This week, with the US Election firmly within sight and many Americans having already voted, we're kicking off the first of our two part special exploring the democratic process, election fairness and what's actually involved in organizing a fair and efficient ballot as we break down how to run a democratic election. Welcome to America, A History Podcast. I'm Liam Heffernan and every week we answer a different question to understand the people, the places and the events that make the USA what it is today. To discuss this, I am joined by Dr. Emma Long, Associate professor of American History and politics and at the University of East Anglia. Hello again, Emma.

Hi, Liam.

It's good to have you back on the podcast. I promise you will get a break very, very soon.

It's always good to be here, you know that.

Always a pleasure to have you. And we're also delighted to be joined by another returning guest, an emeritus professor of US Studies at University College London and an expert on the US Presidency. He's published books on Reagan and fdr and we'll put links to those in the show notes. He joined us about a year ago now to talk about Jimmy Carter. So we're delighted to welcome back to the podcast Ewan Morgan.

Very nice to be here. Thanks for having me back.

Oh, it's really good to get you back on the show to discuss this. A slightly different tone, I guess, to our discussion on Jimmy Carter as we sort of dive into how an election is actually run fairly and efficiently. So, Emma, I'm going to throw to you first because we discussed this a little bit, you know, with John Sopol back in the early days of the podcast, in terms of, like, how an election process actually works. But I wonder if you could provide a bit of a recap over, you know, what that process looks like.

Sure. That seems like a long time ago now, doesn't it? So much as so much has happened in the world of US Politics since then. But yes. Yeah. So trying to remember what we talked about then. I think there are a few points to flag up, I think, that we touched on in that, that podcast. One was that the US Election comes in two parts officially. Right. You've got the primary season, which is where somebody is running for the nomination of their party, done state by state, and they're looking to be the candidate to then run in what is the second part of the election, which happens after the party conventions, usually around August time, which is the general election, which is the bit we're in now, which is where you've got the candidates and they are running for the office of the Presidency. Of course, the first part got a bit messed up this year because Biden went through the, went through the primary season and got all the nominations and then pulled out. So there are bumps in the road with that. But that's generally how it runs in two sections. Of course, the kind of campaigning starts quite a bit before that, particularly for candidates who want to throw their hat into the ring, who want to raise their profiles. So, you know, sometimes we find ourselves talking about potential candidates a year or so before the primary season starts. But in terms of the official election, that's what it is. A couple of other things probably to flag up from that session as well. One is a reminder that even though it's the presidential election, sort of a big national level role, these elections are effectively done at state level. Elections are organized by the states, not the federal government. So this is effectively 51 individual elections all feeding in to the final election result. And 51, just in case anybody thinks I've got my numbers wrong because District of Columbia has an election too. So there's that state level states have control over how the elections are run. And also a reminder that Americans don't actually vote directly for the presidential candidate. Right. They are voting for electors who form the Electoral College, who then go on to vote for the president and Vice President, usually sometime around the middle of December. So although we'll all be waiting for the announcement about who's been declared the winner effectively officially, that comes a little bit later on in the process.

I mean, there's a lot that we need to address in this episode from that. But I want to start with this idea of the two party process because there are other candidates that run for president that don't get half as much publicity or airtime generally go pretty much ignored by the rest of the world. Ewan, I wonder if the reason for that is because the current electoral process is almost deliberately designed to protect that two party system.

