Pod Save America - “Nauseously optimistic.” (Election update)

Episode Date: November 4, 2020

Jon, Jon, Tommy, and Dan discuss the clusterf*ck of an Election Night that has ended with votes still being counted in several states, and Joe Biden on the cusp of defeating Donald Trump.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Levitt. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. And today, we're going to talk about what comes next in the most predictably fucking crazy end to the 2020 election, where we stand in the race for the Senate, and how the hell all of this happened. How did we get here? Let's just... Well, you see, Nate Silver was a sports guy starts with that

you followed sports closely oh let's get to the news let's just jump right in guys um joe biden has won wisconsin they just called uh the second congressional district of nebraska uh and has been declared the winner in ari Fox News and the Associated Press, though they are still counting a lot of ballots there. By last report, the Arizona Republic said possibly six hundred thousand. He's currently leading in Michigan and Nevada. He looks like he has a very good chance of winning Pennsylvania. He has an outside shot of winning Georgia still. And all this means when the votes are counted and all the lawsuits are finished, Joe Biden could very well win the presidency.

He is on the path as of right now at 11.06 a.m. Pacific time on Wednesday. And here's a clip of how Donald Trump has handled this news last night. This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election. frankly we did win this election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud in our

nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we'll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don't want them to find any ballots at 4 o'clock in the morning and add them to the list. Okay? It's a very sad moment. To me, this is a very sad moment. And we will win this. And as far as I'm concerned, we already have won it.

So that was, he found, first of all, he sounded like a fucking maniac there. The weird tone, the, you know, didn't make any sense whatsoever. Let's start with this. What are Donald Trump's actual options here? What can he do? Nothing. Dan? I mean, the most he can do is in states where the state law allows a recount if it's within a certain margin.

Like, for example, Wisconsin, if the margin was within 1%, he can ask for a recount there. But he has no legal authority, no executive authority, no authority at all to stop the counting of ballots. And if he were to stop the counting of ballots right now, at this moment, Joe Biden has 270 electoral votes. So maybe we should be for that. Stop. You know what? We'll stop counting in Michigan. If you stop counting in Arizona and Georgia, we are done. We'll take it. Yeah. I mean, as usual, though, like what Donald Trump says is not the same as what his campaign is doing. So they're they're seemingly going to try to invalidate provisional and corrected ballots in Pennsylvania by people who were informed before polls closed that there was a problem with their mail-in ballot and they got rejected and then they cured them. I just saw an AP headline that the Trump campaign

has filed suit in Michigan to halt the vote count, claiming it was denied access to observe the opening of some ballot. So there's going to be a lot of shenanigans that you're going to read about in various courts. And it's hard for me to tell how likely any of them are to be successful. But a very important thing is when there are legal cases, you very, very much want to be the person who is ahead in the vote count when those things happen. And there's a lot of concern. Yeah, as a Gore guy. Right. Yes. As someone who spent 37 days in Florida when Al Gore was down by 530 some votes, yes, you prefer to be the other guy in that situation. And so like if you want,

he wants to stop counting votes in Michigan, he is losing in Michigan and recounts. Look, we don't want to take anything for granted, but recounts very rarely move a ton of votes, right? Even that recount in Florida moved like 15 votes in a state much larger than Michigan or Wisconsin. And so he has very, very limited options here other than saying dumb shit in tweeting, unless something were to happen in Arizona and Pennsylvania, which would allow him to get to 270. But other than that, right now, as we stand here today, Joe Biden is leading in enough states to put him at 270. I thought that the media and even a lot of Republicans, both Republican pundits and

politicians were fairly responsible in how they handled Trump's insanity last night. Lovett, what did you think? Yeah, I agree. You know, we talked about this on a previous podcast that Fox News had. We know how we know Fox News has too much power in our democracy, but they had an outsized amount of power last night in determining the way in which Republicans would see the election unfold. And the fact that Fox called Arizona for Joe Biden, that became part of the conversation, was important. I think there really was a successful education campaign

around how long it would take to count ballots. I think we saw that from the media. I think we saw that from Democrats. I think we saw that even from a few Republicans that they were the exception that proves the rule. And I was pretty gratified to see that there has been one advantage to Donald Trump not being someone we generally take that seriously in that he goes out, he says that it was sort of anticipated that he would pull a stunt like that. Even for him, he was lethargic and didn't really put his full, his full, uh, you know, body into it. And by the time you got to the morning, it felt like it had been a fart in the wind. And so we started tweeting the same message over and over again. I don't think it is having the, um, impact that he would hope it would have had. So that I think is ultimately a good sign. Just one other point too, as I think what Trump is trying to do, which we shouldn't allow him to do, and I don't

think we are, is conflating uncertainty around the final counting of the ballots that are in and uncertainty around the legal challenges, right? Like I think the uncertainty we feel now is around just the counting. We just have to finish the counting in Arizona, finish the counting in Michigan, finish the counting in Pennsylvania. The legal challenges are another matter altogether. I will feel a lot more relief. I feel, you know, we all, I think, feel pretty relieved this morning, but I think relief will set in when we get to the final count in Pennsylvania, regardless of the challenges that Donald Trump tries to mount. Yeah, I thought it was notable that even Mike Pence, who spoke right after Donald Trump, did not parrot his language on, we have won and they stole it and instead

sounded like Joe Biden sounded and said, we believe we're going to win. We're on a path to victory, which is a perfectly fine thing to say, right? You look at your votes, you model your votes like both campaigns say, I think I'm going to win, right? Even in Trump's own language, he said some version of, in my opinion, I think we have one, right? It's like even for him, it was late and it took them a long time to get him out there.

