Well, good afternoon, or I guess good morning, depending on where you are coming, calling in here from, or Zooming in here from. Welcome to AAD's post-election virtual event. I'm AAD's Vice President of Government Affairs, Daniel Fisher, based out of AAD's Washington office. Before I introduce our keynote presenter today, I'd like to turn it over to Mike McSherry from Higherology. Higherology has been generous enough to help underwrite this event. I know at AAD, we very much value our partnership with Higherology and appreciate your support of this event, as well as many other events throughout the year. So Mike. Absolutely. Thanks for that warm intro, Daniel. Everyone, good afternoon. Great to have you all here. I just want to provide a quick overview of Higherology. Some of you may know us for about a year. We've been a preferred provider of AAD's, particularly with being a talent solution provider. So Liz, if you want to go to the next slide. Really quickly, you know, Higherology's mission quite simply is to help businesses like yours that are on the phone today build their best team. What makes us unique as far as a technology provider is that we specialize working with owner-operated multi-location businesses, in particular equipment dealer distributors, such as yourselves, to make the process much more simplified, make you more efficient with your time spent recruiting and hiring, but also make you more effective. So a couple of the companies we work with, some of you on this call actually work for those companies, or I'm sure at a minimum, you're familiar with them. And if anybody would like to reach out, Liz, you want to go to the next slide? I'm happy to answer more questions directly after the call. Some quick statistics about the work that we're doing. Today we work with 242 member locations, and even though a lot of you may not think that 2020 was a year to focus on recruiting and hiring efforts, it turns out it's been quite a year to do so, and many of your fellow members have taken advantage of a somewhat stable year as far as conditions for the dealerships, and pursued talent that's become available, and interested in working in a dealership that simply wasn't the case a year ago. Year-to-date, over 25,000 applicants have been sent to our AED member locations, and almost 400 hires have been made. So it paints a picture that even though if your dealership isn't hiring at the moment, putting a focus on people's strategy is always a good idea, and it's what we believe will set dealers apart in the future from those that just survived coming out of 2020 and those that really thrive. So on the next slide, Liz, here's my contact information. If you work with us, always love to hear from customers, but if you don't, and you are interested in learning more about our partnership with AED and how we help AED members with the recruitment and hiring process to build a strong team, please don't hesitate to shoot me an email or give me a call at my cell phone anytime. And with that, Daniel, I will send it back to you. Great. Thanks, Mike. Thank you again to Hireology for helping support this event. With that, I will introduce our speaker today, and before I get to that, just one housekeeping item here. You may submit questions via the Q&A tab at the bottom of the screen, so please do submit questions while Q&A at the end. So David Wasserman is joining us today, and David's an editor and senior election analyst for the authoritative nonpartisan newsletter, The Cook Political Report. Since 1984, The Cook Political Report has been the go-to resource for detailed and accurate election analysis for politicians and enthusiasts alike. Wasserman makes regular appearances on Fox News, NBC, and CNN, and is frequently quoted in the country's most prominent publications, including The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. And David, thank you so much for joining us here. I know you've been obviously very busy, and I know you're coming to us, I guess, live from the NBC decision desk here, so I appreciate you taking the time, and I'll let you help us make sense of everything that's been going on the last couple days here. Well, thank you so much, Daniel, and thanks for having me. This is certainly quite a time to be talking politics. A lot of our crystal balls were shattered, at least down ballot, on Tuesday, and I know the tensions are running high right now with so many states that are in close contention. And so what I want to do is try and stick to the numbers as best as we see them and talk a little bit about what happened on Tuesday and what that's likely to mean for politics and policy in 2021, and then dive right into your questions, because I know there are a lot of questions out there right now. I have a few slides to share, and I'm going to hit the share button and hope they come up. All right. So what the heck just happened? And there's going to be a lot to unpack for weeks, months, and years ahead. The first question, the most frequent question that everyone was asking me this past year was, can we still trust the polls? And, you know, after Tuesday, we could probably just spend an hour talking about that. My answer all year had been that polls are like a GPS that can get you into the right neighborhood, but not necessarily to the exact address. And by the time all of the ballots are counted and states' results are certified, it's likely that Joe Biden will be ahead nationally by between four and five points. Now, his lead heading into Election Day, according to RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight, the two most prominent aggregators of polls in the country, suggested that, you know, he was at about an eight to nine point lead. FiveThirtyEight had Biden ahead by 8.3. And of course, when the results were coming in on Election Day and on Election Night, and it was apparent pretty early on that Trump would hang on to Florida, and this looked like a much more Republican night than we were initially expecting. Our initial thought, or many people's initial thought, was probably, wow, how could the polls be seven or eight points off? In the end, I think they'll probably be more like three and a half points off nationally, which is roughly double the polling error that we had in 