No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - The REAL reason for Trump's wildly unpopular tariffs

Episode Date: April 6, 2025

Trump implements disastrous tariff implementation– and importantly, there's a not-so-obvious reason that he’s okay with the results. Brian interviews Pod Save America's Tommy Vietor about the market crash; data scientist Elliot Morris about the implications of the Wisconsin Supreme Court race victory as we head toward 2026; and two candidates: Mallory McMorrow in Michigan and Dan Osborn in Nebraska. Support Mallory McMorrow: https://www.mcmorrowformichigan.com/Support Dan Osborn: https://actl.ink/daosbsen4325?ref=btcShop merch: https://briantylercohen.com/shopYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/briantylercohenTwitter: https://twitter.com/briantylercohenFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/briantylercohenInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/briantylercohenPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/briantylercohenNewsletter: https://www.briantylercohen.com/sign-upWritten by Brian Tyler CohenProduced by Sam GraberRecorded in Los Angeles, CASee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today we're going to talk about Trump's disastrous tariff implementation, and importantly, the not-so-obvious reason that he's okay with the results. And I've got four interviews this week. I sit down with Pod Save America's Tommy Vitor to discuss the market crash, data scientist Elliot Morris to discuss the implications of the Wisconsin Supreme Court Race victory as we head toward 2026, and two excellent candidates as we look toward midterms, Mallory McMorrow in Michigan, and Dan Osborne in Nebraska. I'm Brian Taylor Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie.

So it's clear by now that Trump's imposition of tariffs has been a disaster. The markets crashed, wiping away all gains since Trump took office. Companies are laying off employees. Fears of a recession are reaching a fever pitch. And far from spooking other countries into coming to the negotiating table, they're actually going around the United States and entering into new trade agreements only without us. And those agreements include countries like China. New reporting suggests that Japan and South Korea are teaming up with China to respond to

our tariffs, because that's apparently what we want. At a time when American superiority is threatened by China, we want to drive other countries into the arms of China. But it's also true, tariffs aside, that Trump is uniquely and acutely aware of how damaging high costs can be. And those high costs come, of course, as the result of tariffs. He himself admitted after the election that the reason he won was because costs were high. In fact, when we've spoken about this for months, the global phenomenon of high inflation and therefore high costs is responsible for nearly every incumbent government across the globe, losing either their majorities or losing power altogether.

And so given how disastrous these tariffs are on the economy and given how potent the issue of high costs are, it would lend itself to reason that Donald Trump would want to avoid this like the plague, right? Even for somebody who needs to protect his ego and can't bring himself to admit fault because he views that as a sign of weakness, even he can see how. how disastrous this is and should want to mitigate the impacts immediately. And so the question is, why barrel ahead? And the answer to that is that Trump doesn't care

because what he stands to gain by virtue of keeping these tariffs in place is greater than what he stands to lose. He wants blanket tariffs on every country in hopes that, you know, in an effort to remove them, the countries each offer to give him something. And that something usually stands to benefit him personally. Like, think about where he's employed this strategy before. First and foremost, the law firms. He imposes blanket punishments on all of them, and then one by one, they capitulate to get

themselves off his bad list, right? And that capitulation includes giving him between $40 to $100 million in pro bono legal services, and, you know, you better believe that they're also not going to go after him anymore, meaning that he has neutralized them. He owns them. Or how about the news networks capitulating to him? ABC News, CBS is in the midst of negotiations. both involved in settling frivolous lawsuits.

You think those networks are going to be as aggressive against Donald Trump after paying him millions of dollars? Probably not. How about the tech billionaires? You've got Mark Zuckerberg immediately revamping Meta's content moderation policies and moving its fact-checking to the more neutral state of Texas. Bezos neuters his own Washington Post then spends 40 million bucks on a Melania Trump documentary

that I'm sure tens of people enjoyed. And look, we can go on and on, but this is the same strategy over and over. Donald Trump preemptively targets the entities or the people who threaten him, knowing that the only way they can crawl out of that hole is if they capitulate and give him something that benefits him. It's worked with law firms and media companies and tech billionaires and universities, and he is doing it with literally every country in the world now.

He wants them to beg, because whatever they give him will ultimately benefit him. This isn't just getting some university somewhere to capitulate, right? This is a world leader, somebody who represents an entire country that is valuable for him, more valuable than the pain he's causing right now. Because remember, the pain doesn't impact him. So at the end of the day, dude doesn't give a shit. He doesn't need to rely on his 401k. He doesn't need to worry about high costs from the tariffs.

He doesn't have to worry about the impacts to housing or rent or groceries or cars or electronics or food, none of that impacts him. He's a billionaire who does not pay for anything. You all suffering is a price that he's willing to have you pay. And so he'll wait for these other world leaders to petition the king and grovel with their offerings that will ultimately expand his own power and influence, all the while we all, the American people are the collateral damage. We all get thrown under the bus. 350 million people suffer so that one man can benefit. This is the story of his presidency. Donald Trump looks out for one person, Donald Trump. Now, here comes the hopeful part. We're wise to his plan. There's a reason,

for example, that the Trump administration revoked the nomination of Elise Stefannic to be U.N. ambassador because they were afraid Republicans would lose a seat in a district Trump won by 21 points just this past November. And they saw what happened in Wisconsin, losing by 10 points in a true 50-50 state. They saw what happened in Florida, where even though Democrats lost, they saw an average 16-point swing to the left. And now they saw how middle. Millions upon millions of Americans took to the streets just this past weekend. And this matters. It matters because this administration derives its power from the perception that it is untouchable,

that it can act with impunity, that nobody has the power to fight back. The fact that Democrats are standing up, turning out, and fighting back threatens all of that. I know it doesn't feel like we have much to celebrate right now, but the energy, the momentum, and the enthusiasm is only on one side, and it's not Donald Trump's. Next up are my interviews with Tommy Vitor, Elliot Morris, Mallory McMorro, and Dan Osborne. No lies brought to you by Beam. In today's America, every day feels like a barrage of news

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Because let's be honest, you can't stay in the fight if you're too tired to show up. Rest well, wake up ready, and keep pushing for progress. Rest is resistance. I'm joined now by the co-host of POTSafe America and POTSave the World and the former National Security Council spokesman for President Obama, Tommy Vitor. Tommy, thanks for joining. Great to be here. So right now we are in the midst, obviously, of a total economic collapse.

