The Daily Beast Podcast - Florida’s Top Dem: Ron DeSantis Hid His COVID

Episode Date: March 9, 2021

While Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis may have been the runner-up to former President Donald Trump in the recent CPAC straw poll, his chances of ever becoming president himself are not good, according to Florida’s top Democrat.  “You know, he went MIA for three weeks in November claiming that he was working on some statewide plan. My take is that he probably had COVID and didn’t want to tell people when the vaccines first came to our state,” Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Services Nikki Fried tells co-host Molly Jong-Fast on the latest episode of The New Abnormal.  Fried also spills the tea on DeSantis’ handling of the coronavirus pandemic and his real boss—Trump. “A lot of it was, he [DeSantis] was getting his nod from President Trump and wasn’t able to do anything without President Trump’s approval, and the same thing is happening here, because now President Trump is a resident. So I’m sure that [DeSantis] is consistently calling the president and I’m sure the president’s wealthy friends in the state of Florida are asking for the vaccines, and so they’re getting it delivered to them.“ But Fried isn’t done truth-telling about DeSantis and how his vaccine rollout will burn down his presidential aspirations, after he allowed non-residents to claim coveted doses for themselves while Floridians went without. “He allowed for out-of-state people to come into the state. So we heard, you know, big donors and people on the boards of hospitals and nursing homes were flying into our state,” she tells Molly. Also in the episode, Peter Segal of NPR’s beloved quiz show Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me! joins Molly to talk about the emotional life of politics and everything that isn’t on Twitter. Sagal feels passionately that when the aliens come down to Earth, they are going to not see much of a difference between left and right wing cable television rhetoric. “Differences that are obvious to us would not be to a Martian,” he says. “Looking at a camera and explaining to us very seriously and very sincerely why another group of people are terrible... They’re trying to get the audience to feel the same way about the opposite group of people, to feel indignant, to feel angry, to feel righteously upset about how awful these people are to feed that fuel. And what that says to me is that we’re more alike than we thought.” And then the crew brings on David Shor, who says his job is to “get Democrats elected” but his formal title is head of data science at Open Labs. Shor tells us how Democrats can win elections and the big problem with the 2020 election. “One of the big stories of this election is that those non-white conservatives started to vote more like white conservatives, that we started to see this ideological polarization that’s happened over the last four years,” he says. “This has been a long-term trend, 2018 was worse than 2016. I think it’s something that a lot of people ignored, that there were a lot of races where Democrats did substantially worse than [Hillary] Clinton among non-white voters, and it was impactful. The reason we lost the Florida Senate race, or the Georgia gubernatorial race, if we had done as well among non-white voters as Clinton did, we wouldn’t have lost those races. And in the same way, going to 2020, I think, you know, 2020 was worse than 2018. And if you look at some survey data, you get some hints as to why. We ended up asking after the election, we did a large post-election survey of Latinos and asked a battery of issue questions just to try to get at what was motivating some of these voters who switched over. I think the single largest predictor was attitudes toward crime, attitudes toward public safety, attitudes toward policing.” All of that plus Kyrsten Sinema’s Marie Antoinette imitation and the secret to getting that sought-after “NPR voice” on the latest The New Abnormal. If you... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Jong-Fast and welcome to The Daily Beast, The New Abnormal. I'm a left-wing pundit and an editor at large at The Daily Beast. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. Our world has been turned upside down. On the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and figure out how we get our out of it. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure everything doesn't go too far off the rails while we have fun discussions about our world gone mad. And while I take that

duty seriously, ourselves, not so much. On today's episode, we're going to talk to David Shore, who's head of data science at Open Labs. But it's going to be way more interesting than you think because he's really an expert on how you get Democrats elected and what all this polling actually means that he's going to explain it to us. As well, we have Nikki Freed, who is the third most powerful person in Florida and the most powerful Democrat who's been mounting a strong opposition against Ron DeSantis, who's going to talk to us about what's going on and down in Florida. But first, we're going to have our super fun conversation with Peter Sagal, the host of

NPR's Wait Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Hi, Peter. Hello, Molly. How are you? I'm good. I'm so excited to you're here today. I'm very excited to be here. I'm a long-time fan, first-time caller.

Well, the feeling is mutual. And Peter, I'll say we're really excited to have you here because every podcaster is envious of NPR voices, and having you here will bring so much professionalism to our podcast. Exactly. All you need is a well-modulated voice somewhere in the base range, and all of a sudden you sound like pros. What's interesting is that I actually don't sound like this, but everybody at NPR is given like a small box

that processes our voice to sound basically like Robert Siegel. That's the model. That's the model. Okay, I've always wondered, okay, I'm going to get working on my algorithm. I have to say, as someone who has one vocal chord, I listen, sometimes my husband makes me listen to the pod, and I can't believe how distinctive my voice is. But that's good, Molly. That's really good.

All right. So, Peter. Yes. We just had two different, really interesting guests on. And one was Nikki Fried, the third most powerful politician in all of Florida. She was pretty great. And then we had this amazing guy called David Shore who talked about something that we were hoping we could talk to you about. Right.

David Shore, of course, is the guy he had an interview. I can't remember who it was, but everyone was talking about it because he was like, this is what's really going on. And this is what the Democrats need to do. And this is how Trump was good for the Republican Party. Yeah. Basically, everything on Twitter is wrong. Is that fair, Jesse? That's fair.

Yeah. No more Mr. Potato had discussions. I can confirm that. Are we done? I mean... Even me who sometimes really enjoys this stuff, I'm like, if I have to discuss Bugs' Buddy being hot or whatever the fuck we're doing, one more minutes. Pepe LePue is a rapist.

I mean, but we all do that. Right. I mean, he is, but that is not how Democrats win. I'm convinced from a young age that may be. be fear Frenchmen talking to my girlfriend. Yes. Oh, Pepele Pue. Now we're into the Pepele Pue discourse. There we go. The idea here, though, is that the left uses emotional cues. Right. The left uses emotional cues just as much as the right does, except the left says to

themselves that we're, or I should say, they are the rational ones who are working in terms of reasoned ideas and good ethics, while the other side is just emotional lunatics of the New York times, for some reasons, insists on interviewing in diners. In fact, I found out when I first started nosing around this idea that there's a term in psychology for this, the human tendency to assume everybody but you is acting irrationally. Well, you are an absolute, you know, Spock-like model of careful logic. Wait, what is it called? I don't remember.

