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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, we're going to talk about the most important election of our lifetime. It seems like every election is "the most important election of our lifetime." Historian Jeffrey Engel joins us to assess whether this is really the one.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Jeffrey, thanks for being on the show.
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, let's start with the basics. Has anyone ever said that this is the most important election of our lifetime before?
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: I think the better question is, has anyone not said it? This is the most important election of our lifetime. There are just eight days left in what is the most important election of our lifetime. This will be maybe the most important election that our country's ever had.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [laughs] That's a good point. I mean, it's hard to find someone who hasn't said that at some point.
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: Yeah, I think it's just become a sort of... a cliché, really.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [laughs] Okay, so let's try to figure out if this really is the most important election of our lifetime. You're a historian, so you've studied a lot of elections. Can you take us through some historic occasions where it did actually feel like the stakes were really high?
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: Yeah, I actually think 1932 is a really helpful one for us today, not least of which because the term fascist was thrown around quite a bit during that time as well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [chuckles] Okay, let's set the background for everybody. The Great Depression has already been going on for three and a half years. Farmers find no market for their produce, and the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: This is the worst economic crisis in American history that we've ever had, much worse than anything anybody in our lifetimes basically has seen.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And consequently, it was a very impactful election because Franklin Roosevelt, the challenger, the Democrat, he basically made the following campaign slogan, which is vote for me. I'm not him. And the him was Herbert Hoover.
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: The past three years have been a time of unparalleled economic calamity. They have been years of greater suffering and hardship than any which have come to the American people since the aftermath of the Civil War.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Franklin Roosevelt, who actually campaigned on a remarkably ambiguous platform, basically said two things. I will do more and I'm not him.
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: Ultimately, what really interesting about this election is that Franklin Roosevelt when he gets inaugurated in 1933 we all remember his inauguration address where he said "That the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [laughs] That's a great line, but not the most important line.
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: The most important line is when Roosevelt said, "I intend to work with Congress. Keep in mind, by the way, it's a Democratic Congress. I intend to work with Congress to solve the present crisis. But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two causes. If Congress doesn't do what I want, I'm going to assume... Fraud executive power."
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [laughs] That sounds pretty fascist to me, especially this is the era of Mussolini and literally the era of Mussolini and Hitler.
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: I mean, you know, the story is, and this is one of those stories that's mostly probably true, at least it's true-ish in the sense that it gives a flavor of what happened, is that Franklin Roosevelt was sitting in his office that night, the Oval Office, first time behind the Resolute desk, and his chief aide, Harry Hopkins, comes in and says, "You know, Mr. President, if you solve this, you're going to go down as the greatest president in American history."
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [laughs] That's a great story.
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: To which Roosevelt replied, "If we don't solve it, I'll go down as the last."
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [laughs] That wasn't hyperbole. That was the depth of which people were really questioning whether, and this will sound familiar to us today, whether the world had gotten too fast for democracy, whether the new communications of radio and aircraft had sped things up so much that democracy with its slow, deliberate conversation was just not up to the task of the 20th century.
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: You can hear that argument today, obviously, given the new changes in technology that we have.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let's take it back to a time that was a bit slower. Let's go back to the 19th century for a minute here, because talking about the Great Depression, an inflection point for this republic, it reminds me that we once went to war with ourselves.
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: Was there an election around the Civil War or even Reconstruction that felt pivotal, existential, that felt like the most important we had ever seen?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No doubt. And in fact, I'm glad you used the word existential because I think that's exactly the right word, that there are certain moments in American history that involve elections, but I think broader crises where we say, "Boy, if we don't get this right, then we're not going to have a republic anymore."
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: In fact, I think actually there were three in our past specifically, the Great Depression, the Civil War, which I'll talk about in a moment, and the beginning. You know, if you don't get the country started off right, it's not going to work out well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The 1860 election also has some resonance for us today, though I'm always hesitant to say there's resonance for the Civil War.
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: But this is something I think people should pay attention to. Before the election, Democrats primarily in the South, Confederate supporters, people from southern states, shall we say, pro-slavery supporters, made it very clear, very plain, that if they lost the election, they were going to secede.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think the way most Americans think about the logic and the sequence of this is that the election occurred, Lincoln won, and then the state said, "We're going to secede because we don't like the outcome."
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: Oh, no, that's exactly opposite. They had said very plainly, "We only like democracy if our side wins. If the other side wins, we're out of here."
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So basically you had a referendum on whether the country was going to stay together or not.
