Pod Save America - “Biden v. Trump v. Coronavirus.”

Episode Date: April 9, 2020

The general election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump begins as Bernie Sanders suspends his campaign, COVID-19 trutherism gets worse as Trump media tries to spin the death toll, and Democrats look for a way to make voting safe and easy despite opposition from Trump and his allies. Alex Wagner, the host of Crooked Media’s new podcast Six Feet Apart, joins to break down the news, and Stacey Abrams talks to Dan about protecting the right to vote, the coronavirus response, and 2020 veepstakes.Subscribe to Six Feet Apart with Alex Wagner:apple.co/sixfeetapartcrooked.com/sixfeetapart

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's pod, Dan talks to our friend Stacey Abrams about protecting our right to vote this November and much more. Before that, we'll talk about the fact that we now have a Democratic nominee for president. Presumptive Democratic nominee. Presumptive Democratic nominee for president. And then Alex Wagner, the host of Crooked Media's brand new podcast, Six Feet Apart, will join us to talk about how Trump and his media pals are playing politics with the pandemic. But first, check out Pod Save the World this week.

Tommy and Ben talk about how a coronavirus clusterfuck led the acting Secretary of the Navy to resign, how some inspiring world leaders are rising to meet this moment, and then Tommy talks with some Americans who got stranded traveling abroad. Finally, I just want to thank all of you for donating over now $1.2 million to our Coronavirus Relief Fund, which splits your donation equally to groups providing critical support to food banks, healthcare workers, restaurant workers, seniors, kids who depend on school lunches, and others.

So please, if you can, help those in need at crooked.com slash coronavirus. All right, Dan. Let's pretend for just a few minutes that we're not in the middle of a global pandemic and go back to talking about the Democratic primary. What a world. We're talking about the Democratic primary seems like an enjoyable task.

What a treat to talk about a world. We're talking about the Democratic primary seems like an enjoyable task. What a treat to talk about a primary. The primary effectively ended yesterday when Bernie Sanders suspended his campaign, leaving Joe Biden as the presumptive nominee for president in 2020. After losing the first three contests in a row, Biden's victory in South Carolina marked the beginning of the most dramatic political comeback I've seen in my lifetime. And he went on to win the nomination by a bigger margin than either Barack Obama in 2008 or Hillary Clinton in 2016, based on his strength with black voters, suburban voters, older voters, and moderates. According to RealClearPolitics, he starts the general election with about a six point lead over Donald Trump nationally. Dan, this result is a perfect example of why you and I get out of the prediction business after 2016. What are you talking about? We've always said it was going to end up as Biden.

What is your reaction to Joe Biden, Democratic nominee for president? I mean, I think you really hit it where you talked about the nature of his comeback. This is a it's an overwhelming win for him in terms of delegates. He and he did it coming back from something no one had previously come back for. He you know, it's weird you think about it because it's like Joe Biden, former vice president, been in politics forever. This is his third presidential run. Biden, former vice president, been in politics forever. This is his third presidential run. And yet he won with less money, less infrastructure, less staff. He basically was a front runner in name with an underdogs campaign and he made it work. And not to delve back into the pandemic,

but it's sort of maybe you remember the night that Obama clinched the nomination in 2008. We all knew that was going to happen because it was the last primaries, but it was still this huge. June 3rd. June 3rd, I know, the day after my birthday. Huge celebration. And we had a big party and it felt great. You got to, we all got to be together. And Obama gave a speech in Minnesota at the site of what would be the

Republican convention. And we viewed that as the launching point of the campaign. And here you have Biden celebrating in his house, right in that basement or wherever in a studio that we come to know so well. And all of his staff are celebrating separately at home in whatever their quarantine situation is. And so Biden wins and the conversation was almost entirely about Bernie. And we just were thought about that too. have been skeptical about. But given what's happening in the country right now, it may be the exact perfect right thing. And, you know, I think we should, people, Democrats should be excited that we have a nominee that we can be proud of, even if he wasn't the person you supported in

the primaries. Yeah, I mean, look, it's, we're not going to rewrite history here. We were like, fairly critical of Joe Biden's campaign throughout a lot of the a lot of the primary, I think, campaign throughout a lot of the primary. I think my criticisms or concerns were largely that the campaign is not, and the candidate are sometimes not nimble and creative enough in a very fast paced media environment. And I still have those concerns. But I also worked with Joe Biden like you did and think he's an incredibly decent person. And I do think that now that we're in this crisis, so many of Joe Biden's best qualities do really match up with the moment. He's steady. He's calm. He's experienced. He's empathetic. This is a nation that's going to be grieving for a very long time.

And he is someone who has a lot of experience with grief and with consoling others. I do think like his unity message, if it is about pulling the country together and not negotiating with Mitch McConnell. But I do think it is powerful because there's going to be, you know, the country's going through a tragedy and going through a crisis. And people do want to come together in a situation like that, even if Donald Trump and Republican politicians want to divide us, which is what they're good at. I do think the one quality that Joe Biden needs to show in this moment that I think he has the capacity to is sort of anger at the economic

catastrophe that's unfolding for people. And look, you know, he always talks about himself as middle class Joe. That was his reputation in the White House. I do think the only the danger here for him is. On one hand, the country does want to be unified and wants to come together. On the other hand, as this unfolds, there is going to be so much anger and hurt among people who have lost their jobs and are struggling in the economy. And he has to channel that. And I do think he can, right? He's like the guy from Scranton and he, you know, middle class was a huge part of his message in the White House. But I do, that's sort of the one thing I wonder if he'll, if he'll be able to channel as this goes on. Yeah, I mean, you raise an interesting way of thinking about this, which much of the conversation since the pandemic has hit is about how this moment demonstrates the need for Bernie's policy platform.

Right. When you have, as Bernie points out all the time correctly, that when you have an employer based health system and you go through an economic crisis, you're going to have millions of people who become uninsured. And all. But I also think that this moment might actually perfectly match Biden's personality and Biden's message. And he's got work to do to be able to communicate that message and, as you say, match some of the tone and to change the message. Because it is not about unity between politicians. It's healing a nation. And to get there, but among the people running, and to get there.

But he, you know, among the people running, he may have been the person best suited for this moment, both in terms of experience, demeanor, and personality. The other thing I always look out for after we've had a series of elections is like, what does it tell us about the electorate? And I think when you look at how Joe Biden won and why Joe Biden won, it should tell us something about the kind of qualities and leadership that a lot of Democratic voters wanted this time around.

And I think there were times in the prime, like it is, we can talk about this when we talk about Bernie. You know, I think there's more voters in the democratic primary who may favor a lot of bernie's positions and yet joe biden won such a commanding victory among so many groups of voters that you know it should tell us something about what the electorate wants uh and i think knowing learning those lessons about what voters are actually looking for when they go to the polls is is sometimes the most important thing of all the analysis we do here, because so often we're just flying blind and people's personal preferences feed into their analysis about politics.

And the only thing that can really tell us the truth is sort of what voters think when they actually go to the polls. So let's talk about Bernie Sanders, on wednesday ended what had essentially been a half decade running for president on a progressive platform that really set the terms of the debate in the 2020 democratic primary pushed some of the party to the left and inspired a grassroots movement that was particularly strong with young voters liberal voters and latino voters in a speech wednesday bernie said that while his own campaign would be ending, there was still a lot for he and his supporters to fight for.

Let's take a listen. We have never been just a campaign. We are a grassroots, multiracial, multigenerational movement which has always believed that real change never comes from the top on down, but always from the bottom on up. We have taken on Wall Street, the insurance companies, the drug companies, the fossil fuel industry, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, and the greed of the entire corporate elite. That struggle continues. While this campaign is coming to an end, our movement is not. All right. So first, any final thoughts on Bernie's campaign and his

contribution to the party and to the debate? Well, I think it is hard to overstate how much Bernie Sanders accomplished from where he started. So you think back to 2015 when he announced basically by himself, I think outside of the Capitol, to where he is now, the leader of a political movement. And it's just a tremendous accomplishment. And he, without a doubt, put issues on the table and turned them into more mainstream Democratic issues that were not even discussed in any real or loud way before that. And that is to his eternal credit. I also think that there is a history of losing presidential campaigns having huge impact long after the election in which the candidate lost.

