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Defeating Trump’s Attacks on Voting, plus the Coming End of the Trump Era / Start Making Sense · The Nation Podcasts

0:08
[SPEAKER_03]: From the nation magazine, this is start making sense.
0:11
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm John Weener.
0:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Later in the show, if the election goes roughly as the polls say it will, next Tuesday, will mark the beginning of the end of the Trump era.
0:22
[SPEAKER_03]: Harold Byerson will comment and focus on getting to 51 in the Senate or bitter yet 52.
0:28
[SPEAKER_03]: Harold's editor at large of the American prospect.
0:32
[SPEAKER_03]: But first, defeating Trump's attacks on voting, Rick Hasson will explain,
0:37
[SPEAKER_03]: in a minute.
0:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Democrats chances of winning a majority of house seats is 95% according to Nate Silver and their chances in the Senate are 75%.
0:50
[SPEAKER_03]: So Trump's only real chance of holding on to the House and Senate is to miss with the voting or the certification of the winners.
0:58
[SPEAKER_03]: For comment on his latest moves, we turn again to Rick Hesson.
1:02
[SPEAKER_03]: He's a distinguished professor of law at UCLA, director of the safeguarding the democracy project and editor of the election law blog.
1:10
[SPEAKER_03]: And he's an election law analyst for CNN.
1:14
[SPEAKER_03]: He's the author of many award-winning books, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and he's a 2026 Guggenheim fellow.
1:24
[SPEAKER_03]: Rick Hassan, welcome back.
1:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Good to be back with you.
1:27
[SPEAKER_03]: Several of Trump's efforts to mess with the voting have already failed, the Supreme Court rejected his scheme to enlist the post-office in limiting mail voting, and the Senate wouldn't pass his save act restricting voting.
1:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Those were the big ones, and now with the election a week away, he's trying a few other things.
1:45
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's start with the easiest one, the Alaska Senate race, where Democrat Mary Peltolla is challenging incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan.
1:55
[SPEAKER_03]: Alaska has ranked choice voting and the top four vote getters in the primary go to the final on Tuesday.
2:03
[SPEAKER_03]: The final four now include Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan and an independent candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. Republicans have spent months trying to throw him off the ballot arguing that he's a democratic plant running only to split the Republican vote.
2:21
[SPEAKER_03]: He says
2:26
[SPEAKER_03]: The Daniel J. Sullivan is the right to run as a candidate and to appear on the November 3rd ballot.
2:31
[SPEAKER_03]: So the way that ballot listing there now is Dan S. Sullivan registered Republican and incumbent Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. no party affiliation.
2:45
[SPEAKER_03]: But then last week the Trump administration filed a lawsuit in federal court to try to block
2:50
[SPEAKER_03]: certification of the election if Republican incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan loses by a narrow margin and Trump said of this lawsuit, I'm the one who said do it.
3:01
[SPEAKER_03]: The Republican argument, well, what exactly is the Republican argument?
3:06
[SPEAKER_02]: It's hard to say what their Republican argument is.
3:09
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it is certainly one that starts with the idea that voters might be confused.
3:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Where does the U.S. have any interest here?
3:21
[SPEAKER_02]: It's really hard to say.
3:23
[SPEAKER_02]: So the basis for the claim,
3:26
[SPEAKER_02]: is that the government is enforcing the National Voter Registration Act, which is a very odd thing to say because this is not a case about voter registration.
3:36
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not even a case about voters.
3:38
[SPEAKER_02]: It's about candidates.
3:39
[SPEAKER_02]: And so what they're grasping on is what's known as the preamble of the NBRA.
3:44
[SPEAKER_02]: So this is where Congress states its purpose and findings.
3:47
[SPEAKER_02]: These are generally not actionable things.
3:50
[SPEAKER_02]: And one of the things that says pretty innocuous is that this is
3:53
[SPEAKER_02]: to preserve the integrity of the electoral process.
3:56
[SPEAKER_02]: They're trying to use the fact that it says integrity of the process as a hook for federal government interference anytime they see something that they think lacks integrity, which would be just a license for the federal government to interfere in every election contest in the country.
4:10
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think this is going to go anywhere.
4:13
[SPEAKER_02]: I think this is either something that was being done to please Donald Trump because he said he wanted a lawsuit or more ominously at some kind of placeholder to try to challenge the results of the election if it looks like Peltola is going to win it.
4:27
[SPEAKER_03]: I read that what the lawsuit asks is not that the Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan be declared the winner if his total added to the total of the other Dan Sullivan is greater than Mary Peltolla.
4:41
[SPEAKER_03]: I read it asked only that the court blocks certification until an investigation determines whether enough voters were fooled by the two Dan Sullivan to have swung the election.
4:53
[SPEAKER_02]: Does that sound like a reasonable compromise to you?
4:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, so you used the word blocked.
4:58
[SPEAKER_02]: The verb is missing in their complaint.
5:00
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, this just shows you how shoddy the work is.
5:02
[SPEAKER_02]: So we don't know what they want as there, or they probably were debating it internally and then forgot to put it in there.
5:09
[SPEAKER_02]: The federal government has no business ordering the state to do anything.
5:14
[SPEAKER_02]: The federal courts have no business telling the states you have to investigate confusion.
