As the United States chooses its 47th president, we join John Barron and Chas Licciardello, co-hosts of the ABC's Planet America, for a dumpster fire-side chat about what the fact is going on in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
All eyes will be on the United States in coming days as it chooses its 47th president. But in this country, no one is likely to be more focused on the election than John Barron and Chas Licciardello, co-hosts of the ABC's Planet America.
This will be the fourth US presidential election they've covered and undoubtedly the strangest, with convicted felon and former president Donald Trump up against last-minute drop-in candidate Kamala Harris.
Barron and Licciardello are themselves a curious coupling, but highly successful - the besuited journalist, author and one time research associate at the United States Studies Centre and the T-shirt wearing, hyperactive comedian infamous for gatecrashing the 2007 APEC gathering in Sydney dressed as Osama bin Laden. It's a winning formula that lifts the veil on a sometimes baffling political contest.
The Echidna, the ACM network's daily newsletter, joined them for a fireside chat about the strange planet we call America.
...................................................................
Many Australians think America is cooked. They want to know how someone like Trump can be a contender after January 6, the indictments, the lies, and probably above all for the Australian perspective, the braggartly behaviour?
Chas Licciardello: I think the thing Australians need to realise about America is that it is driven by hatred. It is driven by fear and hatred and paranoia and antagonism against the other side. And as much as Trump does things we find difficult to understand, he's not going to lose his audience as long as he makes the other side angry. That's the thing he's actually an expert on - making Democrats angry. And as long as he's making them angry he's going to get 50 per cent of the support of the electorate and that is sadly the way America works.
Why is it important for Australia to pay attention to US politics and particularly presidential elections?
John Barron: American politics is both a cautionary tale to Australian politics and Australian voters. It's also - to an extent - a tribute to our system of government and the glory that is the compulsory registration to vote in Australia. In the United States a third of all voters who are eligible to vote will not vote. In elections where 50,000 or 100,000 voters in half a dozen swing states determine the outcome, the fact that maybe 70 million Americans are going to just stay at home rather than vote and is something that is quite concerning. And the fact they spend billions of dollars trying to get people angry enough, engaged enough, passionate enough to vote.
As for why Australians should care, obviously since the fall of Singapore in 1942 Australia's foreign policy has been pretty much in lockstep with the United States. If the United States goes to war or defends an ally in war such as Ukraine, Australia tends to follow rather obediently behind. So whoever's behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office has a big impact on Australian lives.
CL: Even if you don't care about politics you should follow it because you can think of American politics as the most expensive, dramatic and consequential reality show on television.
Has it always been that way? Has it become more of a reality show?
CL: I think American politics has always been fascinating and dramatic and gripping. The Trump years have made it more accessible to more people. It used to be gripping and fascinating and dramatic for nerds and now it's gripping and fascinating and dramatic for everyone. I wouldn't say it's become more of a circus because it's always been a circus. I would say it's become more tabloid as time has gone on. There's a lot less policy than there used to be, that's for sure.
JB: I would say in that period that American politics has not just become more polarised and more extreme but there's greater product differentiation between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans have tended to shift right in a populist direction under Trump. Democrats have become more openly progressive certainly than they were in the Clinton and Obama years. So you've now got two groups in America - Democrats and Republicans - who are living in entirely different information ecosystems. And they can't understand the other person's opinion anymore. Both sides are absolutely convinced of their perception of the other, which is why things get so rancorous and bitter and ugly.
What drew you both to US politics?
CL: The thing that really drew me in was when I was at uni and staying up quite late and watching TV every night. The NBC Today Show used to be on at 1am, right in my TV viewing time. And I started to watch a lot of American news at the time Bill Clinton was getting impeached. That was the last time things were particularly out of control in America. It was fascinating and dramatic and it really captured me. It was also about the time the internet was really taking off so I could read a lot more and did. The thing about American politics which people will be horrified to discover is that once you're hooked it's very hard to get that hook out of you because the story just keeps on going. It never ends.
