Ronald Brownstein on Red and Blue America, 2018, and 2020

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 14 July 2018

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ronald Brownstein is a Senior Editor at The Atlantic, Senior Political Analyst at CNN, and a shrewd observer of American politics. In this Conversation, Brownstein analyzes factors that fuel our increasingly polarized politics. He explains why these partisan divisions are likely to increase as we head toward elections in 2018 and 2020. Brownstein and Kristol also consider possible outcomes in the midterms, the direction of the Trump presidency, and reflect on the electoral dilemmas both parties face in an atmosphere of intense partisanship.

Transcript

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0:00.0	And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome to Conversations. I'm joined today by Ron Brownstein,
0:20.0	Senior Editor at The Atlantic, Senior Political Analysts at CNN, in my opinion one of the best analysts of American politics.
0:26.4	So you combine a rare combination of detailed granular understanding of electoral matters and the big historical sweep.
0:36.1	So I have that put a big burden on you here.
0:39.5	Well, we are living in a big sweep,, right? To live up to this introduction.
0:43.8	So I think we talked a year ago,
0:46.8	now we're what, more than a year and a half after the election,
0:49.7	only four or five months until November 2018.
0:53.0	What's changed over the last year?
0:54.4	We analyzed 2016 a little bit last time, but yeah, so what, where are we now here in June
0:59.7	July of 2018?
1:01.0	27, what are we in? 2018.
1:03.0	2018.
1:04.0	I feel like every crevice, every fissure that we talked about in 2017 and that we saw in 2016
1:11.0	maybe even deeper in 2018.
1:13.8	I mean, to me, the Trump presidency
1:16.4	has said more about the country than about him.
1:18.6	I mean, he has been erratic, volatile, racially divisive.
1:24.2	But who would not have expected those things
1:27.4	from 2016?
1:28.2	In many ways, he has been somewhat at the far end
1:30.8	of kind of disruptive from what we thought but not out of
	...

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