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 Donald Trump says, as he said
Speaker 1: many times before, that he will close the Department of Education.
Speaker 1: We have such a great show for you today. CNN
Speaker 1: political analyst Ron Brownstein tells us what he sees when
Speaker 1: he crunches these numbers from the twenty twenty four election.
Speaker 1: Then we'll talk to investigative reporter Miranda Green about pink
Speaker 1: slime newspapers that were mailed to voters in swing districts.
Speaker 1: These newspapers might have swayed the election. But first the.
Speaker 2: News Somali, we are hearing the first rounds of Trump appointments.
Speaker 2: Let us hear the murderer's row of stupid and what
Speaker 2: you're seeing here.
Speaker 1: So again what you see from these appointments, and the
Speaker 1: first two I think are very instructive. Well, the first
Speaker 1: one was Susie Wiles. She will be the first ever
Speaker 1: female chief of staff. So that's a girl boss, if
Speaker 1: you can use the term ironically. But the two biggest
Speaker 1: appointments so far are Tom Holman, the borderss are and
Speaker 1: Steven Miller, and both Tom Holman and Steven Miller. Tom
Speaker 1: Holman used to head ICE, has been involved in deportation stuff,
Speaker 1: and he is most famous for musing before the election
Speaker 1: to sixty Minutes that you don't have to do family separation,
Speaker 1: you can just deport the entire family. And I think
Speaker 1: it's important to realize that these two nominations show pretty
Speaker 1: clearly where Trump World is going, and it's the thing
Speaker 1: that Republicans held signs up about during the Republican National Convention,
Speaker 1: which is mass deportation. Look, there are other picks that
Speaker 1: Trump has made that will get past Senate confirmation, people
Speaker 1: like Marco Rubio to be Secretary of State. Another pick
Speaker 1: will be Lee Zelden for EPA. He is a climate denier.
Speaker 1: But I want to talk about Holman and Miller because
Speaker 1: this is a real clear sign of what they're going
Speaker 1: to do when they first come into office. And it's
Speaker 1: going to be deportation, it's going to be workplace right,
Speaker 1: it's going to be camps. It certainly I hope that
Speaker 1: it won't be any of those things, but this seems
Speaker 1: like a pretty clear sign that that's where we're going.
Speaker 1: And I just want to pause for a second and
Speaker 1: realize that they were a huge swing of Latino voters
Speaker 1: who voted for Trump. Tom Holman, you know, he is
Speaker 1: coming for these Latinos, and you're going to have to
Speaker 1: just we're going to all have to hope that he's
Speaker 1: checking people's you know, legal illegal border status, because these
Speaker 1: people are not known for their specificity or their care
Speaker 1: in the assignment, and it seems highly likely that a
Speaker 1: lot of people are going to get swept up in
Speaker 1: these sweepes. It's quite scary. Also, it's just going to
Speaker 1: be very logistically difficult to do and of course morally horrifying.
Speaker 1: So stay tuned for this and we'll definitely see more
Speaker 1: on this.
Speaker 2: So Mai Lee Zilden, who we remember as running against
Speaker 2: Kathy Hokel on Crime, Crime Crime, is also really really
Speaker 2: psychotically obsessed with climate change not being real. What are
Speaker 2: you seeing here?
Speaker 1: So I think an interesting pick. You'll remember Scott Pruitt
Speaker 1: had it in twenty sixteen. He resigned after being the
Speaker 1: subject of seventeen federal investigations. It's a non agency for Trump.
Speaker 1: He oversaw the rollback of more than one hundred environmental
Speaker 1: rules when he was last president. So again, Zelden is
Speaker 1: here just because it's approach for him and he doesn't
Speaker 1: believe the climate change is real. This will be another
Speaker 1: place where the federal government will either just not do anything, or,
Speaker 1: more likely in this case, try to make it easier
Speaker 1: for polluters. We have oil and gas companies asking Trump
Speaker 1: not to leave the Paris Climate Accord. This is where
Speaker 1: we are at this moment. We have ex on Mobile
Speaker 1: warning Donald Trump not to pull out of the Paris Agreement.
Speaker 1: I have a hard time imagining x on Mobile gives
Speaker 1: a fuck about anything, but I just want to point
Speaker 1: out this is how far down the rabbit hole we are.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not good, So byan scratch my head, at least
Speaker 2: maybe you can make sense this. I can actually Okay,
Speaker 2: good Mike Hookaby for Arkansas governor who once wrote a
Speaker 2: book about killing yourself with a fork and knife about
Speaker 2: our nutrition system and then said fuck that I'm gonna
Speaker 2: get fat again, and this was a bullshit book. He's
Speaker 2: going to be a besser to Israel. Make it makes sense.
Speaker 1: Yes, I could actually make this make sense because this
Speaker 1: is like the fascinating grift of Trump World. Mike Huckabee
Speaker 1: has been leading tours to Israel for years.
Speaker 2: All that I need you to make something makes sense
Speaker 2: for me, you being the wish What are the two
Speaker 2: of us? Yes, Huckabee, does it sound Hebrew to be No.
Speaker 1: He's not a Jew, but you'll remember that religious people,
Speaker 1: very religious, you know, Zealid love Israel. So in fact,
Speaker 1: I'm going to read a testimonial from Blue Diamond Travel
Speaker 1: Experiences our prayer as many many more Christians can travel
Speaker 1: with Mike and Janet Huckabee and feel the presence of
Speaker 1: our Great King in just the same way we did.
Speaker 1: I assume that this will be very good for his
Speaker 1: tour guide business. Being the ambassador, Trump has really leveraged
Speaker 1: the Christians obsession with Israel into his own weird using
Speaker 1: Israel to whatever. And now Mike Huckabee will figure into
Speaker 1: this hole. While this, by the way, his twenty twenty
Speaker 1: four Israel tour is called Unveil the Spiritual Wonders.
