Lawrence O'Donnell, Casey Newton, Tom Bonier

Help me. Welcome, Laurence O'Donnell. Welcome back to Fast Politics. Lawrence. Great to be here. I'm so excited to have you back. I wanted to have you back because we talked pretty recently, and I want you to talk about like how you dealt with these mid terms, because I feel like ultimately there were very few people who were right, and you were one of them. Well, you know, I was right in the in my open declaration, but I didn't know anything.

And perhaps the other thing I was right about was my belief that it is unknowable and that one will waste more of a life than anyone ever should by trying to figure out what's going to happen in congressional elections. I refused, by the way, to use the term mid term elections. I think it's one of the great tragedies of political coverage in this country and political terminology, because it says to people out there, if they ever hear it.

First of all, what it says to them is, what's that, you know, because the kind of non religious voter who's not really hit to these election schedules outside of the presidency, here's that, and they think it's something weird, unrelated to them. It might be city council or school committee or I don't know what it is, you know, And so we

should just call them elections. And if we just keep calling them elections, and that we had this country to have elections literally every year, you know, not necessarily where you live, but you know, we have elections wherever you live every two years, every two years. And there are some places where they have elections in the odd numbered

years from mayor and different things like that. And I never think about these congressional elections because the chess board is way too big and it has become way too complex. It did not used to be complex for the you know, first forty years of my life, the Democrats won the House of Representatives every single time, to the point where none of us were aware that it was a contest.

There wasn't an American who knew that it was optional for the Republicans to actually run the House of Representatives. We had never seen a Republican speaker. And believe me, when they did win in they were shocked. The Republicans were shocked. Uh. And none of them knew how to handle it. And none of them knew how to be chairman. None of them knew how to you know, they obviously don't know how to be speaker for you know, and so it's just become way too complex to to figure out.

And so I ignore it and I don't attempt to figure it out. And I live with this with a condition that apparently, uh, the the American kind of the anatomy of the American body politic uh simply cannot bear. And that is the condition called suspense. And you know, people pay good money to go into dark rooms and have the curtain go up and or the screen illuminate, and spend two hours in suspense in a theater. They pay for that sensation because it is, among other things

so rare in the rest of our lives. You know, we have a neo synthesis, now we have following, we have all of these things that have you know, attempted to remove suspense as if it's an illness, as if it's something we simply physically can't bear. And and so my only point of clarity on this, or or being in any sense right was in knowing that I couldn't know.

Therefore I also couldn't be surprised. So all these people who are going, I'm really surprised that it's not a red wave, Well, they're surprised because they misspent their time for the previous year. And the most absurd way you can possibly use any ounce of mental capacity is to ever look at or refer to what they call the generic congressional ballot poll, in which you get this thing that says, you know, the voters forty seven percent of voters want a Democratic Congress and forty six on a

Republican Congress or something like that. It's the most idiotic thing in the world, especially if you the same time, the people, you know, the people who could play with this all year, these pundits you know, have in their you know ten commandments list. Commandment one issued by House Speaker Tip O'Neill, who was from Boston, All politics as local.

You know, they believe that, right because Tip O'Neal said it, and he's he was a political god and a wise man and all that, and it absolutely appeared to be

completely right. And oh, by the way, you know, that was the political commandment of life that enabled Tip O'Neal as speaker to have a Democratic majority that was so big there was never ever ever a risk of any bill not passing the House of Representatives because you could have dozens of Democrats not vote for it, you know, because they're from Texas or Oklahoma and they're uncomfortable with it, and you'd still be able to pass it. And Tip

understood that all politics is local. When the guys from Oklahoma can't vote for this, we understand that. And so if all Paul tix or local, what the hell are you doing with a pole that's supporting seven you know what a Republican Congress exactly well. And it's funny because with Gretchen Whitmer, who won handily in a swing state and who is not being celebrated nearly as much as Ron De Santis, who won in a state where there's almost no Democratic party structure anymore. Right, But I just

I'm thinking about that. People said the thing they loved about Big Gretch was that she was doing what they wanted in their state, you know, fixing roads and doing things that they wanted in Michigan. Yeah. And by the way, the same thing for De Santis with the voters who voted for him. You know, he's you know, putting sending airplanes to Texas to fly people in markets Vinyard they want that, you know, who lives there, you know, at least in that number, right, I mean, there's a good

of Floridians who were horrified by it, you know. But uh, I think you know, with De Santa's proved in the current climate and this I suspect it's going to hold for a while. There is that Florida is no longer a swing state. You can't really think about it that way. It's really a Republican state, and Michigan remains within the definition of a swing state, which makes it more impressive to win that way. You know. There are so many stories from Tuesday Night of candidates who really like I mean,

