Pod Save America - “Holiday mailbag!”

Episode Date: December 26, 2019

Jon F. and Dan answer your questions on 2020, the Senate, campaign finance, their top Spotify picks, and more.

Language supposedly has all these rules. Most of us never have to think about those rules, but the hidden hand of language guides nearly every interaction we have with other people, determining whether we connect, entertain, confuse, insult, or dazzle the people we communicate with. In Radio Lingo, the new podcast from Duolingo and Crooked Media, we explore how language shapes our world and how our world shapes language. I'm Amad El-Yakber. I'm an audio journalist and James Beard award-winning writer. I am in awe of language, its complexity and its simplicity, the way we can use it to

create both distance and understanding. I'm going to be your guide. Join us as we take you on a linguistic journey. From Crooked Media and Duolingo, this is Radiolingo. New episodes out Tuesdays on your favorite podcast apps. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On the pod today, our annual holiday mailbag where we answer some of your questions. So exciting. What a tradition. What a tradition. What a tradition. Quick housekeeping note.

Pod Save America and Crooked Media listeners have done so much since we launched in 2017. Everything from all the work you did to flip the house to raising over $2 million to support Fair Fight. You should all be very, very proud of your work. And so we compiled some of your biggest achievements in an impact report called Is This Hope I Feel? You can check it out at crooked.com slash impact. So check it out. Pat yourselves on the back and let it inspire you before we head into 2020 and ask you to do more work. I see that my suggestion of naming it slightly less cynical did not take.

You know, Dan, that might have got lost in the email traffic. Oh, I'm sure. All right. Let's start with some questions. We're going to start topical and then we're going to go in all kinds of different directions. Sweet. Isabel Kudel, I'm going to say, from Instagram, asked, could the House impeach Trump twice? Take it easy.

We just got through the first one. Yes. Yeah, technically. Yes, they can impeach him a million times. Yeah, every day day could have been impeachment a day but let's hope uh let's hope we don't have to let's hope we have a different president by then look anything is on the table in the second term i mean it is an interesting question just in that there is some worry and concern among many i think rightfully so that

he's going to get acquitted. And then what happens when he commits a whole bunch more crimes between now and election day, or potentially trying to rig the election, which is the abusive power he's currently impeached for? Yeah, it's a concern. I would say I'm concerned about that. But that was an argument against him being impeached. But there's a flip side of that argument, which is what if the president commits a patently obvious crime admitted to on national television and he isn't impeached?

Wouldn't that also encourage him to do more crimes? Right. I mean, this is, the problem here is you can say to Democrats, you know, and Brian Boiler's made this case, like keep the inquiry open

in case there's more impeachable crimes. You could say, we got to drag it out. We got to include emoluments. We got to include Mueller. We're going to include this thing And all of this rests on, can you get any Republicans in Congress to ever vote to convict this guy? And it seems as if the answer is going to be no. And they are impervious to political pressure on this kind of stuff, right? I mean, that's, so like the number of crimes he commits, like we just, we have to beat him at the ballot box

and we have to beat the Republicans who are trying to protect him. This is not about some sort of magical powers of persuasion that Trump has or intimidation that Trump has. It is about a broken democracy that drowns out the political power

of the majority of Americans because it puts the decision about whether a president can be held accountable for their crimes in the majority of Americans because it puts the decision about whether a president can be held accountable for their crimes in the hands of an entirely anti-democratic institution like the Senate. Laura Renee on

Twitter asks, I still want to hear how focus groups work. I don't know where the still's from. Are they paid? How do you find these mythical swing voters? How much time do you spend with them? Is it hard to keep your face straight when they say they still might vote for Donald John Trump? Go for it. You're the focus group guy.

Yeah, so we worked with a polling firm, Joel Benenson's polling firm, who is our friend and Barack Obama's pollster. Last time I did it, I worked with David Binder and his research firm. He conducted focus groups for Barack Obama. Also our friend. Also our friend, David Binder. There's plenty of polling firms out there that can do this. So the deal with focus groups are, they're not just political. A lot of companies do this for consumer focus groups. And I don't know exactly the science of how they go out to people. I guess that's the secret sauce of the polling firm. But I will say when they recruit people to do the focus group, they don't tell the people they're recruiting exactly what the focus group is going to be about. So you don't know you're going to a political focus group.

