Virginia Hates Tyrants

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Hello, Prince William!

Are we blue yet?

This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Isaac Dover.

On Tuesday night in Prince William County, Virginia, Democrats celebrated.

For the first time in a generation, they have complete control of the state government.

Every executive office, both Senate seats, and now, both chambers of the state legislature, all controlled by Democrats.

I was there in Prince William County on election night.

It's about an hour's drive south of DC at the edge between the blue northern suburbs and the red rural south.

Here's Hala Ayala, one of the area's re-elected delegates.

My district was one of the hardest districts on the on this side of Virginia, the northern side of Virginia, and for the people to elect me back into office, I am so humbled and grateful.

Ayala's race and the races of other Democrats celebrating on Tuesday get an unusual amount of national attention.

The state votes in off years, so people like me look to it to understand where the country is in the years before and after a presidential race.

And that fact isn't lost on Ayala.

I'm ecstatic.

We did it.

Virginia spoke.

We sent a tsunami message to 1600Pen.

Good evening, Democrats.

We're honored to be here.

Thank you for making history.

DNC Chair Tom Perez was also at the Election Night Party, making the case that Virginia was a prelude to 2020.

When you fight for what people care about, that's how we win elections here in Virginia and across the country.

We are a 50-state party again.

We're our vengeance everywhere.

We're winning everywhere.

Thank you, Virginia.

Today on Radio Atlantic, we're going to talk about Tuesday's results with another national figure at that event, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine.

You'll, of course, remember Kaine as Hillary Clinton's running mate in 2016, but he's also a former DNC chair and a 25-year veteran of Virginia politics, from Richmond mayor to lieutenant governor to governor to now a U.S.

Senator.

The morning after the election, we caught up with him in his office on Capitol Hill.

Looking at the results from the night before, he was a very happy man, feeling cautiously optimistic that the way his state voted means that next November will look better for Democrats than his own experience did in 2016.

Take a listen.

Senator Tim Kaine, thanks for joining us here on Radio Atlantic.

You bet, Isaac, glad to be with you.

So we were there last night.

It was a pretty excited mood for Democrats.

Right.

As you're taking this in, you've been in Virginia politics a long time.

Yeah.

How does it process for you?

It was amazing.

I mean, this was the last step of essentially a 20-year effort to assemble a big picture.

It was like the jigsaw puzzle.

When I got into state politics after eight years as a nonpartisan local official in 2000, we had nothing.

I mean, we absolutely had nothing.

No statewides,

deep minorities in our congressional delegation, state legislature, electoral votes.

We hadn't had them since 1964.

And now, progressively, okay, we could win a governor's race, but oh, well, you can't win a senator.

Okay, we won a senate race.

You can't win electoral votes.

We did.

Can't win, take the majority in Congress.

We did.

This was the last piece, taking the majority in the two state houses, which, because of the redistricting that was done by Republicans in 2011, they had a trifecta, both houses, I'm sorry, one house

and a governor.

These were seats that they drew.

And so last night, it was an amazing finish to a 20-year effort where we've gone from nothing to now the Democrats basically have all the majorities, the key levers of power.

That's been for a couple of reasons.

It's been because when we've had the chance to govern, we've done well and Virginians like, hey, I like that.

But it's also, you can't look at last night without just seeing this massive repudiation of President Trump.

After 2016, where we won Virginia, the 17 results in our state races, gubernatorial and House were great.

Our 18 results, my reelection, then flipping three House seats from red to blue.

They'd been red for most of the last 50 years.

That was great.

Last night continues it.

And it was a massive repudiation of this president.

It seems to me like

the last four election nights for you have been a roller coaster of emotions.

2016, obviously you were very involved in that one.

That did not go the way you wanted it to.

Although it was funny, I mean, we knew very early we were going to win Virginia, and we were going to win Virginia by more than Obama did in 2012.

I've spent my whole life trying to get Virginia to catch up.

So the fact that Virginia would be in such great shape, I did think after we knew we'd win Virginia, we're probably going to win this race, but while we were moving ahead, others weren't necessarily standing still.

