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 majority of the twenty twenty four Republican Iowa caucus goers don't believe Biden legitimately won the twenty twenty election. We have such a great show for you today. Run for some things. Amanda Litman tells us about how down ballot races well make a difference in the twenty twenty four election, and we know this
could be tight. Then we'll talk to protect democracies Ian Bassen about protecting democracy. But first we have the host of the Laurence o'donald Show MSNBC is Laurence O'Donnell. Welcome back to Fast Politics. Lawrence.
Great to be here.
It's so great to have you. And I feel like I actually think I was watching the returns. I mean, I don't know they called it with one percent reporting.
That's not my choice. I disagree with my industry on this. I don't think there's any reason to rush it, especially in a I mean, could you have asked for less suspense in the outcome of any voting process in American history? There was no Prize awarded for you know who was the first to say it's all over. But yeah, people were still voting in Iowa, you know, and it's an early finish anyway.
I don't get it. I just don't get it.
I thought, you know, DeSantis was very angry about it and posting about how dare they? And you know, that's the one thing I agree with Desantus about. The Ronald Reagan election victory in nineteen eighty was called by the networks before the polls closed in California, and so that was the first I think of these truly outrageous things and by the networks, and like most of us, they're incapable of learning.
Yeah, United States of Amnesia. Yeah, I mean it's so funny because I'm like on this Gorvidal kick and every time you go back, and also Christopher Hitchins, like they wrote some of these pieces twenty thirty, forty years ago, even though the stakes are not quite as high, a lot of the problems are the same.
Yeah, And isn't it weird when you read older things like that to discover that there used to be smart people before us, Like we're what what they had smart people before?
Oh? How'd they do that?
Yeah, I mean Hitchens is a really good example of someone who I don't know. He just looks at things in a very interesting way. That makes me you want to look at things in an interesting way.
Yeah. There was a pure coldness to his logic, and there was never the slightest attempt to accommodate anyone disagreeing with him. And that was not considered offensive. That was considered a perfectly legitimate conversational approach. And there were people I know, people who knew who sharply disagreed with them,
who never felt uncomfortable in that kind of exchange. And now, you know, so much of what we have to say has to do simultaneously take care of the people who are disagreeing with us as we're saying it.
Yeah, there are things that we can learn from Iowa that are insane and disturbing and also I think a little bit hopeful. So first for insane and disturbing. NBC News Iowa Entrance poll. Did Biden legitimately win in twenty twenty? Eighty percent of the Hailey voters say yes, forty percent of the Disantis voters say yes, and six percent of the Trump voters say yes.
Yeah.
So the entrance and what will now be exit polling from primaries that you see in the ear of Trump are simply intelligence tests.
That's all they are. And they didn't used to be.
It wasn't an intelligence test, you know, when you were getting Romney voter exit polling, you know, or McCain voter exit polling. It wasn't. It was simply a disagreement about techation. It was a disagreement about how big government should be, how much government you can afford, and abortion issues and gun issues. And it was not an intelligence test.
And now it is.
And Trump's the stupidest thing that's ever happened in American politics. And you know, if you're with them, you are not necessarily stupid. But what those polls showed, those entrance polls show last night is that you are in an extremely
stupid group everybody. If you're not stupid in the Trump section of the Iowa caucus, pretty much everyone around you is profoundly stupid and pretty deeply and intensely racist at the Hitlerian level, since eighty one percent believe, as the CBS poll showed that eighty one percent of Republican primary voters, which we have to remember, is a subset of Republican voters. It is just a subset of them, but it is
the most extreme. And eighty one percent of them believe that Trump is right that immigrants poison the blood of this country. Nikki Haley's parents were immigrants. She is the poison blood. She has it in her, the poison blood that Trump is talking about. She's transmitted the poisoned blood Trump is talking about.
To her children. And eighty one percent of the people who Nikki Haley is trying to get to vote for her believe she is walking poisoned blood. So the ceiling on that candidacy is most clearly described by that poll, more than more than any other. It's impossible for her to get anywhere close to the nomination among those voters.
Yeah, it's a certain amount of incredible wishcasting to think that somehow you're going to be able to put in someone who she's ultimately really one America. I mean again, I am not a fan of her policy, but she's made it in America right in a way that you know that our great grandparents did, the way that this is meant to work the whole country, and the idea that somehow these people who voted you know who got vary bubble with Trump because Trump touched that fourth rail
of racism that Republicans pretended not to believe in. I mean, it's kind of an amazing bit of pushcast in.
Yeah, and you know, she's a standard Republican candidate. She comes from a long line of Republican candidates like her. And what she's done is she has adopted Trumpian views where necessary or stayed silent on them. You know, Nikki Haley's position on tariffs, which she hasn't said a word about, will no doubt be functionally identical to Donald Trump's. And that's a one hundred reversal of the Republican Party position
on tariffs until Donald Trump came along. And she looks to a lot of people, I think like a normal Republican candidate, and that's true, but it's a normal Republican candidate who's adapted to trump Ism in many policy corners that go unnoticed.
A lot of us assume that you would behave like a normal Republican if she lost, But there's ample evidence to suggest that this authoritarian streak, while it runs through DeSantis. Why wouldn't it necessarily run through her.
