Kamala Harris & Liz Cheney Take on Donald Trump
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Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's show, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are each facing multiple October surprises in the final month of the race. And later, I sat down with Stacey Abrams this week to talk about Georgia, the new restrictions on voting and having your vote counted, and what you can do about it. But first, Trump's criminal conspiracy to overturn the last election is back in the news, thanks to J.D. Vance, Jack Smith, and Liz Cheney.

Vance kicked off this news cycle during the debate by refusing to say that Trump lost in 2020, which became the night's most talked about moment and led to an ad from the Harris campaign. Then on Wednesday, Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed a filing from special counsel Jack Smith that detailed lots of new evidence in his case against Trump. And on Thursday, January 6th committee co-chair and Kamala Harris supporter Liz Cheney

appeared with the vice president in Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of Lincoln's Republican Party in 1854. Here's some of what they said. One of Trump's aides testified that shortly after that, this aide received a phone call alerting him that the vice president had been evacuated for his own safety from his office off the floor of the Senate. This aide recalled rushing to the dining room

to tell Trump, hoping that this information would convince him to take immediate action to ensure the Vice President's safety. Instead,

After this aide delivered that news, Donald Trump looked up at him and said, "So what?" That is depravity and we must never become numb to it. We must defeat Donald Trump on November 5th. There is not an ounce, not an ounce of compassion in Donald Trump. He is petty, he is vindictive, and he is cruel.

And Donald Trump is not fit to lead this good and great nation. I tell you, I have never voted for a Democrat. But this year, I am proudly casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris. There are so many powerful forces that have been intent on trying to demean and belittle and make people afraid.

There are many who know it is wrong and then there are those who have the courage to speak out loudly about it and the conviction to speak truth.

And, you know, it is so admirable when anyone does it, and especially when it is difficult to do in an environment such as this. But Liz Cheney really is a leader who puts country above party and above self, a true patriot. And it is my profound honor, my profound honor to have your support. Dan, you know what they say, the most successful Democratic campaigns always close with the Cheney.

What did you think of the event, the message, and the strategy behind doing this now? I will say I still have this muscle memory that comes from just years of dealing with crazy Republicans, of them shitting on Barack Obama, that I sometimes struggle with these events. It's why you've seen me very visibly on this podcast have real challenges with Mitt Romney's deserved place on the resistance Mount Rushmore that he's currently on.

But I, so sometimes I look at this, I'm like, we are really campaigning with Liz Cheney. But then you step back and think about it. It's like,

It makes incredible sense. She's a very important messenger. The message is right. And ultimately, if we are going to win an election in a political system where the electoral college is biased towards Republicans, we need to build a big tent. And we should invite everyone who wants to defeat Donald Trump into that tent. And that includes Liz and I even hate to say it, Dick Cheney.

Yeah, I mean, I think you either believe Donald Trump poses a unique threat to the country and to democracy, different than what many of us Democrats believe about Republican policies or other Republican politicians in the pre-Trump era, or you don't. And if you do believe that Donald Trump poses a unique threat that goes beyond just policies, but actually, you know, being willing to

break the law, put himself above the law, use the vast power of the federal government to punish people who don't support him, throw our votes away. If you believe all that, then having someone like Liz Cheney talk about that

and showing people that this is not a partisan issue, this is not Democrat and Republican, this is about, we can all argue about our policies later, then of course you want Liz Cheney at an event. And that was what the, look, we're going to talk about all the January 6th stuff being back in the news, but I think it's perfect timing because...

The event wasn't about how like, and Kamala Harris is moderate, so I can support her. It wasn't about policy. It wasn't about ideology. It was about one thing. The fact that Donald Trump tried to throw people's votes away. And then when he failed, sent a violent mob to Congress. Which is like, you know, should be enough. Yeah. We shouldn't even be having this discussion right now, but we have to anyway. And so I'm glad Liz Cheney's out there doing it. Just two points on the strategy here that why this is smart to do is,

People are so cynical about politics and politicians that they are more likely to believe and be persuaded by people who share their identity in some way, shape or form. And therefore there's a whole group of Republicans, Republican leading independents, uh,

Former Trump voters who are going to be more persuaded by a Republican establishment member like Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger or some of these other people than they would be by Kamala Harris or Tim Walz or us or other Democrats out there campaigning. And so she is a trusted messenger to a group of people. To put some numbers on that, in the May Republican primary, Nikki Haley got 76,000 votes in Wisconsin. Joe Biden won Wisconsin by 20,600 votes in 2020.

There are voters out there who are uncomfortable with Donald Trump who are still not comfortable enough to vote in a Democratic primary. And Liz Cheney might be able to get some of them to come over and vote for Kamala Harris. And even if you get a third of those people, that's enough to win this election.

And again, I think it's a, you know, it's a very powerful message for Liz Cheney to say, like, I've never voted for a Democrat in my life. And she probably wouldn't vote for Kamala Harris in any normal election. But if Donald Trump becomes president again, we might not have another election. That's that's sort of what it comes down to. I've seen some scattered concern on the left about Harris campaigning with a neocon hawk like Cheney, especially at a time of war in the Middle East. You have any worries about this?

You know, I never miss an opportunity to worry about something. But I will say this is pretty low on my worry list. Me too. It's just Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, basically all the Republican figures. Cassidy Hutchinson, who was on the pod. She came out today also said she was Sarah Matthews as well. Kamala Harris, Sarah Matthews, Alyssa Farrah Griffin, like just a lot of former Trump officials, not just for not just Republicans, like former Trump officials have done this.

They have demanded zero policy changes, no moderation whatsoever. They are not asking anything of Kamala Harris or the Democratic Party.

At all. They're just saying, I'm supporting them. I'm supporting Kamala Harris. I'm supporting the Democrats because Donald Trump is unfit for office. That's all. So, like, who cares? Yes. Like, the idea that, like, no one's saying that Liz Cheney is now going to influence Kamala Harris' foreign policy. That's not on the table. No one has said that. Kamala Harris hasn't said that. Liz Cheney hasn't said that. So, like, I don't get why you would fucking care. It's just, it's, there are people... It's silly to me. I mean... It's really silly. It's...

Some of the complaints I've seen are people who are already legitimately mad about the Biden-Harris administration's foreign policy, right, as it relates to Israel and Gaza. And this is just another way to make that point. But it doesn't change anything that Liz Cheney was on that stage today. Yeah, no. If you're mad about the policy, be mad about the policy and be mad at them for the policy, right? It has nothing to do with Liz Cheney.

