Tuesday Morning Politics: Primaries in Progress

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning everyone. Today is a very important primary day in several southern states, especially in Georgia, as you may have been hearing on the news, where there are several tests of how attached Republican voters are to Donald Trump's false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

Trump is backing gubernatorial candidate in Georgia David Perdue, who echoes Trump on the election lie. Mike Pence is backing incumbent Governor Brian Kemp, who refused to throw out the 2020 election results. Down-ballot Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who also certified the election is being challenged by Trump backed candidate Jody Hice.

Today's voting follows the gubernatorial primary win in Pennsylvania this month by Doug Mastriano, who was a January 6th participant and who Democrats fear would use his power as governor to cancel a future Democratic presidential election victory in that state whether there is evidence of fraud or not. Democrats see democracy itself at stake in these Republican primaries.

There was also the partial test in the Georgia primary of the restrictive new election law, which was based on the false election fraud claims and makes it harder to vote in a variety of ways, but it's only a partial test because the critics say the law is targeted at democratic areas which are not voting much in this election with the Republican primaries being the main contests.

There's at least one interesting test for Democrats today. It's a congressional primary runoff in Texas, involving the longtime incumbent Henry Cuellar, against the progressive challenger, Jessica Cisneros. Cuellar is the only Democrat in Congress who opposes abortion rights. Obviously, that's become much more salient as a voting issue since the Alito draft was released.

We get a take on today's elections and the primary season so far, from Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen. He is also a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center think tank. He is the author or co-author of two books, The Working-Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism, and The Four Faces of the Republican Party: And The Fight for the 2016 Presidential Nomination. Thanks for coming on, Henry. Welcome back to WNYC.

Henry Olsen: Thanks for having me back.

Brian Lehrer: Well, I see you have a few columns relevant to the primaries, one from two weeks ago is called, A Trump endorsement is powerful, but clearly not insurmountable. That was before Pennsylvania or Georgia, but you already had some results to work with. Your takeaway, I'm just going to read your last line of that article for everybody was, "Republican voters clearly want a conservative who fights if an establishment type can fulfill that desire, those voters are perfectly happy to leave Trump in the dust." Can you give us an example of someone who fit that bill in a primary so far?

Henry Olsen: Yes. Well, I think that we're seeing that in Georgia right now is that every poll says that Brian Kemp is going to win in a landslide over David Perdue. I think we saw it in Nebraska where Jim Pillen the non-Trump-endorsed conservative basically coopted many of these things. He recently wrote an op-ed in The Washington Examiner talking about how he's going to be a Christian conservative who fights for those values, but he was not the Trump endorsee, and he won moderately comfortably over the Trump-endorsed candidate.

I think we're going to see that in a number of races as well, which is that Katie Britt has been running on that sort of theme in the Alabama Senate primary. Trump rescinded his endorsement of Mo Brooks, in part because Katie Britt and another person Mike Durant ran on those things that Trump endorsements and was leaving Mo Brooks in the dust. There's a lot of examples of that, and I think we'll be seeing more as the primaries continue.

Brian Lehrer: You referred in that column to the victory of Trump-endorsed J. D. Vance in the US Senate primary in Ohio, a very high profile race with that formerly anti-Trump author, but you keyed on the fact that Vance won largely thanks to Trump endorsement yes, but two-thirds of the primary voters chose other candidates in that multi-candidate field. What's your takeaway on the J. D. Vance race and Trump's influence?

Henry Olsen: Yes. I think Trump took a strong candidate and made him a winner. That's what I think you saw in Pennsylvania where right now it is too close to call with Mehmet Oz and David McCormick, but there Oz was running a strong, competitive race without Trump's endorsement. Trump's endorsement gave him a few extra points that may be the difference between victory and defeat.

Again, 2/3 or 70% of Pennsylvania Republicans voted for somebody other than Trump's endorsed candidate. That seems to be a pattern is that Trump's campaign endorsements seem to be able to get a quarter to a third of the Republican vote, and that seems to be about the limit if they got a serious challenger. That's what happened in Nebraska where his candidate got about 30% of voters. 70% of the people voted for somebody else. That seems to suggest a core support of diehard Trumpers that is well short of a majority.

Brian Lehrer: What's your take on the J. D. Vance story, generally. By the way, he was seen as you know, originally in 2016, as an anti-Trump explainer of the culture he came from where Trump was popular. Do you ever take on whether Vance got radicalized by something or was just always an opportunist following where the winds were blowing, and they later shifted more pro-Trump, or what?

