Dana Bash Sees a Political Earthquake Coming in Texas and Maine

I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bullwork, and I want to talk about a phrase that gets thrown around in seemingly every election these days. People say it's the most important election of our lifetime. I have been known to both. If I don't say it, I've certainly felt it. But obviously, every election can't be the most important election of our lifetime. I would even say that this upcoming election, important as it is, probably isn't the most important election of our lifetime. But you can fill an entire book with elections that served as kind of sliding last-door moments in history, which is exactly what my guest today just did. That guest is Dana Bash, host of CNN's Inside Politics and Author with David Fisher of the elections that changed the world, 15 pivotal moments that shaped how we live. Dana, thanks for being here. - Hi, Sarah, thank you for having me. And congrats on your book, you know, I'm so happy for you. It's awesome. - I appreciate that, and it was great to be on your show, put me over the top. That's what, that's really, let's go with that. - Who knows, let's just go with that. - Yeah, I believe I'm gonna own that. I'm gonna dine out on that, Sarah Longwell. - Amazing. Okay, so here's something that's funny about writing a book, which is you end up with kind of like book buddies, like Jessica Tarlove, you, Adam Jenelson, like there were just like people, my buddy, Andrew Weisman, like we were all writing books kind of at the same time. And so when we'd see each other, you know, if I was in the CNN studio, we'd like to talk about the fact that we were working on books and when they were coming out in publication and everything. And so now that your book is out in the world, it came out like a week after mine did, you know, I was like, we should talk about it and get into it because I love the idea of your book. I love your book, but like the idea of what were the elections that changed the course of history? It's like a very provocative thought experiment and led me to think about a lot of different things. - But what? - 'Cause I was one of the goals. 'Cause it's like, it's definitely subjective. Well, yeah, you picked the things that you thought were the most pivotal. But I thought you made a lot of good picks. But my favorite thing was in your introduction when you talked about your sixth grade election for class president. And why don't you start and tell us about that? 'Cause I would also like to share a, it is funny how many of us who are still political nerds today began our nerd journeys as like sixth graders being like, no, I want to run for, I already want to run for office. Like it was already baked in there. But what drew you to this at sort of a young age, do you think? - Well, let me be clear that I peaked in sixth grade. - Sure, we all did. - As a 12 year old. - Yeah, as a 12 year old. I don't actually know if I know the answer to that question. I think that this was at Haycock Elementary School at the time we were living in Northern Virginia. My dad, it was transferred back and forth between DC and New York. And this was during our DC period. And it came time for elections. And I was like, sure, I'll give it a shot and I won. And it wasn't during the election process that I was able to change our little teeny world of Haycock Elementary. But it was when I was president of the student body that I was able to do it. And should I tell the very story? - Yeah, tell what you're doing with the gifted. - Okay, so I was a different kind of normie than you talk about. But a regular kid, I wasn't in the gifted program. And the school that I went to had a section that drew gifted and talented kids from all over the county. And they had a separate area physically in the school. And number one, it was air condition. And it was carpeted, which in DC, it gets hot. So that was a big plus for them. But the thing that really got us scholastic normies was that we didn't get a trip to Williamsburg. And they did their sixth grade year, which was the last year in elementary school, sort of the senior year. We didn't get a year book. And they did. - I didn't understand this. How do you not give everybody a year book? Why would I say the crazy kids get a year book? - Yeah, I don't know. It was just like a part of their program, which was obviously publicly funded, which is not a term that I thought about in my 12 year old brain. But I just kind of knew like this isn't right. So I started a petition. And I got a whole bunch of people to sign it, a lot of people to sign it. And the principal of the school, I remember her name was Mrs. Wright. She was so pissed at me. And she called me into her office and she said, you know, this is not how you use your leadership position. And I remember she had these like binders of curricula. And she was showing me this sixth grade and why it's different and why they're not the same and you can't compare them. And I, I just remember thinking like, lady, I'm not buying it. It's just, it's not right. PS, I was not successful for our grade. But in the years following, they definitely went to Williamsburg, the normie, the scholactic normies, went to scholastic normies, went to Williamsburg. And I'm pretty sure they got a year book, they didn't get a year book also. So, you know, that was my activism. That was the one and only time I was on the