And I think about the Jesse Jackson campaign. I in which the candidate lost. And I think about the Jesse Jackson campaign, I think about the Gary Hart campaign, I think about Howard Dean's campaign in 2004, where you have a candidate who's inspirational enough to bring a lot of people who would not otherwise be involved in Democratic Party politics into the process. And then those people go on to become true leaders in the party for years to come. And I think you're going to see that from Bernie's campaign. You think about the very prominent voices in Congress like Alexander Ocasio-Cortez that have emerged in the shadow of Bernie's movement. And I think that, and I hope, and losing is really hard. And it takes a long time to get over. And we should give people who worked

on that campaign space to grieve over that loss because you care passionately about it. But I hope in the end, Bernie Sanders and Jane Sanders and the whole campaign is forever proud of the imprint that they have put on democratic politics. And when, it's not if in my view, when we have a single-payer healthcare system in this country, when we have something resembling the Green New Deal, it'll be in large part because Bernie Sanders decided to run for president twice and do so in a way that was consistent with his values. Yeah, I mean, on one hand, you know, Bernie Sanders and his campaign ran up against a reality, which is that a lot of older voters in the Democratic Party who vote regularly, or people who sort of newly voted in the Democratic primary who were maybe Republicans before or moderates,

you know, they so Bernie couldn't reach those people. But if you look at voters, not just young voters, but voters under 50 and Bernie won that demographic in so many states, what it tells you is that is the future of the party, right? Like, as things go along, as the as the years pass, that will be the those voters that Bernie won will make up a larger and larger share of the Democratic Party. And I think Democratic leaders in the party would do well to understand what was driving that vote for Bernie, the issues that he championed, and all the rest. And, you know, while Bernie, his campaign couldn't win a majority of people who voted Democrat

this time around, you know, four years, eight years down the road, that could rapidly change as the electorate changes and gets younger. I think that's exactly right. But I do still think, and we can talk about this, but there's still a lot of work for the Sanders-aligned left of the party to do to be able to realize that potential. one is the to-date failure to be able to take that left progressive message and sell it to African-American voters. And there is no path to national democratic leadership without not just doing well with African-American voters, but winning African-American voters. And Sanders made very, very limited progress on that over the course of the five years that he was running for president.

And I think there's some real examination within that part of the party. But that's not about the establishment. That's not about the anti-Bernie media. It's not about corporate media. It is about the fact that they've been unable to convince perhaps the most important part of the Democratic Party, that their message works, that their policies work, that they can deliver on those promises. And a real thoughtful, introspective analysis of that is crucial to building on the success of Bernie in the next presidential election, which is hopefully eight years from now. I'll also just say about Bernie himself,

you know, he's someone who believes what he believes and is not afraid to fight for it, no matter what. And I think that's something very admirable in politics. And I'm glad that there's a leader out there in politics who does that. I think he got even better at campaigning and debating in 2020. His campaign, I think, showed us that you don't need to be funded by big donors. I think showed us that you don't need to be funded by big donors. The grassroots sort of fundraising that they built, I think, will be with us for some time as a model for how to do it. And so, you know, I think he I think he accomplished a lot. And I think the party is better off that he that he pushed it.

So why do you think that Bernie did this now? Why do you think he made the decision to end his candidacy when he did? Some of his supporters had urged him to fight on until the convention, or at least wait until Biden clinched the majority of pledged delegates. Well, even in a normal world with normal elections, something that was really only a month ago, but it seems like 100 years ago, Bernie Sanders was at an essentially insurmountable delegate deficit to Biden. But now you're in a situation was at an essentially insurmountable delegate deficit to Biden. But now you're in a situation where you have an insurmountable delegate deficit, you cannot campaign in any normal way, you're sort of limited to doing live streams from your house.

And most states have moved the election to months from now. And you're in a position, as we saw in Wisconsin, where if you are asking your voters to go out in these elections in the middle of a pandemic in a what is almost certainly a lost cause politically, you're putting them at risk. And this was the – you saw the dangers of that in Wisconsin on Tuesday, and you can only see that repeating itself going forward. And I think Bernie Sanders, as he said every day on the campaign trail, is that there's no task more important than defeating Trump. And now is the time to get out, allow Biden to begin consolidating and preparing to be the nominee and begin the work of unifying the party. And I think it's to his credit that he did that because that is a necessary component to actually winning this election. So in his speech, Bernie called Biden a decent man who he plans to work with to move progressive ideas forward. He also said that he'd remain on the ballot in the remaining contests on the primary calendar so that he could win delegates that would

give he and his supporters more leverage to push progressive policies into the party's platform at the convention later this summer. So nice words about Biden, though not an official endorsement, and he's going to stay on the ballot to rack up delegates. Does this give you any concern? I mean, let's stipulate that I worry about everything. And I do have very real concerns about the ability of the party to unite around Biden. And that's primarily not because it's not about Biden necessarily, but just about how close this election is going to be and how narrow the margins are. And so every voter you lose to not voting, third party voting, Republican is potentially devastating. I am not particularly worried about Bernie's role on that. I believe that Bernie will take him at his word. He has said that he would support and

do everything he could for the nominee if he were not the nominee. I think that is what is going to happen. I think, and people are going to destroy me on Twitter for this, but I think that Bernie Sanders himself gets a really bad rap for what happened in 2016. He did campaign for Hillary Clinton. Higher percentage of his voters voted for Hillary Clinton than Hillary Clinton supporters voted for Barack Obama. And there are a lot of things in that primary that led to division. But after that primary was over, I think Bernie Sanders worked very hard to get Hillary Clinton elected. And I suspect he will do that for Joe Biden. And because he got out in April as opposed to June, there was more time to do that. And so I am hopeful and expect that at a moment of opportune timing for both Bernie and Biden, you will see some sort of

unity event. Maybe that's going to have to be a Zoom conference call from their homes. But I do believe that that Bernie will do what it takes to make sure that Biden gets elected. Yeah, I sort of think it's just a logistical issue, really, that, you know, when you drop out, it's fine to have your exit from the race be about you and your movement and your issues. And I'm sure he will do a more full-throated endorsement of Joe Biden soon. There were some reports in the New York Times that Biden may, even as we're recording this, embrace some of Bernie's policies or at least move further in the direction towards Bernie's platform. And so you could see Bernie wanting to wait for Biden to do that. Before then,

he gave a full-throated endorsement. I also don't have a lot of concern about staying on the ballots to rack up delegates. Bernie was pretty clear in his statement. Joe Biden will be the nominee, but I just want to have these delegates so I can influence the party's platform. On that note, you should probably just talk to people about how influential is the party's platform? How important is it to have, you know, influence on that platform? If you're, if you're Bernie, I don't want to diminish the party platform, because it is something the party spends a lot of time on. And there's going to be a group of very smart people who will be appointed to figure it out. But I will say that after we went into the White House in January of 2009, I don't ever recall looking back at the Democratic Party platform for our to-do list. So look, I think staying on the ballot

is fine. And I actually think it'd be nearly impossible to get off the ballot in most states if you wanted to, even in the normal course of business. All these states that have postponed their primary have undoubtedly printed their ballots. And I think it's a relevant thing to do. I think Bernie's and the Bernie Sanders movement's influence is going to happen not necessarily in the Zoom conference call that is the Democratic Party Convention, but will be if and when Joe Biden is elected president and how they can influence him both from the Senate and from members of his team who will certainly work in the Biden administration. Well, so let's talk about sort of the business of party unity, which, as we know, will be incredibly easy. I did think a productive step was a number of progressive groups, Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement, March for Our Lives, United We Dream, a couple others,

writing a letter to Biden yesterday, asking him to basically adopt most of Bernie and Warren's policies. I don't think he's necessarily going to go that far. But they also suggested that he choose certain progressive leaders to serve in his campaign and his administration, which I thought was a good idea and probably more likely. They wrote, quote, exclusively anti-Trump messaging won't be enough to lead any candidate to victory. We need you to champion the bold ideas that have galvanized our generation and given us hope in the political process. So Matt Iglesias in a Vox piece argued that Biden's actually going to have a really hard time winning over Bernie supporters and that Biden's problem with the left isn't so much about his platform and his policies, it's that they just don't trust him. What do you think about that? How easy will it be for Biden to

get some of Bernie supporters by shifting policy positions. I sort of agree with Matt's point, but I kind of want to disentangle the question in a couple of ways, which is when we talk about Biden sort of unifying the party, we're talking about three, there are different groups of people people are talking about. One is, and Matt talks about this specifically in his article, is Bernie media types, right? The DSA folks, Jacobin, like the sort of prominent Bernie Twitter and media personalities. That's one group. Second group are people who actually voted for and volunteered for and donated to Bernie Sanders. And then there's another group of people that we don't talk about enough when we talk about Joe Biden's youth vote problem, because there's this in political punditry and coverage, we tend to default the conversation entirely to people

who are as engaged in politics as us. But youth turnout was not up in these primaries. So there's a whole group of young voters who probably agree with Joe Biden on exponentially more issues than they agree with Donald Trump who did not get involved. So how Biden thinks about unity and solving his youth vote problem sort of is around those three axes. I don't think there's anything Joe Biden can do for prominent Bernie media types. Now, that doesn't mean that some of them may not end up supporting Biden in the long run. It gets harder and harder to be vocally anti-Biden in good faith when Bernie Sanders himself is campaigning passionately for Biden, or hopefully at one point, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ro Khanna and Pramila Jayapalma people are campaigning

