Trump Calls January 6th a "Day of Love"

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Speaker 15 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.

Speaker 16 I'm Dan Pfeiffer.

Speaker 15 On today's show, Donald Trump says that January 6th was a quote day of love and tells Latino voters that the jury's still out on whether immigrants are eating pets in Springfield.

Speaker 15 Fuck.

Speaker 15 J.D. Vance finally gives an answer on whether Trump lost in 2020.
We won't spoil it for you.

Speaker 15 And our good friend Ben Wickler, chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, stops by to talk about how things are going in the Badger state and how you can help.

Speaker 15 There and everywhere we need to win. But first.
Kamala Harris went on Fox News and lived to tell the tale.

Speaker 15 The vice president sat down with Brett Baer for an interview Wednesday night that just about everyone figured figured would be contentious. And boy, did it deliver.

Speaker 15 Here's some of what just over 7 million viewers saw Wednesday night.

Speaker 17 Brett, let's just get to the point. Okay, the point is that we have a broken immigration system that needs to be repaired.

Speaker 18 So your Homeland Security Secretary said that 85% of apprehensions.

Speaker 17 I'm not finished.

Speaker 18 And let me just finish. I'll get you the question, I promise you.

Speaker 17 I was beginning to answer. And when you came into office, the first bill, practically within hours of taking the oath, was a bill to fix our immigration system.

Speaker 18 Yes, ma'am. It was called the U.S.

Speaker 18 Citizenship Act of 2008.

Speaker 16 It was essentially a

Speaker 18 pathway to citizenship for the election.

Speaker 17 May I finish responding for you?

Speaker 17 But you have to let me finish.

Speaker 18 You had the White House and the House and the Senate, and they didn't bring up.

Speaker 17 I'm responding to the point you're raising. And I'd like to finish.

Speaker 15 Yes, ma'am.

Speaker 17 Brett, I'm sorry, and with all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about the enemy within that he has repeated when he's speaking about the American people.

Speaker 17 That's not what you just showed. He was asked to say that.

Speaker 17 That's not what you just showed. In all fairness and respect,

Speaker 17 he didn't show that, and here's the bottom line. He has repeated it many times, and you and I both know that.

Speaker 17 And you and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest.

Speaker 17 He has talked talked about locking people up because they disagree with him. This is a democracy.

Speaker 17 And in a democracy, the president of the United States, in the United States of America, should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he'd lock people up for doing it.

Speaker 17 And this is what is at stake.

Speaker 15 Hell yes.

Speaker 16 I fucking love it.

Speaker 15 I want to go grab my ballot and just drop it off right now.

Speaker 16 You can. You literally can do that right now.

Speaker 15 I can't find it. That's the whole thing.
Oh, she's such

Speaker 15 a Emily got hers. I don't know where mine is.
Anyway, what did you think? What did you think of the whole interview?

Speaker 16 I

Speaker 16 loved it. It was, I have to say, there was a bit of...

Speaker 15 You, a big proponent of Democrats going on Fox News.

Speaker 16 Well, there is like a little PTSD for me here because back in 2010, I pushed very hard for Barack Obama to do an interview with Brett Baer.

Speaker 16 We were trying to pass the Affordable Care Act because we had all these members in Republican districts. We were trying to get to the support of of Obamacare.
And we did that interview.

Speaker 16 Brett Baer interrupted Barack Obama very similar to this, 16 times in 20 minutes.

Speaker 16 And I would say the walk from the East Wing where the interview was conducted back to the West Wing was one of the longer walks of my life.

Speaker 15 Was he really mad at you?

Speaker 16 No, he was more just, he, I'd say he was disappointed, was the word I would use.

Speaker 16 He just said, well, that was fun.

Speaker 16 And then we just walked in silence silence for a long time i don't remember that interview but was he as firm and still polite as kamala harris was like i thought she really she she was great she handled that could have gone back harder she she was like she was tough but she didn't go to it was perfect i thought i thought her tone was perfect she was she was great she called out the bullshit which i think is one thing you have to do when you go on fox news as a democrat is she is what pete buttigej is great at kevin newsom is great at is you call out the game and when brett bear just fucking leading with his large chin,

Speaker 16 just

Speaker 16 by playing the wrong clip to clean up Donald Trump's mess, like the, like the lackey that he is, made it very easier for him to do that.

Speaker 15 We should say for people at home, what happened was they were talking about Trump's comments where he talked about the enemy within, which he said on a Fox News program to Maria Bradiromo on Sunday.

Speaker 15 And Baer didn't play that clip of Trump talking to Maria Bardiromo, but played the clip of Trump responding to that clip when he was asked a question about it at another Fox News town hall and gave a bullshitty reply that really was just a bunch of lies and craziness from Trump.

Speaker 15 And so just never played the actual clip because Fox had probably been trying to hide the actual clip from their audience ever since they originally aired it when Trump was talking to Maria Bardiromo.

Speaker 16 Yeah, absolutely. Just mask off moment as someone wrote today.

Speaker 15 So overall, you think it was worth doing, Fox News? Net positive, net neutral, net negative. I think we both know not net negative, but what is it? Strong net positive.

Speaker 16 And like, as you said, I generally counsel Democrats to not go on Fox News.

Speaker 15 Like you did to me. Yeah.

Speaker 16 Like I did to you. And look,

Speaker 16 it worked great for you. You have a new best friend in Jesse Waters.

Speaker 16 But this was one of those times where it made sense. And here's why it was worth it.
7.1 million people watched this interview. That is more than three times times Brett Barrett's normal audience.

Speaker 16 Do you know what the number one market in the country was in terms of watching that interview?

Speaker 15 Ooh, what?

Speaker 16 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, my friend.

Speaker 15 Yeah,

Speaker 15 love that.

Speaker 16 And it's, it's clear. David Pluff said this to me on Pod Save America over the weekend, but one of their targets is Republican-leaning independents and soft Republicans.

Speaker 16 It's a group that she has made progress with. She's up to 9% of Republicans in the latest Times Sienna poll.
And this is a great way to reach those voters.

Speaker 16 The best media moments are ones where the candidate performs well.

Speaker 16 well, the platform is chosen because it speaks directly to a voter target, and you do so well that the clips will go viral on TikTok and Instagram and will reach voters who did not actually tune in.

Speaker 16 On all three marks, you hit those here.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and I just, it got outsized media coverage because it was like, you know, Kamala Harris goes into the lion's den.

Speaker 15 Ian Sams, who's, who we know, who's a Harris campaign spokesman, told Brian Stelter on his podcast that they did the interview for two reasons.

Speaker 15 One, because they believe a considerable number of undecided voters watch Fox, and two, to knock down the lies they tell on Fox. Do you think that's right?

Speaker 16 Yeah, I think the more important and larger reason was the meta message of she is strong enough and tough enough to go in to a network that is actively working to elect her opponent, take the tough questions, and Donald Trump is too scared to do an interview with anyone serious.

Speaker 16 Like,

Speaker 16 that's what's ultimately what you're trying to achieve here, larger than who the individual people were who watched the specific interview in that moment.

Speaker 15 I I checked out the latest New York Times Sienna poll, the national one where she's up three, and I looked at the media consumption question at the very end.

Speaker 15 And 10% of voters who aren't yet supporting Trump or Harris get their news from Fox, which was like the third high. 15% said social media, 10% said local news, 10% said Fox, and then every other...

Speaker 15 news source was in the low single digits. So it is, you know, it's, there are some, I don't know how many, but there are some people watching Fox.

Speaker 15 And also Fox is on, especially if you get out of Blue Cities, Fox is on, it's like the, the network that's on in like a doctor's office or a store or an air, you know?

Speaker 15 And so there's some people who aren't like Fox fans, but they just like have Fox on and they're not all MAGA people, right? Like most of them are, but not all of them.

Speaker 16 It's the background music in a lot of communities, right? Like if you go to get your oil changed, it's what's on there at the doctor's office.

