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Debate Preview

2024/9/9
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This chapter discusses Kamala Harris's need to introduce herself to the American public, address perceptions of her as overly liberal, and highlight Donald Trump's extreme positions.
  • Harris needs to increase her public recognition.
  • Many voters perceive Harris as too liberal.
  • Harris needs to contrast her positions with Trump's extremism.

Shownotes Transcript

Hey, pull up a chair. It's Hacks on Tap with David Axelrod and Mike Murphy. Hacks on Tap

But it will take almost superhuman focus and discipline to deal with Donald Trump in a debate. It's no ordinary proposition. Not because Donald Trump is a master of explaining policy ideas and how they're going to make people better off. It's because he's a master of taking any form or format that is on television and turning it into a show that is all about him. Mike Murphy.

John Heilman, the day before the big game. Yes, sir. And a lot at stake here. Yeah. That was Pete Buttigieg. And we'll get to we'll get to we'll talk more a little bit in a little bit about Trump and his debate style, as it were. But.

It seems, I mean, you know, we always, these debates get very hyped and then they often don't mean anything. The last one meant a lot. One of the contestants is no longer with us. Well, he's still with us. I mean, in this race. Still harping on poor President Biden, the last great American. No, you're right. You're right. Debates can change.

You know, they are, I'm going to rob your old line there. They're kind of the electron microscope. Wouldn't be the first time. Yeah. First time. That's a two-way street, pal. First time in this episode of the podcast, though. So, but look at the formula right now. One, we have a minor Democratic panic going on, thanks as always to a New York Times poll.

which came out yesterday or the day before showing a tied race or Trump plus one margin of error stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So the, the, the sugar highly convention is starting to melt away. The second look is coming. It's that, that,

cranks up the stakes. And then you've got this... Oh, it's so early in the morning. Yeah, we pulled you out of bed in California there. I know. It's dawn here. No, no, no. So that turns things up. And then you've got what all the polling shows...

people still don't know anything about or very much about Kamala Harris. 28% said they don't know much about her. And far less with Trump. So it's still about the battle here. The tip-off is defining her, and debates do that. So the stakes are particularly high for her. And if Trump can deny her that progress, he'll have a good night. Heilman, you know, Murphy references the Times poll. It is funny.

You know, when they have these polls that show her surging or showed her surging these battleground state polls, I said people shouldn't get swept up in irrational exuberance and everybody got pissed that I was wrong.

You know, party pooper. Yeah. And all of that. And now it's like everybody's in deep despair because the New York Times says Trump's won. This is the same race it's been pretty much. Yeah. I mean, this is a this is a she's got an uphill fight and she's done real well to leverage herself into this race. But she's got to take the next step. I think Murphy's right.

I mean, people think that when, uh, when Jen O'Malley Dillon and, and others come out and say that she's the underdog, they think, well, you know, she's saying that, but you know, they really feel like they're, you know, that's, that's just like talk to kind of get everyone's head in the right space. Yeah.

I think they know they're the underdogs, you know, I mean, in what world is a candidate who becomes at the, out of nowhere becomes the nominee of their party in the middle of the summer of a presidential year. And what, in what world is that person going to ever be the favorite? It's just like, it's a historically we'll look back on the notion that anybody thought that she was ever the favorite at any given point in this, but

even at the peak of her quote surge as absurd. It's like, you know, she's that's, it's, it's another reasonable expectation. And we also knew that, you know,

if if joe biden had been performing at the level that he did in 2020 would see a race a close race you know that was just that was baked in so i agree with all that i think they just get pissed at you acts because that's like now the fun thing for like essentially even you guys enjoy it i don't understand it yeah well it's a national movement but but here's the thing um

We have this debate tomorrow night. It's another of the events in the decathlon of running for president. And it's one of the bigger ones. It's like the, you know, the 100 meter dash or something. And what does she need to, how many, what does she need to accomplish in this debate? Well, I think that, you know,

I mean, the most obvious Occam's razor answer is a lot of the country doesn't know who she is and she has to convince them. She has to let them know who she is. And the other thing that comes through in that Times poll, which to your point, you know, just shows the racist tide, which we kind of knew it's a margin of error race, but also showed these underlying things that are problematic. One is that they don't people don't know her that well, but the other is that people think she's really liberal. Hmm.

