Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds, and Donald Trump shared a video referencing a unified Reich. We have such a great show for you today. Colorado Governor Jared Paulus stops by to talk to us about what's going on in his state. Then we'll talk to Ari Berman about his new book, Minority Rule, the right wing attack on the will of the people
and the fight to resist it. But first we have the host of the Focus Group podcast, the publisher of The Bulwark, Sarah Longwell, Welcome back to Fast Politics. Sarah Longwoll, Hey, what's going on?
Nothing.
We were just talking about what we're going to talk about and my anxiety about American democracy. I think we should start by talking about something that is actually really positive for Joe Biden. We're still seeing Nikki Haley winning between sometimes as little as ten, sometimes as much as thirty percent of the vote in the Republican primaries. She has not been in this election for a number of months. It's like a zombie campaign. What do you make of that?
Well, the biggest coalition in American politics is an anti Trump coalition, and I don't think it has anything to do with Nicki Haley whatsoever. I just think voters are when given an opportunity to vote against Donald Trump, there's a highly motivated section of voters, many of whom are in the Republican Party, who will turn out to vote against Trump. And look, I've been saying this for a while about the Nicki Haley voters. Some of those voters
are already voting for Joe Biden. Some of those voters are going to come home to Donald Trump, and then the rest we got to fight over because they are the double haters.
Man.
Those are the people who they don't like Joe Biden, they don't like Donald Trump, they don't want to vote for either guy. A lot of them are RFK curious. And this is the swing voter this time, is people who are not happy with either person, which is why it's going to be a super depressing campaign because it's not about who anybody likes, It's not about anything affirmative.
It is all who hates who more.
It's one of the reasons that I think that Trump's numbers are continuing to hold in a positive direction for him, not the country is because look, Joe Biden is top of mind for people, and so they reach for him with their frustrations over inflation or crime or immigration. And Donald Trump as he sits in a courtroom and talks about a hush money payment that was made back in twenty fifteen, people are looking backwards on Trump. They're not looking forward about what he might do. And I think
that that conversation. I'm not saying that the cases are bad for Joe Biden or that they're good for Trump. I think a lot of people are saying, oh, this is going to make people more motivated to vote for Trump. Anybody who's going to vote for Trump because he's in court was already going to vote for Donald Trump. And I think that if he is convicted on the margins, it has some negative impact on Trump.
Right, it doesn't have a positive impact. No, I think that's an insane hill to die on.
Yeah, people get lost in the primary mindset, right, where that everything that Donald Trump that's like weird about him helps him, which is true in a primary, it's not true in a general.
It's not.
Also, like Republican primary voters who are still with Trump are a completely different breed than anyone else voting in this election.
Yeah, I mean, look, I say this all the time, as for me, as like a real bedrock of what's happening right now, which is that the gap between what Republican base voters want and what sort of moderate swing voters will tolerate. That gap has gotten really wide. So like, just let me give you one quick example. Town in North Carolina. You got this guy Mark Robinson running for governor.
Dude is looney toots, right, He's a holocaust denier, says gay people are filth, has some real weird views on women, call the Parkland shooting kids prostitutes. So not a great dude. And he won the Republican primary in a landslip. He won by sixty five percent the Republican primary, but he's polling in the low forties. And the guy Josh Stein, who's kind of just a mainstream LIB running against him, is just trouncing him and all the polling, and we just did a bunch of focus groups on this, so
what's top of mind for me? But that, to me is a good illustration of this gap. But I'll give you a negative theory that I'm holding onto that I've started formulating from the groups, which is one of the weird things byproducts of Republicans nominating just absolutely batshit crazy candidates like Mark Robinson, like Kerry Lake, like herschel Walker. You know, there's a bunch of them in twenty twenty two.
Is that Trump starts to look less insane by comparison because they're so out there and so like in North Carolina, Trump is still in every average, winning by about seven percentage points, which means there's a ton of people And I just talked to this group of people, a ton of people who for whom Trump is totally acceptable and Mark Robinson is not.
That's strange, but real. Why do you think that is?
Some of its abortion people don't view Trump as extreme on social issues. They think of him as sort of a cultural moderate as a result of years of them seeing him just in the media being well, they don't think this is this guy of sexual morality, you know, right, They think he's paid for abortions. People say that in the groups all the time, and so like, they just don't believe, which is which is one of Trump's superpowers, right, He's able to weirdly hawk Bibles and hold them upside down.
And be like, see Christians on one of you, while everybody who's more secular and moderate completely being like, yeah, this guy's not a real Christian and he's not going to do what the Mike Pence or Mike Robinson or anybody else who's sort of deeply who's actually ideologically or religiously committed to some of this stuff.
So, look, there's a.
Lot of bad news I think, both in the polling and the focus groups right now.
So I want you to talk focus groups.
I hate Paul's and I sure saying that's why I do focus groups.
Yeah, where are you focus grouping? And what are you seeing?
We're still it's early enough that we're still doing lots of different places, but we're focused on the Swing states more than anything else. We're talking to a lot of these double haters, and we're also talking to a lot of two time Trump voters who rate him very unfavorably. Because we're trying to figure out who's gettable. The reason I was starting with sort of the directionally bad news, like, look I see in the double haters or swing voters.
So these are people who voted for Trump and sixteen voted for Biden in twenty if you do a group of those, you know, there's usually a few of them in the group who are either going back to Trump or who want to vote for RFK and not Biden. On the flip side of that, though, there is a whole new group of people. This is my most optimistic thing that I've seen. There's a whole new group of people who voted for Trump twice and will not vote
for him again. Now they won't vote for Biden. But I suspect there's going to be a very large segment of the Republican voting population that will leave it blank. And a lot of those voters are kind of these Reagan, Romney McCain Republicans who held their nose and votvoted for Trump both times. But the insurrection, the lying about the election, it was a last straw. And there's a lot of these voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and I hope
Nebraska too. And also my other optimistic piece is that in some of these tough states like Arizona's a tough state, the slide with Hispanics is going to hurt in Arizona. But Arizona's been trending toward Democrats. Carrie Lake is on the ballot again, which is bad for Trump because she's a nut.
