♪ [theme music] ♪ >>>brian lehrer: welcome.i'm brian lehrer. suddenly november feels muchcloser. it is 2016. election year and it'sless than four weeks to the iowa caucuses, five tothe new hampshire primary but there's somethingelse telescoping time. the demeanor of our currentpresident. yesterday surrounded by families from sandyhook, san bernardino and other killing fields a graying andtearful president knowing well
his executive actions wereonly a small step urged a long march against gun violenceone that would not include him. >>>president obama: andyes it will be hard. and it won't happen overnight.it won't happen during this congress. it won'thappen during my presidency. >>>brian lehrer: here's anotherclue the presidential election is not so far off. more mudon the air. increasingly mudslinging ads aredarkening t.v. and computer screens in the early votingstates. this ad from the pack
keep the promise supports iowafront runner ted cruz. i won't spoil it byrevealing who it attacks. >>>brian lehrer: thewinner of this week's out of context award, therubio line, was from a spoof he taped. jeb bushhas also gone negative on rubio hoping a vote against marco willsomehow become a vote for jeb. this ad comes fromjeb's pac right to rise. >>>days after the paris attackssenators came together for a top secret briefing on theterrorist threat. marco rubio
was missing. fund raisingin california instead. two weeks later terroristsstruck again in san bernardino. and where was marco? fundraising again in new orleans. over the last three years rubiohas missed important national security hearings andmissed more total votes than any other senator. politicsfirst. that's the rubio way. right to riseusa is responsible for the content of his message. >>>brian lehrer: rubio's pac,conservative solutions,
isn't wasting moneycounter-attacking jeb. it takes aim at a moreformidable target, chris christie, who is athreat in new hampshire where rubio might needa solid showing to stay viable especially if cruzand trump trounce him in iowa. >>>chris christie couldwell be obama's favorite republican governor.why? christie's record. he instituted internet salestax, supported common core and liberal energy policies.incredibly christie even
backed obamacare's medicaidexpansion. chris christie. one high tax common core liberalenergy loving obamacare medicaid expanding president isenough. conservative solutions pac is responsible forthe content of this advertising. >>>brian lehrer: othernegative ads attack christie for bridge gate and new jersey'sdeficit. but he says he welcomes them all as a signhe is gaining traction in new hampshire. meanwhiledonald trump has produced his first ad, which he says hedoesn't really need but feels
guilty not buying a few becausehis campaign is so under budget. it does not attackother republicans although that might change soon ifthey begin to go after him more directly or trumpcontinues to slump in the polls. trump is reportedlyready to spend two million dollars a week on ads outof his own pocket. in this first ad note how thepictures of hillary and barack side by side cut toanother threatening pair who just happenedto be terrorists.
>>>donald trump: i'mdonald trump and i approve this message. >>>the politicians canpretend it's something else but donald trump calls itradical islamic terrorism. that's why he's calling fora temporary shutdown of muslims entering the united statesuntil we can figure out what's going on. he'll quickly cut thehead off isis and take their oil he'll stop illegalimmigration by building a wall in our southernborder that mexico will pay for.
>>>donald trump: we willmake america great again. >>>brian lehrer: thanksto politifact we know that the people running across the borderare not mexicans streaming into the usa as thevoiceover suggests but moroccan seeking refuge in a spanishenclave in africa but staying in trumps apology freezone his campaign manager said the footage was put thereon purpose to show what america could look likewithout donald at the helm. but it's not immigrationbut guns that are the issue
of the day. let's look atthis marathon through that lens. >>>brian lehrer: yes it'stime for the horse race. ted cruz's politicalcareer was launched defending the constitutionalityof guns for personal protection. turns out he is riding awave that recently has come up. according to a nationalsurvey of gun owners pew research found that in 1999many more gun owner cited hunting as the reason why theyown guns but in february of 2013 those numbers flippedwith 48% of gun owners saying
that personal protectionwas the main reason they owned a gun. just 32% saidthey own their gun for hunting purposes. andwhile obama may be right that voters overwhelminglyagree with several regulations like the extension of backgroundchecks and efforts to prevent the mentally ill from obtaininga gun the public is still divided along party linesspecifically on who should handle the issue. in apew research poll released just last month 43% saidthe republicans are better
at reflecting their viewson gun control versus fewer 37% who saiddemocrats best represent them. a gap that has beenexploited by politicians especially tea partyrepublicans. in may of 2013 when the senate rejectedthe manchin-toomey bill to extend background checks tointernet and gun show sales many politicians publicly supportedbackground checks but few tea party republicanswanted the legislation to actually pass. the reason,fear that the bill would
be a slippery slope toeven more gun controls. a fear made vividly clear bythe ted cruz campaign last night in their responseto obama's new initiative. this image of obama incombat gear ominously telling voters that hequote "wants your guns" and even before obamaspoke cruz reacted, "we don't beat the bad guys bytaking away our guns", he said, "we beat the badguys by using our guns." how could this issueaffect the horse race?
