Episode 3: 2024 Election Takeaways, Part 2

A month after Election Day, New America’s Maresa Strano, Deputy Director of the Political Reform program, and Mark Schmitt, Director of the Political Reform program, share insights on recently-decided races and Trump's cabinet picks.

Transcript

Shannon Lynch: Welcome to Democracy Deciphered, where we explore the history and future of American democracy. I’m your host, Shannon Lynch. Today, we’re taking a second look at the 2024 election results. And I’m excited to be joined again by two brilliant experts from New America, Mark Schmitt and Maresa Strano.

Mark Schmitt is the director of the political reform program at New America. Since its launch in 2014, this initiative has been at the forefront of reimagining how we understand and reform the political landscape. With extensive experience in government philanthropy and journalism. Mark is a leading voice on political reform, budget and tax policy and U.S. social policy. Alongside him today is Maresa Strano, the deputy director of the political reform program. Marissa is passionate about electoral reform and state and local governance issues, and she plays a vital role in shaping the program's initiatives. Her insightful writing has been featured in outlets like Fox, Washington Monthly, Democracy Journal and NBC Think. She also teaches at George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management. Mark, Maresa, welcome back.

Maresa Strano: Thanks for having us back on.

Mark Schmitt: Yeah, thank you, Shannon.

Shannon Lynch: So the last time we talked, it was just two days after the general election. And we know a lot more now. And I'm just wondering if there are some highlights you might be able to discuss on, you know, where the majority landed in the House and the Senate. And any notable races that we didn't know the results of at the time that we do now?

Mark Schmitt: Yeah. Well, there were quite a few that we didn't know the results of at the time, including the Pennsylvania Senate race, for example, which took a little while to decide. But once that once that was settled, what we really learned was there were basically four Democrats who did win in swing states that Trump carried. So in Nevada, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin, either incumbent or new senators came in. Democrats came in despite Trump winning. So that and then the fact that Democrats actually, we now know, gained two seats in the House with the last race being decided just yesterday in California, leaving the Republicans with a very narrow margin. I think what we really learned is this wasn't a super ideological election or an overall partizan shift. I mean, there were a lot of little headlines I saw that said, you know, almost all counties moved to the right and it's right. They moved from having voted for Biden to now voting for Trump again. But not clear that those were always moves to the right, especially because Trump was so elusive on a lot of ideological issues. And Democrats did well, very different from elections, which are I mean, I've lived through elections that were big ideological shifts, including like 1994 when it was all, you know, Newt Gingrich's people coming in or 2010. That backlash to Obama this is feels a little different. And that will leave the Republicans with a very, very small margin in the House, which will complicate things.

Maresa Strano: Yeah, there was a lot more alignment on policies maybe than was visible on the surface there. This election was seemingly more about affective polarization, which is a kind of a political sciency term for, you know, an emotional polarization. You know, we don't like the other side. And that can be we don't like the other side, you know, not because we you know, we love our own side. It's not necessarily a reflection of affection for your own team, but just feeling like the other side is dangerous. And that's obviously a feature of our hyper polarized, you know, binary system. And it's, you know, once again, down to a few races. And Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, will have a very, very narrow majority to work with. You know, the vacancy left by Matt Gaetz's whole ordeal, failed bid at the attorney general position will leave another vacancy. And until they fill that seat, it's going to be nearly impossible to pass anything in the House without 100% cohesion. So that's something to look out for in terms of surprises. Mark already touched on your Bob Casey's loss. And in Pennsylvania, some of those other Senate races and House races. But because, you know, we are in the reform world, we can't not mention the Alaska ballot initiative to repeal ranked choice voting in open primaries, which was in the end narrowly rejected. It took a while for that result to come in, and it was rejected by like 730 votes, something very minimal, which means that we're now in a recount initiated by the Alaska Republican Party. So that's kind of a nail biter. If you all remember from our last conversation, we talked about how the ranked choice voting in open primaries, ballot measures failed across every state where that was on the ballot. They only succeeded at the city and local level. So this Alaska repeal failure is the one kind of bittersweet win something for the advocates to hang their hat on and it may not survive. There's that. Mark, since you mentioned California, if I may, is it just not ridiculous that California takes this long to deliver results?

