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 the latest you gove Economist Poul found that forty five percent respondents filled Trump had been not at all or not very transparent about his health. We have such a great show for you today, the Think Like an Economist podcast. Justin Wolfers gets us up to date on where we are with the stupid tariff saga.
Then we'll talk to can't Win Victory Funds Kate Compton Barr about how running candidates who can't win could help DEM's win.
But first the news.
My let me tell you Doge it was just so effective at hitting its two trillion dollar goal and then the one trillion dollar goal that they pushed back to that. Now Trump needs help from Congress to help with nine point four billion and Doge cuts.
Yeah, this is one of my favorite stupid stories because it's so stupid. So the White House is planning to send a nine point four billion dollar recisions package to Congress next Tuesday, giving lawmakers the opportunity to codify some of the potential cuts identified by Dog. Now let us just think about this for a minute, Doge came in took power away from Congress. Was like, Congress, we know you're supposed to have the power of the purse, but now Elon gets the power of the purse because he
gave a lot of money in Trump. Now Elon is either out or pretending to be out.
He is either. We don't really know what.
The truth is, but either way, these cuts which were identified by such people as big Balls. You'll remember Big Balls with his big haircut. Is that nice cauliflower haircut? That guy has found some cuts he'd like to make in the federal government. And so now the administration is going to Congress to get help from them, castrating them. If you are a member of Congress, you have power, or at least you used to have power. Stop fucking
giving it away. Pretend to care about your job. These proposed cuts would trim one point one billion dollars, by the way, a rounding error from the Corporation of Public Broadcasting eight point three billion, and foreign assets from USAID and Africa Development Foundation. So you're gonna USAID is like impoverished people who need malaria medicine. The statistics I have read three million people a year will die from these cuts.
The USA cuts, you know, they won't be able to get food, they won't be able to get medicine, they won't get all soft power from America will evaporate. China will eat our lunch. Most of NPR and PBS's money comes from non government sources, but the corporation allocates about five hundred and thirty five million in federal funds annually to them.
This is a rounding error.
It is a banishingly small amount of money in the federal government, but it is because Trump World ideologically wants to fuck over the mainstream media, wants to just make life miserable for everyone. The Office of Management and Budget has identified foreign eight grants that is convinced will bolster its case for cutting relief for USAID. They're going to cut President's Emergency Plan for AIDS relief. This is a bush legacy thing. PEP far AIDS relief prevention really important.
Donald Trump going to get rid of it.
So, speaking of getting rid of things, he's going to cut aid for state unemployment systems, which that seems like a really, really, really bad way to keep people from slipping into homelessness after they get laid off. From many of the stupid things that people are getting laid off for today, like when paid a loan services and other loan services layoff people for AI and then go oops, we got to hire everyone back.
Yeah. Look, I don't think any of us should be surprised by any of this. A lot of it is trying to make government less effective so people can get less from it. I want to read this sentence because I think it's explained a lot. The White House is terminating four hundred million in funds for states meant to modernize their unemployment insurance systems. So remember when Trump and Elin were like, we're going to cut fraud, waste, and abuse,
We're going to modernize systems. What they meant was, we're going to make it harder for you to get this stuff that the federal government has been giving you. And this great example of that. These systems needed to be reshored during the pandemic because there was so much unemployment and that led to a lot of fraud and a lot of delays for beneficiaries. You got to update these systems. This is how we've gotten a lot of our problems.
Updating system saves money, right, because it spots fraud, it ends waste and abuse.
These are the things.
This is what Elon was saying he was actually doing, and now they're preventing it from happening. So it just shows that so much of what Trump World said it was doing wasn't real. So much of these things were just not true. It's projection, it's lying, it's gaslighting, but
it's fundamentally Project twenty twenty five. It's fundamentally saying we are going to make the government work less well, so people believe us in the federal government, so we can grip down the federal government to the studs and cut taxes for very rich people.
Yeah.
So, Maia, when I was reading this earlier, I was wondering if I was reading The Handmaiden's Tail times, since that's what this reads like. The Big Beautiful Bill treats single parents differently, because as we know, there's many people inside twenty twenty five who want to punish single parents for apparently not staying in terrible marriages.
So one of the things that we keep seeing in Trump administration, behind the sort of ethos behind a lot of these Project twenty twenty five theories, is that there are these sort of moral components, these ways in which they think that they can de incentivize things by making it harder to get them, so de incentivize people from losing jobs. I actually think they don't really care what happens to people. But this is one of these things.
So again, the thing that Democrats should be screaming about and are bafflingly not is that they want to put in something that means that if you have a child over the age of seven, you must work eighty hours a month in order to qualify for SNAP benefits.
