BONUS Midterm Reaction: Mississippi + Alaska Senate updates, El-Sayed wins and Vance melts down

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But first, we wanted to hop on YouTube and bask in the glow of this victorious glory one more time. By the way, please like this video. Share this video. Subscribe to Pod Save America on YouTube. It really helps us get good information to people about elections, about politics, and everything else. Also, it's free. So quick update. As of this recording, Democrats now have 54 seats in the Senate. We are still waiting on results from Mississippi and Alaska, but Democrats feel pretty good about both. Democrats have officially won 228 seats in the House, but NBC News is projecting that Democrats will win 258 seats. Guys, that is crazy. Our producers have prepared some things for us to. We're going to react to and watch some we've seen. Some are going to surprise us as much as they surprise you. But guys, before that, I came across some pre-election punditry that was so prescient that I had to play it for you first. Let's watch. Not only are we going to New Hampshire, Tom Harkin, we're going to South Carolina and Texas and Michigan. And then we're going to Washington, D.C. to take back the White House. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! What a deep, deep cut. I wonder how many people watching this know that reference. Who, Howard Dean is? Yeah. That is an inside joke from 22 years ago. Wow. Yeah! He was not wrong. He was early. He was early. Yes, he was early. Like many of us. Just like Ann Seltzer with that Iowa poll. Oh, good point. Yeah. Good point. Ann was on it. She called Iowa. All right. Let's start with a race that had not rallied. It wrapped when we recorded last night. Abdul El-Sayed has defeated Mike Rogers in a Michigan Senate race. Here is a fun moment from his victory speech. Let's watch. J.D. Habibi. There is this delicious irony in the fact that you're constitutionally obligated to swear me in in January. So you know what that means? Wolverine one, Buckeye zero. Donald, look, I know you struggled with my name. So after J.D. swears me in in January, you can just go on and call me senator. What do we think, guys? Cocky, fun, a little of both? Look. We did some score settling and pettiness at the end of the pod last night. So why not Abdul? Because as you know, one thing we didn't get to say last night because the race wasn't called is the historic first the that Abdul just achieved, which is the first crooked media podcaster in the. Goddamn right. But not but not the last to tell you that. Oh, yeah. Also, also first Muslim senator. Yeah, that's that's very cool as well. But I was thinking more first first crooked podcaster. Yes, there's nothing to acquire Ted Cruz's podcast and shut it down. Yeah. Oh, that's a good point. There's nothing more crooked podcaster than just a little bit of pettiness in a moment of victory. Right. I did not find the J.D. thing petty at all because like he did the joke at the end and those fucking Michigan, Ohio people are crazy about, you know, the rivalry. So that's fine. He says it about Mike Rogers. That was pretty. He was like, I hope this I hope the state never sees the likes of someone like you again. You chose hate. Now, I will say in Abdul's defense, like when you have been when you were on the receiving end of what he received over the last. Several months, like, I mean, we talk about how Obama got a lot of hate and other candidates like I mean, they just called him a terrorist, you know, like the his his opponent, the president, United States, the entire right wing, they just called him a jihadist, a terrorist. Like, I'd be pretty pissed, too. Typically, I would not recommend that sort of speech, but I had grace for it. I felt the same way when at Zoran's victory speech, when he said he'll never speak his name again. And you know what? Zoran after that, like, was never petty again. No. So it was like and I remember complaining. He wrote that, too, at the time. But I was like, you know, sometimes you just got to get it out in election night. Yeah, we all saw up close how hard it would be at times to turn the other cheek in when we were working for Barack Obama. And this was in, like, another era of politics. Like, if someone is running that nakedly racist and bigoted campaign and let's just be honest, like Mike Rogers, Donald Trump calling him a terrorist, calling him a jihadist, they were putting Abdul's life at risk. You know, I mean, they were like, imagine the signal of sense, like little Muslim kids in this country. To your daughters to watch, have to watch that and hear it. Yeah, it was horrible. So I don't begrudge Abdul a moment of levity and some shit talking there. And, yes, there's no better way to score points in Michigan than by talking shit about the Ohio State Buckeyes, although Michigan football sucks this year. He also he also, we should say, called his shot and he is wins, but he won by seven points. Crazy. Which is exactly what he said. So, guys, speaking of J.D. Vance. So J.D. tweeted out like an op ed. Length take on the election results. I want to read you a little bit. This part caught my eye. So he said he was talking to a pollster who said, quote, in his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers accounting for nearly all of the responses were one and the war to focus on cost of living inflation. Three, put