The Biden-Trump Polls are All Over the Place

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I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer.
On today's show, the Biden-Trump polls are all over the place. Joe Manchin, RFK Jr., and other third-party candidates are still flirting with bids that could tip the election to Trump.
And later, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown stops by to talk about the country's most-watched Senate race, the fight for reproductive rights, and how the city of East Palestine is recovering a year after the train disaster. But first, a new Washington Post poll out of South Carolina gives Donald Trump a 58 to 32 lead over Nikki Haley three weeks out from the primary.
But that's not stopping her, Dan. The latest fundraising numbers show her campaign entered 2024 with $14.6 million cash on hand.
Her super PAC has another $3.5 million. Her team argues that she has a path to the nomination through all the upcoming states that allow Democrats or undeclared voters to participate in the primary.
She's running a new series of ads about Trump and Biden titled Grumpy Old Men. And she's been on quite a media tour, everything from CBS This Morning to Fox & Friends to this Breakfast Club interview with Charlemagne the God, where she had this to say about Donald Trump.
Two more questions. How has Trump changed politics for the good and the bad? He's made it chaotic.
He's made it self-absorbed. He's made people dislike and judge each other.
he's left that a president should have moral clarity and know the difference between right or wrong. And he's just toxic.
I mean, he, you know, I think a lot of the things he broke needed to be broken, but he doesn't know how to fix things again. And it's not okay to just break.
You've got to fix it and make it better. Toxic.
Toxic. What do you think, Dan? Should we run a side hustle where we get Democrats to vote for Haley in these primaries just to keep things interesting or what? I said this to you last week.
I'm going to say it again. I am not getting on board with any plan that tries to convince people to vote for Nikki Haley over Joe Biden, which is what you're suggesting.
But, but, well, that's how it would work. That's a vote from Joe Biden that you're giving to Nikki Haley.
Oh yeah. Watch out.
Watch out. Dean Phillips is going to overtake him in South Carolina.
I mean, just like, look, I just like people who vote for Joe Biden. That's just me.
But that is a great answer from Nikki Haley. It is a great answer.
It is an answer that everything she should have been giving for the last year, all these Republicans have been giving. It's the kind of answer that you can build a campaign narrative on.
Now, that poll shows some real problems for Nikki Haley, right? Which is like this, there's so many ways to look at this, but I'll give you one. There are four subgroups in that poll that Nikki Haley is beating Donald Trump with.
One, college graduates. That's pretty good.
Two, people who identify as moderate or liberal. Three- The libs.
She's got the libs. She's got the libs.
People who think Joe Biden won the election fairly, and people who think abortion should be legal in almost every instance. That's her base, which is not a ...
There are not a lot of those folks in the Republican primary. Now, she has three weeks to change that dynamic.
Expectations are on her side. If she can actually come in a close second by improving significantly her performance among Republican voters, then she has an argument to her donors to keep funding her through Super Tuesday, which is 10 days after that.
It is just beyond wild that people who think Joe Biden won the 2020 election are just a tiny fraction of the Republican electorate. It's just un-fucking-real.
And the Democratic thing is hard too, because in 2012, when the last time there was a Republican primary all on its own, which is, even though there's, I was half kidding, there's technically a Democratic primary this time, only 2% of voters were Democrats. So you have to, we're probably behind the curve if we're trying to get a lot of Democrats to tip this thing for Nikki Haley.
What do you think about that media tour she's on? She also, by the way, just did an interview with Jake Tapper right before we recorded where she said that we will lose if we nominate Donald Trump and also hit him on how much money he's spent on legal fees. It's good she's doing it.
I wrote a little thing in this little newsletter we like to call the message box about lessons Democrats can learn for running against MAGA candidates from all the failures of the Republicans trying to beat Trump. And one of them is you have to compete with him for attention.
Throughout the entire primary, DeSantis, Haley, Scott, all of them just ceded the stage to Trump and let him dominate. And she's out there.
She's trying. She's working hard.
She's doing all these interviews. She's trying to say more provocative things.
She's trying to get attention and try to get in people's mind space. And that's what you have to do.
So it's the it's the right thing. The hard part for her is she's not really welcome on the MAGA media that is speaking to a lot of the base voters.
But Fox and Friends is good. CBS is good, particularly in South Carolina where the voters are older and they probably

see some of that stuff.

And so this is all,

um,

all this stuff is things she should have been doing a year ago,

but it's good.

She's doing it now.

I talked about this with Tommy and love it on Tuesday's pod,

but what do you think she's up to here?

Do you think she believes she can win?

