Pod Save America - “Two Americas.”

Episode Date: January 7, 2021

Donald Trump incites a violent insurrection against the U.S. Capitol, and Democratic candidates Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff make history in Georgia, wresting control of the U.S. Senate away from Mitch McConnell. Then New Georgia Project CEO Nsé Ufot talks to Dan about how years of grassroots organizing paved the way for Tuesday’s victory.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. So, late Tuesday night, you and I were texting about how excited we were to talk about Georgia today. And we're going to do that, including an interview with N.C. Ufot, one of the organizers whose years of work made the Senate victories possible on Tuesday night. But we have been robbed of the joy from those victories by a mob of violent extremists who were encouraged to stage an insurrection against the United States government by the man who was supposed

to be leading it. And so that is what we have to talk about first. The congressional certification of the Electoral College votes on Wednesday should have been a routine event. It usually is. But Donald Trump and well over 100 Republicans in Congress, led by Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, decided that they would object to the election results in an effort to overturn the will of the voters. Donald Trump also urged his supporters multiple times to descend on Washington over the last week, saying, quote, be there, it will be wild. Then on Wednesday morning, while Congress gathered to certify the election, Trump incited a mob of his supporters outside of the White House, many of them armed, and told them to march towards the Capitol to, quote, give our Republicans the

kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. And they did. And they clashed with Capitol Police, and shots were fired, and four people died. And the entire United States Congress, along with the vice president, either barricaded themselves in offices or were evacuated from the Capitol while Trump supporters stormed the building carrying weapons, Trump flags and Confederate flags. Pipe bombs were later discovered and detonated at the Capitol, the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee. It was the first time the U.S. Capitol had been breached since the British invaded during the War of 1812. Except this time, the invaders were extremists who had been incited by the president of the United States. So that's where we are, Dan. I'll stop there and let you react to what you saw unfold yesterday. Watching that everything that happened yesterday was a mix of emotions.

It was incredibly scary. Right. You and I have both worked in that building. We both worked in that building after 9-11. And the idea that people could just walk right in there and take it over with all the security's been put in place is incredibly scary. It was sad and just a terribly – I had viewed what was going to happen simply with just the overly ambitious snake oil salesman trying to overturn the will of the voters in an impotent display of authoritarianism as a dark day for democracy. But when you have an armed insurrection egged on by the president of the United States, that is an incredibly sad day for democracy. And on top of all of that, it was absolutely

infuriating because it was so predictable, so preventable. And we knew we were headed in this direction for years now. And all of the various stakeholders in the Republican Party, in the right wing media, at the social media platforms, just stood by and watched it happen and ignored the warnings. And we ended up in incriminating space. And we are so incredibly fortunate for as horrible as yesterday was, that it wasn't so much worth. There was so much, there could have been so much more carnage or could have been, I mean, there were bombs, there were guns, like as horrible as it was, it was a fraction of how horrible it could have been if a couple of things had gone differently. I also find myself, I was scared at times, a lot of times, but really, really angry.

You know, when we we talked about this Monday on Monday's pod. And, you know, like when I thought about the certification process and Holly and Cruz, like I was I remain enraged at those fucking people. But I was like, these assholes are going to stretch out the process and then they're going to be voted down. There's no chance they succeed. There's no chance that fucking Pence delivers the victory to Donald Trump that Donald Trump thinks Pence could have, but he can't anyway.

Like all that was just, it's fucking upsetting, but it's garbage. At the end of the pod, we said something like, if you're in DC, be careful. Because I did think about the crowds that were coming to D.C. and that worried me more than what was actually going on in in the Congress. And, you know, I was texting with mutual friends of ours in D.C., our friend Mike Gottlieb, who was like, yeah, I'm thinking of just getting the family out of here on Wednesday

because it's going to be so bad. And I was like, oh, God, that is going to be bad. And then we saw this happen. I mean, like one of the tweet that really summed it up for me shared a lot from someone named Ed Stern. He said, well, that escalated steadily for four years. Yeah. Like the scary thing about it, though, is we we all knew it was coming. Something like this was eventually going to happen. We were all afraid of it we've all and when i say we democrats journalists a lot of republicans but never trump republicans like a wide what people all over the world saw this coming saw this kind of thing coming someday and yet we couldn't stop it right like there we were almost powerless to stop we didn't try mainly we try well mainly because the only way to have stopped this was to impeach this man any time over the last four years and republicans protected him too many republicans protected him it is it is the reason to this day

that he remains a threat to this nation because too many members of the republican party too many elected republicans have chosen to protect this man. And so the rest of us have to sit here and worry that something like this could happen. And we are powerless to do anything about it until he leaves office. And that's what's really that's what's really awful. And by the way, it didn't just happen in D.C. The state houses in Georgia, in Kansas, in other parts of the country. There were Trump mobs there too. Raffensperger, the secretary of state in Georgia, had to be escorted out of the state

house there to protect him. And just, you know, what happened in the Capitol building was just fucking atrocious. They vandalized offices. They were down on the Senate floor. They were in Pelosi's office. They wrote murder the media on a door and big letters. I mean, it was revolting. It was revolting. And I think my first question is out of many questions, like there were thousands of people at the Capitol. There were 26 arrests on Capitol grounds on Wednesday, only 26. How did the Capitol Police fail to secure an event that was being attended by the entire United States Congress,

the current Vice President of the United States, and the next Vice President of the United States? I mean, this was like a president and nine Supreme Court justices short of a State of the Union, which is the most closely guarded, heavily guarded event in America every year. What the fuck was going on?

I mean, it was clearly one of the greatest security failures in modern American history. Since 9-11? I mean, worse than 9-11. Like, just, it's 9-11 if they had told you 9-11 was going to happen and you didn't prepare for it. Right, yeah. And there needs to be an investigation into what happened with the Capitol.

Why did they fail to prepare? Why were some of the cops taking selfies with the protesters? There are videos that lack context. So you want to know more about it, about them opening the gates and letting people in. Why did that happen? I mean, there needs to be an investigation. There needs to be accountability. And there likely needs to be changes at the absolute top of the Capitol Police.

This is your job, right? And when I worked for the Senate minority leader, he was protected by the Capitol Police 24-7. I spent a lot of time Capitol Police. This is your job, right? And when I worked for the Senate minority leader, he was protected by the Capitol Police 24-7. I spent a lot of time with him. A lot of really, really good people work at the Capitol Police who do a really good job. But from top to bottom, this was a gigantic failure. And we need to know why, because the members' lives were at risk. I read an Instagram post from the daughter-in-law of Congresswoman Madeleine Dean, whose son we used to work with, about her calling her family from her office, barricaded in her office as people were banging on the door and she and her staff were afraid for their lives. That is the situation we ran.

There's another story I read today about how this is one of the greatest cybersecurity failures in history because we lost complete control of all of the computers in one of the branches of the United States government for hours. And we have no idea what happened to those computers, if something happened to them. Just an absolute failure where we lost control of the home of one of our three branches of government. It is unbelievable. And I do think, and this is related to the question around arrests, is there is an inherent level of racism in how this played. These were white protesters. So people were talking about this on Twitter yesterday, one of our friends texted us about it, about how D.C. police surrounded a home in D.C. for an entire night because there were 100 protesters holed up inside. for an entire night because there were 100 protesters holed up inside. And these people were helped down the steps

as they left after engaging in an armed occupation of the United States Capitol. Well, and it's systemic at every level, right? Because there are, you know, a lot of questions that need to be answered. The question about the selfies, the question about there's a video of cops opening the gate. And then there's also videos too of cops trying to push the crowd back and just being completely

overrun, right? Now Capitol police says a bunch of their members were out because of fucking COVID. So they have less police than they usually have, but also their police force was amped up from like a couple hundred to 2000 after 9-11, just for this very scenario, for a scenario just like this. So even when the cops were trying to push them back, they were overrun. The cops were like, you know, firing tear gas. They did obviously shoot some woman in the chest who died. So, but like, even when they were trying, they did not have the numbers they needed, nor did they act the way they should have to stop an invading force when the entire U.S. Congress was inside. The entire fucking U.S. Congress.

Democrats, Republicans, the two vice presidents. I just, it's staggering. It's staggering. There should be a full-fledged investigation into it as soon as possible. Right. Most of the line of succession was in that building and there was no protection. Yeah. There is an interview with the most recent chief of the Capitol Police in the Washington

Post where she just destroys their entire preparation for it and cannot figure out why they set the barricade so close to the Capitol. Why weren't they off the Capitol grounds? They've been in many, many previous protests, peaceful, of course. Weren't they off the Capitol grounds as they've been in many, many previous protests? Peaceful, of course. And it's just an incredibly dangerous failure that could have been as terrible as it was, could have been so much worse on so many levels. I also read in The Washington Post, too, that the D.C. police, which sort of, you know, sort of guard the perimeter around outside, but they don't guard the Capitol itself.

