Pod Save America - “Trump’s Covid confessions.”

Episode Date: September 10, 2020

Trump confesses to Bob Woodward that he intentionally downplayed the severity of the virus for the last six months, the western United States is on fire because of climate change, and dueling advertising strategies tell us how the Trump and Biden campaigns see the race. Then Equis Research co-founder Carlos Odio talks to Jon about the Latino vote in Florida.

This is a life-changing election. This will determine what America is going to look like for a long, long time. This is the most important election in the history of our country. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's pod, I talk to Carlos Odio of Equis Research, who has done the most extensive research of any pollster on the Latino vote, especially the Latino vote in Florida. Before that, we'll talk about Trump's taped confession to Bob Woodward that he intentionally downplayed the threat of COVID-19,

the climate crisis that's currently engulfing the West Coast in flames, and what the Biden and Trump advertising strategies tell us about the state of the race. Few reminders. Don't miss this week's episode of Pod Save the World, where Tommy and Ben talk about Donald Trump denigrating American service members, the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, new trouble for Brexit, and another controversy involving Disney's new Milan film. Also, if you're not already subscribed to Hysteria or haven't had time to listen in a while, Aaron, Alyssa, and the crew have put out some truly outstanding episodes in recent weeks

with guests like Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley and legendary actress and activist Jane Fonda. So go check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Finally, we have eight weekends left between now and the election. So please adopt a state, sign up for those volunteer shifts and phone banks, and make sure you do not wake up on November 4th wishing you had done more. If you adopt a battleground state at votesaveamerica.com slash adopt, the Vote Save America team will send you everything

you can do between now and the election. You'll be plenty busy every time you're freaking out. Go to Vote Save America. There's a lot to do there where we'll always have something to do for you.

Can I ask a follow-up question? Sure. What's a weekend? Just is it any randomly chosen two days in a week in which you are also in your house can be your weekend get up at the same time do most of the same things read the same tweets you know it's all the same all right let's get to the news on wednesday we learned that in a series of taped

conversations with journalist bob woodward between february and july donald trump admitted that he intentionally downplayed the threat of covet 19 even though he knew all along that the virus was deadlier than the flu and dangerous to children. That is, of course, not what he's been saying publicly for the last six months. Here's a quick ad from the Lincoln Project that plays Trump's comments to Woodward back to back with what he was saying about the virus publicly at the time. Let's take a listen. This is more deadly. This is 5% versus 1% and less than 1%. So this is deadly stuff. We show cases 99% of which are totally harmless. Not just old people, to plenty of young people. Young people are almost immune to this disease. It's also more deadly than your, you know, even your strenuous flus. We lose thousands and

thousands of people a year to the flu. We don't turn the country off. I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down. So these comments came as part of 18 separate interviews that Trump gave Woodward for his new book, Rage. We'll go through some of the other very normal things Trump said to Woodward in a bit. But to me, the comments about the pandemic are the most damning because the president knowingly lied to the public about the severity of a virus that has now killed almost 200,000 Americans. What was your reaction to these comments?

It's like, I know we're not supposed to be shocked anymore by anything, but this is pretty damn shocking. It is, I mean, on every level of it, but you have the president on tape admitting that he lied to the American people and people died as a result. I mean, it's not, this is not anonymous sources tell sketchy former now disillusioned Trump aide something. This is Donald Trump on tape saying that he downplayed the virus and lied to the American people. It is, I mean, it is open and shut and is incredibly disturbing and the consequences are devastating. I think, you know, I see a lot of people say, of course, Trump lied. We've all known that. But I think there was always a question as to whether

Trump was just lying to himself too about the virus as if he was just actually thinking it's not that bad. I'm going to buy a bunch of conspiracies that, you know, wackos on Fox tell me, and it's actually going to be fine. And he's in a bubble. No, that none of that is true. He knew, he knew how deadly it was. He knew it was harmful to children as he's talking about opening fucking schools and how children are almost immune. It is so damning because the president of the United States, like by lying to people, by concealing information that he knew, it absolutely killed. It killed people. Right. Like we would not have believed Trump either way anyway, because we don't you know, most Democrats don't don't believe Donald Trump after four years. A lot of independents don't believe Trump after four years.

Think about his own supporters. Right. Who listen to this guy, who believe this guy. And you turn on your TV and Donald Trump tells you not to worry about this virus. Donald Trump tells you that it's not that deadly, that it's no worse than the flu. Donald Trump tells you that it's not that deadly, that it's no worse than the flu. Donald Trump tells you that it can't kill children. And then you go make decisions in your own life based on what this guy told you, who you've trusted for the last several years. And then you contract a virus and you die. That is what we're talking about here. It's just it is as say that because everyone, even Trump supporters, some of Trump supporters, take what he says with a grain of salt. But they sort of see him as – and I think a lot of the press sees him this way, which is just like he is dishonest, but he is sincere. The words he's saying are inaccurate and they're lies, but they bespeak what he's actually feeling. He does not want to believe that this is bad, so he has convinced himself that it's not. So he is saying things. But what we're actually finding here is he undertook a very specific and deliberate strategy

to lie in order to minimize the political and economic impact of what would happen. Keep the stock market up, keep his poll numbers up. And if people, including children, die, so be it, because he's so unable to think through the consequences to anyone other than himself in any situation that you end up in this place. I mean, it is the most stunning thing our president has ever said on tape. And I include the Watergate tapes in that. It also this is sort of a smaller thing, but it blows up his entire China defense where he said that China lied to us. China did this. We didn't know how bad it was. But he knew.

Of course he knew how bad it was. He can't blame China for this. He was sitting right there knowing how deadly it was. And he just decided to downplay it because as he said, he likes to downplay it. So in response to all this, Trump defended his comments by telling White House reporters on Wednesday, quote, I don't want to create panic. Is that what it was? It was, it was, he didn't want to create panic over the easily transmissible airborne virus that's deadlier than the few. Don't panic about that.

You know, the old saying, don't say airborne in a crowded theater. Like it's, it is insane because this is not like, there are things you say that could create panic. Like you could go out there and say, everyone's going to die. But what he's instead doing is he's, he is refusing to give people the information they could use to save their life. Right. He's not it's not that he's either saying fire quietly or loudly in a crowded theater. He's not saying fire at all. In fact, he's telling everyone everything's totally going to be fine and people died as a result. It's also I mean, yeah, Donald Trump, legendary for not wanting to cause panic. The guy who tells you every day that Joe Biden and his Antifa army are like coming to destroy the suburbs. This is this is not someone who wants to cause panic. Also, you know, Greg Sargent at The Washington Post pointed this out today. The reason that Trump didn't want to cause panic. And we know this from reporting and from what he said before,

he didn't want to panic the stock market. Yeah. And he didn't want to hurt his reelection chances. That's as usual. All of Trump's excuses are not about everyone else. It's about himself. It's the same thing he said at the beginning of the pandemic when he said, I don't want to test that much because the numbers make us look bad. panic the stock market, and that it would hurt his reelection chances. And he thought that even though it was deadly, maybe he could just wish the whole thing away and he could skate by without being politically damaged. That is exactly what happened. Donald Trump has now said this on tape. There is reporting that backs it up from a million different sources. He said it a million times. That is the story of this whole pandemic. A pandemic hit, the guy was worried it would hurt his reelection chances. So he lied about it. Didn't matter if people died as a result. That's it. That's the story. I mean, the thing about it is, it is not just that he is an incredibly selfish narcissist. This is also evidence he's an incredibly stupid,

selfish narcissist. Because if you're viewing this with the prism of, stupid, selfish narcissist. Because if you're viewing this with the prism of, how can I get through this pandemic and still get reelected? There's only one answer to that, which is solve the problem, manage it, deal with it, minimize the human toll, minimize the impact on the economy by actually solving the problem. But instead, he decided in the most short-term, fail the marshmallow test way possible, he decided to take a short-term benefit while making the pandemic worse and therefore his reelection less likely. I mean, it is just, he's so dumb.

