Morning Shots: James Talarico Takes Direct Aim at Elon Musk

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Morning Shots Live here with our toes dangling out over the rest of history one week to go until the midterm elections. Everybody's kind of freaking out about it. I know I am a little bit bill. Maybe you're a little more unflappable. Maybe you're a little bit more. I would have assumed you were sort of a little more stayed and sort of steady about all this. And then I read Morning Shots this morning, which is basically one long exercise in you sort of participating in these ritual superstitions of not jinxing. How everything is looking for the Democrats and all of this. So let me just start before we get into the granular stuff because we got a lot of that to talk about today. How are you feeling, Bill? Where are the vibes at for Bill Crystal one week to go until the election? Yeah, I'm sort of vaguely anti-bibes, but I think the I mean, I guess I have learned over the years I'm at God I've gotten these things wrong so often. Polling is pretty good in mid years, especially when there's not a hidden Trump vote. If it's confirmed by other things like Trump's approval and disapproval, which is pretty catastrophic and which hasn't changed, it continues to drift out of anything. And the early vote, which people can get into reading the entry else too much, but it is real. More than 30 million people have voted. There's stuff to learn from where turnout is coming from. And so all of it together is just struck good for the Democrats. I mean, the average of the polls, so that's always more alive than any one poll, in 501 plus 1, which is a good aggregator and does a little waiting for the more, you know, for the latest ones. And also it's a sophisticated aggregator. It's gone from basically six at the beginning of the Labor Day generic ballot, seven and a half, about three, four weeks ago, now eight and a half to nine, actually a little above nine and right now. So this is what happens in a wave. The trend tends to continue and there's not been much reversion to the media. Everyone keeps waiting for the Republican voters to come home or even show up. There's not a heck of a lot of that happening. It doesn't seem now. Obviously, this could all be off and there could be some hidden Trump vote and there could be a big election day reversal from the early vote. There'll be some. But I think it looked just analytically, if you can get from Mars and someone gave you all this stuff, you'd say something between a good and very good and maybe even awfully, terrifically good Democratic year. So that's why having said all that being a superstitious person, even if it's somewhat calm superstitious person, as you were saying, I therefore have to knock on wood and foe salt of my shoulder. I discovered in 5 a.m. this morning looking around on the internet that in Turkey, they pull on their earlobe. So I'm doing that now a lot too. You know, you got to get the gods, the gods happy and don't want to look hebristic. Don't want to look presumptuous, right? Do you think that works for us or is it sort of like a cultural appropriation thing that the gods actually frown on when we sort of go trotting around the world, trying to find all these different things to stack the odds in our favor a little bit? There could be risks involved. Good point. You know, and of course it is a little bit big and a little bit crazy if we can be honest. I don't know. I don't know what the Christians I'm Jewish. The Jews always had a little bit of a thing about the evil eye. I mean, they were actually like serious rabbis who talk about it and are okay with your doing certain things, not knocking on wood, but that's actually a Christian thing. It comes from the cross, right? Yeah, yeah. No, it is, I think the original custom is a kind of good lock from you know, sort of like touching, you know, bullshitties or something, I suppose, for Catholics. Anyway, we don't need to get into this theological discussion. I am bullish. I am sticking to my bullishness. I was early on saying it was going to be a big wave. So I also have a slight investment in this and I could well be wrong on Wednesday and we're roasts and depressed and we'll have a very sad, sad newsletter Wednesday morning. I was going to say we've all got a slight investment in it, Bill. It's not just, you know, we're all waiting to see whether or not Bill Christel's predictions will be proven right or not, you know, that's not the other things involved. That's not the most important thing. I can't believe it. Oh my god. Let's go through a couple of these races. I should say, by the way, I'm Andrew Eger with the Bullwork. You know who that is. We've been talking about him, all right? That's Bill Christel. We write the morning shots newsletter. We come to you live on Tuesdays here on the Bullworks channels. And man, it is, it's one week to go. We do want to run over, this is not an exhaustive, you know, this is not the Bullworks guide to the Senate map or anything like that. But we have been interested in a number of these races. And I do, I want to start in Texas because that's where Trump is. Trump was rallying in Mississippi last night. That's an interesting race. Talk about that a little bit in a minute. But, but he is headed to Texas today. He's going to have two rallies, two rallies, double header, double barreled Trump rallies as if the guy, poor guy, was not seeming tired enough out there on the stump. He's going to be in Corpus Christi. He's going to be in Lubbock. And then also, they're sort of pegging this to, I mean, this is just so amazing, Bill. I mean, this is this the first Venezuelan oil tanker rolling into the Gulf of Mexico port. I guess, I actually don't know whether it's in the Gulf of Mexico. I assume so. It's rolling in Texas. It's, you know, we're we're getting the oil. He said we'd go get the oil and low and behold, you know, our, our, our ill gotten luker is arriving on our shores. And voters should be very happy about that Marco Rubio will be there in Port Arthur, Texas to welcome that tanker in. This race is interesting. This, there are two races here. Actually, they're