Henry Olsen: I'm a friend of J. D. so I have a little bit of a perspective here. I think that J. D. saw more resistance within the establishment to the reform that he advocated. He saw that Trump was somebody who was willing to take on that resistance in a number of ways. I don't think that J. D. has contorted himself into a pretzel.

I think what he has as many people in the Republican Party have done is see that there's an establishment that doesn't really want to change and that you need to be more vocal about doing it and that Trump is the most vocal advocate of those sorts of changes. I think he's changed his mind about Trump as a result of that.

Brian Lehrer: What kinds of changes from Vance's perspective?

Henry Olsen: Vance has always been going back to his book, Hillbilly Elegy, and some of the work that he did after that, as somebody who believes that globalized trade and a focus on consumerism is hurting tens of millions of working-class Americans, depriving them of the high paying jobs they need while sending their communities like his hometown of Middletown into a cycle of despair and that that means that you need to have some active government policy to deal with that.

That question is really resist or that answer. That diagnosis is really resisted within the Republican Party was one of that Trump shares. I think you've seen J. D. become more and more vocal on that question, as he has become more and more of a public figure. I expect as a senator, and I do expect him to win rather handily in this Republican year, I think you'll see him make that a leitmotif of his first couple of years in the senate.

Brian Lehrer: A lot of people predicting he will win handily as Ohio and Florida, which used to be the ultimate swing states seem to be pretty much not entirely, of course, but pretty much red states these days. Who knows Tim Ryan, the Democratic nominee for Senate against J. D. Vance is a working-class Democrat, he may be competitive, so not to call that race one way or another, but it's interesting how Ohio and Florida have become more red states than purple states, compared to the past.

Georgia and a few other places, Arizona, which were red states have now become purple states themselves. The map, the population, the politics, continue to shift in the United States, as they always have and often have over time. Just one more thing on what you said about Vance. Those economic conditions that you described, they almost sound like they would be more a Democratic Party populist positions against consumerism, against global corporatism, and wanting the government to intervene to protect regular workers.

I think a lot of Democrats would say, well, Trump may have mouthed some things like that in his campaign in 2016, but if you look at how he governed, there was another big tax break for the rich. He really didn't do anything to clamp down on corporations sending jobs overseas. All he tried to clamp down on was immigrants with a lot of nativist overtones, and never really took on that anti-globalist project that you say Vance cares about. What do you think he would say about that?

Henry Olsen: I don't want to put words in J. D's mouth. What I do think is that Trump had an inconsistent record. He walked the walk in many ways, but he didn't walk the walk in all the ways. His Trade Representative Bob Lighthizer is somebody who very much shared that viewpoint and I think he negotiated a revised

NAFTA, which we now call the USMCA, that is helping to steer more manufacturing jobs to the United States.

We saw a increase in manufacturing jobs in the United States reversing a multi-decade decline under Trump. You have the tariffs on China, which tariffs take a while for but the idea was to reduce the incentive to send jobs overseas to China and perhaps increase the incentive to keep them home. I think J. D. will take that on more than Trump did. I think J. D. has said that he's willing to do things like tax corporations that move jobs overseas. That's not where Trump wanted to go. I think J. D. will be more consistent in walking that walk than Trump was.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. On your basic premise, again, from that column that a Republican, a conventional or establishment Republican who fights can fulfill Republican voter's desires, and if they do that those voters are perfectly happy to leave Trump in the dust. From a democratic voter standpoint, say most of the voters in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, where the show originates from to most of them, the distinction between a Republican who fights and a Trump supporter might seem inconsequential. Trump is basically a Republican who fights and fights and fights. What distinctions are you really making there?

Henry Olsen: I think Trump has a degree of personal animus that is hard to-- personal vitriol that is hard to duplicate. Somebody like a Marjorie Taylor Greene might be able to do that, but most Republicans like Ron DeSantis, do not. They're confrontational without being in your face daily abrasive in the way that Trump is. One important distinction is, most Republican voters are upset about what happened in 2020. I happen to be somebody who does not believe the election was stolen.

I've written that many times, I've called out Republicans for not standing up to Trump but the center of Republican opinion is, "They took the election but we can still fight and win." That means they buy into part of what's called The Big Lie, but they don't buy into the election denialism, like say a Doug Mastriano with Donald Trump do.