JB: Growing up in the 1980s in the Reagan era, also watching the NBC Today Show with Jane Pauley and Bryant Gumble. The very idea of Ronald Reagan, this B-grade movie actor having his vaguely demented hand hovering over the nuclear button, we all saw this existential threat of nuclear catastrophe. America was fascinating because it was the dominant culture, its culture, its products, its fast food, its movies, its music dominated Australia in the 1980s. And then, at the top of the tree, was Ronald Reagan, this affable, anecdote telling guy who also seemed to be dangerously extreme and likely to start a war with the Soviet Union. It was a fascinating thing to try to get your head around. Like Chas, it started a decades long intrigue.
It's interesting that you mentioned Reagan. When he was first elected a shock rippled through Australia. How could this actor of terrible old westerns, who seems really old and a little demented, be taken seriously? Do you think Australians have largely forgotten that there was a precedent to Trump?
JB: In a sense Trump is explained by Reagan, at least Reagan and Trump both explain America. Reagan harks back to a golden era of cowboys and good guys in white hats and the greatest generation that fought and won the Second World War. He was very reassuring in the aftermath of Watergate and Vietnam. Trump, too, obviously in aftermath of the War on Terror, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Global Financial Crisis, he represented a throwback to the golden era which was the greed-is-good 1980s. Both of them embodied what felt like a recently lost golden age. And both were extraordinary performers on television particularly.
SIGN UP TO THE ECHIDNA DAILY NEWSLETTER
Trump is, for his many, many faults, an extraordinarily captivating, charismatic television presence. He will be at the same time, in the same breath, the most dishonest and the most honest politician you have ever met. He will say things that are shockingly true and shockingly false. He has no internal checking mechanism, he'll just skip through both of them and quite happily say the two things in the one paragraph.
CL: I think Americans have kind of forgotten there was a precedent for Trump. Surprisingly few Americans seem to be aware that Make America Great Again was Ronald Reagan's slogan before Trump came along. And I think also that ironically the advent of Trump has gone to rehabilitate Reagan's reputation somewhat amongst the left. It's funny the way people's perceptions change over time as we move on in the political story. Every president over time becomes more popular in hindsight. Democrats found a whole new respect for George W. Bush when Trump came along and the spoiler for those reading this article in 2032 and 2036 - you're going to look back on Trump with a positive hue as well at some point in the future.
Some Aussies genuinely think Trump is OK. How do we tell them - is it even our role to tell them - that he's not?
JB: Polls have shown that about 30 per cent of Australians would support Donald Trump, including, I saw in a Yougov poll about a month ago, 10 per cent of Greens voters, which was a bit of a head scratcher. Donald Trump's appeal is in some ways not dissimilar to the appeal Pauline Hanson has had in Australian politics at times. She speaks to people who are sometimes just dismissed out hand as being ignorant and xenophobic In reality, these are people who are often economically insecure, people who are in business for themselves , whose families don't have a lot of intergenerational wealth, who've had to come up the hard way, don't see government as necessarily helping them, which is why it's a message that tends to resonate whether it's in rural and regional Australia or rural and regional United States.
CL: I think that the more you speak about the symbol of people's desires, which is the politician, and the less you talk about their actual desires behind the politician they like, the more likely you are to have conflict and misunderstanding and be speaking at cross purposes. The more we can focus on what is motivating people's preferences, what their actual base desires and beliefs are, the more we can actually speak directly to each other and understand each other. And maybe make some progress.
What's the one thing likely to get Kamala Harris over the line?
JB: In an electoral sense it's the hope that, unlike Joe Biden even in 2020 and certainly Hillary Clinton in 2016, Kamala Harris can appeal to a larger proportion of younger voters, black and brown voters, to come out and vote, the kinds of people who were brought into the political system often for the first time by Barack Obama's candidacy in 2008 and to a lesser extent when Obama was reelected in 2012. If she can build on that coalition with disaffected former Republicans then she can potentially piece together majorities in those half a dozen swing states that are going to decide the election. There is a danger though that because she probably appeals to slightly fewer white working class male voters and possibly to slightly fewer black male voters than Joe Biden did - and certainly than Obama did - there's a possibility Harris could get closer to Trump in all those swing states but still lose enough of those swing states to lose the election. So this really is on a knife edge and there are quite foreseeable reasons why could see either candidate win.