But perhaps if there's a psychologist out there, it's a certain kind of fallacy that's very common to everybody. This is the Daniel Levitton thing. There's like that thing he says that the one thing everyone agrees on politically is they say the other side is insane, but there's a bunch of people on my side who are crazy too. Right, but not me. Yes. Never me.

I'm absolutely obsessed with this because the one thing that is absolutely true is that it's not just the two sides hate each other, the two sides, the grand partisan divide, don't understand each other. And that was what was so weird about the whole rise of Trump, which is that I understand what liberals believe, and I can see that. and I understand what normal conservatives believe, and I can see that. I can understand it, even if I may disagree with it in any given issue. Oh, let's talk about the marginal tax rate.

What's the, you know, I can understand why you'd argue either side. We may disagree. We may even hate you because we think you're so wrong. But I understand you. I don't understand. And I don't know if this is a partisan statement. I don't understand how anybody could support Donald Trump. I don't understand how anybody could have looked at him in 2015, 2016, and said, yeah, that guy should be president.

And it's that, and not only, not to mention everything that happened in the four years, everybody could watch all this and go, yeah, that's great. This is going exactly the way it should. And that utter lack of comprehension, how is this possible for so many people to think this way, has really bothered me because I like to think that I like to understand people, even if I disagree with them. We're all human beings, right? And so I've been thinking about this a lot.

Part of it comes from my background. Before I got into radio, I was a playwright. And one of the things that you do when you're writing any kind of fiction is you try to understand how other people think, even if you really disagree with them. For example, I wrote a play about a Holocaust denier, an anti-Semite. I am not one. But it was really interesting trying to say, okay, if I were one, how would I explain it? How would I emotionally justify what I was doing? And that's, it's both edifying and interesting and fast and, you know, and it's been so tough.

That's why I love the New York Times interviewing these people in diners. Tell me more about what you think, because I don't understand it. And I have come to no real conclusions, but I have some observations. Let's hear them. Okay, and I need to say, as an absolute caveat, because in case this gets taken out of context, I am not both siding liberals and conservatives, Democrats or Republicans. I am not saying they're both the same in any substantive way. We understand this, everybody?

Okay, moving on. They sure sound like each other. Well, explain that. I noticed this first when Obama was elected. And I noticed that the right wing was taught. talking about Obama in almost the same terms that the left wing had talked about George W. Bush. They were saying he's a benefit of a kind of affirmative action. He's an idiot. He doesn't really understand what he's doing. He doesn't understand the Constitution. He's going to wreck the government.

He's a puppet of other forces. Now, obviously, when it came to Obama, there were some other extreme racial things that got said. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about like this general level of partisan dislike, disdain, that seem to end up using the same terms, right? But didn't that start with Newt Gingrich? In a way, yeah. And so these terms, these accusations, these characterizations of the other side, are common to both sides.

Here's a hypothesis. And again, people are going to get mad at me, but it's okay, you know. I live to dare. If you were to take the proverbial Martian, who doesn't understand anything about anything on Earth. He doesn't know who anybody is. He doesn't know what the issues are. He doesn't know who the people are.

He, for some reason, can understand English perfectly. And you were to have him watch, say, Sean Hannity and Medi Hassan, say, I'll pick on those two. There could be others. That alien would be hard pressed to tell the difference. But that alien would see, he would see a very intent human being, because we all look the same to him. Okay, that's one thing. Things that are, differences that are obvious to us would not be a Martian. looking at a camera and explaining to us very seriously and very sincerely why another group of people

are terrible. And that man looking at us in the camera would explain what they've done in detail and why it's so bad. He would be speaking in terms of moral absolutism. He'd be saying this is awful, this is hypocritical, this is a sign of how bad these people are. Then that man would have other people come on and those people would agree with him. And they would discuss in detail with examples how bad the other side is. Now, again, I'm not saying they're the same. There's a huge difference in which that, for the most part, Medi Hassan talks about things that are real, and Sean Hannity doesn't. And that's a really important distinction. But what it also means is that they, as broadcasters, in the largest literal sense, entertainers, they're trying to entertain and

engage their audience, are relying on the same emotional cues. They're trying to get the audience to feel the same way about the opposite group of people, to feel indignant, to feel angry, to feel righteously upset about how awful these people are, to feed that fuel. And what that says to me is that we're more alike than we thought. If you don't believe me, if you think, that's ridiculous. Medellon is an absolute journalist

who's based on fact and whatever. Yeah, that's what I think. Try this, try this experiment. The next time you're on Twitter, chances are everybody, and especially everybody who listen to this podcast is on what's broadly called left Twitter. Right. And what that means is, unless they've really gone out of their way to follow conservative feeds, the only time they see a prominent conservative saying something is when they get dunked on by a liberal.

Like somebody will quote tweet Eric Erickson to pick him at random. It's like, look at this doofus, look at this ass, whatever. Right. Next time that happens, click on the actual tweet, the Eric Erickson tweet or the Ben Dominic tweet or whatever it is. And what you'll find in replies to that tweet, some people were driven there by that quote tweet that you saw and they're dumping, dunking on the person in the same way that you would. But almost all of the tweets are from that account's follower. And I swear to you, they look exactly the same, using the same language, even the same memes that tweets responding to liberals do. Absolutely right.

You tell them. They'll be tweeting, you know, like that, that Rain Wilson thing from the office. if I'm looking at the camera and going, it's true. Right. It shows up everywhere. People are on Twitter, no matter what their political views, for the same reason. They want to get that indignation fed. They want to see their enemies dunked on.

They want to see people humiliated in public because it's fun. And that, I don't know what to do about that except to be aware of that tendency in oneself, which is something I'm trying to do. I don't agree with you, but I think it's interesting. I certainly agree that the hostility between the two, quote-unquote, sides is incredibly problematic and also doesn't serve. And fundamentally, if you want to govern, you need bipartisanship. So unless you get rid of the filibuster, you're going to have to try to get those 60 votes somewhere. I mean, I wonder if it is that we're, you know, if we think of the idea that we're always advancing a discourse to something greater that raises all of our conscious, which is hard to believe sometimes on Twitter.