Speaker 2: Oh, I had that on my to do list for
Speaker 2: next year. That's good.
Speaker 1: An unforgettable journey through Israel, blending faith, culture, and history
Speaker 1: into a unique tapestry. There you go. Ron Brownstein is
Speaker 1: a senior political analyst for CNN and a senior editor
Speaker 1: at the Atlantic. Welcome to Fast politics. Ron Brownstein, he
Speaker 1: molly anything new goal nothing. Absolutely. After this election, I
Speaker 1: was like, I have to talk to Ron. Ron has
Speaker 1: to explain to me what happened. I just wrote a
Speaker 1: piece about all this stuff I got wrong for very
Speaker 1: fair about this election. I did not get this right.
Speaker 1: But you are much more harder than I am, So
Speaker 1: explain to us what happened.
Speaker 3: You know, I'm not sure.
Speaker 4: I was much smarter, and I got one big thing wrong,
Speaker 4: which we will talk about in a minute. But I mean,
Speaker 4: the most abnormal thing about this election, the most shocking
Speaker 4: thing about this election was how normal it was. I mean,
Speaker 4: Donald Trump obviously is not a normal candidate, but to
Speaker 4: a large extent, the electorate treated him that way. And
Speaker 4: you had the normal hydraulics in place, which is in
Speaker 4: a two party system, when the view of one party
Speaker 4: goes down, the other party rises, and you know, there
Speaker 4: are always a lot of things going on, and we
Speaker 4: have to unpack and understand what happened with young men
Speaker 4: and Latino men in particular. But Harris underperformed across the
Speaker 4: board demographically and geographically. She did not have the gaens
Speaker 4: among college white women that you would have expected. She
Speaker 4: did not have the gains among young women that you
Speaker 4: would have expected. She did not have the gains in
Speaker 4: suburbia that seem very much possible after the twenty twenty
Speaker 4: two election. And what you saw was a very normal
Speaker 4: pattern when you have an outgoing president who is unpopular,
Speaker 4: who is either running for reelection or stepping aside. In
Speaker 4: either case, the vast majority of pepeople who are unhappy
Speaker 4: with that president's performance vote for the other side. So
Speaker 4: what did that mean. Well, sixty percent of voters in
Speaker 4: the exepole said they disapproved of Biden's performance. It was
Speaker 4: even worse than the number in twenty twenty two, and
Speaker 4: eighty two percent.
Speaker 3: Of those disapprovers voted for Trump.
Speaker 4: Seventy percent of voters said that the economy was in
Speaker 4: bad shape, it was only in fair or poor condition.
Speaker 4: Seventy percent of those people voted for Trump. That's his vote,
Speaker 4: that's his forty nine point something that'll probably end up
Speaker 4: getting when this is all counted. He's just over fifty.
Speaker 4: Now he possibly, maybe more likely than not, is going
Speaker 4: to fall just under fifty. But if you look and
Speaker 4: compare to twenty twenty two, Molly, the share of people
Speaker 4: who said the economy was in bad shape but voted
Speaker 4: for Whitmer or Shapiro or Mark Kelly or Rafael Warnock
Speaker 4: in twenty two was much higher than the share of
Speaker 4: people who said the economy was in bad shape and
Speaker 4: voted for Harris in those same states. And what that
Speaker 4: says to me was that people associate and attribute the
Speaker 4: president control over national economic policy, and it simply was
Speaker 4: less possible for her to run away from the discontent
Speaker 4: over that. Primarily, other things mattered in you know, the
Speaker 4: border mattered, Prime mattered, But primarily it was harder for
Speaker 4: her to escape the undertow of discontent about the economy
Speaker 4: in Biden's performance than it was for Democratic candidates in
Speaker 4: twenty two, and for that matter, even to some extent
Speaker 4: in twenty twenty four. You know, people like splocking.
Speaker 1: Yes, I want you to talk us through this, because
Speaker 1: I looked at those numbers and you had people I
Speaker 1: feel like, the best example here is the example of
Speaker 1: Carrie Lake in Arizona. You had people vote for Trump
Speaker 1: and then not bother to fill in the bubbles for
Speaker 1: carry Lake, who ran as a mini Trump.
Speaker 4: So explain that to me my basic feeling about this.
Speaker 4: You know, there are people who point to Trump having
Speaker 4: this unique connection with his voters. And I am sure
Speaker 4: that is true, and that was not able to be replicated.
Speaker 4: And in many cases the Democrats in the Senate raises
Speaker 4: did not get appreciably more votes than Harris did, but
Speaker 4: the Republican got appreciably less than Trump did. Certainly, I
Speaker 4: think that was the case in Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: And Michigan and Arizona and Nevada.
Speaker 4: So I actually look at it a little differently. I mean,
Speaker 4: I go back to the point I made a minute ago,
Speaker 4: which is that, for example, if you look in twenty
Speaker 4: twenty two, people who had a negative view of the economy,
Speaker 4: John Fetterman in twenty twenty two lost them in Pennsylvania, right,
Speaker 4: he lost them, but he lost them by eighteen points.
Speaker 4: People who had a negative view of the economy. This
Speaker 4: time in Pennsylvania, Kamala Harris lost them by.
Speaker 3: Thirty seven points. Okay, in Nevada.
Speaker 4: Last time, people who are in a negative view of
Speaker 4: the economy, Catherine court has Master lost them by twenty
Speaker 4: six points. This time Harris lost them by forty one points.
Speaker 4: And then you kind of look at it horizontally. In
Speaker 4: this election, Rosen didn't lose people who are negative on
Speaker 4: the economy by quite as much as Harris did. And
Speaker 4: to me, that's the difference is that as the presidential candidate,
Speaker 4: you are held accountable greater than anybody else.