Well, I don't think it would, because she's rational. Here's the rational part. She knows this. You know, she elected governor. The first thing you do, the first thing you have to do after an election that you win, is work on getting the people who didn't vote for you, picking up as many people as possible who didn't vote for you. So, you know, Richard Nixon wins in nineteen sixty eight by less than one percent of the vote. Okay, it's a cliffhanger.
They don't call it until the day after and all that. Right, So four years later he wins forty nine cents. You know, Ronald Reagan the same thing. Well, what did they do. They spent the entire time trying to get votes they didn't get the first time. That's all he did. Now that you can't get everyone, right, but there's some margin, there's some margin. And so it's why one of the reasons Trump has been so laughable to me since he
one in twenty sixteen. I was waiting for the day, you know, was it going to be a week after the election or when was it going to be the day when he started speaking to the voters who didn't vote for him, and he never spoke to them ever. Right, And so the next time he loses to vote by an even bigger margin than he lost the vote in twenty sixteen. And what's he done since then, Well, he's gone even farther away from the voters who didn't vote for him. And so Hayley will not do that. Ailey
will be a Nixon Reagan, you know, Bush. That's what you do when you get elected. You start working on picking up two or three or five percent of the people who didn't vote for you. She will do that. And so that's where she is. And she's also going to have a dysfunctional Congress basically, you know that won't be able to deliver very much. So there's not much she can do. She certainly won't spend ten seconds of her time shuring the Israeli government to possibly be more
humane and their approach to a situation in Gaza. And what she might or might not.
Do or support doing with Ukraine is likely to be much closer to Biden than to Trump on Ukraine.
And put it that way, what you're talking about is a really interesting point about Trump's in staunch refusal to grow the electorate and You've talked about this with me before, and we've talked about this together, and it is why I actually think that Trump is again. I do think he'll ultimately be the Republican nominee. But he is ultimately in trouble because he's not shown any interest ever in growing his face.
If you look at Biden, it's the standard version. Like when he wins, the first speech he makes is inclusive and reaches up to people who didn't vote for him. I mean, that's true of Richard Dixon, it's true of Ronald Reagan, It's true all these people. It's the very first thing they do, and true of Bill Clinton. And by the way, Bill Clinton, the big group to reach for was the Ross Puau voter. You know, there was a giant.
Third party vote in nineteen ninety two. Bill Clinton gets elected with forty three percent of the vote. That wasn't very comfortable. So he spends every day trying to talk to the Parrot voter, you know, while also trying to hold onto what he had with voters. And that's how he got reelected. It's just the way it works. And so the tension that people have to learn to live with now is that you have a fifty three percent,
saye population. Okay, the CBS poll shows that fifty three percent of Americans disagree with Donald Trump that immigrants are poisoning the blood of America. Okay, So that means fifty three percent is your maximum number of sane people in America. Fifty three percent, that's it. And so Biden doesn't get to work with seventy percent of the population. Potentially, fifty three percent is the absolute maximum that he could get if every single person who thought that voted for him.
And the trouble is that many of the people who disagree with Trump on poisoning the blood of America also want lower taxes, so you know, or other things right that Biden's not going to give them. So the maximum spot you can get to in these elections at most is fifty point one percent.
And so they're going to be close. They're going to always be close.
And it's ridiculous, you know that Donald Trump should have like a closer he should lose more narrowly than Jimmy Carter lost. Is kind of ridiculous, but that's the country you live in now, you know. You notice that the Republican side is completely comfortable with this. They're one hundred percent comfortable with this. They know that when you're landing this plane that the wheels are going to scrape the top of them out and tops, but they don't care
about how close it is. Nobody on the Republican side is worried about how alienating Trump is, how unpopular Trump is. In fact, no one on the Republican side is urging Trump to do something to appeal to these voters, the way everybody on the Democratic side has a suggestion to Joe Biden about how he has to appeal to voters who aren't quite with him just yet. There's never a
suggestion about that on the Trump side. And that's this is a guy, you know, who lost by you know, seven million votes or something last time, and no one's saying it to him, Hey, you got to gotta do better than that. Why do you think that is this interesting professionalism about voting On the Republican side, they are politicians. We now know it more than ever that the Republican
voter is a politician. You know, I used to say this to people that you know during the Clinton years other times that you know, one of the one of the things I didn't want people to have to become was a politician themselves.
When they went into the voting booth.
And so, you know, I used to, you know, welcomely encourage people who thought they wanted to vote for a third party or make some statement with their vote, especially if they lived in New York or California, because it won't matter in the electoral college. But by all means do so, because you shouldn't be forced into becoming a politician with your vote. Well, Republicans never bought that right, and so the Republicans were never voting for Ralph Nader
or anything like that, but Democrats were. And I certainly did many times, you know, vote for third party candidates. But I always voted in Massachusetts, New York, or California, so my vote never mattered. It's never mattered once in my life, the presidential votes. And so I could play around with it in any way I wanted to.
But Republican voters were already politicians. They were already making that calculation of yeah, you know, this guy's not perfect. Romney's not perfect, but I'm with him. McCain's not perfect, but I'm voting farm. Many Republicans definitely did not think Ron Reagan was perfect, but you know, okay, we're will it, you know, And the Democrats have always been more ambitious than that, much less willing to come to that final decision as a voter to be a politician.