ballot. I figured I did well. I won. I was president of the school and now, and I'm done. Yeah. Well, wait a fight the power. That's real rage against machine stuff. And, and I love that. You know, but you can get certain lessons from me. So I learned a lesson and I think it was ninth grade. It could have been eighth. But I was, we had an election for student council. And in this year, they're like, wasn't even, I went to such a small little school. They weren't even enough lessons. So you just put your head down and you'd raise your hand. And, and I lost by one vote. And, but here's the thing, it was me and this other kid. And I voted for him because I thought it seemed like terrible to vote for myself. And I said to him, I was like, I was like, who did you vote for? He was like, I voted for myself, obviously. And I was like, well, I voted for you too. I was like, you should have voted for me. And it would have, and he was like, no, you always vote for yourself. And that was a real lesson for me about how you got to be ruthless and politics politics isn't beanbag. It's not for you to be like a nice, you know, whatever. You got to be tougher than that. That's what I learned. And you got to, and you got to look out for yourself. Yeah. Yeah. And then once you win, then you can look out for everybody else in the school. Which is actually a great and meaningful lesson in our politics today that sometimes I wish. And, you know, I did write this in my book. Part of it was like, do you want to be right or do you want to win, guys? I know. Do you want to win? I know. Because if you don't win, winners make policy losers go home. And this episode is sponsored by The New York Times. With the midterms just around the corner, there's a fascinating disconnect between what Donald Trump is saying and what Republicans are actually doing. That Trump wants voters to treat the election as a referendum on, you guessed it, Donald Trump. But a new New York Times analysis found that less than a dollar out of every $100 that Republicans have spent on House and Senate ads have gone to ads that mention Donald Trump. That's the kind of reporting that makes political commentary possible. The New York Times dug into broadcast and streaming ad data to show how Republicans are trying to navigate Trump's unpopularity while still relying on his support. It's not enough to watch a campaign ad and take it at face value. You need reporters examining the data, talking to the people involved and figuring out what's really happening behind the scenes. That story is just one example of the results of fact-based reporting. And now you get to decide what to think. Without reporting like this, the rest of us are just, frankly, we're just guessing. Wherever you seek it out, nationally or locally support fact-based reporting. And getting people to the place where they remember, oh, wait, we can't govern unless we have one not just the individual seat, but enough power broadly to make the changes that we want. And that requires both a certain amount of pragmatism, a certain amount of ruthlessness. I try to talk about a lot about ruthlessness without cruelty, because I think sometimes Democrats can get a little lost in the need to be absolutely right. >> Yeah, I mean, this is new territory for you. >> This is new territory for you. >> You can't do anything. >> Yeah, yeah, yes, exactly. >> It's right because on the Republican side, they're just straight up mercenaries. >> What do you think is going to happen? >> Open about it. It's not a, there's no hemming and hawing about it or ringing their hands, it just is. >> That's right, for better or worse. So your last book, last time you were on, we were doing a focus group hot-up, so we talked about your book a bunch, because it was about the Louisiana gubernatorial election during reconstruction. And so it seems like you've always been like you're interested in electoral history. That seems to be, I don't know, your bailiwick or the thing that does that, why did you choose to write this particular book at this particular time? The answer to that question is because after the last book, The Deadliest Election, which as you said, was about the Louisiana gubernatorial election that led to the presidential election of 1870. these six that led to the end of Reconstruction and Jim Crow for 100 years, with this all happened in Louisiana. We started there. David Fisher, my wonderful co-author, who is just the best. He and I talked about, okay, what do we do next? What's our next project? 'Cause we'd like the election theme, and of course, thought I had to the next election which now we're in in the cycle. And what we talked about is exactly how you introred me, which is we always say it's the most important election of our lifetime, but what about looking at the elections that have import far beyond the lifespan or lifetime of the people who vote or even the people who are elected? That really do change things for better or worse. And we decided, okay, let's do that. And picked 15 elections, starting with Julius Caesar, going up to Nelson Mandela in 1994, and consulted with historians and experts, and then we had our own opinions. But decided to take on the 15 that we did, knowing that, as I said, it's subjective. And hoping that if people look at the 15, and they're sort of bite-sized chapters, they think, well, what would I have chosen? And that kind of thought exercise