Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 11/3/22: Suburban Voters, Dem Messaging, Twitter Policy, Gas Prices, Covid Reckoning, & More!

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

Krystal and Saagar bring the news about midterm polls, Biden's speech, Twitter policy, Ukraine diplomacy, Biden's stumbles, windfall profits tax, pandemic reckoning, and populist messaging!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/Stan Greenberg: https://prospect.org/politics/a-memo-to-democrats/ More Perfect Union: https://perfectunion.us/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Indeed we do. Guys, we are getting down to it. The midterms are now just days away. We have all kinds of new polls out of each of the states. Also, like, overall national polls. We have one key voting group that Democrats have been counting on moving sharply to the Republicans. So break all of that down for you and just go state by state at what the picture is. We also are going to break down Biden's big democracy speech last night.

We've got a little bit of sound we can play. We can talk about all of that and whether we think it will make a difference or not. New, you can probably guess what we think. New revelations about exactly what Elon Musk plans to do with regards to Twitter and the business model. And also, actually, just this morning, I saw more officially that massive layoffs, about 50% of the workforce, set to be cut there. So we'll break all of that down for you and whether we think it will work or not. New developments out of Ukraine. Russia is back into that green deal.

We'll see what that means. And also some interesting revelations about how close we may have come to the nuclear brink, whether temperatures have cooled at all because of some discussions between our officials and Russian officials. Some interesting intelligence there. And we also have some pretty rough stumbles. We got Biden twice here in the lineup. Some pretty rough stumbles in terms of his ability to articulate exactly what's going on now, what's gone on in the past. And interestingly enough, mainstream media taking notice, which is in some ways the

most interesting part of this, because Biden stumbles are certainly not new. But the fact that The New York Times is writing them up, that is new. So what does that mean? Sager is asking whether we should have a pandemic amnesty. I'm looking at the Democrats' last gasp hope in terms of the midterms. And we have someone we've been trying to get on for a while, Stan Greenberg, who has been doing everything he can to try to persuade Democrats that they should be running on an economic message. New numbers indicate that, you know, overwhelmingly their ads dollars went towards abortion and not towards any sort of affirmative economic message. So we're going to talk to him about all of that. But we do, before we jump into the midterms, want to tell you next week we are going to be doing a live midterms live stream. Live stream, 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Actually, no, I think it'll be

daylight time there. Thank God. Anyway, so whatever. Is it change over the weekend? I'm winning. Great question. Anyway. 7 p.m. Eastern. We will be live

7 p.m. Eastern whenever that is for everybody across the country. We'll be going. We've got Kyle. We've got Marshall. We've got Ryan.

Emily will be in and out. We've got great guests that are standing by. We also have people live on the scene. Thanks very much to our premium subscribers at Oz and Fetterman HQ, which we can go live to in the middle of whatever is sure to be a fun evening. We are going to have a premium benefit for our premium subscribers during that live stream. So if you do want to go ahead and sign up, the link is down in the description, but I think it's gonna

be a lot of fun. Yeah, I'm psyched about it. And I mean, that result is genuinely uncertain. I love election night. Yeah, both of us, I think at this point, really expect Republicans to have a pretty strong night. And that's what the polling seems to indicate as we're about to get into. But you just never know. And the details of who does well and where and the big surprises, like you just there's always something that's going to be completely unpredictable. So excited for that. And we should have a good crew in here in-house to break it all down. All right. That being said, let's get to the midterms.

Wall Street Journal with some new polling with a really dire warning sign here for Democrats. White suburban women shifting sharply back to the Republican Party. Their headline is white suburban women swing toward backing Republicans for Congress. Pretty straightforward. New Wall Street Journal poll shows key group of midterm voters favors the GOP now by 15 percentage points. All right, let me give you a little bit of the details here. This is a 27-point swing away from Democrats since just August. So back in August, and you know, that was around the time when there were some special elections. Those were going pretty well for Democrats. The polls were looking pretty good for Democrats. Fetterman had double-digit lead. That was that time frame. Since then, 27-point swing among white suburban women. This is a voting group that

Democrats relied on in 2018 when they did fairly well in the midterms. It is a voting group that Democrats relied on in 2018 when they did fairly well in the midterms as a voting group they heavily relied on for Biden to be able to win the White House in 2020. Most importantly, this is the voting group they really thought would be most swayed by the overturning of Roe versus Wade and would be most impacted by that and most interested in voting based sort of solely on that. You know, the whole ad strategy of Democrats, which we're about to get into, which was heavily focused on abortion. This is really the group that they were sort of betting the farm on, that they would be really, really critical of that decision overturned Roe versus Wade and would be basing their vote on

it. That does not seem to be panning out. This group, like every other group, is concerned about the economy. And views of the economy among the group are very, very negative. To be specific, and these are, again, numbers from this article, in August, 43% thought that the economy had entered a recession. Still not great. But today, you now have 59% saying that the economy is headed in the wrong direction. So big shift there in terms of sentiment around the economy. That is a disaster. You also have them increasingly citing rising prices and the economy overall as their number one issue. You also, you know, you get some insight into why they're feeling this way. There's been all this discussion about like, oh, the media is portraying the economy is so much worse than it is. And, you know, they're convincing voters that things are bad as if people

don't know what's going on in their own lives. And that's reflected here, too. You've got 66 percent of white suburban women saying that rising costs are causing a major or minor financial strain. That is compared with 54 percent in August. So, again, another number headed in the wrong direction where people are increasingly feeling the squeeze of high prices. And in an ominous warning sign for 2024, if that 2024 election were held today between Biden and Trump, 41 percent of white suburban women say they'd back Biden. Fifty two percent say they would back Biden. 52% say they would back Trump. Back in August, those numbers were not just flipped, but Biden had an even larger lead than Trump enjoys now. 55% in August say they would be behind Biden. So a solid majority and only 39% behind Trump. So this is a massive, massive

warning sign for Democrats as they head down the stretch here. White suburban women, just like the rest of us, it turns out. They're like, hey, I care a lot about abortion and democracy and all this stuff, but rising prices are my topic. I also got to pay the bills. I got to pay my bills. Gas is just too expensive. They even say, there's one woman who was quoted in the article, says, look, I agree with the Democrats on social issues, but right now, like, people are just spending way too much money in order to live.

Shocker. I mean. I mean, women are oftentimes the ones who are going to the grocery store who are seeing, you know, the prices who are like understanding what that means in terms of what they can put on the table for their families. So, you know, one of them is quoted right here. I eat Cheerios every morning. It's doubled in price. It's impacting me personally. I came out with a few grocery bags and I just paid $120. I mean, I always like to think of universal experiences. Like no matter how much money you have, when you check out the grocery store, you're like, oh my God, this is a lot more expensive than it was the last time. You can't help but notice. Same when you go to the gas pump. I mean, these are just things which are going to land empirically with everybody rather than trying to go and niche down. The 27-point swing is just a tremendous validation, or sorry, is a tremendous, is basically like a validation that the Democratic

strategy has been a complete failure, in my opinion. Well, I mean, if you're someone who believes in material politics, I guess it's proof positive. Yes, I certainly think so, yeah. Which is that, you know, you spent all this money on abortion messaging, on democracy and increasingly even amongst people who are sympathetic. You should remember these people did not vote for Trump. They voted. Well, I mean, in some cases, certainly like it was it was closer to 50 50. But this is the coalition that delivered Nancy Pelosi her speakership in 2018. This is the coalition and the group more so than any, which is responsible for Joe Biden winning the presidency. So you should listen to them about what they care about. Not only that, I mean, since 2016, who was it that was famously like, oh, for every white working class voter we lose, we'll win two in the suburbs? Yeah, I don't remember. You know, the famous quote. Yes.

And that has been the Democratic Party strategy. They're like, all right, well, we're bleeding white working class voters. And now, by the way, they're also bleeding like black and brown working class voters as well. But they're like, we'll go with the affluent suburbanites, you know, college educated white liberals. That'll be our base. And now you see even that strategy when you don't have an economic message to back it up, ultimately, when, you know, the economy is overwhelming the number one concern, that ultimately looks to be failing as well. And, you know, it's not like the Republicans have really advertised their economic strategy. It's not like they have a good plan. I broke down here how I think their economic plans, in fact, are for their disaster.

They're talking about triggering a debt crisis, cutting Social Security, Medicare, all of that being said, when you are the party that is in power, if you just default that issue to the other side and you don't really talk about it, of course they're going to have better numbers on it. I mean, no one should be surprised that majority voters say Republicans have a better plan because they're living in the economy right now with Democrats in control. And they're saying this isn't working out for me. So in the absence of any kind of messaging about, hey, concretely, if you give us power again, here is exactly what we will do to help you out in the same way that they did with the two thousand dollar checks. If you aren't offering that, then, of course, you're going to

be hosed on these numbers. And I guess the other thing that we should say here is like, you know, the history is difficult. The economic landscape is difficult. Only so much of that is in Biden and the Democrats control. And maybe even if they engage in the sort of messaging that our guest today, Stan Greenberg, has been arguing for saying, hey, we're going to re-up the child tax credit, we're going to pay for it by taxing the rich. You know, even if they did that, there's no guarantees that they would win the messaging on the economy. But because abortion and social issues are a factor, an important factor, if you just ate into the margin, that could actually be enough. I mean, Republicans gave Democrats every chance to succeed here, like talking about cutting Social Security, Medicare, talking about having a debt crisis, putting up candidates who are like,

you know, basically a freak show. They gave them every opportunity here to buck history and succeed. And Democrats are like, now we're just going to keep talking about democracy because that seems to really be working for us. It's a structural flaw. The elites of the party are obsessed with democracy and with social issues. And, you know, this is always issued. Nobody's saying it's not important, but, you know, for a lot of people, they have to weigh things with what exactly they have to pay at the pump, at the grocery store, mortgage, rent, tuition. I mean, you could go on forever about the prices that have gone up. And just generally, people think that the country is on the wrong track. That is just, look, I keep coming back to the fundamentals, and I increasingly think that we are in for some upsets, possibly. I mean, we were looking at New Hampshire. New Hampshire is razor tight right now.