You could go to a focus group for some new product. But you ask people a number of questions so you can get – this is where the social science comes in you can get the exact demographics you're looking for in a specific voting group because you ask people a whole bunch of questions in sort of the application for the focus group that you can figure out who they've you know who they voted for what party they're from their age other demographic characteristics all these how much they watch the news what news sources they watch so you can really narrow it down to the kind of group that you want um how do you find these mythical swing voters yeah i was like you pay them you do pay them yeah they're paid a small stipend i don't exactly know how much it is but it's pretty small how do you find these mythical swing voters i don't know but they

you know beninson's group was incredible at this because i asked i was very specific i wanted to find four different types of swing voters who I thought would be critical in the 2020 election. And, you know, specifically when I went to Miami for that focus group, I wanted people who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and then stayed home in 2016 or voted third party because so many, we talk so much about the Obama Trump voters. We don't talk enough about the people who stayed home. And I also said, because the people who did stay home and don't tend to vote tend to disproportionately be younger and um black and latino i wanted to make sure that the focus group was very diverse and they found like 20 of those people for me and i could call the list down to 10 so it was

actually really really useful um how much time do you spend with them i spent an hour and a half with each each group of people and then it, is it hard to keep your face straight? It was a little bit because all I told people was because I didn't want to let people know who I am. I didn't want to bias them in any way. And so I said I was producing a show on politics and voting. And I had to then act like I am not a political expert. So when they said things that are – How hard was that for you?

Look, I had to show them I wasn't that smart not even an expert i had to act like i didn't know really anything about politics so i got some questions too like so what is in the medicare for all plan and i tried to act like i had heard about it on the news like i'm you know i'm just someone who pays attention to the news once in a while and you do hear some really wild shit you know but the key to a focus group is you want everyone to talk and to be honest and to feel comfortable so you don't want to shame anyone. When someone says something that's a little off, you don't want to, you know, you don't want to make them feel bad about it. So all you can do as a moderator is really just sort of sit back and let people talk amongst themselves. And it is interesting on somebody like in Milwaukee, I did the Obama Trump voters

and people were so shy about saying that they voted for Donald Trump. And then when one person did suddenly another person did, and then the whole group suddenly realized they were all Trump voters, you know, and they felt a little more comfortable, but, um, yeah, it's, it's pretty fascinating. Have you sat in on focus groups? Yes. I've never moderated, but much of my political career poker I sat like through the the half window like and watching it through the mirror or on a or on a video situation and I have watched them online for hours of my life I will never get back the run-up to Barack Obama's re-election campaign yeah but they are I find them incredibly

useful and illuminating and we will have most of these focus groups not just in the wilderness that's coming out in January, wilderness season two, but you'll be able to see video of the focus groups themselves on the wilderness website. So that'll be cool. All right. Quinton Van Zile from Twitter asks, the election cycle is lasting two years now. Is it not a good idea to shift the primaries back six months to give more focus to the general and lessen the financial burden on the primary candidates? Dan, what do you think? So this question is, so instead of the Iowa caucus being in February of 2020, it would be in September of 2019. Is that the- I guess, yeah. I think we would be better off compressing, not extending.

Yeah. And the problem is it isn't when the primary itself happens, it starts the campaign. The starting gun is decided by when the first candidate gets in the race. And so when Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, he didn't get in the race until the fall of 91, right? Barack Obama announced his exploratory committee on January 13th, 2007, a full year before the Iowa caucus. And so they're getting longer and longer. Elizabeth Warren announced on New Year's Eve, so 13 months before. And so the thing that drives the length of the primary is not the date of the primary. It's our campaign finance laws that require you to spend all this time raising money in order to be able to pay for

your organization, your ads, et cetera. Yeah. Look, I wish the primary was a lot shorter because one of the consequences of a long primary is we've been there. These candidates start running out of real differences that they have with each other, which they do. And you have to keep making news and you have to keep, you know, keeping things interesting and you're trying to, you know, get ahead in the polls and it gets a little nasty. And if you have a situation where the primary becomes nastier than the general, because the general is only three months long, it's certainly not good for the Democratic Party, you know? Yeah, I think there is, regardless of what happens in the 2020 election, I hope there is a very big, thoughtful conversation about how we about the same size as the Republican base,

why is it an effective political strategy for the Republicans to exclusively focus on their base, but not for the Democrats? Because of a little thing called the electoral college. And gerrymandering. And gerrymandering. And the fucking Senate. Yeah. I mean, the problem we have here is there are more Democratic voters and more potential Democratic voters than there are Republican voters, potential Republican voters. The problem is they're not geographically distributed evenly. If everything was decided in a popular vote, a Democratic-based strategy could work. But unfortunately, it does not work that way. And the primary base of the Republican Party, which is white men, often without a college degree, are massively overrepresented in the Senate, overrepresented in the Electoral College. And gerrymandering,

as it has happened all across the country, is done specifically to give them more power and dilute the power of voters of color. The other problem is the Republican base is very homogeneous at this point. It is older white men without a college education and then white women without a college education as well make up a part of the Republican base. So when you're talking about that as a base, you have sort of an easier message policy agenda because you're messaging to people who are more the same and ideologically the same as well. The Democratic base is much more heterogeneous, much more diverse, not just in its identity, but in its ideology.