Speaker 1: And this is really we're only here for my own edification.
Speaker 1: I understand this is a podcast, but this is a
Speaker 1: question I want answered. Doesn't it seem like Harris is overperforming?
Speaker 1: For example, so originally you had this Biden map before
Speaker 1: he dropped out, which showed him losing. This is the
Speaker 1: famous pod Bros. Where they had a map that showed
Speaker 1: him losing four hundred electoral votes, right, which I didn't
Speaker 1: even know was possible, but it is, turns out and
Speaker 1: then Harris jumps in and she reversed the tide, right,
Speaker 1: So you see the down ballot candidates actually do better,
Speaker 1: and they do better in swing states where the campaign
Speaker 1: has taken over the airwaves. So that makes the case
Speaker 1: that a Harris did actually help and b that the
Speaker 1: campaign did actually help, Which gets me to my next thought,
Speaker 1: which is, does this mean that Donald Trump is just
Speaker 1: singularly powerful and that it's not so much about the
Speaker 1: Republican brand or the Democratic brand, but merely about the incredible,
Speaker 1: unheard of power of Trump.
Speaker 4: So to your first point, I think it is unequivocal
Speaker 4: that Harris did better than Biden would have done. I
Speaker 4: mean I talked to one political scientist who said that
Speaker 4: based on Biden's approval, the right track, wrong track, and
Speaker 4: the perceptions of the economy, that his model would have
Speaker 4: had a six.
Speaker 3: Point popular vote loss for the incumbent.
Speaker 4: Harris is going to end up losing by somewhere between
Speaker 4: one point five and two points. What I think I
Speaker 4: got wrong the most, and a lot of people got
Speaker 4: wrong the most, was that the twenty twenty two model
Speaker 4: turned out to be not quite as replicable.
Speaker 3: In twenty four as of the period.
Speaker 4: And what I mean by that if you look at
Speaker 4: twenty twenty in the states where both sides weren't spending money,
Speaker 4: whether they were red states like Texas and Florida or
Speaker 4: blue states like California and New York. In twenty two,
Speaker 4: Republicans improved in those states, which is what you would
Speaker 4: expect when sixty five percent of the country thinks we're
Speaker 4: on the wrong track and the president's approval rating is low.
Speaker 4: But what Democrats were able to do in twenty two
Speaker 4: was basically quarantine the swing state and in the states
Speaker 4: where they ran a full scale campaign Wittmer, Shapiro, Evers,
Speaker 4: Mark Kelly, Katie Hobbs, John Fetterman, Raphael Warnock. They ran
Speaker 4: vastly better than Democrats did in the non competitive state. Okay,
Speaker 4: fast forward to twenty four. Right, fast forward to twenty four,
Speaker 4: The same thing happens in the non competitive states. New
Speaker 4: Jersey gets worse, Arizona gets worse, Florida gets worse, Texas
Speaker 4: gets worse. You know, whether it's a blue state or
Speaker 4: a red state, when you're dealing with a forty percent
Speaker 4: approval rating for the outgoing president, they all get worse. Now,
Speaker 4: what do we look in side the quarantine line in
Speaker 4: the swing states? It works to some extent. Harris doesn't
Speaker 4: deteriorate in them as much as she does outside of
Speaker 4: the swing states, but she doesn't run nearly as well.
Speaker 4: The differential isn't nearly as big as it was in
Speaker 4: twenty two for Whitmer and Shapiro and Ebrs and Warnock
Speaker 4: and Kelly, and the undertow kind of seeps in.
Speaker 3: You know, the quarantine. The moat doesn't work.
Speaker 4: The quarantine doesn't work, As I said, even in those states.
Speaker 4: To me, like, out of all the numbers I've looked at,
Speaker 4: the one that really jumps out at me is that
Speaker 4: in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, significantly more of the
Speaker 4: voters who are negative on the economy voted against Harris
Speaker 4: than voted against the Democratic candidates in twenty two. We
Speaker 4: can argue about why that is. You know, a lot
Speaker 4: of factors probably went into that, including Trump's improving image, which.
Speaker 3: We should talk about.
Speaker 4: But a big part of it, I think is that
Speaker 4: you just can't escape that verdict as the president. And
Speaker 4: the fact that she declined everywhere, the fact that the
Speaker 4: urban centers decline, the inner suburbs decline, the outer suburbs decline,
Speaker 4: the rural places decline. They all declined by about the
Speaker 4: same amount. I wrote this the Center for Rural Studies,
Speaker 4: which is a think tank. They have a classification system
Speaker 4: that categorizes all counties in six groupings, from the most
Speaker 4: urban to the most rural. They all declined by about
Speaker 4: the same amount. That is not something that is about
Speaker 4: messaging or positioning. That is about a common national experience,
Speaker 4: a shared national verdict, which is inflati, which is inflation
Speaker 4: above all, and maybe a little bit of the border
Speaker 4: and crime, but of inflation.
Speaker 1: I mean it seems like that's an anxiety about implanturing, right, yes.
Speaker 3: More than anything else. Absolutely, I think what was it?
Speaker 4: Forty six percent of people in the exitpos said they
Speaker 4: were worse off than they were four years ago, and
Speaker 4: over eighty percent of them voted for Trump. I mean,
Speaker 4: that's kind of the heart of the election right there.
Speaker 1: Doesn't that mean that Trump has more power as a candidate?
Speaker 1: I mean, isn't that what that is? His ability to
Speaker 1: appeal to a broad swath.
Speaker 4: I would say his ability to turn out people inclined
Speaker 4: to support him is his superpower. But I think equally
Speaker 4: critical was that the cross pressure of the economy caused
Speaker 4: a lot of voters who.
Speaker 3: Remain hasard Trump to vote for him.
