208. Are the Democrats Too Broke to Win the Midterms?

Are the Democrats too broke to win? The party is in debt and mortgaging buildings to raise cash. These midterms will be a referendum on Trump, and with his ratings at an all-time low, this should be the Democrats' year. Nowhere is that struggle playing out more than in Maine? Graham Platner blew up the Democrats' race. Now Troy Jackson is their nominee for the Senate, but he's out of cash too. Meanwhile, Donald Trump declared war on the press this weekend at a bizarre White House correspondence dinner. Amid jokes about a third-term Nicki Minaj and Gavin Newsom, Trump peppered his rambling speech with pointed attacks on journalists and insults aimed at his rivals. Was this the moment for American press court to get up and walk out? The relationship looks like it's beyond repair. Welcome to the rest is politics US, I'm Cate Kaye, Antony is off this week, getting some well-deserved holiday time. So I'm joined by Joe Scarborough, co-host of Morning Joe on MS now, and former Republican congressman from Florida. Let's get into it. I thought this news that came out over the weekend about the Democrats' financial woes was extraordinary. I'll just quickly lay it out for people who have not been following this. There is reporting that the Democratic National Committee and this is in their June filings basically that have just come out. The Democratic National Committee, which is the group that runs elections, is $2 million in debt. The Republican National Committee has $130 million almost sitting in the bank. I knew that the Democrats were having problems fundraising, but Joe in a year when the president has record low approval ratings, people are genuinely worried about cost of living issues. They don't like what's happening in the war in Iran. You've got like a Fox News poll came out last week showing on the top five issues that people are concerned about. They trust the Democrats over the Republicans, but it is a truism, American politics, that you can't win races without money. How did they get themselves into this position where they are literally having to mortgage their own building in order to raise a bit of money from the bank to help support races around the country? It's pathetic. They went with Ken Martin who didn't know how to do this. Instead of going with Ben Wickler, who helped turn Wisconsin around and Wisconsin had been really jetty-mandered and rigged for Republicans for years. It was the worst example of that and Ben Wickler turned that around. They could have gone to them, could have gone, should have gone with Rama manual, so some people may not like certain issues, where Rama stands, but Rama's not going to be running himself here. He's going to be helping Democrats win. So putting Rama manual in there who would know how to raise money, know how to spend money, know how to organize it, would have made a difference. Getting Terry McAuliffe up there, Donna Brazil up there. All these grandiose of the Democratic Party. All these of the party who, again, may be the, quote, old Democratic faction, but they know how to run. They know how to win. And most importantly, right now they know how to raise money because it's not going to be Donna Brazil or Rama manual or Terry McAuliffe on the line. It's going to be John Assof. It's going to be our candidates that are going Republican Democratic candidates. It's going to be for Democratic candidates in Ohio and Maine all across the country. And so they need that money. They need it more than ever because the Supreme Court had a decision come down a couple of weeks ago that actually gave parties more power and more authority to spend their money on local races with individual candidates. So it's more important than ever before. The Democrats have known this was a problem for a very long time. If this had been happening in the Republican party, then the RNC chair would have been fired months ago. Republicans do not put up with this sort of stuff. The fact that the Democrats are going around scratching their head going, what do we do? What do we do? Or oh, boy, if we lose this midterm election, boy, then we'll fire him wrong approach. They have to win this midterm election and they have to win in 28. And having a guy in there that's having to literally mortgage the building the DNC's in to keep the place running is the wrong person to have. I mean, look, they've got vendors who are being asked, please don't send us any more bills until after the midterm elections. I don't know how, I don't know how your household works, Joe, but it wouldn't go down very well in my household. I wouldn't have any electricity on if I asked people not to be paid. You know, I'm sorry. I can't pay you for a while. I mean, what's odd about this is that we've got a situation where Democrats have what I think in the latest polling that we spoke about on the show last week, an 11 point enthusiasm gap. And I think that is Fox's own polling, maybe CNN's, but it's a vast enthusiasm gap between which is huge. There's so much antipathy towards Trump and midterm elections are often a referendum on the sitting president. So this ought to be right by rights a great year for Democrats. So if they can't make up this money, if they can't get some of those big old dogs of the Democratic Party to pick up the phone and call everybody they know and say, this is a five alarm fire. You need to donate five million. You need to donate 10 million to fill our coffers. Is it just the nature of American politics and American political