Trump's Halloween Costume
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Written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, critics say A Real Pain is a masterpiece. A Real Pain is playing in select theaters this Friday and everywhere November 15th. Get tickets today. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's show, with the election just days away. Days away, Dan. With the election just days away, the Trump campaign closes with sanitation worker cosplay and a full embrace of anti-vax conspiracy theories.

Kamala Harris prepares to rally with Cardi B and continues to hit Trump on abortion and health care. And because it's our final Friday show before Election Day, you and I are going to take a look at the battleground map, Dan, and talk about what we're watching for on Tuesday. You know what I'm watching for? More votes from Kamala Harris. Done. We've done the segment. Let's wrap this up with the outro and be done.

And then after that, Nebraska independent Senate candidate Dan Osborne stops by to talk about how he's fought to a tie in one of the reddest states in America and what you can do to help.

But first, Donald Trump showed up at one of his final rallies, dressed as a garbage truck driver and delivered a compelling argument to undecided women. My people told me about four weeks ago, I would say, no, I want to protect the people. I want to protect the women of our country. They said, sir, I just think it's inappropriate for you to say pay these guys a lot of money. Can you believe it?

I said, well, I'm going to do it whether the women like it or not. I'm going to protect them. Is there any woman in this stadium that wants to be protected by the president? No, thank you. Of course, Kamala Harris jumped all over this first at a press conference and then during her rally in Phoenix on Thursday. Let's listen. And Donald Trump's not done. Did everyone hear what he just said yesterday? That he will do what he wants, quote, and here's where I'm going to quote.

whether the women like it or not. He does not believe women should have the agency and authority to make decisions about their own bodies. This is the same man who said women should be punished for their choices.

He simply does not respect the freedom of women or the intelligence of women to know what's in their own best interest and make decisions accordingly. But we trust women. So obviously in the closing days, there's a whole bunch of things you can choose to make news on. If you're the Harris campaign, especially with Trump, he and his allies,

goons have given plenty of material to the Harris campaign over the last week, but they chose this comment about women protecting them, whether they like it or not. What does it tell you that the campaign saw an opportunity there? I think it's a great question.

I think it's three things. One, just tactically, you want to be on offense for every minute of this campaign because of the Madison Square Garden rally. Some other things Trump has said and done recently. There is this sort of emerging narrative of, I don't know why it's emerging narrative, but it is in the press coverage of this cycle of Trump saying outlandish things that are politically damaging to him. That makes it, and then when you write, and the conversation is, looks like Kamala Harris is ascendant and Trump is crap in the bed. And so that's one.

Two is, obviously, this has tremendous echoes of Dobbs and everything that's in Project 2025 about abortion and women's reproductive freedom and women's health care. This is a chance to go with that. And the third thing is, and it dovetails with some polling that I've seen that clearly the Harris campaign has seen as well because it shows up in some of their more recent ads, is this idea of –

extremists like Donald Trump with total control, unchecked power, controlling your lives, really resonates with a real segment of voters. And one of the groups, the Harris campaign is courting at the end here. We talk a lot about these Haley Republicans, Bulwark Republicans, as I think Tim Miller called them on the Wednesday pod. But there's also a subset of that group, which are working class white women.

who disagree, who may have had some disagreements with Kamala Harris on some issues, particularly some cultural issues, but they,

Firmly disagree with the Dobbs decision and these Republican abortion bans and that is a target audience here in the final days And it's it's pretty clear by now that it's not just Trump who's stepping in it with Women and his comments about abortion and his record on abortion. It's a lot of his bros, too so we have a supercut of JD Vance who sat down with Joe Rogan today, I guess for four hours and

And then you're going to hear Charlie Kirk, who's basically running Trump's ground operation or helping Elon run Trump's ground operation, their forces combined. And then you're going to hear my pal Jesse Waters. Let's listen. At the very best, if you grant, I think, every argument of the pro-choice side, it is a neutral thing, not something to be celebrated. I think there's very few people that are celebrating. I think it's so just...

nauseating where this wife is wearing the, you'll show it, wearing the American hat. She's coming in with her sweet husband who probably works his tail off to make sure that she can go, you know, and have a nice life and provide for the family. And then she lies to him saying, oh yeah, I'm going to vote for Trump. And then she votes for Kamala Harris as her little secret in the voting booth. Kamala Harris and her team believe that there'll be millions of women that undermine their husbands.

and do so in a way that it's not detectable in the polling. And if I found out Emma was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that's the same thing as having an affair. That to me... Oh my God. Let him finish. Go, Jesse. That violates the sanctity of our marriage. I don't know why you're friends with that guy. Emma!

Vote Harris, whoever you are. In the middle there, Charlie Kirk was referencing this Harris campaign ad that Julia Roberts does the voiceover. And it's these women are walking to the voting booth and there's a husband there too. And he's obviously like a Trumper. She goes into the booth and she like looks at another woman and she sort of just, she votes for Harris and the other one votes for Harris and they exchange a knowing look and-

Conservatives are outraged about this ad. And then, of course, there's J.D. Vann saying that it's too much that women are celebrating the Dobbs decision because they think it's politically advantageous to them. And then Joe Rogan's like, I don't think people are celebrating. I don't know if any of that's going to help with women. I don't know. What do you think?

Yeah. Doesn't seem that way. Or with men, frankly. That was a really interesting part. I only saw the clips. I've not buckled up for the four-hour Joe Rogan, J.D. Vance podcast yet. Do not intend to. But...

The way that Rogan, in the clips that I saw, went after J.D. Vance on Dobbs, and particularly the idea that some of these states would prosecute women for traveling to states where abortion is legal to have abortions, does speak to that we think of Dobbs entirely, or too often, I guess, primarily in the context of how it is motivating women to vote for Kamala Harris. I just mentioned these working-class white women. But...

Young men too, right? And there have been some ads that address this. Some of those ads are pretty bad, but there are ads. And if you remember when Dobbs happened, one of the people who came out and spoke most aggressively about it was Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports. And sort of the – he is the leader of the manosphere in a lot of ways along with Joe Rogan. And so, yeah, I don't think this is helping with women. And I don't think actually a focus on Dobbs helps them with anyone at the end. I think that is purely bad for the Republicans. Yeah.

Yeah. And J.D. Vance saying that, oh, I haven't heard of any of this. Like there's states all over the place now, red states that are considering passing legislation so that women can't even go over state lines to get abortion. Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, is currently has a lawsuit to try to get private medical information from women to see if they've gone over state lines to get abortion, which Liz Cheney brought up.

in one of her events with Kamala Harris, even though Liz Cheney has said that she's, you know, been pro-life for, you know, most of her career. So I do think that like the extreme consequences of Dobbs and sort of the level of control that the government now has over women, women's lives, uh,

people trying to plan families, medical care that women desperately need if they're miscarrying. It's just, I think it's resonating. It has resonated with a lot of people. It has since 2022. And I don't think closing on that is what the Trump campaign wants necessarily. We talked a lot about earlier in this campaign about

issue salience and what issues are in voters' minds when they make their decision. The economy is in most people's minds, but there has been this battle for the number two slot between immigration and abortion. And during the peak of the surge of the border and the migrants showing up being bused to towns, immigration became the number two issue by far. It's been about tied recently. And if you have a protracted conversation about Dobbs over the last few days, inches up a point or two here in some of these states, that could be the difference.

