Election Countdown: John Stoehr + Daniel Nichanian

Sea Change Radio

This week on Sea Change Radio, we give you one last pre-election episode with two keen political journalists. First, a free-flowing conversation about the presidential election with John Stoehr of the Editorial Board where we discuss the state of polling, take a look at the closing days of the two candidates and evaluate the impact of the Harris campaign having a significant ground game advantage. Then, we speak to Daniel Nichanian of Bolts Magazine as he breaks down his site’s new voting guide – a useful tool to get a better grasp of the many amendments on state and local ballots across the country.

Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.

John Stoehr (JS) | 00:21 – We don’t even talk about self-inflicted wounds with him because there’s so many of them. There’s so many. We just toss it in the pile of more of the same. We won’t think of it until he loses. When he loses and all the dread is gone, then we’ll look back and say, of course, of course he was going to lose.

Narrator | 00:39 – This week on Sea Change Radio, we give you one last pre-election episode with two keen political journalists. First, a free-flowing conversation about the presidential election with John Stoehr of the Editorial Board where we discuss the state of polling, take a look at the closing days of the two candidates and evaluate the impact of the Harris campaign having a significant ground game advantage. Then, we speak to Daniel Nichanian of Bolts Magazine as he breaks down his site’s new voting guide – a useful tool to get a better grasp of the many amendments on state and local ballots across the country.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:20 I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by John Stoehr. He’s the founder and editor in chief of The Editorial Board. John, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.

John Stoehr (JS) | 01:37 – Thanks for having me back, Alex.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:39 – I really wanted to get a chance to speak with you before the election one last time. I think we’re all on pins and needles a little bit. There’s that sense of dread, not necessarily because we think Kamala Harris will lose, but because if she does, the downside is just so terrible. I think you, just like myself, have, have skipped over a lot of the articles that we’ve seen. Here’s what will happen to the Department of Education if Donald Trump should win. Here’s what will happen to the EPA if Donald Trump should win. I’m just not clicking on any of those articles right now. Well, why don’t you speak to this greater dread that we’re all feeling and and what it means from your perspective.

John Stoehr (JS) | 02:18 – Well, I, I think first of all, the dread is appropriate. It’s appro. We are all, we’re not crazy. You know, we, we do think, we do, we all understand the risks that we we’re facing and that we are all feeling a bit of hype. Hypervigilance is really what that is. It’s a anticipation, a bracing of oneself or some i some impact that’s coming, and that’s, that is appropriate. And I think, I think a lot of people, uh, actually see things in, in an upside down kind of way. Like, this is a bad thing that we’re all feeling and we actually can’t wait for it to be over. Now, I do think we can all, we all want it to, to be over. That’s true. And I think that’s also reasonable. But let’s not forget how reasonable it is to be bracing for impact . You know, we, it is not crazy. And I think that’s where we should, you know, if you’re, if you’re, um, doom scrolling or trying to get ahead, read ahead about project 2025 and so on and so forth, yes, there can be some, maybe some unhealthy obsession with that. But it’s also, it begins with a very reasonable impulse to protect oneself, at least mentally and emotionally. I think, I think we can, we can spiral off into doom. And I think if you’re into doom, you’ve, you’re going too far because it hasn’t happened yet. , you know, the future is unwritten. We don’t know what it is quite yet. But I think all of us should bear in mind that this, this is, this is really important, right? And, and the feelings, our feelings are telling us something, so we should listen to them.

Alex Wise (AW) | 04:01 – I’ve been quite ambivalent and gone back and forth from being very optimistic to very scared and pessimistic. As a journalist who doesn’t work for an official organization, I’m my own boss here at Sea Change Radio, I’m able to go canvas, and I often take advantage of that by going to a swing state. I’m in California, so my vote really doesn’t count all that much for the presidency. So I’ve been to Reno twice in the last month or so, and just speaking to a lot of Trump voters, because Nevada has this automatic registration system since 2018. So there’s a, a huge swath of the electorate there that is not aligned by party. Many of them don’t even know they’re registered. So you knock on a door and it says Bob Johnson, 35-year-old male nonpartisan. And you just have no idea. It’s almost harder to have these friendly conversations because you have to be friendly with these people in their homes, and then you realize that they’re voting for a fascist, and it, you, you walk away saying, okay, thanks for your time. You know, you don’t want to push it with somebody who’s a Trump supporter, but you end up feeling a real pit in your stomach.

JS | 05:20 – Mm. Can I ask you a question about that, Alex?

