Trump Blasts FAKE POLLS As His Approval Rating PLUMMETS

A week ago we challenged the people to sign up. If a certain number of them signed up they would get to Elijah would go to D.C. Oh, right. What happened? I don't think we're there yet. What happened, Elijah? Elijah's still sitting in North Carolina. Yeah, he's not there, so just a few more subscribers. Just a few more subscribers and Elijah will go, oh, because he's going to go to D.C. and ask a question at the briefing. Right. At the time we were doing it, Katie Zachariah was the press secretary. She's known that it's no longer the case. Well, and did you also, Stephen Chung, communications director, said there will be another briefing soon, but not before the midterms are over?

And there's going to be no new press secretary for the rest of the year? Either way, the next time there's a briefing, do you want Elijah there or not? Right. It's giving you guys an extra time to sign up, but you still need to sign up in order for Elijah to drive to D.C. Exactly. Thank you. Crooked.com slash friends. Lots of benefits, too. All right, Dan. I keep waiting to wake up at 4 a.m. with that familiar pre-election knot in my stomach that comes from bad headlines and or bad polls. But it appears that that'll have to wait till next week or maybe after the votes are counted. Even worse. The final New York Times-Siena poll of the cycle came out Wednesday.

tuesday wednesday wednesday yesterday uh has dems leading the national house vote among likely voters by 11 points 52 to 41 with donald trump's approval rating at just 36 percent uh silver bulletin average has the generic ballot at around nine to ten points so pretty close to the average uh little on the high end too many new house and senate polls to go through uh but the latest silver bullets and averages have Democratic Senate candidates up by about a point in Iowa and Kansas, two and a half points in Texas, three points in Maine and Michigan, four in Ohio and Alaska. All good, but all still close enough that an ordinary polling error could fuck us.

Womp womp. And if you'd rather not believe the polls, you can just watch where the money's going. Republicans are pouring money into Kansas and South Carolina and are now weighing a last minute investment in, wait for it, Mississippi, where Donald Trump will be campaigning on Monday. In the Axios story about this, a Republican strategist who likes beating metaphors to death said, the wall has broken. The enemy is inside the fort. We are now fighting hand to hand. Trump's super PAC is also reportedly dumping another $25 million into house races. And the ass man himself was just in South Carolina delivering his closing argument that men are hot.

As much as I can fall in love with a man, which isn't that much, I fall in love with him and his name happens to be Tim Scott. Darlene and her very handsome husband. He's a good looking husband. I didn't get the Nobel Prize. I didn't get the Pulitzer. I should have gotten the Pulitzer for writing too. I only like two oceans, the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. I'm not going to put either Trump or America on any other ocean but these two. So we seriously looked at the Atlantic Ocean and I called. Google Maps, who are really great with the lake and really great. We're going to call it the American Ocean.

Baby, how good was that tonight? Was that the best? Nobody can do it like me, baby. You see that crowd? The fake news would say, he rambled. I don't ramble. I know everything I'm doing. The oil. Any notes on the closing argument? Perfect. No, John Husted's ass did not make an appearance. But he found other men wandering out. He found other, yes. Yeah, he's just, he's all in on the men. I ask this every time. What do you think he's trying to accomplish? Do you think, I think, I don't know. I feel like it. And neither does he, John. I think he knows it's a thing now, and so now it's just fun for him to keep doing it.

Yeah, I mean, he obviously, he's like sort of a stand-up comic like in the sense that he responds to the crowd and when the crowd likes things he adjusts his routine he's also like you know i think he's he's confident in his sexuality unlike his vice president who's like i love you back but not in the gay way yeah that's true not in the james talafrico way it's just hard to see how any of this is helpful for anyone on the ballot in any of these states no i mean was it helpful for darlene graham who we didn't have a clip of that but she is uh she wasn't that great at the rally either what's the context in which she is great exactly well she's got a lot of experience which is why she's in the senate right now making

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Once they got caught, Wedgwood announced that the whole thing was simply an experimental project, is what they called it, to show the influence that an entirely fabricated polling firm could have. Super helpful project, which has led FCC Chairman Brendan Carr to threaten the license of broadcasters who air fake polls, which seemed like a message designed to please the guy with terrible poll numbers who gave Carr his job. On Wedgwood, candidates like Mallory McMorrow, she tweeted this the other day, that the group did real harm, like specifically to her campaign. Can you explain what happened and why Wedgwood got past so many smart people?

I can't really answer that last part there because, but I think there's a few things to understand there. I don't think we should take it as a given this was some sort of like Nathan-for-you like social experiment. No. Oh, I think it's, well, and even if you look into it, it's only after 50 plus one sent them, asked them for a comment because they had done the investigation that then instead of giving them a comment, Wedgwood just suddenly posted, oh, it was just fake the whole time. So 50 plus one, which is the site that GLE and Morris, formerly a 538, it now has a sub-sex strength in numbers, is a part of, they saw a poll from Wedgwood they thought was kind of suspicious and looked like it might be fake.

