Revenge of the Libs

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

Speaker 5 I'm Tommy Vitor.

Speaker 2 I'm Dan Pfeiffer. John Lovitt could not be with us tonight.
He is at the Andrew Cuomo party.

Speaker 5 No, he's just at his house. He's staying there.

Speaker 2 He's in Andrew Cuomo's house. He's sleeping over

Speaker 2 in that next apartment.

Speaker 2 Big night. Big night for Democrats.
Big night for America, but it's definitely a big night for Democrats. So this feels better, doesn't it? Yeah.
A little bit.

Speaker 2 Did you guys forget what it feels to have a good election night that feels good? Did you guys forget about that? Yes.

Speaker 3 And to have an election night where all the good news came right away.

Speaker 3 There was no waiting. There was no waiting for the college towns to come in or anything like that.
It's just polls close, call for the Democrats. That's how it should be.

Speaker 5 Love it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 One in Virginia, one in New Jersey, Prop 51 in California, one in New York City, Georgia Public Service Commission.

Speaker 2 Big win there.

Speaker 5 The main ballot measure that would have

Speaker 5 put voter suppression tactics in place and voter ID laws in place was losing really badly.

Speaker 2 And the one about a red flag law to take guns away from family members who, I guess, might use them.

Speaker 3 Don't forget the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Speaker 2 Pennsylvania Supreme Court stays 5-2.

Speaker 2 Liberal majority there.

Speaker 2 I think.

Speaker 2 I'm probably forgetting a few, but it was a big night.

Speaker 5 What is this feeling winning? And this was like 2017. That's what it feels like in 2018.

Speaker 2 So let's start with

Speaker 2 just because we just watched the speech. Zoran Mamdani, 34 years old, is the mayor of New York City.
So far, it is, I believe, he crossed the 50% threshold.

Speaker 2 Right now, with 90% reporting, it's Mamdani, 50.4%.

Speaker 2 Andrew Cuomo, 41.6%.

Speaker 2 Gurdisliwa, 7.1%.

Speaker 2 Mamdani won every borough except Staten Island. Won by 20 points in Brooklyn, 11 in the Bronx, over and over and over again.
Hit a million votes.

Speaker 2 First time a candidate has done that in New York since 1969.

Speaker 2 He becomes the first Muslim mayor of New York, the first Democratic socialist, and the youngest mayor of New York since Tammany Hall days, I guess.

Speaker 5 Pretty goddamn impressive.

Speaker 2 Takes on Zoron pulling it out.

Speaker 2 Dan?

Speaker 3 I mean, it's an incredible win. It's a campaign for the Aegis, right?

Speaker 3 You know, they put out this incredible video just the other day that was Zoron standing on a street corner, I think, in Queens, right after the 2024 election, holding a sign saying, please come talk to me about the election.

Speaker 3 And he was trying to, people would have no idea who he was, pay no attention to him. Flash forward one year later, the guy's mayor of New York.
He is a celebrity.

Speaker 3 Everywhere he's go, he's mobbed about people excited by this. There is like a sense of community in New York over this.
People are just so fired up.

Speaker 3 It's like, it's truly, it really is one for the edges.

Speaker 2 Tommy?

Speaker 5 Yeah, just an extraordinary race. I mean, what a, look, I got to talk to him for the first time three or four days ago, and he's just like effortlessly charming.

Speaker 5 He's relentlessly on message. He hammered costs.
He hammered affordability.

Speaker 5 He was able to, and we'll talk about it in the speech, take a two by four to Andrew Cuomo's head in a pretty delicate way, I thought, most of the time.

Speaker 2 Less delicate.

Speaker 3 It was an eloquent way.

Speaker 5 Yeah, he did it with a smile. He did it with humor.

Speaker 5 And he, like, Barack Obama was good at this too, like landing a really hard punch in a way that doesn't feel mean or crass or cruel or what people hate about politics.

Speaker 5 He was focused on cost of living. He picked the right enemy, the kind of Bill Ackman billionaire class, and he ran with it.
And my God, what a win.

Speaker 2 Let's hear a clip from the speech.

Speaker 6 After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him.

Speaker 6 And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.

Speaker 6 This is not only how we stop Trump, it's how we stop the next one.

Speaker 6 So, Donald Trump, since I know you're watching,

Speaker 2 I have four words for you:

Speaker 6 turn volume up.

Speaker 2 I will say,

Speaker 2 Clip cut off the most important part of the Andrew Cuomo line, which was,

Speaker 2 I wish Andrew Cuomo the best in private life and let this be the last time I ever say his name. But let tonight be the final time I utter his name.

Speaker 2 You said Obama.

Speaker 2 Can you imagine Obama being like, I wish Hillary Clinton the best and let tonight be the last time I ever utter her name? We all would have clapped.

Speaker 5 I should say, as we were walking in here, the CNN panel talking about the speech was pretty apoplectic.

Speaker 5 They were expecting a more conciliatory, you know, unifying sounding speech, which I, frankly, in this moment is a touch saccharine. I mean, he went super hard at Trump.

Speaker 5 I wondered if there might be some sort of, you know, ultimately failing strategy to kind of mollify Trump a bit and maybe see if he would not punish New York City.

Speaker 5 But no, I mean, Zoran took the fight right to Trump. He basically called him a slumlord in another part of this speech.
Zoran was like unabashedly himself throughout the speech.

Speaker 5 He talked about, he opened by name-checking Eugene Debs, who many listeners might not know is like a very, very famous socialist. He was proud of his identity.

Speaker 5 He's talking about New York being a nation of immigrants.

Speaker 2 He clearly hates Cuomo.

