The Dispatch Podcast - Closing Arguments

Episode Date: October 28, 2020

The idea that Joe Biden will somehow heal America in a post-Trump era has become the closing argument of the Democratic candidate’s campaign. Will Biden’s “return to normalcy” pitch constrain his presidency? There’s a lot of ill will festering among congressional Democrats over coronavirus relief negotiations and the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Assuming post-Election Day Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate, will Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi pull Biden further left? Our podcast hosts are here for the breakdown. With less than a week until Election Day, Sarah and the guys discuss both presidential candidates’ closing rally schedules, ongoing election litigation, and whether Mitch McConnell is the real savior of the Trump years.  Show Notes: -Tim Alberta and Chris Stirewalt on the Remnant, David’s French Press: “The Curse of ‘Pandemic Law’ Strikes the Electoral Process,” today’s Morning Dispatch: “Election Litigationpalooza,” and “How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk” by Josh Katz and Wilson Andrews in the New York Times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to The Dispatch Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgert, joined as always by Steve Hayes, David French, and Jonah Goldberg. This podcast is brought to you by The Dispatch. Visit The Dispatch.com to see our full slate of newsletters and podcasts and subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. Hey, guess what guys? On November 9th and 10th, we are doing a major dispatch live conference. Go to what's next event.com to see what's happening there. Tickets are $100 and include a new complimentary subscription to the dispatch. We've got interviews lined up with Congresswoman Liz Cheney, Senator Ben Sass, Senator Tim Scott. We'll have more interviews, panel discussions. We'll be announcing them on that website. What's Next Event.com for all of your post-2020 election needs. This week on the podcast, we are going to talk about Biden's closing argument, the rallies and campaign schedules of the candidates, election litigation heading into Tuesday, and the legacy of Mitch McConnell. Let's dive right in. Steve, we're coming to you on Biden's closing argument. Yeah, really interesting to look at the argument that he's been

making increasingly over the past couple weeks. It's been a theme of his campaign, but he's now made it, I think, the centerpiece of his closing argument. And it's this. If Joe Biden is elected, he will be president not of the red states, the blue states, but the United States, picking up on Barack Obama's 2004 convention speech. And that a Biden presidency will heal America after a divisive and difficult four years. The question I have is whether, having closed with that argument, Joe Biden is constrained as president if he wins. Will this keep him from being the Trojan horse for super-progressivism that some folks on

the left want him to be? And I'll start that question with you, Sarah. I think that's an interesting question. I think that is the question of the Biden presidency and what the stressor on it will be throughout. You will have, in theory, a, you know, Chuck Schumer over a majority in the Senate, Nancy Pelosi with a majority in the House, and then a Biden presidency being pulled by those branches to do more, do farther left. And remember, Schumer and Pelosi have been sitting there. battling with Republicans who they feel like have broken the rules, taken advantage. There's a lot of ill will built up, I think, on the congressional side that Biden has missed out on since his days in the Senate. And will they, you know, will their anger and resentment, et cetera, convince him that the Republicans are not acting in good faith? And I think that will lean hard on whether the Republicans act in good faith toward Biden. And I don't,

think at this moment, there's a lot of evidence that they will right now. We'll see what if Biden wins, what that win looks like. And I think there is a difference between a squeaker and a blowout that knocks out a lot of Republican senators in terms of how Republicans will act towards a president Biden. But I do think that will be the question for at least four years. and especially right away on court packing, on Green New Deal, on, you know, a lot of the progressive wish list. So we shall see. Yeah, David, if his campaign is largely about, you know, restoring America and ending the upheaval of four years of Donald Trump, returning to normalcy. I mean, these are all consistent.

themes that Biden himself has articulated, that his surrogates have articulated, that have, I think, driven his campaign. If he is elected on that basis and decides immediately to move to the far left, does that make the arguments that he's using to close the election, fraudulent or phony? Well, I don't think, so I think he will behave in a way that is consistent with the way that he has campaigned

in this sense, that I think that one of the things that he's going to, if he goes ahead and wins, if he does, that it'll get a lot of credit for is sort of ignoring the online world that he's run sort of the least online campaign in a very online world. and what I see from him, and I just really kind of got reaffirmed in this in the last

debate, this guy wants to be an old school Democrat. Now, he's been pulled to the left because the mainstream of the Democratic Party is to the left, and he's nothing, if not a mainstream Democrat. So if the whole party goes to the left, he'll go to the left. But it seems to me he wants to be sort of an old school Democrat. And it's hard for me to imagine him launching a new, presidency by trying court packing, for example, the least popular of his, you know, potential initiatives. Instead, he's got lots of stuff on his plate that has not been done. He sort of has

this target-rich environment of potential legislation. So I'd imagine him getting a freebie, kind of like Obama did, with the stimulus package, with some coronavirus relief, then going into pivoting into health care, maybe immigration, things where he will at least have an argument that he has strong public backing for these things and sort of try to make the Republicans be unreasonable and if they are unreasonable, then the filibuster is nuked. But I fully expect the much more radical stuff like court packing, like adding states, to be something that is sort of his, he would strongly urge to be tabled and it would be sort of held in reserve like the sort of Damocles over the head of the Supreme Court, that this is the thing that

Supreme Court's going to have to think about during the camp during its its term when it's deciding what cases to grant cert or not grant cert. And I think that's going to be sort of the way in which that is used. I think he's just got too much mainstream stuff to try to accomplish early on for him to really sort of double down or move radically left right away. so is that right jota i don't know if it's because we are recording this at an unusually early time um so everyone has got a sort of a jeb level energy in this podcast so far i think it's mainly steve i could steve is really bringing me down i got to say it's a real sort of wilford brimley vibe i'm getting off of them this morning um but uh i also think there's something in the

air right now because everyone is just being so nice and uh so i'm just going to I'm going to stir the pot a little bit. I think there are, there's, the idea that what you campaign on becomes a constraint once you're elected is, well, just bless your heart, as people from Steve, from, from David's part of the country might say. Barack Obama literally ran on Joe Biden's promise of no red states, no blue states, just the United States. And he ended up being a very partisan guy.

I know that the left thinks it's all because of Republican. but I have a narrative on that that I think this contradicts that to some extent. George W. Bush ran as a uniter, not a divider. He tried it for about nine months, and then things went differently. And in 2004, whatever it was that he was running on, I can't quite remember. It wasn't Social Security privatization, and that's what he said he had a mandate for after he got elected. So I think that the whatever Biden campaigns on, it may constrain him politically in terms of his tone. But that tone has more to do with his own, as David said, his own instincts rather than the sort of the political realities and political external political constraints.

