Pod Save America - “The midterms start now.”

Episode Date: November 4, 2021

Republicans have the best Election Night since Trump won in 2016, Democrats debate what went wrong in Virginia and what it means for the ’22 midterms, and Delegate Danica Roem joins to talk about how she managed to be one of the few progressives in Virginia to win re-election last night.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsaveamerica. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

The Supreme Court has had a busy summer loosening gun restrictions in states, overturning Roe v. Wade, and severely threatening our Miranda rights. I'm Leah Lippman, and each week on Strict Scrutiny, I'm joined by my co-hosts and fellow law professors, Melissa Murray and Kate Shaw, to break down the latest headlines and the biggest legal questions facing our country. It's more important than ever to understand the repercussions of these Supreme Court decisions and what we can do to fight back in the upcoming midterm elections. Listen to new episodes of Strict Scrutiny every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau.

I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's pod, Republicans have the best election night since Trump won in 2016. Democrats debate what went wrong in Virginia and what it means for the 22 midterms. And delegate Danica Rome joins to talk about how she managed to be one of the few progressives in Virginia to win re-election last night. But first, I hope you're all listening to Crooked's new show, X-Ray Vision. Host Jason Concepcion and his co-host will be giving us the latest news on films and franchises over the next couple months, including Dune, Marvel's Eternals, Spider-Man, No Way Home, Cowboy Bebop, and

Succession. Awesome. And don't forget to check out Offline. Last week, I had a fascinating conversation with Monica Lewinsky about public shaming and cancel culture. And this Sunday, I talk with Snapchat's Peter Hamby about how Twitter has ruined journalism. This one's for you, Dan. They're all for me, John. They're all for me, John.

They're all for you. You can find Offline here on the Pod Save America feed and you can find X-Ray Vision wherever you listen to your podcasts. All right. Let's get to the news. Spoiler alert.

It sucks. Republican Glenn Youngkin will be the next governor of Virginia, defeating Terry McAuliffe by about 80,000 votes in a state that Joe Biden won just a year ago by 450,000 votes. In a state that Democratic Governor Ralph Northam won in 2017 by 230,000 votes. Democrats also lost the lieutenant governor's race, the attorney general's race and seven seats in the House of Delegates, giving Republicans control of that chamber. But wait, there's more. The Democratic governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, narrowly beat his Republican opponent by a point in a state that

he won by 14 points just four years ago. And the Democratic president of the state Senate in Jersey lost to a random truck driver whose campaign spending totaled 153 dollars for duncan donuts and flyers i do like the duncan donuts part um republicans also won in places like seattle long island and six of them were elected to state and local offices uh who had attended the january 6th rally that led to a violent insurrection against the federal government i could go on, but I don't want you all to turn off the pod. Dan, before we get to why this happened, how surprised were you that this happened? What was your reaction to watching this absolute clusterfuck unfold on

Tuesday night? I mean, obviously, I did not predict, because I did not predict anything in politics, that McAuliffe would lose and that Virginia would be this close. We had a sense that the trends were all moving in the wrong direction. We talked about this a little bit in the lead up to it. Democrats were facing a lot of political headwinds. I had this really bad feeling as I was watching the polls in New Jersey, which all of a sudden, you started seeing these polls.

We paid no attention to New Jersey, which obviously probably an oversight on our part. All of a sudden it's like six points, eight points. And I sort of thought to myself, you know, you can see a world where Virginia is way too close and McAuliffe ekes it out or even, you know, the polls were so close that maybe Young could win, but what would be really shocking would be if Murphy only won by four, right? That would be the shocking thing. It turns out as bad as we thought things might be, they were even worse, which is really a lesson in how we should prepare ourselves emotionally from politics these days.

polls only because I could not imagine that in a country as polarized as ours, that you could have such a big swing like this in a state that Democrats won by 10 points just a year ago. But it turns out you can't. And I'll talk about like why I believe that because we're going to get to this. But a lot of people say, you know, states swing all the time, especially in off year elections. And that's certainly true. But again, with each passing election cycle, the country has grown more and more polarized. And so blue, the trend has been blue states and blue districts get bluer, red states and red districts get redder. And, you know, there was a big question of whether this would continue after Trump left the scene after 2020 or after he was no longer in office. And then sure enough, we had a California recall where the results of the recall were the margin was almost exactly the

same as Gavin Newsom's election in 2018. And the turnout was almost exactly the same as Gavin Newsom's election in 2018. And the turnout was almost exactly the same as Gavin Newsom's 2018 race. And I know people say, oh, it's California. So obviously it's a more liberal state, but you would even think that if you were going to see this kind of swing to the right, that even in the redder and purple areas of California, of which there are plenty,

they're just overpowered by the big blue cities, you would have seen the same sort of rightward shift just a month and a half ago in September. But we didn't see that. And so I expected the same thing to happen both in Virginia and New Jersey. I expected pretty much status quo. Maybe the Democrats lose a few points because Biden's poll numbers are so bad. And the fact that that didn't happen tells me, at least, that Democrats have an enormous amount of work to do, to say the least. But let's start with Virginia and what happened there. What do the results, the data, and the final exit polls tell us about how Glenn Youngkin pulled this off? Basically, what Glenn Youngkin did was he did what did the Democrats did in 2018 in reverse, which is he had incredibly high turnout, but he paired that with winning over a relatively substantial number of people who voted for Ralph Northam in 2017,

Joe Biden in 2020, and then switched their vote for him. So it was a combination of huge turnout running up larger margins in some cases in the redder parts of the state with persuasion. And that is exactly how we took the House in 2018. It is the recipe for winning in midterm elections in states you lose in presidential years. And, you know, a lot of these elections, you look at the data and you say, oh, it's one demographic group swinging or the other. We should just say Youngkin ran ahead of Trump in every single part of the state, cities, suburbs, rural areas, heavily white precincts, non-white precincts. And just to put a finer point on your turnout comment, McAuliffe got 200,000 more votes than Northam did in 2017, which was an absolute historic turnout for Democrats in 2017. So you have like the highest turnout ever for Democrats in 2017 in Virginia,

and McAuliffe gets 200,000 more votes than that. So Democrats have a pretty healthy turnout on Tuesday night. But Youngkin got nearly 500,000 votes more than Gillespie got in 2017. Youngkin got nearly 500,000 votes more than Gillespie got in 2017. So just astronomical turnout for Glenn Youngkin. I believe he got like 87% of Trump's votes in 2020, 2020 being a presidential year where you get the most turnout. So for an off year election to get 87% of what Trump got is just bonkers turnout. And of course, there was also some evidence of Democratic drop-off in big cities and turnout from 2017. And then, as you said about vote switching, exits show that 5% of Biden voters backed Youngkin.

And there was also a lot of evidence in the precinct level of vote switching in some of the swingiest counties in Virginia. So people, again, who voted for Joe Biden and then showed up and voted for Glenn Youngkin on Tuesday night. Do you have any other thoughts on what changed between 2017, 2020 and Tuesday night's results? Well, I mean, it is not unusual for the party that is out of power to do very well in midterm elections like That is what normally happens. And I think it's also fair to say that if you were to pick a time in 2021 that would be the worst time to have this election, it would probably be right now, which is Congress is

wrapped, still has not delivered yet on Biden's legislative agenda. It's just been a giant mess for a long time. Schools have just opened and parents are still navigating the challenges of going to school and taking their kids to school. Vaccines for kids have not yet started. Inflation is hitting. Pandemic pessimism is receding, but not receding fast enough. So it's sort of like the worst of all worlds right in this moment, combined with the historical bounce back for the party out of power.

And you end up with something like this. historical bounce back for the party out of power, and you end up with something like this. Now, that is not to say that this is not a giant fucking warning sign, because this is Virginia. This is a state that was non-competitive in 2016 and 2020. We won easily in 2017 and 2019 in the state legislative level, and we just lost. And all the other stuff aside, there's something bigger here that we have to address and look at. All right, let's get to what everyone is calmly debating online with the kind of humility that comes with an unexpected loss. Why Democrats lost Virginia. So I thought we would go through each big, beautiful take,

one at a time, and then you and I can offer the unassailably correct answer. How does that sound? That sounds great. I want to stipulate that the answer, we're going to address all of these, the answer is all of the above. It's just a question of what percentage each of them are. We'll see. We'll see. Okay. Who knows? Maybe you put some new ones in I haven't seen. I might throw my lot in with one of these takes, Dan. We don't know. Okay. Number one, the party that holds the White House almost always loses off-year gubernatorial races.