5:18
[SPEAKER_02]: And I don't even understand
5:21
[SPEAKER_02]: how this would work.
5:22
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, what are they going to look at?
5:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, it's a ranked choice ballot, which means that if someone's not sure which dance Sullivan they like, they could rank them one and two, and then if they get it wrong, it'll just help the other dance Sullivan.
5:34
[SPEAKER_02]: It is the worst election lock to play I've ever seen in any context.
5:39
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it is sanctionable.
5:41
[SPEAKER_02]: That is, I think that the lawyers who filed, it should be punished because it is so bad.
5:48
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, it takes a while for Alaska to gather all of its ballots and to do this ranked choice calculation.
5:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I really hope we don't have a situation where control of the Senate depends on Alaska, because then it's going to be under a microscope and these claims are going to be.
6:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Of course, they're going to claim it's because of confusion, even if you could demonstrate that it's not.
6:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Trump's other big initiatives have focused on California, and there's at least, I think, three being litigated right now.
6:16
[SPEAKER_03]: First Trump said they had found 190,000 people on California's voters, roles who might be non-citizens, and then they said it was 20,000, and then they arrested 28.
6:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Now these issues are being litigated separately.
6:36
[SPEAKER_03]: the UCLA Voting Rights Project filed suit challenging the 190,000 people claim that was filed September 2nd a long time ago in federal court in Washington DC as far as I can tell nothing has happened yet in election day as next week.
6:51
[SPEAKER_03]: Tell us if I got that right.
6:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so the government made this claim that they were, I think they pointed to a quarter of a million people around the country of which 190,000 were in California.
7:05
[SPEAKER_02]: They now claim that that number was just their outer estimates and now their 20,000 is a better estimate.
7:12
[SPEAKER_02]: We do know that the Los Angeles,
7:16
[SPEAKER_02]: county registrar took a sample of 200 of the names of these 20,000 just to check them out.
7:22
[SPEAKER_02]: More than half of them 112 out of 200 were not registered to vote.
7:28
[SPEAKER_02]: I think about something like 36 or 37 percent were native born U.S. people, so they are almost certainly citizens.
7:38
[SPEAKER_02]: So it doesn't look like this list is particularly accurate.
7:42
[SPEAKER_02]: What DOJ is asking to do violates both federal law and state law, which is essentially take our word for it, but these are non-citizens and set aside their ballots, and then presumably do some kind of investigation.
7:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Before the election ballots are tabulated to figure out if these people are actually citizens and eligible to vote.
8:02
[SPEAKER_03]: I understand there's some sort of hearing later this week, but since the election is just a few days away, it seems like this will survive to be a complaint afterwards of the Trump people that the county registrar has never determined whether the accused people let us call them.
8:19
[SPEAKER_03]: Be accused people, we're not voters.
8:21
[SPEAKER_03]: set up the way you're thinking about this now?
8:24
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think about Alaska and California as two parts of the same strategy, which is pick the places where there's most likely to be a late-called race.
8:34
[SPEAKER_02]: In the event that there is close control for either the house or the Senate, for the house it could be California's house races, for the Senate it could be that Alaska race that we just talked about.
8:47
[SPEAKER_03]: If that's the case,
8:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Uh, these are maybe placeholders to then say, oh, you know, that there was fraud.
8:54
[SPEAKER_02]: We tried to get California to take out the non-citizens.
8:58
[SPEAKER_02]: They didn't, uh, these results are chainted.
9:01
[SPEAKER_02]: The Republicans should fight against, seeding these people in Congress.
9:06
[SPEAKER_02]: That sort of thing.
9:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
9:07
[SPEAKER_02]: If it's very, very close, uh, I don't know if the polls are right, if the polls are right, it's not going to be close.
9:12
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I think these lawsuits go away.
9:15
[SPEAKER_02]: But there are placeholders.
9:17
[SPEAKER_02]: There are zombie lawsuits.
9:18
[SPEAKER_02]: We call them in my field because they seem dead, but they can come back to life after the election.
9:25
[SPEAKER_03]: And then there's the case of the 20,000 names.
9:28
[SPEAKER_03]: This is being indicated this week, as we speak, California Secretary of State and the head of the LA County voter registrar's office have refused to comply with the Department of Justice demands about checking the 20,000 names.
9:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Justice Department sued them.
9:48
[SPEAKER_03]: There was a kind of emergency argument in the ninth circuit on Sunday.
9:53
[SPEAKER_03]: I didn't even know the ninth circuit met on Sunday.
9:56
[SPEAKER_03]: What happened there?
9:57
[SPEAKER_02]: DOJ has asked for a temporary straining order that would require the segregation of ballots pull out all the ballots of the people on our list.
10:04
[SPEAKER_02]: It's before a federal district court judge, one who was already skeptical of an earlier DOJ lawsuit to get voting rolls judge David Carter.
10:12
[SPEAKER_02]: First, DOJ asked for a hearing by November 3rd.
10:16
[SPEAKER_02]: He said it for the 27th of October, then on October 21st they said, you need to decide this by tomorrow at noon.
10:24
[SPEAKER_02]: And he didn't, because he had already set the hearing for the 27th.
10:29
[SPEAKER_02]: So DOJ went immediately to the 9th Circuit and said, hey, this was a constructive denial.
