To the Winfrey, to the Walz (feat. Gretchen Whitmer)

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Speaker 2 This week we're going all out for the Democratic National Convention.

Speaker 2 Here at Crooked Media, we're giving friends of the pod subscribers access to a ton of behind-the-scenes content and community events, including a DNC subscriber live chat, a new subscriber exclusive segment featuring me, John, Tommy, and Dan, four, count them, four back-to-back, ad-free episodes of Pod Save America, recapping the biggest convention news of the night, and brand new episodes of Inside 2024 and Polar Coaster.

Speaker 2 It's going to be a hell of a week for content. And as a bonus, bonus, we'll have a Democratic Party nominee by the end.

Speaker 3 Pretty good deal.

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Speaker 2 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.
I'm John Lovett.

Speaker 4 I'm Dan Pfeiffer.

Speaker 5 I'm Tommy Vietorn.

Speaker 2 We are back here at the United Center to recap night three of the Democratic Convention.

Speaker 4 Back here. I'm not sure we've ever left.

Speaker 2 We have not left. I've been here for most of my life now.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 Most of our lives, and most of that was a Bill Clinton speech.

Speaker 2 On today's show,

Speaker 2 on tonight's show, Governor Tim Walls delivers a blockbuster convention speech here in Chicago. Donald Trump is not happy about Barack Obama and other Democrats being mean to him.

Speaker 2 And RFK Jr. reportedly plans to drop out of the race and endorse Donald Trump.
This all happened while we were running around today. I barely even know what happened here.

Speaker 6 Take one second away to play Cornhaul with Harry Enchin and the CNN Grill. You miss all this news.
That's real, by the way. That's real.

Speaker 3 What I'm describing is real.

Speaker 2 Plus, Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Harris Campaign Communications Director Michael Tyler stop by.

Speaker 2 But first,

Speaker 2 another night of the convention, another night of joy and democratic unity. This one was packed with Democratic stars.
Mayor Pete, Josh Shapiro, Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi, and also fucking Oprah.

Speaker 2 Oprah. We got Oprah.
Surprise guests. She's so good.

Speaker 2 And the night's headliners. We have Bill Clinton, and of course, Tim Walls.

Speaker 2 Let's start with Coach Walls. Just an absolute banger of a speech.

Speaker 2 Guys, we've listened.

Speaker 6 Every night we say we're not going to drink as much as we drank the night before, but then we're so tired from the drinking from the previous evening that the drinks are getting bigger as we get later into this.

Speaker 2 You had me wrong. We waited to drink earlier.
The last couple nights, we waited to drink later. Tonight, we were like, let's just start earlier.
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 You can hear that in the recording.

Speaker 2 Anyway,

Speaker 2 let's listen to Coach Walls accept the vice presidential nomination.

Speaker 2 So there I was, a 40-something high school teacher with little kids, zero political experience, and no money running in a deep red district.

Speaker 2 But you know what?

Speaker 2 Never underestimate a public school teacher.

Speaker 2 And we made sure that every kid in our state gets breakfast and lunch every day.

Speaker 2 Other states

Speaker 2 were banning books from their schools. We were banishing hunger from ours.

Speaker 2 When Republicans use the word freedom, they mean that the government should be free to invade your doctor's office.

Speaker 2 Corporations free to pollute your air and water.

Speaker 2 And banks free to take advantage of customers.

Speaker 2 But when we Democrats talk about freedom, We mean the freedom to make a better life for yourself and the people that you love.

Speaker 2 Freedom to make your own health care decisions.

Speaker 5 And yeah,

Speaker 2 your kids' freedom to go to school without worrying about being shot dead in the hall. Clip and save it and send it to your undecided relatives so they know.

Speaker 2 If you're a middle-class family or a family trying to get into the middle class, Kamala Harris is going to cut your taxes.

Speaker 2 If you're getting squeezed by prescription drug prices, Kamala Harris is going to take on Big Pharma.

Speaker 2 If you're hoping to buy a home, Kamala Harris is going to help make it more affordable.

Speaker 2 And no matter who you are, Kamala Harris is going to stand up and fight for your freedom to live the life that you want to lead.

Speaker 2 Because that's what we want for ourselves and it's what we want for our neighbors. You know, you might not know it, but I haven't given a lot of big speeches like this.

Speaker 2 But I have given a lot of pep talks.

Speaker 2 We're down a field goal, but we're on offense and we've got the ball. We're driving down the field.

Speaker 2 And boy, do we have the right team. Kamala Harris is top.
Kamala Harris is experienced. And Kamala Harris is ready.

Speaker 2 Our job,

Speaker 2 our job, our job, our job for everyone watching is to get in the trenches and do the blocking and tackling.

Speaker 2 One inch at a time,

Speaker 2 one yard at a time, one phone call at a time, one doorknock at a time,

Speaker 2 one $5

Speaker 2 donation at a time.

Speaker 2 And as the next President of the United States always says, when we fight,

Speaker 2 when we fight,

Speaker 2 when we fight,

Speaker 2 Coach Walls got the assignment. Great.

Speaker 5 He knew what to do. What did you guys think? You know what I loved about the speech?

Speaker 3 First of all,

Speaker 5 if you put a bunch of washed-up, middle-aged high school football players on a stage, you got me. You're speaking my love language, Tim Walls.
That was how they opened it.

Speaker 5 They brought out their state championship football team in their jerseys, looking great. But then he focused most of his bio on being a coach, being a teacher.

Speaker 2 Why?

Speaker 5 Because people like coaches and they like teachers. They don't love politicians all the time.

Speaker 5 He talked about like some of you know giving free school lunches to kids and other legislative accomplishments, but he connected as a human being, just came away authentic.

Speaker 6 He like got calmer as the speech went on and more conversational in the delivery.

Speaker 5 It was just excellent. And

Speaker 5 he had a line in there where he talked about

Speaker 5 the hell of infertility and hearing that part like started to get me choked up.

Speaker 5 But then they cut to his kids who were crying and beaming and saying like I love my dad and like everyone in this room started weeping it was just incredibly emotional the first time I welled up the entire convention took up me too me too yeah first time for me when Monday night went after 1130 I started to cry a little bit yeah no different reason yeah the uh

Speaker 3 there's also just there's um

Speaker 6 there's no faking what Tim Walls is in that moment where so they it's it was also funny because they cut to Hope

Speaker 6 and she's making heart and it cuts to gus and gus is just weeping and just like get on his feet saying i love you dad it was it was funny and beautiful and real and you just think it's like a high school football movie yeah that's what it was his shirt went i tell you where his wife home it is older sister little brother energy right there

Speaker 6 and then you compare that to the like

Speaker 6 Capital from the Hunger Games vibe of the Republican National Committee of all these kind of plastered fucking Botox grins of people that barely can are on speaking terms pretending to be a family for one fucking night.

Speaker 2 J.V. Vance in a basement on his laptop in some fucking weird chat room.
That's right. That's right.

Speaker 2 Also, it was a pretty tight speech. Incredibly tight.
And the message was clear. He said right at the top, maybe like the third or fourth line, we love this country.
We help our neighbors.

Speaker 2 We believe in a country where everybody belongs and everybody has a responsibility to contribute.

Speaker 2 And then he told the story, and then he told a story about why Kamala Harris will be a great president and why she'll help people and why this whole campaign is about helping people and why this country can be about everyone helping each other and lifting each other up and turning the page on all the bullshit divisiveness of the last however many years with Donald Trump in our lives.

Speaker 4 It was fantastic.

Speaker 4 The way this process goes often is the campaign manager, political strategist, message person, the candidate, and the speechwriter will sit down and the strategist will say, here are the five things we need to accomplish.

Speaker 4 In the room, the candidate will agree to that. Then the speech writer will go write a speech that does those things.
Then the candidate will get a hold of the speech.

Speaker 4 And they will decide to do crazy, self-indulgent shit. This was like, he checked the box on every single thing that if I had been in the room, I've said, this is what Tim Walsing did in a speech.

Speaker 4 Introduce him to the nation, right?

Speaker 4 Make the case for Kamala Harris. Do on very specific anti-Trump stuff.
One of the challenges that Democrats have is that Donald Trump is not getting the blame he deserves for Dobbs.

Speaker 4 And there's a CBS poll this weekend that shows that majorities of voters and majorities of independents do not believe that Donald Trump will pass a federal abortion ban or try to ban abortion nationally and really believe his leave it to the states bullshit.

Speaker 4 So you got to do that. He went explicitly at that.
Project 2025, he goes at that. And then he does something which is just so smart, which is to pick the moment.

Speaker 4 He picked the moment he want that was the most persuasive moment and told people to send it to their relatives. Yes, yeah.

Speaker 4 And then he ends the speech giving people specific tasks of things to do to win the election. Knock on doors, give $5.