Mark Schmitt: Yeah, it's ridiculous. But, you know, they don't it's not like they need to be in office or anything like that. Right. It is a little ridiculous, but yeah.

Maresa Strano: Yeah. So, yeah, so be it. So be it. It's just in a moment where people are already distrustful of elections. These kinds of delays can be problematic and kind of strengthen the perception that things are not working properly. So something that I've been I've been thinking about.

Shannon Lynch: Okay. So switching gears a little bit from this election and just in the general moment that we're in, what are we learning about money and politics?

Mark Schmitt: Well, I've been thinking about this a bit because I when I first got involved in the field of political reform, it was almost all about money and politics, all about. Campaign finance reform. And when we started the program in 2014, a big focus on what money and politics particularly, and whether we could use public financing to make it easier for candidates to run and be heard. It's amazing how much has changed in that. First, there's a real kind of neglect of the issue at the same time that, you know, money has really changed the way it operates in the political system. So Adam Bonica, who's a political scientist, put out some data just last week that on the Republican side, the top 400 donors, which are mostly, you know, Elon Musk is not is is, I think, number 3 or 4. They're mostly individuals with either inherited wealth or private corporation wealth or not, people who got rich from, you know, big publicly traded corporations running their closely held companies. Those top 400 donors made up well over 60% of the total spending on behalf of Republican candidates, which is to say money that was going not not only through the Trump campaign, but through other super PACs, other things on behalf of of candidates, about 62%, the number for Democrats was much lower, but it's still pretty high. You know, it's still 400 people making up about, you know, between 20 and 25% of the funding. It's been higher in the past for Democrats. So Democrats now have actually a really strong base of small donors. So, you know, it really it changes things in really dramatic ways. And it's very hard to think about the right solutions for this because some of these are really are kind of First Amendment issues. If you want to create your own committee and get out there and start yelling about immigration or another issue, you're going to have a big influence on the election, even if you're not even naming candidates, which was the thing we were trying to regulate. So I think I think what we've learned is there's a whole different challenge about money and politics out there. It's not all because of Citizens United. It's because of a lot of practices and cultural changes. And I think I think there's a real split within American business between those kind of privately held companies private equity, private wealth, not kind of invisible money, and the bigger traditional corporations that are, you know, either you know their name because you buy their product or because they're they're publicly traded on the stock exchange and so forth. So I think that split within business is really affecting, affecting things. And the crypto industry is probably the biggest industry that was playing in the in the election and probably the only one that was aggressively playing on both sides, like really kind of trying to influence Democrats and Republicans. If you have doubts about crypto, there need to have an advantage and government kind of increases those doubts, frankly, because it was such a great product, they wouldn't quite need that much leverage from government. So I think that I mean, I think what what we've learned is it's a whole different money and politics world. The solutions are not easy and the old ones are not even relevant. But it does make me feel like, hey, we have we got to get back into thinking about this at least.

Maresa Strano: Yeah. I mean, I'm hesitant to venture into this space after Mark since he is one of the authorities on this topic. But I. I have to mention that Trump is one of the more transactional presidents, if not the most transactional president that we've ever had. And he has something like seven billionaires in his cabinet. So it's just another testament to the value and the importance of wealth in politics today in a really blunt fashion. So when you put aside campaign money and, you know, the cost of advertising and lobbying, you have this you have individuals who are very, very wealthy in prominent positions of power and not hidden at all. This is not dark money. These are billionaires who have the reins, who have the most powerful person in the world's ear. And that's something that we should be tracking. And also, you know, alongside that, like the stigmatization maybe of wealthy people in power. So we've come pretty far from Occupy Wall Street.

Shannon Lynch: Yeah, that's a really interesting observation. Sorry, Mark, were you going to add anything else?

Mark Schmitt: No, I was just going to say I've got like a little more almost a slogan. Like at this point, it's not it's not so much money in politics or protecting democracy from the influence of money at this point. It's just the staggering, staggering amounts of wealth that that some people have. And and that's kind of the problem in itself, not just as opposed to the past where we would sort of accept that and say, okay, how do we isolate democracy from that influence?

Shannon Lynch: So really quick, could we give a brief overview of. Who are some of these cabinet picks are? What are their backgrounds? Where are they coming from?