Yeah, it was good Virginia news for you, but not good the rest of the news.

And

N16 obviously ends in a long night that didn't go the way you wanted it to, a very rough night, and then processing it.

And then 2017, you have races that do go the way you want them to in Virginia.

2018, like you said, you win re-election in a race that when it was getting started, people thought was going to be actually much more competitive.

Right, yeah.

They were going to try to make an example out of me because I've been on the ticket.

And that didn't occur, and you won, and you won

by,

I don't know, the summer of 2018, people were stopping paying attention to you.

And we were able to flip the focus of our race to flipping house seats.

And we, you know, three dynamic women, two of whom were first-time candidates, elected in districts that had been red for most of the last 50 years.

So 18 was a great night.

But again, there was something about last night because it was sort of the last piece in this puzzle.

And our legislature has been blocking us in Virginia for doing meaningful things on gun safety, even after suffering through Virginia Tech and Virginia Beach and so much gun violence.

They've been blocking raising the the minimum wage, blocking the Equal Rights Amendment, tried so hard to block us from expanding Medicaid with Republicans in control, disenfranchising voters rather than making it easier for people to vote.

Had either house stayed in a Republican majority, we wouldn't have been able to move forward on the things I've just mentioned.

But now with both houses in Democratic hands and a Democratic governor, we have the ability to

do even more than we have done and respond to the concerns that people have.

And that's really sweet.

Does it make you think about the contrast to where you were on election night 2016?

You know, no, it's funny.

I don't, I, I really get Virginia politics.

I'm not an expert in anybody else's politics, you know, any other states,

or, or even national politics.

I get Virginia politics.

I get we are the single best turnaround project in the United States in the last 50 years.

And so the only the only thing that that I think is sort of relevant about it is, hey, Democrats, you want a model.

You want to see how to do things.

Virginia's got got a good model for you.

And I feel really, really proud of that.

So

I think less about 16 than I think about 20 and 22 and 24.

I mean, I think that there are things that we've done in Virginia, and it's this combination of we govern well and people trust us to govern.

We recognize that Trump is the wrong person for this country and against our values.

I say, look, We have a weird state seal in Virginia.

It's a victorious woman standing atop a deposed tyrant.

We hate tyrants.

Our state was born out of opposition to tyranny.

We still hate tyrants.

We can see them coming a mile off and we reject them.

And that's one of the reasons that Trump is so unpopular in Virginia is that we've seen narcissistic, anti-science, bigoted bullies too often in our past.

And we've decided to put away the childish things.

We want something different.

That's the second feature.

But then the third feature going forward is we do really, really well now in suburbs.

That's been the Virginia story.

When Mark Mark Warner was elected governor in 2001, he did unusually well in rural Virginia, running in 01 against a suburban Republican nominee.

I had to run against a rural Virginia nominee in 2005.

And it's like, I'm not going to clean up in rural Virginia against a rural opponent.

I've got to figure out a way to make the suburbs really competitive for us.

And we did in 05 and won Prince William and won Loudon.

And pretty much everybody who's been winning statewide since, Jim Webb, Barack Obama, you know, Mark Warner, Terry McAuliffe, Ralph Northam, has pursued this suburban strategy of investing heavily in the suburbs that are now 65% of the population is suburban.

And we expanded our map last night.

We'd been getting to Ladden and Prince William, but last night, you know, Chesterfield and Stafford, we're expanding the suburban map.

And that's a lesson for Dems nationally.

Is it a lesson?

In 2014, when Mark Warner was running for reelection to the Senate, his race was surprisingly close.

Very close.

end and was sort of dismissed afterwards as a fluke.

But

I think

in reflection, it looked like actually a premonition of what was coming in 2016.

Was

obviously you don't like that Donald Trump is the president.

You tried to make that not happen.

Nothing he's done has surprised me.

I told people for 105 days this is exactly what would happen.

