Lovett or Leave It - America, Welcome to the Resistance

Episode Date: November 7, 2020

We won. Alyssa Mastromonaco joins to break down the results and the experience of the slow reveal, Ben Wikler on how we won in Wisconsin and the lessons of organizing, and Zeynep Tufekci is back to talk about polls, models, and misinformation. What a week. What a weekend.

Welcome to Love It or Leave It. It is Friday afternoon, and while the networks have not called it, we can say here at the Crooked Media Decision Couch HQ that Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States, Kamala Harris will be the next vice president of the United States and the first woman and first woman of color in that role in history. And Ivanka and Jared will never feel totally at ease in a New York City restaurant ever again. Later in the show, we will be joined by Zeynep Tufekci and Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wickler. But first, you know her. You love her. She requires no introduction absolutely whatsoever. Alyssa Mastromonaco. Love it. We did it. America did it. America did it. America did

it. I wasn't sure on Tuesday. Let's get into it. What a victory. As I was going to sleep on Tuesday night, I had these two competing thoughts in my head, just being honest, which is on the one hand, I did feel this sense of grief, just the fact that it wasn't conclusive immediately all over, even though we knew that it would take time to count the votes, even though we knew that there would be this red mirage, even though we knew that we were a polarized country, even though we knew we would win massively in the popular vote. But then there was this other piece of me that felt like, wait a second, wait a second. How much of this is trauma? How much of this is fear? How much of this isn't based on what we're seeing? I really thought about it right

before I was going to sleep very, very late on Tuesday night, which is what reason do I have right now to be less hopeful in seeing these returns than I felt before the votes were cast? And I really couldn't come up with a reason. Because everything that I had seen had told me that we were going to win in Pennsylvania, that we were going to win in Michigan, we were going to win in Wisconsin. We were leading in Arizona. We had a shot in Nevada. We even maybe, maybe, maybe had a shot in Georgia. A lot of people sharing needles, which as we have learned over the years, sharing needles is never good. And so I went to bed hopeful on Tuesday night, even though I was a little bit browbeaten

by reality. But you know what, though? Alyssa, the point is we fucking did it. Did it. Did it. Fuck that guy. I'm going to take a shot. I'm taking a shot. You ready? Wait, cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. All right. All right. Mm. All right. All right. Alcohol, you know, is the edible of an earlier age, you know, in many ways.

It has been a real elixir this week, as it is actually an elixir. But on Tuesday night, I was like, you know what? I'm not going to get twisted because the coverage, that's kind of the thing. Like after this is all over, maybe we should also start a cable news network where we cannot scare the shit out of the American people. But I decided I was just going to take a snooze. I took a snooze. I thought I'd wake back up in an hour. I woke back up at five in the morning.

And not a lot changed for like 72 hours until those mail-ins started showing the fuck up. Those sweet, sweet ballots. Those sweet, sweet ballots. Those sweet, sweet ballots. The experience of going to bed really late, waking up exhausted, and there having been few changes in the vote totals while you were sleeping was really, really annoying. And it very much reminded me of 2000 when I went to bed in my dorm room and I had the map open on my laptop that showed the Florida numbers. And I just said, I'm going to go to sleep. And when I wake up, it's going to be

better. Things are going to be better. It's going to be better. And then I woke up and it just wasn't better. It wasn't better. In 2000, I was with my roommate Volpe and we came home. I was working for John Kerry, came home. We had some cocktails. We made dinner. We watched the returns. And then we got into bed. We fell asleep side by side. We woke up the next morning. We're like, well, this went tits up. This is not what we fell asleep to. Yeah, that's tits up. This one tits up. So look, Joe Biden has urged patience and made it clear that he would declare victory with grace, humility, and an earnest desire

to unify the nation. But we have made no such promises. No, we have not. On Monday, one day before the election, the White House walled itself in with a non-scalable barrier, which honestly was a smart move. I'd like to see Biden become president

with that in the way. Then Tuesday, and little do we know it, it would be 72 hours long. So long. It was the longest Tuesday in history. It was the March 2020 of days. That one's a little esoteric. Think about that one. It was pretty good, though. I think everyone's going to get it. Everyone's going to get it. The night unfolded a lot like 2018 with Florida coming in early and making us feel the way land developers treated the Everglades, drained and like shit. I take that history of land development in the precious, precious Florida Everglades. That was good. I bet you didn't even know that I had done commercial real estate investment when I was just a teeny tiny paralegal. I did. Oh, I did. I did asbestos. I did asbestos litigation when I

was a when I was a when I was a temp paralegal filling out the forms, filling out the forms. I would sit in one. I was in a it was me and four other or three other temps in a very small room. No computer, nothing, no phone, nothing, just a room with tables and a tiny little window in a kind of vaguely decrepit building on Wall Street. And our job was to kind of correct the documents. Basically, you know, these are one of those firms that would just suck up claims like asbestos claims. That's where I was. And then we called it the parapet. It was called the parapet because that's where the paralegals went in the pit. Anyway, the election, the election. I had no idea that we shared such an

arc. But anyway, Alyssa, speaking of interminable processes of repetitive bureaucracy, the vote counting has been ongoing. Counting. It became clear and clear as Wednesday unfolded that Joe Biden would slowly but surely make his way to the presidency, which is, of course, how Joe Biden makes his way anywhere. We're allowed now. It's back. OK, OK.

I just wanted to make sure. I just wanted to make sure. I think it's allowed now. I mean, I have my Biden shirt on, so I just wanted to make sure. Look, look, we're going to figure out the balance. All right? We had his back. We will have his back as president, but we're going to let some of these jokes back in.

All right? We're going to get comfortable. Good. We're going to get comfortable. Oh, I feel. We're going to get comfortable. I feel relieved. Yeah.

I feel relieved. There are a lot of jokes to be made. We got to make them. It's part of it. We got to make them. It's part of it. It's part of it. We can have of it. It's part of it. We can have fun now.

It's also part of his charm. Absolutely. It's his charm. Absolutely. Absolutely. We love Joe. We're gonna do everything we can to help Joe succeed.

And we're gonna make some jokes. We're gonna make some jokes. And we're gonna have to fight harder to help Joe succeed because getting the Senate is gonna be really tough. It's gonna be real slog. We're gonna have to be in his corner.

There's a lot of work we're gonna have to do and we're gonna make some jokes. Right. We're just gonna make some jokes. So yes, we had spent months saying that it would seem bad at first and that we're going to be in his corner. There's a lot of work we're going to have to do, and we're going to make some jokes. Right. So yes, we had spent months saying that it would seem bad at first, and that we all needed to be patient, and then watch them count the mail ballots. But Alyssa, we can know how something might feel,

and then we can experience. Like when you read a review of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and then saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Right? Definitely. Would that have been your first go-to for explaining the feeling difference? It wouldn't have.

It wouldn't have. I've never seen an Indiana Jones movie in my life. But let me just say, people can tell you that Sex and the City 2 is terrible, but you still might watch it several times to understand the exact points they were making. I haven't thought about Sex and the City 2. So look, a conversation for another day because we got a lot on our plate. It's a big day. This is a big day.