actively for Biden. But I don't think there's a policy position Biden can adopt that'll help those people. I think he has to make a good faith effort to get Bernie's voters and volunteers to not just vote for him, but also to volunteer and use their talents as activists to help Biden. And then there's a larger question about how Biden gets youth turnout up in the battleground states where that he's going to need to do that to get to a win number. Yeah, I sort of divide it into, you know, lefty media and lefty activists and

organizers. And I think there is zero shot that lefty media will ever come around to Joe Biden. I think they are beyond persuasion. They have made that very clear. They don't, there's no room for them to be persuaded about Joe Biden. And so I don't think that, you know, much energy should be wasted on those types. I think lefty activists or, you know, some of the activists who make up the groups that I just mentioned, Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement, March for Our Lives, United We Dream, others, people like AOC electeds who supported Bernie. I think those people are in good faith looking for Biden to embrace more progressive policies. And if he does, you know, they won't be as excited

about him as they were about Bernie or even Elizabeth Warren, but they will certainly be part of the cause and part of the fight in the long term because they understand that it is also in their best interest for Joe Biden to win over Donald Trump. And so and I think what they're trying to do with that letter and other ideas, they're trying to be productive. They're trying to figure out a way to bring this party together and sort of form a coalition to beat Donald Trump. And then we can all go back to fighting each other once Joe Biden's in the White House, if he ends up, you know, disappointing the left again by not being as progressive as they wanted him to be. But I think that they understand that in this moment, it's critical for us to have a united front against Trump in order to to win this election. And look, I think, you know, my favorite campaign slogan of the entire primary is Bernie's, not me, us. And I think it was so smart, partly it's because I'm biased, because Obama so often emphasized this isn't about me. This is about a movement. This is bigger than any one person. And I think Bernie really got that as

well. And this entire campaign he's been talking about how this is not just about him. This is about all of us and a movement to sort of defeat the most dangerous president and to sort of, you know, fix the structural inequalities that have been hurting us for quite some time. And, you know, there's an easier transition from that, that this wasn't just about Bernie. And now it's not just about Joe Biden. It's a there are much bigger things at stake than any one Democratic politician or Democratic socialist politician or anything like that, you know, we are under a severe threat by Donald Trump and the Republican Party. And that fight is so much bigger than

anything that we fought about in the primary. What did you think of the list from the groups? The list from the group? So I think that some of the policies you could see a Biden campaign adopted, like let's do health care, for example. Joe Biden is not going to suddenly say, I ran the whole primary not supporting Bernie's Medicare for All bill. And now suddenly I'm going to adopt Bernie's Medicare for All bill. Like it's just not going to happen. But you could see Joe Biden saying there are some elements of Bernie's plan that will get us close to single payer that I will adopt. There are, especially in the Green New Deal, there are certain targets for carbon emissions that you could see Joe Biden saying, yeah, that makes sense. It's a more

dramatic target than I had laid out in my original climate plan. I could adopt that. So you can see some pieces of some of the policies that they asked for him adopting. I think that the more likely scenario is that in some of their personnel suggestions, people to either serve as chairs of his campaign or in policy councils of his campaign or in his administration, it does seem more likely that he will sort of accept those recommendations because I think that's easier to do than just sort of changing all your policies wholesale, which also runs the risk of telling voters, hey, all the things I said during the primary, I was just bullshitting you. And now when Bernie asked me to, I just changed all my policies,

you know? Yeah, yeah, he can. I think there are some really good suggestions in there. And some of them are not inconsistent with how Biden has talked about things like the discussions around a gun control policy are very like, I don't this is not how Biden talked about it. But I don't think the suggestions in there are necessarily inconsistent with how a Biden administration would take on that issue. I think the personnel thing is incredibly important, because I think it's actually more important than policy in persuasion, right? Like, it is one thing because of whatever institutional or primary relevant distrust there may be of Biden by some of these young voters and activists, it may not matter if Biden says to them, I'm going to do X, Y, and Z, right? Even if these are things that these activists want.

But it will matter if Ro Khanna or Katie Porter, who endorsed Joe Biden last night on MSNBC, or Pramila Jayapal, or any of these other pro-Bernie progressives, Elizabeth Warren, if they have a seat at the table in policymaking and personnel decisions in a transition, I think adding one of those types to Biden's campaign chairs is a very good idea. Thinking very carefully about who runs your transition and who would be on your transition committee, I think, would go a long way. You know, some of the things about like you're going to make a pledge not to put corporate lobbyists in certain positions, I think that's an easy pledge to make. But you are right that Biden won, and we should be clear, he won overwhelmingly. As you said, he won by the biggest margin. And therefore, he should make a good faith effort to try to persuade Bernie supporters.

He absolutely should, but he also cannot lose. He cannot break faith with the people who voted for him. And so you have to find things that are adjustments to your policy. And I think climate is one of the primary targets where they should do that that are not inconsistent with the campaign you ran. Yeah. And sort of,

there's a number of, and you can just look to Data for Progress. They always have polls about this. There are a number of progressive policies that people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren proposed that are also broadly popular with the electorate. And there's other progressive policies that are not as broadly popular people in Arctic, but like particularly around some of the economic proposals that like like capping credit card rates, you know, doing something more on student debt, things like that. I think that Biden probably has more leeway to adopt the more progressive policy, but also feel confident that it is widely popular with the broader electorate.

So one person who's going to try to make party unity worse is Donald Trump, who tweeted on Wednesday that he can't see progressives like AOC and the rest of the squad supporting Biden. He blamed Elizabeth Warren for Bernie's loss. He wondered why Bernie wants to keep acquiring delegates, and he invited Bernie supporters to come to the Republican Party. Sure. How does Biden and the rest of us deal with Trump's incredibly predictable but possibly effective attack here? I don't think it's effective. Okay. Look, I think that there is going to be a lot of efforts from people engaging in sophisticated disinformation

to sow divisions between voters skeptical of Biden and Biden. As happened in 2016, I think that is something we have to watch very carefully. Some of that will be done by conservative groups. Some of it will be done through Republican propaganda. Some of it could be done by state actors. But Donald Trump tweeting Captain Obvious statements of stupidity is not it. And I think ultimately the best way to understand Donald Trump is he thinks he's the smartest person in America, which actually translates to him thinking everyone is as dumb as he is and says things that no one would fall for. And so his tweets do not concern me. And if you are a political reporter analyst who thinks that Donald Trump can sow division among Democratic voters who hate Donald Trump, then you're engaging some of the laziest political analysis available. Well, I mean, that happens.

So, like, I think the one thing that Donald Trump understands is that a lazy shtick, which is like what he did with those tweets, can sometimes be picked up by the media who can also be very lazy about this stuff. Like he knows, he knows he's leaning into a narrative that exists already in the media and he's just sort of feeding that narrative. He's not doing it in a particularly clever way. It's quite obvious what he's doing to us at least, but he knows that it will continue to fuel those stories about Democratic disunity. Yeah, it's just a difference between being a chess player and a Tiddlywinks player, which is that he is that, yes, that narrative. Like, we are going to live with the most annoying Biden-Bernie narrative for the rest of time. Yep.

Like, that is going to be there up until the moment Joe Biden wins the presidency. It doesn't matter what Bernie Sanders does. It doesn't matter what AOC plus three does. It does not matter. There will always be a voice somewhere who will get quoted talking about how Bernie voters don't want Biden. And that is likely to be completely disconnected from whatever the polling and data says at that moment.

likely to be completely disconnected from whatever the polling and data says at that moment but when like the smart thing to do if you were trump would be to stand back and let that happen but when you put your um your imprimatur of dishonesty and tackiness on it it makes it harder to believe yes the press will definitely cover, but stories about it that aren't fueled by Donald Trump's tweets would be more effective for his evil and malicious cause. So what does Biden have to do next? What should be the first few things on his list now that he's the nominee? I think the first one is organizational.

He has to scale up. You know, he went into Super Tuesday completely bankrupt with, and he had essentially no staff in any of the Super Tuesday states. So he is further behind organizationally than any previous nominee. And so he has a lot of work to do, and he unfortunately has to do massive fundraising, massive hiring, massive planning at a time in which none of his campaign staff can be in the same room. of planning at a time in which none of his campaign staff can be in the same room. Yeah.

And no real fundamental sense of the timing of when you could actually put people on the ground in these states. And so there's a massive organization. We had the advantage of essentially in 2008 knowing we were going to be the nominee back in May. And we had six weeks until we officially became the presumptive nominee to begin planning. We were raising money at an incredible clip and had a much, much larger staff than Biden has right now. And so he's got work to do there. The second thing is, is the one we talked about, which is he's got to get about the work of unifying the party. And putting that forward, that's responding to this letter from the youth groups.

