At Least 173 Election Deniers Likely to Win Key Races

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: Yeganeh Rezaian, thank you so much indeed. The United States and many western nations have slapped sanctions on the Morality Police and told the Iranian regime that it will be held accountable for the deaths of civilians. In the United States, voting is already underway for the midterm elections. With inflation, abortion rights and the integrity of elections on the ballot. Nearly 300 candidates who still refuse to accept the 2020 vote will be running for office and shaping the future of American democracy. “New York Times” reporter Astead Herndon joins Hari Sreenivasan to explore the crucial run-up to these midterms.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Astead Herndon, thanks for joining us. So, let’s first start with where you see right now the midterms heading. Is this something that is primarily issues driven? Is it a referendum on what Joe Biden has been doing in the past couple of years? Is it about Trumpism? I mean, there’s so many different, kind of, lenses to look at this through. How are you seeing it?

ASTEAD HERNDON, THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONAL POLITICS REPORTER AND THE NEW YORK TIMES “THE RUN-UP” HOST: Yes, I think that’s a great question. And thank you for having me. From what we see in our midterms reporting that we’ve been doing for our show, “The Run-Up”, it’s a mixture of all of those things. You — it’s a kind of choose your own adventure midterm elections. And I think that that is a reflection of the really fractured political landscape we have here. To your point, you see voters really zeroing in on the economy and inflation as their top issue. That’s certainly a real pressure, particularly for working class voters. At the same time, you also have a Republican Party that has embraced election deniers up and down the ballots. Conspiratorial thinking about democracy. And that is certainly driving a lot of these individual races. And then I think also the other big issue you have is the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe V. Wade which is driving so much grassroots energy, particularly on the Democratic side. And so, because all of those things, I think, have happened this year, I think you have a midterms landscape in which both of the parties, both have things that are driving them energy-wise — — so that they could be good things. But they also have things really holding them back. And so, I think when you look at President Biden, that – – this has not been the midterms. It’s just a wreck referendum on him in the way typically see midterms be. But at the same time, it could result in those same type of party losses that will be a devastating blow for his agenda.

SREENIVASAN: So much of the left right now is galvanized by the idea that democracy itself is under threat. And there’s a good chunk of the right that are really questioning what kind of government we have. And I don’t know if it’s just a semantic one about definitions or if it’s just more actually a philosophical core question.

HERNDON: Oh, I think it’s definitely the latter. It is a question that I think it’s going to go — drive right to the heart of elections going forward. I mean, it’s really a question about who does this country — who is this country for and who should its democracy be for. And I think that we have seen several instances — I would say actually throughout American history, but particularly in the last — in the modern elections. Where that question has really come — has been the, kind of, core dividing line between the parties. I mean, yes, 2020 was about Donald Trump instituting election conspiracies to stay in power. But it was also about Republican apparatus who sought to frankly discard a lot of legally cast ballots from coalitions that they simply did not think should have that much of a say. I mean, you have an electoral college that prioritizes certain States over others. You have an American governmental system that is not in direct democracy. And so, when we found in our reporting is that while Democrats are trying to rally the country around this idea that democracy protection should be the foremost goal. That it should come before things like inflation, the economy, or protecting abortion. What you have is a Republican side that is not unified or in the — they don’t — we’ve specifically looked at Arizona where Republicans in that State are attacking the idea of democracy and using, kind of, old talking points. Saying we’re a republic, not a democracy. To say that it’s actually been an obstacle for what they consider real Americans for maintaining political power. And so, you have Republicans up and down the ballot in Arizona. Speaking highly of Joe McCarthy. Embracing a language of far-right groups like Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. It’s built on reporting that I did a couple of years ago going to an event called Trump stop or Woodstock for Trump fans in Arizona where that type of rhetoric was everywhere. And so, I think that you really can’t understate that for a minority of Americans, but a very hardened group of Americans. They do not see democracy as a core intrinsic value for the country. And it’s going to be up to, kind of, the rest of the country to really affirm that value over those concerns if we seek for that to be the real priority of going forward.

