Florida Flashbacks

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Hello, everyone.

This is Alex Wagner.

I have been on the road for weeks, what feels like a lifetime, covering the midterm elections, and I am back, even though the midterm election is not actually over yet.

Votes are still being counted in races in Florida, Georgia, New York, Mississippi, California, Texas, and Utah.

But we're going to focus on one in particular, the state of Florida, where there are recounts for both a governorship and a Senate seat.

Today, we're going to look more deeply at that recount, and we're also going to look back at one of the most consequential ones in American history: Bush v.

Gore, and how American politics was never the same again.

This is Radio Atlantic.

With me now is Isaac Dover, staff writer at The Atlantic, to catch us up on everything that is happening down in Florida.

Hi, Alex.

Welcome.

Welcome.

Thank you.

Take me back, if you will, to election night in Florida.

There was one specific narrative coming out of the state that evening, and that narrative has changed dramatically in the course of the last week.

Like, it looked very clearly like it was a good night statewide for Republicans.

There were a couple of Republican House seats that flipped to Democrats.

But in the governor's race and the Senate race, where

you and I were both there a couple days before the election, and I spent part of the final weekend in Miami and around, and there was a lot of confidence in Andrew Gillum and Bill Nelson among Democrats, and it just fell apart very clearly in a way that was reminiscent to me of 2016.

But then as we watched throughout the night in Florida, the margins started to go down, especially in the Senate race, which is much, much tighter.

And the funny thing from a political standpoint on that is if you'd asked most people in the days leading up to Election Day where they thought it would go, they would have probably said that Gillam would have run ahead of Nelson.

The parts of the map in Florida that everybody has been paying attention to, specifically in recent days, are Broward County and Palm Beach County.

Why are those so important and why are the recounts focused on those parts of the state?

Well, number one, those are the same counties that we talk about every single time that there is a disputed election in Florida.

And that's where the Hanging Chads were.

There is something about Broward County that they have not been able to figure out how to do elections, it seems.

Or ballots.

Or ballots or anything.

And so, yes,

they should literally have some kind of statue in this town center of the hanging Chad just to remind everybody that this happened there and it must not happen again, and yet it keeps happening.

It does, and it keeps happening not because of chance, but because there are poor ballot design issues, and there are issues about how they're administering the elections.

And nobody seems to think about them in between

the

night of the election and the sort of week afterwards when there are disputes over it.

And then they move on, but then it comes back and the issues aren't resolved.

And so one of the things that we saw this year is that in Broward,

there was an issue of how the ballot was designed and where the Senate race

was on the ballot for people to fill in the bubble and whether people missed it.

And that led to this issue of undervotes, people who voted in it looks like every other race, but didn't vote in the Senate.

Except for the Senate race.

To the degree that I think there are almost 26,000 fewer votes cast in the U.S.

Senate race than in the governor's race, for example.

I mean, it just means for some reason, Floridians in Broward County voted at a rate 3.7% lower in the Senate race than in the gubernatorial race.

Yeah, and maybe that's true.

And the reason why that seems to have extra significance is Broward is a Democratic-leaning county, and the margin between Scott and Nelson is smaller than that 26,000 number.

So if there were 26,000 people theoretically who would have voted for Senate and would have voted for Bill Nelson to be the senator, then given the way the numbers went on this, Bill Nelson would be elected senator.

The problem is that if you don't vote, then you don't vote.

Right.

A recount isn't going to account for votes that simply weren't cast.

Right.

There are two other pieces to this that are actual sort of election concerns that exist independent of partisan back and forth as we talk about this current Florida recount.

The Democrats are suing over something called signature matches, right?

Yeah, so this is a law that says that your signature,

if it doesn't match exactly with the signature on file, then your vote can be disqualified.

And then there's the problem that some of these recount machines are overheating and breaking down.

I think one of them broke down to the tune of 174,000 early voting ballots in the recount that now need to be recounted.

Right.

And what that's going to do, presumably, is open up a challenge of voting by or counting them by hand.

Because if the machine broke down once, do you trust it to get the count right the next time?

These are all problems that exist in Florida independent of what has become a political mudfight.

And that is not unfamiliar to people who lived through the 2000 election.

But in Florida, that political mud fight, I mean, I feel like mudfight isn't an accurate descriptor for it.

It's like nuclear war because this time the president is involved.

