Pod Save America - "Florida man."

Episode Date: August 30, 2018

The Florida race for governor will be a contest between the Republican mini-Trump and the Democrats’ future, Paul Ryan’s SuperPAC is blowing louder dog whistles, and Senate Democrats make a deal on judges that gets them nothing in return. Then EMILY’s List President Schriock joins Jon and Dan to talk about the record number of women candidates who are running and winning elections in 2018.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Later in the pod, we'll talk to Stephanie Shriok of Emily's List about the success of female candidates in this election cycle and what's at stake for women in November. We're also going to talk about the results of this week's primaries in Arizona, Oklahoma, and Florida. The deal Democrats cut with Mitch McConnell to confirm another batch of Trump's judges. On Pod Save the World, this week, Tommy tries to figure out what the hell President Trump was talking about when he live-tweeted a racist conspiracy theory about South Africa that he saw on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show.

Bet Tommy never thought he'd have to do a Pod Save the World episode on that when he started the pod. The tweet claimed that white South African farmers are being murdered and their land is getting seized by the state. And so Tommy and economist Africa Bureau Chief John McDermott figure out what's true, what's false, and why the tweet was cheered by white nationalist groups all over the world. Man, that's dark. It's a fascinating episode, though. And make sure to check out this week's Keep It, where Ira Cara and Louis explore, among other stories, how social media reacted to the death of John McCain this past weekend.

And actually, before we start, Dan, we haven't heard from you on this topic yet. Do you have any thoughts on McCain's legacy that you want to share, having been on the 08 campaign and run against him? Yeah, look, I think you guys had a really smart, nuanced discussion about this. I thought Lovett's piece about how the political world reacted to McCain was exactly right. I just wanted to say a couple things about it, which is first and foremost, Twitter, there are all kinds of bad forms of Twitter. I'm not entirely sure what the good forms are. Maybe it's during live events you care about, like the Oscars, the Emmys, or sports events. But in general, there is no Twitter worse than political figure passes away Twitter, which is where everyone – no one can take a break and just say – like everyone thinks this is the moment they have to offer their hot take because the moment for the most engagement on that hot take will pass if they don't do it right there. So yelling about John McCain's legacy in the moments after he died seems completely not constructive to me. And it's just a toxic conversation.

And then there's also – because Twitter is inherently a platform of self-promotion, that it makes it a terrible fit for remembering other people. So people's takes are, honor John McCain by doing the exact thing I would otherwise be asking you to do. And the thing about John McCain is he is a human and a politician. And so he was flawed in both ways. He made mistakes. And he was not a political hero. He was an American hero.

But he did very political things, which makes him not that different than every other politician, which is he was a maverick at one point. And then when he won the Republican nomination, he ran far to the right. And holding him up as the perfect avatar for what we want in our politics today or an enemy of everything we care about in our politics, I think is an impossible standard for anyone to meet and is also a terrible way of looking at John McCain, who was one of our more human politicians

in the sense that he kind of threw himself out there and was sometimes admitted when he was wrong, sometimes lost his temper, was sort of human. And I just found Twitter and the political discussion to be so depressing over the weekend, because it's just like a person passed away and who had flaws like everyone else. And we either ignored those flaws for the purpose of holding them up as an ideal of a politics that probably never existed, or highlighted those flaws for the purpose of holding them up as an ideal of a politics that probably never existed or highlighted those flaws for the purpose of making a political point that you didn't need John McCain's death to make. Yeah. Are you trying to say that social media

doesn't adequately capture all the subtleties and nuance of the human existence? It's actually unfair to even... Yes, I I am saying that and Twitter in particular is terrible about this, but it's even more than that. Cause like Twitter is just a mirror of our larger political conversation in this country these days because Twitter, Twitter determined, it's not that everyone is terrible, but Twitter influences and drives what politicians say it drives what the media covers and so we're in this uh this never-ending loop of ugliness that is at its worst when we need to when we should be our most human well um if i die dan i want you to go find my worst tweets and just ratio the shit out of them that's what i want that's how i want to be remembered. I will not be doing that just in front of you. Okay. We had another set of primaries on Tuesday in Florida, Oklahoma, and Arizona. So let's start there. In the race to replace Jeff Flake in the United States Senate, the Democratic candidate, Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema, won her primary.

She's going to face fellow Congresswoman Martha McSally, who survived an ugly primary against two of the most revolting human beings in politics. I feel confident in saying that. Joe Arpaio, the disgraced sheriff who's responsible for the torture of immigrants and prisoners. And conspiracy theorist Kelly Ward, who suggested that the McCain family announcement that the senator was stopping medical treatment was designed to hurt her campaign. Dan McSally is who the Republican establishment wanted, but Ward and Arpaio received a combined 47% of the Republican vote. What does that tell us? Does that tell us anything?

It tells us the Republicans have real problems, if not political problems, just general problems with their voters. Because there's a real chance that if Ward or Arpaio had run, they would have beaten Martha McSally. And that is notable. If a Kelly Ward or a Joe Arpaio can be competitive in your party, your party is pretty diseased, to be honest. Yeah. How formidable a candidate is McSally, do you think? She's the best candidate they had to offer for that race. She managed to keep faith with enough of Trump's voters to win without supplicating herself in the way that, as we'll discuss, Ron DeSantis did to win the primary.

And so, look, I think this race is a toss-up. Democrats have had high hopes on Arizona for a long time, and they continue to come up short. And so this is race for for control the Senate right here. There is no path to taking the Senate without Democrats winning this Arizona state. So this is gonna be a tough race. Yeah. And Kyrsten Sinema makes a bit of history as the first openly bisexual Senate nominee. She was also homeless for three years of her life. Fascinating personal story. You can check out our interview with her from April 26th we had her on the pod then Arizona also has the chance to elect its first Latino governor in more than 40 years

David Garcia a veteran and education professor who's called for Medicare for all and wants to hike teacher pay after the strikes in Arizona that have made the current Republican governor, Doug Ducey, fairly unpopular and vulnerable in this race. He was one of the more popular governors in the country before the teachers strike. And now Democrats have, you know, I guess the governor's races. It's a very contested, tight race there, right? Yeah. I mean, we absolutely have a shot. I think we have the right nominee to have that shot. It's going to be tough. Arizona is a tough state, but this is a year in which Democrats have a real shot because of the most odious immigration policies in this country, the things that were the forbearer for what Trump and Stephen Miller are doing, the model of the Trump immigration policy started in Arizona.

So if you ever needed an idea of why it is so important to have a governorship, look at Arizona. Let's talk about Oklahoma, where there is a fair amount of good news out of one of the most conservative states in the country. Voters booted out six of the 10 Republican candidates in runoffs who voted against pay raises for teachers who went on strike there earlier this year. Altogether, 12 Republican incumbents lost their seats. Democrats also have a chance to take the governorship. Outgoing Republican Mary Fallin is the most unpopular governor in the country with an impressively awful approval rating of 19%.