That's what I'm saying. Like, obviously it sounds quite evil what he said, and it is, but let's not forget how fucking stupid he is. Because even if he was solely focused on his own reelection and didn't give a shit about the country, the best way to ensure his reelection would have been to fix the virus and do the hard things. And we've talked about this before. You can lay out an entire scenario where everyone rallies around Donald Trump, even, you know, we still hate him. We still wouldn't vote for him. But like a lot of people in this country, swing voters, independent voters, all kinds of people would say,

you know what, this guy's been an asshole for the last couple of years, but he's trying really hard. He's doing everything necessary for this virus. You can see it with Democratic and Republican governors across the country, world leaders. But it's actually even worse than that because like there is this mythical hypothetical situation where Trump rose to the occasion for the first time and only time in his entire life and like did a pretty good job, which he's never done on literally anything at any point.

Business, entertainment, politics, never done a good job on anything. But there's a world where he just does the bare fucking minimum. Right. Tells people to wear masks, right? Doesn't side with armed protesters demanding the opening of Subway sandwich restaurants. Like he just has the bare minimum, but he can't even do that. He actually has to actively go out, as he was doing on Twitter today, and try to make sure that more people get sick and die. Right? Like it is just so, like when you put it in the, like we all know this,

we don't need Bob Woodward to tell us this, but it is just once again another reminder of what a devastatingly stupid and dangerous person we have in charge of this country at perhaps the most dangerous time in nearly a century. So Joe Biden responded to the Woodward revelations during a campaign event in Michigan. Here's a clip of Biden. How many schools aren't open right now?

How many kids are starting a new school year the same way they ended the last one, at home? How many parents feel abandoned and overwhelmed? How many frontline workers are exhausted and pushed to their limits? And how many families are missing loved ones at their dinner table tonight because of his failures? It's beyond despicable. It's a dereliction of duty. It's a disgrace. I thought it was a pretty strong response. I think they also turned around a digital ad pretty quickly. What else do you think the Biden campaign should do with these

comments? This is going to be one of the situations where the Biden and his campaign have to do less to keep this in the news because Bob Woodburn is on a six day high profile news story. I mean, the thing that's amazing is this book doesn't even come out till Tuesday. So it's like we're getting nearly a week of this. And what I think is good, like I think tactically seems like they're doing the right things. They put this topper at the front end of his remarks on the economy in Michigan, recognizing that he probably wasn't going to break through on his plan to stop offshoring on the day the Woodward revelations came out. They turned around a digital ad, which is important to make sure that people who did not see this news in its organic form will see it. But also what I like about it is the tone, which is I think Biden is perhaps at his best

when he demonstrates righteous anger on behalf of the American people. And that's what that was, right? It is the flip side of Biden's tremendous decency and empathy is that he can get angry on behalf of others. And that's what that felt like. And I thought it was very, very strong. My first thought when I saw that was that is the exact tone that Biden should have in the debates, because Donald Trump is going to try to bait Joe Biden in these debates. And I'm sure that Trump people know that in debates, at least in the primary debates,

Biden's weakness, I would say, is that he could get very defensive and angry. But he gets defensive and angry about his own record, about attacks on his own record, about attacks on himself. There's a lot that Donald Trump can do to make you angry. You can either be defensive, you can be angry at Donald Trump. I think either being angry at Trump or being angry that he attacked Biden's own record is not good for Biden. I think Biden being angry on behalf of the American people because of what Donald Trump has done for the last four years is exactly the right tone for him to take. I do. You know, look, there was this whole debate that we had last week over the Atlantic story about Trump's comments disparaging the troops. And people said, will it really matter? How much should people focus on it? We can go back and forth about that. This is different because this is now the territory that Donald Trump doesn't want to be playing on, which is his response to the pandemic. concern of voters right now. And people think that he badly, badly mismanaged it. And so keeping the

pandemic in the news and keeping Donald Trump's response to it in the news is like, I don't make a lot of predictions here, but it's not great for Trump. The Trump campaign isn't happy about doing this. And I saw this, like I watched the stupid fucking Hannity interview of Donald Trump last night, which is like a waste of time. But I was watching Fox News for like 10 to 15 minutes before that. And it was notable that Hannity had to spend his entire show on the pandemic and not on cities burning and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the radical left and all this other stuff. Like even on Fox, they had to spend an entire day talking about this, which with 54 days left of the election is not good for Donald Trump. Yeah. I mean, this is one of the things that people are not going to

miss. You're right. It has the potential to be like we don't make predictions, has potential to be tremendously damaging in a couple of respects. One is another seven to 10 days where Trump is not making the case for himself or a specific case against Biden. He's just on the defense of flailing about, sending out random tweets. But it also undermines the last remaining bit of credibility he could have possibly had on this, which is he'd been able to convince some people that, not his base, but some swing voters, that no one could have known about this, right? This is an act of God. It is something that happened to him, right? And so he just should not get full responsibility for it. But now you have him on tape admitting he knew about it, undermining his last remaining defense of his hand on Leavitt. And so it is definitely not good for him. How bad it is for him, obviously, we'll know the results of that in eight weekends or so you say. I think the most effective way to use it is not to say, oh, look,

Trump lied about something in the past. It is to push it forward. We know he is continually lying to us to this day about the severity of the pandemic. And therefore, we cannot trust this man to lead us as we are still grappling with the pandemic, right? He is, like you just said, he's on Twitter today saying open schools, right? Because it's not a big deal. And like kids aren't going to get it. Kids aren't we know that's a lie now. He there was this whole fucking debate where Kamala Harris said, yeah, of course, I'm not going to take Donald Trump's word for it when it comes to a vaccine. I want to make sure the scientists say the vaccine is safe.

And some people were saying, oh, she shouldn't have said that. It looks like she's, you know, not just Trump people. Like I heard other pundits say, it's fucking ridiculous. Donald Trump, we just caught him on tape lying about the severity of the pandemic.