That's why somebody like a Brian Kemp is destroying David Perdue because the majority of the of that center of Republican opinion doesn't care about the election, the way that Donald Trump does. That's an important distinction for defenders of democracy and for Democrats is that a Republican who fights who's not a Trump acolyte is not somebody who's going to overturn the results of an election because they have unfounded fears of fraud. That's an important distinction, even if you don't like them on every other piece of [unintelligible 00:12:58].

Brian Lehrer: It's interesting, too, when you look at Trump's relentless focus on the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. It moves away from what's supposed to be a strength of the Republican Party in this election cycle, which is it's focused on kitchen-table issues. That's not a kitchen table issue. Of course, Democrats will say they are also strong on kitchen table issues, that's for the candidates of both parties to hash out.

If we see from the polls that Americans are concerned about inflation, Americans are concerned about public safety, Americans are concerned about democracy but the kitchen table issue portions of those things, the economic portions of those things, in particular, focusing on the 2020 election doesn't do anything for that. It looks self-interested. I wonder if that's part of your analysis as to why Trump candidates are beatable in some of these races?

Henry Olsen: I think that a lot of Republicans-- again, the center of Republican opinion, is fear of the Democrats fear of what they consider to be a very strong left-wing agenda. I know Democrats will differ, I'm just trying to explain where the Republican voter's viewpoint is. They don't want to relitigate 2020. They want to move on. Some of that is kitchen table issues. Some of that is immigration. Republican polls continually show that control of the border is one of the top three issues among Republican primary voters. They want to talk about public safety, that's what they're concerned about.

When you have somebody who basically has no argument other than something bad happened to us 18 months ago that everyone knows can't be done. That just like leaves them cold. They want somebody who will fight on the issues that they care about now. Trump's can continuing insistence on that is something that is causing more Republican voters to say, "Thanks for the memories, Donald but we're going to look in another direction."

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you're just joining us, my guest is Washington Post columnist, Henry Olsen on this primary day in Georgia and a few other Southern states. Listeners, who has a question, or wants to help report the story of the Georgia primary today, or what we've learned so far in this primary season with Henry Olsen 212-433 WNYC. Anyone listening in Georgia right now, I know we get calls from Georgia from time to time, want to help report this story, or anyone else anywhere else. 212-433 WNYC, 212-433-9692, or Tweet @BrianLehrer.

Turning more squarely to Georgia now that we've done some of your general perspectives on the primary season so far. There were actually competing campaign events in the last few days as you know, one featuring Trump for his gubernatorial candidate David Perdue and one featuring Mike Pence, backing the incumbent Brian Kemp. What do you think Trump and Pence respectively see as being at stake between those two Republican candidates, either for Georgia or for themselves?

Henry Olsen: For Georgia, I think Trump sees it as a vindication of his election fraud myth. The fact is, he sees that he's losing the argument that David Perdue was closer to Brian Kemp in the polls when he got into the race than he is today. Basically, the more the argument has been made, the more David Perdue has fallen behind. I think Trump knows that he invested a lot. He's invested over 2.5 million dollars in Perdue's campaign. He's invested his prestige. Not only is he going to lose, he's gone backwards.

That I think is going to make him very angry personally. For Pence, I think he both sees it as upholding. Kemp and Pence were probably two of the most high-profile people held out against Trump's pressure when it counted in January 2021. I think he sees it as a vindication of his courage in standing up for democracy.

He also sees it as a way to begin to fight and chip away at Trump's [unintelligible 00:17:27], which is how Pence can make himself president is to try to occupy that middle ground. "I am a conservative fighter, but I'm not Donald Trump." Both his personal and his Democratic [unintelligible 00:17:41] loyalties and interests are advanced by aggressively touting and [unintelligible 00:17:47].

Brian Lehrer: I'm curious how you see Brad Raffensperger in this election today. Again, to remind our listeners, he was the Georgia Secretary of State who gave an honest count of the 2020 election and did not bend to Trump's will when Trump made that infamous phone call asking him to find 11,000 votes or whatever the number was. Now he's up for reelection against the Trump-backed candidate for Georgia Secretary of State. Do you think that result in today's primary will give a national indication of anything worth knowing?

Henry Olsen: I do, the polls-- that is much less polled. The polls we have suggest it'll be roughly a dead heat. There was a poll that came out yesterday that had Hice ahead of Raffensperger 39 to 38. Under Georgia's law, that means that we would have a primary runoff between those two candidates. That again, I would love to see Raffensperger win and the majority, I wish that were going to happen, there's no indication of that happening but doesn't mean that he couldn't win in a runoff race.

