The MeidasTouch Podcast - Good News with Jason Kander and Edward-Isaac Dovere

Episode Date: June 4, 2021

On today’s episode, the brothers have TWO incredible guests lined up! First, the brothers sit down with best-selling author, attorney, United States Army veteran, and politician who served as the 39th Secretary of State of Missouri from 2013 to 2017 (as a Democrat) - Jason Kander. With his organization, Let America Vote, Jason is leading the fight against the anti-democratic voter restriction bills being passed across the country. The brothers & Jason discuss what people can do to push back against the GQP and their corrupt legislation. The following interview is with award-winning journalist, lead political correspondent for The Atlantic & author of his new book, Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump, Edward-Isaac Dovere. Dovere provides an incredibly unique perspective as someone who had traveled alongside the 27 Democratic Party candidates as they were battling it out for the Presidential nomination. The episode is rounded out with updates from the latest fake drama around #FauciEmails along with some GOOD NEWS to leave you feeling right heading into the weekend. Make sure you tune in every Tuesday & Friday for NEW episodes of The MeidasTouch Podcast. Make sure to get your Meidas Merch now at store.meidastouch.com! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/meidastouch/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/meidastouch/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Ben Micellus joined by Brett Micellus and Jordy Micellus. We have an incredible show for you today. We have former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander. Jason has been leading the fight against voter suppression. Jason's group, Let America Vote, is on the front lines with Beto, with Stacey Abrams, excited to speak with Jason. And Jason's name, Jason's 40 years old, by the way. He was born in 81.

His name has been discussed as possible future presidential candidate. Even in the last election, his name was thrown about as someone who could potentially run for president. So excited to bring you Jason Kander. He also has his own podcast. We'll talk podcasts as well. And then we also have Isaac Dover. And Isaac Dover is the lead political correspondent over at The Atlantic. He is also the author of the new book, Battle for the Soul, inside the Democrats campaign to defeat Trump.

Isaac was on the front lines embedded within the Biden campaign. Excited to hear about his observations. Brothers, how are you? Ben, how are you? I think is the actual question. What is happening? That is definitely the bigger question. What's going on, man? For those listening, which would be everybody, because that's the only way podcasts are are consumed usually. I am wearing an eye patch right now. All of my wounds are always self inflicted. And so yesterday I was doing my usual run around the neighborhood and I felt something kind of come in my eye. Well, this is a really bad thing. I felt something come in my eye, but I should.

I mean, that's some immaturity level right there. It stays in the pod. You know, that's all because right now I'm helter skelter is what I'm trying to say. I'm like half here, given the way my my eye situation is. But as I was running, something went into my eye. That's probably the best as the way there's sometimes we're That's probably the best way. Sometimes we're so immature. The best way to frame it. And then I went to take it out to remove my contact because my contact was so painful.

And I think I accidentally cut my, what do you call it? Cornea? Cornea. I cut my cornea. So I went to the... So painful. First off, I cut my cornea. So I went to the first off I've been, yes, this morning I was literally, I haven't slept because I was in so much pain in my sleep last night. I went to the ophthalmologist today. I thought I was really scared, honestly, going to the ophthalmologist

because I was also, and it sounds stupid too. I was kind of embarrassed to tell him the story that I did it to myself. And I was reaching in my eye to remove my contact and cut myself. It's like, oh yeah, you should have seen the other guy. When I asked Ben earlier about his eye situation, because I saw Ben very quickly, I said, Ben, what did you do to yourself? He's like, this is what you're going to do.

You're going to blame me for this. And I'm very curious to hear the story. So now the layers are being peeled back. Yeah, the layers are peeled back. I was running. A tree came in my eye. And now we are here on the podcast and we are in full fledged Midas Touch Brother podcast. I hope you feel better, Ben. I mean, a lot of eye issues with the brother, not so much issues with Jordy. But one of the things going around online right now

is a lot of people are wondering what's up with Jordy's glasses. Speaking of eyes, everybody wants, everybody wants to know. And everybody's wondering though, it's one important question. Jordy, are those real glasses that you're wearing or are they just for show? What do you mean by real? I think you need to clearly define real. Yes, they're real. They're on my face.

They're real glasses. Okay. So you're, you're avoiding the question. So I'm going to assume that there's actually no prescription in those glasses. Would that be a fair assumption? You could assume whenever you want. They're real glasses that are on my face. Got busted. Jordy's wearing fake glasses. Ben is wearing an eye patch. Normally, I am the person out here that has the eye issues. I mean, for those who don't know, I am partially colorblind. I often have

I never knew that about you. Until just now. You're partially colorblind. This is the data. He can't see reds and greens. It's the funniest thing when you're watching Brett go through it. I went to an eye doctor once and they gave me this book and they said, why don't you read the numbers inside this circle? And they give you these circles that have these other little tiny colored circles inside of them. And they say, what number do you see in there? And I said, what number? There's a number? What are you talking about? They go, okay, what about this one? What number do you see in there? I said, there's no, it's a trick

question. There's no number in the circle. And you go to the next one. And I go, oh, oh, 27, 27. And the doctor goes, oh, interesting. Because people who see a normal color see 54, colorblind people see 27. And I was like, you've gotten me really? I got excited that I was passing the test. And so it turned out I have some sort of mild colorblindness and this has afflicted me my whole life, but I haven't known because I still see colors. Like I, to me, I still see colors, but I guess I see just the combination. Right. And here's another going on to that story. Later that night, Brett and I come home both from the eye doctor. I did not, you know, come back as colorblind. And this is like internet 1.0. We go on eBalm's world, which was like the site when I was seven and Brett was 10 and Ben was 25. And then we start taking these colorblind

tests, but we got tricked because you're taking the test. And then like five seconds into the test, all of a sudden, like a really scary like voice and ghost pops out. And I just remember Brent and I screaming our heads off. Well, what happened is they have you focus on the dots. They have you go really close to it to analyze your color. And so I'm looking at the dots and then they have like a monster pop out and they have a voice scream at you. And I got up out of my chair, ran out the door and hit my head on the door because I was so scared of what just happened. So, yes, this has been this has been

a thing. Brett, Jordy, you've both been pineapple. Brother Banter has come to its its its pineapple conclusion. Let's talk about some good news. How about that? Let's talk about very good news, Brett. And I want to start with New Mexico. And I want to talk about the Democratic candidate winning in the first congressional district, which is a significant victory here. The Democrats won by 25 points. The Republican Party, a.k.a. GQP, a.k.a. QAnon Anonymous or not anonymous anymore, just outwardly QAnon. They are blaming low voter turnout as the cause. But what we're seeing here as the GQP, as Republicans are out there just saying that the vote is bullshit,

their followers, this is what we saw in Georgia, right, guys? Their followers are saying, all right, well, if you're telling us that you're making voting one more difficult for us, number one, and number two, you're telling us that it's all bullshit and there's all of this fraud, which isn't the case. Why should we even vote? And Democrats are out there voting. And by the way, that's why whenever you hear anything about, you know, that Republicans are trying to rig elections, which they are, your attitude should not be what the Republicans are doing here, which is, oh, well, why even bother them? Why should I go to the polls if they're trying to rig it? Why should I even do anything then? No, you what you need to do is you need to double down because that's the mistake the Republicans are making. They're saying, oh, well, these elections don't even count.

The Dominion machines are going to switch the votes anyway, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they don't show up. And then Democrats have big victories. And Democrats were expected to win this race, Ben. But I think it's the margins and the trend lines that are important to see here. The Democrat Stansbury here, she won by 25 points, as you said. Joe Biden had won the general election by 23 points there. So you see a two point bump from there. And Deb Haaland had won by 16 points. So it's an incredible jump from that 16 point margin that Holland won by. And it bodes well for Democrats. You know, I'm not exactly ready to read too much too deep into the tea leaves right now and try to extrapolate for other races. But this is a good sign. The Democrats needed this win. They needed a big win. And I think it shows that at the end of the day, people like democracy. People like going back to work. People like health care. People like vaccines. People like getting back to normal. And that's what President Biden is doing. And people are feeling the effects of that. People don't like

crazy, wacky conspiracy. People don't like insurrection. And frankly, people do not like government being used the way GQP members use government to intrude into their lives. At this point, Democrats are the ones who respect that the spheres of government and the private sector and other entities, you know, should have some levels of separation and where government should properly intervene. For the GQP, for the Republicans, they want government to be right there, right inside your living room, telling you how to act and demanding strict obedience if you don't, requiring you vote for the GQP. I mean, I think it's absurd.

I think the point of what we're getting at, though, why it's so important and what you're sort of hinting to here, too, as well, is we're not telling you this as our intro, right? So we all get complacent. And so we think, you know, our job here is done. No, we're saying this because we got to keep our foot on the gas, right? We saw this huge margin of victory in New Mexico. And now it's time to make sure that this happens in every single state. You know, when folks are up for reelection or election, now is not the time to get complacent.