Maresa Strano: Sure. I mean, I already touched on the number of billionaires that Trump has selected for his cabinet. And, you know, those will, you know, may or may not survive the confirmation process. Some will be exempt, like Elon Musk and Vivek Swamy, who are who are, you know, embarking on this doge experiment. But The New York Times actually published a really interesting graphic to visualize the backgrounds of these, you know, prospective appointees and all their overlaps. And it really put in partially for me how unrestrained this administration is going to be even compared to his first round, Trump will point out. So it's picks are either Fox News hosts or contributors or associated with Project 2025 or the American First Policy Institute or hosted events at Mar a Lago. So that says quite a bit. And again, he is extremely transactional, so unsurprising. But just because it's you know, just because there's a lot of drama surrounding them doesn't mean, you know, that it's not something we should still be carefully tracking and scrutinizing. These choices highlight his loyalty driven governance style and emphasize the culture war battles, I would say, over traditional institutional stewardship. So we have Robert Kennedy Jr. We have Tulsi Gabbard, Linda McMahon, Pete Hegseth, who may or may not survive the scandals that have been plaguing him. Mark, I'll let you I'll tag you in too, to list some of the others if you like, or I can proceed.

Mark Schmitt: Sure. I mean, there's Pam Bondi for attorney general, who's there to replaced Matt Gates, who's basically, you know, use the word transactional. She's been in a transactional relationship with Trump for many, many years. She dropped the case against Trump University after Trump gave her a huge campaign contribution, which he actually went through his back through his tax exempt foundation that face criminal sanctions as well. So, you know, there are people like that in a way. Sometimes the billionaires like Scott Besser, the Treasury secretary, almost more qualified than some of the other folks here. You almost feel like Trump's thinking of what's the farthest I can push this and still force these senators to show their loyalty to me, you know? So that's where you get somebody like Kash Patel at the FBI, monumentally unsuited for that position. Or Tulsi Gabbard for the director of national intelligence, somebody whose international alliances are really, really odd. And I don't think we seem to know that much that much about her. So there's there's a real sort of in-your-face quality to some of these to some of these nominations that I always feel like there's a kind of dominance and subservience game going on with Trump where he's just like forcing Mitch McConnell or John Thune, his successor or the others, to just sort of bow down. And and they will on some of these. They'll go talk a game on some of them. I think Seth will be you know, it'll be the second they'll basically have blocked that and they don't usually have the appetite for more than 1 or 2 of those. And so they will give in to Trump on some of the other really, really outrageous nominees. And then who knows what will happen? I mean, they're not people who are you put somebody in charge of an organization who's not well suited to run that organization. Sometimes the organization just kind of freezes them out. You know, I mean, it is a power that bureaucracies have. So it's much more interesting to think about the people coming out of, you know, the people who are nurtured in Project 20, 25, the people who are nurturing America's first policy institute and so forth. You know, do those people become the assistant secretaries and the deputy assistant secretaries and so forth, who can actually change the practice of some of these bureaucracies to some extent, probably making them, again, more transactional and less driven by basic rules that have been pre-established in a way that will be a much more interesting question than who gets placed at the top of some of these organizations. But it's a real reminder that, like, this is not going to resemble the administration that came into office in 2017. And the funny irony is it's probably because he had those more normal, quasi normal Republican appointees that Rex Tillerson, that Secretary of State, or even Jeff Sessions as attorney general. It's probably because he had those more normal people who he felt constrained, Trump felt constrained him. But it's probably because of that that voters had a memory of like, you know, those first three years of Trump before Covid. Yeah, not so bad. It was not so bad. There was a lot he you know, he said crazy stuff, but it was economy was fine. A lot of things were okay. That's because of those people. And those are the very people who he's saying, never again I really want. I really want the nuttiest character confined in any position. So that's more important, I think, than the individual names.

Maresa Strano: That's such a good point, Mark. Yeah, I mean, it is important to remember that Trump won the popular vote. I mean, it was a democratic outcome, however, however narrow, and that's been widely interpreted as a mandate for disruption. That's what he represents, is disruption. So these picks reflect what he sees as a mandate for disruption, and they are likely to deliver. So what we should be on the lookout for is what that disruption will will wreak. Will Americans feel satisfied with what they got? Will they start to look back nostalgically on the days where Trump had guard rails? Will there be buyer's remorse? I mean, it could be that, you know, this kind of shakeup is is welcome and necessary in some in some areas. I mean, Rahm Emanuel was speaking just the other day on how we should be embracing Doge and the opportunity to increase efficiency in the government and to shake things up. And there's there's just a lot that's left unresolved at this point. But I'm certainly curious to see how things shake out.

