Pod Save America - “Fear and electability in Miami.”

Episode Date: June 25, 2019

Tensions with Iran grow as the President threatens obliteration, the U.S. government is holding young children in inhumane detention facilities, and Trump is accused of rape. Then Change Research co-founder Pat Reilly and Jon, Jon, and Tommy break down the results of the very first poll in the Crooked Media/Change Research PollerCoaster 2020 series.

Welcome to Pod Save America, I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tom Vitor. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tom Vitor. Later in the pod, we'll be digging into the first of a series of polls that Crooked Media is doing in partnership with our friends at Change Research. We're calling it Polar Coaster 2020.

Very exciting stuff. But first, we've got quite a bit of news to talk about, from new sanctions on Iran to the humanitarian disaster on our border to a rape allegation against the president. Whew. Not great stuff. Welcome back, Lovett. Good to be back, John. A few quick notes before we get to all that. Dan mentioned last pod that the paperback version of his book, Yes, We Still Can, is out and available.

You should know that for the next two weeks, he's going to donate a portion of the proceeds for every copy purchased to Raices, which is helping immigrant families and children who've been detained. New episode of This Land is out called The Treaty. Fantastic episode. That's one yet, I would argue. Yeah, it digs into Rebecca's family and treaties and Andrew Jackson and all kinds of really fascinating history. So go check that out right now, thislandpodcast.com.

Also, the first Democratic presidential debates are scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday this week. We'll be putting out a pod covering both of them on Friday morning. Dan is coming to LA to join us for that. Finally, another installment of our presidential candidate interview series is dropping on Thursday.

My interview with Montana Governor Steve Bullock that I did last week when he was here at crooked all right let's get to the news since our last podcast the president called off a military strike against iran with 10 minutes to spare initiated new cyber attacks against iran and announced new economic sanctions against the country's top leaders trump acknowledged on twitter fr, quote, we were cocked and loaded. You know... I don't know that that's what he was groping for. He's always cocked. Go on, John.

But that he made the last-minute decision to call off the strike after finding out from military leaders that it would likely kill around 150 Iranians. According to the New York Times, Trump was also persuaded by Fox News host, National Security Advisor Tucker Carlson, who had been arguing that going to war with Iran would hurt his chances for re-election. Cool.

Tommy, this broke on Friday. What was your initial reaction to this news? Thursday night. Thursday night, I'm sorry. That really fun breaking news alert that says we almost went to war. Right, we were all texting about Thursday night. Genuine fear. I remain pretty freaked out by the risk of escalation. I mean, I think what's missing from the debate still is a conversation about the possible worst case scenarios that could arise from a war with Iran. So people know they can use proxy forces and militia groups in Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq,

Lebanon, Syria. They could attack U.S. personnel, our partners and allies in the region. They have ballistic missiles that can target our bases and ships in the region or Israel. They can wreak havoc in the Strait of Hormuz. They could target Saudi oil infrastructure and drive up oil prices. So in other words, like things could get very serious very quickly. But, you know, you're not hearing that discussed. You're hearing glib bullshit from people like Tom Cotton, who said war with Iran would be two strikes, the first strike and the last strike. Cool, Tom.

Brett Stephens of the New York Times says, sink their Navy like it's that easy, and there won't be any sort of response. It's the same Iraq war proponents making the same arguments with absolutely no humility about how absolutely fucked up and wrong they were last time, and also about how incompetent this White House is.

Like, would you trust these guys to manage a war? I would not. So, again, like, remember when Obama said that our option was negotiate a deal with Iran or war, and all the neocons were so hurt and upset. Oh, they're so upset. So mad. Well, here we are, folks. And this is deadly serious, and Trump is escalating the war of words this morning. Yeah, this is one of those examples where I think, you know, Donald Trump being in the White House is obviously awful and scary.

But this is something that neoconservatives, warmongers like John Bolton have basically wanted to do for some time. They basically wanted to get us to this place. Right. Yeah. What was your... You were on vacation. What happened when you heard this news? Did you think about maybe not coming back? I definitely was glad to be out of signal range. I kept like...

You step into American political news and it really is like opening an evil chest of screams. You open it up and it's just the most blood-c of screams. Just, you open it up and it's just the most blood-curdling noises and then you close it again. Okay.

But no, you know, it is very frightening. It's the decision-making process. It's Trump's decision-making process layered on top of conservative dogma, right? Which are two of the most destructive forces on planet Earth. So that is my takeaway.

Tommy, I always like to play this game with you. How do you think a normal administration would have responded to the Iranians shooting down one of our drones? Let's say Hillary Clinton was in the White House. Sure. Stipulating that she wouldn't have pulled out of the Iran deal, and I don't think most reasonable Republicans would have pulled out of the Iran deal. But, like, let's say we are where we are today. I think you bring your whole team into the situation room and you have a conversation about what is our big picture

goal? Because I think that is also missing from the conversation. Is it preventing them from ever getting a nuclear weapon and renegotiating on that front? Are we just concerned about sabotaging ships in the Strait of Hormuz? Is the concern about the drone? And do we want to respond to send a message to the Iranians that you can't do that again? So I think you figure out what your objective is, then you can move forward. I would start with making a very detailed public briefing for friends and allies at the UN maybe about the specific location of our drone, because the Iranian narrative is that it was in Iranian airspace. We say it wasn't. No one's really detailing what the truth is. I would want to bring friends and allies together to talk about some sort of international way to protect ships in the area, and then think about responses that

wouldn't escalate the situation. So I was talking with Seth Moulton, served four tours in Iraq, running for president, member of Armed Services Committee. He suggests responding with a cyber attack that could take down their electrical grid where that missile system is based as a direct response to the drone. And then engaging with allies and friends, building a coalition to protect sea lanes, and then publicly spelling out the golden strategy. That, to me, seems more measured and proportionate to what was actually done to us, which was blowing up a very expensive computer in the sky. I do think Trump is right that killing 150 Iranians in response to blowing up an unmanned drone is completely disproportionate. Yeah. And obviously it's chilling and terrifying to think that Fox's primetime lineup and what its hosts think might dissuade us from taking

