Tangle - INTERVIEW: Isaac talks with Sharon McMahon

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

Although we are off today, we have a special podcast for you all! A couple of weeks ago, Isaac interviewed Sharon McMahon. She is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, educator, and host of the chart-topping podcast Here’s Where It Gets Interesting. Her newsletter, The Preamble, is one of the largest publications on Substack, providing historical context and non-partisan insights to help readers navigate today’s political landscape. My debut book, The Small and the Mighty has been celebrated as one of the year’s top reads.Sharon and Isaac discuss her journey from being a government teacher to becoming a bestselling author and civic engagement advocate. She reflects on the impact of COVID-19 on society, the rise of distrust in institutions, and the importance of individualism in politics. They also talk about issues surrounding unregulated capitalism, electoral reform, and the implications of the 2024 election results. They also discuss the significant topics they think will shape political discourse in 2025, particularly immigration.Ad-free podcasts are here!Many listeners have been asking for an ad-free version of this podcast that they could subscribe to — and we finally launched it. You can go to tanglemedia.supercast.com to sign up!You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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I'm your host, Isaac Saul. Coming up, we have Sharon McMahon on the show. Sharon is a fascinating character and voice in the political space. She is well known for her super popular Instagram channel where she explains how the government works. She's the author of a newly released and now New York Times bestselling book about people you might not know of from American history who have changed the course of American history. She's prolific at bringing people together to donate and fundraise for different philanthropic causes. She raises

hundreds of thousands of dollars for small families who are in need and all these different causes that she cares about, which is really interesting. And she's a teacher. She's been called America's teacher. She loves to explain how the government works, how politics works, what's happening in the news and current events. And she has a reputation for being fair-minded and thoughtful about these issues. She came on our Election Night Live show

and talked to us as the election results were rolling in. And so I was excited to have her on for a longer sit down today on the podcast, where we talked about her upbringing, we talked about how she got into this kind of work, the things she was right and wrong about in 2024, some of what she's keeping an eye on in 2025, the algorithms, whether Americans still have political power or whether we need to tear down the whole system and start from scratch.

Gerrymandering, I mean, we hit on so much in just an hour. I think it was a fascinating conversation, and I'm excited to bring it to you guys. So without further ado, here's Sharon McMahon. All right, Sharon McMahon, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate you being here. It's my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.

First of all, congratulations on The Small and the Mighty. I have a new book that came out. I guess it's not quite so new anymore. It came out towards the end of all, congratulations on The Small and the Mighty. You have a new book that came out. I guess it's not quite so, so new anymore. It came out towards the end of 2024, but has been riding atop the bestseller list. I have it on my bookshelf. I have not yet read it, but I'm excited to dig into it and been excited for you watching its trajectory.

So first of all, congrats. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thanks. It must be an exciting end to 2024. Briefly, do you wanna tell our audience a little bit about what the book is about and why people might wanna go pick it up? Yeah, thanks for that. It hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list,

which is like, I was pretty pleased about that. It's about unsung Americans who changed the course of history. So people you haven't heard of before who did something really consequential, ordinary people, you know, not the people born into power and prestige and wealth and family names and connections, but ordinary people who changed the course of history. And the book was written really as a love letter to the reader. And I hope that when people close the last page, they will understand their own role

in history, that they too can be the small and the mighty, just like the people in the book. So hopefully it's interesting to read. It's a quick and fun read. It's been on the bestseller list for nine weeks now. So I'm pretty pleased with their response. Yeah, huge accomplishment. Congratulations again. So, I mean, speaking of, you know, people who have changed the course of history and the kind of the unsung and maybe less thought about and discussed ways people can get involved in our country and change our country in meaningful ways, you've had quite the trajectory. I mean, people now are understanding and knowing you as an author, a best-selling author, but I came across your work through your Instagram page, which I know is one of your more visible platforms. You have over a million

followers there. You do these massive philanthropic drives where you bring people together to donate money to causes you care about. You've been called America's teacher. You do all the civic engagement stuff. I'm so curious just to hear a little bit about you and your upbringing and how you kind of fell into this work or how you went after it with focus. I'm not really sure what the case was, but we'd love to hear a little bit about how you ended up sort of in this kind of civic, philanthropic, political world that you're having such a big impact in?

Yeah. I started out my adult life as a government teacher and spent a long time teaching government and law in various states on both coasts in the Midwest. I grew up in Minnesota. So that was really my background was in teaching and explaining difficult concepts to an unwilling audience. You think about like 16-year-old boys, they're not the most enthusiastic audience for discussing the filibuster.