It's thinking about personality. It's how do you get, uh, standards involved. And I think the other one is they really need to figure out how you, and, and I know they're doing all these things. So apologies for being also being kept an obvious here,

but I think the, the fundamental task is figuring out how you communicate in trump's media environment and how you get in the pandemic in the pandemic media environment yeah so you have a you have even if like the pandemic i mean easter is sunday so we'll be back to normal uh by next by the time you podcast on monday um but like that actually exacerbates all the other problems but even in it it, if you were to adjust for, for, uh, our normalcy, a thing we barely remember, um, communicating in a general election is a fundamentally different task than communicating in a primary because a primary is largely about reaching hyper engaged voters who pay attention to traditional

media sources, right? Who watch Rachel Maddow, who listen to Pod Save America, obviously the two most important media sources in America. But in a general election, you're now trying to reach voters who are not as engaged. And now you're taking on Trump. And so figuring that out and adjusting your staffing and strategy and plans to that has to be high on the list. Yeah, I mean, you know, first up was sort of doing more television and more interviews. And he's done that. But I think you and I have talked about this, that the next step is if he wants all of that covered, he's going to start making news.

And you can make news in various ways. You can make news by proposing policies or talking about new policies. He can challenge Donald Trump on something. He can challenge reporters to press Donald Trump on something. You know, like there's there's a whole bunch of different ways to make news. And I do think it's much harder in this environment. It's going to take a lot more creativity. make news. And I do think it's much harder in this environment. It's going to take a lot more creativity. But I think that they have not yet succeeded in wrestling the microphone away from

Donald Trump much at all. And part of it is just like, you know, yesterday, Donald Trump did his briefing and Joe Biden had already scheduled a virtual town hall. Now, did they know when they scheduled their virtual town hall that that would be the time that Trump did the briefing? Probably not. But what it meant was no one saw Joe Biden's virtual town hall and everyone watched Donald Trump's briefing. And this is going to continue happening. We can scream at the networks for coverage, but I don't know that that's going to get us very far. And so it's going to be up to the Biden campaign to figure out how to get him attention. And there is a question for them in this context of, do you try to go through or do you go around? And I'm sure it is infuriating in the Biden campaign

that the networks won't cover his events at all, let alone near the level that they communicate Trump's. But that is not a problem they can fix. It's always hard to get the microphone from a president when you're the challenger. That's one of the reasons why challengers rarely beat incumbents is the media infrastructure advantage that incumbents have. And that's particularly true in a national crisis that we are in. So are there ways to communicate that are not dependent on the national media? Because Biden is not actually competing with Trump. He's competing with Trump and the Cuomos. Right. Right?

I mean, Cuomo is filling the role in the Republican-Democrat both sides narrative, right? And I shouldn't even say it that way. It's not both sides. It's in pox on both your houses, both sides false narrative, false equivalency. It's just we have a Republican president and there's going to be a Democratic response. And that Democratic response right now is Governor Cuomo because he is the governor of New York at a time in which New York is also going through the crisis. And then he has this great story in terms of content about his brother. And so it's very compelling television. story in terms of content about his brother. And so it's very compelling television. So can you go around the national media? Can you do more alternative media? Can you do more sort of self-generated content, which they've tried with his podcast and newsletter?

Can you do local media, right? Can you get to the people in your battleground states without depending on a news executive at CNN or MSNBC to deem what you have to say newsworthy. And I think I'm sure they're thinking of all those things. And it's largely a logistical execution thing. But you're not going to win the battle with Trump for news coverage on coronavirus in the middle of this. So you're going to have to there's going to be some alternative tactics and strategies. All right.

When we come back, we will have Alex Wagner, the host of Crooked Media's new podcast, Six Feet Apart, on to talk about pandemic politics. With us this morning, the host of Crooked Media's newest podcast, Six Feet Apart, the one, the only Alex Wagner. Alex, we're very excited you're here. We're very excited you're officially part of the Crooked Media family. Oh, man. I'm so thrilled. I pinch myself every morning. I'm like, is it true? Is it true, universe? Am I really host of a Crooked Media platform? I am. I'm actually entirely deeply indebted to you, Jon Favreau, for greenlighting the whole harebrained concept or convincing other people to over at Crooked Media. It was a brilliant idea as soon as I heard it. Talk a little bit about the podcast before we get into our pandemic stuff.

Sure. Well, I mean, we are all consuming almost a sort of like drinking from the firehose of pandemic related information. I think we've all become armchair epidemiologists, which is not something I think most of the country thought it would be circa 2020. But here we are. And I think that the inclination to stay informed is a totally reasonable one. And it's obviously a deeply traumatic time for the country. But it occurred to me that we are thinking about this or we're digesting information about the pandemic in fairly singular fashion. We're not thinking about it and processing it through the sort of sociocultural lens. And the virus is touching every part of our society. If you are an actor or a baseball player or a ballerina or an undertaker or, you know, a grocer, you are dealing with the pandemic.

And each one of you is dealing with it in a different way. And it seemed to me that there are so many incredible human stories in all of this. And some of them are deeply distressing and some of them are hilarious, and some of them are heartbreaking. And so that's what the podcast Six Feet Apart is dedicated to, which is telling those stories and opening up that window into the wide world of what is happening as the virus touches all of us and sort of reshapes lives in real time. So each week we interview another cross-section of humanity. And this week we're talking about rituals, religious rituals, funeral rites, the things that have been disrupted in this time of crisis at precisely the moment that we need them.

It's such a great podcast. It is a way to both continue to consume coronavirus news, but not in the way that most of the media is delivering it to us, which is through the lens of Donald Trump and the politics. Yeah, yeah. Or like this is the curve and this is how we're flattening it and this is the number of deaths you can expect. Yeah, I think it's like a binary proposition right now, but obviously it's so... I mean, I do think it's not an overstatement when people say this is the defining event of our lifetimes, and we have just begun to begin to grapple with that. And this is one way of helping us all collectively sort of process what's going on. How does the podcast

change when the country reopens on Monday for Donald Trump? Well, I mean, I think it's just going to be like, who is running the ticker tape parade? How did they get that much confetti? Where is the confetti being warehoused? What does the third term of the Trump administration look like? I think, you know, Dan, you bring up a question, which is when does i mean how long does the podcast go on how long are we in this thing i don't know you know i do think it's we are gonna be underneath this thing for a long time much longer than i think anyone has imagined yeah um thus far that's a good segue because now that you have um very helpfully broadened the lens through which we look at this narrow this pandemic we are now going to narrow it

back to um what we were just talking about which is uh donald trump's desire to and the and the right-wing media's desire to sort of open up the country again um so i read uh brian stelter's very good nightly news on Tuesday night. It comes out so damn late, though. I always read it in the morning. Gotta live on that West Coast. It's great. Gotta live on the West Coast for it.

Gotta live on that West Coast. You're damn right. It's better than living in New York City right now. Anyway, go ahead, my friend. I got very mad because what I do is I read things all day long to make me mad, which is a good way to deal with this pandemic. And in the newsletter, it said, quote, some of the biggest

names in right wing media are questioning the official COVID-19 death toll. Indeed, they're suggesting the numbers might be inflated in an effort to paint Donald Trump in the worst possible light. This includes Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Tucker Carlson, Brit Hume. Brit Hume floated a conspiracy that a lot of people with COVID-19 are actually dying of something else, so they shouldn't count. More than 15,000 Americans have died in basically a month's time. Alex, why are these Trump pundits trying to lie about the number of deaths? Because it is a catastrophically bad thing for the Trump administration to say nothing, of course, of the human tragedy, which is paramount in all of this. But there's no I mean, there's literally I mean, Trump has tried every sort of like Heisman maneuver to push off. Is that what Heisman did

to to avoid actually having to take responsibility for this or admit in any way that perhaps he did the wrong thing? And so we've now reached the point, in fact, earlier than I thought we would, where Trump is effectively spawning 9-11 truthers for the coronavirus, which is, I mean, I want to say it's shocking because you think like, wow, that that could not happen en masse. You could not actually get right wing echo chamber to buy into that when they know people in their own communities who are dying. But I think that's where we're at in American politics. I went to Russia two years ago as part of this other show that I host on Showtime called The Circus. And the playbook that they were running

over there about disinformation and lies as a way to dampen people's enthusiasm and fundamentally get them to buy out of the political process was hugely effective. And I think that this sort of similar playbook is being run here, which is if you can't convince people, confuse them into either submission or confuse them into walking away from the process entirely. And I feel like that's sort of, I think that's where we're at. I think that's what you're seeing. Dan, do you think this can be effective here with a pandemic where people know people who are sick and dying? And we should probably also take a minute just to talk about why this conspiracy is so crazy in the first place.

