“Game of Cucks.”

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Today on the pod we have Obama pollster and author of the new book A Black Man in the White House, Cornel Belcher, and the executive director of Indivisible, Ezra Levin.

First subscribe to all of our pods, Pod Save the World, Tommy's talking to Mark Warner this week, and Colin Call about Syria. Love it or leave it. The juggernaut continues. And with friends like these tomorrow, Anna on Saturday did a live show in Pasadena with evangelical pastor Jeff Chu.

And it was a great show. And also she talked to Rick Wilson again this week, so check that out. That'll drop tomorrow, Friday. There's so much happening in the quirky media empire.

There's tons happening. It's, yeah, a lot of podcasts to listen to. So we should probably start by playing the game of cucks. Who's up and who's down?

The thing we always love about Washington. Let's go through that. We're going to run through this rather quickly, and we'll just do it based on who's had a great week and who hasn't had a great week. We'll start with who hasn't had a really great week.

And I think top of that list is our friend Sean Spicer. I love Sean. I love Sean. So Sean is at his briefing on Monday.

Everyone's heard this by now, I'm sure. But he delved into some off-the-cuff Hitler comparisons, which is always... Look, rule number one, if you're going to be a spokesperson, don't do Hitler comparisons, you know? It's very simple.

I don't think it's difficult to abide by. Sean did. He was trying to talk about Assad in Syria, although for some odd reason he calls him Ashad. I don't know where that came from.

And he said at the White House briefing, not even Hitler used chemical weapons. So, you know, when a reporter asked him to clarify because, you know, gas chambers and all, he said Hitler, quote, was not using the gas on his own people the way that Ashad was doing. So apparently the Jewish people of Germany were not Hitler's people. And then he continues to stumble, and this was when I started screaming at the TV, like, please, Sean, stop.

He said, oh, of course I realize that Hitler brought people to the Holocaust centers. What? You can't laugh because then you're laughing at the Holocaust, and that's wrong. And also just, I'm thinking of yourself, do not name this pie, gas chambers and all.

I mean, I'm laughing squarely at Sean Spicer for, like, he, you could just, you could see the train wreck, you know? And he's, like, he's just leaning into it. You know, he just can't stop himself. There's, when he gets the follow-up question from Pasilla Vega from ABC, you can see he knows he's fucked up.

Like, there is legit panic in his eyes, and he doesn't know what to do. And now he doesn't, it's, like, he just doesn't know how to get himself out of it. And there's also, like, at least up until later that day, there's this mantra in the Trump world, you never apologize for anything. So he can't admit, he would just say, like, I misspoke.

So he has to quasi-justify what he said. But now he knows he's a dangerous territory, and he doesn't know what the, quote-unquote, appropriate word is. So he just, like, vomits out the term Holocaust center. And, like, I think that's also why he called them Ashad-Assad, which is a great name.

And, I mean, it's just... Look, I do not think that proves that John Spicer is anti-Semitic, but... He's anti-smart, I think, is what he means. He's anti-smart, I think.

But there were two larger problems with what he said, besides the obvious, right? Number one, if Assad is worse than Hitler, why did the president fire a few missiles at an airfield and then call it a day? You know? The policy of the Trump administration is pretty much to leave Assad in power.

So that seems like a fraught comparison. Number two, the reason he did this crazy Assad-Hitler comparison is because it was floating around on right-wing conspiracy sites the day before. So it was on Newsmax, maybe the InfoWars people said, I don't know, all those wackos were talking about it, which means that the White House press secretary is getting all his news from these places. Like, that, to me, is a pretty big problem.

I don't know why you would think that would be a problem, but he... Do you feel bad for Sean? No. I mean, I don't feel...

Because if you take the whole, like, Sean Spicer's decision to work for Donald Trump to support Donald Trump, to allow this to happen, that is happening to our country, like, anyone who voluntarily participates in this, I don't really feel that bad for. I think you sort of made your bed. You know, if you isolated all the things that Sean Spicer has done before that moment, yes, as another human being who is just sitting there trapped like an animal and unable to get out of this awful situation that he's in, yeah, I guess I could say I feel bad for that. But I do want to...

I mean, I was tweeting, like, stop, stop, please stop talking, run away. Yeah, I mean, he did... Like, I do not take this, to your point, that is evidence of some sort of anti-Semitism on Sean Spicer's part. I have no reason to believe he's anti-Semitic.

I don't know him well enough to know that. This seems just like a massive gaffe that is dramatically exacerbated by these strangely anti-Semitic things that have happened around the Trump campaign in the Trump White House. Right, and those things are true. If Steve Bannon doesn't work there, if he hadn't decided to put out a Holocaust memorial statement without mentioning the Jews because the Holocaust affected lots of people, you know, absent that, like, there's a context for this within the Trump administration that exacerbates Sean's giant fuck-up.

But he's still fucked up. And so in the sense that he... I do not feel sorry for him in the sense that he has made a decision to work for Trump and be part of this completely fucked-up administration where he made this Palestinian bargain that he's going to get famous and probably get to co-host a five in a few years. Right.

He's a White House press secretary. But I do feel sorry for him in the sense that large swaths of the world think he is an anti-Semite because he said this. Right. And that's unfortunate.

And he apologized. He apologized. Yeah, good for him. Good for him for apologizing.

Like, you know, Washington loves to get an apology. You know, all that he's going to get invited to the cocktail parties after he gets fired as press secretary, everyone's going to love Sean again because, you know, he's showing his remorse. So that's great. But pretty bad week for Sean Spicer.

There's no such thing as a good week for Sean Spicer. Every week gets worse. No such thing as a good week. Another person had a bad week is Bill O'Reilly, who, after losing most of his advertisers, announced he's taking a two-week vacation.

I'm sure it was long-planned and completely voluntary. What do you think? Yeah. I don't even know what to say about that.