Speaker 16 Now, the thing that's always hard and one of the reasons why I often counsel Democrats not to go on is that you can handle your individual interview great, but Fox will take whatever the worst clips are and then they'll play those all day long.

Speaker 15 But you know what? They'll do that if they didn't have a clip from Fox to do that with. They do that about her on any other issue.

Speaker 16 And she reached 7 million people doing it, right? Normally, if you're just a normal Democrat, you do it. You just get the specific audience of that show midday, and then they can beat you up with it.

Speaker 16 Here, she obviously brought in a whole bunch of people. And the people who tuned in are people who are A, willing to turn on Fox and B, interested enough to hear what she has to say.

Speaker 16 So those are potential voters for her.

Speaker 15 Other thing, too, is

Speaker 15 she at one point in that exchange about Enemy from Within, she talks about how General Mark Milley, who Donald Trump handpicked to be his chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and how he told Bob Woodward that Donald Trump is fascist to the core.

Speaker 15 And she brought that up. And then, you know, Brett was like, oh, yeah, yeah, he did tell that to Bob Woodward.

Speaker 15 And that was apparently, according to the bulwark, only the third time Fox told its audience that Mark Milley called Donald Trump fascist to its core. That was the third time that happened.

Speaker 15 One was from Kamala Harris. One was from Jessica Tarlov on the five.
And one was, I forget when else it happened, but that was it. Three times since it's happened.
It's been like a couple weeks.

Speaker 16 Just real

Speaker 16 week.

Speaker 16 Fair and balanced journalist over there at Fox News.

Speaker 15 But that is another reason why you go on there is that you expose Fox viewers to facts that they have not heard. Not just like correcting lies, but just things that they've never heard.

Speaker 15 I thought the interview was also an opportunity for Kamala to answer some of the trickier questions she either hasn't answered or hasn't answered well.

Speaker 15 She was asked about the Trump campaign's accusations, which they have put $20 million of ads behind, that she supported gender-affirming care for undocumented immigrants who are incarcerated.

Speaker 15 She pointed out that it is the law. These are court decisions decisions that have required this in prisons.
And so it's not like just some policy she's been pushing.

Speaker 15 And she pointed out, this was reported in the New York Times this week, that that kind of care was also offered under the woke administration of Donald Trump.

Speaker 15 So I thought that was, she handled that. And then she was asked the question about

Speaker 15 Biden that tripped her up on the view. Let's listen.

Speaker 18 It's interesting you said turn the page, Madam Vice President. You were asked on two different shows last week, what, if anything, you would do differently than President Biden.
Here's what you said.

Speaker 18 You're not Joe Biden, you're not Donald Trump, but nothing comes to mind that you would do differently.

Speaker 17 Let me be very clear. My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden's presidency.

Speaker 17 And like every new president that comes in to office, I will bring my life experiences, my professional experiences, and fresh and new ideas. I represent a new generation of leadership.

Speaker 17 I, for example, am someone who has not spent the majority of my career in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 17 I invite ideas, whether it be from the Republicans who are supporting me, who were just on stage with me minutes ago, and the business sector and others who can contribute.

Speaker 15 How do you think she handled it this time?

Speaker 16 I would say much better.

Speaker 16 Much better.

Speaker 16 I mean, her answer is interesting because she obviously improves upon the Nothing Comes to Mind answer, which is now starring in a pretty brutal ad that the Trump campaign is pouring money in in the Battleground States.

Speaker 16 I sent it to her earlier. Hope you didn't click.

Speaker 15 No, I just saw Tommy respond, boy, that's brutal. And I decided I was not going to click.

Speaker 16 I honestly debated whether to send that to you or not.

Speaker 16 You can just live, because we don't live in a Battleground State, you could just live in blissful ignorance for the next three weeks without knowing that was up there.

Speaker 16 So

Speaker 16 she answered it much better. And the other thing I thought was interesting about the answer is

Speaker 16 she

Speaker 16 spoke to two groups of people, right?

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 16 there's two interrelated groups, but one are people who are dissatisfied with the present conditions of America under Joe Biden.

Speaker 16 As unfair as that may be to all the many great things Joe Biden has accomplished, there's a lot of people who think that he has low approval ratings and you have wrong track numbers that are, you know, above 60.

Speaker 16 But she also, by simply saying, my presence is not a continuation of Joe Biden, but then she pivots and says, but I have not spent my career in Washington. And that is speaking to the people who

Speaker 16 are mad about politics generally, that she is an outsider, right? In general, outsider candidates do quite well.

Speaker 16 And she can't be a true outsider because she is literally the sitting vice president of the United States, but she does have a unique biography and a unique background.

Speaker 16 And the person she's running against is not necessarily an outsider because he was the former president of the United States.

Speaker 16 So I thought just that pivot to I didn't spend my career in Washington was notable and interesting.

Speaker 15 If she gets it again, like I think there's a way for her to do this that is,

Speaker 15 it's not even that critical of Joe Biden, right?

Speaker 15 It's just like, you know, Joe Biden had to, when Joe Biden and I took office, had to deal with an economic crisis caused by the pandemic, and he did that, pulled the economy out of recession.

Speaker 15 But now our problem, it's a new time, new problem. Costs are too high.
So I'm going to build 3 million affordable homes. And I'm going to crack down on price gouging.

Speaker 15 And I'm going to expand Medicare to cover home care, right? Whatever her economic plan is.

Speaker 15 So she can, and I actually saw that Blueprint Polling tested these and some of the answers that tested the best on separating yourself from Biden.

Speaker 15 It's not really saying like, oh, Joe Biden did this wrong and I'm going to do this. It's just like, you know what? New person, new time, new challenges.

Speaker 15 And here's what I'm going to focus on now, right? Like Joe Biden's thing was get us out of the pandemic, get the economy back on track. And my thing is now costs are too high.

Speaker 15 And so I'm going to bring them down. Like I just, I think, I think a little granularity on ideas and policies that she's going to pursue in connection to that answer is going to be helpful.

Speaker 16 Yeah, it's just, it is just, you have to think about an opportunity.

Speaker 16 You make the initial statement that my presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden's, and then it's just an opportunity to restate your popular policy agenda. Because

Speaker 16 I think you have to be careful not to play the press's game here, which they all read that and were like, well, she didn't really distinguish herself. What would you do differently?

Speaker 16 What did he do wrong? And I just think there's too much drama that comes with that, and it's too much of an inside baseball for the actual voters.

Speaker 15 Well, she's also, I mean, it just, there's an, there's a, uh, an honesty issue there, too, which is like, she was there, right?

Speaker 15 So you can, you can't, the next, if she says like, oh, Joe Biden made this decision and I wouldn't have made it, then you're going to be like, well, what did you tell him at the time that it was written?

Speaker 15 Yeah, it just, it opens up a can of course. You can't go down that.

Speaker 15 So before she sat down with Britt Baer, Harris appeared in Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania, where George Washington famously crossed the Delaware, Dan.

Speaker 15 And she was there with more than 100 Republican lawmakers and government officials who she said put country first by endorsing her, including former House members Adam Kinzinger and Barbara Comstock.

Speaker 15 What do you think of how she's using Republicans to make the case?

Speaker 15 And do you think that is going to be effective in reaching some of those voters we were talking about who maybe tuned into the Brett Baer interview, who might be right-leaning independents or Republicans who are done with Trump?

Speaker 16 Like we live in such highly polarized times that if you're a Republican, you identify as a Republican, that's probably been your party identity most of your adult life, if not your entire life.

Speaker 16 You voted for Mitt Romney. You voted for, you know, maybe you voted for some Bushes.
You voted for, maybe you voted for Donald Trump once.

Speaker 16 And crossing that Rubicon to break with how you see yourself, because most people's in highly polarized times, people's political identity is their primary identity. That's how they see themselves.