More good news. Vaccine updates. I mean, we're at a point where if you want to get a vaccine, you should be able to get a vaccine right now. And that's that's where we are. According to Politico Nightly, 12 states have vaccinated at least 70% of their adult population. It should not come as a shocker that all of these states were states that voted for Biden in the 2020s. How crazy is that? I mean, it makes sense, but it's so crazy when you actually see the data reflect that. Yeah, and the Biden administration has announced now that with respect to the first 25 million COVID vaccine doses

will be donated to various countries overseas, low and middle income nations to combat the pandemic. And this, fellas, is what America is about. America is about leading at home so that we could lead abroad and we lead abroad so that we could be healthy at home. It is a cyclical leadership. We live in a world that is codependent where what happens in one country impacts us here. We take care of Americans first and then we're able to help others overseas, which is precisely what Biden is doing. And as Biden is out there, championing vaccines here, keeping us healthier here,

and now extending those efforts internationally. I don't know if you saw, it was a New York Times and Buzzfeed did a Freedom of Information Act,IA, is the acronym, request to get the emails and records relating to Dr. Fauci's emails and other officials' emails at the beginning of the pandemic. The GQP, we were talking about this internally. I think I even did a statement about this on Twitter and other social media. Like, I just genuinely think they don't know how to read and don't care to read beyond the very first sentence or paragraph. They are first off, they're like big leaked documents coming out of Dr. Fauci's leaked emails. Leak.

They try to make it sound all salacious. There's no leak. It was a Freedom of Information Act request that goes through a standard legal process. And Fauci and others in the government hand over voluntarily the emails, number one. And then number two, the GQP looks at emails that are at the very outset of the pandemic. We're talking about February, March of 2020. And they're picking out like a specific sentence where Fauci says, with it, like at the very beginning, you know, masks are not effective in preventing a healthy person from contracting COVID. They go, see, see, Fauci said it himself, everybody. Fauci admitted it. And it's like, you don't read the next sentence that the efficacy

of masks. And Fauci was saying this back in February and March. He was saying it publicly too. And so I just have to think like they genuinely, the GQP like literally roots for sickness. And I'm just so thankful because I know for a fact, had we not gotten rid of former guy, had we not get rid of him, I want to talk about what a loser he is in a second. We would have COVID cases crazy spiking right now. We would have like, sometimes you need to take a step back. There could be family members who are lost, friends who died because of that election right there, and not just a few. We would be like some of these foreign countries that you see that we're now helping. That's where we would be. Let me clarify. There was nothing in the Fauci emails that he did not say publicly. It reflected the science that he was telling the public at the time. There's no disparity there. Now, what the Republicans want to do is they want to in order to combat those things as we learned them. I mean, that's how science works.

If you think your whole life that the earth is flat and then you get evidence that the earth is round, when the person comes around and goes, actually, you know, the earth works this way. You don't go, well, you said in the past, you asshole, da, da, da, da, da. No, you adapt the new science and you understand what's out there and then you react as such. Here's what actually happened. In February of 2020, Donald Trump said in private to Bob Woodward that he knew this was a deadly disease. And then he went out, had these rallies, acted like it was no big deal. Every single night we saw those rallies.

Pro-COVID rallies. Pro-COVID rallies. And we saw cases skyrocket. We saw the United States fare worse than most other countries in the world. Deaths through the roof, bodies going into refrigerated trucks. That's how Trump handled this pandemic. And here's what he said. Trump said by April, it will all go away. It will have about, you know, 600000 Americans die. And you're the president of the United States saying it's going to go away. That's on camera. We have the video. Could you imagine if that, you know, that would be a crazy leak, right? We're like, oh, he said that it was going to go away to emails. What a, what a shock. He

would just say the things publicly, how incompetent he was and his stupid ass cult followers would just love it. Death cult. I think there's something to an email that psychologically just messes with people's minds. Like they can't then put themselves back into like the era, the time period when that email was sent and really understand that exchange between two people and two doctors. And then what people often do, and it's bad faith journalism, and we've seen it a bunch, people screenshot and then they highlight the first sentence, and then they report it as fact and go off on it. And then Fox News runs on it for five days. It's ridiculous. It's pathetic and should be called out. You know, one of the things I'm reflecting on as well, and we put this in the

good news category as well, is that the Trump blog that he was calling his social media network has officially shut down. I knew that Trump can never, I mean, Trump can't run anything. I mean, but let's put this in this, let's phrase it this way. Trump couldn't run a blog successfully. And this was someone who had the nuclear codes. That right there is frightening. Dude, it costs like $12.99 to own a domain. The fact that he couldn't keep that going. There was no infrastructure there. He was just doing blog posts. He could do that for free. And the blog post, the page from the desk of Donald J. Trump, you know, is now totally removed. It will not be returning his senior aide, Jason Miller. It's calling Jason Miller a senior aide.

It's just ridiculous. The goofiest idiot, biggest idiot in the world told cnbc and this is miller's spit on it was just auxiliary to the broader efforts we have and we are working on please a couple months ago he was like jason miller himself was the one going out there and saying donald trump's social media network that he's about to drop is going to change social media forever it's going to upend the entire internet. And then three months later, he's like, yeah, this is a part of actually like a broader, more long-term effort. And actually this wasn't the, it's like, okay, okay. But it goes to show you the power of social media, the power when social media is co-opted by Russian and other foreign disinfo, which led to Donald Trump being elevated to begin with and how potent of a force that was because left to his own vices.

Left to his own vices. Trump's vices. Not even his devices. The vice. Not even his devices. His vices. Devices are crisis. Not even his devices. His vices, devices are crisis. Me doing a little freestyle rap. Eight mile all of a sudden?

Eight mile. Think twice's. No, Trump's unable to even run his own making up words. Trump's unable to even run a blog successfully. And he was elevated by bots and other disinfo enablers, a lot of them from foreign sources. Excited now to take a quick break. And when we come back from these messages, we will have Jason Kander. I would say a rising star in the Democratic Party, but he's already a superstar.

I'd love to hear from Jason about his take on what's going on and how we can collectively work together to combat voter suppression. We'll be right back after this. What's up, Midas Mighty? Ben Micellis here, joined by my younger brothers, Brett and Jordy Micellis. Have you got your Midas merch gear? If you haven't gotten your Midas merch gear, I don't know what's taking you so long. I got my gear. Most of the Midas Mighty got their gear. We have some incredible stuff. Isn't that right, Brett? That's right. And with the new CDC guidelines that say you no longer have to wear masks indoors or outdoors if you've been vaccinated, a lot of people have been asking us, how do you let people know you've been vaccinated? How do you know if you're around

other vaccinated people? A lot of people are concerned. us, how do you let people know you've been vaccinated? How do you know if you're around other vaccinated people? A lot of people are concerned. But, you know, we already thought about this, guys. We got our Vaxxed and Relaxed merch line. You could get it now if you still want to wear masks, if you still feel comfortable wearing masks around indoors or outdoors. We got the masks. We got the tees. We got the shirts.

We got it all. And we got more on the way. So let people know you've been vaccinated. Shop at store.midastouch.com to get yours. And that's not all we have. We got the club democracy gear. We got the shout out to the Midas Touch podcast. We are joined by Jason Kander, who is leading the fight against voter suppression. Now, we had a very funny conversation before it started where Jason said, you and your brothers are you must make your parents proud. Look at what you've done. But Jason, I don't even want to give your biography because I would not do it justice. You're 40 years old. You were the secretary of state as a Democrat in Missouri.. And you're 40 years old. So walk us through just so our

listeners know like who we're talking to. And you're a Georgetown alum. You went to AU, Georgetown, Army vet. Just if you could walk us through, you know, how you got into politics. Then I want to talk about your fight against voter suppression with Let America Vote. I mean, all that and I read at a 50 year old level. So my mom and dad are very proud. No, thanks. I appreciate y'all having me. How I got into politics. You know, look, I was one of those kids who, you know, like you said, I went to American for undergrad. So like everybody there, I had my little intern badge when I got on the shuttle and thought I was going to be president of the United States. So I was a political science nerd who the kind of political science.

That's what I did. Yeah. Yeah. So I was like the kind of political science nerd that was always like, you know, I also played baseball in high school. Yeah, I played soccer. Yeah. See, exactly. Exactly.

We are the same. We are. We struggled to fully accept our nerddom. But anyway, yeah. So are the same. We are. We struggled to fully accept our nerddom. But anyway, yes. So that that was me. And then I was going to, you know, I thought I was going to run for office. I didn't really know exactly what that meant at that point. But then 9-11 happened and I decided been on the receiving end of bad decisions by politicians that negatively affected my life I'd grown up privileged, I'd been spared all of that And, you know, it went from, hey, politics is really interesting to me and I want to run for office To, oh, this is not a game, like this really matters And I ended up coming home from Afghanistan and running for the state legislature and got elected at 27, knocked on 20,000 doors myself to make that happen. And then, you know,

fast forward to now, I have a politics podcast, I'm not running for office. And I am the president of a nonprofit that helps veterans and it's really fun. So, you know, it's a journey. But I also, as you alluded to, I founded Let America Vote and, you know, now I'm on the board, but we are leading that fight for the People Act. And you ran as a Democrat in Missouri 2009 to 2013. You were in the Missouri House of Representatives. And then from 2013 to 2017, you were Secretary of State of Missouri as a Democrat. Let me just ask you the the obvious question first, which is how'd you do that? A lot of hard work, which is to say, you know, I couldn't knock on every door in that statewide race. So my campaign manager Abe and I, we put 90,000 miles on his Ford Escape. And I just I hit

every county fair, there were no campaign contribution limits in Missouri at that time. And there was a billionaire backing my opponent. And despite that, and despite the fact that, you know, our average contribution was like 40 bucks, we out raised the competition. And despite that, and despite the fact that, you know, our average contribution was like 40 bucks, we outraised the competition. So I was, I was basically shaking hands at county fairs and telemarketing for, you know, a year. And, and that that's what got us there. We, we won by 40,000 votes out of, you know, like a couple million or whatever, it was a close race. And the other way we did it, and this is what usually surprises people, because when they get to know me initially, and they're like, okay, he's a army vet, white dude from Missouri who won as a Democrat. And