Maybe if Sean Spicer gets fired, he can just host the O'Reilly Factor. Well, it looks like his press secretary Dana Perino is filling in for Bill O'Reilly. Wonderful things happening there. Couldn't happen to a worse person than Bill O'Reilly.

Really, really, really. He's what Hillary Clinton would call deplorable. Maybe irredeemable. Two other people not having great weeks.

Carter Page and Paul Manafort. Oh. Carter Page, man. This guy is a true idiot.

So, Washington Post reports, the Justice Department obtained a wiretap for the Trump campaign advisor, Carter Page, based on evidence that he was operating as a Russian agent. To get such a wiretap, you need probable cause for a court to approve. We also found out that the FBI has basically been tracking him for years. A Russian spy first tried to recruit Carter Page in 2013.

Man, that guy. The FBI secretly recorded Russian spies talking about Mr. Page as, his, unquote, enthusiastic idiot. Many people are saying that you're a communications pro.

If you or one of your clients had just been caught on a FISA wiretap for espionage, would your first move to be doing an interview with George Stephanopoulos on GMA? I'd book him on all the morning shows. I'd say, look, in a situation like this, what you want to do is you want to go out and just speak as much as possible. No talking points.

Just whatever comes to mind. I would just say whatever. I mean, you're in the middle of an ongoing investigation, so certainly give some interviews. Definitely.

You know, he told, Stephanopoulos asked him if, you know, he's ever discussed easing sanctions on Russia with Russians while he was part of the Trump campaign. And his very well thought out response was, quote, let's see what the FISA transcripts say. Referring to the transcripts of the secret surveillance that he was under. It makes me, the fact that the Russian asset may be this doofus really undermines the view of Vladimir Putin, nefarious world-dominating puppet master, who is, you know, just pulling the strings to advance Russia.

If the guy they have helping him is this doofus. Well, look, I mean, it goes to the theme of the entire Trump administration and Trump campaign, which is, you know, incompetence more than malevolence, right? Like, it's just a bunch of, you know, I think Mike Morrell said this, former CIA director way back when, it's not like Trump, you know, was secretly plotting with Vladimir Putin, but Vladimir Putin saw Trump as a useful idiot. And I sort of think, like, I don't know, my guess is if there are revelations about collusion, it is sort of more caught up in Trump people thought they were making money from Russia because they love money and they were idiots and they sort of got caught up with these spies and they're being used by this.

I don't know. Like, I sort of think it's more, it's like, it's a bunch of, a comedy of errors that of course led to horrible interference in our election and Donald Trump being president. So, not so funny. But I think, I think the story is going to be more idiots like Carter Page sort of getting caught up in this, you know?

I think useful idiots, the rapid rise, even more rapid demise of Trumpism is going to be a great title for the Doris Kearns Goodwin book about the spirit of our history. Agreed, agreed. Not to be outdone, Paul Manafort wanted to get in on the action this week too. We learned a couple of things about Manafort.

He received millions from a pro-Russian-Ukrainian political party off a secret ledger. This of course had been reported during the campaign, but more evidence came out that he was actually, that his company was actually paid this money. So we know that. He now decided to register as a foreign agent.

Thanks. Good, he forgot earlier. And then probably the craziest thing, on the day after he stepped down from the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort formed a shell corporation and took out loans worth $13 million from businesses that were all connected to Donald Trump, which is a crazy coincidence. I don't under, I read the story seven times in preparation for this pod.

Same, I couldn't figure it out. And I do not understand, I don't understand any of it. I understand the sentence you just said, so I'm not trying to say, but I don't, like why do these people lend the money? Is it hush money for something?

Is it just, he made these relationships and they want to invest in him? I just don't, I don't understand the money it means. He's like a rich, beyond rich consultant, you know, he's made plenty of money from dictators all over the world. Why did he need $13 million in loans?

What is he doing? Yeah, I just, I just don't know. None of it's good. Like, let's be very clear.

This seems, I don't know why it's bad, but it seems bad. There were, I think Joy Reid reported yesterday that there was another source that said there was a second person who was wiretapped, connected to Trump campaign, much like Carter Page. It has to be Manafort, I think. I mean, if there's someone in this whole thing that's probably going to jail, it seems like Paul Manafort is, he's got to be up there, you know?

He seems like someone who has probably done some stuff that's wrong before, during, and after his time in Trump. Yeah. The other interesting thing I've noticed in some of these stories is the Department of Justice basically said, or sources within the Department of Justice said that during the campaign, they wanted to make sure they didn't get any FISA warrants for surveillance on anyone that was with the Trump campaign, so they waited until Carter Page left the campaign to start the surveillance on him because they were worried that if they started surveillance on anyone as part of the Trump campaign, that was a political and they didn't want to cross that line. So I thought that was pretty interesting, too.

Yeah, that is interesting. Well, and also, so, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, you know who didn't do anything wrong that we found out this week? Susan Rice! What?

I thought I read on the front page of the New York Times that she had been accused of a crime by the most powerful man in the world, not named Vladimir Putin. CNN story, quote, after a review of the same intelligence approach brought to light by House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, both Republican, Republican and Democratic lawmakers have so far found no evidence that Obama administration officials did anything unusual or illegal. Multiple sources in both parties tell CNN. Fuck you, Wall Street Journal editorial board.

Fuck you, National Review, Weekly Standard, Federalist, Fox News, all the rest of these people that for an entire week dragged Susan Rice through the mud, accused her of all kinds of shit, crime, wrongdoing, called her a liar. I can't, man. I just... I mean, it is a truism of the world that when someone is accused of wrongdoing, it's on the front page of the paper.

And when they're exonerated from said wrongdoing, it's on, like, page D12 behind the Sears coupons. You knew it was coming, too. Like, when all this stuff was happening to Susan, I'm like, I know that, like, two weeks from now there's going to be a story buried somewhere in the back of the newspaper about how this whole thing was bullshit because Devin Nunes was lying and the Trump administration was lying and, you know, everyone just took it in face value. I made this point about, you know, A1 versus D12 on Twitter yesterday and I got some aggressive responses from some members of the mainstream media.

