No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - What’s at stake in this election: closing message

Episode Date: November 1, 2020

The campaigns offer their closing messages—including some fatal missteps by Trump. Brian offers his own final thoughts, followed by an interview with the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic party, Ben Wikler, about how things are looking in the country’s most-watched state.Written by Brian Tyler CohenProduced by Sam GraberRecorded in Los Angeles, CAhttps://www.briantylercohen.com/podcast/To volunteer to help get Democratic turnout up in Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, go to votesave.us/btc. To volunteer in Wisconsin, visit wisdems.org/volunteer.See 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 the Trump campaign's closing messages and how they've botched it with some fatal missteps, some of my closing thoughts about this election, and my interview with the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, Ben Wickler, about how things are looking in the country's most watched state. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie. Well, this is the last episode before Tuesday's election. If you've been watching Donald Trump, you'd see that his final message to voters is that we're rounding the corner and coronavirus. coronavirus is on its way out. And we've done so well with it. Now it's 99.8%. I mean, you look at what's going on. And we're rounding the turn.

We're rounding the corner. We're rounding the corner beautifully. You have Don Jr. claiming that deaths are basically negligible at this point. If you look, I put it up on my Instagram a couple days ago because I went through the CDC data because I kept hearing about new infections. But I was like, well, why aren't they talking about deaths? Oh, because the number is almost nothing. Because we've gotten control of this thing.

We understand how it works. You have Mark Meadows throwing in the towel all together on the virus. So here's what we have to do. We're not going to control the pandemic. We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics, and other mitigation. Why aren't we going to get control the pandemic? Because it is a contagious virus. And of course, you've got Tucker Carlson, who wants you to know that he totally, definitely had some documents that we're going to turn this election on its head and sink Joe Biden's candidacy.

and well, then this happened. So on Monday of this week, we received from a source, a collection of confidential documents related to the Biden family. We believe those documents are authentic, they're real, and they're damning. At the time we received them, my executive producer, Justin Wells, and I were in Los Angeles preparing to interview Tony Babelinski about the Biden's business dealings in China, Ukraine, and other countries. So we texted a producer in New York,

and we asked him to send those documents to us in L.A., and he did that. So Monday afternoon of this week, he shipped those documents overnight to California with a large national carrier, a brand name company that we've used, you've used countless times with never a single problem. But the Biden documents never arrived in Los Angeles. Tuesday morning, we received word from the shipping company that our package had been opened and the contents were missing. The documents had disappeared. Those documents have vanished. As of tonight, the company has no idea and no working theory even about what happened to this trove of materials, documents that are directly relevant to the presidential campaign just six days from now. We spoke to executives at that company a

few hours ago. They seemed baffled and deeply bothered by this. And so are we. Okay, I think that's enough disinformation for one episode. Now, in reality, while Trump says that we're rounding the corner, I think what he might be overlooking is the fact that we're not so much rounding the corner as we are completely mired at the worst point of the outbreak we've ever. had. The United States just hit 100,000 new cases in one day, which is a record. The only way this is rounding the corner is if the other end of that corner is a cliff. While Don Jr. says that deaths are at, quote, almost nothing, what he seems to overlook is that we're still losing a thousand people a day. On the day he said this, October 29th, exactly 1,004 Americans died.

I wonder what those thousand families would say if you told them that as far as Don Jr.'s concerned. Their son or daughter or mom or dad or grandparents' life was negligible. Didn't even count. And beyond that, nothing quite like hearing Don Jr. pretend that a thousand dead Americans a day and 230,000 dead Americans in total, is no big deal on the same network that milked four deaths in Benghazi for literal years. I guess dead Americans don't count when the president's are Republican. With regard to Mark Meadows, credit words do, at least he was honest when he said they're not bothering to try to contain the virus anymore. But the dishonest part was the suggestion that they ever were.