There's been a lot of focus on Trump's apparent polling gains with younger men, but much less on Harris's and Democrats' advantage with women, which we've seen show up in polls and election results, more importantly, since Dobbs. Do you buy that we may be headed for the biggest gender gap ever, as you see in some analyses? It seems very possible that we're going to, if not the largest, we will have a historic gender gap. That's happening in part because...

It's two ways, right? Gender gap happens because you have movement in both directions. If the polls are correct, right, which is the question looms over everything we say and think, you are seeing a huge surge of young women, millennial and Gen Z women to Kamala Harris. But you are seeing Trump make gains with Gen Z men over what Biden and previous Democrats had gotten. So if you have those two things, you're going to end up with the largest gender gap.

It's always hard to tell in the polling. There's been some good large sample youth polls, like the Harvard poll, for instance, and NBC did one as well. But in a lot of these polls, if you take the under 29 group and then you slice it in half, you're looking at a margin of error of like nine, sometimes more. And so it's sometimes hard to get into.

If you don't break it down by age and you just do what is the gender gap between women and men? So 2020 women went for Biden by about 12 points, 56, 43. That's like, you know, Catalyst, Pew. Those are sort of months after the election. They get the best read on what happened. So that was 12 points. And then men went for Trump by 52, 46. That's about four points. Right.

So far, the polls right now, because I was looking at the average of all the crosstabs for all the gender splits, women, Harris is winning by about 10 points, 53, 43. So still smaller than the Biden margin with women. And then men, so far, Trump is 52, 44, around eight points. So it's actually not bigger right now, at least according to the polls. But

these are the polls. These are not the sort of final results. So I do wonder that if like, you know, all of the, what we're hearing on the ground, everything we've seen in 20 elections in 22 and 23, if that bears out, will,

especially among women, will that gap, will that margin get bigger for Harris? And then that might help, you know, push her over the edge. That's, that's what we got to see on Tuesday, but there's been a lot of tea leaf reading of the early vote, uh, data in terms of gender breakdown, uh,

Should we just continue to ignore that early vote anecdotes? People are writing stories about it in Politico and Dempsey signs of optimism with gender and early vote. I don't know. I don't want to indulge. I think the one person who I think is worth listening to on the early vote is John Ralston from Nevada. I say that even though his reports for Democrats are not good. But there's a lot going on here that makes the early vote confusing. Yeah.

And you only know party breakdown, and that's not even in every state, of how many Democrats, how many Republicans voted. Another thing is there is no benchmark to compare things to because 2020 was incredibly unique. And since 2020, Republicans have started voting earlier, and you've seen a lot of tried and true stalwart Republican Election Day voters just vote early. And so for people like you and I and reporters covering it, we don't know a ton of information.

The campaigns, however, and I think it's worth explaining, after you vote, your name is now public as having voted. It doesn't say who you voted for or for whom you voted, but it is public. The campaign takes all information. The campaign has a model.

For everyone listening to this who lives in the United States, the campaign has a model for you. They have two models. They have a support score and a turnout score. And that's based on your vote history. It's both based on your partisan registration. It's both on any demographic and geographic information they have. And if you live in a battleground state, it's probably based on some consumer data they have purchased to understand. In the old days, it would be the magazines you subscribe to would be the information you use. In this day and age, it might be the websites or the things you buy and stuff like TV shows you watch, stuff like that.

And then so they rate you on how likely you are to vote for Kamala Harris from a score of 1 to 10 and how likely are you to vote from a score of 1 to 10. And so the campaigns know –

In the states, if as pluffy, the very evocative phrase pluffy use of an army of incels are turning out for Trump. They know if we are getting our lower propensity voters turning out. And the big mystery is the campaign has a support score for the independent or nonpartisan voters, but they don't know for sure who they're actually for. Sometimes that support score is.

Right. So you don't really know for sure what they're going to do. And so even the campaigns don't have a ton of information and they won't know whether their model is right until the polls close. And in states like Florida, where they dump in all the early vote data and the vote by mail results right away.

And they see those numbers and they'll know whether they correctly calculated support scores and turnout composition. So for people like us, I think you can, if you want to read it to look for something positive, go for it. If you want to read it, look for something for doom, that's your choice, but it's really sort of a black box.

Or if you want to just reach out to everyone you know and everywhere you can post about why Trump and J.D. Vance would be horrible for women and issues that women care about, you can do that, too. I mean, that's that is another option other than pouring data. I'm just going to say that for all the things we talk about today. You know, we're so close. All right. As I mentioned, Trump did talk about protecting women against their will while wearing an orange vest.

Why was he wearing an orange vest, Dan? Because he had just climbed out of a garbage truck, obviously. Why was he in a garbage truck? Because a comedian at his Madison Square Garden rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage, which led to days of bad headlines, which led to Joe Biden saying something unintelligible on Zoom that sounded like he might be calling Trump supporters garbage, which has led the Trump campaign to engage in two of their favorite pastimes, playing victim and

and running against Joe Biden. It was a theme Trump hit again on Thursday at an event in, of all places, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Here he is driving that message and talking about why he made a stop in Albuquerque. New Mexico, look, don't make me waste a whole damn half a day here, okay? Look, I came here, you know, we can be nice to each other or we can talk turkey. Let's talk turkey, okay?

First of all, Hispanics love Trump. So I'm here for one simple reason. I like you very much, and it's good for my credentials with the Hispanic or Latino community. Two days ago, Joe Biden called our supporters garbage. You're garbage. He called all of us garbage. We're garbage. I remember the word deplorable. Do you remember the word deplorable? How did that work out, Hillary? Not too good.

But they mean it, even though without question, my supporters are of far higher quality and I think much smarter than Crooked Joe or Lion Kamala. I mean, what'd you think of his Halloween costume? I'm glad my son didn't see it.

I know. I purposely didn't show Charlie the pictures of Trump in the garbage truck because I thought that it might make him like Trump more. I mean, Holly and I were looking at it. I was showing it to her on my phone while we were sitting on the couch and Jack ran over to see like, what are you guys looking at? I was like, nothing, nothing. Anyone driving a garbage truck is automatically his hero. And so I was like, you cannot see that. So if three or three and four year olds could vote, this would be a masterstroke. But alas, they cannot. Yeah.

I am confused as to why they want to continue to keep the Puerto Rico garbage story in the headlines now for the fifth day. I know they think that they've got their deplorable moment, even though it's Joe Biden sort of stumbling over his words on a Zoom and he's not the fucking candidate. Yeah.

Like, I'm like, and I get it. Right wing media is just running wild with this. Part of the reason I think they're running wild with it is because they all know how bad and damaging the Madison Square Garden rally was. Even like Megyn Kelly was complaining about it on her show, saying that the Trump campaign was stupid for, you know, it was like too broed up to have all this comedians there and making terrible jokes. And so I think they finally see this as an opportunity to

Turn the page, to borrow a phrase, on all that. But I don't know if it really does that. I think I'm sure that there's like Trump supporters who are like, don't call us garbage. But I don't think anyone's like, oh, Joe Biden mumbled on a Zoom. And so meanwhile, that must mean that Kamala Harris thinks that too. It's fucking stupid. Okay. All right. A couple of things here. First, there is no evidence whatsoever that Hillary Clinton's deplorables comment mattered at all.