And I don't think... Like, if the President of the United States accuses someone of a crime, it is news. Like, that's... The lesson here is not that people shouldn't write it.

It's that the President of the United States should not accuse people of crimes without evidence, full stop. But, but, to me, it's not... Look, I said that my beef with the New York Times thing was, and this was a very small thing, like, I wasn't sure why Glenn actually used the word crime in the interview to bait Trump instead of just wrongdoing or would she do something unethical or whatever, but, you know, that's a small thing, really. Like, you're right, the President accused someone of a crime, you put that in paper, that's a big deal.

had reporting at the time that was contradicted, that was saying, she did nothing wrong, it was not unusual what she did, blah, blah, blah. And then their editorial board was contradicting their own reporting in their newspaper and just saying that, like, she would have had no reason to do any unmasking. It's really pathetic. I agree.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board is terrible. I've always thought that. I still think that. I will always think that.

It's just that... And they're also smarmy, too. Like, all the people that federalists and all this, it's just... It's gross.

Anyway, enough of that. The biggest loser, the biggest loser in the Game of Cucks this week is Steve Bannon. I thought you were going to read the part of that story that said, first of all, again, watching the Post, we talked to Ashley Parker about this earlier in the week. 21 sources in the story.

They're, like, trying to outdo themselves with each new story. Including one Bannon friend who likened Bannon to a terminally ill family member who had been moved into hospice care. That's quite a friend. What a great friend.

That reminds me of how people in the Clinton campaign are always described as friends of the Clintons and then they always have, like, the nastiest quotes about the Clintons. Yes. 21 sources. We are living in a time...

It's like a... bubble that will burst one day. Like, what do you think will happen when a normal person becomes president, hopefully in three and a half years, and reporters start calling around, and they can only get two sources for their story? I mean, yeah.

Well, that's what happens when, like, none of these people are loyal to Donald Trump. No one's been loyal to Donald Trump through most of his life, so it's not super surprising, you know? The other crazy thing in the Washington Post story is the, well, this was sourced to a well-connected Republican operative. Quote, the fundamental assessment is that if they want to win the White House in 2020, the Trumps are not going to do it the way they did in 2016, because the family brand would not sustain the collateral damage.

It would be so protectionist, nationalist, and backward-looking that they'd only be able to build in Oklahoma City or the Ozarks. Man, that's got to play well with the base, huh? Yes. Do you watch Scandal?

I do watch Scandal. So, you know the Donald Trump character that they had this past season? Yeah, I forget the name. Where he gets caught, in the end, in, like, classic Scandal fashion, Olivia Pope gets into, secretly tapes him, talking about how he was just pretending to be a racist dick, so that, you know, the people in the Ozarks in Oklahoma City would like him.

Right, right, right. This feels similar to that, except Donald Trump's not pretending, just his globalist cut children are. I just, I mean, I can see that as true, too. Like, this whole, I mean, we'll talk about this.

This whole, the Jared and Ivanka and, you know, globalist Gary Cohn wing here. Like, these are, these are, like, New York Manhattanites, right? They're, they're socialites. They, they want to be on Morning Joe and invited to Davos and go to Aspen, and, you know, like, they are, they like being establishment, you know?

They want to be part of the establishment. And so, they are going to try to protect the brain that way. That, to them, is going to be more important than whatever sort of, you know, revolutionary plans Steve Bannon has to, like, tear down the administrative state and, you know, have a worldwide revolution of populists. Like, I don't give a shit about that.

All these stories say that, like, getting rid of Bannon would hurt Trump with his populist and nationalist base. Do we think, I mean, it may hurt him with Breitbart and known populist and, uh, gazillion and Rebecca Mercer, but what, dude, it's hard to imagine the people wearing the MAGA hats, uh, who showed those rallies. Well, look, I don't care who Steve Bannon is. So, I think, again, we focus, uh, everyone focuses too much on, on, uh, personalities and not policy, um, which, you know, that's only didn't hurt us personally.

As we're going through our list of people that have had good weeks and bad weeks. Um, but look, I don't think it's, it's Bannon that's going to get these people worried. Um, and look, there's some people in the MAGA hats who, like, you know, as Trump said, he could go shoot one of his supporters and they'd still be with him. Um, Bill Mitchell would be one of those people.

Um, but look, I think him, him deciding to move to the center on economic policy and have his economic policy run by a dude from Goldman Sachs and then sort of moderate his views on a lot of these other things. Like I think his, the Republican party now has a working class base. It's more than they ever have, uh, in the history of the party for a long time now. And Trump flip-flopping on a lot of these positions and moving to the center economically.

It's not really center, I should say. It's more like it's establishment, you know? Um, it's, it's Goldman Sachs running the White House policy. It's, um, and I think that could really hurt him.

I actually think, I mean, I'm happy about this move, this move to the center. Um, A, because, you know, the scariest parts of Steve Bannon we might not have to deal with, but B, because I think it is going to hurt him politically, right? Like they are now trying, just as he was trying to get the applause of the people at those mega rallies, now he's trying to get the applause of the Washington establishment and Washington establishment, they really aren't good at politics. They don't have a great track record.

So like, yeah, I know. So like, great. They're gonna start talking about him in a positive way on Morning Joe and like, you know, Goldman Sachs, people are gonna like him. Like, I don't think that's really gonna help him politically that much.

I think that's right. Um, I don't like you said this and we should, he's not moving to the center, right? There, there are like in policy, there is left and there's right. And then there's some like general governing tenants that are kind of the same, almost regardless of who was in the white house, right?

And China is one of those supporting NATO is one of those. It's not really a democratic or Republican position or conservative or liberal. It's kind of just what it's like the reality of government, right? And he's reverting to some sort of normal mean on some set of issues that he probably couldn't have really broken from anyway.