for nerds like me and you is kind of fun. - It is kind of fun. And I liked, I mean, I liked a lot of the ones that you chose, although I got to say, some of them, I was, like Adam's versus Jefferson. I was like, okay, I mostly know this from Hamilton, the musical. - You're not alone. - So, okay, I mostly know that from Hamilton, the musical. - Yeah, well, but there are two things that I really knew from, first of all, Hamilton, the musical, but then, because it was the first contested, real contested election in this country. And it was one that didn't work out. There was a problem with this constitution that the men who were on the ballot helped write. And it led to the first constitutional crisis, which meant that the decision was in the House of Representatives, which is the second reason why I knew a little bit about this is because when President Trump was pressuring Mike Pence to change things in the House of Representatives, some of this election came up. And I think it was part of the research that Pence's legal team did that allowed him to say, no, no, no, no, no. This is not how it works. It works this way. But he had so funny. I totally, so much of it is, especially at the ending for Hamilton, which was not ideal, we all know, came from this election. - That's right. And did you have a favorite? I mean, I was gonna say, I have some favorite-- - You're sure favorite, you tell me. - Well, this is bleak and dark, but, you know, learning, it's amazing how much we can still learn about 1932 and Hitler and Germany. - I agree with you. - And I am so careful in my analysis and in my commentary, not to compare Trump to Hitler, because I think it's always a little bit of a lazy analogy or, you know, Trump has not done a genocide or tried to do a mass extermination. And so I don't like the comparison. What the comparison though that I have always thought about is I remember being young and thinking to myself, when I first learned about the Holocaust, I couldn't fathom it. Like I couldn't fathom how human beings could do that to each other. I couldn't fathom a world in which Hitler could become ascendant and nobody did anything about it. And so in these Trump years though, I have learned a great deal about how evil can ascend, how people can make choices and completely reverse their morality, their commitment to liberal democracy. And how it can happen because you stoke the worst parts of people. And so I just, that chapter was very interesting to me. And I think that time period is, it both still echoes today in ways that I sometimes worry, are we at some early phase? - Well, yeah, and it's stoking the worst parts of people and being successful at it because of what is going on in their lives, what the environment is at the time that allows for that to hit home. And that's what it was in 1932. The, you know, table setting here, the, at the end of World War I, the treaty, left Germany in tatters and they, the allies just decided that they were not gonna give, not only not give aid, but they were gonna just keep Germany down economically, never mind militarily. And that really pissed off a lot of people, including a, then a small group of people who's gathered in beer halls and created the Nazi party. And it was, Hitler was sent as like a, basically a police officer, part of a military unit to go check them out to make sure that they weren't gonna do anything wrong. And he walked in and he said, oh my gosh, who are these people been on my life? And, and he, he not only joined, but he quickly took over because he had that, that sensibility, but also, I think they quickly realized that he had this, this charisma that they needed. And it was then, this was pre-1929 stock market crash, but it was after the crash that set the economic situation back, obviously in the US, but worldwide, that really hit Germany because Germany owed a lot to the United States as part of the treaty. And the United States said, okay, it's time to pay up in Germany couldn't. So the economy got even worse. And the desire, the anger about what happened post-war war one took off. The desire to blame somebody became palpable. And then you had this guy, Hitler and his people, along with Gurbals, who was obviously an evil genius, propagandist. And, and that is, what they did was they ran for office. They ran for the Reichstag, the German parliament that was created after World War One. And they slowly each election started gaining more and more seats. Hitler never won office personally. But it got to the point where the Nazi party won so many seats that they were impossible to ignore. Hitler said, make me chancellor. And the president at the time, Hindenburg said, no, I'm not going to do that. Prime Minister, rather, I'm not going to do that. And at a certain point, they decided, no, we are going to do it because they made the decision, the fatal decision that they could control Hitler more from the inside. So they made him chancellor. And then Hitler took a match to this democracy that they had built, you know, 10 years earlier, not even 10 years earlier, became dictator. And it was done. And this is, these are the echoes I'm talking about is sort of the what's the harm in humoring him stuff. What's the harm in letting him try to overturn an election, of going along with it, of making excuses. And also of just sort of being okay with the weaponization of hate as a political tactic. But, okay, so