Well, if we were to just live in sort of Republican intellectual world and just reject the idea of science right now, let's just use common sense, right? So basically, if you take the Brit Hume argument, he is saying that there are a bunch of people who happen to have coronavirus who are dying for other reasons, and that we are counting them in the coronavirus death toll. Now, he's not referring to someone with coronavirus getting hit by a bus. What he is saying is that there are people who have heart problems, respiratory conditions, heart problems, respiratory conditions, other diseases who die while they have coronavirus. So just think about what are the odds, just what are the odds that in the 14-day or so period in which you have coronavirus, you just happen to die from your heart condition or your respiratory

condition with no connection to the underlying lethal virus that exacerbates all of those conditions. Even if that were to happen, how many possible people could that be that it would fundamentally change the numbers? It is an insane proposition. And it's hard to believe that they can even make it with a straight face, but I guess that's sort of where we are. I also think the other way to think about this is that unskewing the fatality numbers is the logical extension of birtherism. Yeah. Right?

It is, basically, we are ashes to ashes in conspiracy theories right now. And can you convince anyone of this? No. What you're doing is you're giving a talking point to your supporters who will support you no matter what. And you're doing exactly what Alex is pointing out, which is you're just making it confusing to people who either do not engage with the news at the same extent that we do and have inherent skepticism of institutions. And therefore, it's sort of like one side says this, one side says that. I'm sure it's somewhere in the middle. And you can maybe convince people it's not as bad as the Democrats

say, even if it's not as good as Trump says. Well, to Alex's point, too, it is showing some effectiveness. Gallup did a poll about right-wing media watchers versus viewers of CNN, MSNBC, readers of The New York Times, Vox, etc. 57% of the right wing media watchers believe COVID is no more deadly than the flu compared to 28% of people who consume normal media. to 28% of people who consume normal media. 71% of the right-wing media folks believe that the media is paying too much attention to this versus 28% of everyone else. And then, of course, 94% of people who consume right-wing media think Trump's doing a good job compared to only 11% of everyone else. Those are some pretty striking figures, right, Alex? Yeah. And I would say, look, you would think this is different because it's not like an event that happens elsewhere. It's an event that's unfolding in people's backyards and in their own communities.

And their local officials are going to have a vested interest in taking it seriously and not being deniers, right? So that's a point in favor of the truth. At the same time, the economic pain from this is so real and could be so prolonged that I think people are going to be looking for a way to escape it or to get out of it or find someone to blame. And in that way, Trump, you know, saying this isn't a big deal. We need to open back up. Those two arguments go hand in hand. And then that that I think is most dangerous, right?

Because if you're a small business owner in a red state who's a Trump supporter and you haven't really lost anyone to this and you've heard about the deaths, but they're not on your doorstep in the same way, you are going to be, I think, naturally inclined to say, let's get over this. And then if you have your news outlets of choice saying, is it really that bad? That's kind of a perfect storm. And I can imagine if this drags on for many more months or weeks, people are going to want to believe that it's not a big deal. People are going to want to believe that the death toll isn't that big because they're going to want to get back to normal. Well, you can see how the right-wing media is already preparing to blame the economic fallout on public health officials, who you know they're just going

to treat as like the next deep state, right? Rush Limbaugh said this week, 10 million people have lost their jobs. That's not enough for people like Bill Gates. That's not enough for people who want to shoot down the entire country. Dan, what do you think about this strategy? Do you think that Trump will get there as well, where he's just going to start blaming all economic pain on public health officials and elected officials who are trying to protect their populations? I mean, he's basically there already, right? It's awkward when he does it with Deborah Birx and Fauci standing right there. But it is the subtext to everything he's saying. It's a subtext about the open up by Easter. This isn't as bad as people say. He's already touting the tremendous victory of models going from 140,000 dead Americans to 80,000 dead Americans.

And so he is going, like that is what he's going to do. I think there are some, we just always have to separate out the people who are going to vote for Trump no matter what in this conversation, because they are going to vote for Trump no matter what in this conversation, because they are going to repeat what he says, whether they believe it or not. And it has zero impact on the election, right? Yeah. So for the rest of the public, is this necessarily an effective strategy? Probably not. And there are two reasons for that, which is public health officials, and Dr. Fauci specifically, have incredibly high ratings in polls in terms of

who they trust, right? In one recent poll, 76% of Americans trusted Dr. Fauci, right? So it's going to be hard for Trump, whose trust numbers are in the low 40s to beat that, right? Republicans and Democrats trust their local officials, in some cases by 20 and 30 points more than they trust the Trump administration. And so this is sort of a little bit where the chickens come home to roost of Trump not caring at all about his own personal credibility, is then when you get in a credibility battle with others, you will lose that. And so I think it's gonna be very hard for Trump to assign blame on some other entity, governors, public health officials for the economic pain. But that does not mean that voters are naturally going to blame Trump for it. It is very likely that absent

very strong persuasive messaging for Democrats, a lot of voters will look at the economic pain and say, who could possibly have expected or dealt with this, right? Trump's not great. He didn't do a great job handling it, but I can't really blame him for this. This would have happened under any president. And tying his lack of preparation, his policies, the inadequacy of the response to the economic pain is going to be a critical part of our message. of the response to the economic pain is going to be a critical part of our message. The thing I wanted to add to that piece is that, you know, if I were the Trump administration, which obviously I'm not, nor will I ever be, even if they offer me that press secretary job,

is that, you know, there is a piece in the New York Times and the world's leading sort of epidemiologists and viral scientists have determined that the virus was circulating in New York City in February and that the transmission rates, the community transmission rates in the United States were actually a lot earlier than anybody thought. And if I were in the Trump White House running off of this, let's blame China for the virus narrative, that is a data point that I would seize on. And I would use it to effectively whitewash what has been an incalculably almost criminal response

on the part of this administration. I would use that to whitewash the behavior and the decision-making inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and say, you know what? The Chinese hid this for months. It was here before we even knew it. Only the CIA maybe could have determined what was happening well before December 31st inside China. And I can imagine a world in which up against a wall heading into November,

this idea of once again trying to pivot back to outside, you know, bad actors as the real root problem of this. And the Chinese, as we know, Trump loves talking about China armed with, you know, some facts from actual science. You know, you can you can feel out a line of argument there for the Trump White House. I was I was just going to ask. I've started wondering if, you know, Trump needs an argument now against Biden that is not Biden's corrupt and there's Hunter and all this other like because everything is about the pandemic now. And I'm wondering if his argument is going to be as we get to the fall and there's potentially another wave of infections by then, as it tends to happen with some of these viruses, that he's going to say, I'm the guy who wants to open up the economy. I'm the guy who wants to help fight for your jobs.

And Joe Biden and all his public health official liberals and the liberal media, they want to keep you at home because they are trying to beat us. They're trying to beat me. And he sort of morphs it into this argument where it's Democrats on one side who hate jobs and the economy and just want to, you know, save the sick people and Republicans. Well, the nanny state, the nanny state, the nanny state that knows what's better for you than you yourself. Yeah. I mean, I guess, you know, the flip side of that is there's people's real experiences, right? Which is, yes, you want to go back to work. Yes, you want the economy to start again. But if going back to work means going into crowds of big crowds of people again,

and you see that every time we lift social distancing measures, suddenly there's another wave of infections. Do you really think it's a good idea to make everyone go back to work? Right. And that's the thing. This isn't happening in the abstract. You know, I talked to a funeral home director who's working 20 hours a day. I talked to funeral home directors outside of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, precisely the areas that Trump is going to have to win. And they are going to be scarred coming out of this. I mean, there are families that are being taken down by this whose mothers and fathers are dying, but they can't inter them. They have to go to the cemeteries and stay in their cars. You don't forget that. That is a seismic event in your existence as a human being. And so that's why the prognostication about how you message

politically around this, I think the wisdom around that is probably mostly out the window because what Americans are dealing with is these are like the basic contours of humanity, right? Like this is like existence on planet earth. And so to try and counter that with like, you know, a tested narrative, I don't, I just, I don't know how I, I don't know how you predict any of it. I don't think he wants to open the economy as much as he wants to be seen as being the one trying to open the economy.

Right. Right. He is trying to use his opportunity. He always just needs to be seen as the fighter, even if he doesn't get stuff done. And I think that's what he wants to do. And he wants to be seen as the person fighting for working people against liberals and elites. Now, one of the problems for Trump in this is that the elites

here are not Hollywood stars or Silicon Valley billionaires. They are scientists and doctors. And scientists and doctors are, to the 2020 election, what firefighters were to the 2004 election, right? They are going to be the single most influential influencers in terms of how people see things, because they have demonstrated their necessity and expertise in this moment. And so I think this is going to be, no matter what happens going forward, most likely an election that is incredibly close. And so none of these strategies or messages have to be universally effective, right? They just have to work on the margins for this to matter. And we're talking about a very small sliver of voters in three to

four states where Trump just has to convince or Joe Biden has to convince. And in that situation, any of these messages can work. I don't think any of them, we should expect any of them to, on our side or Trump's side, to change this from a 48, 47 vote in Wisconsin to 53, 42 or whatever, right? It's just we're operating in a very narrow political world. And I don't, like anything can change. No one predicts in the future. But you have to plan for an election that exists within the narrow bounds of a polarized partisan America with a Republican Electoral College advantage.

