The Election Dividing Husbands and Wives Across America
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So, Jane, you're in New York City. I'm in the Big Apple. Home of corruption. I am. The Big Apple looks like a rotten apple right now. Has anybody tried to bribe you to give any money to a campaigner? No.

Not yet, but you know what to me is always the surprise of these bribe stories, politician bribe stories, is that the stakes are so cheesy a lot of the time. I mean, it's not that I wouldn't like to go to Turkey and fly first class. I mean, that sounds good, but really, would you ruin your entire reputation and throw away your…

public job for a cheap ticket. Now, I will say, you know, remember, a man is innocent until proven guilty. But one thing that's funny is that one of the things you keep hearing today is people in Chicago saying it's just so nice that it's not us for once having a public official on trial. The fireworks are going off in Rhode Island and New Jersey as well.

I have to say, watching how this thing has taken down the entire top level of all of the offices in the New York mayoral world. I mean, seeing the police department, the fire department, the education department. God knows, you know, we'll know next it's the sanitation department. Will anybody be left? Jan, if you've ever wanted to be police commissioner, this is your shot. Ha ha ha ha.

Welcome to The Political Scene, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Evan Osnos, and I'm joined as ever by my colleagues, Susan Glasser and Jane Mayer. Hi, Susan. Hey there. So great to be with you. And hi, Jane. Hey, Evan. One of the remarkable things about this already staggering presidential election is the gender divide, a gender canyon, really, that has widened as we get closer to November.

In a year where we might elect the first woman president, women voters are more and more likely to express support for Kamala Harris. But men in these polls seem likely once again to vote in large numbers for Donald Trump. So what are the implications? How unusual is this scale of gender gap? And what does it tell us about the race and about the broader political terrain?

Today, we have a very special guest joining us to discuss this and more. Celinda Lake is a longtime Democratic pollster and the founder of Lake Research Partners. She's not working for the Harris campaign. She's an independent Democratic pollster. And Celinda, welcome and thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Not at all. It's great to be with you. Thank you so much. So good to have you. It's so good to be with you and so good to connect.

So Linda, this is a topic that is of great interest to us, but of great interest to you, the question of the gender divide. And I wonder if you would start us off by just giving us some definitions of terms, because I don't know if people necessarily know exactly what it looks like in the numbers. What does it mean when we talk about a gender gap in the polls?

It's a really good question, and there are two different definitions, but I will tell you what my definition of it is. It is the margin among men minus the margin among women. So right now, for example, let me get you the newest numbers. I just happen to have them handy. These are fresh out of the machine. I like it. You're reaching for some sort of giant apparatus. Yeah, giant thing. In the most recent data,

For example, among Latino men, we're leading 54-37, and among Latino women, we're leading 63-28. So people calculate it differently, but that would be anywhere from a nine-point gender gap to an 18-point gender gap. But any way you cut it, it's a big number. We're going to dig into all of this, but just historically, how does this

compare? Is this something you see in every election or are we are we in new territory? We always have a gender gap. It looks like it's going to be on steroids this year. It's usually bigger when you have a woman candidate because the women will tend to be a little more enthusiastic, the men a little less enthusiastic. So we had a bigger gender gap with Hillary Clinton than we did with Joe Biden, mainly because women were equally supportive of both.

But men were less supportive of Hillary than they were of Joe Biden. He had improved his margin, particularly among white, older, blue collar men.

So if you compare it this year to 2016, is it basically a carbon copy, same dynamic, same thing, or what? What's going on? No, it looks even bigger than it did in 2016. And it's a little bit different composition. So every group has a gender gap in it. And even your base, you can have a gender gap. For example, Harris is winning younger women by 51 to 24, but winning younger men only 41 to 34.

So there's a big gender gap there, even with a group that is her base. She's still doing better. It's improved, but she's still doing a lot better with Black women than she is with Black men. So it affects every single group. Hillary saw a big gender gap with young men and women. And we need to remember that Trump actually won young white men.

He didn't win young men overall because they are more diverse, but he won young white men by one point. And he lost young white women in 2016 overwhelmingly. So it's a little bit different composition. Harris is a little weaker with older people, seniors. And even though there's a gender gap, she's weaker with both senior men and women. So the electorate is different. It's more diverse. It's younger now. The.