There's so much. I have been, I will say, on a roller coaster in terms of my understanding of the Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall dynamic. Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall dynamic. And I would say much like the pace of vote counting, at first, I really did think the votes were in the favor of Kim Cattrall in terms of the reality of that story. But as more and more information has come in, as more and more data has been revealed,

it turns out that that might have been a Cattrall mirage. And actually, it turns out Sarah- A Cattrall mirage. A Cattrall mirage. And it turns out that in- A Catrall Mirage. A Catrall Mirage. And it turns out that in fact- Bravo. No, no, it was on HBO. And that, I'm just kidding.

Stupid. Please, please. The point is- Who are you talking to? Oh man. You clearly were not part of the distract yourself from the election results and tweet your favorite sex in the city scene.

I played so many video games during this period of time. It was really unconscionable. Anyway, Wednesday morning, Trump said he planned to go to the Supreme Court to stop the counting of votes. There exists no mechanism that allow him to do that. And we're starting to get, I don't know about you, but I'm starting to get the sense that he doesn't really understand how the government might work. Again, I'm getting a sense of that. Not in four years, not in four years. He sussed that out. We are all so sick of talking about Donald Trump. I am sick of talking

about Donald Trump. I am sick of him looming large over our culture. I'm sick of the analysis of his personality, a project that I have certainly taken part in many times. I get that. But man, just to take a moment, the man will leave this job exactly as he came in. No human being in history has been given more opportunities to learn and grow and change and not taken them. I mean, the American presidency, the access to information, the people you get to meet, the problems you get to solve, the incredible precious time you have to use

to help people to have gained nothing. Even just the fun of the intelligence he has access to that he seems to take no interest in. He has gained no insight, no wisdom, nothing, no empathy, nothing. He gained absolutely no skills, nothing. He only lost. He only lost. He only lost. The presidency. On Wednesday, the Trump campaign said that it would request a recount in Wisconsin. If you want to help out, you can go to GoFundMe.com slash Jill Stein recount scam too. That's where you go to help Donald Trump pay for this recount. Then members of Trump's Facebook Q squad flock to voting centers in swing states to intimidate

election workers busy counting the ballots, chanting stop the vote count where they were ahead and keep counting. Count every vote in the places they were behind. Look, guys, election workers aren't coming to where you work and telling you how to honk your shiny red nose and how to fit in that incredibly small car because you're clowns. You're a bunch of clowns. They're clowns. They are. And I mean, I guess, you know, it's like when you think about it,

America really should get time off to vote because I think these people got time off to just honk their horns. Oh, Facebook. A lot of free time. Well, if it's important, Alyssa, you make time. Oh, that's what I hear. Look, as with all things Trump, it has been both very stupid and very dangerous, very silly, very concerning, as the threat of violence did force some locations to close, and there have been several arrests across the country. Then as Wednesday turned to Thursday, and Thursday turned to Friday, it happened. Biden took a slim lead in Georgia, a southern state that has not voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since Bill Clinton won the White House

and our hearts in 1992. Meanwhile, no clear winner emerged in either of the Senate races in Georgia, meaning both contests in all likelihood will advance to a runoff on January 5th. I don't know about you, but I was just thinking to myself, Alyssa, I don't want this to end. Ever. I want this election to continue so we can really savor it. Is my ass off? Yeah. But how much more could my ass be off?

It could be off a little bit more, it turns out? It could be off a little bit more, it turns out. It could be off a little bit more. I mean, why have this deliciousness, anxiety, stress, attachment to CNN? Why would we want any of it to end so that we could finish a book? I've been reading, actually. I've had a lot of two-screen experience where I've been playing a video game while having CNN on my lap, blasting into my retinas. Okay.

Or MSNBC. I have them both. And also, if you want to see a frustrated Ronan Farrow, watch him deal with me when I am, I swear to you, watching both CNN and MSNBC at the same time. Just mentally switching my attention between both on the screen as both audio feeds are coming out. That's a level I got to. That's a lot. I would say in our house,

the extreme was we needed to really understand, you know, what was happening across the country. So we did a lot of Fox the last couple of days. Did a lot of Fox. You know what's interesting? I have a lot of friends who have been doing that. They're actually watching Fox. I don't, as we're recording this.

They were calling shit. Why wouldn't we watch? Well, that was the best part, right? They really actually, that must have been so frustrating for Trump because his, his little, you know, his fascist coup cosplay really did depend on Fox not kind of getting ahead of Trump. And so they were so frustrated by the Arizona call. And that Fox News vote counter man,

who I had not seen before, was so cocky. He was such a cocky guy. He was like, if pigs could fly, Trump will win this state, you motherfuckers. Fox News, Rupert Murdoch pays me. And I think you lost Arizona and I'm not taking it back. And I don't care that no one else has called it. And I don't care that it's narrowing.

Now, deep down, Alyssa, I really think that they were crossing their fingers. I really think that call was pretty early. It tightened. It tightened pretty hard. And I don't care. Because you know what? Sometimes shit breaks for us. Once in a while, this godforsaken year, Alyssa, shit will break for us.

I just, I had been watching Fox for so long. I was like, what's this count on CNN? I don't, what are they not counting? I'm like, why is no one called CNN? If Fox did it, what the fuck is wrong with everybody else? It was amazing. And then I decided maybe Fox was the fantasy land I wanted to live in. And then I turned them on after the press conference.

And I was like, I jumped the shark. I went too far. No, no, no. It's that vote counting man was really an exception that proves the rule over there. You know, like, you know that like, we stand by our call and then just crossing their fingers so fucking hard that they keep Arizona

because it got tighter and tighter and tighter. And you know what? Again, I do not care. We're going to win Arizona. It's going to be closer than they thought. Should they have called it whenever they called it? Maybe not. One thing for us. I'm cool with it. Again. Great. Fuck you, Fox News. We needed it. We needed it. We needed it. It really helped. It really helped because it made it very silly. It gassed us through the last couple of days. It really did. It did. It did. It was that it was that was a that

was a jetpack. That was a jetpack. And we needed it because Trump made it very hard when Trump went to the podium, because when you're going to claim you should stop the votes, you got to be winning. Got to be winning. Got to be winning. And if you're not winning, it's pretty stupid. And you seem low energy. And I like that, too. I'm getting loose. I have to say we recorded Pots of America. I'm gonna to let everybody in. I'm going to let everybody in just a tiny bit. We recorded Pod Save America and it was right after, it was this morning and I think it was still kind of hitting us. I've had a few, I've had some time, had some time to reflect. I'm getting loose. I'm getting excited. I'm getting excited. Yeah, that's it, man. Come on. Look, I went out today and even my guys at the gas station were feeling upbeat. And I was like, oh, my God, I so judged you.

You're like stoked for Biden and Kamala. And this just, you know, it's been a great day since the moment I left the House, to be honest. It has been a great day. We also saw Biden take the lead in Pennsylvania thanks to the overwhelming support of Philadelphia and all the votes that Gritty personally dumped in the Delaware River. Now, obviously, it's a conversation we need to have about the losses in the Senate and the failure to expand our majority in the House. And we will do that later because today we are feeling good.