organizing and the cost of it, even in the social media world where it doesn't, you're not having to buy expensive bad time as much as you used to, is it possible for them to win because I'm hearing some rumblings from Republicans saying, we're not feeling as pessimistic about the house as we were a few weeks ago. Right. I mean, because you know, you look at Susan Collins race when she was running in Grand Planner was still in there. That race got close because they started piling money in whether it was in the beginning of the World Cup or baseball games. If you watch Boston Red Sox game, which goes throughout all of New England, all of Maine, if you watched the World Cup, if you watched any sporting event up in Maine, you would be hit with three, four, five Susan Collins commercials for everyone, Grand Planner commercial. I think that's one of the reasons he decided he had to get out because he couldn't keep up with that. These candidates that are getting a lot of national attention in the Democratic Party because they are populist because they are charismatic. Is the money not necessarily following them? It is for John Ossoff and I mean, Ossoff's raised a ton of money and Grand Planner had raised pretty good money, but he was going to be raising a ton of money in July and August. He was really starting a big campaign, a fundraising swing then. But the problem is again, though, they're raising the money and the D triple C has money. The Senate committee has money for Democrats and a lot of these individual candidates are doing okay, but it's just, it's at the DNC versus the RNC and it's also the biggest downer. The Washington Post had a story that listed the top 50 donors in American politics. I think something like 40, 45 were Republican and the reason why is Democrats lost Silicon Valley and they've lost another part of it. Democrats have another problem, too. There's so much distrust after 24. Donors went all in for Candle. First of all, after the election, they were angry that Joe Biden hung on too long. Then they were angry that Kamala Harris didn't win because she was supposed to win. Even though I, Meek and I at least think that Kamala hit all of her marks. I don't think she's a born, natural campaigner, but we thought that she exceeded all expectations. She beat Donald Trump badly in the debate and on performance alone, she had a good chance of winning, but getting to TV ads, getting the money. I remember watching those NFL ads, you know, I've sitting there watching NFL on YouTube TV where you can see four screens at once. I'm waiting for the Premier League to allow me to do that. We'll forgive you for being a Liverpool supporter. It's okay. Exactly. The Transad started popping up and I, I, I called somebody new in the campaign communication side and said, you get a problem there. I know nobody in the Democratic Party wants to talk about that, but that's going to not only turn off white working class guys. That's going to turn off block working class guys. That's going to turn off Hispanic working class guys. You're going to have a real problem there if they can keep that up and they kept running. It's been like $30 million on that ad alone on the NFL and it made a big difference. And they still don't want to admit that because they have such an issue. They cannot say what three out of four Americans say, which is men who have gone through puberty should not be able to compete against women or young girls after they've transitioned. Now, inside the Democratic Party, that's, that's a, I guess, maybe that's a radical concept. It's not radical for most Americans, it's just not. And so, but the Democratic Party, Kamala Harris' campaign, they couldn't go out and put an ad out and it was a very simple ad to put out, which was, I think the Lincoln Project put this out, which was, yes, Kamala Harris answered this question this way during an ACLU debate in 2019 that we should pay for transition surgeries for prisoners. But at that same time, that was Donald. Trump's justice department policy. That was his bureau of prisons policy. And so I said, when you don't have to attack Trump, you don't have to be hateful like Donald Trump. We should always be compassionate. All of us Republicans, independents, Democrats just state those facts, but they wouldn't do it. And they kept lying saying, well, you know, nobody's paying attention. This isn't showing up in any of our testing. It doesn't test well. Well, the question is, if it didn't test well, then why did Republicans spend $30 million on it and run it in every NFL game for the last month of the campaign? It did make a difference. And that's the sort of thing that you hear people second-guessing. And really quickly, they second-guess that decision. And right now, you have a lot of moderate Democrats, very worried about what's happening in New York City, very worried what's happening with the USA candidates. The Democratic Socialists of America. Very worried with all of this stuff, which I personally think has been blown up so much in the media. Yeah, there are some crazy, crazy policy positions held by a lot of these candidates there in New York City. I mean, this is, you know, Democrats are electing moderates in moderate swing districts. They're electing moderates to win the governorship of Virginia and New Jersey. You know, these people need to get off the sidelines and start helping the Democratic Party, unless they want Donald Trump to have unfettered power the last two years of his presidency. That's interesting. Are you saying that the