Well, whether deliberately or not, that's one of the consequences of it. I suppose you could say that the current two parties who dominate American politics have done so since the 1850s. The Republican Party was actually a new party established in 1854 out of dissatisfaction with the stand of the Democratic Party and what was then its main competitor, the Whig Party over the expansion of slavery. Since then, although there have been not insignificant, I'll put it that way, not insignificant challenges to the two party dominance. It's been a Democrat free Republican race from time to time been important challenges. Progressive Party 1912 Progressive Party 1924 single issue candidate Ross Perot in 1992. And there is a host of smaller parties, Greens, libertarians, Socialists and so on, who get a minimal amount of the vote, but because they can get Even, something like 0.5% of the vote happened when Ralph Nader ran in 2000 and took probably about 0.6% of the votes cast in Florida. That would almost certainly have gone to Al Gore otherwise. This was the difference between Algo losing and winning Florida. And of course, Florida was the crucial state that gave George Bush ultimate victory in that race. So they can sort of snip away at percentage shares of order in a significant way, however small those percentages look. But the other thing I'd say coming back to addressing your question, is it deliberately intended? Well, until fairly recently, and I'd say this century, that's putting it crudely, but I think it's defensible until this century. The two main parties were really coalitions of interests that came together to win national elections. And once a third party began to advance popular issues, what would happen would be one or other, or indeed both of the parties absorbing that issue and bringing it into their platform to broaden their coalition. So it was very difficult for third parties to make the breakthrough. Milton Friedman, the very conservative, militarist economist, was fond of saying that almost everything that appeared on the 1928 U.S. socialist Party had been absorbed by the main party platforms by 1972. I won't test that hypothesis now, but you get Also, third parties find it very, very difficult to get onto the ballot. There are all kinds of arcane and complex rules for the reason that Emma has just outlined, because states make the rules and, you know, you got to get on the ballot because you have a certain percentage of the share of the vote. In the last election, if your share was small, you're going to get lots of signatures to get on the ballot the next time. And it's sometimes very difficult. So all in all, the current party system has a life of its own. And I can't see it in the short to medium term being giving way to either a multiparty system in the fullest sense of the term, or a different competition between a party, either Republican or Democrat today or and a new one later down the road.

Is that perhaps part of a problem, though, in that it feels like, from what you've outlined, the. The real barrier is, is financial. There's a lot of logistical, you know, issues as well in, you know, building up a party that can get on the ballots. But there's a real cost to that as well that the Republicans and the Democrats can afford, but a lot of other smaller parties and candidates cannot. Is that fair and is that really conducive to a very democratic process?

Well, it's certainly true that it would be fairer if the federal government funded the election and there were close controls on what private funding would be available. They have tried it from time to time after the election of 1968 and 1972 where because of Watergate investigation they discovered that bit of dodgy campaign contributions going towards Richard Nixon. They decided to tighten it up. And that worked for a while. But in I'm treading on Emma's territory here, I hope I got the date right. In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that these restrictions on campaign contributions were a denial of fundamental freedom of speech, which is incorporated in the Bill of Rights. And they were swept away and the controls on campaign finance and much weaker now than they were for that 40 year period from the early 1970s.

Yeah, I think you can't talk about this issue without talking about the case you're talking about, which is the Citizens United versus FEC ruling from the Supreme Court which effectively said that non sort of non direct participants in the election so companies and interest groups and all the rest of it could run campaign like if they put money into campaigns sort of on their own behalf. So running campaign ads on issues and those kinds of things rather than donating them directly to candidates, that that was considered freedom of speech under the First Amendment and couldn't be limited. So critics at the time of that ruling effectively said what you are doing is allowing those with the most money to have the biggest voice. And that is entirely undemocratic. And certainly what we've seen since then is the massive increase in spending on elections that is not coming directly from candidates or parties is so called sort of soft money working around in the system. So it's kind of like the nra, the National Rifle association, for example, running a campaign ad in a state which doesn't mention any candidate by name, but campaigns on a local gun control issue that is well associated with one party, with the Republican Party. Right. So you know who they're supporting, but they're never mentioning the candidates by name. That kind of spending is unlimited. And just to give listeners an idea, because I was checking this out the other day. In the 2020 presidential election, the total cost of spending this is from candidates from parties, from interest groups, from outside act across the federal government. So Presidential, congressional and Senate elections was $14.4 billion. I mean, you know, when you, when you think about it, it's just a huge amount of money. And when you think about it in terms of third parties trying to break in to that, to get name recognition, to get on the ballot, to get their sort of campaign message out there, that's, that's such a big obstacle to overcome.

That's. I mean, that feels almost insurmountable from a financial perspective. And it just makes me feel like there should be more rules around this, and maybe there are. Emma, you know what? You know, are there any rules that facilitate a fair campaign process?