So figuring out how to make complicated material, not just accessible, but also interesting to an audience who doesn't necessarily wanna be there is really how I cut my teeth. And I have owned a number of other businesses. I've been an entrepreneur and I was very busy in my entrepreneurial endeavors until a global pandemic happened.

And the world as we knew it changed, right? Like there's nobody who escaped 2020 unscathed. It doesn't matter what your views on COVID are, or if you got it, or you know people that died, like it impacted all of us. And one of the biggest ways that COVID impacted me was my husband was sick with kidney failure. He was diagnosed with kidney failure at the beginning of 2019 and needed a

kidney transplant. And at the beginning of 2020, when the outbreak first happened, all of the transplant programs shut down. They were viewed as sort of elective surgeries, even though they are life-saving surgeries. But they eventually reopened and in August of 2020, my husband got a kidney transplant. He was the recipient of a living donor transplant from a donor who did not know him in Texas and in exchange, my mother donated a kidney to a stranger in Wisconsin. So, all of that made our family situation very, very challenging. In addition to the fact that COVID was challenging for everybody else, being the

recipient of an organ transplant makes you extremely vulnerable from a health perspective. It makes it so that you are, you have to take immunosuppressants for the rest of your life. At the time in August of 2020, there were no vaccines. There were no treatments for COVID. People with kidney failure who got COVID had like a 50% chance of losing their transplanted organ and a 30% chance of death. Those are terrible odds, right?

If I put you in a car and said, you have a one in three chance of dying from driving to the grocery store today, you would not get in the car. Those are not odds that people would be willing to accept, a 30% chance of death. So that made us even more isolated. And all that to say, it gave me time at home

that I had never had in my ever in my adult life. You know, we have children, we have dogs, I had a career and had never had the opportunity to explore something on the internet in the way that 2020 afforded me the opportunity to. So maybe you can relate to this, Isaac. Did you notice a small amount of political misinformation on the internet in the year of our Lord 2020?

It was a little bit rampant and everybody was online. Everyone's online, we have nothing to do. We're all either working from home or we're laid off or whatever. We have nothing to do but argue with each other online. So I decided that sort of in that moment, I could either sit and argue with people who were being confidently wrong on the internet about things that were not a matter of opinion, like is the electoral college a university you can graduate from? That's not an opinion question, okay? The answer is no, that's not real.

That's factually incorrect. No, you cannot. I can either argue with people in the comments about questions like that, or I decided that I could try to do something more meaningful about it, and I chose the latter. Yeah, I love that. I mean, I definitely experienced a lot of the election stuff for me, I mean,

was spending a lot of my time on allegations that the election was stolen and a lot of the really mainstream kind of conspiracy theories around, you know, 2000 mules and films like that that were reporting all this stuff. And still to this day, I mean, I'm digging out of like an avalanche of emails and allegations that I'm trying to take, some of which have, you know, more merit or more interesting or harder to debunk than others. But there was so much, I mean, such a fire hose of just bad information in that COVID era, not even accounting for like the health related stuff. I guess, I mean, related to that, I'm curious, you know, when I prompt you with a question like, how do you think COVID changed the United States,

you know, over that one to two year period between like 2020 and 2022, what comes to mind for you? Cause it feels like we are still living through so many kind of ramifications and narrative through lines that that two year period set off in the country. And you're obviously at this stuff every day. I'm interested in what pops up for you. Yeah.

Setting aside the health repercussions, because again, aside from my own family experience, I'm not qualified to talk about health issues, right? Like you should speak to your doctor about that. I don't ever want to be the person that people are like, Sharon said to do blah, blah, blah. No, I didn't. Talk to your doctor about that. I don't have any kind of background in telling you what to do with your health. But, so setting aside what should have happened with COVID, all of those things. The lived experience of Americans was extremely traumatic.

It was extremely traumatic. A million people died, right? One million people died of COVID in a two-year period in the United States. That in and of itself is a traumatic event. Your children being home from school was very challenging for people. The closure of businesses being laid off. So there's this very big collective trauma that we all experience that nobody wants to

replicate that. We all agree, that's terrible. Let's not do that again. But then when you add in this extraordinarily politically fraught election period, those two events are part of what conspired to create January 6th, 2021. They're part of what conspired, you know, like they set up the dominoes for a lot of things that followed.