And we're just going to take his word for it on a vaccine. That's crazy. That is crazy. So I do think like, again, it's not just about Trump is bad and Trump has a bad character, right? Like, I don't think that's enough to win the election. I think it's Trump's character and his lies have consequences. And they didn't just have consequences in the past. They have, they will have consequences going forward. And if you elect this man, he will lie to you again, and it will cause

people to die. That is what's at stake in the election. Yeah, I mostly agree with that. I obviously don't think the argument should be Trump is a bad person. Everyone knows Trump's a bad person. That is fully understood and manifestly obvious for everyone. I think it is less about honesty than it is about credibility. And I think there are two about honesty than it is about credibility. I think there are two different things, which is people expect politicians to not tell the truth. Even people like Joe Biden, who we're seeing is much more trusted than Trump, but there's this sort of view that most politicians, at minimum, put spin on the ball. In Trump, everyone sort of knows he lies. I think it is about the fact that someone who is unable and unwilling to even acknowledge

the problem, who is not strong enough to tell the American people what they know, what they need to hear, cannot solve the problem. And so it's as much about credibility and capacity. It is about the very specific bit of honesty. Does that make sense? It's also what you lie about. People expect politicians to lie about all kinds of stuff to save their own asses, life or death issues that could have consequences for people. You hope that your leaders don't lie about those kind of things. So it will not surprise any of you to learn that Trump's COVID confessions were not the only crazy shit that he or his staff told Woodward Trump said that he likes to refer to Obama who he called dumb

and overrated as quote Barack Hussein but wouldn't say that in front of him when Woodward asked if they both had a responsibility to better understand the anger and pain of black Americans Trump said no you really drank the kool-aidid, didn't you? Just listen to you. Wow. No, I don't feel like that at all. Trump went on at length about his chemistry with Kim Jong-un,

saying their relationship was like a, quote, fantasy film and that, quote, I'm the only one he smiles with. He also said, quote, my fucking generals are a bunch of pussies

and revealed the existence of a secret new weapons system that nobody in the world knows about, something he told a reporter on the record. Let's start with why in the hell did Trump and his staff agree to talk to Bob Woodward in the first place? As someone who's dealt with Bob Woodward books in the White House, about White Houses. I had dealt with Bob Woodward, and he did two books on Obama. I mostly dealt with the second one, which came out in 2012, which was

a really bad book that was very wrong about many things. But Bob Woodward is someone, put aside Trump for a second. Here's how you end up talking to Bob Woodward. So Bob Woodward came in to meet with Jay Carney, who was the press secretary at the time, and I, to announce to us that he was writing this book, which we knew because he had already been calling people all around town. But he comes into Jay's office. And Bob Woodward is really the most legendary world-famous journalist probably in decades, if not history. And he comes in. He sits on the – and he's very low-key, very personally low-key.

And he sits on the couch in Jay's very low key, very personally low key. And he sits on the couch in Jay's office and he makes some small talk. And then he opens up his like old beaten down leather briefcase. And he takes out a series of White House memos, stamped confidential, and just lays them out on the coffee table. And he's like, you know, I've come into, I've, I've come into possession of these and I've read them and they're really interesting. And it's really some stuff in here that, you know, I just, I don't know. I'm sure there's another side to the story of these things that you, I don't know, maybe you want to share, maybe you

don't. It's really, it's up to you guys really. And then he, then, you know, White House aides who have access and have top secret clearance have a safe in their office that you keep your top secret material. And he gestures to Jay's safe. And he's like, I'm sure you have some things in there that might clear up some of the questions I have, you know. But if you want to show them to me, you show them to me. It's up to you. I've got a lot of stuff. A lot of people have been telling me things that are interesting.

You know, it's just how we do it. And then he left. It's like, I mean, you, you just, you like people like we made a decision as a white house, as every other one has, is that you would manage your cooperation the best you could, where you would have, you designate some people who would talk to Woodward and we would have, and we would record those conversations. So we would have our own evidence of those and the, and then Obama would do an interview at the end. But one thing we did not do was just have the have obama randomly dial

up woodward when he felt like it and just talk to him without any staff present i was gonna say like yeah i guess it's one thing to cooperate when people have already leaked to the reporter but um you know allowing 18 separate interviews and a bunch of staff to talk to him i heard i heard jared thought it was a great idea. So that's, that's pretty good. Well, that, I mean, just so many parts about this,

which is just imagine Trump. Trump is just like, you know what? I see you, Richard Nixon. And I'm just going to cut out the middleman and just call Woodward directly. Like why make him work for it? That's a sort of efficiency you get when you put a businessman in charge of the government.

Well, apparently, I mean, I also read, I think someone reported this, that Trump was pissed about the last Woodward book, that his staff didn't let him talk to Woodward for the last one. And so he thought the way to make himself look better in this one was to talk more. So per usual, Trump thinks the answer is always more Trump and that he can fix it. And he's too fucking stupid to realize that the most damaging thing that's going to end up in the book is what comes from Trump himself, not the staff, even though there's plenty of damaging things from the staff as well. things from the staff as well. I mean, the trick is with this Woodward thing, and I don't know what you think of this, like, I think that the comments about the pandemic are by far the most damning, and will probably have the most lasting effect on the campaign, if at all. All the other stuff I just read, and we could spend like 10 minutes on each of those things I just read, and that's just a small portion of the revelations that are going to continue to spill out in the coming weeks.

Do you think there's maybe going to be too many revelations for people to really digest and make a difference? Yeah, I mean, yes, that's true with all things in the Trump era is there are too many revelations to focus on any individual one of them. But as we know from the polling and Trump's terrible approval ratings, the people are picking up the general sense that things aren't going great and he's not particularly good at his job. And this certainly amplifies that. I mean, I just want to go back to just how this all happened, which is no one got tricked here, right? Like there are examples in time where sort of maybe naive political aides or politicians befriend a reporter or an author, and they maybe sort of unburden themselves too much thinking that person is a friend.

Donald Trump is a criminal president dying up a person who is famous entirely for bringing down a criminal president. They made a movie about it. I believe it won Oscars. Like, no one got fucking surprised here. It's like, Fox, enter our hen house. We're just, come on in. It is just absolutely unbelievable that he did this. Like, he let down his guard with Bob Woodward, who is the actual definition of somebody who brings down a president. Bob Woodward, who is the actual definition of somebody who brings down a president. I think this is more proof that the Trump is incompetent and ineffective as president argument is more powerful than any other argument. Because even Hannity, Hannity last night, as he's talking to Trump on the phone, he's like, I would have told you not to sit down with bob woodward which is the closest

hannity gets to ever disagreeing with donald trump and of course you know then then hannity sets him up and and asks him the question like isn't it horrible what he did to you but trump had to swing at the pitch and be like well let me tell you why i did it you know i had to defend himself and then tucker carlson and his show went on this whole thing with like i can't believe donald trump sat down with him he blamed lindsey graham for Lindsey Graham for it because apparently Lindsey Graham brokered the first meeting between Woodward and Trump or whatever. So he was even getting shit on Fox purely for being too stupid to sit down with Woodward, which, you know, if that bleeds into the Fox universe, that's pretty bad for him. I will say that it is very it is very sad that Donald Trump's Peace Prize nomination was overshadowed by all this news yesterday. He woke up.

It was a big day for him. He was nominated by like a right-wing politician in Norway for the Nobel Peace Prize for the UAE deal. Thought it was a big deal. He retweeted people congratulating him being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize about a hundred times until the Woodward revelations came out. So tough day for Donald Trump. I'll tell you the big loser in this is it's actually me because I had been stressing for 24 hours about what we were going to talk about today. Because because of the weekend you got we did the Monday pop was on Tuesday. So there's basically 18 hours between when you

finish recording that podcast and I have to start writing the outline for the next one. So I got my ass up at the crack of dawn. I poured through everything I could possibly find to come up with some off-news topics that we could do. Did all of that, sent it to you. We went back and forth on it. Michael and Jordan weighed in. Then I went and did a meeting. I get a text from you that is like, this Woodward stuff is crazy. I'm like, what are you talking about? Yeah, that made our lives easier. That's for sure. Let's talk about a story that should be leading the national news coverage everywhere right now, which is the climate disaster that's currently hammering the West Coast of the United States, including here in California.