Isaac, President Trump has, for at least a few months now, seen Florida as kind of his stepchild.

That election means a lot to him.

Ron DeSantis is his acolyte.

Ron DeSantis may be the next governor of Florida.

And Rick Scott, he sees the Senate race as critically important, not just to Republican control of the Senate, but also to the Trump legacy.

So tell me a little bit about how he's managed

the recount publicly and through his Twitter feed over the last week.

Well, what we know from President Trump is that he is

very

interested in talking about voting conspiracies, right?

That there were illegal votes in the 2016 election.

He, before the election happened, was saying maybe it would not be an okay result and he would have to challenge it.

And then when he won, he said, well, obviously that means that it was an okay result.

And so it was very interesting.

It's interesting how the electoral fraud theories are dependent on who's actually the winner.

Yeah, but still the president has continued to talk about this stuff.

And with the recounts going on in Georgia and Florida, he has come back to these

theories.

I don't know what we're going to call them.

They're not even substantiated enough to be theories.

He just says that they're illegal votes or that.

Well, let's call them what they are.

They are baseless.

There's been no evidence that there's been any voter fraud.

Even Republican-appointed officials in Florida have said, we have no idea.

I don't think they've said this directly.

They said, there is no evidence to support the president's tweets that on Monday he said the Florida election should be called in favor of Scott and DeSantis in the large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere and many ballots are missing or forged.

An honest vote count is no longer possible.

Ballots massively infected.

There's no evidence for any of that.

No, and some of this is because of the way that voting works.

A lot of the ballots that are coming in late, as it were, are ballots mailed in from overseas, including from a lot of troops stationed overseas.

Their ballots don't come until about a week after the election, no matter what.

So

that is those are some of the votes that are being found, quote-unquote, found in the infected votes from troops overseas.

But I mean, it does underscore, you know, and we're going to talk about the origins of sort of mudslinging in and around recounts in just a bit, but it underscores the fierce sort of partisan fight that's underway here, right?

I mean, the president is getting involved trying to impugn the integrity of a state's election.

They're calling the Broward County supervisor of elections the supervisor of corruption.

Roger Stone is in the mix.

He's going on info wars saying this is brazen, outrageous, one-sided.

I mean, everybody is in this thing because the stakes are so high.

So, I guess my question to you is: is there going to be a resolution no matter what happens?

Well, there's going to be a resolution at some point.

There will be

some court decisions that show us where the count is, and someone will be sworn in as senator, someone will be sworn in as governor.

But it does seem like there is going to be

an asterisk around this election in Florida, and that seems purposeful.

Look,

this started out as President Trump and Rick Scott and the Attorney General in Florida, Pam Bondi, talking about voter fraud and it being something that Republicans were talking about.

Notably, Republicans were also talking about voter fraud in a number of other races where they were losing around the country.

There was a House candidate in New Mexico who was talking about voter fraud, a House candidate in California, a state Senate candidate in Connecticut.

These are all Republicans.

But in the last couple of days, this has now bled into some Democrats starting to talk about that.

I was at an event earlier today with Sherry Brown, the senator from Ohio, who was talking about Georgia.

And he said, if Stacey Abrams doesn't win in Georgia, we'll know that the count wasn't fair.

Well, that is, she might not be afraid of the fact that it's not.

Well, this is a question of what happens to our democracy.

If we can no longer agree on the fairness of elections,

what are the implications for governance going forward?

It's very difficult, right?

James Madison talked about from the earliest days that the democracy depends on the people who lose not walking away.

Isaac, you are painting a dark, dark picture.

It is a pleasure to have you on the podcast, even if you are painting an apocalyptic picture of what may happen to our democracy.

Thank you for getting us up to speed on the latest and perhaps not greatest in the sunshine state.

Thank you, Alex.

In some ways, the seeds of what's happening today were planted 18 years ago in the same state with the same parties staking out the same positions.

Those results forever changed American politics.

Up next, we're going to take a look back at Bush v.

Gore and the great Florida recount of the year 2000 with two advisors who were involved in those campaigns and who remember well our national trauma.

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 any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

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

To better understand what's happening in Florida today and where it might lead us, we're going to take a trip in the Wayback Machine to the year 2000.

Y2K.

The vice president has recalled the governor and retracted his concession.

Just a few thousand votes separating Gore and Bush.

