Pod Save America - “Fear and Bloomberg in Las Vegas.”

Episode Date: February 18, 2020

Democrats weigh how to confront Trump’s post-impeachment lawlessness, Mike Bloomberg buys himself and his record a lot of attention, and Bernie Sanders looks for another win in Nevada. Then Jon Ralston of the Nevada Independent talks to Jon F. about the caucus ground game and how he’s preparing to moderate the next Democratic debate.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's pod, we'll talk about what's at stake in the Nevada caucus with the help of the best political reporter in the state and a moderator of this week's Democratic debate, Jon Ralston of the Nevada Independent. But first, Dan and I are going to get through a lot of news from the choices facing Democrats in Congress about whether to keep investigating Donald Trump to all the ways Mike Bloomberg is already shaping this primary. Two quick housekeeping notes.

A new episode of Love It or Leave It dropped on Saturday featuring Cara Brown, Larry Wilmore, some guy named Ronan Farrow, who also joined to talk about his podcast, Catch and Kill. Check that out. Great episode. Also, a big thank you to all of you who've helped us raise $150,000 for our Leave It All on the Field Fund. This is our fund to help build the ground game for the Democratic nominee. And to start, we're looking to raise $500,000

to support Organizing Corps 2020, which is recruiting, training, and paying 1,000 organizers on the ground in key battleground states ahead of the general election. To help make this happen, please donate at votesaveamerica.com slash field. Finally, Dan, happy book day.

It's finally here. It's here. It is here. It is here. The book is out today, Untrumming America, A Plan to Make America a Democracy Again is out. Thank you to everyone who pre-ordered it. I will not torture you with a long, overwrought pitch but i hope you if you have already bought it i

hope you enjoy it if you haven't bought it i hope you do uh it's a project that i feel feels more important every day as we head into this next topic on our podcast that's it that was a short perfectly wrought uh pitch it took several months but i but I finally got the right rottenness for a pitch. It's a fantastic book. Everyone, please go buy it. It is incredibly useful in the environment that we find ourselves right now. Okay, let's get to the news. There's a lot of it.

I want to start with Trump, who hasn't learned a single lesson from being impeached, despite what Susan Collins may tell us. He's using the attorney general and the Justice Department to protect his criminal friends and investigate his political enemies. More than 1,000 former DOJ officials, along with nine Democratic senators, have now called on Bill Barr to resign. And a National Association of Federal Judges has just called an emergency meeting over the crisis. It keeps getting worse. Just before we started recording, he commuted the sentence of former Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich. He pardoned Bernie Kerik.

He then said to reporters on the tarmac while he was doing this, I am the chief law enforcement officer in the country, which is not true. Is it not true? It is not true. No, that is the job of me. which is not true. Is it not true? It is not true. It wasn't true. It wasn't true.

Yeah, it wasn't true. That was the job of the Attorney General up until now. So all of this is, you know, very serious, very scary, completely unprecedented. So the question is what to do about it, and the question is what are the Democrats in the House doing? Well, according to the New York Times this weekend, quote, top Democrats say that oversight of the president will continue. But Speaker Nancy Pelosi made clear that the emphasis must shift in a closed door meeting.

She described the party's message as health care, health care, health care. And Hakeem Jeffries, who was one of the impeachment managers, said, quote, Trump's erratic, corrupt, unconstitutional behavior speaks for itself at this point. Dan, is this the right thing to do? And is it the right political strategy for the Democrats at this point? Before I answer, you should know that Brian just, Portler just stormed through the wall like the Kool-Aid man. the wall like the Kool-Aid man. Brian has strong feelings about this, which we all had a friendly debate about in our office slack over the weekend when the story broke. You can start answering the question and I will try to faithfully offer Brian's position on this as well. Look, I think this is the exact right thing to do. And like, I don't want to do narrator voice meme, but this is not an either or. Democrats are going to do oversight. But what they recognize, as every piece of data tells us, is that what voters care about

is healthcare and the economy. And so it's critically important that our candidates, whether they are running for the state legislature, Congress, the governor, or the White House talks about those things. And I think it's important that we don't lose track of that very important fact that what voters care about should drive what we say. Yeah. I also think, I mean, let's work backwards here from the question, what do we do to stop this lawless, reckless behavior, right? Like what is the best, how can we stop it what's the best outcome like let's say the house uses all the investigative power it has subpoenas john bolton which now they say they don't they don't think they're going to do subpoenas all the other doj officials who left or the ones who might have complaints impeaches attorney general bar investigates more

criminality and corruption right like what is the best possible outcome here because is there anything at this point that's going to get any republican to change their mind and say yeah let's let's do another impeachment let's uh let's impeach him for good this time now you know brian will say and brian has said that during impeachment you know the fact that trump was uh being impeached and there were hearings going on in the house like you know the fact that trump was being impeached and there were hearings going on in the house like you know stopped him from from committing even worse crimes but like i don't really think that at this stage a second impeachment hearing or even a whole bunch more house hearings is going to prevent this guy from doing whatever he can to try to win this election, punish his enemies, help his friends.

He's just going to keep doing this because he knows that Republicans, in a moment where he was clearly guilty of that which he was accused of, they protected him, every single one of them, even the so-called vulnerable, moderate Republicans like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. They protected him. They will protect him at all costs. The only way to stop this is to win the election. And if the only way to stop this is to win the election, then you have to ask yourself, what is the best way to win the election? And it is exactly what you just said, Dan. The best way to win the election is to talk about issues that move voters. And what Bill Barr is doing, these are not issues that move voters

as much as issues like healthcare and kitchen table economic issues. That's just the way it is. And no one has presented me or any of us any data that says otherwise. Right. I mean, you did an entire podcast series that talked to voters who answered this question. It's easy to get worked up over this because it's like, it's being framed

as talk about healthcare and let Trump commit all the crimes or try to stop Trump from committing crimes. And you can see why when framed that way, it seems problematic to people because we generally should be at least democratic voters, anti-presidential crimes. But there are entire staffs of people who work for House committees who are going to keep investigating. And if they uncover things, other crimes, corruption, they will expose that to the public. It'll get out. They'll tell reporters. They will do things. They may even have hearings, but we have to recognize two things. One, you point out the most important. Republicans have announced to the world they are pro-presidential crime. So there's nothing we're going to discover, do, say, no hearing, no subpoena, no witness

that is going to change that fact. That can only be changed at the ballot box. The second thing is Trump has thumbed his nose at checks and balances. The second thing is Trump has thumbed his nose at checks and balances. And so I am sympathetic to the position of Pelosi and others, which is if we say we're going to do a bunch of oversight and then end up with no witnesses and no documents, how is that helpful in any way, shape, or form? You know, it's as our old friend, David Axelrod always used to say, you never want to roll out the big cannon.

And then when you light the fuse, a little flag that says Powell comes out, that's sort of how this would be, which is like, we're going to subpoena Bolton. Then we're going to subpoena Bolton. And then Brett Kavanaugh and the Supreme Court are going to say Bolton can't testify. And it's like, until we change the fundamental structural problems that begin with winning this election, we're going to end up right back in this place. Yeah. And I want to really emphasize the point on voters as well. Like, you know, the people that I spoke to in the wilderness focus groups, they do not like Donald Trump. And that includes the people who voted for Donald Trump, the Trump voters, the Obama Trump voters. I spoke to him. I don't like him. They know he's a bad person. They know he's a liar. One One guy in Wisconsin even called him an ass clown.