The only step that Trump seemed content to take was a half-baked travel ban to China on January 31st, and since then, he has spent the last nine months pretending that that did the trick. Even with nearly a quarter of a million dead Americans, 8% unemployment, 11 million jobs lost, the guy is still throwing himself a mission-accomplished parade and pointing to the travel ban. Nothing like touting a solution to a problem that was never actually solved. And finally, when it comes to Tucker Carlson's grand finale about the quote-unquote laptop from hell, this story that some devastating documents got lost in the mail was exactly the amount of pathetic that this whole sham deserves. It was a laughable excuse to try and replicate the last email scandal in 2016, only it never held water.

It made the people who tried to make it happen look like even more of a joke than they all. already were. And frankly, it took time away from what could have been way, way stronger closing arguments by Trump and Republicans. But because this is what the GOP has devolved into, this Fox News fever dream where Democrats are wrapped up in secret scandals funded by George Soros and billions of dollars are being exchanged so that the deep state can order dossiers and don't forget Uranium 1 and PizzaGate and Fusion GPS and Tony Babelinski and Burisma. They get so wrapped up in this tinfoil hat bullshit that they lost the rest of the country.

But they'll never admit that, so I guess we'll just have to take their excuse for it, which is that somewhere in the United States are the documents that will finally expose Hunter Biden. But for now, we'll never know because they were lost in the mail. If you ever wondered

what a grown-ass man would sound like basically selling the equivalent of the dog ate my homework, this is what it would sound like. And look, I could go on with the nonsense that came out of the Trump campaign this week, but you get the point, right? And that is that this is what you get from the right. This is the culmination of four years of overt gaslighting and the shameless peddling of disinformation and just outright conspiracy theories. And this is a

trend that will only continue considering this is what the Republican Party has devolved into. This is what their president spews. This is what their senators and lawmakers spew. It's what their news outlets spew. Trump's terrible, but he's also a symptom of a much larger disease that's overtaken the GOP. And look, with that said, there is one way to fix it, and that is for Trump to lose by so much, to be so thoroughly repudiated at the polls that his brand of republicanism becomes just too toxic to touch.

But I think the best way to talk about the future is to go back to the past. A big part of Republicans' votes in 2016 was that there's a difference between what offended them and what affected them. And so while Trump cursed, while he bragged about sexual assault, while he spewed misogyny and xenophobia and racism,

while it was offensive, it didn't affect the people who voted for him. But what I hope that those people understand now is the extent to which another four years of Donald Trump will not just offend people, but will affect them. And I'm talking about the 20 million Americans who will lose their health coverage when Trump dismantles the ACA, or the 130 million Americans with preexisting conditions

who lose their guarantee of coverage, or those 26 and younger who rely on, the ACA to stay on their parents' plans. I'm talking about the countless women who rely on the ruling in row for access to safe abortions in this country. The women in Kentucky and Mississippi and Missouri and North Dakota and South Dakota and West Virginia,

all of which have only one abortion clinic left in the state. I'm talking about undocumented immigrants brought here as children. People who've had families here and whose lives are here, only to be sent back to a country of origin that they never knew. Families torn apart for no reason other than cruelty. I'm talking about a member of the LGBT community whose right to marry their partner is in jeopardy because of a Supreme Court that's now hostile to Obergefell.

I'm talking about voting rights for people like those who waited 11 hours to vote in Georgia because of voter suppression efforts. The same efforts that demonstrators were beaten over while marching from Selma to Montgomery 55 years ago. I'm talking about anyone living in a blue state that may be unfortunate enough to need disaster relief after a wildfire or a hurricane or a tornado destroys everything they have. and they're left begging hat-in-hand to a guy who only considers the electoral benefit when making decisions. So if you're fortunate enough to not be personally affected by Trump's draconian policies, I'd ask that you consider the people who are, because there are a lot of them. And for those people, it could very well be the difference between life or death. There's a moment I think about a lot.