Speaker 4: Anyway, It's worth noting a couple of these between the
Speaker 4: exit polls and votecasts, which are two major sources right
Speaker 4: of people's attitudes as they were voting, fifty five percent
Speaker 4: said he was too extreme, fifty five percent said they
Speaker 4: were he would lead the country in an authoritarian direction.
Speaker 4: Two thirds almost said they wanted the abortion to remain
Speaker 4: legal in all most circumstances. Fifty five fifty six percent
Speaker 4: majority said they opposed mass deportation, and roughly that many
Speaker 4: said they want the government to do more to provide
Speaker 4: access to healthcare, all of which they're not going to
Speaker 4: get with Trump. And the reason he won is because
Speaker 4: there was a substantial slice of voters in each of
Speaker 4: those questions who express negative views about Trump who voted
Speaker 4: for him. Anyway, Here, I'm going to give you the
Speaker 4: world premiere of something that will be in my Atlantic
Speaker 4: column later this week. Voters who said abortion should be
Speaker 4: legal in all or most circumstances. Okay, pro choice voters
Speaker 4: but were negative on the economy said the economy was
Speaker 4: only fair or poor.
Speaker 3: How do you think they voted? Trump won? And this
Speaker 3: was a big group. This is over one.
Speaker 4: Third of the electorate said they were pro choice but
Speaker 4: the economy was fair poor.
Speaker 3: Trump won them.
Speaker 1: Wow? Is that because he just was able to neutralize
Speaker 1: the issue by saying that he wanted to throw it
Speaker 1: back to the States and then just shutting it down.
Speaker 3: Some of that and some of that.
Speaker 4: The economy mattered more to them the way I phrased it.
Speaker 4: And this is not the first time this has happened.
Speaker 4: This was what happened to Carter with Reagae, It's what
Speaker 4: happened to George H. W. Bush with Clinton. If people
Speaker 4: are dissatisfied with the status quo, stability is the risk
Speaker 4: people view continuing along the track of an unacceptable present
Speaker 4: to be a greater risk than leaping into an unpredictable future.
Speaker 4: And Trump, again, this is a well trod dynamic. The
Speaker 4: shocking part is that it applied to Trump. You know,
Speaker 4: I mean that Trump got all of the traditional benefits.
Speaker 4: He recumbent, and he's someone to try to overthrow the government,
Speaker 4: and he has ninety four felony indictments and convictions.
Speaker 3: And adjudicated sexual assault and all of that.
Speaker 4: And yet if you kind of look at the numbers
Speaker 4: and didn't have his name on it, it would be like, humph,
Speaker 4: this is what the out party gets.
Speaker 3: And you know, maybe part of that.
Speaker 4: And this is where I think there's going to be
Speaker 4: a lot of second guessing about some of the Democratic
Speaker 4: strategy in twenty three and twenty four. His favorability was
Speaker 4: much higher in the electorate in twenty four than it
Speaker 4: wasn't twenty two. His retrospective job approval was over fifty percent.
Speaker 1: That's insane.
Speaker 4: And that is pretty striking given everything else. A big
Speaker 4: part of that is that voters, as we've talked about before,
Speaker 4: you could see this happening all the way through twenty
Speaker 4: three and twenty four. Voters were judging Trump retrospectively through
Speaker 4: the lens of what they didn't like currently about Biden,
Speaker 4: primarily inflating and maybe the border. But it also meant
Speaker 4: that all of the other things they didn't like about Trump,
Speaker 4: they kept his approval rating from ever hitting fifty while
Speaker 4: he was president, were kind of fading in their memory,
Speaker 4: and Democrats didn't really do a great job of reminding
Speaker 4: them of that until the end. I mean, let's just
Speaker 4: consider here, this was the only president ever who's approval
Speaker 4: rating never reached fifty percent while he was in office
Speaker 4: in Gallup, and his retrospective job approprating in Vodecast was
Speaker 4: fifty or fifty one percent. Like that is something, and
Speaker 4: that is partially a reflection of I said, the hydraulics,
Speaker 4: you know, Biden goes down, Republicans go up. But it's
Speaker 4: also the extent to which everything else about his presidency,
Speaker 4: which by the way, people are going to get exposed
Speaker 4: to again that they didn't like kind of faded next
Speaker 4: to the fact that people felt they had more money
Speaker 4: in their pocket at the end of the week.
Speaker 1: That is wild, wild, wild wild.
Speaker 3: And by the way, like, here's one thing that goes
Speaker 3: with that.
Speaker 4: Biden won the popular vote by four and a half point, right,
Speaker 4: So we're gonna have to wait and see when we
Speaker 4: get the actual analysis it's done with the data files,
Speaker 4: which is both Catalyst and Pew. But right now, Biden
Speaker 4: won by four and a half points. But when among
Speaker 4: the people who voted in twenty twenty in both the
Speaker 4: exipol and votecast, they were even in how they voted
Speaker 4: in twenty twenty plus one for Biden or zero difference.
Speaker 4: So that means that a lot of people who voted
Speaker 4: for Biden in twenty twenty did not come back. Did
Speaker 4: they not come back because they didn't fear Trump enough?
Speaker 4: Did they not come back because they didn't like the
Speaker 4: results they got from Biden? Was it both? But there
Speaker 4: was a big fall off in the kind of surge
Speaker 4: anti Maga voter. It came out in eighteen twenty two.
Speaker 1: I wondered if that was the Democratic base staying home. Well,
Speaker 1: it was something she lost young people.
Speaker 4: Well, she won young people, but retreated from Biden in
Speaker 4: twenty I actually think that was probably the surge. Again,
Speaker 4: when Catalyst and Pugh does this and they match their
Speaker 4: analysis to the actual voter file, will have a better idea.
Speaker 4: But if I had a guest today, the irregularly voting
Speaker 4: Democratic leaning constituencies, they came out to vote against Trump
Speaker 4: in eighteen twenty and twenty twenty two, a lot of
Speaker 4: them stayed home, whereas Trump continued to turn out his
Speaker 4: irregularly voting, his low propensity voters, particularly younger men.
