Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
Speaker 1: where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
Speaker 1: today's best minds and everyone was kung fu fighting in Congress.
Speaker 1: Today we have such a great show for you. White
Speaker 1: House Senior Advisor Mitch Landrew details how the Biden administration
Speaker 1: is rebuilding America's infrastructure. Then we'll talk to Boltz magazine
Speaker 1: editor Daniel Nakanian about all of the off off year
Speaker 1: elections that you might have missed. Spoiler Democrats swept the
Speaker 1: judiciary in Pennsylvania. But first we have showtimes the Circus.
Speaker 1: John Heileman, Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Speaker 2: John Fast, Faster, Fastest. However the politics comes, whatever velocity
Speaker 2: it comes at us here. I'm ready to go. I've
Speaker 2: had a guy put one decent night's sleep since nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty seven. I'm ready for what this podcast holds in store.
Speaker 3: Let's go right, Well, as long as you slept in
Speaker 3: the in the eighties.
Speaker 2: I've got my seatbelt on and my leather chaps on
Speaker 2: below the.
Speaker 1: All right, give me the TLDR. What is happening with John,
Speaker 1: with politics, with the world.
Speaker 3: What are you watching? What do you think you what's
Speaker 3: on your mind.
Speaker 2: I love an interviewer who begins with I have no
Speaker 2: real question here. The floor is yours. Back in the
Speaker 2: day when I used to do a hardball with Chris Matthews,
Speaker 2: my favorite question of Chris's was always like he would
Speaker 2: start talking about a topic like abortion in politics or
Speaker 2: the midterms, whatever it was, and he would hold forth
Speaker 2: for you know, two minutes, four minutes, you know, like
Speaker 2: a full skill Joe Scarborough rant for some period of time,
Speaker 2: and then he would say, John Heilman, your thoughts, that's
Speaker 2: what I want, matt And I was always like, I
Speaker 2: don't know you said everything, Chris. I don't know I
Speaker 2: had any thoughts. At this point, I feel like I've
Speaker 2: been beaten with sticks. I'm in New York City. We
Speaker 2: just finished the final six episode run eighth season of
Speaker 2: Showtimes The Circus, which is now part of the history book.
Speaker 2: At least, the incarnation of this show that has lived
Speaker 2: on Showtime for eight years and one hundred and thirty episodes,
Speaker 2: is now finished. What happens next is Anyone's Guests. We'll
Speaker 2: see about that. The show may have some new life
Speaker 2: on some other platform as we go forward. We're trying
Speaker 2: to figure that out. As we speak. That's one of
Speaker 2: the things that's on my mind right now that I'm
Speaker 2: working on. I am amazed by you guys talked about
Speaker 2: this on TV this morning a little bit. But it's
Speaker 2: kind of an awesome world where you live in, where
Speaker 2: it's like the Republican former president United States Republican front
Speaker 2: runner can directly crib from people say echo, it's not
Speaker 2: an echo, it's a crib from mind compf you know,
Speaker 2: you're like writing down the furor's language and you're speaking it.
Speaker 2: And then when someone says, hey, I think I've heard
Speaker 2: that vermin thing before. That's Adolf Hitler, right, And someone
Speaker 2: on the former president's staff says, anyone who says the
Speaker 2: Donald Trump sound like the furor will be consigned to
Speaker 2: hell and will never have a knife.
Speaker 3: It will all be over for that.
Speaker 2: They will be putting Gitmo under the auspices of Stephen Miller,
Speaker 2: Cash Patel and Tiffany Trump forever.
Speaker 3: I can't believe you brought Tiffany into this well.
Speaker 2: Whatever, you know. I mean, I don't like to say
Speaker 2: the other female Trump's name, So it's like yeah, and
Speaker 2: they say, literally, it's like if you're if somebody just says, Hey,
Speaker 2: that's like what Hitler said. Do you off with his head?
Speaker 2: You know, I find it's just kind of incredible.
Speaker 1: Wait, let's talk about this for a second though. Do
Speaker 1: you and I end up at Gimo?
Speaker 2: Yes, oh, yeah, hundred percent, one hundred percent, Molly, Well,
Speaker 2: I won't end up a Givemo because I'll be living
Speaker 2: in Portugal by then.
Speaker 3: Yes, it will just be me and Gimmo.
Speaker 2: I'm in the phase of Porto versus Lisbon at this point,
Speaker 2: like I'm making those contingency plans because there's no doubt.
Speaker 2: You know, it used to be like if you were
Speaker 2: on Nixon's enemies list, there was a chance they would
Speaker 2: audit you, and like, I feel like an audit in
Speaker 2: the if Trump gets re elected, you and I will
Speaker 2: be a lot worse than audits. Let's put it that way.
Speaker 2: It's a cliche now people say, you know, you know
Speaker 2: that whatever her name was used to say, take Trump
Speaker 2: seriously but not literally, and you're just like, again, false binary,
Speaker 2: like take him seriously and take him literally because the
Speaker 2: people who are going to vote for him take him literally.
Speaker 2: And I think there's like a pattern recognition thing here.
Speaker 2: It's like, if you see enough stories where they talk
Speaker 2: about targeting their enemies in very direct ways. You start
Speaker 2: to be like, yeah, it seems like he's got that
Speaker 2: on his mind. Seems like that's what he wants to do, right,
Speaker 2: So I don't know, I'm not gonna take any chances
Speaker 2: with it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's probably a very depressing but good point,
Speaker 1: I will say.
Speaker 2: By the way, just in terms of like campaign strategy,
Speaker 2: I was just talking to my friend Mark McKinnon, who
Speaker 2: you were on Warning Joe with this morning, and I'm like,
Speaker 2: you know, Mark, when you worked on the Bush campaign,
Speaker 2: you were able to destroy John Kerrey's candidacy by quoting
Speaker 2: him saying I voted for it before I voted against it.
Speaker 2: And now it's like, I wonder the Biden team can
Speaker 2: do something with that Hitler reference. You know, It's like,
Speaker 2: it's how far we've come.
Speaker 4: How far we've come?
Speaker 1: By the way, you I saw that Trump is now
Speaker 1: running I mean this is speaking of like campaign fuck
Speaker 1: Erray Trump is now.
Speaker 3: Running an ad on overturning row for.
Speaker 1: The Iowa caucauses, despite the fact that this is electoral poison.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a lot of things to say about that.
Speaker 2: One of them is that he doesn't seem in the
Speaker 2: same place that he sort of doesn't seem to know
Speaker 2: who he's running against. I said to We had this
Speaker 2: in that conversation that Tim Miller and I had had
Speaker 2: with Bannon the other day for the circus.
Speaker 1: What's amazing everyone has to watch that. It's incredible. You really,
Speaker 1: I don't know how you're able to keep her cool
Speaker 1: while losing your shit at the same time.
Speaker 2: It's one of the great challenges of my life. There
Speaker 2: was a moment where Steve was saying, you know, if
Speaker 2: you listen to Trump's speeches, here's a lot of policy
Speaker 2: in there. I'm like, Steve, Steve, have you ever visited
Speaker 2: a memory care unit, you know, for people who have
Speaker 2: advanced to Alzheimer's or dementia. That's what listening to a
Speaker 2: Trump speech is. Like. He doesn't where he is half
Speaker 2: the time, so I don't think he knows in some
Speaker 2: level they really are. Still his campaign is interestingly weirdly,
Speaker 2: they've proven to be very good at certain things, and
Speaker 2: you can't understand the threat if you don't acknowledge that.
Speaker 2: You know, we all said in twenty twenty, were like,
Speaker 2: he's not going to get who voted for Trump in
Speaker 2: twenty sixteen. Who's the person who did voted against Trump
Speaker 2: in twenty sixteen that they're going to turn and go
Speaker 2: to get to vote for him in twenty twenty. And
Speaker 2: they would say to us, they would say, well, we're
Speaker 2: not doing that. Well, we're doing this. We're finding millions
Speaker 2: of people who didn't vote in all in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: and we're going to turn those people out and he
Speaker 2: will get more votes. And we all thought bullshit. And
Speaker 2: then they did exactly that.
Speaker 3: They did pretty well.
