Dark Brandon: The Sequel

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Disney sues Ron DeSantis. And Democratic pollster Celinda Lake stops by to talk about the president's road to 270 electoral votes.
Then, Dan and I sort through the many wild rumors and theories about why Fox News fired Tucker Carlson. Fun stuff.
But first, Crooked's newest pod, Pod Save the UK, is launching May 4th. And if you like to laugh and cry about politics, you're going to love this show.
Love it. Tommy and I sat down with the hosts, Nish Kumar and Coco Khan, for a special bonus crossover episode.
We tackled some really important issues like what the USA and the UK really think about each other's politics, how to turn political outrage into action, and of course course what really happened to the queen's corgis when she died um which you can imagine love it brought up uh here is a sneak peek it's a very historic phrase that we use here in britain and it is chat shit get banged i love that that's the phrase it's true's true. And I promise I mean this genuinely.
There is a lot of chatting shit in politics, a lot of flagrant lying and not enough getting banged. And I think really the general public, like, I'm serious.
I feel like people need to see some consequences to the constant lies. I just want you to know, dan that we got a note about the episode from uh the producers afterwards saying that it was great but that quote they did have to cut all the bestiality stuff oh okay will that be available maybe down the line for others that's for subscribers.
You want the good shit.

It was an unhinged episode in a very fun way.

For more of this crossover episode, watch now on the Pod Save the World YouTube or listen and subscribe to Pod Save the UK wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's get to the news.
President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. has officially launched his re-election bid with a three-minute announcement video that was followed by an ad blitz from the campaign

and allies. President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.
has officially launched his re-election bid with a three-minute announcement video that was followed by an ad blitz from the campaign and allied super PACs. Let's listen to some of the announcement video.
But you know, around the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to take on those bedrock freedoms. Cutting Social Security that you've paid for your entire life while cutting taxes for the very wealthy, dictating what healthcare decisions women can make,

banning books and telling people who they can love,

all while making it more difficult for you

to be able to vote.

Every generation of Americans have faced a moment

when they have to defend democracy.

Stand up for our personal freedom.

Stand up for the right to vote and our civil rights.

And this is our moment. Let's finish this job.
I know we can't because this is the United States of America. There's nothing, simply nothing we cannot do if we do it together.
I just want you to know that I had that song stuck in my head last night.

I think it's catchy.

I like the music.

Two questions, Dan.

What did you think of the video?

And why aren't you wearing the Dark Brandon t-shirt that the campaign is currently selling on its website?

To answer your second question first, it's because the mail has not arrived today.

Okay, that's fair.

That's fair.

Next Thursday, I want to see those two glowing red eyes on your shirt while we record this. I thought the video was very good.
It was upbeat, optimistic. As you mentioned, it had very catchy music.
It framed the race in on very favorable terms to Democrats. It's try to remind people of why they felt so good about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, both in 2020, and then at various points in over the course of the first few years of the presidency.
And I think it didn't seem like a typical political ad. So I thought the audience for these things is not the persuadable voter who's not going to tune in for a year and a half now.
It's for people who are already engaged in politics. And if it wants to get people to, what you want in your announcement videos, people to give money and sign up to volunteer.
And I think I thought it hit all the right notes to achieve that goal. Yeah.
I sort of dissect these videos like frame by frame, because when I was a speech writer, you could write a five, six, seven page speech and just put in everything you wanted. And then a couple of times Axelrod asked me to help with like an ad or two.
Man, that's hard because you have, and this is three minutes, but usually you have like 30 or 60 seconds and you try to write a script and the script is obviously way too long. You really have to choose carefully what you want to include in the video.
So I was interested in what they decided to include. Like they open with January 6th and Dobbs images of both and the Supreme Court.
They talked about freedom a lot. Also democracy wanted everyone treated equally, protect everyone's rights, give everyone a fair shot.
And then when he hit MAGA Republicans and talked about that movement and talked about them taking away freedom, he picked cutting Social Security, dictating health care decisions for women, banning books, telling people who you can love and making it more difficult to vote. I thought it was an interesting choice that the, you know, in the lead up to 2022, the message from Biden was mostly about abortion and about democracy.
I think that their paid ads were much more economy. But what do you think about the fact that this was heavy on democracy and freedom and lighter on economic messaging? I was surprised by that.
And I think somewhat pleasantly surprised because there had been Ron Brownstein, who writes for The Atlantic and CNN, wrote a story or a column a couple months ago about how Biden would handle these culture war, quote unquote, culture war issues, which is a term I hate to use, but I can't think of a better one right now. And in that story, he quoted some people in the Biden operation saying that they were going to avoid taking the bait on these things.
Their primary and main focus is going to be on the economy. And that was just sort of noise on the outside.
And so to see them lean in here, I thought that was not a viable strategy in this political environment. And so I was very glad to see that.
And I thought reclaiming the word freedom, I think, is very important. It's something you and I have talked about a lot.
I have argued for in the past. I think this is the right way to do it, which is to take all of the Republican extremist agenda and frame it under one word, to make them not just be extreme, but sort of these meddling, privacy-invading weirdos who are trying to get involved in all your personal shit.
I think that's a very good way to set the race, create the choice, and help with some of the voters we know Biden's going to need, like young voters who feel the most strongly on these issues. Yeah.
And like you said about intended audience, I think videos like this are probably for an audience of people who have probably been quite politically engaged since 2016, who probably not only voted in all these elections, but maybe volunteered, who pay close attention to politics, and I think who care about these issues quite a bit. And I think that as you try to message to sort of a lot of more working class voters, there'll probably be more economy, though.
It's interesting. You know, I talked to Selinda Lake.
We'll hear that interview soon. She was talking about how this freedom message landed with a pretty wide swath of voters from different backgrounds, different education levels, et cetera.
And so I do think that, you know, it gets to something we always talk about how like, you know, Democrats talk about issues too much and Republicans talk about make it bigger and make it about values. He really this was a an announcement video that was all about values and the value of freedom.
And I think it's so ingrained in the American experience that it will resonate with people who also don't pay close attention to politics. When I was listening to this video and the ad that we're going to talk about in a second, I hearken back to the interview you did on Offline with Lynn Vavreck, who has written the analysis of all the elections and talks about the era of calcification of politics.
But one thing that I think embedded in that interview that is really worth paying attention to is the idea that in the 2020 election, even though a lot of Trump voters agreed with Democrats on a lot of policy issues, those issues were secondary to issues related to identity, to sort of the freedom agenda you're talking about here, right? Abortion, marriage equality, the LGBTQ plus rights, and on both sides, for people who agreed with it, it was more important, even if they disagree with Democrats on the economy, they would side with Democrats there, and then the reverse is true. And so I think that dynamic is playing a role here.
This does not mean the economy is not going to be a huge part of this election. I don't know if Celinda made this point to you in this interview, but she made it when I talked to her a few months ago.
No person has ever won the presidency in the modern era while losing on the economy. And Biden has a lot of work to do there.
And they clearly are going to spend a lot of time trying to rebuild his numbers on the economy heading into the election. Just can't do that right this second.
So this is where they put the focus.