And it was not the kind of, I don't know, there is a worse version of Donald Trump in that moment. Not that this one is great. It's awful. But even his heart did not seem fully in it. So let's talk about like, does he have a chance to win legitimately right now? Like what's happening in, I think the states that are out still counting are Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.

It does look like he is on the path to defeat in Michigan. Feels like that's probably the most confident. Nevada is counting mail-in ballots still, which have been skewing very Democrat. So that's a good sign. Pennsylvania has counted almost like very few mail-in ballots. How many, Dan, do you know like what's going on in Pennsylvania? How many ballots? I think it, I mean, it's when I went to bed, which is not that long ago, which is, or that, or that distant from when I woke up, it was nor, it was nearing 2 million. I think I saw somewhere it was 1.4 million. That's, I wasn't going to change by the time you listen to this, but it's

over a million and the overwhelming bulk of them being from Philadelphia County, which is a place where Joe Biden is going to do very, very, very well. The, the, the Geno Valley, Bob Bauer, Biden campaign call this morning on the election results and the various legal challenges said that they expect to win Pennsylvania. At the time, there were 1.4 million outstanding ballots, and they were not only from heavy Democratic areas, but they were also vote by mail ballots, which makes you think that they're probably even more likely to lean Democrat. And that's the lesson from what happened in Wisconsin last night, which is the mail ballots

are much, much more Democratic than the overall vote because Biden picked up margin in Wisconsin, even in more Republican areas when the mail-in ballot came in, because that was the bulk of his votes. And so that is a very positive sign. It's pretty extraordinary, by the way. Just this is something we talked about. This was something that we said could happen, right? This was the exact conversation we had

that the mail-in ballots will come in later. There will be a red moron. We did a whole video on it. We put out a whole video. But it is a, look, it's just a reality of what it was like to go through. I think there's trauma from 2016. And look, we still don't know what's going to happen. This is not done by any stretch, not suggesting it is a look. It's just a reality of what it was like to go through. I think there's trauma from 2016. And look, we still don't know what's going to happen.

This is not done by any stretch, not suggesting it is. But there's obviously a difference between knowing something could happen and experiencing it happening. It was a tough experience. But again, like this, we are heading towards one of the many outcomes that we would have considered good in terms of the presidential vote. And if you want more on Pennsylvania, Senator Bob Casey, he actually, if you go on Twitter, on his Twitter account, he had like a map of Pennsylvania and just like dug into the map late last night at like two in

the morning, or actually in the East Coast, it was probably like four or five in the morning, East Coast. And he's like talking about exactly why he thinks the vote's going to come in for Biden in the right way. Look, this is a guy who won Pennsylvania by a very large margin in 2018 in his reelect. So Bob Casey knows Pennsylvania well, but he feels good about that. You know, Arizona, the mail-in ballots there should favor Democrats. They have been favoring Democrats, though that is a state where most of the state is used to mail voting. So they could be a little more Republicans. It's a little more up in the air in Arizona, though I think the Biden campaign feels good there too. And then Georgia's the one, what do you guys think about Georgia? I keep forgetting that Georgia is still out and it's

still possible for Joe Biden to win in Georgia. It is quite possible. Let's put it this way. I think it is more possible looking at the vote in and the vote out for Joe Biden to win Georgia than it is for Trump to win Pennsylvania. Now, we know less about Pennsylvania because we're on a standing ballot, but I think it's an 83,000 or 84,000 margin as we're recording this. All the ballots left are in the greater Atlanta metropolitan area. metropolitan area. I can't do the math on this exactly, but my suspicion is that if they come in at a similar way that the Milwaukee mail ballots did in Wisconsin, that Biden could come very close, if not exceed that margin. Now, there's some other votes out there, but 83,000 with that many, with several hundred thousand ballots left to go go is something that would make me very nervous. I was the Trump campaign and North Carolina is definitely leading, like leading Trump's way, but there's a, there are still a lot of outstanding,

outstanding ballots. And we don't know how many are outstanding because North Carolina counts ballots for a few days after that are postmarked before election day, but come afterwards. And so there is, there's outstanding vote there. We don't, and we have no way of knowing how much that is. come afterwards. And so there is there's outstanding vote there. We don't and we have no way of knowing how much that is. Of course, the the count in Atlanta in Fulton County was delayed because a pipe burst in the room where the ballots were being stored. So that makes sense. Got it. That's cool. And just I'm sure a lot of you have done the math, but just in case you haven't. So now that Joe Biden has Wisconsin, the Nebraska second, and it looks like Michigan, he needs either Arizona or Pennsylvania or Georgia to win the presidency to hit 270. He doesn't need all of them. He just needs one at this point.

