Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's pod, the one and only Stacey Abrams talks to Dan about how Democrats can win in Georgia and all over the country. Before that, we'll talk about why Donald Trump is still refusing to concede an election he lost badly, the Republican politicians who refuse to do anything about it, and how President-elect Biden is handling all of this. But first, don't miss this week's Pod Save the World, where Tommy and Ben talk about how world leaders reacted to Joe Biden's victory and why British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is a shape-shifting creep, which is what Tommy called him, which is now a hashtag that's just been trending on Twitter. Tommy caused an international incident, which we love. We love current media causing international incidents.
Ben also talked with a former Mexican ambassador to the United States about what the election is going to mean for one of America's most important diplomatic relationships. So check that out. Also, exciting news. Adopt-a-state Georgia is here. Control of the U.S. Senate will come down to two runoff elections in Georgia on January 5th. John Asa versus David Perdue and Raphael Warnock versus Kelly Loeffler. These will be tough races, but Joe Biden did beat Donald Trump in Georgia, so the votes are there. Help us find them at votesaveamerica.com slash Georgia, where we will send you all the info you need to volunteer and support organizers on the ground. I received word that since it launched this morning, already 6,000 people signed up. So what are you waiting for? You received word? Was it a message in a bottle? Like, did a raven come from...
It was a telegraph from Michael Martinez, actually. That's how I got it. It was in my inbox. Oh, that is antiquated. All right, let's get to the news. I want all of you to know that Dan titled this part of the outline Coup Update. So a coup update you shall have. It has been nearly a week since every major media outlet in the country called the race for Joe Biden. And most world leaders have already reached out to congratulate him. The president-elect is on track to win 306 electoral votes. He's ahead by tens of thousands of votes in each of the closest battleground states. And he's on track to have the biggest popular vote margin of any challenger to an incumbent president since FDR beat Herbert Hoover.
election officials in both parties told the New York Times there has been zero evidence of fraud or other irregularities, and the Trump campaign legal team is now 0 for 12 in their post-election court cases. And yet, Donald Trump refuses to concede. One Republican close to the White House told the Daily Beast, quote, It's like dealing with a lunatic on the subway. Everyone just kind of sits and stares ahead, pretends they can't hear him, and waits for him to eventually get off. A great quote, I will say.
The brilliant Tanya Sominator at Crooked Media responded to that quote last night and said, yeah, the difference is we're all on the subway and he's driving it. We're stuck with him on the subway right now, which is true. Dan, what's going on here? Even if Trump is unlikely to ever actually concede, why hasn't he at least acknowledged the results and allowed the transition to begin? Because he is a small, sad, particularly stupid, petty person.
Correct. Let's move on. It's like there's nothing surprising about what Trump is doing. We sort of knew he would do this. As we know, he raised completely false fraud allegations and contested the results in the election he won in 2016. So how did we expect him to respond to an election he lost? Undermining the integrity and legitimacy of our elections is one of Trump's favorite things to do and has always been one of his favorite things to do. This is why, like, we're going to talk about how alarmed we should be. Whatever level of alarm people should have.
I don't know why anyone is surprised. There's absolutely nothing surprising about what's happening right now. He accused, we heard of him as a political figure because he accused President Obama of being illegitimate. He accused Ted Cruz of cheating in the 2016 primaries in Iowa when Trump lost Iowa. He welcomed Russian interference in the 2016 election. He tried to cheat in that election. And then, as you said, when he won that election, he still said it was fraudulent. He still made up a complete conspiracy about undocumented immigrants voting. I mean, he does this all the time. He has done this throughout his entire career. His favorite thing to do.
One of his favorite things to do is to challenge legitimacy of elections, particularly elections that he loses, but sometimes once he wins. Yes. I mean, I thought it was interesting this morning. Peter Alexander at NBC News said a top White House aide told him that Trump is, quote, very aware there is not a path to victory, but he believes the 72 million people who voted for him, quote, deserve a fight. So he's battling as a form of, quote, theater for them. He's putting on theater for his voters because he knows he lost, but he wants to pretend he won so that they still like him. Look, if there's anything you can say about Donald Trump is that he is a selfless person who would humiliate himself in the present and in the history books in order to do right by the people who support him.
I mean, he is putting the country through hell in service of his own fragile ego, which is also the story of the entire last four years. It is the story of the pandemic. It is the story of the recession. It is the story of every single one of his policies. And now it is the story of him refusing to concede post-election. He is just, he refuses to acknowledge reality because his ego won't let him and he doesn't want to go down in history as a loser, which he is a loser. He lost. So I want to talk about the consequences of Trump refusing to concede.
In the short term, obviously, the transition becomes much harder for the Biden-Harris administration. In the long term, we can talk about this later, there is real damage to our democracy from half the country believing Trump's lies that the election was stolen from him. Severe damage. But I think what's worrying people the most right now is the possibility that somehow Donald Trump could figure out a way to remain in office by overturning the results of the election through some combination of legal challenges, fraud investigations, the actions of Republican-controlled state legislatures, or the actions of Republicans in Congress. I want to get into both the legal strategy and then sort of the state legislatures thing, but...
Dan, why don't you talk about sort of your overall level of concern around 2020 ending with a coup? As we always say, you know, my 2020 motto was worried about everything, kind of kind of thing. We've talked about it a thousand times. The way the last week has gone has suggested that we're probably going to have to keep that edict in place for a while longer. Unfortunately. Yeah. So I don't blame anyone for being worried about anything or this in particular, because like for years, people have said this cannot happen and that it absolutely happens. Like Trump cannot win the 2016 election and then he does. But when you dig into the process.
It becomes very clear that it is nearly impossible for Trump to pull this off. The logistical, political, legal, mathematical hurdles to doing it are just so incredibly high that I think it's just important to put that in perspective, which is we should be concerned. Nothing is impossible. Nothing is impossible in the Trump era of politics. But some things are much closer to impossible than other things. And Trump stealing this election from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is pretty damn close to impossible.
