The Bulwark Podcast - Pete Buttigieg: Time for Radical Change

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

Democrats tend to defend the institutions that Trump is tearing apart, but Pete Buttigieg says the party should be focusing on the bigger, deeper structural problems the country is facing and the need for political reform. The kind of radical institutional changes he’d like to see include: expanding SCOTUS and the House of Representatives, statehood for Washington, D.C., and directly electing the president by popular vote. Plus, Pete gets candid about the “most f*cked-up thing” that’s ever happened to his family, the big opportunity for Dems in Iowa in November, and Pete’s stumping for candidates in places where Fox News reigns.Pete Buttigieg joined Tim Miller in Des Moines.Show notes:List provided by Pete Buttigieg of candidates he has endorsed in the 2026 election cycle can be found in show notes in the below link:https://www.thebulwark.com/p/pete-buttigieg-time-for-radical-change

Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller, coming at you from my old stomping grounds in Des Moines, Iowa, on Sunday evening. I was at the Liberty and Justice Dinner, put on by the Iowa Democratic Party. It was conveniently for me at Prairie Meadows Casino, where I spent a lot of time on the craps table, back in my heyday. So it was nice to get back into town. And I was here to have a little chat with the keynote speaker at that dinner.

I'm delighted to be able to sit down with him today. You might know him as the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, former Secretary of Transportation, Navy veteran, winner of the 2020 Democratic caucuses right here in Iowa. It's Pete Buttigieg. Hey, Pete, how's it going? Good. Thanks for having me. How was it on Sunday night? Great.

Really good energy. Really, it felt kind of like a reunion because there are all these memories of when I was here in 2020. But also, I'd just really feel good about our chances in Iowa. Yeah. to me it felt like even in the room, some of the Iowa Democrats have been depleted. I try to come back to Iowa every year. I got a lot of old friends here from my campaigns past.

And I don't know, I went to an event in 24. And, you know, it's just Republicans have controlled the state for 10 years. And like, after a while, eventually you get beaten down. And it does, it did feel like there was a little bit of a jolt of energy among the Iowa Dems. Yeah, I think so. And it's, you know, it's not just vibes. I mean, people are seeing it in the numbers. You're seeing it in what's possible.

And as the Iowa Democrats are quick to point out, this is maybe the only place where you have a chance to get that many House seats flipped and a Senate seat and the governor's office at the same time. And I also think, I mean, this is a little provincial of me maybe, but I think this Midwest region is an especially important place to prove that out, because I think we can show how what we believe about policy and what we believe about just how people ought to treat each other and how people ought to act all kind of comes into a lot. alignment in the way that people in this part of the country really care about. And then, in turn, the other thing that it strikes me is I think when we have more wins in places like this, we have more voices inside the party who are elected, who are from places like this. And it really makes a different star of vocabulary and our body language and our ability to connect versus the places that are kind of already the biggest strongholds of the party. I was talking to a state senator from Sioux City, who was there. And just at the end of the conversation I looked at her,

I was like, you just talk like a regular person, which is really nice. You know, I think a lot of times the Democrats talk about talking like a regular person, and then you end up actually still, you know, kind of using the types of terms that you'd use like a Grinnell symposium or in like activist meetings or whatever. And it's just different, you know? Yeah. And I think just having that kind of normal human style and approach in vocabulary is rewarded in some places, maybe more than others, and I think it's rewarded here in the politics of a place like Iowa.

I want to talk about your speech and the big themes of it for a lot of the show. But we do have some news today. We're taping this Monday afternoon, so there can be more that comes out by the time this publishes. But there's a man that's killed today and another ice shooting in Biddeford, Maine. He's a 26-year-old from Columbia with work authorization. We don't exactly know what that was, likely an asylum applicant. He was shot six times while he was driving. After they shot him, they still pulled him out of the car, dropped him to the ground, and handcuffed him.

it appears there's a three-year-old girl on the scene, maybe his daughter in bluey pajamas. Just another one of these things. We have obviously the shooting in Houston earlier this week. So I just wondering your initial reactions. I mean, first of all, it's stomach turning and upsetting. We don't know a lot. We don't know everything.

But we know that this keeps happening or some version of this keeps happening. Yeah. And we know that this kind of thing doesn't have to keep happening. and another thing that's on my mind, again, you know, we've just learned about this. More information is probably coming in the next hours and the next day. But, you know, this administration's Homeland Security Department has already been caught in another case saying that somebody was trying to ram federal agents and that turning out not to be true, right? So I think we have more questions at a moment like this than we would if we could trust our federal government. and then you think about people who are caught up in this.

I mean, if these reports turn out to be true about a three-year-old child on the scene. Fix shots. Like, what could possibly? And, you know, whatever else anybody winds up learning or saying or claiming, like, for God's sake, like, obviously she does not deserve to be mixed up in any of this. And I don't know, we'll learn more, but it's so upsetting. And again, it's happening in this context where we keep hearing word of this kind of violence that is not making anybody safer or better off. It's not making America a better place. And it doesn't have to be like this.

You're talking about the response from the Midwest and from this part of the country. And, you know, I thought the Minneapolis response to the violence by eyes there was just maybe the most inspiring thing to me that's happened in Trump 2.0. on just seeing these people in the streets you know you'd kind of J.D. Vance's whole shtick is about how a diverse America, you know, makes it harder for our cohesion. And it's like

you have this diverse community in Minnesota like so cohesive, everybody, different race, religion, everything coming out saying, no, this is not us. And really the people of Minneapolis pushed back the ICE agents. I mean, not physically, but like with their voices,

with their putting their bodies in the streets. And as a result of that, this stuff died down for a little while. And it kind of feels like with the story in Houston and with this in Maine, the administration sort of regrouped. We have a new secretary now. And they're kind of back to the same old thing. Yeah. Part of what Minnesota showed was that you can, in fact, get this administration to back down.

Yeah. It's not easy. But it can be done. And the other thing I took away from what happened in Minnesota, it wasn't just how they were pushing back against the abuses, against what ICE was doing against the administration. But the way they were very much kind of showing that they were for each other, right? They're all these stories of neighbors helping neighbors, people taking shifts to take care of kids

or get groceries to people's houses who couldn't go out. And yeah, just the sheer determination going out in like sub-zero cold by the thousands by the thousands, right? Did you go out there? I can't remember for you in any of that. I wasn't involved in any of that, but talked to a lot of people who were on the ground at that time. and I did visit St. Paul while some of that was brewing. I just felt like we also visit there when it was all brewing. It was so fucking cold.

And, you know, we went out there outside of the detention center, and it's like you had seniors and, you know, people at the end of their work shift, like going out there doing these shifts. And, you know, my feet were freezing. I was out there for 30 minutes. Yeah, but these folks are propelled. It's not just that they're, you know, northerners and they're used to it. It's clearly propelled by this sense of right,

wrong of fairness. I think for a lot of them, they were propelled by faith. And you could tell also that cut across a lot of the old lines. I don't think all of the people marching those streets were lifelong registered Democrats. It wasn't about that. Yeah. What do you think about the response to this and what it's called now from, you know, Democratic politicians? I think the challenge is particularly acute in the case of the situation in Houston that we know more about, like Lorenzo-Rahoe. And it seems to me like Republicans feel like they can act with impunity when it comes to people who came here illegally, even if they've been here for 35 years. And that, you know, I think that there was a sense that, you know, this is kind of part of the risk of coming to the country illegally. Like, this thing could happen, which is obviously insane.