You mentioned the ad to Biden campaign and DNC released their first one, a 90 second spot called Flag, relatively small ad by seven figures. It will run nationally on MSNBC and locally on TV

in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Here's a clip.

As the sun rises, we raise the flag, a symbol of all that Wisconsin. Here's a clip.
But they're under attack by an extreme movement that seeks to overturn elections, ban books, and eliminate a woman's right to choose. Joe Biden has made defending our basic freedoms the cause of his presidency.
Since you host a hit show on our YouTube channel about ads called Political Experts React, why don't you go ahead and react? As a faux political expert, I shall react. So it's interesting to sort of think of all the various pieces of Biden content as sort of like these nesting dolls.
So you had the State of the Union, which had everything. And then you have a three-minute video.
And now we're down to a 90-second video. And in each stage, as you get smaller, more stuff drops out.
And it is very notable what stayed in this 90-second version is the huge focus on a Republican extremist attack on freedom. And I thought I thought it was a good ad.
Now, like, why do you think? Why do you think 90 and not 60 or 30? 90 felt long to me. That's because you're, you've spent too much time on Twitter, like myself.
And so 90 seems like an impossible amount of time. You're like, that's like 19 TikToks.
Like, I can't do it. I know, but I don't think we're alone.
No. I think the way to think about this ad is, once again, this is not, they are not trying to persuade the up for grabs voters who are going to decide the election.
Those people are not watching, they're not engaged with politics right now. Most of them probably have no idea that Joe Biden just announced a re-election.
They may not know he's planning for re-election. Even if they did, historically, they are not going to decide until weeks before the election.
We are 18 months out from the election. So what this ad is doing, I think it's a very smart way to think about modern communications is it is spending some money to improve the information environment in which your announcement is happening.
Because Biden knows his video is going to go out there. That'll get some circulation.
There will be a lot of right-wing media reaction to it, which is dominant. And then you're going to have mainstream media reaction, which is going to be infected with.
But Joe Biden announces, despite low polls or concerns about AIDS, so you put out a piece of content on your terms that's seen by your people, which is why it's on MSNBC and why it's happening in the battleground states. And for that environment, 90 seconds is a totally, I think, useful length.
If we were trying to, you know, 15 seconds is better than 30 seconds if you're trying to get the less engaged swing voters at the end of an election. Yeah.
I love that he's taking back the flag and patriotism. I thought that was great.
Yeah. The democracy and freedom message worked here.
It's interesting. I also like that he is framing it as an extreme movement.
He did two things. First, he said democracy should not be a partisan issue, which is the clip from the State of the Union.
And he also said there's an extreme movement that's trying to overturn elections, ban books, and eliminate a woman's right to choose. And I do think that he's trying to square the circle here on these two things.
But I do think it's important to give people the permission structure to say, this isn't the Republican Party I remember. This is an extreme movement.
And it's not for partisan reasons that I want to vote against them, but it's because they are attacking democracy itself. I think that's like an important he's he's been doing that in the midterms.
And I think he did that again here. I also, you know, when the video came out, when the ads came out, I like watch them quickly.
Didn't really think about it as I was watching them again closely last night. The other thing that struck me is it really makes the campaign a cause for Joe Biden.
And, you know, everyone's like, this guy's running. He's 80 years old.
Why is he doing this again? And it's like, you can tell from what he says in these videos and the thematics here, like the guy is genuinely worried about democracy. he genuinely thinks he can beat Donald Trump, maybe the only one who can beat Donald Trump,

and he might be wrong,

but at the very least, you can tell he genuinely believes that. This is a real cause for him.
And I do think that's important to start out a campaign like that. Is it particularly important for Joe Biden, given what the polls show about the number of Americans and Democrats who think he should run again? Because there is this common sense question.
We all have parents or grandparents who are Biden's age, and they're like, do you want your dad to be president of the United States? Absolutely not. And so it's like, why is he doing it? This is why he's doing it.
Every campaign needs a rationale for why you and why now. And these ads begin to make the case, I think, in a pretty compelling way that is authentic to Biden in his original decision to run for president in the first place, which people asked even then, given everything that had happened with Beau and in his family and his age, everything had accomplished, like, why are you doing this? This is why.
Yeah. Moments after Biden's launch, the Republican National Committee responded with a video that they openly bragged contains 100% artificial intelligence generated images.
Let's listen. This just in, we can now call the 2024 presidential race for Joe Biden.
This morning, an emboldened China invades Taiwan. Financial markets are in free fall as 500 regional banks have shuttered their doors.
Border agents were overrun by a surge of 80,000 illegals yesterday evening. Financials closed the city of San Francisco this morning, citing the escalating crime and fentanyl crisis.
Who's in charge here? It feels like the train is coming off the tracks. OK, first question.
What's with the AI angle? Like, has the Republican party not had enough problems with reality? Was this just a, you're reminding people that, was this just like a stunt to get attention?

Yes, it was a stunt to get attention. That's absolutely was.
And guess what? It worked.

So I'd say-

We're talking about it. We're talking about it.