Right. Well, that's a good place to start. Yes, because it has become a fact in the minds of Republicans and the media that that was the moment when the election fell apart for not, I don't know, Jim Comey's ill-timed letter to Congress that led the press to lose their fucking mind 13 days before the election. Maybe that was a thing. But the DePore was coming, not a real thing.

When you're in a bad news cycle, you're always looking for something to turn the page, be a circuit breaker on what's happening. Generally, you want to look for something that does not include the word that is most associated with the scandal you're trying to avoid.

Right. So this is a suboptimal choice. And not literally wear that word. Yes. Yes. Just drape yourself in it. The place and right wing media went nuts for it because they're for all the reasons you said, I would say traditional media, the political media didn't exactly color itself in glory. I mean, playbook on the morning after Kamala Harris's closing argument speech had like 17 paragraphs of insanity of we don't know what he meant, but it

could matter and here's how it could matter and here's the spectacle. There's a New York Times story that was so infuriating. I know, I know, I know, I know. All of them were like, they were reaching to, you can say whatever you want about Biden and analyze him and the pieces, right? But the

It was such a reach to tie it to Kamala Harris, who gives a speech at the same time that Joe Biden is saying this, where over and over in the speech, she talks about reaching out to the other side and stuff like that. And then is asked about Biden's like, well, he clarified. But let me just tell you, I think it's, you know, like totally did the right thing here.

And they're like, yeah, but Biden's gaffes are trailing Harris. Like, personifying Biden's gaffes? The gaffes are just walking around behind her? What the fuck are you talking about? But also any story that says something like it could spark a backlash or could. Well, no, that's not your job to predict what voters may do. Your job is to wait until they do it and then cover that.

And maybe they, maybe if it's on a fake bullshit issue, they won't do it because you did your actual fucking job and you explained what really happened as opposed to just doing preemptive political prognostication. Okay. Rant over. And I also, when it happened, I actually, when the Biden thing happened, I was like, you know, I rolled my eyes, but I actually wasn't worried for Kamala Harris because I was like,

this is if anything an opportunity for her she just gave a speech where she was like i want to reach out to the other side i want them to have a seat at the table donald trump wants to put them in jail uh his political opponents and blah and so she can now say you know what if you don't like what joe biden said i'm the person that you get to vote for and as i've said in this campaign i am not joe biden and you've all wanted me to separate myself from joe biden well here i am i gave this speech and that's a different message than what some people heard from joe biden a

Again, we don't even know what Joe Biden really meant. I would not imagine Joe Biden would call Donald Trump's voters and supporters garbage because that's not who Joe Biden is. Right. Everything he ever says. Right. But clearly he was just, you know, doing the Biden thing on Zoom. So there you go. I put a mega hat on. He put a Trump campaign hat on a firehouse like a month ago. I know. It's just come on. It's stupid. All right.

Let's back up for a second and talk about Donald Trump in New Mexico. You know, you heard in that clip, he, as usual, reads the stage directions. I'm here to get some, to boost my credentials with Latinos.

But what, what the New Mexico thing? He's not winning New Mexico. There's my prediction. He's not winning New Mexico. Oh, now we make predictions on this podcast. Just as you know what he's, he's not winning Massachusetts. I guess what? If he wins New Mexico, you saying he was going to win New Mexico is really low in the list of problems we have. No, one's going to remember that. No, one's going to remember that. Oh, well, I just clip again right now, but yes, it's good for the pundies. Yes. Um,

Yeah. So he's just head fakes show of confidence. What do you think? I think, I mean, he told us why he's doing it. It is to build credibility with the Latino community because I'm sure that morning he woke up as like, where are we going guys? And they're like, New Mexico. He's like, why the fuck are we going to New Mexico? And they're like to build credibility with the Latino community. And so he just said those words. It's, it's weird. It doesn't make a ton of sense. I don't know how much credibility you're building with Latino community and

The Trump campaign clearly has a thesis that's somewhat, to a certain extent, shared by the Harris campaign that I think is correct, which is all politics is kind of national now. The value of these local stops has gone down for a couple of reasons. It's gone down because local media just matters less than it did before. There's less of it. And when you've been to...

Green Bay, Wisconsin for the ninth time in the last four months. Like how much coverage are you getting? Right. Is it's not the same. It doesn't have the same sort of impact you did before. So he goes there and more people pay attention to it. And he's trying to craft a narrative that, um,

His campaign's ascendant, and they're competing in these blue states that traditional Republicans can't compete in, but he can because he's whatever. I don't think it's a great use of time. And I saw someone say that if he – oh, this was former aide to Marco Rubio – said if he loses Pennsylvania by 1,000 votes, he's really going to regret not going to Pennsylvania the final weekend. Yeah.

Yeah, Mark Caputo just had a story about this in The Bulwark, and he sort of asked around the Trump campaign, and someone said to him, we're the Trump campaign. We're going to go where the fuck we want to go, and too bad if you don't get it.

Okay, that's cool. And then I guess a couple other sources said to him just like, this is Trump. He wants to project confidence. He thinks that he can win some of these states. It's just in his head, in his gut, he thinks he can. And I think this is also like a, they're trying to

Show confidence so that if he loses, he can say, well, I couldn't. I was in New Mexico and Virginia. I thought I could win those like this. It's impossible. They cheated. That's the only way they can win is if they cheated. It's just it's helping his his stop the steal narrative if if he ends up losing. So. All right. Speaking of the Trump campaign, Supreme Confidence, Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick, the billionaire CEO of an investment bank,

He's suddenly he's out and about previewing Trump's policy agenda for the second term. Feeling confident. You guys all heard tape of him on the Wednesday pod scream asking Elon Musk at the Madison Square Garden rally how much funding they could cut from federal agencies. The answer was apparently two trillion dollars, a sum that would almost certainly decimate people's health and retirement benefits in this country. Unfortunately,

On Wednesday night, Lutnick did a CNN sit down with Caitlin Collins. She asked him several direct questions about Trump and RFK Jr.'s claim that RFK will be basically in charge of public health in some capacity in a Trump administration. And here's how it went. So I spent two and a half hours this week with Bobby Kennedy Jr. And what he explained was when he was born, we had three vaccines, right?

And autism was one in 10,000. Now a baby's born with 76 vaccines. But RFK Jr. is a vaccine skeptic. He pushes lies about vaccines. And I don't even think if Republicans... Why do you think he pushes lies? You said, I'm not a scientist and you aren't. Scientists say he pushes lies.

He says, if you give me the data, all I want is the data and I'll take on the data and show that it's not safe. And then if you pull the product liability, the companies will yank these vaccines right off off of the market. All right. So there you go. Vote Donald Trump if you want your kids not to be vaccinated anymore.

Because if he wins, RFK Jr. is going to get to be in charge of public health. And Howard Lutnick says that RFK Jr. wants to get the vaccines yanked from the market. Smallpox in every pot.

I mean, first of all, why should people care what this guy, Lutnick, thinks? He's the chair of Trump's transition. And so for weeks now, if not months, there's been a group of people in an office somewhere in New York, I think is where Trump says, that is plotting Trump's administration. Now, primarily they're taking Project 2025 and just sort of scratching, they're just doing, rewriting Trump over it. But what they're really doing is they're putting together lists of people who are going to staff the Trump government.