Speaker 4 It is soup to nuts. It just hits all the strategic high points for a campaign speech.

Speaker 5 And just one thing on that,

Speaker 5 he said, clip this part and save it. And he reminded me of being at the supermarket with my mother when the checkout lady would see, like, hun, do you have a coupon? Like, it was that kind of vibe.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say it was like the exact right verbiage, but that's also true.

Speaker 2 That's also

Speaker 2 truck. I love that.

Speaker 6 There's also something just said, like, about the... why that speech was so excellent.

Speaker 6 There's an interview some celebrity has been giving about how Hollywood used to think IP wasn't just Marvel Comics, but like your Sweet 16 was IP, right? IP were things that happened to actual people.

Speaker 6 And so often

Speaker 6 in speech writing, people think you need to use clichés to convey basic values, that you'd use the cliché to get at the values underneath.

Speaker 6 But that was a speech about values, and it didn't have a lot of cliches. It expressed the values through his experience and his own words.
And if you do that well enough, you make a new cliché.

Speaker 6 You make something real from your actual experience that conveys the values. It goes in the other direction.
And it was a lot better. There were some, there was some, you know.

Speaker 6 Tim Walls, that was one of the best speeches we've ever heard.

Speaker 2 But you say it's better than Doug and Balfour. Uh-oh.
No, it's

Speaker 2 better. Doug versus Tim Walter.

Speaker 6 But it's close.

Speaker 6 But that was an incredible speech by the vice presidential candidate. And it would have been better if it had been an hour earlier.

Speaker 6 And one of the reasons it wasn't, because there's a lot of indulgent people spreading a lot of fucking Pablo out there.

Speaker 2 We have this later in the

Speaker 2 US. Sorry, you're running away.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

Speaker 6 I'm good now.

Speaker 3 You're right about the imagery.

Speaker 6 Like they weren't cliches, but he was like, it's the fourth quarter.

Speaker 3 We're down a field goal.

Speaker 2 We have the ball.

Speaker 6 Like you paint a picture.

Speaker 5 You see that in your mind's eye and you mentioned Tim Walls like hiking the ball. He's probably the center in this scenario, if we're being honest, not the quarterback.
And that's what I saw.

Speaker 2 Well, and also that fits him, right? Like

Speaker 2 if another speaker tonight used that imagery, we'd be like, what are you doing?

Speaker 2 That sounds so cheesy, but like it fits him so perfectly, which is the whole point of like why if you want to to deliver a great speech at a convention or anywhere, like you can't just look at other good speakers and be like, I'm going to copy that.

Speaker 2 You have to do something that is true to you, right?

Speaker 2 And like Tim Walls, you have to also have the confidence to know that like you can deliver that speech and you can figure out like what's what fits you best and just go for it.

Speaker 2 And Tim Walls clearly had that confidence. That it we saw what we saw in that clip when he was like, you know, you might not know that I don't give a lot of big speeches like this.

Speaker 2 It's like, yeah, he doesn't, but he seems like he does.

Speaker 6 He does. But you also, by the way, like just, you see him and like he's bouncing between the two sides of the teleprompter, like, you would notice he's an incredible speaker.

Speaker 6 But, like, he is new to doing that. And there's a rawness to it and an authenticity to it that carries through because he just, I mean, if Tim Wallace didn't exist, you'd have to invent him.

Speaker 5 He does the ah shucks thing. Like, I'm not used to this.
And there was reporting that one of the things he talked about with Kamala Harris when she chose him is that he'd never used a teleprompter.

Speaker 4 The first teleprompter speech he ever gave was at that rally in Philadelphia.

Speaker 2 Like a couple weeks ago. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And then he, like, his confidence and comfort in his own skin just grew and grew and grew.

Speaker 2 That is very rare. It's so funny.

Speaker 6 It's like J.D.

Speaker 2 Vance is going to stand across from he's some own fucking viles.

Speaker 2 I was just thinking that. I'm like, if if I was J.D.

Speaker 2 Vance and I was his team, like I think the only way to advise him to debate Tim Walls is to just like do your own thing, talk about your own policies, talk about like why their policies aren't good for people.

Speaker 2 Like that would be the smart thing. That's the only thing that's not

Speaker 2 Trump though. Right, you can't do that for Trump.
And I think any, like, being mean to Tim Walls and trying to, like, poke at him through a whole debate is just,

Speaker 2 that strategy, I think, will fail spectacularly.

Speaker 4 It is just so funny now, having watched this speech and watched the last few weeks of this campaign, that the Republicans' initial plan was to make Tim Walls a radical liberal.

Speaker 2 So funny. He shot a pheasant on video at the mid-stage of the convention.

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 2 The students and the football players and everything, it's like, oh, yeah, that guy doesn't seem like a radical liberal to anyone who watched that. All right.

Speaker 2 tonight's other headliner, Bill Clinton, who delivered a healthy dose of that famous Arkansas folksiness. Here's a sampling.
Two days ago, I turned 78, the oldest man in my family in four generations.

Speaker 2 And the only personal vanity I want to assert is I'm still younger than Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 She will break my record as the president who spent the most time at McDonald's.

Speaker 9 The next time you

Speaker 2 hear him, don't count the lies.

Speaker 2 Count the I's.

Speaker 2 What are they supposed to make to these endless tributes to the late, great Hannibal Lecter?

Speaker 2 President Obama once gave me the great honor of saying I was the explainer-in-chief. Folks, I thought and thought about it, and I don't know what to say.

Speaker 10 Take it

Speaker 2 from a man who once had the honor to be called in this convention, the man from Hope.

Speaker 2 We need,

Speaker 2 we need

Speaker 2 Kamala Harris, the president of joy, to lead us.

Speaker 2 What did you guys think of the explainer-in-chief?

Speaker 2 Anyone?

Speaker 6 You know, I think there's some good parts. He was supposed to speak for 12 minutes.
He spoke for 25 minutes, something like that.

Speaker 2 Was it 25? Did we land it 25?

Speaker 2 It was double the length,

Speaker 2 which is pretty standard for Bill Clinton.

Speaker 6 That's fine. That's fine.
Anybody that pushed Tim Wallace out of prime time, I'm not a fan of tonight. That's it.

Speaker 2 They're on your list.

Speaker 6 That's it. Hakeem Jeffries, too long.

Speaker 2 Oh, geez.

Speaker 2 Not speaker of the house yet.

Speaker 5 I think I enjoyed the breaking my record as the president who spent the most time in McDonald's joke. That was a very Gen X slash,

Speaker 6 mostly Gen X.

Speaker 5 Maybe Gen X.

Speaker 2 We're close. We get it.

Speaker 2 Gen X and elder millennial nerds. I think he has some political.

Speaker 2 Boomers certainly get that. Boomers are still around.
He warmed up as he went.

Speaker 2 You forgot the boomers. Yes, yes, for sure.

Speaker 3 I think it started a little slow and meandering.

Speaker 5 I was kind of like, where are we going with this? By the end, I thought it got stronger. It did some good lines.

Speaker 2 It was the one speech that improved the most over the course of the speech.

Speaker 6 Yeah, the lighter moments were great. Yeah, he did take him a beat to warm up.
I think the more rhetorical parts didn't totally, I was like, okay.

Speaker 6 But then the parts where he was like, that kind of old Bill Clinton charm where he's sort of kind of like stepping back and be like, what's going on here?

Speaker 6 It's actually kind of Obama-S too I thought worked.

Speaker 4 I mean, there's political value in it, right? I mean, there are a lot of people who vote for Trump who also voted for Bill Clinton, right?

Speaker 4 And we know there's, and this was true from, it was part of Bill Clinton's superpower, it's still true now, is that a white guy with a southern accent endorsing Kamala Harris helps.

Speaker 4 And we just know like from pure numbers, she has gained with all parts of the Democratic coalition.

Speaker 4 The big question is, will she hold, the only way to make the math work, unless we're going to dramatically overperform with black voters or Latino voters is to hold Biden's share of white voters particularly non-college white voters and that's a group that has voted for Bill Clinton Bill Clinton has

Speaker 4 credibility and credence there and a lot of you hear some of those people talk it's like they miss the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton and so you that explains why he was on stage tonight and that's the sort of the value of that I also thought he made an important point about because this has been driving me crazy for a long time about that we're he basically said at least that line where it's don't count the lies I was just about to say this I'm glad you're saying it's driving me crazy, too.

Speaker 4 Because everyone knows Donald Trump's full shit. They've always known he's full shit.
That's not what is going to defeat him, is you have to go beyond that, right?

Speaker 2 And just to put a fine point on this, like,

Speaker 2 it is important to fact-check Donald Trump, to acknowledge, especially for reporters and journalists, to acknowledge that he lied.

Speaker 4 We want Daniel Dale to eat.

