Hi, I'm Mollie John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds and Donald Trump says Taylor Swift endorsing President Biden when she disloyal to the man who made her so much money.
We have such a great show today.
MSNBC's own Meeker Brazinski tells us about her journey to help women, and she also tells the story of how she mentored me. Then we'll talk to polster Adam Carlson about the flaws and polling.
In the twenty twenty four election.
But first we have the host of the Enemy's List, the one, the only, the Lincoln Projects owned Rick Wilson.
Welcome back to.
Fast Politics, My best ye Rick Wilson.
Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, or whatever time this podcast airs in your part of the world.
I'm glad to be back with you.
Oh no, We're like giddy in this horrible, unbearable way.
I planned today as we record this, to be unbearable all damn day.
I prefer insufferable.
Well I could be insufferable too, you can do it all. I just finished writing this piece about McConnell that hasn't gone up yet.
But you know what, I'm just fucking done. I'm done with these people.
Let's have a moment here. First, we got a lot, a lot of fucking bullshit to talk about. I want to start with the very bad, no good week that the Republicans in the House of Representatives had.
Yeah, let's go through it one step at a time. When you get to the first part of it of Trump not being immune from prosecution, which you know, it seems like that happened like a month and a half ago, but it was Monday. When you look at that decision alone, it is a nuclear bomb going off on the January sixth case. Trump really really was depending right some method to spin that case down, because look, he knows that gutlass Merrick Garland is eventually going to say to Jack Smith, Okay, Boss,
time's up. I gotta call it. He's the Republican nominee. We can't be we can't be seen as biased.
Yahh. We have two minutes to trash Mayre Garland.
You call me anytime, day or night, now, trash Mere Garland. I'm so frickin' done.
Do all special councils have to be a Republican like you know, there are a lot of fucking Democrats.
Out there, generally speaking, the Special Councils of our recent memory. Durham, who, aside from magnificent facial hair, seems to have been an utter fucking legal chuckle fuck of the first order. You know that the infamous Durham Report was going to reshape America forever are and it turned out to be nothing. This guy or Hut or Hoop or whatever his fucking
name is. I'm sorry, but the level of unprofessionalism in that report, the level of editorializing in that report, I'm not the first or the last to make this comparison. This was very much like Jim Comey, I don't have evidence, but I'm gonna go out and slap him around a
little bit, you know. I think Harwood said that yesterday, and I just it's just like, there's nothing, there's nothing in this report that is more important than the finding that they're not going to bring criminal charges against him, set aside the editorializing bullshit, Okay, and they were Biden's handwritten personal notes that were expos facto classified in some of the cases. The real drama that they're trying to make out of this thing is.
Oh Buden Nosino, He's drooling in his porridge. And I will say this, I liked angry Biden last night. I liked angry Biden going out there and knocking the shit out of some of those reporters. We love our friends in the press, but that instinct to bend over backwards to show that you're not biased by being dis when you get a chance to smash Biden a little bit.
It struck me at least as a bit much because Donnie mumblefuck over there, who thinks he ran against Barack Obama and who thinks that Nikki Hayley was in charge of the capital on one six? I am sorry. I want to see them bang Trump with questions about his mental acuity, because he is much much shakier mentally than Joe Biden is by a good stretch.
Well, I have this theory that if you're defending yourselfs so I never defend myself. But I will say one thing, which is her worked in the Trump administration.
That was a choice made by Merrick Garland. I'm sorry. I know everybody had this soft spot for Merrick Garland because of the whole situation with.
He's not a Supreme Court jest Rush, I mean, fuck him.
By the way, I'm not a Supreme Court justice either, and could should have okay, but he is so cautious and so programmatic, and I know, Look, do I want the Attorney General of the United States behaving like a Bill Barr?
No?
I do not.
But do I also want the Attorney General of the United States behaving like he's scared of his own shadow and when the bad guys are aggressively pursuing epic fuckery?
No, I do not.
Yeah, I mean that is really such an important point. The Democrats continue to play by the twenty twelve rules, and Republicans have weaponized the entire federal government. So this week the House Republicans tried to impeach a Cabinet secretary because they didn't like what he was doing. It didn't work because they can't do math. But I mean, come on.
The absolute epic dumbfuckery of the Republicans in the House. And if you were in an ordinary situation, the Speaker would slink away in shame. He would go and leave to spend more time with his son's porn app on his phone, whatever the hell it was. So humiliating, and the guy ran out of there like a scalded dog. I mean he ran out of there like his dick was on fire. And honestly, this whole thing was atrial run for impeaching Joe Biden, which is their biggest desire, their greatest passion.
And they don't have the votes because math is hard.
And they're going to have even fewer votes soon because more Republicans are pulling the switch.
They're getting out of there, They're running.
Here's a question I have for you, So Republicans, Maga Mike Johnson been in the House since twenty sixteen. I mean I've been in the House longer than Mike Johnson's been in the House. This guy, he has decided that he's going to put these bills on the floor and just pray to Jesus that he has the votes.
Turns out, Jesus is not a vote whip.
Here's my sequence of House speakers I have either known or dealt with or been around for. Okay, Jim Wright, Tom Foley, Dennis Haster, Nancy Pelosi, John Bayner, Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy. You know the difference of all of these people and Moses Johnson.