well according to the latestfield poll of likely california voters ted cruz has alreadycaught up to and surpassed trump. now leading him by twopercentage points there. with rubio inchinghis way into third place at 13%. both carson and fiorina havesubsequently fallen, clearing the way for the threenational front runners. in iowa real clear politicspoll averages show ted cruz expanding his lead overtrump while rubio has maintained a solid thirdplace and carson again
continues to fall. in newhampshire trump continues to lead but in these finalweeks he has been on a downward trend sincemid-december, which may be little comfort to themainstream g.o.p. as they suffer from the abundanceof a broad and fractious field of insider candidates.on the democratic side hillary continues to trouncebernie in national polling and endorsements. obama'sputting guns front and center, in front of democrats,might not be the best news for
sanders who had been trending upin iowa since mid-december but currently trailsclinton by almost thirteen percentage points. onthe other hand in new hampshire bernie is morethan four points ahead of hillary, o'malley barelyregisters there at 2%. all right, time to discuss theissues with our guests. they come from differentpoints of view but the same internet generation.zeeshan aleem on the left writes about politics formic.com and on the right
ryan girdusky who writesfor redalert.com. welcome to both of you. thank youvery much for coming in. zeeshan, the presidentobviously feels strongly about the gun issue. hewas crying on camera in front of the nation forheavens sakes but does this hurt the democrats inthe presidential election because the gun issuedespite how this baffles democrats seems to benefitrepublicans time after time? >>>zeeshan aleem: youknow, the public is
sharply divided onguns and as you mentioned earlier they're dividedheavily along partisan lines. it's a sort of issue thatat the moment probably could help mobilize some democratsespecially the ones who lean further left in the base.there's been a lot of excitement over the fact thatobama is trying to circumvent gridlock in congress andactually try to take action on the issue with his executiveactions. there's very positive reception fromthe progressive community,
from gun control communityregarding these kinds of things and it seemslike people were sort of waiting for him to takeissues into his own hands. >>>brian lehrer: do youthink ryan that just like we saw with another socialissue, gay marriage, that there is a generationalthing here? you know young republicans even ifthey're conservative on other things tend nowto support legal gay marriage, do you think guns, whichoften get lumped in with you
know gays and abortion as likethe three big social issues? is there a similarthing happening generationally? >>>ryan girdusky: nobecause guns is the culture war democrats lost. they wonon gay marriage but they lost on guns. i mean pewresearch did a poll last year 52% of americans for the firsttime a majority american said second amendment,protecting the second amendment is more important than usputting gun control first and the biggest growing segmentsof gun owners are women
and minorities. they'renot just white men in trucks anymore. this iswhere the democrat base is and so if you're in ohioand you're a suburban mom or north carolina andyou're reading about stories about crimeincreasing, which it has across every city, almostevery major city in the united states and youget yourself a handgun and they're talking about howto regulate it, how to do this, how to take it away,all guns are bad, that's a
major detractor againstvoting for a democrat. >>>brian lehrer: anydisagreement as a generational issue? >>>zeeshan aleem: well,you know, i'd say that one of the key questions hereis you know what exactly we're talking about whenwe talk about gun control so if you look at thingslike expanding background checks there's actually a broadconsensus across age groups, across political affiliation,that more expansive background
checks are good, which is whyobama's recent executive actions aren't likely to stirthat much controversy in terms of substance of the policy.when you talk about other things like say bans onassault weapons that tends to be a lot more controversial.so for the first time in the last twenty years supportfor bans on assault weapons have dipped below 50% so that'sthe sort of thing where you can imagine ismore polarized. >>>ryan girdusky: rightand most people, assault
weapons is not a realthing. they're talking about semiautomaticweapons which is not you know a machine gun, like,blows four hundred bullets as per second. a lotof these politics- >>>brian lehrer: still,if we're talking about an ar-15 or an uzi, imean those are powerful weapons. >>>ryan girdusky: yes butthe average american is not buying an uzi, they'rebuying, they're buying a gun that shoots one bulletbut you don't have to
reload it so it's asemiautomatic weapon. gun owners know what thatmeans and as the gun owning population hasincreased especially the 350 million guns in thiscountry and it increases into segments that weretraditionally democratic party voters they'regoing to lose those votes. that's what happened toal gore. he sat there and said, i'm going to run onan anti-gun message and he ran himself out ofthe presidency.