But is there a level of wake-up call that happened for the Democratic Party and rethinking how to do things that came because we sort of hit rock bottom as a party with Donald Trump getting re-elected?

Well, you know, I don't think we hit rock bottom.

And I think a danger for Dems, don't overcorrect.

I mean, in 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.

It's really hard to do that for a third term.

Dems don't do that.

It's hard to do that for a woman.

It's hard to do that with Russia and the FBI putting their thumb on the scale against you.

You don't have to turn everything over.

Now, I will say, though,

there was a wake-up call because the consequences of Trump's election are so dramatic.

But, you know, picking a lesser qualified man over a qualified woman, it's not exactly the first time that that's happened in American life.

And I do worry a little bit, the party should do a lot of things differently and capture energy and excitement in the way we have, but you don't have to turn everything topsy-turvy.

And I do worry a little bit about the party overcorrecting.

I think Virginia, you know, it's not like we changed stuff in Virginia.

14 was a tough year because it was the Obama midterm, and Dems were having trouble in the Obama midterm in Virginia and elsewhere.

But we didn't turn everything topsy-turvy.

We have had a path that has led us to generally success since 01, not always.

2009 wasn't a good year for us.

We lost the governor's race then, but we haven't lost a state race now in 10 years, state or federal.

So

we have a path.

We're pursuing it.

Young, diverse, problem solvers, recognizing people's dissatisfaction with this president.

When the most known American does not stand for the values that we think are fundamentally American, inclusion and equality, and can do optimism, he is divisive and kind of pessimistic, then we got to take advantage of that dissatisfaction, and that was a huge factor in the race.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Is it just a mirror, perhaps, of what happened in 2010 and 2011 in politics nationally, where the Republicans were doing well and then Obama was reelected in 2012, right?

That was a period where you were DNC chair, you were thinking about things.

It does seem like things are going well for Democrats when it comes to elections in the last two years, but what does that

mean,

right?

Could President Trump get reelected next year in the same way?

Well, look, that's a fair question.

And so no complacency.

I will say that the one difference that we've really worked hard on in Virginia, and I hope nationally you're you're seeing it too, is

in the Obama election of 08 and even between 08 and 2012, the Democrats built themselves into a really good presidential popular election party.

The Republicans, on the other hand, were working on local races and things like that because they realize they're not a good presidential popular election party.

So they want to do well in local races.

They want to get the Electoral College advantage.

I do think Dems have woken up to that.

So what you saw in Virginia with not just state races, but look, when you have Prince William and Loudon changing

these suburban counties, fundamentally changing the direction of their boards of supervisors and school boards, diverse, progressive, that suggests that we're learning the lesson and we're not just focusing on the presidency, we're focusing on building out

the entire team.

There were a number of firsts in the elections this week.

We have the first Muslim state senator in Virginia, first Sikh, a Muslim woman, right?

First Sikh local elected official in Virginia.

What does that mean for

what the party is at this point?

If you could go back and talk to mayor-elect Tim Kaine of Richmond in 1998, what would you say about where, what would he think about where the party is right now?

He would say the party is

where he dreamed it would be.

I mean, I was the mayor of a city that's predominantly minority.

In 1998, it was majority minority, and it was very unusual that I was the mayor of that city at that time.

But I was the mayor because, you know, our minority community had the grace to extend to me, we trust you, when the white majority never extended that grace to a minority candidate in the hundreds of years

that preceded my time as mayor.

So

our party is a party where everybody's welcome at the table and nobody is pushed away from the table.

It causes them angst because they might see new faces around the table and they think they're losing something as a result.

But what Virginians have learned is, wait a minute, we're not losing anything, we're gaining.

In Prince William, where we were last night,

the guy I beat in the Senate race last year patented this sort of, before Trump, this hard anti-immigrant style of campaigning, and he won some elections that way.

But you know what?

The county saw the results of it and said, that's not what we want.

And last night was a repudiation of it and a statement of, here's who we are as a Commonwealth, here's who we are as a party, here's who we should be as a country.

You can come sit around the table.

We'll all be around the table together.

