The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, December 21

Episode Date: December 22, 2017

Republicans are celebrating their first major legislative accomplishment since President Trump took office - the tax bill. Congress is pushing other big questions - including how to address the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and fund the government long-term - until the new year. More women are running for Congress in 2018 than ever before. And, can't let it go. This episode: host/congressional reporter Scott Detrow, congressional reporter Kelsey Snell, political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben and national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, it's Scott Detrow, host of the NPR Politics Podcast. We're doing a live show in D.C. on January 18th at the Warner Theater, and we'd love for you to be there. You can learn more and get tickets at nprpresents, all one word, dot org. Hi, this is Abigail Jonk here. I'm calling from my graduation ceremony from Florida State University. This podcast was recorded at 145 on Thursday, December 21st. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at NPR.org, the NPR One app, or on your local public radio station. Okay, here's the show.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast here with our weekly roundup of political news. The biggest news this week, it might be one of the bigger stories of the year, is that Republicans finally passed their tax bill. On this vote, the yeas are 224 and the nays are 201. The motion is adopted. But life moves on, and now Congress and the president have to agree on a way to fund the government passed tomorrow. So we'll talk about all of that. Plus, of course, can't let it go. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Kelsey Snell. I also cover Congress. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter.

And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. All right. So we all expected this to be a busy news week. On the scale of one to ten, how much has the news of this week met your expectations? Because on some fronts, pretty newsy, other fronts, a little bit anticlimactic. I'll take like a seven and a half because I'm really exhausted by all of the news. But the tax bill itself felt like it was super anticlimactic. I've been covering this for seven plus years. And to have it just end without drama felt really strange. With minor drama, you mean? Yes, with minor trauma.

Very minor bird rule related drama. Well, there was the UFO news. We'll get to that later. We'll get to that later. But let's leave aside the UFO news, in which case I'll put it at a five. I mean, when nothing absolutely earth shattering happens in a week, I'm going to say that even if a major tax bill passes, that's par for the course, I'm saying. We're grading on a curve. Yeah, I think it's a five because what happened was what was supposed to happen. Yeah. Republicans are supposed to cut taxes. And we didn't have any international incidents caused

by a tweet. We didn't have any new culture wars started by a tweet. I would say this was relatively quiet. OK, well, let's get into what did happen. And let's start with the scene from the White House yesterday. President Trump is standing with Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and a ton of other House and Senate Republicans celebrating the bill's passage. Here's President Trump. But I want to thank Mitch McConnell. I want to thank. What a job.

What a job. And I want to thank Mitch McConnell. I want to thank. What a job. What a job. And I want to thank Paul. They're going to speak. They're going to say a few words. But Paul, Ryan and Mitch, it was a little team. We just got together and we would work very hard, didn't we? It seems like it was a lot of fun. It's always a lot of fun when you win. Kelsey, two questions for you. One real question. But first, I just feel like we should note the way that Trump was calling out all of the different Republicans to the microphone and how like sometimes it got pretty awkward. Yeah, it got particularly awkward with the folks from Alaska. The president was seemed like he was calling out Dan Sullivan, the senator from Alaska. But Don Young, the congressman, was behind him and tried to correct him and say, no, no, I'm Don, which was really awkward. But you know what? Republicans seem genuinely happy and excited to be there. And it was kind of funny to me that only senators really and, you know, the top ranking Republicans in the House got to make it onto the main stage with Trump. There's a little bit of jockeying for who could be in front of the camera the most to celebrate this big tax win.

And the broader point here is that we've talked so much about about infighting with Trump and Mitch McConnell particularly, but but congressional Republicans as a whole. The tone of this was so much different than so much of this year. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And you saw some people who are, you know, earlier in the year were distancing themselves from Trump standing right behind him. So Republican Senator Dean Heller from Nevada was right behind the president, was in all of those shots. And there were a lot of questions earlier in the year, particularly around health care, about whether or not Heller needed to be distancing himself from the president if the president was going to be toxic to his very, very difficult reelect. And then there he was right behind him. So, Mara, let's walk through all of the big things that this bill does and how big of a deal they are

politically and obviously the corporate tax rates, the changes to the individual tax bracket. This bill opens up oil exploration in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, ANWR. That's something that Republicans have wanted to do for more than 30 years. How big of an accomplishment is this for them? I think it's a really big accomplishment. This is a very conservative bill, and it has a lot of things on the conservative wish list stuck in it. Number one, of course, lowering taxes, but doing it in a supply side way, saying if you cut taxes for corporations and for wealthy individuals, the theory is that Republicans believe in, and most economists don't, is that