Mandela Barnes like he lost by one point. I mean the Republicans were pumping millions of dollars into keeping a seat for Ron and on. I mean, like I do think there are a lot of stories of like Democrats overperforming by large margins. Yeah, And what I have to say to Mandela Barnes and this is something I'm actually hoping to do on the show and hoping he comes on, and hoping that Rourke comes on, and others who came in second, what I want to say to them as

thank you. Imagine a Wisconsin in which a strong Democratic candidate side did not emerge to challenge what was you know, a strong enough incumbent Republican running for election. That would have been just a disservice to democracy to not have that contest there. I've seen it, you know when when I worked in the Senate. You saw it all the time. You saw states where you know, this candidate, this senator is so strong that you know that it's going to

be very hard to find an opponent. And we actually had that experience. And I was working for Senator Daniel Patrick moynahan, New York who and the suspense with Amoyahn Senate campaign was always was he gonna win by sixty seven or sixty and the Republicans knew that. And so my first year doing this being involved at all was his re election campaign of nineteen eighty and the challenge

was finding an opponent. And there was this big list of big Republican stars who lived in New York, Henry Kissinger, Jack Kemp, people like this massive speculation in the press, someone named Rudolph Giuliani, who was then the U. S. Attorney And each one of them, one by one dropped out because each one of them stared at it, they thought about it, they kind of wanted to do it, and they saw, oh no, Wynihan will crush me, and so they dropped out, and we finally, you know, at

the end of you know, twenty names ended up with someone, and I remember feeling grateful that that someone stepped forward so that there would be this actual democratic process with by the way, no suspense. But he was going to get out there and argue, you know, the tax argument against you know, the liberal Democrat and New Yorkers were going to have that uh discussion, and they were going to be able to cast those votes and um and and so um you know, imagine, imagine a Texas this

year without Better Rourke. Imagine a year without even hope, without even hope, you know. And there are so many ways of living in that we go through in the course of our lives. The rarest way of living is as a winner. The most common way of winning is as someone who's not quite getting where you need to be. And for Better or Rourke to get up there a third time as statewide, knowing that you know, if he loses this time, they're gonna say, they're gonna call him

a loser. The national media is gonna try to humiliate him, in effect, because the national media despises losers unless their name Trump. I mean, you think about John Kerry, you go back to you know, uh yeah, do Caucus. But John Carey, you know, you go back to two thousand four, if you flip, you know, sixty votes in Ohio, John Terry's president. But he was treated by the media as if he came in ninety points behind, you know, George W. Bush, as if he was this horrible loser to be banished

from our site. And by the way Democratic voters felt that way, people I knew I could feel it like they voted for him, and two weeks later they never wanted to hear his name again. And so you know, the losers to me have a certain kind of nobility that I just feel so warmly about and admiringly about. And I know I would never do it myself. I would never subject myself to that and subject myself to

that possibility of being the loser. Uh. And these people do it, and they do it for us, and they do it for at minimum hope, to give people a year of feeling hope instead of horror. Well, and also there is polling that shows that you do better in a state if you run a candidate even if they don't win, like it helps down ballot. Yes, and it's projectable certainly within our imaginations. You know that there will be again, because there were until the nineties, right into

the nineties, Democratic senators from Texas and Democratic governors of Texas. Again, we can see how that can happen as that as the demographics are moving there. But these betto campaigns are helping lead to whoever the Democratic winner is statewide. Whoever that first Democratic winner is statewide in Texas will have built that victory on what betto Rourke has been doing for years. There. Yeah, that's a really good point and I think really important talk to me about where we

see things go from here. Now, Oh you're asking for so alright, alright, Never I dropped out of that business. I'll tell you know. Here's another thing about about watching politics. There's kind of an optimal level of attention, and it's it's lower than most people realize. So I, as I said, I first got into this in because there was a writer's build strike in Hollywood and my screenwriting career at that point was about a year and a half underway.

And suddenly I was the you know, lowest ranking member in a striking Hollywood union and I was pathetically available to join a campaign, which was not my idea. I knew Senator moynihan and his wife. His wife was a campaign manager, and she just kind of asked me to come into the campaign and and be the other guy. And I did it mostly as a like a tourist, like I'll just this would be fun to watch, Like I have no idea what this is, right, but here's

what I knew with an absolute certainty. Every single day of nine and nineteen eight. Michael Ducacus is never going to be president. There wasn't a single moment when I thought that, okay, even when Michael Ducacus had an eighteen point lead in the polls. I'm from Boston, he was my governor. I had what I thought were I just had. I couldn't even explain it to you. I just had this feeling, right, And so what I had was the

advantage of being an amateur. What I had was the advantage of never having been down there on the field and only watched this thing from way up high in the stands, you know, at the fifty yard line, where you could just kind of see the whole thing. And I I remember saying, after that first year of my life, you know in professional politics that you have about six months. It's your first six months in politics when you know anything, and after that gonna know nothing. Because in your first

