Pod Save America - “Wet president.”

Episode Date: November 13, 2018

The Blue Wave is real, Kyrsten Sinema wins in Arizona, Trump takes a pass on honoring veterans because it rained, and House Democrats put voting rights at the top of their agenda. Then Stacey Abrams�� campaign manager Lauren Groh-Wargo talks to Tommy about the effort to count every vote in Georgia's governor’s race.

Welcome to Pod Save America, I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. Later in the pod, Tommy talks to Stacey Abrams' campaign manager, Lauren Groargo, about what is happening in Georgia. They're not at a recount yet. They're just still counting provisional ballots, trying to stop Brian Kemp from, you know, just certifying the election. Just stealing the thing. Yeah. Lovett is back on Love It or Leave It.

I'm back. How was it? On or leave it it was great we had a great show with emily heller langston kerman and kieran deal from hysteria we did an election post-election special we talked about the blue wave we talked about sessions we talked about ayahuasca wow we covered it all that part of the news tommy what about uh pod save the world we also talked about ayahuasca uh this week me and jake sullivan talked about ayahuasca all for like an hour last week what if this is all weird what if we're all in his ayahuasca experience for the last two years i thought about that a lot and he wakes up and hillary clinton is introducing a uh climate bill that doesn't go far enough. Yeah, Jake's just napping in the National Security Advisor's office.

Anyway, yeah, last week we talked about what Democrats winning in the House means for foreign policy. And then this week in the talk, some North Korean news turns out, surprise, surprise, they're cheating and building all kinds of new missile sites all over the country. And the Trump administration is pretending it's not happening. Good stuff. So much for the love affair. Great success. Well, guys, it seems as though Democrats should have done a bit more gloating last week

because we've won a ton of shit. We've won a lot. More races have been called since last week. As of Monday night, it's looking like Democrats could expand their gain of House seats to more than 40 and limit the Republican gain in the Senate to two seats or one, depending on how the recount in Florida shakes out. That's because Jon Tester won in Montana. And on Monday night, Kyrsten Sinema was declared the winner in Arizona, the first female senator from that state, first openly bisexual U.S. senator. It also looks as though we may end up defeating six of the original Crooked Seven

out here in California. Beautiful. Fingers crossed. We're still waiting on vote counts for Katie Porter to take the lead. She's down about 1,000 votes now. But we've got Democratic officials filling out fake votes left and right, trying to get us over the hump. That brings me to my question.

Guys, why do we keep winning these races what kind of a deep state plot is this winning races a week after because they're counting votes it's so stupid i i don't know how the media isn't structurally prepared to just sort of contextualize the fact that some votes come in later like if you're in the military and you live overseas you get to mail your ballot and it gets to show up a little bit later because it takes time to mail stuff yeah and i will say like the media did a horrible horrible job of this on tuesday night and we fell victim to it we sat here on wednesday and we're like oh poor kirsten cinema she hasn't conceded yet but she's probably going to lose because i mean we paid a lot of attention to news on wednesday night many different outlets and there were too many people who were like like we knew because we live in california Because, I mean, we paid a lot of attention to news on Wednesday night, many different outlets.

And there were too many people who were like, like we knew because we live in California that the California votes would come in late. But didn't know that, you know, Maricopa County in Arizona had like 400,000 ballots left to count. You should also probably get better at counting faster. Yeah, well, so I think the big issue on why some of these votes came in late were a lot of states going to vote by mail. Right. And at least in California, as long as you postmark your ballot on Election Day, it still counts. So think of how long that takes to count. In Florida, at least, I think you had to postmark your ballot if you did mail in by like a couple of days before the election. So it was different. And in Arizona, there's a lot of mail in balloting, too. a couple days before the election. So it was different. And then Arizona does a lot of mail-in balloting too. And again, like there are just patterns, right? Early mail-in ballots usually favor Republicans. Early in-person voting favors Democrats. Election day voting favors Republicans.

Later mail-in ballots favors Democrats. And these patterns have been the same for years. Yeah, we only care about the after election counting when it can determine the outcome of the election. I remember after 2016, some of the narratives around turnout had to be adjusted because there were so many California votes that got counted so late, but because they didn't affect the outcome and they didn't have any close races, nobody cared. Same in Florida. To their credit, the Arizona Secretary of State put out a long blog post explaining why it takes so long to vote. Part of it is there's a whole bunch of people who drop off their early ballots at the polls on election day. They said it's 320,000. So that means you need to verify all

those signatures and then make sure they didn't also vote in person when they dropped that off by accident. No one's alleging fraud here, but you can see why that's sort of an onerous process and takes a while. It just means like we need to remember that we're probably not going to get a whole bunch of results during midterms on election night. And we should just tell people that in advance. Like you can't judge the blue wave on Tuesday night. No, never again.

And many people did. Right. Many people said it's certainly not a blue wave. James Carville. Well, and many people made fools of themselves days later brett stevens i mean you get a little bit of excuse on election night you don't get an excuse a couple days later i love when brett stevens decides to fight back to defend himself because it always means he's going to get a second round of people pointing out the ways in which his first column was so bad. Dunked on by Nate Cohn repeatedly.

I mean, it wasn't just like conservative columnist Brett Stevens. Last night, Monday night, there was an AP headline, No Blue Wave But Democrats' Midterm Success S success sinking in about all of these developments in the piece it says democrats had their their party had their best midterm performance since watergate since 1971 and yet the headline was no blue wave so it's like i mean and to some extent this whole fucking debate is stupid whether you want to kind of blew it to a to the to all the all the extent it's like we're we're debating whether or not an abstraction used to describe this like a metaphor is completely

accurate we should use the wave metaphor the wave metaphor applies god damn it what kind of mainstream media nonsense is this it was it had the crest on top and it killed a server you insinuated a tsunami this This clearly was like, what? Come on, everyone. We were going to win like 40 seats in the House. That is astounding. And then all these governorships and state legislatures. It's a huge night for Democrats.

Yeah. I mean, once again, you know, there's so much focus on personalities and individual races and ideology and like not enough focus on just the way the demographics are in the country. and not enough focus on just the way the demographics are in the country. And if you look, and a couple of posters did this, basically the entire electorate just moved six points more Democratic. And if you go race by race throughout the country, it's like that was enough to put Sinema over the top in Arizona because Hillary Clinton only lost that race by three points.

