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hello and welcome to this inaugural spectator tv us election special which will be running regularly in the run-up to november the 3rd and probably beyond the spectators us edition is the new kid on the block and we hope you subscribe to it or will subscribe to it but our magazine which is the oldest in the world has a long and storied relationship with america in the 19th century from 1859 to 1861 we were owned by americans and we made substantial commercial sacrifices in order to support the north in the civil war we were only major british publication to do so later president teddy roosevelt wrote that he reads the spectator every week and in 1903 he invited the editor and his wife to stay in the white house the current editor is still waiting for that invitation in the first world war the spectator played a crucial role in briefing american journalists and dignitaries on developments in london such as the high esteem of the spectator that in 1967 someone borrowed it and created something called the american spectator but we won't go there at the moment it's fair to say that the land of the free is in our dna which is why we now produce a successful us website and a monthly edition for american readers in fact we're offering spectator tv viewers 10 percent off a new subscription visit spectator dot u s forward slash subscribe and enter the promo code tv and we'll even throw in a special tumbler for you to drown your sorrows from or to celebrate on election night go to spectator dot u s forward slash subscribe promo code tv in the next hour we're going to be discussing the state of the race that's a surprise trump's foreign policy how big an election issue will that be the role of china in the election the possibility perhaps the probability of a contested election and the significance of the debates as part of our discussion we have our spectator usa team freddie gray the editor of spectator usa amber ave our washington editor and melissa chen our new york editor so let's get to the state of the race on that election it's thundering towards us because the first tuesday of the month happens early this november and labor day happened late so it's quite a short campaign in january before the covert virus struck donald trump seemed to be on course to win re-election boasting as much as he could about the extraordinary success of the job-creating u.s economy over the last four years then came the pandemic and it seemed trump's lunk had run out now as we look at the polls joe biden retains a strong advantage but in key battleground states most notably florida donald trump does appear to be closing the gap so let's begin by talking to our expert guest today we're very happy to welcome charles libson he's professor emeritus of political science in the university of chicago and he's a frequent contributor to the spectator usa so charles in the battleground rates races is the race actually narrowing yes it is um it's important for everybody to understand that america votes uh by state uh and each state has the number of uh representatives plus senators it has in the capital and uh some states like new york are predictably democratic so the race always boils down at least it has in the last um number of elections it always boils down to five or six or seven uh so-called swing states which states are swing states sometimes differ but uh most people who look uh to how trump could win boil it down to states like florida pennsylvania perhaps ohio which now looks kind of reliably for trump but some other swing states in the upper midwest michigan and so forth and in those states according to polls it is narrowing all right now let me unpack that a little bit and let me go first to the national polls when i look at the national polls they're not narrowing mr biden retains a pretty consistent leader between seven and eight points but are we right to think that the national polls are not what we should be looking at professor that's correct because uh however large or small the victory is in california or new york is not going to matter to whether uh trump can get to the 270 uh electoral votes that he needs and in the last couple of elections because of large democratic margins in predictably democratic states uh the electoral college winner has not been the winner of the popular vote the problem with polling is uh several fold one is do you get a truly random sample of the people let's say in ohio it doesn't matter uh now whether you're polling california except for local elections there but are you getting a random sample and are you and that means are you getting enough people in the key states that's hard with cell phones and so forth second issue is there are so-called shy trump voters who will simply not tell a pollster they don't know who they're going to vote for and the third problem is it's hard to predict who assuming you've got a random sample assuming people are telling you the truth it's still hard to tell who's going to show up at the polls and vote there's an enthusiasm gap but there's also a questions as to whether subgroups african-americans hispanics jews name your subgroup how large a group will be voting this time and that's why even in a well-conducted uh poll there is still an element of art in it right amber let me bring you in here are is the trump campaign sure that things are narrowing in the battleground states because when i looked at real clear politics of course being a great website to catch up on these things there was certainly a narrowing taken place but the most recent polls uh in the battleground states suggest that perhaps that narrowing has either stopped or slowed down right you when you look at these uh battleground staples what really happened was that biden had a really significant lead in june july and then early august so what really happened was the polls returned to where they were in march and april really before the effects of the coronavirus pandemic and the riots really set in but what the trump campaign is looking at is not is the president ahead is he tied in these states they just need him to be four or five points behind joe