six months in professional politics, you are them. You are one of the people who you're trying to convince you are the voter out there. But once you've been professionalized, which takes about months, then you have no idea how those people think. You spend the rest of your life kissing about how those people think, because you're not one of them anymore. And so your your optimal moment in this is taking it seriously enough to consume the basic news about it. But that first six months of really

kind of watching it is your best. And after that you're just kind of, you know, a kind of calloused old hack who's just kind of you know, filing one hack assumption on top of another hack assumption and some other hack. You know, at the bar in the New Hampshire primary is telling you something. You buy that, and then you go and talk out on TV. Why did you think that du Caucus would never win? I just knew he wasn't a president. This is great because there's

no analysis to it. There's nothing that the experts say. It's what the voters say, right, and so I would have sounded at the time and I would just insist, you know, to Senator Moynehan. You know, he was very disappointed that he didn't endorse Ducacus early, especially when Ducacus was way up in the polls, because it looked like there was going to be a Democratic president elected without

his health. And so he was very jealous that Bill Bradley Center from New Jersey had endorsed, you know, like Duconcus early so he was going to get to be secretary of state or something, and uh, and I was sitting there the whole time, go nowhere, he's not gonna be president. And it's like they go, why he's not gonna be president, you know, because it's like, you know, it was all that stuff that a voter sees. The cosmetics of him aren't right, you know, the the other

guy is taller. It's just it's just raw, you know, voter imagery. And I liked Ducocus and I liked him as a governor. I thought, you know, if you said to me he's going to be governor, I go, yeah, he's gonna be a governor. You know. Michael lucoccus Is stated in writing high school ambition in his Brookline High School yearbook was to be governor of Massachusetts. That was achievable. But he couldn't get me on that. Now, if you run that campaign again, I won't know what to think

because I'm too close to all the professional analysis. You know. It's not like the stock market, where you might maybe get rewarded by studying the company is even closer. It's much more of a gut thing, you know, the way politics works. And you lose your gut after a few months of professional studio. So interesting, Lawrence. I'm really glad you came back, and I'm really glad like this is just sort of a very interesting way to think of all of this, and I really appreciate having you. Thank you.

Tom Bonnier is the CEO of Target Smart. Welcome Too Fast Politics, Tom, thanks for having me here. We won the mid terms, you and I. We did because we were right. And since we're never wrong, certainly never, let's talk about that explained to us. How you got it? All right? I love this premise, by the way, even though I'm slightly uncomfortable with it. But but let's go. Let me say I shouldn't say this, I should don't lean into it. But I'm not a magician. You know,

there wasn't any magic here. I'm not a super genius. I just followed the data and listened to the data. But I also questioned the data. And so yeah, there's a lot of information out there. There's the voter registration data, there's the polling data, and I think everyone just kind of focuses on the polls primarily without a lot of context.

And yeah, I mean, the short answer is I followed the data, I question it, especially when it came to the polls, and the data was generally pointing in one direction, and it's exactly where we ended up. In fact, the only thing that wasn't was this flood of garbage Republican polls that we all looked at at the time and sort of acknowledged, like, hey, these are garbage Republican polls. Then they got used in the averages. Yeah, they got

thrown into five thirty eight, real clear politics. You know, I think a lot of people were frankly nervous because they're humans. They lived through man. That was right where the needle went from seventy percent everything's gonna be okay to your fucked you know, yeah, not great. That was not great. And so like we all remember that, or maybe we don't remember, maybe we've blacked out from our memory,

but it's there. It was in there somewhere, and it was clear and how people were reacting to these things because now everybody's saying the polls were right, the polls were right. Well, if the polls were right and the outcome is a Democratic victory, why was everybody expecting a Republican victory, which is you know, we'd have to bring us chologist in for that. But yeah, follow the data. Okay, who are the people who did the very partisan GOP

polling in in late October? Trafalgar and who else? Trafalgar was the big one. There's inside er inside advantage. There was a whole flood of polls from polsters who I had never heard of. I've got to be honest, and I maga one to three poles. Yeah, yes, it would be like I don't want to pick on kids. There were two polling firms that are run by high school kids that were all over the averages. One of them, I know, I know, I know, I do. I do worry.

They'll get better next election. They'll be in college exactly hopefully yeah or maybe not, maybe not. One of them was from my hometown school I didn't go to, but Phillips and Over. Oh yeah, I don't feel so bad for those kids. Go ahead, no reason to feel bad for them. They got a lot going for it. They had some of the most Republican in outlier polls. And then there was another one from a couple of kids who were in high school. It wasn't like a high

school project. They had some really bad polls. There were poles from a Canadian company that were very Republican. There were poles from a Brazilian company that were very republican. Um Wick was another one that sort of popped up in this election and had a lot of outlier results.