We now have a second statewide recount of of the votes.

When a presidential election was decided by a recount in Florida.

Now the U.S.

Supreme Court has spoken.

Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court's decision, I accept it.

Joining me now to help narrate this pivotal chapter of American political history are two men who lived through the national trauma of Bush v.

Gore on opposite sides of the aisle.

Mark McKinnon is a political advisor, columnist, and co-host with me of Showtimes the Circus.

He was the chief media advisor for George W.

Bush's 2000 campaign.

Mark, it's a pleasure to hear your voice.

Thank you, Wags.

Glad to be with you.

And Jeremy Bash is a national security attorney and a commentator.

In 2000, he was national security issues director for the Gore campaign.

Hey, Jeremy.

Hey, Alex.

Thank you guys both for revisiting this painful chapter of American politics with me.

When you first heard about the current Florida recount for the gubernatorial and senate races, did you have flashbacks to 2000, Jeremy?

Absolutely.

The first thing that I thought about was whether I was going to get a call to pack my bags for three days, which was what we were told on election night in 2000.

And Alex, as you know, 36 days later, after sleeping mostly on the floor and eating out of vending machines, ultimately we lost.

But I certainly thought I was headed back down south.

Well, at least all those Cheez-Its were worth it.

Maybe?

Not really.

Mark, tell me, if you can, a little bit about those closing days of the election in 2000.

And

when did the Bush campaign first realize this was not going to be settled easily?

Well, Florida, Florida, Florida rings in my ears forever.

Tim Russert calling the election that night.

It was at first the worst night of my life politically.

Then it was the best night of my life, and then it was the worst night again,

only to be remedied 36 days later.

But

what a roller coaster that night was for everybody on both sides.

You know, it was, I mean, the moment that we knew that something was, you know, was

awry was when Al Gore called back and took back his concession.

Right.

He called Bush at one point in the evening to concede, right?

Right, he did.

And that's when you guys felt great.

And then...

Yeah, yeah.

Then, you know, I remember that moment distinctly because I jumped up and kissed the wife of a friend of mine.

I was like, oops.

It was just the closest woman I could find.

But did you have a sense, did you have a sense that the margins were narrowing?

I mean, what happened between that first 500?

No, no, no, we thought it was done.

I mean, when that was announced, we thought it was done.

And we, you know, we marched from the campaign down to the Capitol where there was a big election night thing going on.

And we thought that was it.

And,

you know, and then

it all spun southward.

What was the reaction when Gore called back?

Disbelief, really, and anger, you know, on the president's behalf.

He was not happy.

It was just like, wait a minute,

you can't do this.

But of course, he could, and he did.

And, Jeremy, what was happening on the other side?

So Gore had conceded, and then his advisor said, well, wait a second, wait a second, wait a second.

Maybe you haven't lost this thing after all.

Yeah, I had gone out with the rest of the campaign staff to Veterans Plaza in Nashville.

And we were there waiting for Al Gore or somebody to take the microphone and take the podium.

And of course, we waited and waited and waited.

And pretty soon our flip phones started ringing and we were told everyone back to the campaign headquarters.

Gore's not coming out.

He's not conceding.

And this thing may be going to a recount in Florida.

Were you, was there excitement, trepidation?

I mean, it's interesting that, and understandably, on the Bush side, there was frustration and probably a little bit of anger.

Like, you can't do this.

What was the feeling on the gore side?

We felt like the fight was still very much going on.

I mean, we were exhausted.

Don't get me wrong.

It was like running a marathon, falling down, and someone telling you, hey, stand up.

You got to run another one.

And so we had to head back to the campaign headquarters.

But I remember that night when we got back to the campaign headquarters, we all, some of us, kind of the junior and mid-tier staff, pressed our noses against the glass of the conference room where all the senior-level folks were gathered around.

There was a lot of energy, there was a lot of enthusiasm, and we thought, look, we better go down and fight for every vote.

And they had said to me, Hey, we knew you were doing foreign policy on the campaign, but Bash, didn't you go to law school?

I said, Yeah, but I never practiced law.

They said, We don't care.

We leaned lawyers in Florida.

So we went and packed our bags and got ready to board the charter.

Mark, over on the Bush side, the Bush campaign responded quickly and aggressively

in the days after the election.

And by most outside accounts, they had sort of the most aggressive or the more aggressive legal and communication strategy.