And guess what? White suburban women, I hear a lot of white folks live in New Hampshire. Republicans had basically abandoned their nominee there, Balduck or whatever, because he's kind of a fringe freak. And the more moderate candidate that they liked lost in the primary. Well, they're now flooding the zone with me because they see, oh, whoa, we got a shot here. So it tells you the way that things have shifted and moved. We're going to get into that more in a minute. The other pushback that I get online, because I've been talking for a while about the fact that, you know, where is the economic messaging?

You have to be talking about the number one issue. You can't just cede this terrain. As people say, they are talking about it. Here's Katie Porter saying something. Here's Elizabeth Warren saying something. Here's Biden saying something. But, you know, follow the money here. And the reality is, in terms of what ads they are running and what messaging they are running with on the ground. It is overwhelmingly about abortion,

and a tiny sliver is ultimately about the economy. Let's put this on the screen. This is from the New York Times. They broke down the numbers. This is within a larger article. Basically, they say top Democrats question their party strategy as midterm worries grow. So some of this angst, I mean, some of this is also positioning,

you know, Democrats trying to play the blame game in advance so that they can throw whoever their favorite villain is under the bus here when things don't go well in the midterms. But they break down the numbers. Democrats have spent about $320 million on ads focused on abortion. In terms of ads focused on the economy, they have spent a tenth of that, 31 million. So 10 times more on ads about abortion at a time when people are overwhelmingly telling you the economy is their number one issue. The Republicans have run many more ads on inflation and gas prices. And again, they have the luxury, since they're in the opposition now, of not really having to lay out that concrete plan. Now, it would be better if they had a concrete plan that was going to help people than a concrete plan that's going to screw people over.

But all they have to do is say things aren't going well. Gas prices are high. Your budget is stretched. Prices go up and up and up. And that is sufficient when you are ultimately in the opposition. So, I mean, the numbers really bear out that Democrats put all of their eggs in the row, row, row your vote basket and it doesn't seem to be working out. Yeah, I think that's the least of what was said. I think that they will have to eat a lot of crow. Well, actually, no, I'm probably wrong, which is that because in general, what we see amongst

Democratic elites and this actually Republican elites too, all elites in the United States, they never really pay a price for their failures, right? You can literally spend billions of dollars, which is what these people are doing. And apparently the people who give it to them will just be like, ah, you know, better luck next time. They're like, the Republicans are still bad, so I'm going to fork up that check next time around. I would personally never understand it. Like, if I gave somebody $2,500 of my money and they spent it on something which backfired tremendously, or at the very least didn't do what they said they were going to do, why do you keep doing it? I don't get it. I mean, you know, they'll have their ready-made excuse. It's the voters' fault. Yeah, that's right. They need to care about democracy more. They didn't

care about the right things. They didn't vote on the—we told them democracy was at stake. It's their fault that they didn't show up ultimately and vote for us. We'll talk about this more in the next block of Biden's big democracy speech. But personally, if you really view this as existential, that you win this election because of the fate of democracy is at stake or whatever, maybe you should be focusing on the issues that people are telling you they really care about in order to try to win that election. Okay, so let's break down state by state where we are. And big picture, basically every one of these averages, even the ones where Democrats still hold on to a slim or even significant lead, every one of them has been moving in favor of Republicans. And now you have, you know, 538, I didn't check it this morning, but for the first time, they are giving Republicans a narrow edge in terms

of winning the Senate. So you can just see the way the momentum is going right now, even while saying, listen, polls could be wrong in a variety of directions, even though it's mostly been wrong in recent history in favor of the Democrats rather than in favor of the Republicans. But who the hell knows what's going to happen? But I can just tell you the trend right now has been very much towards Republicans in every single one of these races. So let's look at Georgia first. We pulled the RealClearPolitics average for all of these. You can see the trend line at the bottom, which has Warnock falling off somewhat, Walker rising significantly. Walker is now favored in, again, the real clear politics average by one point six percentage points. I went ahead and took a look at the last two polls in this race, and it's a split decision in terms of the last two polls.

The Fox 5 Insider Advantage poll had Walker plus three, the Republican. The New York Times Siena poll had Warnock plus three. Right. We went through last time how York Times-Siena has been, in recent years, more favorable towards Democrats. They've had a miss that, you know, so I would take anything that they have. And I think in Georgia the miss was about three points. Yes. So you would have this as basically a total toss-up. Actually, I believe the miss was four, which, if anything, for Walker, plus one, which sounds right on the money with the rest. Which is exactly what the RealClearPolitics average is.

The average is 1.5. That's where, again, if I had to put my money, that's probably where it would go. I think we're really just learning about structural advantages whenever you are the party in power in a national political environment. The days of local politics effectively died in 2010 with the Tea Party wave and the referendum on Barack Obama. And from that year forward, every single election, downstream, upstream, primary, everything has been on the major national questions. There are some marginal cases where we can argue that that's not the case. But by and large, that seems to be the overwhelming trend of politics. And candidate quality increasingly, as we have seen, the data is bearing out that even if it's a really, really bad candidate, at best, you are talking about

maybe a point or two, which is, you know, sad whenever you do think about it. But on the one hand, some localism does matter. Let's throw the next one up there, which is Arizona. This is where I think you could make a case where candidate quality has made it so that it is a much tighter race crystal than arguably and structurally that it should be. The RCP average has Mark Kelly with a 2.3 percent advantage. Now, that's even with the Fox poll that shows Mark Kelly up by one. As we have seen, he actually is outrunning Joe Biden in his approval rating in the state. He's far above 50 percent. He consistently hammers Biden on the border.

He's talking about inflation. It's a very strange situation because on the one hand, he does vote with the National Democratic Party, right? He's never been the kiss in cinema, stick in the mud on any of that. And yet locally has been able to make the case. He's like, no, I am an independent minded figure.

I don't necessarily go along with the Biden consent. He's even running ads, even saying, talking about the president. I found it fascinating. Maggie Hassan is actually running her latest ad is, I'm standing up to President Biden, which anytime you have to do that, by the know, I've told the story. Chet Edwards, my congressman, who lost by the largest margin in 2010. And he represented a Democrat for our plus 25 district. He ran. I remember one of his last ads. He was like, I'm standing up to Nancy Pelosi. And that's when I was like, yeah, he's going to lose. This is the last gasp effort here. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the other thing that was really persuasive to me in The New York Times polling about this race is even putting the candidates aside, which I think Mark Kelly is a strong candidate for Democrats. I think Blake Masters has been a very weak candidate for Republicans just because of some of the extreme views he's taken both on abortion but also on economic issues. But they also found in Arizona that social cultural issues were weighing more heavily on the electorate than in other states. And they've

had some sort of like fierce local state level battles around abortion rights and whether it's going to be completely banned in the state and those sorts of things. So it makes sense to me that in that way, there is a little bit of localism there where abortion is weighing more heavily on voters' minds. So that would certainly give Mark Kelly a bit more of an edge. I think, you know, this is the race where consistently Democrats have held the largest margin. It too is closing, you know, the gap is closing there as well. So I certainly don't think that it's out of the realm of possibility that Masters would win. But I think as you look at these races, the Arizona one has to be the one where Democrats feel the most comfortable, have the best shot at being able to hold on ultimately.

I think you're right. And let's throw, and why it's fascinating too is demographically, Arizona should be much more in play for the Republicans or for the Democrats than, sorry, Nevada, which we're about to talk to. Let's put that up there on the screen, which is that Nevada demographically, historically, electorally, all of that should be far more favorable to the Democrats here, given that you have an incumbent Democratic senator, you have the state having gone for Biden, for Democrats in the last two presidential elections. It has been tight. And yet we have had Adam Laxalt there up far more over Catherine Cortez Masto than Mark Kelly has or Blake Masters has over Mark Kelly. And I actually have been trying to figure out exactly why.

You know, Cortez Masto is a very run-of-the-mill, just like median Democratic senator. That possibly could be why. She just doesn't have as big of a statewide-type profile, which means that the national wins would move more in the Republican direction. But it is a really difficult one to square, right? Arizona, you know, Biden barely won the state in 2020. And before that, obviously, it was a solidly Republican state for decades. So to just look at Nevada trending so much right now in the GOP direction really does ask us a lot of questions about what that means.

I'm fascinated by politics in Nevada because this is one of the few states where union support really, really makes a difference because, you know, the Culinary Workers Union is so powerful there. You have such a significant sizable chunk of the workforce that is actually organized. And that's why in previous years, even as other places have swung to the right, especially places with large working class bases, Nevada has actually held pretty strong for Democrats. They've been able to hold on to that state, even as large swaths of the working class start to move towards the Republican Party. That's all because of the union base of support there, which, you know, we know that some union members, certainly a significant chunk at this point, vote for Republicans. But being in a union is still one of the most significant indicators of voting Democratic. So it still really matters a lot that you have a

strong union base of support. So that's one point in favor of the Democrats. On the other hand, no state was hit harder during the pandemic than Nevada. You do have a population that is heavily working class, working in the service sector, food prices, gas prices, all of these things weighing very, very heavily on this electorate. So whereas in Arizona, you have more voters saying they're focused on the social cultural issues, in Nevada, it's the mirror image situation where you have more, even more voters saying, no, no, this is all about the economy. And that's just very difficult waters for Democrats at this point. Now, Nevada is one of the states where the polls have been the closest to accurate. So you've got the Republican with about a two-point lead right now. I mean, this thing has been tight the whole way through. It's basically been a jump

ball in terms of the polling the whole way through, whereas some of these other states you had, you know, at times Democrats with like a double-digit lead. This one has always been extremely close. I pulled the last two polls here. The Hill, Emerson had the Republican Laxalt up five. USA Today, Suffolk had Catherine Cortez Masto up by one. But again, the overall polling average has the Republican by almost two points. So yeah, I definitely think you would rather be the Republicans just because, again, economic concerns, Democratic failures to message on economic concerns, probably going to override the benefits that they have there in terms of unionization. If you didn't have that strong union presence there, this thing would be done and over and not even a question mark. That's a great point.