They often have not chosen to do that. And it's in the nature of the way these two parties vote, and it's a riskier thing on the Democratic side. And that's how Richard Nixon became president in nineteen sixty eight, because you know, people thought young voters thought that, you know, Humphrey and Nixon were the same. Turned out they weren't. I certainly believe that I was a little kid at the time. I was hearing it from everybody, you know, all my.
Older brothers, you know, Humphrey and Nixon's to say, okay, you know, so I didn't care. I mean, as a little kid that he were Humphrey lost. I didn't know that what was at stake. And so the notion of lesser of two eevils voting was a very common understanding of the way it works in a two party system. It doesn't work that way in Israel.
You get to vote for exactly what you think, and in parliamentary systems you get to do that.
But in our system, which was set up specifically to avoid the kind of coalition stuff that occurs in parliaments, the idea, you know, lesser of two evils was what I was looking at on ballots pretty much most of my life. You know. It's like I wasn't enthusiastic about what the menu choice was. And so I think one.
Of the Obama effects I think might be, especially with younger voters voters can cast their first vote for Obama, is that they get to idealize presidential voting. They get to go, oh, no, got I voted for a perfect candidate.
I agreed with them on everything, said, well, wow, I never experience and that's pretty amazing. The Republicans are very used to this, that you vote for what's in front of you, and you know, you take the one thing they're serving on the menu, and you know, you know, and Democrats, especially the younger voters I think who got had that Obama experience of idealizing their vote is they feel weird about how come I don't feel idealizing in
my vote for Joe Biden. And so in the end, in September, October November, I think the focus on lesser of two evils will be pretty clear.
I don't think there's going to be that Humphrey Nixon mistake again, because Trump is so much more vividly bad. Even the Nixon was in nineteen sixty eight, and he was pretty bad looking in nineteen sixty eight, but Trump is much worse. And so you know, we had a voter interviewed in New Hampshire West that on MSNBC who said she's heavily left, describe yourself as heavily left, and then said she would, of course vote for Nicki.
Haley over Joe Biden. Well, you're not heavily left, or you have a little more homework to do. I know for a fact, absolute certainty. In fact, I want to track down that voter and bring her on in October and ask her, you know, how she's feeling, because she's not going to vote.
For Republican judges and Republican Supreme Court justices. She's not and she's not going to vote for Republican candidate who has zero sympathies or no sense whatsoever that there should be any restraint ever suggested to the Israeli military. She's not going to vote for that candidate.
No, of course not. Thank you so much, Lawrence. This is really great.
Thank you.
Amanda Littman is the co founder of Run for Something. Welcome back to Fast Politics. My MVP of the week, Amanda Littman.
I'm always always happy to be here, Mollie.
Last was a big week for Run for Something, because yet again a lot of your candidates took the stage and were shown to be just superstars. Can we talk about Congresswoman Crockett.
Jasmine Krockett from the Great State of Texas is just killing it in the best possible way. You know. Run for Something worked with her in her first race for the Texas State House, and when she won the seat there, she was one of the leaders pushing Greg Abbott and Republicans especially against voter suppression and horrific bills they were
trying to pass. Not only did pass in Texas, she became one of the first Run for Something alum to take a seat in Congress and has over and over and over again proven why it really matters to have young, diverse progressives who show up differently and lead differently and do not give a single fuck about what the norms are in terms of civility and is really ready to hold people accountable for their actions.
She's an all star.
So one of the things about the congresswoman is she actually had really I think appropriate background for Congress. Can you explain a little bit about that.
Yeah, So, Jasmine was a civil rights attorney, she was a public defender. She started her own law firms. She duck on a bunch of pro bono cases. She originally ran for the Texas State House back in twenty nineteen in a special election and then was able to run for Congress again in a special election after a Congresswoman Bernice Johnson, and now she wasn't going to seek reelection.
She was in a competitive primary she didn't want. In general, she's like exactly the kind of person you want in office. She is really values driven, she's super smart, and most important, I think she's like very clearly able to call out the bullshit when she sees it in a way that it makes brings so much fresh energy, especially to the hearings that she's doing.
Yeah, I mean, she just it's not business as usual, right, it's really people's lives.
And she understands, like really intimately I think and inherently the value of making a scene like I think this is Republicans been really good at, especially in these congressional hearings over the years, that like going viral not is like is a good thing because it brings attention to an issue you're trying to bring.
She knows that, like she didn't get into.
This to wait her turn, that some people might want her to stay quieted, but she is just deeply ready to cause a little good trouble, I guess is the best way of saying it.
The Oversight Committee was set up by Republicans to be good on television right and to make viral moments that they could then fundraise off of. And what he did which was smart, was he then put on people on the Democratic side who could also do that. The congresswoman is really still new, so I think it's really valuable. But one of the things I wanted to ask you too, is this is a case of a candidate. She comes from a red state that might have a swingy future.
We've talked a lot about how important it is. You and I have talked a lot about how important it is to run people in seats even when you might not win. Can you talk about the importance of that.