The coalitions of the two candidates are different, but the communality is there's a gender gap in every single demographic group. And the gender gap looks like it could be on steroids this year. And one of the biggest times we've had it before was with Hillary Clinton.

So can I ask then, how much does campaigning matter in exacerbating the gender gap? Like Donald Trump, right, he's macho man playing this at his rallies, you know, almost a caricature of masculinity. We all see him and, frankly, his party and J.D. Vance.

Doubling down on that, you know, Harris is not playing gender very overtly and we can talk about why that is in this campaign. But I'm really struck by how much Trump is. Does that matter? Is that part of the reason for the accentuated gender gap on steroids this time?

One of the reasons for the accentuated gap is the abortion issue. The Dobbs decision really, really fired up women. And it's made certain groups of women like college educated women a core constituency. Now they're voting so Democratic. They're like a base constituency now. And in fact, college men are following them. And the Republicans just

implemented a program about a week ago to try to keep college men from voting the same way as their wives. We have a program to try to keep blue collar women from voting the same way as their husbands. Basically, the divider is dividing families more than ever. That's what I'm hearing from you, Celinda. I mean, is there is it like something to have them vote in different rooms or use the ballots that mail in ballots? I mean, how do you how do you how do you divide the couples?

Well, it's a big deal, actually. And what we find is that ticket splitting between men and women...

is higher when they vote in person in the voting booth than it is when they vote by mail. Because when they vote by mail, they sit down together. And a couple of dynamics happen. Women tend to be more deferential to the so-called expertise of men. And men, of course, agree in their expertise. Women also, you know, she'll think, I think I'm voting for Hillary. And he'll look over and say,

We're not Hillary voters. We're Trump voters. Benghazi, Benghazi. And she just goes, oh, I'm not going to argue. I'm not going to fight about this. OK, Trump, whatever. So and I'm going to make the decision about what health insurance plan our families on. He's not going to argue with me on that. So they have their domains. But there are three parts to successfully keeping women from voting like their husbands. One is to empower them.

to say you have your own way of doing things. Lots of people have opinions. You have your own way of doing things, your own way of thinking about things. You take a 360 degree view. And here's a place where you can get some information to help form your own opinion. The second is to say the vote is private. The voting booth is private. No one knows how you voted. And the third is women don't like to vote for themselves. They like to act on behalf of others. So to call on them and say, you know, you're a role model.

Our daughters and our granddaughters are looking at us. You vote for your family. You vote for what's best for your family. And so doing different ways to encourage them to make up their own mind. It doesn't work that well to say you're right, they're wrong, because a lot of women don't want to vote because they're right.

They want to vote because they're taking responsibility for other people in their communities and their whole families. That's so interesting. Yeah. So wait a minute. There's like a revelation embedded in there, it seems to me, which is that actually in-person voting, which Donald Trump is always promoting, is actually bad for him when it comes to the gender gap. Sure.

She's she's nodding, folks. Let the record. But is that does that mean that that as a practical matter, it makes more sense for Democrats to be encouraging in-person voting in some cases? In some cases, for sure. Or one of the things we're playing with right now is to say to women, you know, rather than sit down together and often the husband will say, well, let's vote right after dinner. And, you know, women are like, I'm swamped right after dinner. I got to put away everything. I got to get the kids ready. I got to get make sure they do their own work. I'm swamped.

So to say, vote on your own schedule, vote in your own way, vote in your own time. And women say that the average time that they would ideally vote, if they could vote any time, they would vote somewhere between 10 and 11 o'clock at night after they'd done the laundry. That's the voting hour. Here's the question. We've already talked about elements that are specific to the candidates, to Trump,

to the fact that Harris is running for president, but there are also these underlying sort of structural elements. How much do you see this gender gap as being a 2024 feature, or are we seeing a sort of long-term gap

trend, a kind of polarization between the genders setting into politics more distinctly? Well, this is a question I love because I wrote my master's thesis on it. And the gender gap actually started most prominently in 1980 around Ronald Reagan. And it is rooted actually in women seeing more of a role for government than men.

