The Dispatch Podcast - All the President's Conspiracies

Episode Date: November 13, 2020

Is the Republican Party in the midst of a policy wasteland? Today’s guest, Ben Ginsberg, surely thinks so. According to Ginsberg, who is perhaps the most prominent Republican election lawyer of our time, the future of the GOP rests on its ability to transform its policy agenda into one that appeals to minorities and women. “If [the GOP] can avoid the circular firing squad and instead concentrate on positive policy ideas to appeal to voters,” Ginsberg warns, then “there is a chance for the resurrection of the party.” Stick around for a conversation about our democracy’s nonexistent voter fraud problem and the GOP’s concerted effort to restrict access to the polls. Show Notes: -“My party is destroying itself on the altar of Trump,” by Ben Ginsberg in the Washington Post. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to another special edition of the Dispatch podcast on Fridays. Today, we are joined by Ben Ginsburg, the famed election lawyer. He has worked in election law on the Republican side for 38 years. He co-chaired the bipartisan 2013 presidential commission on election administration. You may know him from HBO versions of the 2000 Florida recount or as my former boss in both the and 12 Romney campaigns. This podcast, of course, is brought to you by The Dispatch. Visit the Dispatch.com to check out our newsletters.

We've got more podcasts. And did I mention I'm joined by Steve Hayes? I'm always joined by Steve Hayes. Let's dive right in and joining us, the one, the only, my former boss, Ben Ginsberg. Thanks for coming. Hello there. Nice to be with you. So, Ben, before Election Day, you published an op-ed with the Washington Post in which you said nearly every election day since 1984, I've worked with Republican poll watchers, observers, and lawyers to record and litigate any fraud or election irregularities discovered.

The truth is that over all those years, Republicans found only isolated, incidents of fraud. Proof of systemic fraud has become the Loch Ness monster of the Republican Party. People have spent a lot of time looking for it, but it doesn't exist. So you publish this before election day. You must feel extra vindicated or not, I suppose, now that we're here. What made you, what triggered you to publish this beforehand? You know, I've been doing poll watcher programs, which I think are really important because you want people in every polling place to be able to see if fraud or irregularities occur. So it's important for the Republican Party and for the Democratic Party to undergo those sorts of programs

because it helps validate the elections at the end. And Republicans have a long, historic fear of voter fraud that is warranted to go and try and discover correct mistakes. But at some point, you have to be honest about the evidence that you've gathered. And when the president of the United States, the candidate of your party starts saying that our basic democratic institutions of elections are fraudulent and the results are rigged and the only way he can lose is if there's cheating, that's destructive in an unprecedented way to one of the bedrock principles of the democracy. So that got me on my high horse.

Now that you've seen the lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign post-election, are there merit to any of them, in your view, as a former election lawyer for these presidential campaigns? Well, I think you have to distinguish between them. I mean, the bottom line is that in terms of documenting fraud, cheating, no. The cases before the U.S. Supreme Court out of Pennsylvania on the extension of the receipt of absentee ballots is a worthy case, especially the somewhat arcane legal part about whether that is a legislative function or a state Supreme Court gets to weigh into that.

I mean, that's a real case. And in fact, the ultimate legal issue, of whether election day means election day or a state can extend election day by some days after, also a legitimate issue before the court, not one that's gonna impact this election in 2020. We should make clear. The cases that have been brought elsewhere in Pennsylvania and Arizona, Michigan,

have all been long and outlandish charges in short, really, really short on any specifics. And under no instance, have they called into question enough votes to change the outcome in any of those states, which is the basic legal standard. So the more we go along, the more the cases that the Trump campaign has filed in the state sort of become less and less noteworthy. And at, you know, at some point you got to face the facts. Let's get in Steve Hayes.