You took special pleasure in announcing that that seat had flipped to a Democrat.

Yeah,

I did.

And you said in your speech that now Prince William is on the same page, same paragraph, in the same century as the voters.

As its citizens, yeah.

I was talking to Tom Perez, the DNC chair at the party last night.

He said that nights like Tuesday night give him faith in humanity again.

Where is

humanity?

Where is the country at this point?

Yeah, well, it's a challenging time.

You try to grapple with and understand the situation.

I've been thinking a lot about the book of Job recently.

When Job was going through trials, he thought, I've been such a good person.

So is it just all pointless?

I'm going to suffer just pointlessly.

And neighbors said, we thought that guy was a good person, but if he's suffering, he must have done something wrong.

But the reader of the story knows it's neither of those things.

The reader of the story is Job's being tested.

And the test is, will he stay true to his values or not?

You can look at U.S.

history as a series of tests.

We have a set of values.

No person is above the law.

The equality principle.

free press freedom of religious expression.

And the question is, will we stay true to those principles when we're tested?

And Trump, in a very open way, is challenging many of these principles.

I'm going to hold myself above the law.

I I don't have to follow it.

I'm going to kick Muslims around rather than recognize, oh, I'm going to kick the press around.

We're going through a test right now.

And the question is, will we be true to our principles or will we abandon them?

It's the same test that Job faced.

And at the end of the book of Job, which is a wonderful piece of literature, you know, some believe it inerrant, but even if you are not a Bible believer, you would have to read Job and say, that is a beautiful piece of literature with a profound insight about psychology.

He holds true to his principles through the test, and then what was lost to him is restored.

I think this is the moment that our country is living in, and we've lived in moments like this before.

So America is being tested.

America is Job in there?

I think America is being tested right now.

We're going through a test, and we go through them, you know, Civil War and Civil Rights era.

We go through tests.

And the question is, are we going to hold fast to the ideals of equality and no person above the law and free press and freedom of religious expression?

Or are we going to compromise on those things?

And I believe, like in the book of Job, when you hold fast to principles, you can be tested, but there can be a good outcome.

And I am completely of the belief that the chapter we're living in now is going to have a positive outcome.

There's been pain, and there's going to be more, in my view.

But I think the outcome is going to be we held fast to our principles.

We're sadder, but wiser.

But we held fast to our principles, and we've continued to show the ability to move forward.

Why am I such an optimist?

Because I see what's happened in Virginia.

My father-in-law was elected 50 years ago to governor of Virginia, 50 years ago, Monday, just two days ago.

Your father-in-law, the former governor of Virginia,

and he was a Republican who ran on a pro-integration platform right in the teeth of the segregationist Dixiecrats.

And he got elected and he integrated the schools of Virginia, and then he got frozen out of politics for the rest of his life.

He's 96 years old now.

He stuck to principle.

And for a long time, he tried to run for the Senate in 1978 and finished third in a four-way Republican primary, the guy who built the modern Republican Party, but he held fast to principle.

And look where Virginia is now.

First African-American governor, Doug Wilder, putting electoral votes behind Barack Obama in 0812, this dramatic political transformation.

So when I look at where we are as a nation and what might happen, I have a pretty good analogous situation right here where we've stuck to principles that were important.

And while there's been pain along the way,

we are on an arc that I like.

And I think the same thing's going to happen in the country.

Is it going to be different when Trump's name is on the ballot next year?

It will be different.

But Trump's name was on the ballot this year.

You know, when he went to Kentucky and said, look,

if Bevin doesn't win, they're going to say it's on me.

You can't let them do that to me.

Trump's name was on the ballot in Kentucky.

Trump's name was on the ballot

in Virginia.

But you're right.

When he is the guy.

So much of it of how he operates is as a sort of cult of personality around politics.

It's so much the attachment to him.

The cult of one.

And it just seems like that will make a big difference in how things go.

In the same way, but I think to a higher degree now, that it made a difference Barack Obama being on the ballot in 2008 and 2012 versus where Democrats were in 2010 and 14, right?

