Rapids from september through may and invite speakers to come and discuss issues that are important internationally and to the united nations. Leon tabak you told me you have an interesting personal background as well, right . Your origins in africa, is that correct . Chris dahle i was born in raised in south africa. I came here to go to college, but ive bee iowan. Leon tabak alrighty. Our second member of our panel is Lynda Waddington who is a columnist here with the gazette. Tell us a little bit more about your interests and role in the community here, lynda. Lynda w oh my gosh, i do quite a few Different Things within the community. I do a lot of public mentor some young writers. Im really enjoying living here in eastern iowa. Tonight i think were going to talk about the election and its aftermath, so i think im here tonight both as the woman, which ive kind of been a lot lately in this election cycle, and ive also covered politics here in iowa for over two decades, so a little bit of background to go with it. Leon tabak hans hassell is a colleague of mine at cornell college, teaches in our department of politics. Tell us about some of your special interests in that area. Hans hassell my research and expertise is on Political Parties and campaigns and elections. I teach the courses in american elections at cornell, and i have published extensively on the influence of parties in primary elections specifically. Leon tabak this is right up your alley. Hans hassell this is what i do every day. This is what i enjoy. Leon tabak id like to begin by asking you each where you surprised on tuesday, november 8 or the morning on wednesday, november 9 . Was this a big surprise for you . Lets go around here. Hans hassell to some extent, yes, because you saw the polls that suggested very strongly that Hillary Clinton was going to win. I mean thats the Biggest Surprise of this entire election cycle was off not large margins but enough that it made a difference. They were systematically biased for a certain subset of states and those subset of states happen to be critical. Thats very surprising. Weve come to expect polling to be it generally is. There seemed to be something about either people not willing to express support for donald trump publicly or people saying that they were undecided, a variety of different aspects that made this outcome perhaps a little more surprising. In other ways im not surprised. Predict president ial vote share on the basis of president ial popularity, on the basis of gdp, growth in the past year on the basis of how long a particular party has held that particular office. That actually predicts the vote share of both candidates almost perfectly, so almost exactly on what wed expect based on previous results. So in some ways its very surprising, but in other ways its not particularly surprising at all, which is my guess is the story of this election. There are then there are things that are very much the same. Leon tabak politics interest me a lot, lynda, but i had a big cold that day, so i went to bed not knowing what had happened, not turning on any tv, and then just waited till the next morning and turned on the computer when i got up. Did you stay up late to watch this and to . Lynda w oh, yeah. For anyone who listened, we were actually live at the gazette talking as the returns came in, having our group, that would have been myself and columnist todd dorman and political reporter james lynch, when they called florida for trump, i think we knew at that point that this was not going to go how the polls had told us it was going to happen. Im also very taken with this whole idea of the end results, to a certain extent, really matched what we were seeing on social media more than real life polls. In the past weve talked about pollsters that only do landlines and dont do cell phones. I wonder if pronounced when you look at the advertising that went into social media, the decline of advertising and traditional venues. So i think we had a much different type of election, and i dont think its going to be the last one in that respect. Hans hassell the pollsters are continually trying to update how they weight these things on the phone have declined drastically. In 90s, 70s and 80s, it was a 30 or 40 response rate. I think pew recently showed that it was under 10 , about 8 response rate. In order to figure out. To get an accurate representatio n of what they think is going to happen, pollsters have to weight these polls to try to balance out and get a representativ e sample of the United States and who they think is going to actually show up to vote. Part of this, its bec process as Response Rates have declined over time. I think the Polling Industry is really struggling with this and trying to say, okay, we didnt get the result that we thought. How do we go forward and figure this out better . Leon tabak chris, what was your experience that day, and whats your engagement with politics here . Chris dahle i was very surprised to put it mildly. I stayed up until about Eleven Oclock and was not happy with what was happening at that point in time and decided that id better go to bed and was worse than i thought. I have been a volunteer in politics here in linn county working with the Democratic Central Committee and also canvassing doing door knocking and that sort of thing for several previous elections; although i didnt participate that way in this current election. Leon tabak id like to ideology played a role or didnt play a role in this campaign. I read one commentator who said this election was not so much about left versus right as it was about inside versus outside. Of course, on the republican side we had a candidate who didnt seem well connected or well grounded with the ideology thats motivated that this . Was this along a different dimension than weve seen before . Lynda w this was an