I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Friday, January 1st.

On Saturday, November 7th, much of the New York area erupted in sound this time because in this part of the country

that tended to be horrified by Donald Trump. There came a spontaneous, joyous noise when the

networks and the Associated Press had counted enough votes to have enough math to declare

Joe Biden the winner of the vote in New York State, 57% in New Jersey, and the blue northeast erupted there largely in relief.

But democracy was seriously challenged in 2020 nonetheless.

Donald Trump is claiming he really won in a landslide, and he's got about 70% of

Republican voters believing him, according to recent polls.

And so listeners, leave someone in 2030 a message about democracy in 2020 and what your

hopes or fears are for where our democracy will be by then.

And here to help us do that is none other than the co-host and managing editor of On the Media,

our own Brooke Gladstone.

Hi, Brooke, happy 2021. You too, Brian. So how did you cover on your show the difference between tracking how

the election was going and tracking what was happening to democracy itself? Well, we didn't focus too much on how the election was going for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, the zone was really flooded there.

I mean, we talked about the various election narrative,

but they hadn't changed very much from what we covered in the previous three years,

although they certainly escalated in Sound and Fury.

Our brief was basically to track the competing narratives,

what they were and how they were fed out into the system.

It was a time to learn, really, that what seemed extraordinary,

once you put it into context, wasn't in fact unique.

...