James M. Lindsay, senior vice president, director of studies, and Maurice R. Greenberg chair at CFR, discusses the party nomination and electoral process in U.S. presidential elections and the foreign policy views of the candidates and their running mates. A question-and-answer session follows his opening remarks, during which we encourage you to ask questions and share best practices.
TRANSCRIPT
FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations State and Local Officials Webinar. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR.
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We’re pleased to have James Lindsay with us today to speak on the party nomination and electoral process in U.S. presidential elections and the candidates’ foreign policy views. We’ve shared his bio with you, but I will give you a few highlights. Dr. Lindsay is the senior vice president, director of studies, and Maurice R. Greenberg chair at CFR, where he oversees the work of more than six dozen fellows in the David Rockefeller Studies Program, as well as CFR’s fourteen fellowship programs. He is a leading expert on American foreign policymaking process and the domestic politics of American foreign policy. He is the author of the CFR blog, The Water’s Edge, which I commend to you all. His blog discusses the politics of American foreign policy and the domestic underpinnings of American global power. And he is also the host of the weekly podcast,
The President’s Inbox, which explores how the United States should respond to global challenges and opportunities that are shaping the future.
So, Jim, thank you for being with us and spending this hour with us. To start off I thought I would ask you to provide a brief overview of the presidential candidate nomination and electoral processes in the United States, and what you see as unique about this year’s cycle.
LINDSAY: Well, first, Irina, thank you for having me on this webinar. And let me thank everybody who is joining us for this call.
As you look at elections, Irina, all elections are a mix of the old and the new, and even the unique. And just think back to 2016. That was the first U.S. presidential race that had a woman topping a major political party ticket. 2020, we had the first American presidential election held in the middle of a global pandemic. And as for 2024 it has some new twist. We’ve seen, regrettably, an assassination attempt against Donald Trump. Sadly, that does have precedent in American history. But we’ve also, for the first time in American history, seen the presumptive nominee of a political party withdraw from the race just weeks before the national party convention.
That said, I would say in some ways election 2024 looks like a lot of other elections. Let me sort of make three broad points. The first would be that the current race is incredibly tight. The United States remains a 50/50 nation. Neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party has built a supermajority, so to speak, with the American public. Indeed, if you look at the last six presidential races, four of them would have been decided by changing the outcome in just a few states, and twice—in 2002 and 2016—the winner of the Electoral College vote was actually the loser of the popular vote.
The second point I would make is that, as in past elections and because of the Electoral College, the election really is going to turn on votes in a handful of states. I think most people on this call are familiar with the so-called battleground states. We have Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Those seem to be the races that are the tightest. And if you are Vice President Harris you can afford to lose Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada and still win the Electoral College, provided you win every other state that President Biden won back in 2020. What that means for both the Harris-Walz campaign and the Trump-Vance campaign is that it matters who you turn out to vote, but just as important where they turn out to vote.
Finally, I’ll leave you with one unique concern about the 2020 election. And that is how well America’s election infrastructure is going to hold up when we get to Election Day. The process of counting votes in the United States once used to be very uncontroversial. People didn’t pay a lot of attention to it. Indeed, in many cases, many states didn’t invest a lot in elections or election security. That clearly has changed, particularly over the last four years.
As you think about votes, particularly if you have strong, heavy turnout—as happened in 2020—there’s going to be the question of whether states, cities, towns, are going to have enough poll workers, after the controversies in a number of states back in 2020. I think a number of localities had trouble keeping people coming to the polls. And a number of states have changed voter access to the ballot box. We don’t know how that is going to play out, to what extent it will become a matter of judicial ruling.
We also have the potential—we saw some of this back in 2020—of voter intimidation, trying to keep people from going to the polls. We remain with the threat of hackers, whether they’re foreign-based or domestically-based, interfering with the vote count. Now if you have a blowout win, whether it’s for the Republicans or the Democrats, all of those problems go away. But if we have something that looks like 2020, where you have basically narrow outcomes in a couple of states and how those states go can change the outcome, this could be sort of a big shock to the system.
FASKIANOS: Thank you. So this is always a question in every election. How significant do you think foreign policy will be in this year’s election outcome, compared to previous years?
LINDSAY: Well, Irina, there’s a general rule of American politics that elections matter a lot to American foreign policy, but American foreign policy doesn’t matter a lot in elections. And I think that’s going to be the case in 2024. If you look at things like the Gallup poll, which every month goes out and asks people to identify the most important issue facing the country, you look at it over the last several years what you discover is foreign policy is nowhere to be seen. And that’s reflected in terms of the speeches that the candidates give. They, for the most part, aren’t talking about foreign policy because, again, if you’re in the business of winning elections it’s important to talk to voters about the issues they’re concerned about. So, again, I think, you know, in terms of 2024, foreign policy, as a general rule, is not going to play a major role.
