The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, October 18

Episode Date: October 18, 2018

Senator Elizabeth Warren and President Trump reignite their fight over her ancestry weeks before the midterms. Plus, the races across the country are tightening before the vote. We look at key races and what they mean for the elections. This episode: political reporter Asma Khalid, political editor Domenico Montanaro, Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, 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

Hi listeners, I'm Adrian. And I'm Lauren. We're at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in the Oregon Cascades, where scientific measurements happen every second. Of every hour. Of every day since the 1960s. This podcast was recorded at 1.47 p.m. on Thursday, October 18th. Things may have changed since this was recorded. Enjoy the show. and claim her Native American ancestry. And across the country, Senate races are tightening up with less than three weeks to go until the midterms. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. I'm Scott Detrow, I cover Congress. I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. So before we dive in, Scott, you are speaking to us on a long distance line. You are in Las Vegas. Catch us up on why you're there. I've got a new podcast residency,

just like Celine Dion. I'm going to be doing podcasts from the Luxor three nights a week. It's a big Senate race. Do you have a stage name? No, you know, it's just me. It's just Scott Detrow Live Unplugged. I talk about politics.

I talk about myself. It's a real, it's an intimate moment. Does it include magic tricks? No, no, that's a different act. This is just politics and storytelling. But sorry, Scott, you were saying you're there for a Senate race in addition to your side act. Yes. Jackie Rosen, the Democrat running against Dean Heller. We're going to talk about this later, but he is the Republican most in danger of losing his seat.

And I'm actually in reality sitting in the parking lot of the Culinary Union, which is a big political force here. And as soon as the podcast is done, I'm going to be out knocking on doors or following around union members knocking on doors as they get ready for early voting, which is about to start. We'll certainly get into that race a lot more later on in the podcast. But first, let's talk about this DNA test that we mentioned that Elizabeth Warren did. Domenico, what exactly did Senator Warren do? And talk to us a little bit about why she seemed to think this was an important move. Well, she's three weeks out from her 2018 reelection, but that is not why she did this. So, you know, President Trump has been calling her, quote unquote, Pocahontas for as long as she's been critical of him. So Elizabeth Warren went and

got a DNA test. She's somebody who was originally from Oklahoma. She'd heard these stories growing up that a great, great, great grandmother was perhaps partially Native American. And it became a controversial issue in her initial Senate run because she had checked a box along the line at some point in Massachusetts. So that became an issue. She decided three weeks out from the midterms that she was going to reveal the results and do it, starting with a video. Hi, this is Elizabeth Warren. Is Dr. Bustamante in, please? Hi, I'm Carlos Bustamante, and I've advised companies in the direct-to-consumer space, including Ancestry.com, 23andMe, and Helix. In the senator's genome, we did find five segments of Native American ancestry

with very high confidence, where we believe the error rate is less than 1 in 1,000. Now, the president likes to call my mom a liar. What do the facts say? The facts suggest that you absolutely have a Native American ancestor in your pedigree. And we should mention that these DNA results, I think, were really difficult for a lot of people to interpret. I mean, for starters, there's not a lot of Native Americans in the DNA genetic pool. So the geneticist who did this says he has to rely on people from different South American countries to pull this all together. And then you look at the actual results, and it turns out that Senator Warren, you know, people from different South American countries to pull this all together. And then you look at the actual results and it turns out that Senator Warren, they say, is somewhere between one sixty fourth and one one thousand and twenty fourth Native American.

Sure. The reality of this is that this was the clearest sign yet that she's running for president. OK, because what you do when you're a candidate for office is that you get your biggest vulnerability out of the way. And, you know, it's never going to be a lot of good news coverage when it comes to this issue for her or a big vulnerability. But getting it out of the way now makes it a three day story rather than a three week story. And she can say in 2019 it's been litigated. And Mara, certainly her target audience, as Domenico mentioned, is not really her opponent in the 2018 election that she's running. It was Donald Trump. And we saw the president pretty quickly respond and react to this.