But I do think we're getting closer and closer to the point where we're going to have to identify people who are acting in good faith and bad faith. I think the greatest evidence of that, even, especially now, is that, you know, that poll that came out today with the one-third of Republicans who are not going to get vaccinated. Right. Yet all their leaders and all the people they get news from will be vaccinated

while they're standing there saying, hell no. Right. Looming over everything I'm saying is that extraordinarily important thing, which I put aside to make my point, which is that for the most part, for the most part, people on the left, the progressive side are dealing with factual reality, and for the most part, people on the right aren't.

And that's a huge difference. One of the things that I'm really interested in and involved in to a certain extent is the idea of news literacy. I'm on the advisory board of something called the News Literacy Project. And the idea is that understanding media, understanding what you can trust,

what you can't trust, how to verify information is a skill that can be taught. And if you teach people early and say high school or even younger, then you can almost inoculate them against bullshit. And I think that's the only way because I think once, let me put it this way. One of the things that you'll see, if you ever come across a conversation, again on Twitter,

between a conservative argument, it's never a conversation. One side will accuse the other of being brainwashed. And you don't know who's going to do it first. could be either. But here's another question that is related to everything I'm talking about. Who runs the right wing in America? Who's in charge? The pundits. Pundits?

It's Murdox. The opinion people at Fox News and the Murdox. Certainly Rupert Murdoch, more than any other person I can think of, has had the longest and most deleterious effect in terms of, like, the discourse. No question. But I'm old enough that I have seen these people come and go.

I, you know, when I was born, Nixon was president. And then into the 70s and 80s, it was Reagan, and then Newt Gingrich came along. And then for a while we thought Roger Ailes was the worst person, and he's the guy who's like creating the right-wing media infosphere. And we thought it was Bill O'Reilly, but Bill O'Reilly

went away. Right. And Roger Ailes died. And Rush Limbaugh. And Rush Limbaugh's gone. He really think that now that Rush Limbaugh is gone, that it's going to in any way stop or change? No. So if nobody, and of course, as we all know, Donald Trump

did not create the American right wing. There was this huge parade going down the street, or I should say mob with torches and pitchforks, and he just jumped in front of it. Right. And if, you know, God forbid he were to die, you know, saving a group of orphans who fell

into the ocean and he bravely swam out there and saved him at the cost of his own... Hey, you know, it could happen. Many years from now, if he, that were to happen, or more likely he dropped dead straining its stool in a gold toilet, the right wing would continue. Trumpism would continue. So where does it come from? Where'd all these weird obsessions come from? Who generates it? And I think the answer is

is that the supply of right-wing memes, be they racist, culturally paranoid, whatever, resentful, varies, but the demand is consistent. And if you go back and you read, back into the 70s, even further into the 60s, everything that's happening now that seems so bizarre and weird was happening then. For example, QAnon and their bizarre obsession with peder-ass, supposed like child predators who were out there, that was in the 70s.

The right wing was worried about who's praying on our... Exactly. With that famous historian who I can't remember at the top of my head called the paranoid style in America politics has always been there. So again, what it comes back to, to me anyway, is it always comes back to something about human brains. And

there's a particular kind of content that thrives in human brains. That metaphor that you see a lot, you know, brain worms, oh my God, you know, the brainworms in the right, that's more literal than you'd think. There's this idea from Richard Dawkins, the famous science writer, from his book, The Selfish Gene. And he comes up, he actually, I think he coined the word meme. You did in that a book. You know all about this. And basically the idea is, just as there are genes that propagate through organisms because they're successful in replicating themselves, there are ideas that really thrive in the environmental environment, being redundant,

the environment of a human brain. And it's not like anyone causes these things to spread. It's just that they work really well in propagating themselves. And I think that that explains more about the right wing than analyses of funding sources on the right, because none of this stuff would work. What the U-lines are funding or the coax are funding, or what Fox News is selling,

none of this stuff would work if there wasn't like this really fertile field for them to work with that existed before they came along and will, I think, frustratingly exist after they get thrown from their jobs because of massive sexual harassment settlements. Ladies and gentlemen.

Many people said Biden's goal of 100 million vaccinations in 100 days was unrealistic and would never happen. As of today, we're just short of 50 days of him and being, in office. He's had over 90 million doses of the vaccine administered. Let's talk about how Biden is

running that, though. It seems that he is not demanding anywhere as much theater and attention as Trump did. What are you guys seeing there? I mean, I think it's important that we talk about what a victory this was for the Biden administration. And we've, you know, we've done a lot. I've certainly done a lot of talking about COVID and this vaccine program is kind of an amazing success. Now, the question I think is, can the Biden administration take all the credit for it? Or are some states actually really, like West Virginia. Not that West Virginia has done this very kind of effective vaccination program. And I can't remember what state is leading it now because it's always changing a little bit. But we have seen a lot of states really do, I mean, we just had Nicky Freight. And Florida is not. is not covering themselves with glory, but there are a lot of states that are.

And so I think the question is like, who can claim this victory? I mean, I hope they both will, but the Biden administration has really stepped up with these FEMA sites, and they've managed to negotiate the supply, right? And while Trump, again, Republicans will say, well, Trump got the vaccine, and again, he was able to help with Operation Warp Speed,

though, of course, Remember, Pfizer didn't actually take the warp speed money the same way that Moderna did. But you have a situation where the vaccine was there, but there really wasn't a plan to distribute it. So I do think the Biden administration has done a great job with it. But I think for me, as a partisan, what's exciting is that the government can work if the people in it wanted to work. Right. There's a broader question of the fact that in one way that the Trump administration was useful, is it gave us an acid test. of the right-wing belief that you don't really need government.

Well, turns out you do. And maybe, I personally hope, because so many people have died, that that lesson is learned by the American people. One of the things I think about, I think a lot about the messaging memes or the messaging ideas, on the one hand, one of the things that we admired, I admired about the Obama administration, is they wouldn't bother with the bullshit.

That whatever I was arguing, they were arguing about cable TV all day, they just ignored and went about their business. And in fact, I remember after the 2012 real act, because you remember how much liberals were freaking out. Oh, my God, oh my God, oh my God, let's watch the needle. Let's watch the needle. And afterwards, the Obama campaign people were like, we weren't freaking out because we weren't paying attention to any of the nonsense everybody else was. We were looking at the fundamentals.