Yes, So I think Congressman Crockett is a really good example of the voters in her community are going to show up for her because they're excited by her. And we're seeing the same thing happen in districts across the country, even in places where we don't always come out on top, simply fielding candidates and fielding candidates voters can get excited about, especially at the most local levels state house, state senate,
city council, school board, can really gin up turnout. We did studies on this back in twenty twenty, and we looked at the presidential election and state legislative races and the governor's races, and found that simply fielding a candidate for a state legislative race in summer we hadn't before, which historically have been a lot of districts that have gone uncontested, can increase turnout for the top of the ticket in that district by anywhere between half a percent
and close to two and a half percent. That's the margin of victory. It makes a lot of sense, like these local candidates are knocking doors, they're having personal conversations with voters, They are much more relatable in many ways than the top of the ticket whatever that is. In that place, they are really running strong, brassroots driven campaigns, especially as folks that run for something works with and it's much easier, I think, to connect those races to
your day to day life. Like, yes, obviously what happens in DC is incredibly important, but what happens to your school and the streets you drive on and the cost of your home, all of that is being determined at the local level, and you get to really have a conversation with a person who's making a decision about it.
And so let us talk about your theory of the case when it comes to the twenty twenty four election and how down ballot candidates could help the top of the ticket.
Yeah, I think we're going to see this, especially in twenty twenty four when, as we now know, it is going to be Trump first Biden. Many of us have known for a while, but I think it's like really starting to think in with the Iowa behind us, it's going to be Trump first Biden round two. There's a lot of people who aren't that excited about it.
That's okay.
You don't necessarily have to be excited to show up at the polls, but you do have to show up, and I think it's really good to give people a reason besides the presidency. So one of the things we run for Something is really focusing on this year is making sure we're recruiting and supporting candidates everywhere, but especially in these places where there's really top of the ticket consequences. Expect to work with more than eight hundred and fifty
candidates this year. Over one hundred and thirty five of them are likely to be focused exclusively in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, knowing that the electoral college will likely be decided in those three key states. We're also thinking a lot about where our school board candidates in California and New York can help maybe spur up turnout for the congressional races, where our local folks in Montana can help
John Tester increase his help hold the Senate hopefully. You know, all of this makes a difference in an election that will likely be decided by tens of thousands of votes, if not less.
When you talk about school boards, we really saw what could happen with school boards and ultimately the Moms for Liberty Crew really did just get creamed. But you were involved in that, so talk about that. Yeah.
One for Something had a seventy two percent win raid for our school board races in twenty twenty three, Moms for Liberty had maybe in the thirty percentage range of a third of their folks one thirty too much. Yeah, like they're not more popular. There's not book not popular. Talking about fur Asian schools not popular. Distracting from the issues like teacher pay and facilities funding and how we're teaching our kids to read. Not popular when we can win.
So it's why I run for something.
That's really thinking about candidate recruitment, especially right now when the deadlines are coming up week after week.
It is almost too.
Late to run for office, but probably not too late depending on where you are.
And if you're a woman, you need to be told. Just remind us that's statistic, because I think that's so important.
You know, there's research that says women need to be asked seven times before they run for office. So the joke goes, men don't need to be asked at all. They'll tell you when they're.
Running and ask you for money.
Right, so you know, if you're listening to this, I'm asking for run. I'm asking you to run seven times over and we'll help you if you decide to get on the ballot.
Yeah, and you'll always be better than Dean Phillips.
Always the bar is so luck you will always be there and feel it.
Tell me about some of the other races that we should be watching. If you are listening to this and you're thinking about running, what are the low hanging fruit, the kind of small races that make a big difference.
Yeah, So I would definitely be looking at school board races. There are you know, twenty four thousand of them happening this year that are going to be incredibly important and that will do a big push towards turnout at the top of the ticket. We know Republicans especially are investing pretty intensely in school board races in California, specifically to
help their congressional folks. I'd also take a look at things like mayor and city council races in Phoenix, Arizona, and Maricopa County in Scottsdale, where there's some really critical turnout that could happen.
We're looking, of.
Course at races in Missouri where there's an exciting governor's race, and also a ton of local elections there. There's city council and mayorship races in some of the bigger places in North Carolina that can make a difference. Obviously, there's a bunch of stuff happening in Ohio, especially a state Supreme Court race. There's like city some in balladives happening.
There are local elections happening all across Texas, including positions that directly oversee the election, like sheriff and tax assessor and county commissions, which we're counting on the future of democracy.
It would be good if people held them.
And I would say in Wisconsin, you know there's the unicipal elections happening this April that will make a difcs and what's happening in November. So all of these is the way to win the big ones is to win these small ones.
Yeah, and I think it's worth I mean, we're talking about California. So in twenty twenty two, the red wave right where we were told there would be a red wave and Democrats would get their assets handed to them. One of the way is that Republicans won was they won these in Biden districts in California and New York. So is that what you're talking about when you're talking about Republicans running school board candidates in California?
Exactly right?
And we have heard this sort of through the grapevine that they have been very intentionally focusing on work in California. Just let an email from the Leadership Institute in the last week or two.
They're starting up.
All of these trainings for activists in southern California, specifically.
For school board races and local races, but.
Coincidentally located the same place as there are competitive congressional seeds. That's how they're going to try and hold the house, and we're gonna be there to stop them.
Right, And I think that's really important. I mean, it's funny because it's like so many of these races. If you look at twenty two, I'm thinking about George Santos, right, George Santos won that race because there was a lack of democratic enthusiasm and a lack of investigation and a guy who really read is pretty sketchy even from early on. That needs to not happen again in twenty four.