AW | 05:22 – Please.

JS | 05:22 – Yeah. So, I mean, where do you begin? And I asked that question specifically because, you know, these are, these are folks who see other people as not human beings. You see what I mean? Like a fascist is somebody who looks at the other as not a human being and, and who’s worthy of destruction. Right? That’s really boil boils down to. So I’m curious like what a door knocker does when they discover . That that’s the fact. I mean, where do you, where do you begin?

AW | 05:47 – Well, it depends on what stage you are in the campaign, when I was there in mid-September, we were still in the voter persuasion and identification stage. So we had a little bit more of a mandate from the campaign to go out and try to really listen to them. We just had a guest on Sea Change Radio, who wrote a book called The Joy of Talking Politics with strangers, Elizabeth Cher, and she’s a superstar, canvasser herself, and her, one of her core principles of canvassing is the 80 20 policy of, of listening 80% of the time, and only talking 20%. So it, it has to be their own conclusion that they’re reaching. You’re not going to be able to make some impassioned speech like an Aaron Sorkin show and convert them to see it the way you see it. This last weekend was very different though, because this was getting out the vote. So if somebody is a Trump supporter, there’s too many people who are on the blue team that you need to get to, you move on. And everybody has their own style. I have to bite my tongue. It kills me to do it, but I really feel like I would be doing a disservice to the candidates and the policies I represent if I got angry or if I told these people what I really think about their candidate.

JS | 07:04 – All right. Yeah, it sounds like the early stages, you’re ac actually the 80 20 situation, you’re actually demonstrating your humanity. You are like, look, this, I’m a real person, . Right? I have real stakes just like you. And we’re all, you know, we really are all in this together. If you, if you believe that we’re all in this together, and I hope you do believe we’re all in this together, because otherwise you’re gonna vote for the fascist . Just really what it boils down to.

AW | 07:29 – Yes. And I’m optimistic about Kamala Harris’s chances in, in the election, but if it all was based on Nevada, I would not like her chances. I think she’s going to win, but I don’t think she’s gonna win Nevada because I think it has unique demographics that have shifted quite a lot over the last 10 years or so. If you think about Nevada’s exploding population centers, originally they were all based on casinos. Reno and Las Vegas are gambling towns. And for the first 20, 30 years of that expansion, there was a huge service economy that had to be built around that. And so there were lower and middle income workers who were working in that sector. I think now you’re seeing more of the, the similar migrations that Phoenix and other parts of the Sunbelt Texas witnessed over the last decade or two. Nevada, you know, doesn’t have an income tax. So you’re seeing a lot of white people moving from California and other states to these regions. Like, uh, Las Vegas has become this giant excerpt, you know, this is a big metropolitan area now. It’s not just the Las Vegas strip. Let me frame it this way. If you were moving to a state that had 60 to 90 days of triple digit temperatures, you can’t really believe in climate change, right? If you think it’s a good investment in the future to buy a home in Phoenix or Reno right now, or, or Las Vegas, your values are that you are able to have a home. You have your own little fiefdom. You want the status quo, which is cheap air conditioning, lots of it. You want to have access to your trucks, your boats, your jet skis. You want to enjoy the fruits of your labor and so to speak. That person wants the status quo. They’re looking to keep what they have. Those people are generally not thinking about the future, and they’re not swayed by a vision of a brighter tomorrow.

JS | 09:24 – I’ve been very skeptical about all the polling. I mean, I, I like it when it, I like everybody else. I, when polls show Kamala Harris going, going up, I’m like, oh, great. But then a part of me thinks, well, yeah, well, well, you know what the last poll is on election day. Let’s just, you know, see what happens. Also, I have this kinda, maybe I have a grumpy attitude. Some say that basically, I’m like, well, you know, polls don’t matter because what matters is what taking democracy, uh, seriously. If you take democracy seriously, then you, then a polls are really irrelevant to you.

AW | 09:58 – The polls don’t gauge who’s voting.

JS | 10:01 – Yeah, that’s right. And, and people so often lie, I mean, this, this just, it’s really stunning. Like so much of our political discourse is based on polling, you know, as if it’s an empirical data point, as if it’s rock solid. And we, we have all these built, we all, all of us, when whenever we talk about polls, we say, you know, caveat, caveat, caveat. There’s all these reasons why these numbers can’t be trusted. But then we write entire pieces based, based on those as, and give the impression that these numbers can be trusted. And so there’s a, there’s a paradox built into our, our political journalism that I myself have, have fallen into that paradox many times.

