Hi, I'm Molly john Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds, and the Justice Department says Trump can be sued for the January sixth insurrection. We have an amazing show for you today. Tennessee State Representative Gloria Johnson, a member of the Tennessee three, stops by to talk
to us about all the fuckory in her workplace. Then we'll talk to Cook Political Reports Amy Walter about the Senate and the congressional maps in twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four. But first we have the host of the Bulwark podcast, Charlie Sykes. Welcome to Fast Politics, Charlie Sykes.
It is great to be back, Molly.
We're delighted to have you. So. I mean, I feel like every week is slightly worse. But the thing I want to read you and start with because feels like a real line in the sand here April eighteenth, is a tweet from Lloyd Blankfine. You may remember Lloyd blankfind does this man have the temperament to be president? Disney is lucky they don't have the launch codes, hippie Lloyd Blankfine.
That is a sick burn round Santis doubling down on Disney, threatening them I'm gonna put a prison next to you. It is one of these strange moves where, now I don't mean to be snarky here, but does anybody actually remember what.
This fight is actually about.
This is one of those things where it's vindicativeness for the sake of vindictiveness. The fight is about the fight. I don't know how many people, many voters would even remember that. This is because Disney criticized his don't say a Gay bill and this is his retaliation.
But he keeps upping the anty. And here's the thing, Molly.
All Disney has to do at this point is put out a press release saying, you know, we're just concerned about the business climate in Florida and we're thinking of moving some of our tens of thousands of jobs out of the state. And what DeSantis is toast, I mean, it's just it is so self defeating. But this is this culture in the Republican Party where Donald Trump has steel balls, so Ron DeSantis has to say, no, I have titanium balls.
There's no end to it.
You see that Trump is now trolling DeSantis about this. I'm true social you know how bad it is when Donald Trump is trolling you saying you're getting killed by Disney and you know this is going to blow up in your face. And I have to tell you, I hate myself for saying this, but Trump is not completely wrong about how dumb a political move this is.
You really know the machinations here better than I do. How did Ron DeSantis get here? You know, this was the great white hope of the Republican Party up until a few weeks ago. I mean obviously not. There must have been decisions that led him to this point.
See, this is an interesting question because you always think that, well, you had to have thought about this, right, I mean, you hadn't know what you were getting into. You had to kind of know that somehow you needed to navigate the MAGA base, You needed to be able to take on Trump without alienating the magabase. And yet it's more and more apparent that Ron DeSantis didn't really see this coming.
I mean, look, it feels like a cliche to say that that, you know, political history is littered with all of these governors who think they could be president and then found that, hey, when the light came on. They were not ready for prime time. It's kind of hard to scale up. I mean there's you know, there's Governor Rick Perry, and you know, I mean there's President Rick Perry, and there's President Scott Walker, remember President really Rudy Giuliani
and all of these guys. Well, Ronda Santis is now kind of like, hey, and I'm the next guy. He made the calculation that he had to go as far right as possible, that he had to out Trump Trump. But the thing is that he doesn't have Trump's reptilian instinct, and so he goes through the motions and he's now gotten himself in a fight with Disney, and as that is not going well, he is now escalating his fight against bud Light. Because of course, we can't let a culture war spat go unexploited.
I want to point out that is the Bush family, the Anheuser Busch family, right.
The Anheuser Busch family.
Republican megadowners.
And so there are some Republicans who are back well exactly there, and this is one of this is one of these strange moments where all of the Republican candidates are all in on the bud Light boycott. With the exception of Donald Trump, who once again is going like, I don't you know these guys give a lot money
to Republicans. It's a he's purely transactional. But you know, this is the thing about Rhonda Santis is that roond De Santis is a guy who is trying to act like if I was a culture war zealot, what would I do? And there's always kind of doesn't get it right, you know what I'm saying. It's a I think when Mitt Romney said I am severely conservative, let's put on a lizard mask and like I am lizard man. No one is more of a lizard than me. And you know, I can't get the tongue quaite right, right.
That's what strikes me is that if you are completely pretending, then it's not going to be authentic, right.
I think that's one of his problems. Yeah, exactly one of the.
Things I wanted to ask you about, which is a thing that I constantly get drawn into discussions about and every time I'm like, what are you talking about? The whole supposition of DeSantis' shtick was that he was going to run to the right of Donald Trump on policy. But Donald Trump and policy. Do they really belong in the same sentence.