Speaker 2: They got millions more votes than they got and no one,
Speaker 2: I mean, I would say most smart strategy analysts, strategist
Speaker 2: journalists were like very dubious about their ability to locate
Speaker 2: all these hidden Trump voters. And they did. They found him,
Speaker 2: and so you can't just say they're incompetent. There is
Speaker 2: this other thing, though, where they seem to think you
Speaker 2: can put an ad on in Iowa for the primary
Speaker 2: and that no one will remember that ad or use
Speaker 2: it against him in a general election, where indeed, you
Speaker 2: know the position of I repealed Roe v.
Speaker 4: Wade.
Speaker 2: I'm proud Roby Wade loved the land before me, after
Speaker 2: me gone gone. So like as if that's not going
Speaker 2: to be a thing they we'll use against him. And obviously,
Speaker 2: you know, he is electoral poison. I don't think he
Speaker 2: sort of gets that people are watching right now, you know,
Speaker 2: and that those ads are like in the are being
Speaker 2: loaded up in the cannon to be fired at him
Speaker 2: over the course of the general election. It's one of
Speaker 2: many things that should make Trump totally unelectable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what are the other things that should make Trump?
Speaker 1: I mean besides criminal the ninety one criminal indetmonds well, and.
Speaker 2: The citations and the regular citations of Hitler, you know,
Speaker 2: you know those things, those you know, the small things
Speaker 2: that should make him unfit for you know, any office,
Speaker 2: let alone the highest office on the land.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I'm struck by is that
Speaker 1: it seems to me like Republicans made a Fastian bargain
Speaker 1: in twenty fifteen with Trump, and they said, we're going
Speaker 1: to touch the fourth rail. We're going to embrace racism,
Speaker 1: We're going to embrace the things we pretended to hate before,
Speaker 1: or pretended not to embrace, but quietly dog whistled too.
Speaker 1: And one of those things is anti choice.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 1: They always sort of kept moderated enough, right with Roe,
Speaker 1: so that there was a chance you know who even knew.
Speaker 1: And I think one of the things that worked for
Speaker 1: Trump was that he was such a roar shack. He
Speaker 1: had no voting record. You could say he was Some
Speaker 1: people could say to themselves, well, he's an evangelical now,
Speaker 1: and other people could say, well, he's a liberal because
Speaker 1: he's from New York and he used to be a Democrat.
Speaker 1: Now they have this right word flank that is so
Speaker 1: used to being appeased and given things they want you
Speaker 1: can't backpedal.
Speaker 3: I mean that Crew wants a federal abortion ban.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, look, I think you would add one
Speaker 2: thing to the list with Trump, which is that you know,
Speaker 2: not only was he in New Yorker, and not only
Speaker 2: had he given money to Democrats, and not only has
Speaker 2: he had he voted as a Democrat in those times,
Speaker 2: everyone you knew just assumed that he paid for at
Speaker 2: least a couple dozen abortions over the course of his life. Right,
Speaker 2: I mean that he was functionally pro choice, even if
Speaker 2: he hadn't given the matter any serious spiritual or moral consideration.
Speaker 2: And whenever I used the word spiritual and moral consideration
Speaker 2: next to Donald Trump, it like feels like I'm talking
Speaker 2: about like my daughter Calculus. You know, It's like, I like, really,
Speaker 2: but I think people just assumed that he could project
Speaker 2: that thing. He needed to say these things to get
Speaker 2: the solid support of evangelicals. He needed to say these
Speaker 2: things in order to get this very important part of
Speaker 2: the of the Republican coalition. You know, when they were
Speaker 2: planning the twenty sixteen campaign and Bannon was feeding him
Speaker 2: the populist, a nationalist, anti China, build a wall, all
Speaker 2: of that nativist, populist, grievance based stuff. That was like
Speaker 2: the core of what Bannon wanted to run on and
Speaker 2: what he saw a lane for a politician who could
Speaker 2: take over the Republican Party by appealing to those parts
Speaker 2: that increasingly large part of the base that was like
Speaker 2: that the big problem was, you know, there's this giant,
Speaker 2: huge chunk of Christian conservatives who have such a dominant,
Speaker 2: outsize role in Republican presidential nominating politics. And so I
Speaker 2: was like, well, what are we going to do about that?
Speaker 2: And I think you know Trump's attitude was, you know,
Speaker 2: I'll just tell him I'm before I'm for repealing, I'll
Speaker 2: say I'm going to repeal ruebu wad, and I'll let
Speaker 2: the Federal Society pick the judges and that all appease them.
Speaker 2: It's worth a shot. And I can very vividly remember
Speaker 2: being with him in Iowa three or four days before
Speaker 2: the caucus in sixteen, up in Sioux City, the most
Speaker 2: conservative part of Iowa, sitting there watching him sit on
Speaker 2: on stage in a beautiful old theater with Franklin Graham,
Speaker 2: you know who he had roped in and it was
Speaker 2: like the ultimate evangelical impromature. And you're like, hey, I
Speaker 2: can't believe this worked. Are these people stupid or what?
Speaker 2: And I think they again, And one of the times
Speaker 2: when we smart ass pundits were like, oh it turned out,
Speaker 2: they were like, yeah, we don't really believe he cares
Speaker 2: about this issue, but we think he will do what
Speaker 2: he said he would do, which is like the Federal
Speaker 2: Society picked the judges and lo and behold, you know
Speaker 2: that's what happened. The thing about the Iowa thing, this
Speaker 2: is the thing I forgot that I meant to say
Speaker 2: a second ago, is it is the state where he
Speaker 2: is the only I mean stated Trump is so full
Speaker 2: of false confidence and exaggerated brio about everything you know,
Speaker 2: he's like, I understand the people wh knew Hampshire. You know,
Speaker 2: I understand the people Mississippi. They're just like me. But
Speaker 2: he really does. He looks around the country and you know,
Speaker 2: whether it's the northeast or the southeast, you know, the
Speaker 2: Florida part of the world, or the Deep South or
Speaker 2: the Mountain West, and a place is like, you know
Speaker 2: the plan, you know, in the place like Nevada or Arizona,
Speaker 2: he's very confident that he understands those people. And the
Speaker 2: one place in the country where he never you always
Speaker 2: then the industrial Midwest. You know that the working class
Speaker 2: is of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Ohio, the place where he
Speaker 2: doesn't really have a feel for it, has never had
Speaker 2: a fingertip feel for it, and he knows it, and
Speaker 2: you can see it because he doesn't express the same
Speaker 2: kind of confidence. Is that part of the Midwest that's
Speaker 2: just full of nice people, you know, right like Iowa
Speaker 2: nice and Donald Trump don't just He's like, who the
Speaker 2: fuck are these people? Like I don't understand them at all?
Speaker 2: And so he and he lost there, as we all
Speaker 2: remember to Ted Cruz, right, and I think it makes
Speaker 2: him crazy that it's this place where he never is
Speaker 2: really understood Iowa. Side note the other major national politician
Speaker 2: who feels the same way as Hillary Clinton. They're like,
Speaker 2: I just don't get this state, you know. And so
Speaker 2: when he's been in Iowa more in this run than
Speaker 2: any other place, he goes keeps going back again and again,
Speaker 2: and he's putting money into it, and he's advertising there.
Speaker 2: And I think that's part of the thing you see
Speaker 2: with those abortion adds is a desperation. He really wants
Speaker 2: to win Iowa and be able to say to people,
Speaker 2: I now understand that I understand the people of Iowa.
Speaker 2: You know, those those people out there, I understand that
Speaker 2: what do they called the Cornhuskers, no weight, that's Nebraska.
Speaker 2: It's like he just really needs Iowa to feel like
Speaker 2: psychically complete, like he has full dominance of America. So
Speaker 2: he's just willing to do whatever, even if it makes
Speaker 2: no strategic sense whatsoever.
Speaker 1: Right, And I think that's right because the truth is
Speaker 1: there's no one even close to him in the polls.
Speaker 2: That's right, you know. But you know, like I said,
Speaker 2: you know, this is the thing with politicians is that
Speaker 2: they get a thing in their craw. He is just
Speaker 2: he looks at Iowa and thinks, you know, I am
Speaker 2: not going to let that happen again. I'm not going
Speaker 2: to let this campaign start with the loss. And you know,
Speaker 2: maybe all the numbers you see, like, what's going to
Speaker 2: happen if any one of these people drop out. He's
Speaker 2: the thing with Trump is in Iowa, he is the
Speaker 2: second choice of almost everybody who is not with him
Speaker 2: on the first choice. So it's like if Santa drops out,
Speaker 2: what happens most of the Santa supporters moved to Trump.