It's a moment from Elijah Cummings during the Michael Cohen testimony. He said, when we're dancing with the angels, the question will be asked, what did we do to make sure we kept our democracy intact? Did we stand on the sidelines and do nothing? You know, I think back to middle school and high school, and we'd learn about World War II and the Nazis, and the question that always comes up is not just how could the Nazis have done what they did,

but how did the people of Germany let it happen? The implication being that that could never happen here, until you see a con man pilfering American tax dollars win over the party of fiscal responsibility, a sexual predator hiding behind the Bible that he's never cracked open winning over evangelicals who saw his rise to power on the promises of erecting walls to keep brown people out and banning Muslims from entering and eliminating protections for LGBT students and cutting food programs to hungry seniors

and then you realize not only could it happen here, but it's happening here. This is how it starts. This is the beginning. And if you say it, if you try to warn people, you sound hysterical, Up until the point where it's too late because then kids are locked in cages and ripped away from their moms and dads and suddenly it's normalized. And trans-Americans have been expelled from the military

and suddenly it's normalized. Peaceful protesters are being gassed and suddenly it's normalized. Immigrants are being sent back to the countries they escape from where they'll die and suddenly it's normalized. And a deadly pathogen is being personally spread by the very government officials

who fail to contain it at rallies to celebrate the leadership of those very people. and it's normalized. It's here. Like, we're at the precipice. But the beauty of that, the silver lining here is that there's so much we can do. We have agency here. We have the power. If we didn't, they wouldn't be working so damn hard to take our right to vote away or to convince us that we can't make a difference. The truth is that we have the power to elect officials who care about fixing our government, starting with HR1, expanding the right to vote and protecting it from foreign

influence. Rebalancing the Supreme Court and bringing on justices who actually represent the will of Americans. Adding Puerto Rico and D.C. estates and giving the voiceless a voice. Expanding health care and making sure people aren't needlessly sick in the richest country on the face of the earth. Codifying Roe so that all women can choose what they do with their own bodies, enacting a livable minimum wage, strengthening union so that workers take back power and restore dignity in their work, ushering in sweeping climate change legislation so we can achieve net-zero carbon emissions and ending subsidies for fossil fuels and ultimately doing away with them forever and transitioning to fully renewable energy, addressing police brutality so that people

of color don't have to live in fear of dying at the hands of those who are charged with protecting them. These things are not pipe dreams. They are days away from being inevitable. The only variable here is us. It's whether we can turn out. We have all the power here. So, keep the pressure on and help however you can, because in 10, 20, 30 years from now, when the next generation of kids is sitting in history class and reading about what happened after 2016, the question those kids are going to ask is the same one posed by Elijah Cummings. What did we do to make sure that we kept our democracy intact? So right now is our chance to ensure that we have a good answer.

Next up is my interview with the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, Ben Wickler. And with all eyes on Wisconsin yet again, he offers a lot to be optimistic about, along with what we can do to help. All right, today we have the chair of the Democratic Party in Wisconsin. Ben Wickler. Thanks for coming on. So good to be with you. What a moment. Yeah. So this is our last episode before the election. I couldn't think of a more appropriate state to focus on right now than Wisconsin, which is a state that Trump won by about 23,000 votes in 2016 and is arguably the most important state to win in 2020. So the big news is that the Supreme Court a few days ago sided with Trump and Republicans that mail ballots have to arrive by 8 p.m. on election day to be counted. So right off the bat, I want to say, do not mail your ballots if you're in Wisconsin.

So beyond that critical note, Ben, what type of an impact do you expect this ruling to have? So that is essentially up to us. And by us, I mean, everyone who wants Biden to win and is organizing to get absentee ballots delivered to drop boxes. At this point, 223,000 absentee ballots are still in people's hands, which is 7% of the, roughly, of the total number of votes that we expect in the state. In the spring Supreme Court election, 5% of all the votes cast in that election came in after Election Day. And they were counted because the Supreme Court decided the opposite in the spring election. So now they've changed the rules.