military action. Obviously, these people should not be part of the chain of command. But they are. And they don't agree on this one either. They don't. Well, you know, this is, as Trump has moved further into his administration, the voices that made Trump uniquely unsettling to Republicans back when they admitted that they didn't want Trump to be the nominee or president was obviously it was trade and immigration, but the other piece of it was foreign policy. And Tucker Carlson does represent the isolationist nationalist streak. Pat Buchanan, this is Ann Coulter. Yes, and it really was an important part

of Trumpism when it was being defined by people like Tucker Carlson and Maureen Dowd calling him a dove because they thought that that Tucker view would be better represented in the White House. So Trump decides to not go with the strike. He goes with, you know, there was a cyber attack. I read that that had been planned maybe even before. Yeah, but I think that that was a limited cyber attack designed to take down missile defense systems that could have taken out airplanes that were flying sorties designed to hit targets. In the event of the actual strike. If we were going to do a strike, you take out the air defenses first with some sort of cyber attack to make sure that our guys aren't shot down. Okay, and then there were economic sanctions against some of the country's top leaders.

In response to those sanctions, Iran has said that the path to diplomacy is now closed and that the White House is afflicted by, quote, mental retardation. Trump responded that Iran's leadership doesn't understand the word nice. Okay. And that any attack by iran on anything american will be met with overwhelming force and in some areas obliteration great so this is of course the fear that uh maybe you know trump who might have started off not wanting war cannot control himself once people once there starts being a war of words on twitter and uh and through the news so what where do we go from here, Tommy?

Right. This is the problem with having a childless idiot in the White House, but this is also the problem of having a strategy that's just fundamentally incoherent. I mean, they have this maximum pressure strategy of crippling sanctions, but it is not paired with a diplomatic off-ramp that could lead to some sort of resolution. And in fact, they're doing the opposite. I mean, they sanctioned the Supreme Leader and Zarif, the foreign minister. Those are the people we need to talk to.

They're the people who can cut a deal and make a decision. They were the ones involved in the Iran deal, right? Yeah, I mean, the Supreme Leader makes every big decision. The foreign minister is the guy you'd negotiate with. But instead, we're just needlessly pissing them off with additional sanctions. They're not going to do anything. I mean, I don't think that the Supreme Leader has got a bunch of money parked in New York that we've now cut off from him. You know, it's like, it's just stupid. So

again, no one knows what their goal is. The message is coming from Pompeo and Bolton and Trump change constantly. And so the Iranians are probably understandably confused. Our allies are confused. The world is freaked out and there's no end game. Like this is, it's as serious a situation that I think we've been in, in a very long time, probably since North Korea. Now, luckily, he pulled a rabbit out of the hat there and decided to just pivot to talks and let them develop nuclear weapons. And the problem is much worse. But at least we didn't go to war. There really are, you know, we are seeing on a bunch of different policies internationally, you know, internationally, in terms of what's happening in the UK, domestically, in the United States when it comes to health care, immigration, other policies,

and now internationally as it comes to Iran, that conservative rhetoric is bellicose, angry, and simple. And it attacks the complex solutions offered by centrists, the left, the international community. But when push comes to shove, they don't like the Iran deal. They think the Iran deal is terrible. Okay, what's your alternative? They don't have one. You know, you say, oh, we want to repeal Obamacare. We want to repeal Obamacare. It's terrible. It's terrible. What's your alternative? We don't have one. We want to leave the EEO. We want to leave the EEO. What's your alternative? We don't have one. And so we have this populist movement calling for all kinds of, you know, a rearguard action against the difficult compromises of modern life. And then once in power, we are left with these hideous choices because they cannot match their rhetoric with any kind of a coherent policy outcome across virtually any possible issue.

Yeah. I mean, I guess all we can hope for is that Congress takes some action that might block off their ability to respond to Iran. But I think that he's got, you know, considerable authorization under the War Powers Act and can respond in ways to defend the U.S. So I don't really know what the path is to preventing him from doing something really stupid. Yeah, I guess that's what I was wondering is what happens in Congress here. And I guess, you know, I know that House Democrats last week repealed the voted to repeal the authorization for use of military force. But that doesn't go anywhere in the Senate, I imagine. constrain him here. It does look like public opinion may constrain him. It's ridiculous that it is to have fucking Tucker Carlson talking you out of a strike on Iran. Public pressure and public opinion and news reports constrain every president on every issue. So maybe we just have to be happy with that. We're just at the mercy of a madman right now. And whether he listens to Tucker Carlson or whether he listens to John Bolton. Or Sean Hannity. Okay. I just wanted to make sure

that's where we are. Yeah, it's good. It's good stuff. All right, so let's talk about another crisis that Trump has made much worse. Federal authorities disclosed today that more than 100 children have been returned to a detention facility on the border in Texas after initially being removed when court-appointed attorneys discovered that kids as young as toddlers had been living in shockingly inhumane conditions with inadequate food, water, and sanitation. There was no access to soap, toothbrushes, toothpaste, beds, blankets.

There had been outbreaks of flu and lice. According to the Associated Press, the lawyers described a four-year-old with matted hair who had gone without a shower for days and hungry, inconsolable children struggling to soothe each other, some who had been locked in the facility for weeks at a time. children struggling to soothe each other, some who'd been locked in the facility for weeks at a time. The acting commissioner of customs and border protection also announced today that he'd be stepping down in the coming weeks. Let's start with the most obvious question. Why is this happening? I mean, I think it's that fear should prevent these kinds of things from happening. You know, like a low-level employee to the very top of the food chain, you should live in fear that if you did this, a news report would come out about the conditions in these facilities and you would be fired or maybe fucking prosecuted for criminal neglect,

right? I mean, that's how normal politics works. But anecdotally, it seems like these guards are actually punishing kids on purpose, right? They were given two lice combs because there was a lice outbreak and they lost one of the combs. And to punish the kids, they took away their blankets or their beds. Like this is some vindictive, crazy shit. So that shouldn't surprise us though, right? Because Trump's policy is fear.

He wants cruelty as a deterrent for future migrants to travel North and make this risky bet. And like that's the reality. And I think that's what Democrats need to be talking about. But the thing I don't really get is he says he needs more funding, but he declared an emergency to reprogram money to build a wall. Why couldn't he declare an emergency to take more money

to build new facilities to put these kids? What they're doing is illegal. Under the Flores Agreement, it's blatantly illegal, and I don't know how to hold them accountable for it except for these press reports. Well, I think this is the problem in Congress right now. I mean, at the heart of this problem is an influx of asylum seekers at the border, right?