There's plenty to talk about. Plenty to talk about. Everyone needs to stop chirping. All the reports about the conversation of the Democratic caucus and how they're all pointing fingers at each other while they lost seats. Guess what? That's a whole fight for a whole other day. Shut the fuck up.

That's a Monday problem. That's a Monday. Stop yelling. Everyone stop yelling. That's a Monday problem. This is Friday. If then. Yeah.

Yeah. That is the equivalent. That is the political equivalent of Friday night after business hours sending an email that says, hey, can we talk about this about this next week it's like don't you outsource your anxiety to me don't put something for me to remember fuck that i know we got problems in the house i know we got problems in the senate i'm dealing with that monday and you know what send yourself a reminder to send that shit 8 a.m monday morning don't send it sunday night either yeah that's bullshit too that is bullshit the sund Sunday night's bullshit.

Monday. Business hours. Sunday night's bullshit. Don't give me the Sunday scaries. No. Fuck you. Absolutely not. So everyone, stop talking.

Just party. Just have a fucking drink. Or whatever makes you feel good. If running makes you feel good, go run. Do something that makes you feel good and stop picking it apart right now. Yeah. Yeah. If you want to take some magic mushrooms, which are, I think, legal in most of the country now, that's

not true. I mean, go to Oregon and do whatever you want. Yeah. Go have a absolute. Yeah. Just, you know, take some Dayquil, add some meth and Oxycontin, have a time, have a time. But can we just just be like, look, like there'll, this is democratic politics. There's always time for recrimination. And again, if it's important to you, you make time. One final thought, we just also should say the past few days have obviously been deeply strange and anxiety producing. And I think a lot of people just want to understand what kind of posture they should take around these legal challenges. And I think one thing that the Biden camp is saying, I think one thing that we should keep in our minds is that it's our job to be confident and to remember that the process is working,

that we've recorded record turnout, record mail-in turnout, counting those ballots will take time. The reason that they are mounting these challenges is that they know they are going to lose, and the lawsuits are meant not to win, but to sow doubt and to generate suspicion, to undermine Joe Biden, to create chaos. And that will not work. As Justin Levitt, a law professor said, which I think he said it so well, he said, a lawsuit without provable facts showing a statutory or constitutional violation is just a tweet with a filing fee. And that is what we are dealing with here. Isn't that great? Don't you love that? That's good. Yeah, that's good. Might have to pin that one. Yeah. These attacks won't work unless we let them work in terms of undermining Joe Biden and trying to attack his

mandate. Trump will be removed. And over the next few days, we will take some time to chill and then get back to work. So we did it. That's the thing. We did it. But, Lovett, can I be a little corny for a minute? Please. Just a little corny. Do it. Okay. So the one thing that you won't say, but I want to,

is that without the tools that Crooked built, without Vote Save America, which gave millions of people the tools and the community to be the activists that they wanted to be. I mean, one of the things I remember after 2016, I was at an immigration organizing activist meeting in Brooklyn, which is where most of them are. And all of these actors and actresses,

Uzo Aduba and Alana Glazer were there. And Alana said, the biggest thing is people are just nervous because they don't know how to get involved. She's like, we all should just record videos of ourselves calling Congress to show people that we're nervous to do it. We don't know how to get involved. She's like, we all should just record videos of ourselves calling Congress to show people that we're nervous to do it. We don't know how to do it. And that is like the embodiment of what Vote Save America has done over the past however many fucking years, thousand years it's been.

And so you should be proud. You know that I don't give compliments easy, but it's been really fucking important and got a lot done. So, you know, I got to give you little transcoastal kisses. Thank you. Thank you for saying that. Thank you for saying that. I feel I will join you in being earnest and say, you know, when we started, we were devastated by 2016.

2016. And I was always, I was really proud by how, just how, just how quickly John, Tommy and I decided we were going to try something. Um, but we didn't have a business plan. We didn't really know really anything about the podcasting business, about how to build a media company. We, we didn't, but we knew we wanted to try. And I'm obviously so proud of Pod Save America. I feel so grateful that, you know, John and Tommy decided to do this with me, that we were able to build this show, that you could be a part of it, that all these wonderful people could be a part of it. But the fact that this podcast that we started because we felt like the conversation was broken somehow managed to give us the chance to find these incredible people like Sarah Wick, who runs our company, Tanya Somanator, who runs Vote Save America. And that this podcast, the success of this podcast, which we never could have predicted, gave us the resources and reach to then empower people like that to build a media company, a progressive media company, to build Vote Save America.

Like, that's the thing I'm proudest of, that we were able to harness this thing of this political conversation that we just felt like we needed to have to allow us to empower these incredibly talented people to build this organization and like provide this connection for people so that all these people out there that wanted to do something,

that wanted to be involved, that wanted to make a difference, but just needed that tiny bit of connection between their desire to help and the fear that they had, just that little bit of ease, that little bit of removal of friction, that that afforded so many people, almost 300,000 people adopting states, 15 million or so calls and texts, 27,000 poll workers, and, you know, I think over 1,000 lawyers signing up, 42 million or so more dollars raised for these campaigns across the country. Like, I feel incredibly proud that we were able to build something that gave all these people the

opportunity to do that. Like, and that that, like, Georgia, like, I think 1,400 or so people registered through Vote Save America because people shared it, because people pushed it, because people knocked on doors, because people made phone calls. Right. Because people put it on social media. That's the margin. You know, that's the margin. All across the country, these little bits, like, really mattered. And because the election was so close, because it was so tight, we know, like, I talked about this with Ben Wickler.

We know that the phone calls people made in Wisconsin, that the activism in places like Madison and Milwaukee made the difference. We know in Georgia, Stacey Abrams, my God, what she built through activism made the difference. We know that Arizona turning blue was a work of all these incredible local organizations that now Navajo organizations turning out the vote to help win in Arizona. Like you can find these stories all across the country. in Arizona. Like you can find these stories all across the country and the reality that like the Senate is going to be really hard that we still have a chance, meaning that like the next year or two is not necessarily a moment of unified democratic government, that it's going to be more of a slog. Yeah. It's like in some sense, heartbreaking, but it should be a reminder that like this shit matters and it's a slog and it's a fucking fight.

And like, we need to stay in it. These problems that we have this, that, that so much of what led to this moment was the failure for us to understand just how much power we had. And it's not, we didn't fix it in one election. We didn't fix it in one election, but like we are fixing it. We are winning. Like we can do this. We are fixing it. Also on this front, I know we're tired. I know we're exhausted. I know we need a break. I know we're sick of paying attention to cable news and Twitter and returns. That break is earned. But after you've taken a break, just know Vote Save America will be pivoting in the coming weeks to winning the Senate by winning the two runoffs in Georgia this January. We are not done yet.

You are not done yet. If you know anyone in Georgia who isn't registered, send them over to votesaveamerica.com slash register. And if you want to help both the campaigns, you can donate at votesaveamerica.com slash getmitch. There is more coming soon. Let's just say we want to make sure people can adopt Georgia. That's not let's just say. That's telling you we're going to do Adopt a State for Georgia. That's what we're going to do. But that's coming.

