Pod Save America - "Nuke the Hurricane."

Episode Date: August 26, 2019

Trump makes an enemy of China and the chairman of the Fed while the Amazon rainforest continues to burn, Trump gets a new primary challenger, and the next Democratic debate might take place over two nights. Then, Dan talks to Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic party, about the organizing that is already going on in the state.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Lovett. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Favreau and Tommy are on vacation in Buritz, making eyes with Justin Trudeau while Trump watches. Dan, how you doing? Good. How are you? Look at this. Another Jetsons-Flintons crossover. It's what the people want. That's your crossover episode go-to? It is. I don't know. Didn't Mad About You go somewhere once?

Didn't they show up in places? Yeah, I think so. Alf was on Gilligan's Island. There are a couple other ones. All right, let's move on. Today we're going to talk about new additions to Trump's long list of enemies, foreign and domestic. Now it's the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Jay Powell, who definitely had a rough Friday. We'll also look at Trump's escalating trade war with China and his decision to skip a climate change meeting at a tumultuous gathering at the G7 in France. Then we'll cover the

Republican presidential primary, which is heating up. Dan, do you think it's fair to say that it's heating up? It's hotter than it was before. So, yes. And the latest news around the Democratic race. Plus, we'll have Dan's interview with Ben Wickler, the new chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, on Ben's efforts to organize in Wisconsin one of, if not the most important states we can target in 2020. Dan, I know there was one thing you wanted to mention. Sure. So for all of our listeners who are in the Bay Area on September 16th, Hallie and I are hosting a fundraiser for RAICES with our friends from Airbnb at their headquarters here in San Francisco.

At that fundraiser, I'll be interviewing Hope Fry, who is one of the attorneys who has been visiting the immigration facilities. As people listening to the pod know, RAICES is an amazing organization that is working to reunite the separated families and advocate for immigrants, particularly those who are suffering at the hands of the Trump administration's policies. So for everyone who's in the area, I hope you can join us. I will tweet out the invitation and more details later today. So go to that. Yeah, come. And then also on Thursday, I will be joined by Alyssa Mastromonaco, who will be filling in for Dan on a very special Thursday pod, which should be fun. But let's start with the latest on Trump's various trade

wars and Twitter wars, because they're having very real consequences for the economy right now. You and John talked about it last Thursday, about the kind of increasingly unhinged musings of Trump around the economy. But on Friday, it did get worse. We woke up to news that China would be adding $75 billion in retaliatory tariffs. The Fed chair, Jay Powell, gave a speech where basically he said that the trade war was doing damage and the Fed was not the right tool to fix it. Trump found the perfect way to combine these two news events. He said, quote, My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi? question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi? Dan, were you surprised to see the president basically issue a threat to the Fed chair on Twitter comparing him to a foreign

adversary? Well, I'm not even sure if it was a threat to Powell. I guess it was a threat to Jay Powell, also to China, and both. And the funny thing is, I saw that tweet, and then I saw that it had been deleted. And I was like, oh, someone got to Trump. They suggested that maybe it was a bad idea to label China our enemy and make the suggestion about the Fed chair. But no, he reposted it moments later because he simply had a typo, which in and of itself, I guess, shows growth from Trump. It was a typo. So it wasn't a fit of pique. He went back and really made sure that he stuck the landing. It was an extraordinary. I do think it's look, I know we talk about Trump tweets all the time, but it really is an

extraordinary document because it contains two very big parts of what Trump is doing at once. On the one hand, it is calling China an our economy that for a very long time was treated as sacrosanct, was treated as something at least in some ways apolitical, whether or not that's true, because there was a recognition that there is a lot of danger in getting our scuzzy partisan politics on the way the Fed operates, given how important monetary policy is to the economy. So let's take each one at a time. Dan, why is it a big deal for Trump to declare China an enemy? You know, it seems so quaint, like even thinking about this way, but there was this time where we

spent all this time thinking and caring about the words that came not just out of the president's mouth, but out of any person who could credibly be labeled a spokesperson for the United States government, whether that was Jay Carney or Josh Earnest or Robert Gibbs or an assistant press secretary in the White House, and that anyone with White House in their title could cause an international incident or markets to sink. I guess now we know why. But the idea that we're very careful what we call other countries. People have been very specific with China to call it either an adversary or a strategic competitor, because enemies are the people you go to war with. And we can all decide that Trump isn't someone we should take seriously or literally either one, but people in China see that. And, you know, it probably is concerning to them that the United

States with the most powerful military in the world and a gazillion nuclear weapons thinks that China is an enemy. And so it's like we everyone has laughed it off. We paid little attention to it. But these are the kind of things that have mattered before, and we'll have to wonder whether they matter again. Yeah, I mean, there is a sort of now the system seems to protect itself from Trump's words, because we just don't take them as seriously. But it does seem as though there was regret on the part of the Trump administration. At the G7, Trump then struck a much more conciliatory tone in how he talked about China, how he talked about the Chinese president, referring to him as being very capable, talking about the importance of making a deal. Now, there was this sort of mini kerfuffle

around whether or not Trump had second thoughts about the trade war. And we can get to that. But do you think that even in his, forget the explicit discussion of second thoughts about the trade war, and we can get to that. But do you think that even in his, forget the explicit discussion of second thoughts, is there an acknowledgement that he went too far in just the way he addressed China during this meeting? I think it, yes, I think there is an acknowledgement, but I think he views that the consequences of his statements, not in the context of US relations around the world, but in the very specific context of he needs China to help him get out of this mess, right? He banked his re-election on these glowing assessments of the economy, saying he's given us the greatest economy in the world, even though the facts do not back that up by any stretch of the imagination. And so I think he did a thing

where he pushed really hard, sort of realized, maybe I went too far, so I'm going to walk it back. But not because it's bad for the US, but because it's bad for Trump. Let's talk about the other ways in which he seemed to escalate this feud with China over the weekend. He issued a series of tweets in which he, quote, hereby ordered, end quote, American companies to look elsewhere from China. Immediately, people were very concerned about what he meant by this, if he meant anything at all, if it was a serious order, if there was some legal mechanism by which he could enforce this order. He then tweeted reference to a law which he claims gives him the authority to do things like this. It does seem as though someone made

a mistake in teaching him the word hereby because it seems as though he added that to make it sound more official. How big of a deal is it, Dan, that Trump is hereby ordering American companies to look elsewhere. I mean, I think it says a lot about the moment we're in. Like, we can talk about the specifics of the order that was hereby given, but he obviously doesn't have the authority to do this. And no one seems to be immediately, like, shuttering their factories overseas. But, I mean, so you, like like I see a couple different dimensions. One is it like it must be noted that almost everything that Trump has ever sold with his name on it is made in China. And

that still to this day, the Chinese government is bribing the Trump family by granting trademarks to his daughter, Ivanka Trump, who somehow has a line of goods that are still sold in China while working in the White House. So there's just a general lack of self-awareness there. The second part is, I do think we didn't, like, I know he can't actually order people to do it, but I don't know that the conversation around it in the media by other politicians fully grasps the gravity of the moment. I mean, Trump is, at bare minimum, Trump is authoritarian curious. And here he is ordering the American companies to stop doing business in China. And we're all

this pretend like, oh, he couldn't possibly have meant that. It's not that serious. We're just going to ignore it. But if we don't take like we are, we have gone to the point where we're just going to ignore it. But if we don't take – like we have gone to the point where we're neither taking Trump seriously or literally, and that's probably a pretty bad thing for the country. Even if it was just what it says about the person in charge of the country right now is that he's like – he is your crazy uncle that you just dismiss what they say at the Thanksgiving dinner. Right. There's two pieces of this that I think are why it's alarming. There's the one piece of it you're describing, which is just not taking what Trump is saying seriously because, oh, the law is murky. But once again, whenever Trump has sought to expand executive power in some way, this has been true around immigration. This has been true on a number of other issues. There's immediately this look at the law and whether or not it's possible. You know, Trump tweeted out reference to a law that he believes gives him emergency powers to make these kinds of declarations over the economy. But the debate tends to resolve to, well, kind of, sort of, probably not. Well, kind of, sort of, probably not.