They knew because of all the posts, all of Trump's posts, that things were getting bad. They were worried that the Capitol police did not have shit under control. But the D.C. police, of course, weren't brought in until the evening to settle things down. It's also like one of the most heavily guarded cities in the world, aside from D.C. police and the Capitol police. There's FBI, there's SWAT teams, there's fucking like all the goons that were out this summer that were in plain clothes that Bill Barr sent out to take care of Black Lives Matter protesters. They were all around too. And a lot of them were sent in, but they were sent in, of course, after the fucking invaders had already taken the Capitol. Unbelievable. Let's talk about the fallout. So there were statements of condemnation and

disgust from other countries, which were pretty hard to take and hard to read as an American. There were statements of condemnation from former presidents Obama, Bush, Clinton, from Democratic and Republican members of Congress, who did finish the certification after the Capitol was clear on Wednesday night. 121 House Republicans still voted to overturn the election when they got back from being, you know, targets of an insurrection, still voted to overturn the election, though only six Republican senators voted to do so, including, of course, Cruz and Hawley. So here's my question on this one. What surprised you more, the 121 House members who voted that way after they were targets of an insurrection, or the fact that every Republican senator but six came around to the same position on this? This is a sad thing to say, but there's almost nothing surprising that the right wing of the Republican Party can do.

Of course, they still did this, right? Because the political incentives that put them in this position still exist. And there is, I guess, Michael, here's, I have a question for you, actually. What was your reaction to seeing those statements of condemnation from former Republicans, current Republicans, people who have supported Trump. So I am, which there should come as no surprise to you, I am certainly not in the like, now they're heroes camp that some people seem to be in these days. But I think what happened is, look, when you're the one barricading yourself in a fucking office because there's goons outside who are coming to get you and they don't care

that you're a Republican who supported Trump because they are extremists who like only answer to fucking, you know, their cult leader, Donald Trump, and they'll mow down a Republican just as fast as they'll mow down a Democrat. You know, like I think there are some Republicans who partly because at least the Republican members of Congress who partly because they experienced yesterday firsthand thought, you know what, this has now gotten out of hand and we've now got to stop this. And look, and some of them got some of them came to that realization before the Capitol was taken. So, you know, Mitch McConnell had clearly had enough of this shit and gave a speech yesterday morning about how a little too late, Mitch, a little too late. But Mitch McConnell gave a speech about how, like, we're not overturning the election.

We're moving on all this other shit. You know, Mitt Romney has been, I will say, courageous, a patriot through all this. And it was outrage like his outrage was real yesterday. You know, not just saying like some leaders have caused this basically saying the president did this. This is the president's thought, you know what, I was on this train, but now shit's gotten too far. And this is actually a little scary, even for me. And then the ones who are like, you know, the fucking Matt Gaetz's of the world and the House Republicans and Ted fucking Cruz and Josh fucking Holly, who were like, yeah, you know what? It was it was it was probably Antifa. Yeah, it was Antifa that did it. It wasn't it wasn't Trump loyalists. It was Antifa. And this is fine. And oh, come on. And both sides are to blame.

And blah, blah, blah, you know, all that bullshit. And that is the core of the Republican Party. And that's probably the part of the Republican Party that will remain successful politically in the months and years to come. Sadly, my reaction is probably. Similar, but a little different. I view most of those statements as just pure CYA. It's possible. And I'm sure there are some. I don't know what goes on.

I honestly, I have no idea what goes on in these people's heads anymore. I just can't. I don't know. I think we should be appreciative for people who speak out, right? If they do it sincerely, like I think Mitt Romney legitimately did it sincerely. George W. Bush, sincere in this.

Ted Cruz's statement condemning the violence did not seem to be dripping with sincerity to me. No, fuck him. He didn't condemn the violence. Then he fucking started tweeting at Beto, like, you're dividing people.

Your rhetoric is divisive. Fuck Ted Cruz. Fuck Ted Cruz. This is my reaction, which is, thank you're dividing people. Your rhetoric is divisive. Fuck Ted Cruz. Fuck Ted Cruz. But here is this. This is my reaction, which is thank you for your statement. Can I get an iota of self-reflection for how we got to this moment? Because all of those Republicans, Mitt Romney included, bear some responsibility for this because I think one of the dangers of this entire situation.

You fucking you rode the tiger. You rode the tiger. The danger of the situation is we make it entirely about Trump. Trump lit the match that started this, but all of these Republicans for more than a decade had been pouring the gas on the ground that let him do it, right? Every Republican for as far back as we can imagine who has been talking about fake voter fraud in order to justify disenfranchising your opponent's voters, bear responsibility for this. Fox News bears responsibility for this. The social media platforms that have allowed Americans to be willingly and knowingly allowed Americans to be radicalized by the spreading of conspiracy theories

are responsible for this. Weaponizing conspiracy theories and racial animus for political gain was the Republican playbook long before Donald Trump ever showed up. Benghazi is a conspiracy theory. Birtherism is a conspiracy theory. They've been doing this forever. And this is where we got here. And if we are in this situation, and we'll talk about this in terms of the 25th Amendment impeachment, where it's like, we're going to get Trump's hands off the wheel and we're

going to be OK. We are deeply fucking mistaken because the forces that gave us Trump are getting worse, not better. Yeah. And look, this is I mean, what's truly insidious about this is that most of these Republican leaders and right wing media figures know what they are peddling is a lie. We said it before, like few people have more contempt for Republican voters and the Republican base than Republican politicians and the right wing media figures who profit off of all of this bullshit. And every day they wake up and they tell millions of Americans these lies. And so if you're someone who's a Trump voter, if you're someone who watches Fox News, you're on fucking 8chan.

You're on one of these platforms. You listen to Donald Trump. You listen to Louie Gohmert. You listen to Ted Cruz. What do you think the world is? What do you think the world is? You think the world is a bunch of radical Democrats who hate you, who are dangerous or worse, pedophiles, socialists. They're coming to get you. They're stealing an election from you. They hate you. They're going

to come into the suburbs and kill you. That's what you hear day after day after day, conspiracy after conspiracy. And there is no one to tell these people that it is a lie. No one will tell them it's a lie because the Republican politicians want their votes. And even though they know it's a lie, they just fucking say it anyway. And they keep saying it. And you know what? Like good for Mitt Romney, who you're right, like he went down this path in 2012 as well. But at least like he has since seen, seen the danger of this. And last night during his speech, he made that same point. He's like, these are lies that we are telling these voters. We are lying to them. And that is at the danger of this. And last night during his speech, he made that same point. He's like, these are lies that we are telling these voters. We are lying to them. And that is at the core of this is that these people are being lied to. And Fox News, fucking Fox News was still lying to

them last night. Tucker Carlson still last night was telling them that it was Antifa that infiltrated this. Tucker Carlson was still telling them that they're going to use this infiltration of the Capitol to take away your rights. You work at fucking Fox News right now, and your network is telling people that after a mob stormed the Capitol, you should fucking look yourself in the mirror and ask why you're working at Fox News. If you consider yourself a fucking straight news reporter or a producer or anyone who works at that network or any of the fucking Democrats who have contracts at that network. or any of the fucking Democrats who have contracts at that network. You know, there is such a desire, probably only because politics is narrated and covered by liberal arts majors like us,

to sort of set the whole thing into a world of protagonists and antagonists. There's a hero's journey, et cetera. And so Trump is the bad guy. And then we're constantly, we're so desperate for some good guys from the other side, because that fits with the narrative. Which is why when Mitch McConnell gave his speech before the violence really took hold, when he gave his speech condemning what Cruz and Hawley were doing and saying, accept the election results. And all these reporters are like, this is the most important speech Mitch McConnell has ever given. Bullshit. The most important speech Mitch McConnell has

should have given is the one he should have given right after the election when he could have told voters to accept the results that these were lies. They let all of this happen because they thought they could leverage it politically and it almost burned down the Capitol, right? This is not just like it hurt them politically. They lost the Georgia elections. It brought our government to heel for hours. Yeah. I mean, you're absolutely right. This whole thing could have been avoided with a couple of speeches from a couple of Republicans the day after the election. The day after the election. And Mitch McConnell just thought, why? Why?

Because they wanted to win Georgia. That's why. They thought they needed the base excited so that they could win Georgia. Well, you lost Georgia. And you almost burned down the U.S. government. that's why they thought they needed they needed the base excited so that they could win georgia well you lost georgia and and you almost you almost burned down the u.s government so guess you miscalculated mitch yeah you're a craven asshole and you're bad at politics let's talk about trump's reaction he spent most of the day angry at mike pence while this was all going on for not trying to unilaterally overturn the

election forum he refused to approve wasaterally overturn the election for him. He refused to approve Washington, D.C.'s request for National Guard troops to help. So Mike Pence and the secretary of defense went around him and approved the request themselves and then put out a statement. The acting secretary of defense put out a statement saying, I've been in touch with Mike Pence and the congressional leaders about protecting the Capitol. Didn't mention Donald Trump because Donald Trump was so angry and pissed and happy that this was going on. Reports that Donald Trump was pleased this was happening. So Donald Trump wasn't part of protecting the Capitol because he was too pissed. He was forced finally by his staff to send out a few very tepid tweets and a video where he told the extremists that he loved them, but that they should go home.