You have to try really hard to get 19% approval. In Oklahoma. In Oklahoma. You're a Republican in Oklahoma. You got 19% approval. So we have former Attorney General Drew Edmondson on the Democratic side. He's already won statewide three times, so that's really good. He's now facing Republican Kevin Stitt, a very Trumpy businessman who was also against the teacher pay raises,

whose state Republicans worry was their weakest primary candidate, so that Republicans did not get the candidate they wanted in this primary. Dan, what's going on in deep, deep, deep red Oklahoma? I think you are seeing the power of populist activism to transcend party lines, where if you, everything else in life is viewed through this partisan filter of either you're for it or against it, you're a Republican or a Democrat. But these teacher protests in these deep red states have had real impact. And if Democrats can find ways to ally themselves with the teachers, workers of all races who are fighting

for a fairer economy, for better wages, you can completely upend the political dynamics in these red states. And I think there's real lessons to be learned here in all of the red states that Democrats have to win in for governor's races and Senate races, that there is a real chance for not nativism and racism wrapped in the cloth of populism, but true economic populism that transcends race in all backgrounds. Yeah, well, I was going to say, I mean, despite the fact that Trump is unbelievably popular in Oklahoma, in a state like Oklahoma, I don't see—Oklahoma isn't a laboratory for Trumpism. What's happened in Oklahoma was a laboratory for Ryanism, for Paul Ryan's view of the world, which is Mary Fallin, was a laboratory for Ryanism, for Paul Ryan's view of the world, which is Mary Fallin, she basically passed this huge tax cut that crippled the state's finances. There are now four-day school weeks in Oklahoma because there's no funding left.

There's not enough qualified teachers by far. There's decaying textbooks. Rural hospitals have been forced to close in the state. Waiting lists for the community help for elderly and the disabled are as long as 10 years long. There's actually a driving limit on state troops to ration fuel. So Oklahoma, and this happened in Kansas as well, like these are examples of what happens when you cut taxes, cut government services, and let everyone fend for themselves. And even in these very red states, when people see that basic services aren't around anymore, that they can't count on government, that they can't count on their own community, they're going to start becoming much more populist.

And I think the question for Democrats is, how do we want to direct that populist anger? And Trump has Trump has decided that he wants to direct it by fanning, you know, racial resentment and resentment against immigrants. And what we have to say is, you know, this is sort of our economic progressive platform to actually make sure that there's a government that's improving your life. That's right. That's exactly right. that includes a $15 minimum wage, Medicare for all, the repeal of the stand your ground laws in Florida, a whole bunch of other positions. Dan, how much did you know about Gillum before this race? And what do you think of him as a candidate? I had read a lot about him and people I knew and respected in politics had been talking about him for a while now as a rising star who is incredibly talented. And I hadn't looked incredibly carefully at this race. I had thought Gwen Graham was going to win. So I sort of just took that at face value. But in the

last few weeks, I've been hearing more and more from people who were who had been supporting Gillum that there was momentum on the ground. It was just a question of whether that was going to get him over the hump at the end. But he clearly was the candidate with momentum at the end of the race. So yeah, you mentioned former Congresswoman Gwen Graham. She was the frontrunner for most of the race. Per NBC News, she spent $8 million on television. The other two candidates in the race also outspent Gillum on television. He only spent $589,000 on television. How did he win? What does that tell us about communication and media strategy in 2018? I'm so glad you asked this question. This is a hobby horse of mine.

I know. If you want to win, this would be my advice to any candidate. If someone comes to you, your political consultant, your guru, whoever else, and lays out the budget for your campaign, and they have you spending more money on television than digital, then you have hired the wrong person. Particularly in a Democratic primary, you should be spending more money on digital. But just think about it this way. when was the last time you watched a television ad i when it's uh when it's been on my phone or on my twitter feed because it's some political thing because it's a political ad that's it it's gone viral right it's already like that's the point it's

already gone viral and if some people will like they're like well dan you watch sports all the time you must watch the tv as during sports i don even do that. Even if it's like a live event or the last times the people are truly held captive to TV. But even then, a lot of people, they're doing other things. They are looking at their phone, they're looking at their tablet, whatever else. Streaming services that don't have ads. Yeah. This is the thing that scares me the most about running against Trump in 2020 is that the model of campaigns that Democrats have been running for a very long time is based on outdated views of how people communicate. We look at – we are direct mail, TV ads, and phone calls. So let me try this question again. When was the last time you paid attention to something in your mailbox?

You answered a call from an unknown number or you watched a television ad. And I think the candidates who ever had the most success are the ones who have been willing to upend that model. And oftentimes you upend the model out of necessity. who've been willing to upend that model. And oftentimes you upend the model out of necessity. I don't know that, I mean, I don't know enough about Gillum's campaign staff to know that they were like, we're definitely not spending money on TV. Maybe they just didn't have money, so they had to be more creative. And we saw this in 2016, Jeb Bush spent basically the equivalent of the GDP of a mid-sized European country on television and got like two delegates more than Ben Carson or something. And Hillary spent more than Trump. And so we have to understand that this change, even in Florida, a state with an older electorate who's more likely to watch the news, it is simply

just an inefficient way to communicate. And Gillum clearly ran a very smart campaign. He peaked at the right moment. He was a really exciting candidate. And I think Gwen Graham would have been an excellent nominee. I don't know her, but people whose opinion I respect are big fans of hers. But Gillum is very exciting. And I think you can see the ability to... Democrats have won Florida, not that often recently, but Obama won it twice. And that's because you have an electorate that is excited, especially young people. And Gillum strikes me as someone who has the ability to do that. Yeah. I mean, and one thing that, I mean, you mentioned this one thing that the party committees, cause I know the D trip still

tells people they have to spend some of their candidates. They have to spend so much money on TV before digital. Um, what they'll say in response is you know so many older voters still get their news from television still watch television but it's like guess what those aren't really our voters they're some of our voters for sure but where we're going to have an edge in these races is with young voters and new voters and new voters are disproportionately younger as well and are watching less and less TV. We, of course, you and I complained about this on the media episode of The Wilderness that's out this week, along with a whole bunch of other really smart Democratic strategists who also are complaining about this. And if you want to hear even more about it,

and especially sort of the consultant complex that still sort of runs the party um next week's episode of the wilderness is just about the party establishment versus the grassroots um we'll dig into that even more because it is a hobby horse that we have but it's also a hobby horse that like talk to any of the young democratic strategists out there talk to any of the people who are now running run for something or Swin Left or Indivisible or all these groups that have inspired grassroots energy since Donald Trump's become president, and they will tell you the exact same thing. And all of the people who are also in tech and data and all those people who have contributed to the Democratic Party

over the last couple of years and especially worked on Obama's two campaigns will tell you that there are far too many candidates in this party who still believe, because their consultants tell them, that spending all your money on television and spending all of your money on fucking direct mail pieces, who the fuck opens their mailbox, is the way to win in a race. Yeah, the mail thing is even crazier than the TV thing to me. Like, I mean, we both live in California. Rich mail consultants getting richer. That's what's going on there.