Even though we have now sort of come out of this global pandemic, we are still seeing the repercussions of the setup. And I think touching on something that you mentioned, which is the rise of QAnon, right? The rise of QAnon was very much related to this global pandemic. The two are sort of inextricably linked and the cascade of conspiracy theories that the United States has contended with for now for years, perhaps to a lesser extent now, like I feel like the jungle drums of QAnon, they're not gone, but they're still in the background if you listen for them. And there are also repercussions from people who were very deeply involved in that conspiratorial

thinking. Conspiracy theories will always sort of morph. That's how they work. They exist to explain things in the world that are difficult to understand. And so as new things happen, those beliefs morph. Yeah. I mean, I have many thoughts on this topic, but those are just a couple off the top of my head. Yeah. I mean, I certainly feel it, you know, in my world. I think for me, I guess to answer my own question, I think what comes to mind is just like this major distrust of institutions that I feel like is so prevalent now. You know, I think a lot of people when I say that probably think of people with sort of right of center, conservative politics, but I think a lot of people, when I say that, probably think of people with sort of right-of-center

conservative politics, but I think it's really true in a lot of spaces on the left too. And as it relates to some of your work, I mean, so much of what you do is trying to explain to people, you know, just like how the government works on a really basic level. I guess I'm curious, you know, given some of your success communicating with people at a large scale, what you think maybe politicians could do a better job of or how they could do a better job kind of earning that credibility and trust with the American public because I, at least in my interactions with normal people who I know in my personal life,

and then also my readers through Tangle and my listeners through this podcast, I would say that's one of the most overarching common sentiments that I encounter. It's just like people who don't trust politicians or the government, don't believe what they say, and are really skeptical of like the quote unquote expert or mainstream opinion these days. You know, it's interesting too about what you just said, which is, which is very true.

This huge institutional distrust of, you know, huge ditch. There is a huge distrust of institutions. But in addition to distrusting institutions, they also have, again, this is over generalization, a deep trust of individuals. Have you noticed this? That like, I don't trust Congress at large, but I love that guy. I don't trust the federal government, but I like this one person that works there. The two kind of go hand in hand, the rise of individualism and the depression of this sort of collective. So,

I totally agree with you that institutional distrust is rampant, but so too is the corresponding rise in the trust of the individual. And I do think part of my success, perhaps part of your success, is corresponds with that increase in trust in the individual. I like Sharon or I like Isaac or I like Donald Trump or I really like Pete Buttigieg or like name somebody that you really, I love that Tim Walz guy. I really like Matt Gaetz. Everybody seems to have a favorite person that they feel like, yeah, I really trust them.

Right? So I think those two things are very much related to each other. The challenge here, though, is that if we view institutions as corrupt, right, the institution of Congress is corrupt, or the institution of the FDA is corrupt, or pick an institution that you view as corrupt, It might very well be. So I'm not saying to somebody, oh no, institutions can never be corrupt. There's many examples throughout history where that has been not true. But if you think it is, the entire, say, you know, FDA is corrupt. What makes you think that a single individual can't be corrupted, right?

The individual trust in, pick a person, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Vivek Ramaswamy, or again, pick any old person that you really love. Why aren't they corruptible? But yet the entire organization of thousands of people, that's all corrupt except for this one person. The likelihood of that happening is not good. The likelihood of that happening that no single individual

can be corrupted, that's not logical. And I think this is one of the big challenges of communicating with people is addressing their very real concerns. Government corruption is a very real and legitimate concern for people. You'd be dishonest if you said, oh no, there's no government corruption, right? It's a very real concern. But yet, operating from the perspective of everyone and everything is terrible and it's all corrupt and I want to burn it all change from.

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unfolds. Starring Sterling K. Brown, James Martin, and Julianne Nicholson, Paradise is streaming January 28th, only on Disney Plus. Something that I've been struggling with, or I guess thinking a lot about in the wake of the 2024 election and sort of what we're seeing with some of Trump's appointments is I've realized that for a lot of the people who I'm talking with and like friends and family and readers and listeners again, who I'm engaging with on a day to day basis, who are really supportive of some of the more like quote unquote extreme picks that he's making, whether it's Tulsi

Gabbard or RFK Jr. or Pete Hegseth, like the people that have kind of generated the most uproar, they're sort of operating from this position of like, I'm ready to just roll the grenade in the room and see what happens basically. And like, let's like really just fundamentally bring the house down, build it anew and take it from there. And when I kind of dig deeper and scratch at that, bring the house down, build it anew and take it from there. And when I kind of dig deeper and scratch at that, I think what I realize is the disconnect for me, at least from wanting some of those people in power

I've been openly critical of despite supporting some of what Trump wants to do and some of his appointees is like, I actually feel like the country is in a relatively good place compared to a lot of other countries. Like when I think about something like national security, I'm like, we're pretty safe. We have stuff like what just happened, this attack in New Orleans, but it's like a major dominant news story for weeks on end because stuff like that is still pretty rare.