We just ran an entire campaign where Republicans were running around with their hair on fire over the fact that eggs were a dollar more expensive than they had been. How successful do you think they're going to be at getting away with tamping down the massive cataclysmic economic losses that we're seeing right now, given what we know about how they were presenting themselves during the campaign? That's what's so baffling about this, Brian. Even if Trump's policies are successful and he brings back manufacturing to the United States, prices of goods are going to go up. Right. That is how this works. He will either bring in a lot of tariff money from products coming in overseas and I don't know, I guess use that to offset a tax cut for Elon Musk and the richest people in the country, or everyone's goods are going to go up in price. Do you think that the Republicans are going to be successful at this new Fox News tack of claiming that this is just something, this temporary pain that we have to endure if we want to really be patriots in this country? Yeah, Brian was watching Fox the other day. It was this Will Kane segment. And he was like, sure, stocks are down. But let's talk about what down means, and then he's zoomed out the chart to a year, and he's like,

if you look from a year or five-year chart. I think we have this clip. Let's take a look. The market today, down, S&P 500, the NASDAQ, the Dow, down. Tech stocks absolutely hammered down 10% on the NASDAQ. It does deserve some context. What do we mean by down? Take a look at this 12-month chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. We have returned to the average of the average of $1.5.

roughly October, down from the December highs of the election of Donald Trump and down from the January highs of the first term, the first month of his second term at the presidency. We've essentially returned to the place that we were a few months before Donald Trump. He just came away looking like Bill Clinton in the 90s, equivocating on the word is. I just don't think this is going to play with anybody. I love this new tack of Republicans zooming out on the X-axis. I saw one Republican on Twitter. I'll put this right here on the screen where they said, well, if you actually look from 2021 to 2025, things don't look too bad. It's basically her saying that if you take a long look at how Biden actually propped up the economy for the last five years, then things don't look

too bad in the long run. It's incredible. These people have no self-awareness. And like, look, there's a bunch of seniors who are going to retire soon who need their 401ks. They need this money. They don't have time. They don't have a decade to wait around for the S&P 500 to come back to where it was. Like, they're going to get hurt. And so I'm curious what you think in terms of political gravity here because we've obviously, you know, seen how potent the issue of the economy could be. Trump himself admitted in the aftermath of the election that one of the two issues that he was able to win on was the economy. That was the result of the worldwide phenomenon of global inflation in the aftermath of COVID. The other one was immigration. But as far as as inflation was

concerned, look, there's no doubting how potent these major economic issues are on the American public. And so is there a way for them to kind of skate by here? Or do you think that political gravity as it relates to the economy is just too strong? I mean, I think if he continues this course with these tariffs, in the long term, it's going to increase inflation. It just is. And it will likely create a series of headlines like we saw this week where the S&P is down 2%, 3%, 4%, and people are going to be looking at their 401ks and wondering where all their retirement savings went. These stories break through. You know, like People, when the stock market is down 5%, that it leads every newscast.

That is on social media. You can't escape that if you're the President of the United States. You can't just blame Joe Biden for that. Like, that's not going to fly. Oh, contrary. You can try. You can try. Right, right.

Well, you said something that caught my attention, and that is that even if this does work, even if Trump, you know, in his wildest dreams, is able to be successful here and we repatriate a lot of the industries or jobs, it's still going to be more expensive because of the cost of labor in the United States versus the cost of labor in China. I mean, there's a reason that a global economy works in some instances is because if Americans are going to buy an iPhone and they want it to be $800 and not $2,500, then you kind of do rely on labor in other countries that is going to be less expensive. That's just the reality of the situation.

Right. Let's just look at the automotive industry. So they slap 25 percent tariffs on all imported cars. Let's say, okay, over six months or a year or two years, that leads GM or Ford or other American companies to bring back manufacturing. to factories that are not working at full capacity or ones that have closed. Your point is exactly right. Cars made in those factories are going to cost more because there are higher labor costs, which maybe we'll bring some jobs back to places like Detroit. My fear is that

a lot of the manufacturing will get done by automation and robots and that really won't create job growth. But the average consumer is going to pay 10, 11, 12 percent more for those cars. To that exact point, I want to throw to a clip from your really good friend, Jesse Waters, who was speaking to Howard Lutnik. Nice. Now, we're not going to have all factories come back, like clothing, manufacturing, that's tough to bring back. But what kind of manufacturing are you talking about returning here? Well, don't, you can't just give that away. See, what's going to happen is robotics are going to replace the cheap labor that we've seen all across the world. I mean, think of what our factories

did. They went to the cheapest labor, the whole world, slave labor, cheap labor. The worst, environmental conditions polluting the heck out of it. And then we bring back those cheap products here and we feel good about ourselves because we don't see the pain. So help me understand because this is basically Howard Lutnik saying that we have to do this. We have to be patriotic to bring these jobs back to the United States. But once they get back to the United States, we're going to replace them with robots? I cannot believe he said that out loud. What is he talking about? Who does this help? Well, if you can't believe he said that out loud, did you hear what he had to say about Beef? No, I'd love to hear that too. Let's throw to the clip. I mean, the European Union

won't take chicken from America. They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful, and theirs is weak. Tell me your thoughts. Some weak-ass beef. I didn't know that about European cows. There was a report in Politico the other day, Brian, that said everyone at the White House hates Howard Lutnik and thinks he's an idiot and that he will probably be pushed out soon. Why might that be? No, I'm starting to get it. Is it, what's their beef with? What's, uh, where's the beef?

Where's the beef? Uh, let me just ask you a question because you, you were part of an administration that I feel like, look, America's first black president. I feel like if Obama did anything one inch left to center, one inch, one inch off kilter, he got completely decimated for it, right? He had to be perfect, and that's the standard, you know, that's the standard for the first black presidents, the standard for really any Democrat. But to see something like that after coming from an administration where you did have to

be careful, where the color of Barack Obama's suit was fodder for a national emergency as far as the right wing was concerned, how does it strike you that Howard Lutnik is being strutted out to just spew like straight fucking bile? It's infuriating, man. I mean, I can imagine if, you know, when we were sitting in the White House, if we turn on Fox News And they were like, sure, the stock market is down 10% this week. But if you zoom out, things are not that bad. I'd be like, when did I drop acid?

If you zoom out over a 90-year period, things actually look pretty good. Yeah, I mean, like, think about some of the things that Donald Trump is doing. Throwing the Associated Press out of the press pool, if Barack Obama had done something to diminish Fox News' access to our press pool, they would have lost their minds. Their hair would have been on fire. But, you know, it's folded into the Fox News culture war. If Barack Obama was telling law firms that they had to get to. you know, do $100 million in pro bono work for issues he cared about, he would be called a tyrant because it would be tyrannical.

He was called a tyrant, by the way. He was called a tyrant because he issued executive orders that were fewer executive orders than all of his predecessors, many of whom were Republicans, including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. So, look, you know, this is the challenge with Trump. Like, he has a cult following. He has propaganda mouthpieces on Fox News and, you know, across the internet. But I do think there's going to be some political gravity here with these economic challenges and pain people are going to feel because, I don't know, if everything costs twice as much all of a sudden, like, there's no spinning that.