So it used to.
Be that if you had a child under seventeen, you could, you didn't need to work.
There was no work requirement for SNAP.
This is food okay, food stand If you are staying at home with your child, you can get food simps. But now if your kid is over the age of seven, they have to be on their own. You have to figure out childcare so you can work eighty hours a month in order to qualify for SNAP benefits.
Again, this is the cruelty, is the point.
They don't want people who need SNAP to have children, right, I mean that's what those those and again like this is not a ton of money, right, Like they're growing the you know the what the Pentagon is getting a trillion dollars. I mean, this is not about saving money. And even the Big Beautiful Bill in fact grows the deficit three point seven trillion dollars. So this is not
about saving money. This is about just complete and utter it's just yeah, the conservative wish casting of influencing behavior among citizens that has gone on for forty years now, of stupidity and failed policy.
Yeah, it's just all the worst of everyone.
So we've talked about a lot of the ills of the Big Beautiful Bill, which seems ironically named at best. It looks like Senate Democrats actually have a tool to stop it. Now, wonder if they will.
What do you think?
So this I think is important just to in case you haven't been to explain this. The Big Beautiful Bill will be passed under reconciliation. Reconciliation is controlled by the Senate parliamentarian. There are certain things, and you'll remember this from the Biden administration, that can go in reconciliation, and there are certain things that the parliamentarian rules that are
not okay to go in reconciliation. For example, reconciliation is supposed to be about budget and not about say he trying to limit judicial power, which the Republicans did.
Sneak in there.
Right, there's something in there about limiting judges power to control the administration for the larger orders. So again the parliamentarian should rule, because you'll remember in twenty twenty the parliamentarian world. That's certain things right. For example, Democrats had things they wanted to put in that bill, the parliamentarian
rule that they were against parliamentary procedure. We'll see what happens here, but for sure, one of the things in here is that the parliamentarian said that they could not nullify the Environmental Protection Action waiver allowing California to set its own air policy standards on vehicles. They were given this authority for a cleanout in nineteen seventy, so the parliamentarian said they could not change it. While Republicans, I know you're going to be shocked to hear this, they
decided that they would overrule it. So now California has a chance. And by the way, I would think this piece really opens the door to that. There are a lot of chances that Democrats have here to the parliamentarian. If the parliamentarian signs off on a lot of stuff, it will be unprecedentedly crazy. My guess is that a lot of this stuff she's going to be like, no fucking why. And once she starts saying no way, I think that there is going to be that There's quite
a lot that can fall by the wayside. I think that we're going to see more of that, and if Democrats are smart. I mean again, I don't know what Democrats are going to do because they had not at this moment been.
Covering themselves with glory.
But I hope that they will use this to push Justin Wolfer is a host of You Think Like an Economist podcast and a professor at the University of Michigan.
Welcome to Fast Politics, Justin.
Wolfers Fast Politics and Fast Economics.
That's right, speak very quickly.
Let's talk about where we are at this moment.
Fifty percent tariffs on the EU No wait, just kidding, No, they don't start till July. Is it undermining Donald Trump's own authority to be back and forth on something so major?
I think the question might actually be leading the witness. Nah, there are complicated times. I look, I'm coming on your show right now as professor of economics. And I think the best thing that I can give your audience is the advice that nasal breathing can help calm you down. And maybe we should just do a little bit of that meditation.
Then, right now, talk us through where we are.
Right now?
Are we in a pause in the trade war?
That's what Russ said to Rachel.
Right, are we in a pause in the trade war?
No, now we're in multimar from multipolar. I don't know what multipolar means. It sounds fancy, multi front. Yeah, trade war. Look, it's funny. Someone told me how to d They said, you know, justin you're really funny. I know this is about the economy, not about me, but I'm getting somewhere.
I'll take it.
And I'm like, no, I'm not funny, but jeez, the world is giving us some cial right now.
Yeah.