biden really for the reasons that charles mentioned there is an enthusiasm gap that they see there's this so-called secret trump supporter that's never going to answer truthfully in a poll like that so they feel that because of the way the polls were in 2016 where pretty much every major pollster had hillary running away with the election as long as trump is within really even just outside of the margin of error they feel confident that that's going to translate to a victory on election day melissa we've seen uh quite incredible urban unrest in various cities in america all around the black lives matter movement and what surprised me is how prolonged it's been i mean i remember earlier riots in some ways were worse than going back to the 60s and the 70s or even early 90s but they didn't last for as long as this you didn't have it 90 nights in a row of protests going on in places like portland or seattle you would think this would play these are democrat cities they've often got left-wing democrat mayors you would think this would play to mr trump as the law and order president but is it it should um i mean trump has been you know sort of advocating for sending in the feds to control um to control all the chaos and in some ways i think i think it's helping him you know i think many cities especially if you look at what's happening in wisconsin and kenosha with the riots over jacob lake you are starting to see this um sort of push back against um the margins that that were slowly starting to to open up for biden wisconsin is looking more and more you know favorable to trump but in the latest poll in minnesota where a lot of this started you would think that maybe this was one that the trump people thought that hillary clinton held on to it this is one that maybe they could take from the democrats there aren't many states like that but it doesn't seem to be playing that strongly or with the people in minnesota despite a lot of the urban unrest minnesota has been democrat since 1972. so i think it's it's been wisconsin was more recently flipped to a red state so i i think that's a factor and also the you know um look at who you know the senators that represent minnesota and just kind of like the in general you know with uh minnesota being the the tinder box that set off um that that set off a lot of these riots like it was the big one this this year that i think yeah that affected us freddie you can see how the trump campaign will play up the urban unrest and uh some of the rather unpleasant scenes that we can see on social media not always in mainstream media in america on the other hand there is the president's handling of covet for which he ain't going to win any prizes he's not alone in that but he certainly isn't going to win any prizes so he may have a plus on what's happening on the streets of some major u.s cities in the biggest story of our time he has a minus i think that's undeniable i think even the most ardent trump fan would not tell you that he had a glorious pandemic uh the press conferences when he was doing daily briefings on the crisis were a disaster overall i'd say and i think although it's it's not actually quite as big a win for the democrats as some of the democrats are liking to make out and i think a crucial factor here which is not very much discussed is that medicare generally is a democratic win uh in 2018 the democrats were able to in the midterms the democrats were able to talk about medicare and a lot of people don't trust trump on healthcare so they want a lot of points on that the thing about the covid pandemic is that it's blown medicare out of the way it's an issue no one's really thinking about health care specifically they're thinking about the pandemic and the crisis so what's what's a big win for the democrats normally has been sort of slightly muted or blunted by the pandemic charles let me come back to you and go back to these crucial battleground states and just talk about a couple of them uh you mentioned a key one is florida i remember in 2016 as the results were coming in when when it looked like after all mr trump was going to win florida as he did in the end that suggested that mrs clinton's hopes of the white house were not the slam dunk her people had thought it would be can mr trump lose florida this time and still win the white house he can but it's unlikely that he could win the white house if he loses florida um and uh you everybody who um looks at the overall race looks at how you put together this number of states and uh going back to the issue that you had talked about before um the the um one of the problems the the trump campaign has had a problem there's no question uh with covin as freddie says and they get a boost from the issue of uh uh unrest urban unrest but i wanna um go back and point out that there's a big difference between unrest in a small midwestern city like kenosha and unrest in portland when west coast cities portland seattle um san francisco uh have riots or unrest a lot of the rest of the country views those as very distinct and not related to them but when they happen in a city like kenosha um they seem to be coming for us middle america middle america the other issue that uh freddie uh pointed to and i i'd like to underscore that how right he is is that the more an issue rises other issues by definition have to recede a bit and trump's strongest issue is actually the economy and voters vote prospectively they look forward not so much backward and the issue is going to be who is best suited to restore economic growth we were in just a great situation before the pandemic yet and the more trump emphasizes other issues including law and order which is kind of on his side the more it downplays the biggest positive issue for him which is the economy and the fact that he is a kind of undisciplined campaigner he talks about anything that's on his mind means that it's very hard to get that message out joe biden is disciplined in the sense that they've kept him out of public sight we don't know who this guy is he's been around for 47 plus years since he hit puberty but there's a real question as to whether or not he's the same guy he used to be not just on