You know, Tim Alberta and I were talking about this and I talked about it with Chris Starwold again on my podcast. And you know, this idea, Tim says, you know, if you could give Joe Biden truth serum, he would admit that he really would prefer if the Republicans held on to the Senate. And I think that's true. And I've been thinking about that a lot lately. It would be the easiest thing for Biden to be able to fend off the left and say, you know, enough with this craziness is to say, look, we just don't have the votes. I got to work with Republicans. This isn't like me wanting to be a centrist guy. this is me dealing with the reality that I got to work with the guy across the aisle

because it actually turns out that Biden and and McConnell get along really well and have for years and whenever Obama was so bad at dealing with the Hill they would always send Biden to go talk to McConnell and they had a pretty good working relationship and I think they're legitimately friends. And so having McConnell be his bad cop would be a much bigger constraint than, you know, people reminding him, oh, you promise to be a uniter, not a divider, and all that kind of stuff. I suspect that there are still those natural constraints going on because there aren't enough votes to pack the courts. There aren't enough votes to add some states. I mean, Joe Manchin's not going to vote for that. Kristen Sinema's not going to vote for that.

If the Democrats have as good a year as some suggest in 2022, and maybe there are those votes, but my hunches is that Republicans could actually take back the Senate if Biden let the left run the show for two years. So it's sort of like a wait-and-see kind of thing. But the underlying assumption there, Anna David's answer, Ann and Sarah's answer, is that Biden would prefer to be a centrist. Is that true? I think, I think, well, first it's been a misnomer. I mean, David touched on this slightly. Biden was never a DLC Democrat, right? He was never a Sam Nunn, what was it, Chuck Robb?

What was that guy's name? You know, he wasn't even a Bill Clinton, DLC guy back when Bill Clinton was a DLC guy. He was never a centrist in that sense. He was a, he wanted to be a centrist within the goalposts of the Democratic Party. He wanted to be like, you know, at the midpoint between the most right-wing Democrat and the most left-wing Democrat, not between Republicans and Democrats. But I do think he's, I don't think it's so much that he's a moderate or a centrist. I think he's an institutionalist.

He spent his entire life in the Senate, except for eight years as vice president. He leaves in the process stuff. And I think that's actually, that's one of the most commendable things about the guy as far as I'm concerned. Well, and I don't, you know, I think he, as I said, he's in the middle of the Democratic Party, which is not the same thing as being in the middle of the country or in the middle, the American middle. And the other thing I think is some of the radicalism won't be up to him necessarily. You know, he might have to give his tacit permission if, for example,

Chuck Schumer detonates the filibuster. But, you know, I can easily imagine something happening. early on, and again, this is unless there's sort of some political malpractice in play, where there is a mainstream, relatively popular, mainstream Democrat, relatively popular proposal put forward. Maybe it's coronavirus that has too much money in it for the newly fiscally responsible Republican Senate, and they block it and filibuster it, and it's very popular. I could easily see Chuck Schumer moving,

right then and there to the nuclear option for legislation, doing away with it in an environment where it's the Republicans who seem unreasonable for much-needed coronavirus relief. And then we're kind of off to the races with what the House and Senate start to send up into his direction. And, you know, does he have the ability to say, you know, to say to his own team, hold on let's let's back up let's slow down but at the same time there's another thing that let's remember big legislation is complicated and time-consuming and one of the reasons why

i don't think Obama got done as much as he wanted to get done perhaps in addition to thinking well he's got this majority that he's just going to have for a while and it evaporated just right away is that it took a long time to do Obamacare. It was a long time to get to do that. And I think we overestimate the ability to just send a big pile of complicated legislation straight up to the president's desk. But I could be totally wrong about that. Democrats have a fascinating opportunity to define the Republican Party if they take control of the Senate in the House. Because if this is a huge wave election, the Republican Party has been defined by Donald Trump. will then, in theory, repudiate at least Trump himself.

But Trump has so redefined the Republican Party and what it stands for for the last four years that basically the party will be floating out there sort of finding its moorings. And there's nothing that defines a party better than being against the other party. And so the Democrats in a way can decide which things the Republican Party will define itself as.

And this certainly happened during the Obama years with Obamacare. The Republican Party basically became defined as against Obamacare. And so I think Biden has an interesting opportunity to do that and to decide what Republicans run on in 2018, which would be really fascinating if they sort of made that strategic decision. I'll give one example, by the way, of the sort of grievance on the left driving where they're headed in a sort of silly way. went to vote yesterday, and on the Virginia ballot is a constitutional amendment to have a redistricting commission. And across the country, generally speaking, Democrats are in favor of nonpartisan redistricting commissions, and Republicans are largely against it because Republicans were controlling

state legislatures and were benefiting from that. And Democrats were not benefiting from it in the last to redistricting cycles. Well, lo and behold, as you may know, Democrats have control of the Virginia state government now. And when I came up and there were these big poster-sized sample ballots, I was very confused because the Republican ballot said that it was for the nonpartisan redistricting commission. And the Fairfax Democratic Party was against the nonpartisan redistricting committee.

And I was like, oh, man, we are in. for some four years of both sides, hitting equilibrium, but switching what they believe in, and that could be a really interesting moment in American politics. And a quick break to hear from one of our sponsors, Bespoke Post.

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come to you first because you and I have had an ongoing discussion about polling and about polling averages. And my argument has been that polls are about a 10-day lagging indicator because an event has to happen, whatever that event may be. And then it has to seep into the electorate. That can take five days to a week depending on the event and just how much of a shock it is to the system. Then the poll has to go into the field. That takes four days sometimes.

And then the poll has to come out another day or two. So oftentimes we're looking at a 10-day to two-week lag. from an event to actually seeing it show up in polls. And I also argued that the polls would narrow as we got closer to Election Day. I thought they would narrow in sort of early October. They didn't. They got more spread apart, David, as you and I have discussed. But here we are, less than a week out, and looky there.