And she's been making all these moves, these smart moves that we have commended to try to get into the center ever since she became the de facto nominee. But that is not wholly taken. And the most striking numbers in that poll are the ones that say that way more voters think she's liberal than voters think he's conservative. And on the merits, that's just, I mean, you could argue about the way she's tried to wriggle out of some of her positions from the 2019, 2020 period, whether she's done that convincingly enough.

But the idea that voters don't think Donald Trump, given his record on Roe, on a variety of other things, is a conservative candidate is bonkers. So I think she has to both try to make a convincing case for why she is moderated and also to throw in a pretty stark relief just how extreme he is. You heard that clip at the beginning of Buttigieg. He was a pretty good characterization, Mike, of Trump. He's an asymmetric fighter, right?

And how do you think she should approach that? Because he can he'll say outrageous things, you know. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It'll be a total word attack salad. He's the number one George Lakoff guy ever. Don't think of an elephant. She killed a guy in a bar in Cleveland. The reason she killed was he was talking about her drug empire. You know, in Oakland, she ran all the drugs. It's incredible. She's a terrible person. She's a murderer.

And, you know, what most politicians want to do is get the old canned, you know, thing and try to go back and forth. Big mistake. Treat them like a toddler having a tantrum. Talk to the camera. Link with the people at home. Tonight, I want to move the country forward. And I want you to learn about me and what I want to do for you. I have a plan. It's not the same as President Biden's plan. I'm going to take the good things he did. Boom, boom, boom. Because the number one thing that's driving this, you know, we got so obsessed with

Joe Biden's age, people were ready to fire him before the debate where the age became such a thing because they're unhappy with the economy. And that stink is still on her. So she has to create her own middle class economic identity. And I would do it tactically by a conversation with the camera while he's setting his hair on fire. I'd have the occasional rejoinder just to say, Donald, you know, that's not true, but you don't care.

Meanwhile, to you who worry about your grandmother affording her diabetes medicine, let's have a grown-up talk here while he throws his tantrum. I'll tell you one thing. Lock on the camera and talk. If his hair catches on fire, you're going to have a wildfire akin to what's going on out there in California. That's like lighting the BP oil spill on fire. Exactly. The ocean will be on fire. It could happen. But, Heilman, when...

When I agree, basically with everything that Murphy just said, it seems to me there's one other piece of business that she has to do. And I want to play, by the way, a little bit of her doing sort of what Murphy suggests in that last. I think we played it last week as well, but it's still relevant. But.

The border stuff, it seems to me, is something that she has to address here. You know, she said she was going to reintroduce that bill that that Trump vetoed. But she also it seems to me she has to say, I'm going to keep this executive order of Biden's in place until Congress passes that bill.

I would have thought she should say that. And it's consistent with her positioning now as I'm a border state. I was a border state law enforcement. I ran, I was the, at a border state attorney general who put, who put those people behind, miscreants behind bars. That was the, one of the great benefits of Biden doing that thing, right? Was what it was essentially going to take off the question of border security and

As an immediate issue, as in like people, migrants flooding across the border for the rest of the campaign, for the rest of the election. She should, I mean, that's a gift. So one part of Biden that she can grab tight and say, I'm glad he finally came around to that position. Yeah. But she can be crisper on it. I know what she's doing now. She does the long windy thing about it was a Thursday night and there was a, I think she has to get to it, which is the border screwed up.

It's the one thing everybody agrees with and that we have a centrist plan. She's perceived as a liberal. That's bad. Move to centrist plan. And the problem, the border, the biggest problem is Donald Trump, who threw a monkey wrench into the centrist plan written by a Republican to crack down. He'll be gone. I'll be in. I'll meet with him on day one. I'll get that done. But CRISPR rather than. She's got to be prepared. He's going to be laying on that pitch. So he's going to try and, uh,

He's going to try and defame that bill and she needs to be prepared for that. But as you say, you don't want to go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. But here's, you know, here I'm not going to play the clip from last week because we did play it last week, which was her basically dismissing his attack on her race and

and saying that's the same old tired playbook. And that was the move you're talking about, just flick them off. Four years ago, she debated Mike Pence, and she took a different approach. Here it is. The American people have witnessed what is the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country. On January 28th, the vice president and the president were informed

about the nature of this pandemic. Thanks to Bob Woodward, we learned that they knew about it. And then when that was exposed, the vice president said, when asked, well, why didn't y'all tell anybody? He said, because the president wanted people to remain calm.