CL: I think that the key question Kamala Harris decided we were going to ask ourselves at the beginning of her campaign was: What do we think about Trump? She decided very early on that she was going to run a small target strategy. And she was going to make this election about her not being Trump. She took a gamble that there would be more people who would prefer not Trump than Trump voting in the key states. So the answer to that question will determine the election.
An interesting parallel to Albanese's campaign in 2022, much of which was based on the fact he was not Scott Morrison.
CL: Australia invented the small target strategy as far as I can see. America's ripping us off.
After 2016 and 2020 should we pay any more attention to polls, which seemed to be wildly inaccurate?
CL: I think if you're asking is there any better method of deciding who is going to win an election two weeks out by doing a poll, the answer is no but that's the best we've got. If you're asking are we actually going to know who's going to win by looking at the polls I would say of all the elections this will be the one where we don't know because it's just so close. This could be landslide to either side at this point in time looking at the polls. And that's not having a go at the pollsters. Even if the polls are 100 per cent accurate I think it impossible to be able to tell who is going to win the election. I do think though that the accuracy or inaccuracy of the polls has been wildly overstated. The pollsters themselves weren't saying Hillary Clinton's absolutely going to win. It was the way people interpreted those polls. Some of the aggregators, some of the media commentators, went way too hard towards Clinton in 2016 and then people just learnt this lesson that polls aren't accurate anymore, which is not true.
JB: I think even though polls are a snapshot in time rather than a prediction of the future they're always going to have that margin of error, plus or minus two and a half, three percentage points, depending on the sample size. And, of course, in the United States the other big issue is that you don't just have the choice of voting for Trump or Harris, you have the choice of staying at home. And a lot of voters don't even know themselves if they're going to end up voting on a Tuesday in November. Even though there are other ways of voting early it's still a bit of a hassle to vote on a work day. That has an impact.
Since 2012, when you first brought us Planet America, has it become more difficult to separate fact from fiction?
CL: As someone who likes to take a deep dive or two I have to say it is unmistakably more difficult to sort fact from fiction now than it was 12 years ago. The resources we have to find facts are much better than they were. The American government publishes a lot more data than it used to and it's available online freely and easily, so that's great. But the fact is there are many, many more people who are deliberately trying to mislead you. And those people trying to mislead you have a much louder voice than they used to as well. And it makes it very difficult sometimes to sort between two competing claims when all you can see are just the claims.
JB: They say a passenger plane doesn't crash because one thing goes wrong, it crashes because a hundred things go wrong. I think the truth has crashed because a hundred things have gone wrong. Trump is one of the very biggest parts of that. He's the catastrophic failure because we've never had a politician who will lie as freely and frequently as Donald Trump. And that is a matter of record. At the same time we've got social media which means that misinformation is spread very easily. We've got a more partisan media in the United States. So Trump goes unchecked on a lot of platforms. They spread those mistruths.
On election day what are the battleground states we should keep our eyes on?
CL and JB: PENNSYLVANIA!
CL: I'd throw in Wisconsin and Michigan. They are the three states if Kamala Harris wins she's going to win the election and if she doesn't win she's probably not going to win the election.
JB: For those old enough to remember Florida's role in the 2000 election, that could well be Pennsylvania. There are other paths for Harris to win if she were to lose Pennsylvania. She could cobble together enough electoral college votes elsewhere but it would be very, very difficult. So it looks like what they call the blue wall of the upper mid west is what you need as a minimum.