money issue is a bigger problem at the moment for the midterm elections than the thing that Republicans are going to repeat from now till November every single day in every ad that they run, that there is some kind of red scare taking over America, and socialism is coming to sweep us away. And yeah, we have seen some DSA candidates have some success, but basically it's normies that are having success. I saw the money reports from the DNC and how little money they had and I thought that's what got me to prick up my ears. That's what made me think they have a bigger problem. Yeah, I think so. And this is, you can tell that Donald Trump and Mike Johnson and Republicans have latched on to this. The commies are here, the commies are here, the commies have reached our shore. We've got to fight the commies, which is hilarious because if you want to talk about socialism, talk about a party where you have its leader actually seizing the means of production for some of our most important companies in America. Talk about that share of intel that he's just taken for the government. Yeah. This is Great Britain, 1978. Let's take some more companies love. That was for this morning, so people that didn't see my British accent this morning. So anyway, so that's what Margaret Thatcher put behind her in Great Britain. So you have actually Donald Trump going full climate at Lee here. I mean, and you look at him taking over companies, you look at all the tariffs, you look at the fact we have the largest deficit ever. You look at the fact we have the largest national debt ever. You look at the fact that 35% of the America's national debt that we've accumulated since 1776, 35% has been accumulated by Donald Trump and this Republican Congress. So they're not spending like drunken sailors. They're spending like drunken socialist. So we really don't need small government lectures from the likes of Donald Trump and Mike Johnson. They're the ones that are seizing control of companies, not Democrats. Anthony and I've just recorded a series for our founding members on JD Vance and we were talking at the end of the series about basically this horseshoe effect of politics where JD Vance and Bernie Sanders are not that far away from each other. On issues like government control and government production and taking over companies. I mean, it's interesting because JD is there too. He is there. He's basically in for kind of a much more conservative Christian form of big government, but you are seeing that from Donald Trump too. Okay, let's zoom in on a little in on main a bit, which I know is a state you know very well. You spend a lot of time there. You and Meeker. We had Troy Jackson being nominated this weekend and I listened to Troy Jackson's acceptance speech as the nominee for the Democratic candidate for the Senate. And of course, we've reported a lot on this show about Platner and the blow up of Platner. And I know that people are saying he's only got 100 days and he hasn't got much charisma and he doesn't have that. And he is a pot of state politician. So he's got some name recognition. And it's going to be very hard for him to kind of break through in just 100 days. But I listened to that 20 minute acceptance speech that he gave over the weekend. I actually found it quite refreshing. I thought here is a candidate who is not making this all about himself. Right from the beginning, I found Platner could be a little angry and a little self-absorbed. Jackson, I thought, took the fight to Susan Collins. He made it about his progressive policies. I've been told from Democrats in Maine, Democratic politicians in Maine that Susan Collins really is underwater with voters. The number of times she's sided with Donald Trump on issues like abortion, other issues as well is starting to really great on people's nerves. Do you think Democrats still have a chance of taking Maine and then taking the Senate or is that over? Do you think? No, I mean, they definitely have a chance to take Maine. And they've got some problems though. Susan Collins is a unicorn in that she won Maine by nine points back in 2020. Donald Trump lost it by nine points. So we got to a stage when we were growing up in America. That happened all the time where you'd have a Democratic candidate doing well in the same state that a Senate Republican candidate was doing well. That stopped happening a long time ago. But now we have, in this case, we've got Susan Collins six years later. She's not as strong of a candidate today as she was back in 2020. Because of the Trump thing or just because of age because she's been there too long, having said she was going to do two terms and now has done however many it is that she's done but a lot more. I think citing with Donald Trump, who was extraordinarily unpopular in the state, hurts her. I think breaking her term limits pledge and sticking around for as long as she did has hurt her. And I also do think too that in an era where Joe Biden's age became a disqualifying factor where Donald Trump's age is becoming a disqualifying factor where let's just admit it, Janet Mills probably lost the grand platinum part because her age was seen as a disqualifying factor. I think Susan Collins, her age, maybe a disqualifying factor, but I don't think it's ageism. I think it's her ability to campaign effectively. Nancy Pelosi is older Bernie Sanders is older than Susan Collins, but both of them are far more effective campaigners. Both of them can just do extraordinarily well in the campaign trail. Susan Collins just as a political athlete