Rebuilding the Blue Wall

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This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Isaac Dover.

I'm in Detroit this week for the presidential debates.

We hear a lot from those 20-plus candidates all the time.

But while I'm here, I thought we could bring you a different kind of voice from Michigan.

That's the new State attorney general Dana Nessel.

She was elected in 2018 as part of the blue wave that hit the state.

It's the state, of course, which surprised the country by narrowly voting for Donald Trump in 2016.

She is not a white moderate man.

She is a progressive Jewish lesbian.

And she won.

And she has some thoughts about what that means for politics in 2020 here in Michigan and beyond.

Attorney General Dana Nessel, thanks for being here on Radio Atlantic.

Thanks so much for having me.

So you got into your race with a splash in 2017.

You had a video that you put up.

It was right after the Harvey Weinstein scandal had broken.

Me too was coming into being.

And

people may,

even if they've never heard of you before, may remember that video because it got a lot of pickup when you said one way to not have a person show you his penis is to not have a penis.

I don't think that was the exact phrasing, but I, yeah, that I guess was the gist of it.

But, you know, I think there was more to it than just the Me Team Moon movement.

There was that, of course.

But what I was running up against was that we were looking at having an all-female ticket for the Democratic Party, and there were a lot of people who were pushing back against that, saying that an all-female ticket couldn't possibly win in our state.

And I was very aggressively saying, actually, I think an all-female ticket is going to do much better than any other ticket composition we could put together so long as we have the best candidates the most exciting candidates that are going to energize people to get out and vote and as it turned out I was right because we all won yeah and and it was a particular importance for you because Debbie Stabenow in the senator was running for re-election.

She's a woman.

She was not going anywhere.

She was part of the ticket.

Gretchen Wintmer, who has now been elected governor, but was favored by a lot of Democrats to be the nominee, was there.

And so then then it was whether there would be some ticket balancing with not a woman with you, basically.

Right.

With the attorney generals.

We had a Secretary of State candidate that was running unopposed who was a woman.

So that left attorney general and I was running against a man.

And so there were a lot of people who felt like the ticket needed that balance.

But to me, I just thought that the ticket needed to be as strong as possible in terms of the individual candidates and not to exclude someone based on their gender.

And it turned out that you were right that an all-female ticket could win.

I'm sorry, can you say that louder?

Could you say it one more time?

That is what happened.

An all-female ticket won.

Right.

You're not surprised by that, but when we think about the conventional wisdom of this,

how does that register in for people, or how do you think it should?

That there was this, oh, we can't have too many women, it's too much.

In Michigan, we're here in one of these states that is crucial in presidential politics and

that was

you took over for a Republican

after 16 years of Republicans in that office yeah and and

the governor Governor Whitmer also took over for a Republican who had been governor for

two terms right this is not just women won but women won in offices that had been held by Republicans right well I think what it should tell us for the purposes of 2020 is you know not to disregard the female vote and And it wasn't just in all those executive offices we just talked about, but the two seats that we flipped in the 8th congressional district in Michigan and the 11th,

those flipped from men to women and from red to blue.

Right.

Alyssa Slack and Haley Stevens, right?

Yes, yes, absolutely.

And so I think that in large part it was due to incredible dissatisfaction by women voters, especially I would say some of the suburban educated women that maybe

had been independents or even moderate Republicans

or maybe they were Democrats, but they weren't very active.

And suddenly they became very, very engaged.

And I will tell you, I was part of the women's march that happened in Lansing.

15,000 people came out for that.

It was the largest event they've ever had at the Michigan Capitol.

And these were women who were mad and they were concerned, they were terrified, quite honestly.

And they remain so, especially when it comes to issues of reproductive rights, but gun violence.

There's so many other things that really transcend your political party at this point, especially for women voters.

And

I think there was only so much you could take of looking at, whether it was in Lansing or in Washington, D.C., of looking at an oval office that was basically all men and feeling like you weren't properly represented and badly wanting that.

So if you look at the numbers, and I think this will be borne out in terms of Trump supporters,

not a whole lot of women supporters here in Michigan.

And I think it's one of the reasons why the Democrats, I believe, will do very well in 2020 in Michigan.

Because if you look at 2018 as any indication, people should take a lesson from that.