Shannon Lynch: Speaking of that, could you just explain what this commission is and who is part of it? And what is it supposedly supposed to do?

Mark Schmitt: The DOJ's commission, which is Core, which stands for the Department of Government Efficiency and may or may not be named after the Dogecoin crypto thing. I think it is.

Maresa Strano: I think it may.

Mark Schmitt: Because they have the same role dog I guess as its logo anyway. It is not a department. It is some maybe something more like a commission. We've had plenty of of commissions to look at the functioning of government. Its claims have actually really been all over the map. I mean, is it going to make the processes smoother and the experience of interacting with government that are similar to the reinventing Government initiative that was led by Al Gore during the Clinton administration and and, you know, probably did some good. Or is it more like a budget cutting commission like we had during the Obama administration? That was the Simpson-Bowles budget cutting commission, which actually had some power because it was set up with an agreement that if the members of the commission, bipartisan commission, could agree on a plan, that plan would be guaranteed a vote in Congress. So that's that's actually some teeth that this thing does not have. There was a lengthy op ed in The Wall Street Journal about it last week, which was probably not written by Musk and Ramaswamy because it was kind of in the weeds, felt like something was written by Russell Thought, who we didn't talk about much before, who's the head of the Office of Management and Budget, who is certainly something, somebody who knows what he's doing here. And there's enormous power in that role. That op ed talked about it largely in terms of reclaiming power for the president away from Congress and the other parts of the executive branch, the independent parts of these guys. Brett So it argued that what Doge would enable you to do was just like very quickly undo regulations that don't align with the Supreme Court's rulings last year about Chevron deference. Very arcane legal stuff. It's not actually true. You can do that. The op ed suggested that in order to cut spending, Trump would claim the power to impound funds, which is to say take funds that are appropriated by Congress and refuse to spend them. Trump did that, actually, you remember, in his first term in trying to withhold funds from Ukraine until they came up with some dirt on Joe Biden that was the subject of this first impeachment impoundment, that process of not spending money Congress has allocated. Empowerment was something that Richard Nixon tried to do. And in the Budget Act, the basic law that creates the federal budget, that creates the congressional budget, it's called the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Act of 1974. In response to Nixon, Congress really established that the president does not have the power to spend or not spend money as it wishes, and the court has upheld that, this op ed said. We think we can do that, and we think the court will back us back up on doing that. I think what that is saying is they want to allow Trump to create a situation where he can sort of allocate money again, be transactional. He can deny money to a city that he thinks isn't being helpful or a mayor who he thinks insulted him, a governor he thinks insulted him, a foreign country that didn't show him proper respect or reward friends in other ways, or reallocate funding, all kinds of powers that were explicitly denied to the president in in 1974, you know, when the president was a crook. So I think that's a that's potentially another aspect of of what DOJ's is setting out to do. It might also be a completely nothing. It might also be like keep those two guys busy. You know, and I'll write up some report and it'll be ignored, which has been the case with some other government efficiency report, government efficiency things. I think the best example of that actually goes back to the 1980s when President Reagan created something called the Grace Commission, chaired by a guy named Grace. And it had a bunch of recommendations and nothing ever happened. But, you know, it could be any of those things. Many of them, many of them quite dangerous, but a, you know, a real commitment. How do you make government processes more efficient and accessible to people, things like automated? You know, they've actually talked about why not have automated tax filing? Because that really shouldn't be necessary to go through all the hoops that we do to file our taxes when the IRS already has most of that information. That's the simplest thing in the world. At the same time, it's something that there's enormous lobbying power behind preventing that from happening. The Biden administration made some progress on trying to do that. Fighting all the way against Republicans who really don't want to allow that to happen simply because of the political power of that tax prep industry. So there's so many things like that. But those are those are the heart. That's the hardest thing for them to do. And I don't think they will do that.

Maresa Strano: Well, Mark, thank you for that crash course in obscure, rational and.

Mark Schmitt: Federal. I know that was pretty good, wasn't it?

Maresa Strano: That was that was quite that was that was something that was.