I suppose. Depends what you mean by fair, doesn't it, what you mean by the process? I mean, the Federal Election Commission oversees the, if you like, the financial side of the election. And there are, there are limits to how much people can donate to individual candidates and to parties and so on and so forth. And they are regulated pretty strictly, but they are, they are not as strict in sort of the widest sense, as a result of what you were saying with the Citizens United decisions. So you can't, as an individual, if you're, you know, if you're mega rich, go along and say, right, I'm going to give $5 million to this candidate because I want them to win. There are ways in which you have to donate it into individual, sort of individual pots and different places. So there are some restrictions there. But as we pointed out at the beginning, elections are run as a result of the Constitution by states. States set the requirements for who can vote, how they vote, how people get on the ballot, how many signatures you need in order to get on the ballot, the deadlines by doing that, whether you have a primary or a caucus, and pretty much everything in between. So it's actually quite hard to generalize about rules. I mean, you could argue on one hand, there are lots and lots and lots of rules because they're all different in each state. But you can't easily generalize about the rules for an election because for the same reason that they all happen at.

State level, Ewan, when we compare the US process to the sort of the more representative electoral process that we see in the uk because I've been a bit negative so far. So I'm going to flip a bit and actually argue for the sort of democraticness of the US election here, because in the UK we don't get to pick who our prime minister is, right? We vote for a party. You know, we vote for. We don't even vote for a party. We vote for an MP who represents a party and then the party with the most power in government get to tell us who is leading our country. In the US it feels like there's a lot more control over being able to vote for a particular individual. And arguably that's why individuals, you know, these sort of celebrity presidents like Reagan and Trump have found their way into power. Is that an argument for a more democratic process, that these individuals are actually able to find a route to the White House?

Well, it's difficult to compare the two systems because one is the presidential system operating in a system of separate institutions sharing power. And one, of course, is the prime ministerial parliamentary system. You know, some political scientists would argue that four parties, to be effective, they need to be able to decide who their leader is. They should have control over the process. Of course, we've reached a stage in the United Kingdom at the moment that there's a debate going on who should choose the party leader. Let's take the conservatives because they have had the greatest coverage on this. You know, Conservatives used to choose their leader on the basis of MPs voting and now it's been widened out to conservative party members. So you have a very strange situation in this country that when Rishi Sunak, well, not only Rishi Sunak, but also Liz Truss became prime minister, they were effectively chosen by the 180,000 to 200,000 Conservative Party members, many of them gray haired, relatively affluent and living in the south of England. So yes, there are problems with the way we choose leaders, but there are also problems with the way that the United States does it. You have to go back to the election, presidential election of 1960. And in that election, it was conducted against the background of the Vietnam War. The Democratic Party was divided over the war and an anti war candidate called Eugene McCarthy entered the primaries, tested the sitting president in a couple of them, Johnson withdrawal. Robert Kennedy entered the race. When Robert Kennedy was assassinated, Eugene McCarthy, who was the peace candidate, assumed leadership of the peace movement. He gets, he's won quite a few primaries, but the man who gets the nomination, who has entered no primaries whatsoever, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, is the choice of the parties, of the party officials, because at that time most of the delegates of the convention were chosen by caucus vote or state party vote. And it was a very elite process. Well, he opened it up. It was opened up as a result of the divisions that beset the Democratic party. They reformed the rules, the Republicans reformed their rules to avoid charges of being a boss party when the Democrats had changed. What happened then was in most states you have to be a registered voter. Not all states, but in both states you have to be a registered voter, whether Democrat or Republican or independent, to cast your ballot in the presidential primary. And voting in the United States in these primary elections is relatively low. Let's say you get about a 62%, 60 to 65% turnout in presidential elections. You get quite often under 50% in many primaries conducted at the state level. For the presidential primary, so the people who turn out are the partisans. What that means you have a better chance of winning the this particular state's primary if you tailor your views to the views of the party identifiers. In the case of the Republicans, they tend to be more right wing than the general population. The case of the Democrats, the party identifiers tend to be more left of the general population. So you have this strange situation that it's really a minority choice, even though it appears to be majoritarian. And then when you come to the election, until Donald Trump came along, you won the election by returning to the center. And that doesn't quite work now. So we're in a very strange situation in American politics that the center isn't holding it's base mobilization that. But we go on to that later.

Yeah, we've spoken a lot on Trump and how he's managed to get his way to the White House and stay at the top of the Republican Party for so long. And I think that will always probably be an anomaly in American politics. But thinking more logistically, because you both mentioned about how the actual operational side of an election is really in the hands of each state. You know, Emma, how does the US Organize a presidential election and turn around those results so quickly with accuracy?

