DeSantis DeShakeUp

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New tonight at 11 on Comedy Central and streaming next day on Paramount+. Welcome to Pod Save America.
I'm Jon Favreau. I'm the bar reader of these two Oppenheimers, Jon Lovett.
I'm Tommy Vitor. It's great to be back, guys.
Tommy, welcome back. Hey, Tommy.
I missed you. It's nice to see you.
He was not here last week. I was not here last week.
I just talked about it so much? Yeah, it was double your own voice. Sounded great.
On today's show, Ron DeSantis gives us the first campaign shakeup of 2024. Joe Biden gets good news on fundraising and the economy.
RFK Jr. is caught on tape at his infamous fart dinner saying COVID may have been targeted to spare the Jews.
What a sentence. And later, I'm joined by MoveOn's Rana Epting and Third Ways Matt Bennett to talk about the diverse coalition that's trying to stop no labels from a third party bid that could elect Donald Trump.
But first, there were two events over the weekend and some new fundraising disclosures that have made it very difficult to argue that the Republican nomination is anything but Donald Trump's to lose. You say with a little sort of, I don't know, sadness in your voice or something.
The criminal, well, the whole thing is sad. The criminal defendant frontrunner was the only major candidate to skip a big evangelical event in Des Moines.

But he did get some help from Tucker Carlson, who emceed the event fresh off his very friendly interview with self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate, recently indicted for rape and human trafficking. That interview was fucking wild, by the way.
I don't know if anyone caught it on Tucker's Twitter show. I absolutely did not.
Yeah, sort of missed that. During my vacation.
Missed that. I watched Black Mirror.
Talk about infuriating things. It's pretty bad.
Was he entertained in a jail cell? I think he's under house arrest in Romania somewhere. Anyway, great.
Tucker tore into Mike Pence and grilled Tim Scott and Nikki Haley over their opposition to Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, Trump and some other candidates spoke in Miami to Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA,

a group so far right that the crowd booed Fox News, heckled other Republican candidates who spoke,

and gave Trump 85.7% of the vote in a straw poll.

Nail-biter.

Talk about Putin. Those are Putin numbers right there.

Trump focused his remarks on Ron DeSantis. Let's listen.

We lead the field by 50 points among young voters. Think of that.
With Trump at 64 percent and a gentleman named Ron DeSanctimonious at 14 percent. He's at 14 percent.
And I don't know why he's not here this couple of days, but he should be here. The sanctimonious and his establishment handlers are wasting such precious time and resources to divide the party.
They're dividing the party. Although he's dropping so quickly, he's probably not going to be in second place much longer.
Not only does it seem like there were no consequences for Trump skipping a major evangelical event in Iowa, he seemed to get much better coverage than any of his competitors coming out of the weekend. What were your takeaways from the two events, Tommy? So my big picture takeaway, I watched all of the Iowa, the Bob Vander Plaats event in Iowa.
Making fun of you for watching Dr. Trudor Show for seven minutes.
Not to brag. This guy's just mainlining right-wing nonsense during the weekend.
In fantasy, he tuned in to see Nikki Haley, and he just had to watch the rest of it. I caught Tim Scott.
That's how I get you. It used to be that candidates would go to Iowa, talk to local activists and press, create some local buzz, right? And that, you know, you get a polling bump in Iowa, it creates this groundswell of support that gives you a national narrative bump, right? And maybe you do better nationally.
That was sort of how Jimmy Carter did well in Iowa. Obama, Mike Huckabee won Iowa back in 2008.
People forget. I know you didn't.
Not me. Not us.
Mike Huckabee. To me, watching this event showed me how that order is flipped and how now the national narrative has completely changed the early state campaigns.
We heard about this from Democratic candidates in 2020 as well. But this was this big cattle call event in Iowa run by a conservative activist named Bob Vander Plaats.
Tucker Carlson moderated it. The Blaze was their media sponsor.
I didn't hear a single Iowa-specific question. There was nothing about farm subsidies.
There was nothing about ethanol. They barely even talked about abortion or gay rights or things you'd expect Christian conservatives to talk about.
Also, at abortion, Kim Reynolds signed the six-week abortion ban at the event. Yeah, exactly.
And Mike Pence tried to bring it up, and Tucker basically scoffed at him and changed the subject. It was very intense.
So instead, it's Tucker asking about things like, was January 6th an insurrection? Should electronic voting machines be trusted or banned? All this Ukraine stuff. He asked Ron DeSantis about Red Tide in Florida.
He also asked Asa Hutchinson if he'd been vaccinated and whether they would pardon Julian Assange. So it was just, it was like bizarro world.
In addition to the six-week abortion ban that Kim Reynolds signed, Trump is apparently now attacking her on Truth Social because she hangs out with DeSantis too much. So it's just like it sort of upended the way the early states normally work in the process to me.
That was my takeaway. Oh, yeah.
You missed the Trump attacks, the governor of the first state to caucus cycle last week where he just went on a tear. He really got mad.
So DeSantis did have have one comment on abortion and what he said was about his six-week ban if i had a chance to do it again i do it every day of the week and twice on sunday which is just okay well there's another perfect quote to put in an ad that will be devastating for him in the future but he's so desperate to try to get some kind of traction he's trying to find something he can do. And it's ironic that it would hurt him so much in the general, that quote, because it was seen as a subtle hit on Trump because Trump said, I don't think that was a mistake.

Like, I don't we follow this for a living.

I couldn't even follow why.

I didn't know it was a subtle.

I didn't even understand that it was a subtle hit on Trump.

It was.

I think he was trying to duck the question because the question was, would you do a national six week ban? And he didn't say yes or no. But then he said that quote, which is just as bad.
Well, this is why like this is why Pence is like he was so indignant after he's like, oh, you know, the Tucker Carlson kind of had him on the ropes. And it's like, you know, Pence is going there to try to distinguish himself on abortion.
it is true that Pence is unequivocally coming in favor of a national ban, but they've all embraced an incredibly unpopular and extreme position, even as they try to kind of Trump and Haley and DeSantis all try to kind of weasel out of any opinion on a national ban. My overall take from the whole thing is if I were Donald Trump, I would probably skip most of these events in most of the debates.
He can completely control his own message by holding his own rallies, his own events. He can do his own interviews with his own sycophants.
He's got plenty of them. One of them was just moderating the Iowa event in Tucker Carlson.
And Trump is doing that. He's going to have a town hall with Sean Hannity Tuesday night in Cedar Rapids in Iowa.
So he's like, he can still campaign in all these early states and spend a lot of time. He doesn't need to be on stage with any of these people.
It's wild. There's no consequences for him skipping any of these things.
So Trump is in Florida doing this event that's just built around him this talking points uh usa turning points but that's a good it's a good slip of the tongue yep and uh this i just was not josh marshall's outfit oh yeah josh marshall's heel turn has been a real surprise no but but uh i just was struck by just how feral the crowd has now gone at these events it was always bad the cpaq crowds were always bad but they there used to be a little bit of uh there was just a little bit of more of a positive feedback loop from the more serious people that would either go or not go and these people are just unleashed by these events now at this from the times at the conference attendees could attach sticky notes to cut out to the republican candidates heads first of all guys you knew what, you knew what you were doing, all right? What do you think was going to say on those sticky notes? Freedom? A man placed one with a homophobic slur in the face of Mike Pence. Later, it appeared to have been removed, but a number of stickers branding Pence as a traitor for refusing to overturn the 2020 election covered his face on a cutout of Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor.
One sticky note said, woman in politics? Cringe.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

TPUSA is the like dubstep strobe light,

like wannabe cool version of conservatism.

The Iowa summit was this traditional sort of white nationalist,

super boring brand of conservatism.

I think Trump also skipped it

because Bob Vander Plaats,

the guy who organizes it,

hates his guts.

