Pod Save America - “One last ride on the pollercoaster.”

Episode Date: October 28, 2020

The Trump-McConnell Supreme Court gets involved in the election, and the results of the final Crooked Media/Change Research Pollercoaster series show Biden in the lead and Trump voters in a Fox News bubble. Then TargetSmart CEO Tom Bonier talks to Jon about the most promising trends in the early vote data.

What's his closing argument? That people are too focused on COVID. He said this at one of his rallies. COVID, COVID, COVID, he's complaining. He's jealous of COVID's media coverage. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer.

On today's pod, I talk with Tom Bonnier, whose political data firm has been analyzing the early vote numbers, not for predictions, but for some interesting insights about who is voting. Before that, we'll break down the results of our final Polar Coaster Survey with Change Research, talk about what the Trump-McConnell takeover of the Supreme Court could mean for the election, and answer a few of your questions about the final

few days of the 2020 campaign this is it dan this is it how you feeling i was up at three o'clock this morning me too i'm feeling i was feeling i was at three o'clock as well and i've been trying to go to bed earlier knowing that i'll wake up in the middle of the night and that didn't really work because i was up late prepping for the pod. So there you go. A couple of days out. A few quick notes. Check out the final pod save the world before the election where Tommy and Ben talked to one of Joe Biden's senior campaign advisors, our friend Tony Blinken, about what a Biden foreign policy would look like and what's at stake in this election at the global level. Great interview with Tony. Check it out. Also want to give a shout out to the incredible team at What A Day who are celebrating one

year of their fantastic daily news podcast. I cannot believe it's been a year already. In these last few days before the election, Akilah and Gideon will be looking at important down ballot races, talking to first time voters, priming listeners on what to expect on November 3rd. This morning, they did a fantastic interview with Charlotte Swayze, who's been on Pod Save America. She's the pollster for Data for Progress, answers all your questions about polls, what to look for, what not to look for, what to be careful of.

It's a really great interview. Check it out. Akilah and Gideon do a fantastic job every day. Make sure to check out What A Day if you haven't already and subscribe on Apple Pods, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And finally, it's crunch time. We need everyone who's listening to this podcast to volunteer in the next few days. From right now until polls close on Tuesday, the Biden campaign and other Democratic campaigns need you to help remind voters to make a plan to vote, return their ballots in person at this point, answer questions about voting and basically turn out every single Democratic voter in America. There are a ton of opportunities in all the states that will make a difference. So go to VoteSaveAmerica.com slash volunteer to sign up for shifts that work for your schedule and help us cross the finish line strong.

Travis Helwig of Crooked Media fame was just tweeting yesterday. He was very nervous about the polls like we all are. He signed up for a tax bank in Florida, texted a bunch of people, got 10 voters. Travis Helwig gets 10 voters. It's better than he's done on Twitter in years, you know? So you too, you too can 10 voters. It's better than he's done on Twitter in years, you know? So you too, you too can get voters.

I mean, for Travis, 10 voters, he gets 10 voters in a phone bank, but he probably loses nine voters per tweet. So more phone banking, less tweeting. Yeah, that's right. We have a lot of news to get to. I do want to start, Dan, with, you know, the president is continuing his super spreader rallies all over the country, just giving people COVID wherever he goes. Now he's also giving them hypothermia.

He was in Omaha for a rally last night. And after the rally was over in 30 degree weather, he took his helicopter. He took Marine One out of the rally. He left all of his supporters there who were stranded because a bus took them there. But the bus wouldn't pick them up to go back to the parking lot where their cars were. And so there was no Trump campaign bus. And so they all wandered around in freezing weather for a couple hours. And then seven of them had to go to the hospital because they had hypothermia well if that's not a fucking metaphor i do not know what is trump leaves supporters in

the cold look look if the covid doesn't get you the cold will think about the fact that in 2016 it was an entire scandal that hillary clinton called some of his supporters deplorables he has given them covid and hypothermia that's how that's what donald trump some of his supporters deplorables. He has given them COVID and hypothermia. That's what Donald Trump thinks of his supporters. It has been sort of a banner day for the Trump campaign, like killing your supporters, never good, right? Trying to kill them two different ways in the same event, really bad. But then one of his spokespeople, Hogan someone,

went on CNN this morning and they asked him about whether it made sense for the vice president to go to Wisconsin because Wisconsin has experienced a serious spike in COVID. Hospitals are nearing capacity there. So did it make sense to have a large crowd event there? And his answer was, of course, it made sense. The vice president has access to the best doctors. Just like Donald Trump saying, like, I got COVID, no big deal. I had access to a life-saving treatment that none of you can have. Yes. That's Donald Trump's argument on COVID. I got better. I got better. I told everyone I thought I was going to die and I was scared shitless.

But then I got a magic treatment that none of you can get. You'll be getting it soon enough, next couple of weeks. Everything's in the next couple weeks but for now just you know hang out amongst yourself at this rally no big deal uh so that's what the president's doing he's closing strong uh he did get some good news earlier in the week uh monday night was not great dan uh it was it was bad enough that the senate confirmed amy coney barrett to the supreme court by a vote of 52 to 48 the first time in modern history, a justice was confirmed without a single vote from the minority party.

But then later that day, the court's right-wing majority ruled that all Wisconsin mail-in ballots will be thrown out if they arrive after election day, even if they're postmarked before election day. Even worse was a footnote in Brett Kavanaugh's concurrent opinion, where he argued that states that require mail-in ballots to be returned by Election Day, quote,

want to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after Election Day and potentially flip the results of an election, essentially echoing one of Donald Trump's many voter fraud conspiracies. That's what Brett Kavanaugh did. So a lot to unpack here. None of it even remotely great. Let's start with Justice Barrett, who was sworn in by Clarence Thomas at yet another White House super spreader event with Donald Trump. So he could get a campaign photo op. No masks, of course.