Men think it's a good day when government doesn't do anything bad to you. Women think, heck no, government has to be a partner here. My family might be dependent on a government program. Somebody in my family might need a safety net sometime. Government needs to protect us. And it's interesting that protection word because Trump is trying to co-opt that.

He's trying to use his strong man and say, you know, I will protect you. You know, if I'm elected, you won't have to worry about abortion or anything. And it's a very paternalistic protection kind of language that some people are nostalgic about. And some men are very nostalgic about the time they played those roles. So it's structural. It's really rooted in role of government. It started in 1980 with Ronald Reagan and perceptions of

who was more likely to get us into a war. And now it's continued dramatically. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be back with Celinda Lake in just a moment.

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Can I ask you to what extent views about women as potential leaders have shifted? Have they shifted at all from 2016 when Hillary Clinton was the first female major party nominee to Harris? Because I think their approaches to the fact of their gender have changed in terms of the campaign. But I'm wondering what the public opinion is on that.

So it's changed and it's related to age and it's related to education and it's changed less than maybe some of us would have liked it to change. And certain candidates reflect a lot less change than other candidates. So I don't think anyone is going to think Donald Trump or J.D. Vance is at the vanguard of feminism. What we do see is people do think there are more women out there.

that women are arriving in critical mass. We see more women running. They are more hesitant to elect women for executive leadership and solo leadership than they are for legislative leadership or collective leadership. They think women will get along better. They'll bring people together. They're compromised. But when you're in a military type situation, when you need a solo leader, maybe you need a man when you're in a crisis.

So there is that difference. And one of the people that has done the most work on that is the Barbaralee Family Foundation, which has done a lot of work on how to shift people's assets for women from collective situations to solo situations like mayors and governors and presidents. We have a record number of women governors right now. We have a record number of women mayors. So women are progressing.

I think there's also, particularly with younger women, and I was very moved by this song in my youth, but we don't have to run around saying, I am Helen Reddy, I am woman. Younger women in particular feel like it's obvious I'm a woman. It's obvious she's a woman of color. She doesn't need to run on it. And

sharing her experiences and her values and the roots of her experience coming from a working mom who saved until she was in 11th grade to buy her first home is something that you don't have to say, I'm a woman and therefore I understand this. I kind of have two questions about this. One is whether the polls really pick up

the real intentions and feelings of voters, or whether this is an issue that on some level is about discrimination and prejudice, whether people just don't really tell pollsters what they really think. Sort of the Bradley effect kind of idea that there was about Mayor Bradley in LA, a black man who polls showed would do much better than he did because when people got into the voting booth, they didn't vote for him. I wonder about that. And the second thing I really wonder about is whether

The gender gap is in some ways a proxy for race issues too. Can you separate out with Kamala Harris how much of the reservations

that male voters may have are really about her gender and how much of their concerns about things like, I don't know her really. I don't really understand what she stands for. She seems different. Is that gender or is that race? And can pollsters tell? So it's a really good question. And there are lots of techniques that we have. So one thing, you can't always just straightforwardly ask it.

And one of the more accurate questions we get is we say, not what do you think, but what do you think your friends and neighbors think? And there are a bunch of people out there that need new friends and neighbors. But they tend to reveal racism and sexism much more when they're talking about their neighbors. Secondly, some of these things operate in an unconscious level for the Barbaralee Family Foundation that I mentioned.

We did work where we dialed ads, you know, dials are those moment to moment reactions like you see after the debate. And we dialed ads of male candidates and ads of women candidates.

On effectiveness. And the minute they saw the woman candidate, they started to dial down on effectiveness. And we said to them afterwards, why did you dial down? And they said, I didn't dial down. I hadn't seen enough of her. I didn't dial down. And then we said, well, we can show you, you actually did dial down and you were flat for the men. And they said, oh my God, I hadn't even realized I was doing that. Wow.

We also, it depends on, you know, the interviewing situation. One of the reasons for the Bradley effect, and we actually studied this for a while, the African-American governor of Virginia, a lot of interviewers in these phone banks are African-American. And at that time, we were doing all of our interviewing on phone, by phone. People can guess the race of an interviewer in 45 seconds. And believe it or not, they're about 80% right. So why?

whites who were talking to African-Americans were a lot more for Wilder than whites who thought they were talking to whites.