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: And, you know, to be fair, the reason that the Southern Democrats primarily, but Southerners felt that they needed to leave the union was because they could read an actuarial table as well as anyone else and realize that if Abraham Lincoln or any Republican or any Northerner is able to capture the White House without getting a single electoral college vote from the South, they're never going to get any again, any presidents again.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it was all laid out before the election.
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: And you said, going back even further, to George Washington, we have an election that fairly qualifies as the most important of a lifetime. Not our lifetime, but a lifetime.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I mean, people certainly in the election of 1800, that was the sentiment. That's, of course, the election when Thomas Jefferson, who had been vice president, defeated the incumbent president, John Adams.
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: That was a real election that was, I think, really critical at the time, but more importantly, critical in hindsight, because this is actually the election that gives us the precedent and the practice for a peaceful transfer of power.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because when George Washington handed things off to John Adams, they were of the same party. So it wasn't that radical a move for the president and the vice president to just sort of hand things off.
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: When Thomas Jefferson took over, this was a hostile takeover. This was new people coming into town and taking the jobs of old people who were kicked out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And one of the things that's been noticed in the last four years, as President Trump broke with the tradition of attending the inauguration of his successor, people pointed out that John Adams did not attend the inauguration of his successor.
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: And in our modern sense, I think some people have chosen to criticize Adams for that. I actually think that that's a moment where we should praise Adams because he's setting a precedent. He is making the point by leaving town before the inauguration that the town is yours. Like the government is yours. My job is done. Literally. Not even ceremonial for me to be here anymore.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A lot of people feel anxious today. A lot of people have felt anxious for weeks, for months around this election. Does your historical vantage, does remembering every day that this country went to war with itself, that this country's leaders used to solve their problems by literally shooting each other, does that bring some cold comfort on a day like today?
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: You know, it gives me confidence, but it doesn't give me a guarantee.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I'll tell you why. We in the United States, especially in the 20th century, the way that we've decided to design our educational system, which, parenthetically, doesn't pay nearly enough attention to history, what people usually do learn about history is that things get better and that we have a crisis we have a civil war That was terrible obviously But look we got better and we resolved some of the issues We got rid of slavery. And then, you know, we had a civil rights movement. It was difficult. It was terrifying for people. But look, it got better.
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: The truth of the matter is that progressive idea that things always get better is true up until the moment that it's not. Which is to say, I take great comfort in the fact as an American that we have bounded together and the better angels of our nature, as Abraham Lincoln would say, spoke to enough people that they were able to pull the country through the crisis.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: However, that only happens because people at the time put their nose to the grindstone and worked really hard through a terrifying time.
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: So I take comfort in the fact that we have a tradition of doing things that make the country better in getting through our crises.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I sleep a little bit better at night, right up until the moment where I wake up in the middle of the night screaming, remembering that, wait, that means I have a responsibility to work as hard as people in previous generations.
--:-- Jeffrey Engel: History professor Jeffrey Engel, Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When we return on today, explain how this year's most important election of our lifetime stacks up against all the rest.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome back to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Julia Azari: I'm Julia Azari, a professor of political science at Marquette University.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We asked her to help us assess this argument that today's election really is the most important election ever.
--:-- Julia Azari: I think that this is a lot clearer on the Harris side, the kind of argument about democracy being on the ballot and the ways that Harris has tried to frame the election around democracy considerations around Project 2025, around January 6th, and the speech that she gave last week in Washington, D.C. to try to allude to that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We know who Donald Trump is. He is the person who stood at this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol.
--:-- Julia Azari: So I think for the Harris campaign, it's very much about democracy. For the Trump campaign, I think it's maybe a little bit blurrier, but his message is always about national identity being at stake.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, he had this phrase he said on January 6th, 2021, about how... And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.
--:-- Julia Azari: It's very similar to some language that Andrew Johnson used in the years after the Civil War.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it's a sort of recurring thing in American politics to talk about the stakes of what's going on and to kind of have a racial element to that.
--:-- Julia Azari: You got to get these people back where they came from. You have no choice. You're going to lose your culture. You're going to lose your country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I do think that that's some of what gets lost in the way that the Democrats frame the stakes of this election is to talk about Trump as being unprecedented.
--:-- Julia Azari: And there are some elements of that that are unprecedented, but there are also some elements that have a lot of deep continuity in history.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do we know if it's working for either Harris or Trump, the message that it's do or die, this one is the big one?