I think again, the fact that a Trump endorsed candidate in a race specifically litigating on that can't get close to a majority in a Republican primary is a telling indication of the limitations of how deeply Trump's support is among Republicans and also how deep we Republicans care about the 2020 election.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to get a perspective from a Georgia Democrat here, George in Georgia in LaGrange to be specific. George, you're on WNYC, hello from New York.

George: How are y'all doing?

Brian Lehrer: Doing all right. How about you?

George: Oh, not bad, myself. It's very frustrating because I live in a very rural part of the state. LaGrange, I believe is about an hour and a half south of Atlanta. I'll tell you what, a lot a lot of Trump signs out here still. Trump 2020 signs, it's two years later, and we still got Trump 2020 signs. I am keeping my eye on this primary because as bad as both of the candidates, I don't like either of them. I'm a Democrat myself. I plan on voting for

Stacey Abrams in the general. As far as that goes, I hope the guy who certified the election wins. He could have said, "No, screw it." He actually did the right thing, and I appreciate that.

Brian Lehrer: George, I'm curious if you've considered voting in this primary. My understanding of Georgia election law, correct me if I'm wrong, is that it's unlike a lot of other states where you have to be registered in the party to vote in their primary. You could walk in as the Stacey Abrams supporter who thinks Kemp is the lesser of two evils and vote for him today if I have my facts. Have you considered doing that?

George: You know what? I have not considered doing that, but that's a good idea. To be quite honest, for most of the primaries, I sit out. I work about 65 hours a week. I don't have much time to go to the polls, and I really liked what they did in the pandemic with the vote-by-mail stuff, but as you know, a lot of laws have been pulling those things back. I don't have time to go to the polls. Maybe the general but not the primary.

Brian Lehrer: George, we appreciate your call. Call us again. Thanks a lot. Interesting call, Henry. Do I have that right about Georgia election law Democrats can cross over if they want to try put their thumb on the scales today?

Henry Olsen: No, that's absolutely right. Georgia does not register its voters by party registration. Anybody can walk into the voting booth, and choose to vote in the primary that they want to choose. That could be one thing that will prove the polls wrong is that it's difficult to poll the primary because you have to guess who's going to participate.

If the polls are underestimating non-traditional Republican voters who are going to vote in order to support campaign Raffensperger, they could be underestimating their support. We won't know until election day. One thing I'll say about the voter, Georgia has extensive in-person voting as well as vote by mail, which includes at least Saturdays.

Now, if you work 65 hours a week, maybe you work on Saturday too, but you can vote at least 10 days in person. Many counties extend that to include at least one or two Sundays. There's massive opportunity to vote on election day, before election day, and by mail. Thanks for the new law. That is one reason why early voting in Georgia is triple what it was four years ago. Almost 900,000 people have already voted in Georgia which is only [crosstalk] number.

Brian Lehrer: I know some Democrats are pushing back on how much of an indication this really is of whether the new Georgia election law is a voter suppression law or not with Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen. By the way, Henry here's a Tweet we just got from a listener who says, "In Georgia, visiting family, Raffensperger, and other non-Trump Republicans are making the primary about Stacey Abrams and not mentioning Trump." You think that's accurate?

Henry Olsen: I haven't watched all of the campaign ads down there, but certainly, opposition to Stacey Abrams is something that unites the Trump and the Republican coalition. It wouldn't surprise me certainly. A lot of Trump ads have tried to make her the issue as well, or I should say Purdue ads. They say that as Trump did that Brian Kemp can't beat Stacey Abrams. Both sides are trying to use a high-profile progressive who as any progressive would is not liked by Republican-leaning voters. Both sides are using that as a motivating factor.

Brian Lehrer: I guess that would be conventional politics in a way. Certainly, Democrats winning in a democratic primary would focus on who's better equipped to beat whoever the villain Republican is in their point of view and whatever race. Let's talk about this new law in Georgia that Democrats see as aimed at voter suppression. Let me get your take on how that's being tested in Georgia right now. Give me a minute to go through some details here for our listeners, especially those not in Georgia who may only have heard a phrase or two about that voting law.

Your Paper, The Washington Post, describes its main points this way, "The law imposes new identification requirements for those casting ballots by mail, curtails the use of drop boxes for absentee ballots, makes it a crime for third-party groups to hand out food and water to voters standing in line, blocks the use of mobile voting vans, like the one in Fulton County, that's where Atlanta is, used in 2020 and prevents local governments from directly accepting grants from the private sector for election administration."