Speaker 2: If Haley drops out, same thing. I don't think he's
Speaker 2: going to lose in Iowa, but he's haunted clearly by
Speaker 2: the fact that Fad Dracula beat him in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 4: Yeah, de.
Speaker 2: Fat Draculus will always be my favorite thing for him
Speaker 2: if it's the only place where I mean, Lion Ted
Speaker 2: was really good, but Fat Dracula is better.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's incredible.
Speaker 1: I mean I was sort of him as fat Wolverine,
Speaker 1: but Fat Dracula is one hundred times batter because ultimately
Speaker 1: he really is Dracula.
Speaker 2: He does want to suck your blood. He wants to
Speaker 2: he loves to site. If I could do a Ted
Speaker 2: cruz accent.
Speaker 4: I want to suck your blood.
Speaker 2: That's what it's all about.
Speaker 1: And he leaves the dog alone, which is unforgivable. So,
Speaker 1: by the way, you have a lot of.
Speaker 3: Experience with this. Notice how I'm not saying you're old
Speaker 3: because you're not.
Speaker 2: Oh I'm old, Molly, I'm old. I'm ancient, but barely
Speaker 2: ambulatory at this.
Speaker 3: Point in the house we have it's very religious.
Speaker 1: I was a lot as the Speaker of the House now,
Speaker 1: Mike Johnson, he is hurtling towards the shutdown right before Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1: I mean, do you think this will reflect or you
Speaker 1: think all of this will be in the rear view
Speaker 1: by twenty four and no one will care.
Speaker 2: I think it will reflect the whole debacle by which
Speaker 2: we got this speaker. I think is a thing that
Speaker 2: will leave and what it's obviously going to lead to,
Speaker 2: which is an enormous amount of incompetence and miscalculation stupidity
Speaker 2: over the course the next nine months. I think it is.
Speaker 2: It will definitely leave a mark on the House Republicans
Speaker 2: and their ability to have any chance whatsoever of keeping
Speaker 2: control even you know those by the slimmest margins of
Speaker 2: the House of Representatives, and I think you know that
Speaker 2: there there is the picture of Republican extremism and dysfunction
Speaker 2: combined together. You know, it's like, you know, fat, dumb
Speaker 2: and stupid is no way to go through college.
Speaker 4: Son.
Speaker 2: It's like, you know, it's like it's like extreme, dysfunctional
Speaker 2: and lunatic is not a great profile for a candidate
Speaker 2: a swing in a swing district, you know.
Speaker 3: In America.
Speaker 2: I think all of that will will add here. And
Speaker 2: I think if they shut the government down, you know,
Speaker 2: this speaker clearly wants to shut the government down. Like
Speaker 2: That's the funny thing about this is that it's like,
Speaker 2: will Mike Johnson come up with a clever plan to
Speaker 2: keep the government open. It's like, deep in his heart,
Speaker 2: the guy's like, shut this shit down. And I think, well,
Speaker 2: that that will hurt Republicans. I think Republicans are doomed
Speaker 2: in the House anyway, but I think it will further
Speaker 2: doom them. Do I think it will play in the
Speaker 2: presidential thing? I don't really because I don't. I think
Speaker 2: Trump is suey generous. You know, you can try to
Speaker 2: make some attenuated argument about you know, Bannon and Gates
Speaker 2: and them being trumpy and like, you know, they are obviously,
Speaker 2: And I don't think anybody who is seriously contemplating a
Speaker 2: vote between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is going to
Speaker 2: be like, hey, the reason to vote against Trump is
Speaker 2: because of you know, I'm on the fence here about
Speaker 2: these two. But like Mike Johnson is what I'm gonna
Speaker 2: is going to be the killer, the dagger to Trump's heart.
Speaker 2: I just don't see that as being like the decisive
Speaker 2: move and size of factor.
Speaker 3: But it does.
Speaker 1: It certainly does paint an incredible picture of Republicans unable
Speaker 1: to govern.
Speaker 2: Yes, And I think, you know, we reach that point
Speaker 2: with the speaker fiasco where it broke through in the
Speaker 2: way that things that matter break through, which is like
Speaker 2: when the thing breaks through to the point that it's
Speaker 2: the subject of late night comedy or YouTube memes or
Speaker 2: you know, social media memes or whatever the you know,
Speaker 2: take your pick of the various four of the various
Speaker 2: platforms in which people who are ostensibly serious start to
Speaker 2: become the butt of widespread jokes. That's an issue of
Speaker 2: political issue that's starting to cut. You know, where you
Speaker 2: could do an SNL cold open with a bunch of
Speaker 2: people in it who no one knows Like SNL is
Speaker 2: always like, hey, we do cold opens. We do them
Speaker 2: about presidents, vice presidents, you know, presidential two nominees of
Speaker 2: a party. Nobody's like at the level of Lauren Bobert,
Speaker 2: you know, has ever been honest at SNL cold open before?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: But now we're at the place where the Republicans collectively
Speaker 2: are such a laughing stock that Saturday Night Live is like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you know what, we can put up a bunch of
Speaker 2: Republican backbenchers here in the cold open and people will
Speaker 2: get why this is funny. That's not a great place
Speaker 2: to be in for National Political Party.
Speaker 3: John, I hope you'll come back.
Speaker 2: Oh, I'll come back. When have I ever said no?
Speaker 2: Sometimes I say later, sometimes I say not this week.
Speaker 2: But I never say no to the Great Molly Jong
Speaker 2: Fast partly because I know that if I ever really
Speaker 2: said no, you would turn on me and say I
Speaker 2: am your retribution or I am my retribution, and then
Speaker 2: I just get fast, faster or fastest retribution. Who wants that.
Speaker 1: Mitch Landrew is a White House senior advisor and the
Speaker 1: former mayor of New Orleans. Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Speaker 1: Mitch Landrew, Where are you at, baby?
Speaker 4: People are not going to understand that it's been better
Speaker 4: if you're from New York. Where yet I'm doing great?
Speaker 4: Thank you for asking.
Speaker 1: It's a year since you became senior Advisor and the
Speaker 1: Structural Court at the White House.
Speaker 4: No, ma'am, I don't want to start off on the
Speaker 4: wrong foot. But it's been two years.
Speaker 3: Two years. It's two years.
Speaker 4: I don't understand. Why are you trying to shorten me.
Speaker 4: I'm two years, So explain to us what that looks like. Oh,
Speaker 4: it's just it's been so unbelievable. You know. When I
Speaker 4: was had the joy of being a Mariti Arleans during
Speaker 4: maybe the most difficult time in the history because we
Speaker 4: had to rebuild the city and it was really hard,
Speaker 4: but we did it and it was a soulful, wonderful
Speaker 4: experience that I learned a lot of lessons strong. So
Speaker 4: when the President called me and said, hey, would you
Speaker 4: come up here and help rebuild the country, I was like,
Speaker 4: I'm all in. What you know, you're kind of starting
Speaker 4: off from scratch because the country hasn't done this in
Speaker 4: a long long time. And I mean like Franklin del
Speaker 4: and R. Roosevelt long or Eisenhower long our royal electrification
Speaker 4: long shows a daunting task, and most people he didn't
Speaker 4: think it was going to happen, and be thought that
Speaker 4: if the bill passed it, we couldn't get anything done.
Speaker 4: So here we are two years later, we're bringing receipts
Speaker 4: chapter verse daytime place. We have forty thousand projects that
Speaker 4: are under some level of formation right now in all
Speaker 4: fifty states, in four thousand, five hundred communities and the
Speaker 4: territories in DC. And so when the President said, hey, look,
Speaker 4: I have an idea. I have a vision for how
Speaker 4: you make America strong, both at home and abroad. The
Speaker 4: way you do that is invest in the American people,
Speaker 4: and you invest in real things that people need every
Speaker 4: day to make their lives better. That's what the idea was.
Speaker 4: And so as a consequence, we pass this piece of legislation, which,
Speaker 4: along by the way, with the Chips Act and Inflation
Speaker 4: Reduction Act, the American Rescue Plan are creating I don't know,
Speaker 4: we're up to past fourteen million jobs now, eight hundred
Speaker 4: thousand manufacturing jobs, another six hundred thousand constructing jobs. People
Speaker 4: back to work making good money, and we're rebuilding communities, roads, bridges, airports, ports, waterways,
Speaker 4: high speed internet, clean air, safe water.
