It Could Happen Here - The Blue Wave Flipped Texas Scam

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

We talk about the recurrent scam run by Democratic Party consultants in Texas to convince people to give money to doomed campaigns promising to "flip" the state and about how to actually make things better in the state.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. What's, are we recording? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The episode started now. I was going gonna say something something to do with Texas

but to be honest why do we do this? why do we let ourselves get famous for saying a particular bit and then just keep repeating it over and over again? are we so creatively bankrupt that there's nothing else we can do but repeat our

greatest hits in order to recapture some of the some of the the excitement that we felt as younger men anyway my co-hosts on this episode are garrison davis james stout and mia wong welcome to it could happen here hi robert i'm glad you're doing so well. We're all doing great. James, you've just been having a searing emotional experience at the border. I have, yeah. And everyone else is busy living in the United States, which is its own searing emotional experience. And today, we're going to be talking about the most and least American state, Texas.

Huzzah. Yeah. Lovely place. Yeah. Who here's spent a lot of time in Texas? Garrison, you lived in the Dallas area for a while, right? Not a lot, but I've made my visits to Texas over the years. With you, even, in the murder house.

You and I have quaffed many a scheiner bach together uh james many um okay i guess we'll move into the fucking episode so uh there was a there was a a an email sent out by texasdemocrats.org recently with the title texas moves from solid red to battleground. Sure. You know, like clockwork, a lot of Democrats got very excited. And I made a couple of people made posts being like, hey, this is the same thing that happens every single election. They are never right. Texas is never a battleground. And it always costs an insane amount of money. It is a con by D.C. political consultants to get your money and pump it into something that will fill up their coffers and not achieve

anything of value for the state of Texas or for the Democrats nationwide. And this makes people very angry for two reasons. One, they tend to interpret it as saying, abandon Texas and the people there, which is not the statement I was making or anyone else was making. And number two, everyone kind of obsessively starts pointing out like, look, look at how over the last 30 years, you know, the things have narrowed in Texas and the proportion of like Democratic votes is, you know, raised. This is a, this is winnable. We can do it. We can do it. We're going to talk today about why anyone who talks to you about flipping Texas as a political goal that you should give money to is conning you, and not only conning you,

but making it actually more difficult for Democrats to win both in Texas and nationwide. That's the premise of the episode, everybody. Here's how Bernie can still win, though. At the very end, we will give you an insight. Yeah, we're going to let you know. He's got a shot. Look, look, if he is capable of putting another three rounds of 6.5 into a dinner plate- size target at 150 yards.

Now, that was, anyway, he'd have to shoot a lot of people to make that happen. He's going to deploy Brianna Joy into a... Do not say that name! Absolutely not. I just maxed out the levels of my microphone horrible person so i i want to talk about this because i i find it like i think people tend to interpret this i've certainly gotten accused of like oh you're just kind of being like a nihilist uh this is you're being you know just an anti-electoralist you're not being practical there was a there was one particular guy

who's like a local democratic candidate who responded seven times to my tweet being like with variation. And his obsession was like, if we win Texas, it's impossible for the GOP to win national elections, which is true. If theoretically the Democrats flipped Texas, the GOP would have no chance at winning a federal election ever again.

Yeah. And like simultaneous to this, right, if there are more Republicans in California than there are basically any other state in the union, and if the Republicans won California, they would win every election forever? Yeah. Yeah, not going to happen.

Not going to happen. I mean, it's one of those things. I am not saying Texas will never be a blue state. You know, that is something that is possible, even likely, given enough time. What I am saying, the argument that I'm making here, and I'll provide you with evidence, is that number one, focusing on these elections from the top down. And when you're saying we want to flip Texas, that's a top down approach, right? You are not focusing on we want to fill up and win a bunch of different local elections. We want to flip, you know, the state houses. We want to flip a bunch of mayoralties and stuff. You are saying what matters is how Texas votes in the national election.

you were to kind of eke out a bear, like in Georgia, right, where you get a narrow victory in the federal election. That would be great for the Democratic Party. One of my issues with it is that kind of focusing obsessively on flipping Texas isn't focusing on the stuff that actually will help Texans, like Texans currently being targeted by the state government, because flipping the state in a federal election, but not taking the governor's seat, not taking the lieutenant governor's seat, not like actually taking the state house, doesn't improve life for people in Texas. I think the kind of the degree to which the federal government, Biden's administration, has been unable to push back very effectively against kind of a lot of the shit that DeSantis has been doing in Florida. You know, they have started to make some attempts as evidence of this. And kind of more to the point, even if you don't agree with that, fundamentally, these strategies that the Democratic Party has embraced in Texas do not work. The Texas Democratic Party is incompetent.