you're going to goose the economy, you're going to get so much growth that it's going to trickle down to ordinary people who are going to have their wages go up and get more jobs. So that's one big thing. ANWR is a big thing because, of course, the Alaska delegation has wanted to drill in this wildlife refuge for a long time. And don't forget, the individual mandate in Obamacare is repealed in this bill. And that doesn't necessarily end Obamacare, as President Trump said, but it does drive a stake through the heart of it. And even as Obamacare got more and more popular this year, and the conversation was on parts of Obamacare that people liked, that remained one part of Obamacare that a lot of voters didn't like. That's the single most unpopular part, that people are forced through a tax penalty to buy insurance even if they didn't want it. But I think the theme of that for this week is Obamacare is dead, long live Obamacare. Because President Trump says we've killed Obamacare. On

the other hand, he is also committed to signing three different pieces of legislation that are going to keep Obamacare going, basically fulfilling his promise to Susan Collins, who demanded these things in return for her vote. But he's going to sign a bill that keeps the subsidies going to insurance companies, something that he said he was going to stop, but he's going to sign a bill that keeps the subsidies going to insurance companies, something that he said he was going to stop, that he didn't like. And also he's going to sign a bill creating high risk pools, which are going to be something that Susan Collins and other Republicans think will solve the problem of getting rid of the individual mandate. So, Danielle, we're talking about accomplishments in the sense that Republicans have campaigned on

these issues. Republicans in Congress have long set goals of obtaining these issues. The question is, will they be rewarded or punished by voters for this next year? Do we have any sense of how voters view this and what voters are thinking about this bill being passed? I reported on one poll from Quinnipiac this last week that found that around half of Americans disapprove of this bill. Around a quarter said they approve. The rest either didn't know or didn't have an answer. What's interesting, though, is that it appears, at least according to one poll, that as Americans learned more about this bill, the more they disliked it. CNN found in November that 45 percent of Americans disapproved.

Then in December that 55 percent disapproved, whereas the approval number barely budged. It might have ticked up a little bit, but it sure seems like Americans have problems with it. And, you know, one thing that many Americans might even be wrong about is what will happen with their taxes, at least in the short term. We got a new report this week from the Tax Policy Center. They're a think tank that looks at this kind of policy. They found that overwhelmingly, Americans' taxes would either get cut or stay the same next year. Only around 5%, I believe, stand to get an increase. Now, a much larger share of Americans think they are going to get a tax increase under this bill. So

some people might be pleasantly surprised. So I should say before Kelsey asks you a question about this, I should say that we're making a point to talk about the political dynamics of this today, because first of all, this is going to be a huge issue in next year's midterms. But also, we've dug a lot into the particulars of the bill. And I would recommend the last podcast in your feed for a look at what was in this final measure. There's one thing I want to add before we get on to the Capitol Hill politics, and it's this. It's that before the 2018 election, many Americans might see bigger paychecks, right? Because the IRS is going to adjust its withholding tables, the amount of money that it pulls out of your paycheck

for your income taxes, right? So that might make a lot of Americans happier. The question for me is this. One, how much does an extra $100, $200, whatever you might end up getting in your paycheck, move your vote, move your political allegiances, move your willingness to vote? Aside from that, this is what's interesting to me. A lot of people, especially Democrats, dislike this bill because it will, at least it looks like it will, overwhelmingly help rich people more than less rich people. But when I'm getting that money in my paycheck, I don't see the rich people. It doesn't really directly affect me. How much will that affect people going forward? I'm curious.

What's so interesting to me is that it didn't work when Obama passed a tax cut. It was in everybody's paycheck. It was doled out a little bit at a time. It was part of the stimulus bill. And people didn't feel that they'd gotten a tax cut. It was in everybody's paycheck. It was doled out a little bit at a time. It was part of the stimulus bill. And people didn't feel that they'd gotten a tax cut. If people see their expenses going up for college or health care, they tend to get angry about that and don't say, oh, Donald Trump gave me a tax cut. But the other thing that's interesting in terms of the Republicans' overall approval ratings and Trump's, Trump gets pretty good numbers for handling the economy. That's the only place where I think he's above water. But his approval ratings are still in the mid-30s, even though we have this really strong economy.