We have issues with our intelligence agencies and all these things that maybe somebody like Tulsi Gabbard could come in and help. But at the end of the day, we have the best intelligence agencies in the world who are really good at what they do and that's part of how we succeed, quote unquote, on the global scale. I guess I'm kind of interested to hear you grapple with that disconnect maybe a little bit or how you view that, whether you agree or disagree, or how you talk to people who maybe are ready

to kind of like burn the house down in some sense and start over. And I don't think it's just the kind of stereotypical or average Trump voter who's sort of feeling that way. I think there are a lot of Americans, I mean, we just saw the UnitedHealthcare CEO who was killed and a lot of people on the left who were, you know, like, this is justifiable or understandable.

I can empathize with why he'd do this because they just feel like the system needs to be burnt down. And I feel like that is part of my disconnect with people like that is I'm like, well, our healthcare system's broken a lot of ways but it's also way better than a lot of other systems. And I don't think it needs to be burnt down.

I think it needs to be fixed. I don't know, it's a lot of preamble to just, I guess, gauge how you think about that attitude and assess kind of where we're at as a country right now. So the first thing is, people ask me this all the time, is this the worst it's ever been? Right. Yeah. That's a very common question.

Is this the worst it's ever been? I get that too. And I think it's easy to perceive like it is because this is the first time in human history that an algorithm has told you what to think. And that you are inundated with thousands of pieces of information on a weekly basis that support this, to support what scares you. The algorithm figures out what you're scared of and it feeds you more of it because fear is a powerfully motivating emotion in humans. You're not gonna spend

eight hours a day engaging with, oh look at that cute kitten and that ball of yarn. Oh my goodness, it's so wonderful. Do you know what I mean? That's not nearly as motivating as to humans as fear is. We have a strong self-preservation instinct. We need to pay attention to things that are scary. So there's never been a time in human history where we have been inundated with as many things to be afraid of. And yet there has never been a better time to be alive. And when I tell people that they're like, excuse me, why are these lies coming from your mouth? But on every objective measure, Americans are, but you know, like, and again, I'm willing to admit that there are certain,

you know, variations from the norm, certain deviations from, you know, like we could be better at this. Our maternal mortality rate is not nearly as good as, you know, it's higher than other countries. We don't, our education system is not as good as other countries in comparison. I'm not saying we have no room to improve. But today, when your baby is born, you have a very reasonable expectation that that baby will live to adulthood.

You have a very reasonable expectation that you will live to be an old age. You know, you have a very reasonable expectation that you won't have your legs sawed off without anesthesia. You have a very reasonable expectation that your house is not going to be blown up in a bombing today in the United States. We're very fortunate to have those reasonable expectations. Now that's not to say that the United States does not have very serious issues with gun violence or, you know, any of other issues that we need to address.

But when I tell people that there's never been a better time to be alive, that is very, like I always receive a lot of pushback on that concept because they feel all of the evidence points to the contrary because they are being again, inundated on a daily basis with thousands of pieces of information that want them to believe that this is the worst time to be alive. Nothing has ever been as bad as it is in this moment.

That's how people make money. They make money by making you afraid. And I love this quote by Tim Snyder. I talked to Tim Snyder, who's written a couple of really impactful books. He's a political historian and he has a book out called On Freedom. And he said something to the effect of, if somebody is trying to make you afraid, they are not trying to make America the land of the free. And that was like, I really had to sit with that and think about it for a while because

there's a difference between warning you that like, your house is on fire, get out. You know what I mean? There's a difference between that, like an imminent threat to your life and just surrounding you in this constant perpetual state of doom. It's not how humans are meant to live. We're not meant to live with a perpetual state of doom. So I do think this is the best time in human history to be alive. I don't want to go back to a time when my tooth infection will kill me. You know what I mean?

I don't wanna go back to that. I don't wanna go back to, well, you know what? You just, you're gonna go blind because you have glaucoma and there's nothing we can do. I guess you're blind now. I don't wanna go back to that. I wanna be able to get my surgery and like fix my eyeballs and wear my contacts

and my glasses and like all of those things, right? I wanna live in a time when people can get organ transplants instead of just dying from kidney failure. That's not to say that things are perfect because they're not. When you think about referencing the UHC CEO shooting, the fact that a lot of people kind of applauded it or were like, listen, sometimes you need violence to upset the apple cart. I reject that idea.