And in that sense, anything's possible. Well, so so let's end then by talking about voting in November. The entire Democratic Party and many Republicans want to make it safer to vote in the fall, at least safer than it was on Tuesday in Wisconsin. Democrats in Congress want to see expanded vote by mail, early voting and other measures in the phase four relief bill. Donald Trump and other Republicans have said they're opposed to making voting safer and easier. On Tuesday, Trump was asked why it's OK for him to vote by mail and not everyone else.

Here's the exchange. We're highly critical of mail-in voting, mailing your mail-in ballots for voting. I think mail-in voting is horrible. You voted by mail in Florida's election last month. Sure, I could vote by mail for that. How do you reconcile that? Because I'm allowed to. Well, that's called out of state. You know why I voted? Because I happen to be in the White House and I won't be able to go to Florida and vote.

What's the difference between mailing within's out of state and does a ballot and everything's sealed, certified and everything else. You see what you have to do with the certifications. And you get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody's living room signing ballots all over the place. No, I think that mail-in voting is a terrible thing. I think if you vote, you should go. And even the concept of early voting is not the greatest because a lot of things happen, but it's okay. But you should go and you should vote. I think you should go and you should vote. You look at what they do where they grab thousands of mail-in ballots and they dump it. I'll tell you what, and I don't have to tell you, you can look at the statistics. There's a lot of dishonesty going along with

mail-in voting, mail-in ballots. So last night, he seemed to take yet another position when he tweeted, quote, absentee ballots are a great way to vote for the many senior citizens, military, and others who can't get to the polls on Election Day. These ballots are very different from 100 percent mail in voting, which is ripe for fraud and shouldn't be allowed. Alex, what's he up to here? And where's where's this coming from? Yeah, well, I mean, it's just sort of naked partisanship, right? Oh, if you're going to vote for me, it's fine. Then absentee ballots. No problem. if you're going to vote for me, then absentee ballots, no problem. Also, we have ventilators,

masks, all kinds of PPE if you have voted for me or you live in a state with someone who is allegiant to me. So, you know, this is the true battle beyond obviously getting our hands around the virus is job number one. But job number two is figuring out what happens in November. And, you know, everybody watched the scenes unfold at districts in Wisconsin. And I mean, I had to stop watching at a certain point because it was so deeply troubling to me. And if that is what happens in November, then we are in deep trouble. I mean, on so many levels, on a human level, on a sort of basic functionality level, and then obviously in terms of politics and the implications there. I mean, sorry, what was the question?

What is Trump doing? He wants to win. You know, like initially when this happened, I thought, oh, he's gonna just postpone the election. And now it's just, oh no, no, this is the last chapter of the voter suppression playbook, which is let them risk their own lives to try and take you out of office.

I don't understand. I would like to know what Schumer and Pelosi, what the conversations are in terms of how they do this, because I am sort of confused that this didn't come up. I am surprised that this is not something they've been fighting for earlier and with more ferocity. And that makes me worried. Dan, one thing I've been wondering is, is the way to get this done somehow making it less polarized and less partisan and pointing to things like, you know, there's five states with universal vote by mail. There's plenty of elected Republicans in all those states. Secretary of State in Ohio and Governor DeWine in Ohio, both Republicans, were tweeting the other day about how they're making it easier to vote by mail, absentee voting.

Like, do you start pointing to all the Republican officials out there who are trying to do the right thing on this? I mean, National Review just had a piece about how to why we should expand, which is, you know, conservative publication, why we should expand vote by mail, why we should do more drive-through voting, expanded early voting. Like, is that, is the way to do it to try to depolarize this? Or is that just impossible in this environment? And you have to fight like hell or maybe both. I don't think you can depolarize it when the president of the United States goes on national television and accuses vote by mail of being ripe for fraud, which it is not. There's no evidence of that.

And I would just, just one very specific point, which is absentee voting and vote by mail are the exact same thing. Same ballot, same process. The only difference is in some states, you're required to state that you will be absent from the state or unable to vote for some other reason. You're out of town, family obligations, health reasons, all of that. You know what's a great absentee excuse? A fucking pandemic, right? And so I don't think you can depolarize it. I think you can win

the argument in two ways. One is, yes, show the example in Ohio, show Republicans and conservatives who have been for vote by mail and that it can work is one. Two, and I think this is one of the mistakes that Democrats always make when it comes to discussing voter suppression, is we say Republicans don't want people to vote, but we never say why, right? And I think that is the connection that we have to make. We have to explain that the reason that they do not want the majority of Americans to participate in the electoral process is because if the majority of Americans participate in the electoral process, they would vote out politicians who supported

cutting Medicare to pay for tax cuts. They would vote out politicians who wanted to overturn Roe versus Wade or roll back civil rights. They would vote out politicians who refuse to acknowledge climate change. Democrats have won the majority position on a whole host of our policy priorities, but we've been unable to put those in place because Republicans have been able to restrict the will of the majority. And so you have to draw the connection between what they're doing and why they're doing it. I think that's an important part. I am very nervous about Democrats' ability to get this in the final package here. And I think this is a problem with Democrats going back many, many years, including when

we worked in the White House, which is Republicans are willing to fight like hell and sacrifice political capital for their voter suppression agenda. And Democrats have been unwilling to do so to the same extent for a voter expansion agenda. Alex, what do you think is the do you think what do you think of the chances that Pelosi and Schumer can get this in the next bill? I'm like I said, I'm really worried. I mean, I think that they're making the choice that I think they optically did not want to be litigating that issue in a moment of great economic pain of, you know, human tragedy. And I mean, maybe that was the reason, but I agree with Dan. I mean, I just think there to assume that you can use reason and logic and sort of the collective

good as a cudgel effectively in negotiations. I don't know if that works. I mean, I just think what happened in Wisconsin proves that there is no ceiling or there is no basement, I should say, in terms of the tactics. It was I mean, I just we should be talking about it every day. And we should, by the way, be following up with and maybe we'll on the new podcast you are going to have people that have literally put their health on the line to participate in democracy. I think Republicans, especially Republicans in Wisconsin, especially Donald Trump, are very comfortable with using all the power they have and all the leverage they have, even in very insidious ways. And I think the one place where Democrats have leverage right now is saying there will not be another relief bill unless there is something done about

voting in that bill. And we should be clear, and I'm sure this is what concerns Pelosi and Schumer, that if they say that, then, you know, there's going to be screaming from Donald Trump that everyone's going to hear screaming from the Trump that everyone's going to hear, screaming from the Republicans that Democrats are standing in the way of economic recovery and relief to small business owners and people who are out of a job because of their voting scheme that they're trying to slip into the bill. And they're very good at spinning their sources, their Hill reporters. you know, spinning their sources, their Hill reporters when, you know, when Mitch McConnell decides to do this. And you'll hear I have a bunch of stories about did Democrats make a mistake here? Yeah. And how many illegal immigrants are they going to get to vote for their party if we give them mail in ballots? I mean, you can hear it coming from the Trump White House. And also it'll just be covered as a partisan fight. Both sides can't come together to provide

relief for people. And you know that the Democrats in Congress are scared of these headlines. And, you know, they're going to come. But this is the only way to fight for this. This is the only way to get it done is put your foot down. And so you have to be confident in your own message about the importance of safe voting. And you have to be able to willing to take what's surely going to be political heat, both from the right and sort of a both sidesy message from the media to get this done. I don't see any other way. You think they just got to grin and bear it? I think they have to. Otherwise, this doesn't get done. Back when we were trying to pass Obamacare, we used to say the only people who believe

Republican talking points are Democratic members of Congress. And that's the real fear here is, and it's not like we tend to put all of this on Pelosi and Schumer and always be like, why won't they do the right thing? And it's so important to recognize, particularly when it comes to Pelosi, is that she is dealing with a very large and very unwieldy caucus that includes a lot of people who are very nervous about their elections, even if we weren't in the middle of a pandemic, because they are in districts that Trump won or that will be very close this time around. And so I'm sure if it was just Nancy Pelosi and she was able to just make the decision all herself with no other things that she would demand this, right?

And I think Schumer, if he was not trying to hold a caucus together that has Joe Manchin and others would probably do that. But we have this very big tent, ideologically diverse party, and it makes it harder for us to do what Republicans do, which is to stick together in these moments. Now, it doesn't mean we shouldn't do it and shouldn't try to do it, but the challenge is always harder than those of us on the outside think. I mean, I do think that that's why finding a few elected Republicans, whether in the states or in Congress, who want this to happen as well is important

because then it gives some bipartisan cover to some of the more scared Democratic members who might not be as willing to put their foot down for this. Mitt Romney is in a state in Utah that does all mail-in voting and has for a long, long time. Cory Gardner. Cory Gardner is. Someone should ask them what they think about the safety of mail-in voting since they both live in states and were elected in states where they have all mail-in voting. That might be a good idea. Cory Gardner actually is the example that a lot of people point to, which is that vote by mail is not as universally beneficial to Democrats as some of us might think.