(Music Break) | 10:48

AW | 11:38 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to John Stoehr from The, Editorial Board. So John, we’re talking about polling. How much do you think polling takes into account a ground game? And how important do you think having non-paid volunteers who are enthusiastic about their candidate knocking on doors by the millions matters ultimately?

JS | 11:59 – Oh, I think it’s really the only thing that does matter. That, you know, people on the ground who are really, who are trained, who are motivated, who have a vision, that’s the thing that really matters most. I think polling is problematic for, you know, a couple of reasons. One is just technology. Most people have smartphones these days, and so much of polling rep, is based on landline conversations. And that’s going to skew the results, I think, in one way or the other.

AW | 12:30 – And the methodology changes so much because of technology changing and other tweaks that they want to make. Pollsters will try to make up for that. And then the Nate Silvers and the Harry Entens and Elliot Morrises of the world will end say, well, we have decades of polling data to look back upon. And, and that is a bedrock, but it’s, those methodologies shift every election. So you can’t say the 1948 Gallup poll is somehow analogous to the 1988 Gallup poll, right?

JS | 12:59 – I mean, you can put some trust in the polls, right? And even Nate Silver will say, well, it’s just a poll and we’ll see how it works out, . But the thing is that all of our conversation is built on, on these, on this, what we give the impression that it’s firm. You know, that this is solid data and it’s, it’s not that solid. And every time we have an election, it reveal, it reveals like how unsolid it was, you know, in 20 18, 20 20, 20 22, you know, 2022 for instance. You know, there was supposed to be the red wave. And historically speaking, that was what everybody anticipated. I did, sort of too. The red wave meaning, you know, whatever parties in the off in the holds, the, the White House, the following midterm is a reaction to that somehow, right? So Republicans were supposed to wait, have a red wave, and what in fact happened was they had a trickle, right? They did take, take the house, but it was by a slim, uh, majority. So much of our conversation, we as journalists have to be confident about what we’re saying, right? Confidence is like basically our realm, the coin of the realm, , right? If we are not, if we don’t feel confident, look confident, sound confident, then you know, people probably are not going to pay attention to us. And there it is, right there. If people are not paying attention to us, we don’t really matter . So we have to sound confident and we have to base it on something. And the, and, and the paradox is that a lot of this basis is quite mushy. And I don’t know what the solution is. I really don’t. I mean, how are we supposed to have conversations if we can’t base it on something? I, I, I don’t, I don’t know what the solution is. But I think it’s important, really important that we acknowledge that it’s not as, as, as solid as it is and maybe have more conversations about how not solid it is. You know, at least as much as we have, we assume that it is solid.

AW | 14:53 – Well, people want to feel one way or another, they want to get that dopamine hit. They want answers. They want either someone to make them feel better or they want to blame somebody if it doesn’t go their way in the end. So that’s part of this self-perpetuating cycle of the, the media, the analyst class, and the pollsters and the consumers of media. I think it’s called limbic politics. I don’t know if you’ve heard that expression.

JS | 15:20 – No, I have

AW | 15:20 – Because it, like, it appeals to somebody’s limbic system.

JS | 15:23 – Oh, okay. Sure. All right, well, all right. And all the power to them. I had somebody the other day tell me that if we just set aside politics and so on, we treat each other with human decency. And they just set us, set politics aside. And I said, it’s the reverse. Human decency is political. It is political to see another person as a human being. That is the bedrock of liberal politics. It is the bedrock. And once you start seeing another person as not a human being, that’s when you start drifting toward fascism.

AW | 15:55 – And that’s why I think door knocking is so critical, because you’re there and you’re making your best pitch, and you have to be polite and you say, thank you, have a nice day. You say why you’re passionate about it, and you make them not look at you as the other.

JS | 16:10 – Yeah. You’re demonstrating your humanity. You’re like, here I am. I’m another person. I disagree with you, but I am another person at the same time. Right? And you’re forcing them to deal with that cognitive dissonance, right. To, to, because in their minds, to disagree is kind of is, is, is that’s the, you stop being a human being once you start disagreeing with them. Right? So you get them to like, no, I’m a, I can disagree with you, and I’m a human being at the same time. Right. That is in itself inherently political. I, I don’t, I really don’t like it when people say, let’s just set aside politics. I mean, Jesus Christ was a political actor.

AW | 16:51 – Explain.