So it turns out if you just literally describe what's happening, people find it really funny when they're not crying. So let me do that. The President on April second, declared Liberation Day. The American economy would be fixed. He was going to use his favorite tool, tariffs. Tariffs were going to do a lot of things they were going to get rid of fentanyl, illegal immigration, secure national security, bring manufacturing jobs home, raised revenue, allowed tax cuts for the rich,
and balance bilateral trade deficits. I think some other things, qre toe fungus. So he announces that on April second, April ninth, markets have freaked out. Everyone has called the White House and said, don't do this. You're destroying the American economy. Rather than the media was wrong in the President Revers's course and says, I was just kidding. I
didn't actually want tariffs. What I wanted was negotiating power the deal out of the deal right right exactly the partly incoherent tariffs he took off, declared a NY pause, kept ten percent tariffs on every country around the world, and said we're going to make deals. A couple of weeks later said in an interview, I've now made two hundred deals. The Treasury Secretary reported, in fact that he
meant sub deals, not deals a new word. They reported that they were already had been called by dozens and later more than dozens of countries. They said they were making trade deals left, right and center, and they already made a dozen or more. But in Navarro says they were going to make ninety deals in ninety days. A typical trade deals, by the way, from a fully staffed,
coherent White House, takes two years from one country. We have one hundred and ninety two trading partners, so Navara says, in ninety days later, on about halfway through the ninety day pause, people start asking about thirty days into this ninety day paus and they have to get ninety one a day done. And we're currently batting zero, which is a very low test score, low batting average. We're getting zero, and so people get answer and they're like, hey, where's
the deals man. So the next day, the White House announces a trade deal with Britain. In a subsequent press conference, the British Prime Minister, when asked did you expect to be announcing a trade deal today, said no. I was called halfway through the Arsenal football game. So that says literally the night before someone from America called and said we're in the middle of something, but we now need to announce tomorrow. So they announced a lot of pomp
and ceremony. The President declared it the greatest trade deal ever made. You read the document, which wasn't released that day. I was released the next day. The document ends with both sides acknowledged that this is not illegally binding agreement. So at that point where now zero trade deals. The Trump does not call president. She makes it very clear. He didn't call president. She President. She makes it clear he didn't call Trump. It's somehow miraculously they communicated. There
was a meeting in Geneva. The Treasury Secretary went over and at the end they declared a trade deal. What you actually saw was they had incredibly high tariffs on each other, prohibitively high. One hundred and forty five percent is what we had on China. They had under twenty five percent on us. They both said, this is point. Let's let's let's move it back down. They did you
read the agreement? The agreement. The deal is the United States and China agrees to have mechanisms by which we can talk in the future.
Right, but that's not a deal.
Okay, so we still move forward. Navarro is still saying we're ninety deals in ninety days. Time moves on, and then suddenly Trump discovers this is not a joke. He discovers that if you try to make ninety deals, ninety countries will try and call you at the same time, and metaphorically, the White House switchboard gets jammed, right, So he says, well, actually, we're not going to have ninety deals in ninety days. Some of these deals, we're just going to send them a letter.
Right now.
Moly, I'm in a relationship, and when Betsy and I want to organize our lives together, we sit down and meet and we talk about it, and there's give and take, and I say what I want and she says which she needs. But if I instead just said, Betsy, I'm going to send you a letter. Whatever it is that Betsy and I trade back and forward would no longer be traded. That's not a deal. So the new deal
is that we're going to send everyone a letter. Fair enough, except they're going to make deals now with the eighteen biggest trading partners, which becomes very complicated because Australia starts calling me and they say a wee eighteenth or nineteenth It depends which table you look up right, no one knows, and then I know I'm going on. But this is just no.
This is where we need to get caught out on the back for us.
Yeah, and okay, so we're still at no trade deals. And in the midst of all this, the President says, and I kid you not, this is the craziest thing. The President says, the European Union and not negotiating in good faith.
Yeah, why what's the driver on that?
Honestly, the Europeans take trade seriously and they want grown up talks, and they are hard to deal with. I mean, someone who's printch for crying out loud, but I mean, I just want you to understand the context of this. Right, He's failed to get anything done with anyone. And in the middle of the pause, and it's literally a pause, it's pause talk, July nine says, well, they're not even doing anything good faith, to which I believe the Europeans
are entitled to the old response. I thought we were on a pause, and so he says, they're not acting in good faith. So I am going to raise tariffs on the European Union to fifty percent. He did that last Friday, to be clear, because it's a high wage country set of countries, as the United States is, A fifty percent tariff effectively means stop the boats. It's an embargo. Nothing's coming in I also want to impress upon people of steaks.
Here.
You might be thinking, oh, well, if liberals are going to have to do without their French wine, you'll have to drink Spanish wine like no, no, even Spanish, boy, You'll have to drink Argentinian, although I would recommend Australian. And maybe people felt good about your next New York party having slightly less fancy wine. Malysian. That's how you spend your days, right, is it? I mean you don't.
I don't drink, so I don't have a I don't have a horse in this race. But I do understand this is not just about wine and cheese. And I hope you all in late exactly. Mulley's stealing all my economics points.
So one of the things that's happened weeks is Molly has graduated from political commentator to economic analyst. And I'm not making fun of Molly. I'm proud, proud of my girl, am I let's say that.