Fill us in on how he reacted. Donald Trump is an expert at finding someone's weakness and really poking at it over and over again. And this is a mistake that Elizabeth Warren made a long time ago. She allowed academic institutions to list her as a Native American, maybe to get points for having, at one point, she was called a person of color on their staff. There's no evidence that she benefited from this. She had an opportunity to put this to rest when she first ran for Senate, and she didn't. Donald Trump's been hammering at her over this issue for years. So she wanted to put it at rest. Clearly, there were some costs to it. She got mocked as somebody who was playing identity

politics. But Donald Trump said, who cares? Like he didn't really care. But he also reneged on a promise he made, because remember, he said, if she takes a DNA test and it turns out she has Indian blood, I'll give a million dollars to her favorite charity, which, of course, she asked him to pay up. She picked a charity that helps Native American women. And he said, nope, I'm not paying. So, Scott, I want to ask you a little bit more, though, about these consequences, because I recognize that she feels she needed to get this issue out of the way. But, you know, especially if she's going to run for president. But there were serious consequences specifically within the Native American community that did not respond well to the to this DNA test. Yeah, absolutely. And this was something that, you know, as a white person who

has not really been fully exposed to Native American culture as much as others, I was surprised by, and I think a lot of other people were as well, and I think more politically damagingly, Elizabeth Warren's campaign staff was surprised by this, just how deeply offensive and how much of a live electrical wire of cultural grievances and cultural appropriations and many other things over the decades, the idea of a blood test is for Native Americans that, you know, going back to when they were subjugated to them by the U.S. government and then many other twists and turns of that as well, that this was probably one of the most offensive things you could do to claim some sort of Native American ancestry. You had an official from the Cherokee

Nation who put out a statement that really just blasted Warren saying this is offensive, that this was the wrong way to go about this, that this really made them upset. And it seems like the Warren campaign did not think this through and how much this would backfire with the Native American community, which is a pretty important, you know, stakeholder in all of this. Right. I mean, that is true. But you also saw the president jump in and agree with the Cherokee Nation in its criticism of Elizabeth Warren. And so you sort of have a lot of folks from different ends of the political spectrum agreeing on this issue. And in fact, I actually spoke to a Democratic operative this week who was very frustrated that they felt like, why did Elizabeth Warren do this now? Why did she feel like this was an urgent issue to address three weeks before the midterms when

Democrats are fighting these races in other places? And they felt like it was just a distraction. I mean, you know, the other big story about Elizabeth Warren, which you could argue is more important than anything about this DNA test, is that she is creating a really powerful political machine nationally. And she is helping, I think, something like 150 Democratic candidates around the country. So she's laying the groundwork for a run. This part of her effort to lay the groundwork clearly got the most news coverage, but maybe it's not the most important. She has been touted as a potential contender for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020. But she's not the only person that we're seeing already making moves that signify that they're likely going to run in 2020. Domenico, why don't you give us a rundown of some

of the other lead key names that we're seeing out there? Well, Joe Biden is first and foremost. I mean, I know that he's somebody who maybe the base of the Democratic Party is a little lukewarm on at this point, if you look at younger voters. But there was a poll out this week that showed Biden is still the person to beat for this 2020 nomination, if that's what we're looking at for an early frontrunner. You know, something like a third of the Democratic Party base said that they would pick Biden if they had to pick somebody right now. So, Scott, talk to us a little bit about some of those other people, because there's, I would say, a number of senators in particular, and you cover Congress, whose names have been flouted about, you know, as potential contenders,

and they're making moves themselves, visiting key states. Yeah. And the last thing to say about Warren is one of the more interesting things here is that she is being most overt about it right now because it's a dance that you walk, right? When you're thinking about running for president, you don't want to be saying, yeah, I'm going to run for president when there's an important election just a few weeks away. But you want to do the moves that kind of wink and nod that, yes, I'm thinking about it. But several other of the prominent senators who are thinking about running for president are all taking the basic same approach of doing a lot of campaigning for other candidates, doing that in key primary states like Iowa, like South Carolina, in one state where a lot of the candidates, and that includes Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Warren, Kamala Harris. A lot of them have made repeated trips to Georgia to cover the governor's race.