They are bad at their job. They are worse. People bring up Georgia a lot when I talk about flipping Texas. And folks are like, well, we flipped Georgia. It's like, yeah, because the state elected officials and candidates in Georgia, number one, the state party did a much better job of kind of harvesting is a weird way to phrase it, but of incubating talent to run for election in a number of local offices than the Texas Democratic Party has ever done. And that was a big part of what allowed them to be competitive and eventually to flip the state.

There's a lot of like kind of dollar sign information on how bad the state party in Texas is at this shit. And I guess I should go ahead and provide some of that now. So in the 2022 election, the midterms, famously an unusually good showing for the Democratic Party nationwide for a midterm election. Everywhere but Texas, O'Rourke ran against Greg Abbott. He lost by 11%. This is kind of to contrast the election that got everyone excited when he was running against Cruz. I think they were like 3% apart.

And again, the only reason – there was this kind of mistaken belief and excitement among Dems that O'Rourke, because he was so close to Cruz, had a real shot of winning Texas. Rourke, because he was so close to Cruz, had a real shot of winning Texas? No, he got kind of close to beating Cruz because even Republicans hate Ted Cruz. No one has ever liked that man. His own wife can barely stand to be in a room with him. His political allies would turn the other cheek if fucking somebody, anyway, we shouldn't talk about political assassinations on this podcast. It wouldn't anger anybody though, right? Lindsey Graham has said that like Lindsey Graham's like what maybe the only good joke a Republican elected officials ever told is that if you were to shoot Ted Cruz on the floor of Congress and the trial was held in Congress, like nobody would vote to convict the murderer. Yeah. Anyway, so Beto lost quite badly to Greg Abbott.

And beyond that, basically every statewide candidate that the Democrats ran lost in that election. It was a bad election for the Democratic Party. And people who pay attention to Texas politics and actually aren't just trying to grift your donation money know this. Joel Montfort, a Democratic consultant in North Texas, said, quote, it's been one election after another where we ramp everybody up and set these expectations

that we're going to finish in first, and then we finish in second. I don't see any indication that we can win at statewide levels or won't continue to bleed House seats to the other party. I love the use of finish in second there, as if there's, like, a podium on election day. Well, I think there's some libertarians there as if there's like a podium on elections. Well, I think it was the Libertarians. Yeah, there's Libertarians.

That's not out of the range of the Texas Democratic Party. They had to take the L to like Jill Stein. Yeah, there were some kind of – there were some wins by Democrats in Texas. They managed to hold on to two out of three seats, congressional seats in battleground regions in South Texas. Yeah, but they still lost one. Yeah, they did. They did still lose one. Insane.

And, you know, the GOP had to spend a lot of money to do that. But like one of the one of the points is that so they they they held on to two of those seats and they won a contested seat in the suburbs of Dallas. And, you know, like but basically in all of these areas, these were super narrow wins, the big successes, and they were narrow wins in areas that Joe Biden had carried by double digits two years ago. And Joe Biden is a historically, like that is part, some of what will show you how bad the Texas Democratic Party is, Joe Biden is not a popular president. And the fact that he carried a lot of these areas by more than the candidates who narrowly won in 2022 could

is not a great sign for the way things are trending. Yeah. It's probably also worth pointing out that, like, those Southern Texas seats, like in the Rio Grande Valley, right? Like, those people are normally Democrats. Yeah, but you have guys like, is it Quella? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, who, like, is opposed are normally Democrats. Yeah. But you have guys like Henry, is it Quella? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Who is opposed to abortion rights. Yeah. Yeah. And extremely hawkish on the border. And like, yeah. Yeah.

What do we gain by having like, yeah, blue team good? Like, not really. If this person is going to take away your bodily autonomy and brutalize people for coming to this country for wanting a better life. Yeah. It's it's like a lot of some of these wins are kind of like marginal at best, given the compromises or just given the kind of Democrats who can win. It's like a Joe Manchin kind of situation.

