Politics and thank you for attending todays program. Discussion groups are made possible by the new mens own foundation and would like toe thank the family fun for sponsoring. Todays program will be live streamed and available on our youtube channel. We arer also excited that cspan is recording this session. You canth also access all past Dole Institute program by visiting our youtube channel. After the program well have time for audience questions. If you have a question please racial your hand and a student worker will come to you. For virtual viewers please send your questions to dole questions at ku. Edu. Ask one brief question. The Dole Institutes mission is to foster civil and respectful discussion around important and difficult topics. Please raise your questions with this in mind and ask one brief question. Before we begin i i would liko remind you to please turn off your cell phones. And now please join and welcoming our fall fellow jerry seib. [applause] so im thinking, did i turn off my cell phone . Thank you all for being here. Its nice to have you here. Were going to talk about Political Polarization which is the subject that hangs over every conversation in washington where i usually amhi an here in everywhere else. Both about politics and governance. Its a huge issue. The former president of colombia the nobel peace laureate is your last night. He said that Political Polarization not just in this country but about the democratic world is maybe the biggest threat to democracy and we have to figure outhr how to come to grips with itt and reduce it. Thats what wee will be talking about today. Im happy to have two great people here to discuss this subject. Neil newhouse is a a partner d cofounder Public Opinion strategies, National PoliticalPublic Research firm, one that used to do polling force at the wall street journal so ive known neil for a long time. He has done dozens of house, senate,te gubernatorial races cn serve as as a pollster for fr president ial candidates including two of senator udall. One and a half may be senator dole. Was a chief pollster for mitm romney 2012 campaign. He has been named pollster of the year by the American Association of politicalame consultants three times. Maybe more important he is from Shawnee Mission kansas so grew up just down the road. If you want proof of that you can look at his twitter handle which i think is casey kid. Interestingly hes a graduate of Duke University which are putting in an interesting spot for football saturday. I will sell it right now. Even okay, i am a ku fan. My alma mater takes precedent. Whenever theyre not playing duke, i am for ku. Fairr enough. You will notice there is not joel. We upgraded. Joel suffered a fall in his hometown of new york yesterday, hurtes his back and was told by doctors do not get on an airplane. Governor sebelius as you all know graciously agreed to. Step in and thank you for that very much. For governor sebelius. [applause] kathleen i like ku. [laughing] you lost the crowd already, neil. You know the story, kathleen was twice elected governor of kansas. As you point out to me she is one of three Democratic Women who have been elected governor of kansas and that makes this the only state that has that distinction. Subsequent issues appointed by president obama as secretary of health and Human Services which is a really easy job. Prior to that she was Kansas Insurance commissioner and serve in the state legislature. As a result we have a conversation here that is simultaneously national, bipartisan and of kansas so thatslt awesome. Topic is Political Polarization and out might affect the 2022 vote but first how we got here. Polarization seems to be the backdrop of everything. You seem to be a country that is not only evenly divided between the two countries but bitterly divided between the two countries. Let me ask you need to talk about how we got here before talk about we go from here. Neil, why did you start . It didnt start with trump. It goes back to the bill clinton era and when Newt Gingrich pushed to impeach bill clinton. Began to polarized the country. What was interesting back then was president clintons approval numbers were not very high. After he got impeached as he is going to the impeachment process his Approval Ratings went up. I would talk to republican audiences and do my usual presentation and people would ask me, who the heck are you pulling . Theres away his Approval Rating can come up while hes being impeached. The answer was to me obvious. When republicans attack democrats, democrats rally around the candidate and it was democratic voters who were not wild about bill clinton letter coming to his defense. When republicans are attacked democrats, democrats rally around their candidates. Republicans rally around the candidates and you begin to see that not just at election time but the route of legislative session, during all points of time during a cycle. I would look at numbers. We track a a race, we pulled p campaign. March of election year. Generally would have a large number ofou undecideds, republicans really were not decided which we would vote and democrats werent. This was two decades ago and now if you pull in march in electionyear the republican candidates winning, Democratic Candidates winning 89 and there are no undecideds. Theres nobody in the middle. It is at, polarization that is really intensified over the past 20 years as a result of not just campaigns were running back the fact that theres nobody in congress who is causing over and crossing party lines right now. Governor sebelius . I cleara practitioner, not a pollster. I do not have the kind of data lends that neil has. I go back to my own personal experience, both my father and fatherinlaw were in politics. We got married in 1974 and they did not know each other gary and i were worried. One was a very liberal democrat and one was a conservative republican. They quickly became