2016 when Hillary Clinton went into Election Day ahead by 3.8 in the FiveThirtyEight average, but ended up winning the popular vote by 2.1. Of course, a big part of winning the presidency is where are your votes located? Because we don't hold one national election for president in this country. We hold a series of state-by-state elections in the Electoral College, and you need to get 270 electoral votes. And in 2016, there's no question that Donald Trump's vote was really efficiently distributed across the upper Midwest and across the Great Lakes states. He won Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by a combined 78,477 votes. And that was essentially attributable to leads in just three out of America's 3,141 counties. If you had subtracted the votes cast in Macomb County, Michigan, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, and Waukesha County, Wisconsin, then Hillary Clinton would be president today. So it's amazing what a small difference these margins can make in some of the key battleground states. Of course, in 2016 and 2020, the state-level polls led a lot of people astray. If you'd believe the ABC Washington Post poll of Wisconsin two weeks ago, Biden was going to win Wisconsin by 17. Looks like his margin today is 0.6. The final polling average in Pennsylvania had Biden up by 5. It looks like he will finish ahead by between 1 and 2 points. In Michigan, a similar differential. So look, there's going to be a reckoning in the months and years ahead about polls. There are entire polling outfits whose reputations have been shattered by this election outcome. And it's going to require news organizations to take a hard look at why they're publishing numbers that were so far off. And if there's one hypothesis that I saw over the course of this election cycle that really rings true to me now, it's the idea that voters who are kind of on the margins of the information ecosystem, those who don't eat, sleep, and breathe politics, don't mainline cable news, they have lower levels of institutional trust and social trust. Voters who, you know, aren't necessarily part of large community organizations, but rather more skeptical of institutions and experts. These are the types of people who both answer surveys at lower rates and are more likely to support President Trump. President Trump is better at communicating with voters who feel marginalized than any other politician I've ever covered. He's also better at repelling people who are closer to what we would think of as the Washington or media establishment than any other politician than I've ever covered. And that trade-off is a good one for outperforming the polls, because the people who are most likely to answer a political poll are those people who are really plugged in. Keep in mind that response rates to surveys these days are close to 2 or 3 percent for telephone polls. So essentially, we've been relying on the 2 or 3 percent of people who are willing to answer the phone to model the political viewpoints of the other 97 or 98 percent. You know, we have to confront the idea that that's a good way of doing business or accurately reporting public opinion in the country, and we're going to have to adjust the model of how we do this. I think we're going to actually see a movement towards online polling as a result of the failure of traditional telephone and cell phone samples to predict what happened. Now, let's talk a little bit about the outstanding votes that – and the outstanding states that the media organizations have not called. And to be perfectly candid with you, my descriptions of how I see the vote count in these states are my own and don't reflect the views of any network, and I think networks are being extremely cautious in making declarations right now about the results, except for perhaps Fox News, which may have jumped the gun a little bit in calling Arizona. But let's talk about these states. Of these five states – Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona – Joe Biden would essentially only need to win, you know, 17 more electoral college votes to get over the top. Donald Trump would need to carry most likely four of these five states. Of the five, Trump is by far in the best shape in North Carolina. I think he's got a lead there that will survive. Additional ballots counted – there are about 150,000, I think, that are still out in North Carolina. Trump's lead is around 80,000. So I don't see a path back for Biden in North Carolina. But once you get to the other states, it starts looking a lot more grim for the President. In Pennsylvania, I believe that once the absentee ballots are counted and the provisional ballots are counted, Biden will be ahead somewhere between 80 and 100,000 votes, which is larger than the lead that he has right now in Wisconsin. In Nevada, we are most likely looking at the lion's share of outstanding ballots being from Clark County and being mail ballots, both of which are good for Joe Biden. He enjoys about a 12,000-vote lead in Nevada at the moment, and I think that's likely to expand. In Arizona, right now Joe Biden is in the lead. Last I checked, about 40,000 in Arizona, and there are still over 100,000 ballots left to count between Maricopa County and several other counties. But Trump would need to win them at a rate in the mid-60s, I believe, to have a chance of success. The last Maricopa County ballot batch that we got had Trump only ahead 53 to 47. I don't think Trump's on track to be able to carry Arizona. It could be about a 30,000-vote deficit for him. And then once you get to Georgia, Joe Biden just pulled ahead in Georgia by about 1,000 votes out of 5 million cast, and we are likely to see 4,800 more ballots in Gwinnett County, which is suburban Atlanta, that break heavily for Biden. There are also 8,900 outstanding military and overseas ballots that have not been counted yet. And keep in mind that we're not sure how many of those 8,900 will be mailed back, but Trump would likely need to win them by a very high rate to come back in Georgia. So look, all four of the states besides North Carolina are looking very good for Joe Biden at the moment. The key question is, what do the next few weeks and next few months look like? I anticipate that it won't be long before media organizations