We're going to set it up. We haven't set it up yet. All right? It's going to take a minute. That's okay. That's part of it. But for now, celebrate, and then we're going to do. But that's coming. We're going to set it up. We haven't set it up yet. All right. It's going to take a minute. That's OK. That's part of it. But for now, celebrate and then let's get to work. And I and I also just want to say that the contribution that Aaron and I will have on hysteria is that we have for months been waiting,

praying, hoping, doing our best so that we could live our dreams, which is holding all those motherfuckers accountable. We're going to make sure Ivanka can never get a hair appointment, that Jared's never on a board. We will follow them until they die. We're not going to kill them. Don't get that. Don't get twisted. But we're going to make sure that there's no soft focus TV afternoon shows for these

people. We remember. We're going to remember. We are going to remember. We are going to remember. And now, before we move on, here it is, a montage of pundits saying the word dump. You're due to get a pretty, well, it should be a pretty big dump. But again, I just want to say, guys, Donald Trump got a little benefit out of that last dump. Massive dumps. That means we could see a very big dump. A dump, Laura, at 9 o'clock East Coast time.

We'll get in another dump around midnight tonight. Two dumps today. It was made at 1120. There had been a huge dump. Very big dump. You know, I have to look more closely after this dump. And so far, the first dump here looks pretty good. Yeah, that's part of it too, Alyssa.

That was awesome. I get it. I'm for it. When we- Dump. Alyssa Mastromonaco. Dump. What? Dump.

Are you dumping me? No. Couldn't dare. Wouldn't dare. Okay, good. I just want to say- Okay. You know, I worked with you at the White House, but I always, you know, I told you this in

the past. I'll say it here. I'll say it here. I'll say it here. I was always terrified that you didn't want to be my friend. I told you that you did, that I was so afraid you didn't want to be my friend. I really was. And I have so loved that one great piece of these last four years through all the fucking bullshit is that we got to make this place where like we got to we got to do tour shows

together. You got to be on a stereo all the time. We get to fun it's gonna come back it's gonna come back the shows are gonna come back someday you're gonna be close to me where i'm gonna tell you how good your hair looks we're gonna compliment each other on the way absolutely on skin it's gonna be awesome the last time when we did that did you see i gave myself a facial because i was coming on i still have i still have the materials i need for the facial that you told me to get. And I will always remember the moment I saw your skin before those HBO shows. My goodness.

Yeah. My goodness. You know what? Our live shows. We were ready. I may be a gray haired hippie, but my fucking skin is like a 30 year old. Yeah. Yeah.

That's great. Yeah. She's got it-old. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. She's got it. Yeah. Her. Yeah. I don't know what the joke is. It's like hair went to Woodstock, but the skin loves BTS, you know?

I was going to say the hair is Woodstock. The face is Madison Avenue. But that's okay. That's good, too. That's good, too. That's good, too. Thank you. Well, we're obviously fucking fried and very loose.

We're loose. Alyssa Mastromonaco. Loose. Love ya. So proud. Love ya. So good to see ya. When we come back, Ben Wickler.

Hey, don't go anywhere. There's more of Love It or Leave It coming up. Ben Wickler. I love that love it. You crafty son of a bitch. I have to get my hat followed by the reveal. There we go. Oh, nice.

Oh, nice. Oh, nice. Oh, nice. Look, we're just in the show. Here he is. He's the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. The man who helped save Wisconsin. He just shaved his head at the behest of Cory Booker in a bet he did not make.

That is very true. Cory Booker came on our all-staff call and announced to the team that I had committed to him the previous night to shave my head if Joe Biden won. And after that, I didn't really have any choice in the matter. Ben, first of all, welcome. Ben Wickler, welcome back to the show,

returning champion. We haven't talked, the last time you were on the show, we were in a big live event in Wisconsin. A lot has happened since, but congratulations on the work you have done to help deliver Wisconsin. What an incredible achievement. As we sit here now, the chyron on CNN says Biden on the brink of winning. Donald Trump just gave a kind of a fascist wine,

I guess you would call it, a kind of, I should be school president, and actually all of you are terrible, and I don't even like going to this school. But we're on the verge, hopefully by the time this comes out Saturday, we'll have a more definitive answer. First of all, Ben, talk to us about how you helped organize Wisconsin to deliver this victory. This victory is the victory of thousands and thousands of people who've been working in the trenches for decades, and especially for the last miserable decade. I often say that the Trump era started in Wisconsin in 2010. It arrived in Wisconsin with Scott Walker six years before Donald Trump ran for president.

And the damage that it's possible for this kind of stuff to do is visible in Wisconsin. They smashed organized labor. They ripped up voter registration rules. They defunded universities and funded prisons massively. They thing after thing after thing. And they rigged the rules to make it impossible for Democrats to win, they thought. And they won in 2016. And there was this question of, has Wisconsin become a red state? And the reason why it's not is that so many people decided that they were going to keep fighting back, even though it seemed like everything was lost. I was living, I grew up in Wisconsin. I was involved in politics as a kid and in high school. And then I moved away and I

worked across the country and watched as the uprising against Scott Walker took place, watched as he crushed the opposition and as people kept picking themselves back up and fighting. Moved home in 2018, I got to knock on doors for Tony Evers' campaign, was at the event, the night that he won the governorship against Scott Walker. It looked like he had lost until like midnight when they opened the absentee ballots in Milwaukee. And then he won by 1.1 percentage points. And I have to tell you, nothing prepared Wisconsin better for this election night than that election night. So one thing that has been, I think, a saving grace that's, I think, unsung right now is we have a Democratic governor in

Wisconsin. We have a Democratic governor in Pennsylvania, a Democratic attorney general. That's been a huge relief in the sense that we've had people at the top whose core value is democracy, of making sure every vote is counted and not giving in to the kind of right-wing paranoia and misinformation. Can you talk a little bit about how much of a difference it has made in Wisconsin to have people who believe in democracy in positions of power during this incredibly contentious period? Yes. So the machinery of the elections in Wisconsin is in the hands of public servants who think that what voters choose to determine what the outcome is. We have a Wisconsin Elections Commission with a professional staff. They've been working around the clock since the spring election, which was a disaster, and helping cities set up extra polling places, get PPE,

get, you know, mark out coronavirus social distancing lines. They've been helping get extra absentee ballot counting machines. We have mayors in cities that are just determined to try to help everyone vote, frankly, in Republican-heavy cities as well as Democratic-held cities. And statewide, our governor thinks the job of the state is to make democracy function as opposed to shut out voters who one party, the Republican Party, doesn't want. And that meant that for all the incredible fear and anxiety that everyone had, this was a really smooth election in Wisconsin.