But you know how quickly the new cycle moves. And the reality is that we are in April of 2025. The next election is going to be, you know, the next forever major election midterms is going to be in November of 2026. And so is this a scenario where, A, it doesn't matter what happens now because five minutes from now, we're not going to remember what yesterday was. like? Or is it B, that this is still important because it helps define an administration and when you're able to do that, those kind of things last? I think that it really matters because if Trump's approval rating starts to take a hit, vulnerable members of Congress will notice that. That will make them fearful of the midterms and change how they vote in the interim. And they've got some really big budgetary things they want to get done. They have a tiny margin in the House of Representatives. And, you know, If Trump's trying to jam through a $4.5 trillion tax cut for the richest people on the planet

paid for by cuts to Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security, you want vulnerable members, vulnerable Republicans thinking this is a death sentence for me politically and not more worried about getting primary from the right. I think to the second point that I had made previously, I think it's going to be important too because Republicans are really good at repeating their attacks and defining Democrats before Democrats have a chance to define themselves. And we did hear the fact that Joe Biden was, you know, in the throes of cognitive decline for years,

unfortunately, kind of bared itself out at the latter half of his presidency. But that was really the recurring theme throughout the entirety of his presidency because they leaned it on this attack, defined him early, and just hit this over and over and over again. And look, you know, I think I speak for a lot of people, but certainly myself in saying that the Joe Biden that we saw at that debate, was not the Joe Biden that, for example, I sat down with in February of 2022. But Republicans still understand the importance of being able to define these figures early and often.

And I think that the Trump administration coming in right now and us being able to show and to repeat over and over and over again that, in fact, while they frame themselves as these responsible stewards of the economy, that they're in fact causing all of this chaos and disfinding. function and crashing the economy, just like, by the way, Trump did in his first term. Just like, by the way, George W. Bush did when he was president. Just like, by the way, George H.W. Bush did when he was president. That is, I think, going to be a potent line of attack as we move forward. Yeah, I mean, the challenge with Trump has always been. He's one of the most famous people in the world. He had this image as a great businessman that was kind of manufactured by a book he had

ghost written and by The Apprentice, an NBC show. And so he wrote that for a long time. He had four years in the White House that ended objectively terribly. We all remember January 6th and how badly handled the pandemic. But over time, people looked back in that period with rose-colored glasses because the economy was doing better. And I think we have an opportunity now to define this administration as incompetent, incompetent on the economy, competent on national security, because Mike Walts and the national security

team are planning bombing runs in Yemen on Signal, right? And like, I think we've got- Eggplants emoji, eggplants emoji. Egg plants emoji. I mean, these are clowns. And you have Elon Musk, who bought his job with a $250 million check during the campaign, is now rampaging through the government, deciding which programs exist and who gets fired. Like, nobody voted for that.

But to that exact point, I mean, Trump left office with probably one of the worst economic environments in modern American history at a 2.5% contraction of the economy. The unemployment rate was at 6.3%. He had lost 2.9 million jobs. And people still do think back to the first Trump term with rose-colored glasses. And so do we risk being in a scenario where the same thing happens, where we are watching the stock market crash in real time and all of our trading partners alienate us around the world? And yet there is just this such a massive disconnect between Earth One where we all live

and what the Trump cult thinks about dear leader that this might be a thing where it doesn't even stick in very much the same way that people think that Trump presided over some gangbusters economy when again it was the worst economy that we'd had since, you know, the Great Depression. Yeah, look, there's risk. And also, like, we just don't know what could happen. There could be such like exigent events that completely changes the conversation that redefines our political reality, like, you know, a terrorist attack, a natural disaster. Like, God help us, right? Though with respect to the economy in Trump's first term, I think most voters understand the pandemic was this once-in-a-lifetime thing. And that is why the economy crashed. People

got laid off. The economy contracted. The stock market went down. They didn't really blame him for that. In this case, right. In this case, he is crushing the U.S. economy by choice. Right. And there's no hiding that. That's the perfect point. I mean, this is the first recession that we will enter into that is both unilateral and completely voluntary. And it's coming off the heels of a gangbusters economy that we were in that was inherited by Joe Biden. I mean, we had, God knows how many months of job growth and, you know, hundreds of thousands of jobs added

on a monthly basis, around 4% unemployment, which is roughly at a 50-year low, and a record high stock market, and took all of those things and kind of threw them away because he decided that he wanted to feed his ego and try and show everybody that he's a tough guy. And I think the most ironic part of all of this is he was so certain,

that every other world leader would capitulate because he has such a distorted perception of how the people around him act because he is surrounded by the most groveling, sycophantic, obsequious hangers on with their mouths latched onto his ass. And so like that really screws with how somebody perceives the people around them.

And then he comes across people like Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, and they're like, fuck this, Yeah. I mean, one thing Trump has done is reawaken nationalism in a lot of countries where we hadn't seen it in a while. Like, the Canadians are furious. And they should be. I mean, he's joking about annexing the country. He's literally trying to crush their economy through tariffs. So these people hate him. And the political incentives for someone like Mark Carney are to fight Trump tooth and nail, to not cut a deal, to look tough. And so, like, I think-

And by the way, he is almost single-handedly rescuing the Liberal Party in Canada. He has absolutely. Trudeau was dead in the water. People thought the conservatives were going a win by 10 or 20 points. And now it's a dead heat. And I do think, look, the other opportunity here for us is, despite all of Trump's enroads with blue collar workers and his man of the people bullshit, the guy has like 13 billionaires in his cabinet. He spends his weekends at his private golf club. Like right now, I think he is at a Saudi run live golf event at his club instead of attending a dignified transfer ceremony for four U.S. service members who are killed overseas in Lithuania in a training accident.

It's moments like that that tell us who this guy is, and those are the ones we have to uplift and make sure that voters who don't pay attention to politics actually see them. Yeah. The Afghanistan withdrawal crowd is awfully quiet today. They are. Tommy, thank you for joining me. Everybody who is watching right now, please support independent progressive media. Subscribe to Potta of America's YouTube channel.

I'll put the link right here on the screen, also in the post description of this video. Tommy, thanks again. Great to see you, buddy. Armour Colostrum. So why are elite athletes, business moguls, and high performers using Armour Colostrum? Armour Colostrum is nature's first whole food with over 400 bioactive nutrients working at the cellular level to build lean muscle, accelerate recovery, and fuel performance, all without artificial stimulants or synthetic junk. Whether you're running a business, training hard, or just want an edge, Armour optimizes your body for peak output. I have a tendency

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Thank you so much for taking the time. Hey, thanks, Brian. So I want to dig into what we saw yesterday. Obviously, we had a few elections, Wisconsin and Florida. So what does the Democratic overperformance look like? And what does that tell us more broadly about the political environment that we're in right now? Yeah, that's a great question. These special elections and off-year elections are helpful because they can point us to trends we might see in the midterms.