And you're like, great, ignore the bullshit. Do the fundamentals. Yay. On the other hand, nobody understood what the Obama administration was doing to benefit their life. So these not enough people, which is one of the reasons why they get one. wiped out in the midterms. People just didn't understand the mechanics of government. There was that there was that amazing story I just heard where they actually talked about putting Obama's name somehow on the stimulus. No, I remember. The specific issue was that the stimulus act that Obama

passed had a tax cut. And they decided not to advertise that, not to push that in public messaging, because they just assumed people would notice. Oh my gosh, I got more money in my paycheck. Nobody noticed. And so I kind of hope, because if I have a politics, I'm like for efficient, helpful government that keeps pandemics from happening, I hope that even though the Biden administration seems to be really good at the first part, avoiding the bullshit. But at the same time, I hope they're not making the mistake of the Obama administration and just assuming people will notice. Nikki Free is the commissioner of agriculture and consumer services for the state of Florida. And today, she's going to talk to us about what's going on down there with their wacky governor. Hi, Nikki.

Hello. So you are the third most powerful politician in all of Florida. Sure. The agriculture chair is a, is something we don't have in every state. Like in New York City, we don't have an agriculture. New York State does not have an agriculture chair. So I think that across the entire country, there are 12 of us that are actually elected. And most of them are going to be in the southeast and a few in the Midwest, kind of where

agriculture is predominant. So how do you get elected in Florida as a Democrat? Statewide, please tell us. It's a magical equation. So it's hard. It's really hard, which is just remarkable, considering that our state is so diverse that Democrats still outrank the amount of voter registration than Republicans, but we have a growing NPA and nonpartisan wing here in the state of Florida. And quite honestly, you know, over the last, and I keep saying, you know, 20, 30, 40 years, the Democrats in the state of Florida and, you know, really the Democrats in the Southeast, we lost that blue dog Democrat, you know, that that blue collar worker, that a lot of its rule, that, you know, really the Republican Party was always the party for those that are, you know,

better well off financially that are only in for tax cuts for the wealthy and really maintaining power for the wealthy in upper class. corporations. So we always had the blue-collar workers who are with the Democratic Party. But what's happened here in the state of Florida is that we've lost that part of our base and haven't really spent enough time really picking up and getting to, you know, be that big tent again. So it's hard. But, you know, I was able to win in 2018 where the rest of my ticket lost. We lost Senator Nelson, as well as the governor candidate, Andrew Gillum, and the CFO and the attorney general. I was the only one who squeaked by. And yeah, you know, I think it's a couple of things. You know, first off,

it was my first election. So I was, you know, not a typical politician who's been in office before. So I came in as kind of this new, fresh face. And then I talked about issues that, you know, every day Floridians cared about, which wasn't always about agriculture. You know, my position, you know, again, has such huge responsibilities. And so we focus really heavy on messaging. And that was on what I called the three Ws, water, weapons, and weed. And these three issues, it was awesome. Like I knew for somebody who's ever run for office, you know, stump speeches can be a little bit daunting after a while. But I knew I had three Ws, having to hit all three.

And on the course of the election cycle, I added a fourth W, which was woman, as it was the year of the woman in 2018. And also I was going to be the first female commissioner of agriculture. And what I have found out, it's not just from Florida, but really the southeast. There's been no female commissioners of agriculture elected anywhere in the South. So this was pretty historic in and of itself. So what we did was we broke down those three issues. You know, water is both Republicans and Democrats in Penns. We all cared deeply about the water quality in Florida.

And I said that I would put science first before politics, you know, novel concept here. And voters are, you know, really a cross-partisan spectrum responded to it very strongly. And in communities where there was traditional red, I was able to really bridge that gap and gain some votes in those areas. And weapons was another huge topic. As a Democrat, I'm also a gun owner. I own a gun. I have my own concealed weapons permit, and I know there are tons of responsible gun owners out there. But news broke during the 2018 cycle that my predecessor had allowed for 13 months no background checks to be performed for concealed weapons permit applicants.

So about a few hundred people fell through the cracks. And so that was something that I promised to the citizens of our state that we would do it efficiently, effectively, and every single person would apply for a, concealed would have a background check. And what was even more just outrageous is that we also heard during that time period the amount of influence the NRA had had in not only my predecessor, but my previous predecessors. And emails like showing up all throughout the campaign about the direct influence the NRA had in my department. So I vowed that when I took office, their influence would be done. And that's exactly what's happened. And so now the NRA has no impact in my office. And the people

responded to that message too because it's not about banning guns the way the NRA likes to paint Democrats. It was about, you know, being responsible, measured gun safety and really limiting the influence of outside groups such as the NRA. And then the third issue that I got to talk about what was weed. The cannabis community is also so diverse between our veterans and our patients, entrepreneurs, activists, and quite honestly, Democrats, Republicans, and independents all care deeply about this issue. And I have credibility as somebody who came from that community. And community where no other candidate across both parties understood the history of cannabis in our state and allowed me to connect with people who may not normally support a Democrat because I knew

that I was going to help get the medical marijuana, be pushing for legalization, and quite honestly, these are things that, again, people cared about overpartisan politics. So I think that's kind of part of the winning equation in Florida. You got to pick issues that really are not partisan in nature and make people understand that regardless if you got a D or R next to your name, that you're going to still fight for them. This square is so much with the guest we had before you who said similar things. First, let's talk about vaccines and DeSantis. Yes.

Where do you want me to say? How much time do we have? What is happening? Oh, my gosh. So what's happened here is that the governor never had a plan. You know, he went MIA for three weeks of November claiming that he was working on some statewide plan. my take is that he probably had COVID and didn't want to tell people. So when the vaccines first came to our state, there was no communication.

There was no plan. No one knew where the vaccines were going to land and by who. And so finally, when they started having these vaccines rolling out, it was first come for surf. And so you had hundreds upon hundreds of people all over the state lining up, you know, elderly citizens, you know, bringing bags to relieve themselves in the line because they, and then websites that were crushing and phone lines that were crashing. It was an absolute disaster.

Then the governor kind of took them away from the hospitals because we also were hearing that he allowed for out of state people to come into the state. So we heard, you know, big donors and people on the boards of hospitals were flying in nursing homes were flying into our state. Finally, he shut down out of state, but only because so many of us were raising this issue and yelling about it. Then he moved the vaccines to publics, which we are so grateful that public stepped up. But, you know, we also know that not every community has a public's. You know, some are 45 minutes to an hour drive if you have a car to get to a global publics. Are all vaccines now only at Publix? No, he's expanded them out.