10:34
[SPEAKER_02]: It was as if the judge has denied the TRO, we're appealing from that we want you to issue an injunction pending appeal.
10:41
[SPEAKER_02]: So the 9th Circuit has a procedure to hear emergency cases like an.
10:45
[SPEAKER_02]: death penalty case.
10:46
[SPEAKER_02]: This is another one in election emergency case.
10:48
[SPEAKER_02]: It is quite unusual that this wasn't just decided on the papers that they did have oral argument.
10:53
[SPEAKER_02]: There were most two hours of oral argument on Sunday.
10:55
[SPEAKER_02]: I watched them.
10:57
[SPEAKER_02]: It was very clear that at least two of the judges are going to rule against the Department of Justice at least procedurally because there's no order yet to be appealed from.
11:06
[SPEAKER_02]: And
11:07
[SPEAKER_02]: As of Monday we're waiting for that, but I think what will happen is on Tuesday the judge will hold the hearing soon there after the judge will rule on the TRL if the judge does not issue the TRL which seems pretty likely We'll be back at the night circuit in front of these same judges within a couple of days and then maybe to the Supreme Court.
11:26
[SPEAKER_02]: This is the way of making a lot of noise
11:28
[SPEAKER_02]: all these headlines about non-citizens voting in California and voters being confused in Alaska, you know, if nothing else, it's meant to so chaos.
11:41
[SPEAKER_03]: And then there's the case of the 28th people accused of voter fraud.
11:45
[SPEAKER_02]: I initially had arrested 11 and now they've arrested a few more.
11:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Looks like some of these cases are cases of mistaken identity.
11:52
[SPEAKER_02]: For example, there's one person who says he's married to a US citizen, he has US citizens, children, one of his children has the same name as him.
12:03
[SPEAKER_02]: And so DOJ simply could have
12:05
[SPEAKER_02]: confused the two of them, the child is a citizen.
12:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Some of them claim they didn't register to vote or didn't know they registered to vote.
12:13
[SPEAKER_02]: So these are all misdemeanors.
12:15
[SPEAKER_02]: Now misdemeanors pretty minor criminal charge, federal government brought in for at least
12:22
[SPEAKER_02]: that the gentleman from Belize, they brought in helicopters and armed Homeland Security agents at 5am for a pre-don raid that gave the New York Post exclusive access to accompanying them on the raid.
12:37
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, this was just a parade meant to feed the idea that there's a scourge of voter fraud.
12:46
[SPEAKER_02]: If these are the strongest cases they have, they've really pointed to a drop in the bucket.
12:51
[SPEAKER_02]: compared to the 23 million buffoters when I think of registered in California.
12:56
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know what that math works out to, but it's a very small number.
12:59
[SPEAKER_02]: They've had, you know, years, a couple of years to investigate these claims and to bring them.
13:06
[SPEAKER_02]: You'd think from the list of 20,000 that they say are nonsense, as they could have found stronger cases than these.
13:13
[SPEAKER_02]: There's no indication that any of these people are connected to each other, even though the New York Post headline, they're exclusive, talked about a network of non-citizen voters.
13:23
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's just complete BS meant to, you know, chin up the claim that dark skin people are engaged in voter fraud.
13:32
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, Trump has been saying this for a really long time.
13:36
[SPEAKER_03]: And there's a few other relevant cases here.
13:38
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a federal judge in Oakland ruled that Homeland Security practice of knocking on doors and asking people about their immigration status and whether they voted in recent elections violates the Voting Rights Act.
13:53
[SPEAKER_03]: And she ordered the Department of Homeland Security to
13:57
[SPEAKER_03]: Halt investigations in nine states into whether non-citizens are registered to vote.
14:03
[SPEAKER_03]: This was a lawsuit brought by protective democracy headed by Ian Basin, who's been a guest on our show here, and the National Law Immigration Center applies to California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin.
14:19
[SPEAKER_03]: The lead plaintiffs are the nurses.
14:22
[SPEAKER_03]: Tell us about this one.
14:23
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a part of the Voting Rights Act, you don't hear that much about which I think is a good thing because it doesn't normally come up, it's Section 11B and it prevents intimidation of voters.
14:35
[SPEAKER_02]: So you know, you threaten voters, you try to discourage them from voting with force or fraud, you know, of these kind of things.
14:42
[SPEAKER_02]: Violate the voting rights act, and so the claim is that this is just a way of trying to invoke fear in the same way that ice raids are trying to invoke fear.
14:52
[SPEAKER_02]: And some of the people who are being targeted are legitimate.
14:58
[SPEAKER_02]: citizens who are eligible to vote and they're being investigated, and the court found, at least for purposes of a preliminary injunction, that this conduct isn't timidating voters and needs to stop.
15:12
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's pretty helpful.
15:14
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not the end of the story, but it's still concerned that federal agents could be sent to certain polling places,
15:21
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that's unlikely, but you know, we'll see it would be, I think, provoked a kind of counter-reaction, a political counter-reaction, there are thousands, literally thousands of lawyers standing by to deal with these potential problems.
15:35
[SPEAKER_02]: So we'll see how far they're willing to go.
15:37
[SPEAKER_03]: In a lot of our friends have worried for a long time that Trump might send the national guard to polling places in blue cities to intimidate voters.