That is an excellent question because I think that anyone who thinks that Republican politics is about ideas or policies has completely missed the transformation of the party because this is a post ideas party. There was a time when Daniel Patrick moyne head said, you know, Republicans are the party of ideas. Well, that was like way decades ago. Now the Republican Party is a party that did not
even have a platform in twenty twenty. It is about posturing, It is about attitude, It is about vibes exactly who can inflict more pain on the people you hate? So yes, thinking that you can run on policy is just incredibly naive. But I think part of it is that DeSantis gets the part about I need to punch people in the nose harder than anybody else. So he has that, but he's not terribly skillful in picking who he's going to punch in the nose. It's worked for him so far
what he's done. You know, you pick on Gaze, you know, you pick on CRT. But going after Disney feels and going after bud Light feels like you're about to turn yourself into a cartoon character.
The thing that I sort of am sad that the Republican Party has completely abandoned is this sort of capital at all. Like I wish they were still into that.
I wonder whether.
They're ever into it actually in retrospect, you know, But you're right, or I would look at it slightly differently, at least into free markets. And this is one of the ironies of someone like a Ronda Santis or the Heritage Foundation is they will say we are for freedom, but you know, free markets not really working for us anymore. So what you have is this kind of this authoritarian desire to use the power of the state nakedly to
punish people. And I think that you know, Donald Trump, you know, stands up and he says, I am your retribution and sitting down in tallahassee Rohnda Santis here's that and goes, well, I have to find somebody that I can be the retribution against them. What people really want is they want vindictamous. They want me to go and inflict pain on someone. That's how we got here. That's how we got Ronda Santis thinking that he can slingshot his way to the presidency by harassing the happiest place
on Earth. I'm just works the optics are really bad.
Boss.
Let's go to war with Moana. Let's go to war with Frozen. Let's go to war with Mickey Mouse. Let's go to war with Sleeping Beauty.
I mean what, he also got married at Disney World.
In everyone I mean, I mean.
I did not. I mean, I just feel like I mean he had some love for the place, the happiest place on Earth.
Well, okay, just from the most transactional point of view, think about the number of employees, the tax base, the economic impact of this company. Now maybe he thinks, well, they're trapped, they can't go anywhere. They have too much invested here. But it is a very rare moment for the governor of a state to go after one of the states, you know, premier economic assets. Leaving aside the cultural issue or the fact that the vast majority of
Americans love Disney World. They love it, they want to take their kids to Epcot, and so he's down there going, well, maybe we'll make it so that families who you know, pack up their their minivans and drive from Oklahoma to get to to get to Disney World will have nightmarish tolls and traffic problems, and you'll have to worry about, you know, the rapists in the state prison next door.
Right, because who is he actually targeting.
He's saying, I'm going to make it miserable for all these American families who are going to spend too much money at Disney World so their kids have an experience. I mean, I have to tell you, Molly, the political genius of this escapes me.
I actually think this is indicative of a larger problem in the Republican Party. For example, So a lot of the things that these Republican candidates are excited about, and again I'm thinking about Tim Scott running to the right of Trump on abortion. A lot of these things are just not I mean, like we're seeing this polling about abortion. You know, it turns out that ending row has made this very popular. Right. Americans may have been on the
fence before, but now they are not. They're just sort of getting into these cultural war issues that aren't necessarily winners. What do you think the.
Play here is, Well, there may not be a play. It just may be that they're trapped. Is that this is a priorty that is held hostage by its own base. But now on abortion and guns, they're not just held hostage by the Republican base. They're held hostage by a very vocal section of the base. Republican voters are not totally down with banning the abortion pill. Republican voters are not necessarily in favor of constitutional carry, where you can
carry concealed weapons without a permit. So what you have is these vocal minorities on the extremes who have a veto power over the rest of the party. So you ask, what is the play. The play is that people like Tim Scott and Rondasy and I just think they have to play to that faction within the faction and maybe they'll figure out, Well when I get to the general election,
I'll worry about that later. Well, that's going to be a very difficult pivot for them to do if they spend the next year pandering to the crazies.
This is a question I actually asked Martin McKinnon, and I'm going to ask you it too, because I feel like you both are uniquely qualified into this. Your fantasy the Republican Party becomes normal again, How does that happen?
Well, Mark so much smarter guy than than I am.
I have to say that I am beyond fantasies because I'm beyond illusions. I don't know that in my lifetime I'm going to see the Republican Party return to anything like a normal rational party. I think the damage that's been done has been too profound, because you know, it's it's misleading to think that all of the problems of the party flow from Donald Trump. A lot of them do. I mean a lot of them do. And I do
think that Donald Trump is a unique existential threat. But the Republican Party has a base problem, and this is going to continue for a very long time, maybe even decades. Think of the number of people who have grown up in this environment who think that this is the way politics are, that this is the way you treat people, that you don't actually have to have policies, you don't
actually have to get anything done. You have an entire generation that's growing up, you know, has grown up since Donald Trump came down that Golden escalator and talked about Mexican rapists. They're going to be around, mollly, They're going to be around for a very very long time. Think about the impact that the politics of nineteen sixty eight have had on politics afterwards, and the way that we're still kind of in that shadow, still kind of hungover from that.