Speaker 16 That's how they sort themselves with their friends. And so to break from that and to do something that runs counter to that identity is hard.

Speaker 16 And the way you get people to do that is you show lots of other people doing the same thing. This is why you bring 100 Republicans on stage.

Speaker 16 It's why Sarah Longwell's group is running videos, videos, running ads with videos of people speaking directly, Republicans speaking directly to camera saying, I voted for Trump, but this time I'm not for these reasons.

Speaker 16 And so this is, this is how you do it. Trump is doing the opposite.

Speaker 16 I just saw before we got on here, Trump doing a, at a barbershop in the Bronx sitting with a bunch of black men talking, just sort of shooting the shit with them just because you,

Speaker 16 he's trying to do the same thing with a different group of voters and to show that, you know, the water is warm. There are other people like you here.

Speaker 16 And so it's a, it's a smart, savvy understanding of the way politics works these days.

Speaker 15 Also, I think there's two target demos they're trying to reach here. There's people who don't always vote and there's people who don't always vote for Democrats.

Speaker 15 And I think the Harris Walls campaign is obviously going after both groups, but it is harder to reach the people who don't always vote, right? And they are.

Speaker 15 They are not as dependable and they are low propensity voters and it's going to take more resources to find them, to convince them to come out to the polls. And I'm sure they're doing that.

Speaker 15 But the thing about the people who don't always vote for Democrats, whether they're independent or Republicans who are open to voting for Democrats, is they are very reliable voters and they show up in a lot of these elections.

Speaker 15 And so I'm guessing the campaign's thinking, all right, it's probably a more bang for our buck to like go after some of these soft Republicans, right-leaning independents who, and Donald Trump has made them available to the Harris campaign because he's so extreme.

Speaker 15 That wouldn't usually happen in a campaign for a Democratic campaign, but Donald Trump has made it more possible this time.

Speaker 16 I can't remember if I use these numbers on this podcast or one of the 700 other podcasts we've done recently, but

Speaker 16 Blueprint also pulled Haley voters. And there's a large chunk of Haley voters who are not with Trump yet and are open to the idea of supporting Harris, but she's got work to do.

Speaker 16 But just to put that number in perspective, 76,000 people voted for Nikki Haley in the Wisconsin primary in 2020. Joe Biden won Wisconsin by 21,000 votes.
Yeah. You know what?

Speaker 16 Obviously, you're not going to get all of them. You probably aren't going to get most of them, but that's a big chunk of voters who could decide the election.

Speaker 16 And the numbers are similar in the other Battleground states.

Speaker 15 Right. So, we learned today about two other Republicans who've decided to level their critiques of Trump in private.
Like a couple of profiles and courage.

Speaker 15 Mitch McConnell, who apparently participated in an oral history project, oral history of slowly degrading democracy.

Speaker 15 I don't know what the project was, but he's on an audio recording calling Trump after January 6th, quote, stupid, a narcissist, and a despicable human being.

Speaker 15 No word on when that recording will be available, but

Speaker 15 it's a book that journalist Mike Tackett is writing, and so the AP reported it today.

Speaker 15 When asked by the Associated Press about these comments, McConnell said, quote, whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what J.D.

Speaker 15 Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him, but we're all on the same team now.

Speaker 16 You know what? I respect it. I truly respect that response.

Speaker 15 What a dick.

Speaker 16 Yeah, he is one of history's great villains and cowards, but I respect the response there.

Speaker 15 Meanwhile, our pal Tim Miller broke some news over at the Bulwark about former Trump Defense Secretary James Mattis on Tim's Bulwark podcast.

Speaker 15 Bob Woodward revealed that Mattis emailed him to say that he agrees with General Mark Milley's assessment that Trump is, quote, the most dangerous person ever.

Speaker 15 So thanks to both Jim Mattis and Mitch McConnell stepping up when it really matters, huh?

Speaker 15 I mean, look.

Speaker 15 Come on, people, say it out loud in front of a camera.

Speaker 16 It's pure cowardice to sit there and believe that a fascist, someone you believe is a fascist, a dangerous fascist is on the cusp of becoming president of the United States.

Speaker 16 And your response is to email Bob Woodward after his book comes out.

Speaker 16 Hey, Bob, maybe you put this in your next one in 2026.

Speaker 15 It's just,

Speaker 15 I don't know, man. I don't know.
Are these revelations something that the Harris campaign should be using down the home stretch? She's already in her rallies all this week.

Speaker 15 She's been talking about the Millie comments, which I think is very smart.

Speaker 15 I think when your opponent's a former top general that they hired is running around telling people that the opponent's a fascist and the most dangerous person to ever exist.

Speaker 15 And it's like a four-star general.

Speaker 15 I think that's useful, the useful knowledge for people.

Speaker 16 It is.

Speaker 16 I mean, obviously it's useful, and it's a a piece of information that every voter should have before they make their decision.

Speaker 16 Just seems like you should put it, it should be in the voter guide, frankly. We've talked about this before.

Speaker 16 These are hard arguments to sell to a lot of voters, particularly ones who are not super engaged with the news on a daily basis, because they were alive for the last Trump presidency and they didn't see it as fascist.

Speaker 16 And so that it's just... It'd be much more powerful on camera, but it just is a, you should talk about it for sure.

Speaker 16 It should be part of the argument as we raise the stakes, but recognizing that it's hard to convince people that Trump will be a a dictator or a fascist because they believe he was not.

Speaker 16 Now, you can get some granularity to it that is, and you need, this is the, you see this in the rads a little bit where it's like Trump has changed. He's less stable.
You do that.

Speaker 16 You talk about this a lot. He's got different people around him.
You got to tell the whole story for people to understand

Speaker 16 why this time would be different than last time. Because last time is.
We had a kind of embarrassing president, didn't seem great at his job. Eggs were cheap.
Then something really bad happened.

Speaker 16 That was beyond his control. America got fucked up.
We fired him. Now he's back.
Right.

Speaker 15 Yeah. I mean, look, I think this is appealing to me,

Speaker 15 not necessarily because we're trying to convince people that Donald Trump is a fascist, who don't already think that he's a fascist or a dictator or whatever you may want to do.

Speaker 15 I do agree that

Speaker 15 you have to frame it as the guy since you last saw him is different. He is older, crazier, more unhinged.
The guy has lost a step, clearly. He's swaying and dancing at his events.

Speaker 15 He's, you know, he's he's saying he's going to use the military against people. He's nuts.
He's lost it, right? Like, I think that is the argument you have to make.

Speaker 15 But I think one of the most effective arguments here is that so many people that have worked for Donald Trump at the most senior levels do not think he is fit for office.

Speaker 15 Like, so Blueprint also did a test of all closing arguments, which was the most effective. Number one most effective argument.

Speaker 15 It boosted Kamala Harris 12 points with all voters and 14 points with independence. Nearly half of Trump's cabinet have refused to endorse him.

Speaker 15 When Trump learned during the Capitol riot that his supporters were threatening to kill his own vice president, he said, so what? And refused to do anything to ensure the vice president was safe.

Speaker 15 Republican governors, senators, and House members have all said the same thing. We can't give Trump another four years of president.
So it was the number one most effective closing argument.

Speaker 15 Number two was abortion. Close behind it.
That boosted her 10 and 12 with independence.

Speaker 15 And then after that, an argument about Social Security and what Trump would do on Social Security and what Trump would do on ACA. That boosted her six points.

Speaker 15 And then everything else was like in the single digits or negative. But those, those were the best arguments, closing arguments against Trump.
And I found that interesting.

Speaker 15 The first number I read was all voters, and then the second one was independence. Yeah.
So that's pretty, you know,

Speaker 15 I just think that people, if you don't know much about whatever, you don't have to make the argument that he's a fascist.

Speaker 15 It's like, hey, see these generals, see these defense secretaries, national security advisors, Mike Pence, they're all like, no, no, don't do it. Don't do it.