declare that Joe Biden has attained 270 electoral college votes, but media organizations do not certify elections. States do. And the certification process and canvassing process is different in every state. Usually we begin to see the first certifications of final election results anywhere from 10 days to two weeks after an election, and in many cases it's, you know, it is isn't until after Thanksgiving or early December. Now it's then up for the state legislatures in these states to send certificates of ascertainment of the election results to Congress and appoint their electors to the electoral college. I don't see the president as someone who is going to ride gently off into the night in this scenario. And I believe in the next few weeks he will apply pressure on Republicans in these states to object to certifying or object to ratifying the certifications of these election results and sending their electors to the Congress. Now, eventually this could make its way to the Supreme Court, and I would anticipate that the court would not think too kindly about overturning the will, the certified will of the election results in three states, which is what would need to happen in order to overturn the results in Biden's favor if the outstanding votes go the way we believe they will. If the Supreme Court were to essentially invalidate the results from enough states to prevent Biden from getting to 270, I shudder to think at the possibility of civil unrest that would follow. Now, long before we had social distancing measures in place, we were noticing vast partisan differences, partisan distancing in perceptions of current events and crises. And look, I think Trump supporters and Biden supporters are viewing what's happening in the country this week through two totally different lenses. And this has really damaging consequences for our ability to function governmentally. Just to give you an idea of how far apart on some issues Democrats and Republicans were in some of the final pre-election polls that were conducted by NBC News in Quinnipiac, and look, you know, you can subtract six or seven from the margins of these if you want to if you think the polls are skewed, but the spread is still pretty large. The NBC News Wall Street Journal poll asked, do you believe the COVID situation in the U.S. is out of control as opposed to under control? Overall 59% said they believed it was out of control, including 95% of Democrats and 23% of Republicans. How about, are you at least somewhat confident it's safe for K-12 schools in your state to reopen? And then the other 50% overall said yes, including just 16% of Democrats and 70% of Republicans. And so what I think's happened is that some school districts have reopened in places where they shouldn't and some school districts haven't in places where they should, but partisan decision-making is playing a role. Do you trust CDC scientists or President Trump more for information on COVID? Well, overall 70% of voters said they trust CDC scientists more, including not surprisingly 97% of Democrats, but 36% of Republicans. And how about, would you describe the state of the nation's economy as excellent or good as opposed to fair or poor? Well, 37% said excellent or good, including 13% of Democrats, but 74% of Republicans. And do you strongly or somewhat support the Black Lives Matter movement? Overall 53% said they were at least somewhat supportive, including 89% of Democrats and just 12% of Republicans. So night and day on these questions of public opinion. And this extended into how voters decided to cast their ballots. The Pew Research Center, a couple of weeks before the election, polled 10,000 voters online to ask them how they planned on voting and who they planned on voting for. Now, of course, they found that Biden was leading 52-42. It's possible by the end of this that Biden will win the popular vote by around 52-47. But of course, that's still a five-point polling miss here. But when they asked voters how they were planning on voting, they found that among voters who were planning on voting in person before election day, Biden was ahead 55-40. Voters who planned on casting their ballots by mail, Biden was ahead 69-27. And voters who were planning on casting their ballots in person on election day supported Trump 63-31. So we're just seeing huge partisan divides in the returns between election day ballots and mail ballots. And that's what explains why Joe Biden has been able to overtake President Trump's lead as more ballots have been counted in Pennsylvania. They're just, Democrats were the ones who predominantly were interested in bypassing election day polling places to vote by mail, because fundamentally, they view COVID as a more severe public health threat than Republicans, whereas President Trump, his rhetoric against voting by mail essentially polarized the electorate along voting mode lines. So one of the reasons, by the way, we're seeing a delay in the count in Pennsylvania is that in Pennsylvania, the legislature had an opportunity to move up the date for counties to begin processing absentee ballots. You know, in Florida, the reason why we had results in Florida so quickly is that the state permits counties to begin processing and counting ballots 22 days in advance of election day. In Pennsylvania, they weren't permitted to start processing and counting ballots until 7 a.m. on election day. This process takes time, especially when there's record demand for ballots. We're likely to see about 160 million votes cast in this election, which is substantially higher than the 137 million that were cast in 2016, and it would likely set an all-time record since women got the right to vote for the share of the eligible electorate who's turned out. That put enormous strain on our election infrastructure, and we should be very grateful to the workers who have tirelessly conducted an election in all corners of the country that was relatively glitch-free, especially compared to some of the dire warnings earlier this year about election meltdown during a pandemic. So look, how did we get to this point of such extreme partisan polarization on all of these matters? Well, it certainly predates Donald Trump. You know, 10 years ago, during a slow news week at the Cook Political