And I think like the thing to keep in mind here is people are coming on like the Biden versus Trump, you know, to do all the work here to get people to show up with the polls. But in places like basically everywhere outside of the core electoral battleground states, Biden's not going to have a campaign presence, nor should he. That's not a job. His job is to win the White House. His campaign job is to win the White House. Going to have organizers on the ground in some of
these suburban districts in New York and California. Nor will they have folks on the ground in places like Montana, where we need to win to hold the Senate.
Right. Oh, because it's not a presidential.
Joe Biden's not gonna win Montana, and it would be foolish campaign to spend resources to try and win Montana.
But we can.
Absolutely help John Tester by investing in city council races, school board races, county offices, the kinds of positions that maybe if the candidate themselves doesn't win, but they get an extra two hundred voters to show up for them that wouldn't otherwise, that can help John.
Tester win that state and hold that state.
So that's what we're looking out across the country is making sure that we have really good candidates running in as many places as possible to do the kind of communications and organizing work that we know wins elections, especially knowing that the Biden campaign isn't and shouldn't necessarily.
Be everywhere that we also need to win.
Yeah. I think that's a really good point. And you know, it's funny it's we're talking about this, but it is true, Like the Biden campaign can only work in the states where Biden needs to win or will win, right, and those are states like Arizona, right, states like and they're not states like Ohio, which is a Senate seat that Democrats desperately need to keep.
Exactly right, And I don't involve the Biden campaign for that. They're doing exactly the right thing, investing as much as they can and the key states they need to win the electoral College. We as a community of people who also care about other things, need to be investing everywhere else.
Yeah, I want to ask you about Florida because I feel like one of the things that you're not on the ground reporting. That's not your job, obviously, but you do get to see where candidates are coming from, and I have a suspicion like if you looked at Arizona Sheriff Joe or Bio caused a great deal of a lot of really cool candidates came out of what was really bad and hurtful anti immigrant policy from this deranged sheriff. Are you seeing a similar dynamic out of Florida.
Yeah, we are seeing some, especially on the education side of things. You know, superintendents in Florida are elected positions are county wide school boards, and these districts tend to be really big because they're county wide. In many places, the supervisors of elections are county wide and a lot of power all of these positions. We are seeing some really like just batchet stuff like that I just saw I think earlier last week. They're banning Bill O'Reilly's book.
They're banning the Dictionary, They're banning Bible, they are banning you know, novels that are like core to cannon and
foundational text for so many, especially teenagers. They're going over the line that SIT's not popular, but we have to make fighting against them, and one of the Florida is one of the places we're really thinking about doing more school board work in the years to come, because you know, Ron De Santis is not going to be president, but he's going to stay governor of Florida for a while, and we're going to make sure that he is being
held accountable for the political machine that he has built there, which includes a lot of these school board candidates.
We had this candidate who's running for Senate in Florida. Her name is Debbie Powell and she's running against really Rick Scott is the guy from Mars attack. Do you think that there is any chance for like a kind of miraculous backlash, I mean like a sort of brown back kind of phenomenon the way that it happened in Kansas and Florida.
Yeah, I think anything is possible.
We got to make sure we have folks on the ground having the conversations to hold other than Florida Republican Party accountable. Florida Democrats have been in a tough spot. You know, it's become sort of a tautological truism. They don't win and then a hard time raising the money so that they really can't win. But we're going to be there for the long haul and hope to be part of the Florida comeback story.
What's such that it could be?
Yeah, that would be really exciting. Tell me other states where you're sort of seeing staff for where you feel that there's something brewing.
I think there are so many places where are really exciting candidates we're working with this year.
Obviously, amazing folks down in Texas.
We're already talking to people that are running in twenty twenty five down in Texas, which is good. We're going to need that long runway to have those conversations. Got amazing folks in Illinois, Missouri, Ohio. There's incredible leadership in mayor Justin Bibb in Cleveland. I'm trying to build that bench there.
We have really cool folks who.
Have run and won. In Indiana, of all places, it's Mike Pence's home state, but he's not going to be on the beout there.
But we have some amazing local folks who.
Are coming up and really like showing what could be possible.
For an Indiana Democrat. I'm really excited about our folks in.
Nevada, Colorado, Washington State, Upstate New York, Connecticut. And really the cool part about this work is there's so many exciting people running in every single state who give me a re and to think that, yeah, like the president is kind of bleak, but the future, if we get there, will be really right.
Yeah, we just have to get there. I think that Biden can be Trump. I have a fair amount of confidence in that. But I do think that there are a lot of young progressives who might not be super excited by Biden for any number of reasons, and that this would be a way to theoretically get them to turn out.
Right, that's exactly right.
And I think especially for young voters who are correctly in many cases furious at the Biden administration, like, we need them to show up for other reasons. And if they also cast the ballot for Biden, that's fine.
They don't ask it, not it. They just got to show up with the polls.
And the more we can give them a reason to be on the presidency, the better.
Yeah, And I think that's a really good point. This is the do you want to have elections? Election?
And like, do you want to have elections elections? Do you want to have reproductive rights elections? Do you want to have the right to marry who you love?
To read?