election for change. I dont think theres any doubt that people went to the polls this year wanting something maybe a little bit different. Leon tabak so what does that mean . Lynda w . Wanting some change in their life. Ill give you a personal example. My brother is a machinist. He works for a very large oil corporation. He voted for donald trump. He did so because he is one of those people who feels a little shaky economically. He doesnt feel to have the same opportunity to go into a corporation. I see hans laughing at me, so well see what hans has to say. But he is a little worried about those things. On top of that, he absolutely just cannot stand Hillary Clinton. So he kind of had both avenues of this election coming at him, but definitely he wanted a change. I dont know. Weve had discussions, he and i, back going to get what he wants based on his vote, but he was willing to take that chance. Hans hassell i think that there is a sense of change. Im just not sure that it permeates much beyond the president ial level. If you look at congress and the senate, 97 of incumbents won reelection, which is even higher than it was in think weve got this story thats driven by the donald trump narrative, but im not sure that thats really whats going on here. I dont view it necessarily as a change narrative. I view it as a sense of feeling left out and feeling as though the Current Administration is not addressing the needs of those individuals, and theyre saying, this is a problem. What youve got is not washington. I just dont want the currently Democratic Administration in there, as opposed to, i dont like politicians. I think that donald trump s the exception rather than the rule in this election cycle in my opinion. Lynda w im not convinced. When you look at iowa especially in the senate, you had tom courtney who had the senate seat down in burlington, i think james lynch said he wasnt aware there ousted from his seat. You look here in town, we have a house seat by todd taylor whos a very big union labor guy, a very friendly House District for him. He had a republican on the ballot with him, also a libertarian, but the republican just neglected to pull his name. He didnt actually run a campaign, and that republican got as many votes as the person from, i think, four years ago who youre saying nationwide, but i think here in iowa theres a lot of correlation to people, like you say, feeling left out, like my brother. Just cant stomach Hillary Clinton is another thing i heard a lot around iowa and looking for change. Leon tabak theres a letter in the wall street journal, chris, that just said, flyover country to the coasts, can you hear this . that was the whole letter. Does this resonat w chris dahle i think there has been a feeling of being left out and as being flyover country. But i think that the people, if they really wanted change, theyre really not going to get much in the way of change because everything that trump has done in terms of appointing people to his cabinet so far are old school, and i dont see much change coming. Leon tabak within the Democratic Party, we had an year, too, with Bernie Sanders. This is an unconventional candidate in some ways. What do you think of that . Are we starting to think that republicans are Something Different than what we thought republicans were, and maybe thought democrats were . How did you look at the Bernie Sanders campaign . Chris dahle i sympathized with Bernie Sanders positions on most things, but i didnt think that he was very electable myself. Apparently other people thought that he was more electable. There have been some people writing since the election saying that maybe he would have done better against donald trump than Hillary Clinton actually did. I in that, though. Leon tabak im going to provoke you with another comment that i encountered in my reading. One of these commenters quoted lord acton, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and said we usually think of that as a reference to the person who holds high office, but thats also telling us something about the people who follow the person who hld leader. What we saw this year is republicans voting for donald trump and excusing some aspects of his personal conduct, and people voting for Hillary Clinton and excusing some aspects of her personal conduct, and maybe some people voting because they didnt really favor the candidate, but they saw themselves as voting for the lesser of two evils in some ways. Does that make this campaign different than other campaigns for you . Can you see definitely two of the least liked candidates in our nations history. I saw a poll where i think trump was 39 favorable and Hillary Clinton was just right above him at 42 . If you wanted to be able to go to the polls and vote for someone who maybe you would like to go on a vacation with or invite over to your house for dinner, that person might not have president ial level. I think most people arent going there to necessarily vote for someone they like. I think theyre going there to vote for someone whos going to do things that will benefit their family. At least thats what i hope, and im a little idealistic when it comes to voters. I think the real tragedy of this election is that we never really got into that. I think clinton tried here and there. But from the conventions other things that happened, but you really didnt have this big roll out of white papers and this big roll out of ideas where you could judge ideas. It was a personality politics from the conventions on. Hans hassell what you just described, this idea of excusing your own candidates flaws and focusing on their highlights is what in political this idea that when you get new information youre not evaluating that information unbiasedly. Youre taking this information and youre saying does it match with the information that i currently have . If it doesnt match, then i need to discount it. Theres probably some reason that its wrong or something along those lines. Thats called motivated reasoning, and people, everybody, you, i, everybody here does that brains are wired. So we have this tendency to discount information that does not align with our particular views. Partisan politics is full of this. We get new information and we say, okay, wheres it coming from . Is it coming from somebody that i trust . Do i need to screen it out because its not a source that i can trust or i believe in or has given me good information in the past or is aligned with my particular goals . First off, we screen out this information. Second, if we do get thi discount it if it doesnt actually align with our own preferences and our own prior beliefs that we hold. Leon tabak are there big issues that you think were left out of the discussion, chris, as we talked about Clinton Foundation and emails and Donald Trumps treatment of women and so on and so on . Were there big issues that you would have liked to have seen addressed and that you think should be addressed now . Chris dahle one of the big policy. They talked a lot about isis and syria and things like that, but there was no real discussion of what the candidates planned to do in the future in terms of foreign policy. Thats a little bit troubling to me. The rest of the world is United States is going to do with donald trump. Angela merkel came out and said that she hopes that he will follow the rule of law and respect human what the germans think about the president elect at this point i think. Leon tabak anybody else want to add to that about concerns from elsewhere about . Hans hassell one of the things that i think is always interesting when we talk about the basis on which we elect people to office. I think youre exactly right that most of the time most people dont investigate the issues with great depth. This is a very good example of that where most people havent really that theres not a lot of depth to Donald Trumps policy positions. I think at one point early on in the campaign he said, the only people that care about that are the media or the journalists who want to read this. Most people dont really care what my policy positions are. I think that thats generally the case, and so what we have to say is can people pick up information through other cues and shortcuts that enables them to say, okay, maybe i dont know this information of who he associates himself with, what he says, how he comports himself, that gives me enough information to say, okay, i can identify generally what his positions will be. then this other thing is that i think that we often think that were electing a president or a public official to deal with the problems that were dealing with now. When in reality were electing them to deal with the problems that are coming in three years. We may not problems are. So i think that saying we need to do just the issues, i think leaves out some of the concepts of how well do we trust this person to behave themselves and how would they get new information . How would they address new crisises and deal with situations that we have no idea what thats going to be . We have to be able to say its not just about the issues. Its also about how do we trust these individuals to deal with situations flashback listening to you to the day after the election when im watching cnn and the folks on cnn are trying to decide what it is that donald trump is going to do for his first 100 days or three months in office, and nobody really has a really clue. I mean we know hes going to build a big, beautiful wall, supposedly to be followed by big, beautiful mexico ladders. We know that he wanted to bring jobs; believe me he was going to do it. But we had no substance. It was the day going, oh, whoa. Whats going to happen now . He was going to repeal obamacare. We had folks here in iowa here on Election Night saying number one thing when we get back to congress were going to repeal obamacare. Now we understand thats probably not going to happen, that were going to be doing some tweaks and do some changes and keep some of the things that are very popular about it and maybe try to keep costs down in when you have this election thats completely built on personality, thats all you have when the election is over is this personality, and where do you go from there . Sadly, i think donald trump, to a certain extent, is right that most americans dont dig into it except for those issues maybe that are very important to them. I dont know. Do you agree, chris . Chris dahle whats really troubling to me is the way that donald trump excluded some of the media from his rallies and is three administration. Then with social media and twitter and facebook and things that also provide news that is not necessarily truthful, we have a real crisis in the future, i think, of freedom of the press, the other candidate went a long time without a press conference is arguing for a change in the law that would permit the suppression of the Citizens United can i distribute a book or a video that criticizes a candidate during the election period . People on the other side are makin want to chime in there . You want to fight me there, lynda . Lynda w no. Leon tabak go ahead. Hans hassell i think its different because i think we have this expectation that the media is going to provide some unbiased. We have this tradition. The media doesnt originate in an unbiased media. If you go back to the penny press, thats an organization that shields a particular candidate or particular party. Ever since that, weve had a news source they possibly can to be profitable, but thats declined. This comes this question of we want this because we think of it as a good source for democracy, this idea of freedom of information, to allow people to evaluate and then