They can do math.
They could do math, they could count votes, they knew when they had the votes and when they didn't. And the number one, the single most important rule of all as speaker, never bring a vote to the floor unless you're going to win. This is something they beat into your head on day one of speaker school. And these guys just don't get it. They just didn't understand it. And I'm sorry, I have very little pity for him. He embarrassed himself.
So he brought the MAJORCIS vote. It lost.
Then he went and brought this Israel funding standalone.
It lost. One of the things I want to ask you is like, so here you have the.
Five vulnerable Republicans like Mike Lawler, that fucking guy, and these guys, and you have about five or six in California, and you have Republicans with a one vote majority. What happens when Mike Lawler goes back to the Hudson Valley and is like, yes, I voted to impeach the Cabinet secretary first time in one hundred years. Yes, I voted from Israel Aid standalone, which, by the way, Israelis didn't want.
What happens then none of these guys. Okay, not one of these guys in that Biden eighteen has a argument to make that they're not all on the crazy train. Every single one of them has to go home and say, yeah, by the way, I know we didn't do anything on X, Y or Z issue that you care about, but we did vote to impeach the DHS secretary. How do you take that out there? That's a bold strategy, Cotton, to go out and say we're going to go out and
campaign on the fact that we impeached. It's so obscure, it's so in the weeds, it's so small ball crazy. I'm just like, who's running this thing? And the answer is apparently nobody, because if someone with a brain.
No, I think the answer is Donald Trump.
That's true.
Let's not forget they wanted to make him Speaker of the House, right, I.
Mean, that would have been amazing. But there's going to be their problem with the R and T chair. They want Rana out.
Rana.
This is a woman who has spent the last whatever ten years basically just destroying herself.
Proving the adage that a guy I know.
Once came up with everything Trump touches. Does this Rana. This is the worst job, right, you have to raise money for the Republican Party. Donald Trump is spending all his money on lawyers, and then I guess he's gonna have to put some money in this eighty three million dollar bond, right, and then he's gonna have another one hundred million, two hundred three hundred million coming up for the fraud case. So Ronald McDaniel has to raise money,
convince big donors. It's not going to Trump's legal fees. I mean, this is a terrible job. So they're going to remove her and put someone else who is less good at fundraising in this job.
How does this work?
Laura Trump is going to be the best Republican Party chairman ever, and I hope she stays there for one hundred years.
Then Eric is calling people asking them for money. I mean, you had a speaker, and again I am no fan of Kevin McCarthy, but but you had someone who sort of knew how to do it a little bit right then Tom.
Emmers wanted to do it.
Trump was like, not Maga enough, Let's get someone who's really incompetent. Because that's the true spirit of Maga erag.
I can see so many outcomes of selecting a different RNC chairman that end up in clownish disaster. And every single one of the people that could take that job that would make Trump happy, every single one of them are going to do one thing. Shovel money back to Donald Trump and every penny that small dollar donors put into the RNC right now or big dollar donors. By the way, this is rnc's major donor season right now.
If this was the Bush or Reagan administrations right now, the RNC chairman, whether it was Michael Steele or whomever, would be out saying, Okay, we're going to do the convention, so at and t we'd like a half a million dollars. And Democrats do this too. Right about now, right everybody's doing their major fundraising. I gotta tell you, if you're a major fundraiser, major dollar fundraiser, a corporate board type, you're thinking, to hell, I'm putting a damn dime into
that rat hole. And that's why the RNC is broke right now. That's why they're broke. When I was working for Bush in the two thousand cycle, I think at this point the RNC had something like one hundred and eighty million dollars in the bank. This is nuts that they have that they have eight million dollars cash on hand and.
Then a line of credit because you know things are going great when you need a line of credit.
But they owe on the eight something like five and so that's why they're out getting a line of credit. At this point, they're gonna be out like getting getting a title loan of their cars.
I mean, it's so bad and we shouldn't make fun of them, but I think we should because fuck them. So, I mean, what is amazing to me is you have a Republican president chill candidate who was an incumbent, who has such a tight grip on the party and also everyone else is so fucking scared of him that he now controls the House. Right, he's fighting with McConnell in the goal of controlling the Senate. They don't even have the majority, but he wants McConnell at.
And by the way they get they may get that.
Yeah.
I think McConnell's like, fuck this shit, don't you think.
Well, look, I think he'll finish his term.
Right, He's not going to do the Kevin Ray leaves in January.
Right, although I will say this.
You know a lot of McConnell people, A lot of McConnell folks that are out there are like you. He could rally one last time. I'm like, if the motherfucker was going to rally, he should have rallied on January sixth, when there was a moment where he had a majority of the Republicans in the caucus, A majority of the Republicans in the caucus were with him, and every Democrat, of course, and he wouldn't do it.
Can we just go to the alternative universe for a second where McConnell whips those votes. Trump gets impeached and it is clear that he can never run again. Republicans fast forward. They are unstoppable. They have Nicki haleynomine. I mean, they did this to themselves and to all of us.
They chose this path. Here's one of the things that I think is really important to remember. The mob terrifies everybody. It terrifies Mitch McConnell, it terrifies Mike Johnson, it terrifies every Republican out there. They're all petrified of Trump and his mob and the idea of their violence and their cruelty and their willingness to use violence and force against people. You know, you want to know why the Supreme Court was so cautious yesterday or the other day in their hearings.