They then went and used the same platform to rerun the same poll. This led them to believe that they had faked the numbers. They asked them about it. All of a sudden, they put out this statement. Hard to know what they were actually trying to do. Yeah. And Nate Silver did a very good analysis of all their polling. There's not a ton of consistency in it. They did have some of the best polls for, you know, more liberal candidates like Troy Jackson, Abdul Sayed, and Francesca Hong. They also polled in some places where no one else had polled, like Mississippi early on. Some suggestion maybe that they were trying to help left-wing candidates or from the Republican side get those candidates nominated, or were they betting on Kulshi or some of these other prediction markets to do it.

We don't really know. It is also not true that they weren't vetted because they had to answer questions from the New York Times and others. They lied in those questions. The two names associated with it were people who had polling experience and had worked for established pollsters in the past. And then as soon as this happened, and this was a social experiment, you would imagine the people who did the experiment would then talk about the results. Yeah, go out and do some press. They've disappeared. They're off the website. They're not responding to calls. So very sketchy here. We now think there's actually a third site.

SoCal Strategies. which I first known as SoCal Strategies in the run-up to the Michigan primary when everyone was anxiously looking for results. And they were touting a poll they were going to have. And I had never heard of them. And I went to their website to see, and you couldn't figure out who – usually a polling website will tell you a lot about their work, their clients, especially if they are a strategic firm because they want more clients and more work. This one had nothing on it. I would note for the record that neither Wedgwood nor Media nor SoCal Shirt has ever made it through the vigorous vetting processes of either MessageBox or Puller Coaster.

So just saying that, New York Times.

those polls were none of these polls were pulling him but like it just it just the whole thing the

whole thing is stupid and counterproductive uh one type of new story that car probably won't be

If we won this election by enough and we got the Senate majority and the House majority, it's done out of the question that you're at least sending, it's actually quite plausible, maybe probably you're sending a War Powers Resolution to his desk and force him to veto it.

Yeah, and he will, and then we'll still have a war. But I think you're going to have a budget that they're going to need money at some point. And if we have a big enough majority in both houses, we're going to be able to not give him the money he needs to do the war. That'll be a whole fight. We're just right back into 2006 all over again. I know. I know. But you know what? But with a bunch of Republicans, though, whose colleagues just lost their jobs because of this war and Donald Trump is on his way out. And so they may be a little more amenable to working with Democrats to end this war. I mean, there are parallels here with how Republicans responded to Bush's loss in 2006 in the years going forward.

And if Democrats can have a great election and make real gains here, it's not just that we'll have more numbers. It's that Trump will have less of a hold on his people on some issues. Yes. And this is likely one of them. Pod Save America is brought to you by Vanta. When you run security for a company that's scaling fast, the stakes tend to heighten quickly. More compliance frameworks, more vendors, more risk, and a board that wants to see it all in one place. And sometimes it's fun in these ads to find out about a very scary part of life that's not ours. I don't run security for a company, and I'm glad other people do.

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Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Pod Save America. It's the best way to support the show. All right, let's get to the latest in Ohio. Good to see old friends and new. We're packed house here. Look at this tonight. We're ready to do this. Sir, sir, excuse me. Excuse me. You're going to leave this room. You're going to be... Sir, sir, do you want to... All right. That's the sound of Vivek Ramaswamy getting heckled at a campaign event for running the most despicable ad I think I've ever seen in politics.

It's up there with the Max Cleland Osama Bin Laden ad. Yeah. But this is probably, I think this is worse. I think this is worse. I thought about that one. I think this is worse. As you've probably read by now, the ad features the estranged mother of Vivek's opponent, Amy Acton, calling her daughter a liar and unfit for office. What the ad doesn't say is that Acton and her brother were removed from their mother's custody after her second husband was charged with raping Amy when she was 10 years old. He then fled the state to avoid standing trial with her mother, who stayed married to him until he died.

Vivek decided to put $4 million behind the ad despite many prominent Ohio Republicans denouncing it. Governor Mike DeWine, who called on Ramaswamy to pull it down, Senator John Husted, former Senator Rob Portman, and former Ohio Congressman Jim Renacci, who said, quote, the floor may have just fallen out from under the Republican campaign for Ohio governor, and any Republican who fails to distance themselves from this ad risks taking on water as well. Well, the most prominent Ohio Republican in the country has not only declined to distance himself from the ad, but actively defended it. Here's the vice president of the United States at a rally in Ohio on Wednesday.

And now the media and the Democrats in the state of Ohio are obsessed because guess what? Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial, which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar. On Thursday, Trump chimed in with a lengthy Truth Social post fully endorsing the ad, calling it, quote, hitting pay dirt. And then later he spoke to reporters on his way to his next event and continued to defend the ad. His whole thing is, well, if it was my mother saying something like saying that I was a liar, you'd all love the ad. You'd all love it. He's not getting the point here, is he?

No, he doesn't. I think he has no idea. Like he's been a little late to this. He seemed a little surprised when the reporter gave him the context. Yeah, he clearly did not have it Because at first, he was like, I don't know. It seemed tough. Like, he had some comment where he wasn't all in. And then clearly, because J.D. Vance went all the way out on the fucking limb, by himself, really, Trump had to back him up. Yeah, I mean, obviously, Trump will always side with the abused or not the abused. So, this is his natural place. But it wasn't clear that he knew exactly what he was supporting in the beginning.