Speaker 1: So I know what you guys have been up to
Speaker 1: because I listened to c SPAN. But for the people
Speaker 1: who don't listen to c SPAN, last week was a
Speaker 1: big week for trains.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about trains.
Speaker 4: Well, if you live on the Northeast cor this is
Speaker 4: something that you know very very well. And by the way,
Speaker 4: the only way that I can start off talking about
Speaker 4: trains is to say that the President of United States
Speaker 4: is a train guy. People should know his story fairly
Speaker 4: well that when he was twenty nine he was elected
Speaker 4: to the United States Senate, there was an incredible tragedy
Speaker 4: in his family. His wife was killed in a car accident.
Speaker 4: He traveled back and forth on Amtrak home at night
Speaker 4: to take care of his two younger sons, and essentially
Speaker 4: did that pretty much every day he was in the
Speaker 4: Senate until he became Vice president. That is a familiar
Speaker 4: experience traveling on the Northeast Corridor from Washington, d C.
Speaker 4: To Boston. And last week, the President and downd sixteen
Speaker 4: point four billion dollars, which is just a piece of
Speaker 4: the investments we're making to trying to have world class
Speaker 4: rail in the United States of America, so you can
Speaker 4: live anywhere along the northeast Corrida all the way from
Speaker 4: Boston down to Washington, d C. The Frederick Douglas Tunnel
Speaker 4: in Baltimore, the Susquehanna Bridge, the thirteen bridges in that
Speaker 4: area that over one hundred years old that are going
Speaker 4: to get replaced. Everybody knows what the choke points are
Speaker 4: in New York around the hug And Tunnel and the
Speaker 4: Gateway Project, eleven billion dollars invested in finally fixing that
Speaker 4: really difficult situation that, by the way, is still suffering
Speaker 4: from some kind of saltwater intrusion from Sandy. A lot
Speaker 4: of investments there to make people's lives better. And then,
Speaker 4: of course they're huge numbers. More than that, high speed
Speaker 4: internet's critically important. I just got off a call with
Speaker 4: the Majority leader about two hundred jobs that are being
Speaker 4: created in Syracuse by a company called PPC that is
Speaker 4: going to start making fiber optic cable there. And we
Speaker 4: have examples like that all over the country, and every
Speaker 4: one of the different kinds of investments that are being made.
Speaker 4: Everybody now knows, by the way, how beautiful it looks
Speaker 4: to have a great airport. Laguadia is just throwing it,
Speaker 4: knocking it out the park. That is what the future
Speaker 4: looks like for aviation in America, and we're investing in
Speaker 4: airports all over the country.
Speaker 1: What does this mean for me when I take my assella?
Speaker 1: Will my ascella be faster?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 3: How will this affect me?
Speaker 4: It's an excellent question. And how it affects me? That's
Speaker 4: pretty much what American citizens ask about. Well, what's this
Speaker 4: really mean to me? Not macro sets, but in the
Speaker 4: micro sets. Essentially, there are a couple of things going on.
Speaker 4: You know, Amtrak is a big player in the space
Speaker 4: along the Northeast cord Or. They have been given a
Speaker 4: substantial amount of money to do a number of different things.
Speaker 4: One of them is to buy and have manufactured in
Speaker 4: the United States new train sets. Those are the cars
Speaker 4: that everybody rides on with the engine that moves it
Speaker 4: from place to place, and so those are in the
Speaker 4: process of being constructed as we speak. I think that
Speaker 4: we are going to purchase over a thousand new train
Speaker 4: cars that have to be manufactured that are going to
Speaker 4: be much closer to being net zero than the ones
Speaker 4: that we have right Now the second thing that they
Speaker 4: are trying to do is along that a tie Northeast
Speaker 4: cord or they're trying to as best as they can
Speaker 4: find out where they can straighten some of the tracks
Speaker 4: without impeding on people's homes and businesses unnecessarily so that
Speaker 4: the trains can actually go faster, and then the trains
Speaker 4: themselves will do that. On top of that, they are
Speaker 4: going to hopefully retrofit a lot of the stations that
Speaker 4: people have to use to make them handicap accessible. The
Speaker 4: other day out for example, I was in Wilmington, Delaware
Speaker 4: cutting the ribbon on a new trains station reproduction project.
Speaker 4: Where folks used to have to carry their bags up
Speaker 4: and downstairs and folks that had physical challenges couldn't move.
Speaker 4: That's all been you know, fixed, and that's going to
Speaker 4: happen across the Northeast Corrida. So the experience should get safer,
Speaker 4: it should get faster, it should get better, it should
Speaker 4: need more climate friendly on top of that, outside of
Speaker 4: the Northeast Corrida, which I know that you're equally concerned about.
Speaker 4: Equally if you were in the southern part of the
Speaker 4: United States of Baracka, where I'm from.
Speaker 3: I went there once.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's like not Florida, right, Yeah, exactly Are you
Speaker 4: happen to be on the West coast? Are you happen
Speaker 4: to be someplace in between? There are opportunities to create
Speaker 4: a really high speed rail that is gonna mirror maybe
Speaker 4: what you see in Japan or in China, and there
Speaker 4: are a lot of different proposers across the country that
Speaker 4: we're considering that way as well.
Speaker 1: Could that actually happen? I mean, is that a real
Speaker 1: thing that could actually happen.
Speaker 4: It can happen from New York to Los Angeles. It
Speaker 4: can happen from Vegas to Los Angeles. It can happen
Speaker 4: from Sanford, just go to Los Angeles. It can happen,
Speaker 4: for example, maybe one day between Georgia and North Carolina.
Speaker 4: You know, I think you have regional things that look
Speaker 4: like that. It just depends on, at the end of
Speaker 4: the day, how much you want to invest to get
Speaker 4: us from here to that. But I don't think there's
Speaker 4: any doubt. So I'm from New Orleans, we don't really
Speaker 4: have high speed rail, and we don't We've got some
Speaker 4: am track, but not the way that you guys in
Speaker 4: the Northeast live on this and it just turns out
Speaker 4: that I think eight hundred thousand folks travel every day
Speaker 4: on the Northeast Corridor and you wouldn't even think about
Speaker 4: necessarily taking a car or taking a plane. The President's like, look,
Speaker 4: we got to make this faster, better and easier for everybody,
Speaker 4: which is what the goal is. So for the first
Speaker 4: time really in the last fifty sixty years, the President
Speaker 4: was able to get this money in place. We're trying
Speaker 4: to get it down to the ground, which the President
Speaker 4: announce the other day. Biggest announcement on the on the
Speaker 4: whole thing was for the Hudson Tunnel to eleven billion
Speaker 4: dollars a piece of change to fix the old tunnel
Speaker 4: and to build a new one, and then to fix
Speaker 4: all the gateway projects that everybody up there has been
Speaker 4: arguing about forever. So the President finally brought you know,
Speaker 4: New York and New Jersey together. The governors were there
Speaker 4: the other day, the majority of Leader and Senator Gillibrand
Speaker 4: were there, all of the secretaries for DOT and everybody's
Speaker 4: as I like to say, gihunt and working together. And
Speaker 4: this is going to be a real deal thing going
Speaker 4: forward in your Life's hopefully going to be a little
Speaker 4: bit safer, fast, easier, and cheaper.
Speaker 3: That's a good So talk to me about the lead pipes,
Speaker 3: because you guys are dealing with the drinking water situation
Speaker 3: too well.
Speaker 4: The other thing, too, is the President and the Vice
Speaker 4: President are adamant that everybody in America are to have
Speaker 4: clean and safe air and water. And quite frankly, of
Speaker 4: all the projects in this bill, the three hundred and
Speaker 4: seventy five of them, and as I told you, they
Speaker 4: criss crossed the country. I've actually, by the way, traveled
Speaker 4: to one hundred and thirty one cities, towns, and counties
Speaker 4: and tribal communities and traveled over one hundred and ten
Speaker 4: thousand miles. I've talked to a lot of folks about
Speaker 4: a lot of things. I have to say that the
Speaker 4: clean air and clean water pieces of this are so
Speaker 4: basic that people just can't believe that in the United
Speaker 4: States of America we're not there yet. And so there
Speaker 4: are happened to be some places in America two million
Speaker 4: people don't have into a plumbing. I know this sounds
Speaker 4: kind of amazing, but that is in fact true. So
Speaker 4: you know, I've been down to Lowndes County in Alabama
Speaker 4: and working on projects like that. I've been as far
Speaker 4: north as in the Pokiok, Alaska, which is like, way
Speaker 4: the hell up there? All right, prob committed me. That's
Speaker 4: the best way I can describe it.