But they know all that. What they don't know still is that he's coming for their health care. What they don't know is that he's coming for their retirement. What they don't know is that he's coming for their kid's education, that he's taking money from factories in Wisconsin to build his fucking wall, which we just heard about this weekend in a report. They don't know any of that stuff, and they don't like any of that stuff. And we can definitely do both. We can continue investigating and we can have a message that's focused on health care and the economy. But as we all know, a good campaign message requires discipline and it requires prioritization.

And you can't be talking about multiple things every day because then nothing breaks through when you do that you have to choose what's most important to communicate and then you have to have everyone say that and this is what fucking fox news and the republicans do every single day and you know this is true about this issue and like everything else that we're going to talk about like we have to prioritize and we have to have some discipline in what we talk about every day because in this media environment it is very hard to have any single message break through to voters and paid media can help the ads the television ads can can help they certainly did in 2018 but we also need our candidate and all of the allies on the left everyone basically everyone who doesn't want

donald trump to become president to be singing from the same hymnal. And we will be saying this 5 million times between now and November, I feel like. Because we understand that repetition is important. We will be singing from the same hymnal repeatedly until November. Yes, that's right, Dan. All right, let's talk about Mike Bloomberg, who's already spent a few hundred million dollars to get a lot of attention, and he has. And he doesn't even seem to mind that a lot of it has been negative.

So last week we talked about the stop and frisk stories. We have talked about his redlining comments. But now over the weekend and the days before that, there has been quite a few more stories. Here's just a few examples. We are definitely leaving some out because this is only an hour or so, this podcast. He compared both the ACLU and teachers unions to the NRA, said they were all extremists. He said he's never been in favor of raising the minimum wage. He talked about cutting Social Security and Medicare. He called Obamacare a disgrace. And The Washington Post did a story about how dozens of sexual harassment and discrimination

lawsuits have been filed against his company, mostly in the 90s, including a woman who alleged that Bloomberg told her to, quote, kill it when he learned she was pregnant and a complaint that he yelled the following at an employee who was having a hard time finding a nanny quote it's a fucking baby all it does is eat and shit it doesn't know the difference between you and anyone else all you need is some black who doesn't even speak english to rescue it from a burning building dan our democratic savior has arrived uh and as of this morning he will be on the debate stage Wednesday night. So Bloomberg's response to these stories or his campaign's response, he really hasn't spoken much himself over the last couple of days. It's involved some apologies, some denials, some claims that he's

grown and evolved on certain issues. And, you know, if you look at all the policies he's rolled out so far, they now look like the policies of a mainstream Democrat, not a progressive Democrat, but a mainstream Democrat. Even though he was a moderate Republican mayor who was more liberal on issues like climate change, gun control, choice, immigration. But really, that was it. That was it. control choice immigration but really that was it that was it um so how does he run for the democratic nomination with all this baggage and and how problematic do you believe these stories are well we know how he runs for it which is to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on television ads like there it was reported today that between when did bloomberg get in the race january december what i don't know is it what what year is it i don't i don't know is it 2021 is this thing over yet have we been sitting here

in the studio talking about this for the last 10 years 15 i don't know it's groundhog day um he's been the race three or four months and he has spent more money on television ads in that three or four months and the obama campaign spent in all 2012 election. It is an ungodly sum of money. And it has worked for him in the sense that he is now up, he's in second in the polls and tied for first in some of the Super Tuesday states, according to polls. The question of how problematic it will be is there two parts of that question. The first is, is it going to stop him from being the nominee? Maybe. Is it a problem in a general election?

Probably. Right now, we are living in a world of Mike Bloomberg, the brand. If you have a television, almost anywhere in America, all you know is that there's this mayor who fought for, who takes on Donald Trump, fights for progressive issues and is loved by Barack Obama, which we will get to. And on Wednesday night, you will see Bloomberg, the person with the record and the personality and the, and the, and the skills will, and we will see whether that candidate matches

up to the hundreds of millions of dollars in ads. But it's been, uh, it is interesting. I would say one more thing about this, which is all of this information is theoretically very problematic for him. Only if people know, right. We were, we were talking to one of our, one of our good friends who was very interested and involved in politics. And that person asked me, how come no one has written the story about, uh, Bloomberg's complicated relationship with Obama? And, and I was like, they did. It was

written in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and some other places, but nothing breaks through in that way, shape or form. So if voters don't know about it, all they're going to know is the guy in the ads. And this is sort of a test for how much goodwill can you buy if you have unlimited resources. So I want to talk about why these stories could be a problem for him on the electability front. But I think before that, I mean, obviously, he has spent an ungodly record amount of money to get his message out and to get his brand out there in front of voters. I think it's worth asking asking why is it appealing to voters so far? Why has it been appealing? Because like you said, he's in third place in a lot of the

polls, some second place. He is doing very well with black voters. What do you think it is about Bloomberg that has been appealing to people so far? Well, I think Democrats are desperate for someone who can win. And all the other candidates have been going through a year long, super harsh spotlight of all of their flaws. And so every voter is very well acquainted with whatever quote unquote electability problems, Elizabeth Warren or Pete Buttigieg or Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders have. There's been none of that conversation around Bloomberg. He's just sitting out here removed from the process with no scrutiny, no conversation. In some ways, I think he is just becoming a placeholder for people who have very real concerns about whether any of the top five candidates who are still in this race can win.

Yeah. And I do think he is, you know, there's a difference between, um, Bloomberg and Tom Steyer. Um, and, uh, the, the biggest difference is the money. About $60 billion worth. Right. I was going to say the, the number one difference is the money. Um, but you know, Steyer has like saturated the airwaves in the early States to, to not much, uh, success. And I do think, you know, there's a couple of things about Bloomberg that I think are appealing to some of these voters. And you're hearing this from people already. You know, number one is they like the fact that he has this much money. They think it somehow inoculates him against, you know, whatever Donald Trump's going to do in the general election. And I think that

case is suspect, but that's one of the reasons. I also think Bloomberg's tactics in this race so far, right, he's basically saying like, you know, I'm a I'm a rich asshole from New York, too. But I can take on Trump. I'm going to be tough. And most of his message has been anti-Trump. Right. Like the the message has been and his his slogan is Mike will get it done. And it is a slogan about electability. And it's also a slogan about effectiveness. And we know from a lot of the research we've seen that one of the big things that moves people, moves undecided voters or swing voters against Trump is that their complaints about Trump is that he has not been effective. He has not been an effective president. And Bloomberg gets up there and say, look, you know,

you might not like everything that I've done, but I was a very effective mayor, three-term mayor of New York City. I'm a business guy. I was successful at that. And, you know, he is basically a placeholder for a lot of, and these, you know, particularly college-educated voters who think to themselves, what I really hate about Trump is his personality, is a lot of his more odious policies, a lot of more, he's more offensive bullshit, all that kind of stuff. And what we need is a lot of his more odious policies, a lot of more, he's more offensive bullshit, all that kind of stuff. And what we need is a bigger bully than Donald Trump, who's richer than Donald Trump. And that'll, and that's, that's how he'll win.