So this is something that, you know, and we had this in the Obama administration in 2014 for a little while. It's obviously now gone on much longer under the Trump administration. So you've got all these asylum seekers and many of them are children. Right now what we're seeing is a lot of children who are accompanied by not their parent, but by some other relative, but not their legal guardian. So what happens is the child and the aunt, uncle, grandparent get to the border. They are separated because it's not a parent.

And what's – Customs and Border Patrol is not supposed to be able to house thousands and thousands of children. That's just – they were never built for that, right? So under any administration, there would be an overflow at Customs and Border Patrol. What's supposed to happen is under the law, Customs and Border Patrol is supposed to hold these kids for 72 hours. And then they're supposed to transfer them to the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement. At that point, that office is supposed to then connect these kids with some parent or guardian or any relative in the U.S., and off they go.

No one has good answers as to, A, why these kids are spending so long in CPB facilities, and B, why once they're moved to the HHS facilities, they're not being connected with parents and guardians fast enough in this country. We don't know on either side what's going on. to be a combination of sort of willful neglect, a reflection of Trump's priorities and his desire to use cruelty as a cudgel, combined with a system that is overwhelmed and a bureaucracy that does, I think, sincerely seem to be overwhelmed. Of course, you know, dehumanized people in the hands of an overwhelmed bureaucracy is one of the most dangerous forces in the world, right? That is, those two things come together to create conditions like this, which is why it's, you know, the system being overwhelmed is not an excuse. Obviously, Donald Trump's policy preferences are the opposite of an excuse. So it's heartbreaking.

are the opposite of an excuse. So it's heartbreaking. And it is a culmination of the choices Donald Trump has made and the leadership he has shown on this issue, the kind of direction he has given to those in these agencies. And I would direct everyone to read the interview in The New Yorker with Warren Binford, who's one of the attorneys that the court appointed attorneys who discovered this. And basically these attorneys who were appointed by the court became whistleblowers because they were so horrified by these conditions. And one of these attorneys said, almost every child that we interviewed had a parent or relative in the United States who were able to and want to take care of their children.

All we need to do is to get these children to their families, and we know that almost all of them will be well cared for, and it will cost the U.S. taxpayer no money to care for these children because they will be cared for by their parents or relatives. So there is no fucking excuse for this at all.

It really is a leadership question because this is why you have a president. This is why you have a White House. The government is big and it is vast and is doing very complicated things all around the world, all across the country, all the time. But you have a White House to set priorities and you have groups of people there who are meant in these moments to step up and take charge of the issue, say, we have a crisis. That's a White House chief of staff. One of the key roles is to solve problems as they come up in a very complicated bureaucracy. But what is clear

is because of this president and the people around him, there is no sense that there is an animated, humane force inside of the administration that would see something like this as a true emergency. It needs to solve. It just doesn't care. Not caring is, is the top down order. I might take it a step further, which is that Stephen Miller might see headlines about kids being tortured essentially and think, okay, that might convince these parents in these, in central triangle company countries down in Central America not to come north now, right? Which we know doesn't work. Right.

From family separation today, you could draw a pretty straight line that they're trying to be as cruel as humanly possible to children to prevent further migration. But I think the thing we need to remember is that we are doing permanent damage to these children. I don't think you can traumatize a two-year-old, three-year-old, 4-year-old, 5-year-old and expect them to get over. These kids are likely to have problems for life. You see some of these videos. It is horrific. Yeah, it's trauma.

We're putting these kids through trauma. You can't undo it. And to John's point about there being no excuse, the second these reports became public, all of a sudden there's the ability to move these kids out of these facilities, right? The second the attention came. Except now that they're moving them back, I don't even know what the fuck. I mean, the worst thing here is the fucking excuses from not only Donald Trump, but his administration and these Republicans. You have Donald Trump telling, you know, Chuck Todd interviewed him over the weekend.

Donald Trump's excuse on this is, I don't have family separation. Obama had family separation. He was the one that separated them. I'm bringing them back together, which is just a fucking insane lie all over the place. You've got Trump saying, we could solve this whole problem in 15 minutes if Democrats just came and changed the asylum laws, which doesn't make any sense because basically Trump is saying, if only Democrats agreed to deny people the right to seek asylum in this country, then somehow the situation at these facilities of children who are already there be fixed. No, that doesn't make any fucking sense whatsoever. And then you've got Republicans in Congress saying, well, Democrats are holding up this

funding because, you know, they don't want us to deny asylum to enough children. They don't want us to put more, have higher guidelines and standards for these facilities. And so we don't want to, you know, they don't want to give us the money to do this. So there's just a bunch of really fucking bad excuses right now when all you need to do is get these kids out of the facilities, get them the resources they need while they're in the facility so that it is actually fucking clean and sanitary. And then, you know, connect them with parents, connect them with guardians and relatives. To Leavitt's point, you're the president, man. You've been in charge for a while. You've made the situation worse.

It's on you to fix it. Get it together. And the rest of the fucking people in Congress that we've elected. Heartless. And, you know, the Democrats are out there talking about this and want to get some, but, like, all these other fucking Republicans,

it's not just Trump. There's a whole country, there's a whole government of fucking people who are just watching as, you know, two-year-olds are scarred for life that is the that is the kind of chilling obviously it's all incredibly heartbreaking but there's this and we'll get to all these stories but there really is this feeling of these stories come out and we don't know what it is but more should happen we should have this feeling like there

should be something more and bigger that takes place when a story like this come out. When someone accuses the president of rape, there should be more that happens. And they're used, I mean, think about the first time we learned about family separation, right? It led the news for weeks and weeks. And I mean, the reason we know about this right now, two different things happened. One, there was an Associated Press story where the lawyers, you know, blew the whistle on this right but it was sort of in the news a little bit before that because Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is on her Instagram story and said we're running concentration camps