Yes, No, I mean I did write a lot about subprime.
So I have had some but yes.
Oh I'm sorry.
No, No, listen if you want to.
It is different than subprime, and and you know these are different things.
You know, and if you want to be a serious political analyst in the current moment, you do need to think about and understand the economics, which is why you've been doing your seduous sleep. What following, let's get back to the story.
Let's get back.
Yes, yes, yes, you know, my therapist told me to keep going. Okay, so what we get? So what do we get from Europe? Actually the most important thing is like precision machinery. So if you want to build a factory in America, if you want to get your stuff packaged out the door. You know those big conveyor belts that look so gleaming and sexy, most of them come
from Germany readily. So if you're halfway through building a factory and you just found out the price of your equipment if you buy it goes up fifty percent, you might actually just stop building the factory, right President, We get chemicals, we get pharmaceuticals. In fact, most of what we get from Europe you would classify as inputs into American production wine and cheese.
So that's things like parts of cars, parts of things.
Electronics parts. This is how you sabotage the American industry. That's all right, you might be upset about it. I was on Friday, but don't worry. We got all the way through to Monday before the president back down. And I think basically the European Union called and said, hey, we're on a pause. Why do you think we can negotiate a trade deal in less than ninety days, given that your entire trade team has been off doing all
sorts of other things instead. Yeah, So now the pause, the ninety day pause that came into effect on April ninth, that he then paused, So he paused the pause on Friday. On Monday, he paused the pause on the pause, resuming the original pause that paused July fourth, right, or the ninth. July fourth is when we enjoy freedom from tyranny and we celebrate small government ironically, Yes that we will.
We celebrate lot steeped in irony.
Yes, we celebrate we move away from a single king.
Yes, towards a single king.
We shall celebrate it like no other. So anyway, the pause that was paused got unpaused, and so we're back to the original pause, which means now that as of July ninth, we'll learn what's happening with trade with the European Union. Okay, now to rewind. Our trading situation with the European Union is currently unknown until July ninth. Our trade situation with Britain is currently unknown because we have
no agreement, but we've agreed to continue talking. Trading situation in China is unknown because all we agreed is to continue to keep talking. And there are one hundred and eighty nine other countries around the world, none of whom have made headlines, with the exception of course, of the Herd mcdonaldet Islands, which the Trump administration subsequently discovered is uninhabited and therefore they are unlikely to do a deal with that particular set of penguins.
Right now, we have the highest tariffs ever since World War Two.
I'd say since nineteen thirty four. It depends on the day.
In the nineteen twenties, the LTE nineteen twenty it's.
Just so god so the is I never did smoot, so you could just trick. But I hear that a lot of things happening background then, not the LEA tariffs, the Depression era as smooth Haly tariffs, which a couple of weeks ago, our tariff rates were higher than smoot Hay, then they got lower. If the European unions at fifty percent, it's hard to do math in my head might be higher again. But actually, let me simplify it for our audience. For an industrialized country, the standard tariff right is round
about one to two percent. The tariffreate that almost every country, with a few small exceptions charges the United States is about one to three percent. So if the United States has an average tariff rate as of today, I'll remember ten percent on the whole world, thirty percent on China, twenty five percent on orders. It gets very, very complicated. We have very large spreadsheets. I've got friends who are
maintaining all of this. But roughly speaking, the American tariff rate is ten times higher than it was on January first, ten times highed and similar countries, and ten times highed in our trading partners. So this is, you know, when you're not tarift from one hundred and forty five percent down to thirty percent, as we do with China. That sounds like a lot, but it's not. It's moving from an embargo to lunacy, right.
I think that's a really good point in a bargo to lunacy. So where are we now a China. I thought we were down to ten percent with China.
We are so here, and I want to be very careful with my language, and I want your listeners to follow the same habit. So Molly didn't say, but many others would say. They'd say, I thought we had a thirty percent tariff on China and they have a ten percent tariff on us. That gets the numbers right, but it gets the words wrong. What you have is a thirty percent tax on Americans who buy from China, right, They have a ten percent tax on Chinese people who
buy from America. By the way, that thirty percent probably hurts us a lot, right. So if you're doing any sort of importing, and it's not just finished goods, remember a lot of what we buy in fact from China as equipment. If you're a tradesman, a lot of your tools might come from China, You're going to be charged
a thirty percent up charge order. The point what I want you to realize is that in every other country around the world, if you want to build a factory and buy Chinese made equipment for that factory, you can do so without a thirty percent up charge. The only country that gets this thirty percent up charge is the United States, and that might make you really mad. You might be really mad at China. Why is China charging me a thirty percent up charge? It's not that's not Beijing,
that's Washington, right right right. In addition, Beijing is taxing Chinese people who buy from the United States. That's going to lead on balance some number of purchases, particularly of agricultural goods and commodities. Why would you pay more to buy from an American They're going to purchase from elsewhere. So that's what's going to hurt, particularly the farmers. Basically, they're going to have to cut their prices in order to sell their goods.