That was enough to get Beto very close because Hillary Clinton only won that race by nine points. She lost that race by three points. That was enough to get Beto very close because Hillary Clinton only won that race by nine points. She lost that race. So if you go through the country, it's a pretty easy explanation for what happened. Hey, John. Yeah? What do you call a video file of the bear from Jungle Book

talking about the election? What? A Baloo dot wave oh it just didn't have to happen yeah anyway i'm recovering from that so so does this i mean to the point about the narrative like yeah let's talk about the narrative it doesn't matter but it does yeah because it does it matter like it informs how democrats run on policy it informs how we run in elections the next time but it informs how the media treats democrats taking power like i do think some of the stupidity of the democratic overreach thing is built on this idea that we didn't have the success we should have had so maybe the strategy has been wrong yep and also margaret sullivan in the washington post uh media

critic wrote a piece um that was very good about this. And she said, you know, some of this and we're going to get to this, you know, Donald Trump and the Republicans refusing to believe in the election results. It certainly didn't help that the media basically said, you had a great night. Republicans went everywhere. Like it sort of fed the narrative in their mind. Like, well, we were told like, you know, dumb people like donald trump we were told that we won everywhere and that we dominated what is this all this about democrats winning it must be phony it must be fraud you know and so there there is this narrative that sets in because the media said it was such a good night for republicans

that you know just sort of feeds conspiracy theories too anyway so everyone should wait next time us Us too. We should talk a little about this. What do we think about Sinema's win? You know, she ran a pretty centrist campaign, barely mentioned Donald Trump, supported him sending troops to the border. And yet she, you know,

is in the lead by about 35, 36,000 votes right now. Yeah. It's just a good example that there's no one narrative or conclusion you can draw from the way Democrats ran across the country. You had Democrats running on Medicare for all across the country and doing really well on that liberal idea. You had Beto outperforming in Texas by running an unabashedly progressive campaign. You have Joe Manchin winning in West Virginia by doing the exact opposite. So I think, you know, I think Ezra Klein wrote a great piece about this, that you just can't make a simple conclusion based on this, that it's a big, complicated country and you can't run the same way in West Virginia that you do in Texas, that you do in Georgia, that you do in Arizona, that you do in California.

Yeah. One thing about Sinema too is she,, I was reading some of the coverage of that Arizona campaign, she ran almost basically a one-issue campaign. And she ran on health care, and she ran on McSally's vote on repealing Obamacare. She ran on pre-existing conditions. And also, even though she ran as a centrist, McSally ran against her as former Green Party anti-war activist. Yeah, but it didn't work. McSally ran against Kyrsten Sinema circa 2000. Right. She called her like a terrorist sympathizer. They'd ran the most negative election they could possibly think of.

And it failed. I mean, I think the other the most interesting contrast to me is the way officials in Arizona writ large have handled the election results and the uncertainty around them as compared to Florida. I mean, they, they, you've had McSally doing this classy video with an adorable dog where she conceded. Uh, you have this, the, you know, governor of the state, uh, election officials saying, let's all take a deep breath. Like voting takes a while counting them all. It takes a while. And then you fucking marco rubio going full info wars although he's like he's like a dumb fratty version of inco wars over in florida and like really potentially creating a dangerous situation yeah i mean let's let's talk about florida uh races for governor senator and agriculture commissioner all face recounts that were triggered because the margins in all three contests are under 0.5 percent r Scott leads Bill Nelson right now by more than 12,500 votes.

DeSantis leads Gillum by 34,000 votes. And Democratic Agriculture Commissioner candidate Nikki Freed is now winning by 5,000 votes, a little more. And yet, as you said, Tommy, somehow Republicans from Rick Scott to Marco Rubio to Donald Trump are accusing Democrats of committing voter fraud and trying to steal an election. Donald Trump are accusing Democrats of committing voter fraud and trying to steal an election. Rubio's phrase was actually the Democrats lawyers are there to try and steal races. That was from Marco Rubio. Trump said that they should stop counting votes and quote, must go with election night. Imagine like Bob Bauer, Mark Elias, like coming out with like pockets, just ballots falling out of their pockets in their coats.

I mean, it's such a laughable, stupid fucking accusation. Especially from Trump. It's not even about the recount yet. It's must go with election night, which means that all of the overseas and military ballots would not be counted. Must go with election night. And as always, Trump is not, hasn't thought about this very deeply at all. He's just thinking ahead and he's thinking about being up in Florida on election night in 2020 and wanting to declare victory so that if he does end up losing a close election in a place like Florida in votes that are counted after, we end up, you

know, in the nightmare scenario of Donald Trump refusing to accept the results. Marco Rubio tweeted, someone posted a photo of a box that said provisional ballots on it. And Marco Rubio tweeted about it and fanned the flames of paranoia about this box somehow was like stolen votes. It was full of envelopes and pens and signs that said, he is such an asshole. He's an, he's an idiot and he's creating problems. He's no better than Matt Geitz who said, for all I know, they're still counting ballots for Al Gore back there. Like, okay. Your state humiliated itself in 2000. There was an election that was stolen from Al Gore back there. Like, okay, your state humiliated itself in 2000. There was an election that was stolen from Al Gore in this awful way. Why would you raise the specter of that?

Right. And here's, Trump is Trump. Rick Scott is very Trumpy as well. Marco Rubio, while acting very Trumpy in this situation, still craves the approval of the establishment in Washington and stuff like that. And so someone, anyone out there, people, reporters, anyone, please get Marco Rubio on the record as to what evidence he has for the claim that Democrats are trying to steal the election. Because he hasn't repeated it since the first week. He definitely knows he went too far because now he's trying to say, no, no, no, it's about Broward County is a disaster and there's corruption

and the election person there is, you know, blah, blah, blah. He's trying to, he's trying to deflect all these things out. But originally he said that they're trying to steal the election and he has not walked it back. I want him on the record. It's a Marco Rubio, uh, goes to great lengths to not actually take a position when he makes these kinds of little, little kind of, uh, points to appease the Republican base. And he's never more indignant as when, as when someone he actually took a position. Yeah. How dare you suggest I said, don't count the votes. I actually was merely making a bunch of implications that you were supposed to read in the subtext of what I said, while not actually being able to find any actual principle inside of my words. And I would also say, if any reporters do manage to get to Marco Rubio and ask him a question about his crazy vote allegations, can you also ask him about some of the biggest issues facing the country from the past year?

Because he has been avoiding taking a position on virtually everything. I mean, you got Catherine Harris out there being like, everyone needs to calm down, which is incredible. But I think Marco Rubio also tweeted about this. And if he did not, I apologize. But a bunch of people were tweeting about a video of an elections worker using his personal car to drive provisional ballots to the headquarters. Everyone was freaking out. Like the MAGA thing to tweet is like, let this sink in. Some man driving about this car.