Can you tell us a little bit about how the sort of top echelons of the campaign closed ranks and figured out and mapped out what they were going to do?

Well, it just, I mean, they just lit up every lawyer in the country and every one of them flew down to, you you know,

a Republican operative

with a law degree and just flooded the zone, you know, on the ground, in the air, in D.C.,

and, you know, and just got the best lawyers they could find,

including especially Ted Olson,

and just said, you know, we're going in.

We're going in bare knuckles brawling, and

we're going to keep this thing.

We're not going to let it be taken away from us.

The Bush campaign sort of hatched what has become a broader talking point in American politics from the Republican Party, which was the Democrats were playing games with the vote, that somehow

the vote in Florida, the recount, all of it was rigged, that it was an effort to steal an election.

Do you remember how the Bush campaign kind of came to that talking point, Mark?

Well, pretty qu quickly.

I mean,

when there was a selective recount of just four counties, you say, well, why were we just counting four counties that happened to be the best counties for Gore?

You know, if you're going to recount, recount everything.

Right.

When the recount began, Jeremy, tell me about what the feeling was inside the campaign,

when the ballots were being looked at again.

The overwhelming feeling, Alex, was mass confusion.

We took a charter plane down to Florida, and it made three stops.

It stopped in Tallahassee, Orlando, and then Fort Lauderdale.

And a bunch of people, kind of selected at random, got off at every stop and just kind of fanned out over to the Democratic headquarters and the canvassing boards where the votes were being retabulated.

But there was not a lot of communication between the team and we didn't really have a game plan.

And so I landed in Fort Lauderdale and we rented a car and we drove up to the Palm Beach Democratic headquarters and visited with Monty Friedkin, the chairman of the Palm Beach Democratic Party, an old party boss, an activist.

And he said, come on, I'll take take you you over to where the votes are being recounted.

And we went over to the canvassing board and we saw, we walked, I will never forget, we walked into the room and we saw them refeeding the punch cards into the machines.

And I felt like I was walking through a cloud of smoke because the Chad from the punch cards were flying everywhere.

We thought, oh boy, we got a situation here.

Wow, clouds of Chads.

It was quite a scene, and it was, and none of us exactly knew quite how to handle it.

Did you feel optimistic at that point?

Did you feel like you could actually turn the election through the recount?

Was that the feeling inside the Gore campaign?

My personal feeling was that we were behind and that it was going to be a very tough struggle to take the lead.

I think our feeling, though, was also motivated by the fact that

a big issue in Florida was the ballot design in Palm Beach County.

And because of the butterfly ballot, which you'll recall, seemed to confuse a lot of voters.

And if you'll recall, of course, Joe Lieberman was on the ticket.

There was a lot of enthusiasm, particularly among the elderly Jewish population in Century Village and all the other kind of gated communities

in that part of South Florida.

And the idea that Pat Buchanan would get 10,000 votes in Palm Beach County when a few years earlier, he gotten obviously a fraction of that.

And so there was a sense that something had gone wrong and that that voters might have been confused and that maybe they were punching in one hole and they should have been punching in another.

And so I think we just wanted to make sure that everybody's vote was counted and that the tabulation was correct.

In any other given year, these screwy situations like the butterfly ballot probably would not have mattered.

You've got so many million votes in a presidential election in Florida, and the idea that a couple of thousand could actually determine the outcome of the state, let alone the presidency, was sort of too hard to contemplate.

But in fact,

the number dividing Gore and Bush, when all the dust was settled, was about 535 votes.

Unbelievable.

Which, if you think in today's context, we're talking about recounts in Florida where there might be 10 or 13 or 20,000 votes separating the candidates, and there are mandatory recounts under the law.

Here we had 500 votes separating the two, and it would be dispositive for who would become president of the United States.

Mark, can you talk to me a little bit about the closing days of this recount?

There was real pressure from the Democrats to let the count continue on.

Republicans wanted the count to end by the deadline.

The Supreme Court shut down the recount on the deadline, and so not all of the votes were counted.

Was that a hard position to take?

Or did the Bush campaign feel like that was the right position to take?

You know, I kind of defer to the lawyers in that one.

They just that was their position that they were doing it by the letter, and that was the letter, and they appealed it through the appropriate

sources at that point, which was the courts, and then ultimately the Supreme Court.