Yeah, and that came after there was some concern. There was a real wake-up call out of Wisconsin because some of the challenges early on in the pandemic in running the primary. Yeah. So in the spring Supreme Court election, 23,000 ballots were thrown out because for one reason or another, they didn't meet these incredibly Byzantine rules that the Republicans had put in place to make the system voter hostile. And as we went to the fall, the Elections Commission created a way to track ballots that were going to be rejected. And clerks started reaching out to people whose ballots didn't have a signature on the envelope or whatever the problem was. And we at the Democratic Party, as well as the Republican Party, could do this, could download the list of people with those

problems and reach out to them. So the absentee ballot rejection rate is close to zero. It's super, super low. You know, there's tons of people who voted early and there's tons of people who voted on election day because they knew that the safeguards were in place and precincts were open because so many young people were working the polls, unlike the spring. All these pieces came together here because you actually had a government that was committed to making democracy work. And, you know And by the barest of margins, it was 0.6 percentage points that Biden and Harris won Wisconsin. But turnout shot up on both sides and that the people actually got to decide who the next president should be. Four years ago, we saw a really devastating loss. We saw a Senate race that I think to this day has sort of like been kind of almost like outside of the narrative because it was a bit confusing.

Like, wait, why did Feingold lose, too? What happened here? And as you mentioned at the top, you know, Wisconsin was a place where a lot of this sort of anti-democratic kind of scorched earth. A lot of these tactics were pioneered, not pioneered. They've been around a long time, but really exploited and put into use by Scott Walker and the Republicans. time, but really exploited and put into use by Scott Walker and the Republicans. Can you talk a little bit about the lessons from kind of trying to dismantle that operation and what you were able to do in this campaign to make sure, as you said, that voters didn't just vote, but that they were educated about how to vote to make sure those votes were counted? The big shift from 2016 to now is that in 2016, the whole organizing operation was set up starting in like August. And although there was lots of advertising work in the Senate race, the Clinton

campaign didn't start running ads until October 28th, the last week of the election. And there was this assumption that Wisconsin was a safe state. In the spring of 2017, my predecessor chair started building an Obama-style neighborhood team-based organizing operation, ran it all the way through the governor's race in the fall, and we swept every statewide race in 2018. And then I was elected chair the next year, and we supercharged this whole thing. We had a bigger team in the spring Supreme Court election this year than we had in the governor and Senate races in 2018. And that team knocked on almost twice as many doors as the presidential had two years before that. It was vastly bigger. And we used the spring election as a rehearsal

for the fall. And we partnered with Stacey Abrams and Fair Fight, her organization, to build a voter protection operation starting in January. And what that meant was that we totally integrated this huge field organizing program with voter protection so that if someone had a problem with voting, the organizer would call the voter protection team and they would reach out to that person. We had 100% follow-up rate. And that helped all these people figure out how to deal with these barriers Republicans had thrown up. And we got a lot right in the spring, but if it had been close, we would have lost because of these Republican rules. But that experience taught us how to do it for the fall. And as we went into the final stretch here, you know, we had phone banks six nights a week to

recruit poll workers and poll observers alongside this constant virtual filmmaking to actually talk to voters directly alongside the follow-up teams for absentee ballot cure, alongside text makers, alongside at the end, you know, people chalking on college campuses and like driving soundtracks around cities, like every single piece. And it all fit together to help people learn about rules that were changing in real time. And as a result, the ballots, like the U.S. Supreme Court ruled a week out from our election that absentee ballots had to arrive by election day. Unlike the spring, they could arrive six days. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. And we just use that as a kind of like giant alarm system

to tell everyone, hand deliver your ballot. And by election day, there was no flood of ballots coming in the mail. People had gotten the message and they were hand delivering them. That shift in response to this partisan U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the ability to turn on a dime allowed us to win.

Look, there's gonna be a lot of conversations about polls, about what happened in the Senate. But fundamentally, can you talk a little bit, given how close this was, of how important some of the phone banking, the volunteering, like in an election like this, how much of a difference did those acts for people in the state, for people out of state, how much of a difference did it make? If you listening right now made calls to voters in Wisconsin, you are at the heart of the reason why Donald Trump is not going to get four more years. The calls, the direct contact with voters, we can see in the behavior of people that our volunteers talk to versus people who did not talk to our volunteers. We can actually see in the math that this was more than the margin of victory. This is a classic field margin. And I will tell you, we hit exactly our targets in terms of getting our voters out.

The Republicans spiked their turnout in a way that no pollster had captured. Our numbers were built to withstand a huge surprise and we got exactly that surprise. But our program worked as exactly as it was intended to. And the Republicans, Trump, you know, energized a whole bunch of people that no pollster had discovered and thank every piece of that work, every piece of work by a volunteer,

allowed us to reach this level that was higher than the Republicans, giant juggernaut barrage, fangs drooling with, you know, their horrible like machine horrible machine could reach. And it's a machine? A venomous toothed machine? It is a toothed, drooling, venomous cyborg wolf machine. Wow. That's nefarious. That's a nefarious machine. And we were out of its fang reach. The jump was powered by the volunteers As a nefarious machine. And we were out of its fang reach. It was so... Yeah.

And the jump was powered by the volunteers who are listening to Love It or Leave It at this very moment. It was everything that we could do. All of it mattered. Everything mattered. It all added up to just enough. And that is how we won. Ben, I also just want to say, you won't say it,

but I'll tell you, one other reason this incredible victory was possible, all the organizers, everybody who turned out to vote, everybody who donated, everybody who helped. But watching you organize Wisconsin has been an extraordinary thing. And one thing I think a lot of people are saying when they see the success we've had in Wisconsin is not just how do we replicate the success, but how do we replicate Ben Wickler? Everybody at Vote Save America, Tommy, Wisconsin adoptee, everyone is so grateful to you for all

the work that you did. And I hope that we can figure out how to harness what you did. Maybe you got to put a binder together, you know, when you get some sleep about your little plan. All right. But about how to be like that. Thank you so much for all your work. And I hope that at a certain point soon, you'll get some sleep, get some rest, and then start focusing on 2022. All right. It's right around the corner. Let me say 2022. So today is Tony Evers' birthday. Today is literally the birthday of Governor Evers. Tony Evers put his whole reelection campaign on hold and spent this year fundraising and supporting like legislative candidates and supporting the party so that we could do all this work across the state. He has been, he is an unsung champion in this fight. And he is up in a year when Republicans

are counting on a backlash and we're going to reelect him and we're going to stop Ron Johnson, America's worst Senator. I would, that was one last question. I forgot that I wanted to ask you. We got to Ron Johnson. He is under the radar. One of the absolute bottom feeding worst human beings in the United States Senate. We got to get him out, all right? You're going to do it? We're going to do it. We. The big we. We. Big we. All of us are going to do it. That guy should

not be in the U.S. Senate. He will not be in the U.S. Senate. We are going to defy history and bring a blue wave and a Democratic president midterm in Wisconsin in 2022. Ben Wickler, good to see you. Congrats. This is amazing. We did it.