It's because they're worried about becoming targets of the damn mob. They don't want to be targets of the mob.
Shay Moss Ruby Friedman, I mean they ruin your life.
I mean that's the you know what, They're really scary.
They are scary, and you know what, and the people that will not put up with their shit are you know, assholes like me dragged out feed first. But the intimidation is where that alternative universe failed. We could have been in a different world, we could have been in a better place. But you know, that day Mitch McConnell said, Nope, we're not going to whip votes for this. It was for frontalers with the ball up marks are not Oh no, well,
polish one. The voters have already spoken. I mean could and as one of his aides said, what's the harm in humoring them?
Right? And I think the level of anxiety right now is pretty high.
Oh, I would certainly say that's the case. It's pretty high, and there are very few people who feel confident right now in American democracy, and you know what, and that kind of sucks. That's kind of a really shit place to be of not being confident in a nation that had a pretty good run of people understanding that while it was messy and loud and complicated and stupid, our country was really fundamentally strong. And now most people don't
share that view anymore. And again it's because of Donald Trump exactly.
I also want to mention that there is some really fucked up shit going on with the Montana Center rays.
Oh, Matt Rosendale's I'm in back baby, Okay.
So Matt Rosendale is like one of the few people who is really just so bad. I mean, he's like doctor Oz but without the is.
He one of the few Molly I think there are.
Let's be honest, you though, he is pink Maga.
He is high tone Maga.
So he was indorsed by Maga Mike Johnson, and then Maga Mike Johnson thought better of it and said that he was unindorsed.
It's been a bad week for Mike Johnson.
Apparently, Mike Johnson's not an ace at picking them as they say this has not been missed on a lot of people. Now that Maga Mike is, shall we say, less less perceptive as a political analyst than he might otherwise be incredible. You can't wake up in the morning these days and expect anything but more of this chaos.
So only two hundred and sixty nine days ago, that's right, that's right, that's right.
Did you know?
Rick Wilson and I are bringing together some friends for a general election kickoff party at City Winery in New York on March sixth.
We're going to be.
Chatting right after Super Tuesday about what's going on, and it is going to probably be the one fun night for the next eighty days. If you're in the New York area, please come by and join us. You can go to City Winery's website and grab a ticket. Mika Brazinski is the host of Morning Joe and Morning Mika as well as the.
Founder of the Know Your Value movement.
Welcome back to Fast Politics, Mika, yay hi hi.
I am so excited to have you.
And this is one of these things where you're doing this mentorship project.
Yes, I am.
You mentored me so.
And I saw this, I was like, wait, so let's talk about First of all, I love the idea that you have to be over fifty for this one.
Category to get on the list. Yeah, you're too young. You're too young.
It's like finally something I'm too young for.
So the thing I think people don't know is you've been doing this for a long time.
And this did not start as a glamorous project.
No it didn't. But can I say a story about you first always, and then we'll talk about how non glamorous this was. So somebody once told Mollie that she would never be something. Yeah, and she told me that story just in passing blah blah blah blah blah, like it was, you know, I ate a sandwich and someone told me I would never be a I don't know, on air contributor or something. And I thought to myself, she just said that like she was eating a sandwich like that was okay, and it was like hard for
the course. It was just something that she decided that she would accept. And I thought to myself, that is fed up. Like right now, I don't know this woman that well, but I need to talk to her. We need to have a little talk, and then she needs to have a little talk with that special person. That's all. That's all I'm gonna say. That was my mentoring. You're welcome, yes, and let me just say you were right.
So I want you to talk about the beginnings of Know Your Value, because like this is really actually a passion project.
It is.
I mean, I don't even know if it was twelve or thirteen years ago, A long time ago. I sort of realized that I didn't know my value, and I started documenting all the disasters in my career where I was so close to making great money or getting a great promotion, and I would literally be the person who made sure it didn't happen, or who made sure that I was the first person to get a job at a certain level was only paid like twenty percent what
the last people who had that job was. Like, I was so lucky to be there, and I realized I was in a cycle. So as I started documenting these things, and then I had my own like real life equal pay battle at MSNBC, I decided to write the book Know Your Value. I wrote in real time what my experience at MSNBC was and actually read it on the floor of Phil Griffin's office. He was the president of MSNBC at the time. He Joe and I sat together and read the manuscript and I thought, I'm so fired.
But I also thought, he's not telling me I'm not publishing this, like he knows that I walked the relationship we had at that point that was not coming in asking for permission, but I wanted him to have a heads up and to see it, and also to have a chance to sort of make sure I wasn't missing an angle on something since it was so close to the network. And the funny story about Phil is he was like, Meca, Meka, I don't say man, Joe, you know, I say no, Joe like and I was like, Phil,
I was trying to protect you. He's like, that's not how I talk. You gotta put the F bomb back in there. And I was like, this is your one change. Okay. Anyhow, but the book was released and it immediately was on New York Times and all these business lists, and it took off in a way that I could have never expected, where people were like stopping us on the street. I read your book. I got to raise I read your book. I got a divorce. I read your book. I changed
my life. I read your book. I got a raise I have heard hundreds of times because knowing your value is not just about getting value back financially, which I definitely put the map out for that, but it's about getting value back in every relationship, which is why you stopped me cold when you told me that someone had said what they said to you and you just accepted it. That was not value back. That was like give me you like a turd on a platter, okay, and you're going, oh,
that looks so good. No, so like it's learning how to say it. And so when I realized that was that message was so resonant and there was such a hunger for it, I started doing events and I actually, you know, went rogue and started on my own event in Hartford, Connecticut, just to see if anybody would show up, and those three words they filled the room. And then some.