they're like, clearly, he was like, you know, barely a Democrat. And no, I'm a progressive, always have been. When I ran for the Senate, I ran a progressive race and outperformed the Democratic ticket by 16 points, but got the silver medal. But running for secretary of state, I mean, I did what nobody was doing then because nobody was campaign against photo ID legislation. So point being, the way I did it is I was unapologetically progressive, but I didn't I didn't sound like I wasn't from Missouri, right? Like I was a you know, I know about this race because like what, Brett, it was what, maybe a year ago, we were just fortuitously linked with Yinka Folletti, who was running for secretary of state against Jay Ashcroft. So I, you know, and he reached out like when Midas Touch was just beginning, when we had like a few hundred followers. Yeah. It's like, I like the videos that you're doing. So I actually studied the Missouri secretary of state race just coincidentally, because, you know, myself and Yinka and the brothers, we all kind of became friends. And Jay Ashcroft couldn't be he's the exact opposite of what you described. I mean, his the bills that he has in place are to encourage voter suppression. And he's the opposite of

unapologetically progressive. And so you have this dichotomy of you just running as an authentic, progressive, democratic platform, someone from Missouri, and then you have him right after you. Like, what do you think explains those shifts? Look, Missouri is a red state. There's no way around it. I mean, we just are. Like, Trump won here in 2016 by more than he won Mississippi. So, like, that's the reality. And despite that, it has been in the not-so-distant history a swing state. And we have two very large population centers in Kansas City and in St. Louis. And frankly, the Republicans, like they are in most, you know, nobody knows whether we're Midwestern or Southern,

but in this case, I'll say just in most Southern states, because that's a dynamic particular to it. They're really freaked out about the fact that if everybody in the state who was eligible to vote voted, these elections would be a lot closer, and they would lose a lot more of them. And so they're really focused on doing things that make it harder to vote, particularly for African Americans who live in Missouri. So it's, at the end of the day, that's what's going on, right? Is that when you see states like mine, and you see GOP election administrators, that's what they're doing. It's not even about, it's not ideology. It's pure tactics. And it's just so gross. Because, you

know, like, if you talk to the average Republican, I'm not talking to elected official, I'm just talking to you, stop a Republican voter on the street. And you're like, hey, do you think that your party's arguments are good enough to win? Or do you think you also should make it harder for the other side to vote? They're going to be like, no, we shouldn't make it harder for the other side to vote because we're right about stuff. Now, I think they're wrong about stuff. But the average voter in the Republican party is like, no, no, we got good arguments. We shouldn't do that. So this is Republican elected officials that do this. Back in 2005, 2006, 2005, 2006, what was interesting, too,

is you were out there saying Democrats could and should win the values debate. You went deep on this. This is wow. I'm impressed. Some homework. One person's deep is another person's Wikipedia. But go on. You scrolled down. Well scroll down. That's impressive. Well, that's the funniest part. We were talking about this on the podcast today. You know, that is a skill just to scroll down because when the Republicans read these Fauci emails, they like read the first two words and they're like, see, we told you. And it's like, just read the whole paragraph and you can actually, you know.

But yes, it is helpful to read the full paragraph. But what do you think about the Democrats winning the values debate? Yeah, no, it's a hobby horse I've been on for a long time. And it's a great place to have this conversation because there's this constant back and forth within the Democratic Party and within punditry, especially about whether or not in states like mine, Democrats should be moving more to the middle, or, you know, that kind of thing. And I just think it's completely the wrong, the wrong question to ask, because it is not a matter of more moderate or more liberal. It is a matter of whether or not you're speaking to what's going on in people's lives. So here's what I mean. You could take the most liberal set of policies, universal health care and UBI and all sorts of stuff. And the fact

is, if you advocate for those in a place like Missouri, in Kentucky and all these different places, and you do it in a way that focuses on the four things that everybody's focused on, which is really about one thing, and it's about their family. Everybody wants four things for their family, and it is they want their family to be happy, to be healthy, to be safe, and to be nearby. And where Democrats at the national level whiff, and it's not a matter of like left or right, where they whiff is on nearby, because the vast majority of the leadership in the Republican Party does come from the coast. It doesn't make them coastal elites. It's not, you know, that's not what I'm saying. But what it does mean is that if you come from a place where our kids, where we're from, tend to leave to get a job,

it is much harder for you to connect with the fact that that's what's motivating so many people and their vote in the middle of the country. When people talk about like Trump resonating in the Midwest because of trade, like that is so such a shallow analysis because I promise you there wasn't anybody in St. Joseph, Missouri going down a spreadsheet and going, you know, what Trump has to say about NAFTA is very interesting. And when I compare it to what,

I mean, that's not happening, but when he's talking about it, whether he did it on purpose or not, they're going, it sounds like what he's saying is my kid could stay in St. Joe, get a good job and raise my grandkids here and I don't have to move and they don't have to move and we could all be together. part that I think the Biden campaign did finally really connect with and understand. And maybe that has something to do with his background. But that's where we got to focus is it's not a matter of left or right to win voters over. It's be who you are, but talk about what's going on in their life. And what's going on in our life here in the middle of the country, I live in Kansas City, is my kid is about to turn eight and then I got-month-old. And I'm already thinking about,

what can I do to make them want to stay here? Because I want to be around them and around my grandkids. And I'm only, like you said, I'm only 40. That's what I'm thinking about. So that's the values debate. And that's, I think, where it is. It seems like all across the board, progressive policies are extremely popular when you do relate it to people's actual lives. People want a higher wage. People want a higher standard of living. But Democrats right now are competing with a party, like we were mentioning earlier, that doesn't really have a coherent ideology. And they are sort of, they're not even playing the same game, if that makes

sense. Like if we were playing chess, they're taking the board, they're throwing the pieces off, they're flipping over the table. So how do we get our policy debate and the nuance of policy? How do we message that when the other side is so emotional with their arguments, if that makes sense? No, it really is about, I mean, you're right, emotional is exactly the right word to use. So we have to make emotional appeals. And it's real simple. It's a matter of doing a couple of things.

One, if you're going to talk about like picking, you know, let's talk about, let's pick a hard issue. One that they want to bring up that's not necessarily, you know, it's like a wedge issue. Let's talk about like transgender bathrooms, right? Well, or transgender, you know, athletes in sports, which is like where they're trying to go now. You know, you can go the direction of lecturing people. And what I'm not going to advocate is in any way compromising on what we believe, right? Like we believe in treating everyone equally. But you can go the direction of like lecturing people about that, making them feel judged by you for how much more woke you are than them. Or you can say something that allows them to not feel judged but still makes your point.

Like, you know, I don't really think we should discriminate against other people's kids. I don't want anybody discriminating against my kids and I won't be discriminating against anyone else's, which is exactly the same policy position as any of the most liberal members of our party. But it is said in a way that is frankly kind of how we talk in the Midwest. And it is an emotional way to address it, which is like, you don't want this, and I don't want this either, right? That's the first part. The second part is we have to activate more people in the middle of the country, not just to knock on doors and that kind of thing, but frankly, just to talk to their friends. And that's what my podcast is. Majority 54 is solely about equipping people with the arguments and with the approaches to have these conversations with people in their everyday lives. Because the truth is, like MSNBC, CNN, you know, people like me showing up on there

in between, you know, the four corners of a box and saying some stuff, that's not going to persuade the average person. What will persuade them is when somebody who they've already allowed into their life and given credibility in their life through a relationship, advocates for this stuff and does it in a very personal way. If you've never had a major property dispute with your neighbor, then over the fence, you can have a conversation where you somewhat awkwardly bring up politics, but you are going to get so much farther with them than me in my best CNN appearance because they've already consented to a relationship with you that gives you credibility. It's why Facebook matters so much because people are not just seeing the article on

Facebook. They're seeing it posted by somebody from their church or from one of the other parents at their school. And all of a sudden, it's much more like why yard signs matter in rural areas because people go, oh, Bob down the street, he's got a sign for that candidate. That's interesting. I'm going to take a look at that candidate, because Bob seems to like that candidate, which matters way more than when some senator endorses him. It matters when Bob endorses him. And that's what we all have to do.