Speaker 5 He was not willing to let it go to Knights.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 he also ended by saying a famous New Yorker once said, you campaign in, you campaign in poetry and govern in prose, which was Mario Cuomo.

Speaker 5 Yeah, going after his father's supposed family.

Speaker 2 And then did the Shining City on the Hill, which is another Cuomo reference. Yeah.

Speaker 5 My biggest anxiety for Mamdani, for his team, for all the young people who have poured themselves into this campaign and all their hopes and dreams is just the reality of how brutal and hard governing can be and how demoralizing it can feel when there are setbacks.

Speaker 5 And I wondered if Mamdani might do some kind of expectation setting tonight. He did not do that.

Speaker 5 He leaned into the high expectations. He said expectations will be high.
We will meet them. So, I mean, look, like, good for him.

Speaker 2 He's owning the moment. Calling a shot.
Calling a shot. Dan?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think he clearly hatred that he and his campaign team had for Andrew Cuomo was palpable. And I understand that because I also hate Andrew Cuomo and the passion of a thousand sons.
So I get it.

Speaker 3 And I see that.

Speaker 2 We've been doing our campaigns farther apart. But yes, also with Andrew Cuomo.
Yes.

Speaker 3 And also, the Cuomo thing works in the sense that Andrew Cuomo represents everything

Speaker 3 that Mondanim is running against, like old, broken, corrupt politics. So he like, it's, yes, there is like a personal hatred there, but it also works with his narrative.

Speaker 3 I'm not apoplectic like the CNN panel. I think the key for his success is going to not be in fights with Trump.

Speaker 3 It's going to be to, I mean, not that Trump is not going to bring the fight to him, but it is to just like.

Speaker 3 cost of living, cost of living, cost of living, affordability crisis, like he's run this whole campaign.

Speaker 3 And I think he'll do the expectation setting in his inaugural speech on January 1st when he takes office. But like he is a powerful, powerful speaker.

Speaker 3 And the thing that I really took from it is like Trump has his vision, this 1970s vision of New York, right? Crime-ridden, the racial makeup at the time.

Speaker 3 And Mondani is completely in tune with the New York of today, the way he was like naming Yemeni bodega owners.

Speaker 3 And it's just like it, like he was name-checking everyone, but it is, that's the New York that he comes from, the New York he represents, is this like amazing melting pot city of immigrants.

Speaker 2 I will say, though, the one part I did, like, I thought being tough on Trump was completely warranted because Donald Trump is at fucking war with American cities right now.

Speaker 2 And he's like, he spent the entire campaign threatening, he's still threatening to pull federal funding from New York. So he wants to hurt the people of New York because of who they voted for.

Speaker 2 He's got goons in Chicago and LA and everywhere. Like you, he can be tough on Donald Trump.
And I actually think showing a little strength is good.

Speaker 2 I mean, this is, again, Donald Trump is not a normal president from another party here.

Speaker 2 So I was actually okay with that. And, you know, you're pissed at Cuomo.
You get a few digs in.

Speaker 5 It's fine. I wasn't like opposed to it or like, it didn't bother me.
I was just a little surprised by it.

Speaker 5 Because, you know, you could imagine a meeting where you're like, look, let's not pick this fight right now. Let's wait.

Speaker 5 You're a young guy. He's going to come after you anyway.
But he's like, no, like, he's going to, he's going to punch me. So I'm going to punch him first.

Speaker 2 Well, and you know what Trump respects. Trump respects people who are fucking throw apart.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I mean, that's the argument for it is he is sending a message to Trump that he'll fight him.
Just I was struck by, there's a way to do it where it's mostly about protecting New York.

Speaker 3 And he really went at like despot, authoritarian, like the root causes of MAGAism.

Speaker 3 But, you know, and also he's going to be a leader in this party. And maybe that's the, you know, the ground he's taking out.
So we'll like sort of have to see where it goes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I know what you're saying, Dan, because I thought he was going to go more in the direction where he did on when he talked about immigrants and he said, you know, this is a city of immigrants.

Speaker 2 Now it's being led by one. And if if you're going to come after us, you're going to have to go through all of us.
Like, I thought that that's sort of the, this is how we're going to take on Trump.

Speaker 2 It's like, it's not Mom Dani versus Trump. It's, you're coming after the city.
You're not just coming after me, which I think is the right.

Speaker 5 Yeah, somewhere in ICE officials, like, okay. Yeah.
It's going to be a challenge. It's going to be, Dan, to your point about name-checking the modern New York.

Speaker 5 Do you see Deesus Nice tweeted, if Zoran has yet to mention your nationality, neighborhood, or bus line in the speech, please stay in line?

Speaker 3 One just factoid on this race that I found the Exopulse was fascinating is that Mom Dani won 9% of 2024 Trump voters.

Speaker 5 Amazing.

Speaker 2 Oh, amazing. Which is a huge number.
Yeah. Are we trusting any of the exit polls, Dan, for any of these? Because

Speaker 2 the top lines on both Virginia and Jersey, because people were doing the math where if you know the gender split, you can sort of figure out the top line, were so wrong.

Speaker 3 Well, that's first wave, right? And the numbers adjusted several times.

Speaker 2 I'm wondering if they have adjusted.

Speaker 5 They have adjusted.

Speaker 3 And I think, like, is it super precise?

Speaker 3 No, like, they never are, but it's like like a piece of data and maybe it's nine, maybe it's seven, but it's still like the idea that this, that there are a bunch of people, and this is an important thing for Democrats to say, there are a bunch of people in New York City who pulled the lever for Donald Trump one year ago, who then pulled it for the 34-year-old immigrant Democratic socialist mayor.