So it's a good thing to focus on. In Florida, we saw two congressional districts special elections last night to fill districts that were vacated. In the first district, there is a 16 percentage point overperformance for Democrats. So what that means is that Donald Trump won one of those districts by 30 points last year. And the Republican candidate only won by 14 last night. So that's a 16-point swing in that district. And the next one, there was a 22-point shift. And that was in a redder district, Florida's first congressional district.

So what we're seeing here... Which is Matt Gates's former district, by the way. That's right. The other one is vacated by Mike Walts. So what we're seeing here is that there's some change. in the electorate. Either people are changing their mind against the administration. We can talk about why. Or Republicans aren't turning out as much as they were previously, or some combination of the two. We also saw this last night in the Wisconsin Supreme Court rates, where Susan Crawford

beat Brad Schimel by about 10 points in the final count, which is also an 11-point shift from 24 when Kamala Harris lost it by one point. So in the Wisconsin race, more Republican precincts in the state had much lower turnout. So those Republicans, we think, are just tuning out from the electorate, giving Democrats the ability to do well. And even in Democratic areas, the Democrats and liberal candidates are overperforming. And how did those relate to what we saw last week? I know we don't have a lot of data points here, but we do have Florida and Wisconsin yesterday. Last week, we had two special elections in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is generally a pretty good state to glean some information from because it's a

battleground state. Yeah, that's right. I mean, at this point, we have data from both battlegrounds, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. And in this Pennsylvania district, I believe, Senate District 36, that's the state legislative district. The Democratic candidate also did 16 points better than Kamala Harris did in 2024. So we have data from those swing districts. And then we also have data from a very, very red state, red districts in a red state, Florida.

And they're all showing the same thing, which is a combination of Republicans tuning out from politics, tuning out, from supporting the administration. I mean, if they don't vote, like you can say maybe they'll vote next time, but they're not voting. And that's the important thing right now, and that's the important thing for the midterms. And then you also see independence and Democrats moving even more supportive of left-leaning candidates. So that should portend pretty good Democratic performance for 2026 if that holds. Right. And that's what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the prospect of Democratic overperformance in midterms. What can we learn from 2018? Because we were in a not dissimilar situation back in 2018, you know, these special elections in the lead up to that first midterm

when Republicans had full control of government. Trump had the White House. Republicans ran the Senate and the House. And obviously Democrats won the House by the Senate. the biggest margin in modern American history that was 41 seats. And so are we seeing similar trends right here in 2025 as we head toward midterms now? Yeah, there are a couple of things that are similar and a couple of things that are different. On the similarities, those numbers I was telling you, that swing from 2024 to 2025, it's about 11 points in all the special elections that have happened across the country. So again, it was 16 points last night. It's 11 points on average.

that number was 10 points from 2016 to the special elections held in 2018. So the sample size is small. There's only been about a dozen of these special elections so far. But if that number stays at about the double digit mark, then overall change in public opinion from the last presidential election to right now in an off year is about the same as it was in Donald Trump's first presidency. So that would indicate, yeah, Democrats are fired up and Republicans are tuning up at the same rate. There is a important difference, though, and that is that the electorates are very different now.

There's much higher education polarization with educated voters, those with college degrees moving towards Democrats and those without moving towards Republicans. And that's created this sort of dual electorate in the country that I like to call it, where you have one electorate that shows up in presidential years, about 70% of 75% of registered voters voting. And then you have the electorate that tunes in for special elections for state Supreme Court races in the off year where about 50% of registered voters vote. And that 25% you're missing, those seem to be Republicans. If that continues, then you can't really map these trends onto the next presidential race, but they still portend good Democratic performance in a low turnout midterm. You had said something that caught my attention, and that was the difference between whether these Republicans are just not turning out. or whether we're seeing Republicans and or independents change their minds. Is there any information yet to suggest which one that is,

or do we have any indication as to when we will kind of get that information? Because I feel like, look, from an activist persuasion standpoint, that's going to be really important to figure out whether we're actually changing hearts and minds or if we're just kind of relying on an unpopular president. We'll talk about that in just a moment. not not being able to turn out his voters just because of tamped down enthusiasm. But really that that's that's a bandaid right now for Democrats. That's not going to help the Democratic broader effort to bring these people back into the tent.

And we've got we do have to think about, you know, high turnout elections, general elections that we have to win. And if folks aren't just turning out like in midterms, it doesn't mean that we're that we've got them. It just means that they're not turning out in these special elections. Yeah. Yeah. Look, for like the strategists, the Democratic campaigners out there, it's both. It's both people tuning out of the election. We know that because turnout is lower in more Republican areas, both across districts and within states and within counties, with more Republican precincts seeing higher drop off in votes relative to 2024. But those decreases in turnout do not explain the entire shift in these results from 2024 to 2025. So there's some persuasion happening as well. backlash to the new Trump administration, to Elon Musk, which we should mention for Wisconsin. He really put himself out there for Wisconsin, and they appeared to have decided against his favor. There's some mobilization against that.

I think we'll probably end up seeing a split from about 70 or 80 percent turnout related to 20 to 30 percent persuasion related. We don't have that data yet. It'll take at least a few months to get the good voter file data on this, those records of who actually have actually voted. But even a 20 or 30% attribution to changing persuasion is enough for Democrats to win the House and potentially to win the presidency if that holds through to 2028. Can you talk about Elon Musk's popularity and whether it was a mistake or how much of a mistake it was to have him be the face of the Republican effort to win in Wisconsin? Yeah, that's a great question because I think it is probably a growing liability for Republicans.

And it seems like they're noticing this. There was some reporting in the Daily Beast out yesterday with Republicans in close competitive races saying they were hoping for a blowout in Wisconsin, so that they could make the case that he sort of talks it to Republican efforts. And the polling data suggests that he is. So one of the last pieces I wrote at 538 at ABC News was a comparison of the popularity of all of the different policy actions by the Trump administration in the first month. So from January 21st to February 21st, when we looked at that, we could see, you know, these polls ask Americans, do you support the president's actions on Israel, on the Gulf of Mexico, or, you know, whatever, and do you support the government cutting funding for Medicaid or Medicare or shutting down NOAA or the NHS? And we found that in questions that asked about things related to Elon Musk's doings in the government, he was underwater by seven percentage points. which is at that point, it was 10 points less popular than Donald Trump's approval rating at that point, slightly positive. So we could say maybe he's a 10-point drag on this administration. And if you look at his current approval rating, that's about true as well.