interesting. Obviously, there's the the very neck and neck gubernatorial governor's race. But, but this, this, this, this Senate race here between James Tallerico and Ken Paxton has become one of the most interesting races and not even necessarily the closest, right? I mean, like you would expect this one to really be screamingly close. And it could be, you know, Paxton could could pull it out. I think people still consider it a toss up. But when you look at the polling, Tallerico has been leading, you know, pretty consistently in all of these polls, every kind of narrative element of this race has been Tallerico, Tallerico, Tallerico, all along, you know, Ken Paxton with all his personal baggage, the sort of sad sack approach out there on the campaign trail, all of those leaks out of that DC meeting where he's just complaining about how much of a drag Trump is on him on the ballot and how little control he has over his own messaging. Trump is there now. Trump is there to sort of again, try to try to put some backbone back into the mega faithful in Texas. Get them to drag themselves to the polls for Ken Paxton. But, but Tallerico himself, even though he has been hitting Trump hard and hitting Paxton hard all along, he has kind of pivoted a little bit in his own strategic messaging over the last week or so. And, and in fact, the person, kind of the new foil that Tallerico has been spotlighting more and more is not Paxton. And it is not Donald Trump, but it is Elon Musk who has poured tens of millions of dollars into this race on behalf of Ken Paxton and is, you know, basically the biggest spender there on his behalf in terms of outside money under the Donald Trump. So, so I just want to play real quick this ad that Tallerico is now running that just is it's all about Elon and I should I should say about the ad that because of YouTube's copyright rules, we have stripped the the the musical accompaniment out of it. So, might make it a little more uncanny than otherwise. Try to just, you know, in your in in the palace of your imagination construct sort of a nice little slide guitar acoustic Texas sounding backing track for this ad, but here is what James Tallerico is running about Elon. Do you keep seeing these attack ads against James Tallerico? Look a little closer. The same super PACs are paying for nearly all of them. Texas Pack, America Pack, Lone Star Liberty Pack. But who's funding these stark money groups? Elon Musk. This summer, Elon made some of the largest political donations in American history. He's now spent more than $180 million to defeat James Tallerico. He's almost single handedly bankrolling the effort to install Ken Paxton in the U.S. Senate. But why is the world's first trillionaire doing this? Elon wants to buy up our land. He wants to buy up our water. And now he wants to buy his own personal U.S. Senator. He knows that if his millions dragged the most corrupt politician in Texas across the finish line, Ken Paxton will owe him everything. So let's remind Elon, Texas is not for sale. Yeah, a minute ago I said a biggest outside spender except Donald Trump, that doesn't even, that doesn't even true. I mean, Elon, the amount of money that Elon has put in is actually far outstripping even what Trump's own mega pack is spending on Paxton's behalf in Texas. So Bill, Bill, what do you make of the ad? What do you make of this attempt? Which is a little bit rare. I think for Democrats this cycle, we have not seen other Democrats take on Elon specifically this directly, this aggressively. What do you make of this from Tallerico? Do you think it works? Do you think it's a useful strategic move? Yeah, I think it's intelligent. I mean, people are tired of seeing the same ads and the same themes over and over and they've seen everything dozens of times, hundreds of times at this point, right? So I think it makes certain Elon's a little bit different angle. He has spent this unbelievable amount of money. He's not popular, though he's not as well known as Trump personally. I was even presumed with the Trump stuff so I baked it at this point. He's on pop and I think tying it, you know, he wants to sort of take over your water and take over your land as a vague, you know, data center, residence there, and other issues. And Paxton is corrupt, if I can say, honestly. And therefore, it's sort of, it wouldn't make sense, I think, if we were spending a lot of money, you know, on behalf of some vanilla state legislator and some other state, right, who was just a kind of normal Republican or something. Paxton has been in, you know, impeached, I guess, a dieted or was going to be a dieted, I can't remember. And anyway, there's so much there on Paxton that it sort of gives it a special punch. So I think it's pretty clever, kind of fresh. Let's just people like us talk about it, gives them a little more. You know, if you want change, I'm just Carval's at this, the other dance, but more concerned. I mean, Democrats just need to stick to the basics here. You want, you know, you don't want to come, you want to Congress a little stop Trump, reinforce them, and you want change, you're not happy with the way things are going. And I think it's a pretty effective way to, to make that point. One last thing on the oil will be going to greet the event as well, and I'll take it. I mean, I guess It's nice that after nine months they got one oil tanker coming from Venezuela, you know, I mean, it's not really a huge success, but I don't know, do you really want to highlight the issue of oil? Is an oil gas? It isn't gasoline costing a dollar more than it was when we went into Venezuela. I mean, I feel like a lot of the Trump stuff, I mean, I was in a white house many, many years ago, and we liked what we were doing. I think we were right to like some of it is the Treasury HW Bush administration. We thought if we could just tell more people about what we're doing, they would come around. And some political guy said to me, he was much more experienced than I said, you know, people don't like kind of like what you've done a lot of it. And you're not going to change their mind in the last week of election campaign. So