And the reason my podcast is called Majority 54 is because it's a reminder to everybody that we're actually the majority in the country. And if we were all doing this, it is more effective than a gazillion dollar ad campaign. Yeah, I agree with you on all fronts there. Because first, I do agree and not to paint everybody with a broad brush, but I feel like a lot of liberals in general and progressives, at least if you're looking at it through like a Twitter lens are far too quick to jump on people and make them feel that, you know, that that defensive mechanism, which then makes them dig their feet in deeper to their positions rather than courts them over to their side. And I think we need to sort of be delicate and and make a soft landing for these people to come over and

vote for Democrats. We're trying to save them, right? Because that's the thing. A lot of people listening to this will say, you know, no, I'm not going to give any quarter to racism. And yeah, I get that. And that is exactly, I'm not saying that you have to compromise with these people. I'm not saying you have to like it. What I am saying is, is that if you are listening to my voice right now from like Brooklyn, well, that is different than listening to my voice from Lexington, Kentucky, which is to say in Lexington, the person who is equally as progressive as the person in Brooklyn, they're surrounded by people who don't agree. And if we are going to actually get a true governing majority and get some important stuff done in this country,

well, that person in Lexington has got to be able to go out and save some of those souls. And so they don't have the luxury of just saying, no, no, no, it is beneath my dignity to go out and engage with people who would vote for Trump. That's just not a luxury that they have. And Jason, that's what our ads were about in a lot of ways. Like, you know, you could look at the ads that we did during the election through the prism of, you know, did that specific 30 second ad that somebody saw on Fox News changed their mind? Or did somebody see that ad or see the millions of views from that ad online and then go out and talk to their friends about it and have real life conversations? And that's why during the election cycle, we were so adamant all the time of talk to your friends. We want you to call five friends today. Just have

conversations with them, human to human, like they could hear from us all day they could hear from cnn pundits all day but if they're hearing it from you if they're if they're learning why these issues are important to you and why they're going to benefit them it's going to mean a whole lot more and the truth is like most of the folks that need to be persuaded are not hearing from us all day most of those folks who really need to be persuaded, their spouse spends an hour with Tucker Carlson every night and it's on in the, you know, because look, their spouse is not persuadable, but they are. And it's on in the background, right? While they're doing whatever they're doing. And that gets in there. And if you, who has, you know, who is their nephew or their niece, doesn't take advantage of that

relationship, well, then Tucker Carlson is going to own that space. And you got to challenge that space. Yeah, we cannot let Tucker Carlson on that space. Yeah, that's right. Or any space. Or any space at all. You're doing incredible work with Let America Vote. Could you tell our listeners about what you're doing and work with Let America Vote. Could you tell our listeners about what you're doing and how we could combat voter suppression? Sure. Yeah, thanks for asking. So we started Let America Vote in early 2017, obviously after the 2016 election, because having been Secretary of State of Missouri, I had seen the GOP voter suppression playbook up close. And it basically works like this. At this

point, unfortunately, everybody knows this, but they erect barriers to voting, and then they erect barriers to the barriers. So like you've seen in states, for instance, where they say, oh, you got to have a driver's license, a photo ID, state issued photo ID in order to vote. And then they shut down and they say, you got to get it at the DMV. And then they shut down the DMVs in the black parts of the state. So it's like a rector barrier and then a rector barrier to the barrier. And we recognized that the big problem that existed at that moment was we had usually at that point successfully fought those sort of laws in court, we being the proverbial we. The problem with that was one, Trump was now appointing the judges, and that was going to get

a lot harder to do. Two, when you successfully beat one of those laws in court, there's no political consequence for that. There's no disincentive for the people who passed that law in the first place not to just go back and try and do it again. Because, you know, by that point, you're a year later, nobody remembers who sponsored that legislation in the first place. And frankly, it's something that wasn't at the top of anybody's list as far as major issues, because if you're able to vote, well, then that's not going to be your top issue, right? It's going to be guns or climate or whatever, or jobs.

And so we said, you know what? There have to be political consequences for voter suppression. So that's what Let America Vote was formed to do. And that's its mission is to create political consequences for voter suppression. So that's what Let America Vote was formed to do. And that's its mission, is to create political consequences for voter suppression. So when there are legislators, often state legislators, for instance, who propose these laws, what we do is we will bring in an army of volunteers, and we'll spend money on digital ads and on TV ads and everything else, and we'll go in and we will defeat them. And what's most important about it is we don't have to just campaign on the issue of voter suppression. We don't have to educate voters who may not be as concerned about that issue. We will just target who we're going

to beat based on who are the worst suppressors of the vote. And then we will go door to door in their district and argue about whatever it is that's going to move their voters. In Northern Virginia, at one point, it was traffic congestion. We beat a bunch of vote suppressors because we were door to door and Let America Vote t-shirts talking about, hey, don't you think something's got to be done about this traffic? We've done it based on minimum wage. We've done it based on everything. Whatever's going to move the needle and get that person out of office, that's what's important because our audience in many ways is Republican

state legislators who need to feel the footsteps behind them and need to understand, hey, yeah, you can co-sponsor this legislation. You can vote for this legislation if you want, but you also might be next if you do. One of the most substantial pieces of legislation of our time that we speak about a lot on the show that a lot of people are talking about right now is H.R.1, the For the People Act. And so I'm just wondering, what are your thoughts on how we pass it? I think it has a very difficult path going forward, given the current makeup of the Senate. And I know that scares a lot of people because this is being pitched. And in many ways, it is like a savior of our democratic system. So what do we do? I know your friends at Crooked Media call it

HR1 or we're fucked, I believe is the terminology they use. So how do we get this thing passed? And what happens if we can't? Well, we have to continue to fight like crazy, right? I mean, yeah, it is very frustrating. You've got a couple of Democratic senators who I don't want to say are unmovable, but who are so far unpersuaded about the filibuster. And that affects not just this legislation, but a bunch of legislation. So we have to continue to push forward hard on that. But we also have to recognize that there's an election next year as well. So if we're not successful in getting this done this time around, like we have an opportunity to actually have more people in the Senate who will pass it and who will

reform the filibuster. And if that doesn't work, there'll be an election after that. I mean, the thing is, ain't none of us moving. So, you know, that's the thing about activism is that you've got to have this sort of weird mix of urgency and patience where you've got to wake up every day fighting for the thing that you care about most as if it could happen today, and yet have the ability to steal yourself to the fact that it might not happen, not this piece of legislation, but whatever you care about until like, after your lifetime, right? But despite that, you got to fight with the same emergency every day. So if it doesn't pass, obviously, it's going to make things even harder in 2022. But look, they keep trying to

make things harder for us. And we keep finding ways to win, because there's more of us, right? Because again, we are the majority. But yeah, on a long term basis, it's not sustainable to have the rules keep changing in a direction that makes it harder and harder for us. So we have to find a way to pass the For the People Act. Democracy is not permanent. I think that that's a thing that people forget. It feels, because it's always been there during our lifetimes and during our parents' and our grandparents' lifetimes, it feels like it can't change.

But if we've learned nothing else from the last four years, I hope we've learned that frickin everything can change and not always for the better. So we have to have that urgency. And Jason, what's your what's your take on cinema and mansion? I mean, at this point, some people speculate that they're actually Republicans disguised as Democrats. What do you think of that? What do you think of their unwillingness to really come to the table and help push across crucial legislation? Well, I don't know Joe Manchin other than I think I met him once. So I don't know what's going on there. I suspect that at some, look, you got to give him

credit for the fact that he's been elected in West Virginia for a very long time. And at this point, I don't think, I don't know, but I don't think it's a matter of political posturing. At this point, I think like he believes the stuff he's saying, which in a way is encouraging because it means this is about persuasion and we can persuade him potentially. I know Senator Sinema decently well. I campaigned for her and I've spent a little bit of time with her. I'll tell you, she's not a Republican. She's definitely...

Confucius Theory acts. She's definitely a Democrat. I'm not... I have not talked to her in the last several months. I am not sure what she's thinking exactly. But in the abstract, not speaking about either of these people individually or specifically, I will just say that if this is a situation where there are people who are thinking, well, you know, the politics of this, I i always say is you know there is some stuff that is worth losing over um and if that's the consideration here i don't know if it is but

if that's the consideration like this is worth losing over um there's no doubt about it like this is american democracy you know and uh you gotta be willing to lose and this would be one of the things that you should be willing to lose for. And Jason, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that all eyes are going to be on Missouri in 2022 with Senator Roy Blunt retiring. Who do you think? I mean, you think the Democrats have a chance of taking that seat in 2022? Yeah, I always believe that we have a chance. It's not going to be easy. We don't know who the candidate's going to be yet. But what I've been trying to tell people is because there's this thing that happens in every state, but particularly in tough states

where every couple of years, people start looking around for who's going to be, who's going to be the candidate that can actually get this done. Right. And obviously like in our state, you, you, well, obviously in our state, people initially, they came to me and they came to Claire McCaskill and Claire and I have, we're just doing other things with our life right now. And, and so we both were like, no no thank you um but what i can't speak for claire but what i was telling people was yes i feel like i would have had a decent chance to win that race i just don't happen to want the job um but that said like we've got to

stop thinking of this sort of thing as like it's a matter of who runs like we need if you look at georgia and stacy abramams is a very good friend of mine. We've been friends for over a decade. I have watched the entire transformation of Georgia through the lens of just being a very close friend of Stacey. So I've watched it from her point of view. And what I think people forget, it's great that Georgia gave folks in states like mine so much confidence. But what people don't realize is, I remember being with Stacey 10 or 12 years ago where she was laying out for me this 10 to 12-year plan

to make Georgia competitive. And then if you look at it, and Ralph and John, our two senators from Georgia now, are both awesome people and awesome candidates, and I've campaigned for both of them, spent time with both of them. But also, like, we have to remember, like, Georgia just elected a black preacher, a liberal black preacher, and a liberal Jewish documentarian, right? That's who they just elected to the United States Senate. And they are both awesome candidates. But I don't think anybody

out there thinks that that was purely based on them finding the two best candidates. But I don't think anybody out there thinks that that was purely based on them finding the two best candidates. No, everybody understands they had two very good candidates who were able to win because of all the work that was put in for a decade in Georgia to make a difference. And so in a state like Missouri and several others, what I remind everybody of is if every two years you were trying to figure out who is the candidate, who is the silver bullet to get this done, well, that is energy that you could be spending right now on organizing and on fundraising and on preparing your state to be in a place where you just got to put up really good candidates and then you've got a great shot. And that's

what Georgia did. That's what North Carolina has done. That's, you know, people forget that Colorado was a red state not very long ago. And now it is a purple with a blue with a heavy blue shade state. And that's because that's the work they put in in those states. That's why I think you were prescient in 2005 about the values debate. I mean, we have these issues here. And I think the contrast is starker than ever. Do you value democracy? Or do you not value democracy? You know, and I think that Democrats need to unapologetically own that we are the party of America at the end of the day. No, look, obviously, I agree. I mean, it is beyond ironic. It's lunacy

for a party, the Republicans, to try to brand themselves as the patriotic party because they have red, white, and blue garments on while they storm the Capitol. That don't make any sense at all. So I agree. Jason Kander, thank you so much for joining the Midas Touch podcast. We do hope you will join us again. Thanks for having me. This was fun. We'll be right back after this. Welcome back to the Midas Touch podcast. Great having Jason on the pod, even though Jason claims he's not running for Senate. And I hear his point about the party being leading with its values, leading with messaging over persons and people. I agree with that. But keep an eye on Jason. I would not be shocked. Not that I take him at his word that he's not going to run in this election.