We fucking did it. We fucking did it. We got rid of this fucking person that we just don't like. Terrible president. Terrible president. Here's the thing I've been thinking about. You look at these countries that were democracies and are not democracies now, and there's these dark forces, this horrible kind of spirit that amasses and

like for Erdogan's fans, you know, and like Bolsonaro, all this kind of stuff. And we came so close to having that overwhelm the country. And we just pulled the wheel and like went back from the cliff. I'll go even further, actually. I'll go even further, which is to say it is rare. I think the fact that this was close actually tells us that those forces had become more entrenched than even we realized. And we managed to pull ourselves back from the brink. I think we forget, even when we weren't complacent, I think we lulled ourselves into believing that the pandemic and the chaos and the economic disaster and the mismanagement and the unfitness would be enough to swamp these right-wing fascist forces, these anti-democratic forces. But it turns out their entrenchment is

deep and rooted, and we have a lot of work to do. So I think it's more than just we prevented it from taking hold. I think we uprooted it at a key moment when it was about to become unstoppable. So I think like everyone, I think because it has been so close has been, I think on edge, I hope once we get the final answer and we feel good about it, everyone takes a moment to appreciate just how big of an accomplishment this was. Yes. And then get some sleep and then get some fucking sleep. Very excited. A lot of work still to do. We should probably just start now. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. When we come back, I talk to Zainab Tufekci about polls, modeling, and misinformation. Don't go anywhere. This is Love It or Leave It, and there's more on the way.

And we're back. She is a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, author of Twitter and Tear Gas, The Power and Fragility of Network Protest and writer of the newsletter Insight. Please welcome back Zainab Tufekci. It's good to see you. Thank you for inviting me again. So I have a couple of things I want to cover with you. You are, you know, look, I just also want to be clear, you know, like you've gotten some great press lately, some great press. I just wanted to be well known that I was a Zeynep Tufekci fan before it was cool. I listened to your early albums. I was here first.

And I just think I deserve some credit for that. And I just I wanted to say it now here. I'm just smiling because I'm going to blame you for whatever I get really wrong next time. It'll be completely your fault. I'll just be like, John, it's his fault. So I want to talk about misinformation right now as votes are being counted. I want to talk about models and I want to talk about COVID. Let's start with with what we're seeing today.

So as we're recording this, it is Thursday afternoon. We are watching vote totals inching towards their conclusion in Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. As we do that, we're seeing a lot of misinformation being spread bottom up on Twitter and social media and top down from Donald Trump and his allies. How do you think the media is doing right now, the political press generally, in responding to both press conferences where wild assertions are made by Trump surrogates and the kind of noise online? So I think we're going through something really interesting right now. Traditional media is just kind of reporting in a sensible way. And what can you do when the president is saying all

these things. But what's interesting to me, is watching Fox News, and Facebook, both kind of take some level of steps against his messaging, right? I think the Fox News one is really significant. They called Arizona early and they're kind of resisting his messaging. And Facebook is shutting down some of the groups that have been bubbling up, disputing the vote count and everything. So we have a natural experiment almost. We're going to see what happens when misinformation doesn't have the outlets putting up with it or amplifying it, right?

Without Fox News and without Facebook groups, it's quite possible that this just might fizzle out, that he will keep tweeting and Twitter will put some labels on it and he'll say his stuff and he'll have a press conference saying how unfair it was. But without sort of the oxygen, social media and Fox in combination could have provided, but very strikingly, both are kind of not providing. You know, you can't rule out single incidents, but I think it's just going to fizzle out and he'll complain about it for the longest time. And then he'll launch his own TV show or TV network and talk about the glorious 2016 election for however long. I think that's like this is an interesting case of when there's misinformation attempts, but not cooperation by the megaphones. Yeah, no, it is. Well, I would draw a distinction,

right? Because it is true that the Fox News side has certainly been pleasantly responsible. And in fact, the Trump campaign has been furious at them for calling Arizona. And while it does look like at this moment, Joe Biden is on track to winning Pennsylvania, you know, at Fox News, fingers are crossed that that call turns out to be right. But it's probably just between you and me. It probably was like a little bit premature for them to call it, but I don't mind. But what I was going to say is it does seem like there's a distinction between what the opinion people can muster and what Trump can muster, which is sort of these mini little protests that have been popping up at polling places, kind of the most activated victims of right-wing misinformation versus like larger purchase of these concepts

among mainstream Republicans. You know, for example, Republicans in Pennsylvania have rejected the idea of awarding the Electoral College to Donald Trump because the election was stolen. So like, how do you think about this? Because one thing I know you've talked about a lot is there's a difference between ideas spreading broadly and the damage that can be done when a small group of people take hold of a dangerous idea, right? Like we have people banging on the doors at polling places. That's not a majority. That's not effective politically, but it is happening. It is happening, but it is also sort of see, again, it's like a natural experiment. what happens to Trump without the enablers.

And I almost feel like the Republican leadership is almost happy to see the end of him because they got a great election result as far as they're concerned, except for the presidency, right? They haven't lost the Senate. They've made gains in the House. They won a lot of state legislatures. I'm just being honest on what it looks like if, you know, you're Mitch McConnell right now. And the one problem they have is the president, while able to mobilize an interesting for them coalition, is a little too easy on the Twitter finger and it was a little too unstable. So they kind of get Trumpism's benefits electorally without necessarily having Trump for the next few years. And they have the Supreme Court kind of firmly in their place. So it's kind of interesting. I feel like despite all

the noise making, the enablers have decided that's kind of it. And of course, they're not going to say anything to the president. He's going to keep kind of making these noises. But leading Republican senators are going to come out and say, too bad, so sad. They're not going to come out and say this was illegitimate. They're going to be like, OK, we're in a good place. We're going to do better in the midterms and they'll just plan their 2024. That's my sense of it. And we'll just see. We'll see. Now, there's another topic that I wanted to talk about with you because you wrote

a piece about models, the 538 model and these other models that put a percentage on the odds of an outcome in the election. I love this topic. I am very excited. I find these models, I actually am not critical of them existing. I understand why somebody would find them interesting. And I don't begrudge the people that make these models who rarely make assertions as to what they mean. They're sort of taken for a ride by the general public. But it's not as though Nate Silver is making grand assertions as to what his model means. But can you talk a little bit about what your criticism is of these percentage based models? Let me just say this. When the models first came onto the scene as probability models in 2012, I was a big fan. I even have an article saying all the pundits are wrong. Nate Silver is great. Let's

just model because it is a better way to try to get some sense of the Electoral College as a forecast compared to just looking at state polls one by one and just looking at the polling averages. Because the Electoral College has, you know, it's a weirdo thing we have in this country. It is what it is. Because what it was replacing, I hoped, and I was wrong about, was the pundits reading tea leaves from the number of lawn signs. And I thought, you know what, this is just, they're just trying to create this sort of narrative tension. And I'm like, you're going to write the great American novel, go write the great American novel, right? and I'm like, you're going to write the great American novel, go write the great American novel, right? Like the punditry likes a narrative driven story because of course those are more attractive and the underdog and the turning point and the October surprise, right? You know, those are fun for a story, but I thought, you know what, if we kind of get that false uncertainty

out of the way when it looks like somebody's kind of overwhelmingly winning and the polls are showing that and we can just focus instead on electoral substance. What's at stake? What's the policy? What should we do? Of course, fast forward, that's not at all what happened. What happened is the models just got incorporated and eaten up by the horse race coverage. So instead of reading the tea leaves from the lawn signs, now we're reading the tea leaves on whether the model moved from like 89% chance to 91% chance. So that was problem number one, is that it just became subsumed and part of the prediction complex. And that was problem number one. Problem number two is that this is not a good prediction complex to begin with, because presidential races occur every four modern polling in the primary era. And if you just have 12, 13 instances of something, you can't really model that well,

especially if some of your instances are, say, from 1980s, you know, or 1984, where we had no Facebook, right? Like, how does this apply? So we don't really know. Third, the polls, which are the data that go into these models, are increasingly unreliable because the response rate is terrible. We can't get to people. Like in 1990s, we would get 30, 40 percent response rate, which wasn't great. We were already worried about it. The social science world was like, this is too low. Now we're down to 6 percent, 3 percent.