To me, like the entire stunt was a perfect encapsulation of how trump and the republican party which includes amy coney barrett uh just have zero fucks left to give they had a super spreader event when they nominated amy coney barrett trump got covid bunch of white house staffers got covid chris christie ended up in the hospital donald trump ended up in the hospital they spread covid throughout dc she gets confirmed back to the White House for another party. I mean, it it's not surprising that Donald Trump threw that event because he is stupid and his default is always whatever the most dangerous pro COVID thing is, he's going to choose at every juncture. So he obviously did it because in his weird, demented little brain to not do another super spread event would be to admit that COVID is contagious and to admit his fault. Obviously, he would rather give people COVID than admit he's wrong. The thing that is notable is that Amy Coney Barrett went to the

event, participated not just in the swearing-in, but also in a photo op hanging off the balcony, which she very well knew would be part of a last-minute Trump campaign commercial, essentially, a taxpayer-funded campaign commercial, and went along with that. She did not have to do that, right? It is pretty rare in a pre-Trump era for justices to be as explicitly involved in box, particularly one who's going to – she left that event to go to work at the court the next day to therefore rule on cases that have implications for Donald Trump's reelection. And so the fact that she put herself in that position, allowed that to happen, did it

gleefully, is a giant warning sign about the kind of justice she will be. It is yet another. This is not a conservative justice. This is not an originalist. This is another Republican political hack put on the court to do nothing more than reward Republican donors and make sure the Republican Party stays in power. That's what it is. This is not liberal and conservative. This is not some sort of historic discussion about or dispute about legal principles. It's about Republican political power. And she played that role willingly.

John Roberts is a conservative justice. Anthony Kennedy was a conservative justice you know once in a while had a good decision Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh are partisan hacks that are on the court now that's what they are I think that John Roberts is a partisan hack

and he is the person I do not want to say that no no because I want to make this clear I don't want to say like John Roberts's decisions are horrific but they come from a conservative ideology that we deeply disagree with. It is bad. It is a bad, bad ideology that is very harmful to people.

But it is mostly cohesive. I know you don't know this is an echo chamber, but John Roberts is just a smarter political hack than Brett Kavanaugh. In 2008, Democrats washed away Republicans by building a massive internet grassroots fundraising machine. About a year later, one of the first decisions that is made in the Roberts court is Citizens United. It's the only way to allow the Republicans to compete is to change campaign finances, overturning a recent precedent in McConnell versus FEC from a few years ago. Then after Democrats win in 2012, with a massive turnout of black and Latino voters, John Roberts guts the Voting Rights Act under the false premise that racism in elections is over. And so like, Roberts is just more clever than the

rest of these people. Like he would not have shown up at that event. But we should watch John Roberts very carefully for rulings that will respond to a Biden victory in a way to help Republican Party power. I do not like John Roberts, just as an FYI. No, I don't either. I'm just saying like— You're a John Roberts fan. Admit it. No, this is what conservatives believe, that fucking corporations are people and should like be able to say whatever they want. They believe that there shouldn't be voting right protections like that.

That is their fucking awful belief, you know, but it is their belief. Like like Brett Kavanaugh, as we're about to talk about, is on a fucking revenge trip. That's what Brett Kavanaugh is on. And he's fucking dumb. And Amy Coney Barrett, again, doesn't give a shit she'll she's she's she is a campaign prop and she is proud to be a campaign prop that's that's what she is uh anyway they're all bad um so shortly after being sworn in justice barrett received a request from the luzerne county board of elections in pennsylvania to recuse herself from a supreme court case where republicans in pennsylvania also want to throw out mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day.

The court already rejected the Republican request to throw out ballots in a 4-4 tie ruling last Friday, because Roberts rolled with the liberals. But now they hope that if they bring the case again, Barrett will rule with the conservative majority. Luzerne County asked Barrett to recuse herself because Trump publicly said that he needed her on the court to help him win the election. Is there any justification for Barrett not to recuse herself in this case? No, but there's no one to make her recuse herself because Supreme Court justices do not abide by any sort of code of ethics.

No rules about recusal. Can do whatever the fuck they want. Whatever they want, which is something we should change. But of course, she is going to sit on here and of course, if this case comes, she's going to rule with the Republicans. It's like, it's a, this is why she's there. This is why they rushed this because they easily could have done this next week, right? They could have confirmed her afterwards, even when they were still in power without rushing this in the very deeply dangerous ways they did it because they need, they want her there for those rulings. And she will gleefully do it, gleefully.

So between these Wisconsin and Pennsylvania ballot cases, there are two big concerns. Most immediate concern is that a bunch of voters won't know about these rulings and therefore mail in their ballots too late because they thought they had they thought it was postmarked by a certain day and it arrived after Election Day. It would still be OK in Wisconsin. Now that is not the case. So what do we do about that? To avoid that, the campaigns and state Democratic parties are doing everything they can to let voters know that if they have an absentee ballot, they need to personally hand deliver their ballot to either a drop box or county elections office if you're in Wisconsin or a county elections office if you're in Pennsylvania.

Super, super important. Do not mail in your ballots at this point. Do not. Tell the people in your life who have mail-in ballots, have not sent them in yet, do not send them in via mail at this point. Drop them off personally. You can look at votesaveamerica.com to find out either if there's, if your state has drop boxes, you can do drop boxes. If there's a county elections office, you can do that. Depends on the state. So drop off your ballots in person. That's number one. But there's a broader concern that has to do with this Kavanaugh footnote that I mentioned, where he endorsed a Bush v. Gore argument that the Supreme Court can essentially overrule the way state Supreme Courts interpret a state's election law, which basically gives the United States Supreme Court

veto power over whatever state Supreme Courts decide is the right interpretation of election laws. That's what Brett Kavanaugh thinks should happen. And of course, there was also Kavanaugh's insane comment that, quote, if the apparent winner the morning after the election ends up losing to late arriving ballots, charges of a rigged election could explode. So first of all, what's wrong with what Kavanaugh said and how potentially dangerous is it? and how potentially dangerous is it? I think it's important to approach this carefully because there are the short-term implications and the long-term implications. And if we focus too much on the short-term implications, we end up doing Trump's dirty work to dissuade people from voting, to make them think their vote does not count.