I mean, the amount of mail that we would get every day during the primary from every ballot initiative candidate is just crazy. One of the arguments in this mail stuff would be Democratic Party organizations or progressive groups can send out the slate, right? These are the candidates that the San Francisco Democratic Party supports or whoever else supports. And you look at it, but it's like everyone Googles that now. I mean, it is crazy. And it is deeply concerning to me as we look at 2020, because even like we're going to know pretty quick among our candidates who is brave enough and smart enough to upend the broken model by who their chief strategists are, who their campaign managers are, what their background is. We'll know it right from the get-go because the candidates who are going to win are going to be, particularly in a democratic fucking primary, are going to be the

ones who are thinking the most creatively about how campaigns are run. So does Gillum's win tell us anything about the state of the party or the divides within the party? There's been a lot of talk about that. Of course, he isn't someone who you can sort of fit neatly into a category. There's been a lot of talk about how he was endorsed by Bernie Sanders. But of course, he endorsed Hillary Clinton back in 2016. The Clintons love Andrew Gillum as well as Bernie Sanders. So what does his win say about the state of the party, if anything, to you? It tells me that Andrew Gillum is an excellent candidate who ran an excellent campaign. Full stop. Everything else is a stupid conversation. Yes, Bernie Sanders

endorsed him. And to Bernie Sanders' credit, he has put political capital on the line to support what he views as the more progressive candidate in these campaigns. And he has not done it in a way that is just sort of settling old scores or paying back debts to people who supported him. Gillum did not support him, and he looked at Gillum and said, this is the right candidate to support him. So to his credit. But it does not say that the Bernie wing has ascended over the Hillary wing. It doesn't tell us that the anti-establishment candidates always beat establishment candidates or the more progressive candidate beats the less progressive candidate. It tells us nothing. Every state is different. Every race is different. Every candidate is different.

Like you take Michigan, right? Michigan, where if you were to try to fit these square pegs into a round hole, you'd look at the Michigan primary and you would say Abdul El-Said, progressive candidate endorsed by Bernie, Bernie campaign forum, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez campaign forum.

And he lost pretty handily to Gretchen Whitmer, who was the more establishment candidate, who was supported by more establishment figures. Each race is different. Each candidate is different. Here's the thing. This is the takeaway, whether it is Georgia, Texas, Michigan, Arizona, wherever else, is we got a bunch of really great candidates who are winning primaries and have a shot to win really hard races. shot to win really hard races. And if you're looking at it through some rearview mirror about what it means for 2016, or even forward looking about what it means for the political power of 2020 candidates, you're missing the most important part of the story.

Let's talk about Gillum's opponent. He's Congressman Ron DeSantis, and boy, is he a piece of fucking work. Here's the first thing you need to know about Ron DeSantis. Guys, can you play the ad, the Ron DeSantis ad? This is one of the, I don't even want to describe it, I just want everyone to hear this ad from Ron DeSantis. Everyone knows my husband, Ron DeSantis, is endorsed by President Trump, but he's also an amazing dad. Ron loves playing with the kids.

Build the wall. He reads stories. Then Mr. Trump said, you're fired. I love that part. He's teaching Madison to talk. Make America great again. People say Ron's all Trump, but he is so much more. Big League. So good. I just thought you should know.

Ron DeSantis for governor. That's real. That's a real ad. Rich has heard this for the first time. He can't control himself back there. I mean, the best part of it is just the first line. Like, everyone knows that he's a big supporter of Donald Trump, but there's more than that.'s also a great dad that second for huge support also a great dad and then obviously it's a podcast so you can't see this but in the ad when he's saying let's build the

wall he's got like little blocks and he's helping his kid learn how to build a fucking wall. Anyway, that's Ron DeSantis. This is the pitch perfect metaphor for the Republican Party in 2018. That the only way you can succeed in Republican politics is to crawl as far up Donald Trump's ass as humanly possible. And it is worth noting that, so Ron DeSantis ran against Adam Putnam, who has been a quote unquote rising star in the Republican Party for a very long time.

He was a member of Congress. He was in leadership there for a while. He went home, ran for Secretary of Agriculture in Florida, served in that office, and was presumed, he's been the governor-in-waiting for a very long time, and was going to almost certainly be the nominee and probably be the next governor of Florida. And then Ron DeSantis came along, and Ron DeSantis had a strategy, which is actually, he doesn't seem like the sharpest knife in the drawer. He's more like a dull spoon. But he did have a smart strategy, which was the only way he could win was Donald Trump's endorsement. So he ran this ad, and he appeared on Fox 121 times because that was the

most efficient way to reach the commander in chief. Trump liked what he said on Fox, so he endorsed him against the wishes of the entire Republican Party over Adam Putnam. And so DeSantis won and won by a ton. And so this is going to be a fascinating race because you have mini Trump against a candidate, a thoughtful, smart candidate like Andrew Gillum. It's going to be very interesting. So yeah, DeSantis' positions are as right wing as they come, especially when he said he wouldn't have approved the gun violence measures that outgoing Republican Governor Rick Scott signed off on in the wake of the Parkland shooter earlier in this year. Rick Scott's gun legislation was too far to the left, too much for Ron DeSantis.

So these are his positions. He's a Trump supplicant, as you pointed out. So this guy goes on Fox News on Wednesday and he said, news on Wednesday. And he said, Floridians need to be careful not to, quote, monkey this up by electing Gillum, who he called, quote, an articulate spokesman for the far left views and, quote, a charismatic candidate. Dan, what on earth did he mean by a phrase that turns up zero Google hits except stories about this very incident? You don't see monkey this up used in any other conversations anywhere. I mean, there's only one way to look at it. And even, I mean, put aside the members of the Republican Party

who now view it as their job to say that racist things are not racist. Most independent observers who look at this are pretty clear. I am as struck not by the term articulate as the use of the term monkey up. It is the classic. Chris Rock had an entire rant on this years ago about Colin Powell. He's so articulate. People would say this about Obama all the time. He is just so articulate and well-spoken.