like this is too low. Now we're down to 6%, 3%. Plus, pollsters are seen as the cultural enemy by people who are more likely to be on the Trump side and who have mistrust of these pollsters. So in this kind of thing where you have terrible response rates and you have all these unknown unknowns, what polls do these days is they use weights, which means you take what data you have and you try to find stand-ins for the people you think you're missing. Right. So you think you're missing the low trust Trump voter and you go find another person that looks like what you think that low trust Trump voter looks like, which is somebody maybe with less education, white guy, and then you extrapolate from that. I mean, by the time you're done with it, you've put so many sort of adjustments on your data is it's not really a random poll in a recognizable way. It kind of depends on whether you got the weights right, which you have no idea because once once again you're trying to model people that you don't know what they're doing plus well that's the whole point right i mean but sorry like that's the

whole point how are you creating the weights when the whole reason you're put in a position to require waiting is you can't get enough people on the phone to understand the makeup of the electorate if you understood the makeup of the electorate and you had good standards like if you were just missing some women randomly you could put other women in their place thinking they'll be like that. But the people you're missing are not missing randomly, right? So that doesn't allow for fixing that. And plus, on top of all these problems, they don't tell us their weights. But given how they're both systematically wrong, like the pulse in 2016 and 2020, they're systematically wrong, but kind of similar to each other. I'm betting there's a

lot of what I would call hurting, right? And hurting is when everybody looks at each other and says, this is what I think the result should be just all the posters looking at each other and says, this is what I think the result should be, just all the pollsters looking at each other and kind of trying to guess what the other one is doing. So what you have is a mixture of unreliable data, potentially groupthink, trying to model a rare event that you have no way of fine tuning your model because it's too rare. And this is my biggest complaint, is that the way these things are interpreted means that a lot of people see these big numbers, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%. And in the end, the big models we had like the 538 and the economists, I think they were like 89, 90% for one and like 94, 96% for the other the last two days. People cannot but get a sense of certainty from such a big, overwhelming probability number. And then they change how they behave,

they may turn up, they may not turn up, they may make decisions, they may split their ticket, they may do all sorts of things based on what that prediction feels like to them. That was my complaint. It's not that I don't like modeling when we can do modeling. It's just that in this particular case, it's not doing us a favor. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. So this problem of the model of behavior, influencing behavior, applies to polls as well, right?

And the models will struggle if the polls are wrong, right? The models are based on public polling. If there's a big error in the polls, the models will be wrong. First of all, even, you know, look, as we're recording this, it is, we are on track for Joe Biden to become president by winning the blue wall, potentially, plus Arizona and Georgia. I am quite sure that a lot of people who I think take out their anger on Nate Silver will hear from Nate Silver, who will say, we predicted an 89% chance that Joe Biden will be the president and Joe Biden is going to be the president. A lot of what our model predicted is what took place. But a friend of mine texted me and he said, I can't believe the model is wrong again. And what I

responded and said is, no, it's worse than that. The model isn't wrong. It actually can't be wrong. It philosophically offers no prediction. It can't be. It actually can't be wrong. It philosophically offers no prediction. It can't be right. It can't be wrong. Forget implication. On a philosophical level, the model is predicting outcomes interior to the model. It is offering a mathematical prediction based on numbers from the world as to what would happen if the world were the model, but the world is not the model. And so when we're talking about what these models offer, I just think on like a philosophical level, it is not offering a percentage about anything in the actual world, because what does that even mean just on a like a pure, like epistemological basis? What does it mean? So these models are

counterfactuals of if this was the distribution of the polls, and if this is the polling error we know, and if we ran lots of simulations, this is 90% of the time Biden would win, and 10% of the time, you know, Trump would win, which of course, as you say, cannot be wrong. And the one good use for those were if you were like, if this was a sports game, and if you were betting, right, right, that's perfectly fine use of trying to model, you know, outcome of sports games for the purposes of betting. But if you can't evaluate if this is good or bad, it goes back to the question, why are we doing this? Like, what is the particular public sphere purpose of modeling these elections? And more importantly, what is

the purpose of paying so much attention to these models before the election? So if there was, you know, because the polling data is there, and it's going to be there. If you just had the polling data, and some people just ran some models anyway, fine. But the point is, we can kind of treat them as these unreliable things that do not incorporate many important variables and are not possible to kind of validate because of the rareness. So anything could happen. And therefore, like, don't give me numbers. Like, don't give me 90%.

Don't give me 60%. Don't give me numbers because the numbers are implying kind of almost like a scientific understanding. I realize what the numbers represent, you know, you ran your simulations. Yeah. As we've been discussing, there's so much in it that they cannot account for. And there's no reason to think their simulations have good data, or are good models, you know, we just don't know, you know, you've made this point. You know, these models say things like 89.2%, right? Like that level of precision is obviously impossible. They go back and they pull polls from, you know,

the Gallup polls from whatever, the 1930s, just to have it in there. But of course, then they say, well, let's make sure we're clear that this is uncertain. So let's make sure the tails are fat so that we can't get a 95, 99% chance because then we'll look really bad if we're wrong. Forget being off by a percentage.

I find it hard to actually find meaning in a percentage at all. Like I don't, what, 89% of what? I can't really distinguish a model like this when it says, say, 20% versus 40%, right? I kind of look at it and I'm like, is there really a meaningful distinction? But 40% is kind of almost saying even, right? Because it's saying four out of 10 versus six out of 10. This is almost like a coin toss. So if I don't even have that kind of confidence in this model, like why are we constantly refreshing? And what I think it has become is a way to channel anxiety, right? People are

understandably anxious about the outcome of the election. And if you want to soothe your anxiety, and if your candidate looks like it's winning, and you just kind of refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh. And also this kind of interest in scientism, let me say, models are great. They have their uses. But what we're doing with election predictions is not really very sort of grounded in science. Because like, if you're doing weather models, you have thousands of weather stations, data every hour, way to find in your model every day. Like we have, that's fine. That's not what we're doing here. And in both cases, in both 2016 and 2020, what I saw was that a lot of liberals