Speaker 3: Again, we'll look.
Speaker 4: At later when we get these other sources, but right now,
Speaker 4: what we have, the exits of the votecast told us
Speaker 4: that Republicans outnumbered Democrats among voters to the biggest degree
Speaker 4: I think ever in the exipolse. I mean the exipolse,
Speaker 4: you know, the exipole was Republicans were four points more
Speaker 4: of the electorate than Democrats, and I think votecast was
Speaker 4: the same.
Speaker 3: There's never been a gap like that, never, never.
Speaker 1: But that's because he got those low propensity ones and
Speaker 1: twos out right.
Speaker 4: And then the low propensity Democrats would be my supposition
Speaker 4: did not come back. Now, why you know, one view
Speaker 4: is they did not have the sufficient sense of alarm
Speaker 4: about MAGA, despite Trump being more radical than he was
Speaker 4: in twenty or sixteen. The other are though, is that
Speaker 4: they came out, they voted for Biden, and their lives
Speaker 4: didn't get better in the way that they hoped, and
Speaker 4: interest rates and inflation were weighing on them, and they
Speaker 4: were just like, screw.
Speaker 1: It, unbelievable. Ron Brownstein, appreciate you so much, and also
Speaker 1: so Deprodson. We're all gonna die, but thank you for
Speaker 1: coming on.
Speaker 3: Can I just say one last thing real quick?
Speaker 4: Yeah, you don't get movement of this magnitude on an
Speaker 4: ideological shift. I don't think the consistency of this across
Speaker 4: every kind of county says to me that this was
Speaker 4: more about performance than anything else. It was a common
Speaker 4: national verdict. Biden's administration did not deliver what people hope,
Speaker 4: even though they had a lot of positive achievement.
Speaker 1: Should that make me feel better, Yes, yes, okay, it should.
Speaker 4: Make you feel better, only in the sense that if
Speaker 4: Trump doesn't deliver. People hired Trump to solve some specific problems,
Speaker 4: particularly they're squeeze in the cost of living. They remain
Speaker 4: hesitant about a lot of the things that he wants
Speaker 4: to do back the APA, undermining vaccines.
Speaker 3: Mass deportation.
Speaker 4: If he gives them a lot of that and doesn't
Speaker 4: deal with doesn't solve the problem that they hired him
Speaker 4: to do. You could see the same kind of uniform
Speaker 4: movement in the other direction in the elections of the
Speaker 4: near future, and.
Speaker 1: It is, I might add, a very hard problem to solve, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, there's no quick fix for making things less expensive.
Speaker 1: Thank you, thank you, thank you. Ron Brownstein. Will you
Speaker 1: please come.
Speaker 3: Back, thank you, thank you. You know where to find me.
Speaker 1: Miranda Green is an independent investigative reporter. I'm Miranda. Welcome
Speaker 1: to Bath Politics Biggs. Talk to us about what you
Speaker 1: discovered and how the right and mago world more specifically
Speaker 1: gets its news.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, I think post this most recent election,
Speaker 5: a lot of the rhetoric and a lot of the
Speaker 5: kind of internal dialogue has been about what the media missed, right,
Speaker 5: A lot of kind of self lagulation about what we
Speaker 5: could have done more, or how we didn't see that
Speaker 5: Trump would win with such overwhelming numbers. And as people
Speaker 5: were having that dialogue, it made me think about the
Speaker 5: reporting that I've been doing these past two years, which
Speaker 5: is not just about kind of where people are getting
Speaker 5: the news, but also how the right has really created
Speaker 5: this ground game of taking advantage of the depletion of
Speaker 5: local news across the country and how they're leveraging that
Speaker 5: to get out their message in oftentimes very secretive, non
Speaker 5: transparent ways. And the reporting that I've been doing these
Speaker 5: past couple of years has been looking into this kind
Speaker 5: of playbook that a lot of these organizations, largely backed
Speaker 5: by the oil and gas industry, are using to take
Speaker 5: advantage of this kind of dual lack of trust in
Speaker 5: mainstream media and also lack of opportunity of taking advantage
Speaker 5: of a local news that no longer exists across the
Speaker 5: majority most of the country, you know, newspapers around seventy
Speaker 5: five percent since two thousand and five across the country.
Speaker 5: More than half of the counties across the United States
Speaker 5: only have one or no local news sources. And this
Speaker 5: is something that players in the oil and gas industry
Speaker 5: and on the right are taking advantage of. And so
Speaker 5: that was something that I really wanted to highlight.
Speaker 1: So make that make sense when it comes to oil
Speaker 1: and gas and local news and what that means.
Speaker 5: Sure, you know, the oil and gas industry has been
Speaker 5: feeling the pressure for at least five years now. You know,
Speaker 5: it started under the Obama administration, It was lacks or
Speaker 5: under the first Trump administration, and it became much stronger
Speaker 5: under the Biden administration. This idea that we as a
Speaker 5: globe are seeing the impacts of climate change, that climate
Speaker 5: change scientists and science show is because of human impact,
Speaker 5: because of the emissions of the Oil and Gas Sact,
Speaker 5: and that in order to change that, we need to
Speaker 5: dramatically curb those emissions. And so, you know, the businesses
Speaker 5: that make their money off of these admissions, they're struggling
Speaker 5: to figure out how to continue to make money, how
Speaker 5: to continue to benefit their shareholders, and to stay afloat.
Speaker 5: You know, their business is like anything else, and so
Speaker 5: one of the ways that they can do that is
Speaker 5: by you know, helping to change public perception over their industry.
