Morning Wire - District Club: Did Vivek Ramaswamy's Ad Go Too Far?

Episode Date: October 25, 2026

Two pollsters are exposed for fabricating midterm data out of thin air. Did they move money, push candidates out of races, or manipulate the prediction markets? Plus, President Trump rallies the faithful in Iowa and tells voters to pretend he’s on the ballot, but is he winning over swing voters or just playing to safe crowds? Meanwhile, Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign releases an ad featuring opponent Amy Acton’s estranged mother urging voters to reject her daughter. It immediately ignited a firestorm of controversy.   And with less than two weeks until Election Day, the knives are out over whether the GOP’s midterm money bomb is actually working to defend red states like Kansas, South Carolina, and Texas. Ep. 9 Hosts: Ben Domenech - Daily Wire Opinion Editor Mary Margaret Olohan - Daily Wire White House Correspondent Tim Rice - Daily Wire D.C. Bureau Chief Rotating Host: Ameshia Cross - Democratic Strategist - - - Today’s Sponsor: FreeSpoke - The midterms are almost here. Do you know what's on your ballot? Freespoke makes it easy to explore candidates, local races, polling insights, and different perspectives on the issues that matter to you—all in one place. Download FreeSpoke FREE at https://GetFreeSpoke.com/DAILYWIRE. Use code districtclub30 for 30% OFF an annual Premium Subscription and come back for real-time election results! - - - Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: https://dailywire.com/subscribe 🇺🇸 Get 3-Months of DailyWire for just $17.76 📜 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Okay, first, before we give you the facts of the day, run hide fight infidels is streaming now only on Daily Wire. It's an ode to the great action movies of the 80s and 90s. There's even a love story which nobody expected. And you can support Daily Wire's mission to continue making movies that people actually want to watch. Go check it out. People disagree about a lot in this country, taxes, health care, education. But wherever you land politically, I think most of us agree on this. Better information leads to better decisions.

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Exclusive with my code. That's Brooklynbetting.com and promo code pray for 30% offsite wine. Support our show and let them know we sent you in the survey after checkout. Brooklynbetting.com promo code pray. President Donald Trump rallies the faithful in Iowa, but with Republicans defending ground in states that he won easily, is he moving boats or just playing to safe crowds? Meanwhile, the polls everyone's been quoting may not be worth the paper. that they're printed on.

In Ohio, Vivek Ramoswamy's campaign unloads on Amy Acton with a hard-hitting new ad. Is it true? Is it fair? And will it work? In Michigan, Abdul-El-Said and Mike Rogers squared off one last time. Rogers came out swinging on El-Said's socialist agenda and alleged terror ties, but Michigan hasn't had a Republican senator since the turn of the century. And with some fearing, a less than photo finish in the midterms, the knives are already

out for party leaders and committees calling the shots. Republicans are asking why campaign money is pouring into ruby red states like Kansas, South Carolina, and Texas, while Mitch McConnell's longtime right hand, Josh Holmes, says the blame game is aimed at the wrong people. We've got a lot to get to. This is the District Club. Welcome to the District Club. I'm Ben Dominic. Happy to be joined today by my colleagues, Tim Rice and Mary Margaret. and to welcome back, Amisha Cross. It's wonderful to have you back here today. We have so many things to talk about going into the final stages of this midterm election, but I think that we have to start with something that really roiled the conversation this week in a way that I think we haven't

seen happen in a concentrated way in a while. There's always controversies about polls in the closing days of any election, especially with the engagement that we see, not just from political activists, but from people who are just following the things that are going on. And this week, we saw not one but two pollsters actually tagged as being essentially completely fraudulent, that they created poles out of thin air in order to perhaps advance an idea, or maybe, if you're a little bit more like me, you think that they were trying to play with the gambling markets, perhaps, prediction markets. But that's something that has really kind of cut to the core of this conversation about whether we can trust any of these polls to begin with.

We've seen the reactions from Nate Silver. We've seen the reactions in New York Times and others who have said that they have cut these polls out, that they, you know, are taking them out of their indexes. But this still has an effect, and it had an effect earlier on in a number of different primaries. I'm curious, you're all experienced observers of this. What is your attitude toward polling and toward the fact that this has now become kind of a public show as opposed to being something that is insider focused? and the potential there for it to be manipulated in ways that actually change races. No, absolutely. I stand by the quote, polls don't vote people do.

In the last four election cycles, we've seen polls that were dramatically off. And I do think that, you know, that doesn't necessarily shape voter behavior. It does drive conversations like these. It does drive news. It can be frustrating for those running. And it also can diminish their fundraising. If you see a poll and it's, you know, it's got you behind multiple people. percentage points, people stop giving you money. I do think that there is an effect in that sense.

But when it comes to actual election day, when it comes to being able to predict who's actually ahead, we have seen time after time. And again, most recently, in the four subsequent or previous elections we've had, the polls have been way off. So you do think for campaigns, it's hard for them to strategize sometimes because unless you're actually on the doors talking to people regularly, those polls don't necessarily necessitate anything in relation to how an election and its outcome is going to be. I think that it becomes extremely difficult, especially in races that we presume are going to be close and then come election night. They're absolutely not. At this point, and I hate to say it, but the investment that campaigns put in polls, the investment that news puts in polls,

we may have to wind a bit of that back because a lot of them have become very, very questionable. Well, other than that, I think that it's time to maybe consider just dropping the entire enterprise. short of like going back to one or two very, very trusted outlets as just a barometer because I agree. I probably gave polls a second chance in 22 and then haven't really cared much about them ever since because that was that to me was the biggest one of just, you know, I can't even remember which wave it was supposed to be. Different polls.

