JFK, politics, & the 2024 election with Larry Sabato
Willy Walker: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to another Walker Webcast. It is my great joy to have my friend Dr. Larry Sabato join me once again. At this time when we're a year away from the 2024 presidential election. We've just come out of some midterm elections. I look forward to hearing from Dr. Sabato's views on what happened the week before last as it relates to Virginia, Ohio and Wisconsin and about a bunch of other election results.
And I also want to spend time today and we'll start there talking about Larry's book on President Kennedy, which he wrote a decade ago. But it is entitled “The Kennedy Half-Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy.” Given that we are now 60 years and two days past that fateful day, I'd love to get his perspectives on whether we know anything more than we did a decade ago when he wrote that book, and talk a little bit about Kennedy's lasting legacy and some other pieces to the book that I found as I read it – really interesting as it relates to kind of harbingers of the political world we live in today. Some things that we've changed and might have gotten right and some things that we potentially haven't changed and gotten wrong.
Quick intro of Dr. Sabato. Even though many of you who joined us on the Walker webcast before know very well his background, but real quick and then we'll dive in.
Dr. Larry Joseph Sabato is an American political scientist and political analyst. He is the Robert Kent Gooch Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, where he is also the founder and director of the Center for Politics, which works to promote civic engagement and participation in politics. The Center for Politics is also responsible for the publication of Sabato's Crystal Ball, an online newsletter and website that provides free political analysis and electoral projections.
Dr. Sabato is a graduate of the University of Virginia, where he was president of the student body. Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and earned his Ph.D. in Political Science. Dr. Sabato has won four Emmy Awards. He has written over 20 books, his most recent A Return to Normalcy: The 2020 Election That Almost Broke America.
So, Larry, first of all, thank you for coming on. I hope you had a happy Thanksgiving in Charlottesville. We were at the top talking about how both of us have been a little under the weather recently, and so I'm glad to see that you're on the mend. And as you can tell by my voice, I feel like I'm on the mend, but I still sound like I'm a little sick. Let's talk about Kennedys for a second, because it is 60 years since that fateful day in Dallas.
You studied not only President Kennedy as a president, but then also everything that went on around that day. Do we know anything more today, Larry, than we did a decade ago when you wrote that book as it relates to the conspiracy theories and release of documents around the assassination of Kennedy than we did a decade ago?
Larry Sabato: Well, my shop at the Center for Politics carefully examines each new document that's released. Of course, there are still thousands of pages that haven't been released. They were supposed to be released in October 2017. And some of the agencies, especially the CIA, some FBI and others, objected to the release of X, Y and Z because we don't know what's in there. And others were released in a redacted fashion to the extent that you really don't know what they're about or they don't tell you anything. But we review all of them. We'll continue to do that as I assume future releases will be occurring at, I hope, regular intervals. I did have an intelligence official tell me ten years ago when I asked him, when will we actually see all these documents. And he said, “My guess would be 2063.” That is the 100th anniversary of the assassination. I don't know about you, but I'm planning on being dead by then, and I'm not going to have a chance to go through the other ones.
But anyway, we have reviewed them. And I would summarize it this way. We actually have learned some interesting stories. We've learned some interesting sidelights. We have learned more about various conspiracy theories, as alleged by people who contacted the FBI or the CIA or other agencies of government. What we haven't learned is anything, in my view, at least millions of people disagree with me. But in my view, we haven't learned anything that would change the basic narrative of what we know about the assassination.
Now, when I say that if your audience is at all representative of the American public, two thirds will disagree with me instantly because two thirds of Americans, even now, 60 years later, believe there was a conspiracy. They do not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was the only shooter, or at least there could have been other people involved. I don't dispute because we didn't get a chance to interrogate him very extensively that Lee Harvey Oswald might have been encouraged to do this when he was in Mexico City and visiting the Soviet embassy and the Cuban embassy. Or there may have been others. There were other suspect individuals that he seemed to come across with some regularity.
But in terms of other shooters, I'm sorry. I've studied this for years. I was traumatized by the assassination. I was in Catholic school. I got involved in politics. Well, partly because my dad was a World War II vet and believed it was very important. But also because John F. Kennedy just happened to come to my town, Norfolk, Virginia, four days before the election, and my dad took me out to a big rally. I was so excited because there were tens of thousands of people there and they were so excited. And it addicted me to the extent that I've always stayed interested in politics. But having said that, and having myself jumped down the rabbit hole for years and years and years, I believe there was a conspiracy without having the background knowledge other than the Warren Commission. And I don't blame the staff. I say that because the few remaining living staff members will jump down your throat very quickly if you utter a word of criticism of what they did. But my criticism is that they weren't told some of the critical information that they should have had access to and that members of the commission, real members of the commission, not staff members like Allen Dulles, the fired CIA director who was put on this commission, he was fired by Kennedy. I've always found that curious. They knew about all these assassination attempts by the Kennedy administration against Fidel Castro, among other things. There are loads of things that were relevant to the Kennedy assassination, and the commission was kept completely in the dark. So, you know, I have my doubts about parts of the story. I certainly have doubts about the Warren Commission report, again, not because of the staff, but because of what they were told by the members and by the leaders of the CIA and to some degree, the FBI, though, I have to say J. Edgar Hoover was more forthcoming because it was just perfectly obvious that they had screwed it up. They were following and checking in with Oswald with some frequency. And incredibly, he had even gone to the FBI headquarters in Dallas just a little bit before the assassination, angry that one of the the FBI agents, Mr. Hosty, had gone to see his wife and threatened him and the FBI and indicated that he would blow up the headquarters of the FBI if they came to see his wife again. Normally, that would cause me, if I were an FBI official, to call him in for close questioning and maybe to have him arrested or certainly in this day and time we would. But he was allowed to go and he was still there waiting by the elevators when somebody read the note. So there are so many pieces of it that are pure incompetence. There are pieces of the Kennedy assassination that are inexplicable. There are pieces of the assassination that have been misrepresented by various people in government for years and years and years.