Farmers are going to have to cut their prices in order to sell their goods.
Well, if we've got a thirty percent tariff from China, if you were trying to sell stuff to China before, the Chinese are not going to pay thirty percent extra for American so beans. They'll buy their so ebens from someone else.
But there aren't huge There aren't huge tech, there aren't huge margins with farming.
There's not huge margins on lots of things.
Yes.
So, by the way, huge margins. I know you want to talk about farmers, but you know what has high paying jobs, that has really fat margins, and that you don't have to walk out in your field and do backbreaking work and when you're not at the mercy of the weather.
Yeah.
Education. I am one of America's great exporters. I know I don't farmer, I don't even sound like an American, but I have students come from all around the world who want to fly into the University of Michigan to do exactly what we're doing right now. Molly, talk economics together for long, baby, Right, I'm not allowed to export. It's one of the few goods we're in order to Normally, when we export, we send the goods abroad. When we export services. You come into America, you get the service,
you leave, but you're leedy cash behind. They're not letting them in the country. You're don't let them in. They they're not going to send their checks. If they're not sending their checks, then there's going to be I know, I get it. No one likes the feed liberals and higher education and indoctrination and all of that, but actually
we are the future. The question for your listeners is do you want your kids to grow up and work in a factory that was created because of Trump's tariffs or would you rather them have the sort of job that I am so privileged to have where I get to wake up and read and talk to interesting people and educate and I get paid more and your kids will get paid more if we grow the higher education sector.
And so just the very direct since my industry is directly under threat, the set of jobs that surround that industry, the people who work for the University of Michigan and universities across the country, and that's before we get into the rest of everything else that higher education brings to our lives. Just so that I put a little ad in for my industry, mate.
I wonder it would just see so much back battling with the tariffs, which I think is actually thank God for that, remember, because there were weeks and weeks where he wouldn't back battle. But I wonder again, like, you can't predict the future, but you can sort of read the past. So, uh, what do you think what would a good resolution of this problem look like? And what would a sort of trumpy resolution of this problem look like.
Okay, let me start on backpedaling. Liberals have taken particular delight that the president takes in a super mucho stance and then a week later backs off. This time it was three days later, but you know sometimes at lasts even more days than that. I don't think they should. So, first of all, realize the what do you The things he's backed off on are the profoundly insane, like the
truly fruit loopy. So the April two tariffs that he called reciprocal tariffs, where he was putting a fifty percent tariff on Lsto because he thought Lesotho was somehow must be protecting. It's the industries because they don't buy much from us, but we buy a lot of diamonds from them. Understand the insane of that that he had a reciprocal tariff on Korea, a country with which we actually have a free trade agreement. So the word reciprocal was a lie.
The level of the tariffs was unconscious, not only unconscionable and uneconomic, but unmoored from any sense of reality. And then that's what's currently on a pause. Okay, So that was literally the worst trade decision of my lifetime, he paused. The good thing about the president is if you thought that was the worst thing of your lifetime, just wait two weeks. And then we got one hundred and forty five percent tariff on China, which is among the top
two worst trade decisions of my lifetime. That we got that back down to thirty percent, And then I am sure this is only the third worst trade decision of my lifetime, the fifty percent tariff on the European Union, which he then knocked back down to ten percent until July ninth. Right, what relief does several weeks of low word tariffs. But this is your point earlier, Molly, the average tariff right around the world is probably going to
be about seventeen eighteen nineteen percent. The average tariff right for an industrialized country is two percent. The idea that Trump always backs down isn't quite right, right, because they're still terrible worst excesses. The unimaginably stupid he gets talked out off right, the merely profoundly mistaken and intensely damaging he sticks with. And that's where we're at. So, Molly, is you know I want to let everyone in on the joke, because apparently it's funny Molly's referring to the
taco trade. Trump always chickens out, so one everyone likes tacos to The most recent chickening out was on a Tuesday, So this is all terrific. But notice that Trump doesn't always chicken out. He walked into the British negotiations and said, the tariff is ten percent, even though you buy more of our stuff than we buy of yours, and that
ten tariff is one hundred percent stuck. And that's where we're still at very high tarot We're still at thirty percent with China, We're at ten percent with every other country around the world. Still this is an end higher in some industries. So this remains an enormous and intentionally damaging set of tariffs. That wasn't answering the question that
was you picked up He always backtracks. Let's talk about that as sort as sometimes does a bit, but let's not overstate it because that makes it feel like there's no damage. There's a lot of damage. Second, you said, what does a good solution look like? This one's easy and I've only really just gotten my head around it because it's so simple. The right answer is for Congress to do its job. The Constitution gives the power of
taris to Congress full stop. Past Congresses delegated authority emergency powers to the president, and the President declares everything an emergency. I'm incredibly hopeful, but I'm not a lawyer. I'm hopeful that at some point all of this will be ruled unconstitutional because in fact there's no emergency. But we don't need to wait for the courts. Congress stops all of this tomorrow if Congress wants to. So I want people to hold onto that the madness of the Trump administration
is one hundred percent fully enabled by Congress. And if you don't like it, call your congressman, and if you're still unhappy, call him or her again, because this is the greatest abrogation of responsibility I've seen, and it's infuriating. So they can Why does Trump go with tariffs rather than other things? Because he can? Yeah, the enabler there.