It wasn't a wave. Whatever. It wasn't a wave either way. And so, yeah, the uselessness of them and the fact that they don't drive turnout is one thing. But now we see, again, these, this, I had scandal life. half scandal of these fake pollsters where, you know, they say they want to, oh, it's a social experiment, it's this, that, or the other thing. But to your book, in terms of how it's affected things, it clearly in Michigan seems to have driven money and institutional support to El Sayed.

And whereas in Wisconsin, it sort of, it failed to do the same thing for Francesca Hong, even though it was those fake polls were trying to put her up. So it's not even that it seems to be this sort of progressive gambit to manipulate them, but if pollsters are doing this, If pollsters are at this point just openly admitting that they're fabricating things and kind of playing with it, I think it's not even a matter of, oh, we can't trust these things, we shouldn't put stock in them. It's this is to a certain point, just get them out of the conversation entirely. I mean, it's pretty insidious when you think about it. We've talked about this for years. I mean, if not decades, how oftentimes when a poll is manipulated, it is for manipulative reasons.

It's because people don't want the public to understand that certain candidates have support. And I think we've talked about this for a long time. but the president has always said that he's experienced this, that the polls are never necessarily in his favor, and he's talked about this a lot this week. But I think when you look at these situations like this, it makes Americans distrust the media, and it makes Americans distrust polling more than ever,

because why should they trust them? Why should they trust anyone except, for example, the president's internal pollsters that maybe he should listen to or internal pollsters on each of these campaigns that would provide more significant statistics than the public polls that might be depressing voter turnout, even if they're not driving turnout, they're going to depress voter turnout if they're signaling that a certain candidate isn't going to do it. And I think that that's a really important thing. And let me just run through three examples of this.

You know, one of these pollsters, so that we have five different cases of this. One of these pollsters earlier on, it turns out, was taking money in order to boost the cause of James Fishback in Florida. Another pollster had a run of Tala Rico being significantly up on Ken Paxton. And a third example of this was the El-Sayette example, which seems to have driven. Mallory McMorrow played some role in driving Mallory McGemarrow out of that race, you know, in a situation where, you know, maybe she had a better shot than we could have considered. Isn't there, don't we reach a point where this becomes more than just like a media

problem and becomes a, what is this actually doing to drive money within the context of these elections, endorsements, et cetera, in a way that manipulates the public when they're paying a lot less attention than they are in the final weeks of a midterm campaign? Well, I think that there is an oversized reliance on polls, specifically for fundraising. McNamara dropped out because she lost money. A lot of money. She just didn't have enough to keep going.

She didn't have enough to take her to the end of that week, much less the end of that race. I think that for a lot of individuals who have been watching races across the country for years, many of them around this, I was going to say table, but there's no table. Who've had this conversation. When I look at races like the one that's currently happening in Texas, if you know anything about Texas, Your belief that this race is extremely, extremely close, or that, you know, there's going to be a toppling based on Tala Rico's polling, I think says that you have never paid attention to a race in Texas. So for some of these, I question the people who are looking at the polls because history tells us that that's just not likely to happen. But also that polling is big business.

We're talking a multibillion dollar industry. And when you have races, we always say this race is the race of our time. Like, we say that every election cycle. This one I do think is one that a lot of people are paying attention to just because of the economic strain that is happening across the country. So there is a much higher relevance to what these polls mean specifically because they drive funding models. They don't drive turnout, but they do drive funding models. And they can suppress, to a certain extent, specifically diverse voters. They have been shown to suppress a lot of diverse voters in some of our most, I would probably say, important battleground states.

Do you think that's simply because they take the idea that this candidate, there's no point in. voting for this candidate because they're that far behind? 100%, because diverse voters are known to be what we call pragmatic voters. So if they see a certain number, it says this candidate is basically in the hole. A lot of them are going to stay home because they don't think their vote is going to matter. I think that would probably be true across the board, though. I mean, I know many people who wouldn't go to the polls merely because, you know, they don't think that their candidate is going to do well.

And I don't know that necessarily it has anything to do with the color of their skin. It's just more perhaps that if that candidate isn't performing well in the polls, they think why would I matter? On the flip side of all of this, though, and I don't know the answer to this. I'm just wondering. I'd be interested to hear everyone's thoughts. What is to be done about this, though, right? I sort of feel the same way about the fake polls as I do back. This hasn't been too much of a thing since like 2016, I feel like, but a lot of the, you know, like the troll farm Facebook accounts, you know, oh, election day got moved to the second Tuesday of January. You know, Donald Trump is going to send you to prison right away. Hillary Clinton's an alien. I mean, look, is it good? No. Could maybe? the companies themselves, not to not to start the Facebook conversation, but, you know, is there a conversation about what sort of content moderation? Sure. But at the end of the day, if a given voter is going to be swayed to or from the polls or two or from a different candidate because of a meme or a poll, whether it's real or fake, like what, you know, it's, it's not illegal

to make fake polls. Well, polling is supposed to be a science. And if we are to believe that, because that was the basis of it, then the ones who are intentionally creating things where they're lying, they need to go out of business. Remember the one in Iowa during the 24 race that basically had Kamala up in a very, very strange, I don't know who believed that poll, but it had her, like, really up here. And what was it, two days later, they just quietly disappeared. Not only were they wrong as hell, and a lot of people questioned it when they saw it. They're like, this is Iowa. I don't know, this looks a little fishy. But they didn't have to be pressed on disappearing. They just disappeared. Right, but is that it? I'm genuinely wondering. Is there something,

