Steve Bullock's Longshot Case

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This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Isaac Dover.

The race for the Democratic nomination has wavered between two questions.

Who do Democrats want to be president?

And who do Democrats think could beat President Trump?

Answering the second question isn't so straightforward.

Politics has changed rapidly, and Trump has shaken everything up.

But there was once an accepted wisdom on good general election candidates, and our guest this week would seem to fit that template.

He's a governor.

Executive experience in government was, until recently, key to winning the White House.

He's the only Democrat who won statewide in 2016 in a state that went for Trump.

Politics used to be a battle for the middle, but now politicians spend more time tending to their bases.

He even has a moving personal story tied to what has become one of the campaign's key issues.

In his case, guns.

Now, you may have been able to guess who I'm talking about, but many of you won't.

And that's not a surprise.

He's been stuck in the 1% range of polls.

And while he made the August debate, he was not on stage last week in Houston.

He's Montana Governor Steve Bullock.

A lot of folks have called for him to do what another governor in the race did.

John Hickenlooper, the former governor of Colorado, dropped out and is now running for Senate.

So we talk about why Bullock doesn't see himself doing that, why his candidacy, which might have been taken more seriously in the past, hasn't, at least so far, caught on in today's environment, and why he thinks the country needs his experience specifically to keep things from getting really bad.

Take a listen.

Governor Steve Bullock, thanks for being here on Radio Atlantic.

It's great to be with you today, Isaac.

So you

did not make the stage for the third Democratic debate.

Let's start with this.

Is it weird to watch that play out from

a distance?

You were on stage in Detroit for the second debate, and now you had to watch the first debate from home.

Or I guess not from home.

You were in New Hampshire the night of the debate in Miami

and then Iowa, right?

Yeah, I did town halls and TV town halls in both Iowa and New Hampshire.

But now you're back off the stage.

You had to watch it from home.

What's that?

Yeah,

you know, there's that part of it that you really look at it, and it is the Hunger Games, right?

They're trying to figure out who's on the stage, who's not, what are the qualifications to kick people off the stages.

They don't even know after these next two debates what the DNC is going to do.

No one knows, including, I think, the DNC.

That could be.

That could be.

And, you know, yeah, there's a degree of frustration because I don't think that's the best for either the best way to pick.

a nominee.

I don't think it's the best for the campaigns when the premium was put on chasing $1 donors and spend a lot of money online.

And really, when you look at it, when almost the whole field's within the margin of any polling

errors right now.

And I think it's also, though, you know, I take heart in as much as you can look at how these things have always gone.

It hasn't been debate rules that said it.

It really is the early states.

And I also take heart in that there's still,

I don't know, 150 days before

any voter expresses a preference.

Yeah.

And it seems like, and we were chatting about this a little bit before we started, I have been to four nights of debates for coverage,

two nights in Miami, two nights in Detroit.

I would be hard-pressed to, as a person who had to cover this as his job, to tell you

who was paid to be there and to pay attention to it,

to

really say much of anything that happened at those debates that was notable.

And some of the notable moments are kind of funny little things that happen that have nothing to do with anything, even the debates.

And the other point about it is that it just seems like not only is it performance art

because you guys prep for it and you go through practice of what would you say if this person says that, but you have been

an attorney general for four years, governor for eight years now.

You debated for it.

Did any of the debate practice or debate experience you had have anything to do with the job of being attorney General or Governor?

Zero.

Absolutely zero.

And, you know, it's more for maybe it prepares you to go on more cable television.

But beyond that, it has nothing to do with the job either that we're seeking to become president or when I think of my time as Attorney General and

as governor, when you have real-life decisions facing you each and every day, and you can't sit there and say, hmm, well, how would I say this in the best way in 15 seconds?

You know,

it is, as you note, I mean, it's performance art.

And it's also something that, as you say, you can't remember much that came out of any of those.

Think of you're actually the undecided voter.

You're the undecided voter five months out.

I mean, maybe they're watching, maybe they're not, but I think that both the press and things need something to cover at this point.

So that's how all the attention gets on it.