I think there are a few things about the AI angle of this. One, it is a piece of shit ad.
So I think humans should feel pretty good about our coming battle with the robots for our jobs. Like it's not there yet.
Second, the fact that AI is used here is irrelevant. They could have used stock images for all of that.
Yes, this is a simply faster, but probably less effective thing than what you would normally do, which is you would use stock images, B-roll, you'd use Photoshop. It's not that hard.
And so the AI thing is so effective. There are very real implications for how AI could change politics in really dangerous ways with deep fakes and really interesting ways in terms of how it could affect how we make content, how we analyze the effectiveness of content, all of that.
And we're going to eat guardrails and their concerns. None of that is pleasant.
These people who are freaking out about the fact this is AI generated, it doesn't matter. They could have done the exact same thing from stock photos and Photoshop.
The AI part is just a trick. It worked.
Also, I was going to say, I didn't see anyone freaking out, but my first thought was this was designed to trigger liberals into screaming about the dangers of AI and disinformation. Even though, like you said, it's not like they used AI in this scenario to spread any disinformation other than the disinformation they would have spread had they not used AI.
Well, it's like they created it. The way people describe this is they used AI to create an entirely fake future.
It's like, to be completely honest, Barack Obama ran this exact same ad at the end of the 2012 campaign that was, what if Rodney won, right? It's a newscast. We just use actors instead of fake images.
That part is not that big a deal. Well, the reason we're talking about it is not necessarily the AI, but it's the first sort of salvo from the Republican Party on how they're going to attack Joe Biden in this campaign.
So what did you think about the ad's message? Was it effective? Do you think it's indicative of how they're going to run against Biden? I think it's indicative of the fact that they don't really know how to run against Biden yet. If you just look at polls and you're like, what is the most obvious attack on Biden? It's that he's too old for the job.
But they can't say that because the front runner for the Republican nomination is basically Biden's age. And then the second problem with the, and they try to use weak as a proxy for it, but it's not the same thing.
I don't, it worries me. The weak thing worries me because I think that, and I don't, I don't, I don't think Biden's weak, but I do think that like, there's a lot of focus on the age.
And then a lot of Democrats say, oh, well, Trump is 76. He's old too.
So the age thing is whatever. But what they're, in this ad, it's very clear they're trying to do the, like, the world is out of control.
The country's out of control control you feel like things are bad and this guy is too old and weak to really handle it you know trump's an asshole we all know that but like trump doesn't seem weak trump seems strong right now like again i'm not like too terrified of that but it does seem like a coherent message it can be a coherent message. There is plus weak, and there's weak.
And if Ron DeSantis or someone else who was not in their late 70s is the Republican nominee, you can do both. And that is probably a stronger message on that dimension.
As we said before, Joe Biden is going to determine how much voters care about age, depending on how he performs in the White House and on the trail. And if he's performed like he has for the last few years, I think that that issue can be taken off the table.
The problem with the way they're articulating that message is they are trying to create a reality that does not compute for the vast majority of Americans who do not live in the Fox News bubble. Are you saying that San Francisco isn't about to be closed down? Well, I got a flight out of there in an hour, so I better hurry.
San Francisco is going to be closed down. It literally says the border is gone.
Right? Like that, this is one of the things I saw all through 2020 and through 2022. One of the problems for Republicans is that people who make their ads have had their brains pickled by the right-wing media.
And so they constantly make ads that are relevant to a world created by the right-wing media and not the world experienced by the voters they need. This video, like the original Biden video, is for a certain audience.
It's for RNC donors. I'll be interested to see if this problem will continue, but it continued all through the ads in 2022.
Yeah, I guess I have a little PTSD from 2016. When I felt like the whole election, I was saying, like, you know, these wrong track numbers, they don't really capture how people are going to vote and people are tend to be grumpy and, and the Republicans talking about and Trump talking about how dark everything is and how awful everything is and how the country's falling apart.
Like, that's not really going to work. That's not optimistic.
And then we know what happened. So I guess, yeah, it's clear that it's an ad that tries to, like you do if you're running against an incumbent, try to make the election a referendum, right? Like, things are shitty.
Joe Biden's the president. Give us a chance.
And I imagine that's going to be harder to do when Donald Trump is your nominee, if Donald Trump is your nominee. Right.
Let's talk about Biden's path to 270. Nate Cohn has a pretty good piece in The New York Times about the president's re-election prospects at this point, a year and a half before Election Day, though I might quibble with the lead, which says, quote, some might feel that President Biden's re-election

is all but a done deal.

If those people are out there,

I would love to get my hands on

whatever drugs they're taking.

You know, Democrats,

famously confident and cocky about elections.

It's like, Elijah, thankfully, I put that in Slack and was freaking out about it and i was like yeah that's pretty bad that's pretty bad nate goes on to write on average mr biden leads mr trump by 1.4 so far this year mr desantis even leads mr biden by less than a point let the freak out begin uh why is this race and especially if it's a Biden-Trump rematch, so close?

Because the last Biden-Trump rematch was decided by like 40,000 voters. Also close.
This is the nature of American politics. It is happening on the margins in a small handful of states.
the last I said this last week I'll say it again we have to remember the last two presidential

elections were decided by a total handful of states. The last, I said this last week, I'll say it again.
We have to remember the last two presidential elections were decided by a total number of voters that was about the size of the number of people who sit in a college football stadium on a Saturday. It is like 120,000 voters.
That's what we were talking about here. It is going to be close.
We should assume it's close. We should act like it's close.
That is the reality of politics. Now, if we had a popular vote election, it would not be close.
The margins have been getting larger for Democrats over the years. But within the context of Electoral College, which trends Republican, we should expect a very close risk.
Yeah. And that's, you know, regardless of which candidates are running, what we've learned over the last several years, regardless if there's a pandemic, a recession, indictments, an insurrection, very few things are shifting in a significant way where the electorate is, at least in the Trump era.
That doesn't mean that can't change, right? Like we thought things were going one way and then 2016 sort of upended everything partly because of Trump. But as for now, 18, 20, 22 have all been pretty much, you know, the, the electorate has been pretty, uh, pretty much the same.
We talked a little bit about, uh, Biden's low forties approval rating on Tuesday, but I know you wrote a message box about it this week. What's going on there? Can he win with those numbers?

Can he improve them?

Biden absolutely can win with a number in the low 40s. He should try to get his number up.
He's going to try to get his number up. But good advice.
Good advice. When Barack Obama won reelection in 2012, the last president win reelection, he did so with an approval rating at about 50%.
There is almost no universe where Joe Biden's approval rating is going to be 50%. Because America's become more polarized, so you have fewer members of the other party who are willing to approve of the president, that lowers your ceiling pretty dramatically.
But we live in a world of negative partisanship where most people vote not for their party, but against the other Party, which is why Biden was able to have a historic performance in the 2022 midterms, despite having a low approval rating. We cannot analyze presidential approval ratings in a vacuum.
Running for president is a lot like avoiding getting eaten by a bear. You don't have to be faster than the bear.
You have to be faster than the other guy. Joe Biden doesn't have to be popular.
He has to be more popular than Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis. And that seems very doable.
That doesn't mean he doesn't have work to do. He needs to improve his leadership quality, how the public sees his leadership quality, his numbers on the economy.
He's got real work to do with young voters. But we should not look at his approval rating and compare it to previous presidents and how they did because the world has changed a lot.
Yeah, I even saw, I think at the NBC Wall Street Journal poll, they did, they tested Joe Biden versus generic Republican nominee. And it was like Joe Biden got 41%, the generic Republican got 47%.
I'm like, that is the most useless question to ask, because there will not be a generic Republican nominee. There will be either Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis.
And so when that's when that's what you get, you've got to you've got to measure it against the actual person you're running against. If you did Donald Trump versus a generic Democratic nominee, I bet you'd get the same numbers or a bigger margin for the Democrat.
Can you talk about how you see the map at this point? I was listening to The Daily the other day, and Jonathan Weissman said it will come down to Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin,

which seemed a bit narrow to me. What's The Daily? Where do you find that? That's the newspaper.
The Daily newspaper. Is that someone who copies one a day? That was like a one a day.
Exactly. The last election came down to six states.
Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan. My expectation is it'll come down to those states again.
The only question on that list in my mind is how competitive Michigan will be. It was the least competitive of those six.
Democrats had a tremendous performance in 2022 there. But when I say how competitive it is,