Report, I decided I wanted to embark on a study to try and identify which two retail chains were the best indicators of where Democrats and Republicans live and vote. And what I wanted to do was to merge a GIS application that can map out all kinds of stores and restaurants around the country with a database of county-by-county election results going back to 1992. And what I found when I ran the numbers was that the highest indexing chain for Democrats was Whole Foods Market, but the highest indexing chain for Republicans was Cracker Barrel Old Country Store. Now, taking a look at the numbers from the last 30 years, it's pretty amazing to see what's happened. In 1992, when Bill Clinton won the White House over George H.W. Bush, he carried 59 percent of counties that today have a Whole Foods Market and 40 percent of the counties that today have a Cracker Barrel Old Country Store. That was a 19-point gap, but that went up every single year since 1992. And in 2000, that gap was 31 points. In 2008, it was 42 points. And then in 2016, when Donald Trump won the White House, he carried 76 percent of Cracker Barrel counties and 22 percent of Whole Foods counties, a 54-point gap. We were wondering in this election, would Joe Biden be the candidate for Democrats who was able to narrow this culture gap? Because after all, for years, he's been portrayed in his party as kind of the patron saint of blue-collar Democrats and the guy from Scranton. Well, he did turn in an impressive performance in Scranton, but if you look around the country, the needle didn't move very much in terms of working-class voters' support of President Trump. It remained extremely strong. And my initial estimate of the county performance is that Donald Trump managed to carry just 18 percent of counties with a Whole Foods Market this time. But he also managed to carry 75 percent of counties with a Cracker Barrel. So that's a 57-point gap, even wider than the one that we had in 2016. And it's really remarkable that after all of the supposed earth-shattering events of the past year, between impeachment and a pandemic and all of the racial and civil unrest that we've had, in addition to the Supreme Court fight, nothing really moved the needle that much. Partisans were extremely dug in into their camps. Now, I ran an update to this study earlier this year before the pandemic broke out. And I was curious whether there were any chains that were on the verge of overtaking Whole Foods and Cracker Barrel as the leading indicators for the 2020s. And what I found was that the new leading indicator for Democrats was Lululemon Athletica. And the new leading indicator for Republicans was the tractor supply company. Now, it's easy to think of this as a proxy for our urban versus rural divide, and in many respects it is. But in fact, the leading growth consumer for both of these chains is the suburbs. And the leading growth consumer for tractor supply these days is not necessarily farmers so much as it is weekend warriors who live in subdivisions and want to convince their spouse that their riding mower is sexy. But just a word of warning for those of you yoga enthusiasts in the crowd, because I know clearly this is more of a Lululemon crowd than a tractor supply crowd. There are three things in this world that always tell the truth. Small children, drunk people, and yoga pants. So just keep that in mind. Now, I had some more slides prepared on the down ballot that, in my mad dash to make sense of the election results, did not get saved. But I do want to talk about the outcome in the House and Senate, because even if Joe Biden does end up prevailing in this election, the coattails that he had down ballot were pretty much non-existent. And our forecast in the Senate was that Democrats were going to pick up two to seven seats. Looks like by the end of it, Democrats will have only picked up one seat in the Senate. In the House, I'll be honest, my forecast in the House sucked. I thought Democrats, based on the polling we saw from both Republicans and Democratic strategists who are investing money in these races, both of the parties were expecting that Republicans would lose 10 seats in the House. If Republicans had actually known the contours of how this election would unfold, they would have invested much differently, because there are plenty of seats where they didn't spend anything that they almost won. And it looks like Republicans are almost going to cut Democrats' majority in the House in half. We're looking at a majority that was 233 to 201 with one Libertarian, going down to potentially 223 to 202. And that would that would make Nancy Pelosi's margin for error much, much narrower when it comes to legislation in the House. Now, one blind spot I think we really had as analysts was that for down ballot congressional Republicans, President Trump being on the ballot was actually the best of both worlds. Number one, President Trump has an unusual ability to bring out low propensity voters to the polls that congressional Republicans never were really able to, certainly didn't when Trump was not on the ballot in 2018. And these voters may not have been crazy about congressional Republicans. You know, a lot of these voters view them as part of the swamp, but they certainly weren't ready. They certainly weren't about to vote for a Democrat. And so in a number of these races, you saw real surges of the Trump vote that that padded Republican congressional candidates' margins. The other factor is that when Trump is atop the ballot, independent voters who dislike Trump can vent their anger at the president by voting against him at the top of the ticket while still voting for Republicans they like down ballot. That's what we saw play out in a variety of these House races and Senate races. The other thing I'd point out about the Senate in particular is that whenever Democrats saw a shiny object or a Republican senator that they deeply disliked in a red or purple state, whether it was Susan Collins, Lindsey Graham, Joni Ernst in Iowa, Tom Tillis in North Carolina, their solution to the problem was just to throw more money at it. And the number one question that we would get all year was, which Senate races will more money make the biggest difference in? Well, it turns out that