Well, that was how.
Many years ago now, though thirty forty to fifty years from now, I think we're still going to have the hangover to the way this culture has been broken by what we're going through right now. So I don't have a fantasy, to tell you the truth. I guess my fantasy is any buddy but Trump, and then let's move
on from there. You know, anybody other than this narcissistic, sociopathic, chronic liar, who in fact would toward the Constitution if you thought it was in his interest, virtually anybody else is, by our lowered standards, is more normal, not necessarily normal, but more normal. So let's break the fever of the
absolute crazy. Let's get to a point where we actually don't have to care about what Mike Lindell says, or Steve Bannon or Marjorie Taylor Green or Paul Gosar, in which we don't necessarily have the Kevin McCarthy's of the world who have to empower, you know, the most irrational, erratic crazies in his caucus. Maybe that would be my fantasy, but that's not that's not much of a fantasy.
I'm not hoping for unicorns.
I'm just, you know, maybe hoping for a really shaggy, flea ridden donkey who is not Donald Trump.
Let's were you chopped at how stupid? But that McCarthy's speech on the floor was yesterday.
I'm constantly being shocked about how stupid it all is. So no, it's like, Okay, this is Kevin McCarthy, who has told us who he is over and over again.
You know.
The scary part is that Kevin McCarthy is about to potentially tank the US economy with the dead crisis.
Yeah, that's not excited for that.
That's concerning because I don't think that he's smart enough to know how to navigate this, and I don't think he has the political power, and so he's steering us right toward the iceberg and there are very very few responsible adults who are going to run in and you know, grab the helm before he crashes it.
Yeah, that is the nightmare fuel that keeps me up because the American economy is in very even though it's doing okay, it's still in a very precarious spot.
Why have worse nightmare fuel for you?
Oh go tell me my nightmare fuel is that we now live in a country where if I ring the wrong doorbell, or if I'm trying to make a U turn and I pull into the wrong driveway while I'm visiting my kids in southern Maryland, Somebody's gonna shoot me.
Yeah, what happened twice.
We have four hundred million guns in this country. And you know, I am old enough to remember when even the NRA was concerned about gun safety and being responsible. And it's basically the NRA has said, fuck it, Let's just push as many guns out there as possible. Let's make them into the ultimate phallic symbols, and then let's encourage people to actively fear and hate one another and assume that anyone that approaches us who looks at is
funny is dangerous. What could possibly happen? So, you know, and I'm sure you've had this conversation as well. You know, after every single mass shooting, after every single atrocity, you go, well, will this be the turning point? Will this wake us up? And you know the answer is no, And so nothing is going to happen to change that at least.
For some time.
So I have lots of night I have lots of nightmare fuel. But that's that's my nightmare fuel that I have on the bedside.
These days, guns are a situation where they're Republicans don't want to come to the table, right because the base loves it, and they think of any kind of compromise, right. But they think of any kind of compromise as a failure. But if you think about it, the labor shortage in this country, I mean the visual of Sarah Sanders signing a child labor bill just to not have to have immigrants in this country. I mean, that's like stuff from another century.
There is an element in which it's become not just from another century, but a cartoon of another century. I mean, it's like, I think we need to go back and read Dickens more because we're going to be living.
In that world.
This is an interesting point because they create because of their impulses, they create these virtually insoluble problems and then like, okay, you know, we demogogue the whole issue of you know, building the wall and everything and not having these immigrants. We're going to come in and rape your women and take your jobs, and like, wait, we have a terrible labor shortage, so of course we're going to put twelve year old white kids to work now.
Right, Yeah, yeah, it's unbelievable. Well, I mean we are sort of Brexit on a smaller scale, right of stupid or larger.
Oh, I think we are way past Brexit. I think Brexit eats our dust all of this.
Charlie, thank you so much for joining us. I hope you'll come back.
It's always fun. Thank you so much more.
Gloria Johnson is a member of the Tennessee State House of Representatives. Welcome too Fast Politics, Representative Gloria.
Johnson, Well, thank you and thank you for having me.
I wanted to have you for a number of reasons, not just because you are now the most famous. You and the Justins are the three most famous state reps ever to come out of the state of Tennessee.
I guess so. I don't know, it's hard to think about that.
I wanted to ask you a little bit about your experience now, just about the protest. When it started, did you have any sense that things would mushroom into what they are now?
Oh?