Like we were not getting out of NATO. Like that's not a thing that was gonna happen. We were not going to put up a bunch of tariffs on China because all of those CEOs who Trump meets with every day would have flipped the fuck out and for good reason, right? And so like, there's not like every, because this has to be this, you know, Game of Cucks narrative about who's up, who's down is, but let's not forget there's like a bunch of other horrible shit happening that, that globalists Gary Cohn and Javanka would be embarrassed to have to tell people at their Manhattan parties.

Like there's a story in the post about the deportation force that Jess Sessions is forming as we speak. Yeah. Someone said this this morning, two this morning, but Paul Walden did. Like for all the talk about Bannon, the most poisonous force in this white house right now is Jess Sessions.

Like like, I mean, there's the deportation force. It's part of the, he said, put out a memo the other day where he threatened to prosecute anyone who harbors undocumented immigrants, bringing back the war on drugs, cracking down on minor offenses, made it clear that he's not gonna do anything about police abuse, basically throw away the report the Obama administration did on, you know, systemic abuse in police departments. Disbanding a forensic science commission that was there. I'm so glad you brought that up.

That is the craziest thing. Un-fucking-believable. There's a commission of scientists to make sure that when you, when you accuse someone or when you try someone for a crime, that the evidence is all scientific and that you could some, you know, there aren't any wrongful convictions based on faulty science. Why would you disband that?

Like the other things I find abhorrent and terrible and pretty dickish, but there is a position, right? The, you can be against criminal justice, the criminal justice reform thing, bipartisan justice reform that we worked on in the White House. You can think wrongly, but that the best way to deal with crime is throw everyone in jail. That is a position.

It is not a position to be for shoddy forensic techniques that put people, innocent people in jail. Like that's not a position. That is just, I'm going to walk around. This is going to be a dick.

Like it's insane. Jeff Sessions is just bad. He's bad. You know what else is bad?

Donald Trump. He is. Like, well, he's not just some vessel for either Steve Bannon or Jared and Gary Cohn and Dina Powell. He is a bad person who's unqualified for the job and doing bad things and using a Twitter account to threaten war with North Korea, which seems concerning.

Yeah. His, his sort of like diplomacy via Twitter and now he's new, he's replaced sad exclamation point with just USA at the end of all these tweets. Um, I don't know what that's all about, but interesting. Um, no, I mean, on domestic policy, you have like Trump, Trump campaigned as this, uh, populist protectionist economically, right?

And he's moving on that to more traditional Republican conservative stances, right? So the export import bank, which provides financing to companies that export overseas, so favorite boogeyman of the Tea Party for years. They said it just helps big corporations. Um, Trump yesterday said he liked it because he found out it helps small businesses too.

He's now for the export import bank. Um, during the campaign, he said he labeled China a currency manipulator because quote, they're the greatest currency manipulators ever. Um, this was always crazy because they hadn't devalued their currency for years. Everyone knew that.

Um, he was just lying at the time. And so now he finally realizes that, that they're not in fact currency manipulators. But again, this was a more protectionist position that he took back and now he's abandoned it. Um, Janet Yellen said she was awful as Fed chairman.

Now he respects her. Now he might keep her. Um, so on all this economic stuff, he's going from campaigning as a populist, which is, you could argue one reason that, um, he won. And, and now he's listening to Globalist Gary.

Um, and on foreign policy, we're seeing that he campaigned as an isolationist America first. Uh, and he said NATO was obsolete. Yesterday he said NATO is no longer obsolete. And then the whole Syria thing, you know, like he, he, how many times did he criticize Obama for saying Obama should not attack Syria, should not get involved, blah, blah, blah.

And, you know, he launched his, he launched his missiles. By the way, can we talk about that Maria Bartiromo interview? Oh, the chocolate cake. The delicious chocolate cake that he was eating while telling the Chinese president that he launched Tomahawk missiles at Iraq is what he said instead of Syria.

That is the best part about the interview is that he had detailed, vivid recollection of the cake, but he was iffy on which country he launched the missiles at. I mean, it was like the glee with which he described launching the missiles too, was just very unsettling, very unsettling. Um, and Maria Bartiromo, by the way, just like laughing and smiling. And that was, talk about, talk about softball interviews.

Jesus. I mean, she, she was auditioning for either another interview or Sean Spicer's job. Yeah, well, she could get it. Um, so the, the last really awful thing that he's been doing lately that, um, really is more of a, I don't want to say like traditional conservative position, but certainly like the Paul Ryan position on healthcare.

Um, he's still, he keeps saying people he's, he's going to do healthcare reform, even though it continues to die. Uh, he keeps trying to bring it back. So here's his latest part of the affordable care act includes a subsidy program that helps insurers pay medical bills for low income customers without these payments, without giving insurance payments, a lot of these insurance companies would pull out of the market and that would leave millions and millions of people without any options for an insurance company. Uh, it would raise costs for just about everyone.

Costs would go up. It would basically help melt down the insurance market. Uh, of course, during the Obama administration, Republicans sued and said that the administration didn't have the authority to make these payments. Um, that lawsuit remains in limbo right now.

So on Monday, Trump's department of health and human services said, you know what? I think we'll probably keep the payments going because we realize it might melt down the markets. Trump finds this out, gets ridiculously pissed, makes them retract the statement, and then said he's using the payments as leverage. He said, quote, I don't, he said to the wall street journal, I don't want people to get hurt.

What I think should happen is the Democrats will start calling me negotiating. So basically Trump's position is, um, you know, if you don't, if you don't come to the table and help me take away healthcare for 24 million people, I will take away healthcare for 24 million people. Like, I don't understand what this is. Yeah.

I mean, it's evil. It's horrible. I don't want people to get hurt. You sound like a fucking, like you're holding someone hostage.