Is there another step short of just waiting for the fraudsters to pack up, pack up their wares and get out of town? I actually think that there is, and I will say, Tim, you know, you're definitely underrating the number of those 25,000 people who saw the Facebook meme that Russia created that the Pope had endorsed Donald Trump, the way that it affected their vote. I actually think that we saw kind of a first step on this from Brendan Carr this week. You know, he came out and basically the FCC chair and said, you know, the networks, the broadcast networks have as part of their license, you know, a requirement that they cannot participate in a hoax or fraud, you know, and that's something that can be brought against them on a licensing basis. So what I think you could see is maybe not something that shuts down these pollsters, but maybe something that forces the networks to sort of say, we got to be really confident of the poll numbers that we're throwing out. out there. And even for the commentators, even for people like us who go on these networks, that we have to be very confident. I always think it's very weird that some people will run with a pollster that they've never heard of to make a point. I'm always skeptical of that.

If I haven't heard of you, I just assume, well, you know, who is this? Like, is this just a guy in a basement doing an AI-based thing? And I think that people are going to have to do that because there could be consequences for the network. I totally agree with you. I think you have to be very aggressive and cracking down on this sort of thing because, again, we're talking about, whether it depresses or encourages votes. But I don't actually, at the end of the day, you should not be lying to the public. It doesn't matter what kind of impact it's having.

If you're lying to the public and misrepresenting how candidates are doing, that's gravely irresponsible. And for people to end up talking about it on a network, for, you know, world leaders to see these sorts of things, to be digesting them. I just think it's incredibly wrong and incredibly manipulative. Yeah, well, I agree. Mary Margaret people shouldn't be lying to the American people.

But it will be, you know, We've got a little bit of a ways to go, I think, before we get lies out of politics entirely. But Amisha, you brought up Iowa in the Kamala context. But Mary Margaret, you were just there with the president. And so aside from the dirty soda that you had on site there at the rally, which I'm sure we can talk about later. I think everyone very much wants to hear about that. What was it like? Give us a quick recap of the speech.

And what were the vibes? What are you seeing? Well, the speech was very much like the other speeches that he's been giving every single night this week. Because the president's been on the campaign trail every single day this week. I actually don't really know how he does it, you know, disagree with his politics all you want, but the man stays up till 1.30 in the morning every single night giving a massive stump speech and firing up this crowd. And I actually was particularly taking note, you know, looking at people's faces when I was in Iowa a couple days ago because I thought it was so interesting to see how these people are still interacting with Trump.

You know, we hear all of this rhetoric about how people are disillusioned. The prices are too high. It's changing how they feel about the president. But the people that I saw in Iowa, they were just glued in, dialed in on the president. They're filming his every move. They're watching his Trump dance. They're just looking at each other. They're so charmed by him.

And granted, again, obviously, this is the MAGA base that is out there for these rallies. But there's something very untouchable there that I think the president will always have with this MAGA base. And I spoke to a couple of these rallygoers. And one of them told me, I pulled him aside and I said, I keep hearing in D.C. that no one likes Trump anymore because of the economy, because of the gas prices, because the grocery store prices. And this man grinned at me. He didn't have all his teeth. He's the nicest man. And he says... Too many dirty sides of us. Maybe too many 30 sides. And he was the nicest man. And he said, what about your friends? Do they feel the same way? He said,

absolutely, we're all behind him, no matter what, we're all loyal. Now, granted, this is a random man that I encountered in Iowa. But I think it's a good reminder to the rest of us, even here in the swamp that we may know, we may find the specific Trump voter who's disillusioned, but he still has a massive base out there, and they are going to come out for him. The president has really been leaning in. I mean, obviously, he hit the campaign, Charlie started spending money, and in the past couple weeks, we've seen him explicitly say, please pretend like I'm on the ballot. Just pretend like I'm on the ballot. Do you think this is having an effect? Or should Democrats start getting a little bit worried? Or is there going to be a little

residual Trump effect this time? Well, he's not on the ballot. And the question was, whether or not his base voters still support him. Because I think that that is true. I think that there are base voters who love Trump who are gonna love Trump no matter what. Unfortunately for the Republican Party, Trump is not at the top of that ticket. His name's not on it anywhere.

Will that transcend to the places where it matters most? Because yes, in Trump country and places that voted for him plus 30 percent, those places, of course Republicans are going to do better in. But he's not worried about those places. He's going to those places because he knows they're gonna love him. It's basically a self-fulfilling prophecy to hear people shout you out in Mississippi and Alabama.

However, when you go to some of these other states, some of the more competitive races, he's not appearing on purpose. And I would argue that that's not something that is untoward. For Democrats, there are places that Kamala can't go and actually raise support either. And there are Democrats who have asked her to stand back. The same thing is happening to him with Republicans. By and large, a lot of people across this country are very upset about their current economic conditions, whether it's housing, whether it's health care, whether it's child care, whether it's basically being. able to afford food, those people are really, really angry, and they want some level of change. Many of them are blaming Trump.

Many of them are just, you know, naturally going to blame the party in power, whether it is, you know, them looking towards Trump, we're just saying Republicans as a whole. And those people, a lot of them were, you know, undecided voters, for lack of a better term. I hate that term because I think most people are decided. They just don't want to tell pollsters who they're going to vote for. The economic anxiety is real. And it was real during Biden's administration. and we saw flips then, it is real now, and I believe we're going to see the flip again. It's not a question of whether the wave it's going to happen.