You are making it clear that you are surprised that an African-American can be well-spoken or can complete a sentence. That is the point you are making. And that to me, even more than the completely obviously badly racist use of the term monkey in this situation, exposes the racism that is at the heart of Ron DeSantis in so much, not just the Republican party, but of society. As we think about this, this is, you hear this all the time in discussions of African-Americans, whether they're African-American politicians, business leaders, athletes, you hear like,

if you, all you have to do is watch like sports for two minutes and like, Oh, I just met with such and such athlete. He's so articulate. It's smart. And it's like, like out of the,

like this, the shock dripping from their voice. And it is very clear what is at play here. It is very clear what are the sentiments that drove Ron DeSantis' win. It's very clear the sentiments that drive Trumpism. And it's very fitting that he went on Fox, which basically has been building a case for white victimization for over a decade now was the place where this happened it's also clear when desantis says something like this that he wants he wants a debate about race he wants to make this campaign about race which is what donald trump wanted in 2016 as well um even when he was running against a white candidate, right? Like they want the discussion not to be around issues, not even to be about around issues that have to do with race.

They want to have someone throw out a comment like this and then spend the next day having everyone in the Republican media environment and Republican politicians and pundits and all this stuff start telling people why this wasn't racist and Democrats like to call Republicans racist and then they get into a whole debate about who's racist and who isn't and what comment is racist and what's not and then that debate obscures other debates about issues that affect black voters white voters and everyone else. And so I think it's even more instructive to listen to how Andrew Gillum responded to DeSantis yesterday during an interview on CNN, which we have a clip of. Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are both scraping from the bottom of the barrel. I actually believe

that Florida and its rich diversity are going to be looking for a governor who's going to bring us together, not divide us, not misogynist, not racist, not bigots. They're going to be looking for a governor who is going to appeal to our higher aspirations as a state, who is going to talk about what it means to build a Florida that makes room for all of us and not just some of us. DeSantis can do the bidding of big business and big lobbyists and Donald Trump in his divisive rhetoric. I'm going to be here to do the business of the people of the state of Florida. That's the job of the governor of this state. What do you think of that, Dan? It's perfect.

It is a perfect response. And you're like you're not just intuiting what you want Republicans to do. Steve Bannon has said this publicly. He said it in Fire and Fury and the Michael Wolff book and everything else that they believe that when the discussion was around race and when Democrats were calling Trump racist, that it helped them. says, but there's no question that the huge part of Breitbart, Bannonism, Trumpism is about trying to stoke a reaction of outrage and then channeling that to make Trump voters think they're victimized to motivate them. And so that is what they want to do. And I think Gillum handed it pitch perfect, which is he called it out and then pivoted. And that is the very important thing because we sometimes live in this checkers playing binary style of political advice. The idea is, oh my God, Trump and the Republicans just ran a racist ad.

They're trying to pull us into the swamp. We have to ignore it and pivot back to our – and talk about healthcare tax cuts, which is all true. We should be talking about healthcare and tax cuts. But you also can't ignore the elephant in the room. And it is simply wrong, both morally and politically, to not call out racism, misogyny, bias against LGBTQ Americans, et cetera. You have to respond to it. But then get it to the discussion

that is at a higher level on the issues because they want... Get to the debate you want to have, have the debate on your ground. And I thought Gillum was pitch perfect on it. Yeah. He also said something when he first started running in November of 2017. He said, there's a debate in our party right now about whether or not we as Democrats should talk to He said, the debate you want to have that on that territory and Gillum who was the only candidate in the Democratic primary who has a truly working class background one of seven kids grew up you know working very working class all the working class he he is he does seem to be a candidate who can fuse sort of discussions about race and stopping discrimination and, you know, reforming our criminal justice system with a discussion about how to make life better through government for

working class white folks and black folks and Latino folks and everyone else. And I do think there's something for other Democrats to learn from that. It's not an either or. It's definitely both. That, I mean, that is so right. And like when we were talking about Oklahoma earlier and talking about a populist Democratic message that speaks to all working class and middle class voters, it is not specific to a very certain segment of white working class voters that the media fetishizes. But we're talking, butishizes. But the candidate who has had the most success in recent years with a purely populist economic message is Bernie Sanders, tremendously successful in doing so. He was unable, for whatever reason, to transcend that

message beyond white voters. It's why he lost, is because he continued to do, even though he approved a little bit in the end, he did not receive a sufficient amount of the vote of African American and Latino voters to win a Democratic primary. And it's going to be fascinating to see the Gillum campaign because it is potentially, to me, a real model for what could very much work in 2020. And we're going to see it because this is about winning the governorship in Florida in 2018. There are so many incredibly important things that could happen. We have not won the Florida government. We have not had the Florida governorship in this century.

Think about that. Crazy. A state that Barack Obama won twice, we have not had the governorship this century. I mean, it is a state that Jeb Bush won twice. That'll tell you something. Yeah. And so it's incredibly important about that. But I think this may be the election that is with the most possible lessons for what a 2020 campaign would be like.

lessons for what a 2020 campaign would like. You have the perfect, you basically have mini Trump running against a candidate who has a progressive populist candidate who could be very broadly appealing. And I just want to say one more thing about this, which is you hear a lot of people saying, the question is, is Andrew Gillum electable? Is he the less electable of the Democratic candidates? Did the Democrats make a mistake? It's the same conversation that was had about Stacey Abrams in Georgia and Ben Jealous in Maryland. Are the Democrats picked an electable candidate? Josh Kraschauer of some publication, I don't know what it is anymore, has raised the question about whether this was the equivalent of the Republicans nominating Sharon Engel and Christine O'Donnell in 2010 and losing those Senate races. So first off, it is deeply offensive to compare any of these leaders, accomplished public servants,

to these wackadoodle candidates. We did not nominate wackadoodle candidates. But also, if we're going to have the conversation, let's have the conversation. It's not just Josh, other people are asking this question. The question that people are really asking is, can African American candidates win statewide? That's the question. It is not, are they progressive? When a white progressive wins, we're not asking, was that candidate progressive? We're asking, can an African American candidate be elected governor in these states? And the history of African Americans being elected governor is quite limited in this country. And so that is the question. If you want to have the conversation, have the conversation, don't use fucking code words to do it. And I find it

deeply offensive to these candidates, people like Stacey Abrams, who we have spent time with, that you would compare them to these nut job candidates who were essentially Kelly Wards or Joe Arpaio from 2010. I will tell you, I find that offensive. I find the entire conversation about electability offensive here in 2018 when Donald J. Trump is president after Barack Obama for two terms. Stop thinking you know what the fuck is electable. You don't. We should stop talking about electability in this country. These political strategists and especially journalists in D.C., God love them, they are like stuck in this mindset where they can only see like, you know, electable as someone who's a centrist and not electable as a progressive or electable as a white guy and non-electable is probably a woman or an African-American. Like we don't know what electable means anymore after especially the last couple of presidential elections when

two candidates who many people did not think were electable on either side of the aisle throughout journalism won the presidency. It's so ridiculous. And let's be very clear, electable means, like the code word electable means moderate white guy. Yeah, it does. Preferably with a military or law enforcement background. And what recent and distant history should tell us is the candidates who win are the best candidates. They are the most authentic ones. They run the best races. And they come in all shapes and sizes.