Speaker 2 We want Daniel Dale to eat. Right.
We want all the fact-checkers. We want to know if he lies.
But a super majority of voters believe that Donald Trump is dishonest.

Speaker 2 But he is is not losing by a super majority of voters, right? Like, so there's like 60% of voters think he's a dishonest person, but he's still like, you know,

Speaker 2 it's a pretty close, almost tied race for president, right? They think most politicians are liars. Exactly.
So they think most politicians are liars.

Speaker 2 And all the energy we expend on, but he's a liar, but we got to call out the lies, but the headline doesn't call out the lies and the story doesn't call it the lies and why don't we call it the lies?

Speaker 2 And I will say that

Speaker 2 it was a Biden campaign strategy for a while and around the debate.

Speaker 2 Now, I think part of it was because Biden did so poorly at the debate that they all had to come out of the debate saying like the only thing they could say is like well what about Donald Trump's lies but then Biden sort of did that too like going into this next debate between Colin Harris like Donald Trump is gonna lie at this debate he's gonna lie a ton at this debate that is not pointing out his lies is not what's going to move people fact-checking him is not what's going to move people and Bill Clinton told us that actually

Speaker 2 sending the message that all he cares about is himself, which has been a running theme of a lot of the convention speakers, some of the the really good ones, this whole week.

Speaker 2 Like, that's going to move people.

Speaker 4 It felt like a little bit of a at Biden, just like

Speaker 3 a little rebuke.

Speaker 2 But it's not just Biden, it's like the entire sort of liberal ecosystem.

Speaker 4 The Democratic Party for seven years now, eight years.

Speaker 5 We've had candidates, we've had elected officials mentioning in television interviews how many Pinocchios Donald Trump was awarded by the Washington Post.

Speaker 2 Like, we've got to get away from that shit. The number of lies.
Whoa, he had 70 lies. Like, yeah, no, I know he's the fucking liar.
We all know that.

Speaker 2 So, as Lovitt pointed out, the list of speakers was already very long tonight, but no one complained at the surprise speaker, Oprah Winfrey,

Speaker 2 here in her hometown of Chicago.

Speaker 2 As always,

Speaker 2 she had everyone eating out of her hand.

Speaker 3 Here's a bit of what she said:

Speaker 2 soon and very soon,

Speaker 11 we're going to be teaching our daughters and sons about how this child of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father,

Speaker 11 two idealistic, energetic immigrants, how this child

Speaker 11 grew up to become the 47th President of the United States.

Speaker 11 And let us choose joy.

Speaker 11 Together, let's all choose Kamala Hara.

Speaker 2 I love Oprah. I just

Speaker 2 Yeah. Do you think it's just like, again,

Speaker 2 our age or older? Right. Like, I was wondering, too, I'm like, if any, younger than us are people like, oh, yeah, Oprah, I've heard of her.
She's cool. Like,

Speaker 2 I see her come out.

Speaker 3 I'm just like, this is a huge deal.

Speaker 2 Oprah's out here. Everyone loves Oprah.
She's given a speech. She's like such a great speaker.
She's inspiring. I don't know.
What do you guys think?

Speaker 4 Well, as old as we are, and I know I'm older.

Speaker 2 A lot of people. Most people are older than us.
A lot of us. Most voters are older than us.

Speaker 5 She might be ironically cool in TikTok. We don't know because it's not her algo.

Speaker 3 But listen,

Speaker 3 I will never forget 2007. Like Tim Wall saying, cutting.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 clipping one. I'm ready to share it.

Speaker 5 I never forget 2007, Oprah came to Des Moines, Iowa. We did a huge event.
It was absolutely bitterly cold, freezing day. I think it was snowing outside.

Speaker 2 We were like, I hope people will come.

Speaker 5 This should be interesting.

Speaker 3 Absolutely packed the house.

Speaker 5 She did another one for us in Cedar Rapids.

Speaker 3 brought the crowd to their feet.

Speaker 5 People were going nuts. We collected all this data.
Like, I think that was a huge moment for Obama. But But we had Madeline Albright.
So,

Speaker 6 you know, both sides had their stars.

Speaker 2 And there was, you know, there was something, there was something novel to that endorsement.

Speaker 5 I think it was the first time she'd ever really endorsed a candidate and come out and get involved in politics.

Speaker 2 It was special and unique.

Speaker 5 But I think she is huge cachet. If you're 50 and over, huge cache.

Speaker 2 And I saw

Speaker 2 Liam Donovan, Republican strategist, on Twitter. He was like, you know, of all the speakers, and he's like, Trump's clearly mad about the Obamas and everything.

Speaker 2 He's like, but what really probably sticks in his craw is Oprah Winfrey because Trump has known Oprah Winfrey for a long time, you know, came of age in the Oprah era and is probably really pissed about that.

Speaker 2 I think Oprah

Speaker 6 is a leader and Oprah saying, I'm not political, but I'm getting political here. I want you all to do everything.

Speaker 6 And making a specific plea to undecided voters, I think that carries weight with a lot of people.

Speaker 4 Also, All politics is attention wars, and you want to get attention for this convention. You want people to know about it, pay attention.

Speaker 4 And having Oprah is like, that is playing your playing an ace right there.

Speaker 4 And I also just thought the way she told the story about

Speaker 4 the idea that a child of two immigrants would be president of the United States in a time in which the other party is demonizing immigrants in the most offensive and xenophobic ways is just such a powerful thing to think about, about the stakes of this election, what it means when she wins.

Speaker 4 So we used to think about that with Obama, right? Like what it would mean for him to do it.

Speaker 4 What it would mean for her to do it for all of the barriers that she would break is like a reason for people who heard Oprah say it.

Speaker 4 Maybe it's not going to persuade a ton of people who aren't paying attention to politics, but people who aren't sure they're going to vote. Maybe they'll vote.

Speaker 4 People are going to vote, maybe they'll volunteer, right? Maybe if they're volunteer, maybe they'll donate now, right?

Speaker 4 It's a very powerful call to arms. Like we still have work to do on our side.

Speaker 2 Also,

Speaker 2 pivotal group of swing voters, older white women. You know who loves Oprah? Older white women.

Speaker 4 I mean, that is exactly true, which when you look at the numbers, the big question around the working class white voters is, can Kamala Harris exceed Biden's numbers with working class white voters?

Speaker 4 Part of that's abortion.

Speaker 2 And she's probably not going to do it with men.

Speaker 4 And she may lose some with men, right? So you've got to find more voters somewhere. One potential pocket is working class white women.
Oprah, incredibly influential with them.

Speaker 4 They are anti-all these abortion bans, right? They're upset about the absolute return.

Speaker 4 So like that is the, when you, we know the people work on this campaign, we know how they think about the numbers.

Speaker 4 You sort of go through the choice of Oprah, how Walls did his speech, you can see how they are getting to their, trying to have the messages that get to their vote goal.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I can't think, you know, we just, we watched the whole Republican National Convention.

Speaker 4 It was this

Speaker 2 like,

Speaker 6 you know, victory lap. I can't think of the moments that you would take from that convention to share on social to persuade undecided people.
But I can think of five.

Speaker 2 Kole Hogan, probably. Yeah, Cole Hogan,

Speaker 4 Dana White.

Speaker 6 Those were the moments. Those were the celebrity moments.
Yes. But in terms of like the, but that was all kind of whatever.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 6 Like

Speaker 6 celebrity and showmanship, not an argument.

Speaker 6 Like you can see the moments that are coming from these speeches that are going to go, that are going to be spread around on social media to reach people who aren't paying attention to this.

Speaker 2 All right, Lovett, this one's for you. What did you think of the overall program tonight?

Speaker 3 It is

Speaker 6 crazy.

Speaker 4 Like clearly it was not a plan to

Speaker 6 pull the strings to get Joe Biden to be late because those same people aren't trying to put Tim Walt after 11 o'clock Eastern. People are going too long and like they're making it about themselves.

Speaker 6 They're giving speeches that they want to give, not the the most helpful speech possible. And that was an incredible speech by Tim Wallace.
It should have happened an hour earlier.

Speaker 6 And it's like very frustrating that that didn't happen. And like, that's it.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I've been thinking about this because

Speaker 2 Stephanie Carter is in charge of the convention. She put together one of the best Democratic conventions ever in 2020 in the middle of a pandemic.
And Stephanie clearly gets the timing. Of course.

Speaker 2 And I think the people they've had problems with are the speakers. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 Are the speakers who were like, no, you're not cutting my time or you're not cutting me from the program or you're not doing this.

Speaker 2 And I, again, I also think this, I think like 80 to 90% of this program was put together when Biden was going to be the nominee.

Speaker 2 And when Kamal Harris became the nominee, they couldn't just turn around and be like, oh, hey, you're gone, you're gone, you're gone, you know? And there's like inter-Democratic, whatever.