So the day before the Wisconsin event, Cheney, Harris, and the rest of us got a nice surprise when Judge Chuckin made public Jack Smith's 165-page legal brief where he lays out the evidence he hopes to present to a jury someday in his case against Donald Trump. As we all know, the trial was supposed to happen before the election until the Supreme Court ruled that Trump is immune from criminal charges that result from official acts as president. Smith then dropped those charges from the initial indictment

He now argues that all the crimes in this brief and the new indictment were committed by Trump, the candidate, not Trump, the president. But don't take our word for it. Here's how Neil Cavuto of Fox News covered the story. In this newly unsealed court paper, we're learning that former President Trump resorted to crimes that have been to cling to power after the 2020 election. In this indictment, we wait. What's this? We're learning that Donald Trump did crimes. Yes.

We got, I mean, this is just a classic Posse America episode. We got Liz Cheney. We got Neil Cavuto. What do we got coming up at the back end here? So what were your favorite, before we get into whether this matters, all that kind of stuff, what were your favorite revelations or highlights from the legal brief? Which, by the way, the clip that we played from Cheney, at the beginning of that clip, it was her talking, when Donald Trump said, so what, about Mike Pence.

being in danger. That was from this brief. That was a new piece of evidence that just in time for Liz Cheney to talk about it at this event. I found it hard to answer this question because when you say, what's your favorite moment about the details of the former president trying to steal an election with violence? It's sort of... I don't know if favorites are the right term. Maybe we can call them lowlights. Yeah, the lowlights. Lowlights is good. So there are three. One of them is obviously the one that Liz Cheney mentioned. I just...

We should just pause for a second on the sort of sociopathic behavior it takes you to say, so what, when you find out that your closest coworker's life is in danger because of a mob you sent to kill them. There's no moment of compassion, empathy, or self-reflection there. It's just like, so what? Whatever happens, happens. Yeah.

I mean, it is truly deranged and dangerous. And it is to the deletionist point. Something like that should be nowhere near power at any level. Right. You shouldn't be able to manage Hardee's, let alone be president. It's like whatever. Just like insanity. Insanity.

The second one is there is a revelation in there about a quote unquote advisor who people generally believe is Steve Bannon, although he's not specifically identified in the filing, where Bannon told a group of Trump supporters that he's going to declare victory. That doesn't mean he's the winner. He's just going to say he's the winner, which really gets to the heart of just how much bullshit this is. Because one of the

the defenses of some of these Republicans or support Trump is no, no, he truly believed the election had been stolen. Now that does not give you the right to send a violent mob to the Capitol, even if you do believe it, right? That's, that's not how that works. But the fact that it was all a fucking con from the very beginning is very damning. Then the last one is,

There's a reference in there about Trump making fun of Sidney Powell and saying she's bonkers, which is important because if he doesn't believe her, then it's evidence that he doesn't believe that the election was actually stolen. But it says – they don't say what the reference is, but it says he made a Star Trek reference to refer to apparently Sidney Powell's bonkerness. I don't know, but –

I just can't imagine Donald Trump making a Star Trek reference. It seems he's other than Hannibal Lecter. He has no pop culture affinity for anything at all. So like, is he a Trekkie? I'm sort of curious about that. The crazy part about that is he does whatever to communicate that Sidney Powell is crazy, whatever reference, but,

And later he wants to appoint her special counsel and considered her plan to seize voting machines. He wanted this. This is who we wanted in charge of this. Someone that he thought was crazy. I'll just add on your on the Mike Pence point. So before the aide tells him, you know, Mike Pence has been evacuated because the rioters are 40 feet from where he was sheltering. And Trump says, so what? Trump was alone there.

in the White House dining room tweeting

And had been on Twitter. And by the way, it's very interesting that Jack Smith says he has forensic evidence from the phones and from the televisions. Basically what Trump was watching, what he was doing on his phone. He was on Twitter the whole time. Who among us, right? And he sent out after he saw that the Capitol had been breached and that everyone in the Capitol was in danger. That's when he sent out the tweet saying,

attacking Mike Pence for not having the courage to do what's right. And when he knew he was in danger. So that was something. There was also, apparently at one point he said to Jared and Ivanka, Trump did on Marine One, it doesn't matter if you won or lost the election, you still have to fight like hell.

And then lawyers and campaign staff also told him that all the election fraud claims were bullshit. And Trump said the details don't matter. Even after they told him it wouldn't hold up in court. They have him berating Pence over and over all these conversations he has with Pence. He's just berating him. Who could possibly have been the source for those? Yeah, right. Well, Mike Pence testified, of course. And a couple of days after Christmas,

He has this phone call with Pence where Pence again for like the 10th time tells him he's not going to try to overturn the election for him because he doesn't have that power. And Trump says, people are going to hate your guts. People are going to think you're stupid. You're too honest. And then after he hung up the phone, he tweeted that his supporters should come to D.C. on January 6th because he knew that now Mike Pence wasn't going to do the right thing.

You're too honest. You're too honest. You're too honest and people are going to think you're stupid. People are going to hate your guts. And of course, he also knew that the electors were fake and not legal. And so did his whole team. And he wanted to send them to Congress anyway and to have Republicans accept them and to have the fight in Congress, even though he was told and his team knew that they were completely illegal and wouldn't hold up in court.

It's just fucking wild, man. Obviously, this is a shitty substitute for the trial we had been promised until the Supreme Court stepped in. But, you know, is this a story that you think Democrats can keep in the news for the next few weeks? Should we even try?

Yeah, I think we should absolutely try. And the events of yesterday in Wisconsin are ways in which we continue to do that. Hopefully there are other endorsements that can come out. There are other ways to talk about this. There's this documentary on YouTube called Fight Like Hell, which is a very powerful account of what happened on that day that people should watch and share with people in their lives. I mean, this is an important story. And I had this reaction recently.

I rewatched the Vance debate after we finished podcasting at a very fast speed. Because sometimes it's so hard to be like taking notes, watching, and I want to go back and watch it one more time. You watched the whole thing again? Yeah, 1.75 speed. So it's pretty fast. Still, real glutton for punishment. Well, I had a message box to write, so I needed to stimulate the brain. But one of my takeaways from watching at the time is like,

Because if you watch the debate knowing what J.D. Vance's answer is going to be about the election, then it just seems so fucking out of touch with reality. It's so normal. They're like, oh, I know what you truly believe in your heart.

And they're being, JD is being nice to Tim Walls and the moderators are asking normal questions. We have to get to the 95th minute or whatever it is for this question about the thing that overhangs everything, which is Donald Trump is a person who has been

He is facing criminal punishment for trying to overthrow an election that included a violent assault on one of America's three branches of government. And we hardly ever talk about it anymore. And I see and I get it. I see all the polling. I know what all the polls say about what people's issues are. And I see the testing. If you watch the ads, right? Forget what people are saying. If you go into a battleground and you watch the ads, it is immigration, abortion,

That's what you see. And I see the testing for all those ads and they test very, very well, but it does sometimes feel a little bit like we're missing the forest for the trees here.