that was one that I really liked. But what was your favorite chapter? Because, okay, that one is obviously one that we all know a lot about. And so, to me, I have had a renewed interest as I feel like there are things to learn about our present day moment from it. I didn't know anything about Sun Yat Sen and China. That was a whole new information. That's what I was going to mention for that reason. I didn't know shit about it. I didn't know how, maybe I just never, I mean, I knew about the imperial, the dynasties in China for centuries. I think we kind of all knew the gist of that. And of course, about the CCP. But what really got us from the emperors to communism, sadly was an interlude of democracy, which didn't work out. And Sun Yat Sen was a Chinese young Chinese guy who moved to Hawaii, which was then a kingdom with his family. And looked around and said, wow, this is crazy. We can have X, Y, and Z and we can think our own thoughts and we don't have to be under the thumb of the emperor and started to learn about what happened in this country and started to become an activist, got others involved. And very long story short, was able for a whole bunch of reasons that had nothing to do with him was able to get into China and make a democracy happen. The imperial family, I think it was the shing dynasties, said, okay, we can try a democracy. They did, and won, and he promised I'm just going to be president for one term. And there were problems right away because they didn't understand China was so, it's hard for us to imagine right now, but China was so not used to the concept of democracy, but also so closed off from the rest of the world for its entire existence, that it was hard just conceptually for them to really engage, and there were rebellions from villagers and farmers. Anyway, so what he did was he said, I'm going to bring in the Soviet Union for help. Incomes Mao. Great idea. No, we're doing, again, we're doing that right now, and I think it's not going to work out great. Incomes Mao and the CCP started, and then totally enveloped and overtook every other party, including Sanyat Sainz, and then there is it, I'm sure you've heard of, and like at least somewhere in the back of your mind, Shanghai Shek, he was, yeah, okay, so he was a disciple of Sanyat Sainz. Went over to Taiwan and said, okay, we're going to put our stake over here. There's what we'll have a democracy China said, no, you won't, and that's still going on over a hundred years later, but it was because that democracy didn't work. They tried it. It didn't work for lots of reasons. It just wasn't the right time or the right people or the right anything, and that's how we got the communist China that we still have today. And this is what sort of why I thought that part, which I didn't know really anything about, is right now, in this moment, democracy is being tested. And a new generation, especially younger people, are asking themselves whether democracy is working. And there are increasing on both the far left and certainly the mega right, like a rise of a liberalism, and people who sort of, I think Trump obviously is obsessed with dictators, with Putin, with Xi, with Kim Jong Un, and people who just murder and oppress their people. You've got some folks on the far left who like to talk about, you know, Ho Chi Minh and Mao as great leaders, and I just, you can see sort of the rise in interest from people around saying, is there something different than democracy we want to be trying? Which to me is always a big part of what I worry about because to me, the maintenance of American liberal democracy is paramount. My opposition to Trump, as somebody who had been a Republican, was always steeped, not in the fact that he had main tweets or he was uncouth or, you know, had slow rough around the edges. It was like, no, this is not a person who believes in American liberal democracy. You can tell from the way he talks, but he doesn't believe in the role of law, he doesn't believe in the constitution, doesn't believe in pluralism, like all of the things that sort of make America what it is. And that shaking confidence is the thing that keeps me up at night. And this, that story was so relevant as a way in which if democracy fails, like that is when people say, well, this is a failure, we should do this other thing. Well, the optimistic part of me, and I tried to stay optimistic about most things, especially democracy, is that the example in China is that they didn't know what to do with it. And I mean, that's one of the reasons, there are lots of reasons it failed, but that was I think one of the main ones. And we know what to do with it. I mean, for how long did we take this democracy, this beautiful democracy that we live in for granted a long time until recently, which is what you're trying to say Sarah. And it's because it's just like a no-duv course we are voting and of course we have elections and of course we have balance of power and of course we have checks and balances and of course, of course, of course. And luckily, that is so ingrained now in us for it's in our DNA for generations. Not to say it is not delicate, or suggesting that it's permanent, but I think that it's obviously very ingrained, which gives me hope. >> Yeah. And for me, just in my book, whenever people are like, well, what do we do? Like a lot of it is about back to the basics guys. Like we do know what we're doing, but