down there and everyone got all fucking upset because she used the word concentration camps and so the first time in months that news of horrible conditions at detention facilities was in the news is because people were upset with the fucking terminology that was used by a single congresswoman, including a lot of reporters and a lot a fucking brand you need to protect. You know, it isn't a when people say we need to learn the lessons of the Holocaust. It is not to avoid comparing anything that ever takes place with that terrible, evil tragedy because it denies the the unique horrors of the Holocaust. It is supposed to mean that we learn from it certain lessons about what happens when we treat people inhumanely, when we fail to take the dehumanization of fellow human beings seriously, when powerful countries put the power and might of their police state, of their military, and they set it against people in need, right? These are the lessons we are supposed to learn. It is not supposed to make a set of terms, sacrosanct, to protect us, to protect the idea of the Holocaust from being used as a way of learning

lessons now. It makes absolutely no sense. It is infuriating. We do not have to wait for things to be far worse before we learn the lessons of how civilized people, people who consider themselves to be good, can participate in something horrible. Yeah. I mean, there are probably some people out there that have a deep personal connection to the Holocaust who don't want to hear it invoked, and that's fine, and that's their choice. But Liz Cheney is not one of those people. She is a cynical, bad faith, lying, horrible person who is invoking the history of the Holocaust to make a political attack on her political opponent. And no one is going to look back on this moment and debate the lexical

definition of a word. They're going to look back on the treatment of kids and think that is a stain in our history and anyone associated with it should be fucking ashamed and driven out of public life. See ya, Liz. Thanks for the Iraq war. Thanks for your shitty dad. Thanks for your terrible congressional seat. You suck. We don't like you. I don't think we can blame Liz Cheney for her dad. We can blame her dad for Liz Cheney. We can do both. Go both directions.

So the question is, what can be done about this? What can Democrats do in Congress? Right now they're trying to pass emergency funding to improve the conditions of these facilities. But, as I was saying, Republicans refuse to accept it unless Democrats also agree to fund more enforcement like immigration raids and detention beds. And some House Democrats refusing to support a bill that does fund these things and doesn't put enough restrictions on Trump. So I don't know what you guys think about this debate. I get the challenge here, right? There's an emergency funding bill. You know, you're in the House. Democrats run the House.

They don't run anything else. I think, to me, it seems like the main priority, the urgent priority right now is to get these resources, get whatever resources we can to these facilities. Because if you can even help, you know, five children to me, it's worth it. Like, I don't want to fund more fucking detention beds and immigration raids either. Like, I don't want to fund more fucking detention beds and immigration raids either. But this is an emergency right now. And I sort of think the Democrats have to just act like it because we're not getting a better deal. We don't run the Senate.

We don't have the White House. Right. And it doesn't close you off from seeking accountability through investigations, through hearings. Right. There are other avenues to hold the administration accountable for its mistreatment of these children while just not using this debate for anything other than help. Yeah. I mean, as usual, Democrats were caught between being responsible and dealing with an administration that is cruel and vindictive and just lies about everything. But I mean, if you're trying to negotiate a deal with Dick Durbin for more funding and then the president of the United States announces that there's going to be massive ice raids in 10 cities, including Chicago. Well, of course, that's a bad faith way to start a negotiation. Of course, they don't trust that the money they would appropriate is actually going to go towards helping kids and not towards additional efforts to rip families apart.

I get that. I get that. I get the lack of trust. I think that I would land in throwing money at the problem to try to help the kids, too. But Trump is making it impossible. Yeah. So then the question is, what can people do at home? You can go to RaisesTexas.org. That's R-A-I-C-E-S-Texas.org. They're an organization that provides free and low cost legal services to immigrant children, families and refugees in Texas.

They're accepting donations and volunteers. We will also tweet out a link to the Texas Tribune, which published a good list of other local organizations that are helping on the border. And of course, you should call your member of Congress and do everything fucking possible to vote Donald Trump and everyone who is helping Donald Trump do what he's

doing out of office. Okay, one more completely awful and enraging story before we get to 2020. Last week, New York Magazine published an excerpt from a new memoir by E. Jean Carroll in which she alleges that Donald Trump raped her in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman in the 90s. Carroll is now among more than 20 women who have publicly accused Donald Trump of sexual assault or misconduct. Trump has denied the allegations. He told The Hill on Monday, quote, I'll say it with great respect. Thank you for that. I'll say it with great respect.

Number one, she's not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, okay? Carol's story wasn't on the front pages of most major newspapers this weekend, nor was it covered significantly on any of the major Sunday news programs. The Washington Post ran a front page story on Saturday. Guys, why hasn't this received front page, top of the morning show coverage? What's going on here? Yeah, this is the kind of stasis that we're in.

There is a brokenness. There's a brokenness to politics. And the assumption that Donald Trump will not face consequences means that when there is something that someone deserves to face consequences over, breaks into the news, it is not given the attention it deserves because the end is already presumed, that this will go nowhere, this will have no consequence. And because of that, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. We see that across a number of stories on Donald Trump. It is simply a fact of his conduct and his incredible gross misbehavior across so many avenues that he has simply, there is a bias in the media in favor of Donald Trump that does not take his misbehavior as seriously as other people. It's just, it is now built in. And it is, I think, a deeply, it is a hard thing. I think it's one of the most painful parts about being, about following

the news in this era for anybody, like for all of us who are paying attention and listening all the time. It is the kind of, it is, I think the part that gives us a stomach ache all the time, because there is this sense that things are supposed to happen that don't happen. And when you say that, you sound naive and you're supposed to be more cynical. Um, but because of Republican cowardice and capitulation and failure to show any political courage whatsoever, combined with the way the media has treated Trump for the past several years, we are trapped. Yeah, I mean, I would recommend people read the whole article because the Trump anecdote is just one of a series of just harrowing accounts of horrible men acting horrifically. I was struck by a few things.