Speaker 3: How do you even get there?
Speaker 4: By the way my boat?
Speaker 3: Oh wow?
Speaker 4: Oh it's insane. I mean, you fly and then when
Speaker 4: you get in anchorage, You're like, okay, well I got
Speaker 4: to get up there. And they're like, well, let's put
Speaker 4: you in a little bitty plane. And then the plane
Speaker 4: lands on a dirt runway and then I'm like, we're
Speaker 4: we there yet, and they're like, no, you got to
Speaker 4: get in the boat. And I'm like, oh man.
Speaker 3: And it's cold when you get up there, right.
Speaker 4: Well, it wasn't. I went. I went when it wasn't cold,
Speaker 4: because I'm smart. But it was wonderful and wet. We
Speaker 4: met the tribal community up there. And of course, the
Speaker 4: point here is that nobody is too far away for
Speaker 4: the president, whether it's in the Black Belt or whether
Speaker 4: it's down in the Delta, or whether it's in a
Speaker 4: tribal community in northern Alaska, which by the way, you
Speaker 4: can actually see Russia from. That's true.
Speaker 1: Actually I feel like if you're stealing somebody else's stick here,
Speaker 1: I'm just saying.
Speaker 4: When I was there, I felt bad because I thought
Speaker 4: that was a joke. But it actually turns out the
Speaker 4: big clothes. So in any of that, the ability to
Speaker 4: get clean air and clean water to people is critically important.
Speaker 4: Now we know about this a lot in the country
Speaker 4: because of what happened in Flint, Michigan, which by the way,
Speaker 4: they're all new piping in Flint, Mishigan. That project is lead.
Speaker 4: Thank god. It took way too long, but the President
Speaker 4: the Vice President were able to put in this bill
Speaker 4: fifteen billion dollars to help eradicate all the lead pipes
Speaker 4: in America and I and we're well on the way,
Speaker 4: working with cities and states to get this done. We
Speaker 4: have twelve hundred drinking and wastewater projects, including funding to
Speaker 4: replace hundreds of thousands of lead service lines. So we're
Speaker 4: on track. But again, this is a hard thing, and
Speaker 4: by the way, it's done by cities and counties. Federal
Speaker 4: government's not doing this work. This money gets pushed down
Speaker 4: to the states, it gets pushed down to the mayor's
Speaker 4: and they have to do the work. And they're in
Speaker 4: the process of doing it as we speak.
Speaker 3: So interesting, Yeah, crazy, it's a lot of work. Let's
Speaker 3: go to broadbands and.
Speaker 4: When you live through COVID, if you didn't understand it before,
Speaker 4: you understand it now that nothing happened. And if you
Speaker 4: don't have access to knowledge, and the access to knowledge
Speaker 4: is through Internet. And the President made a commitment to
Speaker 4: make sure that everybody in America is stressing everybody is
Speaker 4: going to have access to it. And so that two
Speaker 4: things going on here. One of them is making sure
Speaker 4: that we lay fiber optic cable everywhere in America where
Speaker 4: it is not or some other kind of technology that
Speaker 4: is absolutely necessary, for example at a far away place
Speaker 4: like the Pockeyac if you can't get five of there.
Speaker 4: And the second is connecting people who actually have access
Speaker 4: to high speed INNT but can't afford it. So just
Speaker 4: in the past two years, through what they call the
Speaker 4: Affordable Connectivity Program, which you can find that get Internet
Speaker 4: dot go. If you're living at our below two hundred
Speaker 4: percent of the poverty level, you actually can get free
Speaker 4: internet for one hundred bag of bytes per second. And
Speaker 4: we're signed up twenty one million Americans for this project
Speaker 4: is called Internet for all, and we're going to keep
Speaker 4: doing that, and we're going to keep laying fiber op
Speaker 4: to kid. Now, every governor in the state has already
Speaker 4: received what they know is their allocation the federal money
Speaker 4: they're going to get to actually start putting fiber in
Speaker 4: the ground. And you can see that on our website
Speaker 4: invest dot Go as well. And by the way, every
Speaker 4: project in America is on that website. If you want
Speaker 4: to find out what a project is, go on there's
Speaker 4: a map. It's got a bunch of dots on it.
Speaker 4: It looks like a serot painting. You can just push
Speaker 4: the dot and the project will come up and you
Speaker 4: can tell how much it is, where it is. And
Speaker 4: we did that for transparency for the taxpayers of America.
Speaker 4: You know, the governors are in their process of submitting
Speaker 4: their plans to us about where they're going to lay it.
Speaker 4: We're going to say, yes, they're going to get to work.
Speaker 4: But there's already been billions of dollars that have been
Speaker 4: sent to the states through the Department of Agriculture and
Speaker 4: the Department of Treasury to start a lot of this work.
Speaker 4: And as I said just today, like ten minutes ago,
Speaker 4: I just got off of a press call with Seid
Speaker 4: of the Schumer about a company in Syracuse. It's going
Speaker 4: to manufacture the stuff that you need to put to
Speaker 4: build fiber so you can put it in the ground.
Speaker 4: It's going to create a five hundred plus job, which
Speaker 4: was one of the points of all all of this
Speaker 4: stuff anyway, not just to give people better roads and
Speaker 4: bridges and airports and ports, which are all critical, but
Speaker 4: to build them in a way that created lots of
Speaker 4: high pay of jobs so people could build generation well,
Speaker 4: have some dignity in their life. And by the way,
Speaker 4: use products that have made in America so we can
Speaker 4: rebuild communities that have gotten burnt out from offshore. That
Speaker 4: was President Biden's vision. And the truth of the matter
Speaker 4: is he's bringing receipts. There have been lots of people
Speaker 4: that have been in both public office, some of them
Speaker 4: that sat in the White House that said they did
Speaker 4: things that they didn't do, took credit for stuff that
Speaker 4: they and this president can bring you receipts in chapter
Speaker 4: and verse and instead of just talking about an infrastructure week,
Speaker 4: we're actually in the midst of a massive rebuilding that's
Speaker 4: going to be an infrastructure decade.
Speaker 1: Tell me what project. Are you the sort of most
Speaker 1: excited about or what is a project that we don't.
Speaker 3: Know about that we should know about.
Speaker 4: Well, first of all, I wouldn't be doing my job
Speaker 4: if you didn't know about it. But the big cathedral projects.
Speaker 4: The bread Spence Bridge is a massive bridge that connects
Speaker 4: Ohio and Kentucky to Red States by the way, that
Speaker 4: carries about three percent of the nation's gross domestic product
Speaker 4: on any given day, moving goods from ships to shelves.
Speaker 4: That project is a really big project that is pretty
Speaker 4: symbolic of what the whole thing is we're doing. I
Speaker 4: don't need to tell you about the symbolism of a bridge,
Speaker 4: but it actually connects people and then it spiritually connects
Speaker 4: people as well. We've put a billion dollars into the
Speaker 4: restoration of the Great Lakes, So if you live anywhere
Speaker 4: in or around that, you understand the significance of that
Speaker 4: a billion dollars into the Everglades. The biggest project really
Speaker 4: is one in New York in the Hudson Tunnel. That's
Speaker 4: the big one. That's the one that is going to
Speaker 4: touch more people than any singular project in the country.
Speaker 4: We're rebuilding the Frederick Douglass bridge. So if you're coming
Speaker 4: from New York into Washington, d C. And you know
Speaker 4: you kind of heading towards Baltimore, that train slows down
Speaker 4: to thirty miles an hour.
Speaker 3: Yes, I have some experience with that.
Speaker 4: Well, here you go. Here's how it's going to improve
Speaker 4: your life. You're going to have to do your homework
Speaker 4: faster because that's trying to go one hundred and ten
Speaker 4: miles an hour, not thirty around that turn turn running
Speaker 4: into that. But then, and let me just say this,
Speaker 4: those are big, big, big. There are some small projects
Speaker 4: that are exciting, like making sure that we get into
Speaker 4: a plumbing two folks in Lowndes County, Alabama, or you
Speaker 4: meet somebody like Diana Branch and are two kids eight
Speaker 4: in Jada in Milwaukee that make sure they've got to
Speaker 4: have clean water and you see their faces. Are the
Speaker 4: guy named Walter who was a tribal leader up into
Speaker 4: Pockiac who we met. Or a guy named Slim if
Speaker 4: you can believe this, who is the mayor of a
Speaker 4: small town in New Mexico called Hatch, which by the way,
Speaker 4: has the best chili in the world, who really is
Speaker 4: concerned because it's flooding too much. To me, those are
Speaker 4: the things because that President Biden said, look, we got
Speaker 4: to see everybody. This is really easy, you guys. If
Speaker 4: we can do things together, we can do big things.