Yeah. I mean, look, it's a crazy landscape. states, like some flavor of localism is coming out, but the national trends are just really bearing so strongly behind the Republicans that in almost every case, except maybe Arizona, you just have to look at it and be like, well, that seems to be where things are blowing. By the way, we didn't include New Hampshire, but as I alluded to earlier, actually this morning, a new Trafalgar poll actually came out showing Bulldog up for the very first time by just one percentage point over Maggie Hassan there in New Hampshire. That would be a major upset because it would be a gain for the Republicans over that seat. And it's not just Trafalgar.

You also had a Saina Anselm poll was the other most recent poll that also had Bolduc with a one-point lead. The overall average is now just 0.5 in favor of Maggie Hassan. So, yeah, this one has become a real toss-up. You know, one thing on Georgia that I just want to make sure we note, which is that if neither of these candidates get to 50%, which is entirely possible, then that goes to a runoff and, you know, that's a whole other situation. But in terms of who has the edge right now to win the most votes on Election Day, looking like Walker. The last one is, you know, one we focused and the media has focused a lot of attention on, which is the Pennsylvania race

between Fetterman and Oz. Let's go ahead and put those numbers up on the screen here. And you can see Fetterman still clinging to a small lead here in terms of the average. He's up by 1.2 in the RealClearPolitics average. And I pulled the last two polls. Monmouth has Fetterman plus four and Muhlenberg, Muhlenberg College? Yes. Muhlenberg? I don't know.

Whatever. Has it even. Has it as a jump ball. I mean, this one is, again, total jump ball. And Pennsylvania is one of those states where pollsters have been missing and they've been missing big. Yes. Because this is a state that has a significant white working class population, especially the western part of the state. They've been, you know, sort of consistently undercounting Republican support. And so the fact that Fetterman in the average, only with 1.2 of a lead, that looks pretty dicey. And two polls came out this morning, actually, with Oz at plus one entire point.

So the Hill-Emerson, yeah, putting him up. At Oz, taking first time lead in that poll. And Susquehanna, I believe I said that correctly. Susquehanna, maybe? Whatever. All right. Sorry, Pennsylvanians. Has them up by one as well.

So very interesting. I mean, you're effectively a total jump there, which, again, given the way that the polling misses have been in the past, just the wins at the backs of the Republican Party. Yes, indeed. All right. To get into a little bit more of, like, a little more of the texture of how voters are feeling, how they're thinking about this election, how they feel about both of these parties. More Perfect Union actually did a great video where they went down and talked to four South Texas voters. Of course, South Texas famously in 2020, massive shifts to the right, you know, Republicans picking up Latino voters in a way that no one, even I think Republicans in their wildest dreams didn't expect to have that

kind of a shift in that quick of a time frame. And so More Perfect Union did the work of going down and talking to a few folks who have varying political affiliations. You got everybody who's like, you know, pretty much Republican, small business owner, to someone who's like a DSA organizer, a young woman who's a DSA organizer. So let's take a listen to a little bit of what they had to say about how they're thinking about these elections. You know, I'm tired of seeing politicians that are lifelong politicians that are filthy rich, like you're a public servant. How are you a millionaire? They really sometimes they don't even think of the working class, the people that are actually working eight hours a day or more to support their families. In the last two elections, Democrats have been losing working class voters and voters of color,

groups that were once considered their base. And among Latino voters, it's especially dramatic, with Democrats losing as much as 55 points in some regions. National polls have shown that working class Latinos rank economic issues like the cost of living and wages well above any other issue. But in parts of the country, Democrats have failed to convince voters that they can help people who are struggling. Now Democrats are at risk of losing three districts in South Texas that were reliably blue for the last century. Republicans are running three Latina candidates who are campaigning on the economy and high gas prices and painting both local and national Democrats as out of touch

with working class concerns. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's obvious, but it's always important to hear from actual voters. And, you know, the concerns were exactly what you would expect. Yes. I feel Washington's out of touch. They really don't care for either party. It's not like they're in love with the Republicans, but the Democrats are in power right now and things aren't going well for them. They don't feel like they're focusing on their concerns. It's really pretty simple and straightforward. And the candidates she's talking about there, these Latina candidates in that area, they are running relentlessly on gas prices, on inflation. So even though I don't think that their plan is good,

I don't think their plan will work, they're not even really talking about their plan in their ads. They are at least talking about the issues that these voters are saying, hey, this is what I am experiencing and this is what I care about in my day-to-day life. I remember when South Texas went for Trump or very swung to Trump by historic degree in 2020. You know, we read a lot of quotes and one that stuck with me was, look, I got a check with the guy's name on it and gas was cheap. And I remember thinking, that is the best distillation of why people vote. He was like, look, I like Trump. He sent me a check. Gas was cheap while he was in office and whatever, you know, worked for me. They're like, yeah, immigration seems like an

issue, but I'm just worried about myself. That's how a lot of people vote in this country. It's just for all the way that we think about X, Y, message, et cetera. Sometimes it just comes down to the most absolute basics. And that's what they point to. I do also like what that guy was saying about them being rich, because it's one of those things that's just never acknowledged. You're like, yeah, hold on a second. How does that, you know, Virginia, like where I live, Mark Warner, he's worth like half a billion dollars. I mean, in fairness, Mark Warner was really fricking filthy rich before he got to Congress. But there are others who show up in Congress, not already rich, but not that rich. And then they become like a hundred millionaires while they're there. But we just don't ask any quite,

you know, Ron Johnson literally is taking private jets like back and forth between Wisconsin. You're like, is this normal? Like, I don't, I don't think so. And it's like, we're all just supposed to just sit back and be like, no, you know what? It's all totally fine. It's not untoward whatsoever with the trading, with becoming rich. And even afterwards, I mean, they all retire to these like fancy lives. Like, why? What exactly is so valuable about your time that you've spent in Washington? I mean, I know the answer to that, but I think most people can intuit for themselves. They never have to have worked here, never have to have seen it themselves. They work through their everyday lives and see exactly how little of a raise that they get.

And they watch what happens here, and they're like, yeah, this is bullshit. And I agree with them. It is. It is totally bullshit. And it also, I mean, you know, then they look at, oh, and you're not, you don't, you think, you're badgering me about what my concerns should be, and that I shouldn't care about my own, like, bank account and ability to provide for myself and my family, my kids, whatever.

And meanwhile, you're up here, like, living high on the hog. You certainly are looking after yourself. So it fuels a reality that there is a massive disconnect between politicians in Washington and what actually is happening in people's lives. And Democrats, by leaning 100 percent into abortion, you know, you have a lot of voters who care about the issue. And it's not that it's not important. Of course, it's important. But you know, it's a sort of level of condescension to say, no, no, no, we're going to tell you which issue is the most important. And we're going to not just ignore the thing that you are saying

over and over again is of most concern to you. But there is I mean, I see it online all the time when you even suggest that Democrats should be messaging more on the economy, like you get basically called like a fascist enabler or whatever. And there's all this vitriol around being able to say, you know, maybe we should actually listen to voters and meet them where they are and try to address their concerns with something really significant. You talked about the checks with Trump. We also saw the checks with the Democrats. And I brought this up a million times. But if you didn't learn from, they came from behind in these two Georgia runoffs and they promised relentlessly, like, we are going to write you checks. There are going to be checks.

We're going to do release checks. And they won on that message. And then they just instantly memory hold that that was an effective strategy whatsoever. And we also saw in the House with Nancy Pelosi, like basically playing games with the checks back in 2020, you know, voters really punished the Democratic caucus in the House. They were narrowly able to hold on to their majority. So, you know, to end this section on midterms, and we'll get to Biden's speech, which is another conversation about the midterms, the overall picture is just shifting towards Republicans. We talked about the Senate Cook political report has also just shifted 10 seats to Republicans. In fact, I think since this shift came out, they've shifted even a few more seats in the direction of the Republicans. But, you know, these are all every single one of

these districts, 10 districts that they shifted in the Republicans direction. They're all districts that Biden won by between eight and 20 points, eight and 20 points. So that tells you the type of danger that they are in the House. Now, I've seen a few polls that came out that actually have Democrats with the lead on the ballot. Overall, Republicans, you know, in the average, they certainly hold the lead. But I've seen a few outliers. So if you want to hang your hat on that and say, oh, maybe they're missing something that's going on here and it's going to ultimately be different, maybe it's possible. But I can just tell you, looking at the macro numbers, looking at the numbers that we showed you on white suburban women, looking at what people are telling pollsters their number one issue is, doesn't look good for

Democrats. Totally agree, Crystal. And what are they doing to address those concerns? Well, Biden gave a big speech last night on democracy. And, you know, to tie this back to our previous segment with the More Perfect Union video, Faz Shakir, who was Bernie's campaign manager and is now running More Perfect Union, he actually went on TV and was like, before the speech, he was like, I think they need to go back and rewrite it and talk about the cost of living and how you're going to address their concerns. They didn't take his advice. So here's a little taste of one more time. We're going to try to

persuade voters that democracy is the thing that they should be voting on and nothing else. Take a listen. The assailant tried to take Paul hostage. He woke him up. He wanted to tie him up. The assailant ended up using a hammer to smash Paul's skull. Thankfully, by the grace of God, Paul survived. All this happened after the assault. And it just, it's hard to even say. It's hard to even say. After the assailant entered the home asking, where's Nancy? Where's Nancy? Those are the very same words used by the mob when they stormed the United States Capitol on January the 6th. So I had the team pull that particular soundbite because with the Paul Pelosi tie-in, it was at least a little bit different than what Democrats have been saying. But if you go and listen to the speech, which wasn't actually that long, but you don't really

need to listen to it, it's the same rhetoric. And I hate to sound callous about this because I actually really do care about the future of democracy and about people having a voice, which they don't feel like they have right now. And I think if you listen to voters, you will find out like they already feel like they don't really have much say in our great democracy. But, you know, if you care about this election, if this election is existential, if there are massive and I think the majority of Republicans on the ballot in this election are election deniers, that is all true. Then the best thing you could be doing is trying to persuade voters to vote for you by focusing on the issues that they're telling you they care about the most. I mean, what is it like three percent of voters that say that January 6th is their number one issue? And yet, I just really can't wrap my head around it in terms of a strategy here. This is

your final pitch. He billed this as like this big speech. All the networks took it. You know, this was clearly like the final pitch they wanted to make. And I'm not saying that, you know, Republican extremism on this issue hasn't hurt them some and given Democrats somewhat of a chance, but you got to close on how you're going to deliver for people on the number one issue they care about. And instead, it's just like, let's talk about January 6th. Maybe if we say January 6th 10 more times, maybe finally people are going to listen to it. Well, it's very hollow. You know, Josh Barrow actually said this well. He says, if voters reject Democrats' agenda on their record on issues including inflation, crime, immigration, or abortion, they have no recourse at the ballot box. They simply must vote for Democrats anyway, is the message. At least until at such time as a Republican Party is run by the likes of Liz Cheney and Adam Kissinger. This actually amounts to telling voters they have already lost their democracy. Well, what does that mean? And then also, whenever you make the point that democracy is on the ballot and then you lose, what are you saying? Are you saying that democracy is over or

is it democracy in action? Is it capital D democracy, the idea, or small d democracy, the actual practice? This is the thing that I'm trying to say, which is like, democracy is being responsive to voters, right? Not just capitulating to, but being somewhat responsive to what the people are telling you they care about. So you have voters in our democracy saying, I am being hurt by inflation. I think we're in a recession. I am concerned about this.