And this is not just the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, the cabinet members we know, it's the undersecretaries, the administrators, the people that we pay no attention to, but have tremendous power over things like vaccine policy, prescription drug approvals, all of these things. And so if the person who is in charge of putting this whole operation together, who is signing off on these lists of possible names that'll go to Trump, is someone with the

Not very well-informed views of Howard Lutnick. That bespeaks the kind of administration Trump will have. This is a person with real power to shape government policy through personnel. And so Caitlyn also asked him, is he going to be the Health and Human Services Secretary? And Lutnick basically said no. The backstory there is the Trump campaign isn't sure that RFK Jr. could actually get confirmed by the Senate to

to be the Health and Human Services Secretary, because even if it's a Republican Senate, you got your maybe your Susan Collins's and your Lisa Murkowski's and even some conservative senators who are probably like, this guy's fucking crazy. He he's an anti-vax loon. So they don't not sure they could get him confirmed. But Donald Trump could make him like a czar in the White House over the overseas, the public health agencies. And he could still have a lot of power to, again, rejuvenate.

Take vaccines off the fucking market. Like, do you know what our kids get vaccinated for? Hepatitis, measles, mumps, polio, tetanus, chicken pox, whooping cough. And...

Robert R. Kennedy Jr. doesn't fucking like these. He doesn't believe in science. He lies about them all the time. He was connected to a measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people, most of them children, because he went down there and talked to a bunch of anti-vax crazies.

and promoted them, called them heroes. And then now he's like, oh, no, I had nothing to do with it, even though at the time he was like, yeah, it's probably the vaccines that are problematic. And then, you know, vaccination rates fell dramatically in Samoa after he went. And then there was a measles outbreak and a bunch of people died. Like this is I know there's just a lot of shit flying around right now because it's the end of the campaign. But if for no other reason, vote because RFK Jr.,

could be in charge of vaccines and public health and could take vaccines off the market that you need to survive. I just, it's wild. Yeah. It's not completely wild. Also, I don't think it's very, it's not a politically wise move. No, it doesn't seem that way.

Just looked up, you know, 69% of all adults say that it's very slash extremely important to get kids vaccinated. Now, unfortunately, that number has fallen since the pandemic, but only among Republican voters because we all saw what happened there. But around 70% still saying it's pretty important to get your kids vaccinated.

It's a big number. It's a big number. It just the theme here of the Madison Square Garden rally, the crazy things Elon Musk has said, Mike Johnson saying affordable care should be repealed. Howard Lutt decided to do a CNN interview for reasons that are beyond is the Trump campaign really is acting like they have this thing in the bag.

And they're all that Chicago Bears quarterback who was taunting the crowd when the Hail Mary was being thrown. It's sort of like what they're doing right now. I know. I know. It's wild. Like Elon Musk out there talking about cutting $2 trillion and saying that, yeah, Trump's agenda would cause a temporary hardship on people. But you know what? That's okay. Because the economy would crash. We'd crash the economy. We elect us to crash the economy, repeal the Affordable Care Act, take vaccines off the shelf, just...

You know, Donald Trump and Elon Musk and RFK Jr., they'll all be fine. They'll all be fine. But everyone else is just going to have to go through some temporary hardship. Pot Dave America is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Talk about some different offices you've worked in. I don't know, just this one pretty much. This office, there's the U.S. Senate. There's the White House. Yeah. For a beat. Look, there's a lot of different types of offices out there. But one thing's for certain, choosing the right candidate for any office is a huge responsibility. Oh, kind of like presidency, you know. Mm-hmm.

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A Real Pain is playing in select theaters this Friday and everywhere November 15th. Get tickets today. Our final Friday pod before the election. I thought it was a good time to take one last, almost last, whip around to the battleground states. Do some final thoughts on what we're seeing, what we're looking for. I'm ordering these in terms of what I think is easiest for Harris to hardest. Okay. But you can tell me if you disagree. Okay.

I'm going to start with Michigan. Yep. I think Michigan is the easiest of the battlegrounds for her going out there. It's her best state in the polls, first of all. Right now, she's probably got the largest lead there of any battleground state. Of course, that lead is a... One is less than one in your times average, yes. Right, right. But also, Biden won Michigan by the biggest margin of any of the swing states, around three points, 150,000 votes. Of course...

the concerns there, things we'll be looking for, Arab American and Muslim voters upset with the war in Gaza. Of course, there's probably about 400,000 Arab American and Muslim voters in Michigan, 100,000 people voted uncommitted.

in the primary. So that is something to watch. I'm also going to be watching union members and just workers in general because they have been running a Trump campaign. Republicans and super PACs have been running a ton of ads about electric vehicles and telling people that Kamala Harris and Alyssa Slotkin are going to make you, you know, like give up your gas powered car.

And you're going to be forced to buy an electric vehicle and China is going to make the electric vehicles and it's going to put auto workers out of business. And so I'm looking at that. And then I'm looking at, you know, black turnout, black voter turnout. You know, my my gut is that her margins among black voters are the same around the same as Biden.

But turnout is the one that I wonder about, you know, whether black turnout will be the same. Now, there was a report from Detroit today that they are on pace in that city to already break turnout records from 2020, which would be great. A great sign. Obviously, a lot of black voters in Detroit. So anyway, those are my thoughts on Michigan. What do you think? Yeah, it's sort of a lot of the same things. The...

You know, how does Kamala Harris do in those parts in and around Dearborn, right, where there's a large Arab American population? Does she dramatically underperform Biden's numbers there? Does overall turnout go down because people don't vote? Do we end up with people who leave the top of the ticket blank? So I'm very curious about that.

And I'm really, because of that, I'm looking at third party vote in Michigan more than anywhere else. RFK Jr. is still on the ballot in Michigan. And Jill Stein, yeah. And Jill Stein. RFK Jr. was getting three and a half percent in a poll I saw the other day in Michigan. Where is that vote coming from? The way the poll was written, it seemed it was possible that that was helping Kamala Harris a little bit. But so that is the place where you have perhaps the largest group of people who voted for Biden in

who may be looking for somewhere else to go that is not Trump. And so that's a net loss of one for Harris. And can she make up for that? Because for people who listen to the Sunday pod, I talked to Ron Brownstein about demographic changes. And the place where there's been the most demographic change, where the share of the electorate that is white, non-college educated, has gone down the most is in Michigan. And so can she replace that with new suburban voters and higher turnout in Detroit? Yeah.

Yeah. And then the counties around Detroit for those suburban voters like Oakland County. Yeah. Those are the counties where she needs she really needs to run up the score and could possibly do better than Biden. All right. What do you think about Pennsylvania? That's my next one. Is that your next one? I would you go Wisconsin over before Pennsylvania?

I would probably just go for most of this election. I felt better about Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. And actually that's how both of the campaigns felt. I think that shifted in recent days here. And it's really basically could just come down to the fact that

Pennsylvania is just more suburban and more diverse. And even though that math is not the same for us, potentially, as it was in previous elections, it's Wisconsin, just an incredibly white state. And it's very, very rural. So that I would probably they're close, but I probably say Pennsylvania is her next best. It's the one Biden wanted by about a point and a half, about 80,000 votes, I believe.