They're doing a lot to campaign with Stacey Abrams. I mean, Mara, to that point, though, there are these questions right about what Democratic voters actually want, because I do think we're hearing that. And I hear that a lot from voters right now about sort of what direction the party wants to be headed in and who's the right person to actually lead them in that direction. Yeah, I think the bottom line is the Democratic voters want to win. There really isn't a frontrunner. I think the party has to resolve some big fundamental debates. Do they want to go left? Do they think that's the way to win? Do they want to be the left-wing mirror image of Trump? In other words, do they want to adopt a kind of Trumpian style, a scorched earth style of politics? That's the Michael Avenatti Democrats.

And they haven't decided that, but I do think they want to win. And that's what's going to, I think, drive this whole race. Who can beat Donald Trump? That's what they want. Are we seeing signs of this in how people are running their midterm campaigns, you think? Yeah, we're not seeing a burn it all down party. I think this is a League of Women Vot would have been PTA volunteers running for Congress. This is not, you know, anarchists saying we should blow up the system. And the DCCC, which is the establishment representative of House Democrats, won the vast majority of primaries. So I think this is not a moment where the Democratic Party is lurching left. There is agreement in the Democratic Party that they want universal health care, some kind of Medicare for all, Medicare buy-in. The message you hear from Democrats is pretty clear. It's the Republicans cut taxes for the rich, ran up the deficit, and now to close that gap, they're coming for your Medicare and Social Security. I want to work with the Trump administration to do this. I want to work with the Trump administration to do that. And was very clearly walking a very moderate tone. A ton of candidates like him could be the ones who win those Republican races and put Democrats back in control.

That's interesting. But I also will say to that point, Scott, I meet a lot of really angry Democratic voters, too. And I don't really know. I mean, maybe they're going to vote for whoever's at the top of their ticket this year for Senate and governor. But they're going to vote for whoever is at the top of their ticket this year for Senate and governor. But they're very angry. And I don't recall feeling like they were as angry when I was out talking to people ahead of 2016. Anger is a great motivator. That doesn't mean they're so angry they want to vote for someone who's an extreme left-wing candidate.

They want to win. Well, a couple of points of data on that to back up that point. You know, the fact is this is not the Tea Party year. This is not 2010. There have been some notable, as you might call them, Mara anarchists who've gotten some headlines in this election on the left, but it's not like the Tea Party wave of 2010 where you had 45 Republican freshmen who aligned themselves with the Tea Party. That's not happening this cycle. Now, I think that this pragmatism that you're seeing is going to go very far away in 2020. When the midterms are over, if Democrats took back the House, then you're going to have, and I think it's a good thing for the party, a knockdown, drag out, you know, ideological fight that... That's going to push the party to the left? Well, I don't know which direction it goes, but they have to figure out where they want to go,

because in 2016, there were a lot of people on the left, progressives, who felt like the process wasn't fair. So if they have a fair, open process where it's knock down, drag out, we are such a polarized country that it's 45-45 regardless. And by the time they get to a convention, if they feel like it was fair and everyone gets together, they could put someone over the finish line who's enlarged by this process, as Mara puts it. Yeah. And also the Democratic Party has already made a big step forward to making it seem fair to those grassroots activists because superdelegates have all but disappeared. All right. We're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll talk about why some Senate races this year are suddenly tightening. Support for this NPR podcast and the following message come from Babbel,

a language program that quickly teaches real-life conversations in a new language. Choose from Spanish, French, Italian, German, and more. Babbel's 10- to 15-minute lessons use interactive dialogues and speech recognition technology to get you speaking your new language correctly and confidently. Try Babbel for free by downloading the app or going to babbel.com. Support also comes from SimpliSafe Home Security. SimpliSafe is self-installed, wireless protection for your home. The company was founded by an electrical engineer whose friends were burglarized. They wanted home security, but most systems were too complicated and too expensive.