15:45
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a new ruling by the night circuit, Court of Appeals, on that one in case about Los Angeles, which is reassuring to people who have that worry, tells about that ruling.
15:56
[SPEAKER_02]: This is a little outside of the election law area, but it's a question of whether or not the president has the power in the middle of a war to essentially direct the national guard of a state to federalize them, let us to make them kind of temporary federal agents.
16:12
[SPEAKER_02]: And the federal court said, you know, it doesn't look like he has that power.
16:17
[SPEAKER_02]: What's notable about that case is that one of the judges who voted in the majority that this exceeded the power is Judge Bennett.
16:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Judge Bennett is also the judge that is hearing the 20,000 voter case.
16:32
[SPEAKER_02]: He was at the Sunday or argument, very skeptical of the government
16:37
[SPEAKER_02]: to make a broader point.
16:38
[SPEAKER_02]: There's something called the presumption of regularity, and the idea is like DOJ, the Department of Justice is a repeat player.
16:46
[SPEAKER_02]: They come into federal court.
16:49
[SPEAKER_02]: The federal court's going to give them the benefit of the doubt because they have a track record of telling the truth and of playing it straight.
16:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Like you don't mess with U.S. attorneys, they're very professional.
16:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, the courts can rely on them.
17:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, there's been so much disobedience or scurting of court orders, so much in terms of not presenting arguments fairly, not presenting evidence fairly.
17:14
[SPEAKER_02]: The judges are losing patience with the Department of Justice.
17:17
[SPEAKER_02]: And so what you're seeing is more and more cases where judges across the political spectrum are saying, hey, you can't do this, you can't be disobeying these words.
17:25
[SPEAKER_02]: So we're no longer going to give you the benefit of the doubt.
17:28
[SPEAKER_02]: And one of the things we need to think about in the post-Trump Errors, how we can build back the Department of Justice because it plays a very important role in protecting people's rights.
17:38
[SPEAKER_02]: And right now it's been weaponized against people, but we need to get it back to where it's working for the people.
17:45
[SPEAKER_03]: So it seems like Trump's main efforts to affair with voting have not been successful and are not doesn't seem like they're going to be successful.
17:56
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe I'm too optimistic about that.
17:58
[SPEAKER_03]: The election is Tuesday.
18:00
[SPEAKER_03]: 27 million people have already voted early.
18:04
[SPEAKER_03]: How are we doing at this point on election protection?
18:08
[SPEAKER_02]: think we're doing well on election protection, but it's not because Trump didn't try, you mentioned at the beginning, I mean, just take the US mail case.
18:18
[SPEAKER_02]: If Trump would have succeeded at the Supreme Court, then no states would have been allowed to send out any mail ballots.
18:25
[SPEAKER_02]: I think people don't recognize how extreme that would have been.
18:28
[SPEAKER_02]: So there are really three
18:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Trump's attempt to interfere in the elections, one of the courts, and I think they've done a pretty good job.
18:37
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, we can disagree, and I disagree with them strongly on cases like voting rights.
18:41
[SPEAKER_02]: But courts have held the line on protecting fair elections and protecting the ability of states to run their elections.
18:49
[SPEAKER_02]: The second bulric is the states.
18:51
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, California election officials are processing ballots.
18:55
[SPEAKER_02]: They're getting things ready for Tuesday.
18:58
[SPEAKER_02]: They have early voting centers, they have their heads down, they're doing their jobs and the people, you know, people are very interested, they're activated in the selection.
19:06
[SPEAKER_02]: People power really is the ultimate safeguard against attempted subversion.
19:10
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not saying there's no risk, but I think if we look at the Alaskan California cases as an example of what Trump has to offer in the courts at least, it looks extremely weak.
19:22
[SPEAKER_03]: So what's your biggest worry at this point?
19:25
[SPEAKER_02]: My biggest worry is we have a very close election for control of the house or the Senate that in the middle of the tabulation process, which goes on for weeks, counting all the ballots
19:39
[SPEAKER_02]: dealing with curing, you know, when somebody's ballot is rejected and they have a chance to come in and say, no, that's my signature, things like that.
19:46
[SPEAKER_02]: That DOJ will try to seize ballots or vote in machines, which would make the electro chain of custody broken and call into question the results of the election, because if DOJ could take the ballots away in the middle of counting,
19:59
[SPEAKER_02]: we wouldn't know if ballots were added to or taken away from or if they were altered.
20:04
[SPEAKER_02]: That's my biggest concern.
20:06
[SPEAKER_02]: At the safeguard democracy project, we put out a report, we send it to 3,000 judges, we send it to 26 judicial organizations.
20:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Telling judges, hey, you may be getting requests for a ballot seizure.
20:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Remember, Chad Bianco tried to do that here in California and Riverside County.
20:21
[SPEAKER_02]: California Supreme Court smacked him down and said you can't do that.
20:24
[SPEAKER_02]: California Legislature passed more statutes saying you can't have bowel seizures but it just takes one judge somewhere to issue a search warrant and so I think this is what we'll be looking for.
20:34
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think it's a high probability event but we have to prepare for low probability events that would be catastrophic and so you know on my list is
20:44
[SPEAKER_02]: the federal government actually interfering with the counting of the votes.