What, you know, over your long career, I mean, let's just, just for our listeners, we should establish that Ben Ginsburg is not a Republican election lawyer. For all of the time that I've been covering this, you have been the Republican. election lawyers. So you speak with some authority on these issues. In your long career of working on election-related legal issues, what's the most significant or troublesome case of election fraud or election irregularities you've seen or had to deal with? the case in the north carolina ninth congressional district in 2018 was pretty distressing north carolina has a law against what's called ballot harvesting and uh the uh the campaign manager

who is working for the republican congressional uh candidate decided to take some liberties with that law as a court later found. And so, you know, kind of in the midst of when the Trump Commission to look for cheating was created, there was a red-hot example of a Republican violating a law and bringing in votes in an illegal way. So that was, that was as troubling as any that I've seen. Now, I'm looking at this from the perspective of a Trump supporter. And I'm watching all of this unfold. And I see things like the front page story, the New York Times the other day where the times went back and connected with state-level election officials, secretaries of state, local election commissioners, and concluded that there was, I think as the headline itself, said, no fraud. I find that hard to believe.

It seems to me that there's fraud in every election, isn't there? Well, there are certainly, yeah, there may be some minor instances of fraud. I think the question that the Times posed was, is their widespread systemic fraud. Right. And when you're looking at elections, you also have to remember that for better or for worse, this is a federalist system. And there are 10,500 separate jurisdictions around the country that have responsibility for the casting and counting of, of votes. And our systems are really fueled by a million volunteers who come out and do this task, you know, maybe once or twice every other year. So there are always mistakes and there are

always some sorts of irregularity. But the issue that I think the Times was asking about, and what the president has alleged, is widespread systemic fraud. And that's totally different. We've seen now these lawsuits. We've seen recount requests. There are state certifications that presumably are coming. And yet precious few elected Republicans have come out and acknowledge the results of this election. What's their best off-ramp, if you were advising them?

What's the next moment that you think they can say, ah, well, before I couldn't acknowledge it. But now that it's a Tuesday, I can. Well, let's put this in a broad perspective. The president has been talking about fraudulent and rigged elections and sort of increasing volume since 2015, really. And nobody has, Republican officials have been very reluctant to say anything to contradict that. But there's also been no proof. to sustain the chart.

President Trump named an official commission to go out and find these instances of fraud, put the most vociferous advocates for fraudulent elections on that commission. The commission disbanded in 2017 without finding anything at all. In the run-up to this election, The president and the Republican National Committee shouted loudly from the rooftops that they had 50,000 poll watcher army, so that there were Trump supporters and Republicans in every polling place they wanted to be.

So far in the lawsuits, that 50,000 poll watcher army has not produced any evidence. And at this stage, right now, what Republican officials are, I think, seeing is that the President has another ultimate shot to prove this theory of fraud, and that's the post-election process. So they can bring up any fraud or irregularities in any state that they wish in the recount and contest proceedings. In fact, there are basically five states in which the Trump forces are proceeding. Those states all have certification deadlines, certifying the results between November 20th and December 1st. And I think it is at that point when Donald Trump has been given every opportunity to prove his statements about fraud, that is the time for elected officials to Republican elected officials to stand up and ease with the end of the process.

and say, you've had your shot, you've had four shots, and there's nothing there. Now is the time. You see the sort of incremental steps, though, with things like the intelligence briefings for Joe Biden, where more and more Republican officials are saying you ought to be able to do that. So there seems to be a greater willingness to take those incremental steps. And I hope that leads up to when this election is over. It's time to certify the results in the states. That's when it's time to say. But he's got every right to pursue his claims up until that point. The conspiracies that have gained popularity over the last week or so, including up on Capitol Hill, are sort of variance of

two different varieties that both involve the alleged vote flipping of computers that are tabulating the results. One is this Dominion theory. The president's tweeted about it a number of times that this company, Dominion, has either vulnerabilities or miscreants who are in the systems who can flip voters from Biden or from Trump to Biden. That's what happened. That's why Trump lost. And the other is this sort of convoluted theory hammer and scorecard that alleges there is a sort of an NSA run big computer that that goes in and changes election results all over the world. It's really hard to describe it because the proponents of that theory don't really often describe it in any great detail. Just as someone who has an understanding of how elections actually work, is that totally? crazy? Is there, are there kernels of truth there? Is it practical to imagine that that those

kinds of electronic voting systems could be subject to those kinds of vulnerabilities? I will just point out before you answer that, you know, watched a clip from Sean Hannity last night about Dominion. And Hannity seemed to stay one step short of embracing the full-blown conspiracy theory and played clips from Princeton professor who was, you know, These are two, three-year-old clips, but who was raising what seemed like reasonable-sounding concerns about Dominion and its vulnerabilities. Is there anything to those theories? Well, let's talk about Dominion first.