They're narrowing. So not by a lot. The national polls were in the mid-10s with Biden leading. now it's at nine. But those state polls are narrowing in interesting ways. Florida was at four points for Biden. Now it's at 1.9. North Carolina was in the threes. Now it's in two. Arizona at one point was at five this month. Now it's at 2.9. And yet on the schedule of the candidates, we have these rallies going on where Kamala Harris is going to Texas, Joe Biden is going to Georgia. And yes, he's also going to Iowa and Wisconsin. But Donald Trump is keeping. But Iowa is a big one. I mean, Iowa was not

one that was necessarily considered super in play. That's right. That's right. And Trump is keeping a pretty normal schedule where you'd imagine he would be North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania, et cetera. David, what do you think of their closing schedule and what does that say about what the campaigns think is going on that we're not seeing? I mean, to the extent that we can really interpret from it in an era where Biden is doing just less traditional campaigning by a long shot, it seems to me that there's at least some modest play for not just the win, but sort of like the dunk. hang on the rim, taunt the prone Trump campaign in front of the roaring crowd kind of move, that it does seem that there are a lot of Democrats that are making the case that there is a chance here for, I mean, if not 1988-style win, 92 maybe, 96 maybe,

and that given the polling margins in some of these Midwest states, There was just an ABC Washington Post poll that came out today showing that Biden had a 17-point lead in Wisconsin, which feels outliery. 17 feels outliery. But it's a sign of the bowling in the Midwest that they said that his lead in Michigan was modest, and I was looking at that modest lead, and it was seven. Well, that's not super modest. So it might be a sign of their confidence there.

that they are going to go for the bigger win. Of course, your risk is so screamingly obvious, which is that if, that this is a repeat of 2016, that, you know, the one thing that people will do is look back at the Biden campaign and say, what on earth were you thinking when it came to, you know, your campaign? schedule. But I think in their defense, they'd say, I mean, hey, look, if we were wrong,

everybody, every polling entity aside from what's the, you know, one or two sort of outliers, the polling industry as a whole needs to be condemned, shut down, silenced, obliterated, not just us. This was a sort of a collective failure to discern the national will. But, Yeah, it seems kind of obvious to me that they'd really like to see something that's outside of the 2012, 2016 level of electoral vote margin and is moving more towards the 2008 or 96 or 92 margin. Steve, do these rallies matter? You know, you've written a lot about that. I think they can matter as sort of a galvanizing tactic, but less for Joe Biden than for Donald Trump, I think, these closing days, just by the nature of the rallies that Biden is having, you know, he's having

these driving rallies. Barack Obama's been doing events for Joe Biden and we'll have a, you know, a field full of cars that by just by definition isn't going to have as many people attending. The other dynamic to appreciate here is the extent to which Biden is doing the bidding of Senate Democrats and those competitive campaigns. in the states that you've mentioned, where Democrats think a visit from Biden to their state could help tip a competitive Senate election in their favor. They've been giving Biden pressure. This has been part of the dynamic now for a couple months as Biden has continued to maintain these leads in competitive states. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the

individual campaigns, Senate campaigns, have been pushing Biden to come, have been pushing Biden to spend money in these states to go up advertising in places where, you know, the Democratic candidate is not likely to win, but in a blue wave election with the benefit of advertising in the state and perhaps a visit. I'm thinking of places like Texas and South. Carolina and Georgia, the view from some of those Democrats is that with that kind of additional effort, those marginal candidates, unlikely to win in a typical election, but perhaps competitive in a blue wave election, could actually win. So I think in the sense, what Biden is doing has as much to do with bringing along others as it does promoting his own candidacy. But it is

certainly the case, as David notes, that the polling is pretty consistent here. I mean, we've seen some slight tightening, but, you know, it's not like you have one polling outfit that has these numbers. I mean, the reason that we're able to point to these averages is because virtually everybody has similar numbers, not just in the public polling, too, I might add. You talk to Republicans who are polling in these states. They will tell you the same thing. And in some cases, those Republicans were, had these numbers earlier, you know, showed a, showed a place like Montana being much more competitive early than the sparse public polling in Montana indicated. So I think it's a combination of those two factors.

Jonah, what will we look back and say when it comes to campaign tactics, you know, where we have the Trump campaign doing a lot of on the groundwork and the Biden campaign basically saying, yeah, Yeah, no, go ahead and watch the Trump stuff. We'll let that be the deciding factor on whether you vote for us or him. Was that a good strategy, bad strategy, or will it turn out that we find out the ground games don't make a difference? I don't know. I mean, it really all depends on who wins, right? And right now, I think smart money is betting that Biden wins.

And if Biden wins anywhere close to the margins that some people are talking about, then his strategy looks really good. Now the question is, did he need to have that strategy to win like that? And that's the unknowable thing. And but as someone who's been who was saying he should run a front porch campaign long before the pandemic hit, I think it's really hard to exaggerate how much the pandemic was sort of perfect for Joe Biden because it gave him an excuse not to have rallies. It gave him an excuse not to try to compete with Trump on his metric. but instead on his own, it gave a whole permission structure for him to stay in the basement, as it were. It gave all permission structure for people to vote early. And I do think that we'll

look back on it. And one of the things that, you know, part of my argument about why Trump gets this stuff wrong is that not only is he frozen in this flat circle of time about 2016 and thinks the electorate hasn't changed since 2016. But he also gets his intelligence on the ground from watching shows that butter him up every night. And when you follow, if you really think that Lou Dobbs has got his fingers on the pulse of the body politic,

and you take his advice and his guest's advice for how you should run your campaign, you're going to get into trouble. And so, like, on the mask stuff, I think the mask thing is we're going to look back on that and say that was, if not literally, then at least emblematically, a perfect example of how the Trump campaign screwed up, because poll after poll after poll is more pro-mask than anti-mask. And Trump may constantly talk as if he was taking the majority position when he wasn't.