Similarly, we found women who were talking to women were less pro-choice than women who were talking to men. Now, we thought it would be the other way around. But actually, when we went back in and said, why were you more reserved? They said, well, when I'm talking to a woman, I feel like I can tell them, you know, I have some ambivalence about this. After my first child, I don't know that I could ever personally get an abortion. And they can express that ambivalence. When I'm talking to a guy,

I don't want him to think this is his decision. So I just tell him I'm pro-choice. You know, Celinda, you've mentioned this effect that we're seeing, particularly among young men who are gravitating to Trump. If you drill down on this question of men in this election and how they're voting, is there a backlash element going on? Is there some piece of the male vote that is explained by essentially backlash in progress before the possibility of the first woman president?

Well, the stereotypes about a Democrat, the stereotypes about a woman, and the stereotypes about an African-American candidate are all the same. So people rate Democratic Black women as significantly more liberal than Democratic white men.

So that's just one thing that's going on. And there's definitely some backlash against Democrats. I think the very best book that's ever been written on this, and please don't read Hillbilly Elegy. I think it's a terrible book. Haven't heard of it, but yeah. Don't read it. Don't buy it. I'll lend you my dog-eared copy. But a book you should buy, which I think is the best of its kind, is Strangers in Their Own Land, written by Arlie Hotschild. And what she wrote is that

blue-collar men felt they were climbing up a hill and it was a really steep incline and that they were at some disadvantage. But if they kept blotting along, they could make it.

Blue-collar men increasingly feel that Democrats have given other groups of people passes to butt in line in front of them. And that has generated a tremendous politics of resentment. I think it is a brilliant analysis. I think it is operational. And I think as long as this economy seems zero-sum, or some paint it that way by talking about things like, quote, black jobs, then I think we're

We're going to have some trouble here as Democrats. What we believe in is a good economy where everyone thrives and we've got to deliver on that. You know, it's interesting you bring up blue collar men. Democrats actually put someone who comes from that kind of background on their ticket this year. And I've been fascinated to watch Democrats.

kind of J.D. Vance versus Tim Walz dynamic. And I've noticed in a certain sector of kind of right-wing Twitter, their attacks are aimed pretty directly at trying to rip down Walz's otherwise

you know, pretty macho seeming masculinity, right? He's this kind of football coach, gun owning, NRA proficient dude who gives car advice. And yet they're specifically going after his masculinity because obviously that's where it's a threat to their political agenda. Very much so. And they have a theory of masculinity and they're trying to maximize it. So it's going both ways.

And I think they had conflated this brand of masculinity with strength. And they thought that that was the way to beat Joe Biden. And whether it would have worked or not is a different question. They have been very flummoxed. They have not known how to run. And you can see them floundering after Harris. And that's very interesting to see. They hated the fact that the number one selling piece of bling in the Harris campaign is the camouflage hat.

And they made more money on that than anything else. So it shows the cultural appeal here. I think in the long run, what's really important for us as women, as mothers or sons, some of us married to men, as sisters or brothers, we've got to redefine masculinity. This is a very, very harmful notion of masculinity. But the politics of resentment, they are really accentuating it

And in the short run, they have gotten some benefit from it. And if you had said to me, you know, four years ago or eight years ago, we're going to have a national convention where the last night we're going to have a wrestler tearing his shirt off in prime time. I would have said, OK, I agree that things are bad, but you're going a little far here. And look at what we have.

You know, when you say, though, that Harris has flummoxed them somewhat, I mean, I think that's really interesting. And it makes me think, of course, of the abortion issue, which seems like, if anything, it's really an albatross now around Trump's neck. I mean, how big an issue do you think that's going to be in this election? Have they found a way around it? And is it an issue that just

is a woman's issue or are you seeing men also rating it as important to them?

So I think it's the second biggest issue in the campaign other than the economy. And some people think it's immigration, but immigration is more of a base issue. And they're trying to do that to energize their base. Abortion goes way beyond their base. After the Dobbs decision, America was about 10 points more pro-choice and every state got about 10 points more pro-choice because this was going way too far. What was interesting in 2016 was

People did not believe that Trump was anti-choice. They didn't care what he said, you know, New York or his lifestyle, et cetera, et cetera. They did not believe he was anti-abortion.