And I'm not, yeah, I'm not sure where it gets any of this national dialogue on how we're going to beat Donald Trump and how we're going to bridge some of these divides to make government actually work against.

I mean, I think that if the debates were actual preparation for being president, then perhaps Barack Obama, after four years of being president, wouldn't have needed to spend as much time in debate prep as he did to debate for reelection.

And then people may remember his first debate against Mitt Romney was

largely a disaster.

Yeah, not too good, right?

Yeah.

But if he had been if debate prep were related to the job of the presidency, then he would have had four years of debate prep.

But it's not.

But look, you make this argument that it's early, and

in a way, it is.

We're five months out from the Iowa caucuses, six months out from Super Tuesday, which is at this point the earliest that anybody sees this resolving itself for the beginning of March.

We're also nine months into this race, not nine months for you.

You got it in May.

But Elizabeth Warren was the first one she announced on December 31st.

So here we are

most of a year into this.

And many others announced in January and February.

Yeah, I think six of the candidates actually announced when the federal government was shut down.

Think about that.

Harris, Warren announced their intentions when literally the federal government was shut down.

The argument that was made to me by some people involved with campaigns at that point was,

you know, if you try to build yourself around the Trump crisis and political schedule, you're never going to be able to do it.

So might as well just go forward and make announcements.

But

one way or the other,

we are

so sort of early, sort of late.

But beyond that,

with

not making the debate stage, but still feeling like there is a real clear pathway for you, is it that you're just stubborn?

No, it's just that I'm optimistic, not just for my race, but for the country and knowing that we have to beat this guy.

And, you know, I mean, from a process, we could go back, right?

And 31 days out from Iowa, John Kerry was at four points.

Al Sharpton was beating him.

Or in 2007, I think at this point, Hillary Clinton was anywhere between 15 and 20 points above Barack Obama Nation.

So the process is, from my perspective, it is a long way away.

The political and the policy is that I don't think it's stubbornness when you're four months into this where

you really want to make sure that at some point, not only can you beat him, but government can work again.

And I don't, you know, you listen, it's audacious to say you could be the president of the United States for anyone.

anyone.

I sometimes say that anybody running for president is a super ambitious egomaniac.

I hope there's more than that.

It's only like the fate of a 243-year experiment called Representative Democracy.

Leader of the free world, it has to be you.

But by that same token, that knowing both what's at stake and how, I think also Democrats could mess this up.

If I have something to contribute to that to make sure that

not five months from now, but 14 months from now, we don't wake up and Donald Trump's still president.

If I've contributed to that, like, look, I think I'm the best nominee, could be the best nominee to both beat him and then bridge some of these divides and get government working again.

But if I have something to contribute along the way and I end up not falling short, I'll never be sitting there when I'm 80 years old saying, oh, well, I could have done something to save this country.

So you were talking about bridging divides.

Let's try to play this out in real terms over an issue that is now

becoming more central, which is guns, something that you've had a lot of experience with, personal and governmental experience, and talk about both of those things.

There's a story you tell about how

after one of the mass shootings, you were figuring out the proclamation for the flag

after the Las Vegas shootings.

And a staffer told you, well, we have a template for this, and

that you've used that template a bunch of times since then.

was it nine times since Vegas

and since the Parkland shooting also.

What is going on

in the country that you could say to

a gun owner in Montana

that there's something wrong here that

as you believe there is,

that should make them want to

back off the

absolutist position that you can't do anything on guns.

How do you get someone to agree with you when you say something has to happen here?

Well,

and I think the absolutist position is generated in part by the politics of the day.

Meaning that, you know, and I've also said that I'll give you 30 million reasons why Donald Trump, when all the governors were in the White House after the Parkland shooting.

During that week, initially, he said universal background checks.

Then Then he immediately walked back from it after the El Paso and Dayton shootings.

He said that he was the one who would stand up to the NRA, that other people hadn't.

That's what he said.

He actually, after Parkland, said to us governors, I don't know why you're so afraid of the NRA.

It's time that we actually all stand up.

And then they got a call from Wayne Lapierre and walked backwards.

So recognize that I think that it's you know,

the NRA when I was growing up, it was a gun safety, it was a hunting, it was a shooting organization.