One of the worst wildfire seasons on record has already burned millions of acres across multiple states, destroyed entire communities, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and left at least seven dead, including a one-year-old. The fires have been caused by a mix of dry conditions, heavy winds, and record high temperatures that have also caused rolling blackouts here in California, leaving people without air conditioning in 100-degree weather last weekend. I will say, you know, in the last day or so, I do think media outlets are generally paying more attention to this crisis. There have been quite a few pictures and videos of the orange sky that you've been seeing over the Bay Area. But Charlie Worzel had a pretty great column in the New York Times this week about how little coverage climate change gets in general. He wrote, quote, since I moved west,

I've been preoccupied with this question. Would Americans feel a greater sense of alarm about our rapidly warming planet and the disastrous, perhaps irreversible effects of climate change if everyone could experience a fire season in person? Would cable news hosts devote the same nonstop coverage to fires as they do for hurricanes if more of their executives woke up each morning to falling ash? Would more lawmakers care if it looked like this outside the Capitol at high noon? What do you think about Charlie's argument? He's exactly right. I mean, I mean, Charlie, I will say Charlie is just a must read on all topics. And for all of the shit that the New York Times op-ed page rightfully gets about a lot of really bad writers they have had recently, Charlie Worzel and a bunch of Michelle Goldberg and Jamal Bowie are some really great ones. I think this, like I moved to California five years ago. It is stunning how much things have changed just in the five years since I've been here in terms of what fire season is like. We have been in our home much of August, not just not because of the pandemic, but because it's too smoky to go outside.

You know, like, like, my daughter thinks that smoky is a weather condition. When you ask her what the weather's like, she will say smoky. And it's, it's scary. I, you know, I had to evacuate last year, and because of a fire that was near our home. And, you know, I'm home alone with, I'm home alone with Kyla. I get an alert that there's a fire in our community. I look, I see it's a mile away. I look out my window and my neighbors are throwing suitcases in the back of their car to, uh, in speeding off. I mean, it is, if politicians and the media had to live with this, they would hopefully approach, the media certainly would approach climate change differently, and some politicians would. Yeah, I mean, look, I moved here in 2014. My parents moved here a

couple years after. They live in Thousand Oaks, which is just north of Los Angeles. Like, one of the scariest moments in my life is getting a call from my parents like in the middle of the night in 2018. The last time we had a really terrible fire season and them having to evacuate their house because the fire, the flames were next door. And, you know, driving down the 101 and seeing walls of flame and worrying they're going to get here in time and thinking that they were going to lose the house. And luckily, everything was okay. But it is, it's really scary when you actually experience it and you and you live here. And it is something that like, you know, the media in general tends to be New York centric and DC centric. And when there are problems in New York and DC, we hear about it a lot. And when there are problems in New York and DC, we hear about it a lot. And when there are problems elsewhere in the country, not just California, but especially,

you know, drought in the Midwest, the derecho that hit Iowa, like there are climate disasters all over the country that you just don't hear as much about because they don't happen in major media centers. And that's not a knock on those places in New York and D.C. That's just that's what has happened. But of course, it's not just that the media isn't spending enough time on wildfires and even hurricanes. It's that they're not explicitly linking these disasters to climate change. Tommy tweeted yesterday a Media Matters report that showed in the month of August, just 4% of the 114 wildfire segments aired by ABC, CBS, and NBC mentioned climate change. Why do you think the media has such a tough time making the link explicit? Well, part of it is already the geographic location points you

mentioned. Because DC and New York are not immune to climate change, like Hurricane Sandy hit eight years ago. Hurricane Sandy, yeah. They deal with hurricanes. But hurricane season is a period of time where you worry about hurricanes and maybe one or two hit you, hit your area at that time. Fire season is a period where things are on fire for sometimes months at a time, right? And it's just if hurricane season meant you were being hit by a hurricane every day or being worried about being hit by a specific hurricane every single day, that would be very different. The other thing is we dealt with this in the White House.

This was one of your great frustrations was if you try to say that a specific weather event was tied to climate change, the fact checkers would ding you. You could say that the increase in frequency of storms like this or fires like this is related to climate change, but you could not draw a causal link between this event and climate change, or someone would say that that was wrong, you shouldn't do that. And that isn't technically true, right? Like, one of these fires was started by a malfunctioning gender reveal party device or something that was talked about here. But the conditions by which that fire happened are exactly a result of climate change. And it is fucking absurd to not put in that context. both sides an open and shut issue like climate change. Because the Republican Party has decided to advocate all responsibility and seriousness and pretend that climate change is not happening,

it is seen as partisan by some media outlets to talk about climate change, that you were somehow picking a side on this issue. And that is just so dangerously absurd. And when we talk, we joke about how both sides punditry will kill us. Like this is one case where that is not actually a joke. This this is the consequence of journalism that prizes balance over truth. This is it. And the Republican Party knows this. They can be as radical as they want. In their opinion, their stance on an issue is still held up as a legitimate side of the

debate. as a legitimate side of the debate. And so therefore, if the media says that the severity and frequency of fires and droughts and hurricanes is linked to climate change, which is absolutely true, and that's the sort of nuance that you were talking about, it's both the severity of these storms and these disasters and their frequency is directly linked to climate change by science. If you say that, you are siding with the Democrats. You are siding with the Democrats. And the worst thing in the world, worst thing in the world is to be accused of liberal bias.

I will say, I think that over the last couple of years, I mean, that Media Matters study is pretty damning. I do think there are more individual reporters, especially once you get past like network news. Yeah. Print is better than TV here. Yeah. Print is better than TV that will be honest about this. It's starting to turn a little bit, especially younger reporters will recognize this. So it's getting better, but I think it's still, it's a long way to go and we don't have any more time. That's the problem. We have no more time. Which brings us to what both candidates and parties would do about climate change. Trump, of course, believes it's a hoax, but he did go to Florida this week and declare himself a great environmentalist after signing an order to ban oil drilling off the coast of a state he needs to win in November. opening up more land to oil and gas drilling, both on and offshore, allowing companies to release more carbon emissions, in fact, all the carbon emissions they want, and preventing states

like California from setting tougher fuel economy standards for cars. Not only does Trump and the federal government not want to do anything about climate change, they actually want to prevent states who want to do something about climate change from doing it. Joe Biden, on the other hand, released a $2 trillion climate plan in July that would make America's electricity 100% carbon free by 2035 and zero emissions across the entire economy by 2050. Do you think Biden should talk more about his climate plan and Trump's climate record? And do you think that would break through? I do. I mean, look, there are a million things happening at one time. We're in a pandemic.

We are in an economic recession. We have a president who is doing unprecedentedly dangerous things every single day. So it's hard to be like, focus on this one particular issue. But I do think that you can very much tie Trump's failure to prepare for and respond to the pandemic with the Republican Party's approach to climate change, which is we are going to ignore science, we are going to deny reality, and we're going to focus on short-term economic gains over the long-term health of the American people and the planet. And so I do think you can make that tie there. There is an ad by a group called Climate Power 2020 that we talked about on Campaign Experts React a few weeks ago that very cleverly ties together climate change and the coronavirus.