I mean, obviously, we all want to believe the Jim Renacci view that this is backfiring in a huge way. Do you think it is? Are all the Republican condemnations evidence of that? Are there other indicators we can look for? Well, there hasn't been, obviously, any polling that's been done since this ad came out. And I think it's very possible that this will be sort of a object of fascination among the politically obsessed who already made their decision in this race. But I do feel a relative amount of confidence saying that an ad this disgusting that accuses a 12-year-old of lying about rape, that even members of your own party, popular members of your own party are saying is disgusting, is not going to help the candidate whose biggest vulnerability is that everyone thinks he's an asshole.

Yeah. We don't have to overcomplicate this. It is not like, is this the thing that's going to turn the election? I don't know if enough people will know it or see it, but it's not going to help them. And generally, as a rule in politics, you don't want popular, if you're a Republican, you want popular Republicans attacking you 10 days before the election. And J.D. Vance did use the word disgusting. But when he used the word disgusting, it was about Republicans complaining about this ad. That's what he said is disgusting. Like, what do you think? J.D. Vance, like, I know I'm biased because I. hated jd vance for a long time um but i find myself being more infuriated with him than even vivek ramaswamy which is crazy because vivek ramaswamy is complete scum for running the ad in the first place but jd vance that smarmy little fuck getting up there and being like oh everyone's complaining and it just it calls it like it it calls her a liar the ad tells it like it is like the woman in this ad the mother is just fucking i mean i don't know if she's got mental problems i don't know if she's just pure evil i don't know what it is but like i didn't realize this when we talked about it the first time so this guy that she married when she married

him he had already been indicted for sexually abusing his own daughter from another marriage so she first of all marries someone who'd been indicted for uh sexually abusing his daughter then he sexually abuses her daughter 10 years old physically and sexually abuses both kids her brother as well and then when the guy gets arrested and charged with rape of her own daughter she decides to believe him and then flees the state with him so he can avoid charges for avoid standing trial and then Amy Acton never saw her mother again they had been on the run ever since. The guy eventually dies. And then Vivek Ramaswamy says, oh, great idea. I'll put her in an ad. And then JD Vance sees that and is like, fuck yeah. Tells it like it is. And the guy, the hillbilly elegy guy who wrote a book and rose to prominence because of his experience as a child in a traumatized household and he has like not a shred of empathy about this.

It's like he's a fucking sociopath. He has no soul. Like he does not. True sociopath. He calls himself like a Catholic, a man of God and goes on and on about how like he's one. What the fuck? His problem is that he only cares about whatever he thinks advances his own ambition and he has decided that the only way that he can be nominee of Donald Trump's Republican Party is that he has to double and triple down. He has to prove his loyalty because he was once an apostate. He has to prove his loyalty over and over again every single day by doing the most debasing stuff humanly possible. And you know what he's going to, because like he did this with Childless Cat Ladies.

Remember like, you know, a couple months ago, who knows when. He gave some interview where he was like, yeah, I wish I hadn't said that. You know, how much you want to bet like three months from now, six months from now, or a year from now, this will get brought up and he'll be like, you know, once I learned about all the details, which I didn't know at the time, once I learned about that, yeah, they shouldn't run that ad. I don't know. I'm not sure because with the Childless Cat Lady's thing, his thing was not like, you know, I offended a lot of people and I heard from them and I thought about it.

He realized it was bad for him politically, so that's why he felt bad about it. I think this will follow him in 2020. Oh, I think so. I think so as well. And maybe he will realize that. But I just don't, maybe he'll admit it. I don't know, but I'd be, I'd kind of be surprised that he would have enough, like, self-confidence and self-awareness to see, realize it's bad for him. Because there are going to be, you know, Will Sommer at the Bulwark has a piece out today about how now the right media, after being initially against us, the mega media folks are coming out in support of the ad. People like Ben Shapiro, you know, it's like this is, you know, politics is a tough business kind of stuff.

Ben Shapiro compared it to RFK's family members coming out during the campaign and criticizing RFK Jr. He compared it. He said it's the same thing. Missing a few elements of the story, but yeah, sure. Yeah, and the fact that in this case, this person had not really been involved in their daughter's life for 50 years. So like why she's a character witness? just married to a fugitive rapist pedophile. That's a fugitive, rapist, pedophile. Married a pedophile, brought that pedophile into the same house as her children, and then when that pedophile got caught abusing her children, left her children, abandoned her children for the pedophile.