Speaker 16 I would say that right now we are standing at the crossroads of a very large debate within the Democratic political community right now about how best to close this race. That is one argument.

Speaker 15 I'm sure the other one is like, let's talk about price gouging.

Speaker 16 No, no, no. It's not like, it's not.

Speaker 15 It's not. Which I love.
You know how much I love talking about price.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I mean, you are, no one hates price gouging more than you.

Speaker 15 You're the guy. And I'm really, and I'm still angry at the nerds that the liberal policy nerds that don't think it's a good idea.

Speaker 16 it's really I think between the first argument on that list and the second one which is a more focus on abortion than anything else abortion abortion economy and change it's basically taking everything that has been every dollar and cent that's and ounce of blood sweat and tears has been put in building up where Kamala Harris is right now and putting that into one argument as opposed to sort of a shift at the end here which this is a shift from where she was yeah It is a shift.

Speaker 16 I'm not saying, I'm not weighing in here. I want to see more data.

Speaker 15 I don't know. I could craft an argument that gets it all together.
I mean, it's like

Speaker 15 you start with Trump. You start with the fact that he has lost a step.
He is unstable. He is unhinged.
And then you go through all the policies, right?

Speaker 15 Like he, you know, he was always anti-choice, but now he wants to have a national abortion ban and leave in place Trump bans that have led women to die. He was always for tariffs.

Speaker 15 Now he wants to slap 20% tariffs on everything we buy that's imported, iPhones, tequila, cars, everything else. He was always sort of crazy, but now he wants to turn the military on America.

Speaker 15 You know, like, I think you go down the list that way.

Speaker 16 Your fingers work. You hear, I'll cut a deal with you.
You write that down.

Speaker 16 I'll put it in a very popular political newsletter called The Message Box.

Speaker 15 Okay, cool.

Speaker 15 I can guest rate a message box.

Speaker 16 Or, you know, I know you don't write anymore, so just uh, send me a voice memo and I will dive into it.

Speaker 15 Oh, that's got well. I'm doing this podcast.
Maybe someone could take notes.

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Speaker 15 Plus, Black Friday is the perfect time to pre-order unique gifts they'll rave about for years. Use promo code GIFT for 20% off your first order on goldbelly.com.

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Speaker 15 All right, let's talk about Donald Trump. He did this

Speaker 15 Univision Town Hall this week. It aired Wednesday night.

Speaker 15 Surprise, surprise, was a lot more challenging than his Fox News Women's Town Hall, which it turns out was actually stocked with Trump supporters. Whoa, what a surprise.

Speaker 15 Couldn't tell that from the fucking town hall. I watched five minutes of it when I walked in in the office yesterday, and I was like, this is embarrassing.

Speaker 15 I think Kamala Harris would have gotten tougher questions from her own staff. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 16 I take that as a strong guess.

Speaker 15 Yeah, than the questions that they got.

Speaker 15 One woman literally stood up and she was just like, I just want to thank you for everything you're doing

Speaker 15 to stop the woke military.

Speaker 15 What? Is there a question here? But anyway, the Univision Town Hall, excellent questions.

Speaker 15 And there were some people who had voted for Donald Trump and had been Republicans in the town hall who asked them questions, including this man. Let's listen.

Speaker 15 Your

Speaker 20 action and maybe inaction during your presidency and the last few years

Speaker 20 sort of, you know, was a little disturbing to me, you know, what happened during January 6th

Speaker 20 and the fact that, you know, you waited so long to take action while your supporters were attacking the Capitol.

Speaker 20 I'm curious how people so close to you and your administration no longer want to support you, so why would I want to support you?

Speaker 20 If you would answer these questions for me, I would really appreciate it and give you the opportunity.

Speaker 20 Your own vice president doesn't want to support you now.

Speaker 16 Thank you, Amiro.

Speaker 21 So the people that don't don't support, a very small portion, we have a tremendous, about 97% of the people in the administration support me.

Speaker 21 But because it's me, somebody doesn't support, they get a little publicity.

Speaker 21 The Vice President, I disagree with him on what he did. I totally disagreed with him on what he did.
Very importantly, you had hundreds of thousands of people come to Washington.

Speaker 21 They didn't come because of me. They came because of the election.
They thought the election was a rigged election, and that's why they came. Some of those people went down to the Capitol.

Speaker 21 I said, peacefully and patriotically, nothing done wrong at all, nothing done wrong. And action was taken, strong action.
Ashley Babbitt was killed. Nobody was killed.
There were no guns down there.

Speaker 21 We didn't have guns. The others had guns, but we didn't have guns.
And when I say we, these are people that walked down. This was a tiny percentage of the overall, which nobody sees and nobody shows.

Speaker 21 But that was a day of love from the standpoint of the millions. It's It's like hundreds of thousands.
It could have been the largest group I've ever spoken before. They asked me to speak.

Speaker 21 I went and I spoke.

Speaker 15 Day of love. Day of love, Dan.
They tried to, they wanted to hang the vice president. They were hunting Nancy Pelosi.

Speaker 15 Police officers were beaten within an inch of their lives. There were pipe bombs.

Speaker 15 Pipe bombs. And by the way, they did have guns.
Maybe Trump didn't have a gun,

Speaker 15 because he did say we, but they had guns. And Trump knew they had guns, which we learned in the January 6th committee investigation.

Speaker 15 That he said, yeah, they have guns, but they're not going to hurt me. So who cares? Let them through the magnetometers.
That was the quote from him.

Speaker 15 So Trump knew that they were armed with guns, so he knew that he was lying. But it was a day of love.
It was a day of love. What'd you think of that exchange?

Speaker 16 Honestly, holy fucking shit.

Speaker 15 I know.

Speaker 15 What are we doing?

Speaker 16 I mean, it is truly an insane thing to say.

Speaker 16 This is his biggest vulnerability in the election. And frankly, that's also his biggest legal liability is January 6th.
It is incredibly unpopular.

Speaker 16 Even most Republicans don't support what happened on that day. It was an act of absolute violence, of domestic terrorism.
And Donald Trump calls it a day of love, like 20 days before the election.

Speaker 16 We're just like, oh, crazy Trump just talking again.

Speaker 15 Something is like, something is seriously broken in

Speaker 15 it is the media environment. It is our own attention span.
I saw you tweeting this today that like, how is this not the biggest

Speaker 15 story? Like Jim Comey put out a letter saying, oh, there's a couple more emails from Hillary we're looking into and it upended the entire fucking election for the last couple of weeks.

Speaker 16 And maybe civilization. It upended civilization.

Speaker 15 Donald Trump is waiting to possibly stand trial because he's been indicted for trying to overturn the last election and foment a violent insurrection and then goes back to it at a town hall and says it was a day of love what it is

Speaker 16 we should not be talking about anything else for the next cover in two weeks why is not every republican being asked if january six was a day of love all those ones who were in all the video the documentary video footage running for their fucking lives desperately calling the white house to try to get help it's just it is a blip and it is

Speaker 16 like it it's not anyone's fault it is a structural problem in our democracy right now that is in just but it's that structural problem which is kind of why we're in this mess right now, is just highlighted by the fact that he can say that.

Speaker 16 And it's just, we've just moved on. And it happened not 24 hours ago.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 15 Well, fortunately, Kamala Harris jumped on this today in Wisconsin. Let's listen to what she said.

Speaker 17 Donald Trump was at a Univision town hall where a voter asked him about January 6th.

Speaker 17 Okay,

Speaker 17 so now we here know January 6th was a tragic day.

Speaker 17 It was a day of terrible violence. And what did Donald Trump say last night about January 6th?

Speaker 15 He called it a, quote, a day of love.

Speaker 17 But it points out something that everyone here knows. The American people are exhausted with his gaslighting.

Speaker 17 Exhausted with his gaslighting.

Speaker 17 Enough!

Speaker 15 What'd you think of that?