You know.
He can't just do what he wants on fiscal policy. He can't on monetary policy, but in this he can, and that's why the damage is being done. They gave him the loaded gun and then they're surprised he's waving it around. That's what good looks like. Okay, what's actually going to happen? Oh no, I mean, as far as
I can tell, we're in one big soap opera. And it's great because normally soap operas are about complicated emotions that economists like me don't really understand, things like betrayal, jealousy. But this one's all about trade deficits and tariffs. I mean, I think it's a fabulous soap opera, just a shitty economic policy.
You know.
The The analogy here is it's a totaler with the remote control justin Wolfs. They get bored, they thump at it, they change it, and that is American tariff policy justin Wolfers.
Thank you, Thank you.
Keith Compton Barr is the founder of Can't Win Victory Fund.
Welcome to Fast Politics, Kate.
Barr, Hi, Mollie, thank you for having me. I am so excited.
Oh well, I'm excited to have you. I want you to talk about how you got into this. I think of you as a kind of your sort of how you can win pundon.
Right a little bit. I'm a huge fan of losing actual Oh.
So great, start with that that I think tracks with their origin story, right, yes, so get us going there.
So, like most good things in life, all of this started when I was drinking. I was standing in line for a glass of wine at like a local festival we have in my tiny town, and someone said, hey, Kate,
you want to run for state Senate. And it was a joke because our state Senate maps had just come out and they were horribly jerrymandered in our state senate district was a real loser, and we kind of joked around about what might happen to run a campaign that was just radically transparent about what a total loss it
would be. And my background is in behavioral science and in persuasive communication, and I couldn't let go of the idea about using this as a way to bring jerrymandering down to like real people level, get it out of the political science sphere and into why should a voter give a shit about their voting map? And so when I was slightly more sober, frankly, it still seemed like
a good idea. And then my friend, who is now a member of the Can't Win Victory Fund, we were talking about it and she said the phrase clear eyes fullhearts can't win, and I was just like, that has to exist in the world.
I guess we are doing this and here we are.
So tell me what happened when you ran.
Yeah.
So I filed for office and announced my loss the same day. I actually honestly think I could be kind of an awesome candidate and a real district.
You know, I am a public school kid.
I went to University of North Carolina a couple of times. I've been on town planning boards and nonprofit boards, and I have like kids, I'm pto president, Like, there's a lot of stuff I would want and my representative or senator. And the campaign was to make the point that no matter who you are as a candidate, your fate is determined by how the math lines are drawn, and that that's fundamental problem in our democracy. So I ran the
whole thing as a protest against jerrymandering. People call me in the streets still Kate bar can't win, and all of our shirt said things like loser, and it caught on. We were not expecting that. I expected to go right back to my day job after November fifth. I mean I also expected a president Harris.
So you know what do I know.
Yeah, alas falling into that fantasy for a moment, but it like built and built. And then there was a story that came out in the Washington Post in September, and then I spent the next three weeks on like national and international news, and we thought, wow, there's really something here in this message. It's like cutting through during a presidential election cycle, and we started thinking about what it might look like to do this on a larger scale.
So November fifth, I lost, as predicted, but a couple of important things also happened in my district. The bulk of the district is made up by this one county, Ayerdell County, and it is super red and it has been read for a really long time, but it got bluer and it was one of only eight counties in our whole hundred county state that got bluer last cycle,
and that felt meaningful. You know, it's hard to know what to attribute that to, but having a state Senate candidate who like actually showed up for the voters in
that area couldn't hurt. We also saw that so my district overlapped with a hyper competitive state house district, and the candidate Beth Helfrich in that district won pretty handily, frankly and broke the state House super majority, and all credit to Beth for that, but helpful to have two candidates who were actually out knocking doors on the ballot.