Yeah, I mean, the response would be the US doesn't organize it, the states organize it. You know, if we want to be sort of precise. But also I think it's important to remember that it's happening state level. So each state is minding, effectively minding its own business and doing what it needs to do. And there will have been debates between the elections about everything from where polling places are able to be to whether they're going to have early voting. So we know, for example, that voting in some states that have early voting has started. So some people have already cast their ballot. Can people have absentee ballots or vote by post? And what are the requirements for that? Are you going to allow that? What are the opening hours for polling stations and how all of those things are going to work? So those are happening through the year. We've seen in the last decade or so, real discussions about things like voter ID laws, what forms of ID that people might need to, to have concerns about voter suppression as the result of certain types of laws. I think we're going to talk about that in a later episode. So all of these things have been going on so it doesn't just happen on the eve of the election. So all of those things are pretty much in place by the time Roundabout now starts, especially if you've got early voting, you've got ballot papers that have to be printed, sent out to people, sent out to Americans overseas. Actually, I've been talking to some of my American students who are here on exchange program and they've had to set that up so that they can vote from here, as well as my US Friends who are generally based here, who voted in US elections repeatedly from abroad. So you've got all of that to get in place. You need to have election counters, you've got the election officials. That in itself is not so different from here in the UK all of those things need to be set up in place so that when people go along to the polling station and cast their ballot or pull or press the buttons on the voting machine, there are people there to eventually count them and verify them and do all of that. So it's a, it's a big long process, only some of which is covered, I guess, by the media. The rest is going on quietly behind the scenes, as it is in other places.

When you look at what happened four years ago after the 2020 election, okay, it's never happened before, but Trump claimed election fraud. He said there was inaccuracies, there was lost votes, all this and the other. When there's such a gap between the election day itself and the inauguration of the winner of that election, why is there such an urgency in collecting and counting the votes? Would it not be more responsible to allow a little bit more time to appease doubters like Trump and his supporters.

Used to be longer, of course, inauguration used to be March and they moved that back after Roosevelt's first election. So relatively speaking, compared to history, they haven't got very much time at all.

Yeah, I mean, look, they moved it back. Sorry, they moved it forward to January because the country with left in a chaotic situation with an interregnum between an outgoing president and an incoming one at the moment of the Great Depression. So, you know, you've got to keep in mind a lame duck president is holding office at the moment. Biden. And this is one of the reasons that netanyahu is listening to him because he knows all he's got to do is wait until January 20th and Biden's gone. Even if you waited, even if you sort of said, well, okay, the election is held on the first Tuesday of November, so we're not going to make any statement about the results for another month. The situation would build up as the count is taking place. You get pressure on people who are counting. We saw that in swing states like Georgia and Pennsylvania. I'm in favor of a much faster counter, personally, because, you know, the longer it goes on, the more you have opportunity for roadblocks of the legal variety. And the United States is paying the price now. Party competition is so tight. You have one party. I have to say this without being too partisan. Who believes that? Who only believes the election outcome if it's won now, you know, you're always going to have challenges in that situation. Trump, in that sense, has, I think, poisoned the well of American politics. And the Republican Party has followed in his footsteps. You know, the Republican Party is now a MAGA Republican Party. I would bet, generally speaking, that if Trump wins, Harris would concede. Not immediately, but within a few days. We've already had evidence of this, you know, in the 2000 election. Coming back to the Florida situation, where the whole outcome hinged on whether Bush, George W. Bush, or Al Gore had won Florida. And there was a debate over whether some ballots would be counted, the famous hanging chance debate, because the pension in the voting ballot wasn't in the right place. Well, lo and behold, the Secretary of State of Florida, not the US Secretary of State, but the Secretary of State of Florida, a lady called Catherine Harris, ultimately ruled that the ballot shouldn't be counted, and she was upheld in a 5, 4 split decision. Bush v. Gore in the U.S. supreme Court. Now, that is. Yeah, you know, if that's democracy, it's a very strange version of it. And I'd like to come back to this question. We tend to ignore this in Britain, but secretaries of State at state level are now becoming very important people because they are the ones who validate the slate of electors that are going to be sent to the Electoral College. Now in 2020, of course, Donald Trump infamously telephoned the Georgia Secretary of State, a guy called Brad Raffensperger, and asked him, can you find me another Lem Southern Votes Brand? And Brad said, no. But he made himself the target of all kinds of rhetorical and almost physical attacks by partisan Republicans who believed he had torpedoed Donald Trump's chances. Donald Trump's Real re election. He hadn't. He merely implemented the rules. But this is why we don't get it reported over here. Often after the election for the Secretary of state is such an important event now because these are the people who will decide. I don't say this is going to happen, but in a very, very tight race in say, a swing state, light quarter or Pennsylvania, even if the Secretary of State takes a decision that a particular candidate has won and when the votes counted and reports that out, as for these slate of electors to be delegated for the Electoral College and if this is inaccurate, if this is contested and it doesn't tally with the, with some of the figures, you know, it's going to delegitimize the electoral process. And the time between, well, the 4th of November and around January 6th are going to be fraught times in the United States again.