And he needs to hold Nevada. So a few things need to happen, but he is close. He is definitely much closer at this point than Donald Trump is. So we will keep counting the ballots, because we like counting ballots here. That's what you do in a democracy. You count the

ballots, and then the winner wins. As long as they do it in a randomly arranged set of states that get up to 270 instead of the overall votes, because then this would be over yeah right right which is very very american um okay let's talk about how the fuck this all happened because we are in a tight situation that um a lot of people did not expect we would be in. For example, in Florida, the final 538 average was Biden plus 2.5. He lost by 3.4.

In Wisconsin, the polling had Biden up 8.4 and he just barely squeaked it out by less than a point. In Michigan, he was up 7.9. He's also leading now by less than a point and so on and so on and so on in most of the battleground states. A gigantic fucking polling miss. Can I just flag a couple of fun ones? October 20th through 25th, ABC News, Washington Post poll of Wisconsin.

Biden plus 17. Biden plus 17. In Maine, the last polls were Gideon plus eight plus four plus two plus two plus one. You have to go back to July 2nd to find a poll where Susan Collins was winning. This is upsetting to me. I will also say to like the obviously the ABC Washington Post one Wisconsin was fucking crazy. You know, the Marquette Law School poll is like a gold standard poll in Wisconsin. It basically nailed the 2018 result, but it did not nail famously the 2016 result.

There is something big going on with polling that is problematic here around Donald Trump and Donald Trump electorates that we should probably that that like most pollsters have known since 2016. Many of them to their credit tried to fix it. They have failed not just public pollsters, private Democratic pollsters, a lot of private Republican pollsters, like Donald Trump's pollsters sort of saw this coming in fairness to them. But a lot of Republican pollsters that working for a lot of Republican campaigns did not. They did too. So like, what the fuck's going on with polling? Anyone want to hazard a guess? Well, it's a funny, it's a sort of a philosophical question because how do you figure out what's wrong with a process that we use to divine what people think when what we're learning is that the polls were wrong about what people think? The problem isn't the polling is wrong. It's the polling is

wrong in one direction every time. You're going to hear a lot from these pollsters who are going to say, well, the margin of error is 2.5, but the margin of error, that means that we should get sometimes polling that is good for Trump and sometimes polling that is good for Biden. And then in the end, the average will put us in the middle. That's not what happened. We are addicted to polling. We love the public polls. It lets us pretend to be political strategists. We get in the crosstabs. We get into every little word that Nate Cohn writes. But none of that matters. Who gives a shit? That affects the narrative on election night. If we had accurate polling, we would not have spent so much time focusing on Ohio to break our hearts or thinking that a loss in Florida was a downside surprise for Biden.

But Nate Cohn having a functioning needle does not matter. There is a real concern that Democratic polling is struggling to understand what the electorate looks like with Trump on the ballot in a presidential election year, at least. And we were wrong everywhere. Senate races are shocked by what happened, right? I'm we were wrong everywhere. Senate races are shocked by what happened, right? I'm sure the Gideon campaign is absolutely shocked about the result. Cal Cunningham is probably greatly surprised by the result. Democratic House races, like we've been talking about Dave Wasserman, how he kept saying throughout the time that the district-level polls were showing Trump was struggling. Those are not media polls. Those are campaign polls

that are being shared with him as the editor of the Cook Report. And so it's the campaign polling that is wrong. And that's a huge problem. I will say, though, to the Biden campaign's credit, while I think their model may have been a little rosy in some ways, they had the states in the right order. If you saw the presentation that Jen O'Malley Dillon did on Election Day, If you saw the presentation that Jen O'Malley Dillon did on Election Day, they basically said, we feel good about Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Nebraska too. Florida, North Carolina, Georgia toss-ups, Texas, and Ohio stretches. Now, they're off by a few points, right? Because I think they thought they were two points. Maybe they're five points or seven points. But we have to fix this because we cannot make good strategic decisions about where

to invest resources, where to send candidates if we have an incorrect picture of the electorate. It's like trying to choose which plays to run if you have the wrong idea of what the score is in a football game. And this is a big project. There's going to be a huge Nates conference about how to figure this out for media polling. That does not matter. We should not give a shit about that. How the pollsters and the people who do data for Democratic campaigns figure this out for media polling. That does not matter. We should not give a shit about that. How the pollsters and the people who do data for Democratic campaigns figure this out is very, very important. And that has to get fixed sooner rather than later.