And I don't think he's endorsed DeSantis,

but he is very anti-Trump. Yeah.
Vocally so. although he would have faced a pretty friendly interviewer in tucker carlson right oh absolutely i mean i think the the the better move would be to show up to that and show how tough you are and how you can stand up to everybody he's just competing on a different field than these people and the other question is you mean you just talked about how the attendees at the tp usa thing were uh not so nice to some of the other candidates these candidates like tucker carlson goes and does this the series of interviews mike pence shows up nikki haley shows up tim scott shows up they all show up for the asa hutchinson showed up to the tp usa thing got heckled yeah he had a tough time in uh in iowa too but it's like what are they what are they all doing are they trying to win are they to make a point? I don't know what all these people are doing.
Well, I do think this is like, whether Trump goes or not, the crowd is the crowd at both of these events. Tucker asks Mike Pence about Ukraine.
His position, which is probably a 60-40 position in the country, gets him nearly booed off the stage. So the challenge for all these candidates, Trump goes, Trump doesn't go.
These crowds are Trump's crowd wherever in Iowa, in Florida. His interviewers, his party, his crowds.
Every once in a while, you get a Bob Vander Plaats that doesn't like him, right? That's like the exception, not the rule. The rest of the party is his party.
Yeah. And frankly, you know, this same event in 2015, Frank Luntz was doing the questioning.
And that's where Trump made the infamous remark about John McCain and liking people that didn't get captured. So even then, the whole event became about everyone denouncing Donald Trump because of these comments about John McCain.
It didn't matter. They all still liked it better.
Poor Mike Pence. He got a raw deal here.
I mean, I'm not usually a fan of the guy, as you guys know, but it was quite clear that Tucker Carlson hates his guts. Let's listen to the exchange that everyone's talking about with Pence and Tucker.
I'm sorry, Mr. Vice President.
Have you? I know you're running for president. And yet your concern is that the Ukrainians, a country most people can't find on a map, who've received tens of billions of U.S.
tax dollars, don't have enough tanks. I think it's a fair question to ask, like, where's the concern for the United States in that? Well, it's not my concern.
Tucker, I've heard that routine from you before, but that's not my concern. You recently met with Zelensky, according to news reports.
And I'm wondering if during that meeting, as a prominent Christian leader, which you are in addition to your political views, you broached the question of his treatment of Christians within Ukraine. What I can tell you is I asked the Christian leader in Kyiv if that was in fact happening and he assured me that it was not.
Now, let me take a break here. I know we disagree on this strongly.
I would think you would have greater concern for religious liberty in Ukraine. And I'm surprised by your answer.
I told you I raised the issue of religious liberty.

No, you spoke to one person who's clearly on one side of it.

And there are many, many news reports that are not disputed by anybody

that many clergy have been arrested.

I'm not Russian Orthodox, but you can't arrest clergy

for having different views, period.

Because if you do, you violate the basic tenet of religious liberty. Look, I won't look.
I want to be clear with you. I won't stand by it.
I won't stand for it. So Pence got booed, later tweeted that he'd been taken out of context.
And one pastor who was at the event later said his campaign is over. Why do you guys think that evangelicals and seemingly every other Republican has turned on Mike Pence? So I just don't know that that's the case.
Like, I think Tucker Carlson, he started asking about whether January 6th was an insurrection. He asked about electronic voting machines.
He asked like six questions in a row about NATO and Ukraine and cluster munitions and this and that. And like, it did not go well at all.
I think the question. You say that Mike Pence refused to say that January 6th was an insurrection.
Yeah, everyone was horrible. He said, all I could say for sure is that it was no good.
Yeah. All I could say for sure is that they almost hung me.
He said, I never used that word. Then he called it a riot.
I think the question is still whether, obviously, Pence's performance to that audience didn't go well. I also want to be clear that I don't think Mike Pence's candidacy is going anywhere.
He raised $1.2 million in the second quarter, but he did try to start his comments at that event by talking about Iowa's six-week abortion ban and basically got cut off. And the question still remains whether there are conservative Christian evangelicals in Iowa who want to hear about the stuff that he's going to talk about ad nauseum at all these events going forward and whether he got tanked by Tucker Carlson or whether the people in that room just think he's a loser with no momentum and that's all they care about.
I'll take that one. Yeah, I mean, look, odds are.
But like, I think, I just think Tucker Carlson roasting you because he hates your guts at one event is, it's a little too early to say he's done. I think there's like a, the problem though is the way Mike Pence thinks that he's going to differentiate himself from this group of people that don't care about policy at all is he's going to say, even though everyone on this stage is praising a six-week abortion ban, I'm for a six-week abortion ban and I'm for a national ban.
All these other people refuse to say whether or not they're for a national ban. And there's just no evidence that has gained him any traction.
He's been saying it for weeks. It is his position.
It just is... He's too creepy to make that enough to get him over the finish line.
I mean, he's not exciting. His name, everyone knows who he is.
His name ID, because he was vice president, so his name ID is through the roof. When they break down polls by asking, they do demographics, evangelicals.
Donald Trump is way in the lead with evangelicals. When they ask for, they do a specific subgroup of Republicans who top issue is abortion.
Donald Trump way out in front on that issue too. You mentioned the 1.2 million.
It is rough. He is not qualified for the debate stage yet he has not gotten to 40 000 donors he has almost full name recognition he cannot get 40 000 donors meanwhile as he's getting booed at the tucker event vivek ramaswamy says that every other candidate in the field besides him is indistinguishable from joe biden on ukraine and then got a standing ovation and they're in the room when he left in In the clip you played about Trump doing his punditry around what was happening in Iowa, the next sentence was that he thought, he says DeSantis may not be in second place for much longer because he refers to Ramaswamy.
I think because Trump, we and Trump consume clips in the same way and he consumed the clips of the Iowa that showed him getting the standing ovation. Probably.
Vivek Ramaswamy, I think, has a Tucker Carlson-like view on Ukraine that I think Tucker really liked. What was interesting is Nikki Haley and Tim Scott have a more Pence-like Ukraine policy, and Tucker just didn't even come close to going after them the way he did Pence.
He hates Pence's guts. I think the harder part was just dealing with January 6th, probably, for Pence than anything else.
Which I think, by the way, is at the core of why people don't like him. Oh, for sure.
Right? For sure. I also think that, like, I mean, he said in an AP interview last week that he would force women to give birth to babies even when they knew the baby would have no chance of survival.
He, like, explicitly did that. And so then the question is, what is the constituency that, because you're right, you're not getting that position in the national abortion ban from many of these other candidates right now.
So what is the constituency that wants that so badly that like, they're like, okay, Mike Pence is my, is my guy. And I just don't know.
I mean, who knows? There could be one, but his bet is look, the last couple winners of the Iowa caucuses and the Republican side were Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee. It was just

sort of the most right wing, the most

religious, the most sort of fake

Reagan sounding people. So that's

his bet. I don't think he's going to win that bet

but I think that's the bet. Well, I think he'd have a better

chance at that bet if Tim

Scott and Ron DeSantis weren't

in his way. Tim Scott talks the talk

really well. He quoted like seven

Bible verses, right? He knows what these

people want to hear. Yeah.
And look, and Mike Pence

might have more support than those

Thank you. his way tim scott talks the talk really well he quoted like seven bible verses right like he knows what these people want here yeah and look and and mike pence might have more support than those two but you got three people in that lane of trying to get the evangelicals and that's tough it's also there's a group of people who are celebrating the biggest victory they have had in half a century they won on abortion they are fat and happy on.
I don't think they're fat and happy at all. I think they want more.
I think they want a six-week ban everywhere. These people in that room, that's what they want.
But they are not making abortion the issue by which they are deciding to vote between these candidates at all. There's no evidence that they view someone who's going to do a national abortion ban as a reason that they're going to come out to vote for somebody.
They're just not. It's just not anywhere.
The polling John just said shows the same thing. I think that they're mad at him because he didn't help overturn the election.
I think they want the interaction. So the only Republican candidate who had a worse weekend than Mike Pence was Ron DeSantis, who's now given us 2024's first big campaign shakeup story.
He fired about a dozen mid-level staffers, though more layoffs are expected in the coming weeks, according to NBC News. Everyone's campaign finance reports were released this weekend, and DeSantis has apparently spent almost half of the $20 million he raised, which is quite a burn rate.
The campaign will change up its media strategy of not talking to reporters by having the candidate sit down with Jake Tapper this week, because voters just need to hear more Ron DeSantis. That's what we're missing.
In the pantheon of campaign shakeup stories, this one seems relatively small to me, but I don't know. What do you guys think? It's so minor.
It's 10 staffers who do event planning. This is nothing.
And it sounds like they're also trying to get them over to a PAC, which does tell you, forget the shakeup itself, is about the weakness in their fundraising, which is they did better at the very beginning and then it trailed off.