has lost several steps. So I would be surprised if she agreed to do more than one debate because I just don't think she'd be able to get through it. So again, in this era where everybody wants younger candidates, more vital candidates, more dynamic candidates, I think that's probably Susan Collins biggest disadvantage right now. So Democrats can win, but they need to raise money for this guy. Yeah, the moment he is, he says that he raised 600,000 in the first couple of days after his nomination. So maybe he can raise enough money. She is seeking her sixth term, having said she was only going to serve two terms. I think that has pissed people off as well. James Blair, who is Donald Trump's huge big campaign guy for this season who's around the country trying to get Republicans elected over Democrats has said that there has basically outlined their strategy writing that Troy Jackson is a socialist who's flip-flopped on policy, a career politician who keeps losing an inside who is also unknown. His nomination was illegitimate. He has anger issues and he lacks risk. Rizz is Anthony's favorite word. He loves the word. He likes to pretend occasionally that he's as young as his youngest children. That he's with the kids. Yeah, he's with the kids. It's a little awkward, it's not as awkward. Well, I don't know your English accent, British accent, and his desire to be able to do it. Pretty good. Pretty good. That'll be good news for Democrats because I think I had got the impression that after the Platinum meltdown, they thought they didn't have a chance in Maine. But if they do have a chance in Maine and they can hold onto Michigan, they still have some chance of taking the Senate. Exactly. You also have Ohio. You have Iowa. Again, both of those may be longer shots, but on a wave election, those were the type of states that go over. I've always said Texas is fool's gold. I will say you had Beto get within two points of Ted Cruz. Actually, while Beto Arork, who's in good candidate, Taloriko, is a gifted candidate. He's a great political athlete, and I guess they can't tax them. He's a terrible candidate. Horrible. He's the worst candidate. I didn't know how bad he was until they saw a press conference that he had with sheriffs from across the state of Texas. They asked him two or three questions, and they had to drag him out the stage and hide him. Can you believe that? I candidate in July, Why? Who will not take questions at a press conference? Has to be ragged off the stage with sheriff standing behind him looking at what the fuck? Because he can't answer questions. He has so much bad shit in his background that he's been impeached by Republicans. I mean, the ethics violations, everything. So I think that race may be more competitive than Republicans originally expected. I mean, the Texas politician said, political scientist said to me recently, you know, the Texas race is a bit like revolutions. It seems impossible. It happens. And then it seems inevitable when it does happen. And at some point, Democrats will win a statewide seat. It might not be this time around. But the more ice activity there is in Maine, by the way, that is, there's also something that's going to be a real problem for Susan Collins. That main, the ice shooting up in Bidaford Maine just last week is going to weigh heavily against her ice shootings in Texas are also going to be a problem for Ken Paxton because nobody likes them. I just had a 10-hour meeting up in Maine and they were deeply affected and deeply offended by the shooting in Maine. And you look at Donald Trump, how well he did in 2020 among Hispanics, especially along the border in Texas and see how those numbers have completely collapsed even before the shooting in Houston. Those numbers, the support has collapsed. And then you add on top of that, the killing of a man who's been in Houston for 30 years of a father, a great father, a great husband, a great worker. That's just got to got Ken Paxton's support even more in the Hispanic community. It's just, I'm not exactly sure what the White House is thinking. Not only is it savage and inhumane, it's also politically poised. So it's a political issue in Maine and Texas, but of course, ice is a big issue around the country. And it's one of the reasons that Anthony and I want to travel around America ahead of the midterm elections to see what you are all talking about. We will be going on tour this October, so tell your friends and get your tickets at the rest is politicsus.com. You can scan the QR code or click the link in the episode description. Okay, Joe, let's take a break. When we come back, we're going to talk about your favourite event, the White House Correspondence Dinner. Welcome back to the rest is politics of me, Katty Kay and joined by Joe Scarborough, host of Morning Joe. Joe, I wasn't at the dinner that everybody is talking about on Saturday night, and rarely have I been happier to have missed a dinner. Are you at the White House Correspondence Association dinner on Saturday night to listen to the president and revel in the delights of the free press? Yeah, I don't think I've been there for 15 years. Me too. I think it's about 15 years. How funny. But if there were one year that I would point to where, especially please, I wasn't there, it would have been this year and it would have been been Saturday night, I don't really understand why they would allow a president that went after and subpoenaed reporters for telling the truth, finding the truth, digging the truth about his Cotari jet. But they did