The South is Serving Up Another Loss for Trump

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A political savant, a person with more battle scars from Democratic wins and losses than most people I know, the great Jennifer Palmieri, host of a long play right here on Crooked Media. Jen, I'm so excited to talk to you. You know, I mean, I'm so excited to talk to you. As you know, I'm so excited to be in Mississippi. So excited this is going to wrap up. It's all amazing. I saw you at Crooked Con this past weekend and I was and you were coming from Mississippi and it's less than like 48 hours. 48 hours later and you're back in Mississippi, which totally tracks. Jennifer, what is going to happen in a number of hours? Please predict the future for us. So today's Tuesday at 5 p.m. What happens, the deadline for today is that if you have an affidavit, so say you went to vote and they said you didn't have your ID or that they didn't accept your ID, you have until today at 5 o'clock to prove that you are who you say you are. And then those ballots get counted. Same with absentees. They have to be received by 5 p.m. tonight at the election commission. The different there are 82 counties in Mississippi. You will not be surprised to hear that there is like no central control. There are laws that govern, you know, how these processes are supposed to happen in the public. What IDs are acceptable. And as you can imagine, none of you know, there is no count. No, there's just there's just no continuity here. And the secretary of state takes a very hands off role. Kind of lets counties do what they like. County rights. It's like 21st century version of states rights. But what is expected to happen is that Hines County, which is Jackson, which is the state's largest county and also has the most black voters, is done with their affidavits. They'll see what comes in for the rest of today. And then tomorrow they will be able to post their results. That's expected late afternoon. And that margin. And we think that there are also, Alex, no one knows how many outstanding ballots there are across the state or even in one county. You kind of the sort of people like the loan campaign, the NAACP, other groups on the ground here, they've been just like calling around to the counties, having observers go to all 82 counties. I mean, in order for me to find out information on what's going on, I walked down the street to the Hines County Election Commission and I talked to a lawyer there who I have befriended. Like, this is what you have to do to understand what is happening. You got the state wired, though, lady. You got that wired. I got the state wired. And but they expect that there's about 2,000 ballots outstanding in Hines County. Scott Colom is up about 2,600 votes now. The vast majority of the Hines County votes are expected to go to Scott Colom. And then tomorrow, late afternoon, early evening, those results get posted. And then the expectation is that AP will feel comfortable to call the race for Scott Colom. And that will probably be enough for Scott Colom to feel like he can declare himself the victor. Now, I would assume there's two things that, you know, I think everybody's girded for. Number one are lawsuits, right? You cannot file. No party can file. There are no automatic recounts in the state of Mississippi. So you have to file a lawsuit and you can't file a lawsuit. There is no recounts as a form of voter suppression. That's the amazing thing. Well, how about how you like them apples? Jokes on them. Yeah. Joke is on them. How do you like them? How do you like them apples? Yeah. But you have to file a lawsuit and you can't file a lawsuit demanding a recount until after the results have been announced. Is that right? There are lawsuits that can get filed. You have to be the party or you have to be the candidate to do that. You know, there are, there's not anything in the offing. And it's interesting the way Colom has handled this period. He's like, it's going to be fine. They're counting the votes. It's given the room to do that. You know, I think they're, they're trying to keep the temperature down. You know, say this is a very lawful process. I think that they don't want a sense of, you know, I think any sense that there is chaos or mismanagement, even if the mismanagement is happening to the detriment of the Democratic ticket. I think they just don't want any sense of that because they just want this to go as smoothly as possible. The, um, it, the actual process. Is, you know, 5:00 PM today is a deadline and then the state certifies all the counties have to report by Friday, this coming Friday, November 13th. And that is when, um, uh, that's when they have, they have a deadline to report in. So the reason why the race may be called prior to Friday, when the counties need to report to the secretary of state, their results is just that after Heinz County, the lead may be large enough for Colom. Yeah. Which AP will declare it. But we still, you know, the problem for the associated press has been, nobody knows how many F normally in this situation, you know, how many outstanding ballots there are. And so you can weigh the results against that, that the associate press press can't do that because nobody knows how many ballots there are because it's a arcane Mississippi. That worries me. That should worry all of us. Right. I mean, there's so much crazy system that they definitely need, like, you know, this is why, I, people may remember in, um, 2023, Brandon Presley, Democrat running for governor got very close and Heinz County, Jackson ran out of ballots. He may be the, he would be the sitting, he'd probably be the sitting governor. Um, but they ran out of ballots. It's so crazy. It's not a way to run an election. Yeah. And it has been redounding to Republican benefit, these voter suppression tactics or just poorly run elections. And now it could be, you know, shoe on the other foot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's very interesting to hear your perspective on how the Cologne campaign has been handling this. Even when external factors are to their detriment, they're not, you know, there are no alarm bells going off. I, there's a, you guys are filming right now, um, your excellent series long play, and you just spoke to Scott Cologne and, and I want to play the clip because I think you get some of that at the essence of that sort of, we're not panicking here. We're letting everything play out as it should, and we're going to have to accept the results of the election. There's no like, you know, flag waving kind of absolutism, no fire brand kind of rhetoric about, you know, the will of the voters must be respected. It's just, it's