Do you think she's just like, I want to be the runner up with some delegates just in case? What do you think's happening here? I think every presidential campaign involves a tremendous amount of self-delusion, right? You don't get in the race unless you think you can win and you know the odds just that almost every single person who's going to run is going to fail. But I don't know that it's as strategic as I'm going to accumulate enough delegates to be able to take on Trump because, I mean, theoretically, she knows what the rules are.
And if she does not perform well in Super Tuesday, she's going to get basically no delegates after that because almost all of the races after Super Tuesday transitioned to winner take all or winner take most. And so if Trump wins by one, he gets all the delegates.
He wins by 50, he gets all the delegates. And so she gets less, there's less value in coming in second in terms of delegates.
But I think it's, let's give this thing a shot. The memo they laid out with these 13 states that allow independents and Democrats, that's like a far-fetched plan, but it is a plan.
And so if you can improve your performance with Republicans, I think the odds of that are quite

long. But if she does, and she can combine that in those 13 states with a significant

independent turnout doing very well there, then maybe she can cobble together some wins. And then

you fight on to see what happens next, right? So it's like presidential primaries are a little bit like the NCAA tournament, which is just win in advance, win in advance. And she's, or at least, or in this case, come in a less distant second and maybe advance, which is kind of what the goal is here.
I think she probably, I mean, to your point about competing for attention with Donald Trump, I also think there's probably part of her that likes that she's getting some attention. Of course, she's a politician.
It's very hard for any Republican who's not named Donald Trump to ever get any attention. And now she's getting national attention, she's getting invited on all these shows, and whatever happens in 2024, then maybe she's thinking, I mean, I don't think she has a future in the Republican Party in 2028.
But maybe if if for some reason Donald Trump loses badly enough in 2024, even if he loses at all, even if he ends up going to jail, gets convicted, whatever might happen, you know, she could try to fight out again in 2028. I still don't think she'd have much of a chance with the base of the party the way it is right now, because it's still a MAGA base, even if there's no Donald Trump.
But that could be what she's thinking as well. Yeah, there is.
I mean, if she goes through this and makes the argument that Republicans will lose if they nominate Donald Trump and then Donald Trump loses, it is possible. I don't think it's likely, but it's possible.
There is sort of a reckoning like the Democrats had after they lost in 1988, the Republicans almost had after they lost in 2012. And the party starts thinking a little bit differently about the kind of candidates they need to nominate.
And she would potentially be well-positioned if there was some growing backbone in the non-MAGA part of the party. So play it out to the string.
She has the money to be in it. I think she is enjoying the attention, enjoying running against Trump.
So it really is play this till Super Tuesday and see what happens after that. And it's probably over at that point, but maybe not.
One more question for you. Okay.
Do you think there's a chance that if she keeps going down this path, keeps hitting Trump harder and harder, that when she eventually gets out of the race, she will – she's not going to endorse Joe Biden, obviously. But do you think there's a chance she might just say, I'm not endorsing, and I'm just walking away? I don't think there's much of a chance, but there's part of me that think it's greater than zero now.
I think if she believes her future is in Republican politics, she has to endorse Donald Trump.

Yeah.

You can be lukewarm in how you campaign for him.

You don't have to back him on – you don't have to spout 2020 election lies.

You don't have to support his future convictions or any of those things.

But to sit on the sidelines I think would forfeit her ability to run for president in the future if that's something she wants to do. Don't do it, Nikki.
Don't do it. Just step away.
I do think it, I mean, Sarah Longwell has been making this point as well, but I do think if she inevitably does endorse Donald Trump or say that she's going to vote for him after she said all these horrible things about him. It is somewhat damaging to Biden in the general because I think it does create a permission structure for a lot of these anti-Trump voters who have been with Haley to be like, oh, well, we voted for her.
We wanted her. We don't like Trump, but she's voting for Trump.
Maybe I need to just come home and vote for Trump as well. Yeah.
I think that's definitely true is that she would do. I mean, it's hard.
What does she really believe? Does she believe, you know, I think she believes she's better than Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but I think she also believes Donald Trump is better than Joe Biden. And so I think she does.
And I think, which is wild, but yeah. So Trump is reportedly, reportedly we could all guess, uh, extremely annoyed that Haley hasn't dropped out yet.
The Guardian reports that in one conversation, Trump used an epithet pejorative to women while describing her perceived disloyalty. So he called just a couple just a couple options there.
Doesn't really doesn't sound like him, but he's pissed that he has to spend time and money in South Carolina instead of focusing on Joe Biden. Money he may not have since his latest fundraising report shows his super PAC spent $30 million in legal fees to over 47 law firms and attorneys in just six months, which is at least 50% more than they spent on ads.
You don't usually see campaigns spending more on lawyers than ads,

but then again,

you usually don't see campaigns

where the candidate's facing 91 felony charges.

You think this is a problem for Trump

or is he going to have enough money?

I think he will probably have enough money

to run a race,

but he's not going to have as much money as he wanted

because he's going to keep giving it to lawyers

because his legal problems are not going to end

anytime soon.

At some point this spring, hopefully the January 6th case starts, he's still going to have to be dealing with both the Florida case in terms of legal fees, right? You're paying lawyers on retainer. You have lawyers filing motions, filing briefs, gathering evidence, also in the Fulton County case and the Florida case where he's being tried for stealing classified secrets.

So all of those costs are going to continue to accrue throughout the election.

And those are ads he won't be able to run, organizers he won't be able to hire, whatever

else he would spend money on.

But it comes out, money's not zero sum, but it's not entirely fungible either.

$30 million.

He's a real job creator.