And they clearly have some giant donors that are able to put millions of dollars into the campaign, but not in the same way in a sustainable way into the actual sort of small dollars they need for the campaign itself.

Yeah, I think there's, look, they spent $8 million in six weeks.

That's a lot of money to spend.

They have more than a million dollars of payroll,

92 staffers.

It's also a lot of staffers for a campaign early on.

It's a lot of staff

for this early.

It's a big, big list.

Never Back Down

has raised $150 million.

They have 400 full-time canvassers

in Iowa and across the country

already knocking on doors.

So they are basically trying to

cede the entire campaign operation

to the super PAC,

which has some advantages, but also a lot of disadvantages because you're not can't coordinate with the super PAC. Ask Jeb Bush about all the disadvantages that come from not being able to control your super PAC spending.
The Washington Post had a hilarious story about DeSantis' super PAC paying people like 20 bucks an hour to canvas for him and doing horrendous jobs. And there's ring videos of these dudes on people's portraits, like pissing them off.
It's great. It's very worth reading.
So Never Back Down is also running an ad now. It's the first ad that the Super PAC is running directly against Donald Trump in Iowa for Trump attacking Kim Reynolds.
Let's hear the ad. Don't invite her to events.
Trump should fight Democrats, not Republicans. What happened to Donald Trump? Never Back Down is responsible for the content of this advertising.
Tommy, I didn't expect the beat to drop so hard there. Tommy, you are the master of AI voices in political ads.
Oh, is that AI? Yeah. Couldn't you tell? That's AI.
I'm kidding. I also just like, there's an Iowa Republican who's paying attention right now who's like, I like Donald Trump, but I didn't know he was capricious about loyalty and that that mattered so much to him.
I'm shocked. I'm shocked by this.
If you're so offended by his treatment of the governor, you probably heard of it. I mean, this is probably just an attempt to create a little earned media of this fake ad.
Yeah. I did hear Sarah Longwell talk about how in the Iowa folks groups, she was surprised at just the level of approval that Kim Reynolds had with Republican voters.
Like they love her. They think she's the gray people, like bring her up all the time.
But I do think there's a difference between I love the governor and, oh, I love Donald Trump, but now that he attacked the governor, I'm going to go vote for Ron DeSantis. It seems, you're right, Tommy.
I think it's probably just, it seems like a media play. But it does just go into their, like, what happened to Donald Trump.
They're still stuck on this idea of, like, I love Donald Trump, but something's not right the way he used to be. It's exactly the same.
Remember early on when you do, like, the Ron DeSanctimonious or the Ron DeSanctus, you could feel, like, trepidation in the audience. Now they know it's coming.
They expect it. They laugh along with it.
Like, they get used to it all the time. I mean, I am guessing that if the super PAC went and spent some money on this, you could feel like trepidation in the audience.
Now they know it's coming. They expect that they laugh along with it.
Like, they get used to it all. I mean, I am guessing that if the super PAC went and spent some money on this, maybe they saw something in the data that this isn't.
I mean, it may, I'm trying to make their argument just to, just for fun here, but like, it may speak to not just the love that Iowa Republicans have for Kim Reynolds, but one thing that people don't like about Donald Trump in the Republican Party, one of the few things is like, he's always causing chaos. He's always he's undisciplined, right? So maybe it leans into that.
I don't think it helps DeSantis necessarily. But who knows? What do you think about the shift in DeSantis's media strategy? Like, what are what are they hoping to achieve with a sit down with Jake Tapper? Like, can't you see this what happened,, right? Like things are going badly.
All the donors are calling Ron DeSantis. They're calling his wife.
They're calling his top strategists. That's getting everyone really spun up.
They have a big meeting. They pound the table and say, you guys are fucking up.
How are we going to fix this? And they're like, ah, I don't know. Talk to the press.
Well, I do. It's a, it's funny.
They pretend it was such a long time. Like they don't care about elite opinion.
This doesn't matter. We're not going to do any interviews with these people.
We're going to go right to the people. We're going to be on the ground.
We're only going to talk to Twitter spaces. To Twitter spaces.
And we're only going to talk to people that are kind of on our side. And clearly that's not true.
And I do think I was thinking about this and it's like every day Ronda Santas goes out there and he gets questions. He had reporters are at these, you know, public events.
They grab him on the line. And every single day his questions are, why are you failing? What's wrong with your campaign? People don't like you.
Are you weird? Whatever. Just bad question after bad question.
And it's basically like, would you like to fight a thousand duck sized Jake Tappers or one Jake Tapper sized Jake Tapper? You know what I'm saying? It's like Tapper on the rope line or Tapper in the studio. Right, he's getting Tapper every single day in little bits and he can't get out of it.
So it's like, fuck it. Let's just get in there.
I do think though, it's like, you gotta work your way up to a sit down with Jake Tapper. You've faced no hard questions.
He's talked to no one challenging in so long. You're gonna start with Jake? You're gonna a you know that's that's a that's a tough level i do wonder if part of the strategy here is to pick a fight with jake yeah and that's what i would do you know and then say oh look at me i picked a fight with fake news cnn's jake tapper that that lib over there and now i can now he can go tell the republican base how tough he was and and prove that he's got the right enemies just like them it's part yeah that's exactly what like I was thinking the same thing that I think that would actually be a smart strategy create a little bit of a spectacle but like come on man we gotta go for for Chuck Todd you go to meet the press I mean he's got to do it what he's he's not one he's not he's not one I took on the media and they didn't applaud away he's not one away he's going to do this again and again and again i can't wait i listen yeah no i'm in i'll be watching i'm in uh any other maybe it's like it's like maybe jake will leave some coke it's like jake's coke at the white house just getting ready for this thing uh parody jake just kidding uh any other takeaways from the republican fields fundraising reports to get into those numbers well the pence only getting 40 000 not getting not.
Not being sure he can get to $40,000 is pretty desperate. Doug Burgum lent himself $10 million.
Vivek Ramaswamy lent himself $15.25 million since entering. It says he will spend $100 million.
First time I saw that number. My God.
First of all, I didn't know he was that rich. I didn't know who he was really.
I didn't know he was, he was going to spend a hundred million dollars on his, on his race. He's going to be in here for a while.
I'm telling you, there's going to be a state where Vivek Ramaswamy finishes ahead of Ron DeSantis. I don't know if you, you just had to put a picture of all these consultants that are just sort of, just siphoning money off these people and just like, attention in big pockets.
What was the James Carville quote in 93? The Ross Perot's race was the single most expensive act of masturbation in the history of the world gonna take that record Vivek and Doug are both gonna be competing for that good luck gents the cash on hand numbers are sort of interesting Tim Scott 21 million DeSantis 12.2 million Haley 6.8 million Tim Scott because he transferred 22 million watch this space Scott space. Yeah, it turns out transferring yourself a shitload of money before you start is a great way to do it.
Trump, 17.7 million on hand, but raised more than $35 million. Where's the rest? Legal bills, maybe? Attention, big pockets.
That was interesting. Joe Biden's fundraising numbers look pretty great.
Two of the president's biggest political challenges have been enthusiasm in the economy. He got good news on both this week.
Biden campaign raised more than $72 million this quarter, which crushes Trump's $35 million. And together with the DNC, they have more than $77 million on hand.
Nearly one third of all Biden donors are new since 2020. So that's interesting.
There's also been some pretty great economic news over the past few weeks. Inflation has now dropped to its lowest level since March of 2021.
Wages have now risen faster than inflation for the last four months in a row. Unemployment remains at historic lows.
And consumer confidence, we got a report last week, it's now the highest it's been since September of 2021. Economists are starting to change their recession predictions with Goldman Sachs cutting the probability down to 20%.
Let's start with the fundraising numbers. New York Times were in two stories about Biden's numbers.
One headline called it a substantial haul. Another talked about, quote, sluggish small donations.
What's your take? So I went and looked. The Biden campaign is saying they have 394,000 donors, about a third of which are new.
You go back and look at Obama at around this time in, you know, spring, early summer of 2011. He was at 480,000 donors.
I like that comparison. I love that.
I was like, in the grand scheme of things, would you like Biden to be higher? Sure. But you're going against someone who changed politics in part by attracting a massive support of of small dollar of small donors.
So I was like, oh, that's that's that's that was hopeful to me. Also, small dollar donations are down across the board for Republicans and Democrats.
One reason, because the fucking email and text. Yeah.
Industrial complex are so annoying. Yeah.
and it's getting harder for people to open emails harder for people to respond they're just not like it's down for everyone i will pitch out again to the ether my idea for democrat plus where you can sign up and then you never get a message and you just pay a monthly amount i don't know how it's going to work but they're smarter people than me they can get on it type type type code code you referred to them earlier as small donors and i really like that like danny devito on our, but they're smarter people than me. They can get on it.
Type, type, type. Code, code, code.
You referred to them earlier as small donors, and I really like that. Like Danny DeVito is on our team.
What other small donors we bring in this week? Kerry Strug. Also, it's hard to compare to Obama in 2012 because the limits have changed.
So you can now donate more money thanks to an awful Supreme Court decision. There's no limit to what, how much you can donate to parties and PACs.
Right, right, right, right, right. So that makes all the comparisons impossible.
It's all apples. And it's also hard to compare to Trump

and the RNC in 2020. They raised one hundred and five million dollars because Trump started in