And Biden didn't have to be strident in taking the majority position because his, whole strategy was in letting Trump hurt himself and stridently yell about his minority positions on all sorts of things, which is just sort of nuts. On the broader picture, I think it's just really important to remember sort of touching on what Steve said that, you know, the Biden campaign has seen all the polls we've seen. We have not seen all the polls the Biden campaign. Yes. And they have, as, as Haley Barber might say, spent enough money to scald a wet mule on polling and on focus groups and all of these things. And that is one of the reasons. I mean, look, Biden, Biden's a gregarious press the flesh, not in the tube and sense, kind of politician who wants to be out there and glad hand and all that.

and he went against all his natural political instincts. He didn't do that simply because of a hunch. They have a theory of the race. They have a theory of what the electorate wants. They have a theory about the way people react to Donald Trump. And they've been remarkably consistent sticking to it. And I have to think that that's because they've done more research on this. Meanwhile, Trump's position on when it comes to polling and research is, if it's a good result for him, it's a good poll.

not anything else. And so I think he's just going back to his instincts of rallies. And I think rallies are important. But at this point, you can only rally your base if you're Donald Trump. You watch those rallies. There's no effort to bring in a new voter other than just simply declare, hey, suburban women, will you like me? Which is like not, I mean, if you were at a bar and you made that kind of pitch,

people would say, oh my gosh, call this guy a cab. I mean, it's a weird kind of approach to politics. I think that the schedules of the candidates in the last week are the way that you know what they're seeing that you're not. And look, I got 2016 as wrong as anyone else did and thought that Hillary would pull it out. But I will say the Friday before the election, she was headed to Michigan. And I said publicly, something is wrong here. They're seeing numbers that we're not seeing. We're being, you know, the polling averages had Michigan at like six points.

you don't send your candidate on a Friday before the election to a state you're winning by six points. And I said the only way she's going to Michigan is if they have numbers that they believe more that show her within one point and frankly losing by one point in Michigan in order to send your candidate with the most precious resource that they have at that point, their time to a state that publicly they think they're winning by six points. So I don't think we're seeing that right now from any of the candidates, but it's also not the Friday before the election.

Okay. Hey, can I ask one quick point as a direction on this? For six months, back before Brad Parzcal had a bad couple days, we were told over and over and over and over and over and over again that the Trump team has the greatest digital operation since Skynet, right? That they had this granular understanding of micro-targeting and all of these various things. and again, I'm not a regular Facebook user, so I don't know how they've been doing on Facebook,

but I get hundreds of Trump campaign emails from various lists, and two-thirds of them are like, you've always been with me from the beginning. You've been my strongest supporter. Yeah. We have to come to you one more time. And that's like among the least absurd pitches that they've made to me, has there been any evidence to confirm that they actually had this great digital

operation? Because you would think if they could micro-target, that would show up on their email too. But I don't know how this stuff works. So maybe it works differently on different platforms. But do we have a, Sarah, do we have a sense about where the comparative digital operations of both teams are? No, is the best answer. We probably won't until afterward, but there's little clues along the way that, you know, yes, the digital operation is supposed to target voters, but of course, if the voters aren't there, it can't do much about that. It can only tell you that they're not there. And the best piece of data we have on that is that in September, they were spending 77 cents to raise a dollar, which means either their operation isn't as good as they said, possible,

that the people aren't there who they need to be there in order to raise these small dollar numbers, which I think is more likely, so that they're hitting the same people, there's enormous list fatigue, and they're not able to expand that list, which is a really bad sign when part of the reason you raise small dollars is to raise money, obviously. But another part of it is to get that sort of stickiness and attachment from those voters. They've given $5, they're bought in. It doesn't matter whether it's $5 or $5,000 actually. And so if all of a sudden you're not able to get those people and find those people, that's going to put a lot more work on your field team to go find them door to door, literally. Yeah, I think what Trump operatives

would tell you is that they have been working tirelessly to identify Trump-style voters who did not vote in 2016 and wouldn't necessarily show up in the things that we're discussing. Wouldn't necessarily be sort of obvious donors. These are more marginal voters, not people who would be Trump enthusiasts almost by definition because they didn't show up. So they're trying to bring out, particularly in the Upper Midwest, more white working class rural voters who didn't show up last time. And there are lots of them.

So they set out to target those demographic cohorts. And as Sarah says, we'll have to wait until after the election to see how they did. The registration numbers are positive on that front. They certainly in Pennsylvania, for instance, Republicans have blown Democrats out of the water in terms of new registrants. But the Democrats argued that that's actually, it's not new voters. It's people who were Democratic voters switching their registration to Republican, which is fascinating, if that's true, but it is interesting that that's the Democrats' argument over how they're losing the registration battle.

Yeah, that would seem to almost double their problem, right? Yeah, I don't know that. It's not a great explanation there. The greatest way to make the argument. Just to find a point on this, you know, I think, Sarah, you mentioned the 70 cents on the dollar to raise money. I've had some interesting conversations over the past few days about that exactly. We did a morning dispatch item, Declan Garvey reported out for late last week.

I think it was Friday looking at the mail program and the fact that, you know, if you signed up for a Trump list of any kind, and even in some cases, if you haven't, you've just been inundated with emails, many of them from Eric and Donald Trump Jr., not really asking. asking you politely to contribute to their father's campaign, but demanding that you contribute to their father's campaign and that if he loses, it's because you haven't answered this one email from Friday morning at 8.53.

You know, it's kind of this over-the-top, absurd email campaign. And some people I've talked to have made the point that it seems designed less to raise money and sort of galvanize conservative voters in the short term for a Donald Trump election as it is to accumulate names for people that can be monetized in a post-election world. So they keep these names, they keep sending,

They keep spending this money on donor prospecting, expanding their lists again and again and again and again so that they have more people to reach out to, you know, hawk goods or bring to Trump TV or what have you in a post-election world. It's a pretty cynical view of what they're doing right now, but I've heard it enough from people are really smart about this stuff that I believe there's some true to it. Well, I want to move to David's topic, but just let me give you

one more cynical take on the rallies before we leave the topic, which is, I think that the Biden campaign does not think that rallies have any particular effect on turning out their voters this time around, whether it would in some other cycle. And so they're going to Georgia and Texas

not because they think it matters, but because, in fact, they don't believe it matters, except that it will demoralize Trump voters who now believe that Biden has won this by so much that he's showing up in Texas and Georgia. And we saw a little piece of that where there was this, I don't know, like story that broke through the twitters and the online world that Trump had pulled down all of his ads in Florida because they were out of money, which just turned out not to be true. But again, if you're sort of a regular Trump voter, you're seeing that Biden's going to Texas and Georgia, Trump's out of money to run ads in Florida. And I think that the,

you know, I've said all along, the big difference between politics and corporations is that Coke doesn't benefit when they convince Pepsi drinkers not to buy any soda at all. But that's not true in politics. And so I think we're seeing a little bit of the like, hey, no need to buy soda this year. You just drink some water at home. David, why don't you walk us through what's going to happen in the run-up to election day election day some of these litigation pieces yeah so we have um what a mess i mean i've been quoting that movie for a while it's a mess one of the best political movies goodness what a mess so i would urge everyone to read uh the morning dispatch today um i have a newsletter that uh today also on these election cases and and we're going to we're going to we're

We're going to bring in a little bit of advisory opinions right now, Sarah. Everyone needs some. Deerjacking. We're going to talk about deer jacking. Deerjacking really turned into our most popular pod. Amazing. Who knew that we had such a large deer hunting crowd of advisory opinions listeners? But we have, and so I'd urge everyone to read the morning dispatch.