Never heard of them before. But if you go through going five thirty eight and like look at the worst states, the biggest misses, which are like, you know, the Washington Senate race, New Hampshire Senate race, New York governor, New York AG, New York AG. She won by like seventy three percent. I mean she percent of the vote, didn't you Yeah, And and I think it was Travalgart was one of those who had a poll that showed that

being like a margin of vera race. So those polls were not great, I think is the kindest way to put it. What I think is interesting is like clearly we're in an inflection point with ulsters. And the thing that I had thought about was like I had wondered when we were coming up into this election. I just want to actually point something out that's important about these polls in this race that is still being counted, but

probably Lauren beau Bert is going to win. There was a really good Democratic candidate who we actually had on this podcast, and he had a lot of trouble raising money because he was shown to be a like a huge, you know, a kind of a candidate who couldn't win, and in fact, he really could have won. And you know, he's maybe bau Bert will win by a couple of thousand votes, maybe last maybe she won't even win, maybe

because they're still not done counting. But I'm using this to illustrate that these polls actually have real world implications and I want to talk about that. Yeah, they do, and I've seen that. Look, you know, outside of Twitter, my day job is actually working with campaigns. We have a polling theme ourselves and analytics team, and we provide data to Democratic candidates progressive organs around the country, and

so we see that impact. It's maybe why I feel these things even more deeply as we saw that happening in races where there were bad poles out there, and we knew they were bad poles because you can look at the sample and you see, like, well, gosh, this likely voter sample in this state is based on a notion that young people are just going to flee from

the state. They won't vote because there won't be any Like literally, there's a poll in Pennsylvania that came out a few days after the debate that was one night, two hour window poll that had Doctors up by a couple of points, right, that was the kind of thing we're dealing with, And we should have been able to look at those and say this is nonsense. Forget about it, doesn't get into averages. We're not going to talk about it.

We're not as reporters going to go out and pretend like suddenly this race changed and start writing stories about why John Fetterman is losing. We won't do it, but we did do it. And the Bobert race is a great example of one that wasn't on the radar at all, though he was on this podcast. Yeah, and kudos to you, because that's incredible because when you look at like that was a district that wasn't even in like the Cook ratings for like even like the likely Republican whatever the

thing is right behind Safe, it just wasn't there. But I think like some of these higher profile races too, like Mandela Barnes, the fact is that's a one point race. Right now. It's we're talking about what like a swing of thirteen thousand votes, and and he'd be winning that race.

And you look at the polls, and we saw how the polls changed the narrative in that race so dramatically, where he was winning right after the primary, and then a few of these garbage poles come in and suddenly all the narratives are about, well, why is Mandela Barnes losing? Its crime, it's obviously the concern of crime and inflation.

Let's write stories about crime and inflation. And so if you're a voter in Wisconsin, you're waking up every morning the stories about crime and inflation to fit the narrative to explain why Mandela bar Barns is losing. When you look at the pole averages there, it wasn't a huge miss, but it was a big enough mess where I think they had him losing by you know, four points on average, the difference between someone losing or perceiving that they're losing

by four or five points. If you're down four or five points, you're probably not going to win if you believe the polls. But in reality, those polls were wrong. He was down one and I think there would have been a lot of more resources directed to that campaign. The news stories would have been much less negative. Uh, they would have been looking at why is Ron Johnson

the incumbent barely hanging right? And and well they're spending I mean remember Ron and On got a humongous cash infusion because of his sketchy taxation of pass fruit through companies. And you know, there were a couple of donors who just literally put the money they saved in taxes into his campaign. And and by the way, Ron and his kids trust fund saved a lot of money on taxes too.

I mean just completely as sketchy. And I say this as someone who you know myself has been a beneficiary of like familiar all large asse as we say, and I am just like furious. I mean it is so corrupt. I mean, you can't just change the taxes so they benefit you know, but he but he could, he could, and he did, and now he has six more years to try. Yeah, well the lesson we learned there. If you can create the sort of perception of inevitability driven by bad polls, um then you're going to be in

better shape. And I think that's really unfortunate. And I think the people are saying that the polls are right. Generally, what they're doing is like, well, yeah, if you look at it from about a hundred miles away or forty feet in the air, yeah, big picture. They say, well, the poll said, yeah, the Senate was going to be close. Though, to be fair, the models did not predict the seat, you know, a Democratic pick up, an actual gain, and

that's maybe where we'll end up. That's a possible outcome. So, but the reality is campaigns don't engage at the forty foot level, and donors don't either. I think that's the most important point. And can we have confidence in the polls at the micro level, at the state by state level? Now, no, we can't. Look at the Senate races, and a third of the competitive Senate races had polls that where the error was greater than four and a half points. And

so the problem is that error is not predictable. So sure, the average error was four points, and people say that's not bad, but you don't know which. Yes, sorry, you don't know which. I've get I often called it all runs together at this point. But the problem is you don't know which are the third of states that are going to be these massive outliers, and so if you don't know which, how can you have confidence? Should Democrats have followed the polls and put tons of money into