She's such a nut, she's the worst.
She's the worst.
And like there will be people who vote for the Democrat in that Senate race and vote for Trump.
Insane. Yes, but here's the thing.
They're going to get a ballot initiative about abortion in Arizona, and I think that's really gonna help. And so I still think there's two keys to this election, to winning it and saving democracy. One is I wish that RFK wasn't in this race, because anything that splits up that anti Trump coalition is bad. But if he's gonna be in the race, and he's going to be on the ballot, then everybody better figure out how to make these voters understand Democratic voters that voting for him is a terrible
idea and help Trump voters understand he's their guy. And I think making sure that he works as a as somebody who can peel off Trump voters is going to be essential. Like we're just going to have to play that.
Game, right, And he is anti vax.
He's anti vax. He's also sort of anti establishment. And because I've done a lot of groups around RFK. One of the things that's interesting about Republican voters in RFK is that there's nothing they love more than a Democrat who turns on other Democrats, right, they love it, and so he has a lot to offer them. They also hate a regular politician, they love an outsider, and they love an insider outsider.
That's a really good point. So RFK has a lot for those voters.
And that's one thing you gotta do. You got to make O RFK work for you.
That's going to be just a strategic game that people are going to have to figure out how to play.
It's so interesting because clearly Trump has seen that Republicans are RFK Junior curious, so he'll be less the guy is a crazy liberal.
You've heard that, right, of.
Course, I've heard that.
You know, Trump figured out a little belatedly that his voters liked RFK. Now, some of Biden's do too, Like there's just a lot of dams who are kind of like, oh, Kennedy, he looks at a spry seventy, he looks younger than Joe Biden, and then he likes the environments. There's some of that and like you're just gonna have to that's an education game. That is an affirmative education game you're gonna have to do. And then here's the other thing. There's the other thing that's going to win this race,
save democracy, reelect Joe Biden. Which is one of the reasons I like focus groups and not pulling. Is it gauges intensity. And the thing about the double haters, we call them that because they're people who don't want to vote for either guy, but they don't actually hate Joe Biden.
They Donald Trump.
They just are like about Joe Biden, like they just make guttural noises about why this is their choice. Which means that you got to run the hardest, toughest, relentlessly negative campaign against Trump to help people understand what a second Trump term's going to look like, the fact that he's not gonna leave, the fact that he's going to be a lunatic surrounded by other lunatics, and you gotta go negative so hard every day, relent big saragate game. I think that people are going to have to like
stop kind of wringing their hands. You know, you can't roll up your sleeves when you're wringing your hands man, and you gotta go hard.
It's interesting what you're saying, because Biden has definitely got He's got two big problems here.
One is Hispanic support and.
The other is younger Black voters and younger voters too. But I always think of younger voters are kind of an oxymoron, right, like, you're going to get some of them, You're not going to get all of them. They're young. But I know because I have a college kid who I'm like, you have to go and fucking vote and take as many people as you can. He goes to a small college, but he told me there are two people he thinks are going to go from his college
to vote, and I was like, oh Jesus Christ. But the point is, I do think Trump is also hemorrhaging support. I mean, I think this is going to be like the opposite of twenty twenty, you know, a lower turnout election where it's still tight.
You know, yeah, I mean, I think I think that is a entirely plausible scenario. I think that enthusiasm is really down overall, and the lower turnout election in the off season elections, it's really helped Democrats because the people who reliably show up to vote tend to be these college educated suburban voters who increasingly vote with Democrats. It's why you saw in Wisconsin the Supreme Court election, the Democrat pro to Saowitz win by like ten points in
a place like Wisconsin right off your election. And so look, yeah, I mean you gotta hope that enthusiasm's really down for Trump, that people either don't come out for him or they leave it blank.
So it could be.
Look, I don't know, and more importantly, we don't know what's happening, and we just we know what we're seeing right now more than you know one hundred and eighty days from the election.
Yeah. I mean, one of the reasons it's super hard to predict is when you have two functional incmbents running against each other, people don't feel like they need to tune in. I mean, this is the thing with the focus groups, Like people are they know Trump's in court for one of the cases, but like they're not following it.
They're kind of like these two choices. You know, I've been saying to people, it's like the voters have been going through the five stages of grief, where like the anger that these guys were running again, like that anger is those Nikki Haley voters. It's Joe Biden's low approval numbers. There's the bargaining, which is the third party no labels stuff, the RFK, the maybe Kamalo will step down, maybe Joe Biden will still step down. There's like depression, which I think we're in now.
And I want to fact check myself. It's one hundred and sixty eight days to the election, not one hundred and eighty.
Okay, cool.
Anyway, My point is just like we're still a long way from acceptance, and when we hit that phase, I do think like we'll see things move, but like we're not there yet.
I also do think like democrats.
I was talking to a member of Congress today, one of those members of Congress who's like a ranking member, very smart, but not anyone you've heard of. And I was like, you know, what's your taake on this right, because there are so many members of Congress that have the people no one knows who the fuck they are. Excuse my friend, I, what's your tea this? And he said, you know, I see Democrats overperforming, but I also know
that Biden world takes us all very very seriously. And is running a very disciplined campaign, which is why they're going to Pennsylvania and they're going to Wisconsin, and they're going to you know, but it is going to be just a miserable one hundred and sixty eight days.