One, the way the article was talked about online was very euphemistic. There were lots of claims of sexual misconduct or sexual—it was rape. Rape? It was a rape allegation. I don't understand why people weren't using that word. And the decisions at a bunch of newspapers not to report out the story, it's inexcusable, it's unconscionable. I mean, when you think, look, Trump has dominated the news since he started running,

but the only other story that broke through was a bunch of Me Too allegations against Harvey Weinstein and Les Moonves, a bunch of scumbags. This story combines the two. There's no excuse for not putting this on the front page of every newspaper and every newscast. I mean, I would do some soul searching if I were in those newsrooms. Yeah, I do think, love it to your point, we've now had three different segments in this news section and each one I've ended by being like, okay, what can be done now, you know? And on Iran, we're just waiting around to see what happens because no one can stop Donald Trump from doing anything crazy. On immigration, we don't have Congress

and who knows what Donald Trump will do and who knows if the money will get to the border and the facilities because we can't trust them. And now on this, what do you do about the fact that the president is an alleged rapist and, you know, has committed all this sexual assault? And the answer to all of these is to vote him out of office in 2020. And so the media, I think, looks at that and is like, all right, well, that's what we're covering.

We're covering the race to get him out of the office and they don't know what else to do. And also, by the way, this is partly goes to the Democrats in the House saying we don't want to impeach him. We're too afraid because we don't know about the politics. You know, like that is that is not a perfect tool because it will not result in his removal from office because, you know, the Senate will save him. But it is one more tool to at least stand up and say this man is manifestly unfit for office and should not be here because he has committed crimes and done horrible things. Yeah. And I do think that part of that is why I think Democrats generally have a kind of bad feeling. And I think sometimes we translate that into, oh, no, are any

of these candidates the right candidates? Oh, no. Maybe we don't have what takes us in. Oh, no. Fear is in the backdrop of this election in a huge way. Right. And I think sometimes so much of what we're seeing in terms of conversations about electability is not a sense of not believing our candidates are up for the job. It is a terrifying realization about how big the consequences of failure are. I was going to say, just to that point, and it's, you know, we always make fun of electability. It's like, oh, you're basing your decision on what other people are going to do. But it's partly because we're all looking around at each other and we're like, I thought we all knew each other here.

And then 2016 happened and I guess we didn't. So people are guessing what other people are going to do because, you know, you add up all the votes of everyone in the country and that's what happens. Well, unless it's the popular vote. But no, but, you know, yes. Okay. For, you know, popular vote, it's close. The fact that it's close is terrifying

in and of itself, right? We concede every way in which the election was swung toward Donald Trump, it is still a close election. That shouldn't have been. And so it forces us to confront, yes, what we thought we knew about our fellow Americans and about what it means to have a national identity itself. And all of these stories kind of wrench at that because we're forced to confront the fact that millions of Americans now say they believe a lot of the allegations about Donald Trump, but may vote for him anyway. All of these things, I think, force us to make us question some basic ideas we had about what America stood for and about what Americans would stand for. One really small point about this, I do think one of the challenges with this particular story is because it is a first person account, there is no journalistic outlet

that has truly run it to ground. So to me, one thing that I would like to see is for reporters to take up the story. And one of the challenges is because it's already broken, there's not the upside of being the one to break it, but there's such value to reporters now digging in and really, really validating the story, going through the evidence that she has and kind of providing another account. She did tell two friends as well. Yes. No, of course. I'm not, I'm not. No, I'm just saying that's one avenue to go down. Of course. Yeah. I'm not speaking anything. I'm not denigrating her account. What I'm saying is that there's value to an additional account from a journalistic outlet that runs through what she says, what the friends say, that kind of puts it in a – does an objective version. Yeah.

All right. So in a bit, we're going to dig into the results of the very first poll in our Poller Coaster 2020 series. But first, I spoke quickly about the approach and methodology we used with Pat Riley, who's the co-founder of Change Research, which is our partner in this little project. So that interview is up next. On the pod today, we have the co-founder and chief growth officer of the polling firm Change Research, Pat Riley. Pat, welcome to the pod. Thank you, John. I'm excited to be here. Yes, excited to have you and excited that Crooked Media is working with Change on a series of polls on 2020 that we're calling the 2020 Polar Coaster. I love it.

Yeah. So we're going to be digging into this poll in a few minutes on the pod. But I wanted to talk with you about your firm, your approach, and your methodology. To start with, I know you guys are a relatively new polling firm. How did Change Research come together over these last few years? Yeah. So we'll be two on July 20th of this year. And we would not be having this conversation had Hillary Clinton won in 2016. We woke up the next day, I woke up the next day as the mother of

a 11-year-old and 13-year-old and thought, I need to step back into politics. And my co-founder, Mike Greenfield, did the same thing. So change research is about providing fast and accurate and affordable public opinion polling to help Democratic candidates and causes win. And we're really all about trying to improve our democracy by increasing the number of tools that candidates and causes have to understand voters and succeed. So how is your approach at change different than other firms? What's unique about your methodology and how did you guys land on it? Yeah. So one of the big headlines that came out of 2016 was all public pollsters should be shot. And I think Jim Messina is the one who said that. And there was this general recognition that something was wrong with the way that Democratic candidates and causes in the party. The technology just seemed dated. I don't know how many listeners

today have landline phones, but I'm looking at an audience of people with their hands down. Right. And we were all about changing that. My co-founder, Mike Greenfield, was the first data scientist hired at PayPal. He led the data science team at LinkedIn. And he started his first, you know, odds making firm called Team Rankings in the Stanford dorm room. And he went to help a friend of his run for Palo Alto City Council in September of 2016. And he was like, in September of 2016. And he was like, WTF? Here in Silicon Valley, you've got a candidate who's running for a local office that has no accurate way to really understand what voters are thinking. And then Trump won. And we together decided to apply the intellect that he has on how to do A-B testing at scale and apply a modern data science approach to understanding voters to our approach. So here's how it works. You have to

throw out everything you know about or you think you know about traditional polling, i.e. we don't do landline phone calls, we don't do IVR or cell phone calls, and we don't have a big giant online panel. Instead, we have a new technology that we developed called BiasCorrect that allows us to dynamically build a representative sample by soliciting respondents through online advertising. So here's how it works. You're sitting on Facebook, Instagram, whatever's popular on your handheld phone, in front of your tablet, on a screen, and you get a solicitation and it pops up. And it would say, you know, make your voice heard in Des Moines. And it's completely innocuous. You click on that solicitation and you're in our survey instrument. And it looks and feels just like any other survey you've ever taken online. That's as opposed to you're just sitting down to dinner, the phone rings, I don't think I'll take it, or you're getting a bunch of people hitting you up on your cell phone with numbers you don't recognize. Or an online panel, which are often incentivized so that if