Men, women, all races, all backgrounds. men, women, all races, all backgrounds. And looking good on paper tells you nothing about how a candidate actually will do. And you're right. We do not know who the most electable candidate is. We should stop pretending and we should just let the voters pick. And they actually have a pretty good record of picking the candidate they think is the most who will do the best job, both be the candidate most likely to win and being the candidate, the person who will be the best president. Obviously, Donald Trump is a exception to this, but he was probably the most electable Republican candidate. We know this because he won. I mean, the caveat being that he won because the Russians helped him. Jim Comey helped him and he got millions of less votes. But that's either here or there. A little asterisk.

So Florida isn't the only place where Republicans are race baiting. Donald Trump's not the only one who does this. The super PAC known as the Congressional Leadership Fund, which Paul Ryan has raised tens of millions of dollars for from all the billionaires he gave tax breaks to, is using all that money to attack Democratic candidates. And Dan, what issues are they attacking them on? Well, Executive Director of the Congressional Leadership Fund, Corey Bliss, said in April, quote, every Republican member of Congress needs to run on the middle class tax cut and win on the middle class tax cut.

Well, let's see how that's going. In New York, the super PAC is going after Democratic candidate Antonio Delgado, an African American, for his brief career 20 years ago as a rapper, saying he doesn't represent, quote, our voice. In Ohio, they're going after my friend Aftab Puraval, who is of Indian and Tibetan descent, for his work at one of the country's top 10 biggest law firms that once represented Libya years before Aftab ever worked there, using images of the Lockerbie terrorist bombing and saying that Aftab couldn't be trusted.

And in Virginia, Paul Ryan's super PAC received a copy of the confidential application for a security clearance that belonged to former CIA officer turned Democratic congressional candidate Abigail Spanberger. And they deliberately leaked that information to the press so that they could attack her for working at an Islamic school for a few years, a school that after she left, found out that one of its graduates had become a terrorist. And yet somehow, somehow, even though they knew that, the leftists in George W. Bush's administration knew all her history and still gave her a top secret security clearance and a job at the CIA. But these are the things that Paul Ryan's super PAC is focusing on. What happened to the tax cuts, Dan? Well, John, as you can imagine, I have thoughts on this. But I have some questions for you first. Antonio Delgado, did he go immediately from his rap career to running for Congress?

He did not, Dan. He did not. No. I read somewhere he might have also been a Rhodes Scholar. Yes. Didn't see that in the ads. I would note that being a rapper is not disqualifying from running for Congress since I think it is actually more of, in many cases, admiral profession than being a nut job, right wing talk show host, which is what vice president Mike Pence was before he ran for Congress.

So that's one. Two, in your friend's race, Aftab, did he work on the Libya stuff? Nope, never. Of course not. No, he was – when the Lagerby bombing happened, I think Aftab was like five or six years old.

Okay. And Abigail Spanberger, did she mentor this student who was eventually tied to terrorism? Did they have any connection? Nope. She was there in 2002, and then she left then. And then in 2005, they learned that someone who had gone to the school years and years and years ago suddenly had been involved in a terrorist organization. So what you're telling me is that Paul Ryan, the conscious of conservatism, Paul Ryan, the conscious of conservatism, policy wonk extraordinaire, sad-eyed vestige of a Republican Party long gone, is completely and totally full of shit when he told everyone that it was up to the Republican Party to fight back against tribalism and identity politics and the alt-right. Is that what you're telling me? In fact, yeah, he said to Jonah Goldberg last month, identity politics is antithetical to what conservatives

believe. I don't think he's using the word antithetical right, Dan. And that they must fight back against the alt-right at all costs. What a load of shit. And you know what? It's not just Paul Reilly. This is another example of Trump is the symptom, not the cause.

Because a lot of these people who work at the Congressional Leadership Pack and America Rising that's helping them out to our Republican strategists from way back. And they are and Trump's election. The only thing that's changed is it's made it easier to do this sort of race baiting out in the open, to have ads that sort of scare people with Islamophobia and race baiting and all the rest of this stuff. And there's just going to be more of them now because it's okay because Donald Trump is president. Yeah. It is very important perspective for our younger listeners that this is not new. In 2012, the attack that Newt Gingrich and the Republicans launched against Barack Obama was that he was the, quote, food stamp president.

Right. In 2008, it was the words of his minister, Jeremiah Wright, that were used to try to disqualify him as electorate, to try to make Barack Obama look like an angry black man. Now, I will say that it was the anniversary of those tapes coming out recently and i saw some of the videos and donald trump says crazier things every morning before 6 a.m than jeremiah wright did not excuse him what he said but it is uh it it seems very quaint in uh when you look back on it from the trump era yeah and so this is who they are. And here's why they are this way. Here's why you see these ads. Because everything else they stand for

is deeply unpopular. Paul Ryan's tax cut is hated by people. I'm fucking shocked that a tax cut for billionaires and Wall Street executives paid for by jacking up premiums on working class Americans is unpopular. But lo and behold, it is. Paul Ryan's plan to cut Medicare and Social Security to pay for said tax cut?

Very unpopular. Deeply unpopular. Making our air dirtier and our water dirtier? Deeply unpopular. All they have left is a strategy to scare white voters that non-white people are coming for their jobs, their lives, etc. And that has been the subtext of republican campaigning for a very long time but now it is right out there in the open because they've lost everything else they have to hide it with that is exactly the subtext is now text and they are screaming it from the rooftops um

i don't understand i don't understand why reporters are not calling paul ryan out on this he is some sort of paul ryan i don't don't know what Paul Ryan's press office does. Maybe they have gone into hiding. But just last week, when in the moments after, let's do two examples. A few weeks ago, Paul Ryan told everyone that Donald Trump would not revoke security clearances because he was trolling him at people. And then when Donald Trump actually revoked John Brennan's security clearance, reporters called Paul Ryan's office. And then when Donald Trump actually revoked John Brennan's security clearance, reporters called Paul Ryan's office. He had no comment. It's been three weeks now. We've heard nothing from them. And then last week, after the plea deal of Michael Cohen, the conviction of Paul Manafort, people called Paul Ryan to ask his office about it. And they needed to, why people are not calling Paul Ryan out for the difference between what he says, Jonah Goldberg, and what his super PAC is doing with the billionaire's money that he raised in exchange for passing their tax cut. I'm sure they're planning his farewell tour where he tells everyone how he's going to cure poverty with his big ideas. That's probably where they're busy. But look, I think an important thing for Democratic candidates to know,

those who've been attacked by this super PAC, those who will be attacked, which is probably all of them, because there's billions of dollars that are going to rain down on them from super rich people who don't really give much of a shit about anything else except for electing more Republicans so they can consolidate power and get more tax cuts. Listen to Andrew Gillum's response to Ron DeSantis. That's the model of how to fight these attacks.

