Extremists on the Ballot, and America’s Endless War in Afghanistan

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2018

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The 2016 Presidential primaries were a rebuke to moderates in both parties. Bernie Sanders, a sometime Democratic Socialist, built a grassroots movement that bitterly rejected the centrist Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump, whose conservative credentials were deeply suspect, defeated sixteen Republican stalwarts. As the 2018 midterms approach, both parties are wrestling with the question of whether to rise with the tide of extremist sentiment, or run moderates to regain the center. Andrew Hall, an assistant professor of political science at Stanford, studies the effect of extremist candidates on elections. He tells The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson Sorkin that we may be asking the wrong question. Plus, the Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Coll on how the repeated failures of American intelligence and policy led to the nation’s longest and most intractable war.

Transcript

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0:00.0	These are just anecdotes, but it's building up into something more coherent.
0:09.0	I think it's interesting to really try to unravel what his ties.
0:13.0	There's this sort of country city divide for their own convenient, and then it's not clear where it goes next.
0:20.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production
0:24.6	of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:28.7	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:32.1	It's February of 2018, a year and a month into the presidency of Donald Trump, and we're at the point where
0:39.1	every piece of political news is analyzed through the prism of how it will affect the midterm elections.
0:45.5	The Democrats have openings that they haven't seen in years, as we just saw with the election
0:49.5	of Doug Jones in Alabama. And there's talk, though certainly very speculative, of Democrats taking
0:55.2	majorities in both houses of Congress. But a question looms over the Democratic Party. Should it
1:02.0	run moderates and try to grab unhappy swing voters, or should they run progressive candidates
1:07.1	on the left to re-energize the party, and the Republicans at the same time face a mirror
1:11.3	image of that conflict as they defend their majorities in Congress. Andrew Hall is a young
1:17.3	political scientist who studies the dynamics of elections, and he's analyzed the data on why both
1:22.4	parties seem to have been moving toward more extreme candidates. He spoke with Amy Davidson Sorkin,
1:29.0	a political columnist for the New Yorker,
1:31.1	to shed some light on the upcoming midterm elections.
1:35.3	Andy, what's your definition of an extremist candidate
1:39.8	or a moderate candidate?
1:43.7	For the purposes of my research, we use a variety of statistical techniques to try to estimate the ideological positioning of different candidates.
1:53.2	And if you're in a Democratic primary and you're farther to the left than the other candidates, then you're more, quote-unquote, extreme.
	...

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