great friends. They were in the same biz. They were both in military service but both found Public Service to be logical step. They both believed in contributing to the country and told the same jokes. Keith sibelius told my father a democrat had never beaten him. My father said, neither has a democrat beaten me. [laughter] fast forward, the world is remarkably different today. To me, watching this through the lens of kansas, it is about the clinton era politics, but a different thing happened in kansas, we were ahead of the country which was this divide the started in the Republican Party where suddenly there was a new, in 96 in kansas. There was abr new branch of the Republican Party and about a was more ferocious among republicans frankly that it was between democratsra and republicans. In fact, it gave in this state a wide birth to democrats to make deals in the legislature and run and win races. That began to happen all over the o country. The partisanship became much more complicated. It was also tied to, wasnt a broad tent that became a narrow belief system and people were asked to exit from the own party registration. Kansas is interesting. I went back ten years. I thought this was different. We have approximately the same number of registered republicans, independents and democrats as we did ten yearsnd ago. Thatsth not like a lot of stat. Independent is still a big block of voters. Many find themselves not want to self identify as partisan and i think that is somewhat different than a lot of places in the country. Those independents to move back and forth. I do think it has grown and social media has added to that growth in a tremendous way. People selfselection of their fact to base has added to that in a tremendous way. In the 90s things began to dissolve in a way we hadnt seen before. Its not just voters. Its members of congress. Some of the students they recognize national journal. National journal is a publication in d. C. That studies congress. They used to do a study every year and they would rank every member of congress on an ideological scale, mostly liberal to mostal conservative. 1982 there were 275 members of congress that fell between the most liberal republican and most conservative democrat. So thats the middle. 77 or so of congress fell in that middle. In 2015 they redid the study. There were three members who fell in the middle. There wasnt a single u. S. Senator that crossed over that line. I totally agree in terms of social media. Its a combination of social media, redistricting so that republicans are running for more red districts and democrats are running for morera blue districs and you dont have to appeal to voters in the middle. Its a combination of these factors and it has resulted in this bitter partisan polarization that democrats dont trust republicans and republicans dont trust democrats. You and joel had done some work in the space and wanted to put up a couple of numbers. The first one may be the most shocking one, about whether some americans now think that maybe it would be better if their states just seceded from the union, literally dissolved the union. Union. As youllec see 59 of partisans on the democratic side said that wouldnt be a bad idea for the state and 77 of partisans on the republican side. 59 of biden voters and 77 of trump voters said it would be better if all blue states, all right states this gives you an idea of the start intensity of a sentiment aCross Party Lines. Its as if were not having a common conversation anymore which people different size of the party. He gave me that line and you just used it. I thought he might. I had a long conversation with a jolt today and he kept saying say this. He and neil do a lot of programs together. Interestingly republicans and democrats both think the otherer guy is a bully. 73 of democrats think about and republicans. 74 of republicans think that the democrats. They think the other guy is untruthful. So kathleen, i have two questions. First question, is this dangerous what were talkinganab about or is it just an obstacle to Good Governance or is it actually dangerous . Its extremely dangerous and i would say the intensity of voters, you take a whole group of people and they are the large group of people whatever stage are looking at who have just opted out a while ago who are not registered who are not voting who actually have given up on democracy. Added to this is that group who say participating, not only is not a democratic responsibility that it wont solve anything. It doesnt help anything. It doesnt mean anything. In fact, it may be counterproductive. I think the danger is people not only cannot talk to each other, cannot think about working together, any kind of compromise is seen as being a traitor. Often you cant cross the line come you cant put together a deal, you can move anything forward but the intensity to say i want you to live someplace else, i want you to be a new country, i will pick up arms, i will do whatever is a real danger to the democracy. Again if we do not have a common set of shared values and facts, were in real trouble. I mean shared values like do we believe an independent judiciary . What does that mean . What about a free press . What about three equal branches of government . Those tenants have not been under scrutiny and questioned until fairly recently at a think they are under extreme tension and scrutiny and pressure. Tr neil, i am tempted to think the Political Institutions particularly in washington the house, the senate, are more polarized than the nation itself, that they were underrepresented in that sense. Then they see the numbers you have an event maybe thats not true. My question is, is the country as polarized and divided as washington is . I potentially the country more divided than d. C. I agree with the governor. This is extraordinarily dangerous. When joe and i did these numbers and we did this for the university