But I'm interested to see if he does run in the future and potentially a I mean, he'd be a great candidate for president. Honestly, I think that he could be kind of a standout candidate, especially in the you know, in after, you know, after Biden. Great standard bearer of Democratic messaging, for sure. Brett, talking about Democratic messaging, talk to us about infrastructure. You know, we got the infrastructure bill going on. It's a big focus of the Biden administration. And the latest news is that President Biden is working hard on trying to devise an infrastructure plan to negotiate with Republicans. So right now, President Biden has the Democrats' version of the bill. Apparently, Republicans are going to be pitching their own version of the bill.

It sort of feels like very old school Washington, like pre-insurrection, pre-Trump Washington. But in a way, it's very performative, almost on both ends to me. I feel like Joe Biden is trying to show some outreach to the Republicans by saying, hey, like, you know what? Well, those tax rates, you know, we said they were going to be this high. We'll bring him back down to the levels that you wanted. He's capitulating a little. He's he's trying to act and negotiate in good faith. He is negotiating with Senator Shelley Moore Capito on the Republican side. And here's the problem that I have with this all is that at the end of the day, I think President Biden could pitch the exact Republican bill that they end

up pitching and the Republicans would never go for it. I feel like it's like time and time and time and time again. It's like I'll do an extremely current reference. It's like Lucy and the Peanuts putting out the football and Charlie Brown going to kick it. And every time they pull it back. And I feel like the Democrats get sucked into this over and over and over and over. And the reason why I said it seems a little performative, in my opinion, is that I feel like the Biden administration is actually playing to Joe Manchin and the cinemas of the world to try to say at the end of the day, hey, look, we are trying to do this with bipartisan support of the politicians in addition to the

people because people overwhelmingly support this bill. But I think the Biden administration is trying to at least show Manchin, hey, look, we're giving this a fair shot. We're giving them some concessions so that when they're when the Republicans don't come to the table as they inevitably will not, they could say, hey, we tried. Now we got to go at this alone. Infrastructure is the perfect case study, though, to Brett and Jordy, because I think we mentioned this on the last pod, so I won't belabor the point here. Like it's Trump was talking about these exact same things, but just like his blog,

he's unable to write for any significant period of time, like more than a day or two. So but for the fact that Trump is incredibly incompetent, these ideas are non-controversial, bipartisan ideas. And I could guarantee you Democrats would have been very supportive. I would have been very supportive of these ideas had Trump introduced them. We would have passed it on a bipartisan basis. And frankly, Trump would have got a lot of credit for it. And rightfully so if he brought that, you know, if he brought those infrastructure ideas. But because he's so incompetent and now because the GQP hates America, you're left with them just preventing us from just getting better as a country. It's just bizarre.

Now we just have the scourge of Manchin and Sinema just every single time. Is this going to be every single time? An NBC News reporter just spoke to Manchin and Manchin said he really isn't interested in doing an infrastructure bill with only Democratic support. And he repeatedly said he thinks there will be a bipartisan deal between President Biden and Senator Capito, and he's not ready to push this bill through via reconciliation. If not, what do you make? Yeah, I think that there will be a bipartisan bill with the same people who voted against investigating the insurrection. Yeah. Those are the people who I'm going to negotiate with on when it comes to infrastructure. I'll tell you, like my eye is causing me so much

pain in the morning. But that same pain that I feel is getting to be akin to the pain I feel every time I hear cinema and Manchin talk, because I'd like to believe that there's some conviction and substance to their obstinance. But all I see is obfuscation and idiocy. At least when I look at Manchin, I think he believes what he is saying. I think he has this dumb view of progressive platform talking about needing to raise the minimum wage. She gets into office. Boom. She's a totally different person. She's out there hanging with John Cornyn. I mean, what's a bigger middle finger to the United States and hanging with John Cornyn who's spreading conspiracy theories about January 6th and worse? I mean, how do you know? By the way, you can hang with Cornyn, but don't support the filibuster. Like you want to hang with people. You can hang with people, but get our legislation passed, like push it in, like

don't hang with Cornyn and then take Cornyn's position, right? Hang with Cornyn and bring Cornyn to you or stop hanging with them. Like it's a pretty simple formula. And by the way, this is why I was a little shocked by Jason's answer about my the one question I'm allotted per interview when I asked about the rogue, the rogue agents, if he thinks they're, you know, Republicans disguised as Democrats. And he just said, no, they're Democrats. But he just doesn't understand what's going through their minds. I mean, it's frightening. And Senator Sinema, who did not show up for the vote for the January 6 commission, who said after the fact, after being

hounded for a couple of days with questions and refusing to answer them after what I think is making up an excuse that she had, quote unquote, a personal matter. And that's why she could not attend the vote. However, she had more than enough time to hang with John Cornyn of all people. I don't know what an Arizona senator is doing with John Cornyn and of all people. I don't know what an Arizona senator is doing with John Cornyn and not focused on what to do to help this country. But this is why we really need to expand the map and we really need to be getting more seats come 2022, come 2024. I feel good after speaking to Jason, though, that there truly is a path. Jason's an optimist, and I like the way he talked about activism and activism both being urgent and patient

at the same time, but not defeatist. And I'm sick and tired of the fate-accompli, democratic, progressive, oh, you know, they're just going to cheat and they're going to win. Stop having that loser mentality. We can do it. I'm telling you, it was not a fluke. As Jason said, we have a Black preacher and a Jewish documentarian who won in Georgia. And that just goes to show you that the ideas of the Democrat and the fact that the Democrats have the majority combined together is ultimately the greatest formula for victory. We talked about people hanging out with each other and people who we don't want to hang out with. The person who I do want to hang out with is Isaac Dover. Again, we mentioned at the beginning, but Isaac wrote the new book, Battle for the Soul, Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump. Excited to talk to

Isaac. We'll be right back after these short messages. What's up, Midas Mighty? Ben Mycelis here, joined by my brothers. One of the things I am most proud about over the recent weeks is the new, improved, and revamped Midas merch store. And the Midas merch is absolutely crushing it from hats to t-shirts to mugs to masks. You name it. We have it at the Midas merch shop and we appreciate the support. I mean, we're selling out most of that gear almost instantaneous. We got sake bomb designs. We got Vaxxed and Relaxed, the fan favorite. We got Be Mighty. We got Club Democracy. You know what's funny about club democracy, guys? That one really

set off Republicans, probably because democracy is a dirty word to them. So when they say, hey, democracy, they get really angry. But that's why I like to say, and it's half jokingly, honestly, Midas merch might be the best GQP repellent out there. Talk about not wanting anybody to think you're a Republican. You rock the club democracy shirt. You wear a Vaxxed and Relaxed mask. No one's going to think you watch Tucker Carlson. That's all I'm saying. Absolutely. And you left out my favorite design too, the shout out to the Midas Mighty. That's become a fan favorite catchphrase. So hey, if you're interested, if you want to get some merch, help support us, help support the brothers,

please check out store.midastouch.com. That's store.m-e-i-d-a-s-t-o-u-c-h.com and get your Midas Touch gear today. Welcome back to the Midas Touch podcast. We are joined by Isaac Dover, award-winning journalist, lead political correspondent for The Atlantic, and the author of a new book, Battle for the Soul, inside the Democrats' campaign to defeat Trump, which was published in May of 2021 by Penguin Random Out. Isaac, welcome to the Midas Touch podcast. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here. So let's talk about this battle and what inspired you, you know, to write the book, I guess.

What was the main conclusion from the book about the Democrats battle? Could the Democrats fight or the Democrats still completely detached from winning, even though they happened to just pull this one off, in my view, thankfully. I think it's sort of both of those, right? The Democrats could fight, and there's a lot of reinvigoration that happened over the Trump years. But to think that this is all done and settled, when you look at the election results of how, just on the numbers, a 50-50 Senate, losses in the House, Joe Biden winning the popular vote by 7 million, but losing enough voters still that in just a few states, if it had switched a combined 77,000 votes, Trump would have won the Electoral College still.