But I think that they felt like they could just push this under the rug and move forward because it's like it was different than the case of Prattie and good, et cetera. Now we have this situation in Maine. like what's the appropriate reaction, right? And I do feel like at the beginning of this term, a lot of Democrats felt like immigration's a loser for us. We shouldn't focus on this. Like, what is, what's called for from Democratic politicians? Well, I think a lot of that has changed.

I think events have demonstrated that Democrats can and should take a stand and we can bring most Americans with us on this. Look, we believe that you've got to have borders. Borders have to be enforced. We have laws. Laws have to be enforced. All of that is something. most of us agree on, but also most of us agree that you shouldn't be killed over an immigration

violation. And most of us agree that this is not what we were told we would have going after the worst of the worst and the violent criminals first or only. I think it was really telling that, you know, when Kilmar Ibrego-Garcia got unlawfully deported or unlawfully shipped out, a lot of people in the kind of insider political world were saying, like, don't talk about that, don't touch that, don't go that. He seems like a bad guy or whatever. And actually, that was one example where the American public said, whoa, this is like, this is all wrong.

Right. And I think you actually feel that a lot here in the Midwest, too, where people know that this stuff is complicated because their neighborhood or their community or the farms near where they live cannot function without a lot of these people who do not have status, but who are also here and are otherwise law-abiding,

tax-paying, very important members of the community. And I think I hope that this also builds more pressure to actually do something with the system, right? Because so many of the Republicans, of course, who are capitalizing politically on all the anger and confusion over this are the ones who've done everything they can

for years, sometimes for decades, to stop us from actually fixing the system. And, you know, in order for a fence to work, there has to be a gate. And our gate is all messed up. as a country. Yeah. The Abrero Garcia example was such a good one to me because of also an early example of seeing that the administration could be stopped. Even, again, it was like Chris Van Hollen. Shout out like there were some Democrats who were speaking out of this, but that was at a time where

everybody's still very cautious about this. It's like this is insane. Like we have a, like Marco Rubio, we learned this from the Haverman and Swan book. I had Maggie on last week. Marco Rubio, who's supposed to be the normal, responsible adult in the administration was like the point man for cutting this deal with Buckele where he's like, we're going to have a, you're going to have a gulag essentially in El Salvador. We're going to send these people. We were sending innocent people there. And it was absolutely, I think the most outrageous thing the administration has done.

And right now there's nobody there. You know, it doesn't feel like a huge way to have nobody in the gulag. This is important. And it's especially important to understand, like, you don't have to wait till the next presidential election. You don't even have to wait till the upcoming midterm election. to change things that are going on. This administration that swears up and down

that it will never back down, they actually back down quite often when there is enough pressure, whether it is righteous pressure over the mistreatment and the abuse is going on with immigration enforcement or whether it's something like the tariffs.

I mean, it can happen. And that should be a lesson for all of us who were trying to keep up the energy to mobilize against this stuff. How do you think Marco's been doing? If he hadn't asked for it, I would feel sorry for it. him. And, you know, to me, it became hard to look at him the same way ever. I know this is not in the

top ten of what most people talk about. But when Marco Rubio lied to Congress about whether the aid cuts had killed children, when he stood there with a straight face and said no children died over this, when we already knew the names of some of the children who had been killed by this, right then, you could just tell that this guy's just more. morally, and I hope politically, never going to recover from selling his soul. Your lips to God's ears, Pete. This episode is brought to you by The New York Times. There's a bunch of stories that caught my eye this week in New York Times.

Obviously, the story that the administration is investigating them for. We discussed that last week with you guys. They're reporting on how the hand-me-down cuttery plane didn't have the defenses necessary to get our president out of Turkey as a result of that reporting. New York Time is now being investigated by some guy who wants to be Trump's new DNI. It is totally shameful and thank goodness for the work they're doing. Then another story that I wanted to get to because there's so much going on, but we'll just do it right now.

It was by Jane Bradley, Michael Schwartz, and Adam Goldman. Peace is titled How Putin turned Japan into a den of spies. It's like one of these stories. How is this real? They found that the Russian spies were expelled from Western countries. after the invasion of Ukraine, ended up in Japan, where they're part of a secret military intelligence unit called the 20th Directorate to help them figure out Western military technology and strategies

so that they can improve their capabilities in the war on Ukraine. The spies pose as diplomats or business people. It's like the Americans. I guess it's the Japanese. Great TV show. And thanks to this effort unintentionally, this isn't really Japan's fault. their technology is propping up the Russian military. Crazy story, you've got to go read it.

And this is the thing about podcasting. We've got some great reporters here at the Bullwork. I appreciate doing on the ground work. I'm here kind of half reporting in Iowa. So, you know, I do some baby reporting. But you need people out there in Japan. We're not uncovering shit in Japan. Okay.

So you need people doing real reporting so that I can chat about it. So we can analyze it and give perspective and contextualize it so that you guys know what's going on in the world. And so I appreciate all the reporters out there doing that. It takes a lot of time and effort to put together stories like this. This story about the 20th Directorate is just one example. There's so many others out there. Support your local journalists here at the Bullwork at the New York Times and elsewhere, wherever you seek it out nationally locally support fact-based reporting. Let's talk about the speech and the themes. I summed it up this way. You were basically trying to talk about

how to balance the challenges with the broken political system against the questions of people's everyday concerns, right? And this is a big challenge for Democrats, the Democratic circles. Like, how do we deal with this? And I'm going to read just a little bit from part of the speech that I liked as a former pocket constitution, college Republican. I liked this part. Wars have literally been fought over our system, starting with the first one, the one that broke out 250 years ago this month, the one that gave this great nation. its being founders risk their lives for a better political system. So don't tell me that it can't stir people's hearts and don't tell me that it's worth fighting for. It's not worth fighting for,

excuse me. Don't tell me that it can't stir people's hearts was the line that made me perk up my ears, the same there listening, because that did feel like kind of a subtle message to the chattering class, right? That this issue, that because Biden Harris lost and because the whatever pro-democracy movement was not successful in keeping Trump out. You know, there's some people like, we shouldn't talk about, those are esoteric concerns we shouldn't talk about anymore. Make the opposite case. Yeah, exactly.

What I'm trying to make the case for is that the things that are happening in our economy, the price of gas and diesel, what's going on with mortgages and interest rates, cannot be separated from what's broken in our political system. The problems with our economic reality are related to the problems with our, political system. And so it is a response to this conventional wisdom that you get from a lot of the political strategists who say, don't go there on the need for political reform because that comes that, you don't never talk about that when you could be talking about the price of eggs. Nobody cares about democracy when they're worried about putting food on the table. Now, I get that putting food on

the table is the most immediate concern. But I don't think that means we leave behind the other stuff. I think that from the moment of our founding, Americans have understood that so much depends on the system. There was a time, you know, we're all so jaded about the system, right? If I say the system is broken, that would be the most like cliche, unremarkable, forgettable thing I said all that.

Yeah, no shit, right? But think about how crazy it is that we act like that's not a terrifying, alarming thing to say the system is broken. And politicians have been saying that for years, and it's true. that's a really big deal. Like the system in many ways is us.

The system is America's greatest contribution, the idea of a different political system where the people are in charge. It's what the revolution was fought over. It's also a big part of what the Cold War was fought over, right? So, yeah, I just refused to accept. Us being able to project out that our system was better than theirs was like a key part of winning the Cold War.

Yes, and again, importantly, not just that it was better because it was like academically more elegant in its representation It was better because, in fact, if you were just trying to get a ham sandwich, you were better off doing that in our political and economic system than in theirs. In other words, there continued to be a direct line. The tankies are going to be mad at you for that. The tankies. There's a little Stalinist movement coming up on the online left.