20:47
[SPEAKER_02]: So hopefully that does not happen.
20:49
[SPEAKER_02]: If the election is not close, I don't expect we'll see anything like that.
20:53
[SPEAKER_03]: And on the subject of will the election be closed, I just want to cite the prediction of Nate Silver, our best predictor.
20:58
[SPEAKER_03]: His prediction at the Democrats will have a 25-seat majority after election day.
21:05
[SPEAKER_03]: That would seem to preclude a couple of challenges in the house.
21:09
[SPEAKER_02]: In the house at least, yes, I think that's why this Alaska thing that came last week signals that, oh, maybe they're worried about the Senate now.
21:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Nate Silver predicts the Democrats will win 52 seats in the Senate.
21:23
[SPEAKER_03]: The one with the closest odds is Alaska, where he says the chances of Democrats winning is about 64%.
21:31
[SPEAKER_03]: The chances are better in the other close states, Texas, Maine, and Ohio.
21:37
[SPEAKER_03]: but even if Trump succeeded in messing with the Alaska certification, the Democrats still have 51 seats at least according to Nate Silver's analysis of the polls, the fundamentals, the experts and the other factors.
21:53
[SPEAKER_02]: If the polls are to be believed, it's going to be very close for control of the Senate.
21:57
[SPEAKER_03]: Rick Hassan, the UCLA Law School, read him online at electionlawblug.org.
22:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Rick, thanks for all your work, and thanks for talking with us today.
22:20
[SPEAKER_03]: Now for our midterm election preview, we turn to Harold Meyerson.
22:24
[SPEAKER_03]: He's editor-in-large of the American Prospect, Harold, welcome back.
22:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Always good to be here, John.
22:31
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, if the election goes roughly as the polls say it will, then Tuesday seems to me will mark the beginning of the end of the Trump era.
22:40
[SPEAKER_03]: And when they will be talking about what we want to do after Trump, how we can recover from the disasters of the past few years.
22:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Or am I being too hopeful here as usual?
22:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Am I underestimating the risks of the next two years following a big democratic suite?
22:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, both.
22:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I think Democrats will be able to put their mark on a number of policies, but by the same token, and even more unhinged at the rate he's going, Donald Trump will still have executive power, which he defines as entirely personal to do whatever the hell he wants, for the subsequent two years.
23:21
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's gonna be, well it was the name of that movie, one battle after another.
23:27
[SPEAKER_01]: It's going to be that on a daily basis.
23:30
[SPEAKER_01]: The difference is that the side of a decency and sanity will be stronger than it's been so far during Trump's second term.
23:40
[SPEAKER_03]: A lot of our friends are having trouble believing the polls.
23:43
[SPEAKER_03]: We could win in Kansas, really?
23:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Which Trump carried by 16 points where ahead in Texas could that be true?
23:51
[SPEAKER_03]: A year ago, we all understood Democrats would win back the house because that happens in every midterm following a president's reelection.
24:02
[SPEAKER_03]: but the Senate year goes seemed impossible because that would require winning four states Trump carried by more than ten points.
24:11
[SPEAKER_03]: Why were we so wrong about the Senate?
24:14
[SPEAKER_01]: We failed to anticipate just how bizarre and self-destructive Trump's actions would be.
24:20
[SPEAKER_01]: We didn't know we were going to war in Iran and the effect that would have on oil and fuel and gas prices.
24:27
[SPEAKER_01]: We didn't know the complete effect of the tariff regime that he imposed unilaterally and that also affected the cost of living.
24:38
[SPEAKER_01]: We just didn't factor in quite the level of self-destructive self-absorption that Trump would embark upon with a really pretty grim electoral prospects for his side.
24:55
[SPEAKER_03]: And the other thing was this, what now turns out to be deeply mistaken idea,
25:00
[SPEAKER_03]: of a realignment in American politics that young men, especially young men of color, had been successfully recruited to the Republican side, and that this was a realignment of American politics.
25:16
[SPEAKER_03]: It's one of the shortest lasting realignments we've ever had.
25:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, it's so short.
25:20
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not a realignment as Walter Dean Burnham, the academic progenitor of the notion of realignments in American politics made clear.
25:31
[SPEAKER_01]: It's got to be something that takes place over several elections in this place.
25:36
[SPEAKER_01]: It took place provisionally over one election, and it didn't stick because reality simply negated it.
25:45
[SPEAKER_01]: and the reliance of Trump and MAGA on cultural issues now looks a little shakier than it certainly did before because the economy has reared its ugly head, making all of these cultural issues somewhere between secondary, tertiary and whatever is beneath that.
26:05
[SPEAKER_03]: The most striking public opinion number I've seen lately is voters under 30 who think the
26:14
[SPEAKER_03]: nine percent nine yeah anytime you get down in a single digits on polling something big is actually happening and I think it's safe to conclude that the nine percent there is the an indication of that one more factor that you haven't mentioned in what we missed about the Senate the Democrats are running some unusually good candidates and the Republicans are running
26:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, Ken Paxton, no casting director with any sort of self-interest.
26:50
[SPEAKER_01]: What have put Ken Paxton up for the Senate is myriad transgressions, weirdnesses, and personal, and political level, and governmental level are just so glaring that we have seen members of the Bush family now come forward and say they're voting for Tele Rico.
27:08
[SPEAKER_03]: We also have Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Josh Turric, and Iowa, Mary Peltolla, and Adam Hamilton in Kansas, who's running against the doctor who sued hundreds of his patients.
27:20
[SPEAKER_03]: All of these are really talented appealing candidates, I just want to review the math here.
27:25
[SPEAKER_03]: In order to get to 51 an effective majority in the Senate, the Democrats need to flip for Republican seats for 52, which as you've explained more than once in our conversations here, they need five.
27:44
[SPEAKER_03]: According to his forecast, the Democrats' chances are 75% that's 3 out of 4.
27:52
[SPEAKER_03]: What are the states in order?
27:54
[SPEAKER_03]: North Carolina is a lock, plus Ohio Texas and Maine.
27:58
[SPEAKER_03]: That gets you to 51.
28:00
[SPEAKER_03]: Ohio Texas and Maine, there's about 70% wind chance for each according to Nate Silver's forecast.
28:07
[SPEAKER_03]: So what gets you to 52 Alaska?
28:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Alaska is really sort of the tipping point as far as work concerned here.
28:13
[SPEAKER_03]: He says there's a 63% of a democratic win in Alaska.
28:17
[SPEAKER_03]: If we go beyond that, Iowa would be next 58% win chance that gets us the 53.
28:24
[SPEAKER_03]: And Kansas, now rated as a 50 50 state, would make it to 54.
28:30
[SPEAKER_03]: But the big question we look at this list is, could the polls be wrong?
28:34
[SPEAKER_03]: Could there be some systematic polling error?
28:37
[SPEAKER_03]: A lot of people will tell you,
28:38
[SPEAKER_03]: The polls underestimated Trump's support every time he ran.
28:43
[SPEAKER_03]: What do you think of the polls this time?
28:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, Trump's not running despite the fact that he's going around the country saying, I'm on the ballot, and when Trump's on the ballot, he draws out a kind of disgruntled group of folks who won't tend to vote unless they think their disgruntlement is registered in the person of Donald Trump, and I think Nate Silver also makes the point perhaps for that reason, but is a more general point, too.
29:11
[SPEAKER_01]: that the polls have been better at midterm elections and they've been at presidential elections and certainly presidential elections with Donald Trump on the ballot.
29:20
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, they've been much better at midterm elections and also in the odd year elections.
29:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Remember last year we had New Jersey in Virginia and the polls there were five to 10% too low on the Democrats.
29:34
[SPEAKER_03]: One of the biggest polligators in recent decades,
29:38
[SPEAKER_03]: And the other thing is, the pollsters all know that they were horribly off, you know, all of Trump selections, and they've tried to correct for that, because that's what their careers depend on.
29:49
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to talk a little bit more about this line-up of Senate candidates.
29:54
[SPEAKER_03]: What do you think is though, would be the most significant, the biggest, you know, symbolic victories for the Democrats in the Senate races?
30:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, certainly Texas, because Texas is the anchor state of the Republican Party.
30:08
[SPEAKER_01]: It's continued to grow and at some point in the theoretical future, it will pass California as our largest state.
30:17
[SPEAKER_01]: So Texas is really, if any state
30:21
[SPEAKER_01]: is really in play and if it's Texas and that's the ballgame because that is is really both the numerical and the ideological anchor of the Republican Party.
30:33
[SPEAKER_01]: So being able to win in Texas is unquestionably huge.
30:38
[SPEAKER_03]: I agree completely.
30:39
[SPEAKER_03]: I think else I had in Michigan, even though Michigan has been a blue or blue-ish state, for else I had to win there would I think be tremendously significant because he is the first Muslim who would be in the Senate and Trump has been campaigning against him with Islamophobic racist lies.
31:00
[SPEAKER_03]: He's also an extremely talented and very progressive guy who could accomplish a lot in the Senate.
31:05
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'd, I agree with you, Talleriko number one, and I suggest Elsayet is number two.
31:11
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the things that I find interesting about the Republican attacks of late on Elsayet is that they are less on his leftism, which was a problem for Democrats, is a centrist in the Democratic Party, and more on the fact that he's a Muslim Arab.
31:29
[SPEAKER_01]: which is not an ideological condition, but it's the one that the Republicans are in the closing days relying upon i.e.
31:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Picotry, basically.
31:41
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think that makes it a very important race as well.
31:45
[SPEAKER_03]: then there's Adam Hamilton's campaign in Kansas.
31:49
[SPEAKER_03]: If Adam Hamilton can win in Kansas, combined with a Teloreco victory in Texas, this I think would be really significant as a challenge to the evangelical Christians, a different kind of Christian, a liberal Christian.
32:04
[SPEAKER_03]: The basis of the Republican coalition in the last decade has been the evangelical right and its pursuit of Christian nationalism.
32:12
[SPEAKER_03]: and to challenge that with two very appealing democratic senators, I think that would have tremendous significance in American politics.
32:22
[SPEAKER_01]: It would, although the evangelical vote is, in a sense, much more at tribal vote than a vote of religious doctrine.
32:31
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a way to describe, as a group of Americans, describe themselves more in a sense,
32:45
[SPEAKER_01]: culturally and religiously, but I don't think the religion really is a defining aspect there.
32:51
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's more this tribal sense.
32:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, conversely, in light of what you just said, in many ways the base of the democratic party is increasingly secular.
33:05
[SPEAKER_01]: It's going to be kind of a wonderful test, I would say, not just of evangelicals, but of the base of the Democratic Party, to have Telerico and Hamilton and Pope Leo, actually, the signaling a kind of religious liberalism.
33:23
[SPEAKER_01]: that, as I think you rightly note, was kind of disappearing per se, not just from Republican ranks, but it's a liberalism ruled it out.
33:33
[SPEAKER_01]: But to a certain degree from Democratic ranks, since the religious part of it was alien to the base of the party.
33:40
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, it's a fascinating development.
33:44
[SPEAKER_03]: We said the tipping point stayed in the Democrats getting to 52 is Alaska.
33:49
[SPEAKER_03]: If you look up the party registration, party identification figures, only 11% of voters in Alaska are registered Democrats.
34:01
[SPEAKER_03]: So how come Mary Peltola is now ahead by seven points?
34:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I don't think that most Alaskans identify as Republicans either.
34:11
[SPEAKER_01]: The number is 24%.
34:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, 11 and 24 make 35, which means it's 65% of Alaska's, which kind of imports to, I think, our general fuzzy knowledge of Alaska's are independent.
34:27
[SPEAKER_01]: If they weren't independent, what would they be doing in Alaska in the first place?
34:32
[SPEAKER_03]: And obviously, if you're in Alaska, you do not campaign as a Democrat.
34:36
[SPEAKER_03]: You don't bring Obama.
34:37
[SPEAKER_03]: Her campaign slogan is, Peltola for Alaska.
34:41
[SPEAKER_03]: She knows well how to do this.
34:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Look, the democratic party is not only the base being secular, but the basis is also urban.
34:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And Alaska isn't much of an urban state.
34:53
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, even if a relatively high percentage of Alaska's live in greater anchorage, that's still not really a mega-American city by any means.
35:05
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's its own country, you know?
35:08
[SPEAKER_01]: And Peltola is running as the representative of Alaska its own country.
35:14
[SPEAKER_03]: I just want to talk about spending just horrifying levels of spending in this campaign.
35:20
[SPEAKER_03]: In October, more than $1 billion went to pay for digital ads, canvassers, and fundraising events, all in all, more than $11 billion is expected to be spent on ads in this cycle.
35:36
[SPEAKER_03]: almost $2 billion in ads in the final two weeks alone.
35:41
[SPEAKER_03]: A lot of this is coming from AI and crypto, half a billion dollars.
35:46
[SPEAKER_03]: The billionaire class, 172 billion billion air families have spent $1.7 billion on the midterms.
35:55
[SPEAKER_03]: Elon Musk, of course the number one spender, he spent more than $442 million that we know about on
36:05
[SPEAKER_03]: pretty much paying for all of Kim Paxon's campaign in Texas.
36:09
[SPEAKER_03]: My question for you is how important is money turning out to be in politics this year?
36:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you know, you have to reserve judgment until the day after election day, but money can't buy you love as a rock group whose name escapes me once said, and money doesn't necessarily enable Republicans to overcome
36:34
[SPEAKER_01]: the consequences of Donald Trump, which is, you know, the main topic really of this election, it can't change a subject which is daily encountered by every American to with the cost of everything.
36:48
[SPEAKER_03]: I also want to ask you what you think about early voting, early voting of course has been emphasized by the election protection groups as a key to defeating Trump's whatever shenanigans he may try to pull on election day.
37:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Early voting is up a 16% overall compared to the last midterms, but it's radically different from different groups.
37:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Among blacks, early voting is up 11,
37:18
[SPEAKER_03]: up 25% among Latinos, it's up 42% and among whites, it's down 7%.
37:28
[SPEAKER_03]: How much should we make of these startling statistics?
37:34
[SPEAKER_01]: they obviously cut in the Democrats' favor.
37:36
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no question of that.
37:38
[SPEAKER_01]: I think what it says about the current election is that if the current election is reflected in any way by these numbers, that there could be a very good election for Democrats.
37:51
[SPEAKER_01]: That's essentially what it implies and we shall see how valid that implication turns out to be.
37:58
[SPEAKER_03]: Just want to point out here,
38:01
[SPEAKER_03]: Bernie's campaign schedule.
38:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Bernie Sanders is what 85 years old.
38:06
[SPEAKER_03]: He is doing an amazing amount of work in this election.
38:11
[SPEAKER_03]: He was out here in California, the beginning of October to promote ballots over billionaires, Prop 40, the billionaire wealth tax in San Francisco and in L.A.
38:24
[SPEAKER_03]: He also campaigned in Baker's field for Randy Villegas for Congress, our progressive out there.
38:31
[SPEAKER_03]: He's been in Maine.
38:33
[SPEAKER_03]: He did three rallies with Troy Jackson.
38:36
[SPEAKER_03]: He was in Florida, four rallies with Angie Nixon.
38:40
[SPEAKER_03]: He went to Texas, the Amirilla, El Paso in Houston, with Representative Greg Casar and Beto O'Rourke.
38:49
[SPEAKER_03]: Uh, he went to Minnesota to Duluth to campaign for Peggy Flamagan and Keith Ellison.