Absolutely not, because typically, you know, I got here, we started session. I think we started session. I can't remember what time we started it that day, nine o'clock. I got here well before eight because I knew that people were going to be gathering for the protest and I
wanted to talk to folks who were here. And you know, I spent a lot of time that morning talking to moms who had dropped their kids off at school and were, you know, just tereary, telling me that it's terrifying to drop their kids off, wondering if they're going to be okay when they go to pick them up or when they you.
Know, are they going to come home on the bus.
And just talk to so many parents who are there for that very reason. You know, they want to do everything they can. So this is not something that the children have to worry about and parents have to worry about. My generation worried about school shootings was not a thing, but this generation has grown up with that potential and that possibility.
Yeah, I mean, just insane. So you have been in the legislature longer than the two justins you were in the legislature, did you sort of sub out and then come back?
I live in East Tennessee. Justin Pearson's from West Tennessee. Justin Jones is from met Old Nashville. They come from very blue districts. I am from red East Tennessee, and so I won in twenty twelve. So I served in twenty thirteen and fourteen. I was extremely vocal, as you can imagine, and they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To beat me.
Oh wow.
And so I.
Won that first time by a little under three hundred votes. In the next election in twenty fourteen, they beat me by about one hundred and eighty votes. And then in twenty sixteen they beat me by one hundred and fifty votes. And in twenty eighteen I came back and won by twenty five hundred votes.
Oh I love that. So interesting. Let's just talk about the protests for a minute, because this is like the first time that anyone has ever been expelled from the Tennessee State House for decorum violations. Right.
Right.
Previously it was things that were literal crime, right, except for back in eighteen sixty six, where there was expulsion because some people refused to show up to vote for the fourteenth Amendment. Right, but the last ones were robbery.
Fraud, prostitution, right.
Well, the last one was sexual harassment of twenty two women, right and also there were campaign finance violations that all came out, so there were all of that as well.
Yeah, he sounds great, that guy.
Yeah, yeah, it was great.
Yeah. One of the things that I was struck by with this protest, and the thing that I related to you about your story was that you have been an incredibly good allied to these two justins, And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how the way in which you were able to I don't know, I see myself and you as like being able to be a good ally to younger people who will ultimately hopefully you know, you don't have the lived experience they do,
but you are able to, you know, hold space for them.
Right.
Well, you know, I taught school. I taught teenagers for twenty seven years.
I worked with emotionally disturbed teenagers, which is what I say, that's what prepared me to work in the Tennessee legislature. But I mean I've always and even after I retired, I did fellowships and internships training young organizers to fight for issues or to fight for, you know, candidates work
on campaigns and how to organize. And I've been working with Justin Jones for probably ten years because when I was first here, he was coming here as a student from Fisk who was advokating for using student IDs for as voting IDs. And so then after that I got heavily involved in the expansion of Medicaid. Even when I was not in office, I was the state lead for OFA, and our function at that point was mainly to try to organize to expand medicaid in Tennessee. So that was
something that Justin Jones and I worked on together. He was always there for all of those events. And then, of course back in twenty twenty twenty twenty one, when we were trying to have the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a guy who made millions off the slave trade, who slaughtered three hundred surrendering black soldiers at Fort Pillow, who became the first Grand Wizard of the KKK, he had a bust in the Place of Honor in our capital that our members had to walk past to get to
the House and Senate floor. They had Justin Jones was one of the organizers for a sixty two day protest on Legislative Plaza, and I spend a lot of time there with them as well, so I've known him well. Justin Pearson, I have known for less time, but I know about his hard work on the pipeline in Memphis and what.
They were able to do there.
So as soon as I saw that he was running, you know, I got behind him, got to know him, and welcomed him here. And these these young people, they're so smart, they're so well informed. They're passionate about the issues and their district, and they're passionate about the people that they support. And I feel it's imperative that we lift these voices. They are so important in the Tennessee House, especially because those are voices that are not being heard.
And I'm a sixty year old white woman, and you know, I still have a lot to say, but I'm going to do everything I can to bring in young people and to lift those voices, because it's just critically important that we're hearing every voice in this state and not just those at the top, the wealthy and well connected.
What does the Tennessee State has look like now? Protests are still going on. I mean pete Us is sort of a scene of what's happening right now.
I don't think there's a day they haven't been here. Yesterday Reverend Barber was here with hundreds of pastors and other folks. They marched from the Methodist Church all the way to the Capitol and were present all night last night while we were on the House floor. We will also had a group that have been here since last Thursday who are Republicans for Gun Safety. They say they'll be here every day, and we have had something going
on today. I ran into in the hallway, Margot Price, Alison Russell, Cheryl Crow, some musicians are here, meeting with the head of the Senate, meeting with the governor, bringing a letter about gun violence. So it's and today we have a This afternoon at five, there's going to be a human chain from Vanderbilt Hospital to the Capital.