If those ballots all come in after Election Day, they'll all be thrown out. and that will shave, you know, several percentage points off of Biden's margin in the state, which if it is close, that could flip the entire thing. But we are just obsessively working to track down every one of those ballots, every one of those voters and tell them how to drop their ballot off at a drop box or with their local clerk. We have a website set up for it with stems.org slash dropbox. We are running every digital ad we can buy. We are calling, we're texting. We're pulling banners over Milwaukee with an airplane, like everything we can think to do. and that should make a difference in these last four days.

So obviously the most important thing is communicating these changes, basically voter education, that all ballots have to be dropped off. So how successful have you been so far in relaying this information to Wisconsinites? It's going well so far. I mean, we've seen the numbers jump of the absentee ballots that have been returned since the Supreme Court ruling. And the number of people requesting absentee ballots has dropped. one of the reasons for the original, there was a lower court ruling that we won that extended the

deadline for absentee ballots to arrive. Part of the reason why the judge ruled for us is that you can still request an absentee ballot in Wisconsin, believe it or not, right up to four days out from the election. So if someone requests one online and they get it sent in the mail, it arrives the day before the election, and then they put in the mail, they think they've done everything right, but under current law, it gets thrown out. The U.S. Supreme Court overruled the lower court judge. It upheld a Seventh Circuit court decision that was made by a Trump appointee. You know, because of that, someone, there's still people who are going to get absentee ballots in the mail this weekend. And those people just have to, have to have to know that it's time to turn in your

absentee ballot by hand. But, you know, we're shrinking the gap by day by day. And we had about 30,000 absentee ballots come in over the last day, and that number has been going up. And if we keep up that pace, we can mitigate the damage from the Supreme Court ruling pretty substantially. Just to clarify, Ben, you said that you have a way to reach out to the voters who've already requested absentee ballots? Yes. So in Wisconsin, both parties and, you know, whoever wants to can basically pay to download

the entire list of people who've requested ballots and who haven't returned them yet. and we update that every day, and we use that to figure out exactly who we need to reach. The calls we make, the digital ads we run all go to a shrinking universe each day of the people who still haven't gotten their ballots in and haven't early voted in person. And so it means that the effect of the organizing goes up at the same time as the universe goes down, which is part of what gives me some confidence. But, you know, sky's the limit in terms of how much outreach is worth doing when the stakes are this high.

Right. And obviously this issue intersects with the post. post offices slowdown. So how bad have the USPS slowdowns been in Wisconsin? And do you expect that to exacerbate this issue? Yeah, the slowdown absolutely intersects with the absentee ballot situation in a meaningful way. Most of Wisconsin, and most of the population of Wisconsin is in the worst category for male slowdowns where less than 85% of mail is delivered within three days. So, you know, that's roughly an eighth of mail is going to come outside of that window. If you put your absentee ballot in the mail now, there's a, you know, quite meaningful chance

it just won't arrive in time and we'll get thrown out, which is why we're telling everyone these drop boxes. And that risk grows, obviously, every passing day. This is kind of what Trump wanted all along, as he talked about publicly. The good news is that there are drop boxes all over the state. And there's an organizing operation that is, you know, without parallel in our state's history, I think, that is working to get folks to know exactly how to deliver their absentee ballots. But it's a sprint. If you have an hour to make phone calls to voters, if you're listening right now, go to Wisdoms.org slash talk to voters. You can use hyphens or no hyphens, and you'll wind up on a virtual phone bank page, and we could use your calls because we cannot let anyone

think that it is fine to follow the normal procedure right now. So we've actually seen voter suppression efforts like this before, and it backfired with the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. The argument could be made that when Republicans engage in these overt voter suppression efforts, it backfires on them and it actually mobilizes even more people than before. So is there any indication that this could be the case here? Nothing pisses people off more than the sense that someone's trying to take away their right to vote. And there's a real sense in which the U.S. Supreme Court, I think, misfired. The partisans on the Supreme Court thought that they were helping Trump. But this elevated the issue of Republican voter suppression and their opposition