It is, and we're going to live with an extraordinary amount of anxiety. But people want to know what they can do. And some of it is like, you know, be part of turning the vibes around. Go out there, push hard for Biden, like there's no point in being depressed, Like we got to do the work. Make sure you know, Biden's most people's No, it's not their first choice, but.
Got to dance with the guy who brought you. Yeah.
And I also would like to add that he wasn't necessarily the first choice in twenty twenty either, but the coalition got behind him, I think largely because there was a feeling that he was very electable against Trump.
That calculus.
You know, he's a little older, I get it, Orgu's foot whatever, but that calculus has not largely changed. I mean, remember they tried an impeachment and it didn't work because their their lead witness ended up in jail.
Republicans, Yeah, I mean, I don't want to be a super downer. I do think running with a record in an anti incumbent environment, which we are just like perpetually in now, like incumbentcy has lost some of its juice that it used to have. But I still think Joe
Biden can win this. I am like less optimistic about places like Nevada and Georgia, but I remain pretty optimistic about Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, you know, Nebraska too, and Arizona, and I think, you know, you just that's I don't think anybody's getting fancy with Florida and North Carolina, but that's what he's got to Do's got to hold those blue wall states.
It's a tough Senate map, but it's a weird state map.
What are you seeing?
Do you have any hot takes on the Senate?
You know?
My biggest hot take is something we were talking about on the focus group pod recently, which is politics is changing quite a bit, and we don't have of a lot of new examples sort of moderates being able to win over the other party, like in these really red states, like that's getting less and less frequent, where you've got like a Democrat that gets elected in a super red state.
But the places where it still happens or where.
You can get a non Maga Republican elected is people whose reputations precede the Trump era. And so when you take a guy like Shared Brown or a guy like John Tester, you just have a situation where their reputations were forged before all of this stuff. And I think that that who and I can give you like some reverse examples of that, which is like a Mike the Wine in Ohio who MAGA hates Mike de Wine because he's kind of a moderate Republican, or even Kemp in Georgia.
You know, Kemp's been able to withstand it, and that's because they forged their identities with their voters and their relationships with their voters pre Trump. And I just think that's true of Shared Brown, it's true of Tester.
Case in Pennsylvania.
Yeah, in Pennsylvania. And so that I think is one of the things that seems to.
Help Tammy Baldwin though that's a good one, But I think Minnesota being on the map is bullshit, Like Trump trying to get Minnesota, like that's just a dumb news story. He's trying to bait people with Yeah.
I don't think Trump's going to do well in Minnesota.
Yeah, they're smarter. They're smarter than that, I mean.
Sarah Longwell, thank you so much for joining us.
Yeah, thanks for having me. Love doing it.
Spring us here and I bet you are trying to look fashionable, So why not pick up some fashionable all new Fast Politics merchandise. We just opened a news store with all new designs just for you. Get t shirts, hoodies, hats, and top bags. To grab some, head to fastpolitics dot com. Jared Polis is the governor of Colorado. Welcome to Fast Politics, Governor.
Paulas Molly, could you hear your voice?
You are the governor of Colorado, but you also have a number of interesting things about you. You've been into pot before pot was hot, Well not literally, Molly, not literally. Obviously.
This is the biggest, you know, scandal I have as governor of Colorado's I've never actually tried it. So that's now that I never have to run again, I can confine with you.
Pot legalization is now pretty much a thing.
It kind of stems from like a basic value, bodily autonomy, you know, choice, freedom of course, people should be able to use marijuana recreationally just as they use alcohol. Doesn't mean I'm pro alcoholic pro marijuana. These are choices people make.
People make good.
Choices, bad choices, and different choices. It's up to everybody to live their own lives. Obviously marijuana is part of that.
And you're right.
I was at the pot party before it became the popular party. I was always for legal marijuana back when you know, Colorado was one the first date to do it. Actually, I supported the ballot inshative.
Wait, so you're term limited out as governor, but you still might run for something else.
Well, two and a half years left, and I hope my failure to try marijuana doesn't pull me down.
But just because you can't run for governor again doesn't mean you won't run for something else.
Well, I mean, I not something I think about, LOLLI. But if I do, I don't think the lack of trying marijuana will be the end of it.
Yes, well, I've moved on from the marijuana at this point.
I'm glad.
I'm glad. It was sort of a fling in your youth, Lolly. You just had a brief like in college or something.
Well, No, I've been sober since I was a teenager.
Good for you, good believe it or not.
So I don't have any particular personal horse in the marijuana stuff race.
I'm glad you've moved on.
Yes, I know that it's wildly popular, and I know that you have these libertarian leanings despite being a Democrat, and it seems like right now is a time when there is a wide lane.
For libertarians in the Democratic Party.
Well, I would say probably in both parties.
There's an opportunity for that because you know, anybody who speaks the language of freedom, of choice, of empowerment, I think that can be a winning message.
On either side.
It's one that's often not heard enough on either side either. So it's certainly always been part of what I've talked about as a member of Congress and now as governor.
Is it really available in both parties because like what I'm seeing on the Republican side, certainly not maybe not from a Mitch McConnell, but certainly from Madonald Trump is a lot and the Heritage Foundation is a lot of interest in regulation, whether it comes to IVF or birth control pills or abortion.
Oh no, absolutely, the main serare Republican party is very much command and control or strict freedom. I'm talking about folks like Justin Amash and back in the day, Ron Paul Lesso, his son. But yeah, absolutely there's a lane there. You see people doing it, but it's you know, it's it's lonely on either side sometimes, but certainly in terms of the bodily autonomy, personal freedom side, a lot better
time to be a Democrat to support Democrat. Republicans are really trying to control everything people do through government.
I mean you're saying that statement, I'm thinking about it. It's such an insane time in American politics because that maybe it was what they set out to do. But I think the party's gone really far afield. You are in Colorado. It has become a really reliably blue state. How do you think Democrats have won hearts of minds in Colorado?