like we need to remind ourselves just to the fundamentals around democracy. And a lot of the solutions are there. It's that old Bill Clinton line. There's nothing wrong with America that can't be solved by what is right with America. And having done sort of the persuasion work around gay marriage and don't ask don't tell. Yeah. I just like that's democracy in action and that happened with civil rights and it happened with women's rights. And you know, every time we're like rediscovering how to move America forward and to make it more perfect. And sometimes these tough periods, you know, are moments for reinvention. So this is kind, which kind of leads me to my next thing. So like I think a Dana Bash book reader or a Sarah Longwell book reader, like these are election nerds. Like these are people who are into elections in American democracy. But like is there a lesson that you want everybody to take away from this book about the stakes of the democratic process? It couldn't be higher and my takeaway and sort of the overarching theme is that the idea of voting is not just important for us, but it is important for what is to come. So when you go to the ballot box and you're voting on, as you should, what best suits your life or your philosophy or your ideals, that makes sense. But what you're not thinking about, and it's really impossible to know is that sometimes when you cast that vote, it is going to have a ripple effect for generations. And you just don't know it until you look sometimes you know it immediately like Hitler or Abraham Lincoln, but they didn't know it back then, like they didn't know when they were exactly right, exactly, like right, exactly, exactly. And so that's the key is that it's so important to vote and to use this incredible, precious tool that we have to engage in the democratic process and engage in the society and have it imprinted an impact on the society and the government in which we live. But you don't know how huge it's going to be always until you're looking back. So my overall lesson is take advantage of it now. Just take advantage. Don't, don't sleep on it. What I love about this is that, you know, I hear a lot of voters kind of do the like, what's the point? It doesn't make that big of a difference. And you know, it always does feel like a little raindrop and a pond or something. But the way you describe it gives it such bigness, such gravity. It is. It's the butterfly effect of like the way that your action ripples through the world. And I was just thinking, you know, because I did your thought exercise. I thought the thought exercise of, okay, so what would it be? Well, okay, this isn't a big, big one, but I was trying to think about where we're like really narrow, like, so for example, George W. Bush and Florida. Right? The hanging chads. That wasn't that many, that wasn't that many votes. Like, what happens if Al Gore actually had won? Like, do we get to where we are now? But I also felt that way. So one of the ones was in, do you remember when Maggie Hassan sheep beat Kelly Ayat by like a thousand votes in 2016 in New Hampshire? And I was thinking, if Ayat had gotten elected, and I actually always liked Ayat back then, I remember thinking of her as kind of a normie Republican, but she would have voted to repeal Obamacare, even with McCain's thumbs down. Oh, that's interesting. And I was thinking about, would that have derailed Trump the first term? We talk a lot over at the bulk of stuff. Oh, that is so interesting. Because people would have been so pissed that they would have been like, you know, brown. I mean, I just, I was thinking like, what might have derailed Trump fully? Because part of, we talk a lot about stove touching because we're like, people need to feel the effect of voting for Trump in order for them to reject him. And that part of the problem with the first term was actually the guard rails that we were so glad we're holding actually in retrospect. Many of them kept people from experiencing the pain of Trump. And that's one of them. That's one of them. That's so interesting. Yeah. Can we just go back to the Al Gore Changi Chad's thought exercise because this is like going to bend. This is such a sliding doors thing. Okay. You ready? So we're in 2000. Changi Chad's don't happen, Al Gore, or whatever happens, Al Gore wins. He's president. Without George W. Bush, never mind, you don't get the Iraq war. I mean, who knows what would have happened after 9/11, which would have, I assume would have happened, even if Gore were in the White House. It's hard to imagine him, let's say he goes after Afghanistan, and we have that war. It's hard to imagine him taking it into Iraq because he didn't have the baggage that George W had. from his dad. Okay, so without a rock, hard to imagine we get Barack Obama. Without Barack Obama, hard to imagine we get Donald Trump. Yeah. That's right. Like. And look, I mean, these are, it's always hard to run these sort of counterfactuals. And look, people do this a lot. They do it with Bernie and Hillary. And I don't know, you know, I think, I don't think that many people do it with Biden and Kamala. I don't, I think most people are pretty convinced that had Joe Biden's data. And it would have been much worse for Democrats. But it is, I like this idea of it as a momentous, like it is the curvature of time and space. The, the, the, that takes you down a road because we for in the, you