So Donald Trump's approval rating today is about minus 2, so 47% approve and 49% disapprove of him. And Elon Musk is closer to minus 12 or minus 13. So, you know, I think we have enough polling data, and now we have the electoral data to say he's not good for Republican prospects. People don't like him. They don't like what he's doing and the government. Like, people like spending programs. So they're not going to like the guy who's taking away with spending programs. Right.

Let's talk about Trump's approval rating a little bit because he came into office very, very defiantly with a net positive approval rating. It was the first time he had a net positive approval rating since he's been in office, inclusive of his first term. if I'm not mistaken, but correct me if I'm wrong. What is the significance then of the flip that we've seen thus far? And what's the main driver of that? Yeah, it's true that Trump started with his most popular rating ever. He was around plus five in my average of polls published on my substack for the record when he took office.

But it's important to note that is the second lowest starting approval rating for any modern president going back to when we first have polls in 1935. So, yeah, he's doing better, but that's setting the bar literally at its low level. Right. It's just he's doing better relative to the least popular president who's ever been in office. That's right. So he, you know, he started at around plus two previously. And at this point in his first term, he was at around minus 10. He's at minus three today. Yeah, sure, that's better. But a minus three approval rating still gets you, you know, a loss in the midterms, loss of political capital when you're trying to move government policy, general polarization. against the incumbent party. So I'm not sure it's really buying him much to be more popular. Do you think that the Republican Party more broadly is going to suffer?

Because look, he's a lame duck president. And so I know this is more of a political question than a data-driven one. But is there any data to indicate whether the political party would suffer at the hands of a president who isn't running for reelection? Like, is the Republican base more broadly able to differentiate, okay, yes, we have an unpopular president, but I still want Republican-elected officials in office who kind of espouse the same agenda, espouse the same beliefs as him, or is backlash against Trump, by virtue of his underwater approval rating, going to also drag down the rest of the party who is running for re-election? Yeah, well, the problem for Republicans right now is that Donald Trump is one of their most popular

figures. If in a UGov poll, for example, that asked people in February whether or not they've you Trump, J.D. Vance, Musk, and the Republican Party just generally as favorable or unfavorable, Donald Trump was at minus five. J.D. Vance is less popular at minus eight, and the Republican party is underwater by double digits. So if they're banking on, you know, like Mitch McConnell or Mike Johnson to shore up the party's reputation, they're going to have a bad time. Trump is their most popular figure, despite all the caveats about. that popularity. So I don't expect them to move away from Trump, the man. Right, right. I do want to talk about another U-Gov poll, and that was that the majority of Americans actually

think that the Signalgate scandal, where Mike Waltz added Jeffrey Goldberg from the Atlantic into the signal chat, which already unto itself, was irresponsible because that is an unsecured commercial app. And then, of course, having a journalist watch along as they did war planning Americans, you know, primed by a Republican Party that spent the better part of a decade doing fainting spells about the danger of speaking on an unsecured server as it relates to Hillary Clinton. Obviously, they didn't like that. Can you talk about the findings of that poll for Signalgate, especially as they relate

to Hillary Clinton's previous, her previous issues with email servers back in 2022 and 2015? Yeah, so you gov asked a U.S. adults, a representative sample of them, whether or not they believed Signalgate, this sharing of classified war plans over Signal inviting a journalist, whether or not they thought it was very serious, somewhat serious, not so serious, or not at all. And 53% of Americans said it was very serious, and 74% said it was either very serious or somewhat serious. And that includes majorities of every party, Democrats, independents, and Republicans. So clearly this is something that they care about. And that should, you know, be motivating more than like one new cycles of coverage. Americans want some level of accountability for this. In the comparison, so UGov also, because they've been around for a while, was able to ask the same exact question about Hillary Clinton's use of an unclassified private.

server for her emails in 2015, right when the scandal broke. And at the time, 30% of Americans, just one third said that her use of that private server was very serious. So 30% for Clinton in 2015 versus 53% for the Trump administration's signal gate in 2025, 10 years later. Oh, wow, I can't believe that was 10 years ago. Yeah, this is like arguably, you could say, based on this, that people think this was a more significant sort of violation of public law. Indeed, 48% of adults in the UGov survey think that this signal gate violated the law. And in 2015, only 41% of Americans think Hillary Clinton broke the law. Like, again, the law is not a matter of debate for public opinion, but just in terms of the severity here. People think

this is clearly more serious. Right. And again, the irony of all of this is that, they probably wouldn't have thought Signalgate was as serious, if not for the fact that they were primed by this Republican Party to think that using unsecured servers to conduct government business, you know, if they weren't primed to think that it was the biggest national security laps, like some major issue, thanks to the Republican Party themselves. And so one might think that would have been a good impetus to have a little bit better security when you're doing war planning. But alas, here we are. Finally, let's finish off with this. I'm curious what issues you think that from a persuasion standpoint that Democrats should lean into. Obviously, the prevailing knowledge up to now is like Republicans are really strong on immigration and the economy. Even Trump himself said that he likely won based on the fact that he was able to lean in on those two issues in particular.

And so I'm curious now what you think have become the most potent issues for Democrats to be able to exploit as we head toward 2026. Yeah, I think the big one is the economy. I think Trump is right. I think he won in 2024 because of high inflation and perceived slow economic growth under the Biden administration. I think he's totally right. The political science backs that up. The polls back that up. So it's worth noting that the economy now is shrinking at a higher rate than it was.

before he took office. That's the stock market, the hard data on imports, on manufacturing growth, retail sales, et cetera, the job market. And, you know, if voters are consistent, which to be fair is an if, he should be punished for that. And the polling data suggests that he is being punished for that. So before Trump took office, he had an edge on the question of which party people trust more to handle the economy. Now he has no edge. And in fact, he's 10 points underwater on the issue of the economy. When pollsters ask, do you approve of the job the president is doing on X or Y, this time being the economy? And that's worth than his overall approval rating of minus two.

So this is not an issue that Trump has ground on anymore. And just based, again, on the traditional political science theories, I would expect Democrats to take advantage of that. But I will say, look, midterms are mostly about backlash to the party, regardless of what the issue. landscape looks like. There's, you know, as close to a gravitational force in politics as you can get for a decrease in seats in the House in the midterm after a president takes office. So with the average seat loss being in the double digits, where Republicans can afford to lose one seat or two seats to retain the majority. So it's very likely Democrats take back the House next year. It's really only a question of how large. And I expect if they focused on these

issues that were so motivating to voters in 2024. And they focused on the excesses of the Trump administration's sort of remaking of government and cutting of funding. If that indeed ends up happening with things like Medicare and Social Security, then they would be in pretty good shape. And honestly, this analysis does not seem that hard. This one seems pretty clear cut. Well, you know, from your lips to God's ears at this point. So, Elliot, thank you so much for the time for those watching right now. If you want to support Elliott's work, you can check out his substack, strength, and numbers. Thank you again. I appreciate it.