--:-- Julia Azari: In a very general sense, voter turnout does go up when people care about the difference between the two candidates and perceive that difference to be meaningful.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In a very general sense, voter turnout does go up when people care about the difference between the two candidates and perceive that difference to be meaningful.
--:-- Julia Azari: There this sort of misconception that elections that are kind of hard fought turn off voters And actually what we seen is compared with like the late 90s and early 2000s I remember when I was kind of aging into the electorate voter turnout was quite low
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I actually think that's a really interesting point. I mean, it's not just that people are more engaged, but also that the stakes are higher.
--:-- Julia Azari: Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that's what's happening here. People are more engaged, and the stakes are higher.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, Julia, you're saying that Harris is selling this argument that this is the most important election in our lifetimes based on the idea that Donald Trump wants to fundamentally alter our democracy.
--:-- Julia Azari: He was president once. And yes, that whole era ended in an insurrection. but did he fundamentally alter our democracy that go-round?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I actually think so. The most obvious one is that the peaceful transfer of power is this sort of really critical element of democracy that simply did not happen.
--:-- Julia Azari: There's just no way to spin it in 2021, not just January 6th, but all of the legal stuff that went into it, all the legal jockeying that went into it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The election was totally rigged. It's a disgrace to our country. It's like a third world country.
--:-- Julia Azari: I think that Trump decisively lost the popular vote and governed very much as if he had decisively won the popular vote.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think there was a lot of evidence of using the office for private purposes. Records shared by the House Oversight Committee showed Trump hotels and properties charge Secret Service agents five times the normal government rate for accommodations while protecting him.
--:-- Julia Azari: Expenses covered by the taxpayer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I think that there was some real change to American democracy in, I think, really key and important ways.
--:-- Julia Azari: We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by national guard or if really necessary by the military because they can't let that happen.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The argument from the right as to why this is the most important election in the history of the republic is that if you don't vote for Donald Trump, Kamala Harris is going to fundamentally change this country.
--:-- Julia Azari: Is there any credence to that argument?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's very unlikely that Kamala Harris as president would fundamentally change this country.
--:-- Julia Azari: I would mostly look to Obama and Biden for guidance as to what kind of politician Harris will be.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think that if Harris wins, we will think of this as a historic election. We'll think of this as the first woman president.
--:-- Julia Azari: And then very similar to Obama as the first African-American president, we'll then see governance that doesn't really match the level of revolutionariness of the election result.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We'll see governance that very much reflects a complicated Democratic coalition.
--:-- Julia Azari: We'll see governance that I think will reflect a changed Democratic Party that has shifted to the left and consolidated on abortion, has shifted to the left on economics in some ways, but also a party where there are a lot of Democrats in swing districts who are very, very cautious in their rhetoric about the police.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think we'll see somebody like Liz Cheney or another Republican in her cabinet playing a role, probably not setting key policy, but playing a role.
--:-- Julia Azari: And I think it would be to the benefit of the American public to have a member of my cabinet who was a Republican.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I cannot imagine that it will fundamentally change American democracy as far as the policies that she would pursue and the coalition that she would lead.
--:-- Julia Azari: You're kind of saying that Harris pretty much promises more of the same, which might be the fundamental reason that people vote against her.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It might. It might.
--:-- Julia Azari: You know, we spoke to the history professor early in the show. We're speaking to the political scientists now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Both of you seem exhausted by this this pitch from candidates that the most important election ever.
--:-- Julia Azari: Yeah. Yeah. Give me a break.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When it actually comes, will we know it? Will there be a most important election ever? And how will we know it's for real?
--:-- Julia Azari: I have to be honest, I think I might just be exhausted in general.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Join the club.
--:-- Julia Azari: Maybe this is just because elections are real important. You know, I don't want to be cynical about that claim.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I actually want to I want to sort of like give credence to the idea that every election maybe is the most important.
--:-- Julia Azari: Yeah, I think that's a good point.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Julia Azari leads the Civic Dialogues program at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
--:-- Julia Azari: She's also written for Vox.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We here at Vox will try to answer all your questions about the results on tomorrow's edition of Today Explained.
--:-- Julia Azari: But if we don't get to any, there's always the new Explain It To Me podcast.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Give them a call with any election-related questions you may have at 1-800-618-8545.
--:-- Julia Azari: Again, 1-800-618-8545.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Or you can email a voice memo to askvox at vox.com.
--:-- Julia Azari: Vox's Abishai Artsy produced our show today.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He was edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and mixed by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christensdottir.
--:-- Julia Azari: Have a great vote!
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