So, I think the important thing you know about Colorado for you and your listeners is it's really an independent state. The plurality of voters and actually, quite soon, Molly, it'll be the actual majority of voters will be unaffiliated voters, neither Democratic nor Republican, and they're on loan to the Democrats. Yes, they're supporting Democrats, doesn't mean they're in love with Democrats, but frankly, they're not Donald Trump Republicans, to be clear.
So the state they're waiting for, George Bush, mid Romney ran strong here. Obama was also very strong, But this is not a Donald Trump state. It's very well educated and thoughtful Republicans. And you know, again, I think they can win the independent vote, but not with the candidates that they've been running lately, and so those inde bed votes have been on owned Democrats, which is why right now Democrats control both US Senate SA, it's both chambers of the state legislature.
You have gotten a bunch of Democrats mad at you recently because six spills.
You vetoed talk to us about that.
What were year?
I mean year, I veto some bills. I think last year was the year I vto the most ten. But keep in mind, I sign, you know, three hundred or so.
Yeah, I mean, I'm just curious.
There are endless problems with legislation, and some of them are sort of you know, just with the legislation being badly written or I'm just curious with the.
Yeah, I would say every year. It changes year to year, but usually the majority the concept is okay, but it just wasn't sort of fixed. The words aren't right, and it has unintended consequences. So I feel it's better for them to go back and work on it for another year rather than you know, deal with the product that could lead to the wrong outcomes. So that's probably seventy percent of the time. The thirty percent of the time it's one that I disagree with or just you know,
don't think it's a good way to go. So it just sort of depends on the bill. But I every single bill that reaches me. In the way our legislature works in Colorado, Moley, each legislator gets five bills sixty five and hours thirty five cent. That's five hundred bills. There's a few special bills, but usually there's about four hundred that reach me, or so three to four hundred each one. I get a legal analysis, policy analysis, fiscal analysis,
make a decision, and that's how that works. So, you know, like any executive, I don't have a formative role a lawmake you know, That's what I did when I was a member of Congress. But I do have a yay or at a at the end.
Yeah, And what are the sort of things that you're because you are, you know, seeing different voters than I am, and you're talking to people and you really got a good sense of the state. What are the sort of things that people care about your constituents Right.
Now, that's a number one in Colorado. Probably it's the same across country as costs. Just costs have gone up, and housing here is front and central, as it is in not every market, but many markets, because part of what drives it is interest in mortgage rates, right, so that's been tougher everywhere. But on top of that, we've had a significant run up in the cost of a hole. But on top of it's groceries, it's gas, it's all
that inflation, insurance, right, all those things. So we really focused our agenda around, you know, reducing cost, reducing taxes, saving people money. That's a big part of what we talk about. Housing reforums we might get into. We've done a lot of that to build more housing. That's really the number one issue right now, i'd say, followed probably by public safety, and then you know, like always education
strong perennial issue. People care about their kids, in schools and education opportunities.
So you did sign into law House Built thirteen thirteen in which is a zoning law basically helping build multi story houses. These are the things that you have to sort of push up against. How is that going? And is there a lot of resistance?
Yeah?
So you know, why is the cost of housing so high in Colorado? The average home costs in the Denver metro area is about six hundred thousand dollars, you know, state state wide, it's maybe four eighty. So it's expensive. And yes, you could be in southern California and say wow, that's cheap, right, or in New York City, but like for our standards, it's expensive, and compared to our neighboring states, it's expensive. So why is it expensive? High demand? That's good,
people want to live in Colorado. Great place to live, great raised to raise of family, outdoor recreation, all that stuff. But supply has been artificially constrained. We simply haven't allowed enough ones to be built to keep up with supply with demand, and that's what serven crisis up. So we focused our reforms on allowing more housing to be built, not everywhere. You know, we don't want to sprawl further out of more traffick and congestion ruin our quality of life.
We want to do it in a way that protects our quality of life.
And what does that mean.
It means more housing closer to job centers and on transit lines. And the bill you mentioned specifically allows multi family along transit lines near job centers. And that's an important piece of what we need to do to make housing more affordable, more livable, and more sustainable in Colorado.
Do you get pushback from the I mean, is that a delicate balance?
Well, of course, we actually and you might have noted, we actually did not succeed last year getting this through the legislator.
We did this year.
We had kind of an omnibus housing bill for lad use last year. It didn't quite make it. It made it past one chamber or not the other. We broke it up into six different bills. They all made it to my desk, and we're going to build on them all in the future. But it equals over like we got rid of parking restrictions. We allowed accessory dwelling units by right, so people can build it as long as there are lots of certain size. A mother mother in
law and ready flat. So you know, these things add up to a real solution broadly popular the people of Colorado obviously, you know, doesn't mean it's universally popular as people who post it, but majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and Independence all are strongly supportive of these measures to create more housing.
What else can you do as a governor to decrease inflation? I mean, and you know Florida has this crazy inflation largely driven by insurance. Is there anything you guys can do with the insurance markets and also just to lower inflation those costs in a state like Colorado.
Well, look, and we all know that inflation is really a function of monetary policy, fiscal policy federally, they might vary a fraction of a point between different markets. And obviously a place with a hot housing market has like Colorado has had, in Florida has had that drives inflation, because that's one of the facts. But no, can we affect overall inflation?
Wait, I'm going to push back on you for a second. In Florida, the housing market is hot, but you know, the insurers have been monopoly and also climate.