And this is the most important part – there were lots of things destroyed by the FBI and the CIA. The FBI destroyed that note that Oswald sent after the assassination, after it, saying that, oh, well, he's dead now. This is after he was shot by Jack Ruby, oh dead now, we don't need to see this. What? That critical piece of information is evidence. The CIA, of course, has never owned up to what they destroyed almost certainly in the 1960s and 1970s. So, look, there are plenty of reasons to be cynical. There are plenty of justifications for criticism. I agree with most of them. But that doesn't mean that there was a conspiracy because in the 1960s, like previous decades, it was entirely too easy for someone to shoot and kill a president. The amazing thing is that so many of them survived their time in office.
So even now, as we certainly improve the process tremendously in the Secret Service and outside the Secret Service, but even now, there is no way to protect the president at every moment of every day if you're going to let him out of the cage of the White House.
Willy Walker: So a couple of things. First of all, you did note that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't even on the FBI watch list, which is stunning to me, given what you just talked about, about the fact that he walked in and said he’d blow up the building.
Larry Sabato: I mean, he was followed by an FBI agent who checked in with him regularly because he was a defector. This is James Hosty, the FBI agent who did this. So I would say the FBI kept some track of him. What we didn't really know until relatively recently is that the CIA, despite their protestations for decades that they had no following Oswald – knew nothing about him. And, even though he was one of, I think, nine United States defectors to the Soviet Union, what kind of idiot did you have to be to defect to the workers paradise? I mean, it was obvious to the 99.9% of the population, but the CIA was opening Oswald's mail at least as late as October 1963. They've hidden so much. They’re still not telling the full truth. They're just not.
Willy Walker: You also point out that he went to Mexico City and was shuttling, if you will, between the Cuban embassy and the Russian embassy, trying to get a visa to go to Russia. And yet with all of that background and people writing notes about him visiting and this and that, there's no video of him going into either embassy, which I found to be one of those other kind of suspicious things because we know that the CIA was watching both of those embassies and videoing people going in and out. And yet, miraculously, here he is, shuttling back and forth, trying to get a visa. And lo and behold, there's no video from a CIA camera.
Larry Sabato: Well, there are tapes of his calls to the embassy. But here's the incredible part – those tapes that just completely disappeared. But we do have transcripts, apparently. Who knows if they're the real transcripts or if they've changed any of it. But there is a photo of Lee Harvey Oswald, which was released with him coming out of I think it was the Soviet embassy, one of the two embassies in Mexico City that was released within days of the assassination. There's just one problem, it wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald. Not even close. Not even close.
Willy Walker: He was six foot tall rather than 5’9” and a couple of other things.
Larry Sabato: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's just you could not. You couldn't create a series of activities and releases and statements that would lead more people to believe there was a conspiracy than what the U.S. government actually did. Some of it was on purpose, and some of that was complete incompetence, like losing Lee Harvey Oswald's fingerprints. That was the FBI. Really?
Willy Walker: One of the things that I thought was very interesting was that in 1963, assaulting or killing the president of the United States was not a federal crime.Talk about that for a moment as it relates to the scene of the crime, the moment that President Kennedy was then driven to the hospital. You talk in the book extensively about Dallas P.D. stepping in FBI. Who's on first? What's on second? What happens to the limo? What happens to the evidence inside of the limo? There was the limo being cleaned literally by someone at the hospital rather than leaving the evidence in place. Talk through that, if you will, that in 1963, it was not a federal crime to assault a president of the United States. Therefore, there was no mandate that the FBI versus the Dallas police stepped in.
Larry Sabato: Yes, and here's the good news. It now is a federal crime. How about that? They say we make no progress.
Willy Walker: 1965!
Larry Sabato: We make progress. It's silly. And it took the government getting a little love track until 1968 after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy to ban mail order sales of rifles. You would think that after President Kennedy was killed for a grand total of $19.95, that's what it cost. Oswald, via a pseudonym, A. Hedel, to buy that rifle, that it took that long to do that one tiny thing. But of course, we have no place to talk. We still have an outlawed AK 47 or an AR 15, right? We did it for a period of time and then it lasted. And now anybody can just come on in and on the right day, you might not even get the records that indicate they're not qualified to buy one. So we are doing just as poor a job, if not worse then than our predecessors did in the 1960s.