Speaker 4: If we can't do big things together, we can't do anything.
Speaker 4: And oh, by the way, don't leave anybody behind. So Mitch,
Speaker 4: get your butt out there and go find these people
Speaker 4: and talk to them and make sure that they're involved
Speaker 4: in the work that we do on And for me,
Speaker 4: that's been the most uplifting part of this entire process.
Speaker 1: What do things look like now from this point on,
Speaker 1: is just watching these things get finished?
Speaker 4: No, no, no, no. You got to first of all,
Speaker 4: remember when we started, I said, we haven't done something
Speaker 4: this big in a long long time. And so from
Speaker 4: my perspective as a mayor, which is a more of
Speaker 4: a not what you want to do, but how to
Speaker 4: do stuff job kind of where the pedal hits the
Speaker 4: metal or the rubber wrists the road. You got to
Speaker 4: get stuff done. You have to set up what I
Speaker 4: call a mouse trap or scaffolding. You got to make
Speaker 4: sure the federal government and all the cabinet secretaries are
Speaker 4: working together. You got to make sure they're working every
Speaker 4: day with the governors. The governor's cabinets have to be
Speaker 4: working together. You've got to be working with the mayor's
Speaker 4: you got to be working the community leaders. That takes
Speaker 4: a lot of work. If you ever raise a lot
Speaker 4: of kids, you kind of understand what I'm saying here
Speaker 4: where you got to get everybody dressed at the same time,
Speaker 4: because I got five kids and I had four of
Speaker 4: them in different schools, and you got to know what
Speaker 4: you're on, on what you're doing, or you lose a kid
Speaker 4: like in the parking lot, that's not a good thing.
Speaker 3: Yes, I have some experience with this.
Speaker 4: So in other words, if you can think about how
Speaker 4: to herd cats, you have to do that every day,
Speaker 4: all day to make sure one of the kids running
Speaker 4: the street all right. So you can put some technical
Speaker 4: language around all of that, but it's about what I
Speaker 4: call horizontal and vertical integration across federal, state, and local authorities,
Speaker 4: both horizonally and vertically. And that is the team of
Speaker 4: people that have to get stuffed doune of it. They're
Speaker 4: not communicating, collaborating, coordinating every day, then you're not. Nothing's happened.
Speaker 4: So that's important we do that every day. It's like
Speaker 4: running drills, running stadium steps. We work on that. The
Speaker 4: second part is, okay, well, if that team's ready to go,
Speaker 4: they got they can't do anything and they don't have
Speaker 4: the money. So you got to get the money out
Speaker 4: the door. And in order to do this in a
Speaker 4: transparent way where we do these projects on time and
Speaker 4: on task, on budget, with no wayte fraud and abuse,
Speaker 4: you've got to make sure that the applications are good,
Speaker 4: that they're smart, that if you give these folks money,
Speaker 4: they'll actually be able to make it happen. Then you've
Speaker 4: got to get the money to them, and the money
Speaker 4: gets them in two ways. Some of the money goes
Speaker 4: straight to the governors, and then some of the money
Speaker 4: you have to apply for that goes to the mayors
Speaker 4: and the county executives. So you got to run that
Speaker 4: whole process. And then the third thing you got to
Speaker 4: do is what you and I had done today, which
Speaker 4: is telling people about it so they know it's coming.
Speaker 4: They can kind of check on how we're doing. Pick
Speaker 4: us in the butt when we're not doing it the
Speaker 4: right way, demand that we go faster, and then when
Speaker 4: it looks good, say, oh my god, I love that.
Speaker 4: Can we have more of it, and so that's it,
Speaker 4: and so that requires nurturing every day. I do think
Speaker 4: that we are organizationally in a much better place. The
Speaker 4: country's going to be learning now how to build big
Speaker 4: things again. We have to prove its people because nobody
Speaker 4: believed that we can do it. And I'm just really
Speaker 4: hopeful that as we go forward in the country. Remember
Speaker 4: we only end this two years. It takes a long
Speaker 4: time to build a strong foundation that can't ever be reversed,
Speaker 4: and so we're in the early stages of that and
Speaker 4: a lot more work to do, and we're at the
Speaker 4: point where as my grandma would say, she would say,
Speaker 4: it needs a lot of elbow grease. You gotta work it.
Speaker 4: I call it the hard work of governing well and
Speaker 4: demanding that people get off of their high horse and
Speaker 4: quit arguing about extremes and get focused on the thing
Speaker 4: that we all care about, which is a road, filling
Speaker 4: the damn pothole, getting home as fast as we can
Speaker 4: so we can do homework with our kids, to do
Speaker 4: the things that people need to do in a way
Speaker 4: that makes our lives easier. And that's what the presidents
Speaker 4: wanted to do from the beginning.
Speaker 3: Mitch Landrew, thank you, thank thank you.
Speaker 4: We thank you for everything. I appreciate it. You take care,
Speaker 4: you two.
Speaker 1: Danielle Nickinyon is editor in chief and founder of Bolts magazine.
Speaker 3: Welcome, Too Fast Politics. Daniel Thank you so much. You
Speaker 3: are here.
Speaker 1: Because you are the editor of this very good magazine
Speaker 1: called Bolts. It does local elections, but on a micro level.
Speaker 3: Is that fair?
Speaker 6: Yeah? I think the goal is to connect these local
Speaker 6: indued elections with all the issues that readers' voters would
Speaker 6: care about and would look at Washington Floor usually, but
Speaker 6: in fact it's also happening, you know, at the county level,
Speaker 6: at the municipal level.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And this is something I'm very interested in, and we
Speaker 1: should all be interested in what's happening on the local
Speaker 1: level because ultimately it has enormous national implications, as we've
Speaker 1: seen again and again. So I want to talk to
Speaker 1: you first. We're going to talk about an election that
Speaker 1: no one has heard about.
Speaker 3: To accept you and people who live in Pennsylvania, the
Speaker 3: Pennsylvania judiciary elections, because there were three judges elected in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 3: Tell us a backstory. Explain to us the situation.
Speaker 5: Right, So, Pennsylvania was the only state last week that
Speaker 5: was holding elections for its for its court system. You know,
Speaker 5: in a lot of the country judges are elected, not everywhere,
Speaker 5: but in most places. Obviously, Pennsylvania really is the swing
Speaker 5: state I think, I would say for twenty twenty four
Speaker 5: to watch. You know, it really is so important for
Speaker 5: deciding the presidential race.
Speaker 3: You really think that.
Speaker 1: I feel like Pennsylvania is sort of like largely blue
Speaker 1: at this point.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think it is such a huge part
Speaker 5: of the blue wall that if Democrats exactly Democrats kind
Speaker 5: of secure Pennsylvania, they don't need that much more or
Speaker 5: all of the other states Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, Wisconsin ate,
Speaker 5: they only at that point really need one perhaps, which
Speaker 5: which is a big, big style. But Pennsylvania really is essential,
Speaker 5: and I think Mali very importantly. It is the state
Speaker 5: in twenty two that Trump kept trying to go after
Speaker 5: in the court system. You know, he kept filing all
Speaker 5: these lawsuits in Pennsylvania. Obviously did it everywhere, but Pennsylvania
Speaker 5: was arguably the state that sought the most lawsuits, and
Speaker 5: a lot of these lawsuits went to die in the
Speaker 5: state Supreme Court. In November December twenty twenty and what
Speaker 5: one of the seats was empty on This was vacant
Speaker 5: because a Democrat had passed away last year, and that's
Speaker 5: the seat that voters in Pennsylvania were going to sail.
Speaker 5: So Democrats were sure to keep the majority. On the
Speaker 5: corporate matter of the result, it was in me five
Speaker 5: two or four to three. But there have been instances
Speaker 5: on this court that things don't exactly go according to
Speaker 5: party line, and especially when it comes to mail voting.