It's how strong it will be, how many seats they will lose. The problem, I think, from the Republican side, the MAGA side of this analysis that we've seen play out over the last couple of months, which I always felt was the lack of awareness on their part about the gap between that core MAGA base that you're talking about, Mary Margaret, and the number of people who voted for Donald Trump, not because they liked him, but because, because they liked him better than her. And I think that that is just such a significant portion of the reason that he became president again and that Republicans continually discount that category.

When you have such a portion of the American electorate that basically looked at the two of them and said, I've got a binary choice to make and I remember the economy under him and it was better and I don't like her and I don't trust her, I think that that's something that was a massive motivation. And so for them to turn around in this election

and discover that those same people are not particularly motivated to come out and vote for a guy who they feel like hasn't really done as much as they thought he was going to do. And especially for all these other random Republicans who have done even less, I think that that's not really a surprise. And so because of that, look, you know, you said it's about how big the wave is or how big of a trend it is this time, you know, versus whether that trend exists or not. I think that that's the real question that people have to evaluate when it comes to a lot

of these races that are on the margins where we already see. kind of people saying, why are you spending money here? Shouldn't you be spending it there? You know, that kind of internal DC, you know, pre-knife fight that we see going on. I think that that really is the question that afterwards people are going to look back on and say, man, we could have probably motivated more voters in this state versus that state. Well, I would dispute your point just a little bit in just saying that the president is making this personal. He is making it about him.

He's literally going to every single one of these rallies and saying, make it about me, pretend I'm on the ticket. And I would also dispute what you said earlier, you know, to the effect of that the president's just going kind of for the praise and for the laudatory nature of these rallies. He's going out there and saying, if you don't vote for these candidates, then you're going to have to deal with the radical left. So make this about me, pretend him on the ballot and vote for these candidates. And in a way, he's actually making this more of his problem than he needed to. He could just sit it out and say, all right, let's see how they do. You know, I'm president. So my party's probably not going to do as well.

He could hang out in Mar-a-Laga and watch how it goes. But instead, he's out there until the middle of the night, every single night up until election day saying, make this about me. So I think that we would be remiss to not note that. I note that the president, you know, who has gotten a lot of criticism for how he handles midterms, he's really giving it his... But the Democratic Party is making it about him. The other candidates are making it about him. They're saying the war in Iran shot her gas prices up. They're saying your utility bills, you can't afford to pay.

They're saying the food, you can't afford to eat it. They're saying, like, they are making it about him based on the policies that he stood for, the ones that he's... He not only campaigned on, but the Big Beautiful Bill Act, the one that he got passed. They're talking about the things that he has done, up to and including the tariffs, that have caused people to have shrinking pocketbooks at home. So making it about him and his policies is actually a net negative for the president, more than it is a positive. I see where you're coming from, but I also think, and I think this is sort of not to put words in your mouth, but I feel like this is where you were getting out a little.

I also think that this is not what you said. I'm saying I think the president has found his footing a little bit better going through this cycle. Like, at first it was more, yeah, they're going to make it about me. I'm great. Abdul al-Sayyad's a communist. He's gotten more into actually campaigning. This is the thing I think you were saying. Make it about me, not in the negative way, but in the positive way.

So getting back, having the policy discussion, not just the personality discussion. And I think the stuff about immigration in the Iowa speech, which you reported on before the speech too, you would obtain. The not just talking about his successes of immigration, but framing it in opposition to what's happening in Europe, what's happening. what's happening in France, which we've talked on this show before about how the immigration issue is sort of become, it's the snake that's devouring itself because they got the first rave of illegals out. And then all of a sudden, it was ICE trying to figure out exactly what this looked like and maybe voters don't like this as much. But taking it out of that context and saying, look, what's happening here is not what's happening in France. That's what would have happened if Kamala had won. That's what's going to happen if you go for Democrats. I thought that was a very strong message. And I think he's doing more and more of that type of messaging before. Trump has two more years in office. And he could have, if he wanted to, because you hear the cries of the American people, you're hearing from people in Florida,

you're hearing from people in various other states that do lean Republican, who are saying, hey, I can't afford this, that another thing. If he wanted to do something short-term, acknowledging that the election is literally just a few weeks away, he could have. He chose not to. There were policy remedies that he could have done

that would have been able to, I'm not saying absolve all of the disastrous, economic decisions that have been made, but could have allowed for, people to feel a little bit better about their personal economic situation. He can't blame that on anybody else because he's the person in office right now. That's not- That's not the president's go.

He's not out there trying to make people feel a little better right now. I mean, that's not the problem. And it's not about feeling better as well. It's also about fake their heads are not above water. They want some level of a solution. And he's the person in power. You cannot blame that on anybody else. You're coming about this from the perspective of, you know, everything that Donald Trump has done is bad.

And I think that we've got to take a step back and look at everything that he's done. I mean, his base, obviously, is with him. But there's a whole plethora of Americans who are really happy that he has taken steps to protect kids from irreversible child gender transitions. He's keeping woke ideology out of schools and academia and medicine. Then why is he's falling on every single poll we can look at horrible? No, I don't entrust all polls, but I'm saying if all of them are equal in looking at his approval rating, there isn't one that shows a strong. I know. I actually agree with you, and I think that the White House and the president specifically very much botched the messaging on affordability and on Iran with regard to the midterms.

And there's nothing at this point. They're in too deep. They can't change the rhetoric now. It has to just be, you know, the only way out is through. But in the last three weeks of the election of the campaign, if the president had come out and said, I am doing this to bring relief at the pump. Like he tried to, I mean, he tried to do it. He did the diesel deal. and everyone on the left said, oh, my gosh, he's cooperating with Russia.