What you want to, you know, be able to buy or rent a home and a place you want to live. That's what's at stake here, and the more that our local folks can really communicate that, the better.
Thank you so much, Amanda anytime Molly. Ian Basson is the executive director of Protect Democracy. Welcome Too Fast Politics.
Ian, I'm so glad to be here. Thanks for having So.
This is going to air tomorrow, we will be in this kind of post traumatic malaise of the realization that most of us, I think knew this was coming, but there is something spectacularly grim about the reality that Trump is going to be the Republican nomine.
I think we're all in a state of denial, even those of us who pay excruciatingly close attention to these matters. But nationally, there seems to be an inability or an
unwillingness to look at and did just hard things. And so you see this, I think within the Republican ranks, where people are wishing it away, columnists writing chantasy stories about well it could be somebody else, or maybe he's not so bad, all of that, and you see it in the pro democracy coalition seeming to not yet be able to digest the reality that we are going to be facing an election this year in which someone who tried to overturn the results of the book last time
and is a facially patent authoritarian is going to be one of the candidates that have fifty percent chance or better of winning.
Let's talk about where you are involved in this. Tell us what EURO up to.
So I run an organization called Protect Democracy, which is a cross ideological anti authoritarianism group, and I come to this out of the background as a government lawyer. I served for the first three years of the Obama administration of the White House Counsel's Office, where part of my job was counseling executive branch officials on the rules that governed executive branch behavior and trying to make sure that
we didn't violent. And when I did that work, I inherited a set of rules from the Bush administration, and if I had questions about them, I called EMMITTT. Flood did my job for the Bush administration. If Embitt I could answer it, we called the lawyer who did it for the Clinton administration. It didn't matter whether you were serving under a Republican or a Democratic president. The rules
were the same from administration to administration. And when Donald Trump was elected in twenty sixteen, it marked a turning point for our country because unlike anyone else who was running from Bernie Centers on the left to ten crews on the right, Donald Trump doesn't believe in our constitutional, representative democratic form of government. He aspires to be a dictator.
He admires the world's leading autocrats. And so it was a moment that called for the beginning to assemble a coalition that would try to protect the foundations of our democracy. And that coalition needs to include progressives and moderates and conservatives, Democrats and republican and our organization does include all of those people to stand up for the right of a free people to continue to self govern and every four years to be out able to have a free and
fair choice of who to elect. And that is what is in danger right now. And so my role in this is to be part of the coalissionment tries to protect democracy for the next generation.
Yeah, I'm thinking about what it was like when government lawyers just did their job with no partisanship, right, I mean, emmid Flood wasn't going to tell you, you know, Yeah, we just threw that stuff out because we weren't interested in it, or we let our boss take home classified documents.
As any lawyer who served in the executive or a president will tell you, every president tries to push the bounds of presidential power. If you look at a ledger at the end of an administration. This is true for Democrats, Republicans, going back to the beginning of the republic, there are a bunch of issues in which they tried to push the balance and then they said, nope, you know what, the system probably shouldn't allow me to do that, and
they relent. Now there's a bunch where they pushed the battance and they said, oh, you know, maybe this is one where I can kind of push a little bit and get a little bit more powerful the executive. And there's always a couple of examples on each side of the ledger for every president. What is fundamentally different about Donald Trump is he doesn't believe there should be any restrictions on his power at all.
Waking up on this sort of dawn of another bout of authoritarianism, and what can we do.
The way we at least think about it is that our democracy coalition in this country needs to essentially do three things if we're going to survive this moment. And when I say survived this moment, I don't just mean Donald Trump, because Donald Trump is riding a wave of authoritarianism that has been sweeping the world in the twenty first century. You know, democracy had been on the rise in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and then sometime in the early aughts it plateaued and began to
go into reverse. And so you've seen countries that had been making progress democratically, countries like Venezuela, countries like Poland, countries like Hungary or Turkey or even India backsliding into more illiberal and authoritarian forms of government. And that's happening here as well. So in order for us to survive this moment, which goes beyond Donald Trump, he has symptom, not cause of this, although he poses an acute threat
because he is an extremely talented demogogue. We essentially need to do three things. The first is just put the fire out that is engulfing our house, and that is making sure that the twenty twenty four election is free and fair and that ideally a candidate wins who believes in our system of government, who is pro liberal representative democracy. And that's the first challenge. The second is that our founders anticipated that there would be self interested tyrants who
would try to aggrandize power for themselves. They built the constitution in response to King George being a tyrant, and they built a system of overlapping checks and balances and guard rails to constrain tyranny. And those worked relatively well in Trump's first term, not by themselves. They weren't self executing, is because people use them, but they were exposed as
perhaps not being as strong as we would like. The second thing we need to do is we need to strengthen those guardrails, and we need to do that ideally without an autocratic power, but certainly in the instance that we might have an autocred and power. And the third thing we need to do is there's a reason why we're in this mess, and that is that the current structures of our system are in many ways incentivizeding this behavior.
Kevin McCarthy and the other Republicans who behaved in incredibly irresponsible, antidemocratic ways, in a lot of ways, they were doing the rational thing. If you had their set of incentives, and that's because the current structures of our system, the two party duopoly, the first past the post electoral system that we have, where the gerrymandering of districts, the ways that primaries dictate who wins general elections, those are all incentivized in this behavior. They went to college, and so
we've got to change some of those structures. Over the last one hundred and fifty years, every other advanced democracy in the world has updated its system to reflect the fact that we've all learned what makes a better system.