Of course, you know, having the hindsight that we have now,

you know, it ended up being hugely problematic.

It would have been much better to not have the Supreme Court rule on this and have a statewide recount, as we now know that was done by some nonpartisan media sources that determined that Bush would have won a statewide recount.

But the fact that the Supreme Court ruled on it made

at least half of America believe that the thing was fixed, that it was a political decision.

And that became hugely problematic for the whole Bush presidency, I believe.

I think it handicapped him going in.

Half the country didn't believe he was a legitimate president, much in the same way that Obama had to deal with the berther stuff.

You know, both of those presidents just had to go into their presidencies with this hugely problematic issue of not being believed that they're a legitimate president.

Jeremy, what was the feeling in you were involved in the recount?

I mean, in those closing days and hours of the recount itself, where you're fighting against the Supreme Court and a looming decision, what was the feeling?

Well, Alex, first again, remember that Al Gore had won the national popular vote by about 500,000 votes.

And also the way the Electoral College shook out, if Bush was going to be able to get over that 270 threshold, he was going to need all of Florida's electoral votes, and then he would only get over by one vote.

So at the end, he had 271 to Al Gore's 266.

So it was kind of this crazy,

almost threading the eye of a needle that we felt that Bush had to achieve in order to take the presidency.

And so we wanted to make sure that if there were any mistakes in the tabulation of the votes, that we could illuminate that because obviously everything was on the line.

And

the idea was,

and this really came from Warren Christopher, the former Secretary of State, and who had been serving as the leader of the Gore recount effort.

His view was, you know, let's not overreach here.

This is as much a battle of public opinion as it is a legal issue.

And let's try to keep any recount request as narrow and as cabined as possible.

So only in the places where we actually think we have a problem should we ask for a recount.

I want to sort of telescope out a little bit to talk about the after effects of the Florida recount.

Certainly, it shaped a presidency.

Mark, you said that this colored the Bush presidency and that half the country didn't think he was the legitimate president of the United States.

But it also established this idea of electoral fraud, which other Republicans have taken and run with in much more extreme fashion.

If you listen to what President Trump is saying about Florida and the recount, even what was happening in Arizona and Georgia, he is making baseless claims, very toxic claims about the integrity of our election system.

Can you trace some of that back to what happened in Florida?

Well, yeah, I think you can.

I mean, I just broadly think about it anecdotally, but I think you kind of go back and research it.

I think that sort of gave birth to a lot of election fraud conspiracy notions that have spun out since then

that we've seen over and over and over again, including now.

I mean,

the president

was, you know, I guess yesterday saying to stop an election when they didn't even have all the military ballots in,

which, of course, you cannot do.

You're supposed to count every vote.

That's sort of the basis of our democracy.

So,

yeah, it has.

And it's also, you know,

you can sort of factor in

all these suppression,

I would call it systemic

suppression efforts on the part of Republicans, which I just find reprehensible and indefensible.

I think the reality is that the greatest fraud in American politics today is the notion of voter fraud.

It just, it happens so rarely.

You know, any real studies or investigations of voter fraud find literally nothing.

You know, somebody accidentally wandered in and had the wrong card or something.

The incidents where it happens are just,

they're either unintended or stupid, but there's no sort of designed voter fraud going on anywhere nor has there been really ever

does it disturb you that

the republican party has in large part been the party to spin out these theories

yeah uh i mean i i'm concerned because uh of uh yeah that that gets sort of wrapped up in a larger concern that I have about the direction of the Republican Party.

We did an autopsy in 2012 where our conclusion was in order to continue to be a governing party of the majority, of a majority, that we had to make the tent much bigger, that we had to find ways to attract more younger voters, more diverse voters, more women,

you know, across the board.

We just, we couldn't keep winning with old white men.

And what happened with Donald Trump's

election really is and a lot of other these you know sort of suppression efforts going on is just a doubling down on saying,

we're going to find a way to get more white men.

And at a certain point,

that just becomes a suicide strategy.

And I think we're close to that.

Jeremy, when you look back on Florida in 2000, does it feel like the sort of patient zero for this virus of quote-unquote electoral fraud and allegations of electoral fraud?

I think so.

But I think what also we learned from 2000 is that elections are going to be very close.

And particularly in a hard-fought election, no matter if one party wins the popular vote, the reality is that the Electoral College is going to be razor-thin.