maybe you should just cool it on saying what you've been hitting your own themes and just do some other stuff, you know. So it's sort of funny that they want to hype the energy issue in the last week of the election in Texas. But yeah, it is also interesting. I mean, Elon Musk himself has really, I mean, has Taliban go personally as crosshairs. It's not just his spending. If you read his Twitter these days, I mean, it is one long series of anti-Taloriko screeds. He's been, I'm just reading off my phone right now, Taloriko is a far left extremist. The Taloriko campaign is not being honest about what's happening. That's him amplifying the lie that conspiracy theory that he was undergoing mental health treatment at a clinic in Ohio. Taloriko is just a puppet that sometimes doesn't work properly, but his puppet masters are quite smart. There's something deeply wrong with Taloriko. Taloriko will vote to take away your children and transition them. I mean, Elon Musk is just doing this constantly all the time. So I do think there's, I do think it is sort of canny. It's kind of smart for for Taloriko. He's not just running these ads. He's also out there on the campaign trail talking about Elon, talking about poor, how he is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into this campaign, which can backston needs. I mean, can Paxton, this is really a lifeline for him, this spending and then the spending that, that mega, Trump's mega pack is doing, it is a very expensive state to run in, stay wide. Of course, you need a ton of money, a ton of media support, artillery support to do it. But it does let Taloriko do this, you know, he's bought and paid for by Donald Trump and by the billionaires. And these are both high salience messages for voters that Democrats think are getable right now. It's not just Donald Trump and Donald Trump's corruption. It's also the billionaire class stuff that we've spent so much time talking about. That's, I think that's enough for Texas for now. Obviously, you know, we're very interested to see. I, perhaps the most interesting Senate race in America, this cycle, between James Taloriko and Ken Paxton there. But let's talk about a few others. There's an interesting contrast to be made between Iowa and Michigan right now. Again, these are a couple others where, where you'd probably rather be the Democrat, but these are still just toss up races of dual El Sayed versus Mike Rogers in Michigan and Josh Turek versus Ashley Henson in Iowa. And I think we have a couple of polls. Maybe we can throw up that cook political report. This doesn't have the Michigan one up there, but you can see the Texas races we were just talking about now. And then there's the Iowa race. You have Turek by a hair, Rob San, by the way, my guy Rob San, apparently running away with the governor's race there, which is sort of interesting. But then let's also take a look at that Michigan at, or the Michigan sample that we have there. Abdul El Sayed, you can see there among likely voters, nearly 48% to Mike Rogers, 44%. This is kind of across the board. What we're seeing from all these polls is they're all like, well, they're close. They're within the margin of error. If you had a polling miss, you'd probably see a lot of this blue wave dry up. But everywhere you look, it's kind of the same thing. It's kind of Democrats by a hair and Republicans not succeeding in closing this gap. The one thing that I wanted to bring up about these two races specifically is we've talked a lot. A lot of our colleagues, Lauren Egan, who covers the Democrats really well for us. He's written a lot about the internal party jockeying that everybody's preparing to do after these races, depending on who wins and who loses. There is a very interesting contrast between these two guys. Obviously, Abdul El Sayed is a staunch progressive. He ran as a progressive in the primary. He beat Haley Stevens in the primary while channeling that far more swashbuckling, ready to mix it up, progressive energy. On in Iowa, Josh Turek is running exactly the opposite campaign. You would be hard pressed to find a Democratic Senate candidate. This cycle, who is more interested in talking up his centrist, his moderate bonafides in diagnosing ills within his own party, in talking about times he's worked with Republicans in the past. Obviously, Iowa and Michigan are two different states. Iowa's rather than Michigan's pretty traditional swing state. Iowa's been pretty Republican for the last few cycles. But it is interesting to see that we already have a little bit of that narrative breaking containment. You've already got some Democrats like Haley Stevens, who Abdul El Sayed beat in the primary, making a little bit of news this week for being a little bit hesitant and withholding about her endorsement of him in a TV appearance. You've got some progressives being a little bit grumpy about Josh Turek and how hard he's running to the middle and saying that's going to depress Democratic turnout there. There's going to be a lot of this after the election, a lot of football spiking, if things go well, a lot of blaming, if things go wrong, and it's like everybody's so eager to get to one of those narratives that it's already creeping forward. Even though the elections haven't happened yet with a week to go. Yeah, I don't know. Actually, anyone's really eager, except for the people who have a huge investment in the future of the party and who are professional centrist Democrats or professional progressive Democrats, of which there are both. And so they're very interested in making this a big fight to the death of such different strategies. I mean, they're totally predictable. One of them won a primary as a progressive against the centrist. The other one, a primary as a centrist, someone against a more progressive candidate. Turek's was less stark than even if he's a prime minister. But it's still, he is more centrist than he ran that way, as bipartisan to LLCs, sponsor of the state legislature, et cetera. So they are actually just different people and there is something in politics about running us who you are, which is kind of what they're doing, and probably a good idea