You and the two Justins did not disappear the way the Republicans had perhaps hoped.
Oh no, absolutely not. We are going to continue this. Certainly.
We welcome talking to the media because it's a way to talk about this issue. And by talking about this issue, we brought so many people together. We have so much support from other states and their state houses and state senates.
Those folks have been reaching out to us, and obviously the folks from Kentucky are reaching out because of the bank shooting that just happened, and they're like, we want to collaborate, we want to talk about this, and I think some of the state reps are coming down today for our human chain. So it started conversation between states at a federal level, like Gabby Gifford's organization has reached
out to us. So we just want to continue to build partners and build the movement so we can do something about gun violence, which is now the number one killer of our children.
How are those Republicans feeling well? Because I'm reading more and more we didn't want to do it, someone else pushed us to do it, anonymous members saying, well, we had we really, you know, we just wanted to teach them a lot. I mean, seems like a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking.
Did you hear the leak's recording of their caucus?
Though yes I did.
That was not We're sorry. That was we didn't do it hard enough? And how dare these people be in our hallowed halls? And they were at war and we were the enemy. And I'm just thinking, how can you be doing the work of the people when all you're focused on is punishing us. I mean, you know, we had this horrible shooting in Nashville, and their first act is to expel members who were trying to speak up
against gun violence. Their first action should have been doing something about gun violence, not expelling members who wanted to talk about it. And this is who they are. I mean, you heard on that Tate They're destroying our way of life and you know they are the enemy. And I came off of that thinking it sounded like a bunch of Confederates strategizing for the Civil War. I mean, yeah, why are they focusing on us? And why are they not focusing on policy that Tennessee families want and need?
Yeah? No, I mean it's just amazing. Where are you now with sort of building your war chast and also kind of galvanizing Tennessee liberals to run against I mean, some of these people probably can be primary or not primary, but beaten in the general.
I can tell you that I just spoke over the weekend I spoke to It was the statewide dinner for the Tennessee Federation of Democratic Women, And whenever I go, you know, I always make that ask to run for office because right now this House is only ten percent women and that's horrifying to me. And this day is fifty two percent women. We need to be fifty two percent of the House. The fact that women, you know, because the elections have been so hideous, especially against me,
the attacks are just ugly. Now they'll have a picture of me covered in blood spatter saying that my friends are violent criminals. And you know, nobody wants those attacks, especially women and bringing it to their family, right So it's hard to get women to step up. But at that after that dinner, so many people came up to me and said, hey, I'm running against so and so Republican this year, and I mean more than way, more than I've ever heard before. And it was just wonderful
to hear that. You know that they're already thinking about, they're already making plans, they're already you know, sort of tracking what they're what the person that they're going to run against is doing in the House. And it's a great thing to see. People are really really energized, and
we're going to keep that energy up. We want good candidates to run and challenge to these folks because even their own members, like I said, Republicans for Gun Reform have been here since last week and they said they're staying as long as we stay. And in my district, I've run red flag laws and safe storage laws for the last couple of sessions and they've been killed in
committee on a party line vote. But I polled red flag laws in my district in deep read East Tennessee, and even a majority of Republicans support red flag laws. So it's supported by a majority of Republicans, Independents and Democrats. They are missing the vote on this because they're listening to the NRA and the Tennessee Firearms Association and they are absolutely not listening to their own constituents and their own voters in many cases.
Yeah, that is kind of incredible. I mean, we're seeing this everywhere in this Republican party. Is that we're seeing Republicans who are completely way to the right of their constituents.
Yeah, and there all those people were here last night. They stayed for three and a half hours because we had a bill on the floor to arm teachers.
Right, I remember, so stupid.
So Reverend Barber was here, all those pastors were here, Lots of people were here. They went into session an hour early. We went in at four. We usually go in at five on Mondays and we usually go till about eight. We went in at four. It gets to seven twenty seven or something like that. We were right at the bill that everybody wanted to hear about arming teachers, that they had waited three and a half hours for and come from all over the country actually to hear that bill.
They rolled it to the next.
Calendar, which is tomorrow hour. Well, well, yeah, it's tomorrow. But everything's iffy because we've moved into a flow motion where the rules that are suspended.
And we speed up. Everything could be anytime.
Really, Jesse made me watch a video, a local news video about the Tennessee State House. Uh huh, our producer, because he's mean, there is a lot of really and we're not on cable television so I can say this fucked up stuff that's going on over there. Can you explain members can in fact do crazy stuff with bills? Right?