So he built SimpliSafe. Now they protect over 2 million people. And with SimpliSafe, there are no annual contracts. Learn more about SimpliSafe today at simplisafe.com slash NPR politics. I'm Ophira Eisenberg. Join me on NPR's Ask Me Another as we challenge contestants and celebrities to nerdy word games, music parodies and ponderful trivia. Find us every week on the NPR One app and wherever you listen to podcasts. And we're back. So let's talk now about the current state of the midterms and where things are at this point in time, specifically as it relates to the Senate. I would say, you know, a few months

back, maybe longer than that, earlier in the spring, there was a lot of talk about Democrats maybe potentially being able to take over the Senate. And then that narrative kind of shifted to the fact of, you know, could Democrats basically just maintain the status quo, hold on to all their seats? And now I would say the narrative is shifting yet again. And you see some conversations or questions about whether or not Democrats could potentially even just lose some of the seats that they currently have. I don't know that the narrative has changed or if overall we're just sort of seeing a normal, natural tightening. Oh, how far the spring feels, because it really was the fall. It was like early September, just after the summer, when everyone started to see a tipping where people were starting to look at Arizona, Tennessee, Texas.

Oh, my goodness. Everyone wants to talk about the Texas Senate race. Oh, yeah. That seems so long ago. Right. Well, you know, some of that has fallen back to political gravity and political reality. You know, a lot of people will peg it to the Kavanaugh confirmation battle and the fact that Republican enthusiasm spiked. But a lot of this is just natural tightening.

And in states like Tennessee and Texas, there just happened to be more Republicans there. We started this cycle with Republicans very hopeful that they could pick up three, four, five seats because the Senate battleground is full of red states where Donald Trump is extremely popular. And to me, what's been the interesting thing about this cycle is that those dreams have gone away. Now, yes, there was that blip of Democratic hopefulness in the fall that, oh, maybe they could pick up a couple and hold their own everywhere. And maybe even the perennial pipe dream of Texas came up again. But now we're back to where we were. And Republicans are doing worse, I think, in the Senate battleground than they should be given the map and given the great economy that they've got. We've entered that final few weeks of an election that's kind of the dark side of the moon,

where there's not many firm data points, but suddenly you see wild shifts in how political observers view things. The Democrats might be fine after all. The Democrats might be totally screwed. And I think it's just hard to tell, especially in a midterm where it seems legitimate that enthusiasm is higher than before. We just don't know what that means in terms of who shows up to vote compared to typical midterms. So I want us to talk about a few specific races that we're looking at. Maybe we could all just go around and talk about what particular race has been really interesting to us and why. Maybe it tells us something bigger or broader about the overall political culture. Mara, you want to start? Well, I'm looking at Florida. The governor's race there is probably

the most important race in the country because Florida is the mother of all swing states in a presidential year. And Donald Trump really wants a Republican to be the governor of Florida when he runs for reelection. But the interesting thing about Florida is they've got two big marquee races, the governor's and then the Senate race, where Bill Nelson, the Democratic incumbent, is in a lot of trouble. If Republicans can defeat him, they absolutely put an end to Democrats' hopes of taking back the Senate. But the big complicating factor is the hurricane. The hurricane wiped out a lot of precincts in the Panhandle. Those are Republican areas. On the other hand, it gives the incumbent

governor, Rick Scott, who happens to be running for Senate against Bill Nelson, a lot of opportunity to show that he's a good leader, hands on. Hurricanes always give governors a big opportunity. And it's roiled, the race. I mean, the governor's race has been roiled by this. So has the Senate race. But, you know, you look at Andrew Gillum, who's the governor, who's the Democratic gubernatorial candidate at the top of the ticket versus Ron DeSantis, the Republican congressman, how they look on TV in these moments may actually, you know, say a whole heck of a lot to a lot of people. And Gillum also has a benefit. You know, you were talking, Mara, about the fact that Rick Scott is the governor of Florida right now, and so he can be on TV a lot. Well, Andrew Gillum, who is running for governor as a Democrat, is the mayor of Tallahassee, which was an area that was closer to