I also wrote about an aspect of what's happening right now. and that is we have just a web of voting rights cases that are charging their way through the system. And it could be the case if the polling is correct and the national margin is big and the margin in the Upper West is clear that a lot of these just sort of go poof. But if this thing is close,

these cases will get contentious, fast. I was listening to a day, Daily podcast, New York Times Daily podcast, they went back through some of the Bush v. Gore stuff. And I was just thinking, we can't, we can't handle that in 2020. And we certainly can't handle it in about six states, eight states. But it seems to be, Sarah, and I'll go to you first, that what, if I'm going to oversimplify everything, it is this. If it's a state, if the state authorities have taken action in response to the pandemic, then the federal courts,

what the Supreme Court is saying to the federal courts so far, pre-Amy Coney-Barritt, is leave it alone. Leave it alone. If the federal courts have taken action to override the state during this pandemic, what the Supreme Court is saying is stay out of it, federal courts. Stay out of it. Which, because it's 50,

different state elections on the surface makes some sense with the exception that the voting right is also a federally secured right. It's not just a state secured right. So I think that you can begin to see some of the tension here if the state's reaction to the pandemic is seen to be inadequate to secure voting rights, especially as the pandemic is getting worse. So can I morph my question just a little bit? Sure. So here's the morphing. So number one, Sarah, A, do you think that that framing is correct?

B, is it sustainable? And C, with the pandemic suddenly getting worse in a lot of places, is that going to disrupt some people's in-person voting plans? So on the first question, there's a Supreme Court doctrine called Purcell, which basically states exactly what you just said, David, that in the immediate, had run up to an election, the federal courts should not be party to changing the rules and that rule changing in general is disfavored. And the Supreme Court this time around, inexplicably to me, in particular, Justice Roberts, has not defined the contours of what Purcell actually means

in a pandemic when the rules have to change a little. And yes, they could have changed them back in March, but we didn't know really in March that this would last to November, maybe around June or July. We had a pretty good idea that it was time to start making plans. Well, by the time the legislatures got around to it, it was August. I think Pennsylvania is such a good example of this, because Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, as we've discussed, are three of the states that by law, you can't count absentee ballots early. You can't start opening and counting the ballots. And Pennsylvania, both Democrats and Republicans, thought that was silly this time around when you were going to have such a huge influx of mail-in ballots. And so both sides were like,

hey, we need to start counting these early this year. Let's just fast forward. They're not going to be counted early this year because it turns out trying to do some log rolling in August. Then all of a sudden, it was late August. Well, the Republicans originally wanted three weeks. Then within their own caucus. They were like, well, we can't do three weeks. How about three days? And the governor, the Democratic governor was like, well, no, I want three weeks. And the Republicans like, well, we could give you three weeks, but it'll come with these strings, which were poison pills. And then they were like, let's do three days with this other stuff. And so round it around politics, that's how it works. And here we are in November, and they never got

it done. Then most of these cases turn around how you're going to count ballots that are received after election day, these absentee ballots. Right. Now, if, you know, some of it is, what if they're postmarked before election day? But some of it is there is no postmark or they are postmarked after election day,

up to three days after election day. Will you still count them? Some of it's on whether we'll count, look at signature matching at all, which I think is fascinating because I just watched the West Wing Tribute episode that's on HBO Max, where they redo Hartsfield's landing

on a stage setting. And the pitches that they make for the commercial breaks from the actors were in one of them that there can't be voter fraud because we do signature matching. But in court,

they're arguing we shouldn't do signature matching. And there's actually quite a bit of science as signature matching is BS anyway, so I'm not really taking a side on that. I just find it fascinating. It's witchcraft. It is.

But I thought, that the part that concerned me the most was the reaction to the Wisconsin case from the Supreme Court that just came out. So Pennsylvania had had a case of the Supreme Court where basically, David, exactly what you said. They deferred to the state Supreme Court, which was going to allow these ballots to be counted after the fact. Wisconsin was the opposite. And so it was the opposite result. They said in Wisconsin, we won't count ballots that come in after election day. when the Pennsylvania case came out, everyone sort of went, huh, all right, is what it is.

And the headlines were mostly, you know, Supreme Court deals blow to Republicans in election litigation. But when the Wisconsin case came out, the left said that this was further proof that we needed to pack the court, that this was the court going totally crazy, and that they were setting the groundwork for handing the election to Donald Trump if they could. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

That's, that's, that's, blowing this way out of proportion when we had the exact same case, basically, that came out the other way. So maybe look at why Pennsylvania came out the opposite of Wisconsin versus all of a sudden the election is going to get stolen for Donald Trump by the Supreme Court. And the fact that that narrative was just kind of accepted everywhere that I've seen it, to me is not a great sign for what happens if this is a close race. Or if, forget the presidency, if the Senate, it hangs in the balance, and then there's a bunch of these Senate recounts potentially as well. Steve, do you feel like some people in the ski masks hijacked our plane and held an AO, you know,

advisory opinion podcasts on our podcast? I was just about to go to you, Jonah. I was just about. Jonah, what do you think of the Purcell doctrine? I like the odor-free version of that. Because sometimes these hand sanitizers smell really weird. So, here's what I was going to ask you, Joe. Yes, hit me.