Here, it's once again turnout in the collar counties around Philly and then the suburbs of Allegheny County. And then can she do well in some of – across Pennsylvania, there are lots of midsize cities, cities like Lancaster and Scranton. Can she do well in those cities and actually outperform Biden in those cities, which could make up for some bleed she might have either –

with black voters, if you are not correct about that, and I hope you are correct, or if she underperforms Biden with rural white voters. So sort of suburban areas around the big cities and then the small mid-sized cities have become places where Democrats have gotten a lot of vote from recently. You got a bunch of those in Pennsylvania. Yeah.

I think the bull case for some of these, a lot of these blue wall states is in these rural counties and small towns and small cities where Trump tends to do well, especially in the rurals, he wins with like crushing margins, but he doesn't have a lot more vote to squeeze out.

from the rural areas, from some of the exurban areas he does, the places outside the suburbs that are growing, right? So like you could see if the exurbs shifted to the right and Trump got more vote out of there, it could start canceling out some of her gains in the suburbs. But I think population-wise, right?

the Southeastern part of Pennsylvania, those suburbs South of Philly, like that has grown a bunch. So there's like an opportunity for her to, to have bigger margins than Biden and just get more vote out of there. And that, that, and same thing with, um, Allegheny County, uh, around Pittsburgh. So that, that, like you said, that, that cancels out hopefully either his strength in the excerpts or some combo of that plus, you know, black and Latino voters, uh,

inching towards Trump. And then obviously, obviously the Puerto Rican voters in Philly and Allentown, obviously something we'll be very interested in. Wisconsin. Can Ben Wickler save America again? No pressure, Ben.

I know it's like what you just said, which is like demographic wise of the blue wall states. I'm most nervous about Wisconsin, but organization wise and turnout wise, I feel best about Wisconsin because of the organization that Ben and the entire Wisconsin Democratic Party and all the organizers and volunteers who have worked tirelessly in Wisconsin since 2016 have put together.

So obviously, you will want to know what goes on in Milwaukee in terms of turnout and support levels for Harris. The other thing is Dane County, where Madison is, has grown a ton in the last four years. Some of that is people moving from other parts of the state into Dane, but it's also a lot of people who post-pandemic moved to other parts of the country. And so you have some in-migration of more college-educated suburban voters in Dane County. And can that population growth offset further losses in rural areas? Yeah.

Because, you know, Biden and Democrats, it's getting to be like Assad margins in Dane County now. And the turnout in Dane County is off the charts. I mean, there's like a few counties...

in swing states that have as high turnout with as good margins for Democrats than Dane County. I mean, we went canvassing in Dane County and that was, I would say, not exactly hard work. It was like, we've already voted. We know when we're going to vote. We have 17. We have signs for Kamala Harris, Tammy Baldwin, and like nine ballot initiatives in our front yard. Yeah, it's political utopia. Yeah.

But again, you know, Biden went up by 20,000 votes. And so the margin in Wisconsin just for, you know, voters who Trump get if Trump gets more votes or if Trump, you know, if Biden voters go back to Trump or whatever, it's just a smaller margin than it is in Michigan and Pennsylvania. So 21,000 votes. Yeah, that is why it's, you know, it's it's worrisome.

The suburbs in Wisconsin, the suburbs outside of Milwaukee have not moved as aggressively democratic as they have in Pennsylvania and Michigan and other in other battleground states.

I'm going to be curious to see if you see growth there. There were 76,000 Haley voters in the Republican primary in Wisconsin. Can she get 10, 15, 20,000 of those votes? That could really help. Yeah, for sure. Nevada, you mentioned earlier that John Ralston's, his blog about that he updates with the numbers from Nevada every night. It's not exactly been great, but-

One thing we've talked about is that voting behavior has just changed. And so Republicans are voting earlier now, and it's sort of hard to tell what's happening there. But I don't know. What do you want to say about Nevada?

I think Nevada is the test case about whether Trump is making real gains with working class Latino voters. They are, compared to all the other states we're talking about, disproportionately located in Nevada. And if he is, we will see that there. It's interesting. I assume you have Nevada in this place in the order because it was the largest margin of the remaining states. And in fact, the second largest margin in 2020. Is that why? Yes. But demographically, the hardest, I think.

I think it's demographically one of the hardest. I do think...

The turnout, the organization the Democrats have there, the turnout machine there is still pretty strong. You know, it's built by Harry Reid when when he was alive and he was Democratic leader. And it's quite effective. And I just noticed I just looked at it before we started recording, looked at Ralston's blog. The the margin is starting to come down right now. The Republic, if you just so the reason that Ralston and Nevada are like the exception to reading the tea leaves on the early vote.

is that now everyone in Nevada gets mailed a ballot and a lot of people in Nevada, most people vote before election day. So if you have an early vote that's like 65, 70% of registered voters or 65, 70% of the final vote, you can make some assumptions on that, right? You can't predict who's gonna win, but you can make an assumption. The challenge is as they have automatic voter registration in Nevada as well,

And when they automatically register you, if you don't pick a party, you're automatically registered just as with no party. And so you're seeing the share of no party voters like much higher than it's been in the past. And we don't know if those votes from the early vote, we don't know if those votes are for Kamala Harris or for Donald Trump.

And so Republicans have quite a lead in ballots right now over Democrats in Nevada, thanks largely to the rural counties in Nevada and Clark County, which is where Vegas is, is sort of underperforming its registration. So the percentage of the vote from Clark is just lower than it has been in the past. And the rules are like just blowing the doors off the place. And so, yeah,

If it stays that way, then it's going to be really hard for her to win. But the idea is that maybe all of these voters in Clark County who voted last time who just haven't voted yet are going to either show up in the next couple of days or show up on Election Day. And if they still live there, right? That's one of the hardest parts about Clark County in particular is there's just it's very transient. You have people who move in every cycle, people leave every cycle.

The addresses are different. It's like, it's like, we're about to find out. Yes, we're about to do it again. I would say I should have been, it was a real warning sign in my, should have in my 2016 life if I had paid more attention to the, to the door knocks when I was in Vegas. But so it's, it is all hard to tell. Normally Democrats go in with a big advantage and then Republicans have to win a shockingly high percentage of the election day vote. And they have failed to do that in most elections of consequence over the last decade or so.

Now that firewall will not exist of any consequence. It's the opposite. It's a Republican firewall now. That may even out by the time this is all done, but we'd bank all these votes and we're not banking a lead here.

But so everyone knows, Nevada plays a role in very few paths to 270 for Kamala Harris, just because it only has six electoral votes. There are some. I forget which blue wall state if you lose. If you lose Pennsylvania, you can replace it with Arizona. North Carolina or Arizona-Nevada. Well, if you lose Pennsylvania, you can win North Carolina or Georgia and Nevada and get to over 270. Okay.

Right. Okay. So there's a couple of paths it shows up in. I have Georgia next. Would you have Arizona, North Carolina before it? No, I would probably, I think you could flip a coin for Arizona, Georgia here. It really depends on- I kind of do too. It kind of depends on what narrative you want to buy, right? If you're correct that Kamala Harris is going to get to basically Biden level margins with black voters, then Georgia should be next in line.

because it is a huge black voting population, has obviously turned out in 2020 and 2022 to elect Joe Biden, Raphael Warnock twice, John Ossoff, almost elect Stacey Abrams twice, then Georgia would be the one. Also, very large suburbs, lots of college-educated voters. That is a formula for Democratic success.