And it is kind of anti-democratic to be like, you're wrong. That's not the right issue to care about. That's what is driving me so insane about all of this. You know, maybe even if Democrats did all the right things in terms of this election and, you know, leaned into the messaging that Stan Greenberg has been encouraging, the child tax credits and taxing the rich and like offered a real material program, convinced people that there was something to gain by voting for Democrats once again. Maybe they would still lose just because of history and economic wins and whatever. But I'm telling you, Republicans gave them every chance to be able to succeed. They have like

shot themselves in the foot 15 different ways with terrible, extreme, crazy ass candidates, terrible, extreme, crazy ass economic plans. And instead, they've just said, you know what, we're going to go 90 percent on abortion, 10 percent on democracy. And you can just guess what the economic plan is. And if you're not happy in the current economy, then I guess you're going to pretty much expect that things are going to continue in this direction. It is absolutely maddening that they're so foolish. But I mean, ultimately, it's really not foolish. Like there's a reason why they don't like to lean into this type of politics. Because if you make promises on, you know, some sort of economic program, then you actually have some accountability and some need to deliver.

Just like Biden was forced into doing the checks, forced into doing the student loan debt relief that he didn't really want to do. If you make really specific, concrete material promises, you have to follow through on it, and they don't really want to do that. Correct. They don't. Absolutely don't. You know, in many ways, I almost think that the Democrats could learn something from the Republicans. Many Republicans do want to cut Medicare and Social Security. They talk about it, but they don't actually talk about it that much. And when they make their pitch, they don't make that the pitch. They make the pitch like screw Joe Biden. Correct. But even though, so this is what, listen, if you have a secondary or tertiary political goal relative to

the, uh, relative to the voters preferences, it is political malpractice to lead with that tertiary political goal. Instead, you should lean with whatever's going to get you votes. And then when you're in office, you could do whatever you want. You could do that thing, and then you can also do this slightly more unpopular thing. And, you know, who knows? As we're all learning here throughout this election, sometimes it doesn't matter if you have one tertiary political position, which is quite unpopular, as long as you do the top two political things at the top. So anyway, the whole point is that if you believe that democracy hinges on you staying in office,

then you should do everything humanly possible to stay in office. To win, right. And, you know, this just fundamentally, I guess, is the disagreement that I have with a lot of people whenever, you know, they run, which is that I actually believe much more in the voters. I think that they know exactly what the problems are. They have a far better diagnosis of what's actually going on here relative to how you should tell them how to think. I mean, look, I have many positions which I know are not popular, and I would never presume to tell people

that they should care about it. I'll tell you why. I think I care about them, but I would never say that your grocery bill is less important than whatever I'm going to tell you that it is because it is not my place, nor should it ever be, even for a politician, for somebody who's in office.

Anything, it should always be the opposite. It just reminds me of, remember the Mueller report came out? Yeah, I do. And it was like, maybe if we do it in graphic novel form, then people are going to care about it and see it the way we see it. And it just feels like that with this speech as well. It's like, maybe if we do it in a primetime speech a little bit before midterm elections and we tie in Paul, but maybe this time this will be the thing that actually galvanizes people. And it's like, listen, guys, I agree.

It's important. I'm not trying to downplay it. But you have really clear indicators of what people are basing their vote on at this point. And you just continue to like willfully ignore it. So ultimately. Good luck. Good luck. We're going to see if it works,

if the democracy final pitch works out for you very, very soon. Speaking of the end of democracy, let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. Elon Musk making some big moves over at Twitter. Let's go ahead and put this up there. And Elon is saying that the $8 a month check system is fully going to be instituted. He tweets, search, which is essential to defeat spam and scam, ability to post long video and audio,

half as many ads, paywall bypass for publishers willing to work with us. This will give Twitter a revenue stream to reward content creators. There will be a secondary tag below the name for someone who is a public figure, which is already the case for politicians. So let's go and put the next one, which is up there on the screen as well, just to continue reading from what Elon is saying. At the same time on the content moderation front, and this is where I'm starting to get a little dubious about what's happening. He says, I've been talking to civil society leaders like Jonathan Greenblatt over at the ADL, Yael Eisenstadt also at the ADL, some quote unquote civil society leaders. Anytime I hear that term, I'm like, these sound like very fake jobs. And if you look at the rest of the people who are charged there, you include people from the George W. Bush

presidential library and other quote unquote democracy experts. So I'm just going to go ahead and be pretty dubious of whatever the hell that group is. And look, I've already said why I don't think $8 a month for a blue check mark makes any sense. I have no action. And the irony is, is I'm not one of those people who thinks Twitter should be free. I think people should be, have to be paid or should have to pay, but a hell of a lot more than $8 a month relative to the amount of followers I've laid all that out. And apparently they are looking into that. However, let's put even that aside. Cause I don't even think it really matters. They're trying to frame it as a populist thing. We'll see. I mean, I'm curious to see how many people

will actually pay for it. I just don't really know. We know how many people are going to pay for it. I'm actually curious. What do you think? Well, I mean, you look at like, I think it's analogous to our business where we have close to 900,000 YouTube subscribers and definitely not close to that in terms of paid paid premium subscribers. Yes. So there was a poll that was done that there were like 10 percent of blue checks who said they would pay to have their blue check. And that's probably the high watermark because it's very different to tell a pollster like, yeah, in theory, I guess I pay for it. It's another thing to get out your credit card, put it in and, you know, then your credit card number gets lost and gets changed. It's a totally

different thing to then actually go and do the work to pay that $8 a month. So there's two metrics here with the blue check plan. Number one, is it a good business idea? And number two, is it a good idea in terms of the free speech goals that we were told were at the core of Elon's takeover of Twitter year. I think it fails on both counts. I could be wrong on the business side, but when you think about it, first of all, how much money is this really going to raise? What did we find? There's like 390,000 active blue check. Yeah, so I did the math. 10%, it's only 3.8 million a year. That's nothing. It's nothing. That is a drop in the bucket. Meanwhile, we know the big problem with Twitter that Elon was pointing to, too, by the way, before this deal closed, is the fact that many of their most active users, previously most active and largest users, are not using the platform anymore. 90% of the content comes from 10% of the users.

Now, are those all blue checks? No. But a disproportionate number of them are. So you're like antagonizing the core group of people that makes your platform, that is doing the most content creation, that makes your platform interesting and worthwhile. You're like antagonizing them and sort of forcing a further decline in terms of the amount of content, amount of engagement. So I think it fails on the business front because those numbers are just like pathetic. And then you're antagonizing some of your key people. But I also think it fails on the free speech front, especially when you start talking about like, oh, and you can pay to get priority

in terms of your mentions and your replies. The best platform in terms of like actual free speech and people being able to actually have a voice, which is what Twitter was at its best, is neutral, right? The minute that you become like YouTube and you have these algorithms in and you have some creators that get better treatment than other creators and you make it this sort of like pay to play system, that is a hit to free speech. And not just because like it's literally paid speech, but you know, it screws up the ecosystem of making it like a neutral platform experience. So the fact that they already had instituted this thing where it's no longer just like, oh, what's you know, what's the order of the tweets that came in, that they're surfacing what we think that you're going to like. That leads to already a problem in terms of free speech. And then when you add to this, this new blue check system where it's like you can pay to

get favorable treatment in your mentions and replies, that's an issue. The other thing that I would say about the blue check plan is the blue check thing, it did become like this weird sort of like status symbol situation. The original idea wasn't a bad idea, though, which is that on a platform where people can be anonymous and where you have bots, where you have spam, where you have trolls, all this stuff, the blue check was supposed to indicate

this person is who they say they are. Now, reforming that system would be a great idea. It'd be better if you had more blue checks where you could see more clearly that people are who they are advertising themselves to be. That would be an improvement. But instead, what you're doing is shifting the blue check system to just basically be an indication of who's willing to pay for clout. So that's why even though, you know, for

me, $8 a month, it wouldn't be a big deal. Like there's no way in hell I would pay for this because ultimately I'm not trying to be like, oh, I'm the person who wants to pay for clout and let me get my blue check mark. I think it's gross. Well, I also just think that look, from a business, like, we're not going to invest in that because we're not going to get any value from it, right? Which is like, fundamentally, there is no actual value. Now, if there were actual value, like, if we weren't able

to tweet, this gets to why I think Twitter for Enterprise is a way better idea. If we were not able to, let's say, promote our stuff without paying, then yeah, because we pay for anything whenever we need to, like, access, promote our stuff without paying, then yeah, because we pay for anything whenever we need to access to our direct audience on MailChimp or whatever. The point is that Twitter itself is, I think, misunderstanding the actual value. I've laid out this a million times, so I won't belabor the point. Let's go and put this next part up on the screen, though. And this gets to why I think content moderation is really a big problem and why they're not thinking 100% yet clearly about it. So there was a lot of kerfuffle online

over the quote community notes feature after the White House tweeted out that seniors are getting the biggest increase in their social security checks in 10 years through President Biden's leadership. There was actually a fact check on it from a community notes that said seniors will receive that increase due to the annual cost of living adjustment, which is based on inflation, aka nothing that Joe Biden has actually done. So Elon replied to that for somebody who was celebrating the fact check and said that the community notes feature is awesome. Our goal is to make Twitter the most accurate source of information on earth without regard to political affiliation. I actually take a great issue with that because even though I enjoy the fact-checked, here's what I said. All fact-checking

or context is editorial or political in nature. When you pick or choose who or what or how to fact-check, it is a fool's errand because the original problem at Twitter was the editorial choice of ban Trump, but put a label, whatever. And it also failed spectacularly at Facebook. In my opinion, the best policy is to just simply let people say anything that they want within the bounds of the law and then let others decide whether it's true or not. As in, you or I are welcome to reply and say, hey, this is bullshit, and we can make fun of you on our show. Yeah, we'll tweet it, reply to it.