Yeah, it was also, but just one, like Minnesota, I think the 538 average was like Biden plus nine and he won by 7.2. So there are states, including Midwestern states that are like analogous to some of the other places we're talking about that were accurate. But then on top of that, look, I put zero stock in exit polls, especially this year when the methodology was all different. But those numbers were way too rosy, way too rosy for Joe Biden as well. And those are supposed to be like massive surveys, 50,000

people, like lower margins of error. Yeah. There's something just completely broken here. And like, you're also seeing demographics that are traditionally more democratic, either not turn out, break the wrong direction. I mean, there's a lot to unpack. I think, I think in a month, this conversation will be a hell of a lot better informed and we'll understand things just because people will pull together like, you know, precinct level data and we'll actually be able to compare it. But right now I do feel like we're all in the wilderness. Yeah. I mean, I'll just add one more thing on this.

You know, after 2016, David Shore, who used to work at Civis Analytics, and you should read his interview with Eric Levitz about this from New York Magazine. You know, their theory was there's the shy Trump voter theory, which a lot of people dismiss because you see a lot of Trump supporters out there. They don't seem very shy. But there's another theory, which is like people who have low social trust in institutions in general, who don't trust the media, who don't trust institutions, don't want to pick up a call from a pollster, don't want to talk to a media organization. And it's not necessarily that they're shy about saying that they want to vote for Donald Trump. They just don't want to talk to these people. They don't want to take the survey. And if you have low social trust, you are more likely to be a Donald Trump supporter. And so that's it. How do you fix that? I don't think anyone has a good idea. But I do think like

it's I am very angry about the systemic polling error. I do not think the answer is to like throw out all polling because like you said, Dan, we need to have a good gauge of public opinion if we're going to do politics, not just to win races. But as we talk about issues and say like this position is popular, this legislation is popular. You know, like everyone from across the ideological spectrum benefits from that. And if you are basing it on numbers and data that doesn't mean anything, then we're all sort of fucking in the dark. Yeah. I also think too, it's like part of, I think, the lesson, I think we have to figure out what's going on with the polling, obviously. One other point about sort of shy Trump voters, everybody's shy when it comes to answering the phone and doing polls now,

right? Like response rates are low across the board. But also there's a part of this that's about how do we, I see people doing the recriminations, which are incredibly premature about like how we should not use polling at all, disregard it, right? We need to, the diner conversations are not the answer either.

But there is a kind of balance of figuring, thinking about how to be data driven without being data obsessed, right? Like thinking through the way data plus common sense can impact our decisions as we move forward when we have been confronted by such a big polling error. And like one thing we had all talked about, and when I received texts from like cynical friends weeks ago, was that unlike 2016, there was real comportment across the board, right? From national polls to state level polls to local polls, right?

Like there was a consistent problem all the way down that was reassuring when it shouldn't have been. Polls aside, we got ourselves a very close race. I don't want to draw broad conclusions before all the votes are in and we get like reliable data on who actually voted and why. That could take, as it often does, after elections, weeks, maybe even a month to really dig in, especially since the exit polls are trash. But what are some of the things we know right now about why this ended up so close and why we're in the situation we're in right now?

It looks like Latino voters, especially in the Miami area, broke much harder for Trump than I think even the conservative estimates thought and or didn't turn out for Biden. I think that is something that people are going to be looking at closely, which is building on a trend from 16, which we saw again in 18. And that is certainly true in Miami and certainly true in parts of Texas. You know, the interesting thing,

and at key polling, Carlos Odio and Stephanie Valencia, and we've had Carlos on the pod before, they sent out a memo afterwards. And, you know, they noted that one challenge is the Latino community isn't a monolith, right? And that in Arizona and Colorado and New Mexico, Biden did very well with Latinos, right? And did very poorly in Texas, very poorly in Texas. And then, of course, with the Cuban American community in Florida. And so, yeah, that is absolutely one thing to look at.

I think the other big thing is like Trump just got, and we all said this might happen. This was a fear that, I talked about this fear in our last pod before the election. Trump got just un-fucking-believable turnout. Joe biden got unbelievable turnout joe biden turned out more voters than hillary clinton or barack obama in either of his two races more young voters more black voters more voters of all groups of all ages across the board and yet donald trump like just just juiced his turnout from 2016 and did exactly what we had thought we were worried about which is found a bunch of non-college educated white voters registered them and who didn't vote in 2016 and brought them out to vote in 2020 that combined with doing slightly better

among non-white voters was enough to get him to where he is right am i missing anything else no i mean look just to add to you know it's just's just not a Miami, not a Cuba problem. I mean, Patrick Svitek, a Texas reporter, pointed out that Zapata County, which is just north of the Rio Grande Valley along the border, Trump won that by six points. It was 53 to 47. The last two presidential elections there were Hillary Clinton plus 33, Barack Obama plus 43. So there is a broader challenge with the Democratic Party earning the votes of Latino voters. We need to – we should not base these assessments broadly on exit polls because that is often proven to be wrong. It sort of locks us into bad narratives. But it is very possible that when this is all said and done,