Speaker 2 It shouldn't be that way, but

Speaker 2 that's the way it is. And I think they tried to do their best.

Speaker 2 But yeah, if you're like, again, if you're a speaker, tomorrow night, like even tonight, like Walls, we should have heard him in prime time for sure.

Speaker 2 Tomorrow night, if Kamala Harris has to get on that stage by like 9.15.

Speaker 4 We need Nancy Pelosi backstage.

Speaker 3 There's a giant hook for Kermit the Frog pulling people off.

Speaker 2 There's no excuse tomorrow night.

Speaker 6 Andy Klobuchar went through like the whole fucking geography of the United States of America. Cut it.

Speaker 6 Hakeem Jeffries named every day of the week. Cut it.

Speaker 6 What's he going to do? Throw me out of the side of her car?

Speaker 6 now. I'm not gonna get in that car,

Speaker 2 not after tonight.

Speaker 2 Speaking of colours, I'm a fan of hers.

Speaker 6 Senator Klobuchar, I just wanted to say, I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 Please don't hurt her.

Speaker 2 Excellent. Oh, yeah, fucking now I'm alone.

Speaker 6 They told me I would be out to drive if I did this.

Speaker 2 They told me before. They warned me.

Speaker 2 Just me and Bullet Rye out here.

Speaker 2 Speaking of killers, I also want to mention Nancy Pelosi.

Speaker 2 Our pal Mindy Kaling, who did a fantastic job as MC. Quite funny.
Very funny. She introduced Pelosi as Mother of Dragons.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, you know, Pelosi's speech wasn't amazing, but it didn't need to be.

Speaker 2 It didn't need to be because every single person in that hall knows what she did in this election and that she is the absolute pinnacle of her power.

Speaker 2 That said, there was a report in the Washington Post this morning, and, you know, it was extensive in the post, but it's been everywhere. This has been all over the place, little bits and pieces.

Speaker 3 Can't wait to see where this is going.

Speaker 2 And here's the quote: A group of Democrats, including within Biden's orbit and the Democratic National Committee, remain bitterly upset with Pelosi over her public pressure campaign to push Biden out.

Speaker 2 Some have privately pledged to find ways to diminish Pelosi's influence in the party after the November election.

Speaker 3 Bold strategy.

Speaker 3 Good luck with that.

Speaker 6 Yeah, have somebody else start your fucking cars.

Speaker 2 What are you going to do? Yeah. Change your E-Trade pass around?

Speaker 2 Yeah, man. Look, I don't want to keep talking about this because it's like, it's happy, we're unified, whatever.

Speaker 2 But the reason that we had to keep talking about it is because some people, and I don't know, maybe it's just one or two in the whole orbit, just keep talking to reporters about how fucking pissed they are in the middle of the Democratic Convention about what Nancy Pelosi did, which was absolutely correct.

Speaker 6 First of all, Nancy Pelosi didn't make one phone call.

Speaker 3 Except to us.

Speaker 2 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 It is wild. I just like, don't lose.

Speaker 2 This is not helping anything. It's

Speaker 2 silly.

Speaker 5 Threatening the former Speaker of the House on background to the Washington Post as some.

Speaker 2 What are you going to do to diminish her power? You're going to go prime.

Speaker 2 She's probably not running again. You're going to go primary her in San Francisco.
What are you doing? Also,

Speaker 2 folks who are saying this, you're not going to have a job in six months.

Speaker 5 I presumably. You're going to go do something else.

Speaker 2 What are we talking about? All right, so Trump has been doing his best, I think, to bracket the DNC programming with message events of his own. And boy, has he been on message.

Speaker 2 Today he held a rally in North Carolina that was supposed to be about national security. Didn't see that in the headlines.

Speaker 2 What seemed to be on his mind was all the not nice things people said about him here at the convention the night before. First and foremost, very predictable.
Barack Obama, let's listen.

Speaker 12 I think her name will be Comrade because I think that's the most accurate name. You know, I've been looking for a name.
People are saying, sir, don't do it. You know all my names.
They've all worked.

Speaker 12 They've all been very successful.

Speaker 12 And I really didn't find one with her. It could have been Barack Hussein Obama, perhaps we should ask him.
Now, he was very nasty last night.

Speaker 12 I try and be nice to people, you know, but it's a little tough when they get personal. Please, again, remember, please, sir, don't get personal.
Talk about policy. Let me ask you about that.

Speaker 12 We're going to do a free poll. Here's the two questions: Should I get personal? Should I not get personal? Ready? Should I get personal?

Speaker 12 Should I not get personal?

Speaker 12 I don't know. My advisors are fired.

Speaker 2 I like that he's

Speaker 6 that on one side he has his advisors and then the other side is like the loudest racist contractors in the area who came to the rally.

Speaker 2 And like these are the two groups of people that are being weighed against each other.

Speaker 6 Good. Good.
I think you should listen to the contractors.

Speaker 4 It is just so funny that like, oh, you know, I thought about being nice, which is, you you know sort of my style but i don't know after last night i think that the guy who i accused of not being born in america and demanding to see his birth certificate for the better part of a decade i don't know i think i'm gonna sort of uh unload on him i mean he is actually campaigning this week yeah but he was doing like one event every two weeks before now he was out every day this week boy did it break through it was so funny because you know it's been very hard to like follow the news here we're running around doing stuff can't ever really sit down like look at your phone your computer so i finally sat down to catch up and i saw all the tweets all the clips and I finally read an article in the seventh paragraph of the article after the insult stuff the policy stuff It's like in an event that was supposed to be about national security.

Speaker 2 It's like what

Speaker 6 the one thing that he's doing that is interesting is he's like he is doing this sort of like Theo vaughan and like reaching out to these like doing smart dinner.

Speaker 6 He's doing some smart stuff like there are clips going around that interview where he's like is like

Speaker 6 like the rally Trump. It's not helping him.
Great. He should be doing all that.
That's that's good. That's great.

Speaker 5 But that interview he like comes across he does like as a kind of like first of all he asks another human being a question something i've never seen him do in years of watching him and he like seems kind of like approachable and and and like like a like a cool grandpa yeah great yeah it reminded me of my uh fbi background check interview because when they kept saying how do you do that one he kept asking like extensive questions about various uh drugs that theo von was doing was very curious about cocaine he really wanted to hear about cocaine yeah i haven't seen this yet but theo von is that for those who don't know he's a comedian he's sort of in the joe Rogan universe.

Speaker 5 He's probably got a huge young male audience. And this is where the Trump campaign has been really smart.
They're putting him in these spaces to find these young men.

Speaker 5 And I can't remember if we were talking about this on mic or off-mic anymore, but there's a huge gender split among Gen Z in particular.

Speaker 5 The electorate generally, but Gen Z, I think it's emerging even more. And the Trump campaign is going after those young men and very effectively.

Speaker 2 In fact, you're going to hear about that in just a bit because Lovett and I asked Gretchen Whitmer about that. Oh, nice.

Speaker 5 There you go. What'd she say?

Speaker 2 I'll listen later.

Speaker 2 I'll check it out. You know what? Go to bed, wake up, download the pod.
Just listen to it.

Speaker 2 So, Mark Caputo at the Bulwark published a piece today: Donald Trump, I hate my opponent.

Speaker 2 And it starts: Donald Trump has no plans to heed the advice of his aides and limit himself to policy contrasts when he debates Kamala Harris. He wants to make it personal.

Speaker 2 Quote, This is just the way I am. I hate my opponent.
I hate my opponents. Hillary, Joe, Kamala, it doesn't matter.
I just hate them. To another advisor, he said, I'm going to be mean.

Speaker 2 Oh, whoa, watch out.

Speaker 2 He just, this is going to be the debate. Now, you don't think that's like a head fake, do you?

Speaker 5 Just comes out there with a get well soon, Carter.

Speaker 4 I mean, as we're sitting here at this convention, it is wild that the only 90 minutes of self-control that Donald Trump has ever had in his entire life was during that debate with Joe Biden.

Speaker 4 Where he actually managed to,

Speaker 4 like, he was terrible in what he said, but he did manage to control himself enough to allow Joe Biden to be exposed.

Speaker 2 But you know what? Looking back on it, I don't think he exercised any discipline or control. He just wasn't triggered or attacked in any way by Joe Biden

Speaker 2 or the moderators. So it didn't make when he gets, when you make him mad by saying anything to him that is not like, you're awesome, or, you know,

Speaker 2 he'll do his thing.

Speaker 6 Well, what would some criticism by a smart and capable and unafraid black woman do to set Donald Trump off

Speaker 6 on a national television.

Speaker 3 That will be interesting.

Speaker 5 I mean, I think in the debate, Trump was just as shocked as the rest of us were by sort of how things were going down.