where, you know, sort of all the hurricane damage hit. So he also just has the opportunity to shine more in this political moment. And I think because we're seeing the Democrat in the governor's race and the Republican in the Senate race, but both are sort of, you know, out there in this moment around the hurricane, it's a little unclear to me as to who that would actually end up benefiting. Yeah. And the thing to me that I think is really fascinating about that race just generally is you've got a candidate of color in Andrew Gillum using essentially the Bernie Sanders message from 2016 with a kind of Obama

like hopefulness about him. Does that translate in a 50 50 state? If Gillum's able to win, you watch how much progressives are going to say that a progressive with a strong, clear message can win. Scott, why don't you go next? Yeah, I guess I could talk about Nevada since I'm here. What's interesting here is that Dean Heller is probably the Republican incumbent who is most in danger of losing, and that's partially due to the demographics of the state. It's an increasingly purple state where Democrats have done well statewide recently. But Heller is an interesting test case of how Republicans deal with President Trump.

Remember, early on, he was a critic of President Trump during the 2016 campaign. He was a key no vote or threatened no vote, I should say, when it came to trying to repeal Obamacare. He famously held up that process, had a big press conference in Nevada where he said, I can't vote for this bill. Then he changed course, ended up supporting the repeal effort, and then became a pretty close ally of President Trump, who's made repeated visits here. He'll be here again this weekend. And Trump was joking during his last rally that Heller and he didn't get along before.

Now they get along fine. So the questions I have is how do Republican voters respond to that? We've seen time and time again that Republicans have been punished by their base for opposing President Trump. Is everything good with Heller and Republican voters? And does that back and forth hurt him with Democrats and independents? The big thing in this, this is really one of three Democratic targets and the best one that Democrats have a shot at because Hillary Clinton won here. That just shows you how narrow the landscape is for Democrats to try to even never mind pick up seats, but to hold what they've got. And my other big question is what do Latinos do?

Because Latinos in the southwest, not just in Nevada, but in Texas and in Arizona and in the midterms more broadly, you know, really could put Democrats over the edge or hold them back. So, Domenico, you were just talking about Latino voters and turnout. And that makes me think of another really interesting Senate race. That's Arizona. I would say Democrats saw Arizona and continue to see Arizona as a possible pick up opportunity for them, in part because if you look at 2016, Democrats did pretty well. I mean, Hillary Clinton, I think, lost the state by less than 4%. I mean, that was way closer than a traditional swing state like Ohio. And one of the things that's been interesting to me, though, about Arizona is it's a really sort of demographically a state that people think should, in theory, benefit Democrats, but it speaks to the exact

same problem you've been talking about, which is where these voters in the Democratic Party are. Arizona is one of these states where demographers will describe it as having kind of the widest cultural age gap, they say, which means that basically the divide between your older population and your younger population is huge, one of the starkest in the entire country. So you have a lot of retirees and a lot of new people coming into the state. Who are largely brown or other folks of color. And one of the big questions is, OK, fine, that might be changing the population. But those people are young and they're often folks of color and they don't necessarily always show up in the midterm.