Okay. So we just laid out, here's these two separate, here's what the court's doing. If it's a federal change from a federal judge to state standards, the court is saying no. If it's a state change to state standards, the state is saying yes. Bottom line is, as somebody wrote to me today, so wait a minute, we can have a situation where, say, Trump, wins Wisconsin by 2,000 boats, and there's 20,000 uncounted mail-in ballots as a result of a 5-3 decision made by Trump and Republican-appointed judges. How's that going to play? Are we laying – are these – just putting aside the legal doctrines, is this something that could call

in to question the popular legitimacy of an outcome and a close election? Yes. The controversial opinion, Jonah. Yeah. No, I mean, look, it is, it is a hot mess. And I get the principle that, as I understand it, that the Supreme Court is trying to apply in all of this. But as just a simple factual political matter, if it is. it would be let's say there was no pandemic and there wasn't this torrent of early voting

and we just had a fairly normal election if if trump were to get reelected again by losing the popular vote again by an even broader margin than the last time as much as i'm a defender of the electoral college that is a political nightmare for for this country and um and i know that there's a natural, there's a natural tendency among conservatives when I point out things like that to say, but so what? You know, facts don't care about your feelings, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's fine. But as a political matter, there are an enormous number of people who feel like the GOP is rigging the system in favor of a shrinking demographic and desire to sort of have a a minority, political minority stranglehold on the levers of power that is not representative

of their actual numbers in the population. And as much as I'm, I can defend some of these small R Republican type things, politically, that's just a mess. It's just, it's just terrible. And, um, and I suspect that there is, something's going to have to give. If, if, if, if we're really looking at dispositively huge numbers for Biden, which we may not be. Again, Trump can still win, right? I think it's like a 17% chance. That's what my tick-tac-toe rooster says when I ask it. But if it is just obvious that there is this deluge of mismatch of votes for Biden versus Trump,

the old adage about how the court reads the headlines, too, I think they also read the vote tallies, and I think that would be, you'd see some give there in weird places to accommodate that. That said, I do want to return to a point I made on last week's podcast where I pointed out, which we called Chekhov's Gunn and homage to my point about how this whole thing is going to end. I want to expand my prediction. It's not necessarily that Amy Coney-Barratt will rule against Trump on the court.

she also might recuse herself from any election decisions, which would render the court a four-four tie, and as a result, the lower court thing would stand. So again, she would help Trump. And because I have to say, I really, really, I know this is a tangent, I disliked her participating in that political rally thing. I'm glad she's on the court, but I think she does have a political problem of seeming like she's just too into MAGA world, even though I don't think that's necessarily accurate on the facts. And so I do think there's not a terrible case. I don't know what the law says, but as a matter of political optics, her recusing herself from some of these cases might be better for the republic than her participating in them, but that's just my two-sent.

There's an interesting recusal theory about the Obamacare case that she, she may recuse from the Obamacare case because she participated in a moot court about it. And so at least to some extent, her opinion about the Obama care case is already known. Spoiler alert, it does not appear that she would have voted to overturn the whole law. Right. So there might be some pretty compelling arguments, even though it's arguably not legally required or not legally required that there might be some prudential considerations. So here's my question to Steve. Steve?

Thoughts? I like that. I like that. I can take it in any direction I want to. So just two very big picture takeaways from all of this. And again, people should go and look at Wednesday's morning dispatch where we have a sort of point-by-point review of all of these. disputes state by state by state is sort of long-term impression and short-term concern. The long-term impression is when you look at these states cumulatively, it is hard to escape the fact

that Republicans want people to vote less. And while that's not necessarily new, that is not a strong place for a political party to be. If you have confidence in your ideas in the ability to persuade people that you're right, you should be happy to have more people vote. And I know the people who work in the trenches of electoral politics will call that hopelessly naive because they have in the past. But it's hard for me to get to the point where you'd be comfortable with a party that is determined to keep people from. voting. It's just an ugly place. Or not counting their vote.

Be uncomfortable with it. Yeah, or not counting there. But whatever that, I mean, there are about 50 different ways in which this broad view manifests itself and very few of them are defensible in my, in my view. The shorter term concern to go back to the point that Joan was making is that if this is a close selection, it's a it's a huge mess. I mean, we are in for some really, really difficult times. It's not just in a place like Wisconsin where, you know, to use the 2000 vote margin with 20,000 votes to be counted or not to be counted. It is like that in every swing state in one way or another. And that's that is the concern because then you just have a series of arguments about how election laws

were written and how they will be applied and with with i would say already questions about the legitimacy of the elections questions about the legitimacy of the courts um to throw a close election with those kinds of potential outcomes where the overall result lies, arguably on who best handles these court cases. To lay that on top of the unrest that we've seen, the polarization that we're living with, I think would be a recipe for real unrest, additional unrest. and sort of a nightmare after the election.

That is, in my view, the worst case scenario, stripping aside, regardless of who wins, that is the worst case scenario, is if the path to that eventual victory goes this way, I think there are big trouble to come. And last point, I think just something that I've been saying for a while that has been sort of front of my mind, Sarah's written about a couple times. I think it's an underappreciated phenomenon, just how much voters on each side, partisans on each side, think that their man is certain to win. And not just certain to win, but certain to win big.

I was communicating with a good friend of mine last night, very, very strong Trump supporter who has been making the argument for six weeks. This was not Mike Pence. Also, though, from Indiana, interestingly. This person has been saying for months that Trump is going to win. The polls were wrong in 2016. You know, all the egghead elites in the cities wrote off Trump and he was right in 2016 and therefore he'll be writing it in 2020. The extent to which that thought exists in the

minds of, I'd say most of my Trump supporting friends, and again, this is anecdotal, so the anecdotal caveat. But I worry that whatever the result, that everybody's going to, you know, people on either side will feel that it has been in one way or another stole. even if it's a clean win. So you go in and you're a Trump supporter and you think there's a landlide coming and then there's not, you're going to feel like you were robbed.

And, you know, people who are Biden supporters will say, but look at all of the polls. The polls for months and months and months have said this. This is the outcome we're getting. You're crazy to think that, you know, this was somehow stolen. But of course, you have the president at every turn preemptively sort of seating the ground

to make the case that this is illegitimate. And I think on the flip side, if Trump were to win, because all of the polls have suggested what they have, because it's been so consistent, because we started a podcast today with my question about what the Biden presidency would be like, it will be hard for, for, for media types, for non-Trump supporters and others to say, well, you know, it just was an obvious win. This is what happened. So I think adding that on top of the court cases that we've talked about, there is still a real potential in any kind of a close race for some real ugliness in the weeks ahead. Let's take a quick break and hear from one of our sponsors today, Acton Line podcast. Acton Line is the flagship podcast of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, dedicated to the promotion of a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberal. and sustained by religious principles. With episodes released every Wednesday, Act in Line

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That's Acton.org slash dispatch to subscribe. Well, let's move to a unifying figure. Mitch McConnell, Jonah? So, I was just thinking about this. you know, Amy Coney Barrett, whatever you think about the optics of it all, whatever you think about her qualifications. This is just a massive win for conservatives in the political sense. It is a massive win for the conservative legal movement.

