Abolish Bad Tweets

This is LeVar Arrington from Two Pros and a Cup of Joe. Let me tell you about Xero. That's X-E-R-O. Xero is a financial management platform that loves giving small business owners the clarity to have the confidence in their numbers. It puts accounting payments, payroll, and analytics all in one place, so you always have one clear picture of your business. With visual dashboards, Xero makes it easy to understand your cash flow. You know exactly what's coming in and what's going out, so you can make smarter decisions that can help grow your business. Xero's AI can even offer insights to help you make your best move. It's powerful enough for an accountant and simple enough for you. Xero is the all-in-one to get business done. Learn more at Xero.com. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Dan, what do you think of our new studio? I can only see you and four feet to your right and left. Oh, there we go. There's an eagle in there. You didn't watch all of Tuesday's pod on YouTube? No, I listened to it like the Gen Xer I am. What's to your left? Is that a Statue of Liberty? Yeah, there's a Statue of Liberty over here. Or to your right, I guess. And then there's an eagle over there because we are taking patriotism back. We're liberals who love America. One yellow mural at a time. That's right. Well, anyway, you've got to get down here so you can test out the new studio yourself. You and I have a bunch of news to talk about today. Donald Trump's approval ratings are at record lows. And he is losing his grip on the economy, the war, just about everything else Americans care about. And yet, here we are still. Democrats get more good news in the key Senate races in North Carolina and Georgia. And maybe even some deep red states where independent candidates are carrying the anti-MAGA banner. We're also in the homestretch of the heated primaries in Michigan and Wisconsin. We're going to talk all about that. That's fun. We're also going to talk about the latest with artificial intelligence. As Sam Altman tells us, that we are, in fact, in the singularity. Elon Musk is saying that we're all going to die anyway. And nobody on Capitol Hill seems to know what to do about it. So that's cool. But first, a reminder, if we do make it to November and we do make it to these midterm elections and AI hasn't killed us all yet, we have CrookedCon November 5th through the 7th in Washington, D.C. And tickets are going pretty fast. Pretty fast. So you are going to want to get a ticket to CrookedCon if you haven't already gotten yours yet. We're going to be announcing all kinds of fun things in the lead up to CrookedCon. Guests, creators, everyone else who's coming. And so you can check out all the details. Grab your tickets at CrookedCon.com. Friends of the pod subscribers get a special discounted rate. And if you're not a subscriber yet, that's just another benefit for signing up today. Once again, that's CrookedCon.com. And we will see you all in D.C. from November. 5th through the 7th. All right. Let's get to the news. With 95 days until the final midterm elections of the Trump era, the president has made himself historically unpopular and is dragging his party down with him. He has lost control of the Iran war, which is now in its fifth month with no end in sight. He has lost control of the economy, which is now suffering from sluggish growth and high inflation because of Trump's war and Trump's tariffs. He has lost control of his own party in Congress, where two Republican senators, whose careers he ended, are still refusing to confirm his acting attorney general, Todd Blanch, whose nomination Trump says he may temporarily withdraw. The president has also lost the American people. His approval rating in three high-quality polls that came out this week, 32 percent, 33 percent, and 34 percent. Near record lows for Trump in either term, which I can't really understand because the guy has really been on top of his game lately. Here he is on Wednesday. Whether you're a Republican or Democrat, you don't want to go. And be subjected to this airport. Between the trams and the Star War thing that they call it the Star Wars and elevated buses and nobody knows what's going on. It's a it's a real mess. Anytime you see windmills, you see a failing country and they're made in China, not used by China, but they're made in China. I think the arc is going to be incredible. I think the protected ballroom and military center that we're building at the White House is going to be unbelievable. It's very important. You know, grass is like human beings. Grass is a life also. And we're changing. We're raking, cleaning and changing all of the parks. Grass has a life also, Dan. He was talking about Dulles there. He's renovating Dulles Airport. And for any of you who've been to Dulles, it might be the one renovation, the one Trump renovation I'm supporting. Yeah, I agree with that. Dulles is not America's best airport. We're not putting our best foot forward there. The weird elevated buses thing is are terrible. He is correct about that. But it is. You can renovate Dulles Airport without doing a full press event on it, which he is doing. At a time of war, countries may be stumbling ass backward in a stagflation. And he takes time out of his busy day to detail the blueprints of a $22 billion airport renovation. He had a large map. He had a laser pointer. Meanwhile, Iran struck a U.S. base in Jordan. And then Trump told Fox News, we're going to. Fucking beat the shit out of them. But also, we're going to have room to keep talking. The war has widened now to Saudi Arabia is involved. Saudi Arabia and the U.S. are jointly launching strikes at militias in Iraq. I mean, it's completely fucking out of control. And then the headline on Thursday when we woke up this morning was GDP last quarter was only 1.5 percent. Well under expectations. And inflation is still a full point. It's a full point over the Fed's target rate, which is why the Fed did not give Donald Trump the rate cut he's been hoping for when they met this week. So the economy is just humming along, Dan. And thinking of raising rates again to curb inflation. Look, you want ideally you want low inflation, high growth. Sometimes you have high inflation, high growth. The economy is running too hot. Here we have high inflation, low growth. That's the worst case scenario. That is the worst case scenario. And that might have something to do with those approval rates. Down in the low 30s. All right. Let's start with Todd Blanche. So John Cornyn and Tom Tillis asked Blanche for a written permanent commitment that the DOJ would kill two provisions in Trump's IRS settlement. Remember that? The $1.8 billion insurrectionist slush fund and effective immunity for Trump, his family, and his businesses for any tax crimes that they commit. They may have committed. Those are the two deals that Trump gave himself for suing his own government that he leads. And basically, Blanche was like, yeah, sure, we'll do that. And they're like, all right, put it in writing. And he's like, nah. And they put some language in writing that didn't really satisfy either John Cornyn or Tom Tillis. And so Blanche still isn't confirmed. They pulled down the vote. And apparently he met with Cornyn and Tillis on Thursday in an attempt to reach some kind of agreement. And apparently progress was made, but still nothing yet. What do you think about all this? How much does this matter? And what are your thoughts on this? In terms of the confirmation of Blanche, it truly couldn't matter less because Trump does not need to get Blanche confirmed. Blanche just wants to be confirmed so he can be an actual attorney general. I think in his picture, his portrait on the