38:55
[SPEAKER_03]: Just Sunday, a couple of days ago, he was in a Claire in the middle of the day with Rebecca Cook running for Congress, and then he went to Grand Rapids, Michigan that evening to campaign with L.C.
39:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Ed, campaigned the next day with L.C.
39:10
[SPEAKER_03]: Ed, he gave a million dollars of his own campaign funds to L.C.
39:13
[SPEAKER_03]: Ed Bernie Sanders, 85 years old, what a guy.
39:18
[SPEAKER_01]: What a guy, and he doesn't have Trump's advanced staff that Trump is using to campaign in Republican areas.
39:26
[SPEAKER_01]: No, there's no question that Sanders is playing a key role, and I would add that he's really the only major national Democrat campaigning for the well-fax.
39:36
[SPEAKER_01]: in California.
39:38
[SPEAKER_01]: That is, I think, extremely important given that all is spending in that race is billionaire money against it.
39:46
[SPEAKER_01]: It takes a Bernie type mobilization to even begin to counter that.
39:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Also, I wanted to ask you whether you agreed with Michael Tomaski, editor of the new Republic, who argues that Trump has a secret and perverse desire for the Republicans to lose.
40:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, let me just give you the argument here, because it seems so unlikely.
40:06
[SPEAKER_03]: He says, first of all, think about Texas.
40:08
[SPEAKER_03]: The only reason the Democrats have a chance in Texas is that the Republicans are running their worst candidate, can't pass them.
40:16
[SPEAKER_03]: And he won the primary only because Trump endorsed them.
40:19
[SPEAKER_03]: Trump easily could have endorsed the incumbent Republican.
40:22
[SPEAKER_03]: That would be the normal thing to do, John Corbin.
40:24
[SPEAKER_01]: John Corbin.
40:25
[SPEAKER_03]: And then there wouldn't be a contest in Florida.
40:28
[SPEAKER_03]: So right off the bat, you have to ask whether Trump really wants to win the most important Republican state.
40:38
[SPEAKER_03]: Trump is not on the ballot, and he actually kind of wants to say they can't win without me.
40:46
[SPEAKER_03]: That would be completely consistent with his view of the world.
40:49
[SPEAKER_03]: The elections would prove how important he is.
40:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Next to Masky says,
40:54
[SPEAKER_03]: He likes a mortal combat, and so the Democrats taking power and come at him with their new impeachment plans, that he's at home there.
41:04
[SPEAKER_03]: He loves to fight Roy cones lessen that if you're not at war with it.
41:09
[SPEAKER_03]: at least 10 enemies, something is wrong with you.
41:12
[SPEAKER_03]: And third, he welcomes the chance to condemn the Democrats for winning by cheating.
41:19
[SPEAKER_03]: His favorite topic over the last, you know, eight or 12 years.
41:24
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's easily imagine him going on for weeks about how
41:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Voting machines in Texas switched votes from Pakistan to Tallarico or thousands of non-citizens voted for Abdul El Sayyad and Dearborn.
41:40
[SPEAKER_03]: What do you think of Michael Tameski's argument?
41:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, Michael is a good friend of mine, which means I think some of them are good and some of them aren't so good.
41:48
[SPEAKER_01]: But that's okay.
41:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think he does shine a light on the two that I think are very true.
41:55
[SPEAKER_01]: One that Trump's endorsements on occasion went to people who didn't have a very good chance of winning.
42:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And that, yeah, he really likes to demonstrate that without him the
42:12
[SPEAKER_01]: So, Mike is certainly right about those, and, you know, the other two are, let us say, nice conjectures.
42:21
[SPEAKER_03]: On the other side, of course, Trump has offered to pay every adult citizen $5,000 if the Republicans win the midterms.
42:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, he's offered to pay them a federal dollars, not his own dollars.
42:33
[SPEAKER_03]: But let me emphasize, this is not just Republican voters.
42:36
[SPEAKER_03]: Every Democrat will also get the $5,000 if the Republicans win.
42:41
[SPEAKER_03]: And as you point out, this is...
42:44
[SPEAKER_03]: The taxpayers would have to come up with one point to Trilion, I think, is the calculation there.
42:49
[SPEAKER_03]: He's got a new one, though.
42:51
[SPEAKER_03]: On Trude Social, he wrote, quote, anybody reporting voter fraud in past elections, or the upcoming 2026 midterm, will be paid $1 million upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the fraud exclamation point.
43:07
[SPEAKER_01]: That really undermines the failure of their public and party to actually find significant voter fraud anywhere.
43:14
[SPEAKER_01]: We take that as a sign of understandable desperation on the part of Trump and the party.
43:22
[SPEAKER_03]: Understandable desperation, Harold Meyerson, even at Prospect that word, Harold, thank you over the past weeks for all your help in understanding this election.
43:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And let's hope that our provisional optimism means that everything I've said over the last few weeks isn't just nonsense.
43:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Start making sense.
43:53
[SPEAKER_03]: A podcast from the Nation Magazine is recorded in our upstairs studio in Los Angeles.
43:59
[SPEAKER_03]: Renee Reynolds is our associate producer.
44:02
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44:14
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44:19
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44:23
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44:30
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm John Weener, thanks for listening.