Speaker 16 Can I show you a question as a once and potentially future wordsmith?

Speaker 15 Yes.

Speaker 16 Do you think people know what gaslighting means?

Speaker 15 I did not enjoy gaslighting.

Speaker 15 I think it is a resistance term from 2017 that has been overused, and then now a bunch of people use it all the time.

Speaker 16 This is a correct usage of it.

Speaker 15 I would say that. She used it correctly.

Speaker 15 Absolutely.

Speaker 15 But many people have used it in such wrong ways that it's sort of...

Speaker 15 I don't know if it's that he's I guess I don't know if the criticism is that he's gaslighting necessarily.

Speaker 15 The criticism is that like he thinks that attacking the seat of government, a bunch of people violently attacking the seat of government was a day of love

Speaker 15 that he was responsible for, that he is currently under indictment for. Like he is not fit to be president.
He is not fit to be president.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I think there's just fail. One more turn of the argument there, right? Where either it's a combination of he's dangerous and or delusional.

Speaker 15 Right. Yes.
Right. Because we're, yes, exactly.
The frame that he has, he has lost it.

Speaker 15 You know, it's the same thing as dancing up on stage,

Speaker 15 swaying back and forth, thinking about, he's mad king. You know, it's just, it's, I don't know.
I don't know. Like, do they push this? Do they keep pushing it?

Speaker 15 Like, I can imagine they put, I was tweeting, I was like, how long until someone has Donald Trump's answer?

Speaker 15 And side by side with the videos from January 6th, where cops are just getting assaulted and people are getting hurt. And sure enough,

Speaker 15 Harry's campaign, like in a couple hours, put out that video. Like, is it an ad? Do you run an ad about it? Does she bring it up in an interview? Like, what do you think?

Speaker 16 I don't know. It's hard to do.
Yeah, I think she should bring it up all the time. Just, I mean, part of this is not harken back to the previous debate, but there is your final closing message.

Speaker 16 But there's also, you just have to be on offense every day for the next 17 days or whatever it is we have left. And this is one way in which you do that.

Speaker 16 And so every day you're doing all these rallies. You're mixing new stuff in.
And I think it's just like sticking with making this part of the pitch at the end here is, is good.

Speaker 16 I mean, look, there's only so many ads that can run between now and election day.

Speaker 16 And so switching that out for something else, you already, because there's already traffic on now, and it has to bleed through all of its points to have been an effective use of money.

Speaker 16 And then they obviously have a closing argument ad that's coming at some point for the final few days. So, I mean, you can do digital stuff with it for sure.

Speaker 16 Putting on actual linear TV is probably tough and you just have no points to waste right now. Yeah.

Speaker 15 One other thing that came up at the town hall, notable, Springfield, Springfield, Ohio. Let's listen.

Speaker 21 My question to you very respectfully is, do you really believe that these people are eating the people's pets?

Speaker 16 Thank you.

Speaker 21 Well, thank you very much. This was just reported.

Speaker 21 I was just saying what was reported. That's been reported.

Speaker 21 And eating other things too that they're not supposed to be. But that's been in the newspapers and reported pretty broadly.

Speaker 15 No, no, it has not been reported at all.

Speaker 16 It was not. It was reported by you and J.D.

Speaker 15 Vance and a bunch of people who don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

Speaker 16 So

Speaker 15 I do give that guy credit for asking the question respectfully. Yes.

Speaker 15 With all due respect, sir, were they eating the pets?

Speaker 16 The sad part for me as I was listening to that answer was I am so online that I know exactly what Trump is talking about when he says other things,

Speaker 16 which is the geese. It's the geese in the parks.

Speaker 15 I know. I know.
Which is also not true. Not true.
No.

Speaker 15 I don't know. You think you go to a town hall, a Univision town hall, and

Speaker 15 you say that you spread a debunked conspiracy that legal immigrants are eating people's pets.

Speaker 15 He's going to, what is he going to do? Is he doing better than the Latino vote than last time? Is that where we're headed?

Speaker 16 We'll find out.

Speaker 16 It's just worth putting a button on the fact that this is depraved sociopathic behavior because there are innocent people, not just the migrants in Springfield.

Speaker 16 Everyone in Springfield's life has been massively disrupted by this. There are bomb threats in schools.

Speaker 16 People are scared because he has this dumb fucking lie that he can't admit was we're going to just move on from.

Speaker 15 And he has done the same thing to folks in North Carolina who are recovering from the hurricane. They've had to deal with the conspiracies.

Speaker 15 People in Aurora who now have to deal with the fact that they think that

Speaker 15 other people think Venezuelan gangs have taken over the whole city. Everywhere he goes, he just spreads conspiracies in order to try to win that end up hurting people.

Speaker 15 He's just like fucking chaos mission.

Speaker 15 Another thing, another part of the argument that they should make.

Speaker 16 It's going to be a long message box you're writing.

Speaker 15 Like, I'm struggling with this because I get, I am a, I am a data person. Look at the polls, look at the stuff.

Speaker 15 And like, I get that, especially because she is relatively new to the national scene as a presidential candidate this time around, that she needs to define herself.

Speaker 15 And people want to know what she's going to do for them and what she's going to do for the country and her vision. And that's like incredibly important for her to talk about.

Speaker 15 But at the same time, she's not running against a typical Republican. She's running against Donald Trump.

Speaker 15 Liz Cheney, these are all these Republicans. They're not like supporting her because they like her policies.

Speaker 15 They're supporting her because they don't like her policies, but Donald Trump is fucking nuts.

Speaker 15 And like, if I was going to make an argument to someone who was going into the voting booth and wasn't sure what they were going to do, I would probably be like, yeah, maybe you agree with some of the stuff she says.

Speaker 15 Maybe you don't agree with other stuff. But like, this man is unfit to be president because he has lost his fucking marbles.
And that's it.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I think the important part in that is...

Speaker 16 And I think it fits in any version of the argument you want to do, but is that all the people who know him best and work for him before don't think he should be president again?

Speaker 15 Yeah. Yeah.
Don't take my word for it. I'm a crazy lib, right? Like, listen to General Mattis and

Speaker 15 the Joint Chiefs guy and Mike Pence.

Speaker 16 Dick Cheney.

Speaker 15 Like, Dick Cheney. You know, you got to listen to Dick Cheney.
All right. Before we get to Ben Wickler, one last thing I wanted to mention.
J.D.

Speaker 15 Vance finally coughed up an answer on whether he believes the big lie.

Speaker 15 He was asked yet again at an event: did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? And his response is, I've answered this question directly a million times. No.

Speaker 15 I think there are serious problems in 2020. So did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words I would use.
What the fuck does that mean?

Speaker 15 I don't know. I guess that's just

Speaker 15 that. That's one where I do think, like, going back to Big Lie, what do they think?

Speaker 15 I don't know how many people that moves because you've got to move the threat of a Trump presidency forward and you can't just be looking at the past. But like, it goes into the whole like, J.D.

Speaker 15 Vance is full of shit and

Speaker 15 will, you know, do Donald Trump's bidding no matter what and is, you know, next in line for the presidency if he wins. And Donald Trump is fucking old, so, and

Speaker 15 under many indictments. So, like,

Speaker 16 I think people assume, and it's kind of the way the press coverage is, there's this natural assumption that's like, well, Democrats and independents know the truth.

Speaker 16 All the Republicans believe it, the big lie. That's actually not true.
In fact, only a third of voters believe the big lie, and less than two-thirds of Republicans believe it.

Speaker 16 And so it is a signifier that you're an extremist kook when you talk about the big lie. There is this Stanford Business School study from 2022 that showed that the big lie candidates

Speaker 16 did around two points worse than the non-big lie Republicans in that election. And so I'm not saying this is going to cost Donald Trump and J.D.

Speaker 16 Vance two points, but it does matter because it says something to voters about who you are, which then can be projected forward about all the other extreme, crazy things you will do.