I think it's most useful to focus not on what Trump wants to do, which is steal the election. Of course, he wants to do that. But what he's actually doing and how our institutions are currently responding. I think that is probably the best way to go here. So let's start with what can be very loosely defined as a legal strategy from the Trump campaign. Here's how Biden campaign legal advisor Bob Bauer described what the Trump folks are doing during a public briefing this week. The purpose of the briefing today is to put in perspective some of what you're reading and hearing about, which is noise, not really law, ethics, not really lawsuits. Dan, why do you think Bob sounds so confident there?
I fucking love Bob Bauer. He is the ultimate badass. No one ever more calmly just delivers absolute devastating derision than Bob Bauer. And he's exactly right here. He sounds calm because we should tell people that we have both been on many campaigns with Bob Bauer. He is a Democratic super lawyer, election lawyer. He was also a White House counsel. So we've worked with Bob a lot. And he is, in fact, a badass lawyer. Yes, I've worked with Bob. I've actually worked with Bob on a statewide recount before. So I've been down this road with him. And there is no, the Republicans have no.
legal argument. The lawyers who are making these cases are almost embarrassed to do so. I mean, they should have been too embarrassed to take the fucking case to begin with. But like you said, they were over 12. They are alleging something that there is no evidence of. They can, when pushed by the judges, provide no evidence of fraud. And even if they could provide evidence of fraud, the margins in these states are so large that this is inconsequential. And so it is, as Bob put out, theater. And Peter Alexander, who must have one hell of a source in the White House, also reported the other day that a White House aide told him that it is not incorrect for the Biden campaign to refer to these lawsuits as theater because they are theatrics. And so it's a bunch of bullshit that I think.
is being proven to be bullshit at every step of the way. We've seen no evidence that anyone is taking this seriously. There are a lot of really great reporters who are covering these legal proceedings. And I would really encourage everyone to pay attention to what the Trump campaign lawyers are saying in court versus what Trump's goons are saying from the safety of their Twitter feeds and on Newsmax and Fox and all of their safe spaces, because they're very different. Because when you're in court in front of a judge, you can't just spout conspiracy bullshit without any kind of consequence.
on Twitter and on television and at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, you can say whatever the fuck you want. But you can't do that in court. This morning, today, in court in Arizona for a Sharpie Gate lawsuit, the sequel. We're on the second Sharpie Gate lawsuit now, which I'm not even going to explain the first Sharpie Gate one. I thought it was Pengazi.
I did not make that up. Someone else said that. It's so funny. That's good. So the Trump campaign lawyer in this proceeding in court this morning said, quote, we are not alleging fraud. We are not saying anyone is trying to steal the election. Rather, there were, quote, good faith errors in the count, which would not change the outcome.
That's what the Trump campaign is saying in court. So like they have admitted in court that there actually were Republican poll watchers in all of these places, even though Donald Trump is saying otherwise. They have admitted some of their complaints were not about fraud at all, but about clerical errors. In Michigan, they have promised explosive evidence of fraud and instead gave a list of embarrassing complaints. And David Farenthold at The Washington Post has a great story about this today that included loud noises and mean stares.
They thought that an election official was being too loud over the PA to the Republican poll watchers. That was the fraud. One of the so-called shocking pieces of evidence that election fraud was committed, according to a Republican poll observer in Michigan, was that a Democratic poll observer told the Republican poll observer, go back to the suburbs, Karen. They submitted that as evidence of election fraud. So like, look, I am actually surprised that they are 0 for 12. Like, and I don't think, and I'm preparing everyone for this. Don't be alarmed if one of these cases somewhere, they succeed, right? But again, there's an appeals process. There are tens of thousands of votes to overturn in some of these states, which is far more than they're even trying to overturn in most of these cases. So we have a long way to go. And the fact that so many of their lawsuits, in fact, all of their lawsuits have failed so far does not bode well for their legal strategy going forward nine days after the election.
Yeah, that's exactly right. The thing we should prepare ourselves for is that at some point at the end of this process, Trump is going to both complain that unelected judges stole the election from him and pat himself on the back for confirming all of these judges at the same time. That is definitely going to happen, and no one's going to blink an eye. The other big concern is this idea that was first reported by Barton Gilman in The Atlantic back in September that Trump and his goons are pressuring Republican-controlled state legislatures in states that Biden won to overturn the popular vote and appoint their own slate of pro-Trump electors. Here's why I'm not losing sleep over this theory, and I know that a lot of you have read this because a lot of you have emailed me.
And to you, I'm saying people in my family, friends of mine, I'm hearing this all over the place. Here's why I'm not losing sleep over this. Just so you all know, the constitution gives state legislatures the authority to point its electors in a manner that the legislature directs. Okay. That's in the constitution. Every state legislature in the country has already chosen that manner by passing a law that explicitly says the winner of the popular vote gets that state's electoral votes. In Pennsylvania, for example, the law says that the final vote count must be certified by the secretary of state and the final electors must be certified by the governor, both of whom are Democrats. The law that the state legislature passed.
does not provide a role for the state legislature in selecting electors, something that the Republican state Senate majority leader in Pennsylvania has now acknowledged multiple times. He said there is not a role for us. Now, what if he goes crazy, changes his mind, and the Pennsylvania state legislature just breaks its own law and sends its own slate of Trump electors to Congress? And what if for some insane reason, a court didn't immediately strike that down? Then what happens? Well, Democrats control the House, and a majority of senators have now recognized Biden as president. But if for some reason the House and Senate disagree, tie goes to the slate of electors sent by the governors,
who, again, are Democrats in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. This is not going to happen. This is very, very important. And people are very, very worried about this. And like I said, shaming people for being worried about crazy things happening in the Trump era is not the right way to handle this. No, of course. There's so much confusing information out there. There's Republicans lying every fucking day. And then there's, you know, this Atlantic article, which I contend was overwritten, that has really freaked everyone out. So I completely understand everyone's concern here.