Yeah, exactly. And more to the point, like, it's not only is this like evidence kind of that the Democrat strategy isn't working. It's not simply that they tried something and it failed. Not only is this like evidence kind of that the Democrat strategy isn't isn't working. It's not simply that they tried something and it failed. They tried something and it was so expensive that it stopped them from trying things in other areas where the money could have gone better. For example, of how fucking wasteful, particularly the Beto O'Rourke campaign was right. He loses by 11 points to Greg Abbott. He raised seventy seven million dollars to lose by that much. A few years earlier, Lupe Valdez ran against Greg Abbott. He raised $77 million to lose by that much.

A few years earlier, Lupe Valdez ran against Greg Abbott. She spent, raised like $2 million and lost by 13 points. So $75 million may have bought Beto 2%, you know, if you assume that national trends had nothing to do with that gap closing by a tiny amount. If you assume that national trends had nothing to do with that gap closing by a tiny amount. Like with $75 million, I could take control of a moderately sized Texas city. Like, yeah, that is like. You could buy a chunk of Texas for $75 million. You could purchase a large chunk of Fort Worth with that much money.

No. Yeah. That's our goal here at Cool Zone Media. Yeah. Yeah. To own Fort Worth. Finally, my dream completed i'll be able to i'm gonna buy those horse statues at las colinas finally be happy let's get lucifer as well it's probably a good time to pivot to ads that help us pay for our piece of fort sure yeah you know who isn't a waste of money? These fucking ads. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill.

Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America

since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real

people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost

his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez

story as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So overall, we just talked about, you know, Beto raised $77 million. The gubernatorial race cost in total something like $140 million, million. The gubernatorial race cost in total something like $140 million, which is a huge amount of money for something that fails that badly and doesn't, there's no evidence that Beto's campaign, like he was, he's obviously good at fundraising, right? And there was kind of this belief among a lot of Dems, an errant belief, that this meant that he would be good for down

ballot races, right? He's going to bring the entire, because of how much attention he gets, he's going to raise the entire Democratic Party up. The poor showing of the Democratic Party in Texas in 2022 suggests that that's not the case. And the money – like there are fights that could have been won and probably weren't because the money wasn't being invested in those fights. It was going to Beto. And I want to quote from an article by the Texas Tribune here. in those fights. It was going to Beto.

And I want to quote from an article by the Texas Tribune here. This year, the party ran Rochelle Garza, a civil rights lawyer with little political experience against attorney general, Ken Paxton, who was widely seen as the most vulnerable Republican incumbent, but Garza struggled to raise money or gain traction in O'Rourke shadow and lost by 10 percentage points against Paxton,

who has been indicted on felony security fraud charges and is being investigated by the FBI for abuse of office accusations. And it's what maybe she couldn't have won no matter what you did. But one of the rules of politics in this country is that the money you spend at a big race, like a gubernatorial race, like a Senate or a congressional campaign at the federal level, like a presidential campaign, goes less far per dollar than the money you spend in smaller local elections, right? 10 million bucks going into that election might have done something, you know, as opposed to 75 million going into Beto O'Rourke

and accomplishing very little. This has been not just a problem in Texas. In previous elections throughout the Trump area and a little before in particular, this was a problem the Dems had kind of from the middle of the Obama years until the last couple of like really the last midterm. 2018 is when it started to turn around nationally. And the Dems have learned a lot in other regions about like not spending stupid amounts of money on hopeless contests, but not like comprehensively. So for example, in 2022, the second most expensive house race was the 14th Congressional District of Georgia, where Marcus Flowers raised $16 million and lost by 32 points. Not a great return on the investment. And it was like the reason why he raised so much money is because he was running against Marjorie Taylor Greene. And nationally,

Dems outside of Georgia wanted to put in money because they hate her. And it's a trend that relies a lot on social media, on kind of the way in which like hardcore Dems, the Dems that do a lot of the small dollar donations um think about politics where it's like marjorie taylor green bad donate money to opponent well her opponent had no chance of winning in that district like no amount of money would have flipped that and you just wasted 16 million dollars that could have helped somewhere else like maybe that's an insane thing and it it's not as bad as it used to. If you want to look at like the kind of the dumbest it ever was, in 2020, so Lindsey Graham's seat was up in South Carolina. Oh, my God.