Change, Yeah, and their particular model, I know, is driven out many private insurers and forced the government to do that. I would say, first of all, look at an insurance. Is it a problem here? Yes? Why because that we thankfully out of the hurricanes, but we have a higher risk of fire. So people's insurance rates across our state in general have gone up more than inflation. Absolutely the
last couple of years. We had the Marshall Fire two years ago, most destructive wildfire in the history of the state. Destroyed destroyed over a thousand homes. So that drives insurance. What do we need to do. It's not so much that the insurance side has broken, but we need to reduce the risk because you know, at the end of the day, insurance is just actuary a. They compute the risk, they add their profit and boom, you got it. So we need to reduce risk, and we are leading into that.
We are doing fire risk mitigation. We're doing more proactive and controlled burns. We've purchased several helicopters a fire HOWK top of line helicopter, but all so several type two helicopters. We used to rely on a shared air fleet with neighboring states in the West. But what happens if there's a fire in California, Arizona and Colorado at the same time, we're not going to get that quick aerial response. So we've made the decision to move towards having our own fleet.
We now do. It's continuing to grow. We want to boom hit fires early when it matters, when we can reduce them. That in the long run, of course, will help equate to better actuarial tables and reduced insurance costs for our homeowners.
Do you see stient typically that this kind of stuff prevents larger fires. I'm talking about the control burns, the kind of stuff you can do profilactively.
Absolutely, so community defence perimeters that would be your control burns, taking down vegetation in and around communities. So to prevent fires from jumping doesn't mean we're not going to fires. We always have fire smalling coolera. It's always to be.
Fires are part of nature. The danger is when they threaten human civilization, people's lives, and we absolutely significantly reduce that with community defense perimeters and yes, home defense perimeters where we're equipping homeowners with the ability to do that. As an example, we recently remove the ability of hoa's to prevent fire hardening. Many of them are requiring different things. Well, let's call it wooden fences that are trees that were
actually bad for fires. We now empower homeowners to take the steps necessary. But beyond that, community defense perimeters meeting areas with no vegetation that can prevent the spread of fire absolutely a critical tool, as well as rapid detection and response, including aerial response.
Okay, so two questions now. One is I hate tariffs good because I think they punish the consumer. Sounds like you do too, So let's talk about that.
Well, you're on hundred percent right, wellly, I mean it's rare to get an issue that like pretty much every economists degrees on like left right, cent are like saris are regressive, they punished the receiver. Brit is regressive being they're kind of like a sales tax. They don't scale with income, think about consumer products.
They are costly.
They drive inflation. Absolutely, one of my suggestions for reducing inflation is dropping tariffs, entering, having more free trade agreements with more countries, no question about it.
And I'm very critical of with.
Parties obviously, particularly Donald Trump, who champions and talents even more tariffs than Joe Biden.
I encourage Joe Biden.
I hope he is the second term to lean into trade agreements with Europe with our allies. Our Senator Bennett has the America's Act expanding the Free Trade Zone uspectually Canada to other countries. These would be great tangible measures, good for the economy, good for the consumer, and they would reduce inflation.
So you have an aibill. I spend a lot of time reading Balwey media. I don't live in DC, but I know that AI is sponsoring like almost everything right, So clearly they are trying to get ahead of the regulatory environment. I think it's interesting that you're doing this. I think it's good explain to me how what you're doing to regulate AI.
And also, can we.
Just for one second, the lack of regulation is how tech companies basically drove out local news. So I just am curious if you have thoughts on that too.
So I would say that our AI bill that I signed a law. It deals with the potential discrimination of AI. We also appeared deeply about privacy rights of AI. I would say it's a conversation accelerator, meaning what needs to happen, Molly frankly, is it needs to be done nationally because I don't really support a system where there's fifty different versions of two different states.
It's undoable, Yeah, go on.
It's undoable. But the way those things happen, Having served in Congress, I've seen it is it takes a few states to kind of mess around in this space and then all of a sudden, you know, eight states, fifteen states have done it, and then Congress wakes up and says, we'd better figure this out. We better, you know, get it reasonably right. And they can look at what the EU's done, and they can look at other models and create uniformity across the states. But I would say, what
what we're doing? You know, it doesn't take effect to twenty six and hopefully it'll be you know, changed, or Congress will take it up then. But it's a conversation accelerator about how we approach AI and we should look at it from a potential perspective of discrimination as well as privacy rights and how it affects US.
California got a complicated legislative record in my mind, though I like a lot of the stuff they do, though sometimes I think they get ahead of themselves is trying to do something that will regulate tech companies make them pay for content. God forbid, anyone should pay for content. It's a sort of tax. I don't know if you know the No, I.
Don't, but I would just say something interesting about California. So there is an alternative to Congress, because we all know how notoriously slow they have been of late, right.
And how uninterested in tech regulation they are.
California can act and then other states can adopt something similar to created the facto national standard. It could also be Texas or New York, but a big state could lead others. So I have a look at that. I'm not talking about the tax or fiscal round there, Molly. I'm talking about more of the regulatory realm. But we have done a little bit of.
That around evs.
We haven't exactly imitated electric vehicles, that is, we haven't imitated California, but because they've moved a certain way, it's enabled us to move a certain way with manufacturers that Colorado couldn't.
Do on our own.
Because we're, you know, tuber population of the country.
It does seem to me that the only way we're going to get protection for local news, which well, in the end cause us to have better information as citizens and prevent us from ending up in an autocracy. Maybe we won't do it this time, but we will do it at some point. If we don't, if our citizens can't read the truth, could be on the state level. Right.
Well, you know, I want to see where you're going with this, Molly. It's obviously very dangerous for government to mess with the press and freedom of the press in any shape or form, like favoring certain lids or investing or But I'm more.
Just saying that the idea that tech companies should have to be responsible for either what is put on their platform or have to pay for the content that they use.