That's what people who hold people hostage say. But it's also dumb because why would Democrats, I mean, like what incentive Democrats possibly have to come to the table there? Yeah. Come to the table.

Yeah. Come to the table to help me, uh, help me kick people off their healthcare. Yes. I'm, it's basically like, I am going to light myself on fire politically by single-handedly kicking people off insurance.

If they had passed ACHA, if you will, over time, like it would have been horrible. It would have happened incrementally over the next months and years where as the, as they implemented it here with one fell swoop, they could do it right there with their name on it. Like there's no, Democrats should have no political fear over this and Republicans in Congress would theoretically freak the fuck out about it. Theoretically.

Yeah. I mean, look, Kaiser poll recently, 75% of Americans want Trump to make a lot of work. And 61% said Trump and Republicans are responsible for any problems with the affordable care going forward versus 31% who said they blame Obama. Um, so obviously some people are going to say, well, Trump's crazy base.

He's just going to make them believe that it is the Democrats fault. Yes, of course, there are going to be some people who that's going to work on. It is going to be a very small minority of people. Most people understand that the United States, you know, and his party controls both houses of Congress, that if the insurance markets melt down because they didn't take a step they could easily take, then yeah, that's a, that maybe is their fault.

No, this is not good. But it's bad. I mean, I think it tells what it tells everyone is to keep the pressure up, uh, during congressional recess this week. And we know we've already seen this in some of these town halls is people yelling at their representatives, particularly obviously the Republican representatives to, um, you know, to not back Trump care or Ryan care or wealth care or whatever the fuck it may be now.

You're going to keep going with that wealth care thing to the very end. You know, I just, I threw it in because you never know. Yeah. You're a modern day George.

Until it's dead, when it's dead, completely it's Trump care and it's still alive. It's wealth care. That's, that's what I'm doing. And one more thing, uh, before we get to our guests today, we should talk about the race in Kansas.

Democrat James Thompson lost by six and a half percentage points after Trump won the district by what? 20 something points. Yeah. So here's the thing on this.

Like I was pretty, I thought that's pretty good news that we came back close. We were never supposed to win that seat. It shows that, you know, if, if, if, if a Democrat can come back close in the reddest, reddest district, one of the reddest districts in the country, then, you know, that means that people are pretty amped on our side of the aisle and are, um, are ready to fight and doesn't really necessarily predict what might happen going forward, but it should tell us, yeah, it's time to fight. Now there's a bunch of folks on Twitter who were just, you know, like, well, this shouldn't excite us.

We still lost. And it's all the D triple C's fault, the DNC's fault for not paying attention to this race. If they had thrown more money in, then Thompson would have won. Now look, my reaction is like, yeah, I don't know why the D trip ignored this race.

Um, I don't like, of course they should have, you know, but like, I do not think, of course they should have helped out, but I don't think that we should all, this notion that we should all hang our hopes on the D trip, the D triple C and the DNC to fix everything. Just, it's crazy to me. You know, like if, if you're annoyed by them, if you think they're too established and if you think they're ineffective, there's a million different ways to go around them and help these candidates win, you know? Yeah.

I mean, the, the, it was such a emotional rollercoaster on Tuesday night, which feels like when you were playing this pod, I had forgotten that Kansas happened because so much of this happened basically on Wednesday. The, uh, but at first it's, you know, I had very low expectations for this. Maybe we come close. And then you're on Twitter and, you know, Nate Cohn is saying how, you know, how good the early vote is for the Democrat and you're feeling good.

And then much like other recent elections, I remember it doesn't, it doesn't end great. But then people are like, well, this is a great sign for Democrats because this means they're fired up and there's been a shift against Republicans. And then Democrats are shitting on each other. And it feels like the day after the election.

Like we can't be sad. Like it'd be better if we won. Winning is better than losing. Truth is you'd hold this seat.

This happens in special elections. Sometimes you hold the seat temporarily. It'd be much harder to win this in a non-special election environment in November. So, but the winning would be good.

The winning would have a, you know, probably a real impact on how Republicans thought about passing things like, quote, wealth care. Um, if they can't even hold Kansas, there are a hundred Republican districts that are less democratic than this one. So if you, if the Democrat, if this were a hold through November, this sort of shift towards Democrats, Democrats would make the house by a massive margin. Um, I'm sort of torn, you know, I sort of followed the debate around the DCCC, whether they should have invested or not.

Some people were arguing, people, you know, sort of people who've worked at the DCCC in other places, but don't work there now. They don't think they were speaking at the DCCC. But we're saying that in these, in a special election place like Kansas, it's a mistake to nationalize by having the Democratic Party come in. Um, I'm not sure I buy that argument.

And the guy did by his name. He's sort of, uh, you know, it's not, you can, I don't know that you're going to sneak past people. He's a Democrat. Um, then the other argument was money is limited.

So if they're going to spend a million dollars here in Kansas, in what is a very long shot endeavor, there's gonna be some race like in a more winnable district somewhere down the line that they don't spend that money. Yeah. And there's some logic to that. And I've made that, you know, in the court.

of defending things that you have to be strategic in your deployment of resources. I'm not sure in this case that money is actually that limited for Democrats in the Trump environment. I mean, if John Ossoff can raise $8 million for a special election in Georgia, it feels like we should test the proposition that we can't raise enough money to do all the things we want to do. I agree with that too.

I also think someone suggested why doesn't the DCCC put a poll in the field in every district, especially in a special election, just to see if it's closer than you'd imagined from the last race. I think that's a completely fair argument. They should do that. I also think you're right.

You can make a race a big deal nationally these days easier than you ever could. And Ossoff's a great example of that, $8 million going to that race. So yeah, I think there's a good argument that the DCCC should have done more, for sure. But I just think letting your annoyance with the DCCC and DNC make you decide that, oh, I want to pay attention and this isn't worth it and Democrats are awful and blah, blah, blah.