You know, that's precisely the theory and the work from that Princeton professor was done four years ago when the Hillary Clinton folks could not accept the fact that Donald Trump actually won. And that work is from that election. And it's part of what Jill Stein did to file recounts in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan to take away the Trump victory. Hillary Clinton, interestingly enough, intervened in those recount cases on November 26, 2016, just to give you some idea of the time frame that might be involved this year as well. Well, but the Jill Stein theories that now have been embraced by some to explain the president's defeat were debunked when Jill Stein brought them. In reality, each voting machine is tested both before the election and after the election with what they call a test debt.

And so you'll put through 50 or 100 or in some cases, 500 ballots. They're pre-marked so you know how the machine is supposed to read them, and you run it through. And if there was anything to the theory of vote flipping, then that would show up in the test decks that are run as controls both before and after the election. Secondly, in Georgia this year, you will have the full audit, which amounts to a hand recount. And so the accuracy of at least those machines in Georgia will be right there. I mean, you're going to see paper trail ballots for them all to be able to tell. secondly you asked about the great computer in the sky theory of being able to you know i'll say this about the u.s election system it is a really antiquated system like the machines we use are nothing

like state of the art and there's a whole other sort of unfortunate situation with how old the machines are and what it takes to incorporate new technology into voting equipment and the lack of standards and the number of different companies that make voting machines and the different types of machines. But they are old-fashioned machines. Many of them were built before there was an iPad even. And so they are not technologically up to date. And our system is so fractured, again, with the 10,500 jurisdictions that be really, really tough to hack in and manage to impact the results of the election. Yeah, that's something that I always try to explain to people. The antiquatedness, oddly, also offers a protection. Yeah. You'd have to have so many.

You'd have to have so many people in on the conspiracy. You know, and it's sort of why I don't think that the U.S. as proof of aliens. I just don't know any conspiracy that has more than, you know, maybe five people that's ever really worked in U.S. history. Although I guess then I wouldn't know about it, right? If it really worked, you'd never know. And so our theories, our conspiracy theories live on. So there's, the Lincoln Project has done something fairly controversial this week. They have gone after the law firms, including your former law firm, Jones, Day has gotten a lot of publicity. Lincoln Project has targeted individual lawyers. They've targeted clients of Jones Day. This morning, the other law firm that they targeted that actually

represents the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania withdrew its representation. I'm curious, as an election lawyer who has been on the bleeding edge of some of the most controversial cases like Bush v. Gore, what you think of that tactic? The tactic of going after the lawyers? Yeah. I assume they found it a lucrative tactic for the Lincoln Project. I mean, I'm not sure.

I'm not sure what other impact it has. Well, certainly it's not going to stop. The law firm has withdrawn. Yeah, but that, I'm not sure you would credit the Lincoln Project with that. So here, so in these cases, The cases that the RNC brought fall into a couple of different buckets. The unfortunate thing about the way the RNC and the Trump campaign approached all these different lawsuits is that in none of them were they trying to make it easier for people to vote.

The barriers to voting never came down in any R&C lawsuit. And so they ended up targeting groups of people who are, unlikely to be Trump supporters. So that's a, I mean, that's a bad place to be, I think, policy-wise, politically, and substantively. I mean, the way that you would normally want your party to appeal to groups of people who are not friendly is you'd have good conservative policies that would appeal to them. But that's not where the Republican Party is right now. Unfortunately, it's sort of a policy wasteland. And instead, they ended up filing a number of suits that made it harder for groups to vote, despite the president doing better than any other