SREENIVASAN: I want to cite some stats from that other paper, “The Washington Post”. You know, they said — you know, more than half of all Republican nominees for the House Senate in key statewide positions, 299 in all deny the results of the 2020 election. 173 are running for safely Republican seats, another 52 appear on the ballot in tightly contested races. So, it’s almost a given that many of these candidates are going to win. And, say for example, put this in context for us. When the Tea Party, for example, rose in prominence, compare that to the wave of likely members of the House, for example, that will be election deniers.

HERNDON: Yes, yes. I mean — I think that we should, kind of, compare it to that movement. You know, the Tea Party had a lot of elements to it. It was principally, or at least a name in response to the financial actions from the Obama administration. But we know it had that cultural element. It had that birther element. And that was actually — but that was at least for the folks who are spousing that supposed to be the undercard to that movement. For what we see right now, those kinds of cultural grievances are the main event. They are the entre and not the appetizer for these folks. And I think that that is going to be a difference from what we saw from those years ago. If this Republican slate were to take back the House, the energy — the pressure for Kevin McCarthy would be from the Marjorie Taylor Greenes, it would be from the Lauren Boeberts, and Matt Gaetz’. They would have an immense amount of power to pressure the house majority to do things like investigate and impeach the White House. To live out Donald Trump’s grievances. In one of our episodes, someone described them as a possible — that they would be Donald Trump’s voice and attack dogs in Washington. So, that is really what we are talking about here is a relitigation of the past in terms of 2020, but it is also about setting up the infrastructure for 2024 and beyond. These — this is a movement on the Republican side that really sees itself as in the business of saving America.

SREENIVASAN: One of the intriguing things I felt about “The Run-Up” podcast was this, kind of, flipped back to the autopsy that the Republican Party did after Mitt Romney’s lost to Barack Obama. And at the time, it was the wisdom of that party and what you breakdown is really out of that autopsy came a couple of central assumptionist, both for the Republicans and for the Democrats. And they were completely wrong by the time Trump got to power. Break that down for us.

HERNDON: Yes. I mean, this is what we thought was a great starting point for folks to understand this current political moment. After the 2012 election, Republicans were pretty much openly saying that they had drifted too far away from where the country was. And because of the demographic changes, specifically the growth of Latino voters and the rise of, kind of, non-white voting populations. Republicans were saying that they had to change their messages. That they had to do things like embrace immigration reform. And that you couldn’t win big elections, talking as they had done previously. Now, that was done really agreed with where Democrats were who had said that Barack Obama’s election in 2008 and 2012 were a reflection of a country that was moving in their direction. And Democrats, frankly, dismissed the midterm results of 2010 and 2014. You had to share this agreement from Republicans and Democrats heading into the 2016 election. That someone like Donald Trump simply couldn’t win. Not just because of Donald Trump as an individual or because of the campaign he was running. But because it was simply out of step with the country’s direction. They assume that white voters would not come out in those big enough numbers. They assume that minorities would keep up that voting levels that we saw in the Obama presidential elections. And both those things turned out to not be true which led to the huge shock of the 2016 election. We wanted to do that to show that it was beyond polling being wrong or something like that. It was about — it was also about how two parties really believed in the direction of the country. And they used that to shake their decision-making. I think that helps us understand right now while it — why it feels like both parties are catching up to where a country is because they are. They spend eight years assuming it was moving in a direction. That could be true in the long term but was certainly not true yet in 2016. And those were — assumptions were further busted in 2020. It was a presumption of what the demographic changes in America would mean. And those were incorrect. And so, we’re really seeing both parties recalibrate with this new knowledge because they were operating from false assumptions for more than a decade.

SREENIVASAN: You know, speaking of that loss and Mitt Romney, the things that disqualified Mitt Romney, in a way, or changed public opinion against him seemed, relatively speaking, so innocent when, for example, right now you have Herschel Walker still in a competitive race with Raphael Warnock for the Senate. And there were revelations last week, of course, by the (INAUDIBLE) by “New York Times” that he had paid for one abortion, asked for a second abortion from his ex-girlfriend at the time. How is it culturally that we’ve gotten to this place where a phrase like binders full of women could be so scathing against Mitt Romney. And what has been revealed about Herschel Walker in the past week and a half, two weeks doesn’t make the kind of catastrophic slide in the polls that you would imagine?