wall, the Department of Justice, because Blanche can stay. Most secretaries can only stay in an acting capacity for 210 days. But there's an entirely separate law that relates to the Department of Justice, which says the deputy attorney general. He can fill in for the attorney general for an indefinite period of time as long as the attorney general is vacant. The attorney general is definitely vacant. So Trump can pull this nomination and Blanche can just serve in an acting capacity until the end of his term. And that would not matter. All the time, we're like, Trump is so – he exerts ironclad discipline on his party. He punishes people who disobey him, demands complete loyalty. Why don't Democrats do that? This is why Democrats don't do that. Because if you – If you're a primary, an incumbent senator of your own party, you have like six to eight months of that person pissing in your punch bowl for the rest of the time until they leave. And Trump is paying the price for that now. What I don't get is like why – if Todd Blanche can stay in this role indefinitely, why do Tillis and Cornyn think that they have leverage to get this settlement changed? And because like – I'm surprised that like – I'm surprised that Blanche even met with them and are thinking of giving them the language they want because if I were them, I'd just be like, fuck you people. I'm going to stay as acting attorney general. It's hard to reverse engineer strategy from this, but I really think it's because Blanche wants to be confirmed. He wants to be the actual attorney general of the United States. He's just like a personal – just personal best. Like such something you can – You don't really count as an acting. Like when they go through the attorney generals, he will not count. He's just a guy filling a seat is one. Two, this has now become a – loyalty tests and a power play for Trump. There's a power battle here about whether we can get it done or not. Um, I think there was movement when Trump said he was going to withdraw the nomination. That's when Tillis and Cornyn may seem to have moved a little more. They might be lowering their ask because they have less leverage in that situation. So as long as he wants their vote, they're going to try to get something in exchange for that vote. Trump allies were floating, um, uh, as a, as a possible, uh, replacement for Blanche if he didn't get confirmed. Um, Bill Pulte, did you hear about this? Yes. Yes. I mean, that is, that's the other piece of leverage here is that Trump could just put some other goon in who does not require a confirmation and just let that person serve for, you know, however long. Bill Pulte, not a lawyer, by the way. So that would be an attorney general. Not a spy. Not a spy, not a lawyer. He had a DNI for weeks, yes. Yeah, that's great. Not a housing expert as far as we know. Nope, nothing. Just a, just a, just a doofus. Uh, Blanche's nomination wasn't the only setback for Trump's DOJ this week. Uh, their attempt to prosecute Jim Comey over the 8647 seashell photo he posted. What, what a sentence. What a sentence. Is turning out to be every bit as crazy as it seems. And then some. Uh, Comey's team filed motions to dismiss the case, uh, for vindictive prosecution, which included the revelation that, um, in order to prove that Comey knew that 86 had an alternative meeting that was violent, uh, the FBI interviewed notorious mobster Sammy the Bull Gravano, who told them the reason there's no evidence is that mobsters wouldn't leave any. Not many mobsters post Instagram photos about pending crimes with pictures of seashells. Seashells. Yes. Um, it feels like this case might not succeed. Any, anything else jump out at you from the court docs that the, uh, the Comey team filed? Yeah, actually the court docs are fascinating. There is an allegation from Comey's team that the secret service at the request of the number three official in the justice department engaged in warrantless. Surveillance of the Comey's, including of that whole day after posting the photo, including the visiting their son's grave, I believe, and tracked his phone location. That's a track, this phone location and kept me had made frequent phone calls to air force one to keep the president apprised of what was happening. So he could respond appropriately to the seashell Instagram photo at his next press avail. Apparently the FBI, um, uh, they also did some research into. Uh, into the whole 86 term they asked chat GPT at the us attorney's direction. They ran Google AI and chat GPT queries about the term 86 and the AI told them the theory was wrong, including that Miriam Webster doesn't enter a violent meeting. Also, it was also report in the Comey documents that on the same day, within hours of the photo being posted, the, the secret service changed their guidance to. Put have 86, 47 count as a threat against the president. Yes. It also, um, uh, 86 has appeared zero times in the FBI's database of communicated threats since 2007 and before Comey posted Amazon vendors have listed over 200,000 products with 86, 47, 86, 46 or 86, 45 generating zero federal inquiries. Yeah. I don't think this one's going to fly. I remember like Todd Blanch too was like, we wouldn't just do it based on the seashell. Photo. We wouldn't be bringing a case based on that. There's other stuff in there. Okay. We'll see. Uh, it is a pretty high bar to dismiss a case for vindictive prosecution. So you know, we'll see, but, uh, I don't know if the government has the strongest case on this one. Um, Trump's deeply corrupt DOJ also acknowledged in court this week that the federal government terminated $7.6 billion in grants for hundreds of clean energy projects based solely on the political identity of the grant recipients state. 16 states, all of which voted for Kamala Harris, uh, Politico then reported that Trump personally overruled his own agencies to deny disaster aid to four democratic led states just this month. Um, apparently the president has rejected aid, uh, for democratic run states at the highest rate in FEMA's 47 year history. Why isn't this a bigger story? Why isn't this a bigger story could be the title of a compendium of the history of the Trump era. This is one that I saw both of these this week and I was like fucking disaster relief for like, just, just, I don't care. You had a hurricane hit, you had a tornado, you had a fire, people are in need. And because Donald Trump has a beef with the democratic politician that's running the state, nope, no federal money. This is one of the ways in which we've just all of politics, media society has been ground down by Trump's incredible cynicism. Because if this was 2017, there would have been, I'm not saying it would have changed the election or done it, but there would have been a massive uproar about this because this would have been a norm that you do not make disaster aid political. The Trump has overturned nine years later. We've been, we've seen something, some version of this a whole bunch of times with Trump or he's threatened this. They've denied grants. They've done other things too. They've used the government to punish Trump's political opponents in so many ways. We were just talking about the government. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Jim Comey for the seashell Instagram. And so we just like, this has become at least from Trump, not news and not, it doesn't shock the conscious anymore. This is kind of, this is like the longterm damage that Trump has done to how we think about politics and what's appropriate and what isn't can be seen in the fact that this barrel, people barely bat an eye at something that's terrible. Impeachable offense. I think certainly the disaster aid. Oh, for sure. For sure. Certainly the disaster aid. And I can also imagine like the American people should know this. And I do think you can imagine a moment in the 2028 campaign when like, you know, a democratic candidate is, uh, talking about JD Vance or Marco Rubio and said when they were in government the last four years, um, if you were in a state that didn't vote for them, you would get denied money. If a hurricane hit, uh, they wouldn't, they wouldn't come help you out or for a tornado hit and you needed money from the federal government money that you paid into the federal government because you pay your taxes. They just wouldn't give it to you. They just wouldn't give it to you because of how you voted. Like that is, it's like a way to both kick the shit out of them and sound bipartisan because now, now sounding bipartisan is like making sure that we don't starve states of resources just because they happen not to vote for the person in charge. But I guess that's where we are. I mean, it is. So you think about in the Obama era, like we dealt with a raft of tornadoes, which usually hit because of where tornadoes, you know, we're talking about Arkansas, Oklahoma, places like Missouri, places like that where Obama states that voted overwhelming, particularly parts of the states. Yeah. Parts of the state, rural parts of the state that voted overwhelmingly against Obama. Him going there, meeting with local officials, working with officials who, I'm thinking of when we went to, I think you might've been in that trip when we went to Joplin and spoke at the, and he spoke at the commencement, um, to help them out after they admit rural area of Missouri that had been hit by a horrific tornado. And now that, now that's, that seemed, that was quite normal at the time. Now would seem like an extraordinary example of bipartisanship. Pots of America is brought to you by Z Biotics. Uh, let's face it, when you get a little older, if you go out and have a night with a couple of drinks, you do not bounce back like you used to it. For me personally, I wonder what it's going to be like when I'm Tommy's age. I had to make a choice. I can either have a great night or a great next morning until I found pre-alcohol from Z Biotics. Here's what it is. Z Biotics, pre-alcohol probiotic drink. It's the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. 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But this week, CNN now has it at Democrats have an eight point lead. Emerson has Democrats with an 11 point lead. Pew is six points. The argument is eight points. And Fox is seven points. What's your take on why the polling is getting worse again for Trump and Republicans? And how much do you think Republican midterm candidates will be able to outrun Trump's numbers? Because even though this generic ballot number is getting wider, Republicans are still, you know, they are performing better than Trump's approval rating would suggest. Or Democrats are underperforming. Correct. What Trump's approval rating would suggest. So there's a couple things going on here. One is the the obvious, which is the war is back in the news. Gas prices are going up again. That like you can gas prices and a presidential presidential approval rating are highly correlated. And so I think that's part of it. If you want to get nerdy about what's the difference between the polls where like the Pew poll where Democrats have a six point generic ballot lead and Emerson where Democrats 11 point generic ballot lead, it is very you can isolate it. And this is something our friend Ron Brownstein is pointed out repeatedly, is it centers around what percentage of people who disapprove of Trump are voting for Democrats on the generic ballot. In the Pew poll, it is a little less than 80%. And these polls where it's like 11%, you're getting to 90%, 88, 90% Democrats. In most midterm elections, the in both in when Democrats did very, very well in 2018. And in 2022, they did quite well. Sorry, in 2018, it's because we got 90% of, of Trump disapprovers voting for a Democrat for Congress. Now, the reason Democrats did better in 2022, than people expected was because Republicans were not able to get to that 90% number of Biden disapprovers. And so that is the group right now, as you think of, but there is a statistical issue in how these polls work. You know, I don't know which is right, which is wrong. But if you're looking at what's the difference between a good Democratic election and a great Democratic election, one major factor is how successful Democrats are in the polls. And so I think that's candidates are, again, people who disapprove of Trump to vote for a Democrat down ballot. I will say I've noticed in some of the polls where the margin might be a little narrower, there's just a bigger undecided number as well. Like they're not pushing the undecideds. And the Republican number is quite low in those polls. And so it's basically like the Democratic number is under 50, but the Republican number in some of these is like low 40s, high 30s in some of them. And you do wonder in an election where you have the party in power and usually the party in power is punished by the voters if those undecideds don't end up breaking towards the Democrats at the end. I mean, that is the question. And I think it's usually what happens, but you know. It may depend race to race, which is when you look at 2022 is the cautionary example for Democrats because we lost the House. Republicans did not do great, but they took the House. But then Democrats won a bunch of Senate races because- Because we had better candidates running against pretty bad Republican candidates in places like Georgia, Pennsylvania, et cetera. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about the Democratic side of the midterm battle. I'll start with the good news. In addition to those generic ballot numbers, there are some great new Senate polls, including a Fox News poll in North Carolina that has Roy Cooper up nine on Michael Watley. And it looks like at least one Republican super PAC is starting to pull their money out of the state. One- A prominent election forecaster, Larry Sabato, Sabato's crystal ball, just moved the Georgia Senate race from lean Democratic to likely Democratic based on what they call a stable lead in the polls. Did you ever think you'd see a Georgia Senate race move to likely Democratic? Wild. In Iowa, Josh Turek dropped a great new video where our old boss, Barack Obama, endorses him while they shoot hoops, which has already been viewed by the equivalent of the entire population of Iowa. Just on Josh Turek's social accounts alone. It was a great video. What's your take on the developments in North Carolina and Georgia? Is it safe to exhale on those? Obviously, you can say no, but I don't even know why. Of course not. I mean, I've just basically, I almost passed out just at the idea of moving Georgia to lean Democratic. Likely. There's no question we are better positioned in North Carolina and Georgia with less than 100 years ago than we ever thought could be. Possibly a year ago. We have great candidates running against bad Republican candidates. Our candidates have huge fundraising advantages. We should be clear that it is highly unlikely that Rory Cooper wins by nine points and John Ossoff wins by nine, 10, or whatever the polls say. These races are going to be closer. In these polls, Rory Cooper is right around 50. Michael Watley, who's much less well-known, is down below. That undecided is unlikely to allocate entirely to the Democrat. It may be 60-40 or 30-70 with 70% going to the Republican because I'd have to look. We need a more high-quality poll to look at who makes up that undecided, but many of them probably profile as at least potentially