Then the Post describes how the original draft tried even harder to make voting more difficult until there was so much pressure from political and corporate leaders. It says, "Republicans agreed to drop, for instance, language barring most Georgians from voting by mail, and curtailing early voting on weekends." Henry, all of that just using the Washington Post's language there is an indication of what Republicans are trying to do all over the country, use the false claim of widespread election fraud to make voting much harder in the future?

Henry Olsen: I don't think those things make voting harder. That's the thing is that requiring ID for mail-in ballots is something that the very few countries that have mail-in ballots will often require. Australia just had an election and anyone can vote by mail in Australia but you have to-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: They didn't have it in Georgia before the big lie.

Henry Olsen: It doesn't matter whether they had it or not beforehand. The point of is is this something that's going to restrict the person's ability to vote? Anyone in Georgia can vote at least-- I haven't looked at the Georgia law or the law, but they have at least two weeks of early voting during the week. I believe everyone is open on Saturday, and counties can choose to open it on one or both Sundays. You have at least 12 days of in-person early voting, which is the way most people want to vote outside of a pandemic [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Even that on the one you just mentioned, and I'm going to go into a few others as well, but on the one you just mentioned the weekend voting, there didn't used to be a restriction on how many weekend days there could be early voting. There's a limitation on that which seems aimed at the, "Souls to the polls, Black churches voting on Sundays."

I know they're trying to move those to Saturday at a lot of churches and have people go and vote instead of right after church going on Sunday, mobilizing, and going on Saturday, but that takes effort. Why else would they take away some weekend early voting if it isn't to restrict the vote?

Henry Olsen: I think there are many reasons you can argue why you wouldn't want to have seven-day-a-week voting. I live in Virginia, and I don't believe we have seven days a week voting here, and the Democrats are the ones who passed the early voting law here. The fact is if you go and look at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution site, very few people took advantage of Sunday voting. I think it was 11,000 people voted on the most popular Sunday. Most people vote the other days and they have plenty of opportunities too.

Under the law, a county can allow for that voting. I have not followed to see whether the large counties with heavy Black populations wouldn't have to call them Fulton or Cobb have made provisions for that, but the law allows them to. The point is that we have massive numbers of people who are turning out to vote early. There's no restriction.

Anybody who is validly registered to vote, being able to cast a ballot in person 12 to 14 days, early before the election, in-person on election day, or by mail provided that they meet the voter ID, which again, I haven't looked at the data this morning. About 200,000 people have had their vote by mail excepted.

We had an article in the Washington Post over the weekend, or maybe it was yesterday talking about this where one Black voter was quoted as saying, "I was told that I was going to be hassled in the night." The voter said, "I found it was easy." I think a lot of this has been fear-mongering that is not being proven out by what's actually happening on the ground.

Brian Lehrer: I'll push you one more step on this and then we'll move on. My understanding of the law as it passed is that it will make it harder in urban areas where the long lines tend to be and the drop boxes and mobile voting vans and simplicity of voting by mail as well were important to ballot access, not so much in the more Republican outlying areas where voting is just easier to begin with. This big Republican turnout in the early voting period just now wasn't that much of a test of the bill. Do you disagree with that?

Henry Olsen: I do disagree with that. First of all, elections in Georgia is administered by counties. One of the problems is that Fulton County a democratic control jurisdiction in Georgia has few precincts. One of the provisions of the bill says that if you have more than 2,000 people in a precinct and you have a certain amount of waiting line, the county has to provide more voting

location. That's a good thing. That should mean that the county gets pushed to having more voting locations.

Again, I'd have to look at the county by county turnout to see how it stands with respect to Fulton County. It's not like drop boxes are eliminated, it's not like early person voting has been eliminated and I believe they expanded it by a couple of days on balance. If somebody wants to vote they can vote. They can vote by mail, they can vote in person, they can vote in person on election day, and the idea that somehow this is going to throw these insuperable barriers in front of people, I think it was fear-mongering and not pointed out by the evidence today.

Brian Lehrer: All right, well, I guess it still looks to me like they went as far as they could politically after the 2020 lie to make it harder to vote in areas as much as they could, but we will see the real test will be in November. We will find out and look at the real evidence at that time. Here's another caller coming from Georgia. Robert in Atlanta you're on WNYC. Hi, Robert.