I think we should evolve past using violence to solve our problems. I think using violence to solve our problems. I think using violence to solve our problems is evidence of a lack of morals, a lack of education. It's evidence of a lack of character if we're using violence to solve our problems. Just because we've done it in the past doesn't mean we should continue to do that. I agree, there's a lot

of issues with our healthcare system in the United States. I don't think burning it all down, whatever that is, healthcare, government, et cetera, I don't think that's the answer. I don't think that's the answer. What is it going to be replaced with? Could be a lot worse. I'm curious. I mean, I guess related to the the UHC stuff, but also like this kind of general sentiment we're scratching at. I think one of the fundamental beliefs that drives that is One of the fundamental beliefs that drives that is people don't have power anymore. I feel like that's the sense that I get is the sort of left coded version of this is like Bernie Sanders talking

about the oligarchy that exists in the United States that rich people control the elections and the information systems and they don't pay any taxes and what you do can't influence the impact that they have. And then the right coded version of this is like this sort of deep state elite power centers that need to be taken down by a Donald Trump, Elon Musk type figure. So I guess I'm curious, A, how you answer a question like that. Do the American people still have power? Can we still actually elicit change? Which I know is in no small part the subject

of your recent book. And also B, how you think about the way the right and the left sort of talk about that dynamic differently, I guess. You know, whenever I hear these kinds of conversations about like, well, the elites, they've taken over the government or the oligarchs, they've taken over the government, we are talking about the same people. We're talking about the same people.

Uh you can't tell me that there is a difference between the between Elon Musk and the CEO of United Healthcare. These are the same people. These are the elites at the top. Now I'm not saying there's no difference between their personality or the outsized influence at Elon Musk has or whatever. I'm not saying there's no difference, but we're talking about the exact same group of people

by and large. It's just what do those people do? The right does not like that those people, the well-educated and well-off, work for the government. They want those people working for private industry. And the left does not like that those people use private industry to control the government. But we're talking about the same problem. Unregulated capitalism. It's the same problem. We just are mad at different manifestations of the same problem. If you're on the right, you view the manifestation, the problematic manifestation as these people are working for the government and they want to write all these regulations, these regulations and the taxes and it impacts me and I don't like it and you stop trying to tell me what to do.

Right? And if you're on the left, you're mad at the manifestation that allows people like Elon Musk to be like, I'll pay you $47 if you sign this petition and I'll use that money and you'll get you to vote for Donald Trump and Donald Trump will do what I tell it. We're complaining about the exact same problem, just different manifestations of the exact same problem. It's a little bit like if you're having a heart attack, some people are going to complain of chest pain and some people might complain of pressure and a sensation radiating down their left arm.

They're manifestations of the same problem. Your problem is at the root of both of these problems. It's either a heart attack or unregulated capitalism. Both sides are complaining about the same thing. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. If you're looking for flexible workouts, Peloton's got you covered. Summer runs or playoff season meditations, whatever your vibe, Peloton has thousands of classes built to push you. We know how life goes. New father, new routines, new locations. What matters is that you have something there to adapt with you. Paradise is an all-new series set in a serene community inhabited by some of the world's

most prominent individuals. But this tranquility explodes when a shocking murder occurs and a high-stakes investigation unfolds. Starring Sterling K. Brown, James Martin, and Julianne Nicholson, Paradise is streaming January 28th only on Disney Plus. So tell me a little bit about what I guess your solutions to some of this look like. I mean, again, you're a civic minded person, like accepting the premise, which I'm sure some listeners don't accept, but just for a moment as like a thought exercise, accepting the premise that there is an issue with unregulated

capitalism and we have to do something about it and, you know, the wealthy and the elite do have outsized power to a degree that maybe we don't want or they shouldn't have. What can or should we do about it? I mean, what is like the framework for some solutions look like? Well, in Teddy Roosevelt's world, it looked like regulating capitalism. Teddy Roosevelt perceived that this was a huge issue, that these robber barons were controlling the United States. They were controlling the United States government.

They were having outsized amount of influence and it looked like trust-busting. It looked like appointing people to deal with the issues of these essentially oligarchs who were taking over not just government, but taking over society at large. On the other, you know, the other alternative is what? Letting capitalism run unchecked? Well, the right doesn't like that either, because they don't like that Mark Zuckerberg has a large amount of say over what kind of media is allowed to be on his meta-platforms.

They don't like that a private company can restrict what they perceive as their freedom of speech. They want the government to stop doing that. Again, we actually believe in the same thing here. We just want it used in different ways. If you're on the right, you want the government to stop, you want the government to intervene and stop people like Jack Dorsey, which is again related to Twitter, which is why Elon Musk bought Twitter, or Mark Zuckerberg, or TikTok, or you know, fill in your boogeyman. You want the government to stop them from restricting your, what you perceive as your

free speech rights. And if you are on the other side of the spectrum, you want people to regulate actors like Elon Musk from having an outsized amount of influence on government. So, I mean, I have a whole list of proposals of ways that we could return power to the American people. I don't think there's anybody who feels like, yeah, this is all going great, unless you're Elon Musk, right? Most people are not like, this is going according to plan, this is going swimmingly, everyone's being well represented. I feel like I have a say.