when people value authenticity, just a good idea in general, it's easier to run a campaign when you're actually just being yourself to some degree, sometimes I could back for it if you go too far being yourself. And also, just to be simple, I mean, I was 10 points to the right of Michigan in actual voting. It was in the presidential. In 24, Iowa hasn't elected a Democratic senator in quite a while, right? Tom Harkin must have been the last, I don't know when that was. And Michigan has been a blue state at the governor and senate level for quite a while, since so six, I think, oh, oh, oh, oh, maybe, right? It's been saved for him lost. So, you know, it's not, Michigan went blue for senate against Rodgers last time, even though Trump won the state by a couple of points. So again, I think it's pretty standard, honestly. It is, I don't mean to minimize it. Of course, going forward, it sort of matters whether the party is a Turk-type party or an else-a-yid party. That will mostly defend on who else gets elected the other 50 plus senators who are there in the senate and who wants to president and all that. But people are a little bit, I think, overdoing it. And, sadly, this is nothing to do with one Democratic primary ever worked on before I became a Reagan Republican. It was 1976 when I took a couple of months off from grad school in the summer, good excuse to avoid working on my dissertation and went down to work for Pat Moynihan in New York against Bella Abso, the bitter primary between a centrist and born and had it worked in Dixon's White House. This is a domestic policy advisor after all, although he was a real Democrat. And Bella Abso, who was really probably to the latter 50, it was as much to the left then as else-a-yid is today, you know? And Moynihan won by one percent. And so these things, and, you know, whatever, the party didn't actually go to the center right away. It wasn't a monumental, an important election eventually, Clinton got to pick up a lot of those themes of Moynihan, as you might say, but anyway, just a long way of saying that I'm a little less surprised that they're not going to sound so different from each other. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. I think for most voters, it is not like a front-of-mind thing. I have just been interested in this sort of inside baseball thing, if everybody just sort of licking their chops to be able to like get in their licks in terms of this like ongoing constant intro party fight between these factions. But obviously, you know, not that anybody should have that front-of-mind necessarily, you know. But, you know, just one point, let me interrupt. You're right. I mean, the actual comparison that's going to tell you something is Jocelyn Benson, I think in Michigan, who's one of the governor, who is a traditional centrist Democrat, she's Secretary of State. And she's going to win by, I think, eight or ten points, probably. She will run pretty far ahead of L.S.A. So that would suggest just a very simple, matter of way, Michigan, as you say, at the presidential levels of swing state, then maybe, if you want to win Michigan in 2028, you want a presidential candidate. I mean, L.S.A. And I think it's likely to pull it out by a couple of points, so fine, we'll credit to them. But if you want to win the state of presidential candidate, you probably want someone who's a little more like Benson, there in Michigan, then you do L.S.A. That's, I mean, the apples, apples comparisons will be some of these interesting ones. What do you make of you covered Iowa? Are you covered sand? I mean, what do you make of sand as opposed, he's running so far ahead of Turk, it looks like, is that more personal than ideological? Yeah, definitely. Sand is kind of a unicorn, in my view. He is, he has a really compelling personal story and a really compelling history in state government, where he's been the state auditor and has been able to actually work on a lot of this anti-corruption, pro-public transparency type stuff that is the bedrock of his political brand. He isn't really running as like a quote unquote centrist, right? I mean, he's not, he has done a much better job because of his own personal political history. He has been able to sort of take himself off of that sliding scale that so many Democrats spend so much time, you know, obsessing over and agonizing over. And he has basically just said, you know, look, I work with Republicans well, and I work with Democrats well, and I don't have any beef with, you know, people out to my left in my party. What I have beef with is this state that has had one party control, and everything's gotten really sloppy because of that over the years, and that they have, you know, status. act to the deck unfairly in their own favor so that they can pick your own pocket better is like one of his classic campaign lines. So it's not even really like, you know, again, ideological sliding scale stuff in the same way that Turek is, Turek is very deliberately leaning into there is this ideological sliding scale and I'm about in the middle of it, which again, you know, you have to almost a little bit more when you're running for Senate since that is a legislative job and it's so much of what you're going to actually be doing is voting up or down on these bills rather than, you know, administering the state, but I think that does go a long way toward explaining why Rob Sand is apparently again, by all appearances, really running away with this race in a way that Josh Turek is not. Rob Sand's opponent is also much weaker than then then Josh Turek's opponent. Josh Turek is running against a pretty normal by megastandards Republican Senator in Ashley Henson. She's certainly as, you know, very pro Trump, but she has she has tried to, you know, she's tried to like build out this brand. We're like, yeah, I'm pro Trump, but I'm one of you and I'm my own thinker and all these sorts of things. I just don't think that any Republican can succeed doing that. She's done an okay job of doing that Rob Sand's opponent has, has all these like weird personal issues where he has like, he has not been able to dodge this narrative that he is