I was just going to say the same thing. Like I've struggled with this is like the strategic question that I've probably struggled with the most because I've seen all those polls. I have heard from voters that that say like when they ask them, what's your most important issue? They talk about inflation. They talk about cost of living. They talk about abortion. Some even talk about immigration and crime. And you don't hear a lot of January 6th. You don't hear a lot of democracy.

I've heard people say, oh, well, January 6th happened a long time ago. Like, can we just move past that even though it was bad and Donald Trump was bad because, right? But like, I think this shows the limits of polling and focus groups. And it's also a language issue. Like, I think there's a difference between asking someone about the future of democracy or what happened in the past on January 6th

in which they might say, "Future democracy? I'm trying to put food on my table, right?"

I think there's a difference between that and asking them, do you want a president who thinks it's okay to throw away your votes or ignore the law or ignore the courts or shoot you if you go out and protest the government? Because then they might think, you know what? Maybe prices were lower when Trump was president, but I don't know if I can trust him to keep me, my family, the country safe when he's promising to let violent insurrectionists who attack cops out of

out of jail and worse, which is what he's been saying. So like, I think there is a difference. And I think if you just, if just common sense, if you are trying to persuade someone who's about to walk into the voting booth that like, who really thinks they're going to vote for Donald Trump, that they really shouldn't do it.

Like, what are you going to say at the very end? Right. You're going to say you're going to do all the arguments like there's going to be a national abortion ban. There's he's going to try to take away your health care, like all the stuff. But then it'd be like, do you remember what happened?

Do you remember how he tried to overturn the election and then sent a mob to the Capitol? And he might do it again? Like, that's probably the argument you'd make at the end of the day. So I do think that as we get close to election day, like, the argument about the threat he poses to our fundamental freedoms and to the country has to be front and center, or at least included with those other issues. Yeah, I agree with that. This is a real challenge. And if you...

Like Biden ran his campaign against Trump as a, he was essentially running with Donald Trump was a threat to democracy. Biden was going to save democracy. And I never liked that strategy. I was talked about it before. I, I think it's right that the Harris campaign never talks about saving democracy because it is not that democracy is not online here. It's that democracy is a language. It's the language. It's just too, it's too vague and ethereal. And it just makes you the defender of a political system. Most people don't think doesn't work.

I appreciate that the Harris community has transitioned from democracy to freedom. I think that's much better messaging. It is notable. I went back and looked. In their convention speeches, Biden uses the term democracy four times in one paragraph, and Harris uses it twice in the whole speech. Yeah. And both times are not really in reference to this form of democracy. It's about America being the greatest democracy in the world and something else that's very – and I think the other one's in relation to Ukraine. Yeah.

Having said all of that, I think there is a way to take the freedom message and use it as an opportunity to talk about how dangerous Donald Trump is. Because the big lie stuff is not good for Trump. And when he's talking about the election, it's not good for him. We've seen that in polling before. Because it makes him look like a lunatic who has lost touch with reality, who is dangerously dumb, basically. He's not dangerously strong. He's dangerously stupid. And...

Getting him to talk about it helps. And he was at an event today. And what did he do? We went on talking about how he won the 2020 election. And that is good because there is data for progress polling from January 2024, which shows that majority of voters will not support someone who has pushed the big lie. And obviously, Donald Trump is unique in that. But it just shows that only 30% of Republicans, only about a third of Republicans believe the big lie. The vast majority of the country does not.

Also, even if you're going just by, you know, polling focus groups, dial tests, according to the Harris campaign, Vance's answer on 2020, when he refused to say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, scored the lowest rating of the night on their dial tests, lower even than his abortion answer, which was second place. And then Waltz's answer,

scored the highest. And, you know, we talked about this on the last pod, but in that CNN's focus group, there was that Michigan undecided voter. And he said he's now decided because of what J.D. Vance said about January 6th and how he wouldn't necessarily certify the election in 2024. And

That young man clearly knew about January 6th. He had had all this information before. It's not like it was a new revelation to him. But what it did is remind him that these people are fucking nuts. And he was undecided before then and now he's not, right? So like I said, I think that the way Biden did it with democracy, the language was a little too highfalutin. It was a little too John Meacham. And...

And like the sweep of history kind of stuff. And I think that if if she can, like you said, if she can sort of bring it down to earth a little bit and talk about it in terms of like how Donald Trump could affect people's lives, just how just like how his abortion ban could affect people's lives, just like how him taking away health care could affect people's lives, then I think it could be powerful.

Okay, before we go, one quick housekeeping note. With a little more than 30 days to go, some of us sickos are living and dying with every single poll.

If you want to understand what all that means, check out Dan's subscriber exclusive podcast, Polar Coaster. I think on this week, Dan, you dig into the latest polls of the battleground states and you try to figure out what's going on with the youth and Latino voters. Well, John, there's nothing that will cause the Polar Coaster bat signal to go up like a New York Times Siena poll of the battleground states. And so we had the opportunity to talk about the

Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Nebraska, two polls that came out. And we did dig into a bunch of really good, interesting polling on the Latino vote and the youth vote that came out, including the Harvard Youth Poll. So it's a very interesting episode that I think will make you better understand the polls, maybe even feel a little bit better about what the polls say is actually going to happen in the selection. Better you say. Okay. I mean, it depends how bad you feel now. Yeah.

And if you want more news and analysis designed for the folks who want to beat Donald Trump and MAGA extremists, subscribe to the Message Box newsletter that Dan writes all the time for honest analysis of the latest headlines. I start my morning with it every day. You should too. And if you want to subscribe to all this, head to crooked.com slash yeswedan.

That's right. It's crooked.com slash yes, we Dan, and you can unlock a seven day free trial for both friends of the pod and message box. What a deal. Can you imagine how personally painful it was for me to remind the marketing staff to add the horribly cringeworthy? Yes, we Dan landing page into this. I love it. I love it. I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to get my yes, we Dan t-shirt and wear it to Michigan this weekend. Please don't do that.

Conclave is a gripping thriller from Academy Award-winning director Edward Berger, starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and Isabella Rossellini, only in theaters October 25th. The Pope is dead. The throne is vacant. Conclave is an unprecedented and illuminating glimpse into the inner workings of the Catholic Church as it follows one of the world's most secretive and ancient events, selecting the new Pope.

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So the Trump campaign clearly doesn't want the final weeks of the race to be about the 2020 election and January 6th. But the Harris campaign is dealing with their own set of October surprises. Hurricane Helene has devastated parts of North Carolina, Georgia and the southeastern United States. Up until right before we started recording, 45,000 dock workers at some of America's biggest East Coast ports were on strike. Everyone was worried this could lead to shortages and higher prices. But guess what? There's a deal.

They got a, I think, believe a 60 something percent raise. And then they have paused the strike until January 15th after the election to then go back to talking about. So to see if they can settle other issues because it wasn't just pay to settle other issues in the meantime. And so the strike is off. That means that your bananas are safe.