Of course, Kavanaugh has this view. He was one of the litigants in Bush v. Gore. Although, as Ron Klain, the Biden advisor and former chief of staff and our friend, pointed out, in Florida in 2000, Brett Kavanaugh, among the Bush lawyers, argued vociferously for mail ballots that were sent by military members serving overseas be count if they arrived after election day to count. Oh, he took a different position? You're kidding me. It is weird. The coincidences here are hard to fathom. This is what I mean by pure party hack. Yes. Pure party hack. Do you mean because Kavanaugh believed when he worked for Ken Starr that presidents could be sued and investigated. Then when Bush was president, he had a different view. And then when Obama came, he switched back. And then under Trump- Hack in a robe. Hack in a robe. That's what he is. This is the distillation of the Republican strategy, right? The reason that McConnell, in particular,

with the help of Trump and millions of dollars in dark money from corporate and Republican interests have gone into packing the Supreme Court with Republican hacks is the Supreme Court is the Republican break glass plan for minority rule, right? They can put in voter suppression, put in gerrymandering, but if we win elections, we can undo those things. suppression, they can put in gerrymandering. But if we win elections, we can undo those things. The court is the one that is insulated, as it currently stands, from our agency to change things through normal electoral politics. So of course they want that, because Democrats have the potential to, we can win state, we can win governorships and appoint state Supreme Court justices, or in states where there are elections, like in North Carolina, elect them, right? Because

there are more of us than there are of them. But the way to prevent that, the way to always be able to put your thumb on the scale for Republicans, despite the fact Republicans represent fewer voters, is through the Supreme Court. And so they're going to adjust their views to make that more likely and easier to do. I think it's also important. I mean, Brett Kavanaugh, in this concurrent opinion, reveals once again that he is a right wing partisan hack. He also reveals that he's not super bright, nor are his clerks like they're all pretty stupid because there was a bunch of mistakes in the ruling, just factual inaccuracies that any reporter would have to correct. Any politician would be held account for, or at least called out about if they made them. He said that a lot of states want to

call the election that night, which is not how it works at all. The media calls the election, or the media makes a projection. States don't actually certify results for days or weeks later because states always wait for absentee ballots to come in, overseas ballots, provisional ballots. So just the basic knowledge of an election would lead you to not say that states want to call the election on election night. That's not what happens. He said that Vermont never changed their rules to allow voters to mail in ballots when they did. That's not true at all.

Vermont actually sent everyone a ballot this year because of COVID. Just skipped over that. Could have Googled that one. Put it in a fucking Supreme Court opinion. Because from a lot of like legal observers, liberal legal observers on Twitter and other places that, you know, this is Brett Kavanaugh and soon Amy might do this. But if Donald Trump says an election night that he doesn't want ballots to count that are that come in after Election Day or even ballots that do come in on Election Day but aren't counted till the day after Election Day, that suddenly the Supreme Court is going to step in and agree with him. Like, what do you think about all this concern? The whole Supreme Court fuckery of the last few days has a specific purpose, which is to convince people that

their vote does not count. That is what they want. They want you to think they can steal the election. Donald Trump cannot steal this election. We decide what happens here. Brett Kavanaugh doesn't decide. Donald Trump doesn't decide. Mitch McConnell doesn't decide. There are more people in the country and in the battleground states who want Joe Biden to be president than Donald Trump. And if they turn out and vote, if they turn their mail ballots in in person, they drop them off, they do what they are supposed to do here, then the Supreme Court will play no role here. The only way the Supreme Court gets to steal the election is if we let them do it. We have agency here. We have power here. Donald Trump does not. And I think,

you know, you mentioned Ben Wickler and some other people have been talking about this, but like what Trump and Brett Kavanaugh want to do is they want to intimidate us, right? We should use this stuff to motivate us. You know, when there was all of the furor around the rigging of the postal service, what that actually led to was a huge number of Americans requesting their mail ballot early. It was leveraged by Democrats, this podcast, others, to raise awareness about voting. We should do the same thing here. We should use this to fire our people up, to use the news coverage of this to inform them about what we're supposed to do. We can't worry about whether the Supreme Court's going to steal the election because it won't matter if we vote. If

we don't vote, things can be different. But that's up to us. That's not up to Brett Kavanaugh. matter if we vote. If we don't vote, things can be different. But that's up to us. That's not up to Brett Kavanaugh. It's also what we've said many times, control what you can control. And I don't want to be Pollyannish here or naive. Like, I don't put literally anything past Donald Trump or the Supreme Court. But when we're alarmist about it, when we're telling it, when we're saying things like the Supreme Court's going to steal the election, we have to ask ourselves, what is the goal of saying that? Are we going to change? Are we going to shame Brett Kavanaugh into doing the right thing? No, we're not.

Are we going to shame Donald Trump into doing the right thing? No, we're not going to do that. What can we actually accomplish by that? Now, should we make people aware of what's happening? Absolutely. Should we let people know what Brett Kavanaugh is trying to say in this footnote? Yes, for sure. But like you said, there is a danger in telling people that this thing could just get stolen. Like my little cousin texted me that night, a Monday night, and he goes, you know what? This is horrible. The Supreme Court's going to steal this. Why are we even bothering? And like that is the kind of, that message cannot

get out to voters from us that the Supreme Court could do this because there are a lot of people who pay a lot less attention to the news than we do. And if they casually hear that the Supreme Court might steal the election, they might just stay home. And like, I'm as worried about the election as anyone. But I do think in this final week, like, you know, Stacey Abrams says, I'm not pessimistic or optimistic. I'm determined. Like we have to show a little determination and not be so cowed all the time. Even if we're like personally nervous, like we have to show some determination. And I also think like, I'm not optimistic or pessimistic because optimism is guessing what might happen right i am hopeful because hope is about believing that you can make something happen and i do think that like we need to be hopeful in

these last five or six days and and like because that getting people to believe that we can do this, like you said, if we turn out, if enough people turn out, the Supreme Court will not have a say in this. Donald Trump will not have a say in this. If we beat him by five or six points in Pennsylvania, it won't matter. You know, we won't get to the point where there's sort of late arriving ballots and litigation, all this kind of stuff. You know, Donald Trump will threaten litigation and all this bullshit. Of course, he'll say crazy things on Twitter. But if the margin is big enough, we'll win. And I think we have to go into, you know, you see Donald Trump tweeting in these last couple of days, like, up two in Michigan, up 45 in Wisconsin, the red wave is building, right? Like, he knows all that's bullshit. No, like, we shouldn't be

lying about how good we feel, but we should be confident and hopeful in these final days. That doesn't mean cocky. That doesn't mean knowing that we're going to win, but we should feel hopeful about the amount of people voting and what that can do to the final results. I mean, we, the reason like we don't, like you said, we like, we're not saying that Joe Biden is going to win, but it is true that Joe Biden is winning. He is winning right now. And we have to just keep doing what we are doing, keep working our asses off for the next six days.