I think one of the reasons to talk about climate is not that I can point you to a specific poll that it matters. Intuitively, I believe that young voters care a lot about this, but the fate of the fucking planet is on the line here. Right. And I do think for, you know, voters who look at this and they're like, oh, is it, you know, Republicans and Democrats, is there any real difference? Shades of gray. This is the issue, right? This is the issue where the differences are crystal fucking clear. You have Joe Biden and the Democrats want to save the planet. Donald Trump and the Republicans want to burn it to the ground so that a bunch of rich old people can get richer. That's what this is. This is not our plan versus their plan. This is not liberal versus conservative. It's not

government solution versus market solution. It is save the planet, kill the planet, full stop. That is it. That is what is at stake in this election. That is undergirds everything else is that this is like when we talk about this being the most important election in American history, there's ways to talk about in terms of the future of our democracy, the concerns about having an authoritarian for four more years, what it'll say about our institutions if Trump is reelected. The real reason is we don't have four more years to waste on the problem of climate change. And maybe Joe Biden's plan is not exactly what you want. You want it to be as progressive and bold as it is, and it is quite progressive and bold. You want it to be bigger or bolder or closer to the Green New Deal or whatever it is. You're not going to do any of those things if Donald Trump

gets reelected, right? This is the only, if you care about this planet, if you want to ensure that our children and grandchildren have something resembling a normal life on this planet, we have to elect the Democrats in the White House and the Senate and everywhere else. That is the only choice. Everything else is noise. And if we do that, they have to get something done. They have to pass something significant. And if we do that, they have to get something done. They have to pass something

significant. And you're right, we should push for the boldest, most ambitious plan possible, a Green New Deal. That'd be my preference. But like something has to get the federal government has to pour billions and billions of dollars, probably trillions, definitely trillions, into the economy to transition this economy from a fossil fuel economy to a clean energy economy. We have to do it. We have to start doing it. And we can't even let the perfect be the enemy of good. States have to start doing it. The federal government has to start doing it. And you're right. We don't do it in the next couple of years. We're fucked. This is what happened. We are now experiencing one degree Celsius of warming. The consensus is

at the very least, we're going to hit two. So this, what we're experiencing now with these fires and these hurricanes, this is like baseline now. We're headed for something worse, almost definitely, if we don't start reversing this now. And I do think like, you know, part of the problem with getting people to care about climate change is it's always seemed like something far off in the distance. And so there's always a lot of rhetoric around like saving the planet for future generations. It's this generation now. We're here. This is it. There's no more future. And people can, there are a lot of parallels to the pandemic response to this and everything that

Trump and the Republicans did to fuck up the pandemic response they've been doing on climate for a long time. Only the effects will be just infinitely greater on climate, right? It's all short-termism. It's like, let's just get through now. Let's, you know, get quick profits today, not worry about this problem, not do something that seems like it's going to be hard to solve a problem, care only about ourselves and our rich friends, and we'll just get through this. That's their philosophy. It was their philosophy on pandemic. It's their philosophy on climate change. And we have to say that we want action and we want action now and we're willing to fight for it pretty hard.

And to your point about the politics, that group you mentioned, Climate Power 2020, that did the ad, they recently did a poll with Leave Conservation of Voters in Pennsylvania, swing state Pennsylvania, found that 83% of voters said that climate change is a serious problem and 70% of them hold unfavorable views of politicians who deny climate change is a threat.

73% of Pennsylvania voters support the government taking bold action to combat climate change. 74% support Biden's goal of 100% clean electricity by 2035. 74% support Biden's goal of 100% clean electricity by 2035. Even when you put a $2 trillion price tag on the plan, in Pennsylvania, 71% of voters support that plan. That's pretty, I mean, you know, you think about Pennsylvania and people talk about fracking and they talk about coal and they talk about, and you wouldn't assume that it's a state, especially since it's a swing state, that would be where voters would be in favor of really bold climate action. But the research doesn't show that. One more point on this to tie the whole thing up with a bow, which is this is actually just like

the Woodward revelation about Trump knowing the virus was deadly. Even Donald Trump knows that climate change is real. Every one of these Republicans who denies it, calls it a hoax, they know it's fucking real. They absolutely know it's real. But they cannot say that. They will not say it because their only path to political success depends on massive political advertising campaigns paid for by the Koch brothers and other people in the fossil fuel industry. Their silence has been bought on this. They all know it's real. They are not – it is really truly one of those morally reprehensible things that American

politicians have done in our history, but they are lying about the fate of our planet for political power and political donations full stop. If they would all just dial up Woodward like Trump did with stupidly under the advice of Jared Kushner, then we would all know this truth as well. This is not a question of they can't figure it out. They don't know. We just disagree on science.

That is bullshit. They know. Marco Rubio lives in a part of the country that is likely to not exist in a few decades because it's going to be covered by water. Yet he runs around pretending like climate change is not real because he needs the Koch brothers to give him money. But it's not, I think it's not just the donations. It is their philosophy of government at its core, which is that they don't give a shit about anyone but

themselves. They refuse to make any kind of self-sacrifice. They refuse to believe that they have any obligation to other human beings. They don't want to wear a fucking mask. You don't want to pay any more in taxes. You don't want to sort of buy a fuel-efficient car. You don't want to tell businesses that they have to not throw pollution in the air. You don't want to tell anyone to do anything that might be uncomfortable, that might involve sacrifice for the greater good. You are in it for yourself through to the end. That is the Republican governing philosophy to its core. It is now Trumpism. Trumpism is just what the conservative philosophy about government has been taken to its logical extreme. I don't give a shit about anyone but me. But that is definitely true. But you can it's not. Let's remember that 12 years ago,

the primary climate action bill in the Senate was bipartisan. And one of the things that has changed over that time, the Republican Party has become more radical for a whole host of reasons. But one very fundamental thing that's changed is that time, the Republican Party has become more radical for a whole host of reasons. But one very fundamental thing that's changed is the Citizens United decision, which dramatically increased the influence of the Koch brothers and others.

So yes, they are terrible. Their philosophy is what is good for me. It is all that matters. Everyone else has to sacrifice for my benefit. But here's a situation where they are sacrificing themselves.

Florida has had a Republican governor for every year of this century. to sacrifice for my benefit. But here's a situation where they are sacrificing themselves, right? Florida has had a Republican governor for every year of this century. Well, as usual, there's always a big dose of stupidity in with the self-defense. Yes, yes, yes. But I mean, this is Trump standing over John Kelly's son's grave

and turning to him and saying, what was in it for them? Why did they do this? Why did they sign up? Because he cannot understand why you would make a decision that did not immediately benefit you in some way. That is their philosophy. So speaking of campaigns, you can tell a lot about a campaign's overall strategy based on where they're running ads and what those ads are about, especially in the final months of an election. Per the Medium Buying Twitter account,