It is a massive win for really the conservative establishment. And I think it's that last point that really doesn't get well understood. We've lived in a weird world where all wins for the president get counted as among, particularly among conservatives, but among, I think, the media in general, all wins for Trump get counted as Trump wins. All failures by Trump get counted as, depending on who you're talking to, sort of the establishment or the deep state, undermining him. And this is an article of faith that can withstand almost any amount of analytical or factual dissection. And so it just occurs to me that if you were a historian writing about this period,

whatever you think about Mitch McConnell as a person, whatever you think about Mitch McConnell as a political actor, whatever your feelings about the American, garland stuff, all of that to one side. Mitch McConnell is the single most successful political figure of the Trump era, including if Trump loses, Trump. And it's a remarkable thing when you had to go back and remember in 2018, Steve Bannon, you know, would swoop into these various primary races on his bat wings, land with his hoofed feet in a cloud of sulfurous gas, and put up these Trumpy,

troll characters to run, not against whoever the Republican candidate was in the state, but running against Mitch McConnell. It was an article of faith across the MAGA right that Mitch McConnell was the singular obstacle to Donald Trump's total victory and that he was representative of the deep state and the never-trumper resistance, yada, yada, yada, yada. And it turns out that the thing that the Trumpers consider to be... Really, Trump's shining achievement was delivered by Mitch McConnell, which is three justices on the Supreme Court and a huge number of conservative justices on the judiciary as well. So I guess I'll just, I'll make it a more open-ended question because I always forget that I'm supposed to ask you guys questions about this stuff and simply say, Sarah, how do you think Mitch McConnell will be. remembered both on the right and in general in the years to come?

It is fascinating to me that for 100 plus years, it was the speakers of the House that were considered so powerful and memorable. And we've seen a total shift during the McConnell years in particular, away from the House and the power of the Speaker of the House, over to the Senate. and perhaps Mitch McConnell was just the right man and the right moment, but I actually think he has something to do with that shift as well, or the continued shift at least.

And I think Mitch McConnell will be remembered as the most powerful Senate majority leader in United States history. Boom. That's it. Yeah. Mike drop. David, how do you apportion credit or blame for

how the Republican Party has handled Donald Trump over those last four years, and where do you put Mitch McConnell in that mix? You know, it's really remarkable how Mitch McConnell has transformed from the object. I mean, the object of just hatred. I mean, Breitbart was almost like an anti-Mitch McConnell hate site for a while, into sort of like the hero, one of the heroes of the MAGA, right? And through it all, Mitch McConnell is just kind of been Mitch McConnell. He's ruthlessly efficient. He seeks to protect his majority. He understands where his legacy is going to be located.

And he just goes right after it. But now there's like the memeification of Mitch McConnell. I mean, it's sort of an RBG reverse negative thing of like, you know, the turtle and cocaine Mitch and all of that. it's fascinating. Yeah, I mean, it just is absolutely remarkable, the extent to which the perception of him in Maga country has just flipped on its head. And the other thing that's kind of weird about it

is that, you know, we've heard all of these pundit, these maga pundits and sneering at conservatism, ink, you know, and some of them are particularly disdainful, some of them of, you know, classical liberalism and fusionism. Well, do you know what the story of the judges is? The story of the judges is the absolute triumph of the personification of conservatism, Inc.,

the Federalist Society, this entity that has spent really decades building up this pipeline of judges who are, guess what? Almost all of them, sort of classical, liberal, originalists who some of the populist more intelligent populist thinkers go wait a minute

these are some of the same kinds of legal minds that we don't want these are not your integralists these are not your common good conservatives and so what has happened here is a triumph of

conservative ink and classical liberalism working through a streamlined judicial confirmation process streamlined ironically enough by Harry Reid and a lot of forces have come together at once and how will it be remembered? I think one thing that will be interesting

as people reflect back on the Trump era is kind of how much the defeated the alleged you know the defeated conservatism ink aspect of their GOP actually prevailed, actually achieved policy successes from the Ryan tax cut to the McConnell

Fedsock judicial pipeline and how much the populist side really didn't get much at all. Well, they got to own the lives. They did get to own the lips. They got some good memes and a few miles of a wall. A few miles of wall. But But yeah, that's it. Steve, any thoughts on this?

To quote, well, first of all, to quote Mitch McConnell, first you get the, first you get the EA, then you get the money, then you get the power. But to quote, David, thoughts? I mean, sounds like a, sounds like a David French endorsement for Donald Trump. I mean, the things that have happened in the Trump era on the, you know, for, for. conservative establishment and philosophical, classical, liberal's huge wins. No, and I would just say you're right to point out that a lot of the sort of mega wish list has not happened, despite the fact that the president is touring the country

now telling his rally crowds that the wall is being built has made a ton of progress and that Mexico is paying for it. And literally he's making that case now. sort of for four years has been the easiest thing to point to of the failures of, you know, sort of the Trumpy campaign slogans from 2016. And he's now just decided that he's going to just claim it's true even though it's not true. Steve, the wall's going to be done in two weeks.

It's probably right. Probably right. Just like health care is going to come out in two weeks. And Mexico is going to somehow pay for it, either by secret tariffs or, The most interesting thing, I think, is a point that David made, which is that Mitch McConnell did what he did simply by being Mitch McConnell and pressing on Mitch McConnell's priorities. His number one priority for years, in addition to just remaining Senate majority leader, has been to remake the federal judiciary. He's not, there's no secret about it. He doesn't pretend otherwise.

He talks openly about it. emphasizes how important it is. And it's precisely what he's done. You know, I think his critics, including some on the erstwhile Tea Party right and elsewhere would say he's maybe put too much emphasis on that. And even back during, you know, the late Obama administration, could have spent more time focusing on pushing policies and having at least policy differentiation for campaign purposes than he did, but he was almost singularly focused on the federal judiciary, and I think we're seeing the results of this. Mitch McConnell will be, I think, largely responsible for Donald Trump's greatest achievement, which is the remaking of the federal judiciary and

putting three conservatives on the Supreme Court. And he is not and never has been anything close to a maga head. He privately continues to criticize the president to express grave reservations about what Trump has done to the country, to the Republican Party, and never sort of went Trumpy the way that some others in the Senate have. Some of them, I think, because they really believe it. Some of them purely for rhetorical reasons. McConnell hasn't really done that. He's managed to stay in the president's good graces, I think, in part because Trump has realized or has been told repeatedly that McConnell is the one who can deliver on a huge part of his legacy. And they've had this marriage of convenience for that reason. But I agree that

when people look back on a Trump presidency, whether you like the way that it happened or didn't, whether you like that the federal judiciary has been remade or you don't, it will be seen as his crowning achievement. And most of the credit will be due to Mitch McConnell. And with that, the most important question of the podcast, Steve, what's your favorite Halloween candy? Snickers. Oh. That's it. Wow. That's like a really good, good take, actually. Now is it, the big, like normal-sized snickers or the mini-snickers? No, I mean, it's the king-sized snickers. Interesting.