Speaker 5 He sort of says as much at rallies because he keeps joking about how the moderators would be like, Mr. President, you have 82 seconds left in your 90-second answer.
That's sort of like his bit.

Speaker 5 But yeah,

Speaker 5 Kamala Harris is going to make him flip his shit.

Speaker 4 But it's been a month now. He still does not, well, his campaign has a message and they are pouring money behind it.
He is unwilling to or unable to adopt the message.

Speaker 4 And the Comrade Kamala thing is idiotic.

Speaker 4 It's like, what year is this that the big threat is communism?

Speaker 2 It's his campaign, not just him, too.

Speaker 4 I think that is them throwing a bone to the guy here. They're probably like, you know what? Truth social is his safe space.

Speaker 4 We're going to let him do what he wants to do there, and then we're going to run the other one.

Speaker 2 Right, it's not explicitly racial or misogynistic, so it's about communism.

Speaker 10 We'll let him have that one.

Speaker 4 Imagine the other things left on the cutting room floor that ended up at Comrade Kamala.

Speaker 2 We'll probably hear that during the debate. Meanwhile, in less funny news, it was widely reported today that RFK Jr.

Speaker 2 will give a speech on Friday morning announcing that he's dropping out of the race and endorsing Donald Trump. Dan, what do you make of the impact on the race?

Speaker 4 I think it's pretty hard to say. So, right now, if you look at the New York Times polling average, in a two-way race, Kamala Harris has a two-point lead.

Speaker 4 If you include RFK Jr. in the poll, she also has a two-point lead.
And so, what is happening here is that they are mostly splitting the vote, right?

Speaker 4 But it's not going to be the same in every state. And so the downside here from a Kamala-Harris perspective is some of these voters could go to Trump, right?

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 from what we know of the voters, they are disproportionately black and Latino and therefore are voters that we should have a shot at.

Speaker 4 Many of them have voted for Democrats before, might have voted for Joe Biden in 2020. And so we're just going to have to see how it plays out.

Speaker 4 What I don't think matters, I think him dropping out matters. I do not believe that his endorsement of Trump is going to move his voters to Trump.

Speaker 2 I think I agree with that. Right, right.

Speaker 3 The question is: what is the share of voters for RFK Jr.

Speaker 6 that are going to him because they like him, value him, care what he has to say, versus are just looking for an alternative?

Speaker 5 I mean, you and I were debating this in the car on the way over because this we do the pod off air.

Speaker 3 So, unfortunately, we are watching things to talk about.

Speaker 2 How is your family?

Speaker 4 I understand you all have children.

Speaker 2 The most like simplest terms, right?

Speaker 5 Like, people like RFK Jr. because he's anti-vax.
I think that's where a lot of his energy comes from.

Speaker 5 So I can imagine that most of his votes would probably go to Trump then because Trump is the most anti-vax adjacent.

Speaker 5 The counterpoint to that is the lowest of the low information voters maybe don't like Kamala or Trump and they see a Kennedy and they think, oh, that's an easy alternative for me.

Speaker 2 I think that was sort of your perspective. So it might benefit him if you just.
That, and I was trying to think of the vote, like I'm thinking about Joe Rogan, right? Who

Speaker 2 seems like he doesn't like Donald Trump.

Speaker 4 He has said that he is not fighting for Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 And he, you know, something we should have. And Wasai endorsed RFK Jr.
and then sort of walked back and said, I just like him, whatever. So RFK Jr.

Speaker 2 dropping out is not making Joe Rogan go to Donald Trump. But

Speaker 2 what happens? Maybe he doesn't like Kamal Harris. Maybe he doesn't vote at all.
I don't know, right? Like, so there could be, I'm trying to figure out the voter who was like, you know what?

Speaker 2 They've seen Donald Trump for the last nine years. They've decided, eh, maybe I'll do RFK Jr.
RFK Jr. drops up.
They're like, you know what?

Speaker 2 If you've already decided that you might leave Trump for RFK Jr.,

Speaker 2 do you go back to Donald Trump or do you just stay home?

Speaker 6 Where do we think Cheryl Hines is in all this?

Speaker 2 So there was a report that Cheryl Hines is very much against her husband endorsing Donald Trump.

Speaker 6 I saw that, and I just

Speaker 3 the

Speaker 2 like we got to get Larry David on on that. same thing.

Speaker 6 I just like how much it's just sort of a strange thing to think that Cheryl Hines is in this moment of incredible power over the democracy, you know? I don't like it.

Speaker 4 It's just, the thing I think is important to just think about here is it is going to be different in every state because RFK Jr. is just a placeholder for people who don't want Biden or

Speaker 4 Biden or Trump or now Harris or Trump. And that looks different in Michigan than it does in Georgia.
It looks different in Pennsylvania than it does in Georgia.

Speaker 4 And in each place, they're going to sort of profile differently. And I remember we talked to Liz Smith, who was working on this for the DNC on the podcast many months ago.

Speaker 4 And that was one of the points: is that the RFK voter varies by battleground state. The other thing, just from

Speaker 4 a more alarming perspective, is if RFK Jr. is not on the ballot, and I assume that if he drops out, the timing on Friday is based on ballot printing deadlines, that he will not be on the ballot.

Speaker 6 I don't like where this is going.

Speaker 4 But is that you will end up with the only non-Harris or Trump alternatives would be Jill Stein, Cornell West, and maybe a

Speaker 4 Chase Oliver. Chase Oliver.
Not Gary Oliver, as we learned after the last podcast. Chase Oliver.

Speaker 2 Libertarian candidate.

Speaker 4 Libertarian, but

Speaker 4 not a super conservative libertarian candidate. Like Gary Johnson hurt,

Speaker 4 by some studies, hurt Hillary more than Trump in 2016.

Speaker 2 So there's a number of candidates that could pull from Harris and or more likely to pull from Harris than Trump has the issue.

Speaker 4 But it's like how many of the

Speaker 4 if a RFK junior voter goes to

Speaker 6 If there's a third-party voter who uh is third party but would lean right they might go to Trump but if there's a third-party voter they'll have an alternative which is Jill Stein it doesn't there's nobody

Speaker 6 RFK Jr.

Speaker 6 dropping out doesn't mean Kamala Harris voters will go to Jill Stein but it might mean more of the RFK juniors go to Trump than go to Harris because they have somewhere else to go if a third-party voter leaves Cleveland at noon and RFK bring out the whiteboard and some strings I just want to

Speaker 2 actually don't don't front run the next episode of Polar Coaster so sorry well yeah we'll continue this in the subscribers only pod.

Speaker 5 What I want to know is if the August 28th RFK Jr. campaign Sunset Cruise that includes Alicia Silverstone and Meta World Peace will happen either way.

Speaker 2 Is that real?

Speaker 6 Alicia Silverstone is, I just said something so nice about her on Terminally Online today.

Speaker 6 Because she accidentally ate a poison berry she found on the street.

Speaker 2 And I thought that that's unfortunate. She didn't put it on the street.

Speaker 6 Well, I don't know why is she endorsing RFK Jr.

Speaker 6 There's some judgment issues here, but nonetheless, I thought she deserved a bit of a cultural reanalysis based on how she was so mistreated in the 90s, but now I'm second-guessing myself.

Speaker 4 Elijah went home hours ago, so I'm going to have to call him, wake him up, and get him to cut that out.

Speaker 2 Okay, I'm going to end this here.

Speaker 2 Okay, when we come back, more of today's DNC coverage brought to you by Policy Genius, starting with our conversation with Harris Campaign Communications Director, Michael Tyler.

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Speaker 4 Joining us now is the communications director for the the Kamala Harris campaign, Michael Tyler. Michael, how's this convention treating you?

Speaker 10 It's treating me well. I'm not getting quite as much sleep as I would have liked to.

Speaker 2 Because you're at parties all the time?

Speaker 10 I wish.

Speaker 10 I'm looking forward to Thursday night when I can finally go to one of the after parties. But it's been a good week.
I think the energy, the enthusiasm has been on full display.

Speaker 10 We're feeling very good about the story that we're telling and the story that we're contrasting against our opponents in Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.

Speaker 4 When you guys were planning this convention, obviously over the last month here, how were you thinking about the balance between telling the the vice president's story and deepening people's understanding of Trump's agenda or the negative message?

Speaker 10 Yeah, I think for us, like, we understood that you kind of have to do both to be completely honest about it.

Speaker 10 I think we're clear-eyed about the fact that there's more work that we need to do and have to over-index on fully introducing the vice president and governor Walls to a wider swath of the American electorate.

Speaker 10 People were obviously entering this election cycle with President Biden, right, as the presumptive Democratic nominee. All of that changed over the course of the last month.