And its media diet. And its media diet. And so we are trying to have a coalition that includes more moderates, more centrists, and then very, very progressive people, center-left people, Democratic socialists. We have to have a coalition where Joe Manchin and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are in the same coalition. And that's, when you talk about,

oh, is our coalition bigger than theirs? It is, but it's only bigger than theirs if we include both of those kinds of people, the Manchins of the world and the AOCs of the world. And so that makes it a lot harder for the Democrats to just talk about their base than for the Republican Party. Yeah, that's hard. The better part is that we're right and they're wrong.

Yeah, and our party looks more like America than theirs does. 90% of House Republicans are white men. But we are a big tent party, and it's pretty noisy under that tent. All right. Nora Hagen from Facebook asks, thoughts on Trump suggesting he may skip the debates? I think that's highly likely. You think it's likely? Yeah.

So imagine this, right? The Democratic nominee, whoever they may be, and the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, have to agree on three debate moderators. on three debate moderators can you find three human beings who could plausibly moderate a debate that trump and joe biden elizabeth warren amy klobuchar people yeah because we always fucking give in and so uh he'll say chris wallace and we'll be like okay chris wallace yeah like and that may be fine but it's after that so maybe we have one debate. What happens after that? I know. It's like, yeah, think of what he said about NBC, ABC, CBS, like CNN, right? I mean, it is. I worry that at the end of the day, he may show up for these debates. But the effect of the drama before that, when he threatens over and over again to not show up, is working the refs. And so he's going to get the debate moderators that he wants because

the democrats are going to say well we want you know we want to debate we want him to show up at the debates and so we you know the debate commission is going to try to like appease trump like everyone else tries to fucking appease trump because he's like crying and screaming like he always does but ultimately it's a negotiation between a set of negotiators picked by the democratic nominee and a set of ones picked by trump. And they're going to have to agree. And it seems hard to imagine what they can possibly agree on other than Chris Wallace, who Trump also hates. Right. Yeah. Chris Wallace, who said Trump is a threat to the free press the other day. So that's probably not good either. And I think partly how Trump is doing will determine this,

right? There was some speculation he would not debate last time, but he had a very different calculus because he was losing. Yeah. Or so we all thought. And he was also in it for attention back then because this was part of a larger play to fill the unfillable hole in his ego. But this is different, right? Where if he is winning and he thinks he could get his clock cleaned by Elizabeth Warren or Pete Buttigieg or whoever else, he may not show up and he will. Do you think it hurts the Democratic candidate if Donald Trump doesn't show up? Maybe. Very, very maybe. You have to make a case against Trump.

And he already has a giant megaphone as president and controlling American social media um so he can get his message out and could you make a case that it would hurt him that you could that the democrat could say that donald trump's too scared to debate me it could and it's going to depend on the ability of the democrat to make that case but there's nothing about our current media environment to suggest the headlines won't be trump says he won't debate Democrats says he should fair Democrat says he should news it's news at 11. So I think and you know, and you just have when you are less well known, and you were making a case against the you have, you know, we always think about campaigns in terms of five moments. There is the moment you pick your vice presidential nominee, where you will get huge saturation coverage. There is the moment you pick your vice presidential nominee where you will get huge saturation coverage.

There is your convention speech. And there are the three debates. And so if Trump could starve the Democrat of those three moments, that may not be great for the Democrat. I wonder if the solution is just for the Democrat who want to show up at the debate to push to get an empty stage by themselves to just deliver. Oh, I'm sure the group of old Washington wisebeards who we have put in the both sides patrol, the both sides patrol will be sure to be totally willing to do that. Well, we should start yelling about that now, then. Krishan Patel asks from Twitter, please talk about the structural bias of the u.s senate

towards white conservatives and how to fix it we just talked about this a little bit with um sort of the republican base but we should talk about the senate itself and the structural bias of why the senate is so bad what do you think well i wrote an entire chapter in my book on this because i think it is one of- What is that book called again? It's called Untrumping America. Right. And you can order it now, right? You can say that because I promised everyone that I would stop doing book pitches until after the year.

You can order it now, everyone. Untrumping America by Dan Pfeiffer. Go on Amazon and wherever you get your books. Excellent. Thank you so much. Think of the math of this, right? Right now, it is mathematically possible for 18% of the United States population to control the Senate majority. That is fucking brutal.

And that problem is getting worse over time as you have population decline in these rural, mostly white states headed to with either just general population decline or young people moving and people of color moving to bigger, bluer states. And then you have the same amount of power. California and Wyoming have the same amount of power. And that is a huge gigantic problem where if Democrats don't have a put forward aggressive solution to this, begin with a filibuster and adding states like D.C., we're going to be in a world where a shrinking white conservative minority has veto power over the policy preferences of a growing, diverse, progressive majority in this country. And that is an unsustainable problem for a country that prides itself on the concept of democracy. And just to understand a real example of this, the Senate is even more problematic than the Electoral College in this regard, right? Because we talk all about, you know, are we going to flip Texas at some point? You flip Texas finally, and Texas turns blue. And the prize is, what, 34 electoral votes, I think, is Texas? Something like that. Sure. So that really helps

in the Electoral College. texas blue in the senate two two more senators meanwhile all of these other states like your michigan's wisconsin pennsylvania all these states that have been harder and harder for democrats you start losing those senators to the republican side and we cannot there's just not enough states right now that are diversifying that are getting bigger which are which are states like Texas, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina. There's just not many more of those that Democrats can pick up. Like, you can get yourself over the next 10, 20 years to 51, 52 votes in the Senate. You can never get to 60.