It's also not even that much diesel. It's not going to do anything. He talks about rebates and it's, oh, he's trying to bribe people. So do you really think that if the president in the last month of the midterm cycle came out and said, these are the things I'm going to do to relieve the pressure and put more money in your pockets, that that wouldn't have just then become another thing that Democrats used against it? I think party would have talked about it, obviously. Do I think that it would have helped on the campaign trail for actual voters?

Yes. Because the voters want relief. It's the part, you're the opposing party's job to, to go against you. Like, that is literally how it works. I think Amisha has touched on something that is the fundamental problem here, which is that Republicans don't know

what the hell they're running on. They don't actually have a message about how they're going to solve your problems if you send them back to Washington, which is the actual decision that voters have to make in all of these races. It's not even about the president at that point because the president,

the president is going out there on the trail. He's getting that 36 to 40 percent that he's always in the middle of those people, he is going to get them out. He really is. They love him. They're dedicated to him. The tooth-lacking guy that you met in Iowa, he is not. He will crawl over broken glass to go and vote for his president and for his president's party

because he believes in the president. The problem is all those other people that are between that 36 to 40 percent and actually winning an election. And that, I think, is the population that Republicans needed to have a message for this cycle. and I don't know what their message is. And if I don't know what your message is, that's a problem because it means that the average voter definitely doesn't know what it is. Well, the message that I'm hearing at the White House, and maybe this is not translating to candidates. In fact, it probably isn't.

The message I've been hearing is, do you want two more years of us working for you trying to bring successes of the public or do you want radical Democrats? And I think the problem that they're encountering, and we've all been honest about this, is that if war in Iran is going on, it's impacting affordability in a massive way. And so for the president to say, yeah, I know this war is going on, we can't just minimize it for the midterms. We're going to continue carrying this out, regardless of the midterms. These lawmakers have to grapple with that. And not everyone is handling it very well. So, you know, in Iowa, for example, Ashley Henson says she wants the war to come to a rapid close. That was an interesting dynamic because it didn't come up during the rally, obviously.

She never would criticize the president. She thanked him for being there. She was very promotional of him and the other candidates were as well. but she said that out in Iowa to get votes, to get voters out for her. So it's a dynamic that everyone's grappling with. And I think the vice president did a good job in his messaging. Again, really repeating, look at all these things we've done. Do you want us to keep doing them or do you want the radical left to come back and erase all this progress?

That's the dilemma here. And I think if people had taken a page at Advances book on this messaging, it could be helpful, but it really depends on the thing. The other issues that to the extent that Republicans had a message going into this cycle, It was that they were going to run explicitly on the left is crazy. Democrats are crazy. You don't want to put crazy back in control. And that was more effective against somebody like Kamala Harris or Joe Biden where they presented normal enough that the expose of the radical things they wanted to do shocked voters into voting for Trump.

I think one of the things that happened this cycle was that Democrats out-crazied Republicans' message about them. So when you have Abdul Al-Sayed out there basically saying, I kind of love the Muslim Brotherhood. Trump getting up and saying, Abdul Al-Sayed loves the Muslim Brotherhood, it takes the oxygen out of that argument. So, wait. So there are two massive flubs, I would say, this week that we have to talk about, one on the left and one on the right. I would say that I think that El-Sayed experienced, and the fact that he wanted to blast

out this interaction about the Muslim Brotherhood, I do not think that helps him at all at this stage in terms of the voting parts of the electorate that he lacks in Michigan. Maybe you have some thoughts on that. But the flip side, of course, is what the hell happened in Ohio? And we can talk about that, too. But for what first, why does El Sayyad, why can't he just say, like, hey, you know, my family believes some crazy things. I love my family, but I don't believe them.

I've never believed them. Even if he's signed onto letters and things like that in the past. But like, why can't he just say that as opposed to trying to turn this into some? Well, you just are racist for thinking that I love. Well, there are a few things that are happening that are rather unfortunate in Michigan. I think that it is very clear that there is rampant Islamophobia from the other side there. And it is very frustrating. With that being, with that being, no, no, no, no, no.

I think there's Islamophobia writ large. But I am saying when it comes to the ads to how this is being narrated to the debates, there are things that are said. They would not be said if he was not Muslim. They would not be said if he was not of the Islamic faith. We saw some of the same attacks on Zoram Mandani from at the time a Democrat who was running in the primary. So I do think that there is that there is that. this very insidious Islamophobia that exists. Though, when we look at the, and I hate to bring it to the polls,

but also we look at a lot of the conversations, particularly with the black community in Michigan and in Detroit specifically, there has been a longstanding riff between the Muslim community and the black community, specifically of those who are from Middle Eastern backgrounds. And that has existed for generations. That is a very hard hurdle to climb. And a lot of it is because of a certain level of discrimination in fights between, or inner community there that, again, has existed for a while.

It is not on Elsie had to try to clear up all of history. But you don't think that his, like, ads that he's been putting out, that these, like, these attempts on his part to reach out to the black community, they all seem very clumsy and, like, I don't know. It just seems odd to me that he's struggling with this so much personally. Am I wrong about this? Well, I think that there was an assumption that that relationship was stronger than what it was, and they think that that hurt him.

And in part it was because this is a guy who has been in public health for a long time in the area and a lot of the patients and a lot of the people that came into the clinics as well as who were provided by the county that he worked for. A lot of them happen to be black people. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to have an embedded voter group that just

happens to be back, especially older black people. What we know across the country when it comes to a lot of Democrats who lean more to the far left is that older black people do not. They are a lot more in the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. So it is extremely difficult to run as a far left candidate for older black people. Black individuals, because they don't support it.