If the polls are out to the extent they were in 2016 and 2020 then Donald Trump is in fact in front and he is going to win this election. If the polls are out in the same way they were in 2022 in the mid-term elections when Republican support was overestimated, Harris is going to win by a comfortable margin. It really is a flip of the coin and we won't know until some time in the late afternoon of November 6.
What have been the best and worst moments for the candidates in this campaign?
JB: Trump's best moment was his debate against Joe Biden in late June. It wasn't anything particular that Donald Trump did but he just stood back and allowed Joe Biden, who was clearly both unwell and having a bad day for a man in his 80s, to hang himself. Obviously surviving an assassination attempt shortly thereafter was also a high water mark for him. But his lies, his xenophobia in that second debate against Kamala Harris, repeating that absolute lie about Haitians eating people's pets. If it hadn't been so serious it would have been laughable. That was an appalling low moment I would say for Trump.
CL: I would say Kamala Harris's high point would have been her first rally because there were severe doubts among Democrats about her ability to be a competitive candidate when she first began. There were lots of doubts about the way she conducted herself as vice president. But then that first rally she held she was perfect. She was charismatic. She was enthusiastic. The word that they were throwing around at the time was "joy". There was a palpable sense of relief from Democrats. And she shot up in the polls in the days after that. In terms of the low point for Kamala Harris, this is an interesting one. She's actually been working very hard to not have any low points. She's been very choosy in the way she's conducted this campaign. She's not put herself in an environment where she's susceptible to low points. But I would say that some of the interviews that she had early on were pretty ropy.
JB: I'd possibly cite the debate rather than the first rally as Harris's highest moment just because the stakes were made so much higher as a result of Biden's complete implosion in his debate against Trump. Harris was able to dominate that debate and allay some of the concerns about whether she would be able to think on her feet and come across as a viable alternative president. I think as a low moment - it's not a single moment - but her inability to negotiate the tricky terrain she's on, that she's still Joe Biden's vice president. She hasn't found a way to claim credit for the good things and distance herself from the bad things but this is a campaign that has been thrown together in pretty extraordinary circumstances at the last minute. So instead she turns it back onto Trump and tries to argue to people how bad Trump is and how he should be disqualified.
You spend weeks soaking in all the nastiness, the poisonous rhetoric, yet week after week you present this fairly fizzy but quite serious program. You manage to bring us this story in a cool almost lighthearted fashion. How do you manage that?
CL: I would say that as the year progresses there are times when I get a little overwhelmed by not so much the news but more just the general antagonism that is associated with American politics. I think the thing that keeps me light and enthusiastic when I'm on air is the gratitude knowing that I don't need to turn up to work in a tie at 7am every morning, like everyone else. As long as I can keep on living basically like a university student well into my 40s I'm pretty happy with my life despite the topics I talk about.
Where do you get your T-shirts? When we got to Coolidge I thought this bloke's going to Redbubble or something.
CL: I get them printed on the internet. Coolidge was around in an era when they didn't even have political T-shirts. If it's from an era with T-shirts I obviously will get T-shirts reprinted from the past but for the really old stuff I get them from buttons because that's what they used to have. They used to have buttons with these logos so I get the button printed on a T-shirt.
JB: And then there are the T-shirts that have been sent in by viewers and political operatives as well. We've had people who've run a lot of campaigns - ran George W. Bush's Iowa campaign in 2004 - who both Chas and I know quite well. He clears out his garage by sending Chas old T-shirts from many and varied campaigns.
John, how much red cordial do you let Chas drink before taping each show?
JB: Beverages and snack foods, Chas has most of them, not just your mainstream American beverages and snack food. When Dr Pepper brings out a diet watermelon flavoured version of Dr Pepper, Chas will be drinking that . But Chas doesn't actually need any form of stimulant to get ready for the show each week. He usually survives on about 30 minutes' sleep before doing the show and yet he manages to power through it week after week year after year.
- At 8pm AEDT on November 6 (election day November 5 in the US) Planet America will have a one-hour live show on ABC News channel, repeated at 9.30pm on local channels.