Will you please tell the story about what happened in Hartford because you've told the story to me and it feels like such an important moment.
Well, it was incredible. Actually, I had put together of the event with my producers Duby McDowell and Robin Jenris, and we had a couple of weeks to put it together because I do everything in a rush, and I'd say three weeks before it started, we had at the Marriotte Downtown Marriette Marquee in Hartford. I had used my sort of notoriety as a local host from fifteen years earlier, and I had gotten a lot of sort of just Gail King, who used to work in Hartford. She was
lined up. I got companies in the area to sponsor it and CEOs to show up. And I had this idea at the very last minute to have a competition where five women that we pick out of videos that were sent in would compete on stage for ten thousand dollars bonus. They would have to pitch for one minute or less what their value is, no matter what their reality was in life, stay at home mom, CEO, philanthropist assistant,
you know, it doesn't matter. Just tell me what it is that you bring to the table and sell it. And we had five women. We had so many videos sent in. Somebody sent video from prison, literally, CEOs sent videos. It was incredible the response we got and we found five women. We coached them as best we could, and they got up on stage and it was amazing. First of all the whole room. It was five hundred women in the We had perhaps two hundred more people who
walked in. There was a waiting list. People were lining the walls, and they were all so supportive. They were so invested in these women that they had gotten to know all day long throughout the event. And we had a woman from Madison, Connecticut, who was fired from her job on Wall Street. She was in her fifties. She had opened a second hand store for babies and children's clothing in downtown Madison, and she wanted to use the money to start a website for the moms to interconnect.
And we had a woman who had just moved to Middletown, Connecticut from Houston who wanted to be a dress designer. We had a grandmother in her seventies with beautiful long dreadlocks and she had like ten grandchildren. She lived in the North end of Hartford and she wanted to open an animal sanctuary. We had this blonde woman, a mom of three girls who had been dumped by her husband from Avon, Connecticut, who wanted to open a gym in her basement so she could be a trainer as well
as take care of her kids. And we had an assistant named Jennifer Hotchkiss with a booming voice. So she worked as an assistant. She wanted to be the boss someday, but she needed a college education. She was a single mom and she wanted to be the first person in her family to go to college. She named Baypath College in Hartford because I guess they had flexible hours, and she was a mom. The woman who was fired from Wall Street one Darcy sorta. She had this incredible pitch
and she came running up on stage. She gave me a big hub and I noticed a tube was sticking out of her neck, and I was like, are you okay? And everyone's clapping and no one can hear us, and she's like, Mika, I had heart surgery forty eight hours ago. The doctor told me not to come. There's a wheelchair backstage. I had to come. I had to tell you my value. I was practicing on the stretcher. Oh my god, please don't die right here. But that's amazing, and I'm like,
I'm so moved. Let's close out the day. This is a good know your value event. First one, let's get out of here before anything goes wrong. And then this woman starts pulling on my dress saying, I need the microphone. I need the microphone. She seemed pretty elegant, so I said, uh, we have an announcement. I guess I hander the microphone and she goes, hello, I am the CMO of Baypath College, Jennifer Hotchkiss, the runner up young lady, and she pointed
right out her She goes, you are amazing. Come see us on Monday. We are going to give you a full ride. And the whole room went ah, and we all just gasped, and you could hear this collective gasp and then like we all started crying, every single person on stage in the room, and Jennifer was bawling. And she graduated with highest honors two years later and was the graduation speaker at Baypath and is on her way.
That was how I know your value, the events and the book series and fifty over fifty in Nabu Dabi. That's where it all start in Hartford, Connecticut, where I worked as a local reporter and kind of used the scrappy skills that you get in local to put together an event. I got to tell you, Molly, what brought women in there was not me was not Gael was not like anybody that you might have known. It was those three words know your value. Women, especially now, there
seems to be a little bit of a resurgence. We have fallen back in so many ways. We want to know our value and we want to communicate it effectively.
I also well up when you tell the story of Baypath College.
It's amazing.
And my husband is on the board of this college called Southern New Hampshire, which is another college right that does education for people who are going back to college. And it is so important that we make education formal for people.
It's very meaningful to me.
So I wonder if you could explain how people nominate each other or these two different groups thirty under thirty and fifty over fifty.