Yeah, no, I think

Trump has made it even more about him.

You have to assume it will.

And I look, I don't say Dems are necessarily going to win in 2020.

I think Trump could win.

I think that the race is the Dems race to lose, but Trump could clearly win.

And I hope, again, the Dems learned the right lessons from 17, 18, 19.

So it was 16, too.

Learned the right lessons from 16, 17, 18, 19, and then apply them in 20.

But

we

should feel, after last night, Kentucky and Virginia especially, we should feel that we've got momentum.

All right, we're going to step aside for a moment.

After the break, Kane and I discuss impeachment, what its impact was on swing districts, what it will mean for 2020, and what his Republican colleagues in the Senate are really saying behind the scenes.

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What do you think the 2020 candidates, the Democrats, broadly should learn from what happened here?

Well, so, you know, I would say

Trump's increasing unpopularity, not with his core base, but with independents and people who could decide to go another direction.

There's a lot of voters out there that we can get.

I don't know, Trump got 44, 45% in 2016.

Of that, 35% is rock solid, 46%.

Okay, so of that, 35% is rock-solid.

But there's 10 or 11 who are very much in play.

And so

we need to do that.

We need to recognize that, though, I think too often there's sort of an effort on the 10 or 11 that ignores energizing our own people.

And so, I've always run campaigns with what I call the Venn diagram theory: that there's an overlap between things that Dems care deeply about and independents care deeply about.

And you try to run the race in that overlap where people care deeply, not in the mushy middle, run on things that people care deeply about.

And Dems and independents care deeply about many of the same things.

They're climate science believers.

They believe in equality, including LGBT equality, run in the intersection where Dems and independents care deeply about stuff.

So I think we need to do that.

And I think we need to avoid on some positioning, you know, where we're pushing people away.

One way to read the results of last night is that the impeachment conversation so far has either helped Democrats or not registered as a factor in a real way, right?

Right.

Is that the way you think things will hold?

That's a really good question.

We certainly saw as we were, because I did 40 events for 60 candidates, I think, and we were talking to them about their polling,

our legislative candidates polling in September, pre-impeachment inquiry, and then late October, Trump's numbers went down.

So the impeachment inquiry wasn't hurting them with the public.

It was hurting Trump with the public.

Now, did it increase Republican turnout?

You know, sometimes your numbers can go down, but it can energize people.

We'll have to do a little more reading of the tea leaves to figure that out.

But I think you can very safely say that the impeachment inquiry did not hurt Democrats in swing districts in a battleground state like Virginia.

Because you won the race.

In the swing districts.

I'm not talking about the blue districts, and I'm not talking about the red.

But in the swing ones, where we had to pick up the seats to win, Trump's numbers went down in the last month.

And that could be impeachment.

It could be abandoning the Kurds.

It could be,

the revelation of the campaign to sack this career ambassador.

I mean, it could be a million things, but the impeachment inquiry did not hurt Dems.

And arguably, I think probably it helped us a little.

Let me ask you, you have good relationships with a lot of your colleagues in the Senate, a lot of your Republican colleagues.

I am an institutionalist here.

We ought to be working across the aisle together.

There are a lot of people who talk often about how Republican senators know that there's an issue here that they are uncomfortable with.

They are currently trying to thread something along the lines of what Trump did with Ukraine was bad, but not impeachable.

Jeff Flake, your former colleague from Arizona, had an op-ed a few weeks ago that said if there were a secret ballot,

two-thirds would vote to get rid of

President Trump.

And I think he said 20 or 30 Republicans.

Is that a fair assessment of where things are?

I think so.

I have been saying something very similar to what Flake had been saying for some time, which is that two-thirds of Republican senators, no, one-third think Trump is fantastic.

They sincerely believe that, okay?

But two-thirds are deeply worried about him, his character, his judgment, his emotional volatility, his ethics, the kind of people he has around him,

how he acts and what he says.

They're really worried about it.

But

they're deeply worried about the Trump voter.

turning on them.

