Dave Weigel: Now That's a Landslide

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Speaker 10 So, Donald Trump, since I know you're watching,

Speaker 10 I have four words for you.

Speaker 10 Turn the volume up.

Speaker 11 Hello, and welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Speaker 11 Delighted to welcome back to the show, my friend, politics reporter at Semaphore, author of The Show That Never Ends, The Rise and Fall of Prague Rock. We'll get to that at the end.

Speaker 11 But we got some politicking to do first. It's Dave Weigel.
David, we'll do some New York mayor's race, but Zoron there delivered a message to Grandpa Trump. Make sure he was listening.

Speaker 11 It feels like he was listening last night.

Speaker 10 He did some bleeding.

Speaker 11 What did you think was the message that was taken from the president last night?

Speaker 10 It was really unsurprising. The president's been kind of boring, frankly, about New York.
And you could tell that Zoron was bored in talking about it.

Speaker 10 He was a very on-message candidate, kind of famously. It was a very funny interview to the R.A.
Melbourne, where Melbourne dares him to connect everything he can back to the cost of living.

Speaker 10 But yeah, it wasn't a secret. I think Republicans and Trump would tell anybody that would listen, oh, we want this guy to win so we can use him as his foil in every district.

Speaker 10 And Senate Republicans had a memo today saying, We're going to, here is how every single person we're running against, we're going to tie to Momdani in some way. And

Speaker 10 I think the way it played out in New York, there's so many inputs that went into this. This is the highest turnout for a New York mayor's race since I think the Beatles were still a band.

Speaker 10 This electorate was very different. Lots of things influenced it.
Andrew Cuomo going around begging people to drop out, that helped him.

Speaker 10 But the premise of Trump criticizing Momdani was often, I don't like his policies and I will hurt the city and take its money away to punish him.

Speaker 10 Cuomo kind of went along with that, the whole protection racket idea of the president and saying, he's going to eat you alive, but I know how to deal with him. And

Speaker 10 50-point-something percent of voters said, we're going to go with a young guy who wants to fight Trump.

Speaker 10 That feels like more normal politics to me. I feel like there has been a normalization of the idea that the president can stop

Speaker 10 funding states and politicians he doesn't like, which is new. I don't remember Joe Biden saying, I don't like Ron DeSantis.
Sorry about the Hurricane Aid. I'm giving it to my friends.

Speaker 11 Yeah, that is new. And I think it's interesting.

Speaker 11 You've even got on this talking about this, about the backlash, like the kind of people being pissed that they're not getting their money and services and MAGA thinking they can make this all part of some like imaginary internet war where they're owning people and dropping poop from airplanes and stuff and like actual voters like, wait a minute, the bridge isn't open.

Speaker 11 And so I want to get back to New York in a little bit, but we had to start with Zoran Troll and Grandpa Trump.

Speaker 11 The biggest picture, though, you know, you wrote this morning for 7-4, blowout state elections offer something for every Democrat. And I think that's true.

Speaker 11 I like the meta narrative here, and I think that

Speaker 11 a lot of Democrats, a lot of people that listen to this show, a lot of people that have interest in what direction the party goes,

Speaker 11 wanted to make yesterday kind of about the factional fights about the rise of the DSA or

Speaker 11 normie centrist candidates doing better in governor's races, et cetera.

Speaker 11 And the reality, I think, was the elections offered something for every Democrat because the election was a reaction to a president that has not delivered on the economic promises that he made for people.

Speaker 11 And there was a backlash across the board.

Speaker 11 And obviously there's some differences, various races, we'll get into it, but there's an across the board backlash to costs continuing to be high in Hispanic communities to the overreach, especially to the overreach on immigration and just a general sense of the enthusiasm, as is often the case in off-year elections, being on the side of the out-party rather than the party in power.

Speaker 11 Would you agree with that? I kind of like there's one of these things where people like to say like Zoron type candidates couldn't have won in Virginia and the other way around.

Speaker 11 And I'm kind of like, I don't know, actually.

Speaker 11 I think Zoron probably would have won in Virginia and New Jersey. And a non-sex pest

Speaker 11 establishment Democrat who didn't like, you know, play footsie with Donald Trump probably could have won in New York City last night. And there's a big backlash against Trump generally.

Speaker 10 Events change things. I'm not impugning what Mom Dani did because it's historic.
and he changed the electorate.

Speaker 10 And I don't think any candidate added as many Democrats to the voter rolls as they campaigned. It's more than 150,000 people joining the party to vote for Zoron successfully last night.

Speaker 10 But yeah, it was different than the rest of these races because Cheryl and Spanberger, who won by landslides, and like real landslides, not

Speaker 10 like 0.1.2%. But if you look at the swing state, yeah, no, like a real landslide, like one that carried along Democrats who did not think they were going to win their local races.

Speaker 10 They both ran overlapping campaigns that you set it up pretty well. Costs are too high.

Speaker 10 Donald Trump is hurting you on purpose through tariffs and through Doge firings and through Camps in the Gateway tunnel. And I'm not going to get distracted by other stuff.
That was their campaigns.

Speaker 10 And I was writing another piece for the newsletter about we campaign reporters need to appreciate that our interests of writing interesting stories and new stuff every day or so are across purposes with candidates who want to be consistent.

Speaker 10 So, I was noticing in the last week, as I was in these states, and the last places I went to were New Jersey and New York, and finding it looked like a Democratic electorate looked like they were probably going to win.

Speaker 10 They didn't think they win by this much.

Speaker 10 And then I would see commentary that said, Well, look at this boring Mikey Sherrill answer, or look at Abigail Spamberger having a long-winded answer to something.

Speaker 10 And I was thinking, well, yeah, because they want to get to the cost issue. They want to explain the cost they're talking about.

Speaker 10 And there was this idea also of magic that Trump was able to perform perform that Chitterelli might pull off to a lesser extent, Earl Seagers could pull off.

Speaker 10 But sticking with Chitterelli, Hudson and Paseo County, Patterson, the like Union City, these places that were moving towards Trump, he really did campaign in those places.

Speaker 10 His campaign bus, like the biggest pitcher on the bus, was Chitterelli in North Bergen, which is a very Hispanic community surrounded by Hispanic voters.

Speaker 10 He put in the time, he got excitement when he was in the parades there, just got destroyed. And he was not able to convert those people who took a a chance on Trump into Republican voters.

Speaker 10 And if you're a Republican making maps and target lists for next year, assuming that the electorate is what it was in 2024, it's not going to be.

Speaker 11 I want to go really deep in that because to me, I think actually bigger than the races themselves is the impact on this map and the redistricting and Trump's efforts to re-jigger or some Democrats have said, rig the midterms with the redistricting efforts.

Speaker 11 I think that took the biggest hit of all last night. But let's just go a little bit deeper on some of the things you said in some of these states, looking at New Jersey in particular.

Speaker 11 And I will just say, I will raise my hand as that's what I want to have you on. You're actually, you actually go to the states and follow the campaigns.

Speaker 11 I'll raise my hand among the people who was a little frustrated with Cheryl and Spamberger, but I always said.

Speaker 11 I always caveat it. I was like, they're probably doing the right thing that they need to do to win in New Jersey and Virginia.
I was like, I just need like, this is about my emotional needs.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 11 I need an excitement, somebody to be excited about, you know, like

Speaker 11 All my lived out friends were so excited about Zoron. And I kind of came around to them being excited to be against Zoron's haters.

Speaker 11 I wanted somebody to be excited. And they weren't doing that because they were running discipline campaigns that were smart for an off-off-year election.

Speaker 11 But to that point in New Jersey, Mikey ends up winning by 13. Like, that's a bigger pull miss than the Trump pull miss for 2024 that people talk about.

Speaker 11 The idea that she'd win a double-digit victory, I think, exceeded even the most optimistic Ken Martin projection in New Jersey. What do you think that was?