So with fifty over fifty, actually we need to start talking about the next US List. Our first US List came out three years ago. We had ten thousand submissions in less than two weeks. Just to understand when the thirty under thirty list started. For Forbes their first year, it's gone global, it's huge. So I can say this, they had a couple hundred. So again like know your value, fifty over fifty kind of reaches an area where women are really hungry for recognition and for a sense of
their value. And we have found that not just in the United States, but around the world, women are reaching their greatest impact, their most money, their greatest joy well after the age of fifty. Whether it's starting families or becoming CEOs or doing a complete pivot, they're doing it and they're it And I can't tell you how many women we were like, oh my god, this is insane. And so Randa Lane, the head of Forbes, and I, like within minutes, realized after the US fifty over fifty
list was launched that we needed to go global. So there's Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and there's the asial list. And we literally have the most incredible responses when we call out to people to sign up. So you can go on Forbes dot com or Know your Value dot com to know how you have to be over fifty, and you can nominate yourself, which I think is very kyv or you can be nominated by a friend or
a colleague. Honestly, we do the vetting. It's extremely complicated, and it's really fun and really rewarding.
So talk about some of the speakers you're having at this okay.
First of all, last year was insane and this year is turning out to be completely different and insane. We have such a diverse list of of speakers. We meet in Abu Dhabi, the crossroads of the world. The concept is the thirty under thirty listers and the fifty over fifty honorees come to Abu Dhabi. There's a ton of cross generational mentoring going on.
And yet again generation act what generation are we? Jesse? We get left out? But that's okay or not?
Well, that's explain it. Someday you'll have me. You should come, by the way.
No, it's our one live show. If it were not a one live show, I would be on my.
Way with live do it live from Abu Dhabi anyhow. But it's everything from Shania Twain to Shila Johnson to Ellen Johnson, Sirleif the former president of Liberia. We have like Susie Orman and yes, by the way, know your value. She is my inspo. I mean I used to watch her talking to people on the phone and I learned to talk to people honestly by watching Susie.
Kathy Griffin told me the reason she has money is because of Susie. Really yeah, because Susie tells you how to do your money.
She does, and she doesn't mince words. She's like, you're doing it all wrong. This is what you need to do, and she doesn't hold back. I love how just blatantly, bluntly honest she is with people about how they need to change their lives. And it's going to be the event itself. Huma Aberdeen, as you know, who's also on Morning Mika, is the vice chair, and we can have a lot of women from the region as well. We're very well known in their own right in the region.
So the mentoring is it goes in so many different directions, younger to older, older to younger, Middle East to Western.
You know.
I remember the second year when we had Elena Zelenska, Billy Jean King, Gloria Steinem and Hillary Clinton all on stage together. I was like, pinch me right now. I was in the elevator and this girl in her twenties like my daughter's age. She was like, oh my god, this elevator is so slow. I have got to get to networking. And I'm like, who's excited about networking? Like that makes me want to vomit actually like networking. I don't know why, but it feels like such a chore,
you know, right, And she was. She invented the first networking event and loved it so much that she was like late and freaking out. And I thought, Okay, this event is successful if you've got a twenty something like like my twenty somethings like to stay home, so you know, post COVID twenty somethings or not, you know, the most like I want a network. But this kid was just
on her way. So the event's remarkable. It really is something that I could have never dreamed of in terms of what people take away from it, no matter who they are, where they come from, what their age or background is. And I'm really proud of it. I'm blown away by it. But I'm incredibly proud at as to what we've been able to accomplish with thirty fifty in Abu Dhabi.
So now talk to me about more yes, yes, yes.
Four hours and then morning mega. I love it. Actually, I came into it with a little bit of a bad attitude because the four hours are exhausting, and I just was like, am I going to be able to give it and bring it. And the first, like the pilot, I was like, oh my god, I'm so tired.
Do no.
And then I got into it and now I'm like, oh, Joe, you take this segment. I just had an idea. I need to type it up for Morning Mega and I'm like, have you see me on my iPad During the show, I'm like typing away because I'm like, oh my god, great thought. So I love it and I love that
Jen Simone and Huma are the co hosts. What's fun is that I think they just all They're all joyful, beautiful, fabulous people who have a different take on things, maybe a little different than I would have, but we come to it with so much joy. And the whole point is to have a lot of fun and to have a really interesting conversation and to move it along quickly. So when you're watching or you pull it up and you stream it while you're doing other things, it's going
to move fast. It's not going to bog you down, and you might even like rewind and go, what was that that was fun?
I'm going to use that.
So I love it.
I think it's great, and I also think that there's so much resistance in media to the idea of women like doing programs together, and there's something really cool about the fact that all the hosts are women.
Yeah. I mean, you know, everyone was like when the we were putting together the show, and they're like, well, how should we describe it with a women's take, And I'm like, no, No, we're just four hosts. We happen to be women. But I'm not sitting here going women. We must be all women, and let's tell everything about women, and let's talk about women. We will all talk about things that interest us, which probably will bring us to
women's issues, but we're not going to force it. We're going to talk about what's out there and what's bugging us and what's keeping us up at night.
Yeah.
Well, and I also think ultimately, I mean, all of these elections twenty three, twenty twenty two, twenty twenty, twenty eighteen, the story we don't talk about, but they've been women's elections. They've been about Roe, they've been about you know, Donald Trump's messade here. I mean, these have been the issues that have propelled us.
Yeah, and there have been a lot of things that I want to say on Morning Joe it's not that I haven't had the chance. Hahaha. No, it's not Joe interrupting me. It's more I want to own it, and I want to say it right to camera, and I want to be very clear about what I'm saying. And I have some things to share about my own personal experience with that former president, and this is a good place for it.