Well, I'm just going to ask, I guess, why was there an assumption that black Michigan voters would vote for El Cahed? Because he's been a contributing factor to the health care crisis or solving or attempting to solve the health care crisis in Michigan, particularly for black communities for quite some time. So he is a name and a brand that black people know whose families have visited and who understand his leadership. However, that doesn't necessarily translate to individuals who automatically will vote for you. Once it became clear that he didn't have that demographic in his pocket and that perhaps the biggest chunk that he needed to win over, as you were just saying, were the older, more moderate ones, why not just come out right away, as Penn said, and say, look, my mom, a little bit of a loony tune, I'm not in the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Tommy video that he was so proud to blast out, he was treating that like it was Barack Obama in 2007 telling some voter somewhere that just because my middle name is Hussein doesn't mean that I don't have loyalty to the Constitution. This is like, dude, you wrote a letter 10 years ago telling the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt they needed to purge the media. Like, that is dip. That's not, that's not Andrew Cuomo trying to say that Zoranam Dhani's a terrorist because there's a picture of him wearing a Kefia when he was a student in Colombia. No, I mean, I know. I know.

No, he did. But I'm saying Cuomo's attack was clumsy because Momdani then came out and was like, Andrew, come on, man. I'm obviously not a terrorist. It's more than you can say about being a weirdo freak. And that's why Zohrauddinandhi is the mayor of New York. And people have kind of stopped talking about his, now it's just about how he's a commie and not about how he's a radical woman.

There's obviously a playbook here. Did not see that ending. Why is El-Said? Why is El-Sai-ed not doing it? He could just do the Maldi. He could just put him on Dani. Why is he not just doing that? It's a great question.

The tactic is not going to work for him because he's not in that style of a candidate. But the other thing is, again, the moderate, older black voting, in Michigan is the overwhelming turnout voter. So it's going to be very, very difficult for him. And it's not because of the Muslim Brotherhood. That's not the reason why all of that that conversation resonates on the right.

The left and the voters is he's trying to get there as well as some of the ones who are, again, black voters in Michigan, are not necessarily going to run and vote for his opponent. What they are very questioning is, again, the historical fight between the two communities there. And that's something that, you know, El-Sayed shouldn't have to carry, but unfortunately he is. And again, this has nothing to do with Muslim Brotherhood. This has nothing to do with a conversation about, you know, what his mom did or didn't do, who he wasn't raised by anyway. This is a question of and a push against communities that have been infighting for years and discrimination that they have experience. Why is that?

Because is it not possible that there are black voters in Michigan that don't like his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood? Or is it not possible that there are black voters in Michigan that are furious about 9-11 or are really hesitant to embrace anything to do with terrorism or jihad and are hesitant to vote for a candidate that has the. those ties. I mean, I think that is very possible that there are many black Americans who are very hesitant to vote for L. Sayade because of those ties and nothing to do with some of the ties that you're talking about. There are black

voters in a Michigan who have experienced extreme discrimination much more recently in their communities that affect them directly from groups of people who happen to be Middle Eastern facing. And that to them is a very big deal. But so this is why I do think that it has a little bit to do with the

Muslim Brotherhood because I think another way of saying what Mary Margaret just said is wouldn't him very, an earlier, stronger, and better denunciation of all of the Muslim Brotherhood and Radical Islamic claims levied against him prime some voters to think of him less as a member of the Muslim community and more just as the Democrat public health official who's been beneficial in their community? Wouldn't him nailing that and doing it better and earlier and more forcefully, couldn't that have changed that conversation? Doesn't it get back to this a little bit? I think that the personal relationships black community members have with the Muslim community. It's a lot bigger of a hurdle for him to climb.

Maybe that might be so, but I just, I do feel like it. In addition to, I think that some of the things that he has put out policy-wise, again, older black voters are a lot more pragmatic. They don't believe a lot of that can get done. So I think that there are two things that are operating against them at the same time. One of the stats that Mike Rogers' campaign has pointed to is just like the sheer amount of things that are on his website about foreign policy versus the amount of things that he has that have to deal with a black community. So I do think that that, I think it's a weakness.

And I think it's actually, if he ends up losing, I think it will be something that is pointed to as like, this was the aspect that he didn't get. If Vivek Ramoswamy ends up losing, I think we all know what people are going to point at. Hey guys, it's Tim Rice, here to talk to you today about Free Spoke. Free Spoke is rapidly becoming my favorite search engine and go-to tool to help me break down the news.

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Make the case to me, please, as the number one fan of the vice president who is sitting on this platform right now, why the heck did he need to endorse that ad as vociferously as he did? Well, you're right. I do have a lot of opportunities to cover the vice president and get to see him up close. I was puzzled by his response to this ad. I also was puzzled by the president's response to this ad because right before we went to Iowa, the president was outtaking questions. He started talking to the media about how his mother, who he repeatedly said is in heaven, how if she put out an ad like that ad, he literally looked at Caitlin Collins and said, you would be so excited. You would be showing it on your show all night, which is not wrong.

But I saw this ad. I was in a group chat with a number of people who were dissecting it. I thought it was interesting because a couple of the men in the chat were like, oh, this is, wow, this could be a really powerful ad. And myself and several other women were immediately saying, he wasn't. Myself and several of the women immediately said, uh, whoa, wait. Because I'm imagining if my mother said those things, something must have been real wrong in our family for my mother to go out there and say such things like that. My mother would rather die than say things like that about me publicly and attack my campaign. So obviously from the get-go, something's very wrong with this family.