But anyway, there was a fight between the coroner there in Dallas who insisted, as the Secret Service were pulling the and carrying the coffin of President Kennedy with Kennedy's body in it to put in the ambulance, to take to Air Force One to fly back to Washington. And he interrupted them and said, where are you going? You can't do that. The law here in Texas is that when there's a murder, you must have the autopsy done right here. Right here, right now. Well, how long will that take? The Secret Service man asked, and he said, Well, it could be May 10th, 24 hours, maybe longer. Can you imagine making Mrs. Kennedy wait there and not allow that?
Well, I guess the president could have flown back the new president could have flown back on Air Force One, but he would have received a great deal of criticism for leaving President Kennedy's body there. Basically, the Secret Service and I don't blame them. They were on the verge of drawing their guns and they said, buddy, get out of the way. We're gone. We're out of here. And they did. They turned and the guy stepped aside. The irony is he was right, there was a Texas law. Sometimes common sense has to overtake a law – and fortunately, it did in this case.
Willy Walker: It's really interesting, Larry, because then after the 1965 law was passed, which made it a federal offense to assault a president. Assault is the actual term. It's obviously anything, including killing them, that when John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan, that he went to the D.C. jail and then was taken down I-95 to Quantico and was held at Quantico under Marine guard, because at that time, it was actually a federal law. Therefore, federal officials stepped in and took control of him so that you didn't have the same thing that happened at the Dallas jailhouse as it relates to Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby.
Larry Sabato: Yes. And again, you know, I'm not a great fan of Jagger Hoover, that's for sure, especially given everything we've learned. And you know, his wiretaps on Martin Luther King and all the rest of it. But I will give Hoover this: Hoover was very worried about the incompetence of the Dallas Police Department. And he called on Saturday, the day after the assassination, to talk to Jesse Curry, the police chief, who had assured Dallas ahead of time that absolutely nothing would happen. Everything was covered. There was no way for anything to. And because Hoover had heard that a lot of threats were being made against Oswald by some locals, some out of the Dallas area, people who were obviously enraged by what Oswald had been accused of doing and I think did, in fact, do. And Jesse Curry refused Hoover's request that the FBI take over that process in order to protect the accused assassin, to make sure that he got to trial, assuring Hoover that that every resource would be devoted to protecting Oswald. Well, we all know what happened. Really. The incompetence, the incompetence there is still leaves me slack jawed.
Willy Walker: Yeah, it's really quite something. I mean, they didn't even actually charge him, right? So he met with the press. And you point this out in your book, Larry, that the Dallas police allowed Oswald to be questioned by the press corps before he'd even been charged with a crime?
Larry Sabato: Well, even worse than that, you look at the films of the hallways where they were taking Oswald out of the interrogation room and taking him down to the public room where the press could ask questions and so on, back and forth and back and forth. You couldn't even move in those hallways. There were so many people crammed in there because, of course, press from around the world had come in and the police did not know who was really in there. Now we have photos and film of none other than Jack Ruby being right there. It's possible he could have killed Oswald on Friday night, the night of the assassination. Again, just unbelievable incompetence.
Willy Walker: Yeah, it is really quite something. Let's talk for a moment, Larry, about the Kennedy legacy.
Only in that as I think about you in the book, you talk a lot about the well, first of all, the 1956 Democratic convention and where Kennedy kind of stepped to the fore as a potential national figure. And I thought it was fascinating that at that time, in looking at who would become vice president, fortunately, he didn't become vice president in 1956 because that probably would have been a death knell for his political future.
But interestingly, there are a lot of names that pop up, including Al Gore from Tennessee, who had been Al Gore's father, senior, exactly who takes the Tennessee delegates and puts them to Senator Kennedy from the great state of Massachusetts. But you go into the 1960 election and Kennedy, Nixon and I think about it in the context of the advent of the television era. And it was very clear that this young, good looking senator from Massachusetts was going to completely outshow the vice president at that time in the national debate. And that's been widely talked about.
But as I thought about it, Larry, I was thinking about where we are today and whether we're at the point where politics is evolving from the television era to the online era. If you think about how Trump won the ‘16 election and using social media so effectively and going direct to the consumer rather than going through television and through the established press corps, is sort of 2020 for 2020 a changing of the media in the way that the 1960 election was a move from print to television and sort of to some degree, what does that mean about the success of future candidates?
Because we've now gone through this 60 year period where if you were good on television and you knew how to control that medium, you probably had a better shot at national politics than not.
Larry Sabato: Well, we certainly had a tremendous change because of social media. I think television is still important. It still reaches tens of millions of people, all the major networks, but reaches tens of millions of people.
Willy Walker: Let me just jump in there for a second, because you point out in your book that 70 million people watched the Kennedy-Nixon debate, which is almost as many people as voted in the election today. I mean, I know you know this better than I do. How many people watched the last Republican debate on cable television? Did it get 3 million viewers?