of chicago, we asked, we add questions on serving just for the heck of it to see what kind of response we get. It scared the shit out of us. It really did. These are scary numbers. When you talk about potentially democracy the estate i dont think thats an understatement. As youre talking i will ask them to look forward to a set of numbers that a suspect you have in mind. Can i so one thing in your just about the Congress Versus the country . I dont disagree that individuals in their own hearts and minds are getting more and more polarized. I would say the function of government is very different in congress than at the state level. Things done. O get they have tos at the end of the day passed a budget. They have to adjourn. They have to. Move things forward. Theres only a few states in the country element being onee and maybe handful of others that have defineded that. They just cant, they live in some endless monetary morass. But most states actually function and a literally go from step to step and get things done. Often a the government is not te same party as the legislature so i do think congress has a particularlya frozen and dysfunctional look to most of the country. The legislative pretty remarkable just because they are justt like, people literaly cross across parties. We asked voters to think politicians should Cross Party Lines . Everybody, 90 of voters say absolutely they should. And then you ask do you think, your republican incumbent should cross party line and compromise their views . No, no, no. And republicans want democrats to compromise. Democrats what the republicans to compromise and were still stuck in the middle. You have a hard partisans on either side that are just not budging. You do have people in the middle of the people in the middle in politics, independents usually dont voice their concerns. They are relatively quiet about what they believe. Governor civilians lets talk about the experience in the state this year because you had a referendum on abortion in which i think everybody regardless of which side youre on on the abortion debate was surprised at the outcome because the prochoice forces won by 18 Percentage Points in a state that donald trump carried by 15 Percentage Points you have probably 180,000 independents showed up to vote. Is that assigned maybe everybody isnt is in as locked in to their silos as we think and or that independents can still stand up and take a stand from time to time . Its the couple of things. First of all people want to be asked about Big Decisions and this was a big decision and this was a straight on yes or no vote. That made ite easier than translating the candidate or lots of different issues. Also the notion are registered, registration to a party means that you believe x, y and z on these 1010 issues is just blown away by this. The majority of voters in the referendum republicans. Even if 100 of the democrats and 100 of the independent who went to the polls on august 2 voted no, it would have lost. Clearly republicans are prochoice, some portion of them. Some portion of democrats are prolife. Independents are all over the board. I think its true with guns, with climate, i think its true with finances. Party registration often is not the best picture of what people believe andpe they may be leadig a different things. They dont necessarily fall into a silo. What this referendum showed is that at the end of the day kansans overwhelmingly did not want state legislators to control their Reproductive Health decisions for themselves or their grandchildren or their daughters, period. They didnt want that to happen. The other thing it showed is, it didnt show 58 of cancers are prochoice. What it showed is kansans wanted to protect the right to make their own decision. I think even prolifers didnt want to legislate what other people shouldle do. Having grown up in johnson county, wasnt all that surprised by the final a vote. May be the margin but not the final vote. But in all due deference, you might not have been surprised by the no prevailing. I was blown away, and maybe you were more pressing it than i was about pressey at about the turnout and the numbers, registration. And the fact that people were on fire. We talked about this earlier. Ohio which does not have a Ballot Initiative on the ballot, women are out registering men by a margin of 12 points. New registrations in women has got off the charts. The Dobbs Decision has ignited a fire and is not just in kansas. Its easy to see we had about six weeks after the v bad decisn but i i think youre going to se it play out in november in a meaningful way. In terms of engaging some of those folks who just have said nothing really matters, imm nt going to vote. They are suddenly finding this matters and theyre going to vote. Regardless of what happens in november when the republicans when the house, when a center whatever happens were going to look back on this election a decade from now as the dobbs election. This will be the dobbs midterms. This is what defines this election. It defines the election. Its nothing of what issue. Number one issue is cost of living and inflation but the Dobbs Decision worked in anything else the fines with this election is about. Women turned out and young people. The groups that are marginal or regarded as maybe they wont show up this time. Youth vote was off the chart. Latino vote was off the chart. Categories of voters who are often regarded certainly in a midterms as unlikely voters were very much present in the amendment vote. I want to talk about two things. First about the nature of this civil discourse in the country and second what we might do to improve both the civil discourse and the polarization within the infrastructure. We sit here today at the Adult Institute which stands for bipartisanship which i hope were displaying today as well as civil conversation. Neil, the work that you and joe have done there seems to be