Donald Trump will have gotten a higher percentage of the non-white vote than any Republican since Richard Nixon. And that is something that we need to explore very deeply as a party, because it upends all of our priors and narratives that we put forward. And we have to figure that out,

because the entire idea that we are just biding time until demographics give Democrats this gigantic advantage depends on holding our margins with Black and Latino voters. And if we are not going to do that, and Donald Trump is going to hold his margins with white working class voters, we're in serious trouble at every level. And so there has to be, like, we have to get this, these votes counted, get Joe Biden in the White House, and then we have to begin the project of figuring out what this election told us and how we go about addressing those problems before 2022 or 2024. So the worst outcome of the night so far is the Senate, where Democrats needed to net three seats to take control of the chamber. We've so far flipped Republican seats in Arizona and Colorado, where Mark Kelly and John Hickenlooper won their respective races and are heading to the Senate. Unfortunately, Doug Jones lost his Senate seat

in Alabama. Gary Peters has just pulled ahead of John James in Michigan, so that's good. Hopefully he pulls it out when all the votes are counted. But Cal Cunningham in North Carolina, Steve Bullock in Montana, Teresa Greenfield in Iowa, Jamie Harrison in South Carolina, MJ Hager in Texas, Amy McGrath in Kentucky, Sarah Gideon in Maine,olina mj hager in texas amy mcgrath in kentucky sarah gideon in maine and barbara bollier in kansas all lost their races john ossoff is trailing david padu in georgia though there's an outside shot that goes to a runoff and reverend rafael warnock in georgia will be facing kelly loffler in a runoff what happened with the senate i mean i think the gideon race in maine is the is the one that is baffling because the public polling showed her so far ahead. She had tons of money. She seems a great candidate. It was a top

target and it just completely broke the wrong direction. The rest of the races you listed were pretty significant stretches. The one that we had hope in down the stretch was Cal Cunningham in North Carolina. Now, I don't know if the very lame, very public sexting scandal hobbled him in the last few weeks. Like that was one of the areas where there was a local race that had sort of a big news story that might have changed things. But, you know, South Carolina, Kentucky, like those, Kansas, those were all very, very, you know, we're trying to expand the map and it's very difficult to do that. Love it. What do you think?

Yeah. I mean, look, I think, you know, some of these races were places we had hoped we win if they, if the, uh, the ultimate outcome had reflected public polling and we saw something in between, uh, what happened in a wave, right? There were some places we could get in a big wave. That's what the hope for something like South Carolina or Iowa, there was Cal Cunningham's race, which we hope if, if, uh, uh, the numbers were a little bit better, that he would be someone that could be swept in. But it's hard right now to go race by race. That will take time, especially when any individual conclusion seems to be overwhelmed by what we're seeing in the House races where we face trouble, in Senate races across the country. It just wasn't

as good a night as we hoped it was going to be. And that affected us just about everywhere. Well, the challenge is that split ticket voting is mostly dead. And the Republicans won in the states that Donald Trump won, and Democrats won in the states that Joe Biden won, which is why, I mean, I say this- With the big exception. Of Maine. The big exception of Maine. There is a lot to figure out with Maine there. I was actually surprised that Sarah Gideon conceded because, I mean, they must know that Collins is going to end up at over 50% because in Maine, if you get under 50%, it goes to ranked choice voting. But the outstanding votes must be

in the second district and the more Trumpy parts of Maine. This speaks to the Senate and it speaks to everything else. I think we should talk about the consequences of not winning the Senate because they're pretty devastating. Yeah. But if you were to ask us the day after Super Tuesday

when Joe Biden essentially becomes the nominee, like what this is going to look like, we would have said Joe Biden's path is, and the only way this race is going to play itself out, is Biden has a chance to flip the three blue wall states that Trump won and maybe win Arizona and maybe win Nebraska too. If you remember the beginning of the cycle, priorities famously did not put Florida on their list of competitive states. Ohio was never in the conversation. Iowa was never in the

conversation. North Carolina was a stretch. Georgia was never in the conversation. Iowa was never in the conversation. North Carolina was a stretch. Georgia was never in the conversation. Texas was never in the conversation. That all shifted over the course of the summer. In the Senate, we felt, and this didn't turn out to be correct, but we felt Doug Jones was going to be in real trouble. Gary Peters would probably be OK. We thought we had a really good shot at Collins. Great shot at Martha McSally, in part because Arizona's moving blue and Mark Kelly is such a great candidate for that state. Cal Cunningham, North Carolina is a tough one, but he's a good candidate. And so it's sort of, we lived in this fake reality politically for

months because we were all consuming garbage polls. So it's like garbage in, garbage out. And so we thought these things that were not true because of how polling was done in this pandemic. And it sort of played out the way we thought. I mean, it is devastating that we did not win the Senate, right? It is going to have consequences for years to come. There are consequences for down ballot losses that are going to be devastating. We did not get the Texas House.