That's reason for Democrats to be concerned. And the other thing to think about is that it's not clear what the Biden, whether there's someone who can knit together a coalition the way that Biden did, if that person is not Joe Biden. And some of the stuff that I get to the end of the book, but I'll tell you, this book was in process from 2018. That's when I started working on it. And in some ways, it was moving from even election night 2016. I was covering Hillary Clinton's party, wasn't much of a party, obviously, by the time that the results started coming in on election night 2016. And I, at about 10 o'clock at night, I realized that I was going to have to head back to Washington and got myself to the White House by the time that Obama spoke the next day. But as I'm leaving the Javits Center, I sent an email to the same email to a bunch of different people who worked in the Obama White House.

And the email was this just a subject line. Do you have a plan? There was nothing in the body of the email. Almost everybody I sent it to didn't respond to me at all. One person wrote back and just wrote, nope. And that is sort of the essence of what was going on, right? The shock of Trump winning and trying to get through that. And so the book starts on election night 2016, not with that exact moment, but with moments more interesting than what was happening to me as Obama and Biden themselves are watching what's going on and starting to process it, but not, but then it goes deeper than, oh, it's so

crazy that Trump won, starting to look at all the things that went wrong for Democrats that enabled all of that to happen. And then how various people tried various ways to fix it. And so anything surprise you though, as you're writing the book? You know, I guess one of the evergreen aspects, which I which I guess could be good for like our podcast and for people who cover politics, but is bad for America, is that there's so much fucked up things going on in the country. And right after you have this battle, you know, of Democrats defeating Trump, you still have this virulent strain of Trumpism and Republicans, you know, completely kowtowing and just Brett likes to say, saying the silent part out loud, but just outright embracing fascism now and that there legitimately is like a I don't know how else you describe it, a fascist party that wears American flags around them and kind of a pro-democracy kind of element. Did you see did you think that after this election, there would still these same Republicans would

still support the loser, Donald Trump? I have been surprised. And yes, it's my job to cover politics and be smart about politics. But the extent to which people are willing to undermine the republic and question what America and fight for the next one. And I told you about what happened on election night 2016. I'll tell you that the book was supposed to be it was on a very rushed process. So I was filing chunks of chapters to my editor all through December. And the final chunk was due on January 4th. So the morning of January 4th, I sent him an email. I said, here's everything but the last chapter. Here's why.

Number one, there are these Senate races in Georgia tomorrow. I don't know what's going to happen. Doesn't look great for Democrats, but we should just figure out how to account for that and what I write. Number two, on Wednesday, there's the certification of the vote. You know, it's going to be a lot of political theater, but we have to account for that, too. you know it's going to be a lot of political theater but we have to account for that too um and also i was in conversation with the biden folks about getting an interview with him which ultimately happened but didn't happen for a while later they'd said probably the first week in

january was what we could look at so i i was wrong about everything that's why i don't make predictions publicly but i'll tell you what happened i think we all learned not to make predictions at this point i mean but but so i go up to Wilmington on the morning of January 6th, and I think with the idea of, let me write about what's going on from the perspective of Biden. And he was going to give this speech that was, you know, his counter-programming was that he was going to talk about like small business investment. And I had gone to an event that Kamala Harris was doing on that Monday evening on January 4. She like went to pick up Italian food from a restaurant in DC to show that we're supporting our local businesses. And I said to her,

does this seem like a coup? And she said, let me tell you something, Joe Biden and I won the election, we're going to be inaugurated on January 20. And she kind of dismissed it like that. Okay. So then we're sitting all the reporters waiting for Biden to come out. That's right. Right when he was supposed to come out was when everything started. And of course, all the reporters are sitting around and we're like, did you see this? And we're looking at each other's computers. Which one are you watching? You've got the CNN feed. You've got the Yahoo fleet. And it was crazy. Biden finally came out and he spoke and uh and tried to say something that made sense of it um and i i live in dc we're in wilmington i was

expecting to drive home that night uh but because they put a curfew in place i was worried that i wouldn't be able to get home so i stayed overnight in wilmington and uh then the next day, Biden spoke again, he spoke more extensively. And as I'm heading into that, to that speech, I get an email from my book editor that says, actually, we're going to push everything back a couple of weeks, and you're going to need to write through this. So your question, Ben, did I expect this? No. And like, the proof of that I didn't expect this is that they're the last 50 pages of the book, it's only a 500 page book, a 10th of this book was not, it wasn't on the proposal for the book. It wasn't on the outline for the book. It wasn't something that we had conceived of until after the book was supposed

to be done because we could not, even with all of this craziness, to see how this played out was shocking. And I ended up doing an interview with Biden at the beginning of February, and I asked him about it. And he spoke about what was going on. And he spoke, Charlottesville is the moment that changes everything for him and makes him decide to run. But he said to me, there's a direct line from Charlottesville to January 6th, right? And that's what you see going on here. And that's, of course, also him speaking in retrospect. But one of the questions that I asked him then, and I think it's one that he continues to grapple with is, how do you have conversations with Republicans who voted to overturn the election results, even that night after the Ryan habit? I think it's a

really difficult question. And he had sort of an answer for me, but not really an answer because, and I don't think it was just him being political. He's obviously a good politician, but how do you make sense of that? What'd he say? What was the answer? I'm sorry. Okay. What he said to me, I didn't mean to, that wasn't meant to be a cliffhanger, but you will read. What he said to me was, he said, look, he started off and he said something like, you expect people to be in the second edition of Profiles of Courage, but it's awful hard. And he's trying to, he like went back and talked about his first Senate run in 1972 and how he's running. George McGovern's, uh, on the ticket then.

And, uh, McGovern is farther left than, than Biden was then certainly. And Biden is, he says like, look, I distanced myself from McGovern on some things, but I didn't have to worry about him being so vindictive and coming after me. And so he's like trying to understand what you do with these people. He doesn't Joe Biden doesn't want to hate anyone. He doesn't want to say bad things about anyone. But he is really, really dismayed about this. And you look at the comments that he's made even just in the last couple of days, the Memorial Day speech, I think in very stark terms, right? Where he said, like, this is about whether democracy functions here. And he said, it happens that it's also the title

of this book, right? But he said, democracy is the soul of America, right? And that he has to find a way to make government work to make people believe in it again. Otherwise, we're going to get more of what this all was. When Vice President Harris said to you that, you know what, on January 20th, we're going to be inaugurated, everything's okay. I feel like that's kind of a through line and in how the Democrats, at least from a public point of view, are approaching a lot of this craziness. Like, you know, it's sort of a sideshow, you know, no need to panic, no need to worry. But you being embedded in all of this, do you think that's a good strategy? Do you think people need to be on more alert every time we hear, oh, Trump says he's being reinstated in

August? You know, every time we hear this crazy stuff, should we be, you know, DEFCON 5 red alert, this is it, like we need to have our guard up or is it, you know what, our institutions are actually stronger than we may perceive? I think it's a really hard question, honestly, because I think that there, you know, you go through the Trump years

and there are so many things where it seemed like if that had happened in a vacuum, we would have been all of us collectively losing our shit. Right. And should have been. But because each one of them was happening, it was always this question of like, is this the thing that you completely freak out about? Right now, I think a riot in the Capitol that that that's not only like DEF CON, like that's whatever, to go up or down. Truthfully, I don't even know where I pulled that term from, to be honest. It's like spinal tap then, right? Like you turn it up to 11, right? Like that's where that has to be. But Biden's thinking, and it's because of who he is and how he sees the world and how he

sees politics, is that if you don't make the fight happen, they won't fight with you in the same way. It eventually over time lowers the temperature. So I think that when you see the way that he's responded to some of this stuff, people say, oh, he doesn't get it. He's oblivious. He knows what's happening, right? Remember, the Republicans went after, they stood by Trump when Trump went after his son and what led to the first impeachment. That's very personal for Biden, right? Even though he didn't want to impeach Trump, he didn't think that impeaching Trump, impeaching a president makes him uncomfortable, right? So he got pushed to be in favor of it. But he saw what happened then. And he saw the way that they were standing by Trump all the way through, again, even for many of them after the riot happened. He knows what's going on.

He's not oblivious to this at all. I think that the trick for the Republicans has proven to be that they don't know exactly how to attack him when he's doing this. He's not fighting with them. And then you see that they say stuff like, oh, well, we could work with him, but his staff is doing it. You know, he is telling his staff exactly what to do. When they don't make super compromises over the rescue plan or the infrastructure deal, that's not because Joe Biden's being led around by Ron Klain or Anita Dunn or Steve Ruscetti. That's because Joe Biden says, no, we're going to do this now. How that all adds up and whether there's enough of a sense of urgency, really, when you see some of the truly troubling things that are seeping into the country, I don't know. And that is something we're going to see play out. And we might not know the answer until it's too late.