you complete, you know, six to 10 surveys in a day, you might get an Amazon gift card, which is dramatically increasing the likelihood that they'll be wrong. So the way that our bias correct engine works is we have a general sense of who you are based on the advertising targeting we've done. And our bias correct engine goes out across that massive universe of people who are online every day, up to four to five hours a day and gets just the right number of Republicans, Democrats, Independents, African-Americans, Latinos, women, men, older people, and millennials. Plus, we've fully automated the post-stratification and weighting so that we can do things that traditional pollsters simply can't. One,

can do things that traditional pollsters simply can't. One, we can deliver a poll in a national poll in about 24 hours with a very large sample size, a congressional district about two days on the outside, and even a small state legislative district in about four days. We're accurate. in about four days were accurate. Our actual error rate in the nearly 600 polls we completed in 2018 was 2.6. That means we were within 2.6 of what the actual vote share of the Democrat who won was. And most important, we're affordable. So the actual price, the average price of our poll was south of $5,000. So we're removing a lot of the obstacles that make traditional polling inaccurate, and then at the same time, creating an opportunity for women, people of color, people who are not white men who are really rich to run for office with actionable insight that will help them win. So, yeah, I mean, I think one of the first times I heard about you guys was during the 2018 midterms

when I believe that change sort of captured the Andrew Gillum surge in the Florida primary almost before any other pollster did or instead of any other pollster, really, because I don't know that anyone else really caught it. What made you guys, why do you think you were able to sort of capture that sort of late surge by Gillum when other polling firms weren't able to capture that? And then it's also about a commitment to constant innovation and making sure that you're counting people who say they're going to vote. So our approach in working with candidates like Andrew Gillum, Lauren Underwood, some of the other hundreds of down ballot candidates that we worked with in 2018 is instead of spending all of your money on one poll, instead do five polls. Right. So we were able to benchmark Andrew Gillum's rise and we kept saying to his team, man, you're doing pretty well. And then he was able to look at some of those results and make key decisions to help move forward. I think part of the reason that we

were right in Florida is because traditional Democratic Party orthodoxy is we're only going to count voters who have previously voted. The problem with that is that if you are a younger voter, you might not be in the voter rolls. If you are a voter who voted for Obama but sat out HRC, you may also not be on the voter rolls. In the Gillum race, we weighted and counted voters who said that they were definitely going to vote in that election. And that included voters who were not on a voter file. So we can poll folks either from a voter file or via geolocation. And in the Gillum case, it was all via geolocation. So we were weighting and counting those voters who said, that's, you're damn right, I'm definitely going to vote for Gillum. And that's why we're right.

So obviously, the universe of folks who spend a lot of time online is a little bit different than the broader universe of everyone who votes. How do you sort of weight the polls to make sure that you capture all the demographics in the right way so that the universe of people that you find online sort of are, you know, also represent the broader universe of voters? Yeah. I mean, we get that question a lot. And I think the assumption is that older people are not online. But that's simply not true in 2019. I mean, there are people, older people, younger people, we have trouble on occasion getting people over 80, over 85 to reply online. The real challenge is in getting a representative sample of 18 to 24-year-old

African-American men, for example. And I think one of the ways that change research is different is we're 100% committed to constantly innovating and trying to find affordable ways that we can get a representative sample on the communication platform that people are on right now, which is online. So if you wanted to get an accurate sample in the 1980s, you call people on their phone. If you're wanting to get a representative sample now, you have to do it online. You have to do it online. And we think that by taking an approach where you're constantly soliciting voters' opinion in a deep way, you can not only get that snapshot in time, but you also have an enormous amount of data that you can use that can also be helpful and predictive in winning a campaign. What were some of the most important things you all learned during the 2018 midterms? I think the most important takeaway was that

candidates in close races, like J.D. Scholten, for example, I loved being called a hipster at 52 by 538. It was awesome. And they wrote and said, hey, we don't really know what's going to happen in some of these rural districts. We have no idea. We've never seen any polling data. So we took them up on that cause. And there's a whole bunch of polls that we did during that last month before Election Day, including in that J.D. Scholten race. And we made the decision to release that poll. It showed him within striking distance of King. He raised about a million bucks from that poll.

It changed everything. Wasn't quite enough to have him win. But nonetheless, if the Democratic Party and establishment folks did not know that he was in striking distance, he may not have gotten as close. Another really important lesson was in Oklahoma. So because we're able to do affordable down-ballot races. We did dozens of polls in places like Tennessee, Oklahoma, Texas, Florida, places where there simply are not many Democratic pollsters, for darn sure. But then also candidates are running with very little resources, so that every penny counts. And we did two different rounds of polling there in

state legislative races for the itsy bitsy teeny weeny number of progressives in Oklahoma. And one of the things that we kept seeing was that Donald Trump was simply not very popular in Oklahoma City. And we kept seeing that Kendra Horn was within striking distance. We let folks know inside the Beltway that this was a race that they should pay more attention to. And lo and behold, she was the big sleeper winner of that period. So frequent polling allows you to see things that if you're only doing the traditional baseline messaging and then six weeks out a tracking poll, you're going to miss. Yeah. No, I mean, we tell people on the pod all the time, you know, the thing to know about polls are they are a snapshot in time. And so they can capture one moment in time and you shouldn't extrapolate that out into, oh, well, this is

what the whole race is going to be like. But the more you poll, the more polls you have, obviously, the more accurate the picture is. Yeah. And that's why we're really excited about this collaboration, because with our 2020 change polling that we're doing up to three polls per week, poll in all the early primary states, Iowa, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Texas, California, plus deep dives on issues that voters care about, as well as deep national looks at women voters, African American voters, Latinos. We're getting a really deep, deep insight on what voters are thinking well beyond the horse race. And with those polls, we're keeping our eye on the prize, which is when we finish this process and we have a Democratic nominee, that Democratic nominee will have more insight on what American voters are thinking than any nominee before them. And at Change, we're really committed to regime change, as Pod Save America is too.

So we're excited about sharing those results with you weekly, as well as our cool Pola Palooza, whatever you called it. That was really cool. Our Pola Coaster. Our Pola Coaster. Pola Coaster. Yes. Exciting. Well, Pat, we are very, very excited to be working with Change on this project and look forward to many more polls before November 2020. So thanks for joining us and explaining a little bit about this project. And we'll talk to you again soon.