Republican nominee in recent history with a number of those groups. So there are ironies in strategic and tactical decisions that should come under a little scrutiny after the election. But in terms the cases themselves, there were different buckets of cases. In a number of them, and these were actually the ones that Jones Day was involved in, there were state laws that were the subject of suits from the Democrats. And going in and representing a state legislature or state government to defend a law that its policymakers passed seems to me to be a perfectly appropriate position for a law firm to take. Upholding, upholding the will of elected officials is fine. And so a typical case with that is the one that's up before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, where the argument

had to do whether the legislature or the state Supreme Court, where the proper final policymaking group, whether election day means election day or it's okay to have an extension afterwards. Those are legitimate cases to bring. There were a number of other RNC-leg cases that went to things like stopping people from using drop boxes in a pandemic or targeting specific groups and making it more difficult to vote in those areas. And I think that those were the ones that law firms in the clear, clean light of day might have some problems being involved with. I think a number of the law firms involved with the current grouping, the post-election cases, and Jones Day was not involved in that except for the U.S. Supreme Court case I mentioned. But, you know, you also reach a point as a lawyer where you're making allegations in your pleadings

based on, in this case, only a few affidavits. And if those affidians then sort of changed their stories in the course of, litigation. You as a lawyer would choose to withdraw just on the merits of it. So if you mentioned Pennsylvania, one of the key affidavits in the original filing was that of a postal worker who said he saw some sort of malfeasance with a bunch of ballots and then later recanted that. So when your witnesses start saying, well, I wasn't really right in what I said in my sworn affidavit, You're a lawyer having to stand up before the court and make an argument of widespread fraud as your evidence melts away. That's an uncomfortable position to be.

And lawyers do have an obligation under bar rules to not put in accurate statements before a court. So there may be individual cases. I'm not saying it's this one involving court or right, but there may be cases where lawyers just don't feel comfortable continuing the representation. Just thinking forward a little bit, it seems pretty clear that one of the things that we'll debate on a policy level is how we should run our elections. What, given what you've seen over your career, would you recommend in terms of changes to the way that we currently operate our elections that would enhance the legitimacy or at least the perceptions of legitimacy in the eyes of voters after what I think is going to be a pretty bruising. process here, whatever the president ends up doing. And let me add to that, would you support federal legislation to harmonize some of these state laws? Well, I don't think I'd support federal legislation. But I also think that as a matter of institutional design, if you were starting again, you would not

say, well, I got a great idea. Let's give 10,500 different jurisdictions some control. So I do think that you can have more uniformity within states. And that actually is probably what we should be aiming for. You do get yourself into kind of Bush versus Gore, equal protection problems with so much diversity amongst all the counties, at least in the same state. And, you know, some counties are a better resource than others. Some have people who understand equipment and elections better than others.

So I think the place that I would start out is maintaining control with the states, not providing federal legislation. But if I was running a state, I would have the state be more uniform. Much as Georgia has. For example, Georgia, when they do this hand recount, they're all using the same equipment, which will take away a number of the issues that have arisen in other recounts over the year. What about a federal law that mandated that states start counting absentee ballots at least one week before election day so that you avoid the Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin issue where their state legislatures flim flammed around and all of a sudden it was election day and the law on the book said they couldn't open any of the ballots until that morning?

Well, I think it's like an interesting policy goal, but I also doubt that the federal government has the power and authority to do that for individual states. Oh, Ben, what would the power of the federal government being limited? Yeah, what would a little constitutional principle be right now? But you would think, you know, you would think that out of the heat of this election, and which many of the decision in the Pennsylvania legislature to not allow the pre-processing of ballots, you know, came in the heat of this election with lots of pressures. You would hope that in taking a step back in the quiet months of 2021 or the spring of 2022, they might change that policy.

Ben, you sound like someone who's never worked in a state legislature. Well, you know, I've done redistricting. I know. I do believe that even state legislators could rise to the moment. What, just broadly speaking, you know, one of the things that we've debated now since March, I mean, people have been debating this for much longer than that, but debated pretty intensely is the efficacy and advocacy of mail-in voting. How do you feel about mail-in voting broadly?