And then a whole bunch ad makers, staffers, Vivek Ramaswamy, J.D. Vance, I guess Ben Shapiro, all these, they're all like, yep, this is our woman. This is her. She's a great character witness. It's, it's... It's one of the most disgusting things that will ever happen in American politics. It really is. Like, I just don't, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's shocking. It's, it's shocking. And you know what, sometimes it's like a shocking, but not surprising. It actually is surprising. I'm like, I was, I said this yesterday to Rhodes and we did Only Friends, but I was like, you could have, I could have seen a still very slimy way to handle this, which is, would be J.D. Vance being like, I have so much empathy for Amy Acton and I, that's horrible what she went through.

and I don't know about this ad, but Vivek Ramaswamy, he's still the guy I wanted to be governor and that's one ad and maybe it was a mistake, but basically what John Husted did, which is still pretty slimy because John Husted also appeared with Vivek and Vance and didn't actually call for the ad to come down, right? So it's like he's not a fucking profile in courage on this one. Just a coward with a great ass. A coward with a great ass, right? But like Vance could have gone that route. No, that's not the route he went. He decided to go the lowest possible. That's the only way he can go because he's got to prove that he's truly MAGA.

Speaking of Vance being in tune with his home state, after the rally on Tuesday, he dropped in on a Cincinnati Bengals practice. And there was a video of him attempting to greet the players as they went into the locker room, but it sort of sucked. It's just him sort of like, just being his typical doofus J.D. Vance. Well, they all walked past him without acknowledging him. A couple said like, a couple quickly said hi. But here's star quarterback Joe Burrow getting a question about it afterwards. Vice President Vance was here at practice today. Did y'all get a chance to interact at all? We did not.

We did not. He came with everybody and left with swiftness and efficiency. What do you think Joe Burrow was thinking there? Do you think this was just for you personally? Because I know you're a Patriots fan, but you married into a Bengals family. I know. There's a real relief that the superstar quarterback did not do what many NFL players have done. You know what's funny? The true Bengals fan in my life is my mother-in-law. I have not. I've got to ask her what she thought about that. I bet she held her fucking breath through that whole thing. Especially because she's had quite a few things to say about Tom Brady.

Yeah, I bet, yes. To me. Like, how many MAGA quarterbacks could one guy have in his family? Exactly. I think the video itself, which doesn't really play for the purpose of this podcast, but is really worth watching because there's something so delicious about the fact that I imagine that most of J.D. Vance's life was wanting acceptance but being denied acceptance and acknowledgement by the football team. Just like he was never a cool kid, always a nerd, and the football team, best case scenario, pretend like he didn't exist, that's best case scenario. Now he's vice president of the United States.

He is one heartbeat away from being the leader of the proverbial free world. He goes to football practice in his home state and they ignore him just like his high school team. The only enjoyable thing about J.D. Vance's 2028 presidential campaign is going to be watching him put on the human suit and go out and do culturally expected things that a presidential candidate has to do and just watch how awkward it is. I mean, like for all the mockery Mitt Romney got for every time he tried, you know, like the who let the dogs out video. These are all deep cuts. J.D. Vance is going to be a hundred times worse. Yeah, that's true.

He's going to make Mitt Romney look like a man of the people. Same with like, he's going to make Ronda Sanders You just look like the coolest customer out there. It's the only thing I'm looking forward to. I cannot wait. All right, Trump's continuing flirtations with other men kind of drowned out the other political events on Wednesday night. But we did get the final debates in the Michigan and Kansas Senate races. Let's start with Michigan. If you didn't tune in, here's a sample of how it went. So being bought off by the Muslim Brotherhood, having donors to his campaign from Hamas that support Hezbollah is not a problem?

To bring into question, my commitment to the Constitution is really beneath you. I am proud of America. I'm proud to be an American. I'm proud of our Constitution that guarantees all of us the right to pray as we choose to pray. And the question that you would ask that I think is actually really quite shameful. Yeah, so that's how that went. How much of the debate did you get to watch? It actually was not as a tough, like it wasn't as a contentious debate, I think, as the first one. Which is surprising since he's talking about being bought off by the Muslim Brotherhood. I was trying to two-screen the debate as my family was watching the WNBA Finals game with the Valkyries last night.

So I caught most of it. It was like, the other ones were quite heated. And you often see this happen when there's multiple debates. It's by the third one, everyone is sort of, they've gotten everything they have to say. They've unloaded the clip. They're kind of exhausted by it. They've probably seen the focus groups that say that no one liked what they saw. And so it's a little more chill. I'm not sure that any of these debates had any impact on the dynamics of this race. I thought Abdul, the thing where Abdul is very good is he responds to the attack that he is anti-American, too extreme, a terrorist, not by saying I'm not a terrorist, not by rebutting the individual facts, although he does that when he has to.

It's that he shows in what he says and how he acts how he loves this country. Like his closing statement, as has been in all of these debates, is very powerful. He talks about his love for the country, how – it's very Obama-esque and how basically only in this country his story could be true. How privileged he is to have the opportunity to be an American citizen, to run for office here and what that says about this country. So I think he handles that very, very well. Yeah, we talked about the exchange with the Republican, you know, tracker, plant, whatever, in that town hall. The guy with close relationships with CBS News talent?