Now it's nothing more than this dark money field organization.

But directly to your point,

more than even these proclamations, more than a fourth of the times under Obama and Trump that I've been asked to lower the flags are for mass shootings.

When

a middle schooler comes home after his first week of school and says, now I know where to go in case of a mass shooting.

You know, the imprint.

It's not just middle schoolers, it's preschoolers.

No, that's exactly right.

Preschoolers who don't know what's going on, but are told, okay, well, we're going to go stand in that corner, and that's what we would do.

Yeah, and hopefully still, schools are some of the safest places we could ever have.

But yeah, that middle schooler that I was mentioning was my son when I said after his first week of sixth grade, Cam, what did you learn this week?

And he said, this, this.

Oh, and we had good active shooter drills.

It's like that imprint.

is more than anybody should have to deal with.

And I think that how we get there,

like I've said from a public health perspective, like we did all kinds of things with cars over time, from seatbelts to airbags.

Like we know steps that aren't political that we could do that would make a difference.

Gun owners that I know,

how did they get their gun?

Unless it's a family transfer, you go through a national incident check system.

It's pretty easy.

They check your background.

You buy the gun.

Like a background check is something that

the overwhelming majority of gun owners have gone through.

And that's also why the overwhelming majority of gun owners and even NRA members say, yeah, this should be universal.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I mean, you think about what people have to go through to get a driver's license, right?

That's the argument that

maybe it should be.

Yeah, well,

and it's one even probably less.

I mean, I failed my

driving test two times because I couldn't parallel park.

It's true.

I grew up in New York.

I won't tell anyone.

Oh, that's right.

We're on a podcast.

It was probably a little bit harder to do that test in New York than it was in

Montana when I was getting raised.

Yeah, I don't know if you had to do parallel parking.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, that's a challenge no matter what state you're in.

Yes, I couldn't do parallel park.

Well, I'm a little bit better now.

Yeah.

But in Montana and elsewhere, I mean, beginning with the premise that 40% of households in this country have a firearm in it.

Pew did a great study that said, you know, folks that have firearms want to keep themselves and their families safe.

I mean, there's commonality in there that if we could ever shed some of the politics, and it's this city that we're in right now, Washington, D.C., which caused all the problems, red flag laws, like removing a gun, going to a judge and saying you should remove a gun from a household where there's signs that, you know, someone could be using that gun.

Indiana passed that law.

Indiana isn't some fuzzy thinking liberal state, right?

So there's some real commonality that we ought to be able to address.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.:

You come in as a governor, you also have this personal experience of your nephew who in 94, right,

was

killed.

He was 10 then.

He was 11.

He was 11.

And there was

another 10-year-old who had a gun.

That's what.

On a playground, it was an accident, right?

He was

explain what happened there just briefly.

Sure.

Yeah, so briefly, and I'm in my last class of law school in New York City, get pulled out,

and a 10-year-old who had been teased brought a gun to school, and all the kids were lined up to get in that morning.

And 10-year-old shot my 11-year-old nephew, Jeremy.

Jeremy wasn't the intended target,

but when you're a 10-year-old holding a gun.

Right, that's what I meant by accident.

Yeah.

Yeah, so, and it was one, at the time, yeah, the youngest schoolyard shooting in the country.

Right.

Go ahead.

No, no, it's 25 years ago.

It seemed, at that point, it was a big deal.

Oh, it was on the front page.

It was on Today's show.

It was on front pages.

Now, if a 10-year-old killed an 11-year-old, I don't know if it would make Amy Nashville.

Well, I meant right, it was the, and when there was the second shooting in Texas at the end of the month in August, it was,

you have to say which mass shooting in August in Texas you're talking about.

That leaves an impression on you in 94.

What does it do 25 years later?

Where is that for you?

Where is that for your family?

Because one of the things I think about is because of these mass shootings have become so much part of our lives, the routine of the proclamations is part of it.

But for the people who lose someone,

there are more and more of those people around now, and that doesn't fade when the news cycle does.

No, that's a part of my family's literally everyday life in some ways, certainly.