So I guess my question is, will voters feel grateful enough that it will change their perception of the president? I have a hunch that their perception of the president has nothing, very little to do with the economy, because the economy is good. It has to do with his behavior and his divisiveness. And that's not going to be solved by getting a little more money in your paycheck. But Kelsey, going back to what Daniel was saying about the polling, how this has gotten less popular as debate has progressed, what are Republicans saying about that fact and how they're going to sell this bill once it's become law next year? Sure. Republicans are saying over and over that they're confident that people will

recognize that they are getting more money back. Our colleague Sue Davis and I sat down with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell earlier today, and he said that there is essentially a perception problem. If you're talking about the politics of this, we'll have a political debate in the fall about whether this was to the advantage of the American people. We feel very comfortable making that argument. Obviously, they saw it differently. This ended up being a straight party line exercise. But we're very comfortable with this and think we can make an argument to the American people that this was to their advantage. Yeah. And part of the argument that he's trying to make is he told us that he has a piece of paper that he's carrying

around doing a slew of year-end interviews. And McConnell is saying, if you take a family of four making $73,000 a year, they will save about $2,000. And he keeps making this point that inside of Washington and in big cities, that doesn't sound like a lot of money, but 58% will feel like a lot to people. And we just have to wait for those people to see it and feel it. The problem is, it's not entirely certain that A, as Mara points out, they will see it and feel it, or B, that it'll happen in time for voters to go to the polls and say, connect the idea, I got a tax cut with, thank you, Republicans, I'm going to vote for you. And, you know, don't forget that some of the money is going to be returned to them in their paychecks. But in terms of actually filing taxes where you get to take double the standard deduction,

you get to see what happened to your property taxes and the fact that they're not fully deductible anymore, that doesn't happen till April 2019. In other words, the taxes we're all going to pay this coming April are for the 2017 fiscal year. What do we call that? Not everything. Income year. Right. And I know Ivanka Trump did an interview where she said she's so excited about people who are going to see all this tax benefits to them in April.

Well, she's talking about April of 2019. That's after the next election. Well, speaking of doing your taxes and not just speaking of what you pay in taxes, one thing that I'm curious about is come April 2019, people who are expecting, I mean, the word that is often used is reform or overhaul or what have you. Simplification. Yes, exactly. Are people going to expect doing their taxes to become an appreciably different process? Because at least as far as I can see on the individual side, like you have some tweaks here and there, you have a bigger standard deduction, but it's not going to change. They promised a postcard. Right. I mean, I'm curious, you know, when I sit down in front of TurboTax in 2019, how... They said you didn't need TurboTax anymore.

So I don't know if that can become a rallying cry for Democrats. They said you didn't need TurboTax, but you still do. Some of this is also just a fundamental difference between what Republicans think their voters want and what Democrats think the people in the middle, the undecideds and the people who are leaning away from Trump want. So McConnell and other Republicans will point out that their voters wanted them to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And they think that part of the tax bill, getting rid of the individual mandate, does that for them and helps them fulfill two promises. So in some ways, they're talking past each other about what the goals are

here. Kelsey, how did Mitch McConnell put this into the broader context of this year in your interview? Because so much of this year, as we mentioned, was was McConnell and other Republicans failing over and over again to enact the big reforms that they had talked about and campaigned on and had a chance to do since they control all aspects of federal government. I'm curious what he said about how this bill changes that. So he's calling it their second biggest victory, their biggest victory being the fact that Republicans have made a significant impact on federal courts, including getting Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court. This is a big victory for Republicans who say that this is a long term thing that will change the face of how courts decide every legal case across the country.

And so for McConnell, tax reform is a big victory, but so were some of these judicial changes. But he also realizes that this was a really partisan year and he doesn't want next year to be the same. I think we've got some sound of McConnell talking about that. This has not been a very bipartisan year. Most of our big accomplishments, we largely had to do Republicans only. But Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, the record number of circuit judges, 12, is the most number of circuit judges confirmed in the first year of a president since the circuit court system was established in 1891. Most of the regulatory changes we made were one party only.