You talk about them as divisive. You talk about them as, you know, people trying to pit people against each other, trying to start a race war here. And what you want to talk about is issues that actually affect people's lives, whether that's health care, whether that's criminal justice reform, whether that's voting rights, whether that's a $15 minimum wage. I think that's what Democrats need to talk about. It's like we said before, you take the issue head on, you refute the attack head on,

and then you talk about what actually matters to people's lives. All right, let's talk about our Democratic friends in the Senate, Dan, who just cut a deal with Mitch McConnell this week to confirm seven federal judges nominated by Donald Trump, who has now put 60 judges on the bench, including a Supreme Court justice, and now is trying to get another one on. Not a single Democrat objected to the deal cut this week, which was done by unanimous consent. More nominees are set for confirmation next week. One reason that minority leader Chuck Schumer reportedly made the deal was so that his members could go home and campaign.

Dan, what was Chuck Schumer thinking here? I think it is actually unfair to put this entirely on Schumer. Okay. And I say this as someone who worked for Senate, for Tom Daschle when he was Senate minority leader. The, so being Senate leader is different than being speaker. You don't really,

you basically, you're a shepherd. You can't make anyone do anything, but any single democratic Senator could have stopped this. Any single one, any of the people who are running for president in 2020 could have, and should have stopped this. And I'm sure all the Democratic

members in these red states who are in these really, really tough races, and they're getting tougher by the minute, are just banging on Schumer's door to get home as soon as possible. Because normally they get to campaign all August, and they did not get to do that because McConnell, being devious as hell, kept the Senate in and made it so the Democratic incumbents would not be able to campaign. He was willing to basically trade Dean Heller for the rest of these guys. And so there was pressure to do this. And our old friend Pete Rouse used to say, who was Tom Daschler's chief of staff and

I worked for him and worked in the White House with us, that there is nothing more powerful in the United States Senate than the aroma of jet fumes. And the senators will agree to anything when it comes time to go home. But that is a deal and a strategy that reflects an era before, not before Donald Trump, but before Mitch McConnell stole the Senate, the Supreme Court seat that belonged to Merrick Garland. And it is a misreading of the base. It is a misreading of the moment. It is a misreading of the impact that these court

decisions... Think about it this way. If the Democrats have a shot at taking the Senate, it's hard, but they have a shot. And if we could string these out and get fear of them, we could make it so Trump gets no more judicial nominees. And now these people are going to be in the court for the rest of most of many people's lives. Yeah. I mean, there was an alternate strategy here laid out on Twitter by Adam Jentleson, who was a former deputy chief of staff for Harry Reid, someone who knew Senate politics and Senate rules better than most. this. Adam said that a single Democrat could have objected to each nominee, which would have forced McConnell to produce 51 votes two separate times per nominee at a time when McConnell has attendance issues and it has a hard time getting that many Republicans. Now, there is a potential with that strategy to block some of these judges if we run out the clock on McConnell. Not all, not even most, but wouldn't being able to block just one or two lifetime appointments

to a circuit court or to some of these judgeships, wouldn't that be worth the fuss? Especially this whole thing about, oh, they have to go home and campaign. Like you said, all it took is one senator. So the senators who live in Washington and the senators who live in Maryland and Virginia who are close by could have done it. And all the red state Democrats could have gone home. And like, would McConnell have still been able to pass through a bunch of these judges? Yeah, absolutely. But why not try to fight? This is, I think, the fundamental understanding of a lot of Senate Democrats, which is the fight is worth having even if you lose. Like you will be better off politically. This has been true. This was true in the shutdown. This was true.

This has been true of the Kavanaugh discussion is, look, we I am sympathetic. We control no levers of power. If McConnell wants to jam shit through, he can jam it through. And you look at it and you're like, well, should we waste time on this fight that we're going to lose or should we do something else? But on the big important issues, particularly in the Trump era, fighting and losing is better than not fighting. And this is – and I was struck by not just – Get caught trying. That's what Obama always used to say.

That's exactly right. And I saw this on Twitter. I mean totally out of character. I reacted without thinking about it and sent a tweet. And then I thought about it and I was like, look, you and I have both been inside in these discussions, either in the Senate or in the White House. And you have activists, pundits, if there were podcasters, we'd be referring to them back then, who aren't aware of the full context, who react. And it's like, yeah, great. I'd love to do your fucking idea, but here are the 10 reasons why we can't.

So then I was like – I felt a little guilty about it, like maybe I'm missing something. But when you have Adam Jentleson, who was Harry Reid's deputy chief of staff and been in the Senate basically his whole career up until Harry Reid left and understands the pressures that Senate leaders are under. Then you also have Brian Fallon, who was Chuck Schumer's spokesman for years, who had the same viewpoint we did about this, suggests that there really is just a real disconnect between how Senate Democrats, from Chuck Schumer to Joe Manchin, and including Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, everyone else you think of running for president,

disconnect between where their head is about politics in 2018 and where the activist side of the party is. And that is worrisome in a lot of these races going forward. And it concerns me that these things can be deflating, not just in Senate races. They can be deflating because if the base gets deflated, it also affects our ability to take the House. And so we do have this dissonance between a Senate strategy and a House strategy. It's problematic. Yeah. And the other thing that really bothers me is if there was a reason that Schumer did this, if there was a deal he cut, if we got something for this, or if there was just some really legitimate reason for why he did this, let us know. They do a very bad job communicating their strategy and why they're doing certain things in the Senate to the outside world.

They just don't do it. They sort of they make these decisions and then they hide from the criticism and then they all get annoyed about it. But like, tell us, tell us why you did this and then maybe we'll, you know, we'll understand. But the truth is, it seems like in this situation that they could have put up a fight. They may have still lost. They may have lost on situation that they could have put up a fight. They may have still lost. They may have lost on all the judges if they put up the fight. But what's the problem with putting up the fight? You know, like Adam said this on Twitter, but like he said, there's a fear of being seen losing that misses the fact that the fight itself can be inspiring. And I totally agree with that.