And, you know, we 25 years afterwards, we just had a conference in Montana.

This was a few weeks ago to say, what have we learned?

Where have we gone?

And where are we going forward?

Personally, completely impacted some ways that I parent.

Right.

Like what?

With my kids when they were in grade school.

like I wouldn't drop them off on a playground.

Like I'm the guy hanging out, you know, waiting for the bell to ring and walking them in.

Now, in many ways, that was absolutely irrational, right?

Because you know that the chances of that happening on a playground are so dang slim.

And also me being there, hanging out with my kids till then.

But it's just something that you try to grab control of whatever you can.

But it also taught me, I mean, the shooter's statement immediately afterwards was, no one loves me.

right?

So how do you get to the point where there's a 10-year-old and no one,

all he or she feels is no one loves them?

So I think part of this bigger discussion, too, as we look at this, that it's not binary, meaning that

I hate the word hardened schools.

And I had actually said to the president, like, we harden military targets.

We don't harden schools.

But as one example, yeah, we have to do everything we can.

So if there's an active shooter, but we also have to figure out ways to soften schools, get to the point where a 10-year-old would never feel like that they had the community sport, at least that no one loves them.

Or when you look at mania of sort of the isolation of some of these shooters that

dropped the ball along the way where they felt the disconnect from either their community or others, that we ought to be able to do better on.

Does the sadness stay with you, the sort of on-guard thing that you were talking about with dropping your kids in the playground?

How does that process through?

For people who

have

lost someone in the last couple of weeks or years,

you

sadly have this

as part of who you are for a long time now.

Oh, I think forever.

And for

my brother and sister-in-law and overall family and

Jeremy left behind an identical twin Josh you know in 25 years from working in

you know a

law office in Midtown New York to my attorney general's office to the governor's office like there's a proclamation part that came out of the congressional record that talked about what happened I see it just about every day you know and so it becomes

anybody that deals

lives through

a tragedy, I think it becomes part of who they are.

Now,

for me as an elected official, didn't talk about that much for two reasons, one of which you never want to be defined by a tragedy,

and you also never want to seem exploitive of it, you know, if that makes sense.

Because you're defined by it when people say, oh, he's...

the elected official that had a family member shot and killed.

And then they think of you differently in a discussion of guns.

Or if you're out there every day saying, yes, this is part of my life, and I know what that's like,

it's oddly enough, almost a sacred thing that when discussing it, I would never, ever want to think, oh, I'm exploiting one of the most painful chapters in our life for any personal or political gain.

Yeah, it sort of dirty set, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because that's

and it's not why you got into politics.

I think about there's a former congresswoman in New York, Carolyn McCarthy, whose husband and son were killed in a shooting on the Long Island Railroad, and she got into politics because of that.

She was not.

I remember that, yeah.

That's different.

Yeah, but it does shape, like when I was Attorney General, I started this Children's Justice Center.

I made...

it so that we would recognize after-school providers and mentors of the year just like we'd recognize peace officers of the year, to say that this is an important part of community safety and child safety.

As governors, things that I've done in trying to build resiliency for children, you know, it's not like I don't wake up and say, I'm doing it because of the loss of Jeremy, but I'm sure it leaves an imprint for sure.

That was an intense discussion, but we do have to take a break.

When we come back, we'll talk more with Governor Bullock about his campaign and the state of American politics right now.

Hey, it's Hanna, host of Radio Atlantic, here to tell you about the 17th annual Atlantic Festival happening in New York City this September.

We have an incredible roster of guests, including David Letterman, Scott Galloway, Dr.

Becky Kennedy, H.R.

McMaster, and many more.

I'll be hosting a live recording of Radio Atlantic, and we'll also have book talks and screenings, including a first look at season three of The Diplomat and a conversation with stars Kerry Russell and Allison Janney and creator Deborah Kahn.

Guys, you can ask them about that season two cliffhanger.

Learn more at theatlanticfestival.com.

When you're talking to people in Iowa who are maybe more connected than the average voter in America because they're in Iowa and they're used to presidential candidates coming and

lobbying for their support nonstop, but still are not part of this blob of people who are paying the most attention to it in the political world and the media world.