And he will be president of the United States. Kamala Harris will be vice president. The Democrats will take the Senate. And then we can start doing the very hard work of fixing our democracy and undoing all of the shit that Trump has done. But it is right there. And the thing is, like, we treat so much like Trump is Trump is this like magical strong man. He is a fucking Yahoo, right? Yes, he won in 2016. We beat him in 2017. We stopped him from getting rid of the ACA in

2017. We beat him in 2018. We won the election in 2019 and we are winning right now. We just have to finish doing the work. We take nothing for granted, but we can do it. It doesn't mean he can't win, but it does mean that we should be confident. We take nothing for granted, but we can do it. It doesn't mean he can't win, but it does mean that we should be confident. We should be hopeful heading into these last couple of days. That's what we should be

and determined. All right. The final installment, speaking of polls, the final installment of the Crooked Media Change Research Polar Coaster series is here. A national poll of 1,125 voters taken on October 23rd and 24th. So Friday and Saturday of last week, because you're all just as obsessed with the horse races as we are. You're all just as obsessed with the horse races as we are.

Joe Biden leads Donald Trump 51 to 43, an eight point margin that's right in line with the current national polling averages. A few highlights from the horse race. Fifty seven percent in our poll said they already voted. Two percent plan to support third party candidates and only two percent are still undecided. Very low undecided number at this point. Biden gets five percent of 2016 Trump voters. He has a 13-point margin among 2016 third-party voters and a whopping 25-point margin among people who did not vote in 2016. Anything else interesting to you from the horse race section? I don't care about the horse race.

Great. Then that's it. We're moving on. So the main reason, the main reason we conducted this poll was to find out what in the news is actually breaking through to different kinds of voters and what effect this might have on the race. So what do we mean by that? We all spend a lot of time analyzing the messages that politicians and campaigns and ads deliver to voters. We don't spend nearly enough time analyzing what actually gets through the media filter to the eyes and ears of voters.

So we asked, what stories have you heard about over the last week? Where are you hearing them from? And how does it make you feel about each of the candidates? Any other reasons I missed about why we thought this poll was a good idea? Well, throughout the entire Polar Coaster series, we have tried to make these polls

in our partnership with Change Research look a little bit more like campaign polls than media polls, right? Like, yes, we are curious, even though I presented, I didn't care. We are curious whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden is winning right now. Like that's interesting information, but we're more focused on the instructive information, right? That's why we've tested so many messages to give advice to our listeners about like what works when they're talking to the undecided voters in their lives or the people who are deciding between Donald Trump and Joe Biden or between voting and not voting. This poll, we wanted to look at a very specific question that was actually more interesting most of the time than Obama's approval rating or the horse race, because the approval rating horse race is like the snapshot in time right now. The what have

you heard question is a leading indicator of where things are going. And that question is never more important than in the final stretch of a campaign, because it tells you whether you are closing with momentum or on the defensive. And like, whenever I think about 2016, and all the things we missed, like in 2012, we were obsessed with that positive negative question for Obama and Romney at the end. Obviously, in hindsight, Jim Comey's idiocy around emails ensured that voters were hearing mostly negative information about Hillary Clinton as they're making their decision. And when you look at the exit polls in 2016, voters in Wisconsin who decided in the last week, Donald Trump won those voters by 29 points. He won them by, I think,

17 points in Pennsylvania, right? And from this poll, there is good news for Biden on that front. But that's why we wanted to see it, because I think it tells us about where the race is going, not where it is right at this moment, which will not be relevant one moment from now. So well, so what do we find that was most interesting to you? I know you wrote about this poll in this morning's message box. I did. I wrote about it in the message box this morning, which you can subscribe to at messagebox.substack.com. We are very close to our donations goal for Black Voters Matter. We are so close with six days to go. And abortion and paid subscriptions are going to that very important organization.

But the most interesting things to me are Biden is winning the message war. People are overwhelmingly hearing more positive information about Biden than Trump. Trump, you're hearing overwhelmingly negative information about Trump. Only 20% of people said they were hearing mostly positive information about Trump. So that means that the majority of Trump supporters are hearing negative information. Other thing is that, so we asked people about a whole bunch of stories, political stories, international stories for the world, those out there, pop culture events, sports, to see what people are paying attention to. And people are dialed into the news like never before. Nine in 10 are following it very closely or somewhat closely.

Two thirds are following it very closely. More Biden supporters are following it very closely. But what is interesting is the four stories that more than eight in 10 respondents are paying a lot or a decent amount of attention to include the Supreme Court, the debate, the record early turnout, and the new spike in COVID cases. In every single one of those, it made people feel more negative about Trump than Biden. And the Supreme Court is an interesting one, too, because the Republicans clearly thought that was going to help them. Yes, that is exactly right. 48% of voters who said that the stories that they saw about the Supreme Court confirmation of McCormick Barrett made them feel more negative about Trump, only 25% for Biden. So that's a huge winner. Obviously, and not unsurprisingly, the spike in COVID cases, 53% of all voters feel more negative about Trump, including 44% of that small sliver of undecided and third party voters. And so like the short

version of this is, is voters are paying a ton of attention and the issues they are paying the most attention to make them feel worse about Trump. So that is not good news for Trump. to make them feel worse about Trump. So that is not good news for Trump. So talk a little bit about, you know, one of the big findings from this poll is that Trump voters and particularly Trump voters who get most of their news from Fox News, which is, I think, over 60 percent of his voters basically live in their own information universe, which we basically already knew. But I do think these findings really put a fine point on that. So you're correct.