Election workers are expected to use their cars for that purpose. They don't have a fleet of Election Day cars that they get to use. And then Trump was out there saying, how come they never find Republican votes in Broward County? Rick Scott's vote count went up 70,000 votes. They found a lot of votes for him. They just found more for the Democrat because that's the demographic of the county. Well, and also we should say, and the media was late to this too, Florida law enforcement, election observers, and now judges have all said there's absolutely no evidence of widespread fraud or forged ballots in the state. So don't take our word for it. Don't take Democrats' word for it.

It's like we got law enforcement. We got judges. We got Florida election officials appointed by George Bush. It's funny. If you really examine it, the connection between the votes coming in late and the fraud is one that Donald Trump is implying somehow that once Democrats in these Democratic strongholds saw that Republicans might eke it out, they went to work to start filling out the fake ballots. Like there was this group of people quietly watching the returns. And then the second it looked like Bill Nelson and Andrew Gillum might

be in trouble, all of a sudden somewhere, they're just feverishly filling out ballots as fast as they can but not so fast as to uh not draw suspicion because they're all coming in after election day i mean there's a new york times story last night all about how this has been a republican strategy this wasn't anyone actually believing that there's election fraud uh gop strategy according to republican lawyers strategists and advisors this is the new york times to quote treat the recount as the next phase of a campaign to secure the party's majority agenda in the Senate. I mean, it's just like the Kavanaugh. It's all about power. They don't care about the story. They don't care about the argument. They don't care about anything. It's just about power.

But also in Broward, like if there were some surge of votes for Nelson and Gillum and Broward, you might look at that and think that seems irregular. In fact, they underperformed in the county. They got fewer votes out of the county than they do historically. So not great fraud, guys. A lot of media outlets just sort of like repeated in their social media accounts. We can talk about this when we get to Trump. Trump's claim, Republicans claim that there was voter fraud, even though there's no evidence of that. But it's so media organizations need to fact check and some of them do this very well. CNN does this very well the next thing they need to do is actually talk about the motivation behind this strategy right like republicans are not alleging vote fraud because they think there's vote fraud they want

scott to win so they can have more power in the senate the nrsc wasn't mad at mcsally because they believed she was the victim of vote fraud they were like hey you're supposed to be lying like us so we can try to take the seat. You should get that dog back onto that couch. And you'd look at that camera and you say, if I don't win this election, Kyrsten Sinema is going to put this dog to sleep. All right. I mean, meanwhile, in Florida. Holy shit.

Meanwhile, in Florida, like you have a former Democratic congressman named Patrick Murphy who tweeted that his ballot wasn't counted because of the signatures didn't match. So God only knows how many real votes are not being counted. That to me is a real scandal, not 22 votes in Broward getting missorted. And that's and we're going to talk about that, too. When you talk to Stacey Abrams, campaign manager in Georgia, there's still a big issue of provisional ballots not being counted. And on Monday night, a federal judge delayed the certification of the results in that state, wants the provisional ballots to be counted, and even demanded that a hotline be set up for people to call in and find out if their ballot was counted. Well, just one more point on this, too. You know, as we're talking about these bad faith efforts to make this about voter fraud, we're talking about what Bill Nelson is down by 15,000 votes.

voter fraud, we're talking about what Bill Nelson is down by 15,000 votes. Under the previous governor, over four years, about 140,000 people were re-enfranchised because they were felons who then got their right to vote back. Under Rick Scott, over eight years, only 3,000 felons were given their right to vote back. Now that's going to change because Florida passed Amendment 4. But one thing to keep in mind is as they're alleging voter fraud, regardless of what happens in this recount, they have done everything they could to suppress the vote and make the result ultimately illegitimate because there are hundreds of thousands of people in Florida that Rick Scott prevented from voting because he thought they would be Democratic votes. Yeah, that's right. So, how is Trump handling the blue wave?

Thoughtful, statesman-like, sober. With his usual grace. On Friday, he blamed California's forest management and threatened to withhold federal funding as the state was burning from the most destructive fire in history, one that has killed dozens of people destroyed hundreds of homes and forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate then trump flew all the way to france only to cancel a visit to an american military cemetery to mark the anniversary of the end of world war one because it was raining and then yesterday on veterans day trump canceled the unofficial presidential trip to arlington national, also because it was raining. What the fuck is wrong with this man?

I mean, just on the fires real quick. I mean, he's such a scumbag. Like 3% of California forests are actually managed by state and local officials. The rest are like federal government and logging interests and individuals. So like he's just so wrong on the merits but the immorality of attacking people while firefighters are literally dying to try to keep this blaze from like consuming big parts of california is it's insane i don't care if a california state official started the fucking fire you don't fucking send her a tweet saying jerry brown's out there with a zippo you still don't fucking say you don't fucking send her a tweet saying, Jerry Brown's out there with a Zippo. You still don't fucking say it. You don't say that you're withholding federal funding

to a state where people are dying as he was tweeting that. The most destructive fire in state history. Raging. I have to say too, it is something different when you're actually in the place where Trump is attacking.

It looks like a nuclear bomb. We're outraged about a million things he does all the time all over the country. But when you're sitting there and you're driving around and you see the smoke and you know people who evacuated and all this kind of stuff, it's just so deeply fucked up on a human level. All politics aside, this is our fucking president right now? He has no sense of decency. So let's talk about Trump and the troops, respecting our troops by going to, first of

all, Tommy, was that a valid excuse that, so they said that Marine One couldn't fly in the rain and then Secret Service basically, Trump blamed it on Secret Service this morning, said that it was too far to travel via motorcade and that Secret Service said it wasn't possible. I believe we have the technology now to predict weather, in particular rain or fog. So it may be, it's probably true that secret service said, no, you cannot helo in this weather. Fine. Get in the car, man. It's 55 miles. Like the notion that secret service doesn't tell you not to do something. They advise you on safety, but like if the president says, you know what, I'm landing in Kabul and I'm visiting the troops in Afghanistan. They do it because he's the commander in chief.

So I think we can motorcade an hour outside of Paris. One. Two, the notion that he's like really concerned about disrupting the commute of various Parisians as he lands in the U.S. the next day and fires off five tweets attacking Macron. Sacre bleu. I've caused traffic by the Arc de Triomphe. As you know, I'm a globalist. I care

about the people of the world. He just wanted to sit on his fat ass and tweet. And then, like, not going to Arlington on Monday is astounding. Now, if a Democrat did this, we all know it would be the biggest story in the history of Fox News. They'd have an all day special report.