Washington State for Patty Murray. Thank god that didn't happen, but some amount of money went in there because of bad polls, because they're only bad polls. Again, New Hampshire is a great example of that too. Yeah, New Hampshire is a great example. I mean that is you know, I was watching on Tuesday morning when I woke up ready for a blood bath, you know, filled with dread. I thought to myself, if Democrats can hold New Hampshire,

it won't be a blood bath. And you know, not only did Democrats hold New Hampshire, but she was not going to lose. And it just is so shocking to

me how awful out of these polls were. Yeah, but again, if you had actually followed the data, and by the data, I mean not just the polls, and in fact very little the polls, but but if you look at what happened in Kansas, and then you looked at the gender gaps and voter registration around the country after Kansas, after Dobbs, as we were seeing, and we were reporting on and you were lifting this up consistently over that time period. And then you look at the early vote. You look

at New York nineteen, you look at Alaska. Every indicator was pointing in this exact same direction. And if you were someone who I think like the narrative generally, maybe around late August was fairly consistent. If you went to sleep in late August and woke up today, you look at the result and be like, okay, but not surprising. But we all suddenly jumped in bought the narrative of

these garbage polls. Row happened too early, right as a feminist and as a person for whom Row was just so even though I saw it coming with s B eight in Texas a year before. When it happened, it was such a profound moment in my life because I thought this could never be taken away from us, and all of a sudden it was I you know, immediately the next day they were like ten essays, this won't this is not you know, we had all the sort of bad faith Republicans out there being like, this is

not going to move the needle, voters don't care. And then that after that narrative, we saw this polling, We saw these specials where Democrats overperformed, and then in September we started with these stories again row happened too early, voters don't remember. I want to ask you about this idea. It does seem like punden think voters are morons. Yes,

I mean, I'll tell you to your point. I was on CNN at some point in September and I was talking about what we were seeing in the voter registration data, and I was asked by a male host, well, but yeah, that was a long time ago, Dobbs, was a long time ago. Don't you think that's faded by now? Isn't that what we're seeing? And I genuinely didn't know how to answer that question. It's such a bizarre notion, but that became the commonly held perception, a lot of it

again driven by polls. But like we're talking about the polls as if there's some sort of like abstract you know, android, that it's not actual humans making decisions in these polls, that there aren't actual humans pushing this narrative, And then as if there aren't actual humans, the pundits, the media and frankly, the political professionals whose job it is to take these things and learn from them but also filter through them, as if they shouldn't have been able to

look at that and see, like, hey, this whole false dichotomy about the economy or inflation versus abortion is a problem, and no one was saying that. Well not no one was saying that. You were saying that, Many others were saying that, but many more people were saying that it looks like voters have shifted back. They're just concerned about

the economy. Now, well, yeah, so many reasons that that framework is problematic, but that became the dominant framework, and I think contributed more than anything else to this notion that the red wave was back on. Yeah, I also think, you know, I was on this Twitter spaces last night with John Stewart, who I don't know at all, and he was saying this thing, which I actually thought was

quite smart. I don't want to beat up the mainstream media a because I'm lucky and that I'm on the opinion side, so I don't have to pretend not to believe in things. But also I do think that it's been a bad time for the media and people have just been so horrendous. But I do think that they there is you know, the horse race narrative is where

a lot of this election coverage is stock. I share your hesitation in terms of being critical of the media, largely because it is their responsibility to explain what is happening and maybe add some context as to why and when. All they are being fed from these polls and frankly from political If they were only hearing it from Republican campaign operatives, then that's one thing. They have to be

more skeptical. But they were hearing this from democratic campaign operatives to let's be real, not all of them, but enough of them where there is credibility, and you look at these bad polls that are showing them something. So to them, the narrative now is the red wave is back on. Voters have forgotten about jobs, or at least it's not as important as maybe we thought it was to them and their decision making, and therefore I've got to go out and write stories about why that is

and what's happening. And that's generally what happened, and so like. Would have been nice if they were digging in a little deeper on the pulse. But to expect every political reporter to also be a polling expert is not exactly fair, and it is I mean, I just want to point out there were a lot of people on the right pushing the narrative that like, because I remember I did a TV hit I don't know, a couple of weeks ago with Maddie and we were talking about how, like