the money, the out-of-state money Democrats poured into places like Maine, North Carolina, Iowa, and South Carolina, it allowed the Republicans in these races to cast their opponents as puppets of out-of-state interests with deep pockets. And that narrative really took hold in the final weeks of those races before Election Day and I think was responsible for allowing Republicans to really defy the odds in the Senate and defy our pre-election expectations. So what does it all add up to? First of all, I should note there are still about 18 House races that are uncalled and a number of them are in California. So it's still possible that Republicans could do a bit better and even get to 215 seats, although I don't think they have any chance of actually winning the majority in the House. Well, this is going to make for an interesting 2021, assuming we're able to get out of 2020 without a civil catastrophe from a dispute about election results. If the results go the way we think they will, and we have a President Biden and Vice President Harris in addition to a Senate majority led by Mitch McConnell and a House led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, assuming she hangs on and runs for one more term, this is going to be a moderate's dream come true. This is going to be a situation where gridlock is kind of the rule, but there is potentially some possibility for deals to be struck. More than any other executive branch and congressional branch in history, this would be a lame duck set of leaders. What I mean by that is if Joe Biden takes the oath of office on January 20th, I think we can be reasonably sure that he will be a one-term President and not choose to run for re-election at the age of 82. His goal is essentially to serve a term to try and heal the country's rift, although I am doubtful that he'll be able to do that. Whereas in the Senate, we have a majority leader who is, I believe, 80, 81. We have a Speaker of the House who is 80, and the average age of the three Democratic leaders in the House is 81. This would be a country's executive board, essentially, a country's C-suite that would be a living testament to advancements in pharmaceutical medicine, and yet that might liberate them to get things done before they decide to exit public life. Keep in mind that the most powerful people in a 52-48 Senate, assuming Republicans manage to hold both of the seats in Georgia that are heading to runoff, will be the moderates in the Republican conference. People like Susan Collins in Maine, Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, Ben Sasse in Nebraska, potentially even Pat Toomey from Pennsylvania, who is not running for another term in 2022. More than any other incoming President or Vice President, Biden and Harris would have more experience in dealing with Senators than anyone, and Biden in particular knows the workings of the Senate after having spent 40 years there better than, I think, 36 years there and then another eight as Vice President presiding over the Senate. There would be an opportunity behind the scenes for him to try and bring Republicans into the fold to get to 50 or 51 votes to confirm Cabinet appointments, but keep in mind, I don't think this election outcome is going to lead to a Treasury Secretary Elizabeth Warren. This is going to need to be a very moderate set of picks for the Cabinet that Biden makes if he takes the oath of office in order to get confirmed through a Senate that is very divided. I mentioned the Georgia runoff situation earlier. We are likely to see two runoffs on January 5th for the Senate in Georgia. I believe Republicans' stronger seat is the David Perdue seat, which he came within a hair of winning 50 percent of the vote on Tuesday, and the more competitive race is likely to be Kelly Loeffler, the appointed Senator, versus Reverend Raphael Warnock from Atlanta. The reason I am still skeptical on Democrats' chances in these races is that the pattern we have seen in Georgia is that the nonwhite share, the black share of a runoff electorate, tends to be lower than the black share of a general electorate in November. Although I am still skeptical, I think Democrats do have a shot in the Loeffler seat because she is a uniquely polarizing figure in the Atlanta suburbs. That said, Republicans hold them, and we had a 52-48 Senate. We are going to see an initial focus on a major stimulus package on COVID and small business relief. We are also likely to see a big push from Biden over the first year on infrastructure, a major infrastructure package that President Trump was really unable to shepherd through when Republicans had full control of government for the first two years of his administration, and there is small potential for immigration reform. Although I am more skeptical on that because keep in mind that if Joe Biden were to advance a bill that added much more money for border security and permanent status for DACA kids, I am not sure that any compromise that would be amenable to Republican senators would also be amenable to AOC and her squad and Democrats' very thin majority in the House, so I am skeptical on immigration. And then finally, this is not an election outcome that would lead to the country lurching very far left. We are not going to see a Biden administration pursue a massive program of climate change legislation because it simply is not going to get through Congress. We are not likely to see a major policing and criminal justice reform bill as some Democrats would hope for, so this is not a Green New Deal scenario. And if there is a kind of one final takeaway that I have about this election, it was just, you know, it appears to have been decided by very small margins in these battleground states. You know, I mentioned earlier that Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by a combined 77,000. I do think Biden will have a lead twice as large as that in Michigan and about as large of that in Pennsylvania, and he won Wisconsin by the same amount, roughly, that President Trump won Wisconsin in 2016. But the voters who shifted were notable, and they tell us something about where politics is headed in the next few years. We saw a depolarization of the electorate along racial lines. In other words, we saw white voters, especially