I'm saying, is Biden going to win it by two points instead of one point like that? I mean, that's how narrow these states are. Most of them are happening within less than one half of one percent.
And so we should expect those to be where the race is contested again. Yeah, no, I agree.
I was like, I'm definitely more bullish on Michigan than I was at the beginning of 2020 and probably Pennsylvania, too. But I still think they are going to be fiercely contested.
Donald Trump running in Pennsylvania is very different than Dr. Oz running in Pennsylvania.
Yes, yes. Right.
All right. Let's talk about the big news this week on the debt ceiling drama.
Kevin McCarthy finally got a bill passed through the House with no votes to spare. It was 217 to 215 with four Republicans voting no.
In order to win over the most hardcore MAGA extremists, McCarthy changed the bill in the middle of the night so that it would take away health care and food from even more seniors, veterans, and low-income families. Dan, are you ready to say that you were wrong about Kevin McCarthy and admit that he is, in fact, a shrewd political tactician? Congratulations on barely achieving the most basic task aside to you.
Like, we are in participation trophy culture for Kevin McCarthy. That is for sure.
Most of the playbook this morning was just, like, a lot of people showering Kevin McCarthy with compliments. Oh, we had it all wrong.
He really figured this out. I was like, okay.
He passed a bill with all people who voted for him as speaker. Congratulations for not falling on your face while walking seven feet consecutively.
Yeah. I also think that he has a bit of an easier job in the sense that the Freedom Caucus basically made a bunch of demands.
He gave in. He doesn't really have to worry about moderates getting pissed off because all the moderates are gone.
And the people who are now the most moderate in there, they never really had a lot of juice anyway. Their numbers are small and they all folded.
Nancy Mace was like, oh no, I won't vote for a bill that has stricter work requirements on Medicaid. That's bad.
I don't want that. And then she voted for it in the end.

And what is she going to do? Not vote against it? Cause Kevin McCarthy to lose his speakership

and end up with Marjorie Taylor Greene as her boss? I mean, this was always going to happen.

And it's Kevin McCarthy's advantage in life is he has no principles. And so there's nothing he

won't do to achieve a short term, even if it has long term or even medium term consequences for his party, and certainly for the country. I think that's an important point, too, is that he's like, it's very Trumpian and that like, you just get through the news cycle, right? You just get you get to the next day.
And there's a bunch of Freedom Caucus people who are like, Oh, we told them we'll vote for this, but if you don't include everything that was in this bill in the final debt ceiling bill, we're not voting yes. It's like, well, guess what? You're not going to get everything that was in this bill in the final bill, even if you were just negotiating with Senate Republicans, let alone Democrats.
That is a really important point. The fact that he told all these members that this was a floor, not a ceiling, means he already knows how this is going to end, which is some bill passing with a majority of Democrats plus a small handful of Republicans to lift the debt ceiling.
Whether that happens before or after the economy crashes, that's the real question, but that's where it's going. Stay tuned.
Stay tuned. All right.
Here's McCarthy's post-vote statement to President Biden. The Republicans have raised the debt limit.
You have not. Neither has Schumer.
So this was all reportedly a play to get Biden and the Democrats to the negotiating table. Should they bite? Do they have to? Are they coming to the negotiating table now? They do not have to bite.
I don't think they're going to bite because Joe Biden can't enter a negotiation with Kevin McCarthy where Joe Biden's starting point is keeping the economy from blowing up. And Kevin McCarthy's is stopping the economy from blowing up and cutting every federal program by 22% and doing a whole bunch of other bad shit.
Like that's not a good faith negotiation. It cannot happen.
It will not happen. If this is going to get resolved, I don't think it's going to happen with Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden in a room together.
So what happens next then? That's a great question, John. We're barreling towards the deadline.
Although I think that Treasury got some more money in, more than they were expecting. And now they think it's late July, mid to late July is the drop dead date.
I think Treasury is still claiming, still says they were planning for June. Goldman Sachs, which last week said it was June, now says it's July.
And the CBO says, I think sometime between July and September, which is a really precise measurement for something that of these stakes. So we don't really know.
There's some time. It's not going to happen next week or even next month.
But at some point this summer, this is all going to come to a head. I just wonder, like, I feel like the ball's in Biden's court now, at least in the minds of the media.
And the Republicans will certainly help deliver that message as well. And so let's say the White House says no, no negotiations.
And then what happens? I mean, I guess you could say that the Senate then, maybe Schumer takes something up and says that they'll start working on something in the Senate. Because I guess McCarthy did also say that like, hey, well, I want to negotiate with Biden, but if the Senate passes something, then we can get in the room together and negotiate a compromise with the Senate.
I think what would come next, and this is not easy, in a normal world with a normal Democratic majority, the data include Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. And had Dianne Feinstein present, what you would do is Schumer would bring up a clean debt limit bill, get 50 Democrats for it, force the Republicans to filibuster it, and claim Republicans are blocking, avoiding default.
But I'm not sure you're going to get 50 votes for that because of a Democratic absence and two troublemakers in our party. But that would be the next step in the old way of doing business.
So Biden did come out swinging against this bill. Let's listen to a clip.
They haven't figured out the debt limit yet. Will you meet with McCarthy? Will you meet with McCarthy, but not on whether or not the debt limit gets extended.
That's not negotiable. I noticed they quote Reagan and they quote, they quote Reagan all the time and they quote Trump.
Both of which said, it says, I'm paraphrasing, it would be an absolute crime to not extend the debt limit. So that was from Biden.
The White House has also been, you know, tweeting about how this bill would cut veterans health care, meals on wheels for seniors, health care coverage for millions, would send clean energy manufacturing jobs overseas. What do you think of all this messaging from the White House? And are there any other arguments you'd make about this bill? The White House has been making this argument.
Other Democrats have been making it. The most effective argument, according to a poll out this morning from Navigator Research, is by pointing out that the Republican House bill would cut programs like Veterans Affairs, cancer research, child care by 22 percent.
When you put that 22 percent number in and you list some of the programs that would be cut, it takes the bill from three percent support to opposition by 22 points. It swings it 25 points.
And that swing is most manifest with independence. And so focusing on the specifics of the cuts is how they should do this.
The White House has been doing that. They've been setting the stage for it.
I think all you need to know about the politics of this bill is that Donald Trump has not been willing to touch it with a 10-foot pole. Yeah.
Haven't heard him talk about it much. Yeah.
You mentioned the troublemakers. One of them is Joe Manchin.
Obviously, Democrats need to be united to win this fight. I thought we were, personally, I thought we were done talking about Joe Manchin.
But he's out there threatening to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, which basically he wrote, for reasons I can't begin to comprehend. I mean, I do think he's clearly trying to improve his very bad poll numbers in West Virginia.
They are bad because he did vote for the Inflation Reduction Act, and people in West Virginia are quite conservative and probably didn't like him doing that. But I don't know that going to voters in your state and saying, hey, remember that bill that I wrote? Well, I wrote it one way and it passed, but Joe Biden didn't implement it right.
So now I'm threatening to repeal it. I don't know that that works, but maybe I'm wrong.
John, you have a toddler that lives in your house, correct? I do. How does your toddler react if he feels like you're not giving him sufficient attention in any one moment.
Ah, yes, yes. That's what's happening here.
He now says,