And disconnected from the system and disconnected from party politics. So, Domenico, what race have you been really interested in this cycle? You know, I've been looking at, I've been surprised by the fact that in Montana and Indiana, the Democrats there have seemed pretty resilient. You know, we're talking about John Tester, who has the buzz cut haircut, who, by the way, is running against a guy who's got the same buzz cut hairdo. You can go look that up if you want. If it's a real Montana look. Something about Montana. It's that look. I don't know what it is, but apparently that's how you show you're a real Montanan. But to show you're a real Hoosier, as I know that you appreciate. Yes, I do appreciate that lingo. Because you are a Hoosier yourself. You know, the candidate who's running there,

who's the Democratic incumbent is Joe Donnelly. And he's in this red state that President Trump won by a lot. He's running against a businessman, this guy named Mike Braun. And he's a first-time candidate. And, you know, Donnelly's been holding up. Republicans have been surprised at how well. I mean, I'm surprised, honestly, Domenico. It's like I look around and some of the chatter I heard from base Democratic voters was a lot of skepticism about Donnelly. I think that he certainly got some street cred within the local Democratic Party when he decided to vote against Kavanaugh.

Well, and I think that, you know, this is a guy who showed some independence in a lot of ways in that way in one. But let's listen to one of his TV ads. And I think you'll see why it sounds a whole lot different than some of the other Democrats across the country. The radical left wants to eliminate ICE. I support ICE in funding President Trump's border wall. Extremes on the left and right want to cut defense spending. I don't want our troops in a fair fight. I want them to have the best. Listen to that. He says he supports ICE. He said that he supports President Trump's border wall.

How many Democrats across the country would say that? That raised my eyebrows. And he quotes Ronald Reagan saying that he believes in peace through strength. He also said no socialized medicine and no cutting the Affordable Care Act. Now that's a line to walk. There's not a lot of time left before Election Day. And I know that we've all been talking about kind of the ups and downs in this race. But Scott, what specifically are you looking for between now and November? Just when's Election Day? November 6th, right? What are you looking for between now and November 6th that you think maybe could give us somewhat of a clue about what will happen on

Election Day? Well, one of the biggest things that we saw this week was just the insane amount of money that Democratic candidates have brought in. House candidates all over the country bringing in the type of money that sometimes you see Senate candidates bring in. Senate candidates, in Beto O'Rourke's case, bringing in presidential campaign level numbers. There is just a ton of donor enthusiasm on the Democratic side. The candidates have a ton of money. So my question is, what are they going to do with this? At a certain point, you can't buy more TV ads. All the TV time is taken up. So how do they use this money? Do they use it on door knocking, on get out the vote efforts? Do they use it on digital advertising? I'm just really curious to see where that money goes and how they can leverage that advantage that they have.

Because, again, the divide between the party on fundraising was really striking. And also, can they spend it in a way that lays down some permanent infrastructure for Democrats in states where they haven't had much of one? Yeah. Domenico, is there something that you're really watching in these last couple weeks? OK, look, the fact is you're now starting to hear that turnout in this election could be a record, could be as high as it's been since the mid 1960s, another time of social and cultural upheaval. I talked to Michael McDonald, who's a turnout expert at the University of Florida, keeps the big turnout database that everybody looks at.

And he said that he's looking at essentially four markers, four indicators for why he thinks that turnout is going to be that high for a midterm. OK, he said that there is record special election turnout, high primary turnout, a high degree of self-reported interest in the election and high levels of early voting. And we're seeing intensity on all of those metrics. Absolutely. And he said when all four of those are pointing in one direction, he said, you know, look, it just seems to point to the fact that this is this could be an election that is higher turnout than most people have seen in their lifetimes for a midterm. And we should explain that even higher turnout in a midterm means somewhere between 45 to 50 percent of the electorate voting. Mara, what are you watching?

I'm watching the immigration debate. I think that now that the Brett Kavanaugh moment has come and gone, I'm not saying it didn't help Republicans get more energized. But I do think that Donald Trump is looking for another culture war issue that he can use to energize his base. The caravan of people coming through Mexico from Central America, potentially on their way to the U.S. border, is something that he's been tweeting about. I think that what we've seen is when the immigration debate focuses on border security or abolishing ICE, then Republicans win. When the immigration debate focuses on taking kids away from their parents, Democrats win. So I'm watching that caravan of potential immigrants to the U.S. and seeing if it's going to blow up into a big issue before Election Day. That's really interesting. And it's also an issue that I think makes Donald Trump feel really comfortable, right? Like this