JS | 16:52 – He was, he said, love God with all your heart and soul and doing unto others as you would have done unto you. It’s absolutely a political statement. It’s a revolutionary political statement. That’s why he’s Jesus Christ , you know, he changed the world with that kind of thinking, you know, because prior to that, it was basically, my tribe, your tribe, I kill you or you kill me. That, you know, and that’s what Trump and his people are trying to return us to this idea that this democracy is ours. Everybody else is an animal and is worthy of extermination. That’s what they’re saying. You know? And, you know, that’s their politics. Yeah. We keep looking at that as if they’re politicizing democracy. No, that’s a kind of politics that we need to meet with another kind of politics, the good kind, the kind that’s for everyone that’s universal. Where equality is the bedrock of our morality and our, our discussions about how to negotiate and organize society and parcel out all the limited resources, right? That’s , that’s what we, what we need.

AW | 17:53 – So this last week, how is it going to shape how you look at November 5th?

JS | 18:00 – Well, first of all, let’s just make sure that everybody understands that a lot of Americans don’t believe in democracy, period. Let’s just, universal democracy. They don’t believe it. So we shouldn’t be surprised when millions and millions of Americans vote for Donald Trump. We just, just get over that. So, let’s just say we’re on election day, and it looks like Kamala Harris is winning. What we will decide probably is that she ran the, probably the perfect campaign.

AW | 18:25 – It feels that way.

JS | 18:27 – It is a great campaign. It it’s almost full. I can’t think of a mistake that she’s made.

AW | 18:32 – The one mistake that I think she made was listening to the advisors who said, not going back, because that wasn’t like enough futuristic thinking, and it was not positive enough. But I think it was back to that limbic politics where it’s, you got to have those three syllables, that it’s a chant. And people, I mean, I remember in 2008 when Obama had, yes we can, and going to see him speak, and we’re like, oh, he’s going to say, yes we can, and then we can all say, yes, we can. And it was this like kind of self enforcing feel good moment. And I saw that emerging in the early days of the Harris campaign, where she was saying, not going back and everyone go, not going back. But then they quashed it. They were like, nah, that’s not going to be our slogan. So I thought that was a slight misstep, but I agree with you. It has been a flawless campaign thus far.

JS | 19:15 – Everybody can quibble about little things, but other, I don’t think structurally speaking, it’s the strong campaign you can expect from somebody who started in July. Come on. That’s right. So the reverse on election day, it, and I think this will be the case of, we’ll, we’ll see that he’s, that Trump is losing, we will finally come to the conclusion that he has run the worst campaign ever in our lifetimes. In our lifetimes. Anyway, maybe historians can go back farther, but the worst campaign, like, we don’t even talk about self-inflicted wounds with him, because there’s so many of them. There’s so many. We just toss it in the pile of more of the same. We, we won’t think of it until he loses. When he loses and all the dread is gone, then we’ll look back and say, of course, of course he was going to lose.

AW | 20:01 – It’s all of it together.

JS | 20:02 – All of it’s all, it was the worst, all of it. Now, I could be proven wrong next week. I’m sorry if I am proven wrong. I’ll say that to your audience right now, but I’m doing the best I can. I don’t think I’m going to be wrong though. I think we will see that she ran a great campaign and she won because of that. He ran a terrible campaign and he lost because of that.

AW | 20:23 – Well, I know that there’s a lot of reason to be trepidatious, but there’s a lot of reason to be hopeful. John, Stoehr, The, Editorial Board, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.

JS | 20:32 – Thanks, Alex.

(Music Break) | 20:35

AW | 21:17 – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Daniel Nichanian. He is the editor-in-chief and founder of Bolts Magazine. Daniel, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.

Daniel Nichanian (DN) | 21:27 – Thanks for having me.

AW | 21:29 – I wanted to have you on briefly before election day. We spoke six months ago, and you broke down a lot of races in an, in-depth fashion for us. But today, I just wanted you to give us an update on where things are on some of these down ballot races and explain the tool that you and your colleagues have come up with at Bolts Magazine. It’s really cool. This is your cheat sheet to the 2024 general election.