and he did and so all of these reporters came in and they just sat there, all of these journalists who do great work just came in and sat there listening to one insult after another insult, after another insult, why do you sit there? Why don't you get up and leave after the third insult? But they sat there and, you know, I'm sure they had their reasons, but I would have never done it. And they really have to think long and hard about whether they're going to have a White House Correspondence dinner next year with this president or not. Because if you have a president that's working as aggressively against the press, as Donald Trump is with all of the lawsuits, with all of the subpoenas, with all of the threats, why invite him to celebrate free speech? Why invite him to celebrate the first amendment with you? It does not make any sense at all. And I don't think anyone can really say they were surprised. I mean, Caroline Levitt, the press secretary had promised that the remarks were going to be vicious and they were. He went very personally after some of the journalists who moments before had been given awards and he starts attacking them in really gross ways. He's obsessed with people's weight. I don't know why Donald Trump stands up there, given the weight he is, thinking that he can make kind of fat jokes about other politicians. Apparently, there are no mirrors in the White House cat. Oh, well, that's because they've put all that gold. So I guess they had to take the mirrors down in order to have room for all of the gold. I mean, you know, you can't have both and he'd rather have gold. And if there are mirrors, maybe there are those kind of mirrors that they put in magic fairs where they met. Yeah, exactly where they met. Yeah, the slimming mirrors. The slimming mirrors. I need one of those. I could do one of those too. That would be the good mirror to have around. But I agree. I mean, that was an hour long rambling, unscripted speech that was so unfunny. He actually made remarks about how unfunny it was, criticizing his own scripting. And in a way, it was not, okay, I'm very glad. I listened to the speech I texted you and said I was listening to a speech on Sunday on YouTube. And it was an hour of my time. I would never get back again, which was, I thought, heroic of me. But it was more that, to your point, we know that the press suffers already from a trust factor and that there is criticism of the media around the country. So to have this surreal image of the president attacking the press and the press all dressed up in black, I think even the black tie thing doesn't go down particularly well. If you are trying to get voters and listeners and readers and audiences in Kansas to feel that you are trustworthy and understand their way of life and concerns and problems, I'm not sure that sitting in the Waldorf Astoria hotel with the very people that you are trying to report on is the most sensible way to do it. I don't know. It seems weird to me. I don't really agree, but I also agree to you or heroic. I mean, sometimes British heroism plays out on the beaches of Normandy. Other times it plays out listening on Sunday afternoon to Donald Trump's one hour horrific speech on YouTube. I don't know how you did that. You know, well, I do it for you dear audience. It wasn't the longest day, but it was the longest hour. It was a terrible speech and unlike Johnny Carson who could get laughs joking about how bad his jokes were. It seems when Donald Trump tried to do the same, the rumor only got more quiet. Well, I think you have to have some ability to be self-deprecating, right? To carry off a speech like that. You have to be able to poke fun at yourself, which is what Bush did, Obama did, Clinton did, they all managed to kind of have a bit of fun with themselves. He can't do it. He doesn't know how to do that. No, he's too insecure to do it. He won't do it. I remember hearing a story when he was going to go to the Alfa Alpha Club, I think right after he became president and they'd gotten a great speech writer to come in and there were all these self-deprecating jokes and, you know, I think the first one had him going out and say, oh my gosh, look, look out over this crowd. There must be two, three million people here. And he looks up, you know, making fun of the fact that he had obsessed about crowd size at his inauguration just a week or two earlier and he just said, I don't get this. This isn't funny. And they went down like five different jokes and finally just gave up because he can't do self-deprecating. And what the great Mac Greenfield once explained in her book, Washington, that's all people want to hear in Washington DC. They want to hear how your child somehow upended, you know, and, and pote sort of pop the balloon of a very powerful politician or how a politician's wife or husband or father or mother say, and I, you know, and I have used that and I have seen that first hand, you know, it's winning doubt, you know, winning emergency brake glass and I brake glass if it crowds kind of quiet and I figure out how they get to the story of how when I first ran in 1994 against Earl Hudow, he'd been in power for 16 years. Nobody thought that I could win. Nobody knew who I was and everybody said I was being an idiot to do it. So I went told my parents, hey, mom and dad, I know this sounds crazy, but I'm going to quit the law firm and I'm going to run against Earl Hudow. I think I need to get to Congress and my dad sat there and stared at me, looked at the shoes, looked at the shoes on the floor