January fundraising and Biden didn't start till April. So it's pretty it's just a good it's a

really good haul. I just want to say that I've completely lost the thread on how much money you

need to compete or win. Yeah, the numbers sound big.
It is so much money like Clinton outspent

Trump two to one and lost. Biden raised over a billion dollars in 2020.
Trump raised 774 million and Biden obviously won, but it was tight. Like clearly Biden's gonna have a ton of money.
Big donors are not holding back. They're all supporting him.
He's also not trying to raise a lot of money. He's like doing a ton of events right now.
Yeah. So I think this hopefully augurs well for the future, the small dollar donor stuff.
I'm sure they would like more of those, but to your point that they're down everywhere. Yeah.
I think money is one of those things, especially now where it's not going to guarantee a win by any means. If you have more money, as you have more money, as you pointed out with Hillary and Trump.
But if you don't have it, it could be a real problem. So I think this is this is enough.
This is just like some breathing room for the Biden campaign. I'm very happy about this.
It's not going to like assure that they win, but it's good. And also in 2016, one of the things that the Hillary campaign would say, I think correctly over and over again is in the end, a lot of the outside money did get behind Trump to make up some of the.
Yeah, but the Democratic outside money was still bigger than the Republican outside money. She's like, just overspent him, outspent him big time.
The crazy thing to me was Biden has only hired four staffers. I was just going to say that.
Everyone else is chilling at the DNC. Yeah, so they're being frugal, which is great.
I mean, this is very Joe Biden. Like, be frugal, yes, but the point of a campaign is to spend it to win, so ultimately, you're going to spend every dollar of it, so I don't know.
Doing that calculation is for smarter people. Spawn it out like field organizers and ads than people at the DNC.
Field organizing benefits from an early start. But DNC is probably doing that.
On the economy, should Biden and Democrats start telling a more hopeful story about the progress we've made? Or will that piss people off who still might be struggling to pay the bills? I know we have debated this many times before, but it does seem like the underlying facts have changed. Who's got a take? You know, so James for Ricky, there's been a couple of pieces that basically say some version of the data is good.
The vibes are bad. Right.
And that is, you've just sort of seen that as a trend. And one point that he made is that there's a disconnect between what's happening in the economy and what people are hearing in the news.
In May, Michigan's consumer survey, roughly twice as many respondents said they'd heard stories about unemployment as had heard stories about hiring. One under-discussed reason for this is that the industries that play an essential role in shaping public perception, finance, tech, and the media have been going through a much tougher time than the rest of the economy.
So that's one piece of it. The other piece of it is if you look at the actual polling on approval of the economy, it's at 34% according to this AP poll that just came out.
Overall, that's 34%. It's down to 60% among Democrats, which is pretty low.
It's 10% among Republicans. There's a little bit of a partisan.
So consumer confidence, economic confidence, approval, all of that flows with partisanship now, but it flows more for Republicans, right? There's just a bigger headwind in polling around the economy because Republicans know that it is a signal to say, I don't think the economy is doing well. But all of that isn't to say that independents aren't giving the economy low approval rating and there isn't just a really sort of sour mood about the economy still, even, you know, as inflation numbers are going down, unemployment numbers

have stayed down. There's just still this sort of residue of dissatisfaction.
And I do think that

your options are to let that scare you away from making an argument. But if you don't do it,

if you don't actually make the argument, there's no one out there making the case. So he has to make the case.
I think, you know, we grapple with this in the early days of the financial crisis. You know, how much do you say you're making progress versus recognize what people are going through? I think it's a balance.
I think Biden going and giving that speech about Bidenomics is a signal that they understand that they have to shift the balance toward not declaring victory, but declaring progress and saying they're making headway and pointing out the good numbers in the hopes that those good numbers start changing perception.

Yeah. I mean, if economic data and feelings about the economy has now become polarized by

political party like everything else, then you might as well deliver a message that bucks up

your side. I do think that message should be, here's how things are getting better.

Here's the rest of what I'm fighting for. Here's what the other guys are going to do

to make it worse, tax cuts for rich people. The underlying economic situation, hopefully we're going to get a soft landing.
That would be amazing. I think economists increasingly believe that inflation was driven by pandemic, the pandemic weirdness.
And the Fed rate cuts have helped along the margins to bring down some prices. You never know if there could be a lag effect to these Fed hikes or some unforeseen event like the SVB collapse, right, that we all thought was going to send the economy into a tailspin for a while.
But I do think, like, to your point, Lovett, you have to make the case or who's going to make the case.

Yeah, I think when we were talking about this before the midterms, it was really tough to tell people inflation was in their heads when inflation was really high, even though unemployment was low. So you'd have a lot of liberals online being like, what are you yelling? the media.
Why are you talking about people who can't afford milk when we have the lowest unemployment in years, you know, but like there's a disconnect and they were really feeling the

inflation. Now we're actually seeing a lot of improvement in inflation itself.
And we're seeing consumer sentiment, like these surveys of consumer sentiment are higher than at any time since September of 2021. At the time before the midterms, consumer sentiment was quite low, right? And so now, since the underlying facts have changed, I totally agree that you do need to make a case.
And it is worth trying to affect people's psychology about the broader economy with a story about how Bidenomics is working. Notice I said is working, you know, and not has worked, right? It's in progress.
And I think, as you mentioned, Lovett, we dealt with this all through the early years of the Obama administration. But by 2012, when he was running for reelection, we tested that jobs chart, the famous jobs chart that showed all the jobs that were being lost when Obama came into office and then all the jobs that were being created.
And we tested that with focus groups. And it worked really well by 2012.
And partly it's because it was just so stark looking at that chart. And I think, you know, there's a chart that they have now with job growth that they've been sending around.
There's a chart that shows that inflation started going down right after the Inflation Reduction Act passed. Like, going to be a whole bunch of fact checkers on that, but that's the chart.
Follow behind me, fact checkers. And we're doing better than other countries.
Yeah. And I think the other challenge is a lot of these indicators have just changed in the last, has shown real improvement in the last month or so.
And a lot of these polls tend to be backward looking by their nature. So I do think it's still going to be polarized bipartisanship and stuff like that and sentiment.
But I think now is the time to start making the case. One, I think, sign that there is like sort of room to move is Biden's approval, if you just say economy, is lower than if you say jobs and economy yeah which tells you that like that's just talking about inflation and you know that's the inflation inflation is it always has been yeah I do think it I mean obviously it's going to take more than one speech or a whole series of Biden events like they might need some sort of paid element or some big surrogate plan to get people out I just to reach the people who need to hear this message is going to take a lot of work.
That's always the problem. Surrogate plan is and this is like a very everyone in campaigns when something goes wrong, they're like, where's our surrogates? But if it's just Joe Biden out there and the White House talking about Bidenomics, that's one thing like the entire Democratic apparatus, Democratic people in Congress, groups, allies, media organizations, us, right? Like volunteers knocking on doors.
It's really got to be the whole party and all the party's allies out there talking about talking up the economy because if it's just Joe Biden, it's not going to. Yeah.
I also do think a piece of this, which is hard to measure in data, is this is also a country that's coming out of two and a half years, three years of a pandemic that either a lot of people lost jobs, a lot of people were working from home, a lot of people had to go to work despite it being dangerous. A lot of people saw sort of uncertainty and confusion and changes that are still kind of playing out.
There was no clean moment where anyone was able to say, all right, we're in the recovery, we're post-pandemic. And a moment to sort of talk about the progress that has been made since the pandemic on the economy, like that signals a shift, I think, could just have a bigger impact.
I agree. Because the GOP gloom message goes well beyond the economy.
They're wrapping all of it into one thing. And you can tell, too.
I mean, all this aside, the reason they're not just fully celebrating is because there's also potential problems on the horizon. They have to watch out for gas prices.
The Saudis could fuck with us before the election. Student loan payments are going to happen, start happening again in September.
The pause on student loans is going to end. It could be a government shutdown in the fall, seems likely.
And then, of course, we don't know what the Fed's going to do. Like, there could be another one more rate increase.
Yeah, war, Russia. And also, you know, now you start to see some signs that is that in that that that wages