Speaker 3 And I think it's, it's a, it says something about his appeal and it says something about how sort of

Speaker 3 confusing voters can be.

Speaker 2 Before we leave New York, lessons from the Mamdani campaign and Mamdani's victory, can they be applied to anywhere else in the country? Are we now a socialist country?

Speaker 2 And also,

Speaker 2 the Republicans are trying very hard already to make Zoran Mamdani the face of the Democratic Party.

Speaker 2 They've already telegraphed that they're going to tie him to every Democratic candidate all across the country.

Speaker 2 Is this going to work? What do you think, Dan?

Speaker 3 I do not think it's going to work.

Speaker 3 Every election, they pick a bogeyman, right? It was Nancy Pelosi forever. And then in, you know, 2014, they put Nancy Pelosi in all the ads.
Democrat, Republicans did great.

Speaker 3 In 2018, they put Nancy Pelosi in all the ads and Republicans did poorly. Nancy Pelosi was less popular in 2018 than she was in 2014.

Speaker 3 So just the idea that they're really going to be able to use Momdani to help attack candidates in Georgia or this seems kind of far-fetched to me.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah, me too. I agree.
They always have a boogeyman. It's Pelosi.
It's AOC. It's Elon Omar.
It's It's whomever, Hillary Clinton.

Speaker 5 If it's not one, they'll pick another.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Any lessons? Any lessons

Speaker 2 from the campaign?

Speaker 5 I think it's good to not run candidates in their 80s.

Speaker 5 That's one note I had. I wrote that one down.

Speaker 2 All three big races. Young candidates.
Yep. Cheryl, Spanberger, Mamdani.
Yep.

Speaker 5 I just, like, jokes aside, like.

Speaker 3 You're already seeing

Speaker 5 the wars breaking out on Twitter. You've got abundance abundance bros fighting anti-oligark cranks.
You've got neolib shills battling the DSA.

Speaker 2 Everyone just chill out.

Speaker 5 Everyone just chill out for a minute.

Speaker 2 I don't have a big, I don't know. I'd like to hear what you guys think.

Speaker 5 I've not had a big takeaway from this

Speaker 5 election night.

Speaker 5 Some people say the party needs to go left. Some people say we need more moderates, like Cheryl and Spanberger.

Speaker 5 I think all of them were boosted by the fact that Trump has totally failed to focus on the economy. In Virginia, in particular, he fired a bunch of people who voted in the election.

Speaker 5 Running when Trump is on the ballot is really, really hard. Democrats tend to get a decent boost running against Trump when he's not on the ballot, and that benefited everybody here.

Speaker 5 It really is good to pick young candidates who understand the digital age and who can communicate and connect who are good messengers and good speakers.

Speaker 5 But also, Mom Dani picked the right message, which was affordability and battling the billionaire class as the problem. And he hammered it on corruption and the cost of living.

Speaker 5 And like that, that discipline, I do think, is a lesson that can be applied to like every election.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 2 what is the lesson from an election where a Muslim socialist won in New York and an ex-CIA moderate mom trounced in Virginia and another

Speaker 2 woman with a military background, Navy pilot, trounced in New Jersey? The common denominator is Donald Trump hasn't done anything about affordability and has made it worse.

Speaker 2 So that is the one common denominator in all the races, no matter what part of the party you're from, no matter what you believe, who you are, your identity.

Speaker 2 It has all been, it's been about Donald Trump and his failure to do anything about costs.

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Speaker 2 All right, Virginia. Abigail Spanberger will be the first female governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
She won.

Speaker 2 So far, I got 57. She said 57%.
God, that's an S. 57, 42.7 over Winsom Earl Sears.
Jay Jones wins the Attorney General race by a smaller margin, but the margin is 52%,

Speaker 2 and his opponent was 47.5. Democrat Gazala Hashmi is the new lieutenant governor.
She won 55.45.

Speaker 2 Every single, just about every county, I think but four in Virginia shifted blue, some by double digits since 2024.

Speaker 2 You have counties like Chesterfield County, Yonkin won by five, Spanberger is winning by 17. That is like an unheard of swing.

Speaker 2 Virginia Beach, another sort of Bellwether County, Youngkin won by eight, Spanberger by 10.

Speaker 2 Just huge, huge shifts. So

Speaker 2 I was not worried about Virginia. I thought she was going to win by at least Kamala's margin, maybe a few points more.
This was way bigger than that.

Speaker 2 What did you guys think of Virginia, Tommy?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, this was a remarkable drubbing by Spanberger. And also, Democrats are on track to win 64 Virginia House of Delegates seats out of 100 total.
That's a pickup of, I think, 13. 13?

Speaker 5 Which is just massive. That is massive.
And it suggests that it wasn't just top of the ticket. There was anger at the Republican Party all the way down.

Speaker 5 Like, I like you, I think Spanberger's a pretty good candidate.

Speaker 5 She was running against a terrible opponent.

Speaker 5 Republicans all but gave up on this race.

Speaker 5 Although I do think they, the RGA burned like $4 million for no reason at the the very end on ads, which is thank you, I guess, for lighting that money on fire. Yeah.

Speaker 5 But, you know, with all these races, there was chatter in the summer sort of doldrum months that maybe things weren't going well, that maybe something secret was showing up in the polls and Republicans were closing.

Speaker 5 And so you, you know, that creeps into your, to your brain, but no, it was a drubbing.

Speaker 2 Dan?

Speaker 3 Yeah, like, she obviously, I was pretty sure she was going to win the whole time. I mean, the

Speaker 3 party opposite the president has won every Virginia governor's race since 1975, other than 2013, when the Republicans nominated Kenny Cuccinelli, the worst candidate humanly possible.