Well, I voted the same way the President of the United States Donald J. Trump did, which was to say I mailed in a ballot. Look, I think that the core principle is participation in a democracy. And I think that there are safe steps you can take that do make it more convenient for people to vote. And I'm all for that. And I think mail-in balloting with the proper signature matches or different metrics as sort of our technology improves to be certain that the ballots are really from the people who you say are, I'm all for it. I think that the idea of universal mail-in ballot was the president had a point about that. So there were nine states that mailed live absentee ballots to every register voter in the state,

which I think can lead to some verification difficulties. Now, Colorado, Washington, Oregon have been doing that for a decade now without real problems. Nevada imposed it as soon as a Democratic legislature and governor came in and flooded the zone for this election. and New Jersey did the same thing. So I do worry a little bit about just mailing live ballots to lots of people because people do move and die. So it's not going to be an accurate list. The other states mail applications to all registered voters.

So the voter has to take an affirmative step with particular verification to get their ballot back, to get their application back to the state, which then mails them a ballot. So I think that's a really good way to do mail-in voting, to increase participation and make it easy and still have the verification checks. I would just like a bumper sticker that's Ben Ginsburg, people move and die. I'm not the first one to say it. Let me just follow up on something you said there because you said one of the objectives here should be to increase participation.

Certainly you saw comments from the president, I think, maybe saying things out loud that people don't often say out loud, wanting to decrease participation. And one could be forgiven if you just followed the contours of this debate over the past six or eight months from concluding that Republicans actually want fewer people to participate, don't in fact want more people to participate. and that it's advantageous for Democrats, the more people participate and advantageous for Republicans, the fewer people participate.

Are you on an island in your party on this? I'm not sure I'm on an island in my party, but here's what that view is based on. As a matter of policy, we ought to be encouraging people to vote. But as a matter of practical politics, practical politics, you can look at the demographic trends in the country and see that the traditional kind of older, wider base of the Republican Party is a shrinking percentage. So if you're worried about conservative ideas having a strong party behind them, you've then got to be able to appeal

to where most of the voters in the country are going to be in the coming decades. So I think the solution is not trying to restrict people from voting. The solution is for us to come up with conservative policies that will be appealing to those new and emerging groups, which we've been able to successfully do in the past, and to look at that as not only the right thing to do, but also the inevitable way elections are going to get decided and who's going to be voting in future years. And, you know, Georgia is the perfect example of that. And Arizona is the perfect example of that.

Two states that have not gone for the Democrats in a long time, both of whom have seen dynamic growth, especially in the suburbs, especially amongst people of color, suburban women, took on sort of a new attitude in this election. and, you know, trying to restrict those groups from voting did not prove successful in those two states and maybe some good conservative policies would have provided a more successful election outcome. And we'll take a quick break to hear from Gabby Insurance. When you've had the same car insurance or homeowners insurance for years, you kind of get trapped into paying your premiums and not thinking about it.

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Ben, we had an event earlier this week with Republican-elect. elected officials, think tankers, et cetera. And I want to ask you a version of some of the questions I was asking them. Do you still consider yourself a Republican versus a conservative, for instance? And if so, what does the Republican Party mean after four years of Trump and what will it mean heading into the next four years under Joe Biden? I do still consider myself a Republican. I think the best path for the country in this election cycle is to have a good Republican majority in the Senate to provide a restraint on some of the progressive inclinations of the incoming Biden administration. That, from my point of view, is a pretty good, pretty good, the best result we're going to get. But if the Republican Party continues down this path of, for instance, filing lawsuits to prevent more people from voting and standing for some of these things that we've talked about during this podcast that you don't believe in, would you consider leaving the party at some point? And what would a trigger for that look like?

Well, the trigger for that, what that would look like is if we continue to go on an exclusionary path instead of trying to appeal. to those new groups. I do think we're in the midst, the Republican Party is in the midst of a policy wasteland. And it's really important to develop some new ideas. So, you know, I sort of, I sort of pine for the days of the Conservative Opportunities Society in the House when Newt Gingrich and Ben Weber and John Boehner and a number of others were an ideas factor. We've gotten really far away from that. You know, the equivalent in the House now is the Freedom Caucus, which has proved itself much more competent at stopping things than proposing positive solutions. Nobody has accused the Freedom Caucus of being an ideas factory. No. But I do think, but I do think it is times like this