The reason Harris is not pulling as well there is because in the polling, she is not doing as well with black voters. If that were to level set back to where it was, then it's a true toss-up state with maybe a Harris advantage.

Well, and the concern I have there is the concern with black vote everywhere, which is just if if she keeps the margins. But one of the reasons she's not doing well in the polls is that some black voters are just end up deciding not to vote and turnout goes down. Then that that could be a reason that she loses it as well. Yeah. I also think that Georgia is a state is like we've you know, in the Trump era, a lot of the polls we get to Election Day and it's like, oh, they've understated Trump support.

Georgia is not that case. In fact, sometimes I think a couple of times in Georgia, Georgia, the polls in Georgia have like underestimated Democratic support and Biden support, at least in 2020. So it's sort of a state I watch. I don't like take the polling too seriously as I do some other places, or at least I'm not as worried about it as in other places. But, you know, maybe I should be. But I do think there it's all about, you know, blowing it out in Atlanta and the suburbs and in some areas.

Rural places in Georgia where there are a lot of black voters to see if she can run up the margins there. And then the college towns like Athens and then other places that are small to mid-sized cities with large Democratic populations like Savannah. What's going on with Arizona?

What do you think? Because I was bullish on Arizona in 2020. You know, we won. It was very close. But the polls have been brutal this time around. Well, I don't think they've been brutal. I mean, it is. They've just been so different than they were in 2020. Yeah. But they mean in The New York Times average, Trump has a two point lead.

Right, which is well within the margin of error. It is in the polling averages Kamala Harris's worst state. Now the fact that her worst state is at right around two points is pretty good, frankly. This is another thing, right? Are the polls overstating Trump's Latino support or understating Kamala Harris's? Because a lot of times you're getting Kamala Harris at near...

the bot near the Biden number, but Trump is not yet at his 2020 number. He's just, it's just the, they're both under, right. And what's going to happen with that undecided vote? Are people going to vote or are they not going to vote? Right. Is Trump going to get over 40 or is he going to be stuck around 38 where he was before? And it's just, you know, just,

When we talk all the time about the hardest to reach voters, we're always talking about Trump voters, but that other very hard to reach voters, black and Latino voters, right? When we talk, they're talking about the least politically engaged and like, are we actually capturing who that electorate is? And if her numbers are like Biden's in 2020, she's got a very real shot to it. Now it's a state that Biden won by 11,000 votes. So there's not a lot of margin for error there.

But it's just – this is like – there's something the polling is going to get wrong. It happens every cycle, even in a good polling year where – even in 2020, there are a lot of things wrong. But remember one of the narratives leading into the election was Joe Biden is crushing it with seniors. Seniors are going to save America. And it's because – and everyone is like, well, seniors are very COVID-conscious because of the concerns of their health.

We have the whole election. Turns out seniors voted at the exact same level they have in previous elections. It was just a fuck up in the polling, right? And what it missed, Trump's gains with Latinos. Totally missed them. There are going to be some things like that this time, where Trump's either going to do better or worse with some of these groups we think he is doing well with. And there's going to be another group. Plouffe speculated when he was on our podcast that it would be Republicans or Republican-leading independents. But something's going to be missed. And Arizona will maybe be the state where that is, if it's a Latino vote, where that will be most impactful.

What's odd is that in the Time Sienna polls of Arizona, which have maybe been the worst high-quality polls for her in Arizona, I think that's what I was getting at with the... It's been rough for her just because they're good polls. And she's like down five in those polls.

Her Latino number in those polls was like 60%. Yeah. She was having a problem there with independence. She was losing more Biden voters from Biden 2020 voters than in some other states. So I don't know. I don't know what's going on there. I mean, there is a strain of McCain Republicans. There is a lot. This is a state that moved. Georgia and Arizona are the states with the most...

Trump-Biden voters, because they're the states that move the furthest over the course of four years. And so obviously we know from focus groups we hear from Sarah Long and others that we bleed some of those voters. And so that could be the challenge there. Finally, North Carolina, the white whale. We're always so close to North Carolina.

Yeah, I mean, this one's really hard, particularly because of the hurricane. And it's really disrupted people's lives there in a way in which it's hard to focus on politics and elections, particularly if you're in the Asheville area where people are still trying to get their lives back together, schools open, businesses open, water, gas, all of those things.

North Carolina is the hardest state in this group, not just because it's the one that Biden lost, but in all the demographic changes I was talking about, about how the share of the electorate represented by white working class voters has gone down everywhere else. It hasn't gone down in North Carolina. North Carolina, it is. And this is one of the things that...

I will never forget Steve Kornacki writing this in a piece that was about why Kamala Harris was doing better in North Carolina than Georgia, which didn't make a ton of sense. One reason he postulated was there are more of the voters who were undercounted in the polls in North Carolina than Georgia. So it's possible it's just a polling problem. But we'll have to see. It was a 70,000 vote margin vote.

You're going to need a – if the polls are right about the governance race, you're going to need an unprecedented shitload of split-ticket voters for Donald Trump to win the state. Yeah, that is true. Now, that did happen once in 2020 in Maine to almost a similar degree. But that's a hard thing. The math is hard there.

Yeah. So overall, you see like why the whole thing is is close, because if you don't get all three blue wall states, you need one of Arizona, North Carolina or Georgia and two of.

Oh, I said if you get if you know, if you lose one of the blue wall states, if you unless that blue wall states Pennsylvania, then you need to. Oh, yeah. You need or one in Nevada. Yeah. One in Nevada. Yeah. You need you need two other states. One of those two states has to be Arizona or Georgia. Yes. Right. And we just laid out why those are those are tricky. So that's why that's why everyone's that's why it's a toss up right now. The one last thing I'll say about this is if we had an actual accurate perception of what how close the race was in 2020, we

We were looking at the whole thing through a funhouse mirror, but if we actually had known how close it really was and we were doing this exact same exercise in 2020, we would have said the same things about Arizona and Georgia and Joe Biden won them.

Right. That's true. Yeah. And we would, and we all would have been feeling just like we are now. This is actually a gift from the industry that we, we got like, we slept better. We felt better. Our stomachs hurt less in 2020. I don't remember that by the way. I don't know. You were, you, you were, was I, was I, was I fine? I wasn't nervous. You were totally fine.

I was? Yeah, we talked about this all the time. We have conversations every year where we're like, even if we had the largest polling error in history, he still wins, which was true. I feel less nervous now, even though I feel like it's very possible that he wins. I feel like it's a greater chance that he wins than I did in 2020. The polling gods understood in 2020 that with the pandemic happening, we couldn't take it.

