about certain people taking our jobs or free-trade being bad, the economic idea so i think the fact that that great map that theda showed up so many states withthe largest population coming from mexico , i think again it's a very clear target for people to tap into so i absolutely agree. >> is probably important to

remember that even when the immigrants were primarily white, once they moved to southern europe and when they involve jews, things got pretty nasty in our politics back at the early part of the last century but i do think, and that's the point theda was making that you know, the period of rapid immigration and its changing composition has returned us to a, given us a problem and now in many ways our party system isn't able to manage it as well as it had before. for various reasons. and i think that contributes. the one last thing that is

maybe part of the scariest things about what's going on, there are people who are angry and then there are people who are just filled with hate and have been for decades on end that have heat groups, neo-nazi groups and white supremacists and what's stunning is the extent to which in their conversations on twitter and on their websites and now we have investigative reporting going on following these social media channels and everything and the extent to which the alt right as we call it now has come to people, they just brought into the mainstream of america by thetrump campaign . it's really scary so a lot of

this stuff has been around before but this time it broke through from the fringes to the mainstream. >> and the mainstream of course is the fact that donald trump represents one of the two major parties of this country. just to share something with you all, it's kind of interesting i think. last week trump did a speech down in florida which was different from most of his other speeches in the way in which he delivered it. it wasn't a teleprompter but he didn't in. sentences, wholeparagraphs, long words , very creative thoughts and i was saying to myself this is not donald trump. so who is it? and on a hunch i went and read up on some of the editorials that breitbart has been publishingover the last six months . much to my astonishment, the phraseology was exact. the long phrases were simply pulled out of editorials that

had appeared on breitbart so here we have now a major candidate who is expressing something that is not within the normal range but has broken out of the normal. at least that's my sense of it and i wonder if you share that. >> i'm a little less pessimistic than you. i think it's possible that to bring the alt-right into the mainstream, they will be the ones to compromise. they will have to deal with a large political reality that isolation, often melting cabins where they are keeping their you know, anti-nuclear devices all wound up, they are totally separate and their totally isolated from society.

they have to get engaged area they're going to have to learn a little bit about what the real world is or else will be out again. >> if that were the case we would have found this political expression in trump becoming more a movement toward the center and he seems to be in the last couple of weeks hunkering down now and exacerbating the relationship with the breitbart people rather than seeing any distance towards himself and them. >> i'm talking about the alt-right, these kind of places. >> the montana militia. >> those people have separated themselves and society in general. >> i think it's possible. it's probably candy i did this point of view but that they will be possibly a little more reasonable. >> but you guys on the new

yorktimes are so sensible . >> i do, it's sort of puzzling through this, i'm not sure if i have this right but i don't think that people , i think we are setting ourselves up for a bit of a disaster if we describe these people as so far from the mainstream. for example, may i read you a quote from a conversation i heard not that long ago among a group of trump supporters? this is a man who is a member of his community who gets together with a group of his house everymorning in a service station . sorry, and i happened upon, i was visiting them early one morning a few months ago and

he seems like a very reasonable person to me but this is what he said. i was asking about their support for trump and he says it's time for the reckoning. these politicians are, they're going to lose their jobs because they haven't represented us and they put us in debt. you can hear from the democrats , all you hear is free education and that can never happen and he goes on and on and he says if a guy like that, trump, got in there, he'd start to straighten things out so we don't have to work so hard and start paying this debt back someday. everybody's sitting in their old age in the 70s and 80s, they're fine and dandy but everybody that's behind us, many younger people, brace up because we're going to head back to a third world country pretty quick. we're heading there. so it's a pretty regular guy telling me, i guess my point

is the alt-right perspective is not just among recluses but among people. >> the conspiracies have gone mainstream and if bertha resume can as you said continue to attract that percentage, there's a lot of people that believe this stuff. and that's what's scary. what's scary is the rejection of evidence and fact and science and in fact people, you were saying this earlier. people that follow conversations like this, that listen and feel it's the same old people, throwing this stuff address and we know

what's going on. they don't know what they're talking about and we can't ever get in a situation where we can actually sit down and talk it out because they won't do it in congress because there's not an inclination on the part of republicans to engage in that kind of. >> i think there's this dehumanization of writing this situation. these people are inclined to see bertha resume, there must be something underlying that, i don't think they're dumb people. there must be something about bertha resume and the democratic party that lends itself among some people to producing this kind of idea that the head of the democratic party, barack obama is an alien non-american areas to them, i'm not justifying that point of view but there must be

something going on, unless you're just going to say 30 percent of the population has a bunch of mentally ill people. >> unless you start thinking about what is it that is prompting them. >> what is it? >> i think there is a lot of deep resentment in the democratic party having what ronald reagan tapped into years ago when he said i didn't leave the democratic party, the democratic party left me. you see this route white working-class areas, you see this anger at the left and liberalism. you see it in hillary clinton's emails where she tells goldman sachs one thing and she says another thing when she's debating with bernie sanders. >> no, she says things about