What are you hearing from them that gives you confidence that there's a way that this is going to work?

Yeah, and I think that

Iowans take this seriously, not with a sense of entitlement, but with a sense of obligation that their role always has been to take what's a big field, try to figure out what's best moving forward.

So I hear a couple different things, one of which is that as they take it seriously, that they know that

we have to both beat him, but a third of their counties, a third of the counties in Iowa went Obama, Obama, Trump.

Aaron Powell, have you talked with anybody who did that pattern, him or herself, who said, I voted for Obama twice and then I voted for Trump and then you think that you can pull them in?

And

tell me about something else.

Absolutely.

Well, it's folks that said, things aren't working out that well, right?

The economy is not working for me.

And D.C.

doesn't care about me.

I mean, in many ways, I think Trump wasn't the cause, like if we go back, he was the result of people feeling that it wasn't working.

So, when he said drain the swamp, people thought, oh, yeah, finally, somebody will drain the swamp.

But these Obama Trump voters are these mythical beasts in the political world, right?

Because Obama won the Iowa caucuses in 2008, then he won Iowa in the general election in 2008 and in 2012, and then Trump won Iowa by 7%.

Not a close race.

And Iowa is one of the places where this has been really focused on.

There are Obama-Trump voters all over the country.

But who are these people?

Because it's still a mystery, right, to a lot of people how you could be for Barack Obama and for Donald Trump.

And some of it is people who just wanted to have outsiders shake up the system.

That's what it is.

But

are there any specific ones that jump out at you when you think about people you've met who then are open to voting for a Democrat, Democrat, voting for you,

and not voting for Trump again?

Yeah, in Iowa or in Montana, where 25 to 30 percent, you know, the mythical bullock Trump voter

wouldn't agree with all my policy by any means.

The bullock Trump voter, who should be noted, you won reelection on the same night.

It's not just that people voted for Obama and then voted for Trump.

People literally voted on the same day for you and Donald Trump.

Yeah, I was the only Democrat in the country to win a statewide re-elect where when Trump was on the ballot, he took Montana by 20.

I was in the most expensive race in Montana's history.

I won by four.

25 to 30 percent of my voters voted for Donald Trump.

And be it there or be it in

Iowa, I don't think those voters are that mythical.

I mean, when you haven't had, in real terms, a pay increase, You're 60 percent American 40 years,

you don't believe the economy is working for you, And you look at DC and it's captured.

You want to believe that something could happen that could actually make it work again.

Aaron Ross Powell,

another thing that you have spent a lot of time talking about,

and was part of the reason why you didn't get into the presidential race earlier, is because you were trying to get Medicaid expansion done in Montana, which you did.

Yeah, we got it reauthorized.

Like we got it done in 2015.

It was going to be reauthorized by ballot initiative.

In 2018, tobacco company spent $26 million killing that reauthorization.

So then a month after that election where the voters said, no, we're not going to do this, I walk into a legislature that's 60% Republican.

We're not going to have Medicaid expansion anymore.

100,000 Montanans count on it.

So yeah, there was no way I was going to get in before the end of my legislative session because I'll be darned if I didn't have a job to do.

And the weird thing about Montana is that you guys only have a legislative session every other year.

90 days every two years.

So it's either get it done then or you're not going to get it done.

Trevor Burrus But what that does,

it seems to me, is that you had a Republican-led legislature.

You are a Democrat trying to push that forward.

You have people who voted for Donald Trump,

who was obviously running in part on getting rid of Obamacare.

What you were doing is not quite Obamacare, but it is

part of it.

Medicaid expansion was.

Yeah.

I mean, you have to get people who say that they're against this thing, so viscerally against it, to support what is

a component

of Obamacare.

And you pulled it off.

And I wonder, in the context of the race,

there were three governors running.

Of the candidates who've dropped out so far, two of them were

governors, Jay Inslee and John Hickenloo, former governor of Colorado.

You're the only governor left.

We are now into three straight terms of presidents who did not have government executive experience.

But it used to be the governors were part of

that's how you did it.