Speaker 3 But this was a massive, massive win. And I think this is largely about Donald Trump and specifically about Donald Trump's attack on the federal government, like using the exit polls again.

Speaker 3 60% of Virginians said that they were adversely affected by

Speaker 3 the cuts to federal spending or federal jobs. And Spamberger won those voters by 37%.

Speaker 3 Thank you, Donald.

Speaker 3 A fifth of Virginia voters say that someone in their household either worked for the federal, was a federal government employee or a federal government contractor.

Speaker 3 Spamberger won those voters by more than 20 points. It was just an absolute, like if the shutdown was going to be a problem for Democrats, it was going to be in Virginia.
This would be the place.

Speaker 3 This is ground zero for the shutdown. And the fact that the Democrats did so well, so far outran Martins, crushed with moderates.
Right.

Speaker 3 And then just a massive shift in the suburbs from Glenn Youngkin's victory in 21 to Spamberger's victory now. Like just you, in the exit polling, they do it by region, right?

Speaker 3 So, in suburb, people who live in the suburbs, uh, young won by seven points, Spamberger's going to win by about 15 points, like huge, huge wins.

Speaker 3 And, and this is once a place where Donald Trump is 15 points underwater in this state, and he's more unpopular in Virginia than he is in New Jersey.

Speaker 3 And that clearly played a role here.

Speaker 3 And the fact that Spamberger did so well that she pulled Jay Jones across the finish line, who everyone thought was going to lose, was you know, basically left for dead by the Democratic Party because of the texting scandal.

Speaker 3 And he ends up winning pretty handily.

Speaker 5 I know texting scandal. I don't know what you're talking about.

Speaker 2 I'm just kidding. Just kidding.

Speaker 2 He was in one of those group chats.

Speaker 5 We don't do that in our party.

Speaker 2 Yeah, right. I feel like this is a bigger win than 17.
Like,

Speaker 2 this is the biggest Democratic win in Virginia of our lifetimes, I think.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it is. It's the biggest margin by far.

Speaker 3 I think 17 was 10 points, maybe?

Speaker 2 10 points.

Speaker 2 This was wild. And to have the whole, to bring it into the big assembly, too.

Speaker 3 It's the biggest Democratic win.

Speaker 3 And we lost really, really bad in 2009 by like 20 points, I think, or 17 points. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 Cray deeds.

Speaker 2 And so, again, now the lesson to take from here across the country is run moderate former CIA people.

Speaker 3 That's the only option.

Speaker 2 That's it. That is another lesson.

Speaker 5 It has to be binary.

Speaker 2 It's got to be one or the other.

Speaker 5 It's not about running the right candidate for the district you're in. That's ridiculous.

Speaker 2 Mikey Sherrill in New Jersey over Jack Chitterelli, 56 to 43. Now, this is maybe the margin here, I think, at least for me, of the big races, was the biggest surprise of the night.
100%.

Speaker 2 You know, a lot of the polls had this down to

Speaker 2 a one-point lead, two-point lead, three-point lead. There were some others.
There was some variation. There were some that were like seven or eight, but no one had it this morning.
No, I looked today.

Speaker 5 The RCP average, the Real Clear Politics average, was 3.3 at the end. And to your point, like there were a couple polls late that were like Cheryl plus one, Cheryl plus two, plus three, plus one.

Speaker 5 Like it, it seemed like it was tightening up. And this is the one.

Speaker 2 Your day has passed, Atlas Intel.

Speaker 3 Yeah, they officially lost an A-plus rating tonight.

Speaker 2 Fuck you.

Speaker 5 Oh, that's a polling firm for all you non-sickos out there.

Speaker 5 I'm really excited to never have to learn how to say chitterly properly.

Speaker 2 I took notes. You just did.
You did it correctly.

Speaker 5 Well, I know, but I heard John say it.

Speaker 2 Well, that's because I said it wrong a a couple of times. Oh, you did? Not tonight, but in the past.

Speaker 5 Cheater and chider, cheater.

Speaker 2 So this is an interesting one, right? Like Phil Murphy, you've got an incumbent who's already served two terms.

Speaker 2 So it's sort of hard for another Democrat to win after a Democrats already served two terms. Chitterelli is someone who's run before, so he has like near universal name recognition in the state.

Speaker 2 He was seen as a, like

Speaker 2 Winsom Sears. not seen as a great candidate, but Jack Chittorelli, not a bad candidate for Republicans.

Speaker 2 Was not like a super Trumpy Republican

Speaker 2 in the primary, pretended he was a super Trumpy Republican, and then basically forgot that Trump existed in the general.

Speaker 2 I think you had to like, so you look on his website, and he had all the list of people who endorse him at the very bottom in like small letters.

Speaker 2 It says Donald Trump, but that's like the only time he ever mentioned it.

Speaker 3 Unfortunately, for Jack Chitterelli, he said Trump supported him on video, and then it was put in ads for months.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. Well, that's there you go.

Speaker 3 And he also, he also, he also proposed a 10% sales tax at one point, which is a bad move when it costs a living.

Speaker 2 Oh, that's a tough one. That is a tough one.
What do you, what do you what do you think, Dan? What happened? Why was the polling so off on this one?

Speaker 3 I don't know why the polling was so off. I don't know that

Speaker 3 the polling was off in 21 too in New Jersey because that one ended up being much closer than we thought. So maybe we don't know how to poll in New Jersey.

Speaker 3 I don't even think they did exit polls in 21 because we were so sure the race was going to be such an easy win for Murphy.

Speaker 3 So it was hard to even do to like it's to do an apples to apples comparison of how things might have changed.