Now, I have a Ph.D. in political science, so everything I say I have to provide you with a caveat. Let me give you two here. The first caveat is that when I say that foreign policy is not likely to matter significantly to the outcome of the 2024 election, I would not classify immigration policy as a foreign policy issue. It’s not generally treated as a foreign policy issue by people working in the foreign policy area. If, however, your view is that immigration policy is not a matter of control of your own borders and the domestic handling of people entering it, you want to consider immigration as a foreign policy issue, then here I would say, yes, it will be a major issue. We all know it will be a major issue.
What I don’t know is which party will end up getting the better of the conversation on securing America’s borders. The Republican Party, led by President—former President Trump and Senator Vance, is making the argument that the Biden-Harris administration failed to secure the border. The Harris-Walz rebuttal is that the Biden-Harris administration worked out a deal that would have provided very strong border security, but Donald Trump persuaded Republicans on Capitol Hill to torpedo it because he saw it as in his political interest to continue having the border crisis. I have no way of knowing which of those narratives is going to be the one that’s most persuasive to voters who haven’t already chosen.
The second caveat I would make, Irina, is that the fact that foreign policy doesn’t matter to most voters in terms of who they decide to vote for doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter to any voters. So if an election is going to be close enough, even if only a few people care about a foreign policy issue it could determine who wins and who loses. And here the obvious example that’s been commented upon quite often by news channels and reporters is the issue of U.S. support for Israel, and whether or not it will cost the Democratic Party votes. And obviously, the big concern for the Democratic Party is what it will do in the state of Michigan, where there is a significant community of Arab and Muslim Americans who, during the campaign, led a movement called the Uncommitted, which was to deny delegates to President Biden when he was then in the race, in the hopes that would create pressure on the Biden administration to change its policy of support for Israel.
And so how that is all going to work out going forward is one of the big questions because, obviously, it was one set of challenges when it was President Biden who was going to be the standard bearer. It’s a different issue politically—or, at least has the potential to be a different political issue, with Vice President Harris leading the Democratic ticket.
FASKIANOS: Right. So that brings me to elaborate on both candidates’ views on foreign policy. But that is a little bit challenging, since Kamala Harris has only—it’s only been, what, a month since she—and so there hasn’t been a lot of space. And obviously she’s walking the fine line between being part of the Biden administration. So to the extent that you can foresee or what you have heard, where do you think they come out, and where will the differences be on things like Ukraine and, you know?
LINDSAY: Yeah. Well, let me make a broad observation, that it can be very difficult to predict the specific things a president is going to do based on what they say or don’t say on the campaign trail. One of my favorite examples, that will will resonate with people who are older as opposed to younger, was Bill Clinton’s campaigning in 1992. A big part of his foreign policy plank was to be very critical of China, criticizing then-President George H.W. Bush for his, what Clinton would have argued, was too soft a treatment of China given Tiananmen Square, and the consequences of that massacre. But President Clinton would go on to champion a significant piece of legislation to give a very favorable trade deal to China.
So what candidates say on the campaign trail and what they do in office can change. And there are a couple of reasons for that. I mean, one, obviously, is events. And I think we all need to have some humility that the world as it looks today may look quite different on January 20. What happens in Ukraine? Do we see China up its intimidation of Taiwan? Or does a crisis break out in the South China Sea because of Chinese naval vessels intercepting Filipino naval vessels? Do we see a widening of the war in the Middle East? So there’s a lot of churn in the system that can really change what you have to deal with when you’re off the campaign trail and behind the HMS Resolute desk in the White House.
Another thing to keep in mind is campaigns are about promising and governing is about choices. So when you’re on the campaign trail, you’re a candidate, don’t care what party you’re in, you can ignore the tradeoffs, the nuances, the complications. When you are in government and you need to make choices, you can’t ignore tradeoffs. You can’t ignore priorities. You can’t ignore the impact of what it is that you’re doing. Or, if you do, you do so at your own peril. I think a third thing always to keep in mind, we love to talk about presidents, and we assume that presidents are sort of the sole determinants of what their administrations do. But administrations are composed of lots and lots of people. So who the president chooses for their Cabinet, and how they staff their administration matters.
In Washington, we say people are policy. And we don’t really know who Donald Trump would staff his administration with. And we don’t know who Kamala Harris would staff her administration with. We can make guesses, but we really don’t know. And, again, as I think is familiar to many people on this call, you know people who serve a principal—a governor, a senator, a mayor—have considerable discretion. They can amplify their principle’s message. They can derail it. They can modify it. And that’s just how politics works.
And I think I would also say that, you know, one thing also to keep in mind, we’ve been talking about presidents. We haven’t talked about Congress. And who ends up controlling the House and the Senate will matter to what presidents can do. And the obvious point here is if you’re a president and your party controls both houses in Congress, it’s a lot easier to do stuff. In fact, it’s even easier to staff your administration than it is if the opposing party controls Congress. So those are all unknowns for us.
That said, I guess my 40,000-foot message would be, that I would expect a Harris administration foreign policy to look a lot like a Joe Biden foreign policy. Won’t say it’s identical. I guess I would say a Harris foreign policy is likely to be in the same time zone, if not the same area code, as a Biden foreign policy. I would expect her to make China foreign policy priority number one, to continue support for Ukraine, to try to find some way to extricate the United States and Israel from the current crisis without jeopardizing that alliance or leading to a broader war. I expect her to continue to do work to try to combat climate change and to be hostile to new trade deals.
I think when you shift to President Trump, it becomes a bit more difficult to summarize his foreign policy, both because he hasn’t said a lot about the specifics of what he has done. If he watches rallies, much of it is spent talking about what he thinks Joe Biden did wrong and how if he were president none of these problems would materialize. That doesn’t really tell you what you would do or he will do if he is back in the Oval Office. Add to the fact that when Donald Trump was president, he could be quite unpredictable. And he could span sort of the whole spectrum of policy choices. The best example might be how he went from threatening North Korea with fire and fury and then ended up writing or exchanging what he called love letters with Kim Jong-un.
But I would suspect that with Trump, you would have a more blustery foreign policy, a lot more public criticism of American allies, nice things said about American adversaries. Contrary to a lot of the talk, Donald Trump has not committed to withdrawing the United States from NATO. However, his criticism of NATO allies and his talk that perhaps he wouldn’t defend them because they’re not spending enough on their own defense, may have the effect of really eroding NATO. He may end U.S. support for Ukraine, but it is not clear how fast he would do it. So that’s sort of a big question mark. I would expect him to continue, if not amplify, U.S. support for Israel.
And the one thing I’m pretty sure with Donald Trump is that we will get more tariffs. We may not get a 100 percent tariff. We may not get tariffs of 10 percent across the board, because that would have some significant downside economic costs. But I expect to see a Trump administration more enthusiastically embrace tariffs than a Harris-Walz administration.
FASKIANOS: And finally, before we go to the group for their questions and comments, can you talk a little bit about the election rules in the U.S.? And there’s been, you know, over the years, let’s get rid of the Electoral College and just go with the national popular vote. Just talk a little bit about that and—why we don’t do that. And, you know, just what your thought is.
LINDSAY: OK. Well, the reason we don’t do that is because of a decision made at the Constitutional Convention back in the summer of 1789 that it was important, A, not to have direct election of the president, but also—and this is the critical part—that states needed to have a set. You know, when you—when you think about the Constitution, we spent a lot of time arguing about what is meant by the various specific grants of authority the Constitution gives to the president, or to Congress, or to the judiciary.
But if you actually look at the timeline of the Constitutional Convention, most of those issues got settled at the end and in a rush. Much of the debate that took place was centered on the question of large states versus small states, and how they would be represented. Because the then-smaller states, the less populous states—think New Jersey, think Delaware at the time—were worried about entering into a union in which their bigger state brethren would, in essence, have all of the power. And so that gave us the Electoral College.
Now the nature of those states and the size of the United States clearly has grown over more than two centuries, but that’s where it originates. Now the Electoral College, as a practical matter, amplifies the voting power of residents of small states compared to big states. So if you are a voter in Wyoming, you have a greater electoral weight than a voter in California. That’s just a function of the system. Now, as you might imagine, if you are a voter in a populous state, you may want to move to a national popular vote. But if you are a voter from a Wyoming or a Rhode Island, it doesn’t seem as appealing because you like the fact that this gives you political power.
You know Wyoming—thinking of the United States Senate—is equal to California, even though California’s population I think it’s thirty-seven times larger. So you could change that. You would have to adopt a constitutional amendment. Now, keep in mind, we’ve only had twenty-seven of them in our history, and the first ten came in the first year—first year and a half. So it’s—constitutional amendments are very hard to get done.
Now, there has been talk of doing things like a national voter pact where states promise that they will give their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote if enough other states agree to do so. But that effort has sort of petered out and, again, because—particularly if you’re a Republican today and you look at the Electoral College, it’s your friend because there’s a bias toward the Republican Party, given that most smaller, less populous, more rural states are overrepresented in the Electoral College.
FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. So now we’re going to go to all of you for your questions and comments. Again, as a reminder, we are on the record.
(Gives queuing instructions.)
So with that, please do not be shy. And we have our first question from John Jaszewski. And please correct my pronunciation as well. You’re still muted.
Q: There we go. Yeah, it’s Jaszewski.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
Q: Yeah, OK. My question is the credibility problem that we have in this country, with—recently with the false—whether it’s false or not—the skepticism about the count—the counting of the votes. Is there anything that can be done? And how does that affect foreign policy?
LINDSAY: Well, thank you, John.
FASKIANOS: And, just a minute, Jim. John is a council member from Mason City, Iowa. So given your background—
LINDSAY: All four of my children were born in the great state of Iowa, so I’m a big fan of the Hawkeye State.
I mean, you asked two really good questions, John, that I’m probably not going to give fair due to. I would say, on the issue of getting people to believe that the count was fair or is fair, it is very hard to do when prominent people argue that the count wasn’t fair. And this also bleeds into this new world we live in of social media, where people can post claims that have no factual basis but can be believed by people. So that I don’t—I don’t have an answer to. I think a lot of people would like to do so. I will note that the fact that in 2020 something on the order of sixty lawsuits were brought alleging various misdeeds and miscounting, and none of them succeeded, and no evidence has been produced of that—the fact that that hasn’t put to bed the claim that somehow the race was rigged or stolen, continues.
In terms of how it affects American foreign policy—let me correct myself—how it affects how others see us, it damages America’s soft power, as we call it. The appeal of the United States. One of the nice things about my job is I get to talk to a lot of people from overseas. I get to go overseas. And one of the common things you hear from people in many countries is the United States is not like the United States that I remember, or I thought. You’re not like the people I thought you were. And what you also hear is they worry about why the United States has such poisonous politics. And why it seems to be when, from their vantage point, many things are going well for the United States, Americans seem so unhappy, so divided, so partisan. So I think that does weigh on things.
FASKIANOS: Thank you. I am going to take the next question from the mayor of Manvel, Texas, Mayor Dan Davis: Does a potential dropping out of RFK, Jr., and his endorsement of a candidate, change the trajectory of this election cycle? Especially if he endorses Trump, which could have a huge impact on Georgia and Arizona.
LINDSAY: Dan, you asked a question a lot of political analysts are debating right now. And I don’t think anybody knows what the answer to your question is. I’ll make a broad note, which is if you track not just RFK, Jr., but look at all the third-party candidates, and you look at sort of how they track in the polls, they’ve all sort of fallen off the map over the last four or five months. I mean, at one point RFK, Jr. was polling in the low- to mid-teens, or was threatening to get to the mid-teens. But I think the fact that, you know, he’s now talking about—or, it’s being speculated that he’s going to drop out of the race, signals that his campaign really hasn’t done terribly well. I think the last poll I saw he was under five points, towards of the average of polls. And Cornel West and Jill Stein are faring even less well.
What, again, we don’t know it, is for the people who might have been inclined to vote for a Robert F. Kennedy, the question is, will they vote? I mean, one option they have is, if they are what political analysts call double haters—they didn’t like—or, they don’t like the Republican candidate, they don’t like the Democratic candidate—and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was the person that they liked, if he drops out they may just respond by not voting at all. The other question, of course, is, is a voter who was going to go with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. going to go to Trump or go to Harris? And I don’t know that we know.
And the additional complicating factor is if you are a voter who is going to go for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and you decided to go—since he dropped out, to go for Trump, and you vote in Texas, it doesn’t matter because Trump is going to win Texas. The real question is going to be, as you say, in states like Arizona and Georgia. But if you are the Harris campaign, you may not like it but you may be of the belief that we’re going to win in Pennsylvania, we’re going to win in Michigan, we’re going to win in Wisconsin. So even if we lose Georgia, it won’t be fatal. And, again, I’ll just say there’s a lot of time between now and Election Day in most states where people may vacillate.
One quick thing I should just note, and this is—this is different from how we historically did elections—in recent years we’ve moved to a lot more early voting. And the first early voting will take place in less than a month. And Minnesota and South Dakota are going to open up and start taking votes. So—or, accepting ballots. And, again, the rules vary from state to state. And that’s always one thing to keep in mind when you think about American elections, is that we don’t have one national election. We have elections in fifty states, and a District of Columbia, and every state has its own rules governing things like how you get on the ballot, when ballots can be cast, what you have to do to do early voting or mail-in voting if it’s available. Things like that.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to go next to Joelene Thiele, who’s a legislative aide for Representative Wendy Fink in Pennsylvania: I’m curious to know how the Democratic Party was legally allowed to basically handpick a nominee as opposed to having an open convention where there were other choices.
Joelene has two questions, but I’m going to limit to that because there are others, and if we have time I’ll come back.
LINDSAY: Well, what I would say is that parties are free to have their own rules on how they pick nominees. And the Democratic Party had a set of rules of what it would do if it can—it dropped out before a national convention. These rules existed and are long-standing. Indeed, I can recall articles being written back in January about all the variety of scenarios and what would happen, laying out what each party does. And I should note, the Republican Party also has rules governing what happens if a candidate who has won delegates can’t or chooses not to run for office. So there’s nothing illegal about this. The parties have their rules, and the Democratic Party follows its rules, and it has a candidate. They weren’t required by the rules to have an open convention, as many people either hoped for or called for.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to go next to Mayor Gary Hall, mayor of Estes Park town in Colorado: What popular vote or electoral vote margin do you think we need to virtually eliminate arguments of the result? And will the states—will the states that pass laws to allow their state legislature to block state certification create serious delay, regardless of the result?
LINDSAY: OK, I think there are really two questions there. And the first question, I don’t have a number for you because, I mean, the reality is you can have an election in which the winning candidate wins by one vote in every state, and so they would win unanimously in the Electoral College but if you’re looking at votes it would be 50/50. And I would imagine in that sort of scenario, where the votes are narrow, that what will happen is that people will be very concerned about whether or not votes were counted fairly. And here’s where it’s important to always keep in mind that the Electoral College can exaggerate a candidate’s support.
So even with someone like Ronald Reagan, who won—set the Electoral College record back in 1984, there was still 44 percent of the population that didn’t vote for him. So a lot more—what matters is not sort of what the number is in the Electoral College. It’s going to be how many states you have a really close result, as in 2020 where you had a very narrow result in Georgia, and in Arizona. And that can make a difference. And, again, you know, the interesting thing about the 2020 election is that Joe Biden won by some seven million votes in the popular count—popular vote, but if you moved roughly 43,000 of those votes around in the right three states, Donald Trump would have been president. That’s actually closer than what we witnessed in 2016 with President Trump and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. So that’s what really sort of matters.
Your second question I think points to something that is a potential concern, because some states have passed laws, as you mentioned, which would allow challenges to dutifully elected state electors. And you could have a delay. How much of a delay would depend upon how many states contested, how big was the margin in the Electoral College. Again, if you end up with a blowout in the Electoral College, even if the popular vote’s relatively close, then having a couple of states contest probably wouldn’t matter that much.
But we are, in some sense, in a different situation, it’s important to keep in mind, that in the old days there was a close election, politicians or candidates would accept the results. I think the 1960 election is often held up as an example, but even think of the 2000 election with Al Gore and George Bush, and Gore conceding after the Supreme Court ruling. But today it’s quite clear that that norm, we’ll call it a norm—not a law, but a norm—an expectation of how a losing candidate would behave, doesn’t exist.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to go next to Vice Mayor John Shribbs, who has a raised hand. Vice Mayor of Petaluma, California.
Q: Oh, thank you for calling on me.
OK, so I’m partly—taught environmental science. And I look at natural resources as really—those that have natural resources—that the states and foreign nations that have these are able to grow and do things. And so as we shift, especially with climate change, the access to lithium, rare earth elements, things that make our technology, make our energy grid potentially greater and useful. And right now, there’s a lot of contention. And not being talked about is the power struggle of nations going after these resources to power through technology and electricity. So how do the two parties really going to be—how do they differ, really, with their philosophies, and how they go after acquiring these elements that we need that are being now competed against worldwide?
LINDSAY: I don’t think either political party has a developed policy on what you would call critical minerals, rare earth minerals. And indeed, I mean, I’ve read the Republican platform, which comes in about twenty-two pages, the Democratic platforms about ninety pages, I could be wrong, but I don’t believe critical minerals comes up as a topic of significant discussion. I think one of the challenges for the U.S. government with these issues is that there is sort of current demand for these resources, and then there is what will future demand for these resources be. And one of the interesting things that is happening sort of on the technology front is that scientists, investors look around, see the sorts of challenges you pointed out, John, and are asking themselves, OK, can we make money by beating this problem, OK?
And there’s the old argument that necessity is the mother of invention. And if you look out there and you say, I’m really concerned about having access to lithium because the world’s biggest lithium deposits are in South America, particularly in Bolivia. And you’re worried that Chinese companies dominate the extraction and refining of lithium, you begin thinking about other technologies that could substitute. And there’s talk about—for example, we talk about lithium batteries today. It’s possible you could have salt-based batteries. And it turns out that the world’s biggest deposit—known deposit—of the kind of material needed to produce sodium batteries is sitting under the great state of Wyoming.
So you got that technological thing there. And I think what any government needs to do is keep its eyes open to the potential for technology to really scramble what your needs can be. And if you want to do a little bit of backward casting, one of the remarkable developments on the energy front over the last two decades is fracking. The United States is now the world’s biggest producer of petroleum. And despite all of the back and forth between the two parties, the reality is that extracting oil and gas from U.S. territory continues to grow at pace.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to combine two questions that are—have the same strand, from Matthew Castilho, who’s a student at the University of Michigan and legislative intern to State Senator Sue Shink, and Jerry Lore’s, who is in the City Clerk’s Office in the city of Hoboken, New Jersey: So do you see foreign interference as a major issue in this election? And what are the measures that can be implemented, and key strategies to address cybersecurity threats to ensure the integrity for the upcoming election? Especially as we are entering—we have early voting beginning?
LINDSAY: Well, first, since I think the University of Michigan was mentioned, I’m required to say, go Blue. Basically, betray my academic training.
You know, as we sort of look at the issue of foreign interference, it is real. I think, as people on the call know, last week it was announced—or, confirmed by the FBI that actors associated with the Iranian government managed to hack the Trump campaign and tried to hack the Harris-Walz campaign. So that sort of interference exists. We know that the Russians continue some fairly sophisticated disinformation activities, as they did back in 2016. There has been debate about the extent to which China has followed the lead of the Russians in being active in disinformation. Clearly earlier this year there was an incident which Microsoft reported that it closed down several thousand Facebook sites based in China that were clearly being used to try to send messages into the American political system.
So that gets the question of, how do you deal with it? And you can deal with it through a variety of technical means. Again, trying to stop hackers from hacking, trying to figure out what looked to be bots, and shutting them down, as Microsoft and others have done. It’s a bit like whack-a-mole, as best I can tell. I’m not a technologist by training, but it’s possible to set up all kinds of ways to try to penetrate what is a very open society. And that’s what makes the United States so distinctive in terms of its openness. We have lots of information. So in some ways you’re always going to have disinformation.
But I think it’s important always to keep in mind that disinformation doesn’t just come from foreign sources. It can come internally, either because people don’t like the other party, or they want to be an opinion influencer, or it can make them money. And so there’s a lot of disinformation. And again, in the case of the United States, we have the First Amendment. It gives people great freedom in what they write and what they say. And that can make it very hard to track down obvious disinformation. And so you’re—at the end, you’re really left with the best defense, and the only one that will really be effective, is helping people understand how to determine fake evidence, how to assess the quality of what they see.
And I think, as many people on this call know, one of the great concerns that a lot of people had coming into this election is how it might be influenced by AI. artificial intelligence, and the ability to use AI to create fake images, fake video, fake audio. We’ve seen a little bit of that so far. It’s not clear how much of it actually comes from overseas sources as opposed to individuals in the United States. But that also raises the flip problem, which I’m not sure how you solve, which is if there is a possibility that information is fake because of AI, then you can accuse people of creating AI fakes even if what they’re saying is real. And we saw an example of that not too long ago. And that becomes a real sort of problem for any democracy, which fundamentally rests on voter trust but also voter information. And the harder it becomes for people to know what’s real and what’s made up, I think that’s a real challenge for democracy that I don’t know if anyone has an answer for, or certainly any answer that can be summarized in thirty words or less.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to go next to Dr. Eno Mondesir, who is the executive health officer in Brockton, Mass.
Q: Thank you very much for taking my question.
The question is twofold. Should Donald Trump lose the election, the November election, what is the likelihood that we will relive another January 6? And how do we prepare for that eventual theater?
LINDSAY: Well, I don’t know the answer to your question. I can’t put a probability on it. I do think that there is great concern, understandably, that we could have political violence either in the run up to the election or possibly in the aftermath of the election. I will say that one of the consequences of January 6 having happened is that many states, cities have taken this threat very seriously, certainly, the FBI has taken it very seriously, to try to determine the extent to which there might be any kind of coordinated violence. The challenge we really face, and the hardest thing to deal with—whether it’s election-related violence or violence of any other sort—is that sort of conducted by so-called lone wolves, people acting on their own. You know, we saw an example of that this summer with the attempted assassination of President Trump—former President Trump.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to take the next question, a written one, from Debrah Hall-McCullon, who is the city clerk in Riviera Beach, Florida: My question for other municipalities and for you, Jim, is, do you recommend special security practices on Election Day? It’s hard to get poll workers these days because of fear from those who say the votes are being tossed out, changed. What information can we provide to the public to make them feel more secure as poll workers and going to polls to vote?