You just touched on this. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, that is true, but it's not always true. And we did win in 2013 right after Obama had been reelected. Former Governor Terry McAuliffe is proof that you can win gubernatorial elections in an off year. So it is not it explains some, but it doesn't explain everything.

And just chalking it up is just sort of the natural occurrences of history is sort of excuse making and not looking at the problems we need to solve. Yeah, two things, two problems I have with that explanation. One is Virginia and New Jersey have gotten bluer every election cycle. So they are much bluer than they were when we've lost them in past off-year cycles. And two, and this is maybe the more important one, when Democrats lost the Virginia governorship and the New Jersey governorship in 2009, a year after Obama won Virginia and New Jersey, Obama then went on to lose, the Democrats then went on to lose 63 House seats in 2010. So the history of what happens next is pretty grim. So we can all comfort ourselves by being like well this always happens in off-year elections yeah it always happens in off-year elections and then

you know what happens in the midterms fucking catastrophe so it's not it is not something to comfort yourself with that this always happens in off-year elections because the the history is also that the party out of power doesn't necessarily bounce back in the midterms. Number two, Terry McAuliffe was a bad candidate who ran a bad campaign where all he talked about was Donald Trump. This one is a little more complicated because I think there are plenty of completely fair critiques about McAuliffe's campaign strategy. And one is he ran a campaign strategy with his focus on Trump that was sort of born of spending too much time online. If you are someone who is not on Twitter, who does not watch cable news, does not listen to podcasts, or not a political junkie, you have probably not thought about Donald Trump once in months. He is so absent from your life. He's not on the news. He's not on Facebook. He's

not on Twitter. Unless you are someone who lives inside progressive media or you live inside far right media, you don't see Trump. You don't hear anything about him. And so when McAuliffe is running around saying he's Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, you have no idea what he's talking about. It's so removed from your life. I think it's also fair to say that while on paper at the outset, McAuliffe looked like a very strong candidate, he was a successful former governor who had governed and run in the mold of Joe Biden, who had just won the state by 10 points less than a year ago. But as a former governor, he was the embodiment of the status quo, particularly in a state where

Democrats have controlled the governorship for 16 of the last 20 years at a time in which people are very angry. And so in a change for status quo election, we pick sort of the embodiment. You can't get any more of embodiment of status quo with an open seat, non-incumbent candidate, Terry McAuliffe. He had all the downsides of incumbency with none of the upsides. But put that aside, that doesn't explain anything about Phil Murphy or any of the other candidates. And so the thing we have to recognize is, sure, we can nitpick some of the decisions during McAuliffe, but I think they're sort of ancillary to the larger political trends here. And if we focus on how we fix the problems of McAuliffe's campaign strategy, we're all in tactics.

We're all in symptoms and not in disease. And so, yeah, it's all true. But I don't think that maybe a better campaign actually might have eked this out. But the larger political problem still exists. Whether McAuliffe wins by one or loses by two, same problem exists that is devastating in much less blue states that are going to decide control of the House and the Senate. Yeah, my big response to that is Phil Murphy, Phil Murphy, Phil Murphy, right? This is this is one of the most progressive governors in the country, Phil Murphy in New Jersey. He has passed in his first term a $15 minimum wage, new taxes on millionaires, legal weed, free community college, voting rights for

the formerly incarcerated. He spent his entire campaign talking about his accomplishments in his first term, those accomplishments that I just mentioned, and how he handled the pandemic, which he got sky high ratings for. He had a bigger swing against him than Terry McAuliffe, even though he won. It was a bigger swing than what happened in Virginia against Phil Murphy. So whatever you say about Terry McAuliffe has to also apply to Phil Murphy. And that's not to say that, like, you're right, Terry McAuliffe has to also apply to Phil Murphy. And that's not to say that, like, you're right. Terry McAuliffe was a yesterday candidate, right? And it's very possible that voters may not have wanted to give him another term.

The Trump stuff, I have complicated feelings on. Because I think that when Democrats talk about Trump, we can be lazy about it and just go around saying Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. We can be lazy about it and just go around saying Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. You know, like by the end, Terry McAuliffe was saying, like, if Glenn Youngkin wins Trump, Donald Trump's going to announce the next day. Like, you know, basically don't vote for Glenn Youngkin if or else Donald Trump will come back. And that's like a little hyperbole. I think it's a little exaggerated. That said, you know, Sarah Longwell, who's with the Bulwark, does a podcast that only nerds like us would love, which is she has focus groups of voters and then she has people talk about the focus groups.

And she had a focus group of 10 Democrats in Virginia who were undecided. And a lot of them were saying, you know, I'm not sure, but Glenn Youngkin, he's it sounds like he he's endorsed by Trump. He wanted to run because of Trump. He's a lot like Trump. And I don't like that. We can's endorsed by Trump. He wanted to run because of Trump. He's a lot like Trump. And I don't like that. We can't have another Trump. And so I do think some of the Trump stuff worked. But it is, well, I think talking about the fact that Trump could come back, which, by the way, is a valid thing to talk about because the guy is probably going to run again in 2024, almost definitely.

So it's not like Trump is gone and we're just bringing back someone who's gone from the scene forever. He's coming back, probably. Talking about him as valid, it is necessary, but it is not sufficient. You can't just make your message about Trump. I think talking about why the Republican Party has embraced the worst of Trump is important. I think one of our problems in 2020 is we were so intent on running against Trump, which was the most important thing to do. And you saw this in the House level in 2020, is that probably we did not define the Republican Party as well as we defined Donald Trump in that election. And that is why Donald Trump lost. And yet we lost ground in the House and a bunch of

Republicans in the House won. And I still think we have not figured out how to define the Republican Party independent of Trump while letting people know that a lot of the Republican Party's problems are that they have embraced the worst of Trumpism. Does that make sense? It is. I have a lot of thoughts on this that I will share when we get

into the prescriptive parts of this, because I think that this is a repeat, what we saw in this race, which I don't think is what, this is not the main problem. Right. Like I said, it's a problem adjacent is that we Trump has blotted out the sun and we continue to let it blot out the sun for us and how we think about messaging. And I will just say on the flip side, Glenn Youngkin didn't want Trump to come to Virginia to campaign for him. Glenn Youngkin wanted to make sure it was a closed press final teller rally with Donald

Trump. It's not like he clearly didn't think that Trump being involved in the race was a good thing for him. He needed Trump's base, but he didn't want to openly welcome Trump to Virginia, which tells you something about the potency of Trump and how at least this Republican candidate who ended up winning was somewhat afraid of having Trump campaign with him or else he would have brought him to Virginia. Number three, speaking of Yunkin, number three take is Glenn Yunkin is God's gift to the Republican Party and should run for president when his term is up in four years. This is basically what Ross Douthat tweeted on Tuesday. What do you think of that? I think it is fair to say that Ykin ran a very deft campaign. I spent a lot of time watching his ads in preparation for an episode of Campaign Experts React I did with Peter Hamby, your next guest on Offline, a few weeks ago. And his ads are very smart. They made a very specific change for a status quo case against McAuliffe. Glenn Youngkin is an incredibly wealthy private equity executive who was able to make McAuliffe the insider candidate beholden to

corporate interests. And so that's a pretty good trick. And he walked the line between courting Trump's base and appeasing anti-trump independents and republicans very well now i would say that two things about this one is the fact that he was an incomplete political outsider made this task much easier he was not on the front lines of politics for the last five years being forced to offer public fealty to trump there aren't a bunch of clips of him on fox news saying how much he loves trump he doesn't have the scar tissue of the Trump wars of the last few years. And that makes very helpful. And I also think it makes it hard for a lot of Republicans who are likely to be at the top of the ticket to replicate what he pulled off. Republicans in Virginia made a very specific decision to pick Youngkin because they had picked

Trumpy candidates long before Trump and lost. Against McAuliffe, they picked Ken Cuccinelli, a complete nut job attorney general who lost. And McAuliffe, they picked Ken Cuccinelli, a complete nut job attorney general who lost. And I think in hindsight, maybe we should think more about the role that Cuccinelli's weakness played in that 2013 history upending victory. They picked, against Tim Kaine in 2018, they picked Corey Stewart, an actual Confederate, who wasn't even from Virginia. He was a Confederate carpetbagger from Minnesota. Like you have to go out of your way to find someone that bad. And so they had a choice between Amanda Chase, very Trumpy, and Youngkin. They picked Youngkin. It's not clear other

primary electorates who have not faced that level of getting their ass kicked are going to be that clear-eyed about the choice they make. But before we play in his inaugural parade, I think it is likely that Glenn Youngkin's political future looks a lot more like Scott Brown's than a future president. Now, Scott Brown was this pickup truck driving outsider who won the Massachusetts special election to replace Senator Ted Kennedy. It was a huge deal. A Republican took a Kennedy seat in Massachusetts. This guy is the future.