And then he tweeted like, this is what happens when you steal an election, basically, was his tweet. We don't know what that tweet is now because it was finally deleted from Twitter. And then Twitter temporarily banned him from Twitter and Facebook. And both platforms have threatened to permanently ban him if he continues to violate the rules. I was prepping this morning, so I can't keep up with this, but I think Facebook now said he's banned indefinitely and he's back on Twitter. I don't know what's going on. It's on Facebook, Facebook and Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg put us in Facebook and Instagram. We're going to ban Trump for at least until the end of his presidency and possibly longer. Twitter, it's not entirely clear what is coming.

He had a 12-hour ban, I think, as of yesterday. And with, I don't know, by the time, this will probably be in a different iteration by the time this podcast comes out. But I would not be shocked if Twitter followed the lead of Facebook on this, because usually they're slightly ahead of Facebook, which is still way too late on some of these deplatforming issues. But we'll see what happens. Yeah. And I will say, and great, great for Twitter, great for Facebook. Like, you know, as one of our friends noted, it sort of it seemed it felt calmer last night that Trump wasn't on Twitter continuing to rile things up, though, as as Tommy also pointed out, like this whole thing started not necessarily because of his tweets, but because he got up in front of the White House at that rally and told people to go storm the fucking Capitol.

And so, like, the guy can still go to the briefing room and cause trouble. So he is so it's good that he's off Twitter. It's good that he's off Facebook, but he is still a threat. So the question is, what can be done about Donald Trump? There have been calls for impeachment among Democrats, including minority leader, soon to be majority leader Chuck Schumer, and even some Republicans, though not too many publicly there. There have been reports that cabinet officials and White House officials are talking about invoking the 25th Amendment. There have been White House

resignations overnight and rumored cabinet resignations. What the fuck can we do here? Should Trump be impeached or removed from office? Yes. That was true before this happened. It's even more true now.

Is he most definitely unfit for the job of protecting and leading America? 100%. And should the 25th Amendment be invoked? Been true since 2015. Are those things going to happen? It's just worth noting that you need 17 Republicans. Well, I've been going back and forth on this. So, yeah, you need 19 with the current Senate, 17've been going back and forth on this.

So yeah, you need 19 with the current Senate, 17 if Ossoff and Warnock are seated. 24 hours ago, there were 12 Republican senators who refused to acknowledge Joe Biden's legitimate election. So it's hard to imagine where, even if the House were to pitch- Now we're going to get 17 to convince. Yes, 19, 17, that seems very, very challenging. And I should say that Igor Bovich

last night asked Mitt Romney on the way out of the Senate, Mitt Romney being the one Republican who voted to convict last time, last impeachment, because now we're talking about a second impeachment. Donald Trump gets two impeachments. And he said, you know, I think that's really hard to do right now. I think we all have to just hold our breath for the next 14 days, is what Romney said. So if you have the person who convicted last time, the Republican who convicted last time saying, I don't think it's possible this time. I don't know where you're going to find an additional 16 or 17 Republicans in the Senate to convict this man. And look, if the House wants to gavel into session and impeach Donald Trump as a symbolic gesture, as a purely symbolic gesture, which is what it would be. I'm for it.

If I was in the House, I would vote for that resolution for sure. But that's all. Let's not kid ourselves. That's all it would be. I don't think you're going to get 17 senators. But like, look, if you want to pass the resolution and then drop it in Mitch McConnell's lap and make him be the one to say, no, we're going to not convict Donald Trump. I think that's fine. I think that's fine. And, you know, and Tommy pointed this out on Monday. It's not just to remove the threat over the next 13 days. It is to if Donald Trump is impeached and convicted, if he's convicted, he will never be allowed to run for any office again. And I do think it is worth trying to prevent him to make sure that he does not come back in 2024 and run again. Maybe you can sell that to Cruz, Hawley, Tom Cullen. Yeah, right.

Yeah. I mean, it's a good point. My brother made this point. He's like, why wouldn't they want him out of the picture in 2024? You know, like what it is. Look, I think you back to your question earlier about some of these Republican statements, like Georgia plays a big role here, too. Donald Trump is of very little use to any of these Republicans right now. He cost them two Senate seats or helped cost them two Senate seats. Let's say we're going to get into this in Georgia, cost them a majority, destroyed the house majority in 2018, lost in the Senate majority in 2020, one term president. The party is now in tatters.

Um, and a bunch of them want to run for president in 2024. Now they do want his voters. They don't want to piss his voters off, which drives everything that they do. Every fucking destructive move they make is about his fucking voters. Um, but like, what good is Donald Trump to these people now anyway? Well, I was reading this morning, I think from Jake Sherman, that up until yesterday,

Kevin McCarthy's plan for taking the House back was to work hand in glove with Donald Trump to raise money for the House, to rally in Republican districts. Like he was a huge part of their plan. And the question is what, what does that mean? I, I just want to prepare everyone's expectations for this is they are all going right back to him in a couple of months that like, they will find some grievance about Biden or some tweet of Neera Tanden's, and that'll send them right back into

Trump's lap, right? We should just be prepared for that because this is about where the political winds are blowing. And if you're a Republican who is in a safe district and your political fear is not a Democrat in the general election, it's a MAGA Republican in the primary. This pushes you in that direction. And there are going to be candidates running. Take the Georgia gubernatorial election in 2022. Doug Collins, this report, is almost certainly going to run against Brian Kemp. You think Donald Trump is not going to campaign

for Doug Collins and Doug Collins is not going to want him there? And then if Doug Collins wins that primary and Stacey Abrams is the Democratic nominee, you don't think Donald Trump

is going to be on the stump in Georgia campaigning against Stacey Abrams? That is probably to our benefit, but he's not going anywhere. Right. No, he's not going anywhere and all these Republicans

are going to love him. I think maybe the only hope here is the narrow group of Republicans who want to be president instead of him in the Senate. Yes, yes, yes. Want to get rid of him. Yes. And that might be the just purely pure self-interest. Now, let's talk about the 25th Amendment, because I see that going around a lot. And we just got to talk about the 25th Amendment. 25th Amendment of the Constitution is provides for line of succession, removal of the president in case the president falls ill or dies or something like that. So what here's what happens if if a majority of the cabinet decides that the president is unfit to serve. And now when the amendment was conceived, it could either be because the president has a stroke and is, you know, in the hospital and not conscious or because he's Donald Trump and a fucking lunatic.

Take your take your pick. So if a majority of the cabinet, including the vice president, decides that the president is unfit to serve, they transmit a letter to Congress saying, so vice president takes power. Then there is, then Trump gets a move. If the president then says, no, no, I am fit to serve. And these people are trying to stage a coup. The president sends a letter to Congress saying, oh, I am fit to serve. And then what happens is Congress, if they're not already convened, must reconvene within 48 hours. And then Congress basically has to vote to keep the president out of power, needs a two-thirds vote in each house to say, yes, Donald Trump is unfit to serve. So you're not going to get that vote, two thirds vote in the House. That's harder than

impeachment, because impeachment, you need two thirds in the Senate, but you need a majority in the House. To maintain the 25th, you need two thirds in both chambers, which you're not going to get. The only thing here is, it also says in the Constitution that Congress has 21 days to make that judgment and to take that vote. So if the cabinet did this, if Pence did this, Nancy Pelosi could just dick around for 21 days before taking the vote and we'd hit the 20th and that would be that. Donald Trump wouldn't be in power for those days. Mike Pence would. So you could, if you want, like go through the cabinet list donald trump's cabinet and see uh there's 15 of them including uh the chief of staff gets to be a cabinet member

in this administration uh obviously mark meadows isn't voting against him see if you can find eight votes in the cabinet to uh you know say that donald trump is unfit to serve i was i was doing it were you were you looking at the list yeah yeah just for it was a fun game i was just kind of looking through it like hmm but there's not a lot like regina haspel do it at cia probably steve mnuchin after he embarrassed him maybe alex azar after he embarrassed him yeah maybe but like pompeo devos i don't. Could you imagine if we survive this moment as a country and we stop the planet from melting underneath our feet and like a hundred years from now, school kids are learning why this guy was president for like eight days at the end, having to explain this moment to them. So anyway, I mean, look, I think what Romney said last night is probably correct, which is that we the practical effect of all this is going to be that we're going to have to hold our breath for the next the next 13 days. We should also say that late last night, I think four in the morning Eastern, the White House did release a statement from Donald Trump saying pledging an orderly and peaceful transition and saying that he would leave on the 20th, which don't know how they got that statement out. Don't know how much it means. Don't know how fast he basically retracts it when he gets back on Twitter.