There's a structural imbalance that is making that not happen right now. But also, you know, like I'm torn here because one, I like am deeply offended that he wouldn't think it's important to go honor U.S. service members when he's sending them to war to on the politics of it. Like it this should be a career ending thing. And I don't know why it isn't also i mean we complained about optics debates when we were in the obama white house and obama was hit by not just fox news but you know the morning joe set for not doing everything perfectly optics wise right saluting with a cup right he saluted with a cup yeah one time let's let's remember this didn't just offend the right wing. This offended all the fucking people in Washington.

He brought a cup to his forehead. But for Trump, it's not just about the optics when it comes to the troops. The New York Times also reported over the weekend that the 5,600 troops he sent to the border for an election stunt to stop the caravan have nothing to do right now, but will miss Thanksgiving with their families because Trump needed to juice the base in advance of the midterms. And this is from the New York Times story, quote, Pentagon officials privately derided the deployment as an expensive waste of time and resources and a morale killer to boot. They're there with little electricity and they'll be receiving no combat pay while spending time away from their families during the holidays. They're literally sitting around eating MREs. This is a real bank shot, but I just

want to remind everybody that Axios went into the Oval and let Trump tell a long bullshit story about saving money on a Sharpie pen because he's such a fan of being a good steward of tax dollars. They shot it like the end of Veep, but still he did make that point while they're wasting like $200 million on this dumb fucking thing. These are human beings. 5,600 human beings are sent to the border. They're sleeping in tents. They can see the Whataburger, but they're not allowed to go there. They gotta eat the fucking

MREs. They have no mission. They're passing out from heat exhaustion. They're not gonna see their families on Thanksgiving. I mean, this is a big deal. He's using them as a political prop. And remember the reason was in france was because he wanted to have a big military parade parade because he was jealous of macron's parade they convinced him that was going to cost 100 mil so to fly over to france to honor the service members there and then he doesn't leave the hotel the guy is a pathetic human being and someone ran the numbers too and if the entire caravan shows up at once on the border it would be only about

double the daily load of people that they deal with that the border patrol deals with on a daily basis coming to this country yeah it'd be like a three-to-one fight like unless it's a bunch of jean-claude van dams i think we got this covered right so it would be a little more work maybe maybe maybe add some border patrol agents uh from somewhere else for that day when the caravan shows up it would be handled fine you could process the asylum claims it could be a very orderly process fine but instead we have 5 000 troops there remember you remember he said 15 000 before the election and everyone just ran it 15 000 now okay meanwhile i just again i want to focus a little bit on the reason donald trump can't be

in the rain um so so he wakes up and i do believe his hair is about down to his shoulders maybe a little bit further and what you see has to do is he has to and because of that the surgery that removed part of his scalp he has a big gap in the back so basically what happens is he takes from one side and he goes up and over kind of a You know on the let's call it the x-axis. Okay, and then he has to bring the other side Let's say the right side forward and back along the y-axis Okay, so it creates a kind of latticework a delicate latticework, which he brushes back using a hairdryer So then he creates the wave both on the left side and right side of his face

Then he creates the lattice on top. Then he hits it with the hairspray and he fucking hits it with the hairspray. If you remember long before Donald Trump was president, he did have an issue, which is he did believe the CFC version of hairspray was far better than the ozone safe version. Because there was that brief period of time before they figured out how to make an aerosol without the CFCs where you had the pump spray. And that was a fucking deal breaker for him because his life depends. His ability to leave his home depends on good hairspray. Anyway, he hits it and he hits it for a while, okay? Now that is impervious to wind, basically, except toward the end of the day

where you see those videos of it blowing off of his face. But rain, that's his kryptonite, all right? This is, we're in an unbreakable situation. He is not safe in the rain. And he knows that all his power,ite all right this is we're in an unbreakable situation he is not safe in the rain and he knows that all his power all of his base everything goes away if we see what happens when that hair is not held together by a hairspray if it comes down and he looks like a fat Merlin people will freak the fuck out he's weak he's weak he's a weak small he's a weak small petty man and like you you've got macron and merkel out there honoring the legacy of these men and women you have fucking putin

showing up and he's giving them a big how do you do but then trump like macron went out and gave this big speech condemning nationalism and and you know like putting a stake in the ground for how he wants the global world order to go from here. And Trump doesn't do anything about it until he gets home and sends off a bunch of bitchy tweets. I mean, that's his whole deal. The truth is Donald Trump doesn't care about anyone but Donald Trump. Yep. Said this for a long time.

And I think that every incident like this, it just feeds into a larger narrative and message that we have to push ahead of 2020. Because we all remember ahead of 2020 because we all remember ahead of 2004 when we all thought we could beat george w bush no one knew what the message against bush was he's stupid he's too far to the right w stands for wrong w stands for wrong which is fucking it that was one of our slogans from the carry campaign um anyway there's like 10 different attacks against george bush because everyone hated him so much no one. Everyone was so angry they didn't know what to land on. I do think, especially if you look at some of the results of Tuesday Night 2, this idea that Trump only cares about himself. He doesn't care about America.

He doesn't care about the troops. He doesn't care about working people in the heartland. He doesn't care about anyone. He doesn't care about California. He doesn't care about California. He doesn't care about California. He doesn't care about California. He doesn't care about California forest management. He just views California as a place of non-Trump people in the same way he viewed Puerto Rico as being not for him. He attacks the places where he thinks people are not with him to send a message.

He is corrupt because he only cares about his own finances. Everything goes through the lens of Trump only cares about himself. But what's a challenge about all of this? I mean, there are many challenges of all this, but like we all know the game. The game is very obvious to identify. He lobs some lie out there and the media reports it. But we still haven't learned the lessons from two years ago.