Yeah, we do know, don't we? Because there's been coverage of this that Republicans in particular the Republican Party have been recruiting poll watchers, right, to kind of be in places who historically were largely non partisan to make sure that nobody was fiddling around with the ballots or whatever. But we know that Republicans, because of the belief that the election was stolen in 2020, they have been actively recruiting poll watchers for this election with the very real risk that there are going to be challenges even as ballots are being counted. And I mean, I'm part of an election panel discussion about the election two days after the election that I'm involved in organizing. And the only thing I've told the organizers that I can predict is that we very likely will not have an election result by that point. But then actually the whole thing, I mean, I take Ewan's point about the need for stability and everything else, right, to, to have a quick count. But this idea that you like you have to have the result on the day is actually relatively modern and has come with a development of modern technology where that can be, where that can be developed. And I think also something we don't talk about much here when we're watching the TV coverage, right, and they're being, states are being called, unlike here in the UK where constituencies are called sort of like officially, right, by the, like the, the, the election official of that particular constituency. The states are called when we're watching this on TV by the TV networks, right? It's not election officials who are calling those. That process happens a little bit further down the line. But that, that press of the kind of the media environment in which we increasingly live is almost the thing that's putting the pressure on, right, of having an immediate, if not immediate, but a very quick result. And you know, there are examples in the past of networks calling the result and then, you know, having to walk it back. We've already talked about the 2020, sorry, the 2000 Bush vs Gore election where Florida was called for, called for Gore, and then that was rescinded and then it was called for Bush and then that was rescinded because it was too close. So I think that's probably also useful for listeners to remember that when we're hearing, you know, Arizona has been called for or, you know, Wisconsin's being called for, actually that's coming from, that's coming from the networks and not from election officials.

You know, when we, when we take both your points on board, you know, the sort of the immediacy of election results, the sort of the ambiguity that still exists and you know, the increasing pressure on secretary of state at state level, does this not really compound the argument for a digital voting system in future? Because it feels like we should be at that point and yet everything is still quite manual, which creates that room for error, doesn't it?

Well, rationally, yes. You know, you still have parts of the United States, rural areas where, you know, broadband isn't at the finger. You know, it would require a considerable investment. You know, if you're living in the Great Plains, even if you're living in a rural part of a state like Georgia, there are problems. So, you know, it's not going to be done with ease. But I agree with you that the digitalization of the election count would be good. Of course, some people would say, well, hang on, that would expose the count to foreign manipulation. You know, we know that Russia tried to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. We know it's been at work in 2020 and 2024 putting messages out on supposedly neutral websites about, with the intention of undermining confidence in the democratic electoral process. You know, we still haven't figured it out it might become necessary for the United States. Well, personally, I think it will become necessary and sooner rather than later, although I doubt it will happen sooner, but ideally it should happen sooner, is to have a federal regulation of the election process, that we end this actual quilt of election regulation by the states, establish national rules, and that we move to a situation that, you know, in the currently tight electoral environment, that parochial rules don't determine the national outcome. I personally like to see some another reform too. This won't happen because it would require a Constitutional amendment, and that is the direct election of the president by popular vote. But you never, you won't have that because the small states would be up in arms about it. You know, it would become a big state election. We now have a situation where seven to eight swing states determine the outcome. But if we had a national election, it would be the big four, California, Texas, Florida and New York, plus an outer circle of about eight states where things would happen. And the flyover states, New England states, wouldn't get a look in. So, you know, the chances of a constitutional Amendment approved by 3/4 of the states is nil.