all very calm. This is the clip. Let's play it. One of the things they keep telling me that really means the most to me is thank you for showing Mississippi in a positive light, you know, thank you for having reporters come down here. Do you have a sense of when you think this is going to get wrapped up? My perspective is it's all over. But to count at a certain point, we got to accept the results. It's moving just the way I said it was going to move because I pay attention to Mississippi politics. There's just not Republican ballots out there that's left. Just common sense. He almost in a minute sounds like he's going to lose, right? It almost is like he almost sounds like the candidate who's going to concede. We have to result. We have to respect the results of the election, which is that he's going to win. Talk to me more about how the campaign has been managed this, been managing this like period of heightened expectation, but also limbo and you know, just the weirdness of Mississippi rate, the Mississippi elections. Yeah, he is at Scott Columbus, a great guy. He's a very good candidate. And it's a sap. It's it's the team is incredibly small. Gerard Henderson is the campaign manager. Michael Brewer, who was from Warnock, he lived through Warnock and all those reelects, right? I mean, they're like recounts for him. The runoff. It's a communications advisor. Albert Fuji is the comms director. They have a political director and finance director, digital person, and that is it. And yeah, it's remarkable what they have pulled off. But Scott is like a very he's a very good candidate. And so what they've done in this interim period is every day or so Scott Columbus will be out in public. He dropped on Wednesday after the election. He went to three different college campuses, dropped pizzas off at people who were reaching out to people who had followed affidavit, filed affidavit ballots. To make sure that they knew what they needed to do, get their votes counted to thank them. He went one day was with them. He went to the oldest black owned bookstore in the country. He went to a very cool record store, you know, out to lunch. And it's funny because he's like, you know, he knows he has the national media paying attention to him. So he's like highlighting all these great places and Jackson for people to come to. And it's like you can see I just see what a big deal I think it's going to be for the state. You know, assuming he's declared the winner. Because. He's just a leader and it's not even a partisan thing. It's just that the Republican senators here, Cindy Hyde-Smith, Roger Wicker, they just don't seek to be any kind of presence in people's lives. And like he's already, I mean, you just feel like in Jackson, you know, you get by a cup of coffee and the person across the counter is smiling like, when are we going to start talking about the election? Because everyone's so excited. And just to watch the way, I mean, when I was here in early August in Scott Klum and Scott Klum's hometown at his pizza place that he goes to, we filmed there. And then somebody said to him, Scott, are you running for something? And I was like, oh, no, this is not good. This is not good that in his hometown, people don't, you know, at his pizza place where everyone says, hey, Scott, they don't even know he's running for Senate. But just to see there's so much pride in this state. Yeah. Well, did you think? Did you figure it out, the tease that he's running for Senate? I assume so. Scott. No, I think by now she has and she probably voted for him. But there's even pride, I think, with Republicans, too, about what this state is getting ready to do. So the Klum campaign has just been, you know, low key, but positive, being seen. He's talking about tariffs and when he wants to, you know, why it's so important to wrap this race up because he wants to get to work and help farmers. You know, very nonpartisan things that people in Mississippi can't. At the same time, there was a crazy thing that went down with the secretary of state and Experian data where they used Experian data to purge the voter rolls and two hundred and thirty thousand something Mississippians were taken off the voter rolls, not unregistered, but taken off the voter rolls because Experian said they lived in a different address, even though Experian said this data is not. It's not to be used for that purpose. And even the Mississippi secretary of state said that two weeks before the election that they were no longer using it, but it was too late. They had already had this list. So a lot of people who, you know, are regular voters went to vote and found their name was not on the list, which is why there's such a high, you know, and they think that was two hundred and thirty thousand people that whose names were taken off the list off the rolls. They think there's about twenty three thousand provisional ballots out there. That means only. Ten percent of people took the step to, you know, so took the step to actually file a provisional ballot. So there, you know, and Colombo raised that occasionally. There's a lot to answer for once this is done. But I think for now, they just want to, you know, get to that finish line. We're close to it. I will say there are people here like Derek Johnson, who is the national head of the NAACP, went to Tougaloo College, is a son of Mississippi, still lives. He's, you know, very hopeful, but he's like, I don't know what I don't know. And we got to remember who is in charge of this state. And this thing is not done. And, you know, so there's happy expectations, but a lot of nerves as well. I mean, it's just it's kind of shocking for me to see it all happen, that this could really, you know, the Republicans are just like, you know, we're beat and let this happen. Pod Save America Breaking News is brought to you by PDS. 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 PDS debt dot com slash crooked. PDS debt helps thousands of Americans become debt free. The average savings per client for all PDS debts programs is twenty thousand one hundred and twenty three dollars. Stop juggling multiple payments. Get. One lower monthly payment. 