I remember when I covered the Women's March in D.C.

in 2017, and what I wrote about it then was that the people who were marching were all spun up and angry, but they didn't quite know what to do about it.

And the way that I wrote it, I think, was it said something like

they wanted to be the Tea Party and having that kind of an effect on government, but they're worried it would be more like Occupy Wall Street, which was a lot of protests that didn't really go anywhere.

And it turned out to,

based on the midterm results, up and down the ticket, have much

the Tea Party not in terms of the politics but in like reshaping what government looked like and becoming more of a movement and women being a really important part of it yeah absolutely and you know I think Michigan is a great example of that and what can happen when people become energized and activated and we had actually a number of groups that never existed before in democratic politics we have a group here in Michigan called Femmes for Dems

and they're very engaged These are the people knocking doors and phone banking and having fundraisers.

We have obviously a number of indivisible groups which women are a big part of and just the regular Democratic Party groups.

I don't want to say infiltrated by women, but

women becoming really active and even women who always thought maybe they were a little bit too busy to get very involved because they had young kids and they were working and so forth.

But I think Donald Trump changed all that for people.

And they thought, I have to, I don't have a choice.

I have to get actively involved and engaged or else, and I'm sorry if this sounds dramatic, but that life as we know it would be a very different place.

And this is not our America anymore.

And if we want to preserve our American ideals, we really have to get out there and fight for it.

And that's what people, frankly, like I did.

I'd never run for political office before.

Yeah, and well, let me take you back to that video, though.

I mean, I imagine sitting down to record that, knowing what the script was,

it took a lot to say that, to put yourself out there, no?

Yeah, not for me.

So, all right, you know,

firstly, I had been a long time sex crimes prosecutor.

So that word didn't have the same significance to me that it has to a lot of other people because every day I had to go to work and say that word in public, generally to a jury.

And so, you know, I.

Although you're still saying it as that word, right?

Well, okay, yeah.

But, you know, it actually was really important to me always to use the correct anatomical terms with my children just because of some of the child sex abuse cases that I had handled as a prosecutor.

But,

you know, I just thought, let's just go right out there and say it.

And I guess that's kind of the person that I've always been.

And I didn't want to change who I was just because I had decided to seek elected office.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, it it made an impact.

It made an impact here.

I heard about people talking about it right away here and all around the country then.

And

as a

person getting into a race for the first time that was an uphill battle, making an impact and making a splash is not a bad thing to do, right?

Well, I didn't expect to be on all the late night talk shows.

Let's just say that.

You didn't?

You didn't think that that would be what happened?

No, I thought it would get a little bit of buzz locally and and in the state i had no idea that it would go anyplace nationally but it was really interesting to me though the different reaction that people had to it um i would say as a whole a lot of men were really turned off by it but a lot of women were grateful to have somebody just go out and and say some of that but then you know i didn't want my whole candidacy to be nothing but oh you're the lady that said penis you know and i wanted people to know like i'm running on health care and clean water and consumer protection and, you know, all the things that are so meaningful to people and not only to be remembered by that.

So I'm hoping it's not going to be on my epitet.

Like, here lies Dana Nessel, that lady that said penis that one time.

Well,

let's talk about the race overall.

You

were sitting here in Michigan, in Detroit.

You won last year.

You're a progressive

Jewish lesbian.

Keith Ellison won in Minnesota.

He is a black Muslim

who was elected Attorney General

in Wisconsin.

Tammy Baldwin, also progressive lesbian, won in Wisconsin

for another term in the Senate.

It does not seem like it requires there to be a white man to win in the upper Midwest.

That's my belief, and that's my experience.

Yeah.

I think more than anything, what people want to see is somebody that excites them, that energizes them, and inspires them.

And that's the kind of candidate that I think everybody's looking for.

And I look at Donald Trump, and there's so many days where I think, man, how did this guy ever get into office?

But whatever his message was, as much as I don't subscribe to it,

there were people that were drawn to him.

And it certainly wasn't for his policy, right?

there was something that certainly

well i mean you have to tell me what policies he has besides uh policies of um you know hatefulness and vengeance well i think the idea that the way that he was talking about trade would was resonating here that was one of the things that at least at the time seemed to be what was happening among other things

yeah possibly i mean listen we had such a a peculiar set of circumstances here in michigan because you know firstly you had, you know, Jill Stein and Gary Johnson both got a lot of votes.