Mark Schmitt: Not all of that comes from memories within my lifetime. Some of it is book learning.

Maresa Strano: I feel like I learned a lot. I mean, to really dumb it down for myself, mostly what they laid out as their goals is a 75% reduction in the federal workforce, a $2 trillion cut to federal spending and the elimination of a bunch of agencies in their entirety, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which as we we some of us remember, was was formed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. It was the brainchild of Senator Senator Elizabeth Warren. It's highly unlikely that they'll be able to accomplish any of these things. You know, three quarters of the budget goes to entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. Those aren't going anywhere. In all likelihood, you know, the Republican position is sort of shifted on on those in recent years. So where else can you cut? You know, even if you cut most of the federal workforce, you're you're not going to make much of a dent. That workforce hasn't even really increased significantly in decades. And cutting defense spending again, good luck getting that through your Republican compatriots. I think more of it a signaling function than than anything else. So, again, if Americans want disruption to government as usual, you know, trust in government is in the toilet. It just doesn't hurt to at least signal that efforts are being made to make things work better, to be more transparent, to be cheaper. So even if it accomplishes very little, if anything, of of this of this very lofty agenda, it will maybe not actually hurt the administration in any meaningful way. Because what people remember was that attempts were made. And if they are unsuccessful, you better believe they're just going to blame the swamp and, you know, resistance from the deep state.

Shannon Lynch: This is all very interesting stuff. We only really have time for one more quick question. So before we close out. I'm just wondering now that we're a little bit more removed from the Democrats and Kamala Harris's defeat, what else have we heard? Or what's your assessment on some of the failure in messaging on the Democratic Party's side that might have caused her to lose this election?

Mark Schmitt: Well, I think there's really a lot of competing narratives here right now, and I'm not going to lock in on any one of them. And I'm not sure it's all messaging. And some of it may have been really baked into the cake. I mean, one argument is she needed to separate herself more from Biden. And that's probably right. I mean, Biden was extraordinarily unpopular. It's crazy to think that he thought he should run for a third for a second term when he would be 86 or 87 at the end of that of that term. Just hard to sort of actually appreciate how I was not as alarmed about that as I should have been at the time. But so should she have separated yourself? I find I often it bothers me that that people don't actually say about what you know about what should she separate herself? I would have loved to see her take a different position on Israel. I think it's very difficult for the sitting vice president of an administration to take a different position on a key foreign policy issue that is the subject of negotiations and all kinds of things. So. I don't blame her for having trouble taking a different position on that issue. I guess she could have taken a different position on immigration issues. But the position was like, okay, we have the right answers now and the Republicans blocked it and we're moving forward. So I don't I don't know that that was the right one either. So I don't know really know where the difference should have where she should have differentiated herself. You know, there's another one. There's another story that is I don't want to sound like a mocking it, but I'm mocking a little bit that people say the groups, the groups that is progressive issue advocacy organizations that pressed candidates to take strong positions on Green New Deal or things like that largely in 2020. Kind of put them out of sync with where the American people are. I think that, you know, one one response to that is that would have had more of an effect in 2020 than it then than it would now. And most of those progressive groups who are really, you know, good allies and advocates for the more incremental kind of policies that are but still substantial but incremental policies that the Biden administration pursued. So that's, you know, one of it. I think Harris and Walz had a difficult time kind of presenting what their party stood for when the range was so far from, you know, democratic socialist left on the one hand and Liz Cheney on the other. That's a huge and an incoherent range. So I think that's that goes to sort of what's a little difficult about American American parties right now because they do have to represent such a broad range. So I think that sense of I don't really know what this party stands for or what these people stand for is probably part of the message and challenge. I don't know. There's probably a half dozen other explanations. And so you probably have a few on your mind.