may be going up faster than inflation. But that doesn't make up for the months and months and

months in which inflation was higher than wages. And people still feel that maybe they'll start

feeling it shifting back in the other direction. But we're not, you know, no one no one would go

and say, oh, this problem is solved. We have made good progress.
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be there to break it all down. Comedy Central's The Daily Show, new tonight at 11 on Comedy Central and streaming next day on Paramount+.
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All right, before we get to my interview about No Labels, there was unfortunately more news over the weekend about another potential spoiler. At the famed polemic fart dinner we talked about on Thursday, RFK Jr.
floated a completely unhinged offensive conspiracy theory that COVID was a genetically engineered bioweapon that may have been ethnically targeted to spare Jewish people and Chinese people. You got to hear it to believe it.
Here's a clip. COVID-19, there's an argument that it is ethnically targeted.
COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. The races that are most immune to COVID-19 are because of the structure, the genetic structure, genetic differentials among different races of the receptors, of the ACE2 receptor.
COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.
We don't know whether it was deliberately targeted that or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial and ethnic differential and an impact to that. We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bio-weapons, and we are developing ethnic bio-weapons.
That's where all those labs in the Ukraine are about. They're collecting Russian DNA.
They're collecting Chinese DNA, so that we can target people by race first of all where on earth did that conspiracy come from it's Russian disinformation literally no that's literally Russian disinformation about these you could these labs in in Ukraine that they started putting out in the beginning of the war they were part of what the Russians were saying when they invaded was they needed to save all of us from these bio labs um look i think there's been a lot of debate as to whether or not covet emerged from a wet market or uh some kind of government facility these are both red herrings it was from wuhan's only delicatessen um that is where the Jewish doctors, which is a lot like saying ATM machine, as well as the Asian people that conservatives claim had their spots at Harvard stolen by black people, got together and cooked this whole thing up. And I, for one, think that Goyvid-19.
Oh, there he is.

Is finally something that's being exposed.

And do I wish it was by someone who wasn't a crank,

who sounds like the character in our movie

who's dying in a desert

and telling someone where a treasure is?

Sure, I do.

Did you come up with Goyvid19?

No, several people texted it to me

during our meeting

when I was trying to come up with what to call it. I was trying to do something with Shiksa and I didn't land on anything.
Oh, that's funny too. Yeah.
I do like the Wu Han delicatessen. Cats.
I mean, so then, you know, he, in response, he attacks the press. He said, oh, it's supposed to be off the record and then they showed the clip and they had the clip uh he said that he doesn't believe and never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered it seems fairly obvious in the clip that's not really what happened at all and then he tweeted a link to a paper the paper he shared by the way uh which is like a study a health study and it speculates that certain genetic mutations may increase COVID severity, but that they are, even if they are maybe in some ethnic group, they are extremely rare and have no bearing on public health or the broader, or have any broader conclusion that there are, forget about deliberately targeted, that there are ethnic groups that because of genetic mutations are more or less immune.
It's just completely verbiased. completely as usual if you like dig into all of his sort of covid vaccine conspiracies what he does is like he takes these these studies these scientific studies and he you know intentionally or not completely misreads them jumps to conclusion and then they get mixed in with other complete fabricated conspiracies like the russian disinformation that you mentioned so it's like this this of like, there's a little bit of piece of something in a study and then it's mixed with something crazy and then he just says it.
R.B. Jr.
is the final boss of doing his own research. That's what it is.
It's just, you know, I'm not saying it. Go look up the studies.
And he tweets the study and everyone's like, well, this looks like a legitimate study. And all his fans are like his fans like oh and i and like he is a good like it is good to he is a good example to point to because he is the he is the most crank like you know on the spectrum of flat earthers uh uh to i don't know like kind of mainstream conservatives he is sort of closer now to the flat earther side but all of those people in this sort of misinformation swamp, your Jordans Peterson, all those guys, like this is what they do.
They find the study, they say they have facts and backing and all this information, but it's just a sort of fusillade of lies. Well, even the referencing the study, I think there was some reference maybe to like Ashkenazi Jews or Sephardic Jews.
There's a cohort. This receptor.

A million people in China died from COVID.

Clearly this wasn't genetically engineered to protect them.

Right.

Right?

So like it's just these nesting dolls of bullshit on top of bullshit that weaves together these conspiracy theories.

It's impossible to fact check.

It was like what Jake Tapper was telling us about the piece

that RFK Jr. wrote for Rolling Stone and some other outlet.
Was it Slate? I can't remember. Cherry picks piece of information, fabricates other parts, and then uses language like Fear and Cleave docking site, but has no real idea what he's talking about.
But his fans want to believe it because they're like, ah, yes, there is some big bad other out there pulling the strings and trying to control us. And when you believe that kind of conspiracy theory, you are inevitably going to end up blaming the Jewish people because that is what's happened for thousands of years.
If you followed any like really good doctors and researchers during the pandemic on Twitter, these poor people spent most of their time trying to correct idiots who would read these studies and like just just misread them either like intentionally or not and it's it's tough because like these scientific studies are like they're they're a little dense you know they're not they're not very easy to understand all the time they're not written for twitter they're not written for twitter right and then what happens is people on twitter idiots on twitter pick out some small part of it out of context and they spread it around to everyone they get everyone scared and it happens all over the place and he is the final boss of it. Well, it's funny though, because like, you know, John, you and I especially, like- I know, I know.
Because you and I, we had the experience of feeling as though the way research was being interpreted, even by mainstream outlets, was also confusing and misleading and cherry picking.

And you and I would go back and forth

with studies,

but not in the way

that we would just read them

and be like,

this is what someone else is saying.

This is what this expert is saying.

They'd be like,

Tommy, don't get vaccinated.

This is not worth it.

And then we'd be like,

we got to ask Andy Slavitt about this.

Yeah, we go right to Slavitt.

Let's get Dr. Wachter on the pod.

Yeah, yeah.

We got to go to the source.

We got to get the raw data.

Most scientific research papers

are profoundly unsatisfying

because they don't come

to defeat the conclusions.

It's like you take 10,000 of them

the We got to get the, we got to go to the source. We got to get the raw data.
Most scientific research papers are profoundly unsatisfying because they don't come to the conclusions. It's like you take 10,000 of them and then you have a body of research that leads you in one general direction.
That's mostly right. But it's funny.
It's like, there was just a week of headlines, but just sort of like, it is the kind of like noisy, the noisy information environment that also helps these people take off because there was a week of stories about Diet Coke causing cancer that everyone was thrilled to tell me about because they know i love diet coke because everyone has a freudian death drive and they're like ruining something cool for me from my from my cold refreshed dead hands you know what i mean but you have to go in it's like no that is an overstatement of what the study said actually no they're not saying this it's actually compared to that and like that is that is the it's's only if you're vaccinated. And it's only if you're vaccinated.

That'll kill you.

No, this is all us talking about,

you know, trying to debate things with rational people.

Media Matters put together a compilation

of what actual anti-Semites and Nazis,

how they responded to RFK Jr.'s club.

Yeah, dark.

One neo-Nazi said,

based RFK Jr. says COVID was genetically engineered

to spare Jews.