It would end up in the courts. And everybody just sort of goes along with that uncertainty as if that's an acceptable way to imbue a single, very unfit person with a tremendous amount of power. The other piece of it is what it signals about the trade war and whether or not he views it as something that will end soon. So he's in Baritz. And I love saying that he's in Baritz because it's just a city I associate with like drunken Hemingway adventures, you know, but he's in Baritz. I'm sure Trump spent the whole time just catching up, rereading all of his Hemingways.

Yeah, it's a great time for Trump to dive into The Sun Also Rises, sort of like be in the place while experiencing what it was like in another time. But but so as an American traveler, you know, the ugly American, more of a greatest mind of a generation. Yeah. Anyway, he is in Brits talking about how he wants it to resolve. He wants there to be an end. He wants it there to be a deal while he's signaling to American companies for his own politics. And maybe because he also views this as a trade war that will go on for a long time to start looking to stop doing business in China because of how extensive this trade war is going to be. Right. Which is he's out of options. He has placed his fate in the hand of the Chinese. He doesn't understand them. He doesn't understand what their calculus is. And he doesn't get that he's on a 18 month timeline right now. And that you have made many times, which is Trump views this as a thousand different interests at stake here and he hasn't even begun to calculate like what would get them to yes. Right. And there is also just this inherent challenge we have as a democracy, which is they're playing on a much longer timeline. They have

greater tools at their disposal. You know, Trump bristling at the Fed, Trump trying to order American companies to move their factories, it does go to the problem with this trade war that many pointed out from the beginning, which is China has a much different set of tools than the United States does. But he dove in because he never considered it at all. He didn't consider the long-term implications of this fight. He didn't consider very much of anything. It's a view he's had since 1985. It's frozen in amber, this idea that you need to fight China on trade. 1985 was a good term because 1985 was basically the year he stopped learning things. 1985 was a good term because 1985 was basically the year he stopped learning things.

It's like you can take back all of his views or sort of the views of an old rich guy in New York from the 80s. There is a bookmark on page 13 of the very last book he tried to read. And it is very much where it was left in 1985. Dan, before we move on, there was a very important question that was apparently on the mind of many world leaders. This is what Trump reports. The question I was asked most today by fellow world leaders who think that the U.S. is doing so well

and is stronger than ever before happens to be, Mr. President, why does the American media hate your country so much? Why are they rooting for it to fail? Dan, do you believe it was Merkel who said that? Macron? Who do you think is the one who asked such a pointed and honestly hard-hitting question for all of us to consider?

Was the other most asked question, President Trump, why are you so awesome? President Trump, why are you so awesome? He is such a bad liar, because he has now taken a lie that is so obviously not true. But he's also, there's only six other people, it's a G7. There's only six other people who can ask him the question. So it makes it pretty easy to prove that he is full of shit. I mean, I guess Boris Johnson could have in some way asked the question. It's not inconceivable. Yes, I guess if there was one person who would do it, it would be the other authoritarian wannabe anti-immigrant world leader with bad hair of a once great nation. leader with bad hair of a once great nation. Let's talk about the G7 for a bit. The Times has had, I thought, very delightful, delightful writing out of the G7. Ever so gingerly, as if determined not to rouse the American's well-known temper, the other group of seven leaders thought to nudge him toward their views on the pressing issues of the day,

or at least register their differences while making sure to wrap them in a French crepe of flattery as they know he prefers. Though I don't believe he has ever allowed a crepe to enter his face. So now like a small child, he would lick the filling out. Man, do you think that we've talked about Trump too much? Like, in our lives? Like, do you like what are what do you think we would have talked about for days on end during this period at Hillary Clinton one? Would we have had other hobbies? Would you think we would have taken up? I don't know, painting archery? What do you think? I don't know, solve climate change, cured cancer, we watch more better TV. I don't know, solve climate change, cured cancer, watch more better TV. I don't know. So I think there was a signal event at the G7 that's worth talking about that I think captures this tension as a result of the populist government that has taken power there and their disregard for environmental rules to protect a part of the world that sucks up carbon dioxide and provides oxygen for the planet.

So a big deal. Trump skipped the meeting, claiming that he was busy because he had meetings with other leaders like Merkel and Modi in India. However, both of those leaders attended the meeting. Dan, why do you think Trump skipped the climate change meeting? Because he's scared. Because he's scared. This has happened a couple of times at various G7s or G20s or UN General Assemblies where the topic is climate change. And the rest of the world agrees that climate change is real because it's only one half of our two-party political system of America who refuses to believe that climate change is real. And so it was going to be uncomfortable and he seeks to avoid confrontation. So we hid out in his room and watched,

I don't know, Fox, I assume whatever was on Fox news at the moment. And it probably is like, it's kind of funny that Trump is such a giant wuss. And for someone who talks so tough that he can't even defend his indefensible views on climate change. But the world is, as you point out, literally on fire. The world and the United States can't even show up to the meeting. some of his policies and get rid of some of his executive orders, the most damage that Trump will do will be the opportunity cost of four to eight years of dealing with climate change, four to eight

years we don't really have. And the abdication of American leadership. We saw Trump basically issue bromides encouraging Brazil to tackle the fires and suggesting we'd help as if this is a purely natural disaster Brazil is unequipped to fix, as opposed to something that the government has actively encouraged. And we've seen other leaders like Macron in France and others step up to try to pressure Brazil into doing the right thing. And the Times reported that even as Trump talked about how much comedy there was at the G7, how well these countries were getting along. And by the way, it is always so uncomfortable how much he personalizes even these moments about how much basically describing it as a great time. And that's so important. It's so important that we had fun here and really, really had a blast.

We wanted the meeting to last longer. We could have we could have talked for another hour as if these personal relationships are that important if it's based on his personal affection for these people. But behind the scenes, Trump administration officials were criticizing the G7 in France for focusing on niche issues. One of those niche issues was climate change. Yes, the niche issue that matters to the entire fucking planet. So, Dan, if there were an American president, period, if there was someone, if that if that job was filled appropriately by a fully full fledged functioning person. by a fully full-fledged functioning person. What would that president be doing differently about the crisis in Brazil? I think about this all the time because, you know, when we worked in the

White House, you're constantly faced with crises and you often have a limited set of tools at your disposal to deal with it. And we were working on these, you know, people within the government, the White House work on these things all the time. And I just wonder sometimes what the people in the Trump White House are doing other than retconning his tweets into policy. But so with like in this situation, right, so you have what you have is you have a fire in the Amazon that threatens the world, right? It threatens climate change, everything. You have a corrupt, essentially a dictator in Brazil who is unwilling or incapable to deal with the situation. How would the United States deal with this? It would have been not a meeting

the United States skipped. It would have been a meeting the United States chaired at the G7. The president would be on the phone with leaders around the world, with the other G7 nations, but also in the region, marshalling support and putting pressure on Brazil to do something. And instead, we're just sending tweets. And it is like this, like a lot of what's been going on in sort of Trump's Friday meltdown over the weekend is just this really crystallization of what has happened to America's leadership role in the world under Trump. And the consequences of it are serious. I saw on Twitter this morning that Bethany Frankel of the Real Housewives of New York is chartering a plane to go, like a tanker plane to go spray the fires in

some areas and try to help indigenous people. And people are cheering the fact that she is doing it because A, it's great she's doing it, but also because no one else is doing it, right? Like, we actually need people from the cast of Bravo reality shows to step in and do the things the United States government would do, which is scary. I mean, look, they are the real heroes, you know, in a dark time. Well, it's also, you know, Franklin Ford wrote in The Atlantic about the ways in which these fires are more dangerous than weapons of mass destruction. That basically this incredibly valuable global resource is being threatened by this one government. resource is being threatened by this one government. And you can imagine an order led by an American president who cares about this issue and who cares about working with allies on this issue coming up with a way to think about these really important questions, about these incredibly

precious global resources at a moment where scientists tell us we're at a hinge point as to whether or not we can address climate change. You could imagine an American president leading not just on this one issue, but in thinking about these broader questions about resource use, about agriculture. And by the way, the fact that there is a populist in Brazil is just another reminder too, that this scourge of right-wing populism is genuinely threatening the health of the planet. populism is genuinely threatening the health of the planet. It is this, I mean, there's obviously connections between why we have a populist in Brazil, a populist in the United Kingdom, a populist in the United States, all at the same time. But it is this, you couldn't pick a worse time in world history to seed some of the

most important influential governments, either diplomatically or militarily, or in the case of Brazil, literally in charge of the world's oxygen supply. To have these sort of knuckleheads at the switch at this moment. that this abdication of American leadership, as many have pointed out, as Joe Biden has pointed out, that if we can get Trump out of office, we can make this period of time an aberration, not because we view Trump as an aberration, but because we can signal to the world that we recognize the mistake of Trump. But if we affirm him in a second term, the opportunity to send that message to the world is gone at an incredibly critical moment. No one is ever going to be more popular than the first president who isn't Trump at like the G20 or the United Nations.