62% of Trump voters say they get most of their news from Fox. We gave people a multiple choice menu of a whole different of options to list where they got most of the news from. 62% of Trump voters chose Fox. And so what we did in this poll was we compared the Republicans who are Fox watchers with Republicans who are not Fox watchers. And this makes some measure of intuitive sense, but the Fox watchers are much more engaged in the news than non-Fox watchers. 76% of them report following the news very closely. Only 43% of non-Fox watching Republicans report the same, which makes sense. If you watch cable, you are inherently a news

junkie, right? Like you would have, you would have to be to suffer through that. Right. So, and throughout the vast majority of the issues, more of the Fox watchers reported hearing a lot or a decent amount about the Supreme Court confirmation by 14 points, the debate by 10 points, et cetera. So they're more dialed into the news. On every story are the Fox watchers more dialed in except the stories that are bad about Trump. The non-Fox watchers who do not pay close attention to the news, more of them knew about Trump. The non-Fox watchers who do not pay close attention to the news, more of them knew about Trump's Chinese bank account, him chanting, lock them up about Governor Whitmer and about Trump calling Fauci a disaster than the Fox watchers. So the

takeaway from this is we knew Fox was bad, but this very clearly shows how bad Fox is, how much of a propaganda network it is, because they are very clearly hiding bad information about Trump from their viewers. And conversely, the Fox watchers who are Trump voters were the ones who heard the most about Hunter Biden and the laptop story. That's right. 90% of them. 91% of them. Versus like, I think it was like 70 something percent of non-Fox Republicans had heard about the Hunter story. Now, of course, a lot of Democrats had heard about the Hunter story too, but not nearly as many as had heard about we're following the real news stories shaping the election.

But it was interesting because we asked, you know, we asked sort of like, what are the biggest issues in the election? And of course, COVID wins. Trump's handling of COVID, 51% shows is the biggest story of this election. And you know, that's true across like most voters, but when you get to Trump voters, so it's not like they're voting for Trump, because they think he handled COVID perfectly, because even among Trump voters, like he's only got like a 70 percent approval rating on COVID, even though like 100 percent of them are voting for Donald Trump. Right. It's that those voters think that the main issue in the election is either Hunter Biden or riding and looting in this in cities or the supposed radicalization of the Democratic Party. Right. Joe Biden and Antifa warrior. of the Democratic Party, right?

Joe Biden and Antifa warrior. That's what they think. They're in a universe where they see the biggest problems facing America as those issues. Hunter Biden's laptop over COVID. That is what Fox News does to people's brains. I mean, it is a,

like the poll really does reveal the massive right-wing media apparatus and what a tremendous advantage is. Imagine if you had a completely partisan outlet that was committed from top to bottom to reelecting the president of the United States. And that outlet was a major source of news for six in 10 of their voters, right? Where you can give them good news, you can hide bad news, you can push out disinformation about the opponent. Like that is a massive, massive apparatus and ability to set the four corners of the political conversation in this country. The problem is for them this time is that COVID is such an overwhelmingly all-consuming issue that

they can't change the subject in a way they could in a normal election. And so it is very possible and maybe even probable that Joe Biden will win this election despite that right-wing media apparatus. But in the long run, this is a thing that we as progressives have to figure out. Because in a different world, if Joe Biden becomes president and can get COVID under control, the ability of Republicans to set the issue agenda in American politics is going to give them an advantage in every single fight to come for as far as the eye can see. And one of the reasons it gives them an advantage is because despite some in the media and some pundits saying, oh, Democrats and Republicans each live in their own media bubbles, it's not really true.

And this poll shows that it's not true. Republicans, Trump-supporting Republicans, are living in their own media bubble. They're getting, a vast majority of them are getting their news from Fox and that's it. Democrats, independents, third-party voters, unaffiliated voters are getting their news from a whole bunch of different sources. And we know about the Hunter Biden laptop story, right? It has reached us.

We run a partisan podcast. We are trying to get Democrats elected. We have talked about that story on this podcast. We do not hide bad stories from our listeners and neither does the media. And I think like, look, Steve Bannon knew this in 2016 that when he wanted to drop Hillary email stories, Hillary corruption stories, whatever it was, he didn't want to just do it on Breitbart. He wanted to do it. He wanted to place a story in the New York Times because he knew that the New York Times still had widespread credibility. And what the

right knows is if they can seed some of their conspiracy theories with mainstream media organizations, that it can actually set the agenda and affect voters. And this time, Trump and his goons couldn't do that as well, like you said, because of COVID. But in the future, when there's not a pandemic, they may be able to do that unless there is a countervailing force on the other side. That's exactly right. And like Ben Smith, the New York Times media columnist, had a very smart column about this over the weekend, looking at the differences between how the mainstream media has responded to Republican disinformation in 2020 as compared to 2016. But what that column,

which is very smart, does not take into account and something that needs much more exploration and investment on the progressive side is the role that Facebook plays. Biden and Trump voters, by basically equal numbers, say they get most of their news from Facebook. Facebook is overwhelmingly pushing right-wing content. If you get the email that Kevin Roos in the New York Times sends out every day with the, or sorry, if you get the Kevin Roos in the New York Times

tech columnist has put together a Twitter account that every day, it's a bot account that puts out the 10 link posts on Facebook with the most engagement. And it is a fucking dystopia of stupidity. I think today, as we record this, I think Dan Bongino was like eight of the 10 top posts. It's Ben Shapiro, it's Dan Bongino, it's a bunch of shit. And that's a huge problem, which is that's where like the mainstream media can put up levies. But Facebook is the flood that goes over them and can knock them right down. And it just happens to be that in this election, the the number one issue is of such great consequence to so many people that a bunch of that sort of misinformation,

marginalia bullshit does not matter in the way it weighed in 2016 and the way it could very well matter in the 2022 midterms, the 2024 election. Like there is a huge, giant, raging siren inside these numbers for what progressives have to do to fix this asymmetry in our ability to get our message out on our terms. Yeah. And I would encourage everyone to read your message box today where you talk a little bit more about that. And I mean, because, because I, I, because I compliment you, Tommy and love it by name for your, uh, your creativity and courageousness and starting crooked media.

I did. I did appreciate that. Of course, we're trying our best. Like I always say more crooked medias, um, give us best. Like I always say, more crooked medias. Give us some competition. I want a whole progressive ecosystem over here. Can I say one more thing about this that is important? Because before the both sides, people come after us.

You know, we do not want a Fox News on our side. That is not what we want. I think Fox News. I don't think it is politically useful, by the way, to have a or even possible to be like Fox News. Yes. But like what we want, a progressive media ecosystem that doesn't that does not delegitimize or tries to replace the traditional media. We wanted to complement it. We wanted to push back when we think the mainstream media is regurgitating Republican talking points or doing something else wrong. mainstream media is regurgitating Republican talking points or doing something else wrong.