Daniel Nichanian (DN) | 21:54 – Yeah, so, you know, we are , it’s, it’s the final stretch before a presidential election, but that also means that under the hood of the election, everyone is watching. There’s really thousands, frankly, of, of elections, for offices that are all very important, you know, from prosecutors to school boards, to attorneys general. I think a lot of people care about these issues. For instance, you know, there’s conservative efforts to take over school boards and issues like that, but there’s so many different races in the country, so many states, so many counties. Where should people look? What are the most important, interesting, consequential things happening on the ballot? So at Baltimore, we really try and help a national audience, you know, get interested in what’s happening at the local level in these local offices. We have created, um, a cheat sheet with more than 500 races happening at the state level, at the local level, at the county level, organized, thematically organized by type of office. So, you know, if anyone’s interested, you should go to smag.org, smag.org and look up on our, on our homepage. You will easily find this, this cheat sheet. And then you, you can just explore. We could spend three hours here just going one by one through all the very interesting stuff here. But it’s really up to people to find the stuff that they care about. You know, if you care about criminal justice, if you care about education, if you care about voting rights, the most, the, the places you’re going to go on this cheat sheet is going to be different. And, and that’s really hopefully a tool for people to be able to find interesting things where you are, there’s at least one election at the state or local level in every single state, and this cheat sheet and that, and that was very important for us to show that there’s important stuff happening, uh, really everywhere in the country.

AW | 23:39 – And it seems like it would be a really useful tool for people who may not have thought that their vote is going to count as much because they’re not in one of these seven battleground states for the presidential election. But getting under the hood with the cheat sheet makes somebody who lives in a non battleground state realize that their vote means a lot.

DN | 23:59 – No, you’re absolutely right. I think, interestingly, the thing that’s most decides whether a state has a lot on the cheat sheet isn’t whether it’s a swing state or not, it’s typically, you know, some, some states that have odd year elections, places like Virginia and New Jersey that are big states have a lot of their local election state elections. They’re going to have them in 2025. Not, not on even your, if you’re in one of those states, you might find a little less in this, though. There’s still interesting stuff that we, we found. But, you know, anywhere else, even a state that is very blue or very red has very important, uh, ballot measures as well. For instance, there’s a number of states that are red states this year that are voting to require paid sick leave, for instance, there’s a measure in Alaska, there’s a measure in Missouri, to require paid sick leave. That’s not necessarily the type of issue that would pass in those states through the state assembly of the State House that are run by Republicans. So those ballot measures are very important. Just one other example. A lot of people that are living in red areas of Florida, they have important school board elections on their ballots with candidates endorsed by the, the governor there, or by moms for liberties that have endorsed conservative candidates for school board. And it hasn’t obvious, always been obvious for these candidates to take over school boards, even in places that lean red. So again, you know, you can, you can look what’s happening in your area, and I’m sure that there’ll be some interesting things.

AW | 25:33 – So we’re expecting pretty high turnout relatively because of the presidential election. How do you see that maybe impacting some of these less well-known down ballot initiatives and races?

DN | 25:47 – That’s a good question because actually, uh, a lot of states, it’s been a thing in recent years reform that a lot of states have adopted to try and move their elections that are happening at 3D random times of the year in odd number of years, to move them to sync with the presidential race, or at least the, the midterms to increase the number of people who are going to vote. You know, like 60% of people vote in November of a presidential year and maybe 8%, 10% if you just schedule an election. So when you think about a mayoral race, when you think about city council races, the electorate for places that are having those elections now, the, the electorate is more likely to lean a little more young. For instance, on issues waiting to renters and the rights of renters, you know, like an electorate that’s, that’s more large at, at a city council level. If more people are voting, it’s like clearer that, that there’ll be an electorate that’s more young, that has more experience with trying to rent and the issues that can come with that, and that, that type of difference in, in who is voting can, can have an impact on obviously who wins and, and what happens after. Uh, in, I live in Washington DC and there’s an interesting, um, initiative in DC to switch elections in the district to, um, rank choice voting, that that would be a big change in, in DC And that’s also a change that a lot of other states are voting in. So if I do a search for rank choice voting on our, on our cheat sheet, I will, um, you know, quickly, quickly see that Oregon, Alaska, Arizona and other states have measures that might bring that innovative way of voting in their state.

AW | 27:27 – Yes, I was going to ask about rank choice, voting’s influence on a voter being more educated.

DN | 27:32 – There’s a gap in information around certain local races, but right now, Republicans as a whole have really turned against the idea of rankers voting in recent years in places like D.C. actually, it’s Democrats voting against it, but Republicans have proactively tried to ban even local places, local cities, local counties, from implementing rankers voting. And that’s also what we’re seeing this fall.

AW | 27:53 – Daniel Nichanian is the founder and editor in chief of Bolts Magazine. Daniel, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.

DN | 28:00 – Oh, it’s been really fun.

Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise, additional music by George Benson, Jimmy Cliff, and Seu Jorge. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream, or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.