Speaker 5: A lot of this is happening because people, the kind
Speaker 5: of public consciousness has changed to understand that, you know,
Speaker 5: climate change is largely asked that, you know, because of
Speaker 5: these companies, because of what they're doing. What is happening
Speaker 5: is that you know, as mainstream media, as reporters have
Speaker 5: changed from you know, myself included from having to write
Speaker 5: stories that said, on one side, climate change is real.
Speaker 5: On the other side, let's quote a climate denier. And
Speaker 5: now we are finally in this you know, this place
Speaker 5: where we don't have to do that anymore. The science
Speaker 5: shows that climate change is at the hands of you know,
Speaker 5: of humans, that it is coming from fossil fuels by
Speaker 5: and large, and so we don't need to do that.
Speaker 5: But the media is turning against these industries, and so
Speaker 5: you know, what they're doing, by and large is trying
Speaker 5: to find, well, how are alternative ways of getting our
Speaker 5: messaging out there if we can no longer rely on
Speaker 5: reporters to kind of carry this one sided messaging because
Speaker 5: they're going to poke holes in it. And so what
Speaker 5: they have done and I found in my reporting largely
Speaker 5: across the southeast and areas where you know it is
Speaker 5: Republican and areas where oil and gas still has a
Speaker 5: stronghold because it's largely produced in those areas, they are
Speaker 5: buying up local newspapers, creating newspapers online and paying for
Speaker 5: content in kind of you know, papers that are willing
Speaker 5: to take that kind of news to take those kind
Speaker 5: of pay to play stories to push this messaging that
Speaker 5: shows that they are still they are great community supporters,
Speaker 5: that they are there for jobs, that you know, they
Speaker 5: have the best interests of Americans at heart, and that
Speaker 5: what they're doing is not that bad. In a lot
Speaker 5: of the reporting I found in these papers where they
Speaker 5: are kind of buying this influence or creating this influence,
Speaker 5: It's not so much that they were pushing anti climate
Speaker 5: change initiatives or that they were saying how great oil
Speaker 5: and gas was. They were just not reporting on the
Speaker 5: negative aspects of their companies at all.
Speaker 1: Right, So they were sort of just selectively covering what
Speaker 1: they felt like covering that worked for their narrative exactly.
Speaker 5: And you know, you have to keep in mind in
Speaker 5: these communities. You know, I'm talking about rural Alabama, I'm
Speaker 5: talking about communities in the Gulf Coast of Florida. I'm
Speaker 5: even talking about community in Richmond's, California, just outside of
Speaker 5: San Francisco. I mean, in these communities, they have very
Speaker 5: few other options for local news. So when these newspapers
Speaker 5: come online and then residents are thinking, Okay, this is
Speaker 5: a place where I can read community profiles, this is
Speaker 5: a place where I can understand the businesses that are
Speaker 5: opening around me. They're not aware of what they're not
Speaker 5: seeing in those papers because they have so few other alternatives.
Speaker 5: So by being able to control this narrative in this way,
Speaker 5: that is a when for these companies, and it's something
Speaker 5: that they openly talk about. Actually they and they learn
Speaker 5: from one another. And the reporting that I did for
Speaker 5: a story I worked on with The Guardian about Alabama
Speaker 5: Power and it's control of these two newspapers in Alabama,
Speaker 5: one of their PR specialists, who ironically was a former reporter,
Speaker 5: actually went on too a PR podcast and they asked him,
Speaker 5: you know, where did you come up with this idea
Speaker 5: of launching this Alabama News Center, which is one of
Speaker 5: these organizations that they launched in I think it was
Speaker 5: twenty sixteen, And he said, we were thinking that we
Speaker 5: were pitching our stories to reporters. Reporters were no longer
Speaker 5: writing the stories that we wanted them to write, so
Speaker 5: we're thinking, how else do we get these stories out there?
Speaker 5: We're going to launch our own newsroom. And they actually
Speaker 5: said we got this idea from chev because the year earlier,
Speaker 5: in twenty fifteen, Chevron had launched the Richmond Standard in California,
Speaker 5: which was a newspaper that had not exist prior in
Speaker 5: that area, and it was a huge community that was
Speaker 5: lacking local news. And it's doing something very similar where
Speaker 5: it was covering local news. It was covering what was
Speaker 5: happening in the community, but it was not covering itself critically,
Speaker 5: even though it was the largest employer in the area.
Speaker 1: Wow, how does this relate besides climate change?
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, I spoke to Anne Nelson. He is
Speaker 5: a prolific writer. She wrote a book about kind of
Speaker 5: the oil and gas influence and the kind of dark
Speaker 5: money behind manipulation and in the media. And one of
Speaker 5: the things that she said to me, which I thought
Speaker 5: was really interesting, is that, you know a lot of
Speaker 5: the donors that donate to conservative interests and the Trump campaign,
Speaker 5: you know, they make their money in oil and gas.
Speaker 5: You know, some of the largest donors out there, Harold
Speaker 5: Ham out of Oklahoma, Timothy Dunn out of Texas. That
Speaker 5: is where they made their bread and butter. And they
Speaker 5: care about the future of the industry that they've made
Speaker 5: this money up, and they care about conservative ideology, and
Speaker 5: so they're not necessarily just focused on oil and gas
Speaker 5: and climate initiatives, but that is kind of where a
Speaker 5: lot of some of this money stems from. And so
Speaker 5: you start seeing the echo chamber of this and other
Speaker 5: news organizations and other kind of pink slime journalism, which
Speaker 5: is another aspects that I've covered, where it's these news
Speaker 5: seeming websites that exist online that are perpetuating this kind
Speaker 5: of not journalistic news articles that people are picking up
Speaker 5: and reading and thinking that they are vetted in the
Speaker 5: same way. And that is kind of, you know, I
Speaker 5: think the heart of so much of what people are
Speaker 5: trying to grapple with here, which is again, where are
Speaker 5: Trump voters getting their messaging? Where is the other side
Speaker 5: getting their messaging? Where's Middle America reading? And these are
Speaker 5: some of the places where you know, Middle America is
Speaker 5: getting their news, not exclusively, but it is definitely a
Speaker 5: part of the puzzle here. These organizations like Metric Media,
Speaker 5: which is part of a larger network which has more
Speaker 5: than eleven hundred online news sites that span the country.