I actually thought voters would vote for democracy. I thought that that would really that they want calm, and uh, you know, I was being made fun of by people on the right, Like no, people if they keep you know, all they care about or gas prices and you know, look, gas prices are a serious thing, especially if you drive for a living or you have you know, if you live very far from where you work. But and they really are. But but ultimately, like the American voter can

walk and chew gon yes, yeah, they always do. They always do, and and they they pay uh less attention to a lot of these issues than we think. But in other ways they pay much more attention, or they pay attention in different ways because it's what's real to them, it's what's actually breaking through. These polls distill it down into such a simplistic framework, and the fact the matter is, when you ask someone to predict their own behavior or psychology,

there are a lot of problems with that. They're going to tell you what they think is the right answer, or what they should say, or what they would like to think. You know, the person who they would like to be versus the person who they are. In the end, we're poor predictors of our own psychology and behavior. But if you ask someone if money is important to you, or if it's disturbing to you that things cost more than they used to, which is basically the framework of saying,

is the economy important? Are you concerned about inflation? Everyone's going to say yes. And that's the other issue is that the the issues that elevate to the top are those that have sort of bipartisan symmetry and response, meaning Democrats and Republicans both say the economy is important to them, so it elevates to the top of the issue list. Do democrats and Republicans think the same thing about the economy interms? Not at all, not one bit. And so

you're seeing choice. What I was seeing in the data when you go under the hood with these polls was well, sure, overall, choice wasn't as big of an issue and self report as other issues because almost no Republicans were elevating it

because that was the quote right answer for them. But when you looked at the voters who Democrats needed to exceed expectations and to win in this election, meaning mobilization targets Democrats who maybe wouldn't vote unless we persuaded them to, or persuasion targets voters who could vote Democrat or Republican, choice was a very salient issue. Yeah, so interesting. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Tom. Yeah, thank you so much

to thrill to be here. Casey Newton is a tech reporter or a platform er and the host of the podcast hard Fork Welcome Too Fast Politics. Casey, Hey, thanks for having me, Molly. Today's Friday. This will air Monday. We will have it. Is two weeks, fourteen days, right or maybe fifteen days fourteen days really of Elon Musk

owning Twitter? Whoa go? Yeah, I think that's exactly like the only sort of a rational response to the two weeks of Elon owning Twitter is just a series of confused noises, Right, exactly did this go the way you thought it would? And if so, Wow, Well, I think everything is moving much faster. You know, I think it's important to remember that while Twitter had its challenges, it was still an okay business when Elon Musk took it over. You know, it makes billions of dollars a year, it

has hundreds of millions of users. And yet somehow, within two weeks you have Elon Musk appearing before the company saying that bankruptcy isn't out of the question. So that feels very fast to me. Let's talk about what happened here. So he he didn't really want to buy the company, and I think he didn't think he was going to have to until he did. One of the strangest turns in this story is that after he bought it, he

seemed to immediately change his mind. He spent most of the year trying to get out of it, and then some sort of rulings started to go against him in the Delaware Court of Chancery, and he changes to and he said, Okay, I want it, and I'm going to close the deal now. And I still don't really think we've got an adequate explanation for how or why that happened.

But yeah, then he showed up two weeks ago and started making changes, and he really overpaid for it, right, Like he has thirteen billion dollars of personal exposure on this too. Oh yeah, I mean there's not one person who thought Twitter was worth forty four billion dollars when he actually acquired it, right because the tech stalks had all declined so much since then. So Elon Musk really bought it at the peak. Um in a way that is amusing to something I would say. So, now we

have this situation where he fired half the staff. Basically this entire time, people have been telling you what's happening as it's going, tell us what's happened. It really has

been chaos, you know. So a week ago today, from the day that we're recording this, Elon Musk laid off half of the staff, over thirty people, and then less than twenty four hours later started to reach out to some of those same people that had just been laid off and said, actually, um, we might need you back in just a sort of ready fire aim approach to right sizing the company. And of course you can imagine all the turmoil that that cause for you know, employees.

Did some people come back? I have not spoken to anyone who is in that position, and in fact, a lot of the folks I know, after they got that initial notice, we're looking forward to ninety days of essentially paid vacation. There's this sixty day warm Act notice that they get paid out for, and then there is thirty days of severance that are being offered. So most people would rather take that than work at the new Twitter, and so people are hoping that they're not forced to

go take their old jobs back. Ellen is also going to have to pay millions of dollars in fees, right, fees for what for laying off half the company, and because California has laws that are labor laws right well, so my understanding of that is usually usually the penalty for violating the warnack is paying back pay. So that's why all these workers are being given their sixty day notice. Now there are a couple of class action lawsuits. The

lawyers we've talked to. You You don't seem to think they have all that great of a chance of making any real money for anyone but the lawyers. But yeah, the real payment, at least at first, is just going to be sixty days of this warnack notice. Pay let's talk about what Twitter looks like right now. Last night there was more Twitter carnage. Well, there was certainly a lot of confusion around the ongoing disaster of the verification badge.