You had a lot of people that voted and didn't fill out the top of the ticket.

You had a lot of voter suppression.

I mean, when I say that, I really think that the Russian trolls played a really large part in people not wanting to come out and vote at all.

And I saw this in my own Dem circles, the infighting between the Sanders people and the Clinton people, even after

the nomination

process was complete.

And I'd never seen that before.

Normally we get behind whoever the candidate is.

And that did not happen in 2016 at all.

And the fights, the visceral fights that you would see on social media, it was something I'd never experienced.

Now in retrospect, I know that those fights were being started by bots and by trolls.

But beyond that, right, you had the number is something like 300,000 people voted in 2016 in Michigan and did not vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

They either voted for Jill Stein and Gary Johnson or they went in and voted for other races and didn't vote for president in a state that was decided by 10,704 votes.

Yeah, it's in the 300,000 people voted.

And then there are other things like in Wayne County, Hillary Clinton got something like 50,000 votes less than Barack Obama did in 2012, Wayne County, here where we are in Detroit.

That's just people didn't want to vote for either of them, right?

Well, people didn't want to vote for either of them, or there were a lot of people that I talked to that they just thought Clinton was a shoo-in and they didn't feel like it was that important for them to get out and vote.

They didn't have that sense of urgency because they felt like all the polling was telling them that the race wasn't going to be close here.

And I talked to a lot of people who then had regrets later

because they, you know, if we thought that he would have legitimately had a chance, we would have gotten out to vote.

And that is what you saw different in 2018 is you really did see

people feeling as though they had to come out and we had the highest turnout I want to say in 30 or 40 years for a non-presidential election year.

I do think that we're going to have a record turnout in 2020.

Last week I was in Detroit and in Dearborn.

Joe Biden was in town for a couple of things.

He had lunch with a couple of people including the mayor of Detroit, Mike Duggan, who had just endorsed him.

And Duggan said he thinks Joe Biden is the person who's best positioned to win Michigan in the the field.

Now, he had just endorsed him, so you don't have a candidate in this race.

There is this feeling like

among a lot of Biden supporters, you need Joe Biden in order to win Michigan.

Are they wrong?

Well,

I think they are wrong.

I don't think you have to have him to win Michigan.

I think there are so many candidates out there that are inspirational.

And once we see the field sort of whittled down a little bit, I think we'll see more people coalescing behind another candidate.

Although, you know, for many years, I mean, certainly Joe Biden is a known commodity,

was well liked, certainly, not just by the general public, but certainly people in the party, you know, he's been well liked by.

I think the people who don't care for him as much

tend to be people who are more progressive.

And

sometimes I think younger voters that just sort of feel like they want somebody that, you know, honestly is younger and that they don't want to see a race between two white men in their 70s.

We're going to take a short break and we'll be back with more with Attorney General Dana Nessel.

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Walk me through what happened that got you into running for Attorney General.

You were a lawyer, prosecutor,

but you had not run for office before you decide in 2017 that's it, jumping into the race.

Right.

Well, you know, I

had done a lot of different types of work, and some of that was civil rights work.

So I was on the

Michigan same-sex marriage case that ultimately got consolidated with the other Sixth Circuit cases that went to the United States Supreme Court, the

Obergefell decision, which created marriage equality nationwide.

And I knew it was like...

It's very big to have a court case that's involved in a decision that changed society.

That's every lawyer's dream, for sure.

But I knew what it was like to fight the Office of Michigan Attorney General.

And I spent spent a lot of time on Facebook deriding the office of Michigan Attorney General, you know, because I was so horrified with the actions being taken by the office.

And then at a certain point, you just started to think, wouldn't it be so much better if instead of complaining and, you know, filing cases against this office, what if I just run for this office?

But I honestly had never considered doing that, quite frankly, until Donald Trump was in office.

And there were several things about it.

One is when Donald Trump is President of the United States, you have this feeling, and I I think especially for a lot of women, you always think, well, I'm not qualified for this.

I'm not the right person for this.

But then Donald Trump becomes president, and you're like, all you can think of is, if Donald Trump can be president of the United States, then I sure as hell can be Michigan Attorney General, right?