Well, look, our major media companies are also tech companies, Mollie, Right, So I mean there's a blurring to a certain extent. We have a great local press in Colorado, a nonprofit called Colorado Sun, Independent, nonprofit, new model. We obviously, unfortunately many of our newspapers are owned by hedge funds. They have been gutted. That's not a good thing. We still have fairly vibrant local television news. But I'm particularly proud of these new models like Colorado Sun that have created
a nonprofit content generation model. I hope that occurs in more cities and states.
So interesting, you still have half a term left, but you've been governor of Colorado for a while. What have you learned?
Well, a lot. I came from two different backgrounds, I guess through three it away, so as private sector started, several businesses started, a couple of charter schools, social entrepreneur, and then I was in Congress for ten years. So this is obviously the most exciting, fastest paced job I've
ever had, for sure. And you're really able to get things done, unlike in Congress where you might have to work, you know, six seven, eight years to finally get one amendment into something that becomes law in your area of jurisdiction.
We pumped stuff out quickly.
We got universal preschool in kindergarten in the state one of Michaels as governor. We've cut the income tax. We've done a number of savings around healthcare to bring down people's costs, especially in the healthcare exchange for those who don't get it from work. We've protected the environment. We've provided you know, rebates to accelerate electric vehicle adoption and so many things. Just boom boom, boom, boom boom. It's
an exciting job. But of course we yes, we also deal with crisis is, fires, floods, pandemic, you name it. But despite that, it's fun to be proactive and get a lot done at the state level.
Thank you, Governor, Thank you.
Molly ari Berman is a reporter at Mother Jones and the author of Minority Rule, The Right Wings Attack on the Will of the People and the Fight to Resist It.
Welcome to Fast Politics.
Ari Berman, Hey Molly, so great to be here. Thank you.
So Minority Rule, The right Wing Attack on the Will of the People and the Fight to resist it.
I mean, it's like every fucking day.
Go tell us, tell us why we shouldn't just kill ourselves?
No, no, tell us about this book.
Well, good to know we can swear on the podcast. That's always a possi right baby, especially when discussing this topic. So you know, I've been reporting on the issue of voting rights for over a decade now, and as I got deeper into reporting on voter suppression, I began asking my self, why is the Republican Party doing this so aggressively? Is it just to try to get an electoral advantage or is there some larger purpose here? And what I concluded is that the larger purpose here is minority rule.
Right, is to get the electoral advantage.
Exactly, so they can have a minority of the population but a majority of the power, which basically goes directly against the idea of the consent of the governed that democracy is based on the consent of the government has laid out in the Declaration of Independence. So what I did is basically two things. I traced it all the way back to the founding fathers to show that there's
always been these anti democratic strains in the country. But then there's essentially this new anti democratic movement layered on top of it, which is voter suppression, gerrymandering, dark money, all the things that Republicans are doing now. So we kind of have this historical minority rule embedded in the system, but it's gotten worse because the Republican Party has so aggressively radicalized against democracy.
Right, and that is the Republican Party radicalizing against democracy. I want to just do two seconds on that, because you're a voting right sky among other things, so Republicans have wanted to make it so people who are not white can't vote for a long time. But what's happened now is I think it's kicked into high gear in a different way.
Discuss exactly I think that's true. So, I mean, you can go back a long time, and I do trace it a long time in the book about Republicans saying that black people shouldn't vote. I mean they said it during Jim Crow, they said it after the Voting Rights Act. It goes back a long way.
Long and story tradition of racism, big.
Part of Nixon's Southern strategy, big part of Reagan courting white voters. But what I argue is it obviously got worse after the election of the first black president, which sort of crystallized the fears they had about the changing
nature of the country. And so in the kind of modern incarnation of GOP voter suppression that the point is after the twenty ten election, when Republicans get control of all those key swing states like Wisconsin and North Carolina and Ohio and Florida, and they start making it harder to vote, to try to manufacture an electorate that will be older, wider, more conservative as opposed to younger, more diverse, more progressive that I think, in many ways lays the
groundwork for Trump, because the radicalization of the Republican Party happens before Trump, and then it creates an opening for Trump, and then you start to see voter suppression get much worse under Trump. First he makes all these false claims about stolen elections, and then he actually tries to overturt the election and incis and insurrection, and then it's basically
voter suppression on steroids. They're not just trying to make it harder to vote on the front end, they're actually literally trying to overturn votes on the back end as well. And that's the scary thing that's happening today is we have not just laws making it harder to vote, but we essentially have a Republican party in which the Big Lie is now the central organizing principle of Trump's Republican Party.
So what I think is interesting besides the fact that these sentence the big Lie is the central organizing of Trump's Republican Party, which I think is right and also makes me so incredibly depressed about the state of democracy, and also the intelligence of Republicans. What I think is interesting is that Republicans, and I want you to sort of talk us through this because I think this is like they've gotten themselves an interesting place here.
There's a lot of new polling.
I think polls are bullshit, especially these polls, because I just think they're hinky and I'm a cross tabs truther. But I want you to talk about this. Republicans are very excited about the possibility that they could win over black and Latino voters. Now, I think this is very overstated in the polls. But if they are trying to do this, isn't everything they do to keep these people who they are trying.
To win now from voting.
Well, that's what's interesting is you've already heard the Republican Party start changing there too. And I just heard Trump said that people should vote early and vote by mail, which well directly at odds with his message for many years. I mean, I'm conflicted about the polling because I think, first off, i think it's still the case that white voters are the key part of the Republican Party and
certainly the key part of the Republican base. So let's not fool ourselves that the Republican Party has undergone a full Rainbow Coalition make over. I think it's still if you went to most Republican meetings, I think you're going to see a lot of white faces there, and certainly that's where the energy is on the base. Secondly, I'm not sure how much this is about the Democratic Party
or Biden per se. We didn't see in twenty twenty two the Democratic Party have these fundamental problems with voters of color, or young voters for that matter. My sense is if Gretchen Whitmer, for example, the governor of Michigan where the nominee, she would not be losing young voters or voters of color. So I think some of this
is Biden centric to the extent it exists. But I think the basic thesis that I have of that the Republican Party is a largely white party that's concerned about the changing demographics of the country is still true regardless of whether there's some blips in the polling. That is I think more specific to Biden than it is about kind of long term trends in American politics.