Because 2014 was the first election in which Colorado was all vote by mail. And Cory Gardner won that election in what is a pretty blue state now by a relatively large margin. Also, I think it just bears mentioning quickly that this isn't the same kind of – I won't say it was an academic argument to begin with, but this isn't happening in a vacuum. And I do think there's an appeal to be made to Republican officials, Republican leaders. This is not just a question of like who wins. This is a question of whose lives are at risk. And the virus does not know party. and the virus does not know party. And if you want to keep your people safe, if the sort of first part of your oath of office is to not harm the people you represent, then here is the first thing you need to do. I agree with that.

Okay, when we come back, we will have Dan's interview with Stacey Abrams. I'm joined now by the former Democratic leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, the 2018 Democratic gubernatorial candidate and the founder of Fair Fight, Stacey Abrams. Welcome back to Pod Save America. Thank you for having me yet again. Before we get into a bunch of very serious topics, how are you doing? How are you navigating quarantine? Everything okay with you?

As an introvert, it has been not nearly as bad as for my extrovert friends and family. So I'm being compelled to do that, which I would probably and otherwise do sometimes on my own volition. Yeah. My wife has pointed out that I've been social distancing much of my life. So I should be fine with this. Yeah, you know, it's just deeper practice. We're just better than others. That's right. That's right. You knew it would come in handy one day. I want to start with Wisconsin. I want to get your reaction

to what happened there on Tuesday, where voters were forced to choose between exercising their right to vote and keeping themselves safe from a life-threatening virus. So your reaction to what happened in Wisconsin and whether you think that's a preview for what we could see in November? Well, I think the answer to both. The first is it was a travesty and it was a naked power grab that shows just how indifferent to human suffering there some people are in order to hold on to power. And I think it's absolutely a preview of the fall. One of the reasons we launched Fair Fight 2020 in 2019, and why we focus so heavily on raising those funds that you all were so kind to help us raise, was that we knew that the primaries were going to be emblematic of what happens in the general. We have to understand that voter suppression isn't incidental and it isn't episodic.

It happens in every election because it's built into the systems. And because the systems are, because they exist, because we get used to them, those who have the ease of voting never notice the pitfalls and the challenges. And those who are harmed by it often stay out of the process because they are so used to the malfeasance and the misfeasance that are embedded in the system. And that's what's getting folks now, but it's not going to disappear by November. It's just going to be amplified. How has Fair Fight changed its plans and its thinking, given the very real possibility that we can be in the middle of continued social distancing and a pandemic on election day in November? Well, first of all, we entered the process thinking that the worst could happen. And because we live in a state where they have tried many of the more egregious efforts

at voter suppression, we knew that the goal of our organization was to be set up in the battleground states, battleground for the presidency, for the Senate, for the House, but also those down ballot races that will determine what happens with redistricting in the next decade. We knew something bad was going to happen, and we needed to understand the contours and the architecture of every single state. What's happened is that we are prepared. We cannot stop it because, as we saw yesterday or on Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States has no interest in actually meting out justice, except for what may or may not have been an accident with their postmark decision. But what it put into sharp relief is that what we do is necessary. We had folks on the ground.

In fact, I talked to our voter protection director this morning, and he was both despondent about what happened to voters and the number of calls that he got, hundreds of calls he received. But he also was energized because he knows what they've got to fight. And now we've got the remaining months to scale up and arm ourselves for what's going to happen. But the other piece of it is this, because it is systemic, we have to recognize that bureaucracy is slow to change. And this notion that we can wait until September or October to know what we need to do in November ignores just how hard it was to fix a primary. Bureaucracy doesn't move fast. That's why we've had all of these preparations will be for naught. But if we don't prepare for it, we will have a collapse of our democratic system, the likes of which we have

never seen. What is a safe and fair election in a pandemic look like? What are the specific things you would want to see states do to protect the right to vote and protect people's health? First of all, we have to recognize that the safest election allows for every person who is eligible to have access to the right to vote and that we should steer them to the process that is the most effective and the most accessible for them. So I think about it like this. If you have 100 people who otherwise might line up at a polling

place on election day, you want to sift them out as much as possible before they have to get in that line. So number one, we need vote by mail. Vote by mail is available in every state. The issue is it is hard to use in a number of states. And so we need available vote by mail for every voter. It needs to be postage paid. It needs to not have signature matching laws that are hard, in fact, that are disqualifying. And there needs to be a clear process where everyone can have access. So for example, in Alabama, you have to have an excuse, or in Texas, Texas is a better example. Texas requires an excuse. The Texas democratic parties filed suit today to make sure that excuse is lifted because the excuse should be, I don't want to die.

I should be able. So that's first, we need vote by mail. The second is that we need early voting to be made safe because there are populations who will not be able to vote by mail. If you are disabled, you may need to go into a polling place because you need the machines that are specially dedicated for your use. If you have a language barrier, you may need help and assistance with your ballot. If you are homeless, you are not going to be receiving a vote from home ballot. And we are going to have a huge population of people who are displaced by COVID-19 because not every state is abiding by this notion that you shouldn't be evicted because you can't work because it's against the law to go to work. And so we have to anticipate those populations.

But if we have that 100 people, if we get 75 of them out of the line through vote by mail, and 15 more of them out of the line because they get to vote early, by the time we get to election day, you've got 10 people who can socially distance six feet apart and safely abide by CDC guidelines. That's how you create a safe and effective process. The Republicans, including President Trump, people known to argue in good faith about things, have been screaming about the potential for fraud in vote by mail. Can you explain why that is ridiculous? So if you remember in 2017, Donald Trump convened a voter fraud task force. It was so ineffective at finding examples of voter fraud, they disbanded the task force rather than having to issue a report

because the report would have said, nah, doesn't exist. And that wasn't going to conform to his lies, to the story he wants told about the election that has passed and the election to come. If it is so unsafe, as you all very ably pointed out, then why does he use the vote by mail system? Because he voted by mail. So did Steve Mnuchin. So is there argument only wealthy people should be able to vote by mail because only wealthy people can be trusted? I don't think that's what Republicans want to say. I think that is their argument, though. I don't think they want that to be on their bumper sticker. And so what we have to do is educate people to understand that it is incredibly safe to vote by mail if we have safeguards. And those safeguards are easy to put in place because every state

already has them. What they need are the resources to scale them up. And that scaling up is exactly why you need to start doing it now. And it's exactly why Fear Fight was created. We want it to be in place to have the best information and to know what the pitfalls are so that by the time we have a nominee, the nominee can come in and scale up the apparatus. Part of my background is that I build organizations. And you build organizations, you start with the fundamental premise, but then you try to build the infrastructure and train the leaders so that anyone can make it work. And our intention is that we can scale this up in 18 states and we can protect the election in those vital states that are going to determine the future of the republic.

So Congress is right now beginning the process of talking about a phase four COVID bill. And there has been this debate within the party about what to include in terms of election assistance and security in that bill and whether to make democratic support of such a rescue bill contingent upon inclusion of election measures like vote by mail? What would your message be to Congress as they're having that debate? And are there specifics that you would like to see in that bill? The premise of the bill is to say that we want to protect lives and jobs. That's essentially what we're saying. But the most effective way to protect lives and jobs is to ensure that everyone has

participation and those who will be in charge of their lives and in charge of their economy in the next decade. So that can only happen if we fix the machinery, the only machinery available for selecting those leaders. That's an election. And the election does not move. No matter what Donald Trump wants to recommend, the election cannot be moved from November 3rd. And so the reality is preserving the fundamentals of our democracy has to be on par with saving lives and saving jobs because our democracy is this infrastructure that we use to do both. If we have better infrastructure, we would have a public health system that is capable of actually responding to a foreseeable crisis

and to the unforeseeable, they could react faster. If we have the right government, we can fix the job bills so that the rich don't get wealthier because we have a lot of small businesses that can't access the very resources that are being offered. The other piece I would put in place just deepens the saving lives and saving jobs. We have to remember and recognize that there are a lot of workers in our workforce who do not bank and who do not have access to, who don't file tax returns. Right now, they are not eligible to receive the resources that we've allocated. We've got to solve for those folks. We need to recognize that the most economically vulnerable and the least resilient are the most likely to not receive

any aid in this process. And the only way we change that is by fixing the immediate crisis, by sending resources to them, and by making sure that voters in November can pick better leaders because the ones we have today who have completely botched this process, making sure that they get to go home and think about their mistakes while we bring new leaders to the process. Speaking of leaders who have botched the process, I wanted to ask you about what's going on in your state of Georgia. Governor Kemp has offered, I would generously say, erratic leadership on the coronavirus crisis. Originally, waited very long time to put in place stay-at-home orders. And after doing that, immediately signed another order to open the beaches. What is happening down there? What have the consequences been in all across Georgia from

that sort of leadership? Well, my critique of him prior to his stay at home order was that the issue of Georgia is that we have 159 counties. We're a massive state. And some of our counties have as few as 2,000 or 3,000 people, and some have as many as a million. And so, yes, there are going to be vagaries in how people can adapt to a blanket order. But the responsible leadership position is to talk about that, to say, here's the blanket order that we will issue. And then if there needs to be exceptions, here are the exceptions, and here is why we're making these exceptions. But instead of taking responsibility, he essentially just, you know, lazed about waiting for each community to make these choices. And the problem is, everything is interconnected. Supply chain doesn't realize that it's on one side of a county border or another. or another. And so what we ended up with was a chaotic system where everyone was making their own decisions and you could literally cross the street and be under a completely separate set of rules. And that was not tenable. So I'm pleased that he finally took responsibility.