issues but whether he's kind of all there and all of these issues are playing in states like florida pennsylvania wisconsin michigan which are states trump must win if he's to win the white house i think you've just told us that mr biden didn't hit pubertry until he was about 430 um but i won't dwell on that we'll move on let's go on to foreign policy he was first elected his voice hadn't changed i'll take your word for that i thought that's because he came from scranton but never mind foreign policy yesterday was another extraordinary day in washington as israel the united arab emirates and bahrain two gulf states they all signed on to the abraham accords a significant name abraham promising a normalization of relations between these states and a commitment to lasting peace in the middle east other states are expected to follow oman perhaps kuwait the big one most of all at some stage saudi arabia uae and bahrain would not have done this if they didn't have the approval of saudi arabia in the first place donald trump's never even given much credit in the sphere of international relations at times he seemed to be all over the place but for the uae and bahrain to recognize israel to begin relations with israel economic relations flights between them cultural exchanges and so on is a quite historic development and although foreign policy doesn't often play big in campaigns this is something of an achievement though it's been done without the palestinians freddie will this make a difference in the election is it an issue is it a a plus for mr trump i don't think it's quite as big a plus as a lot of non-americans might think it is however what it does tap into is this sense that the media just will not give trump fair treatment because this was a significant development it was a historic achievement in many ways and all you got uh again uh from most mainstream media channels was sort of sniping and sneering at it and i think americans increasingly find themselves frustrated watching the news and seeing a very obvious bias against trump on the international stage and from foreign media and i think that plays in his favor and it motivates americans to regard trump in a favorable manner charles what do you make of it uh freddie has nailed it correctly but i i would add one other important point um maybe two actually one is that trump has gotten american troops out of places where lots of americans can be killed that's a plus so a lot of people thought it looked like isolationism which would be something that a lot of americans might not support they think america should play a role in the world but if it's playing a role in the world by putting less of our young men and women into harm's way that's a real plus the second thing is that although joe biden has a lot of experience in foreign policy he's mostly made bad decisions and he opposed for example uh the killing of osama bin laden he when when obama took that decision obama uh biden was on the wrong side of it he took um he was opposed to the killing of solimani or he talked about it afterwards and i think that the biggest issue that hurts him is that he's very vulnerable on china but that i think to most americans is a corruption issue for biden i also want to endorse freddie gray's excellent point that americans do not vote on foreign policy for the most part this isn't an issue like brexit that dominates the landscape this is an issue that is less important than the health care issue that uh that melissa and uh amber have uh talked about this is less important than economic recovery uh is there are geopolitical forces at work here which will not necessarily be a factor in the election among ordinary americans i mean it is clear that the gulf states particularly the two that have now signed the uae and bahrain they now see they have a common enemy uh in iran and israel is their ally israel sees iran as the biggest threat to the region the sunni arabs see iran is the biggest threat uh to to the region and they the the gulf states soon to be followed as i say i think by others have decided that the common enemy of iran is a reason for making common cause with israel even if it doesn't does nothing for the palestinians even because they're not part of this indeed they've been demonstrating uh against it they're not in there they may be at some stage in the future but they're not at the moment because they're more worried about iran than any kind of resolution of the palestinian issue that's just a hard reap politic about it but amber i would suggest although you know that may be over the heads of most american voters except those who form follow foreign policy americans know that the middle east has been a cauldron it's been a graveyard for american forces it's been a problem it's created embargoes there will surely be some sense even at the most general level that hey getting israel and these arab countries together that's something of an achievement i would certainly say that one of the major shifts in american foreign policy or i should say foreign policy in the minds of americans over the past um 20 years is that they felt that the aftermath of 9 11 was such a huge blunder there was so much cohesion among the american people initially with the decision to go into iraq and afghanistan and that sentiment faded so quickly because of the fact that we didn't really seem like we were there to have a victory but really just to have an everlasting presence that went on forever now the americans are looking at the middle east as a region where they never thought that there would be peace the middle east was considered to be a place that would have conflict for the end of days and so for them to see these achievements coming out of the trump administration will certainly be um not necessarily something that's going to decide their vote but i think it will be in the back of the minds of some americans and i want to hit on another point that charles mentioned with the withdrawing of troops more generally from places like syria and afghanistan um military families do tend to vote republican but i think this will be an even bigger win for them because um in working class families