And I think the most important fact for all of these various scenarios is Joe Biden's victory was not close. He won by a lot. Put aside his 5 million popular vote margin. Put that aside for a second. He won 306 electoral votes once George is called, which we're very confident. Will be 306 electoral votes. Let's just say hypothetically, because people are very focused on Pennsylvania, right? Pennsylvania is a place where this could possibly happen. Let's hypothetically say they pulled this off in Pennsylvania. The Republican leader in Pennsylvania, who has already said he does not want to do this and does not have the power to do so if he did want to do it. But let's say he did that, right? And then let's say somehow this case made its way to the Supreme Court and Pennsylvania was able to.
send its 20 Trump electors to the Electoral College, which is meeting by Zoom, right? So let's say they did that. If that were to happen, which is a tiny, tiny, like a million things have to happen if that's happened, Joe Biden still wins because he still has more than 270 electoral votes. Trump has to pull this off in three states. Let's say he pulled it off in Georgia and Pennsylvania. Joe Biden still wins, right? Like if we were- But again, the other big reason that everyone should feel calm here is that we have the House and Nancy Pelosi has a role in recognizing the slate of electors. And I know people are worried about the 269-269 tie scenario where-
Each state delegation gets a vote in the House and there are more Republican delegations. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the fact that as Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi has a role, as does the Senate, in recognizing conflicting slates of electors if they're ever sent, if it got through the courts. Again, it has to get through all the courts to get to this point. But even if it did, the final role is still played by the Democratic-controlled House and the Senate. And so the worst-case scenario ends in acting President Nancy Pelosi. If there is a completely crazy scenario and it is frozen, the worst-case scenario is acting President Nancy Pelosi. Every other scenario is President Joe Biden.
That's how this goes. That's how this goes. And also, again, like you said, we're talking about fraud on a massive scale that they would need to find. And in nine days after the election, no fraud has been discovered. No fraud is even being alleged by some of the Trump campaign lawyers in these cases. And we are headed towards state certification very soon, which again, in the states we need to hit 270, the Democrats control. The other thing I would just give people advice through is like click on the links and read the stories when you see these panicky things. So someone texted me this morning, this article from Michigan, which is Michigan, the certification process is two Republicans, two Democrats, and you did a 3-1 vote to certify.
The headline is Republican on certification board won't commit to certifying the results. Joe Biden won Michigan by 140,000 votes, 14 times Donald Trump's margin in 2016. And the headline and the lead are very concerning. When you read the story. The person, this member of the certification board, whose wife is, I will say, one of the witnesses who is claiming to have seen things. But even he says he has seen no evidence of fraud. And his wife is a fraud witness, right? For Trump. Yeah. His wife is a fraud witness for Trump. And he's like, I haven't seen anything so far. Yeah. And we see no evidence that would overturn the result. So it's we have a lot to worry about, a lot to do, like read deep into it. Make your own decisions about how much you want to worry about this. That is everyone's point of view. But there is a lot of panicky.
threads happening on Twitter, people being very worried. And I just think if you dig into the process, there are reasons to feel much better about how this is going to go. And so I would just encourage people to do that before getting very worried. Click the links, read things, see what is actually happening out there. And the reality of it doesn't muster a lot of what you're seeing people tweet about or worry about, et cetera, on social media.
And I will say my confidence is not a result of a, oh, Donald Trump and the Republicans wouldn't do something bad. Of course they would. My confidence is also not a result of our institutions are so strong. I trust them implicitly. Although I will say on the judicial side, oh, and 12 is a pretty good sign that the judiciary, even as stacked as it is with right wing judges is holding up so far. My confidence is when you get to the legislative political side.
Democrats are in enough important positions in all of these states and in the House of Representatives that we should feel confident, which is very dangerous for the future, I should say, because if Nancy Pelosi was not Speaker of the House and there was a Republican Speaker of the House, if we did not have Democratic governors in Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin, if we did not have Democratic secretaries of state in some of these places, I would be a lot more worried that this scenario could come to pass. And if the election was close, like I lived this myself in Florida in 2000, there is an exact history of a partisan Supreme Court stopping the vote counting in order to elect the president of their choice. We saw that before. So just the margin of error here is so gigantic. One other thing I would say that I think is an important fact is there are these recounts happening. People are very nervous about the recounts. As Bob Bauer pointed out, these recounts are mandatory because the race is in Wisconsin and Georgia, in particular, very close. As Bob Bauer pointed out in his legal brief, which I would encourage everyone to watch, right? It is very reassuring. It answers a lot of your questions, a lot of legal questions from someone.
who's an actual lawyer, unlike you and I. But as Bob pointed out, there have been 31 state recounts since the year 2000. The average vote change in those statewide recounts is 430 votes. The closest race Joe Biden has is in Wisconsin, I believe, as we sit here right now, and that is over 10,000 votes. And so the idea that any of these recounts could change the outcome of the election is something to which there is no mathematical or historical possibility.
And the secretary of state in Georgia, very Republican, not a rhino, not a never Trumper by any means, said that he does not believe the recount will change the outcome of the election. And also, as they are setting that up, it is going to be open to the public. There will be Democratic and Republican poll observers to watch it. So just in case anyone is worried that when recounts happen, suddenly it's like a bunch of Trump people count ballots. That's not how it's going to go. It is going to be set up in a transparent process so that everyone can see them.