And so they would probably, many of them, be glad to have Mike Pence as president rather than President Trump.

Pence was a congressman.

He's kind of one of them.

He's not going to tweet out negative stuff about him.

They know Trump has no loyalty to them.

But they cannot yet see a path

to

even stand up and rebuke President Trump in their words without making the Trump voter mad.

And the Trump voter is now the GOP voter.

There is essential complete overlap in those two categories.

Trump has has burrowed into and now completely occupies the GOP.

I wonder how it is for you talking with your colleagues and knowing that that's where their minds are, but not where their public statements are.

Because it leads to, among reporters,

a level of cynicism

without betraying any specific off-the-record conversations that I have had, when off-the-record conversations with people do not match up to their public statements.

So you've asked a really interesting question.

How does it make me feel when there's a mismatch?

It makes me feel better than if they all sincerely believe Trump was great.

Because if there's a mismatch between what I know they believe and what they're saying, that's an opportunity.

If they all thought Trump is doing exactly what we think the President of the United States should do, I'd be depressed.

But when a big chunk of them

They don't believe that's what the president should do.

And they're increasingly, you know, boy, on the situation with the Kurds, when Senator McConnell writes a Washington Post op-ed saying the president made a big mistake, that's not just about the Kurds.

That's him going public in the Post, distancing himself from the president.

When the president had to reverse field on bringing the G7 to Dural, he didn't do that because of the media or the Democrats.

He did it because the Republicans said, are you kidding?

This is ridiculous.

Have you heard?

And so there's starting to be a willingness.

And I'll tell you, Isaac, for us on the Democratic side who do have good relations on the other side, our chore is not to convince anybody what to think.

Our chore is to give them a path to say what they already think, what we know they already think.

Do the election results of this week inform that, do you think, for them?

Have you heard from any of your Republicans?

Not yet.

Not yet.

I mean, no, not yet.

It's still too soon having this conversation with you.

But it does suggest, look, Trump will drag you down.

You know, I mean, Trump

is posing danger to to important values of the country, but he also could destroy the GOP.

And they have to grapple with, do they want that to happen?

There is a price to loyalty, and loyalty is damage to a country we love, but loyalty is also damage to a party that many of these people have spent their whole lives working to promote.

What if there's a shutdown in the middle of all of this?

Yeah.

Well, I don't think there's going to be.

And, you know, I kind of

It seems like the right bet over the last few years in American government is when things can get ridiculous.

They will.

They will.

Right.

Here's the.

It's that principle.

Well, I jump to a punchline and then work backwards.

And

some of the steps in my math I can't show you, but I can jump to the end point,

which is

the shutdown last year was bad for Trump and for the Republicans, and they know it.

And we know it.

And most importantly, they know that we know it.

So it's not going to be good for them going into a big election year, and they know that.

And so that means I believe we're going to get to a good path.

Now, I want to get to appropriations and omnibus.

And, you know, you hear my- Oh, you mean like the work of government.

Yeah, the real work of government.

And you're hearing people talk about continuing resolutions.

I'm not worried about shutdown so much as I'm worried about, you know,

kind of slack budgetary practices that don't really look in the

but continuing resolutions is like driving, looking in the rearview mirror.

I want to drive looking in the windshield and drive forward rather than just do what I did last year.

So there's some danger of that, I think, but I don't think we're going to get into the shutdown space.

We were talking about politically what you think the election results mean for going forward here.

What we're seeing as we're recording this is that in Kentucky, which was a good night for Democrats, it seems, Andy Bashir seems to have defeated the incumbent Republican governor, Matt Bevin,

that Bevin is refusing to concede.

He's pushing for a recount.

It's not clear where that will go.

Right, right.

Is that maybe a preview of what we might have in the year ahead, too?

I mean, do you worry about...

I do.

Do you worry about what would happen if Trump would lose?

I worry, I will hear it more generally.

I worry about what President Trump does when his back's against the wall, when evidence comes out on impeachment that's unfavorable.

Could he sack a lot of people?