Yeah. And so they gave us a gift. All those libs just stayed home and answered the pollsters' calls. Thank you, libs. While the Republicans went out and just had a good time. Okay. When we come back, we're going to hear your interview with Dan Osborne. But before we do that, this is, again, the last weekend we get to do everything we can to get persuadable voters to head to the polls for Kamala Harris. And so we are asking you to reach out to everyone you know

particularly in the swing states, make sure they're voting for Kamala Harris, voting for Democrats up and down the ballot, and get them to spread the word. Every call, every conversation matters at this point. And if you doubt that, if you think everyone out there has already made up their mind, heard all the arguments, take a listen to this clip.

from one of our listeners. Her name is Erin from Massachusetts, great state who just used Vote Save America's last call tool. I used the last call tool to reach out to my sister in law in Pennsylvania about voting for Kamala. And we touched on women's health rights and the unrest that a Trump presidency would cause. I used her script to let her know that I was here for any questions she might have.

After our chat, she said that although she had been undecided, she would be casting a vote for Kamala and even thought she could get her mom, who's also in Pennsylvania, on board too. Thanks for the push, guys, and for all you do.

Love that. Nice job, Aaron. Great job doing it. Great presentation, too. You really explained that story succinctly and wonderfully. You should possibly be a podcaster. More succinct than us. Just loviating on for an hour. I know. It's like I'm already late to trick-or-treating. All right. So if Aaron can do it, you can do it. Equally important as reaching out to friends and family is volunteering in the battleground states. Either physically there or you can phone bank, text bank, whatever. This weekend,

Basically, everyone at this company is canvassing, including me, Dan, Lovett, Tommy. We're going to Arizona on Saturday. We're going to Nevada on Sunday. And we're going to knock on some doors, rally some volunteers. And you can join us for those events or sign up to knock doors in the swing state near you. Or you can phone bank. It's all critical. And the final day is go to votesaveamerica.com slash 2024 to volunteer now. When we come back, Dan Osborne.

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Joining me today is an independent Senate candidate running a surprisingly tight race to unseat Republican Deb Fischer in Nebraska. Please welcome to Positive America, Dan Osborne. Thanks for being here. Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Your biography is a centerpiece of your campaign with very good reason. Could you just start by telling our listeners who may not have been following the Nebraska Senate race super closely who you are and why you're running?

Yeah, I suppose it would all start, you know, I joined the Navy right out of high school. I come from a long line of Navy people. My grandfather retired from the Navy. My parents, they both met while they were in the Navy. My uncles were all in the Navy. And then my older brother, he joined the Marine Corps, so we don't talk to him much anymore. But I did two Western Pacific cruises aboard the USS Constellation, so I got to travel the world twice over in two Westpacs.

And I think that was a good education for a young man coming into the world. But I got out and I came back to Omaha where I'm from. I started attending the University of Nebraska in Omaha. I then joined the Nebraska Army National Guard to continue my service. I was a 19 kilo on a M1A1 Abrams tank crew during that time. I've always felt compelled to service. But, you know, my life changed when my wife Megan had our first daughter, Georgia, and

So I stopped going to school. I got another honorable discharge, and I started working at Kellogg's as an industrial mechanic because I needed a job. So I'm with some good benefits to help pay for this new family I've started. And one of the first days on the job, an old Polish guy by the name of Ron Jabowski came up to me.

He looked just like Tom Selleck from Magnum PI. He said, hey, kid, have you joined the union yet? I said, no, sir, I have not. He goes, well, you might want to think about doing that. And I'm like, well, shoot, Tom Selleck's telling me to join the union. I better go do that. So I signed up. I paid my dues. I worked hard for a lot of years, just provided for my family. But over the years, old guys like Ron, aka Tom Selleck, started to retire. And Kellogg's became more beholden to their stockholders.

And we started to lose on contracts. So I ran for executive board in my local. I got elected as vice president. And about three months later, the president stepped down because you get yelled at a lot in that role by both your members and management alike. But I knew the role was important, so I assumed it. I did that for about a year, and then COVID hit. And COVID has changed a lot of lives, and it certainly has changed mine. You know, we were working. There's four...

plants under the master agreement, under the umbrella of the master. And as essential workers, we were all working seven days a week, 12 hours a day during that year. At one point in time, 50% of our workforce was forced quarantine and or sick. But we kept all four of those plants running at 100% capacity. And they made record profits. They went from $19 billion to $21 billion. The CEO gave himself a $2 million raise.

The board enriched themselves, the stockholders enriched themselves, and then our contract expired. I figured it'd be a no-brainer. We'd get a little sliver of the pie. But instead, they sat across the negotiating table from us, and they said, we're going after your health insurance. We're going after your cost of living wage adjustment. So for me as president, that was my old crap moment. There hadn't been a strike in Nebraska since 1972.

So I had to figure out what that all meant and trying to drum up all the support and learn as much as I could. So when October 5th midnight rolled around, we couldn't come to an agreement. Still my belief today, Kellogg's had no intention on coming to an agreement. So we shut down four plants and we walked off the job to preserve our wages and benefits. Certainly one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. Take 500 of my friends and their family out into the great unknown, not knowing if we're going to have a job at the end of it. But we all felt we were on the right side of history.

And I knew out on the picket line, Democrats were going to come out and support. That's traditionally what they do. But I didn't really see my world that way. I didn't see black, white, or women, or men, or Republican, or Democrat. I just saw people that wanted to go to work for a fair wage and some decent benefits in the time that they trade in service to the company. So I set out to make it a nonpartisan issue. I was able to...

Get Republican Congressman Don Bacon out to the picket line and shake hands with the members in favor of what we were trying to do. I was then able to get Republican governor, now U.S. Senator from Nebraska, Pete Ricketts, to draft a letter to the CEO, Steve K. Elaine, imploring him to get our people back to work.

But we settled on a strike just before Christmas after 77 days. And I remember walking in my plant and just feeling a huge sense of pride. We salvaged 1,500 good-paying jobs around the country. And that's why I'm doing this today. I haven't always been a political person, but I see the corporate agenda that our elected officials have.

My opponents certainly know different. It was Robin Williams, the late comedian, said it best that he said politicians should be wearing NASCAR jackets with patches of their sponsors so we know how they're going to vote. That is so true. And my opponent certainly has a lot of patches on her jacket. Talk to me a little bit about the decision to run as an independent as opposed to a Democrat or Republicans. Obviously easier, maybe not easier to be a Democrat in Nebraska, but just to have access to the party machinery and all of that. But you may you pick the hard path here. Tell me about why.

Yeah, well, I've been a registered independent from the time I could vote simply because I've never really been behind the whole two-party system. I've never understood why I have to have a hard set of beliefs on either that side or that side. I've always find myself more of a moderate, working down the middle when it comes to issues and ideas and things like that. But we certainly see

You know, this 118th Congress is arguably one of the most inefficient on working together and getting stuff done. You know, the farm bill is very important here in Nebraska. And we've seen that come and gone. We're working on an extension from 2018. So our farmers and ranchers are falling behind inflation right now because of that.

Uh, there's certainly a lot of things we need to be doing better for, for our people, but that's, that's the way I think, uh, you know, the framers of the constitution intended this to be right. Uh, government buying for the people right now, I feel like it's just a government for the Uber wealthy and corporations. I think how let's, let's say you win. How does that work when you get there? Are you going to just simply caucus with neither party? Are you going to make decisions based on issues? Have you thought, have you thought that far ahead? Yeah, of course. Uh,

Because I'm going to win. That's good. That's the attitude we like. I don't know if I like winning better or if I hate losing worse. So either way, either way. But, you know, it's a I think the system needs to be challenged because I don't feel like it works for me and me and my family. George Norris was the last independent senator from Nebraska. He helped create the nonpartisan unicameral that we enjoy today.