Larry Sabato: Oh, no. They got in between 10 and 20 million over each of their debates. But remember, it's a primary debate. In fact, you don't even have the candidate who's leading by a mile, Donald Trump, in the mix. So I'm surprised they've gotten as many as they have to watch it. I'm not saying one way or another whether the debates were worthwhile, but it's better to have them than not. I'm going to be interested to see whether we actually have them next fall. That is by no means guaranteed. Just because the Presidential Debate Commission issue dates and places does not mean they're really going to be held there.
Willy Walker: Well, but talk about that, because you point out after Nixon got beaten so badly by Kennedy that in '64, '68, and '72, Johnson and Kennedy and Nixon didn't participate in the debates, correct?
Larry Sabato: Yes. We didn't get them back until 1976 because both candidates, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, needed debates. Ford needed to prove and he thought he could prove that he had far more information and competence than Jimmy Carter did. And Jimmy Carter, who was unknown really, except Georgia, outside of Georgia. He also needed to demonstrate to people that he was ready to be president. So that's why we got him back. And once we got them back, the pressure increased on candidates to accept them. You know, in 1980, we only had one Reagan-Carter debate. There was a Reagan-John Anderson debate. And there have been other years. Well, one was canceled the last time between Biden and Trump. I think Trump canceled it. So this is a very tenuous tradition. I'd rather have them than not. I hope we have them. But I also agree with the critics who say debating ability is not the only thing we should be basing our vote on. Somebody could be very good at memorizing soundbites and can come across well in a debate but can be very ill-suited to the Oval Office. So We also as an electorate need some maturity. And that's why I hope everybody's laughing when I talk about the electorate having maturity.
Willy Walker: Well, so when you talk about maturity, Kennedy was 47 when elected president?
Larry Sabato: He was 43.
Willy Walker: 43, excuse me.
Larry Sabato: He was 46 when he was killed. 46 years old. Think about it, I'm in my 70s. At 46 years old, the man had his head blown off. I mean, that's why on Wednesday of this week, as you said, two days ago, the 60th anniversary of the assassination, I was struck by how emotional so many people were in person in interviews on social media. It's just, you know, I lived through it myself. And it was so traumatic. My friends and I, we all had nightmares for ages about it. For us, even after 9/11, we lost around 3,000 Americans. In that sense, it was much more serious, but not really, because this was the Cold War era and he was the President of the States and he was the youngest president ever elected. He was murdered in a vicious way, sitting next to his wife in every way possible. It was horrible. And that's why people who live through it can't forget it and won't forget it.
Willy Walker: In the book, Larry, you talk about the fact that his legacy is one that really shines brighter than almost anybody else because of it being arrested, because it was cut off short. If you look at it from an overall policy accomplishment standpoint, he is there above two term presidents who had massive, massive accomplishments like Reagan, like Clinton. And yet Kennedy still stays on top of it because of the image we had with him.
You and Peter Hart did some polling as it relates to why is it that Kennedy sits so far above others? And it was so fascinating to think about how history is somewhat privileged because of the way in which he went out. And it's just interesting from a psychological standpoint to look back on it and look at all of your writing and the research that you and Peter Hart did on it.
Larry Sabato: It's certainly true that the gauzy retrospective is not often fully accurate. For example, in civil rights, was Kennedy on the right side? Yes. Did it take him forever to get there? Yes. Could he have passed the civil rights bill that Lyndon Johnson passed? No. He had a much weaker version in there. But of course, Johnson was able to pass it. Yes, because he was a legislative magician. He was a wizard with Congress. But also, it was because the memory of JFK being murdered at JFK’s assassination gave Johnson the ability to pass all of that Great Society legislation, at least the first two years of it, because the Kennedy assassination gave him an enormous Democratic majority in both the Senate and the House.
So Kennedy deserves some credit for what Johnson passed on the domestic side, but will leave although again, Johnson was the one who told the troops from 15,000 to 535,000 by the time he left office. You have to look at it from that perspective.
But getting back to why Kennedy gets credit for all that, Kennedy was elevated to “secular sainthood.” That's a phrase I've used for many, many years because of the assassination. We didn't know about his personal foibles and things like that. We didn't know about him until the 1970s. Enough time had passed so that people could put that into some perspective. But people felt guilt. Even those who had voted for Kennedy, I guess, felt some guilt about what had happened. And they felt terrible for Mrs. Kennedy and the children. There were constant reminders of what had happened, and that elevated Kennedy's importance in people's minds.
But there's another factor that people rarely mentioned, Willy, and this is important. I teach a course on Kennedy almost every semester. There are about 150 students there. Needless to say, they were all born in this century. They have no memory, living memory whatsoever of John F. Kennedy.
But I'll tell you what's interesting: When I play tapes of some of his key speeches and press conferences, they are riveted. They pay attention to everything he's saying. They have questions about it. When I show, as I do, other presidents giving talks and speeches that were at least as important, if not more so, than what Kennedy was talking about, their eyes glaze over. They daydream.