But like Democratic voters have always had a very wide ranging media diet. And we just want to increase one part of it. It is a different approach than what the Republicans are doing. So take your both sides bullshit and take it somewhere else. Also, they use, you know, look, they traffic in fear and anger and misinformation on their side. That's how they handle their voters and their audiences, right? That's how they engage them with fear and anger and misinformation. What we try to do is to engage people with, you know, real information, not misinformation. We try to have a little fun. We try to inspire people to go do something, to act, to be involved, to do something about the world around you.

So like we just we take an entirely different approach. And I do think writ large, that's what progressives need to do. We should not copy Fox News, but we need sort of a countervailing force. OK, we have some time for audience questions. Questions. Kate Johansson asks, is there a point at which texting and phone banking becomes ineffective? I've been volunteering every weekend since September and this last weekend was brutal.

Way more opt-outs and hostile voters, way fewer constructive conversations. Is there a point where it becomes less productive? On Wednesday. Right. And look, just so you know, Kate, because there are so few undecided voters right now, because so many people have already voted right now, the universe of people that we're texting and phone banking, just you're going to get a lot more people who are either going to be hostile or going to be like, I already voted or stop talking to me. Like we're getting down to a smaller pool here.

But, and I've been telling volunteers this when i've been talking to phone banks you could call a hundred people or you could text a hundred people you get like two or three voters out of that that's huge that is huge for a campaign because if we have thousands of volunteers and everyone gets just a couple people in a shift that really adds up that's like the margin in a state so like the one thing you should know is like do not get discouraged in these final days if you're getting a lot of opt-outs hostile voters all that kind of stuff it is because we are getting down to the undecided don't usually pay attention to politics don't usually vote pool of voters anna thompson asks what should folks do on election day night watch coverage volunteer more doom scroll we kind of talked about this on Monday's pod, but Dan, what do you think?

What's your advice? I mean, if we were living in a non-COVID world, there would be massive amounts of people out doing GOTV, driving people to the polls, making last phone calls, knocking doors, doing everything you can to pull out that last group of voters. So there is going to be volunteer work to do up until the moment the polls close on the West Coast United States. And so election day is miserable, right? They're like, do anything you can to feel productive and not look at Twitter because Twitter is going to be filled with a bunch of unsourced, out of context anecdotes about lines places. Or I saw three Trump flags on the way to get coffee this morning. Oh, my God. Like it's, it's not productive, right? Volunteer, you know, if you can volunteer, if that's something

you can do on election day, because you voted weeks ago, because you early voted or voted by mail a long time ago, then volunteer. I think it'll make you feel better. There is no upside in being on Twitter. There, you'll get no valuable information really ever, frankly, being on Twitter, you'll get no valuable information, really ever, frankly, but particularly on Election Day. Yeah. And it's going to be important to get our voters out on Election Day because, you know, the way it's looking now is that we've banked most of our votes early and Republicans will have this big Election Day turnout. But we still have, you know, 20 to 30 to 40 percent of our voters are saying they want to vote on election day. And if, you know, all the data analysts on campaigns look and see that we're down here or we need more turnout here or more turnout among this group, like we're going to need

to really move on election day and trying to get people out of their houses and lines and go on a vote. And so we need a lot of people to help with that. So it's really important to do that on election day. Emily asks, in Jacksonville, we flipped blue in 2018. I keep hearing if we flip again, Biden will win Florida. Is that true? If Biden gets Florida, is it over? If Biden gets Florida, it is basically over. I feel pretty confident saying that. Well, John, you're a little younger than me so you probably weren't

sitting in gore campaign headquarters when the networks called it for gore yeah i was gonna celebrate i'm talking about a real win i'm talking about a called win not a florida 2000 win i'm talking about the electoral votes are in his column in florida and can emily have just asked you that question directly or like yeah no yeah it's Emily via Twitter. So maybe it was, yeah, maybe it was my Emily. Um, no, I, I think that, uh, like I think Nate Silver's, uh, on five 38, they have like, if Biden wins Florida, it's 99% chance he wins. And, uh, and if he doesn't win Florida, he still can win. He still has paths, but winning Florida would be much better. Now Jacksonville specifically, I'm not sure about what do you. What do you think about Jacksonville? Yeah, I mean, Duval County is a big swing county. Steve Shale, our friend who's ran Florida for Obama a couple of times and is

the expert in Florida politics, points that out a lot. So that is a big chunk of Democratic votes that you can go get in the city of Jacksonville, which is in Duval County. I hope I got that right. But Florida is the state to watch because it's the one where we're going to get the most information about the electorate first. They count their mail ballots in advance. They dump them in when the polls close. In many cases, we'll get a chance to see what is happening there and whether it means we win Florida or not, but it is a chance to see whether some of the assumptions we made about the election hold true. to see whether some of the assumptions we made about the election hold true.

Right. Florida, man, always. Pat Deves asks, how and when are provisional ballots counted? In general, I know states vary or some tossed. In Texas, I've been told that if you get a mail-in ballot but decide to vote in person, your ballot is provisional unless you bring the original mail ballot to the polling location. This is just one example from a friend's experience. I'm worried.

Provisional, it differs by state. And the big thing here is go to votesofamerica.com and find out the rules for your state. Like when I talked to Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman in Pennsylvania a few weeks ago, I asked a question because there's a lot of concerns about mail balloting in Pennsylvania. And he said, trust the Postal Service. Put your ballot in, send it in early, or drop it off in person. But in Pennsylvania, if you requested a mail ballot, and I think 2.6 million mail ballots have been requested, but then you go vote in person, you have to bring your mail ballot with you, including every piece of it, including all the various envelopes. And if you don't, you end up filling out a provisional ballot, which if it gets counted, will get counted much later in the process.

So the rules are different everywhere. Check the rules. Follow the rules. Go to votesaveamerica.com. Emily Clark asks, can we wear Vote Save America merch to the polls? Fuck yes, you can. Please do. I hope that's true.

I hope I didn't just tell people to break the law. I think you can wear Vote Save America. There are rules. I mean, there's electioneering laws. So you can't you can't be telling people to vote for Joe Biden or Donald Trump too close to the polls. But Vote Save America. Yeah, that seems to save America by voting. What's what's wrong with that?

Look, you and I are lawyers, but we do follow a lot of lawyers on Twitter. And so I feel confident in that opinion. Yeah, no, the legal minds that I quickly scroll through, they say fine. They say fine.