know, in the weeds when you're living it, you don't think about it that way. You think we say it's the most important and extravagant because what we mean is what's happening right now is so bad. And we want to do something about it and it's changing the contours of the country. And so you know it on some level, but like you never know where you're going. Well, this is also the ones that the Kierkegaard quote where life can only be lived forward, but understood backwards. And, and that's what was really sort of potent about your book. Although, did you, you didn't do any contemporary politics? No, in the book. And is that just contemporary politics is brutal right now? No, no, no, no, no, we just made a decision. And again, this was like subjective. Well, what was objective that we decided was we're not going to do the current, you know, the Trump election or even the Obama election, but even the Trump election specifically because we're still in the Trump era. So it's hard to do a history book on an era that you're still in. You could definitely make an argument. Obviously, Obama's election was uniquely historic, right? I mean, that's just objectively true. But we just kind of, Nelson Mandela was an obvious one we wanted to do. And, and so that was your cutoff like 19 or kind of, because we just said like 32 years, like that feels right. Yeah, we've got enough data to sort of look back on that and say, yeah, how we thought about it. Right. Were there any, I mean, you did Reagan. Well, we're doing the tutorial election. We have for Reagan. I think I'm glad you brought that up because we didn't do his presidential run in 1980. We went back in time to do governor because that saved the conservative movement. It rejuvenated the conservative movement, which was like dead after goldwater. Because goldwater ran for president, and he got shellacked. And everybody said, well, it's because nobody wants these conservative ideals. And what happened was it turned out nobody wanted him. And they needed it better candidate to present those ideals. And they saw Reagan, who gave a big speech, actually known as the speech during the goldwater campaign. He was an actor in California. And they said, oh my gosh, this guy can present ideas like our ideas, like nobody can. And they had to convince him to run. He didn't want to. They convinced him to run for governorate or win the primary, then, you know, California wasn't as blue as it is now, but it wasn't red. And so it wasn't easy. But he beat Pat Brown. And then it was off. They were off to the races on conservativeism being back. Not a time to be alive. I wasn't alive. I wasn't. I was just not alive. And I, it's funny. People, you know, it's, I wasn't. Yeah, barely, but I wasn't. Yeah. Well, people sometimes do this thing where they're like, you guys built the Republican party. You guys, you know, Reagan. And I was like, I don't know. I mean, do I, like, I experienced Reagan as like a very small child. I was born in 1980. And so, you're really young. I'm not really young. But I was born in 1980. And so I was like eight when he left office. And so my, I, I, more as somebody who, he shaped some of my views around like the sunny optimism of America, right? Which, you know, I think that was a big part of his appeal. Yeah. But I was, I ended up being sort of much more, what would it be? What was much more formative to me was actually Bill Clinton years because that's when I was 18. And he was sleeping, you know, he was lying to the American people about having sex with his intern who was like three years older than I was. And so, and that was, so that was when my eyes were first, when people talked to me about Reagan or Bush one, I'm like, I wasn't really there for that. Really? That was, that was what pushed you towards Republicanism. Yeah. I mean, it was the thing. Yeah. So there's two things. So I was, some of it was a little bit of a rejection of Clinton as he lied. It was really character that he told. And it, but Republicans were there at then sort of there to say character really counts. I also watched like the feminist groups defend him. And so this was just, you know, I'm 18. And I came from pretty culturally conservative background, I grew up in central Pennsylvania. And so it was really the sort of that rejection of that. And then 9/11 happened when I was in college. And so my, like, my senior year. And so I graduated from college with a real sense of, well, I want to be part of, you know, the people who are pushing back on some of this. And it did only took a few years of doing like real work in the conservative movement for me to be like, you know what? This is not for me, actually. And, but it is to me. And I did a lot of this in my book. There's just, you know, this stuff shapes you. Like you are shaped intellectually, often by like the politics that are happening in your lifetime. Like John McCain, like I became a Republican, like really committed to being a Republican because John McCain, I didn't like George W Bush. John McCain, I was like, that's for me. That guy's for me. And I got John McCain all the way up through, you know, 2008. And I was like in 2008, I remember being like, I'll take either. Like this is, it was one of those elections where I remember feeling like either way, like my preference was for McCain, but either way, we got sort of a, the historic nature of Obama's presidency was also exciting and fulfilling