basically a carpet bagger from Kansas and sort of still semi-lives there now. And he's, you know, he has a long time, he's a long time sort of Koch brothers, a political staffer, which has not been super good for his brand. So it's just like it's, it anyway you dice any of these races, it's always hard to make comparisons because there are always always so many different factors, right? But I do think that is, that is, those are several of the reasons why the governor's race is so much less of a race than the Senate race in Iowa right now. But it is still crazy. I mean, it's crazy to have like, like you say, this is a red state and Rob Sand in that poll we showed is pulling 11 points up. I mean, it's just that, you don't see that very often. We've already gone along on this. I knew it was going to happen. You know, I was just going to go bang, bang, bang through these races. We don't really need to talk about Maine. This new Marist poll out shows Troy Jackson up two points on Susan Collins among likely voters, up nine points among all registered voters, sorry, among independents who are likely to vote there. And nine points out. That's what I'm doing. Nine point advantage among independents who are likely to vote and a nine point advantage among all registered voters. So anyway, you slice this up. It's difficult in these sort of wave elections to do your, your sort of polling alchemy on which voters are actually likely, you know, you could pass behavior. It doesn't necessarily predict future turnout in a race where the turnout is off the charts. Anything about Maine bill before we, before we turn to the races you're excited about? Yeah, in a wave election. I mean, a lot of people are going to vote. We didn't vote. That's why it's a wave presumably in 2022. And some different people are going to vote. We've seen that in some of the early votes where you break down where they're coming from. And therefore, I tend to be dubious. The likely voter screens just to take one second on it are usually, did you vote, either asking people to do vote in the last two or three elections or if you have the voter files seeing if they voted in the last two or three elections? And that's usually a pretty good predictor, you know, but it's a predictor of most voters. But the marginal voters who are the ones who didn't vote in the last election and are voting in this election because it's a wave. And then some are saying, home, we did vote because there were Republicans who weren't happy with Trump. That's what I think would account for that. But it's a little odd to have that big a gap, honestly, between registered voters and likely voters. I don't really know what accounts for 75% of main registered voters are going to vote. I mean, so it's a little, just to the math in your head, can you really go from two to nine if the same 75% is at the base, you know, you could, but it's like a very big jump in the likely voter. So I'm slightly more on the registered voter at this point of this election, given the wavish character of it, I'd look at the registered voters a little more and most of these polls. Okay. Okay. Yeah. The, the bullworks, hopium, map, whisperer, I would say over the last few months here. You've been paying a lot of attention to some of these like democratic stretch goal states. So I want to talk a little bit about three of those about Mississippi, Kansas and Florida. But before we do that, we should throw quickly to an ad here. So let's run this ad. We'll come back. We will talk about the stretch goals. This message is brought to you by Sol. Now, if you've been listening to the show for a while, you already know how much I love Sol's out of office THC gummies and their sparkling beverages. But now get this. They've launched something new. It's called mood gummies. 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I'm meeting my mic, I'm meeting my mic. Bill, let me just kind of let you cook on these. I mean, you Mississippi, Kansas, Florida. We also had that headline yesterday of Mississippi Democrat Scott column doing the rope line at the Trump rally. I've done this many times myself. This is the only real good time to talk to Trump people at the rally because once you get inside, they segregate the press off and it basically becomes impossible. But they line up outside for hours so you can get a lot of good conversations in. I guess Scott columns up up there. Can you just tell us a little bit about why you think Mississippi now is sort of on the map in a way that it really has not been for like ever in my political lifetime. I don't know about yours. Yes. What are the three Kansas, Mississippi and Florida? Okay. Quickly. Kansas. I was early on, I will say. Now everyone agrees. It's a toss up. Adam Hamilton, a very good candidate. But Marshall, a very bad incumbent. I have it to talk to someone from there three, four months ago, who had done some polling actually was thinking of running. And Trump was below 50. And I said, he was below 15 Kansas. I don't know. And it's a kind of undistinguished incumbent. Why is he going to outpull Trump really? And then it turned out Hamilton is a much better candidate than I realize. I didn't really know who he was at the time. So that kind of end diesel prices are up and all that. Farm economy is taking hits from the tariffs. Kind of the one, two punch of the tariffs and the energy prices is very bad in those midwestern grades. They play in states. All bright basketball. So I think Kansas very much would play. Mississippi, slightly different story, because that one came later on to certainly my radar screener. I think a lot of people, but it is somewhat, it's even more, it's even redder state than Kansas. But there, I do think the voting rights decisions by the Supreme Court. And the fact that the eagerness of state legislatures, including Mississippi's to go take advantage of those decisions, weakening the voter rights act to just redistrict, to get rid of one or two democratic, but in these cases, always, always, always black. I think the legislature's representatives in the house really offended people. So I think you are seeing in the early voting of Mississippi what