Oh, they absolutely do crazy stuff. You probably watched the Phil Williams interview with me and Rep. Dixie Yes, And they do this all the time. We in the Senate they have roll call votes. In the House, we have voice votes. So many times we will take a voice vote and the and the ya's or the na's are clearly louder, and they'll call it the other way they'll call the chairman will call it the way they want
to call it. Okay, And you know, there's nothing you can do because you can't request a roll call vote after the vote's been taken, right, And if we if you want to request a roll call vote, you have to have three people raise their hand in the committee. If someone in the committee wants to request a roll call vote, three people have to raise their hand. We only have two sometimes one Democrat in certain committees, so we can't even get to three to ask for a
role call vote. And if you're a member, you and you're bringing your bill and you want a role call vote, you have to say it before you say anything else, because if you say anything else, they say no, you already started talking. You can't get a roll call vote. However, one of their members will walk up and it's a different story. Adding untimely filed amendments. If we have an
untimely filed amendment, it's likely they will refuse to hear it. However, if they do they hear it, they are Speaker has instituted a new rule this session this year for the one hundred and thirteenth that we only have five minutes to debate a bill, like if when I have questions for the spot of a bill, I have five minutes and what that means. And this happened multiple times last night.
I might ask a thirty second question and then the member will read the entire bill or something and eat up the other four and a half minutes, and then the discussion is over and they don't even answer the question part of it most of the time.
Yeah, I mean that is not great.
Yeah.
And one year, a couple of years back, there was a particularly heinous I think it might have been the Heartbeat Bill, total of ban on abortion, and I stood on the House for for forty five minutes with my hand raised, and they never call them.
Yeah, And part of that is a function of them having the super majority.
Right they can vote and pass anything if we're not there. You know, technically they don't have to let us talk. But I mean, it's what are they so afraid of by doing some in depth debate on their legislation, on their policies. You know, when I bring a bill, I'm proud of the policy and I'll stand up and talk about it for days if you want to. You know, I'm not afraid of hard questions. I will answer them. But they seem terrified to debate the issues they bring to the floor.
Yeah, I mean, just insane. Gloria, thank you so much for joining us. I hope you will come back.
Oh.
Absolutely, I appreciate you having me on, and I just hope we can keep this issue of gun violence in the forefront because it is terrorizing children, is terrorizing communities, and we are the only nation in the world with this problem, and we can fix it if we have the will.
Thank you, Gria. Amy Walter is the editor in chief of The Cook Political Report. Welcome to Ask Politics, Amy.
Walter, thank you for having me.
I am very excited. We were on a panel together on a TV show and I thought, oh, she's so smart, and I want to ask I want to get to ask her questions. So I was really excited to get you on here.
You're very kind. Thank you.
It's true I wanted to start by talking to you about this interesting twenty twenty four contest. Let's just get right into it. Twenty four. We could talk about the Mississippi governor's race if you want, right that's twenty twenty three.
Yeah, we could talk about Kentucky governor's race. That's actually interesting. But you're right, where most people are focusing on is.
Twenty twenty four.
Sure, I get it.
But let's just for one second talk about that Mississippi governor's race. Because James Carvo was on our last episode and he was saying that there's a real dem pickup opportunity. There is that wishful thinking. What do you think?
Look, I think this is a state that, not surprisingly has a pretty significant divide when it comes to race. And in this state, if you are able to mobilize African American voters as a Democrat and win over a smallish percent of white voters, there's a path, but it's a very very narrow path. And I would say, you know, you can see the pathway to getting to like forty seven percent, maybe even forty eight. Getting to fifty is
a lot harder. I think what Democrats were hoping is that the current governor would have a serious primary, or maybe he would be dragged into a runoff. That's what happened in his first campaign. That's not happening now. But you know, look, having the last name Presley, living in a time we're in where things are so intense and so intensely polarized, motivating voters in a state that has been afflicted by a number of issues, especially along racial lines.
If you think about.
Jackson and the water crisis and medicare the refusal to expand medicare right, yep. But if I were to say what would be for Democrats, probably the more important and impressive race would be in Kentucky, where you have a Democratic governor, again in a state that nobody would call blue. Right now, he's favored for reelection, and looking at how Governor Basher is able to hold on to a red state, I think becomes an important playbook. Now, it's not going
to work everywhere or for everyone. In the same way that Glenn Youngkin is trying to sell his experience of winning in a blue state like Virginia. The difference with Younkin, though, is well, he can't run for reelection, so you do it one time but you don't get to your proof of concept, right is hard. But for Basher, winning a reelection in this really red state with a Democrat in the white House, that's not an easy thing to do.
And if he does continue to lead and then ultimately win reelection, he's going to be talked about a lot. When we go to the who's in the next tier of potential Democratic candidates for president, he'll be right up there.