And that's how we'll win in November. And I just think it's really worth talking about why, talking about Bloomberg's appeal, because I don't necessarily think it is rooted in a lot of substance or fact. And I think that if Democrats are going to beat Bloomberg or prevent him from becoming the nominee, I think you have to speak to his main appeal to voters, which is this sort of mirage of electability that he's got going right now. sort of mirage of electability that he's got going right now. Yeah, it's a real question of how durable, let's just take that 19% in the Marist poll today,

as fact or indicative of where the race currently stands. So the question of how durable is that? Is that real? Is that just something he paid for? And then once either he faces scrutiny or other candidates start competing in those states, that number will drop? That's a real question. Historically, we have seen self, not at the presidential level, but it's the state level, self-funding candidates buy a bunch of really ethereal support that collapses once there's an actual, once you're comparing them against another person, not just, I don't know how to describe it, but just like right now it's unimpeded. There's no one else on the air. Yeah.

Once, you know, once they have to actually come down from earth and engage in the race and be in debates and go to town halls and do press interviews, Bloomberg is doing none of those things. He's not exposing himself to any scrutiny. So once he actually has to, you has to adhere to the laws of political gravity, will it pull him down? And that is an open question. The argument against it is that people are so scared of losing to Trump and now so convinced of the quote unquote fatal flaws of the current set of non-Bloomberg Democratic candidates that he may be able, like he's basically bought himself a buy into the final round of the playoffs here. From a pure tactical and strategic perspective, what do you think of how Bloomberg

has been running that campaign, how he's been spending all that money? I mean, it's brilliant. I mean, he has done everything you would do with unlimited resources. And it is, we've never been in a situation where a campaign has not had to make a decision. They can do both, right? It's like, sometimes you have like two or three different types of ads or different strategies and you have to pick one of those because that's what your budget says. Bloomberg just writes a bigger check, you know, and you can experiment with all kinds of things like sort of infamously or controversially, he paid a bunch of meme creators to create

Bloomberg memes. Now, if you're operating under a limited budget, you may say that's a high-risk strategy that could end up being a waste of money and blow up in our face. For Bloomberg, he does it. If it works, great. If it doesn't, write another check. I think it is very smart how they've done this. I think his campaign team is very savvy. It is a strategy only available to them. No one else could do this. And I imagine that if the Sanders or Buttigieg or Biden or Warren or Klobuchar campaigns also had $55 billion to spend, we would also think they were geniuses. Yeah. No, I think the other thing that he's done, and this is sort of right out of the Trump

playbook, is he has just made himself be the center of the conversation, right? Not just with the paid ads, but now in the way that the media is covering him, right? And even the controversies, even these bad stories about him have kept him in the middle of the conversation. And he has basically blocked out all of the other Democratic candidates, aside from really Bernie Sanders, from getting any kind of real coverage, right? Like, you know, Pete Buttigieg did really well in Iowa, came in second in New Hampshire, haven't heard much about Pete, haven't heard much about Elizabeth Warren, haven't heard much about Amy Klobuchar, even Joe Biden, right? Like, all of these candidates that I think would

be getting more coverage in any other environment. Bloombergberg's spending and bloomberg's controversy and bloomberg just being out there all the time has sort of taken away from that and out there has a very specific meaning here because it's not like the people who did your strategy for being out there is do a thousand interviews which is a good strategy the bloomberg one is just buy lots of ads and do lots of things that generate attention the one thing i think they are doing that is clever, I think is like they want to fight with Bernie. They want this to be a Bernie Sanders, Michael Bloomberg conversation for the next two weeks,

because that starves, that makes people think that's where this is going. So I'm going to start supporting Bloomberg as opposed to Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar. And it, as you point out, it drowns out the oxygen from all of the... That was a terrible mixed metaphor, but you get what

I'm saying. I was going to say something about blotting out the sun. I don't know what it was. Blotting out the sun. That is an appropriate metaphor. I've been up for a very long time today on book day. And I've been talking nonstop since 6 a.m. But his best chance, and it is a long shot, which we should talk about, is to get to a one-on-one competition with Bernie Sanders very quickly. And starving Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Biden, and Warren from attention is the fastest way to do that. So what do you think of the Bloomberg ads? And there's another one out today that highlights what he seems to believe was a close working relationship he had with his good pal Barack Obama. Did that sigh come through on the microphone?

Because it was quite audible on my end. We should stipulate that basically several candidates have run this ad. Biden has run a version of this ad. Warren has run a version of this ad. Pete Buttigieg has called himself Obama or his campaign has called him Obama. I think it's not fair to Pete Buttigieg. But they have made very explicit comparisons between Barack Hussein Obama and Pete Buttigieg, two people who seem like peas in a pod, if you ask me. But the Bloomberg ad is,

I think, the most tenuous of all of them, which is, one, it's ubiquitous. It is everywhere. I had the TV on here in New York City last night and just bombarded with Bloomberg Obama ads. Even I have a firsthand knowledge of this relationship and I was almost convinced. I was like, oh yeah, they were. Oh, wait a minute. That's not right. And they had a very complicated relationship. They definitely worked together on some of the issues you talked about, like climate change, gun control, other issues like that worked together after Sandy. But Bloomberg did not endorse Obama in 08. He sort of endorsed Obama in 12, but it came five days before the election and it was...

It was the most tepid. I remember at the time being annoyed by it. I have the sentence that is most annoying from this tepid endorsement in 2012 that was basically, yeah, it was right after Hurricane Sandy. It was like a week have the sentence that is most annoying from this tepid endorsement in 2012 that was basically yeah it was right after Hurricane Sandy was like a week before the election. And at one point in the in the endorsement he says this is from Bloomberg about Obama quote. And rather than uniting the country around a message of shared sacrifice he engaged in partisan attacks and has embraced a divisive populist agenda focused more on redistributing income than creating it. Which basically could have been a fucking Romney ad. It basically was. And I remember thinking at the time, I would rather have not had his endorsement

than have that. And I would note that when Bloomberg says Obama did not unite the country around an agenda of shared sacrifice, he is referring to cuts in Medicare and social security. That's right. That is what, his arguments Obama was, I love the guy he's pretty good on climate change but man he didn't want to cut medicare and social security and so i'm unhappy about it yeah so um so that's that's not really great and look i mean we you don't have to over exaggerate it here right like like you said he has been not just because now he's running for president he's been for a long time bloomberg very good on on gun control um he's been for president, he's been for a long time, Bloomberg, very good on gun control.