He's really doing his part to support the economy. Yes.
He paid all these lawyers. It is wild.
It is wild. I also wonder if there's an argument that Democrats should be making that, hey, Donald Trump's out there, again, only cares about himself.
when you're donating to Donald Trump,

most likely you're donating,

especially if you're donating to one of these packs

that's spending money on the legal fees, you're just donating to help this guy defend himself against 91 felony charges. That's where your hard-earned money is going.
Donald Trump worth $3 billion, you know, allegedly, and he's asking you for money so that you can help pay for his legal fees. And I realize that the base is probably just like, yeah, well, he's our Jesus, so we'll do anything for him.
But it's fucking wild. I think there is an argument to make that this is yet another piece of evidence that Donald Trump is in this for himself, not for you.
I think harder to persuade don't the people writing these checks or putting their credit card information into these sketchy texts they're getting to buy that argument for two reasons one the big donors are buying access and they don't they don't care if their access check goes to donald trump's lawyer or to more mediocre probably ineffective tv ads they just want donald trump to know he did they he wrote them a check. The small dollar donors, like there was this CBS YouGov poll last year where they asked people about the indictments.
And a huge portion of voters who identify themselves as part of the MAGA movement, which I think is probably overlaps pretty nicely with people who are sending $10 to Donald Trump, view the indictments of Donald Trump as an attack on people like them. So this is like a righteous fight for them, and they're probably more than happy to fund it to help Donald Trump fight back against the deep state, the elites, big government, whatever else.
But for the broader electorate, I've more and more come to the conclusion that our best message is essentially our most true message, which is that Donald Trump is in this for himself to punish his enemies,

to reward his rich friends, and to avoid legal accountability. That's why he's doing this.

And this is another example of it. Yeah.
He doesn't really care about running for president. He cares about running from prison.
That's Donald Trump.

Put that on a t-shirt.

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All right. The general election polar coaster has begun.
I will use that to as a chance to plug Crooked's new podcast of the same name hosted by none other than Dan Pfeiffer. To hear all the good stuff, go sign up at crooked.com slash friends to be a friend of the pod subscriber and you'll get to hear Dan's Polar Coaster podcast.
When's the next episode, Dan? Next Thursday. Next Thursday.
A week from yesterday. A week from yesterday.
Today, we're recording this yesterday when you're listening to this. but a week from Thursday.
Listen to Polar Coaster. But since I'm an addict, we will talk a little bit about the polls today.
On Wednesday morning, we got a series of horrendous Bloomberg morning consult polls that show Trump leading in every swing state by anywhere from three to eight points. But then on Wednesday afternoon, Quinnipiac saved the day with a poll showing Biden opening up a 50 to 44 lead over Trump, which represents a five point swing towards Biden from their December poll.
But then, Dan, just before we started recording today, CNN dropped a real stinker. Trump 49, Biden 45.
But if you look at the polling average over the last week, you can definitely see evidence that Biden is doing a bit better against Trump. The trends are starting to go a little bit in Biden's direction.
But I don't know. Do you see any signal in all this noise or do I just need to go outside and touch some grass? Both, I think, is the right answer here.
Yeah, that is the right answer. I think if you at the most macro level, four months ago at the end of last year, sort of from the basically beginning of the fall to the end of the year, every poll that came out was bad for Biden.
He was losing in almost all of them. All the numbers were bad.
Trump seemed to be gaining strength. In the last month, we're starting to get a handful of polls that are good for Biden.
Now, which polls are right, which polls are wrong? I can talk a little about why there's a gap between these polls. But the fact that we're seeing more good polls for Biden and the polling average is narrowing a bit, it's just a sign that I think at bare minimum, Biden has stabilized from where he was last fall.
and maybe the combination of improved views of the economy, which we're seeing in some of these polls, the percentage of people who have a good opinion in the economy is inching up, I think is the right way to put it. The consumer confidence numbers have gone way up in the University of Michigan survey.
And so it's possible that as prices come down, Donald Trump gets in the news more. Sort of the election is clarifying people's minds, and that's helping Biden a little bit.
More work to do, obviously, and it's still very early. I tried to figure out why these polls are so different from each other, and there are many reasons, but I'll give you the shortest version here.
In the Quinnipiac poll where Biden is winning by a decent margin, he is up 12 with independence. In the CNN poll, where he is down by four, he's losing by independence by four.
In the Bloomberg swing state poll, he's losing independence by eight. So you have, between Quinnipiac and the Bloomberg morning consult swing state poll, you have a 20-point swing among independents.
And that sort of explains the gap between those polls. Now, we have no idea which one of those is right.
There's a little apples to oranges depending on voter screen and how you do it. But it's just, I think all of this boils down to something we knew to be true last fall, we knew to be true now, and we assume will be true next fall, which is that this is going to be an incredibly close, very winnable election that will come down to 50,000 votes across six states, right? That's kind of what we're looking at.
And what the polls say now

doesn't really change that dynamic.

They really are all over the place though

in a way that I can't remember seeing in 2020.

The other interesting thing about the Quinnipiac poll

is he's winning Democrats like 96 to two in that poll.

And I haven't seen that kind of margin with Democrats in other polls.