A hilarious thing to say, and I totally support it. Another Holocaust denier.
RFK is 100% correct. A neo-Nazi site.
I fully support any presidential candidate saying things like this that make Jews upset. And on and on and on and on.
So, had that effect, which is just wonderful. Terrible.
Wonderful that he's doing it. Been a while since Camelot.
Well, then, you know, the Kennedys were out in full force on Twitter denouncing him today. Kerry Kennedy, his sister, Joe Kennedy.
Oh, what a mess. A little late.
What a Thanksgiving this will be. Yeah, it's also a little late.
What a mess. Yeah, the neo-Nazi quote you read, I'm not going to name him, also said, I don't even really understand what exactly this means, but clearly the implication.
So this guy's like, I don't know what this guy is talking about, but I love it because it's anti-Semitic. That's how Nazis hear what he's saying.
Yeah. The perfect combination of just ignorance and hate.
Okay. Two quick housekeeping notes.
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We'll be right back to talk to Rana Epting and Matt Bennett about the left-center-left alliance that's out to stop no labels from electing Donald Trump. This podcast is supported by Comedy Central's Emmy Award winning series, The Daily Show.
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A few hours from now, Democrat Joe Manchin and Republican John Huntsman will headline a town hall in New Hampshire hosted by No Labels,

the third-party group threatening to get on the ballot in 2024.

Joining us today are two people who represent a broad coalition of left to center left opposition to No Label's plans to potentially play the role of spoiler in the next election. Ronna Epting of MoveOn and Matt Bennett of Third Way.
Ronna and Matt, welcome to the pod. Thanks.
Thank you. So people listening know how I feel about No Labels, but let's start here.
We know that, you know, we've got a closely divided electorate. There is a critical and potentially decisive group of voters who identify as moderate, complain about partisanship, prioritize unity, don't want a Biden-Trump rematch, and, you know, may like the idea of a younger moderate Democrat and a younger

moderate Republican running together. And maybe they think that ticket can win or maybe they just

think it's it's worth a shot. Matt, as someone who spent a long time at a moderate center-left

Democratic organization, what do you tell those voters about a no labels ticket? I tell them that

it is an incredibly bad idea and they should stay away from it like it is the plague. First of all, I don't have to tell you or your listeners that this is probably, we say it every cycle, but this is the most important election of all time, particularly if Trump is the nominee, which looks like he's going to be.
And what we have to understand about what no labels is pitching here is that they're not offering up a protest candidate. I mean, Jill Stein wasn't telling the world she was going to be the next president of the United States.
Ralph Nader wasn't saying that back in 2000. The last guy to say that really was Ralph, was a Roth Perot in 1996, sort of, but really in 1992.
And he didn't come anywhere close. He didn't win a single state.
The problem with what No Labels is offering is they say they're offering a choice between these two guys that you may not love. But what they're offering is an illusion, an illusion that somehow their candidate is going to defy history, going to do what no one has been able to do before.
There's a guy carved into Mount Rushmore who tried to do this and he failed and they're going to win the election. And if you buy that and you give them your vote, you might help reelect Donald Trump and that would be a catastrophe.
So Nancy Jacobson, who's one of the No Labels co-founders, she wrote an op-ed for the New Hampshire Union leader where she argued Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans are working to deny voters the chance to vote for a third party candidate, which is particularly ironic for Democrats who talk about defending democracy and voters rights. Rennell, what's your response to that argument? Yeah, no labels consistently is purporting out there that them offering a third party presidential candidate is about giving people choice or it's about saving democracy in some way.
But in fact, it's not. It's exactly the opposite.
It's as if Matt says it will definitely swing the election towards the Republican, which is most likely Trump in this case. And if it's not, it'll be some other nominee that will be beholden to a very extreme MAGA base here.
And if they are so interested in protecting and safeguarding American democracy, then this is not the strategy one would choose to do that. If you're so interested in doing that, you would work to make President Biden and influence President Biden and his agenda to be a pro-democracy agenda, which is exactly what many of us across the Democratic coalition have been doing the last couple of years.
And it's been effective. You've seen him govern in a very bipartisan fashion, in a very moderate fashion, and use the leverage and the power of his office to ensure that government delivers for people.

So I just don't buy it. And I think the most generous interpretation of no-label strategy is that they're ill-advised.

But the other version is they're not telling the truth. I'm not quite sure why they're actually running this campaign, because every strategic reason they're putting out there doesn't pass muster.
Well, let's dig into the polling a little bit. But, you know, Nancy also argues, you know, the polling that shows them spoiling the race for Trump, spoiling the race in favor of Trump, actually just shows that they have a solid floor in the polling and that they will grow from there.
So their argument is we're not a spoiler. We can win this thing.
We don't even have candidates yet. Once we get candidates, there's enough voters who'd be interested that we could actually win this thing.
Matt, what is what is your polling say about that? And what's the general argument that makes you guys believe that that is dead wrong? Well, every poll that we've seen on this, including the no labels poll, shows the exact same thing. Either Biden is narrowly ahead in a two-way race with Trump, or it's basically tied within the margin of error.
That's what their poll showed. That's what the prime group poll that came out last week showed.
That's what all the public polling shows. And then their poll shows that when you add a third party candidate, in their case, it was an unnamed independent moderate.
So kind of a, you know, a pony or a unicorn or whatever you want to make of that. That candidate ends up in a distant third place with about 20% of the vote.
That's what the prime group found. That's what the public polling finds.
And that is going to be the high watermark. Because of course, if you tell someone, would you like to vote for someone unnamed who is an independent moderate, that sounds a lot better than here's a person with lots of flaws who've done lots of things in their career that you don't like.
And maybe you like Bernie and maybe you like Joe Manchin and you have this fantasy in your head of what that person may be like. So the support is at a high point when you don't name the candidate, it goes down from there.
No label says the opposite. They say it goes up from there.
And here's how they do it. In their

poll, they come in a distant third, but they say, okay, but there's 18% of the voters undecided, and we're going to win 70% of the undecideds. That's what they say, which is insane.
That has never happened. And then they say, we're also going to win four to five percent of the Trump voters and four to five

percent of the Biden voters. That is to say, people who picked Trump or Biden in a three-way race a year and a half before the election.
So all of that is bananas. Not a single pollster worth their salt would ever suggest that that is possible.
And that is the basis for their entire It also seems like even if they won every single swing state that's competitive, in order for a third party ticket to win the presidency, they would need to win either deep blue states or deep red states, which is pretty impossible considering that partisans tend to vote for their party. And if you have a state where the majority of the electorate favors Democrats or favors Republicans, it's very hard to win a state like that, right? I'll just have one more comment on this and turn to Ron.
But if you haven't seen it, I beg you to look at the map that they put up, the electoral college map. You know, everybody can create their own maps now.
They put one out. They put their states in gold.
And to your point, the problem for them is if they win all the swing states and they win all the states decided by 10 points or less in 2020, that gets them to 187 electoral votes, which means they're way, way short of 270. And even though that in and of itself is a fantasy, then they get into real wish casting, like they're going to win Delaware, Joe Biden's state.
They're going to win Hawaii and Rhode Island and Illinois states that Joe Biden won by 30 points or more. They're going to win Alaska that Trump won by 20 points or more.
So it is, if you know anything about politics, their map is laughable on its face. No independent analyst will even dignify it with a response because it's so crazy.
To Matt's point, he's basically something that I've been astonished by is just imagine bringing this strategic proposal into any election, you know, room in the country, you'd be laughed out in a second. And so I'm trying to imagine why is this being taken so seriously? And I think the only reason is because they have tens of millions of dollars behind them.
But I think it is an ill-advised effort. It is not strategic.
Yes, we want more choice in this country. Yes, we want democracy to thrive in this country.
This is not the strategic way to do it. And the only reason this is actually a threat is because there's some donors in a room that they've convinced this is a smart strategy, or there are donors in a room that actually want to sway the election to Donald Trump.
Either way, this is a mess and we have to stop it. Ronna, no labels put out a policy platform over the weekend.
And of course, they've got this town hall with Huntsman and Manchin. Do you all plan on making an argument that no labels policies, their platform, and their potential candidates would be bad for the country? Or are you mainly focused on the argument that no labels can't win? And I ask that because for voters, just telling people, oh, if you vote for these candidates who maybe you're interested in or want to give a shot, we have polling, we're experts, we have polling that says that they're not going to win and that we're just going to throw the election to Trump.
Or do you tell them, by the way, this is what no label stands for. This is the positions they've taken.
And by the way, these are the candidates they've chosen. How do you think about that? I think it's both.
So first of all, on their agenda, number one is that they just made it up. They went in a room in D.C.
and they created this policy agenda. It's not tied to actual real people on the ground.
They don't have a membership base. They don't have really any genuine connections to voters in this country beyond, you know, polls developed by consultants.
So this is a fictitious agenda they've created. And once they actually, if they get to the point where they actually name candidates, those candidates, as they have said themselves, will develop their own agenda.
Number two, if you want a bipartisan agenda that most Americans can agree on, look at President Biden's agenda. I mean, he has passed dozens of bipartisan bills across the policy spectrum from gun violence prevention reform to the CHIPS Act, to the PACT Act, to the bipartisanructure Bill.
And he's leveraged the power of his office through reconciliation to provide some of the most sweeping green jobs and climate-friendly legislation that this country will ever see that will really reconstruct the economic and build the economic infrastructure across this country in communities that have been under-resourced for decades. So I don't know what policy agenda they're going to be creating, but the one they presented today is not based in reality.
It's not based in the current Congress that this president has and what's viable. It's not based on the number of votes that they can get in the House or the Senate.
It's just based on a wish list that right now, I think, just really has no bearing or no relevance to the discussion. It also completely skips taking a position on abortion, which was one of the most important issues for voters in the midterms.
Ronna, what do you make of that? Look, abortion is one of the most, if not the most mobilizing factors in the 2022 election. It will be one of the most mobilizing factors in the 2024 election.
And I think at the end of the day, we live in a two-party system. There will be two major parties contesting for power in the presidential election.
And Joe Biden has made his position clear that he believes it should be the right of women and and people that can, can get pregnant to decide what happens to their own bodies. And that's,