And I was doing some last minute focus groups in Michigan. And I said, Donald Trump will defund Planned Parenthood. He's promised. And the group laughed at me. They said, no, he's not going to defund Planned Parenthood. So I can show you the CNN clip where he's saying he's going to defund Planned Parenthood. And one lady in the focus group stood up and she said, listen, he's paid for three abortions at Planned Parenthood. He's not defunding Planned Parenthood. We could not make people believe it.

Then the Supreme Court and his Supreme Court made a decision that most people believe would never happen. Now it's gone way too far. And he's tried to escape it by saying states' rights. He's tried to escape it by saying, I'm for IVF. Government will pay for all the IVFs.

But it's still hanging around. And people think it's your Supreme Court. You took credit for it. You produce this court. And also, people do not want to state law at this point. They want it nationally. I hate the stories of women having to wait in parking lots or drive to another state in emergency conditions. And then the minute he really went on the full frontal assault to say, I'm going to do the states, I'm going to do the states, Arizona proved that the states are batshit crazy. Yeah.

And so that didn't work very well. So people are like, no, we do not want a national ban. As Walt says, it's none of your damn business. It's a very profound feeling with men and women. Now, women tend to vote it more. They're registering around it. They pay a lot of attention to whether there's an initiative on their ballot. But a lot of men care about it, too. And believe it or not, young men are pretty energized around contraception. They don't want to see contraception tampered with.

Before you go, Celinda, if we can widen out for just one moment, you look at a whole range of fascinating things, even beyond what we've talked about today. Just as we think ahead to the next five, six weeks, the end of this campaign, what is top of mind for you? What do you think Democrats need to be focused on most?

Get out the vote, which they are. We have a tougher time on that because we have the youth vote. We have people of color. We have a lot of new registrants who are better for us. So get out the vote. Number two, I think we should count on a Trump search. I think there will be some voters we didn't expect. I don't think voters are particularly lying right now, but I do think

We got to watch for that Trump surge. There is no question in my mind, unless something really dramatic happens, we will win the popular vote, but we may not win the electoral vote. And what kinds of games are they going to play with certification, etc.?

And then as Harris's speech last night did, we need to get even on the economy. We have never won an election where we have been behind. We've been behind on the economy. We have to be at least even. That's really important in this election. I think the team and chair working very, very hard at that.

But it's full-court press to establish her economic credentials because it's only been a two-month campaign and she's not that well-known. Enormously interesting. So, Linda Lake, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me. Oh, it's great to be with you, really. Thank you for everything. And we'll have to have you back and see if it really did end up as a gender gap on steroids. Well, if it doesn't and if Harris doesn't win, you can call me in Mexico. We'll meet you on the beach. There you go. All right. Deal. Political scene from The New Yorker. We'll be back in just a moment.

All right, Susan, Jane.

Just a tremendous amount of interesting stuff there. What stood out to you most, Susan? Well, I mean, look, I'm really appreciative in this age of partisan puffery where people define being on the team as, you know, just...

Grasping on to any data point that supports their argument and pretending that polls that they don't like aren't real. And it's great to have a professional like Celinda cut through that and say, like, look, you know, the economy is a big problem for Democrats because they've never won an election without being at least even on that. I thought that was just a very interesting statement.

data point and it was something concrete to talk about. But the flip side is the tremendous power of the abortion issue really came through two years after Dobbs. And the fact that society itself is accelerating and that there are structures in our politics from both the left and the right that now have a vested interest in increasing the division. I mean, come on. She said I she kind of said it quietly, so I'm not sure how much it came through. She said, you know, we're promoting divorce. But

to actually have both parties, you know, encouraging husbands and wives to vote differently. I mean, you know, gosh, where is that going to leave us five years from now, 10 years from now? I thought that was fascinating that you've got to get a vote in person in order to get the women out from under their thumbs of their husbands. And that if they had their way, women would be voting late at night, probably while they were, as she said, doing the laundry and the husband was nowhere nearby. But...