And, of course, the tax bill was one party only. What I'd love to see going into year two, most of the other issues that most of us are talking about can't be done one party only. And those issues are things like immigration reform and redoing the entire transportation funding system for the country. Those are the two big things that McConnell names. And he also wants to look into Dodd-Frank regulations, so Wall Street regulations. Those are the things that are not particularly, aside from immigration, things that don't usually get people super excited. They're not the sexiest

political things, but they're probably the most doable out of any of the things that, you know, if you're trying to look at a list of bipartisan things, those three probably probably the most doable out of any of the things that, you know, if you're trying to look at a list of bipartisan things, those three probably reach near the top. So around the same time that you and Sue were talking to McConnell, Chuck Schumer and other Democrats held a year-end press conference. And Schumer, in kind of a Schumer-esque way, where he tried to make a joke and flubbed it, gave his response to how he sees Republicans in the Senate this year and how he sees the tax bill fitting in. So let's just listen to that for the kind of counter-argument.

Republicans haven't accomplished much, but what they have accomplished has only benefited the wealthy and well-connected. It reminds me of the old Woody Allen scene. Woody's at the diner with someone, and this guy says to him, you know, these portions are small. No, sorry, I got it backwards. The guy says to him, this food is terrible. But Woody said, yeah, but the portions are small.

I should say he still got the joke wrong, but anyway, he goes on. The Republicans haven't accomplished much, but what they've accomplished has benefited the wealthy and well-connected. Republicans will argue they had a great year, pointing to three things. Judge Gorsuch, their use of the Congressional Review Act to roll back regulations, and their tax bill. All three of those things will help the rich and powerful. They'll help corporations, but they won't help the middle class. So, Mara, I was wondering about this because we had been hearing so much that Republicans felt like this tax overhaul was a must pass for them electorally.

But isn't it almost as strong of an argument for Democrats to say the only thing they did was cut taxes for the wealthy as opposed to they didn't do anything. Well, sure. Republicans felt that they had to pass this tax bill because if they didn't, their base would be demoralized and their donors would close their wallets. So it was an absolutely existential thing. And that's the way they talked about it. Now the Democrats get to make the argument. They just did it for the rich. They didn't do it for you. And then we fight it out and we see what people actually feel.

Right. And I mean, on top of all of that, when we look at the 2018 election, Republicans do have an uphill battle right now by 13 points against Democrats. That is, when you ask Americans, you know, when you vote for the House next year, who are you going to vote for, the Democrat or the Republican? By 13 points, people tend to say the Democrat right now. Republicans have to win that back if they want to hold on to this. Except, except the last time Republicans were in this kind of hole on the generic ballot, which was back in 2006, the Democrats did get the House back. However, they are a lot better fortified now than they were back then. But a rule of thumb is now with redistricting, Democrats probably need to win 58% of the national vote for the House just to get 50% of the seats. So even though Republicans are behind the eight ball, they're the incumbent party, first term midterms usually hurt the incumbent party, blah, blah,

blah. They are very well fortified going into this midterm. And with that, you are getting a great preview of many episodes of the NPR Politics Podcast. You're welcome, America. So I think we're going to take a quick break here. And when we come back, we will talk about all that stuff that Congress still has to do this week, despite passing that major bill, including, yes, yet again, funding the federal government. Support for this NPR podcast and the following message come from GoToMeeting, a collaboration platform for the modern workforce. Businesses across the globe count on GoToMeeting for simple, reliable online meetings anywhere from any device. With nearly 60 million frictionless meetings

supported each year, GoToMeeting is where real work gets done. Learn more at GoToMeeting.com. Hey, y'all. It's Tamara Keith. Hey, y'all. It's Sam Sanders. And together we are Sam-era.

Sam-era. Yeah, yeah. Fun fact, when Tam and I worked together on the politics team during the campaign last year, we tried very, very hard to get a nickname for our co-hosting duo. And I do think Sam-era was the most successful, although there were others. Yeah, I liked Sam-era. It's easier than Sam and Tam or Tam and Sam. Yeah. Anyway, the whole point of that name was to show that we were, are, still are a team. Yeah. And right now, every NPR podcast you listen to, we are all working together as a team to try

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We get politics. There's slash code switch. There's so many ways. So no matter how you listen, you can support your local station and the work that all of us are doing. Yeah. Happy holidays, everybody. Happy holidays. It's like old time.

Oh, my God. I hope that's going to work. I hope it works. Okay, we are back. So every couple weeks, we seem to have a conversation about an impending government shutdown deadline. Kelsey, it is midday Thursday and it sounds like we are going to have that conversation again next month, aren't we? It does sound that way. The House is preparing and I should say to go back to our usual caveat at the top. By the time you're listening to this, all this might be resolved.