in military families a lot of young men don't have any other choice than to join the military so if they're looking at who they're going to vote for they know that this is their only option the idea that they would not be sent into a place where they could potentially be maimed or killed is going to be a huge benefit to them and certainly something that those families will have in their minds on election day melissa amber and melissa a question uh that really follows up which is about the media coverage we were just i think quite accurately told that these stories are just not getting much play do you think that that will mean that the issue itself that uh amber just laid out so nicely doesn't resonate very much melissa i mean i read the washington post yesterday one of the columnists saying hey this is no big deal this is nothing really what do you think really in the new york times this is a framing issue um the other the other framing the other framing game that they're playing is the what about is in game which is what about palestine or what about you know this country anyway so who cares about the key steel um and in many ways it you know freddie didn't hit the nail when he said that a lot of people are waking up to the fact that this seems to be a bias issue or a coverage issue where where where you know why isn't the the media giving the trump administration any credit had this happened under any other administration you would imagine that it would be signal as a huge accomplishment well i'm probably with charles here i'm old enough to remember the camp david of course and that that led the net with jimmy carter and arafat and the prime minister of israel that led the network news every night for a week charles i i did a post on this yesterday on facebook that juxtaposed i'll say i'll send it to you andrew that juxtaposed the front page of the new york times on the day of those accords every single story including the banner was about them yesterday if you looked at the website every single story was about something else they literally didn't touch on it and cnn went one step better they had a picture of the white house grounds as this historic accord is being signed and said people aren't wearing masks and there's not enough social distancing very i mean you you couldn't you couldn't make it up i said it says if world news was being reported by seventh grade hall monitors that may be unkind to seventh grade home monitors you never know amber just final question for you on this uh do you want to give any credit to jared kushner he deserves a lot of credit and it's it is difficult for me to say that because i've been very critical of him on domestic violence yeah particularly immigration exactly you said he was a kind of machiavelli out of his depth in the spectator magazine that is true i have given him a lot of tough words on particularly the immigration issue i i did feel he's subverting the trump agenda a little bit but he deserves a lot of credit for his work brokering piece in the middle east and look the media said it couldn't be done if you look back on the washington post cnn new york times twitter accounts back in 2019 some of their reporters were mocking jared kushner and the idea that he would be able to broker a deal in the region but clearly his family history his close relationship with the netanyahu's really paid off here and he should um be getting credit absolutely and the timing is right too because they see this foreign this common enemy that any of that help mr kushner if he has played a role but when they when they see former enemies come together to face a far bigger threat as they see it in in iran we're going to stick with foreign policy uh everyone agrees it doesn't play that huge apart normally in american elections but china has been a huge issue for some time uh and it is probably a more pressing foreign policy subject than the middle east in this election particularly as china has emerged as a rival superpower to the united states now donald trump has made a strategic confrontation with china one of his administration's top priorities he slapped tariffs on beijing started trade wars pressured other countries to remove hawaii 5g from their communications infrastructure he's robustly attacked beijing for failing to stop the spread of what he is called the china virus melissa how big do you think is china as a foreign policy issue in this election um china itself is an issue because of the coronal virus i think the coronavirus pandemic brought that to the forefront of the election um still you know second third probably to to the economy and and just coronavirus itself in the handling of this pandemic but you know for years um the trump administration's approach to china really is a very sharp departure from previous decades of engagement um and and i think that the american public has has kind of waken up to that um you know especially with the current virus bringing into sharp focus the fact that our industrial supply chains on medical supply chains were for the longest time um you know just completely embedded there and therefore we were dependent on a geopolitical rival just to get important supplies that we need so you know before it seemed like an abstract thing maybe it only affected the farmers or people for who who were in the industries that trump slapped tariffs on uh but now this was seen as a national security issue for the first time so i think it's there in the public consciousness but um you know whether or not this is something that is front and center uh to the to the as people go into the voting booth that's that's you know that that's not clear to me how big it i would put mr biden to the side for a moment because he said a particular attitude towards china but in terms of the two parties how much does china really divide them now there's no question mr as you say mr trump's tougher line was a departure from the obama years and from what had gone before but then perhaps encouraged by the the the covert virus backdrop it seemed to me that there was a new consensus emerging in washington that everybody wanted to be tough with china even the left of the democratic party