He can have the experience of being heavily scrutinized and you know, I mean not perhaps not careful what you wish for. Let's get to the brass tags here of twenty twenty four, because they don't seem to do things that look like they are caring too much about getting elected, right, Like, they seem to go in on unpopular ideas, if that makes sense, without much care one way or the other. But this map is not a great map for Democrats.
It's not a great map.
Yeah, that's right.
It's a pretty terrible map actually for Democrats. And remember the twenty twenty two map was just great for Democrats. So I'm not taking anything away from the success that those incumbent Democrats had and holding on in a tough year, you know, certainly the headwinds of the economy and an unpopular president. But at least they were in bluish purplish states.
You know, Shared Brown and John Tester and Joe Manchin have to run in red states and then pretty deep red states, and then we've got you know, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Look all of those incumbents. Obviously there's not an incumbent in Michigan, but in the other two states, Casey and Baldwin pretty good track record of success. But Arizona, you tell me.
Who even knows what's going to happen there too, because there's kind of a lawlessness with the Republican Party, I mean whatever that looks like.
Yeah, who comes out of a primary on the Republican side and do Cinema run for reelection? Those will tell us we've got to sort of wait until we know those things before we can at all even slightly confident about predicting what's going to happen. But the map itself even just so take out Arizona. Just look at West
Virginia and Ohio and Montane. Those are the three biggest challenges for Democrats right now, and those are three places where you could argue that having a candidate who wins the primary who's kind of outside the mainstream or seen as you know, maybe not the strongest candidate is not necessarily a recipe for losing. Jadie Vance still won by.
About six points, right, but doctor Oz did not correct.
So it matters in Arizona. I would say, it matters in Pennsylvania, it matters in Wisconsin. It matters and places that are really really evenly divided, in states that have a pretty strong tilt one way or the other. It's just getting harder to call out your opponent as being.
Too extreme right, which is pretty scary stuff if you think about it. Ultimately, Can you just do another minute for me on In my mind, West Virginia looks like the worst of those states Democrats because it's so rad and also because it's so provincial and strange in certain ways, like their governor switch parties. It seems like the normal rules don't necessarily apply there. Do you agree, and what's your take on West Virginia.
That's a good question. And you can look at this two ways. One you look and you say, well, Jill Mansion has gotten elected here, not once, not twice, but three times yea, and so he and he was the former governor. So to the provincial part he has there's evidence that he has a base there that is sort of impervious to national political trends and wins. At the same time, I think about somebody like high high Camp in the twenty eighteen midterm election, where she too was
a statewide elected official. She too won in an overwhelmingly state, but at some point, even though she was well liked, the partisanship of the state catches up with you. And I think there were a lot of voters who voted for her Republican opponent who would tell pollsters, yeah, sure I would like Heidi high Camp. Yeah, I don't have a problem with her, but I do have a problem
with Democrats or we need to support Trump. And that's where you get into some real challenges with Mansion, right, Like, it's not just he's got to outperform Biden in the state by six or seven points, he has to outperform him forty points. That is that is really really hard. Now he is getting some help, as you pointed out,
from the fact that Republicans are fighting amongst themselves. We have a club for growth versus that whatever the other forces on the other side, whether it's Mitch McConnell's super pac or the established at Rhinos or whatever. But Justice I think will be the nominee. But in the case that he's not, well, that's a probably good news for Mansion, right.
So that is just tough.
And as I said, it's getting harder and harder to win in a presidential year if you are a candidate that is from a different the state is voting for a different party for president than your party. So Susan Collins was the only one, the only Senator to win in a state that the presidential nominee if your own party didn't carry since twenty sixteen. So in twenty sixteen, every state voted for the Senate the same way they voted for president twenty twenty, every state. But main is
it going to be John Pester? Could it be Shared Brown? Could it be Joe Mansion? Sure, all three of them. That would be pretty remarkable. Not saying it can't happen, but it's that's going against some pretty low nods.
Democrats have a real opportunity. What happened in New York and in California to a lesser extent was that the Democratic State Party really I want to say something mean, but I'm going to say underperformed. Perhaps because of the governor's foibles, perhaps because of the state party chairs incompetence, but whatever the reason. There are a number of seats in New York that are occupied by Republicans but were
won by Joe Biden. Can we talk about that, one of which is now occupied by the one, the only George Santos.
Yeah, didn't he just win an Academy award the other month for something?
Yeah? Yeah, you know. The thing that strikes me about him is I can't forget the time when the reporting about him yelling at an aid about how he shouldn't get the cheap botox that anyway, so talk to us about that.
To me, the biggest question is can he survive a primary? And as you know, there's already one. Well maybe I shouldn't assume this. I'm the dowork that knows these things. There's already one candidate who's announced on the Republican side that he'll challenge Santos. I guess the question is how many candidates ultimately jump in? But boy, I just don't know that there's a path for Santos even through a primary, but I can't remember. Is it still a late primary.