Thanks, Brian. I'm joined now by Michigan State Senator and the author of the new book, Hate Won't Win. Mallory McMorrow. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Well, I am too. And you're coming to me from a state where the incumbent U.S. Senator, Gary Peters, has opted not to run for re-election. And so there's been a lot of a flurry of activity and questions about your own future in the state. I know that this has been kind of a question that's been asked of you a lot

over the last few years since you first went viral for your speech on the floor of the state Senate. And so I wanted to give you the opportunity right now to see if you have an announcement that you would like to bring to my audience and the base more broadly. I certainly do. This is a big task ahead, especially in a state like Michigan. But yes, I am in. I am running for U.S. Senate. Awesome. Well, congratulations, first of all, on the decision to run. Why did you decide that now was the moment to run? Again, like, you went viral several years ago, and so you've been in this conversation for a really long time. Why was now the moment that you decided to jump in? Now is exactly the right moment. And for me, this is about a new vision for not only the state

of Michigan, but also for the Democratic Party. I think a lot about what happened here in Michigan in 2024, where, yes, we have Senator Alyssa Slotkin, and that's amazing. But Michigan also elected Donald Trump. And what I think Democrats missed is how much people are really struggling. You know, this feels like too often the Democratic Party and the leadership out of Washington is the party of well, actually. When people are telling us that they're struggling, we say, well, actually, things are really great. I am a millennial. I am part of really the first generation that by and large is doing worse than our parents. So there are so many people who do not believe in an American dream, who cannot afford to buy a house, who cannot

afford to start a family, let alone thinking about retirement or going on a vacation. And I'm excited to have the opportunity in this campaign to lay out a very clear vision for a new American dream. As a stark contrast to the idea of Make America Great Again, we're not going backwards. are going forward and we are rebuilding what it means to be a Democrat and what it means to be a Michigander in a way that hopefully the rest of the country is going to take notice of. Well, I want to dig into that a little bit, this idea of, of, you know, you being a millennial, I'm a millennial as well. And again, like, we graduated into the Great Recession. Exactly. Like, we were the first generation to, to graduate into a worse, like, environment than

than our parents did, and to have to have worse expectations for job prospects, for, for health care, whatever it may be than than previous generations. Of course, like the, the notion of being able to buy a house or raise kids. I mean, there is a reason for that. And so can you speak on this idea, as you speak about, like, bringing a, creating a new Democratic Party, this idea of generational change and the Democrats' unwillingness to embrace it and how it's landed us kind of in the spot that we're in right now. So I think what we missed at what Democrats missed and really the Democratic leadership who got us to this place, and this is no discredit to anybody who is in leadership, but it is a very

different time. To your point, you and I did graduate right into the recession, and we're struggling. You know, I graduated with a degree from the University of Notre Dame with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. I had had a great internship. I did not have any job prospects. I applied to probably more than 300 jobs. I worked at Urban Outfitters for minimum wage folding clothes with other kids who were at college nearby who they asked me where I went to college. And when I said Notre Dame, they just looked at me and they were terrified. Like if you're here, what hope is there for the

rest of us? And I spent a few nights living in the back of my car. The Affordable Care Act did not exist yet. I did not have health insurance. I have ADHD and I left that largely untreated at the time, which probably made getting a job even harder. But there are just so many people in our generation and other generations who don't believe that the American dream is real. We're a generation that did everything right. If you work hard enough, you go through school, you go to college or you go to a trade school, that it still doesn't add up. And that gave a window for Donald Trump, Trump and J.D. Vance and Elon Musk to rightly recognize people's frustration and anger with government and with systems, but it gave them permission to blow it up. So what we have to carve out

as a new generation of democratic leadership is to acknowledge the status quo did not work. And it does not work for a lot of people. We still have to defend the institutions, of course, but we have to build them into something new. It's not enough just to say that Donald Trump is ruining it, but there's an opportunity right now when I think even Trump voters here in Michigan look at what Donald Trump is doing and they say, this is not what I voted for.

I did not vote for gutting of Medicare and Medicaid and the Department of Education. In a state like Michigan, people have no idea why we are fighting with Canada. Canada is our neighbor. Canada is our friend. But we need new leaders who feel, and understand the fact that that trust is broken and is not there,

acknowledge that things were not working, and are ready to lay out a vision for building something new that works for all of us. I would note that while Michigan doesn't understand why we're fighting with Canada, neither do the other 49 states or most countries around the world or Canada itself understand why we're fighting with Canada. I want to throw a clip on the screen of the speech that you made in the state Senate. Growing up, my family was very active in our church. I sang in the choir. My mom taught CCD. One day, our priest called a meeting with my mom and told her that she was not living up to the church's expectations and that she was disappointing. My mom asked why. Among other reasons, she was told it was because she was divorced and because the priest didn't see her at mass every Sunday.

So where was my mom on Sundays? She was at the soup kitchen with me. My mom taught me at a very young age that Christianity and faith was about being part of a community, about recognizing our privilege and blessings and doing what we can to be of service to others, especially people who are marginalized, targeted, and who had less, often unfairly. I learned that service was far more important than performative nonsense like being seen in the same pew every Sunday or writing Christian in your Twitter bio and using that as a shield to target and marginalize. already marginalized people. People who are different

are not the reason that our roads are in bad shape after decades of disinvestment or that health care costs are too high or that teachers are leaving the profession. I want every child in this state to feel seen, heard, and supported, not marginalized and targeted

because they are not straight, white, and Christian. We cannot let hateful people tell you otherwise to scapegoat and deflect from the fact that they are not doing anything to fix the real issues that impact people's lives. And I know that hate will only win if people like me stand by and let it happen. That kind of energy, I think, is so perfect for the time that we're in right now because there was a sense of fight. And you spoke about this quite a bit in your book, Hate Won't Win, and admittedly, that was the chapter that I went to first. Like, when I saw in the index that the speech was there, immediately went to that.

Can you speak on this idea of a Democratic Party that has largely ceded this ground of being able to fight back for so long? I mean, look, since I've been in Democratic politics, I've watched the Democrats contend with people like Mitch McConnell and just know that we're just not going to be able to win either because we don't have the tools or if we have the tools we're not willing to wield them. And yet you have you have folks who wield power so aggressively and shamelessly in a world where Merrick Garland doesn't even get a confirmation hearing because God forbid we have a confirmation hearing in an election year. And yet at the same time, you've got voting taking place right now and Amy Coney Barrett can get a hearing and

confirmation onto the court. And so can you speak on this idea of fight as a relates to you in your campaign. Something that's really important to me is knowing when to fight and how to fight because I also feel like people right now are just so exhausted by the noise. It's not enough just to pick a fight every single day. You have to fight and fight for the right things and fight on your own terms. And that, I think, is something that Democrats really need to build up this muscle and why I feel so passionately about the fact that we have to have our own message. We have to be talking about a new American dream so that we're fighting on our own turf. What Republicans are really good at is defining Democrats and defining the fight.