Speaker 5: I mean, they found an opportunity here to really get
Speaker 5: their messaging out and they are known pay to play players.
Speaker 5: New York Times to the story on them back in
Speaker 5: twenty twenty about how they take money for specific stories
Speaker 5: that they write, and they kind of put them together
Speaker 5: into these packages of these websites that look mostly real.
Speaker 5: They're a little odd, they're a little funky. But if
Speaker 5: you're a normal reader and you're kind of pushed to
Speaker 5: these websites, you don't know, right, you know, journalists like us,
Speaker 5: we have a trained eye. Where like most stories have bylines,
Speaker 5: it's kind of weird if they don't articles. What makes
Speaker 5: articles distinct is that they have both sides of the story,
Speaker 5: and they both perspectives, right Like, any time I write
Speaker 5: a story about anyone, you know, say I write a
Speaker 5: story about Exxon, I reach out to Exxon, and I
Speaker 5: give them a chance to comments, and I make sure
Speaker 5: that I have try to represent their point of view
Speaker 5: in the story, even if they don't want to talk
Speaker 5: to me. These stories don't do that. And what they're
Speaker 5: doing furthermore, in what they were specifically doing in the
Speaker 5: lead up to this election that I noticed is that
Speaker 5: in addition to these websites that kind of exist online
Speaker 5: and sometimes there really have a ton of content, sometimes
Speaker 5: kind of seem a bit like sleeper cells, they were
Speaker 5: publishing print versions of some of these key websites ing
Speaker 5: key counties and then sending them to people's mailboxes directly
Speaker 5: who obviously had not paid for them, had no idea
Speaker 5: what they were, but they were showing up and kind
Speaker 5: of pushing specific key issues related to that election.
Speaker 1: That makes a lot of sense. I know what red
Speaker 1: sludges explain to us what pink sludges.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So pink slime is a terminology that kind of
Speaker 5: it's kind of this gross terminology. Honestly, it comes from
Speaker 5: this idea the term that people have used to describe
Speaker 5: the additive filler and meat in food, So you know,
Speaker 5: additives in something like hamburgers or chicken nuggets, say something,
Speaker 5: it's called pink slime. And so it's been kind of
Speaker 5: reutilized as this idea that there is these fake news
Speaker 5: sites that just have this fake content that's like fluff
Speaker 5: and filler contents in these these websites that look real
Speaker 5: but really have bias and have a partisan kind of
Speaker 5: you know, spin on them. And so that's why I
Speaker 5: tend to try to like to use the word news
Speaker 5: seeming or news appearing, because it looks real, but if
Speaker 5: you look close, it's it's not what it seems it
Speaker 5: is something that has been utilized by organizations for years now,
Speaker 5: but really seems to kind of pick up and take off,
Speaker 5: especially around elections or key culture war issues.
Speaker 1: Interesting.
Speaker 5: So, one of the papers that I actually highlighted that
Speaker 5: came out was shipped to people's doorsteps in North Dakota
Speaker 5: October fifteenth. Was a very interesting kind of odd oddity
Speaker 5: because this this paper showed up with people's stores is
Speaker 5: called the Central Lord Dakota News, and it's ten pages long,
Speaker 5: and it's very clearly right leaning. But North Dakota is
Speaker 5: right leading, so, you know, not the kind of place
Speaker 5: that you know, maybe people would automatically.
Speaker 1: Fill this away.
Speaker 5: And it talks about key issues that I'm sure voters
Speaker 5: and that state care about, inflation, security issues, immigration. But
Speaker 5: if you dig deeper into the story, you realize there's
Speaker 5: kind of an odd angle to some of these articles.
Speaker 5: It talks a lot about protests. It talks a lot
Speaker 5: about the Dakota access protests that happened back in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 5: So this is eight years ago, right, twenty sixteen. This
Speaker 5: nowhere close to, you know, what we're currently dealing with.
Speaker 5: Why would they be have an entire section in this
Speaker 5: paper that says, you know, on this day in twenty
Speaker 5: sixty and that talks about all these disruptive protests. Well,
Speaker 5: turns out that the Key pipeline company but that owns
Speaker 5: the Dakota Access pipeline, has a lawsuit against Greenpeace, which
Speaker 5: is a major organization that have protesters protesting against the
Speaker 5: pipeline that is coming up in North Dakota in February.
Speaker 5: And this lawsuit is considered one of the biggest lawsuits
Speaker 5: it's probably going to happen in the state in its history.
Speaker 5: And this is you know, most likely part of their
Speaker 5: ground game to try to get public perception to benefit
Speaker 5: them and turn against remind locals how frustrating that situation was.
Speaker 5: And so again it's all wrapped up in other stories
Speaker 5: that seem just like, Okay, this is part of the
Speaker 5: news cycle. This is not the out of the ordinary,
Speaker 5: but it's putting that back into people's mind. You know,
Speaker 5: do you remember eight years ago about all these protests.
Speaker 5: Do you remember that the roads are blocked. Do you
Speaker 5: remember that the police had to deal with this? You
Speaker 5: remember it was expensive for the state to try to
Speaker 5: remind people before in the lead up to this lawsuit.
Speaker 5: In this court case, is about to happen.
Speaker 1: Wow, how widespread is this news? Like? What percentage of
Speaker 1: Americans do you think get these mailers or read this
Speaker 1: news online?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's really hard to tell how widespread this practice is.