Speaker 5: There's been so many cases in recent years in Pennsylvania
Speaker 5: around whether mail ballots should be tossed, should be counted.
Speaker 5: We're talking about an advocate in Pennsylvania told me tens
Speaker 5: or thousands of bad ballots could be affected in twenty
Speaker 5: twenty four depending on the result of this election. So
Speaker 5: all of these have made it very important for just
Speaker 5: voting rights. I'm not even going to go into all
Speaker 5: the other issues that are important. And Democrats won that seat.
Speaker 5: They won all three, right, there were actually four to
Speaker 5: judge SIPs on the ballot, so there was one for
Speaker 5: Supreme Court and then there were three for intermediate courts
Speaker 5: that are right below the Supreme Court. Democrats swept all
Speaker 5: four and they actually flipped what's called the Superior Court
Speaker 5: of Pennsylvania, which is right below the Supreme Court. A
Speaker 5: lot of cases that end up in the Supreme Court
Speaker 5: go through it, so obviously it's very important that that
Speaker 5: cases be be prepped for a side or on the
Speaker 5: other on lower courts. And what's really interesting is that
Speaker 5: it's not at all usual for Democrats to sweep these
Speaker 5: down ballot elections on an off year. In twenty twenty one,
Speaker 5: Republicans that very well in judge elections in Pennsylvania. Those
Speaker 5: are not years where Democrats usually are eager to go vote.
Speaker 5: So this was very yeah election results.
Speaker 3: Do you think that.
Speaker 1: Speaks to a Democratic electorate that is enthusiastic about the voting.
Speaker 5: I mean to look at Pennsylvania specifically, I think definitely,
Speaker 5: because you saw that same pattern County, per County. You
Speaker 5: saw Democrats do very well in Pennsylvania. So they really
Speaker 5: kept control of the suburban areas of Pennsylvania. They even
Speaker 5: flipped the new Republican areas blue, and in place after place,
Speaker 5: there was heavier enthusiasm and turnout in blue areas than
Speaker 5: there was elsewhere. So for instance, and in Philly, the
Speaker 5: electorate was a third higher than twenty twenty one, whereas
Speaker 5: in the state at large only ten percent higher. Now
Speaker 5: that's not going to exactly hold into twenty twenty four,
Speaker 5: but in vacations definitely are that Dobbs, Trump's comeback and
Speaker 5: a bunch of factors have really energized the base of
Speaker 5: Democratic Party.
Speaker 1: The reason why I'm thinking about this is because and
Speaker 1: now we're going to go to Kentucky in this Kentucky
Speaker 1: gubernatorial so there were two off your Googer tutorials. And
Speaker 1: in Mississippi, obviously that was a little bit different circumstances.
Speaker 3: It's very red state.
Speaker 1: There was sort of a hope that Brandon Presley could
Speaker 1: break through what is a very whatever an R plus
Speaker 1: I don't know, very high numbers twenty thirty forty, but
Speaker 1: he wasn't able to.
Speaker 3: But in Kentucky, one of the things.
Speaker 1: We saw Burscher grew his electoral margins, he won by
Speaker 1: even more, and he ran on abortion unapologetically. But the
Speaker 1: point I wanted to make was that Republicans had a
Speaker 1: real turnout problem in Kentucky.
Speaker 3: Can you talk about that.
Speaker 5: We saw the same pattern in Kentucky as we saw
Speaker 5: in other states. I discussing Republican parts of the state
Speaker 5: just didn't turn out as much as they should have
Speaker 5: for the Republican to have a strong chance.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 5: One a little addendem to this as well in Kentucky
Speaker 5: is that the governor of Kentucky was a Democrat. When
Speaker 5: he came into office in twenty nineteen, he did a
Speaker 5: couple of things. One, he signed an executive order that
Speaker 5: restored the voting rates of about five percent of residents
Speaker 5: of the state. Just got their voting rights back, just
Speaker 5: like that, with one stroke of the pen of the governor.
Speaker 5: And there was a lot of efforts by organizers this
Speaker 5: year by bye, by people who used to be in
Speaker 5: prison and have regained their rights to reach out to
Speaker 5: people who informed people and get them to Tornado as well.
Speaker 5: And the other other is that there was an alliance
Speaker 5: between the governor Bashir and the Republican and some Republicans
Speaker 5: to make it easier to vote by mail, to make
Speaker 5: it easier to vote in some ways. And you know
Speaker 5: that there were efforts done by Democrats with some alliance
Speaker 5: with says as centrist Republicans to make it easier to vote.
Speaker 5: So it's a little too early to tell, you know
Speaker 5: what produced what effects last week. But those things aren't random.
Speaker 5: They were definitely efforts by Democrats, even in the state
Speaker 5: like Kentucky, which is very difficult for them to make
Speaker 5: voting voting easier last week.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's a really interesting situation because you really
Speaker 1: do have a red state with a governor who grew
Speaker 1: his margins and also ran on choice. Let's look at Virginia,
Speaker 1: because Virginia is so interesting to me. My opinion was
Speaker 1: I was very worried about Virginia because I had seen
Speaker 1: you know, Virginia is a purple state. It's maybe getting
Speaker 1: a little bit more blue. But I really thought young
Speaker 1: Kin he puts.
Speaker 3: On that vest.
Speaker 1: He says some stuff that sounds like a moderate. Remember
Speaker 1: that fifteen week ban had been very well tested, right, Like,
Speaker 1: this guy sticks to his talking points.
Speaker 3: He's not like Trump. He goes out.
Speaker 1: There, he says, I'm you know, give me the legislature
Speaker 1: and I will enact this very well polled fifteen week
Speaker 1: abortion man, which was really made in a lab to
Speaker 1: appeal to moderates. And he couldn't do it. If anything,
Speaker 1: he lost the other chamber.
Speaker 5: Talk to me about that, No, I mean, you're absolutely
Speaker 5: right that Governor. Youngkin put a huge effort into recruiting
Speaker 5: into this new vision of the Repulican Party that he
Speaker 5: thought he was building on the backs of like very
Speaker 5: conservative policies, Like he went out and said that he
Speaker 5: will introduce new restrictions on abortions and was hoping that
Speaker 5: that message would make him seem like a centrist, which
Speaker 5: is a bit odd and didn't work at the polls
Speaker 5: because it was odd he was going out and saying actively,
Speaker 5: I'm going to make abortion on an issue. If you
Speaker 5: give me power, I'm going to use new restrictions. But
Speaker 5: that's a compromise position, so obviously there was something here
Speaker 5: that didn't quite add up. But you're right, Ted, it
Speaker 5: was very suspenseful, right.
Speaker 1: At least like he's a little bit disciplined, whereas Republicans
Speaker 1: usually have like Trumps.
Speaker 5: No, definitely, But I think one thing that's important to
Speaker 5: remember is that his own election in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 5: the story behind it and was that there was a
Speaker 5: lot of anger around schools and rental choice in twenty
Speaker 5: twenty one.
Speaker 3: Really peak COVID education fuckery.
Speaker 5: There was this idea by young Kin that the cultural
Speaker 5: wars are going to help him, which actually we saw
Speaker 5: not not just so Republicans failed to flip the state Senate,
Speaker 5: the actually lost the state House in Virginia, but we
Speaker 5: also saw similar results if you go further down, were
Speaker 5: school board elections did not go well for conservatives last
Speaker 5: week in Virginia. They were trying to overtake a bunch
Speaker 5: of suburban school boards, really increased the presence of Moms
Speaker 5: for Liberty, book bands, and all these issues that were
Speaker 5: supposed to have been central in twenty twenty one, and
Speaker 5: that also failed. You know, so I think if you
Speaker 5: combine the abortion result and the school board result again,
Speaker 5: what we see the same thing as we saw in Pennsylvania,
Speaker 5: where the left side of the spectrum was there and
Speaker 5: did not want the book bands, did not want abortion restrictions,
Speaker 5: and showed that itself is not going to sleep through
Speaker 5: these issues.
Speaker 1: Talk to me about Moms for Liberty, because this is
Speaker 1: a fascinating little bit of fuckery. Republicans got very excited
Speaker 1: that COVID restrictions were going to lead to school choice,
Speaker 1: which is going to lead to book bands, which was
Speaker 1: going to lead to them taking over the world.
Speaker 3: Moms for Liberty, you know, they sort.
Speaker 1: Of got the most crazy people they could find it
Speaker 1: didn't work for them, did it.