when parties do can see the necessity of having to become ideas factories. And, you know, the president hinting about running again in 2024, it's kind of going to freeze the field a little bit. And I would hope that those who feel a little bit frozen, instead of engaging in overt politics, would actually see this as the time to develop those new ideas. So I think the party does have some time between now and 2024 if it can avoid the circular firing squad and instead concentrate on positive policy ideas to appeal to voters, that there is a chance for the resurrection of the party. That will not, by the way, come from the political party committee. We should not think that the Republican National Committee is going to be the engine that drives the policy train. that's just not the way it is these days. But there are some smart people in think tanks,

and there are some really smart people on the relevant committees in Congress. When Republicans go to the voting booths in 2024 for the primaries, will Donald Trump either be a candidate in those primaries or a looming presence as other candidates participate in those primaries, or will he be largely a memory in your view? It's a great question.

I tend to think that the answer, I don't know what the answer is. You know, that future is so darn difficult to predict. I do think that a lot of it depends whether he realizes or not on the way he comports himself now. I mean, I think we've been at such a fever pitch that when Joe Biden takes the oath of office on January 20th, people are sort of going to exhale at least for a while. And it's not clear that as many people will be whipped into the frenzy that they may have been before this election. I think you would be hard-pressed in modern political history to find a revenge candidate who is successful. And I mean that even going down to the state and local level. The people who are defeated and think they were ripped off and use it as a revenge tool are not, just don't usually win because it is sort of

too hot, too angry, and not an ideas campaign that looks to the future. You were involved in the 2016 primaries, and were pretty outspoken about how broken the debate process was in 2016. I wonder how you would fix it in 2024, assuming Donald Trump doesn't won, the field isn't frozen, and we have 27 candidates running for the Republican nomination in 2024? So the basic design flaw, I think, is to leave it to the National Committee to run the debates, that it really should be figured out by the candidates. And I think that there were a number of things that were done in 2016 in the debates

that made little to no sense and, in fact, led to sort of an exclusionary slug fast. to me, why you would turn over qualification to the debates to media polls and split them by such a small amount is just crazy. That's just an abrogation of duties. And there are better ways to do it. And in fact, the Democrats did a better job in their crowded primary in 2020 on the debates. So I would leave it. I'd keep the National Committee out of it. And I'd leave it up to the campaigns to negotiate the terms. I think you could also, I don't think you have to be as tied to networks

as we've gotten in the debates. I think given the technology today, you could have the candidates or if they wanted to include the National Committee and the logistics of this. Renah Hall, put up a microphone, do a debate, let any networks who wanted to cover it, cover it, but keep the control of the questioning and therefore how you're presenting your

candidates right with the party as opposed to outsourcing it to media outlets. The media outlets tend to be, tend to see them as a way to credential their own media personalities. That leads to questions that are much more about gaffs and one-liners and soundbites. you could come up with the questioning a different way. Crowdsourcing questions is probably better than leaving it into the hands of one media person. So I think there are some designs, some redesigns of the primary system that you could do. Amen to that. And the general election debates are another issue.

Well, nobody is, nobody is happy anymore. So it's sort of a matter of inertia. And that's not just about the debates. Nobody is happy anymore. Could be the tagline for all of 2020. All right, Steve. Perhaps. Last substantive question to you.

Yeah, I guess I'd like to follow up on the primary thing and ask you to play pundit a little bit. You know, you look at the way things are unfolding. More fun than playing lawyer. Let's stipulate that four years is a long time. A lot's going to change between now and then. I'm just wondering, as you look at the way, even in these first couple weeks after the 2020 election, you look at the way, and arguably before the 2020 election, that potential Republican candidates are scrambling sort of in the wake of Donald Trump to pick up the mantle or pieces

of Trumpism and run like Trump without being Trump. And I'm thinking here of Josh Howley and Marco Rubio. and Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton and Nikki Haley. I mean, there's a group that's all trying to pick up on that. Is that where you see the sort of the energy of the Republican Party in these coming days? And again, asking you to project four years out, is it likely that that's where the next Republican nominee is going to come? Or is this, are we way too far off?