Yes, that's right, yeah. Um, and how, you know, maybe Abdul's answer was part of it was good, but maybe it was like a little condescending, maybe which the questioner deserved, but maybe not the wider audience who might have the questions. I feel like in, this was like the best Abdul, um, handling Mike Rogers attacking this because he was, I mean, he was even respectful to Mike Rogers who did not deserve to be, he did not, he did not take the bait, which is the thing that Abdul tends to do in these cases. And sometimes that works out to his benefit in viral moments and sometimes it doesn't, But he was disciplined in this debate.

And you can sort of watch a debate and get a sense of potentially like what the internal polls say. Like I remember watching the last Abdul-Haley Stevens vote debate. And it was like – remember we had no idea what the public polls were saying. It was like watching that debate, it's very clear that Haley Stevens thinks she's losing this because she's really – she was the one swinging at all the pitches. You watch this, you believe that Abdul thinks he's winning or his polls suggest he's winning. And he's trying to finish strong and not, you know, get dragged into the mud with Rodgers and Rodgers by with all the Hamas.

You can tell Rodgers thinks he's losing. There was also another moment where Rodgers did criticize the tariffs, which sort of but but like didn't say he would do anything about them. So that leaves him open to that. But when you can tell why earlier he hadn't done that, because if you criticize the tariffs, then you have to say, like, well, I'll stop them when I get to the center or something like that. And he can't say that, but he was. He was like, yeah, they weren't well thought out. Well, I bet he says something different when Trump comes to Michigan in two days. Can't wait for that. All right.

So some wild Mad Libs there. Well, here's a simpler corruption scheme to get your head around from a New York Times report on Tuesday. A Venezuelan billionaire named Julio Herrera Velutini wanted a campaign finance conviction expunged from his record. You don't want that on your record. No, no. So what do you do? He made a massive donation to a Trump super PAC. That didn't work. I guess no one really noticed. So he created a fake business, hired Alina Habba as its fake general counsel while she was still working at the Justice Department, and then promised to pay her $50 million over four years.

Just a few weeks later, here's what the Times writes, quote, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Herrera a full and unconditional pardon. How about that? Hobba denied that the employment had anything to do with the pardon, but, quote, declined to discuss her work for the fake business. I'm sure Alina Habba believes that as a member of Trump's inner circle, she's untouchable. Counterpoint, she might want to check out the report in the Wall Street Journal today that DOJ is looking into allegations that former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski profited off his role as a senior advisor slash romantic partner at the Department of Homeland Security. Counter counterpoint. The journal also reports that Lewandowski has told friends that if a criminal case is brought against him, he's going to get a pardon. Counter counter counterpoint.

Trying to count the counters here. Trump was asked about all this just before we recorded and said that if his people aren't honest, they have to be prosecuted because they're stealing from me, is what he said. Me. Me. As the president, stealing from me because the taxpayer money is my money and the corruption that I get to do because of my office is my corruption. What do you think about this one? How much is he going to have to pay Alina Hobbit to get that pardon? Corey Lewandowski. $51 million. Is she going to... Like, so, she got $50 million for this? I mean, I think she's probably only gotten $10 million because it's...

Oh, yeah, it's over a couple years. A couple years. So, she hasn't fully vested her $10 million corrupt money yet. Also, if I was her, I would have slowed the pardon down. It's just really obvious. I mean, it's so... Like, I kept reading that story trying to figure out how it was that she had a $50 million fake job and was working in the Justice Department at the same time. But it turns out she had one of the, like Corey Lewandowski, one of those fake special government employee things where you can work for 130 days, but also make other income on the side. And this is what they're investigating, yeah, this is what they're investigating Corey Lewandowski for because he was special government employee.

So he had this other consulting firm and was just going around, just approving all the contracts for the Department of Homeland Security. So they were, so he was picking the contractors who were, of course, giving him money, giving his, giving him, paying him for this. And then there's a lot of questions about a plane purchase that had some relationship to political supporters of Christy Gnome where they overpaid for it. And this is a stunning detail about the private plane. Okay. We've talked about the bedrooms, the bedrooms, the showers, the marble countertops. There is a table with manta ray skin on it.

What is a manta ray? A manta ray is a very large. It's a stingray? It's a giant ray that is usually often eight feet wingtip to wingtip. Just as a side note, I took my kids snorkeling with manta rays over the summer. And so people are like skinning these things and using countertops. It's definitely not legal. For Christy Gnome? Yeah, I don't really know how they got them. Yes, maybe she had a manta ray pet and was dissatisfied with it. I don't really know. These fucking people. Yeah, like, you know what? Yes, they get to be held accountable. is a thing did you see the whole thing with elissa slotkin last week we didn't we didn't even talk about the popular no she was asked um uh it was a stead herndon and and she was in a the iop in chicago it was like you know what are we doing with democrats take back congress and she's like look well first parties we absolutely have to um take care of cost of living stuff um and we have to work on that she's like you know i also think there needs to be accountability and i think specifically around the corruption and i don't think we can be doing this all the time because we can't just just be focused on corruption there's a lot of other things to do

but i think we need to take some signature cases and make sure that people are held accountable um and not obviously she like we can't you know trump is trump but like all the people who did his bidding you know need to be held accountable too. And, and I want to make sure that, you know, when people are thinking about joining the Trump administration, they think to themselves, well, I don't want to get myself into a bunch of, this is probably more trouble than it's worth because they are going to see the people who were corrupt and broke the laws are held accountable. And people on the right fucking flipped out. They called it fascism. They said that Alyssa Slotkin is trying to, who is just promising that she's going to throw young conservatives in jail or Republicans in jail as retribution.