I'm not less qualified for my job than he is for his.

And so you start to think of it in those terms.

And I think a lot of people who ran for office actually thought about it that way.

But also, you know, you mentioned the fact that I'm Jewish and I come from a family that, you know, my grandparents fled the Holocaust.

They were from Eastern Europe.

Those who didn't get out were killed.

And you can look right now on the Yad Vishem website.

You can see pages and pages of nestles and you can actually see the death camps where they were exterminated.

So I was kind of, I grew up with this feeling of

that never again feeling and understanding

what it was like in the 1930s.

I have read every novel.

I've watched every documentary.

And when Donald Trump was elected, I mean, I cried my eyes out on election night

hysterically, so much so that my wife asked me to stop shrieking because she thought I was scaring our kids.

And I probably was.

And were you able to stop shrieking?

I mean, I had to stop being despondent and start getting angry and determined to do something about it.

So I always said, well, what would I do if I was living in Hitler's Germany?

What would I have done back then?

And how did this come to be that we were in the place of such fascism?

And how did you take marginalized communities and turn them into vermin?

Which is really what

Hitler and his regime were able to do.

And I said, if I ever saw anything like that happen in the United States, and I hoped that I never would in my life, but if I ever did, that I would do anything in my power to fight back as aggressively and tenaciously against fascism as I possibly could.

And when Donald Trump came into power, I was like, wow, I guess this is it, right?

And you hear people say all the time, if you ever wondered what you would have done in the 1930s in Germany, it's whatever you're doing right now.

Has it been weird to be on the inside now as a person who was for so long critiquing the office from the outside?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

And every day I can't believe the great power and authority of that office.

But that's what's so exciting for me.

You know, I have spent a lot of time

sort of teaming up with the other 26 Democratic AGs in the country.

And, you know, we've really

formed, I would call it a team.

It's a team.

that works aggressively to protect our democratic ideals in the United States.

And know, that's what we're doing.

I mean,

I have now joined countless cases with the other Democratic AGs in fighting back against the Trump administration and fighting back against tyranny.

And,

you know, it really gives you the sense that you are working within the system to use all the tools at your disposal to stop some of the most egregious things that our government has ever done, at least in my lifetime.

And because people say the Nazi comparisons are a little much.

I don't think they are.

I think they're right on point.

Do you worry about the rhetoric reaching that point and making it harder for people to have a conversation if they supported Donald Trump and you're saying you supported something that is akin to Nazism?

It's hard for me because, you know, we're sitting in a district right now that is represented by Rashida Tlaib, who now I think is pretty well well known nationally.

Now I know Rashida and I've known her for a number of years and I know her to be a very good person who works feverishly on behalf of her constituents to make certain that they are protected economically in their health care

and their civil rights.

And I mean, here you have a president who very pointedly said, go back to your country to a woman who is from the city of Detroit, who has only ever lived in the city of Detroit.

You know, just because she is,

you know, she's Muslim, she's, you know,

Palestinian to the extent that her family

comes from the Middle East.

And

I don't know, like, I never in my lifetime thought we would see a president that told American citizens who are black and brown.

congressional representatives to go back to their country.

I never thought we would see an American president

who would demean entire American cities the way that he has.

But so what do you say to the person who voted for him and says, I'm still with him, but you want to get that person to now vote for Democrats, for you, for your colleagues in state government, for the Democratic nominee, whoever that may be?

Well, I look at it a couple of different ways.

Firstly, for that person,

I would like to say to them, hey, all the reasons that you voted for Donald Trump, How's that working out for you?

You know, whether you are a farmer, you work in agriculture, whether you're an autoworker, and you work in manufacturing,

no matter what you do for a living, unless you're really in the top 1%,

this is probably not working out so great for you if that was your reason for voting for him.

But the other thing that I would say is this,

for my candidacy, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking, how am I going to convert Trump voters?

What I decided to do was just to energize people who had not voted at all and to get them to the polls.

And, And, you know, I went, a lot of people said to me, well, you're in Michigan and once I was the endorsed candidate for the party, you really need to move towards the center.

And I said, firstly, I don't know that I'm capable of that.