Like, okay, so the caravan mentions, the week leading into the election, there were 40,000 mentions on TV. In the week following, there's been 11,000. What a surprise, right? But Trump goes out there and he tweets, the stock market is down because of democrats and the best you get out of that is like a fact show cnbc tweets the quote

right so that's great good work there cnbc but then the best you're going to get is an article it's like uh is it true that the stock market is down because democrats well the markets are not the economy and it's a lie the stock market is down these apple and goldman sachs are down because apple supplier tanked in an earnings report and goldman sachs is getting sued and it's a price weighted index like there's a very clear answer to why this is bullshit and we need to lead with the lie when we're reporting this stuff and again it it's it's hard to just fight with the media because we're we're going to change very little about it. But Democrats in 2018, in their elections, learned the lesson that they don't have to jump

at everything Trump does. And every Democrat, whether you are further to the left, center left, you know, whatever, they ran laser-like focus on healthcare and pre-existing conditions. They did not take the bait. They did not talk about every single Trump tweet. The media has not learned about that. When you challenge the media about that, they will say, well, he's the president of the United States. We have to cover him. Yes,

of course you do. But you also can learn to cover him with the proper context and proportionality. Right? And so, yes, of course the caravan is a story. Of course people should cover the caravan, right? Like some reporters are like, why shouldn't we cover? Of course people should cover the caravan right like some reporters like why shouldn't we of course you should cover it but does it warrant being mentioned every day over and over again 24 hours a day images on the news for a month same as hillary's emails same as hillary's emails but of course you know two years later however many years later how much self reflection has been done about the hillary email coverage how much will be done about the caravan coverage how much will be done about trump saying that the election is not valid?

It's voted illegitimate in advance of 2020. How much reflection are we going to finally fucking do about how we cover this? None, John. Democrats should go. I mean, the answer for Democrats, because that's what we care about, is to go around the traditional media and do it in 2020. Don't don't give them the interviews. Don't just go get your message out however you can through your own outlets through your own methods of communication don't worry about the media we got a spot mark 2020 candidate

right here at this desk i'm just gonna spend the day talking about jim acosta's hard pass and uh oh yeah we forgot to mention that no we didn't forget doesn't want to mention he's not a good enough reporter to talk about him suing trump over a cost his press connection give him his hard pass back stand up for the press but stop there's a there's a couple things i just put in another bucket before we like trump's also reportedly about to fire kirsten nielsen the homeland security secretary are they gonna be like are people in manhattan gonna protest that dude what's gonna happen you know and uh and also the maryland attorney general is suing Donald Trump over the appointment of Matthew Whitaker.

That's cool. Saying that, no, you can't just stick someone off the street who hasn't been Senate confirmed into the job of attorney general. Well, interestingly, though, DHS, I mean, it's the third biggest agency in the government and there's no deputy. They've even nominated one, let alone confirmed one. one so they're gonna have a similar problem there it's gonna have to be like the undersecretary for management somebody you've never heard of or you know or just brick from the wall construction or he just like you know just like warms up the desk for joe arpaio and everyone freaks out he's like no he's i'm putting him in here um all right let's talk about our friends the the Democrats. Oh, which ones?

Yeah, they're winners. Blue Wave. Party leaders say that the first legislative vote in the new House will be on a bill that includes automatic voter registration, restoration of the Voting Rights Act, public financing of elections, an end to gerrymandering, and a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. What do we think? Good idea? I think that's a good one-week messaging bill.

Yeah. I'm cool with it. I think it's a great way to start because it's a place where the caucus can be unified. It's an important message after the shenanigans from Republicans around this election. And I do think, right, we're going to end up with kind of two big baskets of things we talk about for the next few years. One will be corruption, reform, chaos, kind of the Trump show and what's broken about it and what it tells us about Republicans next few years one will be corruption reform chaos kind of the trump show and what's broken about it what it tells us about republicans and the other will be policy and so i don't mind starting with this kind of reform piece of it especially while it's in the

news no one's going to give a shit about this six months from now right and i think press i mean i think it's a fantastic idea we like obviously we need to do all these things and look they range from you know all of these are about what happens when Democrats are finally in power again in the House and the Senate and in the presidency. And some of them can probably easily get done the first month of a new Democratic president, like automatic voter registration, stuff like that. Some of them, like an amendment to Citizens United, probably aren't going to happen for quite some time. It's going to be a battle. But again, so these are messaging bills. These are so Democrats can say, this is what we're fighting for. Mitch time. It's going to be a battle. But again, so these are messaging bills. These are so Democrats can say,

this is what we're fighting for. Mitch McConnell will not bring this up for a vote. Donald Trump will not sign this. You give us a Democratic Senate, Democratic president, this becomes law, which is a great message. Yep, I like it. But as you guys both alluded to, the challenge here with all of these bills

is keeping them in the news. There's also been a debate that's popped up now about democratic strategy when it comes to oversight and investigation. Tommy, you pointed this out on Twitter. The CNN chyron yesterday was, quote, fears of overreach cloud Democrats' new strategy. The argument here is that if the investigations seem unfair, I guess, or if Democrats bring impeachment charges against Trump, that will turn the public against us and make people sympathetic to Trump. No. What do we think of this?

That's not true on any level. The Republicans investigated Benghazi for four years. That is the only reason we know about Hillary's private server. It did enormous damage to her, did enormous damage in the presidential campaign, damage to Obama and our ability to get stuff done. No one gave a shit about the overreach. to Obama and our ability to get stuff done. No one gave a shit about the overreach. We need to hammer him, hammer him with subpoenas for four years, two years. Yeah, excuse me, not four. I do think, I think there is a risk, you know, Newt Gingrich's Congress was viewed as basically

just harassing Bill Clinton. And there was a backlash there. Some Romney strategists, Stuart Stevens will tell you that the focus on Benghazi in there. Some Romney strategist, Stuart Stevens, will tell you that the focus on Benghazi in 2012 actually hurt Romney a little bit. Like they should have. Well, that's because he completely screwed up the message. He attacked people in an embassy in Cairo who were being attacked by extremists outside. Like that's how we fought. It wasn't because they subpoenaed people. My view on this is it's not, if this was a normal president who had normal scandals, we could have this debate. And maybe there'd be good arguments on both sides of it. No, this is a man, Donald Trump is an unindicted co-conspirator to multiple felonies. You know

what I'm saying? I get the Democrats want to be on message. I get that they want to talk about healthcare and we want to talk about jobs and wages. have to like that has to be the message going into 2020 that's why we did well in 2018 but we can't just let constitutional crises go by we can't just sit there and be like oh the president has committed impeachable offenses but we don't want to go after those impeachable offenses because there's a narrative that if we do people think that we're being mean to the president and his base doesn't agree because fox News is a propaganda machine that's brainwashed them. Like, we can't do that. Well, it combines two things. One is, is it actual overreach on the merits of what's at stake here? Yeah, right. And I would love to see what someone believes. I would love to see an example of what it means

to go too far in investigating the crimes, mistakes, debacles, tragedies, horrors of the Trump administration. What is it that Adam Schiff can do that you think is on policy grounds going too far? Fascinating. Then there's this political question about overreach. And again, I feel we'll know it when we get there, but why don't we do an investigation first? Why don't we do one? Let's take one investigation out for a spin before we claim that we've done too many.