looks like disproportionate black turnout, very high black turnout. And you know, turns out if you do the math and get, it's, I think, the most highest African American population in the nation, you get that vote, 95% of that vote, let's just say, you only need a 28, 30% maybe of the white vote. I'm not sure at the numbers of 25, it sort of depends. And I don't know, is that that impossible? There are people in Mississippi who aren't pro-Trump anymore, who never were pro-Trump. And there are some people who white people who have turned away from Trump. So that was a little more of a stretch, and he's a very good candidate column. I've been impressed. Just tried to watch him a little bit. And he has that clever ad against Cindy Hyde Smith, right? What did she say? Pick another protein thing, right? Yeah. She said this month. Don't worry so much about beef prices coming up. You can pick another protein. There are other proteins you can use. It's like he's got a funny ad, you know, kind of, you know, pick another protein. I'd rather pick another senator. Yeah, really my hamburger here. I want to pick another senator. So that's got done pretty well. Florida everyone's assumed just such a red state. And it has gone very red in descent just one by 19 points in 2022. And then Trump won three times and, you know, the first two times of which people kind of thought Hillary and then Biden might win, including me. So I was just wrong about that. Partly was this, the Latino vote flipped so much in 2020 and then flipped even more in 24 against the Democrats. That seems to have flipped back because of ICE and also because of the economics and gas prices and stuff. And you know, people do forget in 2018, which is not ancient history. It was Trump was already president. Republicans won the governorship and the center races in Florida by one by less than a point and one by like a point and a half. I think to say, this one. So it's not crazy that Florida comes back into play if the wave is big enough. And that those races look competitive, jolly for governor and Nixon for senator. I think that's probably a little more of a reach. But I don't know. And there, there's a lot of competing interpretations of the early, it's a very early voting state. It's a big male state to MAIL state. And therefore, a lot of, a lot of entrails reading about where that vote is and who's voting and stuff. But seems to suggest that it'll be those rates who raises there will be close. You'd have to give a bit of an advantage to the Republicans to have it only a bit, I think. Yeah. It's always so interesting to me in these races, the way that the waves kind of build themselves and like perpetuate themselves, right? I mean, like if things were going really well for Donald Trump, right? And he had cleaned up in all these places and he had, you know, his own states were secure. It's really hard to be in a minority party in a state that loses all the time when the national environment is against you. you know, like, it is, it is hard. to imagine that you would be seeing really strong candidates put together these really strong campaigns where they're able to raise money and they're able to get talent around them and just talented people are jumping into these races in the first place in the absence of this national environment where Democrats are so energized and Trump is so unpopular and it just seems possible, it actually seems possible that some of these Hail Mary plays would win. And by the same token, because these are states that haven't been in place so long, Republicans have not had to field particularly good and like strong candidates in some of these places either. I mean, Cindy Heitzmith, that protein remark that she has made several times now is just sort of one gaff and it's not a topic you want to have a gaff on when people are so mad about affordability and prices in particular. You don't want to be seen as like talking down to voters in that way. But she's just not particularly talented on the stump. Anyway, I don't know if you saw her at the rally last night where Donald Trump called her up onto the stage as he does in all of these red state rallies. He's been doing recently and they they're able to do like a little version of their stump speech and and get people go in and get people juiced up. Cindy Heitzmith just got up there and said something to the effect of isn't Donald Trump the best president we've ever had in our lifetimes and then she left that was it. And Donald Trump like kind of couldn't believe it and he loved it. He's like, that's great. Some of these guys talk for, you know, 10 minutes and it gets so boring. But like, she basically said everything you need to say, but Donald Trump is not the electorate. Donald Trump is not the single person she needs to fleece with that speech. And then you could you could make the same kind of lay out the same case about Roger Marshall in Kansas and the difficulties he's had as a candidate. So I don't really have any other point to make other than the one I said, the way that the way it kind of builds itself in this in this very positive national environment for Democrats. Agreed. Anything else? Anything else on the map? We have a couple pieces of non-map news we should talk about. I feel like we did okay. You know, we're not Steve Cornacchi or any of these data nerds and these egg heads. But you know, it's an interesting time. It's one week to go. It's I am freaking out a little bit about a bill. But I like what you said at the time. I like the data nerds. You know, I got interested in politics originally really because I love baseball. I love baseball statistics. This is all pre-internet, pre-computers really. You know, and I had this baseball encyclopedia. You could study everyone's statistics. And I actually learned math in a way by sort of like how does, you know, batting at how would if someone got three out of four hits late in the season, would his batting average go ahead of the guy and the other, you know, team who was a 326 instead of 328, you know. And so I got into it sort of in that way. Maybe not everyone gets into politics that way. I'm going to say, did you, how