But it looks like the House is going to pass a short term spending bill that would keep the government open until January 19th. The Senate seems pretty well ready to do the same. Yes, this is just another kicking the can down the road. Choose whatever cliche you want about this. We are doing this all over again because that's kind of what we do here in Congress is do this over and over and over again. So here's my big question. It looks like DACA is not going to get resolved. It looks like even though Susan Collins was promised a vote on Obamacare stabilizations, that doesn't happen until next month. We talk so much about all the leverage that Trump gave the Democrats when he

agreed to that three-month extension in September that would put the deadline till around now. Why aren't the Democrats using this massive leverage that they got? I actually think that there's a fairly decent argument to be made that they will have more leverage in January. Well, please make that argument. Because part of what was giving them leverage was that the spending bill was probably going to line up with the debt limit. Now, there's this complicated thing that happens called extraordinary measures where the Treasury Department can make the debt limit last a little longer. Well, moving this out to January actually makes those two things line up a little bit more. And that is in Democrats' court because, as we've talked about many times in the podcast before, Republicans usually have a hard time passing big spending

bills on their own, both in the House and in the Senate. That's because, well, in the Senate, they need 60 votes to get it passed, and there are not 60 Republicans in the Senate. And in the House, there is a large block of conservatives who don't generally believe in funding the government the way that their consensus feeling within Congress is about funding the government. That involves increasing military spending and also increasing some domestic spending above these caps that were put in place back in 2011. So that puts the ball back in the Democrats' court, gives them time to say, you know, you need us to keep the government open. If the government doesn't stay open, history shows that people blame the people in power for a failure. And good luck. Right. And we also have the other big point of leverage that's caused a lot of arguments inside the Democratic family is DACA and the

deportation relief for DREAMers, which President Trump decided to abolish. He put a March deadline on that. So as that deadline gets closer and closer, the Democrats will have more leverage because we know that there is a bipartisan group in Congress that wants this deportation relief to be continued. A lot of Republicans do not want to be blamed for the deportations of a lot of young people who are brought here as sometimes infants. Danielle? Well, I have a much bigger question actually for you, Mara, because you've been covering politics longer than any of

us have. And it's the, you know, the very word shutdown, the threat of a shutdown. It seems like it happens every five seconds here in Washington. But so does it mean less now than it did, say, in the 90s? Is it less of does it send less shockwaves through the political class here than it used to? Well, I think it does, but also for some practical reasons, and I'm sure Kelsey can explain this. Since the original big shutdown in 1995, 1996, there have been more activities of the federal government that have been made shutdown proof. So some of the sting has been taken out of shutdowns because members of Congress didn't want the backlash that they got in the old days. Yeah. And some of the sting of

the threat of a shutdown seems to be going away since we see roughly every four to six months, sometimes even more often than that, we see a shutdown clock appearing on cable news and hear us talking about shutdowns on the radio and seeing it in headlines, people are growing immune to the idea that Congress might actually do it, that lots of people still get outraged by it. But I think there's been a little bit of a boy who cried wolf effect happening. The podcast's shutdown clock is more theoretical. Okay, so before we move on, I just want to walk through all the different things that are up in the air and just a quick status report. As we mentioned, DACA, there's no long-term resolution here, right?

Immigration, we're talking about something maybe in January, but still uncertain. What about the Children's Health Insurance Program, which on the state level is running out of money very quickly in a lot of places? There's money in this spending bill to keep the Children's Health Insurance Program or CHIP up and running. They think that this should be enough to cover them while they finish bigger negotiations. And on DACA, the way we understand it is that things are moving at a pretty good pace towards some sort of agreement that could be reached in January. I've talked to Republicans and Democrats who are working on this and talked to them privately about how they're feeling about this. And I have not gotten the sense from any of them that they think that there are bad faith negotiations on either

side of this. And so even McConnell said earlier today that he thought things were moving in that direction and that bipartisanship is really an option on getting something done for dreamers. And, you know, it's interesting, even though Donald Trump, in an effort to fulfill a campaign promise and please his base, did suspend DACA, he wants Congress to legislate it. In other words, he wants Congress to codify the Obama-era executive order into some kind of legislation. And don't kid yourself. I mean, President Trump, who's used some of the most divisive rhetoric on immigrants ever, will take full credit for letting these kids stay in the country.