Maresa Strano: I have like 15, but I won't bother you with them. I want to start by saying that since we all spoke soon after the election, my reaction that maybe I shared with you at that time, but definitely my reaction the morning of November 6th with, you know, grocery prices were too high. You know, the vast majority of incumbent leaders and parties lost ground in democratic elections across the planet because of primarily high inflation. So maybe this was inevitable. And, you know, as as time has passed, you know, the takes can kind of cool. I'm I'm less I'm less sure about that inevitability, especially given that Democrats came pretty darn close, actually, to overcoming some really bad election fundamentals. You know, it was not, in the end, a landslide in the popular vote, Mark, as you mentioned, the Republicans actually lost seats in the House. There were, you know, a bunch of strategic errors that may have been fatal. But again, it could have been a complete bloodbath. And and it wasn't. If I if I have to point to a few things, since our time is short here, I would say that the Democrats seem to have overestimated the kind of scared or pissed off woman vote post jobs. You know, they either. Failed to turn out or lost a lot of the women they thought, you know, they had locked in for for Harris. And, you know, a few reasons for that include, you know, many women who may have been mobilized to vote. Harris by the, you know, their anger toward. Dobbs Or desire to protect reproductive rights. We're in states where maybe that fear wasn't as potent. You know, they had they were maybe they're in blue states or their states had already sorted out the issues through ballot initiatives in the midterms or, you know, they were able to vote for abortion protections separately on the ballot because it was on the ballot in their state in 2024. Again, also, voters tend to perceive Trump as a social moderate because of his background, despite the starring role that he played and having row overturned. Another thing I think Democrats forgot that they're no longer the cool party of Obama or Bill Clinton or even the antiwar movement of of decades past. You know, they don't represent the hip counterculture, which means they lost a lot of a lot of young voters, especially a lot of male voters. There are other reasons for that. But I think that's pretty key. You know, they are now the establishment in an environment where the establishment, the status quo are toxic.

Mark Schmitt: So I can I just can I just cut in on and say something about these? Do I think I mean, this is a ridiculous thing to say. But not only was Joe Biden too old, in many ways, Kamala Harris is a little younger than I am, was a little old. You know, like the successful Democratic presidential candidates have been in their 40s and often in their early 40s. You know, Bill Clinton, JFK, Obama, obviously, Jimmy Carter was, I think like 51, 52. Like, you know, that's what we really actually do need that. And it makes me look at thing look at it and say, you know, AOC has a lot to offer people to judge, has a lot. They're completely different on some ideological scale, but they are very they just feel very young and responsive.

Maresa Strano: So true. And in this information environment, it is essential that candidates are able to just hang on on a podcast and be authentic. And it's easier for younger, younger people to do that. Younger I think.

Mark Schmitt: Harris was a lot better than you would have expected her to be based on her performance in 2000, 1920.

Maresa Strano: But yeah, but the new generation of leadership, maybe that claim fell fell a little bit flat. Given that even though she looks incredible that she is 60.

Mark Schmitt: So you're saying we can't people in my age can't hang on a podcast.

Maresa Strano: I did not mean to imply that.

Mark Schmitt: Who will take this up in the office next week?

Maresa Strano: Right? Yeah. I think the one final thing that I have to mention, and I'm sorry to prolong this this conversation, but I think Democrats did alienate some voters by through their their get out the vote mobilization effort this time around. You know, they parachuted in canvassers from out of state. They knocked on doors maybe too many times. And while usually that's an effective strategy and I think it still was in many cases, it kind of exposed a failure of organization on the party's part generally. So people noticed that that the party was not a presence between elections, that they show up just before it's time to cast a vote and taking for granted sometimes that that vote will be cast in their favor. And that wears on people when it's when it's done repeatedly. And it's something that the Republicans, even though they did not have a traditional ground game and outsourced a lot of their their mobilization work to, you know, Turning point USA and some of these groups, they have a very broad and well resourced network of groups, many backed by the Kochs and other billionaires that are active year round, year in, year out. They provide services and then they pull you in and and and kind of educate you on the the merits of deregulation and things like that and that that that works.

Shannon Lynch: Yeah, Well, let's end it there. Mark Rissa, thank you so much for coming on again and joining me today.

Mark Schmitt: Thank you so much.

Maresa Strano: Thanks Shannon.

Shannon Lynch: Yes of course and a huge thank you to our listeners as well. Be sure to tune in to our next episode where we'll dive into the history and future of political parties. This is a New America Studios production. My name is Shannon Lynch and I’m your host and executive producer. Our co-producers are Joe Wilks, David Lanham, and Carly Anderson. Social media by Maika Moulite. Visuals by Alex Briones. Media outreach by Heidi Lewis. If you enjoyed today’s discussion, please rate review and subscribe to Democracy Deciphered wherever you listen to podcasts.