Speaker 3 It's a truly like, this is even more of a stunning win than

Speaker 3 Abigail Spamberger's win because of the point you made, which is every election is a chance election.

Speaker 3 And it's so hard for a third Democratic term to replace a two-term Democratic governor and then to win by

Speaker 3 almost as much as that governor won the first time. I think

Speaker 3 I think Murphy won by 17 points in 17.

Speaker 3 But to win by such a huge margin, usually it's a begrudging thing, even in a Democratic state. I think the other takeaway is

Speaker 3 if New Jersey shifted very far to the right

Speaker 3 from 2020, 2024, a 10-point swing in Trump's direction, Trump made huge gains in the counties outside of New York City, like Bergen and Passaic and Hudson.

Speaker 3 And as of the vote count I just looked at, like Cheryl is crushing in those counties.

Speaker 3 Now, and I think that like, this doesn't tell us that Trump, that New Jersey hasn't moved some to the right, but if this is a warning sign that it may be a fleeting moment for Trump to have to have the strength there, it may look more like Obama in Indiana in 08 than Obama in Virginia in 08, in the sense that it's

Speaker 3 a fleeting moment as opposed to

Speaker 3 a state on its path to purple status.

Speaker 2 Ron Branstein was tweeting. He was looking through the exits and some of the

Speaker 2 literally have that highlighted on the

Speaker 2 group received more attention as evidence of realignment in 24 than working class minorities, but Spanberger won 84% of non-whites without a college degree, and Cheryl won 71% of them.

Speaker 2 And that number is probably going to be adjusted up. In each case, that's better than Kamala Harris in 2024.
Oh, I just

Speaker 2 think that's a good question. Ron had a few of them, so who knows?

Speaker 5 Ron also pointed out that in New Jersey, the Republican Cheryl didn't get back to the Democratic share with Hispanic voters that we reached in 2017 or the 2020 presidential race, but Chitterelli did not come close to Trump's 2024 Hispanic number of 43%.

Speaker 5 He only got 34%,

Speaker 5 which suggests that Trump, like having permanently changed the baseline for Hispanic voters, that assumption is probably not proven out yet.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I think

Speaker 2 don't want to step on any of Dan's meta takes at the end, but in all of these races, it does seem like the voters that the voting groups that shifted the most towards Trump in 24, young voters, some black men, Latino voters, and then in some of the polling we've seen in the last couple of months, those have been the voters who are now disapproving of Trump.

Speaker 2 And I think this election has shown that they actually did flip back to Democrats in

Speaker 2 a lot of these races.

Speaker 3 Or they flipped to the couch, which is a more likely thing here.

Speaker 2 Or they flip to the couch.

Speaker 3 Which is just like this is

Speaker 2 too late for that?

Speaker 2 Never, never too late.

Speaker 3 It's just, this is such a smaller electorate with more highly engaged voters.

Speaker 3 So it's not necessarily that a bunch of these people, there will be some who voted Trump in 24, who voted for Cheryl or Spanberger in 25.

Speaker 3 But the most likely scenario is people who came out for Trump in 24 stayed home.

Speaker 3 Now, that is a sign of political weakness for Trump because he has not been able to turn these people into regular Republican voters and he's not going to get allowed to be able to get them.

Speaker 2 They'll never be on the ballot again.

Speaker 2 Will they stay on the couch?

Speaker 2 Will they come off the couch for J.D. Vance, Tommy?

Speaker 2 Phrasing.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 3 Come off the couch?

Speaker 2 I don't know. It's great.

Speaker 5 It's 9:15.

Speaker 5 My kids had me up before 4.

Speaker 2 It's okay.

Speaker 2 We have a 7 a.m. flight tomorrow.
Great.

Speaker 2 Anything else in New Jersey? No?

Speaker 5 Great state.

Speaker 2 Great.

Speaker 5 Close to New York.

Speaker 2 Easy to commute to the city. Good, good.
That's the kind of analysis people come for.

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Speaker 2 Pennsylvania, we retained three state Supreme Court justices, so we got the 5-2 majority. We mentioned that.
It's a big deal. Should we talk about the biggest...

Speaker 2 Honestly, probably the most impressive electoral performance of the whole night are these two

Speaker 2 candidates that won, that flipped Republican seats in the Georgia Public Service Commission because they were state. This is a statewide election.
This is a statewide race.

Speaker 2 And not only did they just win, knocked out these Republicans,

Speaker 2 the margin here is 61 to 38 in one of them and 62 to 38 in the other.

Speaker 5 I mean, wow. And don't take our word for it.
We're going to drop in right here, Steve Bannon talking about this race on the War Room podcast tonight.

Speaker 7 The midterm start tonight.

Speaker 8 One of the biggest warning signs that we've got that we need to get focused is these two uh these two commissioners in georgia that mtg uh mentioned first time in 30 years that uh democrats have won a statewide uh election i don't think they've ever had commissioners have been democrats in a couple of decades that is a warning that this thing is going to cut deeper so yeah like bannon like legitimately i think was shaken up by this georgia result and like for what for those wondering like what are you guys talking about this is a state agency that regulates utilities and makes sure that like electricity, natural gas, and telecommunications are provided safely and at reasonable rates.

Speaker 5 But it became a proxy for this broader political battle we're all waging this evening.

Speaker 2 And you know why people who are listening to us may be more aware of this race than some other folks? Because

Speaker 2 one organization that was laser focused on this race, Vote Save America. Damn right.

Speaker 5 Great work to that team.

Speaker 2 And they would tell us, hey, could you in the pod talk about the Georgia Public Service Commission? And we'd be like, what?