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So President-elect Biden is handling all of this very calmly and confidently. On Tuesday, he took questions from reporters about Trump's refusal to concede. Here is a clip. mildly intimidated by the city president. Marked restraint from Joe Biden, almost comical at times, just the way that he sort of dryly put those two things. Not helpful to Donald Trump's legacy and mildly intimidating. What did you think of Biden's response there? Pitch perfect. It's the exact right way to do it. Do not feed into the panic, project calm and confidence and be like this entire race was defined between the stature gap between our toddler president.
and our mature, experienced, cool, calm, collected president-elect and keeping that right here. There are obviously real challenges in this. You guys talked about some of them on Monday about access to classified information, the quote-unquote ascertainment from the head of the General Services Administration to begin the formal parts of the transition. Those are very real. Joe Biden is not going to solve those problems by projecting panic. He is the winner. He looks like the winner. He's acting like the winner. And that's what people want. That is completely consistent with his campaign and why he won.
I should say too, because I've seen a lot of people say, you know, Democrats should be more prepared. They should be more alarmed. Like, be careful. Trump's trying to steal this. And like...
I just don't I think the question is, what does being more alarmed get you? What goal does it achieve? Right. Like I know everyone's worried, like the Republican state legislature is going to send their own electors to Congress. Well, the law doesn't allow them to do that. Right. Like I can send a letter to Congress saying that I've received 270 electoral votes and should be the next president of the United States. Doesn't mean the Congress has to take it seriously. Right. Like if they if if every single Republican state legislature decides to break the law and every single judge in the land decides that Republican legislatures are allowed to break the law and Donald Trump and Republicans break every law in the country so that he stays in office, then our option then is not to, like, find a loophole in the law to be like.
Gotcha. We were prepared and we made sure we figured out, you know, we stopped you in the nick of time. No, then we have to like flood the streets and protest. And that's the only option available. So like, it's not clear to me what Joe Biden being more alarmed, more panicked or any of us being more alarmed would actually achieve at this point. Panic is never the solution to any problem, right? It's not like, why aren't you panicking? You should never panic. What's the first thing they tell you to do in any crisis? Don't panic. There's a lot of like, don't be caught flat footed. Like no one's being caught flat footed. The guy's trying to steal the election. Like we all get that, but like.
We have a legal strategy in place. We have lawyers beating them in court every day. We have Democratic governors in place. We have Nancy Pelosi. There's nothing to change about our response right now. What is happening, the way Trump is handling this, the way Republicans are going along with it, and we'll talk about this more, I think, but is deeply disturbing and quite dangerous. Horrible, unconscionable, unforgivable. And it speaks for a very long road ahead for our country. When you have one of our two parties in our two-party system, we're willing to burn our institutions down for political power. That is deeply dangerous. The thing is, there is actually something productive we can do about that right now.
And that is to win those two runoffs in Georgia and take control of the Senate and take all of Mitch McConnell's power away. That is a constructive response to what is happening here. We could actually make a difference. And so it's just like, it's totally fair and reasonable to be anxious. We sort of thought this would all be over. And I don't know why we thought that, but Trump would just leave. It'd be done. We could move on. But we are in the 27th mile of this marathon. And the best place to channel anxiety is into something that will actually help save our democracy, which is winning these Senate races.
So one other disturbing story this week that may or may not have anything to do with Trump's refusal to concede was his complete purge of the civilian leadership at the Department of Defense. On Monday, Trump fired Secretary of Defense Mark Esper via tweet. He then replaced three of Esper's top deputies with three of his biggest goons, Kash Patel, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, and Anthony Tata, who was called President Obama a terrorist and called for John Brennan's execution. He's also installed a goon of his named Michael Ellis as general counsel at the NSA, the National Security Agency, and he's being pressured by his idiot son and a few others to fire the CIA director, Gina Haspel. So why on earth is Trump purging all of the defense and national security people that he himself hired?
There isn't no one knows for sure what there are sort of two competing theories about what is happening. One is and this is all from anonymous reporting from sort of national reporters. One is, is that Trump so much wants to get out of Afghanistan. sooner than the Pentagon wants that he's making all these changes. I am quite skeptical of that one. Donald the Dove. Yeah. I mean, that one has really taken hold among a lot of people, but I am, it just doesn't, and these aren't the goons you'd sent. Like the, like these people, Ezra Cohen, Watnick, these people are, Kash Patel, are conspiracy theorists to the nth degree. They make Richard Grinnell look like a man with his feet firmly planted in reality. And so the alternative theory that some people floated is it is about finding ways to declassify a bunch of intelligence that would somehow undermine the idea that Putin helped Trump in 2016.
Which seems very possible to me. Very possible. We know Trump is completely obsessed with that. I mean, the other thing to know is because the scary theory, the third scary theory, which is like, is Donald Trump putting people in place in the Defense Department to help him stay in power somehow? A lot of the reporting has said that these moves were discussed well before the election. So whatever Trump's motives are, they were sort of pre-election motives, which could be, again, either the Afghanistan theory or the some kind of cover up theory or some kind of declassification goal. Like it could be one of those things.
There's been a lot of reporting on this, a lot of good reporters, some of the best reporters in the business, and a lot of Defense Department officials, administration officials, they're all sort of saying it's out of spite. It's just like Trump being an asshole, Trump trying to exact revenge on people that disagreed with him, all of which is very much in line with how Trump has acted for the last four years and most of his life. That's what we know so far. So the only reason that we can't just ignore Trump's pathetic whining is because most Republican politicians are playing along with his deranged fantasy that voter fraud stole the election from him, from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to just about every congressional Republican except Senators Collins, Murkowski, Romney, and Sass.
Republican Senator James Lankford said he would step in if Biden isn't getting the presidential daily briefing by Friday. Chuck Grassley just agreed with him as well. And Democratic Senator Chris Coons said this week that some Republicans have been directing their congratulations to Biden through him because they're afraid of doing it publicly. One Republican aide said to The Washington Post, what is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change. He went golfing this weekend. It's not like he's plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on January 20th. He's tweeting about filing some lawsuits. Those lawsuits will fail. And then he'll tweet some more about how the election was stolen. And then he'll leave. Why do you think?