Speaker 16 It's tied to your people believe if you, if you're crazy enough to do that, you're crazy enough to do all these other things like right to contraception, gay marriage, book banning, cutting social security and Medicare and all that stuff.

Speaker 15 Yeah, no, that makes sense. All right.
Before we get to our interview with Ben, one quick announcement this year, climate is on the ballot all across the country.

Speaker 15 And voters like you are deciding on critical climate measures that affect the air we breathe, the water we drink, and whether we'll still have summers that aren't on fire.

Speaker 15 Vote Save America's build your own ballot tool to the rescue. You can learn who who and what's on the ballot wherever you live.

Speaker 15 Fill out a practice ballot in just a few clicks and be prepared to cast your ballot for climate solutions on or before November 5th.

Speaker 15 Your vote matters, so help build a greener future by electing climate champions. Go to votesaveamerica.com slash climate to check it out now.

Speaker 15 And also, again, sign up, votesaveameric.com slash travel. You can go to a swing state.
There's travel and lodging that will be taken care of by the campaign.

Speaker 15 You can sign up. You can go to Arizona, Nevada.
If you're in the West Coast, you can go to Pennsylvania if if you're in New York. Super important to go help.

Speaker 15 As we have talked about this entire episode, the media environment is broken. There are structural problems with people remembering shit.

Speaker 15 And so the conversations that you have in these final weeks with people, with people who have not decided whether they're going to vote or who they're going to vote for, are going to make the difference in these states where the race is on a razor's edge.

Speaker 15 So please sign up. Vote Save America.
This message has been paid for by Vote Save America. You can learn more at votesaveamerica.com.

Speaker 15 This ad has not been authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. When we come back, Ben Wickler.

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Speaker 15 Plus, Black Friday is the perfect time to pre-order unique gifts they'll rave about for years. Use promo code GIFT for 20% off your first order on Goldbelly.com.

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Speaker 15 Joining us now, he's the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party and a friend of the pod.

Speaker 15 Just looking great

Speaker 15 that she said I'm guessing from you're in Green Bay right now, Ben Wickler.

Speaker 22 In Green Bay, Wisconsin. And hello, Pod Save America and John.
It's good to be with you today.

Speaker 15 So you're in Green Bay. I know that Kamala Harris is going to be there today as well.
Wisconsin was decided by 20,000 votes in 2020. 2022, the Senate race was decided by just under 30,000 votes.

Speaker 15 So 50-50 state has been for a while. Polling in the spring and summer suggested Wisconsin was the blue wall state where Democrats had the biggest lead.

Speaker 15 Now it's arguably the tightest state once again, as it had been in 2020. What, if anything, do you think has changed in the race over the last month?

Speaker 22 I'm removing my cheese head because I'm nodding vigorously and it is hard to nod in a cheese head. So I'm replacing it with my camo hair.
I love that. The blaze orange.

Speaker 15 Love that hat.

Speaker 22 Wisconsin is being itself. Wisconsin is the 50-50 state.
So the big question is whether there's polling error and which direction it goes.

Speaker 22 But the poll is getting super, super tight is kind of what we experience a lot here. And right now, the presidential race is a toss-up.
The Senate race is now a toss-up.

Speaker 22 The Republicans have flooded the zone with attack ads against Tammy Baldwin. So that race has gotten super tight.
The fight for the state assembly majority is a toss-up.

Speaker 22 We are trying to flip four state Senate seats to pave away to a Senate majority in 2026. And then there's multiple House races that are in the margin of error.
So it is intense across the board.

Speaker 22 And the question is,

Speaker 22 were we ahead before? And now it's just that partisans are kind of returning to their camps? Or was there some kind of response bias that was kind of getting the polls a little bit off?

Speaker 22 And now it's actually a truer picture of what's been here all along.

Speaker 22 But either way, our expectation in the final sprint is that this thing comes down to like two or three votes per precinct across the state.

Speaker 22 And it's in the margin of effort, as we say, not the margin of error.

Speaker 15 I promise I won't harp on the polling for too long, but I'm just wondering about the polling error in Wisconsin or the potential polling error. It was the biggest polling error of any state in 2020.

Speaker 15 We all remember the Biden plus 17 poll. Yeah.

Speaker 15 But even the average was way off and it was more off than most other states in most other cycles.

Speaker 15 What's your take on whether the best pollsters, especially private campaign pollsters, have fixed the problem or like, what have they said to you about trying to fix the problem?

Speaker 15 Is it, what are you most worried about in terms of like, uh, what the polls are telling you about where the electorate is, not just in the like, what's the horse race?

Speaker 15 Cause who cares about that, but, you know, in terms of where the campaigns are putting time, money, resources, et cetera. Yeah.

Speaker 22 Well, we've been just obsessed ever really since 2016, but especially after 2020, because we had the biggest polling year in the country also 2016, seven points off in the the real queer politics average in 16 and 20.

Speaker 22 That was before the flood of red wave kind of skewed polling. And the result of that has been a kind of flowering of tons of different types of ways to measure what's happening with whom.

Speaker 22 Tons of focus groups focus on particular subpopulations around the state across race and ethnicity, gender, geography, generation.

Speaker 22 It's lots of polls at different levels conducted with different methodologies that we can kind of pile on top of each other. It's tons of

Speaker 22 work to model who's going to say what when we knock knock on their door and then compare that to what actually happens when we talk to them.

Speaker 22 So you can get a sense of whether you're off one way or the other. That was part of what happened in 2016.
We ignored the data from the field. We don't do that anymore.

Speaker 22 And all those signals are telling us that this is likely to be super close.

Speaker 22 Now, that said, if we wake up the day after the election and we've lost by several points or won by several points, in a way, I would not be shocked because there are two big forces, one pushing in one direction, the other in the other.

Speaker 22 One is that there's a lot of Trump supporters that just do not trust polling and won't answer pollster phone calls. And every pollster has to guess how big the partisan non-response bias is.

Speaker 22 And then the other thing is that the Dobbs decision, especially, has energized a ton of people, especially women, especially young women, but also older women in all parts of the state who are, I think, potentially going to vote in a furious and intensive way that isn't necessarily reflected in public opinion polling.

Speaker 22 Now, if I was a pollster, I'd tell you. These two forces are probably going to basically cancel each other out.
We're trying to

Speaker 22 predict both. And we think it's tied and it will be tied, or that's the most likely thing.
And that's what the margin of error is for us to show you how far it could shift in either direction.

Speaker 22 But we won't really know until the final ballot's counted. And the only thing we can do in the meantime is assume that it is literally a coin flip.

Speaker 22 And that if we throw everything we have against the wall, if we organize with every second of daylight and into the dark now that the sun is setting so early, if we make every phone call, if we raise every dollar to get it into paid communication in every form,

Speaker 22 all of that might be enough to win by a hair's breadth and save democracy.

Speaker 15 I've heard you say that another challenge in figuring this out is same-day registration in Wisconsin.

Speaker 15 And so you can get a flood of people who show up on election day that were probably never captured or thought about by not only pollsters, but I guess modeling.

Speaker 15 How do you guys think of that? I mean, it's a great thing, by the way, that people can register same day and vote. We love that, but I'm sure it makes it trickier.

Speaker 22 It does make it trickier, especially because nobody's polling unregistered voters.

Speaker 22 That's just not, you know, every every pollster they show you likely voters which are a subset of registered voters and then they show you registered voters but we always have wards where there's over 100 voter turnout of registered voters because there are more people who same day register and vote than there are people who were registered and don't vote so the the electorate will grow and if you look at wisconsin voter registration statistics it looks like the electorate's shrinking until an election comes along and then it and then it jumps up.

Speaker 22 And that can go either way. In 2020, the same day registration favored Trump heavily.
Democrats voted early by mail. They all registered beforehand so they could get their absentee ballots.