Biden is now running television ads this week in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and parts of Ohio. Trump is only up in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. So obviously the campaigns are adding and subtracting states every week, but what do the Trump and Biden spending decisions so far tell us about how they see the map? his campaign are doing, right? Just like, let's make sure we're not missing something that will lead to a Trump victory, right? We're just sort of like arrogantly looking at it and saying,

this can't possibly work. I spent a lot of time this morning looking at their spending decisions, trying to figure out what possible sense it could make. And ultimately, the only thing that matters is what is your path to 270 electoral votes? In order to try to figure out what Trump is doing, I went and I took the electoral map and I gave Trump every state that he is currently advertising in, including Minnesota and Wisconsin. But I gave Biden the battleground states that Biden was advertising in, but Trump was not. So that gives Biden Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan. And when you do it that way, Biden wins the race by about 30 electoral votes. Trump is 20 votes short of 270. No matter how I look at this, I cannot figure out

what Trump is trying to do because he is currently competing in states that do not get him to 270. I cannot possibly figure out what possible logic- Do you think it's just the news this week that they have a cash crunch? But even that doesn't make sense because the way you do that, like the the easiest Trump path to win reelection would be to hold on to everything he want, except Pennsylvania, Michigan. So you keep Wisconsin and Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia. Right. That gets you there. But he's not even doing that. Like I can't figure out why he's in Minnesota, not Arizona, right? That there's no sense that makes. It's very, it is very, very strange to figure out. Biden is simply advert, has a lot of money and he's advertising everywhere,

right? He is on, he's playing defense where defense needs to be played. He's playing offense where he, everywhere he can. Trump is, Trump's thing makes no sense to me. I will stipulate that I could be missing some other thing, but in general, it is best in a presidential campaign if you have a plan to get to 270, and Trump currently does not have that plan based on where he's spending his television advertising, at least. The thing I noticed a few things from all the data on this. Trump is not in Pennsylvania right now, but it looks like both campaigns have spent the most money in Pennsylvania and Florida, which I thought was interesting, though it's unclear why Trump would leave Pennsylvania, though he spent quite a bit of money there, more

so than almost any other state. I thought it's interesting that he's not seriously contesting any Clinton state except Minnesota. Like it doesn't seem like they, I thought that they put in ad buys for Nevada and New Hampshire, but they pulled them back or they've delayed them. So there's not real spending in Nevada and New Hampshire. So it seems like they're only seriously contesting Minnesota. It also, it looks like they're sort of giving up on Michigan because they have it first they pulled out for a week but now they've been out of there for a while although I guess he's back up this

week what do you think's going on there do you think he's do you think Michigan's bad enough for him that he's pulling out well so there's like it's I think it's worth looking at Trump's strategy in two periods right earlier this year where it appeared like he would have a massive fundraising advantage over Biden, then he would be spent a bunch of money in Pennsylvania, spend a bunch of money in Michigan, spend everywhere, press your advantage. But the fundamentals of the financials change. And so his strategy would then make sense that you've then moved to a defense-only strategy, right? Just hold, like, you won last time. Just hold most of the stuff you won. Trump does not need Pennsylvania or Michigan if he wins Wisconsin and Arizona, right? He does not need those states. And Pennsylvania is a pretty expensive state. Michigan is not a cheap state. Like, it makes sense in a resource

constrained environment that you would not advertise there. It doesn't explain Minnesota, and it doesn't explain not advertising in Arizona right now. You know, just context, like in 2012, incumbents usually just play defense, right? In 2012, we competed in no state that we did not win in 2008. We seeded some states. We won in 2008, like Indiana. Because we were in such danger of being outspent because of Citizens United and the Republican Super PACs, our campaign did not advertise in Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin, or Minnesota until the very end.

We were just held on to the exact states that would get us across the finish line. And you would think that's what Trump would be doing, but he's not doing that because he's spending money in Minnesota. It is very, very strange. Like I said, there might be a reason why he's doing this, but I cannot possibly figure out what it is. Have you drawn any conclusions about each campaign strategy from the content of the ads they've been running? It seems to me like most of the Biden ads are about Trump's failure on the pandemic, his divisiveness, especially on racial issues, and his plan to cut Social Security, with some messaging about Biden's character and his plans in each of those ads.

Trump's ads are mostly about Biden and Kamala as the puppets of the radical left. And there is one now where they're telling people that Biden would shut down the economy and ruin Trump's great economic comeback. But it doesn't seem like there's a lot of other ads out there. Yeah, the Biden strategy makes a lot of sense to me when you look at their ads. Biden is sort of two-tracking it. He is filling in the gaps on people's knowledge about Biden the person and Biden's plans. And then he is keeping the pressure on Trump on the coronavirus slash economy because they

are tied together and it's very important for Biden to keep them tied together. And then the third piece of it is that he is advertising very specifically to seniors. He has a senior track of advertising. If you look at not just what state he's advertising in, but the shows he's advertising on, my understanding is that it's very targeted toward seniors because that is a place where Biden is overperforming. And he does not want to give Trump any capacity to undermine that because that performance with seniors is what is giving him an advantage in

states like Florida and elsewhere. There's other stuff that's happening on the digital side that I think is more targeted at other groups. But from a broadcast television perspective, where I think we have the most visibility, that's Biden's strategy. Trump's strategy is quite conflicting right now. This new ad that went up today is his first ad that's mentioned coronavirus in months, I believe, that's been on broadcast television, and maybe indicating a sense that he's going to try to do something to fix, at least on the margins, his problem with the handling of the coronavirus. And it's interesting that the yes, that ad pivots to Biden shutdown comments and has a lot about the state of the economy under Trump before this.

But the big thing is that he's going to deliver a vaccine, right? He's trying to create some sort of permission structure for some number of voters who left him over the coronavirus to come back. I, you know, how that he's not telling one story in his ad. Usually good, you know, good advertising tells one broader story that's about why you're the right person, your opponent's the wrong person. His is conflicting about why Trump's right. It's conflicting about why Biden is wrong. He's got confusing narratives about Biden.

There still, it seems, to be trying to get their feet set on what their anti-Biden narrative looks like. So it remains confusing. I've been trying to do that for like six months now. Yeah. I mean, it's very, very hard because they don't know how, if your entire reason for being in politics is to protect more conservative white Americans from a changing America that is going to lead to more power for people of color, Joe Biden is a very tricky person to vilify in that situation. How much do you think it matters that Biden is outspending Trump on ads when we know that Clinton outspent Trump on ads in 2016 and ultimately lost? You know, when I talked to David Axelrod on the YouTube series, Axe made the point that there's

an inverse relationship between the value of television advertising and the amount of coverage a campaign gets. So a congressional race that gets almost no coverage, television advertising is very consequential. Statewide, less consequential than the congressional, but more consequential than a presidential race. That is particularly true in this presidential race where the coverage is all-consuming. There is nothing else we talk about anywhere on the news, anywhere else other than Trump. And so I think it matters. I would be concerned if Biden was being outspent because

Biden has work to do to define himself to voters, and it is harder for him to get coverage about himself separate from Trump. So the only way to get sort of an unfiltered bit of information to the public is by paying for it. But I don't think we should think that Biden will definitely win because he has more money, because ultimately, I think the advertising is only additive to the larger sort of media, social media conversation. Yeah, I think for Biden, it's about filling in the gaps, like you were saying. I mean, yesterday, when Biden was in Michigan, he was giving a speech about a new economic policy proposal that would stop giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas, which is something we've been, you and I have been on campaigns talking about since, I don't know,

2004 earlier. It's like, we know it is like the most common policy for a Democratic candidate. It is one of the highest polling policies ever. People do not like outsourcing. They do not like jobs getting shipped overseas for good reason. But anyway, that announcement was completely overshadowed by Trump's comments to Woodward, right? And Biden had to talk about Trump's comments to Woodward, as he should have. But that meant that the coverage probably got buried. I'm sure in some local press in Michigan, he got some coverage about it, but generally gets buried. And so I think that, and this, of course, happened to Hillary in 2016, Biden has a lot of plans and

policies. He's got a lot of work to do talking about who he is, what drives him. And I think only ads, only a paid media campaign can do that for him because he's probably not going to be able to break through news coverage with all of that. He may be able to do it in the debates. He should do it in the debates. But he'll probably need paid advertising to fill in the gap for people about who he is and what policies he has. That's right. And the other thing that Biden is doing with his ads, and you mentioned it in reference to the digital ad on the Woodward stuff, there was a digital ad we talked about last week on the Atlantic story, which is Biden is now, his campaign is now very

specifically and strategically taking things, taking information that they believe would be helpful for people to support Biden or hurtful to Trump. And they're paying to put it in front of voters because they recognize that in this media environment, particularly the persuadable voter group that's going to decide this election, who engage less with political news than certainly we do, may not see it unless you pay to put it

in their Facebook feed or on their phone or on their television. And they are now doing that very quickly. And that is something that Trump does not need to do because Trump can get his attacks on Biden covered. He can get his self-promotion covered. That is just harder for Biden to do with the challenger running against someone like Trump. That's right.