Speaker 11 You talked a little bit about the canceled projects. You talked about the Hispanic vote.
Passaic County, which you mentioned, Cheryl wins by 15. It's the most Hispanic county.

Speaker 11 It's a county Trump flipped last time. First Republican win in ages.
He'd won it narrowly. Mikey is up by 15 as of this morning.

Speaker 11 What else do you attribute the big, big kind of surprising win for Cheryl?

Speaker 10 Well, we were talking a little about immigration, and that was part of it. So this is the first real test because we had the Wisconsin Supreme Court race.
We've had these races in Iowa.

Speaker 10 We have not had until yesterday a race with a large number of Hispanic voters where Republicans were doing a gut check on, okay,

Speaker 10 he said mass deportation, and it looks like this. It looks like this ice center where the member of Congress is going to get arrested for

Speaker 10 resisting arrest at a protest. And it looks like memes of Halo about how awesome it is to

Speaker 10 everything. We don't need to go into all of it.
But how much were Latino voters in the Northeast going to put up with that? The answer is not really much at all. And Latino voters are very different.

Speaker 10 I mean, they come from different parts of the world to America around the country.

Speaker 10 Texas Latinos, I don't see evidence from, there were just some ballot measures in Texas, some constitutional amendments. You didn't see a shift to the left in Texas, but it was not a candidate shift.

Speaker 10 This is the test we've seen of the Trump policy in action over immigration that is actually removing not just criminals from the country, but people who've overstayed their visas and have not committed any other crime.

Speaker 10 We still have the ongoing birthright citizenship case, right? Which is going to blow up again next year.

Speaker 10 Or DACA, because yeah, in every way, the Stephen Miller policy of just trying to get immigrants out of the country.

Speaker 10 Obviously, I think probably frustrating to bulwark readers because you could say, Didn't you guys look at the signs of the convention that this is their plan?

Speaker 11 Yeah, they put it right there on the sign, y'all. Yeah, yeah, I got pretty frustrated.
We were doing frustration.

Speaker 11 There was a tweet about, I saw you that you also shared, like about a South Asian precinct in New Jersey that went from like

Speaker 11 Trump plus 20 to Cheryl plus 70. And it's a tiny precinct, but they had like 300 votes for Trump and 22 votes for Shittarelli.

Speaker 10 And it's like, y'all, recent immigrants, like we were telling you that it was not just going to be Trendaragua.

Speaker 11 But yeah, that part is frustrating. But it's noteworthy, though, because that was an important part of the Trump shift, right?

Speaker 11 Like not just with Hispanic voters, kind of across the board with recent immigrants.

Speaker 10 And a more minor part, because this is Asians, but also Arab Americans.

Speaker 10 Yeah, in 2024, Trump ran on, I'm going to bring peace to the Middle East. And he has got this deal in Gaza.

Speaker 10 I'm definitely not going to go in the rabbit hole of what the Gaza deal looks like, et cetera.

Speaker 10 But those voters also kind of rented Trump for one election and then, given the chance to vote on other issues with Gaza not top of mind, didn't vote for Republicans.

Speaker 10 They turned out they were very easy for Democrats to flip back. I think his numbers on foreign policy went up a little bit and then nothing else did.

Speaker 10 Like, this is a little reminiscent of the George H.W. Bush problem in the 90s.
Great job on foreign policy. We don't care.
Things cost too much.

Speaker 10 And that's certainly true for first-generation Americans who are also getting that, they're getting more racist rhetoric from social media, from conservatives on social media than they would have before.

Speaker 10 I think just it has changed who is posting on it. People are bolder.
They're gloating about it. I'm worried.

Speaker 11 Look, you've seen this just in, and I don't know if you've seen it in your reporting, but I've seen man on the street interviews from recent immigrants that are not Hispanic Latino, but that are like, I'm worried.

Speaker 11 I've seen examples of people being deported, you know, of people of getting papers checked and things of that nature.

Speaker 11 So I do think that, you know, a lot of these other communities are also like feeling, in addition to like the race of social media stuff, like a little bit of fear now.

Speaker 11 And like, wait a minute, are these masked guys going to come for me and my family? Do I have to worry about that now?

Speaker 11 I think that's potentially having an impact, you know, even beyond the Hispanic community.

Speaker 10 Yeah, and it hasn't solved the Democrats' problem because I think the question for them in 2028 will be: if we put you back in charge, do you let the border fly open again and people come into the country?

Speaker 10 That turns out to be unpopular. Can Democrats be trusted to enforce that? You've got Ruben Gallego, who was campaigning in New Jersey for Cheryl.

Speaker 10 You've got some Democrats just moving on that issue, not to the far right, but moving to like 2012, Obama.

Speaker 10 Actually, maybe you need a deporter-in-chief while you're also not willy-nilly deporting everyone who you can find in the country. So, they're not there yet.
They didn't solve their problems.

Speaker 10 It was just that there was a cost to the way Republicans have carried themselves.

Speaker 10 And just the hubris, the focus they have from day to day is really not on issues that voters care much about, and they cannot stop gloating about the enactment of their policies, even when they're not that popular.

Speaker 10 If I was listening to Republicans in D.C.

Speaker 10 Over the last week, I was hearing about Arctic Frost and investigations of the 2020 election and the plots to overturn it, and hearing about James Comey, and just the degree to which the Republican conversation is centered around Trump and his interests and not voters, that was not what it was in 2024.

Speaker 10 I mean, he could go off on a tangent at a rally, but the whole party just got very confident that elections were like static and

Speaker 10 they didn't really need to go into what voters cared about because Democrats were so weak.

Speaker 11 Yeah, the vibes. And then just being out of touch with where voters are, in some ways, it's a flip of

Speaker 11 how people felt about Democrats, right? Like, where, like, there's too much focus on some of the cultural issues, et cetera, right?

Speaker 11 It's like, why people are focused too much on Donald Trump's random obsessions, like rather than the things that people are upset about.

Speaker 11 One thing I made me think about this yesterday, and it hadn't really occurred to me until I actually got the exit poll data.

Speaker 11 You know, one of the things they always do in the exit poll data is like, what was the most important issue for you? What did you vote for?

Speaker 11 Last year, as I was dealing with my, you know, PTSD from being in New York last last November, I remember looking at that early exit, you know, not at the ballot number of Trump Kamala, but at the, what are the, what is the issue that was most important to you?

Speaker 11 And you look at those numbers and last year and I was like, you know, immigration was up there and crime and your economy. You figure that probably is cutting against, you know, the Democrats.

Speaker 11 And you look at like abortion and democracy, you figure that's probably cutting towards, you know, that's right, those are probably democratic issues.

Speaker 11 You just looked at it all and I looked at the jumble of of issues and I was like, yeah, I don't know. This feels like a Trump jumble of issues that people care about.

Speaker 11 Yesterday, I was looking at the exit polls when they came out and the issues were like economy, immigration, you know, healthcare, democracy. And I looked at them.

Speaker 11 I was like, I wonder if any of these are Trump. What are the...
Earl Sears and Chitterelli people even saying, right? Like any basket of those issues could have been bad for him.

Speaker 10 And I think that kind of to me represented how they're in a bad place right now, just as a party politically like it's not like what would you say that they own issue-wise where you'd look at that and be like oh those people are coming out for trump crime i guess maybe but like it's hard to even think about anything like you figure that immigration is probably cutting both ways at this point yeah and the salience of crime has been falling you saw that with mamdani's success that was the first but i if you look at mayors mayoral races that were not that competitive but got in the news at cincinnati there was this drunk brawl at a jazz fest that got weeks of coverage on Fox News Conservative Media as Cincinnati falling apart at the seams.

Speaker 10 And JD Vance's half-brother was the challenger to the mayor, lost by 56 points, I think. The mayor of Charlotte was facing re-election.