Thank God. That was the big concern. I like bananas. Coffee, too. There was coffee issues. Well, the coffee could wait. And medicine. I mean, more importantly, there was a lot of medicine that came in. But the issue was the bananas, which is they don't last very long. And so... Because people had...

I did a lot of reading on the, see how bad the impact would be on prices because I'm a lunatic. And it wasn't going to be in the initial period that bad because companies had been pretty smart. They knew it was coming. They ordered stuff at stores stocked in advance. They routed some things to the West coast ports, but the big issue was bananas.

Because the most bananas come in through the port in Wilmington, Delaware. And you can only keep bananas for so long. That is true. That is true. I did read in the New York Times that after a week, everyone could handle basically like a week of a strike. And there was also auto parts coming in. So people weren't going to be able to get their cars. It would have been bad. The longer it dragged on, if it dragged on like a week or two weeks, three weeks,

shit could have gotten bad so that's really good and every day of the strike was the six or seven day it was like took like six or seven days to untangle the bottleneck from that yeah all right so we got the hurricane we got the strike take that off the list um but we still have uh bb netanyahu who seems uh intent on escalating the war in the middle east after iran launched a missile attack on israel this week uh so still quite a tinderbox in the middle east

Trump campaign clearly sees a political opportunity here based on this new ad that Donald Trump posted yesterday. Like us, China also saw their weakness. So did Putin. Then he invaded Ukraine. Hamas saw Harris anti-Israel statements and will use it as a green light to keep murdering Israelis. And Iran thinks Harris is so incompetent. New intel shows they're trying to help Harris win the election.

America doesn't need another TikTok performer. We need the strength that will protect us. I'm Donald J. Trump and I approve this message. Disagree. I think we need more TikTok performers. I like to pull that question. So I usually don't join the New York Times pylons, but I found their story about this quite annoying. Yeah.

Here's a quote from it. The scenes of striking workers, hurricane devastation in the southeast and missiles over Israel are unwelcome complications to Kamala Harris's case to keep Democrats in power. A reminder that while Ms. Harris has framed her candidacy as a fresh start for the nation, she very much is part of the administration still in charge.

What do you think, Dan? Should Kamala Harris have prevented the hurricane, forced the shipping company to pay higher wages, and brokered Middle East peace by now? I am confident that the reporters who wrote the story right now are writing a huge story about how Kamala Harris solved the strike. She solved the strike. Yeah, that's it. Fresh start right there. Just to their broader point here, I just got one thing I have to say. So bear with me for one second. Imagine that one of these two presidential candidates

had been president during an unforeseen crisis and then shit the bed so badly that a million lives were lost, the economy crashed, and it took us years to dig out of it. Now, imagine that candidate was not named Kamala Harris. Yeah. In fairness, Donald Trump did get some bad press from that. He did, but the point is- And then he lost the election. That's my point, right? The underlying theory here is that

A chaotic and dangerous world is better for Donald Trump than Kamala Harris. And I think we ought to at least test that proposition because Donald Trump has recently lost an election because the world became too chaotic for his erratic behavior. But there's also this silliness about like how much control

do the president of the United States and especially the vice president of the United States have over all of these issues, right? So the hurricane is probably the craziest to me, right? Like the hurricane, they have no control over the hurricane. They do have control over the response to the hurricane, which so far has had, there's been zero complaints from any of the officials on the ground, including the Republican officials. The only people that have complained are Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and, you know, their henchmen.

And so the idea that the hurricane could politically damage Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, especially Kamala Harris, is insane to me. And I think that she has handled it very well. Now, Middle East, you can definitely talk about, you know, President Biden's influence over what has happened in the Middle East over the last year and whether he should, you know, condition aid to Israel or.

but even then, even if he did, like, this is not a war that U.S. troops are fighting. And, you know, Trump always does this about Ukraine too, right? Like U.S. troops aren't fighting in this war. You can definitely argue with the Biden administration's foreign policy, right? And you can criticize it. We have before too. But like,

Just this notion that anything bad that happens in the world or in the United States is now also bad for Kamala Harris, regardless of whether she and Joe Biden have caused it, have control over it, can fix it. It just drives me nuts. I think it's fair to wonder that as things happen in the world and they affect how voters see the world, which candidate that

Helps or hurts? Yeah. Yeah. The thing that worried me most about this from a political perspective is prices. Both the dock worker strike could have spiked prices for things. And what's happening in the Middle East certainly can spike prices, as we learned today when Joe Biden inarticulately answered a question about Israeli strikes on Iranian oil facilities and the price of crude oil went up 5%. That could theoretically redound to Donald Trump's benefit, but we do not know. It's not the same thing as saying,

what is happening is somehow statement on the failures of Kamala Harris. That's the problem with that Trump ad is I don't think it's believable by saying that they did these things because of Kamala Harris. I don't think voters are going to believe that. That's not what they think the vice president does. They could have said the Biden-Harris administration. They could have said Joe Biden and then said that Kamala Harris would continue those policies. But the way they did the ad was just, as with so many of Trump's ad, there's just a little too much spit on the ball.

Yes. And I guess my complaint about the media coverage on this is like absolutely talk about it is it is fair game. We do it all the time to talk about the political impact of national and international events. Right. And it is also fair to criticize the administration's policies.

but at least educate readers, viewers on what is within their control and what is not within their control. Right, right. And like what is actually done. And then you can talk about sort of the political effects. This is one of my, the greatest, not that this is the point of this podcast, but one of the huge flaws in political journalism is it doesn't try to inform voters about things as so much as it tries to interpret their ignorance for in terms of politics.

Instead of telling them what's actually going to happen, we're going to accept the premise that they don't understand. And then we're going to use that to sort of wildly prognosticate about what could possibly happen.

Yeah. Now, let's talk about what worries us the most here. I mean, for me, like, I am very concerned about what's happening in the Middle East, you know, primarily because of the devastating loss of life that we have seen over the last year and the idea that there could be an even larger war that we get drawn into, that other countries get drawn into, that more civilians die. I mean, it's just... We could talk about that forever. We'll leave that to Tommy and Ben on Pod Save the World. But...

The political impact, I think there are two. One is, like you said, voters go to the polls and they just see chaos.

all over the world and they want someone to control it and they don't think that anyone is controlling it and they think that you know donald trump's tough and and strong and maybe he'll take care of it um which i think is nonsense but that can be a feeling that voters have and then i think the economic impact right now i was reading today i do think that we are uh oil prices are uh less

sensitive to disruptions in the Middle East than they used to be, partly because the United States is now producing record amounts of oil and natural gas. Places like Brazil, too, right? So there's a whole bunch of other countries have stepped up production over the last decade and diversified their energy sources.

this is the ideal here, not just drilling more oil, but actually producing more renewable energy, that if it is just a fight between Israel and Iran, it's going to have minimal impact on oil prices. Now, if Iran starts attacking Saudi Arabia, if they start fucking with the shipping of oil in the Strait of Hormuz, then now we're having some

some problems, right? Oil prices, gas prices just rising a little bit, you know, right a couple weeks before an election. Not good. No. Not good. No. Not awesome. So what do you think that Kamala Harris can or should do differently than she's already doing about all of these things? I mean, like we said, I think she...