women and seniors, move slightly to Biden, but we also saw non-white voters move slightly to Trump. And in fact, it was varying degrees. President Trump didn't make up hardly any ground among Black seniors or Black women. He made up some ground among younger African-American men, and that was noticeable in the results on Tuesday night. We also saw a catastrophic loss of support for Democrats among Hispanic and Latino voters. And when I was seeing the results come in from Miami, and they were kind of jaw-dropping in terms of what high share of the vote President Trump was winning among Cuban voters, I had this song that was playing on loop in my head, and it's been playing in my head ever since. But it's the Latinos for Trump theme song, and I wish I was able to play it for everyone here. But one of the reasons why Trump did so much better among Hispanic voters this time than in 2016 was in 2016, Trump barely made an effort to run any kind of Spanish language campaign. His version of Hispanic outreach was essentially to tweet out a picture of a taco bowl and say, I love Hispanics. Well, in 2020, that changed a lot. His campaign had a robust Spanish language media campaign. He portrayed Democrats as out of touch on the economy and as socialists and communists, especially in South Florida. But it also showed up in the numbers in South Texas. There were counties along the border that Hillary Clinton had won by 35 points in 2016, where Trump won on Tuesday night. That should be a shocking indictment for Democrats of how out of touch the party has become with rural Hispanic voters, particularly along the border in Texas. And we also saw Democrats lose seats they were expecting to win in Miami, in Texas's 23rd district, along the border from El Paso to San Antonio. These are the weak points for Democrats moving forward that suggest that the country becoming less white is not necessarily a guarantee that Democrats are going to have a majority anytime soon. In fact, looking at the results, it's clear who would have the momentum in a rematch in 2024 between Trump and Joe Biden, if Biden were interested in a second term. And I don't think it would be Joe Biden who would have that momentum. So I'll stop there. I know there are lots of questions to get to, and I'm eager to open up the conversation. Well, great. Can you guys see me? Oh, there we go. Okay. Great. Thank you, David. Very, very insightful. I'm guessing by my credit card bills, which have my wife's little lemon purchases, I very much live in a Lululemon district, or at least she's traveling to one very often. So, well, no, thank you for that. Let's start kind of, I guess, with in kind of chronological order. So lame duck session. What are we going to see during this lame duck session coming up here? Is there going to be a lame duck session? Obviously, they need to govern fundings up, you know, in mid-December there. So what do you see getting accomplished, assuming, again, Biden's the president-elect, and we have an incoming, maintaining Republican Senate, and then, you know, a Democratic House? It's a great question. Look, I think a lot is going to be obscured by the likely continued focus of the president on what he sees as fraud and erroneous election results, because this is an obsession for the president, even if there is no legitimate evidence that results have been, you know, widely contaminated by any nefarious action. But, you know, I've spoken with Republican congressional leaders in the last few days, one of whom said, look, we just need to give him time. Eventually, we'll need to sit down with Jared and Ivanka first. And then we need to begin talking about the endgame for the year, and what a deal would entail on government funding, and giving him a landing place, whether that is starting a competing network against Fox News, whether that is declaring that Mar-a-Lago is the new White House. I'm not sure what it is. But soothing this huge wound to ego is going to require a lot, and a lot of courage, frankly, on the part of Republican leaders to be able to move on to the pressing matters of keeping the government funded. And as a reminder, please enter your questions in the bottom chat, and we will get to them. Next question, and you touched on it a little bit, infrastructure. So that's, I mean, our industry's top priority is infrastructure investment, obviously, all infrastructure, roads and bridges, particularly. And, you know, obviously, Trump had a, you know, $2 trillion infrastructure plan, which never ever came to be. Biden very much is focused on infrastructure, or at least said, and I've heard, talked to House Democrats in leadership who have said it's going to be one of the first things out of the gate in, you know, at the end of January or early February. Where does the, you know, the hang up with infrastructure has always been a pay for, right? And so we've kind of been living in an era where it seems like free money has been flowing even among Republicans. And do you see that being, kind of still being an issue that could hold up a major infrastructure package here, particularly with, you know, with the Senate now, you know, now obviously going Republican? Do you see that kind of, I guess that move to austerity holding up the possibility of what we're hoping would be a major infrastructure package? Well, I'm optimistic that we can arrive at a deal on something that involves a deadline, like government funding, because we're, you know, we'd be in, we'd still be in a lame duck where we're at the farthest point away from the next election, and we've got a number of people who are heading for the exits. But once you get into the new year with a new president and new members of Congress, that pay for part of it is going to get harder. I really think it's going to depend on Biden's relationships with members of the Senate who have long time horizons politically. And what I mean by that is people like Mitt Romney, who are not up for reelection until 2024, or Ben Sasse, who's not up for reelection until 2026, or Pat Toomey, who's retiring. And we still don't know the current status of, or the likely status of the working relationship between Biden and McConnell. Clearly, they've worked together better in the past than, say, Harry Reid and McConnell, or