And Jamie Harrison ran against Lindsey Graham. And Dems, again, because Lindsey Graham, evil, you know, raised $130 million and he lost by 10 points. Amy McGrath lost to Mitch McConnell, who is another, like, you can always get a shitload of money to fight Mitch McConnell. $94 million, lost by 20 points. Either of the, like, $130 million, $94 million, that's two state legislatures. You could have flipped or at least made progress on flipping right like that amount of money could potentially do that or at least help set up you know get a couple of people elected who have a chance at kind of broadening a base of support and becoming you know leaders in states that are currently like dominated

by red legislatures like there's a chance at least here and that like specifically the state legislature thing is this has been a problem with the Democrats for fucking ages, which is that they just, like it is only genuinely in the last two years, the Democrats have started giving a shit about state legislatures. Like, and this is, this is one of the things from the Obama era.

Like one of the reasons everything sucks so much is that the Democrats managed to lose like, Oh God. It was like, I think, I think the total number, they lost like a thousand seats yeah it was like 2010 a nightmarish failure yeah yeah and and you know we were seeing the product

of this right like this like was like wisconsin was sort of just a hellhole for the last decade uh and you know i mean like and these are like minnesota too like they're like a lot there are lots of these states that like the top not minnesota what am i talking about michigan yeah michigan yeah and there's like there's a lot of these days and you know like and both of these places were winnable right like like they're like the democrats are winning there now right but they just like fucking left like you know they they fucking left flint to get poisoned by lead because they just not like the only the only things the problem is there's there's no money for consultants in,

in sort of like down belt, like state and like local races, just jack shit. Right. And the Democrat, the democratic party like is not run by sort of like, it's, it's not a party in like an actual real sense.

It is a, it is a collection of consultants and those consultants only care about Senate, about the Senate races. Sometimes they care about house races and they care specifically they spend all of their fucking money on presidential races and you know it's like and the republicans don't do that because they have a bunch of like people they you know because they have a bunch of like part of their base right is these like small and mid-scale capitalists in

you know in cities and in rural areas who have like immediate concerns about like you know there's like there there are specific workers who they want like lives to be worse. And so because of that, the Republican machine is like seize the entire fucking country. And the Democrats have been sitting around like spending like a trillion dollars on Wendy Davis losing by 20 points. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's like, you get these, um, you get these like cases you're looking at $30 million being spent failing to unseat Marjorie Taylor Greene or something like $33 million, something like that. At the same time as like that's happening, as all of these massive amounts of money are being devoted to these like to the races that get attention because there's famous names involved. You have like in 2020, I think it was you have or no, it was 2022. You have the election between Ted Budd, a Republican against the Democrat Sherry Beasley in North Carolina, where the Democratic Party decided not to prioritize this election because it wasn't winnable. And then Bud wound up winning by just four points.

That's a seat you could flip with money. That's not an unreasonable thing, as opposed to, again, the races where it went to and people are losing by like 30-something fucking percent. And if you want to know who a serious candidate is who is not just trying to do the sexy thing or not just trying to like, again, flip the state so that we can win the federal election, but actually wants to help their state. And this is, again, there's very nice things about Beto O'Rourke. I was in Texas during the ice storm. He did good work during the ice storm, like actual like community defense kind of stuff that I do have some respect for.

He is not and has never been a serious politician, and I will tell you why. He went from winning an election to losing a state election against Ted Cruz to losing a presidential race to losing the governor's seat. That is so fucking scattershot. That is not building a base of power. That is not building from the ground up and encouraging the growth of other personalities. You're just darting from whatever the sexiest

and most PR-driven race is. That's not serious. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, Whenever you get your podcast. underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to

get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to god things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.

He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to talk about what, number one, the Democratic Party, the shit that like, as we've said, they're getting better. The National Party got a lot better at this, particularly in 2022.

It was less stupid than the previous couple of elections had been. Really difficult to be more dumb than that, but you know. It is. See British labor, et cetera, et cetera. Israeli labor actually is the big one. Oh my fucking God. No, British labor are taking so much. I want to talk about what has worked and what I think could work again.

And to do that, I'm going to talk about a guy named Howard Dean. Who here knows who Howard Dean was Garrison sadly yeah a little bit have you all heard the video of him screaming that got him like that destroyed his career so before okay well James would you load that up

for us so we can play that in a second let's do the Dean scream Jamie pull that shit up Howard Dean ran for president Let's do the Dean. Jamie, pull that shit up. Howard Dean ran for president and he was the first national political candidate to use the internet effectively to raise money in the history of US politics. He's kind of pre-Obama, worked out a lot of the strategies that Obama's people wound up using to very successfully raise money for him. He was really good at it. He was a reasonably intelligent candidate.