For me, some of the lowest hanging fruit has to do with adjusting some of the underpinnings of how the United States system works. Um and these are actually quite simple proposals but simple does not mean easy, right? We would have to have the the courage to make changes to the system. Um and to me that looks like changing how elections work in the United States. That's that's a huge one. I think if we made some very simple adjustments to how elections function in the United States.

We could make really large, beneficial changes that almost all Americans would agree would benefit us. Can you give me a couple examples of things that you'd get behind? Yeah. The first thing is we need to have, in my opinion, a national primary day. We have a national general election day, but states are allowed to run their own primaries. And what ends up happening is that a huge percentage of Americans feel they have absolutely no say in who is the presidential nominee.

Because all it takes is a couple of primary elections or a couple of caucuses like, you know, what they have in some states. And by the time three have happened, by the time we're done with, say, Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, a whole cascade of candidates have dropped out. And by the time, if you have a late primary, say you live in Connecticut,

by the time the primary election happens in your state, you have no one to vote for. Or South Dakota is another example. There are zero choices other than the one that remains on the ballot. How is that fair? How is that fair to the voters in South Dakota? Through no fault of their own, they get no say in who the presidential nominees will be through no fault of their own. There's no reason we can't have a national primary election day where everyone can get

a say on the same day who's going to run for president, who's going to be this party's nominee or that party's nominee. That's a very simple change. It doesn't even require amending the constitution. We can just pass a law, just like we passed a law saying the date of the general election is X, so, you know, first Tuesday in November. We could have a national primary election day and it would not even be that difficult of a change to make.

So that's just one tiny example. I would also really like to see laws passed on the federal level that ban political gerrymandering. Political gerrymandering is a form of government corruption and Americans know it. They know when they are being sold a bill of goods. As much as we like to talk about Americans engaging in conspiratorial thinking, believing political misinformation, those things tend to be quite sophisticated. And it's easy to understand

why people might believe those things. But they also know when somebody is just lying to their face. Like I'm supposed to believe that the shape of the voting district looks like this, give me a break. You know what I mean? Like it should not be in the shape of a lowercase H.

That's stupid. Like you expect me to believe that? No, a second grader could tell you that's not fair. So I'd really like to see anti-gerrymandering legislation passed at the federal level. That would better ensure competitive elections in a broader variety of districts around the country. Competition is good for democracy. Competition for the best ideas,

competition for the best candidates, that benefits all of us. All of us benefit from competitive democracy. So those are two just like laws that we could change that don't require amending the Constitution. I would like to amend the Constitution, but those are, again, it's low-hanging fruit. We could pass these laws next week if we wanted to. And that would be to the benefit of all Americans. Yeah. At first blush, I like the national primary

day. I mean, it seems like a pretty easy low hanging fruit solution to the massive problem that a huge majority of the country doesn't vote in the first leg of all these elections. That's really important. And yeah, certainly aligned on gerrymandering. I mean, I've written a lot about this entangle. It's one of those issues too that brings out the worst in both our political tribes. Like it is a genuine bipartisan crisis where they just sort of try to out bad each other every time the other side of the ante. We're going to out bad you.

Yeah, they just volley it back and forth. And it's like, oh, New York could turn, you know, eight Democratic districts into 18, then we're going to turn Ohio from seven to 22. And here we go. And it's really disheartening. And I've always written about it in Tangle is the idea that our elected representatives are choosing who votes for them rather than us voting for our elected representatives, which is- Yes. They're choosing their voter instead of the voters choosing them. That's right.

And it's a hard thing to wrap your head around being legal or normal in our country. So you're preaching to the choir there. All right, listen, before we get out of here, I want to do a little retrospective and then a little look forward. I guess, first of all, just taking stock of 2024 and the election results, Donald Trump being elected, Republicans taking control of the House and the Senate, or holding control of the House and taking control of the Senate. Any surprises there for you? Did that pan out how you were expecting?

What did you think was going to happen in the big story of 2024, which was this presidential race and how did it all fall out in your view? I thought it was very likely that the Republicans were going to hold the House. That was not a surprise to me. I was also very much in the camp of like, they're going to take the Senate. There's almost no chance that the Democrats have an opportunity to take the Senate. I did think that Trump's victory came sooner in the process and was more decisive than I originally anticipated.