HERNDON: I think it’s important for us to understand just how the evangelical wing of American politics, specifically white evangelicals have negotiated this change in politics. Remember — if you remember back to Trump, these were the evangelical leaders who were uncomfortable, at least vocally, with his home actions. But as we understood it at the time, made a, kind of, transactional agreement. That because Donald Trump could institute Supreme Court of judges that would allow for Roe to be overturned, what was their top priority, that they were comfortable with that. Now, that we have seen that come to fruition, it is not that little evangelical church has said, OK. That’s it. Enough with that type of Trump- type politics. It’s actually escalating such where we have seen a, kind of, rise of Trump- type preachers who are to — going to step further in terms of reflecting his grievances. And when we talked to a lot of those evangelical pastors, they are now saying a new type of transaction where it’s not just about Donald Trump as an individual. But they are open to embracing the whole new slate of candidates. That are going further or anti-democratic language. Who are doing things like questioning results. Who are doing things like Herschel Walker and being specifically hypocritical from personal life to public policy. It is explicitly about power for the evangelical church. And because Herschel Walker is in a critical race that could determine control of the Senate for many of those people, that is simply too big of a price for them to give up.

SREENIVASAN: I also wonder, in your reporting, where are the moderates? Is there a, kind of, moderate left that can be convinced of either side?

HERNDON: You now asked the question to one of my colleagues the other day about, how does the establishment feel about Donald Trump? And they looked at me and said, he is the establishment. And I think that was a great reminder because that kind of outside is now very much driving where the party is. I think on the Democratic side, it’s a little different. You do have a president in Joe Biden who has tried to represent a more moderate wing. Who has rejected some of the left’s most grand proposals. But at the same time has moved himself on issues like student debt cancellation or as we have seen on his climate change legislation. On what he’s recently done with marijuana reform. Those were things that were pushed on to him and he has reflected. I don’t think anyone would tell you that Joe Biden has become Bernie Sanders overnight. What I think it’s harder for some Democratic voters, is that the ticket and the kind of conversations that are leading where the midterms are, aren’t those, “Moderate issues.” There are a lot of — there are a lot of times those more culture identity grievances, and those are leading where, you know, where elected officials, they’re kind of political terrain right now. And so, what Republicans are going to try to do, is use inflation and use those cultural issues to bring over moderates who are on that center-left side. But it’s harder to do that when you’re running Donald Trump-like candidates up and down the ballot.

SREENIVASAN: When you look at the range of candidates and what voters are facing right now, does policy matter to a voter today more or less than this particular person’s place in the culture war?

HERNDON: Uh-huh. I think it matters. I think, when you — I mean, when you look at what the Senate candidates, particularly on the Democratics side are messaging, they’re trying to focus on what Joe Biden has done. They’re trying to focus on infrastructure built on policy, the climate change legislation. And if he did not pass those pieces, he would — democrats would be in a much worse position than they are now. They were adding real low point over the summer, particularly when people felt like Congress was not delivering. So, doing those things, the prescription drug pricing, those things have mattered. But at the same time, those things are not enough to save Democrats from the real holes that they’re in. Republicans have a unified and animated base that comes out particularly around those cultural grievances. And so, Democrats, not only have to motivate (ph) people around policy, but do have to energize their base in that same way. And because of these house districts, the ways that they’re drawn, the retirements and the path that have shifted, because of the Senate races being in sometimes some States for Democrats, they have to do both those things. Not one or the other. And so, I think that they’re — I think we can’t say that policy doesn’t matter. But we can’t say that policy is not the end all be all. And it’s not the only part of this equation. And so, for democrats, you have to be doing well on the policy front. But you also have to provide a response to how Republicans are speaking on that grievance front and that’s has been a challenging piece for them also. They have not been able to rally their base around democracy protection, as well as Republicans have been able to rally their base around election denial, and that’s a scary thing.

SREENIVASAN: Astead Herndon, national political reporter of “The New York Times” and host of the podcast, “The Run-Up”, it’s worth a listen. Thanks so much for joining us.

HERNDON: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.