And then the other piece of this is this question about how to, you know, scandal investigation are investigations. They're sexier than hearings on how to make Medicare for all possible hearings on education hearings on jobs. And I think that's a reasonable concern, right? We're going to spend a lot of time talking about investigations. Donald Trump is going to choose to argue probably on that territory because it's where he feels most comfortable. So to me, one thing I would like to see House Democrats thinking about is how do you do policy investigations? You know, we had hearings about Wells Fargo. They got the focus on what the banks had done and what Wells Fargo had done to abuse consumers. I would like to see House Democrats do investigations around abuses by corporate interest as a means to get to a sexy version of a policy agenda. I think that is a good route to go. Don't just think about it as policy

versus investigations, because that is a false choice. Other thing I'd say is this is a good route to go. Don't just think about it as policy versus investigations, because that is a false choice. Other thing I'd say is this is a bit of a silly debate, because for the last two years, the Democrats in the House and the Senate were the message of the party because there were no leaders to the party. For the next two years, House Democrats are going to be able to investigate whatever they want. There's going to be a separate conversation happening among all the people running for president in 2020, right? So there's a difference between what Democrats do and what other Democrats say, right? Like the House Democrats, they can subpoena who you need to subpoena, do the investigation. The message of the party is going to come from the men and women who run for the nomination.

And they're not going to be talking about investigations the whole time nor should they be they should be talking about the bigger message about policy and the direction of the country and the vision stuff like that let the house democrats investigate till the fucking cows come up the republicans were manufacturing scandals but they're they right they did not find any evidence of wrongdoing in benghazi except for the fact that that the facility was not guarded well enough and that was a huge tragedy and a problem that needed to be remedied we like the republican crimes are hiding in plain sight we like tom price ryan ziggy you have like cabinet official after official we can subpoena documents and records and figure out all the ways they were abusing their power and and taking government

planes on junkets to like their son's wedding and all the shit these guys were doing we don't need to make stuff up we are going to find a lot of stuff that that shows the culture of corruption the trump administration the failure to drain the swamp in any way shape or form we're about to also see happy to do it adam schiff now has the ability to with this with the democrats on the intelligence committee to start releasing documentation of their investigation which devin nunes has been sitting on because that's how he reaches the wheel of the car. But one other thing about 2020, though, I am a little worried that what we're about to see is a bunch of potential Democratic 2020 candidates trying to audition for who's the right person to argue with Trump in a debate. And that is coming. And I understand why

we're going to have to do that. And it's going to be quite grueling, like everyone kind of doing their, their, their singer, the one, their one act play. But to me, like right now, like I'm so much more interested in the policy side of that debate. And that's what this time I hope is for. And I hope that the candidates thinking about running are thinking less about how do I make sure that I'm able to throw a punch and prove to the Democratic base that I'm a fighter versus actually thinking about the underlying structural problems that made it possible for someone like Donald Trump to get even within shouting distance of the White House to begin with. 100%. I want to just subpoena him and do as much damage to his approval rating as humanly possible over the next two years.

That is my sole hope. That's a good hope. Yeah, that's the House job. That's your job. That's our job. Like, I think that is not the job of a 2020 candidate. I do not think the 2020 candidate. Depends on where you are.

I mean, if you're in the Senate, no. If you're Beto, no. I think you should be spending time on talking about the country. Like, I think a lot of people have made up their minds about Donald Trump. I am interested in investigating subpoenas, not just for his approval rating, or primarily not because of his approval rating, because he may have committed crimes. May have.

What are we doing here? I'm trying to be, yeah. He's an unindicted co-conspirator, and he abused his power, and so we should do something about that. The Wall Street Journal published this blockbuster story that he is the unnamed Trump official who was colluding with Michael Cohen on the hush payments to women he had been having affairs with.

And it just sort of goes away with a whisper. Yeah. Well, hurry up, Bob Mueller. Yeah. Let's go, buddy. Okay. You got to beat that Whitaker guy to the, I don't know, place where indictments are signed.

There you go. The indictment. Bring in some knowledge and expertise to the pod. Get to that indictment pen before that Mike Witter guy can hide it. It's a Sharpie now. It's a Sharpie. All right. When we come back, Tommy talks to Lauren Groh-Wargo, campaign manager for Stacey Amos.

Before we go, though, John, one quick question. What would you say if you had curly hair and you were trying to get a nice new do before you started at a famous French cooking school? You'd say, give me the cordon bleu wavy. They don't get better. They don't get better. They get worse. Michael's crying. On the line is Lauren Gros-Wargo, the campaign manager for Stacey Abrams, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in Georgia. Lauren, thank you so much for taking time out of what must be a crazy week to talk with us. I'm happy to be here. Thank you so much for being interested in this topic.

Very interested in this topic. So for people who haven't been following what's happening in Georgia closely, what is the latest in Stacey's campaign against Brian Kemp? Where do things stand as of, what is it, morning California time on Tuesday? Sure. Before I get into the details, I'll just step back and say that this entire campaign since launching in June in southwest Georgia in 2017 has really been about reaching out to every single voter, in particular voters who hadn't been engaged in the electoral process before, talking to them about the issues they cared about, meeting them where they are, and putting together a non-profit grassroots campaign. And so why that's relevant to this

particular moment is that we have said to voters, vote. It matters. Exercise your power. And by that, we were essentially saying, trust the system. Yes, it's stacked against us and stacked against working people and low-income people and communities of color in so many ways. But our campaign has said, come with us, believe, and let's have this two-way conversation, build this grassroots effort, and we can win. Now, we knew once it was Brian Kemp came out of the Republican runoff, we knew that the deck was stacked against us in even a bigger way. He's been the secretary of voter suppression, and he is well-documented and using every tool in his toolbox to make it harder rather than easier to vote. So coming into this race, we were acutely aware of that. He has come after us in the past.

He has charged people for felonies for registering their family members to vote, you know, from precinct consolidation to voter purges to the exact match, you name it. It's very well-documented. His attempt to make it harder to vote just overall. So we knew that to perform well, we were going to have to out-organize him, out-communicate him, out-work him, just in every single metric. And I think the good news that I can say is that we exceeded our expectations. Stacey Abrams had over 1.9 million votes. That is historic. It is not what the Republican Party

ever expected in a million years. We saw incredible surges in African-American, Latino, Asian-American, young people, white liberal turnout that really brought us to this point where we're in this too close to call. So that is sort of my table setting to say that is why we're here fighting for every vote, because it's actually the whole integrity of the system that is now at stake. That these same voters, over one million new voters, came into our electoral process this year over four years ago.

year over four years ago. And after this sort of rigged corruption that we saw out of Brian Kemp, his bull-faced attempt to steal this election right in front of the world, we know we have to fight for every single vote to be counted. We saw just unbelievable large-scale irregularities through absentee voting, into three weeks of early voting in person and on election day. And we can go through this in more detail. But today in Georgia, with almost 4 million voters, only 20,595 votes stand away from us forcing this race into a runoff. Because in Georgia, there's no outright win when there's three candidates. That often happens. You've got to get to 50% plus one.