During the 2020 election, I remember being interviewed and they were like, when do you think we're going to know the outcome of the election? When is it going to be all done and dusted? All of the lawsuits said are going to be done. I was like, it's going to be weeks. Weeks. And they were like, weeks. That's ridiculous. And it was, it was weeks, right? It was weeks before everything was settled. I didn't necessarily think it was going to be weeks, but I did think it was going to take perhaps days, perhaps up to a week, especially with some of these places that you knew were going to

be very slow counters, like the state of Arizona, very slow at counting their election results. I was surprised that Trump won so decisively, that he took every single swing state. I knew it was going to be a close election. It was not nearly as close as I thought it was going to be. How about you? Yeah, it's a good question. I wrote down a big slate of predictions in one of our last newsletters before the election. I thought that Democrats were actually going to take back the House, that Republicans would lose the Senate and that, or that Republicans would win the Senate, excuse me, and that Kamala Harris was going to win Pennsylvania but lose the election because she lost the other swing states, which

was kind of my, you know, I was on the ground here in Pennsylvania and I thought that they had a good campaign stood up here, and I thought Josh Shapiro was going to help her, and I thought we were just a little too purple or too moderate for Trump to win, but I felt like he had really good odds in Michigan and Wisconsin and Georgia and Arizona. So I sort of had a little bit of a split on my perception and predictions and what actually

came through, though I expected him to win. And I think I just, you know, for me, I was kind of reading the tea leaves of just sort of the incumbent mood, which I think came to bear, just that, you know, it felt like a really tough environment for the quote unquote incumbent to run, even though she wasn't the actual incumbent but as vice president I think carrying Biden's legacy felt like a difficult burden for her because of the rates of dissatisfaction with the economy and immigration and all that stuff. Yeah, I guess like related to that, I mean was there anything else in 2024 that you feel like you got wrong?

I was inspired. I saw one of your Instagram posts talking about, you know, how to approach being wrong publicly and talking about, you know, the confidence that some political prognosticators talk about things with, which is always helpful for me as like a gut check. And I try and bring some humility to my work when I can, though I definitely get lost in the prognostication game sometimes. But yeah, I don't know, maybe even not got wrong, but you were surprised by in 2024, like a development that sort of took you off guard. You know, I was a little surprised at who both candidates chose as their running mates.

I was pretty confident that Donald Trump was going to choose a woman as a running mate. Wouldn't that be beneficial to his ticket, especially given that there was a woman on the democratic side. This was even before, of course, Harris became the nominee. She's still a woman on the ticket. I thought like it makes sense for him to choose a woman. It really does. Things didn't go so great with him, you know, choosing a white male member of Congress the first go round. Maybe he'll choose like a female governor.

So in my mind, I really thought that like Kristi Noem was very high up on his list. I actually think he would have liked to have chosen her. But the dog story did her it. People of all stripes love their dogs. And the shooting your dog thing, that was a bridge too far. That was a bridge too far. That was a weird news cycle, man. Yes. Yes. Why? Why did you put that in your book? Why? Even if you did it, shut your mouth. You know what I mean? I don't get it. Are we supposed to like you more now? I don't think so. So I don't know. Were you surprised that he chose JD Vance? Who's such a newcomer and who's so young and baby faced in comparison?

Yeah. It's funny. We're getting ready to publish our retrospective on 2024. I'm not sure if this interview, our conversation will come out before or after that. We're recording this on Monday and the newsletter is coming out Friday. I've been reading a ton of our old posts and going back on everything we published in 2024 and auditing it. On the Democratic side, I was surprised and delighted to see that I was, on the Democratic side, I was surprised and delighted to see that I was actually saying that I was surprised,

more people weren't talking about Tim Walz, and that I thought he had a really inside track to be in the pick, and it made a lot of sense for Kamala, and that like this kind of Midwestern vibe, and then of course she ended up picking him. And on the Trump side, I was almost the complete opposite. I was very much in your camp where I was like, I'm quite confident he's going to pick either a woman or a minority.

Like I thought Tim Scott, there was a lot of rumors. I had people, sources who were talking to me saying that Tim Scott had a really good inside track and, you know, he was presenting this really positive vision of the country and of the future that I think balance some of Trump's attitude. Sometimes that can be very dark and sort of, you know, more of the fear stuff. And I also like you thought, you know, he's running against a woman, abortion is going to be the toughest issue for him politically and it would make sense if he picked a woman. So yeah, I was surprised by JD Vance. I mean, I did not really see that coming. I think that he, you know, with hindsight and

seeing how he performed in the vice presidential debates and how he acted as a surrogate, I think he was a great choice. I mean, I think he articulates a really kind of intellectual version of Trumpism that a lot of people in Trump's orbit aren't great at articulating. But for all the reasons you stated, I mean, he was pretty green. It was just like this other white dude. And it felt like in this political moment,

that was a gamble for Trump to take. But yeah, I mean, it turned out well. Whatever he had going for him, I guess, was either not so much of an albatross that it hurt Trump or maybe even boosted him in ways that we don't totally understand. But I was definitely surprised. Yeah. I don't, you know, he, during the election, you know, Vance did not poll particularly

well. He, he wasn't really, at least in polling, didn't seem to be a big asset to Trump. But I think that speaks to this sort of larger narrative that maybe political prognosticators got wrong, which is that the vice presidential pick actually has one main job, which is don't hurt the ticket. Trump didn't need Vance to win. I don't know a single person who was like, I'm a Trump voter because of Vance.