But that is where we are as of, let's see, 1030 Pacific Coast time today on Thursday, is Donald Trump pledging an orderly transition on the 20th. Question about long term. Like, what do we do about this violence? What do we do about this violence what do we do about this extremism um what does joe biden do to try to heal this country he did speak yesterday um as this was as this was happening and i think we have a clip of biden's speech the scenes of chaos at the capitol do not reflect a true amer. Do not represent who we are. What we're seeing are a small number of extremists dedicated to lawlessness.

This is not dissent. It's disorder. It's chaos. It borders on sedition. And it must end now. What do you think? What do you think of Biden's speech and what do you think of the path ahead for him in trying to piece all this back together? His speech was great. And some of the things that frustrate a lot of Democrats about Joe Biden in the primary are why he, and sometimes us, frustrate us in the primary too sometimes. But that is why he is the person best suited to this moment. He is someone

who approaches things with decency and not anger. His natural instincts is unity and forgiveness. And that is the right temperament for this. He is never someone who's going to throw gasoline on a fire. He's going to always try to sort of appeal to the better angels people, even when those people have demonstrated no evidence of having angels, he is going to try to do that. And he should continue to do that. I think we all have to understand, and I imagine that Joe Biden does understand this as well, is that the solution to this problem is not something that happens within the traditional bounds of quote unquote normal politics. We are not a tour of red states away from unity. We are not more drinks with Mitch McConnell away from unity. We are not one infrastructure, bipartisan infrastructure

or bill away from solving this problem. This problem is endemic to American society. It is something that includes politics, is driven by politics, but goes much beyond politics. And we have to really take a step back, all of us, right? This is not a problem for Joe Biden in the White House to solve. And think about how we fix it, because our country is coming apart at the seams. We had an armed insurrection in the Capitol yesterday by people who believe, most of them, to their core something that is provably not true. And that lie was spread all across this country by a broken media ecosystem, by social media platforms, by politicians who knew better. And none of that

is going to get better on its own. We are not 14 days, however many it is, from normalcy. There is a lot of work to do. I don't know that anyone, I certainly don't have the answers to this, but it is much bigger than one person sitting in the White House starting in two weeks. I sort of have a few specific things and then one larger thing. We need to regulate these social media platforms and not just wait and hope like out of the goodness of their heart, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack are going to suddenly decide to like implement policies that protect people and stop, you know, the incitement of hate and violence. So there needs to be some regulation of these platforms. I think we need more pressure on right wing media. I think there needs to be more competition for right wing media from progressive

media. You and I have said this a million times. It's why we do this. I think the next Department of Justice, we're going to talk about Merrick Garland in a bit, and the FBI have to go back to taking white nationalism and right wing extremism seriously, surveilling it, going after it. It is a incredibly dangerous threat to this country from within. And that needs to be a priority. And then, you know, then the work of the work of elections and the work of democracy, right? Like, I, I think that, as you said, like the odds are that we will face this kind of hate and violence again. And the sad truth is it's always been a part of who we are as a country. But, you know, our friend Ben Rhodes pointed this out yesterday, tweeted, there's always two competing stories about America.

And, you know, we're a country of slavery and civil war and Jim Crow and horrific racist violence. But, you know, we're also the country of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis. And ultimately, I think politics is about us choosing between those competing stories. And the story that we chose on Tuesday night looked very different than Wednesday's. And it was almost poetic, right? Like, Donald Trump ends the November election by trying to disenfranchise millions of voters, specifically suing to throw out ballots in majority black areas like Detroit and Philadelphia and Milwaukee. Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell's Senate majority depends on two

Georgia senators who have literally profited off the pandemic while denying relief to disproportionately poor and black and brown citizens of Georgia who are hurting most. And one of them, Kelly Loeffler, runs one of the most racist campaigns in memory against her black opponent. And what happens on Tuesday? A multiracial coalition of whites and Latinos and Asians and more black voters than have ever voted in any election in any state ever turn out to end Mitch McConnell's majority by electing a young Jewish kid who worked for John Lewis and the first black Democratic senator from the South who literally preaches from Martin Luther King Jr.'s

pulpit. And that's America, too. We have a good clip of Warnock from his victory speech. The other day, because this is America, the 82 year old hands that used to pick somebody else's cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States Senator. So I come before you tonight as a man who knows that the improbable journey that led me to this place in this historic moment in America could only happen here. We were told that we couldn't win this election, but tonight we prove that with hope, hard work, and the people by our side, anything is possible. Georgia, man, were you surprised?

Yes, only because I refuse to allow myself hope. We were on a text chain where people were making predictions and you should feel free to gloat about yours, but I refuse to do it for two reasons. One, we don't make predictions. Like that was the thing we pledged. And I don't know why you violated that. But my, my prediction was publicly, publicly, my prediction was, look, I'm transparent. My prediction was, was going to be a loss. And I felt you seemed really kind of on edge personally with the shoulder and

the pandemic. I didn't really want to run into your parade. This is what I thought about both in preparing for this podcast and thinking about everything that's happened in the last 48 hours of American politics is, one, it feels so discordant almost to talk about the joyous outcome in Georgia and then break down like what lessons did we learn and how do we win and how we increase turnout with what we just went through right we were going to start the podcast with the wind that was going to be very excited too we were very excited too but imagine what yesterday and today would feel like if we lost in Georgia if everything that happened since the election had been had led to Republicans being rewarded with more political

power with a validation of the idea that stealing elections and spreading conspiracy theories works. If David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler joined the coup the night before the election, and if the voters had then given them six more years, that would have been absolutely devastating. We at least are able to take, it's a small amount of comfort, granted, but it is comfort that Mitch McConnell becomes a minority leader. He loses the power to block Joe Biden's agenda. We have a lot of work to enact that agenda, but they have paid a political price. And it's a pretty steep one for their behavior, both during the Trump years and since the election. And that feeling has turned from joy to relief after what we saw yesterday, in my mind. Yeah, so I don't know why I was so hopeful about Georgia the whole time, because I was a complete anxious mess, as you know, before November. Even when on that text chain that we're on with, and I'll say we're on with Mitch Stewart, you know, field organizing data genius from the Obama campaign. And Mitch like demanded that we all make predictions in November at the end.

He said, just for me, tell me what's going to happen. And we all refused. I made no map for November. I made no predictions. I was too worried, not even to myself. I made no predictions. I was too worried, not even to myself. I made no predictions. But for some reason in Georgia, I started feeling I just felt better about it. And I've started feeling part of the reason I felt better about it is because of what happened in Georgia in November.

Partly because I believe so much in Stacey Abrams and people like Latasha Brown and Nse Ufot who we're going to have on and all of these organizers in Georgia and all the work that they've done. But also like the environment just felt right for this. And I ended up predicting that Warnock would win by 90,000. He's currently up 75,000, but more vote out. And Asaf would win by 80,000. He's currently up 37,000. More about that. So I won't quite hit that one, but pretty close, pretty close. And I was saying, by the way, in early December, I was like, we're either going to win by half a point or lose by a point. And some of our friends are saying down four. We're going to lose by four, which wrong. But anyway, predictions aside, predictions aside. So I want to talk about why we won. But first, what do we know about how this turnout and this Like we just had an election in November.

Nate Cohen was calling it the perfect poll. The only perfect poll is an election. And we took the perfect poll in November. David Perdue beat John Ossoff and the Republican candidates beat the Democratic candidates in the special election. And so in two months time, suddenly Democrats come back and win. What what differed about the coalitions and the turnout? A couple of things are notable. One, Democrats turned out more than Republicans. And Nate Cohn did some cracks of math on this, which is in precincts had voted 80% for Biden in November. voted 80% for Biden in November. Turnout was 92% of the November total. In districts that turned out for Trump at that same rate of 80%, it was 88%.

So that 4% difference is gigantic. And so that's one. And there was one more. In black districts, heavy black districts, which were also 80% black or more, turnout was 93% of the November number, which was bigger than both the Biden districts or the Trump districts. And even more shocking than all of that to me is there were one hundred and forty thousand people who had voted early in this runoff who did not vote in November. did not vote in November.