to the front page of every newspaper to the top of every nightly newscast. I mean, there's no better way to educate Wisconsin voters than to have the United States Supreme Court issue a ridiculous partisan ruling eight days from the election. Right. And we can refer to the Supreme Court ruling and people know what we're talking about. It's a, in that sense, it is a gift. I was still I wish it hadn't happened. But we're going to make the most of it to turn out every possible voter. Yeah, that's a good point. And also, we see this constantly where, you know, these efforts to screw over voters by Republicans backfire and, you know, it's basically the Streisand effect on steroids, you know? I mean, for Trump, for somebody that likes putting his name

on so many things, we might as well swap out the Streisand effect for the Trump effect because nobody's better at it than he is. Got to give him credit for that, right? So tell me about your voter registration efforts there in Wisconsin. How successful have you guys been? Wisconsin is a very unusual state because we have same-day voter registration. So most of the voter registration that happens, happens during the early vote in person period and on election day. And same-day voter registration has shot up this year. And we're outpacing the GOP. Most of the folks who are doing same-day registration, according to our modeling, are Democrats. That surge of new voters is a very hopeful sign. I also will say the Republican operation is geared towards

November 3rd. So we are anticipating a potential flood of folks who are showing up, who are not in any poll right now because they're not registered already or not any on anyone's voter file or database, but who are coming out registering and same day voting for Trump. And that's one reason why, even though the polls say Wisconsin is, you know, in the bag, I think of this is essentially a tied race where we're sprinting for the finish line. Our voters are coming in earlier. We're setting a bar and Republicans are going to try to jump over it. And our efforts can push the bar higher and higher for what Trump has to do. We've got to get it out of jumping range, out of stealing range, out of litigation range to be able to rest easy.

And those calls to not be complacent, basically, should be pretty much echoed throughout the entire country because Trump supporters have been groomed since day one to not take advantage of mail-in voting, to not take advantage of early voting. His whole thing is to show up at the polls on November 3rd. And so, yeah, I mean, that same sentiment should be echoed for states from, you know, Pennsylvania all the way across the country.

So that's a really good point that you brought up. So what are the turnout numbers in Wisconsin so far? So at this point, more than half of the electorate from 2016 has already voted, which is great. It is, let me pull up the number here. So as of today, the number of ballots return, including in-person absentee votes, is 1.738 million. And in 2016, the total turnout was 2.975. At this point, 58% of the electorate from 2016 has voted in 2020. Now, a lot of those people did not vote in 2016.

So the total turnout, you know, is good. could easily be north of three million. And there's a lot less third party voting that's happening in Wisconsin than now than there was in 2016. I bet turnout goes up for both Trump and for Biden relative to Clinton. This is a super high intensity election where everyone and their mother is working to turn out Wisconsin voters. And I bet this happens across the country too. The question is which side surges more? Speaking of, you know, getting Wisconsinites out to the polls, what are the most important issues that are facing Wisconsinites in this election cycle? Wisconsin is in the top three, or the bottom three, I should say, of states as far as coronavirus goes. We have one of

the worst outbreaks in the entire country. Hospitals are filling up. People are discovering that they have coronavirus. They've been spreading coronavirus. There are hotspots essentially everywhere in the state, including in rural areas that thought they were immune. It is really grim. We're sending new records for deaths, hospitalizations, and infections pretty much every day. And that is the storm cloud over this whole thing. It could, you know, affect voters in different ways, because for people, that are thinking about whether to go into a polling place, they might get nervous. I will say the protections that have been put in place are really, really, really strong. So I do think that it is a safe thing to do. But I also know, you know, when people walk in, if they were undecided,

if you're thinking about COVID, you're more likely to vote against Trump. And so I think the GOP has kind of sabotaged itself because they shot down our stay-at-home order. They've been shooting down our governor's emergency orders and have undermined public health in our state in a way that they didn't have to do. And that makes it more of a disaster scenario that the president has to own. And even these rallies, you know, if you look at polling of these rallies themselves, of Trump holding, you know, what has basically become his super spedder tour, the polling on these rallies actually turns people away from Trump. So his efforts to try to bring people into his campaign are actually having the reverse effect.