Brian Kemp has barely edged us out. He's just over 50%. And considering the number of provisional ballots, the unprecedented problems on election day, the tens of thousands of emergency paper, provisional, problematic absentee ballots, our demand is simple, count every vote. And we're using the courts, we're using our field campaign, we're using paid media or immediate. We're using every single asset this campaign has built over the last year and a half to demand that every vote is counted. So those numbers I gave you, Tommy, are the most up to date from this morning. We were still getting votes in last night. And they're starting to trickle in today.

I'll have more updated numbers later tonight. But that's the most updated. And today I'll have more updated numbers later tonight. But that's the most updated. Well, speaking for the team here at Pod Save America, we absolutely think you guys ran a great campaign and should be fighting for every vote. And it is completely outrageous what Brian Kemp did. I just want to get to this point early on in the interview. What can people who are listening do to help you guys both in this legal phase and if it goes to a runoff?

Because I know a lot of people care a lot about this election and want to do their part to pitch in. Well, thank you for the question. First, I will say to any Georgians listening, nearly every Georgian I know, if they didn't have an issue, a neighbor, a friend or family member, a co-worker had an issue. We want those stories. So we continue to be a massive story collection operation. So if you're a Georgian listening, we need you to call our voter protection hotline at 1-888-730-5816. And if you didn't catch that number, just go to any social media feed associated with Georgia Democrats or Stacey Abrams, and that number is everywhere. You can also email us your story or the story of your friend or coworker at voterprotection at staceyabrams.com. We are literally every hour still helping people fix issues with their provisional ballots, field registration questions. And so we're very much still in this fight for Georgia voters. So part one, if you or your friends or family are Georgia voters, please push that out. We need

those stories. We're continuing to build all different types of legal arguments as we work to push this. And then I would say broadly, Georgians or anybody listening, there are sort of three general areas. First, we are doing large-scale text banking of voters in Georgia to get these stories and to make sure that voters are ensuring their vote gets counted. And so our campaign has shared with Pod Save America the link for that, but you can hustle for us and you can go to our social media feeds to get those links. You can text from wherever. We're also doing phone banking at times, and so we are sort of updating any kind of voter contact that you can do remotely. Just look at our social media feed.

That's great. The second piece is volunteer lawyers, volunteer paralegals, et cetera, from anywhere in the country can help us as well. And so again, we have a link on all of our sites that you can go to. Again, you can either come to Georgia, come to Atlanta, or do it remotely. So that is incredibly helpful. A third area is overall social media amplification. Retweet our posts, share them widely, beat this drum of count every vote. This is about our democracy. We need a resounding, just unbelievably loud effort here online and all of our channels to make that point and to push our elected officials and just not let this thing go away and not get lost in a 24-hour news cycle. And the final piece is low-dollar donations. You know, we are continuing to fully fund our massive operation.

You know, we have about 200 staff. We just have added more lawyers to our team. We are just building out, continuing to build out our operation. So those $5 contributions, those $10 contributions are another part of the story on why we're even here today fighting this fight is because of unbelievable low-dollar donor support. So those would be the top things I would say listeners could do to help. That's great. And in terms of financial contributions,

if you go to votesaveamerica.com slash donate, we have put up a page that allows you to donate to four very important races, the Abrams race, John Barrow, Mike Espy, then potentially Bill Nelson, when he's requiring a recount in Florida to help aid those efforts. If you want to give directly to the Abrams campaign, I'm sure they can just go directly to your website.

That's right. Just StaceyAbrams.com. Okay, great. So that's a really important piece of this. So let's talk about Brian Kemp for a second. He ran for governor without resigning as Secretary of State. So he was in charge of the election where he was on the ballots. That seems like a problem. He finally resigned as Secretary of State. So he was in charge of the election where he was on the ballots. That seems like a problem. He finally resigned as Secretary of State after Election Day. Why do you

think he did that? And do you have faith in the information you got and will continue to get from the Secretary of State's office? This would be funny if it wasn't so corrupt. It's almost farcical what happened last week. On Wednesday of last week, Brian Kemp, as Secretary of State, his office sent out a press release to the media that said he had won the race, asserted there were 21,000 outstanding provisionals, provided no data and no detail on that number he just pulled out of his hat. And then this is the part that I will never get over. He had a campaign staffer and a consultant do a press call with the large paper here and the major local news network, where they got on the phone live with the media and said that he won. So his official office, a secretary of state, says, yeah, he did it.

His campaign operatives get on the phone with the media, and we're all just supposed to say, oh, great, it's just another day. I absolutely expect that. It is unbelievably bold and outrageous what they did. And then the next morning, he stood at a press conference with his wife and the governor, and that's where they attempted to formalize it. So his last act as Secretary of State was issuing that release, having his campaign consultants get on the phone with the media. The next day, he stands next to the governor and resigned. So of course, we take

no number coming out of the Secretary of State's office as credible. And what we have seen is that, yeah, he may have resigned, but all of his staff are still over there. The staff at the Secretary of State's office, not all of them, but many of them, the most, you know, sort of public-facing staff, have been acting as an arm of his campaign from the beginning. They have not been giving basic nonpartisan election information to campaigns or to the media. They have literally been a tax-funded arm of his campaign. So the breach of public trust here, the complete and other abuse of power, is beyond anything we should expect in this country. And that we would

all just sit around and say, sure, yeah, we accept all of this. We'll just take the resignation and go on our merry way. Everything, nothing to see here is obviously a complete outrage that we don't accept and the voters don't accept it. We are getting an outpouring of support and not just from Democrats, but also from Republicans and independents who say this is just undermining the entire system here, the way they have operated. And they continue to put out numbers out of the secretary of state's office without backing up the data. And but let me get a little bit more detailed on why this data is not reliable. Because Brian Kemp is underfunded and completely mismanaged the election system in the state, we have 159 counties. In each one of those 159 counties, they administer elections