Great. I'm just saying, you're going to get in trouble on tankie Twitter for saying that it was better. They had good ham sandwiches, I heard, behind the iron cream. You know, maybe there were some decent ham sandwiches out there, but it was not a. a place I'd want to go to the grocery, right? And now I'm having all these images of Tucker in the Russian groceries. These things are all connected, and we can't pretend otherwise. And I think it's also important because the way that the people in charge now are breaking our institutions and our norms and our political system and the way, in my opinion,

they're screwing up everyday life in the economy and health care and prices and tariffs and so on, they're breaking everything at the same time. So we ought to be ready to be fixing a lot. of things at the same time. And I think if we're not ready to present that governing vision now, then it becomes a lot harder for us to explain what we're about. I think it's actually very possible that the Democratic Party does well this November and then lapses into thinking that its job is just to put everything back the way it was. This is what happened in 2022. Yeah. We relitigated Biden the last time you're on the pods. We don't have to do that. But I do think that a big part of Biden decided to run again and was like this idea that in 2020,

that the Democrats, you know, there was supposed to be this red wave. There wasn't. Democrats outperformed. And it created, I do think, a complacency. Yeah. Yeah. And you could see that again. You know, again, being here in Iowa was giving me flashbacks to 2019, 2020, you know, the whole idea of me running, it wasn't just generational change. It was very much a, we can't return to normal kind of message. Yeah. It was the idea that we, there's no going back to the old ways. Partly because that was what my whole formative experience in South Bend, Indiana was. The, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, We couldn't, you know, we were the city that is best known, of course, because Notre Dame is there, but we were the company town for Studebaker and lost our biggest employer, this huge auto company, 20 years before I was even born, my whole youth and upbringing, we were still licking our wounds from that. And when I become mayor, basically 50 years after Studebaker closes, there's still crumbling factories all over the city and we're still figuring out what we're going to be next. And there's still a temptation to say, well, we're going to go back and get that somehow. And so, you know, part of the whole reason I got into elected office was saying, like, we're not going to make South Bend great again.

Like, we're doing something new and different, only to worry that my party has taken the same turn of actually in a weird way. We'd never say it. But in a weird way, sometimes I think Democrats are giving out off the impression that what we want to do is just get the world to look the way it looked. If not under Biden, then maybe under Obama, that we're going to go back or they're going to go back or they're. the Clinton year or something. There's some like date that we have. It's not the 50s, like where the Republicans want to take us. Yeah.

But it's in the past and that just can't be right. Or if not that, you talked with this a little bit in the speech too, that you found yourself in the position of being the defenders of these institutions that are broken. Right. You know, and even, you know, while paying lip service saying they should be changed or whatever, like just because Donald Trump is bringing this flame thrower to everything. But, you know, Democrats find themselves being like, well, you know, defending kind of the military industrial complex because Trump was saying that it was bad or defending the FBI or, you know, like all of these things that, you know, in the past had not been the providence of the left, right? And, and how do you even get out of that bind? Like, I think it's easier to identify it than to figure out how to get out of it. Because when you're kind of, you're always going to be the institutionalist party, kind of, if you're running against, you know, the clowns with flamethrowers. So a couple things. I think this is exactly right. We, we hated.

seeing them burn down or break down all these things. So, of course, we instinctively defended them. And on one level, I get that. You know, it's criminally wrong to just burn down the USAID or the Department of Education or you name it, right? But that doesn't mean everything was going along just fine. So how do we get through this? A couple things. One, I think we need to be going back to first principles.

And we think we're like the intellectual party, like the thoughtful party. But I think in many ways we've actually lost a step compared to the right. I mean, I imagine you may have come up in this world, right? Where if you're like a young Republican staffer of our generation, like you, by the time you show up for your first campaign or Capitol Hill internship, like you have like a copy of Hayek or Friedman issued by the Heritage Foundation under your arm, right? Like you're thinking about like the big things. And you would think the left would have that too.

But actually like because the academic left got less and less connected to kind of politics and in some ways, I think, to reality. we actually have a bit of a weakness on our side. So I think we need to be investing more in the same way that the right did for decades in thinking about, okay, what are our basic commitments in liberalism? And what do they mean for a 2020's answer to what a Department of Education should look like or what housing policy ought to be like or how we do international development? I think that's a really important piece. A project 2029, if you will.

Well, but more like a project 2050, right? This is what I'm getting at. Like, I know there's a lot of kind of attempts at a project 2029. Some of them are doing really good work. But, you know, the thing that became Project 2025 started in the Heritage Foundation in, I believe, 1980. Like, that's when they started this iterative process that they updated every few years that became Project 2025, which means if we wanted to do a project 2050 and we started today, we'd already be like 20 years behind compared to that. Right? So, like, of course, we need answers for kind of immediate moves.

And what I admire about the Project 29 stuff is it's looking at kind of tools and laws and departments, things that exist right now and how you could run with them and make change right away. That's great. But who's thinking about 2050 and kind of solving back from that to what we ought to be doing in 2026 if we want to get to where we ought to be in 2050? I think that's the level of ambition that the last generation or two of right-wing think tank leaders. and the smarter politicians on the right had. And I think we've been punched in the face so much on the left and among Democrats that we have a hard time kind of seeing over the horizon into that. The other thing I would say, I mean, some of that sounds like very kind of like big picture and cosmic and academic. It also sounds a little institutional.

It's still kind of like an institutional answer. The answer is not like, oh, we're going to come in and say, like, look at these mistakes in Iran. and maybe we should get rid of bases in the region. Maybe we should get out of the region altogether. Or look at how cash has screwed up the FBI. Maybe we need to rip the FBI, root and branch and start it from scratch. I don't know. I'm just bed-bong right now.

We should be ready to do that kind of clean sheet thinking, especially because right now we have clean sheets in a lot of places because they just burned everything down. I hate how we got the clean sheet. But that's where we're at. So I think that is the level of ambition we ought to have. But the other way to think about it is ground up. So, for example, I've been talking to more and more mayors

who are very frustrated with dealing with HUD as we know it. And HUD actually has not been destroyed in the same way that, like, the Department of Education or USAID have. But, you know, obviously not being led in the best way right now. But my point is, I don't think anybody would say the way it looked five years or ten years or twenty years ago was ideal. Certainly from the perspective of the mayor trying to build housing or get housing to be more affordable.

So I've been talking to mayor saying, okay, what if you really got to start over? Like, what would be different? What would give you the flexibility you need to actually build something? Because I talk to some mayors who say they're better off finding a different source of money altogether than trying to use federal money to solve a problem. Actually, experience a version of this in transportation, like the signature transportation policy that I had as mayor, the one that got me recognition from the U.S. Department of Transportation. I felt so proud. Did she get a certificate?

Yeah, I got a plaque. Yeah, from the Secretary of Transportation. And I was really proud of that. Norman Manetta? No, no, it was Anthony Fox. And it was a big deal for us. But we actually did that project without federal funding partly because it would have been too hard

to get and to use the federal funding. That was the kind of thing I tried to work on and change when I was in Washington. So what I'm saying is kind of from the top down in terms of like getting back in touch with our first principles and big ideas. And from the bottom up in terms of looking at, okay, what actually works?

we should be ready to have everything look different, including things that are cherished, because the reality is so different, including on things that we cherish. We care a lot about the UN. And, you know, in many ways, even though it's easy to take a shot at the UN, rhetorically, politically,

and there's lots of justification for some of that. But, like, if you talk about the mission of, you know, preventing another world war, like, as of today, done pretty well at that, right? But more broadly, like the way that place works, the bureaucracy of it, the setup of it, the things that don't have any real effectual impact there, probably reflect the fact that that was set up in such a different time.