So it was like, let's see what could happen if we grow this and try to make a path for more people in these unwinnable seats to run, especially because like we've been ignoring voters in those places for far
too long because the seats are unwinnable. And so maybe you get a name on the ballot and it's like one hundred and fifty out of one hundred and seventy districts in our state qualify as unwinnable, and so that's one hundred and fifty districts worth of people who aren't being heard, who aren't having local politicians show up for them, and who fundamentally like don't have real representation and don't have a real way to hold their leaders accountable.
Here's my hottest take, and again this comes from a woman called Demand Aliment, who I'm sure you know, which is that if you run a candidate and I guess this is what you were saying too, if you run a candidate, even if you lose, you win.
Absolutely. I think it matters how you run. And I heard when Amanda was on she's talking a lot about representation and the importance of having people who actually like represent the district therein and the lack that and our legislatures.
At all levels of government. I think if you have a candidate really.
Show up for voters and like, do the candidate things like kiss the babies and go to the fairs and knock on the doors, that is meaningful to people.
I also think the Democratic.
Party right now has a bit of a trust problem where you know, like you've got Trump out there saying whatever the fuck comes into his mind, but it seems really authentic and honest because it feels unfiltered, and then Democrats seem really scripted, not all of them obviously.
Yes, one hundred, yes, yes, yes, Okay, So let's talk about this because I absolutely think this is true. Consultants, all consultants, the consultant class has made Democrats way too afraid of their own shadows and unwilling to say personal stuff.
Discuss yep.
And it's a amazing when you knock on somebody's door and you are radically honest with them, and you're like, I am running for state Senate and I am going to lose. As soon as you say that, your credibility with that person increases like one hundred percent, and the thing you say next is so much more meaningful. So I used that to basically knock doors for Alison Riggs. I mean, I was knocking doors as a candidate, but I was talking about me at the doors. I was
talking about Justice Riggs. Because the whole point is I'm going to lose because our maps are drawn unfairly so that politicians can preserve their power. If you want that to be different, you have to vote for Justice Riggs. That'll flip for twenty twenty six and it'll be If you want that to be different, you have to vote for Justice Earls. And in a state like out especially where I mean we just saw Justice Riggs but win by seven hundred and thirty four votes, like all of that matters.
Yeah, exactly, And I mean I think that's such an important point. There is a kind of trust situation, and I do think part of what people liked about Trump, right, and again I'm not here on Nobody in this podcast is saying Trump is good in any elation to perform, but the sort of fake honesty, the kind of feeling that you weren't just sitting there or hearing somebody read a white paper.
Yes, or a teleprompter.
And when you know you're going to lose, a couple of important things happen. One is that consultants don't care about you, and so they go along. And the other thing is you actually can't screw it up, so you can say anything at all. And so I really see these districts as opportunities for us to innovate our playbook, because we can try anything. You're going to lose anyway, So try some wacky shit and let's see what happens. Maybe we learn something that helps us win somewhere else.
At minimum, you.
Have candidates who are running as their like authentic selves, who are ready when we get fair maps in twenty thirty, who have anson then who can run again to actually win, but they haven't like wrecked their chances by trying to tell people they can win for two or three ciples when obviously they couldn't. Like voters aren't dumb. They in these communities, they know who's gonna win in these elections
because they've been living that reality for so long. Most of them have never had a politician come to their door. And so if we show up for them consistently and we are honest and authentic in how we do it, I think we can make some pretty incredible inroads in places that we just haven't. Also, it's cheap, Like my
Comson vote was like a dollar forty. That's insanely cheap, and I didn't even need all that because no, you know, there's just it's so easy to occupy the airspace because there's no one competing for it.
Right.
It's not those It's not like one of those tiny district where everybody is stuck, you know, a place where the media market gets expensive despite the fact.
That it's small.
I wonder if you could sort of talk us through a case of sort of where you think the places are where Democrats should be running people that they're not.
Yeah, so I think we should be running people anywhere we can get a great community candidate, So someone who is already like a pillar of the community, ministers, like Scout leaders, PTO parents, that kind of thing. In North Carolina last cycle, we ran Democrats in one hundred and sixty eight out of one hundred and seventy state legislative seats.