You can look through those and see what other people are saying. And guess what? The side effect, actually, is that the most accurate information and true information comes from the total discussion around the issue at hand, which is that everybody can say that the White House tweet is a lie because of X context, Y context. We can explain it in a full 20-minute segment here on Breaking Points if we want, or we can reply to it with a snarky tweet as well. Twitter should never be in

the business of picking or choosing what is true or what is not. I believe that, by the way, for all regimes, even the Iranians. I'm like, yeah, let the ayatollah on Twitter. I'd rather him there than not be there. I'd rather hear what he has to say. Agreed. I mean, this is where there gets to be a real direct conflict between the purported free speech goals and the business goals. And Twitter, you know, there's more and more reporting about this precarious financial position they're in, their interest expense with the new debt is going to balloon to about a billion dollars a year. Companies' operations last year only generated about $630 million in cash flow.

Reports that Elon is set to sack about 50% of the workforce, which I understand given the financial straits that they're in right now. But, you know, what you're talking about is what would be good in terms of making this a neutral platform in terms of, like, it being the digital town square and free speech concerns and all of those sorts of things. They seem to feel that is in conflict. And I don't think that they're wrong with the goals of making Twitter profitable, which has to still worry a lot about what advertisers are going to think about this. Because you aren't going to make up the advertiser cash flow with your, like, $4 million you're going to squeeze out of Blue Jacks. And that's exactly why I was worried. When you start meeting with the ADL and all these folks, listen, folks, I'm not saying the ADL is always bad, but they have been very censorious and have

been now for over a decade, which I have a great big problem. Yeah, color of change, same thing. Right, same thing. Look, this is the issue, which is that when you're meeting with these people, if you're even bowing or giving them a foot in the door, they will always go on behalf of censorship and they will always prioritize and pressure advertisers to not advertise with you if you do not go along with their basically blackmail political agenda. So when I saw that, that he's meeting with these people and considering, you know, this whole community notes feature, I'm like, man, you're really misunderstanding.

In my opinion, again, look, he's the guy who owns the company, not me, which is that if you actually want to achieve free speech, good debate, and good discourse, frankly, it might be uncomfortable sometimes. You just got to let people say whatever you want. But again, the profit motive, more than meeting with any of these people, the profit motive is the problem. It's a big problem. And I think it's impossible to square the circle. But, you know, maybe they'll figure it out. He's smarter than I am, so who knows?

I wish him the best. Okay, on now to Ukraine. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. Really interesting essay by Charles Kupchan. Now, why does that matter? He is both a professor of international relations at Georgetown University, but important for our purposes, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, which is like the establishment of the establishment in foreign affairs. And then even more so, writing in the New York Times with a headline, which you would never have seen before, called,

It's Time to Bring Russia and Ukraine to the Negotiating Table. So here's what he opens with. The war in Ukraine is dangerously escalating. Ukraine is advancing on the battlefield and is growing only more determined to expel Russian troops. In the meantime, the Kremlin reinforces its beleaguered forces in eastern Ukraine, pounds Ukrainian cities. Meanwhile, the United States and its allies are sending more weapons to Ukraine, prepared as the G7 democracies are willing to stand firmly for as long as it takes. Ukraine has put up a staunch and inspiring defense of its sovereignty. But the risk of a wider war

between NATO and Russia is rising by the day,ed is very, very worth reading. What I enjoy about this essay, it's actually framed in center-left terms, right? So it's like, well, the idea that a right-wing party would win is anti-democratic, but he's saying like, well, the economic wins are actually to your detriment, if that's something that you care about. He doesn't even mention nuclear weapons there. He talks about the, quote, wider war, about the proximity and the prospect of NATO and other countries of miscalculation. And the reason why I think it's important is that it highlights actually an inspiring story about why diplomacy and talking to your enemies, even when it sucks, is very important. Let's put this up there, the next part, which is that from Max Sedan of the Financial Times

highlighted this quote from a New York Times story, which says, officials say phone calls between Western and Russian counterparts late last month helped ease nuclear tensions. A speech by Putin in which he denied that Moscow was prepared to use a nuclear weapon further lowered the temperature. So why does that matter? Because that piece, which he's quoting that from, actually comes from U.S. officials compiling intelligence and briefing it to the President of the United States that Russian military leaders were very seriously discussing the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

So contrary to all of the he's bluffing and all of that, their most senior military generals were actually saying, no, we actually might use these nukes. We maybe should, we should do it. Maybe we shouldn't. We should present nuclear options to President Putin. Now, ultimately Putin, I mean, look, he says, he says, of course, he would not use it. He also said he would invade Ukraine. So who knows? It's like, not exactly the most credibility. But the point is, is that at the highest level of the Russian military, the CIA and others were saying that they were having serious discussions around nuclear weapons use. Even more troubling, by the way, in this piece is that the whole idea of Americans would have a heads up, it's actually completely fake.

Which is that we apparently don't have any real insight into the Russian nuclear arsenal beyond a very cursory look. And in any terms of warnings would actually probably come after usage we'd be like hey sir this just there is no forward warning yeah because that was one of the things that in every article that talked about the possibility of putin using a tactical nuclear weapon they make sure we've seen no signs and officials assure us that we would know in advance and now it's like, we probably wouldn't know until that shit happens. So that's that's cool. It was interesting to me, too. First of all, on that first op ed, really go and read the whole thing, because he also goes through. I think this is very useful. Here's what a negotiated diplomatic settlement could actually look like

to get to that level of concrete specificity of like, here's the outlines of what it might deal could potentially look like. And here are the tradeoffs and here are the parts that are really Yes. Discussing it according to our intelligence community. And actually, it was the communications between U.S. leadership and Russian leadership, which had not been happening. And even though there was all this weird like, oh, Ukraine, dirty bomb or whatever, those communications helped to pull them back from the brink. Something else we've been saying this whole time is like you have to be in communication during the Cold War. There was communication, constant communication that really, really matters in terms of protecting the globe's safety. So that's one thing. Very interesting to me. Right after this comes out, CNN gets a different leak from the deep state that's like, well, we didn't really have confidence in that intelligence product. And there were disputes about whether or not that was real. So definitely there were factors in there, factions in there,

who wanted to downplay this report. They say the assessment drafted by the National Intelligence Council is not a high confidence product and is not raw intelligence, but rather analysis. Multiple people who have read it told CNN, for that reason, some officials believe the conversations reflecting the document may have been taken out of context, don't necessarily indicate that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon. So somebody, once again, trying to be like, no, no, no, nuclear weapons, they're not even thinking about that. Don't even worry about that because that then justifies the continued direction of U.S. policy. I would highlight the words of Kevin Rudd, for those who don't know. He's the former PM

of Australia. Why does that matter? Well, Kevin Rudd was a member of the Five Eyes Intelligence Sharing Agreement, which is the most sensitive U.S. intelligence shared amongst Western partners. Now, he tweets in response to this news, quote, this is dangerous. U.S. intelligence does not brief like this unless threat is credible. Remember, few believed U.S. warnings of impending Russian invasion. Time for Beijing to urgently intervene and stop Russian nuclear madness. So, I mean, look, the former PM of Australia thinks it's very serious because he also used to once upon a time get briefings like this. And we have very, very, the highest level of intelligence sharing happens within the Five Eyes Alliance. So the point is that people took it seriously. For it to get briefed to the president,

that means it's incredibly serious. The idea of forward warning and all that is fake. And I just want to highlight the fact that those conversations happened is all really you and I have ever been saying from this beginning. We're like, look, support Ukraine. Nobody's saying you shouldn't support Ukraine. We should support Ukraine while keeping in mind all of our red lines. In fact, I think that one of the things that he writes in this op-ed, which is so critical, is, quote, Ukraine battlefield success could go too far. If the defense of Ukraine is not worth U.S. boots on the ground,

the return of the Donbass and Crimea to Ukrainian control is not worth risking a new world war. Imagine thinking that that's controversial. But we need to discuss and think about things in terms of parity and have to be able to have a cool head. Negotiating with your enemies

really sucks. I really encourage everybody to go and watch the new It's All Quiet on the Western Front on Netflix. I saw it in theaters, but they actually added

some parts in the movie that weren't in the book about the actual negotiation between the German Democratic Republic, the newly formed GDR, and the actual French forces and how difficult it was to capitulate by the Germans. But there was the lead negotiator was like every hour that this war goes on, thousands are dying. And it was the juxtapose of the elites in this train carriage. I don't want to ruin it for anybody, but they're basically like living an opulent lifestyle. And then they would flash back to the actual Western Front of guys with rats crawling out of their eyes and dying in their minds.