Anyway, I think also what was interesting to me was the extent to which this is, you know, there really is still gender as an issue and a hurdle for women, even though we're, you know, there's so much happy celebration of the fact that there's a black woman running who seems like such an able candidate, but underneath the surface, you know,

disturbingly, among the people who are really part of the backlash are not just old men, young men. You would like to think that this sort of patriarchal language that Trump's been using about being the protector is something that's sort of, you know, from the 1950s, and we've gotten past it. But if anything, what we're seeing is young men are attracted to it. Yeah, there is this phenomenon that

People were noticing even before Harris was the candidate at the top of the ticket that there is this very clear gender divide among young men. It's sort of the kind of Joe Rogan divide. And part of the reason why I think that this topic is so important

important thinking about the long term is that it also ultimately does ordain partisan affiliation, that if young men are kind of growing up to see themselves as naturally more Republican, then what does that mean if you have Tim Walz, who is, as we've talked about, by any measure, satisfies the quote unquote traditional measures of masculinity, military veteran, a hunter, there he is doing videos about cleaning your

gutters in your carburetor. And yet the Republican messaging on this is so profoundly hostile that it sets these things in stone. Yeah, the gender gap is generational. And frankly, it already has been a generation, as she pointed out. It really began in a discernible way all the way back in the 1980 election between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. And even the language that is needed to communicate the

to men and women. I was so struck by that, that even that has a sort of gender polarization. She said, this was fascinating to me, men want to be told in their political messaging that they're right. Women want to be told that they're doing something good and positive and responsible for their community.

And those just open up just a vantage point of an entirely different ideology, you know, over time. I agree in a very different attitude towards government. The safety net is not a dirty word for women. But let's talk about, I've really been wanting to talk to both of you about this question of Kamala Harris as potentially a breakthrough candidate. You know, we are weeks away from either victory.

And I think it's kind of fascinating that she's taken a different approach than Hillary Clinton to this fact. And some people are saying, and Celinda offered a little bit of evidence for this, the argument that, well, you know, she's not going to win.

It's just more common now to have women candidates or people are more accepting of it. But there's also a different way of looking at it, which is the idea that Hillary Clinton's political advisors and she herself may have seen this as an advantage in 2016. And

Harris and her team may see it as a liability. Yeah, I think one of the things that we heard from Celinda was this idea of this backlash already. And in a way, you know, without having to say so explicitly, I think that the Harris campaign is alert to that risk and says that, you know, if we talk constantly about shattering the glass ceiling, does that essentially animate the worst impulses, the worst things available to the other side?

Yeah, I mean, of course, whether or not Kamala Harris says it out loud, I'm running and I'm black and I'm female, everybody sees it. And you'd have to have been absent for the last 50 years of history or really the last entire history of the country not to realize what a struggle it's going to be to get elected. To me, it brings back in some ways the way that Shirley Chisholm ran. I stand before you today as

as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency of the United States of America. The first black woman running for president in 1972, and she said, I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women's movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I'm equally proud of that.

You want to get past this idea of being seen as a symbolic gesture and be just seen as the best. The tragedy, though, is that not only did she not win, but Hillary Clinton, who was, you know, in a stronger position than any woman ever has been, buffeted by different points of view on this. I remember the sort of intake of breath from many women that I spoke with this summer, especially, by the way, many Black women over the years.

Over the summer when Harris suddenly has to step in for Biden and becomes the nominee and they're so excited. But it's also kind of that fear like, oh, my God, look at what is possibly going to happen again. The backlash that Evan's talking about, the evidence of America's sexism and racism all rolled into one.

In 2008, Hillary was the frontrunner and she was the overwhelming favorite to win the Democratic nomination. And not only did she lose to Barack Obama, but she was pilloried by many commentators for not rallying women around the idea that this was a historic moment and that she could equally be as inspiring as Obama was. OK, so then in 2016, she takes the opposite approach and she's shattering the glass ceiling. And again and again and again, I just feel like

that many women have is that we're going to slam right into that glass ceiling once again with Harris. Well, of course you are. You're going to slam into it. Everybody knows it. And the question is, when is it going to be shattered or will it be shattered in this country? And I don't know that it really makes any difference whether she runs on it or doesn't run on it. The issue is there no matter what. But it is interesting to me that one more thing from Shirley Chisholm's experience with

When she did run, she said, you know, in the eyes of the world, I had two handicaps. And she said being black and being female. And she said being female was a much heavier lift in terms of getting elected than being black. There was a moment when when Harris was asked on a CNN interview not too long ago about this photograph that everybody saw of her grand niece watching her give a speech.