He didn't caucus with anybody his last term. So there is some precedence there. Yeah, I think I think it's going to be issue based and that there's

People will say, oh, well, you won't get committee assignments. Senate rules say you have to be on at least two committees. I'm pretty good at forming alliances and making friends. But there's a chance, there's a real chance I could be the 51st swing vote in the U.S. Senate. So people are going to be knocking on my door. And you use that for Nebraska, I assume. So that's a little bit of leverage there, I guess. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's how I can deliver for Nebraska if that scenario occurs.

What would some of your top priorities be when you, I won't say if you win, when you win? You know, I'll just start with what's important. Yeah, let's do that. The 180 town halls that I hear from Nebraskans. It's the economy and inflation.

Trying to get a hold of that and just, you know, making it so people's paychecks go goes further. No, I hear things like and I read things like, you know, my daughter's generation is going to be one of the first generations of kids collectively that don't do better than their parents. That should scare people.

It definitely certainly does me. So we got to do better to turn that around and flip that script. We all want our kids to do better and we all want to protect the environment. So they have a planet to work and planet to live on. Right. So extremely important issues.

But the economy inflation, number two, is border security and slash immigration. You might be wondering why a landlocked state in the middle of the country like Nebraska, it would be important to people. You know, this is a huge beef state, the industry and farming and ranching, certainly. And, you know, meat packers employ a lot of people. So, yeah.

They're concerned about it. But I don't think Senator Fischer, she's had 12 years to do something on the border. And I do believe if we don't have a border, we don't have a country. We have to secure our ports of entries.

Not just our southern border, but everywhere. And we need more people to do that. And, you know, because it's human trafficking, it's sex trafficking, it's drugs, it's everything that we need to do better at lessening the flow of all that. So we need a comprehensive border package.

That includes drones. And then but on the flip side of that, you know, there's a there's a 10 year backlog of people waiting to get in front of a judge to the for asylum seekers. Well, there's a problem right there. We need we need to address that. But I was watching a debate between Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush that came over my feet the other day randomly. And so I got to stop and watch this.

They were talking about the border and they were talking about immigration the exact same way we're talking about it today. And that was in 1980. So I asked myself, why? You know, why isn't anybody doing? Well, the meatpackers, the people who benefit from exploiting labor, paying them next to nothing, and they can continue to enrich themselves. And those are the folks that can afford to buy batches on a senator's NASCAR jacket.

So it comes full circle. People are seeing, I mean, this is a very close race. That's caught a lot of people by surprise. We spent much of this cycle talking about the competitive center races being in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, et cetera, all the ones that people talk about. And then all of a sudden out of nowhere comes Dan Osborne in Nebraska, New York times poll has this race incredibly close and,

What is going on in the ground there? What are you hearing from voters? It helps explain why this very Republican state is open to replacing their Republican senator who was just elected not so long ago. Yeah, I think it's because...

They're starting to see, you know, when people hurt, they pay a little bit more attention. You know, I like the phrase, it doesn't matter if you care about politics, politics are going to care about you. And I think people are starting to understand that fact a little bit more. Like I said, when your dollar doesn't go near as far. It wasn't that long ago, $250 filled up my grocery cart for a family of five. Now it barely skims the bottom.

That certainly is problematic. But it's our message that resonates with people, that if you work hard in this country, your paychecks should matter, plain and simple. And I'm going to fight to do that. Senator Fischer is just going to be a rubber stamp for whoever her party leader is. That's what she's shown.

She's also shown she votes against... She wants to raise the retirement age to 70 years old. For me, as a steam fitter, that's a slap in the face. I can't imagine 69 years old turning pipe wrenches on a

on a man lift, you know, that's crazy talk. So we need to protect our social security benefits. That's the winning message. People, we've got to take care of our retirees. And then she votes against veterans, extending healthcare for veterans that are victims of burn pit, toxic burn pits, and then dating all the way back to Agent Orange victims in Vietnam. Like, who is this person? Like, this is crazy.

You know, veterans are less than 6% of our population. And then the burn pick victims got to be even smaller. So I don't understand how she votes the way she votes. In Senate race after Senate race all across this country and in the presidential race, abortion is a driving issue. What role is it playing in your race in Nebraska? And where are you on the issue?

Well, there's, there's ballot initiatives. Um, so it's, it's going to play a very important role. There's, there's three ballot initiatives. Well, four, I suppose, two, two abortion. Uh, one would basically codify Roe standards the way we've done it for the last 50 years. Uh,

The second would, uh, is more of a pro-life initiative. And then there's a legalizing medical cannabis, which I am for Fisher is against. And that's, uh, you know, I don't, I don't even know what that pulls out, but I'm pretty sure that's going to, um, if that's your issue, you know, they're definitely going to vote for me. Uh, and then, and then there's family paid sick leave. Uh, and, uh,

She's against that. She voted against the railroaders to have seven days of PTO when that's all they were holding out for. As somebody who's worked over 3,000 hours a year my whole life, I get the need for a work-life balance. Going back to abortion, she is for a complete abortion ban. She's said it multiple times, even not having any exceptions of assault.

And incest on there as well. So that's who she is. But I'm the opposite of that. I certainly believe that the federal government should stay out of our doctor's offices and our bedrooms. But I've been on record many times of saying at the federal level, I would go back to the way we've done it for the last 50 years. Excellent. I have a very, very important question for you.

I have been to Omaha many times. I've listened to Tim Walls talk about this. You got to help me in a little snow. What the hell is a runza? It is a, it's amazing. This is what it is. It's basically a square, a,

I don't even know, like a pie almost, but it's got ground beef and cabbage. And then there's Italian runzas. So it's just this nice, tidy little sandwich that they bake. And it's amazing. It really is. Yeah. If you ever come to Nebraska, you got to try it.

Okay. All right. It's on my list. Okay. I know you're a very busy man, Dan Asborne. You got over a week before the election. Tell our listeners who may have become interested in your campaign by doing this interview how they can help you. Yeah. Well, you know, I haven't always been a political person and being engrossed in this process is fascinating and disgusting all at the same time to see how much money flows into this and independent expenditures and

citizens United and all this, it's, it's, it's crazy. But Mitch McConnell just threw through Deb Fisher, $3 million and money on her side is flowing in to spread lies about me. Uh,

And so I got to defend myself. So, you know, we have to continue to fundraise. We've, we've raised over 10 million, which is insane to say my average donation still remains $40. So I do believe this campaign is powered by the people, the way the framers intended it to be. But yeah,

You could go to Osborne for Senate.com. That's Osborne with no E sorry, not related to the famous football coach, but Osborne for Senate.com. And you can help me with five, 10, 15, or help me with help reach the average of $40. Awesome. Dan Osborne. Thank you so much for joining us and good luck in the final stretch here. Thank you. Appreciate you having me on.

That's our show for today. Dan will be back on Sunday with our final bonus episode featuring Steve Kornacki. Everyone, please call your friends in the battlegrounds. Get out there and get involved this weekend. We'll talk to you soon. Bye, everyone.

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