The only country that hasn't done that is ours. Steve Levitski and Daniel Ziblat, the authors of the book How Democracies Die, have a new book out called Tyranny of the Minority, where they talk about the fact that we as a country are advising other nations on how to update their democracies to be more resilient, and we're not taking that medicine ourselves. It's like a Somalia saying, drink this,
but I won't drink it. Right. We need to update our system, and so we need to do all three of those things, and we've been working out all of those fronts as an organization, but we've got to do it really as a country.
Really good point. I'm curious to know what that would look like. Give me a few ideas here.
Let's get specific. So we talk about protecting the free and fair election. We're talking about a couple different aspects of this. I'll just name two of them. What is elections only work when you have a healthy information ecosystem where we're all having a debate on a shared set of facts. And one of the challenges we faced obviously
years is the rampant spread of disinformation and misinformation. Misinformation being innocently shared information that's inaccurate, disinformation being maliciously shared information that is known to be inaccurate, but people are spreading it anyway for their own corrupt purposes. And we've seen a proliferation of both of those and we've got
to check that. And so we have a project called Law for Truth where we have litigated a number of defamation cases against some people who have spread injurious and false information about elections. So recently people may have seen
this in the news. Are incredibly brave clients, Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss to brave election workers in the state of Georgia, who were falsely accused of corrupting the twenty twenty election one one hundred and forty eight million dollar verdict against Rudy Giuliani on the basis of things that he said about them that were determined in a court
of law to be a false interfamatory. We recently also so wan a decision clearing emotion and dismiss in a similar case on behalf of the Republican recorder in America, Po County, a guy with the name of Stephen Richard who was we alleged was falsely accused by Terry Lake of corrupting the twenty twenty two gubernatory election that she lost, and the court recently ruled that we can proceed with
that case. We have a number of other cases like this where we are trying to do what the legal system has allowed for hundreds of years, which is people who were falsely accused and in a way that injures them materially have recourse through the justice system. And what we believe will happen is if enough of these cases get litigated and people are held accountable, you will start to see the deterrent of tort law work to check somebout business information. But we also need to worry about
the structures of our system. So on January sixth, twenty twenty one, during the storming of the Capitol, what was Congress doing. It was counting electoral college ballots pursuant to an incredibly vague and our Kane law from the eighteen
eighties called the Electoral count Pack. And that law was incredibly poorly drafted, and it allowed for bad faith actors to try to put forward disingenuous interpretations to the law that led to a lot of the conflagration we saw on January sixth, and so one of the things that we did pause for.
A second, so that is that idea that Mike Pence could opt in another slight of electors he could refuse to certify. That was sort of where we had Mike Lee sending, you know, Mark Meadows an email saying, maybe we could do this, we could do that, we could do other slights. Yes, continue, that's right.
And so one of the things that seemed obvious after that tragic day was, well, we should really update that law and make it incredibly clear, for example, that the vice president doesn't have the power to simply decide who the next president should be and so working with a coalition ing great groups like the Campaign Legal Center at Issue one and some terrific lawyers from the right and left like Bob Bauer and Jack Oldsmith and Ginsberg, we advised Congress on how they could reform that law, and
ultimately a bipartisan working group came together the Electoral Account Reformat, which was signed into law by President Biden December of party twenty two. That strengthens that process to hopefully avoid
some of the problems that we solve before. And then going beyond that, we've now been working with state legislators around the country to update their laws to align with the federal new Electoral Account reformat to have a smoother process where there are less opportunities for bad faith actors to try to take us off the rail. So, for example, in Michigan, they've already done that. We're working on in
some other states as well. So those are some of the ways in which, you know, sort of in the in the nitty gritty details of how our electoral system operates, we can try to strengthen the system in time for this election, make sure that there's less opportunity for shenanigans and foul play, and we can talk about some of the things that we could do on some of the other fronts as well.
So I want to just talk about this idea of being able to take out some of that the sort of more vague language that Trump and his people tried to use in twenty twenty. Do you think And again, I know this is probably not going to happened, but I mean, where are you on the fourteenth Amendment and Trump being pushed off the ballot?
You know, I've really come around on this one. I started off concerns, but after January sixth, we did an analysis of the Section three of the fourteenth Amendment, and our conclusion internally was that as a purely legal matter, if you were sort of just an academic interpreting the law, that it's even clear to us that it applied to Donald Trump, that by any definition, Donald Trump engaged in insurrection, and that the purpose of a fourteenth Commendment after the
Civil War was to disqualify anybody who had taken it out and done that in order to preserve our republic from threats like the Confederacy rising again, and that he should be disqualified. But our concern was that, you know, and this has been obviously talked about a lot recently, that in other countries, that tool of disqualifying opponents is one that is used in undemocratic places, and we were worried about what it would look like if that tool
got if that sword got on chief here. But I've come around to the view that I absolutely think now the Supreme Court should uphold the Colorado decision and disqualify Donald Trump. And let me say why, for a couple of reasons. So what the concern that we'll wait a minute, this is a Pandora's box, and if that's done to Trump, won't Texas simply disqualified? Joe Biden, Well, the truth is that every law that we have on our book can be misused by bad faith actors in circumstances for which
it was not intended. But that does not lead us as a nation to simply decline to apply the law as it exists in situations for which it was designed. If we were to do that, then not only would we never enforce laws in appropriate circumstances because of fears that they could be misused in others, but we would give the worst actors of veto over ever being able to be held accountable merely by threatening that if they're held accountable, their allies are going to do it to
someone else. If you were to give bad faith actors that veto, you would essentially put people like Donald Trump and every other criminal in a country above the law, and that cannot be the way that the system should operate.