They'll carry him in on one of those litters. Before we leave this climate discussion, there was one other story that I do believe we have to discuss. I will read from an Axios post that I think caught the world by storm, shall we say. President Trump has suggested multiple times to senior homeland security and national security officials that they explore using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States. It goes on. During one hurricane briefing at the White House, Trump said, I got it. I got it. I can't do it. I got it. I got it. Why don't we nuke them? According to one source who was there, they start forming off the coast of Africa as they're moving across the

Atlantic. We drop a bomb inside of the hurricane and it disrupts it. Why can't we do that? The source added, paraphrasing the president's remarks, asked how the briefer reacted. The source recalled he said something to the effect of, sir, we'll look into that. Are you concerned? Am I concerned? Am I concerned about an atomic hurricane barreling down on the East Coast, flooding our cities, and leaving them covered in radioactive debris?

Yes, I'm a little bit concerned is the word. I did not realize, because I have never seen these films, but this is actually the plot of Sharknado. Apparently, I've also never seen Sharknado and shame on the creators of Sharknado who have planted a terrible idea into the mind of our feeble president. I do think nuking the hurricane captures something essential about Donald Trump as a person because he doesn't believe climate change exists, but the worsening hurricanes heading for us, he does have a plan to make them radioactive and kill more people. I would just try to put myself in the world where you're a normal person, you're reading Facebook, going through, seeing what's happening in the world where you're just, you're a normal person, you're reading Facebook,

going through, seeing what's happening in the world, and you catch a post from your uncle who has this idea in response to some story about hurricanes coming. Do you immediately call a family meeting to discuss this post? Or what is the reaction to it? And how concerned are you that this is coming from a person who actually has the ability to launch said missiles not just pontificate about them yes it does feel like it's the sort of thing where several members of the family kind of speak in hushed tones that you know you know i'm obviously you know he's alone all the time you know uh sarah beth left he's just there you know he's just there alone's having these crazy ideas. I'm not sure what to do. I don't know how much it means it.

I don't know how much he means it. We just need to check on him more. Yes, we're going to draw up a chart and one of us is going to go there every other day for the next month just to make sure that Uncle Insane Person is fine. Let's move on to domestic politics. The Republican primary has entered a new phase.

There is a new competitor. His name is Joe Walsh. And he is going to bring the fight to Donald Trump. His name is Joe Walsh, and he is going to bring the fight to Donald Trump. Dan, how worried do you think Donald Trump is and should be about former congressman, Twitter persona, previous, quote, Obama is a Muslim, end quote quote type guy running against Trump? I don't think Trump should have any fears about losing the nomination. I don't think there's any chance that Joe Walsh is going to beat him. I mean, Trump has a 96% approval rating or whatever from Republican voters. The Republican Party, just to make sure that he wouldn't lose the nomination, canceled the South Carolina primary, which is the primary where conservatives generally have the best chance to knock off an incumbent. It was problematic for George H.W. Bush back in the day.

And so he's not going to lose the nomination, and we shouldn't think that that's going to happen. But I do think he should be more worried about someone like Joe Walsh than either William Weld or John Kasich. William Weld is a doofus. He is a governor of Massachusetts. He was on the third-party ticket last time. He has no constituency in America, let alone the Republican Party. John Kasich is an affable, I guess, guy. He has some popularity. He did a few things that were not terrible in Ohio. He's a CNN contributor,

but also no constituency in the National Republican Party. Joe Walsh is the first person who is making an attack on Trump from the right. And that at least I think is interesting and could have some political consequences down the line. He was on ABC this weekend during the Sunday show circuit, and he attacked Trump for not building the wall and not making Mexico pay for the wall. And that I think, I was intrigued by that. I'm interested to see where that goes. Because that could have, as I said, that could have some political repercussions for Trump down the line, not in a primary, but in the general election.

So there was some effort on the part of Walsh to get George Conway involved in this fracas. And to me, that signaled that this is very much a publicity move for Joe Walsh, because obviously getting George Conway involved is not about appealing to voters in swing states. It's about finding someone who will antagonize Trump the absolute most. You know, there was there was I feel like there was two conversations happening on Twitter about Donald Trump facing a new Republican challenger. One was kind of a, I don't say openness, but at least a willingness to say, well, it's good that this person is doing this. It is good that a former right wing person, even a heinous right wing person, is willing to tell the truth about Trump, even if it's for their own purposes, even if it's to build a brand, even if it's ultimately to fund a right wing campaign for the House. And then there was, I think, a more cynical

take when I think I largely agree with saying this is a this is a purely self aggrandizing move to help one person gain traction and find a way to make income in the commentary economy we have built after we closed all the factories. I think I take an even more cynical take on this. This debate, the don't normalize Joe Walsh debate or the don't normalize Joe Walsh argument has been led by Shannon Watts of Mom's Demand, who is someone we support a lot here at Positive American, really like. And she is right. Joe Walsh is disgusting. He is a disgusting human being. He dispels disgusting racist views. I think he at one point was a Sandy Hook truther, obviously said horrible things about Obama,

really a disgusting person. And we should not take his conversion to anti-Trumpism seriously. Like we shouldn't. Like we, the same thing with Anthony Scaramucci, right? These are grifters who find a market opening, they go into it to make money. And when then that closes, they look for another one. Scaramucci, Dan, Scaramucci wrote a book. He wrote a book about Trump, a pro-Trump book in October of 2018. Like it is one thing to have a change of heart. You cannot write a book and then six months later say the opposite of the book. It's too quick. Yes. I mean, like I can almost buy someone who supported Trump in the election under this idea that he would somehow be a more serious president or would not or like that was a stupid position to have them. But if you decided after a month or two of Trump

as president, like this is not a good thing. He is even worse than we thought. And you do it. of Trump as president, like this is not a good thing. He is even worse than we thought. And you can do it. But he was just as bad in September of 2018, or October, whatever Scaramucci wrote the book as he is now. It was all part of a Scaramucci grift to support Trump. And when that door closed, he found another grift was it was anti-Trump, right? It's a better way for him to get on television, attacking Trump than praising Trump. Walsh is the same way. My even more cynical take on it is, I agree Joe Walsh is disgusting. I do not take him seriously. I do hope that there are some segment of voters who get to see Joe Walsh's message, who get to see Joe Walsh's message, right? Who are conservative but have questions about Trump. There are these universes of Republican voters who could be driven away from Trump, maybe not to

vote for a Democrat, but maybe into a third party camp, or they may decide to sit the election out if they were exposed to an argument about Trump, which no one is making, Walsh is making. So I do think there is some political upside to it, but I think we need to, we should be this way with all of our, the sort of never Trump universe, right? Which is just like, we may agree with what Bill Kristol says about Trump now, but every other part of Bill Kristol's – just because the broken clock has stopped in the right place for right now doesn't mean we should support these people. And I think Joe Walsh falls in that category. or real super PAC who was showing some target universe of conservative or Republican-leading independents a conservative anti-Trump argument, I would be interested to see what impact that could have in an election. As always, we end this segment by wondering where our billionaires are

with the delightful above-board super PACs and less, subversive super PACs that we say we don't want, but secretly do. One other note on what's taking place on the right. Trump has increasingly been directing criticism at Fox News. I don't want to spend too much time on this, but what do you make of this? He has been, he was seemingly annoyed that Donna Brazile showed up on his television because he associates Donna Brazile with a very overblown attack he leveled against her and CNN for a long time around debate questions for Hillary Clinton during the primary. But it does seem he is in some ways frustrated with the way Fox has been covering him. What do you make of it? Yeah, I think he is feeling anxiety about – I mean it's economic.