Great. So as I talked about with Pat, we polled 935 voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina last Monday through Thursday who said they'll be participating in the Democratic primaries and caucuses. So mostly Democrats, but some independents in there, a few Republicans. But everyone said, I'll be participating in the Democratic primaries. race. Joe Biden leads with 29%, then Bernie Sanders with 20%, Elizabeth Warren with 19%, Pete Buttigieg with 14%, Kamala Harris at 5%, and Beto O'Rourke and Cory Booker with 3% each. Everyone else was 1% or under. But the reason we're doing these polls is to go far beyond the horse race. So we also asked why people preferred the candidates they did. We asked people what they're looking for in the next nominee. And we asked all kinds of other questions that you can find on crooked.com right now. I want to touch on a few of the more interesting

findings here. But first, what jumped out at both of you guys from the poll? What's interesting to you? What jumped out at me is that the Warren surge is real and it's real across a bunch of the early states. She's in second place in this poll in Iowa. She's in second place in South Carolina. So she's made a huge amount of progress in a short period of time in the early states and in the national numbers. And I think that if I were her campaign, I'd be pretty happy about it. Yeah. Lovett, what'd you think? So two things. One, you know, we wanted to look at, right, who do you think would, so who do you support, right? And that gives you some information. Then we ask these two other questions. Who do you

think is most likely to beat Donald Trump? And who do you think would make the best president? And I'll just be honest that I thought there might be more difference there. But of course, then you remember that once, you know, when you ask somebody a question, who do you support? Well, they're going to say they're the best person to win. They're the best person to lead. Yeah, it's hard to say I support so-and-so, but I don't think so-and-so would make the best president. So I'm actually interested in kind of trying to push people on that maybe in the next poll, like really kind of force them to like try to attack their own, their own, everyone's a pundit now, so they're going to defend their choice. But even with that kind of built-in

natural desire to defend your decision, you see that there is kind of a pro-Biden electability contingent, and there is a pro-Warren but worried about her electability contingent kind of built into these numbers, where people's second choices tend to go toward Warren, where people concerned about electability tend to go towards Biden. So I think you start to see the kind of debate that people are having around electability and Warren and Biden kind of inside of these numbers. I want to quickly say a few more things about Warren and this and then go right into that electability debate. So to your point, Tommy, the other piece of data that shows a real Warren surge is we decided to ask people how closely you pay attention in the primary and also how much do you

know about all the candidates, right? So voters' preferences vary quite a bit based on how much attention they've been paying. Warren leads with high candidate awareness voters. These are people who recognized all the candidates and said they'd heard a lot and know a lot about all the candidates. And both Biden, so when you do the horse race there, Warren's in the lead, then Biden, then Buttigieg, then Sanders. And then Kamala actually does a little bit better too. So both Biden and Sanders do much better with lower awareness voters. Among people who have low awareness of all the candidates, Biden is at 44 among low awareness voters and Sanders is at 28. Warren, Buttigieg, and Harris get their best numbers with high awareness voters.

So this is as people pay closer attention to the race, they seem to gravitate more towards Warren, towards Pete, towards Kamala, and less towards Bernie and Biden, which I think is a very important characteristic. It's really important for two reasons. One, I think that, you know, we've talked about this, that one of the reasons I think Warren has been doing better is she seems to be running a really good campaign. It's smart. She makes interesting choices. She's ahead of some other candidates on issues, on some of the strategic decisions that the campaign makes. And over time, low-awareness

voters are going to become high-awareness voters. Over time, as we get closer and closer to these votes. Seems like it. The only caveat there that I wonder about, and we're going to have to pull more, but Warren's also leading with highly educated voters, more college-educated voters, who tend to pay more attention to this stuff. And low awareness voters tend to be less educated voters who pay less attention.

So future high awareness voters may not reflect current high awareness voters. Right. We don't know. It could be. We don't know. We don't know yet. And we don't care about the polls. That's like the key thing about this poll.

This is the first poll by people that don't care about polls. That's what makes this so awesome and such an important poll to pay attention to because you shouldn't pay attention. So you should pay attention. Well, I will. That is funny, but I will say the least,

the least interesting thing here is the horse race. And this is why we asked so many more other questions. So you should look at, so I want to talk about electability because we really tried to dig in on this whole notion of electability. Brian Boitler wrote a great piece on this that's on Crooked.com right now. But as you mentioned, Lovett, each candidate's supporters tend to think their candidate would be the best president. But there's a decent chunk of all candidate supporters who feel that Biden is the likeliest to beat Trump. 50% of Buttigieg supporters, 28% of Warren supporters, and 20% of Sanders supporters believe this.

The other question we asked is, to figure out this electability thing, are there candidates that you wouldn't vote for, even though you're going to participate in the Democratic primaries, that you wouldn't vote for if they were the nominee? 83% to 86% of Democratic primary voters said they'd vote for any of the top seven candidates. Even de Blasio? Didn't crack the top seven. Didn't crack the top 17. didn't crack the top 17, didn't crack the top 20.

So Biden and Warren get the best numbers there, but all seven are within the margin of error. That said, Warren's numbers do suggest more enthusiasm than the others. The 23% who would either volunteer or donate to her or gladly vote for her is tied with Sanders for the most of any candidate. And then the 65%

who said they'd either gladly vote for her or volunteer or donate for her is tied with Sanders for the most of any candidate. And then the 65 percent who said they'd either gladly vote for her or volunteer a donate for her is higher than any other candidate. So we not only asked who wouldn't you vote for, we said, which of these candidates would you go volunteer, knock on doors, really be happy to vote for? And the enthusiasm for Warren is quite high with Sanders and Buttigieg actually right below her. And with Biden, it's actually a little lower, the enthusiasm. The other thing that's notable is that Biden is really dominating among African American voters. He's got 62 percent of African American voters. Kamala Harris is next with 11 percent. That would make me very nervous if I were in the Biden campaign, given the recent conversation about his anecdotes about segregation of senators and civility in Washington. It would seem to me that you should, I would be worried about that coming up at the debate.