Speaker 10 And so I think you've seen us approach this convention with that new dynamic in mind, understanding that you have more work to do to introduce the vice president, introduce the governor, but also remind folks that the stakes of the election are fundamentally the same, right?

Speaker 10 The threat posed by Donald Trump is the exact same. His dangerous and extreme Project 2025 agenda is ever clear, ever present as it was before.

Speaker 10 And so for us, that's true of not only how we planned this convention, but if you looked at the work that we've done with the vice president and the governor, crisscrossing all the battleground states, if you look at our paid media investments to date, right, it is both simultaneously fully introducing the new Democratic ticket while also constantly reminding voters of the stakes and the choice in this election.

Speaker 4 Have you been surprised by how Trump has sort of struggled to find a message, some sort of anti-Kamala Harris or Tim Wall's message?

Speaker 4 Have you enjoyed his inability to do so?

Speaker 10 The thing about Donald Trump is his message has remained the same too, right? The message has always been personal grievance.

Speaker 10 The message has always been about Donald Trump and what's best for Donald Trump. Maybe there's more of a magnifying glass on that right now as we sort of hit

Speaker 10 prime time of the general election mode, but this fundamentally is a contrast between Vice President Harris and Governor Walsh, who are like fighting for the American people and Donald Trump who...

Speaker 10 I guess when he does decide to go to a swing state, which is a little more often than it has been as of late, but it's usually just Mar-Lago or Bedminster. It's all about himself.

Speaker 10 It's all about his own personal grievance. It's all about lobbying, personal insults.
It's all about chaos. It's all about fear.

Speaker 10 it's all about division, it's all about personal invective, it's nothing about solutions for the American people, right?

Speaker 2 And so, for us, we're gonna allow him to do that.

Speaker 10 When he wants to pop out, right, he can pop out, but the message that you see from Donald Trump is nothing that the American people actually want to buy.

Speaker 10 And so, we're excited to continue to press the case and show that contrast, not only in high-profile moments like this, but for the next 75 days.

Speaker 4 Last night, you guys pulled off something that was pretty tricky, which was to fill up an entire rally arena 90 miles away from Chicago and then have the convention go live on live television to the vice president.

Speaker 4 How did you guys pull that off? Is there any good behind-the-scenes stuff there?

Speaker 10 Well, listen, I think what we've wanted to do, right, as we approached Chicago was not just think about this as solely one television production, right?

Speaker 10 You want to use this as an opportunity to fully engage, number one, the voters that are going to decide the pathway to 270 electoral votes, but also to engage our grassroots base, right?

Speaker 10 The people who are going to go do the the door knocking, go do the phone banking, talk to their folks on their social networks. And so we've approached this with those two imperatives in mind.

Speaker 10 It's why the vice president and the governor, before they got to Chicago, went on a bus tour through western Pennsylvania, making sure that we were talking about their values and their vision going into Chicago and a crucial part of a swing state in Pennsylvania.

Speaker 10 And it's why we decided on day two of the convention not just to focus on the programming that we've got here in Chicago, but to make sure that we actually took our candidates to a swing state, knowing that it was only 90 miles up the road, right?

Speaker 10 We have the opportunity to go to Milwaukee, an important city and one of the most crucial swing states, and directly engage with the electorate there.

Speaker 10 And what we're excited about is like, yeah, I believe the final tally was actually 18,000, not that Donald Trump would be counting the difference between what he had in Pfizer.

Speaker 2 I heard something about Donald Trump and crowd sizes of possibly for us.

Speaker 10 Yeah, I heard 44 reference that a little bit last night.

Speaker 10 But listen, I think what we're excited about is not just the crowds, right, who show up to these events, but whether it's 18,000 at Pfizer Forum or 20,000 in Phoenix a couple of weeks ago 10,000 down in Atlanta or even places like Eau Claire Wisconsin it's not just the attendance rate right it's the volunteer conversion rate these are people who are coming to our events and then signing up to volunteer you had 10,000 people in Atlanta 1500 of them signed up to volunteer for this campaign right and so those are people who are now going and spreading the gospel in their own neighborhoods in their own personal networks making sure that the people in their lives understand why this election is so important and understand why Kamala Harris and and Tim Walls are the ones who are going to have their back.

Speaker 10 So we're incredibly excited to have moments like this where we can not just speak to a wider swath of the electorate, but where we can truly engage the people who are going to do the critical work over the course of the past few, like the last few weeks of this election.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I saw the 20 million people watched the coverage last night, which is

Speaker 4 not that he would care, but a lot more than watched a second other Republican convention.

Speaker 10 I think they had 14. 14.
Yeah, we had 20 million

Speaker 10 on TV alone. I think the other thing that we're proud of as it relates to this this convention

Speaker 10 is the fact that not only do you have the 15,000 credentialed members of the traditional press corps, but we also have for the first time about 200 credentialed content creators, right?

Speaker 10 These are people who are walking around the convention hall, documenting the comings and goings of the convention and then sharing that content with their followers, right?

Speaker 10 Generating millions more impressions. The vice president has actually sat down and interviewed with a couple of the content creators who are here,

Speaker 10 and we've had all the surrogates do so as well. So again, for us, our North Star is making sure that we're actually meeting voters where they are, right?

Speaker 10 Tapping into people's true media consumption habits.

Speaker 10 So it's why you have credentialed content creators at the convention, and it's why if you look at our fall media reservations that we just unveiled to begin convention week, if you look at the overall budget, it's $370 million.

Speaker 10 It's going to grow, of course, but it was about $170 million traditional television, but we're laying down $200 million in digital advertising, right?

Speaker 10 Because you know in an electorate that is increasingly millennial, increasingly Gen Z, you're not going to reach folks with running ads on Jeopardy every single night.

Speaker 10 You're going to get a lot of folks, but you're not going to get every single voter who you need to reach 270.

Speaker 10 So we're constantly thinking about how we break through, reach the voters that are going to truly decide the pathway.

Speaker 4 I mean, what you guys have done with the Content Creator thing is very cool, the way you guys are allocating your advertising. A lot of the

Speaker 4 flood of online content about the vice president is something that's happening totally organically, right? The coconut memes, the brat stuff, the feminomenon, all of that.

Speaker 4 And you're a communications director, I'm a quasi-retired communications director. People like us, we love control.

Speaker 4 And there is no control there, right? How do you sort of balance

Speaker 4 the memes with

Speaker 4 the message? How do you balance the memes and the message, I guess the way it's?

Speaker 10 Yeah, I mean, honestly,

Speaker 10 you got to embrace it and accept it, right?

Speaker 10 Because when the Zeitgeist is speaking, they're going to do a far better job of communicating than anything that we could come up with craft ourselves, right?

Speaker 10 I think you just talked about it on our side of the ledger.

Speaker 10 I think the other example of this, of course, is Project 2025, where you saw organic conversations about this popping up on the internet as far back as last fall.

Speaker 10 Now, us as a campaign, we saw that and started speaking to it ourselves, right?

Speaker 10 So when Donald Trump is out here paraphrasing Mein Kampf, talking about immigrants poisoning the blood of this country, well then you go look at like Project 2025, the architect, but also what's in the plan, and you see things like mass deportation, you see things like the return of family separation, you see things like the end of birthright citizenship.

Speaker 10 The campaign can help connect the dots to what people are already organically calling out themselves and put a stronger magnifying glass on it.

Speaker 10 But I think to a degree, you have to simply see what people are tapping into right away.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 4 I actually was looking at a study on the Project 2025 thing this week, and it is shocking the growth and awareness over like an eight-month period from basically no one knowing what Project 2025 was to everyone.

Speaker 4 And that is really a credit credit to the,

Speaker 4 it's like a validation of that when Democrats want people to know something, we can actually make it happen, because sometimes we have like that defeatist mentality of it.

Speaker 2 Like

Speaker 4 what's been going on with the coconut memes and all that, that is like just organic enthusiasm for the vice president. The Project 2025 thing is something that a bunch of people decided to do.

Speaker 2 It was relentless message discipline across the ecosystem.

Speaker 4 With a huge focus on social, right, which is really what, because the press, to their credit, was writing about Project 2025, it just wasn't breaking out of the bubble, and then people were doing the TikTok explainers about it.

Speaker 2 It's been, that's very cool.

Speaker 10 And Donald Trump himself knows it now, so why is he going to run away from it?

Speaker 10 It's like, bro, is your people written for you by your folks, and you keep talking about exactly what's in it every single day.

Speaker 4 How's the vice president's speech prep going here?

Speaker 10 Look, I think she's ready to.

Speaker 4 Is it fully locked, done?

Speaker 10 It's never done until it's done. That's right.

Speaker 10 It'll certainly be done by about 10 p.m. Central Time tomorrow night.
Right.

Speaker 4 10 p.m.

Speaker 4 She'll be on at 10 p.m.

Speaker 2 You're making news now.