Like, the Security Council was set up at a time when nine out of ten people living in China were impoverished rural peasants. And now, I think it's probably safe to say that a person who lives in a city, like a middle-class city dweller in China, on average, may live a more. or technologically advanced life than a middle-class city dweller in the U.S. I'd rather be in the U.S. Yeah, sure, sure, sure.

But I'm just talking about, like, one example, AI obviously brings a whole other set of examples of all these realities that have changed, the institutions haven't. I think rather than just fine-tuning and tinkering, it's time to start over. And in many cases, we have to. I have, like, two wolves inside of me on this.

Like, there's the political wolf that is like, I want you to go further. Because it's like, I want to, you know, I want the Democrats to, you know, capture the spirit of, you know, being the ones that went after the system that went after the man, right? Like, I went to a TPSA conference before Charlie died, and one of the things that struck me about it was one of the things I always did is I went up to the young guys and I was just always like, why are you here? Like, what is it that animates you about this? And how many of them

were basically just like, F the man. I'm tired of the man. I don't want to go to a stupid wars. I'm screwed. And it's like, that's so weird that that's the conservative conference, that that is the feeling. And so part of me, like, wants the Democrats to capture that sentiment more. Then there's like the small C conservative part of me, you know, Oakshot, you know, that's like, okay, I read you and noticed the other day you did an interview where you were talking about how you were radicalized inside the Biden administration or something, but by the fact that, you know, some of these big changes didn't get done. But I don't, I look at the Biden administration. I'm like, well, there was one issue in which they, you all went for like big change outside of the norms and the system.

That was student loan reform. And that was a disaster. Was it a political disaster? You know, it ends up getting overruled by the conservative Supreme Court. People that didn't go to college are kind of bitter. They're like, I'm pissed that I, why didn't I get a bailout? People that thought they were going to get a bailout and didn't get a bailout. We're mad.

And so you guys tried to go outside the system and break the system. And, you know, you ended up stepping on a rake. And so part of me thinks about that. It's like, ugh, it sounds nice to say we want bigger form. But the best example of that from the Biden administration was a total failure. So there's a reason that that particular policy wasn't on my list when I was running for president. I am not here to say that the administration was wrong to take big swings. Obviously, I was in the middle of the big swing we took on infrastructure.

I'm proud of it. There's a lot of things also that I learned about what makes it harder to do more in the system that we have. But also, you know, good policies that were big swings, like the policy around the child tax credit that cut child poverty in half in this. country, right? I only think a problem was that there were too many big swings. We could argue that some of them were right, some of them were wrong, but I still think the bigger problem in those years was that our party was not ready to really dig in on the bigger, deeper, structural problems that we have. And I get it. If you finally manage to pull off a win in this structure, are you really going to immediately turn around and try to take down the structure that you want? Well, the people in charge now are.

So what are some examples of that? We weren't. Well, I would, start, first of all, I think we've lost like 10 good years on money in politics. I think if we got to work on constitutional change around Citizens United, precisely because that kind of thing takes 20 or 30 years to do, if we'd done it, if we'd started 10 years ago, we'd be halfway there, if you believe it takes 20 years. And we just don't have that much work to show for it. I think that the commitments on Supreme Court reform could have been a lot of more ambitious. Again, I'm having flashbacks to people looking at me really funny here in Iowa in 2019 when I'm saying, I don't think we have the right number of justices on the Supreme

Court. I don't think we have the right way of choosing justices on the Supreme Court. And now this- I'm going to give you credit on this one. I look at you funny on that one. The very first time, you would not remember this. Very first time we met, my friend, Liz Smith, was gathering a little roundtable for you. I was living in Oakland at the time, and it was in some conference room in San Francisco. You're the mayor of South Bend. And I'm sitting in there with like 20 dudes and lanyards. And you were doing this. Like we need a full Supreme Court reform.

We need 13 Supreme Court. We need rotating justices. And I'm in the back going, I don't know what the hell is happening? Who is this mayor that wants to be president thinks we should do. You have 13 Supreme Court justices. But that was, oh, gee. And you hadn't even announced yet. That was where you were from the start.

Oh, I'm surprised you came to that. Oh, yeah. Well, Liz. It was a favor. It was a favor. It was a favor. Well, yeah, no, that's the thing. And now I think we see why.

that, you know, most Democrats, if not yet, most Americans are there. I think many, most Americans do believe we need some kind of reform, like at least something like an ethics code or term limits. I think it would go bigger, right? I think there's a whole set of things like that. I think the way that we elect members of the House, which, by the way, is not dictated in the Constitution. Uncap the House? Are you going to go uncap the House? Well, definitely the size of the House is a weird thing. And look, having dealt with Congress, I understand that to some extent, to some extent shared. the instinct that says, like, would we really ever want, like, more congressmen than we've already got? 300 more. But, you know, that's a good example of something that we've lived with for 100 years, so we just assume it's in the Constitution. It's just like the number nine Supreme Court justices know we're in the Constitution, right? The number 435 House members, if that feels random, it's because it is. Like, we just updated it every few years, and then we stopped because nobody could agree on how to do it.

The last time we tried, which I think was in, like, the 20s or something. Yeah, something like that. And it turns out that that is one thing that has made it. easier to gerrymander. And that is one thing that has contributed to the kind of lock of the two-party system that we have right now. Maybe not the only of the most important thing. But my point is we need to be asking bigger and deeper questions than these kind of fine-tuning things. So I think it's not just acceptable but correct if you think of yourself as moderate ideologically

to also be interested in radical change institutionally. Yeah. Because, you know, radical institutional change is literally the stuff of the founding. It's what 250 years ago this month we did that made America America. And honestly, the changes I'm talking about are not as radical as that. I'm not about overthrowing, you know, thousands of years of monarchy being the way you do things and replacing it with the untested republic. I'm just saying we've got to tune up our republic in ways that feel radical now. But at other moments in our history have been perfectly mainstream.

You know, I also feel this way about the popular. vote, which I still think has to happen soon or later. I think if we did, it would be good for every community, actually. It would be good for Brooklyn if Republican candidates had to turn out the 30 or 40 percent of votes that they could get out of Brooklyn. It would be good for... 18. I'm sure. Okay. You'd still have to turn it back because there's so many of them. Yeah. It would be good for Utah if Democrats had to show up in Utah and get the votes that they could out of Utah. Like, that would make us all better. And of course, I think it just generally be a good thing if we had the basic principle

that if you get the most votes, you ought to win. You haven't been to Green Point lately. It's not 30%. Utah brings up an interesting comment I saw this week from Mitt Romney. I don't know if you saw this. He's being interviewed by McKay Coppins. And Mitt, I was here.

I was actually going against him in the primary. I believe, is that memory correct? I don't know. Time is starting to get long. But I was here in Iowa at the State Fair where he was on the soapbox when he yelled that the guy, corporations are people, my friend. I can remember that vividly.

And, you know, you made a reference to that last night and the speech, you know, talking about how that's part of the constitutional amendment. Corporations aren't people. I was interested in this interview that Mick gave. He was talking about the malign influence of Elon Musk's money on politics. And he's like, and he basically was saying, we need to do, you know, we have not been in this situation before. Like this is, regardless of what your position is in the past on politics, we've not been a situation when you have a trillionaire.

