Welcome to Beg to Differ, the Bullworks Weekly Roundtable discussion

featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum, from center left to

center right. I'm Mona Charon, syndicated columnist and policy editor at the Bullwark. I'm joined by our regulars, Bill

Galston of the Brookings Institution in the Wall Street Journal, Linda Chavez of the Niskanin Center and Damon Linker of the Week.

Our special guest this week is AB Stoddard, editor and columnist at Real Clear Politics.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, this is our end of the year podcast.

It is New Year's Eve, the day of, the day of New Year's Eve while we're recording this and so I thought we'd

have a look back at the most awful year that probably any of us can ever remember and just review a few of the

outstanding moments but I'd like to begin if we could with a little bit of a discussion about the election because of

course we would all be in a very, very, very different place if the election had turned out

differently.

And I'm going to start with you, Bill Galston.

It turned out to be closer than we thought,

a lot closer than we thought.

And I certainly will plead guilty to having predicted incorrectly

that Biden would win in a landslide. I believe the polls and then I used my own

analysis to go even further.

So I was wrong about that though, he did win. But it wasn't as overwhelming as we had thought. I mean the the popular vote was but the

electoral college vote was a squeaker again, right? Well, it depends on what you mean by a squeaker, I guess.

You know, we can do the math two ways.

He won states with exactly its many electoral votes as Donald Trump won four years earlier

I wouldn't a squeaker in the electoral college is I would say an election in which a switch of one

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