And now he is like, where is Scott Brown? Right. He went to New Zealand to be Trump's ambassador. We've never heard from him again. He sort of became a Nash. It became a national joke. And I don't know that Glenn Young can be a national joke, but he's more the,

the right person in the right moment than some sort of political savant. Does that make sense? Yeah. I mean, like you said, I think it's for all of Glenn Youngkin's talents as a candidate. And I agree, like he doesn't, look, he doesn't sound like Trump, doesn't sound like congressional Republicans. He nodded and winked to the Republican base using the Republican media machine, right? He was on Fox and Seb Gorka's show. But most voters in Virginia didn't see that, those appearances. They saw soft-spoken guy who seemed like a nice suburban dad who talked about raises for teachers in his ads. Didn't know that until I went back because that wasn't in a lot of the coverage that we read. Lower taxes, keeping schools open, letting parents have a

say in what their kids learn. Democrats pointed out that this was all bullshit, what he was doing, and that he was going on Seb Gorka's show and that he embraced Donald Trump. Voters either didn't hear that or they didn't believe it. Right. That was Glenn Youngkin. But again, Glenn Youngkin probably has a very hard time getting through a Republican primary, someone like Glenn Youngkin, getting through a Republican primary, particularly on a national level.

So I don't know that that success can be replicated. And again, I will point everyone's attention to New Jersey, where there wasn't a Republican candidate as talented, perhaps as Glenn Youngkin running against Phil Murphy. I guess his name is Jack Cittarelli. I don't even know if I'm pronouncing that correctly, because I really didn't know who it was until Tuesday. And I do this for a living. But anyway, and he almost beat Phil Murphy, right? So again, I don't think candidates matter. Candidates always matter. They especially matter in close races and competitive races. But I don't know that either Terry McAuliffe or Glenn Youngkin,

both of their talents or their drawbacks as candidates can accurately tell us what happened in both of these races, or at least they don't tell us the full story. Number four take, both Virginia and New Jersey were all about parents' frustrations with schools, namely pandemic-related closings and the controversy over critical race theory. This is a big one. What do you think? This one, I guess all of these are complicated. And the challenge of having any discussion about any of this is there's this tremendous desire to find a simple explanation for a complicated outcome. Because we need to fit our take on

Twitter, right? So it's got to fit to it. But also just our desire as people who care about Democrats getting elected is you want there to be one problem that you can fix. So one of the main points that we've heard people make is Republicans have figured out this secret wedge issue with critical race theory. And they have mobilized parents. And the critical race theory thing is, I think, actually more relevant looking forward than the very real frustration with school closures, because we are hoping and believing that by the time people go vote in the midterms, this is not an issue anywhere in the country. If it is, if schools are still being

closed for COVID, we have gigantic problems that go beyond this as a society, let alone a party in charge of Congress. I believe you and I have said this before. I think we might have also said at one point, if this is still an issue in the fall of 21. But so, yeah, really hoping it's not an issue in fall of 22. But I agree. Like, I think the likelihood is that it won't be. The likelihood is that it won't be. This one has been – the parents' rebellion or the weaponization of critical race theory is complicated because I made this point in the message box I wrote on Very Little Sleep about Virginia is critical race theory is a fake issue.

It is not being taught anywhere. And a lot of people reached out, and I made that point in order to show the power of the Republican media advantage, which is they can take a fake issue and make it seem real to lots of people. A lot of people reached out and said, you're being overly literal about the term critical race theory. Because when people say critical race theory, they don't actually mean the technical definition of critical race theory. They mean a set of changes in curricula and language that makes people uncomfortable, some group of people uncomfortable. They could be people who are to the far right, who don't want any discussion of slavery or America's sort of sorted racial past, or people who are more in the middle and sort of struggling with a very rapid changing set of terms and viewpoints about race in this country. And I think that that is, terms and viewpoints about race in this country. And I think that that is, you know, anecdotally,

you hear that from everyone. That in the case of Virginia, one of the challenges in understanding what really happened is a overwhelming number of people who talk about politics for a living send their kids to the Virginia public schools. Yeah. Right. So it's like, what does that really mean? Now, the exit polling is very confusing on this. That is a very flawed measure, as we would say, but it's the only sort of measure we have right now, which is Youngkin did just as well with men with children as men without children, and women with children as women without children. And so there wasn't – you can't find evidence yet of a specific – that the people who moved were disproportionately parents. And what I think is we have to acknowledge that there is definitely some discomfort with schools, COVID and curriculum. In Virginia in particular, I think, and there are some

examples in Loudoun County and others that have received a lot of national attention. But we also, I think, have to recognize that this is a proxy for a larger issue that goes beyond just parents. And sort of the history of civil rights in this country is progress followed by backlash. And you can chart Republican political success by charting the backlash. Nixon getting elected after passing the Civil Rights Act, success by charting the backlash. Nixon getting elected after passing the Civil Rights Act, Donald Trump getting elected after Barack Obama's two terms, George W. Bush getting reelected on a homophobic platform demagoguing marriage equality after a series of advances at the state level in California and Vermont elsewhere about gay marriage. That is the history. And so you have to connect sort of the reaction to this that goes beyond parents,

beyond just school curriculum, to a backlash to the very public and intense and important conversation about structural racism that began after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and so many others. And so the only reason I bring all of that up is if we say just like, we need a parent's bill of rights tomorrow, or we have to start- Which the Republicans, which the House, Kevin McCarthy has promised to introduce. We have to, or we have to do something very specific about school curricula that that's going to solve our problem. It's I think missing the broader point, which is we're going to have to find a way to navigate racial grievance politics

writ large that is bigger than school curriculum or critical race theory or something like that. Yeah. So I think this is a very complicated issue and I want to exercise some humility in analyzing what happened here because I do think this is one that's heavy on anecdotes, which are important. They're a start for how we learn about this. There's a lot of conflicting polling on this. There were some polls right before the election that showed Youngkin was way ahead with parents who have kids K through 12. Like you said, the exit polls showed that there wasn't as much difference. Let's start by talking about what we know. And let's talk about the importance of the

issue. The exit polls showed 15% of all voters in Virginia said that education was the most important issue. That was right behind the 17% who chose COVID and well behind the 35% who chose the economy. So that's from the exit poll. Again, exit polls are not gospel. Though when they're reweighted at the end, a couple of days after the race, they're a little bit better than all the first wave of exit polls that everyone fucking freaks out about and are usually wrong. Education voters were more likely to choose Youngkin. We also know that. So people who said it was their most important issue are more likely to choose Youngkin. As you mentioned, some of this could be COVID related. Virginia had the seventh fewest days of in-person learning among all 50 states in 2020. And New Jersey was 10th. And so, you know, people could still be remembering that. On the other hand, people who said that the debate over COVID restrictions in schools was the most important issues back to McAuliffe.

So there's that data point as well. I think it is 100% true that there are right-wing activists who show up at school board meetings saying racist shit, trying to stop schools from teaching kids about racism and the most racist parts of our history. We've heard it. We've seen the videos. We know it's true. It's also 100% true that critical race theory, as you said, which is a law school level curriculum about structural racism, isn't technically being taught in public schools. But think about Terry McAuliffe's quote that ends up being the big gaffe of the campaign. I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach. And even that is not, that doesn't have race in it, but that becomes the big quote that Youngkin jumps on and Republicans jump on for the rest of the campaign. And here's how I think this is landing with parents. And to figure this out, you really have to like look through the news

stories in Virginia over the last couple of years. And some people were doing this. Dave Weigel from the Washington Post was doing it. A couple other Washington Post reporters have been looking at that, obviously, because they're Washington Post reporters. It's right over the river. So the stories that parents are seeing are not necessarily stories about Republicans wanting to ban students from teaching kids about racism or racist history, but stories about Virginia schools thinking about eliminating advanced placement math classes, which turns out not to be actually true. But the Virginia Department of Education had to go on record and say, no, we're not really eliminating advanced math classes. But not before it caused this big uproar that all these parents thought that, you know, for the sake of equity, they were eliminating all kinds of advanced placement classes.

eliminating all kinds of advanced placement classes. Also stories about Thomas Jefferson High School, which is this really good school in Northern Virginia, one of the best ranked in the country, was eliminating the admissions tests to that school to increase diversity, which then caused a bunch of families of Asian American kids to sue because they thought that that was going to disproportionately affect Asian American kids at the expense of increasing diversity from other kids in the school as well. So that becomes a big controversy. You get a Loudoun County school board member writing op-eds about how Loudoun County hired an equity consultant

that recommended that teachers base their lessons on books like Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility, which says, quote, a positive white identity is an impossible goal. White identity is inherently racist. White people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy. Now, are those words being taught to kids? No evidence of that. But it's true the book's being recommended to Loudoun County teachers. And it's true that Loudoun County school board members, who are Republicans and who have bad intentions in mind are broadcasting that to everyone in the county and saying those words to everyone in the county. So imagine how that lands with parents who are not super politically engaged, who are not partisan,

who may have been Biden voters, who may have been Democratic voters. And then they hear that about what's now going to be taught in schools. Is it a tactic to inflame racial division on behalf of Republicans? Of course it is. But think about how that lands with parents who aren't really paying close attention to the political back and forth that all of us are all the time. And I kind of think that that's like this whole debate has been a bit simplified on Twitter and just in political debate in general, don't you think? Yeah, for sure. This is incredibly complicated. Anything involving people's kids, whether it's health care, education, thinking about the pandemic, all is very, very complicated.