Robert: Hey, thanks for taking my call. My family has been in Atlanta since before the Civil War. My great-great-great-grandfather was Joseph D. Brown. He's been a hero in one side of the family, he signed the articles of secession from the US. Ever since Greene became a congresswoman, I've had a fantasy of running myself. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Just to be clear, you're talking about Marjorie Taylor Greene, right?

Robert: Yes. I've had a fantasy of running for her spot. I don't know how real it is. I'm from a blue blood family here in Georgia, they probably see me as an enemy from the city. I would like to go out and argue the following and that is we need to stop arguing positions and start arguing interests. All we do now is put labels on people and take a position and say the other position is evil. Well, we don't need to concentrate to go on left or right, we need to go deeper.

Also, I think relating to your previous discussion with the journalist, I feel like we should be like Australia and make voting like jury duty. That it's a right and also a responsibility. You have to do it if you want to be a citizen in the US. Make it like a commitment as jury duty is if you don't show up for jury duty you have a little fine. It wouldn't be too big of a fine with the voting, but you've just enough to prompt people to do it.

Also, I'd like to go out and say that my God we cannot ignore the past, we're doing the same thing, if we do that they're doing now with Stalin and the new Soviet Union. We've got to study our past and understand it so we don't make the same mistakes again and keep making them. I feel like we're going back to 1876 with that election. I think that's the day where we're trying to ignore our past and then go back to hating each other.

Brian Lehrer: Mending an election that undid reconstruction, is that why you're citing 1876?

Robert: That's correct. Now I don't want federal troops coming around of course, but the federal troops left and I can see why people would not want troops in their area but that's what made reconstruction end and that's what made my ancestors go ballistic and hung people from trees right here in Georgia. I'm an actor and a computer programmer, I did a podcast called Buried Truth [unintelligible 00:33:39] about a guy named Isaiah Nixon back in the '40s who tried to vote and the people killed him and this in my state for voting.

It was the first time he could vote in a primary because we only had white primaries up until about '45 or '46 because the white folks here knew that if only white people could vote in the primaries, there wouldn't be anybody to vote for Black people in the November election. As recent as the '40s, we had governors like Eugene Talmadge using the N-word to say we're going to keep the N-words out of these polls.

It feels like I agree with the man from Washington Post. Apparently this year we have broken records for early voting. We have never voted as much as we have this year for early voting. These guys are trying to please their constituents I think by putting all these silly rules out, but it's motivating people to go out and vote which is a good thing I think.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Robert, let me follow up with one question. If people are being so motivated to go out and vote and there are these really large turnout, why do you need compulsory voting like in Australia in your opinion?

Robert: I feel if it's a civic duty we can stop fighting about things that we continue to fight about, and stop putting in these ridiculous rules. Now I don't think we should put terrible fines on people for not voting, but Jury duty is a sacred duty in this country. I think very few countries have that around here where we have the power to go in and judge our peers. It doesn't work a lot of the times but it's a sacred duty. I think we should look at voting as like that.

Brian Lehrer: Robert-

Robert: Make it compulsory if you don't do it, then send a little fine out. Make it-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Thank you so much for your call, I'm going to leave it there, I really appreciate your call from Atlanta today. Henry Olsen as we run out of time, have you as a civics-minded Washington Post columnist ever thought about compulsory voting and the worthiness of that?

Henry Olsen: Yes. Actually, I spoke with my colleague E. J. Dionne who has written a book about that called 100% Democracy. I surprised him yesterday by saying I could go for that which is in Australia you are required to vote. You have a minor fine if you don't, and you can spoil your ballot and a lot of people do. They go out, they vote but they don't actually vote for anybody. They get 85 to 90% turnout and we get 65% turnout.

Compulsory voting has a 20$ or $30 fine for not voting which is what you've done in Australia and which allows you to cast blank ballots or none of the above is E. J's suggestion. I think that would increase turnout and as the caller says lower the temperature because these are the people who are being turned off by loud partisan divisions. If they are actually coming out to vote, people have to talk to them to earn their vote and that means you have to talk to them in the ways that they would like to be responded to. That is not the way we're talking to each other now.

Brian Lehrer: Washington Post columnist, Henry Olsen, also senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center think tank, and author or co-author of the books The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism, and The Four Faces of the Republican Party: The Fight for the 2016 Presidential Nomination. Thanks, Henry, always appreciate it.

Henry; Thank you for having me back, Brian.

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