Speaker 10 One

Speaker 10 won very easily.

Speaker 11 Poor J.D. Vance's half-brother.
What a shame.

Speaker 10 I think he posted he's a good guy and you should vote for him, but he wasn't out there campaigning for him.

Speaker 11 JD is good at sucking up and riding the coattails of somebody that's on their way up. That's been his prime skill throughout life.

Speaker 11 And so he's not grabbing onto a sinking stone just because he's blood.

Speaker 10 That's true.

Speaker 10 He doesn't like to ignore people who are not winning, even if they're related to him. Yeah, Charlotte, the mayor of Charlotte, got re-elected.

Speaker 10 And again, if you paid a lot of attention to conservative media, which I know you do and I do, there was a pretty clear story in conservative media for a few weeks, which was this psychopath who killed a woman on...

Speaker 10 transit in Charlotte, that's Democrats' fault. Specifically, it's Roy Cooper's fault, the former governor, reason TBD.
And also, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. And murder, murder, death, death.

Speaker 10 Democrats want you to die. Democrats laugh about you dying.
Jay Jones is texted. We'll get into that.

Speaker 10 They folded that in. It was a coherent message.

Speaker 10 Like, coherent doesn't mean effective, but this was a closing message for Winsome Sears in Winsom Merle Sears in Virginia was the Democrats are violent people. We can't allow their violence to win.

Speaker 10 And you saw a little bit of this hangover today of Ron DeSantis, the other Republican, saying, well, I guess this election means that Democrats embrace violence.

Speaker 10 And you're starting to see, I think, the separation from the epistemic bubble that Republicans get their news from and what voters who just kind of turn up for elections and are worried about costs live from.

Speaker 10 Actually, it was funny. I was at Curtis Leewa's final rally in New York, not because I thought he'd win.
I just was like, I need to get some Republican voters.

Speaker 10 And I heard some people there talking about, if I can paraphrase the conversation, hey, did you see that picture of all the teachers making fun of Charlie Kirk assassination?

Speaker 10 And they're referring to there are these teachers in Arizona who had a shirt that was a bloody Halloween shirt that said problem solved. That was a math joke, which they'd worn in the past.

Speaker 10 It was a joke about math problems really hard and we beat it. Look at this blood on me.
I kind of get it. I'm not sure if I'd wear that shirt.

Speaker 11 Yeah, it's a dumb dad joke. I did a whole video on this.
It's a dumb dad joke.

Speaker 11 And then like Ron DeSantis, Mike Lee, the whole conservative ecosystem jumped on this as if like a bunch of teachers got together and went to school and were like, we're going to do it, a fuck you Charlie Kirk costume.

Speaker 10 Right. And their assumption was, well, everyone must know that when people see that, they think of Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 10 And I thought, with no disrespect to Charlie Kirk, who I liked personally, did not deserve to be murdered. That's not what the country was thinking about.

Speaker 10 This is this, like it or not, this is a very distractible country that can't remember what it watched yesterday.

Speaker 10 And the effort to say the country is going to change and we're going to have a new conversation about political violence after Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

Speaker 10 One, that didn't happen for people who are not paying a ton of attention to news. Two, it's pretty convenient because it's not like Donald Trump said, you're right.

Speaker 10 I'm going to change my tone and not joke about shitting on protesters anymore. They kind of wanted it both ways.

Speaker 10 We're going to say Democrats are crazy and violent, and we're also not going to police our own speech in any way whatsoever.

Speaker 10 The combination of that, I think, you were seeing how just Republicans were not connecting with people who, in a non-presidential environment, are not paying attention to that sort of news.

Speaker 10 And the final thing I'll say, Chitterelli in New Jersey, who's one of the real losers in this process,

Speaker 10 his stump speech was: Day one, I declare the end to sanctuary cities in New Jersey, and I get us out of the greenhouse initiative, and that's going to drive down energy costs.

Speaker 10 Are those immediate things that solve your problems? Are they the sanctuary cities? Is that not something Trump is taking care of right now?

Speaker 10 They just were not very immediate issues unless you were like watching Newsmax all day, and those are the big issues.

Speaker 11 And just hearing you talk about that and try to explain it just shows how unresonant it is as a message as compared to the type of stuff Trump was running on in 24.

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Speaker 11 Just really quick on Virginia, because the story is basically the same. You know, a blowout for Spam Burger, which is going to have some redistricting impacts, which I want to get to next.

Speaker 11 But just generally, you know, obviously this focus on Northern Virginia and how the shutdown had an effect on this.

Speaker 11 But really, she gained ground across the state, you know, flipped a couple of counties in more ex-urban rural Virginia that Democrats hadn't won back since they were Dixiecrats, you know, wins a huge landslide.

Speaker 11 You know, I looked at Loudoun County, this, you know, kind of classic suburban, ex-urban county that was an early warning sign last year because how well Trump was doing there.

Speaker 11 And she runs an absolute blowout there.

Speaker 11 And the blowout is so great that, as you mentioned, Jay Jones, his attorney general, who got caught up in a variety of scandals, including some texts about like wish casting the death of his opponents and wanting to shit on their graves and stuff and going after their kids, he gets kind of dragged across the finish line, you know, running pretty significantly behind her, actually, but she wins such a huge race.

Speaker 10 Yeah, I was going to say he did better than Kamala Harris. Like, it looked like he would fall over the finish line.
He went over the finish line, then like took another lap and then did very well.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 11 That's telling how big the Spamberger win is, though, actually. The Jay Jones runs like whatever, seven, eight points behind her and still does better than Harris.

Speaker 10 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that was, which is what Democrats said, but they were, look, you were talking to some of the same Democrats, I'm sure.

Speaker 10 They were thinking like, well, maybe if we're lucky, 11 points. And when you win by 17 points, yeah, funny things happen.

Speaker 11 The big cope from Republicans online today is all about Jay Jones and the Attorney General's race.

Speaker 11 Like, to me, there's just not really, I mean, these jokes are gross, like this idea that, you know, I got two bullets, and what was it?

Speaker 11 Like, Pol Pot, Hitler, and my opponent are in the room, and I'm using both of them on my opponent, or something like that.

Speaker 10 It's apparently an old joke. I didn't realize this.
I had a friend who found examples of it, kind of like, not like a, I'm going to defend Jay Jones with this, but he'd heard it before.

Speaker 10 I'd never heard it, but I believe that then somebody pointed out to me it was on the office. And as a non-office watcher, I missed that, but maybe he heard it from there.

Speaker 10 Democrats love normie TV shows.

Speaker 11 They do. So, yeah, anyway, to me, I guess like the analytical response to that is

Speaker 11 I see this everywhere. I see it in areas that concern me a little bit from time to time.
Like some Democratic voters have taken the inverse of when they go low, we go high to heart a little bit.

Speaker 11 Like they're so committed to rejecting the Mitchell Obama line that

Speaker 11 they want to go as low as possible. I think that that is motivating a lot of Democrats.

Speaker 11 But I think that on the other hand, His biggest underperformance is in the areas in Northern Virginia where people are most paying attention.

Speaker 11 You know, a lot of this is that he ends up, you know, it's not as if people are affirmatively going in and being like, I love Jay Jones' text. It was, I'm really upset about this administration.

Speaker 11 Democrats are motivated and he gets dragged across the finish line.

Speaker 10 I had a theory last night and it's a good night to just throw stuff out there and see if it's true or not.

Speaker 10 But Millarez, the attorney general who lost to Jones, his campaign for much of the year was what you typically do if you're an attorney general, especially in a swing state, which is look at all the people I've been putting in jail.

Speaker 10 I've been keeping a safe crime is down. My opponent voted for criminal justice reform.
He's not going to keep crime down. And Jones's strategy was, hey, Doge exists.

Speaker 10 Other states had attorneys general who were suing to get your job back. And Jason Mayars didn't because he's a Trump supporter.
And they had footage of Mayars at a Trump rally.