It's like, if you want to give money to the race, give money to James Thompson directly. Forget about the DCCC. And there's all like, we're going to talk to Ezra from Indivisible, there's Swing Left, there's all these grassroots organizations that are providing money, support, volunteers, resources to candidates all around the country. Like, let's use them, you know, if the DCCC isn't stepping up.

It's fine. These organizations are not the be-all and end-all. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, they play an important role.

Of course they do. And they should do a better job. There are other ways that you can support directly. Just because the DCCC doesn't mean you can't get involved.

Right, these are not all powerful committees here. But I agree that, you know, maybe next time if there's a race like this, the DCCC would get involved earlier. I think that would be great. We have a Montana race coming up.

In addition to Georgia on Tuesday. That's right, that's right. And the Montana race, I think, is late May. We're going to talk more about that in a future episode there.

Okay, when we return, we will have Obama pollster, Cornell Belcher. This is Ponce of America. Stick around. There's more great show coming your way.

On today's pod, we have Obama pollster and author of the new book, A Black Man in the White House, Cornell Belcher. Cornell, how are you? Fantastic. Thanks for having me on your show.

Actually, that's not true. I'm depressed. Like most of the Washington, both Democrats and Republicans, we're all depressed. We're all depressed.

Dark days. Tell us about the book. You know, and thanks for bringing it up. I started working on the book actually in 2008, you know, when we were working on the Obama campaign and it was part of that fantastic polling team there.

You know, we didn't talk a lot about race in 2008, but we did look into how racial attitudes would in fact impact the vote and our electoral chances. And, you know, so I started doing polling actually on my own around indexing racial attitudes. And I thought, frankly, over the course of Obama's presidency, we would see a lessening in racial aversion. But frankly, and I kept going from 2008 right up into the primaries that just passed, and I was really hoping to see a lessening of racial attitudes.

You'll remember there was a lot of conversation about post-racial America after the 2008 election. But through the matters, you know, there was a rallying point where Americans were proud. But then we saw a bifurcation and a hardening of racial attitudes and we saw a rise of a group of people who felt as though they were losing their country. And we heard the cries of take back our country was borne out at that time.

Do you think that Trump sort of contributed to the racial polarization more than Obama, less than Obama's presence on the ticket? What are your thoughts on that? Well, no, but I, and I talk about this in the book, look, you know, the Obama coalition, and you guys know this, right, the Obama coalition was unique, you know, but the Obama coalition took advantage of, or we have a campaign took advantage of the change of demographics in this country. I mean, a lot of people argue that Democrats are unnecessary destiny.

Demographics are destiny, particularly make them so, right? One of the first conversations that we had with then-Senator Obama around a small table, we had a conversation, and it was, you know, Senator Obama talked about building a movement, right? And we're going to build a movement to bring more people into the process and make the electorate look that more like the emerging American electorate, which, of course, is increasingly diverse. And if you look at millennials in particular, you know, the most diverse generation of Americans ever in our history, and about 11% of our vote in 2008 were people new to the process, and about 6% of those were those voters, these millennial voters, these younger voters, right?

So for the first time ever in American history, someone could lose the vast majority of the white vote while winning, right? And it wasn't necessarily a, when you look at the numbers, it wasn't like Barack Obama made a huge racial breakthrough that was different from what Democrats had done before. No, Barack Obama won while garnering 43% of the white vote, while John Kerry lost garnering 43% of the white vote. And in 2012, you know, we got, like, 39% of the white vote.

So for the first time ever because of demographic changes, you know, we could win back-to-back majorities with a vast majority of white voters breaking the other way, and that was, I argue in the book, a real challenge to white political supremacy in a country in a way that it had never been before. So the wolf was at the door with the Obama coalition and you saw backlash to that. Cornelis, Dan, how do you think about the rural white voters who voted for Barack Obama in 2008-2012 but then switched to Trump in 2016? You know, I think we spent too much time on that conversation, right?

Were there Obama-Trump voters? Absolutely. But were there also Romney-Hillary voters? You know, absolutely.

Did Trump run up this war among blue-collar whites more so than Romney did? Absolutely, he did. But also, look at the other side of that is, you know, it didn't do as well with younger, better-educated whites as Romney did. And in the end, it's almost, in the aggregate, it's almost a wash.

I mean, let me take this, for example. You know, Trump, you know, what did Romney get in Florida, right? He got 49% losing. Trump got 49% winning.

If you go to Pennsylvania and go to Wisconsin and you look at what Trump did, his coalition doesn't look that much remarkably unlike from a percentage point from what Romney did, right? But it wasn't, to me, about what Trump did. It was about what we Democrats failed to do. We left a lot of voters on the table.

You know, you remember a lot of articles going into the election talking about young voters being disenchanted, right, in this protest vote. And they were rejecting the binary choice of the lesser two evils that we were trying to force them to make. And when you look at 8% or 9% of millennials breaking third party, it's a real problem, right? When you look at, you know, 8% to 7% of African Americans under 30 breaking third party, you know, that's where the Obama coalition dissipated, right?

To me, we're seeing an awful lot of time talking about how do we gather more of Trump's vote, which is a less than majority vote, right, as opposed to talking about how do we, in fact, garner and bring back together the majority of voters who are out there, you know, we have an expanding electorate that's going younger and browner and more in line with us on the issues, right? And then we have a shrinking, increasingly older, more resistant electorate that's not with us, right? So from a market standpoint, if I'm just running a business, you know, where would I spend a lot of my time and effort? I would spend most of my time and effort at the expanding, less resistant marketplace as opposed to the shrinking, more resistant marketplace.

Should we do better with blue-collar white voters? Absolutely, absolutely we should. But we better also try to cobble together back these younger voters who are not identifying as strong as leader party but did vote for Barack Obama. Cornel, where do you think the failure was in 2016 with the, like, why was the Clinton campaign unable to turn out the quote-unquote Obama coalition at a necessary level to win?