This is like the weirdest. I mean, it's the hallmark of this president. He only ever thinks about his base. Yeah. So people that love a big super spreader rally and think mass are ridiculous, those people are showing up and everyone else is aghast. Yeah. And frankly, like, you know, if you're like a healthcare worker in a community where he has a super spreader rally and you have to watch people come into your hospital a few weeks

later, it's infuriating. And we're seeing these spikes in almost every state that he leaves. It's just like a trail of death and destruction and chaos every time he lands somewhere and then packs right up. And then, you know, what he leaves in his wake is just, is, is, is, is, remarkable. It's a nightmare. It is so bad. But this is, I mean, now is the moment for accountability on this thing. In this final stretch, like, it is worth delaying anything that is not election related that you can. You should eat enough to be able to continue, sleep enough to be able to

operate, but spend your time calling voters, friend banking, use the Vote Joe app, recruiting people to help volunteer. Like, you know, we are, we and lots of other places are still spending money as fast as it comes in on digital ads for the last stretch, you chip in if you have extra money. Like, whatever you can do, this is the time to do it because the window slams shut at 8 p.m. On election day, and after that, it is about winning the win, but all the votes will be cast. So tell me, tell me specifically, like, what can my viewers and listeners do to help? I know that Act Blue has already closed out donations to candidates across the country, but it's not just about giving money so that there's other things that people can actually do to

to help drive turnout. Absolutely. So you can now jump on, if you go to Wistems.org slash volunteer, you can sign up in general. If you go to mobilize.us, that is actually the way to find the kind of closest to you

volunteer opportunities. If you search for Wisconsin, you'll find stuff for Wisconsin. But we need virtual phone bankers, first and foremost. People are now calling people with absentee ballots to tell them to hand deliver them, calling people who are on GeotV list,

but have not requested an absentee ballot to tell them to early vote in person or make a plan for election day and calling unregistered voters who are likely Democrats to tell them you can still same day register. And all those things make a huge difference. The sky's the limit as far as those calls can go. And we're using auto dialers, which is a tool where you basically log into the screen. It does the dialing for you. And so you just spend the entire time, you get connected to a voter, you talk to them. It connects you to the next voter. You talk to them. You mark what you say on the screen. You don't have to punch in numbers and go through wrong numbers and voicemails and all the kind of stuff. So it is very fast and intense, and it's super productive.

We actually have too many text bankers at this point. So we would be counterproductive if we texted people anymore. But the last thing I really want to underscore, the Biden campaign has a tool, an app that you can get for iPhone or for Google called Vote Joe. And Vote Joe, basically, if you give it permission to upload your contacts, it'll match those contacts to the voter database and help you figure out which of your friends don't always show up to vote. And then you can text them and call them. And that goes into the central database so we know that they've been reached out to. That is the most high impact thing a human being can do. Because your own personal relationships, you have a bigger effect on their voter behavior than any volunteer does. So I'd say the first thing

you should do while you're listening to this is download vote, Joe, and friend bank your way through your contact list. Yeah. And that's a great point. And you know, I've said it a million in times between my videos and podcasts, but take care of your circle. That's going to, that's going to be what has the biggest impact on getting people out to vote. So, you know, whether it's your friends or your families, your neighbors, or your coworkers, you know, you can make a huge impact. You don't need to have a massive megaphone to try to, you know, bring about some change. All it takes is, you know, one or two people. And that's enough to flip a precinct in these states. That's so true. And I also want to say, you know, our margin is 22,748 in 2016. Michigan's next. Michigan's next

door was less than 11,000. And Wisconsin was even closer in 2004 and in 2000. We've had under one percentage point margins in three of the last five presidential races. That, like, it is so often, so close. It is so worth pulling out all the stops at this moment. And people won't mind if you text them, or if they do mind, they will forgive you by the time the election is over. Like, take the time to do it. Don't be shy. So building on that, what's being done to ensure that Wisconsin stays blue in the future? Because I I know, for example, that there wasn't much of a foundation before you took the reins. So I do want to just really, really credit my predecessor's chair. She was elected and then experienced