So many Republican politicians refuse to acknowledge Joe Biden as a legitimate winner of the presidential election. A lot of people attribute this to cowardice on behalf of Republicans. They don't want to anger the Trump base. They don't want to get mean tweets sent about him. I think that's incorrect. Cowardice suggests you want to do the right thing, but are too afraid to do it. This is craveness. They are doing this because they think it is good politics for them. Mitch McConnell has been very specific. He thinks keeping the Trump base hopped up on conspiracy theories, racist conspiracy theories in particular, about stolen elections in minority-heavy cities, he thinks that helps him keep control of the Senate.
And what is dangerous about that is it's about Georgia now, and then it's going to be about 2022, and it's going to be about 2024. And each time you get your base more hopped up on higher dosages of racist conspiracy theories, it gets worse and worse and worse. This exact attitude is how we got in this fucking mess to begin with, where these Republicans, you know, they say the things that Trump says. They don't push back on the lies, don't push back on the conspiracy theories. And then they wink and nod to every fucking political and Politico reporter in town that, you know, privately over drinks. They say, you know, I don't really believe this. Don't quote me, but we got to say it.
But the American people aren't in on the fucking joke. Trump's base doesn't know this is all some big charade to help turn out an election or make Trump feel better, whatever your fucking reason is. So what you end up doing is radicalizing your base, which then forces you in the next election to be even more radical. This is exactly how they got Trump, because it's exactly how they responded to birtherism to begin with. Most of them didn't believe it, right? Obviously, but John Boehner and Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, they kept their fucking trap shut because they thought it helped them win the 2020 elections. And then Mitt Romney, because he thought it would help him win the 2012 election, got on his hands and knees and begged Donald Trump for an endorsement.
And then Donald Trump becomes president. So who the fuck knows what's going to happen on the back end of this? But it is deeply dangerous because they're making a specific political calculation that this is good for them. Rant over. No one in this country has more contempt for Republican voters than Republican politicians. Like they have created a monster and the monster is not Donald Trump. The monster is the Murdoch empire and the right wing media ecosystem that is poisoning the brains of most Republican voters in this country right now. And Donald Trump will leave the scene and they will still be riling up these voters with Sean Hannity and Laura Ingram and Tucker Carlson and now Newsmax and now OAN and now all their fucking YouTube craziness and their Facebook bullshit. Like they will continue to get people riled up angry and afraid.
so that Republican politicians can hold power and win elections. And if their voters believe crazy conspiracies, if their voters don't believe in things like COVID and get sick and die, they do not give a shit. They don't care about their voters. They just care about staying in power. And now they have created this right-wing media fucking monster that is just going to keep everyone angry and afraid. Well, long past when Donald Trump leaves. Long past when Donald Trump leaves. The idea that, I mean, the thing is, just think about this for a second. OAN and Newsmax are two things that were created on the specific premise that Sean Hannity is too sane.
And it like it is getting it is getting worse and worse. And every single one of them should be held to fucking account in the present politically and in the long term historically. No one. And you can blame Donald Trump and he is irresponsible. Donald Trump is a fucking disaster of a president who was responsible for the deaths of 10,000 Americans because he was too stupid to wear a mask. But ultimately, when you want to find blame for this, look right at Mitch McConnell. Look right at Paul Ryan. Look at right at Kevin McCarthy. The Republican leaders who theoretically should fucking know better, but are more interested in power than doing what is right for the country and even right for the party in the long term, because the political calculus here is their base is getting smaller. So you need a greater increase in every election to win. And so that means.
The political incentives here are headed in all the wrong directions unless the Republicans change the way they think about things. And there's no evidence they have any desire to do that. And I would say that if you are a Democrat trying to figure out how we do even better next time, how we expand our majority, how we save the House, how we flip the Senate, it doesn't matter what kind of Democrat you are, whether you're a progressive, Democratic, socialist, centrist, moderate, somewhere in the middle of the party. If your analysis does not begin with the fact that we face a very dangerous right wing media ecosystem that is poisoning people's minds. on a daily basis, then you're doing it wrong. We cannot have this conversation even as a party about what went wrong without recognizing what is happening on the other side. And that when we propose something, when we propose a Green New Deal, what does Fox do to it, right? When an activist talks about defunding the police, what does Fox do? When someone proposes something moderate, like a public option to expand health insurance, what does Fox News do to it, right? It doesn't matter what kind of policy you propose as a Democrat. We are...
facing a well-oiled machine that has been lying to people for a long time. And it is getting far worse with social media platforms right now. And like that, to me, that just has to be the beginning of the conversation on what we do. But do you have any ideas? Well, I also want to go back and I want to amend my list of people most responsible for how fucked up America is to include Mark Zuckerberg, because none of this happens without Facebook. Fox, Rush Limbaugh, all of that operated in a very dangerous dark corner. And then in order to become billionaires, Facebook pumped that right wing propaganda into.
the brains of millions of Americans, the 40% of Americans who get their news from Facebook, a place where Dan Bongino, most days, has seven of the 10 most engaged with link posts on the whole thing. So think about that for a second. There are so many conversations that we want to have within the party we want to have on this podcast. We want to have the pages of the New York Times, apparently, about where we go from. There are some amazing stories of success in this election. Senator, primarily Senator on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris winning, flipping Arizona, flipping Georgia. Like even though things went so far worse than we expected in Texas, still Texas continued its inexorable move blue, right? We moved it more in the Democratic direction again. But if we do not figure out this misinformation problem, we are fucked. We are absolutely fucked. And the thing that we have to think about here is Joe Biden was able to survive the right wing assault on him for two reasons. One, he was a particularly pitch perfect candidate for this moment.
and he had exponentially more resources than his opponent. That is something that is not going to happen again anytime soon. The first day of his presidency, this massive right-wing megaphone is going to be turned on Biden. He's not going to be necessarily running hundreds of millions of dollars of ads at that time to get his message out. And we benefited in large part because Trump was stupid. He had this giant megaphone, but he was so stupid that he just used it to hit himself in the face with on a pretty close to a daily basis. That's not going to happen in the future. And we have to figure out how to build up a progressive media infrastructure that competes. We have to figure out how to solve the Facebook problem because we cannot exist in a world where Facebook is continuing to be dominated by conservatives. And that could include pressuring Facebook to be better.