So, again, everyone, oh, who cares about the filibuster? How are you going to stop the filibuster but like there is no universe with the filibuster in place where democrats will ever be able to pass not just progressive legislation any legislation you want to name a fucking post office yeah you'll need you'll need republican votes for that the question i would leave everyone with is do we really need two dakotas that's interesting we talked about adding puerto rico and dc no one's ever talking about taking away states i'm just saying i've been i've been trying to crunch the numbers on what i don't know if we subsumed west virginia and virginia whether that would be a net positive for democrats um okay ricky blank on instagram asks what issues do you feel the media hasn't

given enough attention to since the impeachment inquiry has started uh all the issues yeah all the issues yes we haven't i've noticed it here you know like we've we've wanted to talk about impeachment because it's in the news and i think that you know it was the right decision but there's a lot of issues that have flown under the radar um that are not under the radar issues like you know the planet's on fire and it's an existential crisis that's that's one that's on the top just just to pick one also trump has committed many more impeachable offenses that are not getting the attention they deserve because we're focused on the other one. Yeah, that's true. I mean, we're recording this the day after the last Democratic debate. There's a story in the Washington Post this morning on the front page about how a senior White House official said that it was Putin himself who told Trump that Ukraine actually meddled in the election.

And Trump believes it because he said, Putin told me so and calls him my friend. Cool. Didn't even – I noticed it on the way into the office. I was like, oh, that seems like a big story. Yeah, I saw that as we were walking past the televisions here briefly on the CNN Chiron. The other thing too is – and we all talked about this for the debate last night. They started talking about court reform and they mentioned this case that came before the Fifth Circuit on the Affordable Care Act, which could mean the end of the Affordable Care Act.

It's being remanded back to a district court. Just in terms of the 2020 election, forget about 10, 20, 30 years down the road with the climate crisis that we have to grapple with. that we have to grapple with. You know, Trump getting rid of the Affordable Care Act, which he's tried to do, which his Department of Justice is arguing that it should be held unconstitutional, that's not only 20-something million Americans, more than 20 million Americans losing their health insurance,

that could end up being one of the biggest issues in an election. And Democrats aren't talking about it, not nearly enough. I was surprised that it wasn't a more of a discussion during the debate uh last night or whatever it was when we're recording this five minutes after the debate on that thursday night whatever the date was um but yeah i mean this is this is it's not just impeachment this is life in the trump era is that trump blots out the sun

on some of the most pressing important issues that are either of substantive cultural importance in the United States or would actually be very important persuasive in the context of his reelection. But because he plus Facebook has turned himself into America's assignment editor, we end up talking about the set of things that Trump does and says and tweets about and not the other things that are next to it. And that often inures to his benefit politically. And I think we have to have tremendous amount of discipline in the coming months in 2020 to sort of fix that problem by having not only the Democratic nominee in their campaign, but all the other Democratic candidates and all of us sort of sharing content and talking about the issues that will be beneficial to

Democrats in the 2020 campaign. I think that's a really big deal. Whether it's like the rising cost of healthcare for people and how Trump's fucked that up, student loans, like all of these issues that affect people's lives in a tangible way. We have to be talking about how he has not fixed any of those issues because that's going to break through to people more than, you know, as we just said, him being buddies with Putinin or the ukraine stuff yeah everyone who was making their decision on trump's uh bromance with putin is they've made their decision already yeah michael colvin asks with more billionaires in the debates now than people of color should we have a new conversation about campaign finance reform i don't know if we need a new

conversation about it we just need to fucking about it. We just need it to fucking happen. It's the same conversation. It's just being blocked by, again, we're in this catch 22. We have to win. Right. But even this isn't, I think this is an important point, which is, let's say we win. We get rid of the filibuster. We add two Supreme Court justices. We overturn Citizens United. That would have nothing to do with whether Tom Steyer can buy a billion dollars for the VATs for himself on the stage. You need a constitutional amendment to address the idea that speech is money. Or we have to move to public financing of elections, which is ultimately the right thing to do. It's what other countries do. It would be the biggest game changer for us. But pre-Citizens United, Tom Steyer could have bought all those ads. Michael Bloomberg could

have bought all those ads. Bill Bloomberg could have bought all those ads. Billionaires, millionaires, incredibly wealthy people running for office, spending money from their own pockets is something that people at both parties have been doing for a very long time. So I just think people should have some context that when we normally think of the problems of the Citizens United era, that's not Steyer and Bloomberg. That's a different thing. And just so people know, publicly funding elections is one solution.