voting for a Republican. So I think they're very, very well positioned. These races are going to get closer. And look, if Republicans are pulling money out of North Carolina, that's great because that means the Democratic super PACs may not have to spend as much money. They don't have more money to spend in these stretch states. The North Carolina thing also relates to the shift in the map post-Graham-Plattner, which is if you would have bet in order of likelihood, Maine was the most likely state to flip and North Carolina was the second most likely state to flip. But because of how everything's played out in Maine, North Carolina is probably now the most likely state to flip and Maine is the second most likely state to flip. So you'll see more resources head there. Why do you think Roy Cooper of all the candidates is this far ahead? A couple of reasons. I interviewed Roy Cooper on this exact podcast a few weeks ago. Roy Cooper is awesome. He is just, you know, like we, everyone wants, we often do these super exciting, super inspirational candidates who are like crushing TikTok memes or whatever else. And Roy Cooper is just like a great politician. He is incredibly charming. He is smart. He has delivered for the state. He has tried to be bipartisan. Against one of the most radical Republican legislatures in the country. He has accomplished things. He won in that state twice with Trump on the ballot in the state of North Carolina. And Michael Watley was a terrible choice for Republicans. He is a former state party chair. He's Trump's handpicked choice. Voters don't know him. He like there's a whole bunch about Mike. He just was a bad choice. And so you have a very, very good candidate running against a bad Republican in a state that is, I think it is underperformed for Democrats in the last couple elections, if you look at it demographically. And so there is real potential here, particularly in a midterm electorate will look better than a presidential electorate there because of the high proportion of college educated voters in the research triangle in the other suburbs of the state. I also think on the flip side to your earlier point about, you know, Cooper being at these polls being around 50 and Watley being much lower. One reason for that could be that this is a race that no one knows. Roy Cooper. Yeah, exactly. Right. And so if you're undecided, you've probably there's a probably a better chance you've you know, Roy Cooper and decided you don't want to vote for him. But you don't know who this Michael Watley character is. And maybe it's a Republican who's going to end up coming home or just not voting. And I guess, you know, you could say some similar similar thing about Ossoff in Georgia, right? Like he's their senator. He's been their senator. Mike Collins is just a congressman, one district, but also two really bad candidates in my Collins and and Michael Watley. So Mike Collins today was doing a press avail. I think this was today. And he had to end it early because he got a bunch of questions about all of the anti-Semitic Nazi-esque things that his son-in-law has been posting online. Yeah, really cool. We've also got some potentially good Senate news in deep red states like Montana, Idaho and Nebraska, where the new Democratic strategy appears to be don't run a Democrat. You want to explain what's happening in those states? Sure. So there is an anti-republican story that in states like Nebraska and Montana, it's Trump won by 20 points. In Idaho, it's Trump won by 36 points. The Democratic brand is so toxic that no person, no matter how great a candidate, no matter how well funded they are, could actually beat a Republican. But an independent would have a much better chance at taking out a Republican in an anti-Republican year like the one we're in. And so in Nebraska, you have Dan Osborne, who's a union organizer who ran in 2024 against Deb Fischer. It's running again. He outperformed Kamala Harris by about 14 points. He only lost by six, closer to seven points ago. Yeah. It was like six points, seven points, Trump won by 20. And then in Idaho, you have Todd Achilles, who is a veteran, a businessman, former state legislator, used to be a Democrat, has left the party, become an independent. He is running against Jim Risch, who is an actual senator. That probably comes to news to people, but he is. And in that race, in both Idaho and Nebraska, the person who won the Democratic primary dropped out to give the independent candidate their best chance. In Montana, you have Seth Bodnar running. He is a former Green Beret and the longtime president of the University of Montana. He is running as an independent. And there is also a Democrat in the race who is refusing to drop out. And some polling has shown that Bodnar has a legitimate chance, I think it was down by a point or two, to the Republican, whose name I cannot remember. And you remember the context here is that basically the Republican dropped out minutes before the filing deadline. So there's a whole corruption element to this too. So there's a potential shot in this race, but the Democrat does not seem like she is dropping out. Yeah, the Democrat in Idaho dropped out just this last week. And so, you know, I think Todd Achilles, in that state, the polling hasn't showed him as close to Jim Risch, but like he's still, you know, it's better than the Democrat for sure. And now that the Democrat's dropped out, maybe he'll get some more attention. But in Montana, I mean, there's some polling that shows Seth Bodnar over Kurt. Kurt Almey is the Republican who, basically, you know, the fix was in. And as soon as Steve Daines, who was the Republican Senator of Montana, dropped out, he's the one who just filed a couple minutes after that. But the Democrat in that race just like refuses to drop out. And she has no money, no real campaign, and is just being stubborn for no reason. And she does have until, by the way, August 10th. So she can drop out by August 10th. And then give Seth Bodnar like a real chance against the Republican. And we could, you know, you could get independence in there. Now, Seth Bodnar, Todd Achilles, there's also Brian Bangs is running in South Dakota. You know, they're not like liberal Democrats. They're not even mainstream Democrats. I think all of them have some, and same thing with Dan Osborne. Some of them have some, like, I would say, I would characterize it as more culturally conservative positions on some issues. And then, like, I don't know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Little more economically populist positions on other issues. Not too lefty economic populist, but for a red state, they do. Very focused on sort of anti-corruption, good government. I mean, they're the type of, you would want them in the United States Senate way, way, way over the Republicans in those seats. Yes. I mean, as an example, Dan Osborne in 2024 ran an ad saying he would help Trump build the wall. Right. Right. But he's also like on economic issues, on health care, like, minimum wage, union rights. Proact. Yeah. He's a union organizer. He's great on all of that stuff, you know. So that's, hopefully that'll work. But yeah, if you're, if you're in Montana or you're in Idaho, check out some of these candidates. And also if you're in Montana, like, try to help make some noise so that the Democrat in that race can finally drop out and do the right thing before August 10th and actually give us a shot there. Because if not, we have no shot. I would say that in Montana, and I've heard from some people in Montana about this, that there was a lot of anger in how this has played out. That, you know, you have a Democratic Party, you have a, there's also a vibrant Democratic Party that