Speaker 10 And whenever they could polarize the race, it was good for them. And so the final weeks.

Speaker 11 That's also just a substantive critique, right?

Speaker 11 It's like other states are getting jobs back for the states

Speaker 11 and we're not because this guy's a Trump humper. I mean, it's not just like even like, oh, he's bad because of Trump.
It's like he's bad because of Trump and it's harming us in a material way.

Speaker 10 On either side, Maryland and North Carolina had attorneys general who were sueing and Virginia didn't.

Speaker 10 But so the final 10 days of the race, Democrats call back the legislature, which they can do, to start this process of redistricting.

Speaker 10 And it's another thing, this is a big theme of the night is Democrats being very bold and saying, screw you, we're going to redistrict to get, if you're going to do it, we're going to do it.

Speaker 10 And Mayares gets into that fight by saying, well, I think this is illegal. I read the state constitution.
I'm suing to stop this.

Speaker 10 And so voters who are making their minds up at the last minute, or maybe Democrats who might vote or not, they remember, oh, yeah, that's right.

Speaker 10 We have a Republican attorney general who's trying to stop us from getting two or three or four more seats to beat Trump. I don't like that.

Speaker 10 And they had another reason to put up with Jones. But this is another Trump-era Republican hubristic mistake, possibly.

Speaker 10 Just nothing Miares was doing in the final month, except for saying my opponent sent these insane texts, was saying, and if you're a Democrat, you should vote for me.

Speaker 10 So the first time I was hearing Democrats panicked about Jones.

Speaker 10 And then the first polling that was public and released maybe two weeks later, Jones had lost his lead to Miaris, but Miares had not gained anything. What was he doing to gain people? Kind of nothing.

Speaker 10 It was hoping that they'd leave their ballot blank or something. And some people did.
I think it was

Speaker 10 about 40,000 fewer votes cast in that race than the race for governor, governor, twice as many write-ins. But Democrats felt like voting for Democrats and getting revenge on Republicans.

Speaker 10 And what was his plan for that? He didn't really have one.

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Speaker 11 Okay, to the redistricting. I think this is the biggest news tonight.
So California propped 50 wins. I want to isolate.
Gavin Mania and the impact on that to the next segment.

Speaker 11 Focus on 26 first and then 28. The Virginia win is so big.

Speaker 11 They swung, I think, about a dozen House of Delegate seats. The final count is in, maybe even a little bit more.
And the Democrats are going to have a massive majority in the state legislature.

Speaker 11 And so I think it seems inevitable that they will redistrict now, which could net three seats.

Speaker 11 I saw a map that if Spanberger wanted to go dark Spamberger, they might even be able to get four seats out of that, but three seats seems pretty safe. California Prop 50 wins.

Speaker 11 And that was aimed at getting about four or five seats for the Democrats. So you're looking at, you know, whatever, about seven to nine there between the two of those.
Maryland gets off their ass.

Speaker 11 Westmore announced yesterday that they're going to start a redistricting process. It's only one seat, but still.
The Texas seats, you mentioned this kind of a little bit at the top.

Speaker 11 Their redistricting was incumbent a little bit on redistricting those South Texas districts

Speaker 11 and TBD on whether Hispanics closer to the border move the same way as Hispanics up in North Jersey, but potentially those are a threat, a little iffy.

Speaker 11 And I think other Republican states are about to get a little scared about edge districts, right?

Speaker 11 If the redistricting means if you're in Ohio or Florida and you're like, I'm going to take somebody who's in a

Speaker 11 seat that has Republican plus 15, right, where there's like a 15 percentage point advantage for Republicans and move you to a Republican plus eight district and take that other 7%, move them to a Democratic district to get the votes.

Speaker 11 Like that's how gerrymandering works.

Speaker 11 The Republican that's in that plus 15 district going down to plus eight might be like, whoa, after last night, I might not want, I might not be on board for this anymore because if there's a blue wave, I'm going to get washed out with it.

Speaker 11 And on top of that, Kansas yesterday said that they were backing off. So you combine all this.

Speaker 11 You go from something like three weeks ago, it looked like Republicans could gerrymander their way to like almost like a very hard to penetrate majority, you know, particularly with Voting Rights Act stuff, which is, I guess, a subplot of this.

Speaker 11 And now all of a sudden, it is looking to me much, much more favorable to the Democrats in that redistricting situation.

Speaker 11 And I think sets them up, who the hell knows what next November looks like, but if it looks like last night, you know, for a pretty clear House victory. What do you make of that analysis?

Speaker 10 Yeah, I was just thinking about the reason that Lise Stefan did a farewell tour but did not quit her seat in Congress, which was that Democrats kept doing really well in special elections and her seat, which is redder than I think any of the new seats Republicans drew in Texas.

Speaker 10 I don't want to be too defended. I know, yeah, the Trump margin there was bigger than the new seat that's kind of in San Marcos and the new seats in the Rio Grande Valley.

Speaker 10 That is freezing some Republican blood today. If you were

Speaker 10 starting with a 2020 Trump map, not to repeat myself too much, and you look at that and say, well, roll it back to maybe 2020 Trump margins with non-white voters, with young voters.

Speaker 10 Well, that's not the same map anymore.

Speaker 10 There's a bunch of people who are not in Trump seats. They're in Biden's seats.

Speaker 10 How does that change your math? And how does the change Democrats' math? Let's say Louise Lucas, actually, she's the Senate leader in Virginia who is the most aggressive about remapping.

Speaker 11 Because she has a great backstory. Let's just pause on Lise Lucas really quick.

Speaker 10 She got redistricted.

Speaker 11 She ran for Congress, lost a close race, a black state senator in Virginia, on kind of the eastern Norfolk, Virginia Beach area, somewhere over there. She loses very narrowly.

Speaker 11 And then coming up in the next year, you know, she's going to run again. It's a more favorable year for Democrats.
And they redistrict and kind of draw her out of being able to run in a seat.

Speaker 11 And I guess the Republican legislature says to her at the time, something to the effect of, you're never going to be in Congress.

Speaker 11 And now she is in a position of power in the Democratic State Senate in Virginia, and she's coming for blood.

Speaker 10 She's got, not in the Jay Jones way, but in the redistricting sense.

Speaker 11 She is not going to be shy.

Speaker 10 Yeah, she's Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. She's coming back with the Katana for these.
She probably would, knowing Louise Lucas, if you gave her a good katana gift, she would use it.

Speaker 10 She's kind of infamous for when Yunkin sends a bill to the Senate she doesn't like, she'll post a picture of her with a shredder.

Speaker 10 But anyway, yeah, that's her attitude.

Speaker 10 So it spilled over into Maryland where there is a very fun story happening right now where Wes Moore, who I assume will run for president after saying he won't, does want to talk about redistricting Maryland.

Speaker 10 And the state Senate president is still on the Michelle Obama convention speech island of like, we're not, that's not what our party stands for.

Speaker 10 I think that you can see it quickening the Democrats there and saying, what if we do this?

Speaker 10 And if you look, if you're Lucas looking at Virginia, like we were saying before, well, it's one thing if we're we're remapping the state for seats that can elect 10 Democrats in a Trump map in this map, much easier.

Speaker 10 And you probably want to be cocky, but you're looking at it and say, okay, we can give Eugene Vimman a couple points so Tara Durant can't really challenge him anymore.

Speaker 10 This already happened in Ohio, by the way. There was a Republican who was going to challenge Amelia Sykes in Akron again.

Speaker 10 And then Republicans kind of conceded a map that gave her a couple points and made it, and he just bailed out.

Speaker 11 They didn't go gerrymander maxing in Ohio. I know that was another state where Republicans are going to pick up one probably, but like conceive we could have picked up three.

Speaker 11 But again, they were concerned about this backfire. Yeah.
And I think that chilling effect on their effort is really is the most meaningful story of the night for me.

Speaker 10 Well, I want to see also what it does for candidate recruitment because let's say I'm a state rep in Indiana and I'm in the minority forever and they've drawn a new, they might draw the seats, they might not.

Speaker 10 They've drew a new seat out of Indianapolis that's plus eight Trump or something. Do I go for it? I might try.
That's what Joe Donnelly did when they got rid of his house seat in Kansas.

Speaker 10 That was one of the reasons Republicans made it back down. Is Cherise Davids, who represents the Kansas City suburbs

Speaker 10 in Kansas?

Speaker 10 They've already tried to gerrymander her out.

Speaker 10 They were thinking of trying again. She said, I'm just going to run for Senate in a good year for Democrats.
What are you going to do about it?

Speaker 10 So I'm interested to see what sort of ambition you see from Democrats who, instead of looking at the nice big red map that Trump gives everybody with all the red counties that voted for him, if they look at the slightly less red map from these races and say, imagine a midterm where it's D plus eight, you would win this.

Speaker 10 Do you want to try for it now? I think that'll start happening over the next couple months.

Speaker 11 Yeah. And all these negotiations, it's like the Dems have a much bigger chip stack now than they did, right? Like they are, they are arguing from a position of strength.

Speaker 11 And I think that Republicans felt like they could, you know, to maybe do a lame pun, they could jerry-rig this thing, you know, next year in a way that protects Mike Johnson, protects their House majority.

Speaker 11 And that looks a lot, a lot, a lot worse.

Speaker 11 And, you know, who the hell knows what other shenanigans they might try, but their first gambit here seems to be potentially, I don't want to overstate it, but like potentially rebuffed.

Speaker 11 And a lot of credit for that goes to the electorate last night, but to Gavin Newsome for stepping up. And this was Gavin yesterday.

Speaker 11 I want to listen to him talk about how he defines his own fight against the administration.

Speaker 11 He didn't expect you to show up.

Speaker 11 He didn't expect any of this to happen. He thought maybe we'd have a candlelight vigil.
Maybe we would hold hands.

Speaker 11 Maybe we could all come together and, like, you know, doing op-ed in the LA Times and, you know, just say whata, coulda, shoulda, done something.

Speaker 11 They never expected this. They never expected all of you.
They never expected this show of unity and support and recognition.

Speaker 11 All right. I mean, I got to say, boy, you got to hand it to Gavin, man.
I mean,

Speaker 11 he's out there doing the, he sounds like a presidential candidate. It's the self-critique that all the Democrats believe about the Democrats.

Speaker 11 It's like, hey, people thought we were just going to, you know, get together a blue ribbon commission on this and deal with it in 2032. And I said, F you, I'm going to troll the president.

Speaker 11 I'm going to dunk on him. We're going to steal your five seats.
We're going to drink your milkshake. And I think a lot of Democrats are being pretty happy about that.

Speaker 11 Gavin 2028 stonk seems to be on the rise.

Speaker 10 Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 10 This was a real bet that he took. I remember talking to Gavin people when he announced it because there was one poll.

Speaker 10 California ballot initiatives. I mean, you lived there for a while.
The phrasing really matters. And the Attorney General controls how the ballot measures are phrased.

Speaker 10 And so there were some polling said, well, voters like the Independent Commission.

Speaker 10 Gavin's team said, yeah, they say that, but we're going to make this a Trump referendum and they won it and you know again we know california

Speaker 10 we will find out the margin i don't know at christmas what it was but it probably did much better than kamala harris last year it just a pure partisan hey this is the trump sucks measure do you want to vote for it it did very well not a surprise that would work in california but i i think it's that that spillover that's me i mentioned wes moore and and the difficulty has there but Democrats were tiptoeing.

Speaker 10 They did not want to think about this too hard. Do they really want to be blamed for making the partisanship in Congress worse?

Speaker 10 And they really do have a screw-it attitude that Newsom's partly responsible for. One, there's clearly no, what's the penalty?

Speaker 10 It's kind of a kind of a catch-22. Like if voters want, if you gerrymander and voters don't like it, that's the point of the gerrymander.
They can't stop you. And two, just it might be popular.

Speaker 10 It's certainly popular with Texas Republicans, what Greg Abbott's doing. Although you poll Texas, most people don't like the gerrymander because it was just framed as I'm doing this for Donald Trump.

Speaker 10 But they've gotten a lot bolder, and Gavin was the leader of that. So I hate doing early 2028 predictions, except for I do think that

Speaker 10 it was true before that the governors who can actually resist Trump in meaningful ways and sue him and beat him occasionally have the advantage over no disrespect to him, but people to judge who can't do that.

Speaker 10 He can be on podcasts and he can go to rallies. He cannot govern.
If you're in Congress, if you're Chris Murphy, you can give speeches, but you can't really win.

Speaker 10 So, I mean, you can stop a nominee sometimes. But what's more compelling? Hi, Nashua.
I stopped a terrible nominee for the office of legal counsel, or I destroyed four Republicans with my bare hands.

Speaker 10 Probably the second one.

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Speaker 11 Now, my question is, in this game of mafia that we're going to play, are you going to do better than me? Say it now.

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Speaker 10 I cannot wait till we both team up and get you out, and then one of us gets the other out because we didn't realize they were a traitor the whole time and you were actually an innocent.

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Speaker 11 While we're doing dorky gerrymandering redistricting talk, we might as well do a little dorky hill talk with the filibuster.

Speaker 11 Trump last night posting after the results, you know, basically blaming the results on Trump.

Speaker 11 He speaks about himself in the third person not being on the ballot and on the shutdown and saying that they should end the filibuster.

Speaker 11 He had a breakfast with John Thune this morning, and I'm just seeing coming across right now that Thune said to him he doesn't have the votes to break the filibuster.

Speaker 11 Has Donald Trump ever not gotten what he wanted with the Senate? I don't know. This is the first time for everything, I guess.
Maybe this is it.

Speaker 11 But I'm wondering what you think yesterday's impact is on both that conversation on the filibuster and just the shutdown in general.

Speaker 10 Well, he has never gotten the way he wants the filibuster for the pretty simple reason that right now, the way the country is structured, most of what Republicans want to get done

Speaker 10 in a big new way can be done with 51 votes in the Senate or by suing in the Northern District of Texas and getting the Supreme Court to say, yep,

Speaker 10 that has been the pattern of Trump's term so far. You can't do Medicare for all that way.
You cannot have a president say, executive order, I'm getting rid of your health insurance.

Speaker 10 I guess you could try, but Sam Alito probably wouldn't like that.

Speaker 10 And so it is Democrats who, for their long-term plans, want to get get rid of the filibuster, or just the opportunity cost for Republicans is not there.

Speaker 10 Like you would get rid of it and then in the future, maybe they're not ambitious enough.

Speaker 10 If Republicans said, we're getting rid of the filibuster and we're going to split Texas into five red states, that would get them something.

Speaker 10 But they're not there because they look at the arrangement of the country and say, well, no, the judges are going to take care of a lot of this for us.

Speaker 10 And the Republicans who are barely resisting Trump, except for on some nominees, the tariffs, for example, the tariff's a great example of this.

Speaker 10 Do you need to do some legislative maneuver to stop the tariffs?

Speaker 10 You can have the Senate vote that doesn't do anything, and then you cross your fingers and hope the Supreme Court solves the problem for you.

Speaker 10 So they're just not, it's just not in their interest to do this for Trump, and they know that it is in Democrats' interest to. I think with Manchin and Cinema, it would have been tough.

Speaker 10 But if there was no filibuster whatsoever in Biden's first term, there's not even a debate, should we get rid of this hallowed institution that we pretend is from the founders but isn't, would Kirsten Cinema and Joe Manchin have voted against some of the stuff they voted against?