did you get involved in interested in politics? Well, there was this, you know, guy Donald Trump and he showed up and he seemed kind of bad. And that was a sort of a radicalizing moment for me. I was probably going to be a school teacher before that. But we don't need to do my whole back story. Okay. I didn't know that about that. That'll be another, that'll be another, another podcast sometime. Yes. Yes. No, my wife and I were applying for, for jobs that like, you know, teaching at little schools in like the Quad Cities, Iowa was very different, very different possible trajectory. You know, maybe that would have been a good life. But I'm glad, I'm glad to be here, glad to be here with you, Bill. Happier to be here with you in this environment than I was, you know, two years ago, that wasn't so fun. But we'll see, we'll see, maybe we'll have to eat a lot of crow and be really grumpy and in a week, despite everything, despite everything you never know. That's why they play the games, right? Let's talk, let's talk one little piece, at least one little piece of non-election news. It has been weird watching these political prosecutions. They're still bad, right? I mean, they're still about the worst thing he's doing in terms of the worst things Donald Trump is doing in terms of just violence to norms and to sort of civic infrastructure that we need and that we have enjoyed for many years and that hopefully we'll get to enjoy again in the future. They also aren't working like at all. They continue to be among his least successful attempts to metal with things, even though they are the most, most sort of damaging in terms of what they're trying to do. They do keep falling on their face. He does keep failing to make these happen in court. James Comey, former FBI director for Donald Trump, indicted, indicted is actually not the right word. Charged, a third time, criminally charged, the DOJ brought forth charging documents alleging that he leaked authorized the leak of classified information to the press a decade ago in October of 2016 when Barack Obama was still president, obviously at that time. It is not an indictment because they didn't get a grand jury to sign off on it. They usually, it is not that difficult to have to find a grand jury to rubber stamp a prosecutor's charge. There's that old line about a prosecutor being able to indict a ham sandwich. Grangeries tend to be pretty agreeable. They only are required by law to see one side of the evidence, so you can kind of see why that would be. There has not been any reporting that the DOJ has tried and failed to get an indictment like they have occasionally here, but the 10-year statute of limitations was running out for them to be able to do anything on this. What we have instead is this halfway-charging document where they have said, "We would like to file these charges," and we probably intend to put them before a grand jury. Even though the statute of limitations is expiring, we are telling you now that we're about to do this in an attempt to reset the clock there. It seems silly. James Comey has said, "It would be funny if it weren't for how corrosive it is to the norms." I tend to agree with him on that. These charges have been examined in the past. They are weaker than the 86-47 ones, which were already so weak that they didn't hardly last a day in court. Where are you bill on the weirdness of how silly it is on the one side and how you can almost laugh at it at this point, but then it is also still just insane that this stuff is happening from the president and his Justice Department in America at all. I can intimidate other people who don't have James Comey's, you know, "Mart famous like James Comey don't have access there for it to an awful lot of good lawyers," and if you're just more of a FBI guy there in the trenches, limit a couple of those in diamonds recently, then maybe you pull your punches on a bunch of things where if you're in the private sector and someone starts to go after you. I think it's dangerous and bad, obviously, and really bad internally in terms of what's happened to the Justice Department. We do have courts to actually prosecute and convict someone of a crime. You do need to go to court. You have to go to federal, if it's a federal indictment, if it's a federal justice, you have to go to federal court. You have to go to federal district court, and that's those judges have not been terribly friendly and willing to roll over, including many Trump judges, and so, as you say, in that respect, the system is working mostly the barrier that is the guardrail, right? That's why we have courts independent judges, you know, that were poured to the executive wrench. And so that's good. I was thinking as you were speaking of the contrast with ICE, which I would say, is a place where there's very few guardrail so it turns out. Once they get the money, and your immigration law is very vague and open-ended for the executive and hasn't been fixed in 10, 20, 30 years, and so there are things on the books that aren't intended to let people in mass go around doing what ICE guys are doing, but doesn't exactly prohibit it, or it's hard to prove it prohibits it, or you have to go to court. On behalf of the guy, once he's detained, and that takes six months, and meanwhile, another, you know, 60,000 people have been detained, or 600,000 people, so I'm struck by the contrast. ICE has done, in that respect, I think, yeah, you're right to make the distinction. One is corrosive to our institutions internally, probably less dangerous than the actual effects on human beings, you know, out there. ICE is as corrosive, but actually has had a really horrible effect on actual people and communities. So it's interesting, you know, these different aspects of authoritarianism work in different ways. These remind one of the importance of having independent centers of power that can check the executive, and Congress, if there's a Democratic Congress, could do it, and we'll see how much they can do in their lanes, what the judges are doing in their lanes. Yeah, yeah. You mentioned that some of these judges are even Trump judges who have been dealing him, you