Something is quite troubled. But then to defend the ad, I would have steered far clear of it on every level. I thought it was disturbing, disgusting, let's say. I thought it was upsetting. And for everyone involved, it just made me sympathetic to her daughter, who's having her mother out there. Hold on. Let's also, you've touched on a lot of things about the ad affair, except the one, the big thing, because look, there's probably like a 30% chance that my mother would cut.

an ad for my opponent if I ever ran it. But that's fine. I don't know. I said 30%. I said 30%. But that's not, this is not exclusively. Never cleaned up his room. Packers and vet all the time. This is not. And the reason I say that

partially because it's funny, but also because this is not just about a mother saying that I'm not going to move from my daughter. There is the elephant in the room, which was that Amy Acton is estranged from her mother. And her mother lost custody of her and her brother because her mother's husband allegedly raped her when she was 12 years old. Which makes it even worse.

This is not just a simple matter of the grossness of politics coming between family, which we see with Bobby Kennedy, which we see with J.D. Vance, with everybody, right? That's crazy. That's crazy. Yeah, I'm not one of those families are off-limits people. But I do think then when you have a situation like this where a young child, because by state court records, this was a child who was sexually assaulted from the age of eight to the age of 12. And for the state, you know what the burden of proof is for the state to take a child away

from its mother? It is extremely high. So for the state to do that and to take both of her kids at the same time, every kid in her hole was removed because of the danger they felt that that kid had. And as somebody who is a court-appointed special advocate, I am Acosta for foster kids, that is one of the top reasons that children are removed from their mother. It is typically a drug addiction that they somehow cannot overcome, or it is because there is extreme sexual abuse happening in the home.

So I felt really bad for Emni Act and somebody who has had to have a drug addiction, somebody who has had to go through this process and that leaves residual emotional social development issues for a long time. For her to have to watch this and the world to see it at the same time. First of all, her mom's is scum of the earth. I don't know, like even watching that video, there's something that is just not clicking with the mother. Yeah, like there's something going on there.

But in addition to that, I don't know whether she was paid to do it or she wasn't, but it is very, very problematic. And for the president and the vice president, because initially the president tried to stay as far away from this as possible and his response I thought was strong. Then he came out Thursday and said something that kind of doubled down on what J.D. Vance said. I think I was more upset with J.D. Vance because I'm obviously not a J.D. fan. I did love Hillbilly Elogy. I thought it was a great book. However, he spoke so vividly about the things that happened to him as a young child.

And I thought that as somebody who had gone through that himself in a very, very, like, unfortunate home situation to where his grandmother was basically his savior in that case, that he would be somebody that was a little bit more. to watch him come out in the way he did. Again, this woman was a child when this happened. She had nowhere with all to save herself. And if the state has to come in and do it, this should never be a part of any. It just showed me that Vivek was lower than dirt and that he was very afraid of his campaign.

So I think you're right about Trump originally, Nailor Vance originally having a better response. And I agree with you that it would have been nice to see the vice president say, look, based on my experiences, I can't countenance this. However, it's two weeks till the midterms, President and Vice President, they're trying to get the Vake elected in Ohio. It's easy, we can figure out at least, it's not a good reason, but it's a reason why they would do that.

Well, we still don't know it. And Ben, I wonder what your thoughts are. Why did they cut this ad in the first place? Who thought this was a good idea? How did this get great? They had to, at no point between coming up with the idea, putting a camera in this woman's face, cutting it and releasing it, no one in the Vex camp said, hey guys, what if we did literally anything else? And not to make this about women, but was there's no woman in the world that thought.

No, making about it. My answer was going to be, I don't think they showed this to a single woman. Yes, she's weird. Any woman who saw this ad would say, no, what are you guys thinking? I mean, this is the worst, like, how many tears of decision making did this have to go through that happened this week other than the Atlanta Falcons apparently endorsing the Bird Reich? But here's the thing that I think is psychotic about this ad. But if you're going to lose, like if you look at the internal polling and you think you're going to lose, lose in a way that allows you to run again.

We've seen this over and over. Like there's always, when people are running for office, sometimes, you know, the mercenary, most scurrilous, you know, campaign consultant will come to you and say, we've got this thing and it's gold. And trust me, it's going to change the dynamic. It's going to change the election. You're down by four. but you can change this overnight if you only do this really dirty thing that makes you feel bad when you look at yourself in the mirror. And it's almost always completely wrong to go down that road. It's just, it's always a backfire.

And the thing is, he's not that old of a guy. He could run for state office again. Totally. And we've seen this happen, by the way, in Ohio before with the wine making a comeback and everything like that. Why on earth would you go out in a way like this that says everybody's going to remember this is the reason? you lost, whether it actually was or not. And you know what was interesting in Iowa, the president said that Vivek called him and said everyone's freaking out about this ad, which I'm not sure if the president had said publicly

yet, but I thought it was really interesting because he told the whole world that Vivek told him when he was freaking out. And that was really, I think, what changed for the president's demeanor on the ad because, you know, he likes to put up a fight. So Vivek called and said, what do I do? And the president literally told the crowd, he said, well, it's an interesting ad, but, you know, anyone could have made it. why not? And his argument was really, if you guys could make that about my mother, you would,

and you would use it. And that was the hill that he wanted to die on. So I think this one will be really interesting, Ben, I think you could be right. This could be something that everyone remembers for years to come. Much like, what was the ad that you flagged for me the other day? Oh, Christine O'Donnell. I'm not a witch. I'm not like you. Yes. That was my first one. But that was in Delaware. That was like not Ohio, Ohio, Red Ohio. Also, yes. Yes. But, yes. But to that point, like, we haven't heard from Christine O'Donnell. No, no, no, no, you're right. Like, that was, that was even, like, no, what I'm saying?