There's a bill expiring at the end of the year that allows the federal government to do overseas electronic surveillance. What's up with that? So that is also included in the short term spending bill, and they would be kept in place in its current form through January 19th, like the rest of the spending bill. Okay. So that is all as of mid-afternoon on Thursday. If you're listening to this later in the week, let us know how right or wrong we were. We're going to take one more quick break. We'll be right back. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Google Home. There are things you need to know in the morning, like the weather, your calendar, or the news. A personal assistant can just tell you those things, like the one built into every Google Home.

Just say, hey Google, good morning, and the Google Assistant will tell you the latest forecast, traffic on your way to work, and even the headlines. It's a personalized briefing from an assistant that knows you best. It's a little help at home, like only Google can. We are back. This is one of our last podcasts of 2017. You might think that's a good thing. You might think that's a bad thing. But in 2018, there's one thing that we're going to be talking a lot about. We're going to be talking a lot about the midterms and one big storyline developing for congressional races, but also races up and down the ballot is the fact that just a ton of women are running for office. Danielle, you have been looking at this trend. You've been working on a story. What have you found?

Right. So there is a huge wave of women candidates coming in 2018. If you pay attention to politics and listen to us regularly, you probably already know that. But I think it's really important to understand just how big this is. I think this is going to be one of the biggest political stories of 2018. Right now, there are 383 women running or planning to run for the United States House and 46 for the Senate. That is massive growth. That is, at least according to the latest numbers I've seen, well over double what those numbers look like in 2016, 2014, 2012. It's much higher than even the year of the woman back in 1992. What's the general partisan breakdown of that? The growth among these offices is overwhelmingly Democratic. Okay. Yeah, right. Yes. And that's women running as Democrats.

Right. And that's really important to keep in mind here. So I went to a candidate training in Manchester, New Hampshire to see sort of what women are learning as they are learning to run for office. Because over the last year, since the 2016 election, candidate training organizations and existing programs have absolutely ballooned. And they're filling up with women who are both planning definite runs and also quite a few women who just have a vague interest and who think, you know, maybe at some point in the coming years, I want to do this. And, you know, these are very energetic sort of trainings. This one I went to was an EMILY's List training. They train Democratic women who are pro-abortion rights. And here is how the trainer, this is part of how she opened the training.

I wake up every day. The first thing I do is look at this list of members of Congress that I have, and I figure out who's sick and who's going to die. It's like Arya Stark. Because I want to replace them with you. Yes, she has a list and she's checking it. No, but I mean, like, but really this this woman, her name is Kate Coyne McCoy. She is a trainer for Emily's List. And she really got these women who are already very excited, very fired up to to get into races. There was one woman I spoke to who before the training she had told me, you know, I think it'll be about six years at least before I try to run for office.

I want to, you know, finish law school and move back home, blah, blah, blah. And midway through the training, I talked to her and she said, you know, I think I could do it much sooner. It's like these recruitment efforts, especially with women candidates, tend to work, or at least they are like there's a reason that these would particularly work with women candidates. And it's that research shows that, as one expert told me, men are more likely to wake up one day and say, I would be a great candidate. Here I go. Women do much better with some encouragement, with people saying, yes, you absolutely should run. Part of the reason that women aren't well represented is just that they are not running as often as men. Can we just clarify the sick and dying thing, in case it wasn't obvious to our listeners? I mean, she's talking about looking for open seats or seats that might be open, which are easier to run for than knocking off an incumbent. Yes, absolutely. I just wanted to make that clear. Yes.

That's a great point. It was not nearly as macabre. I mean, it sounded kind of ghoulish to me. Oh, I'm sorry. Apologies. Yes. 2004 and 2006 when she did run, she said that she went to a lot of these very specific candidate training sessions for women and said she learned a lot about how to raise funds and do other things before she did run. Democrats have for a long time had a system that that looks a lot like that. So

Senator Patty Murray was specifically in charge of finding more women to run and be elected to the Senate in the last big cycle. She went out there and she sat down with a lot of women and told them, you know, this is what it actually takes to become an elected official. And she kind of viewed herself as an emissary to people when they were running. And to get into, you know, exactly where this wave is coming from, I mean, as if we need to put words around it, let's just do it. I mean, it's the 2016 election. These women, you got the sense from a lot of them that they've really, they hit their breaking point, kind of. You know, whether it was watching Hillary Clinton lose, some women took that relatively personally. They really wanted

her to win. Of course, these are Democratic women I'm talking to. Or they saw Donald Trump win, and they were very upset. Multiple women referenced the Access Hollywood tape that really, really made women go. It fired them up. The Women's March fired them up and it really made them say, you know, I've I've really got to do something. is that the Democratic Party isn't just interested in recruiting a lot of women candidates, but they're particularly interested in recruiting women who are veterans. They think that that's something that can help them win appeal from a lot of independent voters, especially in Republican districts they need to flip. You know, just sort of the final thing I would add on this is that, you know, one woman I spoke to, her name was Deborah Altshuler. She actually has already won a race. She is in the New Hampshire State House.

And she gave me one of the best analogies I have heard for sexism in politics and how she sees women as reacting to it. Two, three, also no big deal. You kind of scoot your foot around a little bit and you adapt. But once you get up to 15, 20 pieces of sand in your shoe, now you're uncomfortable. And you're thinking, I should have dumped out the first piece of sand when it got in my shoe. But now I've got 15 and I've got to stop and dump out my shoe. And so you'll tolerate certain things for the sake of not having to fight a battle every other day. You know, and at some point or another, you're just done tolerating this nonsense. So, yeah, I mean, really, in conclusion, I think this is something that I imagine I will be back on the podcast and talk about quite a bit next year, because I think this wave just keeps growing. I just checked the numbers of women candidates today, and it was already bigger than the last time that I looked. And we also know that in Virginia, for instance,

record numbers of women were elected to the state legislature. Correct. Yeah, totally. So they're not just running, they're winning. So I feel like a theme of this podcast is we're talking about things that we will talk about a lot next year. And that's definitely one of them, especially if a lot of these women end up winning. Totally. And now it is time to end the show like we always do. We can't let it go. When we all share one thing we cannot stop thinking about this week, politics or otherwise.

Danielle, you're going to go first because you are going to vindicate a long-held belief I have shared on this podcast and been ridiculed for. Yes. So preemptively, thank you. Yes. This week, I want to talk about aliens. Please go on. Yes, okay. Go on. No, I mean. Yes. This week, I want to talk about aliens. Please, go on.

Yes, okay. Go on. No, I mean, so really, this week, what I have not been able to let go at all is this story from the New York Times about unidentified flying objects, about members of the military seeing unidentified flying objects, and the Defense Department then studying this in a program that was called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. But these weren't just any unidentified flying objects. These were incredibly advanced, fast, sophisticated objects. Right. There are a couple of these videos posted

with the New York Times story where one of which you can hear a couple of, I believe it's pilots talking about this thing they see flying. And the issue here is that these UFOs that they're seeing, because they are quite literally unidentified, we don't know what they are, they can't figure out, like they don't move, I guess, the way that any other... Well, they were hovering. They were shooting up and down. They're hovering. They don't have wings. They're jumping all over the place. Right.

Yeah. The way that actually the Daily did a podcast on this, but like the way that they described it was they called one of these UFOs a tic-tac. It was kind of shaped like one and it didn't seem to have any apparent. It wasn't apparent exactly how it was flying, where the lift was coming from. So I've been obsessed with aliens for, you know, since middle school and the X-Files. Who wasn't? You know, but like this is apparently other members of our podcast. Well, previous discussions. But yes, they're wrong. But like, I don't know. But what you have are seemingly credible members of the Defense Department talking about seeing these things and also the fact that Harry Reid, a former Senate majority leader, spearheaded this campaign to get the Defense Department to study this and got bipartisan

support. Here's what has been really bothering me. Yes. I feel like we're turning into InfoWars here, but I'm going with it. Here's what was bothering me. So the New York Times writes this story about this encounter with these unidentified objects. And the one thing that really got me was, so these fighter pilots encounter these objects and then the fighter pilots retreat to something 60 miles away. They get there. The objects are the exact point that the pilots decided to retreat to. So the New York Times writes an article with Pulitzer Prize winning reporters quoting military fighter jets.

These are all incredibly credible things. And yet everyone just makes fun of it on Twitter and moves on. Right. I know. We seem to have lost Kelsey and Mara, but like, come on. What else do you want? Well, UFOs do not stand for alien spaceships. Totally true.

It stands for unidentified flying object. That's totally right. Like literally true. Yes. As a congressional nerd, I was totally here for reading about Harry Reid showing up and saying, yep, I definitely found the funding for this. This is something I'm definitely involved in. I'm with you, Scott. I, you know, the other day and, you know i care about covering taxes but as i was sitting there writing a tax story i was thinking why aren't we all hands on deck on the aliens that are clearly among us on

earth like shouldn't we all be having a special hour of programming on this i think we should this is like an independence day when um i'm blanking on the name of the guy who plays the crank who saves the day at the end the drunk quaid r Randy Quaid. So when Randy Quaid is like being made fun of for believing in aliens, once the aliens arrive, people are still making fun of him for believing in aliens. And it's like, yo, the aliens are hovering over your city. Stop making fun of Randy Quaid. I just feel like people don't want to admit. I think this means you and I are never going to be vindicated on this ever. I don't know what else you need.