She did everything right in response to the hurricane. What about anything else? Well, about an hour ago, my first thing I would say is she should solve the strike. And she did that. Check. Congratulations. Well done. She solved the strike. Yeah. She should take a victory lap on that. If we are in a situation, it's so hard. Could these things change the election a lot? We've already had criminal convictions, assassination attempts, candidates switches, huge debate wins and losses. They all move the polls like 1.5% on average. And so it's

None of these things are game changers. I think that if people's anxiety about the world, their fear of chaos and insecurity go up because of what's happening out there, right? War in the Middle East, hurricanes, you know, I think this would have been massively magnified had the strike continued and people couldn't get some of the things they needed. But if those feelings go up, we do have to focus a little more energy on just how we

erratic and incompetent and frankly dumb Donald Trump is. And he's not the person you want with steering the state, the ship of state during a crisis. We've seen that before and he has failed miserably at it and just, and he's way worse than he was four years. He fucked up four years ago and he's declined significantly since then. I think that's an important part of the closing argument here because I think one, one,

feeling that the Harris campaign is probably fighting against with some of these undecided voters or people who haven't decided, you know, whether they're voting at all is, you know what? We all survived four years of Donald Trump and he was an asshole. He was bad.

I don't think he's the greatest guy, but we all survived it. So is it really going to be that bad? And I think you do have to make the argument that not only has he deteriorated, but the people who will be around him in power are just infinitely worse than the people he had in power. And this is where the

all of the members of his cabinet and his staff who have abandoned him and are not voting for him this time. Some of them are voting for Kamala Harris. Some of them are writing in, I don't know, the ghost of Spiro Agnew or some shit like that into the ballot. But they're not supporting him, not as vice president, not as chiefs of staff, not as defense secretaries, not as – you can go on down the list. And I think that is a helpful reminder to people in the very last weeks here about –

This is not a normal election. Donald Trump is not a normal candidate. This isn't a battle over tax policy and size of government. It is about stopping a very dangerous, dumb, declining person from gaining power again. And also, crises are going to happen no matter what, right? There's going to be natural disasters. There's going to be international events. No matter what, the next president's going to deal with this. The question is,

Who do you want dealing with the crisis? And that's where, to your point, you make the case every time something happens about not only what you would do and what Kamala Harris is doing now, but like what Donald Trump would do and how he would handle crises like this. This was a story on Thursday. Two former Trump White House officials told a Politico reporter that they had to show Trump voter data to get him to help California wildfire victims

which he ultimately only did because they showed him that in Orange County, there were actually a lot of Republicans, Republican voters. And when he found out that there's actually a lot of Republicans in Orange County, he said, OK, you can release the funds to help people who are victims of wildfires. And I think like it is such a that is a perfect message for Kamala Harris and Harris campaign, especially on a day where she appears with Liz Cheney. And the message is country over party.

Donald Trump is someone who is going to help the people who can help him and punish the people who do not support him. That is his view of power. That is his only ideology. It is not conservative. It is not populist. It is only, if you can help me, I'll help you. And if you don't support me, you're fucked. That's it. It's vengeful narcissism.

Yep, that's it. And I think that's how she handles the next couple of weeks. So Kamala Harris will undoubtedly be asked about all these events during her big 60 Minutes interview on Monday night. Donald Trump will not be asked about anything because he pulled out of the interview after initially agreeing to it. Won't debate, won't do interviews with people who aren't Trump fans. You know, he's a guy who usually loves attention, even when it's negative. What do you think is going on?

I don't know what's going on with Donald Trump. It's pretty clear that his campaign believes to their core that the more Donald Trump speaks, the worse it is for the campaign. They let him do these rallies, and it's really just two hours of insanity, which fortunately for them, the local news kind of translates into something resembling coherence. And there are organized opportunities, not really message opportunities for the campaign. But being on national TV, and even if you watch these rallies, which we are

forced by professional obligation to do. He's bad. I mean, he did this. I watched the whole thing live when he decided to do a press conference after Iran launched the missiles at Israel. And he could not have been less coherent, like dangerously incoherent. And he was tired and he seemed like he was- He made no sense. He was stumbling over his words. I mean, if

If Biden had done that when he was in the race, there would have been a huge national story. But we've just – I hate that – you know what? Now we've turned into media critics that we once were and have tried to stop being. But it's just we have accepted a level of –

incoherence, stupidity, dishonesty, depravity from Trump that just goes unremarked upon now. I am very glad that Kamala Harris had the opportunity at the debate in front of 70 million people to invite everyone to go watch a Donald Trump rally. And I do think any undecided voter, if you have undecided voters in your life, please show them the rally. You can put it on 1.75 so they don't have to sit there for two hours. But it is if you want to vote for that after the two hours, it's

By all means. If you do that, you will gain one vote for Kamala Harris and lose one friend for yourself. But that's a price. Given the stakes of this election, that's a price worth paying. All right. When we come back, my interview with Crooked's newest host, Stacey Abrams.

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Joining us now, New York Times bestselling author, voting rights activist and the host of the brand new crooked show Assembly Required, Stacey Abrams. Hello. Thanks for having me. Welcome to L.A. Nice to have you here. Glad to be back. So I want to talk to you about voter suppression, but I'd love to start with your thoughts on the 2024 campaign, which is in its final weeks.

Last time we chatted was right before the debate that changed everything, I think at a live show in Brooklyn. We now have a new nominee who, at least according to the polls, is more competitive in Georgia than Biden was. But Kamala Harris is still a few points behind Donald Trump, at least according to the polling.

How do things feel on the ground in Georgia? And what are you hearing from voters? Georgia feels like a battleground because that's what it is. And I like to remind people that we are a purple state because you actually have to fight there, not because we know who's going to win. And in any fight, someone's going to be up, someone's going to be down. Right now, she's pulling within the margin of error.