And then he gave the speech that we're about to play for you, and it completely cratered his – ended him as a candidate. You know, I always say the thing about Dean – Dean is stunningly unlucky that he ran in the time that he did because the clip you're about to hear is 1000 times less weird than anything DeSantis has ever done like he ran in an I mean there was there was Dan Quayle right but like he ran in an era where like the seriousness and like

non weirdness of politicians was so much higher it's in the chat so you can Mia pull that shit up. This is a good shit. Get straight to that beautiful scream. We're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico.

We're going to California and Texas and New York. And we're going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan. And then we're going to Washington, D.C. to take back the White House. Yeah! That's it. That ended his career as a candidate.

Yeah. And, like, it's a little silly, but that doesn't, that doesn't, that wouldn't be a 12-second news cycle today. No. But after kind of failing out as a presidential candidate, he became chairman of the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, and he was a pretty good one. His kind of primary strategic vision was what he called the 50-state strategy, which is don't focus just on swing states. Never write a state off at unwinnable.

on swing states, never write a state off at unwinnable. Instead, spread the money that the DNC has around to campaign throughout the country everywhere, particularly to fund local DNCs so that they can start building a stable of candidates that can attract voters and eventually win local elections. It's not like an easy, it's not a sexy strategy because a lot of it is focused on like the slow kind of grueling fight to build up a base of support and unfriendly terrain. But it worked like really well, actually. In 20 or so states, those that had voted solidly Republican in previous recent presidential races, Democratic candidates like won elections that had previously gone against them. There were about 20 states where the kind of slide to red was arrested and pushed back to blue. These are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming. You're supposed to scream when you do the list.

There we go. So basically, Dean's strategy led to a net gain of 39 state House seats, and a 2% increase of all seats in the states analyzed. They lost two state Senate seats net, but it worked great in the House, and gained an attorney generalship, gained three House seats, gained a Senate seat. And in 15 of the 20 states, the Democratic nominee saw an increase in vote share between 2004 and 2008, which was the years that... So again, not super sexy. These aren't like, we flipped Texas suddenly, but it's like, oh, we started to see real gains in a lot of pretty red states. Now, it didn't work everywhere. It was not particularly successful in a large chunk of the South. It did not arrest the slide into the red everywhere. But in a lot of the

Midwest, particularly the states that were like the Hillary Clinton's so-called firewall that went for Trump in 2020, it was extremely effective. And of course, it got nixed immediately after Obama won election. And this is a big part of why in 2010, the Dems lost disastrously. But like the basic idea of we should be putting money into local democratic parties in order to like, number one, have like a big part of winning, you know, any conflict, whether it's a war or a political election, is having the resources available, reserves to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves in the moment. So you have a solidly red state house seat or judgeship or something like that or governorship or mayorality and a candidate has a health scare or has a scandal, you know, they get caught fucking a 13-year-old or something.

And suddenly this seat that was solidly red is in play. And if you have no one who can like get votes, who can get voters excited, who can run for that, well, then you're probably not going to win it. It's just going to like go to whoever the RNC, you know, picks to pick up the seat next. example of this is what just happened in Jacksonville, Florida, right? You have DeSantis make go like lunge to the fucking most fascist end of the right and pass this abortion bill that something like 75% of the state doesn't like. And the Dems had a decent candidate there that was able to run against the Republican mayor of Jacksonville and win. And in that election, the Dems spent 2 million and the Republicans $9 million. You are not talking about the kind of resources expended that you're seeing in some of these dumb races we're talking about. actually change things electorally in that state but you can't do it by just like focusing on whoever is at the top like it has to be smarter it's not just about shoveling money into a pit yeah and like i think there's a couple of things i wanted to add one was that like

oh god okay like so tim kane yeah tim kane got put in after they ran out dean and i jesus like tim kaine might be is a is like a once in a generation terrible politician like one of the worst like you know but like you would see shit like he is the winston churchill of making me bored like yeah like i like you would see i mean and this still happens right but like there are there are seats that are winnable that the dems like just literally won't even bother finding people to run for because they're just fucking too lazy and they don't give a shit and you know this this happens this happens in a fucking lot of races and you know and part of the other thing that that happens in this sort of period that like you know is is the reason why the top down okay so this is like if we're gonna actually do this sort of like complicated electoralism like this is why bernie sanders