There's an argument there, Right, that states are losing out either way. Right. It's just different states, I mean, actually that you mentioned, like the New England states, they lose out either way because they're not, you know, they're not considered particularly swing states. So they're not getting all the visits of candidates there and they'd lose out under a popular vote too. So it sort of seems like bad and worse. So at least the director, I mean, the direct election of the President would at least sort of be more obviously Democratic. I mean, I know when I talk to my students, they're just like, we understand the theory of the electoral College, but we don't understand why they haven't got rid of it yet. It makes absolutely no sense. So I think that, you know, there are issues around there and, but I agree it requires a constitutional amendment, so it's going to be hard to see that happening. I think also the idea of, you know, federal rules would simplify everything. But of course, with the partisanship at the moment, that's not going to happen either because neither party is going to do anything that seems to give control or influence to the other side. And on voting, I mean, I understand the value in electronic voting and I'm quite sure minds that are more technologically advanced than mine could work out sort of ways in which you could make those difficult to hack and all the rest of it. But I'm an absolute Luddite. I don't trust technology and not because of any kind of conspiracy theory. I'm never convinced that when I plug it in and turn it on, it's actually going to work. So I'm, I'm, I'm all for the sticker cross on a piece of paper and I've done with it.

Yeah, yeah, fair enough. And I, I, you know, I think to, to your point, you and you know, about sort of federal governance of the election, I, I think, you know, I feel like that would be more than just a constitutional amendment. That feels like that would have to require just a more fundamental shift in the way America, you know, sees itself being governed. Because, you know, just typically and how we've been talking about how elections are run and generally how states are governed, you know, it's all about putting as much power in the state's own hands as possible. Right. So actually getting to a point where a presidential election could be organized at a federal level, that just feels so far off from where we are.

Yeah. It would require almost a constitutional convention to produce a workable system. But let me put this to you, okay. From 1888 to the election of 1996, presidential election of 1888 presidential election of 1996, only once did the candidate who failed to win the popular vote with the electoral college vote. The two were matching in lockstep, although by and large electoral college margins because it's first winner, first pastor post, you get all the. There's no proportionality. Well, in Nebraska and Maine there is now, but that's fairly recent amendment. You had bloated majorities in the electoral College, but you still had majorities in the popular vote. Since 2000. There have been five elections since 2000. The winning candidate in the Electoral College failed twice to win the popular vote. And if Trump wins in 2024, I can guarantee you he won't win the popular vote. Why am I so sure? Because California and New York give the Democrats super majority. Hillary Clinton won by 4 million votes in 2016 in the popular vote. And the margin of that popular vote victory from whopping majority she won in California and New York. It doesn't matter whether you win the state by 1 vote or 5 million votes. You know, you don't get anything more for that. The Republican vote is. It's more efficiently distributed in that regard. The Democrats, when they win, tend to win big, but it doesn't do them any good. Now, if you had the national vote, it would certainly benefit the big states where the, you know, until fairly recently, of course, these states change. New York, Florida and Texas used to be bedrock Democrat. California used to be probably pretty Republican. Now changed for a whole set of reasons. We don't have to go into. It's now too old. Texas, number two state is pretty well Republican. The Democrats are hopeful that the growth of the Hispanic vote would benefit them. That demographic revolution hasn't been converted into a political revolution. Florida, which used to be a swing state, is now solidly Republican. So it's too all but this situation where you have eight swing states, you know, with the best will in the world. I don't think Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina, I won't name them all should really be choosing the president of the United States. All of them should be choosing.

Well, it's a, it's a compelling argument, Ewan. And if any lawmakers are listening to this podcast, take note. But I do, I do want to address in this episode the elephant in the room, which is the fallout from four years ago and Jan.6. And I do wonder what all of that tells us about the weaknesses, but maybe even the strengths of the electoral process in the U.S. i mean, there's.