wanted to be tough with china as well in fact there was a kind of arms race i'm going to be tougher than you on china so does it my i guess my point or question to you know this is does it differentiate the two parties enough now it still does because um the well the rep i think gallup had a poll in july and uh you know it basically showed that republicans were at 83 percent were more you know more likely to view china unfavorably than the democrat 68 percent uh so there was still a partisan focus here but the other issue is also about russia so uh you know they they have asked for i don't know decades now which country represents more of a threat to the united states and it's in cycling between you know it's usually it has been russia in the last few years um but right now china has kind of just slightly you know eeked out uh on on russia in terms of that in terms of americans and how they see uh foreign countries as a threat so you know i there is clearly a by a partisan divide here uh china trump said china 16 times in his rnc acceptance speech um i think joe biden had only said it once and in fact dnc's four days extravaganza it was really only one candidate that said china and it was joe biden it was just once so you know it's it's pretty clear that part of the focus is is very different on on both sides um what direction has a biden has a corruption problem there too doesn't he melissa well yes why is that well hunter biden especially um has been involved in some deals that are you know very um uh shady and and china yes and had it been on the other side um you know i'm pretty sure the the press would be all over this um biden has also been in congress for the last 40 years which has seen this appeasement policy towards china uh ever since uh you know wto um so you know what direction u.s foreign policy will take over the next four years is definitely dependent on which political party is going to be in power charles the american polls may not yet have caught up with this but there is there's no question china is a far bigger threat to america than russia i mean russia zakaria has got a strong military russia and has a huge nuclear power it's got a gdp smaller than italy's it's a declining fossil fuel power it's basically a regional power china is a superpower in technology and military it's got a global reach my question to you about given the importance of china to the future of the united states and the 2020s is there although a number as i see it a number of democrats have kind of caught up and are taking a strong anti-chinese stance too that's not been mr biden's record even earlier this year he was telling us hey china is not not really a threat to the united states we shouldn't be worried about it that's a problem for him if not for the democrat party charles it's a problem for him it's also a problem that we need a stronger navy and a military buildup to confront a rising threat that's a problem for all democrats but i want to go back to the point that melissa made that many americans you see i see we all see that china is a much bigger geopolitical threat but the democrats have emphasized russia at least throughout the the trump presidency and they say that trump has downplayed the russian threat because of his own corrupt relationship of some sort to uh to vladimir putin so the fact that americans are kind of confused as to where the threat is the fact that the media has played up this russia collusion hoax for four years and really hasn't withdrawn from that position and the fact that americans generally speaking don't vote on foreign policy unless we're in the midst of a war in which the case they vote against the war means that i think all of this issue on china is largely an economic issue there is the the medical supply line issue but the fact that uh for trump the issue for china that really plays is china has been stealing our manufacturing jobs that's a big deal and it resonates with the fact that biden voted for a lot of these old trade deals including the deal with mexico and canada nafta that make him vulnerable in these uh swing states of the upper midwest which have a lot of manufacturing jobs so that would be ohio michigan wisconsin minnesota those kinds of states are real question marks pennsylvania for biden because of china stealing the jobs as trump would put it and mexico stealing the jobs that's that's the way i see that issue amber doesn't the trump campaign need to make more of china i mean charles makes a good point that the the media narrative the media consensus is all about the threat of russia russia not as a military threat so much we're interfering in the american elections trump's supposed this obscure or strange relationship with mr putin or whatever the whole business of whether the republicans complicit the report that has bigged up russia in america in american mines i would suggest more than it should be china is clearly a far bigger more important geopolitical threat to american jobs american technology american position in the south china sea on the east asian rim shouldn't miss mr trump be making more of that it would be very smart for him to do so because one of the reasons he won the 2016 election was because of his um sort of novel approach to trade deals where he did take a more protectionist stance as opposed to the free trade liberalism that's been really um sucking up the american political space for the past 30 40 years so the idea that he would go into this election not talking about that would be a huge mistake and in fact he's already seated some ground to the biden campaign there for example the president had a buy american eo that was drafted up for him in part by peter navarro as trade advisor which would require the u.s government to purchase things like medical supplies that were made in the united states as opposed to shipping them in from china which would address that um that reshoring issue that melissa touched on and he hasn't signed that eo yet and meanwhile biden his campaign has used the buy american language in order to market his own trade policy so he's been able to really copy the trump administration and co-op that type of language