All right. When we come back, I will talk to the co-founder of Eckes Research, Carlos Odio. Joining us today, the co-founder of Ekis Research, a firm that focuses on understanding the Latino vote, Carlos Odio. Carlos, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Glad to be on. Can you start by telling us a little bit about what Ekis does and what the challenges are in general with accurately polling Latino Americans? Yeah. So it's a great question. You know, Equis, we started at Stephanie Valencia, my co-founder and I, you know, we'd worked, we'd met on the Obama campaign in 08. We've been talking about these issues for a very long time. There's just these gaps in understanding the

Latino vote. Kind of our concept, how do you apply all of the different sophistication tools, innovation that have been applied to understanding, say, the suburban white woman and apply it to Latino vote. And that's where we come out at both from a research perspective, digital testing, digital innovation on different fronts. And for polling, you know, it's, you know, the challenge is always, it is a harder to reach population. You can't just reach it through one-on-one mode. So if you don't do landlines, you're missing out on older Cuban voters in Florida. phone calls, you're missing out on a very different Spanish speaker. If you don't get large enough sample sizes, then you're not going to be able to wait on all the different variables that affect

the vote from things that normally don't get asked in mainstream polling, like what is your country of origin, right? What generation are you in the country? Are your parents immigrants? These are not questions you normally ask in a general poll that do affect the accuracy of Latino numbers. So I want to dig into Florida specifically, but I know you guys have also done polling across the battlegrounds. What are some of the big issues and concerns driving the decision about whether to vote and who to vote for in the Latino community? Yeah, what you see in the Latino community, right, obviously there is a large amount of anti-Trump sentiment. And it has been a long time coming that the Republican Party leaned into nativism and lost large chunks of Latino vote that were probably available to him at some point, right? You look at the Bush numbers that he got in 2004. What we are seeing today is you have a lot of folks who are anti-Trump, but who have, for one reason or another, felt on the sidelines of the political process, felt left out of it, aren't sure that their vote is going to make a difference, and so want to understand and feel confident in their vote. I think there's this idea that sets in certain voters that they need a PhD in political science in order to be able to cast a vote, or they need to be MSNBC or Pod Save America nerds in order to be able to weigh in confidently.

And so a big part of it's just helping folks feel like they have the confidence to make a choice here. What are some of the messaging that works on voters like that who aren't sure whether they're going to actually cast a ballot? Have you noticed anything that sort of gives people the confidence that their vote's going to count or lets them know that their vote will really make a difference? Yeah. And, you know, what's fascinating here is it's not actually rocket science, right? So much of it's just communicating any message whatsoever, right? Like voters just want to feel, voters need to understand that their vote's going to be decisive and important. And part of that is the signaling of campaigns and organizations who via, you know, inundating them with mail or digital ads or whatever else

are signaling to them, you are important, right? It's not just saying it, it's communicated through all of these contexts and touches. The message itself, you know, message matters, but is secondary to just freaking doing it, doing it at scale and the messengers as well. Right. But, you know, we do see it's just, it's in this, in this particular presidential race, it's people just want to know about Joe Biden. Right. They just want to know like his bio, his achievements, and especially what he's going to do on COVID, on healthcare, on college affordability, go on down the list. People just want to be educated to some extent. Have you noticed any significant shifts in opinions about Trump or the Democratic Party since 2016? Yeah, Trump himself, it's, it's, 2016 was such an outlier, right? I mean, the moment the guy comes down the escalator,

I think every Latino and Black voter in the country was like, okay, we know what this guy's about, right? And so a lot of voters just fled him immediately. Whereas a lot of white voters were still like, let's play wait and see, right? And a lot of non-college white voters were excited about him. You didn't see the same thing among Latino and black voters. He didn't really try very hard in courting Latino vote. And so I think people are a little freaked out by the fact that post 2016, you do see some growth in the Trump vote. Not massive growth, right? It's been fairly stable, but some growth. And a lot of that's just normalization, right? A lot of that's just that he hit historically low numbers in 2016. Now he is being normalized by things like Fox News and very proactive sort of right wing media ecosystems online.

Right. If you're getting your news from YouTube, you have a very different idea of who Donald Trump is than if you are, you know, reading a newspaper every day. Do you see sort of that shift, maybe just a slight preference for Trump or normalization, as you called it, among specific subsets of the Latino community, different demographics, like, or is it just sort of spread out evenly? You know, it's totally different by state. As with many things with the Latino vote, it's just every state is its own unique beast. I know we say that all the time. Like every time you go into a state in a campaign, they say, oh, our state's different. With the Latino vote, like there really are meaningful differences.

You know, Florida is the obvious example, but there's huge differences between Arizona and Nevada that affect the vote there. I would say though, where there is a constant is the appeal to younger men. You know, Latinas are driving the anti-Trump sentiment in this country. Latinas, I think, are going to be a decisive factor

in this election. Where Latinas go, if Latinas turn out, like that's going to decide this thing. Trump understood he couldn country. Latinas, I think, are going to be a decisive factor in this election. Where Latinos go, if Latinos turn out, that's going to decide this thing. Trump understood he couldn't move Latinas or other women of color, so he focused on the men. And I think there are inroads that he's been able to make with the younger men. So turning to Florida, there was a minor freakout, I would classify it as a minor freakout this week week over an NBC Marist poll of the state that showed Trump and Biden tied with Trump actually ahead among Latinos. Now, it was an incredibly small subsample. Other polls like yours have shown Biden doing better among Latinos in Florida. But most of the data shows that he's still underperforming Hillary Clinton in the state among Latinos or at least coming close to matching her margin.

What do you think is going on there? That's right. Can I talk about the Marist poll? Yeah, please. Let's do it. Listen, Marist is a great pollster, and I think the top line is probably right, right? It should shock nobody that this is going to be a close election in Florida. It's going to be a close election. I'm sorry to break this news to people who were hoping that, you know, like election night would be over at 7 o'clock because we already knew the result.