It was, the hysteria was insane. Do you know why there was hysteria? Why? Because they're all making money off this thing. Yeah, I was also... That fucking shit Mike Davis was like, this is what the second, she's going to find out what the Second Amendment is for. Oh, I did. You're right. You saw that. I did see this. But like Mike Lee jumped in, Steve Scalise jumped in. Like, it wasn't just like dickbags on Twitter. It was like real, like elected Republicans going after Alyssa Slotkin on this. It was horrifying. I mean, that's what they're going to do when we do all this stuff. It is this amazing thing where it's like, oh, now see, Democrats are going back to weaponization.

It's like, no, you stole money. You all stole money and profited off your fucking jobs and you broke a bunch of laws. Guess what? When you break laws and you fucking steal from the taxpayers, you should get held accountable. Also, not for nothing, the Trump administration has been trying to prosecute everyone. From the head of the Fed to a guy who threw a sandwich and everyone in the middle. It's like, meanwhile, this guy's like, you know, Lena Haba's getting $50 million to get a pardon. And we're like, oh, don't, stay away. She's general counsel of a fake company. Also, is it really worth $50 million, this dude, to get this campaign finance misdemeanor office?

I was going to ask that. I was like, look, I haven't had a campaign finance misdemeanor on my record, but I don't, I think if I did, I don't know that I would pay $50 million if I have that money. He's also not an American citizen. So like, what is it? What was he looking for there? Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, that's between him and Alina Habba. Well, I guess Alyssa Slack and the rest of us will find out next year. Let's hope so. All right, Dan, when we come back, you'll hear from our candidate for governor of Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms. pod save america is brought to you by neutrophil sometimes upgrading your wellness routine doesn't require a full overhaul it's just about narrowing in on the one thing you can gradually and sustainably improve if hair health is something you've been meaning to pay more attention to now is a great time to make a part of your routine that's where neutrophil comes in neutrophil is the number one dermatologist recommended hair growth supplement brand and it's the number one hair growth supplement brand personally used by dermatologists because hair health isn't one size fits all neutrophil offers different formulas for both men and women and at any age or stage of life.

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We're gonna have Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor, Stacey Abrams, Dan Pfeiffer, Aaron Ryan, and many more special guests to be announced. And they're all going to help us make sense of what's happening as the election results roll in. So here's what you need to do. Subscribe to Pod Save America on YouTube and tune in on Tuesday, November 3rd at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific for hot takes, catharsis, and as many results as we can possibly analyze. This is Troy Millings from Earn Your Leisure. If you run a small business, you know how important it is to stay on top of your numbers. That's why I want to tell you about Xero.

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Welcome back to the pod. Well, thank you for having me. I'm so glad to be here. It's been a long time since we've had you on. Now, back in 2021, you made the unexpected decision to not seek a second term as mayor of Atlanta. You were on Biden's VP shortlist. You had turned down an offer to run SBA. What do you think about that decision in retrospect? And what led you to jump back into politics? I very much still believe it was the best decision. And, you know, it was difficult to articulate it at that time. everybody called 2020 the great resignation. I call it the great re-evaluation. And for me, it was making a decision that was very personal, what was best for my family at that time. My kids were, two were in elementary school, one was in middle school, one was a senior in high school, the disruption of life as we knew it in 2020. And then personally, my dad died suddenly at 55.

And I was giving a lot of thought in the aftermath of COVID, especially just about mortality. And if I had four years left, what would those four years look like? And for me, it was stepping out of the ring. And, you know, people make changes all the time, career changes. Most people don't do it in the public eye. And I did it, you know, with 68 percent approval ratings at that time in the mayor's office. So it was unexpected, but a decision I'm very proud of because I put my family first and I made a decision that I know was best for us at that time. I think if I only had four years left, I'd really focus on gaining as many YouTube followers as I could.

The governor can make a lot of decisions in Georgia. It's one of the most powerful governors in the country, just by the way the office is constituted. Although we anticipate there may be an effort to strip those powers, God willing, when I win, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. But the governor of Georgia has the ability to make 4,000 appointments to boards and commissions. The budget comes from the governor's office. The governor can suspend the gas tax, which my opponent opposed at some point.

So the ability and the will of the governor has a lot of influence in Georgia. I want to expand Medicaid in Georgia. We are one of 10 states who have not expanded Medicaid. And it's not been done because the governors haven't wanted to do it. So I want to talk about where your opponent is on this question because he seems to be a little bit all over the place on Medicaid expansion. In the Republican primary, he seemed to be against it. Now he seems to have moderated. But to be honest, I don't know what his position is. He says he wants intelligent Medicaid expansion, but it's not clear what he's talking about.