So that would be good news in addition to what you mentioned about independence. And one reason to find hope in that Quinnipiac poll is it does show his approval rating is 41.55, which isn't good.
But the fact that he has a 41-55 approval rating in the same poll that he's winning 50 to 44 over Trump is the kind of outcome you would hope for with his approval as low as it is and as low as it has been for the last two years now. Yeah, I firmly believe that Joe Biden can win reelection with a 41% approval rating.
I'm not sure he can win it with a 38% approval rating, but the low 40s, given how people feel about this election, rise in polarization and negative partisanship, that 41, 42 is like 46, 47 was four or five years, a couple election cycles ago, and like 50 was in the early 2000s. It's just the universe of people you can get to say they approve of a candidate has come down.
And so 41, I think would be like, if you're there, you're in the ballgame. I'll also say that we really need more swing state polls.
We've had a dearth of swing state polls this season so far. And obviously those Bloomberg Morning Console polls are terrible, but like there were a few Pennsylvania polls out recently where Biden's in the lead in Pennsylvania.
He's had a few good Wisconsin polls and we haven't had a lot of Arizona polls at all. Haven't had a could use a lot more Michigan polls, too.
So, you know, I think we probably got to we got to wait and see to get some high quality swing state polling to see exactly where we are right now, at least. My one tip for people who listen to Polar Coaster know this, but the number that I would look for in polls where they give you the cross tabs is share of Biden's 2020 vote for a share, Trump's share of his 2020 vote.
In every poll dating back to that New York Times, Siena poll that kicked off this whole panic attack, Trump has had about like a six point advantage on that. And that's a better number for me than Democrats because it encompasses the independents who came to Biden in 2020 and those Trump Biden voters that we have to win back over.
And so if I didn't see that in the Quinnipiac poll where Biden was winning, but that's the one where I always look for is it is Biden making gains there because that's what he has to do to win is to, and if he just gets up to the same number as Trump from his other 2020 vote, then Biden will almost certainly win because he won in 2020. Right.
One thing you notice in all these polls is that the race gets a lot closer and often better for Trump when they ask people about potential third-party candidates. Big question there, of course, is which candidates will end up on the ballot in which states.
CNN just ran a long piece about no labels. TLDR is that the organization seems to be a bit of a mess.
Maryland's former Republican governor, Larry Hogan, reportedly left, not because he's planning to run for president, which was the original speculation, but because he was pissed at no labels for not sharing info about their 2024 plans. Our good pal Joe Manchin is also annoyed with no labels for some of the same reasons, says it's sort of a mess.
They don't know what they're doing, but he's still flirting with a run for president because he reportedly views himself as having, quote, national icon potential. Sure, sure.
And then there's RFK Jr., who, because he's having trouble getting on the ballot in states other than Utah, that's the only state where he's on the ballot right now, he now says he's considering running as the nominee of the Libertarian Party, which is on the ballot in every swing state. The darling of the anti-vax movement has about $5.4 million cash on hand, but his super PAC has nearly $15 million cash on hand thanks to a $15 million donation from banking heir Tim Mellon, who has also donated $10 million to, wait for it, Donald Trump.
So I feel like these third party candidacies are the source of constant anxiety, mostly because they could tip the race to Trump, but also because we still have no idea in what states they'll be on the ballot. What's your take on the latest round of news, where the candidates are, what the ballot access situation is, and when we're gonna know what's happening here? Well, it's all very confusing because we keep getting national polls testing all five candidates against each other, but they're not going to all be on all 50 ballots.
And so that is very confusing. It's also confusing to test when we're testing swing state polls when we don't know which states they're going to be on the ballot.
I think the short version here is that Jill Stein, we know that the Green Party nominee, likely to be Jill Stein, is going to be on the ballot in the very same states that she helped tip the election to Donald Trump in 2016. RFK Jr., we don't know where he's going to be on the ballot yet.
$15 million in a super PAC and $5 million in his own account is enough to get on the ballot in a couple of places. It's not enough to run a 50-state ballot effort, but if he wants to get on the ballot in, I don't know, to pick six random states that sound a lot like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, then yeah, then maybe he could possibly do that.
On a macro level, what is problematic here is pretty simple, which is Donald Trump has never gotten 47% of the national popular vote in either of his two presidential elections. And you can win a five-way race at 47%.
You cannot win a two-way race at 47% because it has to add up to 100. And that doesn't work that way.
And even if you look at this, in Pennsylvania in 2020, Donald Trump did one point better than he did in Pennsylvania in 2016. But he won in 16 and lost in 20 because in 16, about 3% of the vote went to Gary Johnson, Libertarian, and Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate.
And so these candidates just lower the threshold for a candidate who has never proven to get above 47%. Joe Biden has proven he can get above 50% in some of these states and nationally.
And so that obviously just strategically hurts Joe Biden. It's like pure math.
Yeah. I mean, the no labels thing, I could see a scenario where it's just, it's such a mess and they can't because they need a Republican and a Democrat.
So they need a unity ticket. They have been telling people that they want the Republican at the top of the ticket, which has pissed off a lot of potential Democratic options for that candidacy.
And Manchin's basically like he told CNN, the reporting in CNN was he thinks that they're sort of a mess, but that he'd use them as a ballot access organization because they're getting on the ballot in a whole bunch of places. And then he'd just bring in his own staff.
I don't know. I don't.
Do you think Manchin does it? I would be surprised. But what do I know? I mean, who am I to question a self-proclaimed national icon? That is someone who spent way too much time on the Sunday shows thinking that he's a national icon.

Although he's traveling around the country now, so now he's hearing from people.

He's going to events.

People are like, please, please run Joe Manchin.

We're centrist just like you.

So he's probably hearing all the wrong things.

But I don't know.