Right. Spending, you know, half a billion on a single race and then being able to get influence in the White House and then being able to oversee how their company is regulated. Like, that is not something that we've dealt with. Maybe we have back in Gilded Age times, right? Was the last time? Maybe even. Maybe not. And so I thought that was intriguing that, like, the same week that I saw Mitt making

that criticism, you were referencing his remarks. And to me, I think that says a lot about how like that is potentially an issue that there could be broad-based support for at this point. I think among the American people there is. I mean, the American people don't need to be sold on reforms like overthrowing citizens united and doing it with a constitutional amendment, if that's what it takes. I was just in Montana. And, you know, there's an initiative there. It's a ballot initiative to basically redefine corporations to make clear that, they don't get to spend on campaigns. So it's different than trying to regulate campaigns.

It regulates corporations, which only exist in terms of the powers that a state law gives them. I'm not a legal scholar, but it's, as I understand it, a really smart way to try to do a bank shot around Citizens United. So it's called the Montana plan. And what I noticed when I was there was that it's a very bipartisan effort. And Montana is actually a great example, talking about the extreme power you just mentioned, where it really was like that a hundred years ago in the days of the Copper Kings. You had, I think at one point

the richest man in the country, the Elon of his day, if you will, there was this guy, Bill Clark, who's a Montana copper magnate, almost literally bought and sold the legislature of Montana, controlled the newspapers to, him and the other Copper Kings,

and it reached a point where the corruption was so extreme, so it just stank so much, that Montana kind of overthrew it. They passed this law, the Corrupt Practices Act, I think of 1912. It stood as kind of a model of campaign finance legislation, passed in 1912, and it lasted until it met the John Roberts Supreme Court and Citizens United. But anyway, I mentioned all this to say.

That's obviously not like democratic territory in Montana, but I think there's a good chance that this thing will pass. And there certainly was a lot of support for it on the ground. So I think this can be a unifying issue. There shouldn't be anything partisan about political reform, at least some of these basic reforms. I think most of us think we ought to do. Practical concerns. You kind of alluded to this, which is the current Supreme Court. What of this stuff can get past it?

It seems like you're obviously already thinking about that. I mean, you know, by mentioning that congressional, you know, House reform, you know, a number of House members, number of Supreme Court members, D.C. is a state. That wouldn't have to get through the Supreme Court. Would you be for that? Yeah, of course. Like, what sense does it make that you could have two people who are both bartenders or soldiers or whatever who live 100 yards apart from each other, but one of them's on the D.C. side of that neighborhood

and the other one's on the Maryland or Virginia side. And one of them gets to have two senators in a member Congress and the other one doesn't. It makes no sense. It's just at a very fundamental level unfair. So, again, we've got, it's not just the wrong. number of justices on the Supreme Court. We probably got the wrong number of House members in the House, and we got the wrong number of states in the Union. Some of this other stuff, though, is going to be tough to get to the Supreme Court. All this stuff is going to be tough. That's why we need to work really hard on it, right? I mean, I'm sure 50 years ago when the Wright was initiating the project to undo Roe v. Wade, let alone some of the other stuff around the Unitary Executive, whenever that came up. Sure. Like, that stuff wasn't just on the back foot. Some of that stuff would have been considered laughable when they started that, right? And they were willing to take the... I mean, the doctrine that we can start a war without the Senate, but the Senate does need to approve a treaty to end war.

That's the current RIP Lindsey Graham. That was a Lindsey Graham doctrine. Stuff that would have got you laughed out of the room then is reality now. And we should have that same, if we're confident that we're right, we should have that same confidence. Okay, so here's the political pushback you get. Let's say we live in the good place, you know. It's 2029, and there's a regular Democrat that's resident,

whatever that means to you. and the Democrats have 50 House or Senate members so you can squeak stuff through if you want to and they control the House, there's still going to be a lot of pressure to have the priority be Medicare for all that want it, not reforming the number of House members. If they can break everything at once,

we can build a lot of things at once. I just, this idea, especially after what we just witnessed, this just like onslaught, this shock and awe of every part, not just within government and policy, but of society, of everything from universities to law firms to late-night comedians, having to deal with the kind of unrelenting force of the White House.

Like, if they can do that, then surely we can handle health care and house reform in the same session. Maybe. I don't know. Last time you guys tried to put up HR1, and that's languished for the whole four years. Which is terrible because we'd be a lot better off of the past, right? So, yeah, I mean, again, this hard things are hard. I'm not saying any of this stuff is easy. I'm not even saying that Congress or the next president can get half this stuff done.

I'm saying that we've got to get it done in our time. And it only gets done if we get to work on it sooner, like yesterday. Okay, there's another thing that you might have to do in that situation, which is the accountability side of things. Last time you're on, it gave a surprisingly interesting answer from a politician. I have like politicians on the podcast less because, you know, you guys are a less. Interesting, oftentimes. Sorry. You know, for just bullshit.

But I gave you the time machine question, said, if you go back, you know, what would you done differently, you know, five years ago? And like the obvious answer that a lot of people give is Merrick Garland. You know, maybe the Biden administration should have put in somebody else at DOJ who was more aggressive at investigating Trump. You talked about COVID mistakes. People can go listen to that. I agreed with that.

But let's do the project forward now, like within the context of the Garland, right? How do you think about that in 2029? It seems like there's some crimes happening. I mean, President's families getting unbelievably rich. Corey Lewandowski, there's some reports had some insider deals at DHS. We're murdering people in the streets. We don't even know who the shooter was in one of these killings. I mean, it seems like there's a lot of potential accountability.

How do you think about that? I think there has to be accountability. And I don't buy into this idea that we have to just kind of paper over and pretend. that that didn't happen, especially because this is not about going after fellow Americans who disagreed with us politically. This is about making sure that corruption doesn't go unchecked. And it should be done in a way that is raising the bar, whether we're talking about Republicans or Democrats or anybody else in power, abusing their power. I believe much more of that's happening among Republicans right now than not. But it's not about Republicans and Democrats, right?

And I actually think we only get to a place where things get better in this country when we've established that the kind of self-dealing, the kind of corruption, the kind of I'm pretty confident illegal behavior, but that has to be shown, right, in court, that there's some accountability for that. And if we get it right, kind of a permission structure for people who are part of it to renounce it as well. I actually think that's really important. Nobody can make somebody do that. But I know you and I both. know. There are a lot of people who are part of this who know in their hearts that they're part of something that is wrong. And if any one of us is wrong about something politically or ideological, that's whatever. I mean, we're right, we're wrong. That is what it is. But if people are part of something that's legally wrong, wrong, or wrong by the lights of just basic morality in this whole country, never mind the politics of it, that's a big way to talk about that. And over time, that's to be a way to talk about that openly so that we get to a place when I'm thinking in about 2050, where, you know, there are certain just basic boundaries and principles

that people who voted either way last time around agree on by then. The people who were against each other on all kinds of things still agree on this as the foundation. What about the ballroom? Do we take out a sledgehammer to that? Do you start tearing that back down? I mean, I definitely think there's some, like, weird gold filigree that's got to come off a lot of federal buildings.

and some pictures of the dear leader that they have to go. But I don't know. I mean, to me, the thing about the ballroom more is just what it symbolizes, right? This idea that you tore something down and are raising all this money

and spending all this time and energy as if the big problem that Americans have right now is, you know, we lack a nicer ballroom for fancy parties at the White House as if like any of the people who voted for this guy

we're going to the polls saying like the reason I want this guy is I know he built, a damn good ballroom. Yeah. And I wanted to send that to Washington, right? One other quote in your speech last night, which seemed to be a reference to what happened to you recently was this,

a state and federal government that stand up for people's rights. You listed out a bunch of rights. And then it ended with this, the right to be who you are and love who you love and raise your family in peace. It seems like that was a reference to the fact that CPS came to your house and prevented you from raising your family in peace. I mean, it wasn't only about that, but that's obviously something that's been on my mind. What happened to our family a few weeks ago is the most fucked up thing that's ever happened to us since I got into public life.