Speaker 5: We know that there are at least eleven hundred websites
Speaker 5: that exists across every single state and many communities to
Speaker 5: target at them. It's really hard to tell how many
Speaker 5: people are actually getting the sense to them, you know,
Speaker 5: besides people who are tweeting them out or sending them
Speaker 5: to me. That's kind of how I get an inkling
Speaker 5: of what's happening. We do know it's overwhelmingly on the right.
Speaker 5: You know, they arought eleven hundred sites on the right.
Speaker 5: There are about seventy sites on the left that do this.
Speaker 5: So it's not entirely done by conservatives, but it is
Speaker 5: largely done by conservatives. And what's really interesting too, is
Speaker 5: that the conservatives that are doing this, their funding is
Speaker 5: tied to the Koche Brothers. Their funding is tied to
Speaker 5: this kind of conservative apparatus that is taking advantage of
Speaker 5: alternative news. We see organizations like Center Square, we see
Speaker 5: organizations like The Daily Signal from the End, the Daily Caller,
Speaker 5: News Foundation. You know, those are all right leaning state
Speaker 5: policy network backed Coke money taking organizations. They're all kind
Speaker 5: of part of this network. And what I am noticing
Speaker 5: as a reporter is that this is bigger than just
Speaker 5: the election. This is about how do we rework trust
Speaker 5: in news to be trust in us. People don't trust
Speaker 5: the mainstream media. There are a lot of conservatives aren't
Speaker 5: reading the New York Times, They're not going on NBC
Speaker 5: or ABC. They are looking for partisan news, and so
Speaker 5: partisan think tanks, partisan entities are thinking, well, how do
Speaker 5: we capitalize off of this and how do we then
Speaker 5: utilize those eyeballs to push our best interests. It's very strategic.
Speaker 5: They are echo chambers of one another. You know, these
Speaker 5: metric media sites have shared Daily Caller articles, they do
Speaker 5: share Center Square articles. I mean, they are creating this
Speaker 5: robust conservative news movement. And the thing that I find
Speaker 5: the most concerning as a reporter is that there's so
Speaker 5: little transparency there. You know, if people choose to read
Speaker 5: write leaning or left leaning news, that's their prerogative. If
Speaker 5: they want to listen to Joe Rogan because they like
Speaker 5: him and they like his perspective and they kind of
Speaker 5: know where it's coming from. That's their prerogative. But if
Speaker 5: you go on Metric Media's website and you look at
Speaker 5: their about as section, there's nothing there. If you try
Speaker 5: to contact anyone, it is just a form you fill out.
Speaker 1: We really appreciate you taking the time.
Speaker 5: I would just say from a you know, I think
Speaker 5: that the lack of transparency in these pink s Lin
Speaker 5: sites is really the most concerning here. That you know,
Speaker 5: listeners and readers should be able to choose where they
Speaker 5: get their news from, but they should know who is
Speaker 5: behind that news. They should know where the money from,
Speaker 5: they should know the motivation behind those individuals who are
Speaker 5: pushing those narratives. And as long as they do, you know,
Speaker 5: that's up to them. I think that you know, more
Speaker 5: opportunity and more you know, venue to find news is
Speaker 5: never bad, but it's the facts. I want to make
Speaker 5: sure that the facts are accurate, that people are really
Speaker 5: understanding what they're reading and understanding, you know, what the
Speaker 5: motivations are for those who are you know, putting out
Speaker 5: those those papers that they're picking up. Thank you so much,
Speaker 5: thank you, Mollie, pect.
Speaker 1: Jesse Cannon, so my young fast.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, the Republicans seem to have quenched having the majority
Speaker 2: in the House. But there's an interesting asterix that you
Speaker 2: and I were just discussing. What are you seeing here?
Speaker 1: Trump is nominating people who feel more establishment because he
Speaker 1: thinks it will be easier to get Some of these
Speaker 1: people a need to send a confirmation and some of
Speaker 1: them don't. But he's trying to pick from a sort
Speaker 1: of group that's more quote unquote establishment, and this is
Speaker 1: leading him to take Republicans from the House of Representatives.
Speaker 1: Now the House of Representatives has not yet been called,
Speaker 1: though Republicans are going to win the House of Representatives.
Speaker 1: They're going to win it by four five seats about
Speaker 1: what they had in the previous Congress, or is we
Speaker 1: like to think of it here at fast politics in
Speaker 1: unngovernable majority, right, we saw Mike Johnson really had a
Speaker 1: lot of trouble getting stuff passed, almost always had to
Speaker 1: caucus with the Democrats. Now he has this situation where
Speaker 1: Donald Trump has literally already is talking about taking five
Speaker 1: Republican members of Congress and putting them either in his
Speaker 1: cabinet or in his administration. That will mean that while
Speaker 1: those I mean, we'll see what happens how he'll take
Speaker 1: them out or when they have specials. Each state has
Speaker 1: different calculus for special et cetera.
Speaker 2: We know how this shakes out of New York State
Speaker 2: and if he's taking a least Stephonic out. We saw
Speaker 2: this with George Santos already.
Speaker 1: The only thing I would say with that is that
Speaker 1: Stephonic has a safe red seat, So George Santos didn't.
Speaker 2: Yes, but it's still time where that seat will be
Speaker 2: blank and the majority will be slimmer right, and.
Speaker 1: That'll be a real problem for Mike Johnson.
Speaker 2: And potentially our democratic name only Governor Kathy Hochold might
Speaker 2: slow walk.
Speaker 1: That one hard to imagine, but it's possible that, my friends,
Speaker 1: Mike Johnson with his ungovernable Republican majority is our moment
Speaker 1: of fuck Gray. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics.
Speaker 1: Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear
Speaker 1: the best minds and politics makes sense of all this chaos.
Speaker 1: If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a
Speaker 1: friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening and