--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Tuesday, October 15th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, how big crypto companies are influencing our elections. Were women snubbed by the Nobel Prize Committee? And why it's taking so long for your favorite TV shows to crank out new seasons. But first, every election cycle, we inevitably hear some politicians reviving the old debate, should we do away with the Electoral College? The unique system that says in nearly all states, the winner of that state's popular vote also wins all the state's electoral votes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's been the reason why just a handful of times in our history, a candidate for president has lost the popular vote but won the election. Like George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016. Joining me now to talk about where the debate over the Electoral College stands and why it's a little different this year is my colleague Gideon Resnick.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Hey, Shamita.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So, Gideon, I always think it's helpful before the election to sort of remind people of where the system comes from, why we have it, why it works the way it does. Can you give us the, I don't know, 45-second reminder?
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So I think the history here begins in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention, where basically the conversation broke down into two camps. One camp who wanted Congress to decide who the president was, and the other camp who wanted the national popular vote to decide. And the compromise they landed on was a process where state legislatures appoint these electors, and they are the ones who formalized the election.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The critical context here is that slavery shaped the conception of the Electoral College as well because Southern states objected to the national popular vote. The Brennan Center points out what happened was when the Electoral College was actually formalized, enslaved people counted as three-fifths of a person. And that meant that Southern slaveholders and their Northern sympathizers dominated presidential elections as a result.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Fast forward to today, and one Brennan Center fellow argues that the Electoral College still dilutes the political power of Black voters, as many vote for Democrats in southern states that frequently go red.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Okay, important history to keep in mind. So remind us now how things played out in the last few elections and how that's shaping how Democrats and Republicans are strategizing this year.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Yeah, the last two presidential elections feel pretty instructive. So in 2016, Democrats felt really burned about the outcome because Hillary Clinton won almost 3 million more popular votes than Trump. That translated to about 2% more. And as we know, she lost the Electoral College. Then Democrats in 2020 rebounded when President Biden won both the popular vote by a bigger margin this time, more than 7 million votes, and the Electoral College.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So what Democrats have seen in a lot of these cycles increasingly is that these high-population states like California and New York contribute to a large percentage of their national popular vote, but they don't always translate to those electoral wins. And that is because of this winner takes all system that the Electoral College creates, which means that it really doesn't matter how much you win or lose a state by. It just matters if you win it.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Which is why you see all of this focus on the swingiest states, the battleground states, by these campaigns of course. And you know, millions of dollars and campaign visits there to the point where some voters in other parts of the country don't necessarily see their presidential candidates that often coming to their states, if at all.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But going back to that 2016 election, you know, a lot of Hillary Clinton's numbers came from traditionally blue states like New York and California. But she also did win millions more votes in Texas than President Obama had. But neither of those points actually ended up mattering in the total electoral college cumulative number.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So polling right now indicates that we might be seeing something different happening this year where margins are getting tighter, but not necessarily in places where it matters the most. Tell us about that.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Yeah, this is really interesting and a lot of places have written about it, including, I think, the New York Times has had some good analysis on it. There are indications that Trump is polling this year better with voters of color, particularly younger men, and that he could be doing better in some blue states like New York, which he is unlikely to win.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So if all of that were to hold, and it's a big if, he could come closer to winning the national popular vote without actually being elected president again. Kind of the inverse of what happened in 2016. And then conversely, it might mean that Vice President Kamala Harris doesn't need to win the national popular vote by that much in order to win the Electoral College. That is if some of these polling trends were to hold.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, often, I should say, we hear loud criticism of the Electoral College coming from Democrats who claim that it favors Republicans. Is that true? If we look at the last presidential election in 2020, 538 said that Republicans have the largest Electoral College advantage there in 70 years.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: I think conventional wisdom and a lot of experts would say that it still does structurally favor Republicans. But if, for example, some of those trend lines do end up holding up in the polling that we talked about, we might see that advantage change in this election.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So where are we in this debate now? It feels like it comes up every few years. Should we do away with it? Should we reform the system? And somehow it seems like the debate goes nowhere.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Yeah. I mean, Democrats, as you said, are the ones who often bring this up. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz suggested doing away with the Electoral College at a California fundraiser recently. He did end up walking that back. But something of note here is that the most kind of overt effort to make an Electoral College change this year came from Republicans when they tried to adjust how electoral votes were apportioned from Nebraska, where they do actually end up splitting those electoral votes.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But even outside of candidates and parties, you know, voters for quite some time have indicated that they would want a change from this system. More than 60 percent in a recent Pew survey found that they would want to move away from the Electoral College. There have also been hundreds of federal proposals to change or abolish it as well. In fact, both chambers of Congress have voted to change it in the past, most recently in 1969. But every single time their efforts have failed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And then there's a separate project called the Vote interstate compact that would basically bind states to committing their electors to whichever presidential candidate won the overall national popular vote. But that is a pretty far way off from being any sort of reality.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But if we do see another election where there is a split between the national popular vote result and the electoral college result, I do think that this will continue to be part of the debate.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yeah, I would imagine so, Gideon Resnick, thank you so much.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Yeah, of course. Thank you.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's turn now to a different kind of election story. You probably haven't heard of Fairshake, but this super PAC, mostly backed by cryptocurrency companies, is playing an outsized role in our politics. Their power has become huge, and their effectiveness at using those dollars to terrify and bully and cajole politicians has now been proven to be absolutely effective.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Charles Duhigg is a reporter at The New Yorker writing about this. Did you know the crypto industry alone is responsible for almost half of all corporate donations to PACs in the 2024 election cycle. And Duhigg tells us some of the PACs they're associated with are threatening to tank the campaigns and careers of anyone who doesn't get on board with fewer regulations for the industry.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One story he tells us is about Congresswoman Katie Porter. She was running to replace the late California Senator Dianne Feinstein earlier this year. And the super PAC, Fairshake, decided to use Porter as a test case for its strategy.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, Katie Porter didn't feel one way or the other about crypto. She was friends with Elizabeth Warren, who has been anti-crypto. But Porter hadn't voted either way on whether crypto was good or bad. But Fairshake knew that they needed a high-profile victory where they could say, we destroyed this candidate. We blew them out of the water.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it worked. They ran these ads that never mentioned crypto. It never mentioned Fairshake. It called Katie Porter a bully and a liar. It made misleading claims about her taking money from Big Pharma and Big Oil. And that was enough to help convince voters to vote for other candidates. And as a result, she came in third and was knocked out of the race completely.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Other lawmakers saw what happened to Porter and took note. All of a sudden, you started seeing politicians in other states voting for pro-crypto measures in the House and the Senate. You saw candidates making pro-crypto statements, kind of apropos of nothing when they weren't even asked about it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There was this clear effort to sort of signal to Fairshake and the crypto industry, don't come into my race. Don't try and attack me. I'll do whatever you want in order to keep you out of this.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Fairshake and related super PACs have spent more than $100 million on political races this year. $3.5 million was used to defeat left-wing representatives Jamal Bowman and Cori Bush. Of the primaries Fairshake has been involved in, its candidate won 85% of the time.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In response to criticisms against it, Fairshake told reporters at SFGate that it supports candidates who, quote, "embrace innovation and are committed to working across the aisle to get things done." And they seem to be getting what they want.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Earlier this year, the House of Representatives passed a bill in support of favorable regulations for crypto with bipartisan support, in spite of warnings from the SEC that it could put markets and investors at risk.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories being featured in the Apple News app. FEMA says it had to pull back some of its emergency personnel working on the ground in North Carolina in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene after workers in two different counties received violent threats.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Law enforcement arrested one man who they say acted alone, despite earlier reports that the National Guard received threats from armed militias. CNN reports FEMA workers have been getting regular threats since Helene hit.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The threats are fueled in large part by misinformation and rumors about FEMA's response, which former President Trump and his surrogates have amplified in recent weeks.
--:-- Shamita Basu: CNN's Gabe Cohen spoke about the impact of FEMA having to pause its door-to-door operations.
--:-- Gabe Cohen: There could be people on the ground in these communities who are desperately in need of help, one, who are now waiting for that help, but also what about the vulnerable people who are buying into these rumors, who are too scared now to ask for help, who may be entitled to thousands, tens of thousands of dollars in federal assistance, who may end up getting nothing because they believe the rumors.
--:-- Shamita Basu: FEMA says they resumed door-to-door outreach after about a day of assessing threats.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On to the Nobel Prizes, which were announced over the past week. None of the science prizes were awarded to women. In fact, since the Nobel Prizes were created in 1901, just 24 women have received awards in the sciences.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Experts who study gender bias in the sciences say the Nobel gender gap reflects larger barriers that women face in these fields.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This year, the prize for physiology or medicine went to two men, Gary Rufkin and Victor Ambrose, for their discovery of microRNA. That decision is getting a lot of scrutiny after people pointed out that one of the scientist's wives, Rosalind Lee, is his longtime collaborator and an author on one of the studies, and yet she wasn't recognized by the Nobel Committee.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One historian who studies collaborative couples in science told the publication Stat, The Nobels tend to favor people who were in a position of power, the heads of a lab, instead of people who had an idea or proved it experimentally.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And finally, have you noticed that it's taking a painfully long time for the next season of your favorite show to come out? New York Magazine reports that the process of making and distributing TV has become so complicated and so costly that it's now pretty normal for there to be 18 months or more between seasons.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There are a few reasons for this, but one that I found interesting, the time it takes to dub shows and create the subtitles needed to be streamed in 100 plus countries. That alone can add up to four months to the post-production process.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the News app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next. The New Yorker examines how many union members have started to defect from the Democratic Party toward Trump and how Harris is trying to win them back.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story. And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