And like, I'm very hurt. Two months, two months in a special election when they're supposed to be less attention and more drop off. You had more vote. You had that over a hundred thousand more voters who didn't even vote November. And demographically based on what we know from the early vote,

that was a group that was largely favorable to Democrats. And that is incredibly notable. It is a, that is the absolute tribute to grassroots organizing. That's the only way you find those people is through the hardcore work of organizing. And it's a tremendous feat. And it goes against history. In relatively recent history, there have twice been Georgia senatorial runoffs after Democrats won the White House. In both cases, the Democrats lost, including in 1992, a Democrat incumbent losing because Democratic turnout was diminished through complacency, etc. And this time that didn't happen. Our turnout was – when you're in the 90% of November turnout in a runoff election that happens three or four days after New Year's. It's unbelievable. It's unheard of. It doesn't happen. There are no historical examples of it happening that I've heard. Someone can prove me wrong, but it just, it just,

it doesn't happen. It doesn't happen. So I'm talking about the turnout. Turnout ended up being 4.4 million. All the prognosticators, a lot of, you know, folks who were on these campaigns, part of the state party, people believe that if turnout was north of 4.3 million, it would be good for the Republicans because it meant that they're going to match the Democratic turnout. And the fact that it hit 4.4 million and Democrats still won is, I think, an even larger testament to the Democratic turnout operation because, look, we're going to talk about how Republican turnout did sag more than Democratic turnout, but Republicans turned out in this race. They didn't, like, their turnout machine

was strong. Like, getting 88% in the heavy Trump districts over their November turnout is still very, very good for a special election. But Democrats just did more. I want to point out just a few more interesting nuggets here. Youth turnout and youth share of the vote went up. Biden won young voters by 11 points in November. Ossoff and Warnock won them by 34 points. So the share of youth voters went up. The Latino share of the vote went up. So they did better among the Latino voters who showed up than they did among the Latino voters who showed up in the general. And then, as you mentioned, the 140,000 voters who voted in January who didn't vote in November were disproportionately young and people of color. So two very heavily Democratic groups.

Three reasons you win race. Organizing candidate message. Let's start with organizing. What happened here? And I know you're going to talk to N.C. about this more, but just as a top level. A culmination of a decade of work that did not stop. No one took a day off. They went back to work the first Wednesday in November

and kept organizing, kept turning people out. It was local organizing, community organizing. And it is what has happened in Georgia is the model for how we turn more of this country blue. And we have to learn everything there is to learn from the people involved and replicate their model because you cannot turn out the vote like that if you start 60 days before the election or even six months before the election or even a year before the election. It is the work that happens in the odd years. It's the work that happens when no one's paying attention. And the organizers in Georgia, mostly Black women, are heroes.

They literally saved the Republic right here. And I just want to emphasize that point because, you know, there's a lot of people rightfully praising Stacey Abrams. We do it all the time here, but it's, it's, it's, Obama used to say this to us too.

He's like, sometimes people think I just like materialized on a stage in Boston to give that 2004 convention speech. I think sometimes people think Stacey Abrams just like materialized in 2018, just like suddenly showed up and gave a speech where she, you know, talked about voter suppression and how Brian Kemp cost her the election because of his suppression. And she was a star there then. And that's the first a lot of people heard of Stacey Abrams.

Right. Stacey Abrams worked for 10 years on this project, 10 years doing work that nobody wanted to do. And she said this to you in your interview with her after November, like just going around to people with a PowerPoint about why it's important to invest in Georgia because Georgia, the demographics are changing. And it's the most diverse battleground state and it's the youngest battleground state. And if we organize and we register people, we can do this. And like a lot of the work of organizing and the work of winning, so much of it is not glamorous. It doesn't like it doesn't put you in the limelight. You don't get a lot of fame from it. You get a lot of rejection. There's a lot of losses. Stacey Abrams, aside from when she lost in 2018, she endured a lot of other losses.

So did Georgia Democrats. So did the organizers in Georgia who've been working on this for the last 10 years. But they kept at it. And so a lot of these places that we look at today that seem like it's going to be hard to flip or that it's going to be too, you know, whatever, like these things don't happen in one cycle. And just because you lose one cycle doesn't mean that that state or that district should be out of reach for you for the next cycle or the cycle after that. The work of organizing takes time. And that is why Stacey Abrams and Latasha Brown and NSEI and all of these people, Lauren Gower-Wiregower, all of these people who worked so hard in Georgia have finally succeeded because they put in the work for so long. Look, they registered 75,000 voters between November and January. 75,000 voters they registered.

More than half of them were under 35. They started knocking on doors again. That's a difference from the general election. There was in-person campaigning. And I just want to give a shout out to everyone who participated in Vote Save America for this, especially our team at Crooked, who basically took no time off and then just worked through Thanksgiving and Christmas to get Adopt-A-State Georgia up and running. And then everyone who signed up. We had 41,000 people sign up to Adopt Georgia between November and January. Raised $4.2 million for the Get Mitch Fund for Ossoff and Fair Fight Action,

raised $1.65 million for our Every Last Vote Fund, which included Black Voters Matter, Mijente, and the New Georgia Product, made 108,000 calls to unregistered voters with the New Georgia Project Action Fund, and we sent 5,000 volunteers

distributed to local Georgia organizing groups on the ground. So thank you to everyone who signed up to adopt Georgia and who helped out and volunteered or donated in any way over the last couple of months. You really made a huge difference. So as we said, you know, Democratic turnout dropped by less than Republican turnout. What role do you think Trump played in the drop in Republican turnout? Obviously, two possibilities here. Republicans stayed home because Trump wasn't on the ballot,

or they stayed home because Trump, and to a greater extent, lunatics like Lin Wood, told them that the election was rigged. I think it's more the former than the latter. You think it's more that Trump wasn't on the ballot? Yes. If Republican turnout was sky high, and if Democrat turnout had been lower than it was, we would have been blown away by how high the Republican turnout was for this special and if Democrat turnout had been lower than it was, we would have

been blown away by how high the Republican turnout was for this special election. Yeah, for sure. That, like, we talked about how high the Democratic turnout was unprecedented. The Republican turnout is also unprecedented. It's just slightly less unprecedented, and therefore they lost. And so, like, we had this hope that Trump was going to convince all these people not to turn out because of the election rigging, but apparently the Georgia voters got the winking and the nodding and went and turned out. So I think it had more to do with Trump not being on the ballot. Also Democrats doing a better job of organizing. They out-organized Republicans. And so it's more the Democrats won the race than

Republicans lost it. I think that's very important. And as we think about what's going to be really interesting, because turnout was so high on both sides, is was this the last election of the Trump era? Or was it the first election of the post-Trump era? Does it tell us something about how the people are going to stay engaged at this incredibly high level post-Trump? Or will we look back and say this massive amount of engagement where politics was the dominating point of discussion in American life was unique to Trump? And I think that's something we're going to test and see out throughout 2021 and in 2022. And I think it's a really interesting question about where things are headed.

Let's talk about the campaigns and their 22. And it's, I think it's a really interesting question about where things are headed. Let's talk about the campaigns and their messages. Ossoff and Warnock hammered COVID relief throughout the campaign, especially at the end when McConnell blocked the $2,000 checks. Biden even focused on this message in his final campaign stop. He said their election will put an end to the block in Washington on the $2,000 stimulus check. If you send Senator Perdue and Loeffler back to Washington, those checks will never get there. It's just that simple. The power is literally in your hands. What role do you think that played? It played a huge role. It is hard to know in the moment whether it was the checks specifically or the checks were the embodiment of a very effective narrative about Republicans. The, with all of the, this is, I think is a great credit to John Ossoff, Raphael Warnock,

and their campaigns is Trump was the dominating omnipresent figure in the race. Days before the election, he tried to bully the governor into overturning the results of the presidential election, engaged in multiple electoral crimes and moral travesties. He was in Georgia twice. He was tweeting about it all the time. Yet the Senate campaigns ran campaigns like we did in 2018. They pushed Trump into the background and brought the Republican Party and David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler specifically into the foreground. And they ran against Loeffler and Perdue as callous, corrupt corporatists in the middle of a recession. And that proved to be a very powerful message. Now, as we think about how this plays out going

forward, two incredibly wealthy senators who engage in insider trading to enrich themselves off the pandemic are particularly vulnerable to this attack. But I think there's some real lessons learned about how we talk about Republicans not named Trump and elections coming. I do think it's a, there's two sides of the sort of Republicans are corrupt message. There's obviously the negative message about Republicans, and there's the positive message about what you're going to do. And I do think the $2,000 checks gave Democrats the ability to offer voters a tangible benefit to voting for them. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Which is something that we often forget this. And by the way, it's not just, you know, because Stacey Abrams made this point to me in the wilderness, right, when we talked about sort of some of the more, the bigger,

some of the more bigger, progressive, ambitious ideas. And she said, here's the thing. You need to be able to deliver for voters. And so you need to propose something that is going to make voters lives better, but also something that they believe that you can actually get done, because if you promise them the moon and you can't deliver, then they're going to grow more cynical the next time and not and not come out. And the two thousand dollar checks is something that the Democrats can deliver, right? Like it is very obvious that you can just, you can pass the bill. Joe Biden can sign the bill. You can send the checks. Like voters aren't stupid. They know, they know what's possible and what's not possible.

And I think Democrats should remember that when we are campaigning, that it's not sometimes, you know, there are a couple of problems with this. Sometimes we get lost in like tax credit speak and we're talking about expanding the EITC. And, you know, so sometimes we get way too in the weeds and it's benefits that people can't really understand. And it seems small and it seems like, you know, just nibbling around the edges. And then sometimes it's like big and vague promises, you know, like that you make to voters that they know that you're not going to deliver. So I think specific policies that you know you can deliver to voters that actually improve their lives are incredibly important. That sounds obvious, but it doesn't happen enough.