Speaker 3 Breaking, programming notes.

Speaker 4 That's great. What do, as we head out of the last question for you, what happens after the convention? Where are you guys going?

Speaker 4 And how are you thinking about debate prep? Because I was looking at the calendar. That debate's coming around the corner pretty fast.

Speaker 10 It is, it is, it is.

Speaker 10 So listen, I mean, obviously, I think, as we said at the beginning of this conversation, I think in many ways the convention sort of serves as a capstone to this introductory phase of the campaign.

Speaker 10 I think for us right now, obviously you come off of the convention, and the candidates themselves themselves are going to start putting in the sweat equity as they did when the vice president announced the governor as her running mate, right?

Speaker 10 They're going to get back onto the stump, go to all the battleground states.

Speaker 10 And I think for us as a campaign, it's about making sure that we can continue to translate the energy and the enthusiasm that you see here in Chicago into action across the battlegrounds, right?

Speaker 10 How are you leveraging the candidate travel to further build your organizing infrastructure in the battleground states, right?

Speaker 10 We've got 300 field offices opened up across all the battleground states, 1,600 staff across the battlegrounds.

Speaker 10 We're going to continue to scale that up, make sure that we're taking advantage of the high-profile moments that we create.

Speaker 10 And then, of course, looking forward to some of these more high-profile moments that you've spoke to, right, where you've got September 10th, assuming that Donald Trump, again, keeps his word

Speaker 10 and shows up, we will have the first presidential debate.

Speaker 10 We'll have on in October, we'll have the first vice presidential debate, and then hopefully, assuming, again, that Donald Trump keeps his word, we'll have another opportunity for the American people to see the choice front and center in prime time at a second presidential debate.

Speaker 10 So we want to use all of those to make sure that the split screen is front and center for the American people throughout the totality of the voting period, right?

Speaker 10 Early voting begins in late September. So we are going to have a moment here coming up very soon after the first debate where we're already in mobilization mode, right?

Speaker 10 It's going to be GO TV mode here for about six weeks.

Speaker 10 And so it's going to be incumbent upon us to use every tool at our disposal, starting then to use this energy, use the enthusiasm, turn it into mobilization action at the ballot box.

Speaker 10 So increasingly we're going to start pivoting our operation to that really that acute GO TV effort.

Speaker 4 Michael Tyler, thanks so much for joining us. I know you have a crazy busy week for you.
Take a moment, enjoy it. Something special's happening here.

Speaker 10 I appreciate it. I'm going to go get some coffee now, though.
Yeah, go for that.

Speaker 2 All right, man. Thanks.
All right, when we come back from the break, you'll hear our interview with Big Gretsch herself, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

Speaker 2 But before we do that, a brand new episode of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams is out now.

Speaker 2 This week, Stacey recorded live from the DNC floor with the youngest member of Congress, Maxwell Frost, and civic engagement influencer Haley Lickstein to talk about what matters to the youngest generation of voters and how their generation is working to mobilize their peers this election.

Speaker 2 This episode is so good, but it's also just the start of what Assembly Required has in store.

Speaker 2 From deep fakes and NIL deals to the rights-aggressive war on books, Stacey is taking on all the big issues to answer. How can we get good done? New episodes drop Thursdays.

Speaker 2 Listen to Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams right now, wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Gretchen Whitmer.

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Speaker 2 Joining us today, the governor of the great state of Michigan and author of a new memoir, True Gretsch. Gretchen Whitmer, welcome back to Pod Save America.

Speaker 14 It's good to be here.

Speaker 2 This is obviously a very different convention than any of us imagined it would be. I know you're a huge fan of Joe Biden, as are we.
How do you feel about him passing the torch to Kamala Harris?

Speaker 2 And how are folks in Michigan reacting to the new nominee?

Speaker 14 Well, I'm grateful for so much of what Joe Biden has done for this country. I am also grateful that we are in a spot where we're now talking about a brand new chapter in America.

Speaker 14 I am proud to be here as a Harris co-chair of the campaign. I've got my daughter's in tow with me.

Speaker 14 I think that this is historic, but most importantly, we've got an opportunity to hire a president who actually has lived a normal life, who cares about people, who knows how to get shit done, and is a strong leader.

Speaker 14 And this is what we need now more than anything. So I'm really excited.

Speaker 2 Love it.

Speaker 2 I'll go.

Speaker 2 I knew it was my turn.

Speaker 10 So when

Speaker 6 there was a sudden rush of VP speculation, you took yourself out of it. pretty quickly.

Speaker 6 Why'd you do that?

Speaker 14 I've made a commitment to serve out my term as governor of Michigan, and I really believe I can be a great ally to a Harris whomever administration.

Speaker 14 Now we know it's Harris Walls administration, which I'm thrilled about. And I'm excited.
You know, I love my job. I've made this commitment over and over again.

Speaker 14 I know people never believe anything politicians say, but I mean it when I say it.

Speaker 2 That's good.

Speaker 6 And Tim Wall seems like a real asshole.

Speaker 14 I mean, my kids said he is like the male version of me. So, yes, he is an asshole.

Speaker 2 What do you think is the most persuasive single argument Kamala Harris can make to the people of Michigan as someone who has won an incredibly close state on the national level with crushing margins both times?

Speaker 14 I think she's going to make a seat at the table for everyone. You know, she and Tim Walls are people who've lived normal, middle-class lives.

Speaker 14 They understand what Americans are going through, whether it's child care or health care,

Speaker 14 access to food for kids in schools. I mean, they've got receipts.
They've done the work and they're going to make sure that every person has a seat at the table.

Speaker 14 So even if you are an independent or a Republican who doesn't identify as a Trump Republican, there's a seat for you at this table.

Speaker 14 You don't have to agree with everything in this platform, but if you agree that women should be able to make their own damn choices, come on over. If you agree that we need an economy that

Speaker 14 levels the financial barriers to people getting skills to getting a good paying jobs, onshoring supply chains, there is a place for you at this table.

Speaker 14 And that's the message I think we've got to take directly to the voters in Michigan and all these swing states.

Speaker 6 So you're somebody that's won decisively in a state that's now 50-50 in this presidential election.

Speaker 6 How do you explain that space between voters who proudly voted for you and are right now saying they're undecided?

Speaker 14 Well I think Washington D.C. is a lot further from people's lives than Lansing, Michigan is.
And as governor, I can point exactly to how the things that we've done have made people's lives better.

Speaker 14 It's a lot harder to do from the federal government, but I think there's a compelling case to be made. The Biden-Harris administration delivered on their work on advanced manufacturing.

Speaker 14 We are seeing a boom in manufacturing, and a lot of it's happening in the state of Michigan. We've got to connect that work to what it means for people's lives.

Speaker 14 And we're seeing groups like Republicans for Harris coming together. That's important.
It's a legitimate invitation for people to come over and be a part of this.

Speaker 2 So, past few elections, Democrats tend to win. Women voters, Republicans tend to win.
Male voters, polling now is showing an even bigger gender gap than there's been in the past.

Speaker 2 And there are signs that the gap is unusually large among Gen Z with younger men potentially drifting away from the Democratic Party. I looked at your 2022 results.

Speaker 2 You basically broke even with men, which is better than most Democratic candidates, man or woman. What do you think Kamala Harris and other Democrats can do to get a result like that?

Speaker 14 It's boring to say, but it is about the fundamentals. As I talk to young voters, we had historic high youth voter turnout in Michigan, where they had the best in the country in 2022.

Speaker 14 We were on campuses, we were engaging with young people. One of the things that we're trying to do is encourage more young people to produce content to talk to one another.

Speaker 14 I'm a lot closer to voters' ages than Donald Trump is, right?

Speaker 14 So maybe I'm a little more persuasive, but a Gen Z person talking to another Gen Z person is powerful in a way that my messaging on their behalf isn't.

Speaker 14 So that's why I think it's really important to stay focused on fundamental rights, LGBTQ rights, climate change, safe storage, like common sense gun safety laws, which we've gotten done in Michigan, and affordable housing.

Speaker 14 These are the economic issues that young people are worried about that we have delivered on in Michigan and that a Harris Walls administration I know will stay focused on too.

Speaker 6 If we wake up, look,

Speaker 6 you're doing everything you can to make sure we win Michigan, but it's close. If we wake up and we've lost Michigan, what do you think the reasons are?

Speaker 6 What are the places places where you're worried? There's so much enthusiasm now, which is a great change of pace. But where do you think we need to be concerned, keeping our eye on the ball?

Speaker 14 There is a lot of enthusiasm. I mean, I do want to bolster that point.
We are seeing people calling into our campaign headquarters all across the state saying, how do I volunteer?

Speaker 14 I mean, it is a dramatic shift, and that's really encouraging. But I know that our voter contact work has got to improve, frankly, and it is something that we've got to be on the doors.