Trump is finally feeling the economic anxiety that pundits have falsely projected on his voters. Yeah, sure. He is – so I think there is these nerves and he is trying to circle the wagons. This is evidence that he watches Fox too much because Fox is so pro-Trump. You really have to watch it for hours upon hours upon hours to find a glimmer of anti-Trumpism. And because he's always watching it, he manages to find it. I would love to see some reporting on how the folks at Fox are reacting to this because because they have hitched their wagon to Trump, and it helped them in 2016 to get on board with Trump very early.

And I don't know where they would go if they left Trump, or if these voters left Fox, but there must be, like, inside, you know, I don't, not like there's an actual true news division, but somewhere in Fox, the people who keep the money flowing. I would love to know what their reaction is to Trump attacking them. Like, is it like how nervous does it make them? Right. You know, it it strikes me as, you know, look, he lashes out wherever he finds someone who has said something that damages his ego in some way, whether it's the head of the Fed or it's Fox News. It does seem to me that targeting Fox is one of those places where he can actually be far more effective. I don't know what personally attacking the chairman of the Fed will do other than put a kind of battery acid panic in the stomachs of his loved

ones. But it seems as though he thinks going after Fox is going to make them just a little bit more circumspect before they tell the truth to the audience they respect so very much. Okay, let's move on to 2020. This week is the deadline to see who will make the September debate. As of right now, 10 candidates have qualified. One candidate, Tom Steyer, is one poll away. That could be something he hits while we're recording. It could be something he doesn't hit. If Tom Steyer gets the qualifying poll, the fourth poll he needs, he already qualified on donors, that will mean ABC will go to a two night debate with six on one night and five on the other. Dan, I don't know. Sometimes I go back and forth. I obviously have a personal

interest in there being a one night debate because Love It or Leave It is on Friday in New York that night. But when I actually think about it, whether or not there's a kind of lengthier conversation over two nights among smaller groups versus one night in which all the candidates are on one stage, I'm not totally sure which is better for Democrats writ large. What do you think? I have gone back and forth on this, too. So once the DNC – like this has been this lingering question among a lot of people about if it was 11 candidates, would they just, you know, add another podium in and just do it in one night? And the DNC was specific last week that they would make it two. And my initial reaction was, ugh, like I wanted to see, I want to see the, you know, the leading candidates on stage. I want to see Warren

and Biden on the same stage or Warren and Harris on the the same stage and so you can compare them and maybe there will be some interaction but like that was my initial reaction and then i there was like i thought about it for a little bit and which i probably should have done before i tweeted and i actually i damn i know i know don't do that to yourself hey hey you tweet whatever you want without thinking it is 2019 don't hesitate there are no consequences um but i i now in hindsight think that my two nights would be better like it is september of the off year like this is not like we don't need blood sport where we have put the candidates on stage right now and one of the two frontrunners walks off.

It's not the fucking Kumite, right? And like it would be interesting to see at least one debate. I didn't know what that meant. You don't know what Kumite is? What is that? Have you ever seen the movie Bloodsport with Jean-Claude Van Damme? It's a classic 80s cable movie. I don't think I've ever seen Bloodsport all the way through.

I only know it as a movie Donald Trump watches on his airplane, but fast forwards to the fights. It's only like 90 minutes long and it's basically all, it's very 80s. It's all fights in musical montages. It's like an R&B, karate kid. Any dialogue, he's gone. He's gone. Yes. But anyway, so I think it would be interesting to have five or six candidates on stage together having a longer conversation.

And hopefully ABC could either extend the length of answers or get to more topics. And so I kind of think we – just hearing more from the candidates now would probably be useful. I mean so I rescind my original tweet, but I will not delete it. Good, good. And don't apologize ever. Dan, I have to say I am shocked, but I think that I agree now. I guess my actual view is it doesn't really matter that much ultimately, but I do agree that I would rather see longer, more substantive conversations over two nights. And I say that not because I think the substantive debate will mean there's some more likely shakeup of who's supported versus who's not, but because

the kind of cattle call debates we've been having don't seem to be moving the needle that much anyway. And so a good conversation is just a better outcome because we'll just hear more substance. We'll have a richer, deeper policy conversation as we move through these issues. The reason I say that is, so John Harwood reported this in July, actually, that in late April, a poll found that just five candidates,

Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg drew 79% of the Democratic vote. Six weeks later, before the first round of debates, it drew the same 79%. This was from July. After the first round, just before the second, a Quinnipiac poll showed that those five drew 78%. And I went and looked today, that's basically where the vote share is now. But over the course of these several debates, the top five candidates have continued to be splitting around 75 to 80 percent of the vote. Now, things have moved about between those candidates. But this notion that getting on

the debate stage and finally having an opportunity to be seen by millions more Americans will fundamentally shift the dynamics of the debate. That just hasn't happened yet. We're thinking about this, I think, in the wrong way, which is we're seven, eight, nine months, whatever it is now, from the Iowa caucuses. And the debates are the journey, not the destination to a decision, right? So over the course of time, they're going to get to see these candidates, I think, 12 times between now and, I guess guess through the early primary contests. And people will get to make their decision.

Like they're learning a little bit more, both good and bad, about all of these candidates. And then there will be an opportunity for the race hasn't changed, you know, I went and looked back at the Gallup at the polling from this point, 2003, which is probably the most analogous Democratic primary to this one. And Joe Lieberman was leading in the polls, and John Kerry was in fourth, and Dick Karpart was in second or third. And so there was, you know, like, we're still really early in this, and people are learning, and they will either shift among those five or they will move to someone one of those other candidates at some point. And we don't need to think we don't need a debate in the summer of the year before to tell us who's going to be the nominee. We just want we just want people to learn more information. Now, another debate that has been taking place

inside the Democratic Party is whether or not there should be a climate debate this weekend. The DNC held a vote. The climate debate lost. There will not be a climate debate, according to the DNC. Dan, this seems to be sort of a the activists are furious about this. I think a lot of Democratic voters are are angry about this. A lot of the candidates have come out in favor of a climate debate. Jay Inslee, I think, before he dropped out, led the charge on this because he was running on a climate platform. Why do you think the DNC is at odds with activists and I think some of the more energetic and fervent parts of the base over a climate debate right now? I think the DNC is, throughout all of this,

doing the best in a terrible situation. And so from their perspective, as I understand it, the argument against... It's not an argument against a climate debate specifically. It's an argument for an endless series of debates that take the candidates off the campaign trail and put them in a studio. Because it's not just the two hours of the debate, it's also the days of prep for the debate. And they're trying to find this balance. Like when we ran in 2008, there were dozens of debates. It was a huge time suck. It was probably bad for the campaign. In 2016, there were not enough debates. They overcorrected in 16. So this is sort of the just right approach they're doing. And their fear is,

if you say yes to climate, how do you say no to guns, right? So let's say all the activists who, after what happened this past weekend, El Paso or Dayton or anything else, or Moms Demand, or everyone come together and say, we want to debate on guns. How do you say yes to climate, no on guns? How do you say yes to climate, no on a criminal justice debate? And so they're trying to hold the line. So I would make two points on this. One is the campaigns are acting as if they have no leverage here. And if the front runners, not Jay Inslee, who we miss, but not Jay Inslee, but if Biden, Warren, Buttigieg, Harris, Sanders decided there was going to be a climate debate, there would be a climate debate. Like we – in 2008, the front-running campaigns of Clinton, Obama, and Edwards, who was a person in American politics at one time. And the campaign managers would help sort of navigate all the forums and debates together. Because if one of them did it, all three of them

had to do it. And if none of them did it, then it wouldn't happen. And so the frontrunners could decide to have a climate debate, but they have decided not to do that. And so it's the DNC's fault. But right now, a lot of the campaigns want to have their cake and eat it too and say, we are for a climate debate. But the DNC, you know, hold me back. The DNC said we can't do anything. But they could do something if they wanted to. Right. It does seem right.