Now, I have a slight advantage in this discussion because I already talked to Danica Rome for the interview you can hear on the back of this, and I asked her this question. And she told me that the results in Loudoun County are actually not consistent with a giant backlash against that sort of teaching because her colleagues in Loudoun County actually won relatively easily. That was not saying that it's not a real issue that played all over the state, but it was broader than that county. But then also you look at – if you want to look at COVID closures, which is another element of this, because some of the Virginia schools were some of the last ones to open, similar thing in New Jersey. But look at California, which had some of the longest and most frustrating closures of any school, And Gavin Newsom paid, as we can tell, no price for it. Now, does that have to do with Larry Elder versus Glenn Youngkin or the guy whose

name we just learned in New Jersey, who was essentially a generic person not named Phil Murphy, as far as you're concerned? Maybe. That may be. But it is a factor. All of these things you're saying played some role in a two-point race in Virginia, or whatever the margin is in New Jersey, an incredibly narrow one that didn't get called until dinnertime last night, according to the New York Times, everything matters. But the danger is reducing it to being the primary problem or the primary cause of our loss, and therefore focusing a disproportionate amount of our energy on solving that problem, we're going to miss the big thing. Well, that I mean, that's why I sort of started with the importance of the issue to voters, right? Because if it's number three, even to Virginia voters, where it's been this big issue, that tells you something. Well, part of the reason, what do you mean? Well, I think this is why it's complicated, why you sort of have to go back and do focus groups and other things, which is people also people who are planning on voting for a candidate will always cite that candidate's number one issue as their number one issue.

Right. Well, I wasn't saying that to pump up the importance of it. I was trying to say that. Let's remember, even as we're talking about this, voters chose the economy as their number one issue by a healthy margin. No, I was saying it the opposite. But I think why this is important is because there's, look, there's going to be this huge debate about it. There already is right now. We're going to be hearing nothing but critical race theory for the next several weeks, if not months. Republicans, like you said, are planning to use this as a strategy. So obviously we need to talk about it. And I think what would help us here is to understand how complicated and nuanced this can be and how this, how nuanced it can be landing with people. And also like I, you know, someone was tweeting part of Glenn Youngkin stump speech, right? And he said, we'll teach all history, the good and the bad. We have an amazing history,

but we also have some dark and abhorrent chapters. We must teach them all. But what we don't do is teach our children to view everything through a lens of race where one group's an oppressor and another group's a victim. We all know what he's doing here. Those of us who've been in politics, the listeners of Falsetto. But again, think about how this lands with people who don't pay attention to politics that well. They hear that and they're like, well, that sounds relatively non-threatening to me. And then again, these Washington Post reporters like went out to Prince William County, which again went for Terry by 14 points of the blue county. And they interviewed people who might be voting for Youngkin. Latina mom who plans to send her four year old to private school to avoid public school education about race. They talked to her. There

was a black father who said his son brought home an assignment on Lincoln that troubled him. And he said, I'd like to not vote for the guy who said it's not the parents responsibility to take care of their kids. So again, if this is like how it lands with people and even what the point that Dana Caron made to you, like you can see why perhaps those who ran for delegate who weren't sort of right in this fight could have won. And yet McAuliffe was more attached to the education issue, particularly because of what he said in that debate. And so they connected him to that. And also Loudoun County like swung 14 points towards the Republicans. It was probably one of the big it was the biggest swing towards the right in Northern Virginia, right in Loudoun County. So it's good that the delegates won, but it's pretty clear that

there was a rightward shift in Loudoun County towards Republicans. But again, it's not to say, look, this is not to say that we should change our beliefs, our values, our principles, our positions on issues at all. But I think we need to, and a lot of people have pointed this out, we can't ignore this issue because Republicans aren't going to let us ignore this issue. And not only can we not ignore this issue, but we have to speak about it in a way that stays true to our values, beliefs, and principles, but also has language that meets people where they are, who aren't necessarily paying attention to politics and sees everyone as persuadable, who at least has voted for Democrats in the past.

No one is saying, oh, we got to win over the right-wing nuts who show up at the school board meetings and start screaming racist shit. We're not going to win those fucking people over. But there are plenty of people who voted for Ralph Northam and Joe Biden, who then voted for Glenn Youngkin.

And we have to figure out why they made that switch and how to win them back, or else we will not have enough voters to win. That is just the math. All right. Number five, it's the fault of Democrats in Congress for not passing the infrastructure bill and build back better. And depending on who you are, you can either blame Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema for not letting Democrats be bold enough or House progressives for pushing the party too far to the left. What do you think? I think it definitely would have helped to have put this legislative debate behind us. For sure. I mean, just me personally, you personally, people listen to this podcast. I don't know who likes it.

Who likes this debate? Does anyone love this debate? Does anyone enjoy this? Anyone feel good about politics listening to this? Joe Manchin seems to thoroughly love it. He is the one person. Yeah, and Kyrsten Sinema, too. Maybe the two of them like it. Would it have been better to have this done

by the deadline that Joe Biden set out the last time we did the podcast? Absolutely. Is this the reason that Terry McAuliffe lost? No, it just isn't. There's no evidence of that. Let's say the Democratic turnout had been well below what it was in 2017. You might be able to make a case that Democratic voters stayed home because they were angry that the things they had been promised in 2020 did not happen. But while there's definitely, as you point out, there are pockets of lower turnout in certain places, Terma Calloff got 200,000 more votes and still lost. So that wasn't our problem. Now, I think we should get this thing over with and done and passed tomorrow. And we can talk about that a little bit later. But I just have not seen any evidence that that is the primary reason or even a significant reason that we have this current problem.

So the AP exit poll, which is the AP has, there's two different exit polls. The AP one is always a bit more accurate and better. It a stat in it 75% of all voters in Virginia said negotiations in Washington over Biden's governing agenda were an important factor in their vote what do you think that's about I have no idea I just I don't look I I sort of my gut was my gut still is where you were Which is like, it would have been better to have these passed, but it's probably not the biggest deal. I do think, look, these are Virginia voters. A lot of them live in Northern Virginia, and they consume more sort of news about what's

happening in Washington than most people in the country. And if all the news you hear is Democrats fighting each other and not getting anything done, does that have an effect? I don't know. I think I'm leaving myself open to the possibility that it might. Yeah. Look, I think we're saying the same thing, which is it would have been helpful to get it done. And there are two ways in which, right, which is and you make a very important point that I should have acknowledged is the vast majority of people, their paper, to the extent that they are subscribed to a newspaper, is the Washington Post. It is a very different form of local news than happens in any other state.

Second, there's just a general chaos, disappointment, bad news doom loop that we've been on for a long time. Now, that does not seem to have led to a mass depression of the Democratic base. But if you're a person who didn't really like the chaos and incompetence of the Trump administration, and just every time you pick up the newspaper or you go on Facebook, it's just like they can't get anything done. It's not that great. Everyone's fighting. That's not great for the party in power. And the party in power in Virginia, which has been in power for a long time, is the Democrats. So I would say not helpful, but better to get it done. It is not That's not great for the party in power and the party in power in Virginia, which has been in power for a long time as a Democrat. So I would say not helpful, but better to get it done.