Well, let me ask you about that, actually, because one of the things that we see going on in the presidential race is the party trying to sort out how progressive it should be.

and whether there's a version of progressivism that can win or whether you go too far towards the left and you lose.

What do you say to the people who are trying to sort that out?

Well, you know, for me, my version of progressivism

really is just understanding that I'm here to protect people and not corporate profits.

And so whether that's fighting against, you know, the chemical manufacturers based on the PFAS epidemic that we have here, whether it's fighting on behalf of, you know,

people who have been affected by the opioid epidemic and suing drug manufacturers.

It's not really, I don't know when that became progressive in nature.

To me, it's just about protecting people.

I'm the people's attorney.

So

I have a hard time.

I struggle with why these are partisan issues to begin with.

Of course, you ought to be protecting people who live in your state, regular, ordinary, everyday voters, instead of protecting corporate profits.

So I don't know why that's a novel idea, and I don't know why that's some sort of a leftist socialist idea.

Up until Citizens United, I think that's mostly, frankly, what both parties tried to do.

And then, of course, the political landscape was changed just dramatically as a result of that decision.

And that's why you have people who, instead of trying to combat climate change, for some reason, have been, you know, they've been indoctrinated into thinking it's a hoax.

Everybody should want to make certain that we don't have climate change, right?

I'm just going to ask you two more

on healthcare.

You pulled out of the lawsuit against the ACA that your predecessor, as Attorney General, was part of.

This has been a priority for you talking about health care.

Democrats have been talking about health care through 2018.

The first night of the debates featured an extended discussion about health care plans that I will say I could not follow as a reporter.

Are Democrats running for president not getting this conversation right?

Do they need to get it clearer to the voters what it is that they're talking about?

So, you know, I've been thinking a lot about this because

I'm sort of torn a little bit in terms of the direction that the party should go on this.

Because a big part of me thinks that instead of getting mired down in the minutiae, that really it just has to be a sense of messaging, which is whoever the Democratic candidate is, they want to make certain that every single person in this country has access to good and affordable health care.

The end.

And because any one of our plans that any of our candidates espouse is a million times better than the Republican plan, which is nothing.

Literally nothing.

You get nothing.

Rich people, I guess, can afford to buy health care.

And for people, not even just poor people, but just people of moderate income,

probably you're not going to get good insurance if you get any insurance at all.

So I think we maybe need to be a little bit less detail-oriented because these are complicated discussions partially because I'm not in a legislative role.

I haven't spent an enormous amount of time going through the various different plans and

I think the messaging has to be a little bit more on point instead of just arguing about the details, especially because whoever the president is,

They're not going to be able to wave a magic wand.

They have to work with Congress on this.

And it's really going to be Congress that makes the decision, of course, led hopefully by the president, as to what direction to go in.

But, you know, it's going to involve a whole lot of other people and not just an executive decision.

You mentioned your friend Rashida Tlaib.

She, over the weekend, said that she wanted you to run for president.

And you responded by saying that your hair would not deal with well with the humidity in D.C.

I would have needed a lot of straight irons.

Yeah, you said you'd be like Rosanna, Rosanna Dana.

Do you have a Gilda Radner impression?

You know what?

Gosh, I don't think I'd have to think think about that a little bit.

I'd have to watch a little bit of her improv to get a better grasp on that.

I was a big Gilda Radner fan.

She's from Michigan.

Maybe you know that.

But

yeah, I think that was a long way towards Rashida trying to not have to endorse a particular candidate.

Although I appreciated the shout-out on national television.

I was watching it live and I spit out my coffee actually when she said that.

So you did not start a campaign.

There's no nestle 2020.

I have to say, I love being Attorney General, and I am every day

I am astounded by the differences that you can make as an AG that you really couldn't make in any other position in office.

So I'm thrilled to be in this position.

I'm thrilled to be able to work with all the other great Democratic AGs across the country who are really making a difference.

When I look at who my heroes are, honestly, they're the, you know, Tish James from New York or the Javier Becera from California or Maura Healy from Massachusetts.

I mean, these are people that all day, every day, they're out there really protecting America from the very worst of the Trump administration.

And I'm just proud to be a part of this team.

All right.

Attorney General Dana Nestl, thanks for being here on Radio Atlantic.

Thanks so much for having me.

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

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and joining me here in Detroit, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

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