Speaker 22 This time, there's a chance for Democrats to get the jump on this. But there's also lots of years when it's been evenly split in same-day registration too.

Speaker 22 But that's part of what uncertainty is built into the whole thing. And it's also why the returns to effort in Wisconsin are so high.
Because if you're

Speaker 22 out at a bar talking to everyone there about the importance of voting, even people who've never voted in the state before can wake up the next morning and

Speaker 22 have a couple of cups of coffee and then bring their proof of residence and their photo ID and register and vote that very day.

Speaker 22 I will also tell you, I have this vivid memory from high school when a friend of mine, his older sister was a UW-Madison student, and it was a student running for, I think, county board.

Speaker 22 The friend's older sister had a party and a bunch of people stayed up really late drinking and they woke up and they're song over and like they didn't vote and the the candidate wound up losing by fewer votes than the number of people who had

Speaker 22 been too drunk to vote that day so the lesson is no matter how you feel you you will get yourself to the polls you might be the margin of victory right there So if you're going to drink before election night, just set that alarm really loud and put it right next to your head.

Speaker 15 That is the lesson I get from that.

Speaker 22 Yes. Have a buddy who's responsible for dragging you to the polls.

Speaker 15 We're speaking on Thursday. Kamala Harris has three events in Wisconsin today.
Tour with Mark Cuban. Obviously, she's going to be in Green Bay.
She's in La Crosse.

Speaker 15 Also, I think Tim Walls and Barack Obama are going to be in Madison next week.

Speaker 15 I've had some people ask me, in this political and media environment where everything is nationalized, everyone is polarized, what is the value of campaign stops like these to you guys in terms of moving voters?

Speaker 22 They're so, so helpful.

Speaker 22 I cannot say how helpful and how valuable they are. And, you know, time is the one thing you can't buy with money and campaign contributions.

Speaker 22 So when a candidate comes, a bunch of things happen at once. The first thing is that there's a bunch of press about the fact that they are coming.
So it gets in the news.

Speaker 22 The key thing, right, is reaching people who are not paying attention to politics already.

Speaker 22 And when you are in the local like radio news break between the best hits of the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, that Kamala Harris is coming to town, people are finding out about that.

Speaker 22 Then you have the actual event. You have thousands of people show up.
They can all be asked to volunteer. They can all be asked to get on the Reach app.

Speaker 22 They can all be asked to go to wisdoms.org and donate and sign up as volunteers to do door knocking shifts. So they then can multiply out and go talk to their friends.

Speaker 22 Then you have the news coverage of the event itself, which again will reach a lot of people who are generally avoiding political news, but it is the thing happening in town at that moment and in the state at that moment.

Speaker 22 It's covered all over the state. And then there's clips from the rally or the event that happened that go viral on the internet and that are used in ads.

Speaker 22 So many of the ads you see in Wisconsin right now use footage from from events that happened in Wisconsin.

Speaker 22 So there's this, like, if a campaign's doing it right, a visit from the candidate to a community has a multiplier effect before, during, and after, both at the grassroots level and in a kind of air war across the state.

Speaker 22 And I will tell you, the Harris campaign is using these visits in the right way. It is, you know, this is not Trump rambling for an hour and a half in Madison Square Garden.

Speaker 22 This is showing up in Green Bay and lacrosse and actually connecting with people, energizing them, and then sending them out as ground troops while also amplifying the most critical moments.

Speaker 22 So this is, this is gold for us.

Speaker 22 And I will say the fact that Harris and Walls are visiting lots of different parts of the state, different places, they get different media markets with different local TV signals, that they're coming back in different kinds of contexts and that they're bringing along President Barack Obama to Madison on the first day of early vote.

Speaker 22 All those things could give us that final extra edge that Elon Musk, with his gigantic amounts of money and his very weird online presence, he can't match that.

Speaker 22 That is something that we have and could be our counter to the flood of right-wing money that is hitting the airways all over our state.

Speaker 15 You were talking about the deluge of ads with all the right-wing money. What is the gist of these ads in terms of message?

Speaker 15 And what has been the best, most effective pushback to some of these negative ads?

Speaker 22 So all the Republican ads in our state, just about, are hammering on fear. And it's fear of immigrants and immigration.
tied to crime and trans stuff.

Speaker 22 And sometimes they tie all three of those together. Sometimes it's pick two.

Speaker 22 It's like a right-wing rat bag of trying to demonize a group of people and make everyone else afraid of those folks and create an other that

Speaker 22 strongman Trump says he'll protect you from.

Speaker 22 And it's an old, tired, vicious playbook, but it can have an effect. And it's being used at lots of levels.
It's being used in the Senate race as well.

Speaker 22 And to counter it, you have to lay out who you are and what you're for.

Speaker 22 You have to point out why they're making these attacks, which is that they're trying to distract people from the fact that they're trying to rip you off and that they're trying to divide people because they know that if we elect Harris and Walls and we elect

Speaker 22 Hammy Baldwin, then we'll actually have a government that's on the side of the middle class standing up to special interests and blocking extremists from banning abortion.

Speaker 22 So

Speaker 22 you have to be on offense, but also explain why you're under attack and then shift to the ground where you're going on offense and winning.

Speaker 22 And the thing you don't want to do is kind of get stuck in repeating their lies while you're debunking them. So

Speaker 22 they're obviously wrong, but getting on the stronger ground and then pushing back and punching back and explaining why they're doing these attacks is a critical piece of this.

Speaker 22 I think one of the striking things is that Republicans are not even trying to defend against the accusations of abortion bans. They're just on the attack right now.

Speaker 22 And what that means is that a lot of Republicans who are generally kind of partisan Republicans are coming into the fold.

Speaker 22 That's why you see the Senate race tightening also is that a lot of the Trump voters who were lukewarm on Eric Hofde when the ads were about Eric Hovety, they're getting on board for kind of like the mega attack

Speaker 22 game plan. But the Republicans are leaving themselves open for the kind of moderate Republicans who have mixed feelings about the fact that their

Speaker 22 candidates want to ban abortion nationwide. And a lot of the Democratic ads, we have especially kind of

Speaker 22 on offense ads about the economy and the economic vision of Democratic candidates and about this issue of personal freedom, reproductive freedom, and abortion.

Speaker 22 And the personal testimonials from people who've been directly affected by abortion bans or had complications in their pregnancy and urgently needed care that Republicans would try to ban,

Speaker 22 those things do move voters. And I think they affect every race on the ballot.
That's one reason why we're so focused on supporting the down ballot candidates as well.

Speaker 22 Because I think that if you have an ad from a state legislative candidate that talks about the effect of the abortion ban that Republicans put in or refuse to lift a finger to remove after the Dobbs decision, I think that affects every race on the the ballot.

Speaker 15 So two kinds of persuadable voters. One kind that is open to voting for Trump, open to Hove D, open to some Republican candidates.
And then there's the person who's open to not voting at all.

Speaker 15 What are you guys hearing on the doors, on the phones, over text about what issues are driving the race for these persuadable voters and what is getting them off the fence?

Speaker 22 So it's interesting.

Speaker 22 The wall of of right-wing fear-mongering in the state means that if you're talking to someone who's voted Republican in the past, they're often thinking about these, the kind of

Speaker 22 criminal immigrant narrative that Republicans are pushing. And you'll hear that from people.

Speaker 22 And then they're also thinking about what it would mean in their families if abortion was banned and they or someone that they loved needed access to abortion care.

Speaker 22 And this is often you know, it's not people who want a candidate who goes right down the middle of these two issues. It's people who are conflicted across these two things.

Speaker 22 I think the other piece that you often hear, especially from people who generally are fed up with the system, is frustration around the economy and the feeling of like, who's actually fighting for me?

Speaker 22 Like, I had a non-voting Uber driver who, his line to me was like, Republicans care about the rich, Democrats care about the poor, no one cares about the middle class.