excuse me,

excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, because we told him that you need to say excuse me and not just yell. And so now he yells, excuse me.
Yes. So you know what that is? That's a smart kid right there.
Joe Manchin needs attention at all times. I think he may misunderstand some of his own political successes.
If you remember when he was running for election in 2010, he had a campaign ad where he shot the cap and trade bill that was supported by President Obama and passed by the House Democrats. But shooting your shooting someone else's bill and shooting your own bill is a bit different.
He's shooting his own bill. I am a little like, I'm like, what's he up to? Governor Jim Justice of West Virginia is entering the race against Joe Manchin.
Jim Justice is like former Democrat, turned Republican, very popular governor of West Virginia. It seems very like the toughest possible opponent for Joe Manchin if he makes it through the primary, if Justice makes it through the primary.
Manchin released a statement saying, he keeps saying, I'm not going to make any decisions until December about my future. But then he also said, I will win any race I enter.
He keeps leaving open the possibility that there may be other races that he's going to run in. He's already ruled out governor, though.
So, like, are we going to get a fucking Joe Manchin no labels ticket? Is that what we're dealing with? And we haven't talked about no labels much here, but, like, they are going around getting no labels, no label spot on ballots in key swing states. I think they've already got one in Arizona.
And Oregon as well, I believe. I do not believe that Joe Manchin can beat Jim Justice in a Senate race in West Virginia in a presidential year.
Joe Manchin barely won in 2018 against a massively flawed opponent. He was running against an unpopular attorney general who was all mobbed up with the opioid industry in West Virginia.
That is not a good candidate. Yeah.
And so if he's running against Jim Justice, who's going to get Trump's endorsement, he is a former Democrat with Trump credentials. He's not going to win that race.
And so there is a very real possibility. We, you know, as we say, we worry about everything, panic about nothing, but we should be worried about Joe Manchin running for president on some independent ticket.
And when we talked all about, you know, your fears about 2016, the reason 2016 happened one way in 2020 happened to happen a different way is that in 2016, Donald Trump only needed 47% of the vote to win. In 2020, he needed 50.
So we lost. If we get to a point where there's a third party candidate who can take a significant chunk of votes and by significant i mean three points in a battleground state yeah trump can easily win any of these states he's got 47 on lock in these states less than three percent yeah right i mean it's like and also it doesn't have to be in every state right like say it was just arizona it could come down to a down to Arizona and Joe Manchin could pull 1% in Arizona and still fuck us.
Just remember Jill Stein received more votes in several of the states that decided the election in 2016 than the margin of difference between Trump and Clinton. All right.
Let's end on a high note. All right.
One last piece of fun news before Celinda joins. Disney is suing Ron DeSantis for what they're alleging is a, quote, targeted campaign of government retaliation.
The lawsuit came just minutes after DeSantis' goons voted to nullify two agreements that gave Disney control over their resort complex. From the Disney statement, quote, Disney finds itself in this regrettable position because it expressed a viewpoint the governor and his allies did not like in america the government cannot punish you for speaking your mind nbc has also reported that tiny d is uh planning to launch his exploratory committee for president in mid may you think being hit with a lawsuit from the most uh beloved company in america is a win for uh little ronnie puddin fingers kind of Go ahead.
Tell me why you think that is. I think it is a, he's probably going to lose this suit and that will be bad for him.
And it's, and the reason Disney is doing this and based on a lot of what I've read is it's not just DeSantis. Obviously they have some real stakes here, but you can see every Republican governor doing this.
And so any place where they have business interests, they need to win a, here that sets a standard that protects companies from, I don't know, just expressing their opinion publicly without facing repercussions, something that might be included in the Constitution. But Republican politics, you're defined by your enemies.
And corporations, whether they're Disney or even Fox, are incredibly unpopular among the Republican base. You talked to Celinda today when she did that project on Factory Towns.
The most interesting to me part of that project was if you call Fox News corporate news, Republicans run away from it. It's the best way to combat Fox News disinformation.
And so a corporation suing Ron DeSantis can be a win for him, whether he's got the dexterity to make it at least a short-term win for him to be as a proof of his conservative bona fides that he's such a fighter against wokeism or whatever fucking word he wants to use. I don't think it's bad for him right now.
I think in a vacuum where there is no Donald Trump and everyone is like, oh, Ron DeSantis, he's, you know, he's the front runner in the Republican primary. I think that everything you said would be correct.
I think the existence of Donald Trump now shitting on every single thing that Ron DeSantis does makes this much trickier for him because now it fits in a bucket of, oh, look at this guy. He's flailing.
He's sort of he's he doesn't know what he's doing. He you know, Trump already hit him once for the Disney thing.
And I don't know that it's as clean as it would have been had there be no Donald Trump, because now Trump will message to voters. This isn't DeSantis taking on a big, woke corporation.
This is DeSantis doing some kind of stunt and he fucked it up and he couldn't do it right. And now Disney's going to get him.
I think that is that is definitely true that if it was if DeSantis was in this race alone or he was just running against Nikki Haley or whoever else, it would be a much cleaner, bigger deal for him. Everything is more challenging for DeSantis because Trump is in the race shooting on him.
Eating breakfast is a pain in his ass, right? Like everything is hard. But this is at least a chance for DeSantis to have a news cycle that is about him and him alone.
Now, the one thing we should remember, though, is that we have seen no evidence in any of the polling that any of these voters are hearing Trump's attacks on DeSantis.

Because they're just truth doubt and truth social. You and I are missing like 80% of Trump truths because they don't break through anywhere.
Well, apparently he had this great statement about DeSantis' trip to Japan, which also I didn't really – I would have never known DeSantis went to Japan except that he gave that press conference where he fucking sounded like a bobblehead doll. And then Tommy brought it to our attention because I guess he read it on Pod Save the World.
And it's like Trump saying that DeSantis is flying home from Japan and he's like, why did I do this? Why? Why am I running for president? It was very funny. It's great.
His statement on the Disney thing today is actually pretty smart for general election about how this is going to cost Florida all these jobs. But was that what Trump did? I was waiting for it.
I couldn't find it. Like I said, no one hears them.
You and I don't hear them. I had to go to the exact URL of the Trump truths to find it this morning in preparation for this pod.
As it should be. Okay, when we come back, I will talk to Democratic pollster, Celinda Lake.
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Joining us now to talk about Joe Biden's path to re-election, one of his top pollsters, veteran Democratic strategist, Celinda Lake. Celinda, welcome back.
Thank you, great to be here. Big week for the president.
What was the thinking behind the messages in the announcement video in the first ad, which were heavy on freedom, democracy, protecting rights, a little lighter on the economy? Right. So I'm not speaking on behalf of the campaign here.
I'm just speaking as a Democratic bolster. Sure.
But one of the things that we've been finding in all of the work that we've been doing is the power of the freedom narrative it's huge out there and the central narrative of taking away our freedoms and it's something that was also you know is a real through thread for the president he started with charlottesville and the soul of the nation and the and the soul of the nation is as much in jeopardy today or more so because it's been revealed how far the other side will go. So it's a very, very heartfelt thematic.
It tests unbelievably strongly. It's a value.
Freedom is interesting because it's the number one value out there. And it's the number one word that the right uses more than the left, which is quite ironic right now.
So we are taking it back. And I think the president's speech was a strong part of that.
The president, I think there are two pillars to the campaign, the record on the economy and taking away our freedoms and fighting for our freedoms, whether it's voting, whether it's abortion, whether it's LGBTQ rights.

But the other pillar is the economy. Simultaneously to the announcement, of course, the president and the whole cabinet is engaged in a 31-city tour on the economy and on investments from the IRA.
So it's not like it was ignored. It was like, these are the two pillars and they are being spoken to simultaneously, in my opinion.
Can you take us behind the scenes in the world of Democratic pollsters and strategists on how the freedom narrative sort of came to be? Because I remember like democracy and abortion rights. President talked a lot about both of those in the lead up to the midterm.
So did other Democrats. And there was some, you heard some candidates talk about freedom in the lead up to the midterms.
But I feel like it really took hold maybe in the last year or so since the election. I think it actually really took hold after January 6th.
And there had been some freedom messaging around abortion before that. And Anand Shankar Osorio, who I know you know well and adore as much as I do, was really one of the people who developed freedom as such a strong, broad thematic.
And freedom relates to the economy too. The freedom to thrive in the economy was a point that she made and has been making for some time.
Then, of course, with January 6th, with the voting rights restrictions, with the abortion restrictions, the Dobbs decision, medication abortion, taking away our freedoms became a very, very prominent theme. The freedom to be represented by who we want to be represented by and not have them silenced on the floor of the house.
There are just so many things happening that people thought were completely unlikely to happen. And many of them people think, is this even legal? Like, don't I get to vote for who I want? And you can't tell them they can't speak on the floor.
So that has been the push in this last year. There were quite a few candidates who actually ran on freedom in 2022.
And it's been a very strong thematic since then because the Republicans keep making it stronger and stronger for us. You were one of the president's top pollsters in 2020.
You've known him for years. In your view, what do his current low 40s approval ratings and, you know, lack of enthusiasm among some Democratic voters not capture about his strength as a candidate in this race? I think there are three things.
I love your question. Thank you.
I was expecting another one, but thank you. I think, number one, that we beat Trump already.
Seven million more votes.

I mean, this wasn't a, you know, 100 vote margin, 7 million more votes. And that was before January 6th.
That was before Dobbs. It was before Trump was indicted for everything under the sun.
So, and has completely alienated women. And actually of all the indictments in our research, we're finding that the rape trial is the most salient to women.
It's not even the papers or the finances. It's the rape trial, which is very, very vivid to them.
Has that broken through to folks yet? Totally. Particularly college-educated women, suburban women, attentive women, independent women, women democratic women yes it's it volunteered much more than i would have thought um secondly the fact that he has such an amazing record honestly it would have been easier for him if he had gotten a lot less done because then you would know exactly what to talk about we to talk about these four things, because they're the only things we got done rather than these 40 things.
And then I think people are underestimating what a sharp contrast was laid out. And it was laid out by the president's announcement, Vita, and the RNC's response video.
This is a very stark contrast in the future of America. What is the soul of the nation? Is it an optimistic vision or a pessimistic vision? And he is a resilient person.
He is optimistic. He is energetic.
And that's all being underestimated, I think. How much do you think the president and the White House and the campaign can really do to get his accomplishments to actually break through to voters? And I'm sure the voters we're talking about are not the super engaged people who consume a lot of news like us.
But, you know, a lot of folks working class, middle class don't pay close attention to politics. They don't really hear about the accomplishments because the media doesn't really cover them.
How useful are campaign ads, president speeches in really making that stick with voters in your experience? Well, first of all, I would say to the ever-loving frustration of all of us, it is just amazing how difficult it is to penetrate right now. I would have thought this stuff would have penetrated a lot more.
It did in 2008. And I think this administration has tried every kind of communication vehicle known to women kind and mankind.
But I think the more of this that shows up at people's kitchen tables, the more that it shows up in people's neighborhoods, the more that it shows up in the friends and family networks of people, that grandma says, thank God the insulin is only priced at this.

That your Latino neighbor says, I have a job on that construction crew for that bridge.

That the small business owner reminds them, you know, PPP loan actually kept me afloat during COVID.