is what he ran on. Well, he's a culture warrior and immigration was his number one issue. He rode down the golden escalator and said Mexico was sending rapists to the United States. Immigration is the one thing over the past decade that has fired up Republicans almost more than anything else, including the Supreme Court. So, Scott, I know that you have to go report out there in Nevada. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. But take care. Sure thing. See you guys soon. Bye, Scott. All right, we're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, can't let it go. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Grow with Google. Digital skills are becoming more and more important in today's economy. That's why Grow with Google is providing free online training and tools to

help Americans learn the skills they need to succeed. Learn more about Grow with Google and get started by visiting google.com slash grow. Support also comes from ExxonMobil. Over the next five years, ExxonMobil plans to invest $50 billion in the U.S. economy. That kind of investment will not only create jobs in energy, but also help support millions of U.S. jobs in other industries too. Find out more about Exxon Mobil's planned investments at energyfactor.com. Exxon Mobil. Energy lives here. I'm Linda Holmes. There's more stuff to watch these days than you can ever get to. That's why we make Pop Culture Happy Hour. Twice a week, we give you the lowdown on what's worth your time and what's not.

Find Pop Culture Happy Hour on the NPR One app or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back and it is now time for Can't Let It Go. That's the part of the show where we talk about the one thing this week that we cannot stop thinking about. Mara, you want to go first? Sure. This is a nonpolitical story that I can't let go. It's a David and Goliath story. Sometimes David wins. It's also a story that goes under the headline,

it's very expensive to be poor. It turns out that a woman named Amanda Ogle had her car stolen. The car was found. It was towed to a tow lot. And, of course, the tow lot said, you can have it back if you pay us. She went to court to say, hey, I shouldn't have to do that. She's homeless. She lives in her car. Means a lot to her. So the court said, nope, you don't have to pay that. Then she went back to the tow company. Turned out they'd sold the car. But how long was it there? It was not

there very long. They sold the car for one hundred and seventy five dollars. But then she went to the Northwest Consumer Law Center, where lawyers actually help consumers fight big, powerful interests. And they took her case. And it turned out that even though the tow lot had sold her car, they bought it back. And then they said to her, sure, you can have it back, but you have to pay us the $75 per day that it costs to store the car. And because this lawsuit went on for so long, her bill reached $21,634. So this was a real runaround. She was a victim of the system, but she went to court, and the judge said, nope, you got to give her her car back, and every day you delay, Lincoln Towing will forfeit $2,000 to the court. She beat the system.

That's a great feel-good story, Mara. It gives me hope. It's a great feel-good story because she prevailed and she went to a group of lawyers that work for ordinary people instead of big corporations. On the other hand, she was a homeless person living out of her car. And it shows you how expensive it is to be poor. All right. I will go next. So next, for those of you who watched President Trump on 60 Minutes, you might have noticed that there is this kind of iconic painting that was caught in the background. It's an iconic. I'd call it kitschy. Oh, I like it.

Oh, my goodness. Well, anyhow, we'll get on to what the painting actually is. It's a bunch of Republican past presidents sitting around. Of course, this one has an addition. President Trump is sitting in the middle. He has this really bright, stark white shirt on. I will say he's a little slimmer, leaner. He doesn't have a pooch in his stomach in this painting.

A pooch? Like a dog? You know, like a little pooch. Oh, got it. He's a leaner. He's a little more fit looking in the picture. And he seems like he must have cracked a joke or something because you see President Lincoln and President Nixon, President Reagan, they're all kind of like mid laugh. Ike is even leaning in. And they all are seeming like Trump is the center of attention

in this picture. Anyhow, it was just really fascinating to me because apparently Trump has said he doesn't really like portraits of himself, but he really liked this particular painting. In fact, he even called the painter to tell him how much he loved this painting. It also kind of establishes his credibility, right? Like it puts him in the same rank as all these other previous presidents. Oh, I see. Well, I don't know. And he sort of mythologized in that way.