Well, Kennedy was riveting. He still is. He could appear as Jackie could on the street of any American community today and if unrecognized, could walk up and down the street because he fits right in. How many other presidents fit right in? Most of them were outdated when they were in office, much less decades later.
Willy Walker: But when I hear that, I think about my I didn't know until I read your book and look back on it. But my impression would have been that Kennedy was this star force that he rolled to election in 1960 and that every word that came out of his mouth was accepted by the American people as God's word.
Actually, as you point out in the book, he barely won the 1960 election. He won quite handily on the electoral side, on the popular vote side. He didn't have a large margin over Nixon and that there were plenty of question marks as it relates to the veracity of the 1960 election. And so I sit here and think about 2020 and everything that we've been dealing with in 2020 versus back in 1960 and Richard Nixon's ability at that time to have contested the election, he did not. You write extensively about Mayor Daley in Chicago and how Chicago there was. I think it was 320,000 plus margin of victory for Kennedy in Chicago and in the state of Illinois it was nothing close to that. And so it's just an interesting thing because you do talk about the fact that he came into office really without a mandate.
And while we all look back on his inaugural address as this wonderful speech that Ted Sorensen wrote, and he delivered it so well, “Ask not what your nation can do for you, ask what you can do for your nation.” You think about those things and yet you put it into the context. He didn't really have a mandate coming into being president of the United States?
Larry Sabato: No, he did not. One small correction because people say this all the time – that was actually Kennedy's phrase. “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” Because one of his prep school masters had repeatedly used that sentence or something very much like it, so I'm sure Ted Sorensen added something to it. But their relationship, JFK and Ted Sorensen. I just said Ted Sorenson's widow here to talk with students about their relationship. They were just perfect for one another in coming up with ideas, shaping them, polishing them. And a lot of presidents don't have that.
But yes, look, almost every member of Congress, both the House and the Senate, who were up in 1960, got a much larger percentage of the vote than JFK did in their district or state. So they had no great obligation, the Democrats did, to support what Kennedy was doing. They said, hey, I've got a bigger mandate than you do. Among the only people who matter to me, which are the people who can either reelect me or defeat me. So he was weak. He had barely gotten in. The Catholic factor still mattered. And my students today just laughed. They can't believe that was ever a matter of substance in politics. It explains the whole vote. Kennedy got 80% of the Roman Catholic vote and Nixon got almost 70% of the Protestant vote. It was an election about religion as much as party or anything else. It really, really mattered. And Protestants at the time, millions of them believed that Kennedy was a puppet for the pope and that the pope would be calling him up. This is hard to believe the pope would be calling him up every morning and giving him his instructions for what to do that day. You know, you can't make this stuff up. And it just reminds all of us how irrational human beings are. Not just Americans. All of us. It's in the genome.
Maybe one day when we have better genetic engineering, we'll be able to do something about it. But for the time being, we're stuck with that genome. And it explains so much about human behavior, whether it's the U.S. or Russia or Ukraine or the Middle East.
Willy Walker: One of the other fascinating things that you point out in the book, and I'm big on setting bold, highly ambitious goals for my team at Walker & Dunlop. And we've been really successful, Larry, at setting these five- year Jim Collins bold, highly ambitious goals - BHAGs. One of the things that you point out in the book that I thought was fascinating was that when they were talking about a space program and Russia, the USSR at the time, was ahead of us on exploring space – Kennedy originally wanted to set the goal of going to Mars. It was only through other conversations that said, we're never going to get to Mars at any time in our lifetime. Do something that's actually achievable, which is getting to the Moon. And I just find it to be incredible because he had set it as Mars…
Larry Sabato: We never would have gotten there.
Willy Walker: We wouldn't have gotten there.
Larry Sabato: Not in that decade, that's for sure.
Willy Walker: Without a doubt. But the idea of setting an achievable goal rather than this just far out there goal. If he'd said get to Mars, everyone's like, we're not going to get there. But getting it to the moon was something that was achieved. Highly ambitious, clearly, but achievable. And I found it to be fascinating, even in presidential politics and even in setting out a path for a nation where the goal can be ambitious. But boy, oh, boy, it better be achievable.
Larry Sabato: Yes. And look, Kennedy Kennedy knew that he was young, he was inspirational in his rhetoric. And he knew that it fit the new frontier, the name of his administration perfectly, the idea of really opening up space. And as you mentioned, we were not in good shape, certainly not compared to the Russians who were who beat us terribly on just about every significant goal until probably the mid-sixties. We started overtaking them a little bit during Kennedy's administration. But he set the wheels in motion and he set the goal. If it hadn't been for Kennedy, I don't think we would have had that goal at that time. Certainly wouldn't have had the goal to go to the moon by the end of the 60s, and we certainly wouldn't have meant that goal.
But Kennedy did want it to be dramatic because he believed correctly – that was the future. If we could go 500 years into the future, I hope, God willing, that the United States is still here, the human beings are still here. But if we could go 500 years into the future, I'm convinced that that will be the most significant piece of the Kennedy administration. The emphasis on space and setting us on the path to explore the heavens – that was Kennedy's goal.