And it should never happen. So I don't know how much more I can say about it than I've said. I will say this. You know, we made this decision to speak out almost right away. And I'm glad that we did. And when we did, we heard so much more than I expected from so many people. Not just like people who are aligned with me politically or my friends, but like, you know, some people who spoke out who were not our friends politically.

People have campaigned against. So to me, that reinforces the idea that even in this moment, we do in fact share some boundaries, some most of us, almost all of us, at least. some of the basic sense of what is and is not okay and what should be and should not be

part of the cost of being in public life and I was encouraged by that that's nice that you were encouraged by something because the whole thing was pretty distressing to me obviously I didn't experience it but what actually happened that night or the day where they came to your house

like what do you think about that process, like the idea that they could say to you, like, you have to be separate from your kids for a night. I don't have that much familiarity with the system. I assume you have more familiarity now than you did a couple weeks ago. What do you think about that? We got a lot of questions about how it got to that point and how a system whose entire purpose is to protect children and to protect the innocent could be abused that easily. and have learned a lot about that system in these systems since.

One thing I've learned is that many places have a way to have confidential reporting that is still not anonymous as far as the state is concerned, which can be important because making a false report is a crime. Do we know who made the report? So we've been in contact with authorities because we're interested in the person who did this, prosecuted because we're in contact with authorities. That's all I'm going to say about it right now.

But yeah. There's just so much bullshit victim culture sometimes. You know, you see this on the right. You see it across the boards, right? In our society right now, it's like, you can get attention from being a victim and attention matters more than it used to. And so there's part of me that like instinctually does not want to go to the gay place here. And yet, like, it's kind of hard for me to separate this.

And it's kind of hard for me to imagine that if you were a straight politician, that this would have been the criminal prank that was played on you. What do you think about that? I mean, this is the first time I've heard of this being done to anybody in politics. When you go into politics, you know that a lot of crazy and awful things can happen. I did not have the imagination to guess. that something like this could happen. And I hope that it never happens again to anybody.

But yeah, we're the ones that happened to, right? And first of all, obviously, I believe that anybody getting into politics or public life ought to be treated like anybody else. And it shouldn't matter if you're gay or whatever. And also, this is true for people who have nothing to do with politics, who just should, as they go about their lives, have the... the integrity of their families respected and protected by everybody from their neighbors to the federal government, just the same. And it's clear that we're a lot closer to that than we were when I was growing up.

And we're also a lot further from that than where we need to get. To me it said so hard, and I think that I can't separate it out from the part about you guys being gay dads, because this is like kind of the ultimate fear of gay dads, I think, on a lot. And it's the fear of any parent to lose a kid. But, like, there's, I do think a distinct thing about feeling like as a gay dad that, like, you can be separated from your kid, you know, and that the kid can be taken from you. And I don't know. Like, I don't, I mentioned this after it happened on a different show, but, like, I don't know if this happens to you, but I go through TSA pre or clear. The thing happens now where the person asks the kid, like, who is this that you're with?

Does this happen to you? Do your four-year-olds? Can they talk yet? Not like that. Yeah. We travel all the time. I travel with my daughter all the time. And so this has happened on her times.

And it's just like every time it's just there's something that hits you in your stomach that's like, I don't like that question because like that question has a subtext to it that's like maybe that isn't your kid. And maybe the state can take that kid from you or maybe this person, the airport can take that kid from you. That happened to you. Like the state came to your house and said, you have to be separate. from your kid for a night.

I mean, like that hits at a very, I think, particular place. Yeah, and again, I keep coming back to the purpose of these systems, whether we're talking about Homeland Security or they're talking about CPS. The purpose of these systems is to protect families and children. And here's a case where this system was abused in a way that hurt a family, our family. and then the bigger context is what you're describing and that's real, that's there.

Part of you just want to be like, fuck you and I'm staying with my kids and send the cops. I mean, of course. Like, these are my kids, you know? Like, but then, you know, you're also, especially because for 24 hours

we didn't know what this even was, right? I don't know, you don't even know what you're up against. I mean, you mentioned Czech, I remember in a much more trivial example, but maybe a month or two ago.

I was going to Canada. I was going to this big dinner and conference and Mark Carney was there and Obama was there and I was going there. And I'm going through the custom, you know, the Canadian immigration stamping my passport. And he asked what I'm doing there and I'm like, well, I'm going to this conference.

He's like, what's the conference called? I was like, I actually don't know. You know, I had a staff member traveling with me, but she'd already gone through. And then he starts looking kind of skeptical. And And I start feeling like, I start feeling like I must be doing something wrong, like an imposter. I know exactly when I'm there. I'm planning to engage it at the, you know, the highest levels of the Canadian government,

among others in Canada, I have a very legitimate reason to be there. And I feel like immediately just kind of like, I don't know, like I'm doing something wrong. And I was reflecting on it that the next day, not knowing that a few weeks later, something like this would happen. But like any encounter with authority can create that effect. right and so it's one of the reasons why it's so incredibly important that you have trust in the authorities that they will treat you fairly that they will not treat you differently because you're gay or because you're opposed to the government or whatever so Columbia and Asioli that got shot in Maine because in that

context like even if I feel a weird for a second like I know that like this will all like very easily be kind of clear to this Canadian immigration official in a couple of minutes that I'm there on legitimate business. And even though my head was saying that in this scenario too, right? My head is like, okay, this is obviously either a setup or a mix up or something because there's no reason why there's no other reason why this would be happening. You're still saying that while there's a guy in a uniform and a lady with a clipboard in her hand in your home. in your driveway, and you just have to, everything depends on us knowing.

Maybe in a way this gets back to what I'm saying about the system, too. If you're not so sure about the system, as is happening in so many ways right now because of who's running the federal government, right? If, as you and I sit here, we hear about somebody, it sounds like a father shot possibly in the presence of his toddler, and we have no confidence right now that we can even believe authorities

when they give their initial account of what happened because the last time they did they were lying. Everything starts to fall apart, including your ability to feel safe in your own home. It's legitimately scary. You know, I mean... It was like I would not wish it on anybody. It's like it happened to you

and you're with the Secretary of Transportation. It's fucking insane, you know? So a phone call can't be made. I mean, just like, I don't know. I'm getting fucking pissed just thinking about it. A chest.

You seem a little bit more even keel than your husband on this. I'm just making sure he didn't think about January 6th thing the CPS building or something that night.

How's he doing? Again, we understand that there are people who have a job to do. We do not understand how that system got abused this way. And, you know,

it's a little kind of a long road back to normal. Yeah. But, I mean, he's a really strong person and,

you know, we're getting through it. But I'd be lying if I didn't say that this you know really affected us. Does it change your opinion at all about doing shit like this? I mean, you know, does it change your opinion at all? Is it informing your

thinking about whether you run for something again? Yeah. Yeah, because it's like if you're a human being like you, it actually does two kind of opposite things at the same time. Like one thing it does to you is it makes you want to just

run away from the bullshit and into the arms of your family as fast and hard as you can. And then at the same time, the other thing it makes you want to do is whatever it is you can do to make this the kind of place where stuff like that doesn't happen and where just our politics generally is different. I think that's part of why I mentioned the outreach. It's not just that people were nice.

It's that I could feel a hunger for different kind of public life in this country. And so I feel like both of those things. And I do think there's also something weird and twisted. Maybe this is everywhere, but I only know it in the American, like, political culture where, like, if somebody says that they're, like, not going to run again or they're leaving office so they can, like, be with their family more. Like, in Washington speak, that's immediately taken as code for, like, they've done something wrong. Yeah, right? It's just like synonymous with, like, scandal or screw up, right?