It is not like all of this. It's not the sole or primary reason that we lost. I will also say if we pass both bills, it's not like the effects of that legislation people would have felt in time for the election, number one. But, you know, could Terry McAuliffe have responded to Glenn Youngkin's critical race theory stuff and education stuff with, you know what Democrats believe? We believe that every child, no matter what you look like or where you come from, should have a world class education. And Republicans want to give tax cuts to the rich so the rich can then afford to send their kids to private schools while all the rest of our kids have to struggle with budget cuts in their schools. And you know what Joe Biden and the Democrats want to do? We just passed legislation that makes

universal preschool available for every single three and four year old in this country. And we are on the path to making sure that a good quality education is available for every single person in this country, no matter what the color of your skin is, no matter where you live. That's what Democrats are for and Republicans are not for that. And that's the issue with education in this country. That would have been a pretty powerful argument to be able to make. Could he have made it? No, because who knew if Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema were going to cut pre-K, universal pre-K out of the bill. They didn't, but they could have, which is just like a larger issue with how hard it is to sell this bill before it's cooked, because it's a moving, the whole thing is just a moving target. But once again, then you have New Jersey, which had the exact same problem, is much less dialed.

Receives perhaps some of the least political news of any state, because it exists in the nether region between two media markets that serve other cities, Philadelphia and New York, and has been relying on newspapers, mostly owned by the Gannett Corporation, which is a zombie corporation that just exists for the milking of parts for some private equity fund. And so once again, there is something very big here. All of these things contribute to a bad political environment. But it's it's more than what it's a lot more than just one thing. It's even the sum is even greater than the total of the parts here. far to the left. You know, there's a few data points people are pointing to India Walton, a socialist in Buffalo, won her primary, but was then defeated by the incumbent Democratic mayor in a write in campaign, a measure to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with

a new Department of Public Safety safety in, you know, in the city where in the place where George Floyd was murdered, failed 57 to 43. What do you think about that? This is like all of these, I guess. And thank you for downloading our just overly nuanced on one hand, on the other hand, podcast. Like I said, I'm just no matter what we're saying here, neither of us are 100% sure.

We're trying to lay out all the arguments. And I think there's a lot more research to be done before anyone can be confident. Yes. Thank you for joining us to work through our personal processes about this. Yeah. The reason why this one is complicated is all of the provisions of at least the Biden

legislative agenda are not viewed by anyone as overly liberal. They have big bipartisan support. They're incredibly popular. They are, by all measures of public opinion, they are mainstream policies. Now, the broader narrative about them is huge, transformative. It's language being used by the press. It's social policy, social safety net. The $3 trillion social spending bill. Yeah. You can see why it's less ideological and more detached from people's lives, right? Like you just don't – you don't really know what's in it.

It seems messy. You don't trust it. It seems expensive, but you don't really know what's in it. Like it definitely – like the individual piece is popular. So it's not like he moved too far to the left. I think there's a larger conversation about the challenges of electing someone who runs under a socialist banner. There's a larger conversation about the ways in which the criminal justice reform movements have been sort of branded under the defund the police slogan

that has made policies that in a blind taste test are popular in common sense, harder to enact, and what happened in Minneapolis is a certain part of that. But I think now we're in this world where it's, you know, Abigail Spanberger, who's going to run in Virginia and what is likely to be a tough race in 2022, had a quote that was something to the effect of Joe Biden was elected to not be Trump and bring us back to normal, not to pass this giant transformative – Not to be the next FDR, she said. Not to be the next FDR, right. And yeah, I think there is some truth to that of – it was a very narrow election, very aggressive. Basically, as people point out, you're trying to pass an FDR size agenda, at least at the

outset, the $3 trillion original scope, trying to pass FDR's agenda without FDR's majorities or FDR's mandate. But here's what I would say about all that now, which is we are pot committed, right? This is the deal. Can we do a little stuff around the edges and there's some final negotiation to do and Nancy Pelosi has put paid leave back in, which I fully support. We have to fight with the Senate over that, but just get it done. This is where we are. And we can't go back in time and undo that. And so we just got to go.

And it's in everyone's interest, whether you're Pramila Jayapal or Josh Gottheimer, to get it done as close to what we have it as right now and get going. And again, there is a laziness, especially among the press, in terms of defining what constitutes progressive, what constitutes moderate, right? Because it really is about what do people want, what do voters want? And prior to the USA, the Democratic Super PAC put

out a memo today and again reiterated that the most popular policies with new Biden voters, people who hadn't turned out before that turned out for the first time in 2020 for Biden and swing voters, people who switch back and forth between parties are raising taxes on the rich to give middle class folks a tax break, prescription drug reform to make prescription drugs affordable and expanding Medicare so that more benefits for dental hearing hearing, and vision reach more seniors. Those are the most, now, a couple of those are Bernie Sanders policies. A couple of those sound pretty popular, but it's pretty populist. But those are extremely popular policies with the people who swing back and forth between parties. So the definition of what's progressive and what's

moderate and everything else gets sort of, it's just people are lazy about it when they write about these things, which is just something to keep in mind. As a general rule, if something has more than 50% support in a poll, you cannot call it far left or far right. It is a mainstream policy by definition. mainstream policy by definition. And again, you know, when you ask people, do you want to defund the police or do you want to spend more money or less money on policing in your area? You get a majority of people of all races saying they want more money spent on police, even though when you mentioned a whole bunch of police reforms, including using some money from police departments to fund public safety and mental health services and public safety officers who don't have guns, that is far more popular. But as we saw from the ballot measure in Minneapolis, just saying that you want to replace the police department isn't popular, even in a deep, deep blue city like Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered. All right.

Take number six. It's the fault of Joe Biden's shitty approval rating, which is the worst of any president at this point in his term, except Donald Trump. Like passage of the Biden-Lend-Us-Slave agenda, would it have been better if Joe Biden's approval rating was in the 50s? Yes. Would Terry McAuliffe have likely won in that situation? Yes. Would Terry McAuliffe have likely won in that situation? Yes. But there's a real chicken or egg problem when discussing presidential approval and impact on elections. Did Joe Biden drag down Terry McAuliffe and Phil Murphy? Or

did the forces that dragged down Joe Biden, the pandemic, inflation, just general national crankiness also dragged down Terry McAuliffe and Phil Murphy. I think it is more likely the latter than the former. Well, yeah, maybe because it dragged down every Democratic candidate everywhere. I mean, that was my, you know, what I wrote down after that take is, yes, but why is Joe Biden's approval rating so shitty? Which leads to take number seven, the final take down after that take is, yes, but why is Joe Biden's approval rating so shitty? Which leads to take number seven, the final take that we're going to do here, which is the country is miserable that the economic, political and psychological fallout from the pandemic is still with us after two year, two of the worst years in American history. Which I put a little spin on that one because it's it's the one I probably believe the most. The economy is still the top concern with voters.

Inflation is a top concern. Supply chain issues, labor shortage issues, tax issues came into play in a lot of these races, both in Virginia and in New Jersey. And these are the issues that most people who don't pay super close attention to politics or culture wars or anything in the news, which is, by the way, a majority of voters, these are the issues they really care about that they want fixed. Yeah, that's like that is the problem. This is not to excuse the White House to say that they couldn't do this or that better, have a sharper message or be more omnipresent or all of like that's all fair. But that is sort of just happening around the edges. The bigger issue here. And this is different than

like in 2017, we were living in a time of historic peace and prosperity. Trump's approval ratings were terrible because Trump was doing a terrible job as president. It was chaos. It was incompetence, firing people, tweets. Joe Biden is not perfect, but he's doing by all accounts a good job. Not perfect, but he's doing, by all accounts, a good job. But he's being pulled down by things that are largely beyond his control and suffering from it. Because he's being pulled down, everyone else is getting pulled down as well. I think because we're all still living through it, we have underestimated the effect of what the Delta variant has done to the country and to all of us. what the Delta variant has done to the country and to all of us. Everyone had a taste of freedom in late spring of 2021, May, June. And when it seemed like the pandemic was ending, case numbers were down.

The CDC said everyone can take their masks off and go live their lives. And by the way, in late May, that was when Joe Biden's approval ratings were the highest in the 538 average. They basically matched or exceeded his approval when he came into office after he was inaugurated. They were at 54% approval. That was the best because everyone thought everything was great. Then Delta hit. And the message then was, the message before Delta was, get vaccinated and you and your family can go live your life.

The message after Delta was, unvaccinated people aren't safe like they weren't before, but neither are vaccinated people. And so don't just mask up again, but worry about travel, worry about gatherings, worry about indoor restaurants, worry about your kids going to school. And by the way, the economy is going to take a big hit because of all this. And it was almost like we were hit with a second pandemic this summer and fall. And all of the effects that come with that economic, political, cultural, we are still wrestling with right now. And it's making everyone really pissed off.