We lost some of the legislatures. But Trump's voters came out, and we were playing a lot on Trump's territory. And you do not win. Democrats do not win in Republican states when Republicans turn out at the highest level in any presidential race in more than a century. Another weird thing, though, guys, was the Colorado Senate polls were spot on. Cory Gardner got smoked. Hickenlooper is going to be a senator. Those polls were accurate. The state by state accuracy and then completely off nature of these polls is just driving me crazy. One thing that we may find out over time is that

there is a legitimate impact when a state is told they are an incredibly important swing state in which turning out may determine the presidency, right? Minnesota didn't get a lot of that noise for a while, and Colorado didn't either by the time we got to the end. But Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, they did. Georgia didn't, right? And we have a real shot at Georgia. I said the other thing about Colorado, Tommy, is Colorado is one of the only apples to apples comparisons we can have because their election ran exactly the same as it would without a pandemic because they've been doing mail voting since 2014. So if there was a pandemic related polling error, the one place where it is unlikely to show up would be Colorado. Yeah. I also, you know, one of the things I think I was realizing, I really did try to avoid just

even in my own thinking, like to have a prediction, right? We were really trying to just focus on what would happen without trying to kind of prognosticate. But I realized, you know, my hope was that a terrible pandemic and economic crisis, that it would be enough to overwhelm some of the misinformation forces, the propaganda forces that have loomed so large throughout this race, that that would be enough to drive enough people away from Donald Trump to overwhelm the incredible turnout that we really did expect Trump to have. Did we know how big it would be? Of course not. But one of the lessons of 2018 was their success in turning out their people, despite Democrats doing a slightly better job of turning out their people in that

race. And yet, to me, one of the big lessons as this is unfolding, given how vast the underperformance is that you can't point to any one failure or any one candidate is we really are in the midst of an incredible threat via Fox news and Facebook and misinformation. That's not just about left versus right. That's not the polarization that may ultimately be the most important. It is between people who pay very close attention and consume a wide array of news and people who don't pay attention and then or and or consume a really narrow band of news via via right wing propaganda or their friends and family who are exposed to right wing propaganda. And that challenge, I think we always knew was huge, always knew would loom over the next few years, if not longer. But I think we are really confronted by just how big a threat that is. if not longer. But I think we are really confronted by just how big a threat that is.

I was thinking that this race was, at times it felt like it was 2016 again last night, but really this race was 2018, the midterms with just more Republican turnout. And what happened in 2018? We won statewide races in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. We lost michigan wisconsin pennsylvania we lost florida we didn't have a big one in north carolina um we almost won in georgia again in 2018 but we didn't quite get there didn't quite get there in texas um and so it was a replay of that and again like some of these wisconsin polls even that had a you know up five six ten fourteen tony evers won by a point and a half in 2018 in the midterms against scott walker right nothing despite the fact that we had a pandemic uh you know demonstrations against racial injustice a recession all of these things that happened it wasn't too much different than the midterms we saw

in 2018 only in the midterms it it felt different because we could win a whole bunch of house seats in california and take back the house and here we needed those statewide races to add up to 270 um and that was the real that was the real difference you know and like that's the whole thing about like north carolina and hoping for cal is the fourth seat because north carolina we haven't won since 2008 and um and i think I think, again, the difficult thing is we are trapped demographically between these northern battleground states, which are slowly slipping away from us because of the percentage of non-college white voters up there in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and the Sun Belt, which looks attractive to us because Democrats are doing better there. You see Joe Biden could win Georgia, very close. That's where he vastly improved on Hillary Clinton's margin in 2016.

Very possibly wins Arizona. Hillary Clinton lost it by three and a half points. So those states look good, but we're not quite there yet either. So we're sort of trapped in between. And that's what's allowing Republicans to keep winning. I mean, it is interesting that we have treated those Midwestern battleground states as if they were moving in this Republican direction, because we're using as our baseline Obama's numbers in 08 and 12. And what I think one of

the takeaways from this is Obama was the abnormal, not the normal, right? Obama won Wisconsin by 400,000 votes in 2008, 200,000 votes in 2012. There was a recount in Wisconsin in 2000 between Gore and Bush. Kerry barely won it. And so it's actually reverted back to normal without Obama. There are some other shifts happening. Obviously, Arizona has moved in our direction. Ohio has moved in the other direction. But we are back to the Gore-Carrie maps, where it is one state here or there. The wide playing field that happened in 2008, 2012 was the exception, not the rule. So one other thing to say about the Senate races is there's been this cynical take that, why did Democrats waste so much money trying to defeat Lindsey Graham and elect Jamie Harris?

And why do we waste so much money trying to elect John Ossoff in Georgia or Cal Cunningham in these tough states, or even in Kansas or Alaska? And I think it is fair to say that there were some smart Democrats who knew better, who gave people the absolute wrong impression of the likelihood of success in Kentucky running against McConnell. But other than that, we have to run good, strong races in red states if we ever want to make those states not red anymore. We will have a better chance at the state level, in presidential years, and everything else in South Carolina because of the money that was invested in Jimmy Harrison's race. We are more likely to turn North Carolina blue in 2022 when there's a Senate race or in 2024 in the presidential