Speaker 10 Maybe not. If there was a 53-seat Democratic Senate majority under President even Josh Shapiro and no filibuster, could they do a public option like day one right away?

Speaker 10 So, yeah, much more threatening. Yeah.

Speaker 11 Abortion. Yeah.
And then also you get out of that stuff, get into social issues, like a national right to abortion, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 11 While we're talking about progressive dreams, I'm going to do a little bit more on that New York Mayor's race since you were there reporting on it. I watched his speech last night and

Speaker 11 he's good. You know, I mean, he was happy.
He's uplifting. He's good.

Speaker 11 He's throwing some socialist turn. You know, he does some Eugene Debs quotes.
Okay, that's not my people. Okay.
Those aren't my, you know, but whatever. You know,

Speaker 11 the room was happy about

Speaker 11 the Eugene Debs quotes.

Speaker 11 But when I look at that race, and you, you mentioned it briefly, I just want to spend a little more time on it.

Speaker 11 Just like the, I mean, the highest turnout in a race since Mayor Lindsay, you know, ran on He is Fresh and Everyone Else Is Tired, 1969.

Speaker 10 It was a little ominous, but it was a great, great motto.

Speaker 11 And part of the, part of the turnout is

Speaker 11 there was a decent amount of anti-Zoran interest as well. And Cuomo ended up getting more votes than a lot of the winning mayors did in the past few elections.

Speaker 11 But that said, he obviously engaged a lot of folks. And I think that's something Democrats are going to have to care about eventually in 2028.
Zoron can't be their nominee.

Speaker 11 He was born in Uganda, really, actually, not like fake, like Barack Obama.

Speaker 10 But if we make Uganda the 52nd state after Greenland, potentially.

Speaker 11 Well, I think that would be kind of

Speaker 11 Republicans' interest for Trump.

Speaker 10 Well, I'm still stuck on if Republicans got rid of the filibuster. That stuff you can't do.

Speaker 11 But I'm wondering what you made of it just kind of being there. And everybody wants to project onto him their

Speaker 11 pet reason for why he was successful. And I look at it, I just kind of mark this down about what Democrats could learn from him in other places about how they engaged other

Speaker 11 non-voters. Part of it was obviously the relentless message about caring about working people.
And you look at his speech last night.

Speaker 11 He just starts by talking about like listing out random working class jobs and how this victory is for those people.

Speaker 11 And that is like, that is just a notably different strategy than Democrats being like, I care about working people, right?

Speaker 11 It's like, no, I'm going to spend two minutes talking about the dude whose knuckles are burned because he's a fry cook and then the person whose back hurts because they're a garbage, like whatever.

Speaker 11 Like he lists everybody and by name, he just has a lot of focus on that. I think is smart.
That's a good lesson. Obviously, the positivity, the happiness, he's smiling.
It's an upbeat message.

Speaker 11 I think there's a Gaza element to this. There's a little bit of subtext.
He doesn't mention it really in the speech last night, but there's a lot of

Speaker 11 energy, obviously, about folks that didn't turn out for Kamala on that issue. And then I just think that there's just this anti-estat, like he's running at some level against the party.

Speaker 11 He does one line last night that kind of bristled me a little bit. It's like, you shouldn't have to go into the history books to find a Democrat that actually did something.

Speaker 11 Like, they elected the first black Democrat like two minutes.

Speaker 10 I was like, it wasn't that.

Speaker 11 I'm not that old. Okay.

Speaker 11 Anyway, but you know, so that is kind of the gumbo for me of like the ways in which he engaged people that hadn't been engaged. How do you react to that? Was there anything I'm missing? Anything else?

Speaker 10 No, I like that you focused on the way he talked about working people and their jobs. So I've heard this from even Democrats who don't like Mom Dani, their favorite video,

Speaker 10 you free associate. Like, which of the 10 million Mom Dani videos is your favorite?

Speaker 10 Halal trucks. Yeah, halal trucks.
It was the halal truck one. I was like, wait a second.
What if you actually use this?

Speaker 10 And he's not the first Democrat I've seen seen to say, here is a real business, and here's something that, and here's how much it costs, and here's how it's affecting you.

Speaker 10 It's actually Tony Evers, who's the opposite of Zaram Amdani, the elderly, very nice governor of Wisconsin, wins two races. No one ever talks about him running for president.

Speaker 10 His favorite curse term is holy mackerel. But he did this.

Speaker 10 He had an ad where he went to a pizza parlor that he and his wife go to when he was running for re-election and talked about what he'd done to

Speaker 10 the economy. Yes, unlearning the sort of let's run this through focus groups and make sure we cover every interest group and making it very human.

Speaker 10 That was the one thing, not that I thought Cheryl would lose. The one thing I thought, is she doing this the right way? She was very focused on her own biography, which is impressive.
I mean, she's a

Speaker 10 veteran mama for a prosecutor, et cetera, et cetera. And I started to wonder, well, is that a little I'm with her? Are you talking as much about people's lives?

Speaker 10 So, yes, I think that's the first thing you'll see Democrats copy from Zoron.

Speaker 10 Because Democrats do all the time, let's have a press conference, and here's a real person who was affected by this terrible thing that happened.

Speaker 10 They go to the mic and maybe reporters quote them, maybe they don't. Focusing on that is what they'll copy.
Will they copy him protesting Tom Homan in person? Probably not.

Speaker 10 Will they copy him saying he's going to arrest Netanyahu? I don't think so. Maybe there's some assemblymen who got elected.
I'm not sure. I don't know about.

Speaker 10 But the hyper-personalization and being out there.

Speaker 11 Hyper-personalization of a specific type of people, though, too. Like a specific

Speaker 11 and not just kind of generalizing, like, that I care about working people. And, like, that is the thing about Bernie.

Speaker 11 Like, no, any Bernie speech you saw, he's, he's going after the billionaires and he's talking about people who are living paycheck to paycheck. Right.
And it's like that.

Speaker 11 I think that, like, if you talk to the Harris people, they would say she did that. Because, like, she did in like a pablum way, right?

Speaker 11 But it was like, if you look into his speech, it's like they were sent. Now, I'm a lib now.
I'm about to use the words centered.

Speaker 10 They were centered in his speech.

Speaker 10 Yes.

Speaker 10 Whenever you talk about growing candidate in a lab, if you were saying, we need a working class candidate who can speak to how people normally live, let's choose the immigrant whose mom is the director of a bunch of movies and whose dad is a professor at Columbia and who went to a liberal arts college and started students.

Speaker 10 Like, no, you wouldn't, obviously. There are going to be lots of Democrats who have much more, I don't want to say traditional.
That would be a gaffe.

Speaker 10 But the stories that are, they're a little bit more like guy you grew up with rather than son of Mira Nair.

Speaker 10 He had some of the same crazy making ability as AOC because AOC grew up a little more poor than he did.

Speaker 10 Have you noticed sometimes Republicans can't decide whether she's terrible because she was just used to be a bartender or she's terrible because whenever they mention the bartender thing, she's like Bray Rabbit in the briar patch.

Speaker 11 Like, great. Is it she's fake that she went to a liberal arts college or is she down class because she's a bartender?

Speaker 10 Yeah,

Speaker 10 she's lying to you. She lived in a, in a, not in the Bronx, but in a poor chart of Westchester County.

Speaker 10 Whenever they start getting to those details, it's a waste of time because speaking to people who do not grow in a lab, how is Donald Trump able to be a blue-collar billionaire when the many things that you're in the bulwark that he's doing to enrich himself?

Speaker 10 Because I was at a presentation of some polling data a couple months ago, and one of the slides that stuck with me was just contrasting events and

Speaker 10 the success of Donald Trump going to a fake McDonald's, like a McDonald's that had been closed today just to have his campaign event added.

Speaker 10 The mimetic power of that, people saying, gosh, Donald Trump went to a fast food restaurant for five minutes and served fries. That's powerful.