And it's hard. It's hard to find them that are very tangible like that. That is very true. But I also think like as much as Warnock and Ossoff did a good job sort of calling out the corruption of these two Republican senators, I didn't see a tweet, an ad, anything from those two candidates where they didn't mention and where about health care jobs and justice, health care jobs and justice. You know, they had three things that they said over and over and over again, and then they had specifics backing that up. So I thought that was pretty good. Do you have any other lessons that you think we can draw from this race going forward? I mean, there are three lessons I would say. It's negative message against Republicans around a populist economic critique of Republicans pushing Trump out of the narrative as much as possible. Is your point specific populist deliverables in terms of policy? And then I think the other thing

is they ran big, bold campaigns. They were not embarrassed. They were not centrists. They were not embarrassed to be Democrats. You see that a lot in a purple state. They ran ads with John Lewis. They campaigned with Joe Biden. They ran ads with Barack Obama. They were proud Democrats who ran big, bold campaigns. They ran from a position of strength and hope and not fear. And it did not have to be that way. You often see it in these, particularly in these runoff elections where you're trying to just win what you expect to be low turnout. They ran a very motivating race and they benefited from it. And I hope that lots of Democrats follow that lead in 21 and 22. I think there's something to learn

from Raphael Warnock and his campaign. I mean, we have the first black Democratic senator from the South. He ran a, like you said, a campaign where he was unafraid to embrace being a Democrat or a black man in the South. And he also, Kelly Loeffler ran an incredibly racist campaign against him and how he handled

those racist attacks were, you know, there were the puppy videos and then it was also just constantly pivoting to his positive agenda, you know, and when you are getting attacked like that, when she's going after his church and going after things he said, going after associations, all the racist dog whistles that they that Republicans like to blow every single election. There's a lot of pressure from your own campaign, from allies, from everyone else to hit back at every single one of those attacks and it takes a lot of discipline to say i'm going to pivot and say she doesn't have anything to say about herself so she's attacking me and here's what i'm going to do for you she's afraid that if i'm elected i'm going to deliver on these stimulus checks that i'm going to give people health care that i'm going to help make this make more just. And I think Warnock's message, discipline,

and how he handled the racism leveled against him. And I think it's very similar to how Obama handled it in some of his races. I think it's similar to how Stacey Abrams handled it in her race in 2018. I think that is something for Democrats, especially Democrats of color who are running to learn from going forward. And yeah, no, I think it's I continue to just be amazed at what happened in Georgia, a state that has been red for so long, where we have a the first black Democratic senator, a 33 year old Jewish Jewish kid, senators who didn't run as scared centrists, right?

No, they didn't run as like, you know, Democratic socialists either. Like they were, they talked about Medicaid expansion. They didn't talk about Medicare for all. Raphael Warnock ran ads where sheriffs talked about supporting him and he attacked Loeffler on stage and saying, you're the one who's defunded the police with your votes against state and local funding. Right. So they they didn't really run too far to the left, but they definitely didn't run to the center either. They were just Democrats, mainstream Democrats who were proud of what they stood for. And they had an agenda and they had a story about the other side. And sometimes that's it. Sometimes that's what you need. That's all you need.

What I think is so important about Warnock's victory is one of the things that I've really been concerned about over the last couple of years is whenever you talk to someone like Stacey Abrams or Andrew Gillum or someone, a candidate of color who is trying to run statewide, the hardest part is convincing donors, party types, institutional supporters that you can win. And I was very worried about how narrow the presidential race was, where Joe Biden, a 70-something white man from Scranton barely won the electoral college, what that would say about the ability of candidates, black candidates, Latino candidates, Asian candidates to run and win statewide in purple and red states. And we saw that in how the electability question was during

the Democratic primary among our voters was filtered through race and gender. And we have so much work to do on this, but Raphael Warnock has proven that in a very tough race, again, where you're running against an incumbent president who is campaigning- In an incredibly competitive state, incredibly competitive state. You can win. And that is a huge deal. And I hope that we remember that as we think about who our candidates are in races all across this country. I totally agree. I think it's very, very important. And I'm glad that we could end on Georgia because this is a very dark and scary set of things that we are dealing with as a country.

set of things that we are dealing with as a country. And I'm talking about right now that there is this positive thing that matters a lot and bodes well for our ability to navigate what is to come in American life because you've proven how to do it in Georgia. And we should also end by talking about not just what it means for history or what it means for electoral politics, but what it's actually going to mean for Joe Biden and the country to have a Democratic majority. We have a Democratic majority now. We got Mitch. For one, Republicans can no longer block any of Biden's nominees if Democrats just hold together. All the complaints about Neera Tanden or Javier Becerra or anyone else we've heard about. Do not matter. John Cornyn and Lindsey Graham can cry about mean tweets all they want.

They can go fuck themselves. Just complain all you want about mean tweets. You don't matter. Number two, Biden can actually pick some judges and start filling judicial vacancies, including the Supreme Court. I believe Justice Breyer is 82. So nice. Might be a nice time to retire, Breyer, because we have a Democratic president, Democratic majority might not last forever. So you might want to start looking at your calendar. And not like he's going to listen to us. You think Justice Breyer listens to Pod Save America? Probably not. And so both of these points, the nominees and the judicial vacancies, come into play with Biden's announcement on Wednesday that his pick for attorney general is none other than Merrick Garland. Dan, what do you think about the pick and what impact did Georgia have on that pick? It's very notable that Joe Biden waited until the racists were called to

make this choice because Merrick Garland sits on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is the second most powerful court in the land. When Obama was president, one of the reasons why Harry Reid got rid of the filibuster for judges is because Mitch McConnell filibustered every single nominee to that court. He shrunk the court, right? Mr. I care so much about court packing. He shrunk the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals for all intents and purposes to prevent Obama from getting nominees. And so were McConnell to still be in control of the Senate and Biden were to pick Garland, that seat would certainly never go filled in Biden's first term, for sure. And so I imagine

that someone else might have been the nominee if Georgia had gone differently. Because he has made almost all of his appointments. This is one of the big four, as they're called. And he certainly held it until this moment. He clearly wanted to pick Garland, and the voters of Georgia let him do it. Merrick Garland is a tremendous public servant. He has a tremendous record. I had the privilege of sitting in the interview when he was one of the shortlisters to be an Obama pick on the Supreme Court back in 2009 and is a truly phenomenal human being. We have lots of friends who have clerked for him, know him, and think he is tremendous. And the team he put together, it's not just Merrick Garland. Lisa Monaco, our former coworker, is going to be deputy.

Vinita Gupta is going to be the associate attorney general. And Kristen Clark is going to be in charge of civil rights. And this is very notable. He's picked two civil rights leaders to play senior roles in the Justice Department. And that's a huge thing. And I think this is a very, very good team. There's also some reports that Biden could or has been thinking about replacing Garland on the D.C. Court of Appeals with Katonji Brown-Jackson. She is a 50-year-old Black woman who currently sits on the federal district court in D.C.

And also is someone who has been mentioned as a possible Supreme Court justice. And so she could go to Phil Merrick Garland's seat on the Supreme Court and elevate a very young black woman to the Supreme Court of the United States, which would be awesome. So a lot of good things came from what just happened in Georgia. What else can we expect from a Democratic Senate? And where are we still going to face challenges? And where are we still going to face challenges? Well, we're going to face challenges in that the filibuster still exists. So to pass most things, not nominations, not court appointments, but most pieces of legislation, and there are a few exceptions we can talk about, we still need 10 Republicans. And Mitch McConnell still has say under that scenario, under large portions of the Biden agenda. And even still, we have Joe Manchin, a very conservative Democrat, Kyrsten Sinema, Mark

Kelly from Arizona, more moderate Democrats who have concerns with some of the more progressive elements of the Biden agenda, some of the more important structural reforms like turning D.C. into a state or some of those sorts of things. So this is hard. 50-50 sentence are very, very challenging. They take a long time to organize. There's some pretty intense negotiations between the majority and the minority about how many people are on each committee and how you set it up and all of that. So this is an incredibly narrow path to get things done, but it is a path and that would not exist under any scenario if we had not won both of those seats on Tuesday. A few points here, because as you know, Dan, I have some concerns about the filibuster and I have for a while. The reason that we can't,

you might be thinking, why can't we get rid of the filibuster? Like we said, we wanted to. Well, because Joe Manchin doesn't want to get rid of the filibuster. You need 51 votes to get rid of the filibuster, which we have. We have 50 Democrats have 51 votes, but we do not have 51 Democratic senators who want to get rid of the filibuster, namely Joe Manchin. Possibly some others too. Yeah. I'm not sure we have 40 votes right now. Yeah. I don't know that Keir says, But like some of them you could imagine pressuring. You could imagine saying the voters of your state are going to, you know, punish you if you don't eliminate the filibuster and we're going to have a primary challenge. Like I said, Joe Manchin, there's none of that. We're not getting another Democrat out of West Virginia.