He's been very, you know, he did spend a lot of money helping elect Democrats in 2018 and other times. He's very, very good on climate. He's probably done more than most politicians in the country on climate all around the world. For sure. You know, and on immigration as well, too. But, like, that's fine. But you should know that on on just about every other issue he's just a moderate republican and um and not even moderate in some ways right and and he's

had all these very sort of odious comments that keep coming out throughout his career and you know look i think the other thing that's tough here is there's a lot of folks on the left who spent a lot of this campaign telling us that Pete Buttigieg is some centrist shill and not a good enough Democrat. And Joe Biden is not a good enough Democrat. And Amy Klobuchar is not a good enough Democrat. And it's like now we have someone in Mike Bloomberg who really isn't a good enough Democrat, who really is a moderate Republican. And because a lot of times they spent this entire campaign telling us that good mainstream Democrats like Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar and Joe Biden aren't good enough for us, it's going to be harder for a lot of people to believe that that's true about Mike Bloomberg when it is true about Mike Bloomberg.

This is the fable we will tell our children, a boy who cried centrist. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, you know, a lot of these stories that we've seen over the last couple of days seem like they've been pitched by some of the other Democratic campaigns. We've heard just about all of the Democratic candidates go after Bloomberg this weekend. Why do you think they're so focused on him when Bernie's the front runner in the next two states and Bloomberg's not even on the ballot. I think the reason they are most focused on Bloomberg is panic, right? The strategy to date has been whatever your path is, win Nevada, win South Carolina, outperform expectations there, and get into the one-on-one battle with Sanders.

And now you have Bloomberg out there who's not on the ballot in either of those states is sort of evading scrutiny and basically blocking you from that position. And so you have to do something about it. And I think that's what's driving it. And I think there's a belief with, I think some merit that his support is pretty soft and a little bit of relevant information would like the stuff you mentioned at the top of this segment could move voters. And so they are headed in that direction. I think they're also probably pretty annoyed. They're out here like... Yeah, I'd be annoyed. Yeah, they're out here taking the Bolt bus back and forth at the headquarters, and

Bloomberg is flying people on a private jet places. Yeah. So this morning, there was another poll out. It was a qualifying poll for this week's debate. Bloomberg qualified. So now he and he has announced he is going to the debate in Nevada on Wednesday night, even though he's not actually competing in Nevada. Now that Bloomberg is in this debate, what do you think is a good debate strategy for the other candidates? It seems to me, looking at the news over the last couple days,

that they are going to come guns blazing on Bloomberg. And, you know, part of me thinks, like, I understand why they're doing that for all the reasons you just said. And I do think it would be weird if they didn't hit Bloomberg. Like, of course they should take that opportunity to do so. But I could see a debate where most of the debate is focused on all these candidates hitting Bloomberg. And basically what happens as a result of that is status quo. Bernie remains the front runner. No one has challenged Bernie. And if you're Bernie Sanders, that's great.

You know, but if you're any of the candidates not named Bloomberg, who's trying to win the Democratic nomination, I don't know if it's the best strategy. But I don't know. What do you think? I mean, once again, challenging, but you're exactly right about what the likely dynamic here is, which is everyone's going to go after Bloomberg, and Bernie Sanders is going to continue to be the person in the poll position for the Democratic nomination, regardless of what happens to Mike Bloomberg. Because if Biden, Buttigieg, Warren, Klobuchar want to stop Bernie Sanders from being the nominee, they have to stop Bernie Sanders

from winning Nevada or South Carolina. And attacking Mike Bloomberg does not accomplish that goal in any way, shape, or form. Yeah. I guess I want to know what you think is sort of the most effective way to run against Bloomberg. You know, I saw some candidates, Bernie did this, Warren did this, finally take on this notion that Bloomberg is the most electable Democrat, you know, is it is it worth it to make this deal with the devil where you accept a nominee who can spend unlimited money to get the nomination and potentially beat Donald Trump? And Warren rejects the premise of the question. She goes, well, I don't think it's a deal with the devil because I don't think he's the most electable Democrat and here's why. And I do think that going after his electability is the most effective way. I mean, I think you could get up there on stage and say, people think that Mike Bloomberg is going to be the best person to face Donald Trump. This could be Donald Trump's, in many ways, dream candidate. He's going to lose, Bloomberg will lose

the Democratic advantage against Trump on the issues that voters care about the most, like health care and retirement, because he's called for Social Security cuts and Medicare cuts and not raising the minimum wage and all these things that we know actually move voters. And you know that Trump is going to absolutely hit him as an out of touch global elitist who runs that literally runs the fake news. It is right in Trump's message wheelhouse to take on Bloomberg like this. I don't know. What do you think? Well, I think that strategy is right, which is you have to take on the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room at this time may be the electability of a moderate Republican, but is, and I think that has been true always throughout this campaign is that we've danced

around the electability question in so many ways. And when candidates have actually taken it on, either arguing for themselves or arguing against another candidate, they've actually had success in moving numbers. Yes. Because it's what people care about, right? Like Elizabeth Warren was on a rocket ship to the nomination until Buttigieg and Biden made a case against her electability. I don't think that case was accurate. And I think she suffered from it through a lot of misogyny in the media and in the electorate, but they took it on, right? And no one has made that case against Sanders. And if we don't, if you don't make it against Bloomberg, he is going to continue to skate by here. So I think that's exactly right. And I think,

you know, it's just, if you were to like, take a step back and like, get yourself out of the Twitter cable news bubble that we currently live in. And you were to say to yourself, okay, this is election that's going to be decided primarily in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. We're going to have to persuade democratic base voters, mostly African-Americans to turn out at a higher level than in 2016. We're going to have to persuade some white, non-college-educated voters. Who is the best person to do it?

Is it the Wall Street-adjacent billionaire mayor of New York, most famous for taking on Big Soda? Is that the best person to do it? On paper, that doesn't make a ton of sense. I think Bloomberg's electability case is very limited and it has not been scrutinized. And maybe he is the most electable, we don't know, but I think you can make a counter argument to it. And I'll be curious to see if people do that. And as you pointed out, that may be very much to Bernie Sanders' advantage. Look, I think the electability case, to be fair, the electability case for Bloomberg is,

I think that, you know, back to the wilderness, those Romney-Clinton voters I spoke to in Arizona outside of Phoenix, the former Republicans, these are the kind of people who won us the House in 2018. They are not definitely Democrats. They are still swing voters. And they are, you know, primarily in the suburbs. They're college educated voters. Some of them are former Republicans. Some of them are independent. Some of them are just Democrats who go back and forth. And, you know, Bloomberg probably has a better chance of capturing these voters than some of the other candidates. And, you know, I think Bernie is going to struggle with these voters. But the question for all these candidates when you're

talking about electability is you might gain those voters, but what do you lose? And I do think if you've seen sort of Bernie's appeal among younger voters and not just an appeal, I mean, he's crushing among younger voters. There's a real risk that a lot of young people don't turn out for Mike Bloomberg. There's a real risk that a lot of people go third party, right? They vote for the Green Party candidate if Mike Bloomberg's the nominee. And so I don't think when we think about electability, we can't, even though I've been talking about this a lot, we can't just think about, you know, the college educated suburbanites. You have to think about a bigger coalition than that. And I do think that is one that is that is a big concern I have about Bloomberg's Bloomberg's

electability case. Yeah, it's it's math, right? There are three legs electability stool, right? And they have to add up to the win number in enough states get to 270. And that win number is somewhere between 48 and 50.1, depending on third-party candidates. And it has to be, one leg is increased turnout among Democratic-based voters, young people, voters from communities of color, as you said, Romney-Clinton voters, and quote-unquote Obama-Trump voters. And you've got to get, every candidate that we talk about is going to have more of one

and less of another one in that group, but you've got to have enough to get to where you need to be. And there are quite like, and there are questions about everyone we've talked about, but there are also questions about whether Bloomberg is going to, he may get the Romney Clinton voters, but he may suffer with the other two groups and not get you to a number that you win by. Let's talk about Nevada, where early voting is already underway ahead of Wednesday's debate and Saturday's caucus. There haven't been too many polls, but the 538 average shows Bernie in the lead at around 26 percent. Biden at 15 percent. Warren and Pete at 11 percent. Steyer at 10 percent. Klobuchar at 8 percent 36 pledge delegates are at stake.