I wonder what you think has happened here, and is that why we are in this level of dysfunction of government in part, because we don't have people who have come up as being governors?

Is that part of what's happening here?

I think it could contribute.

I mean, I also think that you look at

a post-Citizens United world, things have really began to change.

I mean, and that's like the idea of actually DC, the city working together is almost gone.

Now, part of it may be, actually, because

at least one facet of it is that you don't have folks that have had to figure out ways to figure out, compromise and get things done.

I mean, to your point, Barack Obama was a first-term senator, the last last senator before that that we successfully nominated to

serve as president was John F.

Kennedy.

And in part, because I think that I think it's going to be that much more important after,

you know, we've seen the hollowing out of federal government under Donald Trump and not really taking sort of these institutions of government that seriously.

That

I do think that

at least in the past, there's been a premium for people that have actually had to run things and make government work.

And

the lack of that, at least to a degree, might explain some of Donald Trump or what we have now.

The argument that you get a lot that you are familiar with is you should run for Senate.

There is a Senate race in Montana next year.

Steve Daines,

the incumbent, is running for re-election.

He is a Republican.

I guess let's start with this.

You've said there's no way it's not the right idea.

That was long before ever even decided I was going to run for president.

Why should I believe you when John Hickenlooper said

beyond just

I'm not going to do it?

As you said, he said to me, to other people, it's the wrong job for me.

I'm completely ill-suited to it.

And sure enough, Hickenlooper in August dropped out of the presidential race.

A couple days later, announced that he's running for Senate, and he is now.

Yeah, yeah.

And we can talk about sort of all the different dimensions and elements of this.

Why I said from the beginning I wouldn't do it is, you know, so I have my children are 12, 15, and 17.

Their whole life has been in the public eye, and there's certainly sacrifices in that.

But most evenings,

if I'm in Helena, and it's been for 10 years now, I go home at 6 o'clock.

I have dinner, I spend some time, and then they go to bed.

And if I have to work all night, I work all night.

In point of fact,

if I was a senator, for the rest of the time that my kids are in our house, I'd have dinner with them once a week.

And when Obama was elected and he had come from being a senator to being president, he got to see his family, he would say, more than when he was as president than when he was senator.

Well, that was one of the questions I asked President Obama when I was dividing whether I should actually do this.

It's like,

what do you actually get to see your family?

Because that's,

you know, that to me and to my family is so important.

So there's part of that, that that really is.

It's, look, if it was the senator of Maryland

and this didn't work out run for president, maybe I would give some serious consideration.

You know, you can talk to.

a senator manchin or most of the folks that have served as governors and then gone on to be senators, they complained about the job.

I know that I wouldn't have loved being a senator as much as I've loved being a governor.

But either way, just from the personal standpoint, I've just said that I'm not going to do that to my family.

It's interesting, though, as we go through this discussion, too, because we say how important it is, and it is so important to capture the Senate.

I mean, we overlook the fact that I guess two different things.

One is that if Sanders or Warren

were successful, we'd have a Republican senator because we have

certainly with Warren because the Republican governor.

With Sanders right now, there's a Republican governor, but there's a race next year.

But then maybe it could change.

And the other thing is that I think that we ought to be also recognizing that who we have at the top of the ticket matters for these races.

Like we're not talking about anymore what happened in North Dakota, what happened in Missouri, what happened in Indiana?

Those are the races that Republicans beat Democrats in in 2018.

That's exactly right.

And in part, that it matters, like if we are a party that can only compete on the coasts and we can't win those Senate seats, then we're not going to, at the end of the day, get any of the good stuff that we want to get done anyway.

So I think that in part also, who we have at the top of the ticket, like if we really want to win red and purple states, it matters who's at the top of the ticket and we ought to have somebody that's won in a red and purple state.

So the argument is, yes, you are not putting a Senate seat in Montana in play by choosing not to run.

It doesn't mean you would necessarily win or have any shot at it.

Steve Dane's pretty popular in Montana, right?

But Warren, who

if she won, that seat would go Republican.

And you're saying that you think that it could sink the chances of there are Senate races for Democrats that you guys are looking to win.

There are two now in Georgia.