Speaker 5: This is so important to follow because my Momum's Liberty
Speaker 5: has this sort of smart underd rat or strategy for
Speaker 5: their purposes of going in at the last minute and
Speaker 5: endorsing candidates in the final week seven elections. And it's
Speaker 5: very hard. There were so many elections for school board, Molly,
Speaker 5: We're talking about hundreds in the state.
Speaker 3: It seems like a nightmare. Yeah, to keep track of on.
Speaker 5: A given day. There were one hundreds in many states
Speaker 5: at once. It's very hard to keep track of, including
Speaker 5: for local media, because the candidates are very good at
Speaker 5: not necessarily saying what they think until there, like self,
Speaker 5: last endorsement at the last minute.
Speaker 1: It's very misleading, right, the idea is I love normal,
Speaker 1: but that at the last minute they're like, yes, I'm crazy.
Speaker 5: And what we saw this year on like priories, is
Speaker 5: there was much more effort on the other side against
Speaker 5: Mom's Liberty to put the spotlight on people before even
Speaker 5: they had the chance to do their play. And what
Speaker 5: we saw in the result obviously there's so many elections
Speaker 5: that of course Conservatives won some school boards. They want
Speaker 5: some seats that are important, but overall, in so many states,
Speaker 5: the slates for candidates for conservative school board candidates did
Speaker 5: very poorly.
Speaker 4: And I think.
Speaker 5: Wherever you are listening to this, you you can go
Speaker 5: online and search for your own state. And you know,
Speaker 5: I was just yesterday reading articles on Kansas, on Iowa,
Speaker 5: so not you know, we're not We're not talking about
Speaker 5: loose states here. We're talking about states where the cultural
Speaker 5: wars are supposed to be very important, and overall, conservative
Speaker 5: slates did very poorly. I think the epicenter of this
Speaker 5: was in suburban Philly. There were school boards that had
Speaker 5: already been or overtaken by by by the right in
Speaker 5: recent years, and that we're reading the headlines for policies
Speaker 5: on book bands, policies on transgender students, especially in Bucks County,
Speaker 5: which is a very large suburban county in Philly. These
Speaker 5: these two school boards slipped back away from conservatives. So
Speaker 5: you know, those are a very important election. We're talking
Speaker 5: about so many students who are going to be affected.
Speaker 3: I want you to.
Speaker 1: Talk for a minute about trans panic, because this is
Speaker 1: an amazing thing that Republicans ran on. They basically decided
Speaker 1: that parents would and again this was based on some
Speaker 1: polling which is why I think we should all remember
Speaker 1: that polls are not necessarily the best indicator that parents
Speaker 1: really got upset if their kid was doing sports against
Speaker 1: a kid which they where they felt their gender was
Speaker 1: giving them an advantage, that they thought they could win
Speaker 1: elections on that and they did not.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, I was always kind of skeptical of
Speaker 5: that narrative because sort of the first big national moment
Speaker 5: where these issues, you know, captured the national imagination was
Speaker 5: a law in North Carolina about seven eight years ago.
Speaker 5: Now that was the bathroom Billy had got a lot
Speaker 5: of attention. The governor lost the following year, not to
Speaker 5: say that that is why he lost exclusively, but Hueenly
Speaker 5: became the embottom and of that issue. There was a
Speaker 5: lot of business backlash at the time. A lot of
Speaker 5: businesses left the state and that was definitely a big issue.
Speaker 5: And in a good year in twenty sixteen, that Republican
Speaker 5: governor lost the election, and I think we saw the
Speaker 5: same It's so easy to I think when the media
Speaker 5: expects that something is true, like when you expect that
Speaker 5: there will be a backlash against tread treat trans rights,
Speaker 5: or when there will be a backlash against reformation of
Speaker 5: a crual justice reforms. Any example of that backlash then.
Speaker 3: Becomes confirmation bias.
Speaker 5: Yes, it becomes a momage, right, it becomes gospel, and
Speaker 5: then it becomes used in every story as, oh, you
Speaker 5: know that that famous election, And I think that's sort
Speaker 5: of what we saw in twenty twenty one around those issues,
Speaker 5: when in fact, what we're seeing, I think in twenty
Speaker 5: twenty three, which is reassuring on the issue of trends rights,
Speaker 5: that it's not just that people are at best indifferent
Speaker 5: towards the rights of trans people. But there again, they
Speaker 5: were definitely organizing in the school board elections, people who
Speaker 5: came together, formed slates of candidates, campaigned in their communities
Speaker 5: on this issue and wanting to protect the rights of transtudents.
Speaker 1: Look, there are a lot of dumb Republican issues, but
Speaker 1: this one happens to also be deeply cruel and evil,
Speaker 1: and so that's why I wanted to bring it up.
Speaker 1: You know, the gas stoves also didn't work, but people
Speaker 1: aren't necessarily affected by an obsession with gas stoves the
Speaker 1: way that children are affected by being targeted by Republican politicians.
Speaker 5: With the new Speaker of the House who are a
Speaker 5: very anti gay agenda and hi gay past. You know,
Speaker 5: at this point Republican Party is going to bring back
Speaker 5: anti game measures of all sorts that really go beyond
Speaker 5: the trans rights and trans Americans.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that will be a real disaster, which for them electorally,
Speaker 1: which will be well deserved, so because they've done it
Speaker 1: to themselves. The Virginia races were quite expensive, really you
Speaker 1: know important If Democrats were to sort of take a
Speaker 1: message from those races, what do you think it is.
Speaker 5: I mean, it seems like the one message that our
Speaker 5: guys are getting out of every election for the past
Speaker 5: twelve month is that abortion is very important to people.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: I think there was this I think there was a
Speaker 5: fear on a part of people who you know, were
Speaker 5: very worried about Dobbs that just by virtue the fact
Speaker 5: that twenty twenty two was a midterm with the Democratic president,
Speaker 5: that Republicans would just happened to do well because that's
Speaker 5: what happens on the midterm, and then they'd be this
Speaker 5: like story that forever that that Dobbs didn't create a
Speaker 5: backlash and that would be there bad for abortion policy. Instead,
Speaker 5: what we've seen in every election in the midterms, in
Speaker 5: the Wisconsin elections in April last week, that abortions is
Speaker 5: really on Deepo's mind, and that is true in places
Speaker 5: that have abortion bans, and that is true in places
Speaker 5: that where the abortion ban is a threat that obviously
Speaker 5: could come in the future, and that is going to
Speaker 5: be the messaging that the Democrats are going to continue using.
Speaker 5: Another messaging lesson is that in Virginia and in Kentucky,
Speaker 5: Republicans were very again like last year, messaging around the
Speaker 5: issue of crime, and they were trying to put the
Speaker 5: blame on rising crime rates on on Democrats. Echrinal justice
Speaker 5: reforms that in some places aren't even like Kentucky, haven't
Speaker 5: even been a big a big storyline and that and
Speaker 5: Democrats are sometimes a bit defensive on it, but sometimes not.
Speaker 5: And in fact, in Virginia right now, the new speaker
Speaker 5: of the Virginia House was going to be incoming is
Speaker 5: someone who had a criminal record himself and in the past.
Speaker 5: So it's interesting to see that that that that issue
Speaker 5: also isn't playing out the way that Republicans were expecting
Speaker 5: it to.
Speaker 3: So interesting. Taniel, I hope you'll come back, of course whenever.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 5: Thank you for having me.
Speaker 3: No moment, Jesse Cannon.
Speaker 7: Molly drunk Fast. I'm going to tell you I had
Speaker 7: to like look up if there was a full moon
Speaker 7: and people were turning into werewolves. Because the fighting in
Speaker 7: Congress today was out of hand. Every hour or there
Speaker 7: was something new.
Speaker 1: So it was a normal Tuesday on Capitol Hill. McCarthy
Speaker 1: shoved but later denied it. Congressman Burchett in the hallway,
Speaker 1: Senator Mullin, who was an MMA fighter who knew tried
Speaker 1: to fight Teamster. President Sean O'Brien Comer called Congressman Moscow,
Speaker 1: it's a liar and a smurf, and then MTG said
Speaker 1: that darryl Isa lacked mail anatomy. Congratulations Republicans. We were
Speaker 1: told that Trump is a doesn't scale. We were in
Speaker 1: fact wrong. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics.
Speaker 1: Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the
Speaker 1: best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos.
Speaker 1: If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to
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Speaker 1: for listening.