It's 138 interviews in that poll. There are so many different ways that that could go wrong in a place like Florida, so many different ways. And so it's to say, it's not the poll is bad. Don't throw the poll in the garbage. But if you want to understand Latino vote, please don't, please don't draw conclusions from any one poll. And don't even start with Quinnipiac when it comes to Florida, because they just always get it wrong. But the reality is, yeah, I mean, Biden is up at this point by 16 points in our polling. I think that's pretty consistent with our previous polling. It's been remarkably consistent given everything that's happened in the last year. Other polling is probably in the same teens area. And so the reality is we think, uh, he is

trending by, and it's trending ahead of where bill Nelson was in 2018. And so Nelson loses by 10,000, a little over 10,000 votes in Florida. Uh, you could attribute that to many different things, but Hispanic underperformance is a very obvious one. Uh, Clinton, uh, wins by 27 points in 2016. That is a high watermark. We don't think that is, we're going to exceed that point. I think it's the upper bounds. We've got to reach the upper bounds. But the reality is Biden's going to fall somewhere in the middle, which frankly means it's just more of a normal map in Florida. It's closer to what the Obama elections looked like. It's closer to the 2018 midterm. 2016 just is somewhat of an outlier year that we shouldn't really use

as a comparison point, even though it's kind of interesting. Yeah, I was gonna say, what are your thoughts on why Clinton hit that high watermark among Latinos in the state? And then, as you noted, in 2018, both Nelson and Gillum fell short of that. And now Biden may fall short of that too. Is it a larger Democratic Party problem? Is it something else? I mentioned that Trump really didn't play very hard for the vote in 2016, right? And didn't have a lot of time to kind of, or interest in reintroducing himself in any real way. And so, you know, he hit low numbers. I think a part of that was skepticism among some Cubans in Miami-Dade County. The Cuban Republicans were skeptical of him. There were the stories about him doing business with Cuba. They didn't know who this guy was.

All of that went away post-2016. There's a variety of factors there. But between sort of his bluster on this kind of socialism talk or bluster on Venezuela and Cuba, the economy doing better, the tax cuts, A lot of folks who were skeptical at that point came over. There's also more we could say about the Cuban vote that's very dynamic and a very proactive ecosystem, media ecosystem in Miami that was kind of taking advantage, exploiting all of this. But you had a certain number of people who moved post-2016 to Trump. And they were there for the 2018 midterm. Do you still see, I know that we saw this on the Obama campaigns in Florida, that sort of younger Cubans are still gettable or at least moving towards Joe Biden?

Do you think that's like an area for growth for the Biden campaign? The room for growth in the Cuban vote is definitely under 50, especially on the younger side and the U.S. born. The U.S. born is actually the closest that there is to a Democratic base. side and the U.S. born. The U.S. born is actually the closest that there is to a Democratic base. There are complications. That's why it's so hard to capture all of this in 138 interviews. Yeah. Even the younger set, there are Cubans who've come to the United States since 1994, essentially. There were big migration waves. Those folks used to be very progressive, migration waves. Those folks used to be very progressive, very pro-Obama. They have now shifted very solidly into the Trump column. And so age is less predictive than it once was, but U.S. born ends up being very. But even there, U.S. born under 50, Biden has work to do there.

He can definitely increase his margins when it comes to... And I saw that in your polling, you mentioned that among Puerto Ricans and other Latinos from broader Latin American backgrounds, that Biden has a lot of room there to sort of make up ground as well. Yeah, that's right. Clinton know, Clinton was probably in the, in the seventies with the non-Cuban vote. You know, Biden currently is low sixties. There's just room to push it. You know, we talk all the time about the Cubans. I'm Cuban. I get it. It's, it's, it's, it's fascinating. It's so different. It's, you know, it's exotic, whatever it is. But, and increasingly we're talking about the Puerto Ricans, which is great. Um, you know, at least 43% of the Hispanic vote in Florida is neither Cuban or Puerto Rican, right?

It's just a constellation of other national origin groups. You know, it's, uh, it's Nicaraguan, Colombian, Dominican, Mexican,

American, Venezuelan, Venezuelan is probably like fifth on the list, even though they also get a lot of attention. Um, there's just a lot of these different groups and there is where there's, uh, there's a lot more room for Biden to grow just in introducing himself right outside of Miami and places like West Palm.

And so that's, I think, actually, as much as the Cuban Puerto Rican votes that they're they're they're hotly contested. Right. This other group is actually what is going to push this and decide whether the vote ends up looking more like Clinton or looking more like Nelson. decide whether the vote ends up looking more like Clinton or looking more like Nelson. So you mentioned this, but, you know, Trump and the Republicans have spent a lot of time calling Democrats socialists, specifically comparing them to socialist leaders in Latin America. How much of an effect do you think this has had on Florida voters? Listen, it works, right? I mean, there's real trauma from folks like my family who fled Cuba, people who fled Venezuela, people who fled Nicaragua, people who left Colombia and had negative experiences around FARC.

There's a lot of trauma there to be exploited, and Trump and his allies like Marco Rubio and Rick Scott have certainly tried to exploit that. What I would say is it does work. I would say, though, that the folks that it works on, it has already worked on past tense. It is not going to grow Trump's vote beyond where it is right now, that kind of fear mongering, because especially when the nominee is Joe Biden, it's a hard sell to say that Joe Biden is a radical leftist, even though they're trying. leftists, even though they're trying. I do think it's interesting that in the primary, the candidate who did the best with Latinos nationally was actually a Democratic socialist. What lessons can Biden and the Democrats learn from Bernie Sanders' campaign and the success that they had with Latino voters outside of Florida, mainly? Yeah, I mentioned earlier,

this is not rocket science. You know, Bernie Sanders campaign, what they did was an all of the above blitz. I give a lot of credit to Chuck Rocha who ran that effort. He's now running a PAC, an industrial PAC that's doing a fantastic job on the IE side, boosting Biden and focusing on Biden, Bernie voters are trying to get them over. And what they just did is, you know,

in every conversation on any kind of medium, what they're going to do, if they're going to send mail, if they're going to do radio, if they're going to TV, they said, what are we doing for Latinos? And they included and they targeted Latinos in absolutely everything that they did. And so I wouldn't say it was any one specific thing. Obviously, they had a candidate who had a set of policies that you could say were resonance, right? There was a lot there, especially around the college piece, the healthcare piece, two of the biggest issues in this community, and he was pushing it so aggressively. But Bernie Sanders didn't do well with Latino vote in 2016. The difference between 2016 and 2020 was the kind of campaign he ran in, again, signaling the importance of the vote to his campaign and actually asking for that vote. So if you're in the Biden campaign, the strategy going forward should be more engagement, more communication and sort of letting people know, uh, Latinos in Florida and elsewhere, who he is and what he stands for just sort of basic blocking and tackling stuff. That's right. I mean, it's been hard to show up in person

because of this pandemic we're in the middle of, you know, Kamala Harris was in, uh, is in Miami today. She stopped at like an arepa stand in Doral, you know, where Venezuelans, like that's smart stuff. Joe Biden will be in Miami again next week. You know, that kind of outreach now, let's go to Arizona. Let's take the show to Arizona. Let's take it to everywhere where this vote's going to be influential. When Kamala was in Milwaukee, she stopped and met with Voces de la Frontera, which is a major immigrant rights group in Milwaukee. That's smart stuff, right? So much of this is just showing up and showing that you actually care

and that you're actually gonna have a champion if you elect this person. Carlos Odio, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for all the good work you're doing at Eckies Research and take care. Thanks for having me. Thanks to Carlos Odio for joining us today. Everyone have a good weekend.

Go adopt a state, make some calls and we'll talk to you next week. Bye, everyone. Pod Save America is a Cricket 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 Papadimitriou, Caroline Reston,

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