And when everyone's really pissed off, you know, they the people that they elected to fix it, that's who they get pissed at. Right. Joe Biden was I mean, the one thing that Spanberger said that was correct is people, people who don't pay close attention to politics, people who aren't partisans elected Joe Biden because they wanted to get rid of Trump and they wanted life to go back to normal. And life right now is still not back to normal for a lot of people in the country. And that's what the, I think that's fundamentally what the Biden White House's challenge is in the next year. Which brings us to the, to the final section here, which is where do we go from here?

I think we break it into three quick categories, Congress, Biden, and the 22 midterms. Congress, what do we know so far about how Tuesday's results might impact the passage of Biden's economic agenda, both the infrastructure bill and Build Back Better? It seems like in the House, at least, the losses in Virginia and the poor performance around the country have focused the minds, and all of a sudden, Pramila Jayapal and Josh Gottheimer are retweeting each other, and we are in a rules committee hearing, and it

Retweeting each other? How about that? Jayapal retweets Gottheimer, saying, the election told us that we have to pass both bills as fast as possible, and she retweeted it. Look, everyone's happy. Wonderful. Retweeting each other is the new Tip O'Neill and ronald reagan having dinner together or something um but so as of right now it seems like we are the house is trying to get something done this will not be the end of

the process for them but there's one important point which means it will send the bipartisan infrastructure bill to the president's desk and will become law there is still a lot of work to do on the senate side you have to pass even if the house's desk and will become law. There is still a lot of work to do on the Senate side. You have to pass, even if the House passes something, it will be adjusted by both Manchin and the Senate parliamentarian, and they'll have to pass something again. But they are trying to move this process forward, get out of the stasis we are in. So that is, I think, a very important and positive step in the right direction. And some good news on that, and just the substance of the bill, they came to an agreement on prescription drugs, on a policy that's going

to cap out-of-pocket costs at $2,000 a year and cap insulin costs at $35 a month, which has been a real struggle for a lot of people. And every Democrat is on board with that. The Kyrsten Sinemas of the world, the Manchins, the people in the House that were against prescription drug reform, they're all on board together. So that good as you mentioned pelosi put how paid family leave back in the bill in lease in the house version still seems like mansion will probably try to strip it out in the senate version so that's less good news um the whole salt the salt drama um i read today that the house plan limits your deductions to 72 000 which is, which is, as you heard me bring this up with Katie Porter and then Sean Patrick Maloney and some others, I think limiting it to $72,000 does prevent the attack

that it is just this gigantic tax cut for the rich because $72,000 is not rich for a lot of people. All right. What should Joe Biden do over the next several days, weeks and months? How much how much control does he have over his own political standing here with all of the exigent circumstances that we just mentioned? Very little control, unfortunately. Right. I mean, he is getting a huge win. Like as of today, I believe kids are getting or maybe as of last night, kids are starting to get vaccinated. Kids age five to 12. That is a huge thing for parents, huge. It is going to really change the school conversations. It's going to change how a lot of parents feel, who have unvaccinated people living in their house, who are the most hindered in their life by the Delta surge. And so that's a big deal.

He's just got to keep doing that. But I think the one thing to do is try to go get some wins that are popular. Let me put it this way. When you are down in the polls, the first thing you should do is go try to win back your people, the lowest hanging fruit. So do things, get this win in Congress, try to get BBB done. BBB, I hate myself, try to get your jobs and climate bill done. Yeah, there we go. Thank you. We're going to die on a vine being the only people who use that term, but we're going to try. Maybe there's some executive actions to do to just get up a tempo of strength and leadership and wins that are popular at their base.

You get 5% of Democrats back, your numbers go up, you can begin to sort of set a circuit breaker on the doom loop narrative that you've been in basically since August. Yeah, I think that once we get through, I think the State of the Union this year is going to be a big inflection point for him because I think at that point, a couple of things will have happened. One, these two fucking bills better have passed um two the vaccines will be available to everyone in the country uh they'll probably get six month

to four year olds done as by then as well and three if there is another smaller hopefully winter surge that will be on the downswing by the time he gives the state of the union. And I do think at that point, the state in the state of the union, there's a big inflection point for him. I think he needs to say, you know, you elected me to end the pandemic and revive the economy. And that's what I'm focused on every single day, every single thing I do. Now that we've made it through another winter and vaccines are available to every American, the worst of the pandemic is over. And, you know, I just saw that the prime minister of Singapore gave a big speech the other day and, you know, they had, they did well for a while in Singapore and then they've had like, you know, pretty high cases recently with

Delta and pretty tough restrictions. But he gave the speech where he said, we need to update our mindsets. We should respect COVID-19, but we must not be paralyzed by fear. Let us go about our daily activities as normally as possible, taking necessary precautions. Biden has defined his version of that to say and to put sort of a marker down in the next state of the union now that vaccines are available to everyone and we'll have gone through probably another winter of this because I think he needs to show some optimism here. And then I think he also needs to, as you were saying, just show that he is laser fucking focused on the economy, whether it's new policies proposing, executive actions, jobs, economy, inflation, helping the middle class, selling his plan if

it passes, God willing. And I think, you know, it's some kind of messages like Republicans want us to emerge from this pandemic with, you know, the rich doing well and everyone else struggling. And here's my plan. Here's why I'm different than them. Like, I think that has to be the message next year. And I think he has to be really, really focused on that. Um, last question. What do all of us do about 2022?

Where do we even begin? We talked about Biden, but all of us, uh, all of us have agency here and all of us have a stake. This is not the ideal time to deliver this message because I think people are frustrated and disappointed and it can feel you can feel despair. But this is the exact argument for doubling down and reengaging. The stakes could not be higher. The idea that the when look at what happened, there are two takeaways from this. One is the brittle fragility of our post-Trump electoral coalition. But the other thing is this race in Virginia was incredibly winnable. We can go do that. Because if you think about like, this is one of the things we have to think about. We didn't get fully into the

turnout conversation, but a little north of 3 million people voted in Virginia this election. 4.6 million voted in 2020. There was a huge group of people that we had with time, energy, and a good message we can go get to turnout for 2022. And that takes organizing and work. Now it's persuasion. to turn out for 2022. And that takes organizing and work. Now it's persuasion. We need to persuade some of those people who voted for the sort of prototypical voters who went Biden-Yunkin, and those people exist in every state in this country, and persuade them to stay on our side, why it matters, why it'd be a great mistake to let Republicans take power again. And also persuade

the people who turned out and got involved in politics because of a very legitimate existential concern about Donald Trump and what he was doing in this country, that this midterm matters and that the fight continues. And so we all have to get up off the mat. We have to work ourselves through your process. If you don't have an incredibly long podcast like we just had to do that and then get right, get back engaged. Obviously know, obviously Vote Save America, no off-year funds are going to be huge opportunities to do that. But the deck is stacked against us heading in 2022. But it does not mean we are definitely going to lose. We can win.

These are all states where there are enough Democratic voters to win. We just have to go out and get them. And that is on all of us, the people like us who have an opportunity to try to convince people to do it and the people listening who have the time and opportunity to commit to continuing the fight to

take this country back i think that's very well said you know i started by saying that the results surprised me partially because i thought that the electorate was so polarized that large swings like we saw on Tuesday weren't really possible anymore. Well, the flip side of that is if we could swing this much in just a year, then we can swing this much again in another year, right? A lot can change in a year, but it's not going to change if we just sit around and hope for it to change. We have to do it. We have to change it ourselves. And that's a lot of work. And I do think that starts with like, there's a few things we've got to stop fighting among Democrats among the, about these fucking bills. Like I guarantee yelling about Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema is not winning new votes

because it's just Democrats fighting Democrats. We need to finally settle on a frame for the Republican Party, define the Republican Party in an age where Trump is not, Trump is in the background, still a threat in the future, but not leading it right now, even if he's sort of leading it. But we need a message about the Republican Party and then we need a message about ourselves and what we're for. And part of this is, like you said, it's a very fragile coalition and it needs to stay together. And that requires talking to and listening, listening to our voters. And when I say our voters, I mean everyone who voted for Joe Biden and then some progressives, moderates, former Republicans, voters in cities, voters in suburbs, voters in rural areas where we keep getting crushed, young voters, old voters, all races, right? The math is that we need all of

them, especially because since we have this fucked up system now where Republicans can rule with a minority of the votes in a lot of states and cities because the Senate, because of gerrymandering, because of all the shit we've talked about, we need a bigger majority. And that means that our tent needs to be bigger in order to win. And so we can't have progressive voters staying home. We can't have moderate voters staying home. We need everyone who voted in 2020 and then some to turn out again. It is a tall order. But the only way we're going to get there is to go out and actually like break out of the information bubbles that we're all in, who pay super close attention to politics all the time and actually talk and listen to people who have voted for us in the past. Not not trying to not trying to like

get your MAGA uncle to vote for us, just trying to get your friend who took a flyer on Joe Biden for the first time in the Democratic Party to still vote Democrat. Right. That should be a little bit easier, even if it's still going to be a big challenge. So, you know, don't assume that everyone follows the news and follows politics as closely as you do and give people the time and space to come around to the views that we all hold by working really hard to persuade them. I think that's something to keep in mind. One of the ways that people can help, we've talked about this a bunch recently, is we have this no-off years fund at Vote Save America, where we are raising money for organizations on the ground in key midterm states to find and register new voters now, so that we are not panicking about registering new voters a month before the election in 2022.