Yeah, you're right that this has been a challenge for the Senate Democratic leadership is to manage expectations and explain strategy because Schumer is smart. Yeah, he is. He is not – and he is tough. He is not a mealy-mouthed, DLC, split the difference between the middle Democrats. He is a sharply partisan fighter who was the head of the DSCC when we took the Senate. And so he has a reason. And it may not be a reason that we ultimately agree with, but it's not crazy. It is not crazy. And so explaining it in a way would just, I think, both on the front end and on the back end would just be very

helpful in avoiding the sort of blowback that is coming here because the blowback doesn't help anyone. Yeah. And so obviously a big fight that's coming up is going to be the kavanaugh nomination um uh ben wickler from moveon.org told me to tell everyone uh go to whipthevote.org that's your resource to find out how your senators stand on the kavanaugh nomination whether your democratic senator has come out yet and said they oppose the nomination. So go there, check it out, and then you can get in contact with your senators to try to stop this. And if anyone who's in D.C. next week, there's going to be a lot of protests during the hearings, including bigger protests at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday outside the Capitol building. So check that out. When we come back, we will talk to the president of

Emily's List, Stephanie Shriok. On the pod today, we're lucky to have with us the president of Emily's List, Stephanie Shriok. Stephanie, welcome to the pod. Great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. So we just wanted to start with, you know, for those who don't know, what is the mission of Emily's List and what specifically do you all do to help realize that mission? You bet. Well, Emily's List started in 1985. So we've been around for a while, longer than I've been president of Emily's List. And we started with the sole mission, and it's still the same today, which is to elect pro-choice Democratic women to office.

In that simplicity, everything that we do is focused on recruitment, training, supporting, staffing up and financing strong pro-choice Democratic women for office up and down the ballot. And with that, we've seen a lot of changes over the years, a lot of opportunities. And of course, sometimes I just feel like everything we've done for three decades has just been in preparation for what we have right now in 2018. And how does, say, if a woman wants to run for office, how does she find Emily's List? How do you go recruit candidates? Like, how does that process work? Well, for, you know, in the era that we're in of technology, you can, if you Google, I want to run for office, Emily's List is going to come up.

Particularly if you say, I'm a woman who wants to run for office, Emily's List is going to come up, particularly if you say, I'm a woman who wants to run for office. Emily's List is just going to come up and you can call us. You can go to emilyslist.org and sign up on our run to win program to get into a track to learn how to run for office. But that's all relatively new. But that's all relatively new. If you think about where we started, you know, at the time in the mid 80s, no Democratic woman had won a seat to the United States Senate in her own right. Women weren't running at a very big number. We wouldn't even know where to start on recruitment. When we first started, we sort of grabbed what we had in some really tough women who had broken through some glass ceilings on their own. And our first candidate was Barbara Mikulski, who had been in the House of Representatives, decided that she was going to run for the United States Senate in 1986. As I said, she was our first candidate.

All we did at that moment, we didn't recruit her. She, she came to us. And, and when I say to us, there was no staff. I just want to think about what this looks like. There was no staff. It was a group of really scrappy women led by Ellen Malcolm, our founder, who said, we got to help Barbara Mikulski get up and running. And, and you got to know that at the time, you know, most of the party structure didn't help Barbara Mikulski get up and running. And you got to know that at the time, most of the party structure didn't want Barbara Mikulski running for the United States Senate. There was some really good folks in line. It wasn't her turn. She should wait. All the things that unfortunately some of our women still hear today. She got it all. And we got in and said, we got to make her viable and help her out. And nobody thought she could raise any money because who would give to women candidates? My goodness. And that's what we did in the beginning of Emily's List, which is so extraordinary, particularly in the era now where we can just hit send on an email.

on an email. They did this all through mail. I don't know if folks remember, but there's these things called post offices. You put stamps on envelopes. And that's what this group of women did. They sent it to all of their friends and colleagues and everybody they knew. They pulled out their Rolodexes and asked everybody to support Barbara Mikulski. And that was the beginning of the funding mechanism behind Barbara Mikulski. And so that was the beginning. And then we realized, well, we can't just have one candidate at a time. We've got to actually find some more women. And so they hired a small, scrappy political staff to go recruit women in opportunities where we could find them. That continued to grow. We still do

that work. We start a cycle with very clear targets of where we want to go. We're proud Democrats. We want to take back the majority. We want to do it with women as much as possible. So we, like the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Governors Association, we know where those targeted seats are. And we do really, really hard work to find good, strong Democratic women candidates to run in those pickup opportunities. Because our goal is to change the number of women in Congress, but it's also to get the majority. So that's the work that we do. But a lot of women now come to us saying they want to run. This has been a pretty big sea change for

Emily's List. And I think it is an extraordinary moment for this country to see the volume and energy of women who are willing to raise their hand and say, I want to do this. Stephanie, in Democratic primaries up and down the ballot this year, women have been obviously running at a record rate, thanks to you guys, but winning at a record rate as well. And I'm curious what you ascribe that to. Is it a reaction to Donald Trump? Is it a collection of tremendous candidates, all the above? But we've obviously had a shift in this country in activism, particularly among women. And how's that affecting EMOI's list? Oh, it's just huge. It's extraordinary, as I've said. In the 2015-16 cycle, we talked to about 920 women about running for office. Many of them did. It was one of our best,

arguably our best years ever for recruitment. We called them did. It was one of our best, arguably our best years ever for recruitment. We called it the Hillary bump to just to sort of make my heart hurt. And so we thought, oh, this is a great shift. Little did we know what was going to happen following that terrible election in 2016. And what did happen was a just an explosion of energy and emotion. I mean, it was an emotional loss for so many of us, right? For all three of us here talking, it was an emotional loss for women, for so many women, even if they didn't like Hillary Clinton, though a lot of them loved her, but even if they didn't like Hillary Clinton, they thought it was going to be okay. They thought she was still going to be president. people, to that guy, they realized that they had to do something, that they had to fight for their own rights and their own freedoms. They had to fight for their community. All of a sudden,

there was just an awakening. And you've heard even Maxine Waters use that kind of language. There really was a moment like, oh, my goodness, I got to do something now. And if not me, who? oh my goodness, I got to do something now. And if not me, who? And so we now have had over 40,000 women come to Emily's List saying they want to run for office. Remember, I said 920 last cycle, over 40,000. They may not know what they're running for or what they should run for. They may not know even how to put together a campaign. But the good news is that's what we've been doing for three decades. And so we can help try to provide some basic education tools on how to think about running for office. Look for those opportunities in your communities. We're talking about women running for city council, school board, county commissioner.