know, these losses at the various court levels, and part of that is, part of that is basically any judge, even a very friendly judge with how insane and just nakedly flimsy and corrupt and politically motivated some of these prosecutions are, you know, you would be hard pressed to find anybody in a robe at the bench anywhere in the country who wouldn't slap them down. But it also has been, I think, a saving grace that we maybe don't talk about enough that Donald Trump had not yet really developed his late views on the judiciary. That was not a high priority for him. It was a high political priority for him to confirm a ton of judges in his first term, but he was not doing like the loyalty screens that he was doing for the people around him, you know, as personnel on judges. He was very happy to kind of hand that off to sort of like the professional networks, you know, the federal society, all of these sort of pre-existing Republican groups or conservative groups, and so there are a ton of, yes, very Republican, very conservative type judges in the federal, federal judiciary who Trump got there in his first term, and he has himself been very stung, I think, by how many of these people are not willing to see him appointing them as the best thing that ever happened to them professionally, and therefore a thing that they need to basically pay him back for constantly, which is the way he sees basically everybody in his orbit as he has elevated them, and they therefore have a life debt to him. He has figured that out now. He has made a, you know, he's turned a corner in the way he thinks about certainly Supreme Court justices, but also just the federal judiciary in general. when we talk about, you know, what it would be. mean for Democrats to flip the Senate. A lot of people focus on the investigations and the investigations are extremely important, but they wouldn't have to even conduct a single investigation for them to have accomplished one big thing, which is to become a confirmation check on the judges that Trump wants to put all throughout the federal judiciary. He has been pretty slow with that in the second term for a lot of different procedural reasons, but that is among the most important things, I think, even though we don't talk about it very often. Anything else on comment before we turn? No, we should go, but I think I'm glad you raised that. I was going to mention that yeah, it's fair, but people haven't focused enough on the confirmation stuff. In general, it also would apply to obviously cabinet and sub-captain positions, but particularly for Supreme Court justice, obviously, particularly for, but also for appellate and district court judges. Democratic Senate, Republican Senate, it's one of the biggest, you know, deltas, one of the biggest differences it will make over the next two years. Yeah, yeah. It's funny. We were on that, that live show at Atlanta the other day, and that one of the things that they talked about is who's the first person to get fired after the midterms? That was kind of one of the questions they asked, well, we were on stage, Sarah asked, well, we were on stage. And it's kind of weird to think about. I had not really thought about it in these terms before, but in a weird way, if Democrats retake the Senate, everybody's safer, right? I mean, except it's not going to get fired in an environment where you can't just band together along party lines and shove through anybody that Trump wants to replace him, right? I mean, I think I think if you are a current Trump cabinet member on the hot seat, you might actually have a part of you in the back of your mind that kind of wants Democrats to hang on to the Senate and at least your job then is safe for a couple more years. Could be, though, I don't know. Wouldn't be as happy with it. It could still put acting people in there. But anyway, yeah, I think that's an interesting point, I hadn't really. Yes, no, I do think of Republican Senate after, especially after the exploitations have gotten up here in the last two to three, four weeks. Maybe I'm a little guilty of helping that. Republican Senate would be a shot in the arm for Trump even if they lost the House, they will lose the House, even if they lost the House with 25 seats, even if they lose the governorship. So Ohio and Iowa and maybe one or two others in important states, the keeping the Senate really would be at this point the best, I think, the best thing Trump could hope for, I think. And it would be important for them to do it and conversely would be important if they lost the Senate. The Senate, so is the key, is the key thing to watch on Tuesday night. Governorships important, especially if you live in those states and obviously big state governorship is important, just because they're influential in the country, Texas, so far than itself. House margin kind of important, but the Senate, control of the Senate really is a big deal. Yeah, yeah. We can leave that there. We were going to talk a little bit about the elections in Israel that are taking place today that appear very close, that appear very charged, very high turnout. But I know you got to go bill, we got to let the people go too. So you can look out, I think Billy, you're planning on writing about that a little bit into morning shots, is that right? So you can get Bill's post. Sometimes it's better to write about these things after they happen, rather. Yeah, rather than whether in the middle of happening and you have no idea what's going to happen, you know. There's only so much you can say. Apparently you can say about 43 minutes or so, because we did the Senate map pretty well. And there's probably some things we left on the cutting room floor too. But yes, yes, you can look forward to Bill writing about the outcome of the Israel elections in tomorrow's morning shots. Thanks, Bill, for coming on. I feel like we equated ourselves okay on this on the Senate map. Thank you guys all for watching, for subscribing to the board. Please do subscribe if you're not subscribed already. It helps out the channel a whole lot. Thank you for watching and we will see you all, Jesus. We'll see you all on Election Day. So long.