Well, let's go. But Susan, this is important. And I want to add, Mr. Vice President, I'm speaking. I'm speaking. Yeah. I never thought one that was that great. And they are going to try to do it again. And Trump will just keep going or see. Maybe she'll hit the lucky homer like when she attacked Biden in that Democratic primary debate. But my thing, Heilman, is that I think she should be. She's got to. You know, she can't let him push her around. But the way you command the stage with Trump is to be unbothered by him. Right.

Right. I agree with that. And the only advantage to doing something somewhere in that zone that she did with Pence, not quite that zone, is that if you're trying to trigger him, and that's a reasonable question to ask you two guys, is triggering Trump, should that be a tactical, not strategic, but a tactical aim of this debate? But if you're trying to trigger him, is that a possible way? Again, not quite what you did with Pence, but something like that. It could be. Yeah. But the best way to trigger him is to ignore him.

He is an attention zombie. I think. And so you lock on that camera and you talk, you narrate the debate. It's still Ross Perot trick. Here's what's happening here. You know, um, and you just talk to them. Let's talk a little bit about Trump and what he needs to accomplish. Cause it seems to me, she has more to accomplish. She needs to, because of this, uh,

absence of real deep knowledge of her. But what does he need to accomplish in this debate? And is he capable of it? Before you guys sit, let's listen to this clip of Trump with Hannity talking about the debate. But, you know, when I had Biden, you and I had the same discussion and I let him talk. I'm going to let her talk because, you know, you've all seen it.

There are those that say that Biden is smarter than she is. OK. And if that's the case, we have a problem. But, you know, debating is an interesting thing. I've been in many debates. I think I probably have.

One, because of debating, maybe, you know, we had a lot of debates with the Republicans and we had crooked Hillary. We had a lot of different people. We had a debate and we had some great debates. You do remember the Rosie O'Donnell debate. Remember Rosie O'Donnell? That's a real she's a real great one. Isn't she a great one anyway? But but.

A debate is interesting. You really you can go in with all the strategy you want, but you have to sort of feel it out as the debate's taking place. I've seen it. You go in there and you have a strategy. Mike Tyson made the statement. Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.

So, you know, this reflects a whole number of different things about Trump. One is he has been in a lot of debates. I don't think that should be discounted completely. This will be his seventh. Nobody else has ever done more debates than Trump. And he's a television guy. You know, Buttigieg is right. He knows TV.

And he knows sort of how to take over the stage. But does that serve his purpose? He doesn't do debates. He does his act.

He's got one thing, which is that screw the casino, I'm going all night, you know, vamping thing, throwing out a thousand lies and exaggerations. So he's somewhat easy to prepare for because you know exactly what you're going to get. I think that's the upside of this. And she's not him. If she can move the needle on the middle class economic stuff and be new, interesting, and fresh, which she's been pretty good at in the convention phase,

She's got tools to bring to this thing, too. It's not like he's the great debater. He's just the—if you hate politics on your guy, they all suck. But under traditional debate, he doesn't do anything. It's just more of the same. And the ex getting tired. He was terrible in Atlanta, and the only thing that saved him, Heilman, was that Biden was worse. Yes.

And, you know, he said, he said he was going to let, he just let Biden talk. But in fact, although he was by his standards restrained for the worst part that was by Biden was worst. He did let Biden talk later in the debate. He started being the asshole that he is and constantly like doing all this kind of crazy crap. I,

I will say the one thing to his credit is I don't think anyone on this show would ever have imagined that they would see a nominee, a presidential nominee or an aspiring nominee who could get up on a nationally televised debate and talk about the size of his penis and survive. And he became the Republican nominee in that context. Now, maybe you guys have some other expectations, but I was like, hey, a guy who can get on, go on that Fox Theater debate in Detroit and talk about his schlong and still got nominated. Yeah.

I think you use that as a guy who is shamelessly willing to tell blatant lies. Well, that's fair enough. It's okay down there. I'm telling you, it's all right down there. It is all right. I'll go to any lengths for jokes like that. Any length? Really? Any length? Okay. We're not going here now, are we? Let me just say this. Here's my question to you guys, but I have a carry conviction about that. I just think like,

Trump does what he needs to do. I don't know that Trump can get through a debate with a woman. If you went back and looked at a supercut of Trump with women candidates and with

And with women reporters, female reporters, especially black female reporters at the White House, it's hard to imagine he can get through this debate without saying something demeaning to her. It would be a first because he almost never gets through a conversation with a not really mean, really demeaning. Especially a woman of color. That's what I said. That's what I said. Especially a black woman, right? The super cut of him talking to black female reporters at the White House would, you know, curls your hair. But here's the thing.