Dan, what makes the Nevada caucus different than Iowa? The Nevada caucus is different than Iowa in several respects. One, they're not using an app. Yeah. Well, we'll get to whether that's a good idea or not. Right. They're using an iPad, I guess. They're using something that looks and smells like an app on an iPad, but it's not an app.

They're calling it a tool. Yes, a tool. I think the biggest difference is that there is a culture of caucusing in Iowa that dates back decades. And this is the third Nevada Democratic presidential caucus. And it is – we know very little about it. We have very little way of knowing how it's going to go. And they have a – And they have early vote. And early vote is very interesting because I think it does expand the type of voters who can come. And certainly Las Vegas, which is the biggest pocket of voters and Democratic voters in Nevada,

is a place where shift work makes it very hard for people to show up at a caucus site for hours on end. And so this early voting process, I think, diversifies the group of people who may be able to participate in this very time-intensive process. Yeah. So we have the early voting that's going to be very different. And the electorate is different here as well. Obviously, Iowa was 90% white. In Nevada, 30% of the population is Latino, 10% black, 19% are immigrants. It's very union heavy. And so it is a much more diverse population in almost every way. There's also, you know, the viability threshold is different in each precinct, depending on the number of delegates, which is interesting, too. So it's 15 percent in some places as high as 25 percent, I believe, when there's fewer delegates at stake, which is interesting. So it seems like

Bernie may be a favorite here or at the very least Politico reports that at least three rival campaigns say that the best they can now hope for is second or third because they believe that Bernie is going to win. And of course, the polling shows him in the lead. What would a win in Nevada mean for the Sanders campaign? I think it would mean that he is headed towards being the nominee, not guaranteed that he would be the nominee, but he's in a very strong position now. He would strengthen that position even further and put him in a real spot to win South Carolina, which I think would be rocket fuel heading into Super Tuesday, where he has a lot of structural advantages given the states that are included on that day. And when you say the campaigns think he's going to win, one way of looking at that is this is just

expectation setting. But what I do think is important knowing that in a state with early vote, the candidates have data on who is early voting. And so they know whether people have early voted are ones, twos, or threes, or fours, or fives on their list. That's a sliding scale of support level. And so I imagine many of them are looking at this and seeing a large number of Sanders supporters and the Sanders is building up a lead according to their data going into caucuses that may be insurmountable for the other campaigns. So if you're on the Biden

campaign, if you're on the Warren campaign, the Buttigieg campaign, Globuchar campaign, like what do you need to do now? If you're sitting in those headquarters, like what is the strategy here between, you see Bloomberg on the horizon in Super Tuesday, Bernie sort of steaming ahead in Nevada. You're thinking about this debate on Wednesday. You're thinking about what to do in Nevada and South Carolina. What's the strategy here to sort of stop this before, as you say, Bernie heads into Super Tuesday with momentum and then potentially, or at this point very likely, amasses a pledge delegate lead on Super Tuesday

that will be almost impossible for another candidate to overcome. I think you have to do something on Wednesday night to stop Sanders' momentum. Yeah. And I think that involves taking on the electability question. And I've seen many debates on this about, you know, where yourself and others have raised on Twitter the question of why are these candidates going after Bloomberg or someone else as opposed to Sanders? And I hear people respond saying, does that really make any sense? Sanders supporters are 100% committed to him. Does Biden actually have a chance of getting them or Klobuchar or whoever else or Warren? And the answer is, of course they do. I think Sanders

has the highest, the largest number of committed supporters who are locked into him no matter what else happens. But if we remember, in the last two months or so, Sanders has gone from 13%, 14%, 15% in the polls to 25% to 30%. So where did those people come from? They're certainly not diehard Sanders people. They either came from Biden, Warren, or the undecided column. And so they are available to people. So you can,

like, I think just people think that Sanders is at 25 and the only way I can beat Sanders is to get to 26 or higher. And I don't think that's true. I think Sanders may be locked in at 15, 16. He's not going to go below that. But some of those people who support Sanders now used to support you and you have to believe you can get them back if you can make a compelling case about why you're the person best suited to be Trump. And I do think this is, you know, this debate and then the debate before South Carolina, this is like final chance here for some of these candidates to really shake up the race. And I would, you know, look hard at my debate playbook and and hopefully change it up from the last couple of debates for some of these folks. You know, especially I would say Joe Joe Biden probably needs, you know, the next two debates probably needs to be the debates of his life.

And I think, you know, we've talked before about how Pete probably needs to shake it up. Klobuchar is always excellent at these debates and so is Warren. is always excellent at these debates and so is Warren. But at this point, being super on message and being message disciplined, you know, is probably not enough to really shake things up. And I think there is a way to be explicit about why you are the better choice for president compared to the other candidates without being nasty towards the other candidates. You know, there is a way to contrast yourself and to challenge other candidates without just resorting to all kinds of negative attacks. And I don't know that anyone has really been sort of explicit enough. Like, you know, we talked about this after New Hampshire. I was surprised that in Warren's post New Hampshire speech,

you know, she was pretty she was more explicit about why her and not Bernie than I had heard her in quite some time. And I think you've seen over the weekend, both Biden and Pete have sort of been needling Sanders too. They've been sort of going around this. So look, if I were these candidates, I would definitely probably take on Bloomberg like they're planning to do, but I would try to probably position myself between a Bloomberg and a Bernie if that's possible. What do you think? Yeah, I think that's right. You're not going to beat Sanders if your strategy is to go into the debate and take on Bloomberg. Bernie is going to continue the trajectory he's on. And that's it right now, whether, and I know sometimes we say these

things and people get mad or think we're picking a can over another, but this is how the math is working. This is how the contests lay themselves out, which is right now, Bernie Sanders is winning and everyone else is losing. And so you have to do something to change. If you want to win, then you have to do something to change that dynamic. And you basically have the Nevada caucus,

two debates, the South Carolina primary, and that is it. Unless you have a billion dollars to spend on TV like Bloomberg does. So one challenge that Bernie has had to deal with in Nevada is the fight that's erupted between his campaign and the very powerful Culinary Workers Union over Medicare for All, which the union does not support because they say it would replace the health care plans that they negotiated for with their employers. The 60,000 plus member union has declined to endorse any candidate,