>>>brian lehrer: ryan, whatdo you make of trump's actual support? is this reallya big national movement or is this when you come rightdown to it as you know 25 or 30% of the 20% of americanswho are likely to vote in republican primariesif that's even the number, is this really asliver of a sliver? >>>ryan girdusky: right.it's amazing every single month trump has a new ceiling thathe can't break through. every single month i hearsomeone establishment
conservative saying, oh no. 25%,no 30%, 40%, this is where trump has to stop.no. it's a major thing. if you look at polls across thecountry on like take donald's biggest issue, immigration.take a poll by gallup, by pew, decade after decadeafter a decade a plurality if not a majority ofamericans have said slow down legal immigration. notillegals but slow down legal immigration. every singleyear. sat there and said, hey. we should slow down legalimmigration. and everyone's
saying i can't believe,how, why is he responding. america's been sayingthis for decades. >>>brian lehrer: zeeshan,what do you make of the trump phenomenon? howbig is it and what do you think it actually reflectsabout state of the country? >>>zeeshan aleem: well youknow until the primaries actually begin the pollingnumbers can be deceptive. oftentimes a candidate canbe very popular and then just sort of plunge whenthings start going in iowa
and new hampshire. buttrump does mean something. his popularity, at thevery least, is a proxy for something in the g.o.p. basethat is very concerned with, you know, basically immigrationand policies regarding counterterrorism. broadlyunder you could group under the umbrella of concern ofoutsiders or intruders and regardless of whether or nottrump fairs well in the polls in the coming future theother candidates of course have to sort of appropriatehis message in order to be
able to kind of keep theirown momentum going. >>>brian lehrer: andthe democrats i think are trying to merge thetwo issues of guns and terrorism that keepingus safe from terrorists involves, whatever elseit involves, restricting access to guns now that wesaw, you know, the way the attack came down insan bernardino. you're laughing. >>>ryan girdusky: yeahbecause democrats approach this as let's open theborders to anyone who
wants to come here andthen let's take guns away from americans who needto protect themselves from dangerous possible terrorists.that's the democratic approach, which absolutely makesno sense whatsoever. >>>brian lehrer: zeeshan? >>>zeeshan aleem: well imean you did see obama join the sort of issues with sanbernardino but i do think in general the democrats tend tokeep the issues disentangled and i think they're smart to dothat. people approach guns
very differently than terrorismhere. gun control is something that's very divisive and peoplehave, as we discussed earlier, very very different views onthem while counterterrorism is something that tendsto actually produce a lot of consensus in theamerican body politic. oftentimes when there'sa terrorist attack the entire country tends to swingto the right on issues ranging from surveillance to moreaggressive foreign policy. >>>brian lehrer: you know whatthere isn't consensus on
even what the big issues areit seems between the parties, republicans moraliststerrorism as the top issue to be concerned about.democrats i think still list economic issues as more whatto be concerned about and i think you certainly seethis what the candidates are talking about from eachparty on the campaign trails. does that make sense to youas somebody who might lean more toward the democrats issue?are the republicans talking too much about terrorism?are the democrats talking
too little about it? >>>zeeshan aleem: well imean generally speaking the parties and theirfollowers tend to have different priorities. i did lookat a poll in december you know very credible poll thatshowed that terrorism was a top concern across political linesbut i wouldn't be surprised to see that there's a disparitybetween democrats and republicans. i think forthe republicans it's a smart strategy. there's nolimit to how much you can
talk about terrorism andsort of fear monger and talk about war in that senseyou can't really exhaust the attention of the publicand donald trump is obviously rode this wave ofpopularity on stoking fears. >>>brian lehrer: at thesame time ryan you have, you know, less than a chanceof being struck by lightning. chance of being victimof an actual terrorist attack, the chance that yourfamily is going to fall victim to the declining fortunes longterm of the middle class
is much much much much higher. >>>ryan girdusky: yeahbut if you are killed by a terrorist you don't carewhat the chances are. you care that you got killedby a terrorist or your family member did. and inplaces like san bernardino that matters a whole lotmore. it's an awakening. yeah the chances aredifferent depending upon things on but also trumphas, being the leading front runner, has hit onthe economy. he's talked
about trade, he's talkingabout bring back factory jobs. he's trying to hitback into the rust belt, there's a chance forprosperity again and i don't think that, i thinkthat democrats have been a little disingenuous withthe american voter and trying to play to thehopes and fears of the american voter by offeringa way towards a higher growth and restoringthe middle class without actually presentinga plan for growth.