The interest of the candidate is to be for every debate humanly possible while hoping some other external force prevents them from having to leave the trail again and again. It's also true that there's going to be a climate change forum. So that is also an opportunity to hear all the different candidates on this issue at length. But I do think, you know, I think one of the problems people are having is that there's a kind of objectivity to the rules, which I understand, but just feels quite frustrating to people that that wait a second, what are these qualification terms? Why? Why is why is Tom Steyer able to get so close, but someone like Michael Bennett isn't? I understand that these rules were drawn up before there were candidates so that they'd be fair, but is it actually serving the candidates best? Do you think overall the debate process this time has been working? What do you think? I just – I don't really know. Like there are obviously flaws, right? The donor – the grassroots donor threshold seemed like a great idea at the time.

But it has become a world where the campaigns have had to spend millions of dollars at a loss to try to meet these thresholds. And so there are unintended consequences to all of them. I just cannot come up with a better process. I don't know what – certainly just a non-grassroots donation number or contribution number would be bad. The polling should matter in some way, shape, or form, because what would we have done? It would have been worse if there had not been a 20-candidate cutoff for these first couple debates, and we had three nights of debates, right? You're just getting fewer eyeballs, there's less interaction. And so I don't think there is an ideal way to do this. I think this is the right way to do it. I would be cautious about trying to overcorrect for some of the criticism going forward to make it harder to get into debates.

I think that would be a mistake. All right, we'll leave it there. Before we wrap up, another important development. Dan, Sean Spicer, he was a White House press secretary. This is a sort of a, this is a job of great prestige. It is a job that has been lionized in film, in television, the voice of an administration standing at that podium. People work really hard to get that job. They achieve it. They go on to incredible things. Do you think Donald Trump was being sincere

when he praised Sean Spicer for going on Dancing with the Stars? No. I do not think Donald Trump was being sincere. And I think he sent that tweet because he knew it would make Sean Spicer's life harder. And torturing Sean Spicer is, other than golf and watching Fox News, one of Trump's few hobbies. Do you remember in the early days when Sean Spicer was... A, when Sean Spicer still worked there, and B, there was actually a White House briefing, when Sean Spicer was with a, when Sean Spicer still worked there in B, there was actually a White House briefing that Trump would clear his schedule, watch the briefing in his office, and then demand that Sean Spicer come up there and then give him basically question by question critiques all while making fun of the tailoring of his suit. Right. First of all, I would also,

I would take issue. I would take issue with the phrase clear his schedule. I mean, he had to DVR at least two Fox shows at that time. So something had to give. To make one serious point about this before we go, though, it is. So the one thing that was always fascinating about Sean Spicer is when he was press secretary, kind of wore his pain on his face and in his tailoring. But there was a kind of a gruesome expression he would draw when standing at that podium because of the space between the person he thought he was going to be and the person he had to be by defending Donald Trump, the kind of the distance traveled between being press secretary for a different president and being press secretary for this president. And it was fascinating to see Spicer kind of do this round

of press saying, I just think this should be a politics-free zone, because there's still this desire on the part of people like Sean Spicer to be treated normally, that even now there's still this feeling like they know deep down that Trump is not a legitimate president in any meaningful sense, that working for him will always have an asterisk, that you're not a press secretary or Trump press secretary. And it seems to me that the response he's getting to this is a reminder that as much as they want that to be true, that's just not the case. You can't evade responsibility and only take the parts you want, like the fame and apparently the ballroom dancing. responsibility and only take the parts you want, like the fame and apparently the ballroom dancing. What do you think the calculus was in Sean Spicer's head to do this, right? Dancing with the stars is a refuge for B-list celebrities trying to resurrect their career. It is where the cast of Jersey Shore goes when Jersey Shore goes off the air. And so I presume Sean Spicer,

And Jersey Shore goes off the air. And so, like, I presume Sean Spicer, just on the Republican speaking circuit, selling access, has the capacity to make money in other ways. Are you sure about that? I don't know. That's interesting. I mean, there seems to be a lot of money going around Republican politics. Yeah, but think about that market. Like, who wants Sean Spicer to come speak at their event?

If you're just a, like normally an administration, right, there would be like trade groups, nonpartisan organizations that might want somebody from an administration to come give them the lay of the land in Washington. People pay for that privilege. It is a longstanding, you know, this is basically a version of what Hillary Clinton did when she gave high paid speeches. They want the best person they can get to talk to them about politics. But you might not want Sean Spicer at your event where you talk about the latest in, I don't know, like retail packaging or health administration because he's so controversial. Nobody believes he had any influence. Nobody believes he's still talking to

these people. So all the people trying to buy their way into Trump, they're going to Lewandowski. They're going to other people. I wonder if it's not more complicated than the book didn't sell, you know? Like most of the people who got fired got no-show jobs at Trump Super PACs and are just making – just getting laundered Coke dollars put in their pocket just to not – just basically they're being paid to sign NDAs. So they didn't do that. Or they wrote anti-Trump books. By the way, just so people know, Coke dollars, I thought you meant – I thought you meant like – I thought you meant Coke dollars. And now I'm realizing you meant Coke dollars. Yes. Yeah, K-O you meant Coke dollars. Yes. Yeah.

K-O-C-H. K-O-C-H. Maybe the other ones. Who knows? Or they either wrote these typical conservative selling books that Trump will tweet about, about the fake press or fake Russian collusion, witch hunt, whatever else. Or they wrote telos. And Sean Spicer managed to do neither. He did not write a book that pleased the Trump people, but he also didn't have the courage to tell the truth either. And so he's been living in this, I don't know,

some sort of sad purgatory of he can't figure out how to get himself out of the box he put himself in. I would be very clear. I do not feel sorry for him. He is a grown sentient adult who made a series of choices that everyone knew were wrong and he knew they were wrong and he made them anyway. Yes. It is almost as if he's been sentenced to pushing his reputation up a hill. And then when it gets to the top of the hill, it rolls back down. So he walks back down to the bottom of the hill. And it seems like he may have to do that forever. Pretty good. Seems fair. All right. When we come back, we will have Dan's interview with the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, Ben Wickler. Ben Wickler.

We are here in studio in San Francisco with Ben Wickler. He's the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party and a former senior advisor to moveon.org. And most importantly, or maybe not most importantly, but longtime friend of the pod. You've been on many times to talk to us about activism around the Affordable Care Act and so much other stuff. And we are pleased to talk to you now about Wisconsin. Very glad to be here. Thank you, Ben. So you were here in San Francisco at the DNC meeting, the National Committee meeting. How's that meeting going?

Is the party – we read a lot of reports in the news that perhaps the Democrats are horribly divided. Have you sensed that at this meeting? So there's an autocomplete for the phrase Democrats in disarray. And if you press D-E, then it just autofills the rest. The reality is everyone I'm talking to is totally focused on stopping Trump. And that is this central unifying goal. There's a real sense that we have to fight for state legislatures. We have to fight for the Senate.

We have to fight for the House. But it all connects to the big fight. They're all linked to each other. We know that the fate of candidates, Democrats up and down the ticket is connected to how we prosecute the presidential fight and that there are reverse coattails when you get local candidates, they pull out more voters. So I think there's a real sense of shared mission. And a lot of what's happening now a year out is the kind of building blocks of how we assemble the coalition that we need. How do we get the different structural pieces in place? How do we get organizers trained? So as an organizer myself, I think it's exciting. And I think a lot of the conflict that is at the, you know, you might read about in the news misses the fact that

mostly people are just leaning in to do the work. So you, as I mentioned at the top, your history and your background in politics is in activism and organizing, but mostly from outside of the party structure and oftentimes in opposition to the party structure, pushing the party in directions it may not want to go. How has that background influenced your approach to now being in a position? Now you have the term Democratic Party chair in your title, which is about as inside as you can get. So I grew up in Madison, where I live now, and in Wisconsin. And growing up, when I was in high school, I used to organize debates between state legislators about issues affecting teenagers. And this one state rep would always come and win the debates. And then she ran for Congress. My

friends and I volunteered on her race, and Tammy Baldwin got elected to the House and now the Senate. I worked on governor's races. My godmother is a woman named Ada Deer, who became the first American Indian woman to win a congressional primary when I was 11. That was the first race I volunteered on. So I kind of grew up in the Wisconsin progressive tradition, both in activism, which I did a lot of, and also electoral politics. And frankly, in Wisconsin, there's not much daylight between them. There's a tradition of folks fighting for causes and social justice,

moving in and out of the electoral world. And I think I brought that sensibility to the activism I did. I think one of the things that at MoveOn we try to do is, we are centrally an independent progressive grassroots group, but we try to be in constant contact with elected folks so we understand where the battle lines are, where the pressure points are. And that kind of like the inside-outside game was a big part of how all of us collectively won the ACA fight. That was something where having just really hyper-pinpointed intel about where Republicans could crack or if there were threats to Democratic unity, that allowed us to do our most effective work.