They put themselves in a fascinating situation here, but even still, like if they are losing white college educated voters, which if these polls are right, which again I don't necessarily think they are, they show a real racial realignment for working class you know, not necessarily black, but Hispanic voters going more Republican, and then affluent college educated voters, like these suburban Republicans all becoming Democrats. They would have completely
fucked themselves. I'm just saying, again, we don't know. It's theoretical.
There is a realignment going on, certainly among white voters, right, kind of the kind of classic suburban country club white Republicans, many of them are now never Trumpers.
Ordem which is fascinating.
You know, a lot of the Lincoln Project folks, of those kind of people, and that then you have, you know a lot of the working class whites that were the core of the Democratic Party in a lot of places for many years they now abandoned the Democratic Party. And so I think there's this realignment, and I think, you know, I think you can't make any kind of sweeping predictions. That's why every time there's these books about like emerging Democratic majorities emerging, they always go out of
date really quickly. But I think, you know, there's a pretty consistent through line for many, many years of the Republican Party relying on reactionary wheys. I mean, that's a pretty solid through line that predates this election, you know. I mean, and I trace it. I trace it a long way. I mean, you can go back before there were Democrats and Republicans, you can go back to the founding fathers, and basically they're trying to protect elite white
power before there were political parties. And then, certainly that's been a theme of the Republican Party since the Civil Rights movement, and I think even more of a theme of the Republican Party under Donald Trump.
For sure. For sure.
Now let's talk about where we are right now with this Republican Party and also just what they're doing to make it harder to vote, and our Democrats sort of add quickly addressing that or now.
So, I mean, there's a few things they're doing. First off, they changed in most Republican controlled states, changed the voting laws in some way or another after the twenty twenty election. So this was how they kind of weaponized the insurrection. I called it the insurrection through other means because Trump
fails to overturn the vote. But then in Georgia and all these states they changed the voting laws, and you know, maybe they were fighting the last war, because a lot of this went after mail voting, and we'll see how many people actually vote by mail in the next election. But certainly the laws have changed in meaningful ways in a number of swing states. Then of course they've doubled down on election sub version, so trying to contest election outcomes.
And we've seen local Republican Party officials, for example, fail to certify elections, and we've seen that basically Republicans who have said that the Republican Party should stop contesting elections
essentially get purged from the RNC. You know, Trump won't hire anyone who says that the election wasn't stolen, which leads you to believe that they're preparing for a more organized, better funded effort to try to steal the election in twenty twenty four, if it comes to that, because I think there really was no election denier movement in twenty twenty As you know, Molly, this was totally seated. Their pass This was you know, the hair dye tripping down
Rudy Juliani's base. Four seasons total landscaping kind of election denial, and now this is central to the RNC, it's central to Republicans all across the country that they have a much more organized, well funded movement that's bought into this. And so I think if the election outcome is close, I think we can expect very very aggressive challenges to it in twenty twenty four, in addition to the laws that they're passing to try to make it harder to
vote on the front end. What makes you hopeful, Well, a few things, I think. First off, there's a lot of really interesting organizing happening at the state and local level right now. A key part of the end of my book is about Michigan, and I had a New York Times op ed about this, But basically, Michigan is one of those states that was seemingly rigged. After the twenty ten election. Republicans routinely got a minority of votes but controlled the state legislature for a decade and a half.
And then what everyday activist did is they started putting initiatives on the ballot to try to make the democratic process more fair. They passed a ban on partison jerrymandering, They dramatically expanded voting rights through things like automatic and election day registration. They put on ballot initiatives that enshrine the right to abortion rights. So they use direct democracy to expand voting rights. And that's something that has happened
in a number of places. And then there's also other places where people have changed in terms of Democrats have focused more on local elections. Wisconsin, for example, there's a progressive majority on the state Supreme Court that's struck down jerrymandering there so that those heavily gerrymanded maps are no longer in place. So if you look at the state landscape and the battleground states, it's a lot more fair
than it was in twenty twenty. There is more democratic governors, there is more democratic state legislatures, there's more democratic secretaries of state, attorney general. And I have to say that every Democrat is going to be good on democracy issues, but these are people that ran on these issues that
made it a central part. So I think, you know, if Trump would try to contest the election in the place like Michigan or a place like Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, you have a much tougher time doing it in twenty twenty four than in twenty twenty. And so in that sense, I think the system has been trump proofed a lot compared to how it was last time.
But it's also true that if you have democratic governors, there's less chance to cheat, right there.
Is, Yeah, exactly because a lot of those places, democratic governors are in charge of certifying the election, right so, democratic governor in Pennsylvania, Democratic governor Michigan, Democratic governor in Arizona, Democratic governor Wisconsin. That means that they're going to have a major say in certifying the election results, which means it's harder to cheat. It's also harder to pass laws that make it harder to vote in the first place
as well. And you know, in some of these places there's a stalemate, right like in Wisconsin, where there's a Republican legislature and a Democratic governor, they haven't really been able to do much of anything, but it prevents bad things from happening. And then in places like Michigan, they've been able to do a lot of really proactive things.
And so basically what I'm saying is, I do think we need a long term movement for institutional reform on the federal level to reform the Supreme Court to reform the US setate, to break some of these to break up some of these broken structures. But I also think that changing the state and local level happens a lot quicker. And even if you live in a blue state Molly like we do, there's a lot of swing districts in New York.
So I'm aware that's why Democrats lost the House.
