Extra baggage flies free

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 10th of June. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. 

Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

First up: The Democratic Party just made a very consequential bet.

Democrats in Maine have nominated Graham Platner for the U.S. Senate, despite weeks of controversy surrounding the candidate and open anxiety from parts of the party establishment.

Platner now advances to face Republican Susan Collins in a race that could help determine control of the U.S. Senate. The question is whether Democrats have nominated their strategically strongest candidate—or simply the one who excited voters the most.

BROWN: It’s Washington Wednesday, and political scientist Hunter Baker joins us now. 

Good morning, Hunter.

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning.

BROWN: Well, this was no normal primary. Platner spent the closing weeks answering questions about his personal conduct, past comments, and other controversies. Yet Democratic voters seem to have stuck with him anyway. Now that’s the kind of devotion President Trump has inspired. 

Did Democrats just decide the stakes are high enough that none of the background stuff mattered?

BAKER: I think that what has really happened is that if we were to go back to the 1970s and look at a plot of all the votes by all of the senators, Republican and Democrat, we would have seen a lot of overlap, right?

We would have seen Republicans who were voting more in the center, or even sometimes on the left. We would have seen Democrats who voted in the center, or sometimes on the right—a very sort of unpredictable maze of different votes by members of both parties.

And that is absolutely not the case, and it hasn't been the case for quite a while now, where nowadays you're going to see Republicans voting almost exclusively on the right, you're going to see Democrats voting almost exclusively on the left.

And you know, people are going to be frustrated by me saying this, but just understand that I'm being descriptive, not prescriptive. I am describing reality, I am not prescribing reality.

And the descriptive reality is that voters look at a situation like this, and they're not going to vote for the Republican just because they think they're a better person. Or they're not necessarily going to vote for somebody on the left because they think they're a better person. They're going to vote to try to fulfill their own policy agenda. They're not going to punish themselves by enabling the other side, even when you have an unfortunate choice, such as a Graham Plattner. So he has a much better chance than I think people realize that he does. 

But let me say this: Susan Collins has been an outlier. She has been the Republican to hang on statewide in the Northeast. She has hung on to that seat for a long time, including in 2020, which would have been a tough time. I think she trailed in the polls and she still won.

And so she's going to give Graham Platner quite a fight.

EICHER: Hunter, listen. My takeaway from Maine, seriously, beyond just the pure weirdness of this candidate, Graham Plattner, is his issue set.

He doesn't just have a Nazi tattoo, he has National Socialist positions on issues. You cannot distinguish him from Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or AOC. It's full-strength socialism, is it not?

BAKER: That is the direction where a lot of Democrats are going these days.

I mean, I can remember when the Cold War ended and at that time we had the New Democrats. They were going away from the left, they were running toward the center. Bill Clinton—as improbable as this may seem to people—Bill Clinton was trying to reach like the NASCAR demographic, that's who he wanted to vote for him. And you know, he was pretty successful at that, actually. 

But now, you know, the opportunity seems to be on the left. And it really depresses me, I have to say, beceause there's a really interesting story that illustrates this. They asked people in England where they thought they fell in terms of lifestyle and per-capita GDP relative to the American states. And people in England said probably about as high as the seventh-best American state.

In actuality, English GDP is lower than all of the American states—lower than Mississippi, lower than Louisiana.

So the American economic model works pretty well, especially over against the European model. And if we looked at kind of the overall productivity and what it was 30 years ago versus what it is now, that difference would be very striking.

But Americans just seem not to realize this, at least not in the big cities. They seem to think that socialism is some kind of elixir, and I really feel that economically it's been very badly undermined.

EICHER: Hunter, let's move to South Carolina.

Republicans there delivered another reminder last night that President Trump's endorsement still carries enormous weight. Senator Lindsey Graham easily cleared the field and avoided a runoff, despite a challenge from conservatives who had argued he was not sufficiently aligned with the MAGA movement.

And then at the same time, Trump's preferred candidate for governor—that would be Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette—she advanced to a runoff rather than winning outright, suggesting that even in a state that Trump dominates, his endorsement isn't always enough to settle a race.