The other person who should be concerned about the African-American vote is Pete Buttigieg because he received 1%. And to receive 1% when you're actually polling that high overall just kind of shows you the breadth of the challenge that he faces. And again, it's very, very hard to win the nomination without doing very well among African-American voters in the Democratic Party. I also think it was interesting. Only 11% of Warren supporters said that they chose her over their second choice

because they think she's likelier to beat Trump. That to me is a really interesting number. That's where you start to see inside of these numbers where the electability fears around Elizabeth Warren are very real and very present in people's minds. Well, so, yeah, we asked a follow-up question of those who chose their number one candidate because he or she is likelier to beat Trump. So we asked, why is your number two candidate less electable than the first candidate you chose? 55% of those who ranked Warren second because she was less likely to beat Trump did so because they thought average Americans

are less likely to like her. Those who ranked Kamala Harris number two did so for the same reason, perceived likability, but by an even higher percentage, 67%. And this was also the top reason for those who chose Buttigieg number second, though the number here was only 44%. You contrast that with Sanders.

The people who chose Bernie as their number two said he wasn't as likely to win because he was too far to the left. So it's very interesting that those four candidates after Biden, the reasons why people think they're ineluctable, and it's what everyone thinks, sexism, racism, potential homophobia. It's all there. And then Sanders does have this socialist left. So it's a smaller percentage, but I think it was very interesting.

Anything else? Anything else to go to you guys? I think you really ran the gamut. Yep. The impeachment thing I thought was interesting. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me that much. You know, Democrats happily vote for someone who supported impeachment. They'd be pretty pissed at somebody who actively tried to stop it.

Yeah, it's 83 percent of support impeachment, 52% strongly, 57% who support impeachment would be willing to vote for a candidate who voted not to impeach Trump, but 91% of those who oppose impeachment would vote for someone who voted to impeach him. It just goes to show you that for Democrats running for president, at least, there is no political cost to supporting impeachment, but there is actually... In the primary. Yeah, in the primary, there is a political cost to opposing it. And many of them seem to have figured that out. So good for them. So next time we'll talk, we'll be after the debate.

What do you guys think? I mean, most people in this poll said they'd be watching some or most of the debate. They're going to be pretty interested, especially, of course, the high candidate awareness voters. What are you guys looking for in this debate? I'm really hoping that someone ends their candidacy at this debate.

You know what I mean? I want to see Rick Perry forgetting what agencies he would shut down and saying, oops, I want to see Ben Carson literally getting lost on his way to the stage or Marco Rubio getting unraveled by Chris Christie. Those are the performances I want to see to help me narrow this thing down. Yeah. I would like to see some, some real winnowing, uh, by, younowing by, you know, self-winnowing by real miscalculation. I'm really interested in that.

I agree with Tommy. So we have the first night is Warren as sort of one of the top candidates there. The second night, there are more top candidates, Biden and Sanders, et cetera. We talked about this before. We're still looking for a candidate who can articulate this moment, you know,

in this terrifying, you know, in this terrifying, unsettling political moment in which so much is on the line. And there's still time. These are all candidates who are perfecting what they're saying. They're talking to people. They're listening to people. All of that is food for their figuring out this bigger argument. And at any point, because you look at these numbers, yeahiden's winning they're the next two are warren and sanders no one's no one's running away with this thing any it is i do sincerely believe that many of these candidates if they were to articulate a true kind of compelling argument that appealed to a lot of people could start to emerge and so i just i just think every moment and they should be able to do that in the six minutes they have

a lot of yeah you gotta you gotta grab it i will say one last thing on that like it's interesting in in this poll too um what's driving biden's perception of electability obviously white guy but more so than the other white guys in the race is people say his experience right and we have been part of so many elections that were change elections and obviously this is a big change election as well because people don't want Donald Trump. But because of this fear that we've been talking about this whole podcast, I think this, there is this comfort with Joe Biden, because of his experience that if I were some of these other candidates, I would think about how to make people not just make the case against Donald Trump and make the case for yourself, but make people feel comfortable with the idea of you as commander in chief and the idea of you going toe to toe with Donald Trump and being able to beat him.

You know, like for, for example, if I was Elizabeth Warren, right? Elizabeth Warren has a fuckload of experience. She set up the CFPB. She created it. She had the idea. She set it up from beginning to end. She knows how to run an agency, a government agency. No one else has created a government agency on that stage. I'd maybe talk about that a little bit. You know, Kamala can talk about her, uh, her time as a prosecutor. You know, like everyone can make a case also for their experience, to me, someone like Kamala Harris, I do think has an opportunity. And so far, to me, she has done a good job of saying, of putting in people's minds, you can imagine me going toe to toe against Donald Trump. Like, you get that. I'm a prosecutor. I'm good at interrogating people. I think people who are

paying close attention kind of get that. For me, I think that her opportunity is to kind of put more meat onto those bones like okay, we get it We can see you going toe-to-toe to Donald Trump. What do you want to do? Like what's what's driving what is driving you to make this incredible decision to run for president at this moment? Yeah, there's been a lot of emphasis on like I can be the one who can prosecute the case But it's always like well then what is the case right look the elephant in the room here is that Joe Sestak just upended This whole thing. That's true. Totally forgot that that another candidate asked and we did not talk about that on the pod. We're living in a post-Sestak

world. We're living in a post-Sestak world. You're all laughing. He'll be here in two weeks. One of you is going to talk to him. Do the Oscars play us off music. So we'll talk to you Friday after the debates on this pod, but before that, we are going to, on Wednesday and Thursday night of each debate,

we are going to stream our text thread conversation on YouTube and on Facebook alongside the debates what an experiment this will be this is how exciting this must be for all of you it's going to be our slack channel but now you can see it a window a window into a whole nother part of of crooked media and maybe because you know we won't be on Twitter and so maybe we'll forget that it's public and we'll say some crazy shit. I'm going to let loose.

Anyway, we'll be reacting and shouting and breaking it down in real time. You can submit questions throughout the debates, and we might just discuss your question in the Slack thread. Make sure you are following

Crooked Media on Facebook and YouTube to be able to see this. This is Wednesday and Thursday night during the debates. Yeah, we'll be online just chatting about it. So looking forward to that. Bye, guys.