I feel like she has... We don't have here, but yeah, I get the point. Well, I'm not going to go there. She has huge upside and huge downside in this debate, right? This is a great opportunity for her, and she also has a lot at stake and a lot at risk.

I just don't think he has very much downside or very much upside. Like, is the needle going to get moved in a meaningful way by anything Trump does? He's the most, I mean, who doesn't have a view about Trump? Whose view is going to be changed by what Trump does in this stage? Right. Well, this is in some ways, this is the story of the whole thing.

I mean, you know, but he does have something to lose if she uses him as a foil. If she does what Mike's saying, then he does have something to lose because the thing he has to lose is she can make him look smaller. Yeah, I'm with Johnny. He's he's locked down for good or bad. And by the way, a lot of it's bad. People would love something else.

So she's the one of all the opportunity here. So I think the winner loss from her is not that he'll do great and she'll fall. I mean, if she collapses and falls for his shtick, then that's trouble for her. But it's all about opportunity cost. How much forward can she get out of this debate? Because she's the one a third of the country doesn't understand. And if she can move half that, big win for her. And I think she has a decent shot to do it.

I heard Tom Cotton on one of the Sunday shows at the State of the Union yesterday. And there was a little clip that I grabbed because this is what, like in their dreams, this is kind of what his handlers would like him to do, which is to just stick to the, you know, kind of attack, the issue attack. Yeah, just to economy.

This is a very unusual presidential election. We have a former president running for office, first time in more than 100 years. People remember that when Donald Trump was in office, prices were low, wages were high, we had peace and stability around the world. Kamala Harris as vice president has brought us record high inflation. We have a wide open southern border and we have war everywhere you turn around the world. So I know that endorsements sometimes make news.

But most Americans are making their decisions based on the records of these two candidates. So that is sort of the recitation they want him to go back to again and again and again. The question is, can he? Yeah, exactly. The question is, does he have the discipline to do it? You know, in that in that clip with Hannity, which was actually three minutes long, I trimmed it down. But he you know, he said a whole bunch of different things. But one of them was he said, you know.

Mitt Romney went to a log cabin and he prepared for months for his debates and he was terrible. Actually, Romney was pretty good, particularly in that first debate.

Well, the problem is what his handlers want is irrelevant. Nobody has less influence in the world than a Trump handler. Particularly if she gets a little traction at the beginning and does the talk to you at home thing right, he'll go nuts. The whole game plan will go out. Because he's the one who's the most vulnerable to being hit in the face and throwing out the war plan because he's insecure and crazy and all the Trump stuff we know about. So it'll just be Trump uncorked.

baiting her and hopefully she'll connect with people at home if she's good see you this is where i disagree with you guys because i do like i said if she looks like she's in control and she's in control of the debate and he starts acting out i think it makes him look small you know the mistake that people make with trump is that they try and go toe-to-toe with him and they make him look big

But I think we're kind of, in some ways, there's a question of how you, like, it's a little bit definitional. I think Mike and I are sort of saying,

He can't gain that much, and he, by his performance, can't lose that much. She can gain something, and therefore, by making him look small, and therefore, yes, by implication, he's losing something there. But it's more in her hands, right? It's how much of her gain he can deny her by going crazy, which has a cost, like in the Biden debate. Yes, yeah, yeah.

Listen, there are two other people participating in this debate, and those are David Muir and Lindsay Davis of ABC. Trump's been relentlessly working the refs and hammering ABC as a...

you know, anti-Trump station in that same Hannity interview. He said, he's Hannity said, she's going to try and piss you, piss you off, you know, meaning Harris. And he said, well, the people who are going to try and piss me off are ABC, those ABC people, because they're relentlessly negative on me and so on. What, what do you expect from the moderators? And I guess, what do they have at stake in this thing? Do you think they get cowed by him? Well, I don't know.