>>>brian lehrer: do youthink millennials are going to vote in largenumbers in the primaries? bernie sanders seems tobe the biggest thing on campus. but are people goingto turn out on either side? >>>ryan girdusky: i thinkthat people going to vote for bernie for sure. i thin peopleare very excited for bernie. people that i know arevery excited for bernie. and i think that trump is goingto win a plurality of the youth vote for sure. i meanthat's what the polls indicate
across the board. sois turnout going to be huge? probably not. i think i'dbe higher than in 2012 but not significantly so. >>>brian lehrer: youreported on some campus trump chapters springing up. >>>ryan girdusky: yes.there's a couple of kids outside of north carolinathat started a pro-trump campus, pro-trump campus activism, idon't know how big it's actually forming. it's certainlynot as big as the bernie sanders
activism and you know it'sreally funny though because rand paul was reallyhoping to gain momentum from what his father did four yearsago where his father had tremendous support fromthe youth vote and from independents and butrand's lost a lot of that and because you know he'snot the outsider that he had hoped to be. >>>brian lehrer: allright. you two stay there. we're going to bring insome additional evidence.
>>>brian lehrer: time forevidence based politics where we meet a scholarwho has studied an issue over simplified bycampaign rhetoric. the election season so far hasdefinitely been shaken up by not just donaldtrump but his supporters. they're often describedas white working class americans who haven'tfully recovered from the recession or long termchanges in the economy but further insight on thisright wing populism may
come from germany. a newstudy there has found that as modern germanmanufacturing saw tougher competition from othercountries such as china political parties on thefar right were able to build more support andto explain this we have christian dippel he joinsus via skype. he is a professor of economics atucla. his working paper for the national bureauof economic research is called globalization andit's discontent: trade
shocks and voting behavior.welcome. hello from new york. thank you for doing thisprofessor. >>>chritsian dippel: hibrian. nice to meet you. thanks for having me. >>>brian lehrer: let's putup a graph right away from your study, which showsthat as trade increased the support for the far rightparty in germany or parties in germany also increased.what does this tell us? >>>chritsian dippel: wellwhat we show is the papers
50% about the fact thattrade integration leads to more import competitionand also leads to more export exodus formanufacturing workers in wealthy developedcountries like germany and so 50% of the paper isabout how do votes respond to this increased importcompetition, how to votes respond to this increasedexport access opportunities. and then the other halfof the paper, the other 50%, is what explains therelationship and so we really
emphasize the labor markettransmission channels that are between the tradecompetition or trade access and the voting outcomes. >>>brian lehrer: it seemsvery rational the way you lay it out and very linear.the more jobs that are lost because of imports the morepeople join far right parties. the more jobs that are createdbecause of exports the fewer people join.is it that rational in germany? is it that linear?