I will say the energy is really good. The one caveat is that, of course, we are now going to have to grapple with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

But we have seen the Biden-Harris administration respond, trying to get resources to the communities. And that's important, first and foremost, because of humanitarian reasons, taking care of the people who need to be taken care of right now. This is not the first time that a hurricane has moved through Georgia this close to an election, but it's the first time it's been as widespread. And so what I think we are going to see is that people are going to have to grapple with who do you want to have support?

serve you next because recovery from a hurricane recovery from these kind of Extreme events it doesn't happen overnight and it doesn't happen in a few weeks All of us are going to be focused on how do we make certain every person is taken care of first? but I do think that there will be a recognition of and certainly a sensitivity to How do we make certain that we're ready for the next storm the next calamity? Mm-hmm

In these last few weeks, the vice president and her campaign can warn people about what Trump and Republicans plan to do in a second term on any number of issues. The Harris-Walls campaign can spend time talking about their own plans on any number of important issues. For voters in Georgia who are still on the fence, what do you think they most want to hear from Kamala Harris?

I would say that Georgia voters who are on the fence are not deciding between Vice President Harris and former President Trump. They're deciding between voting and not voting. And so what is incumbent upon the candidates is to remind people of the consequence of not voting, that there are real decisions that are going to be made by this next president. We live in a state that

Until two days ago was still under a six-week ban and will likely be back under that six-week ban once the state Supreme Court reinstates the abortion ban that has killed people in Georgia two women have died and so what I think is going to be the most telling part of this process is What do you want next and who do you believe will deliver that and if you show up? Do you want to be a part of making that happen? Hmm

So on the latest episode of your excellent new podcast, Assembly Required, you talk about voting access with Ari Berman, the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones. Let's play a clip from your conversation. Can you talk about what's different about voting access in this upcoming election as compared to 2020? What tactics to restrict voting are new and what do you recognize from years past?

So, there's really been a continuum since 2010 of restrictions on access to the ballot. But those got turbocharged by Donald Trump's effort to try to overturn the election.

So since 2020, 28 states have passed new laws making it harder to vote in some form or another. And some of them, as you know very well, were direct response to the things Trump said in 2020. From my vantage point, and I think you would agree with this, is that the big thing since 2020 is that we have voter suppression on the front end.

But now we also have voter suppression on the back end, meaning that they're not just trying to make it harder to register to vote or cast a ballot. They're making it harder for votes to be counted because that was Trump's ultimate goal in 2020. So that to me is the most alarming tactic we're seeing in places like Georgia. And I think it's the newest tool in their arsenal to try to undermine democracy.

So Ari mentioned voter suppression on the back end, meaning you might vote, but your vote might not be counted. Can you talk about what some of those new restrictions look like?

So Georgia's been hard at work making it hard to vote. The two most concerning issues involve the state election board, which is the body that has been running amok with creating new rules that we believe are patently unconstitutional and certainly illegal. One is that it gives the individual member of the county election board the ability to essentially decertify the election, not count the ballots.

The second is that it requires a hand count of every ballot in every precinct. We're talking about a state of 11 million people, roughly 5 million possible voters. The sheer volume of hand counting could delay certification and therefore delay the allocation of electoral college votes.

So what they are trying to do is sow chaos to create these fail points in the system where either one person gets angry and says, or is not angry, is very cold and cool-headedly saying, we're not going to count this precinct. We're not going to count this county, meaning that the electoral college process grinds to a halt in the state of Georgia. Or we're going to draw out this process and

and possibly stir up questions of controversy and mismanagement that are not provable, but are so hard to deal with. We missed the deadline. And so, in fact, today, the judge ruled that there are going to be some

Basically, you don't have the right to not certify. In fact, he said, you know, there's a deadline. You're going to get it done. Unfortunately, this case will continue to move through the state courts. We don't know what will happen at the end. But either of those two things could mean that Georgia's 16 electoral college votes do not have the force and effect that they should have. But more than anything, they undermine confidence in the system and they create, again, chaos in how we understand how elections should run.

And the reason that this could really hurt the outcome of the election is there's a deadline by which every state has to certify their election and send their slate of electors to D.C. And if Georgia misses that deadline because they are hand counting every vote or because

someone on the board decided to decertify and people are challenging that, then that means that Georgia's electoral votes will be decided by the House delegation? So there are a couple of

Scenarios. So one scenario is that they simply don't get counted, that they if the certification isn't completed, then you reduce the number of necessary electoral college votes by the number that are not included. And so that shifts the number, the 270 to win no longer becomes the operative number.

We don't know what happens because we haven't seen this happen. The last time the Electoral College got sent to the House of Representatives was Andrew Jackson. And so, you know, we don't have a good accounting of what that looks like.

And you haven't until that point. You also didn't have the extreme gerrymanders because the thing to remember, if it goes to the House of Representatives, it's not the number of members. It's the delegations. That means if you live in a state like, oh, I don't know, Wisconsin, where in terms of sheer number, you have more Democrats. But in terms of extreme gerrymander, you have more Republicans.

the Republican delegation makes the decision, not the number of Democrats versus Republicans in the House. Yeah, I think people, and a lot of people don't understand this because when we talk about the potential for a 269-269 tie going to the House, say, well, what if Democrats win the House? But it doesn't matter because Republicans control more state delegations in the House. So,

Are the legal challenges to these two new rules aimed at just declaring the rules unconstitutional altogether? Yeah. So we've had the strange bedfellows moment where Democrats have sued and Republicans have sued both to mitigate. It will not be shocking to anyone that the Republicans are trying to mitigate in a different way. Yeah. They're like they should be able to do all of it, but let some of it go through.

Democrats are saying it's patently and facially unlawful, so strike down what they've done, in part because the process they used was unlawful. The governor has the responsibility that he is refusing to meet, which is to investigate the failure to abide by Georgia's Open Meetings Act. The first set of rules, the ones that changed to concertify, happened with these called meetings that did not abide by any of the rules in the state of Georgia,

The Republican attorney general said, yeah, it's bad and we don't like it, but the governor doesn't have to do anything about it. And the governor has hidden underneath that protective cover of cowardice. And so they haven't done anything. My issue is this. It does not matter.

Who does it? When you undermine democracy, you undermine it for everyone. And these laws are giving a permission structure for the rules to change in the middle of the game, in the middle of the process. And no one knows what it means. There's a phrase that they're using in some of these rules called reasonable inquiry, but they don't describe what's reasonable or what the inquiry looks like. And it's that absence of certitude that then...

creates more concern and more worry and undermines the confidence in the system. And that's why I say it's designed to sow chaos. So that's Georgia. Yes. Where else have there been new voting restrictions that concern you? Arizona. I was actually recently there working with Native American voters. They are deeply concerned because

One of the new rules in Arizona requires proof of citizenship, which seems innocuous except that it's to prove citizenship does not simply mean that you have your social security card. Every state that is trying to make that a thing has a different set of rules. And that means you are sowing, again, lack of confidence, but also confusion in the system.

In addition, in Arizona, it's the difference between whether you get a state ballot, meaning you can affect the state legislature, which actually changes a lot of your life, or you can only vote on the federal slate.

That has been winding its way through the courts, and the issue becomes who can participate. Texas, as always, is a provocateur of stupid, and so they have decided to make, I mean, they've been doing massive purges. They require anyone registering someone to vote to register independently in each county. It's a lot of counties, and so if you are a voter registration effort, you don't simply get to register. You have to register each time in each county, and if you

Register someone without the appropriate permissions in that county. That registration can be thrown out and you can be fined. Florida has done something similar. North Carolina, they have a new voter ID law. And that should be of deep concern, especially given how hard hit North Carolina was by the hurricanes.

And so across the country, once again, we have states where these will be the deciding votes and the people who simply want to participate in our democracy are facing these hurdles not born of any real protective need. It's born entirely of an attempt to stop them from being hurt.

Right. I think even on the citizenship thing, people don't understand that a lot of people don't have their birth certificate or have their passport or maybe they know their social security number, but they don't have their social security card and just requiring all that documentation from a lot of people who aren't necessarily inclined to be.

Maybe they're voting for the first time. Or they can't afford it. Part of what we get used to, if you have all of these things, you forget how hard it is to get these things. If you're a homeless vet, you may not have all of your paperwork with you while in Georgia. You have to go to the county office.

where you want to register and have your registration authorized there, assuming that you live close enough to the county office to do so. But if you don't own a car, it may not be possible for you to make your way there. And that's presuming you live in a county with public transportation. Most Americans do not have passports. And every time we see these laws, the logic of the law is

Seems unassailable. Of course, only citizenship vote. Of course, you should have ID. It is never a question of the intent. It's a question of the process. And these rules are designed to make the process so complicated that to the untrained eye, it seems impossible.

It's innocuous, but to the person trying to navigate it, it seems labyrinthine and impossible. And it is the sheer exhaustion that often convinces voters not to show up, not because they didn't want to, not because they don't believe in their citizenship, but because they don't have the time or the resources to navigate all of the hurdles that are being put in place for their citizenship to be made real. Yeah, and they're just struggling to put food on their family's table all the time.

I know it hasn't been all bad news. It hasn't. On the voting rights front since 2020. What are some examples of places that have expanded access? Nevada's done a great job. They've done a fantastic job of starting to expand and give more people access. Pennsylvania is doing better. They're a state to watch. Oregon and Washington State are just show-offs. They do great.

Washington, I think they like send you an engraved invitation. You know, they send you cutlery. They really want you to vote. Nice. I like that. New Jersey did some good expansion. So did New York. And the thing to remember is that sometimes voter suppression is benign. It is not that they are actively working against you. It's just they're not doing what they can to make it easier.

We need more states that do automatic voter registration. We need more states that do same-day registration. People move. The rent is too high. And therefore, you may cross a county line and not realize it until you show up to cast your new ballot, and they tell you you can't. So we need more states to follow the lead of making it easier for our citizens to actually participate in their elections.

To your point that one of the more pernicious effects of voter suppression is people thinking, if I'm going to be turned away at the polls or if I'm not sure my vote's going to count, maybe it's just not worth it. What are some steps people can take to

to make sure their voices are heard in this election so start by going to vote.gov verify your vote verify that you were registered verify that you're not in one of the states that has indulged in massive purges georgia of course being a state that likes to purge in fact there was a really good story recently that when kamala harris showed up for her rally on july 30th

There are thousands who got re-registered who'd been purged from the rolls and said no I'm coming back I want to make sure I get hurt this time. So join them. Yeah, make sure that you verify that you are registered to vote The second is then encourage someone, you know to verify this only works if we have the shared system of resistance and we have to resist the attempt to diminish our votes so

The person you know who you know is going to stick with it, great. Call the person you don't know, the person who is always a little waffly when you ask how they're going to vote or if they're going to vote. And just remind them. The next thing is that make a plan to vote. It sounds, again, very basic. But when you plan to vote, you actually have to think through the steps, especially in the places that have been hit by the hurricane.

Making a plan to vote means how do you navigate things that you just did not imagine would be an issue, like the polling place where you were used to casting your ballot no longer exists. Let's find out. So go to vote.gov and make sure you know what the rules are in your state. Places like North Carolina have rules for natural disasters. Other states may not know what the rules are.

And then lastly, volunteer. If you've solved all the problems for yourself, help other people. So there is this wonderful organization called Fair Fight. Oh, I've heard of it. Thank you. That's doing amazing work on volunteering. So go to fairfight.com slash LFGV and let's freaking go volunteer. And it's a great place to sign up to help others who may not know what the rules are for them. They may not know how to navigate the difficulties.

But we've got to remember that if we are willing to verify and then volunteer, then we will vote ourselves to victory. I like that. Any last parting advice for our anxious listeners who are who've been riding the polar coaster in these final weeks?

you and i've had this conversation so many times look polls are a snapshot of where we are they are not a prediction of where we end up but they tell us the work we have to do so if you don't like the polls what are you doing to change the outcome what are you doing to touch more people to call more people to engage more people and stop spreading your worry stop spreading your worry

Spread your ambition, your ambition for women to have the right to control their bodies, for children to not have to go to school in fear, for us to have a democracy when this is all over. If we spread that ambition and we do the work of voting, then we get the country we need to have.

Spread your ambition, not your worry. I love that. That's great. Stacey Abrams, thanks as always for joining Pod Save America. Everyone check out Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams. Fantastic new episode just dropped with Ari Berman. And come back again soon. Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

So to end the show today, we also have a preview from our latest episode of Inside 2024, one of our subscriber shows where us hacks talk about what it's like to work on a campaign. In this episode, Alyssa Mastromonaco and I talk about rallies, why campaigns do them, whether they still matter. And we talk about some of our favorite Obama rallies that still make Alyssa tear up.

This was an awesome episode. This was a great episode. It was fun. It was so fun doing it with Alyssa. And Caroline Reston, our producer, joined as well. So check out the preview. And if you want to get access to Inside 2024, Polar Coaster, a lot of other great insider, behind-the-scenes Crooked content, subscribe to Friends of the Pod by going to crooked.com slash friends or signing up through Apple Podcasts. And now, here's Inside 2024.

Everything right now in the campaign, at least especially for the Harris campaign, is about capturing people's attention and trying to capture people's attention, which is much harder now than it was when we did a 48-hour campaign stunt in 2012 that actually did get a lot of attention. Now it's almost impossible to get people's attention. The debate did that.