And, you know, I think it comes from a place of goodness and meaning well. But we are constantly on defense. When you think of how fights work, are you on defense or are you on offense? And something that I did in that speech now a few years ago, I talked about myself. I I talked about the fact that I was raised by my mom in the Catholic Church and what service meant. And even though what was lobbed against me was a smear that is typically levied against the LGBTQ community, I chose that moment to speak to a majority of people and convince people who look like me and have a background like me and are not directly impacted that we have another way forward. I was very intentional in saying people who are different are not the reason why health care costs are

too high or why teachers are leaving the profession or why housing costs are too high or why the roads are in disrepair to take back the narrative and frankly point out what's happening right now and Donald Trump is excellent at this. It is finding a scapegoat to deflect from the fact that they are not doing anything to actually improve people's lives. So it might make you feel good to throw a punch at somebody. But are you taking the narrative back? Are you getting back on to a playing field that you want to be on because people don't want what Donald Trump is selling, but they also don't know what the Democrats stand for. So we have to choose to fight and fight to take our own narrative back. And that is so spot on. And we have been the victims of that

for so long from as recently as the plane crash over the Potomac, where Republicans immediately came out and claim that it was the result of DEI, going back to the, you know, you spoke about Obamacare, when that was first released, because Democrats left this vacuum in messaging in their narrative, Republicans were able to brand it as death panels, and it was responsible for Democrats getting slaughtered in the 2010 midterm election cycle. So for the better part of, you know, since I've been doing this, since I've been alive and paying attention to politics, Democrats have always been slowly respond. And Republicans have always been able to capitalize on those vacuums, on those voids left by the Democrats' inability to message, inability to be aggressive, inability to get out there

and fight and stand on business. And the result of that is that we are always, always, always on defense. We are always trying to bat back these villains that Republicans will put forward and claim are the, you know, the cause of all of the problems in the world, from Hillary Clinton to George Soros and everybody in between. That's right. You know, I, I, I think while I was reading your book, it really was a story of hope. And I'm curious how you keep the faith in a moment where everything does seem to be going in the wrong direction. I mean, even even in the chapter about your speech, you spoke about the fact that you had largely resigned yourself to the fact that you weren't going to even run for re-election. And I think objectively speaking, things have gotten much worse since that moment.

And so how do you keep the faith and how would you and how would you recommend that a lot of people who are watching right now who do feel a sense of hopelessness and despair and who don't have faith in the political process? Hell, don't even have faith that our election systems are going to hold up in 2026 and 2028. What's your message to those people? So I think what is really incredible about this country is that despite how bad everything has gotten and how hopeless. and powerless we could feel sometimes. I have to tell you, I've been having coffee hours and town halls in my district, and we had one just at a little shop in town. And the last time myself in the state rep held the same coffee hour, we had maybe 12 people.

We had a lovely conversation around a table. The last time I did this a couple of weeks ago, we had more than 200 people show up. And they are showing up en masse, and it's not just out of anger. They're not screaming at me. They're not demanding to know what I'm going to do because what I learned and I detail in the book is there were limits to what my title would allow me to do. But when I have people come out to these town halls, they're not asking what I'm going to do. They're asking what they can do. Who can they call?

How do they use their voice? How do they write to a member of Congress is a letter more powerful than a form? What can they do to make a difference? And we've seen, even in this Trump administration, think about the first federal funding freeze, when that order came down and people showed up to their head start programs to drop their kids off and the doors were closed, they sounded the alarm very quickly. They started calling. They started calling local news reporters. They were getting on the air. And within 48 hours, the Trump administration rescinded that order.

To me, that is nothing but hope. That shows that all of us are a lot more powerful than we think we are. that this administration is not all powerful, that the margins in the U.S. Senate and the Congress are very narrow, and that all of those elected officials at the end of the day have to go back to their voters and justify the work that they're doing. So that's what keeps me going, is every time I go to an event or I've started doing this thing on my Instagram, every week I threw up an AMA and asked me anything, I pop up a question box.

I get hundreds of questions every single week from, people who are paying attention, they're plugged in, they're engaged, they're putting their hand up and saying, put me in, coach, I'm ready. And if that doesn't give you hope, I don't know what does. That's the perfect place to leave off. How can people who are watching, listening right now help your campaign? We have a big task ahead of us. This is going to be the biggest battleground race in the entire country. Please go to McMorrow for Michigan.com. Find out more. Follow us on social media. Tell your friends. I am going to need everybody on board to get this done and show the rest of the country. There is a new way to do this. Well, I also want to put on the screen right now just a

little, a little moment from the book that I thought was so interesting because this was, this was years ago after you had made that speech and you had, you, you put into the book a bunch of examples of what people were telling you. And they wrote, don't stop. We need a million more of you keep up the fight, your breath of fresh air, give them hell. Thank you for giving me hope for the country of love. Please don't stop. We are with you. And it's a nice full circle moment right now for all of that, all of that encouragement that you got quite a few years back that now, you know, you're stepping up into this position where I think you'll have an even bigger platform. And I know a lot of folks have been really, really looking forward to you making the announcement that you've

just made. So best of luck in the campaign trail. For anybody who's watching right now, highly that you grab Hate Won't Win, and please support Mallory McMorrow for the U.S. Senate. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thanks, Brian. I'm joined now by Dan Osborne. Dan, you had run for the U.S. Senate, Nebraska, in an explosive underdog campaign in this past election cycle against Deb Fisher, that obviously caught the attention of the entire country here. You've just made an announcement with regard to a potential entrance into the 2026 race,

Can you explain where you stand right now? Yeah, we're launching an exploratory committee. We're going to see what the appetite is for our brand of politics in Nebraska. And, you know, Pete Ricketts is certainly a formidable man with the ability to write his own checks, maybe a million dollars a day if he wanted to. So it's going to take some money. And I'm just looking to see if people have my backs on this one, I think this is a really winnable race and a really unique time in history where I think,

I think we can call this one off. What do you make of the fact that the Republican, the Republican senator is somebody who would be able to write himself, you know, unlimited checks if he wants to, at a time where the Republican Party is really filled to the brim with people who are doing exactly that? And look, your campaign that you ran in this past election cycle was so people-focused, so populist that even as an independent, you had come within a few percentage points of unseating an incumbent Republican senator in a state that doesn't normally see that kind of. Look, Nebraska is not exactly a battleground state.

