Speaker 1: From Bloomberg News and I Heart Radio. It's the big tag.
Speaker 1: I'm West Cassova today Why this year's US midterm elections
Speaker 1: will decide whether the presidential election can be overturned no
Speaker 1: matter what the voters decide. Republican candidates for offices around
Speaker 1: the country are taking their cue from former President Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: They falsely dispute the outcome of the election, saying Trump
Speaker 1: was a real winner and Joe Biden stole it from him.
Speaker 1: And in five key states where Trump tried and failed
Speaker 1: to overturn the results, the Republican nominees for governor and
Speaker 1: other important jobs overseeing elections are pushing changes to how
Speaker 1: elections are run and how votes are counted, and if
Speaker 1: they succeed, it could be easier to change the outcome
Speaker 1: if Trump or another candidate tried to do it again.
Speaker 1: In Well, there's no question that they rigged the election.
Speaker 1: There's no question that they said about changing the rules
Speaker 1: of game of the game three months out and they
Speaker 1: gave us mail in balloting and we have no voter.
Speaker 1: I d that was Adam Laxall, the Republican Senate nominee
Speaker 1: in Nevada. It was candidates like him that led a
Speaker 1: team of Bloomberg reporters to have fan out across the
Speaker 1: country to try to figure out how vulnerable the states
Speaker 1: are to having their election results overturned, including how state
Speaker 1: lawmakers have changed laws around voting and elections since, and
Speaker 1: whether election officials and candidates for important offices say they'll
Speaker 1: respect the outcome. In candidates like Tutor Dixon, who's running
Speaker 1: for governor in Michigan, they wouldn't have voted to have
Speaker 1: other people influenced this election. I think there were too
Speaker 1: many opportunities for fraud and that Democrats took advantage of
Speaker 1: the fact that we were in the middle of a pandemic.
Speaker 1: From all this reporting, Bloomberg created an election risk index,
Speaker 1: which assesses what the candidates might do if they win office.
Speaker 1: People like Kerry Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in Arizona.
Speaker 1: It's really really game over for those spinalist politicians who
Speaker 1: stood by and they didn't do a damn thing for us.
Speaker 1: They sat there, they did nothing as our elections were
Speaker 1: stolen from us. And Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for
Speaker 1: governor in Pennsylvania, most of the bad things sadly happened
Speaker 1: in Philadelphia. We see bags and bags of ballots showing
Speaker 1: up with without any good chain of custody, and all
Speaker 1: this smells very rotten and something's gone wrong To short
Speaker 1: off this out, I'm here with Ryan t back with
Speaker 1: one of the reporters on the Election Risk project, and
Speaker 1: later in the show, we're gonna speak with Mario Parker,
Speaker 1: Bloomberg's politics editor, Ryan You, and reporter Bill Elsen, who
Speaker 1: was your partner on this project, along with a whole
Speaker 1: lot of other journalists in Bloomberg bureaus around the country.
Speaker 1: You set out to answer this deceptively difficult ship, How
Speaker 1: sound is America's election system? How do you even go
Speaker 1: about trying to measure something as elusive as that. What
Speaker 1: we came up with was a set of criteria for
Speaker 1: each state that we looked at where we could kind
Speaker 1: of break it down to yes, simple yes, no questions,
Speaker 1: do they have this or not? And we looked at
Speaker 1: voting access first of all, um regisuring and voting, and
Speaker 1: then second of all, we looked at ballot security. What
Speaker 1: is ballot security? You know, how do they count the votes?
Speaker 1: How is secure or the voting machines? That a lot
Speaker 1: of the things that people have been calling election integrity.
Speaker 1: We're trying to kind of shy away from that because
Speaker 1: it's become such a politicized term, But you know, is
Speaker 1: is it being counted like accurately and quickly? I think
Speaker 1: those two things have always been kind of like when
Speaker 1: any changes to election law were made, they usually included
Speaker 1: some voter access and some ballot security measures combined, and
Speaker 1: we wanted to make sure that we were capturing both
Speaker 1: of those um And then for the third was like
Speaker 1: what are the people who are running to oversee election, Like,
Speaker 1: what are the governors and secretaries of state and attorney generals?
Speaker 1: What are they saying? What did they say about the election?
Speaker 1: And then we looked at all of the laws that
Speaker 1: were being proposed in all fifty states, and there were
Speaker 1: a lot of them. Yeah, I mean there's thousands. Uh,
Speaker 1: there was more laws proposed in this two year period
Speaker 1: since the election by an order of magnitude than in
Speaker 1: any previous two year two years after an election for
Speaker 1: like the last twenty years. So definitely like a ton
Speaker 1: of interest in this and both Democrats and Republicans, and
Speaker 1: in some ways, like voting is actually easier in a
Speaker 1: lot of parts of the country than before for two reasons.
Speaker 1: One is that during the pandemic, a lot of states
Speaker 1: experimented with things like early voting um or letting people
Speaker 1: register online and things like that because of the pandemic,
Speaker 1: and when they try those they were popular, and so
Speaker 1: they continued with them. In other cases, I think that
Speaker 1: former President Donald Trump's attacks on voting and attacks on
Speaker 1: vote by mail and attacks on the election inspired democ
Speaker 1: rats the sort of rally around those, And so you
Speaker 1: saw a lot of states, particularly in the Northeast, like
Speaker 1: New York, put a lot more energy into trying to
Speaker 1: make it easier to vote, make it easier to register.
Speaker 1: So really like overall, like it's easier to vote in
Speaker 1: most parts of the country. And yet, Yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: big and yet in your story, which is that even
Speaker 1: though it is unexpectedly, according to your reporting, easier to
Speaker 1: vote in a lot of places, and that this year's
Speaker 1: elections are likely to be okay. Um that maybe some
Speaker 1: candidates will claim they won when they lost. By and large,
Speaker 1: the two midterm elections are gonna be okay. But depending
Speaker 1: on who wins this time around, especially in important keys states,
Speaker 1: could determine whether or not the election is going to
Speaker 1: be free and fair. When we looked at what officials
Speaker 1: have had to say, what people who are running for
Speaker 1: key offices have to say, we found two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty eight people who are either currently holding office or
Speaker 1: running and have been nominated for an office governor, secretary
Speaker 1: of state, attorney general, or US House and US Senate
Speaker 1: who are election deniers. So that's two hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: eight people. We published a story noting how many people
Speaker 1: were on that list, and we had to update it
Speaker 1: literally like within a day because there was another two
Speaker 1: people who'd been nominated r And one thing you found
Speaker 1: was that in five key swing states, and these are
Speaker 1: the states that tend to decide presidential elections. And tell
Speaker 1: me if I'm going to name them all right, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona,
Speaker 1: and Nevada and also sort of toss up state of Pennsylvania,
Speaker 1: the candidates for governor, Republican candidate for governor and or
Speaker 1: secretary of States. Some of them have kind of multiple
Speaker 1: candidates deny that Joe Baden won the election, and have
Speaker 1: in one way or another said that they would take
Speaker 1: steps to correct what they see as election fraud in
Speaker 1: election if you should rise right. So the concerning thing
Speaker 1: there is that what we didn't see in the election,
Speaker 1: Trump and his allies pushed back in a lot of ways,
Speaker 1: but when push came to shove, local and state officials
Speaker 1: didn't go along with their sort of schemes. It was
Speaker 1: Republican officials. You know, a lot of case Republicans and
Speaker 1: a lot of cases these were die hard Trump loyalists
Speaker 1: who said, I just can't go along with this, right,
Speaker 1: And I don't know that that's going to be the
Speaker 1: case if Trump or someone else tries a similar effort
Speaker 1: next time. At least among these governors, uh, Doug Mastriano
Speaker 1: in Pennsylvania's probably the one who did the most, both
Speaker 1: behind the scenes and as a state lawmaker to try
Speaker 1: to further Trump's attempts to overturn the election in that state.
Speaker 1: And in his subernatorial campaign he has said things like
Speaker 1: he wants to de certify all of the voting machines.
Speaker 1: We saw Governor Wolf de certified every single machine in
Speaker 1: the state twenty nineteen. We can do the same. And
Speaker 1: you have a Secretary of State candidate Mark Fincham. State
Speaker 1: Representative Mark Fincham is calling for statewide door to door
Speaker 1: voter verification in Arizona. He is running for secretary of
Speaker 1: State right now and as a strong supporter of former
Speaker 1: President Donald Trump's unproven claims of widespread voter fraud. If
Speaker 1: they're elected, paint is a picture of what Arizona looks
Speaker 1: like in the next two years and what the state's
Speaker 1: laws would look like. On the eve of the election,
Speaker 1: Arizona state lawmakers are not anxious to completely upend their
Speaker 1: very popular vote by mail system based on you know,
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories and complaints um from a fraction of voters.
Speaker 1: But you could see a lot of The secretary of state,
Speaker 1: for example, in most states certifies which voting machines can
Speaker 1: be used. So if you are the secretary of state
Speaker 1: in your an election denier, you could simply pick, you know,
Speaker 1: the machines that are used by counties that you don't
Speaker 1: like that tend to go for you know, the other party,
Speaker 1: and you could just simply de certify all as machines.
Speaker 1: So suddenly those counties have to spend a bunch of
Speaker 1: money on their own because they're generally bought by the
Speaker 1: local officials to buy new machines. In fact, Maricopa County
Speaker 1: had to buy new machines because that cyber Ninjas audit
Speaker 1: of Maricopa County in Arizona was so poorly run that
Speaker 1: they didn't have chain of custody of the machines, and
Speaker 1: they couldn't keep using the machines because they couldn't say
Speaker 1: that they hadn't been tampered with. You could do things like,
Speaker 1: you know, try to kick more people off of the
Speaker 1: voter rules as Secretary of State through really aggressive purge.
Speaker 1: So just even creating sort of an air of chaos
Speaker 1: around you know, when and how elections are conducted could
Speaker 1: be enough to really make it harder for people to vote.
Speaker 1: So given all of that, Ryan, how concerned should people
Speaker 1: be about the integrity of the next presidential election? The
Speaker 1: thing is is there are so many election deniers running
Speaker 1: for so many offices that some of them, statistically speaking,
Speaker 1: some of them are going to win. I think that
Speaker 1: some of the people who have staked out the most
Speaker 1: extreme positions on this are going to lose. And that's
Speaker 1: largely because they've also staked out extreme positions on other
Speaker 1: issues that are more salient to voters, and I think
Speaker 1: may end up hurting them more. You know, But some
Speaker 1: of these people are going to get in there. I mean,
Speaker 1: when you look at the Senate, you know, a lot
Speaker 1: of the Republicans who did not go along with Trump's
Speaker 1: efforts are retiring. So like Rob Portman of Ohio, the
Speaker 1: Republican nominee in the state is J. D. Evance, who
Speaker 1: has endorsed election denial, and Senate nominees in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada,
Speaker 1: North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, and New Hampshire who have
Speaker 1: all denied the election was free and fair. And that's
Speaker 1: a lot of people, and some of them are going
Speaker 1: to win. And so you know what happens if some
Speaker 1: of these governor nominees win, and some of these secretary
Speaker 1: of state nominees win, and some of these Senate nominees win,
Speaker 1: you know the next time that you see a similar
Speaker 1: effort to what Trump tried and so far, I would
Speaker 1: say if you were a major party nominee. And you know,
Speaker 1: there's really been very little downside for Trump himself to
Speaker 1: have tried to contest the election. So I don't think
Speaker 1: that this is the last time that an election is
Speaker 1: going to be contested. And given the number of people
Speaker 1: who are running for office, the odds that it may
Speaker 1: come down to one of these people are are good,
Speaker 1: and that's concerning. The laws don't concern me as much
Speaker 1: as the people do. You just don't know what they
Speaker 1: may do the next time they're faced with that question. Ryan,
Speaker 1: you've given us a lot to think about, So thanks
Speaker 1: for that. We're gonna keep you in the chair just
Speaker 1: a little bit longer. When we come back from the break,
Speaker 1: we are going to ask you what we should be
Speaker 1: looking for in this year's midterm elections. Ryan, you've given
Speaker 1: us a pretty sobering overview of how all these potential
Speaker 1: changes to laws and candidates could affect the U S elections.
Speaker 1: But what about this year's mid term elections that are
Speaker 1: coming up in November? What are the places right now
Speaker 1: that people who are watching this election should keep an
Speaker 1: eye on for uh, looking at election interference, other election
Speaker 1: problems and what that might mean. So, there's three laws
Speaker 1: that have been passed since the election which I think
Speaker 1: you can already see an effect from which could be
Speaker 1: decisive enough to decide a close race. Um. The first
Speaker 1: is in Texas, they passed a law that said you
Speaker 1: need to put some kind of voter i D number
Speaker 1: on a vote by mail ballot, and that number had
Speaker 1: to either be your driver's license number or you're such
Speaker 1: security number. And they were warned when they passed this
Speaker 1: law that the state database only has one of those numbers.
Speaker 1: It doesn't have both, because you only needed one to
Speaker 1: sign up to vote, And in some cases, you might
Speaker 1: have signed up to vote a long time ago and
Speaker 1: your driver's license number has changed because you've moved. And
Speaker 1: why did they do this, Well, this is one of
Speaker 1: those things where in the abstract and the hypothetical, it's
Speaker 1: actually a better law than the alternative, which is signature verification.
Speaker 1: Um Signature verification has been shown to be extremely problematic.
Speaker 1: A lot of young black and Hispanic voters have their
Speaker 1: signatures rejected at a higher rate, and so I'm not
Speaker 1: really a fan of signature verification than numerical i D
Speaker 1: works in a lot of states where it's used, and
Speaker 1: it's not really a problem. But the reasoning behind all
Speaker 1: of this is presumably to prevent fraud, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: the reason to pass this is that there's a theory
Speaker 1: that you know, people are sending in fraudulent mail and ballots,
Speaker 1: and again there's not really evidence that there's a lot
Speaker 1: of that happening. But I think it's fine for a
Speaker 1: state to require some kind of I D verification and
Speaker 1: loss of states to do that. But what happened in
Speaker 1: Texas was that if you put the wrong number to verify,
Speaker 1: then it was thrown out, even if it was legitimate ballot,
Speaker 1: because they had no way to verify that number. They
Speaker 1: only had the other number. And so this is just
Speaker 1: incredibly poor execution of an otherwise fine law um they had.
Speaker 1: In the primary, they had twelve percent of mail ballots rejected.
Speaker 1: That's three thousand ballots statewide that were thrown out. The
Speaker 1: national average for an election is about one percent of
Speaker 1: mail ballots are rejected, which is actually still probably includes
Speaker 1: a lot of people whose ballots were legit, they just
Speaker 1: were thrown out. That's a really, really bad rejection rate
Speaker 1: to be twelve times the national average. And if an
Speaker 1: election came down to a few thousand votes and you
Speaker 1: were throwing out, you know, and that's a primary, so
Speaker 1: so you can imagine it's gonna be higher than twenty
Speaker 1: three in November, that could be bad. Does that mean
Speaker 1: that the twelve percent are people who put down a
Speaker 1: wrong number? And therefore you could argue that it was
Speaker 1: a front know, they that's the that's the correct number.
Speaker 1: They put down their driver's license number, but the system
Speaker 1: only had their so security number, and so it was
Speaker 1: flagged as we can't verify this, and it was thrown out.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's that's not a fraudulent ballot. That's not
Speaker 1: a ballot that you know, should be rejected under the
Speaker 1: state's own laws. It's just that they enacted this law
Speaker 1: without you know, updating the database and putting the effort
Speaker 1: into actually making sure that this would work. And these
Speaker 1: ballots are disproportionately democratic because Democrats are much more likely
Speaker 1: to vote by mail right now in Texas. Uh So
Speaker 1: in the primary, there's a lot more Democratic ballots and
Speaker 1: Republican ballots that were thrown out. So that was really problematic. So,
Speaker 1: I mean raises the question. I don't know if you
Speaker 1: have the answer. The Republicans know that this would mostly
Speaker 1: affect Democrats, and is there reasonably that that's behind it
Speaker 1: or is that just an effect of it? You know,
Speaker 1: vote by mail historically has not been partisan. It's not
Speaker 1: been something that either party had a consistent advantage in
Speaker 1: any state. There were some states where Republicans were more
Speaker 1: likely to take advantage of it. Republicans being older and
Speaker 1: less likely to move around, it's tended to be a
Speaker 1: little bit more friendly to Republican voters. And some states,
Speaker 1: like in Florida, they have a really good system for
Speaker 1: sort of getting out the vote through vote by mail.
Speaker 1: Since Trump's attacks on vote by mail, Republicans are much
Speaker 1: less likely to indicate that they want to vote that way,
Speaker 1: and Democrats are much more likely to indicate that they
Speaker 1: do want to vote that way. So I think a
Speaker 1: lot of these laws that are seeking to limit vote
Speaker 1: by mail are sort of predicated on the idea that
Speaker 1: it's more popular Democrats. That's not necessarily true, but it
Speaker 1: was true in the primary in Texas this time around.
Speaker 1: A Texas makes that's really hard to vote by mail.
Speaker 1: So this is just a fraction of votes. You have
Speaker 1: to have an excuse or be over the age of
Speaker 1: sixty five in Texas to vote by mail. So it's
Speaker 1: not a ton of ballots, but if you're throwing out
Speaker 1: twelve percent of them, you know, in a very close race,
Speaker 1: that could make a difference. So there's Texas. You said,
Speaker 1: there are two other states. Yes, the other one that's
Speaker 1: the most concerning is going on right now in Georgia,
Speaker 1: where a law passed since the election makes it dramatically
Speaker 1: easier for people to come in and basically say I
Speaker 1: think that this person is not a registered voter, or
Speaker 1: like who is a registered voter is not valid and
Speaker 1: should be kicked off the voter rules. And so a
Speaker 1: group affiliated with some allies of Donald Trump has gone
Speaker 1: into various counties. They went into Gwynette County, which is
Speaker 1: formally Republican part of the state this now trending democratic,
Speaker 1: and they challenged the voter registrations of thirty seven thousand people.
Speaker 1: What was the basis for saying they identified those particular people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so under the voter at law, it's actually kind of
Speaker 1: hard to remove someone from the voter rules. It has
Speaker 1: to be done under certain circumstances. So there's a lot
Speaker 1: of times where someone has moved to a new state,
Speaker 1: they'll remain on the old states voter rules and tell
Speaker 1: either the state, you know, get some kind of notification
Speaker 1: that you know they've moved, or they don't vote and
Speaker 1: they show up as inactive and then they get sent
Speaker 1: up postcard and if they don't respond to the postcard,
Speaker 1: then they're finally be canceled, but it can take years
Speaker 1: for that process to play out, so there's always some
Speaker 1: dead weight on the voter rules. So the risk is
Speaker 1: that along with people who maybe shouldn't be on the
Speaker 1: voter rules in Georgia anymore, are a lot of people
Speaker 1: who do live in Georgia should be able to vote
Speaker 1: in Georgia but are now being disqualified. Right. There's a
Speaker 1: reason why they typically wait to clean the voter rules
Speaker 1: until the January following a major federal election, and that's
Speaker 1: because it's bad to take someone off who should be
Speaker 1: allowed to vote, because someone who's legally valid and just
Speaker 1: hasn't voted in a while because they just weren't inspired
Speaker 1: by the candidates, or they got busy, or they forgot,
Speaker 1: and then they decide, now this is the time I'm
Speaker 1: going to vote. And they show up to vote and
Speaker 1: they can't and Georgia doesn't have same day voter registration,
Speaker 1: so they're out of luck. And the last state is Florida.
Speaker 1: Never a shortage of drama there, I will say Florida.
Speaker 1: After the two thousand election where everything kind of came
Speaker 1: down to Florida and all eyes were on Florida really
Speaker 1: cleaned up its laws and and overall its voting laws
Speaker 1: are pretty good and they really didn't want to tinker
Speaker 1: with them too much. Then, ain change that they made
Speaker 1: that was problematic since the election was that the Governor,
Speaker 1: Rhonda Santis, asked for a special election crimes police task
Speaker 1: force kind of agency that reports directly to him. And
Speaker 1: what is it that this uh police force is going
Speaker 1: to do. Well, what they're supposed to do is look
Speaker 1: for people who voted fraudulently, people who voted twice, you know,
Speaker 1: voter registrations that people who have broken some kind of
Speaker 1: voting law. And yeah, the particular reason why it was
Speaker 1: flag is problematic was just that they report directly to
Speaker 1: the governor. And so, sure enough, a couple of days
Speaker 1: before the primary, Florida Governor Rhonda Santis held a press
Speaker 1: conference in which he said, well, you know, I'm announcing
Speaker 1: that we're charging a bunch of people around the state
Speaker 1: with crime of voting, even though they are felons and
Speaker 1: aren't allowed to vote. And normally I've been to a
Speaker 1: lot of these kinds of press conferences in the past.
Speaker 1: Usually they're done by an attorney general, and usually if
Speaker 1: it was something as sensitive as like voter fraud, they
Speaker 1: wouldn't do it three days before I Mary, and this
Speaker 1: was very much not did not follow that rule. He
Speaker 1: did not name who the people were, He didn't say
Speaker 1: where they were from. He just sort of insinuated that
Speaker 1: they were from more democratic areas of the county. He
Speaker 1: went to a democratic county to make the announcement. People
Speaker 1: in the state, voting right advocates in the state said that,
Speaker 1: you know, doing this just before an election is kind
Speaker 1: of an effort to intimidate people who you know, may
Speaker 1: be unsure if they can vote. And it's particularly fraught
Speaker 1: in Florida because voters actually passed a referendum to restore
Speaker 1: voting rights cuffelons, which the state legislature and to Santist
Speaker 1: then undermined by sort of complicating the process for doing that.
Speaker 1: So there may be a lot of people who are
Speaker 1: really uncertain of whether they can vote, and by holding
Speaker 1: this announcement, by doing this, you know, he sort of
Speaker 1: made some of those people more fearful of voting. The
Speaker 1: other reason why I was problematic is that, you know,
Speaker 1: as it came out, like who these people were, like
Speaker 1: a lot of their cases were you know, they were
Speaker 1: told by elections officials that they could out. You know,
Speaker 1: in one case they were sort of directly handed a
Speaker 1: forum and said here, sign up to register. It's fine.
Speaker 1: And so those cases really weren't as strong as he
Speaker 1: made them sound. So then, of course RU understanders widely
Speaker 1: thought to have his own eye on the White House, right,
Speaker 1: And I think that that's the other reason why he
Speaker 1: did this, was just that it allows him to show
Speaker 1: himself as being tough on election and security, and right now,
Speaker 1: that's something that a lot of Republican office holders and
Speaker 1: nominees want to do. Thanks so much to Ryan tu
Speaker 1: Backw for joining me. After the break, I speak to
Speaker 1: Mario Parker, Bloomberg's US politics editor. He'll tell us about
Speaker 1: the latest in key races around the country. With just
Speaker 1: one week to go before election day, I'm here with
Speaker 1: Blomberg's politics edator, Mario Parker. Mario, we've been talking all
Speaker 1: about the mid terms, how election deniers could possibly disrupt
Speaker 1: a whole lot of things in this election and the next.
Speaker 1: But election day this year is fast approaching. Can you
Speaker 1: just kind of give us a lay of the land
Speaker 1: of what to expect, because it just seems completely upside
Speaker 1: down out there. Well, that's absolutely it is upside down
Speaker 1: is an app description. I think what's troubling from the
Speaker 1: election integrity perspective is the fact that a lot of
Speaker 1: these races are so close. Right, if they were looking
Speaker 1: to be blowouts, well, that temper is maybe the expectations
Speaker 1: that someone may be able to deny the results of
Speaker 1: the election, right, but the close races kind of signaled it.
Speaker 1: At least they'll have a pathway to making those type
Speaker 1: of arguments, whether they're salient or not. So here are
Speaker 1: the races that are going to be crucial to determining
Speaker 1: control of Congress. In Pennsylvania, we've got Democrat John Fetterman
Speaker 1: against Republican of med Oz who was backed by former
Speaker 1: President Donald Trump. Ump In Georgia, we have herschel Walker,
Speaker 1: backed by former President Donald Trump as well, facing golf
Speaker 1: against incumbent Democrats Senator Raphael Warnock. Similar races are taking
Speaker 1: place in Wisconsin with incumbent Senator Ron Johnson against Democrat
Speaker 1: Mandela Barnes. Arizona has another Trump backed Republican and Blake Masters,
Speaker 1: who was facing golf against incumbent Democrat U S Senator
Speaker 1: Mark Kelly. So those are some of the close races
Speaker 1: to watch in addition to Nevada, where you have incumbent
Speaker 1: Democrats US Senator Katherine Quartets Mastow facing off against another
Speaker 1: correct me if you heard this before, another Trump endorsed candidate,
Speaker 1: and Adam lex I just wanted everybody know because you
Speaker 1: can't see this, but Maria just did all that at
Speaker 1: the top of his head without looking at an your note,
Speaker 1: So kudos to you. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: we've seen a lot of these races, as you say,
Speaker 1: there closed, but it wasn't that close. And a lot
Speaker 1: of the races not so long ago, even just a
Speaker 1: few weeks ago, some of these races of Titan. What
Speaker 1: happened that made a Republicans kind of pull up to
Speaker 1: Democrats who not so long ago looked like they were
Speaker 1: gonna win. Talking to Democrats six weeks ago, Oh, they
Speaker 1: were exuberant. He talked to him earlier this year. They
Speaker 1: were pretty glow. And why were they exuber They were
Speaker 1: exuberant if you were called that was off the heels
Speaker 1: of a couple of things happened during the summer that
Speaker 1: turned the tide for Democrats. You had the rollback of
Speaker 1: Roe versus Way that really ignited the base. Then you
Speaker 1: had former President Donald Trump back in the news with
Speaker 1: the search of his property in mar Lago, whether or
Speaker 1: not he was keeping state secrets there as well, And
Speaker 1: so that's just a gift for Democrats, right, So they
Speaker 1: felt like they were gonna get a little bit of momentum.
Speaker 1: Maybe they wouldn't keep the House because in the mid
Speaker 1: term elections, the party of the president often loses, but
Speaker 1: maybe it wouldn't be a total blowout, right, because it
Speaker 1: wouldn't be a total blowout, it wouldn't be the red
Speaker 1: wave that they thought there was coming for them. About
Speaker 1: a year ago after the Virginia gubernatorial election in which
Speaker 1: Republican and former Carlisles Co CEO Glenn Young Can upset
Speaker 1: Terry mccauloff, who was a big deal in Democratic circles.
Speaker 1: So what changed from there because that kind of winding
Speaker 1: their sales where they're all feeling pretty good about a
Speaker 1: bad situation now kind of feels more like they're feeling
Speaker 1: bad about what looks like it's going to be a
Speaker 1: bad situation. Yeah, just a couple of things happened. Donald
Speaker 1: Trump isn't in the news as much now, that's relative, right,
Speaker 1: So as much as he was in August. In September,
Speaker 1: uh Democrats went all in on the rollback of abortion rights. Really,
Speaker 1: if you look at some of the ads the Democrats
Speaker 1: are running, he likened it to squeezing all the juice
Speaker 1: out of that limit per se, right. And then Republicans
Speaker 1: really harped on crime, the post pandemic, rising crime. And
Speaker 1: you're saying that they that was an effective cudgel. In Wisconsin,
Speaker 1: Mandela Barnes had been pulling quite well against Ron Johnson.
Speaker 1: It eroded his lead. Same thing in Pennsylvania, same thing
Speaker 1: in Georgia. And so when you look towards election night,
Speaker 1: and that's gonna be a hectic night for you, how
Speaker 1: do you see things shaping up? Now? One of the
Speaker 1: things we have to get comfortable with. And we saw
Speaker 1: some of this in that we didn't really expect. It's
Speaker 1: just a prolonged amount of uncertainty. We may just not
Speaker 1: know who controls the Senate for sure, as you mentioned,
Speaker 1: was the House is a little bit more clear, but
Speaker 1: more challenging for them in the Senate races. And when
Speaker 1: it's all said and done, um, who do you think
Speaker 1: controls the Senate? And who do you think controls the hopps. Oh,
Speaker 1: I wish I had that crystal ball. All right, Uh,
Speaker 1: but I won't didge your question. And on this one.
Speaker 1: A few weeks ago, as I mentioned, Democrats maybe could
Speaker 1: have held onto their majority, picked up one seat Republicans.
Speaker 1: Right now, I think that dynamic has flipped right where
Speaker 1: Republicans feel like it could be worst case scenario for them.
Speaker 1: It could be a draw. We stayed deadlocked with the Senate,
Speaker 1: and maybe they pick up a seat. It's funny. We
Speaker 1: had a reporter out with Joe Manson, senator from West Virginia,
Speaker 1: who has really stemmied parts of Biden's agenda, and he
Speaker 1: essentially said something like he's praying to God that it's
Speaker 1: not fifty fifty because then we just have a deadlock
Speaker 1: for the next two years heading into the presidential election. Well,
Speaker 1: if the Republicans are able to somehow November eight fulfill
Speaker 1: right their goal of having some sort of rare wave
Speaker 1: where they take the House and are able to at
Speaker 1: least take a slight majority in the Senate, maybe they
Speaker 1: pick up one seat. If it's a great night for them,
Speaker 1: maybe they pick two stints. Right, maybe they pick up Pennsylvania,
Speaker 1: Georgia and Arizona. Right, that's the type of wave of
Speaker 1: moments and that they're hoping to catapult them to the
Speaker 1: White House in Mario. Parker, thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 1: Thanks a lot, West, great to be with you. You
Speaker 1: can check out Bloomberg's complete election night coverage and I
Speaker 1: mean complete maps and results, reporting, analysis, everything you want
Speaker 1: and need to know. That's all on Bloomberg dot com.
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