Yeah. So interesting, Mika. Thank you for joining us.
Yay, thanks for having me, and thank you for being on Morning Joe. We love having you, Mulli Joe Fast. You're the best.
Oh, it's really fun.
Adam Carlson is a recovering political pollster.
Welcome to Fast Politics.
Adam Carlson, Hi, Mollie, how you do it?
Good Adam? What do you do? Explain to us what you do.
I am a polster. I used to work in political polling for Democratic Polling Organization. I sold out a bit working more in corporate stuff, so more of an outside observer, but kind of lived and breathed that world for about six years or so.
So explain to us a little bit about what polling is now and what it was before and how it's changed.
A little bit. Give us a little rit large on pulling of course.
Yeah, so right now, we are no surprise to anybody. Polling is a bit volatile these days, and it faces a lot of structural challenges for a lot of people. You see all these spam callers on your phone, most people will pick up the phone and.
Those are pollsters right calling you.
Yeah, so they're calling you. In response rates which used to be even like fifteen twenty years ago, we're close to ten percent and fifteen percent are now down to you're lucky to get two or three percent response rate on phone poles, which is obviously you're not going to get necessarily a great representative population. So polls take great
effort to ensure that they have a representative sample. They're contacting people over the phone, but it's expensive to do a really, really good phone poll, so you see a lot of kind of junk polsters come in and do either phone polls but not a lot of strict methodology to cut corners and save costs, or we'll do online polls.
And there are a lot of really good online pollsters out there and a lot of cheap, trashy ones as well, So it's really important to understand which ones are doing the due diligence and are acting in good faith, which ones are kind of cutting corners, are trying to push a narrative. And I think that five thirty eight Polster ratings, which they put out a few weeks ago, do a really good job of looking at their track records and
how transparent they are in methodology. It used to be a hell of a lot easier to pull even ten twenty thirty years ago than it is now.
When you pull, you have this larger question. Right, we have in America a very shifting electra. One of the reasons why the polls were so off in twenty sixteen was that Trump brought out voters who had never voted before.
Yep.
And the same thing happened in twenty twenty as well. I mean, he overperformed his polling in both elections, and kind of a little known fact is that poll was pretty good in the Trump era when he wasn't on
the ballot in twenty eighteen and twenty twenty two. But when he's on the ballot, things tend to get at a little screwy because to your point, a lot of his supporters are pretty distrustful of institutions, including polling, because Trump has railed against them when they haven't been benefiting him. He loves them now because they mostly show him ahead, but they're much less likely to pick up the phone or to even take it online survey, so it's harder and harder to reach his base.
Let's sort of talk about what is happening right now. You have a really interesting thesis. There's a lot of polling that shows Trump ahead in varying degrees, but there's also a lot of pulling.
That is junkie, that is messing up the averages.
So in twenty twenty two, there was this big narrative that was being pushed by a lot of media outlets that it's going to be this big red waves, and a lot of that was informed by again, these kind of junk polsters like Eutrafalgers, your inside Advantages.
Brass button Yes yes, yes.
Rathmlssen, who were just putting out the again these cheap poles. Whether they were acting good faith or whether they were kind of cutting corners on methodology, they were showing Republicans doing better both nationally and in key swing districts in swing states, and that's why a lot of folks were surprised when Democrats ended up holding their own in a lot of these key racers almost holding the House, which
was pretty much unstathomable both to most people beforehand. But they are a site split Ticket which has a lot of great work on this and kind of pokexholes and a lot of conventional wisdom using data, had an average for the national popular vote for the House, which only included high quality polsters, and they got really close to the final result again by being discerning and looking at, Okay, who is a reputable polster, not ones they're showing good
results for your candidate, but ones that are doing their homework. And so we're kind of seeing a bit of a version of that again this year. It's still early, but some data worked on with the Economist using five thirty eight new polster ratings for a Trump versus Biden twenty twenty four head to head race, found that poles taken in January of twenty twenty four, of the really good, highly rated polsters only had Trump head by under a point,
actuallyo point two points. If you look at polsters that are ranked most poorly, so the ones we were just talking about, your fagers, et cetera, they had Trump up five, So it's under one point versus five points. Obviously Biden wants to be ahead, but under one point popular vote margin is definitely easier to come back from than being
down five. So a lot of media and sites like RCP will just group all of these polsters together regardless of quality, when in reality, if you kind of look at it by all, right, what's their track record, are they acting in good faith? Are they publishing their methodology? You can get a but it what is potentially a more realistic average? We won't know until election day. But I think an average is only as good as the poll you include in it.
I want to go from here to the idea of polling as disinformation. So twenty twenty two, Ron Johnson wildly insane, not super popular candidate runs against him, called Mandela Barns. He is the sort of grassroots candidate wins the primary versus a sort of more traditional candidate. He is polling six seven, eight points behind. He loses by a very small one point less, you know, a little less than one point margin. I mean, he was basically destroyed by polls, right, a lot.
Of those decisions. So to your point, Mandela Barnes was pretty much cut loose by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Triage be cousins on all the races. Yeah, they do their own internal polling as well, which we never get to see.
That also probably showed it.