that's the position that most Americans approve of. Have either of your organizations done polling on the most effective argument to voters against no labels and what they're trying to do? We haven't done that because to tell you the truth, this isn't a conversation happening with the broad electorate.
It is among people interested enough in politics to listen to this podcast or watch MSNBC to some extent, but mostly this is happening among the donor class and the people around no labels who might end up on their ticket. So we haven't done anything around that.
But I will say, first of all, I very much agree with everything Rana just said. But the other thing, to your question about that voter out there who says, eh, don't tell me about the polls.
I'm going to decide based on what I feel. I think it's just vitally important that we make one distinction.
If you hate Joe Biden and Donald Trump so much that you cannot bring yourself to vote for either of them, okay, recognize what you're doing. You're issuing a protest vote.
You're voting for somebody who isn't going to be president, but you just can't stomach the two guys from the major parties. And that's a perfectly legitimate thing to do if that is where your politics take you.
However, if you're voting for somebody because you love this agenda they put out, not only is it fake, as Rana just pointed out, it isn't going to be the agenda of the president because there is zero chance that that person will be president. So we just have to make sure voters understand what they're doing.
So no labels keeps claiming that they don't want to be a spoiler. They don't want Trump elected and that they will drop their plans if it looks like they'll hand the race to Trump.
Matt, do you have any idea what their criteria is for making that decision? And when would they decide that? So they have articulated about nine different criteria, many of them conflicting. What they have said is, if Joe Biden is way, way out ahead, we will not run a candidate.
Now, no one's been way, way out ahead in a presidential race since 1988. So that isn't going to happen.
Second thing they've said is, well, if Ron DeSantis is the nominee of the Republican Party, we won't run. Well, that's clarifying.
Then they seem to really like Ron DeSantis and Republicans. Third, they've said, if it doesn't look like it's happening in August of 2024, we won't run.
That's impossible because they won't control the candidate at that point. And in fact, early voting starts in September.
So their candidate's name is going to be on those ballots, whether they want it or not. But the big one they've said is they're going to do a big poll in March of next year, after Super Tuesday and Republican primary.
And that poll will determine whether they go forward or not. Now, we don't know why they would do that because spring polling is notoriously bad.
Spring polling showed Barack Obama losing in 2012. Spring polling has showed all kinds of results that did not happen.
And it is especially bad with third party candidates. Ross Perot was leading the race in the spring before the 1992 election.
He ended up winning zero states. So we don't understand any of those criteria.
Rana, you were mentioning this earlier, but how much do we know about the people behind No Labels and the people funding that organization? And are those answers part of the argument you're making to donors, political strategists, and other political nerds? Yeah. Well, first of all, I'll say we don't know enough.
But what we have found out is not that promising. It's very concerning.
We know that the very notorious Harlan Crow, the right-wing donor to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has given to no labels. We know that donors associated with Jared Kushner and Ron DeSantis have given to no labels.
And we know that there are a number of folks that were on the more Democratic side that were associated with no labels that are now dropping off either publicly or quietly. So they may not be donors, but we know members of the Problem Solvers Caucus, this caucus of Democrats and Republicans that want to come together to do bipartisan work over the last two years.
Many of the

folks associated with Problem Solvers Caucus have come out and saying, we denounce this effort at

a third party presidential ticket. This is not what we're talking about.
We're talking about

creating a bipartisan governance structure. So I think all signs point to this effort is

Thank you. We're talking about creating a bipartisan governance structure.
So I think all signs point to this effort is much far, much more leaning in the Republican direction. But we are digging in to see who is behind it.
And that is really important. And if anything, all that we're finding time and time again, it's just raising more eyebrows.
And Ronna, I mean, they also endorsed Trump in 2016, I believe, right? No labels did? I'm not sure, Matt. Is that true? Well, it depends what you mean by endorsed, but yeah, sort of.
They held an event in New Hampshire in 2016 where they gave him, I'm not making this up, the problem solver seal of approval. Right.
That's what it was. Yeah, I beyond parity.
Yeah. I mean, well, that raises a question.
And Rana, you sort of got to this earlier too. Like, do you think these people believe what they're selling or are they actually malign actors? Okay.
So I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. That's generally my orientation in life.
But when you look at their polling, you look at their strategy, you look at the facts at hand, there is no way you could deduce that their intention is truly what they're saying it is, which is to advance democracy and give voters a choice. It doesn't add up.
It makes no sense. And so it just leads me to believe there is an ulterior motive here that we don't know.
And all we can surmise is that they actually are okay with swinging the election towards Donald Trump. So it sounds like to me, they'd rather have their third party candidate, and they're just hoping they win through a wish and a prayer, because the strategy isn't there.
And if they don't, they're fine with Donald Trump being president. That's not what most folks are signing up for.
And that's not what they wanted in 2020. It's not what most voters wanted in 2022.
And it sure as heck won't be what they want 2024. Matt, I want to talk a little bit about what both your organizations are trying to do here, because I take your point that it's too early in the process to be delivering a message to voters since they're not on the ballot yet everywhere.
Are you guys trying to shame no labels? Are you trying to get prominent political leaders to speak out against no labels? Are there any big names who haven't yet who you'd like to take a stand? What's sort of the goal of this effort? What we really need to do ultimately is ensure that credible candidates don't agree to run on their ballot line because we're not going to be able to separate them from their money. They're very, very good at raising money and they already raised a whole bunch of it.
And it's a free country. If you have enough money, you can buy your way onto ballots because you can hire people to gather petitions and do it the right way.
And they're going to be on the ballot. The only thing we can do is try to convince the people like Joe Manchin and Larry Hogan and others who are toying with this, try to convince them that this would be a terrible way to end a very successful political career.
You don't want to go, Joe Manchin, just remember what Joe Manchin has done. He won statewide twice in a state that voted for Trump by 39 points two times.
So they went Trump by 39, Manchin, Trump by 39. That's pretty amazing.
What he doesn't want to do is end up as a Jill Stein level loser getting 3% of the vote. And that's what we really need to convince him and everybody else who's thinking about this.
Even if they don't care, as Rana says, if they're not motivated by the fact that reelecting Donald Trump would be a catastrophe, maybe they're motivated by the fact that they will go down in history as a loser. Well, I know Joe Manchin's a huge fan of this podcast, so I hope he's listening to this episode.
Rana, is there anything that people listening can do to help? Yeah, I mean, I'm going to make a shameless plug, but you can go to moveon.org slash no labels and sign up there. We are doing early work around educating millions of moveon members across the country around what no labels is trying to do.
Because I do think it's a story if you're not paying attention that you could buy. I mean, you could buy this is a legitimate third party can't finally, finally, we've got a third party candidate that really can win.
But what we're what we're telling we're showing the data to our members are showing basically everything Matt went through in terms of their strategy. It doesn't add up.
So that's super important. And we'll also be calling on members of Congress and U.S.
senators to denounce this effort and doing much, much more. So folks can sign up with move on dot org slash no labels.
And that's where folks across the country can take action to stop them in their tracks. Matt, no labels is currently on the ballot in Colorado, Alaska, Oregon, Utah, and I think the scariest state because it's the closest, Arizona.
Where else are they getting close to getting on the ballot or, in your opinion, likely to get on the ballot? We don't know exactly. All we know is anecdotally where someone is intercepted by a ballot signature gatherer.
But I can tell you that we know they're actively gathering in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania, obviously in the swing states. We know from looking at their map where they feel like they have to win.
I don't think they're going to try to get on a ballot in small, super red states like Idaho, because they won't win there and it's whatever, three electoral votes. But they're going to be actively trying to get on pretty much everywhere.
Under the law, and remember the laws vary by state, but under state laws, they can do this ahead of having a nominee in 35 states. There are 15 others where they have to have nominated someone to kind of be a political party first.
But the other thing I think to remember about what Nullibals is doing is they're doing this as a 501c4 organization. And that means that they do not have to disclose their donors.
As Rana said, their donors are secret. The donors can give in unlimited amounts.
And they're competing against the Democratic and Republican parties who have to disclose their donors. And their donors can only give up to $2,900.
So they are gaming the system and they're doing it very effectively. So I think they're going to be on in a lot of places.
Last question for you. You work for an organization that has for a long time tried to chart a middle path between progressives and conservatives.
Has it been hard to turn around and make an argument like, don't trust these people when the ideological thrust of what they're trying to do is roughly in line with what you guys have tried to do for so long? Yeah, I mean, our middle path really isn't between the left and conservatives. It's just kind of a center left approach.
And since the right has lost its bloody mind, then they haven't been really relevant to us in a long time. But yes, the answer is yes.
One of the people that Rahana was hinting at who has left No Labels is a guy named Bill Galston. He's one of the kind of intellectual forefathers of the center left movement.
He worked very closely with President Clinton. And the people who run No Lab labels were our allies and our friends.
And it's been very difficult for us to take this public fight with them. But we think that there's nothing more important.
And we are proud to be allied with people all across the spectrum who are standing up in opposition to this. and ron a last question to you and i I know you're familiar with this probably because of MoveOn and the constituency that you all represent.
How concerned are you about the Cornel West third party candidacy as a potential Green Party candidate? You know, we love Cornel. We've worked with him for years.
I think he's a wonderful person, good intentions. Cornell doesn't have 70 million plus dollars behind him.
Cornell knows how presidential politics works. At the end of the day, he's going to do the right thing.
And really, we're really focused on no labels, third party candidate, because these guys are serious. They're driving a very dangerous strategy for this country.
They're doing a lot of damage, even though they're not on the ticket yet or on a ballot yet.