But it also includes figuring out what is the progressive way that we get into that daily top 10 list of engaged posts, that it gets closer to 50-50. How do we do that? What is a way in which we can get our message? We can break into these information silos and these information vacuums to communicate with people. Because if we do not do that, we're going to be right back here in a few years dealing with the next version of Trump who's unlikely to be this stupid.
And I will say, as much as I believe that we need to grow our own progressive media institutions, which is why we have Crooked Media, which is why we're sticking around and we'll keep growing as fast as we can. But the reason that we at Crooked Media have launched Vote Safe America and Adopt-A-State is because I think as much as you need media to compete with their media, we also need and cannot replace on the ground organizing and face-to-face conversations with voters and sort of building up grassroots democracy. And that has been difficult to do, obviously, because of the pandemic. Which, by the way, we're not even talking about right now because Donald Trump's trying to steal the election and we're in like literally the worst wave of the pandemic yet and people are dying all over the country and we're hitting crisis mode right now, which is just like one of the many things that we can't be talking about right now because Donald Trump refused to concede the fucking election and Republicans are helping them. But anyway, once the pandemic has passed, I do think Democrats need to get back to sort of grassroots organizing of the kind we've seen in the past, especially in 2018 around the midterms. Because I think, you know, and Barack Obama always used to say this too, like when he would go to downstate Illinois or he would go to Iowa and he would meet people to face to face.
they suddenly realized he was not the caricature that they saw of him on Fox News. And I think Democrats meeting, Democrats running for office, meeting people in person and having conversations is one antidote to those caricatures that people see on their television screens or their phone screens. You're exactly right there. I mean, there are a couple elements of this. One is getting back to the grassroots organizing once it's safe face-to-face within communities. But I think there was a big conversation we had about how we...
and I talked to Stacey Abrams about this in the interview at the end of this podcast, is how do we build sustainable, progressive infrastructure within states, right? I sort of called it the other day a 24-7, 365, 50 strategy where we are constantly organizing. We're not in this feast or famine world where we're going to send $100 million to South Carolina in a four-month period to help try to elect Jamie Harrison, and then we're not going to think about it again for years. That's not the way to do it, right? What Stacey Abrams and LaTosha Brown and so many other people did in Georgia over a significant period of time is how you do that, right? Some of that works happening in Texas. Beto's been doing that for several years now, but we have to do that everywhere. On the misinformation front,
We are not going to solve the Facebook problem or build up a megaphone anywhere near the size of Republicans anytime soon. And the one thing we have to do with this thing is, you know, I've been yelling to you about in every forum for years is we have to find ways to empower our activists to be amplifiers of our message. How do we allow them to be online message organizers within their networks, right? Everyone is walking around with this phone in their pocket with 100, you know, on average, hundreds of contacts, whether that is in their contact list or Facebook or whatever it is. How do we do that as a party? Because like we're the Republican message operation is top down. It is Trump to Fox News to the base, right? And ours has to be bottom up.
Right. And we have to give the message to people and have them push it forward. That is the only way we're going to compete in the short term. And that's one thing that I hope we all have very serious conversations about how to do, how to build the tools, how to build the infrastructure to make that happen. Because I think that is the only way we're going to compete. Because we have like we have Georgia in January. We have gubernator elections in 2019. We have perhaps the most consequential congressional races for a very long time in 2022. And so there is a lot of work to do to take the lessons, good and bad, from this past election. Well, when we come back, you'll talk a lot more about all this and especially organizing on the ground with the one and only Stacey Abrams.
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Stacey Abrams is the CEO of Fair Fight Action and currently leading and winning the fight to flip Georgia blue. Stacey Abrams, welcome back to PodSafe America. Thank you for having me again. Again, always. Before we get into the interview, I want to give you the opportunity to say I told you so, because back last year when Crooked Media was putting forward our Adopt-A-State program, we picked the six states that we thought were most likely to flip from red to blue. Georgia was not one of those states. You told us we were wrong. You made a very compelling case. We did not add Georgia. We did do some volunteer work in Georgia, but we did not add Georgia. But you were right. We were wrong. So I lay myself on the mercy of the court.
I will take the high road of Sheldon Cooper and say, not I told you so, but I informed you thusly. I informed you thusly. Yes, well done, well done. Well, let's talk about Georgia and what happened in this election season. What do you think the key was to flipping Georgia from red to blue? What was the work that was done? What are the lessons we can learn from that? Number one, that this took time. I started traveling the country in 2011 with a 21-page PowerPoint deck that was my growth strategy for Georgia from 2011 to 2020. Actually, it's at 2010 to 2020.
because we had to go from a nadir to being blue. And a big part of what I would tell people is, look, I'm not going to be able to deliver successes every single cycle, but we can make progress. But we also had to think about all of the other groups that have been toiling and working for years, but never had the investment to come to scale or to sustain their efforts in between elections. And so a big part of what I've been working on for the last decade is bringing those resources to Georgia. And Vote Save America was incredibly helpful in corporate media and making sure we were able to create this through line where the money kept coming so that you weren't in this feast or famine cycle that hit so many red states.