has, you know, elected John Tester multiple times. There's been Democratic governors of the state in recent years. And to sort of have that whole process pushed aside for someone who they believe to be quite flawed on many issues has led to anger, which is, I think, leading to bank hits in the race. Now, if you take a step back and you say, what is our best chance of beating Kurt Allmey and winning a seat, even if it's a long shot, it is clearly Seth Bodnar, and it's not a close call. And there is something that connects. This with the DNC conversation you guys had on Tuesday with something we're about to talk about here, which is there really is, like, it's sort of Lord of the Flies in the Democratic Party right now. Ideas, you know, you would like to think that there's someone in charge, someone with authority who could come in and say, look, someone who's trusted, who could say the best thing to defeat Republicans and have Democrats possibly take the Senate and hold it for a while, because we really want to have a governing majority. We need to go back to a world where we can win Montana and Idaho and Nebraska in place. Is for to give Seth Bodnar a chance here, even if it is a long shot. And no one has that authority. Same thing at the DNC, where no one has the actual authority to go and tell Ken Martin he should go if that's what they think. And so there is just, we're kind of no one's in charge right now in the party. And that has consequences in these sorts of situations. And you don't, I'm like, you don't want people from Washington coming in and doing everything. But there is, at times you have to make really hard strategic decisions. And there's no one trusted to make those decisions. So you end up with situations like this. Yeah, it's a real problem. But when you, you know, NBC just had a story about this today, just sort of detailing what's going on in the Montana race. And saying how, like, even though the party is sort of at war with itself right now, people from all different parts of the party are all for Seth Bodnar getting a chance in this race. Like, they interviewed Faz, Shakir, you know, worked for Bernie Sanders, Neera Tanden at CAP, like, the left, the center left, everyone's for this. And so it's just a, it's just a matter of. Actually, these people in these races who are Democrats doing the right things. And a provider will review your information to determine if treatment is right for you. If prescribed, your treatment ships directly to your door. That includes sildenafil, also known as a generic for Viagra, available through HIMSS at up to 95% less than the brand name version. 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This is my attempt to take the manifesto back from mass shooters and nihilists and return it to its rightful place with the warriors, the visionaries, the regular folks with just the right amount of crazy. I compare notes with radicals, secessionists, and the like. I'm not a fan of the word crazy. I'm a fan of the word internet trolls out for a laugh and punk singers screaming their guts out, all trying to turn their anger into the world they want to see. Listen to Manifesto wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of Manifesto early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. All right. Meanwhile, in the upper Midwest, the democratic civil war is raging like the 2016 primary never ended. We are we're in the final stages of the primary campaigns in the Michigan Senate and House races or election day is this coming Tuesday and the Wisconsin governor's race, which is a week later in Michigan. The final debate of the Senate primary between Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed was Monday night. Here's a sample of the vibe. When you ask $60 million to come into a race for you and then say that somehow you're electable, I think you don't quite understand what electability means. If you need a $60 million crutch, you probably can't be elected on your own. My opponent is on these big podcasts. You know, he's running a podcast himself. These folks are making fun of the way I sound, but yet I sound like the people who need help, who are talking to me about what they need. A direct attack on podcasters, Dan. What the fuck? And in one of ours, actually, yeah, the podcast. She was referring to there, America Dissected, one of a crooked podcast for many years. It hasn't been for a couple of years, but yeah, that was what Abdul hosted right here on our network. A podcast about public health. Yeah, I was going to say that's the, it's not really this big. She was trying to make it out to be this like celebrity podcast. It's not breaking down Real Housewives of Rhode Island. No, it's a pretty staid podcast about public health. It's helping inform people about public health. Anyway, it's getting even more heated between surrogates as it often does. Michigan Congresswoman Hillary Shulton, who is a Haley Stevens supporter, was asked by Semaphore on Wednesday evening whether she'll support Abdul if he wins. And she said, quote, I will not stand beside someone who has allowed distinctly anti-American sentiment to enter our public dialogue. When Abdul came on this podcast, Alex Wagner asked him the same question about Stevens. He said, I will do everything I can to make sure Mike Rogers never sees the inside of the U.S. Senate. Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders, the same night that Hillary Shulton gave that interview, was on CNN saying he would support Haley Stevens if she's the winner as well. And just not getting it from all of the supporters on Haley Stevens' side. But Haley Stevens herself has said. Yes, she has. Yes, she has. I think that's an important point. And if we're being totally fair here, there are people on the other side who feel the same way about Haley Stevens. Here's the thing. If you believe the polls, and we only have a small sample size of polls here, Abdul is the most likely Democratic nominee. MARK BLYTH: Yeah. Emerson came out to, so we've had a lot of kind of either internal polls or polls that are like not high quality or, or maybe they're just new pollsters, but we had an Emerson poll on Thursday. Emerson's a high quality poll and it has Abdul up 15% over Haley, which does match what some of those other polls that we weren't sure about were saying. And it matches the internal polls that are circulating. Yes. Um, so I think that that probably is an accurate picture of where the race stands today, four days before the primary and a fair amount of people have voted already in the state, but no matter who wins, everyone's gonna have to come back together again. And both the winner and the loser are going to have to build a bridge to get the other side together, right? Like if Abdul wins, he is going to have to be very magnanimous and very open. And he is going to need the support of all of the establishment that is supporting Haley Stevens in Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, Dana Nessel, Debbie Stabenow, Gary Peters. And if, um, Haley Stevens were to win, then she is going to need the support of the huge grassroots network that Abdul has created, the UAW, which has supported Abdul. Like everyone's gonna have to come together here pretty quickly because this is the problem with the late primary is there's not a lot of time to mend fences, build a coalition, and then go win a general election. Here's all I'll say about it. It is one thing to have supporters. And it is one thing to have supporters on both sides who, when the other candidate wins, are going to say that they're going to take their toys and go home. Um, and that's going to happen. Um, but, uh, it's, it's, there is a difference if it is, uh, people who are