And the reason it's the solution people talk about the most is having simply limits on what you can spend in an election personally gets into free speech constitutional issues, right? Right. That's why you would need a constitutional amendment. Because even like we had public financing of presidential elections for a long time, but the system was not updated enough to keep up with the cost of things. And first, George W. Bush opted out of it in the primary, then Barack Obama opted out of it in the general. No one has been in it really since. But even in that world, a wealthy person could run and they actually would have an advantage in that situation because they could spend more than the federal

limits because the limits only work because they were contingent upon receipt of the public financing. Yep. Dan asks from Twitter, what did the results in the uk portend for the 2020 presidential election nothing in everything what a what a pundit answer that's right amazing you get paid for this um i mean first of all you should all go listen to pods save the world uh ben and tommy have a great discussion with david lammy who's a parliament member in the in the uk about this um what do you think dan what we haven't talked about this well the whole connection between brexit and 2016 and trump's victory is i think not discussed in perhaps

the most thoughtful astute way like it is not a predictor of what's going to happen in american politics right because it's not america right one uh very important political analysis uh but some of the forces that led to the success of brexit originally and then to the large sweep that um the tories had in the uk are also present in our politics, right? In terms of the geographic distribution of power, of conservative media outlets, a whole bunch of other things that are warning signs for that this could go. It's not telling us what's going to happen, but I think we should look at it to see if there are lessons to be learned in it. And one pretty simple lesson is don't nominate someone um to run for president who is incredibly unlikable and jeremy corbin had a negative 40 approval rating which is nowhere near

trump any of the democratic candidates or any leader i've seen anywhere in a while yeah i mean you have to really try to be underwater by 40 points. That's like McConnell numbers. That is nice. Very nice. And he wasn't always that way. When Corbyn came to power, he was, I read this, he was like negative two was his favorability. And he went from negative two to negative 40. Just so you know, like Trump's like sitting around between negative 10, negative six approval.

You know, I think all of our Democratic candidates democratic candidates unfortunately right now are like slightly underwater too um unfortunately because of polarization in this country we may just have candidates for president now who are both underwater on their approval because of what both sides do to the other one but negative 40 is is special yeah and the way it played itself out is also you need strong, clear positions. Labor did not have a clear position on Brexit. And that was what the election was fundamentally about. And so we don't know anything. You and I specifically. For sure. Yeah. Fucking nothing. So listen to Pod Save the World. I did listen to their episode of positive world so now i'm an expert yes yes so let me let me hand the mic to you and second stop thinking things predict other things that's not

the way to think about it it's like what lessons can you learn from a thing that happened that you can apply to your different situation yeah broad trends are one thing but uh you can't do too much predicting kaj leers asks up until six months ago you guys slowly puked in your own mouths when you heard the term electability, but now it appears you've been using it without pundit howling in despair. I don't know quite what that means. What happened? How did the word slip back into the show again? I don't know if that's the most accurate characterization of how we did it, but it is a fair question, which is why I wanted to address it. And I think I understand how this can be confusing.

Here's at least what I believe on electability. I think what we have said for a long time is that it is impossible to predict what is electable, who is electable. And when pundits are running around predicting who is the most electable candidate, oftentimes they get that wrong because you are basing it on polls here and there, and you kind of have to just see how people are voting, right? But we are also in an election, and I think I underestimated this at the beginning of the primary as well. We are in an election where so many voters are driven by, I think rightfully so, a fear that Donald Trump is going to be reelected. And that fear overwhelms almost everything else. And so when you talk to voters, whether I've

talked to them in focus groups, Tommy says he talked to them in Iowa when he did his Iowa special, and this is all he heard on the ground in Iowa. People are afraid. They want to nominate someone who can beat Donald Trump. That's what voters are saying. And they're not just saying it because they heard people talking about it on Morning Joe, or they heard people talking about it on Pod Save America, or they turned on CNN. They're just people who want to make sure they nominate someone who can beat Donald Trump. And that's not new to our current media environment or to 2020. Voters have been worried about electability as long as I've been in politics. It was on the front of people's minds in 2003 when I was working for John Kerry and people wanted to beat George Bush. Again, hard to determine what's electable. That I agree

with you on, but electability is on people's minds. Right. The only electable candidates are winning candidates. Right. And even losing candidates may have been the quote unquote most electable choice. It's all theoretical. It's hypothetical. No one really knows. I think we have tried. And if we have failed at this, I apologize.