.frank. >> it is, read the follow-up story. >> and on. we don't hear you, this is on c-span. >> okay, we can argue this. >> would you like a microphone? >> there is this huge sense that the democratic party is now the party of elites. and that's how the party is perceived and if you look at thedemocratic party , who the activist wing of the democratic party, what it is made up of, is elites. i'm part of that belief. most of this room is part of that elite but that's what the party is in many respects and it's going to be perceived that way so people will see the party in ways that are not going to be, sometimes are going to be kind of off-the-wall but

people better do some existential thanking. >> i agree with tom. >> all that microphone near you. >> there's no question that there's going to be a moderating force i think on the right, and there's going to be the dynamism that will occur i think in this election. i think there's going to be a three party civil war inside the republican party. there's going to be the old right with trump, there's going to be the libertarians with the coke brothers and the traditional white shoe republicans on casey, etc. and it's going to be very brutal. they're going to have to find a compromise with each other. the only thing they're going to find a compromise on is they all hate hillary clinton and the clinton administration and i think they will go into excess. the dynamics here is going to have a leveling effect on the right.

they are going to i think make it possible because she's very skilled politician, very skilled. and just look at the comments of the senators, republican and democrat when she was a senator. i think it's going to create a dynamic where she will be able to compromise and have accomplishments. and set herself up for a nice rerun in 2000. >> we've got about 10 minutes left and i am delighted that you have answered my final question because i'm very interested in what you all feel given the emphasis on the background and reasons for the voter rage. what is going to happen on november 9? does the voter rage then stop? does it get more intensified? what are the reasons, what happens at this point and with that easy question, what is the answer?

>> i'm worried about it. i'll answer with a question and the question in my mind is just how much establishment politicians, elites from both democratic party and the republican party come out in the next few weeks talking about how this is not a rigged election and sort of setting us up for those claims when mister trump, assuming he does not win, i think it would just be extremely dangerous in terms of fomenting further anger and very disruptive anger to claim that it was somehow a fraudulent election. i've been very happy to see so many people coming out in the past saying it's a legitimate electionand we will abide by the results . >> we've said that tom one, i will say and ask you that

same thing,.november 9, what is it that in your judgment is going to happen at that point in terms of this voter rage, in terms of where the politics go? >> hillary clinton is going to be able to accomplish something, i think she's going to have to have both branches of congress and i don't think she's going to. odds are that the house will stay republican and the odds are that the senate republic will be more conservative on average than the ones who are there, that the middle of the road has hurt an election. i foresee frankly another four years of gridlock. and people getting angrierand angrier . at in action and i think the prospects in 2018 in the

senate are not good for the democrats and even if they take back the senate, in 2018 they could lose it. so that the idea of a government who can apparently do something is going to be problematic. if they kept the sentence, i think there's going to be a lot of pressure to change the rules from filibusters on supreme court nominations and an issue of federal appellate courts. it looks like republicans are going to take a hard line even on supreme court nominations area and i think that maybe someplace and there might even be changes in the filibuster rules more generally. >> before you go, let me interject a question. >> okay. >> assuming for a moment that hillary clinton wins, is there anything she can do to head off a future that edsall

has just described? >> yes, by following edsall's advice and putting everything she can into electing a democratic house as well as a senate. tom is absolutely right on this and the notion that an individual the cause she has experienced in this context, in the senate on the third level issues, having had some success working with republicans who can't match up with the structural forces that are at work here and so all this talk about the paper, it's so awful, hillary needs to spend her last week laying out a vision so she has a mandate. hello. there are no mandates.

there are unified governments and divided governments and she needs troops and she needs control and then she needs to do and make clear that while the democratic party is changing, it's more educated, there are more higher income people, it's still on, represents the lowest income whites as well as essentially all minorities and that a prime policy is being pursued by the other side are, i mean, paul ryan is active in many respects but he still is monumental. it's stunning ball how much the program of the national republican party is

unresponsive to the concerns and it's so cynical, the opposition to government, the demonization of other people, the withholding legitimacy from the normal democratic routine. this has really been an anti-democratic effort to stir up and it started with the party and trump pushed it along further and that's why if we have divided government, the difference tom laid out is exactly right. >> what tom laid out was that you have to have a clinton victory and the democrats taking control once again of the senate and the house but let's say that doesn't happen. where are we then and i'm trying to get some image of where this country is going to be in a year from now. pat, have you confided ...

>> several things. let's assume that clinton wins, that the democrats take the senate and the republicans control the house. i think that's the most likely option. the question then is how do you craft a strategy that you can implement between inauguration and august, that's the only time she's going to have to do it.make the changes then and then you hang on to them. so in the senate, i fully agree with tom

there will be tough. they will be after paul ryan and you're going to have the right wanted to take crying out for 2020. ryan need some accomplishments. and so it is up for the president to use the bully pulpit to take and find some issues where there is common consent like rebuilding the infrastructure would be one, find two or three issues such as that, and then try to do. somebody steals you may have to make in private but it is possible for her to a real accomplishment by working the politics inside the house. >> that's what she will try to do. i think you are right, and i think ryan will be tempted. the problem is that he will not remain speaker. he