Speaker 14 We've got to be connecting with people. You know, I won Michigan by almost 11 points.
We didn't write off any community.

Speaker 14 We didn't say, oh, that county looks red on this map, so let's not spend a lot of time there. No, we went in.

Speaker 14 When you lose by seven points instead of 11 points, over and over again in red counties, you drive up your margin in blue counties.

Speaker 14 That's how you win by 11 points and flip your legislature for the first time in 40 years. That's the kind of work that we are going to do going into this election.

Speaker 14 And I think not doing that would be a reason that we might fall short, and that's why I'm not going to let that happen.

Speaker 2 Michigan Senator Gary Peters said this week that he thinks Kamala Harris has differences with Joe Biden on Gaza and that she should speak publicly about those differences. What do you think?

Speaker 14 You know what, I think what Kamala Harris has already done has gone a long way toward acknowledging the pain that so many people are feeling.

Speaker 14 The only universal truth in this moment is that our Jewish community as well as our Arab and Palestinian and Muslim communities, they are not all one in the same and it's always important to highlight that.

Speaker 14 Everyone's hurting right now. Everyone wants the violence to stop, want the hostages returned.

Speaker 14 I think staying in that space, acknowledging the pain that people are feeling, and recommitting to trying to bring a cessation of the violence and return of the hostages and rebuilding the region is going to be really important.

Speaker 14 And she's doing that, and so is Tim Walls. And so big, big kudos to both of them.
I want them to spend a lot more time in Michigan with all of our communities.

Speaker 14 And I think that they will, and I know that they're resonating in a much more positive way.

Speaker 2 I want to talk about your book, True Gretsch. What really struck me is how candid and conversational it is.
You swear, you tell stories about getting drunk, about getting tattoos.

Speaker 2 What made you decide to write an interesting but potentially risky book as opposed to just a safe politician book?

Speaker 14 Well, I figured Christy Noam wrote one.

Speaker 2 Why can't I? And how many dogs? No animals were harmed in the making of your book. And you've got to do that.
None were executed. No goats even were executed in my books.
Okay, well, that's right.

Speaker 14 So, you know, the question I get the most is: how do I stay so positive when everything's so damn heavy? 28 recall attempts. You weren't counting, but I sure as had one.

Speaker 14 You know, a pandemic, a plot to kidnap and kill me, climate events. I mean,

Speaker 14 it's been crazy six years, and still I love my job. I ran for re-election.
People are like, why do you want to keep doing this? And that's what it is.

Speaker 14 These are 10 things I've learned in my life that I have used over these last six years to get through.

Speaker 14 And if I give you a laugh at my expense, or maybe there's a story of inspiration, or just some light reading I've accomplished my my goal in this heavy time.

Speaker 6 Yeah so there's sort of like a contradiction here right you talk about why you've outperformed other Democrats, you talk about getting practical, you talk about policy, but it's obviously more than that.

Speaker 6 There's a lot of Democrats out there who say like, oh they've been trying to do the exact same thing, make the exact same case. They don't do as well with people.
They don't persuade people.

Speaker 6 Put policy aside. What is it that you think Democrats fail to do to communicate with people, to be authentic with people that you seem to be able to do.

Speaker 14 You know, I really think, so one of the things I talk about in the book is the power of listening. It is really important, and it might sound like, you know, oh, it's what a lofty, wonderful thing.

Speaker 14 Like, shocker, Whitmer, that's a great lesson. Like, who doesn't know this? Most people don't listen very well, though.
In my first election, I got into all 83 counties.

Speaker 14 I asked people, if I'm lucky enough to get elected, what can I do that'll make your life better? And people said, fix the damn roads. I didn't come up with this.
I didn't poll test it.

Speaker 14 I didn't say, oh, I want to swear. No, it was just, this is how people talked about it.
But it was in a conversation with a woman in the Detroit Children's Hospital.

Speaker 14 And I said, you know, I asked her the same question. She's there, her son's in a brace.
Like, what can I do that will make your life better? She said, fix the damn roads.

Speaker 14 And I was shocked because I thought we talked about health care or child care or education. She wanted to talk about the roads.
And I said, tell me more. And she explained.

Speaker 14 You know, she was driving from Flint to Detroit, hit a pothole, it busted the rim on her wheel, sidelined her for a whole day, hundreds of bucks out of her pocket.

Speaker 14 She didn't see her kid in the hospital, paid for child care for kids that she couldn't spend time with either. And this was like rent.
It was child care. It was time with her kids.

Speaker 14 So it's like the fundamentals. And if I hadn't asked that follow-up question, if I hadn't asked in the first place, I might not know that this is something that's important to everyone.

Speaker 6 So you don't just wait for your turn to talk?

Speaker 6 Is that not how you do this?

Speaker 2 That is not how you do it. Did you catch any of that? That's why you're not running for office.

Speaker 14 It's novel, I know.

Speaker 2 How's the speech coming for tomorrow night? You're speaking at the convention.

Speaker 14 Good.

Speaker 14 Every night it gets a little bit shorter, though. These people talk too long.
What the hell?

Speaker 6 Everyone is talking way too long.

Speaker 6 They're talking too slow. Everybody is late, waiting for all the applause to die down.
People got to keep moving. This is on television.

Speaker 2 Agreed, man.

Speaker 14 So time me tomorrow and let me know how I rate.

Speaker 6 I want words per minute. I want everybody to pick it up.
Pick up.

Speaker 2 Give us a preview. What do you want to communicate tomorrow night?

Speaker 14 Well, tomorrow night's obviously about setting the stage for Kamala Harris, making sure that people know she and Tim Walls have lived normal, middle-class lives.

Speaker 14 They're just like us, and that other guy is not. So you'll hear me talk a little bit about that.

Speaker 2 She gets the assignment. Yeah.
Let's see.

Speaker 2 The assignment is making sure that people elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walls. That's the assignment of this week.
Boom. Great.

Speaker 6 What should we eat when we're in Ann Arbor?

Speaker 14 What should you eat when you're in Ann Arbor? I mean, Zingerman's is always, well, you know, my fave.

Speaker 2 Zingerman's. All right, man.
I love it. I love it.

Speaker 14 For the record, Tim Walls is not an asshole. That was a joke.

Speaker 2 We knew that. We knew that.
That's going to be

Speaker 14 a little time favorite people.

Speaker 2 You can try to walk it back.

Speaker 6 You can do clean up all you want.

Speaker 2 We all heard what you said. We just had Gavin Newsom on.
He said the same thing. He's like, everyone politicians say, oh, this guy's nice.
Tim Walls, really nice guy.

Speaker 2 Governor Gretchen Whitmer, thank you so much for coming back on a Pod Save America. I've been talking too long for five days in a row.
Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 2 That's our show for tonight, but we've got more from the DNC for our Friends of the Pod subscribers. Love it and Dan did some behind the scenes, and there's a new segment with Reid and Elijah,

Speaker 2 which I'm just going to let you. You have to subscribe to hear what it's called.

Speaker 6 I'll just tell you.

Speaker 6 I'll just tell you, I'll just tell you, you might not know this, but Reed,

Speaker 6 who helps produce this show, is reading every novel by Charles Dickens.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 2 Before he dies.

Speaker 6 Before he dies, which is how he describes it. And have you gone to Bleak House yet?

Speaker 3 He's finished Bleak House.

Speaker 2 He's finished. Really? He has two young children and works his ass off on this show.
Yeah, I don't think he's making a lot of progress.

Speaker 6 Honestly, I think he may not live long enough to finish all these fucking books.

Speaker 2 If you're going to be your regret, if you're a subscriber, these segments should be showing us

Speaker 2 the worst of times. The insane episode in your Pod Save America feed.
If you aren't a subscriber, head to cricket.com slash friends or sign up through the Apple Podcast app.

Speaker 6 You guys see that Mike Lindell argued with a child here?

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 clip it and send it to your uncle. We'll be back on the killing tomorrow with our reaction to the final night, thank God, of the DNC and Kamala Harris's big speech.

Speaker 6 All right, boys, get out the sleeping bags.

Speaker 2 Let's go home, guys.

Speaker 2 Let's get out of here.

Speaker 2 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.

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Speaker 2 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 2 Pod Save America is a crooked media production. Our producer is David Toledo.
Our associate producers are Saul Rubin and Farah Safari.

Speaker 2 Reed Cherlin is our executive editor and Adrian Hill is our executive producer. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

Speaker 2 Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer, with audio support from Kyle Seglu and Charlotte Landis. Writing support by Hallie Heford.
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Speaker 2 Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Phoebe Bradford, Joseph Dutra, Ben Hefcote, Mia Kelman, Molly Lobel, Kirill Pelavieve, and David Toles.

Speaker 2 Welcome back to Listen to Your Heart.

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