Speaker 10 It was obviously a response to Kamala Harris saying she'd worked at McDonald's and not really using it for anything.

Speaker 10 We're all talking about advertisements and authenticity that's being packaged, but it turns out

Speaker 10 you don't need to prove, like, here is my resume, and here is how I've never once gone on a liberal arts college campus. You don't need to do all that.

Speaker 10 You just need to like, I honestly care about these people, and I'm coming up with a thing you can do too is I came up with this idea because I've been doing this listening tour of people with normal jobs, and I think this would improve their lives versus, hey, we did a focus group.

Speaker 10 That's a pretty big difference that might land you in the same place, but one of them is just really powerful to watch.

Speaker 11 One more from Zoran. I just thought this was the best part of his speech last night.

Speaker 11 And it might be, well, he ended up wanting to focus on affordability and the rent freezing and the free buses and all that.

Speaker 11 Depending on what Donald Trump decides to do, this might end up being the biggest fight of his first year. Let's listen to him talking about immigration.

Speaker 10 New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants,

Speaker 10 powered by immigrants,

Speaker 10 and as of tonight, led by an immigrant.

Speaker 10 So hear me, President Trump, when I say this. To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.

Speaker 11 Not bad. Good politicking, but also a preview of, I think, a real potential fight to come.

Speaker 11 If the Republicans are true to what they are saying to you and other reporters, that they want to make Zoron the face of the party, the best way to do that is to pick a fight with him in New York City over immigration.

Speaker 10 Yeah, or I think it's Andy Ogles in the House. There's a couple of Republicans who are going to try stunty legislation to deport him.
Or Randy Fine, I think, has a version of this.

Speaker 10 Anytime you're doing that, so there's a thermostatic shift. People elect Trump and they say, oh, wait, he's against immigration in a way that I don't like.
I wasn't paying enough attention.

Speaker 10 Do we get back to the mood of 2017 where every Democrat was constantly saying we need more refugees in the country? I don't think we get there. But

Speaker 10 the idea that some immigrants should be allowed in the country and improve it when they're here is pretty popular outside of Stephen Miller's office in the White House.

Speaker 10 This White House has gone very far in a nativist direction that I think Mamdani is comfortable rebutting.

Speaker 10 Because yes, there are Republicans who say, I would like to remove people like him from the country. And there are people who say he doesn't seem to be harming anybody.

Speaker 10 I remember when I was in New York early in the year checking in on the Mamdani race, because I met him when he was running for his assembly seat and then covered DSA, et cetera.

Speaker 10 One thing I was asking his campaign is, like, hey, not that long ago, there was the Ground Zero Mosque in New York, and there was a huge backlash that Republicans used around the country, the idea of building a Muslim center near the old World Trade Center site.

Speaker 10 And the campaign was, they were aware of it. And then I talked to voters, they weren't aware of it.

Speaker 10 But I hadn't appreciated how much the country had moved on with some nudging from people like George W. Bush and Republicans who are not blood and soil nativists, saying,

Speaker 10 actually, America is pretty good that America is able to integrate different kinds of people and different religions and live together peacefully.

Speaker 10 There are conservatives who, one thing I've heard is most Muslims

Speaker 10 who live in America right now came after 9-11, and that is bad. I've heard that from national conservatives before.

Speaker 10 When there is a case of terrorism or something, yes, Trump is very good, better than any Republican at turning that into a nativist issue. He did this in 2015.

Speaker 10 It's crazy if you go back now and look at, if you were there, Republicans like Marco Rubia, who are very uncomfortable with the Muslim ban and things he was saying.

Speaker 10 If we're back in that place where there's a mayor of New York trying to abide by the laws of New York, who is a Muslim immigrant, getting racist attacks for things that are legal and people support, support, I think it will backfire.

Speaker 10 How would he play, for example, Texas moving migrants from the border to New York, which backfired? I don't know. But this is the thing.

Speaker 10 When Donald Trump is president and changes the policy environment, like that's not as much of an issue.

Speaker 11 Yeah, it's different. That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 11 Like, actually, it puts him, I think, in a stronger position than it would have been two years ago because Democrats don't have to be for unpopular refugees being admitted or unpopular asylum cases being admitted.

Speaker 11 Like, what he has to do is fight against

Speaker 10 to fight against the Ovaries.

Speaker 10 It's just like Deant Vorid is allowed in the country and nobody else.

Speaker 11 Yeah, it's like he's got to fight against.

Speaker 11 He's going to do the thing that Brad Lander did, like, go down to the, you know, to where, you know, CBP and ice thugs are rounding people up and fight for his people.

Speaker 11 Anyway, I think it'll be a big story next year.

Speaker 10 High key. Looking for your next obsession? Listen to High Key, a bold, joyful, unfiltered culture podcast coming at you every Friday.

Speaker 11 Now, my question is, in this game of mafia that we're going to play, are you going to do better than me? Say it now.

Speaker 10 Duh. Period.
I'm going to eat. You're going to do better than me? I'm going to eat.
Yes. I literally will.
Ryan will.

Speaker 10 I cannot wait till we both team up and get you out, and then one of us gets the other out because we didn't realize they were a traitor the whole time and you were actually an innocent.

Speaker 10 Y'all won't even know that I'm a trainer.

Speaker 11 This is going to be delicious.

Speaker 10 Well, thank you for coming to our show.

Speaker 10 And on that note, thank you for coming to my show.

Speaker 10 Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 11 As you mentioned, you cover the DSA. You knew Zoron before he was Zoron.
You cover random things. I threw a couple of races here into some random stuff I saw yesterday.
I'm going to throw at you.

Speaker 11 At any of these that you think are interesting, you can weigh in on, or there's something you saw that I don't mention, go ahead.

Speaker 11 There are a bunch of ballot initiatives in New York that were YIMBY that all passed. So that'll help Zoron a little bit.

Speaker 11 The YIMBYs are on the rise in a bunch of cities. In Minneapolis, it looks like they had a socialist candidate running as well that's getting lumped in with Zoron and right-wing media, Somali guys.

Speaker 11 Seems that

Speaker 11 they do rank choice. So I don't know if we have a winner yet, but it seems like he's not going to win.

Speaker 11 Democrats win huge in Georgia on the Public Service Commission, statewide race, off-off year, but still.

Speaker 11 Bucks County, there's a district attorney race that was really kind of centered around tough on crime. Bucks County is a big swing area.

Speaker 11 You had this kind of tough on crime Republican type running against a Democrat.

Speaker 11 Democrat wins pretty handily. Any of those things jump out to you? Anything else you saw last night that was of interest?

Speaker 10 Yeah, the Bucks County race, so this is

Speaker 10 they won the DA's office for the first time in Bucks County history. Bucks County has

Speaker 10 Democrats won, yes. Historically, Republican County, it moved to the left because of the suburbanites moving from both Philly and New York, actually.

Speaker 10 It's a nice rural, jeaper area, and it started to move back to the right.

Speaker 10 Republicans are very focused on voter registration and have been just very successful in getting Republicans registered in Pennsylvania across the country.

Speaker 10 If you remember Shane Goldmacher's New York Times story about this, and yet people voted and they got rid of the Republican. And this happened all over Pennsylvania.

Speaker 10 So I'm paying attention because Josh Shapiro is in the mix for 2028.

Speaker 10 Shapiro was very successful and the new party chair was very successful in just maximizing Democratic performance, not just statewide. You can turn out Allegheny and Philadelphia, et cetera.

Speaker 10 But yeah, Flipping Bucks County, the County Council of Luzarin, which is one of the, if you remember, Hazleton and the mayor of Hazelton going to Congress and the popularity of his anti-immigrant measures, there was a reversal there.

Speaker 10 Democrats picked that up.

Speaker 11 Yeah, and that's up by Scranton. I mean, that is prime Trump's Lena Zito country.
You know, this is old.