Do you know what he's talking about? No, I don't know what he's talking about because it doesn't make sense. I describe him like the whiz. Whatever the color of the day is, is what he goes with. One day he wants to be Donald Trump. One day he doesn't. One day he doesn't want Medicaid expansion. And the next day he does. One day he says the National Guard is going to be called in during our election, and then he doesn't remember. One day he owns and invests in four data center companies, and then he doesn't know. Well, he does. So, you know, I don't know what this new position is on Medicaid. He's never explained it. I doubt that he knows it. But what I do know is that his entire fortune is built on us having a broken health care system. He makes money when hospitals can't retain doctors and nurses. He makes money by sending people back in at a much higher rate. In Alabama, he called it venture philanthropy. We call it vulture philanthropy. It was a failing hospital in Alabama because Alabama's also not expanded Medicaid. And he extended them what he called a lifeline at a 14 to 19 percent interest rate. That's a loan shark. I just want you to know something, which is that when I was a kid, I was in an all Jewish production of The Wiz,

not The Wizard of Oz, but little Jewish boys and girls playing all the characters from The Wiz. Can you believe that? No, but I want to see it. I don't want anyone to see it. No one can see it. And what was your role? I was the tin man. Slide some oil to me. I sang it. I sang that part. Well, that's ambitious and impressive. I can't believe that was allowed. All right, we got to move on. Georgia, speaking of the arts, Georgia has become a hub. I can't believe I was a kid. What were the adults doing? I love it. That's wild. That's wild. Georgia has become a hub for film and television production.

But, you know, for a long time here in L.A., it was like, oh, Atlanta's taken all of L.A.'s jobs. Right. And the numbers went up dramatically. But then there was the strikes and there was a slowdown. And now L.A. and Georgia have both lost a lot of production jobs to London and other places. And New Jersey. And New Jersey, which is, I mean, what are we doing? How much of a role do you see the governor is having in trying to keep film and production jobs in Atlanta? Because it was a huge business and that's suddenly declined. Well, again, a lot of what happens in Georgia through the legislature comes from the will of the governor.

So my understanding and talking with industry leaders is that at some point, Georgia got complacent. We came out fast and furious with this great incentives package that was able to take business from California, Louisiana, North Carolina, New York. And then we stopped there. We never updated our incentives. We didn't tweak them based on new competition. So this has been an active conversation that I've had because we now, even in Georgia, have a whole generation of students who've now gone through our university system training to work in the film industry. We've got some great programs at many of our schools, and now the business is not there.

So we got to make sure that we update it as we would with any industry that we're trying to remain competitive in. So right now, if you look at the polls, you have John Ossoff pulling ahead of Mike Collins, and then you're locked in basically a dead heat with Rick Jackson, which would suggest that there are some people out there that are either voting for Ossoff and undecided in the governor's race or voting for Ossoff and maybe considering a split ticket vote. What is your message to those specific voters, that group of people that are leaning Ossoff but not on your side yet? Yeah. And so what I will say about that, and Senator Ossoff is an incredible leader, incredible friend.

We did a great rally together just last week. We've done several together. What our data is showing us is that many of these are Republican split ticket voters. But that being said, you know. I'm making my case to everybody, Democrats, Republicans, independents, and we need strong leadership in Georgia. We need better in Georgia. And better means expanding Medicaid. Better means making sure our schools are fully funded. Our current education formula was written in 1985 when I was still in the marching band at Frederick Douglass High School, and Dougie Fresh was the halftime show. What did you play in the marching band? I played the clarinet. I played the clarinet.

I played the drums. I played the drums in the marching band. Yeah. And for me, it was just a time to be social. I wasn't that serious of a musician. I didn't have any friends. Yeah, but I remember that Dougie Fresh halftime show. We did not do that. That's why I'll sit. It was a different school. It wasn't the wins, but it was Dougie Fresh. But that's when our education formula was written. Also, support of our small businesses, creating a pathway for free technical and community colleges. And I'm hearing from our young people loud and clear expanded access to mental health services. These are the things that are on the ballot that I'm talking about that I've laid out plans for and my opponent has been selling on the things that he has talked about, taking credit for the six week abortion ban in Georgia.

He's taking credit for Medicaid not being expanded in Georgia. So he's focused on all the wrong things because he wants to be Trump's favorite governor. In his words, he wants to be Trump Trump with a southern tone. In his words, he doesn't disagree with a single policy from the Trump administration. In his words, do you think there's like a they're going after you on crime? They're going after you on some of the covid lockdown stuff. It's clearly about keeping a certain subset of voters on side. Right. As you were saying. And are you meeting people on the campaign trail that are sort of susceptible to all these ads that are trying to kind of stereotype Democrats about law and order, about immigration?

Like, do you have a message for those voters to kind of basically say, hey, like, this is this is what the race is about. They're trying to scare you on this. But here's here's the ways you know that you can trust me on these things. When we find that we are able to put the truth in front of people and remind them of what actually happened when I was mayor, it's very easy. This is why resources are so important. This guy's put $200 million into this election, $100 million against me alone. This much money has never been spent to try and slander one person, one family, than has been put up against my family and I.