Anyway, I mean that's the reality of what these things are. So the point is that they were highlighting, and it shows you how difficult it is to negotiate with your enemies, but why it's critical and why it has to happen in the first place. And the reason why we covered it all, this, is a good segue to something which is being totally ignored. Once upon a time, this would have been front page news because we are on the brink of a major war in East Asia of which nobody apparently appears to be taking very seriously because it would just be inconvenient for everybody's picture of the global narrative. So let's go ahead and put up the next one on the

screen from part two, please, the Reuters tear sheet about North Korea. This is very important. North Korea has fired 23 missiles with one landing off the South Korean coast for the first time ever. This comes from a slew of different missile launches by the North Koreans, both towards the Japanese, towards South Korean waters in a response to South Korean military drills with the United States, and spawning major panic in Japan, Crystal. They did overflies of Japan for the second time since 2017. Can you imagine watching television, evening television, and the emergency system? You know, whenever there's like a flood warning on your phone, imagine it says, missile incoming, take shelter, take shelter now. That is what our Japanese allies

are dealing with on a daily basis now. And this is a real bad situation because right now, the South Koreans, let's go and put this up there, have fired three air-to-ground missiles from warplanes into the sea north of the disputed border on top of U.S. military exercises, which are happening. So why does this matter in the context of what we were just talking about in Ukraine at all? Well, Donald Trump, I believe, made one of the most significant diplomatic breakthroughs of all time in modern U.S. history. Whenever he said, screw it, I'm meeting with Kim Jong-un with zero preconditions because the other option was war. That doesn't sound very good. From everything I have read, the North Koreans have a major stockpile of horrific chemical weapons, VX, sarin gas, on top of massive ammunition stockpile. They could level

the city of Seoul in like 45 minutes. It would be horrific. Tens of millions of people would die on top of tens of thousands of American soldiers. Something like two-thirds of the South Korean population lives in Seoul. Exactly. Within 45 minutes of the DMZ, we also have tens of thousands of troops, American soldiers, who are on, I think it's Osan Air Force Base and others, who's basically their job is to die in the middle of one of these conflicts. That's how grave the military plans for all of this look like. Well, we had two options in 2017. Kim Jong-un is not giving up his nuclear program. He's not going to stop firing missiles because he wants entry into the global economy because his country is suffering, mostly because of him,

but he wants access to global markets and end of sanctions. So he's willing to go all in and risk war for that. We had to decide, well, do we want the Korean peninsula to be wiped off the face of the earth? Or should we just try and put an end to this thing, this madness? Trump went to go meet with him. He was hailed, legitimizing this dictator. Yeah. He was said to be abandoning the longstanding U.S. position that we must have denuclearization as a pretext for talks. And he's like, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to go and meet with the guy.

And guess what? They didn't do anything for five years. And it was great. It was actually very nice to not have random ballistic missiles flying into the sea in East Asia, which could even, you know, one issue is that they fire these missiles into the air and they don't give any heads up to like commercial airline pilots. There's a real fear that they can just shoot a plane out of the sky accidentally. Very real consequences. The point is, is that Trump bucked the Washington establishment by

saying, no, I'm just going to meet with them. And also, even though he ended up also not dropping denuclearization from the demand of North Korea, we got them talking. They were exchanging letters. Mike Pompeo was over there all the time. And we were presenting the North Koreans. We're like, hey, look, you can have a great life if you guys give up your nukes. Now, ultimately, I personally think that's just not on the table at all. They would personally, like if I were them, I would never give it up. As they always say in their negotiations, look what happened to Gaddafi. Yeah, they're like, you guys, you know, he died with a ramrod up his ass. He's like, that's not going to happen to me. So that's something that they are wholly wedded to.

The point is, is that this shows you, because the Biden administration immediately reverted back to the Obama position, which is no, we're not going to talk to them at all. And it's up to them whether they want to start a war or not. Yeah. This demonstrates the power and lasting legacy of diplomacy. We had five years of relative peace in East Asia, even though nothing happened. Talking was all that happened. It also shows you, I mean, you know, Americans have a finite ability to consume news.

There's a finite ability of the news media to, you know, focus in on any particular story. And, you know, they're all consumed with the Ukraine war. It's a very important story. We're very consumed with it as well, possibility of nuclear war. But, you know, don't forget that we have other incredibly dangerous, volatile situations unfolding with North Korea, Taiwan, other places. And we don't want to let that fall off the table. And Obama handed off to Trump. That was the thing that he said he thought would be the biggest threat, the largest danger, the most sort of like consuming issue on the international stage. So, you know, that has not

gone away. And even after those first 23 missiles, and then South Korea does their, you know, sort of retaliation, North Korea continued then afterwards and launched four more, including an ICBM, which they say that test failed. But, you know, further escalating even after the initial launch of those 23 missiles. So it's a very, very dangerous situation. And look, maybe I'll say something controversial, which will piss off a lot of the Euros that watch our show. Japan and South Korea are 15,000 times more valuable to the U.S. economy, to the U.S. way of life, and as allies than any place in Eastern Europe. And I know it's difficult to talk that way, but just look at a chart of global GDP and look at trading relationships,

longtime alliances, military spending, commitment actually to the U.S. military alliance, the U.S. way of life, the U.S. global order vis-a-vis China. Asia is, look, 50-something percent of world GDP. And I think there's a real chauvinism the way that we talk about allies and the way that we look at the world. Considering how important this part of the world is, maybe just because we don't have ancestry. Maybe I'm Indian, so I just don't have the European ancestry, so I'm willing to look at it like on a balance sheet, any war in East Asia would be 10 to 15 to 25 times more impactful on U.S. interests than anything that is going on right now in Ukraine. And part of the issue, as I'm always worried about, is that we are blowing our wad on terms of our military industrial complex,

on terms of our supplies, in terms of our just energy, our attention. Public will. While there is, yeah, public will. While there is a real possibility of a war which could end the American way of life as we know it. Already, China's zero COVID lockdowns are making it so that the new iPhone 14 is not going to get delivered, you know, on time. This is outrageous. I really believe that people should, people should understand, like, if there's a war

over Taiwan or in East Asia, this will be the last iPhone that people should understand. If there's a war over Taiwan or in East Asia, this will be the last iPhone that you ever have. And you'll likely have to turn it into the government because they need the chips that are inside of it. So look, it's a serious situation. We can learn. We had a five-year reprieve from over 70 years of war or tensions on the Korean Peninsula. And it came from just talking between two leaders and having high-level conversations. And it led to extraordinary results. The South Korean president goes to North Korea, does the handshake. It's never happened before. It's like we were on the path to a good outcome. And instead, the Biden administration reverted back to the brain-dead

policy of we're going to insist that a country with the capability to nuke us should give up their nukes. Why would they do that? These past several years have really exposed how so much of what is taken for granted is like foreign policy conventional wisdom. And the blob was not just like – it was just completely wrong. It was like total opposite of what you should be doing. I mean, you know, our sanction policy with regard to Russia, how is that? Has that curbed their appetite for war? Yeah, you're talking about nukes. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, there's been a lot of potential learning, but unfortunately the foreign policy establishment doesn't seem to want to learn

those lessons. No, they don't want to learn it at all. Okay, let's, final one here. This is a rough one. Every time we see these moments, it's just so brutal because this is the most powerful man in the world. The fate of the planet rests in this man's hands in a lot of ways.

Rests in this man's hands and yet, we are forced to cover him objectively and say that some of these senior moments are just horrific

and the latest one is two gaffes, which happened in the span of literally 20 seconds while Biden was on the stump. I won't preview them for you. Let's just take a listen. And they talk about inflation. You know, we're dealing with it for a whole second. Inflation is a worldwide problem right now because of a war in Iraq and the impact on oil and what Russia is doing. I mean, excuse me, the war in Ukraine. And think of Iraq because that's when my son died.

Because he died. So first of all, war in Iraq, war in Ukraine. Second, he said that his son died in Iraq. You know the craziest part? That's the second time that his son has died in Ukraine. Second, he said that his son died in Iraq. You know the craziest part? That's the second time that he said that his son has died in Iraq. Yeah. And his son died of brain cancer here in the U.S. Biden also often does this inappropriate thing where, and I am not diminishing Beau Biden's service, like, you know, like he served in Iraq, but he will often liken like the experience of losing his son to a brain tumor than people whose kids get killed in combat.

And it's like, dude, that's actually not the same at all. Like, you can empathize as a grieving parent, but it's like, you know. I mean, he believes, and I think with some justification, that Beau gets brain cancer because of the toxic burn pits. So he does connect it directly to the surface. It's possible. Putting that aside. You know, what was really noteworthy to me was not

the, you know, brain malfunction, which we've seen consistently for a while now with President Biden. It was that the New York Times actually wrote it up. That's what shocked me. Let's go and put this up on the screen. I mean, Biden verbally fumbles twice during campaign trip in Florida. The president confused the American war in Iraq with the Russian war in Ukraine and then misstated how his son, Beau, died. This was a piece by Peter Baker. This comes on the heels also of an op-ed in The Washington Post by the establishment of establishment dudes. George Will wrote that Democrats should dump both Biden and Kamala. And he cites specifically, so it says, for the good of the country, Biden and Harris should bow

out of the 2024 election, citing specifically one of these brain malfunctions on the part of the president where he seemed to forget that he passed the student loan forgiveness program by executive order rather than by taking a vote. I mean, he actually said specifically like, oh, we won that vote by a slim margin by just a couple of votes. It's like, what are you talking about? You that was an executive order that had nothing to do with the Congress. So it is noteworthy to me that establishment media is setting up a case for Democrats dumping Biden and moving forward with a different candidate. Yeah. I mean, I think you might be right. I also just think it's getting so undeniable at this point that it's like you look at that and you're like, that is horrific.

I mean, it comes on the heels of the Jackie clip. Remember? It's just undeniable. It is undeniable. You're like, that is horrific. I mean, it comes on the heels of the Jackie clip. Remember, like, Jackie, where's— It's just undeniable. It is undeniable. And, you know, even in that limited clip that we played on the Paul Pelosi thing, he, like, loses his place. Right. Just in the middle. And some element of Biden being off the cuff has always been there.

I urge people to go—I think I did a monologue. You can go back and watch it, of Biden in interviews from 2003, 2008, even 2016. Basically the same guy. Something happened between 2017 and 2020. When he came, I'll never forget, when I saw him on stage in 2019 at one of his first, I was like, I can't believe it's the same guy. Well, you know, they talk about how with people who are older, it's like when you stop working that you really start to decline. And so it kind of makes sense that, okay, you're done with the duties of the vice presidency. You're kind of in a respite period that that decline really starts to show up. I mean, I'm just purely speculating here, but it is pretty undeniable. Now, question is, if in fact you buy my assertion here that the media is starting to say, hey, guys, you know, there's some real concerns about this guy's age.