But we have tried to not make predictions or assessments of which candidates are more electable than others. Right. We have tried to talk about how the candidates talk about their own electability. Which, by the way, they all are. Yeah. And like, it's not just like Joe Biden's the only one going around there talking about how he's electable. On that debate stage in last week's debate, Bernie Sanders was up there saying,

I'm the most electable because I can build the largest coalition and bring in the most new voters. That's his electability case. Elizabeth Warren, I'm the most electable because we have the corrupt president and the best contrast to a corrupt president is someone with an anti-corruption platform. That's his electability case. Elizabeth Warren, I'm the most electable because we have the corrupt president and the best contrast to a corrupt president is someone with an anti-corruption platform. That's my electability case. In each of their own ways, they're all making an electability case because they know that's what voters care about. And voters can and should make their own assessments about who they think is most electable. I think they should be eyes wide open that most of what people tell them is wrong. They should be eyes wide open that most of what people tell them is wrong. They should be eyes wide open that most of the media discussion of electability is both racist and sexist and is viewed through this incorrect filter that the way you win elections is persuading a small group of white people in Wisconsin who eat in one certain diner.

and dying every week around the New York Times. But you should make your own assessment because we need to beat Trump. And so don't listen to us. Look at the candidates. And maybe you throw up your arms and say,

I have no fucking clue. This is the person I like most. Then vote for that person. Do that, right? I'm all for that. We are all partisans, right? And we're going to vote for whoever the Democratic nominee is

and I'm going to be happy about it. And probably a lot of you listening are going to do that and a lot of your friends are and that's great. And for Republicans, they're going to vote for Donald Trump, no matter what. They're all big Trump people. There are a ton of fucking people in this country who are not partisans. And we're not just talking about the white guys in the Pennsylvania diner, talking about all the people that Democrats often talk about who are people who don't vote or don't vote that frequently. And for those people,

there are certain candidates, you can go for those people, there are certain candidates, you can go talk to them. There are certain candidates they will vote for if that person is running against Donald Trump. And there's certain candidates that they won't vote for if that person is running against Donald Trump. Maybe they'll stay home. Maybe they'll vote third party. Maybe they'll leave the top blank. But it's a real thing that there are a ton of people in this country who could decide an election who are not necessarily going to vote for whoever the democrats um nominate and that's that has to do with electability and so it's a real issue in this race and it would be a disservice not to talk about but it's also why you should have a sort of a widened aperture about who voters are because that it may

be like everyone's going to have a different way of getting to their win number in enough states to get to 270, right? Some candidates can be better at persuading the swing voters. Others could be less well, but fill the gap with increased turnout. And so point is, we don't know. We talk about electability because voters care about it. And we try to never tell you who we think is the most electable because we do not know i wake up every day and often talk to you every day about how do you think this person would do or how would this affect because it just we have no clue who it is but i think it's worth talking about i think the candidate should make their case to voters about it yep all right transmutable quark on instagram i just that's my favorite part of

doing the mailbags is dan doing a book tour in 2020 if so when are dates going to be released uh i am doing a book tour in 2020 i will start the week it comes out which is february 18th because i'm not hawking the book right now because i promise you i would not do it um there are already by the book There are already some dates on the calendar in New York and DC that first week, but I am going to travel a lot of places and I'm going to try to hit swing states in some cases. Nice. And so I will be in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, maybe a couple other of those swing states. So that's your book tour.

Yeah. After the new year, we're going to have a couple of announcements about some fun little things we're gonna do it to try to get this pre-order campaign going so my publisher doesn't have to tell me I told you so and we will also announce the uh the tour dates I'm a shoe from Instagram asks live shows in the new year yes yes we I don't think we can make any announcements on this pod or else i mean we'll double check on this we will be back on the road in the new year it will start in march we will be back on the road in march and uh stay tuned for more updates on the cities we're going to and the dates but yeah we're we're looking forward to getting on the road in 2020 for sure.

Izzy from Twitter. Will John and Ira come to a truce in the new year? I don't know, Izzy. Up to Ira. Up to Ira. He walks by my office every morning when he's here, and he just spits into the office. Really?

No, that's a rumor I'm spreading. I was going to say, like, your desk is the furthest away from the door, and so it feels like Tommy is getting the short end of end of the stick there it's just it's a fucking outrage all i do is just try and try and try i can't get on that show sharon from twitter asks please share your top songs from 2019 from spotify or your guilty pleasure song from 2019. All right, Dan, go ahead. I wonder what my guilty pleasure song is.

My Spotify, as a father of a daughter who really enjoys Sesame Street songs, my Spotify wrapped was very different this year. was very different this year. And I don't know if any of you have ever hit shuffle for your parents out there on the Sesame Street songs playlist on Spotify, but there is a version of the Macarena that just is sneaking out there to get you every time. But also because I was writing this year, I listened to an ungodly amount of non-Sesame Street music

and almost all of my top songs were off the chance of the rapper album i was gonna yeah i have a lot of chance lizzo maggie rogers who performed at our uh at our show at the greek and then um as the husband of uh taylor swift's biggest fan the new lover album i can i can blame emily for part of this this is my guilty pleasure because she did play the album 45 times in a row when it first came out but i have to admit sometimes when i'm in the car i listen to it myself as well i sort of reject the idea that there can be guilty pleasure music i know it's like it's music if you like it it's not guilty yeah it's just pleasure i like a lot of know. There can be guilty pleasure television shows,