We only get attention when we have an exciting race that someone else cares about, which means that the ability to build relationships, to build infrastructure is just incredibly tenuous. I've been privileged to be able to raise money effectively. I'm a really good beggar. And so I've spent the last 10 years building up to this ability to invest. But I want to be very clear, this was a team effort that culminated in this election, but it did not begin with this election or even with my gubernatorial election. My election in 2018, that campaign was about proving it. We wanted to win. We should have won.
But the big piece was to demonstrate to the world this method of actually talking to every voter, engaging every community, not being driven by data to the sense that you are leaving people out, but using data to find those who need and want to be in. That's how you transform an electorate. And that's how you build the capacity to do victory after victory after victory. We're still working on the second and third one, but yes. Right. Yes. We're going to have an opportunity to try to get at least two and three pretty close. A huge part of Fair Fight, very focused on voter protection. That's been a huge part of what Fair Fight has done, what Kirkland Media has worked with Fair Fight on. A big part of this is voter registration, something that is near and dear to your heart, is what the New Georgia Project that you started has worked on for many, many years. It's how we got to this one. Can you talk a little bit about the amazing voter registration efforts in Georgia and who were sort of the heroes of those efforts were? We started voter registration in 2013 or 2014 at scale. And again, that's the difference. So you had groups like the People's Agenda.
run by Helen Butler, who's been doing this work. You had groups that eventually became, groups like Galeo, the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials. They'd been doing the work. Asians American Advancing Justice, they merged with another group that had been on the ground doing the work. The issue was doing the work at scale and doing it again and again. And I want to be clear, the 800,000 number that is being used, that number is the number of people who registered after 2018. So that was not all attributable to any of these groups. There are people who registered simply because they went in to change their driver's licenses. But what matters is that these groups have been building relationships because getting a driver, getting...
getting registered to vote is like getting a driver's license. But if no one teaches you how to drive and you can't get access to a car, it's irrelevant. And so what's so critical about these organizations is that they didn't just register voters. They got into relationship with voters, helped new voters understand this power, helped them navigate the challenges. Fair Fight came in as a part of building the infrastructure so they could actually get to the polls. But the groups that have been doing this voter registration, New Georgia Project, AAAJ, Mahinte Now, Galeo and other groups, the People's Agenda, those are all groups that have been doing this work. They just finally had the ability to coalesce and for us to be able to scale that effort to meet this moment.
We're now looking at two runoffs in January to determine control of the United States Senate and so much of what we care about, whether Joe Biden has the ability to appoint the judges he wants, to appoint the candidate he wants, pass the legislation that he ran on and so many Democrats ran on. How do you see those runoffs playing out? What are the first things we need to do over the next couple months to ensure we have the opportunity to win those like Joe Biden had the opportunity to win Georgia? So first we have to reject the... anachronistic notion that Democrats can't win runoffs in Georgia. The two that people use the most often, the two Senate races, White-Schweiler in 92, Jim Martin in 2008. You have to remember, Democrats won the presidency both of those years, and in neither of those years were Georgia senators necessary for the achievement of their agendas. This is much more akin to 2017 and Doug Jones. This is about coalitions being built in the South to save the Senate. And we know that can work. We know it can work because Doug Jones was able to turn out 48% turnout. We know it can work because coalitions were built together to get this work done. And we have two extraordinary candidates. We have...
candidates who each have their own lanes, but who are compatible, who have a shared vision, and who are actually really good at this. And so John Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are the essential candidates that we need for this moment. They can talk about justice, they can talk about healthcare, and they do so with authenticity and credibility, but they need resources. So we created gasenate.com. That's the link that will let you contribute to both Ossoff and Warnock, but it also contributes to Fair Fight.
Because we also know that the Republicans have not given up on voter suppression. That's why you see the flailing around of David Perdue and Kelly Leffler, the two senators who called on their Republican secretary of state to step down. They did it because it worked. We were able to thwart voter suppression in real meaningful ways, and they aren't happy about it. And so we have to believe that they're going to come back and try to reinsert and reinstall those regimes that block voters. And so Fair Fight is going to remain ever more critical to protect the right to vote. So gasenate.com is the best way to contribute. The last thing I'll say is this. We need volunteers. We do not need the world moving to Georgia. Unless you already have plans to come and establish residency.
What we really need the most of is to know who you are and that you're out there ready to be called on. But you've got a lot of campaigning to do and we've got to build this up. But please, please, please do not make plans to come to Georgia just yet. This is a local election that has national implications, but we've got to do what we did before, which is start with the people, start on the ground and build our way up. But we'd love your volunteers to sign up with us and we will make sure that you get information about how to volunteer at a fairfight.com. We can take your information and then we'll get you plugged in where we need you most.
The recent history of American politics has been that when Democrats have victories that are powered in large part by people of color, Republicans double and triple down on voter suppression. What are you in Fair Fight looking at for the fights to come, obviously in the Georgia runoff, but down the line as Republicans try to figure out how to reduce the political power of the people who put Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in office? The way we were able to mitigate voter suppression in this election included getting clear rules about absentee balloting, allowing people to cure ballots when minor mistakes are made. but their votes would have been thrown out otherwise. Making sure that black and brown voters weren't disproportionately given provisional ballots, ensuring that we had enough polling places that were adequately resourced, ensuring that we had drop boxes because of the weaponization of the Postal Service, making sure that people understood what was on the ballot. Those are things that we invested in. We were also able to get legislative victories on exact match to really thwart the ability of the secretary of state to limit who could register to vote. All of these things can be undone through legislation in January 2021.
And so our mission is going to be to make sure that Republicans don't double down on the voter suppression that we were able to mitigate by restoring the changes, restoring the rules that we were able to change. I will also point out that we were able to help direct almost $30 million worth of resources to counties across the state. And I want to give a big shout out to the Center for Tech and Civic Life and CSME, I think is the other organization, who really invested in nonpartisan building the election administration infrastructure. That has to continue. We cannot allow a calcification of what we've accomplished to turn into a retrenchment on voter suppression.