And so now it's also at some CVS and Walgreens and some doctor's offices, some hospitals, like pop up locations. You know, so it creates this confusion, like where are the vaccines being located? How do I get onto the list? And what's most daunting and just absolutely mind-boggling about all of this is that now we've seen at least three or four separate stories where these vaccines were located in very wealthy donor communities, gated communities or zip codes that were elitist zip codes. Campaign contributions of, you know, we just saw the last one that hit last week, you know, $58,000 from 17 individuals living in a very exclusive gated community in Key Largo.

It's called Coral Reef. And then a couple weeks later, a $250,000 campaign contribution from a past government. of Illinois, who's a Republican, and lo and behold, in January, this very, very exclusive, one of the most exclusive, probably in the state of Florida, received 1,200 vaccines where the rest of Dade County was, you know, sitting in like poverty lines, you know, waiting for handouts. And so we've asked for an FBI investigation. There's just too many coincidences. The governor had his best fundraising last month at $2.8 million.

And I'm sorry, but when there's smoke, there's typically fire. And there's just something that's not, you know, kosher here. And part of that is because of the fact that there was no clear plan. We don't know who's next on the list. Where are these vaccines? And so people can take advantage of it. And the governor is using the vaccines as a political tool and a political weapon and in a lot of occasions. There was an allegation that he was not shipping vaccines to bluer counties.

Yeah. That was, you know, certainly. And I don't know. I don't know if that was actually intentional or not. But again, it goes to the bigger narrative of what's happening. out here. You know, the publicses are located and where the publics are happen to be more in red areas with, you know, wealthier populations. And, you know, certainly in a lot of my rural communities that I oversee, there's no publics within hours of them. And even in some of our minority communities

where food and security is one of my top priorities, we know that, you know, people can't, can't drive to a public. So they've got, you know, taking buses one or two to get to work and have to work all day. So that is caused right now in the state of all the vaccines that have been given out, 50% has been to white population, whereas 11% to Hispanic and 5.9% to our black communities. So that it's on its state happening. Nope. And also Publix, the family generally don't it's Republican. Yeah. You know, Publix gave Ronda Santas a $100,000 campaign contribution in December. And yes, And we saw the heiress of Publix, you know, almost fun the buses for the insurrection that went up on January 6th. So there's a lot of just really, that's really just bad things that are happening.

And stories that keep popping up that, again, is why we not only contacted the FBI, but had a letter that went sent into the congressional oversight committee. Because there's just something going on here. And we need the federal government and more FEMA sites. I've asked for the National Guard to have been more involved in the distribution of the vaccine. and the governor just like he's done in the entire pandemic is doing it his way at the detriment of so many of our Floridians and he keeps wanting to pivot all his talking points to we're vaccinating seniors first that's great and all but you know how are we vaccinating them is it equal access to the vaccines and are we now making our seniors that are not you know financially in a position to

give a campaign contribution are we putting them at the back of the bus and waiting you know websites and phones to be working in their communities. It's very frustrating to all the people that I talk to. I wanted to know what your feelings were about him basically saying, hey, we're open for spring break partying. I find, you know, we're so close to the end of this, and I love to party just like anybody else. But I also want this to be done for good.

And I think, you know, while we all have social needs, I don't think spring breaking and doing keg stands is quite the biggest priority. Oh, come on now. You don't want to relive your college days? What might say I never stopped a little bit about what do you feel about what he's done with that? You know, this is just, again, the latest of examples of him showing a lack of leadership. We saw the same thing happen at the Super Bowl, you know, where he wasn't wearing a mask and he was drinking his beer. And he said, well, I was drinking my beer watching the Super Bowl. What's wrong with that?

And it's called leadership, you know, sure, we all want, you know, people to get back to business. And we want people to come and travel to our state. And that's tourism is a number one economic driver. And so it's important that our economy gets back up and running. But we still have a pandemic out there. And we still have hundreds of people that are dying in our state every single day. And those who aren't dying are sick as a dog for weeks. And so this is just bad leadership.

And we know, unfortunately, and again, I am a big college. You know, I spent eight years at my university and loved every single home football. game and travel with the team and enjoyed my time at college, of course. You know, we want people to be able to enjoy college. But we also know that unfortunately, spring breakers aren't necessarily always the most responsible, but we need leadership to say, hey, if you're going to come to our state, great. Make sure that you are being responsible.

You're wearing your masks. You're not going out to the bars, but also putting onus on the bars, too, to not let people coming in without masks and not to pack the bars. So it's going to be both on a personal responsibility, but also business responsibility. But we've got a governor who's saying all is good. We're open for business. Everybody come and travel here and let's get going. We're going to have just more outbreaks.

And they're going to go home to their respective communities where I'm sure so many colleges across the state, across the country have been really responsible. And now they're going to have, you know, have a whole bunch of college kids coming back from spring breaks from Florida and back to square one in their own campuses. Well, we had Eric Topal on and he was saying that the, that you guys have the one-one. B-1-1-5 variant, the UK. It's like 40% of the cases in Florida or something. Yeah, it's bad.

And the governor just doesn't care. And that's one of my biggest things that I've been kind of really touting is that, you know, in a time of a health care crisis or any type of crisis, you want to be over-communicating with your people, making them feel secure, making them feel safe, making them understand, like, you've got this. And be honest. And the governor from day one has been not transparent, has been hiding numbers, has been very bullish on going this alone, not using experts and scientists.

You know, a lot of it was he was getting his nod from, you know, President Trump and wasn't able to do anything without President Trump's approval. And the same thing's happening here because now President Trump is a resident. And so I'm sure that he is consistently calling that the president, and I'm sure, you know, the president's wealthy, you know, friends in the state of Florida are asking for the vaccines. And so they're getting it delivered to them. Whereas, you know, the rest of the the state and so much of our low-income communities are, we see firsthand the problems in the health care system, especially here in the state of Florida. Governor DeSantis wanted the flags lowered at half-mass for the, to honor the death of shock jock and unapologetic racist

Rush Limbaugh. You push back. Yes. I did. I pushed back very hard. The flag is a symbol of our country that is supposed to honor heroes, is supposed to recognize those who have fallen in the line of duty, people who have actually served our state in our country, whether it's military service or in an elected official. And when you lower the staff, you're supposed to be raising your standards. You know, this is a type of people that you want to emulate. And that is not who rush is. Rush is somebody who spent his entire career creating division and hatred and bigotry and racism and demeaning women. And I'm going to tell you, like, I'm raising three sepsons and I've got a niece and a nephew.