Could he engage in new cruel acts against kicking minorities around to shift attention?

Could he blunder us into a war we shouldn't be in?

I mean, I think there's a lot that's unpredictable right now.

Do you worry about what happens if he's acquitted by the Senate, which seems like barring some changes of what we were just talking about, if the House does vote to impeach him, which looks like it's going to happen, I mean, making predictions is a very dangerous thing, but the likeliest scenario right now seems to be that the the House will vote to impeach him.

It'll go to the Senate

and

he would be acquitted.

I just worry about he is generally a person who is very unpredictable.

He cares about one thing himself.

And if he feels threatened, then he will do things to help himself at the expense of everybody else, including the nation.

And so that could assume so many different forms.

That is the one thing that kind of keeps me up at night is there's a lot of unpredictability right now.

You know, there's unpredictability about impeachment increase in the House and what new evidence will come out.

The politics of impeachment is unpredictable, but the unpredictability that worries me is what President Trump does when he feels threatened, because he is going to preserve himself even if it messes up the country.

And if he were to lose, do you think about what would happen then?

I don't jump and think about, like, well, what would he do and what would we do?

And how would you move around the chessboard?

But I just worry about his,

again,

he will promote himself at the expense of every person and every principle,

including

his oath of office to uphold the Constitution and do the right thing for the country.

And he'll put himself first.

And so I do worry about what forms that may take.

Trevor Burrus: But I'm jumping ahead because

it sounds like you're also nowhere near comfortable in the idea that Democrats would have an easy race against him next year.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I think if we assume it's going to be easy, we make a big mistake.

So I do think the race is ours to lose.

We should win, win, just like in 2018.

You know, it was a really interesting race because some of the factors, like economic factors, were pretty strong.

But I gave an analysis a couple of days after I won in 2018, not really about my race, but just generally.

And I said it was a man shall not live by bread alone kind of election.

Some of the economic signs were strong, but there was a profound unease among the American electorate about the way this president is manifesting.

He is the most known American in the world.

So who he is sends a signal about who we are.

But what Americans said in that race with a good economy is that's not who we are.

And we want to send a clear message of repudiation that don't think this is who we are as a country.

And we saw that same message.

So I think that, I think the race is ours to lose.

We have a good momentum, and last night shows that.

But if we assume it's going to be easy, I mean, look, this is a guy who we already know will pull out all the stops.

I mean, he'll try to get Ukraine to help.

He openly encouraged Russia to help.

He says that there was no election interference when there was.

You know, he will do anything to win.

And we have to not, Democrats, we want to serve.

Trump wants to win.

We got to want to win.

You're a white man who is a Democrat.

That is not statistically.

Thanks for painting that picture for the home audience, the radio audience.

Just make sure that it's an audio medium.

Can Democrats get white men,

white men men who aren't younger voters to vote for them?

That wasn't where things were in 16.

That hasn't been where things are overall.

I think so.

I mean, look,

how do you do that?

As someone who has done that,

not just in the votes that you have cast yourself for Democrats, but has convinced voters over the years to vote for you.

I mean, it's presence.

Joe Manchinois says

they don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

And so

one

thing, when we celebrate that new people are now welcome at the table, and we have to celebrate that, we need to keep our foot on that equality pedal and keep it absolutely floored.

That's the key virtue of this country.

We have to acknowledge that some people when they see new folks come to the table, they think, oh, I must be losing something.

Now they're not.

And that worry is usually a transitional worry.

It's like, oh, well, it's actually working out okay.

But we have to remember always to make our case to everybody.

And sometimes you make your case to everybody.

Look, I spent a ton of time in Appalachia last year in my own race, and I still didn't do that well in Appalachia.

Now, people like me there.

They're glad when I come.

They're just not voting for me yet, but I'm going to keep doing it.

Will they ever vote for you?

Oh, yeah, I believe so.

And I believe

some of their kids do and will.

But you have to go out and really make the case.

Put yourself in an Appalachian voter's shoes.