I'm still questioning if she's a witch. That mistakes were even lower, and it still became a definitive thing that we still remember. Totally true. The point is, but I just think that I'm making is, like, we're used to, like, fringe candidate in super blue stakes, doing crazy ad, you know, late in the day kind of thing. Nothing will ever top that Carly Fearing a goat ad or whatever that was. But anyway. I don't understand. Yeah, it's bizarre.

But it's bizarre that in Ohio, of all places, you feel the need to do this. And from my perspective, kill your political. I mean, I'm sure you could find another thing to run for. But it's like, this is, it leaves a sour, sick taste. And the people who have that campaign on their resume, they're going to go, I didn't have anything to do with that, like, just so you know. Republican Party, to their credit and to Mary Margaret, no matter what conversation we have here, like the protection of children is always a very strong thing.

Yes. And I think that when you have a candidate who, comes out and he is absolutely fine lambassing somebody who is a former child and an abuse victim. That says something. So to the Republicans who have stood out and said that this was wrong and the ones who have denounced it, like the credibility given where credibility is due, it is very frustrating to watch somebody who is a member of a party that has gone out of its way, and I would say strongly, in support of some of the horrendous things that are happening to young people, decide that that type of ad was going to be cut and not fully recognized or not caring,

what residual effects it would have on now adults who have been abused as young people, young people who are currently being abused, that's just not the tact you want to take. One thing that I do think that we have to talk about here, sort of in the closing days of this election, is a month ago on this show, we were talking about the massive investment that Republicans were going to make when it came to advertising and everything like that,

this giant money bomb that was going to come down and explode all over the country and it was going to turn things around, or potentially turn things around, for Republicans. Not to go back to polls, but the indications that we have that things have turned around for Republicans after spending an enormous amount of money in all these different places is very little. And the argument that has been made by some of the people who I referenced earlier here in

D.C., including Josh Holmes and others have advanced this, is basically we've had to defend ground that we didn't think we were going to have to defend in Kansas, you know, in Iowa, in, you know, races essentially that have prevented us for. from spending in places that could potentially expand the map. In his case, he used the example of Minnesota, where a lot of Republicans feel like Michelle Defoea, you know, could pull off an upset if maybe there had been a little bit more investment in there. Why do we think that that money bomb didn't work, unless you do think it worked?

And what does that lesson potentially tell us about the way politicians and political campaigns should spend money in the future? Because it does seem to me like it just skipped. off the top of the pond. Well, I think, first of all, we don't know whether it worked yet and we won't know until election day. And I think that's really key to this conversation is we can predict all we want, but we truly won't know what's going to play, how things are going to play out until we get to

election day. With that whole poll conversation in mind, with a lot of the duplicitous media coverage in mind, I just don't see a way to properly evaluate that until after election day is over. I think, I don't think it's going to work. I don't think it has worked. I think maybe, you know, we'll see it moved things a little bit. You know, they could have ended down 20 instead they ended down 10. I don't think it fully moves the needle in a meaningful way. I think what it tells candidates, and this is going to sound a little bit like a non-sequitur. But I mean it in a non-securter way. I think that we finally hit a point of social media saturation and a level of kind of American engagement with politicians on social media that the essential things going forward, our candidate quality. and message discipline, which have obviously always been and always will be, but you can't, you can't buy your, you can't, yeah, you can't, you can't supplement a bad candidate or a lack of a message with ad buys or leaflets or get out the vote, or money. You can't buy your way

out of it anymore when 10 years ago you could in certain cases. At least y'all had the money to spend. Um, I was saying, Democrats are in trouble in the money part. However, many, many consultants. However, I think that you can't outspend people's attitudes. And at this point, the economic suppression, I think, is going to trump any amount of funding, whether it was spent on social media ads, whether it was spent on rallies or other activities, whether it's spent on doors. If people are just mad as hell, for lack of a better term, as to what their cost of living is, as to not seeing a way out, regardless of the party in power,

because if Democrats were in power right now, they would be F2. It's just one of those things that you cannot outspend people's personal experience. And that is a very difficult hurdle to climb. So, you know, fortunately or unfortunately, it depends on the candidate. At this point, it is going to be extremely difficult. Because I hear people continue to call and want, you know, more of, you know, Trump's war chest to be spent in these races. If you are already in a place where you're running and you're running against the wave of people who just, they don't know where their next rent payment is going to come from, there isn't a thing that you can message your way into. to make them be able to find money for the first.

So there has to be something else. And they think that because the economic conditions are so rough for so many people in this country, regardless of how they typically vote, that is driving decision-making more than anything else. I love my party, but it's not that we're having the best candid experience of this cycle either. It is more so that people are really, really frustrated

about their current condition, and they want to find a way out. All right, well, I think we're going to have to leave it there. Thank you guys. This has been another edition of the District Club. Thanks, as always, to Amisha, for joining us. Thank you, Ben and Mary Margaret. Always a pleasure. We will see you guys back here next week. People disagree about a lot in this country, taxes, health care, education,

but wherever you land politically, I think most of us agree on this, better information leads to better decisions. That's the mission of USA Facts to make government data clear and accessible, because public data should be easy to access, trust, and understand, so we can use it to to make informed decisions. Read and sign our open letter to support public data at usafax.org.