I would never want them to look up to somebody like him. And us lowering the flag says that he is a symbol of somebody that we should want to be like. And I just wasn't going to stand by it. And so I had ordered the flags that are underneath my purview to not be lowered. And I guess the governor was seeing that the public opinion was not behind him. and then said, oh, no, no, we're not going to do the whole state. We're just going to do, you know, Palm Beach County. And even Palm Beach County took my lead and said, not so fast, not here either.

Yeah, well, I can't. Palm Beach is pretty blue, right? Yeah, yeah. Except for Trump. Yes. You do really see how in this one instance, though, that the governor is really is performing for an audience of one. Yeah.

And that's what he's been doing since he got elected, you know, because he should not have been governor, you know, and I've said this and other people who have done. any analysts and analytics on this race. You know, he was, came out of nowhere, a member of Congress, did really nothing while he was in Congress, made no friends. He, you know, we hear all the stories of him walking the halls, wearing his earbuds and not talking to anybody, not, you know, no collegial environment. Constituents couldn't get in to see him. It came out of nowhere besides being on Fox News every night. And we had, you know, somebody in here who is, you know, more of Republican establishment. But Donald Trump endorsed him. It was one tweet.

and that's all it took and he won his primary and then squeaked by in a general election and so he owes literally his entire governorship to Trump and so he's repaid that every single time even though we know

that Trump has no loyalty to anybody and so until which time that Trump needs to stand us again he probably won't get his backing that's really super interesting thank you so much this was great and really appreciate it.

Hey folks, if you haven't heard every single week we do a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast membership program. Sometimes we interview senators like Corey Booker or the folks who explain what's happening behind the scenes in media like Jim Acosta or Soledadad O'Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner

and sometimes we just have friends around to analyze what's happening in the news. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a beast inside member where you'll support the beast fearless journalism, as well as getting full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member, head to new abnormal. That's new abnormal.thedailybeast.com. David Shore is head of data science at open labs,

but if you ask him, what he does is he tries to elect Democrats. And today he's going to talk to us all about doing that. Welcome, David. Hey. To the new abnormal. We're so excited to have you. Can you explain to us your thesis in a nutshell, if you don't mind all of your life's work in like a minute and a half? No pressure.

Sure. I'd just say that an underrated tool to winning elections is to talk about popular things that people care about. I think that's really something I like to say is that everyone says that Democrats talk too much about issues and we don't communicate clearly enough about our values. And I think that's actually like exactly backward. You know, the median voter kind of finds our values weird and alien. And the only reason they ever historically voted for us was because they agreed with us on issues. So talking about issues is a good idea. And I think it's something that we've kind of gone away from. There was this really great academic study that kind of did a bunch of coding and found that Hillary

Clinton ran the least issue-driven campaign in decades from a Democratic candidate. And I think that played a big role in why we didn't do as well. When you say she didn't run an issue-driven campaign, that's totally fascinating. And I think a lot of our listeners are like, wait, what? So can you explain, like, what you mean by that? I think that when Donald Trump, you know, ran for president, he represented kind of everything that, you know, educated liberals, you know, hate in terms of, you know, having a long history of saying really racist things, really sexist things, you know, making fun of people with disabilities. And that's what really animated us in terms of our opposition to him. And we ran a campaign that reflected that. And I think that when we look, like, you know, one of my favorite examples here is the Hillary Clinton mirror's ad. You know, basically the gist of that is that, you know, Donald Trump is saying a bunch of awful, misogynistic things in front of a mirror as like little girls watch. And it was, I think, by far the most shared video of the campaign. But when we actually went and tested it and did a randomized controlled trial where some people, you know, were exposed to it and some people weren't surveyed them afterward. Something that came through really clearly was that it actually

cost us votes relative. And, you know, this is something that millions of dollars were spent on. And if you look at, you know, some of the open ends and the response, you know, you'd see what people would write. You know, they'd say a lot of things like, you know, Donald Trump is out there talking about real problems, you know, trade and jobs and immigration, and you're just trying to guilt-trip us because he doesn't talk the way that, you know, you want him to. And so, you know, I think that that just gets at this problem, which is that there is this really massive cultural divide between people who have degrees and people who don't. And, you know, the actual having a degree itself, that's not the real driver here. If you look at just some of the attitude

differences between the people who switched toward Trump and the people who didn't, you know, you see big differences in class and racial resentment and attitudes toward gender roles, and attitudes toward, you know, what kind of, what neighborhood should be like and what, you know, what kind of lives we should be living. And playing on that divide. you know, really plays into the hands of Republicans for the simple reason that there are a lot more people without college degrees than there are people with. And so historically what Democrats have done is that they've really, they've tended to run very issue-driven campaigns that really focus on all of these concrete ways that working class voters agree with us. And if you switch to an argument about values, that's something that just works a lot less because there are a lot fewer liberals than there are conservatives. Wait, there are a lot fewer liberals than there are conservatives?

of? Yeah, this is one of the most important descriptive facts, I think, about American politics, which is that roughly 20% of the population identifies as liberal, roughly 40% as conservative, but the rest is moderates. And that's gone up a little bit over time, but it's still been remarkably stable and something that's also true across, you know, racial groups, you know, even African Americans or Hispanic voters, even though they vote for Democrats at much higher rates, are not more likely to say that they're liberal. This really means that if you, you know, when all of the people who work in progressive politics identify as very liberal and have kind of the same values across a bunch of, you know, a bunch of all of these different dimensions I talked about, trust and government, racial resentment, et cetera, then that that means that if you use that communication, it's going to end up costing us votes. That gets to defund the police.

Yeah. No, I mean, I think that if you look at how liberals talk, you know, we did an experiment, you know, on how to convince people to talk about, you know, about, you know, about, about. for the value of police reform. And something that came through very clearly is that when you use language that liberals tend to use or people on Twitter tend to use, talking about reining in and a militarized out-of-control police force, you know, that makes people less likely to support reform because most, you know, police officers are broadly speaking, a pretty popular institution. There are a lot more people who have a favorable view of their local police force than have a favorable view of the Democratic Party. But if instead, you know, you try to frame things as common sense reforms that can, you know, improve outcomes and improve policing, then people

actually really do support it. And so, you know, you really just have to meet people where they are. If swing voters agreed with our worldview and saw the world we did, they wouldn't be swing voters. They would be liberals. And so that gets to one of the issues with political messaging is that you really have to try to persuade people who fundamentally don't agree with you on really basic facts about the world. One of the things that I think gets frustrated is that we've all kind of known that we need to get a little bit better message discipline, but then we see things like what happened with the minimum wage and the bad optics of Kristen Sinema and this Marie Antoinette dress doing a thumbs down on the minimum wage. What do you think the Democrats do to be a more united force around these issues?