And as a question, it was a kind of layup about, you know, how did you feel seeing this photo? And what was fascinating about her answer was it was very careful. She didn't say, you know, I saw in that photo, you know, what people can see in me and so on. She was actually very careful.

shrewd about pointing back and saying that photo was moving. But really, what I saw is that I want to be a president for all Americans. And that was just it was such a revealing way in which she said, I'm not going to go for this bait in a sense. The other thing that I think is interesting is as we talk about this feeling of dread and unease about the idea of coming up against crashing against that

ceiling again. I've been on the road a lot talking to voters about Harris. And one of the things I've heard, especially from black voters, is this feeling that people weren't willing in the black community. They were reluctant to voice support for Harris until they heard that white voters were going to do it. It's something that you heard back in 2008 about Obama as well. And frankly, it's what you heard

about the prospect of a Jewish candidate like Josh Shapiro that a lot of Jewish voters said, look, I don't feel very good about the idea of Josh Shapiro because I don't think other people are going to go for it. It seems like America is not ready for that. So there's a way in which from multiple perspectives, we all

are uneasy about what this electorate is capable of. Well, that's right, especially because one of the two parties is running on this very palpable sense of backlash and exclusionariness and, you know, at times even overt racism. To your point about Shapiro, I remember getting multiple emails from Jewish activists

Friends saying, oh, I feel both disappointed and relieved that he's not been chosen because of that anxiety. And I think it's very interesting. You mentioned that incredible picture of Harris and her being asked about. Of course, that's an echo of one of the most famous images of a young black boy watching Barack Obama. And I think of that as being an iconic moment.

portrait of this incredible breakthrough that many people never thought would happen in their lifetimes. This moment in 2008 when the country, you know, that had, you know, been the country of civil war and slavery elects this African-American president. And it was this incredible moment. But it also led in some ways, right, in some terrible ways to the backlash that produced Donald Trump just eight years later. Right before we go, Susan, this week, we're going to have the VP debate between Vance and

And Walls, Vance, of course, has been talking about God knows what, childless cat ladies and everything else. How much do you think this debate may, in fact, matter? Well, the more women who watch J.D. Vance, my guess is the better that is for the Harris-Walls ticket. Yeah.

You know, look, vice presidential debates don't historically make a big difference in the outcome of elections. But I think this is one where there's going to be a lot of interest. Vance has had a very challenging debut on the national stage. He is at the moment by far the least popular of the four people on the two national tickets.

and, you know, viewed negatively even by many Republicans or independent voters. You know, is he going to lean into his role as the attack dog on the ticket? Absolutely. The other night, Sarah Beth and I watched the movie Game Change about the 2008 election and were reminded of a debate I'd completely forgotten about, which is Sarah Palin outperforming expectations of

Oh, of course I'm going to watch the debate. You know, I'm not going to watch the debate.

I have to say, as a Yaley, I'm waiting to see whether, you know, this guy shows any signs of the superior education that the school is supposed to have given him. Beyond that, I have to say, I was saying the other night to somebody who was a former Republican, you know, it's hard to think of anything that J.D. Vance

has done that's really helped the ticket other than bringing in money. And this person turned to me and said, other than money, have you looked at how much money he's brought in? So no matter how he does in this debate, keep in mind, he has opened the floodgates of money from Silicon Valley, and he may be performing another way for that ticket that you're not seeing right up there. Sarah Palin was a pretty big fundraiser, too. Don't forget.

Jane, Susan, great to be with you both. Thanks. All right. Thank you guys so much. This was a great conversation. Great to be with you, too. This has been the political scene from The New Yorker. I'm Evan Osnos. We had research assistance today from Alex D'Elia. Our producer is Julia Nutter and our editor is Gianna Palmer. Mixing by Mike Kutchman.

Stephen Valentino is our executive producer. And Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's head of global audio. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. Thanks for listening. My name is Madeline Barron. I'm a journalist for The New Yorker. I...

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