So what do you take away from South Carolina Republicans last night, Hunter?

BAKER: Well, first of all, those of us old enough to remember the Cold War would talk about who's going to survive a nuclear bomb, and the answer was cockroaches.

Well I'm going to tell you: it's cockroaches and it's Lindsey Graham.

[Hosts laughing]

Lindsey Graham is a survivor, you know? That is a guy, right? I mean, he went up hard against Trump in the 2015–2016 period...

EICHER: You mean this as a compliment, right?

BAKER: Tough, right? Yes, he's tough, and he knows what he's doing.

I mean, Lindsay Graham, I'm in the same state as Lindsey Graham, I'm in South Carolina, I've had plenty of opportunity to observe him, and he does not just go off to Washington, D.C., and forget about South Carolina. He's around. 

When we have the big pro-life dinners, Lindsey Graham is there, and he makes himself known at those events. And he regularly holds events with pastors. You know, I don't know how religious a guy Lindsey Graham is, but he is in touch with the people in the churches and he is not letting anybody get to his right.

So I'm not surprised that he has survived and thrived and is very close with Trump. I think those two respect each other.

With regard to Pam Evette, she was the lieutenant governor of the state. She was also, I think, one of the first American politicians—not only in South Carolina, but in America, period—to endorse Donald Trump back in the beginning, back around 2015–2016.

And so he came in with a very late endorsement, almost as late as it gets, but it seems to have carried her over the finish line to get into that runoff.

BROWN: Well, Hunter, we can't let you go without talking about California. The waiting may finally be over.

A week after Election Day, enough ballots have been counted to confirm the state's governor's race will feature Democrat Xavier Becerra against Republican Steve Hilton this fall. 

But one of the more unusual stories came in Los Angeles, where reality-TV personality Spencer Pratt briefly appeared positioned to make the mayoral runoff before late-counted ballots pushed him out of contention. 

The slow count has once again become part of the political story in California.

So Hunter, I'd like to know what stands out to you: the Becerra-Hilton matchup, the Spencer Pratt phenomenon, or the fact that California still takes days—and sometimes weeks—to settle major races?

BAKER: First thing I would say is I'm really sorry not to see Spencer Pratt make that runoff.

I'm not familiar with the reality show for which he is famous, I just know that there was one. But I listened to him in this campaign, and what I heard was somebody who I think that voters should have listened to. And that's because we're talking about the city of Los Angeles. 

Foreign policy doesn't matter that much, the big ideological points are not really what matters in a city race. I can't remember who used to say it, but the old line, "there's no Republican or Democrat way to take out the garbage."

And of course, in Los Angeles, what we saw was this question of the fire departments. Spencer Pratt famously running because his house burned down. And he was addressing those kinds of issues.

He was saying, "Look, the parks need to be clean. We need not to have needles all over the place. We need not to have threatening, potentially mentally deranged homeless people wandering all over the city. When we have fires, they need to be put out. We need to make sure that we have water that can be accessed to put out the fires."

I thought that was gonna be a very effective message. I think it was, I mean, he did well. And of course, then that takes us to this question of these long, drawn-out vote counting. 

Look, I haven't done an empirical study, and I don't know what the postmortem will really be, but the fact is that I think that the California way of counting votes is intolerable, right? 

I mean, basically you have this system where anybody can have a mail-in ballot, and they can present it at virtually any time. They don't even have to have it postdated—they can date it themselves. 

And, of course, they have this ballot harvesting, right? Where essentially you have motivated activists who can go to any neighborhood where they think that they might have an advantage in terms of the voting population and just go and collect everybody's ballots and submit those ballots for them, you know?

I just think that there's very little integrity to this voting process. And I think whether it works or not, it is built, it's custom-built to make people suspicious and angry.

And I think that we're going to hear more about that as time goes on.

EICHER: Political scientist Hunter Baker. He is provost at North Greenville University.

Hunter, great conversation, thanks. See you next week.

BAKER: Thank you.

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