So we did a good job of running people, but about a third of those folks were only names on the ballot, and I truly don't know if that is as useful as the effort it takes to recruit for those spots. But if you have someone who's willing to run, we should run absolutely everywhere. And I'm looking at like South Carolina is another one where we need to be
doing this. Utah, Florida. I mean, they're thirteen. According to the Princeton Jerrymandering Project, there are thirteen states that fail their jerrymandering test, and frankly, three of those are Democratic jerry manders. So both parties do it, and it's like bullshit on both counts. And we need to be showing up in all of those R plus fifteen districts with kick ass candidates who can just say I'm not going
to win. I can't win. The lines are drawn so that I can't win, and that actually makes it easier for them to run because it's hard to come out as a Democrat in a super red place. But when you come out saying like I'm fighting for the principle of our democracy. I got so many maga handshakes. I had to like bathe and hand sanitizer while I was doing this, because they really get it. Everybody gets it that it's about democracy, not trying to be like, you know,
take down their incumbent who has been there forever. You're running against a system, and it just makes the path a lot easier. You also don't have to fundraise a ton and you can say literally anything you want, which feels really good.
Like the idea here is that you should engage. So I used to think that you shouldn't engage.
This is we can just let's just.
Talk about me.
I would like to thank you.
Since I'm so used to talking about myself at this moment. I used to think you shouldn't go on spaces, you know, like you shouldn't go on Bill Maher or Joe Rogan, that you should just only go to places where you agree with them or where you feel that they don't espouse views you don't agree with or like or find objectionable for any number of reasons, real or imagined. And I have completely changed my tune on this. I now
think you should go everywhere and engage everyone. And part of that is because like when you sit down with someone who is maga and I have actually because I have some friends who are.
Actually real die in the world.
You know people who think like Trump is shaking things up, and they are people.
Yeah, like they may.
Be wrong on any number of things, but they are people. And I think what you're talking about with the jerrymanderin is think the same phenomenon.
Yes, we need to be talking to each other, whether it's you know, in real life or digitally human to human. And I spent a lot of my career doing tailored communications, which means, you know, maybe I need to get out a message to someone or to a group of people about why quitting smoking would be good. My background is public health. Sorry to all the people who love smoking in the world. And if you're not a pregnant person, you don't need to hear about how cigarettes can harm
a fetus. And so we could develop algorithms that would put content together like legos, so that each person would see the content that was relevant to them, presented in a way that we thought would be most likely to reach them. And we see that happening in the way like in politics, you see people segmenting themselves like self segmenting,
self tailoring their content. And so if you only go the places where people already agree with you, and that includes running for office, if you're only running in districts where you think you can win or know you can win, you never grow. And so one of the fun things that we do as we're raising money is it's a very long story, but we're building AI.
Models that think like target voting groups.
And the first step in that is generating a huge range of messages that we might show to that target voting group. And so we go to people's houses and they have parties, and we put up an example persona of someone who voted for Trump that we would like to convince to vote for Democrats in the future, and the folks in that room work together to try to come up with messages that they think would be effective for that person. And you know what, message is never effective?
I told you so, right. It's never effective to say, are you sorry now? And so we.
Start to build some empathy in the room for why someone might have made that choice, and we generate this giant, like unique list of messages that we can then go test and use to train our AI models so that in the future we can predict message performance less expensively and more quickly. But it's also just like an interview for all, So I do.
That i'd be doing anything with AI.
AI can't make the messages for what it's worth if you ask it to make. It looks like some North Korea would put out. I mean maybe that I don't know, maybe we got to test some of that shit too, because here we go down that it's pretty slope, right.
But the point I think is that there is quite a lot of opportunity here for a number of getting to people you might otherwise not get to.
Yeah, and to learn how to best reach them. Like I wake up in the nighttime and think, like, what if we had said big money for small business instead of opportunity economy.
Right, that would have been good.
I mean I probably wouldn't have done it.
But you know, no, tax on tips worked really well for the Republicans.
Yeah, and they're definitely not going to do that.
No hate bar. Thanks for coming on.
Mollie john Fast, thanks for having me.
No more.
Second, Jesse Cannon Smiley, we covered a report that said that Pambondi is just a actor doing the spokesman job, and that Steven Miller is running the ship on many, many things. And now this latest report from Axios is that Stephen Miller has told, in stern words to Christy nom another person who's been accused of kaya just being a spokesperson, that she better get to arrest and a lot more people because he ain't having all these immigrants running around the country causing chaos.
Look, first of all, there aren't even that many people coming here anymore.
This is all to scare people.
This is all to make everyone unhappy, un scared, And all Stephen Miller ever wanted to do was arrest immigrants.
This has nothing to do with reality. This is just who he is.
Ice is already completely out of control, disappearing grad students, Ignore these people, don't do this. Let's just be responsible and good and not do this kind of bullshit because it's terrible.
People are being hurt and hated.
That's it for.
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