Speaker 2 And they were right.

Speaker 2 Glad we focused on that.

Speaker 2 You got to be feeling good if you're John Osoff trying to defend a seat in Georgia.

Speaker 2 Again, obviously, very different electorate, midterm to off year, but I don't know. What do you think, Dan?

Speaker 3 I think it's very positive, right? Like this is, it's just. If there was lingering positive effects for Donald Trump after 2024,

Speaker 3 then this would have shown up in some way, shape, or form. And the exact opposite happened, right? This is a, it's a full rebuke.

Speaker 3 And if the fact that it's even showing up in Georgia, like Virginia, that's a Democratic state. New Jersey has a Democratic state.
California gets your Democratic state. Maine, Democratic state.

Speaker 3 Georgia, purple as can be. Trump won it last time.
And the fact that Democrats are able to win there, that Steve Bannon's right to be worried.

Speaker 5 When Osoff was in here, he said that he thinks his race is going to be like a half a billion dollar election, the Georgia Center race. Also, way taller than I thought.

Speaker 2 Very tall. Very tall.

Speaker 5 Very tall. Goddamn good looking.
tall.

Speaker 2 Handsome. Really handsome.
Handsome and tall.

Speaker 5 That seems handsome and tall. If he were blonde, he would look like a DHS or ICE recruiting host.
He's got that kind of like 50s throwback handsomeness.

Speaker 2 You know what I mean? Change off.

Speaker 2 These guys get it. No, you're glad he's not blonde, right? You're like, don't step into my territory here.

Speaker 5 Get away from my culture.

Speaker 2 My culture is not your costume.

Speaker 2 My culture is ICE's costume.

Speaker 2 Says Thomas Frederick Vitor.

Speaker 2 Should we come back here to California? Prop 50. Gavin.
Wins. Crushes.
Great work. We got 65% of the votes in.
It is 64 to 35 right now. That's awesome.
That's a lot of votes to count already.

Speaker 2 I'm surprised. Usually we don't count votes that fast.
No, we count them early. We do.
They come in early. We count them early.
That's right. And then we have to wait.
And then the harvesting.

Speaker 2 You harvesting votes tomorrow morning.

Speaker 3 Well, when you rig, then it makes it easy to count.

Speaker 2 Anyway,

Speaker 2 big win for

Speaker 2 the Democratic Party in being able to neutralize the gerrymandering that Texas did.

Speaker 2 So they took five. Now

Speaker 2 we'll take five. They're still trying to take more, so it won't completely neutralize the gerrymandering that they're trying to do.

Speaker 2 But it is very good news for Democrats taking the House in the midterms of 2026. It at least gives us more of a fighting chance.
And also, big win for Gavin Newsom, who

Speaker 2 this was a risk.

Speaker 2 He took a bet.

Speaker 5 I think this is a really big deal.

Speaker 5 I mean, obviously, once he put forward the idea and said it was going to be on the there was going to be a ballot initiative, it seemed very likely, given that this is the state of California, given the makeup of off-year voters in a special election like that are primarily like the Libya slibs.

Speaker 5 Yeah, like the Paz Save America election. Like, odds are we were going to win it.
But he had the guts and the foresight to conceive of this idea, push it forward, and get this thing done.

Speaker 5 And like, imagine if we were sitting here tonight, like knowing we were going into the 2026 midterms at a deficit of five seats because of Texas. Like, this is a huge deal.

Speaker 2 I believe he spoke about the idea for the first time right here. Yeah.
Right here at this table.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And then we, I think we scooped his own podcast by accident because we put out the clip early.

Speaker 2 Told us he was like, well, we can either try to do something with the legislature. He's like, but also I think we might just be able to put it on the ballot.
Yeah. Wow, what an idea.
Cool. Do it.

Speaker 2 Here it is. Here we are.
Things happen. Did you vote for Prop 50, Dan? Were you for it? Did I?

Speaker 5 Yeah, me too.

Speaker 2 Me too. Me too.

Speaker 2 Okay, let's do meta takes. Any other races that we should talk about? We talked about those two

Speaker 2 main ballot measures. So there's a red flag

Speaker 2 gun control, we call it. Sure.
It's a red flag gun measure, gun safety measure, has passed.

Speaker 2 And then, Tommy, you noted that a voter ID measure failed.

Speaker 3 John, wasn't there a big race in your wife's hometown?

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. Aftab.
Mayor Aftab Perval had a challenge from JD Vance's half-brother.

Speaker 3 Kicked his ass. The love seat.

Speaker 5 50 points.

Speaker 2 Crushed him. Crushed him.

Speaker 2 Crushed him. Crushed him.
Good job. Good job, Aftab.
Great mayor, great person. Glad Cincinnati has him for another term.
I think that's it. Any meta takes? Should we do meta takes? Dan?

Speaker 2 What do you got, Dan? Yeah, cool, your meta take. I'll give you

Speaker 2 us first before you put it in the message box.

Speaker 3 It's, well,

Speaker 3 What time are you posting this?

Speaker 5 Now.

Speaker 2 It's live.

Speaker 2 Hold on. I need a second.

Speaker 3 Got to hit send.

Speaker 3 I think the biggest one is that this is a massive rebuke of Trump.

Speaker 3 He was underwater in all these states.

Speaker 3 In both Virginia and New Jersey, two-thirds of voters were dissatisfied with the direction of the country. The economy was the number one issue for most voters.

Speaker 3 In both states, the Democrats won those voters by 20 points. The Democrats won with moderates.

Speaker 3 They won with independents, they held their margins with young people in the core parts of the Democratic coalition. Donald Trump

Speaker 3 is unpopular.