That's what organizers on the ground who've been doing this work for a long time tell us is the most important thing to do is to be able to register voters now early and organizing work done early is just a lot better and increases your chance of winning. That's just the way it has been for a long time. So if you go to votesaveamerica.com slash nooffyears, we could really use your help and soak these organizers on the ground. All right, when we come back, we will have Dan's conversation with Virginia delegate Danica Rome. Joining us now, she's a Democrat in the Virginiaia house of delegates first elect in 2017 she was the first openly transgender person to serve in the u.s state legislature and she was just re-elected winning 54 of the vote danica rome danica thanks for joining pod save america

thank you so much dan it's good to be back with y'all well first congratulations on your victory what secret strategy did you have that eluded others across the country and in the Commonwealth of Virginia this week? Well, you know, I was actually just doing an interview with a reporter out of Richmond who was asking me something very similar to this. And what I did that this campaign was exactly what I did in 2017 was exactly what I did in 2019. My messaging at the doors to my constituents did not change at all. So let me talk about what we did in 2019, my messaging at the doors to my constituents did not change at all. So let me talk about what we did in terms of our advertising. And when we talk about what we did in terms of like our field engagement. So in our advertising, we led with Medicaid expansion. It was a promise

that I made in 2017, that I would vote to expand Medicaid at the time to what we thought would be about 400,000 Virginians, and including 3,700 people in the 13th district. I then kept that promise on May 30th, 2018. And when actually coverage began on January 1st of 2019, immediately right there, my constituents started getting signed up. In fact, the first person in the state to get signed up was my constituent, Kara. Kara is an amputee from Manassas who's missing her dominant right arm below the elbow. And within the month that she was enrolled, she had life-saving surgery to have a stent put in. And when we are talking to people about their quality of life and directly bringing it home with those real world examples, and that we're providing people health insurance,

that's the sort of thing that cuts through the noise, because you're talking about an issue that has, yes, national significance, and that, you know, the ACA is what authorized Medicaid in the first place. At the same time, people Virginians in Medicaid expansion. In the greater Prince William area, it's more than 20,000 people. For my constituents, it's nearly 5,000 people of my constituents who've now enrolled. I had 15,000 some odd votes on Tuesday. I would suggest that a large number of them came from a, it's not the majority, but a significant number of them came from people who are now benefiting from that as well. And why? Because it's a quality of life issue for them, as well as a security issue for them, as well as as a pocketbook issue for them. So that was our first message on that. The second one was we talked about the same stuff I talked about in 2017, 2019, fixing Route 28, which is synonymous with my profile locally as well as nationally. And we have actual tangible progress to show people now. All the traffic

lights are gone from the 2866 interchange over in Centerville. As a member of the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority, I voted for the sixth landing that's now underway over in Centerville to be completed in March 2023. And my big push for in here in the 13th district is for innovative intersection designs along the Route 28 corridor between Manassas Park and Yorkshire. And because, you know, even though we're still waiting to get the full funding that we need, the full $56 million to implement all of it, we have already begun making changes there. Like we've reduced the traffic signal phases by adding a flashing yellow, for example, at Orchard Bridge Drive and over at Yorkshire Lane, which cuts down the amount of red lights that you actually have on that little part of the corridor.

We've made safety improvements at Leland and Maplewood. And as we're doing this, people can also see that, that yes there's actual progress being made right before their eyes and so they know this wasn't just a slogan for me but something i really care about and right next to route 28 we have the vre that runs into manassas park literally across the street from my apartment that i'm talking to you about right now and over here i voted for the speaker of the house's bill hb 14 1414 last year, which allows us to increase, you know, basically it gives us the administrative infrastructure that we need to eventually have night and weekend service on the VRA. That's just another one of those

hyper-local issues. And then when I was knocking doors out West, I talked about my bill to ban above-ground transmission lines along the I-66 corridor between Gainesville and Hamer for 10 years, because that will protect your property value as well as the local environment. I talked about how I voted for the funding that we needed for the first commuter bus that now links Heathcote Boulevard and Hamark and Gainesville out to five metro stations a day over in Arlington so we can get more traffic off of I-66 each day. I say all of that to you and to add that we passed eight of my bills to feed hungry kids in schools and that my advocacy that myself and other people from Virginia led to the USDA at the federal level, we have free school meals across the entire country this year. That directly affects people's pocketbooks. It directly affects their kids' nutrition.

It directly affects quality of life. And so when you do all of that together, the issues that I'm talking about at the doors that we're talking about in the mail, and that we're talking about in our advertising really comes down to what are you doing for the district? Oh my God, you're actually doing a lot for the district. I think I can support you. And I say this as that, you know, trans metalhead from from Vadas, you know, reporter turned legislator who's like, yeah, I'm authentically myself. People know exactly that, you know, wearing my heavy metal hoodie right now. People know like, yeah, I'm wildly myself all the time. And at the same time, I'm good at my job. And I think you put all that together and people trust me. And I've, you know, I'm grateful that I earned their respect, you know, over the last few years. I'm curious about your perspective of what it was like on the ground in Virginia, because you ran in 17, great year for Democrats, 19, another very good year for Democrats, 21, other than for yourself and a handful of others, not a very good year.

Did it feel different in terms of enthusiasm or pushback from the from Republicans who may live in your district or just what you're hearing from sort of volunteers and activists out there? At the top of the ticket, yes. For my race, no. I did not have a significant number of, you know, either my field team when they were on doors or myself being on doors, we did not encounter a lot of hostility to us directly. Now that's, you know, we're having good persuasion conversations with that. We also understand targeting at the doors, for example. So, you know, while I serve all my constituents all the time, the doors were knocking and the very intentional, we're not going to, you know, go out of our way

in terms of, you know, talking to people who are never going to vote for us during a campaign cycle about the campaign. I will talk to people who are never going to vote for me about public policy issues that directly affect their community because I represent them. And they know that. And one of the things that happens with this, if you look at my race versus my challenger this past year, my challenger was very underfunded and that could have changed for a lot of different dynamics. But the thing is my constituents like the work I'm doing. And so even if they're not going to support me with their vote, they're not going to be overtly hostile either. And because of that, they're not throwing a lot of money into, you know, getting me unseated in the first place.

And so that's another one of those things that I think Democrats have to understand in terms of how we engage with the other side is yes, bipartisanship in terms of getting a legislation passed is an inherent, it's necessary, we have to do it. At the same time, we also understand that if we're good in our communities, we're showing up, we're doing the right thing, then people, even if they're not going to vote for us, they're not necessarily going to be hostile toward us. Let's get to a place where people aren't hostile. And that will be a big help in terms of our brand turnaround that we're going to really kind of have to need after this year. In saying that, do you think that Democrats broadly, nationally, maybe at the top of the

ticket, are we engendering hostility? Are we not being open enough or maybe dismissive of people's concerns? What do you think is going on there? And also, your cat looks great. That's my Calico Melinda joining us, as she always does anytime I am on camera for anything. Yes. It is very hard for me to say exactly on a national level here's what you need to do that's going to be different from you know what you know it's

going to change an election result or x y or z because the thing that national democrats could have done that at the very least wouldn't have hurt us and at the very best might have actually helped us is pass the two damn infrastructure bills if they actually had done their job and they had demonstrated competency in government you know by bringing all the sides and all the factions together whether it's our you know conservative slash moderate holdouts in the senate or it's you know progressives in the House, and I understand is actually sympathize with their plight in particular, in terms of passing very popular, you know, public policy initiatives like paid leave, I'm all on board, trust me all on board.