America first for change our relationship to Israel. J.D. later writes. The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night. If you like to argue it was worth it that losing the Senate for the next six years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree. That's at least honest. But everyone knows why we lost any honest conversation about where we go from here. Must start there. So, guys, like just to reaction to this, like first on the Iran part, he talks about the Iran war like it's a thing that happened to them. And he's like lashing out about it. Not like a 100 percent their choice. The second is the Israel part. I mean, I'm a bit surprised that relationship to Israel was a top four issue. It does make me wonder why Trump waited until Election Day to announce that the U.S. would no longer provide military aid to Israel and like did it in a throwaway interview on Fox and Friends. But what did you make of J.D.'s take here? First of all, this is we get to the substance, but J.D. Vance is someone who is a MAGA convert, a later MAGA convert who came up. In elite circles, Yale, Silicon Valley, The New York Times op ed page CNN contributor, CNN contributor. And he clearly thinks that he is going to like op ed his way to the presidency by making these like pseudo intellectual arguments and trying to like reason with other elites about why he was actually right. And the Trump administration, I've never heard of the Trump administration. I was always against the war. The Israel thing to me is clearly base politics. It's 2028 primary politics. And he knows that, like, I don't think it was a top four issue. The Tucker crowd. Yeah, right. And I look, I agree with him on changing relationship with Israel for sure. It was not a top four issue. And he's just doing that because he he's worried about the Tucker, the Tucker Carlson part of the Republican base. It's absurd. As you said, he's being a passive observer of his own administration. That's not really going to work. I'm not sure how people in the administration felt this morning when he said that about the war. As you pointed out, Tommy, this was not a case where there was an imminent threat and we had to make a decision. About how to respond to it is not a case where we were attacked and had decided we were going to go to war or not. Trump just decided to go to war because and this is this is what has happened. I completely agree. He's doing politics in a way that I don't think makes a lot of sense. And I would just point out, you can't up edge your way to the president, but you can't stop your way there. Just that's just modern media. Come on, get with it. Can and will. Yeah, it's just like it's a weird thing to tweet. I mean, look, the Iran piece is I agree. It's totally accurate. I'm I guess on some level, I'm glad he said it, but also I think Donald Trump. Is about to ramp the war back up, and it's just an interesting statement to make, like right before that happens, because, you know, the second it happens, J.D. Vance, you know, when he does his next press conference, he'll be like, you liberal media elites are always trying to pit us against each other. Me and Donald are like, OK, dude, like your fucking policy. What are you yelling at us for? He doesn't have a theory of the case of how he can win the nomination and the presidency. He has not figured out how to square the circle from what he believes are the best politics and the reality. The situation he's in is the vice president to the person doing the bad politics that created this context. And so like this isn't if you're really running for president, you have been thinking about what you're going to do the day after the midterms for months. Yeah. Can I ask you, too, because you're the perfect two people to answer this question, like just putting our hacks hats on, right? Just staffers. You're J.D. Vance. You're working for J.D. Vance. He's in the administration. The president decides to go to war with Iran. You're immediately against the idea. Like what is. What would it have been? the best political play for your 2028 politics, other than what J.D. Vance has done. I think that you do what Marco Rubio has done, which is be in the administration and just never say the word Iran. I mean, Marco Rubio is doing it. He is in the administration. He is not associated with it. He gladly handed off the task of negotiating a potential peace deal with Iranians to J.D. Vance, someone who has zero foreign policy experience, like literally none, and put him in charge of it. And he's just like the Venezuela, maybe takeover Cuba guy, and that puts him in a better position. I think J.D. Vance is just, he cannot figure out how to commit to a strategy. One strategy is you're just with Trump, and that's going to get me the nomination. I'll figure out the rest later. The other one is you try to fully break, which is probably impossible in this position. So he's cheerleading the war one day, failing to negotiate a peace agreement the next day, and then just sending signals out that he's kind of sort of not against the war. You're betwixt and between in a way that I think is wholly ineffective. Yeah, he's in a rock and a hard place here. I mean, he can't fuck Trump in any way, shape, or form, or else he'll just get thrown out the White House and never allowed back in. I guess one pivot you could try to make is sort of similar to the Bush, you