slightly differently. And the Secretary of State never issued guidance to them on things that were entirely predictable. For example, we knew we were seeing historic turnout for a midterm in the early voting period a normal functioning secretary of state's office would have issued guidance to the counties going into election day and said things like you should have some extra machines we're seeing unprecedented turnout make sure you have adequate backup paper ballots we're seeing you know these are 16 year old machines and we're seeing a breath of turnout. They did none of those things. And so my team over the past week has been driving around all 159 counties and photocopying and taking cell phone pictures of these handwritten paper ballot lists, provisional ballot lists. They're all stacked up

in my office. And what they look like, it's literally handwritten first and last name with a two-digit code. They're barely legible. And that's the only data we have on how many people actually voted as provisional emergency backup. So we have been going around and hand-collecting this, hand-data-entering it. So there is no way on God's green earth that the Secretary of State's office or that anybody can know how many are actually out there. We saw tens of thousands. At a minimum, we think it's probably at least up to 30,000 provisionals were cast. This has never happened in the state of Georgia, and they just weren't equipped to deal with it at the technological level in any respect. So that's one of many reasons why the data coming out of Kemp's office

is just not credible and why we're just making our demands with the courts that every vote be counted. And I have good news on that. We've been winning our court cases. We took a case to federal court in South Georgia last week around hurricane-impacted counties. We won that. A federal judge said there was an undue burden. We won that case. Last night, Common Cause won a case around absentee ballots. This morning, we won another one. We're about to be in court in about an hour and 10 minutes. We think we're going to win another one around provisionals. These are not hyperbolic, outlandish cases. These are rooted in very simple facts and what happened. And that's why we're winning, because the courts see that literally the fundamental constitutional rights of Georgians are at risk of being trampled here with the way votes were handled. Yeah. And we should add that that's on top of, you know, African-American areas around Atlanta seeing lines of up to four and a half hours, I believe, to vote. I read a story about how thousands and thousands of voting machines were just sitting in a warehouse downtown not being

used because they may or may not have been tainted in 2016 by Russian hacking efforts. I mean, it seems like if Brian Kemp is showing that he can handle an election as part of his attempt to get a promotion, he failed pretty hard here. Oh, absolutely. What we saw at the end of early vote and on election day in terms of lines and machine breakdowns, in particular in Democratic and particularly in African-American parts of the state, is nothing short than a catastrophe. the wages that they were giving up, students were missing class. And what's even more horrifying about what happened in some of those polling locations where they had these long lines and only had a couple functional machines, the database issues on Kemp's Secretary of State database, when they would come to the front of the line, we have numerous reports that we are compiling. They wait for four hours, then they get to the front of the line. We have numerous reports that we are compiling. They wait for four hours,

then they get to the front of the line, and the elections official says, oh, no, you're not at your correct polling location. And we have many reports of folks who went to vote at a polling location that had always been where they had voted and all of a sudden being told they need to drive across town. And so we are just having problem after problem after problem with the way elections are administered. And there's absolutely a disparate impact on provide the guidance, to provide additional funding. And he just fell down on the job. I mean, it's just extraordinary. And again, that's where we saw the lines on Election Day were those types of communities.

Yeah, I think it's safe to say that he sucks. You tweeted over the weekend that the Secretary of State's office has removed data from its website. What data was removed and why did they do that? the Secretary of State's office has removed data from its website. What data was removed and why did they do that? Well, I can only speculate, but it appears because of litigation that us and others are filing that there's some kind of information lockdown going on to the Secretary of State's office.

And we may someday find out this was well-intended to try and get their arms around it. Who knows? They have had security breaches on their website the weekend before the election. It came out that there was a complete open door to the voter registration file. We don't fully understand what's going on there with the website, and they obviously have not been transparent. What I can tell you is they pulled down all this old vote history data before 2018, and, you know, luckily, we had already downloaded all that data. Most people already had who were looking closely at this.

It is in a pattern of a lack of transparency out of that office. There are set, you know, most information in that office is subject to open records requests. We have filed, many allies have filed repeated open records requests trying to get access to data in emails. They continually drag their feet on it and are just not transparent with the public. So it appears to be in line with that pattern of behavior of sharing as little as possible, either to protect themselves from lawsuits or who knows what's going on, because there have been serious issues with how breachable and hackable their website and databases are. I mean, it's very well documented, everything that went on during the OSF special election,

the server wipes, the accidental release of personal information, et cetera, et cetera. Last question for you. What happens next? I mean, when do you think we'll have more information about a recount and a runoff so that people who are listening and care deeply about Stacey and this campaign can figure out how to help and get involved? We don't really know the timetable. So I think folks need to stay tuned. There is a delay now. A court ruled last night that the state cannot certify any earlier than Friday.

The state's deadline is November 20th to certify, but every day as there's additional court decisions slowing down the process to ensure votes are counted. You know, right now it looks like we'll have a, you know, we will know some things on Friday in terms of county and state certification. But again, you know, we're back in court this afternoon. It's hard to say exactly how long this will go. You know, we have just taken no options off the table and are pursuing every possible thing we can to make sure all votes are counted and that we can come out of this on the other side, feeling as though everybody's voices were heard who cast a ballot. So that's our mission. I would say, stay tuned every day this week. There's a lot moving and

happening, and we'll hopefully know a lot more in the coming weeks. I mean, and does the runoff happen December 4th, if it happens, come hell or high water, or could litigation push that date out? Well, you know, that has not been discussed yet publicly, any sort of movement of that. We expect the runoff to occur December 4th. We have a Secretary of State's election that went to a runoff. John Barrow is a Democrat running in that race. I would encourage listeners to get engaged in that race. We also have a Public Service Commission race that made it to a runoff with a strong Democratic candidate running there. So those are scheduled for December 4th. You know, we are going to fight like heck to get into that runoff. But, you know, ultimately, our mission is to count every vote.

And if we count every vote and we don't make it, so be it. But we're really going to fight to count every vote. Got it. Lauren, thank you so much for doing the show. Thank you for running an incredible race. We are with you on this one. And also, you know, we were just lucky enough to get to spend some time with Stacey in Atlanta when we were there for a show. And she is so smart and nice and impressive and would be an unbelievable governor.

And so we hope that you guys win in this effort to count every vote and then kick butt in the runoff because that will be exciting. Well, we really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for covering the issue. Sure, of course. Appreciate it. Thanks to Lauren Groh-Wargo for joining us today. And, you know, we'll talk to you on Thursday.

I think we're back on schedule. Blue Wave. Blue Wave. Blue Wave. Thank you.