Yes, the legislature where we're actively recruiting. Yes, the U.S. House. But these women are running everywhere. And you also just said it. There's this explosion of activism that is powering underneath them. And so, yes, we have a historic number of women running and we have at Emily's List been able to get them a good staff, you know, get them some resources. I mean, you've both been in the campaign setting. Campaigns matter. You got to have good structure. There is sort of a business side to the tactics of running a campaign. But the other, so we are doing that. And so they're

really strong organizations. But what else is going on is that these women are so passionate. They're bringing their whole story, their whole energy into these races. They're so diverse in every possible way, age, race, geography, profession, that we're seeing activists in these Democratic primaries getting excited for the first time because they've never met maybe a woman scientist who's running for office. Or maybe they don't know very many women veterans, but someone like Gina Ortiz-Jones is so inspiring. They've inspired, you know, Gina's inspired a whole nother generation of activists in Texas. So that's the other thing that's going on. And I do believe this is a sea change. Stephanie, as I understand it, Emily's List's general policy has been to not endorse candidates challenging Democratic incumbents, particularly pro-choice incumbents. But there is also, you have this array of very

impressive female candidates who are challenging incumbents, whether it's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Cynthia Nixon. And if ultimately you want to fundamentally change the gender balance in Congress to be much more representative of the gender balance in the country, doesn't that also require electing female Democrats to replace male Democrats in some places? Is that a policy you're considering changing going forward? How do you think about that? Well, this is one of the first cycles where we've seen such a volume of primaries across the board, not just in races with sitting incumbents. But we've had so many races where there have been more than one woman running, obviously many, many candidates running, which I, by the way, think is great for the party. I think it's fantastic. I think you get better candidates out of that. I think you get more

people engaged in the process that way. I just think it's good energy for the Democratic Party. But it has been our policy and is our policy right now to not get involved against sitting incumbent Democratic members of Congress, particularly when they're pro-choice and they're voting right on the issues. That doesn't mean we're not thrilled to see these extraordinary women stepping up to run. I mean, another woman that you didn't mention that we are huge fans of is Ayanna Pressley, who's one of our Gabrielle Giffords Rising Star Award winners from a couple of years ago. And we just think the world of her. Just because our policy is not to get engaged doesn't mean we're not cheering them along on the side. We have so much responsibility

right now in these pickup seats in the house in particular, where I would like to, and I've put a little pressure on my staff. God love them. They do such great work. I was like, we want to take back the majority with women. Yes, some good men can win too. And I'm really excited about that. We need some more Conor Lambs. But can't we just deliver at least 23 women in red to blue seats. And that's a big part of our commitment to this process. And then we, of course, we've always run primaries. And a lot of the women, if you look at who serves in the House today, a lot of those women came through very competitive primaries in safe Democratic seats. We do engage in those because we know that when those women win, they get to serve for a long time. They expand in seniority. And that's our best opportunity to change the percentage of

women in Congress. And I mean, let's face it, the number's terrible. I mean, the United States is well over 100th in the world in the percentage of women in Congress in their federal government. The good news is that after three and a half decades, the Democratic caucus is looking better. I'm not saying great. We have a lot of work to do, but at least we're at a third. But we got to get to at least 50% of the Democratic caucus and then have a real conversation about what's going on on the other side, which is nothing, nothing at all. Stephanie, I want to talk about some of the obstacles that women who are running for office face, which you see every single day. I talked to our mutual good friend, Jen Palmieri, Hillary's

communications director for my podcast, The Wilderness, about the history and future of the Democratic Party. And one of the things she said is that towards the end of the 2016 campaign, she had this, and quoting her, sickening thought that we've made Hillary a female facsimile of the qualities we looked for in a male president. Well, of course, people think she's inauthentic. Of course, people don't really get who she is because we forced this very ill-fitting suit on her. What do you think of that? And do you think it's something that a lot of women face today, women candidates? I think it's really challenging. And Jen, oh, you and I both agree.

She's brilliant. And I think she does have something right about this. And we've got to figure it out. I mean, as we were, particularly in these executive offices, actually, I think it comes up even more in the executive offices than it does the legislature, the House and the Senate. You know, because we all look for something different in those. I mean, if you even think about how you vote, you're looking for something different in a senator than you are a governor. And so how do we break through the mindset of what an executive looks like in this country? You know, in a lot of places, you know, well over 20 states have never had a woman governor. There's not that many

women CEOs, slowly but surely, but truly not very many. So when you think of executive, you think of a very masculine male persona. And how do we switch people's minds about the fact that there are other views of leadership? You can do this in different ways. There isn't just one little box to put yourself in. You know, I think men would be freed if we could figure this out. I think if you don't exactly have to be the same kind of person to win these things, that would be good for everybody. But I'm not going to say this has gotten much easier. It's been very challenging. And, you know, what we get are these unbelievable bars that these women so often have to jump over.

So as we've been working with women running for governor this year, you know, I've had a lot of folks who have come up to say, you know, oh, your candidate's just not that inspiring. Or I just don't see her as a governor. Or, you know, I just don't believe she can win. And I'll say, well, who in this primary can win? Oh, no, she's probably the best candidate. I'm like, what? You know, or, you know, I have flat out had folks in some states tell us that women cannot win governorship after Hillary Clinton lost. That happened for the first six to nine months. Thankfully, that has evolved. Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, our gubernatorial candidate, who really went through it for the first 12 months.

You know, it was interesting. She won, you know. She won her primary. She did really well. Folks were throwing the establishment mantle over her this summer. But I will tell you, 12 months ago, there were a lot of entities who were trying to recruit another person in, trying to recruit another man in. In fact, we went through about three or four other potential candidates from the establishment that she had to fight through. We had some union members who didn't think that she had it. We had a lot of folks, even though she was raising the most amount of money, she had

all this energy on the grassroots from women, putting together a strong organization. For 12 months, we were begging people to get on board with this campaign. So she finally does all of that. She does a great job. Then all of a sudden, she gets hit on the other side. And so the needle they have to thread is really extraordinary. And those who can do it, you know, are fabulous, but it's not really fair. I love a lot of our male gubernatorial candidates. I think, you know, we've got some really good guys, Richard Cordray, Tim Walls, you know, Evers in Wisconsin. But I will be honest, I think they're all going to make great governors. They're not exactly the most inspiring, charismatic, rile them up at the marches kind of guys.

Plenty of uninspiring white guys running for office out there. But they're good guys and they'll make great governors. And I want folks to be like, these are, you know, these are great gals who will make good governors. They just look and sound a little bit different. These are great gals who will make good governors. They just look and sound a little bit different. We can open up our minds to what this can be. And I swear we will all be better, both genders, for opening this up. Because I think the policies and the discussions and how women do this, they just do things a little bit differently. do things a little bit differently. And the mix of that, having more women governors, having more women mayors to work with their male counterparts in other states,

I think are going to lead us to better policies. And we just have to push through this. And we're still pushing. We're not there yet. Well, keep up the good work, Stephanie. I mean, we're all inspired from afar by watching all these women who are running for office, many of them for the first time. It's been incredible to watch one of the few silver linings in the Trump era. So keep up all the great work. And thank you so much for joining us on Pod Save America. Thank you so much. And thank you for everything that you're doing. You're inspiring another generation as well.

And this is why we're going to make great change this November and the next many. Absolutely. Thanks, Stephanie. Take care. Take care. this November and the next many. Absolutely. Thanks, Stephanie.

Take care. Take care. Thanks again to Stephanie for joining us today. And we will talk to you guys next week. Bye, everyone. Thank you.