just, you know, posting online, um, or, you know, influencers here and there, podcasters, streamers, whoever it may be. There's a difference between those people and elected officials and leaders in the democratic party. And if you're a leader in the democratic party, you're an elected official, you set the example, uh, for everyone else to follow. And if random person with a couple hundred thousand followers on Twitter is like, no, I'm not voting for Abdul or I'm not voting for Haley Stevens, whatever. There's nothing we can all do about that. You know, we can shame that person, yell at them, try to convince them, do whatever you want, but like, you're going to get that. That's just going to happen in primaries. Um, we don't have to like amplify that a ton because then, uh, it'll just cause everything to be worse. But elected officials like Hillary Scholten should not have said that like that. And, and there's, there's not an elected official on Abdul's side who has said something similar. There just hasn't been. And like to Haley Stevens' credit, she hasn't said anything like that. Her other elected officials who are supporting her hadn't said that, but like for Hillary Scholten to say that is just unbelievably unhelpful, unproductive. And what you were saying by telling people that is that if Abdul wins the primary, then somehow you'd rather Mike Rogers be the Senator. Mike Rogers, who is a Trump, supporting healthcare cutting, like all of the, all of the right-wing Trump positions who would vote for a Trump nominee to the Supreme court, you would rather that person happen to win the race and then try hard to go out there and make sure that Abdul, uh, wins the Senate race. And I just think that's ridiculous. Yeah. It's not, it's, it is not, it's not constructive is maybe the nicest way to say it. It's not constru- and again, it's like, if you are a leader in the, I mean, we, we don't tend to endorse in races. We, we are in this one because we, we know Abdul and have worked with him, but like I've said from the beginning Haley Stevens wins. I am all in for Haley Stevens. And like, I don't agree with it. That doesn't mean I suddenly changed my mind and agree with her position on Israel. I don't, but like she is far in a way better, uh, than Mike Rogers. And I'm be very comfortable voting for her and supporting her and doing whatever I can to make sure she wins. You know, I would donate, I would, if she wins the primary on Tuesday night, I will donate to her before I eat breakfast on Wednesday. For sure. And, and you look, people will forget this, but like you and I had this conversation a million times back on the whole Platner Mills thing. We're like, Janet Mills wins this primary. We are all for Janet Mills. We'll go up to Maine and knock on doors, right? Like we are on the team here. Did you just get, did someone cattle prod you that we hadn't mentioned Platner in this podcast? I was just thinking like, this is going too well. We haven't engendered any hatred just yet. Let's- I am, I am trying to, cause I really, I just, I have these, we have this primary here in Wisconsin and Michigan that this is happening for, but like, we're going to look ahead. This is going to happen in 2028. I am trying to practice what we preach, set an example and hope that everyone else in positions of influence and leadership in this party does the same thing. Because if we turn around and just, you either, you either want to, um, win or you want to fight, right? Or you want, and then you want to be right. So you, so that like, after someone loses that you didn't want to win, you can say, oh, see, I was right all along. Like, is that going to fit? Is that going to feel more satisfying than having a democratic Senate, democratic House, a democratic president? That's something you have to ask yourself. For people insulated from the consequences of politics, it probably will. But for the American people in Michigan, people in America, absolutely not. Right. So you can post later that like you were right all along. And again, this goes for, we've, we've seen it, we've been doing this for 10 years. We've seen it on both sides. We've seen sore losers on the left and the center left. Um, anyway, uh, what are your thoughts on the, on the electability arguments from both sides? Because I do think in this race, it has been, um, tricky to figure out, to make an electability case, partly because I think there's been such a, a lack of high quality polling. It is, there is one poll from the Michigan Education Association, a business group that circulated last week or earlier this week that showed Haley Stevens doing much better against Mike Rogers, beating Mike Rogers and by a fair amount, and Abdul losing to Mike Rogers very, very correctly. I don't know if that poll is correct. I, the Republicans do believe privately and publicly that Abdul will be easier to beat than Haley Stevens. Yeah. If you look at the real clear politics average, it has Stevens 0.5 over Rogers and Abdul 0.5 over Rogers, exactly the same. And then the, basically the entire electability gap comes from that poll that you just mentioned. Yeah. Kind of surprised that Emerson didn't poll the general. Yes. Like they just pulled the primary and they didn't give us a fucking general. Come on guys. And similar thing with the, the, but we'll get to Wisconsin in a minute. We've seen similar things with some polls that could do that. I'm surprised. Yeah. I'm surprised they didn't do that. Like hypothetical general election polling is quite flawed, but the people whose job it is to win elections on the Republican side believe, and they could be wrong. They absolutely could be wrong, but they do believe they do. And they've spent money to try to do that. There's so much money being spent on the Haley Stevens side that it hasn't really mattered that much, but they have tried to boost Abdul in this race. And so I can, I can make an electability argument for both of them. I've done it in my newsletter. I think it is theoretical self-fulfilling bullshit in most cases. Um, the one thing I'd say is for Abdul, there is like, he's, he, he has more statements and more positions in his life that can be demagogued by Republicans and Haley Stevens does. Yes. For sure. Outside of Israel. Outside. Well, as you say, the, the challenge for Haley Stevens is what makes her a moderate in this race is that she is more moderate than Abdul on a whole bunch of issues, Medicare for all abolish ice, but she is, you know, she voted with Joe Biden, I think a hundred percent of the time. Um, and so she is more moderate than Abdul, but she's not, this is not Joe Manchin or Jared Golden or something like that. What makes her out where the one issue where she is not sort of swimming with the stream and the democratic party right now is on Israel. She is one of the more, or you could say the Michigan electorate. And that was what, that's what I was going to say. Is what the, the thing that gets lost in the conversation about the changing public opinion on Israel is that the biggest shift is not Democrats. It's independence. Yeah. And we have not seen Michigan specific polling on that, but I would imagine it's at least comparable to the national polling or more stark than that. And so that is a challenge. And like for Abdul to win, like in this Emerson poll, he is losing black voters by 30 points. Now I, I'm confident that most of those black voters would prefer Abdul over Mike Rogers, but you just have to turn them out. It's not just that they, whether they choose you or not, or prefer you. And then for Haley Stevens, the hard, it's, it's going to be a very challenging thing to get youth turnout in Michigan, a state with huge colleges in Lansing and Ann Arbor. When