2016. And after 2016, decided we've got to do things differently. So she went on this listening to her around the state and learned about this kind of model that had worked for Obama that state parties almost never do, which is year-round organizing by building neighborhood teams that run their own get-out-the-vote operations. And she started raising and spending money in 2017, you know, three and a half years before now, for the program that I then have helped to grow and grow after I was elected here in 2019.

We now have hundreds of teams all over the state in every county and, you know, in neighborhoods all over. And those teams are running local virtual phone banks where members of communities are calling the other people in that community. It is so powerful. And our focus, year has been, we don't want to have this kind of flood of money and attention come in for the presidential and then disappear. We want to actually build an operation that lives on

after the presidential campaign's over. And so we continued building and building those teams. Then we integrated fully with the Biden campaign, which kept the structure that we'd had in place and most of the, I mean, basically they added staff, but all the folks who had been building in our spring Supreme Court election are still in leadership positions now. And they'll still be here after the election's over. So this is going to continue. And we know the pattern of American politics is backlashes after you elect a president. The other side gets energized. We saw in 2008, we won a blue trifecta in Wisconsin. 2010 Republicans wiped it out, went to red trifecta. Our goal is to stop that cycle in Wisconsin in 2022. So we're going to come out of this with better data, with this

incredibly effective team, with these volunteer neighborhood teams, with county parties that are strong, with a digital program that's like five or eight times as large as it was in 2019 at this point, you know, across the board, we're going to come into this with strength and with a strategy to be able to continue the momentum of grassroots energy that our, you know, knock on wood is going to power the victories on Tuesday. And beyond, because don't forget, we've got Ron Johnson coming up for reelection. And I think people would love nothing more than to, you know, send him packing. So, Ben, thanks so much for what you're doing.

you've turned Wisconsin into a great opportunity and hopefully what will be a squarely blue state moving forward. So thanks so much for doing all the dirty work. And we really couldn't have a better person out there steering the ship than you. Thank you so much, Brian. I really appreciate it. All credit to the just amazing, amazing folks working at our state party organizing day after day in communities around our state. But we're in this together. We're sprinting through the tape and it's going to feel really, really good to win. Thanks again to Ben Wickler. Now, one last time I have to mention that we're not done yet. In addition to the volunteer opportunities mentioned by Ben,

we also need help getting Democratic turnout up in Florida, especially Miami-Dade, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. We need volunteers to fill shifts to reach voters in these areas, specifically those in communities of color. So please go to Votesaveamerica.com, and at the top of the page, click on Find Out where you can volunteer now. Besides that, if you haven't yet voted,

make sure you have a plan to vote, and make sure that plan involves bringing at least one person who didn't vote last time. Whether it's a family member or a friend or a neighbor, make sure the seniors in your life have a ride to the polls, and the same goes for the 18-year-olds in your life, too. We're in the home stretch, so make this time count. And finally, thank you for staying engaged,

for staying energized, and for fighting for the future of this country. The passion that we're seeing now is the best reminder we've got that this is worth fighting for. You've been listening to No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen. Produced by Sam Graber, music by Wellesie, interviews captured and edited for YouTube and Facebook by Nicholas Nicotera

and recorded in Los Angeles, California. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on your preferred podcast app. Feel free to leave a five-star rating and a review, and check out briantylercoen.com for links to all of my other channels.