because of the organizing that was done there. And so just like you cannot say that every time you lose a race, all that money was wasted. That is not true. That builds up sustainable democratic organization that can be used to change the map. I do think the Booker staff in the Amy McGrath's team in Kentucky probably did a ton of organizing that will pay dividends at the local level. And that will also, there were definitely people who were like being silly about how, you know, giving Amy McGrath $100 million is the way to win the state. No, that was not true. But those field teams did a lot of really important work, I think, in Kentucky. Also, like we know very clearly demographics are not destiny,

but you can look to a state with favorable demographics that are getting more favorable. And that is a state where you should absolutely invest a ton of money on organizing every dime that Stacey Abrams and her organization and everyone else poured into Georgia is well fucking worth it because Georgia is now going to be competitive in every single election. The work that Beto O'Rourke and so many other people have done in Texas is worth it because that state needs, you know, is going to be competitive for future. Like you can look at same thing in Arizona, right? Like you can look at these states where the demographic in South Carolina, where the demographics are getting more favorable. And those are good places to invest your time and resources and to organize. So let's talk about if Joe Biden wins, what a Biden, McConnell, Pelosi,

Washington looks like. Not great, not the best ideal, but what can Democrats get done and what can't we get done? I mean, I think the first thing is we have the power of the executive order. We will immediately go back into Paris. We will immediately issue climate executive orders, retract Trump's executive orders that are harmful to the environment, harmful to national parks, harmful to gay people, harmful to trans people, harmful to immigrants. Like there will be a Muslim ban. There will be a host of efforts that will write that. Manage the pandemic. How about that? That's number one. Absolutely. The most, but absolutely, you know, it's all of a sudden, like, you know,

we're all, this is the first thing, thing this these past 48 hours has so consumed us. All of a sudden this morning, I just saw, you know, you know, we're almost at a thousand deaths again. You know, this is ongoing. The crisis ongoing. All of a sudden it struck me that like, oh, my God, that's right. Like there's so much on the line. Like we like the focus on the returns, the focus on all of that, this this just for a moment, the stakes of the election, I think we're lost. But just the the promise of having an administration that takes the pandemic seriously is so important, so central to what happens in the next year. It's just bracing to be reminded of those numbers after a brief moment of focusing on something else. Anyone want to do challenges to the Tesla? joe biden and mitch mcconnell just uh after work sitting together over drinks solving the world's problems hey joe biden hey joe biden you get a lot um no i

think it's like it's mitch mcconnell is going to be mitch mcconnell but like suddenly susan mc the susan mc susan collins and lisa murkowski you know you get those two votes plus all the democrats maybe you can pass things that are more moderate i mean it's and then hope in 2022 you Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, you know, you get those two votes plus all the Democrats. Maybe you can pass things that are more moderate. I mean, it's and then hope in 2022 you flip a few more seats. That's it. That's that's the path. And it's really fucking tough. And it means that a lot of the democracy reforms that we had hoped for are going to be tough.

Obviously, no filibuster reform. A lot of the remember we had a conversation about, you know, rebalancing the court, like that's not, not really going to happen. Although, you know, I do think, I guess if, if there's another Supreme court justice appointment, you know, you could get theoretically a Collins and a Murkowski to be on board for that. Maybe. I don't know, Dan, what do you think? I mean, I want to try to find the right balance between being very realistic about the fact this is going to be a game of inches. The things we care most about are going to be very, very hard, if not impossible, to get through legislatively. And Biden is going to have to take all of the brainpower he can possibly find in the Democratic Party policy apparatus and put it towards doing the most aggressive, most impactful

executive actions possible. And obviously, that includes undoing all of the terrible shit that Trump has done. And you could do that every day for the first term, right? If you did one thing a day for the first term, you could have massive impact on the world just by undoing Trump's stuff. But then thinking very creatively, what is the most aggressive, most impactful way to go after climate in this situation? What's the most impactful way to help the economy? There is going to be opportunities, I think, to get some things done economically. This is not exactly like 2009. In 2009, Mitch McConnell could tell Barack Obama to go screw himself because Democrats controlled all the levers of power. Mitch McConnell has his hand on the knife. And so if he refuses to pass economic

relief, right, to try to fix the economy while defending Senate seats in some tough places, that's going to be very hard. He has a different political calculus than he did in the first few years of the Obama administration. So it's going to be very hard. I just want to be honest, it'll be very hard. But I don't want to take away from the fact that if Joe Biden is president of the United States and Donald Trump is no longer trump is no longer president states that is a gigantic fucking thing that is going to make such a difference in every way shape or form and i will say like if if we knew like that the arizona count was done and that pennsylvania was done during this podcast it would be a different tone right like we are cautiously as what, as we were saying yesterday, nauseously optimistic that Joe Biden is going to pull this out here. But if we knew that for sure,

it would be a lot different, right? Like, yes, we have said from the beginning, right, that Donald Trump is a symptom and not the cause of all the problems facing our democracy. We clearly have some enormous challenges that we are going to face if there is a Joe Biden as president and a Republican Senate. We know that. And especially, we haven't even talked about

the state legislatures, the courts, all the things that we're facing. Like this battle is here and it is going to be fucking tough. But Donald Trump is an immediate threat to our democracy like none we have seen in a long time. And if we can remove him from office and if Joe Biden wins, that will be to say it's an enormous victory is a fucking understatement. We should be dancing in the streets.