Speaker 3 His political operation made things, couldn't get out of their own way, made things harder for Republicans in Virginia, New Jersey. Just like it's very clear in the results.

Speaker 3 Like I think Abigail Spamberger would have won shutdown, no shutdown, doge, no doge.

Speaker 3 But what he did to the federal workforce and federal government sunk that race, made the political situation so much worse.

Speaker 3 And then he's got his fucking Grim Reaper Russ vote, like just canceling infrastructure projects for New Jersey in the months and weeks leading up to the election. And so it's a huge rebuke for him.

Speaker 3 Like it is, we, there are a whole slew of polls came out over the weekend. All of them had Trump at his lowest approval rating in a very long time.
People are pissed about the economy.

Speaker 3 They're pissed at him. Democrats are still fired up.
Even if they don't like the brand or our leaders, they're still showing up to vote again, vote for Democrats.

Speaker 3 Most of the polling shows that people who voted for Spanberg and Cheryl did it to vote for them, not to oppose Trump or someone else.

Speaker 3 And so even when our, so metate number one, very bad for Trump, metate number two, that at least least in this off-year election environment, the base of our party, our true most loyal voters, remain incredibly fired up and ready to go vote for Democrats, even if they are dissatisfied with large parts of the party leadership.

Speaker 2 Fired up and ready to go to go vote. I like that.

Speaker 2 Pretty good.

Speaker 5 Dan Counterpoint, a political analyst I follow on Truth Social posted, Trump wasn't on the ballot and shutdown were the two reasons that Republicans lost elections tonight, comma, according to pollsters.

Speaker 5 That was from Donald Trump.

Speaker 3 Was that Alan Lickman?

Speaker 2 Yeah, that was one of the keys.

Speaker 2 I have another

Speaker 2 new pundit. He just he was

Speaker 2 tied up for a bit and now he's out and about again, Mr. George Santos.
Yes, that's insane.

Speaker 2 Fuck you, Curtis Sleewa. I hate you, your dumb wife, that stupid beret of yours, and all your fucking cats.

Speaker 2 That's a tweet we just got from George Santos. That's good.

Speaker 2 One more question. Federal government has now been shut down for 36 36 days.
That is the longest shutdown in American history. Donald Trump seemed to, well, it didn't seem to.
He did.

Speaker 2 In his Truth Social post was basically like, it was the shutdown that hurt us. Do we think now's a good time for Democrats to cave?

Speaker 2 Shut down.

Speaker 5 I mean, Dan, could you imagine?

Speaker 2 What's going on there? I have not paid.

Speaker 2 I see people are looking for an off-ramp, and then I saw a lot of other Senate Democrats go on the record to CNN and be like, this would be fucking crazy to do this now.

Speaker 2 So I don't know what's real, what sources, and what's not. What would you do?

Speaker 3 I read Punch Bowl, so you don't have to.

Speaker 2 Okay, thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 3 Thank you.

Speaker 3 And so what the folks at Punch Bowl are telling me is there's upwards of a dozen Senate Democrats who are talking to Republicans or interested in some sort of off-ramp, which would include kind of what Thune's been proposing, which is open the government in exchange for a vote on the Obamacare subsidies.

Speaker 3 Republicans had a caucus meeting today. The Republican senators also want to vote on the Obamacare subsidies.

Speaker 3 I think, I'm not saying they're going to vote for it, but they at least want to be able to put up a Republican bill so they're not just voting against a Democratic bill.

Speaker 3 So there's some interest there. People seem to be very quickly moving to the exits on this.

Speaker 2 I keep asking this question, but like, what's going on with the House? You can't have a fucking vote in the Senate on this and then just not have any kind of deal happen in the House. Otherwise,

Speaker 3 it's a flaw in the plan. There's also a lot in there, which is really the motivating factor here, is the appropriators really want to appropriate.

Speaker 3 And part of this deal would be to get the appropriations process working again. And they'd have three, they'd pass three mini buses.
I don't even want to get into what that is, but

Speaker 3 appropriators are excited about it.

Speaker 2 But like,

Speaker 5 I get the substantive reasons that everyone wants to end the shutdown. We want people to get snap benefits.
We want TSA to work. We don't want many more planes to crash.
I saw that shit.

Speaker 3 Sean Duffy said he was going to shut down a lot of our airspace next week if the government doesn't reopen.

Speaker 2 I don't love that.

Speaker 5 Yeah, so that's all not ideal.

Speaker 2 But if you wake up tomorrow and you're Hakeem Jeffries or your Chuck Schumer and you're meeting with your leadership or you're having a caucus meeting like what in the data suggests that what you've been doing for the last month has been the wrong approach totally there's there's a lot of ways to choreograph this so that republicans can still say um you know we didn't let them hold us hold us hostage uh on something while the government was shut down right like there's a way to do it so if you don't get the vote you want then the government shuts down again because you only pass a funding bill that goes that far so like that that's fine if they want to choreograph it but but like the House has to be involved here.

Speaker 2 And we have to like know that Trump's going to sign a bill that includes ACA subsidies as well.

Speaker 2 So like if we're not having meetings where it's a deal between Trump and Schumer and Thune and Johnson and Jeffries, then like, what the fuck are we doing?

Speaker 3 Well, John, Trump is having breakfast with the Senate Republicans tomorrow, and he's going to tell them

Speaker 2 to

Speaker 3 invoke the nuclear option, eliminate the filibuster, and then

Speaker 3 not just open the government, but then pass a whole series of voter suppression methods.

Speaker 3 He also truthed about that tonight. It's what he wants them to do.
That's another thing. Ban mail-in voting, do all these other things.