Take it from me. All right. When we come back, my interview with Target Smart CEO, Tom Bonior. I am now joined by Tom Bonior, a Democratic political strategist and CEO of the analytics firm TargetSmart. Thanks for coming on the pod, Tom. Thanks for having me on.

So on Monday's Pod Save America, we told people not to read too much into the early vote data, especially when it comes to predicting the outcome. You guys have been analyzing early vote data for a few cycles now. Can you talk about what early vote can tell us and how your analysis goes beyond just the raw vote totals that are just broken down by party registration that we see out there? Yeah, absolutely. In a way, it's almost easier to say what it can't tell us. And this is a lesson learned from 2016 that I will own 100%. It can't

tell us who's going to win. You know, we got pretty excited in 2016 about the early vote overall, showing what looked like good numbers for Democrats, and then obviously ended up not being true. Lesson learned was there were a lot of regular voters who were fueling that Democratic advantage in the early vote. And in the end, the real important thing was these infrequent voters, first-time voters, sporadic voters. And so, you know, lesson learned, we applied that to what we're looking at now. We applied that 2018 too, and it actually worked pretty well in predicting the blue wave we saw in 18. So that's really what we're focusing on at this point. Almost 75 million people have voted already, which is crazy.

And if you can't learn something from 75 million people voting, then you're probably not paying attention to the right things. Which again, I did that in 2016, so I'll own it. Well, can you just talk about for people who don't know what TargetSmart does, when you analyze the data, you do something called modeling, right? And so you're not just looking at 40% of Democrats voted and 30% of Republicans and a bunch of independents. And that's what we know so far. You're doing something a little bit more than that. Can you sort of explain what you do for people? Yeah.

So we build a national voter file. So a file of all 210 million or so registered voters in the country. And we maintain a lot of information on it. Not to get creepy about it, we won't go down that path. But we have like some basic information on their past voting behavior being one of the most important things. Which elections do they show up for in the past? Which have they not voted in? How recently did they register to vote? Are they registered as a Democrat or Republican? Are they older? Are they younger? We look at race and ethnicity, things like that. So it's that contextual data that gives us a lot of depth of information about who's voting and like, is it meaningful or not? Is this like someone who's going to impact

the electorate in a way that's going to make it look different than it did in 2016? Or is this someone who we expected to turn out anyhow? So you talked a little bit about what happened in 2016 and 2018. Like what sort of change between 2016 and 2018 and how you analyze the early vote data and how did that actually match up with what happened, I guess, in 2018? So the biggest change was focusing on how the electorate would change from the base expectation, right? So there are certain voters who you know reliably are going to come out in a certain election. We have models, but mostly we just look at the elections they voted in. If you vote in one presidential election, odds are you're going to vote in the next one. You're certainly likely to

vote in a midterm election like 2018. But if you're a new registrant and you vote, or you're someone who's been registered to vote, maybe you came out in 2012 and you came out in 2008 in the Obama elections, but then you've stayed home since then. Then you come out in 2018. That tells us something about the trends. And we can look at that at a macro level and say Well our younger voters performing at a higher level which was something we did see in 2018 We saw that in the early vote data Younger voters were occupying a larger share of the early vote than they had in prior elections And so that was our first clue. Okay, younger voters are pretty engaged here

We think they're gonna be a larger share of the electorate and from the polling We have a pretty good sense that those voters are going to go two to one plus Democratic. So that was the first sign that, well, look, there's something happening here that could be this blue wave building. And so what are some of the most important trends you're seeing in the data right now? The number one that I'm looking at is just how many people have voted already who didn't vote in 2016. Because in the end, if we assume, look, the 2016 electorate is the one that sent Donald Trump to the White House. Electoral college, not popular vote, but it happened.

So question is, how is that electorate going to change? Are there different people who are going to show up who stayed home? We know a lot of Americans stayed home, even though it was a relatively high turnout election. Tens of millions of Americans didn't vote. So the big question is, are they participating? Right now in the early vote, I talked about just about 75 million Americans having voted already. More than one in four of those early voters didn't vote in 2016. Wow. Which is, so that's a lot. I mean, you're getting to the point where we're approaching 20 million new voters have already cast a bell.

Now, the Trump campaign has said from the very beginning that their hope is to turn out a bunch of people who didn't vote in 2016, particularly non-college white voters that may be Trumpy type voters live in the same areas as some other Trump voters. Trumpy type voters live in the same areas as some other Trump voters, and they hope that some of these new voters are their voters. What do we know about sort of we know there's a bunch of new voters, but what do we know about the breakdown between Democrat and Republican? So the thing is, turnout is up across the board, right? It's not that Republicans are staying home at this point. There are some theories because the president polarized the issue of voting by mail and voting really so severely that Republicans would just be staying home. And the fact is, you know, they're coming out. They're just not coming anywhere near to the intensity levels that Democrats have so far. And so what we're seeing when we break things down, obviously, we're looking at, you know,

African-American turnout, seeing that that is surging. You look at some key states like Georgia and Texas, especially African American seniors. This was a group that actually stayed home in 2016. Look, most of them voted, but there's a large share of them that didn't vote. In Texas and Georgia, more African American seniors have already cast a ballot than voted entirely in those states in 2016. There's still six states left. So we see things in the data to that extent that are pointed like, yeah, Republicans are engaged, and it's reasonable to assume that more of them are going to come out on election day.

But right now, they're just not matching that level of engagement that we're seeing from Democrats. So new voters, and then sporadic voters, which, as you mentioned, are voters who are registered, but have sat out a few elections. Do you think the Democrats have an advantage with both sets of voters in battleground states right now? From everything we're seeing, Democrats have a pretty significant advantage to the point where if these trends continue over the next six days, the Republicans are looking at a deficit in these battleground states of literally millions of votes that they'll have to turn out on election day in order to climb out of that hole. And of course, we should let people know, just so no one gets too excited, it's possible that on election day, Republicans could turn out not only their regular voters, but a bunch of new voters and sporadic voters that they had been

hoping to turn out that just didn't vote earlier by mail, right? Absolutely. A Republican source told me that they said that election day is going to look like a MAGA rally. They believe that they're coming out in such huge numbers on election day. There's no reason to believe that they won't come out in huge numbers. We know they're engaged. I think the biggest challenge they have is we know that making voting more accessible and more available increases turnout.