There's Maine, Arizona, Colorado.

Those are the ones that seem like the

best prospects for you guys as a party.

Texas, there's a race in Kentucky, other places around the country that Democrats are trying for.

And you think Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders would make that impossible?

Well, I think it makes it a lot harder because

at that point then and and you look at right, 22 states now are controlled completely at the state level, both governors and both house legislature by Republicans.

We can't become a party that is disconnected from those sort of places if we want to win.

And I do think if

Senator Warren or Senator Sanders was at the top of the ticket, In many ways, it becomes that much harder because all these races are getting more and more nationalized.

The two things that I hear out on the trail are the more optimistic version,

people have more in common and

are not fighting as much as Washington makes it seem or national politics makes it seem, and the other is there's no way to make people agree.

Like, I don't know how I'm going to deal with it.

Republicans say it, Democrats say it.

Which one is it?

And how panicked are you about what we are here?

As far as people in D.C.

agreeing or no, as far as

is America at a breaking point here?

I think if we re-elect Donald Trump, America is at a breaking point.

I think that the sort of the foundation is being deeply, deeply shaken.

I mean, I'll go back to

60% Republican legislature,

right?

We've been able to get things like we have freezing college tuition, investing in our K-12 system, getting dark money out of our elections, getting that health care through.

And we've been able to do that.

Now, what does Montana have that the rest of the world doesn't, if you will, and how do you actually replicate that?

Like, I do begin with a base assumption, right?

That most people want the same things.

You want a safe community.

You want a roof over your head, a decent job.

You want good public schools, clean air, clean water.

You want that generational belief that you can do better for your kids and grandkids.

Even in this time of great, what seems like political

tribalism, folks want the same things.

So we've just got to figure out how to bridge the divides and get some of the politics.

Isn't that just politics talk, though?

You've got to figure out how to do it.

How do you do it?

Well,

and here's the difference between, I think,

this city and actually being a governor and having to get things done.

Yeah, I try to build relationships with people across the aisle

when we're in session the rest of the time.

But I don't rely on those relationships alone.

You know, I spend a lot of time in legislative districts so that the pressure won't come from me.

The pressure will come from their constituents.

I think that the next president needs to be making their case, not just in Washington, D.C., but to America.

If Mitch McConnell's still majority leader, Don't just be talking to Mitch McConnell here in D.C.

Go to Kentucky and talk to Mitch McConnell's voters because at the end of the day, that's who he has to be accountable to as well.

And I think that D.C.'s lost that, right?

That the idea is just, oh, we'll have press conferences and we'll have TV and we'll do some things talking over one another, and we're leaving out the folks out in the districts, which could actually put pressure on their representatives or senators.

Aaron Powell, let's end with this.

We were talking about about at the beginning how you keep going through this and the reasons you feel that there is

a lot of space here to go.

Then we got a little dark.

You did.

I just had to follow you.

That's what I do.

I follow you where you go.

That's executive leadership, Governor.

Outside of Iowa, are you hearing from people who say you're right, stay in this?

What are they saying to you that each day keeps you thinking it's not just my own

little view of Iowa, it's not my own

self-confidence in myself as a politician that makes you think, okay,

I should keep running and that this run will work and that this run

could beat Trump and beyond that.

Sure.

Well, and even more than that, right?

And yes, we've gotten contributions from every state.

Yes, I hear from people along the way that have said that the way I've led in the past isn't just by deep division.

You know, I often say that, you know,

you've heard my first state of the state address with young kids.

I said, we have to act like our kids learn from our words and our deeds, and our kids are watching.

I hear that folks, Democrats and Republicans, saying that they're exhausted in what they want to actually believe is that the differences aren't so big

between

mainly the Democrats and Republicans, and government could actually function again.

And that's what I've done along the way.

So I think part of that empowers me, certainly, that I do think I'd be the best candidate to beat Donald Trump.

But I also believe being outside of the city, actually been able to get bipartisan work done

for progressive things to get done too, that I could contribute something at a time where our country really needs it.

All right, let's end there.

Governor Steve Pullock, thanks for being here on Radio Atlantic.

Thanks for having me.

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

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

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