Speaker 2 This is why they don't want to, this is one of the reasons they don't want to follow his advice and eliminate the filibuster is they don't have the votes to do all that crazy shit.

Speaker 2 Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are not going to do that. They're not going to probably get, I guess they can get

Speaker 2 the Tillis. I don't think.

Speaker 3 They can get

Speaker 2 they don't have the votes for those people to even get rid of the, they probably don't have the votes to get rid of the filibuster. That they don't.

Speaker 3 And they don't want to get rid of the filibuster because then they have to do all Trump's crazy shit. Right now, he calls them and says, do this insane thing.
And they're like, well, we can't.

Speaker 3 The Democrats won't let us. But once they hit the film, he's learned.

Speaker 2 He's like, wait a minute.

Speaker 2 Wait, this is what's stopping me from doing all the crazy shit. That's only five years in.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he's figured it out.

Speaker 5 He did have some new spin on his election night defeat. He tweeted out or chart truthed out, just out.
The 60 Minutes interview of Donald J.

Speaker 5 Trump on CBS Sunday night was the highest rated 60 minutes in years. That is some cope.

Speaker 5 That is some cope that is right alongside when every election the Republicans lose, someone tweets a photo of a map of a state or the country.

Speaker 5 And it's like, if not for all these cities, Democrats would never win.

Speaker 5 It's like, yes, if not for all the human beings, the citizens who live in those cities who vote for Democrats, we would never win. You are correct.
Counties don't vote.

Speaker 2 Here's a Democratic senator who's not backing down. Chris Murphy just put out a statement about the shutdown.

Speaker 2 Democrats win when we show the American people what we stand for and how we're willing to fight for it, as we have been for the last month.

Speaker 2 Tonight's election results are an unmistakable rejection of Donald Trump's corruption and Republicans' billionaire agenda, but the results should also give Democrats confidence that the American people have our back as we engage in the fight to protect people's health care and save our democracy.

Speaker 2 Good for Chris Murphy.

Speaker 5 Get him, MurphDog.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, fucking Chuck Schumer can't even tell us who he voted for in New York.

Speaker 5 Let's talk about that first.

Speaker 3 It's just so, it's bad politics. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's idiotic.

Speaker 2 If you didn't vote for him and like you know that everyone's going to be pissed at you, just fucking grow a pair and say you didn't vote for him. This is Chuck Schumer.
Say it one way or the other.

Speaker 3 This has been Chuck.

Speaker 3 This is why I think Chuck Schumer's greatest flaw as a leader. He's afraid to tell people what they don't want to hear.
And like, what is his thinking here?

Speaker 3 That if he that the Republicans will be like, man, we were going to run all these ads comparing John Ossoff to Mom Donny, but Schumer never voted for him. So I guess that's off the table.

Speaker 3 We can't do it.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Would be unfair. Rats, he foiled our plans.

Speaker 5 Well, in his, the Schumer approach is only just a little bit worse than Hakeem Jeffries, who just took on water from the left for like a month or two months.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he took the bandaid off at the very least.

Speaker 3 Painfully slowly, but he did take it off.

Speaker 5 You took it off, and I give him credit for that, but it's like just raw politics.

Speaker 2 Like,

Speaker 5 what did you, how did that benefit you?

Speaker 5 You got the left mad at you and all the attacks you were worried about can still come.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm like, I'm almost more offended as like a, like a practitioner of politics.

Speaker 2 Endorse him or do that. I would have been annoyed if you said, I'm not voting for him for sure.
But

Speaker 2 this was the worst of all options. And also, does Chuck Schumer think he's going to take the secret to his grave?

Speaker 2 He's going to face reporters and they're just going to, like, people are going to keep asking who you voted for.

Speaker 2 He was so annoying. Secret ballot.
Secret ballot.

Speaker 2 Oh, he's never going to come on Pod Safe America. It's the only thing we're going to ask.
He's not invited.

Speaker 2 Who would you vote for, Chuck? Tell us. Come on.
Was it Sliwa?

Speaker 3 He shows up at the studio, and there's just in his chair is a new piece of crooked merch called that says closeted homosexual waiting for him.

Speaker 2 Remember when people were rocking Cuomosexual shirts?

Speaker 5 Like

Speaker 2 in real life?

Speaker 3 A lot of people's 2020 tweets did not age well, I would say that.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 let us never say his name again. Yeah, let us never say that.
That's actually

Speaker 2 in the words of the next mayor of New York City. Let us defile the words of his father.

Speaker 2 Great night. Great night, everyone.

Speaker 2 We're still alive.

Speaker 2 We're still kicking. Democracy is not dead yet.

Speaker 2 So everyone should feel good about that. Thank you to everyone who volunteered in this election, who got out there and voted, who talked to your friends about it.
It really mattered.

Speaker 2 And we'll see you guys in D.C.

Speaker 5 See a CricketCon. See you, Cricket Con.
What a time to all get together in person.

Speaker 2 So, I'm so excited. Better than the alternative.
Having gotten long crushed. See you guys soon.

Speaker 3 Bye, everyone.

Speaker 2 If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad-free and get access to exclusive podcasts, go to crooked.com/slash friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 2 Also, please consider leaving us a review. That helps boost this episode and everything we do here at Crooked.
Pod Save America is a crooked media production.

Speaker 2 Our producers are David Toledo, Emma Illick Frank, and Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farrah Safari.
Austin Fisher is our senior producer. Reed Sherlin is our executive editor.

Speaker 2 Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.
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Speaker 2 Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Ben Hefcote, Mia Kelman, Carol Pelavieve, David Toles, and Ryan Young.

Speaker 2 Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

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