which is absolutely a winner for working class americans so if trump's going to take that issue back then he he absolutely should be campaigning on this a lot harder than he is right final word to you on this freddy well i would say it is actually a weak point for trump in some ways because he has always tried to play a double game with china he talks tough he slaps terrorists down uh but he's always been angling for this big trade deal breakthrough with zing ping and i think therefore the biggen campaign early on realized that this was a weakness for trump and they did adverts attacking him for playing this double game with china but then typically of uh the democrats sort of political correctness crept in and they started to worry that they were being cynophobic and so they withdrew from that approach quite quickly okay we shall see what happens you're watching spectator tv this is our inaugural u.s election special you can subscribe to the spectator at spectator.us forward slash subscribe you even get a discount if you enter the promo code tv a contested election we had one in the year 2000 the year of the hanging chads in florida in 2016 it was a nasty election uh one of the nastier in modern history 2020 looks like it could be even nastier there's a growing concern around the huge expected increase in mail-in voting people deciding to post their votes because of the pandemic rather than go to a ballot station or both and that the result may not be decisive and that that could produce a serious problem of american democratic legitimacy both candidates already accusing each other trying to cheat mr trump says he'll have to see as to whether he'll accept defeat hillary clinton has told joe biden that under no circumstances under no circumstances should mr biden concede on election night one follower of american politics said to me it is perfectly possible since more of mr trump's voters will go to the the ballot booth than mr biden that mr trump wins on the night but that when mail votes are counted in mr biden has won by sunday then what happens there uh what i would suggest charles is a constitutional crisis what'd you say yes that would be the case and it would be compounded uh andrew by the fact that there is very little confidence in any american institution all the institutions have been gutted out over the past 30 plus years if you look in the early 60s more than 50 years ago and you asked the question do you trust the government meaning the u.s government the answers were more than 70 percent of people did today they trusted about as much as they trust a used car dealer but that is also true for virtually every other american institution with the exception of the military which but i mean if you think about what's happened to the catholic church worldwide where the pedophilia crisis what's happened to the media which uh several of us have talked about about its bias and so forth and it's been known for a long time that our election system is not accurate enough to give you the true winner of a very close election that means that an election ultimately might have to be decided by the courts but if you look at court decisions in america and how they're reported now and i think in a sense accurately reported if a decision is two to one by judges let's say on an appellate court the first thing i want to know the first thing freddie wants to know the first thing amber or melissa want to know is who appointed all three judges and that was the case in that one you look at and therefore if the case ultimately goes up to the u.s supreme court uh where there is a conservative majority but uh it's not a stable majority you have a chief justice a swing vote who could go either way you you wouldn't have a situation i think like the one in the year 2000 where it was a close election ultimately decided uh on the basis of how to count votes in florida by the u.s supreme court in the year 2000 and nobody went into the streets it was accepted even by the side that lost as a legitimate outcome since then there's been a decline and you can see that with trump or in the last election saying he wouldn't necessarily accept defeat and now in this election you have democrats saying they wouldn't and in america final point traditionally votes that come in late are corrupt votes that is they were controlled by the political machine in say chicago and all of a sudden the candidate that was winning on election night loses two nights later as votes are quote discovered somewhere against that background if you have votes coming in by mail and the votes are unsecure so we don't know for sure that every vote was cast by a legitimate voter who had a right to vote and we don't quite know who handled all those votes all the way this is just going to be a potentially a real mess i didn't realize i was going to have to go look up again the old cook county soft shoe shuffle [Music] that's my point uh and that's i remember several graveyards used to vote in cook county the old statement used to be that you wanted to die uh and be buried in chicago so you could remain active in politics indeed and then you could vote early and vote often we'll come back to all of that melissa from what charles says unless either mr biden or mr trump win by a landslide and at the moment that's not on the cards for either of them listening to charles there this is a potential to be a huge mess and it's certainly it doesn't look likely that it's on the cards unless people really believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with polling and that nothing from 2016 was corrected um it's it's very likely you know that it's going to be a different winner between the popular vote winner and the electoral college winner and um i am hearing you know thoughts on the ground about people saying they're afraid of all of this on top of the riots that are ongoing and what that could do to propel a situation that's even more violent um with with protests so that's another issue that that you know it's a possibility well it sounds like it's certainly going to be a dripping rose for lawyers on both sides they're all going to be tuned up with the most expensive lawyers that