It's a really difficult position where we have a very, very slim congressional majority in both the House and the Senate. But, you know, I think the only real answer is that we don't have this trifecta for very long. I don't actually. have a good idea on what the levers are to convince Kristen Cinema that she should do what's done. I mean, I'm all years. But I think really this is the time, you know, to put pressure on moderate Democrats because I think the scale of the structural problems that we face are really underrated. I think that whenever someone gets a trifecta, they always convince themselves that this is

this durable moment. But actually, it's a very rare thing. You know, trifectos, on average, come every 15 years. and all structural signs, you know, point to us probably losing power in 2022. And then, you know, honestly, even for the rest of the decade, you know, all of our institutions have this massive conservative bias, whether it's gerrymandering in the House or all of these states in the Senate or the fact that, you know, rural states are overrepresented in the Senate. We really have this two-year window to push through structural reforms and push through policies

that will change how people look at Democrats. And if we don't do it now, we'll find ourselves in 2011, where we're locked out of power and Republicans have all of this bargaining position, and you know, this strong bargaining position, and there's not that much we can do. So we should do everything we can now, just for the simple reason that if we don't, then we'll lose our trifecta and then we won't. Like at least now, we have the option to pass structural reforms and try to pass economic policies that change how people see Democrats. If we don't do it now, we won't have the ability to in a very short amount of time.

What's your take on how Democrats win? I think it just comes down to understanding who are the swing voters that we need to persuade. And the answer there is that due to, you know, I think the racist nature of the electoral system that we have, non-college educated whites, particularly these non-college educated whites who switched from Obama to Trump, are incredibly important and incredibly overweighted in the electoral college and the Senate. And so we have to do whatever we can to appeal to them. And if you look, you know, issue by issue, there's a broad picture that, you know, working class white voters. And to be clear, you know, also working class Hispanic and black voters agree with us on economic issues. And there's a wide swath of democratic proposals, which aren't just ahead, you know, with the population, but the poll in the 60 to 70 range. And to the extent to which we can associate the party with these issues that voters agree with us on, we'll do better. And I think on top of that, and this gets to kind of the kind of political scientists called a symbolic representation, to the extent to which we can associate our

party with messengers and language that appeals to working class voters will do better. And so, you know, something I like to say is that the median voter is about 50 years old, doesn't have a college degree, watches about five hours a day of television, which is like a crazy fact in and of itself, but it's really true. Regular voters really just watch a lot of TV. I mean, good for that, man. It's very entertaining television. Continue, sorry. So if you want to win, you have to speak a language that they're going to find compelling. And, you know, I think a really important part of this goes to what I was talking about earlier with ideology, which is these voters do not identify as liberal.

And that's really meaningful. They don't trust the same people. They don't trust the same facts and they don't share the same values. And so that means that you have to communicate using language that doesn't paint yourself as liberal or paint yourself as extreme. And, you know, I think that this is something that Democrats used to be, you know, very good at. You know, there's been a big structural shift over the last 12 years or so because the, there's been more ideological sorting within parties. And now you have these highly educated liberals who used to be a minor part of the coalition.

And now are a much more, you know, they have a lot more power than they did before, just one, numerically, because they're a larger percentage of primary voters, but also, you know, the rise of online money means that, you know, they actually campaign. And finance has become purely a world of kind of competing for highly educated, you know, white liberal donor money. And that's really, and at the same time, you know, the media structurally has gotten a lot younger, I think, due to, you know, difficulties in the journalism industry. And so as a result, you know, this group that used to be a very small faction, they used to be like the cossinich of the, of the Democratic Party, now are actually driving things. And that's really alienating a lot of people. And if we want to win elections, we have to be. to change our brand to not be associated as the as a tool of self-expression for a highly educated people who live in cities. So with that, you, I read, had one of the better explanations for a thing that I think has horrified a lot of people on the left, which is how many Hispanics swung towards Trump. Did you explain to me what you've seen there? So, you know, the first thing

is just that there really was a very large swing against Democrats among Hispanic voters. I think a lot of people wanted to write that off as something that just happened in South Florida or just happened in South Texas. But if you really look basically everywhere where there are large concentrations of Hispanics in the U.S., there were large swings against us, whether it's, you know, Lawrence and Massachusetts or, you know, or the Bronx or looking in Los Angeles, like there's really a pretty, there was evidence that there was a really broad decline among Hispanic voters basically everywhere. Can you explain why that is? Just to put numbers on it. You know, we saw about an eight to nine percent decline. You know, this is, the numbers are a little inexact because it's something that surveys didn't pick up.

It's, you have to look at precinct results. But it's, it's clear that there was something like an eight or nine percent swing against us with a particularly large drop of like 14 percent in Florida. And so these are absolutely massive shifts. And, you know, the question then gets to why, as you asked. And so it's hard to know exactly. I think there's two salient facts that I find very interesting. You know, the first is that comes back to ideology, which I was talking about before. which is that among white people, there's been this strong ideological polarization where 90% of liberal white people vote for Democrats and 80% of conservative white people vote for Republicans. But among non-white voters, that hasn't been true. Democrats historically have won non-white conservative voters by very large margins. And one of the big stories of this election is that those non-white conservatives started to vote more like white conservatives, that we started to see this ideological polarizations.

that's happened over the last four years. And this has been a long-term trend. 2018 was worse than 2016. I think it's something that a lot of people ignored, that there was, there were a lot of races where Democrats did substantially worse than Clinton among non-white voters, and it was impactful. You know, the reason we lost the Florida Senate race or the Georgia, the Georgia gubernatorial race, if we had done as well among non-white voters as Clinton did, we wouldn't have lost those races. And in the same way, going to 2020, I think, you know, 2020 was worse than 2018. And if you look at some survey data, you get some hints as to why, we ended up asking,

after the election, we did a large post-election survey of Latinos, and asked a battery of issue questions just to try to get at what was motivating some of these voters who switched over. I think the single largest predictor was attitudes toward crime, attitudes toward public safety, attitudes toward policing. This is like traditionally a very ideological issue, even divorced from party. Liberals care a lot about the rights of the accused. They care a lot about procedural fairness.