have their voices heard, and to be able to make a meaningful choice. But without that we have to say can we survive in a world where we may not sources, where we have to get our media from a certain skew. If we know that that press has a certain skew, are we able to figure that out and say heres what theyre saying knowing their biases that they have, what do i actually believe is actually truthful . Leon tabak some republicans said to themselves, we dont like Donald Trumps character, but we think hes a better alternative than Hillary Clinton and in part because we think that we can check the excesses of donald trump, but we wont be able to check the excesses of Hillary Clinton. Well have the support of the media, well have the support of the academic community, well have the support of the arts and entertainment industry, but donald trump, half the Republican Party will lined up against him, the whole Democratic Party, the whole federal bureaucracy, his excesses will be held in check. Does that argument think a lot of hopes are resting on that argument right now. There are certain things that he is going to be able to do because these are things that president s have been able to do in the past executive orders being a big one. We have seen that grow and grow and grow with each presidency that comes along. It will be good if Congress Puts a check on that and pulls that and reins that in. The downfall of that or the downside of that is that with the congress the only thing thats really moved the conversation forward has been these executive orders. Hopefully, if we have everyone from one party down there in the majority, although they still cant beat a filibuster in the senate, which will be a big hurdle, hopefully we will finally start to see some progress. It may not be what everybody wants, especially the folks that voted for Hillary Clinton, but hopefully at least were going to se washington, dc. I want to go back to the media for just a moment because i think thats a really big topic. As someone who has written about this election, whos been out at events and done all these things, the past two years, going through the iowa caucus, going through this president ial election, has been the most vile that i have ever experienced in all my years as a journalist. I think we have two different rules. You have your new media thats basically internetbased that can say what show what they want, and you have your traditional media that are still trying to play nice. One example, we get our images at the gazette through reuters. If you go in there, you can go to the trump rallies and the photographer s are taking pictures of the Trump Supporters turning around and making nasty gestures. Theres video of them saying nasty things. That doesnt end up in your sunday paper, but that definitely can end up on a website. So theres also a different going to have to learn to balance going forward. Leon tabak were coming towards the end of our discussion. I want to give you each the opportunity maybe to make some predictions of where you think that things are likely to go in the next few months. Who would like to chime in there . Hans hassell thats a dangerous thing, making predictions. Leon tabak . Theres no consequences if youre. Lynda w i didnt bring my ball. Chris dahle i think there will be a short honeymoon for try to push legislation through as quickly as possible and get the Supreme Court filled as quickly as possible. But i see a lot of conflict between the democrats and the republicans especially in the senate, and things will deadlock there, i think. Little bit further out. This coalition that elected trump is an absolutely unsustainable coalition. I dont think youll ever see a president elected with this subset and demographics in the future. Leon tabak youre talking about the votes pulled from the Democratic Party . Is the votes from labor generally that went over to there. I dont know if youll have another republican that comes out with that populist message, and also looking at the ethnic background, how the countrys changing. Hans hassell ill disagree. I think the president has an ability to remake the party. I think that thats perhaps the biggest concern is that hell change what republicans believe because of motivated reasoning, and so hell reform the Republican Party around a populist message. Leon tabak is there going to be a reconciliation between the donald trump Establishment Republicans . Hans hassell well see something. I dont know what itll be. Leon tabak all right. Well, were seeing a lot of response on our campuses, and im sure in your letters to the editor as well. Thank you for being here. It was a great discussion with you. Im glad to meet some new people here in the Community Country through this discussion. Thank you very much. Starting out with a live look weighs in on roles in his new administration. Governor Terry Branstad celebrated his 70th birthday last night. Well tell you about two guests who joined the party. And well tell you why a cedar rapids woman wants to make sure all students are fed. Youre watching kcrgtv9. Now, from your 24 hour news source, this is the kcrgtv9 saturday morning news. Good morning and thanks for joining us. We begin with First Alert Storm Team meteorologis a very cold morning with temperatures in the teens. With the slightest breeze, it will make temperatures feel closer to the Single Digits for some. Be sure to bundle up and keep warm always remember your pets. If you are cold so are they; make sure they are kept warm too. It wont be as windy today. Finally the winds have subsided out of the southeast at about 5 to 10 mph. With High Pressure sitting just overhead well keep mainly clear skies. The sunshine and the slightest southerly wind will push a few degrees warmer today. Tonight temperatures wont be as cool, but still in the 20s. Wind chills will be