And so what do you make of that difference in the campaigns that you have run in the past in terms of the focus, where your focus is versus a Republican Party right now, a Republican incumbent who really has the ability to just look out for himself, write himself, unlimited checks and and serve a donor class that that very much is not populist. Right. You know, nothing changes. Nothing changes for me. The fact that still remains that less than 2% of our elected officials in the House and Senate come from what would be considered the working class. Look, I did 200, over 200 public events and I learned a lot from the people in Nebraska. And most people, they just want to know that if you work hard, and look, I got nice.

against billionaires. I want to make that clear right off the back. You know, everybody wants to be one. We all hope to be one someday. And, you know, if we do something right and get lucky, you have a great idea, whatever that is. But people want to know if you work hard in this country, you're going to be able to get ahead. And right now, that's simply not the case. And, you know, the billionaires that are in the ruling class are carving up to states and carving up to countries for themselves. They're blocking access to Social Security. 80,000 veterans are losing their jobs and not going to have the same health care. Like, this to me is, you know, why I'm starting the Exploratory Committee,

why I want to get back into this. I want to continue the fight for working people. So nothing really changes. Dan, you've obviously just launched this committee today, but in the time that you've been exploring the exploratory committee, have you spoken with Nebraskaans and gotten a sense of where they stand as it relates to where the ruling classes focuses on thus far? Sure. I think it, I think it falls right in line with the similar sentiments in Wisconsin.

You know, people, people are tired of, you know, this class of people coming in and buying elections. And, you know, I know the Ricketts family have spent tens of million dollars influencing Nebraska politics. And I think, I think it's time that we have fair elections. And, you know, putting tens of millions and dollars into elections isn't right. People are feeling that now, more than ever, and people are definitely seeing it. In light of what we're seeing right now with the stock market, obviously, in a free fall, with the economic outlook, suggesting that a recession, if not something worse, may be on the horizon, with 401Ks, obviously taking a massive hit,

how does that impact how does that play into where you stand right now well it definitely affects me look i get a paycheck on the first and the 15th i know how much i'm getting and i know how much i have to have go out and uh you know i just had a uh one of my kids have an emergency appendectomy now i have some unforeseen medical expenses and uh i'm starting to see everything go up and you know i walk by the uh chicken and steak aisle and and and keep on going some weeks because it's just not in the cards for me. And that's what most Americans are dealing with. And, you know, folks like, you know, Pete Ricketts, they don't care if the local pool is getting shut down because they can't fund it because he's got one in his backyard. You know, it's a, that's the kind of

people that are governing us. And I think our government needs to look a little bit more like us, you know, as far as some working class people in there. Do you have confidence that Ricketts and his colleagues in the Republican Party would protect, put themselves on the line to protect Medicaid and food stamps and social security? No, I absolutely do not. I don't need to expand any further. No, I have no confidence in that. What do you say to voters in your state, a lot of whom look at their political affiliation

as a major component of their own identity, and what you would be asking them to do is to vote for somebody who is not a Republican, and they might have voted Republican their whole life and their, and their parents may have voted Republican, and their grandparents may have voted Republican. It's a big step to ask somebody to shed a major component of their own identity. And so what do you say to those folks right now? Well, I would say, you know, I get down on the people to their level and, you know, as far as, you know, being a, being a mechanic, working with my hands, my whole life. And I know what it's like. I know what it's like to have to put Christmas on a credit card. And right now, we're all struggling. You know, I ran a

strike at Kellogg's three years ago, whether you believe in unions or not. The bottom line is out on the picket line. There was no Republicans or Democrats. We're fighting for our livelihoods. And I feel like that's what we're having to do now. And I want to be a voice for the people who don't have a voice in the U.S. Senate. What would you do differently if you do decide to go ahead with this campaign? What would you do differently from the past election cycle? Because there will be folks who look at this and say, look, you know, you ran a race. Granted, it was in less than ideal circumstances, as the 2024 election was. But you already ran a race, and so, you know, you tried.

You made the pitch to voters, and they chose Deb Fisher. And so why will this be different? Well, it'll be different because I'm starting out in a different place, right? Like, you know, the 2020, full race, I had a zero name recognition. I came out of nowhere, and we built everything from the ground level. You know, we were, I like to use the term where we were learning. We were building the plane as we were learning how to fly it. Well, now we're flying it.

So we're going to start from a bigger position. We're going to immediately open up field offices, you know, given if I do decide to do this endeavor. Uh, you know, that's, that's what we're going to do different. We learned, I learned a lot. Uh, you know, I've never been involved politically too much before this. Uh, just saw a government, you know, uh, not working for me and, and we, we decided to do something about it. So we're, we're definitely starting from a better place. Dan, not that political affiliation really matters right now at a moment where so much is at

stake and, and really what the goal is is to just, is to make sure that, that people are okay. Uh, do you have any indication as whether, uh, in terms of what you would run as? I know the last election cycle you ran as an independent. Yeah. Well, I've been registered independent since I could register to vote. And I see no reason to have to change that. That's just kind of who I am.

I get frustrated with the party politics, both sides seemingly catering to their extremes. But, you know, I think we should be operating within the 40-yard lines, not in the end zone. So, Dan, I know the people are going to be watching this and, you know, they're going to see you as a force to be reckoned with in the state of Nebraska and folks like you don't come around often. And they're going to want to help you help you make this, this exploratory committee into a reality, into an actual campaign. And so what can we all do from our end to help make that a reality? Yeah, you know, I hope so. Shoot, I don't even know if we have a website up and running yet. But, you know, I'm still working my 40 to 50 hours a week and doing this on top of it.

But just throw me support, you know, a couple bucks goes a long way. Look, we raised, I think, about 14 million on our last campaign, and our average donation was $37. So if you're watching this and you think, you know, $20, 30 bucks doesn't matter. It absolutely does. You know, that's what's going to get us coming out of the gate strong. Well, I will make sure that I get your website that I put it right here on the screen and also in the post description of this video. Highly recommend for anybody watching right now. Look, as I just mentioned, not a lot of people like Dan Osborne come around often.

And so he presents a rare opportunity for us to be competitive in a state where otherwise Republicans would have really entrenched their own rule. and where somebody like Pete Ricketts, who, to Dan's exact point, can self-fund this thing to the ends of the earth as he looks to represent people who are a lot like him. This is an opportunity to be able to unseat somebody like that. And so if you want to show your support to Dan, again, you can just click the link on the screen or check out the link in the post description of this video. I appreciate taking the time and definitely looking forward to speaking with you again soon. All right. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks again to Tommy, Elliott, Mallory, and Dan. that's it for this episode. Talk to you next week.

You've been listening to No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen, produced by Sam Graber, music by Wellesie, and interviews edited for YouTube by Nicholas Nicotera. If you want to support the show, please subscribe on your preferred podcast app and leave a five-star rating and a review. And as always, you can find me at Brian Tyler Cohen on all of my other channels, or you can go to bryantilorcoen.com to learn more.