Yeah, I think it's interesting watching President Biden in the role now. And I agree. I think he is a fighter. I think he is acutely aware of what is going on. I think he's acutely aware of the threats to democracy with the attacks on voting rights and everything that the Republicans are doing. But then, you know, I think you hinted at this before I saw today that he was going to give some concessions to the Republican for this infrastructure plan. And part of me wants to be like, dude, like, listen, like, I understand that you're like a traditionalist in the way you govern, but you could give them zero percent tax rates for corporations like you could you could adjust the whole bill and make it a Republican bill. They're still going to vote against you. Like, am I am I crazy here for for thinking that like he's not he can't do there is no compromise with this with the Senate? Look, I don't think you're crazy for being worried about that as a as a good Democrat. I think what the the question is, is there really a deal here or is it like what Obama went through with John Boehner over

immigration, right? Where Boehner kept saying like, oh, yeah, we want to make a deal. It's definitely in our political interest to make a deal. We want to, I think. And then he would go back to his conference and call up Obama and say, yeah, I can't get him there. And then eventually, that's what made Obama do all the executive actions that he did over immigration, because he just said, screw it, I have to act on my own. I think what you're seeing with Biden is a play that is, in addition to where his mentality is, there's a political play going on here, which is important because they keep saying, and he said it himself and other people in the White House say, that bipartisan doesn't mean getting support from Republicans on Capitol Hill. But bipartisan means getting support from Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Right. But bipartisan means having support from Republicans and independents all across the country. And so far, they have proven that there's something to that. Right. That the the opposition that they're seeing in Washington on the American rescue plan is the clearest one. Right. No Republican votes in the House. No rescue plan is the clearest one, right? Where there are no Republican votes in the House, no Republican votes in the Senate. And you see polls incredibly well among Republicans too. And that's why you have Republican members who voted against it, who are saying, hey, look at these things that I brought home, which is crazy. But like that's, and again, part of what I trace in the book is this Biden, when he gets into the race in 2019, he has this sense that I think is the more what people assume is still him, which is that he's like this guy who's going to try to calm everybody down and that he's going to work with people and kind of get America past what was happening, get a reset moment for the party and for the country and just the politics and let's move on. Something went really wrong with Trump. But what happens is

over the course of the race with the way that he's running, with the people who are running against him, the conversations that he's having, and of course, with the pandemic and seeing the way the Republicans are, is he gets this sense of his presidency now that it's going to actually be historic in itself. There's a reason that he's got Franklin Roosevelt hanging above the fireplace in the Oval Office now, because that's who he's thinking of. I really don't think that he would have had Roosevelt in that spot otherwise. And some people have asked me in conversations, like, who do you think it would have been? And the best that I can come up with is like Harry Truman, right? It's sort of like a continuation more than in and of itself. But he is for sure thinking of himself in those ways now. Did you think Biden was going to be the nominee? Or said differently? When did you think or have

a feeling that Biden would be the nominee? Well, again, this is why I don't get into the prediction business. I thought he would be in strong shape. I did think that in the fall of 2019, and I think I have the emails to prove this. I was saying this to people farther out that he would stumble and that there was not enough energy in his campaign, not enough operational expertise going on. And sure enough, that is what happened. And remember, he comes in fourth in Iowa.

He comes in fifth in New Hampshire. He's doing so badly in New Hampshire that his campaign says we got got to pull him out. And they sent him to South Carolina. Right. And there's this moment in the book where he's in New Hampshire in the morning and the campaign says he's leaving. And so he makes a stop to say goodbye to some people. And he sees that Chris Coons, the senator from Delaware, is out there in the crowd.

And he has somebody go get Coons and bring him backstage. He's known Coons for 30 years. And Coons looks at him and is like, he's never seen Joe Biden that distraught. And Biden says, you know, I did all the things that I'm supposed to do. I was the candidate. I made the speeches. I did all that. By the way, he wasn't doing a great job making the speeches, it should be said. But so he said, I did all of it. And just didn't work. It didn't work. Damn it. Like that, right? He thinks so. He thought it was over. And then he goes to Nevada. And it's all these things happened so quickly that it's hard to track it all. But what one of the moments that's in the book also is that when he's told that coming in second to Bernie Sanders by about 20 points back is good news for his campaign he's like can you explain

that to me how that's good news um and they talk him through it and it turned out to be good news because it helped convince jim cliburn to back him in south carolina which turns the whole thing around so look the answer your question is uh i i was there in Columbia, South Carolina, the night that he won the primary. Well, I'll tell you, the night before the South Carolina primary, he was doing a campaign event at a college in sort of the northern part of South Carolina. And he was doing a rope line. Joe Biden loves rope lines. And it was the weird thing about it is it was right before the pandemic hit right and it was also uh right uh it was right before he got secret service protection so we could be really up close

to him which is weird and i was like a nosy reporter um eavesdropping on every conversation that he was having and uh eventually he he saw me made contact, and he just put out his hand, shook my hand. And I looked at him and I said, so how does it feel to be winning for once? He's like, yeah, thanks, jerk. And he said to me, well, he goes like that. He put his head down. He's like, well, I don't want to jinx it just yet. That moment's in the book because it's also what happens there is that he's there's this woman who had this piece of paper she'd written about her daughter having a health problem and she needed she was too nervous to talk to him and she's got it written out and shaking and she hands it to him and he holds it tight and he looks at it and he looks at her and he says, get get get my number or give me your number because I might be able to help. And, you know, those sorts of connections are what a lot of Joe Biden is. But even then, right, like that what happened, the way it so quickly came down for him on

Super Tuesday, again, nobody knew it. They didn't know it. And Super Tuesday, he's at he's at a Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles place, shaking hands when the results come in from Massachusetts, again, four o'clock in LA where they are, but it's 7pm in Massachusetts. And right after the polls close, they call the race for him.

And that's in Elizabeth Warren's home state. Right. And, and there were the campaign shocked. And then they, and what they have planned for their big Super Tuesday night bash is a speech at a community center in Baldwin Hills. They didn't know that it was going to be a big speech. Remember, that was a speech of these two protesters that were like – excuse me, protesting Derry, Rush the Stage, and Jill Biden.

Yeah, I remember that. That was that night. But in the shot, it looks like there was a crowd there. I actually wasn't there myself. There weren't that many people there because it was not supposed to be a big night right and then all of a sudden he wakes up and he's like what the hell is this right and meanwhile right and meanwhile right for the week leading up to that basically bernie sanders assumed that he was going to be the nominee and i was talking to the bernie sanders people right after it all fell apart from them. And they were like,

they're flabbergasted is too weak a word for it. They were just like, what happened? How did this, we were done. We won. And, and to,

right. He wins. I, he almost wins. Iowa comes in very, very close second Buddha judge. He wins New Hampshire. He wins Nevada.

He thought he was going to do pretty well on super Tuesday. And it's just poof gone. And all of that, it happens so, so quickly. The title of the chapter in the book is 72 Hours of Changed History, because that's what it was. South Carolina was on a Saturday. Super Tuesday was three days later. And it all changed that quick. So wild. So Biden gets the nomination, wins the presidency, thank God. Do you think anyone else on that stage, you know, that was up for the nomination could have won the presidential election other than President Biden? Look, I mean, it's the big what ifs, right? Like, there's so many things that go into that. Would there have been a pandemic then too?

I don't know. One of the things that I was hearing in the early days of the pandemic, sort of this time last year, maybe even a little bit earlier, was I would start to hear from some of the campaigns like, well, Mike Bloomberg would have been able to make the argument about management. Elizabeth Warren was talking about like having a plan for everything. Bernie Sanders was talking about transforming society in this way that we're all talking about it now. Pete Buttigieg would have been able to say like, well, we do need something completely different from what's going on. They all have their arguments for how it would work.

I don't know. I'm not really sure. But again, Biden in the electoral college terms barely won. And that is something that really, it seems to me when Democrats think about where this election leaves them. And the book ends in February, but it doesn't say like, the end, rock into the sunset, you know, everything's done, right? Like,

is that now with everything that happened, and all of this turmoil and churn and all the crises that the party went through, where does that leave things? Will someone else be able to build something that'll do what Biden did? I think it's important to note that Biden ran ahead of almost every Democratic of people who just vote for president and then don't vote for other things. But also, a lot of it is that Biden's brand seems to have been better than the Democratic Party's. And so what I mean, this is a question, I guess it goes to you guys and to lots of other involved Democrats, who how do you win when Joe Biden isn't there? Which, look, to your point, that anybody, the question was originally, how are you going to win when Joe Biden is there, right? And there are a lot of moments in the book that I track of Obama behind closed doors. And one of them is early out, he's looking at Biden, and he's saying, like, I don't know, I mean, the guy's old, he's rusty, he doesn't have a lot of

swagger, because it's really going to work. And that's in two years, that's the shift that's happened here. And I think, you know, I think swagger aside, I think the thing that sort of links, you know, Obama and Biden and their success is their ability to connect with people. Like you said, Biden was the guy who went up to people during those rope lines. He was the guy who said, let me look into that. Let me see how I can help you. So I think I think that's to me, that's the future of the Democratic Party. It's showing how they're actually making an impact on people's lives. And, you know, I think that's how you sort of bring these various wings of the party that you witnessed together. But where did you see the energy of the party when you were out on the campaign trail? Like there's obviously there's the

Bernie Sanders wing. There's the Joe Biden wing. There's the Buttigieg. Did one of them have like, did you look at one of them and say, oh, yes, that's the Democratic Party, you know, in 10 years from now? Yeah, it's hard. First of all, the campaign trail, like we got all the way through the primaries, right? And then everything got cut short, cut off. And then there were those car rallies or whatever the Biden was doing. That's not a good way to get a picture of anything. But in the primaries, I don't know. It was a mix of what was showing up to the Buttigieg and Sanders and Warren rallies, I guess is probably what I'd say. Right. And and not for the most part what was showing up to the Biden rallies, it seemed.