you are, when you are, have the position you have on Israel and your campaign has been bankrolled to the tune of like $60 million from APAC. And so these are, these are challenges for both of them, but neither of them win to go back to your original point. If we're not completely unified in this race, because Mike Rogers is a very good opponent. This is a 50, 50 state. I think both of them can win, but they both have challenges. Yeah, I agree. So things are no more pleasant in Wisconsin where democratic socialist Francesca seems to have the nomination for governor wrapped up despite a last minute attempt by the state's democratic establishment to stop her. She's crushing in all the polls. Former lieutenant governor Mandela Barnes just dropped out. Couple hours before we started recording and David Crowley who quit the race and then re-entered the race the other week with governor Evers endorsement is still stuck around 10 to 15% in the polls. A lot of Democrats worried about this race with Hong as the nominee based on some pretty far out there, old statements, tweets, policy positions. She once called for abolishing the Senate. Then her campaign said she never did, but the tweet does in fact exist. She once called for abolishing prisons and police, though now says those aren't her current positions. She even had a 2020 tweet about abolishing Thanksgiving, calling it quote, the original super event that killed indigenous folk and women. Folk there spelled F-O-L-X. Dan, what do you think of Hong's chances? Well, if the polls are correct, she is almost certainly going to be the Democratic nominee. There have been two polls out this week where she is up by more than 20 points and has very high favorability. So it seems like she's going to be the Democratic nominee. This is a very, very hard race. It is, she, as you point out, is a Democratic Socialist. Democratic Socialists have a minus 21, I think, approval rating in Wisconsin. Minus 23%. Democrats have a minus 21%. Mac has a minus 19%. No one's doing great. But Democratic Socialism, she has these positions that can be demagogued. In addition to Wisconsin, like I said, Michigan was a 50-50 state. Wisconsin is the swing state. It has been decided by less than one point in five of the last seven presidential elections. And Hong is running to succeed a two-term Democratic governor in a change election. So she can absolutely win. You're a 50-50 state. The political environment, based on the polling statistics we just had, is somewhere between 6 to 11 points Democratic. So you have some margin for error there. But it's going to take some real work, and she's going to have to be very smart and deft. And everyone I know who knows her, Amanda Littman was talking about her with me. She's a Republican. She's a Democrat. She's a Democrat. She's a Democrat. She's going to have to run for something candidate when she was on this podcast a couple weekends ago. She is incredibly bright. She's obviously ran an incredible primary campaign. She's a very good campaigner. And she's going to have to run essentially a flawless campaign and navigate these issues to the end. But if she does that, she can win. But it's hard. It's obviously hard. It's going to be a hard race, no matter who the nominee is. And it's probably a little bit harder with her as the nominee. Here's one thing I'd like to see from her, and to an extent, Abdul as well, if he ends up being the nominee. I've said this before, that you have old tweets. Woke One was crazy in 2020. People had a lot of crazy tweets. And if you want to disavow them, great. I just think there needs to be a little more. So Hong was asked by J-Mart after the debate whether she's still- That's Jonathan Martin from Politico. Sorry, Jonathan Martin. Yeah, I know. It's hard. For those who haven't had their brains broken about politics for the last so many years. Whether she still supports the goal, the aspirational goal of abolishing prisons. And the answer has got to be just no. Just no. No, I don't. And it was, she didn't say she supports it, but it was sort of a long winding answer about over-incarceration and all these things that are true. We over-incarcerate people. Our prisons, the conditions there are terrible. We put people in jail for nonviolent crimes that they shouldn't be in jail for. We put people in jail for nonviolent crimes that they shouldn't be in jail for, right? Like, all of that stuff is true. But when someone asks you, do you think that we should defund the police? The answer is no. Do we think, do you think that we should abolish prisons? No. Should we abolish police departments? No. Should we abolish borders? No. And what about, you said that before. So what was that tweet about? I was wrong. I was wrong. I tweeted something back then. I have thought about it. And you know what? It's wrong. That's it. And like, I don't think Abdul has done that well enough on defund. And I think he can, he needs to fix that if he runs the general. And I think certainly she has a whole bunch, Francesca Hong, of positions like that. Because, and look, and the left will say, well, they have very popular positions on healthcare and data centers, stuff like that. Yes, they do. And those positions, they don't have to worry about as much. And they should spend the campaign emphasizing them. But in order for voters to hear your positions on those issues, they need to feel comfortable that on those other issues, on the group of abolish issues that keeps getting a lot of these DSA people in trouble, that you just disavowed them and you've changed your mind. Yeah, that's exactly right. You have to be very, you have to, look, you have to reckon with the reality of the race you're running. If you are running in a district that Kamala Harris won by 50 points in Manhattan or Colorado, that's one world. If you're running statewide in Michigan or Wisconsin, that is a very different world. And you're going to have to be very clear. And your primary win, you know, if the polls are correct, both of their primary wins are going to be incredibly impressive. But that tells you very little about how you're going to do in the general and the new, in the whole set of voters, you're now going to have to go persuade. And it's going to require a shift in strategy, a change in, not a change in like what you actually believe are your values, but how you talk, but how you talk, you have to be, I guess, you have to think that now I have to persuade a whole bunch of people who disagree with me on a lot of things to support me. And what you can do that by emphasizing the things they do agree with you on, like healthcare being a human right, universal healthcare in whatever form you're choosing to be in. A lot of stuff that data centers, a lot of stuff statewide for Francesca Hong about education in Wisconsin, like that can work, but there are some barriers you have to get over and tens of millions of dollars will be spent throwing your old positions, your old statements, your old tweets in your face on a daily basis. And you're going to have to do what Kamala Harris was unwilling to do in 2024, which is explicitly go out and say clearly and repeatedly, I would change my mind. Here's why. Yeah. Because here's what doesn't work. Just trying to change the issue again, because you don't want to talk about healthcare. No, doesn't work. Doesn't work. No. People can read, they can see the positions, they will watch the videotape of you saying whatever, they will read the old tweets and, and there needs to be video of you out there giving an explanation. And I don't want to hear that the, because we hear this in the Harris campaign that it didn't test well, none of the responses tested well. Of course, they're not going