A lot of concern in terms of, if you think about the legacy of this, there is a lot of concern because this election looks like it's going to be as close as it is, that you may see a replay of this and not necessarily in Washington, which you can guarantee after four years ago. Four years ago is going to be locked down tight. Right. You know, people weren't expecting it last time around. This year, they're going to be prepared for the possibility. But there's a lot of concern, I think, around places that there may be similar reactions in states, particularly in the swing states. But maybe elsewhere, if election results don't go the way that people expect or the way that they want it to go, is it a reflection of the institution or a reflection of where politics is? In the US the rhetoric has ramped up and up and up where people now feel like this is, this is the way that it has to be dealt with. I mean, I think there are elements of both. We've talked over the last year in various episodes, right, about the various weaknesses in the American political system that has in part led to the partisanship that we've got. That's all part of this bigger story and lots of places where reform would be necessary if Americans could just get their head around the idea that you can change the Constitution without destroying the nation and that you should be able to do it. So I think there are elements of both things here. The strength of the political system, I don't know. I mean, certainly on January 7th, when Congress reconvened to certify the votes of the election, Mike Pence, who, let's not forget the crowd outside had built a gallows. And I don't know if it was serious, but they were threatening to hang him for not supporting Trump. You know, whether they were serious or not, the echoes of that are significant. But there was a lot of rhetoric then, right, about you know, our institutions prevailed. We came through it. I'm not sure that that's why they came through it. I'm genuinely not convinced that it's a sign of the things didn't collapse then is a sign of the strength of the institutions, which is a really negative place to end. But I think Americans, they are not, but they really need to take a serious look at a lot of these issues, some of which we've been talking about today, and really think about how they could be properly strengthened and reinforced.

Yeah, I agree with that. You know, my great fear about the American political system as a whole is it is now delivering minority governments. Republicans, when they win the presidency, don't win the popular vote. The Republicans have got a lock on the Senate for the very simple reason that there are more small states that are in the Republican column. And if you get California in your column, you get two votes. If you get Alaska in your column, you get two votes. So it's very difficult for the Democrats to win the Senate because there are simply more Republican leaning states in the Union. The Democrats are almost confined to the Northeast and the Pacific West. And of course, we have the Supreme Court now, which has a conservative majority for the first time since the 1930s, when most of the country doesn't hold similar views on issues as critical as abortion and gun control. We are in a difficult Democratic dilemma at the moment. How you break out of it, the only way you're going to break out of it in reality is if one or other party becomes truly dominant. I don't see that happening anytime soon. And coming back to what Emma was saying, you know, from time to time, I like to amuse myself by totting up the likely outcome of the Electoral College vote. Yeah, well, this is the best case I see for Harris is 276 votes. Okay. Now that's very, very close. It's going to become, you know, a slugfest afterwards. But here's the worst possible outcome. Harris wins by one vote because she wins one Electoral college vote in Nebraska, which puts her on 270. Nebraska has got disproportional representation that will be, you know, we are talking about a very difficult situation. You know, I can see mobs descending on Lincoln, Nebraska or other swing states. And you can protect the Capitol now because you know what's coming. Can you protect, affect everything else? What happens if, you know, you have a patently illegitimate election outcome? We've been in the situation that 75% of Republican voters in 2020 believe that Trump really won the election. American democracy can't go on like this for much longer, of course. Can I just say one thing before we give ourselves a pat in the back about our democracy? It's pretty appalling as well that a party that wins 36% of the vote wins the biggest majority and goodness knows when ours is very imperfect. Okay, if there are any Americans listening, I say don't copy us, okay? But try and find a better solution within your own framework.

Yeah, that's a good point to end on. And you know, we're gonna, we're gonna continue this conversation next week on the podcast as well and look a little bit more granular, not just at how the process works, but who actually can and can't take part in that process and how, you know, when you start looking at matters of, you know, voter suppression and these sort of social and, and racial issues in America, you know, how the election actually really plays out at ground level as well to ensure it's fair or not. So do follow the podcast if you don't already and listen out for that. But we're going to wrap up this part of the conversation. Thanks so much to Emma and Ewan for joining me. Anyone listening? If you want to find out more, there'll be loads of links in the show notes as well, so do check out those. But if anyone wants to connect with either of you two. Where can they do that, Ewan?

Well, they can connect at my UCL email address. I morgancl.ac.uk yep, and the same for me.

As previous listeners will know, I issue pretty much every form of social media. So the best way to find me is to search for me at UEA and you'll find my email address.

Spoken like a true tech luddite, as you proclaim. I am on X. Still hanging in there at this is the Heft. So do connect with me on there and on LinkedIn if you want to. And yet if you enjoy the podcast, leave us a rating and a review wherever you're listening to this. It makes us feel good and helps other people find the show as well. Thank you all for listening. And do remember, tune in next week for the second part of this two part special on the US Election.