>>>chritsian dippel: idon't know what either rational or linear means in that casebut the data says that what you just said is true. andso we have in germany what's sort of nice, what you can'treally do in the united states, is you've got this reallybroad party spectrum and that party spectrum is reallystable over time so what we can actually do is wecan look at small regions of germany, so a unit thatyou call a local labor market, think of that as perhaps acounty, and we could look at
how does voting behaviorchange over time in those regions as they're beinghit with different sort of exogenous exposure tothe global trading environment. and that can be agood thing, export excess, it can be a bad thing, importcompetition. it depends on your industrial structure andwhat's happening in the rest of the global economy. >>>brian lehrer: and your papersays that it's really only the far right partiesthere that have responded to
trade integration. themore moderate parties just don't deal with it at all or don'tfind it to be their issue? >>>chritsian dippel:the more moderate parties don't respond and so whenyou say the paper finds it i just want to be clear thatit is a very quantitative paper and so when we say the paperfinds it's the data says. the data says of the entirepolitical spectrum it's the far right where the action is andso with the mainstream doesn't see any action the liberalsdon't stand the action and
the far left doesn't seeany action or barely any. >>>brian lehrer: so in acountry like the united states with a two party system how doyou see the german experience as analogous or not? >>>chritsian dippel: it'stricky. you know it's speculative because it's out ofsample. germany doesn't have a donald trump or ted cruzand the united states doesn't have a far right partyand so it's difficult to say. it's certainly, what i think iwould say, the finding that
does travel, the generalizablepart of it is there's an element of populism and it'sprobably true in most city countries that the politicalmainstream has a hard time positioning itself as in anyway anti-globalization because where's globalization comingfrom? it's coming from free trade agreementsthat the political mainstream is signing off on. and so aswe're feeling these effects more strongly it's got to besomeone on the fringe who gets to benefit fromthat. and it's going to be
highly country specificwho that is, you know? >>>brian lehrer: you saywe don't have a far right in the united states or a farright party analogous to those in germany. do you thinkthat donald trump is that to any degree because heactually is a conservative who opposes these free tradeagreements as being bad for american workers while mostamerican conservatives support the free trade agreementsbecause they're more pro-business and at thesame time he's got some of
the nativist elements youknow of being anti-muslim immigration, anti-mexicanimmigration so does trump come closer to the european farright parties than anything else we havein the united states? >>>chritsian dippel: perhapshe comes closer than anything else we have in the unitedstates but he still pretty far away. so i think, i think ifwe had done a study of france, so i've got to emphasizethat what we're doing you need all the data to come togetherin a way that's very difficult
to bring together and soit's very hard to find a context where you canstudy what we study but suppose we had donethis for france and we had found an effect on the frontnational, so the le pen party, i would maybe be a littlebit more comfortable drawing direct comparisonsbecause the le pen party, the front national, in manyways, is far more moderate than these far right partiesin germany. you know that they're advocating things thatdonald trump what
never endorse- >>>brian lehrer: and muchbigger in france right? germany maybe becauseof its history of having nazism is moreallergic to that? >>>chritsian dippel: wellyes. it's difficult to say because it's two sides ofthe same coin. one thing is that it's much smallerin germany the other aspect is that the party's are muchmore extreme and so it's two sides of the same coin.
>>>brian lehrer: let mesee if our guests here in new york have a questionfor you or a thought on this. >>>ryan girdusky: i have aquick question for you. so the a.d.f., which is themain probably far right party in germany theyhave only seen their poll numbers go up significantlyso within the last few months since the syrian refugeecrisis. do you think, and if you look at nationwidefar right parties everywhere from argentina, guatemala,poland with the law and
justice party, front national,ukip, across the board have seen their numbers rise. isit more of a correlation that's going on? that tradehappens to be going on at the same time there areother things causing this effect rather then juststrictly being trade? >>>chritsian dippel: so,you know, applied economic researchers are very verycareful in sort of how we tease causation from correlationand so i think it's certainly true that immigrationcorrelates strongly with
anti-globalization sentimentbut the way that we set up our data the basic naturalexperiment that you can think about in our data is we're notdoing a, we're not doing a region that's affectedby immigration versus not affected by immigration.we're not doing a rust belt versus not a rustbelt region. we're doing within a set of manufacturingin regions given your industrial profile do youhappen to be specialized in industries that chinahappened to be expanding its
supply dramaticallyover the last decade? or did you happen to bespecialized in industries the chinese consumptionincreased dramatically. and so we're really separatingthat from these other things like immigration,which also matter. >>>brian lehrer: and ihave to jump in because we have thirty seconds leftin the show. so zeeshan, a last thought from youon what we've just been hearing? >>>zeeshan aleem: well youknow i was just thinking
that you know there issort of a rhythm to things in american history andwe've had moments in the past where we've seenthese kind of nativist impulse in response toeconomic insecurity from white americans. if youlook at say during the gold rush in california inthe 19th century the way that sort of european americansrespond to the influx of chinese immigrants there,there was a whole movement to get chinese people out ofthere and eventually lead to
a ban on chinese immigrationfor close to a century. >>>brian lehrer: and thatis it. we thank you all for joining us this week.finally we should note that the republican fieldis down to twelve now with the dropping out of formernew york governor george pataki. pataki had been the most directin warning against the trump presidency with hisstand up to trump slogan. pataki had also criticized hisparty for denying climate change and he disagreedon some social issues such as
abortion and gay rights.personality apart, not the year for insider liberalrepublicans. in leaving the race pataki said, "i amconfident that we can elect the right person. someonewho can bring us together." we will see about that. areminder, president obama's final state of the union messageis next tuesday. we'll delve into that and thecandidate's reactions on next week's show. i'm brianlehrer. thanks for watching.
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