I think I think that like I think what we are facing is that we have we are very hopeful at this point that we have removed the symptom, if Donald Trump is a symptom. Our job to tackle some of the underlying causes just got much more difficult, right? It just did, right? But less so now that Donald Trump isn't there. Of course, of course. Absolutely, absolutely. Also, not to be morbid, but things happen. Congress is full of very old people. They retire. When Ted Kennedy passed away in 2010, that dramatically changed our political fortunes when we lost that Senate seat in Massachusetts. There's like a lot of ways the ball could bounce that we can't predict right now. And so what's going to be needed to be there to take, you know, those opportunities when

they come? Sustained activism, paying attention, fighting for things you care about. That's our only option. And people should be proud. Just for everyone listening, we're talking like there's a little bit of uncertainty right now. Everything is unbelievably close. With an election this close, what you should all realize is that every single phone call or door knocking shift or text bank you did made a difference. In fact, the text bank shift or phone bank you did made a difference. In fact, the text bank shift or phone bank you did might have been the difference between winning and losing. So the difference in some ways between 16, I think, in this cycle is there were a shitload of people, a lot of them listened to the show, who are wide awake, paying attention, volunteering their time, donating their money, and really,

really, really engaged. And that could be the reason Joe Biden is president. I just want to make sure people get that. Yeah, I mean, that is the margin in Wisconsin. That is the margin in Michigan, Arizona, maybe Pennsylvania. Like what happened was the turnout in Milwaukee and in Dane County, where Madison is, was much higher because people in many of them, listeners to the show, have been organizing that state since the day Donald Trump won. And that's, that is why we won. And so one of the lessons from this is polling is wrong, but activism works. Yes. No, I, I do, you know, we're going to, um, because we have so little info still, and this is, you know, this is still a,

a live ball. Um, we don't have too much more to say today, but we'll have more in the weeks to come. But I do just want to reiterate that, like mean you know think about ben wickler in wisconsin last night our friend ben the democratic chair in wisconsin and like all the times everyone you know all the organizing he did in that state and all the money that everyone donated and all the phone banks that went into that state and same thing with michigan and same thing with arizona all like all of these all of these like little acts of organizing and volunteerism added up to a very small margin of victory in some of these states and everyone should feel like like everyone should feel enormously proud of that. Yeah. And I also, one thing that I think will be clear is we are going to have over the next year, some of the biggest political fights we have ever seen in

our lives. We are, they're going to be enormous over keeping the government open, over taxes, over responding to the pandemic, over the courts, what have you, a real knockdown drag out fight. over the courts, what have you, a real knockdown, drag out fight. And I hope people stay engaged through this period of time, because what we said before this election, I think continues to be true, which is that once Trump is gone, the next year, the next year, the first year of this Democratic administration can be one of the most consequential and important ones we face as we head into a midterm in which we will once again be fighting for a majority. And I just hope that everybody understands that their work really mattered. And while removing Donald Trump is one of the great reliefs and achievements that anyone

could ever point to in politics, not winning the Senate means that there's a fucking ton of work we're going to have to do. No one's going back to brunch it's true but everyone hopefully once this is called can take a fucking breather because everyone because everyone deserves it you know that brunch is just overpriced eggs let's go to lunch or dinner together we can which we can't have together because we're in the middle of a fucking pandemic. Again. But, you know, if Joe Biden pulls this out and we are, you know, and again, like this is the other thing, too. Everyone should feel like we don't know what the final tally is, but fucking feel confident. Put on a put on a happy face out there, guys.

Because like when you were in a recount situation like this, a post-election, you know, the team that exudes confidence is often the team that prevails. Right, Dan? Gore, Bush 2000? Is that what you saw on the other side? Confidence? Yeah, I saw tremendous confidence from little whippersnapper Republican attorneys like Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett. I mean, but it's also, it's, the math is in our favor here, right? We have, we have, you would much rather be us than them. It's not just a wish and a hope here. We are leading in more, in enough states to get to 270. So feel good about that. But also, we cannot allow the trauma of 2016 to make us hide under our desks until this is called called because the Republicans are out there and they are questioning the legitimacy of this election.

They're spreading misinformation. And that's not just about helping Donald Trump win. That is trying to neuter Joe Biden's ability to govern before he even gets to the White House. And so we have to go out there and we have to trust the process. We have to exude patient confidence about what is going to happen here. Seem serious, seem right, because we have every right to feel that way. We should feel it internally and we should feel it externally.

Also, and just one last point, which, of course, is lost in all of this. Joe Biden got more votes than any person in the history of this country. And that does matter. That matters. It just matters. He has that mandate. The fight goes on. The fight goes on.

All right. We will talk to you guys soon. Hopefully, we'll have more of a vote count by then. We don't know when. Could be any time. Don't know. Stay tuned. Bye.

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