I worry about it too. I think they have a lot at stake in the sense that if, if Biden hadn't collapsed in the CNN debate, again, I'll do respect to both, uh,

to both to both tamper and dana to to jake and dana who are i like and who are respectful who are good journalists etc but i think like i i was disappointed and i thought it was wrong when chalyon came out and said they weren't going to fact check trump at all in the debate and just let him lie i don't think that i don't think you can treat trump like that as a moderator and i think they would have come in for a lot of criticism if it hadn't been for biden's collapse so i think that's the specter that hangs over this abc news debate and you saw rick klein

uh, over the weekend was quoted in the times, not saying what Chalian said. He said, we don't have a standard on this. We're not going to fact check him all the time and we're not going to not fact check him. We're going to, we're going to try to make this debate be serious and substantive. We'll fact check him when we think we may fact check. Yes. Well, presumably her, but he's the fountain of lies. And so, and, and that's the bigger challenge because I think there's that issue. And beyond the fact checking issue, there's this issue, which is,

You know, there are a lot of questions in America about Kamala Harris and they, and they are doing the voters business. If they ask her tough questions or tee up tough debates about who she is, what she believes, what she'll do, all that stuff that, that is like, that is the stuff of what this debate should be when it comes to her.

But the idea that's out there in the press right now, which is that this whole debate is about defining Kamala Harris, I just think that shouldn't be how it is. Donald Trump is out there right now talking about anybody who cheated in 2016, 2020, or 2024, I'm going to jail them. You can't not go to the central questions about Trump. If you're a moderator—

And again, it came up, they finally, in the CNN debate, they got around to January 6th, about 40 minutes in. I just can't believe that you're not going to come squarely at him over the questions of some of his recently expressed dictatorial authoritarian tendencies in the wake of January 6th. It's a threat to the country. I mean, he's making a threat. The home run for them, which is wide open, nobody's really done this in any of these debates, is for somebody to be very tough on both of them.

Just prosecute her. Because she gets back on her heels easy. She gets defensive quickly. That's a problem. If you're trying to have a real revealing debate, turn that pressure on her big. And stand right up to him. I think he works the ref to intimidate them. Because they sit around, well, we have to be impartial. Impartial does not mean you're the Don Knotts of the debate moderating world. And you're just kind of sitting there, well, I don't mean to offend you, but could I get a... No, hammer them. Hammer them both.

It'll create a media superstar. For our listeners, as I often have to do, the 60s reference translation. Don Knotts was Barney Fife in Andy of Mayberry. Kind of the wimpy guy. But listen, a couple of things. One is...

If they're and I expect, you know, they've got a great prepping operation over there on the Democratic side. They're they're going to they're going to try and figure out not just what Trump's going to do, but what the moderators are going to do. And they're going to do exactly what you guys have suggested. And they're going to go after her hard with questions. So she should be familiar with that. The whole point of prep is to be as familiar with all.

with all aspects of what you might face. The second thing, though, on working the refs, another interesting thing in that Hannity interview with Trump is he brought up one element of one debate in 2012. You guys will remember when Candy Crowley, then of CNN, asked a—she fact-checked Trump.

Right. And it was considered. No, no, she backed Shepard. Oh, I mean Romney. On Benghazi. On Benghazi. And it still sticks in conservatives' crawls because they think that she actually got the facts wrong and Romney had them right. Right. But it was a momentum stop. You know, it hurt him in that debate. It felt like it hurt him in that debate. I think Obama performed pretty well in that debate, so I don't think that was the...

Some total of what happened in that debate, but in the legend, that was really big. Trump raised that in this Hannity interview. And I think it was another sort of work in the refs, you know, stay out of my stay out of my way kind of thing.

admonition from him. Listen, you guys, we got to wrap this up because this is a speed dating. Let me just interject one thing, though. I'm not going to get on the bandwagon after the debate about all the great prep because I've seen too many lousy Democratic debates for a while. I'm hoping she has great prep. She's putting the time in, but I want to see because the first half of that CNN interview, she was wobbly.

And that, to me, sent a signal. You can put her back on her heels. So let's see. Look, a lot of it rests on the player. Of course. But here's my question on the way out for you guys. Will the race be different on Wednesday than it was on Tuesday? Yes. She'll have had one solid step forward. She will have survived it, and she will have got at least some upside opportunity out of it, though probably not as much as she could.

That's my guess. Maybe a little different. I just think the whole thing is so inelastic that a little, any difference is a lot in some way, but a little different, a little different. I think it will be a little different. And this debate could take up, depending on what happens, not even if it's like a Biden level, you know, uh, imbroglio, it could take up a week. We get a week of, of we got 56 days left to election day. It's like eight weeks. You could end up with a week of, of, of free slash earned media coverage, uh, coming out of this debate. If, if, if it, if it,

It gets to a not quite Biden-Trump level, but an Obama-Romney level of coverage. Eating up a week of the remaining eight weeks of this can be a huge impact just in terms of momentum and all kinds of other things. And if either of them score moments, also social media memes, which will travel far and wide. Yeah.