They care a lot about over-incarceration, while conservatives tend to care more about law and order. And what we saw was that these kind of, these kind of, the Hispanic voters who cared the most about crime and public safety were exactly the ones who switched to Republicans. And I think another interesting angle here was that the swing among Hispanic women was nearly twice as large as the swing among Hispanic men, which, you know, makes sense in the context of historically women have been more sensitive politically to crime than men have. So what can Democrats do to win back those voters? In the same way, I think that this is really the same challenge as what we see with working class white voters, which is what's driving our decline among really both of them is this increasing identification of the Democratic Party with the interests of liberal, highly educated white people

who don't actually have a ton in common culturally with either way. working class white voters or working class Hispanic voters. So does that mean that Democrats should win more should win, should run more working class Hispanic candidates? I think that Democrats should run more working class candidates. They should definitely run more non-white candidates. I think non-white candidates at this point are seen as more conservative and tend to be more moderate than white candidates. And so I think that's a great part of the solution. But I think just on a day-to-day basis, you know, to the extent to which the party can control who is representing the Democratic Party on TV in news quotes and what kind of messengers we're elevating and what kind of messages and arguments we're using, we should have a test.

Like the point of public-facing communication is to persuade people. And we should be holding that test whenever we're going out and speaking in public and think, you know, whose values are we representing? Is this something that a 50-year-old without a college degree is going to resonate with? Who would be a dream messenger for that message? This is a piece where I think it doesn't necessarily map super cleanly with ideology. You know, one thing that was really clear about the Bernie Sanders campaign is, you know, while he did kind of uniformly badly with older voters, probably due to, you know, some generational

differences in how socialism is perceived, he did outperform Biden in polling among younger working class voters. And so I think that there is, if you look at, you know, what are the values of working class voters, you know, you see that they're people who have a lot less trust in society, a lot less trust in government, and are generally more suspicious of the system. And so I think that part of the Sanders appeal of trying to campaign as an anti-establishment candidate that was promising, you know, popular economic issues, I think that that part really works. If you can do that without the explicit socialism label. So would you say that that's like a John Federman or, like,

I mean, Sherrod Brown is, I feel like a good example because he speaks a lot about sort of working class issues, right? Or the issues of the working man and he won in a red state. Is that a good example of what you're talking about? Yeah. You know, I think Sherrod Brown is great. You know, I think less than the particulars of any individual candidate, I think that Sherrod Brown, and this is, you know, something I've really seen is the divide is less, you know, left versus moderate. and really almost more when they started working in politics. You know, if you came out, if you started working in politics in the night,

and this is the reason I think Sanders actually, you know, he's been working in politics for a long time. And the reason is that right now, you know, it's very hard to know what actually changes public opinion. Things are very polarized. The effect sizes are a lot smaller than they used to be. But in the 90s, in the 2000s, things weren't really like that. Like, it was really easy to just give speeches or run ads and really learn a lot about the world. And so I think that the people who have a leg up right now are this generation of politicians who came of age before, you know, digital fundraising totally changed the landscape. The people who were like around in the 90s and the 2000s.

And Sherrod Brown's a great example. Joe Biden's a great example. Bernie Sanders is a great example. And I think that we've just kind of unlearned, you know, that kind of community service. I think Chuck Schumer, for example, is also, you know, a great example of an old school politician. who tries to get on local news, who tries to speak about things and language that people can understand. And that kind of work isn't rewarded anymore because it doesn't result in like a huge, it doesn't generate a lot of national media attention. It doesn't generate a bunch of online money.

But that's, you know, the bread and butter of what you need to be a good candidate. That is fascinating. Thank you so much, David. This was great. Awesome. Thank you. Hi, Jesse, Cannon. Hi, hi, Molly.

Who is your fuck that guy today? My fuck that guy today comes from the other side of the Atlantic. He's British. He's awful. He's hideous. He's horrible. His name is one Pierce Morgan. Oh, just a thought.

Right? You cannot talk about Oprah's blockbuster interview with Megan and Prince Harry without talking about one of the many members of the British press who made Megan. life a misery, and that is when Pierce Morgan. So what did he do this time? He just continually targeted her for months and months and months, which led to them having to leave the country and go to Canada. And he is, and then he had the gall to show up on Fox and Friends this morning. So I just want to say, Pierce Morgan, go fuck yourself.

Well, mine comes from the other side of the aisle than we usually aim at. What? My fuck that guy is Kristen Cinema. Oh, I knew this is coming. Yes, I've been enraged for days now. And it's also like you can make arguments that, you know, obviously the minimum wage just got up in Arizona. Mark Kelly voted for the minimum wage. It doesn't seem like this was her voting with the state's interests are, what she needs to do to get elected.

It seems that she's decided to do this on her own accord. but even if you're going to do this on your own accord, some people were saying that the thumbs down was an homage to John McCain with health care. But when John McCain did that, it was protecting people. This was her giving a thumbs down to people's quality of life being brought.

And then she brought cake apparently. Like, the big thing, and this episode was all about this is, is that the Democrats need to do better at messaging. And when you're doing this Marie Antoinette homage thing here, of fucking eating cake and acting like this, while people are literally starving and having to work five jobs,

this is not a good thing for the Democrats' image, and we need to do everything for that image we can to make sure we do not have an authoritarian uprising in this country, and the Republicans don't capitalize on their opportunity to bring in this pro-worker populism they claim they're doing when really they all voted against the minimum wage with this person. I still think there's a chance to get the minimum wage passed as a skinny bill, more some kind of $10 to $15.

And I don't think Democrats should give up on the fight for 15 because, as we all know, it's a very small percentage of the working population that is being paid the minimum wage. There is money for this, right? Like, there are tax incentives. There's a way to do this. There's a way even for the government to subsidize this if Democrats are smart and not emotional.

So I don't think we should give up on the fight for 15. but I do agree that the optics of that were just awful. Yeah, I mean, this is really just another case of, I wish the Democrats had that message unity that the Republicans have. Right. And there has been the theme for this episode. Yes, Democrats are bad at messaging. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast.

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