to test well. You're responding to something that is unbelievably unpopular. So it's not going to test well. It's just something that you have to say. Abdul got this question on CNN. He would not say, he said a bunch of words that I think he thought in his head added up to that, but it was not clear and basically seemed like he refused to answer whether he still supported it. You know, who was very clear about this? Zoran Mamdani when he was running. I was just going to say like, if you don't want to listen to us, cause we're a bunch of fucking centrist neolib Obama shills, like go just watch some tape of AOC and Zoran Mamdani, right? The, the, the, the heroes of the left, just watch, watch the tape and you'll see that they exactly what you just said, that they know exactly how to talk about this stuff. Yeah. He just, they asked, do you still support? And he said, no. And that was New York city, not Michigan. Right. Yeah. It's good. Easier for him there than it's going to be in Michigan and Wisconsin for sure. There's a new show from the guardian called stateside with Kai and Carter. The idea is pretty simple. Slow things down. Focus on one story. Ask the questions. You're probably already yelling at your phone. And by the end, actually feel like you understand what's going on. They're digging into everything from authoritarianism to the rise of people dating with you. So you're getting coverage across politics, culture, climate, and more. Plus conversations with big thinkers and newsmakers join Kai, right. And Carter Sherman three times a week, as they try to make sense of all this new episodes drop every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you can watch on YouTube or listen, wherever you get your podcast. This is Troy millions from earn your leisure. If you want a small business, you know how important it is to stay on top of your numbers. That's why I want to tell you about Xero. That's X E R O. Xero is a platform built for small business owners that brings accounting payments, payroll, and analytics together in one place. You can access reports, visual dashboards, forecasts, and AI insights to help you better understand your cashflow and make informed decisions about your business. Okay. One last piece of bad news on the midterms before we get to some, some other bad news. Elon Musk says he's going to spend at least $100 million. Elon's back. And he's got a hundred million dollars that he's going to spend to help Republican candidates in the fall. Uh, so much for starting that third party. How big of a deal do you think this is? I think this is fucking great. Problem is they have such a financial advantage that a hundred million dollars is basically like spitting in the ocean at this point. Honestly, that was my first instinct, but I'm glad that you think that too. It's like that all the world's richest man is going to spend a hundred million dollars. Like he could put it, he could put $5 billion in if he wanted it. It would, nothing to him. Let's make Elon Musk the face of a lot of these Republicans. He's incredibly unpopular. It allows you to talk about Doge. It allows you to talk about AI, which we're about to get to. It allows you to talk about big tech. It is like corruption, everything else. Like, well, put him front and center. Yeah. Uh, well, speaking of AI, a couple of these candidates, um, in particular, Francesca Hong, um, have made opposition to AI data centers, a focal point of their campaigns. Uh, and this week it was really easy to understand why putting limits on the AI to people. Um, as some of you may have seen or heard a new model from open AI escaped its so-called sandbox. What's a sandbox? Well, that's basically a lockdown server with no internet where it was undergoing testing, uh, and secretly escaped the sandbox, reached the internet and hacked into a separate AI platform called hugging face in order to score better on a cybersecurity evaluation. Uh, open AI CEO, Sam Altman, said it was quote the first security incident that I have felt very viscerally good. I'm glad. Can I say one thing about that? That is the scariest thing of that is the AI model left notes in the server to itself because they thought it would be destroyed after this. Basically, like, here's how I did it so future versions of me can do this. And I saw someone say that if this AI agent was a person, they would have been convicted of many, many crimes. I'm sure. Yeah. But not Sam. Sam just felt it very viscerally. He seems to be moving toward favoring some kind of centralized controls on AI development kind of slowly, as do Trump, the founders of Anthropic, and more than 1,000 employees of those companies who signed an open letter this week. But not Mark Zuckerberg. That little fuck who's out there being like, oh, all these guys want centralized control, and I just want everyone to have their own AI. And I want everyone to be free to have their own private personalized AI because I'm for that freedom, and they're for central control. Because all the fucking people that Meta has hired on their payroll, Democrats and Republicans, to run their PR campaign on AI realized that the advantage that they could have is to paint. side. There's a whole conversation we had about data centers and everything you said I agree with there. But the safety of these models, like there has to be regulation on. We can't just say like, oh, wow, that one got out of the sandbox and I really felt that one viscerally and next time we're going to fix that. Like, I mean, Ted Lieu has an AI kill switch bill that he introduced that a bunch of people signed on to that would require developers to have a means of shutting down their models. Of course, the industry doesn't support that for some reason. I think like Thune and Cruise and Klobuchar and Cantwell are working on a frontier AI bill. But like so much of this shit is like voluntary regulation and all this kind of stuff. Like you cannot have these models go out to market that are this powerful if they're not adequately tested that they're safe. I mean, that is like that's more important than anything else because that's like lights out for everyone. Anyway, is there a hopeful way to end this? Well, John, but also, but look, we're all dead. Here's the thing, Dan. We're in the singularity now. The thing that Sam Altman was just talking about, you know, at the lunch table. And now we're here. So that's pretty cool. Yeah. We're in the singularity. The Michigan primary is Tuesday and Wisconsin's the next Tuesday. Things are things are looking up. Do you think I think the flaw in Sam Altman's genie argument is do you think they've accounted for the fact that the only smart thing to do? If you get a genie with three wishes, did you ask for unlimited wishes with your first wish? I've heard someone else actually make that say that about AI, that it's the it's unlimited wishes, that it's like, well, it's not because the fucking tokens are quite expensive. So I don't think it's that unlimited. Yeah. Give me some free. Give us some tokens in every pot, Sam. Enough water and electricity to power a small town just for being like, hey, chat, what should I do tonight? Hey, chat, why am I feeling sad? It's just that's a whole time. Right there. That's our show for today. Love it. We'll be back in the feed on Sunday with the Bulwarks. Jonathan V. Last. Have a good weekend, everyone. Bye, everyone. Positive America is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts and Farrah Safari with Reed Cherlin, Elijah Cohn and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis, Kiril Pellevive, David Tolles, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young and Naomi Single. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.