and there's too much of a scramble in front of us. Oh, I think we're way too far off. I mean, I think that given the ease of access to the primary process and to communications tools to get out there, and this is a Donald Trump remark, you know, we, I think, in 2013 did not consider, Donald Trump a real candidate, yet he became one. He never would have been in the list that you just read. So I think we're way too far off. Again, I would, I would, I think if I was advising one of the group that you talked about, I would see the opportunity in developing policies more than political organization at this point. I mean, the ultimate political organization,

organizing machine was the Jeb Bush super PACs, right, and leadership packs and that whole collection raised a huge amount of money, did sort of what was then the traditional way of moving forward and it didn't work. Yeah. So I think the use of political tools is not the right way to spend the next two years. That it really is becoming a leading voice in the new Republican Party policies is the key to perhaps being the nominee in four years. Okay, I have to sneak in one more substantive question, and that's on campaign finance reform issues. In 2016, Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump. She lost. In 2020, Joe Biden outspent Donald Trump, and he won, but plenty of down-ballot candidates, all of the Senate Democratic candidates, massively outspent the Republican

Senate candidates. And it didn't seem like it made much of a difference. Some won, some lost. It seemed separate from the money. Are we past money having an outsized influence in politics, regardless of how much may still be spent? Or is it simply that there's a diminishing return at some point because we're spending so much money? I think it's the diminishing return. And I think any candidate who's running has to meet kind of the threshold of credibility to get out his or her message on a, you know, a pretty big level. But I think it's the marginal dollars that come afterwards, which a ton of which is being raised, but you can't show that it's being spent efficiently. Now, part of that may be a consumption issue. It may just be that we've reached the stage where what we spend most of the money on, which is television, is not, there's so much of it.

It's so saturated that it's really hard to break through. And so that's not the way you actually most effectively reach voters. that, in fact, it's much more social media play, much more online, much more targeted than TV and cable ads can be. And would getting rid of super PACs in your mind, if Congress were to take that up under the Biden administration, would that be a detriment to the system as a whole, a positive to the system?

Would it hurt one party versus another? more? Well, it might hurt one party more in one election, but the parties are pretty good at adapting to the reality on the ground. Look, I don't honestly think it would make that much of a difference. It might be something symbolic. But I'm not sure what it's going to change. I mean, it is a free country. You are still allowed to comment on the actions of public officials, whether they're elected or unelected. And so there will always be a way to do that. And my brethren and sister in the Society of Hourly Billers

for the Election Law Bar will figure out a way to get out a message no matter what form is. All right. It wouldn't matter what form is allowed or not allowed. Now, of course, for the most important question, Ben gave me my first shot in this world back in 2008 on the Romney campaign, although it was actually 2006 that I had met you and told you that Mitt Romney was my candidate. And so I got to go on that primary campaign working for you, but like 27 layers down. But one of my, you know, fond memories in my head is you walking around, I believe you had two blackberries, actually. And you could actually sort of do both blackberries. I'm wondering if you have any, you know, now here, more than a decade later, there's no more BlackBerry's. Do you have BlackBerry nostalgia?

You know, I miss the keyboard. I do miss the keyboard. Much easier. I like the dictation function. I missed the Blackberry keyboard. Steve, were you a Blackberry guy, the click, the track pad or the click thing? Yeah, I had a Blackberry, but very, it was a work. sponsored Blackberry at the Weekly Standard for a very short amount of time. And then I was, I don't even remember what I graduated to, maybe right to the iPhone. So I was not a Blackberry addict when I was covering the campaigns. Everybody on the campaigns had Blackberries. I think campaign issued Blackberries. And I was not with them on that. I mean, Ben elevated Blackberry

usage to it art. And I'm just, I'm a little sad to see an artist lose his paintbrush, you know. You know, I first discovered Blackberries in Florida during the 2000 recount. Wow. Because a couple of, I was sitting in a meeting, and there were a couple of people who had their phones. And they're like, you could tell they were talking to each other, right? In the way when you see two people in a meeting, like texting or something. And I had never seen anything like that before. I thought, what is going on here?

And it was the first Blackberries. Margaret Tomweiler gets credit for that. Well, thank you, Ben, so much for joining us. This has been a real treat for so many reasons. If nothing else, the nostalgia, back to the early aughts of Republican campaigns. Best of luck moving forward. Really loved your Washington Post op-ed. I hope we'll see more of you out there in the coming weeks, months, years, etc.

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