I don't know about that. But, Mara, have you seen this painting up close? I haven't seen this painting up close? I haven't seen the painting up close, but I'm very familiar with it because it's a famous piece of kitsch. And it's often repainted sometimes with dogs, sometimes with presidents. Oh, yeah. So the dogs, when I looked up, apparently they were playing poker. That was it.

Yes, yes. But it's a real common, I don't know how to describe it, but it's a classic piece of kitsch. Yeah, it's like a common remake. It's like they call it a fantasy painting, having all these guys together. I feel like you guys are trying to say that it's not high art. It's not high art. Oh, not at all. Do you think it's high art? I think the original ones of him doing this with different presidents is a really novel concept.

No, it's been around for years. All right, Dominic, could you go next? This is not Andy War concept. No, it's been around for years. All right, David, could you go next? This is not Andy Warhol. Are we serious? I'm just saying, pop art. All right, you go next. Okay, so what I can't let go of is the fact that Canada, an entire country, legalized marijuana this week.

Oh, I heard. And almost nobody seemed to notice, right? It's like we're talking about Elizabeth Warren and her like Native American roots or whatever the latest. Oh, record, you know, pause or screech. Right. Because an entire country legalized marijuana. The United States, obviously, Colorado, Washington state, they have legalized marijuana. California has moved that direction as well. And there are half a dozen ballot initiatives on the ballots this fall that have to do with expanding marijuana rights. At the same time, while this movement is happening,

we have an administration that feels very differently about that. In fact, let's take a listen to Jeff Sessions, who is now the Attorney General, when he was a senator talking about marijuana. The creating of knowledge that this drug is dangerous, you cannot play with it, it's not funny, it's not something to laugh about, and trying to send that message with clarity that good people don't smoke marijuana. One of the weird pieces of conflict here, though, is that the U.S. Border Patrol has noted that it can actually stop people from coming into the United States if they admit to even pass drug use, not if they're like high at the time that they're crossing the border.

But if Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, who has admitted to pass marijuana use, if he were to say, yes, I admit to pass marijuana use, the Border Patrol could actually stop him from coming into the United States. There was a conference call this week with Border Patrol, with Customs and Border Protection, where they said that they reserve the right to stop anyone they want to. And if they ask and they admit to it, they could stop them. Wait, are Kim and Kanye really splitting up? Elle just put something out. Hold on. Look at this.

And then click the link. That should have been your click. Okay. Hold up. I got a late-breaking click, guys. I just opened up Twitter. This is unprecedented. I don't know if this is allowed.

Well, I had not checked my phone for the last, what, hour that we've been in here. And there was this tweet from Elle magazine that says, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West are splitting up. Scary emoji face. Heartbreaking emoji. So, of course, I click the link because, you know, who doesn't want to read about celebrity gossip?

And when I do, look at this. Ooh, it says, when we all vote, Elle magazine, register to vote. It's a sham. It's fake news. That's not a sham. That's really smart it's through rock the vote apparently but i feel like this is fake everyone already thinks there's fake

news and now they're using fake news to try to get people to vote but how is that any different than saying amazing uh exercises to shrink your tummy fat they're gonna get two million people to click on that thing. Maybe you get 50,000 or 100,000 people sign up to vote. It accomplished exactly the goal. You know how many people said it was annoying that the Obama campaign would send these emails that said,

you, me, and Michelle, dinner? It's like, oh, why do they send this every time? Why did they do it? Because it raised them a ton of money. The psychologists say you feel annoyed by it and it still works. Yeah, but this is like two individual people. Granted, celebrities. But like they're saying that they split up.

I mean, how do you think Kim and Kanye feel about this? But the National Enquirer does that every day. Maybe they're wondering if it's true. Ouch. I was very annoyed by this, though. All right. Well, those are the things that we just can't let go of this week. We'll be back as soon as there is a political headline that you need to know about.

Until then, I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.