and about three or four seconds later said, well, that's great Joey, but I'm voting for Earl and the crowd laughs. If that story has the added benefit of being true and Mika does the same thing with her family who always proudly told anybody who would listen that Mika had the lowest SAT score in the history of Williams College, crowd laughs, then you can get into your job. Donald Trump is too insecure to do that. He doesn't, he just can't make light of himself. And so people like you are tortured by watching him for an hour on YouTube and those poor souls in the White House at the hotel had to listen, but again, I don't understand why people stay. I know. So that's the question. I think you're right because they didn't need to stay and they could have, I mean, maybe I've maybe I've got this wrong because several of the journalists who were in the room were saying, well, he went after Caitlin Collins of CNN in these very personal ways, saying, you know, she's so attractive, but she never smiles. It's something he said many times before. It seems to really bother him that she doesn't smile. He also says that she, she looked like a trans influencer. He posted this thing out. He posted out. Yeah. And that she got some, oh, she thought she'd got some Bud Light commercial. And actually it was a trans influencer who got the button. And then he posted it out on this unbelievable spree he had of non-stop posting on Sunday. I don't know. I thought we had a water run. But anyway, he posted something like 60 times in six hours or something. And they could have left. I agree with you. They could have left. And it's not like, and I think it's worth reminding people, this is not just verbal attacks that the president likes to make and that he used to make at his rallies, whether it was this sort of medieval fair moment rallies that I would go to where he suddenly turns on the press. And it's like the whole crowd at the rally will turn around and boo at the press pen. And it really is. It's like one of those sort of, you know, it's like a comedy act. He gets into this. This is worse because he's actually has taken action against me. You know, he's he has sued the Wall Street Journal over their reporting on the Epstein files and his drawing of that drawing for Jeffrey Epstein's birthday book. AP has been barred from the Oval Office from Air Force One from the pool events and is still in litigation against that. Journalists are still not allowed into the Pentagon. I mean, there's there are lots of instance where they have actually taken action, rather than just getting the crowd to boo at them and throw tomatoes at them. Yeah. Well, and good for Wolf Blitzer, who I guess apparently called out the president when he was giving an award to the Wall Street Journal people. And the president was there shaking their hands and, you know, making funny gestures. And then Wolf Blitzer kept going and said their family had to be relocated because of all of the death threats that they had received. So that was good that Katty this sort of raises another question that I've always had about the the White House press corps. And I know it's easy for me to say this because I've got man show I'm not in the White House press corps, but I know how I am. And I know how I would respond. If somebody asked a question of Donald Trump and he insulted them and didn't answer their question and then came to me next, I would say, I don't know what that just was, but I'll ask her question, Mr. President, why what that and I genuinely curious because this just I just this would never happen. I just I just I'll be I'll be careful how I say this. I don't understand why the press doesn't call him out when he insults and bullies and refuses to answer a question from one of their colleagues and then just asks another question like nothing's happened before. Nothing just happened, you know what I mean? Yeah, I don't like to say that doesn't work well on the journalists in the room, but it doesn't necessarily reflect well on the journalists in the room. It just doesn't because that would be the strategy. I mean, it's I know people are desperate to get ahead and it's a cutthroat environment and it's a very competitive industry. But actually, when you look at how Fox News responded when A P was thrown out of the pool and thrown out of the Oval Office, actually this and other major news organizations all supported the Associated Press. I mean, it didn't stop them all then going, you know, traveling with the president, but they did send round a letter signed by Fox News among others saying this is not okay. Well, I personally think standing up for a colleague would be good for your career. I think it would be very good for your career. I think it would help you stand out and just say, first of all, Mr. President, you shouldn't be insulting a member of the press that way. That's an attack on one is an attack on all of us. Secondly, I'm going to ask the same question that she asked. If you are a young journalist and you would like a little bit of career advice, tune in and listen to Joe Scarborough. There you go. Okay, we're going to leave it there. Joe, thank you so much for joining us again. It's a pleasure to have you on the show. And Joe will be with us for our question and answer for our founding members later this week. So you can join us there. You can become a founding member by signing up at the rest is politics us.com. Joe, thank you very much. Thank you, Caddy. It's Fred, as always. And thank you all for listening. See you soon. (bright music)