He talked early on with NASA's administrator, whose name was Jim Webb, not the U.S. senator from Virginia, but James Webb (the telescope in space right now that we see photos from all the time.) That was James Webb, head of NASA's. And he said, “Look, we need to be dramatic and I think we ought to go to Mars.” And the administrator said, “Mr. President, that is just not achievable.” He was very blunt with him and explained why. And Kennedy was able to process that information very quickly and realize the moon was achievable, as you said, and Mars was not.
Now, look, there were plenty of people who criticized Kennedy at the time saying we're not going to get to the moon and we're going to be very embarrassed. We don't even have launch vehicles big enough to go to the moon. How are we going to develop these things? There were the usual critics, but America was very optimistic at the time. We were still in that post-World War II glow. We were running the world in a lot of respects. We were clearly the strongest superpower, much stronger than the Soviet Union, as we learned later. But Kennedy knew that this was the time to act. Americans were ready for dramatic action. And it was something that everybody could agree to. You know, the conservatives were very anti Soviet Union. They didn't want the Soviet Union to beat us there, because I remember my dad taking me out to the backyard in 1957. I was five years old so we could watch Sputnik. Sputnik was about this big, but we could see it. It was well lit by the sun. And we were in awe of the human beings that managed to do this. Think of that, that tiny little thing.
But we also were afraid because we knew if you could put a satellite up there like Sputnik, then you could put weapons in space and we could have nuclear weapons raining down from space. So you see, we had awe and we had fear and that combination was able to unite most Americans behind the Kennedy space program.
Willy Walker: Let's shift, Larry, from 60 years ago to today. On your website last week, the title was Dems strong in last week's election. Below that, it said there were a half dozen key races we were watching: the Kentucky and Mississippi gubernatorial races, an abortion rights ballot issue in Ohio, Pennsylvania state Supreme Court race, and both chambers of the Virginia state legislature. Democrats won five of these six races, losing only the Mississippi gubernatorial race. Those are the facts, how should we read into them?
Larry Sabato: We should read into them that Democrats had a very good day. A lot of it was due to abortion rights. And the conservative Republican Supreme Court's overturning Roe v. Wade, which has turned out to be massively unpopular. I mean, massively so that even in deep red states, you have upwards of 60% disagreeing with what the court did. Obviously, in more liberal states, it's 70-75%. So it was a disaster politically, whatever you think about the policy, and I don't want to get into discussing abortion one way or the other, or both ways. But that was what was significant about the election.
Now we have a full year to go before the next election, okay. So you don't stretch elections beyond their true meaning. And the half life of an election is really quite, quite short. So what does it mean for next year? You know, you can go back in history and say, well, you know, in most cases it gave a hint at what was going to happen in the presidential race. But there were certainly cases where it didn't. So we need to focus on the present and the future, not what happened in a handful of races in early November of 2023.
Willy Walker: Does Andy Beshear, being the governor of Kentucky, have any impact there? I mean, Kentucky is solidly red. I mean, you've always said, Larry, I know you've told me before many, many times, “Hey, Willy, good candidates win.” Is that another case in Kentucky that just Andy Beshear was better than Daniel Cameron and as a result of that, he's got the governorship – but don't think that all of a sudden Kentucky's a blue state?
Larry Sabato: Yeah, well, that pretty much summarizes it. Kentucky was 60% for Trump. Anybody who thinks that any Democratic nominee next year, Biden or somebody else is going to even do well in Kentucky, much less win, doesn't know much about politics. Andy Beshear was a very good ideal candidate. He had to be four years ago. I mean, he won by like 5,000 votes against an incumbent Republican governor. Everything had to go perfectly for him to win, even though he was a much better candidate and he was much better liked than the Republican incumbent. And this time, the same was true. He'd had four years to demonstrate that he was good at handling disasters, which unfortunately, poor Kentucky has had more than its share of over the past few years. So it says a lot about Andy Beshear. Maybe Andy Beshear should be considered for the Democratic ticket in 2028 simply because he could reestablish the Democratic tie with at least some rural areas, not going to carry Kentucky, never going to carry West Virginia again, at least not in our lifetime, but could potentially make enough difference in states like Ohio, which has a lot of rural area to make Ohio competitive again, which currently it is not. It is not as heavily Republican as Kentucky or West Virginia, but it's 54:46 Republican. And that's that's pretty weighted toward the GOP for a state like Ohio. So, yeah, I mean, it was interesting. I know Andy Beshear is very pleased with the victory. Democrats like to say that. But in terms of its meaning for 2024, I think our talk right now probably has as much meaning, which is to say not much at all.
Willy Walker: But I find it to be interesting when you use West Virginia as an example only because you know the history of it. And were it not for Karl Rove and George W Bush saying West Virginia is one of those swing states that we can go win. I mean, back in 2000, this was not ancient history. Back in 2000, West Virginia was up in the it was a toss up state between Democrats and Republicans. Now here we are 23 years later, and it is the first state that you jump to after Kentucky to say it ain't going democratic anytime in the near future. It's just amazing how quickly the political tide can shift in any of these states. I mean, we're not talking about Mississippi and Alabama and some other states that for a very, very long period of time have been engrained red. And I just find that to be interesting, that's the first state you pull out.
Larry Sabato: Well, look, I of course, I grew up in West Virginia. My mother's family is all from South West Virginia, very near the West Virginia border. And they were heavily Democratic back then. They voted for Michael Dukakis. I mean, that's how heavily Democratic they were. And in 2000, Bush and Rove and others involved in that campaign used abortion and guns. Those were the two issues that switched West Virginia and Tennessee, Al Gore's own state that he had represented in the U.S. Senate that Clinton-Gore ticket had carried handily twice. If he just carried Tennessee, he would have been president. If he just carried West Virginia he would have been president. So it was a cultural change. That's what I did. The Democratic Party increasingly became the party of college graduates, and the Republican Party increasingly became the party of those without the benefit of a college education. It's only become more so, Donald Trump accelerated it. And that's the big division, every bit as much as race and gender in our politics today.
Willy Walker: So what's wrong with West Virginia? Senator Manchin is not going to run for reelection to the Senate. And Mitt Romney is not going to run for reelection in the state of Utah.
First of all, let's talk about the potential for a third party candidate. I guess we already have Kennedy out there as a third party candidate running as an independent now. What's your thought, Larry, as it relates to the viability of either the Kennedy candidacy that's already out there or a Romney or Manchin ticket that steps forward and says we need to present an alternative to this two party system, particularly that has Trump and Biden as their nominees.
Larry Sabato: Well, my guess is today that certainly Romney will run, and I doubt Joe Manchin does, no matter what he's saying now. And the reason is because that potentially is the No Labels ticket. Larry Hogan, the former governor of Maryland, may be more likely to run as a presidential nominee for that ticket. But frankly, it could easily I'm not predicting it this far in advance, but it could easily deliver the election to Donald Trump. If there's one thing Joe Manchin and most people, including I think Larry Hogan, don't want to be tagged with in history, it's giving Donald Trump a second term. So we'll see how that actually works out.
Robert F Kennedy Jr. of course, look, he wasn't going to do anything in the Democratic Party. There was no way he was going to even come close to Joe Biden. He's running as an independent and some polls have him over 20%. That's often true with third party candidates early in the process before people start focusing on the real choice between the Democratic and Republican nominee. But we thought he would hurt Biden at first. Now it looks like he could potentially take more votes from Trump as an independent. But then you have the other third party, and independent candidate, Cornel West. There may be some people who wouldn't have voted otherwise, but the vast majority of his votes are going to come right out of Joe Biden's column. You have Jill Stein running again. You know, there's a good argument to be made that she cost Hillary Clinton, Michigan and maybe other states, Wisconsin, in 2016, and she's back. And she can only hurt Biden as the nominee of the Green Party. You have beyond that, the Libertarians may nominate – I haven't heard any names mentioned yet, but they usually put a national candidate for president up. Who that will hurt depends on who it is.
So it's going to be an interesting mix of candidates. I still say probably the total result of those third party and independent candidates will be helpful to Trump and not Biden. And that's because Trump has a ceiling and his ceiling is below 50%. You can argue whether it's 46% or 47% or 48%, but he's below 50%. He never got over 50% a single day of his presidency. Even the first day he didn't get over 50%. So as you reduce the percentage necessary for him to get an Electoral College majority and Hillary beat him by two points in the popular vote. So he only needs 45-46% to win the election.
As you pull votes out, you increase the chances of a second Trump presidency having lost the popular vote again. But that's not what elects presidents in the United States. You can say it's foolish and we should have gone to a new system decades or centuries ago. But facts are facts, and we're not ever going to change that ever. By ever I mean, as far as we can see, the future.
Willy Walker: Inform people what happens if Trump or Biden doesn't win enough electoral votes to win the presidency in the general? In other words, a third party candidate comes in and takes up enough electoral votes that no one gets enough to get over what is needed to be president of the United States. What happens?
Larry Sabato: Well, if a third party candidate or more than one actually wins electoral votes (and that's tough to do, they have to be sectional candidates.) Ross Perot got 19% of the vote and didn't win a single electoral vote back in 1992. So it's not easy to do. George Wallace was a sectional candidate, winning more than 40 electoral votes by carrying some Deep South states. So if any electoral votes go to a third party candidate and if those votes make the difference between no one getting 270 and somebody getting 270 or over, then I assume the third party candidate can bargain with those electoral votes, assuming the electors will do what the candidate wants them to do. That's what Wallace had intended to do. If he had made the difference between 270 and not for Nixon or Humphrey. He was going to negotiate with those electoral votes. But if nobody gets 270 and the other electoral votes don't go to one of the two major candidates, then we kick in a provision of the constitution that hasn't been used since 1824. Thankfully, because it's going to be a bloody disaster. That is every state gets one vote. California gets one vote. Texas gets one vote. Rhode Island gets one vote. Wyoming gets one vote. In other words, the leasts populated states, the Dakotas each get a vote and you have to get 26 votes to be elected president, a majority of the states.