lost two elections in a row is that you can't actually like like actual sort of like substantive political change like doesn't happen from the top down it it's it's like it happens on bottom up organizing and you know the the the democratic, like, the last two years were basically, like, them eating actual social movements. It's, you know, like, they – it's them basically, like – there's a sort of rejuvenated anti-abortion movement that they just sort of consume, right? They've been doing a very, very good job of sort of, like, eating, like, whatever sort of queer rights, like, movements exist alive. like whatever sort of queer rights like movements exist alive and they had kind of stopped doing that for a while because they chose to just like destroy occupy whether rather than like try to co-opt it yeah and you know i mean there were there were reasons for that right but like part of part of the thing like if if you if if you're a democrat and you want to actually like win texas

you need to have like actual you need to have actual sort of social movements that you know the democrats can eventually take over and destroy but in in in the time between they destroy them destroying them and them and you know like like in the brief time while they both exist and are controlled by democratic party that's how you actually sort of like build the kinds of the build the kinds of coalitions to build the kinds of organization that win these races and the democratic party has just no interest in doing that like almost anywhere basically outside of minnesota where i don't know those the minnesota devs are fucking built different i don't i don't i don't know i don't i don't have another explanation for that but like

yeah it's i don't know it's it's it's like one don't know. It's – abortion. And you can get people registered, you can get people out organizing, you can get people donating money, and most importantly, you can get people voting and voting in numbers that they haven't before and make, if you're able to kind of harness that sort of thing. But being able to harness that, again, part of it is, and this is not sexy. This is not something we can say this is going to flip a state in 2024. But putting in the money and the resources to have people who are being supported to go out and make attempts and to build like a reputation and a base of support and networks in the state, like that's the non-sexy thing that, number one, the Republicans are really good at. If you're asking yourself, looking at all these horrible anti-trans bills, anti-gay bills, anti-abortion bills, how do they do this? Well, because churches organized at the local level to build up the kind of support and the kind of human infrastructure that allowed them to take advantage of the kind of broader social trends that drove some of those states more deeply red.

And that kind of like made it possible for them to do things that 10 years before people had said, like, there's no way to make this happen. That can work on the left side of things, but you have to have the groundwork in. They started with like school boards. They started with going after school boards, going after books. Then you get a base of people riled up that you can go after health care for minors and you can go after health care for for adults it was a very easy path and it started by like going to the most accessible places to have public comment on issues which was complaining

about books inside of school yeah yeah yeah and another thing i'd say about the church thing is like the the thing that used to do that for the democrats was unions but then they destroyed them all and but you know but like you can actually you can actually see what this looks like like in in the places where some something like this this is why the state level midwest dems are so much further to the left than the dems everywhere else because like the people of minnesota the people in wisconsin are like the the only reason they're even sort of remotely in power is because and you know you're seeing this like it's like in chicago too with uh brandon

johnson is that like the those those people are like functionally dependent on like the on their teachers unions to exist as like a political coalition yeah and so you know like and like union organizing is a is a like we're just like fucking just giving money to a strike fund is a, even, even if the thing that you want to do is win elections, that is a more effective way of winning, of winning elections than fucking giving money to Beto O'Rourke like a seventh time. get across here is the right thing to do is not say, and no one is suggesting this here, fuck Texas, it can never be fixed. The right thing is saying, if you're focused on one famous guy running in Texas or this top-level thing of flipping Texas, you don't actually care all that much about the problems being faced by people in Texas, because that's not really going to fix them, right? Beto's not going to win. And even if Texas flips for an election, that doesn't mean the state legislature flips. It doesn't mean the governor flips. It doesn't mean that things get better

for people. Doing these kind of bottom-up approaches, number one, will eventually flip the fucking state, right? There is a demographic trend happening. Part of how you flip the state, by the way, if you're actually responsible, is like proving that you can make people's lives better. If you want to flip the state, that's maybe more ethical than just being like, what if we dump $170 million to try to make this guy who goes viral

on YouTube or twitter sometimes look better right maybe one of those is more ethical than the other anyway i don't want to rant about electoralism anymore but as a as a transplanted texan i get frustrated by this uh so i i felt like we had to say something yeah i also get frustrated by beto o'rourke claiming to be punk which is the least punk thing in the fucking... No. We have one elected leader who's gotten anywhere close

to being punk. And it was Bernie Sanders when he got into that cold book depository that November morning with a Manliqar Carcano rifle. Extremely punk. Anyway. Cutting the feed here.

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