Speaker 22 And I was like, well, I don't want to ask you to listen to a Kamala Harris speech, my friend, because you will hear someone lay out a vision for the middle class.

Speaker 22 The folks can buy houses and start businesses and support childcare, support their aging parents through Medicare.

Speaker 22 But

Speaker 22 it's going to where the voter is that actually makes the difference. And the thing about the abortion bans is that they've reached into people's personal lives.

Speaker 22 They've reached outside of politics, outside of what's on the news, and into people's most intimate, urgent medical decisions and the moments when they're most vulnerable.

Speaker 22 And suddenly it's politicians calling the shots. And that is horrifying for people.
It's a horrifying thing. It's a horrifying prospect.

Speaker 22 And it's something that a lot of people in Wisconsin are one or two degrees of separation away from someone who actually experienced it for 451 days. We had an abortion ban here.

Speaker 22 And that's that is affecting all these different races, the economic argument and this question around freedom.

Speaker 22 You know, we have candidates, Democratic candidates in every congressional district. I'm in Kristen Lyrely's district right now in Green Bay.

Speaker 22 She is a pro-choice OBGYN who's running for Congress and making this absolutely clear as a dividing line in this race in a way that I think energizes voters.

Speaker 22 You have Rebecca Cook in the third congressional district running against Eric Hovety.

Speaker 22 Eric Hovety, by the way, who was on Capitol grounds on January 6th and would be inside the congressional chamber in

Speaker 22 January 6th, 2025, if he were re-elected. But that guy supported total abortion bans.
And Rebecca Cook is a young pro-choice woman candidate who grew up on a dairy farm. She's nobody's idea.

Speaker 22 She's a very like kind of centrist Democratic candidate in a purple district, but she is crystal clear that the government should not be overriding people's personal decisions about this.

Speaker 22 And that combination of economic populism, clarity about

Speaker 22 choice and reproductive freedom, and

Speaker 22 the kind of common sense rejecting extremes, it's a really good fit for the district.

Speaker 22 And then you have in the first, Peter Barka, who is up against Brian Style, who supported all these abortion ban bills in Congress.

Speaker 22 In all these different races, the arguments that the candidates are making in the House races, they echo the candidates' arguments for Tammy Baldwin's Senate race against Eric Hufty, who said he's totally opposed to abortion.

Speaker 22 And they echo the argument that Harrison Walls make against J.D. Vance, who supported national abortion bans, and Donald Trump, who wants to punish women.

Speaker 22 And so there's a surround sound, an echo effect, and also with the state legislative candidates.

Speaker 22 If that can be what is on voters' minds as they walk into the polling place, someone who's on my side on the economy against special interests and somebody who's on my side for freedom against meddling extremist politicians, Democrats win this election, even if it's close.

Speaker 22 If people walk into the polling place feeling afraid of a phantom crime wave that's whipping through their communities, you know, driven by these kind of caricatured policies Republicans are telling them Democrats are imposing, then it becomes really hard.

Speaker 22 And

Speaker 22 they fight for what the election is about in a way is existential. And it's part of what volunteers can change when they're talking to people at their doors.

Speaker 15 Speaking of the doors, you mentioned Elon Musk.

Speaker 15 I've heard reports that even the Trump folks who are quite confident about winning are less confident in their ground game, which has mostly been outsourced to Elon Musk.

Speaker 15 I know that Democrats, including folks in the Harris campaign, are quite confident in the ground game.

Speaker 15 I know you're confident in the ground game, but what are you seeing in Wisconsin in terms of both sides' ground game?

Speaker 22 I was in Platteville, Wisconsin yesterday in western Wisconsin. This is like the southwest corner of the state.

Speaker 22 And like in every county that I visit, I was asking the volunteers there if they're seeing Republican canvassers when they're out on doors.

Speaker 22 The answer is a two-letter word that begins with N and ends with O.

Speaker 22 We are out in communities all over the state, in every single county all across wisconsin every week and every week we hear about maybe a couple of places where where america pack canvassers are showing up and often they are not even uh successfully hanging their door knockers uh they're door knocking uh you know uh door hangers off the doorknobs in people's houses there's been like two instances where i've heard about actual conversations people have had with them i you know, I know that this is shocking given his business record, but it might be that he's not going to hit his deadlines get, for, for, for getting those door knocks done.

Speaker 22 And I love this for the Republican Party. I think it's great.
I think it's a great example of, uh, you know, outsourcing jobs that used to be done by Wisconsin Knights.

Speaker 22 Uh, someone who doesn't believe in union labor and hard work. And

Speaker 22 this is, this is their plan. Now, does that guarantee that we're going to win? It absolutely does not.
But it means that we might be able to work our way through to the finish line in this thing.

Speaker 22 And having a, you know, one sort of medium of the contest in which I think we have a serious advantage means that we need to triple down on that.

Speaker 22 There's a, you know, in general, your weaknesses are not actually your strengths. And so what you want to do is make the most of your strengths and then

Speaker 22 shore up your weaknesses. And on the Republican side, they've let the bottom fall out of this thing.
And

Speaker 22 we just need to run up the score with everything we can do to organize and get our friends out to vote.

Speaker 22 And again, I'm just going to hammer wisdoms.org slash volunteer, or if you go to kamalaharris.com slash volunteer, you can sign up wherever you might be in the country.

Speaker 22 I know I vote save America, your volunteer links.

Speaker 22 Folks, those phone calls, those door knocks, the relational outreach that we're doing friend to friend, these things do matter.

Speaker 22 And this thing could come down to, you know, fewer votes than the number of contacts in your phone and your five best friends' phones.

Speaker 22 Like that could be the margin of victory in states like Wisconsin. And there are not a lot of those states.

Speaker 15 That's a good place to leave it. Everyone, if you're nervous, volunteer.
And Wisconsin's a great place to do it. You guys could use some help.
I will let you go.

Speaker 15 I know you got a Kamala Harris event to attend up in Green Bay. And thanks, as always, for joining us.
And Ben Wickler, good luck out there.

Speaker 22 Thank you so much, John. And folks, do not sleep on our Senate race, the House races, the state legislative races.
We finally at Fairmaps and the presidential. This is every line of the ballot.

Speaker 22 All systems go. Let's go fight and win.

Speaker 15 That's our show for today. Dan will be back with a bonus episode on Sunday.
Dan, who are you talking to this week?

Speaker 16 This week I talked to Amy Walter, one of the smartest people in politics.

Speaker 16 She is. She is the editor-in-chief and publisher of the Cook Political Report.

Speaker 16 And we talked about the presidential race, but also the House and Senate races to understand if Democrats have a chance to sweep all three in this election.

Speaker 15 All right. Everyone, check it out Sunday.
Have a good weekend. And we'll be back with another Pod Save America on Tuesday.

Speaker 16 Bye, everyone.

Speaker 15 If you want to get ad-free episodes, exclusive content, and more, consider joining our Friends of the Pod subscription community at cricket.com slash friends.

Speaker 15 And if you're already doom scrolling, don't forget to follow us at Pod Save America on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube for access to full episodes, bonus content, and more.

Speaker 15 Plus, if you're as opinionated as we are, consider dropping us a review to help boost this episode or spice up the group chat by sharing it with friends, family, or randos you want in on this conversation.

Speaker 15 Pod Save America is a crooked media production. Our producers are David Toledo and Saul Rubin.
Our associate producer is Faris Safari.

Speaker 15 Reed Cherlin is our executive editor and Adrian Hill is our executive producer. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

Speaker 15 Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer, with audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Writing support by Hallie Kiefer.
Madeleine Herringer is our head of news and programming.

Speaker 15 Matt DeGroote is our head of production. Andy Taft is our executive assistant.

Speaker 15 Thanks to our digital team: Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Phoebe Bradford, Joseph Dutra, Ben Hefcote, Mia Kelman, Molly Lobel, Kirill Pelavieve, and David Toles.

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