but they have distributed flyers that say Bernie would, quote, end culinary health care. Naturally, some Bernie supporters have responded by harassing and threatening two of the women who lead the union, among others, according to the Nevada Independent, quote, the union and its leadership have been referred to as bitches, whore, fucking scab and evil entitled assholes. One email said, quote, this is your chance to fix your mistake before the millions and millions of Bernie Sanders supporters will find you and end your ability to earn a living. We will find you corrupt motherfuckers of that you can be sure and we will make sure you wallow in poverty and suffering. Lovely, lovely. Altogether, the union

says it's received dozens of phone calls, more than 300 emails and thousands of tweets. So, Dan, you know, just about every other Democratic campaign has criticized this garbage over the last week. I've seen it from Warren, from Pete, especially from Biden and Bloomberg. Bloomberg cut a little digital ad with some angry tweets from Bernie supporters. That's a whole separate thing. Bernie responded to the culinary union incident with a statement that said, harassment of all forms is unacceptable to me and we urge supporters of all campaigns not to engage in bullying or ugly personal attacks. He also said, quote, anybody making personal attacks against anybody else in my name is not part of our movement. We don't want them. Question,

is that enough? Is this a political problem for Bernie and should it be? Question, is that enough? Is this a political problem for Bernie and should it be? Well, it is a political problem in the sense that it has caused real, real issues with the most powerful labor union in one of the four most important early state contests. So, yes, that is such a complicated and fraught topic because it is a conversation about what happens on Twitter that is much more complex and nuanced than Twitter would allow, not being known as a place for complexity and nuance. Where, like, let's put aside the politics for one sec. Do the people who are being referred to here, are they indicative of Bernie Sanders supporters? No. Right. No. Are Bernie Sanders supporters responsible for all of the online harassment of Democratic candidates? No. Does it seem like more of the harassment of

Democratic candidates and other people on Twitter is by supporters of Bernie Sanders than other people? Yes. Did Bernie Sanders say the right thing there? Yes, I think he did. Could he say more? Yes. And I do sort of want to separate two things that I think get lost in this conversation, which is you have the anonymous people who are sending these, who are attacking people on Twitter, who are sending these death threats to the culinary union and saying these horrible things. Like that is one group of people. I do think that Bernie Sanders has limited control over what those people do.

Yeah. Right. Like I think we, he has responsibilities to set a tone and say the right thing. I think he has done a lot of that. You know, I think he could do more, but he is not responsible for all of those people. lot of that. I think he could do more, but he is not responsible for all of those people. Then there is a group of people who are more, who are sort of prominent blue check mark supporters of Sanders, who are very aggressive with a lot of people on Twitter, who have spread some, I think, false information in some cases, who have trafficked in conspiracy theories,

but have not reached the level of the sorts of, certainly not gone anywhere near the sorts of things that have been directed at lots of people, and particularly people of color and women are the targets of this. Those people are a different group. Those people are probably more responsive if the Sanders campaign were to ask them to stop, right? Like we have the, I don't even dig into the Liz Smith sock puppet controversy, but- I was just going to say, yeah, you try to explain that to someone in real life and you sound like a fucking crazy person.

So go look it up, everyone, if you want to see what was going on this weekend. We really had a banner President's Day weekend between the sock puppet and all the other dumb stuff we did. And I do think the Sanders campaign could ask those people to do better, right? Because they are hurting the Sanders campaign. Because you have Bernie out here, as much as anyone, and maybe more than any other candidates, calling for unity, right? And saying that he will support the Democratic nominee no matter what. And people who are very close to the campaign going out there and calling people who don't support Medicare for all murderers or attacking Elizabeth Warren in ways that Bernie Sanders certainly I do not believe would find

acceptable. People who are spreading conspiracy theories, like could he have more influence on those people? I think maybe because people are doing a disservice to their campaign. Last point here, because I'm sure I was canceled nine points ago. Is this a real political problem? It is a problem. I don't think it is a giant political problem. And I do feel sometimes when I hear these other campaigns talk about it, like I think in many cases, they're answering questions from reporters. So in fairness to them, and they're defending their supporters and their staff from some of these attacks. But this is a process argument. And if they go on the debate stage and make this a centerpiece of their

argument against Bernie, I think they will be playing small ball at a time when they should be trying to raise the stakes of the election. Yeah. So, you know, I agree with that. I mean, look, I saw a lot of people on Twitter asking us why we haven't talked about this kind of harassment on the pod before. And honestly, it's not because I don't find it disgraceful because I do. It's because most of the assholes who do it are very sad, small people who are, you know, just desperate for attention and relevance. And as you said, you know, they don't represent the bulk of Bernie supporters who we've all met. I mean, we, you know, we've said this before. We went to Venton, Iowa. We've talked to them other places. We know some of the people on the Bernie campaign, and they're just not like that in any way at all. But, you know, it's out there and

it's fucking toxic. And it's not just bots. It's not just accounts with a few dozens of people. It's like you said, it's Twitter personalities and media personalities on the left. And you're right, they have not gone as far as some of the people who've threatened the culinary workers union at all but they are still incredibly aggressive um and you know they're spreading all kinds of theories that aren't true and a lot of us have been on the receiving end of it us included and it's a i think here's why it's a problem and i don't think it's a short-term political problem but i think it's a long-term political problem it's it's not our vote that they have to worry about like if bernie is the nominee like the fucking left-wing crazies in our twitter feeds can just like continue attacking us all they want you know bernie still got my vote and he's i'm still going to do everything i possibly can to make sure he's elected if he's

the nominee so you have to worry about us you can keep attacking us all you want. But let's not kid ourselves how difficult it is going to be to run a Democratic socialist against Donald Trump. It is not going to be easy. And let's not kid ourselves about how difficult it's going to be to convince moderate suburban swing voters who won the Democrats the House in 2018 and who we absolutely need in 2020, that Bernie is not some scary socialist, but that he is a very acceptable mainstream nominee. And that job of persuading those voters is harder when you have this minority group of supporters out there spewing this garbage. And, you know, when some I see some people on his campaign, you know, respond to this and respond to complaints about this by either dismissing the complaints or acting all aggrieved. And, you know, exactly who I'm talking about, that that's not really helpful.

You know, like I interviewed a couple of weeks ago. I don't know when it was last week, maybe. Faz Shakir, who's like 10 days ago. Yeah, right. Faz Shakir, who's Bernie's campaign manager. And I respect 10 days ago. Yeah, right. Faz Shakir, who's Bernie's campaign manager. And I respect the hell out of Faz. And he is such a great campaign manager. And he totally gets this. And he tweeted after the culinary episode, quote,

to those already in our movement, stay focused. Don't get distracted. We're so close. We've got a job to do to fight for the working class and win. To those not already in our movement, come on in. The water's warm. We welcome you. To me, that is the exact right message.