All the polling says a majority of Democrats want a different candidate. The number one concern is his age. And, you know, along with it, like his his mental acuity. I still continue to believe, though, that it's going to be impossible to, um, for establishment Democrats to push him to the side because ultimately who's the bench? I mean, how do you get past Kamala Harris, the first black female vice president? How do you do that when you know that she would be worse than Biden? And by the way, it's not like, you know, the guy they'd all like, Mayor Pete. It's not like his approval ratings or his electability is really in better shape than the incumbent president of the United States. So I continue to think at the end of the day, they suck it up and all rally behind Joe and stop. Remember how there was a

time during the primary where they were willing to talk about his fumbles and his inability to speak. And then all of a sudden, when they decided they had no other choice in order to defeat Bernie Sanders, they're like, we can't talk about that anymore. And it's just a stutter. And how dare you be ableist? I think we'll see a similar trajectory. That is my guess, but we'll see. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, in the final days, the campaign season with Democrats facing potential doom in both the House and the Senate, President Biden is trying one last ditch effort to turn the party's fortunes around in addition to his democracy speech. Frankly, this is what I've been begging the party to focus on all along. The Wall Street royalists, the corporate profiteers who've been

taking advantage of the current moment to price gouge. Specifically, Biden decided to dip his toe in the water of going after some of the worst corporate actors, the oil and gas giants. Take a listen. Oil companies' record profits today are not because they're doing something new or innovative. Their profits are a windfall of war, the windfall from the brutal conflict that's ravaging Ukraine and hurting tens of millions of people around the globe. You know, at a time of war, any company receiving historic windfall profits like this has a responsibility to act beyond their narrow self-interest of its executives and shareholders. I think they have a responsibility to act in the interest of their consumers, their community, and their country.

To invest in America by increasing production and refining capacity. Because they don't want to do that. They have the opportunity to do that. Lowering prices for consumers is a pump. You know, if they don't, they're going to pay a higher tax on their excess profits and face other restrictions. My team will work with Congress to look at these options that are available to us and others. It's time for these companies to stop war profiteering, meet their responsibilities to this country, and give the American people a break and still do very well.

The American people are going to judge who's standing with them and who is only looking out for their own bottom line. I know where I stand, and I want to hear more from you about this when the Congress gets back. Thank you all very, very much. Appreciate it. Biden's team is 100 percent correct about the record-breaking profits the oil and gas giants are raking in. So the combination of high post-pandemic demand and high prices has led to an astonishing $19.7 billion profit for ExxonMobil. That's just in the third quarter. Chevron, no slouch either, raking in a record $11.2 billion in profits. Both of those represent massive increases quarter to quarter and year over year. Now, Biden's statement and the threat of a windfall profits tax, it's part political messaging and it's part economic policy. On economic policy, the theory is that oil and gas companies, even while raking in record profits,

are too spooked by the possibility of recession or new lockdowns in China to invest in significant production increases, no matter how much money they are making right now. What's more, these companies can see the writing on the wall with the green transition away from fossil fuels, which has actually been accelerated by the war in Ukraine. In the short term, Russia's war has upped the need for fossil fuels and dirty energy sources like coal. But in the medium to long term, it has made a compelling case to the world they'd better get serious about renewables to protect both their economies and their national security from future shocks of the type they are currently experiencing. By the way, side note, this is precisely why we should nationalize our oil and gas industry to up production in the short term, wind it down for the long term,

but you can go back and watch my previous monologue on that one. Bottom line, the natural workings of the market are not going to lead these companies to up their production to help us out in the short term, no matter how record-breaking their current profit margins. In the Biden administration, they've already tried inducing increased production through carrots for the industry by using the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to effectively guarantee a price floor. With the windfall profits tax, the administration is now trying to break out the stick. And in my opinion, that is long overdue. Basically, they're saying, nice profit margin you got there. Be ashamed if something happened to it. The threat of a windfall profits tax is an attempt to induce the gas companies to produce more and lower prices in order to avoid that threat of a costly tax.

Now, there's no guarantees that the threat or the reality of a windfall profits tax will compel increased production. But if these giants are not going to up production anyway, and the Biden admin obviously not bold enough to actually nationalize them, at least they could use the tax proceeds to invest in a future that doesn't depend on these companies or on bad actors like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Venezuela. Now, on the politics, a windfall profits tax is a clear political winner. Just take a look at this. Back in March, when a group of House and Senate Dems unveiled legislation which would impose that windfall profits tax, a poll found an astonishing 80 percent of voters would back such a measure. An even higher 87 percent, including majorities of Republicans, said they want politicians to, quote, crack down on price gouging and excessive price increases by oil companies that result in higher gas prices at the pump. Just listen to how the crowd responded to Tim Ryan, he's the Democrat running a closer than expected race

for Senate in Ohio, when he brought up a windfall profits tax, and this was at a Fox News town hall. I think the fact that oil companies are making huge profits and having stock buybacks right now, while average person here is paying nearly $4 a gallon, I think that's wrong. And I think we need to crack down. We need to crack down on it. Now, apparently some critical players in

the White House have been paying attention to the incredible power of gas politics for a while. Our friend Jeff Stein of The Washington Post has a great inside look at how the second most powerful man in the White House, that would be Chief of Staff Ron Klain, became obsessed with gas prices. Jeff writes that, quote, many aides say the president's popularity is closely tied to a single economic number. They could be right. He goes on to explain that Ron Klain starts his day at 3.30 a.m. checking the AAA website for the daily average gas price.

He then eyeballs the gas station prices on his morning commute, continues checking in and tweeting about the daily trends multiple times around his busy day. Klain's focused on the political case for a gas price obsession. And the case is pretty simple. When gas prices have been high, Biden's approval has been low. When gas prices dropped, Biden notched his highest approval rating since the early honeymoon days of his term in office. As I write this, gas prices have been mostly trickling slowly down.

The national average is now about $3.76. Not exactly cheap, but better than when they were topping $5 a gallon, getting kind of close to where they were back in 2021. Fortunately for the White House, two of the most expensive markets in the country are in the swing states of Nevada and Arizona. On the other hand, Georgia boasts some of the cheapest gas in the country. Could be an interesting little experiment on election day of whether gas prices are as significant a political indicator as the White House seems to think they are. As Jeff writes, economists say there is something puzzling, if not irrational, in the political power of gas prices. Gas typically amounts to just 4%

of the average family's budget, with food and housing typically representing larger shares of how Americans spend their money. Gas appears to have a disproportionate electoral impact in part because of its visual prominence and the frequency with which consumers must buy it. Cost of housing, medicine, even groceries can be relatively opaque, while the price of gasoline is emblazoned on large public signs in every part of the country. So the current White House prayer down the stretch is that the downward slow drift of gas prices will translate into a disproportionate impact at the polls. That maybe this last little economic lift before election day will provide them with a boost that lets them hang on to the Senate. That perhaps this late downward decline is coming at just the right time and isn't showing up yet in the polls,

which as we've been covering, have been drifting steadily towards the GOP. Or maybe with voters having a lot of legitimate economic concerns outside of gas prices, and with Democrats mostly fixating on abortion, and in a final pitch on democracy, it's all too little, too late. Not gonna have to wait long to find out. Thing that's a little perplexing here though, Sagar, is, you know, this whole piece about Ron And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints.com. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, if you were to ask what I think separates me from most of the people who work in this profession, it's this. I think most of the people who work in so-called capital P politics are irredeemable and we should be better off without them. If you

were to ask them, they would say, yeah, we screwed up X or Y, but you don't know how to do Z without us, and everybody makes mistakes. In many ways, that's the central dividing line in American politics today. Do you acknowledge that things are bad and you want to tweak the system, or do you want to pretty much replace it? That's the framework through which we should approach the following subject, which has ignited a firestorm in our political discourse in recent days, after Brown University professor Emily Oster published a new piece in The Atlantic titled, quote, Let's Declare a Pandemic Amnesty, with the subhead, quote, We need to forgive one another for what we did and then when we were in

the dark about COVID. The crux of the argument is this, quote, Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward. She continues, we have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Oster focuses much on the early days of the pandemic, like April and May, for which I actually do have some sympathy. So I think it's worth parsing out why people are so angry about this thesis. First is this. She is dishonest in her portrayal of

quote hard calls that some had to make in early days. Nobody is mad at people for closing schools in March of 2020. Given the uncertainty, it was perfectly reasonable. What people are mad about is that schools were not reopened in August of 2020 after six months of data showed us that kids were not at risk. People are not mad that they were asked to mask up in the first couple of months of the virus. They are mad that many states and cities had straight up outdoor mask mandates for more than a year after the virus came to us. And we knew with relative certainty that COVID did not widely spread outdoors. I'm not mad about lockdowns in the first two months of the pandemic,

but I am furious that when a bunch of people take to the streets, that the public health establishment is willing to justify it completely and then have the gall to also say that it was okay for them, but if you want to walk your dog without a mask, then you're a grandma killer. Not mad about banning indoor dining in March of 2020. I am mad about heavily restricting it a year later, like we did here in Washington.