know, 2005, 6, 7 pivot, which is like, oh, well, it was not the war itself that was the problem. This was the Iraq war. It was how it's been conducted so far. And you could try to like pivot tactics. Surge? Surge in Iran? Well, what I would do is make a hard play to get fucking Pete Hegseth, pushed out of the Pentagon and have someone professional named to actually manage the war. Because there could be a version of this conflict that is dumb and expensive, and I don't think is a good idea. But that just kind of continues the status quo that they're doing now of like the blockade and preventing Iran from getting any oil revenue that kind of bleeds the country out over time. And that isn't like a, you know, Bibi Netanyahu wants me to bomb Pickaxe Mountain with a nuke option. The really hard part of the administration and why the Iran, Iraq comparison is imperfect here is other for the, obviously for the people whose families were serving, right? But like once you did the surge, you were able to get a measure of stability in the country, at least compared to what was happening before. And it took it out of the news. You can't take Iran out of the news because people are not mad about Iran because they're turning on CNN every day and learning about what is happening in various places. It's because they drive, go to the gas station every day. So as long as gas prices are up, no matter what your strategy is in Iran, it's going to be very, very damaging politically. Yeah. You're going to probably have to take a bad peace deal. Pod Save America breaking news is brought to you by PDS Debt. Are you tired of making monthly payments without seeing your balance go down? PDS Debt can help you break free. Minimum payments aren't designed to get you out of debt. They're designed to keep you stuck. PDS Debt is the way out. They can reduce up to half of what you owe on credit cards, personal loans, and medical bills. And it starts with a free 30 second assessment at pdsdebt.com slash crooked. PDS Debt helps thousands of Americans become debt free. The average savings per client for all PDS debts programs is $20,123. Stop juggling multiple payments and get one lower monthly payment. Savings start the day you complete the 30 second assessment. Checking your options is fast, free, and won't impact your credit. If you're carrying any balance on your credit cards, it's costing you money every single day. No minimum credit score required. PDS is the top rated company in the industry with thousands of five-star reviews and an A plus rating on the BBB. Get your free 30 second personalized assessment today. At pdsdebt.com slash crooked. That's pdsdebt.com slash crooked. All right, let's look at the overall status of the Senate. So Democrats have 54 seats. Mississippi is a dead heat right now. We probably won't know for a few days. And then in Alaska, Dan Sullivan, Mary Patola, and Dan Sullivan, actually just the two of them, Patola and Sullivan are nearly tied with over 70% of the vote counted. And unless one of them pulls away and gets over 50%, it's probably going to take a while. So let's look at the overall status of They've ranked choice voting and they won't do all that tabulation until mid-November. How are you guys feeling about those two races? I mean, I'm hearing from a lot of people in my life, strategists, you know, pundits, whatever, but they feel really good about Mississippi. I feel like Alaska, people just kind of don't know yet, maybe. Yeah, all the election nerds who we love, I say that with the most loving, in the most loving tone, they think that she's in a strong position to win because most of the vote out is her vote. Zachary Danini at VoteHub said she's in a strong position, though the race may be closer than the Senate contest in South Carolina, Iowa, and Kansas. After applying RCV, she's roughly tied right now. Mail shifted three points toward her in the primary, not callable yet, but a loss would be surprising. And then some people were doing like where the extra mail is coming from. And I think it's like Anchorage and places where she's, where she's doing well. So they think that she won't need RCV, like she might get, but like still the ballots won't come in until I think November 11th or 12. Yeah, it's so slow. Yeah. So that's just even the ballots. Forget about rank choice voting. I mean, one of the great miracles is that we are not sitting here today with the entire balance of the Senate hanging in Alaska as we wait weeks for this to be finished. And then in Mississippi, it seems based on Brandon Presley, who ran for governor and almost won recently, was pointing out that the remaining county, the county where the most votes are left in Mississippi is a county in which he did incredibly well as a very large black population. And so that's why the nerds are pretty optimistic. And that in the near time needle was before they shut it down at 4am for reasons I can't understand, um, was very favorable towards column. And it looks like he is a very, very, very real shot to win and probably a slight favorite at this point. Did the needle get tired? Yeah. I don't know. Why did they take it down? I like woke up this morning. I'm like, where's the fucking needle? Yeah. I don't know. Come on, Nate. Uh, one thing I want to just talk about with you guys, there are, you're seeing, look, everyone's mostly just really, really happy with the result. You're seeing