What Happens if Trump Doesn’t Concede?

Matter of Opinion

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Ross Douthat, News, New York Times, Journalism

4.2 • 7.2K Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2020

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

After polling misses in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, Michelle and Ross ask Nate Cohn, domestic correspondent for The Upshot at The New York Times, whether we can ever trust polls again. They discuss Nate’s four theories of why polling may have been so off this year and how much the coronavirus pandemic affected results. Then, Michelle and Ross try to read the tea leaves for the next 10 weeks before inauguration with Rosa Brooks, a professor of law and policy at Georgetown University Law Center and a founder of the Transition Integrity Project, whose previous post election scenarios have proved eerily prophetic. Together they debate what the Republican strategy is right now and what happens if President Trump doesn’t concede. Plus, a trick for making all your video calls less painful, literally. For background reading on this episode, visit nytimes.com/theargument.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi there, it's Ross. On the argument, we want to hear everyone's perspective, and that includes you.
0:06.4	Whether you're a long time listener or a new one, we're asking you to fill out a survey
0:10.5	about how you listen to this show and to others at nytimes.com, backslash the argument survey.
0:17.2	We want to keep improving, and we can't do that without hearing from you. Again, that's nytimes.com,
0:23.4	backslash the argument survey, and thank you in advance. Now onto this week's show.
0:30.4	I'm Michelle Goldberg. I'm Ross Douthet, and this is the argument.
0:37.1	Today, what went wrong with polls in the 2020 election? And can we ever trust the polling industry again?
0:44.1	And then, Donald Trump still hasn't conceded. What does that mean for the long 68 days until the inauguration?
0:53.9	Joe Biden is the president-elect of the United States, but not by the margin that lots of people
1:02.8	expected, and not with the co-tails the Democrats had hoped for. So we have to ask, what were all those
1:09.3	pre-election polls with wide eight and nine and ten-point margins really capturing?
1:15.7	What happened with polling in 2020? To answer our queries, or at least to start, we've brought on the
1:21.6	Times polling expert extraordinaire, Nate Cohn, whose Twitter feed you may have been furiously refreshing,
1:28.1	as I was all election week. Nate covers polling elections and demographics for the upshot at the
1:34.2	Times. Nate, welcome to the argument. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. Even if we're
1:42.0	going to give you a terribly hard time about the polls. So the polls aren't, the polls aren't either
1:48.4	of the Nate's fault, right? I mean, their model didn't fail. It was the poll at the underlying
1:53.5	polling failed, or... Yes, although the Times itself, we have our own polls. Okay, thank you.
1:59.6	So in some sense, we failed corporately. But so, Nate, you wrote a piece saying that the predictions
2:06.8	for this year's election were even worse than 2016. So in spite of all the talk about, you know,
2:13.0	how we were going to correct for 2016's errors, we ended up doing even worse. And you've also
2:19.1	offered several provisional theories about why. So why don't we start with you running through some
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New York Times Opinion, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of New York Times Opinion and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.