but guilty pleasure music, no. On the Taylor Swift note, someone else asks, I would like to know how the team plans to arrange a Taylor Swift podcast appearance in 2020. Taylor can energize her fan base to vote. I am not a plant. Emily Favreau did not send me. I am not positive this is not Emily's burner Twitter account,

first of all. Yeah, it's very possible. But we would love to get Taylor on the pod. She's very political these days. She's finally, as Emily always said, she has come out as a Democrat. She's progressive. So Taylor, if you want to talk about politics, we're here. And we'd love you to get plugged into Vote Save America.

She did post something on Instagram where she had the Vote Save America logo on one of her Instagram stories. Was that on purpose? We don't know. Was that a hack? It's great either way. She's got a huge following. So anyway, anyone who can reach Taylor, let her know. We'll have her on the pod. Charcles asks from Twitter,

which episode of Pod Save America is It's Not Great Dan from? I have no idea. i don't either i just wanted to say that i stole that as many people might know from mad men from the famous meme when uh you know pete campbell's in the elevator and bob benson walks in and he says not great bob and now it's on fucking t-shirts that you can't even order because we're out of stocks it is sweeping the nation dan's wife, Holly, texted and was like, how do I get an It's Not Great Dan t-shirt for our house, for Kyla?

She just, you know. Yeah, we finally have a few in our house now. Oh, that's good. I'm glad that you guys got some. All right. Leanne from Twitter asks, besides doing all your podcasts where you scream into the void and we listen, what kind of self-care activities, routines, rituals, fun stuff, etc.

do you do to avoid going totally insane in today's political climate? How do we know we haven't gone insane? I can't promise you that at all. What do you do, Dan? I do... Man, I don't do anything. I need to do more.

This is one of my New Year's resolutions in the next pod. It's also one of mine. I do really try to unplug at night from my phone. Yeah. At least from politics on my phone. I am in a very competitive fantasy basketball league. Okay.

And so I'm very dialed into my fantasy my fantasy basketball app but in general i have tried and in my house unless a president is being impeached there is no political news on the television oh that's good none debates too i guess it'd be impeachments and debates are the only times and everything else is uh something that I find enjoyable. That's interesting. We did so well on that for a long time until impeachment began. And then we started putting some cable on once in a while just to follow the impeachment stuff, which made me realize how much I don't like that. And so my only unwinding is when I go home at night to try to turn on the television and watch some good show or a movie or something like that.

Even that, though, I'm realizing, if it doesn't totally capture my attention, I'm still looking at my phone once in a while and looking at Twitter or texting you guys. So one of my resolutions for the new year is I have to read more and I have to read nonpolitical stuff. I was in bed the other night and Emily's reading a book on her iPad and I'm on my iPad. And she's like, what are you reading? And I was like, oh, I'm just reading the news. She's like, oh, you're doing work. And I'm like, no, I'm reading the news for pleasure. And she's like, that is the saddest thing I've ever heard. You have to start reading things that aren't the news. That's the thing I did when I left the White House was I do not bring my phone. I go to bed I plug my phone in away from the bed and I do not look at it after that and I used to read books on an iPad but I would

find myself being drawn to Twitter oh yeah and so turn off the wi-fi on so I that's why I go on airplane motor that's why I have a kindle and so smart so you just read and stay away from the news and I think I think that like, that is, I think embedded in this bizarre conversation we're having right now is a, a way for people to think about the next year, which is it is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. It is going to be fucking hard.

It is going to be stressful. It is going to be scary. Trump is going to be horrendous. He's going to make the last three years of Trump look fucking nice. It is going to be terrible. And we have a lot of work to do. Everyone, right? Every citizen in this country who wants to undo what Trump has done has a lot of work to do.

But it is also okay to unplug from the horror show, watch something good on television, read a book, listen to music, talk to another human being and like take a break from it and not, we don't have to marinate in the toxic stew of Trump 24 seven for the next year. No, I think that's wise. I mean, that leads into the last question here

from Christina. How should we be preparing now that the 2020 election is imminent? Hoarding alcohol for the debates, doing specialized canvassing exercises at the gym requiring voter registration proof before allowing friends into holiday parties that one fuck yes that was a good one yeah i guess all of the above i don't know how else should people be preparing well i think i think like what we're just talking about is like the mental and emotional preparation for it. Yeah. I think it is to channel the tremendous angst we're all going to have and the tremendous anger towards what Trump has done and will do into activism. Yeah. I always think about you and I from we started this on keeping it 1600, although we took it from Plouffe, you know, the bedwetting thing.