Probably in our lifetime. Maybe I'm wrong. I shouldn't say that. At least in the next 10 years, let's say, we're not another Democratic senator out of Virginia. And certainly not another Democratic senator out of West Virginia who is more liberal than Joe Manchin. Joe Manchin doesn't care about your pressure campaigns. He doesn't care about you calling his office and yelling at him. He won a seat recently. He's there for a while, and he's just going to be Joe Manchin. And I hate that. You hate that. But like, that is the reality that we have. So the question is, can we ever get to a point where there's legislation that comes to the floor that's so important that McConnell is obstructing so much

that we somehow can convince? And by we, I really mean Joe Biden and his administration, because again, Joe Manchin doesn't respond mean Joe Biden and his administration, because again, Joe Manchin doesn't respond to popular pressure and is somewhat insulated from political pressure. Can Biden ever convince Manchin to change his position on the filibuster? I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question. The other opportunity we have is, you mentioned most legislation requires 60 votes. There is something called a budget reconciliation bill where we can pass that bill with only 51 votes. What can you put on a budget reconciliation bill? Well, first of all, you're only allowed one budget reconciliation

bill per year. You can stuff whatever you want in that so long as it is about taxing and spending and has to do with actually changing the budget itself. So what can get done within budget reconciliation with 51 votes? The $2,000 checks can get done. Democrats can expand eligibility for Obamacare subsidies. They can get Medicare to negotiate for better prescription drug prices that way. You can actually change the Medicare age, the age of eligibility for Medicare within budget reconciliation, which Joe Biden, because of Bernie Sanders, has promised to bring down five years. I read that you can possibly do a public option within budget reconciliation. Tax hikes for the rich, anything that has to do with

taxes, you can do in budget reconciliation, which means climate spending, anything that has to do with taxes you can do in budget reconciliation, which means climate spending investment that has to do with climate. Um, you can do some immigration things, uh, within budget that have to do with money, but still a lot of immigration stuff would actually have to be real legislation. Um, and then the things that you can't do are minimum wage, immigration guns. And then this is the big one that worries me that I wanted to ask you about is all of these democracy voting reforms that we know we need to pass in order to make sure that we can still have free and fair elections again. Like, what do we do about H.R.1, which we've talked about before, which is the House Democracy Reform Bill that they are going to rename the John Lewis Voting Rights Act? What do we do about that bill? Is that dead on arrival? Does Biden try it anyway? What do you think? I don't want to say

dead on arrival, but there is no plausible path to 10 Republicans supporting something that helps black people and brown people vote. There's no recent history of that being the case. However, I think it's critically important that Biden, in the appropriate order, calls the question. We can't just presume Mitch McConnell's obstruction. We have to force him to actually obstruct to things for two reasons. One, so that we can create a paper trail of the costs of the Republican Senate for when we are going to go be trying to defeat Republican senators in 2022. And if you want to make a case, if Joe Biden wants to do this, and Joe Biden is very reticent on the filibuster, even as important as Joe Manchin, is Joe Biden is not someone like Elizabeth Warren or Pete Buttigieg or some

others who were running for president who were very adamantly opposed to the existence of the filibuster. Joe Biden, as close as he came during the campaign, was to say he was open to the idea if Mitch McConnell was obstreperous, I think was his term. Now, Mitch McConnell was obviously going to be obstreperous, so he opened the door wide for it. But let's test the proposition on all of these issues of the things that are very important that have huge majority support

from the American people that Mitch McConnell wants to stop. Let's make him stop them. Let's make Marco Rubio stop these things. Let's make Ron Johnson stop these things. Let's make the people that we are going to try to defeat in 2022 go on the record blocking popular legislation. Let's not assume their obstruction and so avoid them. Now, when I say do it in the proper order, I think there's going to be a real question about what that budget reconciliation bill is. How soon do you do it? How important is it to fill in the gaps of the very meager COVID relief bill that was passed last month? How quickly do you get these checks out? That is going to require being the budget reconciliation bill. So is that something that's going to move very early? And should that move? The House can do

things like this, right? So they'll, like Nancy Pelosi, pick whatever, if you want to do H.R. 1 first and then come around, do the other thing, that's great. The Senate takes much more time. It's much harder. And so it is a real, you know, there's a very curious to see how the order in which Biden prioritizes these things and how quickly he wants to play that budget reconciliation card in his presidency. I would go very hard on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. I would put it on the floor if I was Schumer and just dare Mitch McConnell and those Republicans. If you want to filibuster it, like actually filibuster it, sit down, get on the Senate floor and just talk about why you don't want to expand voting rights. And I don't think that's necessarily going to shame Republicans, but, you know, maybe the pressure builds at that point. Like Joe Manchin, do you want the Republicans to filibuster a bill named after John Lewis about voting rights? That, you know, we don't pass some of these democracy reforms, voting reforms. I get pretty worried about elections in 2022 and 2024 and 2026 and beyond. We have redistricting this year. That's going to be tough for us.

Like, you know, we know we already saw in Georgia. Right. They're getting ready to pass a raft of voter restrictions in Georgia. And look, there's limited stuff that you can do on the federal level, but H.R. 1 is a good bill. And I think that the Democrats should push very, very hard for it and make it very, very clear whose fault it is if it doesn't pass and do everything they can to pass it. I mean, this is the central issue. Everything flows from it. And when we talk about Mitch McConnell nurturing this lie about a stolen election, and we talk about in the context of jacking up turnout in Georgia, that's part of it. The longer term reason why all the Republicans who definitely knew better allowed this lie to fester is because it creates pretext for more voter suppression.

This is going to happen all across the country. And this is the last throws of a shrinking white conservative majority in a country defined by a diverse growing progressive majority. And we, we bet we are going to have some limits of what we can do in the Senate, but we got to call the question. We got to fight on it. We got to talk about it. We got to make it the defining issue because everything else we care about

flows from that. All right. When we come back, we will have Dan's interview with Nse Ufot. I'm now joined by Nse Ufot, the CEO of the civic engagement group, the New Georgia Project, whose critical work in registering and turning out voters helped turn Georgia blue once again on Tuesday. Nse, welcome to the show. Hi, Dan. How's it going?

Well, I just want to start by thanking you for all the work you did to turn Georgia blue twice. John and I were talking a little earlier about what, as horrible as yesterday was for this country, how much worse it would have felt if the people who had egged on what happened had been rewarded just the day before with more political powers. I just want to say thank you for all of your work. You're welcome, on behalf of the people of Georgia. Yeah, so I thank the people of Georgia, yes. You were on another Crooked Media podcast last month when you said your gut feeling was that we were going to win this thing. Why did you feel so good then?

And what was your reaction when you found out that Reverend Warnock and John Ossoff had both won? So I was confident in, one, our organizing, to be completely honest. I've said before that the demographic shifts in Georgia are the fire and organizing is the accelerant. It's the gas that we poured over the fire. You know, Georgia's going through this rapid, massive, and unique demographic shift. Demographers and political scientists are calling it the reversal of the Great Migration. The Great Migration, 1920s to the 1970s, Black Americans fled the South, fleeing racialized violence, looking for economic opportunities, which is why so many Black folks in Chicago can trace their roots to Mississippi. Black Americans in New York and New Jersey

can trace their roots to the Carolinas and to Georgia. And now those folks are moving back south where their children are. And it's created these opportunities for a different kind of politics in the south. And so we've been watching, and so have the other side, been watching these demographic shifts. But we also learned about all of the sort of tips and tricks in their toolbox that they've been using to suppress the vote.

And so in addition to the two million doors that we knocked on, the seven million phone calls that we made, the four million text messages that we made, the 7 million phone calls that we made, the 4 million text messages that we made. We also had 4,500 volunteers who were our eyes and ears watching for voter suppression. We had lawyers and lawyers and lawyers on deck that were in place and prepared to respond to any sort of shenanigans that arose during early voting and on election day. And quite frankly, like people are tired. So all the conversations that we were having on the doors, right, folks were pissed off at their president, told them to drink bleach, right? Folks were pissed off that the governor lied about what he knew about COVID. And it's particularly egregious to us in Georgia because everybody knows that the governor's

mansion is three miles away from the CDC headquarters, right? And so, you know, as an organizer, we're out, we're in the streets, we're on the doors, and we're talking about the pain that people are experiencing right now and what they can do to stop it. And one of those things is voting. So we knew folks were going to turn up. So in November, Joe Biden won a narrow victory, but David Perdue got more votes than John Ossoff in the other race. The sum total of the Republican

candidates got more than the sum total of Reverend Warnock and the Democratic candidates. What adjustments did you make to your strategies and your organizing to overcome those deficits in such a short period of time? Right. So we knocked on about 405,000 doors, having high quality face-to-face conversations between Labor Day and the November general election. We knocked on 1.7 million doors in the nine weeks between the November general and the January election. So there was a lot of deliberation with public health experts and with our board and with our staff about going out on the doors and going big and leaving it all on the field.