Well, the odds are and we'll wait for the election, but the odds are Republicans are going to control the delegations in at least 26 states. That's the way it looks right now. Maybe it'll change. That's the way it looks right now. So you could have a candidate losing by millions of popular votes who is elected by the House of Representatives with the gargantuan California and gargantuan Texas having one vote and those small states each having a vote. The scary part is some of the other states, if they have, say, three Republicans and three Democrats representing them in the House or whatever the number is, if it splits equally, they will get zero votes. Zero votes for president, zero. Think about that and the anger that will be generated by that. So it's a nightmare. It should have been changed decades ago.
I understand why it was put in to begin with, we didn't have popular elections. We didn't have real votes until 1824. So I understand why it got in there, but it should have been ditched years ago. And of course, we have it because we only respond to a crisis. We're very good at responding to a crisis, and that's all we're good at responding to.
Willy Walker: I love going back to the summer of 2007 when you said very clearly and at that time, Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton were without a doubt the two nominees for the Republican and Democrats. And you said “That ain't going to be the ticket that people are going to be voting on a year and a half from now.” And you were exactly right. Neither one of them made it. As you look now a year away from next November, is the ballot in front of people when they walk into their polling stations a year from now, Trump and Biden, or does something change?
Larry Sabato: Well, when you've got an incumbent president who's 81 and you've got the main challenger, Donald Trump, being by then 78, I'm not going to tell people the probability of anything because I'm here to tell you I'm a lot younger (You know, six, seven, eight years younger than they are.) And things go wrong with some frequency when you get older. That's just the way it is. So that is something that we really haven't had to consider very often. Maybe 1984 with Reagan, maybe 1956 with Eisenhower. But it's rare that you have to think about that. And so that factor is not part of the calculus, it can't be part of the calculus. But obviously, Trump is way ahead on the Republican side and Biden is way ahead on the Democratic side. But a lot's going to happen between now and next November.
Willy Walker: So if you had to put odds on us walking in and seeing a Trump-Biden ballot…?
Larry Sabato: Well, it's likely today.
Willy Walker: Is still the likelihood?
Larry Sabato: It's still likely today. And we're a year away. And sadly, we're out of time. I'd go into much more detail. I'd tell you more precisely, Willy, but we just don't have time. You shouldn't have spent so much on JFK.
Willy Walker: Exactly. My bad. My final one is this. I had thought that Glenn Youngkin, by not going into the Republican primary, would stay unscathed by what's going on between Nikki Haley and the other Republicans running for it and would present potentially the white knight for the Republican Party. If you're getting to a convention next summer and maybe Donald Trump's been convicted and people say, okay, this just isn't he can still serve, but that's not going to get us there. We've got to shift, and that Glenn Youngkin would be the white knight for the Republican Party. The showing in the election week before last in Virginia, where he pushed really hard to win both the House and the Senate and it both stayed Democratic, seemed to be a rebuke to that sort of a Youngkin candidacy. Is that reading too much into a very difficult Virginia state legislature dynamic, or is that true that Youngkin has been slowed down in his path?
Larry Sabato: Well, he's certainly been slowed down, but I don't think it had any major effect on the vote, because that's not why voters vote. That's not how voters vote. They vote about real issues that matter to them, like abortion rights one way or the other. That had much more to do with the result in Virginia than did Youngkin's presidential ambitions. But I have to tell you on that one, many of us were right, because the people saying that Youngkin could slip in that way. We're operating from a mindset that died decades ago. We don't have party leadership running certainly the Republican Party choice for president and to some degree the Democratic choice, though there's more of it still on the Democratic side.
You don't have leaders sitting in a back room, a smoke filled room or even smokeless backroom picking candidates. It doesn't work like that anymore. It's a broad electorate, although it's a narrow electorate. Well, on the right for the Republicans, center left for the Democrats, which is why they can pick a Biden who wasn't nearly as far to the left as some of the other Democratic candidates in 2020. But if you think the Trump electorate, which will be there, whether Trump is or not, if you think they are going to let some big shots, the big boys pick Glenn Youngkin, you know, a half billionaire, maybe he's worth more than that who's out of the old mold, who certainly has governed conservatively, but is hardly a populist. If you think that they were going to pick him, then, you know, we're obviously you got a time machine. And we have gone back several decades. And I'd love to do that, assuming I would be as young as I was several decades ago. If you've got one, let me borrow it. Give it to me as a Christmas gift. Willy, will you do that?
Willy Walker: Well, this was a very nice Thanksgiving gift for you to take time during this week to join me, Larry.
We will be back. We will dive into the issues as we get into 2024. I'm super, super thankful for your time. Happy late Thanksgiving. Thank you for taking the time. Great to see you and everyone who joined us today. I hope you found this discussion with Larry is as insightful and fun as I did.
Larry Sabato: It was a lot of fun. Thank you, Willy.
Willy Walker: It's great to see you. Take care, Larry.
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