And so that counsels for every side to kind of pull out all the stops in the run-up to election day.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: It looks like if you look at the landscape today, right, the midterm elections aren't over.

There are recounts happening in states across the country.

And that's because the margins are so close.

And so as we we look to the future

with a country as divided as we are we're gonna have even more closely divided elections which inevitably means we're gonna have more recounts in our future more opportunity to make what should be a fair and open process filled with integrity a place where you can inject partisan rancor and partisan politics Are you guys worried about the future of elections?

I'm not.

I'm a prisoner of hope.

I think as flawed as our systems.

Bless you, Mark McKinnon.

I think they are getting better and better with each election.

We learn more.

The systems have more integrity.

Hopefully we'll have one in the future where

we don't have voting machines actually burning like they are in Florida right now.

Overheating of voting machines, yeah.

Yeah,

how does that happen in 2018?

I would like to just amend something, if I may, Alex, just about sort of where this all all started.

The real precedent for a lot of the sort of voter conspiracy and voter fraud stuff that we're seeing today was an Indiana race in 1984 that ultimately got settled by the House of Representatives and the Democrats kind of pulling a double reverse in the Congress, which was

such an egregious move that Barney Frank.

a Democrat, voted against it.

Which is just to say that the notion of gaming the system to your advantage is not a Republican or Democratic issue.

It's whoever

happens to be gaining the upper hand at the time is going to do whatever they can because it's all about power and keeping it.

Yeah, I think we should be clear that gaining, trying to get the upper hand in any election and have the results that you'd like to have is not something unique to either party.

But on the hopeful note, just as a way to as evidence of that and to reinforce it, we had a great outcome in Arizona this election.

We had a very close race

in the U.S.

Senate race there

between Kirsten Sinema and Martha McSally.

And

McSally was ahead, and then more votes came in and it turned around and there was a lawsuit filed by Maricopa County and everybody got together and said the rural counties objected to it and they found a solution and it was a very sort of progressive model for how this can work.

And then Martha McSally very diplomatically conceded the race after she had been ahead.

So, you know, hopefully we'll see more of that in the future.

And Alex, I would just add that I think the key is to make sure that all the votes are counted properly, no matter the circumstances.

And I agree with Mark that Arizona in some ways is the model.

And I think our legal systems should ensure that recounts can happen quickly and expeditiously.

I like the new Florida law that basically says it's not one side requesting a recount.

It's not Nelson or Gillam requesting a recount if if they're behind or DeSantis or Scott opposing a recount if they're ahead.

There are automatic triggers.

There has to be a recount of the votes if the margins are small enough.

Well, all I will say is this.

With Florida and the importance of the state in the 2020 presidential election, with the importance of each Senate seat in the current makeup of the Senate and the outsize importance that state governors play in national politics, it's imperative that whatever the results this week or next week or whenever this Florida recount ends,

a lot in American politics will be riding on it.

And maybe,

maybe,

maybe this time Florida has actually learned its lesson.

Jeremy and Mark, thank you guys so much for joining me and opening up old wounds.

Our listenership is wiser for it, and we appreciate your time.

Well, thanks, Alex.

It's an important topic.

And I think Jeremy can confirm that even though we're having problems in Florida right now, they passed a lot of state legislation to make it better than it was.

Obviously, still problems, but hopefully, we'll learn more lessons this time.

And to your point, hopefully, in 2020, we will not hear late at night, Florida, Florida, Florida.

I don't think you guys can dark.

I was going to say I'd have a flashback and a breakdown all at the same time.

Just for your own sanity, we hope it doesn't come back to Florida.

Thanks, guys.

Thanks.

Kick it hard.

Katherine Wells is the executive producer of Atlantic Podcasts.

Our theme music is the Battle Hymn of the Republic by John Batiste.

Check us out at theatlantic.com slash radio and rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

Thanks for listening.

We'll be off next week for the holiday and stuffing our faces with turkey.

So enjoy Thanksgiving and we'll see you the week after.

Martha listens to her favorite band all the time.

In the car,

gym,

even sleeping.

So when they finally went on tour, Martha bundled her flight and hotel on Expedia to see them live.

She saved so much, she got a seat close enough to actually see and hear them.

Sort of.

You were made to scream from the front row.

We were made to quietly save you more.

Expedia, made to travel.

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