some kind of limited recriminations about Florida and questions about what's going on in the state. And I think that's whether Democrats could or should have invested more in Florida to win the Angie Nixon race. I just like, I like, I feel like in the, with the benefit of hindsight, all of us wish there had been more money spent in Florida, but like, there wasn't just a pot of money sitting around that we could have drawn from. There wasn't like a bank loan. We didn't take out, like you would have to have taken from one race to give it to another. And I don't like even the most optimistic strategist we were all talking to didn't expect, the blue tsunami results. So, I mean, these are just like, these are not easy decisions. You know, it's like Chuck Schumer would have loved nothing more than to win Florida. Like the idea that this was some purposeful thing or like some massive failing by the party. I feels pretty unfair to me, but what, how would you say? No, I agree a hundred percent when you're making these decisions, both whether you're running for president or trying to win the Senate is you look at what you call the tipping point state. What's the state that is going to put you over the top. And then you invest in the states at that one and down below the most, because look, Chuck Schumer, you want as big a majority as you can possibly get. But what you have to do is get the majority. If you spend a bunch of money when you're at a massive resources advantage on a bunch of races that will never be, it was never a world where Florida, we were going to win, you know, we're going to flip North Carolina and Maine. We were going to win Ohio. And then the next state we were going to win is Florida. Like that just wasn't going to happen. And you make the most important point, which is there was no more money. Like there was not some pot of money that was sitting there that they were not spending because like Angie Nixon or this candidate didn't say they're going to support Schumer. I mean, I think to the Senate majority pack and Schumer's credit, they spent a lot of money on candidates who said they were not going to vote for Chuck Schumer. Yeah. Particularly in Michigan. Now, if you had known that we were going to win Texas by 12, you obviously wouldn't have spent as much money there, but no one knew that. That was impossible to know. It's the size of Florida here too. Because remember, Schumer and them didn't go in on Texas until later, like relatively speaking. And so if Angie Nixon was running in South Carolina or Mississippi, you could maybe make an argument that towards the end, you dump a bunch of money in there because they're smaller states, you know? But the decision to go into Florida towards the end when no one expected that Angie Nixon was going to be the nominee in the first place just is not something that would have materialized. Yeah. It's like they put $5 million in Kansas late this month. And $5 million in Kansas is a huge deal. $5 million in Florida is nothing. It is just. It's got to be top five most expensive states to run in, right? I think it's probably two would be my guess. Number two. Yeah, it's going to be three, I guess. We could probably go California. Texas. It's in the top four. Texas, Florida, and New York are all in that metric. Yeah. North Carolina is shockingly expensive. All right. So the results may have come as a shock for some in the MAGAverse. Here's a clip we saw from a MAGA influencer, Benny Johnson, looking at the votes coming in yesterday before the polls closed. Let's watch Benny. If Florida and Texas are any indicators, then you are going to get a Republican Senate, and you may even keep the Republican House. We'll see. But the blue tsunami that has been promised is not materializing. It is going to be a crisis day for Democrats when they realize that they've been lied to yet again, that the polls are wrong yet again, and that they are completely and totally despised by the American people yet again. Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers not available in all states. Must be tough for an electorate to realize they've been lied to, huh, guys? Yes, I imagine, Ben. And he's probably offline today doing introspection, trying to figure out what he got wrong so he can provide better, more reliable, trusted information to his audience going forward. Is that what's happening? Yeah, I think that's probably right. You guys have any other fun bad takes or petty shit? I saw Scott Pressler. What does he do for a living? Is he just like a turnout guy? Isn't he the Talking Points USA person? Yeah, I think he's like dodging indictments. No, the guy with the weird long hair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a, look, he's a weirdo, like a Christian nationalist. Yesterday he tweeted, holy cow, I'm screaming. Republicans just flipped the governorship of Guam from blue to red. Keep going. Don't stop for a gosh darn second. I wonder if he's still screaming, guys. Scott, we've all been there on a tough election night. You got to find your silver lining in a very dark cloud. Yeah, yeah. Clay Travis has learned nothing. No introspection there. He said 2024 was awesome. Tonight mostly sucked except for Florida and Tennessee. Well, we won a bunch of house races. The Florida gerrymander failed, so we won a bunch of house races there. The Republicans lost a rural congressional district in Tennessee. So