Explained to those of us who are not like extremely online, what the verification badges, what Ellen wanted to do with it, and the chaos that ensued. Yeah, so the verification badge was created in two thousand and nine and it has only ever had one point, which is to say that whoever is tweeting, whether it's a person a government agency, is who they say they are, Right, so when I tweet,

you know that it's me Casey Newton who's tweeting. Ellen thought that that was a little too elitist because not everyone could have access to verification, and he wanted to expand that. And by the way, I think that's a good idea. I think Twitter could be better if people

could optionally verify their identity. Right. But he goes about it in the strangest way imaginable, which is that he takes that same blue checkmark that has been synonymous with you are who you say you are for over a decade and he starts giving it away to anyone who will pay him eight dollars, and he finds himself surprised when people do exactly what you and I would have guessed that they would have done if they were given

this feature. So you have people creating uh, you know, fake Tesla accounts, getting verified and then tweeting jokes about running over pedestrians. You have people creating an Eli Lily account, getting it verified and said tweeting that insulin is free. Right, So, and all of this stuff is like kind of funny, and I think most of the things that we've seen so far are kind of in that zone of like hijinks. But you can imagine much darker and scarier uses of

this kind of mischief. Yes, absolutely, completely and utterly true. Now, were there trust in safety people who left last night or was that not true? That is true. So the head of trust and safety on the site, you know, l Roth, resigned from the company. A number of other people who I think I'm as sort of the watchdogs of Twitter left too. So the chief information security officer, the chief privacy officer, members of various like security and risk teams have all been resigning as well. So some

really important rules that the company are now empty. I feel like that is just like two on the nose, right, like if you're writing that book, it's weekend of burnings. I'm a little bit. I mean, you know, Ellen is very actively involved. You know, he is in the office. He does have workers who are there working almost around the clock to sort of respond to his whims and get features into development. So you know, there are still more than three thousand people who work at this company

and and they're doing things right. The whole thing is just so strange what happens now. Ellen is like very worried about losing money. He's got these eight dollars. The verification is gone, but you can't do Twitter Blue now, and there's a badge that's as Official. Yeah. So on Thursday night, in response to all of the criticisms that

exactly what people said was gonna happened happened. They paused new sign ups for Blue, so you cannot go get another one of these check marks, and they're going to try to figure it out. They also have started to give out this secondary badge called official, which they're giving two accounts that had been verified under the old you are who you say you are policy. Then, of course the really funny thing about that is that Musk is recreating the exact sort of elitist like system that he

used to have there. They just have a different color check mark now. So the other thing I want to ask you about is Musk is all this debt he needs to service, right, he has his personal exposure, and then he has all this debt. He has banks, he has Tesla stock, The Tesla stock is going down. Explain to me what is his sort of idea here about

how he's going to make this all work. So what he's telling employees is that he wants to get fifty percent of revenues coming from subscriptions, so something like that Twitter blue eight dollars a month thing. You know. I reported earlier this week that he has also talked to his advisors about putting the entire site behind a paywall. So like, maybe you browse Twitter for an hour a month, but if you go over that hour, he asked you

to pay him. That's what they want to do. But that's a challenge, as you know, for reasons that we've just seen. It's it's it's hard to build that and it's hard to get people to pay eight dollars a month, right, So that's kind of challenge number one. He wants us to pay for the free content we're making. Exactly if you want to be a part of Twitter, he wants you to essentially subscribe to see it. So it's you know,

like Netflix for for texts or something like that. But you know, he has this more immediate problem, Molly, which is that he owns a company that makes eight nine percent of its revenue from advertising, and several big advertisers have paused all spending on the platform. You know, they've been looking to him for reassurance, and it is not reassuring when the head of trust and safety quits, when a bunch of your privacy and security people quit, right.

The two top ad people in New York quit too, write that is true, although one of them was lured back after she quit yesterday, So it'll be interesting to see, you know, sort of what effect that has. But you know, Ellen, instead of really courting those advertisers, he's just been tweeting about how you know they're they're pulling out because you know, like the woke leftist mob you know, wants to kill

free speech in America or something. And that's also not something that generally makes advertisers want to open up their wallets. So you know, what happens to ads on Twitter is a big open question here in the next few weeks. So he's basically doing everything to mess himself up, like he's self destructing. I would say, there's a lot of

unforced errors. And you know, something that the Musk team believed when they came into Twitter, according to the people that I've spoken to, there was that most of these Twitter employees were not that smart right there. There was this view of them that they were these sort of you know, coddled leftists who had just been you know, paralyzed for years and had never shipped a useful feature and had no idea what they were doing. And Ellen was going to come in and sort of jump start

this company. And I think the darkly funny thing about all of this is that Twitter, and the same Twitter employees that he's so disdained and you know and and gutted the staff, it was those employees who told him every single thing that was about to happen to him, and he ignored them and went ahead anyway, and guess what it all happened. It's amazing. I actually love Twitter.