I'm displeased that he put communities in jeopardy by opening the beaches. I grew up in a coastal town and people don't call each other and say, I'm going to the beach. You shouldn't show up because we need to socially distance. Everybody shows up. And so today, in fact, he renewed the order for the next month. It's going to extend until May 15th. And my hope is that he will pay closer attention to the most economically vulnerable. In states like Kentucky and Louisiana and North Carolina, those governors have scaled up their public benefits in ways that Georgia just has not, and Georgia has some of the weakest public benefit coverage. We are not an expansion state for Medicaid, which means our most vulnerable

populations are even more at risk, And he could use more of his executive power to actually serve the populations that are in deepest need. And my hope is that he will use his power to do so. A lot of people, including Dr. Fauci, have pointed out that the coronavirus pandemic is putting into relief the broader disparities we've seen in our healthcare system for a really long time, particularly in African American rural communities. What do you hope comes out of our country being forced to confront this problem? My hope is that we will finally take action, that we will fire those who have shown such a marked distaste and lack of interest in their needs, that we will hire new leaders who prioritize

helping the most vulnerable, but also those who understand the notion of government. We've had, and let's be clear, the Republican Party spent 40 years trying to dismantle the public system, the public sector. But that dismantling means that we don't have a public health system that is, again, resilient enough and stable enough to be able to take on this type of crisis. We have a mismatch, or we have both a mismatch and a melange of approaches to healthcare, which means that if you're in one state, in fact, if you go just north, if you go to Kentucky, you've got healthcare. If you go to Georgia, you don't, if you're at the same income bracket. And so we also have to have public

policy that is intentional, not about giving things away, but about giving opportunity by mediating those things that block people from access. And economic hardship tends to visit itself in the same ways in the same communities everywhere. And that is you can't get a job because of undereducation. If you get a job, it doesn't pay you enough. You can't leverage for more pay because you don't have the labor controls that you need. We need leadership that tries to actually address the system,

not socialism, but humanity. And that is that we make it possible for people to have access and to have opportunity and to improve their lives by doing what they can. But we have to recognize there are impediments that are real and concrete and can be addressed. You have spent a lot of time and energy encouraging Americans to fill out the census. How is this pandemic affecting those efforts? How worried are you about affecting the census count? And what can be done to ensure that we have a fair and accurate census? because I'm Southern, and I've been a Black Democrat in the South for a long time. So I tend towards, you know, hoping for the best, working for the best, but assuming the worst. So much like Fair Fight, which was designed to meet the worst possible outcome, Fair Count was

intentionally designed to help the hardest to count communities. Those were the communities that were not going to receive the resources, or're going to see the dregs of the resources needed. And so we have been very nimble. We've been able to take our field teams and turn, instead of them knocking on doors, they're making phone calls, they're texting. We are working on more digital assets. For those who have access to the internet, we had an amazing array of celebrities and thought leaders like the team from Pod Save America ask us questions, and we got thousands of responses. And so we've been able to build into our program a response shifting that lets us continue to touch the people we need to touch. We're launching Sisters for the Census, which is going to help us target Black women. We already have Black Men Count. We have been working in tandem with other national organizations. And we're taking

responsibility for being in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, as well as Georgia, because these are states where the state investment in the census is either negligible or non-existent. And so part of what we built was the idea that we may have to be broader than our initial intent of serving Georgia. And we've proudly actually been helpful in Nevada and Massachusetts and in Illinois, and we pretty much go where we're called. Have you found resistance among people, particularly communities of color, in responding to a census from the Trump administration? Oh, absolutely. And that's been a big part of our work.

We have to dispel the mythology of what is going to happen because it was the intention of the Trump administration to diminish communities of color participation. It began with the most public example was, of course, the citizenship question. But it also included the fact that he eradicated the 39,000 question centers that President Obama put in place. They were going to replace it with this mobile unit that if you happen to be on, it's like waiting for the ice cream truck to come. You never know when it's going to come down your street and what time you have to hope you've got the money you need when it happens. Well, even that half-baked idea has gone, has been scuttled because they can't deploy it. They have had to hold off on submitting the hand-delivered reforms to rural communities, 6.2 million people. A lot of those are communities of color, largely African-American or Latino, if you're in the South and Southwest. And then we know that they have done their best to just make, to underfund it.

So the $5 billion gap was finally filled at the end of 2019, but the GAO has said that it is a critically underfunded process. That said, we can still fight back. One, we have to tell people and remind people that it's safe, that the citizenship question is not on there. The ethnicity questions have always been on there, and they help allocate dollars. Number two, people need to understand that if you have a utility bill, a cell phone, they can already find you. If you answer the census, they can give you the money for what you need. And then number three, we want people to understand that this is financial power,

$1.5 trillion, and it's also political power. It's reapportionment. When they reshift the 435 members of Congress, you can either lose or gain power in your state based on what your count is accurate. And it's how they draw the political lines. The lines are drawn through gerrymandering. That means politicians get to pick their voters. And if it's drawn through a fair redistricting process, it means voters get to pick their leaders. And that's what we are trying to make sure everyone understands about the census. Last question for you. Today, former Vice President Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee. Do you have plans? You've been neutral to date. Can we expect to see an endorsement from you soon? And do you plan to be out on the campaign trail this fall? So on the endorsement,

what I pledged to all of the presidential candidates when we launched Fair Fight 2020, as well as the promise that we made to state and local leaders was that I was going to be neutral because we needed everyone to invest in protecting our democracy. No matter who the nominee was, we needed them to trust that it wasn't the arm of someone else's campaign. And, you know, everyone was very understanding, including Vice President Biden, about why my silence was important to my integrity. You know, I would be honored to be on the campaign trail as a running mate,

but that is a process that you can't campaign for, and I'm not campaigning for it, I'm just being straightforward. But that is a process that you can't campaign for. And I'm not campaigning for just being straightforward. But no matter what, my intention is to ensure that Joseph Biden becomes the next president of the United States. We have to not only write what has been broken, but we have a unique opportunity to fix our democracy. I was asking if I, by someone else, our democracy. I was asking if I, by someone else, if I got to do one thing, what would I do? And what I would do is pass legislation to fix access to the ballot. Our democracy is driven by your ability to get on the rolls, stay on the rolls, have access to a ballot, and have that vote counted. If we use the imprimatur of the federal government to finally pass federal legislation

that guarantees that to every single voter, and if we pass H.R. 4, which will make certain that those who are bad actors are held accountable and that the bad actors pay for their mistakes, not the voters, then we have created a seismic change in how our democracy works, and we will be on the path to progress. And that's what I'd like to see. Stacey Abrams, thank you so much for joining us. We hope to have you on many, many times between now and election day. You're always welcome on Pod Save America. Stay safe out there. You too. Thank you so much and take care of yourselves. thanks to stacy abrams for joining us today and thank you to alex wagner this was fun oh gents this is just like my my turn at the wheel on the breakfast club on power 105 dan of course is charlamagne the god i've never gotten real about hip- and R&B like I did today.

Never gotten down. This is like our turn of the wheel on the circus where John is Mark McKinnon. I was going to say, was I going to be Mark McKinnon? Cool. You're lucky. You won. You won fast. I got the cool hat. Yeah.

Good luck. Good luck to you. Well, the weird twist here is you're Mark McKinnon. I'm Alex Wagner. Alex Wagner is John Hyland. Good, good. All right. Let me go pop another six pieces of Nicorette in my head.

Guys, thank you for having me on. The podcast is Six Feet Apart with Alex Wagner. Please go subscribe. Alex, come back again. This was fun. We'll talk to you all later. Bye, guys. Bye, everyone.

Pod Save America is a product of Cricket Media. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Somanator, Katie Long, Roman Papadimitriou, Caroline Reston, and Elisa Gutierrez for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, Yale Freed, and Milo Kim, Thank you.