were worried about Trump. And in both cases, they look to 538 or New York Times to tell them it was okay, that their candidate was going to win. And I kind of want to say that the comfort you seek isn't there. It's the side that thinks of itself as liking science. So you go to the things that feel like science. But I'm kind of like medicine isn't medicine because it smells like menthol, right? There's something to the method that needs to be more vigorous. And, you know, with this kind of polling and with this kind of a rare event, this is the best you can do. But it's not really giving you the kind of precision and certainty people are seeking to soothe their anxiety and like just all too much focus. lot of cases where Comey says he sent that letter out thinking Hillary Clinton was going to be president. We have reporting that President Obama thought Hillary Clinton was going to win. So there

were certain actions he didn't take about misinformation and meddling. We know from reporting that Facebook thought, you know what, we have a problem, but let's just do this after the election because they thought Hillary Clinton was going to win. And how many people listen to someone like Edward Snowden, who tweeted with a screenshot of New York Times showing 93%, 97% chance of Clinton winning something like that saying there's never been a safer election to vote third party. You know, how many people did that thinking Hillary Clinton is a shoo-in. So the model forecast itself is not an observer. It's a player in how people behave. So if I'm thinking like the main polls are all wrong, they show Senator Collins losing, she's comfortably winning. So there are two options here. Option one, the polls are all wrong. And given garbage polling this year, that's quite possible.

Polls are all wrong. And given garbage polling this year, that's quite possible. Option number two is that the polls were right, but people looked at the forecast and thought, you know what, it's going to be a Democratic Senate and a Biden presidency. So we might as well return her to what they thought would be a minority caucus and instead have entrenched the Republican Senate, right? It's completely possible for various kinds of ticket splitting to happen because people do make strategic calculations depending on who they think is going to win. And if there's more certainty than attached to the feeling these models emanate, people are not making the correct strategic calculations. I'm not saying people shouldn't make strategic calculations, but I think the models should recognize their players in people's voting calculations.

Yeah. And again, we don't know exactly. I think it's hard right now, especially to point to any one influence of the models. But I do think like this is not a criticism of having those models or even taking interest in those models, though I do think to your point about the percentages, they would be less interesting to people if they were constantly saying the odds were somewhere between 55 and 45 percent, right? If they were a little more cautious, which there's no reason to believe they couldn't create a model that was more cautious based on the information that we have. But it does seem that the problem is the outsized role they've played in the way people think about politics.

That, to me, is the problem. There's nothing wrong with having a model. And I think, actually, Nate Silver is incredibly sophisticated in how he thinks about polls and how he thinks about the role of the model. But it's that it has played this outsized role. Well, something needs to change for sure.

Zeynep Tufekci, good to see you. Good to see you, too. Thanks to Zeynep Tufekci for joining us. When we Good to see you too. Thanks to Zeynep Tufekci for joining us. When we come back, let's end on a high note. Hey, don't go anywhere. There's more of Love It or Leave It coming up. And we're back. Okay, so on Friday morning, we decided to ask everybody to leave us voicemails about how you were feeling now that we knew Biden had won. Because we needed this week, here it is, your high note. These were awesome. Hey, love it. It's Colin. And I just woke up this morning hearing that Biden is up in Pennsylvania and the race is pretty much all

but locked up. I'm extremely relieved that Biden will likely be the next president because as a trans person, I won't have to worry about the president attacking my rights on a daily basis. You know, I'm a little bummed about the Senate, but I'm energized and I'm looking forward to doing everything I can to get Ossoff and Warnock elected on January 5th. We'll see how it goes. Hi, my name is Adrienne and I am from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And this morning, I'm just feeling completely emotionally overwhelmed. I did not really anticipate what I would feel knowing that a woman has been elected to the White House. the organizers, and the people who believe that we deserve better. And I'm so grateful that things are looking up. And I'm feeling determined to fight harder than ever to get those last two Senate seats in Georgia. So, you know, in true 2020 fashion, the hard work is never done.

But this is an incredible day to be alive and for America. Hey, Love It or Leave It listeners. It's me, CJ, again. Hey, John. Miss you, girl. I am so happy, so happy that they have been defeated. I cannot wait to see Ivanka in her annoyingly pressed hair and Jared in his walking stick looking self, his placid, characterless face to get the fuck out of my motherfucking house where I actually pay taxes for it. Oh, my goodness. It feels so sweet.

It's almost saccharine. I am so happy. I hope you guys have a great rest of your day. Hey, love it. This is Jake from Chicago. I'm feeling pretty elated this morning. Not only me, but our oldest daughter, who wants to be president someday, is very excited. Our middle child, she is super excited, too, because she is very clear

on who she wanted to win this election. My wife has been counting down votes as they come in as an amateur Steve Kornacki. And it's just really cool, and we're really excited. And thank you to everybody in the Crooked Media extended universe for all the work you did. God love y'all. Hi, Love It. This is Corey from New York. I am feeling a sense of joy that I didn't quite realize had left my body four years ago, and it's rapidly returning, a sense of joy that I didn't quite realize had left my body four years ago.

And it's rapidly returning. And I feel like there's a peace that I haven't felt in a long time. And I feel so incredibly grateful for the organizers and the activists who got us this point. Stacey Abrams, Garrett Fergetten, so many people registered to vote and engaged in the process. And I just feel so, so relieved. Thank you for all that you and the Crooked Media family are doing and have done up until this point. A lot of work to be done, but I'm excited to do it together.

Hey, John. It's Noah calling from Portland, Oregon. I wanted to say how good I am feeling this Friday morning. Despite all the ups and downs this week, I am so proud of the state of Arizona. I was in Maricopa County all last weekend and on Election Day working as a poll observer and the amount of enthusiasm and turnout was so inspiring and just was giving me life throughout throughout the election day process. And seeing that this morning, Congressional District 7, which is where I was at, just dropped a bunch of Biden votes on Trump's margins has been giving me life. So, yep. Thanks for all you do. Bye. Hi, love it. This is McKenna from Arizona. And I am feeling just so much relief and happiness for the first time this year, I think. And I know that the work isn't done. I know that come full circle into our first woman BP is very,

very exciting to me. And I am hopeful for the future. Thank you for all you've done to help. And I'll see you on the other side. Thank you so much, everybody who called in. If you want to leave us a message about something that gave you hope, you can call us at 323-521-9455. There were so many this week. There were far more than we could ever hope to use. But thank you so much for sending them in. They were great. Also, let me just shout out, obviously, fan favorites, Colin and CJ.

Always lovely to hear your voices. Thank you to Alyssa Mastromonaco, Ben Wickler, and Zeynep Tufekci, and everyone who called in. There are 59 days until the Georgia Senate runoffs. Go to votesaveamerica.com to help. In the meantime, though, please take a few days off. Take a moment to celebrate in relief and success. I mean it. Have a great weekend.

Love It or Leave It is a Crooked Media production. It is written and produced by me, John Lovett, Elisa Gutierrez, Lee Eisenberg, our head writer, and the person whose gender reveal party started the fire, Travis Helwig. Jocelyn Kaufman, Pallavi Gunalan, and Peter Miller are the writers. Our assistant producer is Sydney Rapp. Bill Lance is our editor, and Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Our theme song is written and performed by Sure Sure, Thank you.