Right. And we said, don't don't do bedwetting. And obviously everyone should have been bedwetting because, you know, we lost the election. But really what that was about, I've been thinking about the, you know, the serenity prayer. It's a long time prayer. It's like required embroidery in most people's grandmother's house. Right. And it's also like Alcoholics Anonymous, they say it, right? It's like, God grant me the serenity to know the things that I cannot change.

The courage to change what I can and the wisdom to know the difference, I believe, is the prayer. And I do think it's important to apply that to next year and to politics. Like, there are certain things in this election and in politics that we cannot control and we cannot change. We cannot control the polls every day. We cannot control what Trump does. We cannot control the polls every day. We cannot control what Trump does. We cannot control the money that he's going to spend. There's a whole bunch of things. Can you control what headlines the New York Times uses?

We're trying, but it seems like we can't. Yeah, we can't. That's another thing. We can yell about the media coverage to a point. Sometimes it works. Sometimes reporters understand and they do better next time. But there's a lot of that that's out of our control as well well so there's a whole bunch of things that are out of our control and i think the and this is a message to myself as you know um that i think we need to uh figure

out the things that we can change and not spend a lot of time worrying and anxious about them and then do worry about the things that we can control which is getting out of our houses knocking on doors talking to people about politics sharing content that's going to help on our social media channels, making phone calls, visiting swing states, right? There's going to be so much we can do to affect the outcome of this election. And we just have to know the difference between what we can't control and what we can't. I mean, this is something we've experienced as we've traveled the country with Positive America, doing our shows. And I've been fortunate to experience

a bunch of times recently, which is every time you feel dark and depressed and cynical about not just Trump, but everything that led to Trump, right? And the idea that so many people are okay with Trump. Every time you feel that way,

and I start to get down, I find myself either on tour with us, or I was at a swing left fundraiser up in the Bay Area last week. And you're around all these people who feel the same way you do and are doing something about it, right? When you can be around people who have channeled that anger, that angst and activism, you're going to feel better. It's infectious. That energy is infectious. And I wouldn't just encourage people,

not just like, you shouldn't think about canvassing, volunteering, phone banking, whatever else as sort of this thing you have to do because it's so important. And it is important, but it is also a way to manage your emotional and psychological state in this upcoming year. I will tell you, I'm really excited for all you guys to listen to this season of The Wilderness.

And part of that was not only did I do these focus groups, which sometimes can get you a little afraid because it's a focus group of swing voters, but I got to talk to a lot of organizers and activists on the ground. We interviewed a lot of people. And every day that I turned from the news to working on the wilderness and working on the script writing and hearing all these organizers and activists, I just felt so much better because you just hear about these people who are on the ground in these really important states doing really important things. And it's not like they're all, you know, oh, we're going to win. Everything's fine. But it's just like they don't focus on a barometer of whether we're doing well or not doing well.

They're just doing the work, you know, and every day they're doing the work and they're meeting inspiring people and they're hearing inspiring stories. And I do think that for all of our mental health, doing the work will actually help us feel better between now and November because you'll feel like you're doing something. A few, this is probably about a month or so ago, it was in the middle of impeachment kicking up and just also this very disturbing feeling about how the Republicans were responding, voters and politicians responding to impeachment. And I went to this book event in San Francisco that, for the book that Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg, the founders of Indivisible. Yeah. And go to, it's this bookstore and we get there and it is packed, right? This is a handbook for political activism. It is a rainy, pretty cold night in San Francisco. It's a Friday night, right?

And it is packed and there are all these people of all ages, kids, parents, grandparents, all wearing their Indivisible shirts from various, all if they've traveled, some cases more than an hour to get there. And you sort of you sit in that room and you talk to Ezra and Leah about what they're doing and how they got involved in politics, post Trump informed invisible, and you're like, Oh, like, we can do this, right? And that, and that is the feeling that I want people to seek out in 2020. Because we can do this, right? We can do it. And that is the feeling that I want people to seek out in 2020 because we can do it, but we won't do it if we sort of give in to the darkness.

Like that is ultimate. We had that earlier conversation about political strategies, right? Cynicism is the friend of conservatism. And cynicism is a guarantee that we will lose. Yes. For sure. Everything. Given into that is the guarantee that we lose.

Gerrymandering, voter suppression, Trump screaming at us, all the noise. All of that is a strategy to make you so cynical that you will not knock a door. You will not make a phone call. And you will not vote. And that is how they win. That's right. All right, everyone. So Merry Christmas.

It's the day after Christmas that you're hearing this, which also means happy birthday dan i know your birthday is the 24th it is the 24th yes so happy birthday merry christmas and merry christmas to all of you happy holidays and uh we'll have a new year's resolution pod with uh me and john and tommy that's going to drop on the 30th uh next week and then the week after we we'll be back. So bye everyone. Pod Save America is a product of Cricket Media. The senior producer is Michael Martinez. Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Carolyn Reston, Tanya Somanator, and Katie Long for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Narmel Coney, and Yael Freed, and Milo Kim, who film and upload these episodes as a video every week.