in some ways. And so, also, either way, it was, we get a good man. A good man. Yeah. Like this wasn't, there wasn't somebody who was going to assault liberal democracy. And then I ate years of Obama before Trump came along. So I don't know that, yeah, I don't know that I built the modern conservative movement. I don't think you did Sarah. Yeah. Thank you. Lots of, there's lots of people on the far left who think that it was just me. I'm here to say nope. Yeah. So just as a, as we wrap up, which elections this year, do you think have especially high stakes from sort of like a meta historical perspective, like could have extra knock-on effects? Well, my first instinct is to say Texas, but I don't know that it's knock-on effects because I think in Texas, it's, the headwinds are bad for Republicans everywhere, but there it's just candidate quality. If, if, if, if, if, Talorika pulls it off, you know, first time since 1988, a Democrat is elected from Texas for the Senate, it will be for lots of reasons, but the main reason is because he's a good candidate and Ken Paxson is not. It's just, it's, it's simple as that. So, um, I think, let me, let me think, let me think, let me think, let me think, Maine, maybe, maybe Maine is the answer to that question because, you know, Platner was this, was this, it turned out to be Haley's comment, but he was this, this bright light that everybody was looking at and then fizzled, uh, and then the thought was, okay, so Susan Collins, even though it's a bad year for Republicans, Susan Collins, Susan Collins, and she always pulls it off, and she might, but Troy Jackson, uh, became the, the nominee, and it's still neck and neck. So, could it be that it's just the time it, it's time for what has been the DNA of Maine on a presidential level to finally turn towards the Senate level. I don't know. What do you think? Like reassert itself. Yeah, what, what are you looking at? Well, so I had two, um, races, um, and they're both governor's races. Okay. So I am pretty obsessed with Keisha Lance bottoms winning in Georgia because if she doesn't win, talk about historic, I don't think that, uh, Ossoff runs for president. Now, I know he's already telling people that he won't run for president. I don't believe him. Um, then I also think if he's very, very flat, flatly like, yeah, well, so little bit of a ball. But I was just going to say that, yeah. Uh, so I don't know. Um, yeah. Okay. That's a good one. Uh, so, and, and warlock too, right? There's two Senate seats. Then obviously I am, I have, I've like got real, I'm like an, uh, well, I mean, I don't understand. I am a big John Alsoff believer. I believe that he would be a very good candidate. I think if he runs, um, he has both the skill. And then I, I have this theory that like the way that the Democrats come back together is that they nominate, uh, a Jewish person who is, uh, critical of Netanyahu, but helps to sort of soothe the distance between, um, people who, either Alsoff or Shapiro, he's very critical of that. Totally, totally. But that's why, I mean, oh, JB Pritzker, um, I mean, I don't think it would be Rahm Emanuel, but there's several sort of Jewish candidates who I think, um, that's why I have this theory, uh, that any of them, or even if they're on the ticket, helps with this particular cleavage point in the Democratic Party. So Keisha Lance Bottoms, uh, her winning Georgia would also be historic for its own reasons, um, but like I was thinking about the knock-on effects of what happened similarly in, uh, Iowa, the Iowa governor ship will have implications because if Grassley passes away, um, because he's very old, uh, then you would have a, uh, you know, Rob Sand would be able to, um, nominate a Democrat in his place. And so that's just, those, those were the ones I was thinking about. Oh, those are good. Okay. And by the way, Grassley has said out loud that very thing. He's like, I'm the reason I want the Republican to win the governor ship is because I'm old. Yeah. I know he said something like, I'm not planning on dying in office, but I am 92 or whatever he is. I think he's older. Oh, man. Well. But he has a brand new vacuum cleaner. So that's good. I love it. Honestly, I get really mad at Grassley and I, I, I think that he's made atrocious decisions during the Trump era as so many of them have, but like when he tweets, I can't help it. There is something about it. When he talks about his naming is, uh, I know. Bertha too. Yeah. It's really something. I agree. I agree. What a fun conversation. Sarah, thanks for writing a book that I, I think you're the best. Thank you so much for having me. So fun. I, I love this. I loved the concept and the ability to think about some of these things. And so, uh, and way to go, it's always, look at you just turning out books. I brought one and I'm ready to never do it again. Yeah. Okay. But you need here, you need to have, you need to call David Fisher. I'll give you his number and go and co write it with him because this is his full-time job. And you have like 20, you, I think you actually have 25 jobs. I mean, missing one is a 26. I got it. I, you know, this, this book leave thing that people are talking about. Yeah. I find it an interesting concept. I'd love to do it sometime. Yeah. So, uh, independent journalists like you know, did a bash thank you so much for coming on today. See you again soon. Thanks to all of you for listening. Bye.