So as state party chair, I'm on the other side of that handshake, but it is still a handshake that we see ourselves in the party as part of an ecosystem and a movement. We're working with amazing groups, with organized labor, with grassroots groups, everyone from high school students to there's a group called the Raging Grannies of seniors that sing at progressive events. We're all working on it together. And we all get that the stakes, you know, they ripple out from the political system to every person's life. So to me, it's not, there's no silos in this business. So Wisconsin is the center of the political universe in 2020. It is the state that all the data analytics types predict is the person who wins Wisconsin is most likely to be the next president of the United States. And so beyond the pressure that may put on your shoulders, I think it's worth

spending a little bit of time examining how Wisconsin became that state because Barack Obama won Wisconsin in 2008 by 13 points. He won it by seven, almost seven points, I believe, in 2012. It is a state in 2012 that Obama felt had such confidence would be in his camp that he almost didn't campaign there. I think we went once at the end, and I'm sure we even ran an ad to the point where Hillary Clinton loses. Small margin, but loses. What has happened in Wisconsin in the last decade that has changed the politics to the point it went from a non-competitive blue state to a purple state that some see to be potentially trending red? Scott Walker and the Koch brothers. And they're a symbol of a broader apparatus on the Republican

side funded by incredibly wealthy, often heirs who are trying to protect the ability to build a kind of aristocracy in America, who have systematically gone after and dismantled the pillars of progressive power. So everyone knows about Act 10. After Scott Walker came into office, he was recorded saying his plan was to divide and conquer, and he eliminated the power of public sector unions to organize, had a just giant cataclysmic fight with 100,000 people outside the Capitol. But he pushed the law through. He then did a right to work law that further was a body blow to organized labor in Wisconsin. He put in extremely harsh voter ID laws that made it way harder for people to be able to register

to vote and to cast their ballots. Something people don't know is that he eliminated the ability of student governments to be able to do mass registration drives on their campuses. And he changed the voter registration rules. So instead of being able to be deputized statewide as a voter registrar, you have to get deputized by every municipality. And we have 1,852 municipalities that administer their own election rules in Wisconsin. Just point after point after – oh, and here's another one. He changed the campaign finance laws to suit the profile of his specific donors. So in Wisconsin, if you're a union, you can give $12,000 to a state party. If you're an individual, you can make unlimited contributions. And there's a billionaire named Diane Hendricks who writes literally seven-figure checks to the Republican Party. All of that, then, the state party can make unlimited donations to state candidates and the gerrymander at the same time. So in all these ways, they took a progressive state. If you poll Wisconsinites about issues,

they're very progressive and put it into shackles. They handcuffed the state to make it so that democracy couldn't work. And the ultimate expression of this was in our state assembly races last year, Democrats got 54% of the votes. Republicans got 63 out of 99 seats. So democracy is just broken in our state. And our one shot now is in this election, simultaneously, we have to stop Trump. And if Republicans get three more seats in each chamber of our state legislature, they get veto override supermajorities and lock in the gerrymander for another decade until my seven-year-old's graduating from high school. So we have to fight with both hands. And so 2018 was great around the country, also good in Wisconsin, right?

Great in Wisconsin. Scott Walker gets sent home. But the numbers are interesting, right? That you obviously see, as you mentioned, the results of gerrymandering, which is the state legislative results do not reflect the popular will of the people of Wisconsin. But even then, there are some warning signs in those numbers, right? But there is an exception to those warning signs in the sense that Tammy Baldwin, your friend since high school, did incredibly well, right? And there is this large swath of, or not, surprisingly large swath, I would say,

of Baldwin-Walker voters. And so what do you, like, what is either the profile of that voter or what is the way to turn a Baldwin-Walker voter? So someone who picked Tammy Baldwin over Tony, but did not pick Tony Evers, your governor. Like what is the profile of that voter and how do we reach that? How do you convert – turn a Baldwin-Walker voter into a Democrat in 2020 or a Democratic voter in 2020?

So the key thing that I think is true in Wisconsin and is more true than people realize across the country is that swing voters and ticket splitters are not centrist. They're conflicted. They have a bunch of different ideas that don't cohere into a perfectly polished gem of ideological consistency. They might have incredibly strong views in one way or the other on guns and totally different views on health care and totally different views on unions. They're human beings and they're beautiful and bewildering complexity. And in Wisconsin, the key thing is showing up and speaking to and making most salient the issues that people care about in their own lives, their lived experience that connect with progressive values.

And so Walker was incredibly effective at breeding resentment. His divide and conquer strategy carried right through in 2018. And he was able to pull that off and pull a lot of voters towards him, even ones who trusted that Tammy Baldwin was going to make sure that the ACA wasn't ripped away. issue in Wisconsin in 2018. And it was interesting because at the national level, there was this fantasy that they could go after Tammy Baldwin for endorsing Medicare for all. And Leah Vukmir is a nurse, and she talked about pre-existing conditions all the time. But everyone knew, because of the giant fight over ACA repeal, that one vote in the Senate could mean that their health care would be taken away. And they knew that Tammy Baldwin was on their side. She also did a ton of stuff in rural Wisconsin. She's been fighting tooth and nail. She did ads about going after almond milk

because we make real milk in Wisconsin and people get that. We have a dairy crisis in Wisconsin. You might not get out of San Francisco alive if you crash almond milk. Don't you dare mention oat milk. I will be out of this state by the time this episode airs.

But I will defend our dairy industry to the last in Wisconsin. And by the way, we have two dairy industry to the last in Wisconsin. And by the way, we have two dairy farms closing every day in Wisconsin. There have been 1,600, keeping it 1,600. 1,600 dairy farms have gone under since Trump came into office. It is just a massacre. And that is related to his policies in what way? So one thing is the trade war, which is we've got retaliatory tariffs. It's making it really, really tough. And also farm equipment,

all these things that farmers need to be able to sell their products and keep their farms running are under threat. A second piece is he's bailing out and supporting and not doing anything about the incredible level of consolidation. Big ag, you know, we have these handful of farms

that are buying up smaller ones and it's tough to compete against them. His policies are all tilted towards the super rich. Even the tax bill allowed these companies to pull in tons of money and be able to just gobble up the smaller farms. People can tell in rural Wisconsin who's on their side. And Tammy has been fighting her whole life. She's for, you know, she went to West High School in Madison like me, but she's shown up consistently at every step of the way. And people can see that. And I think that's one of our avenues or one of our openings with Trump is that people are experiencing real problems in their lives.

They can see that Trump is spending all day on Twitter, not doing anything about the threats that they face and making, you know, making that case and drawing that connection is part of how we win. So we did a poll a week or so ago of Wisconsin. It was part of the Crooked Media Change Research Polar Coaster Series. Yes. And this was our first, we had done a couple primary polls with our first general election poll. We picked Wisconsin for the reason I stated, that it seems to be the most important state, an under-polled state, I think. Is it your sense, you know, you were quoted in the New York Times saying the general election is underway in Wisconsin. And I know you guys, you're with the party doing a lot of organizing strategies. I

want to hear you talk about that. But do you think the rest of the party infrastructure understands, A, how important Wisconsin is? And by party infrastructure, I don't just mean the folks you met with at the DNC, but the Super PAC universe. Yeah, the organizer, which is there's one state that we cannot win, most likely cannot win the presidency without winning.