money uh can buy ambulances they have already done that but i saw that they've hired hundreds of lawyers amber what is it about mailing ballots um why can't they be organized properly why don't they count them on the day with the other votes why don't they count them in advance and keep the result quiet why do they seem to want to make such a mess of it well i think the biggest issue is that the united states simply has never seen mail-in ballots done at this scale before so the system is just not prepared for it there's of course the question of fraud back in 2005 the election commission chaired by jimmy carter ran this study and found that there was significant fraud among absentee and mail-in ballots jimmy carter later reversed on that decision in may of course when trump started talking about potential for voter fraud because jimmy carter could not be caught dead agreeing with donald trump but it is an issue in new york um in the primary races two really close congressional races took more than six weeks to get um a final decision and the other problem was that one of the races was within 2000 votes and yet there were 10 000 mail-in ballots that were cast out for things like minor clerical errors or not having the proper postage so if we scale that up to a presidential election where we have more mail-in ballots than ever coming from all 50 u.s states we can only imagine the fact that the usps is going to be overwhelmed that the election commissioners are going to be overwhelmed there's simply not enough time to prepare for the system undergoing male and voting at this level and so that's going to be the huge issue come election day and why these results are going to probably be delayed for so long it's important to recognize that every state conducts its own elections and has its own rules so you can't just say it's a national problem which it is and therefore it can be corrected nationally has to be corrected in north carolina which is different from michigan and so forth freddie when you look from the outside of this it begins as if a lot of the american electoral process is simply not fit for purpose you know you look at the way each state draws its congressional boundaries it's all gerrymandered to whoever whichever party is in charge of that state at that time you look at uh the mail-in votes how they're counted how the rules are set by the individual states america still has an electoral college which most americans don't even understand uh either maybe not none of that mattered so much in the past it seems it could matter a hell of a lot well i think the major issues the major issue you've got is the is the absolutely ridiculous polarization that's happening in america now and for for a democracy like america to work you need some shared agreements and shared values about how that democracy will work and that's just simply not happening at the moment i mean a big a a big way an interesting way of looking at it is to look at what the the various teams are various sides are accusing each other of pretty big conspiracy theories uh the democrats are convinced that trump is trying to use the postmaster general to suppress votes that he will use the military to try a coup uh if he doesn't get the result he wants and on the trumpis side you're hearing people talk about a color revolution and how the democrats are trying to use the blm riots as a way of sort of as an uprising tool to overwhelm the government and get their way without a democratic mandate right so no big issues there at all freddie the future of american democracy therefore the future perhaps of western democracy there's a big american no file i'm very worried actually a number of people have said to me who are huge always been huge supporters of america have defended americans against european defended america against a lot of europeans who have been anti-american that they've never felt more worried about the future of the united states uh but in that cheery note let's uh move on to the debates and our final subject for tonight debates i think have become more significant now because the the pandemic has meant there hasn't been a traditional campaign there haven't been the mass rallies uh and so on the wonderful pictures that you get on uh during an american television uh campaign uh the kickoff in cleveland i think it is in september the 29th for the first debate get the popcorn in for that it doesn't matter what time zone you're in you have to watch that live i certainly will be things will get heated they may also even get a little bit incoherent as well given the two candidates involved when they get off their autocue on their scripts i want to put a point to all of you and get you to react it seems to me that debates have been significant when they have confirmed things that people were already sensing so mr dukakis in his election he couldn't answer the question about how he would feel about if his wife was raped and murdered would he still be against the death penalty he didn't answer that properly mr ford in 1976 saying that the eastern europe was not under the soviet jackboot when obviously it was but in both occasions people were already beginning to feel that neither mr dakakis nor mr ford really quite had it and the debates confirmed that that the debates on their own are not necessarily game changers now that was then this is now can they be game changers charles yes um all the emphasis uh in the analysis that i've seen is that it is the first debate that really matters but i would say in the last few years the biggest issue that occurred in any debate was in a primary debate when the former governor of texas rick perry said he wanted to eliminate three congressional departments and could only name two i remember that and that confirmed what most people thought which was he was he didn't have the intellectual capacity for the job the issue for biden is whether he has declined in a cognitive sense and indeed is healthy enough to run the office of president now expectations have been set pretty low if he can zip his pants up and show up on stage the democrats and the media are going to declare him a winner but it's it's a very significant