It seems like No Label's plan was originally to have an in-person convention. Then they were going to do a virtual convention.
Now they're not sure if they're going to do a virtual convention. But they keep saying that by mid-March, that's when they will decide at some convention or decide what the potential unity ticket would be.
But we still haven't heard any reports that there are actual Republican and Democratic candidates seriously looking at this or seriously being considered by no labels. So that it's still sort of a big question mark with the no labels thing.
I mean, their ballot access operation is well funded and well executed. They're on the ballot in a bunch of places.
Now, a lot of those places are states that we're not overly worried about in the general election, like Hawaii, for example. The ones I think to worry about are they're on the ballot in Arizona, Nevada which would be enough to fuck up the election.
Maine which splits its electoral vote so they could always win the second congressional district which is more conservative than Maine. They could screw things up there.
So those are the states to worry about. I worry about Oregon too because they're on the ballot in Oregon and Nader always fucked up Oregon for Gore.
Gore was campaigning in Portland right before the election in 2000, which is not a thing a Democrat wants to be doing. And it has a history of independent candidates.
We had this independent candidate who ran for governor, who didn't win, but took a big chunk of vote. And so just across the board, not great.
You're exactly right. Where the no labels thing falls apart is can they get people to actually join this effort who seem credible.
And it's just worth noting that this no labels thing is sketchy as hell.

They want to run a presidential candidate, but they refuse to declare themselves as a political party because for legal purposes, if they were to do that, they'd be required to disclose their donors.

And they want to be able to fund this whole thing, all this ballot access, all this research, all this messaging without ever having to say which billionaires wrote these checks to them. And that is just the height of corrupt sketchiness.
Well, and also they know that it's a messaging and political problem because a successful third party candidacy is going to be like raging against the establishment or I'm independent of all the moneyed interests in Washington and no labels is the opposite of that. So anyone they put up is going to be like very establishment, well funded by a lot of billionaires and a lot of corporate interests likely.
So, you know, that's going to be a problem for them. Cornel West is tested in a lot of these polls, but he is currently on the ballot nowhere because remember he was flirting with the Green Party nomination and then decided to just do an independent candidacy.
So, so far there is no Cornel West isn't on the ballot anywhere. And the thing to worry about with RFK Jr.
and the Libertarian Party flirtation is they are on the ballot in every single swing state. Libertarian Party is on the ballot in most states in the country, but definitely all the swing states.
Their deal is they have a convention in May where the delegates to the convention pick the candidate. And there's already been, bet you didn't know this, a primary season going on.
There was an Iowa primary for the Libertarian party. So they have a bunch of candidates running already.
So I don't know how RFK junior does this, but I do think if somehow he convinces all the delegates at the Libertarian convention to make him the nominee of the Libertarian party, that would be worrisome just because he has the name recognition. He has a super PAC that's now funded by some Trump donors.
And yeah, that would worry me. You want to hear an RFK stat that would really worry you?

Well, this is more than just RFK. So this is a third-party stat that should scare the crap out

of us. And this is courtesy of John De La Volpe, the pollster who's been on this podcast before.

In the Quinnipiac poll among 18 to 29-year-olds in a head-to-head between Biden and Trump,

Biden's winning by 24. When you test the five-way with Biden, Trump, Kennedy, West, and Stein, Biden's lead drops to plus two.
Wait, I'm sorry. Quinnipiac poll? Among 18 to 29-year-olds.
Was that the one that we were just talking about? Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Because the lead is smaller in a five-way. And the ballot access question is the big question with RFK Jr.
for sure. I will say that there's a lot happening underneath with RFK Jr.
He is making the rounds. He's built a support network among these rich tech folks, like the all-in podcast type world.
But also, my wife pointed this out to me the other day, which is he's built a support network among these rich tech folks, like the all in podcast type world. But also he, my wife pointed this out to me the other day, which is he's constantly doing interviews with like wellness podcasts and influencers all the time, talking about things that are not anti-vax, although that does come up, but like our food system and how people are being poisoned by chemicals and all this other stuff.
And he like, there is is a, you know, it's just something to watch. And there's going to have to be an effort if he does get ballot access to really define him for voters.
Because in a world in which a lot of people are unhappy with the choices at the top of the ballot, he becomes a vehicle for that anti-establishment vote. Yeah, it's something to watch.
And hopefully we will know what's going on. I mean, we will know what's going on probably in the next couple of months because at some point we get into deadlines.
Okay, a few quick notes before we go to break. On last week's episode of Pod Save the People, DeRay interviewed Deputy Commerce Secretary Don Graves about President Biden's economic record and how to push back on the Biden haters in your life.
Check out this great conversation and more episodes of Pod Save the People wherever you get your podcasts. And on a special bonus episode of Strict Scrutiny that is out today, the host talked to E.
Jean Carroll and her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, about their big victory holding Donald Trump accountable in court. Here's a clip.
Can you give our listeners a sense of just how, outside of the band of normal defendant behavior, the behavior of Donald Trump during this trial was. In any trial, someone behaving the way Donald Trump behaved, making nasty comments to his lawyer, shaking his head.
When we were picking the jury, one of the questions was, who believes that the 2020 election was stolen? He raised his hand. Oh, my God.
We're your podcasts. When we come back, Dan talks to Senator Sherrod Brown.
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however small? And how can we find the kind of hope that can sustain our work in difficult times?

Listen to new episodes of Assembly Required every Thursday on Amazon Music. Joining me now is the senior senator from the great state of Ohio, Sherrod Brown.
Senator, welcome back to Potsdam. You were going to say great senator from the, you were going to say great senator.
I think that was implied by senior senator. And then you didn't say that.
Okay, go ahead. I guess great and senior senator from the great state of Ohio, Sherrod Brown.
Senator Brown, welcome back to Pod Save America. Dan, good to be back.
So we're recording this interview a few days before the one-year anniversary of the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. I know you have spent a lot of time with the people of that community, working on what happened there, working on the response.
Can you tell us what things are like on the ground a year later? Yeah, I've been to East Palestine eight times, meeting with all kinds of people affected, meeting with farmers, meeting with small business people, meeting with people at a health center, meeting with people just generally walking the streets. And people, my job for this last year is two things.
One is to help people get their lives back to normal. And that's helping them on testing the water, helping them on making sure their food is safe, helping them get the kind of help from Norfolk Southern, which they promised and have entirely delivered on, and to make sure this doesn't happen again.
We have seen in the last year, in about the last year, we've seen in just my state alone, derailments in Sandusky and Springfield and Ravenna and, well, East Palestine, obviously, a couple others around the state. We've also seen the railroads in their arrogance not keep up, not maintain their bridges and tracks that they own all over the state.
So you'll see in Cleveland or you'll see in Butler County, pieces of bridge fall down on the road where cars pass underneath because the railroads aren't investing the way they should. And they've been a powerful interest group for a hundred years.
I mean, they've been railroads and Wall Street and coal and oil companies, some of the most powerful interest groups in the country forever. And that's why we haven't been able to get this bill passed.
Yeah, so I want to ask you about that. Tell us a little bit about the bill you worked on with Senator Vance and what exactly is holding it up and what the prospects are for possible passage in the near term.
I think we're going to get it passed. I've been in enough fights here to restore pensions for people who lost, because of Wall Street greed, lost their pensions, 100,000 union workers.
It took us five or six years. Child tax credit took us even longer than that, and it changed people's lives, and we're doing it again.
So I'm not giving up on this. I'm hopeful it passes in the next two or three weeks.
I'm hopeful it'll pass in the House. We're doing everything we can.
The problem in the House is the railroad lobby is really close to the Speaker of the House. So we know that, and we've got to overcome that.
Primarily the bill, these trains go through towns, and literally millions of Ohioans in a state of 12 million, Dan, as you know, live fairly near a railroad track. My wife and I live maybe 300 yards from a railroad track in Cleveland.
So these trains pass by all the time. Nobody really knows what cargo they're carrying.
They don't have to register. They don't have to notify the state or the community when they pass through carrying liquid natural gas or some kind of chemicals that they carried in East Palestine.
So if there's a derailment, everybody has to flee. Everybody has to move, at least temporarily, until they find out what's in the train.
So there's that problem there. The railroads haven't implemented the safety devices that they could in terms of detection of heat in the wheel bearings.
And the railroads are most bizarre of all. The railroads are insisting that they should only have to have one engineer on these trains.
These trains are two, two and a half miles, sometimes three miles long. They carry, sometimes they pull 200 or more cars.
And I asked the CEO of CSX when he came to see me, I said, did you fly up here? And he said, yeah. And I said, did you look in the cockpit? Was there one pilot or two? I mean, nobody, you wouldn't get on a plane with one pilot.
And this railroad should be no different in terms of public safety. So we're fighting on that.
We're going to win. The public overwhelmingly is with us on this.
But frankly, I mean, every Democrat's going to vote for it. We got to get 10 Republicans and we keep pushing for that.
The White House announced that President Biden is going to make this long-awaited visit to East Palestine next month. What do you hope to accomplish with his presence there? Well, I hope that he calls for and pushes and gets the administration to do regular sort of baseline safety checks to begin with in terms of health care.

We know that, I mean, I met dozens of people who had pretty bad-looking rashes on their

arms and their necks and faces, in some cases, from ingesting this toxic, whatever it was,

stuff that people didn't really know.

I want to see what happens longer term for people there. I want the president to make sure we do regular water testing and soil testing, farmland and in town.
I want the president mostly to listen to what people have to say. I mean, what I was able to do in my eight trips there is bring information back to pass this bill to help them in a variety of ways to get EPA and FDA to respond.
One thing we recently found out was that a number of people who have been, who have gotten reimbursement or at least some payment in dollars from Norfolk Southern, that they might be hit with a tax bill. So we, the bill that passed last night, overwhelming bipartisan vote in the House, included a provision that the dollars they got from Norfolk Southern to East Palestine won't be taxed.
It's not a big issue nationally like the child tax credit or the R&D tax break, but it's a really big issue in Eastern Ohio. You brought up the child tax credit, the bill that passed last night.
I know you worked for a long time on the child tax credit. It passed the House.
Now there's reports that Senate Republicans may be the problem here. What are the prospects for getting this bill through the Senate quickly?

Well, it passed in the House with 370 votes, I think. Every House member in Ohio except one voted for it, so it's got really good bipartisan support.

Corporate America wants it because it will mean jobs for small businesses and research and development and keeping those jobs in the United States, keeping the intellectual property, if you will, in the United States from that R&D. And the families of 575,000 children, 150,000 black children in Ohio will benefit from this.
It's a big deal. The Wall Street Journal's opposed it, of course, but it's got very broad support.
And I think that senators will listen of both parties, will listen the way House members of both parties listened. That's good.
That's great. It would be a huge accomplishment to get something done in this election year with this Republican House.
So that's a big deal. Yeah.
six months ago, nobody thought we'd get a tax bill. And what happened was a number of us encouraging Democratic colleagues when business comes in and says they want the R&D tax credit that we said every time, you know, I'm for it because I think it does help business growth.
I think it helps entrepreneurs. I think it helps keep these jobs in the US.
But the answer from all of us over time, and Ron Wyden really led on this, was if you want that tax break, you've got to support the child tax credit. Otherwise, nothing's going to happen.
And over time, we build up enough interest in a tax bill and enough interest across party lines from the child tax credit. It's really impressive stuff.
Maybe in less optimistic Capitol Hill news, a lot of your colleagues were working on a border security bipartisan deal that was hopefully going to allow Congress to pass aid for Ukraine and Israel. That seems to have hit the skids in the Senate.
What do you see happening there? And if a border security deal is not passed, do you see any path for aid for Ukraine to get through this year? I don't give up easily, as I said in the last question. I've watched Senator Langford and Senator Murphy, a Republican from Oklahoma Democrat from Connecticut, sort of assiduously go through this and make this border agreement work.
I think they essentially have a deal. I can't imagine that the House is so dysfunctional that they would turn their back on it after demanding we won't do anything else until you do the border.
I would say presidents of both parties have failed on the border. We haven't done what we need to do.
Part of it is sending enough resources there at the points of entry to keep the fentanyl out. And most of the people bringing fentanyl out are American citizens going back and forth across the border.
We need to enforce those rules and laws. We have better detection equipment than we've ever had to find this stuff.
It's small quantities of poison that can kill thousands of people, as you know, Dan. But we do that right.
And I mean, I just can't imagine they're going to continue to block that when they've been calling out for that. And the pressure from internationally, the pressure from people that care about our national security and Ukraine.

I mean, what people don't think about, I'm not sure that we all, many people in this country pay enough attention to history. But if we allow Russia to overrun Ukraine, it means they're right up against the border of a NATO country.
And you know, in your years in the Obama administration, we all know they're paying attention to this, that if NATO's ever attacked, every country has got us in troops. And that's a really scary thought of a land war.
We've already had, we have right now the biggest land war in Europe since World War II. And we just, that is just lunacy.
So I think cooler heads prevail ultimately. We're doing it in the Senate.
A number of Senate Republicans are really strong on this. McConnell wants to do this on the border.
And all of us know this is a major national security issue all the way around. You're running for reelection in Ohio, a state that has been difficult for Democrats in recent cycles, although you won relatively handily in 2018.
Your campaign launched your first ad this morning. Talk to me a little bit how you plan to run for re-election in Ohio in a year with Donald Trump or a Republican at the top of the ballot.
I run for office the way I always have, and it's really about what we do and what we have accomplished. I wear in my lapel a depiction of a canary in a birdcage given to me in a workers' Memorial Day rally some 25 years ago.
The mine workers took the canary down in the mines. If the canary was on his own, he had no union strong enough or no government that cared enough to protect him.
And so it reminds me, always reminds me of whose side I'm on. I've worn this pen, as I said, for 25 years.
When you come to the Senate, they give you a really nice looking, cool, expensive looking piece of jewelry. And I wore that for about a week and I took it off and put the canary pen back on because it really does keep me focused on workers, whether you punch a clock or swipe a badge, whether you work for tips, whether you're working in an office as a data entry person.
It doesn't matter what you do. You're contributing to society.
You ought to be paid. And if you love this country, you fight for the people who make it work.
And it's only whose side are you on. And I don't look at politics as sort of this left or right on the spectrum.
I look at it as whose side are you on. And it means taking on the drug companies and bringing the price of drugs down.
It means taking on Wall Street and making them accountable on trade agreements and on what they did on pensions. It means taking on interest groups.
That means taking on the railroads and the abuse and the damage they did to a community in my state, and we can't let them do it again. It's pretty simple, frankly.
Obviously, the economy is always a top issue, but people's frustration with the economy was incredibly higher over recent years, particularly in the 2022 election with inflation going up. There have been some signs in consumer confidence and maybe in some polling that shows that the outlook is brightening a little bit.
What are you hearing from Ohioans about how they feel about the economy right now? Well, there's always concern's always concern about the price of things. And the price is higher than it was three years ago.
I hear people say inflation has become lower, and it is, but they also, people are concerned with prices. And it's clear to me that when you go to the grocery store, if you go to Dave's supermarket, a union supermarket in Cleveland, you're paying higher prices in large part because you're paying for stock buybacks and you're paying for executive bonuses and compensation.
I mean, that's what drove prices more than anything was corporate greed. Things as we came out of the pandemic, input costs were a little bit up, but big corporations, especially transportation companies and meatpacking companies and drug companies and oil companies use that to raise their prices.
And it really was predatory practices by large corporations that contributed so much to this. So that's why you go after the drug companies to bring drug prices down.
You go after the insurance companies and the oil companies, and we'll see a better country as a result. Do you get the sense that people are feeling a little bit better about the economy as prices have come down some, even if they're still higher than they were? Yeah, I think people are feeling better.
But I also see, I mean, I walked a picket line in Toledo back during the strike, the Stellantis, the old Chrysler plant. It's called Stellantis now.
And as I'm walking the picket line, I'm meeting people that just started working. I mean, some were new workers.
Some had been there 20 years. But the CEOs were making literally 800 times what an entry-level worker Chrysler was making.
So prices are still too high, but prices are still too high in large part because of corporate greed. And there are not enough around here that take that on.
And people always know I'll take them on, whether it's a bad trade agreement that costs jobs in my hometown of Mansfield or Springfield or Akron, or whether it's drug companies overcharging people, or whether it's banks and their junk fees that cost people a whole lot of money. Do you have some legislative or policy proposals that you're pushing to tackle to make it harder for these corporations to be so greedy? Well, first of all, on the one end of it, that's what the child tax credit is about to make it easier for large swaths of people in my state, particularly people with kids, but beyond that, to be able to deal with those prices.
It means a better federal tax policy. It means what we've done on drug prices that we've limited the cost of insulin to $35 per month.
We've limited the out-of-pocket cost for seniors to $2,000 for the year. We've also gone after stock buybacks with a stock buyback tax, which probably will be enough, high enough that people will simply not, that some of the companies won't do these stock buybacks.
One of the other things we've done is taking on landlords. Increasingly in our cities, and not just cities, we've seen kind of Wall Street predators come up and buy lots of homes, raise rentals, and essentially not keep these properties up.
But those companies all get to deduct their mortgage the way you do in your personal home, Dan. So we will take that, the way we will do this predatory lending act is to stop them from doing that and making it much less likely they're coming into our cities to do that.
You have, there's a Republican primary, folks running against, running for the opportunity to hopefully be beaten by you. The one thing that they all have in common is very extreme positions on abortion.
Several of them support bans with no exceptions, either for rape or incest. Talk to me a little bit about the role you think abortion is going to play in this campaign, especially given the response in the Ohio constitutional amendment last year.
Yeah. The entire Republican Party now in Ohio is pretty much for a national abortion ban.

They passed a terrible six-week abortion ban. They called the heartbeat bill overwhelmingly in the legislature.
Then Ohioans fought back. We got 700,000 people signed petition to go to the ballot for a constitutional amendment for abortion rights.
we then saw that

then the Secretary of State

and the legislature

tried for a constitutional amendment for abortion rights. We then saw that then the Secretary of State and the legislature tried to change the rules, one, making it harder to vote, second, to change the threshold instead of 50% plus one, to carry a ballot issue, making it 60%.
We defeated that in a special election in August decisively. Then in November, Ohio passed a constitutional amendment, as you mentioned, 13 points, passed it by 13 points.
Now, when Roe was overturned, my three opponents and a number of others celebrated the overturning of Roe and then began to pass more and more restrictive legislation. Last November, we blew a hole in that by passing the constitutional amendment for abortion rights.
All three of my Republican opponents, one of them will come out of the March primary in a couple of months as the nominee, but all three of them are for a national abortion ban. So it's not going to be perhaps the most salient issue we talked about, but it's going to be the contrast will be clear.
And, you know, all three of them are kind of running from it. They don't sort of know what to do.
They're talking about whatever they're talking about is women don't trust them. And it's clear that this contrast is clear.
They're for a national abortion ban. I've my entire career, my entire life been supportive of women's rights.
In the end, they don't want, in the end, it shouldn't be politicians in Columbus that make these decisions. It should be women and their doctors.
It's really clear. It's really easy to explain.
They can dance all they want. This contrast is clear.
And there's no way Americans want a national. Ohioans may be a more conservative state than some, but Ohioans don't want a national abortion ban.
Not to toss you the softest softball of all times, but we don't keep the Senate without winning your seat. And fair to say that if we do not do that and do well in these 2024 elections, that national abortion ban that your opponents support has a very real chance of becoming the law of this land if Republicans have control of government, right? I'm just trying to make the – for our listeners who are not in Ohio, I want them to understand why your re-election is so important.
Yeah, well, thank you for that. That's not the softest ball.
I could give you some others, but that's not bad. I mean, it really is clear that when this passed, again, by 13 points, not two or three, when it passed by 13 points, the immediate reaction of legislative leaders, these guys, almost all guys who think that they know best, the immediate reaction was we got to find a way around this.
We got to find a way to make this not count. We've got to find something in the Constitution.
Already for the November election, the Secretary of State changed the ballot language. They're supposed to write a summary of the ballot language.
His actually was longer than the ballot language submitted, so it wasn't a summary at all. So they've tried to do anything to play to their extremist far-right base, and it hasn't worked, and they're going to keep trying.
And I don't have a lot. I mean, I am pretty certain if they win this race and they beat Tester and they win a couple other races that they are going to continue to try for a national abortion ban.
I mean, it's clear that's their goal. They want to ban it in Ohio.
Every state they get an opportunity, they ban it. Really no exceptions.
Maybe they sometimes will say exception, but frankly, they want no exceptions. They want a six-week ban.
They want that everywhere. And that's one of the reasons I'm going to win is that women in my state don't trust them.
Women in my state, men in my state too, think that this is a decision between a woman and her doctor, not a bunch of politicians in Columbus. Senator Sherrod Brown, thank you so much for joining us.
Good luck out there. And I'm sure we'll talk to you again before November.
Dan, thanks. Good to be with you.
Thanks to Sherrod Brown for joining us today. Everyone have a great weekend and we'll talk to you next week.
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