We came out of COVID. We're still here because of those loans and that help.
The more that those networks express what is actually showing up. And then I think there are two things that are blocking the communication.
One is for a while, I think Democrats didn't seem in touch. We were taking victory tours and we were saying everything was good.
And it's like, what planet are you on? And we had people in focus groups asking what neighborhoods do economists live in? Because they sure don't live in my neighborhood. So I think now that there's a much greater understanding, which Bill Clinton had in his administration, that we've made this progress, but it's not good enough.
It's not good enough to hear, hear, and hear. And then the cynicism that voters have for every institution right now is at record high.
I mean, people say the president's numbers are bad. Okay, well, the president's numbers are weak.
Want to be the Supreme Court right now? Want to be Congress right now? Want to be Donald Trump right now? I mean, his numbers are better than all of them. So it's just we're just in an era of great dissatisfaction, instability.
And I think we have to factor that in. Yeah.
How big of a factor is the president's age in the focus groups and polling you've done? People mention it a lot. I think sometimes people mention it protectively.
Some seniors will say, well, I can't handle it. I'm not sure if he can.
But on the other hand, if age is the worst thing they can say about him, oh my gosh, are we in great shape. No scandal, no corruption, no failed programs.
Keep on it. The second thing I think is the best anecdote to age is just for him to be out there showing his energy, showing what he can do.
And that will come across, I think, as he's out in the hinterlands. And I think we're finally resigned.
And you mentioned it, John, we can't get any national press on the accomplishments. So they're going market by market.
It's a slow grind, local news by local news. But people are also relying on local news and podcasts more than they were in the past.
Yeah, I noticed in the announcement video that he narrated the whole thing. And I wondered if that was partly to show people like, here he is.
He's got energy. He's talking, he's out there? Like, does the, do you think the campaign will be trying to put him in situations where he can show energy that he's interacting with people, all that kind of stuff? I think so.
I mean, I'm not privy to those plans, but I think it's obvious. And I think the great thing was, people know Biden and they know that he's not Barack Obama in terms of being an orator, but he laid out a clear vision.
He emotionally spoke to what was in his heart and he laid out the contrast. Frankly, he did that in 2022 very effectively in a series of speeches.
So I think showing him out there energetically locally deliver for markets in paid ads and in speeches is a formula that worked in 2020. It's a formula that will work in 2022.
And it contrasts vividly with the erraticism and chaos of the Trump team. How are you expecting the 24 electorate to be different than the 2020 electorate? You know, we were just you just mentioned that he won by 7 million votes.
Obviously, in the swing states, it was like 40,000 votes, right? If they'd gone the other way, Trump would have won because the Electoral College. Like, you know, a lot has happened in four years, but also since Trump won won in 16 the electorate hasn't changed that much i would say and there's just been sort of swings and differential turnout here and there um what do you expect what are you seeing as we head into 24 i think a lot of the the more they change the more they stay the same but there is going to be a younger electorate particularly if they turn out out to vote.
And for the first time, we're going to have younger voters outnumber potentially baby boomers. That's good for Democrats.
Yeah. What does the map look like? Narrower, larger, same swing states? Pretty similar, I think.
The battleground states are still battlegrounds. Florida was already tough.
If DeSantis is the nominee, it'll be even tougher. Michigan's a little better for us, but it's the same playground, I think.
Which groups of voters worry you the most, keep you up at night the most if you look at Biden's 2020 coalition? Blue collar, the same people that worried us in 2020, blue collar women and blue and blue-collar men, particularly blue-collar women, because they're pretty upset at instability. They are the most cynical about accomplishments, and they are being pressured by their husbands to vote for Donald Trump.
Yeah. So we got to make sure that a lot of women vote differently than their husbands, particularly blue collar women.

What about working class voters who are Latino, even some black men? We've seen some attrition there in the last couple of elections. What do you think about that?

I think that's a problem. And I think it's a problem that derives from the central problem

for all Democrats, which is we have to more firmly establish an economic message. We have to lay out an economic contrast.
And the Biden team is well aware of it. As we've talked about before, John, Hillary Clinton, and I love Hillary Clinton, ran one ad totally devoted to the economy.
60% of the Biden media was devoted totally to the economy. We have to establish an economic plan.
We have to give out economic vision. We have to get the economy in better shape.
And the administration is working 24-7 to do that. The RNC's response to Biden's announcement video was basically, you know, country's out of control.
This guy is too old and weak, you know, to fix it. Wheels are coming off the bus.
He's over his head. Does that message worry you? Does it land with voters? And how does that message seem if, you know, the GDP numbers came out today? I think growth slowed a bit.
Like if we tip into even a mild recession, I mean, obviously Biden can't do much to control that, but does the messaging become sharper on the economic contrast or how do voters deal with that? Do you think? I think that one of the things that we have to worry about as Democrats is that Republicans are still slightly ahead on the economy. And that's generic Republicans.

And Trump economics is still perceived to be better than Obama economics or Biden economics.

So that's why we've got to stay on this message.

And, you know, it's back to the future.

As James Carvel said, it's the economy, stupid.

We got to stay on that message.

We got to establish how this economy is delivering for everyone, not just people on the coast, not just people with a college education. And that includes young black men.
And that includes Latinos, particularly Latino men who are very economically focused. Now, for case in point, Latino men love the infrastructure bill because they firmly believe we will be the ones who build those roads and bridges.
So we've got to stay on that and really make sure that we communicate to all of those channels. You made a bold, very early prediction on this show that Democrats would keep the Senate in 2022.
Before it was ever cool to think that. Care to do the same with 2024? Yeah.
I think we're guaranteed to take back the House, that we're going to have to work hard for it. Our margin is very narrow, and we got 17 seats that were won by Biden.
And I think the choice issue is going to matter a lot in the House seats. And then I think we're going to hold the Senate.
We've got really good candidates running. They're still having candidate problems.
And I think these are tough, tough races. But the John Tester, Sherrod Browns, Ruben Gallegos of the world are the kinds of seasoned candidates we need to win these seats.

And a Biden win on the presidential level?

Biden win on the presidential, for sure.

Okay.

Well, now we're out of the prediction business here, but it's always good to have you on.

You have actual data to back it up and talk to voters, so we love that.

So Linda, thank you so much for joining Plymouth of America, and come back soon.

We'll keep in touch during the course of this campaign. Thank you for having me so much and thanks for your good analysis.
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Sign up for Greenlight Infinity at greenlight.com slash podcast. All right, before we go, Dan, we got to talk about Tucker.
You haven't really had a chance to talk about Tucker yet. In the days since Rupert Murdoch knifed his golden child, there's been a flurry of theories explaining why.
So I'm going to do, I thought we'd go through each of these theories one by one, and you're going to tell me if each theory is either possibly true or resistance fanfic. Okay.
All right. I like it.
Okay. All right.

Theory number one.

He violated too many HR policies.

So the Dominion,

and that's an understatement.

The Dominion lawsuit exposed Tucker's text messages

where he disparaged Fox executives,

calling one senior executive the C word.