Look, you know, we've been all part of campaigns and, you know, and Lord knows we did a lot of things on the Obama campaign that we took plenty of incoming for and people called us idiots about so I'm not going to be able on the Clinton campaign because, you know, for the most part they did an excellent job but again, they were also sat up with a candidate who had incredibly high negatives, right? And then you did have young people who thought that regardless she was, you're asking them to vote for less or two people. But I do think, and this is not just about the Hillary campaign, I think for Democrats more broadly, look, we have to spend more time and resources particularly with younger voters and we have to turn over and upset the apple cart on how so many of we run these campaigns where we spend, what, 60, 70% of our resources on television. And Trump was absolutely right when he said after the election he was more effective in social media than the Clinton campaign was with all their millions and millions of dollars of advertising and there are some studies out there that actually point to that being true.

I think there was also a miscalculation in that, you know, go six, seven months out from campaign, from election day. I think a lot of Democrats argued that, well, she doesn't have to hold the Obama coalition as tight, but certainly she's going to do better among white women, right? Certainly Cornell she's going to do better among white women. Well, she didn't really do better among white women because the electorate was so racially polarized so she actually had to hold that coalition, you know, tighter, but it's also a problem for Democrats because look, these younger voters in that, they were Obama voters, not necessarily Democrat voters.

We've got to work hard to bring them in line and keep them energized. So I want to go back for a second to this emerging demographic majority. I think certainly if you were running a truly national campaign you would think there are more of our voters than their voters, right? But in the states, do you think there's enough of these voters in states adding up to 270?

Do you think that we are in the right geographic concentrations, like when you talk about Michigan, Ohio, some of these Midwestern states? Do you think that within those states there's enough of the emerging sort of Democratic coalition for us to win future elections? In the battleground states, the battleground states are actually where most of the demographic sort of explosion is happening. We're having conversations about Georgia becoming a battleground state now, not because of demographic changes, right?

But again, look at Florida. To me, there's no more central battleground states for better or worse than Florida, right? And Florida was actually browner, you know, this election than it was in 2012 for us. Like, if Barack Obama had won a run in Florida this time around, you know, he would have won by a bigger margin.

And overall, nationally, the electorate, according to the ethical were about two points browner. You know, worse turned out down in some places absolutely, particularly like North Carolina where it was, you know, they intentionally made it harder. But I reject the idea that we didn't have the right electorate. Because if you look at how younger voters made a large swath of the electorate than the seniors, which is different from midterms, right?

And if you look at this electorate being two points browner, I would argue that Barack Obama had had this electorate even at 152, maybe almost 53% other votes. And then you look at some of these battleground states where Hillary won demographically the Obama coalition. She doesn't win them by the same margin. And it wasn't that they broke for Trump.

It was that they, you know, she offed Barack Obama's margin almost exactly the percentage that went their party, right? So I think it's about cobbling together the coalition again in the battleground states. Now, that's not House districts, right? Because we know gerrymandering is real and that's a real problem to have a House of representatives.

That is not a representative body. It is a six game. But that's different. But from a national campaign standpoint, I think we have to spend a lot of time trying to cobble back together this expanding, diverse, younger electorate as opposed to trying to double down on going after, you know, some of the 46% who actually bought into the argument that he was making, right?

I think that the path of least resistance is actually going after these younger voters who are on our side on the issue standpoint but are so disenchanted with the system and politics as usual. Interesting. So one last question I'll let you go. You mentioned Clinton-Rondi voters.

There certainly seems to be a lot of those in the 6th Congressional District My company has done some work on the IE side for that. But I think, look, first of all, these are Republican districts, right? And they're really Republican districts. This should not be a swing district.

That is apparently this close, I think, speaks to the problem. And we saw that in the special election in Kansas where it was a 20-point drop often there. So the Trump effect I think is real and Democrats are going to be able to pick up seats this time around, red seats this time around. I think it does look an awful lot like these districts that they're in Georgia where you do have a better educated, more affluent white voter.

Remember, in the campaign going into the 20 November, a lot of people are arguing, well, he's doing better or he's doing worse among college educated white voters than typical Republican candidates does, right? I think in the end, college educated white, they did back break for him begrudgingly. But you also see in the public polling right now erosion there among the better educated, more affluent white Republican voter. And if we can keep up the energy of our base, because you know the midterm electorate is very different from the general electorate.

They are older, more conservative, less diverse. And that's been our problem. That's been a large part of our problem. If we can keep up the energy levels and we see this with the marches quickly, we can keep up the energy level and get some of these more affluent, better educated voters to road away who are rejecting what they see in Trump, I think we have a great shot.

If we have strong candidates, I think we do have a strong candidate there in Georgia. Excellent. We shall see you on Tuesday. Cornell, thank you so much for joining us.

We appreciate you coming on and come back again soon. Thanks for having me. We've got to catch up and grab a drink sometime and talk about it all the time. For sure.

Let us know when you head to the West Coast. Soon. Thanks, guys. All right.

Take care. Don't go anywhere. This is Pots of America and there's more on the way. And our guest today, the Executive Director of Indivisible, Ezra Levin.

Ezra, welcome to the show. Hey, great to be here. Long time for a time. It's great to have you.

You guys are doing some great stuff out there. Well, I appreciate it. You're doing some pretty great stuff over there, too. Well, thank you.

Okay, so Tuesday is the special election in the 6th Congressional District of Georgia. What can anyone who wants to help John Ossoff, the Democratic candidate, do over the next couple days as we get into the homestretch here? Yeah, well, one thing I would say, you can't talk about Tuesday without reflecting on what just happened in the 4th District of Kansas. That was my next question.

That was my next question for you. Great. Let's do both. Okay, great.