And I’ll just say, we—this is—this is a forum to share best practices, so if you have thoughts as well you can raise your hand. So, Jim.
LINDSAY: Yeah, let me echo that, Irina, because I think there has been some learning that is taking place across the country at the grassroots level, at the at the local city, town, village level, that would be very useful if people shared. I mean, one of the great things about American democracy is that it’s a very decentralized democracy, with lots of government units and people trying to sort of deal with the issues that they face. And again, I’m sad to hear—though not surprised—about the challenges of trying to recruit poll workers, because it has been a real problem.
And the concern is, I think, for people choosing to be poll workers, is not limited to what might happen on Election Day. They’re concerned about what will happen in the days after. It takes a while to count ballots. You know, or they’re worried about the lead up, that, in parlance, they’re going to be doxed, that people are going to try to get information about them and make it public. Some very famous cases from Georgia. And there’s also concern about swatting, where people call the police and allege that something untoward is being done by a poll worker, and the rest. So I think it’s a—it is a very big issue.
And I think, you know, it would help to the extent that political leaders of all parties stress the importance of peaceful elections, nonviolence. I think it would, again, help if states that have had some successful plans dealing with this and assuring poll workers share that. And I think, ultimately, the direction we’re going, I think state and local municipalities are going to have to invest more in their election infrastructure to strengthen it from this.
Now, and the question, again, about how do you get people to believe election results, you know, that, I think, is the hardest, because the temptation is to think that if you just give people facts that will change their mind. And I think one of the things people who do social psychology will tell you is that people often have made up their minds and then determine what they consider to be facts. And they search for things that confirm their worldview, confirmation bias. And that is a very real problem, amplified by social media over and over again.
FASKIANOS: Yes.
Thank you. I’m going to go next to Cindy Wolf, who is with San Juan County Council: How does the decoupling of the U.S. dollar with Saudi Arabian oil interact with the worldwide perception of U.S. political stability in terms of worldwide valuation of our currency? How do you think the results of the election might further affect this situation?
LINDSAY: Could you read the second half of the question again, Irina?
FASKIANOS: Sure. It’s, how do you think the results of the election might further affect the situation?
LINDSAY: OK. I’m not quite sure what is meant by the decoupling, or what the questioner has in mind. But I will note a couple of things. One is that oil is traded on an international market. It will continue to be traded on an international market. Prices are set on an international market. That’s one of the reasons why it’s very hard to contain flows of oil, because it’s traded so widely.
Second thing is, the United States dollar is the world reserve currency. And I anticipate it will continue to be the world’s reserve currency for quite some time, only because it’s not clear what the alternative is and people find it much more convenient to deal in dollars than any other currency. Now, yes, the Chinese are trying to champion ways to make their currency more—used more. That has a bunch of problems for other countries, but also for the Chinese. So I think the status quo is likely to last for quite some time.
FASKIANOS: I’m going to go next to Ron Wilczak, who has raised a raised hand.
Q: Hello, can you hear me?
FASKIANOS: Hello. Yes. And your commissioner from Braidwood, Illinois?
Q: Yes.
FASKIANOS: Yes, great.
Q: A public health and safety commissioner.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
Q: First of all, I’d like to—first of all, I’d like to say thank you, Mr. Lindsay, for bringing us what is clearly a lot of knowledge and perspective on our political environment.
One of the biggest things we are experiencing in today’s politics, the extreme divide with a large part caused by the opinions on if the last election was fraudulent. If the sixty legal cases showing no evidence of vote rigging exists—since it does exist, what do you think are ideas and ways that we can make it more convincing to all of legitimate vote counts?
LINDSAY: Again, that’s an excellent question, Ron. Let me say thank you very much for the kind words.
Several things have happened. One is that, as you know, in a number of states they have enacted what supporters call enhanced voter security, what critics call efforts at voter suppression. One of the interesting things that we will see in November is how those rules play out. Do they affect the vote? And one could imagine in states where these rules have been enacted, if they produce outcomes different from what the supporters wanted, then that may perhaps persuade people that it really was a fair election. After all, if you say we built a more secure system and it still gives you a different outcome, it would seem—would seem to weaken the argument that somehow skullduggery or some underhanded behavior changed the result.
But beyond that, I don’t know what is going to cure our current lack of trust in established fact. The reality is, as we said several times on this call, despite an absence of evidence that the election was stolen, a very large number of Americans believe in their bones it was. And the issue also gets complicated by concerns about—some people have, obviously former President Trump has articulated, that even if the rules are in place, certain types of voting are, by definition, illegitimate or subject to manipulation. That’s obviously, you know, the argument against early or mail-in voting. So, again, there’s a ton of investigations have been done, and most famously that very lengthy audit in Arizona which ended up producing more votes for Joe Biden and taking votes away from Donald Trump. But that didn’t, as best I can tell, change the minds of those people in the state of Arizona who firmly believe that the election was taken unfairly from Donald Trump.
FASKIANOS: Thank you. There have been several written questions about the conflict—the war in Gaza. Jim, I’m going to take from Rachel Tomas Morgan in the city council in South Bend, Indiana. Can you say more about the extent that the war in Gaza will impact the elections? Surrogates have spoken about a ceasefire. Isn’t that enough? What do you think Kamala Harris herself needs to say to win over those voters?
LINDSAY: Well, in terms of Gaza’s impact on the American election, it comes down to whether Gaza as an issue leads people either to stay home or to change parties. And here we’re really talking about people who would have ordinarily voted Democrat voting for Republican. And, again, the example that’s held up time and time again is the state of Michigan, which is a heavily contested battleground state in which there was a large movement during the primary for individuals to vote for “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary, rather than for Joe Biden, as a way to signal to him that you have trouble in Michigan unless you address our concerns about what we perceive as your excessive support for Israel.
To what extent those voters, or voters inclined in that direction, have to carry it over to Kamala Harris, I don’t think we know the answer to that. Obviously, for some—as you can see from the protests in Chicago around the United Center—they don’t see a distinction between the vice president and the president. But beyond that, voters like that have a challenge in which a Trump administration is very likely to be as supportive of Israel, if not more supportive, than the Biden administration. And, again, how do people make those tradeoffs? And I don’t think we have a really good handle on that.
And so even in the case of, you know, Michigan, with its significant population of Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, if the Harris campaign does well with other democratic constituencies it may not matter. And that’s what we don’t know. And which is why you don’t just talk about elections, you have to count the votes.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I think we have time for one last question. Let me go to New Hampshire Alderman Chris Thiebodeau, from Nashua, New Hampshire. You are unmuted, and yet we cannot hear you.
LINDSAY: I’ll just say, I’m a big fan of Nashua, having been a few times as a young man, so.
FASKIANOS: OK. I’m going to go next—sorry that we’re having technical issues—I’ll go to Cheryl Pasteur in Delaware. OK.
Q: Did I just—I did.
FASKIANOS: Yes, did it. You’re good.
Q: Thank you. No, actually, I’m not. It was really by accident. I just really wanted to say before we shut off that this has been one of the absolute best and most informative. The questions were good. Your information at the beginning was excellent. But just really good questions. It helps me, but it also will help me help my constituents. And I’m from the proud state of Maryland.
LINDSAY: Thank you for the very kind word, Cheryl.
Q: Thank you.
LINDSAY: I’m in D.C., so we’re next door.
Q: I thought she said Delaware. Delaware is a wonderful state, but I’m from Maryland.
FASKIANOS: Ah, my apologies. It’s Maryland. I did get it wrong. I was juggling different things. Maryland.
Q: But this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for doing this.
FASKIANOS: Thank you so much.
LINDSAY: Thank you.
FASKIANOS: Appreciate that.
Jim, any final words before we close?
LINDSAY: I would just say thanks to everybody for joining us. I want to thank everybody for their service. I know how important state and local governments are to the functioning of American democracy. And here’s to hoping we have perhaps a tough political contest, but a fair and peaceful one.
FASKIANOS: Thank you. And thank you all. I’m sorry that we couldn’t get to your questions. We will just have to come back—have you back, Jim, to share your expertise again. We’ll send out a link to this webinar recording and a transcript. You can follow James Lindsay on X at @JamesMLindsay. I also commend to you, again, to sign up for his blog, The Water’s Edge, as well as subscribe to his weekly podcast,
The President’s Inbox. Those are both great resources for you.
And, as always, we encourage you to visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for the latest analysis on international trends and how they’re affecting the United States. And as always, share suggestions for future webinars by emailing us at
[email protected]. So thank you all again for being with us. I hope you enjoy the rest of August. Not much left before Labor Day, and then we begin the new school year. So thank you all. Thank you, Jim.
LINDSAY: Thank you, Irina. Thank you, everyone.
END.
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