Oh me too. Yeah, So as much as like, I don't mind seeing this happen to Ellen and it seems like he's you know, he's sort of like Chorus, right, But I just wonder, like, is there a world in which things work out here? We are still in the early days of whatever this is. It's possible that Twitter will have a next act, right, maybe Musk will sort of gradually be willing to seed more control to people who actually know how to run a social network and

he'll kind of go from there. But you know, if you talk to people who have worked with him at Tesla as I have, that's not how he runs that company. You know. He has a sort of very intense, you know, micromanage, whim based style of management there as well. So it's hard for me to be optimistic, but you know, I would love to be proven wrong because, like you, I love Twitter. Yeah. I know, I'm not supposed to ask people to predict the future, but predict the future, I

mean a few things that I can predict. A lot of the engineers I've talked to you some are still there, some have left. They think that Twitter is going to have a significant outage, Like they think they've gotten rid of so many technical people who are necessary to operate this right, that something is going to go down and it's just gonna take a long time to fix. So that's something that I'm sort of looking at. I think Ellen is going to continue to tweet about new products

and services that are coming. You know, he's we're gonna do this, and we're going to do that, right the sort of, you know, much of the same way that Donald Trump used to tweet about new policies, and then just as what Trump, we're gonna have to see, well, like does it actually happen? Is this something that he forgets about in two hours or is this something that

actually gets built? That's gonna have a lot of consequences for employees who are going to be learning on Twitter what their jobs are supposed to be, right, which was another thing that you know, you'll you'll remember from the Trump administration. So lots of chaos and lots more to write about and podcast about Twitter in the the coming weeks and months. I think, do you think there's like

another Twitter that's going to come along? There's never been a better time to start when you know there's this service mastered on that's existed since that. Some people are kind of I have them mastered on. I actually looked you up on masted on. Yeah I am there, but you haven't tweeted since two thousands. You haven't massed don Yeah, it's been well. I I logged on the other day and was just sort of like, hey, what's up, But like I haven't been there. You know, since some people

are getting into it, we'll have to see. I sort of think it will have a relatively short shelf life. I mean, I like, to me, this is just right, Like this is what silicon value is supposed to be good at, is just seeing the market opportunity, seating some you know, smart team of people, and just letting them go do their things. So I think we need a new text based social alternative, and you know, the time's right to build it. I think, Yeah, does it end

up that the bank owns Twitter in a year? Let's see, a year is a long time, really hard to say. I will say that some employees do think that that the company is on a path to bankruptcy if for know the reason that it will let Elon restructure his debt obligations in a way that's outdvantageous to him, So, you know, I do think that there's a significant likelihood

that that's something like that might be a foot. Can you talk to us about f t X, explain it to us like we're stupid, And by we I mean me, sure well, and so you know, we're we're we're sort of at the very edge of my knowledge here. This isn't my main beat, but we did talk about it this week on my new podcast, hard Work, which I do with The New York Times, and my co host Kevin Ruce really sort of helped me understand this. And basically f t X is a place where you could

go and buy cryptocurrencies. So maybe you want some bitcoin, that's a place where you could go. And if I say that to you, you know, you like me, probably think, well, that doesn't seem like that risk. You have a business, you know. But what seems to have happened is that f t X, which is owned or created by this guy, Sam Bateman Freed, is become you know, this major democratic

and progressive donor. He also had this other business, Allometer Research, which was a hedge fund, and somehow it seems like customer funds got commingled, so funds that people had put into f t X. You never want that. It's the classic mistake. Molly is the daughter of a divorced lawyer. You never wanted to touch this stuff, you know that's in the Escaroa camp. Yeah. So that's basically what seems

like happened. You know, it's truly astonishing because f t X was seen as this sort of rock solid crypto business. In fact, it's spent most of this year buying up just rest crypto companies that had gotten into trouble themselves, and so everyone saw them as sort of the savior of the crypto world. And then overnight the entire thing imploded and Sam bankman Fried lost of his wealth. Wow, unbelievable. So interesting. I hope you will come back. I would

love to come back. Thank you. Jesse Cannon, Molly John Fasts. So we're tapping this on Sunday night, and it seems like one side is going to have a very very narrow lead over the other in Congress. It's going to be very very tight. Our moment of fuccory is that, believe it or not, this house is going to be so tight. The idea here is that in this hundred

and seventeen Congress. Last the last congress Um, there were fifteen special elections for congressional seats, and so if Republicans have a one seat majority or even a two seat jority, every congressional special election is going to be like Georgia was two years ago. And if Democrats win special congressional elections, then the power in Congress could switch back and forth, and so that will be a lot of funckory. And so it is our moment of gery. That's it for

this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to her 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.