That is the message that the candidate is spreading and it's in Bernie's stump speech. So Bernie's on that page. And the people in the Sanders campaign who are not on that message need to grow the fuck up and act like people who could be the country's only hope of beating Donald Trump. You very likely could be the country's only hope of beating

Donald Trump. You very likely could be leading this party very soon. And you need to understand that this is a very large coalition, that you need a very large coalition to beat Donald Trump. And you can't have that coalition by scaring a bunch of people off by acting like a lot of these people are acting. That's why I think it's a long-term political problem. You're right. I don't, I like, he's probably going to do really well in Nevada, even with this culinary workers fight. I don't know that it has much of a short-term effect. But I do think as we're trying to win in November

and everything has to go right to win, that these people should spend their time promoting Bernie Sanders' message, trying to persuade people that it's the right message, that he's the right candidate, and not spend their time either fucking, you know, diving deep into dumb conspiracy theories or just attacking, you know, the democratic establishment. Like the road to 270 is not mean tweets about Neera Tanden. That is brilliant. And unfortunately, like two words too long to be the episode title it also would really alarm a lot

of people so yeah mirror most specifically yes it's true it's just like it's it's like i said it's a it's a question of effectiveness you know not even necessarily like whether this is morally right and wrong which we can talk about till the cows come home but like like we only have so much time between now and november and it is an enormous task and everyone has to keep fucking focused and that's exactly what faz said bernie's campaign manager that is exactly what bernie says himself and all of these people on the left who are who have large twitter followings look i know you don't like us i know you're gonna keep fucking tweeting at us fine do whatever the fuck you want but if you want your candidate to win, you've got to shape up.

I think that one relevant example of this, because I can already see the tweets in response to this from some folks, which is Favreau just said that our mean tweets are going to keep centrists. Oh, right. Oh, it's the rude tweets. It's not rude fucking tweets. It's threatening culinary workers. And it's not just how do we appeal to independents and moderate Republicans, right? I think the most interesting and alarming example of where this is going is the fact that

our friend who we are 100% biased for, who we work with, we support, Stacey Abrams, is currently being attacked nonstop by people on Twitter because her group, Fair Fight, which is, I don't know, protecting voting rights, took $5 million from Michael Bloomberg, which she very nicely tweeted about my book today. And I was very grateful for that. The replies to that are so fucking dark and depressing because you have these people, many of them white, yelling at Stacey Abrams saying that she is a supporter of stop and frisk. If you just took a step back and thought about that for a second, because she took Michael Bloomberg's money to protect voting rights. Right. Yeah. What do you think? You think Stacey Abrams took the $5 million and pocketed it?

You think she's using it to win electoral office? No, she's using it to protect voting rights. It will help Bernie Sanders right he is the nominee right it's just it's unbelievable oh i don't know man i don't know but look like i said i am saying this as someone who want like as as we have made it pretty clear on this podcast it is very likely at this stage unless something changes dramatically which you know it's politics and it's politics in the trump era so it certainly can unless something changes dramatically like bernie sanders is not just the odds on from runner he's like on his way to become the democratic nominee and that means that he we all need him to succeed and i will want him to

succeed as the democratic nominee abso-fucking-lutely um and i think that he has plenty of strengths and i am not as nervous as some folks in the democratic establishment about him though i you know certainly have some concerns um but like it is in all of our interest to have him succeed and to all be united in doing this and that includes his own supporters and that includes everyone on his campaign and like i said I think there's some people on his campaign that we all know who have, who have figured that out and get that. And there's others who have not. So hopefully we can, uh, hopefully there's plenty of time to fix this between now and November, right? Can I just end this segment on a hopeful note? Sure. Yeah. Which is I've been wandering around New York, getting up very early, stopping

to get coffee. And very early this morning, someone stopped me and they were a very nice listener of Pots of America. And they asked me if we, if all of us, the four of us were doing okay. Cause we had seemed sort of dark recently. And I kind of thought about it and I said, you know, I, I do feel like maybe this has been a brutal part of the process. You know, I think Iowa, how everything played out there was kind of depressing considering how sort of inspired we were by everything we saw up until the moment they started failing to count the votes. And I, and you do see this in polls, right? Where people are starting, like people now overwhelmingly think Trump is going to win, especially Democrats. You, you know, people are getting frustrated because the candidate they love

may not be winning or the candidate they love the least may be winning. And these next few weeks are going to be tough for a lot of people, right? Maybe you don't like Michael Bloomberg. Maybe you don't like Bernie. Maybe you love Bernie. Maybe you love Joe Biden or Pete Buttigieg or Elizabeth Warren or Amy Klobuchar, whoever else. But I do think for as dark and painful as it's been, particularly as Trump is on a presidential crime spree, I'm not saying we're going to win this election, but we can win it. It's absolutely winnable. It is so winnable. It's like right there for the taking. And we know exactly how to do it, regardless of who the nominee is. We have the roadmap from 2018 and every person listening

or speaking into these microphones has agency in what's going to happen, right? Like if you're, like we've talked about this before, but if you're, if you're filled with angst or anger, we can like just go do things, right? Like sign up with swing left or indivisible or go to vote, save America and figure out what you can do. It's like, we do need to remember that if we unify and we do the hard work of activism, we will beat Trump. We have all, he has a lot of advantages, but we can overcome them. And so it is worth remembering that like, this is,

this is very, we can win and we, we have to win, but we can, we know how to do it. And we just got to get through this always very dark, depressing period where the candidates we love may not be doing as well as we want them to be. Yeah, I could not agree with that more. And look, this was always going to be hard. This was always going to be pretty brutal. And I think part of this Bloomberg temptation that's out there is a lot of Democrats looking for an easy way out of this. Like maybe this is maybe this guy's our savior.

Maybe someone else is our savior. We're always looking for someone to save us. No one's coming to save us. It's us. It is entirely up to us what happens in this election. And when we are going to select a nominee that a bunch of people do not like and was not their first choice,

and perhaps when we select this nominee, that person will even fall behind Trump or be too close to Trump in the states we need. And then it'll be up to us to go to those states and to persuade the people who are on the fence or persuade the people who are not with us to be with us. And that's going to happen on the ground with all of us. And it's not necessarily just going to be the job of the nominee. And no one is magic. and no matter how much money anyone has or how many what kind of credentials they have it's not going to be easy to beat donald trump and that's why all of us need to be in it together and you know you it was really

smart that you said this a couple weeks ago that like a you know a weak nominee with a party united behind that nominee is stronger than a strong nominee with a divided party. And so the most important thing, whoever wins, is that we come together and work our asses off for that person. And all of these people would be one gazillion times better than Trump. Easily. Easily. It's just true. Just look at, and you don't have to look at what they're promising.

Just look at their records you know okay when we come back i will be talking to the editor of the nevada independent john ralston joining us today the editor of the nevada independent and one of the moderators of this week's Democratic debate, John Ralston. John, welcome to the pod. Hi there. So you're not only the most plugged in political reporter in the state, you also know the voting and demographic data better than anyone. What have you learned so far from the first few days of early voting? Well, there hasn't been a lot of data that has been released or that the campaigns have been able to extract from the party. It's been very, very slow.

But it does look like there's a ton of new caucus goers. More than half of those who have gone to early voting so far have been new voters, which may be a sign of enthusiasm for the Democrats here. It also appears that they're getting very good turnout in northern Nevada, which is not normally true. It's not nearly as Democratic as southern Nevada. So I still think it's too early to point to any trends since we still have one more day of early voting and we have caucus day. And as you mentioned, things could be affected by what goes on in the debate. Right. So what's your level of confidence that Nevada can avoid an Iowa-style caucus debacle? Well, I say many more prayers than I usually do every day. And whatever prayers I'm saying, the Democratic Party here is saying more. I was going to say that.