Well, I think that is a Republican plus 15 district that went by only 7 points to the Republican. This is a district that Mike Pompeo, who is now, unfortunately, CIA Director, won by 32 points last year. This is an absolute disaster for Trump. It's reminding every single member of Congress right now that, oh, yeah, there are elections next year and, oh, yeah, people actually aren't in love with what Trump is doing in his first 100 days, let alone when he tries to accomplish over the next few months.

I think you're going to see a huge impact from that election on exactly what Congress is doing in the weeks and months that come. But so for what's happening in Georgia 6, we're really excited about Georgia 6 for a couple reasons. One is that there is a ton of energy there, too. There are 19 individual groups right across the three counties of Georgia 6, which is just crazy.

We started doing outreach there a month or two ago and doing coordinating calls. We've been doing weekly calls. And you hear the individual stories of these groups down there, and they all have their own firing origin story. One is a group of moms that formed right after the election.

They can't gather 20 people in their living room, and now they've got 500 people, and they're basically building up an organization. They've got a diversity committee doing outreach to the Latino and faith-based communities in the district, and they're doing GOTV trainings, and they're doing a whole bunch of campaign-related stuff in addition to the advocacy work. So here's what I would say. If you want to get involved in Georgia 6, you should do what everybody else in Georgia 6 is doing, which is get together in your local group.

Maybe that's an indivisible group. Maybe that's a different group that's organizing there. That's fine. But find your local group and participate.

This is an election that's going to be determined by voters, not by money, although it's nice to hear that he's got a lot of money, too. But money doesn't vote. People vote. And so whether or not this is an outcome we'd like to look up, it's going to depend on whether people actually get up and go out and discuss them.

Ezra, talk to us about the tax march that's coming up this weekend. Yeah, so we're excited about the tax march. We are smack dab in the middle of congressional recess, and we call it congressional recess. It's a global term, but actually what it's called in Congress officially is the district work period, right?

And it's called district work period because there are no votes or no hearings in D.C. People, the members of Congress are expected to go back home to their home districts or home states and do district work. That means listening to their constituents, asking about their concerns, and we saw a lot of this going on in the February congressional recess. That was the first one.

action during that congressional recess that especially quasi-moderate Republicans dropped off the bill. This is Republicans like Barbara Comstock or Leonard Lancer, Representative Freeland and there were town halls going on during that congressional recess and before where people were pressuring them and they changed their behavior. So the tax march is actually really exciting for that reason now, too, because this Saturday, April 15th, we're in Washington, D.C., but also in 120-plus communities across the country, there are going to be these tax marches. And in addition to just people coming together to pressure President Trump to release his tax returns, there are going to be town hall events and public events with members of Congress.

And the reason why this is exciting is because, look, I don't think Donald Trump is going to find Jesus and decide, yeah, I am going to release my tax returns to the right thing to do every president since Nixon has done it. But what we do know is that Congress has the unilateral ability to give you tax returns. There's legislation that's been on the books for 90 years that gives them the ability to do this. And we know that they're responsive to their constituents because they care more about what their constituents think than anything that Donald Trump has tried to get done.

So the April 15th tax march is a real opportunity for constituents across the country to say, hey, member of Congress, you've got the ability to actually get these tax returns. You need to use it. And we've already seen actually in this reset that working. There's a story out of Florida, Representative Yoho, who is not any kind of moderate Republican, conservative Republican, but he talked to a local individual member and that individual member changed his mind.

Yeah, he wants to see Donald Trump's tax returns too. Just today, actually, there was a poll released with the Global Strategy Group and move on, it's a poll, found that 80% of Americans want Donald Trump's tax returns, including 64% of Republicans. This is not a partisan issue. It's not just about taxes either.

Taxes are boring. You know, I did progressive tax policy work and did long-form reports. I understand that not everybody gets a shout Is part of the message of these tax marches also going to involve sort of Trump's push for tax reform that's going to happen in the next couple of weeks? Because I think, I mean, health care reform, as we saw for Trump and the Republicans, was about cutting taxes for rich people.

Tax reform is going to be about cutting taxes for rich people and also increasing the deficit because it doesn't seem like they want to pay for it. It seems like it's a pretty fruitful message to go along with. You know, a lot of Trump's policy on taxes is going to benefit Trump. Yes, right.

No, absolutely. And look, you say that that Trump cares about taxes and that they're gearing up in a lot of ways to cut taxes for rich people, it really seems like just about everything they're doing is ultimately what they would like to get done with Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell would really like to do is just cut taxes for rich people. That's the number one goal. And so, yes, they were focusing on the Affordable Care Act because they promised it to their base, but fundamentally what they would like to do is just allow rich people to pay a lot less.

I think their plan for quote-unquote tax reform are no different. When they talk about tax reform, what they're actually talking about is they really like millionaires and billionaires to get people do not think that millionaires and billionaires have it too hard right now. And so, yeah, I think one of the messages coming out of these tax marches is, look, we don't know how much Donald Trump is trying to save himself when he tried to get behind some of these tax reform plans, and we certainly don't want to see the social safety net programs and programs that support the young to old, the people that depend on public education, everybody who depends on the services that the federal government provides. We don't want to see those cuts at the same time as you're cutting the taxes for the uber wealthy.

It makes no sense, and it's got to support. You'll see pushback doing the tax march on that too. Ezra, thank you for coming on the pod. Everyone go to indivisibleguide.com, form your own indivisible group, find out where your local tax march is, and go get involved.

Thank you so much. We'll see you out there. Thanks, Ezra. Take care.

That's our pod for today. We'll talk to you soon. Bye, guys. Can we talk about Lover to Leave It?

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Do you think maybe that was funny the first couple of times now it's not as funny? I don't know. We plugged it at the top of the show a little. And now we're doing it every time.

Who's on Lover to Leave It this week? Yeah, who is on Lover to Leave it? I didn't know that. Oh, see, now there are questions.

We have Ria Butcher, Mike Schur, Zubin Parang. It's a great panel. People should subscribe. Okay, we'll talk to everyone later.

Bye.