Uh, and, and that's where we're focused. So.
Rana, Matt, thank you so much for, uh, joining Pod Save America and for, uh, the work you're doing trying to, uh, avoid this catastrophe. So appreciate it.
Thank you for having us. okay quick quick thing before we go.
The most anticipated movie of the summer. It's not about a nuclear bomb.
Okay, thank you. Is out this week.
Barbie. And since everything is politics all the time, the trailer has already caused quite a stir.
In it, a map of Barbie world showed a nine dotted line coming off of China. It's eight dots in the screen it's a it's eight dots yeah the non-dotted line the non-dotted line is what they claimed it is just sorry continue you were supposed to put together this segment show the map this is your this is your responsibility correct me leave all of this in oh that wasn't great i'm telling you right i'm expecting the map i want to see the map anyway this go ahead let's see the map and then i counted eight two but it was hard to tell if it was just from far away yeah we don't know so this map has prompted um republicans from ted cruz to marshall blackburn to accuse the movie of cozying up with the communist party of china so so they're the i saw the reports about the right about the conservatives claiming that this was a communist map before I saw the map.
And they basically say that Warner Brothers has included the nine dotted line. Tommy, can you explain what this is? The nine dash line.
Nine dash line. It was how China draws a map in the South China Sea where they claim to own about all of the territory, essentially.
Like a thousand miles off of their coast. They draw this dotted line to claim all this territory.
And everyone else in the world, especially the Vietnamese, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Brunei say, no, that's not the case. This line takes our territory and gives it to China and violates our sovereignty.
It looks like, remember when Trump drew the hurricane line further actually, it just sort of like dips all the way down. So anyway, the conservatives claim that they've put the nine dash line on this map because there's a dotted line that leaves a cartoon map of Asia on the screen.
But I really think it is drawn in such a way as to truly make it unclear if they were trying to do it or not. Well, there's a couple other dotted lines on the map as well.
Is Greenland complaining about the one that's going to Canada? I mean, that's the response. Or the one that seems to be going from, I don't know, Colombia to, is that Florida? There's also no Europe on this one.
Right. What are we doing? What is happening? Well, it's not just the Republicans that were mad.
The Vietnamese said they were investigating the issue.

They're kind of trying to punch back.

Are they banning the movie in Vietnam? They're going to blur it.

They're going to blur it, I think.

Yeah.

But this has happened before.

In 2019, there was an ESPN broadcast that showed a map of China that included the Nine

Dash Line.

And people were like, why is this happening?

And obviously, Disney has a lot of movies they want to have aired in China. So there's all this kowtowing to the Chinese Communist Party, even by US media organizations that want access.
So that would be the motivation for actually doing this. Oh yeah, well there's also, I mean like there was a kerfuffle over the new Top Gun movie because they changed the back of Tom Cruise's jacket.
I saw Mission Impossible and 10 out of 10. My thetans loved every moment of it, but there's a moment where they refer to this villain that's attacking countries all over the world and they refer to Australasia instead of actually referring to China, I believe.
It's a little strange. I've never heard of.
I mean, my favorite example of this is from 2021 when John Cena recorded an apology to the Chinese people because he referred to Taiwan as a country. The quote was, Taiwan is the first country to watch Fast and Furious 9.
That led to him having to record this hostage video that I think he did in Mandarin, maybe. Yes, no, he did.
And it was very comfortable. Let me read you guys a quote from it.
I must say right now, it's very, very, very, very, very, very important, Sina said. I love and respect China and Chinese people.
I'm very, very sorry for my mistake. Wow.
Yeah. So there's some real groveling when you screw up and maybe get locked out of the Chinese market.
I will say this is a very funny map to be upset about though. Yeah.
It's- You guys gonna see Barbie? I have my Oppenheimer tickets. I don't yet have my Barbie tickets.
You know, my last shot to really see a movie in the theater when Emily and Charlie were away was this weekend. And I really hoped it was the weekend.
I just missed it by a weekend. You should go see Mission of Hustle.
I almost did, but I didn't want to support that Scientologist. I'm going to see Oppenheimer in, I had to go to one of the theaters that has the 11 mile IMAX.
The nine dash IMAX. It's 70 millimeters IMAX.
And the movie is so long that the actual film is 11 miles long at the chinese theater they had to like build a bigger projector area to to show it and i just i just think it's amazing that christopher nolan has somehow nationality man uh managed to i'm ignoring it has somehow managed to convince a studio to give him like a hundred million dollars to make a three-hour biopic also it's really funny it's about the obviously the creation of the nuclear bomb they don't um he said all the effects are practical and it's like i'm sorry did you go to north korea and dedicate like don't did you he's like it's all practical effects did you do a nuke test is that a term for not digitally yeah they didn't add yeah they i think they blew up some stuff but it's actual actual explosions. I don't yet believe Christopher Nolan has achieved a nuclear bomb.
I do not think his nuclear program has gone far enough. I look forward to his apology if he did.
He's very, very, very, very, very sorry. Very, very sorry.
Okay, well. I'll see Barbie.
It seems fun. I'm probably gonna wait until it's at home, though.
It does seem fun. I'm in.
Whenever I can. All right.
Thanks to Ronna Epting and Matt Bennett for joining us today.

We will be on Discord Tuesday night for the Trump Town Hall.

And we'll talk to you again on Thursday.

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