Nobody could actually want to be at their family that much. is that could actually be what's on your mind, which is so strange because, like, I think it's the, you know, it's definitely like the number one regret or complaint of people I know who are in this life. And it's the number one thing that makes it hard to do. Even just the regular stuff, like being on the road a lot and being away from your family, let alone the kind of threats or fear or harm that can come to your family or the effect on your family of the things that are, that happened to you. You know, all of that, how could that not? Yeah. How could that not be like on your mind when you're thinking about where you fit in and whether your highest and best use is politics? Which side's winning out? Ask me in a few months.

Okay. All right. I wanted to finish this politics, but actually, can we just, uh, let's palac cleanse a little bit because that's so fucking awful. Tell me a funny story about the kids. How are the kids? They're four now? They're four.

They're great. What's happening with them? They're hilarious. I mean, it's fun because now they're beginning to get these glimmers at how the world works, right? Like they have these pieces, these fragments, but they don't have the picture. So with our son, it's mostly actually about the natural. It's about animals. Like, he is all about animals.

He watches this show full of animal facts. And then, like, I'll just, and he always, he's our morning person. I don't know how anybody in our household turned out to be. morning person, but he did. So he'll just, like, show up. Like, you'll hear the footfalls. And then I'll, I'll hear him, like, he'll come right up to the side of the bed, like right up to my face, you know?

And I'm not, it's dark. I'm like, not awake. Like, Papa. I'm like, what, yes, is everything okay? What, somebody pee? Like, what's going on? Papa. There are seven species of giraffes on the African savannah.

And that's it. Like, he just needed me to know that, you know? But I'm like, what does he think the African Savannah is? Like, he doesn't understand. geography. He doesn't know where Michigan is. He knows we live in a place called Michigan. You know what that means. And same with our daughter. The fun thing with our daughter is she's starting to form this sense of like, just the very beginnings of like a sense of like civics.

So one time I can't remember how we got onto this. I think it was because you're just asking about like princesses and kings and queens and which ones are real Elsa compared to Taylor Swift. She thinks is basically a Disney princess. And we got on to like kings and the revolution and all of that. And another time we were driving by a few days ago, we were driving by this patriotic display close to where we live in Michigan. And I had the Constitution, you know, the we the people kind of on the parchment as well as an eagle and a bell and some other very

patriotic things. And she's asking about it. And I was trying for the first time in my life to explain to a four-year-old what the Constitution is. Right. And I was like, well, you know, those letters there that's part of the Constitution, she's like, what's that? I'm like, well, it's like the basic law. All the rules kind of come from that set of rules. What does that mean? I was like, well, it's like the instructions for the government. They know what Legos are. They know what instructions are for Legos.

So I'm like, it's the instructions for government. And I'm not sure whether she's ever heard the word government before or not. But her mind immediately went to who makes up the government. Because the next question he said was like, who is that? Who does that? And I'm trying to think about how I render like, I can't do like the three branches. And how do I start to explain this? And before I can form a sentence, she's,

says, is it, is it Judge Judy? No. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Who's watching Judge Judy in your house? Her grandma, sounds like. She was staying with my in-laws and there's a little bit of Judge Judy on.

And so what I like is that she's not that far off, right? I know. It's not quite it. But like she's got, she's like on the right track. And then there's a part of me that's thinking like, you know, it might be better off. We all just imagined that that was just the three branches of government for now. It would probably be better than we're. what we've got. I don't know anything about Judge Judy's politics, but yeah, so we're just in that

phase of life where, like, you know, the, we're stepping on Legos a lot, but we're also, like, getting to make Legos, which is just one of the great, like, making Legos with your kid is, like, one of the great joys in life, I think. That's cute. I'll tell you where the, uh, the animal facts are going, uh, because my daughter's a couple years ahead. She has already done the animal fact show, and now she's doing a show on, um, like the great mysteries, you know, so it's like a kid's show. but like the Bermuda Triangles are real or not or the Chupacabras. And then they do some real ones.

So I feel like that's nice, actually. Yeah. It's kind of debunking conspiratorial thinking early a little bit. Interesting. So she's been coming to me with questions about that. So we were through the African Savannah. I'm sure it'll circle back around. But I feel like that's the right trajectory for him.

At four, you're lucky. It'll be six. Does Trump exist in their world? Not really. I don't think so. Yeah. It was the worst part of, that's not true. Among the bad things of him winning again was like,

I felt like I could get away with her not really knowing him. You know, had he not won again? Now it's too late. And so now she understands that he's bad. And she expressed a very bad thought about Donald Trump in front of my father on the lady. And I was like, okay, we got to, you know, we got to stand down the edges a little bit here

about what thing happened in the house. But we're doing our best. I love that, though. Seven giraffes of the African Spina? I didn't know that. Yeah, I don't know if I got, that might not be true. verified that.

But he's usually on point. Like, he knew some I had wrong about what Peregrine Falcons eat or, I forget. But like, it's amazing the stuff that they hold on to. And of course, the other thing they hold on to is like any promise you've ever made. Like if you said they're going to get some candy after lunch and then like, they're ready to talk about accountability. Like their readiness to hold you to like that's like a prosecutor. It is. Yeah.

Days later. Yes. You promised me to go up to the candy store. Yeah. I was like, I did? Yes. Why? Over what?

It was like, you said, if I do this, we'll do that. And I was like, you're right. I did do that. All right. We'll do a little politics to close. You've been traveling the country a bunch. That's what you're here. You're going to Omaha tonight after this.

Do you have any favorites? We've got listeners sometimes for like looking for who to support or who to donate to or to knock on doors for. Anybody impressing you out there? Yeah, you know, again, very impressive what's going on in Iowa. I think when we talk about kind of squaring, you know, immediate economic concerns with like big picture stuff. One thing, one reason Rob's hand is very effective and I think will be the next governor here is that he is not afraid to talk about these kind of systemic issues about corruption and also talk about the everyday. I was really

impressed with him last night. I thought that his presentation was what he is, we talked about this night when I saw you after the speech, but he's like in front of a party event. So it's like a Democratic Party regulars. And he's in there saying, you know, here's the thing about if I get in there, the Republicans are still going to control the house. And so We're going to have to meet over coffee and figure out, you know, how to meet in the middle and how to compromise, just like my grandpa had to at Hardee's when he met his neighbor who was a Democrat. And I was like, that's a pretty savvy thing to do, you know, message to give that seems authentic to him. That, you know, I just sometimes it makes, it's like anything else you want people to clap for you. And so you're a democratic thing, you know, your instinct might be to give a very partisan speech.

And I was impressed by what he was doing last night. Yeah, I think he could really, again, I think also when he's elected within the Democratic Party, he'll be very, I mean, he's already, you know, somebody, I think a lot of people respect across the party. But I want him and more of those kind of tables where there's not a lot of people from the middle of the country. I think, I'm going to be in Nebraska next, Omaha. I really, really excited to see Denise Powell's campaign for Congress there. Can be in Florida soon a lot to be excited about there. I've endorsed a couple of candidates there who were veterans, Darren McCauley and Leela Gray there, who she's a general. He's a general. He's a. military doctor, both of them for house. That guy, Bail Dalton, you got to check him out. He's over on the Daytona Beach side. He's running against Corey Mills. He's maybe one of the worst people in Congress. So, anyway, it's another one.