We knew that he called Sidney Powell the C word,

but it's also apparently a Fox News executive. Fox was also worried about a lawsuit filed by a former producer, which apparently details a highly sexist, misogynistic workplace in the Tucker show.
Again, shocker, shocker. Who would have guessed? It's always the ones you least expect.
All right. So what do you think about that theory? That sounds possibly true.
And there is even in one of the many stories about this, there is a details of meeting with the Fox attorneys and Tucker where they came to him and said, good news. We were able to get redactions of a bunch of your messages so the public won't see all the things you said, including calling the Fox News executive the C word.
And he was not happy. He wanted his views out there.
It doesn't seem like the sort of team player you want to go to war with. And a lot of people are understandably saying, well, what about the timing? He's been doing this shit forever.
And the New York Times last night, Wednesday night, broke a story. And they had some new reporting in this, which is there was basically the night before they were supposed to go to trial, even though the Fox lawyers had all the unredacted text messages from Tucker, the board and senior executives hadn't seen all of them.
And so they saw all of those messages the night before. And Dominion basically said, yeah, we're going to call Tucker to the stand and we're going to try to make sure he has to answer for all of the text messages, even the redacted ones.
And that finally was apparently the straw that broke the camel's back and why they all flipped out. Which seems, again, I would agree, possibly true.
Theory two, he dazzled Rupert's girlfriend with Bible talk. Rupert Murdoch did not like that Tucker laced religion into his show.
Then in March, Murdoch invited Tucker over for dinner, and Tucker bonded with Rupert's then-fiancée and Leslie Smith over the Bible. Rupert has since broken up with that fiancée over email.
It's just very Logan Roy. She later told Murdoch that tucker was a messenger from god to which rupert reportedly responded nope which honestly best response and uh and of course they broke off their engagement shortly after that what do you think about this theory i am first most surprised that rupert murdo That's a good point.
I didn't think about that. I mean, he was a man basically born in the Telegraph era, and he's just out here firing off emails to break up with women.
I mean, I find that surprising. This feels very fanfic-y to me, this discarded succession plot line, which is a joke a thousand people have made.
But it just seems hard to imagine this all. Well, okay, Rubt Murdoch, who is a ruthless business person, got upset because Tucker bonded with his wife over religion or his fiance of religion seems an unlikely reason to make a multimillion dollar decision for his company.
Yeah, no, I agree. I can believe that Rupert got pretty tired of Tucker and maybe wanted to fire him for a while or was thinking about it.
And this could be one of the reasons, one of the many. But like you said, you don't pull the trigger on that multi-million dollar decision just because of personal peak.
Yeah, and Rupert Murdoch does not like Donald Trump. He has never liked Donald Trump.
But he's certainly willing to help get him elected and help fuel the path to his insurrection because it's good for the business. Theory three.
This is the succession theory. The Murdoch kids are thinking long-term.
Lachlan Murdoch is preparing to lead the company when Rupert passes. His siblings, James and Elizabeth, have been pressuring to do something about Tucker.
Lachlan knows he'll need their support to run Fox because of how the family trust is structured. The Murdoch children and top execs at Fox feel that no one personality is bigger than the Fox news platform.
Is there something between possibly true and resistance fanfic? This, this just, this is our show. We can do whatever we want.
This feels like succession galaxy brain. Like we're just like, it's a succession fanfic yeah we are overly complicating this and trying to fit it into how we all understand media now which is through an hbo drama i do think succession has probably done for the way we think about media probably what west wing did for politics, which is creating a very different version of how things actually work.
Yeah. Theory four is internal warfare.
Radio talk show host Michael Savage suggested on Newsmax that Sean Hannity stabbed Tucker in the back and convinced Fox to get rid of him because he's long held a grudge against Tucker who displaced him as the most powerful Fox personality. He is a very jealous, talentless thug.

He hated Tucker's wild success from the beginning. Hannity may have had something to do with it.
This isn't resistance fanfic. This is MAGA fanfic.
That's right. I mean, who wouldn't believe Michael Savage, who I'm sure has won multiple Pulitzer's for all of his reporting.
and also

is there anything

about Sean Hannity

that suggests

he could concoct

and execute

some sort of

complicated

conflict multiple Pulitzers for all of his reporting. And also, is there anything about Sean Hannity that suggests he could concoct and execute some sort of complex plan? Very good point.
Very good point. Theory five, ratings don't equal money.
The Wall Street Journal reports that despite being the highest rated show on the network, Tucker's show didn't make big bucks. That's because Tucker's content was so unhinged that the big blue chip advertisers wouldn't buy ad time on his show.
So Fox couldn't sell commercials at a premium rate. No, that's not fanfic.
That is a misunderstanding of cable news economics. Yes, his ads were not.
And how carriage fees work, right? Yes. Yeah, right.
The Fox News gets a lot of money, not by the ads they show, but just by being on everyone's cable box. So all you people who have not yet cut the cord are still paying for Fox and whether they run ads from fortune 500 companies or weird virility supplements or gold buying or, you know, Trump commemorative coins is not, is only sort of marginal to the bottom line.
Yeah. There was also a report to, I I'll just throw in another theory, that Rupert Murdoch was angry about Tucker's Ukraine war stance.
Come on. It's just like, you know, Rupert's principled stance on the Ukrainian war, and he can't stomach Tucker out there being so pro-Putin.
Yeah, because it's obviously an outlier on this network. They're never Putin or Russia.
Like, how could that possibly happen? The reality here is very simple. Fox just lost three quarters of a fucking billion dollars in a lawsuit because a bunch of people on the show, on the network said dumb shit.
And Tucker Carlson clearly is someone who does whatever he wants and can't be stopped, which is why he ran that insane false flag January 6 documentary, which everyone tried to stop. He said, do it anyway, and then got access to those tapes and then did more of that dangerous shit.
And so they're going to take a small term hit now to avoid getting sued for a trillion dollars in 2024. It's that simple.
Yeah, that seems right. Highly plausible, I would say.
Great. How fun is this that uh oliver darcy reported that um the ratings for fox last night were like some of the lowest ratings in the post 9-11 period and that not just low ratings for fox because you could say okay well they tucker was their highest rated host they're now doing some sort of filling rotational you know a rotation of while they try try to find a new one so of course their ratings could i own but newsmax's ratings have started going up we saw this think about that we saw the same thing after january after the arizona call uh in 2020 and it it reverted to the mean it will likely revert to the mean now the next person in that slot may not get t numbers, but it will continue, probably continue to be the most watched cable news program at that time.
Forever. We had the same thought you guys made this point on Tuesday.
Everyone thought it was all going to fall apart when Glenn Beck left. And then when Bill O'Reilly left and when Roger Ailes left and it always, it returns to where it was and whether it's Jesse waters or Greg Gutfeld, or I don't know what other Yahoo they're going to put in there, they'll continue to do fine and continue to make a shitload of money dividing America on racial lines.
one um material effect of that on politics i think is in order to revert to the mean

they and and not lose audience to Newsmax.

I think all these stories

about how like the Murdochs

are done with Trump

and they want DeSantis now

and all this kind of stuff.

I think that's all gone.

I think they're going to go so

everyone at the network

all in for Trump

because they don't want to lose.

They just can Tucker

and they don't want to lose

his audience to Newsmax.

So they're going to be

right up Trump's ass now. Yeah, that's right.
That's exactly right. That's how that's what happened last time.
Yeah. Thank you to Celinda Lake for joining us and have a great weekend, everyone.
We'll talk to you next week. Bye, everyone.
Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez.

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Thanks to Hallie Kiefer, Ari Schwartz, Sandy Gerard, Andy Taft, and Justine Howe for production support.

And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Milo Kim, and Amelia Montu.

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