Let me finish up real quick by playing the pearl-clutching Democratic game, because here's the downside scenario that could happen. These things are like literature. You know, they kind of have a narrative.

So the narrative has been super comma, great convention, Trump crazy, Trump's campaign in disarray. If she has a wobbly debate, that'll flip and the new narrative will be the Trump comeback, got his act together. He's on fire. Well, she's like, we should have had a primary. She was untested. It was a big mistake. And then it's going to be three weeks of hell.

because the country almost doesn't necessarily fall into the narrative, but Washington sure does, and it can drive the country. So that's the thin ice out there, and we will see. But I will say, as the guy who predicted that Biden would have a terrible debate and it would force him out, if he had a terrible debate, it would force him out of the race, to scoffs and ridicule, I think she's going to do okay.

So there you go. I think she might do okay too. And I'll just say, just to go back to Obama Romney and David, you will have something to say about this. It's like the reason that the Obama Romney thing took up as much oxygen as it took up. And again, we know we could have a long discussion about whether it actually moved numbers and, you know, and how much pressure it put on you guys in the second debate. But the reason it did what Murphy just described, which is,

you know, sucking up a lot of news cycles for a week, 10 days. You guys had that second debate that you could come back at. She doesn't have that. Right. And, and, and this filter and the political class has the, the things that Mike has said in their back of their head, uh,

they've been watching super Kamala, but they've been kind of like quietly when I say they, I mean the press and the political class, Democrat and Republican alike, wondering when some of the, of the weaker elements of, of Harris would come out. If she shows that it could be a firestorm.

I mean, not, not again, whether I'm not saying fairly. So that's like a hair trigger. They're ready to go for. Correct. I'm not, I'm not endorsing it. I'm just saying that is a thing. That is a scenario that should be at anyone's like top five potential scenarios because people are looking for the, you know, you can already start to see it, the course correction on, you know, on. Right. But I'll tell you something, these debates are,

And every major event in these campaigns is like a part of a decathlon. And in each one, people judge, how do you handle this particular kind of pressure? How do you? And this one is particularly important because you're unplugged. You don't have notes. You don't have prompters. So people see it as a more legitimate test of pressure.

who you are. She's got to be on that debate stage, the person they saw delivering that convention speech. Exactly right. 2019. Here's around the horn for you guys, very quick, over under on audience size. 50 million watched the first Biden-Trump debate. 75 million watched the first Biden-Trump debate in 2020. 30 million watched the convention speech that she gave. 69.8.

That's your over, that's your, you know, I mean, there's, we got more channels now going on. I'll take a north of that.

I'll say 72 million people. I think it'll, I think you could end up with, with it being more than the first Biden Trump debate in 2020. I think you can end up north of 75. All right. All right. No black sock stuff here. Don't fix it. Chicago style. We should remind our, we should remind our, our listeners of two things. One is that we will be back.

on Wednesday to assess how wise or foolish we were in our comments today. I already know the answer to that. And the second thing...

And the thing, and the second thing is I want to remind people that we're now on YouTube as well. And we apologize for that. Take a look at this. Murphy, it's unbelievable. Since we went on YouTube, I've gotten more than a few texts asking, weirdly asking if you're married. It's like, what are you kidding me? Mike, I've got a few texts asking more than a few times whether Mike is human.

I've gotten a few. Any of you clowns own a collared shirt? So I stepped it up a little here. Or are any of you clowns own an electric vehicle? Yeah, well, you've got an electric secret, and we're going to be exploring that and help Axelrod choose the right electric vehicle for him on the new podcast, Directly Current with Max Atten. I can't believe how many of you conspired in this.

All right, guys, we'll see you all on Wednesday. If you do have a question, send it to us for our post-debate show. Send us a few during the debate if you want. HacksOnTap at gmail.com. Or you can just record a voice memo with your name and email it to us. HacksOnTap at gmail.com.

But we will address your questions the following week. And if you sing one, okay, if we do a musical question, we might shove that one in the air in the post-debate show. If not, we'll get it next week. This was the longest wind-up since Louis T. We're just trying to go. All right, guys. So with that, we'll see you Wednesday.

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