Probably informed it for sure, and he for whatever reason. So they were all wrong and they were all wrong, and polls are wrong and mean with Wisconsin has had some big misses and polling recently too. I don't know if you remember the poll that had bidened up by seventeen there in twenty twenty October twenty eighth, twenty twenty, which obviously is a big, a big outlier, but to your point, it was clearly a pattern right where he
outperformed his polling. And then in retrospect, if Democrats had invested in Barns the way they had in other races like Arizona Pennsylvania, it's a very good chance he would have won. And Ron Johnson is one of the most right wing senators in a representing a state that Biden won, which is very rare in these days. That one really hurts. I don't necessarily buy for that race that it was disinformation.
Certainly in that race, I don't think it was, but there's clearly a way to shift the narrative via polls.
Yes, And this was actually a point that one of Nate Silver's hypotheses, which ended up not looking so great in twenty twenty two, was that, well, Republicans are releasing all these poles from their internal their internal polls and Republican affiliated pollsters that are skewing these averages. Like Democrats could do that too, but they aren't. So it's kind
of like a free market effect. And maybe that was Democrats didn't believe their own numbers, Maybe they just wanted to keep it close to the vest, who knows, But in reality, it was just them flooding the zone with Republican leaning polls. Again, whether that was good faith, poor methodology, just you know, a regular polling miss will never really know. But it did shape the narrative leading up to it, and we don't really know what the effects of that
narrative shaping are. Did it shift funding probably? Did it prohibit Democrats from donating in races that they otherwise would be competitive because there were despondent You never know. It could have had the opposite effect. But polling for better or for worse, I would argue mostly for worse, does shape the narrative, which the media narrative, especially especially if
we don't have much else to go on. People are trying to read the tea leaves from these like uncontested presidential primaries right now, and they're grasping its straws for the most part, and polling is the only thing to talk about right now, and right now the narrative is that Trump is winning, Biden's in trouble. That drives clicks. But it's a little more complicated than that, I think.
Yeah, so let's talk about this because there is also one other factor here that is deeply involved in polling, and that is No Labels, Mark Penn's wife's organization, Nancy Jacobson. So Mark Penn has a polling company. Can you talk a little bit about that No Labels as a third party organization that fundraises, gets a lot of money from Republicans, really desperately wants to make the case that Biden cannot win and that a third party candidate needs to come in.
They've had some trouble trying to find a third party candidate, but that is their goal.
So Mark Penn hits up a Stagwell group which partners with Harvard University on the Harvard Harris Caps polls. He also has an organization called HARISX, which primarily does tech and telecom polling, but has been doing political polling since at least twenty eighteen. They put out some kind of eye popping headlines and Dave Wibel did a great story about this stick around Israel, and they did a lot
of polling around and the Bob Moler case. If everyone what remember is that I feel like decades ago, I kind of raised some headlines and has shown some polling or they've put out some maps that show this kind of viability for a third party candidate that had been met with some skepticism.
Right, which is very convenient because the wife is running an organization that is running a third party candidate or trying to.
I think the press is waking up to that a little bit. I think that'll take more shape if and when they find a candidate, which supposedly will be as soon as March. But there's been a lot of stories. Adam mass has been doing a lot of good research on this and put some good stories on this, but
they're just really struggling to find a candidate. They're onbout the ballots in some states, but they're having a lot of internal issues, including with their their funders, who thought to be more of an issue based organization.
Don't They have some donors who are suing them.
Yes, Robert Durst, So it's members of the durs family.
Because they feel it's a bait and switch, right.
Yeah, they wanted to be kind of based on issues
and finding a middle path and by part reisanship. I believe there was a whole time story about this, and they feel that they're not getting what they paid for because they're trying to seal the third party candidate, which most people are concerned about what hurt Biden more than Trump, especially given that there's all the people that are going to decide this election are people that don't really like either of them, and they maybe have a take towards
a Joe Manchin or Larry Hogan or people who are more in the middle of the spectrum.
Of course, it's hard to see the difference between Joe Mansion and a Joe Biden when they largely read a lot a like, except that Joe Manchin worked on killing some of Joe Biden's more fullsome legislation, you know, I mean it's sort of amazing. Like I think Joe Manchin is more for the donor class right than Joe Biden, because I mean, ultimately he cares about you know, it was a lot of decisions about taxes and trying to deprive working people of benefits. So let's just talk for
another minute about pulling methodology. Sometimes posters will look at the numbers and sort of rejigger them in other ways, right.
Yeah, I mean in twenty twelve, if any numbers that far back, there was this whole Republican leading organization called Unskewed Polls or the guy to this pastournalist I believe our blogger started, which was taking these polls that were showing good results for Barack Obama and being like, oh no, this party identification, Like there's too many Democrats in this point.
So I'm going to take the data. I'm going to rewait it add more Republicans or more independence or what have you, and like, here's what the actual numbers are. And of course, in retrospect, this is kind of silly, but there's been written about extensively that the Romney campaign was buying into this, and they entered into election day, I think, well, all these polls are wrong, they're pulling too many Democrats, putting too many Democrats, and we're going
to win. I think he was genuinely flabbergasted, even though most of the polls are very very good that year and showed Obama winning by a few points. He won by a few points in a comfortable electoral college margin. But it's funny this year kind of see a bit of the opposite happening, where a lot of polls are showing potentially impausibly good polls for Trump, but maybe they're maybe they're accurate.