And we are still tied in this race. So when I remind people, I balanced the budget for four years. I didn't raise taxes. I gave police and fire largest pay increase in the history of the city. I left one hundred and eighty million dollars in the bank. We got our employees up to $15 an hour during the fight for $15 that we created a child savings account for all of our public school kids, 7,000 units of affordable housing. We created an affordable housing trust fund. When those facts are put in front of people, then it's no match. But when you are up against the largest television buy that's ever been made in the history of Georgia, this guy sends so many mailers to my house.

I get like three duplicate mailers a day telling me not to vote for me. It is this unlimited amount of money and we are tied. Then it is it's this reminder that he has the money, but the people still have the power. Our challenge is just having the resources to get our messaging out, which, by the way, anybody who wants to support can do that at Keisha, K-E-I. S-H-A for governor.com. And momentum is on our side. The turnout numbers that we are seeing from Democrats are very similar to those that we saw in May during the primary. We were outspent by $100 million by Republicans, and we still outvoted them by 150,000 votes. And a poll that came out today from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The newspaper shows that I'm winning with independent voters. One of the issues that's been sort of part of this race is data centers. You've come out for a moratorium. Your opponent has said it should be left up to local governments, the counties. He's also an investor in data centers. Why is a moratorium more appropriate than just leaving it up to, say, county commissioners?

Well, let me just touch on what he says. Which is what he's saying, yeah. Yeah, now that maybe he remembers or doesn't remember, or I don't know if he's just not telling the truth or if he honestly doesn't remember that he owns these four companies. In Bowie, Texas, right now, there's a community fighting against him where he said, I want community to decide. The community is saying, we don't want this data center in our backyard. and it's been clouded in secrecy and they're saying we don't want it and he's still trying to push it forward. I'm saying pause in Georgia. Right now we are number one in the country for new construction.

We have passed Northern Virginia. The billions of dollars of incentives have been promised. I'm saying let's take a pause. Let's get everybody at the table from people who can talk to us about our water sources, who can talk to us about property values, who can talk to us about long-term health impacts, who rate payers, who are saying, my bills have gone up. Let's get in a room and then figure out the responsible way that we move forward as a state. So I'm asking for us to pause on new construction until we can get all of the information, because the state of Georgia has never offered that to people in our state.

So your dad was a Grammy-nominated R&B and soul singer. He opened for the Beatles. Elton John got to start playing piano for his band. I think he actually played guitar. Oh, guitar. Really? Elton John has actually told me this story, but I can't remember. He said it was the biggest break he ever got in music.

He said we had moved to Europe, and there was something called the Northern Craze, Northern Soul, where soul singers like my dad would then move to Europe when their careers started to wane. And Elton John says that he went to audition for Wilson Pickett, and he passed on them. And my dad picked the band up, and they traveled around Europe, and he said at the end of the tour, my dad took his tie off and put it around his neck. And then Sir Elton serenaded me with one of his songs. Did you ever think about going into a career in music over politics? Was that ever something that was a draw to you?

It was. I just can't sing or dance. It was what I always wanted to do. So yeah, that was the end of that. If elected, you would be the first black woman elected governor anywhere in America. Obviously, your campaign follows Stacey Abrams' campaigns to sort of build and organize in Georgia. What does that mean to you? How do you think about that? For me, it is deeply personal. My family goes back at least five generations, at least five in Georgia. We can trace our roots to a plantation in Crawfordville, Georgia. My daughter recently pulled up some census records from Hancock County, Georgia, and it has one of my ancestors listed as a field hand, one as a house servant. And the fact that I am able to be the Democratic nominee just speaks to what's possible. The other side of my dad's story, my dad was just an incredible person and a wonderful father, wonderful human being. My dad's name was Major Lance. My dad struggled with addiction.

When I was eight, my dad went to prison. And I say my first Thank you. tour around Georgia, was not running for governor, was going to visit my dad and all these places. And I go to some of those towns now. Like, oh, I remember when daddy was in prison here. And so for me, it is so much more personal that given my story and all the generations of my family overcame and sacrificed, that this opportunity is before me. And it is, I hope, representative of the possibilities for people all around the state. So when this guy says he wants to be Trump's favorite governor, like, I want to be the favorite governor of that little girl who no longer gets to go to ballet but has to go visit her dad in prisons on the weekends.

Keisha Lance Bottoms, good luck in the campaign trail. Thank you. The website is keishaforgovernor.com. You should consider putting $60 million of your own money in. I think that that would be a smart way to compete. I don't know why you haven't thought of doing that. Well, God hasn't seen fit to make me a billionaire yet, but hey, I'm still young. Who knows? Yeah, anything is possible in America. Thank you so much. Thank you. And great talking to you. Thank you. That's our show for today. Thanks to Mayor Bottoms for coming on. Alex will be back in the feed on Sunday with a conversation with former Attorney General Eric Holder about election protection and how this year's big gerrymandering push is playing up.

Bye, everyone. No, I just don't say anything. I just don't even know what you're going to say. I'm just waiting for you to say the wrong thing.