Clay doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. Yeah, he's not good at predicting. Speaking of the House, let's talk about the House and how big the wipeout was. Here is a graph from the New York Times from a Nate Cohn piece titled, There's No Modern Precedent for This Democratic Sooner. NAMI. The ballot may end up being D plus 13. And Mike Johnson just announced he will not run for House Minority Leader. I can barely see that graphic, guys, because I'm on my home computer. And it's very small. If it was in front of me, I couldn't see it today. Yeah. I see a lot of blue going to the right. So that's cool. Oh, it's by the years. It is the biggest. Since 74, right? Yeah. Which was 15.6, I think. Yeah. Speaker Johnson resigning. Does anyone care? No. But Jim. Didn't Jim Jordan announce he's running? Yes. In Scalise. In Scalise. Yeah. So, no. Mike Johnson will go down as a footnote in history. Yeah. It was a brief, brief. Accidental speaker. Didn't do anything with his speakership. Basically, just tried to avoid being ousted as speaker. That was basically the whole of his speakership. And then he passed a bunch of, I guess he shepherded through a bunch of cuts to Medicaid and a giant tax cut. And then the greatest wipeout in 57 years. Yeah. Good job. So that's Mike Johnson. Yeah. Mike Johnson. Yeah. Mega Mike. Just a little. Self kind of supplicant. Interesting. I guess he's going to start the lawn business. Yeah. He's got lawn care. He's going back to Louisiana to do some lawn care. That's what he said. That's what he said a couple months before. Yeah. Maybe he can, you know, get the Covenant Eyes app. There it is. I always forget the name of it. Thank you. Covenant Eyes. Yeah. Interesting note I saw. Heavily Hispanic counties swung more to Dems than any other in the Texas districts that are more than 90% Hispanic, switched by a staggering 24 points. Democratic Latino candidates claim victories across the entire map even. But of the battleground races, the GOP so far has won lone survivor Maria Salazar in Miami by just over 1,000 votes. I copied and pasted that from somewhere. I no longer know where. Sorry for plagiarizing whomever. I just thought it was an interesting note. Yeah. I just, I feel like we've been so focused, rightly so, on the Senate and the House. Like, Nate Silver tweeted this map last night. Democrats are going to now hold governorships in states totaling 300. And in fact, we're holding governorships in states totaling 392 electoral votes. Like, the importance of what happened at the state level, I think, has not been getting as much attention, and hopefully it will in the coming weeks. But like, this means that in 2028, like, all the fears we have about certification and Trump trying to steal the presidency or do what he did in 2020, like, we're going to be in a great position with governors in just about every single, we have governors in every single swing state. Every single country. Yeah. I think there's going to be, by some estimate I saw, which once again, it was someone from VoteHub, I believe, pointed out that it could be a loss of 800, 900 Republican legislators lost their seats. So, yeah, Daniel McCannian, Daniel on. I literally just pulled up Daniel, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, new Democratic trifectas, governorship and the state legislature. Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, congrats to Ben Wickler and all our friends in Wisconsin. Yeah. Minnesota. And Michigan. Yeah. All them trifectas. And, oh, is Nevada going to happen, too? Yeah, that's as of an hour ago, he tweeted that. And we are 268 votes away in North Carolina. We flipped governorships in Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, Texas, breaking the Republican trifectas in those states. And the Republican trifecta in New Hampshire was also broken. And just amazing, amazing stuff. Like, that's going to mean a lot on the state level for, like, efforts to, like, get the like, you know, unrig the map and unrig, like, the, you know, how the map is tilted against Democrats and then just all the wonderful stuff they're going to be able to do for people on a state level. Yeah. Yeah. It's an extraordinary night. All right. Let's just take a minute to acknowledge that this does not happen on its own. We want to shout out to all of our listeners and everyone who got involved in this election through Vote Save America. We flipped the whole crooked dozen, I believe. Yes. The 12 House seats held by Republicans that we targeted. Our listeners raised over 3.7%. $7 million for candidates and organizations. We got 20,000 people to volunteer to help Democrats in this election. So thank you, everyone who got involved, got off the couch, did something. If you want to figure out what you can do in 2028, go to VoteSaveAmerica.com. Also, though, if you just want to help us build crooked media here and everything we're going to try to do to expand on this victory going into the presidential, please consider becoming a Friend of the Pod subscriber. You get tons of great content. You get ad-free episodes, you get bonus episodes, you get great newsletters, discounted CrookedCon tickets. So crooked.com slash friends to learn more. Guys, any final thoughts before we head to the airport? What a night. What a night. It's never thought I'd see this. All right. Talk to you guys soon. We'll see you then. Bye, everyone. Bye. Bye.