Chuck Schumer and McConnell. They were able to get a deal done on taxes during the Obama administration that involved some compromise on both their parts. And so one thing to keep in mind also on the infrastructure potential here is the Democratic chair of the Transportation Infrastructure Committee, Pete DeFazio, was in a really tough reelection race. And he survived, it looks like. So we're going to see a number of his priorities close to the top of Democrats' agenda in the House. You know, we've seen for a long time Democrats pushing to restore highway funding that was kind of tied up during the time when the Freedom Caucus steered House Republicans to the right. So these are questions we'll be watching in the months ahead. All right. And then let's talk a little bit about the, I guess, a COVID relief package, sort of a CARES Act, I don't know, you know, I guess maybe, I guess CARES Act Part Two, or whatever you want to call it. Obviously, the Secretary Mnuchin and Nancy Pelosi were unable to come to terms. I think we can argue now in retrospect, whether that was a wise move by Pelosi to play hardball until the election, or whether she should have taken what she had gotten. But needless to say, we are where we are. The majority leader has, I think, expressed support now for a slimmed down COVID relief package. Where do you, I guess, where do you see kind of the next relief package going? What's it look like? Is there going to be state and local money? Is there going to be, you know, what kind of is included in that? And then when do you see that happening? Is that a lame duck thing? Or is that a first thing out of the gate in January thing? Well, it depends whether the President wants to take credit for something heading out the door, or whether he would prefer to leave things in a place of limbo on his way out. And so, you know, there is some degree of uncertainty about his state of mind on that. If we enter into the new year, and we're talking about a CARES 2 COVID relief bill in January, I think we're likely to end up somewhere around $2 trillion for a package. And, you know, the devil will be in the details. I don't think we're likely to see as many add-ons, you know, as Democrats were pursuing in this round for, you know, economic stimulus that Republicans chided as irrelevant to COVID. I think it's going to be more a pure small business relief package. Let's see. We have a couple questions, I think, that more involve less policy, I guess, more on just the future of the electoral process, which I know is right up your alley. So can, the question is, can you see a way to a sensible election process across the country? I guess the concern here is that every state is doing something so different that, you know, it just kind of undermines trust, maybe undermines trust in the entire system. When, you know, you voted one way in Colorado, and then, you know, you're seeing what may be, you know, kind of just a totally different voting process in Oregon or Washington, you know, wherever. I mean, is there, is this kind of just the way our system is? Or, I mean, is there, you know, is there any possibility there's some kind of, I guess, more uniform method of voting and vote counting? Yeah, it's a great question. Look, I think part of the reason this election was so confusing for people is that every state does have its own approach. That's federalism at work for you. And rules on everything from postmarked deadlines to witness signatures varied from state to state. That made it exceptionally difficult for the candidates and for the media nationally to be able to communicate the rules to voters and make sure more people knew what to do to ensure that their vote would count. That really became a state-level operation for the campaigns. It's apparent that, you know, it was crucial for Democrats in Pennsylvania. Keep in mind that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court prior to the election declared that ballots that voters forgot to enclose in an inner envelope would not be counted. And in the past, about five or six percent of Pennsylvania's absentee voters had forgotten to include it in an inner envelope, and their votes had been counted. But this time, Democrats, who were primarily the ones voting by mail, had to undertake an education campaign to make sure that voters knew that. And it appears that, you know, in fact, the number of naked ballots was quite small. But this is a challenge moving forward that the nation has to address. How are we going to move to a more uniform system that makes sense in the 21st century? How are we going to expand access to the polls in a way that people can trust? Personally, I think Democrats made a huge tactical mistake by voting in the California legislature to allow for third-party ballot harvesting. I don't see the upside in that for expanding access, and if anything, it does more to legitimize trust in elections overall. The other thing I'd point out is that many states, particularly in the Sun Belt, took steps that were really positive for expanding access. In Texas, we saw polling locations, early voting locations, that were open 24 hours a day, including drive-through locations. This is how to run an election in the 21st century, and a lot of other states are way behind. And another kind of, so I think you sort of answered, touched on the next question here, but how about, I think there's a question whether there's going to be re-voting in any of these battleground states. I imagine a re-vote is not going to happen, I mean, given the cost, or then the other kind of second part of this particular question is, do you expect the mail-in ballots to be a thing of the future? Will we be going back to in-person voting and absentee ballots only in a post-COVID world? I mean, are we going to get back to actually going to the ballot box, or is it, it's kind of, I guess, and you kind of talked, are these alternative voting methods a thing of the future, and we should just kind of expect that that's going to be a part of our voting culture? Yeah, look, everyone on the losing side of the battle would like to have that battle again, right? And I know that if the certification results in an election outcome that one party doesn't like, they will look for reasons why