It's a D plus two.
Oh no, but the primary used to be in September, but I don't I don't know if that's the case. Whatever it is, it might be a while before we
know who the nominee is going to be. So if you're a Democrat here, you have to be someone who is running not just as a oh look, I'm running against the serial fabulous George Santos, but can be a candidate that would win in a race that didn't feature Santo's right, because as you said, D plus two, that's that's officially a Biden seat, but that's not like a overwhelmingly Democratic seat as we saw with Trump in the past, Like Long Island is a pretty good it's pretty good
Trump territory. So I when it put that one in the bag, especially if Santos is not the nominee. But you know, you've got those upstate districts that were also Biden districts, like the one that Sean Patrick Maloney, the former d triple seat chair, moved into lost that seat. So you've got that one and then the other Long Island seat that is even much more democratic.
I think the Hampton's right.
No, the one that is closer into the city, I think it's is it suffic Oh yeah. Part of the reasoning here for Democrats is, look, as you said, the governor was a big drag the local campaign, big drag on the entire party. In twenty twenty two, twenty twenty four, you're going to have presidential election. Turnout's going to be up, and especially in some of these districts that have significant black and Latino population, those voters are going to show
up they didn't show up in the last midterm. That should help in some of those districts. But beating an incumbent is still not easy. Yeah, just in covering the House, I'm always amazed at party committees that say, oh, it's okay, we lost it this time, but you know we'll get it back next year. Well, maybe you will, And in some cases it's true, there are times where you know the district is just so partisan that yeah, in a fluke, you want it, but you probably can't hold on to it.
But some of these people hold on, and they hold on year after year after year. You can't assume that all of those New York districts flip back. And then there's California, which has the other tranche of Biden Republicans, some of them who have been winning and winning and winning even though they were supposed to be just you know, a one or turmer when they first got the seat.
What do you think about like Gillibrand in what way? What does that mean that A w.
What you think about goldfish crackers? What is your opinion on them?
Do you think that GILIBRANDT could theoretically be primary or now?
Oh?
Oh, okay, I guess so. It just doesn't seem as if there's that much energy there. This is what's really interesting when you look at the two parties and the ways in which they're furthest out from the center parts of their party deal with the incumbents. Many more Republicans went on to challenge incumbents who they saw a is, you know, not not strong enough, not loyal enough to
Donald Trump, not loyal enough to conservatism. Remember, after the Tea Party took power in yeah, twenty and nine and ten, you had a lot of incumbents that got knocked off. It has been rarer on the Democratics side. And when it does happen. Trying to think about if there's been a state wide race in recent memory, I'm going through my database and I just can't find it.
So now this short answer is no.
No, And we had like a Senate came to that lose from the left, Senate incumbent versus a Republican losing from the right. And we can all go through a number and Dick Luger and whoever. I remember Bennett in Utah, Murkowski in Alaska.
Yeah, though she ultimately had the last laugh.
She ultimately won, but she had to she did. But you just don't have that, at least in a significant way on the Democratics for a statewide contest. And even at the house level. You look at the places where those on the left have been successful, and some of it has been as much about age versus ideology. Right, this person's been there too long, this person isn't sort of paying enough attention to the district versus this person is not sufficiently liberal.
Right, But we've sort of never seen that, right.
I just cannot think of that right now. I'm sure that I'm missing someone, but I'm old now. I don't remember anything.
Harder and harder to please come back.
Yes, I will try. I will try if I can remember it. This is what happens after fifty.
Everything goes everything.
Don't let anyone tell you that fifty is the new forty, because I've been forty and this is not forty. Just know that. Just know it.
No mo, my junk fast Jesse Cannon is fron decetis though he hangs out with such nice people.
I mean, this is like one of these stories. It's it's like so upsetting because it's an underage girl, but it's also just unbelievably stupid. A major Desantist owner who Dessant is nominated to Florida's Board of Governors, the body which oversees the state's university system. A real shock to everyone.
Right, that guy, a guy they say kind of made Dissentis that guy?
You probably shouldn't have that guy in your children. What did he do? He's accused of having an inappropriate relationship with an underage teen. His name is Kent Discermon. He eventually killed himself after the girl's father turned down a five figure son in hush money deal and reported him
to the police instead. He is a prominent Desander to ally and GOP donor based in Jacksonville, Florida, of course, and he was bribing this little girl with Taylor Swift concert tickets if she showed him anyway, The point is this is really these are the people who are supposedly protecting your children and stopping grooming, but in fact every Republican accusation is a confession. That's it for this episode
of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.