Yeah, listen, they are some of the best operatives in the country that run the Democratic Party here. They are very, very good. But number one, the Iowa debacle, you know, screwed them in the sense that they then had to discard their app and essentially start from scratch, and they didn't have much time to do it, and their messaging hasn't been great to the campaigns or to the public. So people are really unsettled. And so you get the national stories coming out, which I expected, the kind of long-distance chaos expected.

It could be worse than Iowa, all this stuff. But no one really knows. They tried to reduce the wild cards out there, but it's a caucus. Stuff's going to go wrong. It's run by volunteers. They're doing early voting, which they've never done before. No one knows how big the turnout's going to be on Saturday. And don't forget, they have to transfer all the results from early voting into the precincts.

They have to parse it by precincts so they can do the viability calculations because, as I said, it's a caucus. Yeah, I think a lot of people don't realize that caucuses by nature are chaotic. And when you add in early voting and some new technology, it's a tough mix. It's a tough mix. Listen, no one really knows is the answer. And that's the truth. Yeah. So as you know very well, in 2008, Hillary beat Obama, 51, 45% in Nevada, but we took home more delegates. Can you talk a little bit about the delegate math and whether you've seen any of the campaigns organized in a smart way to

take advantage of that math? Yeah, it's interesting because I think you guys set the guide path for everyone else to follow ever since, because as you remember, there was that was a really intense time here. And Hillary did end up winning and they were cheering. And then suddenly everyone realized that because you guys understood how the delegates were apportioned by congressional district and you were out in the rural counties and doing things nobody else was doing, you won the delegate battle. It is, I think you'd agree at this point, much more about momentum and continuing or blunting momentum than it is about amassing delegates. However, you do see much more campaigning in the rural counties by Democrats who generally don't go out in rural Nevada at all for fear of being hung in effigy. So they've done a lot more of that,

and they're very conscious of the congressional district apportionment. I just think that the delegate battle early on in these early states is overhyped. It's really not nearly as important as momentum. Right, because the delegates still are relatively small compared to what the rest of the states have to offer. Right. Why do you think Bernie has such a big polling lead? Do you buy that he's really that far ahead?

And what other campaigns do you think are in the hunt here? You know, it seems like every question requires all kinds of caveats, right? Because of the uncertainty out there of the caucuses and because it's always hard to poll in Nevada. Listen, I think most of the campaigns think that Bernie is ahead. And the reason they think Bernie is ahead is twofold. First is the momentum that he's gathered from the first two states. Secondly, he had a really good showing here in 2016, you may recall.

He almost beat Hillary here. And it was basically just a bunch of rag-tag folks not being professionally run who managed to carry that off. Now they have some real pros running the operation here. They know how to organize, and they're harnessing that energy. So I still think he's the favorite with all the caveats about caucuses and about how we don't know what the turnout is going to be. don't know what the turnout is going to be. And most of the polling, such as it is, shows Bernie in the lead either by a relatively small amount or almost 20 points. And then everyone else clustered below him in the mid to low to mid teens. So I think it's really people think here, the campaigns think it's a battle for second place. Biden, I think, really sees this as his firewall. He's got to do

well here or his South Carolina firewall collapses and he's in big, big trouble. But also, I think Elizabeth Warren, who's almost disappeared from the conversation, right, has a very good organization here. And so she's really pushing that, too. And Mayor Pete set up his entire campaign here. He's got the second most staffers to Bernie's campaign. And they never showed up well in the polls here, but they wanted to harness any momentum they were able to gather from Iowa and New Hampshire. And it looks like that might be working. So it would be just closing my eyes and throwing a dart at a dartboard to say who is likely to finish in second. closing my eyes and throwing a dart at a dartboard to say who is likely to finish in second.

If you push me, I would say Biden appears to be building some momentum here, but he doesn't have nearly the infrastructure on the ground, which is, as you know better than anybody, very critical for a caucus. Indeed, indeed. So you hadn't expected the culinary workers to endorse and they didn't. Have you seen or heard of any additional fallout from their fight with the Sanders campaign? Do you think it's having an effect on the rank and file or limited effect? Here's what I think. And you saw this, you recall this too, in 2008, when right after Hillary won New Hampshire, the culinary endorsed Obama and were not able to pull him to victory in the popular vote. Very difficult to suddenly turn a 50,000 to 60,000 member group around in a short amount of time. And by now, a lot of these culinary workers have been working on campaigns, and by the

way, including Bernie's. And so if the culinary had done a really hard endorsement of Biden and then said, you've got to stop Bernie. I think they could have moved a lot of their members to do that. And I still think that they're relatively anti-Bernie. And certainly the people at the top of that union are very upset about what some of his supporters did. And they believe that Bernie has not done enough to condemn them. So there's some really hard feelings there. But it doesn't appear that they're doing any messaging to their folks to vote for one candidate or another, which I think hurts Biden. Yeah. So you got this debate Wednesday night. How do you go about

preparing to moderate a debate like this? And what are you most interested in people taking away from this debate? You know, it's really interesting because I've been through a couple of meetings. I just finished one trying to prepare for this debate. I'm one of five moderators of this. And I think that my attitude of these debates is the format is way too restrictive, so it doesn't really become a debate unless the moderators let it become a debate. And so I hope that that occurs. But listen, this is the first debate in which Michael

Bloomberg will be up there with the other candidates. That creates a dynamic unlike anything that we've seen. And you add that to all the tension that's built up here in Nevada with these candidates. As I said, there's this cluster below Bernie jockeying for position and attacking each other. I think there's going to be a tremendous amount of tension with Bloomberg there. And I know it's the cliche of cliches that elections are about choices, but I just hope people get to see the contrast between some of these candidates. And that's what a debate should be, right? I'm hopeful, but it's very, very difficult with that many candidates.

And I guess that many moderators. Yeah, I don't know if it's going to be the most congenial affair, but we just said the same thing. I think there is a way to talk about why you're the best person to be president and contrast yourself with your opponents without resorting to being nasty. And I don't know that any of them have quite hit that yet in these debates because I don't know if they've been quite sharp enough. Yeah, listen, the nastiness quotient goes up as the closeness

of the campaign continues, right? And so that's just how this always goes. I don't think that as moderators of the debate, we should give in to that. We should try to create or foster a discussion among the candidates, a debate among the candidates on why they are the best person to go up against Donald Trump. But you know this as well as anybody. Since you train someone in this, it's hard to get a candidate off their talking point, right? And so it's very, very difficult. And so without that many follow-ups and without a format that is more unstructured than these are, it's very difficult to do.

Yeah. Well, best of luck to you. We'll all be watching. And thank you for taking the time to do this. I know you're quite busy this week, so I appreciate you joining. Thanks for having me on. Thanks to John Ralston for joining us today. We will be back on Thursday with a post-debate pod after the Wednesday night debate. So we'll talk to you then. Bye, everyone. Good luck with the book tour, Dan. Bye.

Thank you. Pod Save America is a product of Crooked 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 Somenator, 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, who film and upload these episodes as videos every week.