Speaker 11 This is like your generic, like used to be Democrat, white working class Rust Belt area that Trump has done well in. And they flipped the city council.

Speaker 10 Yeah. And so how much of that

Speaker 10 Erie County, which is a swing county that used to be super Democratic, and then Trump won it again in 2024. Democrats got rid of, they probably pretty big margin because I think they're done counting.

Speaker 10 They flipped back the county executive office. They just won a lot down the ballot in addition to winning those state Supreme Court races.
I think those did get attention.

Speaker 10 The fact that Democrats wanted to retain these justices, but it was harder to cover because, you know, the justices, they did won TBA, but they're not out there at diners answering questions about Zoram Mamdani.

Speaker 10 La theme is: talk to Democrats. They were not BSing me.
They were not nervous, but they thought they'd win. And then they won by 20 points.

Speaker 10 And Republicans were just not able anywhere in Pennsylvania to say, hey, guy who voted for Donald Trump, it's very important for you to come out for this more obscure election to support Donald Trump.

Speaker 10 How much of that is people who might come back

Speaker 10 to vote against Shapiro, might come back for J.D. Vance, I don't know.
But a lot of Republican gains just were wiped away in Pennsylvania. The Minneapolis thing is

Speaker 10 it's interesting because of how conserved media cover it. I think they call the Omar Fateh the Minneapolis Mamdani, which that's alliteration.
That's pretty good.

Speaker 10 But Jacob Fry is probably winning a third term in Minneapolis. He won his second term after refusing to endorse defunding the police and abolishing the police department.

Speaker 10 He is favored to win this term over a DSA member who was much more left-wing than him. And Tim Walls actually campaigned for Fry over this guy.

Speaker 10 It divided the party locally, but if you are a Democrat, let's say you're like a Democrat who wants to rebut your opponent that everyone in the entire party is represented by the worst thing Mamdani said.

Speaker 10 Progressives are, I think they've regained some ground in cities, but it's very important how Mamdani renounced to fund the police many, many times. And I talked to him in debates.

Speaker 10 He ran to the right of where he was when he got into politics. A more pro-socialist candidate in another liberal city is not going to win.

Speaker 10 So it's not like the part, I don't think the Democrats have figured out the Goldilocks situation where they know exactly how they should run around the country. But yes,

Speaker 10 the progressives have some limits.

Speaker 10 They need to be a little bit more careful about their criminal justice policies to win. And then where Democrats are running in swing districts, they really figured out what to do.

Speaker 10 I mean, they just had a fantastic night. Everywhere that was competitive, and they had the can they wanted, and Republicans had the message they wanted.

Speaker 10 The only places I was seeing Republicans hold on were Nassau County and Long Island, on Long Island, where Mount Bounty was obviously a big issue.

Speaker 10 They held those offices, they held Manchester Mayor's office. They did okay in places where they already had won.
They were not gaining ground anywhere.

Speaker 10 In Pennsylvania, the inability to do that right now, after Democrats are clearly losing ground with registration, that is significant. That is a problem for them.

Speaker 10 They're just kind of talking past today.

Speaker 11 Final topic: the South Carolina governor's race. Really important

Speaker 11 race to cover. Congresswoman Nancy Mace is running for governor.
She continues her psychotic break. It's been hard to follow.

Speaker 11 She sent, I believe, 97 tweets about an incident that she had at the airport where I guess she yelled at a cop, and then it has spiraled out of control in a lot of ways just for kicks to let people uh you know to give people a nice some landing gear for this podcast i want to listen to nancy mace discuss this encounter that she had at the airport when the

Speaker 10 dirty cop yes

Speaker 10 the cop or cops that filed a false

Speaker 12 incident report you're giving other cops a bad name And I'm coming for you. So you need to know that.

Speaker 12 But my interaction with the dirty cop was like,

Speaker 12 was it one second or was it two?

Speaker 7 It's really hard to tell.

Speaker 12 And if you're not man enough to take my feedback, my constructive feedback for you, not doing your job,

Speaker 12 then

Speaker 12 what are you going to do when Al-Qaeda shows up at the airport? Like,

Speaker 11 I don't know what's happening with with our girl Nancy, but she is off the rocker. Any other any thoughts on that? I looked at a Winthrop poll in South Carolina government's race.

Speaker 11 She's in the Republican primary. It's tight as a tick.
She's a lot undecided. She's right now tied to the lieutenant governor, Pamela Yvette.

Speaker 11 What's happening there with Nancy?

Speaker 10 Well, this is not the first time that she has

Speaker 10 said that there is a conspiracy that only she has unraveled, and she needs to be there to get justice, and she needs more power in the governor's office to fire the people who have been behind the scenes

Speaker 10 smearing her, hurting her ability to

Speaker 10 be the best Nancy May she can be. And this extends to the mall cops.
Yes, the mall cops.

Speaker 10 She has always done a lot. I've never gotten over how in 2021, she just got elected in 2020.
She upset, it was like a Republican district, but she overperformed the polls, one.

Speaker 10 And then a few months later, reported that Antifa, which I didn't know was in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, had graffitied outside her house slogans like, pass the PRO Act.

Speaker 10 And these Antifa members were never caught. They've never been seen in South Carolina again.
And even then, I was talking to some Republicans who she does not have a lot of fans in South Carolina.

Speaker 10 Republican strategists who said, like, yeah, that's interesting that there's not any video evidence of what happened on her house. So South Carolina has a runoff system.

Speaker 10 And the question Republicans had was, is she famous enough to get through the first round of the runoff to then lose to literally anyone else?

Speaker 10 Because you've got the lieutenant governor, you've got the attorney general.

Speaker 10 They were pretty confident that Donald Trump, who she has gone back and forth with in humorous ways, you know, he's terrible. No, he's not.
I'm going to campaign Trump Tower, et cetera.

Speaker 10 Other Republicans in this race have been more supportive of Trump.

Speaker 10 Alan Wilson, the Attorney General, son of Joe Wilson, the congressman, was a day one Trump endorser and did not dither at all, like she did. So Republicans I talked to are

Speaker 10 different kinds of amused by this. I know some some who are not amused, they really just can't stand her to want her to go away.
It's not funny to them anymore. But

Speaker 10 every tweet she sends gets them closer to just anyone beating her in that primary and her going away.

Speaker 10 That is what I hear from South Carolina Republicans who are not, and now all of them obviously are in league with the cops and the trilateral commission and the other people who are trying to destroy Nancy Mace.

Speaker 10 So keep grain of salt there. Yeah.

Speaker 11 Yeah. RuPaul's drag race is involved.
Everybody, everybody's out together. Nancy, Tay Weigel, appreciate you, man.
One of the real ones out there doing reporting.

Speaker 11 As I mentioned at the top, you also did a book about Prague Rock. I asked you to choose a Prague Rock song to take us out with.
Do you have a comment on why you've chosen this number for people?

Speaker 10 Oh, yes. It's King Crimson's One More Red Nightmare.
And unimaginably,

Speaker 10 if you are in the red team, did you have a good night? No, you had the opposite of a good night. You had a nightmare.

Speaker 11 So keeping it nice and

Speaker 11 it was sweet dreams. It was sweet dreams and la resistance.

Speaker 11 Dave Wago, we'll holler at you next year during primary season. All right, man, appreciate you very much.
Everybody else, we'll be back tomorrow for another edition of the podcast. See you all then.

Speaker 11 Peace.

Speaker 11 I've been

Speaker 11 to the same

Speaker 11 wow.

Speaker 11 So make it as it falls down. My neck as I turn round.

Speaker 11 I heard voices shouting, they are

Speaker 11 shouting.

Speaker 11 The play was from the song sea, and I told you this can be the steward baby, but the candy for baby.

Speaker 11 One for more than a dye man.

Speaker 11 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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