Yeah, exactly, they lost the House because of California and New York. And I always hear people in New York say, I'm going to Georgia, I'm going to Wisconsin, and I'm like, you could just go to Staten Island.
Yeah, well don't go to Stutson Valley, but you could.
Go to Long Island exactly. You could flip the House there. And so I mean, I think people need to think more about organizing locally in general.
And I think that's a really good point.
I mean, the federal staff, I hesitate to say that this Supreme Court has done something that isn't completely beyond the pay. Explain to us what's happening in this congressional district in the Great State of Louisiana.
Yeah, so this is a complicated case, but basically the good news is that the Supreme Court ruled that Louisiana has to use a congressional map for twenty twenty four that includes two majority black congressional district Are you shocked. I'm not shocked, only because the state of Louisiana took this position. So I mean, like, black voters in Louisiana
are on the same side, which is very rare. The state of Louisiana was forced into drawing a second black congressional district, which is expected to elect a Democrat because of lower federal court decisions. Now, what the Supreme Court has done is it is upheld those lower court decisions and that has been a rare bright spot for voting rights. And that they did this not just in Louisiana. They did it in Alabama too, which was very surprising. Now we'll see how long this lasts to the sense that
there is support for voting rights in the court. It's very tenuous. It takes five justices, obviously one of them who is in the majority in the Alley Bama case, Brett Kavana, also already said he's open to challenging the constutionality of the remaining parts of the voting Rights Act.
So I'm not popping too much champagne here, but I do think like, given this is a six to three conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, so anytime they don't do something terrible, you have to celebrate it, at least momentarily.
Yes, how did they break Well, this is.
The interesting thing. It broke six to three, which normally six conservatives and three liberals assenting. Normally, you would think that that would mean that it was a bad decision on voting rights. It was a good decision on voting rights. But the way they reached the case was basically in voting this principle that said that you can't make election
changes too close to the election. Now, that was a good thing in this case, but a lot of the times the Supreme Court invokes the same principle to then reinstate discriminatory voting. Yeah, exactly, so they it's mostly been used for crappy purposes. So I think the three liberals may view this as something of a pyrrhic victory where they said, listen, the Conservatives are giving us a win here, but they're about the fust.
So do you think they see something coming?
I don't know. If there's something coming. My guess is yes, But I also think they're probably just worried about. Listen, you expand this principle that is generally speaking been used to curtail voting rights. You're expanding it in a good way here, but then you could weaponize it in a bad way further. So I think that's why they dissented. So every victory on voting rights by the Supreme Court, which is a rare in of itself, always comes to some kind of asterisk, and I think that that's the
asterisk in this case. But you know, again, live to fight another day, right.
Oh so interesting?
So what's still on the docket with the Supreme Court? I mean, besides the death of democracy? And they're also going to fuck over the birth control pill staff, not the birth control, the meth of pristone. Talk to us about what else you see that's voting rights wise on the Supreme Court docket.
We're still waiting for them to issue a decision in a South Carolina redistriction case, which is Nancy Mace's congressional district. And the crazy thing here is that basically the lower court struck down her district. They called it stark racial jerrymandering. Basically, they took a bunch of black voters out of the district to make it a lot more Republican. Mace has become a lot Trumpier as a result. Remember she was one of I think seven House Republicans who ousted Kevin McCarthy,
and so she's become very trumpy. And essentially this was appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court was told to act by the beginning of the year. It's now May and they haven't taken any action. And the lower court that struck down the district was basically forced to reinstate it because the Supreme Court had done nothing. So it's kind of like the version of the immunity case. They basically just ran out the clock to deny Democrats having a shot at winning back another House seat. And
that's concerning because the House could be extremely close. I mean, it could very well come down to one district.
The Louisiana decision gives a seat to Democrats, right.
Yeah, yeah, so basically, but I mean Democrats need more than two seats. So right now, Democrats have picked up seats in Alabama and Louisiana based on the court decisions, they could have theoretically picked up another seat in South Carolina that they're not going to pick up. The problem is is that in North Carolina, Republicans drew a really jerrymandered map that's going to get them three to four new seats, So you've got to make up those seats somewhere.
There's some talk about whether they could pick up seats in New York, but New York actually passed a redistricting map that was very similar.
It's so fucked up.
New York passed basically a completely unjenary mandered redistricting map.
Yeah, I mean, I think that the conventional wisdom here is that the New York Democrats feel like they can just win seats outright on this map. But I mean, they certainly didn't adopt in North Carolina tactics. And some people would view this as unile or disarmament that basically Republicans in North Carolina jerrymandered as aggressively as they could
and New York didn't. Now, maybe Democrats in New York were worried about court striking down a map, but nonetheless they add the power to jerrymander Moore and they didn't and we can argue whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that parties are basically just try to jerrymander the fuck of things. I think that's ultimately bad for democracy when they engage in like a gerrymandering arms race. But I think it's also fair to argue that if one party is doing it, then the other party has
no choice but to do it as well. But it's a complicated argument, and I don't think it's probably very good for democracy if that's where we end up.
So interesting. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Ari, thanks so much. Molly really appreciate it.
No moment full Jesse Cannon.
Molly junk Fast.
It seems like Donald Trump decided to do Joe Biden a favor today.
What are you seeing here? So? Donald Trump said on an interview that he was looking at placing restrictions on contraception. Let me tell you a little more about this. Trump was asked by a local Pittsburgh TV station, do you support any restriction on a person's right to contraception that's birth control, and he said, we are looking at that. I'm going to have a policy on that very shortly. Sounds like infrastructure week. I think it's something you'll find interesting.
Trump says, you will be releasing a very comprehensive policy on contraception within a week or so. Things really have to do a lot with the states, and some states are going to have different policies than others. That's pretty scary stuff. I never thought that we would be in this place in America. Really scary. 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.