She kicked ass at the debate. Her polls went up. We're already seeing some of the bounce she got from the debate fade a little bit in the polls, which is why I think the Harris campaign wants another debate. Trump is ducking the second debate. If they can't get him to do a second debate, I think that in those final weeks of the campaign in October, we're

the Harris campaign is not just going to do rallies like they've been doing and just running television ads and that's that. Like they're going to,

want to come up with very creative ways to break through the noise and capture people's attention since they don't have another debate. I think it's really hard to figure out what an event would be like or interview or anything that would break through the noise, capture people's attention. There is no more monoculture anymore. Everyone's getting their news from different spots. So like people need to brainstorm on this. If you guys have any ideas. I just had an idea. Oh, Caroline's got one idea. What? What?

presidential speed dating we gotta hold on she's married no not for like actually like dating but you get a bunch of like people i don't know people who go to a rally people who are interested you line them up with the candidate and like other staff members and they like round robin get to talk to them for two minutes each caroline who did you learn round robin from

Miss Mashed Monica. Misses, excuse me. Subscribers, friends of the pod, Discord users, send us ideas if you have them. That wasn't a good one? No, no, I'm just saying see if you can beat Caroline's idea.

I also forgot that we took Barack Obama to like the Middle East and Europe at the end of July in 2008. We were all about trying to break through. Yeah. And that was when it was easier. Is that considered a creative move? What? Oh, yeah. To go to the Middle East in the middle at the end of your campaign? He did a... Yeah, we went to Brandenburg Gate in...

and had a crowd of how many people? It's like 250,000. 250,000 people to show that like this was the Bush years. The world hated us because of Iraq, right? And so this was to show that like, look, if we elect this new leader, the world will once again love America. Wow.

But it was a high wire act because he was not the president. He wasn't the president. So we had no embassy support. We had no embassy support. A lot of the things you get when you're president, we just kind of, Alyssa just basically planned it herself. Did you both get to go? I did not. I did. I mean, Alyssa went.

And roads went, right? Roads went. I was, I was back home, but, uh, that was, um, that was, it was like five countries, seven countries, something like that. And a couple of days it was, um, it was crazy. We had to prove, we had to prove to the America that we could perform on a world stage. And then we came back and John McCain had those good, um,

superstar ads where he compared Barack Obama to Paris Hilton because we got so many people in Germany. But Fabs, do you also, like, just to give people a sense of like the choices that you make. So it was not that far before the election. It was sometime in October that we heard, Barack Obama's sister called me to tell me that his grandmother did not have much time left. And Plouffe said to me, he's like, listen,

If I, if I talk to him, he's not going to want to go. Like, think about this is the woman, the most important in his life. And he really struggled with like letting us down by saying, yes, I want to take like two days off the campaign trail and go to Hawaii. And I always think about what a hard decision that felt like for him at the time. And like, how, as a real adult now, that makes me sad because it was such the right thing to do. She passed away just a couple of days before the election.

Yeah, and also, I mean, first of all, yeah, she was like another mother to him, right? Yes. Because she raised him and his mother was working too. Basically, she raised his grandmother, his grandfather, and his mother raised him. So he was very, very close. But I was thinking about it, like, if it was now...

It'd be a no-brainer. It would be a no-brainer partly because, you know, there's just so many other ways to get in people's faces if you're a candidate. Back then, it didn't feel that way. It didn't feel that way, especially towards the end. It felt like a big deal that he was going to leave the trail for a couple days. But now... I feel like now it'll help you. Like,

Look what a sympathetic normal person who cares about a parental figure. Donald Trump was sat in court for a month. Didn't do much. He's still not. Yeah, right. He's still not. He's still just hanging out in Mar-a-Lago half the day. So, yeah, I don't I think that was it's interesting that that changed.

But Favso, here's my question. So we've talked about the rallies. But part of what I loved about this episode that sometimes I think we forget because we were such a team. You know, it's like people didn't sit around taking credit for whatever their contribution was to whatever happened that day. And I was watching so many of Barack Obama's speeches.

And Favs, all the ones I was watching, you fucking wrote. And I'm like crying and I'm tearing up. And I'm like, this is some like, these are like so West Wing. They're like better than the Sorkin crescendos of speeches that he wrote. And I want to-

I want to know, how do you, so at this point, how are you looking at speeches that you're giving Obama? Because also, unlike someone like Trump, he didn't just take one, you know, 12 minute speech and just give it over and over again. It was always different. So how did you, what makes a great, a rally speech great? And like, how did you do it?

Well, first of all, thank you. You know, had Rhodes help me and Frankel and Cody and Sarah, the whole crew. Credit where credit's due. And Barack Obama, of course. But anyway, first of all, it took us a long time, as you know, to get a stump speech. Stump speech is like your rally speech that was good. Meaning most of 2007 when we were campaigning, his stump speech or his rally speech was like,

45 minutes and he would like talk about policy details and then like we'd all get in trouble because it was not great and he knew it wasn't great and we knew it wasn't great and we were just it was really hard so starting from like the fall of 2007 a couple months before the Iowa caucuses he did the Iowa Jefferson Jackson dinner speech that was the first time and he had to memorize that speech because you couldn't read a prompter that was such a good spot we got like a

good 10 to 12 minute speech that he had memorized. And that became like the basis for our stump speech. And then that of course evolved. I mean, that, that became the basis for like when he won Iowa, there was like the Iowa night victory speech. There was the New Hampshire speech where he actually lost, but that was like the yes, we can speech. So we had this series of like primary night speeches

And then we ended up into the, and then of course it changed again by the general. But basically the key to a good rally speech is obviously you want applause lines, right? And you want, you know, applause lines like that's why I'm running for president. Big applause. That's what we believe. Big applause, right? Like that's why we're going to create good jobs here in the United States of America. Ooh, everyone cheers. But you do not just want a rally speech to be a collection of,

You want it to tell a story. And good stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. You want it to be 10 to 15 minutes. That's it. You don't want it to be super long. Or at least you want to have it written to be 10 to 15 minutes, knowing that the candidate's going to ad lib. So, yeah, you want to tell a story. You want to talk about who you are.

You want to talk about the problems in the country, what you're going to do to solve them, and then also sort of like wrap it up in a – like here's what works in a rally speech. Unity, hope, patriotism, populism. Those are like the four ingredients to a really good democratic rally speech. And then you've got to make it your own, and then you've got to change it up depending on what's in the news.

And so by the end of a campaign at this point, so John McCain would say something or Sarah Palin would say something and it would make news and then Obama would respond to it in his speech.

And so you'd have your typical stump speech that you'd give in a rally, but you would, we would call them either a topper. You'd top the speech with something new to respond to your opponent or an insert or something would happen in the news that you'd respond to. And you'd try to, you know, have a funny line that was quotable that would get the crowd going. But that's sort of how you would change the rally speech or modify it with each new event and keep everything fresh because the

The news is going to cover your speeches and you want them to cover something somewhat new because if it's the same shit over and over and over again, like people are just going to get bored with it.

That's our show for today. Thanks to Stacey Abrams for stopping by. Sign up for Friends of the Pod at crooked.com slash friends. And we'll hopefully see some of you in Ann Arbor. We're going to be there Saturday night. We're going to be in Philly Sunday night. Those pods will be in your feed afterwards. And I think we'll be back for another normal pod on Wednesday. Bye, everyone.

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