Do people get that fact? People get it. Yes. Are they acting on that fact? They're acting on it. I think the pieces are coming into place. And I would say

we need to like find some way to push the accelerator through the floor to make this happen. I met with a group of high school Democrats in Waukesha. And they, every time they log onto YouTube, they're seeing Trump ads. And what that tells you is that Trump is coming for everybody. I mean. Or they have terrible data. Or they have terrible data.

I think it's probably the former, though. Yeah, I think it's probably the former. I mean, even if they have terrible data right now, they're using their digital ad campaign mostly to ID people. They're trying to find every voter they can. They actually don't have a message to persuade at all. As far as I can tell, Trump's strategy is ID every possible supporter, get them all to vote, and suppress everybody else. And it's not a persuasion game. It is just getting people to vote for him or not vote at all.

And, you know, our response to that is a little more complicated. Like we certainly, I, you know, I would make the case to a Republican that Trump is betraying their values and, you know, it would make, you know, they should think twice about whether they actually want to cast a vote for him. But we also, we need to persuade and massively turn out our base and ID tons of people who have been bystanders to this whole thing. And, you know, if you look in 2016, Trump and Clinton both got fewer votes than five of the previous six presidential campaigns in Wisconsin. There are a ton of people who didn't vote for either of them.

Your point about fewer people voting for Clinton and Trump than previous nominees points to two things, right? It points to people who didn't turn out, right? But also points to a group of people who voted third party, right? So a chunk of Johnson voters, but also the Stein voter margin or the number of Stein voters was larger than the amount Trump won Wisconsin by. That's right. It's about 30,000 versus about 20,000. What's the Wisconsin party doing to target both those groups? So first non-voters in a state where,

as you point out, voter registration is incredibly challenging on purpose. Yeah. But then also, how do you persuade some of these third-party voters to be Democratic voters in 20? So the key thing in Wisconsin is you treat anyone who's eligible as a potential voter, whether they're registered or not, because we have same-day registration. That's the one thing that Republicans did not manage to take away. So if you find someone who might be able to vote, might be inclined to vote for you, you can start a conversation with them now as we're doing, find out what they care about and keep up that conversation all the way through election day. And frankly, you know, you're, you advocated for just a sustained digital persuasion campaign. I think that is a great thing to do. It is also

important to have a multi-layered, like two-way conversation with voters. And that means you knock on their door, you follow up with a postcard, you follow up with a text, you text back and forth, you make sure they're getting emails and, you that are tailored to the conversation they had at the door. And maybe the same person follows up with them right before the election and makes sure they're going to vote. That takes a level of kind of organization and sophistication and data connected to your field program. That's what we're building at the state party to a level that it's inspired by the neighborhood team model from the Obama campaigns. But we're doing this already at a scale that's never been seen before in the state. We have hundreds of neighborhood teams across the state right now. And if you do all that, you know, you just you

have to break out of just tapping the same people that have been hit every time. There are doors where no Democrat has ventured for a very long time in the state, in part because, you know, data kind of deteriorated over time and you never want to mobilize people who are going to vote for the other side. But right now, when it's this early, you can talk to people and just find out who they are and what they care about and begin a conversation that can lead to a vote down the road. Is it a question of data deteriorating over time, which is a larger problem within the party, but also a misunderstanding, at least in 2016, of shifting coalitions. Like a lot of people beyond just Wisconsin talk about being asked to make phone

calls at mobile phone banks or mobile text banks around the country on election day and getting a lot of Trump supporters from a Democratic GOTV universe. And there's clearly, even in Wisconsin, a group of people, there's a chunk of Romney Clinton voters who have moved into a different universe. Is it – are you out there just – are you trying to just freshen the data, hitting every door so you can get a sense of who people are because you have the advantage of starting so early? There's – so, you know, the coalitions did shift. I think any conversation like this, you have to remember the 40-year massive blitz campaign to poison people to Hillary Clinton. That was the backdrop to everything that happened in 2016. It was easy to lose track of because people liked her being Secretary of State. There were a lot of people that got freaked out when she got closer to power. And that piece is not on the table this

time. They don't have that head start with any of our Democratic candidates. And the goal that we have in terms of, we call it the bridge building canvas. It's a deep canvas where we go and talk to people at their doors. It's to, you know, it's to find out what issues motivate them and find out which way they're leaning and not assuming, not taking anyone for granted and not writing anyone off. So in communities of color and in rural Wisconsin and in the Milwaukee suburbs, like there are a lot of people who've zigzagged. There are literally voters in counties that were Obama, Walker, Obama, Walker, Baldwin, and Walker simultaneously. People who've cast votes one way or another, or different people who come out one way or another. And so Wisconsin, this gets into the weeds a little. We don't have partisan voter registration. So when you register to vote, you don't register with a party.

We don't have race on the voter file. So you have to figure out how people identify racially and ethnically through other means and through talking to them. We don't have partisan primaries. We have open primaries. So you can't tell based on which primary people voted on. And we have voter purges that go on. But we have same-day registration. So when people register, they're new in the data system. And all that means the quality of data in Wisconsin, if you're not actually talking to people and listening to them, it's easy to lose track of who's who.

And Republicans have been obsessed with building really, really strong data infrastructure. So that's an area where, you know, it caused me and so many other people in 2016 who are knocking or calling in Wisconsin to pull their hair out. We've got to leapfrog them in this cycle. And that's part of that is just the work of volunteers grinding it out, talking to people one at a time and having actual conversations. There's nothing that replaces that. You can't model your way out of a problem like that. You have to talk to people. Have you seen in Wisconsin the obviously tremendous wave of enthusiasm in 2018, people out knocking doors a year, more than a year out of the election?

Has that sustained since then? Because obviously there was this Supreme Court race not long after the 2018 election, which saw things, which the Democrats lost, which was sort of a brutal loss over relative to the impact of a Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin that sort of saw things shift back away from the surge of enthusiasm in 2018. How's that working for you guys? So the way I think about Wisconsin, you know, Obama won twice. We actually had trifecta control after 2008 for a hot second. 2010, Coke machine moved in.

Walker, you know, Republican trifecta control. They started dismantling all our stuff. They were trying to make Wisconsin an actually red state. And they almost got us over the cliff. And I think the like huge uprising of people organizing across Wisconsin, it was like they were able to grab a tree branch before they fell off the edge and pull back up. We won the governorship by 1.1 percentage points. We swept statewide races for the first time since 1982, but they still had a lock on the

state legislature. They did a special session, a lame duck session to grab power away from the elected Democratic governor and attorney general, including to stop them from changing how voter ID laws are administered. I mean, totally intent on locking in their power. What happened in the spring of 2019, this spring, is that Democratic enthusiasm stayed high. We actually turned out more voters in our Supreme Court race this spring than we did in the previous spring, where Democrats won by 11 points. We won a Supreme Court race in 2018 by a blowout. And then we got more votes this time, a 7% increase in turnout. The Republican side had a 30% increase in turnout. Essentially, Republicans surged back onto the field. Their enthusiasm is going to be red hot. And I think this, you know,

we're always looking for cracks in the Republican base. They love Trump. The Republican base is enthusiastic about, I mean, the intensity of their support is not as weak as the intensity of our opposition. That's one of our strengths. But it's not like the Republican base is fundamentally fractured. He's consolidated it. And part of the reason why a lot of Republicans were leery in 2016 is they thought he wasn't right wing enough. People forget that now. But, you know, they were like, oh, he wants to protect Social Security, Medicaid. Like, screw that guy. He's got them locked.

He's given them their justices. He's given them their tax cut. So we have to expect that they're going to turn out a lot more voters than they did last time. Not fewer, even after all the horrors they've committed. So I want to tell you about we have this five fight plan. Yes, yes. So it's going to you about, we have this five fight plan. Yes, yes, yes. Please do. So.

So it's going to be a quiz about the five fights afterwards. It'll be a quiz about the five fights. I want everyone to take out their, take out their notebooks or their note app or whatever they notate on. Tattoo artists,

prepare to write this onto your customers' wrists or wherever people are getting their political notes tattooed. So we're first, we're gearing up for the one year out. November 3rd of 2019 is a Packer game. So we're going to have a huge canvas on November 2nd.