A lot of people are concerned about this hand recount or audit that's happening in Georgia. Can you explain a little bit what is going on there? So Georgia was always going to have what's called a risk-limiting audit to look at the new machines to make sure that they were working the way they were supposed to. Georgia law also allows for a recount. And they will also do what's called a re-canvas just to make sure that people voted where they said they voted. Typically, when these things happen, there is a nominal change in the votes. There will not be 14,057 new votes that suddenly spring up and make Donald Trump the victor. He lost. He lost Georgia. We won.
He needs to accept it. But as someone who believes in the legal process, I say let them do it. Let them follow through the rules. Just we need to believe and understand it's not going to change the outcome. There is no harm in the rules being followed. Now, what is harmful is the misinformation that's being spewed by Republicans because they're intentionally trying to gin up their voters by claiming that fraud has happened. There has been no fraud. The secretary of state says there's no fraud. The lieutenant governor says there's no fraud. These are the Republicans saying this. And so we can't allow the misinformation to swamp communities who suddenly believe that they can't be heard if they try to vote.
So the process is fine. It's the misinformation and the rhetoric that's dangerous. When we take a step back and look at the election all across the country, obviously the defeat of Donald Trump, the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is of historic importance, right? Donald Trump represented a unique threat to our democracy, our way of life, our ability to get this pandemic, everything. For the Democratic Party, lower down the ballot, there were some very disturbing signs, some wins we thought we were going to have, we didn't have. We didn't flip Senate seats in states that Donald Trump won. What are some of the broader lessons you take from the election writ large? One, that Donald Trump is a unique...
cancer in our nation. And luckily enough of us believe that it needed to be excised that we did. But we are a divided nation. And that was made manifest because of Donald Trump, but it wasn't created by Donald Trump. The real challenges about whether access to health care is a right or a privilege, that argument continues to rage. The real conversation about how we invest in our economy to help not only those who are wealthy get wealthier, but help those who are middle or lower working class actually gain access. Those are real debates we're having in this nation. The question of justice being something that should be guaranteed. That's a real conversation. That is a real debate in our nation. And so we shouldn't be so sanguine that we think because we were able to get rid of this grotesque example of bad.
that the bad doesn't continue in just more palatable forms. Our responsibility is not to read into this that we have to wholesale change who we are. We just have to do a better job of getting those who share our values to participate. We saw voter increase, yes, but we have more opportunity out there and we've got to be intentional about cultivating that opportunity, not just during presidential elections, but we should start with city and county elections that are coming up next year. We have state ledge races that are gonna be happening next year and in 22. Those are all opportunities to continue to move the pendulum in our direction because if we stop pulling it, it's going to swing the other way and we are going to be devastated by it. The victory in Georgia and the success we did around the country were powered by...
millions of people who got involved in politics for the very first time after Donald Trump. What would you say to people to help keep them involved, help the people who got involved because of Donald Trump stay involved now that he is on his way out? And that was part of what I was saying before, which is Donald Trump is a symptom. He was not the disease. He was just the symptom on steroids and in technicolor.
We need you to stay involved because what he was trying to do, they will do quietly through your school board. They will do quietly through your city council. When zoning laws are made that allow poor communities and communities of color to be saddled with chemical plants, that's Donald Trump on a local level. When there is a disinvestment in your local schools in the midst of COVID, that's Donald Trump at the local level. So we have to stop focusing on his now fading example and focus on the real people who are making these choices. Because when we allied local elections, when we skip over those lines on the ballot, what we're saying is you have permission to be just like Donald Trump, only quieter.
But the effect is just as devastating and just as permanent. People, after the victory in Georgia, people have been tweeting everywhere about how Stacey Abrams should be in charge of the DNC for the Democratic Party. I'm not going to ask about any of that. But what do you think the top two or three things the Democratic Party should do to take the success we had in Georgia and export it to states that are on the cusp of it? Texas, obviously. North Carolina, one that's been on the cusp of it for a very long time. South Carolina. How do we sort of build a sustainable, progressive infrastructure that you all have built in Georgia and other parts of the country?
So this is a shameless plug for my book, Our Time is Now, Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America. So the first half of the book, I talk about voter suppression and voter engagement. But the second half of the book is exactly that. We have a demographic revolution that is not destiny. It is opportunity. We have to, one, acknowledge that identity politics works for us. And it's this. When you say you can see someone's community and understand the challenges they face and that those challenges may be different than your own, that's identity politics. And that's why people vote. Number two, we have to have sustainable, consistent investment that does not rely on...
political candidates coming in saying, we think your county or your state matters this year. There has to be consistent investment throughout. And it has to be year round. It has to be diffuse. I am proud of the work that we do at Fair Fight. But Fair Fight is not the only group doing good work. And so part of what we're doing in this runoff election is we're moving money to other groups, too, that we know won't they won't float high enough in the ether to get their own attention. So we're going to make sure they get the resources they need. And then number three, we have to wash, rinse and repeat. This is a process. This is not an event. We are all focused on, you know, ding dong, the witch is dead in the White House. But the reality is we've had to do this again and again, election after election for a decade.
It's going to take time. Patience is hard, but patience met with investment and with mission is how we get the change we need and how we make it as permanent as change can be in politics. Stacey Abrams, thank you so much for being with us. Congratulations on everything you've done in Georgia. We very much look forward to working with you to win these two runoffs and continue to turn Georgia and the rest of this country blue. Thank you. Thanks, Dan. Thanks to Stacey Abrams for joining us today. Everyone, go to votesaveamerica.com slash Georgia, adopt Georgia, and let's get to work. Bye, guys. Bye, everyone.
Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our associate producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Katie Long, Roman Papa-Dimitrio, Caroline Rustin, and Justine Howe for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nara Malconian, Yael Freed, and Milo Kim, who film and upload these episodes as videos every week.