They don't see economic opportunities in their communities that others are experiencing, Northern Virginia.

They turn on TV.

So

you just watch network TV.

The shows are about

wacky waitresses in New York and

big city police chiefs.

They never see a representation of themselves in popular culture that's kind of like a lift you up and

we want to pay attention to you.

So they do find.

Yeah, that was part of the theory, right, of why Roseanne was, when that show came back, that it was the first time that there was, in a long time, a show that was about working class America.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

And that shows, I mean, now it's the Connors, right?

But it's in she.

And I get it.

You, you live in a part of the country where your broadband access, you know, is so bad.

And that's like a highway and electricity now.

You know, if you don't have good.

connectivity, then you are basically like living in a valley without electric power or a county without roads, you know, in 2019.

So we have an obligation to not only go make the case, but then produce.

That's one of the things that I'm really proud about in Virginia.

When Virginia expanded Medicaid, that hugely benefited parts of the state that never vote Democratic.

Last year, Governor Northam and others did a big transportation package that was largely for western Virginia.

The western Virginia legislators who'd been complaining about transportation for years voted against it.

But it was Democrats from urban Virginia that put the votes in place to solve, to try to solve rural Virginia's transportation problems.

So to anybody who says to me, Dems don't care about rural Virginia or rural America, I'd say, well, you know, actually,

can I show you that we actually care more about the health care needs and the infrastructure needs and the education needs of rural voters than Republican legislators from those communities do?

I think we got a good case to make.

So you have to make it.

You can't be unrealistic that having made the case in one election cycle, you know, the sun is going to part the clouds and everybody's going to immediately start voting for you.

But you just got to be present and you got to make that case.

I'll ask you just one more here.

I spend a lot of my time on the campaign trail.

There are so many Democrats who are running that when Betto Rourke dropped out, that now made the Democratic field equal to the previously largest primary field ever.

Interesting.

So that was Republican 16.

Exactly.

So it's not like there's been a shortage of Democrats running for president.

But do you ever think about what it would have been if you had run?

Not really.

I had this, I do things by feel.

And when I walked into the office, we're in my office right now, when I walked in here the day after I got back from 2016, my feeling was I think the Senate is going to be incredibly important to saving this country in the next few years.

And here I have this opportunity to be in a body that will be called on to save the country.

Now, will we rise to the challenge or not, TBD?

But I really felt like the Senate will be necessary to save this country in the next few years.

I know what it is to run for president.

I haven't done it, but being on the ticket.

And if you do that, it's all in.

So you're a little bit of an absentee.

I mean, you're...

You're a lot of an absentee.

You're not around.

Some of your colleagues who are running for president have

just basically written off the fact that they're.

I mean, and so when we were trying to get out of a shutdown last year, that was really important to Virginians.

I was here working on the guts of that and the back pay bill as we're trying to decide what to do if an impeachment inquiry comes around.

If I was a declared presidential candidate, I would have zero ability to go to a Republican and say, what's best for the country?

They would view me as, well, you know, you're running for president.

It's a partisan thing.

So I have this opportunity that Virginians have entrusted me with at a moment in time where I do think the Senate is, in a way, is going to be sort of needed to save the country.

Going back to my Job analogy, as we're being tested and being tested to stay true to our principles, the Senate is really important in that.

So I kind of felt like as long as Donald Trump is president, I have got to be right here.

And that's why I ran for re-election in 2018.

And I knew when I ran for re-election, I wasn't going to run and then turn right around and say, okay, now I'm running for president.

Some of your colleagues, I needed to be here.

I needed to be here.

Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Amy Flavisher all did that.

Right here.

And look, presidential candidates play a really valuable role, too, because in addition to trying to be president, they're going out and articulating what's right about us, what's wrong about President Trump.

That's an important thing to do.

I'm glad there's 17 people doing that.

But I have a role right here that I think is important, and it's only going to get more important in the next few weeks and months.

And I've got to be here focused on that.

All right.

Senator Tim Kaine.

Great.

Thanks for that.

Yeah.

You bet.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

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