Do you know any people who were like, I was gonna vote for Kamala, but then Vance came along. I don't know a single person who picked that ticket because of Vance. His main job is to not hurt the ticket. I don't think he hurt the ticket. I don't think he really like raised Trump's profile or like, you know, brought a lot to the table that perhaps, you know, you would hope they would bring to the table.

But I don't think he hurt the ticket. Yeah, no, I think I agree with that assessment. I mean, I, it is sort of funny to think now about how much time we spend every election cycle focusing on something like the vice presidential pick when in reality, I mean, unless you're in a circumstance like Kamala was where you're sort of coronated in some sense and there is no primary

and there's all this ambiguity. I mean, in some ways, her pick maybe had, like there was much more at stake. Yeah, it mattered more in a way that I think seems obvious now, but when we were in kind of the fog of war of the election, it was sort of maybe not so clear. Well, okay, putting 2024 for a side again, aside for a second,

with the last couple of minutes we have here, I mean, you are, from where I'm sitting, you know, people always comment to me about, I can't believe how much you write and how much content you're training out. You are like, you put me to shame. You are a content machine. I am so interested in like coming into 2025. What stories are you thinking about?

Like what's the stuff you're keeping your eye on that you feel like are gonna be big storylines you're gonna be covering, what your audience is interested in, the kind of topics you're gonna be all over as this year kicks off? I think Americans writ large are very interested in immigration.

And whether that is immigration, like we need massive immigration reform I think Americans writ large are very interested in immigration. Whether that is immigration, like we need massive immigration reform and we need to remove as many immigrants as possible, as Trump has promised to do, or whether you view the system as broken, but you don't think getting rid of all the immigrants is the move, whatever your view is, this is a topic of interest. I'll just leave it at that. This is a big topic of interest. I do think if Trump moves forward with his campaign promises to deport potentially tens

of millions of people, that is going to be a very, very, very big story. You cannot have mass deportations without first having mass incarcerations. And the mass incarceration of potentially millions of people, the removal of temporary protected status for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, what will happen with the dreamers, what will happen with a huge variety of people. Because the biggest portion of undocumented immigrants in the United States are people who have overstayed their welcome, overstayed their visas, I should say. They came into the country legally, but have overstayed their visas. We tend to picture it as people

sneaking across the border in the middle of the night. No, it's people who entered legally and then just didn't leave when they were supposed to. This is a very, very, very politically fraught topic that most Americans care a lot about. So that is for sure going to be top of my list of things to watch, especially now. I'm finding it very interesting to see some of the infighting in a MAGA world about H-1B visas. So that's gonna be a story I going to keep keeping my eye on as

well. Yeah, that's conveniently our newsletter tomorrow is on the H-1B visa stuff, which I also, yeah, I find really fascinating. And I think you're starting to see just like, anytime you have a big tent political party, you know, I think you saw this with Obama in 2008, you bring a lot of people maybe who aren't typically aligned ideologically under one roof with some shared main vision for the future. And it does not take long for the fractures to start to show and the divisions to start to show.

And it's gonna be a really interesting fume. I mean, this is all happening before Trump's even been inaugurated. So I think once we start seeing actual legislation and policy pushes, it's going to be a really, really fascinating time. Sharon McMahon, thank you so much for coming on the show and spending some time with us. I always love to give our guests an opportunity to share where people can keep up with their work or anything they're working on. I guess in your case, a fresh book that's hit the press, anything you'd like to promote to our audience.

Yeah, thanks for that. My book is The Small and The Mighty, and you can buy it wherever you buy your books. You can also just follow me on social media at Sharon Says So or you can go to SharonMcMahon.com, where you can check out my newsletter, the preamble, and all of the other projects I have going on there. All right, Sharon McMahon, thanks so much for sitting down with us. I appreciate it.

Thanks, Isaac. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by John Wall. The script is edited by our managing editor, Ari Weitzman, Will K. Back, Bailey Saul, and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bacopa, who is also our social media manager. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. If you're looking for more from, Peloton's got you covered. Summer runs or playoff season meditations, whatever your vibe, Peloton has thousands of classes built to push you. know how life goes new father new routines

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