You never want to knock doors during a Packer game. Note to people who might be visiting Wisconsin. But we're going to do a big push this fall. But that gears us up for next year. So normally, if you look at the graph of sort of activist engagement, volunteer participation, it looks like a hockey stick. There's like this sort of long rumble and then this explosion at the end.

Our strategy in Wisconsin is to use moments before the election to build up so it looks more like a series of steps, but they're curved. It's not a very good metaphor. It looks, you know- It's an audio medium, just roll the tape. Yeah, just imagine in your mind a wave

that is tilted up into the right. Yes. So the first thing is our presidential primary, April 7th, is also the date of our Supreme Court race in the spring and our local elections. Mayors, county board supervisors, school boards, all the stuff that Republicans have been focused on, Democrats have been letting slide for so long. We want hundreds of candidates to run for office. If you're listening right now, we want you to run for office in the spring of 2020. And we're going to engage. I've been talking to presidential candidates about engaging in our local elections and our Supreme Court election as they come to woo Wisconsin voters for the primary.

It's a dress rehearsal for the fall. We want a full court press. We're going to knock a zillion doors. We're going to make calls, send text messages, write postcards, do all the things, figure out what works, figure out where our strengths and weaknesses are, max that out, have a step change. So we're looking like a fall campaign in the spring. Second thing, we've got the national convention in Wisconsin. And conventions are huge productions. They're important nationally. The key thing for Wisconsin is to leverage that and make it a trampoline out of which comes this huge surge of new volunteer engagement.

So we'll have thousands of people volunteering at the convention. We want all those people to commit to volunteering for the election. And I think there's a huge opportunity to train, to get people to make commitments before they leave Milwaukee about what they're going to do in the fall. So we'll come out of that, again, with this huge surge of energy. That's fight number two. So it's win the spring, leverage the convention. Fight number three is our state legislative fight. As I mentioned, super majorities are on the line and gerrymandering is on the line. The districts where Republicans are attacking us, they're the Milwaukee suburbs, there are places in western Wisconsin near Green Bay. So those are areas where it's not the most Democratic vote dense, but we have to contest every one of those votes for the presidential as well as for state legislative fights. And it focuses the mind, gets people to run for state legislature to know that the stakes in Wisconsin are going to be so vast. So fight

number three is protect the governor's veto with a state legislative and local fights. And we also want to run progressives for prosecutor positions across Wisconsin. So there's a bunch of great fights there. Fight number four is stopping Trump. And nothing focuses the mind like holding the electoral college in your hands. We're building the general election campaign without a nominee. There's always this incumbent advantage. And part of that comes from having an extra year to be able to prepare your campaign. So what the RNC did in 2016 is it built a general election campaign before they knew Trump was going to be the nominee. In Florida, they had 62 field offices open for more than a year. We're building that kind of campaign at the grassroots level through our neighborhood

teams and our field operation and building all that to stop Trump. That's fight number four. Fight number five is we do all this so that we're stronger for the future. Because 2022 cannot look like 2010. If we win the White House this time, and then we have a wipeout in 2022, we lose the future of our state, and it threatens everything we want to do nationally and in my home state for the long term. All of our statewide offices are up for reelection in 2022.

We'll have new maps for the House, the state Senate, and the state assembly. We have a Senate race that'll probably be open. Ron Johnson's talking about stepping down. So we've got to come out of 2020 just a finely tuned, totally aligned machine to be able to fight the next fight. And if we do that, it might take a cycle or two. But if we get new maps, we actually have a democracy in Wisconsin, we could become a blue trifecta state. And then we could make an inclusive democracy that starts representing and fighting for everyone.

How quaint. I know. It's an amazing thing. And we've seen the examples like New York this year, New Mexico this year, states that became actual kind of blue trifectas passed almost the whole legislative agenda in one session. That's the goal in Wisconsin, that we do that. And that's what Minnesota did after they protected their – they had a Democratic

governor in 2010 while Wisconsin elected Scott Walker, they had Mark Dayton. And then they got trifecta control in 2012. And in 2013, all those folks were sworn in and they passed a huge agenda right away. And their trajectory as a state has been so much more hopeful and optimistic than Wisconsin's next door. It kills me that Minnesota has leapfrogged Wisconsin as a bastion of progressivism. Wisconsin is supposed to be the progressive state. So we want to get that back and shine a light onto the nation about what's possible. I always forget that the greatest rivalry in America is Minnesota-Wisconsin. I never forget.

Yeah. Last question for you. As the Democratic Party chair, I assume you're assiduously neutral. You love all the candidates equally. So I won't ask you to pick. Great. I won't get you in trouble. Great.

candidates equally. So I won't ask you to pick. Great. I won't get you in trouble. Great. But I do want to ask you what you think is the profile of a candidate who can win in Wisconsin, right? Like what does it take? Because Wisconsin is a very, it's a hard state that is getting harder for all the reasons you mentioned. It is the prototypical example of you have to do both, right? You have to do both. The question of do we just turn out the base or do we persuade swing voters or Obama-Trump voters, whatever else, the only way to get there in Wisconsin is to do both. So what is the profile of a candidate who can do both and therefore win Wisconsin? What I will describe are actions that I think the candidate should take. Do this as carefully as possible, obviously. Yes. So the first thing is showing up in all caps in the richest sense of that term. That means

coming to Milwaukee and coming to Madison, also coming to Northern Wisconsin, coming to Western Wisconsin, coming to the Fox Valley, going to all the different regions of our state, Racine and Kenosha and Southwestern, every part of Wisconsin, and listening, finding out what's actually happening in people's lives. And I will say the Democratic Party of Wisconsin is here as a partner. All of you presidential campaign staffers listening right now. We will work with you to make sure you connect with and hear from the people that you need to hear from and be able to talk about the issues that they're facing. I think the biggest fallacy in democratic politics is the idea that you come up with a message through introspection. You don't come up with a message by thinking about what would make sense to you in your own head.

You do it by talking to actual people and learning and being able to reflect back to them about what's happening in their lives. People who win in Wisconsin show up, they listen, and they connect. And it doesn't mean trimming your sails ideologically or, you know, swinging for the fences necessarily. It means showing that you are on people's side. It's a populous state. It's a state that has a kind of an independent, almost pocket tradition that stretches back more than a century. Fighting Bob La Follette is still the icon in Wisconsin. He had the progressive party.

He was like, you know, outside the party structure. But he fought for people. He fought for change. He fought for change. He fought for farmers and for people in cities. The sense of having a fighter who actually cares, who actually comes through and listens and takes up the mantle, that's the key thing for our state. That's what wins every time. That's what President Obama did in our state. And I think it's the sense of distance or disconnection is the thing that maybe kills us the most.

So we are rolling out the red carpet. And I will also say anyone who's listening right now can help make this happen. So the thing that is most vital for us right now is people becoming recurring donors to the state party so we can actually hire and budget based on those contributions. I love big bursts of money. But if you go to wisdoms.org slash donate and become a recurring donor, it makes a giant difference to build the kind of infrastructure we need. And then go to wisdoms.org slash volunteer, because whether you're in Wisconsin

or anywhere in the country, we're going to need folks making calls to fill door-to-door volunteer shifts. We're going to need those text messages to follow up with people. All that work is stuff that folks can do from across the country to support the organizing we're doing in the state. We are all honorary cheeseheads now. This is an all-hands-on Wisconsin moment. So I'm grateful that folks get the urgency of it. We've got to translate the anxiety that you feel when you see those push alerts on your phone into action to win the state. If we win Wisconsin, we win the White House. Ben, thank you so much. Good luck with everything. And I'm confident we will be talking many times between now

and when we're all waiting late into the evening on election night for the votes from Waukesha County to go. Thanks so much, Dan. Appreciate it. What an interview, Dan. It was amazing. Join us on Thursday.

It'll be me and Alyssa Mastromonaco. What else do we have to say? That's the pot everyone wants. Finally, people are saying to themselves at the gym, on the toilet, or in their cars, wherever you get this. Bye, Dan.

Have a great week. Have a great break. Bye, John. Pod Save America is a product of Crooked Media. The show is produced by Michael Martinez. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Caroline Reston,

Tanya Somanator, and Katie Long for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, and Milo Kim, who film and upload these bad boys every week.