You know, what I love about a lot of these candidates is, obviously, I tend to agree with them on the issues, but a lot of them also just represent, like, a different expectation about, well, about character. To use this, like, very quaint term that used to be big when we were grown up, right? Just this idea that kind of matters, what you're like, what you've shown, what you're about, what your sense of services. And so, you know, I'm going to continue going to these places. A lot of them are redder.

A lot of them are uphill. And we know it. It was in Northwest Georgia campaigning in Marjorie Taylor Green's district for Sean Harris there. We're campaigning for our candidate for Congress in Little Rock. There's so many places that there just haven't been enough Democrats speaking to these communities and these audiences. So it's kind of like the geographic version of my Fox News practice, right? You can't blame somebody for not embracing your message if you haven't been out there to share it with them. And I'm going to keep doing that to the bell rings.

What is a good message for Trump voters right now, do you think? Speaking to somebody that's the voted for Trump, but this maybe doesn't like how things are going, like which issues would come to mind for you? I think the most important thing, the core of the whole message is he doesn't deserve you. And I think it's really important to talk in a way that shows that we have a regard for you as a voter. I don't think any less of you as a person because you voted a different way than I voted. What I'm saying is the things that you may have believed

that he would do because he promised you he would, whether it was cutting prices very quickly, whether it was no new dumb wars and especially not a war with Iran. A lot of things where, you know, I could argue until I'm blue in the face about why he was never believable anyway. But the point is he said he would do these things, a lot of good, smart.

people believe that. They supported him. And now he's screwing them. And I think a message like that that focuses on how you as a voter deserve better. And I also know that when I say he doesn't deserve you, we still have some work to do to make the next step, which is that we deserve your vote more than him, or in this case in 2026, his congressional enablers, right? but that's where I think we show the things that we have done and will continue to do to make sure you can have health care, right? I'm especially thinking about like Obama Trump voters who voted a certain way and that might be part of why they have health care now because the Affordable Care Act. And then went along with what Trump had to say and now Trump is screwing them.

Something that was cultural stuff though. The thing I get a little nervous about when I talk to Democrats is it's kind of like the easy thing to say. It's true and right, and Democrats should say it, which is Trump has let you down on wars and pricing. And that might be good enough in 2026, because he really has, let them down. But still, to that other part of it about the Democrats not winning them over, a lot of that isn't those issues. It's more of, you know, culture issues, whether that be policing or immigration or LGBT stuff or whatever. What do you think about that? But here's the thing. I mean, on so many of those issues, too, not all of them, but on so many of those. issues on something like marriage where when I was first, you know, worked on my first campaign out of college, that was kind of so lethal for Democrats that they were putting on the ballot to help Bush, right? Yeah.

And now in a country, that's like a 60 or 70 percent issue among the American people. Even immigration, if you ask the question, right, if you say, look, of course we got to have borders, of course we got to control who can be a citizen and who can come into this country. And we also need to be fair and we need to be humane and we need to recognize that the economy has pulled in more people than the law has allowed. And we need to have a pathway to citizenship as well as a strong border. Like people are on board of that, right? So there are all these things.

But to me, a lot of the cultural stuff is actually code for something that's a level deeper, which is a lot of people who got the impression that Democrats don't like them. Yeah. And if you think if a voter feels like that. that way, then like, it's not going to matter that like you think I'm right about taxes or whatever, right? You can't blame somebody for that. Yeah. It's why one thing I can't stand is the self-reinforcing version of that that is, you know, whenever you hear somebody accusing a voter of voting against their own interests.

Yeah. What's the matter with Kansas? Yeah. And frankly, a lot of those voters could look at a lot of the people who say that kind of thing and say, so are you. Yeah. We all vote a complicated mix of our interests and our values. And the more we show regard for that, respect for that for each other, the more I think we're one step closer to finding our way out of this. And campaigns matter, obviously campaigns matter hugely in terms of who wins. Campaigns matter for more than who wins, right? The way a campaign has done is a big deal in and of itself. And I think the Democrats I'm supporting across the country, I get that, they reflect that.

The ones who win will be fantastic, even the ones who come up short. I think we'll make our party in our country better because of the way they run. That's the kind of thing I'm looking for anyway, when I'm getting involved. You're not a candidate, so you're just a voter in Michigan. There's a big Michigan Senate primary happening right now.

Gary Peters came out today and endorsed Taylor Stevens, so it's kind of nasty about it. And then now we talked about Abdul. I kind of feel like you're maybe like a swing voter in Michigan. Are you? I mean, in that primary? I'm not a swing voter in general. No, in that primary.

Are you, Abdul, and I kind of, but you look at just as a political scientist. Yeah. I look at this as a political observer, not a scientist. I look at this and I say, well, the Abdul voters are people who are with Bernie and it was with Warren in the primary, and the Haley voters are probably with Joe Biden in the primary. And it's like the Pete voters might be up for grabs. Yeah. So how are you looking at it?

I mean, I'm mainly focused, and I'm choosing my words here because I think it's really important in this very interesting. intense primary, that we not lose supporters of whoever's going to lose. And a very effective candidate with a very strong following is going to lose. And we're going to have a matter of weeks because the primary is so strangely late in our state to get together and make sure that Mike Rogers is not the next U.S. Senator to be a rubber stamp from what Trump's doing. So that's how I'm coming at. Privacy of the ballot box for you then. I adore Haley consternation. It's so late.

They could still call you. I'm sure they can call you. Yeah, they have. See? I guess. All right, Pete. Anything else? Any other final?

Do you want to leave us with an Iowa favorite? You know, do you get to stop by any of your favorites? I didn't get the fair food this time. So that alone is... Raygun. You got any T-shirts? Yeah, I saw you were there. I did.

I did. I think I may have made a mistake. Okay, what? Well, we got twins. So I got to do something for both of them. And they already have the Raygun shirts that they like. Okay. Do you do the same?

Same thing or different? I do different. It's risky. Yeah, because I got, they're both getting green shirts. Mm-hmm. But he's getting a squirrel shirt. It says, take me to your feeder. I love that.

Right? Especially because we've had a lot of rodent situations. I got a bird feeder shirt last time I was in town. Right. Same odd. No, it was all the different kinds of possums. Oh, yeah, yeah. We have one of those birds that Gus loves.

Yeah, so we got to take me to your feeder shirt for Gus. I got her, she's really into unicorns. Okay. So I thought, okay, I'll get her the unicorn shirt. But I realized it's a unicorn with a pirate, a sword-wielding pirate on it. Okay. And so I think it's understood. It's like a her kind of shirt because of the unicorn.

But now I'm thinking about it because at the Cherry Festival the other day, which is a big thing in Traverse City where we were. We, of course, went to the parade, which was fun. you know, I've been to dozens of parades that I was in them. I've never had the experience. It's just like sitting on a blanket with my kids like watching a parade, watching the marching bans go by. I don't know if we're ready for that.

I think you are. But anyway, so we came out of it and he got to pick his toy and he got this light up plastic pirate sword thing. And now I'm wondering is there going to be a contest over the shirt because he's got a pirate on it. And so I don't know, we'll find out when I get back. Please report back. I know the listeners are going to want to know how that went.

That's Pete Buttigieg. Man, I appreciate all the time. Good luck in the campaign trail. The candidate you're endorsing are really, really great. We're super aligned and all that. And so we'll put a list of where you've been here in the show notes so folks can decide if they want to support them. And we'll see you soon.

All right, man. Come on down to New Orleans. You don't have to be Marty Graw. I might turn up. But we'll see you soon, all right? Thank you. Thanks, Pete. But your softest whispers louder than the highways call to me.

Close your eyes. I'll be here. in the morning. Close your eyes. I'll be here for a while. The Borg podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, Associate producer Anzley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz, and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.