Okay. We've lost everybody else. All right. Let's bring it back. Mara. Okay. Back to the realm of politics. Yes. Much more anodyne and not nearly as sexy and exciting as UFOs. In Virginia, the race for the House of Delegates, Democrats picked up a lot of seats. And if this last one contested race had gone in the Democrats direction, the House of Delegates would have been split 50-50. But although it was first reported that the Democratic candidate had won by one vote

in this race, it turns out that that one of the ballots was contested, and it is now considered a tie. Each candidate has 11,608 votes. And according to Virginia law, that tie is going to be broken by drawing lots. Oh, my gosh. Out of a film canister. That's the part that I thought was totally crazy. No kidding. Well, they could use a glass jar. I guess.

But it's going to happen on December 27th. Why couldn't they just flip a coin? They're going to pick up a rotary telephone. Well, I guess they just have to decide on the method. And this is going to happen on December 27th. And they're going to draw lots. And if it's the Republican, then that means Republicans will control the House of Delegates by one seat. But there is a provision in Virginia law, which I love, that says if the loser of the coin toss, lot drawing, whatever we're calling it, doesn't like the results, they can have another recount.

Now, the moral of the story is every vote counts. Yes. If you didn't understand that before, you should understand that now. It didn't even occur to me until now that film canisters are kind of an endangered species at the moment. I think that's so interesting that you really think the most important thing about My Can't Let It Go is the film canister. It's the fact that this is a Thai, House of Delegates, tie race, and it's going to be determined by chance.

Because you were so artful with all the other analysis. There's nothing else left to say. No, but I feel like this is going to be a civics class anecdote for decades to come. Like, kids, always vote, you know, because by God, your vote counts. I can't even remember what it was. I don't know if it was the movie Election where the candidate forgot to vote for themselves. Yeah, I think it was. That's also another important lesson.

If you run for something, don't forget to vote for yourself. Kelsey, how about you? All right. Mine is decidedly not political. I have been obsessed with this idea that the New Zealand Post Service runs a nationwide Secret Santa program. So you can sign up. The way they do it is you sign up on Twitter, you register an account, and they find you somebody to have as your Secret Santa. They recommend you spend around $10 and you send your package on to the post office and they forward it along to your, you know, whoever this person is

that you are buying gifts for. And people like the prime minister of New Zealand participated. And let's see, the Canterbury police and people are just posting all over Twitter, these fun gifts that they are sending to each other. And I think it's completely adorable. What did the prime minister give or get? So they encouraged the people to go and do sleuthing on the people they're gifting to. So she sent a book for the woman's daughters. And it looks like she sent body lotion and bath stuff and a pin that, like some gold pin that she received from, it looks like maybe from APEC. I feel like 2017 America can probably not get a National Secret Santa together.

Yeah, probably not. One of the people, I tweeted this the other day, and somebody from New Zealand responded by saying, I swear we're a real country. That's great. All right. I will go last. And Kelsey, actually, you inspired my Can't Let It Go with a note you sent to Sue Davis and myself a couple hours ago, but I saw it. It inspired me. I think I'm going to revolve my New Year's plans around it now. This is a tweet from Phil Collins from a couple hours ago. Phil Collins suggests that if you play In the Air Tonight by Phil Collins on December 31st at 1256.40, this will happen right at midnight. Which to me feels like a really great way to ring in the new year. With the best drum fill in. Yeah, it feels good. It also feels like listening to

three minutes of Into the Air tonight feels like a fitting way to end a pretty strange year. I'm into it it all right that is a wrap for this week we are going to take a break for the holidays we'll be back in your feed after christmas next thursday in the meantime the news will continue and you can keep up with all of our coverage on your local public radio station on npr.org and npr politics facebook page and again you can support all the work we do at donate.npr.org slash politics and let everyone know why you did with the hashtag WhyPublicRadio. Thank you so much for doing that.

Thank you so much to everyone who has supported us over the last few weeks as we've been talking to you about that. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Kelsey Snell. I also cover Congress. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.