And at the end of the day, you still have to produce a bill. And at that point, it no longer matters in terms of if you're right or wrong, if nothing happens. Nothing happened by the time our names were on the ballot. And these are supposed to be core issues that Democrats agree on. Just like we did with all the COVID emergency funding, as soon as the president was sworn in. That was wildly popular with American people. If our folks had figured out their act in time to actually have something good on these two infrastructure bills that they could have done in early fall, that could have been another message we brought to the doors. For example, when I'm looking for funding for Route 28, I'm putting together a lot of pieces from a lot of different funding sources. If I could say, absolutely,

this bill is, because of this, they're going to have more enhanced build grants, what used to be tire grants. And because we're going to have these grants, absolutely, my multimodal project is definitely going to be able to qualify for that. We're going to be able to expedite delivery of this, blah, blah, blah. It might sound like a bunch of jargon and nothing to other people. But when you're in the district and you're having that conversation, you're demonstrating competency and you're demonstrating a plan that, yes, I'm not just blowing smoke. I am telling you this is, you know, you can follow along and you can watch how it is that I'm operating in order to do my job. And because I have that openness, that transparency and everything, that's something that I think

a lot of national Democrats could really, you know, focus on is let's really hit home on those quality of life issues that we know we're good on, that we know the public supports, the public supports infrastructure, the public supports paid leave. Let's bring it all together. Let's get it done. But the fact that they've just been holding out and they've been doing this, they did us no favors whatsoever. I'm not going to say that's going to make the difference in every race, but again, it wouldn't have hurt us for them to do it. It's very interesting because that's been one of the debates among sort of the national political analysis was how much that mattered. It's very interesting for you to say that it,

not necessarily that it was decisive in the election, but was certainly downward pressure you did not need. And I've got two of my colleagues lose, you know, who are currently trailing by less than 300 votes going into the mail-in absentee ballots that will, you know, that have to arrive at the registrar's office by noon tomorrow. And then we'll see what happens. You know, maybe we can salvage one or two of them. When we're that close, maybe there are a few voters, you know, within that little pool where that could have made a difference in terms of this, their overall, their overall thoughts about Democrats. Because the phrase I've been using is this election was not because of one thing. This was death by a thousand cuts. There was a lot of things contributing to that. But

if you stop the bleeding in even one area by showing here's a really good public policy thing that we're doing, and we're communicating that we're marketing that so that, you know, in 2017, after I won my election, I said, and I said this, I was quoted in an online publication about this, I said, you can't just hate Trump your way to victory. You have to show people, give people a reason to believe in you and to be inspired by what you're doing. Is tying a Republican to Donald Trump going to be effective? If you do it late in the campaign, after you have already defined that person on all the other public policy issues that directly affect the person's life, that your challenger in that case or the Republican nominee happens to be out of sync with your constituents on, then at the very end, yes, that can be effective. And our polling showed that the difference between asking

as the first question of the battery versus the last question of the battery, it outperformed much better when you do that the last, because people have fatigue over the issue. They're burned out over it. They want to talk about something else. And to me, it's getting that public policy, those good accomplishments done, having a very effective strategy for talking about it and bring it home and let people know you, let them trust you. to connect on the pocketbook, being able to connect on infrastructure, being able to connect on healthcare, and having a consistent, clear message about it, that consistency goes a long way to helping win elections. It's interesting what you said about the death of a thousand cuts. One of the issues that's gotten a ton of attention, both in the run-up to the election and then in the post-election analysis, has been about schools, whether it's critical race theory or other

objections to school curricula. You know, we talked to a local activist right before the election on last Thursday's episode who said not something she was hearing at the doors at all. What were you hearing about that? Do you think that played a big role, less of a role than people are saying? So here's the thing. I represent Western Prince William County in the city of Bonassus Park. So the county I represent is directly south of Loudoun, but I do not have Loudoun County in my district.

The Republicans went all in on everything they didn't like about Loudoun County for this election. And then they claim victory afterwards saying, well, look, we lost Loudoun County by less points than we otherwise should have. That's a win for us. And I go, hold on a second time out number one ed gillespie actually beat mark warner in 2014 in the u.s senate race in loudon county number two they have a county-wide elected republican sheriff for example loudon county can and will vote republican under right circumstances and had that message been as effective as they thought it was going to be my my colleague, Wendy Gidaitis, who sits directly next to me, she's my seatmate on the House floor, would not have made it through this election.

She won. She found a way to win. All of our other Democratic incumbents and the Democratic open seat for part of Loudoun that we had as well, all of them are returning. And they're returning with healthy, significant margins of victory, in some cases with more than 60% of the vote, had that issue out of Loudoun been as pertinent as it was made out to be in terms of voters, we would have felt it in the House of Delegates. It would have hit our people at the most local level because we would have been the people most directly associated with the community in that case. So that's the first thing I'm going to say is that was the margin down compared to 2020? Yes.

But did it do as much damage as they think it did in Loudoun? No. What it did do was it gave them a straw man and it gave them a boogeyman that they could take to other areas of the Commonwealth and have something to run against. Don't you not like this one thing here? Don't you not like this issue that we're manufacturing and that we're going to create faux outrage over to make sure that you're really mad about? Because even though the people in Loudoun County didn't agree with our assessment on this, we still think that other people in other

areas are going to see the news coverage of it. And they're going to say, oh my God, this is what Democrats want to do everywhere. Well, here's the thing with our, you know, basically protecting trans kids in schools, you know, bills that we passed that were passed with bipartisan support in both chambers, by the way, they've been adopted now by school boards all across the Commonwealth.

They're actually mandated to have to adopt them, but some of them haven't. The loud ones doing the same thing as these other ones, but because of its proximity to Washington, D.C., to having what was seen as a suburban battleground area, it became a political hot point, which when you're dealing with education and your kids and everything like that, when you overly politicize that, you're creating a hostile work environment for people to actually even go to school and to go to school board meetings then.

That's not okay. And so long story short with this is I think that what we saw out of Loudoun, when they made that the central message of their campaign, maybe they got something out of it statewide, but it did not affect down ballot in terms of our House of Delegates candidates, which means that they're going to have to have a new message going into 2022. Well, that's fascinating. And once again, congratulations on your victory. And thank you for sharing this perspective with us. I know a lot of candidates around the country follow your model of how you were able to win in this very tough political environment. Well, thank you very kindly. And just the last thing that I just want to mention on this, if you really focus, and this is my message to democrats across the country yes yes you can focus on pro-inclusion pro-equality initiatives in virginia house delegates we've you know the

general assembly and our democratic majority last two years we adopted two dozen pro-lgbtq equality bills not one person at the door threw that back in my face everywhere I was going. And we won by a larger margin this year than I did in my first race in 2017 against a 26-year incumbent. So I'm saying that, yes, you can be pro-inclusion and equality. And as you're doing that, your primary message that you're bringing out to people has to be concrete issues, such as concrete, such as infrastructure. You have to talk about issues that directly affect people's lives. And as you're doing this, you've got to be of the mindset here that if you can talk to people about what is affecting their quality of life, whether it's, you know, in my case, fixing roads, bringing out more mass transit, ensuring more of my constituents have health insurance, making sure that above ground transmission lines in Gainesville and Haymarket aren't affecting people's property values, local environment, as well as all the other sort of stuff that we deal with.

We voted to increase the standard deduction by 50%. These are things that we should have put a lot of money behind, a lot of attention, a lot of focal point emphasis and saying that this is what we were really good at. And there comes a point where if you don't emphasize that properly, even when it's been an emphasis of your work in the legislature, people aren't going to feel it. And you got to let people know that you've done the right thing and that you've done it consistently. There's one thing that polling will show. Polling will always say abortion is what motivates people and X, Y, and Z. And that's a very important issue. Reproductive healthcare is very important. As a trans woman, my entire transition is dependent on reproductive freedom. At the same time,

you got to get people feeling it in their pocketbook. You got to get people feeling it in terms of their healthcare and all these other day-to-day quality of life issues. Because if you don't, you're not going to inspire them to vote for your positive message as much as you're just trying to get them to be opposed to the other side. That's not healthy. And this is what we got to do. That is incredibly insightful. And as I said, I hope everyone follows that advice. Thank you so much for joining us and we will talk to you again soon. Thank you.

Thanks to Danica Rome for joining us. Everyone enjoy your weekend and we'll talk to you next week. Bye everyone. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our senior producer is Andy Gardner Bernstein. Our producer is Haley Muse, and Olivia Martinez is our associate producer.

It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Somanator, Sandy Gerard, Hallie Kiefer, Madison Holman, and Justine Howe for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Milo Kim, and Amelia Montooth. Our episodes are uploaded as videos at youtube.com slash crooked media.