You know, we don't know.
It's still nine months out. Although there's reasons to be skeptical, which we can get into later, But there's Democrats who are just like seeing poles are unfavorable to Biden and saying, no, this can't be true, this can't be right. The polls are broken, and this isn't right. And then I understand that skepticism, especially after twenty sixteen and twenty twenty, but they're still really important for showing us where the races
are most competitive. Even if you take them seriously, not literally, you're actually they're still pretty accurate. And there's this huge discourse that's been happening with like Simon Rosenberg and Matt Iglesias. If the election were held today, who would win? And I think it's kind of a silly premise to begin with, because it's not campaigns matter. The Biden campaign and the Trump campaign will spend billions and billions of dollars and their allies, a lot of people still don't know that's
going to be the matchup. I know it's kind of hard to believe.
No, I think that's absolutely right.
It's like a third of the electoris still doesn't kind of either doesn't want to believe it or doesn't believe it. So I think everyone just needs to be a little bit more patient about this instead of just immediately attacking the polls like poles are misunderstood as these kind of predictive things.
To spar out right and not just a moment in time and exactly right shifts.
It seems like twenty sixteen, the polls were wrong because they weren't able to pull Trump right, the Trump factor, whatever that is. And you're saying that again in twenty twenty, the polls were wrong because they weren't able to pull the Trump factor, but Biden was able to pull.
Out more voters too, so it ended up working out right.
Yeah, I think it's definitely twenty twenty is a bit more complicated. There's a lot of theories, but I think there was some of that kind of repeat that just it's Trump voters are kind of weird and hard to contact sometimes that can skew things. The polls had Biden winning in twenty twenty, and it got that the national popular vote decently right, but really underestimated Trump in the
swing states, so he still won. So directionally like they got, they said Biden was going to win, and he did, but it was very, very very narrow, and that was not the case from the poles were show and I thought it was gonna be a pretty comfortable way.
So basically, when Trump is on the ballot, it's much much harder to paul.
It's a small sample size, but for the data we do have twenty sixteen and twenty twenty, yeah, it tends to be a little bit unpredictable, and the past two times it's worked in his favor. But one theory that some people have, which is again hard to prove, is that polsters have been looking for answers. Going back to the beginning of this podcast, what are the problems facing
the industry? Sometimes polsters are changing their methodology from cycle to cycle to be like, all right, we're having trouble getting a representative sample, getting enough Republicans, or getting enough young people or people of color on the phone, which are just harder to get in general. So it's possible they could overcorrect, change the methodology too much and underestimate Biden. I think that's an underrated possibility.
Again, we won't know.
But just because something's happened twice before, it doesn't mean it's going to happen a certain time.
Oh so interesting and also so strange. Are you guys going to figure out a new way to do.
Pauline, It's a constant conversation. I mostly do again for mostly a corporate nonprofit clients, although there's a bit in the political realm to do online polling. The issue with that is you can't get a truly as much as you can ever get a truly representative sample because you have to opt in, you have to click in, and you usually you're paid for your answers. Versus phone polls. You can do a random digit dialing, and you can work for very very large voter lists and work from
there get a representative sample. Then you have the response rate issue. The New York Times did a good, really interesting experiment in Wisconsin in twenty twenty two with mail voting, I mean mail polling rather to see if that would increase response rates. It gave a little incentive that's not really replicable on a big scale because just takes too long to get everything back and there's a lot more
logistics involved. People try and contact via text messages. So honestly, the industry is always looking for answers, always looking to improve, and understands that I think just one or two more big polling misses away from further distrust in the industry. But I can tell you that after twenty sixteen, when I was working with the Democratic Pollster, you know, we were just looking for we were looking for answers. We're like, okay,
we got to really examine what worked, what didn't. If we got a state right, was it for the right reasons or we had two errors canceling each other out. It's always a challenge. So to answer your question, I don't know if we'll find the silver bullet, but I think it's important to keep searching for it, and I
think twenty twenty four will be very instructive. If the polling industry gets the margin wrong a third time by a big amount, I think it was going to be even deeper soul searching, and even deeper and quite deserved public cometicism. Thank you so much, of course, thanks for having me.
No moment full on, who.
Is your moment of fuckery? We covered a lot of shit.
My moment of fuckery this week is the special counsel who decided he was going to try to make this into a job application in the Trump two point zero administration instead of a straight up the middle analysis of the legal case that he was hired and swore an oath to examine. If, like me, you read that thing and thought, wow, this is an editorial not an actual fucking legal case, you would be like I am kind of pissed off, and you think this is a moment of fuckery, and it is my favorite.
Actually thought on this comes from our friend Joe Scarborough, who said they couldn't indict Biden legally, so they tried to indict him politically.
Yeah, that's exactly right. Joe's exactly correct on that one hundred percent right. None of this had to go this way, but this guy chose to make this into a very personal dig on Biden. Look, I think it was exceedingly unprofessional and exceedingly shitty. And yet you know, remember, this is a guy who found a place in the Trump administration, so that tells you an awful lot about his character.
Thank you, Rick Wilson, as.
Always happy to be with you, and I will see you again next week.
Yay.
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.