People are not mad that a vaccine was created. They think people are rightfully mad that it was sold as a total preventative measure when it was not. When people were told it was two and then you're done. And then months later, we're still being forced to mask up and then asked to get an additional three boosters. When thousands of people were fired from their job under fundamentally was a false premise. What I'm laying out in this diatribe is that there were immense societal costs to wrong calls during COVID. On a scale,

some people can be forgiven for lack of knowledge. But basically for me, everything past June of 2020 lockdown and mask policy-wise, and basically everything after the first two months of the mask rollout, should not be. Or how about the lab leak theory? Should we really forgive and declare a pandemic amnesty to the people who unleashed this plague upon the world, covered it up, and are continuing to fund the very same research by the U.S. government? Really? Should we really have amnesty for Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is up there, in my opinion, with George W. Bush in terms of damage that he has wrought upon this country and its lasting legacy? He lied about the lab leak hypothesis. He admitted to lying about herd immunity. He manipulated the media throughout

2020 and 2021 to impact policy, which by definition curtailed the lives of hundreds of millions of our citizens. No, I don't think an amnesty is in order for many of these transgressions that I laid out. The reason why I think that the George W. Bush analogy is important is this. During the Trump years, you had two options. Either you thought Trump came out of nowhere and that half of America was irredeemably racist, or you took a second and you think pretty hard. How does America elect the dude from The Apprentice as president? If you are willing to ask that question, you had no choice but to grapple with elite failure at the highest level over two successive American presidencies

where the, quote, experts were in charge. Trump was the cost of the war in Iraq, of the financial crisis, the turbocharging of cultural liberalism under Obama. To grapple with Trump, you had to accept on some level that the failures of the elite class, both then and going all the way back to the Reagan administration. That's why I cannot get behind a, quote, pandemic amnesty. I'm wrong all the time, and I was very wrong about a lot of things during COVID. To the best I can, I have admitted to that to try and inform my perspective, because I think it's important to retain all of your trust. The elites in charge do not think that way.

If they are wrong, they will never admit it, because they are not accountable to any of us. They are accountable only to their flawed peers. That is how the people who got us into the war in Iraq are literally all multi-millionaires with big careers in Washington and New York City, making big money while the kids that they sent abroad either died or came back missing a limb or missing the peace of mind that they once had. The point is, is that a quote amnesty only works one way. It forgives the crimes of the elite class and it would do nothing for the people who lost their jobs. It would do nothing for the tens of thousands of drug addicts who died during the pandemic,

for the millions who suffered depression or mental illness, took their lives, or just people who simply had a bad time and didn't have to. People in power should pay a price for that. Now, we can argue what that exact price should be, but an amnesty is not and should not be on the table. I believe this to my core about all elite failures. It's okay to be wrong. Anyone in power inevitably will be. It's not okay to be wrong, not admit it,

wreak consequences, and then say that the people who are mad should not be mad because they had the best of tensions when those people were wrong. Doing that over time is exactly how we got to where we are. Inevitably, it reveals fundamental discomfort on behalf of people who are professionally wrong with being held even somewhat to account. Now, do I have confidence anyone will have a price? Pay a price? No, I don't. Republicans say they'll investigate Fauci.

We'll see. I haven't had a real congressional accounting of elites since the church committee in the 1970s. And we live in a very, very different country today than we did then. Until then, we can come together with this. No amnesty for now. I mean, look, Crystal, I get where she's coming from. Like, I get why it's uncomfortable. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Very excited to talk to our guest today, someone whose research I've been citing relentlessly for the past several weeks. You guys are probably sick of hearing about it, from me at least,

so I thought I would bring the man himself in. Stan Greenberg is a founding partner of Greenberg Research, Democracy Core, and Climate Policy and Strategy. He's also a prospect board member and is author of It's the Middle Class Stupid. Great to have you, sir. Welcome. Good to see you, sir. Thank you. Thank you for having me at such a critical point. Yes, absolutely. So you've been trying to sound the alarm about the Democratic messaging or frankly, the lack thereof in terms of the economy and what they would affirmatively do if voters do hand power back to them after the

midterm elections. One way you did that was in a recent, you labeled it or titled it, Memo to Democrats. Let's put this up on the screen. In the American Prospects, and this is with a number of other pollsters and strategists, you say, we will win this election if we convince voters we care about their economic well-being. So you did some focus groups and came away with some really specific recommendations for Democrats in terms of what they should be selling to the voters. What did you find in those focus groups? Look, what I found both in surveys and is that you have to start with the cost of living. This is a cost of living plus election.

That's what I call it. Yes, abortion is going to be a very important piece. The assault weapons are a very important piece. The extremism, a very important piece. But it's a cost of living election plus. You have to start there. People have to hear that you understand they haven't seen a pay raise in decades and the elites think otherwise. Washington's out of touch. And you have to be clear that the cost of living, you know, look, we know the cost of living is hyperinflation. It was not caused by Joe Biden or Democrats or government. It was caused

globally by the pandemic, by the cutoff of energy. People understand it. They're not stupid. They understand this is global. They don't think Joe Biden created this. But when you have hyperinflation on top of decades of declining wages, the only thing people want to hear is, how are you going to help them? And Democrats have been helping them. And Republicans have been making it worse. And in fact, they only back the big corporations. They fight all

of these changes. So it's straightforward. But they have to hear out of your mouth. I listened to Ryan this morning. Tim Ryan does get it. He knows he starts there. People have to hear you start on the economy. You can't be going to something else than deal with the economy. People are on the cliff.

They don't think Republicans are going to be much help. Democrats have been. And so it's been, I've been tearing my hair out. I've said it's not rocket science, but I'm tearing my heart out, you know, my hair out. I don't know how much, I'm okay with it. But the tearing my hair out, that Democrats have not embraced this obvious message. Yeah, you famously said, we read it here on the show, if your goal is to win an economic argument, go on Morning Joe. If the goal is to win an election, look at the fucking data.

What do you think the most salient data that you've highlighted is the most salient data that these Democratic candidates should be paying attention to? Look, cost of living is the heart of it. I worked in various places in the world, not just the U.S. And so the pandemic drove up prices, but when you have the cutoff of Russian energy, you had this spike of energy, unbelievable energy costs. And the elections became, who is going to help people with the cost of it. So I added cost of living to my surveys. I have inflation

and I have unemployment in the economy overall. But it's cost of living that's off the top. Now I found I added that to my surveys in Britain and I included it in my surveys here and it's like a majority of it, above any other issue, it's the cost of living. And so how do you help people deal with the fact that jobs don't pay enough to live on? And they've been struggling for years. And Democrats did that with the Affordable Care Act and expanding Medicaid. They did it in the pandemic and with the child tax credit, you know, with direct household payments, help on health care costs.

And we passed it at the end of this Congress. We have a real story to tell and real contrast. But we have to embrace it. It's not like we should be reluctant, you know, because inflation's high. It's high everywhere in the world. Not caused by Democrats, not caused by this government, not caused by Joe Biden. Embrace it, own it, and, you know, and use it to empathize with what people are experiencing. So the Democrats are reluctant to do this. You know, the White House for months and months and months, you know, have been trying to

convince people this is a good economy. Two thirds think this economy is awful. Yeah. You can't win that debate. Right. People know what they're experiencing in their own lives, you know. And we talked about some of the numbers earlier about like the split in terms of ad dollars. Democrats across the

country spending 10 times more on ads focused on abortion versus economic issues, which seems, you know, seems to be an issue as they head down the stretch here. And Republicans are winning voters who say their number one issue is the economy, and the majority of voters say that is their number one issue here. Another thing that you pointed to, and I think this was in that Politico piece where you had that great quote, quote that Sager just read, you were saying one of the worst messages is if you just talk about the record so far and say, see all of the great things that we did for you, without also talking about how it's not enough in here, affirmatively is what that we did for you without also talking about how it's not enough in here. Affirmatively is what we will do for you in the future and how we will continue

to make things, you know, make sure that things improve for you. Well, I mean, it's really important that you brought that up because we were so frustrated by the failure, you know, to pass, you know, the legislation we thought was going to happen last year. Before Christmas, it was going to be the celebration of this major, major passage of legislation. And for months and months, we've been just depressed about what the Congress has done, even though it had done a lot. When it finally passed something, the Congress embraced that and then went to the public saying, look how good a job we've done.

We've kept our promises. We've delivered X, Y, and Z. Look, when you have two-thirds wrong track and two-thirds saying the economy sucks and their lives are going to the edge of a cliff, they don't want to hear what a great job you've done. They want to hear what you're doing for them and how you're helping them. The focus is not on reelecting me because of the checklist of things I accomplished. Our Democrats are still doing that. Look, it's important to accomplish these things, but that's about, that's so self-centered.

You got to focus on the voter. And the voter's hurting, and we're helping, and they're not. They're making it worse. So one of the things that you cited there was Tim Ryan. I mean, look, maybe you disagree, but I think it's very likely that he's going to lose. So my question to you would be, even if they did embrace this strategy, is it more of a game of margins by how much you lose by, or do you think they actually had a shot at winning? In Ohio, Ohio's tough.

But if anybody can do it, it's Jim Ryan. As a leader. He embraced this messaging from the very beginning. He believes it in his soul. You can tell with him, he's upset that working people are going through. To be honest, most Democrats are not. They don't wake up every day saying people haven't had a pay raise in two decades. And I'm angry about that.

Instead, they've been trying to convince people this is a dynamic economy. Pass the infrastructure bill. It's going to grow in the future. No. If an economy is not producing rising wages or living expenses, it's failing. And he sounds angry about that. Whereas most Democrats aren't. So that's the starting point.

And it's not a tactic. It is a core essential empathy and recognition of what's happening to most working people and feeling it and knowing you want change. Well said. Yeah, I think that's well said. And so finally, we covered in our show today, the president's big speech last night, focused on January 6th, focused on the threats to democracy. This was kind of his big final closing pitch in terms of the midterms. You know, put aside, look, we all think future of democracy is important here. There's no doubt about that. But in terms of politically a closing pitch to the voters, do you think that that was the right direction to go in?

I think people have to hear that we are consumed with the economy. When we have hyperinflation, how can you be caring about anything else? They start with that. I mean, you obviously move to democracy and you move to the other. But they have to hear that the most important thing to you is doing something about the economy, which is, in this context,

is helping people with the high cost of living. And Democrats are actually doing that on healthcare, prescription drug costs, and tax cuts. I think that is all very well said. Thank you so much for spending a little bit of time with us Democrats are actually doing that on health care, physician drug costs, and tax cuts. I think that is all very well said. Thank you so much for spending a little bit of time with us to explain it yourself. Thanks for having me. Get out the word.

Appreciate it very much, sir. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. Go ahead and become a premium subscriber today. You could support all of our work. We've got CounterPoints tomorrow. It's going to be a fantastic show. We've got the incredible live stream that is planned.

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