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But I but let's not let's not experience. That bad news yet or maybe ever. Like the the reality is that a Democrat is like within, you know, the next 24 hours poised to win one of the two Senate seats. And and what I want to I want to get into the sort of big picture on this. Like the Washington Post had a piece yesterday that was like, could you wait a couple of days to write this kind of shit? Washington Post. But basically it said, you know, Democrats won big in the South, but there is a fight brewing over whether the gains could have been. Even more significant, like Dems in Alabama and in Florida and Tennessee and Louisiana winning by like losing by very close margins. You know, they they use the example of Dave Jolly in Florida, who I think is like competed against a one hundred and seventy million dollar Republican campaign. This is in the Florida gubernatorial race. And National Democrats offered Dave Jolly again, the Democratic candidate, one million dollars at the very end. So one hundred and seventy million from National. Republicans, one million from Democrats. And Dave Jolly narrowly lost that race. Get your quote today at progressive dot com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states. He did a good job. He ran a very savvy race. Yeah, he is a smart. There were great candidates across the South. They didn't get the support that they needed. Democrats are very good at making a positive into a negative. But I do want to get your thoughts as a as a as an expert on the South. Like, what should we what should the takeaway be here as far as rebuilding the presence of the left in a part of the country that's largely been a political desert for them? I mean, I think the. The money will come now because, you know, it's like and I think that the most I think Mississippi is the most important race for the future of the South because, you know, obviously so much work went into Texas and has been going in on in Texas for, you know, 10 and with some people, 20 years. Some people have never given up from when Texas was, you know, and Richard was there 30 years ago. Right. There's been a ton of focus, ton of effort in Texas. Same for Georgia, Mississippi. The Mississippi win is very much a Mississippi story. Some, you know, more money came into. There's this guy, Charles Taylor, who's the executive director of the Mississippi Conference for the NAACP. He came from national politics. He's Mississippi. He's from Mississippi. But he was like a data guy. He was like an analytics guy. Right. You know, in the national political scene, came back to Mississippi and he's just had this theory. He's like, with the amount of black voters here, we need to get black voter turnout up. We need a quarter of the white vote. And like that is that is a winning. And so there is an infrastructure in Mississippi. It is small. It is mighty. And it is going to deliver a historic win. And it is people that have lineage going, you know, not far back from the civil rights era. Some of them are still here. People from SNCC, you know, SNCC students that were part of Fannie Lou Hamer. They are still here and they're still fighting. So that is what this story is. But what I think it means is like if Mississippi can do this without a lot of effort. Like, hey, there are 10 the Democrats are 10 seats behind in the Mississippi state legislature. May I remind everyone that Dobbs came out of Mississippi? OK, so much. I mean, and Alex, like we covered this all this together with Texas. So much, you know, of like, you know, distressing state of America today can be you can, you know, you can attribute to state legislatures in the south. You can raise a lot of money. And those races happen. And in 2027, Mississippi, the governor's race and the state legislative races. Right. So I think this and the same is true for Louisiana, because, you know, they like to vote off your elections to make it harder for people to vote. So you have to vote every year. So that's like another form of voter suppression. Just like, let's make it tedious for everyone. But this time jokes on the Republicans again, because I think there's going to be a lot of enthusiasm. So I think that the money, I think now that there's proof and also these states are not expensive. Right. And the other thing that I think is really important for Democrats to consider is imagine how much easier, because I think sometimes people think and I think this is true largely that Southern Democrats are more moderate, but they want to get big problems solved for poor people because, you know, these these are very poor states. You know, you're going to create a constituency. How about if you had you had a lot of congressional delegations of Mississippi had three Democratic members of Congress or, you know, right. Right. Like that is when you get some of this big stuff done. So I just see. You know, ALEC, the Republican, you know, state legislative effort. American Legislative Exchange Council. Those people. You know, they had a, there was a 30-year effort on the Republican side to flip as many state legislatures as possible to make them the test kitchen for these very conservative social agenda and get us to where we are now. I don't think you need a 30-year effort in the South to do that now. Like, I think that the, because they've just been so underfunded, a little money is going to go a long way. A long way. You know what this reminds me of? I remember when the curse of the Bambino was lifted on the Boston Red Sox because. Yes. I think it was Theo Epstein, like, came in as GM and was like, we're playing a new kind of baseball here. We're going, we're looking, we're looking at the metrics differently. We're building teams differently. And then all of a sudden the Chicago fucking Cubs won the World Series. Right. And now. And now the Milwaukee Brewers won the World Series. Yeah, right. We're just looking, I mean, not that politics, politics ain't baseball, but the idea is that we're looking at these, these previously, like, you know, the, I won't say like, but will political losers, the Democrats thought of the South, right? It's not true. There are constituencies that are untapped. And if you drill deep into the numbers and the people and get local and get statewide, you can change, you can change the persuasion of these states. You can change their leaning. You can change their representation. It's really remarkable. And I feel like this election, the 2026 midterms are the sort of benchmark of the beginning of this era. So. Yeah. Yeah. But you got to go back to counting. Like, you better go get to figure out when. I know you know what's happening. I love talking to you about this. I will check in with you later this week, I'm sure, to find out what happened and where we go from here. What you're doing with long play is not only indispensable in terms of infrastructure. But so artful, such an incredible, like, next generation of the circus, the show that we did together. And I'm just always thrilled to talk to you, especially when we're talking about stuff like this. So thank you. Thanks so much. Thanks. Thanks. Today at Progressive.com. 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