So that was one of the major adjustments that we made to our program. We still and will continue to privilege high quality face-to-face conversations with people because we, A, know that it works. But also, B, we train our organizers. Listen, you have twice as many ears as mouths. Right. And so people want to be heard. Right. And so we listen to people. It helps inform our messaging um it helps inform all of our tactics quite frankly um at the core of the work that the new georgia project does is a very bold very aggressive research agenda um and so you know

just because we're black and brown just because we're young people, millennials and Gen Zers, they'll automatically make us experts in those, you know, youth politics that we study to show ourselves approved. So, you know, that was one of the adjustments that we made. And then quite frankly, I think that even with our like nine months of aggressive, again, A-B message testing, polling, focus groups and all that, nothing was more powerful than watching the state flip for the first time and watching Georgians vote for a Democrat for president for the first time since 1992. Nothing was more powerful than hearing really awful remixes and remakes of Georgia on my mind and having the entire country

talk about, I mean, some of them were good. I don't want to offend people, but some of them were not. But it all contributed to the chorus, right? That your vote matters, that Georgia votes matter, and that Georgia's had the opportunity to sort of save our democracy. and that Georgians had the opportunity to sort of save our democracy. It's really interesting what you said about door-to-door canvassing. So to get this right, is that for most of the general election, you sort of shied away from it for the very obvious public health reasons, picked it up a little bit towards the end, and then, not that anyone can return to normalness, but it was a much bigger focus in the runoff was door to door as opposed to phone and text. Is that correct?

Correct. One, we saw that there was an additional registration opportunity. Right. So an additional 30 days to add more people to the voter rolls. There ended up being like 33,000 young people that registered to vote. About 14,000 of them were young black Georgians. And we registered about 7,000 of those, right, in 30 days. But also, I think having someone knock on your door underscores the importance of the opportunity, the importance of the moment that we're in.

We definitely saw tons of people who were like, no, no, I voted already. I voted in November. of people who were like, no, no, I voted already. I voted in November. I voted for Biden. And we're like, thank you. And don't know if you heard. And so again, just having an opportunity to one, listen, but then to also underscore the opportunity. And here's why it matters. Like one, like obviously, you know, campaign field operatives, folks know the effectiveness of these face-to-face conversations. But the secondary benefit for us was that there's been a ton of misinformation and disinformation targeted at young voters and Black voters. So being able to hear what people are reading in online magazines and hearing what they're reading on social media and being able to combat that disinformation with a real human who's standing on your porch telling you that it's really important for you to vote and that Mitch McConnell is trying to take $1,400 out of your pocket and you can do something about it. The, you know, there's the turnout on both sides, frankly, particularly on the Democratic side was unbelievable turnout, particularly among Black voters, Latino voters, young people, just flies against every piece of conventional wisdom about Democrats and runoff elections. But the

number that blows me away when I look at what you guys accomplished was the 140,000, I think it was, people who voted in the runoff, but not in November. Yes. Who are those people? How did you find them? And how did you get them to vote? Because that is a margin larger than either John Ossoff or Reverend Warnock are going to win by. I'll suffer Reverend Murdoch are going to win by. So. Absolutely. So a couple of things. One, there are 23,000 Georgians that turned 18 in the period between the November general and the January runoff. Right.

So we wanted to get out and make sure that we registered them to vote. So what that, what does that mean? We called a whole bunch of guidance counselors, high school principals, and said, can we have a virtual assembly with your seniors? Let's do a virtual birthday party for everybody that's turning 18. Killer Michael, hop on the Zoom. We'll welcome them to adulthood and register them to vote. So that was awesome. And those folks were absolutely motivated to get out and vote too. Again, Georgia has a long and a recent history of voter suppression. And so, you know, at the end of 2019, going into 2020, there were 750,000

Georgians that were purged from the voter rolls. And because our Secretary of State does an awful job of giving people notice, there are a lot of folks who showed up to vote in November who didn't find out that they'd been purged until they showed up to vote. And so we went out trying to make sure that they got re-registered and that they showed up and vote. And again, those people were particularly motivated because they had experienced disenfranchisement firsthand.

I think there's also folks who just moved into the state. Listen, tons of people keep moving to Georgia. That's a part of the demographic shifts that we're talking about. I joke and be like, you know, traffic is awful. Atlanta is full. You should check out Charlotte. I hear it's lovely this time of year. But the truth of the matter is that, you know, they're here and they are a large part of why we have this opportunity.

But I also want I want to underscore that enthusiasm was high on both sides. Right. Right. And so it wasn't that there are a lot of folks who thought that the phone call with Brad and President Trump would depress Republican turnout. Earlier, towards the end of the year in December, you know, there were these Trump supporters who were saying, don't vote because, you know, the elections are rigged, et cetera. That did not work. Republicans turned out and they turned out in numbers. It's just that there were more Democrats that showed up and particularly more Black voters that showed up. The history of political success for Democrats, particularly in the South, is one of a lot of work, success,

and then backlash from the political leadership in the state. You know, particularly when it is a candidate, you know, a black candidate who wins Barack Obama's election in 2008 led to a raft of voter suppression laws all across the country. There's already talk from a lot of Georgia Republicans about a whole new set of laws to suppress the vote in Georgia. How are you thinking about that? What are you planning to do to fight back against those? So we're going to call it what it is. It's a white lash. Fair point. Fair point. Yes. And so really a couple of things. One, we have built sort of permanent, independent, organizing infrastructure, progressive infrastructure in Georgia. And so, you know, the central conceit of the New Georgia Project, in addition to, you know, every voter, every election, is that we want to win.

we want to win. We want to build infrastructure that's designed to harness the power of our electorate, of our neighbors, to win things for our families, for our communities, and then defend those wins beyond one election cycle. And so where a campaign is designed to get a particular candidate elected, right, there's grand opening and then grand closing. We're still here and we're going to be here. And we're, I mean, after vacation, much needed rest. We are preparing for Georgia's legislative session. And, you know, they haven't telegraphed what their intentions are. They are telling us we lost, we suck. people are not buying what we're selling. And the only way that we're going to hang on to power is if we cheat, is if we change the rules. And so that is what we're preparing for. So we are preparing to turn up in the Georgia state legislature, frankly, having a sort of robust democracy to have, you know, robust elections infrastructure

is the sort of foundation that we need for any of the policy changes that we want. I don't think people know that the minimum wage in Georgia is $5.15 an hour, right? Georgia's building two new nuclear power plants in Black neighborhoods. There Georgia's building two new nuclear power plants in Black neighborhoods. There haven't been any new nuclear power plants built anywhere in the U.S. in 30 years, right? So there's a lot that is on Georgians' minds that they want to get addressed in the state legislature. We have nearly 12 hospitals, eight that have already closed in rural parts of the state because of the state's failure to expand Medicaid. People are dying. And we're in the middle of a pandemic. And hospitals tend to be the largest employers in the rural communities where they are. So people

are losing their jobs, right? People are, we're running out of beds. And let's be clear, people are still having babies, right. People are still fighting cancer. And COVID is on the rise. So there's a lot that is on Georgians' minds. And they have a lot to say to their legislatures. And so we have the permanent infrastructure that is designed to, again, capture the fears, the hopes of Georgia voters and help turn it into policy. So if our listeners want to help support your work, both in fighting back against voter suppression and pushing these building sustainable progressive

infrastructure to push for progressive policies, but also to prepare for what are going to be incredibly critical elections in Georgia in this next cycle. How can they do that? Sure. This is where I throw up the softball and you knock it out. I'm going to catch this value. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Listen, you can reach us always at newgeorgiaproject.org. We're also on all the social media platforms as New Georgia Project, right?

So Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. I mean, if you want to see the CEO give you some auntie bars, like you can join and follow up any of those platforms. But yeah, we do this work year round, the traditional launch of our voter registration year is MOK weekend. And so again, after we take a break, we're going to be back at it. Well, and say thank you so much for everything that you were doing. You are an inspiration. We are so grateful for the work you've done. And I, the New Georgia Project, as we say to our listeners a lot, is a model for what Democrats need to be doing around the country to build sustainable progressive power and turn these

red states blue. And so we thank you. We thank you for your work. And I encourage everyone who can to support your efforts. We have a lot of work to do to make sure that Georgia is on a an inexorable path to becoming a blue state, much like we want to be more like Virginia than North Carolina right now. So thank you so much. Thank you. Take care. Thanks, Sensei, for joining us today. And we will talk to you have everyone have a good weekend we'll talk to you next week bye everyone hot save america is a crooked media production the executive producer is michael martinez our associate producer is jordan waller it's mixed and edited by andrew chadwick kyle seglin is our sound engineer thanks to tanya

sominator katie long roman papa dimitrio caroline rustin and justine how for production support Thank you.