But again, I guess I was proven wrong here, right? But Brett, I think that the point that you're getting at of like Democrats need to show that they are having an effect on things is really, really, really important, right? Because there are two sets of focus groups. It's the same focus groups, essentially, that I track in the book. One of them, it's with the famed Obama-Trump voters, right? People who, how did this happen? They voted for Obama in 2008 and for Obama in 2012 and then voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

It's really confusing to a lot of people. But for people looking to win campaigns, they are key, right, those voters. And there's a set of these focus groups done right after Trump wins in 2016 that they go to Iowa, Iowa, which was always a special place for Obama because he'd won the caucuses there and because they've been the most Obama to Trump counties that had flipped in the country. And there's this scene where there are people talking, there's a woman who says, yeah, you know, I voted for Obama because I want him to go in there and make all these changes. But then he couldn't do it. They stopped him. And so now I need Trump to go in there and do it. And there's people who didn't really, they were sort of turned off by Trump personally, but really liked the idea of someone's going to go.

And it's actually because of the resistance to Obama, they wanted Trump. That's like, that's weird, right? They bring those results back to Obama and Obama says, his response is very Obama, just like this. I get it. And that's the best Obama impression that I can manage.

Not bad, not bad. Usually I can only do this one. It's better than Ben's impressions, I'll tell you that. But then there are another set of focus groups, again, with Obama-Trump voters that are being done right before the election in November. Now, these are voters, it's a subset, those that are undecided about Trump and Biden. And they ask him, like, what do you think about Trump? What do you think about Biden?

And the gloss of what they say is basically this. They say about Trump, I don't like him. I know I voted for him. I don't like him. Every which I voted for him. I don't like him. Every which way he seems terrible. But he seems like he knows what to do with the economy.

And it's not his fault what happened with the pandemic, but it would be him who could get us, get the economy back in shape when it happens. I don't think he can get us through the pandemic, get us out of it. And they look at Biden and they say, he's a good man. I don't think he knows what's going on with the economy.

And I'm a little bit concerned about what's going on with defund the police and these other things, socialism that I keep hearing about. But he does seem like he's the one who can get us out of the pandemic. And those voters broke more for Biden than they did for Trump. And because you look at the election results, that's an important group of voters to have won. The way that relates to now the same thing of getting things done is it's up to Biden now to make people feel the way that they felt when they got those checks a couple weeks ago, right? And to keep feeling that way, to have them feel like

the schools are going to be open in the fall, that the pandemic's under control, that the economy is coming back. And it's coming back, not just in a way that they'll see like, oh, record numbers on the Dow Jones or whatever, but ways that they feel it in their lives. Totally. Because so much of Trump's power, and I talked to Biden about this too, but it's not just from him. So much of Trump's power is people just feeling like they were getting fucked. Like nobody cared. They couldn't pay their mortgage. They couldn't pay for their student loans or for their kids' tuition or whatever it may be. And nobody cared. And they turned to Trump because he seemed like he was

going to do something about it. What Biden said to me is it's up to Democrats to talk to those people and to make them feel it. And that's what you see his focus on. Don't talk, it's not about saying all these big things that you want to do. If none of it gets done, you have to make people feel it. Because otherwise, I think we're going to have a complete, complete collapse of faith in our government and he and our country. And that's, that's yet another thing on his shoulders. Yeah. And I think, you know, people more than ever are seeing the tangible effects of the change in leadership. I think, you know, you'll have those certain people who are rooted in, you know, everything's the Democrats fault and China's fault. And, you know, that will never change. But I think you'll have some people who realize, hey, like I went on

vacation this week. Hey, I got my job back. Hey, I went out to a party and I saw, you know, family and I saw friends who I haven't been able to see in a year and look at all these businesses that are open. And I hope that people keep in mind why, you know, and that this is because that's part of their job to manage. And it's part of the job of people like us who are messaging and what our lives are today as opposed to what they are one year ago. Now, before we let you go, craziest story from the campaign trail, funniest, quirkiest. Is there any sort of moment, any sort of weird thing that a candidate did that you're like, oh, OK, OK, he's into that? I'll give you one moment that got cut from the book. How about that?

Oh, it's an exclusive. You're hearing it here first, everybody on the Midas Touch podcast. Just like capture the absurdity of it. I was with Bloomberg on Super Tuesday because he thought he was going to do well. And then that worked out. Yeah, that chapter title is a billion dollars for Samoa, because that's

how much he spent and what he won. But he landed in Florida, in West Palm Beach, because he was like two miles away from Mar-a-Lago for an event that was supposed to be trolling Trump. And by the time he lands, it's like three or four hours before the polls close. He's not a dumb man. He knew it was over. And there was just this moment of him looking up at the sky and just not saying anything.

I covered him when he was mayor. It was just seeing him frozen like that. You see the regret. And then he turns to an aide and he says, are my clubs on the plane and that was it on to the next we had to cut it just because there was a lot going on in that chapter and just to make it make sense though but yes that was like this craziness of like the billionaire who's like you know what fuck it i spent a billion dollars but like at least i'll go golfing when i'm

down in the end he flew back to new New York in the middle of the night and didn't go golfing. But seeing that thought process play out. That's great. And the book is Battle for the Soul Inside the Democrats' Campaign to Defeat Trump. Isaac Dover, thank you so much for joining us on the Midas Touch podcast. Thanks for having me. This is great. We'll be right back after this. Welcome back to the Midas Touch podcast. You know what? We're giving people a lot of info here. We've done these back-to-back guests, great guests. Let me ask you too many guests, too much info. Just right. Tell me Goldilocks. Is Goldilocks the name for our listeners? No, Jordy. Oh, okay. I, you know what I think for the Friday episodes, I think this was really nice. Cause it gives people like people are busy. They got chores to do. They got a weekend ahead of them. You know,

they could put the podcast down, come back to it. It feels like two new podcasts for them over the weekend. How's my porridge? Goldilocks. Jordy says it's just think it's just right. I mean, truth is golden. Goldilocks. No, I get it. It's very funny. I do need to correct something before the DEF CON people start coming after us on this. I didn't step in because I didn't want to ruin the flow. DEF CON 5, Brett, is the lowest DEF CON level. DEF CON 1, believe it or not, is actually the highest. So before the DEF CON community started to get mad at you, I just want to correct it here first on the pod. It's a good correction, actually. It's a great correction. But like I said, I admit it. I said, I don't even know where that phrase came from. I don't even know what it

is. Sometimes you just pull phrases out and you're like, where did I get that word from? I didn't even use that term ever. I'm a guy who says DEF CON. That's me. Okay. I guess that's me. That's basically the entire podcast. When you break it down, you're like, where are these words coming from? Words are just coming out of our mouths wow i mean i'm just we're getting very like existential existential this is the way life works okay anyway but let's talk about existential for a second let's let's conclude on some existentiality and it is the existential threat of crazy QAnon zombie fascism taking over our country. OK, I think that when you watch these zombie movies, I think they prepare these zombie apocalypse movies. we're seeing with Trump and his groupies of destruction and death and chaos and hate, which is really what they are. But could you believe, I know it's a weird way to end

the podcast, but we have to just at least reflect on how delusional former guy is, that he's outright talking to reporters about how he and other Senator David, former Senator David Perdue, former Senator Martha McSally, how they will shortly be reinstated in their positions. Now, look, on one hand, we could view this as just showing how stupid and make a mockery of it. But let's not forget, that's the same language of insurrection. That's the signaling to the crazy base. When he's saying reinstated, they're talking about what Flynn was saying at the QAnon conference. They're talking about a Myanmar-style coup. That's what they're talking about, these sicko people. And that's why we need a band together. We need to do something.

We can't just be upset and whiny. Oh my gosh, woe is me that they're out there. We need to get active. You need to be talking to your friends. If you're listening to this podcast, I'm so grateful you're a podcast listener, but you also have the power and your power is frankly no different than the power that Brett, myself and Jordy and Goldilocks have. I mean, for us, we just talked about words coming out of our mouth and that being a surprising thing. That's very basic stuff, ladies and gentlemen. You have the same power to do what we did. What do you think? Final thoughts, Brett and Jordy. Final thoughts. I think you're exactly right. I think at this point, after in a post-January 6 world, there is no threat, there is no comment that should be taken lightly. And I think it's easy to look at something like that and laugh and go, oh, what an idiot. He thinks he's going to be reinstated. But I think you're absolutely right in that what he is doing is he is signaling to his base that if they find a way to get him back into power through whatever means, whether peaceful or violent, he would accept that. And I think that's scary because we saw on January 6th,

the effects of language like that, and that he can actually motivate people to fight on his behalf. Now, do I think anything's going to come of this? No. In terms of, is Trump going to be reinstated? No, absolutely not. He's absolutely delusional in that respect. But I worry about the violence that could come even if on a small scale from him doing this. But yes, he does have a group of rabid fans. And I think Ben, the zombie analogy, I think is spot on. I actually do think we are like living in a real life zombie movie and they infect each other. And like, oh, they're they multiply and there are more of them. And when you try to get rid of them more of them pop up it's the zombie analogy is apt also zombies don't have brains that's the zombies don't have brains they eat brains they eat they eat brains in this case fauci to bring it back to the top they eat brains they eat the smart people and so what we need to

do is we just need to be on guard we need to be doing this but we also need to be doing the work every day to preserve our democracy doing everything that Kander said to fight for voting rights, because that is the number one mission that all you could do is fight for voting rights and register to vote and make sure all your friends are registered to vote. Let's start now. Why start? Why start a month before the election? Call five friends. Yeah, you just listened to a podcast for 90 or so minutes, which we love. Keep listening. Tell your friends to listen. Make sure you tell your colleagues, your co-workers to listen. But now you're inspired. You're inspired. So take that inspiration and bring it to action. Goldilocks,

what are your final thoughts? Shout out to the Midas Mighty!