The second reason I think it's really important the Supreme Court applied the text of the Constitution as it is written is because there is this fantasy out there that somehow, if the Supreme Court were to disqualify Donald Trump, he and his supporters would go ballistic and cause all sorts of chaos. But here's the thing, we know they're going to do that anyway if he loses at the ballot box.
They did that in twenty twenty. So this fantastical notion that if we withhold ourselves from applying the law, if the Supreme Court somehow we're to just look the other way at the text of the Constitution, then our crisis would be resolved in some more peaceful, plesident way through some other mechanism is a fantasy that is not going to happen. The truth is that Trump has launched an anti democratic movement of this country that is going to wreak havoc on this country. No matter what, they are
going to rek havoc on his country. If he has returned to power governs as an autocrat. They're going to rerekavoc in many ways if he is defeated at the ballot box. And yes, they are likely to wreak havoc if the Supreme Court disqualifies him. And given that they're going to wrekavoc one way or the other, there's no way out. Only way is through, and we should apply the Constitution as written. That's what the Supreme Court is for. That's what the law says. The Supreme Court should do it.
And if there is to be essentially a prudential decision to say, you know, even if the law says that he should be disqualified, he should run anyway, Well, you know what, the fourteenth Amendment says, that decision is in
Congress's hands, not the courts. Because the other provision of Section three of the fourteen Amendment is that Congress can remove the disqualification by a two thirds vote of both houses, and that meant that the framers of the Constitution understood that there might be times when we might want to say, even if this person did engage in this direction, we should lap the voters decide, and the Framers very clearly
delegated that power to Congress, not the court. And so if the court feels that it just would be better for the nation if Trump were allowed to run, then that's Congress's job, not the court.
Right exactly in this larger anti democratic movement. So when you look at the exit polls from last night, a very large percentage of Trump supporters and again you know this is a percentage of a percentage, but very large percentage of Trump supporters believe that Joe Biden did not win the twenty twenty election. And if you read in Politico today, there was a really good article about these poll workers who just cannot explain how things are on
Earth one to these people in Trump world. So again, this is something I spent almost all my time thinking about it because I'm such a nerd. But what do you do here? How do you deprogram these people?
Well, they didn't come up with those ideas on their own. They were given those ideas first and foremost by Donald Trump,
who has been humping this toxicity into our body politic. Now, he has had all sorts of help in doing that from allies within his party, from a conservative media ecosystem that is doing it, But he is the originator of that big lie, and frankly, I think if he were no longer pumping that lie into people's mind, the rest of the ecosystem would not be nearly as effective or even have the incentive to do so to the degree
that he does. And so I don't think you get out of this death spiral of deep distrust in our system and in elections while the primary agent that is infecting our system with that virus is out there continuing to spread it. And that's another reason why the Supreme Court, I think, would be wise to apply the law as written and uphold the color Art decision against Soland Trump, because so long as he is out there in some capacity as an active candidate and potentially president of our system,
he is eroding the very fabric of our democracy. And I'm not suggesting that the Supreme Court should a legal interpretation to remove him him from being tending, not at all. I'm suggesting that, given that the law clearly does apply to him, they shouldn't bend over backwards to not apply the law as written to him, precisely because he is the person that the Constitution was written to deal with, someone who is fundamentally not committed to our system of government.
And only once he is he no longer has a stranglehold over the Republican Party. Can you hope to rebuild the underlying fabric of our society? Bring people back together again, have people rooted in a sense of shared reality, have people committed to a common project. So long as he is out there unleashing his political virus on the scene, it is going to be very, very hard to cure the body politics. Thank you, Ian, thanks for having me.
I am optimistic notwithstanding all of this sort of doomed speaking that at root, this country is a pro democratic country. This country has, in multiple elections over the last several years, made pro democracy choices. I think it will again, and it thanks to people having conversation like this.
One moment full Jesse Cannon.
My junk fast. Who would have guessed that Trump couldn't keep his mouth shut about Egene Carol, I will tell you this, I have definitely guessed it. Yes, if we weel on the betting market. This would be the safest bet of the entire world.
Yes, exactly. I don't know how many gag orders he has, he's gagged, he's ordered, he's ordered, he's gagged, and how many trials, and yet he still can't keep it. So here he is. He calls the case attempted extortion based on fabricated lies and political shenanigans. Jesus Christ. Anyway, let me point out how much he is just digging himself into yet another hole. And while his supporters are on Earth two, the rest of us are on Earth one, and on Earth one, the guy who got charged with defamation,
we'll get charged with more defamation. And for that, Donald Trump, killer of democracy, winner of the Iowa Caucus, defendant against ninety one criminal charges, is our moment of fuckory. 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.