signal that his campaign has been unwilling to have him talk to anyone without using a teleprompter whether he can go for a long debate without making not an ordinary gaff not mixing up iraq and iran like he did yesterday which i think a lot of people would say that's a kind of ordinary gap but losing his train of thought or doing something that suggests that he's in the midst of cognitive decline that's his big risk trump uh has suggest has subjected himself to a lot of testing hard questions joe biden has taken only the the most softball questions if you were a tree what kind of tree would you be he's not uh potentially prepared for a hard debate and i think the biggest risk is will he make any mis grievous errors in the three debates and in particular will he show up in the first debate as capable of running the country how do you see it melissa well that was that interesting um uh piece of news that popped up two days ago when trump basically said that he would be willing to sit down with uh joe rogan moderating a debate between him and joe biden and you know the the reason for that is simply that with with biden's numbers in the polls if you know why why why debate trump he doesn't want to risk exactly what charles said which is just the possibility of that juxtaposition and in a very long form debate like the ones that logan does that goes on for three four hours this is something that you you can't hide with nice little sound bites or you know cameras panning away it's not canned it's it's completely just freewheeling and the truth will come out so it makes every every sense to me that uh joe biden's team has been completely reticent on this matter they won't do that they simply won't they won't amber let me bring you in as we come to the end of our broadcast i mean i don't thought both teams will be worried about the debates and about their man but mr trump will kind of bluster his way through as he usually does and he sees it almost doesn't matter what he says even if there's a gaffe his base just gives him a get out of jail card but i'd have thought for the democrat campaign people around biden i mean they must this is their narrows are going to be on tender hooks for this if if there's several times he can't finish a sentence he's going to be a nightmare for them well and remember the media actually tried to give joe biden an out if his campaign decided not to do the debates there were several op-eds that were run in the new york times that suggested he should simply not do them because they weren't going to be fair and that he should insist on several conditions not least of which would have been a live debate fact checker which for a multitude of reasons i won't get into would be an absolute disaster uh and then even speaker pelosi suggested that uh joe biden should not get involved in the debates with trump because again they wouldn't be fair for him so they had every opportunity in the world to bow out but they know that the perception of bowing out even with the backing of the media would be too much for the voters to bear now the other issue is getting back to mail and voting is how many people are going to have already cast their ballots by the time these debates conclude maybe not by the first debate by but certainly by the second and third i i suspect a significant amount of americans will have already cast their ballots and so that really lessens the importance of the debates even further than they have been in past elections what makes cleveland more important uh than ever freddie if i was mr biden's campaign manager i i would be hiding behind the sofa during this debate is not unable to watch uh in case it all went pear-shaped uh is there any chance that they can find a way out of just not doing the debates i think i think it would be too difficult now to do it they may try it if biden is being particularly doddery in the days running up to the event but i think as as charles suggested that the standards are so low that the expectations are so low for biden now that really it's trump's to lose because he's not actually that great a debater he was good in the republican primaries in 2016 but i mean overall clinton really thrashed him i mean in the second debate he scored some points but overall he was he was really quite poor so i wouldn't be surprised if after the election open-minded obviously partisans of biden are going to say he won but i wouldn't be surprised if independence fell that hey biden wasn't that bad one thing i would say is that the intellectual caliber uh will be probably lower than any presidential debate we've ever had so this won't be uh this won't be oxford union that's for sure yeah it stands for the oxford union aren't that high but but lincoln douglas it ain't going to be i think it ain't on that listen thanks to the home team uh freddie amber melissa for joining us uh charles lipman thank you very much for joining us too as our very special guest thanks to all of you for joining and watching this episode the first episode of spectac spectator tv the us election special we'd love to find out what you thought of it how we could improve it we know there's plenty of room for improvement send your thoughts to spectator tv at spectator dot co dot uk if you enjoyed it recommend the show to your friends and family it'll be up there on youtube and if you enjoyed hearing from freddie charles amber melissa subscribe to the spectators us coverage go to spectator dot u s forward slash subscribe enter that promo code tv you can remember that you get 10 and a free tumblr i mean you'll be wanting the show off my back neck if we back next if we go like this you might enjoy just before i go the week in 60 minutes it's our thursday night gathering of spectator journalists in london special guests for discussion on british news european news international appearance signs surrounding coronavirus we've got on the man who's led the outlier program in sweden in our next program which i think will be of interest not just to british or european viewers but very much to american one two you can see that on youtube as well but for the moment see you next time thanks for joining us bye-bye you