We've seen that in the states that have gone to vote by mail in past elections like Colorado, Utah, California. And the fact of the matter is Democrats have built up this advantage in turnout over a course of four or five weeks. So when you show up to vote and you see a line that's eight hours long, you can come back the next day. Or if there's a problem with your job or your childcare, you can come back the next day or the next day. Republicans are putting all their heads in the basket of let's all show up on this one day. And if something goes wrong, there's not a backup plan. I think that's the biggest challenge for them at this point. What are you seeing from young voters this time around? So young voters are turning out, obviously, in larger numbers overall. But again, we passed the

early vote number from 2016 about a week ago and we're now 30 million votes past it. So in raw numbers, obviously they're turning out higher numbers, but even in the share of the electorate, I think that's the most interesting thing is they are accounting for a larger share of the early vote now than they did at this same point in time in 2016. So certainly it's a first encouraging time. Younger voters do tend to vote a little bit later than older voters. Basically, the way the early vote usually goes is it starts older and whiter, and then it gradually gets younger and more diverse. And we've definitely seen that

where just in the last four or five days, the youth vote is really beginning to pick up. And two groups of voters that Democrats have had some concerns about just from the polling are sort of young black voters, young Latino voters, and specifically young black and Latino men. Are you seeing any trends with those groups of voters in the early vote data? So, you know, as you know, especially with younger black men in 2016, there were a number of them just didn't vote. That was, I think, a group that dropped off more than any group in 2016. It was probably one of the biggest deficiencies we've had. We've begun to see

encouraging signs among younger Black and Latino voters. I think there's still a ways to go to see those numbers get to exactly where they need to be. But again, over the last several days, those numbers have begun to pick up. So you've written that we'll have a rough sense by next Tuesday of just how deep of a hole Trump will have to dig himself out of on election day, and we'll be able to place that in the context of the remaining non-voting electorate. What data are you going to be looking at as results come in to see if Trump has been able to dig himself out of that hole? Well, I think, you know, the big sort of, you know, to state the obvious, like the big coalition for him is non-college educated white voters. And when you look at these numbers nationally, again, we'll be looking at it state by state, but this really encapsulates it to me. If you compare the number

of college-educated white voters, a group that are doing much better for Vice President Biden, and you compare that to the total number that voted in 2016, we're right now about 15 million votes behind, which sounds like a lot, but really isn't when you think of the trajectory of the early vote and the election day vote. Non-college white voters are about 45 million votes behind. So it's about a 30 million vote gap, which is significant. So that's the number of things we'll be looking at is just the turnout in those areas. And some of those counties, when we think about the Florida panhandle, some of the rural whiter areas of Georgia, some of these states that could be decisive and also will count

early, those are the ones that we're going to be watching our election. The other thing that I've been trying to figure out looking at all this data is, so you see in the early vote numbers, you know, Democrats have a red party registration advantage in a lot of these states over Republicans. But then when you look at polls of people who say they've already voted, Biden's advantage over Trump is much larger than the party registration advantage that you're seeing come out of these states. And to me, that says that, you know, it's from it's what we've seen in the polling all along, which is Biden's doing better among independents that Hillary Clinton did and non-affiliated voters. And he's also pulling more Republicans from Trump than Hillary did.

Are you seeing that in the data that you're modeling in the early vote? So that's the really important caveat. What we see is, you know, whether or not people voted, Don Talley voted, which sounds like an obvious caveat, but you'd be surprised. We talk about these things and people will say, you know how we voted. We don't know that. And so we can look at the general partisanship, but to your point, we don't see the swings. We don't know, you know, is Biden winning 60% of the independents or are they splitting? Is he losing them? That doesn't show up in this information. I mean, we can get

a sense among the, of who the independents are, who are voting and do they look more like our voters? We can get a general sense. But yeah, that's that's the big question for election night is how are these groups? I will say the reason I feel more comfortable with the analysis that we're looking at now, why I feel more optimistic about next Tuesday is, as you said, is, as you said, the polling has shown that Vice President Biden is doing better than we have in the past with a lot of these groups, unaffiliated voters, independent voters, white college-educated voters, now even white non-college-educated voters, seniors. I mean, the surge that I talked about with these one to four voters that didn't vote in 16, a lot of them are over the age of 65, which we don't think about turnout targets, but there's almost 5 million voters over the age of 65, which we don't think about turnout targets, but there's almost 5 million voters over the age of 65 who didn't vote in 16 who voted already in this election. And so,

you know, there's reason to believe he's doing better with those voters too. Right. Are there any other outstanding questions that you're really eager to understand as the vote continues to come in? You know, the big question is Republicans have been talking about we've been registering more voters and there's some evidence during that, during the at least the early days of the pandemic, we know that it hit communities of color a lot harder than other areas. And we saw that in the voter registration data. So I'm interested to see, you know, these new Republican registrants, what rate they're coming at. We know that traditionally new registrants do vote at a higher rate and really just looking at that Republican turnout overall.

And you'll have a better picture of that probably as we get like Tuesday morning. You'll probably know more about what's left in the electorate for Republicans than we do right now. Right. That's right. We'll start over the weekend and then we'll dig into that coming into Tuesday just to look at what's left and just how plausible it is. We won't be able to project the race even, you know, in the middle of the day Tuesday. And I'm not going to make that mistake again anyhow. I decided to do less prognostication. None of us are. Or analysis, right? So, yeah, we'll get a sense of how steep the hill is that Republicans will have to climb because it's clear it is going to be a hill that they're going to be climbing on Election Day. And then we can just put that in historical context and say, you know, how many non voters, new voters, new registrants will they need to get out in order to get there? And we'll see how how realistic it is.

The only the only good news we can say with confidence is people are voting and a lot of democrats are voting and a lot of democrats are excited right it's the most true thing you can say all right uh tom bonnie thank you so much for joining pod save america and uh good luck to you in these last couple days thanks very much thanks to tom for joining us today we'll be recording one more episode all four of us on friday that's our last pre-election episode. We'll talk to you then. Bye, everyone. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our associate producer is Jordan Waller.

It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Katie Long, Roman Papa-Dimitrio, Quinn Lewis, Brian Semel, Caroline Reston, and Elisa Gutierrez for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Thank you.