Give me the massive foot-long, you know, dukey-in-the-pool, uh, caddyshack. Although that was a, that was a, that was a baby-ruth. Yes, exactly. Baby-Ruth. Those are also good. So that changes the ratios, though, between the real size, the king-size, and the mini-size.

And the ratios matter a lot to me. Okay, so you're king-sized snickers. Yeah, maybe. I mean, look, I just remember when I was trick-or-treating back when I was a kid, the best houses were the houses that gave out the full-sized Snickers bars. Like, if you got one of those, the rich people. You would, yeah, you would go around the block again and again and again and keep, like, showing up so that you could get more of those.

David? Well, I just have to say Snickers is the best golf course candy when you're winning a closest to the pin competition. Accident, not an achievement, David. Achievement, not an accident. But the best candy is the Recy Peanut Butter Cup. The single, not the full-size one. The single, full-size, Recy Peanut Butter Cup is clearly, clearly the best candy.

Jonah? Okay, first of all, we have to have a second conversation about the pronunciation of Reese's. And dispatch. Um, yeah. So I think the peanut butter cup claim is defensible. Um, I think the Snickers claim is fine. Correct. Correct is the word you're looking for? Um, frankly, uh, you know, if I had my druthers while trick-or-treating, I would like a

thick wad of cash, but I just never get it. Um, but, uh, I got to say, I, I'm a big Butterfinger fan. And I think, but I think the thing that, in part because it's so rare and it's so good, Twix, I think, is a jackpot Halloween candy to get. And Apple is an act of cruelty by people who are thieves of joy. No, raisins. And I've gotten many.

And raisins, boxes of raisins, yeah. Or popcorn ball. Popcorn ball. That's another one. Dental floss, you know, another. The box of raisins was always the most immoralizing. I find it interesting that you all picked chocolate, and I

wonder whether you're forgetting your sort of early trick-or-treating days when, in fact, as a child, like an early child, you would have preferred the sugary ones over the chocolate ones, which would have come later in your trick-or-treating Halloween era. I think y'all are just wrong. I think your memories are wrong

because you're so old and adult-brained, you know? no this is an argument i have often with my daughter i um generally dislike any candy that could be confused by the naked eye for plastic so like mike and ikes jelly beans all of those things um i don't like there are a couple exceptions i like uh i like starburst although i think cherry flavor is garbage um but for the most part i i'm a more of a salty and savory guy and so chocolate but is always going to win, particularly chocolate with the cookie or not kind of actually. I don't doubt that it wins now. I'm not a.

No, but even as a kid. I'm not a big, yeah, just pure sugar. I don't have a big sweet tooth in general. Like if I could go trick-or-treating and you could give me a filet at every house, I would much rather have like big and savory. Actually, you know, pork chops are almost a perfect size. Not pork-chop, lamb chops are perfect size for like trick-a-treaty. Gosh, I should do that.

That would be great. My kids would be so embarrassed if I just gave out lamb chops. But that's what I would. Halloween would be better. Broughts on toothpaste. You'd be swarmed by the parents for the lamb chop. That is true. That is true.

But I never liked the sugar stuff that much. Did you answer the question? No, because I mean, the truth is that Reese's full size and Snickers minis are my favorite now, but I think sweet tarts and it's ilk were probably higher on my list early. And I think that the thing that adults give, trick-or-treaters that they forget that actually at that age you don't like are the Hershey's chocolate nugget bars that come in the fun pack or whatever. And like you're getting

dark chocolate as a five-year-old, which is delicious for adults, but is like actual hot garbage for children? Yeah. It's like giving them. Right. Like it's pointless. So I just, I urge all the listeners. Like healthy chocolate. If you're going to do some trick-or-treating this year, I have a friend who has built a slide so that from their second story townhome, they're going to have a candy slide for social distancing where they send down candy to the trick-or-treaters. Get creative. Support your local children and their sugar needs. But don't give them dark chocolate. Take that for yourself. Well, so first of all, what are people put it, what are you guys actually putting out? Because we, by tradition, at the Goldberg household,

put out, um, Tutsi Pops. Lots and lots of Tutsi Pops. But, um, I don't, I don't know why we've monomaniacly focused on this one candy, but it's pretty much what we put out and we're known for it. And I defer to the lady folk. But what do you guys put out? Recy cups. Recy? And snickers. And are they different than Reese's? I thought he was just like stumbling over his words. No, this is, this is a major regional thing in America. And it makes me, it drives me crazy. Recy. Hey, hey, yeah. David, what do you call the footwear you use for sports? Tennis shoes.

Okay. What do you call the thing that firemen hook up their hoses to get water to put out fires? A faucet or a fire hydrant. Fire hydrant, okay. There are all these words that are regional. What do you call soda products that are? Cokes. Yeah.

Cokes. Okay. Yeah. So like you would, you would at a restaurant, a waiter would say, or waitress would say, where would you like to drink? And you say Coke and then they would say, what kind? No, you'd say, what kind of Coke do you have? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. What kind of Coke's do you have? We have Pepsi. See, now, if you ask Mitch McConnell that, you get a very different answer.

Who do you play? There's this great New York Times site that will ask all those questions. And it is remarkably accurate. It pegs me as coming, originating just like just north of chat, And I live, you know, about 90 miles north of Chattanooga, northwest of Chattanooga. That thing got me within like five square blocks of where I grew up. But it completely blew, it completely missed my wife because there's just not enough data on Fairbanks, Alaska to narrow that down. Is it still live? Could we link to it in the show?

I'd like to make it through our family group text the other day. All right. We'll put that in the show notes. Thank you all for listening. Have a wonderful and safe Halloween. We will see you after Election Day. I'm going to be able to be.