the vote was invalid. Look, we're likely to see a result that's over 300 electoral votes, including margins in states where elections were run by Republican secretaries of state. We are likely to see margins that are outside the typical range of what would plausibly be overturned by a recount, and if for any reason the Supreme Court were to hear arguments from the losing side and order a revote absent evidence of widespread fraud, which the numbers and the patterns I see suggest nothing to, there's nothing to suggest that there there's any pattern that doesn't really fit our prior from county to county, then I think it could lead to the civil disintegration of the country. So the nation's leaders have to be careful about what they say. Let's, and I know a big concern for a lot of our members is obviously the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and a lot of those provisions expire over the next couple years. And I mean, I guess I think you answered the threat of actually an affirmative repeal of those taxes seems very minimal at this point, given that McConnell will not let that happen in the Senate. So I guess the question is, is, are there pieces of the, you know, there's certain pieces that, you know, are set to expire. I mean, is there hope on compromise on some of these provisions that, so they don't go away, or is it kind of, is, are taxes just going to be too tough to touch, I guess, in the next couple years? I suspect that the tax reform package that Republicans and President Trump signed into law the other year was the last action we'll see for a while on this. There's no clear path right now to one party getting its way on taxation matters. So most of what we're likely to see President-elect Biden do if he is, if he does become the President, and, you know, I imagine that at some point today media organizations will begin declaring him the President-elect, then we, you know, we're likely to see more action on the executive side in terms of executive orders and rollbacks of, of the rollbacks during the Trump administration on regulation of the financial sector, regulation in the energy, and more EPA side of things. So that will initially please Democrats, but legislatively the horizon is very constricted. What do you see as Biden's initial foreign policy focus? It's a good question. I think initially his, his focus would be to try and restore trust with NATO allies and re-establish trade relations by, by rolling back the tariffs that we've seen. So those are the two, kind of two biggest areas that would, would be his initial focus. I don't anticipate that he'll continue Trump's more open level of communication with North Korea or, or Russia, but Biden would enter office having met and spent time with more world leaders than just about anyone who's ever entered the presidency, and that at least initially should offer him some advantage. I know we're kind of up against time here, but we have a couple more questions here. So you mentioned that maybe the Speaker Pelosi will obviously is going to run for another term as Speaker. The question is what, is there actually any chance that she runs and does not make it? And I guess who would be possible, I mean, you know, you mentioned her whole leadership team is all over 80, so 80 years old, who would be a potential, I guess, next Speaker if, I guess, if, if there's any chance that Pelosi is not the next Speaker? Yeah, it seems as if once she goes, they would all go that, I mean, this has been a thing now for a long time since they turned 70, and now they're going, they're, you know, going on 80, and, and Pelosi and Hoyer are such rivals dating back to when they were interning together on Capitol Hill in the 1950s, I think, 50s or 60s, that they, I think they would have a very hard time, or she would have a very hard time handing it over to him. But there is an appetite, I think, among Democratic members for a generational change, and Hakeem Jeffries from New York is probably at the top of that list. All right, and then, let's see here. You, I think you answered this question, but there is a question about how do we handicap the two special Senate election seats or races in Georgia? And you want to touch on that again, just real quick? Sure. Yeah. And look, if Democrats had nominated a stronger candidate than John Ossoff, they might have a chance in that race against Perdue. But I don't think John Ossoff's the ideal fit in Georgia. He's got a pretty thin resume for the Senate. And in the other race, Warnock also has some baggage, but Loeffler is probably the better target for Democrats to focus on because of the stock sell-off scandal that she's had to spend a lot of time talking about and explaining earlier this year, but also because her personal wealth has, it rubs a lot of voters in the northern Atlanta suburbs who are pretty wealthy themselves the wrong way for some reason. And so that race looks closer to me than the other one. I could see some potential Perdue-Warnock voters, but ultimately, I think both races will go the same way, and it'll be pretty difficult for Democrats to win, especially considering the atmosphere. If we have a president-elect Biden, you know, anger is a stronger motivator than love, and I think Republicans will be extremely motivated. All right. Well, the final question is here is regarding the presidential election. Have you seen enough? You know, I am legally prohibited from being able to say that I've seen enough, even if I have. So unfortunately, I have to leave it at that. All right. Well, David, thank you so much. I know it's been a crazy few days, a crazy election season for you, so I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you again to Hierology for supporting this event, and thank you everyone for joining. Stay tuned to AED for much more analysis as we get more clarity on the results and we know what we're kind of facing over the next few months. So appreciate everyone joining, and thank you, David, and everyone stay safe. Thanks for having me.

post-election virtual event

David Wasserman

election results

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key states

uniform election process

Biden's presidency

tax cuts and jobs act

Biden's foreign policy

Georgia Senate runoff elections